They are probably going to use gravity assists, and planets are hard to come by outside of the ecliptic. However, I suppose they could use the last gravity assist to deflect it upwards.
The wheel was patented in 2001. I don't think that patent will survive a lawsuit, but it does show how much of a rubber stamp getting a patent has become (in Australia, and for one type of patents).
Apparantly, in the UK, a monopoly is defined as anyone having more than 25% market share. That probably assumes that the competition is split between many, smaller entities, so that 25% market share actually gives you market dominance. Whether the relevant competition for the iPhones is android, or each of the companies using android, is an interesting discussion.
Yes, but are there wars over cubic zirconia? If I give a stone as a symbol of the love I have for someone, by god, I demand to have lifes on my consience! Besides, there isn't a monopoly artificially keeping up the price of cubic zirconia, so it isn't an effective, yet publically accepted, way to show off my wealth.
The earth's core isn't cooling, AFAIK. Nuclear decay keeps it nice and warm. Of course, that will end gradually, but when it hasn't done so yet, it probably won't be a problem until the sun becomes a red giant.
Because we can find one thing humans do better than computers, we should stick to human driven vehicles? What about comparing the overall quality of the two systems? Of course we should demand that the computer was better than a human to a certain, defined, degree, but to demand that it is better in all respects? Why choose the inferior solution because the other is not perfect?
Then again, I spent a couple of years actually commuting to work by train and know just how much they suck ass.
It really depends on the structure of the city. If the suburbs have high enough population density and the train network is properly maintained, it can be a very good solution. AFAIK the first requirement is not fulfilled in most american cities, and the second is hard to ensure.
Rotation can change that. Depending on the direction, rotation will either move the hottest (most active part of "rocket engine") to the front, slowing down the comet, or to the back, speeding it up. I have no idea whether that is the explanation here, though, or, indeed, whether we are in need of an explanation, or in need of checking calculations.
Phthalic anhydryde has got nothing to do with naphthalene, except that it was originally synthesised from it (it might still be, I don't know). Naphthalene sulphonate is closer, in that it isn't completely implausible that some of it could be transformed to naphthalene, but it is very unlikely that it is going to do that in any significant amount. They are not forms of naphthalene. They are both much more polar than naphthalene and thus easier for the body to excrete.
Using the first limit I found when searching for "water limit naphthalene", those 4000 pounds is able to pollute 13 billion liters of drinking water. If we take into account that it is not uniformly distributed acros Texas, that can easily be significant. And that is only one compound. I am not saying it is a problem, but saying "The main component by volume of fraccing fluid is water." as if that makes it harmless is not correct.
Sorry for the self-reply, but: The amount of carcinogenous compounds in the fluid is of course not that interesting, the interesting part is where they end up. But that was not the point LoyalOpposition made, and so, not what I commented on.
I was answering LoyalOpposition who answered a hope for less toxic frackin fluid with
The main component by volume of fraccing fluid is water.
It is right, of course, but also totally irrelevant. So no, in order to counter LoyalOppositions argument, I don't need to cite concentrations. Had I wanted to, I would have cited Haliburton. From there, it seems the typical content of thing other than water, nitrogen and propant is about 0.5-3%. Of this, about 1/10 is surfactants, which is probably where the aromatics will be. Of the surfactants, up to 5% is naphthalene. This means that Haliburtons fluid is up to 150 ppm naphthalene. If we multiply that by the amount of fluid used in Texas, that is around 600 gallons of naphthalene used. That is a heaping lot of carcinogenous PAH, and it is only one of the aromatic compounds in there.
Yes, and there are many minor ingredients, including lead and naphthalene(pdf warning). Small concentrations times massive quantities give quite high total amounts.
That is interesting and a great read, thank you for the link.
I have two points to make from the article: firstly,
The report makes some striking comments about the geology of the site as well. Rather than the classic picture of fracking operations separated from drinking water aquifers by many thick, impermeable layers, a much different judgment of the stratigraphy is given. The EPA reports that there is "no lithologic barrier (laterally continuous shale units) to stop upward vertical migration of aqueous constituents of hydraulic fracturing."
The problem isn't generalisable to most fracking operations, but it we should stop doing it where the isn't a lithologic barrier. Secondly,
"further investigation would be needed to determine if organic compounds associated with hydraulic fracturing have migrated to domestic wells in the area of investigation." That's because "the existing data at this time do not establish a definitive link between deep and shallow contamination of the aquifer."
We don't know whether the heavier hydrocarbons found in the water wells come from fracking or are released from spills on the surface. They say that the gas in the water wells are there because of the gas production, though. I didn't think it possible, the differences in depth are simply too big, but it seems I was wrong, according to the EPA.
You and me may not be dumb enough to fall for [advertising]
Yes, yes you are. We all are (well, I wouldn't call it dumb, but we are all affected by marketing). If you believe you aren't affected by advertising, that only means your filters are down, making it easier to affect you.
I knew I should have used burning women at the stake as an example in stead. They haven't found a way that helps against epidemics, have they?;-)
Well, we have used history to guide which experiments to do, and the experiments to tell us what works and what doesn't. So that is close to what I suggested above.
As an ex-academic, I'm very sympathetic to this idea. I've been involved for the past year in a project to get the hundreds of studies, including double-blind, that have been done in China, Taiwan, and Japan translated into English.
It is a travesty that non-english articles are not used more. So much work is being replicated simply because people doesn't take the effort to read Japanese or German. That being said, the quality of research from China have been found lacking in quite a lot of cases, to a higher degree than the same can be said about research from western countries or Japan, so a certain reservation is to be expected. This is particularly true for research aobut subjects originating in the East. For example, the proportion of Chinese studies about acupuncture with postive findings is much higher than the same proportion for studies done in the West. This is pretty damning when the state of the best evidence we have is that acupuncture doesn't work.
It would be foolish to ignore the evidence that we have in front of us because it is informal or empirical.
I'm not saying we should disregard it, but it isn't useful for much more than generating the hypothesis we should test. It simply doesn't have the controls we need to make sure it holds water. After all, bloodletting has a much longer documented history than meditation, so if we use history as a guide, we should perform that in our hospitals.
And don't forget that Isaac Newton was an alchemist, who applied the same rigor to his alchemy that he did to his physics..
He was perfectly scientific about what he published about alchemy: He couldn't reproduce the findings of others, so he didn't publish anything. I don't really see the relevance?
Plus, it is a fine size for a first study, to refine the hypothesis a larger study is going to test, and to demonstrate that the larger study will likely not be a waste of time, thus making funding the larger study easier.
So, if your sarcasm gland needed emptying, it WAS just what you needed. Which means that your comment wasn't sarcasm. But then it wasn't just what you needed, so it must have been sarcasm. Are you by any chance from descended from Cretans?
That's quite enough, if you also consider the (casual) human trials that have been going on for a millennium, involving billions of participants. [...] it's interesting that the standard for us can only be a series of studies, published in English, for any evidence.
The plural of anecdote is not evidence. The whole point of science is that we have learned the hard way that we are very adept at fooling ourselves, so we need to make absolutely sure that that is not what we are doing. In essence, that is all science is: A toolbox of techniques that let us examine something without falling into the traps our own minds set out for us. There is nothing wrong with meditating if that makes you feel better (at the very least, mediation is relaxing, and who couldn't use some more of that?), but if you want to know whether it does more than make you feel good, you need to be very careful not to fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. (with apologies to Richard Feynmann).
Firstly, a study with 16 participants is interesting, and can generate hypotheses, but nothing more than that. Secondly, it seems the controls were simply non-intervention. How do we know whether it was meditation, relaxation or simply learning something new that had that effect if it is not controlled for? The senior author even says:"This study demonstrates that [...] people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing." It does no such thing, they haven't controlled for it! Thirdly, I particularly like the part of "Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. ". Ah, yes, we didn't find any effect, but if we had just kept on longer, I'm sure we would have! A beautiful example of special pleading. Do the test for longer and see if there is a difference, until then we can only state that we haven't seen an effect yet.
Really, they have a center for mindfulness, and they produce this kind of bullshit? Talk about cargo cult science.
Of course, none of this says anything bad about tai chi, which I am sure is fun and relaxing, and relaxation is something most people could do with more of.
Slashdot Mirror
They are probably going to use gravity assists, and planets are hard to come by outside of the ecliptic. However, I suppose they could use the last gravity assist to deflect it upwards.
The wheel was patented in 2001. I don't think that patent will survive a lawsuit, but it does show how much of a rubber stamp getting a patent has become (in Australia, and for one type of patents).
Apparantly, in the UK, a monopoly is defined as anyone having more than 25% market share. That probably assumes that the competition is split between many, smaller entities, so that 25% market share actually gives you market dominance. Whether the relevant competition for the iPhones is android, or each of the companies using android, is an interesting discussion.
Yes, but are there wars over cubic zirconia? If I give a stone as a symbol of the love I have for someone, by god, I demand to have lifes on my consience! Besides, there isn't a monopoly artificially keeping up the price of cubic zirconia, so it isn't an effective, yet publically accepted, way to show off my wealth.
The earth's core isn't cooling, AFAIK. Nuclear decay keeps it nice and warm. Of course, that will end gradually, but when it hasn't done so yet, it probably won't be a problem until the sun becomes a red giant.
Because we can find one thing humans do better than computers, we should stick to human driven vehicles? What about comparing the overall quality of the two systems? Of course we should demand that the computer was better than a human to a certain, defined, degree, but to demand that it is better in all respects? Why choose the inferior solution because the other is not perfect?
Then again, I spent a couple of years actually commuting to work by train and know just how much they suck ass.
It really depends on the structure of the city. If the suburbs have high enough population density and the train network is properly maintained, it can be a very good solution. AFAIK the first requirement is not fulfilled in most american cities, and the second is hard to ensure.
Rotation can change that. Depending on the direction, rotation will either move the hottest (most active part of "rocket engine") to the front, slowing down the comet, or to the back, speeding it up. I have no idea whether that is the explanation here, though, or, indeed, whether we are in need of an explanation, or in need of checking calculations.
Phthalic anhydryde has got nothing to do with naphthalene, except that it was originally synthesised from it (it might still be, I don't know). Naphthalene sulphonate is closer, in that it isn't completely implausible that some of it could be transformed to naphthalene, but it is very unlikely that it is going to do that in any significant amount. They are not forms of naphthalene. They are both much more polar than naphthalene and thus easier for the body to excrete.
Using the first limit I found when searching for "water limit naphthalene", those 4000 pounds is able to pollute 13 billion liters of drinking water. If we take into account that it is not uniformly distributed acros Texas, that can easily be significant. And that is only one compound. I am not saying it is a problem, but saying "The main component by volume of fraccing fluid is water." as if that makes it harmless is not correct.
Sorry for the self-reply, but: The amount of carcinogenous compounds in the fluid is of course not that interesting, the interesting part is where they end up. But that was not the point LoyalOpposition made, and so, not what I commented on.
The main component by volume of fraccing fluid is water.
It is right, of course, but also totally irrelevant. So no, in order to counter LoyalOppositions argument, I don't need to cite concentrations. Had I wanted to, I would have cited Haliburton. From there, it seems the typical content of thing other than water, nitrogen and propant is about 0.5-3%. Of this, about 1/10 is surfactants, which is probably where the aromatics will be. Of the surfactants, up to 5% is naphthalene. This means that Haliburtons fluid is up to 150 ppm naphthalene. If we multiply that by the amount of fluid used in Texas, that is around 600 gallons of naphthalene used. That is a heaping lot of carcinogenous PAH, and it is only one of the aromatic compounds in there.
Yes, and there are many minor ingredients, including lead and naphthalene(pdf warning). Small concentrations times massive quantities give quite high total amounts.
Isn't diesel fuel a mineral oil? Is there some distinction which I am not aware of?
I have two points to make from the article: firstly,
The report makes some striking comments about the geology of the site as well. Rather than the classic picture of fracking operations separated from drinking water aquifers by many thick, impermeable layers, a much different judgment of the stratigraphy is given. The EPA reports that there is "no lithologic barrier (laterally continuous shale units) to stop upward vertical migration of aqueous constituents of hydraulic fracturing."
The problem isn't generalisable to most fracking operations, but it we should stop doing it where the isn't a lithologic barrier.
Secondly,
"further investigation would be needed to determine if organic compounds associated with hydraulic fracturing have migrated to domestic wells in the area of investigation." That's because "the existing data at this time do not establish a definitive link between deep and shallow contamination of the aquifer."
We don't know whether the heavier hydrocarbons found in the water wells come from fracking or are released from spills on the surface. They say that the gas in the water wells are there because of the gas production, though. I didn't think it possible, the differences in depth are simply too big, but it seems I was wrong, according to the EPA.
You and me may not be dumb enough to fall for [advertising]
Yes, yes you are. We all are (well, I wouldn't call it dumb, but we are all affected by marketing). If you believe you aren't affected by advertising, that only means your filters are down, making it easier to affect you.
I knew I should have used burning women at the stake as an example in stead. They haven't found a way that helps against epidemics, have they? ;-)
Well, we have used history to guide which experiments to do, and the experiments to tell us what works and what doesn't. So that is close to what I suggested above.
You don't say (pdf warning). 11 pages (to be fair, the actual manual is only 6 of those).
As an ex-academic, I'm very sympathetic to this idea. I've been involved for the past year in a project to get the hundreds of studies, including double-blind, that have been done in China, Taiwan, and Japan translated into English.
It is a travesty that non-english articles are not used more. So much work is being replicated simply because people doesn't take the effort to read Japanese or German. That being said, the quality of research from China have been found lacking in quite a lot of cases, to a higher degree than the same can be said about research from western countries or Japan, so a certain reservation is to be expected. This is particularly true for research aobut subjects originating in the East. For example, the proportion of Chinese studies about acupuncture with postive findings is much higher than the same proportion for studies done in the West. This is pretty damning when the state of the best evidence we have is that acupuncture doesn't work.
It would be foolish to ignore the evidence that we have in front of us because it is informal or empirical.
I'm not saying we should disregard it, but it isn't useful for much more than generating the hypothesis we should test. It simply doesn't have the controls we need to make sure it holds water. After all, bloodletting has a much longer documented history than meditation, so if we use history as a guide, we should perform that in our hospitals.
And don't forget that Isaac Newton was an alchemist, who applied the same rigor to his alchemy that he did to his physics..
He was perfectly scientific about what he published about alchemy: He couldn't reproduce the findings of others, so he didn't publish anything. I don't really see the relevance?
Sorry about the autoreply, I of course meant preliminary study in stead of first study.
Plus, it is a fine size for a first study, to refine the hypothesis a larger study is going to test, and to demonstrate that the larger study will likely not be a waste of time, thus making funding the larger study easier.
True, if you take a 70% larger confidence interval to be "almost identically significant" (not counting the "far more than").
So, if your sarcasm gland needed emptying, it WAS just what you needed. Which means that your comment wasn't sarcasm. But then it wasn't just what you needed, so it must have been sarcasm. Are you by any chance from descended from Cretans?
That's quite enough, if you also consider the (casual) human trials that have been going on for a millennium, involving billions of participants. [...] it's interesting that the standard for us can only be a series of studies, published in English, for any evidence.
The plural of anecdote is not evidence. The whole point of science is that we have learned the hard way that we are very adept at fooling ourselves, so we need to make absolutely sure that that is not what we are doing. In essence, that is all science is: A toolbox of techniques that let us examine something without falling into the traps our own minds set out for us. There is nothing wrong with meditating if that makes you feel better (at the very least, mediation is relaxing, and who couldn't use some more of that?), but if you want to know whether it does more than make you feel good, you need to be very careful not to fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. (with apologies to Richard Feynmann).
Firstly, a study with 16 participants is interesting, and can generate hypotheses, but nothing more than that.
Secondly, it seems the controls were simply non-intervention. How do we know whether it was meditation, relaxation or simply learning something new that had that effect if it is not controlled for? The senior author even says:"This study demonstrates that [...] people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing." It does no such thing, they haven't controlled for it!
Thirdly, I particularly like the part of "Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. ". Ah, yes, we didn't find any effect, but if we had just kept on longer, I'm sure we would have! A beautiful example of special pleading. Do the test for longer and see if there is a difference, until then we can only state that we haven't seen an effect yet.
Really, they have a center for mindfulness, and they produce this kind of bullshit? Talk about cargo cult science.
Of course, none of this says anything bad about tai chi, which I am sure is fun and relaxing, and relaxation is something most people could do with more of.
As this is on a web page, it is usually easier to open a new tab and ask Googles built-in calculator.