They call this an explosion, and they use tons of TNT as the benchmark. Is it really an explosion?
When those gamma rays strike something, they'll heat it up. If you put that much energy into something that fast, it blows up. The explosion looks and acts almost the same whether the energy source is chemical, nuclear, or gravitational. The instantaneous release of 4 gigajoules of energy in any form looks a lot like a 1-ton TNT explosion.
If anyone were proposing that life existed on the surface of Europa, the presence of a cloud of high-energy particles (aka "radiation") surrounding it might be a problem.
However, most serious proposals for life at Europa suggest that it exists within the liquid water interior of the moon, several kilometers beneath the surface. Radiation will not be a problem there.
These results are irrelevant to the question of life within Europa. The only way it could matter is if free radicals (aka "nasty chemicals") created by the surface radiation could somehow be carried back into the liquid interior.
By the way, if you or your institution subscribes to Nature, you can read the original article (which wisely says nothing about life) here.
Even the coat pattern is different! Then what are the similarities?
Because of some interesting details of cat coat color genetics, clones of calico and tortoiseshell cats are guaranteed to look very different from their genetic parent. Had the researchers chosen to clone any other kind of cat, the clone would appear much more similar to its parent.
I suspect the researchers chose a calico cat specifically to demonstrate that there's more to life than genes.
A quibble regarding the excellent post above: The poster says "The other X chromosome is completely inactive", but actually, the deactivated X chromosome reactivates in the ovaries, so that the eggs all end up with functioning X chromosomes.
The really interesting thing about this is that while Cc is genetically a calico, she looks exactly like a white-patched gray tabby. In all probability, she is the only calico cat on the planet with no orange spots.
Even more interesting, she is probably the only gray cat on the planet who can mate with a gray or black male and give birth to orange kittens!
For a "perfectly normal" cat, Cc is actually a pretty strange critter.
It's arguably Canadian territory. The major straits and passages between islands are wider than 6 miles across: whether they lie entirely within Canadian territorial waters depends on whether you follow the
UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Last I checked, the US and several other nations had not signed this treaty.
And in any case, the UNCLOS exclusively permits all ships the right of "innocent passage" through territorial waters. The right of ships to pass through
"choke points" such as the Bosporus or the Straits of Gibraltar is expressly protected.
I'm not saying that I think the Northwest Passage doesn't belong to Canada. But that claim is open to interpretation, and Canada can't do much to limit the passage of cargo ships (and even nonbelligerent warships) through it.
While 9/10 of an iceberg's mass is below the waterline, it can never "float underwater". It's not like this is rocket science: Archimedes figured this stuff out 2200 years ago. macdaddy, back up your claim.
Macdaddy is also confusing sea ice with icebergs. Sea ice is what's blocking the Northwest Passage: it's frozen seawater. Icebergs are chunks of glaciers which have flowed into the sea and broken off. Arctic sea ice is not transparent: it's full of bubbles and brine pockets, making it translucent/opaque. I've seen it with my own eyes. Icebergs are much more transparent, but this is because the pressure in the glaciers which formed them has squeezed the bubbles shut, not because of some "bottom-up freezing" (whatever that means).
I do research on the
Snowball Earth hypothesis, and macdaddy is off base there too (not to mention off-topic). Snowball Earth sea ice may have been pretty transparent, but my calculations suggest that it would have been hundreds of meters to a kilometer thick. Even if some areas were 60 m thick, that's too thick to permit photosynthesis: you need to find areas with ice 20m thick -- see McKay, 2001: Geophysical Research Letters, 27(14):2153. Ice transparency alone isn't enough to solve the biological objections to the Snowball Earth hypothesis
- A Space Shuttle would need 25 years to travel to Quaoar.
What? The Space Shuttle can't even leave Earth orbit. 25 years for a Hoffman-style rendezvous trajectory sounds reasonable, but the Shuttle can't carry enough fuel to do that.
So let's get this straight: this thing kills enemy fighters by delivering 100 KW of heat. Meanwhile, it delivers 900 KW of heat to the plane firing it.
It's like a gun that shoots nine bullets backward for every bullet it shoots forward.
Ah, you say, but they'll design the fighter to deal with the heat load. Yes, well, you could wear a bulletproof vest while using the nine-bullets-backward gun; that still doesn't make it a good idea.
There's no denying that lasers are more interesting than bullets and missiles, but I've seen no evidence that they're more useful.
...the contextual menu is not required for ANYTHING. By design, there's *nothing* you can do with a contextual menu that you can't do in some other fashion.
What about "Show Package Contents" for an application bundle? It's in the context menu in the Finder, but if there's a menu-bar item for it, I haven't found it.
1) Some have claimed that parent/child relationships will be different enough between mammoths and elephants to mess up the mammoth baby. Note that mammoths and elephants are in the same family, but differ in genus. This is a very close kinship, and the two animals have very similar behavior and appearance. I doubt there'll be a problem -- but we have no way to tell if the mammoth "comes out wrong".
2) Even if a true clone is possible, the state-of-the-art technique won't result in a true 100% mammoth. Assuming they insert a mammoth somatic cell nucleus into an elephant ovum, the resulting creature will have an elephant's ribosomal DNA. Probably not a big deal, but who knows? You can only get real, 100% mammoth if you find a viable mammoth ovum. Pretty unlikely!
No. It sounds to me like "frequency of occurrence" refers to the probability of a particular token in the datastream, and NOT to any sort of Fourier/cosine transform analysis. I.e., "frequency" = "probability" here, not "cycles/second". Basically, they're describing a sort of Huffman or Morse-style encoding.
Evidence
on
Baked Alaska
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I cancelled my Earthlink service over the phone in 5 minutes. I don't remember any complicated phone trees, just a friendly human who cheerfully agreed that getting cable modem was a good reason to cancel my service.
This is a good idea, but not a new one. See, for example, "Mars Crossing", by Geoffrey Landis. It's been discussed on sci.space.tech/policy/science, too.
You have to think carefully about the economics here, though. If a Shuttle trip is worth $20 million/person and you charge $10/ticket, then, factoring in a 50% administrative overhead, you'll need to sell 4 million tickets to break even.
Now, 4 million tickets is peanuts compared to the Big Game and other national lotteries, but there are a lot more people willing and able to receive a gajillion bucks than are willing and able to travel into space.
Finally, big lotteries have progressive payoffs: if a lottery is unpopular and not many people buy tickets, the jackpot is smaller, and the chance of winning lower: this reduces the risk to the people running the lottery.
But for a trip to space, you must award a grand prize (people will be furious otherwise, and you have to schedule the Shuttle ahead of time), and the prize value is constant. If only 100,000 people buy tickets, NASA is totally screwed.
I looked at a titanium wedding ring in a store the other day. It was the wrong size. A gold ring can be stretched or squashed to the right size in no time, but with titanium, forget it!
It was cool to a hold a titanium ring in one hand, and a platinum ring of the same size in the other. The platinum ring weighed down my hand like Frodo-in-Mordor.
The comments saying this is a dangerous thing to do are missing the point. Nobody in their right mind will do this to the hard drive containing their life's work. This is a *toy*, to play around with. Maybe one would use it as a/scratch drive, if you feel like living dangerously.
Sad but true: for many Slashdot readers, a $200 hard drive falls in the category of disposable income, the kind of thing they'd pick up along with a six-pack of batteries and a roll of toilet paper.
For a hard drive manufacturer, if one out of five drives they build go bad, they might go bankrupt. For many Slashdot readers, this is an acceptable risk in the name of having fun.
And please don't bother comparing this to home appendix removal, unless you want to claim that a hard drive crash is as bad as dying of gangrene.
My fiancee is looking for a new machine. We were looking at the old iMacs -- the power and price-point were right on, but she didn't like the lumpy shape, and wanted a flat-panel display.
And today, I read about this new Imac. Perfect!
Now we just need to find the best way to hook up a minidisk recorder to it, so she can burn CDs of her concert performances.
I've been considering buying a few Loki games in the last few months. If I don't do so now, I may never get a chance. And certainly people here are suggesting that we all help bail Loki out.
I know almost zero about Chapter 11, but I do know it means that a company doesn't necessarily have to pay its debts to all its creditors. Is it possible for Loki to take my money and not send me my game? Unlikely, I'm sure, but is it possible?
I'm sure they can fail to ship me the game if they actually go out of business. If the Ch11 thing doesn't go well, how soon could that happen?
I know Slashdot is a lousy place to ask this sort of legal question, but given the current economic climate in the tech industry, I suspect some people know a fair bit about this sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
When those gamma rays strike something, they'll heat it up. If you put that much energy into something that fast, it blows up. The explosion looks and acts almost the same whether the energy source is chemical, nuclear, or gravitational. The instantaneous release of 4 gigajoules of energy in any form looks a lot like a 1-ton TNT explosion.
You shouldn't. But there are millions of customers with more money and less masochism than you.
Because a Bug is an easily-identifiable object which weighs very close to one ton.
These days, since the New Beetle weighs over 1.5 tons, one might use a Mini for comparison. But the Old Bug has become traditional.
However, most serious proposals for life at Europa suggest that it exists within the liquid water interior of the moon, several kilometers beneath the surface. Radiation will not be a problem there.
These results are irrelevant to the question of life within Europa. The only way it could matter is if free radicals (aka "nasty chemicals") created by the surface radiation could somehow be carried back into the liquid interior.
By the way, if you or your institution subscribes to Nature, you can read the original article (which wisely says nothing about life) here.
Because of some interesting details of cat coat color genetics, clones of calico and tortoiseshell cats are guaranteed to look very different from their genetic parent. Had the researchers chosen to clone any other kind of cat, the clone would appear much more similar to its parent.
I suspect the researchers chose a calico cat specifically to demonstrate that there's more to life than genes.
The really interesting thing about this is that while Cc is genetically a calico, she looks exactly like a white-patched gray tabby. In all probability, she is the only calico cat on the planet with no orange spots.
Even more interesting, she is probably the only gray cat on the planet who can mate with a gray or black male and give birth to orange kittens!
For a "perfectly normal" cat, Cc is actually a pretty strange critter.
And in any case, the UNCLOS exclusively permits all ships the right of "innocent passage" through territorial waters. The right of ships to pass through "choke points" such as the Bosporus or the Straits of Gibraltar is expressly protected.
I'm not saying that I think the Northwest Passage doesn't belong to Canada. But that claim is open to interpretation, and Canada can't do much to limit the passage of cargo ships (and even nonbelligerent warships) through it.
While 9/10 of an iceberg's mass is below the waterline, it can never "float underwater". It's not like this is rocket science: Archimedes figured this stuff out 2200 years ago. macdaddy, back up your claim.
Macdaddy is also confusing sea ice with icebergs. Sea ice is what's blocking the Northwest Passage: it's frozen seawater. Icebergs are chunks of glaciers which have flowed into the sea and broken off. Arctic sea ice is not transparent: it's full of bubbles and brine pockets, making it translucent/opaque. I've seen it with my own eyes. Icebergs are much more transparent, but this is because the pressure in the glaciers which formed them has squeezed the bubbles shut, not because of some "bottom-up freezing" (whatever that means).
I do research on the Snowball Earth hypothesis, and macdaddy is off base there too (not to mention off-topic). Snowball Earth sea ice may have been pretty transparent, but my calculations suggest that it would have been hundreds of meters to a kilometer thick. Even if some areas were 60 m thick, that's too thick to permit photosynthesis: you need to find areas with ice 20m thick -- see McKay, 2001: Geophysical Research Letters, 27(14):2153. Ice transparency alone isn't enough to solve the biological objections to the Snowball Earth hypothesis
Amtrak already does this, depending on your definition of "cheaply".
What? The Space Shuttle can't even leave Earth orbit. 25 years for a Hoffman-style rendezvous trajectory sounds reasonable, but the Shuttle can't carry enough fuel to do that.
It's like a gun that shoots nine bullets backward for every bullet it shoots forward.
Ah, you say, but they'll design the fighter to deal with the heat load. Yes, well, you could wear a bulletproof vest while using the nine-bullets-backward gun; that still doesn't make it a good idea.
There's no denying that lasers are more interesting than bullets and missiles, but I've seen no evidence that they're more useful.
What about "Show Package Contents" for an application bundle? It's in the context menu in the Finder, but if there's a menu-bar item for it, I haven't found it.
1) Some have claimed that parent/child relationships will be different enough between mammoths and elephants to mess up the mammoth baby. Note that mammoths and elephants are in the same family, but differ in genus. This is a very close kinship, and the two animals have very similar behavior and appearance. I doubt there'll be a problem -- but we have no way to tell if the mammoth "comes out wrong". 2) Even if a true clone is possible, the state-of-the-art technique won't result in a true 100% mammoth. Assuming they insert a mammoth somatic cell nucleus into an elephant ovum, the resulting creature will have an elephant's ribosomal DNA. Probably not a big deal, but who knows? You can only get real, 100% mammoth if you find a viable mammoth ovum. Pretty unlikely!
A good story, but there's no way to check whether it's true.
My colleagues often informally refer to a paper like this, in which the famous author isn't first, as "et al and Schneier."
Also note that in some fields, the last author denotes the senior scientist who runs the lab and/or provides the funding and direction.
You can't find exact mathematical solutions, but you can certainly run an accurate computer simulation for many, many years.
In any case, since the mass of the spacecraft is negligible, this isn't the full 3-body problem.
Dark matter is only important on galactic scales. We know where all the (important) mass in the solar system is.
No. It sounds to me like "frequency of occurrence" refers to the probability of a particular token in the datastream, and NOT to any sort of Fourier/cosine transform analysis. I.e., "frequency" = "probability" here, not "cycles/second". Basically, they're describing a sort of Huffman or Morse-style encoding.
There's no way to summarize decades of detailed research in a short Slashdot post. Read the The summary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment report. It should provide you with plenty of non-anecdotal evidence.
I cancelled my Earthlink service over the phone in 5 minutes. I don't remember any complicated phone trees, just a friendly human who cheerfully agreed that getting cable modem was a good reason to cancel my service.
You have to think carefully about the economics here, though. If a Shuttle trip is worth $20 million/person and you charge $10/ticket, then, factoring in a 50% administrative overhead, you'll need to sell 4 million tickets to break even.
Now, 4 million tickets is peanuts compared to the Big Game and other national lotteries, but there are a lot more people willing and able to receive a gajillion bucks than are willing and able to travel into space.
Finally, big lotteries have progressive payoffs: if a lottery is unpopular and not many people buy tickets, the jackpot is smaller, and the chance of winning lower: this reduces the risk to the people running the lottery.
But for a trip to space, you must award a grand prize (people will be furious otherwise, and you have to schedule the Shuttle ahead of time), and the prize value is constant. If only 100,000 people buy tickets, NASA is totally screwed.
I looked at a titanium wedding ring in a store the other day. It was the wrong size. A gold ring can be stretched or squashed to the right size in no time, but with titanium, forget it!
It was cool to a hold a titanium ring in one hand, and a platinum ring of the same size in the other. The platinum ring weighed down my hand like Frodo-in-Mordor.
The comments saying this is a dangerous thing to do are missing the point. Nobody in their right mind will do this to the hard drive containing their life's work. This is a *toy*, to play around with. Maybe one would use it as a /scratch drive, if you feel like living dangerously.
Sad but true: for many Slashdot readers, a $200 hard drive falls in the category of disposable income, the kind of thing they'd pick up along with a six-pack of batteries and a roll of toilet paper.
For a hard drive manufacturer, if one out of five drives they build go bad, they might go bankrupt. For many Slashdot readers, this is an acceptable risk in the name of having fun.
And please don't bother comparing this to home appendix removal, unless you want to claim that a hard drive crash is as bad as dying of gangrene.
My fiancee is looking for a new machine. We were looking at the old iMacs -- the power and price-point were right on, but she didn't like the lumpy shape, and wanted a flat-panel display.
And today, I read about this new Imac. Perfect!
Now we just need to find the best way to hook up a minidisk recorder to it, so she can burn CDs of her concert performances.
I know almost zero about Chapter 11, but I do know it means that a company doesn't necessarily have to pay its debts to all its creditors. Is it possible for Loki to take my money and not send me my game? Unlikely, I'm sure, but is it possible?
I'm sure they can fail to ship me the game if they actually go out of business. If the Ch11 thing doesn't go well, how soon could that happen?
I know Slashdot is a lousy place to ask this sort of legal question, but given the current economic climate in the tech industry, I suspect some people know a fair bit about this sort of thing.