Mein Herr looked so thoroughly bewildered that I thought it best to change the subject. `What a useful thing a pocket-map is!' I remarked.
`That's another thing we've learned from your Nation,' said Mein Herr, `map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?'
`About six inches to the mile.'
`Only six inches!' exclaimed Mein Herr. `We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!'
`Have you used it much?' I enquired.
`It has never been spread out, yet,' said Mein Herr: `the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.
What has bothered me for a long time about the Chicxulub theory is that nobody ever provides evidence linking the impact to the extinction. Every time new evidence appears indicating that there was an impact, it's reported as being new evidence that the dinosaurs were wiped out by it. Actually, all it shows is that there was an impact of some sort.
Years ago I read Robert Bakker's book, 'The Dinosaur Heresies". In it he claims that the fossil evidence shows that the dinosaurs were in decline long before the KT boundary and the appearance of its famed iridium layer. Furthermore, many species survived the extinction, and some of those species (such as amphibians) were ones that you might expect to be particularly susceptible. So although the impact might have contributed to the mass extinction, it's not likely to have been the root cause.
At least looking at the picture for makign antibubbles with dishwater, these merely look like bicelles. Basically, the detergents line up so that their hydrophobic tails interact and their hydrophilic head groups form a barrier on each side, just like a lipid bilayer in a cell membrane.
Not to burst your bubble, so to speak, but the term for the structure you are referring to is "micelle".
No, a micelle is bunch of surfactant molecules with their hydrophobic tails all pointing in and their hydrophilic heads pointing out. It doesn't have two layers. A bicelle is two nested topologically spherical sheets of surfactants, with the tails on one sheet pointing towards the tails on the other sheet. Back in the days when I used to work on them, we called them "lipid bilayer vesicles". At least, I think that's what's being referred to here as a bicelle.
The difference between an antibubble and a bicelle appears to be the presence of air between the sheets of surfactant in the antibubble.
Others are more skeptical.
Simson Garfinkel, another MIT researcher who follows RFID, said credit card companies ought to be using "smart" cards with public key cryptography, a very strong form of security.
Simson Garfinkel? Is that the guy who sang "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Oregano"?
Have you ever noticed how apparent the Doppler effect is when standing next to a road at night? The cars going away from you always look redder than the cars approaching you.
I used to ride my unicycle from home to the office when I was in grad school at Cornell. The distance wasn't too far but the gradient was pretty steep. The thing to remember about unicycles is that they're a spectacularly inefficient means of transportation. Unlike a bicycle, a unicycle requires you to expend a lot of energy just to stay upright. Going downhill is tough too, because you're constantly braking with your legs.
So yes, it's lightweight and compact and fun and all, and I realize that the original poster wasn't serious, but having tried commuting by unicycle I can't really recommend it. How about roller skates?
Re:Yes, a cat's got my tongue, OK?
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
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· Score: 3, Funny
They're called dipthongs.
Don't you mean "dgnthpois"? You're right, it doesn't seem to work very well...
Where you and I will continue to disagree is that I contend that we can see where we're going - and know that there is just about -everything- out there, and the trip is nearly -guaranteed- to be fruitful.
On what timescale?
If it's 100 or 500 years, what's the rush? Let's spend the next 10-100 years getting our lives in shape back home, and figure out the space flight thing when we have the time and money for it.
If it's 10 or 20 years, I don't believe you.
We do agree that NASA isn't doing a good job. But I'm not sure that I agree with you that privatizing space exploration will work better. Corporations have a very bad track record lately in investing in long term research. (Anyone who's looked for a physics post-doc position lately can tell you that. Just look at the decline of Bell Labs and Exxon.) How can a company these days do anything that isn't going to make a profit for the shareholders in the next quarter? It is the government's role to do those long-term tasks that private citizens and companies can't or won't do.
I'll grant you that we could do both, if we could afford it. But given the current state of things, I don't think we can afford it, unless we cut the defense budget. I don't see that happening, however much I would like to see it.
How can we justify spending money on manned space flight when we can't even afford good public education systems? When state governments are all going broke? Can't we fix problems at home first?
The comparison to sailing off the edge of the earth in the 1400's is irrelevant. We know a lot more about outer space now than Columbus knew about the far side of the Atlantic. We can see where we're going, more or less, and know that there's not much there. Early explorer's of earth didn't know what was there, but had good reason to suspect that whatever was there was more or less like what was at home, and that there was a good chance that the trip would be fruitful.
don't we all feel the burning -need- to get off this rock? to ensure that civilization will survive the next giant asteroid? to get off this rock and swing on a star?
I don't feel any need to "get off this rock". There are far too many problems that we need to solve right here at home, and pouring money into manned space flight won't solve them. What are you going to do, spend a gazillion dollars and move everybody to Mars? How will that help anything? You'll still have death, war, pestilence, and famine, but you'll have it all crammed into an enormously expensive terraformed Jetson-ville.
Let's make Earth a more reasonable place to live while we still have a chance.
and don't start that the moon is pointless, or mars is pointless. of course it is. but if you never aim for the stars - you'll never get off the ground.
Broaden your mind. Don't just explore spatially. Explore new sciences, new technologies, new societies, not just new places. Staying on Earth puts very little limitation on the human race, because we have so many new things to do and fields to explore right here.
Or are you literally aiming at the stars? How many years will it take an expedition to get there? How many generations? Are you willing to commit yourself and your children and your grandchildren to a life of utter tedium en route? Given how far it is and how many things will go wrong on the way there, aren't the chances infinitesimal that any stellar exploration will be able to return any useful information back to earth?
Let's put some effort into meaningful endeavors... Fix some real problems.
Interestingly, the Casimir effect also occurs in biological systems. Proteins embedded in a lipid membrane restrict the fluctuations of the membrane and therefore decrease the entropy in the region between the proteins. Since thermal systems evolve toward maximum entropy, the proteins move toward each other. Here the fluctations are thermal instead of quantum mechanical, and the medium is the membrane instead of the vacuum, but the principle is the same.
If you google for "casimir membrane" you'll find a lot of papers on the subject.
I'm told that Geri's Game, the Pixar short about a man playing chess with himself, was the first film in which clothing was modeled well. When Toy Story was made modeling clothing, hair, and skin was too difficult, so they didn't even try.
The Washington Post article is... a very necessary wake up call to the average Joe Windows users.
Too bad it's on page F7 of the Sunday edition... Joe Windows User will never see it there. It should have been on the front page, or maybe in the sports section.
Except that what we call "continents" were defined well before plate tectonics was an established theory. The definitions are just cultural, from a western European perspective. So Greenland isn't a separate continent because it has no noticable culture (having too few people). Antartica is a continent because... well, because it's too big to ignore.
(This post only seems to be off topic. The topic of this discussion has been slowly drifting over the millenia. In a few million years this post will be about the RIAA suing SCO for incorporating OS X code into Netgear routers.)
Your information wants to be free; my information wants to be private. See?
Oh, come on. That's ridiculous. There's a distinction between public information and private information. Published programs, even if they're copyrighted, are published. They're not private, like the user's MAC address and personal grooming habits.
I'm not trying to justify running pirated programs, I just think you need to make a better argument.
cellophane has a poor separation quality, i.e the difference between 90 degrees (blocked) and 0 degrees (pass) polarized light is little.
You're confusing a polarizing filter (which blocks one polarization of light) with a half wave plate, which changes the direction of polarization but doesn't block anything. The claim is that cellophane makes a good half wave plate.
Consider that the population of the US is approximately 300 Million, that's one telemarketer for every 150 people. Assume that each call takes 5 minutes and a caller works four hours a day (5 to 9 PM, to maximize the chances of interrupting dinner). That's about 50 calls a day. At that rate it takes three days for each marketer to call his 150 people. So we all should be getting a couple of calls a week. That's not that far off.
When I started this comment I had intended to argue that 2 Million had to be an exaggeration, but I changed my mind. Consider that not all of those 2 Milion are actually making calls, and many of the jobs are part time. I'm not defending the telemarketers, mind you.
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This is a dup! I submitted this same article next week.
What has bothered me for a long time about the Chicxulub theory is that nobody ever provides evidence linking the impact to the extinction. Every time new evidence appears indicating that there was an impact, it's reported as being new evidence that the dinosaurs were wiped out by it. Actually, all it shows is that there was an impact of some sort.
Years ago I read Robert Bakker's book, 'The Dinosaur Heresies". In it he claims that the fossil evidence shows that the dinosaurs were in decline long before the KT boundary and the appearance of its famed iridium layer. Furthermore, many species survived the extinction, and some of those species (such as amphibians) were ones that you might expect to be particularly susceptible. So although the impact might have contributed to the mass extinction, it's not likely to have been the root cause.
Continental drift is exactly as fast as my grandmother.
No, a micelle is bunch of surfactant molecules with their hydrophobic tails all pointing in and their hydrophilic heads pointing out. It doesn't have two layers. A bicelle is two nested topologically spherical sheets of surfactants, with the tails on one sheet pointing towards the tails on the other sheet. Back in the days when I used to work on them, we called them "lipid bilayer vesicles". At least, I think that's what's being referred to here as a bicelle.
The difference between an antibubble and a bicelle appears to be the presence of air between the sheets of surfactant in the antibubble.
Have you ever noticed how apparent the Doppler effect is when standing next to a road at night? The cars going away from you always look redder than the cars approaching you.
I used to ride my unicycle from home to the office when I was in grad school at Cornell. The distance wasn't too far but the gradient was pretty steep. The thing to remember about unicycles is that they're a spectacularly inefficient means of transportation. Unlike a bicycle, a unicycle requires you to expend a lot of energy just to stay upright. Going downhill is tough too, because you're constantly braking with your legs.
So yes, it's lightweight and compact and fun and all, and I realize that the original poster wasn't serious, but having tried commuting by unicycle I can't really recommend it. How about roller skates?
They're called dipthongs.
Don't you mean "dgnthpois"? You're right, it doesn't seem to work very well...
On what timescale?
If it's 100 or 500 years, what's the rush? Let's spend the next 10-100 years getting our lives in shape back home, and figure out the space flight thing when we have the time and money for it.
If it's 10 or 20 years, I don't believe you.
We do agree that NASA isn't doing a good job. But I'm not sure that I agree with you that privatizing space exploration will work better. Corporations have a very bad track record lately in investing in long term research. (Anyone who's looked for a physics post-doc position lately can tell you that. Just look at the decline of Bell Labs and Exxon.) How can a company these days do anything that isn't going to make a profit for the shareholders in the next quarter? It is the government's role to do those long-term tasks that private citizens and companies can't or won't do.
I'll grant you that we could do both, if we could afford it. But given the current state of things, I don't think we can afford it, unless we cut the defense budget. I don't see that happening, however much I would like to see it.
How can we justify spending money on manned space flight when we can't even afford good public education systems? When state governments are all going broke? Can't we fix problems at home first?
The comparison to sailing off the edge of the earth in the 1400's is irrelevant. We know a lot more about outer space now than Columbus knew about the far side of the Atlantic.
We can see where we're going, more or less, and know that there's not much there. Early explorer's of earth didn't know what was there, but had good reason to suspect that whatever was there was more or less like what was at home, and that there was a good chance that the trip would be fruitful.
I don't feel any need to "get off this rock". There are far too many problems that we need to solve right here at home, and pouring money into manned space flight won't solve them. What are you going to do, spend a gazillion dollars and move everybody to Mars? How will that help anything? You'll still have death, war, pestilence, and famine, but you'll have it all crammed into an enormously expensive terraformed Jetson-ville.
Let's make Earth a more reasonable place to live while we still have a chance.
Broaden your mind. Don't just explore spatially. Explore new sciences, new technologies, new societies, not just new places. Staying on Earth puts very little limitation on the human race, because we have so many new things to do and fields to explore right here.
Or are you literally aiming at the stars? How many years will it take an expedition to get there? How many generations? Are you willing to commit yourself and your children and your grandchildren to a life of utter tedium en route? Given how far it is and how many things will go wrong on the way there, aren't the chances infinitesimal that any stellar exploration will be able to return any useful information back to earth?
Let's put some effort into meaningful endeavors... Fix some real problems.
I always thought a large forklift would come in handy when parking... It's cheaper than a tank, and probably gets better gas mileage too.
Don't worry. That won't happen. The trash can will know that you dropped the Coke can in.
Interestingly, the Casimir effect also occurs in biological systems. Proteins embedded in a lipid membrane restrict the fluctuations of the membrane and therefore decrease the entropy in the region between the proteins. Since thermal systems evolve toward maximum entropy, the proteins move toward each other. Here the fluctations are thermal instead of quantum mechanical, and the medium is the membrane instead of the vacuum, but the principle is the same.
If you google for "casimir membrane" you'll find a lot of papers on the subject.
I'm told that Geri's Game, the Pixar short about a man playing chess with himself, was the first film in which clothing was modeled well. When Toy Story was made modeling clothing, hair, and skin was too difficult, so they didn't even try.
Too bad it's on page F7 of the Sunday edition... Joe Windows User will never see it there. It should have been on the front page, or maybe in the sports section.
(This post only seems to be off topic. The topic of this discussion has been slowly drifting over the millenia. In a few million years this post will be about the RIAA suing SCO for incorporating OS X code into Netgear routers.)
Oh, come on. That's ridiculous. There's a distinction between public information and private information. Published programs, even if they're copyrighted, are published. They're not private, like the user's MAC address and personal grooming habits.
I'm not trying to justify running pirated programs, I just think you need to make a better argument.
Now, that's a better argument.It should be like selecting a new pope -- black smoke for shutdown, white smoke for reboot.
Yet another dupe. This same story was posted a year ago.
Consider that the population of the US is approximately 300 Million, that's one telemarketer for every 150 people. Assume that each call takes 5 minutes and a caller works four hours a day (5 to 9 PM, to maximize the chances of interrupting dinner). That's about 50 calls a day. At that rate it takes three days for each marketer to call his 150 people. So we all should be getting a couple of calls a week. That's not that far off.
When I started this comment I had intended to argue that 2 Million had to be an exaggeration, but I changed my mind. Consider that not all of those 2 Milion are actually making calls, and many of the jobs are part time. I'm not defending the telemarketers, mind you.
-- Steve