In 30 years people will still be buying Rolex watches.
Possibly, more to the point, people who brought an iWatch (whatever it's called - I've never seen one, nor even an advert for one ; I'm not even sure if they're on sale in Europe) and a Rolex at the same time might be selling the Rolex in 30 years time and getting a good price for it. The iWatch will probably be in the recycling within 5 years, not worth the effort of trying to sell.
Although they have 45 specimens, they only range over a little more than a factor of 2 in size, and seem to be a single size distribution. Or, to put it another way, only one part of the life cycle of these organisms has been identified and assigned to this organism (there may be other parts of the life cycle in recovered samples, but they haven't been assigned to this morphological species ; it's a general problem in palaeontology).
Latest-Ediacaran ("Neoproterozoic" - terminology has changed over time) metazoan embryonic fossils have been identified in other phosphorite-rich rocks from further south in China (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6667/full/391553a0.html) ; but linking such few-hundred-cell stage fossils to fossils that can be as large as 1.2mm is going to be hard. but that would be needed to compare modern concepts of "deuterostome" with these ancestral organisms.
My stromatolite is only a billion (maybe up to 1.2 billion) years old. It's not far structurally below a meteor impact ejecta layer though, so it's descendants probably died in an interesting way.
Nope. Breasts developed AFTER the development of internal development.
Look at your pet platypus or echidna and you'll see that they exude milk from modified patches of sweat glands, which is then lapped up from the skin by the infant. Breasts (with internal milk channels leading to one nipple per breast) developed after the ancestors of the monotremes diverged from the ancestors of the marsupials and the placentals.
Thus observing more than one in your life suggests they are not random.
Or that your analysis is wrong.
You claim that we haven't had a major impact in a couple of hundred years. In the areas where humans live in significant numbers (to report it). So you've already discounted the 3/4 of the Earth's surface which is oceanic.
Go back and re-watch Dr Strangelove. The "Doomsday Bomb" weapon they parodied was the cobalt bomb. We just call it a "dirty bomb" these days. Any country with large nukes - not necessarily mobile ones - has this technology within grasp.
Personally, I'd look at distributing strontium-90 more widely. It'll follow calcium biochemically and be severely deleterious for anything with bony (or calcareous) hard parts. Pretty nasty stuff.
Granted, Mars would remain unliveable for longer. But we could do that to Earth tomorrow. Well, a few months for anyone competent enough to build their own nukes.
Suppose serious asteroid impacts happen about once in fifty million years
Define serious.
The Barringer/ Meteor Crater impactor (about 14kyr ago) was pretty trivial. If it happened today, probably not even a megadeath. At 1.1km diameter, that gives us a sort of calibration point. Assuming that population impact scales roughly with crater area, then to get a gigadeath (and presumably some pretty large social consequences), you need an impactor leaving a crater of 30km or more diameter. (It's by no means a watertight argument, but it's good enough to give us some idea of what we're facing.)
From EIB (I can't find a diameter-versus-age sortable table), the most recent suitable candidates I can find are :
El'gygytgyn, N 67 30', E 172 5', 18 km diameter, 3.5 ± 0.5 Myr old. A bit small, but recent.
Kara-Kul, Tajikistan, N 39 1', E 73 27', 52 km diameter, <5Myr. Disturbingly recent, and well into the "big effects range.
Ries, Germany, N 48 53', E 10 37', 24 km diameter, 15.1 ± 0.1 Myr. Doesn't quite reach the size criterion, but this was probably part of a multiple impactor.
Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, U.S.A., N 37 17', W 76 1', 40, 35.5 km diameter ± 0.3 Myr Well under your 50 million year W.A.G.
Popigai, Russia, N 71 39', E 111 11', 90 km diameter, 35.7 ± 0.2 Myr. A lot bigger than my W.A.G criterion, and still well under your W.A.G. interval.
I think that you're somewhat underestimating the risk. Particularly since the dearth of discoveries in the southern hemisphere (a sampling effect - less ground there. Consider the Eltanin structure of some 2 million years old (poorly defined at the moment) and 10s of km in diameter (also poorly constrained - the site is on the flank of some seamounts) and on rugged terrain (water depths of 2.5 to 5 km).
Hmmm, heard about that game on a number of occasions. If they did have an asteroid-intercept mission, that would increase my interest. [Googles] Seems KSP Demo will work on Debians. Let's see how that works.
Oddly, there have been studies that show that the placebo effect does work in dogs.
Placebo is about the effect of the treatment process - not just any pill you're given. Which is why, in particular, in properly-organised medical trials not only do the patients not know if they're getting "treatment" or "placebo", but also the practitioner delivering the care doesn't know if the patient is going to receive "treatment" or "placebo."
(I should also note that in most medical trials, the test isn't "treatment" versus "placebo," it's "new treatment" versus "standard treatment." If a condition has a standard, somewhat effective, treatment and a proposed "new treatment," then you have to struggle hard to get "treatment" versus "placebo" past the ethics committee instead of "treatment" versus "new treatment.")
Perhaps Hyland's raised their standards for a while, then let them slip again?
See my comments up-thread about this being a sign of abysmal preparative laboratory standards.
Exactly this sort of concern is why (in Europe), there are strict requirements about the training of staff to work in such laboratories. Obviously, "Hyland" don't want to spend that money to protect their idiot customers from their idiot management.
I'm convinced that a patent on putting a toy inside chocolate is a bit ridiculous.
So, your society doesn't have a tradition of putting small items - typically coins - into cakes "for luck"?
Traditionally in mine, it would be a number of threpenny pieces (three penny value) in each bowl of mix for the Christmas pudding, before steaming them en masse. I remember making them myself - to Dad's Mum's recipe - until we ran out of threpenny pieces when I was an early teenager. Most years, we got most of the threpennies back from the family members we distributed the puddings to, but eventually we ran out, some 20-25 years after the coins were removed from circulation.
Kinder (and any others) are playing on that tradition. Look through your bok of nursery rhymes for Little Jack Horner for another expression of the same idea.
Which would be fine if it was just morons poisoning themselves, but they're poisoning small children, and that's the chief problem here.
But since those children are motly (70-90% numbers vary with social details) are the genetic offspring of the morons who are bringing them up and poisoning them, that''s less of a concern. Killing the offspring of morons is little different from killing the parents. And as this homeopathic company is showing, seems less likely to lead to push-back.
In the case at hand, the solution still contained traces of belladonna. How in the hell did this get screwed up?
That's not hard to understand.
To make the preparation you have to prepare a mix of the symptom-mimicking material ("deadly nightshade", "belladonna", or the poison atropine depending on their method - all terms refer to the same substance) and water. Therefore, at some point in your factory you have to have the hazardous substance.
Then, someone introduced an early dilution of the active substance into a late stage of the process (eg by re-using an un-washed early-stage vessel later into the process - an utter failure of process control, which is why preparation of pharmaceuticals is subject to stringent regulation which does not seem to apply to the homeopathic industry) ; or some how the raw active substance got into the final stage of process (same comments). I've seen people make exactly the same errors preparing lab reagents in a rock-testing lab, and had to explain the error in nit-picking detail until they finally understood where they'd fucked up. This is called "staff training" ; it costs money, one way or another.
In short, it's an utter breakdown of laboratory practice and management. I don't know American regulations, but there are strict qualification requirements for working in pharmaceutical preparation labs in Europe. I would hazard a guess that exposing their preparation labs to this level of management would reduce the profit margins of the homeopathy companies. So they fight back.
Just to put things into context, another material present in every homeopathic preparation lab, and therefore capable of being introduced into the final product, given this evidence of laboratory incompetence, are fecal bacteria. Even if their staff wash their hands after wiping shit off their hairy rings, they will (not "may" ; "will") still have fecal bacteria on their hands. Since they can't manage basic dilution and process control, then I'd be astonished if their product didn't have shit in it on a routine basis. Which is another can of worms that the companies don't want to open.
Not at all. Vaccination uses the logic of using parts or relatives of a disease causing agent (e.g. killed preparations of the bacterium or virus, broken into fragments, or for the classic smallpox virus, the cowpox virus which seemed to be a similar disease and had a known (if not understood) preventative ability). Homeopathy however only uses a symptom-based similarity idea, before diluting the symptom-similar substance to irrelevance.
If you think that's the same logic, then your understanding of logic is fatally flawed. I do hope that you work in programming and lose your job because of your public demonstration of seriously flawed logic.
'll have to try successive restarts with no sites opened to test, I guess.
Will Firefox do that - as opposed to opening the home page?
Regardless, there's nothing (AFAIK) to stop you from setting a local file with no content as your home page, which would probably have the desired effect.
Base camp is built on moraine. Even the yaks don't consider that stuff to be in any one place permanently.
No, seriously, tent platforms etc constantly have to be rebuilt as the ground shifts, because the ground is loose rock and mud with moving ice along one edge.
IF he'd been doing anything of significance with the "HYPErloop" concept, then he'd have paid some attention to tunnelling - as well as to bridging - because if a mile of tunnel (bridge) can save you 30 miles of route, and tunnels (bridges) cost 10 times as much per metre of route then regular ground-level building, then the tunnel (bridge) makes economic sense. This has been known since the canal boom of the late 18th century - and hasn't changed despite the huge changes in technology in that time.
Building both tunnels and bridges are pretty stable industries. In tunnels, you're limited by having to get the spoil from the workface, past your boring equipment, to the entrance of the tunnel. In bridges, you've got to lift the components into position ; both limit the rate at which you can move stuff.
I deduce the Musk is making a joke of some sort, or is not actually investing any serious consideration into the "HYPErloop" project. Or both.
Slashdot Mirror
FTFY
Off to LO's office to see what the release notes say.
Possibly, more to the point, people who brought an iWatch (whatever it's called - I've never seen one, nor even an advert for one ; I'm not even sure if they're on sale in Europe) and a Rolex at the same time might be selling the Rolex in 30 years time and getting a good price for it. The iWatch will probably be in the recycling within 5 years, not worth the effort of trying to sell.
Latest-Ediacaran ("Neoproterozoic" - terminology has changed over time) metazoan embryonic fossils have been identified in other phosphorite-rich rocks from further south in China (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v391/n6667/full/391553a0.html) ; but linking such few-hundred-cell stage fossils to fossils that can be as large as 1.2mm is going to be hard. but that would be needed to compare modern concepts of "deuterostome" with these ancestral organisms.
Hand in your nerd card until you've revised your Derek & Clive.
My stromatolite is only a billion (maybe up to 1.2 billion) years old. It's not far structurally below a meteor impact ejecta layer though, so it's descendants probably died in an interesting way.
Look at your pet platypus or echidna and you'll see that they exude milk from modified patches of sweat glands, which is then lapped up from the skin by the infant. Breasts (with internal milk channels leading to one nipple per breast) developed after the ancestors of the monotremes diverged from the ancestors of the marsupials and the placentals.
Or were you being facetious?
A solution has been known. Several possible ones are now known.
Tomorrows announcement is that a 3-4km impactor is ETA in 60 days. Do you (or anyone else) have a solution?
Ban people from posting as AC more often than they post under their UID?
Or that your analysis is wrong.
You claim that we haven't had a major impact in a couple of hundred years. In the areas where humans live in significant numbers (to report it). So you've already discounted the 3/4 of the Earth's surface which is oceanic.
Personally, I'd look at distributing strontium-90 more widely. It'll follow calcium biochemically and be severely deleterious for anything with bony (or calcareous) hard parts. Pretty nasty stuff.
Granted, Mars would remain unliveable for longer. But we could do that to Earth tomorrow. Well, a few months for anyone competent enough to build their own nukes.
Define serious.
The Barringer/ Meteor Crater impactor (about 14kyr ago) was pretty trivial. If it happened today, probably not even a megadeath. At 1.1km diameter, that gives us a sort of calibration point. Assuming that population impact scales roughly with crater area, then to get a gigadeath (and presumably some pretty large social consequences), you need an impactor leaving a crater of 30km or more diameter. (It's by no means a watertight argument, but it's good enough to give us some idea of what we're facing.)
From EIB (I can't find a diameter-versus-age sortable table), the most recent suitable candidates I can find are :
I think that you're somewhat underestimating the risk. Particularly since the dearth of discoveries in the southern hemisphere (a sampling effect - less ground there. Consider the Eltanin structure of some 2 million years old (poorly defined at the moment) and 10s of km in diameter (also poorly constrained - the site is on the flank of some seamounts) and on rugged terrain (water depths of 2.5 to 5 km).
#Chthulu2020 has your name on a list. It's not a good list to be on.
Hmmm, heard about that game on a number of occasions. If they did have an asteroid-intercept mission, that would increase my interest. [Googles] Seems KSP Demo will work on Debians. Let's see how that works.
Placebo is about the effect of the treatment process - not just any pill you're given. Which is why, in particular, in properly-organised medical trials not only do the patients not know if they're getting "treatment" or "placebo", but also the practitioner delivering the care doesn't know if the patient is going to receive "treatment" or "placebo."
(I should also note that in most medical trials, the test isn't "treatment" versus "placebo," it's "new treatment" versus "standard treatment." If a condition has a standard, somewhat effective, treatment and a proposed "new treatment," then you have to struggle hard to get "treatment" versus "placebo" past the ethics committee instead of "treatment" versus "new treatment.")
Soylent brand baby oil. Now there's an idea.
See my comments up-thread about this being a sign of abysmal preparative laboratory standards.
Exactly this sort of concern is why (in Europe), there are strict requirements about the training of staff to work in such laboratories. Obviously, "Hyland" don't want to spend that money to protect their idiot customers from their idiot management.
So, your society doesn't have a tradition of putting small items - typically coins - into cakes "for luck"?
Traditionally in mine, it would be a number of threpenny pieces (three penny value) in each bowl of mix for the Christmas pudding, before steaming them en masse. I remember making them myself - to Dad's Mum's recipe - until we ran out of threpenny pieces when I was an early teenager. Most years, we got most of the threpennies back from the family members we distributed the puddings to, but eventually we ran out, some 20-25 years after the coins were removed from circulation.
Kinder (and any others) are playing on that tradition. Look through your bok of nursery rhymes for Little Jack Horner for another expression of the same idea.
It's really really important to educate these children that their parents were dickheads, and that they cannot trust the pronouncements of authority.
But since those children are motly (70-90% numbers vary with social details) are the genetic offspring of the morons who are bringing them up and poisoning them, that''s less of a concern. Killing the offspring of morons is little different from killing the parents. And as this homeopathic company is showing, seems less likely to lead to push-back.
That's not hard to understand.
To make the preparation you have to prepare a mix of the symptom-mimicking material ("deadly nightshade", "belladonna", or the poison atropine depending on their method - all terms refer to the same substance) and water. Therefore, at some point in your factory you have to have the hazardous substance.
Then, someone introduced an early dilution of the active substance into a late stage of the process (eg by re-using an un-washed early-stage vessel later into the process - an utter failure of process control, which is why preparation of pharmaceuticals is subject to stringent regulation which does not seem to apply to the homeopathic industry) ; or some how the raw active substance got into the final stage of process (same comments). I've seen people make exactly the same errors preparing lab reagents in a rock-testing lab, and had to explain the error in nit-picking detail until they finally understood where they'd fucked up. This is called "staff training" ; it costs money, one way or another.
In short, it's an utter breakdown of laboratory practice and management. I don't know American regulations, but there are strict qualification requirements for working in pharmaceutical preparation labs in Europe. I would hazard a guess that exposing their preparation labs to this level of management would reduce the profit margins of the homeopathy companies. So they fight back.
Just to put things into context, another material present in every homeopathic preparation lab, and therefore capable of being introduced into the final product, given this evidence of laboratory incompetence, are fecal bacteria. Even if their staff wash their hands after wiping shit off their hairy rings, they will (not "may" ; "will") still have fecal bacteria on their hands. Since they can't manage basic dilution and process control, then I'd be astonished if their product didn't have shit in it on a routine basis. Which is another can of worms that the companies don't want to open.
If you think that's the same logic, then your understanding of logic is fatally flawed. I do hope that you work in programming and lose your job because of your public demonstration of seriously flawed logic.
Will Firefox do that - as opposed to opening the home page?
Regardless, there's nothing (AFAIK) to stop you from setting a local file with no content as your home page, which would probably have the desired effect.
Chomolungma ("Mt Everest") would need to lose over 200m of height to be lower than K2.
No, seriously, tent platforms etc constantly have to be rebuilt as the ground shifts, because the ground is loose rock and mud with moving ice along one edge.
Building both tunnels and bridges are pretty stable industries. In tunnels, you're limited by having to get the spoil from the workface, past your boring equipment, to the entrance of the tunnel. In bridges, you've got to lift the components into position ; both limit the rate at which you can move stuff.
I deduce the Musk is making a joke of some sort, or is not actually investing any serious consideration into the "HYPErloop" project. Or both.