Oh well, I was dumb, my house sank. Got my insurance check.
Better double-check that policy. For years I've been advising anyone I meet in the insurance game to remove those elements of cover. They may have gone one clause at a time over several revisions, or just been dropped completely for new customers. But it's essential for insurance companies to drop those unavoidable costs as soon as possible. Insurance is about playing the probabilities ; if the probability of a payout approaches 1.0, then the annual premium approaches the re-instatement value, or the the insurer stops taking bets (premiums) beyond year "X".
There has been a lot of fuss about this for people at risk of flooding for rivers for years, increasing in the last few years. And the insurers have been getting a PR caning for it. You can bet that they've been quietly modifying their risk profiles with respect to sea-level rise too. Then again, for many areas (principally in the SE of the country), they've been dealing with sea level rise (isostatically, due to land sinking, not eustatically due to increasing volume of water in the ocean basins) there for decades and know it's inevitable. So they don't insure against it.
Or finding someone dumb enough to buy that beach estate.
"Tough."
Buying it was your decision. Selling it is your problem. If you'd asked me for my opinion (paid for, of course), then I'd have advised you to not do it if you expected it to be worth anything at all in 50 years time, but even then, I'm not going to take responsibility for you not following my advice.
Incidentally, if talking like this harms the resale value of your beach property, once more I say "tough."
Well, some people do care whether other people can survive.
While not agreeing with symbolset's denialist position, I do agree with him on this point.
I've thought carefully about where to invest in property ; regarding people who haven't invested that degree of thought have made a mistake : "Just Think Of It As Evolution In Action."
(And for irony, I'm not even playing the evolutionary game for the rest of the gene pool of Homo sapiens.)
Since we do not know much about extinction events prior to multicellular life, we should not be calling P-T extinction as largest ever. It's just just the largest (so far) in the last ~500 million years.
A good point, and one that I was considering raising myself.
The hypothesis that the "contrecoup" concentration of energy from an astrobleme is necessary to the initiation of a flood basalt province, has little support in the geological community. Part of the reason is the small energy content of an astrobleme compared to a flood basalt province - it's a severe case of the flea on the dog's tail wagging the whole dog. But a better reason is that some flood basalt provinces seem to predate their alleged astrobleme progenitors. Then there are the flood basalt provinces that (as you point out) don't have an associated antipodal astrobleme.
The Earth appears to be able to generate flood basalt provinces without the input of an astrobleme ; so, the presence of a flood basalt isn't a reason to expect the presence of an antipodal astrobleme which precedes it closely in time.
So I'm still thinking... asteroid strike, followed by 2 huge De Meijer/Van Westrenen blasts, one triggered by the astroid hitting a collection of georeactors down at the Karoo,
While I don't accept any of your other stuff without checking (and I'm pretty dubious of it's relevance in any case), this is relatively easy to dispose of.
Unless I've misunderstood it substantially, van Westrenan is talking about accumulating fissile deposits at the core-mantle boundary. That's just shy of 3000km below the surface. To have a significant effect there, you'd need an impactor that is going to rip the Earth into pieces with 10s of percent of the mass being ejected, at least temporarily. Also, van Westrenan has been proposing a mechanism which would require considerably higher concentrations of U-235 and other highly-fissionable isotopes, and is therefore something that is far less likely as you wait longer and longer after the formation of the earth. So, it was about 16 to 32 times as likely to happen in the first 1000 Myr of the Earth's existence as it is to happen in the current 1000 Myr of the Earth's history. All these events under discussion have happened in the current 1000 Myr of the Earth's history.
One of the reasons that zircon crystals are considered good for dating work is that they are very resistant to the penetration of contaminants applied to their surface. In fact, examining the changes in date that you get by dating the outermost micron of a zircon crystal, then the next micron, then the next... is a pretty routine part of using zircons for dating, because that can give you information about the entire history of the zircon crystal, which can often reveal several cycles of recycling of an individual crystal through re-melting of the rock. Your proposition would result in a severe discordance between the inner and outer dates for the crystals. I don't know of such reported complex histories for LIP zircons ; can you cite relevant papers that would support your model?
I really can't see what you're getting at in respect of "Pangaean Caribbean and Scotia plates?" Are you suggesting that (for the South African example), the South African craton has delaminated it's lower crust and lithospheric mantle which is now floating around as the Scotia plate?
Russian cross dressers can be rather intimidating.
Speaking as a man married to a Russian woman, I can assure you that cross Russian un-dressers can be positively mesmerising. And "demanding" in a way that will get the average Slashdot denizen rubbing the hair off the palm of his hand just thinking about it.
The Yucatan impact was close to (but not necessarily coincident with - this is a matter of dispute and debate at the moment) the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. It could have been up to 300,000 years earlier, which is... troublesome... for people advocating the impact causing the extinction. The impact wouldn't have left anyone with a "good hair day," but that's not necessarily the same as "Die! Now."
The end-Permian mass extinction was at around 252 Myr ago ; 190 Myr before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Extinction levels were about as you say.
Fingers claiming to explain the end-Permian mass extinction have been pointed at a putative Antarctic crater, at one off the NW coast of Australia, and also at Lac Manicougain in Quebec, Canada. They've also accused the Siberian Traps LIP (Large Igneous Province). Pointing fingers is not the same as producing an undisputed case. And, as for the end-Cretaceous, the close coincidence in timing between the LIP and an impactor may have been a coup de grace being applied to an already highly stressed ecology, begging the question of whether one cause or the other alone would have been significant on a global scale. We (my geologist colleagues and I) don't know the answer, and opinions do vary between researchers. The end-Triassic LIP known as the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province may be a relevant counter example, without a coincident impactor, and a relatively minor effect on species count and diversity.
You're being a bit over precise (and over-dramatic) with your temperatures and habitability estimates. Living through a LIP event (which typically take less than a million years, but we don't generally know if it's 1/4 Myr or 3/4 Myr, which has a big effect on expected levels of gas emissions. It's also within the bounds of dating precision that a LIP takes 3/4 Myr, as 25 distinct pulses of 10 kyr each.
It'd still be a pretty "bad hair millennium" to live through. (Incidentally, Yellowstone isn't in the same league. It hasn't shown itself able to ejaculate often enough.)
Just because the producers of "popular science" programmes present something as clear and simple, doesn't mean to say that's what the actual scientists in the field think. Particularly, they've been hyping the "impact extinction" hypothesis as an answer to the end-Cretaceous extinction event, but several persistent critics of that hypothesis are still very much in contention. I don't like to see too much confidence nailed onto that hypothesis, because it's definitely not a settled question. Everyone would like to know "who killed the dinosaurs," but we really don't have a "beyond reasonable doubt" case. See also my signature.
we all know that it was the meteorite that landed in the yucatan
Not agreed at all, within the professional geological community (Discovery Channel producers may disagree, but they'll come round to our point of view, once we decide what that is). For a start, it may have been up to 300,000 years before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (though that is still a matter of disagreement).
the kamkuska
ITYM "Tunguska" ; the hypocentre was near the "Stony Tunguska" river.
anti-matter one
The geological evidence does not support or require such exotic materials. (Which is a polite way of saying "bullshit!")
was in 1910
1908. 07:14 local time on 30th June, to be more precise.
If Sarah cannot stand the heat, she should go back to the kitchen.
See - now that is political incorrectness.
You missed out the bit about taking her shoes off and getting pregnant. Though I doubt she'd be satisifed by your minuscule "appendage".
(If Sarah is reading - doubtful - and cares - even more doubtful - I can lend a microscope to go appendage-hunting through the collective trousers of Slashdot. Likely an exercise in laughable futility though.)
Depends. If your oxygen concentrator doesn't run for 9 hours or you can't keep your insulin cold for 9 hours, yeah it could be a catastrophe. If you have lederly parents to care for or young children,
Young children... oh, you mean for feeding them warm milk. Don't you have tits? Or tits available in less than 9 hours? Or even camping stoves, pans and water? Besides which, while a babe-in-arms may be wailing and complaining, there are more than enough cases of babies being trapped in collapsed buildings for multiple days, in tropical weather, and surviving. Probably not exactly happy, but somewhere on the "not dead" side of dieing.
Elderly and diabetic, with a temperature-sensitive variant of insulin. Strange you should say that, as my Dad, who manages medicine for my diabetic Mum, had the fridge breakdown while I was visiting at the weekend. (During what passes for a heatwave in this country.)
"Big. Fucking. Deal."
Insulin came out of the warming fridge and into a cooler-box (kept in the garage with the old camping kit) with several litre bottles of cold tap water and (this is the critical bit) about 10 litres of ice (in old milk cartons, IIRC) kept in the freezer for this precise purpose. Then, once Sis had come round to Mum-sit, we went off to find a fridge of the right size to replace the dead one (we trouble-shot until Sis arrived - the failure was in the fridge's compressor ; not an economical repair). That was going to be about 36 hours to deliver - not a problem.
Dad isn't a paranoid ; but these are issues that he's faced before : power cuts during the miner's strikes of 1972 ; power grid failures during the winters of 1963 (IIRC ; before I was born) and about 1986 (IIRC ; I was in a different country by then), but not last winter. Camping trips ad nauseam taught the techniques. After that, it's just that rarest of commodities : common sense.
Oxygen concentrator? If it is that critical to life, then surely you have bottled back-up oxygen (looking into my garden shed - a normal tank of 7 litre water capacity and 300 bar for 2100 litre STP of oxygen ; flow rate of 2 litres/ minute is sufficient for climbing Everest ; so you've 1000 minutes or some 16 hours ; I've got bigger tanks than that 7 litre "dumpy" and I'm nothing special in terms of diving equipment). OK, again I may be a touch more paranoid than most people, but when I have systems essential to life (e.g. my breathing air when I'm diving in caves), I have backup, on hand, and tested. And I drill in it's use. Dad is no more paranoid than I am, but he didn't get to be old by being reckless.
It's easy enough electronically, but then why not just make a google maps short url link and stick it in an SMS? Problem solved...
If you've got a mobile phone signal. Then again, you'd probably need that to use the app, or the website. (I automatically question the assumption that you're going to have a mobile signal, because I spend 90% of my working time outside such signals, and maybe 30% of my leisure time similarly. Comes from working at sea and walking in the mountains for leisure ; I turn my phone off when I walk up the hill, because after the first 10 miles, you're generally outside contact.)
Words are harder to remember than they'd like.
I don't disagree with you - anyone who's tried to remember passwords is likely to know where you're coming from. But is "52.511206,-0.506444" much more memorable (or transmissible with minimal errors) than my first example below. Or even better than "goo.gl/PLrV9"?
I'm sure other people have been trying to work out what their algorithm is. Probably not too complex, but I couldn't see it myself. I see your point about word forms and homophones (hmmm, I should check them, in a minute).
I tried :
initially - expect.fugitives.proof (woodland in central England)
versus - expect.fugitives.denial (lake on Victoria Island, Canadian Arctic)
They're not on either a meridian or parallel, so the mapping isn't in simple stripes ("proof" mapping into somewhere on the "expect.fugitives" meridian and "denial" somewhere else on that meridian ; or orthogonally). Meh ; to get a trillion combinations (10^12), they need a dictionary of 10^4 words, ten thousand, which isn't exactly demanding. To come up with a mapping between the two systems... oh there are lots of ways. Not a terribly interesting problem.
Homophones... "their" and "there" should be a good start. So... to play : "expect.expect.expect" gives somewhere in Essex ; but any combination involving "there" fails to return anything ; similarly any combination of "expect" and "their" fails too. So, they've done at least minimal exclusion of homophones from their dictionary.
Interesting idea ; might be interesting if it flies, but some how I doubt that it will. (My singature becomes more appropriate than normal.
Our house is on just over a hectare of land. That's about 1000 of those damn word triplets; even a fast talker would go blue in the face saying them.
Define the corner points (if rectilinear) : 12 words. If circular (unlikely, because they don't tile a plane), one tuple of words and a radius. For the most complex regular polygon that does tile the plane, the hexagon, 6 vertices for 18 tuples (this would also suffice for a rectangle that has a missing rectangle, an "ell" shape). Which is still hardly a severe problem.
A lat-long pair in decimal degrees to similar precision... would be I think 18 significant decimal digits which (since you'd know how many digits you need for the whole number of degrees) I think you'd need about a 64-bit word. Might need a transform to keep everything in positive numbers, such as expressing things north and east from the South Pole ; otherwise you'd need to assign a couple of sign bits.
I'll have to go and RTFA now to find out how they come up with their tuples.
Personally, having to routinely track oil well positions to the millimetre, across multiple kilometres in both plan and elevation, I wonder what the point of this would be. I'm perfectly comfortable using UTM coordinates in any of 120 zones and to 3 decimal places. And I really should get round to writing that conversion routine from local coordinates to UTMs, because you do have to take into account the non-sphericity of the geoid. Ugly maths!
As an American, as an American who loves my country, I need to have the courage to face the reality --- that my country has ceased to be the land of the free, the home of the braves, but has turned into an empire which is moving towards oblivion.
This is a genuine question - not rhetorical... and not just to you.
Just checking my Rhetoric 1.0.1 course notes... but I think that's actually a statement of internal state, not a question. As a statement of internal state, it is unchallengable (pending the development of effective mind-reading).
Actually, I think the GP does have to face that reality. Whether you accept his description of (seemingly) your mutual country as reality is a question, but as a description of the GP's internal state, it's unchallengable.
In itself, that's not a problem. Ang San Suu Kyi was awarded the Peace Prize in 1991, but didn't get to collect it until a couple of years ago.
Besides, what's the problem with it being delivered to the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo? It's not the most beautiful of transit lounges, but it's not as grim as Vnukovo's.
I'll take a leader who leads people places they want to go over leaders that go wherever the hell they want any day of the week.
What about a situation where "the people" in general (a) can't decide where they want to go, and (b) if there is anything like a consensus, it's for something that is impossible, dangerous, or likely to be highly expensive and ineffective?
It's still possible they could sell Windows versions at different rates for different devices
I've not exactly been caring about the details of the Windows environment for half a decade now, but isn't this what they started trying with about WinXP, expanded with Vista, and have been ramping since.
I'm pretty sure that we had several cases of the Boss picking up a laptop from PC-Wankstain ("PC-World", it says on the door) on a Saturday afternoon for a Sunday morning helicopter to the boat, and then discovering that it had the wrong version of the OS on it, which wouldn't so some networky things, or service management things. I may even have been the poor schmuck on the boat, trying to patch something workable together after burning out the existing machine. Nightmares ; now Someone Else's Problem.
Gun makers have another problem. Guns rarely fail. I have a Mosinâ"Nagant from 1890's. It still works perfectly today. They are already worried about gun sales. Not because of legislation but because most gun buyers are already gun owners. They worry that eventually the market will shrink as no new buyers get into the gun ownership game.
So, what you're saying is, the gun manufacture and sales industry should get their product to kill their customers, and to self-destruct regularly. Which is a strategy which has worked well for the cigarette industry for decades (incidentally, I'm a smoker ; I think I'll go and have a hand-made in the garden now the weather is cooling off).
Oh, hang on, they're introducing complex electronics into things which are still lethal weapons... I think you may have hit upon a significant point there.
Granddad knew that 70 years ago, and he made his living as a steelworker, not as a card-shark, economist, or some other type of professional fraudster.
There's probably an Egyptian tomb with it carved in hieroglyphics (may be a poor example ; I'm not sure that the Egyptians really "did" money ; perhaps s/Egyptians/Babylonians/ and s/hieroglyphics/cuneiform/.)
less foreigners == more american STEMs getting hired?
Or the work just gets done overseas. It is probably roughly 50 / 50.
Where it still gets spied on.
But the spying is done by people with legal authority to do so, overseen by their relevant jurisdictions instead of by Americans intent on stealing everyone else's data to try to bolster their failing economy.
One would think they'd weigh the container themselves and charge accordingly. But then I'm not in the shipping business so I dunno...
Fuck the shipping company's interests.
so they operate on an honor system?
The crane company will be charging by the number of lifts and the tonnage of each lift. They have to. It's part of their maintenance procedures for changing out (or slip-and-cutting) the lifting cables. Every so-many tonnes multiplied by kilometres of hoisting done, another X metres is lopped off the free end of the cable, the winches are re-zeroed and the crane comes back into service.
Every industrial crane I've seen keeps these records. And to do that every crane has a load cell. And every crane operator has to either add up his "tonne-kilometres" at the end of the shift, or it's done in the crane's monitoring computer, and put out warnings that there will be a slip-and-cut in three, two, one days.
Hoisting cable isn't cheap. So it's either going to be re-billed somewhere, or it's got to be accounted for within the crane company's charges. Both of which need numbers.
so they operate on an honor system?
In fact, the stability technicians in the ship wouldn't need this detailed data themselves. They've got water-line sensors ; they know which way the ship is tilting. They can do cross-checks themselves. So they know the loading on the ship pretty accurately too. And since they're going to be sailing on the tub, they're even more motivated to not exceed the ship's design capabilities than the crane operator who is going to sleep onshore tonight.
Whether the design was right, and whether the welding during construction was done right... now there are some good questions. But it's very unlikely that the ship was over-loaded without a considerable number of people knowing about it, including a number of people whose lives were at risk when the ship sank. I'd put reasonable money (TWO beers!) on it being either bad design or bad welding. Or possibly the design's "we won't ever be sailing through 10m seas" assumption being proved wrong. Seas are un-predictable things. (Having my vessel hit on the underside by a 22m wave was "interesting" a couple of winters back.)
Human activities do cause events that are recorded in the Richter range of M = 1 to M = 5, but the number and range of events caused by geologic processes is much more significant.
First point : no--one outside the legions of poorly-educated press recyclers uses the Richter scale any more - it relates to a model of seismograph that has been out of service for about 4 decades. What is used these days is the moment-magnitude estimate of the energy released from a quake (numerically similar to Richter's measure of his model of seismographs, but his measure was quicker to calculate. If you had that particular model of seismograph. Which no-one outside a museum has had for 40 years). Richter-rant over.
The Moment-Magnitude scale (like the scale that Richter developed) is logarithmic, with every 2 steps corresponding to a 1000-fold increase in earthquake work done. So your magnitude-1 event has a millionth of the energy of your magnitude-5 event, a (short-)billionth[10^-9] of the energy of a magnitude-7 event, and a (long-billionth or short-trillionth ; [10^-12]) of the energy of a magnitude-9 quake. We've had three magnitude-9 events since Richter was working, and I've got no idea how many magnitude-8 events.
Still, it is true that pumping fluids into and out of porous rocks can cause events on significantly correlated time scales. Explosions of all types including those for mining can also cause events
Don't forget filling, or emptying, dams. Of if you're Gaia kicking back from being a planet to post on Slashdot under an alias, you could always inflate or deflate a volcano's magma chamber.
If you are Gaia, slumming, I've a question. When is the Naples area going to be wiped out again? Just as a matter of interest. I'd like to see it before it goes. Several days at least before it goes.
"Natural-gas extraction, geothermal-energy production and other activities that inject fluid underground have caused numerous earthquakes
If you actually understand the technologies involved, you'd know that they're talking about fracking, not the extraction of natural gas by conventional processes. But don't let that disturb your hysterical screaming, Slashdotters, it's just reality. I know that few of you have any real connection to reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, I suspect that you're right.
Better double-check that policy. For years I've been advising anyone I meet in the insurance game to remove those elements of cover. They may have gone one clause at a time over several revisions, or just been dropped completely for new customers. But it's essential for insurance companies to drop those unavoidable costs as soon as possible. Insurance is about playing the probabilities ; if the probability of a payout approaches 1.0, then the annual premium approaches the re-instatement value, or the the insurer stops taking bets (premiums) beyond year "X".
There has been a lot of fuss about this for people at risk of flooding for rivers for years, increasing in the last few years. And the insurers have been getting a PR caning for it. You can bet that they've been quietly modifying their risk profiles with respect to sea-level rise too. Then again, for many areas (principally in the SE of the country), they've been dealing with sea level rise (isostatically, due to land sinking, not eustatically due to increasing volume of water in the ocean basins) there for decades and know it's inevitable. So they don't insure against it.
"Tough."
Buying it was your decision. Selling it is your problem. If you'd asked me for my opinion (paid for, of course), then I'd have advised you to not do it if you expected it to be worth anything at all in 50 years time, but even then, I'm not going to take responsibility for you not following my advice.
Incidentally, if talking like this harms the resale value of your beach property, once more I say "tough."
While not agreeing with symbolset's denialist position, I do agree with him on this point.
I've thought carefully about where to invest in property ; regarding people who haven't invested that degree of thought have made a mistake : "Just Think Of It As Evolution In Action."
(And for irony, I'm not even playing the evolutionary game for the rest of the gene pool of Homo sapiens.)
A good point, and one that I was considering raising myself.
The Earth appears to be able to generate flood basalt provinces without the input of an astrobleme ; so, the presence of a flood basalt isn't a reason to expect the presence of an antipodal astrobleme which precedes it closely in time.
While I don't accept any of your other stuff without checking (and I'm pretty dubious of it's relevance in any case), this is relatively easy to dispose of.
Unless I've misunderstood it substantially, van Westrenan is talking about accumulating fissile deposits at the core-mantle boundary. That's just shy of 3000km below the surface. To have a significant effect there, you'd need an impactor that is going to rip the Earth into pieces with 10s of percent of the mass being ejected, at least temporarily. Also, van Westrenan has been proposing a mechanism which would require considerably higher concentrations of U-235 and other highly-fissionable isotopes, and is therefore something that is far less likely as you wait longer and longer after the formation of the earth. So, it was about 16 to 32 times as likely to happen in the first 1000 Myr of the Earth's existence as it is to happen in the current 1000 Myr of the Earth's history. All these events under discussion have happened in the current 1000 Myr of the Earth's history.
One of the reasons that zircon crystals are considered good for dating work is that they are very resistant to the penetration of contaminants applied to their surface. In fact, examining the changes in date that you get by dating the outermost micron of a zircon crystal, then the next micron, then the next ... is a pretty routine part of using zircons for dating, because that can give you information about the entire history of the zircon crystal, which can often reveal several cycles of recycling of an individual crystal through re-melting of the rock. Your proposition would result in a severe discordance between the inner and outer dates for the crystals. I don't know of such reported complex histories for LIP zircons ; can you cite relevant papers that would support your model?
I really can't see what you're getting at in respect of "Pangaean Caribbean and Scotia plates?" Are you suggesting that (for the South African example), the South African craton has delaminated it's lower crust and lithospheric mantle which is now floating around as the Scotia plate?
Speaking as a man married to a Russian woman, I can assure you that cross Russian un-dressers can be positively mesmerising. And "demanding" in a way that will get the average Slashdot denizen rubbing the hair off the palm of his hand just thinking about it.
The end-Permian mass extinction was at around 252 Myr ago ; 190 Myr before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Extinction levels were about as you say.
Fingers claiming to explain the end-Permian mass extinction have been pointed at a putative Antarctic crater, at one off the NW coast of Australia, and also at Lac Manicougain in Quebec, Canada. They've also accused the Siberian Traps LIP (Large Igneous Province). Pointing fingers is not the same as producing an undisputed case. And, as for the end-Cretaceous, the close coincidence in timing between the LIP and an impactor may have been a coup de grace being applied to an already highly stressed ecology, begging the question of whether one cause or the other alone would have been significant on a global scale. We (my geologist colleagues and I) don't know the answer, and opinions do vary between researchers. The end-Triassic LIP known as the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province may be a relevant counter example, without a coincident impactor, and a relatively minor effect on species count and diversity.
You're being a bit over precise (and over-dramatic) with your temperatures and habitability estimates. Living through a LIP event (which typically take less than a million years, but we don't generally know if it's 1/4 Myr or 3/4 Myr, which has a big effect on expected levels of gas emissions. It's also within the bounds of dating precision that a LIP takes 3/4 Myr, as 25 distinct pulses of 10 kyr each.
It'd still be a pretty "bad hair millennium" to live through. (Incidentally, Yellowstone isn't in the same league. It hasn't shown itself able to ejaculate often enough.)
Just because the producers of "popular science" programmes present something as clear and simple, doesn't mean to say that's what the actual scientists in the field think. Particularly, they've been hyping the "impact extinction" hypothesis as an answer to the end-Cretaceous extinction event, but several persistent critics of that hypothesis are still very much in contention. I don't like to see too much confidence nailed onto that hypothesis, because it's definitely not a settled question. Everyone would like to know "who killed the dinosaurs," but we really don't have a "beyond reasonable doubt" case. See also my signature.
Not agreed at all, within the professional geological community (Discovery Channel producers may disagree, but they'll come round to our point of view, once we decide what that is). For a start, it may have been up to 300,000 years before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (though that is still a matter of disagreement).
ITYM "Tunguska" ; the hypocentre was near the "Stony Tunguska" river.
The geological evidence does not support or require such exotic materials. (Which is a polite way of saying "bullshit!")
1908. 07:14 local time on 30th June, to be more precise.
You missed out the bit about taking her shoes off and getting pregnant. Though I doubt she'd be satisifed by your minuscule "appendage".
(If Sarah is reading - doubtful - and cares - even more doubtful - I can lend a microscope to go appendage-hunting through the collective trousers of Slashdot. Likely an exercise in laughable futility though.)
Young children ... oh, you mean for feeding them warm milk. Don't you have tits? Or tits available in less than 9 hours? Or even camping stoves, pans and water? Besides which, while a babe-in-arms may be wailing and complaining, there are more than enough cases of babies being trapped in collapsed buildings for multiple days, in tropical weather, and surviving. Probably not exactly happy, but somewhere on the "not dead" side of dieing.
Elderly and diabetic, with a temperature-sensitive variant of insulin. Strange you should say that, as my Dad, who manages medicine for my diabetic Mum, had the fridge breakdown while I was visiting at the weekend. (During what passes for a heatwave in this country.)
"Big. Fucking. Deal."
Insulin came out of the warming fridge and into a cooler-box (kept in the garage with the old camping kit) with several litre bottles of cold tap water and (this is the critical bit) about 10 litres of ice (in old milk cartons, IIRC) kept in the freezer for this precise purpose. Then, once Sis had come round to Mum-sit, we went off to find a fridge of the right size to replace the dead one (we trouble-shot until Sis arrived - the failure was in the fridge's compressor ; not an economical repair). That was going to be about 36 hours to deliver - not a problem.
Dad isn't a paranoid ; but these are issues that he's faced before : power cuts during the miner's strikes of 1972 ; power grid failures during the winters of 1963 (IIRC ; before I was born) and about 1986 (IIRC ; I was in a different country by then), but not last winter. Camping trips ad nauseam taught the techniques. After that, it's just that rarest of commodities : common sense.
Oxygen concentrator? If it is that critical to life, then surely you have bottled back-up oxygen (looking into my garden shed - a normal tank of 7 litre water capacity and 300 bar for 2100 litre STP of oxygen ; flow rate of 2 litres/ minute is sufficient for climbing Everest ; so you've 1000 minutes or some 16 hours ; I've got bigger tanks than that 7 litre "dumpy" and I'm nothing special in terms of diving equipment). OK, again I may be a touch more paranoid than most people, but when I have systems essential to life (e.g. my breathing air when I'm diving in caves), I have backup, on hand, and tested. And I drill in it's use. Dad is no more paranoid than I am, but he didn't get to be old by being reckless.
If you've got a mobile phone signal. Then again, you'd probably need that to use the app, or the website. (I automatically question the assumption that you're going to have a mobile signal, because I spend 90% of my working time outside such signals, and maybe 30% of my leisure time similarly. Comes from working at sea and walking in the mountains for leisure ; I turn my phone off when I walk up the hill, because after the first 10 miles, you're generally outside contact.)
I don't disagree with you - anyone who's tried to remember passwords is likely to know where you're coming from. But is "52.511206,-0.506444" much more memorable (or transmissible with minimal errors) than my first example below. Or even better than "goo.gl/PLrV9"?
I'm sure other people have been trying to work out what their algorithm is. Probably not too complex, but I couldn't see it myself. I see your point about word forms and homophones (hmmm, I should check them, in a minute).
I tried :
initially - expect.fugitives.proof (woodland in central England)
versus - expect.fugitives.denial (lake on Victoria Island, Canadian Arctic)
They're not on either a meridian or parallel, so the mapping isn't in simple stripes ("proof" mapping into somewhere on the "expect.fugitives" meridian and "denial" somewhere else on that meridian ; or orthogonally). Meh ; to get a trillion combinations (10^12), they need a dictionary of 10^4 words, ten thousand, which isn't exactly demanding. To come up with a mapping between the two systems ... oh there are lots of ways. Not a terribly interesting problem.
Homophones ... "their" and "there" should be a good start. So ... to play : "expect.expect.expect" gives somewhere in Essex ; but any combination involving "there" fails to return anything ; similarly any combination of "expect" and "their" fails too. So, they've done at least minimal exclusion of homophones from their dictionary.
Interesting idea ; might be interesting if it flies, but some how I doubt that it will. (My singature becomes more appropriate than normal.
Define the corner points (if rectilinear) : 12 words. If circular (unlikely, because they don't tile a plane), one tuple of words and a radius. For the most complex regular polygon that does tile the plane, the hexagon, 6 vertices for 18 tuples (this would also suffice for a rectangle that has a missing rectangle, an "ell" shape). Which is still hardly a severe problem.
A lat-long pair in decimal degrees to similar precision ... would be I think 18 significant decimal digits which (since you'd know how many digits you need for the whole number of degrees) I think you'd need about a 64-bit word. Might need a transform to keep everything in positive numbers, such as expressing things north and east from the South Pole ; otherwise you'd need to assign a couple of sign bits.
I'll have to go and RTFA now to find out how they come up with their tuples.
Personally, having to routinely track oil well positions to the millimetre, across multiple kilometres in both plan and elevation, I wonder what the point of this would be. I'm perfectly comfortable using UTM coordinates in any of 120 zones and to 3 decimal places. And I really should get round to writing that conversion routine from local coordinates to UTMs, because you do have to take into account the non-sphericity of the geoid. Ugly maths!
Just checking my Rhetoric 1.0.1 course notes ... but I think that's actually a statement of internal state, not a question. As a statement of internal state, it is unchallengable (pending the development of effective mind-reading).
Actually, I think the GP does have to face that reality. Whether you accept his description of (seemingly) your mutual country as reality is a question, but as a description of the GP's internal state, it's unchallengable.
Besides, what's the problem with it being delivered to the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo? It's not the most beautiful of transit lounges, but it's not as grim as Vnukovo's.
What about a situation where "the people" in general
(a) can't decide where they want to go, and
(b) if there is anything like a consensus, it's for something that is impossible, dangerous, or likely to be highly expensive and ineffective?
Sometimes, leaders need to ... well, lead.
I've not exactly been caring about the details of the Windows environment for half a decade now, but isn't this what they started trying with about WinXP, expanded with Vista, and have been ramping since.
I'm pretty sure that we had several cases of the Boss picking up a laptop from PC-Wankstain ("PC-World", it says on the door) on a Saturday afternoon for a Sunday morning helicopter to the boat, and then discovering that it had the wrong version of the OS on it, which wouldn't so some networky things, or service management things. I may even have been the poor schmuck on the boat, trying to patch something workable together after burning out the existing machine. Nightmares ; now Someone Else's Problem.
So, what you're saying is, the gun manufacture and sales industry should get their product to kill their customers, and to self-destruct regularly. Which is a strategy which has worked well for the cigarette industry for decades (incidentally, I'm a smoker ; I think I'll go and have a hand-made in the garden now the weather is cooling off).
Oh, hang on, they're introducing complex electronics into things which are still lethal weapons ... I think you may have hit upon a significant point there.
Or, in Slashdot-ese,
s/Soviet\ Russia/NSA\ America/
There's probably an Egyptian tomb with it carved in hieroglyphics (may be a poor example ; I'm not sure that the Egyptians really "did" money ; perhaps s/Egyptians/Babylonians/ and s/hieroglyphics/cuneiform/ .)
But the spying is done by people with legal authority to do so, overseen by their relevant jurisdictions instead of by Americans intent on stealing everyone else's data to try to bolster their failing economy.
Win all round, I think.
Except for America.
Which is their problem, not mine.
Fuck the shipping company's interests.
The crane company will be charging by the number of lifts and the tonnage of each lift. They have to. It's part of their maintenance procedures for changing out (or slip-and-cutting) the lifting cables. Every so-many tonnes multiplied by kilometres of hoisting done, another X metres is lopped off the free end of the cable, the winches are re-zeroed and the crane comes back into service.
Every industrial crane I've seen keeps these records. And to do that every crane has a load cell. And every crane operator has to either add up his "tonne-kilometres" at the end of the shift, or it's done in the crane's monitoring computer, and put out warnings that there will be a slip-and-cut in three, two, one days.
Hoisting cable isn't cheap. So it's either going to be re-billed somewhere, or it's got to be accounted for within the crane company's charges. Both of which need numbers.
In fact, the stability technicians in the ship wouldn't need this detailed data themselves. They've got water-line sensors ; they know which way the ship is tilting. They can do cross-checks themselves. So they know the loading on the ship pretty accurately too. And since they're going to be sailing on the tub, they're even more motivated to not exceed the ship's design capabilities than the crane operator who is going to sleep onshore tonight.
Whether the design was right, and whether the welding during construction was done right ... now there are some good questions. But it's very unlikely that the ship was over-loaded without a considerable number of people knowing about it, including a number of people whose lives were at risk when the ship sank. I'd put reasonable money (TWO beers!) on it being either bad design or bad welding. Or possibly the design's "we won't ever be sailing through 10m seas" assumption being proved wrong. Seas are un-predictable things. (Having my vessel hit on the underside by a 22m wave was "interesting" a couple of winters back.)
First point : no--one outside the legions of poorly-educated press recyclers uses the Richter scale any more - it relates to a model of seismograph that has been out of service for about 4 decades. What is used these days is the moment-magnitude estimate of the energy released from a quake (numerically similar to Richter's measure of his model of seismographs, but his measure was quicker to calculate. If you had that particular model of seismograph. Which no-one outside a museum has had for 40 years). Richter-rant over.
The Moment-Magnitude scale (like the scale that Richter developed) is logarithmic, with every 2 steps corresponding to a 1000-fold increase in earthquake work done. So your magnitude-1 event has a millionth of the energy of your magnitude-5 event, a (short-)billionth[10^-9] of the energy of a magnitude-7 event, and a (long-billionth or short-trillionth ; [10^-12]) of the energy of a magnitude-9 quake. We've had three magnitude-9 events since Richter was working, and I've got no idea how many magnitude-8 events.
Don't forget filling, or emptying, dams. Of if you're Gaia kicking back from being a planet to post on Slashdot under an alias, you could always inflate or deflate a volcano's magma chamber.
If you are Gaia, slumming, I've a question. When is the Naples area going to be wiped out again? Just as a matter of interest. I'd like to see it before it goes. Several days at least before it goes.
If you actually understand the technologies involved, you'd know that they're talking about fracking, not the extraction of natural gas by conventional processes. But don't let that disturb your hysterical screaming, Slashdotters, it's just reality. I know that few of you have any real connection to reality.