I take it you're another member of the (fairly large) class of "people who have never drilled a 4km-deep well in their life". That's a lot of kit. Just the cable is multiple tonnes.
Vibration monitoring is hardly new. But yeah, your point about de-humanning the workfloor meaning fewer ears makes sense in needing to retrofit this to complex production lines. Obviously, newer process equipment would have built-in, and almost certainly hard-wired, sensors throughout, It's relatively cheap at build time.
They've been in valuable machines with a high cost of failure for decades. Thing is, dspite what most people seem to think, cars are cheap bits of commodity crap and if they fail they don't cost anything much by not working.
Get up to a 10MW gen-set in a vessel which clocks $10,000/hour of down time with several hundred personnel idle while the machine is idle... and miraculously vibration sensors (which they're describing as "ultrasonic sensors" ; meh) start sprouting from major shafts, in the sides of bearing mounts, all over. 40 years ago, they've have gone to a dial gauge with a pen marking at "normal" and writing the figures onto a data sheet every hour. 30 years ago, they'd have gone onto a chart recorder. 20 years ago, the chart recorder would have sprouted alarms and recorded a dozen sensors. Ten years ago, it got computerised.
WiFi *might* be easier than hard wiring, but you've still got to power the sensor. Or you have to change the batteries regularly in your PPM (Planned Preventative Maintenance) schedule.
Their working theory is a collision in the asteroid belt 300 million years ago
In this context, there is a lot of work supporting a brief (around 20 million years) period of increased micrometeorite delivery to Earth, which are recorded in "shelf carbonates" of the Ordovician series. Actually the record is getting good enough that people are arguing for several distinct pulses of micrometeorite delivery within that period. Of the less-altered micrometeorites analysed, they appear to be significantly less diverse than present day delivery, which is proposed to be the result of a significant collision in the asteroid belt, producing a lot of debris, some of which impacted the Earth.
That event lasted in the order of 20 Myr ; a 300 million year event is... well, not implausible, but it does strain my credibility. It needs some dynamics work, which is definitely above my pay grade.
In the interval between 301 million years ago and 300 million years ago, about 70 stars would have passed close (10 ly) to the Solar system. A different 70 (+/- about 20) would have passed similarly close between 300 and 299 Myr ago.
Which stars? They could literally be on the other side of the galaxy by now.
The approach, passage and recession of a passing star takes tens of thousands of years, which will put a moderate degree of agitation into the Oort cloud. But that is happening almost continuously (there are 7 known near-approach stars in the next 100 kyr), so they blur into one another as a more-or-less constant background level of agitation in the Oort cloud and outer solar system.
On a much longer timescale, this work is suggesting that there has been a persistent increase in cratering events in the Earth-Moon system.
Evidence of older [than 300 Myr] ones has been subducted. How do you think we would account for them?
Errr, doh? So, in your immense knowledge you've never heard of the Sudbury structure - a Grenville age large astrobleme near the Canada-USA border, from about 950 Myr ago. Or the Stac Fada structure recently discovered in Scotland, dating from approximately 1.1 Gyr? Or the Vrefefort structure, one of the largest on the planet and about 2 Gyr ?
Not really. That's a strange definition of "soon". The 50-100 million years it's expected to take for them to disappear is functionally equivalent to "forever"
Speak for yourself. As a geologist, I'm quite used to thinking of error bars bigger than that. You're just having a calculation failure.
Why does it have to be the U.S. government's job to produce a "World Magnetic Model"?
They produce it for employees of US-based companies (some of whom might also be US citizens, but that doesn't often go together) who are working in places which are in "the World" but not in the United States. For an example, one of my classmates at university graduated and joined a wellbore-surveying company called Sperry (HQ in Houston, Texas), and was trained how to do surveying using the WMM in their European base. Since then, he has worked in the Gulf (Persian, not Mexican), the Sahara, the FSU, and for two surveys, in the USA. All for the same company. All using the same model.
Since he steers oil wells to tolerances of under a metre at several kilometres reach, this model moving out of tolerance will be a problem for them. It'll increase the uncertainty in the wellbore's location noticeably, and it's not clear if that'll be a randomly distributed error or a skew one.
reversals are rapid
Define "rapid." There's at least one sill (intrusion parallel to country rock lamination) which solidified during a reversal. The event was too rapid to "see" through direct radiometric dating, but by measuring the melting temperature of the rock (the texture indicates that it was emplaced fairly fluid), the Curie temperature and with how well the surrounding rocks conduct heat, the cooling time of the sill is estimated as taking several centuries. And the orientation of the magnetic field changed by about 150 degrees during those centuries.
But yeah, "rapid" for certain meanings of "rapid".
the magnetic field does not disappear during reversals though there may be multiple poles
That is how the models go - and it is not incompatible with the observations noted above. They're well supported models, but not observations.
no extinctions correlate with them
No more than would be expected by chance. No fewer, either.
so the "fun" would be technology / navigational system issues, no anything directly dire to life
Yep, I'd look forward to living through one, particularly since that would imply a lifetime of several centuries.
To use GPS you need to have sight of the sky. That may be the case in your navigational tasks. For mine (surveying newly-discovered caves tens of kilometres from daylight as the cave-cricket walks and up to a kilometre below the land surface, it's not true.)
The penetration of RF signals into rock with more than a few % of water is measured in tens of metres at most
Hmmm, interesting proposition when I was looking at this.
"All planetesimals born near the Kuiper Belt formed as binaries"
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.00683
The cold classical Kuiper belt objects have low inclinations and eccentricities and are the only Kuiper belt population suspected to have formed in situ. Compared with the dynamically excited populations, which exhibit a broad range of colours and a low binary fraction of ~10% cold classical Kuiper belt objects typically have red optical colours with ~30% of the population found in binary pairs; the origin of these differences remains unclear. We report the detection of a population of blue-coloured, tenuously bound binaries residing among the cold classical Kuiper belt objects. Here we show that widely separated binaries could have survived push-out into the cold classical region during the early phases of Neptune's migration.
Let's think it through. A force exists to move the lobes from one position to another - a few degrees, but it's still several hundreds of metres of movement, but that's OK, forces can do that. But then, the force reverses.
Do you know any forces that reverse like that? I can only think of one that would work in space - if there were another body in orbit with the main body. Pushing, then pulling.
But - that is precisely why both Hubble and the cameras on NH have performed long exposure ("deep", to low brightness) searches of the vicinity of MU69 over the last couple of years. IF there is such a satellite, then it is either very small (I think the limit of 1.5km diameter has been mentioned) and so only capable of producing small forces, OR it is extremely dark (but can be larger, producing greater forces).
The two lobes don't occult each other much as they rotate, as seen from the Sun/ Earth/ New Horizons direction. So probably the axis is not far from this direction.
That would imply that it's rotation axis is not far from laying in the fundamental plane of the solar system, similar to the Pluto/Charon system and Uranus. Which makes me go "Hmmm, interesting."
While no coherent light curve for MU69 has been modelled, there is variation in the brightness. See, for example, fig 5 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.047... (caption includes "Although there is quite a bit of scatter in the data and we cannot determine the period, it is possible to hide a lightcurve amplitude of up to 0.6 magnitudes within this dataset.") "No rotation" is possible (but unlikely) ; slow rotation (much less than the 9 day intense observation campaign, for example) is also possible ; irregular rotation ("tumbling") is possible.
With the data that has downloaded so far (which is not a lot more than when I wrote the submission, because MU69 is close to the sun in the sky which interferes with the about 10^-20 W of signal from the spacecraft), they don't know the rotation rate well (15+/-1 hours) nor the orientation of the rotation axis. It is also possible that it is tumbling and has no rotation axis.
And there is a problem with this?
If you think "I've never a river move that slowly".. well, it's not a river. Specifically, the material above it has almost exactly the same density, unlike air versus water.
French remained the language of diplomacy for a century after Waterloo.
French is still the international language of diplomacy. For example, between my wife's British and Russian passports, the only language in common is French.
You kill the family. You leave the perpetrator alive to suffer. You might pulp his hands to prevent him being able to suicide. Keep him around "pour encourager les autres". (page 123)
A skim read (because I'm more interested in the mineralogy than the politics that is obsessing most commenters) tells me:
In addition, although the importation of this expensive foreign pigment into medieval Europe is first materially attested in the 10th century (15), its presence in an otherwise unremarkable womenâ(TM)s community in northern Germany powerfully testifies to the expansion of long-distance trading circuits during the 11th-century European commercial revolution. [...]
Female biological sex was confirmed using both osteological and genetic methods (16)[...]
To isolate the blue particles for further study, we first sought to demineralize the surrounding dental calculus using a dilute HCl solution (0.05 M), as is typically performed during microbotanical analysis. However, we found that this procedure led to color instability and loss (fig. S3); by comparing colors of the acid-demineralized calculus to reference pigments, we confirmed that using an acid as a decalcifying agent is detrimental to color stability and particle size in lapis lazuli, azurite, malachite, and vivianite (fig. S4; see the Supplementary Materials). We then tested an alternate approach on a second dental calculus sample from the same individual, decontaminating the calculus surface and then disrupting the calculus structure by sonication in ultrapure water. Calculus fragments and mineral particles released by this procedure were transferred to a microscope slide without mounting media or coverslip and allowed to dry under controlled conditions. Inspection under light microscopy revealed more than 100 particles of deep blue color (Fig. 2), many of which were observed in situ still encased within fragments of dental calculus (Fig. 2B). [...]
(The colour intensity in the supplied figures is remarkable. I've not seen lapis lazuli under a microscope for decades, but vivianite is a little more common, and is just dull in comparison. ) With the exception of lazurite (the dominant blue mineral in lapis lazuli), all blue pigments that were available and used during the medieval period contain metal (copper, cobalt, or iron) as a major element in their composition [...]
The archaeological blue particles lack copper, cobalt, and iron, thereby excluding pigments containing these metals as major elements, but they closely resemble the elemental composition of lazurite, the sulfur-containing tectosilicate that gives lapis lazuli its dark blue color.
Unlikely, and if so, extremely unlikely to be stained with ultramarine/ lapis lazuli. When the process for making the dye Prussian Blue was discovered (by accident) in the early 1700s, it pretty rapidly replaced the extremely expensive lapis lazuli (the best of which comes only one small area in Afghanistan, which has been mined for around 9 kiloyears).
The image in TFA shows the stained tooth encrustation. If the image is anything like true-colour, then the actual dye content is probably less then 10%.
As an ordained minister of the Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster (May Sauce Be Upon Her Meaty Balls), my interpretation of this is that it is a sign of the Start Times - in that all over the world Pastafarians of distinction will use this celestial phenomenon as an excuse to START a good party. Pirate regalia recommended but not required. Idiotic Christianity guns and hard drugs to be left at home, thanks. Enjoyment and hangovers hoped for to celebrate the holy hangover which lead to the FSM(MSBUHMB) creating the universe.
Ramen!
(I bet my prediction has more truth in it than your Christian "End Times" prophecy.)
Slashdot Mirror
I take it you're another member of the (fairly large) class of "people who have never drilled a 4km-deep well in their life". That's a lot of kit. Just the cable is multiple tonnes.
Which has been clear for decades.
Vibration monitoring is hardly new. But yeah, your point about de-humanning the workfloor meaning fewer ears makes sense in needing to retrofit this to complex production lines. Obviously, newer process equipment would have built-in, and almost certainly hard-wired, sensors throughout, It's relatively cheap at build time.
Get up to a 10MW gen-set in a vessel which clocks $10,000/hour of down time with several hundred personnel idle while the machine is idle ... and miraculously vibration sensors (which they're describing as "ultrasonic sensors" ; meh) start sprouting from major shafts, in the sides of bearing mounts, all over. 40 years ago, they've have gone to a dial gauge with a pen marking at "normal" and writing the figures onto a data sheet every hour. 30 years ago, they'd have gone onto a chart recorder. 20 years ago, the chart recorder would have sprouted alarms and recorded a dozen sensors. Ten years ago, it got computerised.
WiFi *might* be easier than hard wiring, but you've still got to power the sensor. Or you have to change the batteries regularly in your PPM (Planned Preventative Maintenance) schedule.
Who thought this was even news?
In this context, there is a lot of work supporting a brief (around 20 million years) period of increased micrometeorite delivery to Earth, which are recorded in "shelf carbonates" of the Ordovician series. Actually the record is getting good enough that people are arguing for several distinct pulses of micrometeorite delivery within that period. Of the less-altered micrometeorites analysed, they appear to be significantly less diverse than present day delivery, which is proposed to be the result of a significant collision in the asteroid belt, producing a lot of debris, some of which impacted the Earth.
That event lasted in the order of 20 Myr ; a 300 million year event is ... well, not implausible, but it does strain my credibility. It needs some dynamics work, which is definitely above my pay grade.
Which stars? They could literally be on the other side of the galaxy by now.
On a much longer timescale, this work is suggesting that there has been a persistent increase in cratering events in the Earth-Moon system.
Errr, doh? So, in your immense knowledge you've never heard of the Sudbury structure - a Grenville age large astrobleme near the Canada-USA border, from about 950 Myr ago. Or the Stac Fada structure recently discovered in Scotland, dating from approximately 1.1 Gyr? Or the Vrefefort structure, one of the largest on the planet and about 2 Gyr ?
Speak for yourself. As a geologist, I'm quite used to thinking of error bars bigger than that. You're just having a calculation failure.
They produce it for employees of US-based companies (some of whom might also be US citizens, but that doesn't often go together) who are working in places which are in "the World" but not in the United States. For an example, one of my classmates at university graduated and joined a wellbore-surveying company called Sperry (HQ in Houston, Texas), and was trained how to do surveying using the WMM in their European base. Since then, he has worked in the Gulf (Persian, not Mexican), the Sahara, the FSU, and for two surveys, in the USA. All for the same company. All using the same model.
Since he steers oil wells to tolerances of under a metre at several kilometres reach, this model moving out of tolerance will be a problem for them. It'll increase the uncertainty in the wellbore's location noticeably, and it's not clear if that'll be a randomly distributed error or a skew one.
But yeah, "rapid" for certain meanings of "rapid".
the magnetic field does not disappear during reversals though there may be multiple poles That is how the models go - and it is not incompatible with the observations noted above. They're well supported models, but not observations.
no extinctions correlate with them
No more than would be expected by chance. No fewer, either.
so the "fun" would be technology / navigational system issues, no anything directly dire to life
Yep, I'd look forward to living through one, particularly since that would imply a lifetime of several centuries.
The penetration of RF signals into rock with more than a few % of water is measured in tens of metres at most
"All planetesimals born near the Kuiper Belt formed as binaries"
https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.00683
Do you know any forces that reverse like that? I can only think of one that would work in space - if there were another body in orbit with the main body. Pushing, then pulling.
But - that is precisely why both Hubble and the cameras on NH have performed long exposure ("deep", to low brightness) searches of the vicinity of MU69 over the last couple of years. IF there is such a satellite, then it is either very small (I think the limit of 1.5km diameter has been mentioned) and so only capable of producing small forces, OR it is extremely dark (but can be larger, producing greater forces).
Data is coming. I fucking love science.
I almost forgot why I normally exclude ACs from even being read.
That would imply that it's rotation axis is not far from laying in the fundamental plane of the solar system, similar to the Pluto/Charon system and Uranus. Which makes me go "Hmmm, interesting."
While no coherent light curve for MU69 has been modelled, there is variation in the brightness. See, for example, fig 5 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.047... (caption includes "Although there is quite a bit of scatter in the data and we cannot determine the period, it is possible to hide a lightcurve amplitude of up to 0.6 magnitudes within this dataset.") "No rotation" is possible (but unlikely) ; slow rotation (much less than the 9 day intense observation campaign, for example) is also possible ; irregular rotation ("tumbling") is possible.
With the data that has downloaded so far (which is not a lot more than when I wrote the submission, because MU69 is close to the sun in the sky which interferes with the about 10^-20 W of signal from the spacecraft), they don't know the rotation rate well (15+/-1 hours) nor the orientation of the rotation axis. It is also possible that it is tumbling and has no rotation axis.
And your list of accepted submissions is how long?
And there is a problem with this? If you think "I've never a river move that slowly" .. well, it's not a river. Specifically, the material above it has almost exactly the same density, unlike air versus water.
French is still the international language of diplomacy. For example, between my wife's British and Russian passports, the only language in common is French.
You kill the family. You leave the perpetrator alive to suffer. You might pulp his hands to prevent him being able to suicide. Keep him around "pour encourager les autres". (page 123)
The original paper is at http://advances.sciencemag.org..., and is Bronze Open Access with the PDF at http://advances.sciencemag.org...
A skim read (because I'm more interested in the mineralogy than the politics that is obsessing most commenters) tells me :
The image in TFA shows the stained tooth encrustation. If the image is anything like true-colour, then the actual dye content is probably less then 10%.
How does the relevant taxman code for that. It's an asset with a depreciation timetable, but how much of the usage is business and how much is play?
Ramen!
(I bet my prediction has more truth in it than your Christian "End Times" prophecy.)