I take that point, but my thought on reading the concept was "Great, so now you have hundreds or thousands of people bobbing around in the sea in indestructible survival capsules. Where they die slowly of thirst and starvation, as most of the local boats have been wrecked by the tsunami, or parked a kilometre inshore, or are being used by their owners to search for missing friends/ relatives, or to bring in supplies from nearby devastated areas.
Then I look out of the window at the (nearly) indestructible TEMPSC ("lifeboat" to you landlubbers) and remember the 3 or 4 that were found floating around the wreckage of the Piper Alpha. (One was seen to impact the water a mile from the platform, having flown the intervening distance. It held two burned lifejackets and no bodies. Figure that one out.) They were found several times each, as different S&R assets came into the hot zone and moved back out. They got in the way of the search for survivors, and being composed of highly visible, highly buoyant materials, continued to be a problem until S&R assets were deployed to tow them away and tie them up out of the way.
I'm sure the guy can engineer a fine piece of aerospace. But that doesn't make him the right man to engineer a marine safety system. (Note : a system ; it's more than just a device.)
As in "Oh, Yellowstone is erupting. I'll get some popcorn to watch until all the news broadcasters are dead. Then get on with my life."
A Yellowstone supervolcano would be devastating for the United States and most of Canada. At home, we might even get some ash fall (but we get that from Iceland already). Wouldn't be good for crops for the next couple of years, but we could probably use a 50% population drop. It'll be back in less than a century. Fuck up comms ofr a couple of years too, but the world will go on.
It destroyed my daughter's machine when I got her an iMP3 player one Xmas and she tried to install iTunes as instructed. Obviously she hadn't taken advice to back up her school work to the file server, so that was my weekend fucked.
Never considered an Apple product since, and only touched them on occasions (to move them out of the way).
The sediment in which the flakes were found was dated by magnetostratigraphy to have been deposited 3.3 million years ago, meaning the flakes cannot be younger than that age.
Remarkably, the article's authors did actually put that information into the article, so that people could possibly read it and become better informed. It's a shocking new concept called "communication".
Nevermind many of the various "voyages of discovery" that European nations conducted from the 1400s onward that went into uncharted territory, spending long times at sea,
"uncharted" does not equate with "unoccupied".
A couple of years ago, my commute to work included an 8 hour boat ride starting from port passed by Vasco de Gama on his outward trip to Calicut ; at that time, the port had been established for several centuries by Arab slave traders.
Seriously, the stuff is all around us, from axle grease and lubricants found sitting in every vehicle on the planet (including junkyards),
Are you serious? Unless you're talking about a lubricant distributor's warehouse, you're not talking about more than a few months supply. That's what distributor's warehouses are for.
to existing-but-unused reservoirs sitting around idle in abandoned refineries and petroleum distribution companies scattered throughout.
I had a friend who worked in environmental clean up from abandoned petrol stations, and working in the oil industry myself (well, the both of us do now) I've got a better idea than most about the amount of paperwork involved in hydrocarbon handling. I simply do not believe that there are significant amounts of hydrocarbons in your putative "abandoned refineries". The paperwork would be horrendous and unrelenting, and in any case that feedstock is both valuable and dangerous. Do you have any conception of the number of isolations and lock-outs you need to get a confined space entry permit for accessing hydrocarbon storage tanks.
Citation needed.
(I'm going to guess that you come up with some story about hundreds of tonnes of contaminants which leaked out of a tank during the working life of a refinery. Which is not the same thing at all. Your first problem in exploiting such a "resource" is going to be mining the stuff - again - followed by separating it from the waste.
Love it, hate it.. but, honestly you simply can't discount a film franchise in which two of the four movies have had global revenues of over a billion dollars and shows up on the lists of highest grossing films.
You might not be able to discount them, but I certainly can. Crap remains crap even if it's designed to sell merchandise (Transformer-branded shit-paper, anyone?) and succeeds in that by means of brat's pester power.
I didn't actually know (or care, in the slightest) that they were a quadruple of films, or that they were high grossing. I only know of their interminable existence from the presence of mounds of promotional crap in the town centre.
The fire safe (as is typical for the class) should be rated for 1500 degrees for 30minutes while keeping the inside temperature below that necessary to char paper. The walls are heavily insulated and the seals on the door in extreme heat melt and seal the interior completely.
There are other things to consider which can seriously alter your fire situation.
(I'll point out that I have to do fire training including a number of evacuations through burning buildings every couple of years, and have been doing it since we routinely had people die in the training. It is very likely that I've spent more time in burning buildings in BA sets than the average Slashdotter, unless there are a lot of undeclared firefighters on the board. I work in the oil industry, and dieing in a fire is a non-trivial risk at work, in addition to the normal hazards of being at sea.)
Being in the UK, we build our houses with bricks, mortar and concrete, with minimal wood. Rather different to the US, I gather, and I'm not sure how that would alter the progress of fires there. If I were to get a fire safe, I'd probably mount it by either excavating into the floor of my garage (concrete) and covering it's access with a paving slab (40mm thick) ; or I'd mount it into the concrete and breeze block wall of the garage along the party wall with the neighbours. Since I don't keep significant flammables in the garage (that is in the shed, outside ; that can burn and I'd get a toasting fork instead of getting worried.) Either of those options should take hundreds of degrees off the exterior temperature of the fire safe. Putting it in the floor would be better temperature-wise, but not so good for protection from water damage. But since I've also got water-proof diving pouches and silica gel in abundance, I'm pretty sanguine about water.
Where to site a fire safe - for a combination of low fire risk and acceptable security (I wouldn't put it in the shed!) is going to have a very big effect on the conditions it is exposed to.
Does the LHC still use bubble chambers? Not at ATLAS, according to http://www.atlas.ch/detector.h... , nor at CMS. Nor in LHCb. Nor in ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment). The TOTEM experiment uses something called a Roman Pot. and I've now got bored.
From the other end of the telescope - would what is essentially an imaging detector like a bubble chamber be suited to a high-data rate situation like the LHC?
CO2 concentrations in liquid, sure. But what does that have to do with PH? You indicate that it's self-evident, but it's not to me. Maybe you can explain that relationship in high-school sciencey language.
In equations : CO2 + H2O H2CO3
In words : Carbon dioxide dissolved in water is in equilibrium (ASCII doesn't have the proper double-direction arrow) with carbonic acid.
H2CO3 H(+) + HCO3(-)
Carbonic acid, dissolved in water, can split up into free protons and bi-carbonate ions. (I've bracketed the charges to distinguish them from the "and" symbol).
Really, if you didn't get your head around this sort of incredibly elementary chemistry while you were at school then you shouldn't be approaching anything about real-world chemistry, which is not under any obligation to be as simple as you want it to be. (For a start ; there's another ionisation stage where the bi-carbonate ions form more protons and carbonate ions ; and the protons are solvated in the real world.
I'm not a professional chemist ; but I grew up in a house with a chemist, studied it for a year at university and have been making routine practical use of (wet and gas-phase) chemical analyses for nearly 30 years in labs literally around the world. I can't work out how your understanding of chemistry can be so appallingly wrong. That colours your entire credibility on a fundamentally chemical topic, and if you can't recognise that, then your credibility on all other subjects is destroyed by yourself.
There's an assumption in your discussion below that there is only one recording device which records both sound and vision simultaneously. Many of the "turn the camera off" situations you discuss are ones that can be perfectly adequately addressed by turning off the sound on some occasions (personal phone call) or turning off the camera on others (piss-stop).
The huge lateral blast of the initial eruptions pretty much surprised everyone.
The scale of the lateral blast was a surprise. The presence of a multiple-hundreds of metres bulge on one flank of the volcano and it's increase over a period of days before the event was a bit hard to miss, which was why it was being monitored.
Most people expected a landslide from that flank, but not an explosion, because no-one had observed such an event from sufficiently close, and then lived to tell the tale in sufficient detail for it to get into the geological record.
I'd pretty much made up my mind to study geology before Mt St Helens, but it did temporarily raise the profile of the subject.
It would be trivial for developed countries to write laws that prevent the import or manufacture of products made from raw materials that came from "dirty" factories.
Trivial?
It would work for about 3 seconds - if that long - because the instant there were even a hint of that, then there would spring up a slew of intermediate companies whose on-paper existence is as intermediates in the import-export business from one country to another (if you've ever had to import or export equipment or raw materials, then you'll know this is a very plausible excuse), but in reality who provide multiple layers of plausible deniability between ultimate consumers and ultimate suppliers.
Because, for all the hand-wringing and public pronouncements, a sufficient number of people in the consuming societies are only concerned with the lowest immediate price. They will get pandered to, and the entire supply chain will become contaminated as a result.
If you really think it's "trivial", list the steps. Start with regulations for your country, then for the next bigger economy, and the next, until you've got to the biggest economy (China, isn't it? Or is it India yet?).
Give it a couple of million years and people will be clamouring for this stuff. (For values of "people" including small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri and other galactic residents.)
I'm surprise no Keynesian has pointed with admiration to WW 1 trench warfare, which used up lots of military materiel. With better management by the belligerent nations, it could have lasted decades.
Considering that significant chunks of the current problems in the world are consequences of the mismanagement of the Middle East by the "victorious powers" in the aftermath of World War 1, you could make a fair argument that WW1 is continuing to this day.
I note that the Ottoman Empire didn't have any significant problems in the region in the preceding centuries. But hey, they're darkies, and non-Xtians with it, so they can't have been doing anything right.
To my knowledge the U.S. hasn't done anything like that to a British company, with maybe the exception of BP after they blackened the Gulf of Mexico.
BP were operating in concert with an American company (Anadarko, 25% owner). While being a minor partner means that Anadarko wouldn't have had full control of the operations of drilling (and completing) the well, they would certainly have had substantial input in the planning phases, and at non-urgent operational decisions during the drilling of the well. While they won't have shared full culpability for the blowout, they at the very least did not object ot the bad choices made which lead to the blowout.
Yes, they brought out of the disaster afterwards, but their hands were by no means clean. Nor would Halliburton's, not Transocean's, even if BP take the majority of the blame.
Slashdot Mirror
Then I look out of the window at the (nearly) indestructible TEMPSC ("lifeboat" to you landlubbers) and remember the 3 or 4 that were found floating around the wreckage of the Piper Alpha. (One was seen to impact the water a mile from the platform, having flown the intervening distance. It held two burned lifejackets and no bodies. Figure that one out.) They were found several times each, as different S&R assets came into the hot zone and moved back out. They got in the way of the search for survivors, and being composed of highly visible, highly buoyant materials, continued to be a problem until S&R assets were deployed to tow them away and tie them up out of the way.
I'm sure the guy can engineer a fine piece of aerospace. But that doesn't make him the right man to engineer a marine safety system. (Note : a system ; it's more than just a device.)
Popcorn.
As in "Oh, Yellowstone is erupting. I'll get some popcorn to watch until all the news broadcasters are dead. Then get on with my life."
A Yellowstone supervolcano would be devastating for the United States and most of Canada. At home, we might even get some ash fall (but we get that from Iceland already). Wouldn't be good for crops for the next couple of years, but we could probably use a 50% population drop. It'll be back in less than a century. Fuck up comms ofr a couple of years too, but the world will go on.
Never considered an Apple product since, and only touched them on occasions (to move them out of the way).
Nor is an oxygenated atmosphere at all likely to help with the origin of life (under pretty much all models I've looked at).
Yeucch! And this is accepted by the sheeple? Horrors!
The sediment in which the flakes were found was dated by magnetostratigraphy to have been deposited 3.3 million years ago, meaning the flakes cannot be younger than that age.
Remarkably, the article's authors did actually put that information into the article, so that people could possibly read it and become better informed. It's a shocking new concept called "communication".
that's why they're doing it. Clear now?
You may have seen the movie, but I don't think I have. Wasn't Alfredo Garcia in the trunk of the car or in a plastic bag for most of that movie?
"uncharted" does not equate with "unoccupied".
A couple of years ago, my commute to work included an 8 hour boat ride starting from port passed by Vasco de Gama on his outward trip to Calicut ; at that time, the port had been established for several centuries by Arab slave traders.
... which is currently in "development hell" due to a severe shortage of tasty Greeks to turn into food.
what property-rights hating country would allow that to happen?
Are you serious? Unless you're talking about a lubricant distributor's warehouse, you're not talking about more than a few months supply. That's what distributor's warehouses are for.
I had a friend who worked in environmental clean up from abandoned petrol stations, and working in the oil industry myself (well, the both of us do now) I've got a better idea than most about the amount of paperwork involved in hydrocarbon handling. I simply do not believe that there are significant amounts of hydrocarbons in your putative "abandoned refineries". The paperwork would be horrendous and unrelenting, and in any case that feedstock is both valuable and dangerous. Do you have any conception of the number of isolations and lock-outs you need to get a confined space entry permit for accessing hydrocarbon storage tanks.
Citation needed.
(I'm going to guess that you come up with some story about hundreds of tonnes of contaminants which leaked out of a tank during the working life of a refinery. Which is not the same thing at all. Your first problem in exploiting such a "resource" is going to be mining the stuff - again - followed by separating it from the waste.
You might not be able to discount them, but I certainly can. Crap remains crap even if it's designed to sell merchandise (Transformer-branded shit-paper, anyone?) and succeeds in that by means of brat's pester power.
I didn't actually know (or care, in the slightest) that they were a quadruple of films, or that they were high grossing. I only know of their interminable existence from the presence of mounds of promotional crap in the town centre.
There are other things to consider which can seriously alter your fire situation.
(I'll point out that I have to do fire training including a number of evacuations through burning buildings every couple of years, and have been doing it since we routinely had people die in the training. It is very likely that I've spent more time in burning buildings in BA sets than the average Slashdotter, unless there are a lot of undeclared firefighters on the board. I work in the oil industry, and dieing in a fire is a non-trivial risk at work, in addition to the normal hazards of being at sea.)
Being in the UK, we build our houses with bricks, mortar and concrete, with minimal wood. Rather different to the US, I gather, and I'm not sure how that would alter the progress of fires there. If I were to get a fire safe, I'd probably mount it by either excavating into the floor of my garage (concrete) and covering it's access with a paving slab (40mm thick) ; or I'd mount it into the concrete and breeze block wall of the garage along the party wall with the neighbours. Since I don't keep significant flammables in the garage (that is in the shed, outside ; that can burn and I'd get a toasting fork instead of getting worried.) Either of those options should take hundreds of degrees off the exterior temperature of the fire safe. Putting it in the floor would be better temperature-wise, but not so good for protection from water damage. But since I've also got water-proof diving pouches and silica gel in abundance, I'm pretty sanguine about water.
Where to site a fire safe - for a combination of low fire risk and acceptable security (I wouldn't put it in the shed!) is going to have a very big effect on the conditions it is exposed to.
From the other end of the telescope - would what is essentially an imaging detector like a bubble chamber be suited to a high-data rate situation like the LHC?
In equations : CO2 + H2O H2CO3
In words : Carbon dioxide dissolved in water is in equilibrium (ASCII doesn't have the proper double-direction arrow) with carbonic acid.
H2CO3 H(+) + HCO3(-)
Carbonic acid, dissolved in water, can split up into free protons and bi-carbonate ions. (I've bracketed the charges to distinguish them from the "and" symbol).
Really, if you didn't get your head around this sort of incredibly elementary chemistry while you were at school then you shouldn't be approaching anything about real-world chemistry, which is not under any obligation to be as simple as you want it to be. (For a start ; there's another ionisation stage where the bi-carbonate ions form more protons and carbonate ions ; and the protons are solvated in the real world.
I'm not a professional chemist ; but I grew up in a house with a chemist, studied it for a year at university and have been making routine practical use of (wet and gas-phase) chemical analyses for nearly 30 years in labs literally around the world. I can't work out how your understanding of chemistry can be so appallingly wrong. That colours your entire credibility on a fundamentally chemical topic, and if you can't recognise that, then your credibility on all other subjects is destroyed by yourself.
Strange, I thought we'd landed missions on the Moon in the last couple of years.
Including, of course, the P-T extinction event which is the subject of discussion here.
There's an assumption in your discussion below that there is only one recording device which records both sound and vision simultaneously. Many of the "turn the camera off" situations you discuss are ones that can be perfectly adequately addressed by turning off the sound on some occasions (personal phone call) or turning off the camera on others (piss-stop).
The scale of the lateral blast was a surprise. The presence of a multiple-hundreds of metres bulge on one flank of the volcano and it's increase over a period of days before the event was a bit hard to miss, which was why it was being monitored.
Most people expected a landslide from that flank, but not an explosion, because no-one had observed such an event from sufficiently close, and then lived to tell the tale in sufficient detail for it to get into the geological record.
I'd pretty much made up my mind to study geology before Mt St Helens, but it did temporarily raise the profile of the subject.
Name and shame.
Trivial?
It would work for about 3 seconds - if that long - because the instant there were even a hint of that, then there would spring up a slew of intermediate companies whose on-paper existence is as intermediates in the import-export business from one country to another (if you've ever had to import or export equipment or raw materials, then you'll know this is a very plausible excuse), but in reality who provide multiple layers of plausible deniability between ultimate consumers and ultimate suppliers.
Because, for all the hand-wringing and public pronouncements, a sufficient number of people in the consuming societies are only concerned with the lowest immediate price. They will get pandered to, and the entire supply chain will become contaminated as a result.
If you really think it's "trivial", list the steps. Start with regulations for your country, then for the next bigger economy, and the next, until you've got to the biggest economy (China, isn't it? Or is it India yet?).
Give it a couple of million years and people will be clamouring for this stuff. (For values of "people" including small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri and other galactic residents.)
Considering that significant chunks of the current problems in the world are consequences of the mismanagement of the Middle East by the "victorious powers" in the aftermath of World War 1, you could make a fair argument that WW1 is continuing to this day.
I note that the Ottoman Empire didn't have any significant problems in the region in the preceding centuries. But hey, they're darkies, and non-Xtians with it, so they can't have been doing anything right.
BP were operating in concert with an American company (Anadarko, 25% owner). While being a minor partner means that Anadarko wouldn't have had full control of the operations of drilling (and completing) the well, they would certainly have had substantial input in the planning phases, and at non-urgent operational decisions during the drilling of the well. While they won't have shared full culpability for the blowout, they at the very least did not object ot the bad choices made which lead to the blowout.
Yes, they brought out of the disaster afterwards, but their hands were by no means clean. Nor would Halliburton's, not Transocean's, even if BP take the majority of the blame.