But what if your fine bungalow happens to be below a dam,
Then it's your own stupid fault for buying a property beneath a dam. (Or to be more precise, in the predictable flood pattern of the dam.)
There is a legal Latin phrase "caveat emptor" which translates as "if you don't do your homework before you buy X, then it's your own stupid fault for getting whatever you've got."
(Actually, these days for buying a property in the UK, there has got to be a "home information pack" including a survey by a properly accredited surveyor, who should catch these things. So you probably do have a leg to stand on with your legalistic snivelling. But really, you should do your own fucking homework.)
I grew up in a town where development spread out onto the flood plain of the river, where the river has regularly (half of the winters) flooded the plain beside the river. And people brought this property. And the river flooded. And they whinged and moaned, and got no fucking sympathy from anyone who could see that the town hadn't been built there for over a thousand years, for some good reason. [DOH!]
So I gather, but since posting the submission I've had an extremely flaky connection for several days, so didn't know that I'd raised a moderate-scale shitstorm of comment.
I'll have to visit Jerry's site to see if the Slashdot effect had been a productive part of the pressure. And, of course, to actually see the video and have a good laugh. But that'll be tomorrow. Work to do!
Strathclyde, contaminated from Dounreay ? In deference to Private Eye's recent anniversary, Shome mishtake, shurely?
I'm not disputing that Dounreay has produced contamination ; I'm not disputing that there is contamination in Strathclyde, and probably also in the Firth of Clyde, but on vanilla geographic grounds, I'd suspect the sources of contamination are much more likely to be the East Kilbride reactor centre and the Faslane Septic bomb target respectively.
(Memo to self : I must get that Geiger counter working for Tom!)
Someone mentioned getting readings of "14 times background" at Seascale, which raises a "So?" from me, living in Aberdeen with at least 10 times "background" (depending of course, on where you're measuring your background!) glowing on street corners. To say nothing of the natural beaches with up to 20 times "background" that I've encountered as reservoirs at work previously.
If I chose a different place to measure my "background", I could probably vary the value of "background" by around a factor of a hundred without leaving the UK and without resorting to artificial concentrations of natural radioactive materials.
Furnaces have exploded ; nuclear bombs have been dropped ; tsunamis have wiped out cities ; alien invasion... if you're meaning extraterrestrials then we've no good evidence of it having happened, but for simply "foreign" aliens, that happens all the time.
For all of these events (with the debatable exception of the alien invasion), sufficient experience exists to estimate the probability of it happening again in the future.
On the basis of oilfield experience, the fact that Alaska has not yet had a major oil disaster (in drilling or production ; you've ceded the transportation example already, though quite why you consider that appreciably different isn't clear to me) is in significant part luck. At some point, there is likely to be a major disaster of this type. The more exploration and production that happens, the higher the probability of it happening in any particular time period in the future. Follows a Poisson distribution, IIRC my statistics courses.
I haven't touched Slack since my failed experimentation with it in '02 - it didn't recognize any of my hardware, X wouldn't use any sane resolutions without massive text file configuration and hours of research
s/02/1994/
But isn't that part of the fun? I had to get a copy of the Pink Shirt Book off the shelf to understand what the fuck it was talking about in partitioning. Which is knowledge that I've used time and time again. Ditto resolutions.
When I get around to being excited about an OS again, it will probably be because I have moved to something with a more stable interface, that actually works, with only minor tweaking necessary (instead of the hellish battle with my own computer that any Ubuntu install/upgrade has become).
Sadly, I have to agree you on the hellish battle front. And I'm afraid that next time the battle comes around, it's going to be a new distro. I'd better order a new hard drive for experimenting on.
Their presence is felt in almost every community in America,
... because every community in America above a (pretty small) minimum size has people contributing money and influence directly or indirectly to the drug cartel.
There's nothing wrong with assigning blame. Just make sure that you know where to assign it.
Any sort of EM radiation can be beamed; the term is not exclusive to visible light.
Not just EM radiation. Sound can be beamed ; particle radiation can be beamed (alpha, beta ; gamma is light). Anything that has a direction to it can be beamed.
Drilling in Alaska - two of your three examples - has never had a large environmental disaster.
You've missed one small, but rather important word : "yet".
Note - I'm speaking as a geologist in the oil business, currently on an exploration well off the east coast of Africa. You could claim that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but the companies who pay my invoices would probably disagree with you.
You'll get done for "going equipped," or something similar.
Having mud splotched over your license plate you can get away with. Having installed something that has no purpose other than to allow you to commit a crime will just be evidence to the court of a "mens rea", a "guilty mind", that you knew that you intended to do something wrong.
So, you'd need to come up with some plausible reason for the device you install. At which point, IR doesn't do much, because people can't see it. (Other people point out that the camera are likely protected against it too. Which doesn't matter in this context.)
If I were to look at the problem... I'd look at a couple of things. Firstly, does your country use paint-on-metal plates with a sheet of plastic glued over the paint to protect it? (That's what ours uses, generally, so it's the context I'm thinking of.) I'd experiment with an old plate from the scrapper - if you flex the plate to less than the point at which the plastic snaps cleanly, does it develop lots of little en echelon fractures perpendicular to the surface of the plastic. (I've seen this happen with some hard, brittle plastics, but I've not tried it with UK license plates. Experiment!) If you can develop those fractures, try shining a bright white lamp at them from the side - does it reflect the light back at the observer? Now, try arranging white LEDs along the side of your license plate, so they light up the plate nice and clearly - you may need to flex the plate to make it fit along with your LEDs, which will accidentally force the plate into a curve... and from many angles there will be a plate-obscuring reflection from the LEDs. Oh dear! What a pity! Never mind! How sad. Sorry Officer, I never noticed that it did that!
Of course, you could try the alternative of paying attention to the road while you're driving. I've not had a single speeding ticket in the 22 (I think) years since I got my license (though I've only owned cars during around 10 of those years), and it's not because I don't speed. It's not through subscribing to some SatNav-based database of speed camera locations either (fuck you, Road Angel). It's by paying attention to the road and to my speed. Heretical, I know.
Plan "B" : apply force to the plate at convenient location(s) to fracture the plastic coating ; then apply chemicals to make the paint and metal underneath rust. Make it look accidental. Make sure that the plate can/ will be mis-read by a camera with the corrosion. Or do the same by gluing on "mud". Make the front and rear plates read differently, though this itself may make some ANPR systems flag you for attention.
Try the same logic with the 'Mona Lisa' and an accurate-to-the-nanometre copy of the 'Mona Lisa'. The law would recognise that the uniqueness of the original thing is important.
I'm sure that there is abundant case law about (say) someone whose wedding ring gets lost when being repaired by the jewellers being compensated in addition to having a similar ring given to them "because it not *the* ring that X gave to me".
You're missing my point. People have been making electrically powered neutron generators for a while now. That's not radioactive neutron sources that have electrically-controlled windows in the shielding, but neutron generators which start to generate neutrons when you switch them on, and stop generating them when you switch off. Then you can tear the machine apart at your leisure, without needing radiation safety techniques.
They're not a matter of intellectual curiosity, but of industrial production and use. At work it's significantly handy, because it halves the number of sources that need to go into "the hole" (the "we might have to expend a lot of time, money and effort to get this back, if we run into problems" zone of operations). But on the other hand, because the intensity of the source flux is lower, you may have to expose the other (gamma) source to the hole's hazards for longer. The calculus of risk is not quite as simple as it sounds.
That's not an "intellectual curiosity".
(Actually, there's around a half-hour half-life when you switch the machines off. On my geologist's time scale, that's negligible. But it is a factor in the calculus of risk.)
Oh, I see that Wikipedia has an article. Another sign of being common (?) industrial tools rather than intellectual curiosities. I infer from the list of references that Harryburton have got such a tool, in addition to the ones I've met previously from Scumburger and BHI. "BFD."
Here in BC the local natural gas company (Fortis) keeps advertising how they capture a lot of methane and mix it with natural gas to be burned for heat.
Hmmm, I'm just looking at the output form the gas analysis system on the gas well that I'm drilling here and now : that natural gas is a bit over 90% methane. Which is normal.
I'm assuming that they're talking about methane (plus moderate amounts of ethane, propane etc, "condensate") that bubbles out of their crude oil and makes it a bitch to pump. (The gas can bubble out and cause cavitation damage to pump surfaces.) So I'd guess that they're producing some natural gas well, and some oil wells, and are separating off the methane from the oil wells by depressurising the oil, then compressing the methane and the natural gas into a gas storage tank.
They'll also perhaps get a small amount of propane and butane liquid from their natural gas compression, and they'll separate that from the gas and re-inject it into the oil pipeline.
Single-phase pipelines are cheaper to make and run than multi-phase pipelines. So they might as well burn the least valuable part of their output to provide energy on site (and export as electrical power?) while pumping (or tankering) their more-valuable product to some refinery somewhere. Being "green" is a nice PR side-effect.
On a side note, I think there is also a fifth unnamed object, but that doesn't matter. The difference between Charon and a moon is that Charon is not much smaller than Pluto, in fact it doesn't orbit Pluto. Rather, the two bodies orbit their common centre of mass outside of Pluto.
That the barycentre of the system lays outside either body is a fair point, but begs the next question : when you have 2 stars (say Alpha Centauri and it's secondary) which orbit their system's barycentre outside either star, do they cease to be stars? If they don't, what is your reason for considering the location of the barycentre to be of fundamental importance? If it's not of fundamental importance to a star, is it of fundamental importance to a brown dwarf? To a gas giant? By introducing that criterion, you've introduced the need for another arbitrary line in the sand.
A fifth body in the Pluto-Charon-Nix-Hydra system? Rings a bell ; doesn't change anything much. (Doesn't seem to have been formally published?... Found it!)
I forgot about Mercury. But Pluto's orbit is such that there are times when it gets closer to the Sun then Neptune, which would make it hard to class it as the "ninth" planet.
When was Pluto the ninth planet? Oh yes, before the discovery of 2060 Chiron in 1977. So, in 1976 it was the ninth planet, in 1977 it was the tenth planet, then in February 1979 it became the ninth planet again until 1999 when it again became the tenth planet. It's difficult defining a planet when the definition includes other things that may or may not be planets.
That "clears it's orbit" criterion is really logically dirty, because for so long you're not going to have any real confidence that a particular system has "cleared it's orbit" for planet "X".
You make a qualitative argument not a quantitative one.
All of these at the moment are qualitative arguments, not quantitative ones.
Your definition proposal is interesting, but I wish you have detailed the stability part instead of the spherical part. The n-body problem is not an easy one, how do you guarantee that a planet will stay in orbit for a long time?
You don't. Ever. For any planet.
There is nothing fundamentally impossible about some neutron star coming barrelling through the Solar system tomorrow, smacking into and swallowing Jupiter (bar a few meteorite candidates), and barrelling out the other side leaving the rest of the Solar system to sort it's dynamical stuff out without Jupiter.
Equally, there is around a 1% probability of one of the terrestrial planets being ejected form the Solar system in the next couple of billion years, just through interactions with Jupiter, then mutual interactions.
But odds are, that if it's been around for a billion years, it's unlikely to not be here in another billion. So getting a lower bound on the age of the star is an important point.
Because the 3-body problem itself (let alone 'n'-body problems for large 'n') is insoluble analytically, no general 'n'-body situation can be considered stable in the mathematical sense. (Lagrangian points being the exception, but they have a constraint that at most two of the particles in the system have significant mass. Which isn't very general.)
Sphericity, on the other hand, is assessable, and if it's gravitationally-induced, then it is permanent outside large collisions.
Also, a couple of orbits of the candidate is not an easy thing to wait for with Pluto.
So? Get on with the waiting!
The ability to extend it to extrasolar celestial bodies is a huge advantage. I admit most of my arguments are based on the Solar system. With
Pluto shouldn't be classified a planet, as it doesn't share a lot of properties with them.
Well, that's a viable form for an argument. Let's examine your claims then.
First it's not a celestial body but 2.
Two bodies? Not four?
Let's try your criterion elsewhere :
"Mars is not a planet, because it's not the one body that it's discoverer (Ugh, unpublished work carved on a cave wall, 238532 BP) thought, but three (Phobos and Deimos, discovered about 80BP by some dude with a telescope)."
"Neptune is not a planet because it has several satellites which were not seen when it was first discovered by some guy with erroneous calculations of the orbit of Uranus - not that the errors mattered because they cancelled out, more or less."
Nope, I don't think this criterion is a valid one for rejecting Pluto as a planet.
Second, its orbit is elliptical, as opposed to the circular orbit of the planets, and not in the ecliptic.
Well, what is your line in the sand for Pluto being "too eccentric" (e=0.249)? If you draw the line at e>0.2 (in base 10 ; why do you choose base 10?), then you exclude Mercury (e=0.206) ; if you draw the line at e>0.05 then you exclude Mars and Saturn too. Choose a line to draw, then (this is the hard bit) justify it and persuade other people that your justification is good.
We can examine the inclination argument too. Here the order of increasing inclination is Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Ceres, Pluto, which would make the Earth the next of the planets to be discounted in a countdown.
I don't accept this as a valid criterion for rejecting Pluto as a planet.
Also, it's very small, smaller than the Moon.
Same form of argument, let's reject Mercury as a planet because it's smaller than Ganymede. I don't accept this as a valid criterion for rejecting Pluto as a planet.
TBH, the main criterion I argued for (informally, because I'm not an astronomer and haven't "done my chops" on the telescope to get a vote) was a fundamentally a compositional one : if it's stable (not losing mass, and not likely to collide with anything on a foreseeable orbital timescale) and it's sufficiently massive to have compacted it's material into a more-or-less spherical shape, then I'd count it as a planet. Which would include all the gas giants (the large amount of gas hides spherical rocky cores ; they were just "lucky" enough to reach this size in a region where water ice, hydrogen and helium were still significant components of the solar nebula), the terrestrial planets, a small (slightly arguable) number of asteroids (Ceres, Vesta, arguably a couple of others), the Pluto-Charon double planet, and probably a few dozen other Kuiper Belt objects and/or Oort Cloud objects. Which would give us a class of dozens, but not more than a few hundreds. That's a manageable number of class members, IMHO. And it's a determination that can be made within a couple of orbits of the planet (the stability criterion) and with only a fairly crude light (or occultation) curve, so in principle it could be applied reasonably consistently to extra-solar planets too. Not that we're in a position to detect anything that's even remotely likely to not be a planet, except for a brown dwarf.
What is my criterion for a "more-or-less spherical shape"? Well, I guess that I'd look at Saturn, which is a compact body rotating rapidly but maintaining it's structural coherence against that spin. But there are also (small) asteroids which are very irregular and maintain their structure against their spin. But if you knocked a lump off Saturn with an impactor, the majority of the material would fall back onto Saturn ; try hitting 243 Ida with an impactor and it's likely to fragment completely. Somewhere between those two is a "more-or-less spherical shape" limit. (Clearly my proposed criterion needs a bit of firming up ; but it's not a formal proposal.)
it is at best an intellectual curiosity where it might rival the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor as something to produce a neutron radiation source that can be turned on and off with a light switch
What is an intellectual curiosity about a switch-offable (or switch-onable) neutron source? They're great products for their particular niche market, and so much cheaper than fishing for lost sources. They might be used on surface too, though conventional sources might be cheap enough to compete with the safety advantages of the powered sources.
Either the guy is a stinking genius and has discovered the cure to world peace
Yeah, got to do something about that epidemic of peace that's breaking out all over. Problem is, most of the vaccines against peace have lead in them, and that's dangerous!
I might as well buy the same size car (civic) and pay for gas because the price difference is the gas cost for 10 years of driving.
It's people like you that make me a happy bunny. You're paying for my bar bill, my wife's fuel bill (she drives to work daily ; I fly/ boat to work monthly), and my retirement plan, and are obviously keen to continue to impoverish yourselves to my benefit.
Thanks for the money.
(I drill for oil and gas. I'm not joking. Can I haz payrise?)
Neck snapping acceleration could be the NORM, not the exception.
Hey, now there is an idea. Making ALL new "suicide machines" (in the words of the Bruce Springsteen (?) song) have such high accelerations that they can break the necks of inconsiderate drivers with a too-heavy left foot.
That's some design feature there. Points for autodarwination !
The quadriplegic wheel-chairs will have the same acceleration? And a steering-wheel mounted "considerate driving harpoon" too? Compulsory retrofitting of the high-performance engines to all old machines when they come in for (for example) fuel too?
That Duqu is a framework makes it seem to me more likely that it's a for-profit (i.e. criminal in origin) attack rather than a government-produced attack.
OR, it's a government-produced attack, but they decided that they wanted plausible deniability and so coded it far above their normal standards to deflect attention.
The question is not, "Am I paranoid?" It is "Am I paranoid enough?"
While it's moderately interesting that Google are funding research into geothermal energy, no doubt for their own excellent business reasons and with a credible claim to some vanilla altruism too, this is hardly a virgin field of research.
Geothermal mapping has been happening for decades, publicly and privately funded, in many countries of the world. The potential is real, though the technological challenges are real too (how do you drill a well in rock that's hot enough to turn your drilling fluid super-critical? I work in drilling, and I see it as a whole host of inter-related problems. Which is not saying that it's impossible, just that it's difficult. And therefore it's expensive. Which you've got to make economical within certain energy price ranges.)
Example : USGS map of geothermal potentials, dated 2008 ; a little research will give you ones dated further back for some areas.(This link appears very flaky - I can't get the PDF to download fully, but the cover page implies there are maps there.) A page with working maps back to 2006.
The earth is about one trillion cubic kilometers big, and most of that is molten.
I make it 1,083,206,916,845 km^3... so yeah about a "trillion", depending on your meaning of "trillion".
But while almost all of it varies from "hot" to "very hot", only around 25% of it is anything like "molten", comprising the outer core (which stops the transmission of seismic shear waves) and the vastly larger asthenosphere which is without (Gk "a-" prefix) strength (Gk "sthenos" root) which may have up to several volume-% of melt in it. The rest is solid for all practical (human) intents and purposes.
The phase diagrams of most common rock-forming minerals have melting take place at higher temperatures when under higher pressures. The common, everyday example that most people intuit from is water, and it's phase diagram (for modest near-surface pressures) is not like this. But water is a very unusual substance.
You've condemned some well-known computing luminary to death in the next 4 or 5 days (depending on your time zone / DST state).
Well done. Law of unintended consequences and all that.
What are the odds ?... Loosely defining the "Golden Age" of computing as mid-1950s to mid-1970s, and Golden Age contributors having reached 30 in that time (the young have interesting ideas, but it takes time to implement them)... that would put birth dates in the interval 1925 to 1945, and ages at the moment between 86 and 66.
Yes, they're going to be dropping like flies.
By the way, I believe that the guy has died, not moved to the place where all the pollution goes ("Away" ; been looking for it in the atlas ; haven't found it). We're all adults here ; no need for euphemisms when someone's homeostatic functions stop and gross decay sets in.
Slashdot Mirror
See darkshadow88's comment above. 56W is not a huge power if it's fired once per hour. (Obviously higher average power if it's fired more often.)
All? For certain values of "all" that include about 1/10th of the countries. That's like saying that North America is "all" Canadians.
(I was thinking of making a comment too, since I go by the nickname of "Wol" in Real Life (TM). So your trip up saved me <G>.)
Then it's your own stupid fault for buying a property beneath a dam. (Or to be more precise, in the predictable flood pattern of the dam.)
There is a legal Latin phrase "caveat emptor" which translates as "if you don't do your homework before you buy X, then it's your own stupid fault for getting whatever you've got."
(Actually, these days for buying a property in the UK, there has got to be a "home information pack" including a survey by a properly accredited surveyor, who should catch these things. So you probably do have a leg to stand on with your legalistic snivelling. But really, you should do your own fucking homework.)
I grew up in a town where development spread out onto the flood plain of the river, where the river has regularly (half of the winters) flooded the plain beside the river. And people brought this property. And the river flooded. And they whinged and moaned, and got no fucking sympathy from anyone who could see that the town hadn't been built there for over a thousand years, for some good reason. [DOH!]
Two old pennies, one for each eye.
I'll have to visit Jerry's site to see if the Slashdot effect had been a productive part of the pressure. And, of course, to actually see the video and have a good laugh. But that'll be tomorrow. Work to do!
I'm not disputing that Dounreay has produced contamination ; I'm not disputing that there is contamination in Strathclyde, and probably also in the Firth of Clyde, but on vanilla geographic grounds, I'd suspect the sources of contamination are much more likely to be the East Kilbride reactor centre and the Faslane Septic bomb target respectively.
(Memo to self : I must get that Geiger counter working for Tom!)
Someone mentioned getting readings of "14 times background" at Seascale, which raises a "So?" from me, living in Aberdeen with at least 10 times "background" (depending of course, on where you're measuring your background!) glowing on street corners. To say nothing of the natural beaches with up to 20 times "background" that I've encountered as reservoirs at work previously.
If I chose a different place to measure my "background", I could probably vary the value of "background" by around a factor of a hundred without leaving the UK and without resorting to artificial concentrations of natural radioactive materials.
For all of these events (with the debatable exception of the alien invasion), sufficient experience exists to estimate the probability of it happening again in the future.
On the basis of oilfield experience, the fact that Alaska has not yet had a major oil disaster (in drilling or production ; you've ceded the transportation example already, though quite why you consider that appreciably different isn't clear to me) is in significant part luck. At some point, there is likely to be a major disaster of this type. The more exploration and production that happens, the higher the probability of it happening in any particular time period in the future. Follows a Poisson distribution, IIRC my statistics courses.
s/02/1994/
But isn't that part of the fun? I had to get a copy of the Pink Shirt Book off the shelf to understand what the fuck it was talking about in partitioning. Which is knowledge that I've used time and time again. Ditto resolutions.
Sadly, I have to agree you on the hellish battle front. And I'm afraid that next time the battle comes around, it's going to be a new distro. I'd better order a new hard drive for experimenting on.
... because every community in America above a (pretty small) minimum size has people contributing money and influence directly or indirectly to the drug cartel.
There's nothing wrong with assigning blame. Just make sure that you know where to assign it.
Not just EM radiation. Sound can be beamed ; particle radiation can be beamed (alpha, beta ; gamma is light). Anything that has a direction to it can be beamed.
You've missed one small, but rather important word : "yet".
Note - I'm speaking as a geologist in the oil business, currently on an exploration well off the east coast of Africa. You could claim that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but the companies who pay my invoices would probably disagree with you.
Having mud splotched over your license plate you can get away with. Having installed something that has no purpose other than to allow you to commit a crime will just be evidence to the court of a "mens rea", a "guilty mind", that you knew that you intended to do something wrong.
So, you'd need to come up with some plausible reason for the device you install. At which point, IR doesn't do much, because people can't see it. (Other people point out that the camera are likely protected against it too. Which doesn't matter in this context.)
If I were to look at the problem ... I'd look at a couple of things. Firstly, does your country use paint-on-metal plates with a sheet of plastic glued over the paint to protect it? (That's what ours uses, generally, so it's the context I'm thinking of.) I'd experiment with an old plate from the scrapper - if you flex the plate to less than the point at which the plastic snaps cleanly, does it develop lots of little en echelon fractures perpendicular to the surface of the plastic. (I've seen this happen with some hard, brittle plastics, but I've not tried it with UK license plates. Experiment!) If you can develop those fractures, try shining a bright white lamp at them from the side - does it reflect the light back at the observer? Now, try arranging white LEDs along the side of your license plate, so they light up the plate nice and clearly - you may need to flex the plate to make it fit along with your LEDs, which will accidentally force the plate into a curve ... and from many angles there will be a plate-obscuring reflection from the LEDs.
Oh dear!
What a pity!
Never mind!
How sad.
Sorry Officer, I never noticed that it did that!
Of course, you could try the alternative of paying attention to the road while you're driving. I've not had a single speeding ticket in the 22 (I think) years since I got my license (though I've only owned cars during around 10 of those years), and it's not because I don't speed. It's not through subscribing to some SatNav-based database of speed camera locations either (fuck you, Road Angel). It's by paying attention to the road and to my speed. Heretical, I know.
Plan "B" : apply force to the plate at convenient location(s) to fracture the plastic coating ; then apply chemicals to make the paint and metal underneath rust. Make it look accidental. Make sure that the plate can/ will be mis-read by a camera with the corrosion. Or do the same by gluing on "mud". Make the front and rear plates read differently, though this itself may make some ANPR systems flag you for attention.
Try the same logic with the 'Mona Lisa' and an accurate-to-the-nanometre copy of the 'Mona Lisa'. The law would recognise that the uniqueness of the original thing is important.
I'm sure that there is abundant case law about (say) someone whose wedding ring gets lost when being repaired by the jewellers being compensated in addition to having a similar ring given to them "because it not *the* ring that X gave to me".
They're not a matter of intellectual curiosity, but of industrial production and use. At work it's significantly handy, because it halves the number of sources that need to go into "the hole" (the "we might have to expend a lot of time, money and effort to get this back, if we run into problems" zone of operations). But on the other hand, because the intensity of the source flux is lower, you may have to expose the other (gamma) source to the hole's hazards for longer. The calculus of risk is not quite as simple as it sounds.
That's not an "intellectual curiosity".
(Actually, there's around a half-hour half-life when you switch the machines off. On my geologist's time scale, that's negligible. But it is a factor in the calculus of risk.)
Oh, I see that Wikipedia has an article. Another sign of being common (?) industrial tools rather than intellectual curiosities. I infer from the list of references that Harryburton have got such a tool, in addition to the ones I've met previously from Scumburger and BHI. "BFD."
Hmmm, I'm just looking at the output form the gas analysis system on the gas well that I'm drilling here and now : that natural gas is a bit over 90% methane. Which is normal.
I'm assuming that they're talking about methane (plus moderate amounts of ethane, propane etc, "condensate") that bubbles out of their crude oil and makes it a bitch to pump. (The gas can bubble out and cause cavitation damage to pump surfaces.) So I'd guess that they're producing some natural gas well, and some oil wells, and are separating off the methane from the oil wells by depressurising the oil, then compressing the methane and the natural gas into a gas storage tank.
They'll also perhaps get a small amount of propane and butane liquid from their natural gas compression, and they'll separate that from the gas and re-inject it into the oil pipeline.
Single-phase pipelines are cheaper to make and run than multi-phase pipelines. So they might as well burn the least valuable part of their output to provide energy on site (and export as electrical power?) while pumping (or tankering) their more-valuable product to some refinery somewhere. Being "green" is a nice PR side-effect.
That the barycentre of the system lays outside either body is a fair point, but begs the next question : when you have 2 stars (say Alpha Centauri and it's secondary) which orbit their system's barycentre outside either star, do they cease to be stars? If they don't, what is your reason for considering the location of the barycentre to be of fundamental importance? If it's not of fundamental importance to a star, is it of fundamental importance to a brown dwarf? To a gas giant? By introducing that criterion, you've introduced the need for another arbitrary line in the sand.
A fifth body in the Pluto-Charon-Nix-Hydra system? Rings a bell ; doesn't change anything much. (Doesn't seem to have been formally published? ... Found it!)
When was Pluto the ninth planet? Oh yes, before the discovery of 2060 Chiron in 1977. So, in 1976 it was the ninth planet, in 1977 it was the tenth planet, then in February 1979 it became the ninth planet again until 1999 when it again became the tenth planet. It's difficult defining a planet when the definition includes other things that may or may not be planets.
That "clears it's orbit" criterion is really logically dirty, because for so long you're not going to have any real confidence that a particular system has "cleared it's orbit" for planet "X".
All of these at the moment are qualitative arguments, not quantitative ones.
You don't. Ever. For any planet.
There is nothing fundamentally impossible about some neutron star coming barrelling through the Solar system tomorrow, smacking into and swallowing Jupiter (bar a few meteorite candidates), and barrelling out the other side leaving the rest of the Solar system to sort it's dynamical stuff out without Jupiter.
Equally, there is around a 1% probability of one of the terrestrial planets being ejected form the Solar system in the next couple of billion years, just through interactions with Jupiter, then mutual interactions.
But odds are, that if it's been around for a billion years, it's unlikely to not be here in another billion. So getting a lower bound on the age of the star is an important point.
Because the 3-body problem itself (let alone 'n'-body problems for large 'n') is insoluble analytically, no general 'n'-body situation can be considered stable in the mathematical sense. (Lagrangian points being the exception, but they have a constraint that at most two of the particles in the system have significant mass. Which isn't very general.)
Sphericity, on the other hand, is assessable, and if it's gravitationally-induced, then it is permanent outside large collisions.
So? Get on with the waiting!
It's got between a half an eon and five eons more, then the lights go out and it's going to have to find it's way around in the dark.
Well, that's a viable form for an argument. Let's examine your claims then.
Two bodies? Not four?
Let's try your criterion elsewhere :
Nope, I don't think this criterion is a valid one for rejecting Pluto as a planet.
Well, what is your line in the sand for Pluto being "too eccentric" (e=0.249)? If you draw the line at e>0.2 (in base 10 ; why do you choose base 10?), then you exclude Mercury (e=0.206) ; if you draw the line at e>0.05 then you exclude Mars and Saturn too. Choose a line to draw, then (this is the hard bit) justify it and persuade other people that your justification is good.
We can examine the inclination argument too. Here the order of increasing inclination is Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, Earth, Ceres, Pluto, which would make the Earth the next of the planets to be discounted in a countdown.
I don't accept this as a valid criterion for rejecting Pluto as a planet.
Same form of argument, let's reject Mercury as a planet because it's smaller than Ganymede.
I don't accept this as a valid criterion for rejecting Pluto as a planet.
TBH, the main criterion I argued for (informally, because I'm not an astronomer and haven't "done my chops" on the telescope to get a vote) was a fundamentally a compositional one : if it's stable (not losing mass, and not likely to collide with anything on a foreseeable orbital timescale) and it's sufficiently massive to have compacted it's material into a more-or-less spherical shape, then I'd count it as a planet. Which would include all the gas giants (the large amount of gas hides spherical rocky cores ; they were just "lucky" enough to reach this size in a region where water ice, hydrogen and helium were still significant components of the solar nebula), the terrestrial planets, a small (slightly arguable) number of asteroids (Ceres, Vesta, arguably a couple of others), the Pluto-Charon double planet, and probably a few dozen other Kuiper Belt objects and/or Oort Cloud objects. Which would give us a class of dozens, but not more than a few hundreds. That's a manageable number of class members, IMHO. And it's a determination that can be made within a couple of orbits of the planet (the stability criterion) and with only a fairly crude light (or occultation) curve, so in principle it could be applied reasonably consistently to extra-solar planets too. Not that we're in a position to detect anything that's even remotely likely to not be a planet, except for a brown dwarf.
What is my criterion for a "more-or-less spherical shape"? Well, I guess that I'd look at Saturn, which is a compact body rotating rapidly but maintaining it's structural coherence against that spin. But there are also (small) asteroids which are very irregular and maintain their structure against their spin. But if you knocked a lump off Saturn with an impactor, the majority of the material would fall back onto Saturn ; try hitting 243 Ida with an impactor and it's likely to fragment completely. Somewhere between those two is a "more-or-less spherical shape" limit. (Clearly my proposed criterion needs a bit of firming up ; but it's not a formal proposal.)
What is an intellectual curiosity about a switch-offable (or switch-onable) neutron source? They're great products for their particular niche market, and so much cheaper than fishing for lost sources. They might be used on surface too, though conventional sources might be cheap enough to compete with the safety advantages of the powered sources.
Yeah, got to do something about that epidemic of peace that's breaking out all over. Problem is, most of the vaccines against peace have lead in them, and that's dangerous!
It's people like you that make me a happy bunny. You're paying for my bar bill, my wife's fuel bill (she drives to work daily ; I fly/ boat to work monthly), and my retirement plan, and are obviously keen to continue to impoverish yourselves to my benefit.
Thanks for the money.
(I drill for oil and gas. I'm not joking. Can I haz payrise?)
Hey, now there is an idea. Making ALL new "suicide machines" (in the words of the Bruce Springsteen (?) song) have such high accelerations that they can break the necks of inconsiderate drivers with a too-heavy left foot.
That's some design feature there. Points for autodarwination !
The quadriplegic wheel-chairs will have the same acceleration? And a steering-wheel mounted "considerate driving harpoon" too? Compulsory retrofitting of the high-performance engines to all old machines when they come in for (for example) fuel too?
OR, it's a government-produced attack, but they decided that they wanted plausible deniability and so coded it far above their normal standards to deflect attention.
The question is not, "Am I paranoid?" It is "Am I paranoid enough?"
Geothermal mapping has been happening for decades, publicly and privately funded, in many countries of the world. The potential is real, though the technological challenges are real too (how do you drill a well in rock that's hot enough to turn your drilling fluid super-critical? I work in drilling, and I see it as a whole host of inter-related problems. Which is not saying that it's impossible, just that it's difficult. And therefore it's expensive. Which you've got to make economical within certain energy price ranges.)
Example : USGS map of geothermal potentials, dated 2008 ; a little research will give you ones dated further back for some areas.(This link appears very flaky - I can't get the PDF to download fully, but the cover page implies there are maps there.)
A page with working maps back to 2006.
I make it 1,083,206,916,845 km^3 ... so yeah about a "trillion", depending on your meaning of "trillion".
But while almost all of it varies from "hot" to "very hot", only around 25% of it is anything like "molten", comprising the outer core (which stops the transmission of seismic shear waves) and the vastly larger asthenosphere which is without (Gk "a-" prefix) strength (Gk "sthenos" root) which may have up to several volume-% of melt in it. The rest is solid for all practical (human) intents and purposes.
The phase diagrams of most common rock-forming minerals have melting take place at higher temperatures when under higher pressures. The common, everyday example that most people intuit from is water, and it's phase diagram (for modest near-surface pressures) is not like this. But water is a very unusual substance.
Well done. Law of unintended consequences and all that.
What are the odds ? ... Loosely defining the "Golden Age" of computing as mid-1950s to mid-1970s, and Golden Age contributors having reached 30 in that time (the young have interesting ideas, but it takes time to implement them) ... that would put birth dates in the interval 1925 to 1945, and ages at the moment between 86 and 66.
Yes, they're going to be dropping like flies.
By the way, I believe that the guy has died, not moved to the place where all the pollution goes ("Away" ; been looking for it in the atlas ; haven't found it). We're all adults here ; no need for euphemisms when someone's homeostatic functions stop and gross decay sets in.