I'm going out on a limb, but I don't think the word "pizza" appears anywhere in the Old Testament.
I'm not certain, but I think the GP's comment was some obscure reference to the myriad and varied (and probably self-inconsistent) dietary laws of the various Jewish sects. There's probably some rule against eating dairy and tomato in the same meal, which would make almost any formulation that fits "pizza" impossible.
(By "Jewish" I include the various derivative sects such as Christianity and Islam. It's all barely-distinguishable shit. A curse on all their houses - when Northern Ireland have finished slaughtering themselves, can we use it as a compactor to throw the rest in in mutually murderous combinations so we can get the fuckers out of our way?)
BA does not charge hidden fees for everything. In-flight food and drink, a reasonable number of checked bags, etc. are all provided at no extra cost.
(The downside is that BA tickets are more expensive up-front
Surely that means that hidden fees are charged for everything you list : your free in-flight "food" is covered by part of your "ticket" price ; your checked baggage (both the handling and the weight) is covered by part of your "ticket" price ; your "etc" is covered by part of your "ticket" price. But the actual costs of all those items is hidden in the "more expensive up-front ticket".
Me, I can't wait to see what has long been enforced in most of my flying : "Please step onto the scales sir, carrying all your baggage." That's non-commercial flying, but it will eventually get into commercial flying too, because the number-one determinant of airline's costs is the fuel to overcome the weight in the air.
No, this does not violate people's human rights. It enhances them, because it helps you to appreciate the value of every single kilogramme that makes up you. Or, you're free to move along to the next ticket desk.
For certain, people (Americans even, if that's relevant to you) have done hard time in Russian jails for being in the wrong place, carrying espionage equipment, i.e. a GPS.
(Note that there is no implication that they were using the GPS, or even performing espionage of any sort. The particular case I heard of in my fiancee's home area, the guy jailed was simply using it for navigation on a self-organised walking holiday. But in that region, possession is a crime with mandatory 5 years hard labour, and that's what he got sentenced to. Though he was released to the US jail system after only a couple of years, and didn't do much hard labour, I'm told. Very lenient.)
Be very, very sure that the areas you are going to are safe to carry a GPS in. If you're not certain, the safest thing to do is not take it. At all. Map and compass can be dangerous enough but if they are available locally, then you're reasonably safe to get them locally and use them.
Photos on a cell phone ? Meh. Get a decent camera, unless this is going to be a trip you'll be repeating every few months. Your memories will thank you.
Uploading your photos... well if you're anywhere where there is adequate wireless to actually use a phone, there is going to be faster land-line available through Internet cafes or hotels. Get out there, mix with the people, keep your hand on your wallet (which you mostly emptied into the safe in the hotel, anyway) and experience the place.
Storage ? The last holiday with the wife, we clocked up around 10GB of photos (which we still haven't pruned the dross from), around 1Gb/day for 200-300 photos/day, or an average of a photo every couple of minutes. Look at the size and weight of 8 or 16GB SD cards... maybe consider a netbook or tablet for transferring them to a USB hard drive as a backup.
If you're going to go to places and do things that you think might get you searched by the authorities, then you've got bigger things to worry about than your photos. Like, lead poisoning for having a GPS. Think for a second about how many airports have "no photography" signs in place... and then think about how they might take to meeting a dangerous foreigner (that's a tautology of course, everywhere) with a camera and a GPS. (Think also about how often you've seen your local police enforcing the "no photography" zones in your home area.)
Oh, it's an AC... is it worth replying too? Well, possibly, since I can't be bothered searching the discussion for anything else worth bothering to reply to.
Where's your start menu in iOS? Oh but iOS is the best OS in the market! It doesn't need one cause they have the dock bar at the bottom.
Have any of you used windows 7 lately? Guess what that bar is down there. Yeah that's right.
Actually using Windows 7 at the moment, because it's what work have provided on this laptop, for this trip. What I get next trip on the next job, who knows?
errr, bar at the bottom? Same shit that has been there since IIRC Win95. Is that the same as iOS-PussyCat-49 (or whatever the current version is)... well I'll ask the next person I see using a Mac. Don't expect an answer for several months.
There's the window key+typing, there's the new dock bar+pin functionality and the good old search for your software.
Sorry, but the last training I had in how to use computers was... back when we made the transition from actual Teletype terminals to "glass Teletype" terminals. Everything else since then I've had to pick up the manual, read it, and then catch up with the work that I've missed while reading it. Which, since I get paid for doing my job, not for being an IT person, generally means that all novel interfaces etc get ignored for 4 or 5 years, and except for systems that I'm paid to use (and teach the use of), half to two-thirds of major releases get skipped. They are not cost-effective.
Why the gratuitous hate for the company that granted
"granted"? "GRANTED"? Man, can I have a smoke on that. I know I'll fail my next piss test, even if it is in a couple of years, but it must be worth smoking. Or is that just your pay check talking?
most of you the means to be the engeniers and IT guys you are today?
Even if I spell "engineer" differently to you, why do you assume that I'm an engineer OR an IT guy? Sure I use IT quite a bit ; sure I'm normally the person (on the site) with the best understanding of IT in general and personal computers and their applications in particular. But what makes you think that I'd want to do that for a living?
The banner is (or was? I can't remember what the home page looks like, it's so rare to go there) "News for Nerds". Not "News for engineers and IT guys." There may be a lot of IT guys here ; they may even be a majority (if you include the programmers under that banner), but they're certainly not even what you'd call a "substantial majority".
"Most preschoolers get scolded for writing on walls, but kids living 13,000 years ago were encouraged to scribble, at least in caves."
Uhm... How do they know that those children didn't get scolded for it too?
Last line of the linked article reads, " And some of the drawings were high on the walls and on the ceiling, suggesting that the children were lifted."
... however, concerning paintings done in comparably-dated caves, the location of some of the paintings practically requires the painters to have erected scaffolding of some sort, or at least ladders (though this begs the question of "where are the marks from the tips of the ladders?", which hasn't TTBOMK been seriously addressed).
Which re-raises the prospect of "There you are you little tyke! I told you not to come in here! SLAP!", followed by a leathering for daubing on grandpappy Ug's magic drawing, "And it's no reindeer steak for you you troublesome little git, straight to bed with a baculum to suck on and think yourself lucky you're not getting thrown out tonight to take your chances with the wolves!"
My grandpa used to regale me with stories of wattle.
Wattle is great. It's the daub that can get a little objectionable to work with. Unless the shit is well rotted along with the mud and straw.
When my parents and I were re-wiring their house - back in the early 1970s - we had to remove and then repair substantial areas of lath-and-plaster walling We were replacing the existing strands of single-core wire with rubber and cloth insulation with new cables that used modern plastic insulation. But it used to freak me slightly that the fibre-reinforcement of the plaster (yes, it was a composite material, generally akin to glass-fibre-reinforced-plastic or carbon-fibre-reinforced-epoxy) was strands of horse hair several centimetres long. In perspective it shows me two things : how many horses were around in those days, and how much re-cycling they did in those days.
These days, it would be like collecting the "marbles" of tyre rubber from the roads and using them as building material. And people object to recycling "because it's not what my Daddy did" ? !
Meanwhile, if you ever get another chance to see the movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3D,
Unfortunately the only cinema within 300 miles that showed it... doesn't have any 3D facilities. There's a possibility that it'll appear at the local Imax theatre one day (though the cave would not permit the entry of Imax cameras), which would be worth the 400-mile round trip to see it. I'd have to get the bus though - I doubt that I'd want to drive with the post-3D headache.
But, having seen the 2D version... I think it'd be worth the effort to see it in 3D. It's the only film I've said that about.
I was slightly surprised to find that no-one on Slashdot had even considered that this might be a "spoof", or a "parody".
Then I realised that the original link was to the Torygraph. Which explains it. Rampant lunacy, plus total absence of fact-checking ; QED. The spoof is on them.
Taking my holidays next year in San Serriffe, assuming I can find it again.
This test is mostly a test of balloon technologies - tethering, manoeuvring, deployment and recovery, with the pumping sulphates being a relatively minor part of the question.
At (say) 20km height and 100atmospheres per km (of water), the implied pumping technologies are a step forward, but not a major one. 20,000psi (1300 atmospheres) pumping in considerable volumes is an off-the-shelf technology. Another factor of a dozen is likely to be no major deal, given that simultaneous improvement in balloon-supported platforms are implicit in the package.
What interested me more in the story was that balloon-mounted Metropolitan-Area-Networks is one of the communications technologies touted for improving local connectivities without needing to lay lots and lots of new fibre. A balloon technology that can adequately support multiple tons of machinery for months or years is... well, a balloon technology that can support multiple tons of machinery for months or years. Which will have other uses.
Shopping centres are generally (not always, but generally) private property, not public places. So you abide by the rules that the property's owner imposes.
Yes, there are issues about "are the rules adequately communicated before the contract is accepted by entering the premises?" and such like. But fundamentally, they're private property, even if they are places that the public can, under certain conditions, access.
Actually it was Neptune that was discovered by observing Uranus's orbit.
True, but there were errors in all of [the input data, the methods used, the calculations performed] which if done correctly would have predicted the position of Neptune differently to where the planet actually was. So although the discovery followed the calculations, it was essentially discovered accidentally.
Analogy : I form the hypothesis that people with blue trousers often drop their wallets when walking down the high street. I follow a person wearing blue trousers, he drops his wallet, I think my hypothesis is confirmed. However, someone else trying to replicate the work forms an alternative hypothesis that it is people with baggy trousers, regardless of colour, who tend to drop their wallets. But he only gathers one wallet too.
Interestingly Pluto was also found the same way, yet it turns out that Pluto is much too small to cause the observed orbital perturbations.
That's the "baggy trousers" hypothesis against the "blue trousers" hypothesis.
(You'll note that neither the "baggy trousers" nor the "blue trousers" hypothesis disputes in the slightest the law of gravity, and the effects of belts are not considered. Also, this is not how Pluto was found.)
There may yet be a large planet out there as a 150 years ago it seems that Uranus's orbit was more perturbed then now.
Citation please? I'm reasonably up to speed on orbital mechanics, and that is contrary to what I thought I knew, which is that Nemisis/ Niburu/ SillyName2012 is logically dead and there's no evidence for anything much bigger than Sedna and Quaor out there. There may be lots of somethings, but there's not much room (in orbit-mass-temperature-luminosity-location space) for something substantial. One proposal (which I'm downloading for my after-lunch read) maxes out at something "tenths of Earth-mass" at around 100AU perihelion. (yeuch - 80 pages, not printing that!)
I see that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune puts the recurring "mismatch in perturbations" story down to an initial small error in the mass of Neptune, which was corrected by sending a test particle (Voyager 2) past Neptune to weigh it.
(And the trousers analogy... it's getting simpler to use CCTV cameras to watch *everyone* for dropped wallets. Which is pretty much the technique that Clyde Tombaugh was using to find Pluto.)
Tombaugh's job (paid work, for a skilled amateur astronomer) was to carry out a comprehensive photographic survey of the whole ecliptic with at least 2-fold coverage. The 2-fold coverage allowed the use of blink comparametry. The "whole ecliptic" dictated the time scale (an integer number of years) and strongly influenced the search strategy. At the darkest part of night, images could be made of the anti-sun direction on the sky, several hours apart. Process the plates that night and blink them at the start of the next shift (so that any bad films or interesting sights could have an additional plate or several taken on the next night.
But it was a comprehensive survey - anything bright enough to be seen by the telescope/ plate combination, near the ecliptic, should have been caught. And indeed, Pluto was.
Taking a comprehensive survey like that is a pretty clear sign that the director of the search has no plan to direct his search, and instead is looking everywhere, systematically. "Remove all all cushions from armchair ; search armchair. Remove all cushions from sofa, stacking them on armchair ; search sofa...." Eventually you'll find the keys/ wedding ring/ girlfriend's earring.
Most of the exo-planets discovered so far have been via the transiting method (this is what Kelper uses).
KePLer may well have the numerical advantage by now, but the precedence for the techniques certainly goes to orbital timing, not occultation or spectroscopy.
Uranus was discovered due to unexplained perturbations in the orbits of the other outer planets.
No it wasn't. Oh, it's an AC... well I'll respond to one of the other people.
It would also explain why you can't understand how a geek could enjoy watching Star Trek.
I didn't say that I couldn't understand how a geek could enjoy watching Star Trek. I objected to the implication in the original statement comment that liking Star Trek (many versions) enough to spend large amounts of money on buying copies of it is a necessary-if-not-sufficient qualification for being a geek. It's not.
Just as a reduce-to-the-absurd example, Alan Turing would be a pretty good contender for the archetypical geek, but it's a pretty safe bet that he never had an opinion on Star Trek, to like it or dislike it.
Comparing Star Trek to some of the alternative bits of slack-jaw-glassy-eyed entertainment on the telly - say, football, or Coronation Enders and East Street (soap operas) - it's relatively tolerable. But that's not sufficient to get me to spend hundreds or thousands of pounds on copies of it to watch time and time again.
That'll be the advertising psychologists succeeding again.
(Incidentally, we do have a rental account with a DVD company, and we get stuff delivered regularly. Watch once, send back, receive next.Very occasionally watch twice. Our 'send list' is, at current rates, about 5 years long.)
your definition of "passive slack-jawed entertainment" can equally apply to reading, listening to the radio, or watching sport. Or looking at art, for that matter.
You read passively? You're not continually looking forward to try to work out where it's going, or looking back to see if there's a piece of evidence you missed. (That applies to both fiction and non-fiction.) For fiction, you're not trying to work out what the motivations of particular characters are, or how they're going to get out of this situation? For non-fiction of course, you've got all of (whatever the field is) to review to assess what you're reading, whether you think it's right or not, if it's not right, why not... Reading is a profoundly active activity. Well, it is for me.
Pretty much the same applies to listening to the radio (I don't know if that applies to listening to music - it did for me, but I was normally listening to the lyrics, and lyrics are, at least for the music I paid attention to before I got rid of my music collection, intensely political and historical).
I wouldn't know what goes through the minds of people watching sport. By observation, it's normally an incitement to bloodlust to see the death of supporters of other teams in the same sport, but I can't claim much understanding at all of the sports fan mentality. They really are a different species.
Pretty much the same comment about art, but without the bloodlust.
I've read the abstract too, but having been reading Moorbath et al's work for years, studying the chemical evolution of the mantle, I've got a better idea what they're talking about.
Your comments about the non-zero solubility of [anything] in hot water are not incorrect, but not relevant to this work.
The LHB veneer idea doesn't claim that there would be no siderophile elements at the Earth's surface after segregation of the core. It simply states that the early mantle and the early segregating core would have been in (approximate) chemical equilibrium, and consequently the concentrations of different elements in the iron-rich phase compared to the silicate-rich phase would have approximated towards the concentrations predicted from the partition coefficients of the relevant species in the relevant conditions. (This is a tautology - that is what "partition coefficient" means ; whether the conditions approached equilibrium is a more moot point, but they would probably have satisfied my Mantle Petrology tutor's criteria of being to more than 100km depth for more than 100 million years, which is a regime not terribly amenable to experiment.)
However, when one does the sums, and plugs in the experimental data that one has, one finds that there is, in most mantle samples from 3+ billion years ago and 100+km below the surface, more of various elements, including tungsten, gold, PGEs, etc., which should have been taken core-wards with the differentiation of the planet. So, either the segregation process and the rates of diffusion were less efficient than we have reason to believe, or there is something peculiar going on.
It gets more peculiar though... some sources of samples (diamonds, to be precise) do show mantle materials that have been depleted in siderophile elements to the expected extent (compared to meteorite materials).
So in some places the process works as expected, and in others, it doesn't. Which is damned peculiar. And that peculiarity is what makes them come up with the model of late accretion of a modest amount of (undepleted chondritic) material onto the upper surface of the mantle after the accumulation of 90%+ of the Earth and the segregation of the core.
That puts it into the time scale appropriate for the (probable) Moon-forming Giant Impact, and for the considerably later "Late Heavy Bombardment", but I've not yet seen anyone explicitly linking the 3 events into two or even one event.
Memo to self : must make time to attend the next public lecture I hear of being given by Moorbath; this is a dead-interesting topic.
If I were a Luddite, I'd be coming round to your house, smashing your TV, then heading off to the nearest TV factory (probably in Singapore) and smashing that.
As it is, I had nearly 10 years of having the tax man coming round annually demanding to know why I wasn't paying my TV tax. Which tends to get one annoyed.
and since we don't watch live TV (can't get it free here,
Yeah, why would you watch live TV, except for news/ current affairs stuff? But where do you live that you can't get a free satellite feed? Northern Alaska? Even here off the east coast of Africa we can get at least one news channel free (I've only explored the camp's TV set up for a couple of minutes in the nearly 2 months I've been here - it's generally tuned to either football, cricket, or some Swahili soap opera).
Otherwise, yes, we do a fair bit of chit-chat to and from when we're watching some TV, or I'll be listening and reading something and chip in when I've got something to say.
You can't work out how people can enjoy entertainment? Honestly?
You missed out the "self-respecting geek", and the "passive, slack-jawed consumption", which changes what you're answering considerably from what I said.
Advertising-funded anything tends strongly to need to suppress the critical facilities of the consumer, because they (the psychologists in the advertising companies) want you to react to the advertising (and buy "Brand X", not "Brand Y"), not think about whether you need an "X" or a "Y" at all. TV people, working in advertising-funded environments, respond to those requirements. Hence, for example, MTV. Hence pretty much all team sports broadcasting (I'm trying to think of a counter-example in team sports, but I can't. However it's possible that there is a counterexample.)
or you are somewhere way out in the autistic spectrum.
Bearing in mind that autism being a spectrum, includes the "normal" population (they're just normally autistic, not abnormally autistic), then obviously I'll score somewhere on that. I took a test a while ago... but that site is blocked, and I can't remember what my score was. Whatever, I was somewhere several SDs away from the norm, but not far enough out to be labelled as "autistic", or Aspy... So I just went and found one, in the process finding out that Simon Baron-Cohen (a name I knew) is a researcher in autism spectrum disorders (which I didn't know, or didn't know explicitly), and found a score of 37, which is fairly high. Anyway, as the associated reading implies, since it doesn't cause me any distress, it's obviously not a problem.
Digressions into what autism is aside, well so what? Significant degrees of autistic behaviours are generally accepted to be more common in in the "geek" population than in the "normal" population. So?
People need entertainment and I'd be very surprised to find you had none in your life
Read what I wrote, not what you wanted to read.
I'm trying to remember who the advertising guy was who, a couple of years ago, suggested that skipping the advertising in TV, movies etc was the moral equivalent of mugging old ladies. The event fixed in my memory, but the non-entity advertising anthropoid didn't.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, reading makes considerably different demands on the brain to watching TV.
I spend quite a bit of time listening to documentary material on the radio (I believe there are also music channels on the radio, though I've not bothered to research them since the late 1980s when I re-tuned to Radio 4) ; but I'm almost always doing something else as well - reading a book, shooting aliens, writing papers for work. Something that can be put down if necessary to concentrate on something form the radio.
Radio reception is getting much worse these days, so I often use the radio channels from the satellite dish, through the TV.
Did I read about 11/9 on 12/9? No, of course not ; we didn't have any flights that day, so no newspapers. And at that time we didn't have Internet access either. No, I heard about it in newsflashes through the day on the radio, then had to break the news about it to an American mud man on his first trip abroad when he came on shift in the evening. He thought that I was playing some very sick joke on him, and was getting quite close to punching me when the top-of-the-hour news programme came on the radio, repeating what I'd just told him.
And what self respecting geek wouldn't have those?
I'm a geek, and self-respecting.
I don't have any Star Trek seasons on any media, and I'm pretty sure I've not got any single episodes either. At 7 seasons each to TNG and Voy(ager?), I'd guess that I've seen maybe a third of each, when the telly in the communal lounge has been playing them and I've been in for a read or a smoke. DS9 stands for "Deep Space 9"? and I've seen bits of a Voyager-ish but not Voyager Star Trek, so I guess that's DS9, yes? Or maybe it's Bablylon 5? There's a black/white/flashing purple hole that appears as a plot element every 30 seconds?
Whichever, I'm fairly sure that I've not watched a complete episode of either.
But then again, I did spend over a decade without a TV and would prefer to not have one these days (the wife insists).
I'm trying to work out why any self-respecting geek would participate in any pastime that requires passive, slack-jawed consumption of entertainment over something that requires active involvement.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not certain, but I think the GP's comment was some obscure reference to the myriad and varied (and probably self-inconsistent) dietary laws of the various Jewish sects. There's probably some rule against eating dairy and tomato in the same meal, which would make almost any formulation that fits "pizza" impossible.
(By "Jewish" I include the various derivative sects such as Christianity and Islam. It's all barely-distinguishable shit. A curse on all their houses - when Northern Ireland have finished slaughtering themselves, can we use it as a compactor to throw the rest in in mutually murderous combinations so we can get the fuckers out of our way?)
Surely that means that hidden fees are charged for everything you list : your free in-flight "food" is covered by part of your "ticket" price ; your checked baggage (both the handling and the weight) is covered by part of your "ticket" price ; your "etc" is covered by part of your "ticket" price. But the actual costs of all those items is hidden in the "more expensive up-front ticket".
Me, I can't wait to see what has long been enforced in most of my flying : "Please step onto the scales sir, carrying all your baggage." That's non-commercial flying, but it will eventually get into commercial flying too, because the number-one determinant of airline's costs is the fuel to overcome the weight in the air.
No, this does not violate people's human rights. It enhances them, because it helps you to appreciate the value of every single kilogramme that makes up you. Or, you're free to move along to the next ticket desk.
(Note that there is no implication that they were using the GPS, or even performing espionage of any sort. The particular case I heard of in my fiancee's home area, the guy jailed was simply using it for navigation on a self-organised walking holiday. But in that region, possession is a crime with mandatory 5 years hard labour, and that's what he got sentenced to. Though he was released to the US jail system after only a couple of years, and didn't do much hard labour, I'm told. Very lenient.)
Be very, very sure that the areas you are going to are safe to carry a GPS in. If you're not certain, the safest thing to do is not take it. At all. Map and compass can be dangerous enough but if they are available locally, then you're reasonably safe to get them locally and use them.
Photos on a cell phone ? Meh. Get a decent camera, unless this is going to be a trip you'll be repeating every few months. Your memories will thank you.
Uploading your photos ... well if you're anywhere where there is adequate wireless to actually use a phone, there is going to be faster land-line available through Internet cafes or hotels. Get out there, mix with the people, keep your hand on your wallet (which you mostly emptied into the safe in the hotel, anyway) and experience the place.
Storage ? The last holiday with the wife, we clocked up around 10GB of photos (which we still haven't pruned the dross from), around 1Gb/day for 200-300 photos/day, or an average of a photo every couple of minutes. Look at the size and weight of 8 or 16GB SD cards ... maybe consider a netbook or tablet for transferring them to a USB hard drive as a backup.
If you're going to go to places and do things that you think might get you searched by the authorities, then you've got bigger things to worry about than your photos. Like, lead poisoning for having a GPS. Think for a second about how many airports have "no photography" signs in place ... and then think about how they might take to meeting a dangerous foreigner (that's a tautology of course, everywhere) with a camera and a GPS. (Think also about how often you've seen your local police enforcing the "no photography" zones in your home area.)
Well, my 0.02â worth. Your mileage may vary.
Actually using Windows 7 at the moment, because it's what work have provided on this laptop, for this trip. What I get next trip on the next job, who knows?
errr, bar at the bottom? Same shit that has been there since IIRC Win95. Is that the same as iOS-PussyCat-49 (or whatever the current version is) ... well I'll ask the next person I see using a Mac. Don't expect an answer for several months.
Sorry, but the last training I had in how to use computers was ... back when we made the transition from actual Teletype terminals to "glass Teletype" terminals. Everything else since then I've had to pick up the manual, read it, and then catch up with the work that I've missed while reading it. Which, since I get paid for doing my job, not for being an IT person, generally means that all novel interfaces etc get ignored for 4 or 5 years, and except for systems that I'm paid to use (and teach the use of), half to two-thirds of major releases get skipped. They are not cost-effective.
"granted"? "GRANTED"? Man, can I have a smoke on that. I know I'll fail my next piss test, even if it is in a couple of years, but it must be worth smoking. Or is that just your pay check talking?
Or maybe I'll persuade the IT guys to pass this new version too. Or just stick to using one of the older laptops until they've all burned out.
(I leave the question of "Why should I care?" as an exercise for the reader.)
Which re-raises the prospect of "There you are you little tyke! I told you not to come in here! SLAP!", followed by a leathering for daubing on grandpappy Ug's magic drawing,
"And it's no reindeer steak for you you troublesome little git, straight to bed with a baculum to suck on and think yourself lucky you're not getting thrown out tonight to take your chances with the wolves!"
Wattle is great. It's the daub that can get a little objectionable to work with. Unless the shit is well rotted along with the mud and straw.
When my parents and I were re-wiring their house - back in the early 1970s - we had to remove and then repair substantial areas of lath-and-plaster walling We were replacing the existing strands of single-core wire with rubber and cloth insulation with new cables that used modern plastic insulation. But it used to freak me slightly that the fibre-reinforcement of the plaster (yes, it was a composite material, generally akin to glass-fibre-reinforced-plastic or carbon-fibre-reinforced-epoxy) was strands of horse hair several centimetres long. In perspective it shows me two things : how many horses were around in those days, and how much re-cycling they did in those days.
These days, it would be like collecting the "marbles" of tyre rubber from the roads and using them as building material. And people object to recycling "because it's not what my Daddy did" ? !
Unfortunately the only cinema within 300 miles that showed it ... doesn't have any 3D facilities. There's a possibility that it'll appear at the local Imax theatre one day (though the cave would not permit the entry of Imax cameras), which would be worth the 400-mile round trip to see it. I'd have to get the bus though - I doubt that I'd want to drive with the post-3D headache.
But, having seen the 2D version ... I think it'd be worth the effort to see it in 3D. It's the only film I've said that about.
When did you stop beating your wife?
Then I realised that the original link was to the Torygraph. Which explains it. Rampant lunacy, plus total absence of fact-checking ; QED. The spoof is on them.
Taking my holidays next year in San Serriffe, assuming I can find it again.
Same asphyxiation effect, but with a mild degree of anaesthesia as well.
At (say) 20km height and 100atmospheres per km (of water), the implied pumping technologies are a step forward, but not a major one. 20,000psi (1300 atmospheres) pumping in considerable volumes is an off-the-shelf technology. Another factor of a dozen is likely to be no major deal, given that simultaneous improvement in balloon-supported platforms are implicit in the package.
What interested me more in the story was that balloon-mounted Metropolitan-Area-Networks is one of the communications technologies touted for improving local connectivities without needing to lay lots and lots of new fibre. A balloon technology that can adequately support multiple tons of machinery for months or years is ... well, a balloon technology that can support multiple tons of machinery for months or years. Which will have other uses.
Yes, there are issues about "are the rules adequately communicated before the contract is accepted by entering the premises?" and such like. But fundamentally, they're private property, even if they are places that the public can, under certain conditions, access.
True, but there were errors in all of [the input data, the methods used, the calculations performed] which if done correctly would have predicted the position of Neptune differently to where the planet actually was. So although the discovery followed the calculations, it was essentially discovered accidentally.
Analogy : I form the hypothesis that people with blue trousers often drop their wallets when walking down the high street. I follow a person wearing blue trousers, he drops his wallet, I think my hypothesis is confirmed. However, someone else trying to replicate the work forms an alternative hypothesis that it is people with baggy trousers, regardless of colour, who tend to drop their wallets. But he only gathers one wallet too.
That's the "baggy trousers" hypothesis against the "blue trousers" hypothesis.
(You'll note that neither the "baggy trousers" nor the "blue trousers" hypothesis disputes in the slightest the law of gravity, and the effects of belts are not considered. Also, this is not how Pluto was found.)
Citation please? I'm reasonably up to speed on orbital mechanics, and that is contrary to what I thought I knew, which is that Nemisis/ Niburu/ SillyName2012 is logically dead and there's no evidence for anything much bigger than Sedna and Quaor out there. There may be lots of somethings, but there's not much room (in orbit-mass-temperature-luminosity-location space) for something substantial. One proposal (which I'm downloading for my after-lunch read) maxes out at something "tenths of Earth-mass" at around 100AU perihelion. (yeuch - 80 pages, not printing that!)
I see that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune puts the recurring "mismatch in perturbations" story down to an initial small error in the mass of Neptune, which was corrected by sending a test particle (Voyager 2) past Neptune to weigh it.
(And the trousers analogy ... it's getting simpler to use CCTV cameras to watch *everyone* for dropped wallets. Which is pretty much the technique that Clyde Tombaugh was using to find Pluto.)
But it was a comprehensive survey - anything bright enough to be seen by the telescope/ plate combination, near the ecliptic, should have been caught. And indeed, Pluto was.
Taking a comprehensive survey like that is a pretty clear sign that the director of the search has no plan to direct his search, and instead is looking everywhere, systematically. "Remove all all cushions from armchair ; search armchair. Remove all cushions from sofa, stacking them on armchair ; search sofa ...." Eventually you'll find the keys/ wedding ring/ girlfriend's earring.
KePLer may well have the numerical advantage by now, but the precedence for the techniques certainly goes to orbital timing, not occultation or spectroscopy.
No it wasn't. Oh, it's an AC ... well I'll respond to one of the other people.
I didn't say that I couldn't understand how a geek could enjoy watching Star Trek. I objected to the implication in the original statement comment that liking Star Trek (many versions) enough to spend large amounts of money on buying copies of it is a necessary-if-not-sufficient qualification for being a geek. It's not.
Just as a reduce-to-the-absurd example, Alan Turing would be a pretty good contender for the archetypical geek, but it's a pretty safe bet that he never had an opinion on Star Trek, to like it or dislike it.
Comparing Star Trek to some of the alternative bits of slack-jaw-glassy-eyed entertainment on the telly - say, football, or Coronation Enders and East Street (soap operas) - it's relatively tolerable. But that's not sufficient to get me to spend hundreds or thousands of pounds on copies of it to watch time and time again.
That'll be the advertising psychologists succeeding again.
(Incidentally, we do have a rental account with a DVD company, and we get stuff delivered regularly. Watch once, send back, receive next.Very occasionally watch twice. Our 'send list' is, at current rates, about 5 years long.)
You read passively? You're not continually looking forward to try to work out where it's going, or looking back to see if there's a piece of evidence you missed. (That applies to both fiction and non-fiction.) For fiction, you're not trying to work out what the motivations of particular characters are, or how they're going to get out of this situation? For non-fiction of course, you've got all of (whatever the field is) to review to assess what you're reading, whether you think it's right or not, if it's not right, why not ... Reading is a profoundly active activity. Well, it is for me.
Pretty much the same applies to listening to the radio (I don't know if that applies to listening to music - it did for me, but I was normally listening to the lyrics, and lyrics are, at least for the music I paid attention to before I got rid of my music collection, intensely political and historical).
I wouldn't know what goes through the minds of people watching sport. By observation, it's normally an incitement to bloodlust to see the death of supporters of other teams in the same sport, but I can't claim much understanding at all of the sports fan mentality. They really are a different species.
Pretty much the same comment about art, but without the bloodlust.
Your comments about the non-zero solubility of [anything] in hot water are not incorrect, but not relevant to this work.
The LHB veneer idea doesn't claim that there would be no siderophile elements at the Earth's surface after segregation of the core. It simply states that the early mantle and the early segregating core would have been in (approximate) chemical equilibrium, and consequently the concentrations of different elements in the iron-rich phase compared to the silicate-rich phase would have approximated towards the concentrations predicted from the partition coefficients of the relevant species in the relevant conditions. (This is a tautology - that is what "partition coefficient" means ; whether the conditions approached equilibrium is a more moot point, but they would probably have satisfied my Mantle Petrology tutor's criteria of being to more than 100km depth for more than 100 million years, which is a regime not terribly amenable to experiment.)
However, when one does the sums, and plugs in the experimental data that one has, one finds that there is, in most mantle samples from 3+ billion years ago and 100+km below the surface, more of various elements, including tungsten, gold, PGEs, etc., which should have been taken core-wards with the differentiation of the planet. So, either the segregation process and the rates of diffusion were less efficient than we have reason to believe, or there is something peculiar going on.
It gets more peculiar though ... some sources of samples (diamonds, to be precise) do show mantle materials that have been depleted in siderophile elements to the expected extent (compared to meteorite materials).
So in some places the process works as expected, and in others, it doesn't. Which is damned peculiar. And that peculiarity is what makes them come up with the model of late accretion of a modest amount of (undepleted chondritic) material onto the upper surface of the mantle after the accumulation of 90%+ of the Earth and the segregation of the core.
That puts it into the time scale appropriate for the (probable) Moon-forming Giant Impact, and for the considerably later "Late Heavy Bombardment", but I've not yet seen anyone explicitly linking the 3 events into two or even one event.
Memo to self : must make time to attend the next public lecture I hear of being given by Moorbath; this is a dead-interesting topic.
Hmmm, memo to self : try to get the transport secretary to organise me on the sleeper train home from London, when this bloody job is over!
As it is, I had nearly 10 years of having the tax man coming round annually demanding to know why I wasn't paying my TV tax. Which tends to get one annoyed.
Yeah, why would you watch live TV, except for news/ current affairs stuff? But where do you live that you can't get a free satellite feed? Northern Alaska? Even here off the east coast of Africa we can get at least one news channel free (I've only explored the camp's TV set up for a couple of minutes in the nearly 2 months I've been here - it's generally tuned to either football, cricket, or some Swahili soap opera). Otherwise, yes, we do a fair bit of chit-chat to and from when we're watching some TV, or I'll be listening and reading something and chip in when I've got something to say.
You missed out the "self-respecting geek", and the "passive, slack-jawed consumption", which changes what you're answering considerably from what I said.
Advertising-funded anything tends strongly to need to suppress the critical facilities of the consumer, because they (the psychologists in the advertising companies) want you to react to the advertising (and buy "Brand X", not "Brand Y"), not think about whether you need an "X" or a "Y" at all. TV people, working in advertising-funded environments, respond to those requirements. Hence, for example, MTV. Hence pretty much all team sports broadcasting (I'm trying to think of a counter-example in team sports, but I can't. However it's possible that there is a counterexample.)
Bearing in mind that autism being a spectrum, includes the "normal" population (they're just normally autistic, not abnormally autistic), then obviously I'll score somewhere on that. I took a test a while ago ... but that site is blocked, and I can't remember what my score was. Whatever, I was somewhere several SDs away from the norm, but not far enough out to be labelled as "autistic", or Aspy ... So I just went and found one, in the process finding out that Simon Baron-Cohen (a name I knew) is a researcher in autism spectrum disorders (which I didn't know, or didn't know explicitly), and found a score of 37, which is fairly high. Anyway, as the associated reading implies, since it doesn't cause me any distress, it's obviously not a problem.
Digressions into what autism is aside, well so what? Significant degrees of autistic behaviours are generally accepted to be more common in in the "geek" population than in the "normal" population. So?
Read what I wrote, not what you wanted to read.
I'm trying to remember who the advertising guy was who, a couple of years ago, suggested that skipping the advertising in TV, movies etc was the moral equivalent of mugging old ladies. The event fixed in my memory, but the non-entity advertising anthropoid didn't.
I spend quite a bit of time listening to documentary material on the radio (I believe there are also music channels on the radio, though I've not bothered to research them since the late 1980s when I re-tuned to Radio 4) ; but I'm almost always doing something else as well - reading a book, shooting aliens, writing papers for work. Something that can be put down if necessary to concentrate on something form the radio.
Radio reception is getting much worse these days, so I often use the radio channels from the satellite dish, through the TV.
Did I read about 11/9 on 12/9? No, of course not ; we didn't have any flights that day, so no newspapers. And at that time we didn't have Internet access either. No, I heard about it in newsflashes through the day on the radio, then had to break the news about it to an American mud man on his first trip abroad when he came on shift in the evening. He thought that I was playing some very sick joke on him, and was getting quite close to punching me when the top-of-the-hour news programme came on the radio, repeating what I'd just told him.
I remember the day quite clearly because of that.
(Someone is going to come up with a Simpsons character called Hammurabi now. I can just feel it.)
I'm a geek, and self-respecting.
I don't have any Star Trek seasons on any media, and I'm pretty sure I've not got any single episodes either. At 7 seasons each to TNG and Voy(ager?), I'd guess that I've seen maybe a third of each, when the telly in the communal lounge has been playing them and I've been in for a read or a smoke. DS9 stands for "Deep Space 9"? and I've seen bits of a Voyager-ish but not Voyager Star Trek, so I guess that's DS9, yes? Or maybe it's Bablylon 5? There's a black/white/flashing purple hole that appears as a plot element every 30 seconds?
Whichever, I'm fairly sure that I've not watched a complete episode of either.
But then again, I did spend over a decade without a TV and would prefer to not have one these days (the wife insists).
I'm trying to work out why any self-respecting geek would participate in any pastime that requires passive, slack-jawed consumption of entertainment over something that requires active involvement.