Your point is well taken, but you're mistaken about gold. Gold is an excellent electrical conductor but copper is a better one, and silver is best at 20 degrees C.
Dead wrong; you've misunderstood how evolution works.
As the population of prey reduced, the fecundity and population size of the new stronger humans would fall, but the fecundity of their weaker rivals would fall even faster. As the human population crashed, the trait would gain ground, becoming present in a greater proportion of the survivors. Eventually, the human population would likely stabilise at a lower level that the prey could support, as the weaker humans died out.
A relatively superior trait could drive a population level down to extinction in the absence of a counter-balance, but an improving predator/prey ratio provides such a counter-balance. We can expect this process to have occurred as we grew in intelligence.
Evolution in sexually reproducing selects for the fittest traits/alleles relative to rival traits, even at the expense of the fitness of the host species to its environment.
To illustrate how deadly evolution can be for a species, consider what might happen to the human race if a male developed a mutation on his Y chromosome that suppressed the production of sperm with X chromosomes, so that all his kids were male...
You can buy a gold-plated Toslink coupler at http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=29294 . I wonder what proportion of salesmen in a store would use the word "gold" when selling this product to a customer. Quite a high percentage, I suspect.
Slowing the craft into orbit would've required a rocket and propellant, and therefore a much bigger and more expensive spacecraft. Fetching it from orbit would've required an expensive operation, with risks. Far cheaper and simpler to have the craft bring itself straight in. And that worked except, critically, for the chutes.
I wonder if someone forgot to remove a safety device? It could be something as absent-minded as that. What's worrying is that that the Stardust mission has the same chute system...
The only thing to do now is to build Genesis II. It will cost less than the first.
I was watching Nasa TV's coverage of the descent via the internet when I found that BBC News 24 was showing live pictures on TV, so I switched off Nasa.
Big mistake. Just as the BBC showed camera pictures of a spinning craft, they interrupted coverage to tell us what channel I was watching and to play the channels brain-dead countdown to the top of the hour.
When coverage resumed, it was to show the craft on the ground and a recording of what had happened. Utterly infuriating.
It seems BBC News 24 has a human director with the intelligence of a cuckoo clock.
I use OE on my old computer. I like to use the preview pane, so I added a dummy message with a date in 2009 to every folder that could get a problem email message.
This ensures that when I first enter the folder, new mail is not previewed unless I explicitly select it. I have the opportunity to turn off preview and examine the source text first.
Great mad hatters think alike. To stop evaporation, I wonder if you could use an amalgam, perhaps as dentists use? Maybe you could apply some gold leaf, then add a tiny bit of mercury for luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Your point is well taken, but you're mistaken about gold. Gold is an excellent electrical conductor but copper is a better one, and silver is best at 20 degrees C.
See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Electrical_resistivity .
Dead wrong; you've misunderstood how evolution works.
As the population of prey reduced, the fecundity and population size of the new stronger humans would fall, but the fecundity of their weaker rivals would fall even faster. As the human population crashed, the trait would gain ground, becoming present in a greater proportion of the survivors. Eventually, the human population would likely stabilise at a lower level that the prey could support, as the weaker humans died out.
A relatively superior trait could drive a population level down to extinction in the absence of a counter-balance, but an improving predator/prey ratio provides such a counter-balance. We can expect this process to have occurred as we grew in intelligence.
Evolution in sexually reproducing selects for the fittest traits/alleles relative to rival traits, even at the expense of the fitness of the host species to its environment.
To illustrate how deadly evolution can be for a species, consider what might happen to the human race if a male developed a mutation on his Y chromosome that suppressed the production of sperm with X chromosomes, so that all his kids were male...
... or a really hot cup of tea.
Assuming you couldn't have three stars merging at once, wouldn't the limit of an unstable star size therefore be twice that of the stable limit?
You can buy a gold-plated Toslink coupler at http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=29294 . I wonder what proportion of salesmen in a store would use the word "gold" when selling this product to a customer. Quite a high percentage, I suspect.
Moonlight is reflected sunlight. It only looks grey because our colour vision fails at low light levels.
Slowing the craft into orbit would've required a rocket and propellant, and therefore a much bigger and more expensive spacecraft. Fetching it from orbit would've required an expensive operation, with risks. Far cheaper and simpler to have the craft bring itself straight in. And that worked except, critically, for the chutes.
I wonder if someone forgot to remove a safety device? It could be something as absent-minded as that. What's worrying is that that the Stardust mission has the same chute system...
The only thing to do now is to build Genesis II. It will cost less than the first.
I was watching Nasa TV's coverage of the descent via the internet when I found that BBC News 24 was showing live pictures on TV, so I switched off Nasa.
Big mistake. Just as the BBC showed camera pictures of a spinning craft, they interrupted coverage to tell us what channel I was watching and to play the channels brain-dead countdown to the top of the hour.
When coverage resumed, it was to show the craft on the ground and a recording of what had happened. Utterly infuriating.
It seems BBC News 24 has a human director with the intelligence of a cuckoo clock.
> The point of this story is that we MUST have a crater named smelly cat, just to fuck with people's minds.
ET created Phoebe's orbit for just this purpose.
I use OE on my old computer. I like to use the preview pane, so I added a dummy message with a date in 2009 to every folder that could get a problem email message.
This ensures that when I first enter the folder, new mail is not previewed unless I explicitly select it. I have the opportunity to turn off preview and examine the source text first.
One of my modern favourites is "illegitimus non carborundum" or "nil illegitimi carborundum". I don't know which version a latin scholar would prefer.
> FYI, I just bought a new dual-1Ghz machine
Cue "hyperthreading".
Now this confuses me. Didn't Einstein say that there was no absolute reference for speed through space?
Great mad hatters think alike. To stop evaporation, I wonder if you could use an amalgam, perhaps as dentists use? Maybe you could apply some gold leaf, then add a tiny bit of mercury for luck.