Which is why we should go straight to the heart of the matter. Once they have access to any kind of technology, they could use it for evil, nasty or just distasteful and self-serving purposes. The solution is obvious.
Make sure they never learn to read. That way, they can never, ever cause any trouble.
People with ids 20,000 registered in the first six months or so that Slashdot was up and running.
Are you sure? Slashdot had been up for a while before I even heard of it, and I'd been reading before I registered, for a couple of months at least. And that was way back... in... 1998...
(mentally adds "a couple of months" to October, 1997)
During the past few months, I have spent entire days locked up in my office, writing my first manuscript to be submitted to a peer reviewed scientific journal.
The first time hurts the worst, rookie. Just wait till the reviews come back. You'll have ample opportunity to build up some calluses on your ego.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have three manuscripts to finish by the end of the year. The FISCAL year, that is, which ends on Sept. 30.
"The only way to dissipate the heat would be through radiation, and that's slow compared to convection."
It's only slow if there is a small temperature differential between your source and your sink. Pointing the radiating fins out toward dark space would let them dissipate it pretty quickly.
Inflation was introduced because the presumptive model of the Big Bang says that the universe sprang from an infinitesimally small point. At some time later, the expansion rate of the universe is thought to have changed. This change in expansion rate (inflation) was required by the assumption about the point-source of the Big Bang, working backwards from what we see around us today.
But what if the Big Bang was not a point source?
If the universe (the one that we see and experience in our daily lives, anyway) was created when two branes slapped together, there's no reason to think that that had to take place within a single infinitesimal point. If this contact took place over a larger region of space, the diameter of a single hydrogen atom, for example, then "inflation" isn't necessary.
So, replace Big Bang with Big Slap, and get rid of inflation.
"Having fat friends makes you fat" implies that if you have fat friends, you have no choice but to become fat. This is untrue. Article is, once again, idiotic and pure flamebait.
In a social peer environment where everybody else is either plump or really fat, being slim means getting teased at every social event, every family gathering, every "social networking" event.
If you don't eat Grandma's signature dish of deep fried twinkies with buttercream frosting when everybody else is piling their plates high with them, Grandma's feelings get hurt. Ditto for the fried chicken, buttermilk pound cake, candied yams, etc., etc., etc.
If you have to request (or bring your own) healthy food to every event because any vegetable that's there is slathered in cream of mushroom soup and cheddar cheese, you are labeled a snob.
If you have to request (or bring your own) diet soda pop and/or light beer to every barbeque, you are derided as a wimpy, effeminate liberal.
If you host a party for your friends and relatives where you serve the foods that you typically eat instead of the foods they typically eat - grilled, broiled or baked meats instead of fried, deep-fried or chicken-fried, fresh vegetables instead of salt, sugar and cream casseroles, relatively low-cal drinks instead of colored and carbonated high fructose corn syrup, good desserts instead of huge desserts - then your parties will be really low on anyone's list of favorite events, because the food is "weird".
Doritos, sour cream and onion potato chips, bowls of candy or nuts and chocolate-covered strawberries are as tempting to slim people as they are to fat people. It's really easy to be fat. It takes effort to stay slim. By exerting that effort at these social events, by not accepting the food they offer to you, you are saying to your plump/fat/obese friends and relatives, "I don't want to be like you." Or at least, that is how they will interpret it.
If you have a fat social network that does not exert pressure on you to also get fat, either overt or covert pressure, conscious or unconscious pressure, then you are very, very lucky.
Well, geez, that's a question that pretty much answers itself, unless the wives on your planet are, statistically speaking, MUCH more open-minded that the wives we have here on Earth. You get points for asking, though.
Scientist predicted that life couldn't survive in a number of environments on earth, yet it has been found in each one:
1- In lakes frozen hundreds of meters down in antarctica 2- In the dept of the ocean where NO light permeates 3- Next to Volcanic openings in the earths crust were tempuratues are well over 800 degress c 4- In the highly acidic and poisionus ponds in Yellowstone National Park
I think the problem is not that life is unable to adapt so that it can survive in these extreme environments. The problem is that it's very difficult for life to begin in these environments.
Here on Earth, we've got lots of very hospitable little niches where life can get started - tidal pools, mud flats, etc. Once it gets going, then it can spread and adapt. Life will spread right up to the very edge of the environment, right at the point where it's too hot/cold/acidic/poisonous to support life, and then competition and evolution leads to the ability to go out into the Zone of Death and set up a home there.
If the entire planet were frozen/boiling/acidic/toxic/etc., with NO temperate, chemically neutral, energy-rich environments AT ALL, then the thermodynamic hurdles are much higher for establishing a self-contained, self-replicating, energy-utilizing cell, so there would be much less of a chance for any life to occur. Probably a non-zero chance, but much closer to zero than on our own pleasant home.
All raw agricultural products carry a minimal risk of contamination, said a University of Illinois scientist whose research focuses on keeping foodborne pathogens, including the strain of E. coli found recently on spinach, out of the food supply. "Once the pathogenic organism gets on the product, no amount of washing will remove it. The microbes attach to the surface of produce in a sticky biofilm, and washing just isn't very effective,"
Just do a search on biofilms e. coli "food safety". E. coli biofilms are hard to kill with chemicals. You have to use heat, irradiation, or some other approach like competitive exclusion, or interrupting quorum sensing or phage attack.
... by Lowell Wood, a noted physicist and recent retiree of the
This is the point at which I stopped reading TFA.
A physicist talking about chemistry and biology, and a retiree talking about how easy/cheap/fast/simple it would be for you young people to do, if you only had the kind of vision we had back in the day.
Sorry, I've known too many physicists. (and too many retirees...)
I think you can manage long-term in a low gravity environment, you just have to include enough load-bearing activities in daily life to stimulate bone formation. Resistance work like weight lifting or a daily swim through a high-density slurry, perhaps.
Once all the details of off-planet living get worked out on the moon, then we'll be ready to tackle Mars.
Off-planet habitation should focus on the moon instead of Mars.
You'd still need completely enclosed domes, caves or spaceports.
You'd still need full shielding from cosmic radiation and hard UV.
You'd still need imported air, water, food, medicines, equipment, etc.
However, you'd be a lot closer to home, reducing shipping costs and times, both ways. You can coast to the moon in three days, or accelerate there in 12 hours.
Reduced time in transit means reduced radiation exposure, which means reduced ship shielding (and weight) necessary.
You'll have better solar array efficiency because of brighter sunlight and no dust. Or you could use nuclear power.
No pesky winds or dust to mess with your instruments.
More people would be able to afford a vacation trip to the Moon than could afford a vacation trip to Mars. Better revenue stream.
0.16G surface gravity means a space elevator would be more feasible to move cargo and people up and down the lunar gravity well. Getting off the earth would still be horrendously expensive, but maybe our space elevator cable could be made in our lunar factories out of moon dust. That would certainly be convenient.
Right, because this is an iterative, custom-fit exam. They assume you generally know your stuff, since you passed the writtens; they don't care about where you're strong, they want to know where you're weak, and how weak you are. As soon as the examiners start to smell the whiff of ignorance in an oral exam, they pursue it mercilessly, and work together to explore the depths of your particular areas of ignorance the same way a tag-team of sadistic dentists will use an array of very small and very sharp bits of steel to dig in and thoroughly explore a bad spot on a tooth. God help you if you give them an especially juicy target to work on, or if you give them more than one.
(Shudders when thinking back on doctoral oral exams.)
To paraphrase, he said that decent tests count the number of right answers you get, but really good tests also count how many times your answer is, "It depends."
Does this make anyone else think of Alpha Centauri? Thermal boreholes give lots of energy, but they raise temperatures in the surrounding 8 sectors - not necessarily a bad thing on Mars.
I don't see any roads, farms, mines or solar collectors, though. You're never going to grow the colony and win the game without farm sectors.
Home fuel-cell installations will be the next big thing for the small guy to make big. The power companies would be wise to start backing them now. Subsidize them, let them get a good base then buy them out.
"Home fuel-cell installations will be the next big thing for the small guy to make big. The power companies would be wise to... buy them out."
In Soviet Russia, you fight the power. In Corporate America, the power fights you!
1. Open the freezer and take out the 5:1 mixture of Kona mild roast and Kenya AAA dark roast beans, which I stored in an air-tight plastic tub. 2. Measure exactly 1/4 cup of beans into my grinder, add 1 teaspoon of ground chicory, which I stored air-tight but at room temperature. 3. Grind medium fine and pour half into the bleach-free Melita filters in my Braun drip machine. 4. Grind the remainder extra fine and add to the filter. 5. Fill the machine with the filtered water I'd let stand overnight to outgas the chlorine, and start the machine. 6. While coffee is brewing, use a soft-tipped brush to clean out the grinder and put the coffee and chicory away. 7. Pour the coffee into a my very clean mug, reserved just for coffee, just as the pot finishes brewing. Enjoy the appearance, aroma and intense flavor of the first sip, and let the flavor bloom through each subsequent sip. 8. Discard any coffee that's been sitting on the warmer for more than 30 minutes, and make it fresh. 9. Wash pot, filter, lid and mugs by hand with very hot water and a mild Alconox solution, to remove residues. Dry with a soft towel and replace, ready for the next pot.
How I do it now, with four kids:
1. If there isn't any cold coffee left from yesterday, open can of Folger's. 2. Put four or five scoops into the paper filter I got in bulk at Costco, in my Braun drip machine. 3. Fill pot with water straight from the tap. Add to machine. Press button. 4. Feed kids while coffee is brewing. 5. Pour coffee into whatever mug's closest, as soon as I get the chance. Drink. Repeat until either pot is empty, or I have to go to work. 6. Leave empty mug, empty pot on counter. Go to work.
The problem is the same problem you always have with electrical energy based (as opposed to kinetic energy based) weaponry:
PASS will use a solid-state laser, which only needs a supply of electricity, but the engineering challenges are still significant, says Braun.
"The biggest problems with mobile laser systems in the field are the power supply concerns, overall size of the laser and optics, and the tolerance for those optics to endure rapid changes in temperature, airborne particulate and the kinds of vibrations a military platform imparts on its load." Says Braun.
Once they can invent the same kind of batteries that power a light saber, these will be practical.
Another suitable crop is known as High-Energy, Multi-use Plant. It grows efficiently, is drought tolerant and produces a wide range of industrially useful materials for food, feed and fiber, including energy-dense oils and resins.
Unfortunately, The Man doesn't want people to grow High-Energy, Multi-use Plant, for some reason...
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why we should go straight to the heart of the matter. Once they have access to any kind of technology, they could use it for evil, nasty or just distasteful and self-serving purposes. The solution is obvious.
Make sure they never learn to read. That way, they can never, ever cause any trouble.
People with ids 20,000 registered in the first six months or so that Slashdot was up and running.
Are you sure? Slashdot had been up for a while before I even heard of it, and I'd been reading before I registered, for a couple of months at least. And that was way back... in... 1998...
(mentally adds "a couple of months" to October, 1997)
Geez, it has been a long time.
During the past few months, I have spent entire days locked up in my office, writing my first manuscript to be submitted to a peer reviewed scientific journal.
The first time hurts the worst, rookie. Just wait till the reviews come back. You'll have ample opportunity to build up some calluses on your ego.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have three manuscripts to finish by the end of the year. The FISCAL year, that is, which ends on Sept. 30.
Sorry, Kansas has no Bering in this matter.
"The only way to dissipate the heat would be through radiation, and that's slow compared to convection."
It's only slow if there is a small temperature differential between your source and your sink. Pointing the radiating fins out toward dark space would let them dissipate it pretty quickly.
Inflation was introduced because the presumptive model of the Big Bang says that the universe sprang from an infinitesimally small point. At some time later, the expansion rate of the universe is thought to have changed. This change in expansion rate (inflation) was required by the assumption about the point-source of the Big Bang, working backwards from what we see around us today.
But what if the Big Bang was not a point source?
If the universe (the one that we see and experience in our daily lives, anyway) was created when two branes slapped together, there's no reason to think that that had to take place within a single infinitesimal point. If this contact took place over a larger region of space, the diameter of a single hydrogen atom, for example, then "inflation" isn't necessary.
So, replace Big Bang with Big Slap, and get rid of inflation.
"Having fat friends makes you fat" implies that if you have fat friends, you have no choice but to become fat. This is untrue. Article is, once again, idiotic and pure flamebait.
In a social peer environment where everybody else is either plump or really fat, being slim means getting teased at every social event, every family gathering, every "social networking" event.
If you don't eat Grandma's signature dish of deep fried twinkies with buttercream frosting when everybody else is piling their plates high with them, Grandma's feelings get hurt. Ditto for the fried chicken, buttermilk pound cake, candied yams, etc., etc., etc.
If you have to request (or bring your own) healthy food to every event because any vegetable that's there is slathered in cream of mushroom soup and cheddar cheese, you are labeled a snob.
If you have to request (or bring your own) diet soda pop and/or light beer to every barbeque, you are derided as a wimpy, effeminate liberal.
If you host a party for your friends and relatives where you serve the foods that you typically eat instead of the foods they typically eat - grilled, broiled or baked meats instead of fried, deep-fried or chicken-fried, fresh vegetables instead of salt, sugar and cream casseroles, relatively low-cal drinks instead of colored and carbonated high fructose corn syrup, good desserts instead of huge desserts - then your parties will be really low on anyone's list of favorite events, because the food is "weird".
Doritos, sour cream and onion potato chips, bowls of candy or nuts and chocolate-covered strawberries are as tempting to slim people as they are to fat people. It's really easy to be fat. It takes effort to stay slim. By exerting that effort at these social events, by not accepting the food they offer to you, you are saying to your plump/fat/obese friends and relatives, "I don't want to be like you." Or at least, that is how they will interpret it.
If you have a fat social network that does not exert pressure on you to also get fat, either overt or covert pressure, conscious or unconscious pressure, then you are very, very lucky.
Is the Vader thing still a spoiler?
I have one word for you: Rosebud.
Well, geez, that's a question that pretty much answers itself, unless the wives on your planet are, statistically speaking, MUCH more open-minded that the wives we have here on Earth. You get points for asking, though.
but the PC can be locked away somewhere safe.
You misspelled that last word. It should be q-u-i-e-t.
Scientist predicted that life couldn't survive in a number of environments on earth, yet it has been found in each one:
1- In lakes frozen hundreds of meters down in antarctica
2- In the dept of the ocean where NO light permeates
3- Next to Volcanic openings in the earths crust were tempuratues are well over 800 degress c
4- In the highly acidic and poisionus ponds in Yellowstone National Park
I think the problem is not that life is unable to adapt so that it can survive in these extreme environments. The problem is that it's very difficult for life to begin in these environments.
Here on Earth, we've got lots of very hospitable little niches where life can get started - tidal pools, mud flats, etc. Once it gets going, then it can spread and adapt. Life will spread right up to the very edge of the environment, right at the point where it's too hot/cold/acidic/poisonous to support life, and then competition and evolution leads to the ability to go out into the Zone of Death and set up a home there.
If the entire planet were frozen/boiling/acidic/toxic/etc., with NO temperate, chemically neutral, energy-rich environments AT ALL, then the thermodynamic hurdles are much higher for establishing a self-contained, self-replicating, energy-utilizing cell, so there would be much less of a chance for any life to occur. Probably a non-zero chance, but much closer to zero than on our own pleasant home.
May I suggest that, in focusing on medical applications, you are being too narrow?
E. coli Found Recently On Spinach: Foodborne Pathogens Hard To Remove From Produce
Just do a search on biofilms e. coli "food safety". E. coli biofilms are hard to kill with chemicals. You have to use heat, irradiation, or some other approach like competitive exclusion, or interrupting quorum sensing or phage attack.
... by Lowell Wood, a noted physicist and recent retiree of the
This is the point at which I stopped reading TFA.
A physicist talking about chemistry and biology, and a retiree talking about how easy/cheap/fast/simple it would be for you young people to do, if you only had the kind of vision we had back in the day.
Sorry, I've known too many physicists. (and too many retirees...)
I think you can manage long-term in a low gravity environment, you just have to include enough load-bearing activities in daily life to stimulate bone formation. Resistance work like weight lifting or a daily swim through a high-density slurry, perhaps.
Once all the details of off-planet living get worked out on the moon, then we'll be ready to tackle Mars.
Off-planet habitation should focus on the moon instead of Mars.
You'd still need completely enclosed domes, caves or spaceports.
You'd still need full shielding from cosmic radiation and hard UV.
You'd still need imported air, water, food, medicines, equipment, etc.
However, you'd be a lot closer to home, reducing shipping costs and times, both ways. You can coast to the moon in three days, or accelerate there in 12 hours.
Reduced time in transit means reduced radiation exposure, which means reduced ship shielding (and weight) necessary.
You'll have better solar array efficiency because of brighter sunlight and no dust. Or you could use nuclear power.
No pesky winds or dust to mess with your instruments.
More people would be able to afford a vacation trip to the Moon than could afford a vacation trip to Mars. Better revenue stream.
0.16G surface gravity means a space elevator would be more feasible to move cargo and people up and down the lunar gravity well. Getting off the earth would still be horrendously expensive, but maybe our space elevator cable could be made in our lunar factories out of moon dust. That would certainly be convenient.
There is no way to hide any lack of knowledge
Right, because this is an iterative, custom-fit exam. They assume you generally know your stuff, since you passed the writtens; they don't care about where you're strong, they want to know where you're weak, and how weak you are. As soon as the examiners start to smell the whiff of ignorance in an oral exam, they pursue it mercilessly, and work together to explore the depths of your particular areas of ignorance the same way a tag-team of sadistic dentists will use an array of very small and very sharp bits of steel to dig in and thoroughly explore a bad spot on a tooth. God help you if you give them an especially juicy target to work on, or if you give them more than one.
(Shudders when thinking back on doctoral oral exams.)
To paraphrase, he said that decent tests count the number of right answers you get, but really good tests also count how many times your answer is, "It depends."
Plus the Christians would go nuts, seeing it as a sign of further support for the homosexual agenda.
Huh? What are you talking about? Why would a reference to Xena: Warrior Princess be perceived as support for homosexuality?
Two minutes into the video, and the subtitles are messed up. He didn't say "crowded bathrooms" he said "frequent trips to the bathroom".
I hate it when the translators mess up the subtitles.
Does this make anyone else think of Alpha Centauri? Thermal boreholes give lots of energy, but they raise temperatures in the surrounding 8 sectors - not necessarily a bad thing on Mars.
I don't see any roads, farms, mines or solar collectors, though. You're never going to grow the colony and win the game without farm sectors.
Home fuel-cell installations will be the next big thing for the small guy to make big. The power companies would be wise to start backing them now. Subsidize them, let them get a good base then buy them out.
... buy them out."
"Home fuel-cell installations will be the next big thing for the small guy to make big. The power companies would be wise to
In Soviet Russia, you fight the power.
In Corporate America, the power fights you!
How I did it before I had kids:
1. Open the freezer and take out the 5:1 mixture of Kona mild roast and Kenya AAA dark roast beans, which I stored in an air-tight plastic tub.
2. Measure exactly 1/4 cup of beans into my grinder, add 1 teaspoon of ground chicory, which I stored air-tight but at room temperature.
3. Grind medium fine and pour half into the bleach-free Melita filters in my Braun drip machine.
4. Grind the remainder extra fine and add to the filter.
5. Fill the machine with the filtered water I'd let stand overnight to outgas the chlorine, and start the machine.
6. While coffee is brewing, use a soft-tipped brush to clean out the grinder and put the coffee and chicory away.
7. Pour the coffee into a my very clean mug, reserved just for coffee, just as the pot finishes brewing. Enjoy the appearance, aroma and intense flavor of the first sip, and let the flavor bloom through each subsequent sip.
8. Discard any coffee that's been sitting on the warmer for more than 30 minutes, and make it fresh.
9. Wash pot, filter, lid and mugs by hand with very hot water and a mild Alconox solution, to remove residues. Dry with a soft towel and replace, ready for the next pot.
How I do it now, with four kids:
1. If there isn't any cold coffee left from yesterday, open can of Folger's.
2. Put four or five scoops into the paper filter I got in bulk at Costco, in my Braun drip machine.
3. Fill pot with water straight from the tap. Add to machine. Press button.
4. Feed kids while coffee is brewing.
5. Pour coffee into whatever mug's closest, as soon as I get the chance. Drink. Repeat until either pot is empty, or I have to go to work.
6. Leave empty mug, empty pot on counter. Go to work.
Give the man a prize!
Another suitable crop is known as High-Energy, Multi-use Plant. It grows efficiently, is drought tolerant and produces a wide range of industrially useful materials for food, feed and fiber, including energy-dense oils and resins.
Unfortunately, The Man doesn't want people to grow High-Energy, Multi-use Plant, for some reason...