The price for building the SSC was a small fraction of the cost for even the limited International Space Station we actually built, much less the original planned ISN they kept in the budget the year Congress axed the SSC. Spending a few billion on the SSC, which was guaranteed to either give us the Higgs boson or prove the Standard Model wrong (the exciting if unlikely option) and thus provide some new basic science strikes me as a much better investment than tens of billions on the politically motivated ISN. I'm willing to invest money on real space science (Hubble, Galileo, many others), but too much money that supposedly for science goes to political stunts like the Moon landing instead of projects of actual scientific value. I'm not sure how practical generating power on the moon is and beaming power down has obvious security implications.
For the poster who asked about how old the Standard Model is and why we haven't seen applications, the Standard Model was created in the 1970's so it's very young by physics standards. We're just beginning to deal with the implications of quantum mechanics for silicon chips and the basics of that area of physics were established in the 1920's. Technology lags physics by a substantial amount of time. However, the physics of particle accelerators themselves has led to enormous advances in medicine and manufacturing as such techniques are used to look inside the human body for disease as well as inside microprocessors for defects, so it's been far from useless even from a shortsighted perspective.
Re:Good, Original SF Recommendations
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Farscape is Back
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· Score: 1
I cannot even begin to devise a plan of action for how to start to express my extreme shock that Iain M. Banks is inexplicably not on your list.
I'm not sure how to explain his absence either, especially as I was sitting not more than a couple meters from my nearly complete Iain Banks collection when I wrote the post. His Consider Phlebas, Against a Dark Background, and many others should be on the list too.
Good, Original SF Recommendations
on
Farscape is Back
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· Score: 5, Informative
I think science fiction is in its golden age today, both in terms of interesting well-developed ideas and in terms of the quality of writing. Here are some relatively recent novels that focus on interesting ideas that I'd recommend:
Stephen Baxter's Ring, Manifold:Time, Anti-Ice
Greg Egan's Quarantine, Diaspora, Distress, and Permutation City
Ian MacDonald's Terminal Cafe and Evolution's Shore
Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space
Rudy Rucker's Software and sequels, which are the weirdest fiction I've encountered since Phillip K Dick
S.M. Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time
Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South, Agent of Byzantium, and World War series
Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky
Robert Charles Wilson's Chronoliths and Bios
David Zindell's Neverness
For short stories, the Year's Best SF series edited by David Hartwell is quite good. Stephen Baxter and especially Greg Egan have amazing short story collections fo their own. If you know a good used bookstore, I'd also highly recommend John Varley's short story collections (most published under several titles). He's not a bad novelist, but he's incredible in short fiction.
Now tell me, sir, when and how did you make the land on which your house is built, which I presume you claim to own?
Despite your presumable attempt at sarcasm, you've brought up an excellent question. Whereas property rights for objects that you've made seem reasonable, it's more difficult to argue for ownership of lang. In fact, throughout US history, if you left the land fallow and didn't improve it, someone could squat on the land, improve it by farming it or building on it, and thus gain ownership. I'm not sure how well the courts support such laws today, but to the best of my knowledge, they haven't been repealed.
I switched from Slackware to RHL version 2.0 a long time ago, and while I've considered Fedora, this change has prompted me to think about switching distributions. I like what I've read about Debian's apt-get and I like using FreeBSD's ports system at work, plus I want to be a bit more current with certain packages so I'm planning to give Gentoo a try.
My gripe is that I have to work 146 out of the 365 days per year to support people who are too lazy or too stupid to support themselves.
The thing is that you don't. Nowhere near 30% (approximately 146 out of 365) of your income goes to support people who can't support themselves. Even if you're paying 60% of your income in taxes, which is unlikely, that would assume that half of the taxes you pay go to support such people which simply isn't true. About that much actually is going to "defense," so you could gripe about that wasted money if you're so included though.
As for the decline in achievement post 1800... that's probably because all the low-hanging fruit are gone.
As we develop new areas of science and mathematics, we find new branches of low-hanging fruit of which we were previously unaware, so this statement is not true in general. For example, when Feynman and Schwinger figured out how to regularize quantum field theory calculations in QED (for which they received the Nobel prize), they made a wide array of previously unsolvable particle physics problems into low hanging fruit, generating a burst of research in the field for the next few decades.
However, such opportunities are rarer in the arts. It's no surprise that someone like Shakespeare appeared during the particular time period when he wrote. He was lucky to be born at a time when the field of English-language plays was emerging and took advantage of that fact to pick plenty of the low-hanging fruit. The same is true for the other great Renaissance artists. Today's artists have to reach much higher to find any fruit.
Not a single sole in the United States could give a flying rats ass about what some Kiwi newspaper has to say about 9/11
It's not just the sole. Most salmon in the US don't pay attention to newspapers in NZ either. The kind of attitudes today's schools are producing are just shameful.
While the Taiwan giant TSMC dominates the ASIC production business (though they do build some of their chips in fabs in Oregon), Taiwanese companies don't have a similar level of market penetration into the microprocessor space. Intel is by far the largest manufacturer of desktop microprocessors and the vast majority of its microprocessor fabs are located in the US (Arizona, California, and Oregon, with smaller concentrations in MA, NM, UT, and WA), though it does have some in Malaysia.
While Intel does have fabs in China and Israel, they don't manufacture microprocessors in them. They do ASICs (ethernet, etc), chipsets, and flash memory. The other microprocessor companies like IBM and AMD also manufacture many microprocessors in the US, though I don't know about their fab distribution as well as I know Intel's.
One of the problems we have, is when you have clusters with 100+ machines, and need to push configs, or gather stats off each box.
On solaris, we run a script called "shout" that does a for/next loop that ssh's into each box and runs a command for us. We also have one called "Scream" which does some root privilege ssh enabled commands.
While the serial approach of looping through machines is a huge improvement over making changes by hand, for large scale environments, you need to use a parallel approach, with 16 processes or so contacting machines in parallel. I wrote my own script, but these days the Parallel::ForkManager module for perl does the process management part for you.
There are many good reasons for objecting to the concentration of power, economic or otherwise, but this is a new one for me. It makes sense, but I'm curious as to whether you've read this elsewhere. Have any historians or economists investigated this effect?
You could fit 6 billion people into Texas, and it would be less densly packed than Tokyo, Japan.
While this statement is true, it's disingenuous as a reply to population concerns. When people talk about population problems, they aren't worried about the amount of physical space each person takes up. After all, billions of people could fit on the small island of Zanzibar, as the classic SF novel Stand on Zanzibar points out.
The real issue is whether people consume resources faster than they can be replentished, which is an obvious problem in many areas ranging from water rights in the American West to the depletion of fisheries. Unfortunately, what's not obvious is precisely where those resource limits are in general. After all, you can build desalination plants to make more fresh water, but that diverts a substantial amount of energy and money from other areas. The Earth's biosystem and humanity's changing technological capabilities combine to create a complex system for which we cannot make certain predictions to the degree of precision we need to determine the planet's carrying capacity.
So what would you prefer? $1.00 per album on 2 million sales? Or $7 on 30k of albums (and STILL have to split songwriting with Harry Fox doing the accounting and taking their chunk because they bill ya directly because you don't work with a label)?
Sure, I'd like to win the music lottery and get the two million dollars, but you also have to ask the question of what's your chance of becoming that music lottery millionaire? Would musicians as a group be better off if there wasn't a lottery and so there were a larger number of musicians selling 30k albums instead of a tiny fraction of them selling millions and most of the rest nothing?
You have a good point about how music has been different historically than it is in the modern era. It was the rise of the technologies of broadcasting and mass reproducing recordings that led to the rise of music being a big money industry, but what one technology gives, another can take away. Modern computers and networking have made the broadcasting and mass production of information into activities almost anyone can do, eliminating the former exclusivity of such activities that made them so profitable.
The interesting aspect of Bujold's SF is not her space battles (read David Weber's Honor Harrington books if you're into that) but her biological technologies (uterine replicators, genetic engineering from chromosomal-level sex changes to producing new species) and how well she describes their impact on society. Her focus is on Barrayar, a planet formerly isolated from the wider human civilization but which is working feverishly to catch up in much the way Japan did after it emerged from its isolation in the 19th century. Barrayar is a feudal society overlaid with a new parliamentary democracy, with vastly more military technology than civilian. Yet for all the power of the men and their weapons, their society is changing out from under them as the women gain access to advanced genetic technologies, including one woman who challenges her cousin's succession by becoming a man and thus gaining a place for herself despite the rule of male primogeniture.
The funny thing is, people were claiming that the war in Afghanistan was about oil, yet their only argument for that claim was that the US wanted this pipeline. Two years later, where's the pipeline?
They're working on it. Multibillion dollar deals don't happen overnight, especially when they have to get three countries to agree on them and deal with an ongoing war in one of the countries.
At the end of 2002, Afghan President (and UNOCOL consultant) Khamid Karzai signed an agreement with the leaders of Turkmenistan and Pakistan to begin building a 1500km trans-Afghan gas pipeline to Multan where it will join to an existing pipeline that will take it to a port in Pakistan. Here is a link to the story at the BBC. The preliminary cost of the project is $2-3.2 billion. I suspect that the lack of US control outside of the cities of Afghanistan is the reason that large scale construction hasn't begun.
Why is the pipeline important? Well, it's estimated that 16% of the world's petroleum reserves are in the Caspian Sea region. Today, only a small amount of that oil and gas is extracted for use by nearby countries because there are no major pipelines to take it to the global markets. The best routes for a pipeline go through Russia, which the West doesn't want, Iran, which the West also dislikes, or Afghanistan and Pakistan. As the previous poster mentioned, UNOCOL gave up on the pipeline project in 1998. They couldn't get the Taliban to give them what they want. Afghanistan's government is quite different after the US invasion and wants to go ahead with the pipeline.
There's another factor why the US is worried about control of Middle Eastern oil resources. Currency. Saddam made quite a profit when he started trading his oil in euros instead of dollars in 2000. Other OPEC countries like Iran are thinking about using euros instead of dollars. This may not seem important on the face of it, but the use of American currency as a standard medium of exchange is a great source of American power, one of the cornerstones of American dominance of international finance, as it was for the British before the World Wars. Other countries using dollars allows the US to export its inflation by printing more money and issuing treasury bonds at low interest rates and also helps the US to avoid facing the consequences of its large trade deficit.
For a literate and entertaining look at the concepts of calculus, I highly recommend David Berlinski's A Tour of the Calculus. It won't teach you how to solve problems, but it will teach you the concepts behind limits, differentiation, and integration along with the important theorems and their proofs.
While I agree that copyright is an important concept for protecting authors and creating new works, I think that file sharing is a complex question. Tim O'Reilly has some insightful thoughts on the true economic consequences of file sharing in his article Piracy is Progressive Taxation. I've quoted parts of the first two lessons, which I think are most relevant to this issue, below:
Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Let me start with book publishing. More than 100,000 books are published each year, with several million books in print, yet fewer than 10,000 of those new books have any significant sales, and only a hundred thousand or so of all the books in print are carried in even the largest stores. Most books have a few months on the shelves of the major chains, and then wait in the darkness of warehouses from which they will move only to the recycling bin....
Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
For all of these creative artists, most laboring in obscurity, being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement. Piracy is a kind of progressive taxation, which may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven), in exchange for massive benefits to the far greater number for whom exposure may lead to increased revenues.
Our current distribution systems for books, music, and movies are skewed heavily in favor of the "haves" against the "have nots." A few high-profile products receive the bulk of the promotional budget and are distributed in large quantities; the majority depend, in the words of Tennessee Williams' character Blanche DuBois, "on the kindness of strangers."
Our current distribution systems for books, music, and movies are skewed heavily in favor of the "haves" against the "have nots." A few high-profile products receive the bulk of the promotional budget and are distributed in large quantities; the majority depend, in the words of Tennessee Williams' character Blanche DuBois, "on the kindness of strangers."
Lowering the barriers to entry in distribution, and the continuous availability of the entire catalog rather than just the most popular works, is good for artists, since it gives them a chance to build their own reputation and visibility, working with entrepreneurs of the new medium who will be the publishers and distributors of tomorrow.
I have watched my 19 year-old daughter and her friends sample countless bands on Napster and Kazaa and, enthusiastic for their music, go out to purchase CDs. My daughter now owns more CDs than I have collected in a lifetime of less exploratory listening. What's more, she has introduced me to her favorite music, and I too have bought CDs as a result. And no, she isn't downloading Britney Spears, but forgotten bands from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, as well as their musical forebears in other genres. This is music that is difficult to find -- except online -- but, once found, leads to a focused search for CDs, records, and other artifacts. eBay is doing a nice business with much of this material, even if the RIAA fails to see the opportunity.
Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
I'll stop quoting here to stay within fair use limits and let you read the remainder of the article from the link.
The USSR certainly said it existed in 1918, and of course that's what matters as far as the impact of the US invasion on Soviet feelings about the US military. How did the US feel after the Revolutionary War about the British military? I'll give you a hint--the US didn't shrug and say "Oh well, they didn't recognize our independence so we're not upset by the war from 1776-1783." That's why it doesn't matter to this argument when other countries recognized the Soviet government.
The Armistice agreement in the East was signed between Germany and the Russian Czar. What does that have to do with the US? Absolutely nothing - thanks for noticing.
I'm talking about the Armistice Agreement in the West. Read what I posted, including the references.
You make an inane assertion like the American involvement in events after WWI caused the cold war to be prolonged.
I did not and do not assert that. Please try to argue with what I actually said, not a strawman of your own devising.
You back it up with statements that are either false or are delberately twisted.
You're the one who is spouting falsehoods and twisting the facts to suit yourself. Claiming that no US invasion occurred because it was small or under Allied command is what's completely disingenous.
I haven't assigned blame, but rather pointed out that a certain foreign policy decision may not have been as effective as claimed. I don't understand why a simple expression of doubt generates such hostility.
Many governments justify internal oppression by external threats. Witness how George Bush justified the Patriot Act and Total Information Awareness in recent times or how the US justified Japanese-American internment camps in the past. That doesn't mean that the internal oppression actually has anything to do with the external threats.
No they didn't. The Soviet Union didn't even exist in 1918.
The Soviets are going to be surprised by this one since they adopted their constitution on July 10, 1918. I'd hate to ask when you celebrate Independence Day for America since by your standards, not only did the US not exist in 1776 when it declared independence but not in 1787 with the Constitution either. However you want to quibble about it, the Soviet Union certainly thought that it existed in 1918.
Small numbers of troops from western nations participated, but those were mostly British and French. The assertion that the the US invaded Russia in completely false.
The US landed a division of 8500 men in Vladisvostok in August 1918 and three regiments in Archangel and Murmansk in September 1918 and a full division of 8500 men at Vladisvostok. They fought with the Red Army, weren't numerous enough to effect a victory, and eventually the last American troops left in April 1920. See here for details or any good text on American history.
the Treaty of Versailles required that German troops to continue occupying large areas of conquered Russia after the war
Sorry, I meant the Armistice agreement. It's in article XII. Check google for an online copy. Check here for some details of the German occupation of western Russia after the Armistice. There are better offline sources.
Try picking up a history book before you go making ridiculous assertions.
With all due respect, it's you that needs to pick up a history book for a change.
While the Republican party likes to claim that Reagan's hard-line policies were responsible the collapse of the Soviet Union, it's not clear that that was the case. In fact, hard-line American policies made it easier for the Soviet government to justify repressing its own people. After all, the US had invaded the Soviet Union in 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles required that German troops to continue occupying large areas of conquered Russia after the war, so how could they trust the US when it was building up its military?
I'm hardly the only person to have doubts, as former US ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan wrote that "the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union by the end of the 1980s."
CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, is one of the best examples of a reusable code base out there. It is the one reason that I generally write a perl solution to a problem first.
It's just a choice to redefine momentum, which has always depended on velocity, instead of moving the new velocity-dependence into the mass term. The naive idea that mass changes as velocity indicates that objects would collapse into black holes if their velocity was too high. As this does not happen (the conditions discussed in the article are quite different), it's clear that relativistic mass can't be used in the same way as rest mass. As they're different quantities, why not simply redefine momentum (and you can use relativistic momentum everywhere.)
Accelerating charged particles, such as the electrons and protons in atoms, causes them to emit electromagnetic radiation. Gravitational radiation too, but there's about 40 orders of magnitude less of that. Black holes were first discovered through this radiation--ones that are consuming matter around them, accelerate the matter and cause it to emit X-rays and gamma rays.
Today physicists do not interpret relativity to mean that mass is dependent on velocity. The definition of momentum from Newton is formula p = m v. Special relativity makes it p = gamma m v, and some people decided to keep the old p = m v by redefining mass in a velocity-dependent way: m = gamma m0, where m0 is the rest mass. No physicists do this any longer, though this idea remains in some layman's explanations.
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The price for building the SSC was a small fraction of the cost for even the limited International Space Station we actually built, much less the original planned ISN they kept in the budget the year Congress axed the SSC. Spending a few billion on the SSC, which was guaranteed to either give us the Higgs boson or prove the Standard Model wrong (the exciting if unlikely option) and thus provide some new basic science strikes me as a much better investment than tens of billions on the politically motivated ISN. I'm willing to invest money on real space science (Hubble, Galileo, many others), but too much money that supposedly for science goes to political stunts like the Moon landing instead of projects of actual scientific value. I'm not sure how practical generating power on the moon is and beaming power down has obvious security implications.
For the poster who asked about how old the Standard Model is and why we haven't seen applications, the Standard Model was created in the 1970's so it's very young by physics standards. We're just beginning to deal with the implications of quantum mechanics for silicon chips and the basics of that area of physics were established in the 1920's. Technology lags physics by a substantial amount of time. However, the physics of particle accelerators themselves has led to enormous advances in medicine and manufacturing as such techniques are used to look inside the human body for disease as well as inside microprocessors for defects, so it's been far from useless even from a shortsighted perspective.
I'm not sure how to explain his absence either, especially as I was sitting not more than a couple meters from my nearly complete Iain Banks collection when I wrote the post. His Consider Phlebas, Against a Dark Background, and many others should be on the list too.
- Stephen Baxter's Ring, Manifold:Time, Anti-Ice
- Greg Egan's Quarantine, Diaspora, Distress, and Permutation City
- Ian MacDonald's Terminal Cafe and Evolution's Shore
- Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space
- Rudy Rucker's Software and sequels, which are the weirdest fiction I've encountered since Phillip K Dick
- S.M. Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time
- Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South, Agent of Byzantium, and World War series
- Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky
- Robert Charles Wilson's Chronoliths and Bios
- David Zindell's Neverness
For short stories, the Year's Best SF series edited by David Hartwell is quite good. Stephen Baxter and especially Greg Egan have amazing short story collections fo their own. If you know a good used bookstore, I'd also highly recommend John Varley's short story collections (most published under several titles). He's not a bad novelist, but he's incredible in short fiction.Now tell me, sir, when and how did you make the land on which your house is built, which I presume you claim to own?
Despite your presumable attempt at sarcasm, you've brought up an excellent question. Whereas property rights for objects that you've made seem reasonable, it's more difficult to argue for ownership of lang. In fact, throughout US history, if you left the land fallow and didn't improve it, someone could squat on the land, improve it by farming it or building on it, and thus gain ownership. I'm not sure how well the courts support such laws today, but to the best of my knowledge, they haven't been repealed.
I switched from Slackware to RHL version 2.0 a long time ago, and while I've considered Fedora, this change has prompted me to think about switching distributions. I like what I've read about Debian's apt-get and I like using FreeBSD's ports system at work, plus I want to be a bit more current with certain packages so I'm planning to give Gentoo a try.
My gripe is that I have to work 146 out of the 365 days per year to support people who are too lazy or too stupid to support themselves.
The thing is that you don't. Nowhere near 30% (approximately 146 out of 365) of your income goes to support people who can't support themselves. Even if you're paying 60% of your income in taxes, which is unlikely, that would assume that half of the taxes you pay go to support such people which simply isn't true. About that much actually is going to "defense," so you could gripe about that wasted money if you're so included though.
As for the decline in achievement post 1800... that's probably because all the low-hanging fruit are gone.
As we develop new areas of science and mathematics, we find new branches of low-hanging fruit of which we were previously unaware, so this statement is not true in general. For example, when Feynman and Schwinger figured out how to regularize quantum field theory calculations in QED (for which they received the Nobel prize), they made a wide array of previously unsolvable particle physics problems into low hanging fruit, generating a burst of research in the field for the next few decades.
However, such opportunities are rarer in the arts. It's no surprise that someone like Shakespeare appeared during the particular time period when he wrote. He was lucky to be born at a time when the field of English-language plays was emerging and took advantage of that fact to pick plenty of the low-hanging fruit. The same is true for the other great Renaissance artists. Today's artists have to reach much higher to find any fruit.
While the Taiwan giant TSMC dominates the ASIC production business (though they do build some of their chips in fabs in Oregon), Taiwanese companies don't have a similar level of market penetration into the microprocessor space. Intel is by far the largest manufacturer of desktop microprocessors and the vast majority of its microprocessor fabs are located in the US (Arizona, California, and Oregon, with smaller concentrations in MA, NM, UT, and WA), though it does have some in Malaysia.
While Intel does have fabs in China and Israel, they don't manufacture microprocessors in them. They do ASICs (ethernet, etc), chipsets, and flash memory. The other microprocessor companies like IBM and AMD also manufacture many microprocessors in the US, though I don't know about their fab distribution as well as I know Intel's.
There are many good reasons for objecting to the concentration of power, economic or otherwise, but this is a new one for me. It makes sense, but I'm curious as to whether you've read this elsewhere. Have any historians or economists investigated this effect?
The real issue is whether people consume resources faster than they can be replentished, which is an obvious problem in many areas ranging from water rights in the American West to the depletion of fisheries. Unfortunately, what's not obvious is precisely where those resource limits are in general. After all, you can build desalination plants to make more fresh water, but that diverts a substantial amount of energy and money from other areas. The Earth's biosystem and humanity's changing technological capabilities combine to create a complex system for which we cannot make certain predictions to the degree of precision we need to determine the planet's carrying capacity.
You have a good point about how music has been different historically than it is in the modern era. It was the rise of the technologies of broadcasting and mass reproducing recordings that led to the rise of music being a big money industry, but what one technology gives, another can take away. Modern computers and networking have made the broadcasting and mass production of information into activities almost anyone can do, eliminating the former exclusivity of such activities that made them so profitable.
The interesting aspect of Bujold's SF is not her space battles (read David Weber's Honor Harrington books if you're into that) but her biological technologies (uterine replicators, genetic engineering from chromosomal-level sex changes to producing new species) and how well she describes their impact on society. Her focus is on Barrayar, a planet formerly isolated from the wider human civilization but which is working feverishly to catch up in much the way Japan did after it emerged from its isolation in the 19th century. Barrayar is a feudal society overlaid with a new parliamentary democracy, with vastly more military technology than civilian. Yet for all the power of the men and their weapons, their society is changing out from under them as the women gain access to advanced genetic technologies, including one woman who challenges her cousin's succession by becoming a man and thus gaining a place for herself despite the rule of male primogeniture.
The funny thing is, people were claiming that the war in Afghanistan was about oil, yet their only argument for that claim was that the US wanted this pipeline. Two years later, where's the pipeline?
They're working on it. Multibillion dollar deals don't happen overnight, especially when they have to get three countries to agree on them and deal with an ongoing war in one of the countries.
At the end of 2002, Afghan President (and UNOCOL consultant) Khamid Karzai signed an agreement with the leaders of Turkmenistan and Pakistan to begin building a 1500km trans-Afghan gas pipeline to Multan where it will join to an existing pipeline that will take it to a port in Pakistan. Here is a link to the story at the BBC. The preliminary cost of the project is $2-3.2 billion. I suspect that the lack of US control outside of the cities of Afghanistan is the reason that large scale construction hasn't begun.
Why is the pipeline important? Well, it's estimated that 16% of the world's petroleum reserves are in the Caspian Sea region. Today, only a small amount of that oil and gas is extracted for use by nearby countries because there are no major pipelines to take it to the global markets. The best routes for a pipeline go through Russia, which the West doesn't want, Iran, which the West also dislikes, or Afghanistan and Pakistan. As the previous poster mentioned, UNOCOL gave up on the pipeline project in 1998. They couldn't get the Taliban to give them what they want. Afghanistan's government is quite different after the US invasion and wants to go ahead with the pipeline.
There's another factor why the US is worried about control of Middle Eastern oil resources. Currency. Saddam made quite a profit when he started trading his oil in euros instead of dollars in 2000. Other OPEC countries like Iran are thinking about using euros instead of dollars. This may not seem important on the face of it, but the use of American currency as a standard medium of exchange is a great source of American power, one of the cornerstones of American dominance of international finance, as it was for the British before the World Wars. Other countries using dollars allows the US to export its inflation by printing more money and issuing treasury bonds at low interest rates and also helps the US to avoid facing the consequences of its large trade deficit.
For a literate and entertaining look at the concepts of calculus, I highly recommend David Berlinski's A Tour of the Calculus. It won't teach you how to solve problems, but it will teach you the concepts behind limits, differentiation, and integration along with the important theorems and their proofs.
I'll stop quoting here to stay within fair use limits and let you read the remainder of the article from the link.
The USSR certainly said it existed in 1918, and of course that's what matters as far as the impact of the US invasion on Soviet feelings about the US military. How did the US feel after the Revolutionary War about the British military? I'll give you a hint--the US didn't shrug and say "Oh well, they didn't recognize our independence so we're not upset by the war from 1776-1783." That's why it doesn't matter to this argument when other countries recognized the Soviet government.
The Armistice agreement in the East was signed between Germany and the Russian Czar. What does that have to do with the US? Absolutely nothing - thanks for noticing.
I'm talking about the Armistice Agreement in the West. Read what I posted, including the references.
You make an inane assertion like the American involvement in events after WWI caused the cold war to be prolonged.
I did not and do not assert that. Please try to argue with what I actually said, not a strawman of your own devising.
You back it up with statements that are either false or are delberately twisted.
You're the one who is spouting falsehoods and twisting the facts to suit yourself. Claiming that no US invasion occurred because it was small or under Allied command is what's completely disingenous.
I haven't assigned blame, but rather pointed out that a certain foreign policy decision may not have been as effective as claimed. I don't understand why a simple expression of doubt generates such hostility.
Many governments justify internal oppression by external threats. Witness how George Bush justified the Patriot Act and Total Information Awareness in recent times or how the US justified Japanese-American internment camps in the past. That doesn't mean that the internal oppression actually has anything to do with the external threats.
The Soviets are going to be surprised by this one since they adopted their constitution on July 10, 1918. I'd hate to ask when you celebrate Independence Day for America since by your standards, not only did the US not exist in 1776 when it declared independence but not in 1787 with the Constitution either. However you want to quibble about it, the Soviet Union certainly thought that it existed in 1918.
Small numbers of troops from western nations participated, but those were mostly British and French. The assertion that the the US invaded Russia in completely false.
The US landed a division of 8500 men in Vladisvostok in August 1918 and three regiments in Archangel and Murmansk in September 1918 and a full division of 8500 men at Vladisvostok. They fought with the Red Army, weren't numerous enough to effect a victory, and eventually the last American troops left in April 1920. See here for details or any good text on American history.
the Treaty of Versailles required that German troops to continue occupying large areas of conquered Russia after the war
Sorry, I meant the Armistice agreement. It's in article XII. Check google for an online copy. Check here for some details of the German occupation of western Russia after the Armistice. There are better offline sources.
Try picking up a history book before you go making ridiculous assertions.
With all due respect, it's you that needs to pick up a history book for a change.
While the Republican party likes to claim that Reagan's hard-line policies were responsible the collapse of the Soviet Union, it's not clear that that was the case. In fact, hard-line American policies made it easier for the Soviet government to justify repressing its own people. After all, the US had invaded the Soviet Union in 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles required that German troops to continue occupying large areas of conquered Russia after the war, so how could they trust the US when it was building up its military?
I'm hardly the only person to have doubts, as former US ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan wrote that "the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union by the end of the 1980s."
CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, is one of the best examples of a reusable code base out there. It is the one reason that I generally write a perl solution to a problem first.
It's just a choice to redefine momentum, which has always depended on velocity, instead of moving the new velocity-dependence into the mass term. The naive idea that mass changes as velocity indicates that objects would collapse into black holes if their velocity was too high. As this does not happen (the conditions discussed in the article are quite different), it's clear that relativistic mass can't be used in the same way as rest mass. As they're different quantities, why not simply redefine momentum (and you can use relativistic momentum everywhere.)
Accelerating charged particles, such as the electrons and protons in atoms, causes them to emit electromagnetic radiation. Gravitational radiation too, but there's about 40 orders of magnitude less of that. Black holes were first discovered through this radiation--ones that are consuming matter around them, accelerate the matter and cause it to emit X-rays and gamma rays.
Today physicists do not interpret relativity to mean that mass is dependent on velocity. The definition of momentum from Newton is formula p = m v. Special relativity makes it p = gamma m v, and some people decided to keep the old p = m v by redefining mass in a velocity-dependent way: m = gamma m0, where m0 is the rest mass. No physicists do this any longer, though this idea remains in some layman's explanations.
And yes, I am a physicist.