The U.S. has joined Iran, North Korea etc. on my list of "Places that are too dangerous to visit right now."
The US has been on my list of "places to avoid visiting if at all possible" for about a decade now.
My list of "too dangerous" places has oscillated through various parts of Africa at various times (in response to local wars, revolutions, etc), included Columbia a lot of the time, parts of Peru and Bolivia at times. Chechnya. Afghanistan. Otherwise, everywhere is on the "I'd consider it, what's the day rate?" list.
I thought about it for a couple of days when I was asked if I wanted to work in Iraq - the price wasn't right. The requests I've received since haven't been tempting enough - too many other strings attached. North Korea I've already agreed to, if the fucking politicians would get just out of the way. Iran... yeah, I'd do Iran, no problem.
The request last year for people to work in Somalia seems to have fallen flat. They didn't respond to our request for more information, which makes us think they were just flying a kite. Or maybe they're revising their plans. We'll see. Maybe.
Jean le Commerce generally does have a choice. If it's an American supplier he's looking for then the first option is, of course, to find a non-American supplier. Second option is to have the American come to him Not normally a problem for a supplier looking for significant sales.
If it's a customer of Jean's... well Jean is always looking for other customers any way. The possibility still exists of getting the Americans to do the travelling. Or meet at a mutually convenient location (which Jean can get to without using a carrier who deals with America). Or finally, have a sacrificial minion (say, a convenient American) do the sales trip.
Boycott may be difficult, but beating your business colleagues up has sucha a successful history of encouraging further trade that I can't imagine why it's not been used more often.
We're working on educating Hanz Ze Holidaymaker.
everybody who has ever said this had no intention nor need to travel to the USA anyway.
My burning fury at the intrusiveness of this sort of American behaviour conflicts severely with my desire to continue working with my Canadian clients. You can imagine how much this makes me likely to want to travel to the new Land of Gilead again.
this is also why i don't recommend it to college kids as most of the teachers use MS office 2K3 or 2K7 and you hand them a complex doc made in LO and you can watch your grade get dinged when it comes out looking like shit.
I've heard this assertion multiple times ; you sound as if you've actually seen it happen, and be a problem. I've occasionally had problems going in one direction or the other, but I've never seen that happen without the file actually being corrupted totally (like it's lost the tail 30%, or there's a 4096 byte long segment of nulls somewhere in the middle), consonant with some sort of transmission or copying error.
But I don't think it's that common. I'm an intermittent student with the Open University (http://www.open.ac.uk), one of the largest and longest-established distance-learning universities in the world. Their standard computing support for students, since 1999 IIRC, has included a CD with Windows and Mac (and lately, links to Linux) versions of Star Office. I mean OpenOffice.org, I mean LibreOffice. More recently they just send you the links. Document submissions are required to be in Word format, and editable (so the examiners can annotate their comments) and are required to be sent as a single zip file with various naming regulations for different courses (which will protect, hopefully, against the transmission errors mentioned above), delivered through a web-interface to what is probably an (S)FTP(-approximately) back-end.
Now, at something like 260,000 students and 7,000 tutors (mostly volunteering part-time for the OU, while working full-time at many other institutions), you'd think that they would make appropriate warnings about this problem. I've never heard a thing about it - no mention in the paperwork ; no mention in discussion at the bar with approaching a hundred other students I've been on field courses with ; not a whisper ; no anecdotes ; nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
How many actual cases of this causing an un-recoverable problem have you seen?
And how many of those were un-recoverable because one side or the other of the transaction was just being an arsehole?
As an example of defence against such problems, I would routinely include in my zip-file, the document ; any diagrams as separate PNGs (line art) or JPEGs (photos), appropriately named ; any supporting documents (such as a programming project file) ; and finally, a PDF of the presentation, as it's meant to be. Put the whole lot into a zip, triple-check ; upload to the submission server ; receive receipt. (The back-end does some consistency checks on the zip.) I've never once had a hint of any problems from my tutors. Nor have I heard of anyone else having a problem.
Oh, there is one other possible reason : the advice to students is to keep the formatting of documents simple. Because they're not meant to be fancy pieces of high-faluting art-work ; they're dull tedious unimaginative reports on experiments, on research tasks, discussions of understanding of a subject... But fancy pretty-work is explicitly required to not be submitted. Maybe that's the problem - people using fanciness that's not necessary? Or even, horror, students not reading the instructions before doing their tasks?
I'm wondering if she has any plans on how she's going to defend her crops. Or if people like my survivalist friend would just move in and take her harvest at the appropriate time.
That's one of the more concise and coherent arguments in favour of monarchy that I've heard.
Oh, hang on - were you arguing FOR the establishment of a monarchy, or describing the origin OF monarchy in general?
Only as long as you've got a stock of caustic material (sodium or potassium hydroxide). Another consumable (and fairly rare) chemical.
Though... I wonder if you could do the same job with calcium hydroxide? That you can make with reasonably low tech (roast limestone to form quicklime ; add water to the quicklime to form slaked lime : calcium hydroxide).
- people who own vehicles that are not driven on public roads (e.g. farm vehicles on farms whose land is in one contiguous block)
- people who own vehicles on islands with less than a mile of public road and no scheduled vehicle ferry service
And I think there are a small number of other classes too.
I was commiserating in the pub with a local farmer who had saved himslef a couple of hundred quid a year by not insuring his old rust bucket of a Landie (Land Rover, Mark 1 IIRC) with the intention of just using it to get around on the hills of the farm. Perfectly legal. He had another "tidy" car for going to town, visiting,etc. Then one day he needed to post a letter and took the wrong vehicle down to the post box in the village, where the vehicle was spotted by passing traffic cops, who investigated . . . several hundred quid fine, a criminal conviction, points on his license, much embarrassment. "Won't be mekkin' that mistake agin, yooth!"
Oh, I see you're an American. Well, I'd be surprised if there weren't such let-out clauses for your laws too. Privately-owned islands ; large blocks of private land.
You think that an insurance company wouldn't try to get out of paying a claim if they could find out whether you were speeding?
And do you not think that if you're violating your contract with the insurance company by speeding , then possibly you don't actually deserve to get away with your lies.
I don't know, because I just noticed that you're an AC, which jurisdiction you're in, but in this country, every vehicle insurance policy I've ever read has had basic limits written into it along the lines (the legalese varies) of "driving in accordance with local laws and regulations". Which would mean, automatically, that once you're travelling over the local speed limit, your insurance is void.
So, then, if you have a crash when you know you're speeding, then you also know that you were driving outside the terms and conditions of your insurance. And therefore, by filing that claim to your insurance company, you are attempting to commit theft by defrauding. (If you didn't know that you were speeding, then you were almost certainly guilty of "driving without due care and attention", which a violation of local laws and regulations. So you're still culpable.)
And now you're objecting to the increased probability of you getting caught committing theft?
You'll be calling for the disbanding of police forces next. Criminal scum bag.
I don't think I've ever heard a professional photographer talking about art, at least with respect to their profession. Art has got almost nothing to do with (say) documenting the integrity of several hundred welds on a high pressure gas line (photographs of the ultrasound scan). Or evaluating the compositional trends along a hundred-foot of mineral exploration core so you can work out if it's worth mining. Or getting six houses photographed today to get their pictures up onto the house-sales website.
Did you by any chance mean to write that "When professional Art photographers come together, they talk about... Art?"
I have occasionally thought about possibly getting suitable racks on my bicycle (or even a bicycle trailer), so that it could carry several bags of groceries
A modest, reasonable quality rucksack would probably serve your needs, as well as being appropriate baggage for all but the stuffiest of business meetings or hotels. It depends, of course on what you mean by "several" and "bag". You'd have to apply a bit of nous to the packing (bread and eggs on the top ; tins at the bottom), but carrying up to around 12kg isn't that much of a strain. But if you needed more, then you'd really need to put racks and panniers on.
Having said that, my local bike shop is carrying clip-on wire mesh pannier baskets that should fit onto my bike perfectly fine (which had rear racks supplied, and I seriously considered adding front racks to the build order). Worth thinking about, if you've got the option.
With a rucksack, make sure that you keep the shoulder straps snug, so that it rides high but doesn't slop around. Consider using the waist belt too. Your centre of gravity is raised, slightly (do the maths), but having something unpredictably slopping around can be quite disconcerting.
Sorry if this offends a few alleged 'patriots', but the lesson to learn from this story is once more:
Do not host your software or potentially controversial content on US servers or servers run by US companies!
Why on earth would that upset approximately 96% of patriots?
Patriotic Albanian ? No problem.
Patriotic Algerian ? No problem.
Patriotic American ? Possible problem, though for the life of me, I can't see how pointing out that some part of the government is acting reprehensibly is necessarily going to be upsetting to a patriot. Unless that patriot also accepts the argument that their government's behaviour constitutes the country's only grounds for self-esteem. To quote a more realistic Zimbabwean colleague, "our government are murdering bastards, but I miss the beauty of the veldt".
Patriotic Belgian? Pas de probleme.
...
Patriotic Zimbabwean ? No problem.
Now, whether American patriots find it embarrassing that their government is acting to suppress free speech and privacy while theoretically supporting those freedoms... is a problem for them to worry about. To me, the concept of governments behaving hypocritically is reprehensible, but is so absolutely normal that it is the exceptions which surprise me.
Personally, I prefer to not spend any money in America - let them starve ! - but even if that were insufficient reason, then distrust of American spying would be another completely sufficient reason to not consider using any American service or business.
None of which invalidates your general message that content or services likely to be embarrassing or controversial to Government X (and/or their associates and paymasters) should not be hosted in Territory X or with companies susceptible to pressure from Government X.
While that may be true, my understanding is there's also some dye added.
I hear... the sound of regulatory paperwork rustling in the dark... and I think I'd like to avoid that paperwork. Some people might use dyes, but that would worry me.
AFAIK, that red stuff ain't blood;
Oxygenated (or carbon-monoxide-enated) myoglobin? The analogue of haemoglobin which provides oxygen storage and transport within muscle cells.
Putting a protective atmosphere of carbon monoxide into packaged meat to give it a pink colour? Sounds not in-credible, but the plant and process would be fairly (potentially) hazardous to the staff - that's a lot of poisonous gas around. I'd look more to batch treating the meat in a pressure vessel with the CO, then using CO2 or N2 as a filling material for the final packaging - which is a process likely to leak more gas into the worker's environment than the impregnation.
Doing a risk analysis of your idea... I don't think the meat company's lawyers would like the level of hazard it exposes the workers to (and the consequent risk of directors doing jail time for reckless endangerment).
Doesn't Saturn have an outer moon in a retrograde orbit?
I think that you may be right on that. But the outer Solar System is a much emptier place than the inner solar system.
I think the Saturnian example is thought to be a captured asteroid. Shrivelled up comet? Something.
Neptune has a retrograde satellite too - ISTR? [checks] Yeah, Triton and three others are retrograde (and the Saturnian retrograde one is "Phoebe"). A lot of Neptune's satellites are "irregular" - high eccentricity, high inclination to the plane of the planet - 5 out of 13. For Uranus, it's 9 out of 27. Saturn 38 out of 64. Jupiter, it's 58 out of 66. And inside the Asteroid Belt, it's 0 out of three.
I think that collection of figures suggests that the presence of retrograde satellites is more related to the (inward) proximity of the Asteroid belt.
Would explain the crazy slow rotation of Venus compared to Earth and Mars, and why it was resurfaced relatively recently.
Hmmm, making a guess that in your model Venus had a rotation rate comparable to Earth and Mars (Mercury has a complicating tidal interaction with the Sun)... then you can work out the angular momentum and kinetic energy that had to be lost to achieve the present situation. That should be enough information to solve for the nature (mass, velocity) of the impacting body. 14+ mechanics problem. OK, maybe 16+ : it's a long time since I did my physics.
From the cratering record on Venus - a bit wobbly because of the cushioning effect of the dense atmosphere - the estimated epoch of Venus' most recent re-surfacing is 200-500 million years. For your scenario, there might be secondary debris impacts on Earth (complicated by the recycling effect of plate tectonics), but there are (practically) certain to be impacts on Mercury. Is there any evidence of this?
I'm not being nasty asking these questions - I can see how to go about assessing the likelihood of your scenario. You're making proposals like a scientist ; following through the consequences of your idea and trying to invalidate it is the next step (exactly as Prof Minton said up-thread). Feynman had an appropriate Feynmanism for the situation (but he would, wouldn't he?).
There was a program I saw on television years ago though which showed that if you bake the water out of crustal rocks here on earth, they become much stronger.
"stiffer", (I don't think the ultimate compressive strength changes so much) and with a reduced density change against temperature, I think. Both of which would act to make convective overturn harder.
it's possible its crust became so rigid that volcanic activity couldn't break thru until it shattered violently,
Welllll.... more likely without convective overturn, the core heat would slowly build up in the upper mantle/ lower crust until the temperature gradient did get high enough for convective overturn to start. Since this would happen with more-or-less radial symmetry, then it would lead to...
unleashing a planetary-resurfacing flood of volcanic activity over a very short period of time.
That's the way I read it though. But this is just a hobby ; I may well be wrong.
One other thought I've had - what if Venus had a good-sized moon in a retrograde orbit?
Hmm, how would you get a moon in a retrograde orbit without some pretty vigorous interactions already?
If I recall my maths from pre-university properly, there is a property of shearing systems called "curl" which allows you to predict the rotation direction of vortices, their shedding frequency, the probability of uniformly sheared flows (e.g. the protoplanetary disc) developing turbulent instability... powerful tool. And as flow speeds get faster (orbits are smaller, closer to the proto-Sun), the "curl" gets higher, which tends to make things more uniform. So, a priori I'd expect you to be more likely to spontaneously develop retrograde satellites etc further out in the protoplanetary disc.
Ah, good ; buried in "the pile" is "Nature-0459-0817 collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars and Venus with the Earth", the Laskar & Gastineau paper cited previously. See if I can read it adequately on the Kindle on the bus to work !
Just love those employers that purchase a site license for places like Nature, intending it to be used by a couple of dozen geoscientists and/ or engineers world wide, but leave the gates open to anyone on their network !
They aren't really big enough to toss each other out completely.
Hmm, am I mis-remembering the "moving Mercury" paper then? I thought that it had around a 20% probability of an interaction in the next few billion years, with one of the three (Mercury, Venus, Earth) getting ejected. I'll have to go back and re-read the paper.
So after an instability they either want to collide with each other or the Sun. The problem with an excitation that leads to a solar collision, is that you leave the remaining system in a state of instability. A collision between two proto-Venii solves this by decoupling Earth from the dynamics of the precursors. I can easily end up with solar systems that dynamically resemble our own, and I'm not sure that a solar collision would do that.
OK, I can see that at a qualitative level. You're the expert. (Compared to most other people who'll be posting in this thread.)
But I'm still looking into it.
Horror! Wouldn't you be better looking for clues in crop circles?
I'm also fascinated by the apparent young, yet uniform, age of the surface of Venus.
Who, who is aware of the issue, isn't?
I think Douglas Adams failed to report on one of Magratheia's advertising slogans (the planet-building agency) : "Diversity'Ð'Us"
(That's probably going to get borked by Slashcode's inability to handle non-Latin characters ; it's a Cyrillic "Capital Ya". Thought so ; borked ; thanks Slashcode.)
'Fourteen passengers and two crew were hurt, and seven needed hospital treatment. None were wearing seat belts, even though the seat-belt sign was on.'
The injuries were self-inflicted. That "put your seat belt on, NOW" warning sign which is visible from every passenger seat, is installed, wired up and tested to communicate the message that you should, doh!, put your seat belt on, NOW. Not in ten minutes ; not when you feel it convenient ; not if your horoscope says beware of seagull shit. It means, approximately, "put your seat belt on, NOW."
Most of the time when I fly (I've had my flight to work bumped three times this week already), then not wearing the seatbelt is an unemployment offence (the flight would have to be turned round and landed as soon as possible). As is listening to an MP3 player (you might miss announcements from the pilots), reading an e-book, having a phone in your pocket (as opposed to hold-baggage).
Until you grow wings and feathers, flying is fucking dangerous, and should be treated with due respect.
Excellent and thoughtful post, Prof. Minton. I was wondering from TFS if you'd taken into account the "wandering Mercury" paper of a few years ago, but it seems that you have. It's an interesting idea, but I'm wondering why you started with Venus as a double planet then having a late collision instead of (for example) looking at the effects of losing a 5th "terrestrial" planet from the inner solar system, producing an outwards movement of Earth on the time scale you want?
But I would guess that you're already exploring "parameter space" around the original idea. Do I smell a singeing Beowulf cluster in the basement?
Not to use the God of the gaps crutch, but could Science consider the idea that an outside actor (God, aliens, etc...) terraformed the Earth? I'm no expert, but that seems like it could be a logical answer.
It could be an answer, but since it discards one of the fundamental tools of logic - Occam's Razor, paraphrased as "avoid the unnecessary multiplication of entities" (incidentally, Occam was a theologian, did you know? He developed his razor to cut through the verbiage of many of his contemporary theologians. The cad ! ) - then it would be a tortuous struggle to describe it as a "logical" answer.
That is, of course, regardless of your personal desire for for a god-of-the-gaps-shaped crutch to protect you from fear of your imminent death.
... which rarely happens these days, since cars with catalytic converters (mandatory here for nearly two generations of cars - meet the tin worm!) produce such low levels of CO (carbon monoxide, not dioxide) in the exhaust that people who try to poison themselves with the hose pipe in the exhaust often wake up with a hell of a hang over, and sometimes brain damage.
OK, you can probably find a uncatalysed car, and possibly you'd get sufficient CO out of a diesel engine (never used one), but that's a bit less spontaneous.
I see the Wikipedia page mentions using an indoor barbecue as a possibility. Having kissed the razor's edge in the past with a unventilated gas heater in a cold winter, I could well see that working. That heater nearly got three of us - and it was the first time that I got the boring flatmate (bank clerk, for fuck's sake!) to actually got to the pub while the flat ventilated.
wouldnt u realize that before makeing big city duh
Firstly, the siting of the camp for the prisoners that originally worked the mine was a political decision, not a reasoned, geologically-informed decision.
Secondly, it seems (TFA isn't terribly detailed) that there wasn't a problem until about 2000, when they encountered a fresh water flow which they couldn't control adequately, and which started to corrode the "pillars" which had been left in place to support the roof. Only once they'd dissolved did the sink holes start to develop. So, the sequence is (1) site camp ; (2) camp develops into (a fairly small) city ; (3) problem underground ; (4) sink holes work their way from underground to surface in the middle of the city.
The sink holes didn't exist (or didn't have any surface expression) before the camp (city) was positioned.
As a caver and a geologist, I spend some of my leisure time searching for sink holes in sink-prone areas. Since the ground is largely covered by glacial debris, spotting a sink hole which isn't actively in use by a stream can be really difficult.
There's a team at the University of Zaragosa who are trying to develop ground-penetrating radar techniques for (1) detecting pre-existing sink holes in the ground ; and (2) monitoring for changes before the problems reach the surface. But even they don't find it easy. Certainly the GPR work that I was involved in wasn't terribly successful at finding known sink holes.
So... the city in question is on the margins of the Urals (hence likely to have glacial outwash debris blanketing the landscape) ; it's sited on the banks of a river (so, one would expect that 750 to 1000m below the ground, the rock is likely to be saturated with water). So mine flooding is likely to be a difficult issue (if they were on the top of a hill, drainage can be much easier - dig an adit drain).
It looks to me as if the simplest solution would be to move the city. But that largely depends on if it's a company town or if property has been sold to people.
And the Aztec Gods are still mad about what happened to their people.
And with typical religious logic, the Aztec gods are expressing their wrath by hurting the descendents of the people who the Aztec gods didn't support sufficiently in the first place
Just because an employer doesn't represent an employee's best interest does not automatically mean an existing union does.
Which is why The Bitch Queen, Thatcher spent years trying to make it impossible to set up a new trade union, and we (www.oilc.org) responded by setting up a new trade union. We've outlasted the bitch's mind, are still going strong, and look forward to pissing on her grave.
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The US has been on my list of "places to avoid visiting if at all possible" for about a decade now.
My list of "too dangerous" places has oscillated through various parts of Africa at various times (in response to local wars, revolutions, etc), included Columbia a lot of the time, parts of Peru and Bolivia at times. Chechnya. Afghanistan. Otherwise, everywhere is on the "I'd consider it, what's the day rate?" list.
I thought about it for a couple of days when I was asked if I wanted to work in Iraq - the price wasn't right. The requests I've received since haven't been tempting enough - too many other strings attached. North Korea I've already agreed to, if the fucking politicians would get just out of the way. Iran ... yeah, I'd do Iran, no problem.
The request last year for people to work in Somalia seems to have fallen flat. They didn't respond to our request for more information, which makes us think they were just flying a kite. Or maybe they're revising their plans. We'll see. Maybe.
If it's a customer of Jean's ... well Jean is always looking for other customers any way. The possibility still exists of getting the Americans to do the travelling. Or meet at a mutually convenient location (which Jean can get to without using a carrier who deals with America). Or finally, have a sacrificial minion (say, a convenient American) do the sales trip.
Boycott may be difficult, but beating your business colleagues up has sucha a successful history of encouraging further trade that I can't imagine why it's not been used more often.
We're working on educating Hanz Ze Holidaymaker.
My burning fury at the intrusiveness of this sort of American behaviour conflicts severely with my desire to continue working with my Canadian clients. You can imagine how much this makes me likely to want to travel to the new Land of Gilead again.
I've heard this assertion multiple times ; you sound as if you've actually seen it happen, and be a problem. I've occasionally had problems going in one direction or the other, but I've never seen that happen without the file actually being corrupted totally (like it's lost the tail 30%, or there's a 4096 byte long segment of nulls somewhere in the middle), consonant with some sort of transmission or copying error.
But I don't think it's that common. I'm an intermittent student with the Open University (http://www.open.ac.uk), one of the largest and longest-established distance-learning universities in the world. Their standard computing support for students, since 1999 IIRC, has included a CD with Windows and Mac (and lately, links to Linux) versions of Star Office. I mean OpenOffice.org, I mean LibreOffice. More recently they just send you the links. Document submissions are required to be in Word format, and editable (so the examiners can annotate their comments) and are required to be sent as a single zip file with various naming regulations for different courses (which will protect, hopefully, against the transmission errors mentioned above), delivered through a web-interface to what is probably an (S)FTP(-approximately) back-end.
Now, at something like 260,000 students and 7,000 tutors (mostly volunteering part-time for the OU, while working full-time at many other institutions), you'd think that they would make appropriate warnings about this problem. I've never heard a thing about it - no mention in the paperwork ; no mention in discussion at the bar with approaching a hundred other students I've been on field courses with ; not a whisper ; no anecdotes ; nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
How many actual cases of this causing an un-recoverable problem have you seen?
And how many of those were un-recoverable because one side or the other of the transaction was just being an arsehole?
As an example of defence against such problems, I would routinely include in my zip-file, the document ; any diagrams as separate PNGs (line art) or JPEGs (photos), appropriately named ; any supporting documents (such as a programming project file) ; and finally, a PDF of the presentation, as it's meant to be. Put the whole lot into a zip, triple-check ; upload to the submission server ; receive receipt. (The back-end does some consistency checks on the zip.) I've never once had a hint of any problems from my tutors. Nor have I heard of anyone else having a problem.
Oh, there is one other possible reason : the advice to students is to keep the formatting of documents simple. Because they're not meant to be fancy pieces of high-faluting art-work ; they're dull tedious unimaginative reports on experiments, on research tasks, discussions of understanding of a subject ... But fancy pretty-work is explicitly required to not be submitted. Maybe that's the problem - people using fanciness that's not necessary? Or even, horror, students not reading the instructions before doing their tasks?
That's one of the more concise and coherent arguments in favour of monarchy that I've heard.
Oh, hang on - were you arguing FOR the establishment of a monarchy, or describing the origin OF monarchy in general?
Only as long as you've got a stock of caustic material (sodium or potassium hydroxide). Another consumable (and fairly rare) chemical.
Though ... I wonder if you could do the same job with calcium hydroxide? That you can make with reasonably low tech (roast limestone to form quicklime ; add water to the quicklime to form slaked lime : calcium hydroxide).
And I think there are a small number of other classes too.
I was commiserating in the pub with a local farmer who had saved himslef a couple of hundred quid a year by not insuring his old rust bucket of a Landie (Land Rover, Mark 1 IIRC) with the intention of just using it to get around on the hills of the farm. Perfectly legal. He had another "tidy" car for going to town, visiting,etc. Then one day he needed to post a letter and took the wrong vehicle down to the post box in the village, where the vehicle was spotted by passing traffic cops, who investigated . . . several hundred quid fine, a criminal conviction, points on his license, much embarrassment. "Won't be mekkin' that mistake agin, yooth!"
Oh, I see you're an American. Well, I'd be surprised if there weren't such let-out clauses for your laws too. Privately-owned islands ; large blocks of private land.
And do you not think that if you're violating your contract with the insurance company by speeding , then possibly you don't actually deserve to get away with your lies.
I don't know, because I just noticed that you're an AC, which jurisdiction you're in, but in this country, every vehicle insurance policy I've ever read has had basic limits written into it along the lines (the legalese varies) of "driving in accordance with local laws and regulations". Which would mean, automatically, that once you're travelling over the local speed limit, your insurance is void.
So, then, if you have a crash when you know you're speeding, then you also know that you were driving outside the terms and conditions of your insurance. And therefore, by filing that claim to your insurance company, you are attempting to commit theft by defrauding. (If you didn't know that you were speeding, then you were almost certainly guilty of "driving without due care and attention", which a violation of local laws and regulations. So you're still culpable.)
And now you're objecting to the increased probability of you getting caught committing theft?
You'll be calling for the disbanding of police forces next. Criminal scum bag.
... going to stop it being a deviant behaviour and convert it to being the norm.
Did you actually read what you wrote?
Oh, no, of course you didn't - you're an AC.
Did you by any chance mean to write that "When professional Art photographers come together, they talk about ... Art?"
A modest, reasonable quality rucksack would probably serve your needs, as well as being appropriate baggage for all but the stuffiest of business meetings or hotels. It depends, of course on what you mean by "several" and "bag". You'd have to apply a bit of nous to the packing (bread and eggs on the top ; tins at the bottom), but carrying up to around 12kg isn't that much of a strain. But if you needed more, then you'd really need to put racks and panniers on.
Having said that, my local bike shop is carrying clip-on wire mesh pannier baskets that should fit onto my bike perfectly fine (which had rear racks supplied, and I seriously considered adding front racks to the build order). Worth thinking about, if you've got the option.
With a rucksack, make sure that you keep the shoulder straps snug, so that it rides high but doesn't slop around. Consider using the waist belt too. Your centre of gravity is raised, slightly (do the maths), but having something unpredictably slopping around can be quite disconcerting.
Why on earth would that upset approximately 96% of patriots?
Patriotic Albanian ? No problem.
Patriotic Algerian ? No problem.
Patriotic American ? Possible problem, though for the life of me, I can't see how pointing out that some part of the government is acting reprehensibly is necessarily going to be upsetting to a patriot. Unless that patriot also accepts the argument that their government's behaviour constitutes the country's only grounds for self-esteem. To quote a more realistic Zimbabwean colleague, "our government are murdering bastards, but I miss the beauty of the veldt".
Patriotic Belgian? Pas de probleme.
...
Patriotic Zimbabwean ? No problem.
Now, whether American patriots find it embarrassing that their government is acting to suppress free speech and privacy while theoretically supporting those freedoms ... is a problem for them to worry about. To me, the concept of governments behaving hypocritically is reprehensible, but is so absolutely normal that it is the exceptions which surprise me.
Personally, I prefer to not spend any money in America - let them starve ! - but even if that were insufficient reason, then distrust of American spying would be another completely sufficient reason to not consider using any American service or business.
None of which invalidates your general message that content or services likely to be embarrassing or controversial to Government X (and/or their associates and paymasters) should not be hosted in Territory X or with companies susceptible to pressure from Government X.
Oh, I suppose I'd better RTF-preprint now. Just for a change.
I hear ... the sound of regulatory paperwork rustling in the dark ... and I think I'd like to avoid that paperwork. Some people might use dyes, but that would worry me.
Oxygenated (or carbon-monoxide-enated) myoglobin? The analogue of haemoglobin which provides oxygen storage and transport within muscle cells.
Putting a protective atmosphere of carbon monoxide into packaged meat to give it a pink colour? Sounds not in-credible, but the plant and process would be fairly (potentially) hazardous to the staff - that's a lot of poisonous gas around. I'd look more to batch treating the meat in a pressure vessel with the CO, then using CO2 or N2 as a filling material for the final packaging - which is a process likely to leak more gas into the worker's environment than the impregnation.
Doing a risk analysis of your idea ... I don't think the meat company's lawyers would like the level of hazard it exposes the workers to (and the consequent risk of directors doing jail time for reckless endangerment).
That's about 500 years and he's still not wrong. That's a pretty good record.
I think that you may be right on that. But the outer Solar System is a much emptier place than the inner solar system.
I think the Saturnian example is thought to be a captured asteroid. Shrivelled up comet? Something.
Neptune has a retrograde satellite too - ISTR? [checks] Yeah, Triton and three others are retrograde (and the Saturnian retrograde one is "Phoebe"). A lot of Neptune's satellites are "irregular" - high eccentricity, high inclination to the plane of the planet - 5 out of 13. For Uranus, it's 9 out of 27. Saturn 38 out of 64. Jupiter, it's 58 out of 66. And inside the Asteroid Belt, it's 0 out of three.
I think that collection of figures suggests that the presence of retrograde satellites is more related to the (inward) proximity of the Asteroid belt.
Hmmm, making a guess that in your model Venus had a rotation rate comparable to Earth and Mars (Mercury has a complicating tidal interaction with the Sun) ... then you can work out the angular momentum and kinetic energy that had to be lost to achieve the present situation. That should be enough information to solve for the nature (mass, velocity) of the impacting body. 14+ mechanics problem. OK, maybe 16+ : it's a long time since I did my physics.
From the cratering record on Venus - a bit wobbly because of the cushioning effect of the dense atmosphere - the estimated epoch of Venus' most recent re-surfacing is 200-500 million years. For your scenario, there might be secondary debris impacts on Earth (complicated by the recycling effect of plate tectonics), but there are (practically) certain to be impacts on Mercury. Is there any evidence of this?
I'm not being nasty asking these questions - I can see how to go about assessing the likelihood of your scenario. You're making proposals like a scientist ; following through the consequences of your idea and trying to invalidate it is the next step (exactly as Prof Minton said up-thread). Feynman had an appropriate Feynmanism for the situation (but he would, wouldn't he?).
"stiffer", (I don't think the ultimate compressive strength changes so much) and with a reduced density change against temperature, I think. Both of which would act to make convective overturn harder.
Welllll .... more likely without convective overturn, the core heat would slowly build up in the upper mantle/ lower crust until the temperature gradient did get high enough for convective overturn to start. Since this would happen with more-or-less radial symmetry, then it would lead to ...
That's the way I read it though. But this is just a hobby ; I may well be wrong.
Hmm, how would you get a moon in a retrograde orbit without some pretty vigorous interactions already?
If I recall my maths from pre-university properly, there is a property of shearing systems called "curl" which allows you to predict the rotation direction of vortices, their shedding frequency, the probability of uniformly sheared flows (e.g. the protoplanetary disc) developing turbulent instability ... powerful tool. And as flow speeds get faster (orbits are smaller, closer to the proto-Sun), the "curl" gets higher, which tends to make things more uniform. So, a priori I'd expect you to be more likely to spontaneously develop retrograde satellites etc further out in the protoplanetary disc.
Ah, good ; buried in "the pile" is "Nature-0459-0817 collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars and Venus with the Earth", the Laskar & Gastineau paper cited previously. See if I can read it adequately on the Kindle on the bus to work !
Just love those employers that purchase a site license for places like Nature, intending it to be used by a couple of dozen geoscientists and/ or engineers world wide, but leave the gates open to anyone on their network !
Hmm, am I mis-remembering the "moving Mercury" paper then? I thought that it had around a 20% probability of an interaction in the next few billion years, with one of the three (Mercury, Venus, Earth) getting ejected. I'll have to go back and re-read the paper.
OK, I can see that at a qualitative level. You're the expert. (Compared to most other people who'll be posting in this thread.)
Horror! Wouldn't you be better looking for clues in crop circles?
Who, who is aware of the issue, isn't?
I think Douglas Adams failed to report on one of Magratheia's advertising slogans (the planet-building agency) : "Diversity'Ð'Us"
(That's probably going to get borked by Slashcode's inability to handle non-Latin characters ; it's a Cyrillic "Capital Ya". Thought so ; borked ; thanks Slashcode.)
The injuries were self-inflicted. That "put your seat belt on, NOW" warning sign which is visible from every passenger seat, is installed, wired up and tested to communicate the message that you should, doh!, put your seat belt on, NOW. Not in ten minutes ; not when you feel it convenient ; not if your horoscope says beware of seagull shit. It means, approximately, "put your seat belt on, NOW."
Most of the time when I fly (I've had my flight to work bumped three times this week already), then not wearing the seatbelt is an unemployment offence (the flight would have to be turned round and landed as soon as possible). As is listening to an MP3 player (you might miss announcements from the pilots), reading an e-book, having a phone in your pocket (as opposed to hold-baggage).
Until you grow wings and feathers, flying is fucking dangerous, and should be treated with due respect.
But I would guess that you're already exploring "parameter space" around the original idea. Do I smell a singeing Beowulf cluster in the basement?
It could be an answer, but since it discards one of the fundamental tools of logic - Occam's Razor, paraphrased as "avoid the unnecessary multiplication of entities" (incidentally, Occam was a theologian, did you know? He developed his razor to cut through the verbiage of many of his contemporary theologians. The cad ! ) - then it would be a tortuous struggle to describe it as a "logical" answer.
That is, of course, regardless of your personal desire for for a god-of-the-gaps-shaped crutch to protect you from fear of your imminent death.
OK, you can probably find a uncatalysed car, and possibly you'd get sufficient CO out of a diesel engine (never used one), but that's a bit less spontaneous.
I see the Wikipedia page mentions using an indoor barbecue as a possibility. Having kissed the razor's edge in the past with a unventilated gas heater in a cold winter, I could well see that working. That heater nearly got three of us - and it was the first time that I got the boring flatmate (bank clerk, for fuck's sake!) to actually got to the pub while the flat ventilated.
Oh, where is it made?
USA?
I'm sure I can get one from a safe(-er) location.
No sale.
Firstly, the siting of the camp for the prisoners that originally worked the mine was a political decision, not a reasoned, geologically-informed decision.
Secondly, it seems (TFA isn't terribly detailed) that there wasn't a problem until about 2000, when they encountered a fresh water flow which they couldn't control adequately, and which started to corrode the "pillars" which had been left in place to support the roof. Only once they'd dissolved did the sink holes start to develop. So, the sequence is (1) site camp ; (2) camp develops into (a fairly small) city ; (3) problem underground ; (4) sink holes work their way from underground to surface in the middle of the city.
The sink holes didn't exist (or didn't have any surface expression) before the camp (city) was positioned.
As a caver and a geologist, I spend some of my leisure time searching for sink holes in sink-prone areas. Since the ground is largely covered by glacial debris, spotting a sink hole which isn't actively in use by a stream can be really difficult.
There's a team at the University of Zaragosa who are trying to develop ground-penetrating radar techniques for (1) detecting pre-existing sink holes in the ground ; and (2) monitoring for changes before the problems reach the surface. But even they don't find it easy. Certainly the GPR work that I was involved in wasn't terribly successful at finding known sink holes.
Did you want a simple answer? There isn't one.
View Larger Map Will a Google map link work?
Or this link?
So ... the city in question is on the margins of the Urals (hence likely to have glacial outwash debris blanketing the landscape) ; it's sited on the banks of a river (so, one would expect that 750 to 1000m below the ground, the rock is likely to be saturated with water). So mine flooding is likely to be a difficult issue (if they were on the top of a hill, drainage can be much easier - dig an adit drain).
It looks to me as if the simplest solution would be to move the city. But that largely depends on if it's a company town or if property has been sold to people.
And with typical religious logic, the Aztec gods are expressing their wrath by hurting the descendents of the people who the Aztec gods didn't support sufficiently in the first place
Which is why The Bitch Queen, Thatcher spent years trying to make it impossible to set up a new trade union, and we (www.oilc.org) responded by setting up a new trade union. We've outlasted the bitch's mind, are still going strong, and look forward to pissing on her grave.