I've been watching this site for that long and I don't remember a time when most of these discussions were much more than flame wars with made up statistics, dubious assertions and ad hominem on both sides.
I do agree that it's gotten worse in recent years, though.
This is why it's risky to rely solely on single ouside suppliers for critical items. The funding for new Pu-238 production by DOE has been held up at least in part due to the availability of it for sale by the Russians.
It's a good source and a reasonable solution, provided unforeseen problems like the contract trouble that's stopped us buying it don't come up. But, in world affairs, they sometimes do.
Unfortunately, it would take several years to start producing it again even if funding were available now.
Similarly, we're about to rely on Russia for manned transport to the ISS and don't have a backup that wouldn't take years to be ready (be it man rating the Falcon 9, or some other). Similarly, I'd not advise the Russians to rely on the US (or any other single country) as a sole source supplier for something critical either.
Countries like the US and Russia have different interests and needs that sometimes don't work out the way people expect. Outside events can push them to differences when no such was planned or foreseen.
My own preference would be to mostly rely on Soyuz as a manned laucher to the ISS, but keep a couple of shuttles running at a much lower launch rate for a back up until newer vehicles are proven. Expensive and hopefully not needed, but most insurance is like that.
Oh, I think 20 kg of high purity Pu-239 would make some individual Muslims feel very good. Specifically, Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. It's not HEU, but it'll sure do in a pinch.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a whole host of others might be less than thrilled by it, though.
You can argue that view, and it may even come to pass. But, that is indeed for the future.
That's not really my point.
I get uncomfortable when people start talking about sanctioning others based on principle rather than rules or laws. Different people take different principles to be important. And different people have different interpretations of those principles. For an extreme example: The KKK takes the principle that one race is superior to others to be very important. I find that odious, and am comforted that in order to impose any sanction due to it they have to overcome a massive amount of admittedly recent law and judicial history.
There's also no direct procedure to change a principle. You have to change the minds of those who hold the principle to be important.
At least with rules or laws, it's fairly straightforward (by comparison) to find out what the current interpretation is.
There are some who would be upset if the AG had tweeted "May the Goddess accept him back to the Earth". You could argue that would be more indicative of endorsing a particular religion.
I don't think in either case it would reasonably be seen as an attempt to impose a belief on others via the position held.
If at a future time the law or the interpretation of it is changed then so be it.
(I do hope he gets in trouble for his invocation of "God" if this is indeed an official government communication.)
How? The first amendment and the doctrine of separation of church and state don't say that no one working for the government can mention God, or even give a religious observance. Else, both houses of congress would be in violation with their opening blessings.
It didn't endorse a particular religion from what I read. It's fine to say that you don't think he should have said it, but if you want him to get penalized for it, you need to have a real legal or procedural reason, else it just becomes a matter of "because I didn't like it".
Well, that particular offender will certainly have a low recidivism rate. I've yet to hear of someone committing another violent offense after a successful execution.
I'd be interested in hearing if you have a counter-example that doesn't involve zombies, ghosts or other fictional entities.
I can't say the same about life imprisonment due to escapes, a mistaken release (they do happen, though rarely), killing a guard, killing another inmate, battery of one of the above, etc.
Parole or pardon is a bit different and IMHO not really relevant, as a legally empowered panel or official has decided the person is not a further danger, or should be given a second chance.
Whether or not you feel that capital punishment should be a penalty in some cases, the above effect is pretty undeniable. It's just a question of whether you think we as a society pay too high a cost (moral, social, or even monetary) for executing someone.
The Russians already knew at least part of it. They were the ones that did the initial surveys back in the 80s. The US geologists began to realize the potential when they saw those reports that Afghan geologists had hidden from the Taliban in the intervening years.
The Chinese are already involved in mining copper, albeit on a limited scale, in Afghanistan.
This can be a very mixed blessing. If it's handled well, and reinvested in the people and country, it's great. If it just adds to the corruption and infighting it won't be.
That's the old problem of what's perceived as valuable to the community: Internet access. And what's more valuable to the individuals: a phone charged for "free".
Yes, the box itself can work in the middle of the Sahara, but how much is a satellite link and the ground equipment for it going to cost? I'm guessing it doesn't provide enough power to run that as well as the unit itself. So, you probably also need a power source for the ground station.
It might be more usefull in a village with no power, but close in to a city with wireless connectivity that could be accessed with a good directional antenna.
If you've already got a place with a hard wired connection or a ground station, then the PC's and power source are likely already available.
(Sorry, but you left yourself wide open for that one.:)
To cool the pipe and contents as you say, you have to move a lot of heat. Liquid nitrogen is good for cooling things to very low temperatures, but it doesn't have as high a heat capacity as a lot of other coolants. It also is limited in how much heat it can remove quickly by the Leydenfrost effect. It tends to form a sheathing blanket of nitrogen gas around what it's cooling. Thats why when a group I worked with was trying to vitrify water to study its electrical properties, we used liquid argon instead which doesn't do that as much.
Now, you either have to send down a very large tank of LN, or pipe it from the surface. If you pipe it down, you've got a mile or so of piping that you have to send it through surrounded by lots of water at a much higher temperature. That means you have to make the pipes very good insulators, like Dewar type vacumn insulation surrounding with an air space and something waterproof. Getting together a mile or more of that would take more than a bit of time.
For sending down a tank of LN, the amount needed would be pretty substantial. you've got a 21 inch well pipe spewing as much as 210,000-1,100,000 gallons per day (estimate from wikipedia). That fluid is an oil methane and water mix that likely has a much higher heat capacity than than the LN. It's also being replaced constantly with equally warm fluid from below until you actually get it frozen for some way down the pipe. And, it's moving quite fast. (Beginning to see the problem? Ever notice how fast moving rivers tend not to freeze easily in winter? The fluid was moving slower where it froze.)
You'd have to use prohibitively large amounts of LN to freeze it, and you'd have a research project just getting the design right and testing it before you spent millions on harware that would take a looong time to have custom made.
Other coolants would be better than LN, but still I think it's not going to be all that easy.
Just because it worked in Terminator 2 doesn't mean it's a good option in real life. There are better ways to stop it.
There's one obvious way that BP has avoided. Cutting the drill pipe just above the blowout preventer and using off the shelf well control hardware to attach a valve body to it. Once the valve body is in place, you can close it off. One of the several problems with that is, if it fails you're left with a massively greater flow rate of oil. Another is the lack of dexterity of the robot manipulators they're using. I have little knowledge of welding and cutting at that depth, but I'd guess it's not straightforward.
BP is trying things that won't make the spill rate radically worse. There may come a point where they have to change that strategy.
I wonder if now you've brought up that video helping defeat Goldwater (an old style conservative Republican), some of the people arguing will now switch sides.;) Bring up the one with Dukakis (a New England Democrat) and the tank, and those on the other side might switch.;)
A lot of what I see here are logical arguments specifically crafted to agree with the writer's existing emotional/partisan response.
Hopefully, the court will rule on more neutral grounds.
There's an old Usenet maxim that no ironic humor can be so blatant that someone won't take it seriously.
I figured the idea of Virgin cancelling the space flights due to losing money on the Euro flight shutdown was oddball enough to signal that. Apparently not;)
Slashdot mass opinion being a very fickle beast when it comes to geeky endeavors has long been a target of lampooning.
Branson: The shutdown of airspace was a massive overreaction that needlessly cost us large amounts of money and we should be compensated.
Slashdot geek: Branson is being a greedy corporate pig that doesn't care about lives and wants a bailout. He should be replaced!
Branson: It cost us enough that we're shutting down Virgin Galactic and there will be no suborbital space tourist flights.
Same Slashdot geek: Those overcautious government nanny state meddlers wasted so much money on a needless overreaction, and are scuppering private development of space. They should be replaced!
A child on the Ghanaian Space Agency base on Europa asks her father, "Almost every nation on Earth has built outposts and colonies in the Solar system except America. What happened to them, Daddy?".
"Oh, they decided to stay home and play Dark Orbit instead."
Actually, the study on honeybee dance was looking at the effect of dopamine levels in the bee's brain. How do you raise dopamine levels? Cocaine is actually a pretty direct and clean method of doing that. Bee dance is a complex social and communicative behavior that's used for one be to tell others the location of food sources. Looking at it can tell you a lot about what's going on in the central nervous system of the bee.
I hardly think the researcher would've wanted the paperwork, oversight and hassle needed for using a scheduled drug in research just for fun.
But, just to reassure people that this doesn't start a trend, I live about 20 miles from where the research was done. And I've seen no increase in the local bees out on the street corner jonesing for a toot.
In other words, the NIF will be used, at least some of the time, to re-create the conditions inside of an exploding nuclear warhead so we can design new nukes without testing them and therefore violating the test ban treaties.
So, this keeps us from having to explode nuclear weapons, and thus violate treaties?
Plus, it has side research benefits like experimental data for inertial confinement fusion?
And it only costs 3.5 Bn initially? That's not much more than an accounting error in a budget the size of Dept. of Defense or Health and Human Services.
Wow. Sounds like a real deal to me. Can we have a few more programs like this?
I think there's some misunderstanding of what the PNAS article says.
P16 is a known tumor supressor gene. It's also in humans. Think of it (and P27, another tumor supressor gene, as well) as sprinkler systems that get set off in response to the fire of excess cell proliferation.
What they found was that in the mole rats, the cells were much more sensitive to crowding than human cells were. Apparently, there is a second crowding detecting system in the mole rats that is more sensitive. They also have the less sensitive crowding detecting system that humans have.
Further, they found that this early crowding signal "set off" (caused expression of)the P16 supressor. The less sensitive crowding detection system that both humans and mole rats have instead "sets off" the P27 tumor supressor gene.
Just having the P16 gene isn't the whole story, humans have it too. It's the entire chain of signals that "sounds the alarm" from mild crowding of the cell and proceeds to the expression of P16. Knowing that it's P16 that gets expressed gives a starting point to figure out the rest of the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Good food and caffeine. Few things can't be improved by that.
I've been watching this site for that long and I don't remember a time when most of these discussions were much more than flame wars with made up statistics, dubious assertions and ad hominem on both sides.
I do agree that it's gotten worse in recent years, though.
Wow... Does this mean that the Chinese government is also using Baidu Space to spread political unrest here in the US?
Maybe Gen. Jack D. Ripper was right, and they're using it to pollute our bodily fluids!
This is why it's risky to rely solely on single ouside suppliers for critical items. The funding for new Pu-238 production by DOE has been held up at least in part due to the availability of it for sale by the Russians.
It's a good source and a reasonable solution, provided unforeseen problems like the contract trouble that's stopped us buying it don't come up. But, in world affairs, they sometimes do.
Unfortunately, it would take several years to start producing it again even if funding were available now.
Similarly, we're about to rely on Russia for manned transport to the ISS and don't have a backup that wouldn't take years to be ready (be it man rating the Falcon 9, or some other). Similarly, I'd not advise the Russians to rely on the US (or any other single country) as a sole source supplier for something critical either.
Countries like the US and Russia have different interests and needs that sometimes don't work out the way people expect. Outside events can push them to differences when no such was planned or foreseen.
My own preference would be to mostly rely on Soyuz as a manned laucher to the ISS, but keep a couple of shuttles running at a much lower launch rate for a back up until newer vehicles are proven. Expensive and hopefully not needed, but most insurance is like that.
Oh, I think 20 kg of high purity Pu-239 would make some individual Muslims feel very good. Specifically, Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. It's not HEU, but it'll sure do in a pinch.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and a whole host of others might be less than thrilled by it, though.
Judge Marty Feldman?!??? You gotta be joking...
Well, I certainly hope he keeps an eye on this case.
You can argue that view, and it may even come to pass. But, that is indeed for the future.
That's not really my point.
I get uncomfortable when people start talking about sanctioning others based on principle rather than rules or laws. Different people take different principles to be important. And different people have different interpretations of those principles. For an extreme example: The KKK takes the principle that one race is superior to others to be very important. I find that odious, and am comforted that in order to impose any sanction due to it they have to overcome a massive amount of admittedly recent law and judicial history.
There's also no direct procedure to change a principle. You have to change the minds of those who hold the principle to be important.
At least with rules or laws, it's fairly straightforward (by comparison) to find out what the current interpretation is.
There are some who would be upset if the AG had tweeted "May the Goddess accept him back to the Earth". You could argue that would be more indicative of endorsing a particular religion.
I don't think in either case it would reasonably be seen as an attempt to impose a belief on others via the position held.
If at a future time the law or the interpretation of it is changed then so be it.
(I do hope he gets in trouble for his invocation of "God" if this is indeed an official government communication.)
How? The first amendment and the doctrine of separation of church and state don't say that no one working for the government can mention God, or even give a religious observance. Else, both houses of congress would be in violation with their opening blessings.
It didn't endorse a particular religion from what I read. It's fine to say that you don't think he should have said it, but if you want him to get penalized for it, you need to have a real legal or procedural reason, else it just becomes a matter of "because I didn't like it".
Well, that particular offender will certainly have a low recidivism rate. I've yet to hear of someone committing another violent offense after a successful execution.
I'd be interested in hearing if you have a counter-example that doesn't involve zombies, ghosts or other fictional entities.
I can't say the same about life imprisonment due to escapes, a mistaken release (they do happen, though rarely), killing a guard, killing another inmate, battery of one of the above, etc.
Parole or pardon is a bit different and IMHO not really relevant, as a legally empowered panel or official has decided the person is not a further danger, or should be given a second chance.
Whether or not you feel that capital punishment should be a penalty in some cases, the above effect is pretty undeniable. It's just a question of whether you think we as a society pay too high a cost (moral, social, or even monetary) for executing someone.
The Russians already knew at least part of it. They were the ones that did the initial surveys back in the 80s. The US geologists began to realize the potential when they saw those reports that Afghan geologists had hidden from the Taliban in the intervening years.
The Chinese are already involved in mining copper, albeit on a limited scale, in Afghanistan.
This can be a very mixed blessing. If it's handled well, and reinvested in the people and country, it's great. If it just adds to the corruption and infighting it won't be.
That's the old problem of what's perceived as valuable to the community: Internet access. And what's more valuable to the individuals: a phone charged for "free".
How about, the entire human genome that runs your sorry ass excuse for a self?
Or are you one of the young earth creationists that thinks humanity romped with the dinosaurs, and didn't develop in Africa?
Yes, the box itself can work in the middle of the Sahara, but how much is a satellite link and the ground equipment for it going to cost? I'm guessing it doesn't provide enough power to run that as well as the unit itself. So, you probably also need a power source for the ground station.
It might be more usefull in a village with no power, but close in to a city with wireless connectivity that could be accessed with a good directional antenna.
If you've already got a place with a hard wired connection or a ground station, then the PC's and power source are likely already available.
"Why do we need nuclear physicists?"
Because they know more physics than you do.
(Sorry, but you left yourself wide open for that one. :)
To cool the pipe and contents as you say, you have to move a lot of heat. Liquid nitrogen is good for cooling things to very low temperatures, but it doesn't have as high a heat capacity as a lot of other coolants. It also is limited in how much heat it can remove quickly by the Leydenfrost effect. It tends to form a sheathing blanket of nitrogen gas around what it's cooling. Thats why when a group I worked with was trying to vitrify water to study its electrical properties, we used liquid argon instead which doesn't do that as much.
Now, you either have to send down a very large tank of LN, or pipe it from the surface. If you pipe it down, you've got a mile or so of piping that you have to send it through surrounded by lots of water at a much higher temperature. That means you have to make the pipes very good insulators, like Dewar type vacumn insulation surrounding with an air space and something waterproof. Getting together a mile or more of that would take more than a bit of time.
For sending down a tank of LN, the amount needed would be pretty substantial. you've got a 21 inch well pipe spewing as much as 210,000-1,100,000 gallons per day (estimate from wikipedia). That fluid is an oil methane and water mix that likely has a much higher heat capacity than than the LN. It's also being replaced constantly with equally warm fluid from below until you actually get it frozen for some way down the pipe. And, it's moving quite fast. (Beginning to see the problem? Ever notice how fast moving rivers tend not to freeze easily in winter? The fluid was moving slower where it froze.)
You'd have to use prohibitively large amounts of LN to freeze it, and you'd have a research project just getting the design right and testing it before you spent millions on harware that would take a looong time to have custom made.
Other coolants would be better than LN, but still I think it's not going to be all that easy.
Just because it worked in Terminator 2 doesn't mean it's a good option in real life. There are better ways to stop it.
There's one obvious way that BP has avoided. Cutting the drill pipe just above the blowout preventer and using off the shelf well control hardware to attach a valve body to it. Once the valve body is in place, you can close it off. One of the several problems with that is, if it fails you're left with a massively greater flow rate of oil. Another is the lack of dexterity of the robot manipulators they're using. I have little knowledge of welding and cutting at that depth, but I'd guess it's not straightforward.
BP is trying things that won't make the spill rate radically worse. There may come a point where they have to change that strategy.
I wonder if now you've brought up that video helping defeat Goldwater (an old style conservative Republican), some of the people arguing will now switch sides. ;) Bring up the one with Dukakis (a New England Democrat) and the tank, and those on the other side might switch. ;)
A lot of what I see here are logical arguments specifically crafted to agree with the writer's existing emotional/partisan response.
Hopefully, the court will rule on more neutral grounds.
There's an old Usenet maxim that no ironic humor can be so blatant that someone won't take it seriously.
I figured the idea of Virgin cancelling the space flights due to losing money on the Euro flight shutdown was oddball enough to signal that. Apparently not ;)
Slashdot mass opinion being a very fickle beast when it comes to geeky endeavors has long been a target of lampooning.
Branson: The shutdown of airspace was a massive overreaction that needlessly cost us large amounts of money and we should be compensated.
Slashdot geek: Branson is being a greedy corporate pig that doesn't care about lives and wants a bailout.
He should be replaced!
Branson: It cost us enough that we're shutting down Virgin Galactic and there will be no suborbital space tourist flights.
Same Slashdot geek: Those overcautious government nanny state meddlers wasted so much money on a needless overreaction, and are scuppering private development of space.
They should be replaced!
I used to BE a physicist you ignorant clod!
Stupid git.
A child on the Ghanaian Space Agency base on Europa asks her father, "Almost every nation on Earth has built outposts and colonies in the Solar system except America. What happened to them, Daddy?".
"Oh, they decided to stay home and play Dark Orbit instead."
Actually, the study on honeybee dance was looking at the effect of dopamine levels in the bee's brain. How do you raise dopamine levels? Cocaine is actually a pretty direct and clean method of doing that. Bee dance is a complex social and communicative behavior that's used for one be to tell others the location of food sources. Looking at it can tell you a lot about what's going on in the central nervous system of the bee.
I hardly think the researcher would've wanted the paperwork, oversight and hassle needed for using a scheduled drug in research just for fun.
But, just to reassure people that this doesn't start a trend, I live about 20 miles from where the research was done. And I've seen no increase in the local bees out on the street corner jonesing for a toot.
It was YOUR aeon to watch the aluminum atom. I did it LAST aeon. It was there safe and sound when I finished!
In other words, the NIF will be used, at least some of the time, to re-create the conditions inside of an exploding nuclear warhead so we can design new nukes without testing them and therefore violating the test ban treaties.
So, this keeps us from having to explode nuclear weapons, and thus violate treaties?
Plus, it has side research benefits like experimental data for inertial confinement fusion?
And it only costs 3.5 Bn initially? That's not much more than an accounting error in a budget the size of Dept. of Defense or Health and Human Services.
Wow. Sounds like a real deal to me. Can we have a few more programs like this?
I think there's some misunderstanding of what the PNAS article says.
P16 is a known tumor supressor gene. It's also in humans. Think of it (and P27, another tumor supressor gene, as well) as sprinkler systems that get set off in response to the fire of excess cell proliferation.
What they found was that in the mole rats, the cells were much more sensitive to crowding than human cells were. Apparently, there is a second crowding detecting system in the mole rats that is more sensitive. They also have the less sensitive crowding detecting system that humans have.
Further, they found that this early crowding signal "set off" (caused expression of)the P16 supressor. The less sensitive crowding detection system that both humans and mole rats have instead "sets off" the P27 tumor supressor gene.
Just having the P16 gene isn't the whole story, humans have it too. It's the entire chain of signals that "sounds the alarm" from mild crowding of the cell and proceeds to the expression of P16. Knowing that it's P16 that gets expressed gives a starting point to figure out the rest of the system.
When you hack a firewall, F O E!