Xenon is certainly hypnotic at surface conditions. I don't know about argon being narcotic, or hypnotic, or even hallucinogenic at any depth, but I do know that working with it at surface carries no particular hazards (I have to sit through the risk assessments and toolbox talks sometimes, though it's only tangentially involved in my work) . I've heard rumour of a diver who accidentally connected his argon bottle (for suit inflation - it's got a lower thermal conductivity than helium, and is much cheaper) in place of his helium diluent bottle on a trimix rig and got into trouble because off the viscosity of the gas mix as he descended, but no particular reports of mental effects (just suffocation!) ; the wash-up message was "don't do that", but no recommendation against using argon, which I'd have expected if it were significantly mentally affective.
They used to use a Helium mixture for deep dives, I am not sure what they do these days
Hydrogen-oxygen mix for really deep stuff - 400m plus IIRC. 3% O2 in hydrogen at 400m would be a PP/O2 of 1.2 bar, which is OK, but you'd have cut the O2 back for much deeper work. Shallower work, as you raised the O2, you'd need to dilute with helium to keep below the lower explosive limit of hydrogen-oxygen mixes.
Of course, at those pressures, you can't rely on your ideal gas laws being anything like accurate.
400 bar air-tanks were available in the mid-1990s IIRC. The problem is finding an air source that can fill them. At my local dive shop I rarely get better than 260 bar in my 300s.
The mid-1990s tanks used IIRC a metal wear lining over a carbon-fibre epoxy pressure vessel, which made exterior inspection of the pressure vessel impossible, and therefore you couldn't get your cylinder re-certified after the initial manufacturer's certs had expired. But if you needed the volume, you accepted that the cylinder had a 3 (or 5) year life time. Of course, you almost certainly had your own compressor too, so that for air diving, that wasn't much of an issue. quite why you'd use them if you were on open-circuit air though... I can't quite figure out.
You already have seriously long underwater times with present rebreathers.
Practical consequences : pee-valves have been routine for years ; diapers are nothing unusual (and have been routine for saturation diving for... as long as there has been saturation diving, if not longer).
Move up to longer (multi-day) dives and you're looking at having to deal with eating and drinking underwater - the latter isn't too difficult - and also dealing with the effects of long-term immersion on the skin (greasing up all over the exposed skin, for example, or using environmentally-isolating suits as for shit-diving).
Pure oxygen is toxic at all pressures (equivalent to water depths) that I've heard. It becomes very rapidly toxic, with convulsions, unconsciousness and other symptoms that are good ways to die when in the water, at partial pressures of greater than about 1.8 bar PP/O2 absolute. Which is a pressure achieved at around 9m in seawater at normal temperatures. The strong recommendation from diving organisations is to keep your PP/O2 below 1.5 bar absolute, and at a recent presentation by the medical manager of our local hyperbaric treatment centre (for both diving and other pressure-treatable conditions) he made his recommendation to keep PP/O2 below 1.3 bar absolute, to avoid the risks of a variety of symptoms which are damaging but not rapidly lethal.
Which isn't to discourage you from going diving, or indeed from using closed-circuit systems where you explicitly or implicitly manage your PP/O2. But don't kid yourself about the inherent hazards of what you're doing.
What is this "ATM fee" that you allow yourself to be ripped off by?
We had that argument back in the late 1990s ; people stopped using banks that charged ATM fees, the banks lost money and changed their behaviours, and voila, the problem was gone.
Well, almost gone ; there are ATMs run by non-banking organisations that still charge fees - 2-3% of the maximum transaction, and more for smaller transactions. I sometimes use one out of spite, running the software up to the point at which I am asked if I agree to the fee, then aborting the transaction. But that's done with malice aforethought, in the intention of driving the companies into bankruptcy. I hope there are many other people who do the same.
Anyone watching the autumn sky knows that migrating birds fly in a V formation,
Some migrating birds fly in 'V' formations and are highly visible. Some fly singly and are almost invisible, unless you're purposely looking for them. Some fly in irregular groups, and are of intermediate visibility.
Corresponding to these multiple migration strategies, I'd expect there to be multiple solutions to the problem of "how do I get from $HERE to $THERE with minimum energetic expense?"
These dinosaurs have been facing the changing problems of survival in a resource-constrained world for about twice the period of time and perhaps three times the number of species that mammals - humans included - have, and I'd reckon it's a safe bet that they've come up with lots of solutions.
In fact, with the exception of the relatively short migrations of gnus and some other African herbivores, and some whales... are there any mammals that have major natural annual migrations? I'm trying to think of examples. (Caribou/ reindeer/ elk : any more?)
Its 2014. Time to move on. You can get 4 gigs of ram for $50.
So what?
If my office support people are still using Office 2003 (which they are, because it works sufficiently well for their letter writing and expenses spreadsheets), on a 10-year old machine, why should I go out and buy an new machine (and OS license, and Office license) for... no purpose what so fucking ever?
...
(7) The only options they have are for donations in USD, CAD or Euros. While I routinely buy USD for paying bribes, and Euros for eating while in transit, I don't actually have a bank account that operates in any of those currencies.
Nope. You (second person, plural) may live and breathe Netflix, and possibly even watch a lot of TV and movies (if that is what Netflix does ; never seen it myself), but you and your associates are not everyone.
I've been hearing about sustainable fusion all my life.
You may have been hearing about "sustainable fusion" for all of your life, but you've obviously not been letting much information penetrate into your skull if you think that it's got anything to do with the construction and continuing operation of the LHC.
OP should be praised for embarking on a serious quest for self-improvement.
Yes... but that doesn't necessarily mean that the course that he's chosen is likely to be the most effective one for his (hmmm, did TFQ specify a gender? Meh.) personal circumstances and abilities.
[Some] people can and do get smarter.
Not untrue ; but there is a corollary that other people can and do get less smart. There is no way that I can see to distinguish one case from the other from the information in TFQ. Hopefully it isn't the case, but from the information presented, there's no real way of knowing one way or the other. (There's also the trivial case of no (detectable) change, for completeness.)
The OP really needs to get some professional advice from a specialist in the "psychology of learning", and/ or "careers". It is peculiar that he's going back to full time education in his thirties, which implies that he's made a significant amount of money at something during his young adult years. So why does he so strongly feel the need for college education? There's unwritten, but probably relevant background there.
the assumption that car-cyclist collisions are the only significant kind of accident.
My last taste of cobblestones was because of a car coming round a 90degree corner (at the exit of a bridge) on my side of the road as I was approaching the bridge, forcing me into unseated cobbles and subsequently into a drystone dyke.
No actual contact with the car, who didn't even stop.
(And yes, I was using lights, as was the car. And no, I wasn't wearing a helmet - but since I was doing about walking pace when my pedals finally caught in the wall and toppled me, that's not terribly relevant. I don't wear a helmet when I'm walking either.)
Islamist hatred of the USA predates the existence of Al Quaeda by some decades. When the last Al Quaeda operative is dead and landing in installments on the landscape, there will still be Islamist hatred of the USA.
So then you kill all the rest of the Islamists.
And then you find out there are non-Islamists who hate the USA and Americans.
I suppose filters could be applied on a per pixel basis in order to make a 5 or more element R,G,B,IR,UV sensor, but the cost would be.... considerable
In theory, you're correct. In practice, for telescopy, they build sensors with a wide range of sensitivity (well characterised and stable ; probably radiation-hardened too) and deep A:D depths (8 bits for a consumer grade sensor ; 12, 14 or 16 bits for serious amateur to professional telescopy).
In front of that you mount a "filter wheel" (or several) containing the array of filters that you want to use and you take successive pictures through each filter. (Many filter wheels will have an empty slot - so you can stack several filter wheel units, for variety and/ or combination of filters.)
Which is fine, if your study object doesn't change significantly over the duration of an exposure. If you're wanting motion pictures... well that's why movie sets need big lenses (for lots of light) and bright lights (for lots of light).
Would it really be that much more than an RGB filter?
You can achieve RGB filtering by blocking your pixel array on a 2x2 grid, with one pixel unfiltered (for overall luminance), one with a cyan filter (transmitting red), one yellow filter (transmitting blue), and one magenta filter (transmitting green). A square array, for square pixels.
I you want to go up to R, G, B, IR, UV, you'd need to move up to a 3x2 array, implying that you'd probably need to make your pixels in a 2:3 rectangle (to keep the over all array square(-ish). Not too bad, I guess. But each pixel would be 2/3 of the size of the RGB version (for the same sensor dimensions and glassware), so exposures would be 3/2 as long (leading to more motion blur) or you'd need SQRT(3/2)x diameter glassware (expensive!)
And for such a small target market! Economic suicide.
This is mass-production economics, not instrumentation economics. That's why your camera can cost £100, but a camera for a telescope may be £1000. (Or for microscopes, my territory, £750 ; there are more microscopes than telescopes.)
if your phone is generating any [gamma rays] then something is horribly wrong.
Substitute "more [gamma rays] than your head" for "any [gamma rays]"?
Your phone will be generating gamma rays ; so will your head. And, let's hit below the belt, so do your balls. (Ovaries if appropriate ; or both if you've got more options than most.)
Malls are not a city centre. City centres have soul. A mall is just a big, ugly shopping centre.
You haven't lived or worked in many mining towns north of the Arctic Circle, have you? (And for sure you haven't done so south of the Antarctic Circle.)
These places are built to service the mines. They have enough facilities to make life sufficiently tolerable for the workers and their families, who choose to move there for the duration of their careers because of the increased wages and then leave.
Perhaps we could help funnel it through into the mantle,
There have been serious propositions to dispose of nuclear waste (high-level waste) in this manner by encasing it in tungsten capsules (very high melting point) and then positioning the capsules in the recently-solidified magma of a plutonic intrusion. In theory, the additional heat from the (HL) radioactive waste would allow the rock to soften, letting the capsule sink into deeper, hotter and softer rock.
The main difficult things would be (1) drilling the holes to emplace the capsules - you're well above the softening temperatures of steels, and ceramics are hard, but not tough ; (2) choosing a recently-emplaced, hot magma body which isn't going to feed into a volcano in the few hundred thousand years that the waste remains hot.
There are other problems ; the idea didn't gain much traction.
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Xenon is certainly hypnotic at surface conditions. I don't know about argon being narcotic, or hypnotic, or even hallucinogenic at any depth, but I do know that working with it at surface carries no particular hazards (I have to sit through the risk assessments and toolbox talks sometimes, though it's only tangentially involved in my work) . I've heard rumour of a diver who accidentally connected his argon bottle (for suit inflation - it's got a lower thermal conductivity than helium, and is much cheaper) in place of his helium diluent bottle on a trimix rig and got into trouble because off the viscosity of the gas mix as he descended, but no particular reports of mental effects (just suffocation!) ; the wash-up message was "don't do that", but no recommendation against using argon, which I'd have expected if it were significantly mentally affective.
Those tanks were from a "Soda Stream" fizzy-drink maker. Filled with CO2, which is why Bond died a couple of seconds after sucking on that gag.
Hydrogen-oxygen mix for really deep stuff - 400m plus IIRC. 3% O2 in hydrogen at 400m would be a PP/O2 of 1.2 bar, which is OK, but you'd have cut the O2 back for much deeper work. Shallower work, as you raised the O2, you'd need to dilute with helium to keep below the lower explosive limit of hydrogen-oxygen mixes.
Of course, at those pressures, you can't rely on your ideal gas laws being anything like accurate.
The mid-1990s tanks used IIRC a metal wear lining over a carbon-fibre epoxy pressure vessel, which made exterior inspection of the pressure vessel impossible, and therefore you couldn't get your cylinder re-certified after the initial manufacturer's certs had expired. But if you needed the volume, you accepted that the cylinder had a 3 (or 5) year life time. Of course, you almost certainly had your own compressor too, so that for air diving, that wasn't much of an issue. quite why you'd use them if you were on open-circuit air though ... I can't quite figure out.
Practical consequences : pee-valves have been routine for years ; diapers are nothing unusual (and have been routine for saturation diving for ... as long as there has been saturation diving, if not longer).
Move up to longer (multi-day) dives and you're looking at having to deal with eating and drinking underwater - the latter isn't too difficult - and also dealing with the effects of long-term immersion on the skin (greasing up all over the exposed skin, for example, or using environmentally-isolating suits as for shit-diving).
Oh, great. So, if I stop finning forwards, I lose my air supply.
Someone has really worked hard on the usability of this design concept. Not.
Which isn't to discourage you from going diving, or indeed from using closed-circuit systems where you explicitly or implicitly manage your PP/O2. But don't kid yourself about the inherent hazards of what you're doing.
What is this "ATM fee" that you allow yourself to be ripped off by?
We had that argument back in the late 1990s ; people stopped using banks that charged ATM fees, the banks lost money and changed their behaviours, and voila, the problem was gone.
Well, almost gone ; there are ATMs run by non-banking organisations that still charge fees - 2-3% of the maximum transaction, and more for smaller transactions. I sometimes use one out of spite, running the software up to the point at which I am asked if I agree to the fee, then aborting the transaction. But that's done with malice aforethought, in the intention of driving the companies into bankruptcy. I hope there are many other people who do the same.
Some migrating birds fly in 'V' formations and are highly visible. Some fly singly and are almost invisible, unless you're purposely looking for them. Some fly in irregular groups, and are of intermediate visibility.
Corresponding to these multiple migration strategies, I'd expect there to be multiple solutions to the problem of "how do I get from $HERE to $THERE with minimum energetic expense?"
These dinosaurs have been facing the changing problems of survival in a resource-constrained world for about twice the period of time and perhaps three times the number of species that mammals - humans included - have, and I'd reckon it's a safe bet that they've come up with lots of solutions.
In fact, with the exception of the relatively short migrations of gnus and some other African herbivores, and some whales ... are there any mammals that have major natural annual migrations? I'm trying to think of examples. (Caribou/ reindeer/ elk : any more?)
So what?
If my office support people are still using Office 2003 (which they are, because it works sufficiently well for their letter writing and expenses spreadsheets), on a 10-year old machine, why should I go out and buy an new machine (and OS license, and Office license) for ... no purpose what so fucking ever?
...
(7) The only options they have are for donations in USD, CAD or Euros. While I routinely buy USD for paying bribes, and Euros for eating while in transit, I don't actually have a bank account that operates in any of those currencies.
Nope. You (second person, plural) may live and breathe Netflix, and possibly even watch a lot of TV and movies (if that is what Netflix does ; never seen it myself), but you and your associates are not everyone.
You may have been hearing about "sustainable fusion" for all of your life, but you've obviously not been letting much information penetrate into your skull if you think that it's got anything to do with the construction and continuing operation of the LHC.
Yes ... but that doesn't necessarily mean that the course that he's chosen is likely to be the most effective one for his (hmmm, did TFQ specify a gender? Meh.) personal circumstances and abilities.
Not untrue ; but there is a corollary that other people can and do get less smart. There is no way that I can see to distinguish one case from the other from the information in TFQ. Hopefully it isn't the case, but from the information presented, there's no real way of knowing one way or the other. (There's also the trivial case of no (detectable) change, for completeness.)
The OP really needs to get some professional advice from a specialist in the "psychology of learning", and/ or "careers". It is peculiar that he's going back to full time education in his thirties, which implies that he's made a significant amount of money at something during his young adult years. So why does he so strongly feel the need for college education? There's unwritten, but probably relevant background there.
Nope, it's not wrong.
My last taste of cobblestones was because of a car coming round a 90degree corner (at the exit of a bridge) on my side of the road as I was approaching the bridge, forcing me into unseated cobbles and subsequently into a drystone dyke.
No actual contact with the car, who didn't even stop.
(And yes, I was using lights, as was the car. And no, I wasn't wearing a helmet - but since I was doing about walking pace when my pedals finally caught in the wall and toppled me, that's not terribly relevant. I don't wear a helmet when I'm walking either.)
Islamist hatred of the USA predates the existence of Al Quaeda by some decades. When the last Al Quaeda operative is dead and landing in installments on the landscape, there will still be Islamist hatred of the USA.
So then you kill all the rest of the Islamists.
And then you find out there are non-Islamists who hate the USA and Americans.
Have a nice rest of your life.
In theory, you're correct. In practice, for telescopy, they build sensors with a wide range of sensitivity (well characterised and stable ; probably radiation-hardened too) and deep A:D depths (8 bits for a consumer grade sensor ; 12, 14 or 16 bits for serious amateur to professional telescopy). In front of that you mount a "filter wheel" (or several) containing the array of filters that you want to use and you take successive pictures through each filter. (Many filter wheels will have an empty slot - so you can stack several filter wheel units, for variety and/ or combination of filters.)
Which is fine, if your study object doesn't change significantly over the duration of an exposure. If you're wanting motion pictures ... well that's why movie sets need big lenses (for lots of light) and bright lights (for lots of light).
You can achieve RGB filtering by blocking your pixel array on a 2x2 grid, with one pixel unfiltered (for overall luminance), one with a cyan filter (transmitting red), one yellow filter (transmitting blue), and one magenta filter (transmitting green). A square array, for square pixels.
I you want to go up to R, G, B, IR, UV, you'd need to move up to a 3x2 array, implying that you'd probably need to make your pixels in a 2:3 rectangle (to keep the over all array square(-ish). Not too bad, I guess. But each pixel would be 2/3 of the size of the RGB version (for the same sensor dimensions and glassware), so exposures would be 3/2 as long (leading to more motion blur) or you'd need SQRT(3/2)x diameter glassware (expensive!)
And for such a small target market! Economic suicide.
This is mass-production economics, not instrumentation economics. That's why your camera can cost £100, but a camera for a telescope may be £1000. (Or for microscopes, my territory, £750 ; there are more microscopes than telescopes.)
Substitute "more [gamma rays] than your head" for "any [gamma rays]"? Your phone will be generating gamma rays ; so will your head. And, let's hit below the belt, so do your balls. (Ovaries if appropriate ; or both if you've got more options than most.)
You mean the debate that ended in the early 1990s (for mobile phones), in the 1970s (for power lines) and the 1930s (for radium compounds)?
Who resuscitated this old corpse again?
You haven't lived or worked in many mining towns north of the Arctic Circle, have you? (And for sure you haven't done so south of the Antarctic Circle.)
These places are built to service the mines. They have enough facilities to make life sufficiently tolerable for the workers and their families, who choose to move there for the duration of their careers because of the increased wages and then leave.
There have been serious propositions to dispose of nuclear waste (high-level waste) in this manner by encasing it in tungsten capsules (very high melting point) and then positioning the capsules in the recently-solidified magma of a plutonic intrusion. In theory, the additional heat from the (HL) radioactive waste would allow the rock to soften, letting the capsule sink into deeper, hotter and softer rock.
The main difficult things would be (1) drilling the holes to emplace the capsules - you're well above the softening temperatures of steels, and ceramics are hard, but not tough ; (2) choosing a recently-emplaced, hot magma body which isn't going to feed into a volcano in the few hundred thousand years that the waste remains hot.
There are other problems ; the idea didn't gain much traction.
P.boisei survived for around (2.8-1.4 ~=) 1.4 million years ; "Anatomically Modern Humans" have been around for about one tenth of that, if not less.
Who were you calling a too-specialised non-survivor?
Sounds to me like a fusion power plant. A staple of science fiction, if not really technologically manageable at the moment.