Now, years later I know better. [SNIP] That totals 3,865 of only this horrendously light weight list.
Don't forget the 100,000 to 200,000 killed by (mostly) Christian soldiers in the most recent invasion of Iraq. Or the thousands of people killed annually in India in lots of little outbreaks of Hindu-on-Christian and Hindu-on-Muslim sectarianism. Oh, chuck in around 3500 killed in the Ulster "Troubles" over the last 40-odd years too ; that's Orange-skinned-Christians massacring the heretical Green-skinned-Christians (with a number of Red-white-and-Blue-Skinned-Christians and others killed as "collateral damage"). And the half-dozen Green-jerseyed-Christians killed on my birthday morning a few years ago because they worshipped at the altar of a different Football Team than the Blue-jerseyed-Christians did.
Or that (Christian) girl with a little mental handicap
Describing Christianity as a "mental handicap" ?... no disagreement from my keyboard!
this religion will never stop until either the last muslim is dead or the whole world is muslim.
Yes, I believe that is precisely the plan. Glad to see that you've figured it out.
But I think the additional figures I've cited above should point out that the problem isn't Islam per se. It's religion, per se. As (IIRC) Christopher Hitchens once put it, "Religion poisons everything".
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk [wikipedia.org]
What have you got against Norilsk? OK, it's a relatively grim Siberian industrial mining town. But that doesn't automatically make it a worse place to go than (check visas in my passport) Busan, or Noyabrsk, or AbuDhabi, or Mtwara. I wouldn't necessarily add a "discomfort" element to my fee for going to work there (though I might add one after going there, for any return visit).
Some brain EEG measuring techniques might be able to detect this.
Fuck that shit. Too complex, too delicate.
Skin resistance using contacts built into the fingerprint-reader ; microphone for breathing rate (arrange the wall-mounted reader so that you've got to have your mouth in a certain place, where the microphone is, for signal-to-noise ratio improvement. Say, use two fingerprint readers metre apart, to be operated simultaneously ; put microphone in wall 0.75m above the midpoint of the two fingerprint sensors). Fuck it ; put a breathalyser in there too, why not? They're cheap enough to put in the hands of cops by the thousand. Or an iris scanner, for "Wow" factor?
I don't believe all the hype of polygraph salesmen (hell, there's only one country where the courts actually believe them), but for a binary discrimination of [unstressed | refer to security officer], those two measures should be sufficient.
Will you be allowing people to be carrying stuff into or out of your secure area? Really?
Is there any possible a close encounter to Mars that might cause C/2013A1 to act as if it were orbiting mars, (at least for half a rev duration of that single pass)?
I get goodmanj's description of the orbital mechanics. I've not used the orbital mechanics simulator that he talks about, but I've used others and the effects are counter-intuitive, but as he describes. (And yes, I do get that the whole orbit changes, but that the largest changes are at the far end of the orbit.) One thing that you don't seem to appreciate is that this comet is going to be flying past Mars very rapidly, so the time during which the gravity of Mars has a significant effect on the comet is going to be relatively short. That considerably reduces the influence that Mars can have on the orbit.
I don't have enough maths to prove that your concern is im-possible, but I'm confident that it's highly improbable.
And if so, just how much can Mars deflect the orbit of C/2013A1 from what it might have been for centuries?
The comet is on a hyperbolic orbit, as far as we can tell (eccentricity of orbit > 1). That means that it's on a one-time-only visit to the inner solar system. Wherever it has been orbiting for aeons, it probably had an encounter with some other body and acquired sufficient energy from the interaction to be put onto it's hyperbolic orbit. That also implies... [SFX : grinding gears] that the unseen other body... [SFX : more grinding] has lost energy in the encounter... and has been projected outwards (conservation of momentum) from the interaction area... and will eventually come barrelling in on a similar but elliptical orbit.
goodmanj - can you check me on that? does it make sense?
That's actually quite worrying a deduction. Of course, given 100,000 year Oort Cloud orbits, the second comet could be 50,000 years away. Or 5 years?
I note that the uncertainty on the eccentricity that the JPL database gives is large enough the eccentricities of < 1 are plausible. Need more observation arc.
I make a back of the envelope calculation that there were several million kilos of plutonium in the Earth a century ago, and regardless of what we do in the next few centuries, there will still be several million kilos of the stuff in the Earth in, say, 2500.
Of course, it's diluted by several billion billion times as much other non-threatening material.
I like your reasoning, and I'm sure such considerations will weigh with the discoverers (who get to propose the name) and the IAU (who approve or disapprove the proposed name).
I can't say that I'm excited by "Vulcan" as a name for this satellite, but at least the forms of etymology have been followed.
IIRC, these are neither the inner-most (known) satellites of Pluto, nor the outermost. Which makes naming them awkward. As the guardian of the (earthly) entrance to the underworld, Kerberos should be at the very edge of the Pluto system. As the outer border of Hades, it should be interior to Kerberos (and Hydra, and the other guardians of the portals) ; but I can't remember the sequence in which the rivers are crossed, so I don't know which one should be interior to which others.
But "Meh", if I'd wanted to argue over the dancing angel areal density of pinheads, I'd have studied Classics, not Geology. "Vulcan" does follow the rules closely enough to be considered.
Cerberus guarded one of the (Earthly) entrances to the underworld ; Styx marked the border between the underworld and the Earth. The only times that either would have been close to Pluto was when he was on a tour of his realm's most distant parts.
If you wanted something on the list which was routinely close to Pluto, then Persephone/ Proserpina would likely have been the best choice. Unfortunately, as I explain up-thread, those names are (almost certainly) invalid.
Temperature has nothing to do with what defines a desert.
Otherwise in "hot desert planet" the "hot" would be redundant. Your point being?
The AC is correct. Temperature has nothing to do with the definition of a desert. What matters is precipitation, or the lack of it.
The interior of Tibet is one of the larger deserts on the Earth, at 4000-odd metres altitude, and with significant salt deposits which form part of the Sherpa's historical trading network. Another large desert is in the centre of Antarctica, where the air is so dry (particularly in the winter) that it is being used as a site for infra-red telescopes (which are particularly sensitive to atmospheric moisture).
Mars is described as a desert planet because it is not subject to rainforest-like rainfall. In the past Mars was significantly wetter, which period is named the "Noachian", in deference to the flood described in the Gilgamesh epic and later copied by the monotheists.
Last I checked, Pluto and it's moons were too far away from the Sun to have any connection to fire and volcano(e)s.
The first planet in towards the Sun from Pluto (dodging the is it/ isn't it planet status debate) has a satellite with active volcanism.
OK, the working fluid is liquid nitrogen IIRC, but it's still active volcanoes, closer to Pluto than to Earth (sometimes).
Without doing the sums... but wearing my "I'm a professional geologist speaking in my field" tee-shirt... there's a good chance that the commonest "rock type" in the solar system (or universe) is "water ice".
Shatner has Twitter followers who get paid to operate robots on Mars. That is probably the coolest thing about Old Beastiality himself.
(Having sex outside your species is beastiality, even if they do look like member of your species with prosthetic rubber glued onto their faces, arms or tits.)
The important word in that comment is "hypothetical". It didn't exist when proposed, doesn't exist today, and won't exist until we get seriously better at space construction projects.
I had a hypothetical dog called khasim1285 back in 1995. Give me his user name back!
I agree that its a pretty long stretch to get from Vulcan to Pluto.
Not what I'd call a long stretch, genealogically. Vulcan / Vulkan / Hephaestus is a son of Zeus/ Jupiter, who is brother of Pluto / Hades ; therefore the relationship is a nephew-uncle one. Vulcan is more associated with volcanoes ("D'oh") than the undeworld specifically, but given that his workshop is traditionally under (whichever volcano is erupting at the moment), he's definitely a chthonic deity.
I'm not a great fan of Trekkie-dom myself, but I think that they've done an adequate job of justifying what, to them, is the (one-true-right-and-only-possible-)answer.
Incidentally, I note that "Hephaistos" would probably be an inadmissible name, already being attached to a minor planet. As is Cerberus (#1865, discovered by Kohoutek of "comet" fame), Elysium (probably ; location on Mars), Erebus (probably, location on Earth), Heracles (#5143), Hypnos (#14827), Orpheus (#3361), Persephone (#399), Proserpina (#26, discovered and named in 1853!), Sisyphus (#1866), and Tantalus (#2102).
That's actually quite disappointing - I'd have expected a respectable group such as the SETI institute to have checked issues like this before putting out their list for voting. 11 invalid (or likely to significant challenge) names out of 30. Could have had some severe egg on their faces.
Coming soon to the corners of the Internet occupied by Americans, a whole wave of recycled horse-burger jokes fresh from their successful appearances in the European corners of the Internet.
In the words of Phineas Freekowtski, "Hubba bubba!"
Or, just possibly, he should have attended his first aid courses at school, and subsequently at work, so that he'd have had a good idea of what to do.
The site of gushing blood has a remarkably sobering effect. And the ABCs of first aid aren't exactly rocket science. which is why they're called ABCs ("Airway", "Breathing", Circulation").
Oh, it's only an AC. So we'll never know if he keeps his first aid certification up to date. I do - it's a required part of my employment (and I've had to put it into use on a number of occasions).
I guess we'll have to wait until a lot of people die, or a politician or celebrity gets sick.
Which is why, for years, I've argued that the safest place for nuclear material storage is inside or underneath the centres of governemnt. Precisely so that the first people to die from mis-storage will be the politicians who are ultimately responsible for the material.
No, its not complex, nor subtle, nor difficult. Which is why it will never happen. The personal cowardice of politicians will not be an issue in storing these materials in parts of the country distant from the homes of major politicians.
I do, of course, write as someone who was disappointed in bidding for work for site evaluation for a nucelar storage site in Britain. But it gave me an opportunity to think about these matters. The site has repeatedly been found to be unsuitable, which is why plans are going ahead to use it. Residents of the Irish Sea coasts, watch out!
Are they Imperial ounces and tbsps, or American? I know the "cups" measure must be American, becazuse it's only used here in recipes translated (partly) from American. And it''s a rare week when I don't have to stop and try to remember if the person I'm talking to thinks there are 3.7-something liters to the gallon, or 4.5-something.
Get with it, America, and get just the one set of measurements that agrees with the rest of the world! Not the hodge-podge mess you have at the moment.
They were smart, however - on the left end of the row of pins, the 3rd pin from the left is missing. On the right side, the 4th pin from the right is missing. On the connector intended for the left side, the 3rd hole is plugged; similarly the 4th pin on the right connector is plugged. That makes it impossible to install the connectors incorrectly without great difficultly, and the solution is incredibly cheap.
If only it were so.
At some point, a third-part add-on, or repair part, will come on the market where those two blanking plugs are omitted to save 3 micro-coins of currency on the bill of materials and 10 micro-coins of assembly costs. and the mis-wirings will continue...
Never seen it? Look at 2/3 of the PATA connectors made in the last half-decade of the format's life. Look at cheap & nasty SCSI cables.
Also, never underestimate the power of a twit with muscles. I had an idiot boss once - a Lebanese cunt - who managed to assemble a desktop computer by plugging the 15-pin density-and-a-half SVGA cable into a serial port. It took me 3 hours of painstaking work to un-bend the pins and get it working again (which since the site was 12 hours drive from the nearest road... was worth the effort. Because I needed that machine, even if he didn't know what it was for).
... He said he now understood how offended the global developer community are and told me there was obviously only one outcome that was now possible.'"
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the 100,000 to 200,000 killed by (mostly) Christian soldiers in the most recent invasion of Iraq. Or the thousands of people killed annually in India in lots of little outbreaks of Hindu-on-Christian and Hindu-on-Muslim sectarianism. Oh, chuck in around 3500 killed in the Ulster "Troubles" over the last 40-odd years too ; that's Orange-skinned-Christians massacring the heretical Green-skinned-Christians (with a number of Red-white-and-Blue-Skinned-Christians and others killed as "collateral damage"). And the half-dozen Green-jerseyed-Christians killed on my birthday morning a few years ago because they worshipped at the altar of a different Football Team than the Blue-jerseyed-Christians did.
Describing Christianity as a "mental handicap" ? ... no disagreement from my keyboard!
Yes, I believe that is precisely the plan. Glad to see that you've figured it out.
But I think the additional figures I've cited above should point out that the problem isn't Islam per se. It's religion, per se. As (IIRC) Christopher Hitchens once put it, "Religion poisons everything".
What have you got against Norilsk? OK, it's a relatively grim Siberian industrial mining town. But that doesn't automatically make it a worse place to go than (check visas in my passport) Busan, or Noyabrsk, or AbuDhabi, or Mtwara. I wouldn't necessarily add a "discomfort" element to my fee for going to work there (though I might add one after going there, for any return visit).
Fuck that shit. Too complex, too delicate.
Skin resistance using contacts built into the fingerprint-reader ; microphone for breathing rate (arrange the wall-mounted reader so that you've got to have your mouth in a certain place, where the microphone is, for signal-to-noise ratio improvement. Say, use two fingerprint readers metre apart, to be operated simultaneously ; put microphone in wall 0.75m above the midpoint of the two fingerprint sensors). Fuck it ; put a breathalyser in there too, why not? They're cheap enough to put in the hands of cops by the thousand. Or an iris scanner, for "Wow" factor?
I don't believe all the hype of polygraph salesmen (hell, there's only one country where the courts actually believe them), but for a binary discrimination of [unstressed | refer to security officer], those two measures should be sufficient.
Will you be allowing people to be carrying stuff into or out of your secure area? Really?
I get goodmanj's description of the orbital mechanics. I've not used the orbital mechanics simulator that he talks about, but I've used others and the effects are counter-intuitive, but as he describes. (And yes, I do get that the whole orbit changes, but that the largest changes are at the far end of the orbit.) One thing that you don't seem to appreciate is that this comet is going to be flying past Mars very rapidly, so the time during which the gravity of Mars has a significant effect on the comet is going to be relatively short. That considerably reduces the influence that Mars can have on the orbit.
I don't have enough maths to prove that your concern is im-possible, but I'm confident that it's highly improbable.
The comet is on a hyperbolic orbit, as far as we can tell (eccentricity of orbit > 1). That means that it's on a one-time-only visit to the inner solar system. Wherever it has been orbiting for aeons, it probably had an encounter with some other body and acquired sufficient energy from the interaction to be put onto it's hyperbolic orbit. That also implies ... [SFX : grinding gears] that the unseen other body ... [SFX : more grinding] has lost energy in the encounter ... and has been projected outwards (conservation of momentum) from the interaction area ... and will eventually come barrelling in on a similar but elliptical orbit.
goodmanj - can you check me on that? does it make sense?
That's actually quite worrying a deduction. Of course, given 100,000 year Oort Cloud orbits, the second comet could be 50,000 years away. Or 5 years?
I note that the uncertainty on the eccentricity that the JPL database gives is large enough the eccentricities of < 1 are plausible. Need more observation arc.
It's all a plot by the people in Black Helicopters to steal our guns, teach us evolution, and interfere with our precious bodily fluids.
I have a feeling that I've missed a conspiracy. But that'll be the CIA's brain projectors interfering with my memory. Again.
So, you are willing to abandon your "the Earth is only 6000 years old" hypothesis?
Of course, it's diluted by several billion billion times as much other non-threatening material.
I can't say that I'm excited by "Vulcan" as a name for this satellite, but at least the forms of etymology have been followed.
IIRC, these are neither the inner-most (known) satellites of Pluto, nor the outermost. Which makes naming them awkward. As the guardian of the (earthly) entrance to the underworld, Kerberos should be at the very edge of the Pluto system. As the outer border of Hades, it should be interior to Kerberos (and Hydra, and the other guardians of the portals) ; but I can't remember the sequence in which the rivers are crossed, so I don't know which one should be interior to which others.
But "Meh", if I'd wanted to argue over the dancing angel areal density of pinheads, I'd have studied Classics, not Geology. "Vulcan" does follow the rules closely enough to be considered.
If you wanted something on the list which was routinely close to Pluto, then Persephone/ Proserpina would likely have been the best choice. Unfortunately, as I explain up-thread, those names are (almost certainly) invalid.
The AC is correct. Temperature has nothing to do with the definition of a desert. What matters is precipitation, or the lack of it.
The interior of Tibet is one of the larger deserts on the Earth, at 4000-odd metres altitude, and with significant salt deposits which form part of the Sherpa's historical trading network. Another large desert is in the centre of Antarctica, where the air is so dry (particularly in the winter) that it is being used as a site for infra-red telescopes (which are particularly sensitive to atmospheric moisture).
Mars is described as a desert planet because it is not subject to rainforest-like rainfall. In the past Mars was significantly wetter, which period is named the "Noachian", in deference to the flood described in the Gilgamesh epic and later copied by the monotheists.
The first planet in towards the Sun from Pluto (dodging the is it/ isn't it planet status debate) has a satellite with active volcanism.
OK, the working fluid is liquid nitrogen IIRC, but it's still active volcanoes, closer to Pluto than to Earth (sometimes).
Without doing the sums ... but wearing my "I'm a professional geologist speaking in my field" tee-shirt ... there's a good chance that the commonest "rock type" in the solar system (or universe) is "water ice".
(Having sex outside your species is beastiality, even if they do look like member of your species with prosthetic rubber glued onto their faces, arms or tits.)
The important word in that comment is "hypothetical". It didn't exist when proposed, doesn't exist today, and won't exist until we get seriously better at space construction projects. I had a hypothetical dog called khasim1285 back in 1995. Give me his user name back!
Mind you, it's a few weeks since I submitted one, and longer since I had one accepted, so I'd better peel my eyes too.
Not what I'd call a long stretch, genealogically. Vulcan / Vulkan / Hephaestus is a son of Zeus/ Jupiter, who is brother of Pluto / Hades ; therefore the relationship is a nephew-uncle one. Vulcan is more associated with volcanoes ("D'oh") than the undeworld specifically, but given that his workshop is traditionally under (whichever volcano is erupting at the moment), he's definitely a chthonic deity.
I'm not a great fan of Trekkie-dom myself, but I think that they've done an adequate job of justifying what, to them, is the (one-true-right-and-only-possible-)answer.
Incidentally, I note that "Hephaistos" would probably be an inadmissible name, already being attached to a minor planet. As is Cerberus (#1865, discovered by Kohoutek of "comet" fame), Elysium (probably ; location on Mars), Erebus (probably, location on Earth), Heracles (#5143), Hypnos (#14827), Orpheus (#3361), Persephone (#399), Proserpina (#26, discovered and named in 1853!), Sisyphus (#1866), and Tantalus (#2102).
That's actually quite disappointing - I'd have expected a respectable group such as the SETI institute to have checked issues like this before putting out their list for voting. 11 invalid (or likely to significant challenge) names out of 30. Could have had some severe egg on their faces.
Coming soon to the corners of the Internet occupied by Americans, a whole wave of recycled horse-burger jokes fresh from their successful appearances in the European corners of the Internet.
In the words of Phineas Freekowtski, "Hubba bubba!"
The site of gushing blood has a remarkably sobering effect. And the ABCs of first aid aren't exactly rocket science. which is why they're called ABCs ("Airway", "Breathing", Circulation").
Oh, it's only an AC. So we'll never know if he keeps his first aid certification up to date. I do - it's a required part of my employment (and I've had to put it into use on a number of occasions).
Which is why, for years, I've argued that the safest place for nuclear material storage is inside or underneath the centres of governemnt. Precisely so that the first people to die from mis-storage will be the politicians who are ultimately responsible for the material.
No, its not complex, nor subtle, nor difficult. Which is why it will never happen. The personal cowardice of politicians will not be an issue in storing these materials in parts of the country distant from the homes of major politicians.
I do, of course, write as someone who was disappointed in bidding for work for site evaluation for a nucelar storage site in Britain. But it gave me an opportunity to think about these matters. The site has repeatedly been found to be unsuitable, which is why plans are going ahead to use it. Residents of the Irish Sea coasts, watch out!
Subject says it all.
Get with it, America, and get just the one set of measurements that agrees with the rest of the world! Not the hodge-podge mess you have at the moment.
If only it were so. At some point, a third-part add-on, or repair part, will come on the market where those two blanking plugs are omitted to save 3 micro-coins of currency on the bill of materials and 10 micro-coins of assembly costs. and the mis-wirings will continue ...
Never seen it? Look at 2/3 of the PATA connectors made in the last half-decade of the format's life. Look at cheap & nasty SCSI cables.
Also, never underestimate the power of a twit with muscles. I had an idiot boss once - a Lebanese cunt - who managed to assemble a desktop computer by plugging the 15-pin density-and-a-half SVGA cable into a serial port. It took me 3 hours of painstaking work to un-bend the pins and get it working again (which since the site was 12 hours drive from the nearest road ... was worth the effort. Because I needed that machine, even if he didn't know what it was for).
ITYM "explosive."
Promotion. With a very healthy pay rise.
If you're not good enough to leave ... I'm sure youll get used to the stabbing pain in your bum.
It's called a meritocracy.
FTFY
One very small step.
One tiny, wafer-thin little step.
We know what's going to happen next.