We tend to make the assumption that an average lifespan of 30 means that nobody lives past 35 years old
We who? I doubt anyone thinks that.
To misquote someone, nobody ever lost money by underestimating the statistical ineptitude of the common man. Or something like that.
I wish it were true that nobody really thought that poorly. But I am realistic enough to recognise that there are significant numbers of people who really are that ignorant and incapable of basic maths.
We're dumping centuries worth of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
Looking back into the rock record (I used to use the rocks associated with this event as steering information to earn my bread and butter ; I work in a different part of the world this year), we've released as much CO2 in under 2 centuries as the PETM (Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) took around 6 millennia to release. Dull, boring fact - like I said, my bread and butter for over a decade.
(look at the "clathrate gun hypothesis" for an example of what could happen).
s/clathrate gun hypothesis/PETM/ (or the interface between Forties / Andrew Sand Formation and the overlying Sele and Baldur Formations (spellings vary between countries and companies).
s/could/did/
Dull boring facts, again.
Global warming deniers can bullshit all they want. Here in the oil industry we've no doubt what is happening. If our managers (not being geologists) want to lie about geology (or pay shills to lie for them), that's politics, not geology.
I suppose I'd better go and drill my hole in the ground now.
Will it have time/fuel to "duck and cover" by getting to the far side of the planet before the close approach of the comet and the potential of a cometary dust storm that could wreck it?
While this is a non-zero probability event, it is a low probability event. I doubt that the mission planners are particularly worried about it.
Maybe if there's a mission-compatible way of sequencing things that will reduce this low probability even further, at little cost (which is what Hubble did during a predicted Leonid meteor shower ; but the Hubble Deep Field South was already planned, and the only real change was when the exposures were scheduled. Which by coincidence pointed the HST away from the radiant of the meteor shower.)
Incidentally I note that the mission is being monitored by the Indian Deep Space Network. Which either operates for a few hours a day (per mission, depending on direction to the spacecraft), or indicates that India has done some significant multi-national diplomacy to get their ground stations into a number of countries.
LMGTFY. There's a Wiki page that says it's one site near Bangalore. And that mentions the use of steerable antennae to " improve[s] the visibility duration". But this site says there are a number of other tracking sites. "ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) [...] has a network of ground stations at Bangalore, Lucknow, Sriharikota, Port Blair and Thiruvananthapuram in India besides stations at Mauritius, Bearslake (Russia), Brunei and Biak (Indonesia). " So, maybe several different organisations, with overlapping missions and facilities. Like Topsy, it's probably something that "just growed".
A short-wave transciever could come in mighty handy should disaster come.
Several people each having working and mutually compatible transceivers would be much more useful. So you need to have been, in practice, drilling with your local emergency services professionals to ensure that you know how to contact them, what to report and how to triage... in short, you need to spend considerable time practising these things.
Which is why, on the vessel I'm working on today, we spend about an hour a week on safety drills involving the whole crew (on-shift and those nominally asleep ; nobody sleeps through those alarms). An hour a week ; 52 hours a year, or 6 and a half working days a year. That's the sort of commitment you need to make to be significantly useful. For a less focussed "how to be effective in a major emergency" level of preparation, you'd probably still need to devote a full weekend a year. Which is do-able ; but it's a lot more than having some particular piece of equipment and then not really knowing how to effectively use it when the shit hits the fan.
If you're going to be strict about getting the absolute best out of the budget, then spending more than a trivial sum on optics is a complete waste for most potential astronomers, regardless of age. Most of the budget will need to go on getting away from light pollution.
you could argue that is only some 50% of the target audience, but it's still 50% who you're going to need to ship dozens or hundreds of km to decent skies.
Alternatively, allocate 20 or 30% of the budget to dark sky advocacy work. You could even use a "reduce waste" slogan like "why pay to light up the bottom of the clouds?" Which raises another point, always a bugbear of astronomy, the weather.
not bore them to death trying all night to set up their mounts.
It took me about 15 minutes to polar align my first ever telescope, on it's first night after delivery. It's not rocket science, and it's not as difficult as you seem to think.
I will admit that the manual was pretty decent on this point, and I'm the sort of person who Rs T F-ing M before unpacking anything else. which isn't a normal 11-year-old's natural trait. But so what? On the first night, you set up the scope and get them hooked. First night is for seeing sights. If that works, then there will be other nights for them to learn the hobby. If the first night doesn't show enough goodies, then there won't be a second night.
Reported reserve growth is common. Changes in prices (and extraction technologies) alter the economic cut-off at which a deposit becomes an economically-exploitable reserve.
Actual growth of a reserve is much much rarer and much slower. It takes millions of years to cook a source rock and generate hydrocarbons ; it takes more millions of years for the hydrocarbons to migrate from source into a reservoir. Most ore deposits also take extended periods of time to form, with consequent slow absolute production rates.
When oil prices were rising (a joyful period - it's around 10 times the price now compared to when I entered the industry), there was a bunch of economists who'd make a lot of ill-informed comments about how the rising prices meant there was literally (not figuratively) an infinite supply of oil available. Which goes to show how delusional some economics professors can be. Some of these people really do need to go out and take a hammer to a lump of granite for an afternoon - it's both educational and therapeutic.
I read that too. As a geologist, I take such predictions with a considerable pinch of halite. I know how unsure such predictions are - it's my job to make such estimates.
You may remember some kerfuffle a few years back with several oil companies admitting to 30 to 50% decreases in their predictions of production and reserves? Within the industry, that was viewed as a perfectly reasonable admission of the inherent uncertainties of the original predictions.
I honestly doubt that other extractive industries will have better resource estimates. Particularly when you get into Rumsfeldian known-knowns, unknown-knowns and unknown-unknowns. Which is where a lot of reserve and resource predictions lay.
In addition to being illegal, [in-]effective[,] not soluble is water, and would not make hydrocarbons more mobile or more soluble. It would however, readily dissolve in hydrocarbon fluids, where it would be difficult and expensive to separate.
These are valid general objections. I'll add a genuine question from someone with 30 years experience in drilling oil wells - what the fuck would you expect it to do?
The only time I've seen carbon tetrachloride used on an oil rig (with the possible exception of in HVAC systems, which I just use but don't have to maintain or care about their details, and which might contain CCL4) is as a laboratory reagent for separating different densities of liquid hydrocarbons. Which is something you don't really need to do at the rig site (why would you want 10 different tankers or pipelines when you can just run one to the storage farm and on to the refinery after blending). Separating gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons is routinely done (strangely, in the so-called "separator" ; doh!), but just using simple physical properties ; separating out solids ("waxes") is also needed in some low-temperature fields to prevent "waxes" accumulating in pipes, tanks, etc. But again, you don't need CCl4 for that either.
I can't think of a reason to use anything more than traces of CCl4 on a drilling rig. Even for the lab uses we've replaced it with propan-2-ol or acetone.
about half a day of average power consumption in used battery storage. So, while we probably don't need that much storage it may be considered so inexpensive that we'll use it all.
Is there enough lithium in the world for that?
No, seriously? Is there enough lithium at a high enough concentration in ore minerals (e.g. spodumene, or other primary lithium sources), to make that quantity of batteries? Or would you need to depend on more esoteric accumulator cell chemistries such as the magnesium-based ones promised for the last decade or so?
That would be... the French invading the British province of Canada with assistance from some bunch of ex-convicts in 13 colonies on the east coast of the southern part of the continent?
How did that turn out? Did you get that house painted white again?
White man's immigration to America - and their genocides of the inhabitants - started well over 3 centuries ago, in large part as a colony for transportation of criminals and other undesirables. By two centuries ago the hecatomb of the native inhabitants was well under way using germs, steel and guns in approximately that order of importance. Though that's not the origin myth that your educational machines in Hollywood put out.
A bunch of relays (or pneumatic or hydraulic values for that matter) is not self-concious, and no amount of them however interconnected will become conscious, self-aware, or have feelings.
There's no reason to believe that's true.
Yet he states it as if true with the unshaking certainty that is normally associated with the raving lunatic (who has stopped taking their prescription drugs) or the religious. not that there is much perceivable difference between the tow groups.
I'm hoping my lunatic friend stops taking his medications again. When he's rational and dosed-up we both want to use his deranged ravings to found a religion and make us lots of money. Worked for Hubbard ; worked for Joe Random Swami ; worked for Sun Yun Moon ; worked for Moses ; no reason it shouldn't work for us too. You can sell the same claptrap repeatedly. just keep your sucker lists from one religion to the next.
In fact it's looking very like the Apple connection is solely intended as a viral marketing stunt. Apple vendors are piggybacking a mundane murder trial with their astroturf in order to sell more iPhones.
So, let me get this right. This story (fabrication, whatever) implies that Apple users are so fucking retarded as to do something like this, and that Apple VENDORS are using this demonstration of the retardedness of Apple USERS to sell more Apple stuff to those same Apple USERS.
Now, I've never liked Apple stuff after owning one for a couple of years. But I know that the guy who sold that Apple iWhatever to me (at a good price ; trying for a conversion!) wasn't a retard - I still work with him. So I think this story probably reflects worst on Apple salesmen. I could believe it of them.
To go against the wishes of your management in Korean culture is one tough thing to do. That lady has got (metaphorical) balls. More so than the large majority of the Koreans I've worked with (in Korea).
I wasn't aware that South Korea was involved in the Iraq debacle (either round). So their space programme might actually be bigger than their Iraq losses.
If it's in a separate form factor, then you could wear them under a motorbike helmet
Not a motor bike rider myself. On the push bike, I don't bother with a helmet because I prefer full environmental awareness (and after 40 years on a bike, I ain't dead yet), though I could conceive of mountain biking situations where I'd wear one (if I did those thinks ; unlikely, as I don't like the mess mountain bikes make of high upland soils). when ice or rock climbing, I'll wear a helmet if I consider the rockfall hazard sufficient. And when caving, I need somewhere to clip my lamp(s), so I'm always wearing one. In short, neither a helmet-Nazi, nor a helmet-phobe.
But I'd be very, very careful of mounting hard objects inside a helmet - particularly in close proximity to the skull. I've seen the blood pissing out of someone's forehead because they put a lamp-mounting clip's bolt in bass-ackwards, and it ain't a pretty sight.
That's not saying that it can't be done - just that making it detachable for moving between helmets is going to require a lot of attention. I'd start by looking at fitting it around the jaw-line and cheek roots, for example. Smash them and you may well not suffer long term effects (apart from a smashed face), but do the same damage to your brain pan and you're likely to be...
Any recent news on Schumacher? The last I heard was in mid-June and "slow progress".
I don't know that I've lost email, and my message history goes back to 2000.
I joined Yahoo for mail in about 1996, and don't recall having lost mail ever. Deleted accidentally and been unable to retrieve, yes ; lost mail on the server, no.
I have lost access due to directed spam attacks (from Creationist Muslims and hipCrime) overloading the account traffic, yes ; but mail going missing, no.
As in, one email account connected to two email addresses, one in say Russian, and the other using the latin alphabet.
And when there is no "one-to-one", "official" transliteration from one script to the other.
My wife's Russian passport transliterated her name into Latin characters in two different ways. This cause non-trivial issues when trying to get her citizenship sorted out.
So, you add TWO Latin 2equivalents to the one Russian one? Doesn't work, does it?
Slashdot Mirror
To misquote someone, nobody ever lost money by underestimating the statistical ineptitude of the common man. Or something like that.
I wish it were true that nobody really thought that poorly. But I am realistic enough to recognise that there are significant numbers of people who really are that ignorant and incapable of basic maths.
I carry 2x1TB drives around with me, and synchronise between them. No online storage for me.
Then again, with 1MBPS of public network link shared between 180 people, no online storage for anyone on this job either.
Looking back into the rock record (I used to use the rocks associated with this event as steering information to earn my bread and butter ; I work in a different part of the world this year), we've released as much CO2 in under 2 centuries as the PETM (Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) took around 6 millennia to release. Dull, boring fact - like I said, my bread and butter for over a decade.
s/clathrate gun hypothesis/PETM/ (or the interface between Forties / Andrew Sand Formation and the overlying Sele and Baldur Formations (spellings vary between countries and companies).
s/could/did/
Dull boring facts, again.
Global warming deniers can bullshit all they want. Here in the oil industry we've no doubt what is happening. If our managers (not being geologists) want to lie about geology (or pay shills to lie for them), that's politics, not geology.
I suppose I'd better go and drill my hole in the ground now.
While this is a non-zero probability event, it is a low probability event. I doubt that the mission planners are particularly worried about it.
Maybe if there's a mission-compatible way of sequencing things that will reduce this low probability even further, at little cost (which is what Hubble did during a predicted Leonid meteor shower ; but the Hubble Deep Field South was already planned, and the only real change was when the exposures were scheduled. Which by coincidence pointed the HST away from the radiant of the meteor shower.)
Incidentally I note that the mission is being monitored by the Indian Deep Space Network. Which either operates for a few hours a day (per mission, depending on direction to the spacecraft), or indicates that India has done some significant multi-national diplomacy to get their ground stations into a number of countries.
LMGTFY. There's a Wiki page that says it's one site near Bangalore. And that mentions the use of steerable antennae to " improve[s] the visibility duration". But this site says there are a number of other tracking sites. "ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) [...] has a network of ground stations at Bangalore, Lucknow, Sriharikota, Port Blair and Thiruvananthapuram in India besides stations at Mauritius, Bearslake (Russia), Brunei and Biak (Indonesia). " So, maybe several different organisations, with overlapping missions and facilities. Like Topsy, it's probably something that "just growed".
Several people each having working and mutually compatible transceivers would be much more useful. So you need to have been, in practice, drilling with your local emergency services professionals to ensure that you know how to contact them, what to report and how to triage ... in short, you need to spend considerable time practising these things.
Which is why, on the vessel I'm working on today, we spend about an hour a week on safety drills involving the whole crew (on-shift and those nominally asleep ; nobody sleeps through those alarms). An hour a week ; 52 hours a year, or 6 and a half working days a year. That's the sort of commitment you need to make to be significantly useful. For a less focussed "how to be effective in a major emergency" level of preparation, you'd probably still need to devote a full weekend a year. Which is do-able ; but it's a lot more than having some particular piece of equipment and then not really knowing how to effectively use it when the shit hits the fan.
you could argue that is only some 50% of the target audience, but it's still 50% who you're going to need to ship dozens or hundreds of km to decent skies.
Alternatively, allocate 20 or 30% of the budget to dark sky advocacy work. You could even use a "reduce waste" slogan like "why pay to light up the bottom of the clouds?" Which raises another point, always a bugbear of astronomy, the weather.
It took me about 15 minutes to polar align my first ever telescope, on it's first night after delivery. It's not rocket science, and it's not as difficult as you seem to think.
I will admit that the manual was pretty decent on this point, and I'm the sort of person who Rs T F-ing M before unpacking anything else. which isn't a normal 11-year-old's natural trait. But so what? On the first night, you set up the scope and get them hooked. First night is for seeing sights. If that works, then there will be other nights for them to learn the hobby. If the first night doesn't show enough goodies, then there won't be a second night.
Irrelevant. The BBC is not governed by American law. (Hint : look at what the first "B" stands for.)
Actual growth of a reserve is much much rarer and much slower. It takes millions of years to cook a source rock and generate hydrocarbons ; it takes more millions of years for the hydrocarbons to migrate from source into a reservoir. Most ore deposits also take extended periods of time to form, with consequent slow absolute production rates.
When oil prices were rising (a joyful period - it's around 10 times the price now compared to when I entered the industry), there was a bunch of economists who'd make a lot of ill-informed comments about how the rising prices meant there was literally (not figuratively) an infinite supply of oil available. Which goes to show how delusional some economics professors can be. Some of these people really do need to go out and take a hammer to a lump of granite for an afternoon - it's both educational and therapeutic.
You may remember some kerfuffle a few years back with several oil companies admitting to 30 to 50% decreases in their predictions of production and reserves? Within the industry, that was viewed as a perfectly reasonable admission of the inherent uncertainties of the original predictions.
I honestly doubt that other extractive industries will have better resource estimates. Particularly when you get into Rumsfeldian known-knowns, unknown-knowns and unknown-unknowns. Which is where a lot of reserve and resource predictions lay.
If that's really your attitude then you must be some sort of right-wing tax-avoiding nut job.
American? That would explain it!
These are valid general objections. I'll add a genuine question from someone with 30 years experience in drilling oil wells - what the fuck would you expect it to do?
The only time I've seen carbon tetrachloride used on an oil rig (with the possible exception of in HVAC systems, which I just use but don't have to maintain or care about their details, and which might contain CCL4) is as a laboratory reagent for separating different densities of liquid hydrocarbons. Which is something you don't really need to do at the rig site (why would you want 10 different tankers or pipelines when you can just run one to the storage farm and on to the refinery after blending). Separating gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons is routinely done (strangely, in the so-called "separator" ; doh!), but just using simple physical properties ; separating out solids ("waxes") is also needed in some low-temperature fields to prevent "waxes" accumulating in pipes, tanks, etc. But again, you don't need CCl4 for that either.
I can't think of a reason to use anything more than traces of CCl4 on a drilling rig. Even for the lab uses we've replaced it with propan-2-ol or acetone.
Is there enough lithium in the world for that?
No, seriously? Is there enough lithium at a high enough concentration in ore minerals (e.g. spodumene, or other primary lithium sources), to make that quantity of batteries? Or would you need to depend on more esoteric accumulator cell chemistries such as the magnesium-based ones promised for the last decade or so?
How did that turn out? Did you get that house painted white again?
White man's immigration to America - and their genocides of the inhabitants - started well over 3 centuries ago, in large part as a colony for transportation of criminals and other undesirables. By two centuries ago the hecatomb of the native inhabitants was well under way using germs, steel and guns in approximately that order of importance. Though that's not the origin myth that your educational machines in Hollywood put out.
Yet he states it as if true with the unshaking certainty that is normally associated with the raving lunatic (who has stopped taking their prescription drugs) or the religious. not that there is much perceivable difference between the tow groups.
I'm hoping my lunatic friend stops taking his medications again. When he's rational and dosed-up we both want to use his deranged ravings to found a religion and make us lots of money. Worked for Hubbard ; worked for Joe Random Swami ; worked for Sun Yun Moon ; worked for Moses ; no reason it shouldn't work for us too. You can sell the same claptrap repeatedly. just keep your sucker lists from one religion to the next.
FTFY
So, let me get this right. This story (fabrication, whatever) implies that Apple users are so fucking retarded as to do something like this, and that Apple VENDORS are using this demonstration of the retardedness of Apple USERS to sell more Apple stuff to those same Apple USERS.
Now, I've never liked Apple stuff after owning one for a couple of years. But I know that the guy who sold that Apple iWhatever to me (at a good price ; trying for a conversion!) wasn't a retard - I still work with him. So I think this story probably reflects worst on Apple salesmen. I could believe it of them.
To go against the wishes of your management in Korean culture is one tough thing to do. That lady has got (metaphorical) balls. More so than the large majority of the Koreans I've worked with (in Korea).
I wasn't aware that South Korea was involved in the Iraq debacle (either round). So their space programme might actually be bigger than their Iraq losses.
Not a motor bike rider myself. On the push bike, I don't bother with a helmet because I prefer full environmental awareness (and after 40 years on a bike, I ain't dead yet), though I could conceive of mountain biking situations where I'd wear one (if I did those thinks ; unlikely, as I don't like the mess mountain bikes make of high upland soils). when ice or rock climbing, I'll wear a helmet if I consider the rockfall hazard sufficient. And when caving, I need somewhere to clip my lamp(s), so I'm always wearing one. In short, neither a helmet-Nazi, nor a helmet-phobe.
But I'd be very, very careful of mounting hard objects inside a helmet - particularly in close proximity to the skull. I've seen the blood pissing out of someone's forehead because they put a lamp-mounting clip's bolt in bass-ackwards, and it ain't a pretty sight.
That's not saying that it can't be done - just that making it detachable for moving between helmets is going to require a lot of attention. I'd start by looking at fitting it around the jaw-line and cheek roots, for example. Smash them and you may well not suffer long term effects (apart from a smashed face), but do the same damage to your brain pan and you're likely to be ...
Any recent news on Schumacher? The last I heard was in mid-June and "slow progress".
Someone who puts a network cable into it.
No, I'm not going to give the fridge a password into my wifi. Why should I? And I'm certainly not going to pay for a cellphone service for it.
I joined Yahoo for mail in about 1996, and don't recall having lost mail ever. Deleted accidentally and been unable to retrieve, yes ; lost mail on the server, no.
I have lost access due to directed spam attacks (from Creationist Muslims and hipCrime) overloading the account traffic, yes ; but mail going missing, no.
If you happen to have a Windoze CD and appropriate license. Neither of which I have.
No, actually ... I've got a legit Win2k CD and license somewhere. And about 6 out of the dozen or so Win3.11 floppies. got a floppy drive?
Sorry, got a sticky shift key ; "equivalents"
And when there is no "one-to-one", "official" transliteration from one script to the other.
My wife's Russian passport transliterated her name into Latin characters in two different ways. This cause non-trivial issues when trying to get her citizenship sorted out.
So, you add TWO Latin 2equivalents to the one Russian one? Doesn't work, does it?