The sounds are not utterly unfounded in reality either : a significant number of dinosaur genera have substantial oro-nasal cavities, which were long thought to be possibly resonant chambers. I recall that early in my existence on the Internet, in the early 1990s, there was a sound file around from the results of a supercomputer attack on the problem... I think for Parasaurolophus... and I recall that the sound was in.AU or.AIFF format, because I had to learn more than I wished to know about sound formats to play it. Let's see what Google can come up with :
Anyway, what required a supercomputer 14 years ago should be relatively routine these days, so if you've got a sufficiently well-preserved skull that you can CAT/ MRI scan it to get the internal dimensions of the air spaces, and can make reasonable assumptions about the soft tissues, then you should be able to get some idea about the sounds that could be made.
Add in some artistic interpretation... lather, rinse, repeat.
Too bad you don't remember the name of the movie.:)
It was a remake... not long ago...
Nope, sorry, can't come up with it. And now I'm getting distracted by having discovered Star Trek porn parodies, which is a pretty safe indication that I've spent too long on this.
If you think the US Air Force's space initiatives are about "cataloging space debris", I've got a HAARP facility in Alaska that I'm willing to sell you, cheap.
They do need to track space debris if they're going to launch [more] weapons into it.
Surely... wouldn't it be more effective to launch the [weapons, telescopes, whatever] around or past the debris, rather than launching directly into the debris?
OK, perhaps if you're trying to "shoot up" (rather than "shoot down") a particular piece of space debris, then this might be an effective way of doing it, but for the more general case, it's not going to be terribly helpful.
I guarantee there is a or backdoor master key that will allow law enforcement to access the drive.
And since the press release is on the "toshiba.com" (i.e., US) website, and refers to "NIST"-approved practices (i.e. US NSA approved, therefore US-spooks readable), I think that your suspicion is well-founded.
I'll stick to using non-corporate, non-US encryption, thanks.
As far as I can tell, there is a desire is to ban systems which the Russian government cannot easily eavesdrop on, but there is no aim at "banning encrypted applications".
Why am I thinking of the "Clipper" fiasco of a few POTUS ago? That couldn't happen here, surely? (For many values of "here", including both American non-American values. And Russian values of "here", too.)
2a. Market a range of special "Bear Tasering" rechargeable batteries for Tasers.
2b. Get Sony to put miniaturised video cameras into the batteries, which only activate after (about) 20 bear Taserings ; put some shitty DRM on the camera's recordings.
2c. Users get used to Tasering bears ; bears get pissed off.
2d. Batteries start running their cameras instead of powering the Tasers.
2e. Sony's DRM means that you have an excellent collection of gory videos of pissed-off bears ripping the heads off retarded bear-Taser-ing rednecks, which you can now sell, sell and re-sell.
3. Profit.
And it's all almost ethically sound. Well, you'd probably have to give the bears some sort of compensation, like feeding them the rest of the retard's family too. But that shouldn't be terribly controversial. It's not like they're worthwhile humans, is it?
Still, that would be an awful long 3 minutes to consider the options.
Options?
Headfirst;
Feetfirst;
Bellyflop?
I recall an otherwise tedious film with an early scene of someone who bellyflopped from a great (i.e. aviation) height, impacting into a compressed gravel road. The "bones" on their mannequin had been broken in an impressively large (but probably unrealistic) number of places. I almost wish the rest of the film had been as memorable as those flexible arms.
Every diver will tell you what happens if you depressurize too fast.
Well... every properly-trained diver will tell you what the text books say happens over a period of time, if you depressurise by too much, and too fast, with the wrong chemistry.
Unfortunately, as an AC has pointed out, dropping by a half of a bar isn't likely to do much to you very fast. (Note that commercial airliners are pressurised to around a half-a-bar.) The no-stops time for diving at 20m is (checks tables... ) 45 minutes, for 10m it's 219 minutes, and for 5m it's going to be a bloody long time. The time to onset of symptoms, if they ever happen, is going to be correspondingly long.
Frankly, the concentration gradients across your tissues are going to be pretty low, which is going to translate to low rates of reaction.
My €0.05-worth is - why bring in experts when you can interview the pilot who got sucked out of the window of his plane a few years back. Oh, hang on, that's been done ; that doesn't make for a very good story. Oh well. Next story, please.
Last summer, when the oil geyser had been flowing uninhibited for over two months, I posted here about my idea
Well, it's compactly presented and has obviously had fair thought applied to it, so it deserves a reasoned response.
for using the US Navy's portable nuclear reactors to power air pumps that would oxygenate ocean waters affected by the spill. The oxygen would feed the bacteria already present in the water that happily consume seeped oil.
... which would work until the [bacterial] populations reached the next limiting nutrient after oxygen. So you need to apply other nutrients than just oxygen, and you need to apply the right ones in the right quantities at the right times. That's going to vary from place to place, and possibly from time to time. The research programmes to provide this information will need to be started years or decades before the event occurs. So, someone, somewhere needs to get cracking on that problem yesterday, if not sooner. (Whether that someone is the consumer or the vendor is a different political issue, best left to politicians.)
The slick on the surface isn't "the tragedy" of these oil spills. Most of the tragedy is below the surface, where TV cameras and congressmembers won't see it.
[SNIP] But let's not pretend that cleaning up the surface could possibly "prevent the tragedy". By the time this thing is out there cleaning up, most of the tragedy has already gone down.
Probably true. Unfortunately human nature isn't very good at giving a shit about things it can't see.
effectively responding to future underwater blowouts will require massive infrastructure and power. Like what could be stored on, delivered and powered by a retired nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
You did say "effectively" ; what's the undocking and sailing time for such a vessel from, for example, the USN docks on the West Coast to, for example, the source of much of America's energy in the Persian Gulf? A week, a month, six weeks?
Having resources on "hot standby" has costs, real costs. What's the annual leakage of pollution (nuclear, chemical, biological) from a crewed carrier already? Let alone the actual operating cost?
It's an idea ; I don't think it's a particularly good one, but it's an idea.
The Protei (wrong case, surely?), as an idea for a low-maintenance ocean-going platform, has a lot of interesting potentials. It might even be plausible to rapidly re-purpose one (or many) from their normal duties to perform clean-up.
I pledged $150 to this project and look forward to wearing the Protei hoodie that they'll send me.
Congratulations ; a positive contribution.
I couldn't believe that it hadn't gotten more attention.
It's news to me too, which annoys me more than a little as I work in the industry. But it doesn't particularly surprise me - the industry is notoriously discussion-of-risk averse.
I'm not affiliated with the project in any way, but I know that I'm going to weep with bitter joy when I see one of these skimming oil from an oil spill.
Not affiliated, except by being a funder?... well, it's your slice of cake ; it's up to you to choose whether you wish to eat it. (But it doesn't keep!)
I hated the feelings of helplessness and desperation that I [had] when watching the tragedy of the Gulf spill.
Which one of the many was that? Oh, you mean the relatively recent one in the American Gulf, not the routine and continuing ones in the Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea, South China Sea, etc, etc ad nauseam. Let alone the many continuing leaks in and around ports, from small shipwrecks, etc. Or is this only a tool suitable for use in big events?
It's an interesting technology.
Supporting this project at least gives me something concrete to do which just may one day help keep our oceans clean.
When did you sell your last car and revoke your driving license? How many flights are you foregoing this year and using video-conferencing instead? Does this week's food shopping have a lower food-miles bill than last week's shopping?
What I really want to know is how the f* do they know what colour skin dinosaurs have?! We've had the smurf-blue kosmoceratops, now this multi-coloured red thing. Is there any reasoning behind it, or just bored artists?
Partly bored artists, but it's not without reasoning.
Extremely well-preserved skin and feathers from a variety of dinosaur clades (well... there's a different argument) certainly show that there were different arrangements of melanocyte (-cete ?) grains which were present, and in more modern reptiles similar arrangements of melanocyte grains go with different colours. Also, more primitive (less-derived) organisms than the dinosaurs such as reptiles have expression of a wide range of colours, AND more "advanced" (more-derived) organisms such as birds have expression of a wide variety of colours, so it is parsimonious to expect that the intermediate organisms (dinosaurs) had a wide range of colours available.
At which point, the artists can open up the full range of their palettes with a reasonably clear conscience.
However, considering that the connection between dinosaurs and birds has been at least conjectural since the 1850s, an equally good question might be, why did the artists originally close off the vivid parts of their palettes? Which, as a geologist, I'm not really qualified to discuss.
You seem to think that the interests of the USgovt eavesdroppers and the leaderships of these various countries diverge.
Why would you believe that? These countries are important supporters of the USgovt's War For Terror (TM, all rights reserved and acknowledged) ; the interests of these govts (status quo, continued energy sales) remain aligned,
Holy crap, 20 years? I'm pretty sure I first installed it in '92 or '93, that really makes me feel old now.
I remember being contemplating buying (yes, "buying"!) a copy of... a 386-based Unix... Coherent (?) at about the time that I saw a note of the initial releases of Linux in print media (of course, I did not have a phone line at the time. Let alone a telephone). So I decided to hang on a few months...
I know it was a Slackware install with a 0.99a Kernel or something like that. I know there were an immense amount of floppy disks involved
... and I came back from a month or two in the deserts of Arabia with money burning a hole in my pocket and brought an MFM drive and an RLL controller for it, which gave me space to play with. And yes, Slackware.
"Kermit" and "stinky" leads to some Miss Piggy jokes you really don't want to hear.
[Sniffs]
.
.
Finger.
(Didn't bother with memories of getting the Boss out of trouble with Kermit. Either Boss, and I've been with the company for longer than one loss and longer than Slashdot has existed. Longer than Netscape. Longer than HTML3, but not longer than HTML. Jayzus H. Kreist. ; aging oneself by protocol version numbers? Pass me the Zimmer frame.)
I'm pretty sure a camera would have a crush depth somewhere not as deep as the pressures they're expecting. If it weren't, you could wrap it in a ziplock bag, and drop it down on a rope.
Actually, to a first approximation, you could. Probably. But you'd have to start with a pretty large $ziplock$ bag.
Say that your camera, on the bottom of the Marianas, has a volume of 0.001m^3 (1 litre), at a pressure of about 1100 atmospheres (11km = 11000m ; 10m of seawater ~= 1 atmosphere) inside the $ziplock$.
At 550 atmospheres / 5.5km it would have a volume of 0.002m^3...
275 / 2.75 / 0.004
137 / 1.37 / 0.008
[SNIP : working]
1.07 / 0.011 / 1.024
Oh, that's convenient ; around surface, you'll need around a 1m^3 bag for your 1 litre camera. That passes a 1000-odd factor check, which I should have done first.
Now, practically, this isn't unmanageable. Silly, but not unmanageable. The crinkles would get a bit awkward.
At this point, your camera is penetrated throughout by air at around 1100 atmospheres. Which shouldn't, in and of itself, stop things working. The batteries might contain sealed objects that might blow ; the exposed surfaces of the sensors might not like so much oxygen (or nitrogen) ; the mechanical parts of shutters might not like the viscosity of the atmosphere. And you could still get a water leak.
But in principle, there's nothing wrong with putting an optical instrument into a $ziplock$ bag and taking it to depth. It's just that the buoyancies get a bit practically awkward. Which is why I just spent £200-ish on a water-tight (to 40m) AND balanced housing for my wife's camera. That can handle those crushing pressures. My right supra-orbital sinus, on the other hand, does not like more than about 0.15 atmospheres of pressure difference across it's bones.
[I] suggest casting Sarah Palin (as herself) and Matt Stone.
Palin to both "act" (note the quotation marks!) and script at least her own part.
I don't know who the other one is... [WIKIS]... oh, one of the South Park guys. [/self thinks] Nope, I don't get that bit of your sense of humour. Is Stone allegedly some sort of closet Moral Majority retard?
Ach. Life is too short to try to catch up on Slashdot after the holiday.
You're right. I'm surprised that I'd never heard that before.
It's a bit surprising too, because most of the cases of orbital synchronisation that I've heard of are when the orbit is very tight. Or, in the case of Earth-Moon, the synchronisation is thought to have developed very early in the evolution of the system when the Moon was very close to it's Roche limit.
To say that there would be profound upheavals would be an understatement.
did you misunderstand?
No, seriously ; my fingertips (including the one with the rose-thorn in the tip, thank you roses!) were involved in non-trivial effort to type that post, and several of my braincells collaborated on composing it.
It may be unhip, but I do actually think about what I write, compose it, edit it. I even spell check it. BEFORE I POST IT
Of course, it's possible that I'm treating Slashdot with more dignity than it's worth. That question is more for the most recent few half-millions of UIDs to worry about. But the day I hang up my UID, will be the day that the 5-digit UIDs feel slightly more outnumbered by the 6-digit UID sprogs. Are we onto 7-digit UIDs yet?
A day on Titan is the same period as an orbit around Saturn.
Err, Titan and Saturn are in rotational/ orbital resonance?
When Saturn-Titan-Sun are co-linear then Titan will get eclipses. Which are likely to be meteorologically important. For Titan. The corresponding solar eclipses on Saturn by Titan are unlikely to be significant to Saturn.
Titan is essentially co-planar with Saturn's rings (gravity assures me of that). Saturn's rings are around 20 degrees inclined to the ecliptic.
Without having (to hand) the eccentricity of Titan's orbit around Saturn, or Saturn's orbit around the Sun... how much effect Titan's distance from the sun at different parts of it's orbit around Saturn would have on illumination... I don't know, but I doubt that it is important.
Slashdot Mirror
Try this.
Anyway, what required a supercomputer 14 years ago should be relatively routine these days, so if you've got a sufficiently well-preserved skull that you can CAT/ MRI scan it to get the internal dimensions of the air spaces, and can make reasonable assumptions about the soft tissues, then you should be able to get some idea about the sounds that could be made.
Add in some artistic interpretation ... lather, rinse, repeat.
It was a remake ... not long ago ...
Nope, sorry, can't come up with it. And now I'm getting distracted by having discovered Star Trek porn parodies, which is a pretty safe indication that I've spent too long on this.
There's a haiku in that thought, I'm sure.
Surely ... wouldn't it be more effective to launch the [weapons, telescopes, whatever] around or past the debris, rather than launching directly into the debris?
OK, perhaps if you're trying to "shoot up" (rather than "shoot down") a particular piece of space debris, then this might be an effective way of doing it, but for the more general case, it's not going to be terribly helpful.
(/humour)
And since the press release is on the "toshiba.com" (i.e., US) website, and refers to "NIST"-approved practices (i.e. US NSA approved, therefore US-spooks readable), I think that your suspicion is well-founded.
I'll stick to using non-corporate, non-US encryption, thanks.
Why am I thinking of the "Clipper" fiasco of a few POTUS ago? That couldn't happen here, surely? (For many values of "here", including both American non-American values. And Russian values of "here", too.)
1. People Tasering bears.
2. ????
3. Profit
...
Now what could fill in the question marks?
Try this :
2a. Market a range of special "Bear Tasering" rechargeable batteries for Tasers.
2b. Get Sony to put miniaturised video cameras into the batteries, which only activate after (about) 20 bear Taserings ; put some shitty DRM on the camera's recordings.
2c. Users get used to Tasering bears ; bears get pissed off.
2d. Batteries start running their cameras instead of powering the Tasers.
2e. Sony's DRM means that you have an excellent collection of gory videos of pissed-off bears ripping the heads off retarded bear-Taser-ing rednecks, which you can now sell, sell and re-sell.
3. Profit.
And it's all almost ethically sound. Well, you'd probably have to give the bears some sort of compensation, like feeding them the rest of the retard's family too. But that shouldn't be terribly controversial. It's not like they're worthwhile humans, is it?
I see your TV-based analogy and raise you a "Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls" (about 1898 ; Conan Doyle recanted for the royalties).
Options?
I recall an otherwise tedious film with an early scene of someone who bellyflopped from a great (i.e. aviation) height, impacting into a compressed gravel road. The "bones" on their mannequin had been broken in an impressively large (but probably unrealistic) number of places. I almost wish the rest of the film had been as memorable as those flexible arms.
Well ... every properly-trained diver will tell you what the text books say happens over a period of time, if you depressurise by too much, and too fast, with the wrong chemistry.
Unfortunately, as an AC has pointed out, dropping by a half of a bar isn't likely to do much to you very fast. (Note that commercial airliners are pressurised to around a half-a-bar.) The no-stops time for diving at 20m is (checks tables ... ) 45 minutes, for 10m it's 219 minutes, and for 5m it's going to be a bloody long time. The time to onset of symptoms, if they ever happen, is going to be correspondingly long.
Frankly, the concentration gradients across your tissues are going to be pretty low, which is going to translate to low rates of reaction.
My €0.05-worth is - why bring in experts when you can interview the pilot who got sucked out of the window of his plane a few years back. Oh, hang on, that's been done ; that doesn't make for a very good story. Oh well. Next story, please.
Well, it's compactly presented and has obviously had fair thought applied to it, so it deserves a reasoned response.
Probably true. Unfortunately human nature isn't very good at giving a shit about things it can't see.
You did say "effectively" ; what's the undocking and sailing time for such a vessel from, for example, the USN docks on the West Coast to, for example, the source of much of America's energy in the Persian Gulf? A week, a month, six weeks?
Having resources on "hot standby" has costs, real costs. What's the annual leakage of pollution (nuclear, chemical, biological) from a crewed carrier already? Let alone the actual operating cost?
It's an idea ; I don't think it's a particularly good one, but it's an idea.
The Protei (wrong case, surely?), as an idea for a low-maintenance ocean-going platform, has a lot of interesting potentials. It might even be plausible to rapidly re-purpose one (or many) from their normal duties to perform clean-up.
Congratulations ; a positive contribution.
It's news to me too, which annoys me more than a little as I work in the industry. But it doesn't particularly surprise me - the industry is notoriously discussion-of-risk averse.
Not affiliated, except by being a funder? ... well, it's your slice of cake ; it's up to you to choose whether you wish to eat it. (But it doesn't keep!)
Which one of the many was that? Oh, you mean the relatively recent one in the American Gulf, not the routine and continuing ones in the Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea, South China Sea, etc, etc ad nauseam. Let alone the many continuing leaks in and around ports, from small shipwrecks, etc. Or is this only a tool suitable for use in big events?
It's an interesting technology.
When did you sell your last car and revoke your driving license? How many flights are you foregoing this year and using video-conferencing instead? Does this week's food shopping have a lower food-miles bill than last week's shopping?
Partly bored artists, but it's not without reasoning.
Extremely well-preserved skin and feathers from a variety of dinosaur clades (well ... there's a different argument) certainly show that there were different arrangements of melanocyte (-cete ?) grains which were present, and in more modern reptiles similar arrangements of melanocyte grains go with different colours. Also, more primitive (less-derived) organisms than the dinosaurs such as reptiles have expression of a wide range of colours, AND more "advanced" (more-derived) organisms such as birds have expression of a wide variety of colours, so it is parsimonious to expect that the intermediate organisms (dinosaurs) had a wide range of colours available.
At which point, the artists can open up the full range of their palettes with a reasonably clear conscience.
However, considering that the connection between dinosaurs and birds has been at least conjectural since the 1850s, an equally good question might be, why did the artists originally close off the vivid parts of their palettes? Which, as a geologist, I'm not really qualified to discuss.
I don't know. But I wish it had been me. It would have made the whole point of April Fools Day bearable.
(And yes, I did RTFCs about it actually being March 31 ; the point still stands.)
Why would you believe that? These countries are important supporters of the USgovt's War For Terror (TM, all rights reserved and acknowledged) ; the interests of these govts (status quo, continued energy sales) remain aligned,
I remember being contemplating buying (yes, "buying"!) a copy of ... a 386-based Unix ... Coherent (?) at about the time that I saw a note of the initial releases of Linux in print media (of course, I did not have a phone line at the time. Let alone a telephone). So I decided to hang on a few months ...
I think I had to get a CD drive to do it.
[Sniffs]
.
.
Finger.
(Didn't bother with memories of getting the Boss out of trouble with Kermit. Either Boss, and I've been with the company for longer than one loss and longer than Slashdot has existed. Longer than Netscape. Longer than HTML3, but not longer than HTML.
Jayzus H. Kreist. ; aging oneself by protocol version numbers? Pass me the Zimmer frame.)
Actually, to a first approximation, you could. Probably. But you'd have to start with a pretty large $ziplock$ bag.
Say that your camera, on the bottom of the Marianas, has a volume of 0.001m^3 (1 litre), at a pressure of about 1100 atmospheres (11km = 11000m ; 10m of seawater ~= 1 atmosphere) inside the $ziplock$.
At 550 atmospheres / 5.5km it would have a volume of 0.002m^3 ...
275 / 2.75 / 0.004
137 / 1.37 / 0.008
[SNIP : working]
1.07 / 0.011 / 1.024
Oh, that's convenient ; around surface, you'll need around a 1m^3 bag for your 1 litre camera. That passes a 1000-odd factor check, which I should have done first.
Now, practically, this isn't unmanageable. Silly, but not unmanageable. The crinkles would get a bit awkward.
At this point, your camera is penetrated throughout by air at around 1100 atmospheres. Which shouldn't, in and of itself, stop things working. The batteries might contain sealed objects that might blow ; the exposed surfaces of the sensors might not like so much oxygen (or nitrogen) ; the mechanical parts of shutters might not like the viscosity of the atmosphere. And you could still get a water leak.
But in principle, there's nothing wrong with putting an optical instrument into a $ziplock$ bag and taking it to depth. It's just that the buoyancies get a bit practically awkward. Which is why I just spent £200-ish on a water-tight (to 40m) AND balanced housing for my wife's camera. That can handle those crushing pressures. My right supra-orbital sinus, on the other hand, does not like more than about 0.15 atmospheres of pressure difference across it's bones.
Palin to both "act" (note the quotation marks!) and script at least her own part.
I don't know who the other one is ... [WIKIS] ... oh, one of the South Park guys. [/self thinks] Nope, I don't get that bit of your sense of humour. Is Stone allegedly some sort of closet Moral Majority retard?
Ach. Life is too short to try to catch up on Slashdot after the holiday.
It's a bit surprising too, because most of the cases of orbital synchronisation that I've heard of are when the orbit is very tight. Or, in the case of Earth-Moon, the synchronisation is thought to have developed very early in the evolution of the system when the Moon was very close to it's Roche limit.
Interesting.
You have put things very precisely. I have had to do "triage" (I am not a emergency professional.) ; it is not fun. And everyone makes mistakes.
did you misunderstand?
No, seriously ; my fingertips (including the one with the rose-thorn in the tip, thank you roses!) were involved in non-trivial effort to type that post, and several of my braincells collaborated on composing it.
It may be unhip, but I do actually think about what I write, compose it, edit it. I even spell check it. BEFORE I POST IT
Of course, it's possible that I'm treating Slashdot with more dignity than it's worth. That question is more for the most recent few half-millions of UIDs to worry about. But the day I hang up my UID, will be the day that the 5-digit UIDs feel slightly more outnumbered by the 6-digit UID sprogs. Are we onto 7-digit UIDs yet?
Or, BOTH?
Err, Titan and Saturn are in rotational/ orbital resonance?
When Saturn-Titan-Sun are co-linear then Titan will get eclipses. Which are likely to be meteorologically important. For Titan. The corresponding solar eclipses on Saturn by Titan are unlikely to be significant to Saturn.
Titan is essentially co-planar with Saturn's rings (gravity assures me of that). Saturn's rings are around 20 degrees inclined to the ecliptic.
Without having (to hand) the eccentricity of Titan's orbit around Saturn, or Saturn's orbit around the Sun ... how much effect Titan's distance from the sun at different parts of it's orbit around Saturn would have on illumination ... I don't know, but I doubt that it is important.
The Russian term is "white nights". Which raises a pun on "white knights" which at least one oil company has made use of before they got brought out.