Heck.. medical science STILL cant tell you _why_ it works, just that it does.
Urban legend. Try googling "How Aspirin works" The entire line of COX-2 inhibitors came about because someone finally did figure out aspirin works a couple of decades ago. Before that time, there wasn't much need to. Aspirin was on the FDA's GRAS list, so it was not a big candidate for major research dollars.
Uh, no. There were no dynanometers at the Port Chicago explosion, so we are relying on perceived damage. If that is the only measure we are allowed to use, then the Nagasaki bomb would be considered a weaker bomb than the Hiroshima one. Tall Boy did considerably more damage than Fat Man, despite the fact that Fat Man had 50% more yield.
Fuel-air explosions are also extremely powerful. Due to the way that the fireball forms, they are also incredibly destructive for their nominal explosive yield. It would not be surprising to find a fast analysis mistaking a fuel-air detontation for a low-yield nuke, particularly if the observation was made from orbit.
As an example of what a small fuel-air explosion can do, see if you can find a reference to the loss of the carrier Taiho during the Battle of the Phillipine Sea. It was lost to fuel-air explosion triggered by poor damage control. I also remember an account of a liquid propane traincar derailment someplace in the South that essentially wiped a town off the map, a la Hiroshima. Unfortunately, I don't remember enough detail to find it in Google. I used it an example in a high school debate on nuclear power safety many moons ago.
Don't forget that in europe public transportation generally works, and people rarely have as far to go anyway.
Give that man a cee-gar. The two go hand in hand. Most of the countries in Europe are smaller in land area than most states. The higher population density makes mass-transit more effective.
This from a person who does not own a car and takes public transit every day. If I didn't live and work in the DC/Maryland area, this would be totally impossible.
I've seen Hidden Fortress. I've seen Rashomon, which is one of the best movies ever made. Kurosawa is a genius.
I've also read The Postman. I've read Earth. Neither of them rise to the level of literature, I'm afraid. Mediocre source material should have yielded a mediocre movie, but in the case of The Postman we got even less than that.
I firmly believe that film students will be studying Kurosawa 50 or 100 years from now. I'm equally confident that literature students won't be reading Brin.
Like Brin's Movies Are Any Better
on
David Brin On LOTR
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· Score: 1, Troll
C'mon, it's obvious that Brin is just upset that the movies made from his stories didn't make the kind of money that LOTR or Star Wars (another movie he's written rants on) did. I call it sour grapes because The Postman really was a fetid, steaming, pile of crap.
We are talking climate change that might affect an entire hemisphere of the planet here. No crater's going to be that big. Mars does have significant gravity and holds a decent, if a little thin atmosphere. We are talking about events that take a few hundred years to complete. An eyeblink in geologic time, but not as quick as ten minutes after the impact.
If a bolide impact at the end of the Cretaceous can so alter the Earth's climate for long enough to drive an entire order to extinction (Dinosauria), then a similar impact on Mars could certainly give it liquid water for a few decades.
A big enough impact can easily impart enough energy to warm the surrounding area for a few hundred years, particularly if it fractured the crust and allowed a significant magma eruption to occur.
Objects with the kind of mass the article is talking about are relatively rare now, but it is thought that they were abundant in hte early solar system. Over the billions of years, the planets have kind of swept up most of the debris that crosses their orbits. Nature likes a tidy orbital plane.
The single biggest constraint on the Apollo 13 lunar module was the amount of cooling water on board to keep the systems at their operational temperatures. In a vaccum, you don't get any convective cooling, and radiation is extremely inefficient. At one point, they were looking at re-using the astronaut's urine in the cooling systems, but it turned out that it was unnecessary.
Zero-g is also a factor. Lovell actually commented in his debriefing that you could get warmer if you didn't move. A small blanket of warm air would form around you, and since there was not much to move it around (all the fans being shut off) it would just stay there. Then you'd move and you'd be freezing again.
Must not have been an IBM mainframe, since the article makes the point that not only will the latest ZSeries mainframe run 24 bit code from the sixties without recompiling, it will even run the 60's Operating System(s) without recompiling.
If they'd stuck with Big Blue, they could have just swapped the hardware for something newer.
As an aside, I find a lot of people are confused about just what a mainframe is. Even at it's most complicated, a VAXCluster or a Data General machine was still just a mini. They lacked the hardware redundancy and pure I/O throughput of something like a 390. Mainframes are aimed at the business market, which cares far more about I/O performance. Most of the arithmetic that they're doing is still probably packed decimal for Bob's sake. Vector units and floating point units don't really matter when you're handling inventory and cash transactions.
Re:Einstein on a bicycle
on
Einstein Unveiled
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· Score: 4, Informative
I don't see how he could have been "often" seen at CalTech doing anything, since he spent the bulk of his time in the United States at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He did visit the left coast on occasion, and apparently the picture you cite was taken during one of those visits.
Duh.. They know how prion-based disease is transmitted.
Are you suggesting that these deer and elk have turned cannibal? There has to be another method of spread or, as someone else has noted, this may not be prion-based at all.
Re:Before we all start siding with the underdog...
on
Phoenix To Change Name
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· Score: 2
Might I remark that the BIOS manufacturer also has no right to the name, since a very successful city in the Southwest has been building their brand for even longer? I'm sure the city uses electronics, and probably even has a web page. Why should I get a boring BIOS manufacturer when I'm trying to plan a vacation? Where does this stop?
Personally, I'd think about naming it Cardinal, since it's being forced to move from Phoenix. The only problem is, it doesn't suck.
beside's the usual answer: "because i can do it !"
I'm curious why you think that there needs to be any other answer than that. Now if he started a business to sell these things, I would question his sanity.
And yes, I have stood up against management that way.
I'm suprised that you're still employed. As the lawyers have described it to me, it's perfectly OK for your employer to say, "OK, go collect your last paycheck then." If you work in an at-will state and are not under a Union contract, you're gone. No legal recourse whatsoever and a hell of a lot of explaining to do at your next job interview. You might even be unable to collect unemployment, since you were fired for cause (insubordination, to be precise).
That also doesn't cover the situation where John Law walks in after hours and serves a warrant on your desk. With that statement in the book, your employer is legally covered when they say "go ahead." Again, you have no recourse, since you agreed the "no expectation of privacy" statement in hte handbook when you accepted a paycheck.
I would suggest that you read your employee handbook, especially the section entitled "No Expectation of Privacy" and then re-think whether or not you want your personal data locked up in a work-provided facility.
In related news, NASA has announced a followup test to determine the problem in the Delta IV guidance system. To facilitate tracking, the new orbit will have a different inclination, with several passes over Pyongang.
I think your humor detector may need a little fine tuning. I think he was referring to the fact that this is an incredibly complex piece of software, written by people We Really Should Not Trust. Who knows what else might be lurking in there, particularly if it has to be compiled as root?
Now since he's released the tools as source, I doubt that there's anything particularly nasty in there. Paranoia is still a virtue in the sysadmin business, however.
He was the guy who slammed you up against the lockers.
Right up until he tried to shove Billy Gates into a locker, evidently. Billy paid his friends to give Scot a major swirly on Wall Street.
Re:Creepy...
on
Book on NR-1
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· Score: 4, Interesting
True, but at the depths NR-1 is capable of operating at, the pressure is so great that small leak comes in with enough force to sever a finger or even an arm like a band saw would. It's designed for deeper diving than the typical fast-attack, although not as deep as a specialized deep-diver like Alvin.
Slashdot Mirror
Urban legend. Try googling "How Aspirin works" The entire line of COX-2 inhibitors came about because someone finally did figure out aspirin works a couple of decades ago. Before that time, there wasn't much need to. Aspirin was on the FDA's GRAS list, so it was not a big candidate for major research dollars.
Fuel-air explosions are also extremely powerful. Due to the way that the fireball forms, they are also incredibly destructive for their nominal explosive yield. It would not be surprising to find a fast analysis mistaking a fuel-air detontation for a low-yield nuke, particularly if the observation was made from orbit.
As an example of what a small fuel-air explosion can do, see if you can find a reference to the loss of the carrier Taiho during the Battle of the Phillipine Sea. It was lost to fuel-air explosion triggered by poor damage control. I also remember an account of a liquid propane traincar derailment someplace in the South that essentially wiped a town off the map, a la Hiroshima. Unfortunately, I don't remember enough detail to find it in Google. I used it an example in a high school debate on nuclear power safety many moons ago.
Never piss off the trees. Saruman learned that the hard way.
Why should the OS let an unhandled exception in a userland app crash the entire box? Bad design decision.
Give that man a cee-gar. The two go hand in hand. Most of the countries in Europe are smaller in land area than most states. The higher population density makes mass-transit more effective.
This from a person who does not own a car and takes public transit every day. If I didn't live and work in the DC/Maryland area, this would be totally impossible.
I've also read The Postman. I've read Earth. Neither of them rise to the level of literature, I'm afraid. Mediocre source material should have yielded a mediocre movie, but in the case of The Postman we got even less than that.
I firmly believe that film students will be studying Kurosawa 50 or 100 years from now. I'm equally confident that literature students won't be reading Brin.
C'mon, it's obvious that Brin is just upset that the movies made from his stories didn't make the kind of money that LOTR or Star Wars (another movie he's written rants on) did. I call it sour grapes because The Postman really was a fetid, steaming, pile of crap.
If a bolide impact at the end of the Cretaceous can so alter the Earth's climate for long enough to drive an entire order to extinction (Dinosauria), then a similar impact on Mars could certainly give it liquid water for a few decades.
Objects with the kind of mass the article is talking about are relatively rare now, but it is thought that they were abundant in hte early solar system. Over the billions of years, the planets have kind of swept up most of the debris that crosses their orbits. Nature likes a tidy orbital plane.
Zero-g is also a factor. Lovell actually commented in his debriefing that you could get warmer if you didn't move. A small blanket of warm air would form around you, and since there was not much to move it around (all the fans being shut off) it would just stay there. Then you'd move and you'd be freezing again.
Uh, really? Debian Official ISO Mirrors
As an aside, I find a lot of people are confused about just what a mainframe is. Even at it's most complicated, a VAXCluster or a Data General machine was still just a mini. They lacked the hardware redundancy and pure I/O throughput of something like a 390. Mainframes are aimed at the business market, which cares far more about I/O performance. Most of the arithmetic that they're doing is still probably packed decimal for Bob's sake. Vector units and floating point units don't really matter when you're handling inventory and cash transactions.
There are some interesting memories of Einstein in John Archibald Wheeler's Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics. Wheeler was also Feynman's thesis adviser.
And the Lone Gunmen buy the farm.
Are you suggesting that these deer and elk have turned cannibal? There has to be another method of spread or, as someone else has noted, this may not be prion-based at all.
Might I remark that the BIOS manufacturer also has no right to the name, since a very successful city in the Southwest has been building their brand for even longer? I'm sure the city uses electronics, and probably even has a web page. Why should I get a boring BIOS manufacturer when I'm trying to plan a vacation? Where does this stop? Personally, I'd think about naming it Cardinal, since it's being forced to move from Phoenix. The only problem is, it doesn't suck.
I'm curious why you think that there needs to be any other answer than that. Now if he started a business to sell these things, I would question his sanity.
no, that idea sucks.
Bag it already...
I'm suprised that you're still employed. As the lawyers have described it to me, it's perfectly OK for your employer to say, "OK, go collect your last paycheck then." If you work in an at-will state and are not under a Union contract, you're gone. No legal recourse whatsoever and a hell of a lot of explaining to do at your next job interview. You might even be unable to collect unemployment, since you were fired for cause (insubordination, to be precise).
That also doesn't cover the situation where John Law walks in after hours and serves a warrant on your desk. With that statement in the book, your employer is legally covered when they say "go ahead." Again, you have no recourse, since you agreed the "no expectation of privacy" statement in hte handbook when you accepted a paycheck.
I would suggest that you read your employee handbook, especially the section entitled "No Expectation of Privacy" and then re-think whether or not you want your personal data locked up in a work-provided facility.
In related news, NASA has announced a followup test to determine the problem in the Delta IV guidance system. To facilitate tracking, the new orbit will have a different inclination, with several passes over Pyongang.
Now since he's released the tools as source, I doubt that there's anything particularly nasty in there. Paranoia is still a virtue in the sysadmin business, however.
He was the guy who slammed you up against the lockers. Right up until he tried to shove Billy Gates into a locker, evidently. Billy paid his friends to give Scot a major swirly on Wall Street.
Neither job is for the risk-adverse, I'm afraid.