In fact, pretty much any animal - even my goldfish, can be conditioned to respond to a food stimulus - they know what precedes them being fed and act accordingly.
Agreed.
I have a reef aquarium. One of its inhabitants is a cleaner shrimp who has learned that when i open the cover of the aquarium, its dinner time. Normally it hangs out on the underside of one of the rocks, but as soon as I open the cover he/she (not sure) is straight out in front waiting for tasty morsels.
Cleaner shrimp have a brain about the size of a grain of sand. If they can develop a response to "food stimulus" anything can.
The other thing I've noticed is that if I'm working hard (physically) i don't tend to feel hungry, even if I haven't eaten in several hours. I DO tend to feel hungry if i stop working and take a break, but as long as i'm moving, it seems to suppress feeling of hunger.
Its true, but I've always noticed that it makes me active rather than hungry.
I notice it most often on Saturday mornings... If I eat breakfast, I tend to loose motivation to get things done around the house: in other words, I just don't feel like doing anything. And that can be a large hurdle to step over, even if it is only a mental one. If I skip breakfast, I seem to have unending ambition.
It makes sense from a biological perspective. If you are a hunter/gatherer, when you get up in the morning you have to go find your breakfast, it isn't just in the cupboard in the kitchen. If you don't go out and find it, then you will go hungry. So before you eat you have lots of ambition. Once you found your breakfast, you body wants to to slow down to digest and conserve energy (why expend energy if you already ate?).
For this reason I usually avoid breakfast on weekends. I get WAY more done if i do.
I'm guessing that there are a lot of people that don't like twitter, for whatever reason. Maybe because they are this big VC company that has no business model. Maybe because the site seems to be the hip thing right now, and you despise anything that is considered hip. But really, you have no solid reason to despise it... yet you do.
So along comes a kid who gives you some reasons that he believes twitter will fail. And HAZZA! you now can feel like your distrust of twitter is well-founded because he agrees with you. Even though this is just one kid's opinion you give it more weight because it makes you feel good about your own position.
The dry mass of a larger rocket (ie one that could lift as much as the four smaller rockets) might not be less than that of the four smaller rockets. Making the rocket larger means that the forces involved have increased, so the engines and structure all have to be made significantly stronger. In the end, you may well end up with a rocket that uses more fuel per kg than four smaller ones that can be built lighter. Yes, you wouldn't need 4 navigation/control computers on the large rocket, but computers don't weigh very much, and the only thing that is really going to matter is weight.
Further the stage rockets would no longer be needed for individual craft to reach orbit since they are already there.
What are you talking about? What the heck is a "stage rocket"? I presume this is just your name for the lifter, ie the rocket itself, and not the spacecraft attached to the top.
To put it mathematically... suppose you launch 4 vehicles from earth, and each costs 1 million to launch (completely theoretical numbers). However, you build a barge type vehicle which needs its own stage rockets, costing 2.5 million to launch. It is capable of delivering the modular parts to create the 4 space craft to the port. Since those craft no longer need to be launched from earth, they no longer need the stage rockets to get there (the largest parts of our current space craft). This leads to an overall savings of 1.5 million on the launches alone. I'm pulling these numbers out of my arse, but I hope you are picking up on my train of thought.
So you are proposing to build a huge heavy lift rocket that is capable of launching in one shot the same amount of mass (the four spacecraft) as four smaller rockets. (which you would then apparently have to assemble in orbit)
One large rocket probably is more efficient in terms of fuel consumed per kg of mass to orbit presuming appropriately sized stages, but I seriously doubt that it would be as much of an improvement as you are suggesting. Also you have to take into account the non-trivial cost of maintaining the space-port. Not to mention the fact that building things in microgravity is really difficult, and we are not at all good at it.
Frankly, I think you are more excited about the the idea that we would have a space-port than any practical improvements in terms of cost.
I remember hearing about a research satellite that had a very long tether that it could use to either generate electricity from the earths magnetic field (by sacrificing some of it's own velocity/altitude) or use electricity to push against the magnetic field and raise its orbit.
Seems like that would be a partial solution to the space stations orbital decay problem. It has power from it's solar panels, so it theoretically could boost it's own orbit without needing a spacecraft (with extra fuel) attached.
Resupply missions would still be needed, of course, but they wouldn't have to bring excess fuel, so they could be done cheaper than is currently possible.
Another thing that irks me is how decompression in a spacecraft is always portrayed (in TV, movies, books, etc) as being an explosively violent event with huge winds blowing around inside a spacecraft as everything gets sucked out thru some hole or blown-out window. Few people realize that there is less than 15 PSI difference in the atmospheric air pressure at the surface of the Earth and the "vacuum of space". An air leak on a spacecraft is a very subtle (but deadly) thing. A sudden decompression of a whole spacecraft would be very little more violent than a big fart.
I'm with you there. I can suspend my disbelief of the force of the wind for the sake of the story (after all, 15 lbs/in^2 is actually a pretty significant force. If you were near a large hole when it was formed, you would certainly get sucked out if you weren't already holding onto something. ) But what really irks me is the length of time that all of those scenes seem to last. Give me a break. Unless you are in one freaking large spacecraft, all of the air would be sucked out in seconds if there was a large (ie: several feet in diameter) hole in the hull. I even remember a movie recently that had a scene where a several foot diameter hole is created in the side of a plane, and people are fighting not to get sucked out for several minutes. I mean, how much air the the writers actually think is in a plane?
That is a nice idea and all, but I have a suspicion that the amount of fuel that would be required to achieve that would be impractical to blast into orbit. Also, being that the ISS is in low earth orbit, it gets to benefit from the earths protective magnetic field. If we were to send it to the moon, we would probably have to add radiation shielding to many components that weren't designed to operate away from the Earth. (and probably some sort of safe-room for the astronauts for the inevitable solar flare)
He spent a couple million on some big-ass windmills, and a little more on lobbying/advertising efforts to see if he could sucker the public to pitch in on it.
Actually, wasn't it a couple BILLION for the windmills? I'm pretty sure each one costs several million dollars.
I'm not saying speculation didn't have a part to play in the whole process, and it could have accounted for 20 to 30 cents of each gallon of gas, but speculation actually helps keep the prices stable, otherwise you'd have gas prices vary by 30 cents every day all over the map. Can you imagine THAT nightmare?
So how many investors do we need in order to maintain price stability? Surely not 70 times more than the number of commodity consumers. At the height of the oil price spike, the average oil future was traded around 70 times before an oil consumer bought it. It is just plain ridiculous that something like that is allowed.
Ummm.. no it wasn't. The spike in 08 was due entirely to supply and demand market conditions. People needed more oil than we had available, so the price went up until the right number of people quit buying and the supply and demand equaled each other.
No,
What caused the spike was the fact that we have fairly little spare oil production capacity. This created a feeling in the market that oil demand would soon outpace supply. The political instability present in many oil producing countries added to this fear. At the same time, inflation was climbing due to years of low interest rates, so investors were looking for safe places to put their money.
With the fear present in the oil market, it appeared to be a safe bet. Investors also knew that oil demand is relatively inflexible due to it being a required resource for many businesses and consumers. Thus investment money began to flood the oil futures market.
With oil futures prices rising, businesses that depend on oil had to choose between locking in a high price by buying futures, or risk that the price will be even higher when they need the oil. The fears of instability, and the highly visible rising futures prices caused many businesses to lock-in their price by buying futures.
Investors, seeing that their investments in futures were successful, (more often than not they were able to sell their futures for more than they bought them for), continued to invest. Many dumping even more money into the futures markets.
As prices continued to rise, many companies that had previously decided to wait out the price spike began to fear that they had made a mistake. So they too bought oil futures. Which further supported the investors.
This continued until oil consumers could no longer support the prices. This often meant that the companies were failing, their business models no longer viable due to massively increased operating expenses. Individual consumers (people) were also having their own budgetary crises, having to choose between paying the rent/mortgage, and putting food on the table.
Sure. The market corrected in the end. But only once the investors started to truly loose money. Unfortunately that was long after many companies and individuals were severely impacted. And all of it was due to a fear. No not actual supply and demand, but a fear that there MIGHT be a supply shortage.
The GP was explaining why cyclists use the road rather than designated paths. They explained that every intersection of a bike path and a road (with some exceptions) is an uncontrolled intersection where the cyclist must yield. If the roads are busy, it can take a long time to cross each street. Cycling on the street is faster because the cyclist has a turn to cross at the stop-sign/light, just like all of the cars do. You don't have to wait for every car like you would at the bike path crossing.
There are poor cyclists out there, just as there are poor drivers. That doesn't mean that they should not be respected, though.
Respect should be earned.
If respect means giving a cyclist enough room that they most likely won't be killed by something you do (sudden avoidance maneuver, etc.) then it seems to me that all cyclists (and drivers) deserve respect by default. It isn't your right to endanger someone's life even if some of their group are total assholes.
The device is just showing where the rider is, placing a "lane" around the cyclist. It isn't about making a lane where there isn't one. It is just for the safety of the cyclist. Anyway, by law you ARE required to share the road.
Anybody that doesn't concern themselves with the others that use a roadway are being assholes, whether it be pedestrians, cyclists, or drivers, they all cause aggravation.
...so that's probably why I've never noticed a problem with oncoming cars' lights (except assholes with them on full beam).
I see it all the time. Usually the culprits are trucks and SUVs that have their low beams adjusted too high. (they might project a level beam, but that level beam starts out higher than many car windshields.) If you've never noticed it, I suspect you have always driven an SUV/truck or high riding vehicle of some sort.
And it still won't keep you safe. My dad lost a co-worker (who always used lights on his bike - yes the flashy kind) to a girl who hit him while trying to grab a CD that fell on the floor...
A dozen trees wouldn't be enough. an average car puts out about 4 tons of CO2 per year, thus 12 trees (when mature) would only sequester 15 years worth of emissions, and it would take a lot longer than that for them to mature. if the average driver drives a car for 50 years, they would need to plant 40 trees, and give them enough room to mature. Not only that, they would have to be left undisturbed, thus no development can occur on that land.
How many people do you think have enough land to plant 40 trees and can afford to hold onto that land without developing anything on it?
Err... that isn't quite right... if nobody has a majority, the candidate that received the fewest votes is dropped and the votes all go to the next choice on each ballot. This is repeated until someone has a majority.
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In fact, pretty much any animal - even my goldfish, can be conditioned to respond to a food stimulus - they know what precedes them being fed and act accordingly.
Agreed.
I have a reef aquarium. One of its inhabitants is a cleaner shrimp who has learned that when i open the cover of the aquarium, its dinner time. Normally it hangs out on the underside of one of the rocks, but as soon as I open the cover he/she (not sure) is straight out in front waiting for tasty morsels.
Cleaner shrimp have a brain about the size of a grain of sand. If they can develop a response to "food stimulus" anything can.
To Self-domesticate would simply mean to evolve, to have certain traits preserved due to their being conducive to cohabitation with humans.
Exactly, but isn't it easier just to say self-domesticate? Clearly you understood the meaning.
The other thing I've noticed is that if I'm working hard (physically) i don't tend to feel hungry, even if I haven't eaten in several hours. I DO tend to feel hungry if i stop working and take a break, but as long as i'm moving, it seems to suppress feeling of hunger.
Its true, but I've always noticed that it makes me active rather than hungry.
I notice it most often on Saturday mornings... If I eat breakfast, I tend to loose motivation to get things done around the house: in other words, I just don't feel like doing anything. And that can be a large hurdle to step over, even if it is only a mental one. If I skip breakfast, I seem to have unending ambition.
It makes sense from a biological perspective. If you are a hunter/gatherer, when you get up in the morning you have to go find your breakfast, it isn't just in the cupboard in the kitchen. If you don't go out and find it, then you will go hungry. So before you eat you have lots of ambition. Once you found your breakfast, you body wants to to slow down to digest and conserve energy (why expend energy if you already ate?).
For this reason I usually avoid breakfast on weekends. I get WAY more done if i do.
I'm guessing that there are a lot of people that don't like twitter, for whatever reason. Maybe because they are this big VC company that has no business model. Maybe because the site seems to be the hip thing right now, and you despise anything that is considered hip. But really, you have no solid reason to despise it... yet you do.
So along comes a kid who gives you some reasons that he believes twitter will fail. And HAZZA! you now can feel like your distrust of twitter is well-founded because he agrees with you. Even though this is just one kid's opinion you give it more weight because it makes you feel good about your own position.
The dry mass of a larger rocket (ie one that could lift as much as the four smaller rockets) might not be less than that of the four smaller rockets. Making the rocket larger means that the forces involved have increased, so the engines and structure all have to be made significantly stronger. In the end, you may well end up with a rocket that uses more fuel per kg than four smaller ones that can be built lighter. Yes, you wouldn't need 4 navigation/control computers on the large rocket, but computers don't weigh very much, and the only thing that is really going to matter is weight.
Further the stage rockets would no longer be needed for individual craft to reach orbit since they are already there.
What are you talking about? What the heck is a "stage rocket"? I presume this is just your name for the lifter, ie the rocket itself, and not the spacecraft attached to the top.
To put it mathematically... suppose you launch 4 vehicles from earth, and each costs 1 million to launch (completely theoretical numbers). However, you build a barge type vehicle which needs its own stage rockets, costing 2.5 million to launch. It is capable of delivering the modular parts to create the 4 space craft to the port. Since those craft no longer need to be launched from earth, they no longer need the stage rockets to get there (the largest parts of our current space craft). This leads to an overall savings of 1.5 million on the launches alone. I'm pulling these numbers out of my arse, but I hope you are picking up on my train of thought.
So you are proposing to build a huge heavy lift rocket that is capable of launching in one shot the same amount of mass (the four spacecraft) as four smaller rockets. (which you would then apparently have to assemble in orbit)
One large rocket probably is more efficient in terms of fuel consumed per kg of mass to orbit presuming appropriately sized stages, but I seriously doubt that it would be as much of an improvement as you are suggesting. Also you have to take into account the non-trivial cost of maintaining the space-port. Not to mention the fact that building things in microgravity is really difficult, and we are not at all good at it.
Frankly, I think you are more excited about the the idea that we would have a space-port than any practical improvements in terms of cost.
I remember hearing about a research satellite that had a very long tether that it could use to either generate electricity from the earths magnetic field (by sacrificing some of it's own velocity/altitude) or use electricity to push against the magnetic field and raise its orbit.
Seems like that would be a partial solution to the space stations orbital decay problem. It has power from it's solar panels, so it theoretically could boost it's own orbit without needing a spacecraft (with extra fuel) attached.
Resupply missions would still be needed, of course, but they wouldn't have to bring excess fuel, so they could be done cheaper than is currently possible.
Another thing that irks me is how decompression in a spacecraft is always portrayed (in TV, movies, books, etc) as being an explosively violent event with huge winds blowing around inside a spacecraft as everything gets sucked out thru some hole or blown-out window. Few people realize that there is less than 15 PSI difference in the atmospheric air pressure at the surface of the Earth and the "vacuum of space". An air leak on a spacecraft is a very subtle (but deadly) thing. A sudden decompression of a whole spacecraft would be very little more violent than a big fart.
I'm with you there. I can suspend my disbelief of the force of the wind for the sake of the story (after all, 15 lbs/in^2 is actually a pretty significant force. If you were near a large hole when it was formed, you would certainly get sucked out if you weren't already holding onto something. ) But what really irks me is the length of time that all of those scenes seem to last. Give me a break. Unless you are in one freaking large spacecraft, all of the air would be sucked out in seconds if there was a large (ie: several feet in diameter) hole in the hull. I even remember a movie recently that had a scene where a several foot diameter hole is created in the side of a plane, and people are fighting not to get sucked out for several minutes. I mean, how much air the the writers actually think is in a plane?
Exactly. Isn't that what is supposed to happen when a project isn't funded?
That is a nice idea and all, but I have a suspicion that the amount of fuel that would be required to achieve that would be impractical to blast into orbit. Also, being that the ISS is in low earth orbit, it gets to benefit from the earths protective magnetic field. If we were to send it to the moon, we would probably have to add radiation shielding to many components that weren't designed to operate away from the Earth. (and probably some sort of safe-room for the astronauts for the inevitable solar flare)
I find your position amusing considering your id.
..and doesn't produce any science.
Not true. But as to whether it produces enough science to justify the cost? who knows.
He spent a couple million on some big-ass windmills, and a little more on lobbying/advertising efforts to see if he could sucker the public to pitch in on it.
Actually, wasn't it a couple BILLION for the windmills? I'm pretty sure each one costs several million dollars.
No kidding. My dogs suddenly become completely obedient if I happen to be holding food.
I'm not saying speculation didn't have a part to play in the whole process, and it could have accounted for 20 to 30 cents of each gallon of gas, but speculation actually helps keep the prices stable, otherwise you'd have gas prices vary by 30 cents every day all over the map. Can you imagine THAT nightmare?
So how many investors do we need in order to maintain price stability? Surely not 70 times more than the number of commodity consumers. At the height of the oil price spike, the average oil future was traded around 70 times before an oil consumer bought it. It is just plain ridiculous that something like that is allowed.
Ummm.. no it wasn't. The spike in 08 was due entirely to supply and demand market conditions. People needed more oil than we had available, so the price went up until the right number of people quit buying and the supply and demand equaled each other.
No,
What caused the spike was the fact that we have fairly little spare oil production capacity. This created a feeling in the market that oil demand would soon outpace supply. The political instability present in many oil producing countries added to this fear. At the same time, inflation was climbing due to years of low interest rates, so investors were looking for safe places to put their money.
With the fear present in the oil market, it appeared to be a safe bet. Investors also knew that oil demand is relatively inflexible due to it being a required resource for many businesses and consumers. Thus investment money began to flood the oil futures market.
With oil futures prices rising, businesses that depend on oil had to choose between locking in a high price by buying futures, or risk that the price will be even higher when they need the oil. The fears of instability, and the highly visible rising futures prices caused many businesses to lock-in their price by buying futures.
Investors, seeing that their investments in futures were successful, (more often than not they were able to sell their futures for more than they bought them for), continued to invest. Many dumping even more money into the futures markets.
As prices continued to rise, many companies that had previously decided to wait out the price spike began to fear that they had made a mistake. So they too bought oil futures. Which further supported the investors.
This continued until oil consumers could no longer support the prices. This often meant that the companies were failing, their business models no longer viable due to massively increased operating expenses. Individual consumers (people) were also having their own budgetary crises, having to choose between paying the rent/mortgage, and putting food on the table.
Sure. The market corrected in the end. But only once the investors started to truly loose money. Unfortunately that was long after many companies and individuals were severely impacted. And all of it was due to a fear. No not actual supply and demand, but a fear that there MIGHT be a supply shortage.
We can't allow this to happen again.
The GP was explaining why cyclists use the road rather than designated paths. They explained that every intersection of a bike path and a road (with some exceptions) is an uncontrolled intersection where the cyclist must yield. If the roads are busy, it can take a long time to cross each street. Cycling on the street is faster because the cyclist has a turn to cross at the stop-sign/light, just like all of the cars do. You don't have to wait for every car like you would at the bike path crossing.
There are poor cyclists out there, just as there are poor drivers. That doesn't mean that they should not be respected, though.
Respect should be earned.
If respect means giving a cyclist enough room that they most likely won't be killed by something you do (sudden avoidance maneuver, etc.) then it seems to me that all cyclists (and drivers) deserve respect by default. It isn't your right to endanger someone's life even if some of their group are total assholes.
The device is just showing where the rider is, placing a "lane" around the cyclist. It isn't about making a lane where there isn't one. It is just for the safety of the cyclist. Anyway, by law you ARE required to share the road.
Anybody that doesn't concern themselves with the others that use a roadway are being assholes, whether it be pedestrians, cyclists, or drivers, they all cause aggravation.
It isn't illegal for motorcycles to ride side-by-side in all states. In some it is allowed, at least in certain circumstances.
...so that's probably why I've never noticed a problem with oncoming cars' lights (except assholes with them on full beam).
I see it all the time. Usually the culprits are trucks and SUVs that have their low beams adjusted too high. (they might project a level beam, but that level beam starts out higher than many car windshields.) If you've never noticed it, I suspect you have always driven an SUV/truck or high riding vehicle of some sort.
And it still won't keep you safe. My dad lost a co-worker (who always used lights on his bike - yes the flashy kind) to a girl who hit him while trying to grab a CD that fell on the floor...
A dozen trees wouldn't be enough. an average car puts out about 4 tons of CO2 per year, thus 12 trees (when mature) would only sequester 15 years worth of emissions, and it would take a lot longer than that for them to mature. if the average driver drives a car for 50 years, they would need to plant 40 trees, and give them enough room to mature. Not only that, they would have to be left undisturbed, thus no development can occur on that land.
How many people do you think have enough land to plant 40 trees and can afford to hold onto that land without developing anything on it?
Err... that isn't quite right... if nobody has a majority, the candidate that received the fewest votes is dropped and the votes all go to the next choice on each ballot. This is repeated until someone has a majority.