This also puts the age of both the earth and the moon at "when the first rocks formed", not "when the celestial body formed" which imho is when a significant amount of space debris, possibly molten, clumps together to form something resembling a planet. There's probably no way to really figure that one out.
We bracket the ages. This sort of study gives us a minimum age for the formation of the object in question (the Moon must have formed before the rocks of its surface. However, in a proportion of meteorites - the chondritic ones - contain small spherical inclusions of refractory calcium- and aluminium- rich silicate minerals ("CAIs") which have textures and chemistries indicating a fusion even in the dust disc surrounding the proto-Sun (it is still a matter of debate whether the CAI-forming event was the initiation of fusion in the Sun, or a magnetic heating event). When dated, CAIs give whole-inclusion ages that cluster fairly tightly on 4568 million years, and are the oldest reliably identified objects in the Solar system, thought to mark an event before the formation of the planets got well under way.
Personally, I found that date a little annoying, because for a few years the "age of the Earth" from several estimates sat at a memorable 4567 million years. But since all reasonably credible models of the formation process has it taking several million years, more precision is not helpful. It's still a useful number to remember, because it's memorable and not-wrong.
Not really. As the terminal event in a hierarchical series of events, the GI could happen at pretty much any time in the development of the Solar system (or any other stellar planetary system). Indeed, there is at least one line of argument that the last "giant impact" in the history of the Earth has not yet happened. There's on the order of a 0.2% chance of Mercury impacting the Earth in the next 4 billion years (J. Laskar & M. Gastineau, "Existence of collisional trajectories of Mercury, Mars
and Venus with the Earth", Nature, 459, p817, 2009), and appreciably higher chances of other inter-planetary collisions.
That said, the likelihood of violent interactions is higher in the early Solar (other stars are available) system, because after the initial period of aggregation of planets, the number of large particles decreases.
It's been years since I allowed one to be installed on any machine under my control. Because, on the machines not under my control, the damned thing sucked so many processor cycles and crashed so often that... well, why would you use Adobe to read PDFs?
"Emergency Stop" is not necessarily the same as "power cut off". Sure, you'll probably shut off you prime mover motor. But you're also likely to want to engage the brake system to stop components moving, maybe disable heaters but enable (at max) ventilators to dump heat from the motors, gear boxes and brake systems.
It's not as simple as it looks at first glance. The emergency stop on the last boat I talked to the bridge crew on, when they engaged "emergency stop" the engines go to full power. Think about it.
Contemptible though the military are, I doubt that they're so incompetent as to deliberately design a machine that goes on unstoppable killing rampages. They need a machine that can go on stoppable killing rampages.
From a 3-figure UID? That question was answered before Slashdot was in existence. That paranoia is almost as dead as anti-vaxx paranoia, and as groundless.
Possibility of the battery exploding?
So you don't do it with a Samsung S7, not that you can et one these days. There are other smart phones in the world. And if I remember correctly, if you had a Samsung S7, you could get it replaced, free of charge. (Actually, I'm probably within a year of geting a new phone on my plan. I might have to pay more attention to what phones are on the market in 6 months or so.)
Possibility of the smartphone overheating when under humid conditions?
To repeat the question : define "overheating" in degrees (centigrade, Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Rankine ; who cares?) I've spent several months working in the deserts at 45 to 48 C all day, without cooking my eyes. What temperature is your phone getting to in your use case?
My VR headsets do tend to get a bit "steamy" if I have just come home after climbing the stairs.
Sounds like poor ventilation design problem. Probably because the high-tech VR companies haven't got one person in the company who has been spending the last 30 years designing crash helmets or other low-tech things where ventilation is an issue. It's not like that's a new issue.
I wonder if I'll have a reason to put my (£10) VR headset on this month? Or this year?
Definitely the elimination of malaria would be a benefit to both Africa and the various malarious parts of Asia (not to forget it's potential return with climate change into significant areas of Europe. It used to be a major killer there too. And the southern states of America too, lest they feel all "can't happen here" about it.).
But malaria isn't by a long shot the only problem that Africa has (rampant corruption and beggar-my-neighbour capitalism for two others). "Curing" malaria wouldn't be a panacea for the continent. for as long as the cure lasts, in any case. We've had a generation or so of access to effective antimalarial drugs, and guess what - the production pipeline is pretty dry. After all, there's fuck-al profit in saving the lives of poor people, and not enough rich people at risk to be worth developing for. Simultaneously, in the hundred or so generations of the malaria protozoan, different populations have developed different spectra of resistance to the various anti-malarial drugs, which is why you need to tailor your prophylaxis and treatment to the specific regional strain you're exposed to. That's inconvenient for travellers, so they sufficiently often don't do it. The spread of all the resistant trains to all areas, and their recombination into pan-resistant strains is a certainty. At which point, the empty drug pipeine is going to become a bit better known - as rich travellers start to die more often.
But it's not all doom and gloom. Much of the decrease in malaria rates in the pre-drug era was accomplished by dull, low tech approaches that reduce mosquito numbers - draining land to improve it agriculturally ; managing both waste water and rain run-off in cities to minimise pooling of stagnant water ; improving garbage management - and in the last couple of decades by techniques that reduce the access of mosquitoes to humans (i.e. bed netting, and particularly netting coated and regularly re-coated with insecticide). But most importantly, the education of people so that they know why they're advised to tuck the netting in under their child's mattress is reducing the infection rates. Not to zero - but enough to improve matters.
Of course, all those things - education, public health, infrastructure - are costs which many countries are unwilling to bear - or at least, to bear for reducing the deaths of poor people. As long as rich people have effective drugs and don't die of malaria, the effective, resistance-proof techniques won't be applied. Start killing rich people, and something might be done about it, but not until then.
It wipes out most of the continents GDP every year.
That's a hell of a claim. the costs of malaria could well exceed the continent's healthcare budget, and it certainly exerts a cost on business (the last time I was working there, we had an anti-malarials bill of tens of thousands of dollars a month for the transiting crew, and routinely would find that the local crew who we wanted - for shorebase or shipboard operations - were unavailable due to "illness" (often malaria, but also dysentery ; we lost access to a couple of dozen specialists when Ebola broke out in their home country ; that cost a couple of million dollars), which means increased costs finding new people, importing them , or training new people. Definitely there are real costs associated with poor health. But the entire GDP? Hyperbole is an effective rhetorical tool, but you do need to try to keep it in contact with reality.
The whole asteroid belt could coalesce into one body - and it would be considerably smaller than the Moon. If it's a "failed planet", then if it were lumped into a single planet, it would be similar to or smaller than Pluto. Maybe smaller than Charon - I haven't checked the numbers.
There's a pretty high probability that Venus also had a large late impact. It's axial rotation is not only the slowest in the planets, but it's also retrograde (in the opposite direction to the rotation of the other planets).
Uranus is also thought to have had a large late impact - it's rotation axis is flipped at 98 degrees to the orbital axis, which is often described as "orbiting on it's side".
The Pluto-Charon system is also likely the result of a late large impact. Their size difference is even smaller than between the Moon and Earth. The centre of mass of the system is outside Pluto.
To generate gamma rays you need far more compact objects than star cores.
I'm still trying to find the original work (the links so far are to a poster or presentation at an astronomical conference - so this is pretty fresh work) which should have the individual star's mass estimates, to estimate the effects on any planets in the system. I doubt they'd be destroyed (and there's no reason to expect them to be appreciably gravitationally disturbed - because nothing significant would change), but the larger merged star would be brighter than the two pre-merger stars added together, so you'd expect climatic effects.
I just checked my Mass-Luminosity toolkit. It's not going to be good. Say that the two progenitor stars total 2 solar masses : if they're the same (approximate) mass, then you'll go from 2*1.0 solar luminosity to 1*16 solar luminosity - a 16-fold brightening. If there's a 10:1 mass ratio (1.8 plus 0.2 solar masses), the luminosity change will be from 9.4+0.006 solar luminosity to 16 solar luminosity - a 1.7 fold brightening. That's after the transient brightening of the interaction settles down. If this was my sun, I'd be a very worried RockDoctor.
Malaria is now basically confined to a single continent
Which continent? Asia or Africa?
It's probably significantly worse In Africa than Asia, over all. But plenty of people die of Malaria in Asia too. Southern India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand. Have I left anyone out? If I recall the reports from a couple of years ago, artemisinin-resistant malaria was being reported from SE Asia before the Nobel had even been awarded for discovering artemisinin.
Which is not to diminish malaria. I had a friend collapse with a recurrence of cerebral malaria one day when I was a youngster, and it was not a pretty sight. Which is why I was always pretty good about my anti-malarials, even as they played havoc with my bowels. But I think you've over-baked your comments a bit.
There's an adequate mortality from malaria in South America to consider too.
Even though the consumer-facing side of it is completely fraudulent, you can bet that their billing system knows exactly where these calls are originating.
The billing system of $US TELEPHONE COMPANY$ ? Of course they know where the calls are originating : at a privately-owned multiple line switchboard in downtown Queens (insert name of low-rent business district of choice ; I'm barely even confident that "Queens" is somewhere near New York ). Upstream from that, the billing system doesn't know.
You could argue that "there should be regulation" about connecting multiple phone lines to one premises. Good luck with that - because you'll be up against the businesses setting up genuine call centres in $BUSINESS ZONE$ , staffed with Americans trained to use a Canadian accent to give a genuine call centre experience.
Can't hear you - someone turned the radio louder, and now all the other data systems of the plane are being operated. How long did you say these things last before they overwrite the previous data? I said HOW LONG... Oh, never mind.
Is there a standard to these gaskets? I rather doubt there is an ISO. Within one company though, they're probably going to re-use sizes across a range, to reduce the parts count in the supply chain.
The one on my wrist at the moment has odd little indentations around each of the case's securing screws when there is sufficient real estate to have a much smoother curve, if not quite a plain circle. This has always struck me as odd, and I've long suspected it being there to accommodate an O-ring already in the supply chain for a different watch.
Without taking my watch apart, I recall the O-ring as about 1mm (material) diameter, and the splicing kits I mentioned up-thread bottom at 1.6mm diameter. But I've only scraped the surface of the O-ring repair and manufacture industry. Finding where your repair shop gets their parts would probably be informative.
And just think how you could out-nerd your nerdiest friend at a party with the hour-long tale of how you repaired your watch. As the credit card adverts say, "Priceless!"
I was going to ask the same question, but I have had to make (o-ring) gaskets in the past. We kept a kit like one of these (link) in the technicians workshop for when we really couldn't get o-rings from the manufacturer.
If you don't actually take it diving, and apply a non-setting sealant compound to the groove before seating your replacement, you should get back to (approximately) IP66 or IP67, which is good for getting soaked through in driving rain, or possibly falling out of the boat with.
(Caveat : in the technician's workshop, we knew that these replacements were not to manufacturer's specs and kept a very tight rein on them as temporary repairs. At about the same time an oil rig in the area had a blowout (one dead (RO Tim Williams), some tens of millions of dollars damages ; the rig carcass went on to become the "SeaLaunch" system) due to a $100 o-ring being replaced with one of these kits. International arrest warrants are still outstanding, TTBOMK.)
Embedded diamonds and gold crowns don't make them tell time any better than dirt-cheap watches! Besides, then they make you a target for thieves and other petty criminals.
Also expensive watches hurt more when you lose them.
True stories : one April, my apartment mate and I went for a dive after the winter lay-off. While playing "tag" some 15m down in the kelp, my buddy got his watch snagged by a kelp stalk and 'ping', off goes the watch into the boulders, never to be found. Which was a problem, as it was a gift from his parents, who were coming to visit a week or so later. Over a week's wages it cost him IIRC.
Later that summer a different friend had a similar loss while rock climbing on the sea cliffs. Rope rubbed on wrist ; 'ping', 'splash'. So I lugged the diving gear (60+kios!) and climbing gear down to the site, rapelled to the water's edge to kit up, spent 2 bottles (3 hours) diving doing a fingertip search and found it. He was somewhat amused to be presented with the watch (still working) next evening at the climber's pub - and a bill for about 10 times it's value for the diving. He brought me a pint instead. He'd already brought a new watch, valued at about 5 pints.
I still don't see the point behind three watches. One that's waterproof for potentially wet sports is superfluous. I've not brought a non-waterproof watch since... the 1970s, I think. Which is when my first watch (a gift from my parents, for exams) died due to driving rain as I was walking home from school. A dress (analogue) watch versus a casual (by implication, digital) watch? Again, why? If the watch works, and the strap is comfortable, what is the difference?
It's not as if other people can see it unless you roll your shirt or jacket sleeves up.
Checks wrist (since watch hasn't been taken off for months). It's a Casio, brought for my birthday about 10 years ago by my wife ; waterproof to far deeper than my SCUBA certification will ever be ; solar powered ; time corrected daily by LW radio from MAningen, IIRC. Because it's a gift, it never gets removed except to exchange it for a proper diving watch (ratchetted bezel) when I'm going down to the harbour to go diving. The diving watch is analogue (for ease of reading in low-light conditions) and cost about 15 pints of beer at the time of purchase (~8 years ago); gets a new battery when I take my tanks for testing.
I heard (from a drunk potato-digger in the pub last week - an unimpeachable source) that the KGB got a hack so they can apply a HCF instruction to the Aurora using an NES and 3 miles of barbed-wire.
Slashdot Mirror
We bracket the ages. This sort of study gives us a minimum age for the formation of the object in question (the Moon must have formed before the rocks of its surface. However, in a proportion of meteorites - the chondritic ones - contain small spherical inclusions of refractory calcium- and aluminium- rich silicate minerals ("CAIs") which have textures and chemistries indicating a fusion even in the dust disc surrounding the proto-Sun (it is still a matter of debate whether the CAI-forming event was the initiation of fusion in the Sun, or a magnetic heating event). When dated, CAIs give whole-inclusion ages that cluster fairly tightly on 4568 million years, and are the oldest reliably identified objects in the Solar system, thought to mark an event before the formation of the planets got well under way.
Personally, I found that date a little annoying, because for a few years the "age of the Earth" from several estimates sat at a memorable 4567 million years. But since all reasonably credible models of the formation process has it taking several million years, more precision is not helpful. It's still a useful number to remember, because it's memorable and not-wrong.
That said, the likelihood of violent interactions is higher in the early Solar (other stars are available) system, because after the initial period of aggregation of planets, the number of large particles decreases.
It's been years since I allowed one to be installed on any machine under my control. Because, on the machines not under my control, the damned thing sucked so many processor cycles and crashed so often that ... well, why would you use Adobe to read PDFs?
A significant number of genuine humans would fail the test.
Seriously, but no "ha ha".
It's not as simple as it looks at first glance. The emergency stop on the last boat I talked to the bridge crew on, when they engaged "emergency stop" the engines go to full power. Think about it.
Contemptible though the military are, I doubt that they're so incompetent as to deliberately design a machine that goes on unstoppable killing rampages. They need a machine that can go on stoppable killing rampages.
From a 3-figure UID? That question was answered before Slashdot was in existence. That paranoia is almost as dead as anti-vaxx paranoia, and as groundless.
So you don't do it with a Samsung S7, not that you can et one these days. There are other smart phones in the world. And if I remember correctly, if you had a Samsung S7, you could get it replaced, free of charge. (Actually, I'm probably within a year of geting a new phone on my plan. I might have to pay more attention to what phones are on the market in 6 months or so.)
To repeat the question : define "overheating" in degrees (centigrade, Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Rankine ; who cares?) I've spent several months working in the deserts at 45 to 48 C all day, without cooking my eyes. What temperature is your phone getting to in your use case?
Sounds like poor ventilation design problem. Probably because the high-tech VR companies haven't got one person in the company who has been spending the last 30 years designing crash helmets or other low-tech things where ventilation is an issue. It's not like that's a new issue.
I wonder if I'll have a reason to put my (£10) VR headset on this month? Or this year?
But malaria isn't by a long shot the only problem that Africa has (rampant corruption and beggar-my-neighbour capitalism for two others). "Curing" malaria wouldn't be a panacea for the continent. for as long as the cure lasts, in any case. We've had a generation or so of access to effective antimalarial drugs, and guess what - the production pipeline is pretty dry. After all, there's fuck-al profit in saving the lives of poor people, and not enough rich people at risk to be worth developing for. Simultaneously, in the hundred or so generations of the malaria protozoan, different populations have developed different spectra of resistance to the various anti-malarial drugs, which is why you need to tailor your prophylaxis and treatment to the specific regional strain you're exposed to. That's inconvenient for travellers, so they sufficiently often don't do it. The spread of all the resistant trains to all areas, and their recombination into pan-resistant strains is a certainty. At which point, the empty drug pipeine is going to become a bit better known - as rich travellers start to die more often.
But it's not all doom and gloom. Much of the decrease in malaria rates in the pre-drug era was accomplished by dull, low tech approaches that reduce mosquito numbers - draining land to improve it agriculturally ; managing both waste water and rain run-off in cities to minimise pooling of stagnant water ; improving garbage management - and in the last couple of decades by techniques that reduce the access of mosquitoes to humans (i.e. bed netting, and particularly netting coated and regularly re-coated with insecticide). But most importantly, the education of people so that they know why they're advised to tuck the netting in under their child's mattress is reducing the infection rates. Not to zero - but enough to improve matters.
Of course, all those things - education, public health, infrastructure - are costs which many countries are unwilling to bear - or at least, to bear for reducing the deaths of poor people. As long as rich people have effective drugs and don't die of malaria, the effective, resistance-proof techniques won't be applied. Start killing rich people, and something might be done about it, but not until then.
That's a hell of a claim. the costs of malaria could well exceed the continent's healthcare budget, and it certainly exerts a cost on business (the last time I was working there, we had an anti-malarials bill of tens of thousands of dollars a month for the transiting crew, and routinely would find that the local crew who we wanted - for shorebase or shipboard operations - were unavailable due to "illness" (often malaria, but also dysentery ; we lost access to a couple of dozen specialists when Ebola broke out in their home country ; that cost a couple of million dollars), which means increased costs finding new people, importing them , or training new people. Definitely there are real costs associated with poor health. But the entire GDP? Hyperbole is an effective rhetorical tool, but you do need to try to keep it in contact with reality.
All of the above.
Oh, is it Christmas again? Or was that last week?
The whole asteroid belt could coalesce into one body - and it would be considerably smaller than the Moon. If it's a "failed planet", then if it were lumped into a single planet, it would be similar to or smaller than Pluto. Maybe smaller than Charon - I haven't checked the numbers.
Uranus is also thought to have had a large late impact - it's rotation axis is flipped at 98 degrees to the orbital axis, which is often described as "orbiting on it's side".
The Pluto-Charon system is also likely the result of a late large impact. Their size difference is even smaller than between the Moon and Earth. The centre of mass of the system is outside Pluto.
An AC trying to use sarcasm. What an absolute waste of effort. Even more so than normal AC comments.
To generate gamma rays you need far more compact objects than star cores.
I'm still trying to find the original work (the links so far are to a poster or presentation at an astronomical conference - so this is pretty fresh work) which should have the individual star's mass estimates, to estimate the effects on any planets in the system. I doubt they'd be destroyed (and there's no reason to expect them to be appreciably gravitationally disturbed - because nothing significant would change), but the larger merged star would be brighter than the two pre-merger stars added together, so you'd expect climatic effects.
I just checked my Mass-Luminosity toolkit. It's not going to be good. Say that the two progenitor stars total 2 solar masses : if they're the same (approximate) mass, then you'll go from 2*1.0 solar luminosity to 1*16 solar luminosity - a 16-fold brightening. If there's a 10:1 mass ratio (1.8 plus 0.2 solar masses), the luminosity change will be from 9.4+0.006 solar luminosity to 16 solar luminosity - a 1.7 fold brightening. That's after the transient brightening of the interaction settles down. If this was my sun, I'd be a very worried RockDoctor.
Which continent? Asia or Africa?
It's probably significantly worse In Africa than Asia, over all. But plenty of people die of Malaria in Asia too. Southern India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand. Have I left anyone out? If I recall the reports from a couple of years ago, artemisinin-resistant malaria was being reported from SE Asia before the Nobel had even been awarded for discovering artemisinin.
Which is not to diminish malaria. I had a friend collapse with a recurrence of cerebral malaria one day when I was a youngster, and it was not a pretty sight. Which is why I was always pretty good about my anti-malarials, even as they played havoc with my bowels. But I think you've over-baked your comments a bit.
There's an adequate mortality from malaria in South America to consider too.
Could be worse. Could be German.
The billing system of $US TELEPHONE COMPANY$ ? Of course they know where the calls are originating : at a privately-owned multiple line switchboard in downtown Queens (insert name of low-rent business district of choice ; I'm barely even confident that "Queens" is somewhere near New York ). Upstream from that, the billing system doesn't know.
You could argue that "there should be regulation" about connecting multiple phone lines to one premises. Good luck with that - because you'll be up against the businesses setting up genuine call centres in $BUSINESS ZONE$ , staffed with Americans trained to use a Canadian accent to give a genuine call centre experience.
Can't hear you - someone turned the radio louder, and now all the other data systems of the plane are being operated. How long did you say these things last before they overwrite the previous data? I said HOW LONG ... Oh, never mind.
Is there a standard to these gaskets? I rather doubt there is an ISO. Within one company though, they're probably going to re-use sizes across a range, to reduce the parts count in the supply chain.
The one on my wrist at the moment has odd little indentations around each of the case's securing screws when there is sufficient real estate to have a much smoother curve, if not quite a plain circle. This has always struck me as odd, and I've long suspected it being there to accommodate an O-ring already in the supply chain for a different watch.
Without taking my watch apart, I recall the O-ring as about 1mm (material) diameter, and the splicing kits I mentioned up-thread bottom at 1.6mm diameter. But I've only scraped the surface of the O-ring repair and manufacture industry. Finding where your repair shop gets their parts would probably be informative.
And just think how you could out-nerd your nerdiest friend at a party with the hour-long tale of how you repaired your watch. As the credit card adverts say, "Priceless!"
13-some year half-life.
Yes, this also applies to "Fire Exit" signs too - they're "low maintenance," not "zero maintenance."
If you don't actually take it diving, and apply a non-setting sealant compound to the groove before seating your replacement, you should get back to (approximately) IP66 or IP67, which is good for getting soaked through in driving rain, or possibly falling out of the boat with.
(Caveat : in the technician's workshop, we knew that these replacements were not to manufacturer's specs and kept a very tight rein on them as temporary repairs. At about the same time an oil rig in the area had a blowout (one dead (RO Tim Williams), some tens of millions of dollars damages ; the rig carcass went on to become the "SeaLaunch" system) due to a $100 o-ring being replaced with one of these kits. International arrest warrants are still outstanding, TTBOMK.)
Also expensive watches hurt more when you lose them.
True stories : one April, my apartment mate and I went for a dive after the winter lay-off. While playing "tag" some 15m down in the kelp, my buddy got his watch snagged by a kelp stalk and 'ping', off goes the watch into the boulders, never to be found. Which was a problem, as it was a gift from his parents, who were coming to visit a week or so later. Over a week's wages it cost him IIRC.
Later that summer a different friend had a similar loss while rock climbing on the sea cliffs. Rope rubbed on wrist ; 'ping', 'splash'. So I lugged the diving gear (60+kios!) and climbing gear down to the site, rapelled to the water's edge to kit up, spent 2 bottles (3 hours) diving doing a fingertip search and found it. He was somewhat amused to be presented with the watch (still working) next evening at the climber's pub - and a bill for about 10 times it's value for the diving. He brought me a pint instead. He'd already brought a new watch, valued at about 5 pints.
It's not as if other people can see it unless you roll your shirt or jacket sleeves up.
Checks wrist (since watch hasn't been taken off for months). It's a Casio, brought for my birthday about 10 years ago by my wife ; waterproof to far deeper than my SCUBA certification will ever be ; solar powered ; time corrected daily by LW radio from MAningen, IIRC. Because it's a gift, it never gets removed except to exchange it for a proper diving watch (ratchetted bezel) when I'm going down to the harbour to go diving. The diving watch is analogue (for ease of reading in low-light conditions) and cost about 15 pints of beer at the time of purchase (~8 years ago); gets a new battery when I take my tanks for testing.
It's the only way to be sure.
I heard (from a drunk potato-digger in the pub last week - an unimpeachable source) that the KGB got a hack so they can apply a HCF instruction to the Aurora using an NES and 3 miles of barbed-wire.
Or were you aiming for a Frist Proust ?