Yeah, I wish someone would put as much effort into decoding Linear A (the language of the Minoans)
I wonder how large the corpus of Linear A is, compared to the Voynich text. I would be surprised if the Linear A is the larger, but that is more likely to find more Linear A (in secure archaeological contexts) then it is to find a second Voynich manuscript.
Indeed, I've seen papers published - in about the last decade, showing that the Voynich textis statistically indistinguishable from what could be produced with a physical frame (to select letters) and a sheet or randomly distributed characters. Which is well in advance of cryptographic and statistical methods consonant with the historical record of the document, but otherwise well within the reach of inventors of the time. The diagrams seem rather more interesting.
THIS is the vaunted wonderful user interface of the Apple-o-Sphere? By the four balls of Jesus Mary and Joseph, but that is laughably bad! I know that I got rid of my Apple device because I didn't like the user interface... probably before the iPad physically existed (thinks - I still had my Psion with a touch screen and two week battery life)... years ago nonetheless. But for fuck's sake, you;d hope that thy improved the UI/UX somewhere in the intervening years.
If there was an iDevice seller in town, I'd be half-tempted to go there to have a laugh at how bad they still are.
Yes, someone that twisted an ankle shouldn't be taking anywhere near that much but you people have NO IDEA how many people in this country are in chronic unrelenting pain for various conditions.
And this is the country whose president is lecturing us about the failings of our medical system.
You were given pain relief pills for a tooth extraction? I was slated for all 4 wisdoms to be extracted at age 13, walked from school up to the dentist and went under the gas. The anaesthetist got the doses wrong and I woke up (but felt nothing) as they pulled the first. I felt them pulling the second. As they pulled the third, I thrashed about and managed to hit the dentist, at which point they realised there was something wrong and stopped treatment. I spat the blood, exercised my muffled and very lightweight collection of swear words, then walked back to school for the afternoon with an appointment for having the fourth tooth pulled. They did that one under the needle instead of gas.
What made the USA great (Score:1) [...] Was the ability to read, publish, self publish, review publications, talk about books and news.
Hmmm, there's probably an almost-interesting question of historical fact buried in the assumptions behind that assertion. Not being an American, and having no interest in re-visiting the place, I don't personally give a shit, but I do wonder when the country's level of literacy reached being a majority, and if it was before or after the famously bigoted and biased press barons of the 10s, 20, 30s and 40s, as so ably parodied in Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane".
Biased press and controlled information sources have been a popular and effective technique since... well, Jonathan Swift was complaining about it in the 1720s. So as a problem it's considerably longer-established than the USA.
That's what'll get the OP McSWATed and dragged off to McJail to become a McBitch.
The very idea of not ramming profit-making adverts into the childs eyes from the womb is so un-American that probably it would be best to exterminate the family back to the biblically approved seventh generation.
How is the programme of installing advertising screens into wombs going? I heard they got the dates of eye and visual cortex development figured out, so we know when to replace the direct brainfeed electroshock machines with waterproofed under-eyelid screens. But will it all be in place and the population thought-controlled in time for Trump's third term in the presidency?
Each must be the absolute best in their field, because tehy must make decisions and carry out life sustaining operations
Astronauts don't make many decisions. They carry out the tasks they've spent months training for on the ground, under overview from people on Earth who can (and do) take the technical decisions in the event of things not going to plan.
I don't disagree that this is a stupid idea, but the concept that you need your astronaut to be the best in the world at 47 different fields is also laughable. You'll merely guarantee that n significant numbers of humans ever get to live of this planet. At least, not until all the problems have been worked out using robots, and the habitats built.
The issue I was thinking about is the conception and development of a fetus in other than Earth gravity.
Review basic biology. Conception and early development takes place in suspension in fluid - effectively at zero-g. When (if) gravity becomes significant, I'm not sure. I'll guess around the second or third month, when the foetus becomes supported by the womb walls instead of fluid.
There are a few scientists that think that our life cycle it tied very closely to a 1G gravity.
It's an SF trope, certainly. Whether it has any actual grounding in reality, the experiments haven't been done. Probably wouldn't get past the ethics committee.
From first principals, I find the basic idea of "fertility limitation by gravity" dubious. Relatively closely related to us, the cetaceans (whales and dolphins) went from land-dwelling (1g) to obligate aquatic (effectively 0g) in a fistful of millions of years, using the famously efficient natural method of "mix up the genes and cull the failures". I suspect we could do better, between mechanical technology and drugs.
A pretty high infant/ perinatal mortality isn't a barrier to settlement. 50% mortality of under-5s hasn't slowed down growth meaningfully in any society in the historical record. Just make more children. Required unskilled labour.
In Larry Niven's universe, asteroid miners find ice in the asteroid belt and bring it to Mars and Earth
Not in Known Space they didn't. In Known Space, they didn't bother with colonising Mars - not worth the effort, and if you're going to have to live in a space station, why do it at the bottom of a hole (gravitational potential well)?
The science fiction trope is that terraforming is quick, but it isn't
Niven's "Building Harlequin's Moon", the terraformers went back into hibernation for the first 60-odd thousand years of the terraforming of a Mars-size planetesimal, leaving the tedium to the AI. Seems a bit quick to me (I'd estimate more like a 100 thousand), but the ball park is right.
moving the quantities of ice mass needed from the asteroid belt to Mars is a not inconsiderable problem
You'd need most of the volatiles inventory of the asteroid belt. Which means tracking down and wrangling hundreds of thousands of wet rocks. The big ones are too rocky - they baked their volatiles off in the process of of becoming big. You might try using a half a Jovian Moon... raising it's own problems.
between Russia, China, North Korea, and the US. The other three countries show numerous new ways to kill Americans,
T's all about America, isn't it. Never considered that the Russians and Chinese may have good reasons to throw nukes at each other? Ditto the DPRK and Russians? DPRK vs China is fairly uniikely, I'l grant.
Russia, China and DPRK have mutual land borders, providing many grounds for mutual conflict. And you're also forgetting the joys inherent between Pakistan and India, and between Israel and all of their neighbours.
Basically, America is hardly important enough to warrant worrying about.
93 Escort Wagon
I scrapped my Escort in 1993. Floorpan rust, IIRC ; not an economical repair.
unwitting buyers (if they buy them off the streets) is what's important.
Hang on - it's an iDevice in question, isn't it? I thought they were only available from iShops and (fairly large) authorised resellers (large department stores, computer stores, phone dealers etc.) So automatically you know that if it's for sale "on the street", then you know that it's stolen.
Arsenic won't in itself biodegrade, it's a metal. It will spread in the environment.
Finally someone who gets it. Yes, it's a poisonous element. So by introducing it into the environment, you're introducing it into the environment, and it's going to remain in the environment for the foreseeable future. (NB : I'm foreseeing with the eyes of a geologist here - hundreds of thousands of years.)
Someone in the mid-1920s showed that adding a lead compound to fuel mixes would make engines run better, so they set about doing it, at a non-trivial amount of profit and noticeable increase in engine performance. And nobody cared about the increasing levels of lead in the general environment, and more specifically increasing lead levels in the blood of city dwellers, young and old. In hindsight, that seems to have been a less than wonderful idea, and people had known about the poisonous nature of lead for centuries before it's widespread environmental distribution.
So, repeating that performance with arsenic? Is that really a wise idea?
You will also need some pretty specialized workers servicing the reactor.
Shrug. Lots of industries have faced this sort of problem. Depending on the relative costs of training a "specialized worker" and training a "specialized worker called an astronaut," then either astronauts will be trained to service nukes, or nuke workers will be trained to be astronauts. Big deal neither way.
A for-instance : using radioactive sources to perform non-destructive testing of welds (to verify that the weld is a good one) is a fairly specialised worker. Training people to climb ropes to access remote work sites without spending weeks building scaffolding to get to the site is fairly specialised work (ti's called "rope access", http://www.irata.org/ (note, their IT is fucked up ; insecure ; they're rope jockeys, not bit jockeys). I know instructors in the latter who have trained dozens of the former to do rope access over the years. Which way things go is just a question of the relative costs (time, money, materials) of the different subjects.
Of course, if nuclear maintenance takes 45 years solid to learn, and astronauting takes another 35 years to learn, then you'd only have nuclear maintenance astronauts who are over 80. Which is not impossible. But since most astronauts are in their 30s to 40s, and the various nuclear workers I've worked with have covered the same age range, I don't think that's a show stopper.
I thought we didn't yet know how long the reversals take?
Much modelling - all of it somewhat self-contradictory and inconclusive.
The archaeological record doesn't help a lot. Yes, stacked hearths might tell you, in theory. If each hearth could be independently dated. And each of them had both the same mineralogy (clay from exactly the same source, with exactly the same thermal history, and particularly the same oxidation history, because Fe2+ has a different magnetic susceptibility to Fe3+.
However, The geological record does give some help. In (IIRC) the basalts from a generation or two before the Yellowstone hotspot moved to Yellowstone, and was somewhere near Idaho (my foreign geography is a bit crude, I'm afraid), a basalt sill was injected into existing rocks and started cooling. As it cooled, the coldest parts passed through their Curie temperatures and "recorded" the strength and orientation of the local magnetic field. And the outer parts of the sill record a different orientation to the inner parts.
Modelling (hawk, spit ; but it's the best we've got) the thermal history of a ~10m thick wide slab of rock embedded between other slabs of rock (with how much ground water movement??? Or gases???) suggests the this field change, IF it was a full reversal, took some centuries to a millennium to happen.
That was the state a decade or so ago. There may be more data points now - I've not noticed subsequent papers, if there have been any. But it is a datum. Normal mantra : "more research needed." But no-one is shitting their breeks over the question, so, no funding.
"concerned" is a little strong. "aware" is how strong it gets for pretty much everyone. That guy on Discovery Channel, Munchkiniko "It's Aliens" Poopants (or whatever his name is) notwithstanding.
that the magnetic poles might
"will", not "might"
soon go through one of their cyclic reversals,
aperiodic, but fairly frequent. Most people, when told something is cyclical, think "it'll happen every 100,000 years or what ever", then think, "it hasn't happened for 50,000 years, so 50,000 years to the next one". The actual distribution of field reversals is a lot closer to random than this sort of thinking implies. "Soon" is in a geologist's sense : within a 100000 years, plus or minus 200000 years. We may be in the middle of a field reversal at this time and have been so for the whole of recorded history.
flipping north and south. This would result in a number of years where the earth has no net magnetic field.
Not untue, but also misleading. Most models suggest that there will be no overall field, but incoherently oriented and variable local fields. For example, the overall field over SE South America and the South Atlantic is considerably weaker than average, and is changing relatively rapidly, which is interpreted by some as meaning that a reverse current is operating in the core below there, which might be an indication of an approaching reversal event. Or it might not be. Welcome to the bleeding edge. If we knew what was going on, we couldn't describe it as research.
I know a wellbore surveyor who once recorded the difference between his magnetic sensor's orientation and the steering bend's orientation out by 180 degrees - he read the wrong side of the protractor when torquing the tools together at around 20,000 Nm. For some kilometre of kick-off and around a day's work, they could not work out why they set up the tools to drill in THAT direction, and it drilled in the opposite direction. Then - "light bulb moment", 10 minutes of calculation on the Ouija board (doesn't interfere with the computer), and a very embarrassed conversation with the client. Fortunately, it only cost a few hours of actual operations time, so we covered it up.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how large the corpus of Linear A is, compared to the Voynich text. I would be surprised if the Linear A is the larger, but that is more likely to find more Linear A (in secure archaeological contexts) then it is to find a second Voynich manuscript.
Indeed, I've seen papers published - in about the last decade, showing that the Voynich textis statistically indistinguishable from what could be produced with a physical frame (to select letters) and a sheet or randomly distributed characters. Which is well in advance of cryptographic and statistical methods consonant with the historical record of the document, but otherwise well within the reach of inventors of the time. The diagrams seem rather more interesting.
THIS is the vaunted wonderful user interface of the Apple-o-Sphere? By the four balls of Jesus Mary and Joseph, but that is laughably bad! I know that I got rid of my Apple device because I didn't like the user interface ... probably before the iPad physically existed (thinks - I still had my Psion with a touch screen and two week battery life) ... years ago nonetheless. But for fuck's sake, you;d hope that thy improved the UI/UX somewhere in the intervening years.
If there was an iDevice seller in town, I'd be half-tempted to go there to have a laugh at how bad they still are.
And this is the country whose president is lecturing us about the failings of our medical system.
Painkillers for use at home? Don't make me laugh!
Hmmm, there's probably an almost-interesting question of historical fact buried in the assumptions behind that assertion. Not being an American, and having no interest in re-visiting the place, I don't personally give a shit, but I do wonder when the country's level of literacy reached being a majority, and if it was before or after the famously bigoted and biased press barons of the 10s, 20, 30s and 40s, as so ably parodied in Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane".
Biased press and controlled information sources have been a popular and effective technique since ... well, Jonathan Swift was complaining about it in the 1720s. So as a problem it's considerably longer-established than the USA.
That's what'll get the OP McSWATed and dragged off to McJail to become a McBitch. The very idea of not ramming profit-making adverts into the childs eyes from the womb is so un-American that probably it would be best to exterminate the family back to the biblically approved seventh generation. How is the programme of installing advertising screens into wombs going? I heard they got the dates of eye and visual cortex development figured out, so we know when to replace the direct brainfeed electroshock machines with waterproofed under-eyelid screens. But will it all be in place and the population thought-controlled in time for Trump's third term in the presidency?
Astronauts don't make many decisions. They carry out the tasks they've spent months training for on the ground, under overview from people on Earth who can (and do) take the technical decisions in the event of things not going to plan.
I don't disagree that this is a stupid idea, but the concept that you need your astronaut to be the best in the world at 47 different fields is also laughable. You'll merely guarantee that n significant numbers of humans ever get to live of this planet. At least, not until all the problems have been worked out using robots, and the habitats built.
Well, there's your new career mapped out for you.
Review basic biology. Conception and early development takes place in suspension in fluid - effectively at zero-g. When (if) gravity becomes significant, I'm not sure. I'll guess around the second or third month, when the foetus becomes supported by the womb walls instead of fluid.
It's an SF trope, certainly. Whether it has any actual grounding in reality, the experiments haven't been done. Probably wouldn't get past the ethics committee.
From first principals, I find the basic idea of "fertility limitation by gravity" dubious. Relatively closely related to us, the cetaceans (whales and dolphins) went from land-dwelling (1g) to obligate aquatic (effectively 0g) in a fistful of millions of years, using the famously efficient natural method of "mix up the genes and cull the failures". I suspect we could do better, between mechanical technology and drugs.
A pretty high infant/ perinatal mortality isn't a barrier to settlement. 50% mortality of under-5s hasn't slowed down growth meaningfully in any society in the historical record. Just make more children. Required unskilled labour.
Not for the fish.
I was driving (a hired car) in Sicily a year and a bit ago. It was ... enthralling.
On a time scale of millions of years, yes that would be a problem. I'm very dubious that you'd find enough volatiles.
Not in Known Space they didn't. In Known Space, they didn't bother with colonising Mars - not worth the effort, and if you're going to have to live in a space station, why do it at the bottom of a hole (gravitational potential well)?
Niven's "Building Harlequin's Moon", the terraformers went back into hibernation for the first 60-odd thousand years of the terraforming of a Mars-size planetesimal, leaving the tedium to the AI. Seems a bit quick to me (I'd estimate more like a 100 thousand), but the ball park is right.
You'd need most of the volatiles inventory of the asteroid belt. Which means tracking down and wrangling hundreds of thousands of wet rocks. The big ones are too rocky - they baked their volatiles off in the process of of becoming big. You might try using a half a Jovian Moon ... raising it's own problems.
Actually, you probably don't know that.
As they used to say back when I had neither phone line nor Internet connection "On the Internet, no one knows that you're a dog - even a dead dog."
Paint, drying.
T's all about America, isn't it. Never considered that the Russians and Chinese may have good reasons to throw nukes at each other? Ditto the DPRK and Russians? DPRK vs China is fairly uniikely, I'l grant.
Russia, China and DPRK have mutual land borders, providing many grounds for mutual conflict. And you're also forgetting the joys inherent between Pakistan and India, and between Israel and all of their neighbours.
Basically, America is hardly important enough to warrant worrying about.
I scrapped my Escort in 1993. Floorpan rust, IIRC ; not an economical repair.
Hang on - it's an iDevice in question, isn't it? I thought they were only available from iShops and (fairly large) authorised resellers (large department stores, computer stores, phone dealers etc.) So automatically you know that if it's for sale "on the street", then you know that it's stolen.
Finally someone who gets it. Yes, it's a poisonous element. So by introducing it into the environment, you're introducing it into the environment, and it's going to remain in the environment for the foreseeable future. (NB : I'm foreseeing with the eyes of a geologist here - hundreds of thousands of years.)
Someone in the mid-1920s showed that adding a lead compound to fuel mixes would make engines run better, so they set about doing it, at a non-trivial amount of profit and noticeable increase in engine performance. And nobody cared about the increasing levels of lead in the general environment, and more specifically increasing lead levels in the blood of city dwellers, young and old. In hindsight, that seems to have been a less than wonderful idea, and people had known about the poisonous nature of lead for centuries before it's widespread environmental distribution.
So, repeating that performance with arsenic? Is that really a wise idea?
Shrug. Lots of industries have faced this sort of problem. Depending on the relative costs of training a "specialized worker" and training a "specialized worker called an astronaut," then either astronauts will be trained to service nukes, or nuke workers will be trained to be astronauts. Big deal neither way.
A for-instance : using radioactive sources to perform non-destructive testing of welds (to verify that the weld is a good one) is a fairly specialised worker. Training people to climb ropes to access remote work sites without spending weeks building scaffolding to get to the site is fairly specialised work (ti's called "rope access", http://www.irata.org/ (note, their IT is fucked up ; insecure ; they're rope jockeys, not bit jockeys). I know instructors in the latter who have trained dozens of the former to do rope access over the years. Which way things go is just a question of the relative costs (time, money, materials) of the different subjects.
Of course, if nuclear maintenance takes 45 years solid to learn, and astronauting takes another 35 years to learn, then you'd only have nuclear maintenance astronauts who are over 80. Which is not impossible. But since most astronauts are in their 30s to 40s, and the various nuclear workers I've worked with have covered the same age range, I don't think that's a show stopper.
Much modelling - all of it somewhat self-contradictory and inconclusive.
The archaeological record doesn't help a lot. Yes, stacked hearths might tell you, in theory. If each hearth could be independently dated. And each of them had both the same mineralogy (clay from exactly the same source, with exactly the same thermal history, and particularly the same oxidation history, because Fe2+ has a different magnetic susceptibility to Fe3+.
However, The geological record does give some help. In (IIRC) the basalts from a generation or two before the Yellowstone hotspot moved to Yellowstone, and was somewhere near Idaho (my foreign geography is a bit crude, I'm afraid), a basalt sill was injected into existing rocks and started cooling. As it cooled, the coldest parts passed through their Curie temperatures and "recorded" the strength and orientation of the local magnetic field. And the outer parts of the sill record a different orientation to the inner parts.
Modelling (hawk, spit ; but it's the best we've got) the thermal history of a ~10m thick wide slab of rock embedded between other slabs of rock (with how much ground water movement??? Or gases???) suggests the this field change, IF it was a full reversal, took some centuries to a millennium to happen.
That was the state a decade or so ago. There may be more data points now - I've not noticed subsequent papers, if there have been any. But it is a datum. Normal mantra : "more research needed." But no-one is shitting their breeks over the question, so, no funding.
"concerned" is a little strong. "aware" is how strong it gets for pretty much everyone. That guy on Discovery Channel, Munchkiniko "It's Aliens" Poopants (or whatever his name is) notwithstanding.
"will", not "might"
aperiodic, but fairly frequent. Most people, when told something is cyclical, think "it'll happen every 100,000 years or what ever", then think, "it hasn't happened for 50,000 years, so 50,000 years to the next one". The actual distribution of field reversals is a lot closer to random than this sort of thinking implies. "Soon" is in a geologist's sense : within a 100000 years, plus or minus 200000 years. We may be in the middle of a field reversal at this time and have been so for the whole of recorded history.
Not untue, but also misleading. Most models suggest that there will be no overall field, but incoherently oriented and variable local fields. For example, the overall field over SE South America and the South Atlantic is considerably weaker than average, and is changing relatively rapidly, which is interpreted by some as meaning that a reverse current is operating in the core below there, which might be an indication of an approaching reversal event. Or it might not be. Welcome to the bleeding edge. If we knew what was going on, we couldn't describe it as research.
I know a wellbore surveyor who once recorded the difference between his magnetic sensor's orientation and the steering bend's orientation out by 180 degrees - he read the wrong side of the protractor when torquing the tools together at around 20,000 Nm. For some kilometre of kick-off and around a day's work, they could not work out why they set up the tools to drill in THAT direction, and it drilled in the opposite direction. Then - "light bulb moment", 10 minutes of calculation on the Ouija board (doesn't interfere with the computer), and a very embarrassed conversation with the client. Fortunately, it only cost a few hours of actual operations time, so we covered it up.