[SNIP] AND to describe people who think they know in detail what God wants, especially visa vis the sacrificing of virgins, the stoning of infidels, etc.
Don't forget the sacrificing of your first-born son too. The Bible wasn't always about killing off the daughters ; sometimes the daughters were to be given to a crowd of angry perverts intent on sodomising someone that night (as intended by that upstanding citizen, Lot [Genesis, 19:8], praise to the prophet). The Bible is pretty even-handed in thinking of nasty things to do to people.
Here here! I am not religious but when I was younger and did go to church with my parents, the church always supported that very view point. Evolution, physics, they're all just God's way of doing things.
You will spend eternity in hell, burning and suffering the most unspeakable of torments, for thinking that. If it is any consolation, your parents and the other parishioners of your former congregation will be suffering those same torments. (Since it might be a consolation, you won't be allowed to know this, I'm sure. But since you're obviously a heretical unbeliever (you yourself say that you no longer attend church, damn you [and I mean that literally, not metaphorically]), you'll be getting the hellish tortures (again, literally, not metaphorically) specific for recidivists like yourself.
Evolution, physics, they're all just God's way of doing things.
That may or may not be true - God seems to be silent on all matters (fuelling debate over whether or not this "god" thing actually exists). However, the above promise of utter torture is definitely how God's people, priests and supporters behave. Just to add to the terror inspired by these promises, please put yourself into the mind of a child when considering how your tiniest doubts will lead to an eternity of torture.
Yeah, yeah ; your god is a god of love, not the god who will inflict punishment seven generations after the transgression. Obviously not the god of the Bible. Whatever. They're all the same animal.
In the case of both the Coelacanth and Tuatara, the modern animals just bear a very strong resemblence to their fossil counterparts.
I've never got up-close and personal with a tuatara, but I did specially go to the NHM a couple of years ago to look at coelacanths. Now, I don't claim to be an ichthyologist (why do you think I went to the NHM, which does house and feed real ichthyologists?), but even I could see the differences between late Jurassic coelacanths in the specimen cabinets in the back room (well, East wing) and the Recent one stuffed in the hallway. Yes, Latimeria is indubitably a coelacanth. But it isn't particularly similar to the last of the fossil coelacanths (Macropoma, for example); it's more similar to some coelacanths from the Permian.
Things such as Ice Ages and volcanic eruptions aren't going to have a profound effect on a lifeform that lives hundreds of feet (or even several miles) below the surface of the water.
Mr Blobby, the indeterminate lifeform spends generations blobbing about 2 miles deep in the ocean. Some mad fool on the surface starts an ice age. Surface temperatures drop, though not enough to freeze the water. Just enough to cut primary photosynthetic production by 90% overall, with a very brief bloom in "high summer". Mr Blobby now has to deal with an environment where, instead of a steady rain of "marine snow" coming down all year round, there is severe seasonality and only a very brief season of relative abundance. Enter, from stage right, Mr Darwin with his wonderful "Natural Selection", with which he will proceed to remodel the entire species from the bones (if Mr Blobby has any) out.
animals that are tasty with pasta were allowed to remain unevolved
Are sharks tasty with pasta?
If they've not evolved over X million years, then they must be (though I don't recall the mentioned verse in my copy of the FSM Gospel - but I'll just have to re-read it until I am touched again!). For, of course, certain values of "shark" and "tasty".
Actually, there's been a good degree of evolution going on in the sharks over the last few hundred million years. The elaborate rostra of some families have gone, and body sizes have varied drastically. But the general body plan hasn't changed significantly, because it works well.
Octopii have complex eyes with a superficial similarity to vertebrate eyes (not just humans, and for that matter, not all vertebrate eyes). But some of the details of the structure are tellingly different - for example, the nerve wiring in vertebrate eyes lay between the lens and the light receptors, while in the octopus eye the order is the much more sensible lens-receptor-wiring. When you look in detail, they're very different though. Dawkin's "Climbing Mount Improbable" will tell you a good deal more than you likely wish to know about the diversity of vision systems across the animal kingdom.
but even better suited to low light conditions and this despite the fact that the Octopuses and humans have no common ancestors who also had eyes.
... which would be as expected given the disparity between vertebrate and cephalopod optical systems. However, in exactly the same batch of evidence is evidence of the common molecular mechanisms underlying sight. Both vertebrate and cephalopod eyes use molecules based on the retinol/ retinal core as the light-sensitive element of their eyes, and this is a molecule found in essentially all eukaryotes, and in no small number of prokaryotes. Similarly I think that the basic molecular biology of nerves are very similar.
Those little shrews went and developed opposable thumbs and they're running the place!
Some of those little shrews with the opposable thumbs think that they run the place, but in reality it's still the bacteria that are in control. Always have been, and most likely always will be.
Another situation, which produces something analogous to a fossil but isn't really, is when you get a soft body forming an impression as a hollow. Again, this might happen if decomposition is extremely slow. If that hollow is then filled in at a subsequent time, you form something that looks like a fossil. (Really, it's casting from a mould, rather than a replacement process.)
This would get you a pass mark (just) as a definition of a "trace fossil" or ichnofossil. More specifically, you're describing a "resting trace". There are a wide variety of other ichnofossil types. The link I gave up-thread leads to mention if at least one modern trace fossil that is produced specifically by octopii.
No not really. It simply means that the octopus has not been "challenged" by its ocean environment or catastrophe, and therefore not forced into extinction or modification.
Considering the behavioural complexity and intelligence shown by modern octopii, wouldn't it be more likely that the challenges that octopii have been faced with in the last 95 million years have been ones that were most quickly and efficiently circumvented by behavioural changes. Behaviour doesn't fossilise terribly well. Hmmm, I wonder if there's any ichnotaxa assigned to octopus feeding traces. Google hints that there are : http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=ichnotaxa+octopus&btnG=Search&meta=... and - what a surprise - Darwin appears in the references. Along with, for example, "Bromley, R. G. 1993. Predation habits of octopus past and present and a new ichnospecies, Oichnus ovalis. Bulletin of the Geological Society of Denmark 40: 167-173." Well, if the Library stocks Bull.Geol.Soc.Denmark, I'll maybe have a look at that.
There's little evidence that octopii haven't evolved in 95 million years. There's this collection of fossils that show that the gross morphology of some octopii 95 million years ago is very similar to the gross morphology of some present day octopii. It doesn't say anything about the fine morphology of these octopii ; it doesn't say anything about the molecular biochemistry of these octopii compared to present octopii ; and it doesn't actually say anything much about how these fossilised octopii are actually related to modern octopii. It's perfectly feasible that the closest descendants of these octopii have a very different morphology, and that a different family of octopii have convergently evolved a morphology very similar to these ancient octopii.
Compare this evidence with the similarity of a Jurassic ichthyosaur and a modern dolphin. Given only the ichthyosaur and the modern dolphin specimens, and only the skin outline of the ichthyosaur, you might as well conclude that the dolphin is descended from the ichthyosaur, and that it has evolved little in 95 million years.
As always, the call is for more fossils!
(BTW, I don't have access to the full paper, though I'm contemplating a wander down to the library. The authors may have been more detailed in their taxonomy than I am or the reporters. I'm not a palaeo-octopus-ologist, but I do have a geologist's working knowledge of the palaeontology of the rest of the Mollusca.)
Don't ask Slashdot, ask yourself: "What would the BOFH do in my position?" Then profit.
As near as I can figure, something involving his boss, the building electrical, and an elevator shaft. And deleting files. There always seems to be deleted files for some reason.
The BOFH's Bosses are interchangeable, therefore all the incriminating files from the most-recent-dearly-departed Boss need to be transferred to the new Boss's account, with appropriately adjusted time stamps. This is an undocumented service of all BOFHs which permits the new Boss to get his departure strategy in place without needing to waste time on actually downloading porn, hacking into BeanCounterCentral, etc.
Indeed, the new BOFH Boss's only task during this critical phase of his employment would be to provide the Solitaire usage statistics and to try to understand how his office door's card-controlled exit works (hint : you're on the inside with the card-reader ; the card is on the outside ; this is not accidental. You can reach the card along the window ledge over the snake pit, or through the shark pool, but the poor sharks are hungry because no-one has gone that way for years.)
...but in my defense I did preface my statement by saying "I am just pulling this out of the air"
I've never been able to understand why people think that this is some sort of valid defence for being inaccurate (or, for that matter, poor spelling or sloppy grammar).
After all, it takes longer to TYPE a message than it does to do some fact checking ; spelling checkers are ubiquitous (I assume that you're using an open-source browser - I don't know if the proprietary browsers have managed to catch up yet) ; grammar is free to anyone. I suppose that if you thought your comments were of no importance, that might explain it, but that then begs the question of why you bothered to write the comment. Or maybe you think that your opinions are of no importance, in which case the fact that I chose to answer you may adjust your self-esteem appropriately upwards. Maybe you think that your comments online aren't a part of the permanent record and that you may not have to live with the impression you create for the rest of your life? You may be right, but I wouldn't stake my career on that being the case.
(I'm not picking on you personally - I've simply never been able to comprehend the mindset that thinks that permanently-recorded public comments don't deserve at least a modicum of care about their composition before you attach your name to them. There may be a number of Usman Ismail in the world, but you're not going to be able to run away from the name for your whole life. There aren't many Aidan Karleys in the world either, so I tend to expect my comments to follow me about.)
And they call me anti-social next they are going to call me a communist.
And I bet they meant it as an insult too! The fools!
An amusing scene yesterday afternoon : in amongst the "usual suspects" at the Citizenship Ceremony (from Moldova, the Philippines, Venezuela etc) was a family of 3 Israelis taking citizenship and one American. Obviously all is still sweetness and light in the 51 states.
Electron/proton beams would work as well, as would alpha particles, but they'd pose a risk to humans in space. In fact, using charged particles might induce a charge on the debris that would then help direct the debris toward it's doom (debris vector, Earth's magnetic field, right hand rule....whatever).
You do know that electrons/protons/alpha particles have mass, right?
True that most (all? I'd have to check) charged particles have mass. But where there are charge and mass in the same particle, the effects of the electromagnetic forces on the charge are going to be a lot larger than the associated gravitational forces. Larger by, IIRC, a factor of around 10^18.
Actually, that suggests an alternative possibility - use a suitably tuned laser that triggers the photoelectric effect on (say) aluminium, causing it to spit out a modest number of electrons, and so acquire a charge. If you planned that carefully with respect to the orbital path intersecting the Earth's magnetic field, you could generate either depressing or elevation forces on the particle (because the direction of the magnetic field is opposite at north and south poles). Whether that would work from a ground-based laser? Well... interesting. Also, whether the forces generated would be sufficient? Could you use it to steer particles in one swathe into a narrower swathe more suitable for mechanical collection?
Does anyone have an idea how quickly frozen water sublimates in a vacuum?
When you think about it, you won't be surprised to find that the answer depends on the temperature of the frozen water.
Vapour pressure varies as the [something] power of the temperature, for most materials at most temperatures.
Mass loss [per unit time] from your ice block is going to be proportional to the vapour pressure.
Duration of the ice block is going to be proportional to the mass-loss rate and the initial mass.
The experimental procedure relevant to your question is that of "freeze drying". Despite... well, before I go into a description, check the Wikipedia article. As the article points out, heaters are sometimes used in the drying chamber to increase the sample's temperature (and thus the vapour pressure and thus the mass loss rate) under the vacuum. One would expect the industrial manufacturers of such equipment to have fairly extensive data about the low-temperature vapour pressure of water (and other volatile materials - e.g. urea, ammonia, simple lipids - of relevance to drying biological materials) ; whether such data is more widely available... I can't be bothered looking. I searched a while ago for the corresponding "equation of state" for water at high temperatures (with relevance to supercritical water in geological environments), but never found the detailed data on the 'Net.
It's possible that any ice chunks would turn to water vapor fast enough to not pose a problem for other orbiting objects.
Very possible. Over a human timescale, we see comets decaying in their activity as a consequence of in-space sublimation. In particular, the mass loss and the "jet effects" alters the orbit in ways that can't be explained by gravitational forces alone.
In another message on this thread I said that I thought the colour of the ice produced would significantly affect the lifetime of the ices. Given what I say above about the temperature of the ice affecting the vapour pressure and so on, you should now see my train of reasoning.
There is an apocryphal story that the same line of reasoning lead to the introduction of lead into petrol.
Granted they will sublimate over time but until that happens you have a bit of a problem.
As tubal-Cain points out - how long is the "over time". This is eminently suitable to experiment.
I'd bet good money that it would make a big difference to the sublimation time whether the water was dyed something dark or whether the water was more or less clean.
I mean all satellites must have some ferromagnetic material in them.
ummm, Run that past me again. All satellites must have some ferromagnetic material in them? I don't recall seeing that constraint in the laws of motion or gravity (which is what determines whether something become an escapee, an impactor, or a satellite).
OK, assuming that while you wrote what you wrote, you meant to write something along the lines of "all artificial satellites must have some ferromagnetic components in their structure, somewhere." But to be honest, I think that even there you're on pretty thin ice. If there's steel capable of achieving a certain stiffness for X kilogrammes of launch weight... the likelihood is very high that you can achieve the same stiffness for about X/2 kilogrammes by using either aircraft-grade aluminium or titanium. Neither of these are ferromagnetic.
Yes, the Al or Ti parts would cost a factor of [several] more than the equivalent iron or steel ones ; but launch costs of the order of 10000/kilogramme will pay for an awful lot of replacing iron or steel with Al or Ti.
That's one point. But let's briefly posit that steel bolts (for example) do turn out to be the most economic solution, and so all commercial satellites include steel bolts. (We'll exclude the occasional weird scientific or military satellite with a dire need to be non-magnetic.) So, you have a satellite with steel bolts - which gets involved in a collision and fragmented.
90% of your fragments are going to be of aircraft aluminium or titanium (or circuit boards, hoses, etc) ; and 10% of steel bolts. Most of the debris cloud isn't going to be ferromagnetic.
Thin ice out there, and global warming is coming! I'd head for shore, if I were you.
As for orbital debris, why lasers? Why not use an electron or ion beam and take advantage of induced electrostatic forces within the debris field?
Errr, because electron or ion beams are composed of particles with a net charge and so will
diverge, due to the repulsion of electron on electron;
and therefore, decrease in power at the target (power parallels amount of light pressure or surface ablation, and therefore to deflection, and it's deflection that you really want);
Also, over the ranges involved, even the relatively weak magnetic field of the Earth is enough to make a straight line (to a charged particle) a non-straight line (to a light or radar photon). That makes aiming much, much harder.
Also, those very induced electrostatic (or magnetic) forces you invoke will of necessity be locally variable through the depth dimension of the debris field, meaning that you're making your aiming task even harder.
I'm reminded of Larry Niven's line in The Mote in Gods Eye : "We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity."
"I think the question is whether the world "violent" will come before the revolution or not, and whether it will have to be, for that matter."
I think that is pretty much impossible....they have already taken your guns over there in the UK, haven't they?
Ah, do I detect the mating call of the Common Spotted American Dimwit, who thinks that you can't have violence without guns?
Just for your information, the British authorities haven't "taken" "our" guns ; since the days when ball and shot were loaded separately, very, very few people have had guns, or have had a need for guns. Similarly, very few of the police have access to guns, or know how to use one. The army ? - oh forget them, they're tied up abroad fighting for American oil and are rapidly falling below 80% of their nominal strength.
The closest this country has been to revolution in my lifetime was the Miner's Strike of 1983-4. The weapon of choice then was the paving slab with a strong showing from the fence post. Which are perfectly adequate tools for carrying out a revolution against an unarmed police force. Numerically, the army don't matter, and would quite possibly lose significant personnel to mutiny in a popular revolution.
Psion actually did have high-quality handhelds back before they became so commonplace. [..] Of course, this is back in the '90s, before even the Newton...
Indeed, I'm a card-carrying Psion user and have been for well over a decade - the Psion was the alternative I took up when my Nokia 9000 mobile phone/ computer was banned from work. I have sufficient old machines sitting in storage bags that I don't foresee having to re-enter the "handheld" market much before 2015, so I can afford to wait for important features - principally a battery life of several weeks and a decent keyboard. Until something comes out with those features, it doesn't really get a look-in.
I've considered getting a NetBook (TM) on occasions. But they're not really pocketable.
If health insurance was like auto or home insurance:...
Is this true or not ? And if this isn't the case, why on earth isn't it true? I mean, it's insurance - so you apply relevant actuarial data to each case to try to calculate an appropriate premium for each insured risk.
(Note : I've no idea how the US health insurance market works, if "market" is indeed an appropriate term. It's someone else's problem. Come to think of it, I've no real understanding of the UK health insurance market since it's nearly 20 years since I worked for a company that wasted money on such a scheme.)
We all know that Iranians have beards, this is what is powering this device.
Implying that women (neither Iranian nor western) will be unable to get this to work. (Sorry, I just realised that TFA made no mention of the gender of the researchers. So, still accepting "beard power" as a working hypothesis for the moment, perhaps it's the absence of beards necessary, or the average beard-count-per-sq.km ?)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the sacrificing of your first-born son too. The Bible wasn't always about killing off the daughters ; sometimes the daughters were to be given to a crowd of angry perverts intent on sodomising someone that night (as intended by that upstanding citizen, Lot [Genesis, 19:8], praise to the prophet). The Bible is pretty even-handed in thinking of nasty things to do to people.
You will spend eternity in hell, burning and suffering the most unspeakable of torments, for thinking that. If it is any consolation, your parents and the other parishioners of your former congregation will be suffering those same torments. (Since it might be a consolation, you won't be allowed to know this, I'm sure. But since you're obviously a heretical unbeliever (you yourself say that you no longer attend church, damn you [and I mean that literally, not metaphorically]), you'll be getting the hellish tortures (again, literally, not metaphorically) specific for recidivists like yourself.
That may or may not be true - God seems to be silent on all matters (fuelling debate over whether or not this "god" thing actually exists). However, the above promise of utter torture is definitely how God's people, priests and supporters behave. Just to add to the terror inspired by these promises, please put yourself into the mind of a child when considering how your tiniest doubts will lead to an eternity of torture.
Yeah, yeah ; your god is a god of love, not the god who will inflict punishment seven generations after the transgression. Obviously not the god of the Bible. Whatever. They're all the same animal.
I've never got up-close and personal with a tuatara, but I did specially go to the NHM a couple of years ago to look at coelacanths. Now, I don't claim to be an ichthyologist (why do you think I went to the NHM, which does house and feed real ichthyologists?), but even I could see the differences between late Jurassic coelacanths in the specimen cabinets in the back room (well, East wing) and the Recent one stuffed in the hallway.
Yes, Latimeria is indubitably a coelacanth. But it isn't particularly similar to the last of the fossil coelacanths (Macropoma, for example); it's more similar to some coelacanths from the Permian.
Mr Blobby, the indeterminate lifeform spends generations blobbing about 2 miles deep in the ocean. Some mad fool on the surface starts an ice age. Surface temperatures drop, though not enough to freeze the water. Just enough to cut primary photosynthetic production by 90% overall, with a very brief bloom in "high summer". Mr Blobby now has to deal with an environment where, instead of a steady rain of "marine snow" coming down all year round, there is severe seasonality and only a very brief season of relative abundance.
Enter, from stage right, Mr Darwin with his wonderful "Natural Selection", with which he will proceed to remodel the entire species from the bones (if Mr Blobby has any) out.
If they've not evolved over X million years, then they must be (though I don't recall the mentioned verse in my copy of the FSM Gospel - but I'll just have to re-read it until I am touched again!). For, of course, certain values of "shark" and "tasty".
Actually, there's been a good degree of evolution going on in the sharks over the last few hundred million years. The elaborate rostra of some families have gone, and body sizes have varied drastically. But the general body plan hasn't changed significantly, because it works well.
Octopii have complex eyes with a superficial similarity to vertebrate eyes (not just humans, and for that matter, not all vertebrate eyes). But some of the details of the structure are tellingly different - for example, the nerve wiring in vertebrate eyes lay between the lens and the light receptors, while in the octopus eye the order is the much more sensible lens-receptor-wiring. When you look in detail, they're very different though. Dawkin's "Climbing Mount Improbable" will tell you a good deal more than you likely wish to know about the diversity of vision systems across the animal kingdom.
... which would be as expected given the disparity between vertebrate and cephalopod optical systems. However, in exactly the same batch of evidence is evidence of the common molecular mechanisms underlying sight. Both vertebrate and cephalopod eyes use molecules based on the retinol/ retinal core as the light-sensitive element of their eyes, and this is a molecule found in essentially all eukaryotes, and in no small number of prokaryotes. Similarly I think that the basic molecular biology of nerves are very similar.
Some of those little shrews with the opposable thumbs think that they run the place, but in reality it's still the bacteria that are in control. Always have been, and most likely always will be.
This would get you a pass mark (just) as a definition of a "trace fossil" or ichnofossil. More specifically, you're describing a "resting trace". There are a wide variety of other ichnofossil types.
The link I gave up-thread leads to mention if at least one modern trace fossil that is produced specifically by octopii.
Considering the behavioural complexity and intelligence shown by modern octopii, wouldn't it be more likely that the challenges that octopii have been faced with in the last 95 million years have been ones that were most quickly and efficiently circumvented by behavioural changes. Behaviour doesn't fossilise terribly well. Hmmm, I wonder if there's any ichnotaxa assigned to octopus feeding traces. Google hints that there are : http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=ichnotaxa+octopus&btnG=Search&meta= ... and - what a surprise - Darwin appears in the references. Along with, for example, "Bromley, R. G. 1993. Predation habits of octopus past and present and a new ichnospecies, Oichnus ovalis. Bulletin of the Geological Society of Denmark 40: 167-173."
Well, if the Library stocks Bull.Geol.Soc.Denmark, I'll maybe have a look at that.
There's little evidence that octopii haven't evolved in 95 million years. There's this collection of fossils that show that the gross morphology of some octopii 95 million years ago is very similar to the gross morphology of some present day octopii. It doesn't say anything about the fine morphology of these octopii ; it doesn't say anything about the molecular biochemistry of these octopii compared to present octopii ; and it doesn't actually say anything much about how these fossilised octopii are actually related to modern octopii. It's perfectly feasible that the closest descendants of these octopii have a very different morphology, and that a different family of octopii have convergently evolved a morphology very similar to these ancient octopii.
Compare this evidence with the similarity of a Jurassic ichthyosaur and a modern dolphin. Given only the ichthyosaur and the modern dolphin specimens, and only the skin outline of the ichthyosaur, you might as well conclude that the dolphin is descended from the ichthyosaur, and that it has evolved little in 95 million years.
As always, the call is for more fossils!
(BTW, I don't have access to the full paper, though I'm contemplating a wander down to the library. The authors may have been more detailed in their taxonomy than I am or the reporters. I'm not a palaeo-octopus-ologist, but I do have a geologist's working knowledge of the palaeontology of the rest of the Mollusca.)
To rhyme with "Featherstonehaugh" or with "Fanshaw"?
The BOFH's Bosses are interchangeable, therefore all the incriminating files from the most-recent-dearly-departed Boss need to be transferred to the new Boss's account, with appropriately adjusted time stamps. This is an undocumented service of all BOFHs which permits the new Boss to get his departure strategy in place without needing to waste time on actually downloading porn, hacking into BeanCounterCentral, etc.
Indeed, the new BOFH Boss's only task during this critical phase of his employment would be to provide the Solitaire usage statistics and to try to understand how his office door's card-controlled exit works (hint : you're on the inside with the card-reader ; the card is on the outside ; this is not accidental. You can reach the card along the window ledge over the snake pit, or through the shark pool, but the poor sharks are hungry because no-one has gone that way for years.)
I've never been able to understand why people think that this is some sort of valid defence for being inaccurate (or, for that matter, poor spelling or sloppy grammar).
After all, it takes longer to TYPE a message than it does to do some fact checking ; spelling checkers are ubiquitous (I assume that you're using an open-source browser - I don't know if the proprietary browsers have managed to catch up yet) ; grammar is free to anyone.
I suppose that if you thought your comments were of no importance, that might explain it, but that then begs the question of why you bothered to write the comment.
Or maybe you think that your opinions are of no importance, in which case the fact that I chose to answer you may adjust your self-esteem appropriately upwards.
Maybe you think that your comments online aren't a part of the permanent record and that you may not have to live with the impression you create for the rest of your life? You may be right, but I wouldn't stake my career on that being the case.
(I'm not picking on you personally - I've simply never been able to comprehend the mindset that thinks that permanently-recorded public comments don't deserve at least a modicum of care about their composition before you attach your name to them. There may be a number of Usman Ismail in the world, but you're not going to be able to run away from the name for your whole life. There aren't many Aidan Karleys in the world either, so I tend to expect my comments to follow me about.)
And I bet they meant it as an insult too! The fools!
An amusing scene yesterday afternoon : in amongst the "usual suspects" at the Citizenship Ceremony (from Moldova, the Philippines, Venezuela etc) was a family of 3 Israelis taking citizenship and one American. Obviously all is still sweetness and light in the 51 states.
True that most (all? I'd have to check) charged particles have mass. But where there are charge and mass in the same particle, the effects of the electromagnetic forces on the charge are going to be a lot larger than the associated gravitational forces. Larger by, IIRC, a factor of around 10^18.
Actually, that suggests an alternative possibility - use a suitably tuned laser that triggers the photoelectric effect on (say) aluminium, causing it to spit out a modest number of electrons, and so acquire a charge. If you planned that carefully with respect to the orbital path intersecting the Earth's magnetic field, you could generate either depressing or elevation forces on the particle (because the direction of the magnetic field is opposite at north and south poles). Whether that would work from a ground-based laser? Well ... interesting. Also, whether the forces generated would be sufficient? Could you use it to steer particles in one swathe into a narrower swathe more suitable for mechanical collection?
When you think about it, you won't be surprised to find that the answer depends on the temperature of the frozen water.
Vapour pressure varies as the [something] power of the temperature, for most materials at most temperatures.
Mass loss [per unit time] from your ice block is going to be proportional to the vapour pressure.
Duration of the ice block is going to be proportional to the mass-loss rate and the initial mass.
The experimental procedure relevant to your question is that of "freeze drying". Despite ... well, before I go into a description, check the Wikipedia article. As the article points out, heaters are sometimes used in the drying chamber to increase the sample's temperature (and thus the vapour pressure and thus the mass loss rate) under the vacuum. One would expect the industrial manufacturers of such equipment to have fairly extensive data about the low-temperature vapour pressure of water (and other volatile materials - e.g. urea, ammonia, simple lipids - of relevance to drying biological materials) ; whether such data is more widely available ... I can't be bothered looking. I searched a while ago for the corresponding "equation of state" for water at high temperatures (with relevance to supercritical water in geological environments), but never found the detailed data on the 'Net.
Very possible. Over a human timescale, we see comets decaying in their activity as a consequence of in-space sublimation. In particular, the mass loss and the "jet effects" alters the orbit in ways that can't be explained by gravitational forces alone.
In another message on this thread I said that I thought the colour of the ice produced would significantly affect the lifetime of the ices. Given what I say above about the temperature of the ice affecting the vapour pressure and so on, you should now see my train of reasoning.
There is an apocryphal story that the same line of reasoning lead to the introduction of lead into petrol.
As tubal-Cain points out - how long is the "over time".
This is eminently suitable to experiment.
I'd bet good money that it would make a big difference to the sublimation time whether the water was dyed something dark or whether the water was more or less clean.
ummm, Run that past me again. All satellites must have some ferromagnetic material in them? I don't recall seeing that constraint in the laws of motion or gravity (which is what determines whether something become an escapee, an impactor, or a satellite).
OK, assuming that while you wrote what you wrote, you meant to write something along the lines of "all artificial satellites must have some ferromagnetic components in their structure, somewhere." But to be honest, I think that even there you're on pretty thin ice. If there's steel capable of achieving a certain stiffness for X kilogrammes of launch weight ... the likelihood is very high that you can achieve the same stiffness for about X/2 kilogrammes by using either aircraft-grade aluminium or titanium. Neither of these are ferromagnetic.
Yes, the Al or Ti parts would cost a factor of [several] more than the equivalent iron or steel ones ; but launch costs of the order of 10000/kilogramme will pay for an awful lot of replacing iron or steel with Al or Ti.
That's one point. But let's briefly posit that steel bolts (for example) do turn out to be the most economic solution, and so all commercial satellites include steel bolts. (We'll exclude the occasional weird scientific or military satellite with a dire need to be non-magnetic.) So, you have a satellite with steel bolts - which gets involved in a collision and fragmented.
90% of your fragments are going to be of aircraft aluminium or titanium (or circuit boards, hoses, etc) ; and 10% of steel bolts. Most of the debris cloud isn't going to be ferromagnetic.
Thin ice out there, and global warming is coming! I'd head for shore, if I were you.
Errr, because electron or ion beams are composed of particles with a net charge and so will
I'm reminded of Larry Niven's line in The Mote in Gods Eye : "We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity."
...food, sex, money (or some permutation of those). Or, to put it more accurately (by being less precise), most people don't think much, if at all.
They're all wallpapering Peet's living room wall.
Ah, do I detect the mating call of the Common Spotted American Dimwit, who thinks that you can't have violence without guns?
Just for your information, the British authorities haven't "taken" "our" guns ; since the days when ball and shot were loaded separately, very, very few people have had guns, or have had a need for guns. Similarly, very few of the police have access to guns, or know how to use one. The army ? - oh forget them, they're tied up abroad fighting for American oil and are rapidly falling below 80% of their nominal strength.
The closest this country has been to revolution in my lifetime was the Miner's Strike of 1983-4. The weapon of choice then was the paving slab with a strong showing from the fence post. Which are perfectly adequate tools for carrying out a revolution against an unarmed police force. Numerically, the army don't matter, and would quite possibly lose significant personnel to mutiny in a popular revolution.
Indeed, I'm a card-carrying Psion user and have been for well over a decade - the Psion was the alternative I took up when my Nokia 9000 mobile phone/ computer was banned from work. I have sufficient old machines sitting in storage bags that I don't foresee having to re-enter the "handheld" market much before 2015, so I can afford to wait for important features - principally a battery life of several weeks and a decent keyboard. Until something comes out with those features, it doesn't really get a look-in.
I've considered getting a NetBook (TM) on occasions. But they're not really pocketable.
Is this true or not ? And if this isn't the case, why on earth isn't it true? I mean, it's insurance - so you apply relevant actuarial data to each case to try to calculate an appropriate premium for each insured risk.
(Note : I've no idea how the US health insurance market works, if "market" is indeed an appropriate term. It's someone else's problem. Come to think of it, I've no real understanding of the UK health insurance market since it's nearly 20 years since I worked for a company that wasted money on such a scheme.)
Implying that women (neither Iranian nor western) will be unable to get this to work.
(Sorry, I just realised that TFA made no mention of the gender of the researchers. So, still accepting "beard power" as a working hypothesis for the moment, perhaps it's the absence of beards necessary, or the average beard-count-per-sq.km ?)