The majority of cactus have a metabolic system called CAM (Crasulacea Acid Metabolism). In such plants, the stomata open at night, thus needing only to respond to light and dark, not to each other. There is no phasing of groups of stomata in the plants epidermises. CO2 enters the stomata at night whereupon mailc acid is synthesized. During the day, stomata are closed and photosyntheses is driven by the energy of the malic acid to produce the various sugars and goodies needed to run the plant.
Only a few very primitive cacti have leaves. The rest grow stems which may be cylindrical or spherical, usually with ribs which facilitate expansion when rains fall.
Check the current Scientific American for information about how bacteria sense the presence of many of their species in order time release of toxins and other activities. The genes and proteins which control these coordinated activities have been identified.
I am displeased at the number of paper back fantasies I have to look past to find any science fiction at all. However, there is good, IMHO, science fiction being written and published. I'm primarily interested in good character development and interesting situations. I grabbed a sampling of authors I hold in good regard from a couple of our bookcase shelves.
Stephen Baxter, Charles Sheffield (sadly deceased, but with a number of good novels left behind), Sean Williams & Shane Dix, Jack McDevitt, Jeffrey Carver, Michael Flynn, Frederick Pohl, William Barton & Michael Capobianco, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, David Brin, and Allen Steele. Several others have already been mentioned. Look for them instead of whining and bitching.
Also check Analog and Fantasy & Science Fiction. These tend to stack up on me because I prefer novels, but they do have some good stuff.
When I first started getting serous about Internet stuff, I signed up for the urban legends list server, but found that it was almost entirely folks commenting about what other folks had said. Dropped out. Did I miss something?
Anyone else remember Freddie Slacks record (circa '44-'46) "The House of Blue Lights"? I was told that "blue light" referred to an African-American bordello (OK, so I'm being PC).
I was surprised no one presented what actually happened to the LOTR and its copyright.
Some one in the publisher's employ forgot to renew the copyright after 14 years. Within a very short time, many publishers came out with editions of LOTR. My impression ws that Tolkien's estate did not do well as a consequence of the copyright loss. I'm not sure whether Tolkien was still alive at time of the outburst of copyright-free publication; does anyone know?
What I am sure of is that the three volumes of LOTR didn't take off until low cost copies were on the market.
The business about throwing things down wells to confound the theories of stratification is utter nonsense. Strafication studies treat of the total context of the situation. Wells, caves, and the like leave traces that can and will be used in the evaluation of stratification studies.
Thanks, Anonymous Coward. (I don't know, of course, if you are the same Anonymous Coward whom I already thanked for the exposition about David Bohm.) My undergraduate education didn't get into the Planck's derivation as deeply as yours did and I am pleased sot have leaned about it.
Thanks, Anonymous Coward. Bohm's work, it seems, was emerging a bit just before I graduated from college with a B. Sc. in Physics. I found it fascinating, but doubt that I have the mental horspower left to comprehend it. But I am gratified to know that such deep thinking has been done and its approximate nature.
The wavelength distribution of blackbody radiation had been determined some (many?) years earlier. However, no one could figure out how to to explain how it could come about.
Somehow, Planck worked out an equation which yielded that wavelength distribution quite precisely. I believe that it is correct that his model was a "what if" conjecture about energy exisiting in discrete packets.
As discussed, the rest is history.
53 years of passing time has dimmed my memory, but I'm pretty sure that is the story.
Evidently, everyone wants to be a comedian tonight.
Diamonds, non-gem grade, can be produced from the vapor phase from several carbon-based molecules. Obviously not suitable for corpse transformation.
Diamonds, of any grade, can be produced from elemental (or, perhaps, from suitably doped) elemental carbon by application of extremely high pressures and temperatures.
There is no extant process for reducing a human body so that only the carbon atoms are left.
Therefore, the very suggestion of converting a human body to diamond seems to be pure bullshit.
The title says it. That does make me vulnerable to changes in EULAs, but I give myself the luxury of chancing that.
I once refused to install a piece of software, Liquid Music (IIRC), that came with my PleXWriter 12/10/32S CD-RW drive. I was to acknowledge that it installed remotely controllable software which they could use to disable their software, but they did not guarantee that it would not otherwise screw up my computeer (again, IIRC).
I contacted PlexWriter's Tech Support and inquired why the hell their Marketing folks ever included something that crappy in their bundled software. The person who responded didn't know, but agreed that they hadn't installed on their home machine either for the same reason.
The moral? Read the damned EULA at least once per publisher no matter how boring they are. You might keep a poisonous snake out of your machine as I did.
There were other foreign-sited ads besides the Belgain nuns. All were very professionally done, but were designed solely for international corporate business. Nothing there for the end user.
During that period, I was phasing out of the Amiga market and had purchased a Windows laptop. I wondered if I should consider OS/2 Warp to replace Win95. (I recognize now that the laptop could not have hacked it with OS/2 Warp!) Then, an ad appeared for OS/2 Warp that showed a group of youngish folks gathered around a computer, oohing and ahing about what they were supposedly seeing on the screen. No hint of what was supposely displayed on the screen was shown.
Evidently, some high-level marketdroid thought that viewers would be motivated to go post haste to a nearby computer store to see what the excitement was about.
My take was that something exciting would have been shown if there was anything like that to show. I concluded that OS/2 Warp was an empty promotion and I never chose to even look at it.
My loss? I think not. It cost me nothing and I have survived.
The article only mentioned the Belgian nuns TV ad, but there were several others, all of high production quality, but of no interest to an end user.
I was weaning myself away from the Amiga at the time by buying a Windows laptop. I was aware of OS/2 Warp and wondering if I should buy it. (I recognize now that the laptop couldn't have hacked it!) However, IBM ran an OS/2 Warp TV ad that totally turned me off.
The ad showed a goup of youthful folks clustered around a computer, oohing and ahing and generally making sounds of enthusiasm and approbation. It never showed a hint of what was supposedly on the computer display to generate such excitment.
I assume that some high-level marketdroid thought the ad would make the viewer eager to see what the excitements was all about.
I don't know how other folks reacted, but my conclusion was that OS/2 Warp had nothing special worth showing or else they would have shown the computer display. Therefore, why should I even give a thought to OS/2 Warp.
My loss? I think not. I didn't invest any money in OS/2 Warp and it remained a non-factor in my life.
A number of years back, I read that the Apple Macintosh was a bootleg project and that when Steve Jobs learned of its existence, he tried to kill the project. Was this false information? I find it quite believable.
I also find it quite believable that Steve Jobs is now credited with having "invented" it. That is the way of the world.
'... For example, here in Arizona there was a project to build a toxic waste incinerator (a *good* thing for the environment since it would destroy most of the toxicity). Greenpeace sent agitators down to block the project, and it was ultimately shelved. That incinerator would have been out in the middle of the Sonoran Desert ( a *good* place - far from people).'
Despite saying that he is from Arizona, the fact is that the project in question was to be built near the town of Mobile which would NOT site it "far from people". There was also the fact that considerable arrogance was displayed at public meetings by the project proponents. I am not a Greenpeacer, but I was not sorry to see the project shelved. It had a real stench to it.
SW Ohio, near Washington Courthouse, is noted because ~1 meter eurypterid fossils have been found there. That probably makes it the very late Ordovician or very early Devonian period. I never chased down the location, which is probably on private land, when I lived in the Cincinnati area. If anyone wants to look into searching for the fossils, you might be able to get some information from the Geology Department at the U. of Cincinnati.
BTW. A headline that states "... stalks South Africa" rather than "... stalked South Africa" is really cheap shit.
A sick feeling I had in 1967
on
Apollo 1
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I had a simulation subcontract from NASA in 1966. I needed data on the characteristics of the ventilation control valve in the Apollo Command Module which allowed the crew to breathe module-supplied air or their suit's air (IIRC). My employer's contact man at the MSC had a great deal of trouble chasing down these data. He finally found them two hallways away from a man who should have had the data. He estimated that he had saved NASA two weeks from their normal data handling methods in getting that valve data to the right engineer.
I told my wife afterward that I thought the people at the MSC would wind up killing someone.
When the account fo the horrible pad accident was published, I felt sick about it; not because I could have done anything that might have prevented it, but because there was nothing I could do despite my offhand conviction.
I have read a number of plaudits for the hydrogen economy, but I have never seen inclusion of how you handle the stuff. In compressed form, you get a lot of container weight and the net energy density is not particularly good.
In liquid (cryogenic) form, the net energy density is quite good, but cryogenic refrigeration and insulation is difficult, although not impossible, in industrial and commercial environments.
In large quantities, liquid cryogenic fluids are very dangerous. A spill tends to be disastrous. The escaped liquid must extract energy from the environment to evaporate and this can take an appreciable length of time.
A LNPG spill occurred in Cleveland OH in about 1903. The embrittlement of standard steels at crygenic temperatures had not yet been recognized. Everybody knew that cryogenic fluids evaporated immediately. Therefore, it was not considered necessary to have retaining embankments around the LPNG tanks. Consequently, when one of the tanks ruptured spontaneously, the LPNG ran down the streets and into the storm sewers. After a bit, enough of the liquid had vaporized and found a source of ignition. There was a huge widespread explosion that, IIRC, killed over 600 people, both workers and residential civilians.
Do you really want to live in a hydrogen economy? I'm not convinced, yet, that I want to. I'd really like to see an advocacy that really considered all aspects of the required support technology, including how we store and how we transport the stuff, especially in mobile vehicles.
A lot of stuff from the 70's and earlier 80's seems to be unknown now. Was this due to proven lack of value or what?
IBM developed the Chief Programmer Teams which included lots of mentoring and non-author code reviews.
There was proof of correctness via p-notation. (I never really mastered it, but I thought that was my fault.)
There was truly structured code. Dahl, Dijkstra, and Hoare had "Structured Programming" published in 1972. I only saw Dijkstra mentioned in thie discussion. Pity.
There were Truth Tables, which presented all of the operational variable names and the affected variable names as column headings. The rows of the tables were all values (or irrelevacies) of the operational variables and the resultant values of the affected variables. (I never used the single Truth Table generator that I ever saw, but when I ran into very tricky logic, I would write a truth table for the situation. I could alway determine that the table was complete and that my encoding was a valid representation of the table.)
Back, I believe, in the late 70's, there was a French firm named, IIRC, Mellisind. They had supposedly achieved good success by a business approach where they contracted for an analysis period which they felt adequate. Then they would inform the customer,if they regarded the job as feasible, how long it would take and how much it would cost to finish the job. Evidently, their success was overrated, but was it really?
Were these all false hopes or do people just forget?
Slashdot Mirror
The majority of cactus have a metabolic system called CAM (Crasulacea Acid Metabolism). In such plants, the stomata open at night, thus needing only to respond to light and dark, not to each other. There is no phasing of groups of stomata in the plants epidermises. CO2 enters the stomata at night whereupon mailc acid is synthesized. During the day, stomata are closed and photosyntheses is driven by the energy of the malic acid to produce the various sugars and goodies needed to run the plant.
Only a few very primitive cacti have leaves. The rest grow stems which may be cylindrical or spherical, usually with ribs which facilitate expansion when rains fall.
Check the current Scientific American for information about how bacteria sense the presence of many of their species in order time release of toxins and other activities. The genes and proteins which control these coordinated activities have been identified.
Coevolution handles that synchronism between plants and their pollinators.
No creationist fables are necessary.
If so, where do we report things like grossly misleading subject text?
If not, when does CAN-SPAM reporting actually kick in?
Nobody has yet indicated whether the award is good whether the virus writer is alive or dead.
A clearer statement is in order.
Read Steve Gibson's account of his direct contact with computer vandals. They were adults, not 13 year olds.
I am displeased at the number of paper back fantasies I have to look past to find any science fiction at all. However, there is good, IMHO, science fiction being written and published. I'm primarily interested in good character development and interesting situations. I grabbed a sampling of authors I hold in good regard from a couple of our bookcase shelves.
Stephen Baxter, Charles Sheffield (sadly deceased, but with a number of good novels left behind), Sean Williams & Shane Dix, Jack McDevitt, Jeffrey Carver, Michael Flynn, Frederick Pohl, William Barton & Michael Capobianco, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, David Brin, and Allen Steele. Several others have already been mentioned. Look for them instead of whining and bitching.
Also check Analog and Fantasy & Science Fiction. These tend to stack up on me because I prefer novels, but they do have some good stuff.
"Imagine if a 50's science fiction writer had thought of the web."
Actually, Murray Leinster did, to some degree, in a story that I believe was called "The Wocky".
It was about a type of terminal that provided access to all human knowledge for anyone of any age who could get access to such a terminal.
The story dealt with the nasty social impact of such a device. And here we are, living out the wocky!
When I first started getting serous about Internet stuff, I signed up for the urban legends list server, but found that it was almost entirely folks commenting about what other folks had said. Dropped out. Did I miss something?
Anyone else remember Freddie Slacks record (circa '44-'46) "The House of Blue Lights"? I was told that "blue light" referred to an African-American bordello (OK, so I'm being PC).
I was surprised no one presented what actually happened to the LOTR and its copyright.
Some one in the publisher's employ forgot to renew the copyright after 14 years. Within a very short time, many publishers came out with editions of LOTR. My impression ws that Tolkien's estate did not do well as a consequence of the copyright loss. I'm not sure whether Tolkien was still alive at time of the outburst of copyright-free publication; does anyone know?
What I am sure of is that the three volumes of LOTR didn't take off until low cost copies were on the market.
The business about throwing things down wells to confound the theories of stratification is utter nonsense. Strafication studies treat of the total context of the situation. Wells, caves, and the like leave traces that can and will be used in the evaluation of stratification studies.
Thanks, Anonymous Coward. (I don't know, of course, if you are the same Anonymous Coward whom I already thanked for the exposition about David Bohm.) My undergraduate education didn't get into the Planck's derivation as deeply as yours did and I am pleased sot have leaned about it.
Thanks, Anonymous Coward. Bohm's work, it seems, was emerging a bit just before I graduated from college with a B. Sc. in Physics. I found it fascinating, but doubt that I have the mental horspower left to comprehend it. But I am gratified to know that such deep thinking has been done and its approximate nature.
The wavelength distribution of blackbody radiation had been determined some (many?) years earlier. However, no one could figure out how to to explain how it could come about.
Somehow, Planck worked out an equation which yielded that wavelength distribution quite precisely. I believe that it is correct that his model was a "what if" conjecture about energy exisiting in discrete packets.
As discussed, the rest is history.
53 years of passing time has dimmed my memory, but I'm pretty sure that is the story.
Evidently, everyone wants to be a comedian tonight.
Diamonds, non-gem grade, can be produced from the vapor phase from several carbon-based molecules. Obviously not suitable for corpse transformation.
Diamonds, of any grade, can be produced from elemental (or, perhaps, from suitably doped) elemental carbon by application of extremely high pressures and temperatures.
There is no extant process for reducing a human body so that only the carbon atoms are left.
Therefore, the very suggestion of converting a human body to diamond seems to be pure bullshit.
Anyone want to invest in the venture?
The title says it. That does make me vulnerable to changes in EULAs, but I give myself the luxury of chancing that.
I once refused to install a piece of software, Liquid Music (IIRC), that came with my PleXWriter 12/10/32S CD-RW drive. I was to acknowledge that it installed remotely controllable software which they could use to disable their software, but they did not guarantee that it would not otherwise screw up my computeer (again, IIRC).
I contacted PlexWriter's Tech Support and inquired why the hell their Marketing folks ever included something that crappy in their bundled software. The person who responded didn't know, but agreed that they hadn't installed on their home machine either for the same reason.
The moral? Read the damned EULA at least once per publisher no matter how boring they are. You might keep a poisonous snake out of your machine as I did.
IIRC, the actual sentence is along the lines of, "If you would destroy liberty, first kill all the lawyers."
Kind of makes it useless for lawyer bashing, doesn't it?
During that period, I was phasing out of the Amiga market and had purchased a Windows laptop. I wondered if I should consider OS/2 Warp to replace Win95. (I recognize now that the laptop could not have hacked it with OS/2 Warp!) Then, an ad appeared for OS/2 Warp that showed a group of youngish folks gathered around a computer, oohing and ahing about what they were supposedly seeing on the screen. No hint of what was supposely displayed on the screen was shown.
Evidently, some high-level marketdroid thought that viewers would be motivated to go post haste to a nearby computer store to see what the excitement was about.
My take was that something exciting would have been shown if there was anything like that to show. I concluded that OS/2 Warp was an empty promotion and I never chose to even look at it.
My loss? I think not. It cost me nothing and I have survived.
I was weaning myself away from the Amiga at the time by buying a Windows laptop. I was aware of OS/2 Warp and wondering if I should buy it. (I recognize now that the laptop couldn't have hacked it!) However, IBM ran an OS/2 Warp TV ad that totally turned me off.
The ad showed a goup of youthful folks clustered around a computer, oohing and ahing and generally making sounds of enthusiasm and approbation. It never showed a hint of what was supposedly on the computer display to generate such excitment.
I assume that some high-level marketdroid thought the ad would make the viewer eager to see what the excitements was all about.
I don't know how other folks reacted, but my conclusion was that OS/2 Warp had nothing special worth showing or else they would have shown the computer display. Therefore, why should I even give a thought to OS/2 Warp.
My loss? I think not. I didn't invest any money in OS/2 Warp and it remained a non-factor in my life.
I also find it quite believable that Steve Jobs is now credited with having "invented" it. That is the way of the world.
Despite saying that he is from Arizona, the fact is that the project in question was to be built near the town of Mobile which would NOT site it "far from people". There was also the fact that considerable arrogance was displayed at public meetings by the project proponents. I am not a Greenpeacer, but I was not sorry to see the project shelved. It had a real stench to it.
SW Ohio, near Washington Courthouse, is noted because ~1 meter eurypterid fossils have been found there. That probably makes it the very late Ordovician or very early Devonian period. I never chased down the location, which is probably on private land, when I lived in the Cincinnati area. If anyone wants to look into searching for the fossils, you might be able to get some information from the Geology Department at the U. of Cincinnati.
BTW. A headline that states "... stalks South Africa" rather than "... stalked South Africa" is really cheap shit.
I had a simulation subcontract from NASA in 1966. I needed data on the characteristics of the ventilation control valve in the Apollo Command Module which allowed the crew to breathe module-supplied air or their suit's air (IIRC). My employer's contact man at the MSC had a great deal of trouble chasing down these data. He finally found them two hallways away from a man who should have had the data. He estimated that he had saved NASA two weeks from their normal data handling methods in getting that valve data to the right engineer.
I told my wife afterward that I thought the people at the MSC would wind up killing someone.
When the account fo the horrible pad accident was published, I felt sick about it; not because I could have done anything that might have prevented it, but because there was nothing I could do despite my offhand conviction.
I have read a number of plaudits for the hydrogen economy, but I have never seen inclusion of how you handle the stuff. In compressed form, you get a lot of container weight and the net energy density is not particularly good.
In liquid (cryogenic) form, the net energy density is quite good, but cryogenic refrigeration and insulation is difficult, although not impossible, in industrial and commercial environments.
In large quantities, liquid cryogenic fluids are very dangerous. A spill tends to be disastrous. The escaped liquid must extract energy from the environment to evaporate and this can take an appreciable length of time.
A LNPG spill occurred in Cleveland OH in about 1903. The embrittlement of standard steels at crygenic temperatures had not yet been recognized. Everybody knew that cryogenic fluids evaporated immediately. Therefore, it was not considered necessary to have retaining embankments around the LPNG tanks. Consequently, when one of the tanks ruptured spontaneously, the LPNG ran down the streets and into the storm sewers. After a bit, enough of the liquid had vaporized and found a source of ignition. There was a huge widespread explosion that, IIRC, killed over 600 people, both workers and residential civilians.
Do you really want to live in a hydrogen economy? I'm not convinced, yet, that I want to. I'd really like to see an advocacy that really considered all aspects of the required support technology, including how we store and how we transport the stuff, especially in mobile vehicles.
IBM developed the Chief Programmer Teams which included lots of mentoring and non-author code reviews.
There was proof of correctness via p-notation. (I never really mastered it, but I thought that was my fault.)
There was truly structured code. Dahl, Dijkstra, and Hoare had "Structured Programming" published in 1972. I only saw Dijkstra mentioned in thie discussion. Pity.
There were Truth Tables, which presented all of the operational variable names and the affected variable names as column headings. The rows of the tables were all values (or irrelevacies) of the operational variables and the resultant values of the affected variables. (I never used the single Truth Table generator that I ever saw, but when I ran into very tricky logic, I would write a truth table for the situation. I could alway determine that the table was complete and that my encoding was a valid representation of the table.)
Back, I believe, in the late 70's, there was a French firm named, IIRC, Mellisind. They had supposedly achieved good success by a business approach where they contracted for an analysis period which they felt adequate. Then they would inform the customer,if they regarded the job as feasible, how long it would take and how much it would cost to finish the job. Evidently, their success was overrated, but was it really?
Were these all false hopes or do people just forget?