XKCD kinda shows this problem. We still don't have a good way to transfer files with people on different network. We have the technology but no clear standard.
I see your XKCD and raise you a different XKCD. Which is sad, but true.
a rival copied and surpassed the Howell's capability.
Apparently patents haven't been invented yet.
It was the capability that is reported as copied and then surpassed, not necessarily the method of achieving that capability.
Say that you have a patent on killing mice using a machine-vision system, servos and an air pistol. Great fine and marvellous ; it kills mice.
I come along and think... "kill mice", and design a method using squeak detectors per-room and a knee-high-to-a-mouse rotating laser system that chops them off at the patella (and elbow).
Have I violated your patent? The normal phrasing of a patent is "A method to achieve X."
Many prisons use electronic locks on all the doors,
They might in your country (I'm going to guess that it's somewhere between Canada and Mexico), but you've got a massively industrialised incarceration business, with an incentive to maximise profits for the corporations who run the prisons. Most European prisons (there are a few exceptions in Britain, which are struggling to break even) are state-run and incarcerate typically less than a tenth of the proportion of the population that the American penal system does. Being much smaller (a thousand person prison is "huge"), economies of scale are also smaller.
Not having been in jail myself, but the inside of police stations that I have seen, all the locks are mechanical. No wiring to compromise ; no servers vulnerable to being hacked. To open, or close, a door needs someone with the correct key to go to the correct door, insert and turn that key. Sometimes, a key needs to be turned simultaneously on either side of the door, which makes stealing a warders keys considerably less effective.
When was the last time that we had a successful break out from a prison higher than minimum ("parole", literally) security prison. I can't remember one. I can remember occasional riots, and a couple of warders getting killed several decades ago ; but no associated break-out. Which tends to suggest that the level of security is appropriate to the actual threat.
Why should I descend into grouchiness? Indeed, why should one ascend from grouchiness? I've not seen anything in the Slashdot ToS requiring unfailing good humour, and I see plenty of good reason for bad humour.
I honestly doubt the ability of the human race to accept the reality of such a severe threat. I don't think that they're going to do it. So... there will be a hecatomb (not a "decimation" - look up the original meaning of the word, not modern softened usages ; I'm not sure that English has a word for the 2/3 to 4/5 losses that I anticipate), followed by a population bottleneck.
Whether a new hominid species (with an improved ability to face facts) arises... well, we're not going to see that ourselves. Unless there's some spectacular medical technology in the pipeline, and you can bring yourself to use such.
Go back and study the data that is reported in the studies under discussion and the state of understanding of the Chandler Wobble in the late 1970s. It's NOT an extended span of data, it's a change in behaviour.
But hey, why should I do your homework for you. It was my homework in the 1970s, so it can be your homework for the 2010s.
You're envisaging that an impact on the Moon causes enough mass of ejecta that the amount impinging on the Earth's atmosphere is enough to do... something significant? Or that a single impactor of sufficient size is ejected from the lunar impact which could then impact on a city/ county/ state/ country/ continent and obliterate it?
The latter case is pretty implausible : you'd want an ejectum of several kilometres diameter to be a worthwhile opponent. The 50-odd metres of the Barringer impactor really isn't enough to wipe out much more than a small city. Particularly the sprawling cities of America. To get an ejectum from an impactor, you need a very large shear rate, which only occurs in a small range of angles from the axis of the impactor. (Unless you've got a very grazing impact.) So you're unlikely to have a big enough volume to generate such a large impactor. And you'd get a much larger volume of smaller ejecta generated at the same time.
Producing lots of "Chelyabinsk" or "Tunguska" like air-bursters... that's a more credible situation. But it'd still need a fairly large impactor, and they are the less common ones. And I think that they're more likely to impact the Earth than the Moon (and then spray the Earth with secondary ejecta).
But to be honest, I'd lose more sleep over the big impactor headed directly for Earth than the effects of secondary ejecta from a Lunar impact. And I do pay attention to these things, looking at the (literally) astronomical chances of them happening and affecting me, and I don't lose sleep over that (being far enough inland and up-hill to not worry about a distant ocean strike).
Water melons vary by a factor of... 3 or 4 (I don't know - I don't think that the season has started yet, has it ? ; certainly haven't brought one for... a couple of years. Pomellos, on the other hand ; lots.), and beachballs, again, I don't think I've seen one for I don't know how long. The gale force winds tend to make them a bit academic on the local beach. So sorry, your parochial size terminology is useless to me.
"Boulder" says precisely what it means to say, no more and no less.
In this context, I read "boulder" as being a technical term, from the list of sediment grain size classes. The largest class of sediment grains is "boulder", at sizes greater than 256mm (yes, it's a power-of-two scale) ; so a "small boulder" is something not far above this boundary condition.
"small boulder" is completely the correct term to use. Just because it sounds like the talk you'd hear on the street, doesn't mean that it's not a precisely worded technical description.
(Yes, I am a geologist, and yes, I do use this size scale every working day of my life.)
You may be right but many of the effects of global warming are really starting to manifest themselves.
The effects are becoming clearer. But I've been watching these things happening for my whole adult life - 30 odd years of it now. The dominant historical comment on the late 20th century is sure to be "missed opportunities".
Over the next 5 or 10 years they will be increasingly difficult to ignore.
They've been impossible to ignore for decades. But people still somehow ignored them.
I guess it's the optimist in me thinks more and more people will have their "Come to Jesus" moment over this and the tide will turn.
Sorry, but I fail to see how getting sexually excited over a non-existent delusional Jewish carpenter's son is going to help. Do you have a lot of irrational religious whack jobs in your nation, and are they allowed out of their asylums and into power?
I'm glad there's room for the rest of us in your brave new world of highly specialized humans
I'm glad for you. Please feel free to consider your abundance of mechanizable skills to be your problem, for you to find a solution to.
Yes, I'm specialized ; but mainly because I work in a situation where teams are assembled on a timescale of a few months, for a task that lasts for a few months, then the teams are separated and go onto the next job, to reassemble in a different configuration ; with no standardisation of components (well, more like the classic and highly cutting XKCD 927), someone has to act as glue between the components, and that's me.
"True North and True South" are defined by the geographical grid system (or whichever local grid your country uses). Certain locations (typically astronomical observatories) have accepted physical locations (the Transit Circle at Greenwich, for example). These locations define a grid.
The Earth has a rotation axis, which passes through the Earth's surface at two points ; these points are not (directly) connected to the geographical grid described above. (Originally the two were expected to be the same, but for over a century it has been known that they're not.) As the rotation axis moves around compared to the geographical grid, these are plotted against time.
Thirdly, there is a magnetic field with it's own poles where it's symmetry axis passes through the surface of the Earth ; this moves around a lot more, and more rapidly, in response to poorly-understood changes in the deep Earth, and is also pushed around by magnetic fields from the sun.
All three poles move relative to each other. Nothing is fixed or stable in the long term.
If the rate of pole movement increases then logically the center spin displacement of the mantel will change proportionally as well.
Oh, by the four balls of Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Another person whose spelling chequer can't distinguish between the shelf above a fireplace ("mantel") and something which surrounds a kernel ("mantle"). Come on people, don't be homophonephobic!
Obviously even a small change in the positioning of the spinning mass will change stress points along geographic faults. Therefore rapid pole movement due to the loss of ice mass might very well increase the frequency and severity of earth quakes.
I could work numbers if you want... but I'll take my geologist's hard hat off and go to sleep with exactly the same degree of worry tonight as I would have done last night.
Let's see... an 18-odd cm movement in the rotation axis compared to the geographical coordinate system... will have an effect of a factor of [0.18/(6371000^exponent)]. For exponent 2 (gravitational field); that's 4.43x10^-15 ; or if you think that surface gravity is important, exponent 1 and a factor of 2.82x10^-8 . I feel my sleep not being disturbed by these considerations. There are considerably higher probabilities for dying from literally astronomical events.
The fact that random people here often think they did a better job at the science in a 20 sec post (especially if that science is related to a politically sensitive topic) is something interesting I have been observing on/. for the last 2-3 years, and is quite a disappointing trend imho.
It's been annoying me for... well, at least a decade. But I am a scientist.
Hmm, I tried this on several occasions back when I had a proper GPS (I'm told that my phone has one ; "meh") by having it output an NEMA (I may have forgotten some terminology ; more "meh") string every couple of seconds, and grabbing that RS-232 stream. But for battery life reasons, I couldn't run for more than 8 hours at a time.
My results looked pretty random in NS and EW coordinates. (IIRC I used an UTM coordinate system, but that's another "meh")
but in fact there are several systems, and as I recall GLONASS (the Soviet/Russian one) is a lot more accurate in polar areas.
... possibly because Russia / the FSU has more polar areas than Canada and Greenland put together, and the USA doesn't consider either Greenland or Canada to be significant threats.
(It's moot, because the GPS and GLONASS systems weren't used in this experiment.)
If you know the base stations haven't moved w.r.t. the pole,
You don't know this, because they have. The surface of the Earth is not stable laterally or vertically. Trust me on this ; I am a geologist in Real Life, even if I don't play one on TV.
The GPS coordinate system is defined by the Earth's axis.
No it's not. It's defined by the orbital ephemerides of the satellites in respect to the centre of mass of the Earth-Moon system and the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. That coordinate system is then mapped onto any one of a couple of dozen different coordinate systems (OSGB, WGS-80, UTM-ZoneNumber..... and I forget what others were options in my GPS that was stolen a decade ago. Lots of coordinate systems, including "geographic" or "degrees, minutes, seconds".
Towards the 90degE Ridge (below the Indian Ocean, naturally ; you can guess it's approximate longitude). Of course.
More important: if you put your toilet on the North Pole, which way does the water swirl when you flush?
In whichever direction it's dominant angular momentum vector dictates, since the physical geometry of plumbing and ceramic-ware is considerably dominant over the (small) Coriolis force.
Don't be fooled by either oft-repeated urban legend, or the videos of people with buckets at the equator ; the former are urban legends, and the latter are fakes designed for parting tourists from their money. The tourists believe the urban legends, so they get shown the demonstrations that produce the videos that fuel the urban legends.
I bet that you think that everyone believed that Christopher Columbus was going to sail off the edge of the Earth, apart from Copernicus, don't you.
How much redistribution is this, compared to say, the mass of ocean being moved by various forces, and the natural flex in the earth's crust?
These influences have been happening for as long as we've been able to measure the movement of the rotation axis pole compared to the pole of the coordinate system. What is being reported is a CHANGE in the trends of these recurring changes.
I was reading about the attempts to understand the more-or-less cyclic changes in the pole in NEW text books in the late 1970s. Now, they're seeing something which they weren't seeing in the 19xx-s.
Now, all we need is some planet-sized wheel weights, and we're all set.
The asteroid belt has a number of suitable weights.
Lessee... 240km^3 water ice ~=120km^3 rubbly rock. 120km^3 has a radius not less than 3-something km.
Where do you want it delivered? Not that it really matters much. Nor does it really matter if it's rock, or water that's delivered. Oh, sorry, delivery location matters for re-balancing the wheel ; it doesn't much matter for stopping anthropogenic global warming.
TFA talks about the geographic north, e.g. the intersection of the surface and the axes around which the earth spins.
Nope. Geographic North isn't the intersection of the Earth's surface and the rotation axis ; it's the pole of the geographical grid system defined by knowing that "here" has *these* coordinates and "there" has *those* coordinates (for many cases of "here" and "there", including the axis of the transit telescope at Greenwich and a number of other astronomical observatories).
ORIGINALLY, the two locations were the same. but as the precision of measurement has improved, then people slowly came to realise that they were different things. These decades, the coordinate system is measured by back-calculation from GPS coordinates, not astronomical observatories, but that's no more significant than using a metre-stick instead of a centurion's stride. It did take people decades (back in the 1870s, IIRC ; it's not an area that I've followed really closely) to believe that they two really were different things, and that they move relative to each other. And in the late 1970s the distinction caused considerable head-scratching in my geology class at school. But we got our heads around it eventually (well, Paul G and I did ; I'm not sure that the other Paul G really grokked it).
Now we know the poles both move and flip. The actual pole movements would be attributed the spin of the core of the Earth compared to the spin of the mantel
I think that you're getting confused between the poles of the Earth's magnetic dipole field (not that it's better than a rough approximation to a dipole field...) and the poles of the Earth's rotation axis, which intersect with the poles of the geographical coordinate system.
I realise it's a lot of poles to keep track of, but they are different poles.
Slashdot Mirror
I see your XKCD and raise you a different XKCD. Which is sad, but true.
It was the capability that is reported as copied and then surpassed, not necessarily the method of achieving that capability.
Say that you have a patent on killing mice using a machine-vision system, servos and an air pistol. Great fine and marvellous ; it kills mice. ... "kill mice", and design a method using squeak detectors per-room and a knee-high-to-a-mouse rotating laser system that chops them off at the patella (and elbow).
I come along and think
Have I violated your patent? The normal phrasing of a patent is "A method to achieve X."
They might in your country (I'm going to guess that it's somewhere between Canada and Mexico), but you've got a massively industrialised incarceration business, with an incentive to maximise profits for the corporations who run the prisons. Most European prisons (there are a few exceptions in Britain, which are struggling to break even) are state-run and incarcerate typically less than a tenth of the proportion of the population that the American penal system does. Being much smaller (a thousand person prison is "huge"), economies of scale are also smaller.
Not having been in jail myself, but the inside of police stations that I have seen, all the locks are mechanical. No wiring to compromise ; no servers vulnerable to being hacked. To open, or close, a door needs someone with the correct key to go to the correct door, insert and turn that key. Sometimes, a key needs to be turned simultaneously on either side of the door, which makes stealing a warders keys considerably less effective.
When was the last time that we had a successful break out from a prison higher than minimum ("parole", literally) security prison. I can't remember one. I can remember occasional riots, and a couple of warders getting killed several decades ago ; but no associated break-out. Which tends to suggest that the level of security is appropriate to the actual threat.
Why should I descend into grouchiness? Indeed, why should one ascend from grouchiness? I've not seen anything in the Slashdot ToS requiring unfailing good humour, and I see plenty of good reason for bad humour.
Whether a new hominid species (with an improved ability to face facts) arises ... well, we're not going to see that ourselves. Unless there's some spectacular medical technology in the pipeline, and you can bring yourself to use such.
Go back and study the data that is reported in the studies under discussion and the state of understanding of the Chandler Wobble in the late 1970s. It's NOT an extended span of data, it's a change in behaviour.
But hey, why should I do your homework for you. It was my homework in the 1970s, so it can be your homework for the 2010s.
The latter case is pretty implausible : you'd want an ejectum of several kilometres diameter to be a worthwhile opponent. The 50-odd metres of the Barringer impactor really isn't enough to wipe out much more than a small city. Particularly the sprawling cities of America. To get an ejectum from an impactor, you need a very large shear rate, which only occurs in a small range of angles from the axis of the impactor. (Unless you've got a very grazing impact.) So you're unlikely to have a big enough volume to generate such a large impactor. And you'd get a much larger volume of smaller ejecta generated at the same time.
Producing lots of "Chelyabinsk" or "Tunguska" like air-bursters ... that's a more credible situation. But it'd still need a fairly large impactor, and they are the less common ones. And I think that they're more likely to impact the Earth than the Moon (and then spray the Earth with secondary ejecta).
But to be honest, I'd lose more sleep over the big impactor headed directly for Earth than the effects of secondary ejecta from a Lunar impact. And I do pay attention to these things, looking at the (literally) astronomical chances of them happening and affecting me, and I don't lose sleep over that (being far enough inland and up-hill to not worry about a distant ocean strike).
"Boulder" says precisely what it means to say, no more and no less.
"small boulder" is completely the correct term to use. Just because it sounds like the talk you'd hear on the street, doesn't mean that it's not a precisely worded technical description.
(Yes, I am a geologist, and yes, I do use this size scale every working day of my life.)
The effects are becoming clearer. But I've been watching these things happening for my whole adult life - 30 odd years of it now. The dominant historical comment on the late 20th century is sure to be "missed opportunities".
They've been impossible to ignore for decades. But people still somehow ignored them.
Sorry, but I fail to see how getting sexually excited over a non-existent delusional Jewish carpenter's son is going to help. Do you have a lot of irrational religious whack jobs in your nation, and are they allowed out of their asylums and into power?
I'm glad for you. Please feel free to consider your abundance of mechanizable skills to be your problem, for you to find a solution to.
Yes, I'm specialized ; but mainly because I work in a situation where teams are assembled on a timescale of a few months, for a task that lasts for a few months, then the teams are separated and go onto the next job, to reassemble in a different configuration ; with no standardisation of components (well, more like the classic and highly cutting XKCD 927), someone has to act as glue between the components, and that's me.
The Earth has a rotation axis, which passes through the Earth's surface at two points ; these points are not (directly) connected to the geographical grid described above. (Originally the two were expected to be the same, but for over a century it has been known that they're not.) As the rotation axis moves around compared to the geographical grid, these are plotted against time.
Thirdly, there is a magnetic field with it's own poles where it's symmetry axis passes through the surface of the Earth ; this moves around a lot more, and more rapidly, in response to poorly-understood changes in the deep Earth, and is also pushed around by magnetic fields from the sun.
All three poles move relative to each other. Nothing is fixed or stable in the long term.
False ; the idiots' failure's to deal with humanity's carbon dioxide output will cost them little ; but it'll kill or severely harm their children.
Meh ; phone me when I need to give a shit.
Oh, it'll fuck your children over too.
Oh, by the four balls of Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Another person whose spelling chequer can't distinguish between the shelf above a fireplace ("mantel") and something which surrounds a kernel ("mantle"). Come on people, don't be homophonephobic!
I could work numbers if you want ... but I'll take my geologist's hard hat off and go to sleep with exactly the same degree of worry tonight as I would have done last night.
Let's see ... an 18-odd cm movement in the rotation axis compared to the geographical coordinate system ... will have an effect of a factor of [0.18/(6371000^exponent)]. For exponent 2 (gravitational field); that's 4.43x10^-15 ; or if you think that surface gravity is important, exponent 1 and a factor of 2.82x10^-8 . I feel my sleep not being disturbed by these considerations. There are considerably higher probabilities for dying from literally astronomical events.
It's been annoying me for ... well, at least a decade. But I am a scientist.
My results looked pretty random in NS and EW coordinates. (IIRC I used an UTM coordinate system, but that's another "meh")
... possibly because Russia / the FSU has more polar areas than Canada and Greenland put together, and the USA doesn't consider either Greenland or Canada to be significant threats.
(It's moot, because the GPS and GLONASS systems weren't used in this experiment.)
You don't know this, because they have. The surface of the Earth is not stable laterally or vertically. Trust me on this ; I am a geologist in Real Life, even if I don't play one on TV.
Your speculations are moot : the experiments relied on measurements from the GRACE satellite. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Recovery_and_Climate_Experiment and particularly the section entitled "2 How GRACE works."
The satellite system that was used was "GRACE" (Gravity Recovery And something something), not GPS.
No it's not. It's defined by the orbital ephemerides of the satellites in respect to the centre of mass of the Earth-Moon system and the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. That coordinate system is then mapped onto any one of a couple of dozen different coordinate systems (OSGB, WGS-80, UTM-ZoneNumber ..... and I forget what others were options in my GPS that was stolen a decade ago. Lots of coordinate systems, including "geographic" or "degrees, minutes, seconds".
Towards the 90degE Ridge (below the Indian Ocean, naturally ; you can guess it's approximate longitude). Of course.
In whichever direction it's dominant angular momentum vector dictates, since the physical geometry of plumbing and ceramic-ware is considerably dominant over the (small) Coriolis force.
Don't be fooled by either oft-repeated urban legend, or the videos of people with buckets at the equator ; the former are urban legends, and the latter are fakes designed for parting tourists from their money. The tourists believe the urban legends, so they get shown the demonstrations that produce the videos that fuel the urban legends.
I bet that you think that everyone believed that Christopher Columbus was going to sail off the edge of the Earth, apart from Copernicus, don't you.
These influences have been happening for as long as we've been able to measure the movement of the rotation axis pole compared to the pole of the coordinate system. What is being reported is a CHANGE in the trends of these recurring changes.
I was reading about the attempts to understand the more-or-less cyclic changes in the pole in NEW text books in the late 1970s. Now, they're seeing something which they weren't seeing in the 19xx-s.
The asteroid belt has a number of suitable weights.
Lessee ... 240km^3 water ice ~=120km^3 rubbly rock. 120km^3 has a radius not less than 3-something km.
Where do you want it delivered? Not that it really matters much. Nor does it really matter if it's rock, or water that's delivered. Oh, sorry, delivery location matters for re-balancing the wheel ; it doesn't much matter for stopping anthropogenic global warming.
Nope. Geographic North isn't the intersection of the Earth's surface and the rotation axis ; it's the pole of the geographical grid system defined by knowing that "here" has *these* coordinates and "there" has *those* coordinates (for many cases of "here" and "there", including the axis of the transit telescope at Greenwich and a number of other astronomical observatories).
ORIGINALLY, the two locations were the same. but as the precision of measurement has improved, then people slowly came to realise that they were different things. These decades, the coordinate system is measured by back-calculation from GPS coordinates, not astronomical observatories, but that's no more significant than using a metre-stick instead of a centurion's stride. It did take people decades (back in the 1870s, IIRC ; it's not an area that I've followed really closely) to believe that they two really were different things, and that they move relative to each other. And in the late 1970s the distinction caused considerable head-scratching in my geology class at school. But we got our heads around it eventually (well, Paul G and I did ; I'm not sure that the other Paul G really grokked it).
I think that you're getting confused between the poles of the Earth's magnetic dipole field (not that it's better than a rough approximation to a dipole field ...) and the poles of the Earth's rotation axis, which intersect with the poles of the geographical coordinate system.
I realise it's a lot of poles to keep track of, but they are different poles.