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User: hotdoghead

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Comments · 17

  1. Re:Whoa! Consider the Law on A Call To RICO Climate Change Science Deniers · · Score: 1

    Maybe AC meant "tons" literally. If there's 2000 climate scientists total, 5% would weigh about 15,000 lbs., which is several tons. There's just a lot more tons of climate scientist on the consensus side.

  2. Re:Why bother? on Giant Survival Ball Will Help Explorer Survive a Year On an Iceberg · · Score: 1

    Agreed. His website says he wants to inspire sustainable living, but I really don't see how living in an expensive plastic-and-aluminum ball with packaged food and water does that.

  3. Re:Fluoridation on Study Finds Human Teeth are as Tough as Shark Teeth · · Score: 1

    Never said I didn't buy into it. I use a fluoride mouthwash. Just curious.

  4. Fluoridation on Study Finds Human Teeth are as Tough as Shark Teeth · · Score: 1

    Does this mean that fluoridating our water and/or using a fluoride mouthwash are useless?

  5. Re:Well... on Ask Slashdot: How To Introduce Someone To Star Trek? · · Score: 1

    Seriously. Anyone who's already shown some interest in watching Star Trek can certainly handle that.

  6. Re:A week? on Who's Pirating Game of Thrones, and Why? · · Score: 1

    I really wonder how many shows would be produced if people could pay for individual series on the equivalent of Pay Per View, but at a more reasonable price.

    Well, HBO hasn't gotten any money from me, but AMC has. I willingly forked over $2/episode for Breaking Bad and Walking Dead, which I can watch again and I don't have to sit through the FBI warning. So call it $40 for the 2nd season of Walking Dead, and they had an average audience of ~5 million. If all those people were like me and didn't have cable, that's potentially ~$200 million in revenue. Let's be conservative and halve it. The total budget for that season was something like $60 million. So that's a $40 million profit, which I wouldn't scoff at. In fact, that's all of AMC's quarterly profit. Seems like a viable model in a world where people aren't shelling out $100/month for a bunch of crap they don't want to watch.

  7. Re:James Webb on SETI Finds Funds For the Allen Telescope Array (For Now) · · Score: 1

    It's a good telescope.

    "... the efficiency of the ATA will be increased by doing radio astronomy and SETI searches simultaneously."

    In fact only one of the science goals listed is actually related to SETI, and the rest are quite interesting even if you think SETI itself is useless.

  8. Re:Yes your honor... on Court to Decide If Man Can Keep His Moon Rock · · Score: 1

    If I recall, Judge Rehnquist wrote the majority decision: "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah."

  9. Re:The earth is round, p .05 on Evolution Battle Brews In Texas · · Score: 1

    If you wish to create an ethical construct "You should be monogamous with a member of the opposite sex and faithful for your entire life." Then you should have evidence to support that the outcome of that rule results in the maximum happiness/success/productivity/etc.

    The trouble there is in deciding what to maximize/minimize. I suspect it would be fairly easy to show heterosexual monogamy minimizes inheritance battles (assuming patriarchal inheritance) while maximizing baby production and genetic diversity. And I think a few people still genuinely believe these are the sole/primary goals of marriage, but most don't.

    Both the logical and philosophical fields also require empirical data to form their assumptions.

    I don't think that's how assumptions work.

    Empiricism is great, and there are some values everyone's pretty much agreed on (e.g. stealing is a dick move if you have other means of providing for yourself, and don't kill anyone unless you have a really good reason), and I believe in an objective reality. But values can't be empirically determined; empiricism only shows which behaviors maximize values determined by some other means.

  10. the math on 50% of Tweets Consumed Come From .05% of Users · · Score: 1

    Not sure I buy this. If 20k are responsible for 500 million per week, that means those users average a tweet every ~15 seconds, 16 hours per day, 7 days per week. And since that's an average, some users would be tweeting at an even higher frequency. That just doesn't seem sustainable; wouldn't they starve by the end of the week? Or have carpal tunnel syndrome by the end of the month?

  11. Magnet-on-a-stick on Ask Slashdot: What Gadgets Would You Use For Hunting Meteorites? · · Score: 1

    Cheap, effective for finding ferrous meteorites. We use magnets from old hard drives. Good place to look is the average winter windward shore of a large dry lake bed, where small meteorites tend to get concentrated. Look for signs of eolian erosion. Poke around until something sticks. Kinda time-consuming, but we've found a couple chondrites that way. Probably doesn't make good TV, though.

  12. Re:Crash on See The Supermoon Tonight · · Score: 1

    Apparently it's blamed for the tsunami.

    No it's not. I'm no fan of the Mail, but the headline "Did tonight's super moon cause Japan's tsunami?" leads to "And yet there is not a shred of evidence to support this."

  13. trailer on MIT-Designed Game Used To Train an AI System · · Score: 1

    FTA: a really boring trailer. Most low-budget sci-fi movies I've seen were considerably more interesting than the trailer to this game. Skynet will be trained by the incredibly bored.

  14. Re:journal article on Scientists Discover Solar Powered Hornets · · Score: 1

    Some institutions and universities cover the OpenChoice cost for the authors.

  15. Re:So Confused on the GPS Data and Logic on Midwest Earthquake Hazard Downplayed · · Score: 1

    I'm not a geologist so I'm very confused, if something is 'storing up energy' how does moving around equate to that? I mean, if the moving of the ground in violent ways is the releasing of that 'stored energy' then how is small movements indications that it's storing up energy? I would assume that the worse earthquake areas are those when there's a lot of movement going on deep underground but nothing on the surface releasing that energy until a very devastating movement.

    Full disclosure: I am a geologist, but I don't study intra-plate earthquakes and I'm not familiar with Stein's work. You're correct that the faults themselves are locked, so there's no relative motion immediately to either side of the fault. But the strain accumulation is caused by the relative motions of much larger crustal blocks, and this movement can be seen using GPS. Saying "the faults are moving @ x mm/yr" is incorrect short-hand for saying "the relative motion of the crust on either side of the fault far away is x mm/yr". That said, I'm used to dealing with GPS for faults that have surface expressions. I'm not sure how the thick layers of sediment above the New Madrid fault zone would affect the signal, but my guess would be that the GPS signal would be more diffuse and noisier. Yes, they are ground stations.

    What about the northern earthquakes? Do GPS stations up there report tiny movements in the crusts leading up to those earthquakes? I'm just curious if it's possible that you're dealing with different kinds of faults when comparing the San Andreas fault line versus the Ramapo fault line versus the New Madrid fault line.

    The San Andreas is a strike-slip fault, so GPS will show motions of the North American and Pacific plates roughly parallel to the fault line. The Ramapo fault is a normal fault, so far-field motions will be perpendicular to the fault line and directed away. The New Madrid fault zone actually consists of two strike-slip faults and a thrust fault, so the GPS signal will be more complex. I don't know if there are GPS data for the Ramapo area, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't be used to detect motion in Canada, other than the fact that it would mean working in Canada.

    This sounds, at best, questionable or highly fitted to very recent events that we've had the privilege to watch. It's difficult to look over long swaths of time historically when our precision instruments for measuring are a very recent thing compared to the age of the crust. I'm not arguing for the spending of billions in the mid-west but I'm not sold on a single expert's opinion, is this consensus in the geological community?

    I don't know. Obviously they're not using GPS data to constrain when faults were active thousands of years ago, but other kinds of geologic evidence could be useful in that regard. It may be the consensus of those who study intra-plate earthquakes, which from my perspective are just something that happen sometimes.

  16. Re:There is no way an AI can build a cleverer AI. on Why Motivation Is Key For Artificial Intelligence · · Score: 1

    And yet it happened, iterating all the way up to HAL-9000

  17. Re:Is it powered by bovine excretions? on Introducing the Warpship · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here's his paper: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0712/0712.1649v6.pdf Besides discussing a mechanism, he also does some quick calculations about how much energy would be required to use this method to fly at light-speed. "Let us consider a spacecraft of dimensions 10 m x 10 m x 10 m ... The total amount of energy 'injected' locally would equal 10^45 J ... roughly the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter."