The host rock for the Oklo reactors is fairly ordinary Proterozoic-aged sandstone and shales,
Yeeees. Nothing particularly abnormal about the host rock.
so if some ancient civilization did abandon waste products, they basically left it on the surface on a beach or river bank about 1.7 billion years ago.
Noooo. Part of the point of the paper linked to (you did read TFP, didn't you? That's why the authors wrote it and posted it to Arxiv, for people to read.) was to describe a lutetium excite state thermometer which they used to drive water densities and temperatures as a moderating medium. Their results are that the moderating water was at a temperature in the 200 to 300 degree Centigrade range. So, the confining pressure must have been in the hundreds of atmospheres.
The hydrothermal systems that spewed their uranium-mineralising solutions onto and into the seabed (composed, as you say, of unexciting Proterozoic sands and shales), did so beneath several kilometres of water. Not anywhere near the surface.
Your non-Ockhamian aliens dumped their waste into deep water. Very deep water. Well, deep to most standards - my workplace can manage up to 3.5km water depth, and we're not the deepest-capable of vessels. But it's a bit beyond your average dredging barge.
Well, that's great. The next time that your inattention allows a mugger to get a gun to your head, then the mugger ends up with your phone, wallet and car keys AND another gun. Way to go!
Since the only important copy of the licensing data is the one in the database, that is normally sufficient. The paper copies are only for countries (counties / roads) without the IT infrastructure for roadside police to check against the database.
If you have your license revoked - say, you acquire one speeding ticket too many - but you keep the physical copy of the driving license, is that going to protect you from being booked for illegal driving if you get pulled over for speeding? Of course it's not : you'll present your (illegally-retained) license to the copper ; they'll call it in to HQ (or use their laptop, or whatever), and find that your license has been revoked ; they'll then arrest you for driving without license, without insurance, and speeding. And unless there's another licensed and insured driver in the car, that's going to be towed to the pound at your expense.
To be honest, I don't even carry a copy of my driving license with me. It's not photographic, so "meh". No use except as emergency shit-paper.
We got the paper tape with our coded program and any error messages from the compiler back the next week. Then we had to feed them through the teletype terminal to get a print out to find out what had happened.
Well, the alternative was to connect the teletype to the acoustic coupler, dial up the college where the compilation and running was done, and run the program directly. But since the cost of the phone call (20 miles, at 300bps) exceeded the budget for the entire computing class (communications budget was zero pounds and zero pence per class per year). The budget for paper, and the mimeography to make the blank coding forms could be hidden in the rest of the school's running costs, but the cost of getting a second phone line into the school and of paying the phone bills couldn't be hidden.
Obviously, all the equipment was donated by local companies. But they couldn't cover the phone bills. So the forms went to the college when one of the teachers drove past on his way home, got processed in the college's computing centre's (on the good will of their hearts), and picked up a few days later to come back to school with us.
A hell of a fankle. So, after a few months, the headmaster (EN_US : principal) knocked the course on the head, telling us that, as we were likely to go to university in 4 years time, we'd be able to do computing there. (He was dead proud - before our year's intake, the school had not had a single pupil go to university. That's non-comprehensive education for you.)
The element that bothers me is the anyone who owns a GM car can call On Star to find out where the heck am I?[...]
But we can't find an airplane?
I'm not sure quite how well this "OnStar" thing would indicate your car's location if it were at the bottom of a few kilometres of water. Have you tried some experiments?
Male fish are definitely not supposed to have female characteristics.
That depends on the fish.
Leaving aside the fact that everyone attending to this conversation is a fish (to a reasonably close approximation ; out of water, but still fist, in the sense that we've got bones and... well, that's about it)... there are fish (of the lives-in-water/ one-lung fat-filled variety) whose life style is to be female UNLESS there are no males around. If there happen to be no males around, the largest of the female fish change sex to become male, until there are sufficient males to suppress the gender changing tendencies of the rest of the female fish.
There are a lot more ways of organising sex in a species than you got taught about in school. Unless you did a course in fish biology.
Not only that, but there are no pedestrians on freeways.
There aren't meant to be. But around many crashes, there are.
Yes, I know that you're meant to get survivors / walking wounded off the road and away off the verges as soon as possible. And medically-trained passers by aren't meant to stop ot help. But they do, and people aren't thinking at their best after a crash.
So... to correct The Friendly Summary at the top of the thread, you're relating the rise of concrete as a building material to the downfall of the Roman Republic and it's replacement by the Roman Empire, and not (as per TFS) to the downfall of the Roman Empire.
That seems a much more defensible position, since the rise of concrete-based construction occurred a few decades to a century before the collapse of the Republic, but some 5 centuries before the collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire, and 14 centuries before the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Those are transport flasks for moving high-grade waste and spent fuel from reactor to re-processing plant. They're not storage flasks.
Storage flasks are (typically ; designs vary between countries) stainless steel 220 litre (40-odd gallons, depending on how big your gallon is) barrels, lined with concrete, stuffed with the waste for storage (vitrified, building materials, steel, whatever), topped up with concrete, then welded shut. Within a repository, they'll be buried either in concrete, dry clay (to reduce water circulation), or whatever. You can load the concrete with barytes if you want to have better radiation absorbtion.
Storage flasks are pretty tough, but they're a different degree of tough to the transport flasks.
Most countries have done the sums and decided that treating or storing waste / spent fuel on site has less potential risks than moving the glowing shit around. Doom-players may agree as they wade through the green shit, Knee-Deep In The Dead.
Has been on every version of Windoze which I've tried it on for... I don't know how long. Going back into the 1990s at least. I honestly can't remember if it was in Win 3.11, which I was using until about 2000.
Good grief, can't people actually think up something sensible to post?
This one has been done to death more often than the fatted calf gets pole-axed.
The only way this is actually going to be a problem is if the change in average behaviour takes place in a time period less than a couple of breeding cycles of the food animal in question. Which would be about 4 years for cattle, and less for pretty much every other food animal. (Counter examples, anyone?) On any longer timescale, the decreases in consumption rates will depress prices (supply exceeds demand), leading to the producers (I hesitate to use "farmers" for modern intensive meat production technicians) reducing their breeding of stock in order to bring the unit price back up.
Bringing about such a rapid change in average behaviour on a national basis... is utterly incredible. Not credible. Un-be-lieve-a-fucking-ble.
Try coming up with a new argument. It's not a blood sport unless you punch yourself in the head trying to get the braincell working.
The impression I got from the article was that she was dead before these samples were taken. There was no hint of any therapeutic component to the study.
Why? Efficient contraception, such as I had done a decade before I met my wife, meant that we've never had to worry about her getting pregnant while enjoying un-frustrated sex lives.
Oh, you're thinking of people who actually want to have children? That's quite malleable, if you've got the time to do it - just use cultural influence to make breeding seem rather coarse and gross (taking all late pre-teen children for a week's work experience in a midwifery ward would probably help, a lot), and then you'd have to bribe people to make the babies you need. And you'd probably have less strain on health services and education services, which should allow better planning of resources.
It's a trope that has been used in fiction multiple times - "Brave New World", Joe Haldeman's 'Forever War', to name two examples - and we're steadily creeping into such an experiment in western societies with the de-stigmatisation of non-traditional sex lives.
(Didn't I hear a rumour that 'Forever War' was in production as a film? Yes. Let's just hope that it's not a sack of shit like 'Prometheus'.)
That is one of the most bone-flayingly polite pieces of excoriating rudeness I've seen for years. You really don't like them, SCI, do you?
I'll have to remember to talk to Dad about whether he's comparison-shopped for funeral providers before Mum croaks. But yeah, I know what you mean on that score : my best friend died while I was at work last year and in the 4 days before I could get back to shore to help, the widow had been persuaded to sign up for about £6000 of various expenses. He'd got good death-in-service benefits from his work, which meant it wasn't a problem. But it really upset her when she realised that she'd been fleeced.
is a fictional character on the CBS television series The Big Bang Theory, portrayed by actor Jim Parsons
So, what's the relevance of a fictional character in a foreign TV programme to the conversation? I've got better things to do with my time than watch the TV. Particularly TV designed to be broken up into 2 second chunks between the adverts.
I didn't have a TV at all between 1991 an 2005, when I got married. I still don't watch much TV, because most of it is crap, and 90% plus of the stuff we buy from abroad is really crap, due to being designed around advertising breaks.
You said that there are (paraphrasing) tons of thorium to be found at metal mines and I asked you for citations. You gave a list of items referring to thorium (minerals) as a contaminant of (and waste from) RARE EARTH metals.
Now, here's the bit that seems to be causing a problem, though it doesn't require mind reading. But I'll spell it out. All members of the set of Rare Earth Elements are members of the set of Metals, but not all members of the set of Metals are members of the set of Rare Earth Elements. The same relations apply amongst mines.
In fact, you may be astonished by two other facets of the name "Rare Earth Elements" ; they all form weakly acidic oxides (that's what the "Earth" bit of the name means, though it's quite archaic terminology now), and they are all rare. At least, rare compared to metals like iron, lead, copper, zinc ; not so rare compared to gold, platinum, etc.
So while it may be true that there are appreciable quantities of thorium-rich gangue at all RARE EARTH metal mines, there are many many more metal mines, active and abandoned, with no mounds of thorium-rich gangue scattered around. And that last is the claim that you made. It may not be what you intended to write, but it is what you published.
You're assuming these transits would occur frequently and that we actually have the equipment pointed at the sky to detect them.
Which parts of the MACHO theory and experiments didn't you understand? The ones that said "it's the late 1980s, and we've been running these observational programmes for several years and we're not seeing enough interactions to explain the gravitating mass that we know needs to be there"? Or the ones that said "it's the mid-1990s, and we're still not seeing enough interactions, but we have seen what appears to be two mutually-orbiting bodies transit a halo star"? Or the ones that said "it's the late 1990s and the several different MACHO programmes appear to be far below the detection rate that would be necessary to explain the observed rotation profiles"?
I was reading those reports in the science press through those times. Weren't you?
The observed rates of MACHO detection (by microlensing, particularly, because that was easiest) were far too low to account for the "missing miss". So people stopped trying to solve the missing mass problem by going down that route.
Ditto for this "nonstar," it's hot for the same reasons that the inside of the Earth and Jupiter is hot, mostly K40 and U235.
Actually, probably not. There wasn't much potassium and uranium at the orbital position where proto-Jupiter formes, compared to water ice. So most models of the formation of Jupiter (and the rest of the Solar system) have a proto-Jupiter forming largely of water-ice, then going into runaway growth at about that mass and building up huge additional amounts of hydrogen and helium from the Solar nebula.
Some models still have Jupiter collapsing from the crystallisation of metallic hydrogen in Jupiter's core, which releases heat (as says). Other models ahve that heat generated because of the gravitational settling of helium into Jupiter's core (rather analogous to the settling of iron into the Earth's core). And it's possible that both processes are going on ; we don't know the equations of state of hydrogen and helium well enough at these pressures to be really sure.
Yeah, actually it would. I get planted and the world is improved by kicking a few advertising people to death and burying them in the same hole.
Actually, no need to kick them to death ; they just need to be sufficiently immobilised to get them into the pit for long enough to shovel the soil in. We could be onto a winner in the funeral planning department here, if we advertise it properly.
The fossil fuel industry may invest a great deal in buying scientists to deny the problem to the larger public,
That part of their PR budget disappears into the small change compared to the amount they're spending trying to locate more reserves. Just going through the workforce of my senior colleagues, we'll be the point people for around a couple of billion dollars of exploration expenditure each year. And the juniors in the company will be working on about the same amount of investment in development and production work.
What do you think the PR spend by the energy companies is?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeeees. Nothing particularly abnormal about the host rock.
Noooo. Part of the point of the paper linked to (you did read TFP, didn't you? That's why the authors wrote it and posted it to Arxiv, for people to read.) was to describe a lutetium excite state thermometer which they used to drive water densities and temperatures as a moderating medium. Their results are that the moderating water was at a temperature in the 200 to 300 degree Centigrade range. So, the confining pressure must have been in the hundreds of atmospheres.
The hydrothermal systems that spewed their uranium-mineralising solutions onto and into the seabed (composed, as you say, of unexciting Proterozoic sands and shales), did so beneath several kilometres of water. Not anywhere near the surface.
Your non-Ockhamian aliens dumped their waste into deep water. Very deep water. Well, deep to most standards - my workplace can manage up to 3.5km water depth, and we're not the deepest-capable of vessels. But it's a bit beyond your average dredging barge.
Well, that's great. The next time that your inattention allows a mugger to get a gun to your head, then the mugger ends up with your phone, wallet and car keys AND another gun. Way to go!
If you have your license revoked - say, you acquire one speeding ticket too many - but you keep the physical copy of the driving license, is that going to protect you from being booked for illegal driving if you get pulled over for speeding? Of course it's not : you'll present your (illegally-retained) license to the copper ; they'll call it in to HQ (or use their laptop, or whatever), and find that your license has been revoked ; they'll then arrest you for driving without license, without insurance, and speeding. And unless there's another licensed and insured driver in the car, that's going to be towed to the pound at your expense.
To be honest, I don't even carry a copy of my driving license with me. It's not photographic, so "meh". No use except as emergency shit-paper.
Well, the alternative was to connect the teletype to the acoustic coupler, dial up the college where the compilation and running was done, and run the program directly. But since the cost of the phone call (20 miles, at 300bps) exceeded the budget for the entire computing class (communications budget was zero pounds and zero pence per class per year). The budget for paper, and the mimeography to make the blank coding forms could be hidden in the rest of the school's running costs, but the cost of getting a second phone line into the school and of paying the phone bills couldn't be hidden.
Obviously, all the equipment was donated by local companies. But they couldn't cover the phone bills. So the forms went to the college when one of the teachers drove past on his way home, got processed in the college's computing centre's (on the good will of their hearts), and picked up a few days later to come back to school with us.
A hell of a fankle. So, after a few months, the headmaster (EN_US : principal) knocked the course on the head, telling us that, as we were likely to go to university in 4 years time, we'd be able to do computing there. (He was dead proud - before our year's intake, the school had not had a single pupil go to university. That's non-comprehensive education for you.)
It's not Fox News. That's what's nice about it.
I'm not sure quite how well this "OnStar" thing would indicate your car's location if it were at the bottom of a few kilometres of water. Have you tried some experiments?
That depends on the fish.
Leaving aside the fact that everyone attending to this conversation is a fish (to a reasonably close approximation ; out of water, but still fist, in the sense that we've got bones and ... well, that's about it) ... there are fish (of the lives-in-water/ one-lung fat-filled variety) whose life style is to be female UNLESS there are no males around. If there happen to be no males around, the largest of the female fish change sex to become male, until there are sufficient males to suppress the gender changing tendencies of the rest of the female fish.
There are a lot more ways of organising sex in a species than you got taught about in school. Unless you did a course in fish biology.
A lance with a point on each end.
There aren't meant to be. But around many crashes, there are.
Yes, I know that you're meant to get survivors / walking wounded off the road and away off the verges as soon as possible. And medically-trained passers by aren't meant to stop ot help. But they do, and people aren't thinking at their best after a crash.
That seems a much more defensible position, since the rise of concrete-based construction occurred a few decades to a century before the collapse of the Republic, but some 5 centuries before the collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire, and 14 centuries before the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Thanks for clarifying that.
Storage flasks are (typically ; designs vary between countries) stainless steel 220 litre (40-odd gallons, depending on how big your gallon is) barrels, lined with concrete, stuffed with the waste for storage (vitrified, building materials, steel, whatever), topped up with concrete, then welded shut. Within a repository, they'll be buried either in concrete, dry clay (to reduce water circulation), or whatever. You can load the concrete with barytes if you want to have better radiation absorbtion.
Storage flasks are pretty tough, but they're a different degree of tough to the transport flasks.
Most countries have done the sums and decided that treating or storing waste / spent fuel on site has less potential risks than moving the glowing shit around. Doom-players may agree as they wade through the green shit, Knee-Deep In The Dead.
Has been on every version of Windoze which I've tried it on for ... I don't know how long. Going back into the 1990s at least. I honestly can't remember if it was in Win 3.11, which I was using until about 2000.
This one has been done to death more often than the fatted calf gets pole-axed.
The only way this is actually going to be a problem is if the change in average behaviour takes place in a time period less than a couple of breeding cycles of the food animal in question. Which would be about 4 years for cattle, and less for pretty much every other food animal. (Counter examples, anyone?) On any longer timescale, the decreases in consumption rates will depress prices (supply exceeds demand), leading to the producers (I hesitate to use "farmers" for modern intensive meat production technicians) reducing their breeding of stock in order to bring the unit price back up.
Bringing about such a rapid change in average behaviour on a national basis ... is utterly incredible. Not credible. Un-be-lieve-a-fucking-ble.
Try coming up with a new argument. It's not a blood sport unless you punch yourself in the head trying to get the braincell working.
Can we have some caveats and shades of grey on that, please?
The impression I got from the article was that she was dead before these samples were taken. There was no hint of any therapeutic component to the study.
Why? Efficient contraception, such as I had done a decade before I met my wife, meant that we've never had to worry about her getting pregnant while enjoying un-frustrated sex lives.
Oh, you're thinking of people who actually want to have children? That's quite malleable, if you've got the time to do it - just use cultural influence to make breeding seem rather coarse and gross (taking all late pre-teen children for a week's work experience in a midwifery ward would probably help, a lot), and then you'd have to bribe people to make the babies you need. And you'd probably have less strain on health services and education services, which should allow better planning of resources.
It's a trope that has been used in fiction multiple times - "Brave New World", Joe Haldeman's 'Forever War', to name two examples - and we're steadily creeping into such an experiment in western societies with the de-stigmatisation of non-traditional sex lives.
(Didn't I hear a rumour that 'Forever War' was in production as a film? Yes. Let's just hope that it's not a sack of shit like 'Prometheus'.)
That is one of the most bone-flayingly polite pieces of excoriating rudeness I've seen for years. You really don't like them, SCI, do you?
I'll have to remember to talk to Dad about whether he's comparison-shopped for funeral providers before Mum croaks. But yeah, I know what you mean on that score : my best friend died while I was at work last year and in the 4 days before I could get back to shore to help, the widow had been persuaded to sign up for about £6000 of various expenses. He'd got good death-in-service benefits from his work, which meant it wasn't a problem. But it really upset her when she realised that she'd been fleeced.
So, what's the relevance of a fictional character in a foreign TV programme to the conversation? I've got better things to do with my time than watch the TV. Particularly TV designed to be broken up into 2 second chunks between the adverts.
I didn't have a TV at all between 1991 an 2005, when I got married. I still don't watch much TV, because most of it is crap, and 90% plus of the stuff we buy from abroad is really crap, due to being designed around advertising breaks.
Now, here's the bit that seems to be causing a problem, though it doesn't require mind reading. But I'll spell it out. All members of the set of Rare Earth Elements are members of the set of Metals, but not all members of the set of Metals are members of the set of Rare Earth Elements. The same relations apply amongst mines.
In fact, you may be astonished by two other facets of the name "Rare Earth Elements" ; they all form weakly acidic oxides (that's what the "Earth" bit of the name means, though it's quite archaic terminology now), and they are all rare. At least, rare compared to metals like iron, lead, copper, zinc ; not so rare compared to gold, platinum, etc.
So while it may be true that there are appreciable quantities of thorium-rich gangue at all RARE EARTH metal mines, there are many many more metal mines, active and abandoned, with no mounds of thorium-rich gangue scattered around. And that last is the claim that you made. It may not be what you intended to write, but it is what you published.
Which parts of the MACHO theory and experiments didn't you understand? The ones that said "it's the late 1980s, and we've been running these observational programmes for several years and we're not seeing enough interactions to explain the gravitating mass that we know needs to be there"? Or the ones that said "it's the mid-1990s, and we're still not seeing enough interactions, but we have seen what appears to be two mutually-orbiting bodies transit a halo star"? Or the ones that said "it's the late 1990s and the several different MACHO programmes appear to be far below the detection rate that would be necessary to explain the observed rotation profiles"?
I was reading those reports in the science press through those times. Weren't you?
The observed rates of MACHO detection (by microlensing, particularly, because that was easiest) were far too low to account for the "missing miss". So people stopped trying to solve the missing mass problem by going down that route.
The mathematics of Newtonian gravity require the invisible gravitating mass to be inside the radius of the (excessibely rapidly) orbiting outer stars.
Actually, probably not. There wasn't much potassium and uranium at the orbital position where proto-Jupiter formes, compared to water ice. So most models of the formation of Jupiter (and the rest of the Solar system) have a proto-Jupiter forming largely of water-ice, then going into runaway growth at about that mass and building up huge additional amounts of hydrogen and helium from the Solar nebula.
Some models still have Jupiter collapsing from the crystallisation of metallic hydrogen in Jupiter's core, which releases heat (as says). Other models ahve that heat generated because of the gravitational settling of helium into Jupiter's core (rather analogous to the settling of iron into the Earth's core). And it's possible that both processes are going on ; we don't know the equations of state of hydrogen and helium well enough at these pressures to be really sure.
Actually, no need to kick them to death ; they just need to be sufficiently immobilised to get them into the pit for long enough to shovel the soil in. We could be onto a winner in the funeral planning department here, if we advertise it properly.
And the non-rare earth metal mines?
That part of their PR budget disappears into the small change compared to the amount they're spending trying to locate more reserves. Just going through the workforce of my senior colleagues, we'll be the point people for around a couple of billion dollars of exploration expenditure each year. And the juniors in the company will be working on about the same amount of investment in development and production work.
What do you think the PR spend by the energy companies is?