Bear in mind that the total inhabitable volume of the land is roughly equal to the total inhabitable surface area * 1 (to convert area to volume), and the total area of land (inhabitable or not) is less than a third of the total surface area.
The oceans are staggeringly deep in places, virtually everything can be occupied by something (right down to the deepest of the oceanic trenches), and the range in which an organism can survive is often beyond comprehension (some whales dive to below 10,000 feet). This greatly increases the range an animal can thrive in, and thus reduces pressure from any given competing species.
However, evolution does happen in the oceans. I, for one, am rather glad that one specific beastie that had an estimated bite of 45 tonnes per square inch is not in circulation at the moment. Although it might make a cool monster in a horror flick! Being able to bite clean through an armoured car in one go has to be worth some decent SFX.
True enough. Of course, there are freak exceptions, such as when the conditions make it difficult or impossible for bacteria to do a whole lot. Trees in coal mines are of this sort.
Another situation, which produces something analogous to a fossil but isn't really, is when you get a soft body forming an impression as a hollow. Again, this might happen if decomposition is extremely slow. If that hollow is then filled in at a subsequent time, you form something that looks like a fossil. (Really, it's casting from a mould, rather than a replacement process.)
What's wrong with Santa? We know St. Nick was real (so we know there are charitable people) and we know wormholes are real (so we know how to travel around the globe in an evening).
The Easter Bunny is a modern corruption of the Eostre hare, which seems to have involved throwing eggs at Bugs in the morning, or something like that.
Spider threads are one of the strongest organic materials known. If we assume the thread could be scaled to the thickness of a typical hemp rope and that the strength scaled with it, it might just about be strong enough to pull building over with, never mind scaling them.
It's not about these superheros not being possible - clearly the science says otherwise. It's about them not having happened yet. Which, since the tales all come from the past, means time travel will have to be invented along with them.
You could be right on that correction. Certainly, there was a view that had a measure of credibility in the 60s that the police were the major cause of crime. (You'll find references to this in the novel "Eight Keys to Eden".)
I don't know of any way to solve this. Correction - I can think of ways to solve this, but the human cost would be horribly high. However, as best as I can tell, the only way to have selfless cops is to eliminate the cops' sense of self. Anything else and the only human result possible is that the human need for self to be of supreme importance will always subvert any concept of law or order.
You'd be right if it weren't for the fact that there are already people in jail for making apparent "terroristic" threats on the Internet in the US. It has already been legalized, the Supreme Court has apparently considered such threats to be fair game for legal action, so it seems there's bugger all the constitution can say on the matter. It's a done deal.
Well, cops (in the US) have guns and dead people don't tend to take the stand a whole lot.
Also, an arrest does more damage to a person's reputation than a conviction. This means arrests must be done with as much consideration for the law as humanly possible. Those found innocent afterwards never fully recover, so you want as few such cases as you can.
Lastly, the cops are not hired to be thugs. They are hired to keep the peace, not beat the living daylights out of it. If all you want are enforcers, then organized crime is generally better equipt than police forces, and often does a better job. No sane populace opts for this, because enforcement should be the smallest component of policing, not the largest. It is also why countries like the UK have opted for community policing (which is 99% helping people and only 1% cops-mash-up-robbers) to reduce actual crime.
And that is why you don't want cops who are known to exaggerate, tell tall tales, seek out confrontation where none exists so they can brag about it afterwards, etc. With power comes responsibility, and responsibility never meshes well with those who play false.
Au contrare. The precident set in this case would say that your facebook status shows prior knowledge of the action and therefore would secure your conviction.
Now, if the cop who arrested you had a facebook page status of "I need 3 more arrests to make my quota for the month", you might have an easier time of it. Who, in their right minds, is going to take the sworn testimony of a cop needing to make up numbers seriously?
In your example, the situation is reversed. Who is going to take YOUR sworn testimony seriously if you accuse someone of setting you up before the event in question took place? My guess is that your credibility would be zero, just like this cop's.
If they do, they would have legal grounds for getting the officer investigated (vigilantism has been a crime for a while, and "terroristic threats" were added shortly after 9/11), possibly kicked out the force, and maybe even jailed.
This should not be considered a bad thing. Getting rid of bent cops is the only way you can ever ensure law enforcement is free of corruption. If the corrupt advertise their corruption, do not excuse them for it, nail the bastards to the courtroom wall.
You want to know the reason nobody trusts those with power, and why power seemingly corrupts? Easy. Power doesn't corrupt, the corrupt seek power, and society hands that power to those who brag the best (ie: are the least stable). If you want those with authority to be responsible, then do not permit the irresponsible within a mile of authority.
I doubt it. Prejudice within witnesses has been recognized in law since the days of the Magna Carta (which forbade the testimony of unsupported statements for exactly that reason), possibly earlier. At most, American law is merely upgrading itself to the 13th century. More likely, American law already had, and we merely need to upgrade the rest of Americans.
More importantly, though, unless someone has multiple personality disorder, the chances are their professional persona is no different from any other persona they have. The neurology and brain chemistry are the same, the person's memories and views aren't swapped in off a USB stick.
If someone does locker-room bragging (ie: they have no sense of right and wrong, they have little inclination towards honesty, their self-esteem is so pathetic that they need to create an illusion around others), I'd personally lock them out of the locker-room. The people you want, especially in positions of power over others and responsibility for life-and-death situations, are people who have no need for bragging, who are emotionally stable enough to regard reality as sufficient, and who have no need of the alpha-male nonsense that is fit only for lower animals.
So long as the plasma is moving at a speed such that the magnetic field can only just contain it, I'd have thought you'd be ok. Helium has a higher mass, so greater momentum, and therefore mass separation is possible. The helium will not be capable of changing direction as fast as tritium, so provided the field can barely contain the tritium, it wouldn't be capable of containing helium.
However, as other posters have noted, there are other containment methods that don't have the problem to start with.
In addition to that, if the core is hot enough, helium will fuse with a net release of energy. In fact, you can go all the way up to (but not beyond) iron. However, super-hot fusion reactors might not be terribly popular if they go nova.
I've thought of that myself. Picture a cluster of programmable cores, such that each core's instruction set matches the interface for a Java class. Also picture having a stack of registers on that core, such that each instance of a class is equal to a given set of registers. Inheritance is simply taking an unrecognized opcode and forwarding it to another core.
In principle, this would give you the ability to run a Java program as a physical machine, similar to the way the iWarp and Transputer worked, but using an object-oriented design rather than a functional design.
The communication overheads in such a system are high, the complexity of the decoding is enormous, and you'd have to essentially rebuild the computer every time you reprogrammed it, but it should not be possible to run an object-oriented program any faster than such a machine could. (Using a mix of hardwired coding and microcode programming will give you massive performance gains over a general-purpose computer, as the individual cores need not be Turing-complete and can therefore be optimized for some specific subset.)
Working on this design has, however, completely convinced me that there are huge benefits to being extremely lazy and just using general-purpose mass-produced components.
Slashdot Mirror
Bear in mind that the total inhabitable volume of the land is roughly equal to the total inhabitable surface area * 1 (to convert area to volume), and the total area of land (inhabitable or not) is less than a third of the total surface area.
The oceans are staggeringly deep in places, virtually everything can be occupied by something (right down to the deepest of the oceanic trenches), and the range in which an organism can survive is often beyond comprehension (some whales dive to below 10,000 feet). This greatly increases the range an animal can thrive in, and thus reduces pressure from any given competing species.
However, evolution does happen in the oceans. I, for one, am rather glad that one specific beastie that had an estimated bite of 45 tonnes per square inch is not in circulation at the moment. Although it might make a cool monster in a horror flick! Being able to bite clean through an armoured car in one go has to be worth some decent SFX.
True enough. Of course, there are freak exceptions, such as when the conditions make it difficult or impossible for bacteria to do a whole lot. Trees in coal mines are of this sort.
Another situation, which produces something analogous to a fossil but isn't really, is when you get a soft body forming an impression as a hollow. Again, this might happen if decomposition is extremely slow. If that hollow is then filled in at a subsequent time, you form something that looks like a fossil. (Really, it's casting from a mould, rather than a replacement process.)
Hyperdilution got into the science section of Nature. In comparison, this article is positively accurate.
What's wrong with Santa? We know St. Nick was real (so we know there are charitable people) and we know wormholes are real (so we know how to travel around the globe in an evening).
The Easter Bunny is a modern corruption of the Eostre hare, which seems to have involved throwing eggs at Bugs in the morning, or something like that.
Spider threads are one of the strongest organic materials known. If we assume the thread could be scaled to the thickness of a typical hemp rope and that the strength scaled with it, it might just about be strong enough to pull building over with, never mind scaling them.
It's not about these superheros not being possible - clearly the science says otherwise. It's about them not having happened yet. Which, since the tales all come from the past, means time travel will have to be invented along with them.
What? He already is! You missed that part of the article?
If symptoms of a lack of oxygen are taken to include brain death, there is ample evidence they banned oxygen some considerable time ago.
You could be right on that correction. Certainly, there was a view that had a measure of credibility in the 60s that the police were the major cause of crime. (You'll find references to this in the novel "Eight Keys to Eden".)
I don't know of any way to solve this. Correction - I can think of ways to solve this, but the human cost would be horribly high. However, as best as I can tell, the only way to have selfless cops is to eliminate the cops' sense of self. Anything else and the only human result possible is that the human need for self to be of supreme importance will always subvert any concept of law or order.
You'd be right if it weren't for the fact that there are already people in jail for making apparent "terroristic" threats on the Internet in the US. It has already been legalized, the Supreme Court has apparently considered such threats to be fair game for legal action, so it seems there's bugger all the constitution can say on the matter. It's a done deal.
*looks in DSM:IV* Yes, that would appear to be the right percentage of the population to be nutjobs.
Hmmm. If you fed the output from one of the (many) kernel mapping programs into LinCity, you could indeed have a street view.
The printout generated a gravity well so severe that it formed a black hole and took the civilization that developed the script with it.
There was another kernel map (in wheel form) that was front page a few years back. Personally, I prefer the wheel format.
Well, cops (in the US) have guns and dead people don't tend to take the stand a whole lot.
Also, an arrest does more damage to a person's reputation than a conviction. This means arrests must be done with as much consideration for the law as humanly possible. Those found innocent afterwards never fully recover, so you want as few such cases as you can.
Lastly, the cops are not hired to be thugs. They are hired to keep the peace, not beat the living daylights out of it. If all you want are enforcers, then organized crime is generally better equipt than police forces, and often does a better job. No sane populace opts for this, because enforcement should be the smallest component of policing, not the largest. It is also why countries like the UK have opted for community policing (which is 99% helping people and only 1% cops-mash-up-robbers) to reduce actual crime.
And that is why you don't want cops who are known to exaggerate, tell tall tales, seek out confrontation where none exists so they can brag about it afterwards, etc. With power comes responsibility, and responsibility never meshes well with those who play false.
Au contrare. The precident set in this case would say that your facebook status shows prior knowledge of the action and therefore would secure your conviction.
Now, if the cop who arrested you had a facebook page status of "I need 3 more arrests to make my quota for the month", you might have an easier time of it. Who, in their right minds, is going to take the sworn testimony of a cop needing to make up numbers seriously?
In your example, the situation is reversed. Who is going to take YOUR sworn testimony seriously if you accuse someone of setting you up before the event in question took place? My guess is that your credibility would be zero, just like this cop's.
If they do, they would have legal grounds for getting the officer investigated (vigilantism has been a crime for a while, and "terroristic threats" were added shortly after 9/11), possibly kicked out the force, and maybe even jailed.
This should not be considered a bad thing. Getting rid of bent cops is the only way you can ever ensure law enforcement is free of corruption. If the corrupt advertise their corruption, do not excuse them for it, nail the bastards to the courtroom wall.
You want to know the reason nobody trusts those with power, and why power seemingly corrupts? Easy. Power doesn't corrupt, the corrupt seek power, and society hands that power to those who brag the best (ie: are the least stable). If you want those with authority to be responsible, then do not permit the irresponsible within a mile of authority.
I doubt it. Prejudice within witnesses has been recognized in law since the days of the Magna Carta (which forbade the testimony of unsupported statements for exactly that reason), possibly earlier. At most, American law is merely upgrading itself to the 13th century. More likely, American law already had, and we merely need to upgrade the rest of Americans.
More importantly, though, unless someone has multiple personality disorder, the chances are their professional persona is no different from any other persona they have. The neurology and brain chemistry are the same, the person's memories and views aren't swapped in off a USB stick.
If someone does locker-room bragging (ie: they have no sense of right and wrong, they have little inclination towards honesty, their self-esteem is so pathetic that they need to create an illusion around others), I'd personally lock them out of the locker-room. The people you want, especially in positions of power over others and responsibility for life-and-death situations, are people who have no need for bragging, who are emotionally stable enough to regard reality as sufficient, and who have no need of the alpha-male nonsense that is fit only for lower animals.
Maybe so, but nobody with proper psychological functioning becomes a cop.
Yes we can, but the technology for turning hot air into Iron Man is still a work in progress.
je ne sais quoi-ness? So long as you don't go all Withnail and talk about firm young carrots.
So long as the plasma is moving at a speed such that the magnetic field can only just contain it, I'd have thought you'd be ok. Helium has a higher mass, so greater momentum, and therefore mass separation is possible. The helium will not be capable of changing direction as fast as tritium, so provided the field can barely contain the tritium, it wouldn't be capable of containing helium.
However, as other posters have noted, there are other containment methods that don't have the problem to start with.
In addition to that, if the core is hot enough, helium will fuse with a net release of energy. In fact, you can go all the way up to (but not beyond) iron. However, super-hot fusion reactors might not be terribly popular if they go nova.
They do, but in the Middle East, they are not permitted to be seen in public without wearing a full atom.
I could tell you, but then I'd have to shoot Schrodinger's cat.
I've thought of that myself. Picture a cluster of programmable cores, such that each core's instruction set matches the interface for a Java class. Also picture having a stack of registers on that core, such that each instance of a class is equal to a given set of registers. Inheritance is simply taking an unrecognized opcode and forwarding it to another core.
In principle, this would give you the ability to run a Java program as a physical machine, similar to the way the iWarp and Transputer worked, but using an object-oriented design rather than a functional design.
The communication overheads in such a system are high, the complexity of the decoding is enormous, and you'd have to essentially rebuild the computer every time you reprogrammed it, but it should not be possible to run an object-oriented program any faster than such a machine could. (Using a mix of hardwired coding and microcode programming will give you massive performance gains over a general-purpose computer, as the individual cores need not be Turing-complete and can therefore be optimized for some specific subset.)
Working on this design has, however, completely convinced me that there are huge benefits to being extremely lazy and just using general-purpose mass-produced components.