Women. They love shiney. Diamond is ++shiney++, the shiniest of the shiney.
The main component of "shininess" is the refractive index of your material. Diamond has a high R.I., but not the highest. Amongst the common minerals (working definition of "common" : included as a mineral in Deer, Howie and Zussmann's "Introduction to the Rock-forming Minerals", which is the UK geologist's mineralogy bible. Needless to say, the rarest minerals in the book are deerite, howieite and zussmanite. I believe there is also a danaite to keep the Transpondians happy. My DH&Z is teetering on the brink of disintegration, but is thick with scribbled notes.), rutile (titanium dioxide; the basis of almost the whole white paint industry because of this high R.I.) is moderately higher, and mossianite is considerably higher. You'll probably never see natural mossianite (artificial silicon carbide on the other hand - I have several kilos in my garage), but you'll often see crystals of rutile on sale but they'll normally be embedded in large quartz crystals ; within those crystals, you can't see into the rutile because of it's high R.I. totally reflecting light at the quartz-rutile interface.
The other major component of "shiny" is "dispersion" - the difference in refractive index for different frequencies of light. That is what gives diamond it's "fire". It's not a very useful property for identification, because it doesn't vary much, so it's hard to find it tabulated. I'd have to go through my DH&Z to come up with a list, but it's a pretty safe bet that diamond is up at the top - that is the most unusual characteristic of diamond, by a considerable degree.
But who cares about "shiny" - women excepted? Diamonds are fascinating. They can literally give us a time capsule into the early history of the deep interior of the Earth. The one in my pocket (of course I keep an uncut diamond in my wallet. Who wouldn't?) could well be 3 billion years old, and they commonly contain fragments of their surroundings at the time of their formation, encased in a literally diamond-hard, extraordinarily impermeable, shell which can preserve the mineral contents against the subsequent gigayears of nature's insults to eventually provide us with geothermobarometry and chemistry of the interior of the Earth. Literally nothing else on Earth can do that. And jewellers have the temerity to call these "flaws"? Fools!
One of my siblings has a Physics degree, so I'll ask next time I see him
You're heading towards a minefield of cutting-edge (diamond-edged!?) materials science and the murky borderlands of physics, chemistry and quantum theory calculation. And you're rushing in there riding a pogo stick. This could be an interesting ride!
I'll get popcorn ; don't let me discourage you for a second. Once I've got my popcorn.
we need to journey to the center of the earth to save the planet!
Errr, why? There's no implication that the actual temperature of the core is changing; just that our estimates of it's temperature, obtained through several thousand kilometres of decidedly variable rock, are changing.
How about an anthropic "hotness" unit on a scale from the sea level freezing point of the most abundant compound in the human body (oxidane, freezes at 0 C, triple point a tiny fraction of a kelvin higher) to the normal operating temperature of the human body (37 Ð)
You are aware that M.Fahrenheit recently proposed such a scale to the King of France, with the zero point being the lowest temperature that could be attained with easily-available materials (ice and salt), and the "100" degrees point being a readily-available "high" temperature, i.e. the temperature of human blood?
OK, I made up the bit about the King of France - I think it was just something he published in a Parisian journal. But your suggestion is around 300 years too late for a claim of priority to be seriously entertained.
I am no physicist, so, what impact does this have on the estimated age of the earth?
None.
Around half of the Earth's internal energy is from radiogenic sources (potassium, uranium and thorium decaying in the interior) and about half is the heat of accretion (landing comets and asteroids on the surface supplies a lot of energy). A relatively small (20%) change in estimated internal temperature doesn't affect the estimate of the age of the Earth, because the age of the Earth is not estimated from it's temperature.
In the 1860s, estimates of the age of the Earth were made based on ideas about it's internal temperature. But these did not include the effect of radioactive decay, which wasn't discovered until the late 1890s, and wasn't well understood until the 1930s. Inevitably they were wildly wrong - like estimating how long your savings will last without including your wife's clothes buying in the calculation.
By that time (the 1930s), radiogenic dating by comparison of parent-daughter radioisotope sets was yielding estimates for the age of mineral specimens of up to 2 billion years. As the technology of measurement has improved, a wider range of minerals and smaller samples have become available to dating technologies. Holmes' 1930s work needed kilogrammes of sample, hence he used lead minerals from lead mines ; modern dating can use nanogramme or picogramme samples - literally microscopic - and so a much wider range of rocks and minerals can be examined. So, within the era of radiogenic dating, the estimated age of the Earth has changed from "greater than 2 billion years" (using the lead minerals which cannot be the original material of the Earth, being embedded within other rocks which could not be dated at that time) to "greater than 4.1 billion years" (for microscopic re-cycled grains of the mineral zircon found in the Jack Hills metamorphosed water-interacted sediments of central Australia). Which is not a huge change, given the changes in capability of measurement.
Please note : these are the ages of minerals formed on the Earth's surface ; therefore they must be younger than the Earth as a whole.
... This is not an important issue, as your question is about crystallography, not geology. I'm not a crystallographer, but I did enough of it (up to reading X-ray diffraction results for mineral identification, and quite a lot of symmetry work, also for mineral identification) to recognise which field your question applies to. (I am a geologist ; card-carrying, along with an uncut diamond. Diamond is a fascinating material and mineral - why do people ruin it by polishing away it's surface and cutting it into unnatural shapes?)
but is it possible that the pressure on the solid core is so great that it becomes some state anagolous to a carbon diamond - but for Iron, hence an Iron Diamond.
The well-known forms of carbon for the layman have a structure of linked "aromatic rings" - the carbon backbone of benzene, napthalene, anthracene etc, going up to arbitrarily large multi-ring structures, through the "PAH" or "PAC" messes (Poly-Aromatic (Hydro-)Carbon compounds ; terminologies vary ; also often described as "amorphous" in older work) to end up at "graphene" or in larger multi-layered masses, graphite. All with various, often large, amounts of disorder (asymptotically tending towards "amorphous"). That is actually quite an uncommon structure on the scale of the mineral kingdom. Diamond has a very different structure with all the carbon atoms interlinked into a 3-d mesh. Though often described as a "tetrahedral" structure, it's underlying symmetry is actually cubic (which is why the un-cut diamond in my pocket has the shape of an octahedron - the Platonic dual of a cube ; 8 tetrahedral subunits make up a cubic unit).
Iron at surface temperatures and pressures has a cubic structure already (though with different bond types ; metallic, not covalent) ; it is already in a structure more similar to diamond than it is to graphite.
To answer your question more accurately (even at my utilitarian level of knowledge of crystallography) would require you to have quite a lot more background understanding. A couple of weeks of first-year university study, spread between the Physics and Chemistry departments would be about enough. If you want more info, please feel free to contact me when you've done that. (Meanwhile, I'd have to revise my crystallography!)
Something to do with the mediaeval crap forced down their necks (at gun point, much of the time) by the "missionary" troops of invading European industrialised powers.
I'm looking for the first African Pope - it was a narrow margin last time - to start re-importing that mediaeval shit back into the "developed" world. Though I must admit that some days it looks like it's already taking over here too.
It is well within the bounds of possibility that the person pictured is guilty of... well, here we'd call it "reset", selling or receiving stolen property. Or even almost credibly, of "theft by finding". Which are undoubtedly crimes. But they're in a different category to mugging, drink spiking and other sorts of assault. Not particularly likely, but not impossible ; and we have communally agreed to let the courts of our peers decide the truth of such matters.
But I once worked at a place where the mainframe guy had retired, was drawing his pension, and had been hired back as a consultant at 3-4x his previous salary because there wasn't anybody on the planet who could run the old system. Literally, since he'd been the one who maintained it for several decades.
I had a friend with a retirement plan like that, but I fucked it up for him. He was given a temporary assignment in his logistics department to help with a particular short-term project, and didn't understand what was involved. So he asked me (who worked in that particular game) for a 10 minute introduction to that part of the business. My intro actually took about 2 pints, but it gave him a clear understanding of the sequence of things that would be needed, what precedes what, likely lead times. All the sorts of things that one needs to understand to supply the project with materials and equipment. And he did this temporary assignment work easily and well.
UNFORTUNATELY, he did it so well that when his retirement plan came to fruition and most of his normal department were laid off (then re-hired at consultant rates), he was kept on, at employee rates, to do the work of 3 previous people (including himself) in the new department, which became permanent.
I'll not get into the debate over whether it's a bug or a feature - I've driven in all 5 common configurations and none is significantly different to any other - but I note that the bug report/ feature change request is marked "WONTFIX" and not "UNFIXABLE".
Several countries have changed form using one driving rule convention to a different one, with negligible changes in accident rates. It takes planning, commitment and motivation, and it can be done perfectly well. For an Island nation, motivation to change is slight.
To this day I'm still sure that Albert Steptoe is secretly Dot from Eastenders in drag.
FTFY
I find it somewhere between amusing and slightly worrying that I'm not sure if the Dot character is dead yet ; but it's probably a couple of decades since I sat through an episode, deliberately or accidentally.
That said, woven stainless-steel wallets are looking pretty nice; and durable...
My first response too was to wonder how fine a Faraday cage I'd need. Or whether it'd be better to just leave the cards at home and go back from 80% cash transactions to 99% cash transactions.
Time for a little Googling...
Not exactly a new idea - it's been touted (to the extent of respectable corporations making product available for purchase - which implies that to some degree the product is fit for purpose, at least in this country) since 2006, as far as the first page of Google results goes. Including, unsurprisingly, here.
Carbon fibre or woven copper mesh would probably look classier, to my eye at least.
"Carbon fibre braided sleeve made from a heavier 6k continuously woven 2/2 twill biaxial carbon fibre. With a nominal diameter of 80mm this sleeve can be used for tubing diameters of between 24mm and 104mm. [...] The braided sleeve is sold by the linear metre (1.1 yards). There is no minimum order quantity but several volume discounts are available for larger quantities.
£25.66 (ex VAT)"
Looks credible at a first glance.
What frequency ranges does NFC operate in? "NFC operates at 13.56 MHz "... so wavelength would be around 20m ; if the conductivity is reasonable, then anything that is a "fabric" on a human scale should be an effective block, unless there's a gross leak (which is one of the reasons I seized on the tubing - fewer gaps.
It all sounds very do-able. What might be more of an issue would be testing the design - I'd need to have access to a phone (or whatever device) that had a known-good reading hardware. Which might be a bigger expense than is worth the effort, compared to leaving the cards at home and carrying cash.
Surely a vending machine can cook and dispense noodles?
From TFA:
Runguan's robots peel noodle strips from a firm piece of dough and tosses them directly into boiling water âoebefore dinersâ(TM) eyes can follow the whole process.â
The robot makes the noodles (approximately the way that Mama-san did), then cooks them, and by implication the (human) server then presents them to the customer, who can see that they're as fresh as the dough they were made from. If you've also got a dough-mixer in the corner of the shop, then your customers really do know how fresh the food is. And your consumables costs probably also go down.
As I said in my previous post, it's almost time to go down 6 deck levels to the Mess room. Where the catering staff do make the meal on site from fairly raw ingredients - though they also do get pre-peeled potatoes and some of the time-consuming, weight removing grunt work done by the catering supply companies. I haven't checked this work site's galley, but it's normal for them to make their own bread dough, for example.
A robot potato peeler and dough mixer... might conceivably make it into the galley. But I suspect not, because the tonne-kilometres of shipping potato peelings to and from the location would definitely be a WOMBAT (attached to the potato, in one direction).
Sometimes you need to get off your ass and walk around once in awhile. Focus your eyes on something that doesn't involve pixels or a desk. Lunchtime is perfect for that.
TFS and the parent didn't talk about eating lunch at your desk ; they were talking about having lunch in the building or on site.
I don't know what it's like where you work, but most places I've ever worked at have strongly encouraged (or "required", as in "Verbal Warning, then Written Warning if you don't comply.") to go to a separate break room to eat. Some others provide a (paid for, if subsidised) canteen on site.
People having to leave the site to go and get a meal is a really big time waster. Particularly if the restaurant or whatever has a bar.
On which point, lunch time looms ; leave the desk and 6 decks down to the Mess, on the deck level between the engine rooms and the accommodation levels, to manage noise levels for those off-shift.
mixing up cage labels to confuse experimental protocols. Researchers at the university say that it will take years to recover their work
So... in the unlikely event that I'm ever designing an experimental protocol which involves animals, then the low cost of subcutaneous RFID tags for all animals becomes pretty easy to justify. And maintaining an off-site database.
Might be a bit big for mice ; maybe tattooing with combinations of different UV-fluorescent dyes?
I'd have thought that the prospect of going on Linked-In alone would have been sufficient deterrent to ever going on Linked-In.
Does nobody on that site read people's fucking CVs before spamming them with job offers? Evidently not. Despite clearly stating that I used the site for keeping in contact with friends and that I wasn't interested in job-hunting, I got another fucking request to apply for a 150~210k$ job today, and it pisses me off to have my time wasted like that.
Slashdot Mirror
The Soviets saved half of Europe from being Americanised. ÐÐÐÑÐбо Ð'оÐÑÐ!
Bloody Slashcode's script incompetence!
Get thee off Slashdot! Thee art a witch, a heathen and a heretic and thee art lucky thee is not already on the barbecue!
The main component of "shininess" is the refractive index of your material. Diamond has a high R.I., but not the highest. Amongst the common minerals (working definition of "common" : included as a mineral in Deer, Howie and Zussmann's "Introduction to the Rock-forming Minerals", which is the UK geologist's mineralogy bible. Needless to say, the rarest minerals in the book are deerite, howieite and zussmanite. I believe there is also a danaite to keep the Transpondians happy. My DH&Z is teetering on the brink of disintegration, but is thick with scribbled notes.), rutile (titanium dioxide; the basis of almost the whole white paint industry because of this high R.I.) is moderately higher, and mossianite is considerably higher. You'll probably never see natural mossianite (artificial silicon carbide on the other hand - I have several kilos in my garage), but you'll often see crystals of rutile on sale but they'll normally be embedded in large quartz crystals ; within those crystals, you can't see into the rutile because of it's high R.I. totally reflecting light at the quartz-rutile interface.
The other major component of "shiny" is "dispersion" - the difference in refractive index for different frequencies of light. That is what gives diamond it's "fire". It's not a very useful property for identification, because it doesn't vary much, so it's hard to find it tabulated. I'd have to go through my DH&Z to come up with a list, but it's a pretty safe bet that diamond is up at the top - that is the most unusual characteristic of diamond, by a considerable degree.
But who cares about "shiny" - women excepted? Diamonds are fascinating. They can literally give us a time capsule into the early history of the deep interior of the Earth. The one in my pocket (of course I keep an uncut diamond in my wallet. Who wouldn't?) could well be 3 billion years old, and they commonly contain fragments of their surroundings at the time of their formation, encased in a literally diamond-hard, extraordinarily impermeable, shell which can preserve the mineral contents against the subsequent gigayears of nature's insults to eventually provide us with geothermobarometry and chemistry of the interior of the Earth. Literally nothing else on Earth can do that. And jewellers have the temerity to call these "flaws"? Fools!
You're heading towards a minefield of cutting-edge (diamond-edged!?) materials science and the murky borderlands of physics, chemistry and quantum theory calculation. And you're rushing in there riding a pogo stick. This could be an interesting ride!
I'll get popcorn ; don't let me discourage you for a second. Once I've got my popcorn.
He doesn't "have" it. He's applied for it. Different things.
I applied for a quintillion dollar withdrawal from my bank account last night. That doesn't mean that I'm going to get it.
Errr, why? There's no implication that the actual temperature of the core is changing; just that our estimates of it's temperature, obtained through several thousand kilometres of decidedly variable rock, are changing.
Sulphur (however spelled, correctly or Americanly) hasn't been called "brimstone" since we have a scientifically useful concept of "element".
You are aware that M.Fahrenheit recently proposed such a scale to the King of France, with the zero point being the lowest temperature that could be attained with easily-available materials (ice and salt), and the "100" degrees point being a readily-available "high" temperature, i.e. the temperature of human blood?
OK, I made up the bit about the King of France - I think it was just something he published in a Parisian journal. But your suggestion is around 300 years too late for a claim of priority to be seriously entertained.
Excepting the troll's teeth.
None.
Around half of the Earth's internal energy is from radiogenic sources (potassium, uranium and thorium decaying in the interior) and about half is the heat of accretion (landing comets and asteroids on the surface supplies a lot of energy). A relatively small (20%) change in estimated internal temperature doesn't affect the estimate of the age of the Earth, because the age of the Earth is not estimated from it's temperature.
In the 1860s, estimates of the age of the Earth were made based on ideas about it's internal temperature. But these did not include the effect of radioactive decay, which wasn't discovered until the late 1890s, and wasn't well understood until the 1930s. Inevitably they were wildly wrong - like estimating how long your savings will last without including your wife's clothes buying in the calculation.
By that time (the 1930s), radiogenic dating by comparison of parent-daughter radioisotope sets was yielding estimates for the age of mineral specimens of up to 2 billion years. As the technology of measurement has improved, a wider range of minerals and smaller samples have become available to dating technologies. Holmes' 1930s work needed kilogrammes of sample, hence he used lead minerals from lead mines ; modern dating can use nanogramme or picogramme samples - literally microscopic - and so a much wider range of rocks and minerals can be examined. So, within the era of radiogenic dating, the estimated age of the Earth has changed from "greater than 2 billion years" (using the lead minerals which cannot be the original material of the Earth, being embedded within other rocks which could not be dated at that time) to "greater than 4.1 billion years" (for microscopic re-cycled grains of the mineral zircon found in the Jack Hills metamorphosed water-interacted sediments of central Australia). Which is not a huge change, given the changes in capability of measurement.
Please note : these are the ages of minerals formed on the Earth's surface ; therefore they must be younger than the Earth as a whole.
The well-known forms of carbon for the layman have a structure of linked "aromatic rings" - the carbon backbone of benzene, napthalene, anthracene etc, going up to arbitrarily large multi-ring structures, through the "PAH" or "PAC" messes (Poly-Aromatic (Hydro-)Carbon compounds ; terminologies vary ; also often described as "amorphous" in older work) to end up at "graphene" or in larger multi-layered masses, graphite. All with various, often large, amounts of disorder (asymptotically tending towards "amorphous"). That is actually quite an uncommon structure on the scale of the mineral kingdom. Diamond has a very different structure with all the carbon atoms interlinked into a 3-d mesh. Though often described as a "tetrahedral" structure, it's underlying symmetry is actually cubic (which is why the un-cut diamond in my pocket has the shape of an octahedron - the Platonic dual of a cube ; 8 tetrahedral subunits make up a cubic unit).
Iron at surface temperatures and pressures has a cubic structure already (though with different bond types ; metallic, not covalent) ; it is already in a structure more similar to diamond than it is to graphite.
To answer your question more accurately (even at my utilitarian level of knowledge of crystallography) would require you to have quite a lot more background understanding. A couple of weeks of first-year university study, spread between the Physics and Chemistry departments would be about enough. If you want more info, please feel free to contact me when you've done that. (Meanwhile, I'd have to revise my crystallography!)
I'm looking for the first African Pope - it was a narrow margin last time - to start re-importing that mediaeval shit back into the "developed" world. Though I must admit that some days it looks like it's already taking over here too.
It is well within the bounds of possibility that the person pictured is guilty of ... well, here we'd call it "reset", selling or receiving stolen property. Or even almost credibly, of "theft by finding". Which are undoubtedly crimes. But they're in a different category to mugging, drink spiking and other sorts of assault. Not particularly likely, but not impossible ; and we have communally agreed to let the courts of our peers decide the truth of such matters.
Police incompetnece or inactivity? "Yawn."
I had a friend with a retirement plan like that, but I fucked it up for him. He was given a temporary assignment in his logistics department to help with a particular short-term project, and didn't understand what was involved. So he asked me (who worked in that particular game) for a 10 minute introduction to that part of the business. My intro actually took about 2 pints, but it gave him a clear understanding of the sequence of things that would be needed, what precedes what, likely lead times. All the sorts of things that one needs to understand to supply the project with materials and equipment. And he did this temporary assignment work easily and well.
UNFORTUNATELY, he did it so well that when his retirement plan came to fruition and most of his normal department were laid off (then re-hired at consultant rates), he was kept on, at employee rates, to do the work of 3 previous people (including himself) in the new department, which became permanent.
Oh well, he did ask!
Every AC has a different "they".
I've found that thermite is not a terribly effective contraceptive. Well, not if you want to have a sex life afterwards.
I'll not get into the debate over whether it's a bug or a feature - I've driven in all 5 common configurations and none is significantly different to any other - but I note that the bug report/ feature change request is marked "WONTFIX" and not "UNFIXABLE".
Several countries have changed form using one driving rule convention to a different one, with negligible changes in accident rates. It takes planning, commitment and motivation, and it can be done perfectly well. For an Island nation, motivation to change is slight.
FTFY
I find it somewhere between amusing and slightly worrying that I'm not sure if the Dot character is dead yet ; but it's probably a couple of decades since I sat through an episode, deliberately or accidentally.
My first response too was to wonder how fine a Faraday cage I'd need. Or whether it'd be better to just leave the cards at home and go back from 80% cash transactions to 99% cash transactions.
Time for a little Googling ...
Not exactly a new idea - it's been touted (to the extent of respectable corporations making product available for purchase - which implies that to some degree the product is fit for purpose, at least in this country) since 2006, as far as the first page of Google results goes. Including, unsurprisingly, here.
Carbon fibre or woven copper mesh would probably look classier, to my eye at least.
Looks credible at a first glance.
What frequency ranges does NFC operate in? "NFC operates at 13.56 MHz " ... so wavelength would be around 20m ; if the conductivity is reasonable, then anything that is a "fabric" on a human scale should be an effective block, unless there's a gross leak (which is one of the reasons I seized on the tubing - fewer gaps.
Copper woven fabric ... what a surprise - there's a non-trivial marketplace for such, e.g. http://www.lessemf.com/fabric.html
It all sounds very do-able. What might be more of an issue would be testing the design - I'd need to have access to a phone (or whatever device) that had a known-good reading hardware. Which might be a bigger expense than is worth the effort, compared to leaving the cards at home and carrying cash.
Yep. It sucks like a bevvy of Thai hookers.
From TFA :
The robot makes the noodles (approximately the way that Mama-san did), then cooks them, and by implication the (human) server then presents them to the customer, who can see that they're as fresh as the dough they were made from. If you've also got a dough-mixer in the corner of the shop, then your customers really do know how fresh the food is. And your consumables costs probably also go down.
As I said in my previous post, it's almost time to go down 6 deck levels to the Mess room. Where the catering staff do make the meal on site from fairly raw ingredients - though they also do get pre-peeled potatoes and some of the time-consuming, weight removing grunt work done by the catering supply companies. I haven't checked this work site's galley, but it's normal for them to make their own bread dough, for example.
A robot potato peeler and dough mixer ... might conceivably make it into the galley. But I suspect not, because the tonne-kilometres of shipping potato peelings to and from the location would definitely be a WOMBAT (attached to the potato, in one direction).
TFS and the parent didn't talk about eating lunch at your desk ; they were talking about having lunch in the building or on site.
I don't know what it's like where you work, but most places I've ever worked at have strongly encouraged (or "required", as in "Verbal Warning, then Written Warning if you don't comply.") to go to a separate break room to eat. Some others provide a (paid for, if subsidised) canteen on site.
People having to leave the site to go and get a meal is a really big time waster. Particularly if the restaurant or whatever has a bar.
On which point, lunch time looms ; leave the desk and 6 decks down to the Mess, on the deck level between the engine rooms and the accommodation levels, to manage noise levels for those off-shift.
So, you only need 1.5 jobs to be able to eat. Wow, I'm glad I turned down that job in America.
What was I saying a few moments ago in reference to burning witches? Oh yes, something about getting the blunt set of flensing knives.
So ... in the unlikely event that I'm ever designing an experimental protocol which involves animals, then the low cost of subcutaneous RFID tags for all animals becomes pretty easy to justify. And maintaining an off-site database.
Might be a bit big for mice ; maybe tattooing with combinations of different UV-fluorescent dyes?
Does nobody on that site read people's fucking CVs before spamming them with job offers? Evidently not. Despite clearly stating that I used the site for keeping in contact with friends and that I wasn't interested in job-hunting, I got another fucking request to apply for a 150~210k$ job today, and it pisses me off to have my time wasted like that.