Right, because he was invited to the Whitehouse because it was the most awesome invention ever? Is that the takeaway that you got out of this?
Hahn had indeed an inventive spirit - although his accomplishments were rather overplayed in the media. Also, he was 17 when he did what he did, not 14, which is a fairly big difference in terms of education and time to gain experience tinkering. But still, Hahn is an interesting case, and his dedication to learning and experimenting was commendable (the lying and stealing, not so much). Unfortunately, the postscript isn't very pretty. It turns out that he has paranoid schizophrenia and he's struggled to live a normal life since then.
He also said in an interview he only spent about 20 minutes on it, and it was anything but one of his best "inventions" (something that a number of other people in interviews have mentioned).
The kid is 14. And here we have someone at Artvoice who put great effort into writing an article criticizing him for not silk-screening his own circuit boards. I mean, seriously? What sort of person did he think he was writing for? Someone who looked at the clock picture and automatically assumed, "I bet a 14-year-old made that circuitboard"?
Huh? Last I checked, the policy was that everything gets released within a week's time, at least jpeg format (the raws will be release later). If you want complaints, take them to the ESA, which has a terrrible record concerning timely release of data.
Those are huge numbers for a space mission. You're calling 1600 people / 250 reporters covering a NASA press conference small? That's freaking insane. By contrast, people generally have more interest in human endeavours in space than robotic, but when NASA held their press conference to interview members of the Colombia crew live from space (which turned out to be the last chance before they died), only four reporters showed up. The "Martian microfossil" press conference had about two hundred.
Seriously, you think one in every 2000 people on Earth, from newborn Vietnamese infants to elderly Masai tribesman, logging onto NASA.gov to read about a relatively low budget mission to be a poor showing? How often does anyone go to NASA.gov? Look at how much the page views for their entire website spiked from NH. Tiny percentage of their budget, cut their distance to the top of the net rankings in half.
783000 people streamed bloody NASA press conferences. When does anything like that ever happen?
450 major papers had it on their *front page*. We're not talking blogspot.com, we're talking NYT, LA Times, etc. When was the last time you ever saw anything like that? Maybe the Columbia disaster?
This should have been "moon landing"-ish, are you out of your gourd? The Apollo Program as a whole consumed about 5% of a year's worth of the US GDP. New Horizons consumed 0,005%.
Maybe I'm reading you wrong. Maybe you're joking. I sure hope so...
It's hard for me to remember the last time an unmanned NASA mission has gotten this much public attention. Maybe some of the high budget Mars missions, but I'd say that's questionable for the more recent ones. This really turned out to be not just a science windfall, but a PR windfall for NASA as well. New Horizons was a cheap mission (as far as space exploration goes), and it's exceeded everyone's expectations, revealing a young, geologically active world driven in manners never before seen, with formations never before seen. The fact that it came on the heels of the "Pluto Is Not A Planet" controversy drove what would already have been high public interest up to even higher levels. Then the fact that out of pure luck Pluto gave them a giant "heart" formation on their last high-res pre-flyby images to plaster all over the news was just icing on the cake.
NH director Alan Stern is also a very different character from Taylor, and one that I really like. He's been an incredibly passionate advocate for exploration and for open access to data as well as supporting youth interest in science. He's also been one of the leading voices against the IAU Pluto decision, analogizing it to the USGS declaring that there's only 8 rivers in the world in order to make the list easier for schoolkids to memorize. His view is that "cleared the neighborhood" is fundamentally flawed in numerous ways while hydrostatic equilibrium is a very meaningful dividing line, both from the public's perspective on what one naturally interprets to be a planet (the "Captain Kirk" test), and scientifically (it involves the destruction of primordial materials and the creation of altered materials and the release of energy). He takes it so far as to say that moons in hydrostatic equilibrium like Titan, Triton, Ganymede, Europa, etc deserve a title like "planetary moon" or similar - a recognition of "what they are" being at least as important as "where they are".
The hydrogen economy is, and always has been, a stupid idea. The cycle throws away two thirds of the energy for no good reason. And the fuel to store is detonation prone (not just deflagration), very low density, metal-embrittling, ignites with trivially weak static sparks (which common household devices are not rated to prevent), destroys ozone when it leaks, leaks trivially easily, and has a bunch of other nasty properties like pooling under overhangs, entering pipes from the outside, flowing to their destination, and then pooling there. People should read NASA's guidelines for safe handling of hydrogen - it includes things like for any building that handles more than a dozen or so kilograms at a time, the roof should be designed to be blown off in an explosion, among other gems. But all that pales in comparison to the main issue: the hydrogen cycle is just way, way inefficient.
Just stick with electricity. It's what you start with, it's what you want to end with... it's stupid to convert forms. (Okay, technically, storing in a battery is conversion to chemical energy, but it's extremely efficient in doing so - at least with modern forms like li-ion).
And no, hydrogen fuel cells are NOT "cheaper than batteries", they're absurdly expensive systems (and with, I should add, shorter lifespans than batteries to boot). A FCV with the performance of Honda Civic will run you several hundred thousand USD. And one should note that they still have to have a battery pack (hybrid-sized) to average out the demand fluctuations. And yes, batteries are coming down significantly in price (way more than fuel cells), and are predicted to drop even faster in the coming years due to developments like the gigafactory coming online.
Note: When writing the above, I initially wrote "... like the "peak oil" crow obsesses over." While I corrected it, come to think of it, wouldn't that make a great mascot for peak oil? A glossy-black animal that feeds on the remains of the living and has often been seen as an omen of death?
Here in Iceland they're even doing CO2 injection at the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant. It does indeed seem to work - although it doesn't come free, of course
Fuel from CO2 and renewable energy is a great example of why it's irrelevant whether liquid fuels are produced in an "energy positive" manner like the "peak oil" crowd obsesses over. Liquid fuels don't need to be energy positive, just human society as a whole. Liquid fuels are actually a very expensive form of energy per joule compared to most other widespread forms of energy that we use. It can make perfect economic sense to produce them in an energy-negative manner using other, cheaper forms of energy as the source; all that matters is that when all forms of energy combined are considered, that the energy outputs outweigh the energy inputs to produce that energy (preferably by a large margin).
Of course, it's probably going to be a while before fuel from CO2 is the cheapest way to get it. You can make liquid fuels from syngas (CO + H2), which can be made by the incomplete combustion of almost any organic matter, from coal to trash. I'd think it'd be hard for these CO2/sunlight fuels to compete with that.
It should be noted that such programs have been trialed in small areas. They're not only generally met with wide support, but they tell an interesting story. The rate of people working does drop, but only in certain categories: generally only 1) teenagers and young adults, who use the time to get a better education when they would otherwise have worked; and 2) new parents, who take more time to spend with their children. In other groups, the rate of work does not change. For those two groups, the lack of work is still a sacrifice - the basic income is well less than what one could earn with a proper job. But it lets people focus on what's important in their lives - for their happiness and their future.
The whole system is this stupid piecemeal trying to hide the fact that people already don't want a system where people's basic needs aren't met. Excepting the most hardcore libertarians, that is. I'll use "We" in this context to mean the US, but similar things apply almost everywhere in the world. We have food stamps because we don't want people going hungry. We have social security because we don't want the elderly losing their homes. We have subsidized housing projects for those too poor to afford housing in their areas, and homeless shelters for those with no housing. We have minimum wages to ensure that low-end working class families can afford the minimal of essentials in their area. We have medicaid, disability, unemployment insurance, and dozens if not hundreds of other programs, all designed to piecemeal away at a really simple truth: we're uncomfortable knowing that there are people who don't have a minimum standard of living.
Basic income is basically about cutting the BS: get rid of all of these patchwork programs and just send give a monthly "minimum standard of living" deposit. All of these cracks for people to fall through, all of the endless paperwork and overhead - for individuals, for the government, for businesses - gone.
The left gets their bleeding-heart taking-care-of-everyone feel-goods. The right gets their dream of shrinking government down so small you can drown it in a bathtub. All of these endless debates over countless programs get simplified down to just one debate: the left wanting that minimum standard of living figure to be larger, and the right wanting it to be smaller.
It's a good point. Nazi Germany had many talented engineers. But their basic sciences in many regards had been ideologically purged - not just by driving out the jews and other undesirables, but also those who supported them and didn't support the general principles of Nazism.
There are some ways which I think that Facebook, while a giant money-centered corporate overlord, does some good. In particular I'm thinking about how many times recently I've seen friends post BS stories on Facebook, and immediately there pops up underneath "related links" that almost always include debunking or counterpoint links. Facebook deserves serious kudos for that one. I don't know if they do it as a deliberate counterpoint-posting system or just "the things most frequently posted as a response", but either way, I think it's great for trying to stop the spread of BS and expose people to different points of view.
It never should have been "like"; that's inherently confusing. It should have been something like "appreciate" or "recommend" or "uprate".
Example:
"Just wanted to let you know... my mother's long struggle with cancer is over. She passed away at 12:43 today.:( She had been suffering so much..." (LIKE) - Bad!
Vs...
"Just wanted to let you know... my mother's long struggle with cancer is over. She passed away at 12:43 today.:( She had been suffering so much..." (APPRECIATE) - Better! "Just wanted to let you know... my mother's long struggle with cancer is over. She passed away at 12:43 today.:( She had been suffering so much..." (UPRATE) - Better! "Just wanted to let you know... my mother's long struggle with cancer is over. She passed away at 12:43 today.:( She had been suffering so much..." (RECOMMEND) - Better!
The message should be, "I appreciate that you posted this" or "I recommend that others see this", not "I like the subject matter of the post". "Rapes are up 200% at the college this year and the police are refusing to investigate!" (LIKE) - WTH is wrong with you?
That said, I don't think that, say, gamma rays, neutrinos, etc would ever be a relevant energy source. But things that people don't immediately think of certainly could be. For example, in the above Pluto case: if you have a heavier nitrogen ice layer over a lighter water ice layer, and a chunk of the ice breaks through and floats to the surface... that's an energy input. That's moving the system to a lower energy state. In Enceladus, one energy source that's now believed to be going on is serpentinization of a deeper rock layer, creating an ultrabasic soda ocean and releasing hydrogen gas. And of course, as the hydrogen rises, that too is another release of energy.
Haha, that's exactly my attitude too:) It's almost a running joke that you launch a probe to anything in space and find out that it has an unexpectedly large amount of energy input;) And I agree with your assessment that there's probably no single factor, just a lot of different energy sources that people haven't thought of. Unfortunately, humans tend to go into each situation with the blinders of experience, expecting things to be like that which we've already seen. The reality can be incredibly different, and space seems to have no shortage of interesting things to throw at us.
Pluto, for example, has a couple of nonconventional sources for driving tectonics. One is its wild temperature swings over the course of its year, shrinking and then expanding its crust. Potentially more powerful is the hundred-something kilograms of nitrogen it loses every second; over geological timeperiods, it amounts to the loss of hundreds to thousands of meters of nitrogen from the whole planet, that's a massive amount of subsidence. Probably the best theory for what's going on right now (caveat: this is still VERY early in the process!) is that Pluto has a relatively thin water ice crust across the whole planet, underlain with a mantle of heavier, viscous-flowing nitrogen ice, which reaches the surface at Sputnik Planum (the "heart") and where impacts have pierced through the water crust. The loss of nitrogen where it's exposed drives its motion (through relaxation), causing a rise in the form of the convection cells at Sputnik and subduction on the opposite side of the planet. Deeper than the nitrogen layer would be a water ice layer (during Pluto's formation, at some point the nitrogen would have been a liquid ocean atop a heavier water ice layer). Now that the nitrogen is solid, it's heavier than the water ice, so the deeper layer is only stable when at great enough depth. As the nitrogen mantle boils off, the outer surface of the deeper water ice layer becomes unstable and chunks break off and are entrained into the nitrogen like xenoliths, slowly floating up along the convection cell borders and reaching the surface as "floating ice mountains". These then, over geological timeperiods, wash to the shore and collect on the chaos terrain.
Like anything we've ever seen before? Hell no! But I fully expect nature to do this to us again and again.
Think of the periodic table, of all of the elements that are reasonably common in the universe, and the chemical forms they usually take. There's a lot of them. Now picture the full range of possible temperature and pressure combinations across the universe - it's vast. Now think of the phase diagram for each chemical, of all of the different possibilities. Now factor in time, how the temperature and pressure experienced by a body can change depending on the circumstances.
Yeah, there's a *lot* of bloody possibilities out there! Metals plating out into giant dendritic spires, superconducting seas, natural nuclear reactors kicking off rainbow-glowing clouds and rivers... it's almost impossible to imagine all of the potential diversity.
Here's one: picture a close binary world, far from its star - so with a temperature not greatly over the cosmic background. At these temperatures, helium - the second most common element in the universe - could readily pool into oceans, with a thin helium atmosphere. Neat enough on its own. But if the larger party in the binary was eating helium from the atmosphere of the smaller body (or other method of losing the atmosphere), then this would be evaporatively cooling the smaller body. I ran some calculations a while back and found that due to the low rate of radiative heat exchange at such cold temperatures, it's quite possible for the helium on the smaller body in the right conditions to evaporatively cool below helium's lambda point - aka the ocean would become a superfluid - flowing with zero velocity, climbing over obstacles in thin surface layers with ease, creating powerful boiloff fou
Islet cell neuroendocrine tumor has very long average survival time if caught early (like Jobs' was) and treated properly (which Jobs' wasn't). Not just a couple years - over a decade. And that's for regular folk, not for people who count among the wealthiest individuals on Earth and can afford the best care on the planet. These tumors are so passive that 10% of autopsied patients in the general public are found to have had a gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumor without ever knowing, and 30% of the tumors are so good at maintaining their original function that there's debate over whether to even call them "cancer". Insulinomas are anything but a virulent form - but they can spread if left to fester. Jobs' cancer was caught very early on, and by all standards he should have had a very long life expectancy had he actually gone with actual medical treatment advised by his doctors (as well as his friends and family). Instead, he committed "suicide by woo", letting it fester until it become something actually bad and hard to remove completely. Something that he deeply regretted later.
Never said that woo isn't bipartisan. Just pointing out that yes, Corbyn is a woo supporter. Because hey, it comes from "organic matter", just like actual medicine!
Nobody was talking about letting Ukraine join the EU. They're way far away from meeting the standards, and as it stands, a lot of people think that even letting states like Hungary in was a mistake. What was being offered was a trade pact.
Here's a quite detailed history of the negotiations and where things went awry, from both sides. Basically, the EU handed Yanukovych a set of economics calculations showing the huge amount of money that would flow into Ukraine, and the conditions they had to meet to get it. They were never really open to negotiation, convinced that the amount of windfall was all that mattered, and they'd fall in line on the conditions. "Vast amounts of money flowing into the country" certainly appealed to ostrich wrangler Yanukovych, but the main sticking point early on was his political prosecution of former prime minister (and Princess Leia impersonator) Yulia Tymoshenko. The EU was quite confident that he'd fall in line in order to get the windfall from the trade membership, and they also didn't see how it was any matter of Russia's what Ukraine, a sovereign state, decided to do on its own, and thus how they even were relevant to the negotiations. It was a pretty haughty position, but if was a quite passive position. Everything Yanukovych tried to change about the deal was rebuffed - it was a "take it or leave it" situation, with the EU fully convinced that the "take it" answer would arrive any day. Russia first tried imposing counterpressure on Ukraine with an economic carrot and stick approach, but this approved not enough to derail the negotiations - although left the Ukrainian side increasingly rebuffed trying to get further concessions from the EU to compensate it. However, the sudden and unexpected reversal came after a relatively brief meeting between Yanukovych and Putin. What was said at that meeting is anyone's guess - although how far Russia was willing to go to keep Ukraine from drawing closer to the EU has been made abundantly clear since then.
Session: 2006-07
Date tabled: 28.03.2007
Primary sponsor: Vis, Rudi
Sponsors:
Campbell, Ronnie
Conway, Derek
Meale, Alan
Russell, Bob
Wareing, Robert N
That this House welcomes the positive contribution made to the health of the nation by the NHS homeopathic hospitals; notes that some six million people use complementary treatments each year; believes that complementary medicine has the potential to offer clinically-effective and cost-effective solutions to common health problems faced by NHS patients, including chronic difficult to treat conditions such as musculoskeletal and other chronic pain, eczema, depression, anxiety and insomnia, allergy, chronic fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome; expresses concern that NHS cuts are threatening the future of these hospitals; and calls on the Government actively to support these valuable national assets.
Total number of signatures: 206
Show:
Supported byWithdrawn signatures
Showing 206 out of 206 Name Party Constituency Date Signed...
Corbyn, Jeremy Labour Party Islington North 17.04.2007
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because he was invited to the Whitehouse because it was the most awesome invention ever? Is that the takeaway that you got out of this?
Hahn had indeed an inventive spirit - although his accomplishments were rather overplayed in the media. Also, he was 17 when he did what he did, not 14, which is a fairly big difference in terms of education and time to gain experience tinkering. But still, Hahn is an interesting case, and his dedication to learning and experimenting was commendable (the lying and stealing, not so much). Unfortunately, the postscript isn't very pretty. It turns out that he has paranoid schizophrenia and he's struggled to live a normal life since then.
He also said in an interview he only spent about 20 minutes on it, and it was anything but one of his best "inventions" (something that a number of other people in interviews have mentioned).
The kid is 14. And here we have someone at Artvoice who put great effort into writing an article criticizing him for not silk-screening his own circuit boards. I mean, seriously? What sort of person did he think he was writing for? Someone who looked at the clock picture and automatically assumed, "I bet a 14-year-old made that circuitboard"?
Not to the degree that you might think.
Huh? Last I checked, the policy was that everything gets released within a week's time, at least jpeg format (the raws will be release later). If you want complaints, take them to the ESA, which has a terrrible record concerning timely release of data.
Those are huge numbers for a space mission. You're calling 1600 people / 250 reporters covering a NASA press conference small? That's freaking insane. By contrast, people generally have more interest in human endeavours in space than robotic, but when NASA held their press conference to interview members of the Colombia crew live from space (which turned out to be the last chance before they died), only four reporters showed up. The "Martian microfossil" press conference had about two hundred.
Seriously, you think one in every 2000 people on Earth, from newborn Vietnamese infants to elderly Masai tribesman, logging onto NASA.gov to read about a relatively low budget mission to be a poor showing? How often does anyone go to NASA.gov? Look at how much the page views for their entire website spiked from NH. Tiny percentage of their budget, cut their distance to the top of the net rankings in half.
783000 people streamed bloody NASA press conferences. When does anything like that ever happen?
450 major papers had it on their *front page*. We're not talking blogspot.com, we're talking NYT, LA Times, etc. When was the last time you ever saw anything like that? Maybe the Columbia disaster?
This should have been "moon landing"-ish, are you out of your gourd? The Apollo Program as a whole consumed about 5% of a year's worth of the US GDP. New Horizons consumed 0,005%.
Maybe I'm reading you wrong. Maybe you're joking. I sure hope so...
It's hard for me to remember the last time an unmanned NASA mission has gotten this much public attention. Maybe some of the high budget Mars missions, but I'd say that's questionable for the more recent ones. This really turned out to be not just a science windfall, but a PR windfall for NASA as well. New Horizons was a cheap mission (as far as space exploration goes), and it's exceeded everyone's expectations, revealing a young, geologically active world driven in manners never before seen, with formations never before seen. The fact that it came on the heels of the "Pluto Is Not A Planet" controversy drove what would already have been high public interest up to even higher levels. Then the fact that out of pure luck Pluto gave them a giant "heart" formation on their last high-res pre-flyby images to plaster all over the news was just icing on the cake.
NH director Alan Stern is also a very different character from Taylor, and one that I really like. He's been an incredibly passionate advocate for exploration and for open access to data as well as supporting youth interest in science. He's also been one of the leading voices against the IAU Pluto decision, analogizing it to the USGS declaring that there's only 8 rivers in the world in order to make the list easier for schoolkids to memorize. His view is that "cleared the neighborhood" is fundamentally flawed in numerous ways while hydrostatic equilibrium is a very meaningful dividing line, both from the public's perspective on what one naturally interprets to be a planet (the "Captain Kirk" test), and scientifically (it involves the destruction of primordial materials and the creation of altered materials and the release of energy). He takes it so far as to say that moons in hydrostatic equilibrium like Titan, Triton, Ganymede, Europa, etc deserve a title like "planetary moon" or similar - a recognition of "what they are" being at least as important as "where they are".
Really, you want to derail this article over an incident that has nothing to do with New Horizons? How many articles do you want to derail?
The hydrogen economy is, and always has been, a stupid idea. The cycle throws away two thirds of the energy for no good reason. And the fuel to store is detonation prone (not just deflagration), very low density, metal-embrittling, ignites with trivially weak static sparks (which common household devices are not rated to prevent), destroys ozone when it leaks, leaks trivially easily, and has a bunch of other nasty properties like pooling under overhangs, entering pipes from the outside, flowing to their destination, and then pooling there. People should read NASA's guidelines for safe handling of hydrogen - it includes things like for any building that handles more than a dozen or so kilograms at a time, the roof should be designed to be blown off in an explosion, among other gems. But all that pales in comparison to the main issue: the hydrogen cycle is just way, way inefficient.
Just stick with electricity. It's what you start with, it's what you want to end with... it's stupid to convert forms. (Okay, technically, storing in a battery is conversion to chemical energy, but it's extremely efficient in doing so - at least with modern forms like li-ion).
And no, hydrogen fuel cells are NOT "cheaper than batteries", they're absurdly expensive systems (and with, I should add, shorter lifespans than batteries to boot). A FCV with the performance of Honda Civic will run you several hundred thousand USD. And one should note that they still have to have a battery pack (hybrid-sized) to average out the demand fluctuations. And yes, batteries are coming down significantly in price (way more than fuel cells), and are predicted to drop even faster in the coming years due to developments like the gigafactory coming online.
Note: When writing the above, I initially wrote "... like the "peak oil" crow obsesses over." While I corrected it, come to think of it, wouldn't that make a great mascot for peak oil? A glossy-black animal that feeds on the remains of the living and has often been seen as an omen of death?
Where's John Oliver when you need him? ;)
Here in Iceland they're even doing CO2 injection at the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant. It does indeed seem to work - although it doesn't come free, of course
Fuel from CO2 and renewable energy is a great example of why it's irrelevant whether liquid fuels are produced in an "energy positive" manner like the "peak oil" crowd obsesses over. Liquid fuels don't need to be energy positive, just human society as a whole. Liquid fuels are actually a very expensive form of energy per joule compared to most other widespread forms of energy that we use. It can make perfect economic sense to produce them in an energy-negative manner using other, cheaper forms of energy as the source; all that matters is that when all forms of energy combined are considered, that the energy outputs outweigh the energy inputs to produce that energy (preferably by a large margin).
Of course, it's probably going to be a while before fuel from CO2 is the cheapest way to get it. You can make liquid fuels from syngas (CO + H2), which can be made by the incomplete combustion of almost any organic matter, from coal to trash. I'd think it'd be hard for these CO2/sunlight fuels to compete with that.
It should be noted that such programs have been trialed in small areas. They're not only generally met with wide support, but they tell an interesting story. The rate of people working does drop, but only in certain categories: generally only 1) teenagers and young adults, who use the time to get a better education when they would otherwise have worked; and 2) new parents, who take more time to spend with their children. In other groups, the rate of work does not change. For those two groups, the lack of work is still a sacrifice - the basic income is well less than what one could earn with a proper job. But it lets people focus on what's important in their lives - for their happiness and their future.
The whole system is this stupid piecemeal trying to hide the fact that people already don't want a system where people's basic needs aren't met. Excepting the most hardcore libertarians, that is. I'll use "We" in this context to mean the US, but similar things apply almost everywhere in the world. We have food stamps because we don't want people going hungry. We have social security because we don't want the elderly losing their homes. We have subsidized housing projects for those too poor to afford housing in their areas, and homeless shelters for those with no housing. We have minimum wages to ensure that low-end working class families can afford the minimal of essentials in their area. We have medicaid, disability, unemployment insurance, and dozens if not hundreds of other programs, all designed to piecemeal away at a really simple truth: we're uncomfortable knowing that there are people who don't have a minimum standard of living.
Basic income is basically about cutting the BS: get rid of all of these patchwork programs and just send give a monthly "minimum standard of living" deposit. All of these cracks for people to fall through, all of the endless paperwork and overhead - for individuals, for the government, for businesses - gone.
The left gets their bleeding-heart taking-care-of-everyone feel-goods. The right gets their dream of shrinking government down so small you can drown it in a bathtub. All of these endless debates over countless programs get simplified down to just one debate: the left wanting that minimum standard of living figure to be larger, and the right wanting it to be smaller.
It's a good point. Nazi Germany had many talented engineers. But their basic sciences in many regards had been ideologically purged - not just by driving out the jews and other undesirables, but also those who supported them and didn't support the general principles of Nazism.
There are some ways which I think that Facebook, while a giant money-centered corporate overlord, does some good. In particular I'm thinking about how many times recently I've seen friends post BS stories on Facebook, and immediately there pops up underneath "related links" that almost always include debunking or counterpoint links. Facebook deserves serious kudos for that one. I don't know if they do it as a deliberate counterpoint-posting system or just "the things most frequently posted as a response", but either way, I think it's great for trying to stop the spread of BS and expose people to different points of view.
It never should have been "like"; that's inherently confusing. It should have been something like "appreciate" or "recommend" or "uprate".
Example:
"Just wanted to let you know... my mother's long struggle with cancer is over. She passed away at 12:43 today. :( She had been suffering so much..." (LIKE) - Bad!
Vs...
"Just wanted to let you know... my mother's long struggle with cancer is over. She passed away at 12:43 today. :( She had been suffering so much..." (APPRECIATE) - Better! :( She had been suffering so much..." (UPRATE) - Better! :( She had been suffering so much..." (RECOMMEND) - Better!
"Just wanted to let you know... my mother's long struggle with cancer is over. She passed away at 12:43 today.
"Just wanted to let you know... my mother's long struggle with cancer is over. She passed away at 12:43 today.
The message should be, "I appreciate that you posted this" or "I recommend that others see this", not "I like the subject matter of the post". "Rapes are up 200% at the college this year and the police are refusing to investigate!" (LIKE) - WTH is wrong with you?
That said, I don't think that, say, gamma rays, neutrinos, etc would ever be a relevant energy source. But things that people don't immediately think of certainly could be. For example, in the above Pluto case: if you have a heavier nitrogen ice layer over a lighter water ice layer, and a chunk of the ice breaks through and floats to the surface... that's an energy input. That's moving the system to a lower energy state. In Enceladus, one energy source that's now believed to be going on is serpentinization of a deeper rock layer, creating an ultrabasic soda ocean and releasing hydrogen gas. And of course, as the hydrogen rises, that too is another release of energy.
Haha, that's exactly my attitude too :) It's almost a running joke that you launch a probe to anything in space and find out that it has an unexpectedly large amount of energy input ;) And I agree with your assessment that there's probably no single factor, just a lot of different energy sources that people haven't thought of. Unfortunately, humans tend to go into each situation with the blinders of experience, expecting things to be like that which we've already seen. The reality can be incredibly different, and space seems to have no shortage of interesting things to throw at us.
Pluto, for example, has a couple of nonconventional sources for driving tectonics. One is its wild temperature swings over the course of its year, shrinking and then expanding its crust. Potentially more powerful is the hundred-something kilograms of nitrogen it loses every second; over geological timeperiods, it amounts to the loss of hundreds to thousands of meters of nitrogen from the whole planet, that's a massive amount of subsidence. Probably the best theory for what's going on right now (caveat: this is still VERY early in the process!) is that Pluto has a relatively thin water ice crust across the whole planet, underlain with a mantle of heavier, viscous-flowing nitrogen ice, which reaches the surface at Sputnik Planum (the "heart") and where impacts have pierced through the water crust. The loss of nitrogen where it's exposed drives its motion (through relaxation), causing a rise in the form of the convection cells at Sputnik and subduction on the opposite side of the planet. Deeper than the nitrogen layer would be a water ice layer (during Pluto's formation, at some point the nitrogen would have been a liquid ocean atop a heavier water ice layer). Now that the nitrogen is solid, it's heavier than the water ice, so the deeper layer is only stable when at great enough depth. As the nitrogen mantle boils off, the outer surface of the deeper water ice layer becomes unstable and chunks break off and are entrained into the nitrogen like xenoliths, slowly floating up along the convection cell borders and reaching the surface as "floating ice mountains". These then, over geological timeperiods, wash to the shore and collect on the chaos terrain.
Like anything we've ever seen before? Hell no! But I fully expect nature to do this to us again and again.
Think of the periodic table, of all of the elements that are reasonably common in the universe, and the chemical forms they usually take. There's a lot of them. Now picture the full range of possible temperature and pressure combinations across the universe - it's vast. Now think of the phase diagram for each chemical, of all of the different possibilities. Now factor in time, how the temperature and pressure experienced by a body can change depending on the circumstances.
Yeah, there's a *lot* of bloody possibilities out there! Metals plating out into giant dendritic spires, superconducting seas, natural nuclear reactors kicking off rainbow-glowing clouds and rivers... it's almost impossible to imagine all of the potential diversity.
Here's one: picture a close binary world, far from its star - so with a temperature not greatly over the cosmic background. At these temperatures, helium - the second most common element in the universe - could readily pool into oceans, with a thin helium atmosphere. Neat enough on its own. But if the larger party in the binary was eating helium from the atmosphere of the smaller body (or other method of losing the atmosphere), then this would be evaporatively cooling the smaller body. I ran some calculations a while back and found that due to the low rate of radiative heat exchange at such cold temperatures, it's quite possible for the helium on the smaller body in the right conditions to evaporatively cool below helium's lambda point - aka the ocean would become a superfluid - flowing with zero velocity, climbing over obstacles in thin surface layers with ease, creating powerful boiloff fou
Islet cell neuroendocrine tumor has very long average survival time if caught early (like Jobs' was) and treated properly (which Jobs' wasn't). Not just a couple years - over a decade. And that's for regular folk, not for people who count among the wealthiest individuals on Earth and can afford the best care on the planet. These tumors are so passive that 10% of autopsied patients in the general public are found to have had a gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumor without ever knowing, and 30% of the tumors are so good at maintaining their original function that there's debate over whether to even call them "cancer". Insulinomas are anything but a virulent form - but they can spread if left to fester. Jobs' cancer was caught very early on, and by all standards he should have had a very long life expectancy had he actually gone with actual medical treatment advised by his doctors (as well as his friends and family). Instead, he committed "suicide by woo", letting it fester until it become something actually bad and hard to remove completely. Something that he deeply regretted later.
Never said that woo isn't bipartisan. Just pointing out that yes, Corbyn is a woo supporter. Because hey, it comes from "organic matter", just like actual medicine!
No, it's not a byproduct of making plutonium for nuclear weapons. See above.
Are you kidding? It'll work out great! Think of the cuddling potential! Okay, okay, sometimes it might be a bit awkward...
Nobody was talking about letting Ukraine join the EU. They're way far away from meeting the standards, and as it stands, a lot of people think that even letting states like Hungary in was a mistake. What was being offered was a trade pact.
Here's a quite detailed history of the negotiations and where things went awry, from both sides. Basically, the EU handed Yanukovych a set of economics calculations showing the huge amount of money that would flow into Ukraine, and the conditions they had to meet to get it. They were never really open to negotiation, convinced that the amount of windfall was all that mattered, and they'd fall in line on the conditions. "Vast amounts of money flowing into the country" certainly appealed to ostrich wrangler Yanukovych, but the main sticking point early on was his political prosecution of former prime minister (and Princess Leia impersonator) Yulia Tymoshenko. The EU was quite confident that he'd fall in line in order to get the windfall from the trade membership, and they also didn't see how it was any matter of Russia's what Ukraine, a sovereign state, decided to do on its own, and thus how they even were relevant to the negotiations. It was a pretty haughty position, but if was a quite passive position. Everything Yanukovych tried to change about the deal was rebuffed - it was a "take it or leave it" situation, with the EU fully convinced that the "take it" answer would arrive any day. Russia first tried imposing counterpressure on Ukraine with an economic carrot and stick approach, but this approved not enough to derail the negotiations - although left the Ukrainian side increasingly rebuffed trying to get further concessions from the EU to compensate it. However, the sudden and unexpected reversal came after a relatively brief meeting between Yanukovych and Putin. What was said at that meeting is anyone's guess - although how far Russia was willing to go to keep Ukraine from drawing closer to the EU has been made abundantly clear since then.
... of my US laboratory's work to create a race of mutant tentacle monsters!
Link