they use oil-sulfur sprays on those, the whole thing has a faint whiff of SO2.
But, elemental sulphur doesn't smell of sulphur dioxide. Sulphur dioxide smells of sulphur dioxide, so I deduce that you were burning these "oil-sulphur" sprays. Or... there's some pretty powerful chemical ju-ju going on with that oil to oxidise elemental sulphur to the dioxide (in which case, I'd be very worried about being within fumes range let alone droplets range of this witch's brew). Or just possibly, your "sulphur" part of the mixture is actually something like sodium sulphite, which does release sulphur dioxide under relatively gentle conditions.
Don't get me started on the number of people who "know" that hydrogen sulphide "smells of rotten eggs", but don't know what rotten eggs smell like. The number of times that I've been called to the drill floor because one of the hands think that they have smelled "sour gas" (H2S), to find nothing showing on the hand-held tester, but a nasty smell nonetheless. I re-calibrate my nose routinely (when I do the calibration check on our plumbed-in and hand-held portable gas detector machines), and I know what H2S smells like. But I still don't know what rotten eggs smell like either.
Sorry ; running irritation at work ; people claiming to know things which they don't know.
Given the vulcanicity of Io, and the attendant seismicity (earthquakes), I'd score Io pretty low. Pending a few years of data from an on-surface seismometer (which would include radiation dosimeters etc. too ; why not), I'd be quite concerned about the ground literally shifting under an installation and popping half the seams in the place at the same time. Sure, it could be engineered around ; but do you go around making sticks to beat your own back?
Any human settlement outside LEO is going to require as close to a closed ecological cycle as possible, purely to control costs. So, long before we're in the position to build a base on Io, we'll have much much better ability to sustain a base on re-cycling it's own water, food and shit. So, say we build Io-base in the shipyards at Ceres-base and then ship it there (roboticised ship?), wouldn't it be more sensible to just by re-build a small asteroid (for radiation shielding) and boost it up there on a 50 year mission with 10 year crew-changes (for those who don't settle well).
It must be counted, moved to the bank, change must be brought back to the store and so on. It is also easy lost or stolen.
For most cash businesses that I've had dealings with, it doesn't work like that. One trusted employee does the cashing up of tills (for family-owned or franchised businesses, that's normally a member of the family), and puts the large majority of the small change and small notes beck into the tills as their "float" (so they can make change for the first hundred customers of the shift). Only the large notes go to the bank. The hardest part of managing this is keeping sufficient stock of little coin bags so that the cash cabinet can have dozens of little bags labelled "20x£1" for £20 in £1 coins, etc. The bags tend to disintegrate.
And if there's an accumulation of tuppenny bits... well that's what you give to one of the minions when they need to go and get a couple of pints of milk for the canteen.
A coin-counting machine costs the equivalent of about 20 hours of a minimum-wage peon ; so if you want to do the sums on what your bank charges for handling cash, versus what it's worth while doing yourself, it's easy. (More rugged machines are probably more ; do your homework if your machine beaks down.
At some point you've got to trust someone in cash handling. Or stock handling. You've also got to trust your staff to not slip an advert for the opposition into the pocket of every customer.
Like selling shovels and booze to miners in a gold rush,
Very apposite. Few people that I know, other geologist aside, seem to know that the large majority of gold rushes result in net INCOME into an area, as people bring their savings into an area, spend them on shovels and booze, and then depart poorer than they arrived.
But you'll not see that in the advertising, of course. "Sucker", "minute", "born", "one" ; rearrange.
'The study seems to have misunderstood how Siri was designed to be used,'
IIRC (I've not used it, and I'm not sure that I've seen it being used), Siri is a Mac application, for the Mac phone? So... reading manuals should be utter anathema, as the user interface should be so obvious to the end user that you never need to consult the manual. Ever.
Does Mac Towers (or whatever gulag the Mac developers are incarcerated in) have a gibbet out the front for the bones of developers who suggested writing manuals?
At what point in history did the commercial software to run a PC start costing 3-5 times the cost of the physical PC?
Ummm, since the "PC" as anything other than a hobbyist thing started in around 1979, I'd say it was about 1979.
All the time that I've worked for my current employer (since 1991 ; I see no reason to move, not even for a 100% pay rise without any worthwhile benefits), we've been charging an annual fee for our software of several times the cost of a high end corporate PC. That would put, these days,... actually, I can't configure a business machine anything near that high. I'd have to go to some sort of gaming rig, I guess, with several computers-worth of video card in place of the 1024x78 standard.
The other way of looking at it is that the personnel to run tour software make 70% of the cost of getting the task done, the software another 20%, the hardware 5% and the rest (bean-counting, buildings, bullshit) 5%.
"Up against the wall! Spread 'em!" Instance 1:
"Dude, where are you going with 2 tons of ammonium nitrate?"
"Uh, I got me a farm and I'm using it for fertilizer?"
"Oh, OK."
Instance 2:
"Dude, where are you going with 2 tons of finger nail polish remover?"
"Uh, you should see how big my girlfirend's fingers are?"
"Down on the ground! Spread 'em further!"
Until and unless the IAU gives some authority to Uwingu, they have none. IAU says it's still AlphaCent-Bb.
Lark remarks that the name comes from the Latin name of his late grandfather, stating
And with an etymological justification like that... it's going to remain Alpha Centauri-Bb for quite a while yet.
All very fine and good for the guy to attempt to remember his grandfather, but to name a whole planet for him? Hubris! If he'd restrained his etymology to "bright", then he'd have had a much better chance of getting it (and he'd have had the private reason too. But by publishing an etymology like this, he has completely shot himself down. And in the process, he's destroyed Uwingu and their attempt to raise money for science. What a result! (And not in a good sense!)
Snakes are cold blodded, right? Or can an animal be warm blooded part of the time?
Yes.
To both questions. Simultaneously.
An animal can be "warm blooded" (i.e. maintain a relatively high and constant internal temperature) without having a physiological mechanism for maintaining that temperature. Some animals can do it well-enough using behaviour alone.
Today's birds did not evolve from any "traditional" dinosaurs that survived the K-T event.
You're the first person I've encountered, other than a particularly deranged creationist from St Albans, to claim that "the birds" are descended from dinosaurs that survived either the Chixulub impact or the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (it remains to be proved that those two events are the same, though they certainly happened close together in time - within a few hundred thousand years of each other). Everyone who has made a more than cursory study of the subject is aware that there were multiple genera (and higher taxonomic levels) of avian dinosaurs diversifying through the Cretaceous. Whether those groups map well onto modern families etc. is a distinct question.
It is very clear to me that, not withstanding the non-monophyly of the dinosaurs and the possible non-monophyly of the birds, ALL of the organisms that acquired the "bird" lifestyle and anatomic characteristics in the mid-late Jurasssic were members of the dinosaurs, and therefore the assertion that I've been making in my signature for ages now (see below) is correct.
But nobody "corrects" someone talking about mammals saying "dude they are CHORDATES!!!"
You need to get out more, specifically to pubs where cladistics buffs go for a pint and a bun-fight after work.
Calling birds "birds" is still a very useful distinction from dinosaurs and modern reptiles and mammals and whatever else.
If you're solely considering how things are at the moment, the distinctions between these groups is clear. But if you're going back to the roots of these groups, which you are inevitably when you're talking about the fossils, then the problems of correctly identifying the paraphylies involved does become important. It's not as if we go around inventing these terminologies for the fun of pronouncing Latinesque jaw-crackers after the third pint.
The only feathered dinosaur fossils that have been found are in China
Hmmm, I think that you're missing several well-known genera there - and the likelihood is high that there are as-yet-undisovered feathered dinosaur genera too. I'm thinking of - minimally - Archaeopteryx - but there have been others (Sciurumimus for example) which have "integumentary structures" which appear to have been feathers. Though not necessarily "contour" feathers as Archaeopteryx has.
Yes, the recent (last couple of decades) Chinese discoveries are impressive. But they're not all that is going on in the palaeontological world. And I'm pretty sure that the Chinese discoveries come from several different horizons and therefore represent different events.
Surely you've had the weapon surgically built into your forearm so that it can't be taken out except by using a neck tie (connecting your neck to a concrete pillar) and a hospital MRI scanner to rip the metal clean out of your limbs?
What could possibly go wrong? A home-made version of this worked wonderfully well for the "Travis" guy in that Taxi film, after all?
Seriously, since a lot of satellites are composite, then you only really need to look at the set of satellites (and satellite fragments) which contain at least some ferromagnetic parts to see the [ehemm] attraction of this sort of idea. Whether one could be stable in flight (against interaction with the Earth's magnetic field) AND have large enough field of effect to sweep a usefully large volume - they're different, important, questions.
Such devices wouldn't be able to clear up ALL debris. But to clear up some old satellites before they impact each other and make the problem even worse... could be a worthwhile part of the solution.
Also, this could be a feasible technique for seek-and-deorbit systems, as part of the grappling and holding system. Then attach (permanent magnet? glue? weld? tie?) something that drops it into the atmosphere, release and move onto the next target.
Statistics can't tell you next weeks weather because it can't model chaotic systems.
[SELF : looks at the 10 day forecast on the vessel's internal network. Sees another weather bump coming in which will mean we have to get Wednesday's boat alongside and unloaded and going into the ground no later than Thursday afternoon, or the completion operation gets at least a week's delay. That's 600,000 to 700,000 USD extra cost on the operation.]
Sorry, what were you saying about not being able to get a weather forecast into next week? We pay around USD 1000/ day for these forecasts, because they are accurate enough to make decisions on the basis of. I suspect that you're not talking to the right weather forecasters.
What is inherently wrong with drugs and prostitution? We've almost certainly been indulging in those entertainments since our ancestors were chimp's ancestors.
Theft and tax avoidance are the new kids on the block. And neither generally directly kills anyone.
Wars and fratricide... are probably the oldest behaviours of the bunch - and they've not made us (or any of our ancestor species) extinct. Ever.
I wonder - what does Global Positioning become when you are no longer on the globe? Does it become Orbiting Positioning? Space positioning?
That does raise the moderately interesting question of how far from the Earth the GPS system would remain useful.
Doing a little geometry, the distance from receiver to satellite varies between about 25Mm (at local horizon) and 20Mm (zenithal range). So receivers need to be able to handle that 20% variation in time-of-flight.
I make it that those relative time-of flight differences would make the same basic (relative) capabilities of the receivers be able to work outside the orbital altitude of the transmitters to a height of +230Mm (which would be about half-way to the Moon's orbit) and and down to a height of about -25Mm from orbital altitude (which is pretty close to the centre of the Earth).
So, if the receivers are sensitive enough, then a timing and calculation system that is just good enough to work on Earth, should work out to about half-way to the Moon. Which may have been a subsidiary design concept, because a relatively small fleet (6, or 8? satellites) stationed spaced around the Moon's orbit would then probably give fairly good absolute positioning (to within a few km? ; radio/ visual range?) for the whole of "sub-Lunar space". That could be coincidence, but I doubt it.
Of course, signal strength and receiver fidelity would probably be the real determinants. I.e. you get what you pay for.
It's for when you're reversing for 50 miles because you haven't realised that the vehicle has a manual transmission and can't read the instruction manual while driving.
Considering that novelty golf ball detectors can be sold successfully as bomb detectors, this doesn't say a lot for the actual effectiveness of this idea.
That gives us a range of bodies that we can deal with :
BodySurface gravity (m/s/s), composition.Oh!I've not used the DL/DT/DD construction before on/. ; I'll have to remember this!
Jupiter
2.5, gas with heavy radiation
Neptune
1.14, gas
Saturn
1.06, gas
Earth
1.0, clement
Venus
0.905, dense atmosphere & hot
Uranus
0.9, gas
Mars
0.38, no effective atmosphere & cold
Mercury
0.38, no atmosphere & hot
Io
0.183, sulphurous thin atmosphere and intensely volcanic
Moon
0.166, no atmosphere
Ganymede
0.15, no atmosphere
Titan
0.14, thick cold atmosphere
Europa
0.13, icy, strong radiation and no atmosphere
Callisto
0.126, icy, strong radiation and no atmosphere
So, which one would you work with, particularly considering that we've no viable techniques for getting any further out than Mars (and that is pretty dubious).
I've said it before and I'll say it again : to get anywhere in the Solar System, we have GOT to learn how to live for indefinite periods in space. And once you can do that, why go to the bottom of a gravitational hole?
(And before people raise the objection, this may mean living without gravity, but it doesn't mean living without an environment with a constant acceleration of around 10m/s/s.)
Slashdot Mirror
(Native Americans excepted.)
But, elemental sulphur doesn't smell of sulphur dioxide. Sulphur dioxide smells of sulphur dioxide, so I deduce that you were burning these "oil-sulphur" sprays. Or ... there's some pretty powerful chemical ju-ju going on with that oil to oxidise elemental sulphur to the dioxide (in which case, I'd be very worried about being within fumes range let alone droplets range of this witch's brew). Or just possibly, your "sulphur" part of the mixture is actually something like sodium sulphite, which does release sulphur dioxide under relatively gentle conditions.
Don't get me started on the number of people who "know" that hydrogen sulphide "smells of rotten eggs", but don't know what rotten eggs smell like. The number of times that I've been called to the drill floor because one of the hands think that they have smelled "sour gas" (H2S), to find nothing showing on the hand-held tester, but a nasty smell nonetheless. I re-calibrate my nose routinely (when I do the calibration check on our plumbed-in and hand-held portable gas detector machines), and I know what H2S smells like. But I still don't know what rotten eggs smell like either.
Sorry ; running irritation at work ; people claiming to know things which they don't know.
Any human settlement outside LEO is going to require as close to a closed ecological cycle as possible, purely to control costs. So, long before we're in the position to build a base on Io, we'll have much much better ability to sustain a base on re-cycling it's own water, food and shit. So, say we build Io-base in the shipyards at Ceres-base and then ship it there (roboticised ship?), wouldn't it be more sensible to just by re-build a small asteroid (for radiation shielding) and boost it up there on a 50 year mission with 10 year crew-changes (for those who don't settle well).
SF ; but not Fantasy.
For most cash businesses that I've had dealings with, it doesn't work like that. One trusted employee does the cashing up of tills (for family-owned or franchised businesses, that's normally a member of the family), and puts the large majority of the small change and small notes beck into the tills as their "float" (so they can make change for the first hundred customers of the shift). Only the large notes go to the bank. The hardest part of managing this is keeping sufficient stock of little coin bags so that the cash cabinet can have dozens of little bags labelled "20x£1" for £20 in £1 coins, etc. The bags tend to disintegrate.
And if there's an accumulation of tuppenny bits ... well that's what you give to one of the minions when they need to go and get a couple of pints of milk for the canteen.
A coin-counting machine costs the equivalent of about 20 hours of a minimum-wage peon ; so if you want to do the sums on what your bank charges for handling cash, versus what it's worth while doing yourself, it's easy. (More rugged machines are probably more ; do your homework if your machine beaks down.
At some point you've got to trust someone in cash handling. Or stock handling. You've also got to trust your staff to not slip an advert for the opposition into the pocket of every customer.
Very apposite. Few people that I know, other geologist aside, seem to know that the large majority of gold rushes result in net INCOME into an area, as people bring their savings into an area, spend them on shovels and booze, and then depart poorer than they arrived.
But you'll not see that in the advertising, of course. "Sucker", "minute", "born", "one" ; rearrange.
IIRC (I've not used it, and I'm not sure that I've seen it being used), Siri is a Mac application, for the Mac phone? So ... reading manuals should be utter anathema, as the user interface should be so obvious to the end user that you never need to consult the manual. Ever.
Does Mac Towers (or whatever gulag the Mac developers are incarcerated in) have a gibbet out the front for the bones of developers who suggested writing manuals?
Are you a lawyer, who somehow believes that laws are mutable human constructs?
Ummm, since the "PC" as anything other than a hobbyist thing started in around 1979, I'd say it was about 1979.
All the time that I've worked for my current employer (since 1991 ; I see no reason to move, not even for a 100% pay rise without any worthwhile benefits), we've been charging an annual fee for our software of several times the cost of a high end corporate PC. That would put, these days, ... actually, I can't configure a business machine anything near that high. I'd have to go to some sort of gaming rig, I guess, with several computers-worth of video card in place of the 1024x78 standard.
The other way of looking at it is that the personnel to run tour software make 70% of the cost of getting the task done, the software another 20%, the hardware 5% and the rest (bean-counting, buildings, bullshit) 5%.
... and why should I buy one if I have to ignore adverts to use it?
They're brown-skinned foreign farmers. They have no legitimate use for either fertilizer or oxygen.
Haven't you been reading your Tee-party indoctrination guidelines?
FTFY
And with an etymological justification like that ... it's going to remain Alpha Centauri-Bb for quite a while yet.
All very fine and good for the guy to attempt to remember his grandfather, but to name a whole planet for him? Hubris! If he'd restrained his etymology to "bright", then he'd have had a much better chance of getting it (and he'd have had the private reason too. But by publishing an etymology like this, he has completely shot himself down. And in the process, he's destroyed Uwingu and their attempt to raise money for science. What a result! (And not in a good sense!)
Yes.
To both questions. Simultaneously.
An animal can be "warm blooded" (i.e. maintain a relatively high and constant internal temperature) without having a physiological mechanism for maintaining that temperature. Some animals can do it well-enough using behaviour alone.
You're the first person I've encountered, other than a particularly deranged creationist from St Albans, to claim that "the birds" are descended from dinosaurs that survived either the Chixulub impact or the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (it remains to be proved that those two events are the same, though they certainly happened close together in time - within a few hundred thousand years of each other). Everyone who has made a more than cursory study of the subject is aware that there were multiple genera (and higher taxonomic levels) of avian dinosaurs diversifying through the Cretaceous. Whether those groups map well onto modern families etc. is a distinct question.
It is very clear to me that, not withstanding the non-monophyly of the dinosaurs and the possible non-monophyly of the birds, ALL of the organisms that acquired the "bird" lifestyle and anatomic characteristics in the mid-late Jurasssic were members of the dinosaurs, and therefore the assertion that I've been making in my signature for ages now (see below) is correct.
You need to get out more, specifically to pubs where cladistics buffs go for a pint and a bun-fight after work.
If you're solely considering how things are at the moment, the distinctions between these groups is clear. But if you're going back to the roots of these groups, which you are inevitably when you're talking about the fossils, then the problems of correctly identifying the paraphylies involved does become important. It's not as if we go around inventing these terminologies for the fun of pronouncing Latinesque jaw-crackers after the third pint.
Hmmm, I think that you're missing several well-known genera there - and the likelihood is high that there are as-yet-undisovered feathered dinosaur genera too. I'm thinking of - minimally - Archaeopteryx - but there have been others (Sciurumimus for example) which have "integumentary structures" which appear to have been feathers. Though not necessarily "contour" feathers as Archaeopteryx has.
Yes, the recent (last couple of decades) Chinese discoveries are impressive. But they're not all that is going on in the palaeontological world. And I'm pretty sure that the Chinese discoveries come from several different horizons and therefore represent different events.
Surely you've had the weapon surgically built into your forearm so that it can't be taken out except by using a neck tie (connecting your neck to a concrete pillar) and a hospital MRI scanner to rip the metal clean out of your limbs?
What could possibly go wrong? A home-made version of this worked wonderfully well for the "Travis" guy in that Taxi film, after all?
Why would I bitch : fewer little sprogs threatening to try to do my job for lower day-rates. Let them take vampire studies.
Such devices wouldn't be able to clear up ALL debris. But to clear up some old satellites before they impact each other and make the problem even worse ... could be a worthwhile part of the solution.
Also, this could be a feasible technique for seek-and-deorbit systems, as part of the grappling and holding system. Then attach (permanent magnet? glue? weld? tie?) something that drops it into the atmosphere, release and move onto the next target.
Then again ... dead hard drive ...
[SELF : looks at the 10 day forecast on the vessel's internal network. Sees another weather bump coming in which will mean we have to get Wednesday's boat alongside and unloaded and going into the ground no later than Thursday afternoon, or the completion operation gets at least a week's delay. That's 600,000 to 700,000 USD extra cost on the operation.]
Sorry, what were you saying about not being able to get a weather forecast into next week? We pay around USD 1000/ day for these forecasts, because they are accurate enough to make decisions on the basis of. I suspect that you're not talking to the right weather forecasters.
Theft and tax avoidance are the new kids on the block. And neither generally directly kills anyone.
Wars and fratricide ... are probably the oldest behaviours of the bunch - and they've not made us (or any of our ancestor species) extinct. Ever.
That does raise the moderately interesting question of how far from the Earth the GPS system would remain useful.
Doing a little geometry, the distance from receiver to satellite varies between about 25Mm (at local horizon) and 20Mm (zenithal range). So receivers need to be able to handle that 20% variation in time-of-flight.
[dum-te-dum] Pythagoras [tweedle-dee] Solve quadratic.
I make it that those relative time-of flight differences would make the same basic (relative) capabilities of the receivers be able to work outside the orbital altitude of the transmitters to a height of +230Mm (which would be about half-way to the Moon's orbit) and and down to a height of about -25Mm from orbital altitude (which is pretty close to the centre of the Earth).
So, if the receivers are sensitive enough, then a timing and calculation system that is just good enough to work on Earth, should work out to about half-way to the Moon. Which may have been a subsidiary design concept, because a relatively small fleet (6, or 8? satellites) stationed spaced around the Moon's orbit would then probably give fairly good absolute positioning (to within a few km? ; radio/ visual range?) for the whole of "sub-Lunar space". That could be coincidence, but I doubt it.
Of course, signal strength and receiver fidelity would probably be the real determinants. I.e. you get what you pay for.
It's for when you're reversing for 50 miles because you haven't realised that the vehicle has a manual transmission and can't read the instruction manual while driving.
Considering that novelty golf ball detectors can be sold successfully as bomb detectors, this doesn't say a lot for the actual effectiveness of this idea.
So, which one would you work with, particularly considering that we've no viable techniques for getting any further out than Mars (and that is pretty dubious).
I've said it before and I'll say it again : to get anywhere in the Solar System, we have GOT to learn how to live for indefinite periods in space. And once you can do that, why go to the bottom of a gravitational hole?
(And before people raise the objection, this may mean living without gravity, but it doesn't mean living without an environment with a constant acceleration of around 10m/s/s.)