I think that "tautology" doesn't mean what you think it means. Your three part list doesn't seem in the least tautologous to me, for example, because it doesn't even cover a continuum, let alone all possible cases in a continuum. What is your attitude to things that you cannot change, but someone else can (say, that girl who completely ignores you, no matter what you do to gain her attention ; you can't change that, but she can)? Or the things that you cannot change, and no-one else can (you're not going to get a suntan from Sirius A). Are you going to change the voting system in your country to one-man, one vote (with you being the one man, and you having the one vote)?
DEFINE your terms, if you're not really, really really sure that they're generally understood.
What is a "hipster" ; I see the word used about every couple of months, and I've always taken it to refer to a low slung type of jeans, though whether they're on men, women, or androgynes has never been clear. And so what a "hipster effect" I guess would be what we call "builders cleavage". In America, it may be called "butt cleavage" - I heard the term occasionally back in the 1980s.
Crazy apocalyptic Xtian? And you think that is incredible? America is pretty much the world source of supply for that bunch of nut-jobs.
OK - the Philippines produce some too, nailing themselves to crosses and that sort of stunt - but they're an American partly-devolved colony, which may be their excuse.
it seems to imply there was / is 'secondary' or 'auxilliary' wiring.
There was. It wasn't at all uncommon to have things like door bells (and servant's bells - I've excavated the wiring from the walls in the former servant's level) to be powered from a battery system.
Also, with the analogue telephone system, that has a low DC voltage on it, from batteries/ UPS in the exchange. So that was another powered wiring system in some houses. Actually, you should still be able to run a ringer off the telephone line, and dial out using connect-disconnect pulses on the line. I used to be able to dial with the handset hook only, but haven't practised it for years.
I don't think that they've got sufficiently fast lenses to capture transient atmospheric events like this.
Likely the evidence comes from radio observation of the echoes from the impacts i nthe upper atmosphere. That's a popular rate measure on Earth too, because it doesn't depend on (absence of) sunlight, cloud cover, etc.
You sound appropriately sceptical of terraforming Mars. Very appropriately. To increase the mass of Mars sufficiently to generate enough magnetic field to protect the atmosphere from solar wind stripping, you'd need to double it at least. Adding every asteroid in the asteroid belt will get you about 1% of the way there. Adding Pluto and Charon would get you another couple of percent of the way there. You're going to have to strip the Solar System of asteroids, minor planets and many satellites to get the mass there.
Then you need to add in the volatiles that you need to make an atmosphere... oh no, you've already added them already, because you've stripped the Solar System of everything that's not at the bottom of a gravitational hole. (On which consideration, you may have to count the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn as being too deep in their gravitational wells to extract. More material problems.)
But let's say that : you terraform Mars as best as possible, with the available material. Wait a couple of million years to let the impact debris solidify. What, you want to do this in a millennium or ten, because we're shitting in our own environment? Oh, sorry, but you're going to have to deal with your environmental crises on your own planet while we build a new one for you.
Wait, what was the reason for the terrraforming in the first place?
It just doesn't work, to me.
My next objection was to be that once you've got your planet terraformed, and the population moved, the atmosphere is still going to decay. So you then need to replace atmosphere with the population still on-planet. Good luck with that one! But I think the project is dead already, before getting to that point.
Your drunk driver scenario would depend on the driver crashing into a local distribution box, where the teleco's network backbone gets multiplexed into copper pairs for the "last mile". Most of the time, taking out a telegraph pole with a cable on it wouldn't take out the associated distribution box if it has a feed from another distribution box. Whether they're arranged in a star network, or a mesh is probably a local choice, but a relatively small amount of cross-linking greatly improves fault tolerance.
Of course, if the drunk driver takes out your "last mile" of copper, then your line is fucked, and possibly a couple of your neighbours. But not many more. However, even then, in dense areas (where most drunk drivers and consumers are, there's also a good chance of a sufficiently good mobile phone signal to work with, and you should be able to pass the costs back to the landline company for the loss of service. Who'll then pass it onto the driver's insurance company. And insurance rates go up again - oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
You really do seem to be courting a libel case. That's fine : your choice, your consequences.
If you really want to continue to expose your not-even-sophomore understanding of statistics in public, that's your choice too.
To answer one of your earlier slights, I do get paid to write things, but not on the Internet. I spent several hours today writing a report on an oil well I drilled, and had to pass through West African airports in the process of the drilling. It is very likely that the current Ebola outbreak is a lot more personal to me than it is to you. That and you insulting attitude to people who are actually trying to do something about the problem is why I weighed-in and I get no reward for this but to enjoy watching you dig your hole deeper.
Belt and braces (suspenders if you're American, or female, or just plain kinky) are definitely the way to go. And that is on a boat where you should have 30 other pieces of cordage within reach even if you're having a dump.
People think I'm weird because I wear a belt strong enough to pull a mini-bus out of a ditch. Except, of course, for the people who were having to help me, with other belts, rucksack straps etc to pull said mini-bus out of the ditch.
TFP discusses how they actually assessed the lethality of the challenge dose of virus used. I've already forgotten the details - no need to file that in long term memory, that's what papers are for. But definitely they did devote a half-page or so to discussing that.
Otherwise - yes, using experimental animals is complex, and the complexity and difficulty doesn't seem to decrease. And the cost doesn't go down either.
I would advise you to go back to your course components on non-parametric and Baysean statistics.
Because a study isn't ideal (and I am not saying that small studies like this are ideal) does not mean that they are devoid of useful information. If you don't understand statistics well enough to use that information, then that's fine. But your incomprehension does not give you the right to go around accusing other people of fraud in a public place.
Is the internet growing / reproducing using material which it has metabolised itself from non-life sources? Does some inorganic algorithm called "Cisco Corp" autonomously instruct some hydraulic jack in a Chinese rare-earth mineral mine to scoop up ore into a bucket labelled "for Internet", and then dispatch it for processing.
While the internet portrays many fascinating behaviours, including it's influence of living organisms, I don't think you can call it alive until it, itself, controls it's own metabolism. For the present, and probably for the foreseeable future, that is commanded by human beings who use the internet it is true. But does that make the seawater that certain primates use to wash the dirt off their food alive as well? It's just a tool that is being used. (I'll cede the possibility, but I don't see the reality at the moment.
People have been stabbing at that particular log in the fire for decades. There is no generally accepted definition. People who are crucially concerned with the question (e.g. Origin of Life researchers - real ones not delusional Creationist) don't see it as being a pressing problem, but do have intermittent bouts of "whack-a-definition", with typically several dozen contenders coming to the table, and most of them leaving with some bruises, but no killer blows.
What we really need is a second group of organisms that are generally accepted as "alive", but significantly different to the DNA-RNA-protein system that is currently most well understood. Even a Frankenstein cackling in Hollywood-ese that "It's ALIVE!!!!!" over some misbegotten sludge in a test tube would be illuminating, if it didn't contain life as we know it.
'Bones' was classically cautious : "life, but not as we know it".
I wonder what they get in the 4 to 10 light-year range.
They access about (1/100)^3 volume of space, and therefore to about 1/1000000 (one millionth) of the number of protoplanetary discs to examine.
The closest protoplanetary disc I can think of is around Beta Pictoris, at 63 light years. So in the 10 l.y. range, I'd expect there to be (1/6)^3 other protoplanetary discs - less than one two-hundredth more systems.
There's a reason for looking at objects hundreds of light years away - there aren't any (or many) examples closer.
TFA suggests that this is a unique image from a new telescope.
We've been seeing things like protoplanetary discs since the late 1980s (Beta Pictoris, IIRC, I haven't checked it). A decade later we were seeing the protoplanetary discs distinctly from their stars. Now we're seeing multiple gaps within the discs, which allows us to do (or infer) certain Keplerian relationships about those systems.
New instruments lead to higher resolution both by direct observation and by interferometric combination of new and old instruments. And our understanding of these structures and events doesn't start from scratch, but builds on pre-existing observations and models (e.g. the Keplerian relationships I mentioned above, which are based on observations in our own stellar system).
Spotting a planetary disc is probably being pretty optimistic at that range. However spotting planetary events - e.g. a major asteroid impact, or the ejection of an intermediate-size body through the interaction of two others - may be more likely.
Actually, the near-circularity of the cleared areas suggests that there aren't any close interactions in the near future or recent (millions of orbits) past.
For certain values of "next" and "happens". As a geologist, I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that it takes in the order of 50 million years to turn a collapsing gas cloud into a star and a suite of planets. But if you translate that into events that we could observe at this range (e.g. analogues of the giant impacts suspected responsible for the Earth-Moon and Pluto-Charon systems and the axial tilts of Uranus and Venus), you're still looking at one ten-millionth of a chance of seeing such an event in a solid year of observation.
Which is why astronomers have to go looking for lots of comparable examples of a class of events, in order to try to assemble a time-series of snapshots of events. Actually capturing an event is comparatively rare. For example, no-one saw the most recent (known) supernova in our galaxy, in about 1868, because it was behind too much dust. And actually demonstrating that this radio source was an SNR, and it's date, too 20+years of data gathering.
Brief examination of this artists impression is that the science image has been distorted and placed onto a background image - possibly a stock one - of a bright star in a star field.
Even my limited image-editing skills could knock this together in a matter of minutes.
To go back to your original question, I wouldn't be surprised if NASA's press offices have enough work passing through that they do have either a number of full-time graphics artists who work on this sort of thing (for different offices), or they make appropriate skills a requirement for their press officers.
Many projects will have the skills in-house to produce their own graphics, before passing stuff up to the PR department. The same happens in the process of submitting to conventional publications too, who often want cover images, images for editorial content etc too.
Then you chain your bike into a cluster of shopping carts stuck around one of the anti-ram-raid pillars and when the management complain ask them to put the bike racks a bit closer to the doors. Possibly even as part of the anti-ram-raid equipment. And if they still don't like it, go in, do your shopping, then leave it at the checkout, unpaid for, saying that you think it is too far to carry out to your so-distant bike.
It takes time, years, but eventually they get the message.
2) We don't all have the luxury of coming to work smelling like someone who just took a 20-30K bike ride....
Most work places that I've used in the last couple of decades have had at least some shower facilities. Not that it ever worried me, though my cycle into work varied between 3 and 8km (to the office) or 3-500km helicopter ride (to the worksite). Believe me, after 5 hours farting into a water and gas tight plastic bag, you don't exactly come out smelling of roses, and everyone was in one of those bags.
The last time that we were getting significant power outages (as opposed to occasional glitches from lightning, people driving into power lines, ice bringing lines down... and the system taking a couple of cycles to switch in alternative circuits from the regional/ national/ transnational grid) was during miners strikes in the 1970s. Then, the power was going out for hours at a stretch. But even then, the power available was switched between industrial users at some times, and domestic users at other times. Sometimes domestic users would get power on for a couple of hours, off for a couple of hours.
If things get as far as 24-hour outages, then you probably can't rely on the power coming back on in the foreseeable future. For a start, much of people's domestic stocks of food will deteriorate, and you're very rapidly eating into the 3 meal gap between civilisation and barbarism.
Slashdot Mirror
s/coffee shop/private home/
I think that "tautology" doesn't mean what you think it means. Your three part list doesn't seem in the least tautologous to me, for example, because it doesn't even cover a continuum, let alone all possible cases in a continuum. What is your attitude to things that you cannot change, but someone else can (say, that girl who completely ignores you, no matter what you do to gain her attention ; you can't change that, but she can)? Or the things that you cannot change, and no-one else can (you're not going to get a suntan from Sirius A). Are you going to change the voting system in your country to one-man, one vote (with you being the one man, and you having the one vote)?
What is a "hipster" ; I see the word used about every couple of months, and I've always taken it to refer to a low slung type of jeans, though whether they're on men, women, or androgynes has never been clear. And so what a "hipster effect" I guess would be what we call "builders cleavage". In America, it may be called "butt cleavage" - I heard the term occasionally back in the 1980s.
OK - the Philippines produce some too, nailing themselves to crosses and that sort of stunt - but they're an American partly-devolved colony, which may be their excuse.
There was. It wasn't at all uncommon to have things like door bells (and servant's bells - I've excavated the wiring from the walls in the former servant's level) to be powered from a battery system.
Also, with the analogue telephone system, that has a low DC voltage on it, from batteries/ UPS in the exchange. So that was another powered wiring system in some houses. Actually, you should still be able to run a ringer off the telephone line, and dial out using connect-disconnect pulses on the line. I used to be able to dial with the handset hook only, but haven't practised it for years.
Likely the evidence comes from radio observation of the echoes from the impacts i nthe upper atmosphere. That's a popular rate measure on Earth too, because it doesn't depend on (absence of) sunlight, cloud cover, etc.
Then you need to add in the volatiles that you need to make an atmosphere ... oh no, you've already added them already, because you've stripped the Solar System of everything that's not at the bottom of a gravitational hole. (On which consideration, you may have to count the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn as being too deep in their gravitational wells to extract. More material problems.)
But let's say that : you terraform Mars as best as possible, with the available material. Wait a couple of million years to let the impact debris solidify. What, you want to do this in a millennium or ten, because we're shitting in our own environment? Oh, sorry, but you're going to have to deal with your environmental crises on your own planet while we build a new one for you.
Wait, what was the reason for the terrraforming in the first place?
It just doesn't work, to me.
My next objection was to be that once you've got your planet terraformed, and the population moved, the atmosphere is still going to decay. So you then need to replace atmosphere with the population still on-planet. Good luck with that one! But I think the project is dead already, before getting to that point.
Of course, if the drunk driver takes out your "last mile" of copper, then your line is fucked, and possibly a couple of your neighbours. But not many more. However, even then, in dense areas (where most drunk drivers and consumers are, there's also a good chance of a sufficiently good mobile phone signal to work with, and you should be able to pass the costs back to the landline company for the loss of service. Who'll then pass it onto the driver's insurance company. And insurance rates go up again - oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
Interesting, thanks. May consider my first Bitcoin transaction.
If you really want to continue to expose your not-even-sophomore understanding of statistics in public, that's your choice too.
To answer one of your earlier slights, I do get paid to write things, but not on the Internet. I spent several hours today writing a report on an oil well I drilled, and had to pass through West African airports in the process of the drilling. It is very likely that the current Ebola outbreak is a lot more personal to me than it is to you. That and you insulting attitude to people who are actually trying to do something about the problem is why I weighed-in and I get no reward for this but to enjoy watching you dig your hole deeper.
Sir, you're a prick.
I do. several layers of it, if I can't manage several hundreds of miles range.
People think I'm weird because I wear a belt strong enough to pull a mini-bus out of a ditch. Except, of course, for the people who were having to help me, with other belts, rucksack straps etc to pull said mini-bus out of the ditch.
Otherwise - yes, using experimental animals is complex, and the complexity and difficulty doesn't seem to decrease. And the cost doesn't go down either.
Because a study isn't ideal (and I am not saying that small studies like this are ideal) does not mean that they are devoid of useful information. If you don't understand statistics well enough to use that information, then that's fine. But your incomprehension does not give you the right to go around accusing other people of fraud in a public place.
While the internet portrays many fascinating behaviours, including it's influence of living organisms, I don't think you can call it alive until it, itself, controls it's own metabolism. For the present, and probably for the foreseeable future, that is commanded by human beings who use the internet it is true. But does that make the seawater that certain primates use to wash the dirt off their food alive as well? It's just a tool that is being used. (I'll cede the possibility, but I don't see the reality at the moment.
What we really need is a second group of organisms that are generally accepted as "alive", but significantly different to the DNA-RNA-protein system that is currently most well understood. Even a Frankenstein cackling in Hollywood-ese that "It's ALIVE!!!!!" over some misbegotten sludge in a test tube would be illuminating, if it didn't contain life as we know it.
'Bones' was classically cautious : "life, but not as we know it".
Perhaps they may wish to apply to the Disco.Ins.tit who are a bunch of Creationists. They like throwing money at worthless projects.
They access about (1/100)^3 volume of space, and therefore to about 1/1000000 (one millionth) of the number of protoplanetary discs to examine.
The closest protoplanetary disc I can think of is around Beta Pictoris, at 63 light years. So in the 10 l.y. range, I'd expect there to be (1/6)^3 other protoplanetary discs - less than one two-hundredth more systems.
There's a reason for looking at objects hundreds of light years away - there aren't any (or many) examples closer.
We've been seeing things like protoplanetary discs since the late 1980s (Beta Pictoris, IIRC, I haven't checked it). A decade later we were seeing the protoplanetary discs distinctly from their stars. Now we're seeing multiple gaps within the discs, which allows us to do (or infer) certain Keplerian relationships about those systems.
New instruments lead to higher resolution both by direct observation and by interferometric combination of new and old instruments. And our understanding of these structures and events doesn't start from scratch, but builds on pre-existing observations and models (e.g. the Keplerian relationships I mentioned above, which are based on observations in our own stellar system).
Actually, the near-circularity of the cleared areas suggests that there aren't any close interactions in the near future or recent (millions of orbits) past.
For certain values of "next" and "happens". As a geologist, I'm perfectly comfortable with the idea that it takes in the order of 50 million years to turn a collapsing gas cloud into a star and a suite of planets. But if you translate that into events that we could observe at this range (e.g. analogues of the giant impacts suspected responsible for the Earth-Moon and Pluto-Charon systems and the axial tilts of Uranus and Venus), you're still looking at one ten-millionth of a chance of seeing such an event in a solid year of observation.
Which is why astronomers have to go looking for lots of comparable examples of a class of events, in order to try to assemble a time-series of snapshots of events. Actually capturing an event is comparatively rare. For example, no-one saw the most recent (known) supernova in our galaxy, in about 1868, because it was behind too much dust. And actually demonstrating that this radio source was an SNR, and it's date, too 20+years of data gathering.
Even my limited image-editing skills could knock this together in a matter of minutes.
To go back to your original question, I wouldn't be surprised if NASA's press offices have enough work passing through that they do have either a number of full-time graphics artists who work on this sort of thing (for different offices), or they make appropriate skills a requirement for their press officers.
Many projects will have the skills in-house to produce their own graphics, before passing stuff up to the PR department. The same happens in the process of submitting to conventional publications too, who often want cover images, images for editorial content etc too.
It takes time, years, but eventually they get the message.
Most work places that I've used in the last couple of decades have had at least some shower facilities. Not that it ever worried me, though my cycle into work varied between 3 and 8km (to the office) or 3-500km helicopter ride (to the worksite). Believe me, after 5 hours farting into a water and gas tight plastic bag, you don't exactly come out smelling of roses, and everyone was in one of those bags.
The last time that we were getting significant power outages (as opposed to occasional glitches from lightning, people driving into power lines, ice bringing lines down ... and the system taking a couple of cycles to switch in alternative circuits from the regional/ national/ transnational grid) was during miners strikes in the 1970s. Then, the power was going out for hours at a stretch. But even then, the power available was switched between industrial users at some times, and domestic users at other times. Sometimes domestic users would get power on for a couple of hours, off for a couple of hours.
If things get as far as 24-hour outages, then you probably can't rely on the power coming back on in the foreseeable future. For a start, much of people's domestic stocks of food will deteriorate, and you're very rapidly eating into the 3 meal gap between civilisation and barbarism.