Well, I rather suspect that you're joking, but I do hope that you get cancer and die in agony under treatment by a cancer scientist who is as much of a tosser as you think the IAU are. It would only seem just.
All panspermia discussions strive to avoid being seen to duck the difficult question : how did life first originate anywhere? Even if you prove beyond doubt that Sol organisms are derived form (e.g.) Van Maaanen's Star organisms, as are Banardians and... you still have the problem of finding out how originated the first time.
While OOL (Origin Of Life) is by no means a settled question on Earth, we do at least have good evidence of what happened here. Otherwise, being able to determine that life originated in a cluster which got destroyed 3 billion years ago by a GRB is unlikely to leave much tangible evidence.
If it can happen anywhere, it could happen repeatedly. And so multiple civilisations is my bet, and they just learned to keep quiet around the Primitives.
Everyone is dead, or elsewhere remains on the list of possibilities.
They could simulate normal life perfectly inside orbital colonies.
By the time you've reached that point, the number of people living in orbital colonies wouls mean that they are the norm, and it is people who live at the bottom of a (gravitational) hole who would be considered dumb, crippled dwarfs.
Given that CPU and memory get less expensive over time,
Ouch!
Certainly that has happened in the past (I too remember paying £200 extra for the 4MB version of a computer instead of the 1MB version) ; there are processes in the production pipeline that should keep the trend downwards for a decade or so.
Beyond that... much thinner ice. And looking into the immediate future (speaking as a geologist, say doubling our species' age to ~100,000 years... well, you'll need sub-gluon storage, and a hard drive failure could locally cause heat-death of the visible universe.
That a GPU is sitting unused in a desktop application is one of the safest assumptions you can make in the current computing work
Is it? I don't even know if I've got a GPU - why should I? I do know that when I try running a seismic-visualisation tool, it crawls like a dog run over by a series of artics. but I still don't know if I've got a GPU. [Checks details] "Intel GMA 650," whatever the fuck that means.
The work might be being done in America - land of the Fahrenheit, if not land of Fahrenheit - but since non-Americans are involved then there is no chance that they'll be working in Fahrenheit.
Jeebus, check your facts. Wakefield, as is normal for a doctor, didn't have a PhD, but a bachelorship in surgery and medicine. He did have a fellowship of the royal college of surgeons, but that's not an academic qualification.
What happened to Wakefield - for his fraud and ethical lapses - was that he was struck off the medical register, and so was no longer able to practice medicine in the UK.
I'm not entirely sure that there is any procedure by which an earned PhD can be removed from someone. Honorary doctorates on the other hand, can be retracted, and have been. but that's not the case here.
Sure, Wakefield was - and presumably remains - a sleazebag and is practising medicine in the USA as I understand things. But to the best of my knowledge he retains his PhD. I would be very surprised if the RCS had allowed him to remain a fellow, and it's possible that his proposer and seconder could have had a bollocking over not spotting that he was an unprincipled bounder and a cad and an unfit mother. But with 13 years between joining and going into the fraud business, they're probably not really deserving of blame.
Where in the Bible does it state that the Universe is six thousand years old?
The methodology that Archbishop Ussher adopted was to tally up the ages of the various patriarchs listed in the Old Testament, then tie them to the historical record at about the Babylonian captivity and more recent events.
They may have been working from ridiculous premises, with ludicrously limited data sources, but they were actually perfectly serious scholars.
So they could set up a container with two chambers separated by an RO filter and an
air chamber, put it out in space, and let the vacuum of space draw out the non-alcohol whiskey.
You would need a semi-permeable membrane which passed everything except (ethyl) alcohol. In particular, the higher alcohols and poly-alcohols which are major components of the flavours of whiskeys (real ones, or Japanese ones). That is actually a pretty severe requirement, because most semi-permeable membranes achieve their separating effects by physical mechanisms, frequently passing molecules of only a set range of sizes. That's not a lot of use if you want to pass, say, propan-2-ol but not pass ethanol.
Carrying out low-temperature distillation with the abundant vacuum of space and good fractionation would be simpler, if for some incomprehensible reason you wanted to produce (ethyl) alcohol-free whiskey. But to be honest, I suspect it'd taste pretty bowfing (Scottish for "vomit-inducing").
All you need to know is how far from the coast you need to live. If people are stupid enough to live close to hurricane-prone shores, they are welcome to die for their housing choice.
What makes you think that your American solution would be acceptable in Europe?
(Oh, and as the actual news reporting points out, while two off-duty US marines were involved, there were at least as many civilians involved in tackling the gunman too. Of the two classes of people, I'd posit that it took more balls for the non-military personnel to go to the attack, precisely because they aren't trained how to kill people with their todgers and a rubber band.)
How great to know that at some date ahead, we can announce that a specific patient was the last such loss to occur.
How are you going to know that? I have a patient here, with septic shock. My patient dies. I announce the patient was the last who will ever die of septic shock. What is there to prevent another patient from dieing of septic shock the next day in Ulan Bataar?
If it were a recordable disease (like TB, some STIs, typhoid, and not many others I can think of off the top of my head), then you might have a point, but I'm not aware of septic shock ever having been enough of a threat to public health to be considered a reportable disease. After all, it's not transmissable.
It's bad enough that some places have outfitted their police vehicles with automated license plate scanners,
Many police patrol vehicles have ANPR (Automated Number Plate Recognition) for over a decade now. Along with average-speed cameras (read the number plate at one location ; read it 10 miles down the road ; divide distance by time and issue ticket appropriately ; yes, they are generally installed just after and before major junctions) spreading across the nation's roads.
Obviously petrol stations and parking garages have been deploying the technology for years too, to locate and discourage theft (of fuel, of parking service). This is just not news, and hasn't been for years.
If it's collected repeatedly over a long period of time, it can reveal intimate data about you like attending a religious service or a gay bar.
Don't drive to the bar - how difficult was that? Many countries have laws against driving while shagging, or driving while drunk, so isn't that what taxis are for? Unless you don't trust Uber.
I'm moderately amused by the idea of holding a religious service in a gay bar.
Only not just in Germany. Well, according to the wife, who when I told her about this said 2that makes sense, and I'd thought that myself at restaurants". (Certainly she's been food photographing for years, where I'm just not interested.) So there's at least one other non-German who thinks it's a reasonable idea.
Seems simple enough to defeat - don't connect to the internet. Or set up rules on your firewall to block those domains. That would be *.microsoft.com and *.live.com
Probably because they're naturally present in the raw materials. After all, both lead and cadmium are parts of the natural environment. Lead is also present in appreciable amounts in almost all areas where internal combustion engines were used between about 1935 and 1980. Cadmium is rarer, but since it chemically follows zinc, I'd expect to find it pretty much anywhere that has had zinc used. So - any farm that has had some galvanised steel sheet in a building or equipment potentially has a cadmium problem.
Then there is mine waste. For a typical lead mining operation (from the lead mines I've examined as a geologist and a caver - the ore is rarely more than a couple of percent of the material that is removed from the ground, but all of that "gangue" (non-ore material) gets hauled out to the surface, where it'll eventually become soil, and a potential source of contamination.
What is slightly more interesting to me is whether the Soylent processing of their raw foodstuffs concentrates the heavy metals, or dilutes them. But with the California "action level for lead being 15 ppb (parts per billion) and so implied levels in the Soylent being around 300ppb, that's going to be difficult to treat down. Probably their best strategy would be to tighten up on their source materials, and test every batch that comes in.
It's people like you that convince me that I'm correct to ride in the middle of the lane. And if you want to overtake, you just do a full overtaking manoeuvre.
There are very few places on earth where nature doesn't occasionally try to kill you.
And don't live in solar systems with un-controlled asteroids floating around, for they too have a long record of hitting planets and causing very large numbers of deaths.
Is that all cases covered?
(You'll note that I'm not repeating the "asteroids cause mass extinctions" meme, because I'm not 100% convinced that has been proven. Lots of deaths certainly ; mass extinctions, the jury is back out.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I rather suspect that you're joking, but I do hope that you get cancer and die in agony under treatment by a cancer scientist who is as much of a tosser as you think the IAU are. It would only seem just.
While OOL (Origin Of Life) is by no means a settled question on Earth, we do at least have good evidence of what happened here. Otherwise, being able to determine that life originated in a cluster which got destroyed 3 billion years ago by a GRB is unlikely to leave much tangible evidence.
If it can happen anywhere, it could happen repeatedly. And so multiple civilisations is my bet, and they just learned to keep quiet around the Primitives.
Everyone is dead, or elsewhere remains on the list of possibilities.
By the time you've reached that point, the number of people living in orbital colonies wouls mean that they are the norm, and it is people who live at the bottom of a (gravitational) hole who would be considered dumb, crippled dwarfs.
Ouch!
Certainly that has happened in the past (I too remember paying £200 extra for the 4MB version of a computer instead of the 1MB version) ; there are processes in the production pipeline that should keep the trend downwards for a decade or so.
Beyond that ... much thinner ice. And looking into the immediate future (speaking as a geologist, say doubling our species' age to ~100,000 years ... well, you'll need sub-gluon storage, and a hard drive failure could locally cause heat-death of the visible universe.
Is it? I don't even know if I've got a GPU - why should I? I do know that when I try running a seismic-visualisation tool, it crawls like a dog run over by a series of artics. but I still don't know if I've got a GPU. [Checks details] "Intel GMA 650," whatever the fuck that means.
wrong on so many levels.
The work might be being done in America - land of the Fahrenheit, if not land of Fahrenheit - but since non-Americans are involved then there is no chance that they'll be working in Fahrenheit.
That may explain why I've heard of Bruce Lee, but not heard of Chuck Norris. I don't think I've got any of their LPs though.
Having such fucking idiots for parents must indeed be a severe disability.
What happened to Wakefield - for his fraud and ethical lapses - was that he was struck off the medical register, and so was no longer able to practice medicine in the UK.
I'm not entirely sure that there is any procedure by which an earned PhD can be removed from someone. Honorary doctorates on the other hand, can be retracted, and have been. but that's not the case here.
Sure, Wakefield was - and presumably remains - a sleazebag and is practising medicine in the USA as I understand things. But to the best of my knowledge he retains his PhD. I would be very surprised if the RCS had allowed him to remain a fellow, and it's possible that his proposer and seconder could have had a bollocking over not spotting that he was an unprincipled bounder and a cad and an unfit mother. But with 13 years between joining and going into the fraud business, they're probably not really deserving of blame.
The methodology that Archbishop Ussher adopted was to tally up the ages of the various patriarchs listed in the Old Testament, then tie them to the historical record at about the Babylonian captivity and more recent events.
They may have been working from ridiculous premises, with ludicrously limited data sources, but they were actually perfectly serious scholars.
You would need a semi-permeable membrane which passed everything except (ethyl) alcohol. In particular, the higher alcohols and poly-alcohols which are major components of the flavours of whiskeys (real ones, or Japanese ones). That is actually a pretty severe requirement, because most semi-permeable membranes achieve their separating effects by physical mechanisms, frequently passing molecules of only a set range of sizes. That's not a lot of use if you want to pass, say, propan-2-ol but not pass ethanol.
Carrying out low-temperature distillation with the abundant vacuum of space and good fractionation would be simpler, if for some incomprehensible reason you wanted to produce (ethyl) alcohol-free whiskey. But to be honest, I suspect it'd taste pretty bowfing (Scottish for "vomit-inducing").
That is a good title. Now all you need to do is write the book. Guaranteed best seller.
All you need to know is how far from the coast you need to live. If people are stupid enough to live close to hurricane-prone shores, they are welcome to die for their housing choice.
Not that I'm a touch typist. That was a girls school subject when I was at school.
(Oh, and as the actual news reporting points out, while two off-duty US marines were involved, there were at least as many civilians involved in tackling the gunman too. Of the two classes of people, I'd posit that it took more balls for the non-military personnel to go to the attack, precisely because they aren't trained how to kill people with their todgers and a rubber band.)
How are you going to know that? I have a patient here, with septic shock. My patient dies. I announce the patient was the last who will ever die of septic shock. What is there to prevent another patient from dieing of septic shock the next day in Ulan Bataar?
If it were a recordable disease (like TB, some STIs, typhoid, and not many others I can think of off the top of my head), then you might have a point, but I'm not aware of septic shock ever having been enough of a threat to public health to be considered a reportable disease. After all, it's not transmissable.
Many police patrol vehicles have ANPR (Automated Number Plate Recognition) for over a decade now. Along with average-speed cameras (read the number plate at one location ; read it 10 miles down the road ; divide distance by time and issue ticket appropriately ; yes, they are generally installed just after and before major junctions) spreading across the nation's roads.
Obviously petrol stations and parking garages have been deploying the technology for years too, to locate and discourage theft (of fuel, of parking service). This is just not news, and hasn't been for years.
Don't drive to the bar - how difficult was that? Many countries have laws against driving while shagging, or driving while drunk, so isn't that what taxis are for? Unless you don't trust Uber.
I'm moderately amused by the idea of holding a religious service in a gay bar.
Only not just in Germany. Well, according to the wife, who when I told her about this said 2that makes sense, and I'd thought that myself at restaurants". (Certainly she's been food photographing for years, where I'm just not interested.) So there's at least one other non-German who thinks it's a reasonable idea.
Sounds like engineering to me.
Seems simple enough to defeat - don't connect to the internet. Or set up rules on your firewall to block those domains. That would be *.microsoft.com and *.live.com
Then there is mine waste. For a typical lead mining operation (from the lead mines I've examined as a geologist and a caver - the ore is rarely more than a couple of percent of the material that is removed from the ground, but all of that "gangue" (non-ore material) gets hauled out to the surface, where it'll eventually become soil, and a potential source of contamination.
What is slightly more interesting to me is whether the Soylent processing of their raw foodstuffs concentrates the heavy metals, or dilutes them. But with the California "action level for lead being 15 ppb (parts per billion) and so implied levels in the Soylent being around 300ppb, that's going to be difficult to treat down. Probably their best strategy would be to tighten up on their source materials, and test every batch that comes in.
Most gold mines are not very profitable. They need a long-term investment of quite large amounts of cash, and the product has a pretty volatile price.
Fucking dangerous car drivers.
And don't live in solar systems with un-controlled asteroids floating around, for they too have a long record of hitting planets and causing very large numbers of deaths.
Is that all cases covered?
(You'll note that I'm not repeating the "asteroids cause mass extinctions" meme, because I'm not 100% convinced that has been proven. Lots of deaths certainly ; mass extinctions, the jury is back out.)