It only seems common in famous rich people because it's common in everybody. A lot of homeless people will steal a dollar from their mate, too.
But statistically, higher IQ (we're talking better than Mensa level, not dime-a-dozen IQs of 120 or so) tends to correlate with higher ethical standards, more sense of "fair play". To become a Gates you need to be an anomaly that has both a high IQ and low ethical standards.
True, but that show didn't portray a black and white distinction either, with Carter coming down pretty solidly in both camps, and both nerds and soldiers displaying attributes of the other (at least in the regular casts - yes they trotted out stereotype cardboard characters in some episodes).
I did my time in Signal Corps, full of geek warriors (or warrior geeks).
Ignoring the noted discrepancies (which may mean the experiments don't confirm anything), the experiment as designed confirms only that neutrino flux -- of the type of neutrinos emitted by Au-198 decay -- does not affect the decay rate of Au-198.
One could generalize this further to say that (Au-198) neutrino flux doesn't affect beta decay, but that's only one type of decay... and one flavor of neutrino. (Neutrinos come in three flavors, plus their antiparticles. Beta decay actually produces electron antineutrinos, and while some observations suggest than neutrinos can oscillate between different flavors, the time scale for that is too long for it to occur in these small gold samples.) In fact, one (controversial, of course) proposed explanation for the decay-rate oscillations (in Pr-140 and Pm-142) observed at Darmstadt relates to neutrino oscillation.
Even with this generalization, they've only covered 1/9th of the possible combinations of decay type and neutrino flavor (or 1/18th counting antineutrinos). So it's an interesting experiment, but doesn't confirm what the summary says it does -- except for Au-198 beta decay and electron antineutrinos.
I'm not saying that there is a real effect seen in the long-term experiments that seem to suggest it, but considering that measurements of decay rates of different isotopes seem to have shown a different phase vs the position of Earth's orbit, and that some isotopes (eg plutonium in deep space RTGs) may not be showing an affect at all (hard to tell because the decay rate is inferred from a measurement about three levels of indirection removed from the actual decay rate), it leaves open the possiblity that the mechanism (if there is one) varies with the type of nucleus involved.
If there is such a decay rate change, it may have nothing to do with Earth's distance from the Sun, but rather Earth's distance from something else (eg galactic core) in which case interplanetary RTG decay rates wouldn't vary nearly as much as if distance from the Sun were a factor.
(Also, I note that observed decay rate changes so far seem to occur in isotopes of lighter elements (Pr, Pm and Si) and not in isotopes of heavier elements (Au, Pu) so perhaps the more complex nuclear structure of heavy elements masks or cancels the effect.)
So, interesting experiment, and it narrows down the places to look for a possible cause, but it doesn't prove that there's no effect.
these days they tend to compress the sound so that it would easily fit on vinyl without causing a lot of needle skipping.
There are a few classic vinyl recordings that came with warnings about what to set your stylus pressure, etc, at to avoid skipping (and warnings about protecting your speakers). In particular some recordings of "The 1812 Overture" especially if done with real cannon.
For assassinating houses, 13 meters will most likely still give the remote operator the same house.
In sparsely-built American suburbs, perhaps. Most places that's the house next door, or the car across the street or a couple of car lengths ahead or behind.
seems these rare earth's are usually found with radioactive thorium and uranium.
Yes, the actinides (which include thorium and uranium, and a bunch of not naturally occuring transuranics) are chemically in the same Group as the rare earth elements, so would tend to be concentrated by the same geochemical processes.
China probably doesn't take the same safety precautions with mines and the thorium, which the article did say was costly to dispose of.
Or they put the thorium to some other use. There used to be more of a market for thorium; it was used in the mantles of gas lamps, even (in camping lanterns) up until a decade or so ago. The "atomic boy scout" extracted the thorium from thousands of such for his experiments. Government regs these days put a lot more limits on the availability of the stuff, so American mines that may once have been profitable selling both REEs and thorium are no longer if they can't sell the thorium.
You're correct that rare earth elements aren't rare in the cosmic abundance sense. The original name came about because they were first isolated from a mineral only found in a particular mine in Ytterby, Sweden (hence the names of many of them: scandium (from scandanavia), yttrium, terbium, ytterbium, erbium).
The modern "rarity" issue comes in because they all have very similar chemical properties (mostly lanthanides, plus the rest of Group 3 (III-B oldstyle) of the periodic table). They tend to occur together, and because of the similar chemical properties, are difficult to separate. Not quite as difficult as, say, uranium isotopes, but not as trivial as separating lead or zinc from mixed sulfide ores.
And the people who come to slashdot and think they have the right to any non-physical copyrightted work, even without paying for it.
Thats what the Canadian recordable media levy allows me to do
That media levy means that you are paying for it, just indirectly. It also means that you're paying for it even when copying works you have permission to copy for free, including your own work.
But in the event of an accident, those people who are not belted in will be thrown free of the car to relative safety whereas those belted in will be strapped into a deathcage which could easily catch fire!!!
Maybe your sarcasm tag isn't working, but the "relative safety" of being thrown free of the car usually leads to broken neck, back, or crushed skull; and contrary to what the movies would have you believe crashed cars rarely burst into flame. (And if they do, the seatbelt may prevent you from getting knocked out or otherwise becoming too disabled to free yourself from the wreckage -- assuming you weren't thrown through the window at whatever speed the car was going in the first place.)
Speaking of being thrown, you'd be surprised how far a body can travel. At 60mph a person ejected at roughly a 45-degree angle will travel over 200 feet horizontally (and 50+ feet vertically) before hitting the ground (at, roughly, that same 60mph). I've seen the result of a single-car went-off-the-road accident with an unbelted driver. The car was in the ditch beside the road -- looking not too badly damaged -- and the paramedics and cops were all clustered around a spot in the field easily 150 feet or so from the car.
This is only true if your desktop firewall actually filters out something that the server-based solutions do not.
Like attacks from within the internal network, such as from that laptop somebody took home and got infected or that unclean USB stick somebody just plugged in.
There's a reason buildings have interior firewalls (in the original sense of the word).
Okay, I will concede that in the dictionary I consulted, that use was indeed listed... in the 5th meaning of the word.
Doesn't matter whether it was the 5th, the 1st, or the 97th, it invalidated your statement that "Spacecraft to not 'fly'". If you're going to accuse somebody of intellectual laziness, you'd better have done your homework yourself.
Water could be considered really, really soft ground, so not necessarily. But as another poster observed, what penguins do underwater is more like flying than anything else.
Spacecraft do not "fly". I'm not nitpicking; there is a pretty big difference. It's just plain intellectual laziness on his part.
Nope, ignorance on yours. Spacecraft do indeed fly. Flying has nothing to do with wings or aerodynamic forces, it has to do with moving without touching the ground. There are certainly other terms for how spacecraft move -- which depend on the particular spacecraft and what they're doing -- but even pure ballistic flight (aka "orbit") is still flight.
Why would you think that the "news industry" has anything to do with journalism? It's in the business of selling advertising, with whatever sensationalism they can use to attract readers/viewers/listeners.
Depends whether you're talking about the glowing cloud things in the deep sky, or the awards handed out by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The plural of the latter is correctly Nebulas.
Only pneumonic plague spreads very quickly, the bubonic kind doesn't. But more to the point, anyone descended from European or Middle Eastern ancestry has a pretty solid level of genetic resistance to plague. It's not the killer today that it was in the 14th century, even without antibiotics -- the vulnerable population died out.
So no, Yersinia pestis isn't going to be that effective.
Except that Cassini isn't measuring the decay rate, as the other experiments were directly, but measuring the power output from thermocouples heated by the energy of the particles captured (by the overall mass of the thermocouple/isotope system) from the decaying material -- which also has a rather long half-life.
There's a lot of averaging out of effects in all that, and the effect they're looking for is quite small. The link didn't mention a lower bound for the detection sensitivity based on looking at Cassini power outputs. Cassini doesn't rule it out, it just sets an upper bound for the effect -- and if the effect were that strong we'd likely have noticed it before now.
I actually LIKE Greedo shooting first in Episode IV. It's more consistent with Han's character through the rest of the classic trilogy.
Arguably it isn't, because Solo is always shown as more of an act first, think later kind of guy. But if it is, then it denies his character the opportunity to show growth through the story arc.
And FWIW, in the novelization he shoots first.
(Mind, if we're going to get picky, the original isn't "Episode IV" or even "A New Hope", but just "Star Wars". The "Ep IV" came on the re-release when "Empire" was in production.)
If the big stuff stays up there, it has a tendency to get hit by the small stuff, which turns the big stuff into more clouds of little stuff. Above a certain density of stuff in orbit, this can lead to a rapid chain reaction that leaves LEO rather inhospitable. Better to de-orbit the big stuff as soon as it's no longer useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, is there a "too informative" mod?
It only seems common in famous rich people because it's common in everybody. A lot of homeless people will steal a dollar from their mate, too.
But statistically, higher IQ (we're talking better than Mensa level, not dime-a-dozen IQs of 120 or so) tends to correlate with higher ethical standards, more sense of "fair play". To become a Gates you need to be an anomaly that has both a high IQ and low ethical standards.
The world is not Stargate.
True, but that show didn't portray a black and white distinction either, with Carter coming down pretty solidly in both camps, and both nerds and soldiers displaying attributes of the other (at least in the regular casts - yes they trotted out stereotype cardboard characters in some episodes).
I did my time in Signal Corps, full of geek warriors (or warrior geeks).
Ignoring the noted discrepancies (which may mean the experiments don't confirm anything), the experiment as designed confirms only that neutrino flux -- of the type of neutrinos emitted by Au-198 decay -- does not affect the decay rate of Au-198.
One could generalize this further to say that (Au-198) neutrino flux doesn't affect beta decay, but that's only one type of decay ... and one flavor of neutrino. (Neutrinos come in three flavors, plus their antiparticles. Beta decay actually produces electron antineutrinos, and while some observations suggest than neutrinos can oscillate between different flavors, the time scale for that is too long for it to occur in these small gold samples.) In fact, one (controversial, of course) proposed explanation for the decay-rate oscillations (in Pr-140 and Pm-142) observed at Darmstadt relates to neutrino oscillation.
Even with this generalization, they've only covered 1/9th of the possible combinations of decay type and neutrino flavor (or 1/18th counting antineutrinos). So it's an interesting experiment, but doesn't confirm what the summary says it does -- except for Au-198 beta decay and electron antineutrinos.
I'm not saying that there is a real effect seen in the long-term experiments that seem to suggest it, but considering that measurements of decay rates of different isotopes seem to have shown a different phase vs the position of Earth's orbit, and that some isotopes (eg plutonium in deep space RTGs) may not be showing an affect at all (hard to tell because the decay rate is inferred from a measurement about three levels of indirection removed from the actual decay rate), it leaves open the possiblity that the mechanism (if there is one) varies with the type of nucleus involved.
If there is such a decay rate change, it may have nothing to do with Earth's distance from the Sun, but rather Earth's distance from something else (eg galactic core) in which case interplanetary RTG decay rates wouldn't vary nearly as much as if distance from the Sun were a factor.
(Also, I note that observed decay rate changes so far seem to occur in isotopes of lighter elements (Pr, Pm and Si) and not in isotopes of heavier elements (Au, Pu) so perhaps the more complex nuclear structure of heavy elements masks or cancels the effect.)
So, interesting experiment, and it narrows down the places to look for a possible cause, but it doesn't prove that there's no effect.
these days they tend to compress the sound so that it would easily fit on vinyl without causing a lot of needle skipping.
There are a few classic vinyl recordings that came with warnings about what to set your stylus pressure, etc, at to avoid skipping (and warnings about protecting your speakers). In particular some recordings of "The 1812 Overture" especially if done with real cannon.
For assassinating houses, 13 meters will most likely still give the remote operator the same house.
In sparsely-built American suburbs, perhaps. Most places that's the house next door, or the car across the street or a couple of car lengths ahead or behind.
The Cold War arose because of the Russian fear of the nuclear-armed US [...] and their desire to create buffer zones in the West of the Soviet Union.
You mean to the West of the Soviet Union. Places like Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and anywhere else they could roll in tanks and grab.
seems these rare earth's are usually found with radioactive thorium and uranium.
Yes, the actinides (which include thorium and uranium, and a bunch of not naturally occuring transuranics) are chemically in the same Group as the rare earth elements, so would tend to be concentrated by the same geochemical processes.
China probably doesn't take the same safety precautions with mines and the thorium, which the article did say was costly to dispose of.
Or they put the thorium to some other use. There used to be more of a market for thorium; it was used in the mantles of gas lamps, even (in camping lanterns) up until a decade or so ago. The "atomic boy scout" extracted the thorium from thousands of such for his experiments. Government regs these days put a lot more limits on the availability of the stuff, so American mines that may once have been profitable selling both REEs and thorium are no longer if they can't sell the thorium.
Now, if we had a good breeder reactor program....
You're correct that rare earth elements aren't rare in the cosmic abundance sense. The original name came about because they were first isolated from a mineral only found in a particular mine in Ytterby, Sweden (hence the names of many of them: scandium (from scandanavia), yttrium, terbium, ytterbium, erbium).
The modern "rarity" issue comes in because they all have very similar chemical properties (mostly lanthanides, plus the rest of Group 3 (III-B oldstyle) of the periodic table). They tend to occur together, and because of the similar chemical properties, are difficult to separate. Not quite as difficult as, say, uranium isotopes, but not as trivial as separating lead or zinc from mixed sulfide ores.
And the people who come to slashdot and think they have the right to any non-physical copyrightted work, even without paying for it.
Thats what the Canadian recordable media levy allows me to do
That media levy means that you are paying for it, just indirectly. It also means that you're paying for it even when copying works you have permission to copy for free, including your own work.
But in the event of an accident, those people who are not belted in will be thrown free of the car to relative safety whereas those belted in will be strapped into a deathcage which could easily catch fire!!!
Maybe your sarcasm tag isn't working, but the "relative safety" of being thrown free of the car usually leads to broken neck, back, or crushed skull; and contrary to what the movies would have you believe crashed cars rarely burst into flame. (And if they do, the seatbelt may prevent you from getting knocked out or otherwise becoming too disabled to free yourself from the wreckage -- assuming you weren't thrown through the window at whatever speed the car was going in the first place.)
Speaking of being thrown, you'd be surprised how far a body can travel. At 60mph a person ejected at roughly a 45-degree angle will travel over 200 feet horizontally (and 50+ feet vertically) before hitting the ground (at, roughly, that same 60mph). I've seen the result of a single-car went-off-the-road accident with an unbelted driver. The car was in the ditch beside the road -- looking not too badly damaged -- and the paramedics and cops were all clustered around a spot in the field easily 150 feet or so from the car.
This is only true if your desktop firewall actually filters out something that the server-based solutions do not.
Like attacks from within the internal network, such as from that laptop somebody took home and got infected or that unclean USB stick somebody just plugged in.
There's a reason buildings have interior firewalls (in the original sense of the word).
Okay, I will concede that in the dictionary I consulted, that use was indeed listed... in the 5th meaning of the word.
Doesn't matter whether it was the 5th, the 1st, or the 97th, it invalidated your statement that "Spacecraft to not 'fly'". If you're going to accuse somebody of intellectual laziness, you'd better have done your homework yourself.
Water could be considered really, really soft ground, so not necessarily. But as another poster observed, what penguins do underwater is more like flying than anything else.
Spacecraft do not "fly". I'm not nitpicking; there is a pretty big difference. It's just plain intellectual laziness on his part.
Nope, ignorance on yours. Spacecraft do indeed fly. Flying has nothing to do with wings or aerodynamic forces, it has to do with moving without touching the ground. There are certainly other terms for how spacecraft move -- which depend on the particular spacecraft and what they're doing -- but even pure ballistic flight (aka "orbit") is still flight.
Did the news industry forget what journalism is?
Why would you think that the "news industry" has anything to do with journalism? It's in the business of selling advertising, with whatever sensationalism they can use to attract readers/viewers/listeners.
Journalism? There's no money in that...
Depends whether you're talking about the glowing cloud things in the deep sky, or the awards handed out by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The plural of the latter is correctly Nebulas.
Only pneumonic plague spreads very quickly, the bubonic kind doesn't. But more to the point, anyone descended from European or Middle Eastern ancestry has a pretty solid level of genetic resistance to plague. It's not the killer today that it was in the 14th century, even without antibiotics -- the vulnerable population died out.
So no, Yersinia pestis isn't going to be that effective.
Except that closer analysis of the Si-32 data from Brookhaven also showed a 33-day cycle correlating to the rotation of the Sun's core.
Except that Cassini isn't measuring the decay rate, as the other experiments were directly, but measuring the power output from thermocouples heated by the energy of the particles captured (by the overall mass of the thermocouple/isotope system) from the decaying material -- which also has a rather long half-life.
There's a lot of averaging out of effects in all that, and the effect they're looking for is quite small. The link didn't mention a lower bound for the detection sensitivity based on looking at Cassini power outputs. Cassini doesn't rule it out, it just sets an upper bound for the effect -- and if the effect were that strong we'd likely have noticed it before now.
NASA didn't exist through most of the 1950s. It was created on Oct. 1, 1958.
I actually LIKE Greedo shooting first in Episode IV. It's more consistent with Han's character through the rest of the classic trilogy.
Arguably it isn't, because Solo is always shown as more of an act first, think later kind of guy. But if it is, then it denies his character the opportunity to show growth through the story arc.
And FWIW, in the novelization he shoots first.
(Mind, if we're going to get picky, the original isn't "Episode IV" or even "A New Hope", but just "Star Wars". The "Ep IV" came on the re-release when "Empire" was in production.)
If the big stuff stays up there, it has a tendency to get hit by the small stuff, which turns the big stuff into more clouds of little stuff. Above a certain density of stuff in orbit, this can lead to a rapid chain reaction that leaves LEO rather inhospitable. Better to de-orbit the big stuff as soon as it's no longer useful.
Fine, just impose net neutrality on those segments of the infrastructure which traverse land not owned by the ISP.
Oh, wait, that's almost all of it.
Magnetic levitation photos or it didn't happen.