I must have put too much sugar in my coffee, I missed the subtle taste of irony
No, you missed the taste of irony because someone put too much (several percent of chromium and vanadium in the steel of your coffee spoon, rendering it something like stainless steel instead of plain old mild steel (it was very unlikely to ever have been pure iron - very little even vaguely pure iron is made these decades).
The link is between nutrition and brain development, [...] I can't imagine why anyone would see this as controversial.
by ahodgson
Probably because there just aren't all that many people in the 1st world who are truly going hungry.
The link cited was between "poor nutrition" and "brain development", not between "going hungry" and "brain development". I can feed you a kilo and a half of rice a day and watch you die of malnutrition. It may take a while, but you'll never be particularly hungry while you're dying of malnutrition.
Construction has always been dangerous. That doesn't mean that the number of deaths is acceptable.
We actually had to give up an hour of our off-shift time last Sunday, after the safety meeting, to go through some corporate "culture building exercise" (something I normally associate with home brewing) about how in the past the death rate was reckoned at about one corpse per million dollars spent, but by the investment of 0.13 million dollars (a leg or so), the guy who constructed the Golden Gate Bridge saved 26 lives on his 35 million dollar project, and got something like a 800% ROI from his spending on safety.
Working in construction (of oil wells, but it's construction nonetheless), it is just possible that I take a slightly different view of "that makes it different how?" Those people you dismiss with a "how?" are friends and colleagues of mine. We're on a half-billion dollar work site trying to construct things that your (and my) civilisation is going to be needing and using in the coming decade. I'm probably a damned sight closer than you are to the man who'll be earning his dollar "spraying plastic onto the roof" of your Moonbase. It won't be constructed by geeks steering robots by telepresence. At the very least, speed-of-light means that it'll be constructed by telepresence from within Moonbase-0.5. Bollock-frying radiation, leaky vacuum toilet and monotonous dehydrated diet and all.
And on that subject - our internet connection dies for the 4th time in a half hour. What was I saying about telepresence?
Gilbert may have proposed that lunar craters were impact structures a long time ago (I'm tired of fighting with 20-minute page loads so I'm not going to search for it. I wish the crane operator hadn't smacked the aft satellite dish.), but that doesn't mean that his explanation was accepted at the time. As I said, the strong consensus at the time that Heinlein was writing (that book) was the lunar craters were volcanic phenomena. About 1962-63, an aspirant astronaut and field geologist, Eugene Shoemaker, started publishing and presenting papers arguing parallels between the structure of the small number of known terrestrial impact craters and the structures visible on the moon, and proposing that the large majority of the craters on the Moon were of an impact origin, not an eruptive origin. Through the 1960s Shoemaker argued the position, was ruled out of the astronaut corps for health reasons, and successfully changed the expectation until the Russian landers of the mid-60s shifted the balance of evidence appreciably in the favour of the impact origin hypothesis for craters.
Actually that's how science is meant to work. It wasn't as dramatic a paradigm change as the contemporaneous development and acceptance of plate tectonics and so was probably overshadowed in the popular press, but that is what went on.
Meanwhile, absolutely no-one has ever argued that all craters on the Moon are of impact origin and none of volcanic origin, in the same way that no-one has (TTBOMK, and I am actually a geologist) seriously argued that all terrestrial craters are of volcanic origin and none of impact origin. We know of craters and other structures on both bodies, of both origins.
Lunar rilles were proposed as possible lava tube collapses so long ago that I'd have to seriously look it up to find an alternative proposal (and that bloody crane operator!).
more recent papers on fairly RECENT volcanic flows (as early as 100 million years ago).
In the 1950s a variety of people (including the selenographer Patrick Moore, famous as a BBC astronomy broadcaster from the same period) were continuing to report "Transient Lunar Phenomena" from a number of places, and proposing that they might be the product of volcanic fumarole activity, or something similar. i.e. contemporaneous volcanic activity. Certainly not impossible, though it's not clear that Moore had really made his case. But he did present a good argument.
All that said, the overwhelming majority of the Moon's volcanic activity took place in the "maria-forming" period of about 4 gigayears ago (maybe as recently as 3.7 gigayears ago), and the structures formed then have only been lightly modified since. That is when the structures we recognise as "the Man in the Moon" were formed.
Check out volcanic glass recovered by Apollo 17
You seem to be under the misapprehension that volcanic glasses are of necessity "recent" (if not "Recent", or Holocene). This is incorrect. It is true that, under terrestrial conditions, volcanic glasses do devitrify fairly rapidly (I've sketched the thin sections ; I've actually used devitrification of (non-volcanic) glasses to estimate pressure-temperature conditions of a geological event as part of my mapping-derived Honours thesis. But I'll stress again that this is under terrestrial conditions. If you have a glass-forming melt which is very low in water, (and other volatiles, but principally water) then the devitrification rate goes through the floor as the mobility of ions in the glass drops considerably. By the time you're down to the millimolar (IIRC - marginal internet here, as I said above) water concentrations in your magma, it's perfectly possible to have glasses persist for billions of years. Your Apollo volcanic glasses could easily be Archean or Hadean in age (Before 2.5 gigayears ago, or 4.0 Gyr respectively : I've got Gradstein & Ogg's 2013 chart taped to the wall of the office.), and still be vitreous.
Neither does drilling a hole in the ground involve any new technology principles. Tell that to the widows of the Macondo 11. Or the Piper Alpha 167. Or the North Cormorant 13. Or the Shetland 45. Or the more recent Shetland 4. Or, for that matter, yesterday's Russian 54.
Moonbase-1 will be built on blood (boiled to a powder) and bones.
The reason dark matter was hypothesized in the first place was because of the behavior of colliding galaxies,
Not by a large part of a century. (Expressing it as a fraction of a century to get the magnitude of the difference across. I feel a bit wobbly and I'm not yet a half century old.)
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, while some palaver called world war two was happening in some parts of the world, astronomers were mapping the rotational velocity profile of rotating galaxies. to their surprise they found that the velocity profile did not match the distribution of luminous matter (stars), but had to incorporate a significant quantity of non-luminous ("dark") matter in addition to the luminous matter. And thus was born the mystery of the dark matter. Constraints on the properties of the dark matter have tightened, slowly, over the decades, and estimates of it's quantity have increased (at first) then stabilised at around 4 times the gravitating mass of the luminous matter (note : I'm not tying it's gravitating and inertial mass to each other - we don't know anything where the two aren't exactly equal to depressing precision, but I'm not aware of any good reasons why that is the case).
It's not a new problem. It's a much older problem than our ability to clearly image colliding galaxies.
Rumour is that a Hubble-type error had happened on at least one nadir-directed telescope, and that opticians who were aware of those problems had watched the public design of the Hubble with increasing unease then downright horror as they saw the error become increasingly likely.
But because they were on classified work, they couldn't say a thing.
Our system protects people by instilling fear of consequences. That works very well for most crimes and criminals, but not if the criminal believes he has the skills to avoid being caught (the beltway sniper) or is intent on committing blue suicide (Adam Lanza).
Agreed on the fear of consequences. But I think you're looking at the wrong set of consequences. The most likely way this data would be used would be for the doxxed target to be observed, and when he (or she - there may be female soldiers on the list, I don't have a reliable enough connection to bother looking) goes off to the daily grind in civvy street... a while later Mr Wil'I'am Jihaddy turns up with a Pizza Hut uniform and box and shoots the soldier's family and children dead. An then probably gets away because no-one noticed.
The fear is of having your family killed as a consequence of signing up for the military. And yes, it is intended to inflict terror on the target population (anyone in the military, or who is family to anyone in the military).
Hate them or fear them, but you've got to admit that Al Quaeda and ISIS have got some pretty effective (note : that word does not imply "nice", or anything like it) tactical planners.
Considering these are a real and verified occurrence and considering the considerable amount of energy they release as has been recorded,
Have you actually looked at the magnitudes of moonquakes? Apart from the sporadic ones caused by impacts, they're not powerful quakes, and they're deep below the surface, which add up to low levels of ground shaking. Which is what you are really concerned with.
The typical shaking caused by a 5.5 magnitude earthquake (on the moment-magnitude scale, since the Richter scale has been deprecated since the equipment went out of service in the 1940s and 50s) would be in the region of V - VI on the Modified Mercalli Scale :
V. Moderate Felt by nearly everyone; many awakened. Some dishes, windows broken. Unstable objects overturned. Pendulum clocks may stop. VI. Strong Felt by all, many frightened. Some heavy furniture moved; a few instances of fallen plaster. Damage slight.
Actually, there's at least one kimberlite which erupted in the Eocene - up in central Canada, IIRC. Whether it is diamondiferous, and it's relations to the known-diamondiferous ones a little further north, I don't know.
When I was a student of mantle petrology (as opposed to earning a living grubbing around in the crustal ephemera), we couldn't say "there is no chance of a kimberlite being emplaced somewhere on Earth tomorrow. And I still don't see any particular reason to make such an assertion. And to be honest, I'd like to see it happen. Even with the boulders falling from the skies, raining death and destruction across the landscape, I'd like to see it. It'd be some sight to see.
It's not easy making something functional that you can also guarantee can be completely disinfected.
OTOH, it might be easier to make something that is sufficiently functional to take (and transmit to a server, wirelessly) the data and is cheap enough to then be disposable by dumping in the incinerator (bleach pit, or whatever technology is most convenient). For example, a sheet of cellulose-based fibres impregnated with visual prompts and orientation marks on which further marks can be placed as the medic acquires clinical information. Such a sheet can then be held against the screen (behind a sterilisable cover) of an OCR scanner to enter the data into the system.
Yes, "doctor's traditionally abysmal handwriting", but I counter with "most pharmacists have very clear handwriting". It's a training thing - teach doctors to write, while they're in college. All of them.
(Obviously, you can have a human interlocutor on the safe side of the fence to check the information has been scanned correctly ; getting the data corrected is generally easier at the point of collection than later. While that person needs some medical knowledge, they probably don't need more than nursing knowledge.)
The link is one of the references in TFA. IIRC, it was reference 3 or 4, but having downloaded, saved, opened and read the paper (abstract really), I see absolutely no reason to deny you that pleasure. Enjoy!
it's just a big volcanic bubble, two miles across, and if it had broken through, way back when, it would have been a crater."
So... Heinlein was writing within the accepted science of his day (no surprise there), which was that the craters of the Moon (there were no others known) were primarily a volcanic phenomenon.
In the 1960s there was a protracted dispute between various people in the geology community on determining the origin of the lunar craters. Eventually it was won by the people proposing that they were primarily impact-formed structures, and they did it largely by fieldwork on Earth examining various large terrestrial crater remnants. You may have heard of one of the proponents - one (Eu-)Gene Shoemaker.
Not detracting from Heinlein's fun storytelling, but his science was wrong. Which is an all-too-common problem when SF authors try to stay near the bleeding edge of science.
With the evidence from Apollo, and more recently from Lunar meteorites, we now know that most of the Moon's surface is composed of impact debris, with volcanic rocks in relatively restricted, dark areas known as maria.
Sealing them is pretty straightforward actually, you just use a sprayable plastic to coat to the interior.
Hmmm, you sound like someone who has actually spent a lot of time installing materials over your head, supported on ropes of uncertain anchorage, or installing the scaffolding truss work to avoid having to trust the rock which you're trying to stabilize. Or rather, you sound like someone who hasn't done exactly that.
I'm not saying that it's not do-able. But that doesn't mean to say it's "straightforward".
Actually, I'd expect the process to work more by building initial bases in smaller tunnels and tunnel sections, then using the structural strength of those buildings to anchor extensions of the walls to surround increasing volumes. Kind of like the building of a cantilever bridge, if you get my drift. A pretty long term programme.
If you think Symantec is a solution to any problem that exists, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Does Symantec provide a solution for the problem that is Symantec? In particular, their atrocious (as I recall... it has been a long time) uninstall programmes.
some people do deserve it. timothy mcveigh for one example
McVeigh? Oh, you mean the freedom fighter who was murdered by the government for his attempt to start the War of Liberation of the American People from the Curse of Washington? The future will not look kindly on the people who murdered this martyr, and the supporters of that government will be first up against the wall when the Revolution comes.
It looks a bit different from the other end of the telescope, doesn't it?
... or planned a novel, which he then sliced up into short-story-sized parts for publication.
Innovative? Bullshit! Dickens was doing this 150 years ago. The only significant difference was that Dickens had guarantees of the order in which his installments would be published. but he still needed to set up each story (not everyone would have got all the previous parts), continue the established story lines, and lead to a cliff-hanger for the end of the episode. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The answer has been known to be about 3^361 for... probably longer than the notation for expressing 3^361 has been known. That is approximately 10^172.24, but you need to correct for the number of board positions which are not legal. That's not going to be a simple function of board size, I suspect.
There is a ha-ha-but-serious school of thought about Go that it's not a matter of life and death, but something much more important. You'd be harder-tested to find a room full of Go players who could meaningfully give an opinion on whether Go was more important than the heat death of the universe. I suspect that given such qualified people, you'd get an affirmative on the question.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you missed the taste of irony because someone put too much (several percent of chromium and vanadium in the steel of your coffee spoon, rendering it something like stainless steel instead of plain old mild steel (it was very unlikely to ever have been pure iron - very little even vaguely pure iron is made these decades).
The link cited was between "poor nutrition" and "brain development", not between "going hungry" and "brain development". I can feed you a kilo and a half of rice a day and watch you die of malnutrition. It may take a while, but you'll never be particularly hungry while you're dying of malnutrition.
We actually had to give up an hour of our off-shift time last Sunday, after the safety meeting, to go through some corporate "culture building exercise" (something I normally associate with home brewing) about how in the past the death rate was reckoned at about one corpse per million dollars spent, but by the investment of 0.13 million dollars (a leg or so), the guy who constructed the Golden Gate Bridge saved 26 lives on his 35 million dollar project, and got something like a 800% ROI from his spending on safety.
Working in construction (of oil wells, but it's construction nonetheless), it is just possible that I take a slightly different view of "that makes it different how?" Those people you dismiss with a "how?" are friends and colleagues of mine. We're on a half-billion dollar work site trying to construct things that your (and my) civilisation is going to be needing and using in the coming decade. I'm probably a damned sight closer than you are to the man who'll be earning his dollar "spraying plastic onto the roof" of your Moonbase. It won't be constructed by geeks steering robots by telepresence. At the very least, speed-of-light means that it'll be constructed by telepresence from within Moonbase-0.5. Bollock-frying radiation, leaky vacuum toilet and monotonous dehydrated diet and all.
And on that subject - our internet connection dies for the 4th time in a half hour. What was I saying about telepresence?
Actually that's how science is meant to work. It wasn't as dramatic a paradigm change as the contemporaneous development and acceptance of plate tectonics and so was probably overshadowed in the popular press, but that is what went on.
Meanwhile, absolutely no-one has ever argued that all craters on the Moon are of impact origin and none of volcanic origin, in the same way that no-one has (TTBOMK, and I am actually a geologist) seriously argued that all terrestrial craters are of volcanic origin and none of impact origin. We know of craters and other structures on both bodies, of both origins.
Lunar rilles were proposed as possible lava tube collapses so long ago that I'd have to seriously look it up to find an alternative proposal (and that bloody crane operator!).
In the 1950s a variety of people (including the selenographer Patrick Moore, famous as a BBC astronomy broadcaster from the same period) were continuing to report "Transient Lunar Phenomena" from a number of places, and proposing that they might be the product of volcanic fumarole activity, or something similar. i.e. contemporaneous volcanic activity. Certainly not impossible, though it's not clear that Moore had really made his case. But he did present a good argument.
All that said, the overwhelming majority of the Moon's volcanic activity took place in the "maria-forming" period of about 4 gigayears ago (maybe as recently as 3.7 gigayears ago), and the structures formed then have only been lightly modified since. That is when the structures we recognise as "the Man in the Moon" were formed.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that volcanic glasses are of necessity "recent" (if not "Recent", or Holocene). This is incorrect. It is true that, under terrestrial conditions, volcanic glasses do devitrify fairly rapidly (I've sketched the thin sections ; I've actually used devitrification of (non-volcanic) glasses to estimate pressure-temperature conditions of a geological event as part of my mapping-derived Honours thesis. But I'll stress again that this is under terrestrial conditions. If you have a glass-forming melt which is very low in water, (and other volatiles, but principally water) then the devitrification rate goes through the floor as the mobility of ions in the glass drops considerably. By the time you're down to the millimolar (IIRC - marginal internet here, as I said above) water concentrations in your magma, it's perfectly possible to have glasses persist for billions of years. Your Apollo volcanic glasses could easily be Archean or Hadean in age (Before 2.5 gigayears ago, or 4.0 Gyr respectively : I've got Gradstein & Ogg's 2013 chart taped to the wall of the office.), and still be vitreous.
Heinlein's writin
Moonbase-1 will be built on blood (boiled to a powder) and bones.
Not by a large part of a century. (Expressing it as a fraction of a century to get the magnitude of the difference across. I feel a bit wobbly and I'm not yet a half century old.)
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, while some palaver called world war two was happening in some parts of the world, astronomers were mapping the rotational velocity profile of rotating galaxies. to their surprise they found that the velocity profile did not match the distribution of luminous matter (stars), but had to incorporate a significant quantity of non-luminous ("dark") matter in addition to the luminous matter. And thus was born the mystery of the dark matter. Constraints on the properties of the dark matter have tightened, slowly, over the decades, and estimates of it's quantity have increased (at first) then stabilised at around 4 times the gravitating mass of the luminous matter (note : I'm not tying it's gravitating and inertial mass to each other - we don't know anything where the two aren't exactly equal to depressing precision, but I'm not aware of any good reasons why that is the case).
It's not a new problem. It's a much older problem than our ability to clearly image colliding galaxies.
With nukes.
But because they were on classified work, they couldn't say a thing.
Agreed on the fear of consequences. But I think you're looking at the wrong set of consequences. The most likely way this data would be used would be for the doxxed target to be observed, and when he (or she - there may be female soldiers on the list, I don't have a reliable enough connection to bother looking) goes off to the daily grind in civvy street ... a while later Mr Wil'I'am Jihaddy turns up with a Pizza Hut uniform and box and shoots the soldier's family and children dead. An then probably gets away because no-one noticed.
The fear is of having your family killed as a consequence of signing up for the military. And yes, it is intended to inflict terror on the target population (anyone in the military, or who is family to anyone in the military).
Hate them or fear them, but you've got to admit that Al Quaeda and ISIS have got some pretty effective (note : that word does not imply "nice", or anything like it) tactical planners.
And you don't.
Have you actually looked at the magnitudes of moonquakes? Apart from the sporadic ones caused by impacts, they're not powerful quakes, and they're deep below the surface, which add up to low levels of ground shaking. Which is what you are really concerned with.
The typical shaking caused by a 5.5 magnitude earthquake (on the moment-magnitude scale, since the Richter scale has been deprecated since the equipment went out of service in the 1940s and 50s) would be in the region of V - VI on the Modified Mercalli Scale :
V. Moderate Felt by nearly everyone; many awakened. Some dishes, windows broken. Unstable objects overturned. Pendulum clocks may stop.
VI. Strong Felt by all, many frightened. Some heavy furniture moved; a few instances of fallen plaster. Damage slight.
You're worrying about a pretty small hazard.
When I was a student of mantle petrology (as opposed to earning a living grubbing around in the crustal ephemera), we couldn't say "there is no chance of a kimberlite being emplaced somewhere on Earth tomorrow. And I still don't see any particular reason to make such an assertion. And to be honest, I'd like to see it happen. Even with the boulders falling from the skies, raining death and destruction across the landscape, I'd like to see it. It'd be some sight to see.
OTOH, it might be easier to make something that is sufficiently functional to take (and transmit to a server, wirelessly) the data and is cheap enough to then be disposable by dumping in the incinerator (bleach pit, or whatever technology is most convenient). For example, a sheet of cellulose-based fibres impregnated with visual prompts and orientation marks on which further marks can be placed as the medic acquires clinical information. Such a sheet can then be held against the screen (behind a sterilisable cover) of an OCR scanner to enter the data into the system.
Yes, "doctor's traditionally abysmal handwriting", but I counter with "most pharmacists have very clear handwriting". It's a training thing - teach doctors to write, while they're in college. All of them.
(Obviously, you can have a human interlocutor on the safe side of the fence to check the information has been scanned correctly ; getting the data corrected is generally easier at the point of collection than later. While that person needs some medical knowledge, they probably don't need more than nursing knowledge.)
The link is one of the references in TFA. IIRC, it was reference 3 or 4, but having downloaded, saved, opened and read the paper (abstract really), I see absolutely no reason to deny you that pleasure. Enjoy!
So ... Heinlein was writing within the accepted science of his day (no surprise there), which was that the craters of the Moon (there were no others known) were primarily a volcanic phenomenon.
In the 1960s there was a protracted dispute between various people in the geology community on determining the origin of the lunar craters. Eventually it was won by the people proposing that they were primarily impact-formed structures, and they did it largely by fieldwork on Earth examining various large terrestrial crater remnants. You may have heard of one of the proponents - one (Eu-)Gene Shoemaker.
Not detracting from Heinlein's fun storytelling, but his science was wrong. Which is an all-too-common problem when SF authors try to stay near the bleeding edge of science.
With the evidence from Apollo, and more recently from Lunar meteorites, we now know that most of the Moon's surface is composed of impact debris, with volcanic rocks in relatively restricted, dark areas known as maria.
Hmmm, you sound like someone who has actually spent a lot of time installing materials over your head, supported on ropes of uncertain anchorage, or installing the scaffolding truss work to avoid having to trust the rock which you're trying to stabilize. Or rather, you sound like someone who hasn't done exactly that.
I'm not saying that it's not do-able. But that doesn't mean to say it's "straightforward".
Actually, I'd expect the process to work more by building initial bases in smaller tunnels and tunnel sections, then using the structural strength of those buildings to anchor extensions of the walls to surround increasing volumes. Kind of like the building of a cantilever bridge, if you get my drift. A pretty long term programme.
I feel the need ... the need to tweet "Drop the bird!"
Plugh!
Does Symantec provide a solution for the problem that is Symantec? In particular, their atrocious (as I recall ... it has been a long time) uninstall programmes.
Why are you using the future tense? They've been doing this for decades in Britain.
McVeigh? Oh, you mean the freedom fighter who was murdered by the government for his attempt to start the War of Liberation of the American People from the Curse of Washington? The future will not look kindly on the people who murdered this martyr, and the supporters of that government will be first up against the wall when the Revolution comes.
It looks a bit different from the other end of the telescope, doesn't it?
Innovative? Bullshit! Dickens was doing this 150 years ago. The only significant difference was that Dickens had guarantees of the order in which his installments would be published. but he still needed to set up each story (not everyone would have got all the previous parts), continue the established story lines, and lead to a cliff-hanger for the end of the episode. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Probably means diapositive : slides.
The first online site whose interface is so horrible that I specifically check to see if links go there before refusing to click them.
The answer has been known to be about 3^361 for ... probably longer than the notation for expressing 3^361 has been known. That is approximately 10^172.24, but you need to correct for the number of board positions which are not legal. That's not going to be a simple function of board size, I suspect.
It's Go ; it's more important than mere finance.
There is a ha-ha-but-serious school of thought about Go that it's not a matter of life and death, but something much more important. You'd be harder-tested to find a room full of Go players who could meaningfully give an opinion on whether Go was more important than the heat death of the universe. I suspect that given such qualified people, you'd get an affirmative on the question.