Due to plants (esp. trees) getting leaves in spring and those leaves falling down in winter, the summer rotation is slower than the winter rotation.
I highly doubt that. Surely the accumulation of snow at high elevations during winter would completely swamp the effect of growing vegetation at low elevations during summer. If anything I would think the rotation would be slower in winter.
Second, what about the conservation of energy? If the angular moment of Earth changed (according to the article earth speed up) where did the energy come from?
Wow, talk about screwed up thinking.
It's precisely because of conservation of angular momentum that the rotation has increased! Angular momentum must stay constant. The radius of earth has decreased slightly. Thus, in order for the angular momentum to remain the same, the rotation must speed up slightly.
Angular momentum is not the same as rate of rotation. NOT THE SAME!
The faster the planet spins, the more intertia I have. The more inertia I have pulling me away from the planet, the less the effects of gravity (acting as a centripital force) would be felt.
There's nothing pulling you away from the planet! The planet is pulling on you.
The earth exerts a gravitational force on you. Some of this force is used up by keeping you along a circular path as the planet rotates. The rest is what you sense as "gravity."
Weight is defined as the force of gravity on an object. Since, as you pointed out, the mass of the planet has not changed, your weight also has not changed. However, your effective weight has decreased by a very small amount, because a slightly larger piece of the gravitational force is now necessary to keep you circling the earth. To put it in a calculus framework:
a = v^2/r
da/dv = 2v/r
da = 2v*dv/r (approximately)
To calculate da (the change in acceleration necessary to keep you circling the planet) you need to find dv (the change in your orbital velocity). Then it's a simple matter of plugging in the numbers v (rotational speed of earth before the event) and r (the radius of the earth before the event).
I can't do it for you because the values v and dv will depend on your particular latitude. People at the equator will have a larger effect than those near the poles.
However, this is all pointless anyway, since the change is so small we couldn't possibly feel it:-)
It's pretty easy to understand, really. The moderator read a comment pointing out where people could see tsunami videos. He/she thought this to be in poor taste, or was disgusted by it, and thus marked the comment Troll.
What disturbs me is that people think that watching video of the tsunami is somehow unethical. Are we supposed to shield ourselves from reality? Come on. As far as I'm concerned, it is the duty of every person who can stomache it to look once, just once, at the videos of what happened. It's your responsibility as part of the human race to see and get a small taste of the horror, not to sit in your armchair and sigh "Oh, too bad all those people died," as if the rest of the world was just some quaint figment of your imagination.
There's a difference between doing that and playing the footage repeatedly and laughing about it. A big difference.
If you are suggesting that the taxes paid by Oregonians would be lower if the credit system were not in place, that is certainly incorrect. When is the last time you remember a government program cancellation followed by a corresponding tax decrease?
Nope. Hydrolysis is close to 100% efficient. Use your brain and think about it. If it was highly inefficient, where is the waste energy going? Water undergoing hydrolysis doesn't get hot. Try it yourself!
If it's turning infra-red into electricity, well I live in a hot desert. Not only could I get electricity to run my air conditioner from painting this on the outside walls and roof of my house, but I'd expect to have less of an a/c load to start with if this is turning 30% of the energy into electricity.
Forget the air conditioner. If you're producing enough power to run it, you don't need it.
Air conditioners are not 100% efficient. A large portion of the energy they consume is wasted as heat in the exhaust air. Assume that you have a 500 watt air conditioner. In actuality it is not capable of removing 500 watts of heat, but it requires 500 watts to run it. Now, suppose you have 500 watts available from solar cells. That means there is 500 watts less heat falling on your house (because it is being absorbed by the cells and turned to electrical energy). But the AC was removing less than 500 watts. Thus, the AC is pointless, since the solar cells themselves are cooling your house even better than the AC would.
It would be a total waste to run the AC. Take the power and sell it back to the utility company.
Right now with amorphous silicon, with, what, 10% to 15% efficiency, people are putting solar cells on their roofs. Yeah, they're expensive. Yes, the govt. in NJ and CA hand out subsidies.
SUBSIDIES? Jeez dude, come to Oregon where they practically pay you to do it. I just ordered $1500 worth of panels and I'm not paying a DIME for them.
That only copies the first sector of the disk. While it is true that the partition table is contained in that sector, the boot loader is only a stub to load the Real Deal. If you dd that sector back onto a disk, the partition table will indeed be correct, but I'd highly doubt it would boot properly.
For the money he would raise, he could have gotten a construction team of probably 20 to 50 Honduran men to work on those churches.
And as a result he'd have no income for that two week period, wouldn't be able to make his mortgage payment back home, and might lose his house. Try thinking sometime, it's fun.
It is a very typical "failure mode" of the human mind. We see something coincidental that catches our attention, and assume that something fishy must be going on.
We can rest assured in the fact that, for every moon that coincidentally has a ridge coinciding with its equator there are thousands of moons elsewhere which do not. The reason we notice the "unusual" arrangement is precisely because it is unusual. Unusual to the human mind, that is.
How many mundane events happen to you on a daily basis? And how many coincidental and weird ones? Does that mean there is a ghost following you around making strange things happen? Of course not. We notice weird stuff because that's what our brains evolved to do. Ignore the usual and pick out the unusual.
To get technical about it, it's not really an incubation period because during incubation an organism isn't doing anything except growing and maturing. It isn't reproducing.
This is more like the "lag period" after pitching yeast to make beer. There is a period of time (anywhere from 6 to 48 hours) where the yeast is not yet fermenting anything, but working as hard as possible to reproduce and grow its numbers. Then, once the resources start to get crowded, it switches into a new life mode and begins its "real" life function of fermenting sugar.
A computer virus might work in the same way. It would "know" when to start activating when its "resources" start to diminish, i.e. when it starts getting difficult to find new uninfected hosts to spread to.
S/MIME is worse than nothing? Surely you mistyped:-)
It bewilders me why more people don't use S/MIME. It comes on most standard Linux systems in the form of the "openssl smime" subcommand. It's absolutely fantastic for encrypting and signing anything, not just email.
The universe somehow produced "real" intelligence without the benefit of understanding anything. We humans, on the other hand, strive to create "artificial" intelligence by leveraging our understanding, and we continually fail.
So what do we observe in the universe?
1. The unthinking, uncomprehending universe can produce intelligence.
2. Thinking, understanding humans cannot.
So why do you think that this vague concept of "understanding" intelligence is so necessary to creating it?
This is probably going to be the biggest natural disaster in human history.
Not likely.
On November 12, 1970, a cyclone struck Bangladesh and killed 300,000 people. In the year 1991, 139,000 died on April 30 (another cyclone). And just over a month later another cyclone struck killing another 126,000. See here
There are mostly unverifiable records that 830,000 people died in the earthquake which struck Shaanzi (in China) in 1556. And again in China, the Tangshan earthquake of 1976 killed (officially) 255,000 but some estimates placed the toll closer to 655,000.
This planet is dangerous, and huge numbers of people die en mass on a regular basis. We need to express sympathy and provide help, but being horrified isn't necessary. This is the normal way of things.
I... just don't understand how the Right's brains work. You just carry your own reality around with you in a self-contained bubble? You literally do not hear anything which contradicts your version of the universe?
Substitute "people" for "the Right" and you've got a valid statement there. Assuming that "the other side" is the only one who refuses to see the facts is a pretty universal human trait.
Those on the left/liberal leaning side are no better at processing data objectively than anyone else. We're all frickin' morons who don't want to listen. End result is that nobody on the entire planet has a fucking clue what is really happening. Ever.
Using a signed integer allows you to distinguish between error and non-error conditions. In UNIX for example, system calls return a negative value on error, so these calls often are declared to return a signed int even though the number they return in a non-error condition will always be positive.
This might be viewed as laziness depending on the cirucmstances. Obviously, it seems weird to waste half of the integer space just so you can return -1 on error, but if you need to report many various error conditions, using negative numbers to do so makes things a little easier because you can just check if the return value was negative in order to detect an error (instead of comparing the return value one by one against each possible error code).
However, the entire problem is mitigated if you just switch to a slightly different calling convention. If you need a function to return some value which is always positive, but you still want to indicate possible error conditions, forget about using the return value to return the result. Instead pass a variable by pointer or reference, stick the result in there, and return 0 on success or -1 on failure.
Unfortunately many programmers regard this as ugly, so we're stuck with silly crap like wasting half the integer space just in order to report errors.
char is not always default signed. The C language does not specify. On some compilers it defaults to signed, on others to unsigned. On GCC, you can switch between the two with the -fsigned-char and -funsigned-char flags.
Uh, there's no problem with taking advantage of real-world constraints. Using an unsigned int would imply a minimum transaction time of 86400/65535 = 1.31 seconds per transaction.
I get the sense that you are objecting that the system has no room for expansion. Well, yeah, but you're probably complaining outside of the requirements. If the stated software requirement was to run on a single POS system managing a single register, then the limitation is perfectly appropriate. There is no human clerk, and for that matter no customer, who could complete one transaction every 1.31 seconds on a single register, constantly. It's simply impossible.
The solution is to mount an unshielded microwave magnetron on your roof. The microwave noise from that sucker will keep just about everybody from associating to your AP, including you. It might also result in some bird/squirrel carcasses on the roof, and a nasty visit from the FCC and most likely the FDA as well.
Pennies are coated in copper, and we handle those all the time, and little children even put them in their mouths and swallow them. Is the exposure from this paint going to be greater than that from pennies and other everyday copper objects? I sort of doubt it.
Suppose someone wants Photoshop, but doesn't want to pay $500. Suppose he can afford to pay perhaps $100. There are a LOT of these people out there. Many of them right now pirate Photoshop. However, there are photo manipulation programs out there that cost around $100 that they could legitimately buy. If these people with $100 didn't pirate Photoshop, then there would be a larger market for $100 photo manipulation softwares. Some company would hire programmers and software designers and marketers to produce and sell $100 photo manipulation software.
By this logic, people who download the Gimp are also acting unethically, because they are damaging the market for $100 photo software. After all, if there wasn't a free alternative, they would have to buy the $100 software. The fact that it is legal to download Gimp and illegal to download Photoshop has nothing to do with it -- your argument is that piracy is wrong because it damages the market for cheaper alternatives, and that is exactly what free software does as well.
I still agree that copyright infringement is unethical, but I think this is a really bad argument toward that end.
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I highly doubt that. Surely the accumulation of snow at high elevations during winter would completely swamp the effect of growing vegetation at low elevations during summer. If anything I would think the rotation would be slower in winter.
Wow, talk about screwed up thinking.
It's precisely because of conservation of angular momentum that the rotation has increased! Angular momentum must stay constant. The radius of earth has decreased slightly. Thus, in order for the angular momentum to remain the same, the rotation must speed up slightly.
Angular momentum is not the same as rate of rotation. NOT THE SAME!
There's nothing pulling you away from the planet! The planet is pulling on you.
The earth exerts a gravitational force on you. Some of this force is used up by keeping you along a circular path as the planet rotates. The rest is what you sense as "gravity."
Weight is defined as the force of gravity on an object. Since, as you pointed out, the mass of the planet has not changed, your weight also has not changed. However, your effective weight has decreased by a very small amount, because a slightly larger piece of the gravitational force is now necessary to keep you circling the earth. To put it in a calculus framework:
a = v^2/r
da/dv = 2v/r
da = 2v*dv/r (approximately)
To calculate da (the change in acceleration necessary to keep you circling the planet) you need to find dv (the change in your orbital velocity). Then it's a simple matter of plugging in the numbers v (rotational speed of earth before the event) and r (the radius of the earth before the event).
I can't do it for you because the values v and dv will depend on your particular latitude. People at the equator will have a larger effect than those near the poles.
However, this is all pointless anyway, since the change is so small we couldn't possibly feel it :-)
It's pretty easy to understand, really. The moderator read a comment pointing out where people could see tsunami videos. He/she thought this to be in poor taste, or was disgusted by it, and thus marked the comment Troll.
What disturbs me is that people think that watching video of the tsunami is somehow unethical. Are we supposed to shield ourselves from reality? Come on. As far as I'm concerned, it is the duty of every person who can stomache it to look once, just once, at the videos of what happened. It's your responsibility as part of the human race to see and get a small taste of the horror, not to sit in your armchair and sigh "Oh, too bad all those people died," as if the rest of the world was just some quaint figment of your imagination.
There's a difference between doing that and playing the footage repeatedly and laughing about it. A big difference.
I don't believe I used the word "free."
If you are suggesting that the taxes paid by Oregonians would be lower if the credit system were not in place, that is certainly incorrect. When is the last time you remember a government program cancellation followed by a corresponding tax decrease?
Nope. Hydrolysis is close to 100% efficient. Use your brain and think about it. If it was highly inefficient, where is the waste energy going? Water undergoing hydrolysis doesn't get hot. Try it yourself!
Forget the air conditioner. If you're producing enough power to run it, you don't need it.
Air conditioners are not 100% efficient. A large portion of the energy they consume is wasted as heat in the exhaust air. Assume that you have a 500 watt air conditioner. In actuality it is not capable of removing 500 watts of heat, but it requires 500 watts to run it. Now, suppose you have 500 watts available from solar cells. That means there is 500 watts less heat falling on your house (because it is being absorbed by the cells and turned to electrical energy). But the AC was removing less than 500 watts. Thus, the AC is pointless, since the solar cells themselves are cooling your house even better than the AC would.
It would be a total waste to run the AC. Take the power and sell it back to the utility company.
SUBSIDIES? Jeez dude, come to Oregon where they practically pay you to do it. I just ordered $1500 worth of panels and I'm not paying a DIME for them.
That only copies the first sector of the disk. While it is true that the partition table is contained in that sector, the boot loader is only a stub to load the Real Deal. If you dd that sector back onto a disk, the partition table will indeed be correct, but I'd highly doubt it would boot properly.
You're seriously equating a ridge on some moon with a monkey producing the works of Shakespeare? Talk about desperate argumentation...
And as a result he'd have no income for that two week period, wouldn't be able to make his mortgage payment back home, and might lose his house. Try thinking sometime, it's fun.
We can rest assured in the fact that, for every moon that coincidentally has a ridge coinciding with its equator there are thousands of moons elsewhere which do not. The reason we notice the "unusual" arrangement is precisely because it is unusual. Unusual to the human mind, that is.
How many mundane events happen to you on a daily basis? And how many coincidental and weird ones? Does that mean there is a ghost following you around making strange things happen? Of course not. We notice weird stuff because that's what our brains evolved to do. Ignore the usual and pick out the unusual.
Yawn...
This is more like the "lag period" after pitching yeast to make beer. There is a period of time (anywhere from 6 to 48 hours) where the yeast is not yet fermenting anything, but working as hard as possible to reproduce and grow its numbers. Then, once the resources start to get crowded, it switches into a new life mode and begins its "real" life function of fermenting sugar.
A computer virus might work in the same way. It would "know" when to start activating when its "resources" start to diminish, i.e. when it starts getting difficult to find new uninfected hosts to spread to.
It bewilders me why more people don't use S/MIME. It comes on most standard Linux systems in the form of the "openssl smime" subcommand. It's absolutely fantastic for encrypting and signing anything, not just email.
So what do we observe in the universe?
1. The unthinking, uncomprehending universe can produce intelligence.
2. Thinking, understanding humans cannot.
So why do you think that this vague concept of "understanding" intelligence is so necessary to creating it?
Many people view it as acceptable usage. You do not. At the most, this is a difference of opinion, not "ignorance."
Not likely.
On November 12, 1970, a cyclone struck Bangladesh and killed 300,000 people. In the year 1991, 139,000 died on April 30 (another cyclone). And just over a month later another cyclone struck killing another 126,000. See here
There are mostly unverifiable records that 830,000 people died in the earthquake which struck Shaanzi (in China) in 1556. And again in China, the Tangshan earthquake of 1976 killed (officially) 255,000 but some estimates placed the toll closer to 655,000.
This planet is dangerous, and huge numbers of people die en mass on a regular basis. We need to express sympathy and provide help, but being horrified isn't necessary. This is the normal way of things.
Substitute "people" for "the Right" and you've got a valid statement there. Assuming that "the other side" is the only one who refuses to see the facts is a pretty universal human trait.
Those on the left/liberal leaning side are no better at processing data objectively than anyone else. We're all frickin' morons who don't want to listen. End result is that nobody on the entire planet has a fucking clue what is really happening. Ever.
This might be viewed as laziness depending on the cirucmstances. Obviously, it seems weird to waste half of the integer space just so you can return -1 on error, but if you need to report many various error conditions, using negative numbers to do so makes things a little easier because you can just check if the return value was negative in order to detect an error (instead of comparing the return value one by one against each possible error code).
However, the entire problem is mitigated if you just switch to a slightly different calling convention. If you need a function to return some value which is always positive, but you still want to indicate possible error conditions, forget about using the return value to return the result. Instead pass a variable by pointer or reference, stick the result in there, and return 0 on success or -1 on failure.
Unfortunately many programmers regard this as ugly, so we're stuck with silly crap like wasting half the integer space just in order to report errors.
char is not always default signed. The C language does not specify. On some compilers it defaults to signed, on others to unsigned. On GCC, you can switch between the two with the -fsigned-char and -funsigned-char flags.
I get the sense that you are objecting that the system has no room for expansion. Well, yeah, but you're probably complaining outside of the requirements. If the stated software requirement was to run on a single POS system managing a single register, then the limitation is perfectly appropriate. There is no human clerk, and for that matter no customer, who could complete one transaction every 1.31 seconds on a single register, constantly. It's simply impossible.
The solution is to mount an unshielded microwave magnetron on your roof. The microwave noise from that sucker will keep just about everybody from associating to your AP, including you. It might also result in some bird/squirrel carcasses on the roof, and a nasty visit from the FCC and most likely the FDA as well.
Pennies are coated in copper, and we handle those all the time, and little children even put them in their mouths and swallow them. Is the exposure from this paint going to be greater than that from pennies and other everyday copper objects? I sort of doubt it.
By this logic, people who download the Gimp are also acting unethically, because they are damaging the market for $100 photo software. After all, if there wasn't a free alternative, they would have to buy the $100 software. The fact that it is legal to download Gimp and illegal to download Photoshop has nothing to do with it -- your argument is that piracy is wrong because it damages the market for cheaper alternatives, and that is exactly what free software does as well.
I still agree that copyright infringement is unethical, but I think this is a really bad argument toward that end.
Well, if you get 15 years for piracy but only 7 for murder, logically the thing to do is shoot the witness, right?