Only lightning and cosmic rays can form nitrogen oxide, and lightning is relatively rare,
Well no, lighting is fairly common, actually -- there's always a lighting storm going on somewhere. However, if one assumes that the global rate of lightning is fairly constant then given that the amount nitrogen oxides contributed by cosmic rays fluctuates, you'd still see a correlation. So you may be right.
No, the tee shirt was from the Paris Air Show. Yeah, they gave away Concorde freebies too, about as exciting as the stuff you'd get at a trade show. Hell, the first time I crossed the Atlantic by air, on a TCA-operated Lockheed Super Constellation, I got freebies. A little plastic model airplane.
I disagree that the technical skills required are that valuable, let alone that they are directly equal to flight time sitting in an aircraft in flight.
Tell it to the FAA, who also count appropriate sim time as loggable hours. Hell, any pilot will tell you that most flying is hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror -- but the time counts the same.
The Concord comes to mind, but when the last one Augured-In just past the runway at Eiffel-Tower-X, Concord immediately went bankrupt.
Uh, no.
The Concorde which crashed in Paris was the first (and only) such crash of a Concorde. However, the Concorde fleet (operated by British Airways and Air France, there was no such company as Concord to go bankrupt) was aging and becoming increasingly expensive to operate between maintenance, fuel costs, and post 9/11 regulations. They did return to service for a short while after the crash investigation was complete, then were phased out.
My wife flew on a Concorde on the way back from a Paris Air Show, and all she brought me was a lousy T-shirt.;-)
All they'd have to do is tie the magnets together, throw them up to the power line
Except that superconducting power transmission lines are likely to be buried along with their cooling systems. There are a couple of places on Earth where overhead superconducting power lines might work year round, but there's really not much call for a power grid in Antarctica.
With discrete component electronics you just pot the whole thing in epoxy. I don't know how well that works with integrated circuits -- the point of failure is likely to be the fine wires that connect the chip to the package leads, although those may be light enough that the real concern is vibration rather than steady G force. Even vacuum tubes can be built tough, if they're built small.
But ~400 Gs (per calculations by a poster above) is nothing. The radio proximity fuzes in WW II antiaircraft projectiles didn't use transistors, and had to withstand ~20,000 Gs when fired and ~5,000 Gs of shell spin.
Fuel isn't explosive. Fuel-oxidizer mixes, or some monopropellants, may be explosive, but are not necessarily shock-sensitive. This would be fine for launching suitably-built canisters of fuel or water, or other insensitive cargoes.
And don't overestimate the sensitivity of some electronics packages -- gun-fired projectiles with electronic fuses are a decades-old technology.
If this is really a serious course in SF/F lit, what texts are you using from the analysis side? They'll give you a good guide to what stories/novels you should be looking at.
It's been a long time since I took such a course, so I don't know if Hartwell's 1984 Age of Wonders ("a penetrating exploration of the realities behind the history, development and current popularity of science fiction") or Ketterer's New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (1974) are still in print. They're authors worth looking for, anyway. There are also more popular studies such as Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree or James Gunn's various works on the history of science fiction. Speaking of the latter, you might also check with the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, seems like an excellent resource for what you want.
(Personally I'd argue that unless you're doing a compare-and-contrast, the science fiction and fantasy genres are so different (excluding space fantasy like Star Wars, here) that they probably ought not be studied together. It's almost like a course on "Romances and Thrillers" - yeah there are some common elements, but....)
I've never bought a pre-built system in my life, but I'm seriously considering it now that I'm looking to replace my 4 year old desktop system.
I can't quite say "in my life", but the last pre-built system that I bought new was a Mac way back in System 7 days. Since then I've built my own x86 boxes for my use, or bought cheap "pre-owned" systems (typically corporate systems being replaced by something that will run the current Microsoft bloatware), which suit the kids' needs just fine. I'm in the midst of replacing the household DMZ machines -- P-166 based Dell boxes that cost me $15 each -- with newer 933 MHz P-III Compaq boxes at $10 each.
No, they won't run the latest gosh-wow PC games. That's actually a plus, since my kids don't bug me to buy those games and they're quite well entertained by the games that do run on the boxes (or their Wii).
are you subject to road laws if your vehicle doesn't touch the road?
Probably not, but you don't really want to explain to the FAA why you were (a) below minimum altitude and (b) above maximum speed (250 kt below 10k feet), (c) in an uncertificated aircraft (d) without a pilot's license. The Feds tend not to have a sense of humor about such things.
Pity, really. I was looking forward to learning what Hard and Soft Plith was. On the other hand, it's probably a good thing that we've gotten past the attitudes displayed in How the Heroes Die.
Agreed. And on the gripping hand, it doesn't prove that the core of our galaxy hasn't already exploded (although the central black hole makes that unlikely).
They have volcanoes of liquid nitrogen on those moons for pete's sake.
But nitrogen freezes at 63 K, so that liquid nitrogen is at least twice as warm as the 33 K found on the Moon. Now, if those moons have craters at their poles that are permanently shielded from sunlight....
(Actually there are other factors in play, like the thermal conductivity of whatever the moon in question is made of, heating effects of tidal friction, etc.)
That was actually Niven's first sale, and the news that Mercury wasn't locked in a 1:1 resonance came out between acceptance and publication. They decided to go ahead with it anyway. It's still a good story, it just takes place in a slightly alternate universe.
Under what Constitutional authority do the Feds get to collect State taxes? You don't really think the States will see any of that money (or data, for that matter), do you? At least not without all sorts of extra-Constitutional strings attached.
Mileage can easily be determined by looking at odometer readings. You can even do that at annual plate renewal time, although yeah you could encode it into an RFID scheme too.
Calling for GPS is shenanigans, either on the part of somebody trying to sell GPS chips or on the part of the government for tracking purposes. Or both.
Two or three hundred years of oil combined with a sensible usage & conservation policy should be sufficient to see us start to harvest comets and other off-planet resources for hydrocarbons. (emphasis added)
Right. Like that's going to happen.
Of course we no longer have two or three hundred years' worth of oil, and as for harvesting off-planet hydrocarbons . . . for what? To burn them? If you though the greenhouse effect was bad now . . . . (BTW, all the propane on Titan wouldn't meet the US's propane needs for more than a year and a half, although we'd do better with the ethane.)
The other options - nuclear, solar, etc may not be infinitely sustainable, but they're a lot closer to it in human terms than oil or even coal.
Ghandi's tactics worked against a Britain weakened by WW I and on the brink of defeat in WW II. It might have been a bit different against Nazis, or Stalin, or Imperial Rome, or... but you get the idea.
one nuclear accident could render a majority of the US inhabitable. Presumably you meant "uninhabitable", but you'd still be wrong.
In the 1940s-1950s, the US detonated numerous nuclear weapons above ground in Nevada and New Mexico, releasing a hell of a lot more radioactive material than Chernobyl -- and Chernobyl-type disasters cannot happen with US power reactors (totally different reactor design). This hardly rendered even a significant fraction, let alone "a majority" of the US uninhabitable.
A nuclear plant also produces less radioactive waste than does a corresponding coal plant. Of course since the latter doesn't fall under the authority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the radioactive substances in coal ash (like thorium) just get dispersed into the environment along with the stuff that stays toxic forever like arsenic and mercury.
Slashdot Mirror
Only lightning and cosmic rays can form nitrogen oxide, and lightning is relatively rare,
Well no, lighting is fairly common, actually -- there's always a lighting storm going on somewhere. However, if one assumes that the global rate of lightning is fairly constant then given that the amount nitrogen oxides contributed by cosmic rays fluctuates, you'd still see a correlation. So you may be right.
Wait, a SharePoint conference? In Vegas? With blackjack, and hookers? Forget the SharePoint....
No, the tee shirt was from the Paris Air Show. Yeah, they gave away Concorde freebies too, about as exciting as the stuff you'd get at a trade show. Hell, the first time I crossed the Atlantic by air, on a TCA-operated Lockheed Super Constellation, I got freebies. A little plastic model airplane.
I disagree that the technical skills required are that valuable, let alone that they are directly equal to flight time sitting in an aircraft in flight.
Tell it to the FAA, who also count appropriate sim time as loggable hours. Hell, any pilot will tell you that most flying is hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror -- but the time counts the same.
The Concord comes to mind, but when the last one Augured-In just past the runway at Eiffel-Tower-X, Concord immediately went bankrupt.
Uh, no.
The Concorde which crashed in Paris was the first (and only) such crash of a Concorde. However, the Concorde fleet (operated by British Airways and Air France, there was no such company as Concord to go bankrupt) was aging and becoming increasingly expensive to operate between maintenance, fuel costs, and post 9/11 regulations. They did return to service for a short while after the crash investigation was complete, then were phased out.
My wife flew on a Concorde on the way back from a Paris Air Show, and all she brought me was a lousy T-shirt. ;-)
All they'd have to do is tie the magnets together, throw them up to the power line
Except that superconducting power transmission lines are likely to be buried along with their cooling systems. There are a couple of places on Earth where overhead superconducting power lines might work year round, but there's really not much call for a power grid in Antarctica.
isn't part of Europe?
With discrete component electronics you just pot the whole thing in epoxy. I don't know how well that works with integrated circuits -- the point of failure is likely to be the fine wires that connect the chip to the package leads, although those may be light enough that the real concern is vibration rather than steady G force. Even vacuum tubes can be built tough, if they're built small.
But ~400 Gs (per calculations by a poster above) is nothing. The radio proximity fuzes in WW II antiaircraft projectiles didn't use transistors, and had to withstand ~20,000 Gs when fired and ~5,000 Gs of shell spin.
or explosive materials (fuel)
Fuel isn't explosive. Fuel-oxidizer mixes, or some monopropellants, may be explosive, but are not necessarily shock-sensitive. This would be fine for launching suitably-built canisters of fuel or water, or other insensitive cargoes.
And don't overestimate the sensitivity of some electronics packages -- gun-fired projectiles with electronic fuses are a decades-old technology.
But the Pauli Exclusion Principle is actual science.
If this is really a serious course in SF/F lit, what texts are you using from the analysis side? They'll give you a good guide to what stories/novels you should be looking at.
It's been a long time since I took such a course, so I don't know if Hartwell's 1984 Age of Wonders ("a penetrating exploration of the realities behind the history, development and current popularity of science fiction") or Ketterer's New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (1974) are still in print. They're authors worth looking for, anyway. There are also more popular studies such as Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree or James Gunn's various works on the history of science fiction. Speaking of the latter, you might also check with the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, seems like an excellent resource for what you want.
(Personally I'd argue that unless you're doing a compare-and-contrast, the science fiction and fantasy genres are so different (excluding space fantasy like Star Wars, here) that they probably ought not be studied together. It's almost like a course on "Romances and Thrillers" - yeah there are some common elements, but....)
I've never bought a pre-built system in my life, but I'm seriously considering it now that I'm looking to replace my 4 year old desktop system.
I can't quite say "in my life", but the last pre-built system that I bought new was a Mac way back in System 7 days. Since then I've built my own x86 boxes for my use, or bought cheap "pre-owned" systems (typically corporate systems being replaced by something that will run the current Microsoft bloatware), which suit the kids' needs just fine. I'm in the midst of replacing the household DMZ machines -- P-166 based Dell boxes that cost me $15 each -- with newer 933 MHz P-III Compaq boxes at $10 each.
No, they won't run the latest gosh-wow PC games. That's actually a plus, since my kids don't bug me to buy those games and they're quite well entertained by the games that do run on the boxes (or their Wii).
are you subject to road laws if your vehicle doesn't touch the road?
Probably not, but you don't really want to explain to the FAA why you were (a) below minimum altitude and (b) above maximum speed (250 kt below 10k feet), (c) in an uncertificated aircraft (d) without a pilot's license. The Feds tend not to have a sense of humor about such things.
(And oh yeah: (e) ??? (f) profit! )
Pity, really. I was looking forward to learning what Hard and Soft Plith was.
On the other hand, it's probably a good thing that we've gotten past the attitudes displayed in How the Heroes Die.
Agreed. And on the gripping hand, it doesn't prove that the core of our galaxy hasn't already exploded (although the central black hole makes that unlikely).
They have volcanoes of liquid nitrogen on those moons for pete's sake.
But nitrogen freezes at 63 K, so that liquid nitrogen is at least twice as warm as the 33 K found on the Moon. Now, if those moons have craters at their poles that are permanently shielded from sunlight....
(Actually there are other factors in play, like the thermal conductivity of whatever the moon in question is made of, heating effects of tidal friction, etc.)
That was actually Niven's first sale, and the news that Mercury wasn't locked in a 1:1 resonance came out between acceptance and publication. They decided to go ahead with it anyway. It's still a good story, it just takes place in a slightly alternate universe.
Under what Constitutional authority do the Feds get to collect State taxes? You don't really think the States will see any of that money (or data, for that matter), do you? At least not without all sorts of extra-Constitutional strings attached.
Mileage can easily be determined by looking at odometer readings. You can even do that at annual plate renewal time, although yeah you could encode it into an RFID scheme too.
Calling for GPS is shenanigans, either on the part of somebody trying to sell GPS chips or on the part of the government for tracking purposes. Or both.
Their site mentioned that the antenna of the phone got embedded in the ground
The "ground" at that point having roughly the consistency of sand. Dropping your phone from a pocket is enough to do that.
Two or three hundred years of oil combined with a sensible usage & conservation policy should be sufficient to see us start to harvest comets and other off-planet resources for hydrocarbons. (emphasis added)
Right. Like that's going to happen.
Of course we no longer have two or three hundred years' worth of oil, and as for harvesting off-planet hydrocarbons . . . for what? To burn them? If you though the greenhouse effect was bad now . . . .
(BTW, all the propane on Titan wouldn't meet the US's propane needs for more than a year and a half, although we'd do better with the ethane.)
The other options - nuclear, solar, etc may not be infinitely sustainable, but they're a lot closer to it in human terms than oil or even coal.
Ghandi showed Asimov's Hardin epigram to be true
Ghandi's tactics worked against a Britain weakened by WW I and on the brink of defeat in WW II. It might have been a bit different against Nazis, or Stalin, or Imperial Rome, or ... but you get the idea.
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" -- Salvor Hardin,
But the competent know better than to leave it to the last.
LOL. I'd mod that up if I hadn't already commented in this topic.
I hate to feed the troll, but:
one nuclear accident could render a majority of the US inhabitable. Presumably you meant "uninhabitable", but you'd still be wrong.
In the 1940s-1950s, the US detonated numerous nuclear weapons above ground in Nevada and New Mexico, releasing a hell of a lot more radioactive material than Chernobyl -- and Chernobyl-type disasters cannot happen with US power reactors (totally different reactor design). This hardly rendered even a significant fraction, let alone "a majority" of the US uninhabitable.
A nuclear plant also produces less radioactive waste than does a corresponding coal plant. Of course since the latter doesn't fall under the authority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the radioactive substances in coal ash (like thorium) just get dispersed into the environment along with the stuff that stays toxic forever like arsenic and mercury.