Frankly drinking on the job is a greater problem by 99%.
Horses for courses ; drinking on the job isn't a problem in this particular branch of the business. No bars for hundreds of miles ; no shops except for the company shop, and a "no, we won't under any circumstances ship alcohol to the location, even if you are French!" policy with the shipping agents. (Of course, the supply boats are "wet" ; and are rarely away from shore for more than a week at a time.)
That got a lot of gallic backs up when it was enforced.
On land jobs, it can be more of a problem. But on land jobs, you've always got the option of running for the horizon if it all goes very pear-shaped ; those land jobs where you don't have the option of running (Siberia, -50degC), are treated like offshore jobs - again to the horror of the French. And the Swiss, as I recall.
Whether or not it is legal in America is irrelevant to those not in America (are you?)
Whether it is legal in the jurisdictions where I live and work (I've averaged three different continents a year for about 8 years now.) is also irrelevant to the policies of the companies to whom I'm sub-contracted. The terms of the contract are "random testing at site" ; "compulsory testing by third party of client's choosing at least annually" ; "failure to comply by any contractor personnel is termination of contract at the company level" and "dispute of this policy is termination of contract at the company level." They defend this on health and safety grounds. Which is stupid, but successful.
I.e. the law doesn't matter ; neither the law of your home country, your employer's country, the client's country, or the country you're working in. You get caught and you're fucked and your colleagues (mostly friends, too) are fucked unless you're fired immediately. It's not a nice position for us field staff, and our bosses don't like it either. But we knew what the business was like before we came into it.
I still have friends who smoke regularly, for entertainment. And because they know the rules of the business, they know better than to offer me a toke.
Well, I wouldn't claim "expertise" ; more familiarity than 99% of people, but not "expertise". I know enough to know how little I know.
AIUI, if it gets hydrogen fusion going, then it's a main sequence star, even if it's a tiddler. That's pretty clear, and because people want to kill other people, the minimal limits for hydrogen (proton) fusion have been researched thoroughly. Objects that don't get hydrogen (proton) fusion going are brown dwarfs, planets, or dust.
Observationally, if something has been hot for a billion years or so from internal sources, then it must be burning hydrogen (protons) or something heavier ; nothing else can provide the necessary energy for that long.
A brown dwarf doesn't get hydrogen (proton) fusion going, but it might get deuterium fusion going, until it runs out of deuterium. That is, I think, an undefined point. Observationally though, a YOUNG brown dwarf may still be hot from accretion (which converts the potential energy of infalling gas into heat), so one must also look for the presence of deuterium in it's atmosphere. Which one could do spectroscopically, though it's a bitch. But lithium is considerably easier to detect spectroscopically, and it was produced in small quantities in the Big Bang (strictly, in the nucleosynthesis event some seconds after the Big Bang, as things cooled down ; I forget the exact time, but it was one of the predicted events that gave the title to Stephen Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes", while this was new science ; the detection of primordial lithium was a cornerstone of demonstrating that the Big Bang really did happen according to something very similar to 1970s "Standard Model" particle physics), and crucially, it is destroyed during the process of fusion with deuterium. So, if you measure a putative brown dwarf and it has primordial amounts of hydrogen, of helium and negligible amounts of lithium, then you've got evidence of deuterium burning. Boom - confirmed brown dwarf.
But... what if your star-like object contains an intermediate amount of lithium? Did it form from matter depleted in lithium (from a supernova remnant, perhaps?) ; or did it go through a deuterium-burning phase as it was forming and unstable (convecting, like a pot boiling on a stove), but it has since started hydrogen fusion in it's core, and radiative heat transfer has taken over internally leaving a surface with an abnormally low lithium content, which is not mixed with the core (where lithium is being produced as a side product of normal nuclear fusion, in small quantities.
So, intrinsically, it is difficult to decide whether a particular dim star is a star or a brown dwarf. There's a lot of arguments over every case. And TBH, for more details, you're going to have to "read The Literature" ; welcome as an observer to the cutting (bleeding) edges of observational astronomy. (Oh, the spectroscopy is cutting edge too - it's not much more than 30 years since instruments started to get this good, and it needs a LOT of that scarcest of commodities - observing time on a highly-figured well mounted "light bucket" of a telescope.)
At the low edge of "brown dwarf", discrimination is difficult too. As you get to smaller masses, the amount of "metals" (anything heavier than helium, to an astrophysicist) increases, irregularly, making it very hard to predict exactly what mass a planet can "turn on" deuterium fusion and qualify as a brown dwarf. If your candidate (there's a nice neutral word) has, say, a lot of 60-Fe in it's composition (itself a likely indicator of origin in supernova debris ; 60-Fe has half-life of a couple of million years), then the radioactive heat and particle release from that can distort the "turn on" temperatures that one would expect in a pure hydrogen progenitor, or a "primordial composition" progenitor. Again, the details get messy.
Short version long ; the definition of "brown dwarf" is pretty clear. However since we're lacking "tricorders" that can operate at ranges of dozens of light years, act
A brown dwarf never achieves sustained fusion and is not considered a full-fledged star, so i am also confused to why it is considered a star system.
Because they can temporarily achieve fusion, which no planet can do.
It's like - you have guys, fat guys and really really fat guys (they're your planets, various sizes from terrestrial planets through the Neptunian planets to gas giants like Jupiter), and continuing in increasing mass, you have small blobs, medium sized blobs and gargantuan blobs (stars, from red dwarves, though sun-size stars to Betelgeuse-size stars up to behemoths like Eta Carinae), with the dividing line being those whose legs break under the strain of supporting their whole weight (or... sustain hydrogen fusion, for the stars). On that analogy, brown dwarfs are the ones whose legs can support them for some time, but not indefinitely.
There is an underlying continuum (of mass, in both analogies), separated into apparent classes on the basis of a measurable but not vital criterion.
If you want a geological analogy, to me two specimens might be forsteritic fayalite and fayalitic forsterite, but to my ignorant barbarian of a sedimentologist friend, they're all olivine, just of differing density. (Is it obvious that density isn't important in to the fundamental properties of the two specimens?)
Wow, that was difficult. But, doesn't America have, like, a 3489th Amendment to it's constitution that says "Speed limits apply, but not to me." It's the amendment just before or just after the one that says "Oral isn't losing your virginity unless you swallow."
Sheesh. Fucking lawyers (which definitely is losing your virginity ; all holes, at once)!
I've always heard it controls nausea and improves appetites in advanced AIDS patients.
Ohh, I fancy a spliff. I'll just head out to the gay bar and catch myself some Anally Injected Death Sentence, then neglect to get it treated for a decade or so. Then you can roll up a spliff for me so that I can control my nausea and improve my appetite.
There are plenty of perfectly good arguments in favour of legalising marijuana, or at least making it a similar status to nicotine and ethanol. Your argument isn't a good one.
Over the long (shoooooo-inhale-ooooooort) term days are getting longer
FTFY
There are some geologists around on Slashdot who consider the 400 million year arc over which variations in the day/month and month/year ratios have been demonstrated to be a quite short time. The same effects have doubtless been going for a longer period (since the Moon-forming event), but there's around 50 million years uncertainty in that datation too.
Don't let the astronomers get started. Or the theoretical cosmologists, with their wear on the Turtle's toenails.
Your screen has a background consisting of a diffuser element, several lamps (probably cold-cathode, though there are other possibilities), and an opaque backing sheet incorporating the structural support and protection for your screen.
You could get rid of all of those, rendering your screen transparent except for the switched-on pixels. The screen would then be almost completely fucking useless except for posing in front of in shit movies.
Whether that would be an improvement on the original problem of having a Windows 8 PC is not at issue ; how big an improvement it would be is debatable.
Why the fuck doesn't Library of Congress also dole out ISBN's for free?
What does the "I" in "ISBN" stand for?
I'm sure that the USA's LoC could, if it desired, come up with a scheme of LoCSBNs that would be locally unique, and which might, for the present, be not-incompatible with the ISBN system. But at some point...
ISBN was designed for the publishing situation in... when, the mid-1970s? The situation is now different. It sounds as if ISBN may not be an appropriate standard for the future. Which is a good reason to start thinking about the fundamentals, before pontificating.
What is a "document"? What is "publishing"? How long might I want the new scheme to work for? How do I intend to "transmit" the "references".
Time scale is easy - Earth is likely to be uninhabitable by anything resembling humans in a billion years, so let's design for that.
What is "publishing" - say, any written record that pertains to one individual primarily and others only tangentially. So, your receipt at the supermarket might be a document you need to refer to in the future (to claim tax relief on your condoms, for example). So... is it credible that a human could generate 100 million documents in a 100yr lifetime? How many people.... for round numbers, lets' choose an average of 10 billion.
I make that 10^10 people * 10^9 years / 10^2 years/lifetime * 10^8 documents per lifetime for an address space of 10^(10+9-2+8) = 10^25
That's 0xDE0B6B3A7640000, a 15 hex digit number. Make it 16 hex digits and you've got a good deal of room. That's not too drastic to transmit, even over the phone ; quite a few people could probably remember important ones without writing them down. Make it 9 hex digits for your personal identifier and 7 hex digits for your document identifier, and you might be onto a workable system.
In related thoughts, the 16 decimal digits of a credit card number allows for up not far short of a million cards per person existent today. Or 1000 cards per person, for a thousand generations, assuming that the average population isn't much different to today. Is that utterly implausible? Are the numbers utterly unmanageable?
What somewhat surprises me is that they don't get the wacky plastination guy in on the project.
They want a result that will last for decades to a century. "Plastination" has only a couple of decades of proven track record. It may well have good potential to last a lot longer, but that isn't the same as having a record.
Given that, I'd stick with the best of proven techniques for conventional embalming (including literally getting him into the fridge while he's still warm, to stop him being warm). You're not going to get a second chance with "Plastination" (capitalised, as IIRC it's a trademark), but repair techniques with conventional embalming have been in work for decades, so you do have second chances. By the time that Hagen's children (if he bothered to have any ; cousins otherwise) are dead, if the first Plastination specimens are still in good condition, then you could realistically consider the technique for preserving a body to last for 2+ generations, after which it really is of academic interest only.
Oh, doesn't Plastination involve continuously soaking the body in a vat for months? While most of embalming can be done by pumping a new batch of formaldehyde into the blood stream (and guts, surely?) during the night, and letting it soak into the stiff through a day on the podium? That would make a big difference too.
Mar 07 04:08:02.040 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.5 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.050 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.6 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.060 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.7 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.070 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.8 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.080 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.9 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.090 UA565 altimeter: altitude -36455.0 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.100 UA565 altimeter: altitude -36454.9 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.110 UA565 altimeter: altitude -36454.8 feet
Don't knock it ; we've all seen it happen (even if I've forgotten precisely the number at which Tetris rolled over).
I, for one, welcome our numerate engineering and software design overlords who understand the concept of "appropriate precision". Or, I would do, if they'd stop chasing Zeno's tortoise and actually get here.
What's the range of travel on a normal undercarriage? A foot? A half-metre? About the same as the precision necessary in an altimeter? And the frequency of sampling / storage/ transmission is likely to be related to the rate of change?
need of planet telescopes designed to watch for asteroids.
"off" planet telescopes surely?
I do actually go to the effort of composing and checking my messages before I post them. It triples or quadruples the length of time it takes for me to write a post. But I proffer my correspondents the respect of thinking and writing reasonably clearly (except when I'm drunk). And this afternoon, I'm having to use a keyboard laid out for one language, but with a driver for a second language, and I'm writing in a third language. Which makes life difficult all round! But anyway...
Off-planet telescopes ; possibly. But more as a question of resolution rather than light-gathering. What we really need are more telescopes, to perform a thorough ecliptic survey (the most likely direction for an incoming impactor) and then repeat it watching for new objects. Out-of-ecliptic impactors are really far beyond our capability to do anything about at the moment.
A "grand survey" of the whole of the solar system is implausible. It is a very large volume you're talking about (the zone of interest for a 20-year prediction would be out to 40 or 50 AU - double or triple the orbit of Pluto - and out there things are extremely dim. Given the typical albedo of outer solar system bodies (a few % of light reflected), you'd need a lot of truly massive telescopes to do such a survey. (Large telescopes inherently have a small field of view.) We don't have the space infrastructure to build them, and by the time that we do have the infrastructure, we'd probably no longer be at threat of extinction. We might even plausibly be able to do something to protect Earth itself from a seriously threatening impactor.
I'd be seriously dubious about being able to do anything about a 20-year warning today. If it were coming straight in to impact us... the travel times and delta-vees would probably mean we've got no real chance of doing something. If it were coming in so that after interaction with some other body, it could hit us... that's a very different task. To start with, the approach would be more circuitous, so the delta-vees needed would be smaller, and if we can get to it before it has a close encounter with A.N.Other body, then we've got a (relatively) good chance of changing that close encounter enough to make the problem go away. Might have to sacrifice a Mars rover or two to do it... but think of the video you'd get in the last few seconds!
If something came in today, we're fucked. As Brad Pitt once put it in a movie, "Proper fucked."
and I expect that the governments will be more focused on keeping us in uninformed to preclude societal collapse.
So, that's the UN Green Beret Spetznaz in the black helicopters impounding telescopes in your country? Along with printing presses, computers and the Internet.
Ohh, how upset the $GOVERNMENT$ are going to be when some nasty little renegade government (say, DPRK) lets the news out when it's politically convenient for them and politically inconvenient for $GOVERNMENT$.
Nope, I don't see that working for long. It's the same argument as the size of conspiracy implied by the Moon Landing Hoax idiots.
He didn't write that. He wrote "'come to relative rest," Which is NOT the same thing. Is English your native tongue? It doesn't look like it. But "drinkypoo's" original post made perfect sense to me.
And then to break AND accelerate into the opposite direction to match course and speed of roughly 20km / sec - 35 km / sec ( after ll this is delta V of 30 - 45 km / sec)
Yes, we don't have propulsion technologies to achieve that sort of delta-vee. So... either we remain vulnerable and exposed ; or we start pre-placing equipment which would give us options, given our actual propulsion technologies ; or we start having significant (hundreds) of people in self-sufficient ecosystems off planet... or... your suggestions? (I'd go for "all of the above", because the offshoot technologies will be useful to all of the problems.)
Even if you can't cure or prevent a problem, you can sometimes mitigate it. At which point, starting off by NOT making the problem worse is a good idea.
These are all very difficult problems (hint : use more, or bigger towing ships ; keep on adding them as fast as you can build them!). But since the alternative in the "extinction level" scenario is, well, extinction, it's not as if you're particularly bothered about, say, maintaining TV service while doing it.
The attempted "quick kill" option with nukes always remains a possibility. Or helping the gravity tow along with stand-off "ablation" explosions later in the process. But given that we don't know the structure of Joe Random Asteroid, then the first response is not going to be "nuke it", because there is a very real possibility of making the problem worse, or of making a manageable problem into an unmanageable, lethal problem.
You have an immense over-confidence in human technology against Nature. I don't have that confidence, but I do spend a large part of my working life watching out for Nature's nasty little tricks and trips and trying to prevent them becoming a problem. I know that Nature can - and eventually well - kill me. And you.
In the real world, we need to have been working out the practicalities of what we'd do when faced with an impactor, and we need to have started a decade or two ago. At least we've trialled rendezvousing with an asteroid (comet), which gives us a chance to assess physical properties.
If you know something is going to kill you in 15 years time, then you've got options.
There is every chance of not even getting 15 months warning. Not all asteroids (and comets) are tracked, and not all orbit in the plane of the ecliptic (which is where the large majority of the searching has happened). So a no-warning or minimal-warning impactor is a real possibility.
Even if you do have 15 years warning, then you'd have to be really really really sure that your first attempt at fixing the problem isn't going to make the problem worse. Say, you spend you first year deploying a nuke... which busts the threatening impactor into 20 major chunks, only one of which is not on a impacting course. Lovely!
OK. Now I'm sure that I'm going mad. Or sane. Or somewhere in between.
I've discovered LOLCODE, which is mad, but in a sane sort of way.
And then I've discovered "esoteric" programming languages. Actually, I've known of them for some time. "Whitespace", for example, is a language which I met several years ago from a different direction (it's the ultimate in steganographic programming ; the hard copy printouts consist only of... errrr... white space).
But I see a trend towards programming languages which have very small numbers of commands and operators. And this is where I think that I really should check what goes into the coffee machine, because it's getting weird.
I conceive... (of)... a programming language with a small vocabulary (commands, operators), which, with a "modified" keyboard, could produce valid code by a cat could walking across the keyboard. "I have a dream, LOLCATz and LOLKITTEHz..."
Better (?), but probably harder to achieve, would be a programming language where correct code could only be written by a cat walking across the keyboard.
I'm not sure which is scarier - that I can think of such things ; that other people might just possibly agree with me that it's a worthwhile project ; or the terrible, terrible implications of Rule 34.
with sufficient antimatter (say, 10 Kg, magnetically isolated)
That would be a few billion times the amount of antimatter we've made so far. Sweet. Can I have some?
the tungsten shield absorbing what heads for Earth due to tactical trajectory placement
... and the tungsten disk acquires the momentum of it's impacting debris, i.e. towards the Earth. We now have a tungsten frisbee heading towards the Earth at a considerable speed. Sweet.
making the object much more susceptible to break-up and frictional heat destruction if any of it hit the atmosphere.
By the time it hits the atmosphere, we're toast. Literally. The energy of the asteroid will still have pretty much all of the effects of the original impactor, just no crater. For a dinosaur killer type of impactor... we're still toast.
but I would rather have a 20ft diameter disk coming at the Earth instead of a house-sized chunk of iron and nickel, wouldn't you?
The Chelyabinsk impactor was the size you're talking about. The "extinction level event" that Tyson is talking about is several hundred times the diameter, and so tens of millions of times greater in consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Horses for courses ; drinking on the job isn't a problem in this particular branch of the business. No bars for hundreds of miles ; no shops except for the company shop, and a "no, we won't under any circumstances ship alcohol to the location, even if you are French!" policy with the shipping agents. (Of course, the supply boats are "wet" ; and are rarely away from shore for more than a week at a time.)
That got a lot of gallic backs up when it was enforced.
On land jobs, it can be more of a problem. But on land jobs, you've always got the option of running for the horizon if it all goes very pear-shaped ; those land jobs where you don't have the option of running (Siberia, -50degC), are treated like offshore jobs - again to the horror of the French. And the Swiss, as I recall.
Did you spot the deliberate error? It's cobalt that's the give-away "you've been super nova'd" nucleide.
Whether it is legal in the jurisdictions where I live and work (I've averaged three different continents a year for about 8 years now.) is also irrelevant to the policies of the companies to whom I'm sub-contracted. The terms of the contract are "random testing at site" ; "compulsory testing by third party of client's choosing at least annually" ; "failure to comply by any contractor personnel is termination of contract at the company level" and "dispute of this policy is termination of contract at the company level." They defend this on health and safety grounds. Which is stupid, but successful.
I.e. the law doesn't matter ; neither the law of your home country, your employer's country, the client's country, or the country you're working in. You get caught and you're fucked and your colleagues (mostly friends, too) are fucked unless you're fired immediately. It's not a nice position for us field staff, and our bosses don't like it either. But we knew what the business was like before we came into it.
I still have friends who smoke regularly, for entertainment. And because they know the rules of the business, they know better than to offer me a toke.
AIUI, if it gets hydrogen fusion going, then it's a main sequence star, even if it's a tiddler. That's pretty clear, and because people want to kill other people, the minimal limits for hydrogen (proton) fusion have been researched thoroughly. Objects that don't get hydrogen (proton) fusion going are brown dwarfs, planets, or dust.
Observationally, if something has been hot for a billion years or so from internal sources, then it must be burning hydrogen (protons) or something heavier ; nothing else can provide the necessary energy for that long.
A brown dwarf doesn't get hydrogen (proton) fusion going, but it might get deuterium fusion going, until it runs out of deuterium. That is, I think, an undefined point. Observationally though, a YOUNG brown dwarf may still be hot from accretion (which converts the potential energy of infalling gas into heat), so one must also look for the presence of deuterium in it's atmosphere. Which one could do spectroscopically, though it's a bitch. But lithium is considerably easier to detect spectroscopically, and it was produced in small quantities in the Big Bang (strictly, in the nucleosynthesis event some seconds after the Big Bang, as things cooled down ; I forget the exact time, but it was one of the predicted events that gave the title to Stephen Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes", while this was new science ; the detection of primordial lithium was a cornerstone of demonstrating that the Big Bang really did happen according to something very similar to 1970s "Standard Model" particle physics), and crucially, it is destroyed during the process of fusion with deuterium. So, if you measure a putative brown dwarf and it has primordial amounts of hydrogen, of helium and negligible amounts of lithium, then you've got evidence of deuterium burning. Boom - confirmed brown dwarf.
But ... what if your star-like object contains an intermediate amount of lithium? Did it form from matter depleted in lithium (from a supernova remnant, perhaps?) ; or did it go through a deuterium-burning phase as it was forming and unstable (convecting, like a pot boiling on a stove), but it has since started hydrogen fusion in it's core, and radiative heat transfer has taken over internally leaving a surface with an abnormally low lithium content, which is not mixed with the core (where lithium is being produced as a side product of normal nuclear fusion, in small quantities.
So, intrinsically, it is difficult to decide whether a particular dim star is a star or a brown dwarf. There's a lot of arguments over every case. And TBH, for more details, you're going to have to "read The Literature" ; welcome as an observer to the cutting (bleeding) edges of observational astronomy. (Oh, the spectroscopy is cutting edge too - it's not much more than 30 years since instruments started to get this good, and it needs a LOT of that scarcest of commodities - observing time on a highly-figured well mounted "light bucket" of a telescope.)
At the low edge of "brown dwarf", discrimination is difficult too. As you get to smaller masses, the amount of "metals" (anything heavier than helium, to an astrophysicist) increases, irregularly, making it very hard to predict exactly what mass a planet can "turn on" deuterium fusion and qualify as a brown dwarf. If your candidate (there's a nice neutral word) has, say, a lot of 60-Fe in it's composition (itself a likely indicator of origin in supernova debris ; 60-Fe has half-life of a couple of million years), then the radioactive heat and particle release from that can distort the "turn on" temperatures that one would expect in a pure hydrogen progenitor, or a "primordial composition" progenitor. Again, the details get messy.
Short version long ; the definition of "brown dwarf" is pretty clear. However since we're lacking "tricorders" that can operate at ranges of dozens of light years, act
Because they can temporarily achieve fusion, which no planet can do.
It's like - you have guys, fat guys and really really fat guys (they're your planets, various sizes from terrestrial planets through the Neptunian planets to gas giants like Jupiter), and continuing in increasing mass, you have small blobs, medium sized blobs and gargantuan blobs (stars, from red dwarves, though sun-size stars to Betelgeuse-size stars up to behemoths like Eta Carinae), with the dividing line being those whose legs break under the strain of supporting their whole weight (or ... sustain hydrogen fusion, for the stars). On that analogy, brown dwarfs are the ones whose legs can support them for some time, but not indefinitely.
There is an underlying continuum (of mass, in both analogies), separated into apparent classes on the basis of a measurable but not vital criterion.
If you want a geological analogy, to me two specimens might be forsteritic fayalite and fayalitic forsterite, but to my ignorant barbarian of a sedimentologist friend, they're all olivine, just of differing density. (Is it obvious that density isn't important in to the fundamental properties of the two specimens?)
I do hairdressing. Lengthwise. On each strand.
Wow, that was difficult.
But, doesn't America have, like, a 3489th Amendment to it's constitution that says "Speed limits apply, but not to me." It's the amendment just before or just after the one that says "Oral isn't losing your virginity unless you swallow."
Sheesh. Fucking lawyers (which definitely is losing your virginity ; all holes, at once)!
Ohh, I fancy a spliff. I'll just head out to the gay bar and catch myself some Anally Injected Death Sentence, then neglect to get it treated for a decade or so. Then you can roll up a spliff for me so that I can control my nausea and improve my appetite.
There are plenty of perfectly good arguments in favour of legalising marijuana, or at least making it a similar status to nicotine and ethanol. Your argument isn't a good one.
... After the dethronement of Bush the Second, son of Bush the First, adoptive son of RayGun the Incontinent.
FTFY
There are some geologists around on Slashdot who consider the 400 million year arc over which variations in the day/month and month/year ratios have been demonstrated to be a quite short time. The same effects have doubtless been going for a longer period (since the Moon-forming event), but there's around 50 million years uncertainty in that datation too.
Don't let the astronomers get started. Or the theoretical cosmologists, with their wear on the Turtle's toenails.
So ... starting with Kansas, Louisiana, or Texas?
You could get rid of all of those, rendering your screen transparent except for the switched-on pixels. The screen would then be almost completely fucking useless except for posing in front of in shit movies.
Whether that would be an improvement on the original problem of having a Windows 8 PC is not at issue ; how big an improvement it would be is debatable.
What does the "I" in "ISBN" stand for?
I'm sure that the USA's LoC could, if it desired, come up with a scheme of LoCSBNs that would be locally unique, and which might, for the present, be not-incompatible with the ISBN system. But at some point ...
Oh, there's an XKCD for that.
ISBN was designed for the publishing situation in ... when, the mid-1970s? The situation is now different. It sounds as if ISBN may not be an appropriate standard for the future. Which is a good reason to start thinking about the fundamentals, before pontificating.
What is a "document"? What is "publishing"? How long might I want the new scheme to work for? How do I intend to "transmit" the "references".
Time scale is easy - Earth is likely to be uninhabitable by anything resembling humans in a billion years, so let's design for that. ... is it credible that a human could generate 100 million documents in a 100yr lifetime? How many people .... for round numbers, lets' choose an average of 10 billion.
What is "publishing" - say, any written record that pertains to one individual primarily and others only tangentially. So, your receipt at the supermarket might be a document you need to refer to in the future (to claim tax relief on your condoms, for example). So
I make that 10^10 people * 10^9 years / 10^2 years/lifetime * 10^8 documents per lifetime for an address space of 10^(10+9-2+8) = 10^25
That's 0xDE0B6B3A7640000, a 15 hex digit number. Make it 16 hex digits and you've got a good deal of room. That's not too drastic to transmit, even over the phone ; quite a few people could probably remember important ones without writing them down. Make it 9 hex digits for your personal identifier and 7 hex digits for your document identifier, and you might be onto a workable system.
In related thoughts, the 16 decimal digits of a credit card number allows for up not far short of a million cards per person existent today. Or 1000 cards per person, for a thousand generations, assuming that the average population isn't much different to today. Is that utterly implausible? Are the numbers utterly unmanageable?
My Hollerith card puncher doesn't have syntax highlighting. Can I get an upgrade?
They want a result that will last for decades to a century. "Plastination" has only a couple of decades of proven track record. It may well have good potential to last a lot longer, but that isn't the same as having a record.
Given that, I'd stick with the best of proven techniques for conventional embalming (including literally getting him into the fridge while he's still warm, to stop him being warm). You're not going to get a second chance with "Plastination" (capitalised, as IIRC it's a trademark), but repair techniques with conventional embalming have been in work for decades, so you do have second chances. By the time that Hagen's children (if he bothered to have any ; cousins otherwise) are dead, if the first Plastination specimens are still in good condition, then you could realistically consider the technique for preserving a body to last for 2+ generations, after which it really is of academic interest only.
Oh, doesn't Plastination involve continuously soaking the body in a vat for months? While most of embalming can be done by pumping a new batch of formaldehyde into the blood stream (and guts, surely?) during the night, and letting it soak into the stiff through a day on the podium? That would make a big difference too.
Or so my father tells me, referring to his college chemistry courses in the 1950s.
It was a tired old aphorism then.
Don't knock it ; we've all seen it happen (even if I've forgotten precisely the number at which Tetris rolled over).
I, for one, welcome our numerate engineering and software design overlords who understand the concept of "appropriate precision". Or, I would do, if they'd stop chasing Zeno's tortoise and actually get here.
What's the range of travel on a normal undercarriage? A foot? A half-metre? About the same as the precision necessary in an altimeter? And the frequency of sampling / storage/ transmission is likely to be related to the rate of change?
I don't think that you meant "sublimate" ; or "sublimate" doesn't mean what you think it means.
Simple fluid flow, followed by evaporation to leave the salts behind is a quite adequate mechanism.
"off" planet telescopes surely?
I do actually go to the effort of composing and checking my messages before I post them. It triples or quadruples the length of time it takes for me to write a post. But I proffer my correspondents the respect of thinking and writing reasonably clearly (except when I'm drunk). And this afternoon, I'm having to use a keyboard laid out for one language, but with a driver for a second language, and I'm writing in a third language. Which makes life difficult all round! But anyway ...
Off-planet telescopes ; possibly. But more as a question of resolution rather than light-gathering. What we really need are more telescopes, to perform a thorough ecliptic survey (the most likely direction for an incoming impactor) and then repeat it watching for new objects. Out-of-ecliptic impactors are really far beyond our capability to do anything about at the moment.
A "grand survey" of the whole of the solar system is implausible. It is a very large volume you're talking about (the zone of interest for a 20-year prediction would be out to 40 or 50 AU - double or triple the orbit of Pluto - and out there things are extremely dim. Given the typical albedo of outer solar system bodies (a few % of light reflected), you'd need a lot of truly massive telescopes to do such a survey. (Large telescopes inherently have a small field of view.) We don't have the space infrastructure to build them, and by the time that we do have the infrastructure, we'd probably no longer be at threat of extinction. We might even plausibly be able to do something to protect Earth itself from a seriously threatening impactor.
I'd be seriously dubious about being able to do anything about a 20-year warning today. If it were coming straight in to impact us ... the travel times and delta-vees would probably mean we've got no real chance of doing something. If it were coming in so that after interaction with some other body, it could hit us ... that's a very different task. To start with, the approach would be more circuitous, so the delta-vees needed would be smaller, and if we can get to it before it has a close encounter with A.N.Other body, then we've got a (relatively) good chance of changing that close encounter enough to make the problem go away. Might have to sacrifice a Mars rover or two to do it ... but think of the video you'd get in the last few seconds!
If something came in today, we're fucked. As Brad Pitt once put it in a movie, "Proper fucked."
So, that's the UN Green Beret Spetznaz in the black helicopters impounding telescopes in your country? Along with printing presses, computers and the Internet.
Ohh, how upset the $GOVERNMENT$ are going to be when some nasty little renegade government (say, DPRK) lets the news out when it's politically convenient for them and politically inconvenient for $GOVERNMENT$.
Nope, I don't see that working for long. It's the same argument as the size of conspiracy implied by the Moon Landing Hoax idiots.
He didn't write that. He wrote "'come to relative rest," Which is NOT the same thing. Is English your native tongue? It doesn't look like it. But "drinkypoo's" original post made perfect sense to me.
Yes, we don't have propulsion technologies to achieve that sort of delta-vee. So ... either we remain vulnerable and exposed ; or we start pre-placing equipment which would give us options, given our actual propulsion technologies ; or we start having significant (hundreds) of people in self-sufficient ecosystems off planet ... or ... your suggestions? (I'd go for "all of the above", because the offshoot technologies will be useful to all of the problems.)
Even if you can't cure or prevent a problem, you can sometimes mitigate it. At which point, starting off by NOT making the problem worse is a good idea.
The attempted "quick kill" option with nukes always remains a possibility. Or helping the gravity tow along with stand-off "ablation" explosions later in the process. But given that we don't know the structure of Joe Random Asteroid, then the first response is not going to be "nuke it", because there is a very real possibility of making the problem worse, or of making a manageable problem into an unmanageable, lethal problem.
You have an immense over-confidence in human technology against Nature. I don't have that confidence, but I do spend a large part of my working life watching out for Nature's nasty little tricks and trips and trying to prevent them becoming a problem. I know that Nature can - and eventually well - kill me. And you.
In the real world, we need to have been working out the practicalities of what we'd do when faced with an impactor, and we need to have started a decade or two ago. At least we've trialled rendezvousing with an asteroid (comet), which gives us a chance to assess physical properties.
Oh well, off to the heliport to go to work soon.
There is every chance of not even getting 15 months warning. Not all asteroids (and comets) are tracked, and not all orbit in the plane of the ecliptic (which is where the large majority of the searching has happened). So a no-warning or minimal-warning impactor is a real possibility.
Even if you do have 15 years warning, then you'd have to be really really really sure that your first attempt at fixing the problem isn't going to make the problem worse. Say, you spend you first year deploying a nuke ... which busts the threatening impactor into 20 major chunks, only one of which is not on a impacting course. Lovely!
I've discovered LOLCODE, which is mad, but in a sane sort of way.
And then I've discovered "esoteric" programming languages. Actually, I've known of them for some time. "Whitespace", for example, is a language which I met several years ago from a different direction (it's the ultimate in steganographic programming ; the hard copy printouts consist only of ... errrr ... white space).
But I see a trend towards programming languages which have very small numbers of commands and operators. And this is where I think that I really should check what goes into the coffee machine, because it's getting weird.
I conceive ... (of) ... a programming language with a small vocabulary (commands, operators), which, with a "modified" keyboard, could produce valid code by a cat could walking across the keyboard. "I have a dream, LOLCATz and LOLKITTEHz ..."
Better (?), but probably harder to achieve, would be a programming language where correct code could only be written by a cat walking across the keyboard.
I'm not sure which is scarier - that I can think of such things ; that other people might just possibly agree with me that it's a worthwhile project ; or the terrible, terrible implications of Rule 34.
This "Malbolge" sounds interestingly difficult to use. But what about Intercal?
That would be a few billion times the amount of antimatter we've made so far. Sweet. Can I have some?
By the time it hits the atmosphere, we're toast. Literally. The energy of the asteroid will still have pretty much all of the effects of the original impactor, just no crater. For a dinosaur killer type of impactor ... we're still toast.
The Chelyabinsk impactor was the size you're talking about. The "extinction level event" that Tyson is talking about is several hundred times the diameter, and so tens of millions of times greater in consequences.
Well, you said it.