Thank you for clearing that up. And I needed a good laugh. For a few minutes, I thought your previous posts were serious...
Re:A Clean Alternative
on
Solar Sails
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· Score: 1
Nope. You use whatever means you find convenient to escape Earth orbit, so you're in solar orbit at the same distance as the Earth. Then use the solar sail to reduce your orbital velocity. All you need to do is position the sail at an angle to your orbit, so the resulting force is antiparallel to your orbital velocity. Your velocity decreases, and gravity does the rest.
Too bad you haven't picked up much of your colleagues' knowlege. Cerenkov radiation, as several others have stated, is no more than ordinary electromagnetic radiation, a.k.a. light. It is possible, while very unlikely, to produce a few gamma rays along with the other stuff, which is mostly within an order of magnitude of visible wavelengths. However, your smoke detector produces more gamma radiation than this experiment will. As somebody else suspected, a pocket MagLite produces several orders of magnitude more electromagnetic radiation than this detector will.
To point out some other problems with your earlier posts:
Being 2 km undergound is absolutely necessary to get meaningful readings. At or near the surface, evidence of the neutrino reactions would be completely washed out by cosmic radiation. What "uderground atmospheric properties" do you think are going to alter the readings?
And what the hell is "creating a medium of radio
frequency hypersensitivity in the surrounding air" supposed to mean?
I know that C14 has far too short a half-life to date rocks around a billion years old. The parent poster mentioned using C12/C13 dating to determine the age of the meteorite. Apparently, this method can be used for ages on the order of a billion years. But C12 and C13 are both stable, so I don't immediately expect an age dependance in their ratio. Of all the light nuclides I can find that would produce C13, all have very short lifetimes, most less than an hour.
I am genuinely curious about this method, and would appreciate it if searleb could comment further.
>First of all there is the galaxy; it needs to be very very specific in both size, age, and type.
Bullshit. Just because our galaxy has a certain configuration doesn't mean that's the only configuration that can support life. Do you honestly think that life can only occur in the uncharted backwaters of the unfasionable end of the western spiral arm of a particular type of galaxy?
>The star has to be exacly the right size nad exactly the right point in its life
Bullshit. Our sun is about 4.5 billion years old. Life has existed on Earth for better than 3 billion years of that. So the sun has been at "exactly the right point in its life" for 2/3 of its life. Uhmm, right. As for size, the only thing that matters is the luminous intensity at the planet's surface. A larger or brighter star simply requires a larger orbit, thicker atmosphere, or more temperature-tolerant life.
>The planet has to be composed of exactly the right material...
Bullshit. Earth is mostly iron and nickel. The crust is mostly silicon, aluminum, and oxygen. Only one of these elements is important for the basics of life. To produce Earth-like life, the planet needs certain amounts of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, etc. at the surface. These do not have to be the primary constituents of the planet.
>...be the right size...
Bullshit. Earth-like life requires a certain minumum size, to hold an atmosphere. There is really no definite upper limit on size, though. Life, especially simple life like bacteria, would have absolutely no trouble evolving on a planet 10 times as massive as Earth.
>and be at exactly the right distance from the sun
Bullshit. Again, Earth-like life requires the surface temperature to be within a certain range, but it's hardly exact. The primary requirements are that water be a liquid and proteins hold together against thermal disruption. Known life on Earth exists in temperatures over a range of better than 350 Kelvins. Even if you needed a smaller temperature range, you have 3 variables to adjust. Sun brightness, orbit distance, and atmosphereic reflectiveness. It's not too hard to find a combination of those that will produce the right temperature.
>There has to be a moon at exactly the right distance and exactly the right size
Bullshit. Whose ass did you pull this statement out of? Do you honestly expect me to believe that chemical reactions on Earth's surface are dependant on the luminosity and gravitational pull of the Moon?! At least the other arguments sounded credible before you thought about them. This one's just ridiculous.
The Leidenfrost effect rocks. One of my physics profs knew a guy who used to do demonstrations for grade school kids. Part of his act was to put a bit of liquid nitrogen in his mouth, then spit it back out. No harm was done as long as he spit it out quickly. One time, though, he accidentally swallowed it. Nothing got frozen, but the resulting belch was one for the record books.
Cognitive ability is not dependant on technology. Technology is dependant on intelligence, but also on resources and physical manipulation. Dolphins, without those crucial opposable thumbs, aren't all that good at manipulating objects. Their social interactions and language (what little we can figure out from it, anyway) seem to indicate that they are quite intelligent, even if they can't make and use tools.
I wonder if they have developed any understanding of mathematics, beyond simple counting. Math is fairly abstract, so it probably wouldn't suffer as much in translation as other ideas which are grounded in either species' primary means of perception.
I think you missed one: the Space Shuttle. Nearly all launch vehilce tecnology in use today is descended from German research during and before World War II, specifically by Werner Von Braun. Before that, there was Robert Goddard, who was born and worked in America.
These trolls just seem to be getting dumber and dumber. A bit of advice for the original poster: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt." It's a widely used quote, and has been attributed to many different people. There's even something similar to it in the book of Proverbs. Still, it seems that the above troll has not yet figured out its meaning.
First, game designers seem to think that dark environments create an eerie, menacing atmosphere, thereby saving them the trouble of creating that atmosphere through good writing. Second, less light means shorter visual range, which means less load on the video system. With a lot of large, open areas, making them fade into blackness allows you to get more frames per second, or do more cool stuff in the area you can see.
The same thing seems to happen a lot with mist and fog. Not every piece of the outdoors is perpetually immersed in fog, though you might think so if you play too many FPS's. I haven't quite figured out the reasoning behind that, though.
>No one wants to spend 8 hours to play one game of heroes of might and magic.
Maybe not, but I have repeatedly spent entire days playing Steel Panthers III and Master of Orion. In fact, the only games I've been playing lately are Counter Strike and MOO. Even in CS, I prefer the times when strategy apply. Rushing and shooting like hell is fun for a few mintues, but it gets old really quick. The real fun is when you have a slower game going, and you actually have time to think about where your targets might be, and how best to attack them.
"One should consider free-look mode only as a breathing-time, which gives one leisure to contrive, and prepare to execute, military plans." - Apologies to Niccolo Machiavelli
Chess is definitely not going to die in the near future. But computer game companies are not going to make millions of dollars selling it, either. In the eyes of those play everything the day it comes out and shelve it a week later, turn based games are nearly nonexistant. There is no question that lots of people still play turn based games. The question is if many people are still buying turn based games, or if many companies are still making them.
It's been done. Twice. Slashdot even had articles about the first one and the sequel. The trouble happens when certain semiconductors get too cold to semiconduct. (Remember, conductivity increases with temperature in a semiconductor)
The partners link quit working soon after the more recent article was posted. I haven't tried it in the past few days, so it might have been temporary. I finally registered myself an account, which you're free to use if you want. Username is "fuckmarketers" password is "fuckthemall".
Time is not required to be all that different from a spatial dimension. Some theories describe perception of time merely as a consequence of increasing entropy, which is itself a consequence of an expanding universe. If I understand the explanation I read correctly, time is simply a name for a direction in which a certain characteristic of the universe changes predictably. Specifically, a 4-dimensional (3 space, 1 time) universe is described as the surface of a 5-dimensional sphere. Most theories today use plenty more than 4 dimensions, but this case is easy to explain.
Along the 'time' dimension, the entropy of the universe varies roughly with size. That is, as the universe increases size, entropy increases. As the universe decreases size, entropy decreases. Our perception of time is proposed to be simply a function of increasing entropy, so we must always observe increasing entropy and an expanding universe.
So time is not fundamentally different from other dimensions, but simply happens to be the property of the universe on which our consciousness depends. It is consciousness, not time, that introduces all the wierdness in relating the different dimensions. Or so goes that particular theory. Such theories are quite popular for speculation, but have no real evidence in their favor thus far. As I previously mentioned, this is where philosophy begins to take over from science. If you want to do anything useful, you still have to treat time and space as being fundamentally different.
Seriously, though, what theory are you using that completely does away with time? Every one I've heard of incorporates time in the same way as spatial dimensions, or at least a very similar way. Perception of time is another matter entirely, and statements like "Time does not exist" are still strictly the domain of philosophy and metaphysics. Take some of your own advice.
Also, this is not an article about string theory. The subject of the article is a test of a particular brane theory. This is somewhat similar to string theory, but is definitely not the same thing. At the very least, read the article to which this is a follow-up.
If you're just trolling (which is a definite possibility, seeing as how you appear to know nothing of what you speak), I think "All your string are belong to us!" or something similar would have been more effective.
Considering that light only goes that slowly in a certain Bose-Einstein condensates, you wouldn't have a signal for long. Light propagates through a millimeter of that about as well as it propagates through several meters of solid graphite.
IIRC, it was shown that Alzheimer's causes increased aluminum concentrations. So there is a correlation, but the cause-effect relationship is opposite what was originally supposed. I can't remember where I heard/read that, though.
The privacy concerns are raised by the plans, explicitly stated in the article, to push home scanners as indispensable appliances. The intention is to allow these scanners to communicate with the manufacturers and vendors, while gathering detailed information about consumer habits and camouflaging it as convenience (see the bit about the scanner in the fridge).
If this marketer's dream came true, then there would be some serious privacy concerns. But if you listen to anybody who says "In the future, we'll all have [insert technology here]," we were all supposed to have intelligent fridges buying stuff for us 5 years ago. Right now, my fridge just keeps stuff cold, and that's the way I likes it.
>This is compared to a database of what doors that card can open and if it matches, the door unlocks and I walk in.
Do the doors make that little noise the ones in the original Star Trek did? Now that would be cool.
>(After the lawyers, can we kill all the people in Marketing? =)
You may remember that the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were the first against the wall when the revolution came. Now we just need a revolution...
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for clearing that up. And I needed a good laugh. For a few minutes, I thought your previous posts were serious...
Nope. You use whatever means you find convenient to escape Earth orbit, so you're in solar orbit at the same distance as the Earth. Then use the solar sail to reduce your orbital velocity. All you need to do is position the sail at an angle to your orbit, so the resulting force is antiparallel to your orbital velocity. Your velocity decreases, and gravity does the rest.
To point out some other problems with your earlier posts:
Being 2 km undergound is absolutely necessary to get meaningful readings. At or near the surface, evidence of the neutrino reactions would be completely washed out by cosmic radiation. What "uderground atmospheric properties" do you think are going to alter the readings?
And what the hell is "creating a medium of radio frequency hypersensitivity in the surrounding air" supposed to mean?
I am genuinely curious about this method, and would appreciate it if searleb could comment further.
Bullshit. Just because our galaxy has a certain configuration doesn't mean that's the only configuration that can support life. Do you honestly think that life can only occur in the uncharted backwaters of the unfasionable end of the western spiral arm of a particular type of galaxy?
>The star has to be exacly the right size nad exactly the right point in its life
Bullshit. Our sun is about 4.5 billion years old. Life has existed on Earth for better than 3 billion years of that. So the sun has been at "exactly the right point in its life" for 2/3 of its life. Uhmm, right. As for size, the only thing that matters is the luminous intensity at the planet's surface. A larger or brighter star simply requires a larger orbit, thicker atmosphere, or more temperature-tolerant life.
>The planet has to be composed of exactly the right material...
Bullshit. Earth is mostly iron and nickel. The crust is mostly silicon, aluminum, and oxygen. Only one of these elements is important for the basics of life. To produce Earth-like life, the planet needs certain amounts of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, etc. at the surface. These do not have to be the primary constituents of the planet.
>...be the right size...
Bullshit. Earth-like life requires a certain minumum size, to hold an atmosphere. There is really no definite upper limit on size, though. Life, especially simple life like bacteria, would have absolutely no trouble evolving on a planet 10 times as massive as Earth.
>and be at exactly the right distance from the sun
Bullshit. Again, Earth-like life requires the surface temperature to be within a certain range, but it's hardly exact. The primary requirements are that water be a liquid and proteins hold together against thermal disruption. Known life on Earth exists in temperatures over a range of better than 350 Kelvins. Even if you needed a smaller temperature range, you have 3 variables to adjust. Sun brightness, orbit distance, and atmosphereic reflectiveness. It's not too hard to find a combination of those that will produce the right temperature.
>There has to be a moon at exactly the right distance and exactly the right size
Bullshit. Whose ass did you pull this statement out of? Do you honestly expect me to believe that chemical reactions on Earth's surface are dependant on the luminosity and gravitational pull of the Moon?! At least the other arguments sounded credible before you thought about them. This one's just ridiculous.
>...this is not a troll...
Sure had me fooled.
But that guy did die from natural causes. It's quite natural to die when you have 17 stab wounds in your chest.
And what is the accuracy of C12/C13 dating for 4 billion year old objects?
The Leidenfrost effect rocks. One of my physics profs knew a guy who used to do demonstrations for grade school kids. Part of his act was to put a bit of liquid nitrogen in his mouth, then spit it back out. No harm was done as long as he spit it out quickly. One time, though, he accidentally swallowed it. Nothing got frozen, but the resulting belch was one for the record books.
I wonder if they have developed any understanding of mathematics, beyond simple counting. Math is fairly abstract, so it probably wouldn't suffer as much in translation as other ideas which are grounded in either species' primary means of perception.
These trolls just seem to be getting dumber and dumber. A bit of advice for the original poster: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt." It's a widely used quote, and has been attributed to many different people. There's even something similar to it in the book of Proverbs. Still, it seems that the above troll has not yet figured out its meaning.
That thing could probably keep your voice sounding funny for weeks, as long as you breathe some oxygen every now and then.
The same thing seems to happen a lot with mist and fog. Not every piece of the outdoors is perpetually immersed in fog, though you might think so if you play too many FPS's. I haven't quite figured out the reasoning behind that, though.
Not "fuck the mall," it's "fuck them all." I have nothing in particular against malls (though I do avoid them when possible).
D'OH! Forgot that first <P> tag. Well, I'm a dumbass.
"One should consider free-look mode only as a breathing-time, which gives one leisure to contrive, and prepare to execute, military plans." - Apologies to Niccolo Machiavelli
Chess is definitely not going to die in the near future. But computer game companies are not going to make millions of dollars selling it, either. In the eyes of those play everything the day it comes out and shelve it a week later, turn based games are nearly nonexistant. There is no question that lots of people still play turn based games. The question is if many people are still buying turn based games, or if many companies are still making them.
My currently registered ID is fuckmarketers/fuckthemall, and everybody's welcome to use it.
It's been done. Twice. Slashdot even had articles about the first one and the sequel. The trouble happens when certain semiconductors get too cold to semiconduct. (Remember, conductivity increases with temperature in a semiconductor)
The partners link quit working soon after the more recent article was posted. I haven't tried it in the past few days, so it might have been temporary. I finally registered myself an account, which you're free to use if you want. Username is "fuckmarketers" password is "fuckthemall".
Along the 'time' dimension, the entropy of the universe varies roughly with size. That is, as the universe increases size, entropy increases. As the universe decreases size, entropy decreases. Our perception of time is proposed to be simply a function of increasing entropy, so we must always observe increasing entropy and an expanding universe.
So time is not fundamentally different from other dimensions, but simply happens to be the property of the universe on which our consciousness depends. It is consciousness, not time, that introduces all the wierdness in relating the different dimensions. Or so goes that particular theory. Such theories are quite popular for speculation, but have no real evidence in their favor thus far. As I previously mentioned, this is where philosophy begins to take over from science. If you want to do anything useful, you still have to treat time and space as being fundamentally different.
And lunchtime doubly so, right?
Seriously, though, what theory are you using that completely does away with time? Every one I've heard of incorporates time in the same way as spatial dimensions, or at least a very similar way. Perception of time is another matter entirely, and statements like "Time does not exist" are still strictly the domain of philosophy and metaphysics. Take some of your own advice.
Also, this is not an article about string theory. The subject of the article is a test of a particular brane theory. This is somewhat similar to string theory, but is definitely not the same thing. At the very least, read the article to which this is a follow-up.
If you're just trolling (which is a definite possibility, seeing as how you appear to know nothing of what you speak), I think "All your string are belong to us!" or something similar would have been more effective.
Considering that light only goes that slowly in a certain Bose-Einstein condensates, you wouldn't have a signal for long. Light propagates through a millimeter of that about as well as it propagates through several meters of solid graphite.
IIRC, it was shown that Alzheimer's causes increased aluminum concentrations. So there is a correlation, but the cause-effect relationship is opposite what was originally supposed. I can't remember where I heard/read that, though.
If this marketer's dream came true, then there would be some serious privacy concerns. But if you listen to anybody who says "In the future, we'll all have [insert technology here]," we were all supposed to have intelligent fridges buying stuff for us 5 years ago. Right now, my fridge just keeps stuff cold, and that's the way I likes it.
Do the doors make that little noise the ones in the original Star Trek did? Now that would be cool.
>(After the lawyers, can we kill all the people in Marketing? =)
You may remember that the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were the first against the wall when the revolution came. Now we just need a revolution...