Unfortunately, Mr Occam's Razor is a fickle beast, and can bite the hand that grasps it.
There is indeed, core evidence indicating flooding of the Black Sea and influx of Mediterranean organisms at the approximate end of the most-recent Ice Age. There is also seismic reflection profiling which shows major flood channels. Which provided an ample basis for the original work.
However, further work has shown that there are MULTIPLE flood channels, which cross-cut each other. And the core samples are also complicated in detail ; different cores describe similar events, but decades to perhaps centuries apart.
The nice, simple, catastrophic story is no-longer supported by the evidence. There were floods, bad ones. Then a few years, perhaps a generation later, another flood, also bad. Lather, rinse, repeat, for a century or two.
Looking at the complex, tectonically active, Hellespont, Sea of Marmara, then the final Istambul channel, is it so realistic to expect that system to break in one fell swoop over a hundred-plus miles, with only 10s of metres of head? Most similar major floods have recurred several times. Look, for example, at the complications of halite stratigraphy in the Messinian Salinity Crisis of the Mediterranean Basin : not a simple filling event, and that has the relatively simple Gibralter channel as it's main choke point.
I worked out the meaning from the knowlegde of Greek and Latin vocabulary that I've acquired simply by reading science for a while (and reading English for a little longer).
sub- lower or under, as in "submarine"
-strate layer, as in stratigraphy,
topo- shape, particuarly of landscape, e.g. "topography", and
-nymy giving names to things, as in "name".
I wouldn't be 100% sure which were stolen from Latin, which from Greek, but such lifting of word roots is rampant in the sciences. I makes life a lot easier, until some nirk comes along and tries to incorporate Mayan-Mandarin constructs into the literature.
I admire, slightly, your persistence in getting to 30-odd. I'd given up on it being SF long before then, and just laid back to look at the SFX. Disappointed.
The "Black Sea flood" appears to have been a much more complicated, and protracted event than the original proponents asserted. So much so that, after examining more data of the same sort as used originally (shallow seismic and sediment core analysis), one of the two (Ryan or Pitts? I forget, and this tablet is not conducive to running off to researh it) has back-pedalled a lot, while the other has pedalled in a different direction. Normal science : a hypothesis is tested by looking for more data, and the answer doesn't look like the "either" or the "or" interpretations, but somewhere closer to "neither". Or to "nor". As the tee-shirt says, "If we knew the answers, we couldn't call it research."
Even if it took several centuries of decadal small floods, the linking of the Black Sea to the rest of the oceans probably had a lot of effects locally. But simultaneously there were vigorous climatic changes (linked to the eustatic and isostatic changes), and the spread of new agricultural products and techniques from the Anatolian highlands. For a "racing certainty", those were going to have profound effects radiating outwards too. Including around the Pontic margins.
Probably in the middle of the first lean-to made from the skin of a dead beast on a cold night. Which would suggest somewhere that gets fairly cold (to stimulate the need), and sub-tropical (because, like it or not, we are descended from African anthropoid apes). I'd put the Turkey- Caucasus- Iranian mountains as a plausible locale, and anywhere between 200,000 & 1,000,000 years ago as the date.
The oldest EXAMPLES of posts... more recent, IIRC around 30kyr, Siberian or Ukrainian "bone huts" built of mammoth bones, but that might stretch your meaning of "post". But posts to support a spit roast would stretch the definition the other way, and that would make posts made by non-humans a lot older than First Post jokes on Slashdot.
No, and I don't. I create such an account around once a year, often with the same screen name as I use on Slashdot. There's over a dozen of them.
It's clear that you don't expect anyone to take your Cowardly Anonymous comments seriously. Pretty pathetic really. I bet it really sticks in your throat having to blow policemen after a hard night of getting paid to blow Johns. That is how your sad little life sounds from here.
The AC's comment may be priceless, but the hardware and access that it was made with werelikey paid on... I've forgotten the name of the silly credit card's adverts. You know who I mean.
it mentions "metal shavings on one of its bolts and around the housing" when they removed the bolt and now it won't go back in again.
Ah, galled. So, either vacuum-welding, wrong metallurgy, or excessive force. All of which would have been alleviated by use of the appropriate "thread lubricant" compound (often called a "dope") during initial assembly.
Being galled, use of excessive force is likely to make matters much worse.
You're not going to get significant penetration of any lubricant into the close-fitting gap (OK ; by "working" the bolt, you might just work some in. But you'd need to get some movement first.)
So... that doesn't leave a lot apart from drilling the fucker out sufficiently to relax the threaded portion (hard!), or heating the mounting plate to try to free the stuck bolt.
The heating option can be applied in incremental stages.
I'd look at
(1) rig up an existing tool to put constant (at-limit) torque on the bolt. Thermal cycling of the structure might be enough (it might take a week or two... meh!?)
(2) while (1), prepare electrical heating jig and attach. This may require significant re-wiring of the power supply.
(3) while (1) and (2), experiment on planet with suitable pasty mixes for providing chemical high-power heat. Up to and possibly including a welder's torch rigged for space (complications : reaction from the hand-held rocket motor ; cutting undesired structures (including the astronaut!) ; hydrogen embrittlement of the metal)
That's a nasty list of complications ; a jig to brace the fouled bolt against some other part of the structure might be much easier.
But hey, what do I know ? I'm not a space-station designer.
Re: Anecdote : There are formulations of "metal putty" which are not available to Joe Sixpack fixing his fender. I've seen 10-inch washed-out 'o'ring grooves with working pressures of 3500+psi repaired and continue working for over 15 years. You'll be amazed at what you can do when you've got a $20,000 bill plus 30-week manufacturing lead time to replace a part.
Many, many asteroids are remnants of planets, so this isn't exactly a massive leap of logic.
Actually, adding up the masses of all of the known (and an estimate for the unknown) asteroids, you don't get anywhere near Lunar mass, let alone multiple planets (footnote).
Your information on the structure and history of asteroids is woefully out of date. As in, approaching 2 centuries out of date.
(footnote). Planet : however defined ; I'd use the self-sphericalising criterion myself, making several of the largest asteroids planets themselves. But I'm weird, and a geologist not an astronomer, so I don't get a vote.)
Your image of the "Slashdot community" may be of barely-pubescent Morlocks living a troglodyte existence in the cellar of their parent, playing $MMORPG_of_the_week$ while eating cold pizza and drinking luke-warm flat cola. But that doesn't cover the whole range of "nerd". I do plenty of outdoor stuff ; I sometimes even get sunburned and frost nipped on the same day and consider it to have been a good day.
I'm trying to remember the references for the nylon-precursor - eating bacterium. If you'd not posted AC, I'd consider looking harder. It exists ; find it.
The Greeks certainly did think it was possible - that whole Leda thing.
(Speaking as a full-time geologist and part-time palaeontologist, birds are not dinosaur descendants ; birds are dinosaurs. For all meaningful values of "bird", "are", and "dinosaur.")
More seriously, though, the H. floresiensis hobbits seem like a really obvious next set of people to do DNA analysis on - we're not sure if they're modern humans or what,
DNA, like any organic molecule, is prone to decomposition in warm and/ or wet conditions. The Denisovan DNA was found in bones in a cave in a mountainous area of Siberia. The "hobbits" bones were found in a low-altitude cave in the tropics.
While "hobbit" DNA would be absolutely fascinating to discover, the odds are not good.
Which doesn't stop people from looking, but they're also looking for other things at the same time.
this is england but here in the US you need beyond a reasonable doubt.
In England, criminal cases need to be proven "beyond reasonable doubt" too. The American adversarial legal system is derived from the English system, and inherits many of it's flaws as well as it's strengths. For example,
there is no person in the adversarial system who is actually interested in getting to the truth of an event (prosecution is interested in getting a conviction ; defence in getting their client off ; no-one is interested in the truth). In contrast many of the continental legal systems have a "judge of investigation", whose task is to find out what happened and why, while other lawyers then go on to perform the prosecution ; in cases of unintentional deaths from machinery malfunctions for example, this can make a huge difference in ultimate outcome.
In England and America, there are only two verdicts available (guilty or not guilty) ; whereas England's Scottish neighbours also have the option of "not proven", in which case there is no punishment, but the case remains open and goes onto the accused's criminal record ; a retrial, with novel evidence, remains possible.
The 15-person Scottish jury is also less prone to stalemate.
For most tourists (or workers ; I've worked quite a bit in Africa in the last couple of years, but I'd barely consider it as a tourist location. Too fucking hot, on average.), malaria is an inconvenience, but not deadly. Typhoid and other food-poisonings, on the other hand... rabies from the mangy mutts all over the place... traffic accidents...various aggressive invertebrate wildlife... are all more important for the average traveller. TBH, some of the anti-malarial drugs are comparably dangerous to the disease itself ; one of my colleagues discovered that he couldn't get Malarone in his country (obviously it's a waste of time buying it in Africa - too many counterfeiters) but could only get Larium ; he refused to take this, having seen it's effects on other people. So he got moved from the lucrative Africa job to a shit-hole job without the malaria.
Then there is the most dangerous species on the continent : an extremely aggressive, inventive anthropoid ape. You need to watch those motherfuckers every second of the day.
Wonderful ethical question, but if the human race is known for anything, its the non-subscription to the magazine which ponders over such things.
I don't know, Scientific American seems to have a decent subscription rate, for example, and is also known for covering topics such as this.
That rather depends on what you're comparing it's subscription rate to. If you're comparing it to (say) American Scientist, which is in the same arena, but about 3-to-4 times as hard a read (which is why I reluctantly overcome my loathing for exporting money to America and indulge my brain cells there), then Scientific American has got a good subscription rate. If, on the other hand, you compare it to "Guns'n'Ammo Monthly", "Mass Murderer Weekly" or "Barely Legal Girls Getting Sodomised Hourly", then it's subscription rate rather sucks.
Wasn't it a PTBarnum-ism that "No-one, but no-one, ever lost money by underestimating the taste of the public." (I think he was being specifically rude about the American public, but Brits are no better ; nor are Cloggies (but they have better porn, and put it on the bottom shelf because it's a health-and-safety hazard for the school children to climb up the shelving to get the porn and laugh at it). Noggins are pretty cool, until you ask them about getting tuna-friendly dolphin steaks for supper ; then they turn all "Guns'n'Ammo" on you.)
On the substantive issue, I'm pretty neutral about the ethics of the process. In a world where immense suffering is caused to immense numbers of farm animals purely to make excessively fat people fatter (the the detriment of their health!), then the existence or not of pretty small numbers of very carefully and very expensively created organisms is pretty unimportant.
Oh, and people still kill other people too, which is a fairly important ethical point too.
Why do it? Because it'll be hard. And, in the process of learning just how hard, we'd learn a lot about how organisms work and genetics works. Which would be moderately valuable. But I think there are more urgent things to do.
. . . Those 50,000 bends being a proxy for the bends that, for example, it would get from being bent by your knee as you cycle to work. Which neglects the fact that you'd probably design the device with bulky elements like batteries around the waist. Or in some other location where it is not (much) subject to bending.
My big question for all these technologies is, how do you wash it?
Posted from/. Mobile Alpha
There is an old joke (sort-of joke, anyway) that "the plural of anecdote is not data."
Your seeming plurality of anecdotes still don't comprise data. A reasonably randomised collection of interview transcripts, the results of a collection of street interviews, etc would comprise usable data, but as it stands your anecdote doesn't really cut it. There is too high a likelihood that your 13 (I think) correspondents do not meaningfully represent the general population. For example, your influence as a Linux user (probable, given your presence here on Slashdot) might have biased all of them in a way that the general population don't get biased.
You should look for a lot of burn marks. As a Windows administrator, he's going to suffer a lot of torture in the future, so you're best off with someone who has already suffered tortures in the past. Previously-tortured people are less likely to break down into gibbering wrecks at the first turn of the thumbscrews.
Slashdot Mirror
There is indeed, core evidence indicating flooding of the Black Sea and influx of Mediterranean organisms at the approximate end of the most-recent Ice Age. There is also seismic reflection profiling which shows major flood channels. Which provided an ample basis for the original work.
However, further work has shown that there are MULTIPLE flood channels, which cross-cut each other. And the core samples are also complicated in detail ; different cores describe similar events, but decades to perhaps centuries apart.
The nice, simple, catastrophic story is no-longer supported by the evidence. There were floods, bad ones. Then a few years, perhaps a generation later, another flood, also bad. Lather, rinse, repeat, for a century or two.
Looking at the complex, tectonically active, Hellespont, Sea of Marmara, then the final Istambul channel, is it so realistic to expect that system to break in one fell swoop over a hundred-plus miles, with only 10s of metres of head? Most similar major floods have recurred several times. Look, for example, at the complications of halite stratigraphy in the Messinian Salinity Crisis of the Mediterranean Basin : not a simple filling event, and that has the relatively simple Gibralter channel as it's main choke point.
I wouldn't be 100% sure which were stolen from Latin, which from Greek, but such lifting of word roots is rampant in the sciences. I makes life a lot easier, until some nirk comes along and tries to incorporate Mayan-Mandarin constructs into the literature.
I admire, slightly, your persistence in getting to 30-odd. I'd given up on it being SF long before then, and just laid back to look at the SFX. Disappointed.
Even if it took several centuries of decadal small floods, the linking of the Black Sea to the rest of the oceans probably had a lot of effects locally. But simultaneously there were vigorous climatic changes (linked to the eustatic and isostatic changes), and the spread of new agricultural products and techniques from the Anatolian highlands. For a "racing certainty", those were going to have profound effects radiating outwards too. Including around the Pontic margins.
That's my 2 cents worth. YMMV, TCITP, IWCIYM.
Stop injecting facts into what is clearly intended to be a bigoted diatribe. That's my job!
The oldest EXAMPLES of posts ... more recent, IIRC around 30kyr, Siberian or Ukrainian "bone huts" built of mammoth bones, but that might stretch your meaning of "post". But posts to support a spit roast would stretch the definition the other way, and that would make posts made by non-humans a lot older than First Post jokes on Slashdot.
Why do I waste my time feeding the AC trolls?
It's clear that you don't expect anyone to take your Cowardly Anonymous comments seriously. Pretty pathetic really. I bet it really sticks in your throat having to blow policemen after a hard night of getting paid to blow Johns. That is how your sad little life sounds from here.
Just checking that I'm logged in.
No-one else is ; why should I? [GRIN]
Ah, galled. So, either vacuum-welding, wrong metallurgy, or excessive force. All of which would have been alleviated by use of the appropriate "thread lubricant" compound (often called a "dope") during initial assembly.
The heating option can be applied in incremental stages.
I'd look at
That's a nasty list of complications ; a jig to brace the fouled bolt against some other part of the structure might be much easier.
But hey, what do I know ? I'm not a space-station designer.
Re: Anecdote : There are formulations of "metal putty" which are not available to Joe Sixpack fixing his fender. I've seen 10-inch washed-out 'o'ring grooves with working pressures of 3500+psi repaired and continue working for over 15 years. You'll be amazed at what you can do when you've got a $20,000 bill plus 30-week manufacturing lead time to replace a part.
Actually, adding up the masses of all of the known (and an estimate for the unknown) asteroids, you don't get anywhere near Lunar mass, let alone multiple planets (footnote).
Your information on the structure and history of asteroids is woefully out of date. As in, approaching 2 centuries out of date.
(footnote). Planet : however defined ; I'd use the self-sphericalising criterion myself, making several of the largest asteroids planets themselves. But I'm weird, and a geologist not an astronomer, so I don't get a vote.)
Your image of the "Slashdot community" may be of barely-pubescent Morlocks living a troglodyte existence in the cellar of their parent, playing $MMORPG_of_the_week$ while eating cold pizza and drinking luke-warm flat cola. But that doesn't cover the whole range of "nerd". I do plenty of outdoor stuff ; I sometimes even get sunburned and frost nipped on the same day and consider it to have been a good day.
I'm trying to remember the references for the nylon-precursor - eating bacterium. If you'd not posted AC, I'd consider looking harder. It exists ; find it.
Emergency services are very picky about the equipment that they use, and with good reason.
(Speaking as a full-time geologist and part-time palaeontologist, birds are not dinosaur descendants ; birds are dinosaurs. For all meaningful values of "bird", "are", and "dinosaur.")
Lung fish (not to be confused with the African ones ; a very different taxon)?
And lots and lots of impressively nasty invertebrates.
DNA, like any organic molecule, is prone to decomposition in warm and/ or wet conditions.
The Denisovan DNA was found in bones in a cave in a mountainous area of Siberia.
The "hobbits" bones were found in a low-altitude cave in the tropics.
While "hobbit" DNA would be absolutely fascinating to discover, the odds are not good.
Which doesn't stop people from looking, but they're also looking for other things at the same time.
In England, criminal cases need to be proven "beyond reasonable doubt" too. The American adversarial legal system is derived from the English system, and inherits many of it's flaws as well as it's strengths. For example,
No, that 1% don't want "free money" ; they want to take more free money from someone else.
(Emphasised points are all important.)
Then there is the most dangerous species on the continent : an extremely aggressive, inventive anthropoid ape. You need to watch those motherfuckers every second of the day.
That rather depends on what you're comparing it's subscription rate to. If you're comparing it to (say) American Scientist, which is in the same arena, but about 3-to-4 times as hard a read (which is why I reluctantly overcome my loathing for exporting money to America and indulge my brain cells there), then Scientific American has got a good subscription rate. If, on the other hand, you compare it to "Guns'n'Ammo Monthly", "Mass Murderer Weekly" or "Barely Legal Girls Getting Sodomised Hourly", then it's subscription rate rather sucks.
Wasn't it a PTBarnum-ism that "No-one, but no-one, ever lost money by underestimating the taste of the public."
(I think he was being specifically rude about the American public, but Brits are no better ; nor are Cloggies (but they have better porn, and put it on the bottom shelf because it's a health-and-safety hazard for the school children to climb up the shelving to get the porn and laugh at it). Noggins are pretty cool, until you ask them about getting tuna-friendly dolphin steaks for supper ; then they turn all "Guns'n'Ammo" on you.)
On the substantive issue, I'm pretty neutral about the ethics of the process. In a world where immense suffering is caused to immense numbers of farm animals purely to make excessively fat people fatter (the the detriment of their health!), then the existence or not of pretty small numbers of very carefully and very expensively created organisms is pretty unimportant.
Oh, and people still kill other people too, which is a fairly important ethical point too.
Why do it? Because it'll be hard. And, in the process of learning just how hard, we'd learn a lot about how organisms work and genetics works. Which would be moderately valuable. But I think there are more urgent things to do.
. . . Those 50,000 bends being a proxy for the bends that, for example, it would get from being bent by your knee as you cycle to work. Which neglects the fact that you'd probably design the device with bulky elements like batteries around the waist. Or in some other location where it is not (much) subject to bending. My big question for all these technologies is, how do you wash it? Posted from /. Mobile Alpha
... if only they opened before 11 in the morning, when I'm going to work.
There is an old joke (sort-of joke, anyway) that "the plural of anecdote is not data." Your seeming plurality of anecdotes still don't comprise data. A reasonably randomised collection of interview transcripts, the results of a collection of street interviews, etc would comprise usable data, but as it stands your anecdote doesn't really cut it. There is too high a likelihood that your 13 (I think) correspondents do not meaningfully represent the general population. For example, your influence as a Linux user (probable, given your presence here on Slashdot) might have biased all of them in a way that the general population don't get biased.
(This is a "ha ha, but serious" post.)
Why does the original author assume that everyone plays games?