I've never seen a diamond described as a single three-dimensional molecule, the way that GP#x hulls are described, multiple times, in canon stories.
I've also never seen a diamond disintegrate into dust when a small internal device is stimulated by a particular pattern of light pulses (one of the recent collaboration stories, presumably also canon).
It's near-magical (h/t ACC) technology alright, but not THAT near-magical technology.
They would see it as their religious duty to pursue you to hell to continue with your torment. Since that would involve sins of pride ("I'm the right man for this job!"), arrogance ("Who does this Ghod dude think he is, letting those apostates off like that!") and lots more... they're already likely bound to meet you anyway.
Come on, give him a break. He's shipping computer parts to _China._
I doubt it, given only one crossing of the equator. My bet would be Oz or NZ.
Nobody has ever done that!
Bollocks. We've shipped works computers to China and Korea and other far east destinations regularly. If you've got unusual stuff (in our case, industrial backplane systems of vintages from the mid-80s to the mid-90s), shipping the hardware is normally easier than sourcing new hardware at the destination.
(That said, for COTS desktop hardware, I'd just copy all the data and hand-carry 'X' hard drives. And maybe a laptop. For paranoia's sake, you might want to produce hidden Truecrypt volumes. "Meh.")
Why would one, you'll get a new one there for less than the transport costs.
Nostalgia? Having just moved house by the "throw everything into a box" method, I'm seeing things that are essentially junk, but which I have a nostalgic attachment to. And when I finish this round of Slashdot, I'll fire up my Cobra Mk-III and be off on the Tionisla run, hunting the Thargoid invasion fleet. Try doing that on an x86 box that runs above 40MHz!
My school was one of the first state-funded, non-selective ones in the country to attempt a qualification in computing for the 16y.o. cohort. (The exam infrastructure already existed, I assume because of the non-state sector for educating thieves, lawyers and politicians.)
The first year that the course was run, it was severely oversubscribed. So, some people who had asked to go on the course were put off it. The headmaster said to us, "You're the people who are likely to be the first pupils from this school to ever go to a university anywhere. The people we've left on the course are likely to never have another chance to study computing. When you get to university, you may get a chance to study computing. So, for the sake of your year-mates, will you just put back learning about computers for four years or so. It's not as if anything important is going to change in that period of time."
No, seriously ; that is (the gist of) what he said. He was probably a Classics man.
Hardware : consisted of a stack of Hollerith encoding forms and a Teletype with a tape reader. Interactivity was that one week you write your program on the form, and the next week the results of your program would come back from the university as a box of tapes, which we then fed into the Teletype to get the results. Which were typically error messages from the mainframe.
Of course, it wasn't long (about 3 weeks) before some of the brighter thickos realised that they could punch their own tapes and cheat their homework by producing tapes of their own which appeared to show a correct run of their program. Unless they slipped with the hole punch and made a spelling mistake in the "output". And unused rolls of paper tape became a valuable commodity.
But without the ability to attract impulse watches, such a business would be at a disadvantage.
With lower prices, such a business would be at an advantage.
"an advantage" or "a disadvantage" does not equate to either "immediate total dominance" or "catastrophic failure before the day is out". If your business model is predicated on "impulse buys", then you have just got yourself into a business where you are going to be destroyed by a new competitor one evening while having your after-dinner nap.
Concerning your suppositions for compression techniques... I'll let you invest your money in that. I gave up counting compression technologies that have come and gone back in the mid-90s (when I had to assess a couple of dozen for work ; we ended up rolling our own proprietary one partly for technical reasons, partly for commercial ones). There will always be a new one next week, and I really don't care enough to waste my time studying imaging neurology and psychology in order to understand the problem for photographic images. If it is, indeed, a problem. Perhaps a more important problem is a "me me now now immediately bwahhhhhawahh!" attitude in many of the younger generations.
... until competition appears, such as posting out DVDs to your home address with a pre-paid return envelope. With (say) 3 DVDs (or Blue-rays, not that I've felt any inclination to attend to that technology) at home at any one time, and about a 2 day turn around time, that's in the order of a MB/minute equivalent data rate. I'd been using the internet for 8 to 10 years before I could routinely achieve rates like that.
As competition from that (or other) sources increases, data companies will start to lose customers until they lower their charges. Isn't that how competition is meant to work?
The technology required to build any kind of Dyson sphere and the technology required to move a large population
Why move a large population, when all that you need if for enough(*) to decide or agree to move. Once that happens, the species can move. Whether the species remains viable on their planet of origin is a problem for the ones who chose to stay behind to solve. (Individual survival is of course, implausible. Unless your species has effectively achieved personal immortality, and the inevitably associated birth control.)
* How many is "enough" is a very moot point, even for our species, even discounting things like taking some full-size adults and lots of eggs / sperm / embryos in liquid nitrogen and lead shielding. Or, even, once you've decided on a destination, sending multiple colony ships over an extended period of time, slowly increasing your colony's gene pool.
Namely, have it freeze into the surface of the hole and covered later by windblown sand.
Which does not describe the tabular nature of the deposit in question. So, it's relevance to the deposit in question is... ?
Rounding pebbles could happen without the presence of liquid water. It can happen dry ; it can happen in liquid hydrocarbons ; it can happen in liquid CO2, I'm sure ; it can probably happen in liquid fluorine ; but it would take time to happen, even in the liquid fluorine. Of those liquids, the most credible on in a previous Martian environment is, by far, the liquid water.
Dry flow would require repeated rejuvenation of the slope to keep the sediment on the move, on a slope of around 30degrees to the horizontal.
Liquid hydrocarbons would require some pretty exotic chemistry to have happened on Mars, for which there is no other evidence.
Liquid CO2 would require an atmospheric pressure of around 500 times the present, for which there is no evidence (nor enough CO2 on the planet).
Occams razor strongly suggests liquid water to be the most credible option for the fluid involved.
Please describe the difference between "red" and "blue" in a way that would be unambiguously understood by a blind person who doesn't speak any language in any language family that you speak, and who has grown up in a society of blind people whose language and culture has no reference to any of the concepts that group around "sight" or "light."
Oh, I forgot - they're all polydactyls with seven digits on one hand, six on the second hand and three on the gripping hand.
That is why they used black and white images, not colour.
The location 20 meters down will also have a higher actual pressure due to the presence of 10 meters of overburden
Only if the overburden has effectively zero permeability and the pore-filling material is supporting the overburden with no remnant matrix stress. Which, as you'll know from your well-control courses and pore-pressure analysis experience. They are rather important things, as BP found out a couple of years ago (and on the back of which, I got about 5 months of work in Canada ; interesting but not particularly lucrative).
But you very explicitly want your overburden to have permeability (so that the carbon dioxide can get into the formation from the atmosphere). So, the increase in pressure on the pore fluids will be the integral of the density of the pore fluid with the vertical distance into the sediment. (Normally you'd express as the product of the density and the vertical distance, but that only really works if you know or assume that your pore fluids have uniform density, or you're talking about your drilling or completion fluids, which bloody well better have uniform density or the mud engineer has got some explaining to do.)
Anyway, if you want to be able to move CO2 into the sediment, then you've got to have hydraulic communication to the atmosphere. which means that the overburden is supported by stress in the sediment grains and the pressure of the pore fluids is the atmospheric pressure at the sediment-atmosphere interface plus the integral mentioned above. This really is basic pore pressure work - I've had to train a few dozen Applied Drilling Technology Engineers, Wellsite Geologists and Operations Geologists, for about a dozen companies (contractors and operators) in it after their first couple of years out of university, and it's been a routine part of my work for nearly 25 years.
Warmth. That increases the vapor pressure of CO2 near the surface. As it evaporates, you have
a net force on the newly evaporated CO2 (the vapour pressure of the evaporating CO2 on one side of any particular unit of gas, opposed by the general atmospheric pressure acting on the other side, giving a net force away from the evaporating solid CO2) ; that net force accelerates the mass of gas AWAY from the evaporating solid. So, bye bye CO2, and an infinitesimal increase in the general atmospheric pressure.
You're talking about fluids of very low stiffness ; the only way that they can support a significant pressure differential is through their density acting over a vertical distance.
There's a lot of people who say that they know what they're talking about.
Some of them do. Many are bullshitters, but some do actually know what they're talking about. And when you're talking about your client's money, you do think quite hard before tossing it away. They tend to ask you why you did that, and then check if your answers add up. Funny that, you'd almost think they gave a shit about their money.
Freeze CO2 out of the atmosphere in winter. Due to heating from the moderately permeable ground, CO2 vaporizes and refreezes further in the ground.
Wrong direction. The ground is heated from below, or cooled from above ; pick an alternative and you get a gradient in the same direction. So, solid CO2 at (say) 20m below ground surface will have, generally, a HIGHER vapour pressure than solid CO2 at 10m below ground surface. So generally the heat flux from the ground will result in an outgassing flux from the soil.
Then in spring, sudden drops in pressure, say from a vaporizing layer of CO2 causes the occasional flash into vapor.
Wrong direction. In spring, as the Martian polar caps warm with approaching perihelion, the atmospheric pressure increases.
You have a fair argument, but you don't have evidence to support it.
I wish that I could say the same, but I think that you've got several effects operating with the wrong sign in your mental model.
Anyway, I've got to bugger off now to attend a planning meeting for a 20-30 million dollar budget effort to investigate some ancient streambeds somewhere in the North West Europe Hydrocarbon Province. Which, considering the approaching winter season, could be "interesting".
How many years did the perp serve in jail, and how many more years was she banned from driving for before she had to re-sit her driving test?
(Speaking as someone who lost a family member to an idiot cager. I hold the opinion that jail time for a killer-by-vehicle should be compulsory, as should several years of non-driving after release from prison. I also hold the opinion that everyone who has a driving licence should lose it every decade or so and have to re-pass their driving tests. Vehicles change ; road regulations change ; road conditions change. Continued competence should be regularly proved.)
It absolutely does have to be 100% accurate when you're ultimately going to use that technique as evidence in a court of law.
No technique of experimental science is 100% accurate ("100" being an integer, not a real number). All techniques have some degree of measurement uncertainty, even if it is very low.
Go back and read your references on Martian atmospherics. The polar ice caps are mostly carbon dioxide with small amounts of water ice. That's been accepted for decades. Unless of course, you know better.
HOW, precisely, are you proposing to get carbon dioxide FROM an atmosphere at a small fraction of a bar, THROUGH a soil of moderate permeability, AGAINST a temperature gradient (the surface cools by radiating into space ; the subsurface has a heat flux from the cooling interior), to then condense onto existing CO2 ice.
Then, how are your conditions going to alter sufficiently rapidly to cause the CO2 you've accumulated over an extended period to flash into vapour.
After that, explain how the subsequent landslips move this package of vapour-supported sediment from it's reduced slope to another location with an even further reduced slope. You're talking about multiply repeated landslip events affecting this particular unit of sediment ; and each landslip starts with a (relatively) high inclination landscape and turns it into a relatively low inclination landscape.
According to various sources involved in the 3d-printer world, the makers of the Replicator 2 device have unilaterally taken it closed-source, including many contributions made be the Open Hardware community.
I don't follow this scene too closely - I didn't have room at the old house to build a 3-d printer. But it's still on the agenda for the not too distant future. If you actually care about the ideas of Open Source (hardware, firmware or software), then you need to examine this question extremely carefully. There is a lot of sound and fury ; how much that signifies, I'm not sure. I was considering buying one of Caveat emptor, very much indeed.
I would be moderately happy to have a mobile app, if it worked. The alpha was essentially impossible to use ; I haven't had time or inclination to try the beta yet, since the alpha was so horrible. (That is the purpose of alphas though).
I suppose that I'd better actually go and try it....
OK, despite being warned that my plain-vanilla Android tablet and Firefox are "not a supported platform", it does load and work. There's no indication that the stories and comments are loaded off-screen - but hours of fucking with the alpha version had told me to try that. It certainly looks more usable. But I don't think that I'll be using it until I've put a proper keyboard onto the tablet. I'm definitely not a fan of touchscreen typing.
... and in the Martian context, when CO2 freezes out of the atmosphere (which it does every Martian year), it forms a frost rather than penetrating into the sub-surface. So . . . what is your process for getting CO2 to penetrate into the subsoil, and then to change conditions (in the subsoil) so as to cause rapid outgassing. Then lather, rinse and repeat.
Your fundamental problem is that your proposed mechanism requires repeated rapid changes in conditions in the subsurface, coupled with large fluxes of atmosphere through the soil.
The proposed CO2 outgassing landslip scars in various parts of Mars are one-off events precisely because of the difficulty of recharging the subsoil with CO2. Feel free to try addressing that problem, because you won't be the only person by a long chalk to have looked at it. Then you might look at the question of how to cause a second (3rd, 4th...) landslip in the debris deposited by a previous landslip. Landslip material comes to a stop precisely because it has come to an area of low potential energy.
Writing documentation is boring and tedious. (Score:-1, Troll)
'Nuff said.
And it is ABSOLUTELY essential to product uptake and use.
That said, I've been nagging the 50-odd users within my employer of our product (I don't know or care how many sales there are ; many, many more.) to bloody well document their code contributions in the macro language. Out of those 50, and adding the development team (about 10 coders) and our sub-contracting division (another 10 users), to the best of my knowledge I am still the only person who has ever written any documentation for their code.
Which pisses me off. But short of sacking someone, I don't see it changing.
Personally, I think that it's an indication of a lack of pride in their work for people to be ashamed to write documentation and put their names for it.
My thinking here is a billion years of alluvial material slowly getting knocked around by many, many landslides generated by carbon dioxide flashing to gas.
The debris movement of a landslide last for minutes to hours at best. It's not very effective at rounding off boulders. Having climbed through significant landslip deposits in caves and cave entrances, and over many landslip deposits in the Scottish highlands during my 6 weeks of compulsory (for my geology degree) geological mapping work and 30-odd years of recreational mountaineering, I can state that from personal observation.
A landslip results in the movement of state from a position of high gravitational potential energy and low kinetic energy to a state of low(-er) gravitational potential energy and high(-er) kinetic energy. That kinetic energy is dissipated partly into fragmentation of the debris, but largely into heat.
To repeat a landslip you either need to have additional removal of the topography to allow the material to fall again, or uplift of the material you wish to re-work.
What is your mechanism for re-injecting the landslip material with sufficient CO2 to generate a second (third, fourth...) landslip? This will then cycle back to the conditions that cause the landslip, and then repeat the cycle again. And again.
The corresponding cycle of events for the "it's a liquid stream" interpretation is a water cycle not dissimilar to that operating on Earth today.
To elaborate on my previous point, there are no analogous terrestrial processes to carbon dioxide-triggered landslides.
You don't think that the outgassing viscous magmas collapsing and erupting from the flanks of a volcano are comparable? Each grain (sedimentological sense) of the material emits several times it's own volume of gases (water and CO2 primarily) while involved in a large (multiple cubic kilometre) landslip event. Review this video, particularly from about the 7 second mark when the "cockscomb" plume of a gas-evolving lateral blast becomes obvious. (Surtsey's phreatomagmatic eruptions have some similar effects.) I think such events are comparable (NB : "comparable".NE. "identical") ; gas-fuelled pyroclastic eruptions are not renowned for their high grain rounding.
Mars has been running erosive processes for billions of years, but most of them seem to have been moribund for the last 2 billion years. (Incidentally, when you're referring to modifying the surfaces of sediment grains, be they micron- or metre- scale, "corrasion" is probably a better term than "erosion". "Erosion" is normally something that happens to landscape and landforms.)
Anyway, I've got to get floorboards ripped up to install cabling, so I'll be offline for the rest of the day.
Slashdot Mirror
I've also never seen a diamond disintegrate into dust when a small internal device is stimulated by a particular pattern of light pulses (one of the recent collaboration stories, presumably also canon).
It's near-magical (h/t ACC) technology alright, but not THAT near-magical technology.
Which license do you think should be revoked? The license to drive, or the license to breathe?
What's that smell? Damn - eschatology on my shoe!
I doubt it, given only one crossing of the equator. My bet would be Oz or NZ.
Bollocks. We've shipped works computers to China and Korea and other far east destinations regularly. If you've got unusual stuff (in our case, industrial backplane systems of vintages from the mid-80s to the mid-90s), shipping the hardware is normally easier than sourcing new hardware at the destination.
(That said, for COTS desktop hardware, I'd just copy all the data and hand-carry 'X' hard drives. And maybe a laptop. For paranoia's sake, you might want to produce hidden Truecrypt volumes. "Meh.")
Nostalgia? Having just moved house by the "throw everything into a box" method, I'm seeing things that are essentially junk, but which I have a nostalgic attachment to. And when I finish this round of Slashdot, I'll fire up my Cobra Mk-III and be off on the Tionisla run, hunting the Thargoid invasion fleet. Try doing that on an x86 box that runs above 40MHz!
Too flammable. Lead foil burqa.
The first year that the course was run, it was severely oversubscribed. So, some people who had asked to go on the course were put off it. The headmaster said to us, "You're the people who are likely to be the first pupils from this school to ever go to a university anywhere. The people we've left on the course are likely to never have another chance to study computing. When you get to university, you may get a chance to study computing. So, for the sake of your year-mates, will you just put back learning about computers for four years or so. It's not as if anything important is going to change in that period of time."
No, seriously ; that is (the gist of) what he said. He was probably a Classics man.
Hardware : consisted of a stack of Hollerith encoding forms and a Teletype with a tape reader. Interactivity was that one week you write your program on the form, and the next week the results of your program would come back from the university as a box of tapes, which we then fed into the Teletype to get the results. Which were typically error messages from the mainframe.
Of course, it wasn't long (about 3 weeks) before some of the brighter thickos realised that they could punch their own tapes and cheat their homework by producing tapes of their own which appeared to show a correct run of their program. Unless they slipped with the hole punch and made a spelling mistake in the "output". And unused rolls of paper tape became a valuable commodity.
With lower prices, such a business would be at an advantage.
"an advantage" or "a disadvantage" does not equate to either "immediate total dominance" or "catastrophic failure before the day is out". If your business model is predicated on "impulse buys", then you have just got yourself into a business where you are going to be destroyed by a new competitor one evening while having your after-dinner nap.
Concerning your suppositions for compression techniques ... I'll let you invest your money in that. I gave up counting compression technologies that have come and gone back in the mid-90s (when I had to assess a couple of dozen for work ; we ended up rolling our own proprietary one partly for technical reasons, partly for commercial ones). There will always be a new one next week, and I really don't care enough to waste my time studying imaging neurology and psychology in order to understand the problem for photographic images. If it is, indeed, a problem. Perhaps a more important problem is a "me me now now immediately bwahhhhhawahh!" attitude in many of the younger generations.
As competition from that (or other) sources increases, data companies will start to lose customers until they lower their charges. Isn't that how competition is meant to work?
Do you still have a pulse? If so, then it's not too late to retrain.
Why move a large population, when all that you need if for enough(*) to decide or agree to move. Once that happens, the species can move. Whether the species remains viable on their planet of origin is a problem for the ones who chose to stay behind to solve. (Individual survival is of course, implausible. Unless your species has effectively achieved personal immortality, and the inevitably associated birth control.)
* How many is "enough" is a very moot point, even for our species, even discounting things like taking some full-size adults and lots of eggs / sperm / embryos in liquid nitrogen and lead shielding. Or, even, once you've decided on a destination, sending multiple colony ships over an extended period of time, slowly increasing your colony's gene pool.
Which does not describe the tabular nature of the deposit in question. So, it's relevance to the deposit in question is ... ?
Rounding pebbles could happen without the presence of liquid water. It can happen dry ; it can happen in liquid hydrocarbons ; it can happen in liquid CO2, I'm sure ; it can probably happen in liquid fluorine ; but it would take time to happen, even in the liquid fluorine. Of those liquids, the most credible on in a previous Martian environment is, by far, the liquid water.
Dry flow would require repeated rejuvenation of the slope to keep the sediment on the move, on a slope of around 30degrees to the horizontal.
Liquid hydrocarbons would require some pretty exotic chemistry to have happened on Mars, for which there is no other evidence.
Liquid CO2 would require an atmospheric pressure of around 500 times the present, for which there is no evidence (nor enough CO2 on the planet).
Occams razor strongly suggests liquid water to be the most credible option for the fluid involved.
I find myself deeply suspicious about the implied duration of orbital stability too.
Please describe the difference between "red" and "blue" in a way that would be unambiguously understood by a blind person who doesn't speak any language in any language family that you speak, and who has grown up in a society of blind people whose language and culture has no reference to any of the concepts that group around "sight" or "light."
Oh, I forgot - they're all polydactyls with seven digits on one hand, six on the second hand and three on the gripping hand.
That is why they used black and white images, not colour.
Only if the overburden has effectively zero permeability and the pore-filling material is supporting the overburden with no remnant matrix stress. Which, as you'll know from your well-control courses and pore-pressure analysis experience. They are rather important things, as BP found out a couple of years ago (and on the back of which, I got about 5 months of work in Canada ; interesting but not particularly lucrative).
But you very explicitly want your overburden to have permeability (so that the carbon dioxide can get into the formation from the atmosphere). So, the increase in pressure on the pore fluids will be the integral of the density of the pore fluid with the vertical distance into the sediment. (Normally you'd express as the product of the density and the vertical distance, but that only really works if you know or assume that your pore fluids have uniform density, or you're talking about your drilling or completion fluids, which bloody well better have uniform density or the mud engineer has got some explaining to do.)
Anyway, if you want to be able to move CO2 into the sediment, then you've got to have hydraulic communication to the atmosphere. which means that the overburden is supported by stress in the sediment grains and the pressure of the pore fluids is the atmospheric pressure at the sediment-atmosphere interface plus the integral mentioned above. This really is basic pore pressure work - I've had to train a few dozen Applied Drilling Technology Engineers, Wellsite Geologists and Operations Geologists, for about a dozen companies (contractors and operators) in it after their first couple of years out of university, and it's been a routine part of my work for nearly 25 years.
a net force on the newly evaporated CO2 (the vapour pressure of the evaporating CO2 on one side of any particular unit of gas, opposed by the general atmospheric pressure acting on the other side, giving a net force away from the evaporating solid CO2) ; that net force accelerates the mass of gas AWAY from the evaporating solid. So, bye bye CO2, and an infinitesimal increase in the general atmospheric pressure.
You're talking about fluids of very low stiffness ; the only way that they can support a significant pressure differential is through their density acting over a vertical distance.
Some of them do. Many are bullshitters, but some do actually know what they're talking about. And when you're talking about your client's money, you do think quite hard before tossing it away. They tend to ask you why you did that, and then check if your answers add up. Funny that, you'd almost think they gave a shit about their money.
Wrong direction. The ground is heated from below, or cooled from above ; pick an alternative and you get a gradient in the same direction. So, solid CO2 at (say) 20m below ground surface will have, generally, a HIGHER vapour pressure than solid CO2 at 10m below ground surface. So generally the heat flux from the ground will result in an outgassing flux from the soil.
Wrong direction. In spring, as the Martian polar caps warm with approaching perihelion, the atmospheric pressure increases.
I wish that I could say the same, but I think that you've got several effects operating with the wrong sign in your mental model.
Anyway, I've got to bugger off now to attend a planning meeting for a 20-30 million dollar budget effort to investigate some ancient streambeds somewhere in the North West Europe Hydrocarbon Province. Which, considering the approaching winter season, could be "interesting".
(Speaking as someone who lost a family member to an idiot cager. I hold the opinion that jail time for a killer-by-vehicle should be compulsory, as should several years of non-driving after release from prison. I also hold the opinion that everyone who has a driving licence should lose it every decade or so and have to re-pass their driving tests. Vehicles change ; road regulations change ; road conditions change. Continued competence should be regularly proved.)
That is no reason not to flog it. I want to see bone showing before you put the whip down. Get to it!
No technique of experimental science is 100% accurate ("100" being an integer, not a real number). All techniques have some degree of measurement uncertainty, even if it is very low.
HOW, precisely, are you proposing to get carbon dioxide FROM an atmosphere at a small fraction of a bar, THROUGH a soil of moderate permeability, AGAINST a temperature gradient (the surface cools by radiating into space ; the subsurface has a heat flux from the cooling interior), to then condense onto existing CO2 ice.
Then, how are your conditions going to alter sufficiently rapidly to cause the CO2 you've accumulated over an extended period to flash into vapour.
After that, explain how the subsequent landslips move this package of vapour-supported sediment from it's reduced slope to another location with an even further reduced slope. You're talking about multiply repeated landslip events affecting this particular unit of sediment ; and each landslip starts with a (relatively) high inclination landscape and turns it into a relatively low inclination landscape.
I don't follow this scene too closely - I didn't have room at the old house to build a 3-d printer. But it's still on the agenda for the not too distant future. If you actually care about the ideas of Open Source (hardware, firmware or software), then you need to examine this question extremely carefully. There is a lot of sound and fury ; how much that signifies, I'm not sure. I was considering buying one of Caveat emptor, very much indeed.
Links : 1, 2, 3 (with a lot of comments!)
I suppose that I'd better actually go and try it. ...
OK, despite being warned that my plain-vanilla Android tablet and Firefox are "not a supported platform", it does load and work. There's no indication that the stories and comments are loaded off-screen - but hours of fucking with the alpha version had told me to try that. It certainly looks more usable. But I don't think that I'll be using it until I've put a proper keyboard onto the tablet. I'm definitely not a fan of touchscreen typing.
Your fundamental problem is that your proposed mechanism requires repeated rapid changes in conditions in the subsurface, coupled with large fluxes of atmosphere through the soil.
The proposed CO2 outgassing landslip scars in various parts of Mars are one-off events precisely because of the difficulty of recharging the subsoil with CO2. Feel free to try addressing that problem, because you won't be the only person by a long chalk to have looked at it. Then you might look at the question of how to cause a second (3rd, 4th ...) landslip in the debris deposited by a previous landslip. Landslip material comes to a stop precisely because it has come to an area of low potential energy.
And it is ABSOLUTELY essential to product uptake and use.
That said, I've been nagging the 50-odd users within my employer of our product (I don't know or care how many sales there are ; many, many more.) to bloody well document their code contributions in the macro language. Out of those 50, and adding the development team (about 10 coders) and our sub-contracting division (another 10 users), to the best of my knowledge I am still the only person who has ever written any documentation for their code.
Which pisses me off. But short of sacking someone, I don't see it changing.
Personally, I think that it's an indication of a lack of pride in their work for people to be ashamed to write documentation and put their names for it.
So you're looking to repeatedly put CO2 into the soil then release it abruptly. That doesn't sound very feasible to me.
The debris movement of a landslide last for minutes to hours at best. It's not very effective at rounding off boulders. Having climbed through significant landslip deposits in caves and cave entrances, and over many landslip deposits in the Scottish highlands during my 6 weeks of compulsory (for my geology degree) geological mapping work and 30-odd years of recreational mountaineering, I can state that from personal observation.
A landslip results in the movement of state from a position of high gravitational potential energy and low kinetic energy to a state of low(-er) gravitational potential energy and high(-er) kinetic energy. That kinetic energy is dissipated partly into fragmentation of the debris, but largely into heat.
To repeat a landslip you either need to have additional removal of the topography to allow the material to fall again, or uplift of the material you wish to re-work.
What is your mechanism for re-injecting the landslip material with sufficient CO2 to generate a second (third, fourth ...) landslip? This will then cycle back to the conditions that cause the landslip, and then repeat the cycle again. And again.
The corresponding cycle of events for the "it's a liquid stream" interpretation is a water cycle not dissimilar to that operating on Earth today.
You don't think that the outgassing viscous magmas collapsing and erupting from the flanks of a volcano are comparable? Each grain (sedimentological sense) of the material emits several times it's own volume of gases (water and CO2 primarily) while involved in a large (multiple cubic kilometre) landslip event. Review this video, particularly from about the 7 second mark when the "cockscomb" plume of a gas-evolving lateral blast becomes obvious. (Surtsey's phreatomagmatic eruptions have some similar effects.) .NE. "identical") ; gas-fuelled pyroclastic eruptions are not renowned for their high grain rounding.
I think such events are comparable (NB : "comparable"
Mars has been running erosive processes for billions of years, but most of them seem to have been moribund for the last 2 billion years. (Incidentally, when you're referring to modifying the surfaces of sediment grains, be they micron- or metre- scale, "corrasion" is probably a better term than "erosion". "Erosion" is normally something that happens to landscape and landforms.)
Anyway, I've got to get floorboards ripped up to install cabling, so I'll be offline for the rest of the day.