The thermal mass of a brick wall is high enough and the thermal conductivity low enough that you'd need to be stationary for some time, several seconds?, to be detectable. Longer if the central heating is on and set high.
Which might explain why I can't recall seeing video footage of police using such things from the UK. It possibly happens, but with the overwhelming majority of housing being built with double walls of brick and "breeze" block ("cinder block" in US terminology) with foam insulation between the two layers, AND "drywall" on the inside, that's a lot of inertia and insulation for a relatively weak signal (~250K vs ~235K) to get past. Tactically, your uncertainties are going to be high enough that you're still going to have to go in through the door (and/ or windows) mob-handed, so what has your thermal camera actually achieved.
Yes, the fire service do use thermal cameras. To look for injured people AFTER the fire is extinguished and is being damped down. And they do it by scanning around each room in turn, looking for injured people under (wet, cooled) debris. Probably similar considerations there too, but the need for speed to get people to treatment justifies the equipment. If there's active fire in an area where there are missing people, the priority is to extinguish the fire.
And on that point, we'll have to agree to differ. I hope that you enjoy having the proctors rip you off your (person of reproductively-appropriate-anatomy) once the gametes have transferred, because having that extra wiggle is just for fun, and banned in your mindset.
Actually... considering that you use the word "period", I take it that you only fuck (penetrative or penetrated, I think you're still ambiguous) during the couple of days of maximum fertility. Otherwise, you're like evil, y'know.
"Every Sperm is sacred / Every Sperm is good.
Masturbation must be a sin (in your book. But it's hardly Original.
Trust me on this - if you saw sand burning in the sense that I was meaning, you would beat your "personal best" for the standing-start-5km run. Regardless of the rampant diarrhoea. Justified diarrhoea,but diarrhoea none the less.
If you don't like living in America, then stop paying them taxes and leave. If you've got good skills, you'll be welcome. (He says, in a hotel 6000km from home, on contract to a multinational, in the early stages of an Apollo-scale programme ; the world is a big place.)
I don't absolutely oppose oppose the use of drones. I've had friends involved in mountain rescue where the SAR helicopter has become a second incident, as an example. It's not intrinsically an evil technology (to quote the rat-poison designers who invented Zyclon-B). But for sure there are some severely dodgy uses to which it is being put (to quote the inventor of the rifled gun-barrel, metaphorically.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU! [bit.ly]
Nice.sig. Slip a few daggers in there too, whydontcha?
That's a more useful response. Which works if "drywall" is what you think of as a wall. That constitutes about 1/3 of the walls in my house, and it's not what I think of as a wall. It is, after all, something you can fight your way through with boots and/ or furniture given enough encouragement.
If they decide to use their own drones outside the boundaries of international law
I am interested in this thing called "international law" and am wondering how, since it doesn't seem to apply to the United States, any other country would give a shit about it if the United States refers to it while masturbating onto the biscuit.
Why should I plan, do groundwork? We don't have to!
So... you have never, ever, ever had a piece of technology stop working on you because the batteries have gone flat?
When I had a GPS, for interest, in the early 2000s, I was interested in the navigation aspects, and also in the barometer in the device that I brought as a tool for understanding weather trends. But for the barometer to work as a barograph, the device needed to be powered up continuously. The internal batteries would last - when I put in a set of the best of the then-new NiMHs available - for about 8 hours. So at least once during a day in the saddle, I'd have to connect up the external battery pack and calbe (doubling the weight and bulk that I had to carry), then plug in the replacement internal batteries, then remove and pack away the external battery pack and cable (because that broke the device's weatherproofing, which you don't want to do on the handlebars. I'd also have to change batteries in the middle of then night, too. Any trip more than 4 battery changes long and I carried more weight and bulk of batteries than I did of the GPS itself.
Basically, this was technology designed for use within seconds of walk from a power source. So when the burglars took it a couple of years later, I didn't bother to replace it. I've not seen a device that doesn't have that fundamental problem (and I do look). So, am I a Luddite, or am I someone who wants a device that doesn't exist, and which for perfectly understandable marketing reasons, isn't going to exist unless I make it myself.
I see no reason to make one for myself since I've got technologies that hugely outperform it (for the tasks that I need) for a vastly lower outlay, and which can survive being dropped into rivers and don't need their batteries changing more than once a month or so. (That's a map, a compass, and a headtorch.)
Lots of things have worked for centuries, doesn't mean we can't do them better.
GPSs do different thing than maps and compasses. But that doesn't make them better than map and compass for the things that map and compass do.
Trying to rally the public with "if you get a scrape you will die" is pretty much fear mongering. And fear mongers can fuck right off.
I think that you should read up on the development history of penicillin, even though you're an anonymous coward.
The second patient ever treated with penicillin had this case history:
With the help of Charles Fletcher, a young doctor at the Radcliffe Infirmary, on 12 February 1941, Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old policeman, became the first patient to be treated with penicillin. He had scratched his face on a rose bush, the wound had become infected and the infection had spread. Fletcher injected him with penicillin regularly over four days, and within 24 hours he was greatly improved.
Remember - this was a patient who was considered so likely to die from his disease that giving him the second ever human dose of penicillin. The treatment was considered his only realistic chance of surviving (and he did survive, for 2 weeks, until they ran out of supplies.)
Oh, oh, oh, it's time for one of my favourite web pages of all time!
You say
Sand itself burns as well, becoming mostly ash in a complex chemical reaction.
... and you're obviously confusing burning the oil that is in the pore spaces between the sand grains. Don't worry, it's a common confusion. I deal with it on a weekly basis because I'm an oil geologist by trade.
But when I'm talking about "burning sand", I'm talking about chemicals that you can pour onto some sand - clean sand, that you could melt to make clear window glass - which will burn it, make it red hot, and produce clouds of less energetic chemicals which will dissolve the skin, lungs, bodies and bones of someone unlucky enough to be nearby.
In a comment to my post on putting out fires last week, one commenter mentioned the utility of the good old sand bucket, and wondered if there was anything that would go on to set the sand on fire. Thanks to a note from reader Robert L., I can report that there is indeed such a reagent: chlorine trifluoride.
If you have the remains of school chemistry hiding in the back of your memory, I heartily recommend the page. It will bring tears of... something.. to your eyes. Which isn't good if there's phosphorous pentoxide dust in the air, as the resulting acid will eat your eyeballs. Painfully.
itâ(TM)ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile
I do not want kids now and never in my whole life have I ever wanted kids. Nor do I expect to ever change that opinion. But having said that, I can still answer your next question.
why are they having sex?
Because fucking is fun. (Incidentally, my significant-other-of-the-other-anatomy likes me to fuck her up the arse, which is a fine example of a heterosexual non-reproductively-targeted sexual activity. And great fun for both of us.)
Are they criminally ignorant?
Neither of us are ignorant nor criminal. Despite what you seem to think.
Your division of the world implies that you think that the only reason for having sex is to get pregnant, and that anyone who has sex for any other reason is a criminal.
It must be real fun in your house with the thermometers and other paraphernalia. Do you at least swing the female half of the couple from the chandelier to encourage the cum to soak into her cervix. Or is it a (pre-warmed) turkey baster all the way? To avoid having any of that evil "fun".
I would suggest that such aliens have something better than radio to use.
You know, I see that sort of aspiration so often, particularly when SETI-like topics come around.
Pardon me for being a boring old fart of a scientist, drilling holes in the ground to try to find fuel to put into next decade's cars. But where in the first (or most-recent) dozen decimal places of our understanding of the 4 forces of physics are these wonderful new capabilities? Laser communications - SETI searches getting started? High frequencies... the bands that are being searched in are the ones with relatively low absorbtion, because in the spectral regions of high absorbance, signals don't travel very far. (Do you use your flash light to look through air at things, or to look through walls for things on the other side?)
Sorry - I love my SF. But this isn't about SF wish fulfilment, this is about science.
Leaking gas lines, oil/fluid leaks dripping on to cataclysmic converters
That caught me too, but there's no point in talking to an AC.
Now, I admit to giving approximately 2/3 of a poor shit about cars, but I do have a reasonably good idea of how they generally go together. And of the small number that I've looked at the underside of, the large boxes in the exhaust system, which include the catalytic converter and muffler (I forget the Americese - silencer?), they've all been recessed into the floor panels, with the fuel line running forwards separately in a different recess. So, short of someone bodging up a home made fuel line in the engine bay, how the fuck is the fuel going to get into a position to leak onto the converter. Even supposing that the exterior gets hot enough to reach the ignition point of the fuel.
My bullshit detector is flashing amber on this one. It's a bit of an obvious design flaw which I would have expected to go out with 1960s model-T death traps. Post Nader, y'know.
That said, my first car was a 1960s one. A Volvo 'Amazon' 122S : pretty much the first production car world wide with the then-revolutionary seat belts. Not that that is why I brought it though.
A monitoring station is just a fixed GLONASS receiver with a data connection. It receives position information and transmits it back to HQ, where a map of corrections for atmospheric effects is constructed [sdcm.ru] and corrections are sent out via the satellites. Since when do you need permission for a receiver?
I'm not so sure that the corrections are for atmospherics. I'd have thought it more likely to check o nthe ephemeris of the satellite (and that data is sent up to the satellites, with all the satellites broadcasting the ephimerides of the entire constellation at regular intervals). Atmospherics information changes on a minute by minute to hour by hour basis, so there's not a lot of point broadcasting it much more than the few hundred kilometres over which it is valid.
But yes, since when do you need permission for a receiver? Cheap and basic GLONASS receiver, connected to a cheap mobile phone on a PAYG contract. Put it in the attic of the small guest house you stay in on your road trip and don't care if it stops signalling.
There are extremophiles everywhere if you go deep enough.
Arguable (hint ; I'm a geologist, and I do follow this work) but I'll grant you the supposition. The problem is to get this stuff to an upwards escape velocity (allowing some leeway for atmospheric drag) without sterilizing it first. For a microbe that is stable at 114degC (the last record-breaking temperature I heard of for metabolism) and 30MPa confining pressure, the problem is less one of getting it to escape velocity (plus...) without overcooking it, but of getting it from 30MPa confining pressure to zero without rupturing every cell.
Hmmm, I have a thought experiment in mind, which I could potentially perform without buying any (new) fancy kit. I vent one of my 300bar diving gas bottles to atmosphere, pour a litre of home brew beer-making kit into the 7l bottle, then equalise ("decant") between that and my 12l bottle. That would, I calculate, give balanced bottles at 189.84 bar. Take the 12l bottle down to the shop for a refill, and decant again for 259.42 bar. Third decant, 285 bar. 6th decant takes it to over 299 bar, assuming that I really get 300bar fills (I don't; rarely better than 270bar).
Then, after slowly ramping the pressure over several days, I vent the pressure over a period of seconds. Drain the brew off, and see if the bugs have survived. Anyway ; that's a doable experiment. Except that I'd have to pay to have the tank serviced afterwards.
Would the bugs survive? Maybe. But that is just one aspect of the things that these putative panspermia microbes would have to survive.
Endoliths are quite tough organisms, well adapted to cold and water stress. They avoid having to handle UV radiation by burrowing into intergranular pore spaces in the rocks. So by definition they are in pressure communication with the atmosphere (from which they acquire CO2 and water). That doesn't mean that they're well adapted to surviving against vacuum, and they have precisely one generation and probably only a few hours to get it right first time.
I think panspermia is an interesting idea, but it is intellectually unsatisfying because all it does is move the hard question - of the origin of life from non-life - from here to somewhere else. It doesn't actually answer the question, any more than a loan from a loan shark solves the problem of too much spending and not enough income.
Maybe not. Europa is believed to have an ice layer between 10 and 30 km thick. It is unlikely that an impact by a 3m rock would penetrate more than 100m or so
The working rule of thumb for impacts at interplanetary speeds is that your impactor will dig an initial crater of about 10 times it's own diameter (and of surface diameter around 100 times it's own diameter), being vaporised in the process, and the large majority of the impactor then being ejected along with most of the impact site.
For your 3m meteorite, that's an initial crater of 30m deep, followed by flash sterilisation and ejection back into space as a silicate vapour with small amounts of water, carbon oxides and some ammonia. Touch of phosphoric acid. Snifter of sulphuric.
You need an impact cushioning system at the receiving end, i.e. an atmosphere. Which Europa (and all of the other Galilean satellites, doesn't have. (OK ; a weak pass for Io ; a few ten thousandths of a bar isn't enough though.)
To mis-quote Walter Matthau on the subject of killing your wife, "Splat!" (I think he used more exclamation marks.)
Since the NSA has backdoored encryption schemes in the past, how can Yahoo determine if the scheme they implement is actually going to prevent the NSA from decrypting it?
Use multiple encryption schemes from different providers, and shuffle them around intermittently. So that one week the NSA can decrypt the data stream to reveal material that has been encrypted by a Russian system, but the next week they get something that has been encrypted by a Chinese system. And the same goes for the Russians at their tap and the Chinese at their tap.
Unless, of course, all of the spooks can seamlessly read all of the other spook's data. At which point, why the fuck are we paying these people anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
Which might explain why I can't recall seeing video footage of police using such things from the UK. It possibly happens, but with the overwhelming majority of housing being built with double walls of brick and "breeze" block ("cinder block" in US terminology) with foam insulation between the two layers, AND "drywall" on the inside, that's a lot of inertia and insulation for a relatively weak signal (~250K vs ~235K) to get past. Tactically, your uncertainties are going to be high enough that you're still going to have to go in through the door (and/ or windows) mob-handed, so what has your thermal camera actually achieved.
Yes, the fire service do use thermal cameras. To look for injured people AFTER the fire is extinguished and is being damped down. And they do it by scanning around each room in turn, looking for injured people under (wet, cooled) debris. Probably similar considerations there too, but the need for speed to get people to treatment justifies the equipment. If there's active fire in an area where there are missing people, the priority is to extinguish the fire.
Masturbation must be a sin (in your book. But it's hardly Original.
Yay! Spelled shitting-your-pants correctly!
If you don't like living in America, then stop paying them taxes and leave. If you've got good skills, you'll be welcome. (He says, in a hotel 6000km from home, on contract to a multinational, in the early stages of an Apollo-scale programme ; the world is a big place.)
I don't absolutely oppose oppose the use of drones. I've had friends involved in mountain rescue where the SAR helicopter has become a second incident, as an example. It's not intrinsically an evil technology (to quote the rat-poison designers who invented Zyclon-B). But for sure there are some severely dodgy uses to which it is being put (to quote the inventor of the rifled gun-barrel, metaphorically.
Nice .sig. Slip a few daggers in there too, whydontcha?
That's a more useful response. Which works if "drywall" is what you think of as a wall. That constitutes about 1/3 of the walls in my house, and it's not what I think of as a wall. It is, after all, something you can fight your way through with boots and/ or furniture given enough encouragement.
That is an answer not significantly different to "God". i.e. No use what so ever.
I am interested in this thing called "international law" and am wondering how, since it doesn't seem to apply to the United States, any other country would give a shit about it if the United States refers to it while masturbating onto the biscuit.
So ... you have never, ever, ever had a piece of technology stop working on you because the batteries have gone flat?
When I had a GPS, for interest, in the early 2000s, I was interested in the navigation aspects, and also in the barometer in the device that I brought as a tool for understanding weather trends. But for the barometer to work as a barograph, the device needed to be powered up continuously. The internal batteries would last - when I put in a set of the best of the then-new NiMHs available - for about 8 hours. So at least once during a day in the saddle, I'd have to connect up the external battery pack and calbe (doubling the weight and bulk that I had to carry), then plug in the replacement internal batteries, then remove and pack away the external battery pack and cable (because that broke the device's weatherproofing, which you don't want to do on the handlebars. I'd also have to change batteries in the middle of then night, too. Any trip more than 4 battery changes long and I carried more weight and bulk of batteries than I did of the GPS itself.
Basically, this was technology designed for use within seconds of walk from a power source. So when the burglars took it a couple of years later, I didn't bother to replace it. I've not seen a device that doesn't have that fundamental problem (and I do look). So, am I a Luddite, or am I someone who wants a device that doesn't exist, and which for perfectly understandable marketing reasons, isn't going to exist unless I make it myself.
I see no reason to make one for myself since I've got technologies that hugely outperform it (for the tasks that I need) for a vastly lower outlay, and which can survive being dropped into rivers and don't need their batteries changing more than once a month or so. (That's a map, a compass, and a headtorch.)
GPSs do different thing than maps and compasses. But that doesn't make them better than map and compass for the things that map and compass do.
I think that you should read up on the development history of penicillin, even though you're an anonymous coward.
The second patient ever treated with penicillin had this case history :
Remember - this was a patient who was considered so likely to die from his disease that giving him the second ever human dose of penicillin. The treatment was considered his only realistic chance of surviving (and he did survive, for 2 weeks, until they ran out of supplies.)
By the way, he was dieing hard, not dieing easy.
You say
... and you're obviously confusing burning the oil that is in the pore spaces between the sand grains. Don't worry, it's a common confusion. I deal with it on a weekly basis because I'm an oil geologist by trade.
But when I'm talking about "burning sand", I'm talking about chemicals that you can pour onto some sand - clean sand, that you could melt to make clear window glass - which will burn it, make it red hot, and produce clouds of less energetic chemicals which will dissolve the skin, lungs, bodies and bones of someone unlucky enough to be nearby.
If you have the remains of school chemistry hiding in the back of your memory, I heartily recommend the page. It will bring tears of ... something .. to your eyes. Which isn't good if there's phosphorous pentoxide dust in the air, as the resulting acid will eat your eyeballs. Painfully.
Joy!
I do not want kids now and never in my whole life have I ever wanted kids. Nor do I expect to ever change that opinion. But having said that, I can still answer your next question.
Because fucking is fun. (Incidentally, my significant-other-of-the-other-anatomy likes me to fuck her up the arse, which is a fine example of a heterosexual non-reproductively-targeted sexual activity. And great fun for both of us.)
Neither of us are ignorant nor criminal. Despite what you seem to think.
Your division of the world implies that you think that the only reason for having sex is to get pregnant, and that anyone who has sex for any other reason is a criminal.
It must be real fun in your house with the thermometers and other paraphernalia. Do you at least swing the female half of the couple from the chandelier to encourage the cum to soak into her cervix. Or is it a (pre-warmed) turkey baster all the way? To avoid having any of that evil "fun".
You know, I see that sort of aspiration so often, particularly when SETI-like topics come around.
Pardon me for being a boring old fart of a scientist, drilling holes in the ground to try to find fuel to put into next decade's cars. But where in the first (or most-recent) dozen decimal places of our understanding of the 4 forces of physics are these wonderful new capabilities? Laser communications - SETI searches getting started? High frequencies ... the bands that are being searched in are the ones with relatively low absorbtion, because in the spectral regions of high absorbance, signals don't travel very far. (Do you use your flash light to look through air at things, or to look through walls for things on the other side?)
Sorry - I love my SF. But this isn't about SF wish fulfilment, this is about science.
Errr, this is an item described as a TV. So why is it connected to the Internet?
Or am I falling behind the times with TVs? I thought you just sent them a video signal and they turned it into pictures (moving or not).
That caught me too, but there's no point in talking to an AC.
Now, I admit to giving approximately 2/3 of a poor shit about cars, but I do have a reasonably good idea of how they generally go together. And of the small number that I've looked at the underside of, the large boxes in the exhaust system, which include the catalytic converter and muffler (I forget the Americese - silencer?), they've all been recessed into the floor panels, with the fuel line running forwards separately in a different recess. So, short of someone bodging up a home made fuel line in the engine bay, how the fuck is the fuel going to get into a position to leak onto the converter. Even supposing that the exterior gets hot enough to reach the ignition point of the fuel.
My bullshit detector is flashing amber on this one. It's a bit of an obvious design flaw which I would have expected to go out with 1960s model-T death traps. Post Nader, y'know.
That said, my first car was a 1960s one. A Volvo 'Amazon' 122S : pretty much the first production car world wide with the then-revolutionary seat belts. Not that that is why I brought it though.
Tremendously effective. No one has been legally killed in a mall, cinema or school since they were introduced.
Richelieu was an optimist.
He admitted to the possibility of an honest man existing, for his agents to find, get handwriting from, and then have hung.
Modern law enforcement doesn't really believe in the possibility of people not being "perps" in some form.
Would Sir like some hashish to go with his next pipe of opium?
The gentleman from Porlock is due soon. [/end Jeeves]
I'm not so sure that the corrections are for atmospherics. I'd have thought it more likely to check o nthe ephemeris of the satellite (and that data is sent up to the satellites, with all the satellites broadcasting the ephimerides of the entire constellation at regular intervals). Atmospherics information changes on a minute by minute to hour by hour basis, so there's not a lot of point broadcasting it much more than the few hundred kilometres over which it is valid.
But yes, since when do you need permission for a receiver? Cheap and basic GLONASS receiver, connected to a cheap mobile phone on a PAYG contract. Put it in the attic of the small guest house you stay in on your road trip and don't care if it stops signalling.
Arguable (hint ; I'm a geologist, and I do follow this work) but I'll grant you the supposition. The problem is to get this stuff to an upwards escape velocity (allowing some leeway for atmospheric drag) without sterilizing it first. For a microbe that is stable at 114degC (the last record-breaking temperature I heard of for metabolism) and 30MPa confining pressure, the problem is less one of getting it to escape velocity (plus...) without overcooking it, but of getting it from 30MPa confining pressure to zero without rupturing every cell.
Hmmm, I have a thought experiment in mind, which I could potentially perform without buying any (new) fancy kit. I vent one of my 300bar diving gas bottles to atmosphere, pour a litre of home brew beer-making kit into the 7l bottle, then equalise ("decant") between that and my 12l bottle. That would, I calculate, give balanced bottles at 189.84 bar. Take the 12l bottle down to the shop for a refill, and decant again for 259.42 bar. Third decant, 285 bar. 6th decant takes it to over 299 bar, assuming that I really get 300bar fills (I don't; rarely better than 270bar).
Then, after slowly ramping the pressure over several days, I vent the pressure over a period of seconds. Drain the brew off, and see if the bugs have survived. Anyway ; that's a doable experiment. Except that I'd have to pay to have the tank serviced afterwards.
Would the bugs survive? Maybe. But that is just one aspect of the things that these putative panspermia microbes would have to survive.
Endoliths are quite tough organisms, well adapted to cold and water stress. They avoid having to handle UV radiation by burrowing into intergranular pore spaces in the rocks. So by definition they are in pressure communication with the atmosphere (from which they acquire CO2 and water). That doesn't mean that they're well adapted to surviving against vacuum, and they have precisely one generation and probably only a few hours to get it right first time.
I think panspermia is an interesting idea, but it is intellectually unsatisfying because all it does is move the hard question - of the origin of life from non-life - from here to somewhere else. It doesn't actually answer the question, any more than a loan from a loan shark solves the problem of too much spending and not enough income.
The working rule of thumb for impacts at interplanetary speeds is that your impactor will dig an initial crater of about 10 times it's own diameter (and of surface diameter around 100 times it's own diameter), being vaporised in the process, and the large majority of the impactor then being ejected along with most of the impact site.
For your 3m meteorite, that's an initial crater of 30m deep, followed by flash sterilisation and ejection back into space as a silicate vapour with small amounts of water, carbon oxides and some ammonia. Touch of phosphoric acid. Snifter of sulphuric.
You need an impact cushioning system at the receiving end, i.e. an atmosphere. Which Europa (and all of the other Galilean satellites, doesn't have. (OK ; a weak pass for Io ; a few ten thousandths of a bar isn't enough though.)
To mis-quote Walter Matthau on the subject of killing your wife, "Splat!" (I think he used more exclamation marks.)
... particularly if those employees are foreign nationals (from an American perspective) living abroad under their native jurisdiction.
Which is where the Assange question suddenly veers back into the spotlight.
Use multiple encryption schemes from different providers, and shuffle them around intermittently. So that one week the NSA can decrypt the data stream to reveal material that has been encrypted by a Russian system, but the next week they get something that has been encrypted by a Chinese system. And the same goes for the Russians at their tap and the Chinese at their tap.
Unless, of course, all of the spooks can seamlessly read all of the other spook's data. At which point, why the fuck are we paying these people anyway?
Just a second while I get my popcorn. This is going to be good.
How did this thread accumulate hundreds of replies and leave this window open?