ah ha, that's so right it's wrong. Or so much horse flesh dragged along behind the unstoppable juggernaut of a cart.
Tsar Putin - but of course! Except, why would Putin want to limit himself to the powers and capabilities of a mere Tsar?
And as for Putin being in the running... well only if you mean "Putin is standing still, awaiting the unanimous demand of the people's of the RF that he take up the new post of hereditary First Secretary for life.
I just realised - I don't know if Putin has any children or not. That might make an interesting change. [...] Oh, two daughters. So, conventional family-based dictatorship then. Much like the Bushes.
From the [base of the] dorsal fin to the base of the fluke? I'm trying to figure how that would work, without potentially breaking the whale's back.
Oh, I see that you're just copying and pasting the Wikipedia article, not supplying anything yourself.
That article seems to have been regurgitated all around the web - or the Wikipedia article is a regurgitation of someone else's article - but without any additional data. But it doesn't sound anatomically correct to me, because a muscle aligned as the article says would act to curve and eventually snap the distal spine. If you look at a convenient adductor muscle such as your biceps, it inserts on the radius and on the same side of the humerus, not on the opposite side.
I've managed to find some muscle diagrams for a dolphin, showing a muscle, the longismus dorsi, which runs from under the fluke, along the ventral (belly-wards) side of the spine to insert at points anterior (headwards) to the dorsal fin. Which indeed would give a bending moment to the spine and drive the fluke (and nose) down through the water.
That Wikipedia article (or wherever it was copied from) reads like a rough translation job by someone without much anatomy knowledge. Meh - mine is only really from trying to work out how fossils work and "wtf is this from?", but it seems that I can get a clearer idea of how the beasts are put together than the author. I'll grant that detailed anatomy diagrams of whales are few and far between on the web, buried under mounds of stuff intended for spoon-feeding kindergarten students.
In 1272 I hung myself in a barn. It was 1348 before the damn barn fell down and I was able to walk away.
Nice variant on a well-used trope! Is it your own, or did you get it from somewhere? (Someone below refers it to Marvin, which is fair, but it's a long way from Marvin.)
The idea does have a certain appeal to it. It might possibly even be true - while Trumpette's dealings with my area have shown him to be a thorough-going bastard who shouldn't be trusted as blackboard monitor, let alone president of the Brewery's Piss-Up Organising Committee, he hadn't really shown many signs of the derangement that is coming out of his face-hole these days. So it could be your "conspiracy" (of one person - is that really a conspiracy, or a World Domination (Fast) Plan?). Or it could be a rapidly developing brain tumour. Or it could be that he actually believes this shit.
The ultimate hilarity of course would be if he actually wins the presidency, and reveals the conspiracy on the dog-emptying lawn (wherever they hold the oath-taking ceremony in January)... to be promptly shot by an assault-rifle wielding member of a militia empowered by his coming policy speeches, who actually believed the bullshit.
Ah, I'll just get some popcorn to throw away, and a nice bag of cashews to eat while watching this. Kenyan cashews, of course ; Hussein Obama brand.
The F35 is the last manned fighter that will ever be built for the foreseeable future. They already have to severely limit the planes performance characteristics so the pilot isn't killed.
So... replace the pilot with a high-speed data link to the actual pilot (probably more like "flight supervisor", as more of the second-to-second flying is done by onboard computers) who is sitting in a disused missile silo in Kansas somewhere.
And shooting a ball (or other projectile) is going to be much better?
Caveat - I'm not a diabetic, yet. But with both parents now insulin-dependent, and one of two siblings too... I'm not in doubt about which way things are going to go for me.
Your enzymes, or some convenient bacterium's enzymes.
But fascinating as Slashdot's interminable lingistic battles are, Charlie Stross is a good enough author, and consistently interesting and amusing enough, that I shall forego the Slashdot Biscuit Race in favour of going and reading what he has to say for himself. Enjoy your share of the biscuit, one and all!
Hmmm, I'd have to think quite a lot on that last point. But then, I'm in the process of trying to organise airfreight for a half-ton of stuff from a Francophone country to China, via a Dutch-speaking country, using personnel from a mix of Norway, UK and America. Oh, and the Phillipenes too. Can't forget the Filipenos!
Did I mention Customs paperwork? Even that would be simpler, since each of the countries involved has their own way of formatting addresses.
That's why I was trying to read the technical paper, but it fell foul of the firewall against Dropbox.
So, translating "squiggle.wombat.banana" into Spanish would lead to a different location. Hmmm, that would be a major failing, and I couldn't see that in the FAQ (because after RTFA, I also RTFFAQ). Nor in the "technical paper". And without that, I don't see the benefit, really.
After all, though it goes beyond my knowledge of Spanish, I wouldn't be surprised if the Spanish for "squiggle.wombat.banana" were something not far from "escriblo.wombat.banana" (two of the words being very non-Spanish, and even non-Romance. Possibly non-IndoEuropean). Which would make the wordlist part of things much more complicated.
I know why I was thinking down those lines - I read Wossname-XKCD's "What If" book on the plane to work, and was wondering if his "Thing Explainer" idea was worth reading on the way back (if I could find a copy)... thousand word long word list... then this comes along with a slightly longer wordlist.
Excuse me... thinking on keyboard. 10000km pole to equator. 40000 along the equator. Therefore 333000 by 1332000 3m units for 443556000000 3m.sq units (first approximation, OK) sorry, double that to take on the other hemisphere. 887,112,000,000 units. Stick in the thousands markers. Not far off a trillion.
So, to name those million-odd parcels with a wordlist, you'd need nearly a million words for two-word addresses, 10,000 words for three word addresses, and you could do it with four words using Munroe's (I remembered his name, if not the spelling) thousand word wordlist.
And I've got to go and do some work. Damn - I'll miss the galley.
Selective breeding almost always involves inbreeding.
In theory, now, you could compare two examples of $BREED from opposite sides of the world, and with no known common parentage, decide they're a good match, and cross-breed them. But in practice there are likely to be hidden (i.e. not known to the owners) relationships between two of $BREED. And the transport costs from one side of the world to the other are likely to wipe out any profit for professional breeders.
It is far easier to breed amongst your own stock of animals-for-sale. And kill the gimps. Use them for food, why not.
With some knowledge of genetics, a sensible breeder would cooperate with someone aiming for similar characteristics from a different original stock, and intermittently cross-breed between their best lines to regain some "hybrid vigour" without bringing in too many different characteristics. But that still increases the costs, and the customer is mostly not going to care about your ethical breeding strategies.
We have rolled out our 3 word address system in 9 languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, Russian, German, Turkish & Swedish. We are adding to those every month and are currently working on Italian, Greek, Arabic and more.
Given a 25 to 40 thousand word wordlist, then smaller and older languages with small dictionaries might pose a problem, but simply working down the list of languages by speaking-population will address that on a minimum effort basis. I'm only surprised they haven't tackled either Chinese, Korean or Japanese yet. Though Japanese should succumb to kanji transliterations, if nothing else.
They do somewhat overstate the difficulties of current location systems. I use UTMs frequently, and they don't bother with positive or negative numbers, or north or south. Everything is so-many metres north of a point a few thousand kilometres above the south pole, and everything is east of a point a few thousand kilometres west of the zone of validity. So you need an integer (UTM zone), two reals (northing and easting) and an optional real for altitude. Perfectly convertible to any other geodetic system, though the calculation is not human-friendly.
I did have some questions about the way they manage to get to 3m.sq grids from such a short wordlist, though I'm willing to accept it can be done. Perhaps an extension of "magic square" methods for allocating resources in (statistical) experimental design. Unfortunately the "technical report" goes off to Dropbox, which is absolutely forbidden here, so no joy.
The front of my hard hat and the back of my coveralls say "geologist", and the FGS (Fellow of the Geological Society) sort of leans in the direction that other geologists consider me a geologist too. For me, "proven" means that the evidence of it;s existence is sufficiently strong that to believe otherwise than in it's existence would require perversely illogical special pleading.
Others have mentioned the petrophysical characteristics - seismic velocity, density. The way that chemistry of melts of silicates and volatiles changes when held under top-of-mantle conditions of temperature and pressure matches the trends we see in individual crystals (olivines, cpxs) and the trends in eruptions of single and multiple volcanoes.
But for me, the thing that counts is holding lumps in my hand. Which you can do quite easily. Go to a place where MORB (mid-ocean ridge basalt) or an alkaline basalt is being erupted (Iceland, Hawaii, the Azores, the Canaries, certain African Rift volcanoes, the ancient Deccan or Siberian traps...) and nose around the pebbles of black basalt on a beach until you find one with a greenish-yellow blob in the black matrix. Pick it up, weigh it in your hand, and contemplate that it originated 30 or so km beneath your feet. Just 30km away.
You can back this assertion up with lots of studies - the science is sound. But for me, the visceral experience of holding it in my hand makes it real to me.
ALL humans with biological brains and nervous systems are susceptible.
You have an example of a human who doesn't have a biological brain and nervous system?
I@m seeking an example... Stephen Hawking doesn't fit for example, because he has a biological brain (in fine working order, to best I can tell from his conversation) and a biological nervous system. The non-brain parts of his nervous system are pretty fucked-up, and requiring significant mechanical and electronic assistance to communicate with the rest of the world. But they're still biological. Even Kevin Warwick is basically biological, with small electronic peripherals. A person with a cochlear implant in place of an ear sensor has a slightly non-biological system - but not even a couple of percent.
If helium becomes valuable to produce because the demand grows, the the natural gas fields which today just release all that useless helium will start capturing it and producing 2 products.
How are the natural gas fields of today going to capture helium in the future.
Oh, you're making the assumption that the field producing today (and allegedly venting helium into the atmosphere) are still going to be producing in 5, 10, 20 whenever years when you think the helium price will rise. Some of them may be. And some of them - increasing numbers as you go further into the future - will not be producing at that future date. This is irrespective of whether they're produced by conventional non-hydraulic fracturing technology or conventional hydraulic fracturing technology.
I wonder just how they go about capturing the helium in such a field. I'd guess the simple thing to do would be to capture the headspace gas after producing LNG, and then process that down to drop out as much of the N2 as you can, then compress the remainder for sale as "technical helium" - good for balloons and some forms of welding, but not for cryogenics without more processing.
I'll ask the test spread's chemists if they know - or indeed if they even analyse for He.
While I've definitely liked some of KSR's work, Red Mars was tedious enough to put me off the rest of that Cycle. I'll not cross him (or is it a she - I can't remember, and can't be bothered to look it up) off my reading list. But the Mars cycle isn't going to get me at the bookshop again.
You've not done much work in remote locations, have you? Building sites, work sites 50 miles from a road, that sort of thing? There are a lot more generators out there than you seem to think.
Not in the middle of major cities, I'll grant you. Not so many there. But still enough.
it should be a hand flicking someone off. Everyone has a middle finger, we can't leave out the women!
Your sentiment is fair, but you're still wrong. Not everyone has a middle finger.
The site's safety officer is actually running a "topic of the month" on keeping your fucking fingers away from loads being moved by cranes, and the "hammer it home message" is photos of lots of hands with 4.5, 4 or 3 fingers left on the hand.
Actually, now that I remember it, I used to work with an instrument technician who had 2 fingers left on his left hand. He used to collect used shell casings (as in "artillery", not as in "handgun") and one still had some of the bursting charge left in it, so he started to melt the TNT out (which isn't as mad as it sounds - TNT is normally melted into shell casings). It was educational. He uses long tongs these days.
There was a video file of (IIRC) HP technicians using a lemon as an incandescent lamp doing the rounds years before YouTube came into existence. Years pre-Slashdot, even!
Yes, it is unstable. Any discrepancy from precise balance will be exacerbated, and the presence of the Moon alone (ignoring effects, such as that due to Jupiter) is sufficient to perturb this system, leading to either a close encounter, or a Trojan- Greek relationship.
AND we don't own the Sol system. We happen to be here but we have no claims to anything beyond the moon
The claim to the Moon is pretty shaky. OK, so it's got a few rovers on it and a couple of footprints. Is that grounds for an eternal claim? Hmmm, would it work on Earth?
Aboriginal American to Hispanic Settler (just to shuffle the stereotypes a little) : "I say, old bean, would you mind moving out of New Mexico. My great^15 grandparents lived in that desert back when it bloomed, while your great^15 grandparents were having their hearts hacked out on top of a pyramid somewhere or fighting Arabs in Andalusia. Look there are their footprints!"
Sounds like a rapidly weakening claim.
Incidentally, I wonder just how long-lasting those footprints are going to be. There is actually such a thing as "space weather", and they are not going to last for ever. Even without tourists and/ or trophy hunters.
What would be the market price of the footprint in the famous photo, I wonder? You'd need to do something like casting it in transparent resin - an aerogel, perhaps. Technically tricky, but given a high enough price, someone is going to work out how to steal it.
Slashdot Mirror
ah ha, that's so right it's wrong. Or so much horse flesh dragged along behind the unstoppable juggernaut of a cart.
Tsar Putin - but of course! Except, why would Putin want to limit himself to the powers and capabilities of a mere Tsar?
And as for Putin being in the running ... well only if you mean "Putin is standing still, awaiting the unanimous demand of the people's of the RF that he take up the new post of hereditary First Secretary for life.
I just realised - I don't know if Putin has any children or not. That might make an interesting change. [...] Oh, two daughters. So, conventional family-based dictatorship then. Much like the Bushes.
And there is something wrong with being a Luddite?
Oh, I see that you're just copying and pasting the Wikipedia article, not supplying anything yourself.
That article seems to have been regurgitated all around the web - or the Wikipedia article is a regurgitation of someone else's article - but without any additional data. But it doesn't sound anatomically correct to me, because a muscle aligned as the article says would act to curve and eventually snap the distal spine. If you look at a convenient adductor muscle such as your biceps, it inserts on the radius and on the same side of the humerus, not on the opposite side.
I've managed to find some muscle diagrams for a dolphin, showing a muscle, the longismus dorsi, which runs from under the fluke, along the ventral (belly-wards) side of the spine to insert at points anterior (headwards) to the dorsal fin. Which indeed would give a bending moment to the spine and drive the fluke (and nose) down through the water.
That Wikipedia article (or wherever it was copied from) reads like a rough translation job by someone without much anatomy knowledge. Meh - mine is only really from trying to work out how fossils work and "wtf is this from?", but it seems that I can get a clearer idea of how the beasts are put together than the author. I'll grant that detailed anatomy diagrams of whales are few and far between on the web, buried under mounds of stuff intended for spoon-feeding kindergarten students.
Nice variant on a well-used trope! Is it your own, or did you get it from somewhere? (Someone below refers it to Marvin, which is fair, but it's a long way from Marvin.)
The ultimate hilarity of course would be if he actually wins the presidency, and reveals the conspiracy on the dog-emptying lawn (wherever they hold the oath-taking ceremony in January) ... to be promptly shot by an assault-rifle wielding member of a militia empowered by his coming policy speeches, who actually believed the bullshit.
Ah, I'll just get some popcorn to throw away, and a nice bag of cashews to eat while watching this. Kenyan cashews, of course ; Hussein Obama brand.
So ... replace the pilot with a high-speed data link to the actual pilot (probably more like "flight supervisor", as more of the second-to-second flying is done by onboard computers) who is sitting in a disused missile silo in Kansas somewhere.
Whodathunkit?
And shooting a ball (or other projectile) is going to be much better? Caveat - I'm not a diabetic, yet. But with both parents now insulin-dependent, and one of two siblings too ... I'm not in doubt about which way things are going to go for me.
He bloody well was.
(signed) Satan.
But fascinating as Slashdot's interminable lingistic battles are, Charlie Stross is a good enough author, and consistently interesting and amusing enough, that I shall forego the Slashdot Biscuit Race in favour of going and reading what he has to say for himself. Enjoy your share of the biscuit, one and all!
Did I mention Customs paperwork? Even that would be simpler, since each of the countries involved has their own way of formatting addresses.
So, translating "squiggle.wombat.banana" into Spanish would lead to a different location. Hmmm, that would be a major failing, and I couldn't see that in the FAQ (because after RTFA, I also RTFFAQ). Nor in the "technical paper". And without that, I don't see the benefit, really.
After all, though it goes beyond my knowledge of Spanish, I wouldn't be surprised if the Spanish for "squiggle.wombat.banana" were something not far from "escriblo.wombat.banana" (two of the words being very non-Spanish, and even non-Romance. Possibly non-IndoEuropean). Which would make the wordlist part of things much more complicated.
I know why I was thinking down those lines - I read Wossname-XKCD's "What If" book on the plane to work, and was wondering if his "Thing Explainer" idea was worth reading on the way back (if I could find a copy) ... thousand word long word list ... then this comes along with a slightly longer wordlist.
Excuse me ... thinking on keyboard. 10000km pole to equator. 40000 along the equator. Therefore 333000 by 1332000 3m units for 443556000000 3m.sq units (first approximation, OK) sorry, double that to take on the other hemisphere. 887,112,000,000 units. Stick in the thousands markers. Not far off a trillion.
So, to name those million-odd parcels with a wordlist, you'd need nearly a million words for two-word addresses, 10,000 words for three word addresses, and you could do it with four words using Munroe's (I remembered his name, if not the spelling) thousand word wordlist.
And I've got to go and do some work. Damn - I'll miss the galley.
In theory, now, you could compare two examples of $BREED from opposite sides of the world, and with no known common parentage, decide they're a good match, and cross-breed them. But in practice there are likely to be hidden (i.e. not known to the owners) relationships between two of $BREED. And the transport costs from one side of the world to the other are likely to wipe out any profit for professional breeders.
It is far easier to breed amongst your own stock of animals-for-sale. And kill the gimps. Use them for food, why not.
With some knowledge of genetics, a sensible breeder would cooperate with someone aiming for similar characteristics from a different original stock, and intermittently cross-breed between their best lines to regain some "hybrid vigour" without bringing in too many different characteristics. But that still increases the costs, and the customer is mostly not going to care about your ethical breeding strategies.
So, only people who keep children can have pets?
It might be an idea to, like, RTFFAQ?
Given a 25 to 40 thousand word wordlist, then smaller and older languages with small dictionaries might pose a problem, but simply working down the list of languages by speaking-population will address that on a minimum effort basis. I'm only surprised they haven't tackled either Chinese, Korean or Japanese yet. Though Japanese should succumb to kanji transliterations, if nothing else.
They do somewhat overstate the difficulties of current location systems. I use UTMs frequently, and they don't bother with positive or negative numbers, or north or south. Everything is so-many metres north of a point a few thousand kilometres above the south pole, and everything is east of a point a few thousand kilometres west of the zone of validity. So you need an integer (UTM zone), two reals (northing and easting) and an optional real for altitude. Perfectly convertible to any other geodetic system, though the calculation is not human-friendly.
I did have some questions about the way they manage to get to 3m.sq grids from such a short wordlist, though I'm willing to accept it can be done. Perhaps an extension of "magic square" methods for allocating resources in (statistical) experimental design. Unfortunately the "technical report" goes off to Dropbox, which is absolutely forbidden here, so no joy.
That's a pile of balrogs!
Define "definitely." Define "proven."
The front of my hard hat and the back of my coveralls say "geologist", and the FGS (Fellow of the Geological Society) sort of leans in the direction that other geologists consider me a geologist too. For me, "proven" means that the evidence of it;s existence is sufficiently strong that to believe otherwise than in it's existence would require perversely illogical special pleading.
Others have mentioned the petrophysical characteristics - seismic velocity, density. The way that chemistry of melts of silicates and volatiles changes when held under top-of-mantle conditions of temperature and pressure matches the trends we see in individual crystals (olivines, cpxs) and the trends in eruptions of single and multiple volcanoes.
But for me, the thing that counts is holding lumps in my hand. Which you can do quite easily. Go to a place where MORB (mid-ocean ridge basalt) or an alkaline basalt is being erupted (Iceland, Hawaii, the Azores, the Canaries, certain African Rift volcanoes, the ancient Deccan or Siberian traps ...) and nose around the pebbles of black basalt on a beach until you find one with a greenish-yellow blob in the black matrix. Pick it up, weigh it in your hand, and contemplate that it originated 30 or so km beneath your feet. Just 30km away.
You can back this assertion up with lots of studies - the science is sound. But for me, the visceral experience of holding it in my hand makes it real to me.
You have an example of a human who doesn't have a biological brain and nervous system?
I@m seeking an example ... Stephen Hawking doesn't fit for example, because he has a biological brain (in fine working order, to best I can tell from his conversation) and a biological nervous system. The non-brain parts of his nervous system are pretty fucked-up, and requiring significant mechanical and electronic assistance to communicate with the rest of the world. But they're still biological. Even Kevin Warwick is basically biological, with small electronic peripherals. A person with a cochlear implant in place of an ear sensor has a slightly non-biological system - but not even a couple of percent.
How are the natural gas fields of today going to capture helium in the future.
Oh, you're making the assumption that the field producing today (and allegedly venting helium into the atmosphere) are still going to be producing in 5, 10, 20 whenever years when you think the helium price will rise. Some of them may be. And some of them - increasing numbers as you go further into the future - will not be producing at that future date. This is irrespective of whether they're produced by conventional non-hydraulic fracturing technology or conventional hydraulic fracturing technology.
I wonder just how they go about capturing the helium in such a field. I'd guess the simple thing to do would be to capture the headspace gas after producing LNG, and then process that down to drop out as much of the N2 as you can, then compress the remainder for sale as "technical helium" - good for balloons and some forms of welding, but not for cryogenics without more processing.
I'll ask the test spread's chemists if they know - or indeed if they even analyse for He.
While I've definitely liked some of KSR's work, Red Mars was tedious enough to put me off the rest of that Cycle. I'll not cross him (or is it a she - I can't remember, and can't be bothered to look it up) off my reading list. But the Mars cycle isn't going to get me at the bookshop again.
You've not done much work in remote locations, have you? Building sites, work sites 50 miles from a road, that sort of thing? There are a lot more generators out there than you seem to think.
Not in the middle of major cities, I'll grant you. Not so many there. But still enough.
Your sentiment is fair, but you're still wrong. Not everyone has a middle finger.
The site's safety officer is actually running a "topic of the month" on keeping your fucking fingers away from loads being moved by cranes, and the "hammer it home message" is photos of lots of hands with 4.5, 4 or 3 fingers left on the hand.
Actually, now that I remember it, I used to work with an instrument technician who had 2 fingers left on his left hand. He used to collect used shell casings (as in "artillery", not as in "handgun") and one still had some of the bursting charge left in it, so he started to melt the TNT out (which isn't as mad as it sounds - TNT is normally melted into shell casings). It was educational. He uses long tongs these days.
There was a video file of (IIRC) HP technicians using a lemon as an incandescent lamp doing the rounds years before YouTube came into existence. Years pre-Slashdot, even!
Yes, it is unstable. Any discrepancy from precise balance will be exacerbated, and the presence of the Moon alone (ignoring effects, such as that due to Jupiter) is sufficient to perturb this system, leading to either a close encounter, or a Trojan- Greek relationship.
Your second consequence follows from the first.
He did the best that he was able!
The claim to the Moon is pretty shaky. OK, so it's got a few rovers on it and a couple of footprints. Is that grounds for an eternal claim? Hmmm, would it work on Earth?
Aboriginal American to Hispanic Settler (just to shuffle the stereotypes a little) : "I say, old bean, would you mind moving out of New Mexico. My great^15 grandparents lived in that desert back when it bloomed, while your great^15 grandparents were having their hearts hacked out on top of a pyramid somewhere or fighting Arabs in Andalusia. Look there are their footprints!"
Sounds like a rapidly weakening claim.
Incidentally, I wonder just how long-lasting those footprints are going to be. There is actually such a thing as "space weather", and they are not going to last for ever. Even without tourists and/ or trophy hunters.
What would be the market price of the footprint in the famous photo, I wonder? You'd need to do something like casting it in transparent resin - an aerogel, perhaps. Technically tricky, but given a high enough price, someone is going to work out how to steal it.