Brain injuries change rapidly in the early periods after the injury. It can easily take months to years to come to a realistic assessment of the long-term consequences of an injury like this.
My mother had a series of minor strokes a couple of years ago. Her mobility and cognitive state are still recovering nearly two years later. That's normal for brain injuries.
A couple of weeks after an injury like this, nobody should be making any long term decisions. Including the patient.
(I got an "RCMP" notice that all my files were locked because of pxxn in my PC.. I know it's fake because I have absolutely none of that, due to my faith)
Faith as a guarantee of the absence of porn on your PC? Oh, I understand - as a typical person who relies on faith as an argument for anything, you keep your porn on your Mac. In the dungeon with your sex slaves.
I'm not sure if he's disagreeing with you or agreeing. What you say is fairly moot because TFA is talking about "reserves" in the technical meaning of the word in the context of finite resource exploitation, as is bbsalem ; while you seem to be thinking of the word in the language of the streets. If TFA and bbsalem's comment had been written in Esperanto, and your reply in Estonian, the mismatch wouldn't have been any less.
"Reptile" is a polyphyletic clade. Well everyone who knows more about the subject than the average creationist knows that. (This even includes some of those rare beasts - relatively bright creationists!)
But the point of the question is - is the fossil figured in 1730-or-so (1)well-enough characterised to be considered identifiable - which is arguable unless the actual holotype is found (I don't think it's known, but the store-rooms of museums are strange and wonderful places); and (2) is the name scientifically valid. The latter point is fairly strong - first (known) publication ; binomial form (despite humourous intent) ; Latin-ish ; descriptive.
If the first point is made (e.g. a suitable speciment for the original is found, with a credible provenance), then a nomenclatural bunfight that would make Apatosaurus vs Brontosaurus is in the offing. Unless someone can find a subtle route to invalidate the name that I haven't thought of. Bye Bye, Megalosaurus, perhaps?
Yeah, and why would you want a lettuce low in potassium
Because potassium is the source of something like a third of your daily radiation dose. Didn't you know that?
and nitrates anyway?
Nitrogen reacts with electrons to form carbon-14, which is not only radioactive death for everyone who ever even hears about it, but it's also the work of Satan because Evil-utionists use it to prove that dinosaurs are cool and make Baby Jesus cry.
I want to move out of the US to escape the stupidity.
In other words, this crater was spotted less than a day after the impact that formed it!
It was photographed at less than a day old, but since it's only being reported now, there was probably a period of some days or even weeks between the photos being taken, downloaded to Earth, decoded, and analysed with a before/ after filter. Then follow-up photos with other orbiters, preparing reports etc... I'd guess that it wasn't much more than a week between the photography and realisation (the actual "spotting") ; but I won't go into philosophical pickiness over whether the "spotting" was done by the before-after comparison algorithm or the human reviewing the list of before-after differences.
It would be informative (if The Bad Astronomer is reading) to know how many false before-after differences turn up each day or orbit? Tens, hundreds? The origins would be informative too - weather, cosmic ray hits, transient glints off Tripods?
That would be about the time that it was changed from so-many 37ths of the distance from the Imperial nose to the Imperial right testicle, to 25.4mm. Give or take a stoned hippy's memory deficit.
I don't think I saw more than a few tens of minutes of Avatar when it was on while we were waiting for a flight briefing. Blue people and dragons?
I see enough use of modelling software to, for example, understand the biomechanics of a T.rex's walk that it's clear that the understanding of how bones and muscles interact, and how to model them (how much muscle volume is needed to accelerate a lever of mass X and moment of inertia I at Y ms^-2), is good and getting better. Which can then take the place of the Disney movies of dancers, or go directly into a 3d model and thence into a render farm.
I suspect that the constraint on production is less in the skills of the 3d modellers inventing the animals, and more in the producers afraid of what the public will pay to see (Avatar was an American film, which is why I won't willingly watch it). I guess that leaves the window open to things like animation competitions and short films to slowly push back the limits of the producer's arguments with the focus groups.
I remember seeing some of the first computer modelled and rendered animation in the late 1970s - the classic anglepoise lamps playing football (sorry, "soccer") - and realising that I was seeing the future. And it is getting closer. At about one year every calendar year.
(In fact, in order to explode a few American heads - I'm a republican socialist!)
Like it.
I may try using that one over lunch, if one of the Louisiana rednecks happens to be at the table. Of course, the Nigerians, Arabs, Philippenos, Brits and Norwegians will hardly notice, if at all. Unless the head really does explode, in which case I'll have a lot of paperwork to do over the fatality enquiry.
That then begs the question of how long it takes to desorb that water monolayer, and to sufficiently dehydrate the interior of the particles to stop the monolayer from re-forming.
I guess you'd need to get your materials into the vacuum, then bake them to a quite high temperature (olivine from lavas at over 1000degC can easily contain thousands of parts per million of water - which considerably affects it's physical properties), stir them (to get the water out of the mass and the crucible and off into the vacuum pump and cold traps)... then start your experiment.
This is getting to be a very non-trivial change to your experiments. And people want value for their tax dollars and don't want Golden Fleece Awards.
Who needs a cellphone carrier if they have access to the internet?
When I was working in rural Africa last year, the choices for internet access were (1) cellphone carrier and (2) satellite base station and dish.
One cost a moderate amount and had an incremental charging scheme. The other had a very large (about $5000) equipment cost and a fixed-rate charging scheme.
This was rural Africa - 2 hours drive (50km) from the nearest town with electricity. 1.5 hours drive (10km) from the nearest paved road, which also had telephone lines alongside. If you could afford to put in 10km of telephone line, you too could have 9.6kbps internet access.
How else are they going to get Internet access? Skyhooks?
Something that gets worse over the course of decades, in contrast, is a long-term pattern.
That's a short term pattern. I'm a geologist, you insensitive clod!
What's the shortest Milankovitch cycle? 21000 years or so. Now you're starting to talk about short-term or long-term. Or if you're looking at things that humans are likely to give a shit about, you'd be looking at around a generation (20-30 years, rather dependent on social factors and getting longer by a few years per generation).
Well, actually, both. The water dissolves the minerals, but water is relatively incompressible.
Glad to see that you acknowledge that water is compressible. So many people on Slashdot get hysterical about water being incompressible, and even more hysterical when corrected. Meanwhile, we're rigging up to do a 15,000psi pressure test, where the compressibility will be around 20 (US) gallons.
Karstification (the formation of landscape structures by the chemical dissolution of bedrock) is a natural process, but it's rate can be substantially altered by changes in land use, drainage patters and groundwater chemistry, all of which can be altered by humans on a human timescale. "Gripping" (a.k.a. using a "mole" to cut sub-surface unlined drainage channels in moorlands has hugely changed the rate at which water gets from rainfall into the caves of England, for one example, increasing erosion rates. But the destruction of the upland forests that were there before there were moors changed the carbon dioxide content of ground water and previously decreased corrosion rates.
Some mining processes can produce increases in the acidity of ground water (e.g. mining coal can expose pyrite and marcasite (iron sulphide minerals) to oxygen in the air, when they'll form sulphuric acid, which is reasonably effective at dissolving limestone.
And, of course, mines can act as conduits for water flow, as well as collapsing themselves.
There are a number of processes which may be involved in any particular sink hole, and there is no one solution or target for pointing the finger of blame at. You have to examine each case individually.
There is also sloppy reporting : I saw a case a week or two ago reported as a "sinkhole" when it was clearly the collapse of a railway cutting, possibly because of high rain fall and possibly because of failure of a retaining wall. I smelled a rat there, because the brickwork appeared quite old, but only one section had collapsed on a fairly uniform slope, suggesting inadequate or uneven maintenance.
Fear of giving idiots ammunition is not a valid reason for declaring a name invalid. Unless the ICZN have brought out a new revision recently ; if so, enlighten me!
There's a damned good reason for thinking long and hard before revising rule books : once you've revised the rule you've got to live with it's consequences. Or you admit that you were an idiot to vote for the revision.
There's lots of evidence for stone age people wiping out swathes of huge mammals, for good cause some of the time.
There are pretty fair correlations in a number of places that the arrival of humans and the disappearance of the "megafauna" are coincident to within a few tens of generations.
And what is the mantra to chant when you hear the word "correlation"? All together now : "correlations are not, of themselves, evidence for causation."
There's also no reason not to think that a large part of the effect of humans on the megafauna was by killing the young. They're easier, after all. And the adults will keep on producing more young. (Yes, there are mass kill sites, of megafauna of all ages ; but is that sort of operation the mean, or the most effectual method of population control?) But... how does the arrival of the first humans in America lead to the (approximately coincident, to a few centuries) extinction of the megafauna in continental Europe where they'd been interacting with humans for hundreds of thousands of years? Just because it's on Discovery Channel, and it tells a nice, simple story (in 10 minute segments, between the adverts), doesn't mean that it's true.
The "good cause" thing is just so laden with cultural assumptions. Are you really, totally happy that the mammoths are extinct? Smilodon? The cave bear? (Assuming, for the moment, that the "human overkill" hypothesis is correct, which I consider undemonstrated at this time.)
What I mean by "live action" is CGI constructs interacting on screen with other CGI constructs, some of which may be completely computer based, and some of which may use humans for motion capture. Or for the human actors to interact with, while being green screened for the CGI processing.
If I want to see a guy in a rubber suit, I'll watch a diving video.
Yeah, the US has a fine population of ostriches growing there. Britain is no better.
My proposition (for 25 years now, since I was trying to get work on a nuclear site and thought about these things), is that since the difficult thing is ensuring long-term maintenance of the store, then the logical place to put is is directly beneath the government's main building. So that if the politicians cut the maintenance budget too much, they're the first to die.
It works for London - the London Clay is an adequately good potential repository. I don't know how well it would work for Washington D.C. ; maybe you'd have to move it. Considering how many complaints one hears about the climate and the murder rate there, is moving capitals (or more precisely, moving government seats) that horrible a prospect? Find a half-way decent waste site in the middle of the country ; build the repository ; park the politicians on top of it. Job. Done.
(No, I don't care if politicians die because of this. As Voltaire once said, "dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres." ("in this country it is found requisite, now and then, to put an admiral to death, in order to encourage the others to fight." Candide, Ch.23))
Variable, but it's a good quantity. Spreading shit on the fields may offend some idiot's sensibilities, but that doesn't make it an inherently bad idea. We've known how (and approximately why) to do it for millennia.
Slashdot Mirror
Brain injuries change rapidly in the early periods after the injury. It can easily take months to years to come to a realistic assessment of the long-term consequences of an injury like this.
My mother had a series of minor strokes a couple of years ago. Her mobility and cognitive state are still recovering nearly two years later. That's normal for brain injuries.
A couple of weeks after an injury like this, nobody should be making any long term decisions. Including the patient.
Faith as a guarantee of the absence of porn on your PC? Oh, I understand - as a typical person who relies on faith as an argument for anything, you keep your porn on your Mac. In the dungeon with your sex slaves.
A 50 second summary of the relevant geology. Thanks.
I'm not sure if he's disagreeing with you or agreeing. What you say is fairly moot because TFA is talking about "reserves" in the technical meaning of the word in the context of finite resource exploitation, as is bbsalem ; while you seem to be thinking of the word in the language of the streets. If TFA and bbsalem's comment had been written in Esperanto, and your reply in Estonian, the mismatch wouldn't have been any less.
Smilodon (or similar genera)? Kewl! that's enough to make me amble off to RTFA.
But the point of the question is - is the fossil figured in 1730-or-so (1)well-enough characterised to be considered identifiable - which is arguable unless the actual holotype is found (I don't think it's known, but the store-rooms of museums are strange and wonderful places); and (2) is the name scientifically valid. The latter point is fairly strong - first (known) publication ; binomial form (despite humourous intent) ; Latin-ish ; descriptive.
If the first point is made (e.g. a suitable speciment for the original is found, with a credible provenance), then a nomenclatural bunfight that would make Apatosaurus vs Brontosaurus is in the offing. Unless someone can find a subtle route to invalidate the name that I haven't thought of. Bye Bye, Megalosaurus, perhaps?
Because potassium is the source of something like a third of your daily radiation dose. Didn't you know that?
Nitrogen reacts with electrons to form carbon-14, which is not only radioactive death for everyone who ever even hears about it, but it's also the work of Satan because Evil-utionists use it to prove that dinosaurs are cool and make Baby Jesus cry.
Communist!
It was photographed at less than a day old, but since it's only being reported now, there was probably a period of some days or even weeks between the photos being taken, downloaded to Earth, decoded, and analysed with a before/ after filter. Then follow-up photos with other orbiters, preparing reports etc ... I'd guess that it wasn't much more than a week between the photography and realisation (the actual "spotting") ; but I won't go into philosophical pickiness over whether the "spotting" was done by the before-after comparison algorithm or the human reviewing the list of before-after differences.
It would be informative (if The Bad Astronomer is reading) to know how many false before-after differences turn up each day or orbit? Tens, hundreds? The origins would be informative too - weather, cosmic ray hits, transient glints off Tripods?
The cat should have listened to it's dam when she was teaching it the Green Cross Code : "Look left, then right, then left again!"
That would be about the time that it was changed from so-many 37ths of the distance from the Imperial nose to the Imperial right testicle, to 25.4mm. Give or take a stoned hippy's memory deficit.
You just don't read (or speak) enough languages. How poorly educated or inattentive you are.
Didn't you read Hennig when you were at school?
I see enough use of modelling software to, for example, understand the biomechanics of a T.rex's walk that it's clear that the understanding of how bones and muscles interact, and how to model them (how much muscle volume is needed to accelerate a lever of mass X and moment of inertia I at Y ms^-2), is good and getting better. Which can then take the place of the Disney movies of dancers, or go directly into a 3d model and thence into a render farm.
I suspect that the constraint on production is less in the skills of the 3d modellers inventing the animals, and more in the producers afraid of what the public will pay to see (Avatar was an American film, which is why I won't willingly watch it). I guess that leaves the window open to things like animation competitions and short films to slowly push back the limits of the producer's arguments with the focus groups.
I remember seeing some of the first computer modelled and rendered animation in the late 1970s - the classic anglepoise lamps playing football (sorry, "soccer") - and realising that I was seeing the future. And it is getting closer. At about one year every calendar year.
Like it.
I may try using that one over lunch, if one of the Louisiana rednecks happens to be at the table. Of course, the Nigerians, Arabs, Philippenos, Brits and Norwegians will hardly notice, if at all. Unless the head really does explode, in which case I'll have a lot of paperwork to do over the fatality enquiry.
I guess you'd need to get your materials into the vacuum, then bake them to a quite high temperature (olivine from lavas at over 1000degC can easily contain thousands of parts per million of water - which considerably affects it's physical properties), stir them (to get the water out of the mass and the crucible and off into the vacuum pump and cold traps) ... then start your experiment.
This is getting to be a very non-trivial change to your experiments. And people want value for their tax dollars and don't want Golden Fleece Awards.
When I was working in rural Africa last year, the choices for internet access were (1) cellphone carrier and (2) satellite base station and dish.
One cost a moderate amount and had an incremental charging scheme. The other had a very large (about $5000) equipment cost and a fixed-rate charging scheme.
This was rural Africa - 2 hours drive (50km) from the nearest town with electricity. 1.5 hours drive (10km) from the nearest paved road, which also had telephone lines alongside. If you could afford to put in 10km of telephone line, you too could have 9.6kbps internet access.
How else are they going to get Internet access? Skyhooks?
For values of "every" meaning "every 2 to 5 years, irregularly".
That's a short term pattern. I'm a geologist, you insensitive clod!
What's the shortest Milankovitch cycle? 21000 years or so. Now you're starting to talk about short-term or long-term. Or if you're looking at things that humans are likely to give a shit about, you'd be looking at around a generation (20-30 years, rather dependent on social factors and getting longer by a few years per generation).
Glad to see that you acknowledge that water is compressible. So many people on Slashdot get hysterical about water being incompressible, and even more hysterical when corrected. Meanwhile, we're rigging up to do a 15,000psi pressure test, where the compressibility will be around 20 (US) gallons.
Karstification (the formation of landscape structures by the chemical dissolution of bedrock) is a natural process, but it's rate can be substantially altered by changes in land use, drainage patters and groundwater chemistry, all of which can be altered by humans on a human timescale. "Gripping" (a.k.a. using a "mole" to cut sub-surface unlined drainage channels in moorlands has hugely changed the rate at which water gets from rainfall into the caves of England, for one example, increasing erosion rates. But the destruction of the upland forests that were there before there were moors changed the carbon dioxide content of ground water and previously decreased corrosion rates.
Some mining processes can produce increases in the acidity of ground water (e.g. mining coal can expose pyrite and marcasite (iron sulphide minerals) to oxygen in the air, when they'll form sulphuric acid, which is reasonably effective at dissolving limestone.
And, of course, mines can act as conduits for water flow, as well as collapsing themselves.
There are a number of processes which may be involved in any particular sink hole, and there is no one solution or target for pointing the finger of blame at. You have to examine each case individually.
There is also sloppy reporting : I saw a case a week or two ago reported as a "sinkhole" when it was clearly the collapse of a railway cutting, possibly because of high rain fall and possibly because of failure of a retaining wall. I smelled a rat there, because the brickwork appeared quite old, but only one section had collapsed on a fairly uniform slope, suggesting inadequate or uneven maintenance.
There's a damned good reason for thinking long and hard before revising rule books : once you've revised the rule you've got to live with it's consequences. Or you admit that you were an idiot to vote for the revision.
This is science. Not populism. Or politics.
There are pretty fair correlations in a number of places that the arrival of humans and the disappearance of the "megafauna" are coincident to within a few tens of generations.
And what is the mantra to chant when you hear the word "correlation"? All together now : "correlations are not, of themselves, evidence for causation."
There's also no reason not to think that a large part of the effect of humans on the megafauna was by killing the young. They're easier, after all. And the adults will keep on producing more young. (Yes, there are mass kill sites, of megafauna of all ages ; but is that sort of operation the mean, or the most effectual method of population control?) But ... how does the arrival of the first humans in America lead to the (approximately coincident, to a few centuries) extinction of the megafauna in continental Europe where they'd been interacting with humans for hundreds of thousands of years? Just because it's on Discovery Channel, and it tells a nice, simple story (in 10 minute segments, between the adverts), doesn't mean that it's true.
The "good cause" thing is just so laden with cultural assumptions. Are you really, totally happy that the mammoths are extinct? Smilodon? The cave bear? (Assuming, for the moment, that the "human overkill" hypothesis is correct, which I consider undemonstrated at this time.)
None of which makes popcorn anything less than shite.
If I want to see a guy in a rubber suit, I'll watch a diving video.
My proposition (for 25 years now, since I was trying to get work on a nuclear site and thought about these things), is that since the difficult thing is ensuring long-term maintenance of the store, then the logical place to put is is directly beneath the government's main building. So that if the politicians cut the maintenance budget too much, they're the first to die.
It works for London - the London Clay is an adequately good potential repository. I don't know how well it would work for Washington D.C. ; maybe you'd have to move it. Considering how many complaints one hears about the climate and the murder rate there, is moving capitals (or more precisely, moving government seats) that horrible a prospect? Find a half-way decent waste site in the middle of the country ; build the repository ; park the politicians on top of it. Job. Done.
(No, I don't care if politicians die because of this. As Voltaire once said, "dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres." ("in this country it is found requisite, now and then, to put an admiral to death, in order to encourage the others to fight." Candide, Ch.23))
Variable, but it's a good quantity. Spreading shit on the fields may offend some idiot's sensibilities, but that doesn't make it an inherently bad idea. We've known how (and approximately why) to do it for millennia.