Our successors not realizing the media contain prtentially valuable recorded information early on, resulting in the media all being destroyed long before the successors' technology is up to decoding them.
That is why the proposed data form consists of QR codes visible to the naked eye, each pixel of which is composed of a QR code readable with an optical microscope, each pixel of which QR code is composed of a QR code readable with an electron microscope... (you may be able to fit several levels of microscopy in there).
So, as the putative reading species improves their technology (potentially with information from the already-decoded level), new levels of data become visible.
Haven't you heard? When aliens finally stumble upon the Voyager Golden Record, it will point them here
For a few thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years; possibly a million years or two. Not very long.
The Sun's position is described in relation to 14 pulsars, each identified by their rotation frequency. The rotation frequency of each should remain stable for a significant while longer, but you should note that the Sun is more-or-less in the equatorial plane of all of them. That isn't going to be the case for J.Random Alien from Somewhere Else. Also, the Sun is moving relative to all of those pulsars, and they're moving relative to each other.
I don't know what the useful time scale of that map is, but it's certain to be only a small fraction of a rotation around the galactic core - which is ~200Myr. A couple of Myr is credible, but I wouldn't believe a couple of tens of Myr.
There was a bigger bubonic plague outbreak in the 7th century in Constantinople.
The Justinian Plague was a big one, no doubt about that. What it's causative organism was is rather less clear. Bubonic Plague has certainly been put in the frame, but I don't think that the case has been closed.
Oh, sorry, I see that the case has been pretty much nailed shut in the last few years. I withdraw my objection.
^ Wiechmann I, Grupe G. Detection of Yersinia pestis DNA in two early medieval skeletal finds from Aschheim (Upper Bavaria, 6th century A.D.).Am J Phys Anthropol. 2005 Jan;126(1):48-55
^Harbeck, Michaela; Seifert, Lisa; HÃnsch, Stephanie; Wagner, David M.; Birdsell, Dawn; Parise, Katy L.; Wiechmann, Ingrid; Grupe, Gisela; Thomas, Astrid; Keim, P; ZÃller, L; Bramanti, B; Riehm, JM; Scholz, HC (2013). "Yersinia pestis DNA from Skeletal Remains from the 6th Century AD Reveals Insights into Justinianic Plague". In Besansky, Nora J. PLoS Pathogens 9 (5): e1003349. doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1003349. PMC 3642051. PMID 23658525.
In a way, that's a relief ; if we know what caused that plague, then that's one fewer nasty pathogen to worry about.
Speaking as a geologist, and thus probably somewhat better acquainted with the idea of "Deep time" than many people here, the question of format stability was what occurred to me too.
In a billion years, locally, we've had 4 Himalayan-scale mountain ranges built up and ground back down to sea level.
[prettiest flight] for me was on some kind of prop flying low in Zambia, to Lusaka.
On an Embraer-something, from Port Gentil to Rabi, last month.
Lovely view of giraffes.
Elephants approaching the runway.
Most memorable ride for me was
[...] losing one of the engines when coming in to land ; pilots decided to try to dive away from crashing through the helideck, and missed the deck with the rotors by about a metre. The pilots managed to re-start the engine before we hit the sea, and pulled out of the dive without getting the wheels wet. Just. We circled and re-tried the landing and got in. Incident investigation never did find a reason for the shutdown.
I've not had to swim home, yet, in nearly 30 years, but I accept it as a near inevitability.
Keep in mind that there are a bunch of people who fly regularly who get a larger lifetime dose of internal ionizing particles from increased exposure due to flying than they would from ingesting or breathing small amounts of dirt from Fukushima.
Some people who regularly fly "over the pole" (e.g. flight crew who fly UK to Japan on a daily basis) are already approaching the level of radiation dose which would classify them as "radiation workers."
I don't work with artificial radiation sources myself, but the NORM ("Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material) that I do work with regularly (Kimmeridge Clay and other "black shales" ; mozonite- and thorite-rich storm-winnowed sands ; "pipe scale" from inside oil drilling equipment) can have quite hight readings too. But those readings are not as high as the background radiation I get from living in "the Granite City", of around 2200micro-sieverts. That's substantially higher than the average for a UK city, and approaches the background levels for Americans (because of the higher use of medical scans in the US).
Radiation is a real issue - the amount of paperwork you have to go through if you lose a source is something you don't want to experience - but that doesn't of itself justify having a fit of the screaming ab-dabs over it.
Out of the 10 apartments I've lived in, only one had definitely been decorated by a man, because I did it myself. All the rest had the same decor when I left as they'd had when I arrived, and generally showed signs of not having been decorated for years or decades previously. So the default series of assumptions would be (1) no-one decorated the cave, within living memory, followed by (2) some woman in the distant past decorated the cave ; and (3) some guy decorated the cave in the distant past, under the orders of some woman.
I don't count the times the wife has nagged me into decorating the house. That's me doing labouring under her direction, and her repeated asking my opinion until I give her the answer that she wants to hear.
[images] such as the ones generated by MRIs when there is insufficient time to complete a scan.
(my emphasis)
So, you're in one of two situations : you've got an acute problem - suffocation, massive bleeding, something really, really time-critical - and if they don't stop the MRI now and do something else now, then you're dead meat ; or, there has been some mechanical or financial issue with the machinery and someone is trying to save money by not re-doing the scan. In the one case, you've got a choice between a perfect MRI of a corpse, or an imperfect MRI of someone who's alive. In the other case, well,someone, somewhere is playing with your life for their financial gain. Do you suffer under some sort of capitalist healthcare system there or something equally barbaric? (I am of course writing from a handful of miles away from where MRI was developed, under a socialized healthcare system. I used to ice climb with people who worked on the development.)
I've never heard of a brain tumour where taking an extra hour to get a better scan would be life-critical. An extra week, yes that can be an issue. But an hour ; n/a.
No, it's a country on the SW corner of the Caspian Sea, bordering with Iran, Georgia (Stalin's one, not Carter's) and several of the troublesome 'Stans of southern Russia. Cool winter climate, but I can't speak for the summer climate. And some of the most beautiful women in the world, IMHO ; they've a lovely mix of European and Asian features.
Totally unsurprised by the vote rigging. It's a very 'Patrician' democracy : one man, one vote and Aliyev is The Man and it's HIS vote. I do know how glad I am to visit there rather than live there. I also know that there are much worse places in the world.
Israel may be exporting a lot of brains to USA, but they are also importing a lot from elsewhere. [...] Of the four persons I personally worked with, three were originally born in Soviet Union and the fourth had immigrated form Australia.
I certainly heard more Russian being spoken in Herzilya than Hebrew. Then again, I can understand some Russian, unlike Hebrew, so maybe there was a perception bias too.
At the very least, it's proof that the problems associated with fusion power are solvable.
Proof positive that the problems of exceeding break-even in as fusion powered system shines down out of the sky 24 hours a day, every day of the year. The question of whether such performance can be achieved at human-manageable scales is a much more interesting, and currently unresolved, question.
(Yes, I do mean 24 hours a day ; some stars are closer than others, but they're all fusion powered.)
Filtration and centrifugation will separate part of your mixture on the basis of physical properties, specifically their density. Density does not cleanly distinguish between the nice stuff and the nasty stuff. If it did, re-processing fuel would be a doddle. The rotting tanks at Hanford, and the slime pits at Sellafield/ Calder Hall/ Seascale / Seafield (whatever it's name is this year) and I'm sure something horrible in the French re-processing plant all suggest that re-processing is not actually a doddle.
That's assuming that the person really was convicted of the crime and the picture was officially released or otherwise searchable through traditional means.
TFS specifically states that it's about arrestees. People who have been arrested, and possibly charged, but not yet tried and certainly not yet convicted.
I believe that America has a system called "the courts" where the process of trial and sometimes conviction occur. That's not the police's department. Literally.
Because the last time the entire earth has all the water as ice (snowball earth)
I've never heard a serious scientist proposing that the "Snowball Earth" events froze all the water on the planet. Typical scenarios under discussion propose a kilometre or so of ice floating on top of the liquid ocean. That would leave about 2.6km of water in the average part of the ocean (assuming the same volume of water as today, and the same volume of continental crust floating on mantle of the same density ; the latter assumptions are a little bit unsure, as temperature regimes have probably changed slightly , and continental crust is probably accumulative)
What makes the climate qualitatively different in a Snowball Earth situation is that the ice covers essentially the entire surface of the ocean, from pole to equator. If such a situation persists for any significant period of time (a few hundreds of thousands of years), then the severely reduced evaporation from the (ice-covered) ocean would reduce the amount of water transport onto land, so land ice would decline substantially.
I position the pointer, then start to type with both hands reasonably used. (No, I'm not a fully-trained touch typist ; but I did get more training than around 90% of my gender-generation group.) When I need to re-position the pointer, I switch modes from 'typing' to 'mousing' for the couple of seconds until I go back to being productive.
I use left-Ctrl and left-Alt as left-Ctrl and left-Alt ; I've not assigned uses for right-Ctrl and right-Alt(Gr). That silly key with the menu on it, which brings up the context menu is rather the most used, and has no left-key equivalent. There's a key with a wavy flag on the left that doesn't nothing detectable ; maybe I'll assign that to duplicate the "menu" key.
The annoying thing is that every other computer I work with during a day will have a different configuration of keyboards. You can't even rely on two consecutive systems being configured for the same language or character set.
'At a red light, you're still driving, according to the law. You're on a roadway, behind (the wheel of) a car, in charge of it, with a vehicle in drive,'
Ok, I'm probably going to expose the fact that I've never actually been taught how to drive an automatic (just thrown behind the wheel of one of the rare beasts and told "it's an automatic ; any idiot can drive it!"), but aren't you meant to put your vehicle into "Neutral" or "Park" when you're stopped for more than a few seconds. If you don't, you're going to burn out one of the several clutches in the transmission earlier than you need to. And changing a clutch between the motor and the gear box is enough of a PITA, but to change out one of the several in an automatic is going to be a real PITA.
OK ; one of my driving instructors also told me "get your foot off that clutch and onto the floor" about 3 seconds after changing up into 3rd at EVERY junction. But that's the way I've been taught to treat transmissions : "Don't ride the fucking clutch unless you're prepared to replace it in a ditch!"
When you're doing things like HFT, colocation in a different geographical area is a non-option. [Reason] Putting the servers way the hell out somewhere away from Wall Street is not helpful.
And it's also a false dichotomy. The dichotomy is not between
- putting the server next to the trader's desktop, and
- putting the server in disaster-proof New Madrid
It's between
- putting the server and generator on the 17th floor, necessitating a bucket-brigade or a 17-floor capable fuel pump, and
- putting the server on the 17th floor, a dedicated power line to the generator in the basement (or even, on a platform outdoors, 5m above ground level), and a fat fuel tank within a few 10s of metres of the generator.
There's this wonderful thing about electricity : it can be transmitted from place to place through lumps of copper. You may want to minimise the length of the lumps of copper, but that's a detailed design issue. I wouldn't be surprised to see buildings (multi-occupancy ones, even!) with a lobby at street level, a couple of floors (where the elevators physically cannot stop) housing the UPS / fuel tanks / generator sets above street level, then office space / data centres further upstairs.
I'm pretty sure that I've never used "middle-click-to-paste", never having had a 3-button mouse ; I vaguely remember being asked questions back in Slackware days about what to do on a middle-click, but without such a mouse, "MEH".
In any case, even if the option is removed at the Window-manager level, then it can certainly be re-introduced at the application level, and probably at the driver level. So, "MEH^2".
The problem is that is teaches science, and not the controversy.
This is Britain, not America. There may be controversies in science (e.g. , speed of climate change, or fine details of evolutionary processes), but no controversy about science as opposed to believing some particular religion. And with 6 or 7 major religions to choose from, most of which have multiple blood-lettingly indistinguishable septs, you're not going to get much agreement between them.
Hmmm, that probably says more about you and your behaviour and environments than it does about general failure rates. My personal statistics for laptops is (about) one physically smashed screen, three static zaps, one (power) connector failure, and zero spinning disc failures.
Oh, sorry ; one spinning disc failure, of a sort ; when the screen got broken, the hard drive also took a whack and didn't boot about 30% of the time ; I managed to re-solder a couple of loose pins, and got the drive back for long enough to back up and transfer to a new hard drive. It took me some months to get a new laptop and transfer the data onto it, and I never trusted the hard drive after getting the data after it.
I spend a lot of time, with my laptops, in environments with very dry HVAC systems. Bad for the nose, lungs and electrostatic destruction of electronics.
Then again, I don't think that I've NOT upsized the hard drive on ANY laptop I've owned.
Slashdot Mirror
That is why the proposed data form consists of QR codes visible to the naked eye, each pixel of which is composed of a QR code readable with an optical microscope, each pixel of which QR code is composed of a QR code readable with an electron microscope ... (you may be able to fit several levels of microscopy in there).
So, as the putative reading species improves their technology (potentially with information from the already-decoded level), new levels of data become visible.
Interesting scheme.
For a few thousands, maybe tens of thousands of years; possibly a million years or two. Not very long.
The Sun's position is described in relation to 14 pulsars, each identified by their rotation frequency. The rotation frequency of each should remain stable for a significant while longer, but you should note that the Sun is more-or-less in the equatorial plane of all of them. That isn't going to be the case for J.Random Alien from Somewhere Else. Also, the Sun is moving relative to all of those pulsars, and they're moving relative to each other.
I don't know what the useful time scale of that map is, but it's certain to be only a small fraction of a rotation around the galactic core - which is ~200Myr. A couple of Myr is credible, but I wouldn't believe a couple of tens of Myr.
The Justinian Plague was a big one, no doubt about that. What it's causative organism was is rather less clear. Bubonic Plague has certainly been put in the frame, but I don't think that the case has been closed.
Oh, sorry, I see that the case has been pretty much nailed shut in the last few years. I withdraw my objection.
In a way, that's a relief ; if we know what caused that plague, then that's one fewer nasty pathogen to worry about.
Harry Harrison?
In a billion years, locally, we've had 4 Himalayan-scale mountain ranges built up and ground back down to sea level.
On an Embraer-something, from Port Gentil to Rabi, last month.
Elephants approaching the runway.
[...] losing one of the engines when coming in to land ; pilots decided to try to dive away from crashing through the helideck, and missed the deck with the rotors by about a metre. The pilots managed to re-start the engine before we hit the sea, and pulled out of the dive without getting the wheels wet. Just. We circled and re-tried the landing and got in. Incident investigation never did find a reason for the shutdown.
I've not had to swim home, yet, in nearly 30 years, but I accept it as a near inevitability.
Some people who regularly fly "over the pole" (e.g. flight crew who fly UK to Japan on a daily basis) are already approaching the level of radiation dose which would classify them as "radiation workers."
I don't work with artificial radiation sources myself, but the NORM ("Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material) that I do work with regularly (Kimmeridge Clay and other "black shales" ; mozonite- and thorite-rich storm-winnowed sands ; "pipe scale" from inside oil drilling equipment) can have quite hight readings too. But those readings are not as high as the background radiation I get from living in "the Granite City", of around 2200micro-sieverts. That's substantially higher than the average for a UK city, and approaches the background levels for Americans (because of the higher use of medical scans in the US).
Radiation is a real issue - the amount of paperwork you have to go through if you lose a source is something you don't want to experience - but that doesn't of itself justify having a fit of the screaming ab-dabs over it.
I don't count the times the wife has nagged me into decorating the house. That's me doing labouring under her direction, and her repeated asking my opinion until I give her the answer that she wants to hear.
And the problem with that is ? What?
(my emphasis)
So, you're in one of two situations : you've got an acute problem - suffocation, massive bleeding, something really, really time-critical - and if they don't stop the MRI now and do something else now, then you're dead meat ; or, there has been some mechanical or financial issue with the machinery and someone is trying to save money by not re-doing the scan. In the one case, you've got a choice between a perfect MRI of a corpse, or an imperfect MRI of someone who's alive. In the other case, well ,someone, somewhere is playing with your life for their financial gain. Do you suffer under some sort of capitalist healthcare system there or something equally barbaric? (I am of course writing from a handful of miles away from where MRI was developed, under a socialized healthcare system. I used to ice climb with people who worked on the development.)
I've never heard of a brain tumour where taking an extra hour to get a better scan would be life-critical. An extra week, yes that can be an issue. But an hour ; n/a.
Totally unsurprised by the vote rigging. It's a very 'Patrician' democracy : one man, one vote and Aliyev is The Man and it's HIS vote. I do know how glad I am to visit there rather than live there. I also know that there are much worse places in the world.
I certainly heard more Russian being spoken in Herzilya than Hebrew. Then again, I can understand some Russian, unlike Hebrew, so maybe there was a perception bias too.
Proof positive that the problems of exceeding break-even in as fusion powered system shines down out of the sky 24 hours a day, every day of the year. The question of whether such performance can be achieved at human-manageable scales is a much more interesting, and currently unresolved, question.
(Yes, I do mean 24 hours a day ; some stars are closer than others, but they're all fusion powered.)
Filtration and centrifugation will separate part of your mixture on the basis of physical properties, specifically their density. Density does not cleanly distinguish between the nice stuff and the nasty stuff. If it did, re-processing fuel would be a doddle. The rotting tanks at Hanford, and the slime pits at Sellafield/ Calder Hall/ Seascale / Seafield (whatever it's name is this year) and I'm sure something horrible in the French re-processing plant all suggest that re-processing is not actually a doddle.
TFS specifically states that it's about arrestees. People who have been arrested, and possibly charged, but not yet tried and certainly not yet convicted.
I believe that America has a system called "the courts" where the process of trial and sometimes conviction occur. That's not the police's department. Literally.
I've never heard a serious scientist proposing that the "Snowball Earth" events froze all the water on the planet. Typical scenarios under discussion propose a kilometre or so of ice floating on top of the liquid ocean. That would leave about 2.6km of water in the average part of the ocean (assuming the same volume of water as today, and the same volume of continental crust floating on mantle of the same density ; the latter assumptions are a little bit unsure, as temperature regimes have probably changed slightly , and continental crust is probably accumulative)
What makes the climate qualitatively different in a Snowball Earth situation is that the ice covers essentially the entire surface of the ocean, from pole to equator. If such a situation persists for any significant period of time (a few hundreds of thousands of years), then the severely reduced evaporation from the (ice-covered) ocean would reduce the amount of water transport onto land, so land ice would decline substantially.
Didn't you stay awake through your MMO (Marine Mammal Observer) course? Evidently not.
I position the pointer, then start to type with both hands reasonably used. (No, I'm not a fully-trained touch typist ; but I did get more training than around 90% of my gender-generation group.) When I need to re-position the pointer, I switch modes from 'typing' to 'mousing' for the couple of seconds until I go back to being productive.
I use left-Ctrl and left-Alt as left-Ctrl and left-Alt ; I've not assigned uses for right-Ctrl and right-Alt(Gr). That silly key with the menu on it, which brings up the context menu is rather the most used, and has no left-key equivalent. There's a key with a wavy flag on the left that doesn't nothing detectable ; maybe I'll assign that to duplicate the "menu" key.
The annoying thing is that every other computer I work with during a day will have a different configuration of keyboards. You can't even rely on two consecutive systems being configured for the same language or character set.
Ok, I'm probably going to expose the fact that I've never actually been taught how to drive an automatic (just thrown behind the wheel of one of the rare beasts and told "it's an automatic ; any idiot can drive it!"), but aren't you meant to put your vehicle into "Neutral" or "Park" when you're stopped for more than a few seconds. If you don't, you're going to burn out one of the several clutches in the transmission earlier than you need to. And changing a clutch between the motor and the gear box is enough of a PITA, but to change out one of the several in an automatic is going to be a real PITA.
OK ; one of my driving instructors also told me "get your foot off that clutch and onto the floor" about 3 seconds after changing up into 3rd at EVERY junction. But that's the way I've been taught to treat transmissions : "Don't ride the fucking clutch unless you're prepared to replace it in a ditch!"
And it's also a false dichotomy. The dichotomy is not between
It's between
There's this wonderful thing about electricity : it can be transmitted from place to place through lumps of copper. You may want to minimise the length of the lumps of copper, but that's a detailed design issue. I wouldn't be surprised to see buildings (multi-occupancy ones, even!) with a lobby at street level, a couple of floors (where the elevators physically cannot stop) housing the UPS / fuel tanks / generator sets above street level, then office space / data centres further upstairs.
Let them take it and die, without issue. Self-limiting problem.
In any case, even if the option is removed at the Window-manager level, then it can certainly be re-introduced at the application level, and probably at the driver level. So, "MEH^2".
This is Britain, not America. There may be controversies in science (e.g. , speed of climate change, or fine details of evolutionary processes), but no controversy about science as opposed to believing some particular religion. And with 6 or 7 major religions to choose from, most of which have multiple blood-lettingly indistinguishable septs, you're not going to get much agreement between them.
Oh, sorry ; one spinning disc failure, of a sort ; when the screen got broken, the hard drive also took a whack and didn't boot about 30% of the time ; I managed to re-solder a couple of loose pins, and got the drive back for long enough to back up and transfer to a new hard drive. It took me some months to get a new laptop and transfer the data onto it, and I never trusted the hard drive after getting the data after it.
I spend a lot of time, with my laptops, in environments with very dry HVAC systems. Bad for the nose, lungs and electrostatic destruction of electronics.
Then again, I don't think that I've NOT upsized the hard drive on ANY laptop I've owned.
Yes, this is the sort of shit that leaves Apple off the list of "might possibly be considered" suppliers.