Like I said, the UN is showing the number of endangered languages today to number in the hundreds of thousands. One can only imagine what the number was like 500 years ago, when empires routinely extinguished native languages.
Linear A is indeed much, much older but we have the advantage of having many thousands of texts, the context, a better concordance and greater trust in the contents not having been altered.
We know that the page numbers and some of the images are newer than the actual text, so we know that prior owners weren't above doodling. You'd need to to use X-Ray fluorescence or the detection of impressions on other pages to be certain none of the characters have been added or altered in some way, and I see no evidence such tests have been done.
I have said elsewhere that it could be nonsense, but (as Spike Milligan and Lewis Carrol demonstrated) something can be nonsense and still not junk. The analysis done certainly does seem to show that it's not junk. I agree with you on that.
I also agree it's not been seen before or since, which means that you have a sample size of one - insufficient for a useful concordance, as different uses for writing will produce different character frequencies. This appears to be a technical document, which will be very different from a work of poetry or a legal document.
I do think it is a dead language, but because there are just so many of them (many without writing systems of their own, but any of which could have been given one by an interested proto-anthropologist or proto-historian), we'll likely never know which one it was.
Not that we go great even when we do know which language it was. There are plenty of lost languages with plenty of samples of writing that are just as recent that we simply can't read and likely never will.
That is entirely possible, except that the frequency of character groupings and word groupings seem to match up with real-world natural languages.
Of course, we know from J.R.R. Tolkien's work on Elvish that it's possible to create a "natural language" that fits perfectly with known patterns and yet has no existence in the real world outside of its creation.
This would allow the script to both be nonsense and yet appear coherent to the sort of basic analysis that has been possible. It could even be done by someone who was quite insane. Illiterate would seem less likely, but I suppose is possible - you only need to be able to count and distinguish symbols to understand patterns, you don't need to know what the symbols mean. It would take an ubergeek of an illiterate, though. Mind you, most ubergeeks are insane and (as textspeak, 'leetspeak and lolspeak show) are quite capable of inventing their own languages.
I quite agree. And Japanese isn't even the worst. There is a writing style where you alternatively write right-to-left then left-to-right. The dead language of Easter Island, Rongo-Rongo, goes one worse and even requires you to turn the page upside-down on alternate lines. (That's the ONLY thing anyone can understand of it.)
The Wikipedia article states that some words are repeated three times, which strongly suggests that words can be modified not only by other words but by groups of other words. Quite a number of languages also have special symbols (determinants) which can completely alter the meaning of the word they're associated with.
Others liberally mix alphabetic, syllabic and iconographic symbols - modern English is a good example of a language that does this. In some languages, the same character can be used in any or all of these forms, depending on the characters around them.
I suspect you are correct in your conclusion that it was some (alas failed) attempt to preserve a dead language, which may also include my idea that such a language was being used as a secret language but is not restricted to that theory.
It would be interesting to know which language it was, and where, but I'm not sure we'll ever get beyond the (fairly wide-ranging) language family already guessed at.
Hmmm. If the Government criminalized being an asshole, then all lawyers and 90% of Florida and Texas would be convicted. I don't see the disadvantage of this.
Apparently not now. This could be used as case law to argue that yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater (or around a firing squad) is acceptable.
The main problem with this case, all along, is that it was going to set some sort of precedent. That was inescapable. Judges HATE setting precedents and try their damnest to always set the most relaxed precedent possible, so as to not get blamed later on. (It rarely has anything to do with law, as far as I can tell, purely a CYA.)
The secondary problem was that there was no rational or sane legal instrument that could be used. It was going to be the same farce as the British Govt using lockpicking laws against the guy who broke into Prince Philip's e-mail account.
The first problem is going to be hard to avoid with any new real or potential abuse of technology. The second problem is caused entirely by lawmakers who are too stupid to say what they mean and mean what they say, but try to fancy-up the language to sound impressive. It should be entirely possible to codify a set of laws that are independent of the technology of the day or the social mores of the day. Instead, their aim is not so much to write clean law but to get re-elected.
It's times like this that I wonder if there shouldn't be a branch of Government solely concerned with working through the laws and shredding everything too stupid or too of-the-moment to keep.
It wasn't nearly as strong as the author thought, but was still strong enough to resist cryptographers for a long time. That's impressive.
I wonder, though. There's a certain level of indirectness and jitter in the system used, but not enough to raise the complexity even to the single millions, let alone the millions of millions. Would it be possible to increase the strength of the system and still have it memorizable and usable by any person in the field without book, computer or other aid?
Perhaps, but there's no evidence that the Voynich manuscript is a cypher in the traditional sense. A natural language isn't normally "decyphered", since it was never encrypted in the first place.
Given that there are many hundreds of thousands of natural languages today for which there is no written form, it's entirely possible that this is a script invented for such a language. In WW2, natural native American languages were sometimes used in this way as an "unbreakable cypher" - who's to say that medieval Europeans hadn't done the same thing themselves?
If that is the case, then it isn't particularly compelling (we know of many extinct languages for which no known writing exists - and hundreds more go extinct yearly), and is not so much "difficult" as useless - the text could never be read.
The wikipedia article doesn't say anything about using techniques to detect writing that is no longer visible, so I must assume no such techniques have been used.
(It may be possible to establish some of the content of a missing page if the page after had been underneath at the time of writing. Non-destructive techniques for doing this formed a part of the case against the West Midland's serious crime squad in the 90s, where it could be shown pages of confessions had been altered after being signed. However, if no such analysis has taken place, the presence of such data is unknown.)
Regardless, there are many missing pages. From the articles, the page numbers seem to be relatively new compared to the text, so we don't know how many pages are actually missing, we only know how many went missing since being numbered. This makes understanding the text very difficult and even if the text could be translated, there's no guarantee we could even read it or understand it without those pages.
We know vastly more about Linear A than we do about the script on the Voynich manuscript, including the archaeology of the people writing Linear A, yet after all this time we've got no further than knowing the number system and a few of the numbers in it.
The closest to "super-yeast" I know of are wine yeasts which go up to somewhere in the 21-24% region. If you use an ale yeast first, to get the right waste products, errr flavour, then restart with something like this to ramp up the neurotoxins, you should be fine.
However, if you just want regular ale, I would recommend SkullSplitter.
Now, having said that, the size of fish (cod definitely, and I would assume tuna as well) has declined due to industrial fishing practices wiping out the larger subspecies entirely and then moving down the chain.
I can't see any objection to reviving a subspecies that would have existed had sane fishing practices existed - say, by using the same technique as for gene therapy and splicing in genes from extinct varieties - provided it is done with caution.
It wouldn't matter too much if such a revived subspecies escaped, as the environment has evolved on the basis that it is present. Creatures further up the food chain might start reviving, for example.
It might also start to deal with "dead zones" (oxygen-free regions in the seas and oceans), which are largely a product of overfishing resulting in excessive algae, the lives, deaths and decaying of which simply eliminates all the oxygen present. Reintroducing a stable, self-sustaining food chain to the oceans would be dangerous but still much safer than the current disaster.
The problem is, this is NOT what is being done. Instead of recreating a subspecies that should have existed but was obliterated due to the stupidity of the seafood industry, they are creating a whole new subspecies according to market tastes. And when the market shifts (as it routinely does), the old stocks will be worthless and dumped into the wild in an uncontrolled way that has nothing to do with restoring the ecology and everything to do with maximizing profit.
They are also not going to make any effort to develop anything further up or down the foodchain, which means you'll have something that throws off whatever balance does exist in the current environment.
Anyone here remember the old ecology computer games, like "foxes and rabbits", where you specify the initial number of each and the available area of grass for the rabbits to feed on? Of those who do, how many of you succeeded in producing stable environments? It turns out that it's damn hard when the number of elements is very small, it's only viable when you've an extremely high level of biodiversity.
Here we have the three elements of the original game, with the food for the tuna replacing the grass, the tuna being the rabbits and the human consumers being the foxes. If, after all this time, you still can't find good starting numbers, what makes you think the fish markets (who don't give a rat's arse about the environment) are going to do any better?
So for the ultra-careful, you'd want a distributed key where the number of key fragments needed does not reveal the key length, merely the upper bound possible.
It actually sounds dubiously cheap. There are something like 88,000 students at the universities in Manchester, and probably close to ten times that in the whole of Greater Manchester. (The population in each is around 440,000 and 2.2 million respectively.)
So even if we ignore ALL the costs involved in cleaning up the computers for University and school staff, the city council, the civil service, and all other Government-related facilities, we're looking at $4 per incident.
The REAL cost to Manchester will obviously depend on the exact fraction of machines infected and the exact number of people with machines running Windows in the first place, but a saner estimate of costs would be closer to $40 per incident, and about 1 non-student incident per student incident.
This would give you a cost 80 times greater than the estimate given. You won't find it in any single financial account, because it's incredibly distributed, but it still gets paid for by the same people in the end whether it's on one statement or 2.2 million statements. It's just better-hidden on 2.2 million statements.
If we use Manchester's estimate and assume it applied to the whole country, then Britain as a whole forked over $60 million to clean up the worm. If we use my estimate, it'd be closer to $4.2 billion. Not that it matters which it is, really, it's far far too much in either case.
You're absolutely right that it's inexcusable, and I'd love to know why it was anything like so high. The regional and national computing centres are in Manchester, the University of Manchester has one of the best computing departments on the planet and GMING means that infections should have been easy to identify, trace and block.
With the kinds of resources that COULD have been thrown at the problem, Manchester has really no excuse for there ever having been a problem at all.
The TSA are, I believe, considered law enforcement. Mercenary law enforcers, the same way that King John hired mercenary law enforcers, the same way Blackwater/Xe were mercenary law enforcers, and - for that matter - how the Taliban is also largely made up of mercenary law enforcers.
Hands up all those who think mercenaries make bad enforcers? No, stubs don't count. The rest of you, form a line. The guy with the axe will be round shortly.
Trust me, that was NOTHING compared to what they did to the guy who had the complete transcript for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
(For the humour-impaired - ie: all those in the TSA, - this is a joke. Well, unless you know something I don't, in which case feel free to post your confession as a reply.)
Bear in mind that the Constitution ONLY applies to the US Government. The people running the security at airports are all contractors, outside corporations, and therefore not Government.
(This works the same way that contract-written software for the Government is considered "COTS" - commercial off-the-shelf - whereas if a Government employee did the same work, it would be "GOTS" - Governmental off-the-shelf. The Constitution limits what the Government can own, patent, copyright, etc, but hiring contractors bypasses the Constitution.)
There have also been cases where the Constitution has been found not applicable in terms of Government employees. Because the relationship is that of employer to employee, not Government to citizen, Constitutional safeguards do not always apply to employees.
In this case, it is possible that the TSA has found a way to get passengers declared employees (or even employers, as the passengers pay the TSA's bills, ultimately), and therefore no safeguards are due.
Consider this. If, indeed, the TSA has argued that the populace is, in essence, an employer or an employee of the system, this means that ANY branch of Government can say the same. The police get paid via the taxes you pay and the fines you pay, so essentially you are part of the payroll system.
I got out of the research game because the pay was crap in the UK and the tricks you have to pull aren't a whole lot better than those you describe.
Typical UK researchers get paid for doing commercial work and, if they're clever enough and quick enough, exploit the availability of the lab to get the real research done. The company paying for the real work never knows they're paying for other projects on the side.
Ultimately, though, all such methods are crap. Real research, the blue-sky stuff, is where the real discoveries take place, where the real magic of science can be found. The Renaissance was so successful because patrons didn't mind funding such work so long as stuff that interested them got done as well. (Occasionally, this was even the same thing.)
The modern era is progressing slowly and in fits and starts because nobody wants a discoverer.
Yes, because research has undefined results and therefore undefinable market value ahead of obtaining those results. Scientists absolutely have to think solely of the potential value not to the market but to other scientists, otherwise they'd either go stark raving mad from the uncertainties or turn into Dr Evil.
It's the usual confusion of relative to absolute. In principle, you could have an aircraft that was stationary to the ground and still have an airspeed of 150 miles per hour. (The plane is not moving at the same speed relative to the air as it is relative to the ground.)
I am not 100% certain on this, but I believe certain species of bird will use this technique to do precisely what I described above - stay absolutely still relative to the ground, using the air's speed relative to the ground to stay aloft.
Once, just for amusement, I counted up all the Boeing and Airbus crashes over a given period of time (I forget how long it was, but it was long enough for the effect of chance to balance out). Airbus and Boeing had a near-enough identical number of crashes. (I think Boeing had one crash more over the period I looked.)
Since then, I've kept a tally of what planes crash. The two corporations have remained at a dead heat. (No pun intended. Or maybe it was.) Whatever superiority one has in one area is totally cancelled out by the superiority of the other in a different area.
From this, I conclude that neither computer nor pilot should have overall control, but that the degree of say should vary according to scenario.
I also conclude that aircraft should have more extensive internal monitoring, which should be dumped to an airline database on landing, and that the black boxes should be adapted to hold more data to cover the extra instrumentation.
The first, in theory, should allow airlines to detect faults not yet obvious to the crew and thereby reduce the number of preventable failures.
The second, in theory, should allow crash investigators greater insight into exactly what the point of failure was. I'm basing this on Rolls Royce' technique of developing the Merlin engine - they deliberately wrecked engines, strengthened the bits that broke and repeated until it was the best engine material science permitted at that time.
If there's data on them, it's data that was lost from some mission or other. There are plenty of missions (such as the Venus landings) where a bucket of extra data spools could provide massively valuable scientific data, even to this day.
Now that the moon has been (at least partially, if not fully) mapped in high-def, and a host of other probes have been sent to collect all kinds of other data, moon tapes would be really more interesting from a historic standpoint. Nothing wrong with that, especially as staggering achievements tend to wake public interest and open the money taps, but from a scientific standpoint there must be huge numbers of reels of tape that would actually be of greater value to NASA.
Exactly. There are all kinds of ways in which temperatures can remain static or even appear to fall, even though the total heat in the system has risen. (This is due to phase change and also due to different substances requiring different amounts of heat to change by 1'C.)
What we need is a map of the heat, where temperature is marked on the way windspeeds would be on a regular map (as temperature difference determines heat flow). This would show a totally different picture than mere temperature plots and would reveal details that temperatures hide.
Now, global warming models doubtless do use heat rather than temperature, as it's the fundamental unit and temperature the dependent value. But because temperature is what gets talked about in the media, temperature is what people and politicians (who aren't really people but aliens from Alpha Centauri) think about. Because temperature is an unsafe guide, unsafe conclusions are drawn and unsafe actions are taken.
Never, ever trust the Average Person with meaningless data. Remember, these are people who can find voices of ghosts in white noise, and mistake lights reflecting off the windscreen for UFOs. You can be absolutely certain they'll find something in junk temperature data.
To your question: Correct. The only thing that is meaningful (in a global -warming- debate) is the normalized value for the heat. The heat should be totally independent of all natural (and unnatural) fluctuations in temperature and if the planet is globally warming, the heat should be rising regardless of what the temperature is doing.
Since the air will be changing in composition because of natural and unnatural pollution, it is possible for the temperature to fall in air whilst the heat is rising. I'm not saying it's likely, merely that it's possible. Water vapour will hold a hell of a lot more heat than a nitrogen molecule per degree C rise.
The more risk there is of disguising what the problem is, where the problem is, and how the problem could be tackled (assuming the problem is there at all), the less worthwhile the data.
Normalize all of the data to show the total heat, use the temperature SOLELY to show the rate at which heat will be flowing. Then and only then will we see what is real and what is illusion.
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Like I said, the UN is showing the number of endangered languages today to number in the hundreds of thousands. One can only imagine what the number was like 500 years ago, when empires routinely extinguished native languages.
Linear A is indeed much, much older but we have the advantage of having many thousands of texts, the context, a better concordance and greater trust in the contents not having been altered.
We know that the page numbers and some of the images are newer than the actual text, so we know that prior owners weren't above doodling. You'd need to to use X-Ray fluorescence or the detection of impressions on other pages to be certain none of the characters have been added or altered in some way, and I see no evidence such tests have been done.
I have said elsewhere that it could be nonsense, but (as Spike Milligan and Lewis Carrol demonstrated) something can be nonsense and still not junk. The analysis done certainly does seem to show that it's not junk. I agree with you on that.
I also agree it's not been seen before or since, which means that you have a sample size of one - insufficient for a useful concordance, as different uses for writing will produce different character frequencies. This appears to be a technical document, which will be very different from a work of poetry or a legal document.
I do think it is a dead language, but because there are just so many of them (many without writing systems of their own, but any of which could have been given one by an interested proto-anthropologist or proto-historian), we'll likely never know which one it was.
Not that we go great even when we do know which language it was. There are plenty of lost languages with plenty of samples of writing that are just as recent that we simply can't read and likely never will.
That is entirely possible, except that the frequency of character groupings and word groupings seem to match up with real-world natural languages.
Of course, we know from J.R.R. Tolkien's work on Elvish that it's possible to create a "natural language" that fits perfectly with known patterns and yet has no existence in the real world outside of its creation.
This would allow the script to both be nonsense and yet appear coherent to the sort of basic analysis that has been possible. It could even be done by someone who was quite insane. Illiterate would seem less likely, but I suppose is possible - you only need to be able to count and distinguish symbols to understand patterns, you don't need to know what the symbols mean. It would take an ubergeek of an illiterate, though. Mind you, most ubergeeks are insane and (as textspeak, 'leetspeak and lolspeak show) are quite capable of inventing their own languages.
I quite agree. And Japanese isn't even the worst. There is a writing style where you alternatively write right-to-left then left-to-right. The dead language of Easter Island, Rongo-Rongo, goes one worse and even requires you to turn the page upside-down on alternate lines. (That's the ONLY thing anyone can understand of it.)
The Wikipedia article states that some words are repeated three times, which strongly suggests that words can be modified not only by other words but by groups of other words. Quite a number of languages also have special symbols (determinants) which can completely alter the meaning of the word they're associated with.
Others liberally mix alphabetic, syllabic and iconographic symbols - modern English is a good example of a language that does this. In some languages, the same character can be used in any or all of these forms, depending on the characters around them.
I suspect you are correct in your conclusion that it was some (alas failed) attempt to preserve a dead language, which may also include my idea that such a language was being used as a secret language but is not restricted to that theory.
It would be interesting to know which language it was, and where, but I'm not sure we'll ever get beyond the (fairly wide-ranging) language family already guessed at.
Hmmm. If the Government criminalized being an asshole, then all lawyers and 90% of Florida and Texas would be convicted. I don't see the disadvantage of this.
Hey, wait a minute! I thought reading TFA was what was a crime!
Apparently not now. This could be used as case law to argue that yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater (or around a firing squad) is acceptable.
The main problem with this case, all along, is that it was going to set some sort of precedent. That was inescapable. Judges HATE setting precedents and try their damnest to always set the most relaxed precedent possible, so as to not get blamed later on. (It rarely has anything to do with law, as far as I can tell, purely a CYA.)
The secondary problem was that there was no rational or sane legal instrument that could be used. It was going to be the same farce as the British Govt using lockpicking laws against the guy who broke into Prince Philip's e-mail account.
The first problem is going to be hard to avoid with any new real or potential abuse of technology. The second problem is caused entirely by lawmakers who are too stupid to say what they mean and mean what they say, but try to fancy-up the language to sound impressive. It should be entirely possible to codify a set of laws that are independent of the technology of the day or the social mores of the day. Instead, their aim is not so much to write clean law but to get re-elected.
It's times like this that I wonder if there shouldn't be a branch of Government solely concerned with working through the laws and shredding everything too stupid or too of-the-moment to keep.
It wasn't nearly as strong as the author thought, but was still strong enough to resist cryptographers for a long time. That's impressive.
I wonder, though. There's a certain level of indirectness and jitter in the system used, but not enough to raise the complexity even to the single millions, let alone the millions of millions. Would it be possible to increase the strength of the system and still have it memorizable and usable by any person in the field without book, computer or other aid?
Perhaps, but there's no evidence that the Voynich manuscript is a cypher in the traditional sense. A natural language isn't normally "decyphered", since it was never encrypted in the first place.
Given that there are many hundreds of thousands of natural languages today for which there is no written form, it's entirely possible that this is a script invented for such a language. In WW2, natural native American languages were sometimes used in this way as an "unbreakable cypher" - who's to say that medieval Europeans hadn't done the same thing themselves?
If that is the case, then it isn't particularly compelling (we know of many extinct languages for which no known writing exists - and hundreds more go extinct yearly), and is not so much "difficult" as useless - the text could never be read.
The wikipedia article doesn't say anything about using techniques to detect writing that is no longer visible, so I must assume no such techniques have been used.
(It may be possible to establish some of the content of a missing page if the page after had been underneath at the time of writing. Non-destructive techniques for doing this formed a part of the case against the West Midland's serious crime squad in the 90s, where it could be shown pages of confessions had been altered after being signed. However, if no such analysis has taken place, the presence of such data is unknown.)
Regardless, there are many missing pages. From the articles, the page numbers seem to be relatively new compared to the text, so we don't know how many pages are actually missing, we only know how many went missing since being numbered. This makes understanding the text very difficult and even if the text could be translated, there's no guarantee we could even read it or understand it without those pages.
We know vastly more about Linear A than we do about the script on the Voynich manuscript, including the archaeology of the people writing Linear A, yet after all this time we've got no further than knowing the number system and a few of the numbers in it.
The closest to "super-yeast" I know of are wine yeasts which go up to somewhere in the 21-24% region. If you use an ale yeast first, to get the right waste products, errr flavour, then restart with something like this to ramp up the neurotoxins, you should be fine.
However, if you just want regular ale, I would recommend SkullSplitter.
I completely agree.
Now, having said that, the size of fish (cod definitely, and I would assume tuna as well) has declined due to industrial fishing practices wiping out the larger subspecies entirely and then moving down the chain.
I can't see any objection to reviving a subspecies that would have existed had sane fishing practices existed - say, by using the same technique as for gene therapy and splicing in genes from extinct varieties - provided it is done with caution.
It wouldn't matter too much if such a revived subspecies escaped, as the environment has evolved on the basis that it is present. Creatures further up the food chain might start reviving, for example.
It might also start to deal with "dead zones" (oxygen-free regions in the seas and oceans), which are largely a product of overfishing resulting in excessive algae, the lives, deaths and decaying of which simply eliminates all the oxygen present. Reintroducing a stable, self-sustaining food chain to the oceans would be dangerous but still much safer than the current disaster.
The problem is, this is NOT what is being done. Instead of recreating a subspecies that should have existed but was obliterated due to the stupidity of the seafood industry, they are creating a whole new subspecies according to market tastes. And when the market shifts (as it routinely does), the old stocks will be worthless and dumped into the wild in an uncontrolled way that has nothing to do with restoring the ecology and everything to do with maximizing profit.
They are also not going to make any effort to develop anything further up or down the foodchain, which means you'll have something that throws off whatever balance does exist in the current environment.
Anyone here remember the old ecology computer games, like "foxes and rabbits", where you specify the initial number of each and the available area of grass for the rabbits to feed on? Of those who do, how many of you succeeded in producing stable environments? It turns out that it's damn hard when the number of elements is very small, it's only viable when you've an extremely high level of biodiversity.
Here we have the three elements of the original game, with the food for the tuna replacing the grass, the tuna being the rabbits and the human consumers being the foxes. If, after all this time, you still can't find good starting numbers, what makes you think the fish markets (who don't give a rat's arse about the environment) are going to do any better?
So for the ultra-careful, you'd want a distributed key where the number of key fragments needed does not reveal the key length, merely the upper bound possible.
It actually sounds dubiously cheap. There are something like 88,000 students at the universities in Manchester, and probably close to ten times that in the whole of Greater Manchester. (The population in each is around 440,000 and 2.2 million respectively.)
So even if we ignore ALL the costs involved in cleaning up the computers for University and school staff, the city council, the civil service, and all other Government-related facilities, we're looking at $4 per incident.
The REAL cost to Manchester will obviously depend on the exact fraction of machines infected and the exact number of people with machines running Windows in the first place, but a saner estimate of costs would be closer to $40 per incident, and about 1 non-student incident per student incident.
This would give you a cost 80 times greater than the estimate given. You won't find it in any single financial account, because it's incredibly distributed, but it still gets paid for by the same people in the end whether it's on one statement or 2.2 million statements. It's just better-hidden on 2.2 million statements.
If we use Manchester's estimate and assume it applied to the whole country, then Britain as a whole forked over $60 million to clean up the worm. If we use my estimate, it'd be closer to $4.2 billion. Not that it matters which it is, really, it's far far too much in either case.
You're absolutely right that it's inexcusable, and I'd love to know why it was anything like so high. The regional and national computing centres are in Manchester, the University of Manchester has one of the best computing departments on the planet and GMING means that infections should have been easy to identify, trace and block.
With the kinds of resources that COULD have been thrown at the problem, Manchester has really no excuse for there ever having been a problem at all.
Impossible. I've yet to see anyone claim that the Government functions at all.
The TSA are, I believe, considered law enforcement. Mercenary law enforcers, the same way that King John hired mercenary law enforcers, the same way Blackwater/Xe were mercenary law enforcers, and - for that matter - how the Taliban is also largely made up of mercenary law enforcers.
Hands up all those who think mercenaries make bad enforcers? No, stubs don't count. The rest of you, form a line. The guy with the axe will be round shortly.
Trust me, that was NOTHING compared to what they did to the guy who had the complete transcript for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
(For the humour-impaired - ie: all those in the TSA, - this is a joke. Well, unless you know something I don't, in which case feel free to post your confession as a reply.)
Have you checked behind the radiator, or inside the toaster?
Bear in mind that the Constitution ONLY applies to the US Government. The people running the security at airports are all contractors, outside corporations, and therefore not Government.
(This works the same way that contract-written software for the Government is considered "COTS" - commercial off-the-shelf - whereas if a Government employee did the same work, it would be "GOTS" - Governmental off-the-shelf. The Constitution limits what the Government can own, patent, copyright, etc, but hiring contractors bypasses the Constitution.)
There have also been cases where the Constitution has been found not applicable in terms of Government employees. Because the relationship is that of employer to employee, not Government to citizen, Constitutional safeguards do not always apply to employees.
In this case, it is possible that the TSA has found a way to get passengers declared employees (or even employers, as the passengers pay the TSA's bills, ultimately), and therefore no safeguards are due.
Consider this. If, indeed, the TSA has argued that the populace is, in essence, an employer or an employee of the system, this means that ANY branch of Government can say the same. The police get paid via the taxes you pay and the fines you pay, so essentially you are part of the payroll system.
Paranoia level? Would that be Green-level troubleshooters, Vulture Squadron or the commie mutant traitors, friend Citizen?
Meanwhile, will all infra-red troubleshooters please report to the termination chambers as the food vats are running low.
I got out of the research game because the pay was crap in the UK and the tricks you have to pull aren't a whole lot better than those you describe.
Typical UK researchers get paid for doing commercial work and, if they're clever enough and quick enough, exploit the availability of the lab to get the real research done. The company paying for the real work never knows they're paying for other projects on the side.
Ultimately, though, all such methods are crap. Real research, the blue-sky stuff, is where the real discoveries take place, where the real magic of science can be found. The Renaissance was so successful because patrons didn't mind funding such work so long as stuff that interested them got done as well. (Occasionally, this was even the same thing.)
The modern era is progressing slowly and in fits and starts because nobody wants a discoverer.
Yes, because research has undefined results and therefore undefinable market value ahead of obtaining those results. Scientists absolutely have to think solely of the potential value not to the market but to other scientists, otherwise they'd either go stark raving mad from the uncertainties or turn into Dr Evil.
It's the usual confusion of relative to absolute. In principle, you could have an aircraft that was stationary to the ground and still have an airspeed of 150 miles per hour. (The plane is not moving at the same speed relative to the air as it is relative to the ground.)
I am not 100% certain on this, but I believe certain species of bird will use this technique to do precisely what I described above - stay absolutely still relative to the ground, using the air's speed relative to the ground to stay aloft.
Once, just for amusement, I counted up all the Boeing and Airbus crashes over a given period of time (I forget how long it was, but it was long enough for the effect of chance to balance out). Airbus and Boeing had a near-enough identical number of crashes. (I think Boeing had one crash more over the period I looked.)
Since then, I've kept a tally of what planes crash. The two corporations have remained at a dead heat. (No pun intended. Or maybe it was.) Whatever superiority one has in one area is totally cancelled out by the superiority of the other in a different area.
From this, I conclude that neither computer nor pilot should have overall control, but that the degree of say should vary according to scenario.
I also conclude that aircraft should have more extensive internal monitoring, which should be dumped to an airline database on landing, and that the black boxes should be adapted to hold more data to cover the extra instrumentation.
The first, in theory, should allow airlines to detect faults not yet obvious to the crew and thereby reduce the number of preventable failures.
The second, in theory, should allow crash investigators greater insight into exactly what the point of failure was. I'm basing this on Rolls Royce' technique of developing the Merlin engine - they deliberately wrecked engines, strengthened the bits that broke and repeated until it was the best engine material science permitted at that time.
If there's data on them, it's data that was lost from some mission or other. There are plenty of missions (such as the Venus landings) where a bucket of extra data spools could provide massively valuable scientific data, even to this day.
Now that the moon has been (at least partially, if not fully) mapped in high-def, and a host of other probes have been sent to collect all kinds of other data, moon tapes would be really more interesting from a historic standpoint. Nothing wrong with that, especially as staggering achievements tend to wake public interest and open the money taps, but from a scientific standpoint there must be huge numbers of reels of tape that would actually be of greater value to NASA.
Exactly. There are all kinds of ways in which temperatures can remain static or even appear to fall, even though the total heat in the system has risen. (This is due to phase change and also due to different substances requiring different amounts of heat to change by 1'C.)
What we need is a map of the heat, where temperature is marked on the way windspeeds would be on a regular map (as temperature difference determines heat flow). This would show a totally different picture than mere temperature plots and would reveal details that temperatures hide.
Now, global warming models doubtless do use heat rather than temperature, as it's the fundamental unit and temperature the dependent value. But because temperature is what gets talked about in the media, temperature is what people and politicians (who aren't really people but aliens from Alpha Centauri) think about. Because temperature is an unsafe guide, unsafe conclusions are drawn and unsafe actions are taken.
Never, ever trust the Average Person with meaningless data. Remember, these are people who can find voices of ghosts in white noise, and mistake lights reflecting off the windscreen for UFOs. You can be absolutely certain they'll find something in junk temperature data.
To your question: Correct. The only thing that is meaningful (in a global -warming- debate) is the normalized value for the heat. The heat should be totally independent of all natural (and unnatural) fluctuations in temperature and if the planet is globally warming, the heat should be rising regardless of what the temperature is doing.
Since the air will be changing in composition because of natural and unnatural pollution, it is possible for the temperature to fall in air whilst the heat is rising. I'm not saying it's likely, merely that it's possible. Water vapour will hold a hell of a lot more heat than a nitrogen molecule per degree C rise.
The more risk there is of disguising what the problem is, where the problem is, and how the problem could be tackled (assuming the problem is there at all), the less worthwhile the data.
Normalize all of the data to show the total heat, use the temperature SOLELY to show the rate at which heat will be flowing. Then and only then will we see what is real and what is illusion.