You were charged with a crime but did your time and are back in society? Sure, let's forget about it and let you get back to being a member of society. (Otherwise we might as well just brand criminals on the forehead)
I don't know about your country, but this one (the UK) has had laws like that since... I honestly don't know when - since before I started to learn the laws of the country. For most offences, after a certain period of time your conviction is "spent" and you're not required to tell any one about the conviction. For some convictions, the sentencing judge (or sheriff) may vary the time for the conviction to be spent, within various sentencing guidelines.
Branding people on the forehead has been shown to be ineffective at returning them to being productive members of society. Therefore, other members of society end up paying for their upkeep - probably to the profit of corporations (e.g. the incompetent Group 4) who run prisons and who therefore have an active interest in increasing prison populations and preventing rehabilitation of offenders. So, if you're looking for who promotes policies to prevent effective rehabilitation, just follow the money.
Another version of the same story (also ascribed to Edison in some versions) was that Faraday replied that he didn't know how, but soon Peel would be taxing electricity.
It's possible that an organism might resemble the hexagonal parts of a buckyball but not the pentagonal parts if the pentagonal parts are uneven or convex.
I can't work out how you can have the hexagonal faces of a buckyball without having the pentagonal faces, since the edges that define the hexagonal faces also define the pentagonal faces. I'm not sure that what you're describing is possible or if you're trying to describe a 5-cornered square.
Although this [kameleon.ba] looks just like a normal icosahedron.
That is, as you say, a normal icosahedron. For a natural product, it's a good approximation to the Platonic solid. There's nothing that I can think of that would fundamentally prevent a virus from forming it's coat proteins into a buckyball configuration of comparable, though it also wouldn't surprise me if I found that all viruses which had regular coats (I don't know if that's normal or even always the case?) composed of triangles - for reasons of strength of face versus edge components making triangles more stable than squares or higher-order polygons. Do you have some reason to believe that a buckyball coat form would be unstable? Or, for that matter, particularly stable?
As you say, generally the problem is not boiling water, but cooking food. And because of the reduced atmospheric pressure at those altitudes, when you do get your water to boil, the temperature is so low that it takes forever to cook - including things like re-hydrating noodles.
The first time I heard of this problem being successfully addressed was the 1975 Everest SW Face expedition. they took pressure cookers (literally an off-the-shelf product) up to at least the Western Cwm, if not higher.
Sure, improving the efficiency of heat transfer from flame to pan would also help. But using a pressure cooker has an effective track record.
I'm not aware of anyone who still worships or believes in the Roman (or Greek) gods.
However, at the time that they were given these names - in the millennium or so BCE - essentially everyone in the (known, then) world followed those gods and their cognates, and the names of the gods were assigned to "wandering lights in the sky" (that's what the Greek root of "planet" means) appropriate to the personality of the gods (fast-moving Mercury, the messenger ; blood-coloured Mars, the god of war...), and in a very real sense, those planets were thought to be those gods, while also accepting that the gods "lived" on Mt Olympus. Note also that the Greeks, Romans and Babylonians didn't get overly concerned with names. If you came into contact with a culture that had a war god, and you had a war god, then evidently you were talking about the same god, even if you used different names and rituals. So, meh - we're all following essentially the same religion. If one author of a star catalogue (Hipparchos, or Ptolmey) used one name for a planet, or a constellation, then that was done in piety, not in blasphemy. Even if they used a different name than you did locally, it didn't make them wrong.
Anyway, the IAU don't want to get involved in this sort of mud-slinging match. So, if they find (or have pointed out to them) a religious association to the name you propose, into the trash can goes that proposal. They're the rules ; play by them or go and play a different game. It's not a democracy, and you don't get to make the rules unless you manage to get yourself elected to the IAU council and persuade the rest of the council. Which is going to take several decades.
Who is this "we" who are reasonably sure that Mars is barren? It sure doesn't include me. OK, I'm not a specialist biologist emphasising study of the 5 points which we've measured on Mars (and found lacking in life forms which we recognise, I'll grant), but I am a geologist with a better than normal understanding of the variability of rocks and the habitats that they represent to life forms. People I was at university with have worked on (and published) on some very peculiar terrestrial organisms from deep oil wells, and that represents just a few percent of the potentially habitable volume of this planet. And remember : so far we're only looking for life forms that have metabolisms and physiologies which function broadly similarly to ours.
If we had (say) 10 independent OOL (Origin Of Life) events (say, in different stellar systems), and in our couple of decades of experimentation Mars didn't have a trace of any of those systems, then I might agree that a few decades of searching would be sufficient. But since we still really have NO IDEA what the actual range of effective solutions to the questions of metabolism and physiology are, for this initial case I'd vote strongly in favour of waiting for a generation or ten. Say, until we've got a plan to decontaminate the planet which is as achievable (in the next ten human generations) as terraforming the planet.
(Though I'm a fan of SF, when I'm talking about terraforming Mars, I'm talking about a real plan, not a hand-wavey SF-quality plan. For example, it would be nice to know where you plan to get the 4*10^18kg (approx) of water that you'd need to put a 100m of water onto 30% of the surface (assuming you want some sort of vaguely terrestrial climate, and you're going to use a significant amount of water for things like agriculture). More to the point, how are you going to get to that level of space-faring expertise without concluding that living in asteroid belts is just plain easier than terraforming even quite terrestrial planets like Mars? Build the environment that you want, rather than having to tear down an existing environment and then build the environment that you want.)
You're conflating "phone" and "smartphone". They are different things.
People can phone me and send well-crafted packets as much as they want, but they won't be able to turn on my phone's WiFi, accelerometer or GPS because the hardware doesn't exist. And I can answer work emails any time that I want to - by going home and logging into my computer and thence into the mail server. Which suits me fine - I don't want to answer work-email when I'm on leave.
We've already reached the breakeven point where a suicide bomber can kill more people standing in the incoming security line of the airport than he'd kill bringing down a plane
Was there ever a time when that wasn't the case? Typical numbers queuing at my local airport (where I start or end intercontinental, but thankfully not American, flights on a monthly basis) are around a hundred, and the maximum size plane they can service is about 150~170. Since not all planes run full, it's probably always been more efficient to trigger the bomb when approaching the X-ray machines. (BTW, I think the radiation shielding in the X-ray machines will likely double up as blast containment. That's how I'd design one, anyway.)
Thinking to larger airports... yeah, easily a plane load of people in most scanning areas, except at 3 in the morning. I seriously suspect that the security check has always been a viable detonation point. The only thing doing the plane adds is visceral terror of surviving the bomb to experience the free fall. Briefly.
That's a construction that different countries (specifically EN_GB and EN_US) disagree upon. Notably, most EN_GB users disagree with one of the prime reference sources (Johnson, Sam) about which is correct.
Your sources who think that "wence" is an accepted spelling of "whence" are?
All of those questions are definitely on the table.
After the Human Genome was published, I wondered why the fuck Craig Venter went off on his boat to do shotgun PCR on random buckets of seawater. Though this work isn't directly related to that, it's marking Venter's decision to forgo the complexities of culturing organisms as being a truly inspired insight. (And I'm not even a biologist! I deal with dead things and I can see the importance of this choice.)
If life started with a giant virus, and viruses reproduce by infecting living creatures... wence life?
"Whence." Your spelling checker needs switching on.
That is one of the discussions elaborated in TFA : did viruses initially need life forms to replicate on? Or did they force the development of modern life forms. Or... was there an earlier form of organism, distinctly different from modern cells (post-3.5Ga ago) and modern viruses (also post-3.5Ga ago) which held an intermediate position between modern cells and modern viruses?
One interpretation (NOT undisputed) is that giant mimiviruses could fill that position, and have genes old enough for the hypothesised split.
There doesn't appear to be a consensus. Which is normal for cutting-edge research.
the sort of spectacular, over-the-top attraction Dubai is known for.
Carefully chosen words. It's not insane to conceive of future humans deliberately tracking the Voyagers down. Then selling them on eBay. It's not very likely, but it's not impossible.
the sort of spectacular, over-the-top attraction Dubai is known for.
"Spectacular", yes. "Over-the-top", certainly.
"Attraction?"
It's in fucking Dubai. That in itself makes it as attractive as a dose of syphilis.
(OK,I'll admit to having had to work in that area - there are a few nice people in the working classes, but most of the locals and ex-pats are a bunch of bastards.)
The yellowstone caldera - that thing is the nation killer, possibly world-killer if it ever goes up.
It's not "if it ever goes up" ; it's "when it goes up AGAIN" ; there have been 4 or 5 major eruptions of Yellowstone in the last couple of millions of years.
"World-killer"? Evidently not. Nation-killer? Possibly. Very destructive, when it next goes off? Certainly.
Do you think they're al going to be set off at once?
If they did that, how would they know if they're listening to a delayed echo from shot point #7, indicating a magma chamber at 17km depth, or a differently-delayed echo from shot point #13, indicating a magma chamber at 27km depth, or a differently-delayed echo from shot point #4, indicating a magma chamber at 7km depth, or a differently-delayed echo from shot point #2, indicating a magma chamber at 2km depth,...
It gets repetitive, doesn't it? That's why deconvolving seismic data is, and always has been, a major consumer of computing resources.
Watch some video of a seismic array being shot. They (well, "we" - I do some seismic-while-drilling work, though I don't claim to be an expert) fire one gun at a time, then listen for an appropriate number of seconds (the "two-way time" to collect the echoes. Then they fire the next gun in the array (or wait for the gun to re-charge, if there's only one gun), and listen for the echoes... it gets repetitive. With every shot (hundreds of thousands in a survey) recorded up to kilohertz for each of up to thousands of hydrophones, each one of which has it's GPS position recorded at all times in the recording phase (because where things are matters)... you rapidly climb through the tens of terabytes of data.
There are intermittent efforts to develop various mineral resources in that area. But the details in the press are limited. What I can see is compatible with anything between literally tearing a mountainside apart and turning it into dust to driving an adit into the hillside and following a vein. That's a large variety of different mining techniques.
The people of the area have procedures for assessing environmental damage likelihood, and for balancing the likely effects of employment in a mining operation versus the (possible / probable) loss of tourism income. I'll let them argue that question.
Meanwhile, at the weekend I'm thinking of going up a very nice mountain which I know, but where there is ongoing disagreement between the locals (who want to develop a gold mine and have jobs to keep the young men in the area) and the regional capital (who want to keep the hillside pretty for tourism). And as both a geologist (interested in the minerals) and a mountaineer (who loves the whole area), I'm going to keep my mouth shut and my ears open.
As I say up-thread, the important issue is the length of fracture that you can create with your explosion, and whether that penetrates far enough into the volcano (cylinder) to increase the stress level in the remaining material to the point at which the fracture will continue to propagate after the fracture initiating event (explosion).
Understanding fracture propagation is a pretty basic part of materials science, and (probably) fundamental to many courses in mechanical engineering. (I'm a geologist, and we covered it un structural geology. But mechanical engineers of my acquaintance when I was a student studied the same material at a different part of their course. They also did a bit of geology - you need a bit to understand what you're building foundations in/ on.)
Incidentally, I've seen a charged compressed air cylinder fall 10m and land on rough boulders. With about 250bar of air inside, we leapt for shelter, expecting it to go off like a bomb, but it didn't. So, somewhat gingerly, the person who dropped it came down the rope and carried on "Sherpa-ing" it into the cave where the diver was going to use it. We gave the a hydraulic test the next day, and it passed, but with that dent in it, it was never going to pass a visual inspection, so it was relegated to the back of the club's air bank.
I don't recommend treating cylinders like that, but they're not as delicate as you'd think. Well, not the steel ones ; I don't know anyone who uses aluminium tanks.
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I don't know about your country, but this one (the UK) has had laws like that since ... I honestly don't know when - since before I started to learn the laws of the country. For most offences, after a certain period of time your conviction is "spent" and you're not required to tell any one about the conviction. For some convictions, the sentencing judge (or sheriff) may vary the time for the conviction to be spent, within various sentencing guidelines.
Branding people on the forehead has been shown to be ineffective at returning them to being productive members of society. Therefore, other members of society end up paying for their upkeep - probably to the profit of corporations (e.g. the incompetent Group 4) who run prisons and who therefore have an active interest in increasing prison populations and preventing rehabilitation of offenders. So, if you're looking for who promotes policies to prevent effective rehabilitation, just follow the money.
Another version of the same story (also ascribed to Edison in some versions) was that Faraday replied that he didn't know how, but soon Peel would be taxing electricity.
And he preferred his babies fricasseed, not barbecued.
Didn't they all (or mostly) move to Israel in the late 1970s?
I can't work out how you can have the hexagonal faces of a buckyball without having the pentagonal faces, since the edges that define the hexagonal faces also define the pentagonal faces. I'm not sure that what you're describing is possible or if you're trying to describe a 5-cornered square.
That is, as you say, a normal icosahedron. For a natural product, it's a good approximation to the Platonic solid. There's nothing that I can think of that would fundamentally prevent a virus from forming it's coat proteins into a buckyball configuration of comparable, though it also wouldn't surprise me if I found that all viruses which had regular coats (I don't know if that's normal or even always the case?) composed of triangles - for reasons of strength of face versus edge components making triangles more stable than squares or higher-order polygons. Do you have some reason to believe that a buckyball coat form would be unstable? Or, for that matter, particularly stable?
The first time I heard of this problem being successfully addressed was the 1975 Everest SW Face expedition. they took pressure cookers (literally an off-the-shelf product) up to at least the Western Cwm, if not higher.
Sure, improving the efficiency of heat transfer from flame to pan would also help. But using a pressure cooker has an effective track record.
However, at the time that they were given these names - in the millennium or so BCE - essentially everyone in the (known, then) world followed those gods and their cognates, and the names of the gods were assigned to "wandering lights in the sky" (that's what the Greek root of "planet" means) appropriate to the personality of the gods (fast-moving Mercury, the messenger ; blood-coloured Mars, the god of war ...), and in a very real sense, those planets were thought to be those gods, while also accepting that the gods "lived" on Mt Olympus. Note also that the Greeks, Romans and Babylonians didn't get overly concerned with names. If you came into contact with a culture that had a war god, and you had a war god, then evidently you were talking about the same god, even if you used different names and rituals. So, meh - we're all following essentially the same religion. If one author of a star catalogue (Hipparchos, or Ptolmey) used one name for a planet, or a constellation, then that was done in piety, not in blasphemy. Even if they used a different name than you did locally, it didn't make them wrong.
Anyway, the IAU don't want to get involved in this sort of mud-slinging match. So, if they find (or have pointed out to them) a religious association to the name you propose, into the trash can goes that proposal. They're the rules ; play by them or go and play a different game. It's not a democracy, and you don't get to make the rules unless you manage to get yourself elected to the IAU council and persuade the rest of the council. Which is going to take several decades.
Who is this "we" who are reasonably sure that Mars is barren? It sure doesn't include me. OK, I'm not a specialist biologist emphasising study of the 5 points which we've measured on Mars (and found lacking in life forms which we recognise, I'll grant), but I am a geologist with a better than normal understanding of the variability of rocks and the habitats that they represent to life forms. People I was at university with have worked on (and published) on some very peculiar terrestrial organisms from deep oil wells, and that represents just a few percent of the potentially habitable volume of this planet. And remember : so far we're only looking for life forms that have metabolisms and physiologies which function broadly similarly to ours.
If we had (say) 10 independent OOL (Origin Of Life) events (say, in different stellar systems), and in our couple of decades of experimentation Mars didn't have a trace of any of those systems, then I might agree that a few decades of searching would be sufficient. But since we still really have NO IDEA what the actual range of effective solutions to the questions of metabolism and physiology are, for this initial case I'd vote strongly in favour of waiting for a generation or ten. Say, until we've got a plan to decontaminate the planet which is as achievable (in the next ten human generations) as terraforming the planet.
(Though I'm a fan of SF, when I'm talking about terraforming Mars, I'm talking about a real plan, not a hand-wavey SF-quality plan. For example, it would be nice to know where you plan to get the 4*10^18kg (approx) of water that you'd need to put a 100m of water onto 30% of the surface (assuming you want some sort of vaguely terrestrial climate, and you're going to use a significant amount of water for things like agriculture). More to the point, how are you going to get to that level of space-faring expertise without concluding that living in asteroid belts is just plain easier than terraforming even quite terrestrial planets like Mars? Build the environment that you want, rather than having to tear down an existing environment and then build the environment that you want.)
People can phone me and send well-crafted packets as much as they want, but they won't be able to turn on my phone's WiFi, accelerometer or GPS because the hardware doesn't exist. And I can answer work emails any time that I want to - by going home and logging into my computer and thence into the mail server. Which suits me fine - I don't want to answer work-email when I'm on leave.
Was there ever a time when that wasn't the case? Typical numbers queuing at my local airport (where I start or end intercontinental, but thankfully not American, flights on a monthly basis) are around a hundred, and the maximum size plane they can service is about 150~170. Since not all planes run full, it's probably always been more efficient to trigger the bomb when approaching the X-ray machines. (BTW, I think the radiation shielding in the X-ray machines will likely double up as blast containment. That's how I'd design one, anyway.)
Thinking to larger airports ... yeah, easily a plane load of people in most scanning areas, except at 3 in the morning. I seriously suspect that the security check has always been a viable detonation point. The only thing doing the plane adds is visceral terror of surviving the bomb to experience the free fall. Briefly.
Your sources who think that "wence" is an accepted spelling of "whence" are?
After the Human Genome was published, I wondered why the fuck Craig Venter went off on his boat to do shotgun PCR on random buckets of seawater. Though this work isn't directly related to that, it's marking Venter's decision to forgo the complexities of culturing organisms as being a truly inspired insight. (And I'm not even a biologist! I deal with dead things and I can see the importance of this choice.)
Why? He's not likely to need breathing apparatus to manage poison gas (H2S), so why should he scrape his beard off to conform to your aesthetics?
Congratulations. You've just invented the (soccer) football. While channelling Buckminster Fuller.
"Whence." Your spelling checker needs switching on.
That is one of the discussions elaborated in TFA : did viruses initially need life forms to replicate on? Or did they force the development of modern life forms. Or ... was there an earlier form of organism, distinctly different from modern cells (post-3.5Ga ago) and modern viruses (also post-3.5Ga ago) which held an intermediate position between modern cells and modern viruses?
One interpretation (NOT undisputed) is that giant mimiviruses could fill that position, and have genes old enough for the hypothesised split.
There doesn't appear to be a consensus. Which is normal for cutting-edge research.
(Just taking the polish off their words to expose the turds of their ideas.)
Carefully chosen words. It's not insane to conceive of future humans deliberately tracking the Voyagers down. Then selling them on eBay. It's not very likely, but it's not impossible.
"Spectacular", yes. "Over-the-top", certainly.
"Attraction?"
It's in fucking Dubai. That in itself makes it as attractive as a dose of syphilis.
(OK,I'll admit to having had to work in that area - there are a few nice people in the working classes, but most of the locals and ex-pats are a bunch of bastards.)
In America, maybe.
This isn't a story about America ; it's a story about England, where they have different laws.
FTFY.
It's not "if it ever goes up" ; it's "when it goes up AGAIN" ; there have been 4 or 5 major eruptions of Yellowstone in the last couple of millions of years.
"World-killer"? Evidently not. Nation-killer? Possibly. Very destructive, when it next goes off? Certainly.
Am I concerned? See 2 minutes into this video.
If they did that, how would they know if they're listening to a delayed echo from shot point #7, indicating a magma chamber at 17km depth, or a differently-delayed echo from shot point #13, indicating a magma chamber at 27km depth, or a differently-delayed echo from shot point #4, indicating a magma chamber at 7km depth, or a differently-delayed echo from shot point #2, indicating a magma chamber at 2km depth, ...
It gets repetitive, doesn't it? That's why deconvolving seismic data is, and always has been, a major consumer of computing resources.
Watch some video of a seismic array being shot. They (well, "we" - I do some seismic-while-drilling work, though I don't claim to be an expert) fire one gun at a time, then listen for an appropriate number of seconds (the "two-way time" to collect the echoes. Then they fire the next gun in the array (or wait for the gun to re-charge, if there's only one gun), and listen for the echoes ... it gets repetitive. With every shot (hundreds of thousands in a survey) recorded up to kilohertz for each of up to thousands of hydrophones, each one of which has it's GPS position recorded at all times in the recording phase (because where things are matters) ... you rapidly climb through the tens of terabytes of data.
There are intermittent efforts to develop various mineral resources in that area. But the details in the press are limited. What I can see is compatible with anything between literally tearing a mountainside apart and turning it into dust to driving an adit into the hillside and following a vein. That's a large variety of different mining techniques.
The people of the area have procedures for assessing environmental damage likelihood, and for balancing the likely effects of employment in a mining operation versus the (possible / probable) loss of tourism income. I'll let them argue that question.
Meanwhile, at the weekend I'm thinking of going up a very nice mountain which I know, but where there is ongoing disagreement between the locals (who want to develop a gold mine and have jobs to keep the young men in the area) and the regional capital (who want to keep the hillside pretty for tourism). And as both a geologist (interested in the minerals) and a mountaineer (who loves the whole area), I'm going to keep my mouth shut and my ears open.
Understanding fracture propagation is a pretty basic part of materials science, and (probably) fundamental to many courses in mechanical engineering. (I'm a geologist, and we covered it un structural geology. But mechanical engineers of my acquaintance when I was a student studied the same material at a different part of their course. They also did a bit of geology - you need a bit to understand what you're building foundations in/ on.)
Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for a starter.
Incidentally, I've seen a charged compressed air cylinder fall 10m and land on rough boulders. With about 250bar of air inside, we leapt for shelter, expecting it to go off like a bomb, but it didn't. So, somewhat gingerly, the person who dropped it came down the rope and carried on "Sherpa-ing" it into the cave where the diver was going to use it. We gave the a hydraulic test the next day, and it passed, but with that dent in it, it was never going to pass a visual inspection, so it was relegated to the back of the club's air bank.
I don't recommend treating cylinders like that, but they're not as delicate as you'd think. Well, not the steel ones ; I don't know anyone who uses aluminium tanks.
Alias?