You know, when there is a physical mechanism connecting two phenomena AND a correlation between them, that correlation != causation thing is simply, well, bullshit.
Well, as soon as you are through with Stand on Zanzibar, you are ready for anything. Not that I don't like it, but, man, this one took a couple of tries.
Well, you made sure that it will take longer than the idiots spamming an unrelated topic with their denialist bullshit. Seriously, slashdot. We get some interesting astronomy news and half the posts are climate change trolls. Way to go, folks.
Can you imagine the "weak on terror"-shitstorm that would break loose if he really did veto the renewal? That would be the most impressive political suicide ever. No one can repeal that shit, ever, because of this. This act is a self-perpetuating monstrosity that caught its creators and imprisoned them within their own propaganda. Fascinating, but ugly. Very, very ugly.
Depends. Going with world war Z, zombies are not particularly active in the cold, iirc - better hole up in some cabin at the arse end of Alaska then. Desert heat might set them on overdrive...
That strongly depends on the parameters of the zombie outbreak. Check this for a full mathematical treatise of zombie epidemiology. Under certain boundary conditions, no hunting skill will save you. Besides, as someone else already stated, hunting does not particularly give you the close quarter skills you gonna need...
Government institutions are independent of each other and the CDC wouldn't be instrumentalized in a second for warfare purposes if some sick fuck would deem it necessary?
The crack, lay it off. It is not good for you. I mean, it was always clear that you are a flaming idiot, but, dude... calling you crazy as a shithouse rat would be an insult to all upstanding shithouse rats in the world....
The isotopes involved in the elevated radiation levels have been determined, mostly by gamma spectroscopy. The main culprits are iodine and cesium isotopes. Radon is only a factor if it gets trapped, like in cellars for example. The place I was born has granite bedrock, which has quite some radon emission - so in some places, people had to install ventilation systems in their cellars. The high backgrounds in Japan, however, are measured in the open, where radon is basically no problem because of atmospheric dilution. So it is probably safe to assume that a possibly radon contribution to the contamination measured in the topsoil is in the sub-% range.
True, but that gives even LESS reason to keep it around. In particular, given the fact that you do not need the original virus for the vaccine. The only reason to keep the samples I can see is the fear that one might be a step behind in possible future weaponization. And, frankly, people reasoning like that are working on a Mengele level.
We know how to make the vaccine for more than a century. It was the first vaccine ever made, actually, with technology every third world doctor can reproduce by now. We do not need the virus stocks to test it. Keeping them is just holding open the door for possible weaponization.
We have the whole genome on file. Why exactly are you defending keeping stocks that rationally can serve only one purpose - possible weaponization? We don't need em for research, we don't need em for vaccination. They are kept by people closely associated by the military. The sick fuckers don't want to lose the possibility to use it as a weapon, however remote that seems at the current situation. That's Mengele-grade shit going on there.
Yeah, that was a brainfart - I wanted to shoot for order of magnitude only, so I originally planned to set 10% of total thermal power. That somehow got garbled into 10 MW. So I undershot it by a factor of 10. You are right, with losing about 150 tons of water, the core would probably fall dry within the hour given a loss of circulation immediately after scram.
If they lost cooling at the moment of the quake, they'd have to deal with roughly 10MW thermal. Heat of vaporisation for water is about 2kJ/g, so at 10 MJ/s we get vaporization of 5 kg/s. For 40 minutes between quake and tsunami, we have 2400 s, giving us 12 tons of water evaporated. That is definitely lower than the whole content of the RPV, so we won't get a dry core and total meltdown there, assuming that there is no other path for coolant loss than evaporation. Partial exposure of the rods with partial melting is still possible, though.
Can't be arsed to do the math right now, but 20 kg for a tank killer seems like pretty much overkill at first glance. Kinda depends how much mass you ablate on the way down, of course. 20 kg arriving at the tank - just from intuition, I guess that vaporizing the tank and a good part of its surroundings would indeed count as "fairly effective". Feel free to correct me if you got the correct numbers, just doing seat of the pants estimates here.
Rather than wind resistance, friction heat would probably eat those up. With unpleasant effects for the shooter. Nice little plasma cloud in the barrel already...
He might have saved his butt by this - no self-respecting alien would eat him now, for fear that such a misconception about matters culinary might be the result of something transmissible. A truly horrible fate no sentient being would take upon itself.
You might have misunderstood me here - I basically agree. I was talking about the GP, who flat-out characterized fusion as a pipe dream. I recently visited the ASDEX-Upgrade experiment in Germany and heard some nice talks about recent progress, which pretty much supports your timeline regarding commercial viability. As for the memetics - have you noticed how often the words - and exactly the words - "Fusion will always be 40 years in the future" pop up in slashdot discussions? That pretty much qualifies as a meme in my understanding. It is a self-propagating piece of thought that persists independently of reality. In a sense, I would characterize it as defining a culture - a faux cynical "know-it-all"-culture quite popular amongst lots of nerds.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, when there is a physical mechanism connecting two phenomena AND a correlation between them, that correlation != causation thing is simply, well, bullshit.
Are you going for the "stupidest post in slashdot history" achievment with that? And who the heck modded that interesting,please?
Well, as soon as you are through with Stand on Zanzibar, you are ready for anything. Not that I don't like it, but, man, this one took a couple of tries.
Well, you made sure that it will take longer than the idiots spamming an unrelated topic with their denialist bullshit. Seriously, slashdot. We get some interesting astronomy news and half the posts are climate change trolls. Way to go, folks.
Appreciation of the concept of coincidence? ;)
Can you imagine the "weak on terror"-shitstorm that would break loose if he really did veto the renewal? That would be the most impressive political suicide ever. No one can repeal that shit, ever, because of this. This act is a self-perpetuating monstrosity that caught its creators and imprisoned them within their own propaganda. Fascinating, but ugly. Very, very ugly.
Depends. Going with world war Z, zombies are not particularly active in the cold, iirc - better hole up in some cabin at the arse end of Alaska then. Desert heat might set them on overdrive...
That strongly depends on the parameters of the zombie outbreak. Check this for a full mathematical treatise of zombie epidemiology. Under certain boundary conditions, no hunting skill will save you. Besides, as someone else already stated, hunting does not particularly give you the close quarter skills you gonna need...
Government institutions are independent of each other and the CDC wouldn't be instrumentalized in a second for warfare purposes if some sick fuck would deem it necessary?
The crack, lay it off. It is not good for you. I mean, it was always clear that you are a flaming idiot, but, dude... calling you crazy as a shithouse rat would be an insult to all upstanding shithouse rats in the world....
The isotopes involved in the elevated radiation levels have been determined, mostly by gamma spectroscopy. The main culprits are iodine and cesium isotopes. Radon is only a factor if it gets trapped, like in cellars for example. The place I was born has granite bedrock, which has quite some radon emission - so in some places, people had to install ventilation systems in their cellars. The high backgrounds in Japan, however, are measured in the open, where radon is basically no problem because of atmospheric dilution. So it is probably safe to assume that a possibly radon contribution to the contamination measured in the topsoil is in the sub-% range.
True, but that gives even LESS reason to keep it around. In particular, given the fact that you do not need the original virus for the vaccine. The only reason to keep the samples I can see is the fear that one might be a step behind in possible future weaponization. And, frankly, people reasoning like that are working on a Mengele level.
We know how to make the vaccine for more than a century. It was the first vaccine ever made, actually, with technology every third world doctor can reproduce by now. We do not need the virus stocks to test it. Keeping them is just holding open the door for possible weaponization.
We have the whole genome on file. Why exactly are you defending keeping stocks that rationally can serve only one purpose - possible weaponization? We don't need em for research, we don't need em for vaccination. They are kept by people closely associated by the military. The sick fuckers don't want to lose the possibility to use it as a weapon, however remote that seems at the current situation. That's Mengele-grade shit going on there.
Yeah, that was a brainfart - I wanted to shoot for order of magnitude only, so I originally planned to set 10% of total thermal power. That somehow got garbled into 10 MW. So I undershot it by a factor of 10. You are right, with losing about 150 tons of water, the core would probably fall dry within the hour given a loss of circulation immediately after scram.
If they lost cooling at the moment of the quake, they'd have to deal with roughly 10MW thermal. Heat of vaporisation for water is about 2kJ/g, so at 10 MJ/s we get vaporization of 5 kg/s. For 40 minutes between quake and tsunami, we have 2400 s, giving us 12 tons of water evaporated. That is definitely lower than the whole content of the RPV, so we won't get a dry core and total meltdown there, assuming that there is no other path for coolant loss than evaporation. Partial exposure of the rods with partial melting is still possible, though.
Can't be arsed to do the math right now, but 20 kg for a tank killer seems like pretty much overkill at first glance. Kinda depends how much mass you ablate on the way down, of course. 20 kg arriving at the tank - just from intuition, I guess that vaporizing the tank and a good part of its surroundings would indeed count as "fairly effective". Feel free to correct me if you got the correct numbers, just doing seat of the pants estimates here.
That kinda depends how long that pulse of your 5 kW pulsed laser is, I'd wager. That and it's dead time.
The point was not Mars being economic to colonize, the point was that there is well, no point in making a self-sustaining Antarctica colony.
Rather than wind resistance, friction heat would probably eat those up. With unpleasant effects for the shooter. Nice little plasma cloud in the barrel already...
Since when do you need gravity for projectile weapons to work? Atmosphere? Probably not, too, if your propellant is chosen well.
Well, you covered his argument already. Just wanted to reinforce you. Sometimes I post for another reason than to flame the one I reply to :D
Spun, you are in a particularly righteous rage today. Not to say that this is bad, but is it healthy?
He might have saved his butt by this - no self-respecting alien would eat him now, for fear that such a misconception about matters culinary might be the result of something transmissible. A truly horrible fate no sentient being would take upon itself.
You might have misunderstood me here - I basically agree. I was talking about the GP, who flat-out characterized fusion as a pipe dream. I recently visited the ASDEX-Upgrade experiment in Germany and heard some nice talks about recent progress, which pretty much supports your timeline regarding commercial viability. As for the memetics - have you noticed how often the words - and exactly the words - "Fusion will always be 40 years in the future" pop up in slashdot discussions? That pretty much qualifies as a meme in my understanding. It is a self-propagating piece of thought that persists independently of reality. In a sense, I would characterize it as defining a culture - a faux cynical "know-it-all"-culture quite popular amongst lots of nerds.