I'd like a law like this too. If technology ever makes my job obsolete, I plan to stay at home watching TV and receiving payments from my current employer, as mandated by a proposed law intended to preserve the status quo I enjoy today: the "Nerd Employment Preservation Act of 2006".
If we scrape together some money we can easily have this done. Republican Senator Gordon Smith, for example, the genius behind this fair use bill, can be bought for pretty cheap:
Between May 2001 and May 2002, Abramoff wrote three $1,000 checks to Smith, followed by a $2,000 check in June 2002 from one of his main clients, the Mississippi Band of Choctaws. In late October 2002, right before Smith's reelection, while he enjoyed a large lead in the polls over Democrat Bill Bradbury, the senator accepted three more checks totaling $4,000, two from the Mississippi tribe and one from another Abramoff client, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians in California. Since the election, Smith has received two additional checks from Abramoff's Indian clients, totaling $6,000.
Why should record companies get all the status quo preserving laws? If everyone in this thread were to donate $10 to a special PAC, we could probably get the "Nerd Employment Preservation Act of 2006" passed easily. And we could make extra money by taking short positions on the stocks of all our employers before Wall Street finds out about our new law.
Wiretapping also works: the Al Qaeda cell in Italy that was planning to outdo 9-11 was caught by wiretapping.
Oh really now? That was the plan, to "outdo 9-11"? Says who?
Oh, right- the same full-of-shit Italian government that gave us the forged Niger-Uranium documents, and is now listed as the sole source in every article covering this story.
I heard a comment from a mother on the playground this past summer regarding Splenda - apparently it achieves its desired effect by adding a hydroxyl (OH) group to the sucrose molecule.
That mother was wrong- they remove three hydroxyl groups and replace them with chlorines. C-Cl bonds are stable but rarely found in nature. This makes them indigestible and also environmentally persistent.
That 2 volts you get from subtracting potentials on the chart assumes 1M concentrations for both the Cu and Al electrolytes at a temperature of 298K. The real potential from a "tree cell" will be a little different.
A friend of mine had it come on recently. He was behind an old guy when a light turned yellow. It saved his ass but it was the first time he'd ever seen it work. Lots of people are so surprised by the ABS when it comes on for the first time that they unconsciously release the brake.
Lagadonis said tests have generated 0.8 volts to 1.2 volts by driving an aluminum roofing nail half an inch into a tree attached to a copper water pipe driven 7 inches into the ground.
The real source of the power is the aluminum nail, which is converted from its oxide using electricity- massive amounts of electricity. (Remember back in 2000 when aluminum producers started reselling that electricity to California during its power crisis, instead of just making aluminum with it?)
When the nail completely corrodes, the tree will stop "producing electricity" and this company will have moved on to impressing investors with potato clocks.
As I understand it, it should take infinitely long for any bit of matter to cross the event horizon.
No, that's to a distant observer. As you fall in you appear more and more redshifted to him until you reach an infinite redshift at the event horizon and your image appears frozen there. In practice you'd still disappear quickly from the visible spectrum, although in theory you might be visible a few microseconds longer to any observers with an ELF antenna. But in the proper time aboard the ship you fall right through the horizon and reach the singularity in seconds.
Where does this 200,000 years come from?
Probably standard Newtonian stuff: the decay of angular momentum. The gas won't fall in if it has significant angular momentum around the hole. You have to wait for that to be lost somehow, and one way it's lost is by friction. The gas heats up and emits X-rays, which carry off energy and angular momentum. A similar mechanism will make Saturn's rings fall into Saturn in a few hundred million years (as the particles bump into each other, etc). Even without friction, if there is ionization the gas will radiate as the hole flings it around. The losses from X-ray emission are what make the gas eventually fall in.
And, why don't we expect to find a shell of matter frozen around the outside of the event horizon?
Because it fell in and its ghost redshifted away.
I could guess (though they never seem to say) that they're expecting the event horizon itself to grow each time any bit of matter crosses (by whatever means), causing it to engulf just a bit more of the stuff collected just outside, in a positive feedback loop. That seems pretty fragile, particularly for an especially massive hole.
It doesn't grow by that much. The Schwarzchild radius has a linear dependence on black hole mass, about 3 km per solar mass. Unless there's more than one solar mass within 3 km of the horizon it should reach a stable radius.
Can it show why lakes don't freeze from the bottom up as water approaches 0 Celsius?
Freezing water is an example of a first order phase transition, involving a transfer of latent heat across a clearly defined phase boundary. Algorithms have been able to deal with those for some time (or so I assume). The big breakthrough here is that these guys figured out how to model a second order phase transition (i.e phase transitions in a supercritical fluid) without incurring infinite CPU time.
Most people are familiar with first order phase transitions (like melting ice or boiling water) but have never seen a second order phase transition. In general first order phase transitions involve a transfer of latent heat, and are noticeably discontinuous- the two phases are easily distinguishable from each other. Second order phase transitions do not involve a latent heat transfer and there is no abrupt discontinuity during the transition, as they occur above the critical temperature and critical pressure, beyond which the liquid and gas phases are indistinguishable.
The article doesn't explain this at all, but the giveaway here is that the reporter talks about the critical point.
Agreed. Even more, in New York, marchers need permits from the city. How's that for non-violent protest.
That's so they can set up a fenced-in area and call it a "First Amendment Zone". All protest is required to take place inside this fenced-in area. You still have your First Amendment rights, but only inside the fence. They are usually set up a considerable distance away from whatever event is being protested, and reporters are forbidden to speak to or take pictures of anyone inside.
The key to creating heavy elements is a large neutron flux from the supernova. Nuclei pick up lots of neutrons quickly during a time span of a few seconds (shorter than the free neutron half life of 13 minutes) and then undergo a quick succession of beta decays followed by a longer beta decay series over millions of years to form stuff like gold and uranium.
but is there enough energy stored in the 40 degrees F difference between the warm and cold seawater
Ignoring complications introduced by salt, and pretending this is pure water with a heat capacity of 4.184 kJ/kg: calculate the energy that can be extracted by warming a unit volume V of deep water with an equivalent volume V of surface water: Surface water is 80 degrees F or 300K, deep water is 40 degrees F or 278K. Difference is 22K. Heat energy difference is (300-278)K * 4.184 kJ/(kg*K) = 92 kJ/kg. Multiply by Carnot efficiency e=(Th-Tc)/Th = (300-278)/300 = 7.3% 92 kJ/kg * 7.3% = 6.74 kJ/kg extractible energy = 0.00187 kWh/kg theoretical maximum or 1 / 0.00187 (kWh/kg) = 534 kg/kWh = 0.5 cubic meters seawater per kilowatt-hour. Realistically, probably several cubic meters of seawater would need to be pumped per kWh extracted.
Now I'll start pulling some numbers out of my ass. Assume it's 1 cubic meter seawater pumped per kWh (a lowball estimate). A guess for an average household electric bill is 400 kWh/month or 5000 kWh/year, so 5000 cubic meters need to be pumped per house per year. Multiply by a billion households: 5 trillion cubic meters or a cubic volume of water 17 km to an edge. But the ocean isn't 17 km deep. From RTFA I see we are talking about a depth of 1000 meters between hot/cold reservoir depths, so if you naively divide the volume by say 500 meters you get 10 billion square meters of ocean surface area, or 100000 square km (40000 square miles) of ocean that need to be pumped in this way, an area roughly the size of Kentucky per year per billion households. That should give a very very rough idea of the ecological footprint, off by a few orders of magnitude in either direction.
As other posters have noted, when the animal size goes up 2X, volumes increase by 8X while areas only increase 4X. While this causes structural difficulties and joint problems, etc., the most fundamental problem is heat. If a warm-blooded animal gets too big, it will cook itself on the inside just by virtue of the fact that the surface area to volume ratio is insufficient to allow heat to escape. You'd have gorilla au jus.
The parts of the LoTR movie script that he had Fran write are original. Fran didn't seem to care for the books- she talks a lot in the DVD commentary about her improvements on Tolkien's story to "give the audience something to care about". Usually during those scenes everyone hates.
Fran has writing credits in Kong, which is harder to mess up since there is no canonical form of the story for her to deviate from. I haven't seen it but I'm guessing the gorilla-heroine romance gets developed to hell in this version.
Evolution within a species occurs when a great crisis happens: the particular survivor with the resistant genetics to the herbicide will breed with those genes intact.
Not true. A "great crisis" is not necessary for evolution at all. It also happens when hot chicks hang out with guys like me and avoid the likes of you.
A friend of mine got on GMail's shitlist somehow last year, even though she was emailing me from a GMail account herself- which she had gotten from my invite. Every single email from her had the big yellow box warning: "This email may not be from whom it claims to be." Which struck me as funny, since it was essentially tagging email being sent from one GMail account to another. I think she complained to Google and after a few days it went away.
That's not much at all. And that's if you store it uncompressed.
And any compression routine will immediately tokenize the long heavily repeated phrases: "September 11, 2001", "Global War on Terror", "aid and comfort to the enemy", "America's will is strong", "central front in the war on terror", "the American people are safer", "9/11", "we will prevail". There isn't a lot of entropy in this particular dataset.
Seriously, why would anyone make it easier for themselves to be indicted?
So you could assign a different cool ringtone to each charge defined by South Korea's criminal code. You don't want "Slandering the State" to sound too much like a charge of "Obstruction of Business". But most people will probably want to set the ring tone to vibrate anyway, in case they get indicted during an important meeting.
Slashdot Mirror
If we scrape together some money we can easily have this done. Republican Senator Gordon Smith, for example, the genius behind this fair use bill, can be bought for pretty cheap: Why should record companies get all the status quo preserving laws? If everyone in this thread were to donate $10 to a special PAC, we could probably get the "Nerd Employment Preservation Act of 2006" passed easily. And we could make extra money by taking short positions on the stocks of all our employers before Wall Street finds out about our new law.
But the UCLA effort sloppily confuses the two and winds up looking like a blacklist, blowing its credibility in the process.
WTF? If something "winds up looking like a blacklist", it is a blacklist. You blow your own credibility by pretending otherwise.
Wiretapping also works: the Al Qaeda cell in Italy that was planning to outdo 9-11 was caught by wiretapping.
Oh really now? That was the plan, to "outdo 9-11"? Says who?
Oh, right- the same full-of-shit Italian government that gave us the forged Niger-Uranium documents, and is now listed as the sole source in every article covering this story.
And they had to carry up all the fuel for their return trip- now that's a real ballbuster.
I heard a comment from a mother on the playground this past summer regarding Splenda - apparently it achieves its desired effect by adding a hydroxyl (OH) group to the sucrose molecule.
That mother was wrong- they remove three hydroxyl groups and replace them with chlorines. C-Cl bonds are stable but rarely found in nature. This makes them indigestible and also environmentally persistent.
That 2 volts you get from subtracting potentials on the chart assumes 1M concentrations for both the Cu and Al electrolytes at a temperature of 298K. The real potential from a "tree cell" will be a little different.
A friend of mine had it come on recently. He was behind an old guy when a light turned yellow. It saved his ass but it was the first time he'd ever seen it work. Lots of people are so surprised by the ABS when it comes on for the first time that they unconsciously release the brake.
When the nail completely corrodes, the tree will stop "producing electricity" and this company will have moved on to impressing investors with potato clocks.
As I understand it, it should take infinitely long for any bit of matter to cross the event horizon.
No, that's to a distant observer. As you fall in you appear more and more redshifted to him until you reach an infinite redshift at the event horizon and your image appears frozen there. In practice you'd still disappear quickly from the visible spectrum, although in theory you might be visible a few microseconds longer to any observers with an ELF antenna. But in the proper time aboard the ship you fall right through the horizon and reach the singularity in seconds.
Where does this 200,000 years come from?
Probably standard Newtonian stuff: the decay of angular momentum. The gas won't fall in if it has significant angular momentum around the hole. You have to wait for that to be lost somehow, and one way it's lost is by friction. The gas heats up and emits X-rays, which carry off energy and angular momentum. A similar mechanism will make Saturn's rings fall into Saturn in a few hundred million years (as the particles bump into each other, etc). Even without friction, if there is ionization the gas will radiate as the hole flings it around. The losses from X-ray emission are what make the gas eventually fall in.
And, why don't we expect to find a shell of matter frozen around the outside of the event horizon?
Because it fell in and its ghost redshifted away.
I could guess (though they never seem to say) that they're expecting the event horizon itself to grow each time any bit of matter crosses (by whatever means), causing it to engulf just a bit more of the stuff collected just outside, in a positive feedback loop. That seems pretty fragile, particularly for an especially massive hole.
It doesn't grow by that much. The Schwarzchild radius has a linear dependence on black hole mass, about 3 km per solar mass. Unless there's more than one solar mass within 3 km of the horizon it should reach a stable radius.
What makes you think it is in orbit in the first place? It's just basic gravity. Things fall down.
You're drawing a distinction where there is none. That's what an orbit is.
Can it show why lakes don't freeze from the bottom up as water approaches 0 Celsius?
Freezing water is an example of a first order phase transition, involving a transfer of latent heat across a clearly defined phase boundary. Algorithms have been able to deal with those for some time (or so I assume). The big breakthrough here is that these guys figured out how to model a second order phase transition (i.e phase transitions in a supercritical fluid) without incurring infinite CPU time.
Most people are familiar with first order phase transitions (like melting ice or boiling water) but have never seen a second order phase transition. In general first order phase transitions involve a transfer of latent heat, and are noticeably discontinuous- the two phases are easily distinguishable from each other. Second order phase transitions do not involve a latent heat transfer and there is no abrupt discontinuity during the transition, as they occur above the critical temperature and critical pressure, beyond which the liquid and gas phases are indistinguishable.
The article doesn't explain this at all, but the giveaway here is that the reporter talks about the critical point.
Agreed. Even more, in New York, marchers need permits from the city. How's that for non-violent protest.
That's so they can set up a fenced-in area and call it a "First Amendment Zone". All protest is required to take place inside this fenced-in area. You still have your First Amendment rights, but only inside the fence. They are usually set up a considerable distance away from whatever event is being protested, and reporters are forbidden to speak to or take pictures of anyone inside.
It's what the Framers intended.
Give us credit, we've gotten further along than that. Our current knowledge about gravity dates to 1930. Newton didn't know about black holes.
The key to creating heavy elements is a large neutron flux from the supernova. Nuclei pick up lots of neutrons quickly during a time span of a few seconds (shorter than the free neutron half life of 13 minutes) and then undergo a quick succession of beta decays followed by a longer beta decay series over millions of years to form stuff like gold and uranium.
but is there enough energy stored in the 40 degrees F difference between the warm and cold seawater
Ignoring complications introduced by salt, and pretending this is pure water with a heat capacity of 4.184 kJ/kg: calculate the energy that can be extracted by warming a unit volume V of deep water with an equivalent volume V of surface water:
Surface water is 80 degrees F or 300K, deep water is 40 degrees F or 278K. Difference is 22K.
Heat energy difference is (300-278)K * 4.184 kJ/(kg*K) = 92 kJ/kg.
Multiply by Carnot efficiency e=(Th-Tc)/Th = (300-278)/300 = 7.3%
92 kJ/kg * 7.3% = 6.74 kJ/kg extractible energy = 0.00187 kWh/kg theoretical maximum
or 1 / 0.00187 (kWh/kg) = 534 kg/kWh = 0.5 cubic meters seawater per kilowatt-hour.
Realistically, probably several cubic meters of seawater would need to be pumped per kWh extracted.
Now I'll start pulling some numbers out of my ass. Assume it's 1 cubic meter seawater pumped per kWh (a lowball estimate). A guess for an average household electric bill is 400 kWh/month or 5000 kWh/year, so 5000 cubic meters need to be pumped per house per year. Multiply by a billion households: 5 trillion cubic meters or a cubic volume of water 17 km to an edge. But the ocean isn't 17 km deep. From RTFA I see we are talking about a depth of 1000 meters between hot/cold reservoir depths, so if you naively divide the volume by say 500 meters you get 10 billion square meters of ocean surface area, or 100000 square km (40000 square miles) of ocean that need to be pumped in this way, an area roughly the size of Kentucky per year per billion households. That should give a very very rough idea of the ecological footprint, off by a few orders of magnitude in either direction.
Cool! What's its ticker symbol?
As other posters have noted, when the animal size goes up 2X, volumes increase by 8X while areas only increase 4X. While this causes structural difficulties and joint problems, etc., the most fundamental problem is heat. If a warm-blooded animal gets too big, it will cook itself on the inside just by virtue of the fact that the surface area to volume ratio is insufficient to allow heat to escape. You'd have gorilla au jus.
The parts of the LoTR movie script that he had Fran write are original. Fran didn't seem to care for the books- she talks a lot in the DVD commentary about her improvements on Tolkien's story to "give the audience something to care about". Usually during those scenes everyone hates.
Fran has writing credits in Kong, which is harder to mess up since there is no canonical form of the story for her to deviate from. I haven't seen it but I'm guessing the gorilla-heroine romance gets developed to hell in this version.
Just look at the picture of the guy. It says all you need to know. Pretentious, overinflated self-worth, and a (masked) double-chin to boot.
Yeah! And who is this dude whose lap he is sitting on?
Evolution within a species occurs when a great crisis happens: the particular survivor with the resistant genetics to the herbicide will breed with those genes intact.
Not true. A "great crisis" is not necessary for evolution at all. It also happens when hot chicks hang out with guys like me and avoid the likes of you.
And now for something completely different.
A friend of mine got on GMail's shitlist somehow last year, even though she was emailing me from a GMail account herself- which she had gotten from my invite. Every single email from her had the big yellow box warning: "This email may not be from whom it claims to be." Which struck me as funny, since it was essentially tagging email being sent from one GMail account to another. I think she complained to Google and after a few days it went away.
$1 buys you a character. I hope to collect a cool $120 by the time this is all over.
That's not much at all. And that's if you store it uncompressed.
And any compression routine will immediately tokenize the long heavily repeated phrases: "September 11, 2001", "Global War on Terror", "aid and comfort to the enemy", "America's will is strong", "central front in the war on terror", "the American people are safer", "9/11", "we will prevail". There isn't a lot of entropy in this particular dataset.
Seriously, why would anyone make it easier for themselves to be indicted?
So you could assign a different cool ringtone to each charge defined by South Korea's criminal code. You don't want "Slandering the State" to sound too much like a charge of "Obstruction of Business". But most people will probably want to set the ring tone to vibrate anyway, in case they get indicted during an important meeting.