Supernovae generate tremendous temperatures, and under the right conditions, the fusion reactions that take place during the peak moments of a supernova can produce some of the heaviest elements like californium.
While it's true that you lose energy when you fuse to stuff heavier than iron, that doesn't mean that it never happens. In a supernova, for instance, there is a short time when there's energy to burn (pardon the pun) and heavy stuff like lead and uranium etc. can form. That's why you see that the solar system is made up of mostly hydrogen and helium (stuff not yet fused), several percent the stuff heavier than helium but lighter than iron, and only a tiny fraction of a percent of the stuff heavier than iron. The heavy stuff almost never gets a chance to form.
Those spirals you're talking about all happen on the surface of the earth, where things like the coriolis effect matter. I think that for a vortex to throw off sub-vortices, it has to be happening in a continuous fluid, with no vacuum allowed. (But I'm not positive of that. I never finished fluid dynamics.)
This isn't really a spiral effect at all. Gravity is more circular/elliptical, and the group of stars is disc-shaped. The only spiral aspect is that as tidal forces reduce the orbital energy of a particular star, its orbit will decay closer to the primary (the black hole in this case), resulting in a (very slow) spiral.
That's quite possible. If they formed in a wider orbit around the black hole, for example, they could well have been caught by tidal drag and slowly moved into lower orbits.
The real question is how they can exist at all in such a low orbit (or, more accurately, how they can exist in such a strong gravity gradient). What happens is that if they tidal difference between the two sides of the star (the difference between the black hole's gravity at the closest edge of the star and that on the furthest edge) exceeds the star's escape velocity, matter will be able to leave the star and it just falls apart. The implication (which the Yahoo! article was too low-tech to get right) was that the stars must be very dense. A dense star will have both (a) less distance between that nearest and furthest edge and (b) a steeper gravity well for material to get out of in the first place.
The other interesting bit is the rather close estimate of the black hole's mass. Most of the other estimates of galactic center black hole masses I've seen are based on things orbiting them far more distantly, such as 10-100 light years.
Can you imagine the liability if you screw up in controlling a hurricane? You could essentially be sued for the entire damage done by the hurricane. That might cost high.
Remember, however, that the initial electricity need not come from an expensive fossil fuel like petroleum. Coal costs, on average, about half as much per BTU as does oil. If done correctly, it could even come from electricity that would otherwise be wasted (ie "off-peak" hours). Coal burning power plants take days to change their power level dramatically, so during months where the power load shifts dramatically, the power company can offer cheaper industrial power rates on off times, which would be the best time to do this kind of work. Of course, there's always solar and wind power, which are time-inconsistent enough that this would be great for them too.
I don't get it. Are they made out of solid platinum? No, the article says the materials are inexpensive. Does it take 400 hours to handcraft each one? Do they crumble to dust in the presence of gravity? Do you have to hold a seance to get the hydrogen back? Ooh, I know: each 20-gram pellet is made from the concentrated brains of twelve dead whales. Come on folks, there has to be something that makes these things completely impractical. All we have to do is figure out what it is.
Wake up and smell the Bush. What do you think all of those state national guard units have been busy with the last few years? I'll give you a hint: it's somewhere between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Just because he's not the first president to have done so doesn't exonerate his actions. The constitution DOES say that congress has to declare war. It's just that in the old days, folks used to actually declare war. Ever since world war II, we haven't really bothered with that part.
You mean like the big flood that hit here in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1997? The one that took out a few dozen square blocks of the city,and while the streets were flooded, a good chunk of downtown burned out? Nope, nothing ever happens in North Dakota.
Active volcanoes often have spectacularly good farmland around them (all that ash, ya' know). I'm not quite sure what his point was about earthquakes. Maybe he was thinking of California with both earthquakes and a nice climate?
You might note that the grandparent was griping about the _millionaires'_ homes, not the poor little dwellings. Your rant is relevant to the discussion (and in my experience largely true), but not really to the comment you replied to.
It was also done in Grand Forks North Dakota (where I am currently posting from) after the big 1997 flood (which actually made national news for a day, if you remember). Large areas of what used to be city, down by the river, are now parks. They made a pretty good frisbee-golf park out of one segment of it.
It took about 5 years before they had all of the old structures torn down and rebuilt the area in its new form, and that was only a couple of dozen square-blocks. Imagine how long it would take in New Orleans.
What you've neglected to think of is that the wealthy are in charge of the government (no matter which party is in control on a given year). What they apparently want out of that government is, among other things, to get their house back for free when they build it where it'll fall into the ocean/get submerged/get swept away by flood waters.
I agree with your post, but I think you missed the parent's point about "unreasonable". He was saying that the stipulation that folks should make the same amount of money after DRM that they did before it is unreasonable.
You have to return a normal dead-tree book because there are only a few copies, and making more copies costs time, materials and money. Because of this, the product is scarce and thus market forces (supply/demand) apply.
I think you've missed the fact that most books are still under copyright. That means that only the copyright holder, or those who have the holder's license, are allowed to print copies. This is a (deliberately created/enforced) monopoly, so supply and demand don't really hold sway.
Not that I disagree with your conclusions, of course. I think you're right.
Even Stephen King couldn't get enough people to pay for a story delivered by installments about 4 years ago - and if he couldn't make it work, you can forget about anyone else doing it.
Yeah, but what is "enough"? Mr. King wanted 90% (or was it 75%? It doesn't matter which, really) of people who downloaded it to pay him. This was completely unrealistic. A more reasonable system, and one that's more favorable to small-time artists, would be to try to get 10% of people to pay. For example, if I write a book (I'd probably try Creative Commons, but a more restrictive license could work better) and release it online, and I get 50000 downloads, I'd be happy if 5000 of them each paid me a dollar. The way the publishing system works, this could still end up being more money than the author would have been paid for 50,000 dead-tree books (well, paperback. for hardcover gives the author more) and could well engender more good will from readers, and therefore more readers recommending you to their friends.
Does anybody care to comment? I know that folks like Cory Doctorow have used similar systems (though cory's was a bit different. He used a publisher to sell paper copies, and only used the CC non-commercial license for publicity and because he thinks it's the right thing to do. He didn't collect donations.)
I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
How exactly is that illegal? If you're not allowed to discriminate between job applicants based on what is in their resume, then what exactly is the resume/hiring process for?
If you've ever been through one of those harassment/prejucide/whatever training seminars, then you know that what's illegal is discrimination/prejudice against protected classes, like racial groups, gender, age, etc. I can almost guarantee (though I do not actually KNOW) that people being with/without certifications is not protected in this sense.
God help us no! People studying? Before a test? What has the world come to?!?!
Seriously, though, most test systems publish their previous question database somehow, and reuse questions at least sometimes. This wouldn't (necessarily) be all that different.
Slashdot Mirror
Supernovae generate tremendous temperatures, and under the right conditions, the fusion reactions that take place during the peak moments of a supernova can produce some of the heaviest elements like californium.
Read up.
Read the article. The black hole in question is about 140 million solar mass.
While it's true that you lose energy when you fuse to stuff heavier than iron, that doesn't mean that it never happens. In a supernova, for instance, there is a short time when there's energy to burn (pardon the pun) and heavy stuff like lead and uranium etc. can form. That's why you see that the solar system is made up of mostly hydrogen and helium (stuff not yet fused), several percent the stuff heavier than helium but lighter than iron, and only a tiny fraction of a percent of the stuff heavier than iron. The heavy stuff almost never gets a chance to form.
Wouldn't neutron accretion be the fusion of a heavy element with hydrogen?
Nope. A hydrogen ion is a proton, not a neutron.
Those spirals you're talking about all happen on the surface of the earth, where things like the coriolis effect matter. I think that for a vortex to throw off sub-vortices, it has to be happening in a continuous fluid, with no vacuum allowed. (But I'm not positive of that. I never finished fluid dynamics.)
This isn't really a spiral effect at all. Gravity is more circular/elliptical, and the group of stars is disc-shaped. The only spiral aspect is that as tidal forces reduce the orbital energy of a particular star, its orbit will decay closer to the primary (the black hole in this case), resulting in a (very slow) spiral.
That's quite possible. If they formed in a wider orbit around the black hole, for example, they could well have been caught by tidal drag and slowly moved into lower orbits.
The real question is how they can exist at all in such a low orbit (or, more accurately, how they can exist in such a strong gravity gradient). What happens is that if they tidal difference between the two sides of the star (the difference between the black hole's gravity at the closest edge of the star and that on the furthest edge) exceeds the star's escape velocity, matter will be able to leave the star and it just falls apart. The implication (which the Yahoo! article was too low-tech to get right) was that the stars must be very dense. A dense star will have both (a) less distance between that nearest and furthest edge and (b) a steeper gravity well for material to get out of in the first place.
The other interesting bit is the rather close estimate of the black hole's mass. Most of the other estimates of galactic center black hole masses I've seen are based on things orbiting them far more distantly, such as 10-100 light years.
Can you imagine the liability if you screw up in controlling a hurricane? You could essentially be sued for the entire damage done by the hurricane. That might cost high.
Remember, however, that the initial electricity need not come from an expensive fossil fuel like petroleum. Coal costs, on average, about half as much per BTU as does oil. If done correctly, it could even come from electricity that would otherwise be wasted (ie "off-peak" hours). Coal burning power plants take days to change their power level dramatically, so during months where the power load shifts dramatically, the power company can offer cheaper industrial power rates on off times, which would be the best time to do this kind of work. Of course, there's always solar and wind power, which are time-inconsistent enough that this would be great for them too.
I don't get it. Are they made out of solid platinum? No, the article says the materials are inexpensive. Does it take 400 hours to handcraft each one? Do they crumble to dust in the presence of gravity? Do you have to hold a seance to get the hydrogen back? Ooh, I know: each 20-gram pellet is made from the concentrated brains of twelve dead whales. Come on folks, there has to be something that makes these things completely impractical. All we have to do is figure out what it is.
Wake up and smell the Bush. What do you think all of those state national guard units have been busy with the last few years? I'll give you a hint: it's somewhere between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Just because he's not the first president to have done so doesn't exonerate his actions. The constitution DOES say that congress has to declare war. It's just that in the old days, folks used to actually declare war. Ever since world war II, we haven't really bothered with that part.
That's a nice, well thought out comment you've got there. Too bad the badlands are in South Dakota. Dumbass.
You mean like the big flood that hit here in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1997? The one that took out a few dozen square blocks of the city,and while the streets were flooded, a good chunk of downtown burned out? Nope, nothing ever happens in North Dakota.
Attention: your rant has been interrupted by a completely different rant on another topic.
HEY! He's not our airhead! We voted against him all the way back in 2000, remember? He's the Supreme Court's airhead.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled rant.
In the sort of quiet, never admitted racism that still fills this country; yes. That's what you call it.
Active volcanoes often have spectacularly good farmland around them (all that ash, ya' know). I'm not quite sure what his point was about earthquakes. Maybe he was thinking of California with both earthquakes and a nice climate?
You might note that the grandparent was griping about the _millionaires'_ homes, not the poor little dwellings. Your rant is relevant to the discussion (and in my experience largely true), but not really to the comment you replied to.
It was also done in Grand Forks North Dakota (where I am currently posting from) after the big 1997 flood (which actually made national news for a day, if you remember). Large areas of what used to be city, down by the river, are now parks. They made a pretty good frisbee-golf park out of one segment of it.
It took about 5 years before they had all of the old structures torn down and rebuilt the area in its new form, and that was only a couple of dozen square-blocks. Imagine how long it would take in New Orleans.
What you've neglected to think of is that the wealthy are in charge of the government (no matter which party is in control on a given year). What they apparently want out of that government is, among other things, to get their house back for free when they build it where it'll fall into the ocean/get submerged/get swept away by flood waters.
I agree with your post, but I think you missed the parent's point about "unreasonable". He was saying that the stipulation that folks should make the same amount of money after DRM that they did before it is unreasonable.
You have to return a normal dead-tree book because there are only a few copies, and making more copies costs time, materials and money. Because of this, the product is scarce and thus market forces (supply/demand) apply.
I think you've missed the fact that most books are still under copyright. That means that only the copyright holder, or those who have the holder's license, are allowed to print copies. This is a (deliberately created/enforced) monopoly, so supply and demand don't really hold sway.
Not that I disagree with your conclusions, of course. I think you're right.
Even Stephen King couldn't get enough people to pay for a story delivered by installments about 4 years ago - and if he couldn't make it work, you can forget about anyone else doing it.
Yeah, but what is "enough"? Mr. King wanted 90% (or was it 75%? It doesn't matter which, really) of people who downloaded it to pay him. This was completely unrealistic. A more reasonable system, and one that's more favorable to small-time artists, would be to try to get 10% of people to pay. For example, if I write a book (I'd probably try Creative Commons, but a more restrictive license could work better) and release it online, and I get 50000 downloads, I'd be happy if 5000 of them each paid me a dollar. The way the publishing system works, this could still end up being more money than the author would have been paid for 50,000 dead-tree books (well, paperback. for hardcover gives the author more) and could well engender more good will from readers, and therefore more readers recommending you to their friends.
Does anybody care to comment? I know that folks like Cory Doctorow have used similar systems (though cory's was a bit different. He used a publisher to sell paper copies, and only used the CC non-commercial license for publicity and because he thinks it's the right thing to do. He didn't collect donations.)
The fact that you don't know how to spell irritate irates me.
I know this was a joke, but is "irates" the verbed form of "irate"? If so, then you get back to the original statement (pretty much).
I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
How exactly is that illegal? If you're not allowed to discriminate between job applicants based on what is in their resume, then what exactly is the resume/hiring process for?
If you've ever been through one of those harassment/prejucide/whatever training seminars, then you know that what's illegal is discrimination/prejudice against protected classes, like racial groups, gender, age, etc. I can almost guarantee (though I do not actually KNOW) that people being with/without certifications is not protected in this sense.
In other words, learn a law.
God help us no! People studying? Before a test? What has the world come to?!?!
Seriously, though, most test systems publish their previous question database somehow, and reuse questions at least sometimes. This wouldn't (necessarily) be all that different.