It is form of a specialized axe, known as a maul. Still an axe, but only good for splitting short logs. Still, if you are busting wood for heating you would do well to have the right tool for the job.
"The model uses physics at the one-millimeter rock grain scale to explain how the whole planet behaves."
A 3,000 x 3,000 x 3,000 grid is considered very large for modern scientific models. Assuming they are working on a cartesian grid, and an earth diameter of 12,000 km, their model would be 12,000,000 x 12,000,000 x 12,000,000; twelve orders of magnitude larger than the biggest physical model I've ever heard of.
This cannot be the case.
Whew! Its a good thing they never claimed they were doing any such thing.
"physics at the one-millimeter rock grain scale" does not mean that they were using a model grid of that same scale.
To show that the assumption that it must, or even should, is incorrect consider any engineering model that involves the effects of static friction.
The phenomena that cause static friction exist on the molecular and atomic level, and theoretical predictions of friction under arbitrary conditions need to be analyzed and calculated at that scale.
But once you have determined what the coefficient is under a given set of conditions, you only need to use the single number in a macro scale model.
That is what they did here. If you read TFA you will see that their macro model used coefficients calculated using the detailed physics.
Globalfirepower rank them about the same, though they include a lot of factors, but shouldn't all those be included?
I would take the "Globalfirepower" rankings a tad more seriously if they revealed the model they used to combine and weight all those factors, and if they weren't a "link farm" site that lists itself as being "for entertainment only" and the people running it weren't completely anonymous. There is no reason to attach any credibility to the ranking scores they offer.
Obama was on Seal Team Six? I didn't know that. He was working with the CIA to track down Bin Laden in Pakistan, before he was President?...
When Obama became President, no one in the CIA was tracking down bin Laden in Pakistan. In 2005 George W. Bush shut down the CIA unit tasked with tracking bin Laden (code named Alec Station and established in 1996 by Bill Clinton).
"C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden".
It took an executive action by Obama to recreate an intelligence unit to pick up the hunt, and then a tough call to send the SEAL team in when the intelligence about bin Laden's presence was still uncertain. A weaker man would have temporized about the uncertainty and done nothing (GW Bush and Tora Bora?).
BTW - the right's adulation of GW Bush as a hero, strutting in front of his "Mission Accomplished" banner, when he had never fired a shot in the invasion, while pretending Obama had nothing to do with the termination of bin Laden "because he wasn't on Seal Team Six" is a double standard so glaring that it makes one stand dumb-founded at the intellectual dishonesty involved. Yeah, and Reagan defeated the Soviet Union single-handedly. Right.
OM F***ing G. I know this is a popular theme on Slashdot, but please STOP. It is wrong, and stems from a serious misunderstanding about what it means to say that "the US owes China money."
In addition, doesn't anyone bother to look up just how much of the U.S. "balls" China is holding? China holds just 6% of the U.S. Federal debt! ($1.1 trillion out of $17.6 trillion).
A graceless concession after a showed up the foolishness of your post, and more than a bit of a non sequitur, but I accept it anyway. Have fun waving whatever it is you are waving now.
... But, at the same time, let the idiots who decide to overdose suffer the consequences of their actions. That is the point at which the liberals who want to LEGALIZE drugs fail the logic test. They want the government to allow them to use their favorite substances, and then rescue them when they have trouble...
So you are advocating that anyone showing up at an ER with the strong smell of alcohol on their breath, and no obvious injury, should be kicked out on the curb to die. Correct?
(This is 3.5% of all ER admissions, and outnumbers all illegal drug admissions combined).
A bit broader than "Western Europe" - you are a couple of decades out of date at least. It would be more like "the entire rest of the advanced industrialized world" since much of Eastern Europe is now included, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and a fair part of South America as well (I'm sure you have flown on Brazil-made airliners, they are very good).
I guess that is a bit elitist.
I find it very interesting that the American right is finding it necessary to point to the worst nations in the world (Middle East police states, African kleptocracies) to prove U.S. virtues.
I came, I saw, I hated Unity. I still do, pretty much.
But it you install Classic Menu or CairoDock then you have access to the old way menus for finding your installed apps, and you can ignore Unity entirely (but I occasionally hit the Unity sidebar for some minor convenience from time to time).
Some lessons I have learned for working with Ubuntu if, like most people, you just want a desktop environment that lets you do your work efficiently, employing established knowledge and skills and not have to muck about with solving problems created by the distribution and its UI:
Only ever install the LTS version, otherwise you find yourself dealing with Shuttleworth's "experiments" and support gets terminated in 18 months,
Only ever select the default UI (Unity in this case). I tried every alternative to Unity first, but every one had some basic feature that was seriously broken and could not be fixed in a reasonable amount of effort. Guess only the primary UI gets sent to QA.
I will be trying the new LTS after it has been out a little while.
With a 10% annual growth, you hit a million in 20 years. That grows to $5 million in about 35 years. That becomes $2.5 million after 35 years when you count inflation, but that still shows it is pretty easy to hit a million in any professional level job.
Heck! With 20% annual growth you can hit a million in 14 years, and with 30% annual growth you can hit a million in 11 years!
Just ask Bernie Madoff!
The real long term return on stocks is 6% or so. You only get 10% if you carefully draw the period to cover two bubbles and avoid the post-bubble malaise, collapse and ensuing low-grade depression. That's called "cheating with statistics".
And even stock market optimists (like Jeremy Siegel) feel that returns over the next few decades will be around 5%, as the long hang-over of the Bush crash persists, and the relative decline of consumer purchasing power continues.
With a more realistic return of 5%, the time to accumulate a million is 30 years.
Look for it as the eclipse starts, it will be a full moon high overhead. You can't miss it (assuming that you can see the sky at all).
At the height of eclipse the moon turns dark reddish because the only thing illuminating it are all the world's sunsets and sunrises at once!
After the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in mid 1991 pushing more particulates and sulfur into the stratosphere than any eruption since Krakatoa, the following lunar eclipse on 9 December 1992 was so dark the moon completely disappeared, except for observers in truly dark sky sites.
The El Chichón eruption in 1982 also led to a very dark lunar eclipses in July and December of that year (but not as dark as the Pinatubo eclipse).
It shouldn't be a dark eclipse tonight, since there have been no major recent eruptions - but these things are hard to predict.
>There is a massive cache of existing technology which can be repurposed to rebuild society.
None of which works when the electricity dies.
There are a huge number of electrical generators in existence - almost every vehicle on the planet has one for example. Anything that can run a motor can produce electricity. Electricity would be precious perhaps, but absent? Hardly.
Without laying down what we mean by this "apocalypse" (What happened? Where? Why?) no useful discussion can result (well, this is Slashdot, so perhaps I am being redundant).
Is industrial civilization just going to sort of evaporate? Really? How?
Why would we revert to pre-industrial society, rather than to an earlier form of industrial civilization, or more likely a hybrid of early and later technology?
"Moving on", in the words of Tom Murphy, means throwing out a computer, loaded with the software you use, that does exactly what you want it to.
A system originally built with XP was bought more than 7 years ago, and due to OS bloat, er, "enhancements", the currently available OS offerings from M$ will not run on it. Your only option is to toss the computer, and buy a brand new one. And right now for your average user that means having to "upgrade" to Windows 8, which a confirmed XP user is probably not that keen on (yeah, I know they put the "start" button back, but that ain't fixing a broken GUI).
I have a perfectly good XP desktop that, since it will no longer get security patches, I am going to have to abandon. Since I hate Windows 8, that means a custom build on which I can install Windows 7. I had hoped to wait for Windows 9, but the end-of-life on XP now forces my hand.
And after 900 your fission 'war' heads won't work anymore, so the slow down will be difficult ^_^
Why would that be? U-235 has a half-life of 700 million years. These things can be engineered to be storable for a few millenia (especially with deep space cold storage - if needed).
... The fastest spacecrafts we've ever built take about 9 years or so to go from Earth to Pluto. At that rate, they would take about 120,000 years to reach the next closest solar system....
True, but irrelevant. No one is going to build a generation ship powered by chemical rockets, not even with gravity assists.
The one technology that we currently know can be turned into interstellar propulsion is fission pulse propulsion - using many small fission bombs.
With optimization of this technology, and a suitably large vessel (the technology does not scale down very well) speeds up to ~0.5% c possible, making the voyage a mere 900 years.
And let's not touch land for three years, as some of the old whalers did. And let's make sure that everyone knows there is a minimum of a 20% mortality starting off. And let's enforce discipline with a rope's end.
I don't think so. Pacific whaling voyages from New Bedford might indeed last three (even four) years - but they sure as heck touched land during that period. Whaling vessel visits to Pacific ports were the rule - Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand were common ports of call, with calls at the many Pacific islands also (see how many times Melville trod on land).
Also, on these long-range whaling voyages flogging was rare. These men were generally trained professionals, and they vied for births on out-going voyages where they stood to make some good money. Don't confuse the commercial whaling fleet with the conscripted ranks of the British navy of an earlier period. Shorter voyages are a different story.
But, yeah, dangerous. Loss rates of 100% were not unknown.
Slashdot Mirror
It is form of a specialized axe, known as a maul. Still an axe, but only good for splitting short logs. Still, if you are busting wood for heating you would do well to have the right tool for the job.
Allow me: "Who-o-o-o-sh".
"The model uses physics at the one-millimeter rock grain scale to explain how the whole planet behaves."
A 3,000 x 3,000 x 3,000 grid is considered very large for modern scientific models. Assuming they are working on a cartesian grid, and an earth diameter of 12,000 km, their model would be 12,000,000 x 12,000,000 x 12,000,000; twelve orders of magnitude larger than the biggest physical model I've ever heard of.
This cannot be the case.
Whew! Its a good thing they never claimed they were doing any such thing.
"physics at the one-millimeter rock grain scale" does not mean that they were using a model grid of that same scale.
To show that the assumption that it must, or even should, is incorrect consider any engineering model that involves the effects of static friction.
The phenomena that cause static friction exist on the molecular and atomic level, and theoretical predictions of friction under arbitrary conditions need to be analyzed and calculated at that scale.
But once you have determined what the coefficient is under a given set of conditions, you only need to use the single number in a macro scale model.
That is what they did here. If you read TFA you will see that their macro model used coefficients calculated using the detailed physics.
Is the US vastly superior?
Globalfirepower rank them about the same, though they include a lot of factors, but shouldn't all those be included?
I would take the "Globalfirepower" rankings a tad more seriously if they revealed the model they used to combine and weight all those factors, and if they weren't a "link farm" site that lists itself as being "for entertainment only" and the people running it weren't completely anonymous. There is no reason to attach any credibility to the ranking scores they offer.
Obama was on Seal Team Six? I didn't know that. He was working with the CIA to track down Bin Laden in Pakistan, before he was President?...
When Obama became President, no one in the CIA was tracking down bin Laden in Pakistan. In 2005 George W. Bush shut down the CIA unit tasked with tracking bin Laden (code named Alec Station and established in 1996 by Bill Clinton). "C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden".
It took an executive action by Obama to recreate an intelligence unit to pick up the hunt, and then a tough call to send the SEAL team in when the intelligence about bin Laden's presence was still uncertain. A weaker man would have temporized about the uncertainty and done nothing (GW Bush and Tora Bora?).
BTW - the right's adulation of GW Bush as a hero, strutting in front of his "Mission Accomplished" banner, when he had never fired a shot in the invasion, while pretending Obama had nothing to do with the termination of bin Laden "because he wasn't on Seal Team Six" is a double standard so glaring that it makes one stand dumb-founded at the intellectual dishonesty involved. Yeah, and Reagan defeated the Soviet Union single-handedly. Right.
China has the US by the balls via debt
OM F***ing G. I know this is a popular theme on Slashdot, but please STOP. It is wrong, and stems from a serious misunderstanding about what it means to say that "the US owes China money."
In addition, doesn't anyone bother to look up just how much of the U.S. "balls" China is holding? China holds just 6% of the U.S. Federal debt! ($1.1 trillion out of $17.6 trillion).
Ooh! Sc-a-r-r-y!
A graceless concession after a showed up the foolishness of your post, and more than a bit of a non sequitur, but I accept it anyway. Have fun waving whatever it is you are waving now.
Water cooled lights. End of problem.
... But, at the same time, let the idiots who decide to overdose suffer the consequences of their actions. That is the point at which the liberals who want to LEGALIZE drugs fail the logic test. They want the government to allow them to use their favorite substances, and then rescue them when they have trouble...
So you are advocating that anyone showing up at an ER with the strong smell of alcohol on their breath, and no obvious injury, should be kicked out on the curb to die. Correct?
(This is 3.5% of all ER admissions, and outnumbers all illegal drug admissions combined).
A bit broader than "Western Europe" - you are a couple of decades out of date at least. It would be more like "the entire rest of the advanced industrialized world" since much of Eastern Europe is now included, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and a fair part of South America as well (I'm sure you have flown on Brazil-made airliners, they are very good).
I guess that is a bit elitist.
I find it very interesting that the American right is finding it necessary to point to the worst nations in the world (Middle East police states, African kleptocracies) to prove U.S. virtues.
I think that is very telling.
I came, I saw, I hated Unity. I still do, pretty much.
But it you install Classic Menu or CairoDock then you have access to the old way menus for finding your installed apps, and you can ignore Unity entirely (but I occasionally hit the Unity sidebar for some minor convenience from time to time).
Some lessons I have learned for working with Ubuntu if, like most people, you just want a desktop environment that lets you do your work efficiently, employing established knowledge and skills and not have to muck about with solving problems created by the distribution and its UI:
I will be trying the new LTS after it has been out a little while.
...
With a 10% annual growth, you hit a million in 20 years. That grows to $5 million in about 35 years. That becomes $2.5 million after 35 years when you count inflation, but that still shows it is pretty easy to hit a million in any professional level job.
Heck! With 20% annual growth you can hit a million in 14 years, and with 30% annual growth you can hit a million in 11 years!
Just ask Bernie Madoff!
The real long term return on stocks is 6% or so. You only get 10% if you carefully draw the period to cover two bubbles and avoid the post-bubble malaise, collapse and ensuing low-grade depression. That's called "cheating with statistics".
And even stock market optimists (like Jeremy Siegel) feel that returns over the next few decades will be around 5%, as the long hang-over of the Bush crash persists, and the relative decline of consumer purchasing power continues.
With a more realistic return of 5%, the time to accumulate a million is 30 years.
Look for it as the eclipse starts, it will be a full moon high overhead. You can't miss it (assuming that you can see the sky at all).
At the height of eclipse the moon turns dark reddish because the only thing illuminating it are all the world's sunsets and sunrises at once!
After the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in mid 1991 pushing more particulates and sulfur into the stratosphere than any eruption since Krakatoa, the following lunar eclipse on 9 December 1992 was so dark the moon completely disappeared, except for observers in truly dark sky sites.
The El Chichón eruption in 1982 also led to a very dark lunar eclipses in July and December of that year (but not as dark as the Pinatubo eclipse).
It shouldn't be a dark eclipse tonight, since there have been no major recent eruptions - but these things are hard to predict.
>There is a massive cache of existing technology which can be repurposed to rebuild society.
None of which works when the electricity dies.
There are a huge number of electrical generators in existence - almost every vehicle on the planet has one for example. Anything that can run a motor can produce electricity. Electricity would be precious perhaps, but absent? Hardly.
Without laying down what we mean by this "apocalypse" (What happened? Where? Why?) no useful discussion can result (well, this is Slashdot, so perhaps I am being redundant).
Is industrial civilization just going to sort of evaporate? Really? How?
Why would we revert to pre-industrial society, rather than to an earlier form of industrial civilization, or more likely a hybrid of early and later technology?
"Moving on", in the words of Tom Murphy, means throwing out a computer, loaded with the software you use, that does exactly what you want it to.
A system originally built with XP was bought more than 7 years ago, and due to OS bloat, er, "enhancements", the currently available OS offerings from M$ will not run on it. Your only option is to toss the computer, and buy a brand new one. And right now for your average user that means having to "upgrade" to Windows 8, which a confirmed XP user is probably not that keen on (yeah, I know they put the "start" button back, but that ain't fixing a broken GUI).
I have a perfectly good XP desktop that, since it will no longer get security patches, I am going to have to abandon. Since I hate Windows 8, that means a custom build on which I can install Windows 7. I had hoped to wait for Windows 9, but the end-of-life on XP now forces my hand.
We'll never get through the thick ice layer...?
Because you have complete knowledge of all present and future drilling technologies?
If only someone, somewhere had a good idea about how to do this! Wait, what's this? Oh how I love this "Google" thing.
And after 900 your fission 'war' heads won't work anymore, so the slow down will be difficult ^_^
Why would that be? U-235 has a half-life of 700 million years. These things can be engineered to be storable for a few millenia (especially with deep space cold storage - if needed).
Just take frozen sperm to diversify.
You also need to maintain mitochondial DNA diversity, so this isn't a sufficient solution.
Overblown, use a dime to represent our solar system and the next one will be less than 100m away....
Let's use the Yap Rai stone currency (up to 3.6 m across) - then it would be 20 km away.
... The fastest spacecrafts we've ever built take about 9 years or so to go from Earth to Pluto. At that rate, they would take about 120,000 years to reach the next closest solar system....
True, but irrelevant. No one is going to build a generation ship powered by chemical rockets, not even with gravity assists.
The one technology that we currently know can be turned into interstellar propulsion is fission pulse propulsion - using many small fission bombs.
With optimization of this technology, and a suitably large vessel (the technology does not scale down very well) speeds up to ~0.5% c possible, making the voyage a mere 900 years.
And sevenses of birds?
Why embryos?
Just ship frozen ova and sperm.
You poor devil! How about submariners, who spend months at a time in cramped, crowded conditions?
A strategic ballistic missile sub cruise is 3 months.
A mission to Mars lasts about 3 years.
Big difference.
And let's not touch land for three years, as some of the old whalers did. And let's make sure that everyone knows there is a minimum of a 20% mortality starting off. And let's enforce discipline with a rope's end.
I don't think so. Pacific whaling voyages from New Bedford might indeed last three (even four) years - but they sure as heck touched land during that period. Whaling vessel visits to Pacific ports were the rule - Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand were common ports of call, with calls at the many Pacific islands also (see how many times Melville trod on land).
Also, on these long-range whaling voyages flogging was rare. These men were generally trained professionals, and they vied for births on out-going voyages where they stood to make some good money. Don't confuse the commercial whaling fleet with the conscripted ranks of the British navy of an earlier period. Shorter voyages are a different story.
But, yeah, dangerous. Loss rates of 100% were not unknown.