It seems like people have acquired total tunnel vision about the CO2/global warming problem. hello? what about the massive amounts of NOx, CO, SO2, SO3, O3 and other compounds AND particulate soot that would result from doing this? Seems to me that burning plants is, if CO2 "clean", still a very dirty process.
7 years ago when that site went up initially it had the finish date as being this year. Now, everything past the next two flights is "under review". nice. Prediction of time remaining untill cancellation of project completion by congress (a la SSC): 2 years. Prediction of time remaining untill cancellation of all project funding and decision to deorbit: 5-7 years.(though I hope I'm wrong) When the first parts of the ISS started to go up I was in high school and while I can't say that I actually found the mission exhilirating, I did think it fascinating and thought it held promise for real scientific discovery. ~8 years on and it's seeming more and more like giant waste of money. I follow space science and astronomy/planetary science very closely but if I were asked to name even one major accomplishment of the ISS thus far, I would be very hard pressed to come up with anything at all. In the end it will be seen as an almost entirely uncharismatic venture that the public could'nt have cared less about, and that will be the cause of its final demise. sad.
Now! Follow me over to the GIANT Vas Defernes model OF SCIENCE!!
DID YOU KNOW THAT??!!>Gonorrhoea is characterized in male patients by dysuria accompanied by thick, copious, purulent (condensed milk-like) urethral discharge is the most common presentation and examination show a reddened external urethral meatus?? NOW YOU KNOWWW!!!
DUH the test was a waste of time and everyone here already knew it was BS, but people, have you SEEN the "cow taser" page linked to from the review article?!! I think I just pissed myself from laughing so hard.
Actually Pu238 IS fissile and has a critical mass. Yeah, it surprised me too. We had a very long discussion about this on the wiki RTG page and due to the lack of detailed unclassified information on Pu being fissile, we never decided what exactly we should add to the article.... It should be noted though that it is very unlikely that Pu238 is a proliferation threat, as the specific activity (ie. decay rate) is so phenomenally high (a mass sufficient for supercritical assembly would be spewing out over 5 kW of heat) that any fissile subcritical geometry for a bomb would probably just melt itself before full assembly and kill the bomb maker.
Oh you mean just like how they "stole all the credit" for the cassini huygens mission when they landed huygens on Titan? Yeah. Thought so. If you had a clue, which by the way, you don't, you'd know that we'd probably supply an orbiter which would communicate with an esa lander. The majority of the science data returned coming from the orbiter. The fact that average joe clueless still thinks that space should be one huge dick size comparison is a big part of what's preventing us from doing truly collaborative big science missions on a regular basis and reaping the scientific knowledge just waiting to be taken from such missions.
oh! you were talking about the opportunity rover! The same thing has happened to the Spirit rover a couple days ago, which is what my post was referring to.
It is quite obvious at this point that this is in fact what has happened. Often the simplest explanation really is the most correct! I submitted an article yesterday but...:o( oh well. It's said that the rover has increased its power output from ~350 Watt/hr. to over 700+ Watt/Hr!! It's nearly like a new mission!:)
I'm not really convinced that they are because I don't think microwave ovens typicvally emit enough radiation to be dangerous when operating properly. BT operates at about a tenth of the power of a cell phone though so if you believe that cell phones can be dangerous (I don't) then obviously a BT device would be proportionally less dangerous.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! pwhew. I'm sorry, it's out of my system now, really, I promise. The idea that microwave ovens operate at 2.45Ghz because this is a resonant line of water and it absorbs most strongly here is some kind of pernicious zombie urban legend from hell that will not die! It's just totally incorrect. There is no particular resonant line for water here at all.(search for "resonant" in the page) For a good visualization of how microwaves heat things (any molecule with a dipole charge) look at this very cheesy but useful site.
"There is a reason for that. The sky can't suddenly develop a crack or leak and expose him to deadly doses of radiation in minutes."
Can't it? During a coronal mass ejection directed at earth, proton radiation (and the associated induced muon radiation from subsequent "air showers")spiraling in along the magnetic field lines of the planet often cause polar flights to be rerouted (flights over the south Atlantic anomaly are also rerouted) in order to avoid relatively large doses to flight crews and passengers.
No. The amount of ALL baryonic light emitting (or reflecting) or not is tightly constrained with high confidence by the WMAP result at ~4%. This number may change in the future with more precise CMBE measurements but certainly not by more than mere fractions of a percent.
Jeez how clueless can you get? Are people really this anal here? If you even took 5 minutes to look into this issue you'd see that it is NOT a big deal. Steve Squires himself said: "The effect in all cases was less than the uncertainties in results, so none of our science conclusions are affected,". Conclusion: it wouldn't have even affected the science appreciably if they never found out they were switched!! Also you're totally wrong when you say "Had either of the Mars Rovers crashed or broken in some way, this mistake would never have been discovered.". Hello? do you not think they took the calibration data ON EARTH? It wouldn't have mattered if either one were lost. We'd still have all the calibration data.
"On top of that, since when is being religious a bad thing?"
Since religion was used as an excuse to fly planes into skyscrapers?
Since the Salem Witch trials?
Since it was used as an excuse to enslave and convert native people?
Since the Crusades?
Since it is used as an excuse to mutilate body parts of children?
Since the Inquisition?
Since the latest rash of obviously covered up molestation scandals?
Since the systematic persecution of homosexuals (and other minority groups)?
Since mostly looking the other way during the worlds worst genocide?
Since.... I could go on and on.
When does following a worldview or belief system which is responsible for such acts become ethically and moraly indefensible? Those are some pretty bad things if you ask me. It seems that blind faith in all its many forms, including religion, is a very dangerous thing indeed.
*POP* "Did you know your country might be infected with TERRORISTS? You can help to protect your country by downloading policestate V2.0 from GovSoft today! Click here now!"
:o) Hello David. I see you are acquanted with the guys who are doing the X-ray's-from lightning-research, perhaps you might be able to answer a question about this I've been bugged by for quite some time. I confess to not having read many of the lightning-X-ray papers but I assume that due to the high attenuation of X-rays in air all the detections must've been done with artificially triggered lightning usng model rockets trailing thin wires behind them. My question is: how do they know that the X-rays are not an artefact of using these wires? The mechanism by which the X-rays are produced, I suspect, must be the 'self-pinching' the plasma channel experiences due to the strong magnetic fields associated with such high current flow and the subsequent plasma heating/density increase thereby created. But wouldn't loading the plasma with (high Z) metal ions from the trailing wire essentially force the plasma to radiate away all of its energy via bremsstrahlung in one quick pulse? I'm not suggesting that "natural" lightning does not emit X-rays but that perhaps the "artificial" variety has an increased portion of its energy abnormally converted to X-rays. Is this idea defensible? Also, how much X-radiation are we talking here?
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It seems like people have acquired total tunnel vision about the CO2/global warming problem. hello? what about the massive amounts of NOx, CO, SO2, SO3, O3 and other compounds AND particulate soot that would result from doing this? Seems to me that burning plants is, if CO2 "clean", still a very dirty process.
oh crap! someone help this guy quick! he's stuck in a time warp from 1983!!!
7 years ago when that site went up initially it had the finish date as being this year. Now, everything past the next two flights is "under review". nice. Prediction of time remaining untill cancellation of project completion by congress (a la SSC): 2 years. Prediction of time remaining untill cancellation of all project funding and decision to deorbit: 5-7 years.(though I hope I'm wrong) When the first parts of the ISS started to go up I was in high school and while I can't say that I actually found the mission exhilirating, I did think it fascinating and thought it held promise for real scientific discovery. ~8 years on and it's seeming more and more like giant waste of money. I follow space science and astronomy/planetary science very closely but if I were asked to name even one major accomplishment of the ISS thus far, I would be very hard pressed to come up with anything at all. In the end it will be seen as an almost entirely uncharismatic venture that the public could'nt have cared less about, and that will be the cause of its final demise. sad.
already done
Are you KIDDING?!! The "momentessy" video was pure genius!!!
(sorry it's such a postage stamp, its all I could find)
Now! Follow me over to the GIANT Vas Defernes model OF SCIENCE!!
DID YOU KNOW THAT??!!>Gonorrhoea is characterized in male patients by dysuria accompanied by thick, copious, purulent (condensed milk-like) urethral discharge is the most common presentation and examination show a reddened external urethral meatus?? NOW YOU KNOWWW!!!
(sorry, I just had to...)
Hi Dan! :)
DUH the test was a waste of time and everyone here already knew it was BS, but people, have you SEEN the "cow taser" page linked to from the review article?!! I think I just pissed myself from laughing so hard.
Actually Pu238 IS fissile and has a critical mass. Yeah, it surprised me too. We had a very long discussion about this on the wiki RTG page and due to the lack of detailed unclassified information on Pu being fissile, we never decided what exactly we should add to the article.... It should be noted though that it is very unlikely that Pu238 is a proliferation threat, as the specific activity (ie. decay rate) is so phenomenally high (a mass sufficient for supercritical assembly would be spewing out over 5 kW of heat) that any fissile subcritical geometry for a bomb would probably just melt itself before full assembly and kill the bomb maker.
Oh you mean just like how they "stole all the credit" for the cassini huygens mission when they landed huygens on Titan? Yeah. Thought so. If you had a clue, which by the way, you don't, you'd know that we'd probably supply an orbiter which would communicate with an esa lander. The majority of the science data returned coming from the orbiter. The fact that average joe clueless still thinks that space should be one huge dick size comparison is a big part of what's preventing us from doing truly collaborative big science missions on a regular basis and reaping the scientific knowledge just waiting to be taken from such missions.
oh! you were talking about the opportunity rover! The same thing has happened to the Spirit rover a couple days ago, which is what my post was referring to.
It is quite obvious at this point that this is in fact what has happened. Often the simplest explanation really is the most correct! I submitted an article yesterday but... :o( oh well. It's said that the rover has increased its power output from ~350 Watt/hr. to over 700+ Watt/Hr!! It's nearly like a new mission! :)
I'm not really convinced that they are because I don't think microwave ovens typicvally emit enough radiation to be dangerous when operating properly. BT operates at about a tenth of the power of a cell phone though so if you believe that cell phones can be dangerous (I don't) then obviously a BT device would be proportionally less dangerous.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! pwhew. I'm sorry, it's out of my system now, really, I promise. The idea that microwave ovens operate at 2.45Ghz because this is a resonant line of water and it absorbs most strongly here is some kind of pernicious zombie urban legend from hell that will not die! It's just totally incorrect. There is no particular resonant line for water here at all.(search for "resonant" in the page) For a good visualization of how microwaves heat things (any molecule with a dipole charge) look at this very cheesy but useful site.
"There is a reason for that. The sky can't suddenly develop a crack or leak and expose him to deadly doses of radiation in minutes."
Can't it? During a coronal mass ejection directed at earth, proton radiation (and the associated induced muon radiation from subsequent "air showers")spiraling in along the magnetic field lines of the planet often cause polar flights to be rerouted (flights over the south Atlantic anomaly are also rerouted) in order to avoid relatively large doses to flight crews and passengers.
Referring to radio waves, x-rays, microwaves and any other portion of the EM spectrum as "light" is VERY common in the literature.....
No. The amount of ALL baryonic light emitting (or reflecting) or not is tightly constrained with high confidence by the WMAP result at ~4%. This number may change in the future with more precise CMBE measurements but certainly not by more than mere fractions of a percent.
Wow!! I just woke up and put on MY glasses and thought that I had misread yet another pointless "I misread that headline as" post!
Jeez how clueless can you get? Are people really this anal here? If you even took 5 minutes to look into this issue you'd see that it is NOT a big deal. Steve Squires himself said: "The effect in all cases was less than the uncertainties in results, so none of our science conclusions are affected,". Conclusion: it wouldn't have even affected the science appreciably if they never found out they were switched!! Also you're totally wrong when you say "Had either of the Mars Rovers crashed or broken in some way, this mistake would never have been discovered.". Hello? do you not think they took the calibration data ON EARTH? It wouldn't have mattered if either one were lost. We'd still have all the calibration data.
So in summary:
:)
"we haven't killed ourselves off or succumbed to extinction by natural disaster yet! yaaaaay for humans!!!!"
Less controversial. I feel the same way though.
"On top of that, since when is being religious a bad thing?"
.... I could go on and on.
Since religion was used as an excuse to fly planes into skyscrapers?
Since the Salem Witch trials?
Since it was used as an excuse to enslave and convert native people?
Since the Crusades?
Since it is used as an excuse to mutilate body parts of children?
Since the Inquisition?
Since the latest rash of obviously covered up molestation scandals?
Since the systematic persecution of homosexuals (and other minority groups)?
Since mostly looking the other way during the worlds worst genocide?
Since
When does following a worldview or belief system which is responsible for such acts become ethically and moraly indefensible? Those are some pretty bad things if you ask me. It seems that blind faith in all its many forms, including religion, is a very dangerous thing indeed.
great stuff. thanks much for your time!
*POP* "Did you know your country might be infected with TERRORISTS? You can help to protect your country by downloading policestate V2.0 from GovSoft today! Click here now!"
:o) Hello David. I see you are acquanted with the guys who are doing the X-ray's-from lightning-research, perhaps you might be able to answer a question about this I've been bugged by for quite some time. I confess to not having read many of the lightning-X-ray papers but I assume that due to the high attenuation of X-rays in air all the detections must've been done with artificially triggered lightning usng model rockets trailing thin wires behind them. My question is: how do they know that the X-rays are not an artefact of using these wires? The mechanism by which the X-rays are produced, I suspect, must be the 'self-pinching' the plasma channel experiences due to the strong magnetic fields associated with such high current flow and the subsequent plasma heating/density increase thereby created. But wouldn't loading the plasma with (high Z) metal ions from the trailing wire essentially force the plasma to radiate away all of its energy via bremsstrahlung in one quick pulse? I'm not suggesting that "natural" lightning does not emit X-rays but that perhaps the "artificial" variety has an increased portion of its energy abnormally converted to X-rays. Is this idea defensible? Also, how much X-radiation are we talking here?