Quoting: I got 1,100 km on my 55L tank just this weekend. What's the trick?
Energy density. As in "not equal between hydrogen and diesel". Since getting enough hydrogen into a less than car-sized tank has hitherto been a challenge, this is nice progress.
You know, that interpretation never even crossed my mind, although I can usually see these jokes coming.
It is probably because I know physicists, being one myself, and they are in general just as social and married as "normal" people.
I thought it was obvious, but it was the eco-activists who were, to put it mildly, taken aback that someone would dare to mention the b-word to them.
Maybe it was different in the US, but in Germany, there was much resistance against the breeder fission reactor project, so much that it is proverbial.
I once was at a public lecture about fusion, given before an audience of half ecological activists, and half physicists. When the lecturer (a director of a large German fusion experiment) mentioned the "breeding" of tritium from lithium, an audible gasp went through one half of the auditorium. The lecturer hastened to explain that this kind of breeding was *not* eeeevil.
Quoting:... the fact that since most of the energy comes off the reaction as a 15 MeV proton, the Bremsstrahlung losses absolutely kill you.
Actually, the bremsstrahlung is how you get the energy out of the plasma, heating the wall. Only a fraction of the energy of the fusion products is used to keep the plasma heated, the rest has to get out of the confinement region -- to make steam.
Mea culpa. As I kept adding more and more specific information to the post, I forgot I was only talking about the US. I will need to find out about those differences when I go back to Germany;-)
Funny stories. Just a little nitpick: 60000ft would be flight level (FL) 600. The lowest flight level is FL180, which is at a pressure altitude of 18000ft, which in standard atmospheric conditions is 18000ft above sea level. Pressure altitude is the altitude inferred from the ambient pressure. It coincides with the real altitude only at standard atmospheric conditions, i.e. no high, no lows, no hot or cold day.
This means that, if pressure or temperature are lower than standard, the flight levels come down accordingly, so FL180 could actually be *below* 17500ft. Consequently, FL180 to FL185 are not used on those days.
Below 18000ft, pressure altitude is usually corrected for non-standard pressure, and that corrected value is shown on the altimeter. This makes it easier to find your altitude above ground level, which is important for clearing obstacles and landing at airports, whose elevations are given in "real" ft above mean sea level.
At higher altitudes, these ground problems are not so relevant, and the flight level scale is used.
On the other hand, that is precisely what helps Airbus justify (before the WTO) the subsidies they get from Europe.
So maybe Airbus should not be too annoyed;-)
When lack of sleep has such a great (negative) impact on your life, is it maybe time for you and your doctor to reconsider the benefits of just drugging you up with diazepam or the like every night (at least for a few months)?
That was my first idea, too, but I have no points to mod you up. Humans are much better than machines at voice recognition, and the original poster did not say she was totally incomprehensible.
Quoting: That it will have similar nutritional content, less fat, and taste not quite right.
Maybe there will be "Premium" Artificial Meat(tm) that closely mimics the structure of certain all-time best pieces of meat. Which will be copyrighted, rely on a patented procedure, and will just in general be more expensive than traditional meat!
There is also no reason why there could be no "enhanced" versions of the artificial meat -- why mimic nature when you can tailor your product to whatever your customers think is good? Substitue evil fat with disgusting undigestable substances, and we have the nutrasweet equivalent from the great-grandparent post.
Maybe you did not know this, but artifical sweeteners are not artifically made sugar, but totally different substances that, by pure coincidence, taste somewhat like sugar.
People use them because they are not sugar.
With artificial meat, there is no reason not to reproduce the actual product (minus sinews and gristle), since the objective is to get rid of expensive, wasteful, and unhealthy animal upbringing procedures and animal suffering.
So one of your arguments is that 1/6 of some length in feet will still give an integral number of inches. Is that *really* worth all the hassle that I humourously illustrated in my previous post?
You also say: Anyway, things are about as bad as doing 5/3 km vs 726 m +938m.
The point I want to make is that noone in metric-land ever wants to give distances in fractions of a unit (other than decimal fractions), so you always just add the decimal fractions. You don't have to calculate (or remember) if 107in is more or less than 9ft. You just look at the numbers and immediately know it. In extreme cases, you may have to move a decimal point by three digits. I also posit that in practice, it is easily remembered that 1000/3 = 333 and a bit. This also teaches you about measurement tolerances and the need to restrict yourself to a reasonable number significant digits;-) By way of compensation, dividing by 5 or 10 is really easy in the metric, or rather, the decimal system.
As an aside: I occasionally do machining in a non-metric shop and I especially hate the coexistence of mills and 1/64th of inches. The latter has all the disadvantages of having to do fractions in your head and all the disadvantages of having few (i.e. one) prime divisors.
Quoting: But the metric system is not as well adapted to fractional operations as the English system, which is based mostly on multiples of 2, 3, 4, and 6.
Yes! For the slight inconvenience of having to work with four different length units (inch, foot, yard, mile) with easily remembered conversion
factors, we can finally express lengths of 1/3 or 1/6 inch as umm... 10.667/32 in, or... 0.3333 mill. Better example: Highway exit signs.
The Englisch system is obviously superior, since we can easily say 1/4 mile, where you only need to divide 1760 by 4 to get yards. Easy!
Converting something like 1/4 kilometer to meters would involve dividing 1000 by 4: Totally ARBITRARY!
You win, I'm switching over to Imperial today.
chl
PS: Is 543 yards plus 1563 yards longer than 1-1/4 mile? I lost my calculator.
Quoting: Ever wondered why the rockets in quake will knock a player back 10 feet but the recoil doesn't move the shooter one inch??
Because rockets, by their very nature, do not have recoil? Because, by exploding in someone's face, forces are generated that were not present when the shooter pressed fire?
But! Since you have to dispatch tens or hundreds of enemies, you always run out of ammo. Since the amount of ammo you can carry for every weapon is arbitrarily limited, you have to lug around an assortment of different guns just to be able to use the ammo you are carrying. The only reason I kept the P90 in Far Cry was that I was not allowed to ditch useless ammo and concentrate on 5.56mm (or whatever the assault rifles use).
And, to add insult to injury, the bad guy you just offed before he could even raise his assault rifle, drops a 1/64th clip of ammo.
Deus Ex had a nice inventory system, where heavy stuff took up more space, so you could only carry three times as much as ordinary people. Ammo was excluded from this limitation.
It was very funny to stand in front of a mirror and change weapons. Your whole inventory seemed to be stored in your sleeves.
(Deus Ex II had a shitty "copy protection" that was a very effective play protection too. Also the main character seemed to have switched to the dark side again.)
The antithesis of this was Return to Castle Wolfenstein, where you carried, at the end, 1 knife, 3 pistols, 3 submachine guns, 2 sniper rifles, just 1 assault rifle, tens of grenades, 6 panzerfausts (at several kilos each), 3 demolition charges, 1 flame thrower(!), 1 experimental lightning gun (with 100kg batteries), and, yes, a.50 cal mini-gun with 1500 rounds (that did as much damage as a pistol, but we will let that pass). Plus some ammo for all the other stuff.
And, while I am ranting about FPSs: Not only do your employers usually not equip you with more than a knife, they often take away what you scavenged in previous missions!
Quote: Why do we look down on people with illnesses of the brain and not people with broken arms or heart disease or any other illness?
Maybe this is because people think they are in control of their mind. If a tree falls down and breaks your arm, a reasonable person will not blame your arm for being broken, and will accept that medical treatment is necessary. Noone expects you to "will yourself healthy".
If, on the other hand, you have a mental illness, you are perceived to be "thinking wrong (unhealthy) toughts", and since "everyone only thinks what they want", it is your fault that you cannot will yourself healthy again. Furthermore, there are no symptoms that are obvious to the casual observer, so the illness is not taken seriously.
Another thing may be that a person's personality is usually defined by their behaviour, which is controlled by their brain. If that brain is perceived to be defective, the whole person suddenly becomes worth less.
Actually, I think it is also a useful metaphor in the human perspective. It is just a different metaphor than the one with the containers and I do not personally mind if people choose a different model to represent what is going on in that strange gray box.
I could not even tell you if my coworkers use Folder or Directory.
In the unix world, "directory" is (was?) exactly the right word, since in the typical unix file system, a directory is just a list that matches inode numbers to names, just like the (phone) directory from which this metaphor is derived.
Quote: If you're going to play the numbers game, why not ask people of both genders, and double your chances of getting a date?
I was assuming that the typical person wants to date someone in order to start a relationship that will eventually lead to having sex. Most people can only enjoy sex when the other person is of a specific gender. So for most people it does not make sense to date persons of the inappropriate gender (unless you are forced to successfully produce a date of unspecified gender in order to satisfy the twisted humour of a recently deceased rich uncle, who put that condition into his will).
But, slightly more seriously: One way to get more dates is to ask lots of persons of the appropriate sex for one. Not only will that improve the chance of success, it will also desensitise you to rejection.
The only danger of this method is that you could get depressed faster than you get desensitised and kill yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Energy density. As in "not equal between hydrogen and diesel". Since getting enough hydrogen into a less than car-sized tank has hitherto been a challenge, this is nice progress.
chl
chl
Maybe it was different in the US, but in Germany, there was much resistance against the breeder fission reactor project, so much that it is proverbial.
chl
chl
Actually, the bremsstrahlung is how you get the energy out of the plasma, heating the wall. Only a fraction of the energy of the fusion products is used to keep the plasma heated, the rest has to get out of the confinement region -- to make steam.
chl
chl
I hear the Abuse Department has some ideas. Customer Abuse, that is.
chl
This means that, if pressure or temperature are lower than standard, the flight levels come down accordingly, so FL180 could actually be *below* 17500ft. Consequently, FL180 to FL185 are not used on those days.
Below 18000ft, pressure altitude is usually corrected for non-standard pressure, and that corrected value is shown on the altimeter. This makes it easier to find your altitude above ground level, which is important for clearing obstacles and landing at airports, whose elevations are given in "real" ft above mean sea level. At higher altitudes, these ground problems are not so relevant, and the flight level scale is used.
chl
On the other hand, that is precisely what helps Airbus justify (before the WTO) the subsidies they get from Europe. So maybe Airbus should not be too annoyed;-)
chl
chl
chl
chl
Maybe there will be "Premium" Artificial Meat(tm) that closely mimics the structure of certain all-time best pieces of meat. Which will be copyrighted, rely on a patented procedure, and will just in general be more expensive than traditional meat!
There is also no reason why there could be no "enhanced" versions of the artificial meat -- why mimic nature when you can tailor your product to whatever your customers think is good? Substitue evil fat with disgusting undigestable substances, and we have the nutrasweet equivalent from the great-grandparent post.
chl
With artificial meat, there is no reason not to reproduce the actual product (minus sinews and gristle), since the objective is to get rid of expensive, wasteful, and unhealthy animal upbringing procedures and animal suffering.
Sarcasm or not, you totally missed the point.
chl
You also say: Anyway, things are about as bad as doing 5/3 km vs 726 m +938m.
The point I want to make is that noone in metric-land ever wants to give distances in fractions of a unit (other than decimal fractions), so you always just add the decimal fractions. You don't have to calculate (or remember) if 107in is more or less than 9ft. You just look at the numbers and immediately know it. In extreme cases, you may have to move a decimal point by three digits. I also posit that in practice, it is easily remembered that 1000/3 = 333 and a bit. This also teaches you about measurement tolerances and the need to restrict yourself to a reasonable number significant digits;-) By way of compensation, dividing by 5 or 10 is really easy in the metric, or rather, the decimal system.
As an aside: I occasionally do machining in a non-metric shop and I especially hate the coexistence of mills and 1/64th of inches. The latter has all the disadvantages of having to do fractions in your head and all the disadvantages of having few (i.e. one) prime divisors.
chl
On the moon, maybe.
chl
Yes! For the slight inconvenience of having to work with four different length units (inch, foot, yard, mile) with easily remembered conversion factors, we can finally express lengths of 1/3 or 1/6 inch as umm... 10.667/32 in, or... 0.3333 mill. Better example: Highway exit signs. The Englisch system is obviously superior, since we can easily say 1/4 mile, where you only need to divide 1760 by 4 to get yards. Easy! Converting something like 1/4 kilometer to meters would involve dividing 1000 by 4: Totally ARBITRARY!
You win, I'm switching over to Imperial today.
chl
PS: Is 543 yards plus 1563 yards longer than 1-1/4 mile? I lost my calculator.
PPS: Sarcasm is not funny. Mod this insightful.
Because rockets, by their very nature, do not have recoil? Because, by exploding in someone's face, forces are generated that were not present when the shooter pressed fire?
chl
And, to add insult to injury, the bad guy you just offed before he could even raise his assault rifle, drops a 1/64th clip of ammo.
Deus Ex had a nice inventory system, where heavy stuff took up more space, so you could only carry three times as much as ordinary people. Ammo was excluded from this limitation. It was very funny to stand in front of a mirror and change weapons. Your whole inventory seemed to be stored in your sleeves. (Deus Ex II had a shitty "copy protection" that was a very effective play protection too. Also the main character seemed to have switched to the dark side again.)
The antithesis of this was Return to Castle Wolfenstein, where you carried, at the end, 1 knife, 3 pistols, 3 submachine guns, 2 sniper rifles, just 1 assault rifle, tens of grenades, 6 panzerfausts (at several kilos each), 3 demolition charges, 1 flame thrower(!), 1 experimental lightning gun (with 100kg batteries), and, yes, a .50 cal mini-gun with 1500 rounds (that did as much damage as a pistol, but we will let that pass). Plus some ammo for all the other stuff.
And, while I am ranting about FPSs: Not only do your employers usually not equip you with more than a knife, they often take away what you scavenged in previous missions!
chl
Maybe this is because people think they are in control of their mind. If a tree falls down and breaks your arm, a reasonable person will not blame your arm for being broken, and will accept that medical treatment is necessary. Noone expects you to "will yourself healthy".
If, on the other hand, you have a mental illness, you are perceived to be "thinking wrong (unhealthy) toughts", and since "everyone only thinks what they want", it is your fault that you cannot will yourself healthy again. Furthermore, there are no symptoms that are obvious to the casual observer, so the illness is not taken seriously.
Another thing may be that a person's personality is usually defined by their behaviour, which is controlled by their brain. If that brain is perceived to be defective, the whole person suddenly becomes worth less.
chl
chl
Of course, people may choose not to care.
chl
I was assuming that the typical person wants to date someone in order to start a relationship that will eventually lead to having sex. Most people can only enjoy sex when the other person is of a specific gender. So for most people it does not make sense to date persons of the inappropriate gender (unless you are forced to successfully produce a date of unspecified gender in order to satisfy the twisted humour of a recently deceased rich uncle, who put that condition into his will).
chl
But, slightly more seriously: One way to get more dates is to ask lots of persons of the appropriate sex for one. Not only will that improve the chance of success, it will also desensitise you to rejection.
The only danger of this method is that you could get depressed faster than you get desensitised and kill yourself.
chl
chl