Now picture that sort of threat display on something as big as, say, a T-rex. Can you think of anything more terrifying than that?
I've seen the business end of a policeman's gun, locked, loaded, and pointing in my eye at about a metre range. That's a very sobering experience. (More sobering when you realise that most of our police are not trained to use weapons or ever issued with them.)
But yes, the behaviour of birds gives us our baseline for the behaviour repertiore of theropods at least.
We do know that dinosaur species were found at low palaeolatitudes throughout their history. Unfortunately, we've also discovered in the last couple of decades that at some times in their history they also lived year-round above their palaeolatitude for the antarctic circle. And there is evidence for at least migratory presence above the palaeolatitude of their arctic circle.
It is not unreasonable to believe that the dinosaurs evolved in tropical to temperate latitudes - certainly their discovered diversity is greatest in those palaeolatitudes - but if you know of evidence that unambiguously demonstrates that they evolved in a tropical environment... enlighten me.
Having internal temperature regulation certainly seems to increase the available behavioral response to cope with environmental change without having to change bodily structure (grow a winter coat, for example).
This also explains why most of the reptiles that did survive are aquatic. Water would have helped the aquatic species regulate their body temperatures better.
That may be true. But the persistence of water-dwelling food (fish, pond-weed) could also explain the same observation.
their common ancestor isn't even as far back as the common ancestor between dinosaurs and pterosaurs.
That is much more dubious. While we can constrain relations between the theropod dinosaurs, crocodilians, turtles, lizards (includes snakes), tuataras, and frogs (out-group) using genetic data, with any morphological data we want to add or can get from fossils. But for the pterosaurs, we only have the morphological data (seen through the filter of taphonomy - the mangling and loss of detail that happens with decomposition and fossilisation). So we're still quite unclear on the origins of the pterosaurs.
The amazing thing to me is it's starting to look more and more like, in the right conditions, you can actually recover soft tissue from dinosaurs, even sequence proteins.
It has certainly happened at least once, and that means the chances of finding more specimens is definitely not zero. Unfortunately, the processes involved favour preservation in massive dense bone (the original find was in a femur from a tyrannosaur). Unfortunately, pterosaur bones are not renowned for their massive construction.
But when you start having a wide variety of soft tissues that you can study on both macroscopic and microscopic scales, suddenly that's a very different picture. You know how the cells should look. You can see how each of the organs should be developing.
You're asking a lot of the fossil record. A huge amount.
And, in as much as humans are the same as they always have been, the lessons of religions are immutably valid.
Since every human who ever put finger to keyboard on Slashdot has at the least gone from being a "mewling, puking brat," through an acne-ridden teenager confused over sex, to an approximately well-educated adult who may even occasionally have sex with another person, then yes, I agree. Every human is not at all the same as they've always been, and the lessons of religion are completely mutably invalid.
Which particular invisible sky fairy do you profess allegiance to this year, and when did you last change your invisible sky fairy for a new, upgraded model?
Oddly, I've been making that point about the non-extinction of dinosaurs here for years. See my sig.
What has become increasingly clear in the last decade (though it was really as clear 30 years ago, we just have smaller error-bars these days) is that at least thee events were coincident, to the precision of the geological record - the eruption of the Deccan Traps (and associated volcanics off the Seychelles Platform) ; the impact at Chicxulub (that there was a structure here, and it's approximate age was known 30, even 4 years ago ; it's nature wasn't recognised until the mid 1980s) ; and the extinction of many families of marine, flying and terrestrial animals.
Anyone who is being more precise than that is probably sticking their neck out further than is wise. If in any uncertainty at all, insist on reading the original paper and all supplementary material before commenting. If they've got extraordinarily good data, it'll be clear in the paper ; otherwise it's probably not going to change the error bars much.
What we really need - and people are looking - is to find more appropriate fossils in the Deccan series, which is around a kilometre-thick pile of lavas separated by soils (look at Vesuvius - barely 2000 years between eruptions and thick, productive soils have developed over the ruins of Pompeii). With that we can bracket the extinction event within the lava sequence, and carry out radiometric dating on the lavas to compare to the suevite dates from Chicxulub. They (IODP) have also just finished a coring programme in the Chicxulub crater.
Nutella may still be trying to push the idea that's it's healthy, so wouldn't want to be labeled as a desert.
I've never read the label of the stuff - though my step-daughter insists on it being in the house when she visits - but apparently it is (1) 54.4% by weight sugar, and (2) Nutella Corp are not keen on disclosing this.
(Also, 30% w/w fat, 13% nuts, and 7% cocoa solids. Just to make sure you've got a good picture.)
News to me too, though I do actually understand the chemistry involved.
Surely, the obvious answer to the problem of your "chocolate" rotting in storage is to make a product that tastes good enough that it sells before it rots on the shelves. But for corporate sludge-making entities, that doesn't seem to be profitable enough.
I'd long ago stopped buying the products of American sludge corporations (greatly helped by the spread of European retail companies into Britain over the last few years - they greatly increase the diversity of shopping choice), but I didn't know why, in this case. Now I do.
I suspect that you're talking about Mega-corp's Nougat-a-like Nougat Substitute sludge. Bear the same resemblance to real nougat that chocolate (e.g. Belgian or Swedish 75%+cocoa chocolate) bears to the chocolate flavoured milk-solids and vegetable fat confection which goes by the name of "milk chocolate".
I'm not great one for sweets, and generally I've remembered some horrible nougat-like concoctions from 40+years ago and just avoided it. But I also remember a concoction introduced to me while climbing in the Alps by a couple of French guys I met on the mountain, which they called nougat and was wonderful. From a country with 200 types of cheese, what would you expect but variety?
(While not really going for sweets, salmiak is an experience to be tried. Projectile vomiting may be your personal response, but some whole nations like it.)
Irrelevant. The export of PGP as printed documents of code, which were protected free speech under the first amendment blew that one out of the water. The fact that non-US nationals started putting effort into developing US-free encryption tools dismantled the flying wreckage into dust blowing in the wind.
Wasn't there a US spy plane that had to do an emergency landing in mainland China... about a decade ago... where they reported having to do pretty much that while the pilots were lining up for an emergency landing.
10 cycles of zeros-then-random might have been sensible in the 1980s with stepper motor head positioning and wide inter-track areas, but by the early 2000s the tighter head positioning using voice coils and servos and so on meant that a couple of cycles were considered adequate. (I'm trying to remember the author. Some Kiwi, IIRC.)
Of course, you could make sure you used glass platters.
In other words, whichever write-authorized app connected to your Twitter is least secure is exactly how secure your Twitter account is.
So, does anyone keep a list of Twitter-connected apps (there is something other than logging on through the website?), and their relative security strengths?
e.g. in English history there was a lot of bloody fighting between Catholics and Protestants, whoever came into power would chop the heads of several of the opposite sect.
Well, once. Bloody Mary. Her successor, Liz-1, was Protestant, but deliberately tolerated the existence of Catholics, as long as the swore allegiance to her and kept their heads down. Which is why she didn't have much of a problem with religious strife. All her successors were also Protestant. When Jimmy-1&6 came along, he started being more aggressive to the Catholics, got the Gunpowder Plot, and then backed off on the religious shit (though still running an effective state security apparatus). By the time we got into the Civil War, it was largely sects of Protestants murdering other sects of Protestants, the Catholics having learned to keep their heads down. A general (not a king, or even a Lord Protector) called Cromwell went on massacre through Ireland in 1649-50, and two changes of sovereign later there was another revolution that effectively took power out of the hands of the monarch and put it firmly in the hands of Parliament. That was within a decade or two of America having it's witch trials. (I forget - who was the best witch?)
it's unlikely that any terrorist will be able to duplicate the 9/11 attacks due to...
All over the world, a criticism that has often been laid against the Police (with respect to conventional crime), Military (with respect to wars) and Spooks (both of the above, plus "dirty tricks" and terrorism) is that of preparing to fight the last crime/ war/ terrorist (cyber war, sedition plot, whatever). Of course, part of that is the penetrating wonderfulness of hindsight. But there is certainly an element of truth to it (I saw the "Patton" movie last week, and remember his (acted) comment about how he'd drive around the Siegfried Line in exactly the way that the Third Reich drove around the Maginot Line).
However, it is such a well known trope (was it in Sun Tzu? Probably.) that it would be a very stupid terrorist who didn't take it into account and deliberately choose a method of attack different to the last attack. And while you might disagree with the motivations of the terrorist, expecting them to be stupid is simply a stupid thing to do.
You know how armies regularly play war games among themselves? Well a large part of that is about getting both sides to think about the opponent is as smart as they are - because the last time you ran this game, you were the opponent.
Sometimes when playing chess (or other black/white, 2-player games of perfect knowledge) and there is an odd number of players, we'll play Player A (black), Player B (white), Player C (black), Player A (white), Player B (black), Player C (white), Player A (black), Player B (white)...
Each player has to read the board and play their best, but before thy return to playing that colour again a different player has played, maybe to a different strategy. It's a great way of speeding up your reading of a board situation. And you know that half of the moves of your opponent are actually the moves you'd have made in their position because, well, you did.
As for other countries, the US should consider occupying a country, instead of blowing it up and leaving.
As opposed to the Iran model (the CIA sponsored coup against the Mossadegh government in 1953), or the Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos model of the late 1960s (oh, sorry, America lost that one, so we can't count that) , or the Grenadan model of 1983, or the Afghan model of 2002 to present or the Iraqi model of 2003 to present?
You know, I think you'll find some thoroughly entrenched opposition within the American "body politic" to changing that strategy, which has served so long and to such.... great effect.
Assignment will be at random, no way to group parties traveling together.
Carers traveling with vulnerable or disabled adults? Parents with children. Random assignment won't work.
Unpredictable assignment might work. A party of 6 traveling at 16:00 - won't fit at station X, Y, or Z, but the algorithm picks one of P (7 spaces in that time slot), Q (9 spaces) or R (10 spaces).
Around here, the sporting venues all do metal detectors and handbag searches, so in-the-event is a lot harder, but the side effect is a few thousand spectators jammed up in entry concourses.
So... if you're not into suicide bombing, then it's the old "pipe bomb in a beer can" and drop it into a trash receptacle, then stroll into the john to get a wall between you and the explosion.
So true. I'm just thankful that the 'terrorists' think airports are the best places to attack. I rarely travel, but I always shop and consume. Of course, you ass clowns just keep blowing up places that do little to impact anyone's real economy
You've just explained very well the reasoning behind the IRA's 1993 bombing of Warrington's main shopping street - 2 dead and 56 injured. As a politically motivated (as opposed to religiously motivated) terrorist movement, they found the results less than helpful.
Could you put Timothy McVeigh's bombing of... wherever it was... in the same category. I forget the details.
That comment was in reference to the situation at Delhi, not at Ataturk. Which you'd know, if you'd ever been through Ataturk (I have, about 6 times in the last year).
Fucking Slashdot's fucking lack of complex character fucking support!
helium (0.3% Ã) a
That should be a "greater than or equal to" sign. I.e. the lower limit for economic collection of helium from a natural gas source is 0.3%, but higher is better.
Gas seeps containing up to 10.6% helium have been discovered in Tanzania... Despite this, discoveries of economic helium (0.3% â) are still only serendipitously found while searching for petroleum
There's a datum for those who were debating the level of purity that is necessary for economical recovery and purification.
The comment about "serendipitous discovery" on the back of petroleum is... interesting. Since there certainly is exploration work going on in the area (what can I say that's in the public domain? Well, this conference was very worth attending.) But when they finish their abstract with this:
The high concentrations of helium in the region are likely related to the heating and fracturing of the Archean Tanzanian Craton and Proterozoic Mozambique Belt by the younger arms of the East African Rift System (I get the feeling that they have (a) gas samples; (b) they know the samples are from near faults recorded from surface geological mapping [contrary to snark expressed up-thread, the Geological Survey of Tanzania are perfectly competent and have been working their valuable mineral resources for a century now]; (3) they don't have seismic to locate or delineate any actual traps (this is not too severe - there certainly is seismic available, for a price. Whether it covers their precise areas, I don't know, but there are traps in the region, just hard to get an exact handle on.)
The paper is only an abstract, but I get from it that they're looking at the relations of He:Ne and He:Ar to try to work out the level of groundwater transport and the residence time, from which they get their resource estimate.
Given enough development money, they might be in production in 10-15 years. If the market will support the development, which comments upthread about the sell-off of the US reserve of helium make unlikely, at least until the US glut is turned off.
Ummm, the Great Game was between Britain and Russia for Central Asia. Britain lost.
Britain took Tanzania from the Germans in world war 1. Carrying a gunboat across about 600 miles of land to sail on Lake Tanganyka was one of the more insane aspects of that war.
Slashdot Mirror
Because in this respect they are individually and communally stupid.
I've seen the business end of a policeman's gun, locked, loaded, and pointing in my eye at about a metre range. That's a very sobering experience. (More sobering when you realise that most of our police are not trained to use weapons or ever issued with them.)
But yes, the behaviour of birds gives us our baseline for the behaviour repertiore of theropods at least.
We don't know that.
We do know that dinosaur species were found at low palaeolatitudes throughout their history. Unfortunately, we've also discovered in the last couple of decades that at some times in their history they also lived year-round above their palaeolatitude for the antarctic circle. And there is evidence for at least migratory presence above the palaeolatitude of their arctic circle.
It is not unreasonable to believe that the dinosaurs evolved in tropical to temperate latitudes - certainly their discovered diversity is greatest in those palaeolatitudes - but if you know of evidence that unambiguously demonstrates that they evolved in a tropical environment ... enlighten me.
Having internal temperature regulation certainly seems to increase the available behavioral response to cope with environmental change without having to change bodily structure (grow a winter coat, for example).
That may be true. But the persistence of water-dwelling food (fish, pond-weed) could also explain the same observation.
Agreed.
That is much more dubious. While we can constrain relations between the theropod dinosaurs, crocodilians, turtles, lizards (includes snakes), tuataras, and frogs (out-group) using genetic data, with any morphological data we want to add or can get from fossils. But for the pterosaurs, we only have the morphological data (seen through the filter of taphonomy - the mangling and loss of detail that happens with decomposition and fossilisation). So we're still quite unclear on the origins of the pterosaurs.
It has certainly happened at least once, and that means the chances of finding more specimens is definitely not zero. Unfortunately, the processes involved favour preservation in massive dense bone (the original find was in a femur from a tyrannosaur). Unfortunately, pterosaur bones are not renowned for their massive construction.
You're asking a lot of the fossil record. A huge amount.
Since every human who ever put finger to keyboard on Slashdot has at the least gone from being a "mewling, puking brat," through an acne-ridden teenager confused over sex, to an approximately well-educated adult who may even occasionally have sex with another person, then yes, I agree. Every human is not at all the same as they've always been, and the lessons of religion are completely mutably invalid.
Which particular invisible sky fairy do you profess allegiance to this year, and when did you last change your invisible sky fairy for a new, upgraded model?
Anyone who is being more precise than that is probably sticking their neck out further than is wise. If in any uncertainty at all, insist on reading the original paper and all supplementary material before commenting. If they've got extraordinarily good data, it'll be clear in the paper ; otherwise it's probably not going to change the error bars much.
What we really need - and people are looking - is to find more appropriate fossils in the Deccan series, which is around a kilometre-thick pile of lavas separated by soils (look at Vesuvius - barely 2000 years between eruptions and thick, productive soils have developed over the ruins of Pompeii). With that we can bracket the extinction event within the lava sequence, and carry out radiometric dating on the lavas to compare to the suevite dates from Chicxulub. They (IODP) have also just finished a coring programme in the Chicxulub crater.
I've never read the label of the stuff - though my step-daughter insists on it being in the house when she visits - but apparently it is (1) 54.4% by weight sugar, and (2) Nutella Corp are not keen on disclosing this.
(Also, 30% w/w fat, 13% nuts, and 7% cocoa solids. Just to make sure you've got a good picture.)
Surely, the obvious answer to the problem of your "chocolate" rotting in storage is to make a product that tastes good enough that it sells before it rots on the shelves. But for corporate sludge-making entities, that doesn't seem to be profitable enough.
I'd long ago stopped buying the products of American sludge corporations (greatly helped by the spread of European retail companies into Britain over the last few years - they greatly increase the diversity of shopping choice), but I didn't know why, in this case. Now I do.
I'm not great one for sweets, and generally I've remembered some horrible nougat-like concoctions from 40+years ago and just avoided it. But I also remember a concoction introduced to me while climbing in the Alps by a couple of French guys I met on the mountain, which they called nougat and was wonderful. From a country with 200 types of cheese, what would you expect but variety?
(While not really going for sweets, salmiak is an experience to be tried. Projectile vomiting may be your personal response, but some whole nations like it.)
Irrelevant. The export of PGP as printed documents of code, which were protected free speech under the first amendment blew that one out of the water. The fact that non-US nationals started putting effort into developing US-free encryption tools dismantled the flying wreckage into dust blowing in the wind.
10 cycles of zeros-then-random might have been sensible in the 1980s with stepper motor head positioning and wide inter-track areas, but by the early 2000s the tighter head positioning using voice coils and servos and so on meant that a couple of cycles were considered adequate. (I'm trying to remember the author. Some Kiwi, IIRC.)
Of course, you could make sure you used glass platters.
So, does anyone keep a list of Twitter-connected apps (there is something other than logging on through the website?), and their relative security strengths?
Well, once. Bloody Mary. Her successor, Liz-1, was Protestant, but deliberately tolerated the existence of Catholics, as long as the swore allegiance to her and kept their heads down. Which is why she didn't have much of a problem with religious strife. All her successors were also Protestant. When Jimmy-1&6 came along, he started being more aggressive to the Catholics, got the Gunpowder Plot, and then backed off on the religious shit (though still running an effective state security apparatus). By the time we got into the Civil War, it was largely sects of Protestants murdering other sects of Protestants, the Catholics having learned to keep their heads down. A general (not a king, or even a Lord Protector) called Cromwell went on massacre through Ireland in 1649-50, and two changes of sovereign later there was another revolution that effectively took power out of the hands of the monarch and put it firmly in the hands of Parliament. That was within a decade or two of America having it's witch trials. (I forget - who was the best witch?)
I'm waiting for the first massacre of the pickers of cherries. The harvest must be coming ready about now (in the northern hemisphere).
All over the world, a criticism that has often been laid against the Police (with respect to conventional crime), Military (with respect to wars) and Spooks (both of the above, plus "dirty tricks" and terrorism) is that of preparing to fight the last crime/ war/ terrorist (cyber war, sedition plot, whatever). Of course, part of that is the penetrating wonderfulness of hindsight. But there is certainly an element of truth to it (I saw the "Patton" movie last week, and remember his (acted) comment about how he'd drive around the Siegfried Line in exactly the way that the Third Reich drove around the Maginot Line).
However, it is such a well known trope (was it in Sun Tzu? Probably.) that it would be a very stupid terrorist who didn't take it into account and deliberately choose a method of attack different to the last attack. And while you might disagree with the motivations of the terrorist, expecting them to be stupid is simply a stupid thing to do.
You know how armies regularly play war games among themselves? Well a large part of that is about getting both sides to think about the opponent is as smart as they are - because the last time you ran this game, you were the opponent.
Sometimes when playing chess (or other black/white, 2-player games of perfect knowledge) and there is an odd number of players, we'll play Player A (black), Player B (white), Player C (black), Player A (white), Player B (black), Player C (white), Player A (black), Player B (white) ...
Each player has to read the board and play their best, but before thy return to playing that colour again a different player has played, maybe to a different strategy. It's a great way of speeding up your reading of a board situation. And you know that half of the moves of your opponent are actually the moves you'd have made in their position because, well, you did.
As opposed to the Iran model (the CIA sponsored coup against the Mossadegh government in 1953), or the Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos model of the late 1960s (oh, sorry, America lost that one, so we can't count that) , or the Grenadan model of 1983, or the Afghan model of 2002 to present or the Iraqi model of 2003 to present?
You know, I think you'll find some thoroughly entrenched opposition within the American "body politic" to changing that strategy, which has served so long and to such .... great effect.
Carers traveling with vulnerable or disabled adults? Parents with children. Random assignment won't work.
Unpredictable assignment might work. A party of 6 traveling at 16:00 - won't fit at station X, Y, or Z, but the algorithm picks one of P (7 spaces in that time slot), Q (9 spaces) or R (10 spaces).
So ... if you're not into suicide bombing, then it's the old "pipe bomb in a beer can" and drop it into a trash receptacle, then stroll into the john to get a wall between you and the explosion.
It also explains why the US's annual death toll from personally-held firearms isn't going to change any time soon.
You've just explained very well the reasoning behind the IRA's 1993 bombing of Warrington's main shopping street - 2 dead and 56 injured. As a politically motivated (as opposed to religiously motivated) terrorist movement, they found the results less than helpful.
Could you put Timothy McVeigh's bombing of ... wherever it was ... in the same category. I forget the details.
That comment was in reference to the situation at Delhi, not at Ataturk. Which you'd know, if you'd ever been through Ataturk (I have, about 6 times in the last year).
Also, you don't know how many drug tests Armstrong took - and failed - while learning his physiological profile of response to a particular drug.
That should be a "greater than or equal to" sign. I.e. the lower limit for economic collection of helium from a natural gas source is 0.3%, but higher is better.
"New High-Grade Helium Discoveries in Tanzania"
There's a datum for those who were debating the level of purity that is necessary for economical recovery and purification.
The comment about "serendipitous discovery" on the back of petroleum is ... interesting. Since there certainly is exploration work going on in the area (what can I say that's in the public domain? Well, this conference was very worth attending.) But when they finish their abstract with this :
Britain took Tanzania from the Germans in world war 1. Carrying a gunboat across about 600 miles of land to sail on Lake Tanganyka was one of the more insane aspects of that war.