I'm just the opposite, I don't understand how this would be good for delivering things to remove, inaccessible areas. They're short-range aircraft, and even if they weren't, you wouldn't want to monopolize an expensive piece of hardware doing one-by-one package deliveries to remote areas, tying it up for an hour or two per package. Here it's short quick hops, then back to charge and be ready to be quickly launched again.
As for the need, it's the same reason as why people choose short delivery periods today. Maybe it's a broken part on your factory line that's costing you a ten thousand dollars an hour. Maybe you're leaving on a trip in an hour and you forgot to pick up something you're going to need. Maybe you're a hospital and speedy delivery could save a patient's life. Maybe you're about to give a presentation at a conference and you discover you need something. Maybe you ran out of petrol and you could really use a couple liters. Maybe you're holding a party and discover you've run of / forgot to pick up some essential item. There's countless reasons why a person may need objects under a couple kilograms delivered quickly - let alone why they may just simply want something quickly (the whole "dammit, I want to be playing around with that new purchase *now*!" attitude)
Beyond speed, if drone delivery takes off (pardon the pun), it could potentially (must stress "potentially") reduce costs for delivery services as well. Ultimately you could completely take humans out of the equation. You're running off of electricity. You need a lot more delivery drones than trucks, but they're also going to be a lot cheaper. Quicker deliveries mean reduced inventory management. Etc. So there's a possibility that it might in the long run prove cheaper. Trucks could increasingly be just for heavy stuff, or paired with drones (aka, the concept of having the truck drive through the general area and drones deliver to the final destination within a few kilometers of the truck as it goes, then returning to its new position, so that the truck doesn't have to weave into every little side street).
1. Uranus and Neptune are more properly termed ice giants than gas giants. 2. Two dwarf planets in our own solar system - Chariklo and Chiron - are believed to have rings. Its suspected that Phobos will one day turn into a ring around Mars.
Show me a study that can relate a high fat low carb diet
It's almost as if the previous poster just wrote, "not all fats are the same".
Which is, by the way, absolutely true. "Fat" is a very broad class of molecules which have differing health consequences. Even subcategories like "omega-6 LA", "omega-3 ALA", "saturated fat" and "trans fat" each represent many molecules, and it's likely that by breaking them down further one will find further variation within each group. And this is already happening.
The problem here is not what Scott "Global Warming Is A Lie" Adams makes it out to be, it's about his usual confusion of what scientific research is saying and what the public's belief that science is saying is
Nutritional science had in the beginning to work out the most broad truisms, and has since worked to refine them further and further. They found, for example, that animals withheld certain chemicals would develop deficiencies, isolated and identified these necessary agents, and labelled them as vitamins and minerals. Naturally companies immediately started capitalizing on this by making and promoting multivitamins, but there never some body of peer-reviewed research behind their claims, there was never some metastudy published in Nature saying "everybody needs to take daily multivitamins!" or anything even close to that. Likewise, early scientists also studied the significant differences in health between rural populations eating diets high in fruits and vegetables, and city populations with diets high in salt and fat. So they were able to break out these two very specific diets into "this one is associated with less disease than that one". It's been a long process ever since to refine it further and further down into specific causative elements in the diets.
The specific criticism of the 1992 Food Pyramid is a glaring example on Adams' part. The Food Pyramid isn't a scientific publication, it's an infographic made by a government agency. It's been criticized as being poor right from the beginning, not due to changing science, but just simply a bad product. But it was just one in a long line of USDA products, and it's the only one of them to show an unusually large grains segment. It should be noted that USDA infographics have changed more over time due to differing political realities than due to any changes in science - for example, the diet promoted by the USDA during the Great Depression was heavily influenced by cost, while during World War II it was influenced by food rationing. USDA products always have some basis in science, but they are not themselves science and are full of compromises and oversimplifications. The main oversimplifications of the 1992 pyramid was not the WHO report that it was based on, but that they conflated different recommendations together in a confusing manner. In particular, the fruits and vegetables sections were supposed to be seen as minimums, while others were supposed to be seen as maximums, and the fat on the top was only supposed to represent pure fats (butter, for example) but not fats found in other foods elsewhere on the pyramid. The WHO reports have been updated since then based on the latest science, but their recommendations have remained quite similar (mainly just more precise in breakdowns - for example, breaking down different types of fats). The fact that the USDA infographics have changed so much is not a reflection of changing science, but simply the recognition that the 1992 pyramid was an awful product.
Actually, disabling substances are used in the vast majority of rapes. The most common is alcohol (trying to get the victim too drunk to resist or looking for someone who already is, in about two thirds of rapes), but drugs are used in about 20% of additional rapes. Very, very few rapes follow the classic Hollywood script of "stranger leaps out of the bushes with a knife" - so vanishingly few that the scenario is statistically almost nonexistant. Disabling substances are extremely popular because 1) they work very well, 2) the victim often can't remember the attacker well if at all, 3) the victim is not in a state to be making a report until long after the event, 4) the victim's ability to make legally reliable testimony is compromised. Why would people choose the Hollywood way over that?
And I'm sorry, but if you think that you can watch everything you consume every second of every evening you're out and not slip up, you're an idiot. And yes, the reason people get mad at people like you is that the problem is that there are people out there drugging other peoples' drinks en masse and thinking that this is acceptable behavior, not that victims haven't gained supernatural abilities to hyperfocus on everything they may potentially consume at all times and never slip up. "Look, I'm sorry that you're dying of pancreatic cancer, but you should have been getting pancreatic function tests daily and working two jobs to pay for weekly MRI scans to find it before it could have posed a threat to you, and because you weren't, it's your own damned fault, and don't act like I'm a jerk for pointing this out!" That's how you come across when you take that tack. The problem is the f***ing cancer, not the victim.
Right, so women are supposed to walk around at all times with a gun in their hand, never setting it down for anything, and have a proximity radar to warn them if anyone is approaching them where they can't see so that she can pump them full of lead?
Why, I bet the gun will just shoot the rohipnol right out of drinks too!
The percent of rape cases in which having a gun could have helped is probably in in the single digits. And with it of course carries the risk of escalating the risk of getting you seriously injured or killed.
1) If an accusation is made, and the accused is convicted, the legal system has been determined that the person is guilty. 2) If an accusation is made, the accused is not charged, and the accuser is convicted of making a false accusation, then the legal system has determined that it was a false charge. 3) If an accusation is made, the accused is not charged, but neither is the accuser, then the legal system has made no finding in any direction due to insufficient evidence to match the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard in either direction.
This should be obvious, but for some reason, many people are always fixated on interpreting #3 (by far the most common scenario) as #2.
As for Kahn? Since then he's been caught up in one sex related charge after another - and has admitted to parts of them. He's currently out on bail awaiting trial for running a prostitution ring; the trial begins a couple days from now.
Well, that's certainly what the submitter was trying to imply with the two sentences of flamebait about Strauss-Kahn tacked onto the end of an essentially unrelated news story.
My point was all about what happens when the mosquitos are not as infertile as planned.
If some offspring survive that means that they didn't get the gene to kill them for some reason. Aka, they're just like wild populations. So.....?
If chemical companies are going to dump something into my backyard, I will scream and shout just as loud
Your back yard is full of the intentional products of chemical companies. Here we're talking about the intentional products of genetic engineering. You're trying to change the situation by comparing waste products with intentional products.
You seem to claim that people should just trust experts. I claim that experts should attempt to inform the public better, thereby earning their trust...
Sorry, but Joe Blow GED is never going to become an expert on genetic engineering. Ever. Period. And the same goes for the vast majority of the public.
So, rabbits that got released in Australia are the top predator? The Pampas grass in California is the top predator? I can make a long list of invasive species that are not the top predator and still influenced their ecosystem a lot
.
Got any examples that aren't introduced species? We're talking about reducing or eliminating species within an ecosystem, not adding new ones from totally different ecosystem. And part of the reason rabbits were so uncontrolled in Australia anyway was because settlers had killed off almost all of the top predators. One could easily imagine that, for example, tasmanian tigers would have quite enjoyed a rabbit feast. Dingo numbers were also shaply culled in the areas with the highest rabbit populations.
That's because most physics and chemistry experiments don't breed and multiply.
Neither do infertile mosquitoes; your point?
They are talking about something that happens literally in their own backyard.
Really, you think there's no products of modern chemistry in your backyard?
They are right to do a risk assessment.
And there have been risk assessments done, by regulators, taking into account the scientific data. Risk assessments are not something for Joe Bloe and his GED who reads NaturalNews and thinks that "GMO mosquitoes" means that they're going to bite his children and spread a zombie plague.
Changing the balance in an ecosystem can have huge consequences.
Contrary to popular belief, changing the bottom of a food chain rarely has major consequences; it's the changing of the top of a food chain that tends to have the biggest consequences. The higher up the food chain you go, not only do you have more of a profound impact on the landscape (look at how radically, say, deer overpopulation transforms a whole ecosystem), but also the more species tend to be generalists rather than specialists. Generalists means the ability to switch more readily between food sources, meaning changes further down have little impact on them. But if you eliminate a top predator from an area, the consequences further down can be profound.
Ah, Americans and their "mammoth snowstorms" - try living on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. You know what we call a snowstorm with gale-force winds and copious precipitation? Tuesday;) Our last one was... let's see, all weekend. The northwest gets hit by another gale-force storm tomorrow. The southeast is predicted to get hurricane-force winds on Thursday morning.
Here's what the job of someone dispatched to maintain antennae for air traffic control services has to deal with here.;) (those are guy wires)
A sun-like star is about 1 1/2 million kilometers in diameter. To blot out all light from such a star that's 10 light years away, a 0,75 kilometer diameter disc could be no more than 1/200.000th of a light year, or around 50 million kilometers (1/3rd the distance between the earth and the sun).
The brightest star in the sky is Sirius A. It has a diameter of 2,4 million km and a distance of 8.6 light years. This means your shade could be no more than 25 million kilometers away.
The sun and the moon both take up about the same amount of arc in the night sky so would be about equally difficult to block; let's go with the sun for a nice supervillian-ish approach. 1,4m km diameter, 150m km distance means it'd be able to block the sun at 800km away. Such an object could probably be kept in a stable orbit at half that altitude, so yeah, you could most definitely block out stars with the thing - including our sun!
It makes sense. We can radiate individual photons for thrust if so desired. We can move individual electrons from one position in a spacecraft to another for tiny adjustments of angle and position if so desired. It seems you're going to be much more limited by your ability to precisely track your target than by your ability to make fine adjustments.
I think a much bigger problem is going to be isolating standing waves from within the shielding material from distorting its perfect rim (with a shield that big and thin, there *will* be oscillations from even the slightest thrust inputs). You need to isolate the rim from the shielding. And you also need to make sure that you can have a rim that can be coiled up for launch but uncoil to such perfection in space.
Tough task... but technically, it should be possible.
I would presume that the bulk material in the inside has no need for accuracy, only the very rim. The question is more of whether you can have a coiled material that when uncoiled (deployment) can return to a shape with that level of accuracy. I would think it possible, but I really don't know.
I would forsee a super-precise rim with just a small bit of light shielding on its inside, deployed via uncoiling, and then attached to a much stronger, less precise uncoiled ring to which the bulk shielding material (and stationkeeping ion thrusters) are attached. The attachment between the two would need to provide for vibration and tension isolation (even the slowest adjustments in angle of such a huge, thin shield are going to set in motion relevant vibrations, you've got almost no damping - you want the structural ring to deal with those and not transfer them through to the precision ring). Not to mention that your shield will be acting as a solar sail whether you like it or not (unless you're at L2... but then your craft better be nuclear powered).
Your telescope behind it is going to need to do some real precision stationkeeping (either extreme precision on the whole spacecraft positioning, or merely "good" positioning of the whole spacecraft plus extreme precision adjustment of the optics within) . This means long development times and costs to demonstrate that you can pull it off before you actually build the shield. But I would think that also possible - just very difficult. If they take the latter route they could probably demonstrate that here on Earth, which would be a big cost-saver.
I don't get why they'd think New Zealand would be safe from protests. If they really want to be safe they should be thinking places like, say, Heard Island, like a true billionaire supervillain would.
It's a two-step process. The first is a chemical that dissolves the proteins (still in their "cooked" folding), and the second is some sort of centrifuge or similar (they don't go into details on the device in the article) that subjects the proteins to very high sheer strain, effectively mechanically unfolding them so that they can then relax back into their natural state.
Not exactly a spice you can sprinkle onto your steak, but still pretty neat.:)
That just raises another issue - why are you services and utilities so unreliable in the US? Here in Iceland we get hurricane-force winds several times a year on average - I've had gusts over Cat 5 on my land. Winter isn't incredibly cold but is super wet (all precipitation forms), windy, and lasts a long time. Up at higher altitudes you get stuff like this (yes, those are guy wires... somewhere in that mass). I lived in the US for a long time and had an average of maybe two power outages a year from downed lines and such - sometimes lasting for long periods of time. I've never once had a power outage here that was anything more than a blown breaker in my place.
It's really amazing what you all put up with - your infrastructure standards are really low.
Yeah, here in freaking Iceland most people have 50 or 100 Mbps fiber for a lot cheaper than that. And not just in the capitol region, it even runs out to Vestfirðir now where the largest city is under 3k people.
It makes no sense whatsoever that a hunk of rock just under the arctic circle, 3 1/2 hours plane flight to the nearest land mass with any sort of half-decent manufacturing infrastructure, consisting often unstable ground constantly bombarded by intense winds, ice, landslides, avalanches, volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, etc, with the world's 2nd or 3rd lowest population density and heavy taxes on all imported goods, can do this while the US can't. What the heck, America? You've got half of the world's servers sitting right there, why the heck can't you manage to connect people to them?
I'd fully support removing any barriers to that. They'll surely get charged out the nose, but it's a reasonable proposal. What's not reasonable is having regular drivers subsidize Uber drivers by letting Uber drivers do commercial work on non-commercial insurance.
Haha, yeah, I remember back when all that was on fark.com was a picture of that squirrel with the oversized genitals. Heck, I knew him before Fark.com, when he was the wizard Cletus on the mud Three Kingdoms.
That falls into statistically normal usage. Being a commercial driver absolutely does not. Statistically, a commercial driver drives way more than a noncommercial driver, and they're much more likely to be sued, and for more money. It's absurd to argue that they should be able to drive on insurance rates calculated for statistical norms of noncommercial drivers. If you allow that sort of ignoring of statistics then you might as well get rid of all statistical tables period and charge every last person the same rate for all types of insurance.
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I'm just the opposite, I don't understand how this would be good for delivering things to remove, inaccessible areas. They're short-range aircraft, and even if they weren't, you wouldn't want to monopolize an expensive piece of hardware doing one-by-one package deliveries to remote areas, tying it up for an hour or two per package. Here it's short quick hops, then back to charge and be ready to be quickly launched again.
As for the need, it's the same reason as why people choose short delivery periods today. Maybe it's a broken part on your factory line that's costing you a ten thousand dollars an hour. Maybe you're leaving on a trip in an hour and you forgot to pick up something you're going to need. Maybe you're a hospital and speedy delivery could save a patient's life. Maybe you're about to give a presentation at a conference and you discover you need something. Maybe you ran out of petrol and you could really use a couple liters. Maybe you're holding a party and discover you've run of / forgot to pick up some essential item. There's countless reasons why a person may need objects under a couple kilograms delivered quickly - let alone why they may just simply want something quickly (the whole "dammit, I want to be playing around with that new purchase *now*!" attitude)
Beyond speed, if drone delivery takes off (pardon the pun), it could potentially (must stress "potentially") reduce costs for delivery services as well. Ultimately you could completely take humans out of the equation. You're running off of electricity. You need a lot more delivery drones than trucks, but they're also going to be a lot cheaper. Quicker deliveries mean reduced inventory management. Etc. So there's a possibility that it might in the long run prove cheaper. Trucks could increasingly be just for heavy stuff, or paired with drones (aka, the concept of having the truck drive through the general area and drones deliver to the final destination within a few kilometers of the truck as it goes, then returning to its new position, so that the truck doesn't have to weave into every little side street).
1. Uranus and Neptune are more properly termed ice giants than gas giants.
2. Two dwarf planets in our own solar system - Chariklo and Chiron - are believed to have rings. Its suspected that Phobos will one day turn into a ring around Mars.
To follow up this post: Link
It's almost as if the previous poster just wrote, "not all fats are the same".
Which is, by the way, absolutely true. "Fat" is a very broad class of molecules which have differing health consequences. Even subcategories like "omega-6 LA", "omega-3 ALA", "saturated fat" and "trans fat" each represent many molecules, and it's likely that by breaking them down further one will find further variation within each group. And this is already happening.
The problem here is not what Scott "Global Warming Is A Lie" Adams makes it out to be, it's about his usual confusion of what scientific research is saying and what the public's belief that science is saying is
Nutritional science had in the beginning to work out the most broad truisms, and has since worked to refine them further and further. They found, for example, that animals withheld certain chemicals would develop deficiencies, isolated and identified these necessary agents, and labelled them as vitamins and minerals. Naturally companies immediately started capitalizing on this by making and promoting multivitamins, but there never some body of peer-reviewed research behind their claims, there was never some metastudy published in Nature saying "everybody needs to take daily multivitamins!" or anything even close to that. Likewise, early scientists also studied the significant differences in health between rural populations eating diets high in fruits and vegetables, and city populations with diets high in salt and fat. So they were able to break out these two very specific diets into "this one is associated with less disease than that one". It's been a long process ever since to refine it further and further down into specific causative elements in the diets.
The specific criticism of the 1992 Food Pyramid is a glaring example on Adams' part. The Food Pyramid isn't a scientific publication, it's an infographic made by a government agency. It's been criticized as being poor right from the beginning, not due to changing science, but just simply a bad product. But it was just one in a long line of USDA products, and it's the only one of them to show an unusually large grains segment. It should be noted that USDA infographics have changed more over time due to differing political realities than due to any changes in science - for example, the diet promoted by the USDA during the Great Depression was heavily influenced by cost, while during World War II it was influenced by food rationing. USDA products always have some basis in science, but they are not themselves science and are full of compromises and oversimplifications. The main oversimplifications of the 1992 pyramid was not the WHO report that it was based on, but that they conflated different recommendations together in a confusing manner. In particular, the fruits and vegetables sections were supposed to be seen as minimums, while others were supposed to be seen as maximums, and the fat on the top was only supposed to represent pure fats (butter, for example) but not fats found in other foods elsewhere on the pyramid. The WHO reports have been updated since then based on the latest science, but their recommendations have remained quite similar (mainly just more precise in breakdowns - for example, breaking down different types of fats). The fact that the USDA infographics have changed so much is not a reflection of changing science, but simply the recognition that the 1992 pyramid was an awful product.
No, the point of the 3d printing is to give it a lattice of small channels, increasing its porosity and surface area.
I wonder how the Mystery Goo is going to behave in that orbit.
Actually, disabling substances are used in the vast majority of rapes. The most common is alcohol (trying to get the victim too drunk to resist or looking for someone who already is, in about two thirds of rapes), but drugs are used in about 20% of additional rapes. Very, very few rapes follow the classic Hollywood script of "stranger leaps out of the bushes with a knife" - so vanishingly few that the scenario is statistically almost nonexistant. Disabling substances are extremely popular because 1) they work very well, 2) the victim often can't remember the attacker well if at all, 3) the victim is not in a state to be making a report until long after the event, 4) the victim's ability to make legally reliable testimony is compromised. Why would people choose the Hollywood way over that?
And I'm sorry, but if you think that you can watch everything you consume every second of every evening you're out and not slip up, you're an idiot. And yes, the reason people get mad at people like you is that the problem is that there are people out there drugging other peoples' drinks en masse and thinking that this is acceptable behavior, not that victims haven't gained supernatural abilities to hyperfocus on everything they may potentially consume at all times and never slip up. "Look, I'm sorry that you're dying of pancreatic cancer, but you should have been getting pancreatic function tests daily and working two jobs to pay for weekly MRI scans to find it before it could have posed a threat to you, and because you weren't, it's your own damned fault, and don't act like I'm a jerk for pointing this out!" That's how you come across when you take that tack. The problem is the f***ing cancer, not the victim.
Right, so women are supposed to walk around at all times with a gun in their hand, never setting it down for anything, and have a proximity radar to warn them if anyone is approaching them where they can't see so that she can pump them full of lead?
Why, I bet the gun will just shoot the rohipnol right out of drinks too!
The percent of rape cases in which having a gun could have helped is probably in in the single digits. And with it of course carries the risk of escalating the risk of getting you seriously injured or killed.
I should add that the Strauss-Kahn red meat is getting old. First off, most of the descriptions of the case are way off, partially inspired by the prosecutors switching from overplaying the case against him to overplaying the case for him. To be clear:
1) If an accusation is made, and the accused is convicted, the legal system has been determined that the person is guilty.
2) If an accusation is made, the accused is not charged, and the accuser is convicted of making a false accusation, then the legal system has determined that it was a false charge.
3) If an accusation is made, the accused is not charged, but neither is the accuser, then the legal system has made no finding in any direction due to insufficient evidence to match the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard in either direction.
This should be obvious, but for some reason, many people are always fixated on interpreting #3 (by far the most common scenario) as #2.
As for Kahn? Since then he's been caught up in one sex related charge after another - and has admitted to parts of them. He's currently out on bail awaiting trial for running a prostitution ring; the trial begins a couple days from now.
Well, that's certainly what the submitter was trying to imply with the two sentences of flamebait about Strauss-Kahn tacked onto the end of an essentially unrelated news story.
If some offspring survive that means that they didn't get the gene to kill them for some reason. Aka, they're just like wild populations. So.....?
Your back yard is full of the intentional products of chemical companies. Here we're talking about the intentional products of genetic engineering. You're trying to change the situation by comparing waste products with intentional products.
Sorry, but Joe Blow GED is never going to become an expert on genetic engineering. Ever. Period. And the same goes for the vast majority of the public.
.
Got any examples that aren't introduced species? We're talking about reducing or eliminating species within an ecosystem, not adding new ones from totally different ecosystem. And part of the reason rabbits were so uncontrolled in Australia anyway was because settlers had killed off almost all of the top predators. One could easily imagine that, for example, tasmanian tigers would have quite enjoyed a rabbit feast. Dingo numbers were also shaply culled in the areas with the highest rabbit populations.
Then they didn't get the gene to kill them. Your point?
Neither do infertile mosquitoes; your point?
Really, you think there's no products of modern chemistry in your backyard?
And there have been risk assessments done, by regulators, taking into account the scientific data. Risk assessments are not something for Joe Bloe and his GED who reads NaturalNews and thinks that "GMO mosquitoes" means that they're going to bite his children and spread a zombie plague.
Contrary to popular belief, changing the bottom of a food chain rarely has major consequences; it's the changing of the top of a food chain that tends to have the biggest consequences. The higher up the food chain you go, not only do you have more of a profound impact on the landscape (look at how radically, say, deer overpopulation transforms a whole ecosystem), but also the more species tend to be generalists rather than specialists. Generalists means the ability to switch more readily between food sources, meaning changes further down have little impact on them. But if you eliminate a top predator from an area, the consequences further down can be profound.
Ah, Americans and their "mammoth snowstorms" - try living on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. You know what we call a snowstorm with gale-force winds and copious precipitation? Tuesday ;) Our last one was... let's see, all weekend. The northwest gets hit by another gale-force storm tomorrow. The southeast is predicted to get hurricane-force winds on Thursday morning.
Here's what the job of someone dispatched to maintain antennae for air traffic control services has to deal with here. ;) (those are guy wires)
A sun-like star is about 1 1/2 million kilometers in diameter. To blot out all light from such a star that's 10 light years away, a 0,75 kilometer diameter disc could be no more than 1/200.000th of a light year, or around 50 million kilometers (1/3rd the distance between the earth and the sun).
The brightest star in the sky is Sirius A. It has a diameter of 2,4 million km and a distance of 8.6 light years. This means your shade could be no more than 25 million kilometers away.
The sun and the moon both take up about the same amount of arc in the night sky so would be about equally difficult to block; let's go with the sun for a nice supervillian-ish approach. 1,4m km diameter, 150m km distance means it'd be able to block the sun at 800km away. Such an object could probably be kept in a stable orbit at half that altitude, so yeah, you could most definitely block out stars with the thing - including our sun!
It makes sense. We can radiate individual photons for thrust if so desired. We can move individual electrons from one position in a spacecraft to another for tiny adjustments of angle and position if so desired. It seems you're going to be much more limited by your ability to precisely track your target than by your ability to make fine adjustments.
I think a much bigger problem is going to be isolating standing waves from within the shielding material from distorting its perfect rim (with a shield that big and thin, there *will* be oscillations from even the slightest thrust inputs). You need to isolate the rim from the shielding. And you also need to make sure that you can have a rim that can be coiled up for launch but uncoil to such perfection in space.
Tough task... but technically, it should be possible.
I would presume that the bulk material in the inside has no need for accuracy, only the very rim. The question is more of whether you can have a coiled material that when uncoiled (deployment) can return to a shape with that level of accuracy. I would think it possible, but I really don't know.
I would forsee a super-precise rim with just a small bit of light shielding on its inside, deployed via uncoiling, and then attached to a much stronger, less precise uncoiled ring to which the bulk shielding material (and stationkeeping ion thrusters) are attached. The attachment between the two would need to provide for vibration and tension isolation (even the slowest adjustments in angle of such a huge, thin shield are going to set in motion relevant vibrations, you've got almost no damping - you want the structural ring to deal with those and not transfer them through to the precision ring). Not to mention that your shield will be acting as a solar sail whether you like it or not (unless you're at L2... but then your craft better be nuclear powered).
Your telescope behind it is going to need to do some real precision stationkeeping (either extreme precision on the whole spacecraft positioning, or merely "good" positioning of the whole spacecraft plus extreme precision adjustment of the optics within) . This means long development times and costs to demonstrate that you can pull it off before you actually build the shield. But I would think that also possible - just very difficult. If they take the latter route they could probably demonstrate that here on Earth, which would be a big cost-saver.
I don't get why they'd think New Zealand would be safe from protests. If they really want to be safe they should be thinking places like, say, Heard Island, like a true billionaire supervillain would.
Um, you do realize that Canada is a commonwealth state and the queen is the head of state, right?
It's a two-step process. The first is a chemical that dissolves the proteins (still in their "cooked" folding), and the second is some sort of centrifuge or similar (they don't go into details on the device in the article) that subjects the proteins to very high sheer strain, effectively mechanically unfolding them so that they can then relax back into their natural state.
Not exactly a spice you can sprinkle onto your steak, but still pretty neat. :)
That just raises another issue - why are you services and utilities so unreliable in the US? Here in Iceland we get hurricane-force winds several times a year on average - I've had gusts over Cat 5 on my land. Winter isn't incredibly cold but is super wet (all precipitation forms), windy, and lasts a long time. Up at higher altitudes you get stuff like this (yes, those are guy wires... somewhere in that mass). I lived in the US for a long time and had an average of maybe two power outages a year from downed lines and such - sometimes lasting for long periods of time. I've never once had a power outage here that was anything more than a blown breaker in my place.
It's really amazing what you all put up with - your infrastructure standards are really low.
Yeah, here in freaking Iceland most people have 50 or 100 Mbps fiber for a lot cheaper than that. And not just in the capitol region, it even runs out to Vestfirðir now where the largest city is under 3k people.
It makes no sense whatsoever that a hunk of rock just under the arctic circle, 3 1/2 hours plane flight to the nearest land mass with any sort of half-decent manufacturing infrastructure, consisting often unstable ground constantly bombarded by intense winds, ice, landslides, avalanches, volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, etc, with the world's 2nd or 3rd lowest population density and heavy taxes on all imported goods, can do this while the US can't. What the heck, America? You've got half of the world's servers sitting right there, why the heck can't you manage to connect people to them?
I'd fully support removing any barriers to that. They'll surely get charged out the nose, but it's a reasonable proposal. What's not reasonable is having regular drivers subsidize Uber drivers by letting Uber drivers do commercial work on non-commercial insurance.
Haha, yeah, I remember back when all that was on fark.com was a picture of that squirrel with the oversized genitals. Heck, I knew him before Fark.com, when he was the wizard Cletus on the mud Three Kingdoms.
God I feel old...
That falls into statistically normal usage. Being a commercial driver absolutely does not. Statistically, a commercial driver drives way more than a noncommercial driver, and they're much more likely to be sued, and for more money. It's absurd to argue that they should be able to drive on insurance rates calculated for statistical norms of noncommercial drivers. If you allow that sort of ignoring of statistics then you might as well get rid of all statistical tables period and charge every last person the same rate for all types of insurance.