Some people are a bit bothered why the chemist in TFA is careful with his words about the origin of the samples.
'After examining the data, I think it's a dead ringer for the MC252 oil, as good a match as I've seen. My guess is that it is probably coming from the broken riser pipe or sunken platform.'
I can think of at least one plausible (and very unwelcome) scenario that could have Macondo reservoir oil coming up to the surface, but not from the original well. Actually, now I can think of three ways.
There could be a leak from one of the two relief wells. Which would be unwelcome in the extreme, but at least they're known quantities, and re-entering a well in good condition for an "intervention" is a pretty routine operation. That's the nice option that has Macondo oil coming to surface but not from the MC252 well.
Alternatively, with all the high-pressure operations happening on the MC252 well and on the relief wells, then it's possible to have fractured the cap rock over the HPHT (high pressure high temperature) reservoir, allowing oil and gas to start to migrate up to the surface, in exactly the same way that natural oil seeps occur all over the Gulf (and other oil provinces). That could be the start of a long-drawn out process of draining the reservoir to surface. Which shouldn't take more than a few centuries.
Actually, there is a third plausible option : searching for naturally occurring oil seeps is a well-established technique for exploration. I've had several satellite imagery companies trying to convince me of the value of their imagery and analysis tools for finding precisely this sort of oil seep, as a guide to where to put your seismic boats, then your seabed samplers, then your drilling rigs, then your production platforms. I don't know if BP/Andarko used seep-tracking in their prospecting in this area, but it's certainly possible. In which case, this may just be a "normal" seep that is being noticed because of the intense scrutiny of the area.
Anyway, with those several possibilities, the chemist is being correctly cautious about attributing the origin of the oil. He can be confident that the oil has the same characteristics as the ones that he's measured from the main flow, and that suggests but does not prove the point of origin, or the reason for the oil coming to the surface.
Oil from the rig?
It's not impossible that there was enough crude in storage on the Deepwater Horizon for it to have started seeping now. But it's fairly unlikely. By the stage they'd got to in the well, they should have finished testing the well, and the testing equipment spread would have been being stripped down for return to shore (and taken OFF RENTAL, as the encouragement to get it done NOW). You don't ship separators, chicksans, production chokes etc full of anything other than thin air, let alone full of flammables. So there is unlikely to have been more than a few gallons of Macondo crude onboard. Plenty of diesel, lube oils, gas bottles for the galley or the welder, certainly helicopter fuel... but Macondo crude itself is unlikely to have been present in more than sample quantities. And all of those hydrocarbons have very different chemical signatures, so should be easily distinguished.
Cue a thousand American "news" outlets incorrectly referring to BP as "British Petroleum" and implying that it is somehow linked to the unAmerican-ness of the company that allowed such a terrible thing to happen.
Don't forget that they'll also forget about the other partner companies in the well, who are jointly and severally liable along with BP. But since that's likely to result in bankruptcies and lost jobs in the US South as the companies fold, it'll probably not be noticed.
First, you might want to consult with your physician about the dosage of your meds.
What the fuck prompted that?
You made a comment about panspermia concepts ; I replied ; we're exchanging ideas civilly, then you come out with the typewritten equivalent of throwing a beer in my face. If anyone should be checking meds, it isn't me (BTW the doses are one set of tabs of a broad-spectrum antibiotic, one set of industrial grade antihistamines, and malaria prophylaxis ; and I competed the first two courses yesterday with the infected bite having shrunk away nicely, thank you. The malaria prophylaxis continues until after I finish this job.
Second, nobody's reading this old thread except you and me, so we may as well have a private discussion.
The thread is what - 5 days old? You never encounter discussions that continue for years? Weird planet you live on.
Anyway, in the spirit that you obviously think is appropriate, go fuck a creationist and make the world another retard.
Oh, and how do youknow that no-one else is reading this thread?
Some points as they occur to me - then I've got EoWR to write.
1a - consider the Jack Hills and Acasta detrital zircons with the oxygen isotope compositions appropriate to an active hydrological cycle... and which seemingly date back as far as 4300Ma, if not older. The work is replicated, from multiple areas. The belief that the planet had a thoroughly molten surface any significant time after the Moon-forming Giant Impact... is in serious trouble form material evidence. It always had difficulty from an energy balance point of view - the flux of radiation varies as the 4th or 5th (I forget) power of the absolute temperature, so to have sustained fusion of a primitive crust requires a seriously greater whole-planet temperature than a planet with localised fusion around impacts, out-gassing volcanoes, etc. So the global magma ocean idea has long had difficulties. Putting a hydrological cycle onto the surface at 4300Ma give it real difficulty.
1b - 1a, 1b, and 1c are not mutually exclusive. Surface reseeding from remnant deep ocean basins, from lithophagic ("rock eating") organisms, and from re-impacting small debris could all happen sequentially or simultaneously (at which point, "re-seeding" becomes a dodgy concept). I note that "deep genomics" is seeing the deep roots of the "tree of life" as being a ring of organisms interlinked by considerable horizontal gene transfer, but with many of the most deeply-rooted genes being related to modern hyperthermophile genes. Which is what you'd more-or-less expect from the rather messy model above.
2a,b,c - ALL panspermia models have the problem that life has to originate somewhere, either in space or on a planet. Then it has to get here without being destroyed through space. Then it has to proliferate in the extremely different environment on a planet's surface. That is at least one major environmental change (space->planet) which is going to be a bottleneck, along with a (probably) low probability step (non-life->life). That is a pair of low probability events happening pretty independently, so you multiply the probabilities together and get an even lower probability.
Life exists here ; the Copernican Principle ("we don't live anywhere particularly unusual") then suggests that life is not terribly uncommon. So tieing together two low probability to get a relatively common event... doesn't work.
You seem to be moving towards what I'd call a "weak panspermia" : the generation of "pre-biotic molecules" as a normal part of (inter-)stellar chemistry leads to developing solar systems having large (relatively) amounts of interesting compounds available if any solvent-wetted variably-energetic environment develops. Plate tectonics on Earth (possibly, briefly on Mars, differently on Venus) ; vigorous volcanism on Io ; ice flexure above a water-ocean on Europa ; methane rainfall on Titan. All would have been peppered with ain interesting mix. Which may (or may not) have resulted in development of life.
"Weak panspermia" you will note does not require the development of life to produce the various interesting chemicals. It is a non-biological idea. So calling it a "panspermia" is more to contrast it with the stronger panspermia daydreams people have, including the ones that are religion with modesty boards (to stop scientists looking up god's skirt).
3 - "Universal panspermia" probably isn't impossible (I use the term to mean what the term means, not "low probability"), but it's probability is pretty low and is extremely unlikely to be influenced by your likes and dislikes. After all, it probably happened before you were born to have ideas (odds less than 100:13,700,000,000, assuming that you're less than 100 years old).
4 - you've been reading plenty of SF (says the guy with a hard drive full of SF). Try working out just how you're going to do this. Your projectiles are going to be limited to survivable impact velocities (say 300km/s = 0.001c, very generous to
If you're really going to ignore the underlying causes of the decline of the US
Again you seem to think that I do, or should, give a firm shit about what is happening in the US. I'll spell it out for you : with the exception of the small number of pleasant Americans that I've met, most of whom have already fled the country's territory, if not it's tax man, I greatly enjoying watching the decline of America into a second-world country. It's long overdue and well earned. And the internally-focussed habit the Americans have (which you're repeatedly demonstrating) of referring to everything solely in terms of how it affects America, is one of the reason that people the world over are cheering as your country falls to pieces around your ears.
It's better than any entertainment that Hollywood provides. Not that that is difficult, itself often being concerned solely with parochial matters.
I'm not going to wholly ignore the causes of the decline of America - I often celebrate and encourage them with a fine glass of beer (not, it should be said, the anaemic maiden's piss-watter that passes for "beer" according to your advertising media).
The next post over (in my choice from the headlines is one part of the hilarity. How on earth can a country (allegedy) in the 21st century still have so many religious idiots in power? And you've had a generation grow up complaining about Iranian Ayatollahs and not seeing the irony.
With regards to punctuation, the colon and semicolon are grouped with the preceding word for the sake of making reading less ambiguous; they are a form of terminator.
Read programming manuals for most programming languages : while few dictate precisely how whitespace is deployed, this sort of deployment is very common.
As for the sociology : I've got data to upload while the network works. I'm sure your local phonebook has people in it who are interested in sociology.
I think an unspoken assumption you are making is that the evolution of life "advances" toward intelligence linearly at a common rate. This isn't really accurate. Advanced life does not necessarily mean intelligent life.
Simon Conway-Morris would disagree with you on that. I don't necessarily agree with him, but he's a sufficiently respected figure in evolutionary theory and palaeontology (and arguing a contrarian point of view) that you've at least got to read his opinions.
We can look for examples in the communities surviving around deep ocean thermal vents (which are likely the best analog we have for the environment in Europa's oceans).
The assertion is often made that these life forms are independent of the surface, existing solely on chemical and geothermal energy. This assertion is wrong for many of the community : they use photosynthesised oxygen to oxidise geologically supplied electron donors. Photosynthesis at Europa, at around 5.2AU, will have at best 1/27.04 of the productivity of that on Earth, falling by another factor of [several] for every metre below the ice surface that the light has to go through. Hydrothermal vents may be the best analogue we have for possible Europan life, but it's not necessarily a very good analogue, and could certainly be over-played.
The latest evidence has fossil life appearing on Earth so soon after the LHB that it is implausible it evolved here.
Having just downloaded the paper to read over lunch and siesta, I'm wondering what makes you find the idea of life evolving on Earth so implausible that you're willing to accept the severe difficulties of panspermia, and the unresolved difficulty of having to have somewhere that life did originally evolve at. Not forgetting of course that there is only time for a limited number of panspermia cycles before you're back into a galaxy too metal-poor for life (as we know it) to exist.
I do agree that the timetable is getting a little crowded, but not enough to make me think "implausible". For example, I look at modelling that suggests that in a word with oceans and something resembling plate tectonics, even major impactors are not necessarily effective sterilising agents. Which makes the timing of the LBH less of an issue. And the advances in study of plausible pre-biotic chemistry are continuing apace.
(Afternoon, because we lost internet connection and I'd pulled another long shift.)
Read the paper. Doesn't much relate to the LHB, except pointing out that, for the ejecta considered, a significant fraction - several percent - re-impacts with the Earth within 30ka of a major impact. 30ka is their line in the sand for survival of viable organisms on a piece of ejecta. Which they take as plausible for re-seeding the Earth after a sterilising impact. Which, as I said above, reduces the significance of the LHB as a line before which life could not have evolved.
What makes you think that I am part of any American solution, or problem.
My spacing of punctuation is my choice. I happen to think that it looks better. Your opinion may differ, feel free, but I don't do it by accident, I do it by design.
(FWIW - I developed the habit with some particularly recalcitrant hyper-stylised technical documentation where such techniques were often necessary to achieve even vaguely legible text.)
They should re-think the location of that sign. Presumably if you're in the polling station, you've participated.
Was chatting to an Aussie in the bar a few nights ago, and if I understood him correctly he was saying that, because voting is compulsory in Australia, and they count your ID card on entry to the polling station, then no small number of people go to the polling station, take a form and throw it un-voted into the ballot box. Which is about the lowest level of participation you can get. Even writing "none of the above" is a more valid expression of intent.
No business will do anything that is a pure cost ; if they do anything beyond the completion of their contract, it's as part of trying to get the next contract.
I don't know what support the Danish government leases for LO, assuming they have anything, but having support on a lease keeps them keen, because the support company is always trying to justify the next pay cheque.
On the other hand, as a sole supplier of proprietary software, we like leasing software because we get regular payments for it. And if the customer stops paying, the software stops working. Which keeps us honest, and them.
I really hope you don't pass that viewpoint on to your biological/
Of course that's not going to happen. Do I look like a psychopathic sadist to you?
academic/
One of the jobs of academe is to push and pull people to higher levels. Having high expectations is a pretty basic part of that. The sub-standard students, you haul up to standard (your standard, not theirs); the above-standard students you push to exceed both of your expectations ; expectations rise.
Comfortable in your cave? Want to try booting this "fire" thing I've discovered?
corporate successors.
It's self defence : get 90% of the company afraid to compete with you, and be the "goto" guy for problems that are challenging the other 10%... you're in a position that is relatively safe from redundancy.
As for the future ; I don't care much (the academic argument is the one I care most about, and my standards are not high enough for academia) because, DOH!, it's the future : I'll be dead in the future and won't be caring then. Meantime, I can keep up.
Smoke from any burning organic matter is a carcinogen.
Ummm, is there non-organic matter that you can burn?
Coal : organic?
OK, you could probably burn graphite, which is effectively not-organic-any-more, though some graphite deposits have the isotopic signatures of having been through several RuBisCo cycles, which means organic fixation at some point in the past.
You might just possibly be able to sustain a fire with pyrites, but it's going to be difficult. And even then, the sulphur isotope composition in many pyrite deposits shows strong evidence of the sulphide having been through organic action at some point in the deposition process.
I know that plant genomes are generally bigger, and platypi are very interesting, but, come on, priorities people.
I think that you'll find that the priorities of the people who sequenced the platypus probably centred on doing something interesting with their limited resources.
These may not be your priorities, but they are the priorities of the people who chose to do the work - including the work of preparing and submitting the grant applications for funding to do the work.
My older brother has been "randomly selected" for several flights in a row
[..]
But our democratic republic uses "secret lists" now to persecute people. What can you do?
Err:
(1) Check for sure that your brother isn't actually a terrorist. More than a few sucessful(-ish) terrorists in the past have kept it from their families. Others have been shopped by their families. YMMV.
(2) Change your country by becoming politically active. (This may adversely affect your health, morality, or free time.)
(3) Change your country by emigrating to one whose policies you find more sympathetic - assuming that you are a sufficiently useful member of society that you'd be acceptable as an immigrant.
Oh, sorry, you wanted an opportunity to rant and complain and not actually do anything? Well go right ahead. Floor is yours. Turn the lights off when you leave.
That only works as long as the payment is not complete
did you not read or understand?
Once payment is complete (note that word!), then pretty much any support request is met with "I'm sorry, our support worker for that arena need all documents submitted in 1982 VolksWriter files and written in Ancient Sumerian." Support (on a completed contract) is a cost, to be minimised. If there is no expectation or hope of a repeat sale, or re-licensing, then there is no reason to expect any income stream to come from responding to support requests. The only reasons for then honouring support requests are contractual, reputation or... well, it's business so "honour" is a 4-letter word.
Which is why our software isn't sold, it's leased. And the supprot (sic) department have (and try to adhere to) a 3-rings phone policy. And we fix bugs. And they'll read any document they can (including ODF formats).
No what will happen is like most government crap they'll pass the costs over to businesses who will know have to deal with TWO Office suites and all the bullshit and compatibility that comes with it.
Businesses don't have to deal with two office suites. They do have to comply with the law.
How long have you been employed by Microsoft (or a front company for their PR department)?
Errr, are you deliberately not typing "nooks of the internet" as some sort of joke on how much internet there is and how it blows your mind, or did you get your spell-checker trained by the Shakespearean monkeys?
Even with substituting a comma for the 'm', I don't understand you. You obviously 'get' that I'm using 'diameter' as "minimum separation of two parallel planes necessary for the object to pass between those planes"... but then you lose me.
What is the edge length of the largest cube that can be passed through a unit cube (i.e. a cube of edge length "1" in whatever system of measure you choose. In a Euclidian geometry.
There is a good reason I posed the rhetorical question.
continuity is a mathematical concept that doesn't exist in reality if you look deep enough.
Mathematical concepts don't exist in reality? A lot of people could ADD to that discussion, but there is a high probability of DIVIDING the audience into mutually mis-communicating groups, which would MULTIPLY the number of times I'd need to explain things, and in turn SUBTRACT from my time in the pub.
Pretty much all of which are undesirable outcomes, in my book. And in the pub's books too.
I don't know what you think of as "continuity" in the sense of a mathematical concept, and I don't have a precise definition of it since I don't claim to be a mathematician (competent at arithmetic is as far as I'd go ; and if that means a million-line spreadsheet rather than a ten line program, so be it), but I do have a pretty good handle on what is a continuous function, what is a discontinuous function, why it's important to differentiate (hah!) between the two , and how to get around the problem if you have to integrate a discontinuous function.
The driller on the brake or the derrickman in the pits may not recognise their pit management of a well kill as involving functions of any sort (apart from squeaking the brake, or opening a valve), but they do. And that is a very real-world piece of reality.
Slashdot Mirror
My school text books had long articles on how the seismic signatures of earthquakes and explosions differed.
That was in 1978.
I can think of at least one plausible (and very unwelcome) scenario that could have Macondo reservoir oil coming up to the surface, but not from the original well. Actually, now I can think of three ways.
There could be a leak from one of the two relief wells. Which would be unwelcome in the extreme, but at least they're known quantities, and re-entering a well in good condition for an "intervention" is a pretty routine operation. That's the nice option that has Macondo oil coming to surface but not from the MC252 well.
Alternatively, with all the high-pressure operations happening on the MC252 well and on the relief wells, then it's possible to have fractured the cap rock over the HPHT (high pressure high temperature) reservoir, allowing oil and gas to start to migrate up to the surface, in exactly the same way that natural oil seeps occur all over the Gulf (and other oil provinces). That could be the start of a long-drawn out process of draining the reservoir to surface. Which shouldn't take more than a few centuries.
Actually, there is a third plausible option : searching for naturally occurring oil seeps is a well-established technique for exploration. I've had several satellite imagery companies trying to convince me of the value of their imagery and analysis tools for finding precisely this sort of oil seep, as a guide to where to put your seismic boats, then your seabed samplers, then your drilling rigs, then your production platforms. I don't know if BP/Andarko used seep-tracking in their prospecting in this area, but it's certainly possible. In which case, this may just be a "normal" seep that is being noticed because of the intense scrutiny of the area.
Anyway, with those several possibilities, the chemist is being correctly cautious about attributing the origin of the oil. He can be confident that the oil has the same characteristics as the ones that he's measured from the main flow, and that suggests but does not prove the point of origin, or the reason for the oil coming to the surface.
Oil from the rig?
It's not impossible that there was enough crude in storage on the Deepwater Horizon for it to have started seeping now. But it's fairly unlikely. By the stage they'd got to in the well, they should have finished testing the well, and the testing equipment spread would have been being stripped down for return to shore (and taken OFF RENTAL, as the encouragement to get it done NOW). You don't ship separators, chicksans, production chokes etc full of anything other than thin air, let alone full of flammables. So there is unlikely to have been more than a few gallons of Macondo crude onboard. Plenty of diesel, lube oils, gas bottles for the galley or the welder, certainly helicopter fuel ... but Macondo crude itself is unlikely to have been present in more than sample quantities. And all of those hydrocarbons have very different chemical signatures, so should be easily distinguished.
Don't forget that they'll also forget about the other partner companies in the well, who are jointly and severally liable along with BP. But since that's likely to result in bankruptcies and lost jobs in the US South as the companies fold, it'll probably not be noticed.
What the fuck prompted that?
You made a comment about panspermia concepts ; I replied ; we're exchanging ideas civilly, then you come out with the typewritten equivalent of throwing a beer in my face. If anyone should be checking meds, it isn't me (BTW the doses are one set of tabs of a broad-spectrum antibiotic, one set of industrial grade antihistamines, and malaria prophylaxis ; and I competed the first two courses yesterday with the infected bite having shrunk away nicely, thank you. The malaria prophylaxis continues until after I finish this job.
The thread is what - 5 days old? You never encounter discussions that continue for years? Weird planet you live on.
Anyway, in the spirit that you obviously think is appropriate, go fuck a creationist and make the world another retard.
Oh, and how do you know that no-one else is reading this thread?
What ma I going to do now for cryptographically strong random numbers now? Count radioactive decays or something?
Life exists here ; the Copernican Principle ("we don't live anywhere particularly unusual") then suggests that life is not terribly uncommon. So tieing together two low probability to get a relatively common event
You seem to be moving towards what I'd call a "weak panspermia" : the generation of "pre-biotic molecules" as a normal part of (inter-)stellar chemistry leads to developing solar systems having large (relatively) amounts of interesting compounds available if any solvent-wetted variably-energetic environment develops. Plate tectonics on Earth (possibly, briefly on Mars, differently on Venus) ; vigorous volcanism on Io ; ice flexure above a water-ocean on Europa ; methane rainfall on Titan. All would have been peppered with ain interesting mix. Which may (or may not) have resulted in development of life.
"Weak panspermia" you will note does not require the development of life to produce the various interesting chemicals. It is a non-biological idea. So calling it a "panspermia" is more to contrast it with the stronger panspermia daydreams people have, including the ones that are religion with modesty boards (to stop scientists looking up god's skirt).
Again you seem to think that I do, or should, give a firm shit about what is happening in the US. I'll spell it out for you : with the exception of the small number of pleasant Americans that I've met, most of whom have already fled the country's territory, if not it's tax man, I greatly enjoying watching the decline of America into a second-world country. It's long overdue and well earned. And the internally-focussed habit the Americans have (which you're repeatedly demonstrating) of referring to everything solely in terms of how it affects America, is one of the reason that people the world over are cheering as your country falls to pieces around your ears.
It's better than any entertainment that Hollywood provides. Not that that is difficult, itself often being concerned solely with parochial matters.
I'm not going to wholly ignore the causes of the decline of America - I often celebrate and encourage them with a fine glass of beer (not, it should be said, the anaemic maiden's piss-watter that passes for "beer" according to your advertising media).
The next post over (in my choice from the headlines is one part of the hilarity. How on earth can a country (allegedy) in the 21st century still have so many religious idiots in power? And you've had a generation grow up complaining about Iranian Ayatollahs and not seeing the irony.
Read programming manuals for most programming languages : while few dictate precisely how whitespace is deployed, this sort of deployment is very common.
As for the sociology : I've got data to upload while the network works. I'm sure your local phonebook has people in it who are interested in sociology.
Simon Conway-Morris would disagree with you on that. I don't necessarily agree with him, but he's a sufficiently respected figure in evolutionary theory and palaeontology (and arguing a contrarian point of view) that you've at least got to read his opinions.
The assertion is often made that these life forms are independent of the surface, existing solely on chemical and geothermal energy. This assertion is wrong for many of the community : they use photosynthesised oxygen to oxidise geologically supplied electron donors. Photosynthesis at Europa, at around 5.2AU, will have at best 1/27.04 of the productivity of that on Earth, falling by another factor of [several] for every metre below the ice surface that the light has to go through. Hydrothermal vents may be the best analogue we have for possible Europan life, but it's not necessarily a very good analogue, and could certainly be over-played.
Having just downloaded the paper to read over lunch and siesta, I'm wondering what makes you find the idea of life evolving on Earth so implausible that you're willing to accept the severe difficulties of panspermia, and the unresolved difficulty of having to have somewhere that life did originally evolve at. Not forgetting of course that there is only time for a limited number of panspermia cycles before you're back into a galaxy too metal-poor for life (as we know it) to exist.
I do agree that the timetable is getting a little crowded, but not enough to make me think "implausible". For example, I look at modelling that suggests that in a word with oceans and something resembling plate tectonics, even major impactors are not necessarily effective sterilising agents. Which makes the timing of the LBH less of an issue. And the advances in study of plausible pre-biotic chemistry are continuing apace.
(Afternoon, because we lost internet connection and I'd pulled another long shift.)
Read the paper. Doesn't much relate to the LHB, except pointing out that, for the ejecta considered, a significant fraction - several percent - re-impacts with the Earth within 30ka of a major impact. 30ka is their line in the sand for survival of viable organisms on a piece of ejecta. Which they take as plausible for re-seeding the Earth after a sterilising impact. Which, as I said above, reduces the significance of the LHB as a line before which life could not have evolved.
My spacing of punctuation is my choice. I happen to think that it looks better. Your opinion may differ, feel free, but I don't do it by accident, I do it by design. (FWIW - I developed the habit with some particularly recalcitrant hyper-stylised technical documentation where such techniques were often necessary to achieve even vaguely legible text.)
Was chatting to an Aussie in the bar a few nights ago, and if I understood him correctly he was saying that, because voting is compulsory in Australia, and they count your ID card on entry to the polling station, then no small number of people go to the polling station, take a form and throw it un-voted into the ballot box. Which is about the lowest level of participation you can get. Even writing "none of the above" is a more valid expression of intent.
Point, yes. Hadn't thought of that one. I was working through lists of things that people burn for fuel and didn't think more widely.
Actually, it might not be that bad a project name. It has a sort of "Motley Fule" tone to it.
I don't know what support the Danish government leases for LO, assuming they have anything, but having support on a lease keeps them keen, because the support company is always trying to justify the next pay cheque.
On the other hand, as a sole supplier of proprietary software, we like leasing software because we get regular payments for it. And if the customer stops paying, the software stops working. Which keeps us honest, and them.
Of course that's not going to happen. Do I look like a psychopathic sadist to you?
One of the jobs of academe is to push and pull people to higher levels. Having high expectations is a pretty basic part of that. The sub-standard students, you haul up to standard (your standard, not theirs); the above-standard students you push to exceed both of your expectations ; expectations rise.
Comfortable in your cave? Want to try booting this "fire" thing I've discovered?
It's self defence : get 90% of the company afraid to compete with you, and be the "goto" guy for problems that are challenging the other 10% ... you're in a position that is relatively safe from redundancy.
As for the future ; I don't care much (the academic argument is the one I care most about, and my standards are not high enough for academia) because, DOH!, it's the future : I'll be dead in the future and won't be caring then. Meantime, I can keep up.
Ummm, is there non-organic matter that you can burn?
Coal : organic?
OK, you could probably burn graphite, which is effectively not-organic-any-more, though some graphite deposits have the isotopic signatures of having been through several RuBisCo cycles, which means organic fixation at some point in the past.
You might just possibly be able to sustain a fire with pyrites, but it's going to be difficult. And even then, the sulphur isotope composition in many pyrite deposits shows strong evidence of the sulphide having been through organic action at some point in the deposition process.
I think that you'll find that the priorities of the people who sequenced the platypus probably centred on doing something interesting with their limited resources.
These may not be your priorities, but they are the priorities of the people who chose to do the work - including the work of preparing and submitting the grant applications for funding to do the work.
Err :
Oh, sorry, you wanted an opportunity to rant and complain and not actually do anything? Well go right ahead. Floor is yours. Turn the lights off when you leave.
did you not read or understand?
Once payment is complete (note that word!), then pretty much any support request is met with "I'm sorry, our support worker for that arena need all documents submitted in 1982 VolksWriter files and written in Ancient Sumerian." Support (on a completed contract) is a cost, to be minimised. If there is no expectation or hope of a repeat sale, or re-licensing, then there is no reason to expect any income stream to come from responding to support requests. The only reasons for then honouring support requests are contractual, reputation or ... well, it's business so "honour" is a 4-letter word.
Which is why our software isn't sold, it's leased. And the supprot (sic) department have (and try to adhere to) a 3-rings phone policy. And we fix bugs. And they'll read any document they can (including ODF formats).
Businesses don't have to deal with two office suites. They do have to comply with the law.
How long have you been employed by Microsoft (or a front company for their PR department)?
Errr, are you deliberately not typing "nooks of the internet" as some sort of joke on how much internet there is and how it blows your mind, or did you get your spell-checker trained by the Shakespearean monkeys?
I don't. People tend to live down to what is expected of them.
What is the edge length of the largest cube that can be passed through a unit cube (i.e. a cube of edge length "1" in whatever system of measure you choose. In a Euclidian geometry.
There is a good reason I posed the rhetorical question.
Mathematical concepts don't exist in reality? A lot of people could ADD to that discussion, but there is a high probability of DIVIDING the audience into mutually mis-communicating groups, which would MULTIPLY the number of times I'd need to explain things, and in turn SUBTRACT from my time in the pub.
Pretty much all of which are undesirable outcomes, in my book. And in the pub's books too.
I don't know what you think of as "continuity" in the sense of a mathematical concept, and I don't have a precise definition of it since I don't claim to be a mathematician (competent at arithmetic is as far as I'd go ; and if that means a million-line spreadsheet rather than a ten line program, so be it), but I do have a pretty good handle on what is a continuous function, what is a discontinuous function, why it's important to differentiate (hah!) between the two , and how to get around the problem if you have to integrate a discontinuous function.
The driller on the brake or the derrickman in the pits may not recognise their pit management of a well kill as involving functions of any sort (apart from squeaking the brake, or opening a valve), but they do. And that is a very real-world piece of reality.