Or Stonehenge could be the remnants of the foundation for a tall structure.
No. Or more precisely, it couldn't be any "building" more than a small fraction of the weight of the stones themselves.
The stones of Stonehenge (and indeed, any of the other megalithic structures) are not just placed in holes dug into the soil. The soil is rarely even a metre thick on the Chalk downlands. This is not enough to support the weight of the stones, or to prevent them from tipping over. Don't look for counteracting forces from the lintel stones of the "trilithons" - the mortise and tenon joints don't mae closely enough to provide appreciable lateral forces. Instead, the stones are all (lintels excepted) set into sockets cut a metre or more deep into the bedrock (dug : the antler picks, carbon-datable have been found in some of the sockets, giving an earliest possible date for the setting of that stone into that socket) ; in the bottom of those sockets the chalk has been crushed to powder by the pressure of 8-10m of stone above it (I'm not particularly strong ; I can crush Chalk bare-handed ; it's not strong).
If you hypothesise another storey of trilithons above the current ring, then during the erection the underlaying ring of stones would have settled tens of centimetres (possibly a full half-metre) into the ground. Try building on top of a foundation that shifts that badly. The approximately contemporary pyramids of Seferu are a series of failure of precisely this sort, of having inadequate foundations for the weight of the higher levels of the construction. The Bent Pyramid is a terribly instructive example.
Technically, you might just get away with a tent-like structure, arguably a "building", of extremely long, floppy poles resting on the trilithon lintels to roof it. But try putting a second floor in on top of the lintels and the sag would put centrifugal loads on the trilithons and... tumbledown Stonehenge.
You really need to bring a structural engineer in if you want to make this idea fly further than the departmental coffee break. And I don't think you're going find it works at all. You're sure as hell going to struggle to roof it. (Practically every person involved in building Stonehenge would have built one or several wooden roundhouses in their lives - for their family, or for their extended family - and they'd have known how strong the forces on the poles and lintels of those structures are. Build roundhouse for yourself, then reconsider your idea. With numbers.
Also - don't forget that Stonehenge is a wildly aberrant and extremely late example of the "stone circle and megalith monuments" West Atlantic culture. I cannot think of another example of a trilithon - not one - in Britain.
The Brits think the henges are ceremonial partly because of finds inside the henge and partly because it makes no defensive sense.
Also, typical henges have wide openings at two (sometimes four) points, with an unexcavated section of the line of the ditch and no bank. They were built without defensive structures. (Do casual reader realise that a typical henge ditch was cut 3 to 4 metres into the bedrock and the spoil piled up onto the surrounding bedrock to form the outer bank.) This is in contrast to the entrance structures around "hill forts" where the way over an outer ditch then turns and runs parallel to the bank above for 10s of metres before turning to pass through the bank. Thus an attacker has to turn a right-angle then progress for some distance under a hail of projectile fire (slingshot stones, arrows) from the defenders, then turn another right angle to attack the next gate.
Once you've walked the ground, you see why henges are not considered to be defensive structures. [fulldisclosure]I'm a Time Team fan[/fulldisclosure] Me too, and I feel sure you'll have walked the ground too.
Taking a walk around any of the hundreds of stone circles in Britain, or the West Atlantic coast (stretches from Shetland to Cadiz) cultural area will soon disabuse you of the idea that these things can disappear in just a few thousands of years. However, to steal a joke from a 1950s satire about 1950s excavations near Stonehnge itself, "We used to have a Woodhenge here, but it rotted." The "wooden henge" in question (Durrington Walls) was contemporary with Stonehenge, but used multi-metre diameter posts (i.e. whole tree trunks) in place of stones. The posts were unknown until excavated in he 1950s (the ditch-inside-bank henge remained though, being the "Walls" of the site's name.
It is hypothesised ("hypothesised" !) that Eastern England had as many henges with wooden posts as SW England and Scotland had aberrant ones using stone posts - because E England didn't have adequate resources of strong enough stone. Certainly, henge structures have been documented without the stones, but few have been excavated since the discovery of the "post monument" at Durrington Walls, with the precision of search necessary to find 4000 year-old post holes. Having excavated such mark myself, it takes time (if I do another, I'll be considerably faster ; it takes experience). It also takes money. The money isn't there - if such a structure is found on an archaeological investigation prior to starting development work, generally the developer shuts the project down and sells the land because they don't want to get involved in years of expensive investigation before getting permission to proceed with destructive construction. So evidence for or against the hypothesis is in short supply - no one is willing to spend the money to answer the question.
The water isn't particularly warm, and often has considerable amounts of (slowly melting) glacial ice floating along in it (and considerably increasing the erosive power of the flood.
Seriously, downstream of a Jokullhlaüp is a good place to not be. to the side - interesting. But have an escape route planned if you intend to be a witness not a statistic.
I recently started learning Polish, just so that the local shopkeeper gets his wish of driving all the Poles out of the country, I can ensure that he still dies of an apoplectic fit on hearing Polish in his shop. Fuck the Little Englanders - that's what I say.
You missed the most imprtant safety-related seating metric :
I wish to face in / against the direction of travel.
Having taken a number of hard landings and violent turbulence in various helicopters over the years, I can assure you that you get thrown about far less in a rear-facing seat. (Except for those rare occasions when the aircraft is flying backwards, which the pilots only do at taxiing speed anyway, on account of having to look in their mirrors while doing it.)
Obstruction... probalby. but that can just as well be passive as active obstruction. A telecoms infrastructure is (for one set of technologies) as much a natural monopoly as a railway system. When a new technology is introduced (e.g. canals meeting railroads, standard gauge railroads meeting wide gauge railroads, 500MHz digital mobile versus 1500MHz mobile [I forget the relevant frequencies]), then having different provider isn't unreasonable, but mixing multiple companies with profit incentives on the same technology is a recipe for disaster (as we're been watching with the last 20 years of railway privatisation in this country).
And no government is going to want multiple interfaces to the outside world. To quote a manager of mine in a former life, "I want to be able to walk into the radio room, and with one blow of an axe know that the only person talking to my Boss is me". (The next day he banned mobile phones from being brought to the site at all. They had to be left onshore.)
"I have a plan for solving this immediate problem after a half decade or so of work" is not a terribly helpful solution for an immediate problem.
Is there actually a single working example of such a system being deployed "in the wild"? The cafeteria of a university with a large computing science department not being "in the wild". A town of 50000 people being more like an "in the wild" example.
My youngest son is allergic to dairy products [not lactose intolerant] just that alone is really hard to avoid.
I'm sure. It was hard enough being a vegan in the UK in the 80s and 90s.
I'm not sure I could imagine a world without [list]...
Your son.
Put that way, isn't the choice simpler?
The world doesn't guarantee that all your choices will have a nice option. I didn't particularly want to spend a decade as a vegan, but I felt that it was unavoidable.
especially when terrorists who want to murder our children in their beds are operating...
But America elected those terrorists to their positions of power.
Who would need to spoof the IP logs for a social media profile? You buy one that has been generated from your home city, or near enough. If people can make money generating fake news of the most ludicrous sort in the last year, then the 5-year old plus market for fake clicks, fake "likes" etc would have had people generating thousands of fake profiles years ago. After that, it takes little to maintain sufficient profile to pass casual inspection. Anything more than casual inspection would be extremely costly for the border police. A pre-visa inspection using the multiple warrants you're talking about will just add billions more to the bills of the border police (all those lawyers are going to want paid, before doing the work) and simply guarantee that only the best funded and forensically aware terrorists make the approach. The only ones that would get caught are the incompetents and "lone wolves" that aren't any real threat. "Security Theatre" is what it has been described as for years, and this is another act in the distraction joke.
Nothing like telling a vegan that their pancakes have undeveloped chicken embryos in them.
If you need to tell a "vegan" that, then your so-called vegan has been seriously failing to do their homework.
When I decided to become a vegan, I knew perfectly well that I was going to have to read every word of the contents list of everything that I ate. And ruthlessly put it back on the shelf if it had the slightest hint of animal product in it. No "if", no "but" ; if it has any animal produce in it, it is out of the shopping basket.
Made life difficult for an hour or so when I went to visit my parents next. Then I took over doing cooking and shopping for myself - simples.
Road's problem is the infrastructure costs are really high. Keeping miles and miles of roads in useable condition is hard and labor intensive. Maintaining cars costs money...
FTFY The only difference is that one of the sets of maintenance costs (for the "rolling stock") is farmed out to millions of tax payers who've already paid the other half of the bill.
Hours of operation, conditions of the truck, all that is pretty tightly regulated.
What isn't regulated is keeping the driver attentive on the road if his attention wanders or if he gets tired.
What do you think the "hours of operation" regulations are for, if not to prevent companies from working their staff to being over tired? I was taking the bus last weekend when the driver got caught by the 15 minute warning on his hours meter and only just managed to get off the motorway onto a lay by before he timed out (the driver was not normally on this route, and there had been a delay due to a crash earlier in the shift). The bus was delayed for about 3/4 hour until they could drive a relief driver out to take over the bus and take it into the depot.
You'll have noticed that pilots are under hours-of-operation regulations too. For the same reasons. If the regulations were not present, and strictly enforced (if our driver in the example above had driven on for one minute more, he'd have lost his driving license and his job), then their managers will (not "might", "will") set up their schedules to work their drivers to the absolute limit. And people will die in consequence.
Your general point that long distance motorway/ autobahn/ freeway/ autostrada (I'll be driving in Italy next week, I think) is a better place for introducing autonomous driving technology is fair. But how much of that is relevant? The bus in question travelled into a town centre about every hour to pick up or drop off passengers. Major cities are mostly 2 to 3 hours drive apart, which is most of the spacing of major distribution centres. At the speed limit, it would take only 12 hours to drive from one end of the country to the other (probably less than 8 hours to cover 90% of the population. It might be more of an issue in America, but so what? The manufacturers are going to be selling into a global market, not a parochial one. Hell, they're not even going to want to have two systems for LHD countries or RHD countries, because each type of country will have oddities where the roads are the opposite handedness to normal, so the systems will just have to deal with what the mapping system throws at it.
Since mammoths are elephants(*), and elephants never forget (**), then estimating the information content of a mammoth is... tricky.
Let's say... two eyes at around 4k.pixel square each and 20 frames per second is around 231,928.234*10^9 bytes/day for the eyes. What is sound? About 1MB/minute (I don't do music, so that's a wild guess.) for 1.5*10^9 bytes/ day. All other sensory and thought data - let's round it up to 250TB/day. Even if you assume JPEG-ish or MPEG-ish lossy compression for the visual information, you're probably still up at several TB/ day.
There's more going on in that mammoth than you'd think.
You said that you'd "I'll lose my account" to your account. Implicitly permanently.
Quite how you're going to do that without logging in, changing the password, then logging out again without keeping any record of the password, isn't clear.
How would you circumvent it? In the cities, you'd get you internet from the national telephone company - whose routers would seem to have been switched off. Or you'd go to your mobile phone, which goes to the phone company's routers and then to the same switched off routers. Got satellite equipment? Ah now you've got an option.
Cameroon has modest oil potential and a lot of CO2 resources. Plus effective agriculture.
and where puppet governments can be installed.
Ah, that may be the falling point. They're not so good on puppet governments. They don't like foreigners barging in and trying to tell them what to do.
But the atmosphere of Venus contains massive amounts of toxic gasses.
It's not as simple as that. Near the surface, the atmosphere is CO2 (96.5%) and N2 (3.5%) with a trace of SO2. Interestingly, that''s nearly the same absolute amount of N2 as in the Earth's atmosphere. It would kill you even if you reduced the temperature to something survivable, but it wouldn't either dissolve you or kill people trying to autopsy your corpse. Higher up are the cloud layers which we can see, which contain water droplets, and the SO2 has dissolved in the water to make it acidic. But although those clouds are probably not something you'd want to wash your cock with, that doesn't make them terribly toxic themselves. And even if the clouds are made of "droplets of sulphuric acid", that still wouldn't, of itself, make it a lethal place. When planes or gliders or parachutists fly through clouds on Earth, do the passengers and crew drown? No, because the volume density of the liquids in the clouds is low.
The Wikipedia article mentions other compounds such as ferric chloride. Even at fairly low concentrations, they'd be more of a problem because they'd form conductive solutions on exposed conductors, and that is not good for any electronics. But I've got plenty of electronics that can handle being bathed in such solutions - it's various elements of my SCUBA equipment. I probably wouldn't want to wash my cock with a dilute acidic mix of ferric chloride and sulphuric acid either, but I have assessed using such mixes for laboratory work in preference to other mixtures and found the hazards to be manageable (but still not desirable, from a risk-management PoV). Normally I have to deal with hazards of fire, explosion and drowning in my work, but I have to deal with chemical hazards too, and I don't see that sort of mix as being terrifying, just requiring eye protection and latex gloves. Not even double-gloving - which is something we do do on a regular basis.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Or more precisely, it couldn't be any "building" more than a small fraction of the weight of the stones themselves.
The stones of Stonehenge (and indeed, any of the other megalithic structures) are not just placed in holes dug into the soil. The soil is rarely even a metre thick on the Chalk downlands. This is not enough to support the weight of the stones, or to prevent them from tipping over. Don't look for counteracting forces from the lintel stones of the "trilithons" - the mortise and tenon joints don't mae closely enough to provide appreciable lateral forces. Instead, the stones are all (lintels excepted) set into sockets cut a metre or more deep into the bedrock (dug : the antler picks, carbon-datable have been found in some of the sockets, giving an earliest possible date for the setting of that stone into that socket) ; in the bottom of those sockets the chalk has been crushed to powder by the pressure of 8-10m of stone above it (I'm not particularly strong ; I can crush Chalk bare-handed ; it's not strong).
If you hypothesise another storey of trilithons above the current ring, then during the erection the underlaying ring of stones would have settled tens of centimetres (possibly a full half-metre) into the ground. Try building on top of a foundation that shifts that badly. The approximately contemporary pyramids of Seferu are a series of failure of precisely this sort, of having inadequate foundations for the weight of the higher levels of the construction. The Bent Pyramid is a terribly instructive example.
Technically, you might just get away with a tent-like structure, arguably a "building", of extremely long, floppy poles resting on the trilithon lintels to roof it. But try putting a second floor in on top of the lintels and the sag would put centrifugal loads on the trilithons and ... tumbledown Stonehenge.
You really need to bring a structural engineer in if you want to make this idea fly further than the departmental coffee break. And I don't think you're going find it works at all. You're sure as hell going to struggle to roof it. (Practically every person involved in building Stonehenge would have built one or several wooden roundhouses in their lives - for their family, or for their extended family - and they'd have known how strong the forces on the poles and lintels of those structures are. Build roundhouse for yourself, then reconsider your idea. With numbers.
Also - don't forget that Stonehenge is a wildly aberrant and extremely late example of the "stone circle and megalith monuments" West Atlantic culture. I cannot think of another example of a trilithon - not one - in Britain.
Also, typical henges have wide openings at two (sometimes four) points, with an unexcavated section of the line of the ditch and no bank. They were built without defensive structures. (Do casual reader realise that a typical henge ditch was cut 3 to 4 metres into the bedrock and the spoil piled up onto the surrounding bedrock to form the outer bank.) This is in contrast to the entrance structures around "hill forts" where the way over an outer ditch then turns and runs parallel to the bank above for 10s of metres before turning to pass through the bank. Thus an attacker has to turn a right-angle then progress for some distance under a hail of projectile fire (slingshot stones, arrows) from the defenders, then turn another right angle to attack the next gate.
Once you've walked the ground, you see why henges are not considered to be defensive structures. [fulldisclosure]I'm a Time Team fan[/fulldisclosure] Me too, and I feel sure you'll have walked the ground too.
I thought this was a nerd's site. We need evidence, not speculation.
(I have spent weeks as an unpaid volunteer on archaeological digs. Check for the presence of glass houses before throwing stones.)
It is hypothesised ("hypothesised" !) that Eastern England had as many henges with wooden posts as SW England and Scotland had aberrant ones using stone posts - because E England didn't have adequate resources of strong enough stone. Certainly, henge structures have been documented without the stones, but few have been excavated since the discovery of the "post monument" at Durrington Walls, with the precision of search necessary to find 4000 year-old post holes. Having excavated such mark myself, it takes time (if I do another, I'll be considerably faster ; it takes experience). It also takes money. The money isn't there - if such a structure is found on an archaeological investigation prior to starting development work, generally the developer shuts the project down and sells the land because they don't want to get involved in years of expensive investigation before getting permission to proceed with destructive construction. So evidence for or against the hypothesis is in short supply - no one is willing to spend the money to answer the question.
Seriously, downstream of a Jokullhlaüp is a good place to not be. to the side - interesting. But have an escape route planned if you intend to be a witness not a statistic.
Errrr,
"Rah ! rah ! Rei !" ??
Sounds like they're fans of Einstürrzende Neubauten. Not that that's a bad thing at all. (One of the many things to thank John Peel for.)
Why would a non-Londoner want to?
I recently started learning Polish, just so that the local shopkeeper gets his wish of driving all the Poles out of the country, I can ensure that he still dies of an apoplectic fit on hearing Polish in his shop. Fuck the Little Englanders - that's what I say.
I wish to face in / against the direction of travel.
Having taken a number of hard landings and violent turbulence in various helicopters over the years, I can assure you that you get thrown about far less in a rear-facing seat. (Except for those rare occasions when the aircraft is flying backwards, which the pilots only do at taxiing speed anyway, on account of having to look in their mirrors while doing it.)
"No shit, Sherlock?"
And no government is going to want multiple interfaces to the outside world. To quote a manager of mine in a former life, "I want to be able to walk into the radio room, and with one blow of an axe know that the only person talking to my Boss is me". (The next day he banned mobile phones from being brought to the site at all. They had to be left onshore.)
"I have a plan for solving this immediate problem after a half decade or so of work" is not a terribly helpful solution for an immediate problem.
Is there actually a single working example of such a system being deployed "in the wild"? The cafeteria of a university with a large computing science department not being "in the wild". A town of 50000 people being more like an "in the wild" example.
I'm sure. It was hard enough being a vegan in the UK in the 80s and 90s.
Your son.
Put that way, isn't the choice simpler?
The world doesn't guarantee that all your choices will have a nice option. I didn't particularly want to spend a decade as a vegan, but I felt that it was unavoidable.
But America elected those terrorists to their positions of power.
Who would need to spoof the IP logs for a social media profile? You buy one that has been generated from your home city, or near enough. If people can make money generating fake news of the most ludicrous sort in the last year, then the 5-year old plus market for fake clicks, fake "likes" etc would have had people generating thousands of fake profiles years ago. After that, it takes little to maintain sufficient profile to pass casual inspection. Anything more than casual inspection would be extremely costly for the border police. A pre-visa inspection using the multiple warrants you're talking about will just add billions more to the bills of the border police (all those lawyers are going to want paid, before doing the work) and simply guarantee that only the best funded and forensically aware terrorists make the approach. The only ones that would get caught are the incompetents and "lone wolves" that aren't any real threat. "Security Theatre" is what it has been described as for years, and this is another act in the distraction joke.
If you need to tell a "vegan" that, then your so-called vegan has been seriously failing to do their homework.
When I decided to become a vegan, I knew perfectly well that I was going to have to read every word of the contents list of everything that I ate. And ruthlessly put it back on the shelf if it had the slightest hint of animal product in it. No "if", no "but" ; if it has any animal produce in it, it is out of the shopping basket.
Made life difficult for an hour or so when I went to visit my parents next. Then I took over doing cooking and shopping for myself - simples.
FTFY The only difference is that one of the sets of maintenance costs (for the "rolling stock") is farmed out to millions of tax payers who've already paid the other half of the bill.
Cue "spy in cab" complaints from both professional drivers and privacy activists.
In a metal vehicle? You've not actually had to do compass & distance dead reckoning, have you?
What do you think the "hours of operation" regulations are for, if not to prevent companies from working their staff to being over tired? I was taking the bus last weekend when the driver got caught by the 15 minute warning on his hours meter and only just managed to get off the motorway onto a lay by before he timed out (the driver was not normally on this route, and there had been a delay due to a crash earlier in the shift). The bus was delayed for about 3/4 hour until they could drive a relief driver out to take over the bus and take it into the depot.
You'll have noticed that pilots are under hours-of-operation regulations too. For the same reasons. If the regulations were not present, and strictly enforced (if our driver in the example above had driven on for one minute more, he'd have lost his driving license and his job), then their managers will (not "might", "will") set up their schedules to work their drivers to the absolute limit. And people will die in consequence.
Your general point that long distance motorway/ autobahn/ freeway/ autostrada (I'll be driving in Italy next week, I think) is a better place for introducing autonomous driving technology is fair. But how much of that is relevant? The bus in question travelled into a town centre about every hour to pick up or drop off passengers. Major cities are mostly 2 to 3 hours drive apart, which is most of the spacing of major distribution centres. At the speed limit, it would take only 12 hours to drive from one end of the country to the other (probably less than 8 hours to cover 90% of the population. It might be more of an issue in America, but so what? The manufacturers are going to be selling into a global market, not a parochial one. Hell, they're not even going to want to have two systems for LHD countries or RHD countries, because each type of country will have oddities where the roads are the opposite handedness to normal, so the systems will just have to deal with what the mapping system throws at it.
Let's say ... two eyes at around 4k.pixel square each and 20 frames per second is around 231,928.234*10^9 bytes/day for the eyes. What is sound? About 1MB/minute (I don't do music, so that's a wild guess.) for 1.5*10^9 bytes/ day. All other sensory and thought data - let's round it up to 250TB/day. Even if you assume JPEG-ish or MPEG-ish lossy compression for the visual information, you're probably still up at several TB/ day.
There's more going on in that mammoth than you'd think.
Quite how you're going to do that without logging in, changing the password, then logging out again without keeping any record of the password, isn't clear.
How would you circumvent it? In the cities, you'd get you internet from the national telephone company - whose routers would seem to have been switched off. Or you'd go to your mobile phone, which goes to the phone company's routers and then to the same switched off routers. Got satellite equipment? Ah now you've got an option.
Actually, the Cameroonians I've known have been very nice and happy people.
Ah, that may be the falling point. They're not so good on puppet governments. They don't like foreigners barging in and trying to tell them what to do.
It's not as simple as that. Near the surface, the atmosphere is CO2 (96.5%) and N2 (3.5%) with a trace of SO2. Interestingly, that''s nearly the same absolute amount of N2 as in the Earth's atmosphere. It would kill you even if you reduced the temperature to something survivable, but it wouldn't either dissolve you or kill people trying to autopsy your corpse. Higher up are the cloud layers which we can see, which contain water droplets, and the SO2 has dissolved in the water to make it acidic. But although those clouds are probably not something you'd want to wash your cock with, that doesn't make them terribly toxic themselves. And even if the clouds are made of "droplets of sulphuric acid", that still wouldn't, of itself, make it a lethal place. When planes or gliders or parachutists fly through clouds on Earth, do the passengers and crew drown? No, because the volume density of the liquids in the clouds is low.
The Wikipedia article mentions other compounds such as ferric chloride. Even at fairly low concentrations, they'd be more of a problem because they'd form conductive solutions on exposed conductors, and that is not good for any electronics. But I've got plenty of electronics that can handle being bathed in such solutions - it's various elements of my SCUBA equipment. I probably wouldn't want to wash my cock with a dilute acidic mix of ferric chloride and sulphuric acid either, but I have assessed using such mixes for laboratory work in preference to other mixtures and found the hazards to be manageable (but still not desirable, from a risk-management PoV). Normally I have to deal with hazards of fire, explosion and drowning in my work, but I have to deal with chemical hazards too, and I don't see that sort of mix as being terrifying, just requiring eye protection and latex gloves. Not even double-gloving - which is something we do do on a regular basis.