Wait a minute. Why is BP getting blamed for all this? Sure, they operated the well, but it was all rental equipment.
This is a valid point in general - if you leave out some of the more hysterical gibberings of other people in this thread. And within the industry, people know it. TransOcean are gearing up to be on the receiving end of a shitstorm.
Why Transocean or Hyundai getting any heat?
Why aren't they? Well, Hyundai aren't receiving any shit because they built a rig to a design from a client, and delivered it. And it worked according to specifications. Then the rig's owners did some things out of specification and the rig sank after burning for several days. I fail to see any grounds for throwing shit at Hyundai.
TransOcean on the other hand... have been extraordinarily lucky in the way that all the vitriol and invective has been directed at BP, and almost no attention has been paid (by the general public ; within the industry, attention is being paid!) to the fact that a number of TransOcean-owned, maintained and operated bits of equipment either failed or were not operated correctly.
If you've been on a TransOcean rig in the last few months (I've been on 2 since DWH), you'd have seen the near-hysterical manufacturing of safety statistics ; someone high up in TransOcean is well aware that the shit and the fan are going to come together, and they're putting the squeeze on every one to produce pretty-looking safety statistics.
Three quarters of the incidents on oil drilling platforms are on Transocean owned platforms, even though less than half the rigs being operated are from Transocean.
Actually, as an insider in the industry, without any particular affiliation with TransOcean (or any other drilling company), I don't see any great disproportion between TO's operational safety and the average. If push came to shove, I'd say that they're probably a little better than average - but that's mainly because there are some shockingly bad operators out there.
That's scarcely a ringing endorsement.
And it just begs the question of why the fuck they continued using a BOP that wasn't able to pass it's pressure test. Someone, somewhere is going to have to answer that question. Or they're going to have to migrate to a country that doesn't have extradition arrangements with the US - which is a tactic that several drilling companies have practised over the years, so there is plenty of experience of how to get around problems like that.
Oh, and guess who manufactured the blow-out preventer on the Deep-Horizon Oil Spill. You guessed it: Transocean.
Errr, I don't think so. I think that it was a Cameron stack.
It was TransOcean personnel who operated it, and maintained it. There are suggestions that some of the hydraulic control lines may have been incorrectly rigged up. Which will make Cameron's people breathe a sigh of relief if it's proven true.
I've got a £5 bet with a colleague that it will turn out to be America's equivalent of the "Ocean Oddyessy Lesson" : replacing a $100 O-ring from the manufacturer with a $5 O-ring from the local car shop may just slightly compromise performance of the equipment in question.
That's a cheap lesson. It's depressing that people still decline to learn it.
I don't have an HDTV in my house and the contents of the drawers are scattered about wildly already, you insensitive clod!
Then go out and spend your termination pay check on a swarm of robots to rearrange the mess from the drawers on the floor and to watch your new HDTV for you.
Sheesh, some people just don't understand consumerism.
Also from the same source :
"The Vindaloo served in western restaurants is really just a version of the standard "medium" restaurant curry with additional chilli and including potatoes."
Or, as many sub-continentals of my acquaintance would describe it, "slop".
But then again, a high proportion of my acquaintances frequently returned to the "home country", and a fair number were involved in the food trade for their discerning compatriots. Some also made a good living selling "Indian" food (also includes Pakistani foodstuffs, though not named as such ; that's marketing for you, no connection to truth), to ignorant Westerners, because they could get away with selling cheap slop at inflated prices. So I'll cede that their opinions may be somewhat biased by decades of exploiting Westerners.
I can't imagine that a spicy vindaloo would sit too well with her right now.
She's Indian : if presented with a "spicy vindaloo", her first comment is likely to be "what is this repulsive slop?", followed shortly by howls of alternating hilarity and incredulity as you explain to her that you think this is "Indian" food.
It would be cheaper to work on being ambidextrous, and that may pay off in the future sometime as well.
Same comment.
For reference : one spring while I was a student, I decided to teach myself to write with my right hand. After a couple of weeks of inconsistent effort, I could write with reasonable legibility in each of 8 ways : left or right (hand) ; left-to-right or right-to-left (as per Galileo, or was it Leonardo of Quirm?) ; and normal way-up versus upside-down.
I wouldn't claim to be particularly limber, and I haven't done it for 20 years, but it did only take a few weeks to attain reasonable facility.
Maybe "reasonable facility" isn't good enough for him - I don't know his work style. But it could well be enough to keep him working in his business while his hand heals. Working on idea sketches ; doing admin or development work, that sort of thing.
Niven has retconned to accommodate scientific reality before ("The Ringworld is Unstable!") but I still haven't seen a satisfactory explanation for the whole "galactic supernova" thing, since it's pretty much crucial to the "Puppeteer migration" thing.
Better than "retconning" was getting the world in [ ahemm ] a spin in the early printings of Ringworld. But these things do happen.
Maybe the whole "galactic supernova thing" is, like certain fiscal entities, "too big to fail".
Equally maybe - perhaps the Puppeteers have noticed that there's a gamma-ray burster about to burst into light on our horizon. Would that be a sufficient reason for an attack of the OUTBEs? (Overwhelming Urge To Be Elsewhere)
Actually, as "art" goes, it is actually quite good. I couldn't envisage me buying it, but if it the artist was sitting in front of it with a tin cup and a dog on a bit of string, I'd throw a medium denomination coin into the cup.
"Liverbeasts", "heartbeasts" and Bussard ramjets are all technologies that we have one or several ideas of how to implement. The hyperspace though is utterly without connection to reality. The closest that we've got is the (mathematical) physicists saying that it's not necessarily impossible. For teleportation booths, we don't even have that.
Depressing, but true.
Autodocs... now that's an interesting case. Very interesting technologies are in development, and vastly interesting capabilities are being studied. But fitting it all into one box - even a room-size box - is one thing, and letting it work overnight... that's more like mythology.
Not that I'm confusing Larry's work with reality, but as a (generally) hard-SF author his ideas are subject to changing technologies.
The distinction between planets and brown dwarfs is really fuzzy.
No it's not. The distinction is at the point where the accreting planet achieves sufficient mass to start to burn lithium. Finding out what that mass is is moderately fuzzy (it almost certainly varies with metallicity of the progenitor material) ; measuring masses is also moderately fuzzy (i.sinand all that jazz) ; determining if the object is depleted in lithium compared to it's progenitor material is also fuzzy. But the criterion is not fuzzy.
To use the traditional car analogy - you can argue whether the cop's speed gun was reading correctly ; you can argue that you were on this side of the change-of-speed limit sign, not that side, and therefore that the ticket doesn't apply. But there is no fuzziness about the speed limit itself.
Even Jupiter emits more light in some frequencies than it receives from the sun.
True, but not relevant. The Sun probably puts out more near-UV than it does far-IR, because of it's high temperature. Jupiter's low temperature would then make it brighter in (say) the far-IR than the Sun. (This is proposed as a way of detecting extra-solar planets, BTW.)
What you mean to say, probably, is that when summed over a wide range of wavelengths, Jupiter emits more energy than impinges on it from the Sun. Which means that Jupiter is radiating some internal heat. But that's OK, it just means that it's a big planet which acquired a lot of energy from the infall of it's component materials, and is taking it's time about radiating the heat away.
Looking back at historical examples of human migration on vast scales,
Who has ever seriously proposed moving vast numbers of humans between the planets, let alone the stars? Seriously, move a minimal number and breed up a new population at the far end - the work is unskilled and the workforce are generally willing to do overtime.
A trip from Germany or Poland to California in the 1850's took approximately about a year, including travel by ship to one of the eastern US ports, and then overland on foot or wagon.
As a point of fact, I suspect that the trip more often (mode or median ; pick either) took closer to a generation, with people travelling to get onto a boat, using the boat, getting off the boat, settling in the city or in the East somewhere (because they need to make money, approximately now!), finding that was horrible, then moving on to try the lands out West in the next generation.
Not many fleeing a shitty situation in Europe would have been in a situation to sit around and save enough additional money for a wagon and homesteading supplies before leaving the country they're fleeing. As soon as they'd got the boat fare plus a small amount of "travel cash" (maybe as jewellery, not cash, but WTF) then they'd be away.
Not that I believe the [delusions/ lies] of the claimant for one second...
And it could be so easy, just hooking up EEG...
How would you go about doing the "easy" "hooking up of an EEG"?
Step (1) first obtain an EEG.
I guess that I'd have to try getting to know some research workers at the Department of Medical Physics. I can't think of anywhere else that would have one (which I could borrow - the A&E department have probably got several, but need them on a "now, not in 5 minutes" basis.
Step (2) : find someone who knows how to connect that model of EEG to a patient...
OK, conceivably you've got 7 EEGs in your apartment, which you've stacked up and thrown a faux tiger-skin over to form your Quagmire-a-like bar. But that's unlikely to be a commonly available solution.
I'd have gone for the video-camera solution someone else suggested. But as you say, that would have shown him full of microsleeps, along with the occasional fumble when they change the tapes. (Actually, changing the tapes would be a worthwhile test of dexterity. He'd have failed, regularly.)
(I regularly pull 36 hour stints, with concentration and detail levels rising towards the end ; I don't believe the guy's claim for a second.)
We had to walk 15 minutes from our dorm to the lecture theater,
15 minutes? 15 minutes! Thee was lucky, youth! A good solid 15 run minutes through Mugger's Park would get you to the near end of the university area of town (campus, what campus), and then you could choose between another 18 minutes along the main road before crossing Psychotic Driver's Roundabout to get past Neanderthal College (home of welding, hairdressing and Advance Dole Scrounging ; also the Observatory, for teaching navigation to sailors) and finally hove into your department. No, there isn't anywhere to chain your bike up, so better to run.
over wet grass both ways.
I refer the Honourable Gentleman to my previous comments about "crossing Psychotic Driver's Roundabout".
'alf the time, our walkman batteries would run out
What is this "walkman" thing you talk of? Would it be of any interest to the inhabitants of Mugger's Park?
and our Led Zepplin albums would go all wonky and put us to sleep again.
That sounds like your Led Zepplin albums are working perfectly well.
It was all you could do to get down to the university pub for a late breakfast at 2.
AM or PM? Ours stopped serving food at about 1:30PM, and stopped serving beer at about 2AM.
Are they interested in things that weren't mentioned in Ussher? "If it's not in Ussher, it's too recent for us" being their philosophy. So they're welcome to everything else that does get mentioned in Ussher's work, without of course the benefits of modern science to alleviate them.
... nor your pathetically recent age.
(Sudbury could quite reasonably have been responsible for the extinction of half the species of life on the Earth at the time, given that species diversity seems to have been less in those times.)
On TV you see lots of computer sims but none look realistic to me.
This is only of academic interest.
Would there be a light covering the sky so bright you couldn't see it or would it traverse the atmosphere so quick it wouldn't have time to heat up and you really would see this huge space rock impact. And what would the explosion look like? WOuld it be a fireball initially or would you simply see billions of tons or rock being launched into orbit?
If you're observing the touchdown of a multiple-kilometre body (asteroid, banana, comet, dog ; it doesn't matter) on the Earth, from the Earth's surface, and you see the fireball, then you're dead to a close approximation in position and within a couple of hours precision in time. Geologically, these are unimportantly small differences, though they might make some personal difference to you, for a short time.
If you're observing from near-Earth orbit when you see the fireball, then you may have enough time to scavenge your craft's air into storage tanks, seal up your personal suit, and apply as much delta-vee as you can. If you've got a resource-recycling space colony to go to, you might be able to survive until the human population of the planet is able to replenish your supplies ; otherwise you need to land now, or make your colony permanently self-sustaining.
Seriously: you really, really don't want to see any non-trivial asteroid touch down.
Some people reckon the entire Pacific Ocean basic and the moon were a result of asteroid impact
Many, many years ago, that idea was proposed on some extremely tenuous grounds. There's a faint bell tinkling in my head that it was actually one of Darwin's sons, and the timing is vaguely right for it to have been a response to discovering the high average depth of the Pacific from the Challenger expedition.
The idea has never had any strong support from data, and since the turn of the last century (i.e. 1900) it has been a pretty dead idea.
the moon is actually a bunch of material ejected from the earth when the asteroid(s) hit.
That is a gross oversimplification and distortion of the modern "Giant Impact" hypothesis, which has about as much relation to Darwin's idea (I'll associate him with it, but only on the strength of one braincell.) as, errr, not a lot.
I've been laughing to the Igs for years. I'm making reference to the inspirational shoe-bomber, Richard Reed, who's non-exploding training shoes have since inspired a catalogue of imitators to throw footware at the rich, famous, evil and/ or retarded (or in the case of Dubya, all four with one shoe).
Soldiers are not just soldiers, they are what [SNIP]sented by the US military.
What the fuck? I mean, just what the fuck?
Sorry, could you elaborate a little, because it's obvious that English is not your native language. I can't tell if you support the [SNIPPED] post or are in some way trying to denigrate it and/or it's poster.
Are you trying to imply that generations of conscripted soldiers have been brutalized by what their governments have put them through, and that there is something decidedly worrying about modern professional armies composed of people who volunteer to become involved in such psychopathic activities.
Or do you think that volunteers for modern armies are people who believe the propaganda that is fed to them on a plate by their governments, and then have problems when they discover the reality of what they've volunteered for?
I really can't work out from "What the fuck?" which position you're trying to support.
One of their funding routes - the execrable UK-based Moneybookers, has caved to American pressure.
I hope they go bust.
The route via Wau-Holland Foundation seems to be continuing to work. And since I've been contacted in the past by American journalists wanting to know why I donate to Wikileaks... I take that as evidence that the route works.
(There was in the past an option to not hide the fact that you're donating, but I haven't seen that for a while. In any case, I've never been concerned to keep my support secret.)
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a minute. Why is BP getting blamed for all this? Sure, they operated the well, but it was all rental equipment.
This is a valid point in general - if you leave out some of the more hysterical gibberings of other people in this thread. And within the industry, people know it. TransOcean are gearing up to be on the receiving end of a shitstorm.
Why Transocean or Hyundai getting any heat?
Why aren't they? Well, Hyundai aren't receiving any shit because they built a rig to a design from a client, and delivered it. And it worked according to specifications. Then the rig's owners did some things out of specification and the rig sank after burning for several days. I fail to see any grounds for throwing shit at Hyundai.
TransOcean on the other hand ... have been extraordinarily lucky in the way that all the vitriol and invective has been directed at BP, and almost no attention has been paid (by the general public ; within the industry, attention is being paid!) to the fact that a number of TransOcean-owned, maintained and operated bits of equipment either failed or were not operated correctly.
If you've been on a TransOcean rig in the last few months (I've been on 2 since DWH), you'd have seen the near-hysterical manufacturing of safety statistics ; someone high up in TransOcean is well aware that the shit and the fan are going to come together, and they're putting the squeeze on every one to produce pretty-looking safety statistics.
Three quarters of the incidents on oil drilling platforms are on Transocean owned platforms, even though less than half the rigs being operated are from Transocean.
Actually, as an insider in the industry, without any particular affiliation with TransOcean (or any other drilling company), I don't see any great disproportion between TO's operational safety and the average. If push came to shove, I'd say that they're probably a little better than average - but that's mainly because there are some shockingly bad operators out there.
That's scarcely a ringing endorsement.
And it just begs the question of why the fuck they continued using a BOP that wasn't able to pass it's pressure test. Someone, somewhere is going to have to answer that question. Or they're going to have to migrate to a country that doesn't have extradition arrangements with the US - which is a tactic that several drilling companies have practised over the years, so there is plenty of experience of how to get around problems like that.
Oh, and guess who manufactured the blow-out preventer on the Deep-Horizon Oil Spill. You guessed it: Transocean.
Errr, I don't think so. I think that it was a Cameron stack.
It was TransOcean personnel who operated it, and maintained it. There are suggestions that some of the hydraulic control lines may have been incorrectly rigged up. Which will make Cameron's people breathe a sigh of relief if it's proven true.
I've got a £5 bet with a colleague that it will turn out to be America's equivalent of the "Ocean Oddyessy Lesson" : replacing a $100 O-ring from the manufacturer with a $5 O-ring from the local car shop may just slightly compromise performance of the equipment in question.
That's a cheap lesson. It's depressing that people still decline to learn it.
Not following along with the radical consumerism insanity during the Big Holiday is unamerican, didn't you know?
Why do you assume that the AC is American?
Or for that matter, that the AC cares whether or not you think that they are American.
I don't have an HDTV in my house and the contents of the drawers are scattered about wildly already, you insensitive clod!
Then go out and spend your termination pay check on a swarm of robots to rearrange the mess from the drawers on the floor and to watch your new HDTV for you.
Sheesh, some people just don't understand consumerism.
Or, as many sub-continentals of my acquaintance would describe it, "slop".
But then again, a high proportion of my acquaintances frequently returned to the "home country", and a fair number were involved in the food trade for their discerning compatriots. Some also made a good living selling "Indian" food (also includes Pakistani foodstuffs, though not named as such ; that's marketing for you, no connection to truth), to ignorant Westerners, because they could get away with selling cheap slop at inflated prices. So I'll cede that their opinions may be somewhat biased by decades of exploiting Westerners.
I can't imagine that a spicy vindaloo would sit too well with her right now.
She's Indian : if presented with a "spicy vindaloo", her first comment is likely to be "what is this repulsive slop?", followed shortly by howls of alternating hilarity and incredulity as you explain to her that you think this is "Indian" food.
It would be cheaper to work on being ambidextrous, and that may pay off in the future sometime as well.
Same comment.
For reference : one spring while I was a student, I decided to teach myself to write with my right hand. After a couple of weeks of inconsistent effort, I could write with reasonable legibility in each of 8 ways : left or right (hand) ; left-to-right or right-to-left (as per Galileo, or was it Leonardo of Quirm?) ; and normal way-up versus upside-down.
I wouldn't claim to be particularly limber, and I haven't done it for 20 years, but it did only take a few weeks to attain reasonable facility.
Maybe "reasonable facility" isn't good enough for him - I don't know his work style. But it could well be enough to keep him working in his business while his hand heals. Working on idea sketches ; doing admin or development work, that sort of thing.
Niven has retconned to accommodate scientific reality before ("The Ringworld is Unstable!") but I still haven't seen a satisfactory explanation for the whole "galactic supernova" thing, since it's pretty much crucial to the "Puppeteer migration" thing.
Better than "retconning" was getting the world in [ ahemm ] a spin in the early printings of Ringworld. But these things do happen.
Maybe the whole "galactic supernova thing" is, like certain fiscal entities, "too big to fail".
Equally maybe - perhaps the Puppeteers have noticed that there's a gamma-ray burster about to burst into light on our horizon. Would that be a sufficient reason for an attack of the OUTBEs? (Overwhelming Urge To Be Elsewhere)
Actually, as "art" goes, it is actually quite good. I couldn't envisage me buying it, but if it the artist was sitting in front of it with a tin cup and a dog on a bit of string, I'd throw a medium denomination coin into the cup.
"Liverbeasts", "heartbeasts" and Bussard ramjets are all technologies that we have one or several ideas of how to implement. The hyperspace though is utterly without connection to reality. The closest that we've got is the (mathematical) physicists saying that it's not necessarily impossible. For teleportation booths, we don't even have that.
Depressing, but true.
Autodocs ... now that's an interesting case. Very interesting technologies are in development, and vastly interesting capabilities are being studied. But fitting it all into one box - even a room-size box - is one thing, and letting it work overnight ... that's more like mythology.
Not that I'm confusing Larry's work with reality, but as a (generally) hard-SF author his ideas are subject to changing technologies.
Hell you can't even buy police uniforms for this very reason.
You can buy them, but you have to be careful what you do with them.
The thing with ASCII is that it's easy to write on standard keyboards, and does not require a specialized layout.
What language do you write in? Oh, probably you're one of those English speakers. It must be sad being so restricted.
The distinction between planets and brown dwarfs is really fuzzy.
No it's not. The distinction is at the point where the accreting planet achieves sufficient mass to start to burn lithium. Finding out what that mass is is moderately fuzzy (it almost certainly varies with metallicity of the progenitor material) ; measuring masses is also moderately fuzzy (i. sinand all that jazz) ; determining if the object is depleted in lithium compared to it's progenitor material is also fuzzy. But the criterion is not fuzzy.
To use the traditional car analogy - you can argue whether the cop's speed gun was reading correctly ; you can argue that you were on this side of the change-of-speed limit sign, not that side, and therefore that the ticket doesn't apply. But there is no fuzziness about the speed limit itself.
Even Jupiter emits more light in some frequencies than it receives from the sun.
True, but not relevant. The Sun probably puts out more near-UV than it does far-IR, because of it's high temperature. Jupiter's low temperature would then make it brighter in (say) the far-IR than the Sun. (This is proposed as a way of detecting extra-solar planets, BTW.)
What you mean to say, probably, is that when summed over a wide range of wavelengths, Jupiter emits more energy than impinges on it from the Sun. Which means that Jupiter is radiating some internal heat. But that's OK, it just means that it's a big planet which acquired a lot of energy from the infall of it's component materials, and is taking it's time about radiating the heat away.
Looking back at historical examples of human migration on vast scales,
Who has ever seriously proposed moving vast numbers of humans between the planets, let alone the stars? Seriously, move a minimal number and breed up a new population at the far end - the work is unskilled and the workforce are generally willing to do overtime.
A trip from Germany or Poland to California in the 1850's took approximately about a year, including travel by ship to one of the eastern US ports, and then overland on foot or wagon.
As a point of fact, I suspect that the trip more often (mode or median ; pick either) took closer to a generation, with people travelling to get onto a boat, using the boat, getting off the boat, settling in the city or in the East somewhere (because they need to make money, approximately now!), finding that was horrible, then moving on to try the lands out West in the next generation.
Not many fleeing a shitty situation in Europe would have been in a situation to sit around and save enough additional money for a wagon and homesteading supplies before leaving the country they're fleeing. As soon as they'd got the boat fare plus a small amount of "travel cash" (maybe as jewellery, not cash, but WTF) then they'd be away.
And it could be so easy, just hooking up EEG...
How would you go about doing the "easy" "hooking up of an EEG"?
Step (1) first obtain an EEG.
I guess that I'd have to try getting to know some research workers at the Department of Medical Physics. I can't think of anywhere else that would have one (which I could borrow - the A&E department have probably got several, but need them on a "now, not in 5 minutes" basis.
Step (2) : find someone who knows how to connect that model of EEG to a patient ...
OK, conceivably you've got 7 EEGs in your apartment, which you've stacked up and thrown a faux tiger-skin over to form your Quagmire-a-like bar. But that's unlikely to be a commonly available solution.
I'd have gone for the video-camera solution someone else suggested. But as you say, that would have shown him full of microsleeps, along with the occasional fumble when they change the tapes. (Actually, changing the tapes would be a worthwhile test of dexterity. He'd have failed, regularly.) (I regularly pull 36 hour stints, with concentration and detail levels rising towards the end ; I don't believe the guy's claim for a second.)
We had to walk 15 minutes from our dorm to the lecture theater,
15 minutes? 15 minutes! Thee was lucky, youth! A good solid 15 run minutes through Mugger's Park would get you to the near end of the university area of town (campus, what campus), and then you could choose between another 18 minutes along the main road before crossing Psychotic Driver's Roundabout to get past Neanderthal College (home of welding, hairdressing and Advance Dole Scrounging ; also the Observatory, for teaching navigation to sailors) and finally hove into your department. No, there isn't anywhere to chain your bike up, so better to run.
over wet grass both ways.
I refer the Honourable Gentleman to my previous comments about "crossing Psychotic Driver's Roundabout".
'alf the time, our walkman batteries would run out
What is this "walkman" thing you talk of? Would it be of any interest to the inhabitants of Mugger's Park?
and our Led Zepplin albums would go all wonky and put us to sleep again.
That sounds like your Led Zepplin albums are working perfectly well.
It was all you could do to get down to the university pub for a late breakfast at 2.
AM or PM? Ours stopped serving food at about 1:30PM, and stopped serving beer at about 2AM.
...if The Creation Museum has an exhibit on this yet?
Are they interested in things that weren't mentioned in Ussher? "If it's not in Ussher, it's too recent for us" being their philosophy. So they're welcome to everything else that does get mentioned in Ussher's work, without of course the benefits of modern science to alleviate them.
... nor your pathetically recent age. (Sudbury could quite reasonably have been responsible for the extinction of half the species of life on the Earth at the time, given that species diversity seems to have been less in those times.)
On TV you see lots of computer sims but none look realistic to me.
This is only of academic interest.
Would there be a light covering the sky so bright you couldn't see it or would it traverse the atmosphere so quick it wouldn't have time to heat up and you really would see this huge space rock impact. And what would the explosion look like? WOuld it be a fireball initially or would you simply see billions of tons or rock being launched into orbit?
If you're observing the touchdown of a multiple-kilometre body (asteroid, banana, comet, dog ; it doesn't matter) on the Earth, from the Earth's surface, and you see the fireball, then you're dead to a close approximation in position and within a couple of hours precision in time. Geologically, these are unimportantly small differences, though they might make some personal difference to you, for a short time.
If you're observing from near-Earth orbit when you see the fireball, then you may have enough time to scavenge your craft's air into storage tanks, seal up your personal suit, and apply as much delta-vee as you can. If you've got a resource-recycling space colony to go to, you might be able to survive until the human population of the planet is able to replenish your supplies ; otherwise you need to land now, or make your colony permanently self-sustaining.
Seriously: you really, really don't want to see any non-trivial asteroid touch down.
Some people reckon the entire Pacific Ocean basic and the moon were a result of asteroid impact
Many, many years ago, that idea was proposed on some extremely tenuous grounds. There's a faint bell tinkling in my head that it was actually one of Darwin's sons, and the timing is vaguely right for it to have been a response to discovering the high average depth of the Pacific from the Challenger expedition. The idea has never had any strong support from data, and since the turn of the last century (i.e. 1900) it has been a pretty dead idea.
the moon is actually a bunch of material ejected from the earth when the asteroid(s) hit.
That is a gross oversimplification and distortion of the modern "Giant Impact" hypothesis, which has about as much relation to Darwin's idea (I'll associate him with it, but only on the strength of one braincell.) as, errr, not a lot.
Too long of a list.
You'll see a bunch of them on the ballot next week, tho.
I take it that there is an election in your country in the near future? Are you anywhere interesting?
Ig Noble... Here we come!!!
I agree, this is almost a shoe-in to win an Ig Nobel!
Spelling mistake, or light-brown brogue reference?
no, it really is spelled Ig Nobel
Errr, "Woosh"?
I've been laughing to the Igs for years. I'm making reference to the inspirational shoe-bomber, Richard Reed, who's non-exploding training shoes have since inspired a catalogue of imitators to throw footware at the rich, famous, evil and/ or retarded (or in the case of Dubya, all four with one shoe).
Soldiers are not just soldiers, they are what [SNIP]sented by the US military.
What the fuck? I mean, just what the fuck?
Sorry, could you elaborate a little, because it's obvious that English is not your native language. I can't tell if you support the [SNIPPED] post or are in some way trying to denigrate it and/or it's poster.
Are you trying to imply that generations of conscripted soldiers have been brutalized by what their governments have put them through, and that there is something decidedly worrying about modern professional armies composed of people who volunteer to become involved in such psychopathic activities.
Or do you think that volunteers for modern armies are people who believe the propaganda that is fed to them on a plate by their governments, and then have problems when they discover the reality of what they've volunteered for?
I really can't work out from "What the fuck?" which position you're trying to support.
I thought Wikileaks donations were being blocked?
One of their funding routes - the execrable UK-based Moneybookers, has caved to American pressure.
I hope they go bust.
The route via Wau-Holland Foundation seems to be continuing to work. And since I've been contacted in the past by American journalists wanting to know why I donate to Wikileaks ... I take that as evidence that the route works.
(There was in the past an option to not hide the fact that you're donating, but I haven't seen that for a while. In any case, I've never been concerned to keep my support secret.)
By nearly any standard the Iraq War is a war crime.
By whose standards is the killing of 10^5 (give or take a factor of "several") civilians not a war crime? Could you name names?
s/"gifts of the Holy One"/"touch of the noodly appendage"/ FTFY