Lexis Nexis as well as your ENTIRE CREDIT HISTORY. I can get a report that tells me what resturants you eat at and when.
Disregarding that they may or may not confine their interest to Americans, but you'll have tremendous difficulty finding out which restaurants I eat in. I pay with cash, so you'd need to get into either mobile phone tower records (IF I'd taken my mobile with me that night, AND left it switched on.) or CCTV. And that's a lot harder than credit card records.
Actually... it's over a week since I used the bank card for anything other than getting cash out of the hole in the wall. It's not as if I need to use anything other than cash for most things. Data mining... fucked.
I don't know that programme. Is it American? Is it exceptionally good?
That sort of procedure would produce a consensus of their opinions of a "perfect woman" ; with a different panel of picture-choosers, they'd get a different result. Unless you know of an objective definition of "the perfect woman"?
So, right off the bat, we have a living thing that's not at all adapted to standing on the bottom and breathing through a long tube to the surface nevertheless standing on the bottom and breathing through a long tube to the surface
In terms of pressure (which is what matters here - ask anyone who lived through the 1940s and 50s thanks to an iron lung), the long tube isn't "at surface" ; it's at the depth to which it's pressure is equivalent. (I work routinely with installations that include saturation divers ; they use the "descending", "at depth", "surfacing" terminology for pressure changes, not for physical movements. And surfacing can easily take a week while you're sat "in the pot" on deck.)
Looking through the rest of your post, you need to review your basic physiology and anatomy before you sit your diving exams. I don't have time to go through it in detail (field trip tomorrow, 5 hours driving to do this evening to get there), but your understanding of anatomy and physiology are dangerously flawed. If you're planning on doing anything that requires such knowledge, you really need to correct this. (Sport diving is one of the most common such situations for the man in the street ; the safety procedures for flying over water are common in my locale, and your misunderstandings could kill you.)
OK, two points:
For that matter, it might even have dedicated muscles in various parts of its body just for that purpose, or even secondary hearts.
This would leave appreciable anatomical evidence - major blood vessels do leave marks on bones. If you know of anatomical evidence published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature of someone reporting evidence to support this, please cite it. Palaeontology is a science where rampant speculation is very much constrained by the evidence present. (I'm a geologist by trade, working offshore hence the diving equipment ; I do keep a reasonably close eye on "the literature"
That's not very far-fetched in animals that had secondary "brains" (not real brains, I know).
Oh that... poor choice of terms (I'm tempted to call it a "lie", but that would imply deliberate misleading which I don't think was present). Some (but only some) dinosaurs show evidence of a swelling (a "ganglion") in the lowermost spine, which in the 1870s or 1880s was described occasionally as a "secondary brain". And the name has stuck. You've got a similar ganglion spread through your sacral vertebrae and lowest spine, and proportionately it's not much smaller. Some reflex actions get routed through it. Do you feel as if you've got a "secondary brain"?
I watched pairs of sky-rats fucking together to create new dinosaurs every year for a half-decade, on the roof of the apartment next to mine. And boy, did those bloody sky rats squawk and screech at each other every bloody morning noon and night.
Dinosaurs can create new dinosaurs without godly-intervention.
(Birds are not dinosaur descendants ; birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs".)
It's called 'ancestral state reconstruction' and its what I make my students do each year. There's a ton of assumptions that go into it, though, and few few are likely to be correct over long timescales.
Metric tonne, Imperial ton, or just an industrial shitload?
Your disproof of the bottom-walking sauropod model in flawed. The big problem isn't in the throats. Or in the intercostal (between-rib) muscles. It's the blood pressure.
Put your sauropod on the bottom of a lake, it's lungs at 10m below air surface (for a number). The purpose of breathing is to oxygenate (and de-carbon-dioxide-ate) the blood. To achieve that, you've got to have blood circulation. which means that the absolute blood pressure will be (say) 2.15 atmospheres (= 1 atm for the atmosphere + 1 atm for the water depth + 0.15 atm differential pressure from the heart's pumping effort (114mm Hg, approx)) . Meanwhile, the absolute atmospheric pressure inside the alveoli will be around 1.00001 atm. So, the pressure differential across the alveoli lining is 2.14999 atm.
Divers who have (inadvertently) been exposed to such pressure differentials, die. Their lungs either grossly rupture, or so much fluid seeps from the blood into the lungs that the diver drowns in his own pulmonary oedema. That starts to happen at a differential pressure of around 0.2atm (people vary) in humans. In whales, it is less studied, but their lungs are rarely more than 5-odd m deep when they're in-/ex-haling, suggesing a limit for them of around 0.5 atm. (Incidentally, some ichnofossils of sauropods prove that they did enter water and swim ; but that does not require that their lungs were much more than 3-4m below the surface.)
There are other reasons for the bottom-walking sauropod model to be wrong.
I'm much more cautious about the reported result than many of the people commenting here. For this particular underground environment, then yes, that would seem to be the result of their calculations. But for other underground environments, other results would be found. That would be environments with different temperature conditions, with different groundwater pH, with different oxygen concentrations ; there's three degrees of freedom. I'd be surprised if concentrations of metal cations (e.g. Ca++) didn't have an effect ; anions likewise.
Oh, I suppose I'd better RTFA... and sure enough, the last paragraph of the article is
Moreover, the researchers found that age differences accounted for only 38.6% of the variation in DNA degradation between moa-bone samples. âoeOther factors that impact on DNA preservation are clearly at work,â says Bunce. âoeStorage following excavation, soil chemistry and even the time of year when the animal died are all likely contributing factors that will need looking into.â
You just show the computer a photo of a dinosaur, let it start from the DNA of a Komodo Dragon, and let it try different "what if" changes to the DNA, simulating the growth of the each resulting organism.
Why bother with troubling the Dragon? Wouldn't it be better to start off with the DNA of a dinosaur, and then try modifying it to form a different dinosaur. For convenience, I'd probably start with Gallus gallus domesticus, but if you've got some to hand, why not a Opisthocomus hoazin?
Birds have been being dinosaurs (and thus also dinosaur descendents) for millions of years longer than primates have been being mammals.(Probably)
OK, you might find the Dragon is a better starting point for an Ornithischian dinosaur, but I wouldn't honestly bet on it.
Could even happen within the lifetime of Randall Munroe.
Who? OIC, XKCD-man. I didn't know that he had a name. Is he, perhaps, also "Mohammed Jones?"
Yes, I read that paper. The issues with potential contamination were severe (though the original researchers had gone to impressive lengths to try to prevent it, and to test for it at various stages in their preparation of the salt crystals). I haven't followed the subject closely, but I haven't heard of any successful replication. My bet (looking at the geology of the situation ; I am, after all, a geologist) would be that the salt diapir had re-crystallisation continuing as it moved and that the crystals were only a few millennia or a few hundred millennia old. In such a circumstance, it's no surprise that the "resurrected" bacteria are very closely related to modern hyperhalophiles.
No, I haven't RTFA either. But I don't find anything terribly surprising or unexpected in TFS, so why bother?
You're assuming that Hitler was the worst possible outcome of WW1. I'm not denying that Hitler was a thorough-going psychopathic bastard with a significant skill at rabble-rousing ; but it's credible that he's not the worst possible outcome.
Try this alternative history.
- Hitler survives WW1, goes on with his life and tries rabble-rousing in Munich.
- The time traveller trips up Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch, where he hits his head, suffers a brain injury and spends the rest of his life a bed-ridden doubly-incontinent aphasic. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
- German has a slow recovery from the effects of WW1, and there is no WW2.
- Italy continues as a fascist country, but without the deep psychopathy of the Nazis. Fermi continues working in Italy ; Hahn and Meitner continue their researches in Germany.
- In 1960, the Italians explode the worlds first atomic bomb, shortly followed by the German bomb. The Russians and Americans acquire the Bomb by a mix of indigenous research and espionage in 1970 ; they manage to keep approximate parity with the European Union in a three-superpower world.
- In 1999, on a service called Dotslashslash, alternative histories are discussed, but no-one could remember the name of the obscure sideline of German History which trashed a city on the centre-line of that year's total eclipse.
- Future generations don't know how to restore American hegemony by sending someone back to trip up the time-tripper.
What a horrible history. Better not let that happen. Hitler lives!
Roadkill tastes like... well, if it is roadkill moose, rather like moose (with a slight aftertaste of rubber and diesel) ; if it is roadkill rabbit, rather like rabbit (with a slight aftertaste of rubber and diesel) ; if it is roadkill sheep, rather like sheep (with a slight aftertaste of rubber and diesel); if it is roadkill kangaroo, rather like kangaroo (with a slight aftertaste of rubber and diesel)...
Which reminds me... kangaroo is quite nice. But at 40-odd quid a kilo... hmm.
Isn't this airbag mess more an example of the free market in action? Just like letting Huwei build our telecom equipment? And didn't the government just quash that particular bit of business?
Shock! Horror! USian govt turns Communist!
Revolution imminent!
Lenin's embalmed corpse is waking up and planning a move to Chicago, the better to oversee the revolution.
I'm just wondering what happened to Stalin's stiff? Ah, Kremlin Wall Necropolis, just along from Lenin's tomb. I'll remember that, mostly to make sure that I don't go to the wrong one, next time I'm killing time in Moscow.
I've got my (blunt) dissecting knife here, some ropes, and I can mix up a bucket of (non-sterile) saline to slow down it's death from shock. Do you have a sturdy table and a video camera?
As cold weather animals, mammoths are ideal candidates for something like this. The dinosaurs required much warmer climates.
Mammoths certainly have lots of cold-weather adaptations. Having said that, a few years ago I was doing some work in Yamal-Nenetz oblast during the summer and it was sweltering... on the permafrost. (And 8 months later when I went back, it got up to -30 during the daytime.)
However, it's an observational fact that during the late Jurassic and Cretaceous, there were dinosaurs living (and getting fossilized) at local latitudes of more than 67degrees - i.e. in the "Arctic" and "Antarctic" regions of those day. Some certainly lived in burrows - they may have partially hibernated - but they weren't massive beasts, and would have not had a huge benefit from passive production of body warmth. There are valid uncertainties about climate modelling that far back, but it's safe that the polar regions of the day were pretty cool. Permafrost probably wasn't present anywhere on the planet (OK, maybe up in the mountains, but they rarely fossilize), but it would certainly be incorrect to describe the area as "tropical". Some dinosaurs probably required sub-tropical or higher temperatures, but by no means all of them.
The question of dinosaurian physiology and poikilothermy (or endothermy) is not a simple one, and no-one really knows the answer (though plenty claim to know the answer) ; it is entirely possible that some branches of the dinosaurian radiation were poikilotherms and others were endotherms. Asserting that "dinosaurs" require "warm(-er) climates" is definitely wrong.
A couple of ice asteroids would take care of the lack of water and atmosphere at the same time
I'd have to do some maths to quantify "a couple", but there's another issue : the topography of Mars. The entire northern hemisphere (well, slightly less than "hemi-") is at significantly lower altitude than the southern hemisphere. So you'd end up with an ocean a kilometer-or-so deep (depending on how many asteroids) in the north, a relatively narrow littoral zone with a relatively Earth-like hydrological cycle, then the main part of the planet in the south would remain as a high altitude, low air pressure desert.
Hmmm, big step forward.
Perhaps it'd be quicker to bring the Magratheans in and just build a planet from scratch.
OTOH, as a thought-experiment in planetary science, "terraforming Mars" is an interesting project.
I think that you mean "convecting", not "spinning". The core stopping spinning is Hollywood scriptwriter drivel ; magnetic fields being generated by magnetohydrodynamic self-stimulating dynamos is (reasonably well established) science.
(There have been degrees of success (not 100%, but significant) with experiments using spinning globes of molten metal (sodium!) to try to replicate the self-stimulating dynamo hypothesis, but the physics seems to be more complicated than theorised, and work is continuing.)
Subject says it all. You're not born with a TV ; at some point you choose to get a TV. You choose to have drivel poured into your eyes, interspersed with insulting advertising. You choose to have politicians lie to you about how much less they are liars then the other politicians.
Once you make that choice, your brain will be fucked, for good. Getting "off" TV is hard - harder than getting off tobacco or alcohol - so why get on the drug in the first place.
Plan 'B' : when the kid says "Can I have a TV?" you say "Sure, the store is over there ; there's a ladder, which you can use to put up an aerial or satellite dish. If you want paid-for TV, I'll sign any paperwork needed for you to buy the service. Are you sure that this is how you want to spend your allowance?"
That raises a question - what's the minimum age for buying (say) a satellite service which may include porn? I'd assume 18, but I'm not certain. I'll try to remember to ask next time I see a TV service salesman.
That would be my line of attack too. Unless your time is free, then the 100-odd pounds/dollars for a pre-built device is going to be considerably cheaper than hacking something together yourself from cellphones, large battery packs and whatever ; then programming some motion detection into it ; then waterproofing it to an adequate degree ; then attaching some sort of mounting kit without damaging the waterproofing...
Yep, that would be where I'd start from. That they're reasonably camouflaged will help too, not that the fly-tippers are likely to be looking for them. Getting creative with your positioning may help too - 5m up a tree, so you can see the likely dump site, the vehicle registration plates, and hopefully the perp's faces. But really, you don't need anything more than the registration plate. If the registered keeper of the vehicle won't finger the driver, then they're guilty themselves. Slam dunk. (Your jurisdiction may differ.)
Slashdot Mirror
Deliberate or accidental '1984' reference?
Disregarding that they may or may not confine their interest to Americans, but you'll have tremendous difficulty finding out which restaurants I eat in. I pay with cash, so you'd need to get into either mobile phone tower records (IF I'd taken my mobile with me that night, AND left it switched on.) or CCTV. And that's a lot harder than credit card records.
Actually ... it's over a week since I used the bank card for anything other than getting cash out of the hole in the wall. It's not as if I need to use anything other than cash for most things. Data mining ... fucked.
That sort of procedure would produce a consensus of their opinions of a "perfect woman" ; with a different panel of picture-choosers, they'd get a different result. Unless you know of an objective definition of "the perfect woman"?
Damn - signature is broken.
In terms of pressure (which is what matters here - ask anyone who lived through the 1940s and 50s thanks to an iron lung), the long tube isn't "at surface" ; it's at the depth to which it's pressure is equivalent. (I work routinely with installations that include saturation divers ; they use the "descending", "at depth", "surfacing" terminology for pressure changes, not for physical movements. And surfacing can easily take a week while you're sat "in the pot" on deck.)
Looking through the rest of your post, you need to review your basic physiology and anatomy before you sit your diving exams. I don't have time to go through it in detail (field trip tomorrow, 5 hours driving to do this evening to get there), but your understanding of anatomy and physiology are dangerously flawed. If you're planning on doing anything that requires such knowledge, you really need to correct this. (Sport diving is one of the most common such situations for the man in the street ; the safety procedures for flying over water are common in my locale, and your misunderstandings could kill you.)
OK, two points :
This would leave appreciable anatomical evidence - major blood vessels do leave marks on bones. If you know of anatomical evidence published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature of someone reporting evidence to support this, please cite it. Palaeontology is a science where rampant speculation is very much constrained by the evidence present. (I'm a geologist by trade, working offshore hence the diving equipment ; I do keep a reasonably close eye on "the literature"
Oh that ... poor choice of terms (I'm tempted to call it a "lie", but that would imply deliberate misleading which I don't think was present). Some (but only some) dinosaurs show evidence of a swelling (a "ganglion") in the lowermost spine, which in the 1870s or 1880s was described occasionally as a "secondary brain". And the name has stuck. You've got a similar ganglion spread through your sacral vertebrae and lowest spine, and proportionately it's not much smaller. Some reflex actions get routed through it. Do you feel as if you've got a "secondary brain"?
I watched pairs of sky-rats fucking together to create new dinosaurs every year for a half-decade, on the roof of the apartment next to mine. And boy, did those bloody sky rats squawk and screech at each other every bloody morning noon and night.
Dinosaurs can create new dinosaurs without godly-intervention.
(Birds are not dinosaur descendants ; birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs".)
Metric tonne, Imperial ton, or just an industrial shitload?
(Geologist here, BTW.)
Put your sauropod on the bottom of a lake, it's lungs at 10m below air surface (for a number). The purpose of breathing is to oxygenate (and de-carbon-dioxide-ate) the blood. To achieve that, you've got to have blood circulation. which means that the absolute blood pressure will be (say) 2.15 atmospheres (= 1 atm for the atmosphere + 1 atm for the water depth + 0.15 atm differential pressure from the heart's pumping effort (114mm Hg, approx)) . Meanwhile, the absolute atmospheric pressure inside the alveoli will be around 1.00001 atm. So, the pressure differential across the alveoli lining is 2.14999 atm.
Divers who have (inadvertently) been exposed to such pressure differentials, die. Their lungs either grossly rupture, or so much fluid seeps from the blood into the lungs that the diver drowns in his own pulmonary oedema. That starts to happen at a differential pressure of around 0.2atm (people vary) in humans. In whales, it is less studied, but their lungs are rarely more than 5-odd m deep when they're in-/ex-haling, suggesing a limit for them of around 0.5 atm. (Incidentally, some ichnofossils of sauropods prove that they did enter water and swim ; but that does not require that their lungs were much more than 3-4m below the surface.)
There are other reasons for the bottom-walking sauropod model to be wrong.
I'm much more cautious about the reported result than many of the people commenting here. For this particular underground environment, then yes, that would seem to be the result of their calculations. But for other underground environments, other results would be found. That would be environments with different temperature conditions, with different groundwater pH, with different oxygen concentrations ; there's three degrees of freedom. I'd be surprised if concentrations of metal cations (e.g. Ca++) didn't have an effect ; anions likewise.
Oh, I suppose I'd better RTFA ... and sure enough, the last paragraph of the article is
Quelle surprise, not.
Now, why would I do that?
Why bother with troubling the Dragon? Wouldn't it be better to start off with the DNA of a dinosaur, and then try modifying it to form a different dinosaur. For convenience, I'd probably start with Gallus gallus domesticus, but if you've got some to hand, why not a Opisthocomus hoazin?
Birds have been being dinosaurs (and thus also dinosaur descendents) for millions of years longer than primates have been being mammals.(Probably)
OK, you might find the Dragon is a better starting point for an Ornithischian dinosaur, but I wouldn't honestly bet on it.
Who? OIC, XKCD-man. I didn't know that he had a name. Is he, perhaps, also "Mohammed Jones?"
No, I haven't RTFA either. But I don't find anything terribly surprising or unexpected in TFS, so why bother?
That seems a rather drastic action to take for 2000 years of lost progress in religion, literature, music, philosophy etc.
Try this alternative history.
What a horrible history. Better not let that happen. Hitler lives!
("Where ARE they?")
Which reminds me ... kangaroo is quite nice. But at 40-odd quid a kilo ... hmm.
The image of a resurrected velociraptor being fed on reconstituted mammoth sounds right on so many levels.
Shock! Horror! USian govt turns Communist!
Revolution imminent!
Lenin's embalmed corpse is waking up and planning a move to Chicago, the better to oversee the revolution.
I'm just wondering what happened to Stalin's stiff? Ah, Kremlin Wall Necropolis, just along from Lenin's tomb. I'll remember that, mostly to make sure that I don't go to the wrong one, next time I'm killing time in Moscow.
I've got my (blunt) dissecting knife here, some ropes, and I can mix up a bucket of (non-sterile) saline to slow down it's death from shock. Do you have a sturdy table and a video camera?
Mammoths certainly have lots of cold-weather adaptations. Having said that, a few years ago I was doing some work in Yamal-Nenetz oblast during the summer and it was sweltering ... on the permafrost. (And 8 months later when I went back, it got up to -30 during the daytime.)
However, it's an observational fact that during the late Jurassic and Cretaceous, there were dinosaurs living (and getting fossilized) at local latitudes of more than 67degrees - i.e. in the "Arctic" and "Antarctic" regions of those day. Some certainly lived in burrows - they may have partially hibernated - but they weren't massive beasts, and would have not had a huge benefit from passive production of body warmth. There are valid uncertainties about climate modelling that far back, but it's safe that the polar regions of the day were pretty cool. Permafrost probably wasn't present anywhere on the planet (OK, maybe up in the mountains, but they rarely fossilize), but it would certainly be incorrect to describe the area as "tropical". Some dinosaurs probably required sub-tropical or higher temperatures, but by no means all of them.
The question of dinosaurian physiology and poikilothermy (or endothermy) is not a simple one, and no-one really knows the answer (though plenty claim to know the answer) ; it is entirely possible that some branches of the dinosaurian radiation were poikilotherms and others were endotherms. Asserting that "dinosaurs" require "warm(-er) climates" is definitely wrong.
An old saying, but relevant : "be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it".
("Siphonophore" ... one of the less well-known invertebrate phyla. What prompted that?)
Why don't you have a waterproof computer so that you can read Slashdot while you shower?
I'd have to do some maths to quantify "a couple", but there's another issue : the topography of Mars. The entire northern hemisphere (well, slightly less than "hemi-") is at significantly lower altitude than the southern hemisphere. So you'd end up with an ocean a kilometer-or-so deep (depending on how many asteroids) in the north, a relatively narrow littoral zone with a relatively Earth-like hydrological cycle, then the main part of the planet in the south would remain as a high altitude, low air pressure desert.
Hmmm, big step forward.
Perhaps it'd be quicker to bring the Magratheans in and just build a planet from scratch.
OTOH, as a thought-experiment in planetary science, "terraforming Mars" is an interesting project.
(There have been degrees of success (not 100%, but significant) with experiments using spinning globes of molten metal (sodium!) to try to replicate the self-stimulating dynamo hypothesis, but the physics seems to be more complicated than theorised, and work is continuing.)
QED.
Once you make that choice, your brain will be fucked, for good. Getting "off" TV is hard - harder than getting off tobacco or alcohol - so why get on the drug in the first place.
Plan 'B' : when the kid says "Can I have a TV?" you say "Sure, the store is over there ; there's a ladder, which you can use to put up an aerial or satellite dish. If you want paid-for TV, I'll sign any paperwork needed for you to buy the service. Are you sure that this is how you want to spend your allowance?"
That raises a question - what's the minimum age for buying (say) a satellite service which may include porn? I'd assume 18, but I'm not certain. I'll try to remember to ask next time I see a TV service salesman.
Yep, that would be where I'd start from. That they're reasonably camouflaged will help too, not that the fly-tippers are likely to be looking for them. Getting creative with your positioning may help too - 5m up a tree, so you can see the likely dump site, the vehicle registration plates, and hopefully the perp's faces. But really, you don't need anything more than the registration plate. If the registered keeper of the vehicle won't finger the driver, then they're guilty themselves. Slam dunk. (Your jurisdiction may differ.)