If some people didn't have radios, they would still be able to get weather warnings, thus radio is not an essential medium either. No one medium is essential.
What is essential is timely warnings of public-safety issues. TV reaches a lot of people who would not have the radio on, and so is an important part of the public-safety warning system.
My argument is partly that public-safety notices going out on TV is essential because people are more likely to have it on, for whatever reason. Nothing at all to do with entertainment. I don't know or care why people have the TV on -- they may be watching the Nightly Business Report or C-SPAN.
The other part of my argument is that TV's delivery of public-safety announcements is superior because it doesn't prompt people to turn it off (like a WeatherAlert radio does...live with one on here in Tornado Alley for a summer week and you'll see what I mean).
And behind both arguments is the one that it doesn't *matter* which single medium is the most effective because different people will have different ones on. We need them all.
And I *can't* have a (general-purpose) radio on all the time or I will get nothing done. I once had one in my office but I had to take it out.
See, my contention is that any radio listener whose program was continually interrupted by irrelevant warnings would soon tire of the whole thing and turn his radio off. That doesn't happen with TV because putting a crawl on the bottom of the screen doesn't interfere with delivery of the program.
And the last I was aware, most of commercial radio was either rock or "country" (i.e. entertainment) and TV still has news and educational material in addition to The Simpsons. Meanwhile my Weatheradio doesn't work unless I turn it on, and when I do it strongly motivates me to turn it off again.
Yes, I have a weather alert radio. Normally it's turned off, because when bad weather comes in the alarms will start hours ahead of its arrival and continue for hours after, squawking again and again every five minutes as the storm front passes through countless localities that are 20-200mi away from mine. I don't need to be interrupted every few minutes to be informed that the storms are still moving away from my location.
But the TV is often on when we're at home, and the warning strip can be swiftly read and ignored, requiring no action on my part unless it told me something I need to know. The TV alert user interface is much more in tune with the users than those radios that have to be poked every time the same storm moves from Wibblestown to Bumblyburg to Pugsleyville.
What TV does that radio cannot is deliver information through two channels at once. To announce that a storm is passing through a town 60 miles north of me, the radio station has to stop broadcasting the program I was enjoying. TV can paste the information at the bottom of the screen, emit a modest "beep", and go on with the program concurrently for the vast majority of its viewers who are unaffected by the moment's announcement.
Actually, these days I think we could do even better. Local agencies produce detailed plots as severe storms pass through, and mostly do nothing with the information. What if, five minutes ahead of the near-certain arrival of damaging weather, every telephone in your neighborhood rang to deliver the news that it's time to seek shelter? What if the local government's emergency management office had a page up showing a map of the city with the projected storm track and "greatest likelihood of damage here" plotted and updated every 60 seconds? What if it also showed locations of significant damage reports (road closed due to high water/tree down/powerline down/fire/police or EMTs/car crash)? We have *much* better spatial data available these days than when the WeatherAlert system was designed, and a much more powerful and flexible communication infrastructure too. We can do a lot better than broadcasts that are much too broad and too intrusive to boot.
Pick up any recent Sunday newspaper from Indianapolis and check the big wad of ad. inserts. See any DTV converters? Neither do I. But thanks for the link -- if the local stores don't want my money maybe someone else does.
Come to the Midwest and enjoy all of the severe-weather notices that overlay or interrupt our programming every other day in summer. Emergency notification is essential and television is the medium most likely to be playing in the average household when one goes out.
At my home in Outer Suburbia we are just barely close enough to hear the Civil Defense sirens when *outside*. Inside -- forget it. If they didn't put it on TV nobody would know until the walls started shaking.
And those decoders may even be available in stores by then. I keep hearing about them but I've never seen one. It always turns out that I have to buy a $3000.00 75-inch screen with my digital tuner, which is about $2750.00 and 50 inches more than I want.
Actually I think the problem with the seven-day Creation thing is that it takes too *long*. You can recite the whole story in under a minute, monologues included, and God didn't have the narrative to deal with.
Any organization that refuses to attempt to answer questions it cannot is thinking clearly. We get no end of trouble when science and religion try to address each other's questions. They can't do it, and the smart practitioners in both camps won't try to make them.
Please note that I distinguish here between "cannot answer" as in cannot *ever* answer for structural reasons, vs. "will not answer" as in don't know the answer *yet*.
The Law of Conservation of Matter/Energy has only been observed to hold within the Universe. "Before the Big Bang" is not within the Universe so we haven't much reason to insist that such laws operate there.
We'll have a lot more to go on once we figure out how to point telescopes at right angles to reality.
Indeed. It takes a lot of hard work to turn a raw idea into a "mere theory", and a well-crafted theory is (on average) about the most reliable thing you can find. A theory is an idea that has survived multiple, merciless attacks by logic and observation of how things actually behave, and while it may not be the whole truth or nothing but the truth, a good theory is a darned close approximation of truth.
Far too many people misuse "theory" when they mean "guess", just as some confuse "believing what someone else told me to believe" with "thinking".
Beats me. I don't know as much French history as I should. Whoever they were, one party were seated on the left side of the chamber and the other on the right. The labels you give sound like they correspond somewhat to the general meanings of "liberal" and "conservative", although those words are today in the U.S. merely arbitrary symbols and don't describe the thinking or the actions of the people to whom they are usually applied.
What I like about this, aside from reminding me of several Larry Niven stories that I liked, is that it is much more controllable over the short term than anything previously proposed. Because if we're going to start tweaking the biosphere *intentionally*, sooner or later we'll make mistakes we have to correct, and I'd like to be able to change course in less than 100 years. Remixing the atmosphere of a planet takes a lot longer than moving some spaceships around.
Sealand is indeed pretty small. Consider, however, that it was designed and built for one purpose: a defensive structure. It would be somewhat harder to crack than an office block of similar size.
I think the point is that some reporters, and some organizations, don't even try. That's not news; it's advertising, and it shouldn't receive the same respect or legal protection that news does.
"while with cnn etc. you would have 1 or 2 reporters who same a similar point of view (aligned with the station) and the a editor or so would pick the one article that fits with his and the stations bias the mosts and let the reader read that, thereby forcing that bias onto the reader."
And then the reader hops over to BBC or Ha'aretz or Pravda or the like to see if the story is told differently elsewhere. Right? Even if you prefer major-brand news, you can compare and learn more than you would from *any* one article.
Even if it is a total loss, we got something for $4 million: evidence that $4 million is too little to do a successful space shot. It would be useful to know that, if true. We might avoid sinking a whole lot more on a plethora of bargain-basement missions doomed from the start by insufficient funding.
Spending more doesn't always get you better. But it may be that the "sweet spot" is $40 million, not $4 million or $4 billion.
Let's see. On the illuminated side of the sail we have pressure X. On the unilluminated side we have, uh zero. Sounds like a low-pressure area to me. The problem must be somewhat different from what you describe.
I should look it up, but I thought that tacking was basically a lot of vector addition that winds up cancelling out all the side-to-side motion and keeping the forward component. The wind tries to push the sail back, but the sail mostly wants to go sideways. The keel will let the hull go sideways but only if it also goes forward. Switch bearing frequently to get rid of the sideways motion and you wind up oscillating forward around your desired course.
But I've never operated a sailing vessel so I'm probably (heh heh) all wet.
You never actually stop accelerating; it's just that as the photon flux thins out you reach a point beyond which the acceleration is so small that you may as well ignore it, even over long stretches of time. After all, we get a measurable amount of light from objects 14 billion light years away, and every one of those photons accelerates the object that absorbs it by a tiny amount. It's just not enough to feel and nobody's yet thought of any use for them other than imaging.
Why bother to furl the sail? It's a lot more complex than unfurling it and you may not be able to unfurl a second time when you need it. Either leave it be, or jettison the "outbound sail" and have a second "inbound sail" for the deceleration phase.
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If some people didn't have radios, they would still be able to get weather warnings, thus radio is not an essential medium either. No one medium is essential.
What is essential is timely warnings of public-safety issues. TV reaches a lot of people who would not have the radio on, and so is an important part of the public-safety warning system.
My argument is partly that public-safety notices going out on TV is essential because people are more likely to have it on, for whatever reason. Nothing at all to do with entertainment. I don't know or care why people have the TV on -- they may be watching the Nightly Business Report or C-SPAN.
The other part of my argument is that TV's delivery of public-safety announcements is superior because it doesn't prompt people to turn it off (like a WeatherAlert radio does...live with one on here in Tornado Alley for a summer week and you'll see what I mean).
And behind both arguments is the one that it doesn't *matter* which single medium is the most effective because different people will have different ones on. We need them all.
And I *can't* have a (general-purpose) radio on all the time or I will get nothing done. I once had one in my office but I had to take it out.
See, my contention is that any radio listener whose program was continually interrupted by irrelevant warnings would soon tire of the whole thing and turn his radio off. That doesn't happen with TV because putting a crawl on the bottom of the screen doesn't interfere with delivery of the program.
And the last I was aware, most of commercial radio was either rock or "country" (i.e. entertainment) and TV still has news and educational material in addition to The Simpsons. Meanwhile my Weatheradio doesn't work unless I turn it on, and when I do it strongly motivates me to turn it off again.
Yes, I have a weather alert radio. Normally it's turned off, because when bad weather comes in the alarms will start hours ahead of its arrival and continue for hours after, squawking again and again every five minutes as the storm front passes through countless localities that are 20-200mi away from mine. I don't need to be interrupted every few minutes to be informed that the storms are still moving away from my location.
But the TV is often on when we're at home, and the warning strip can be swiftly read and ignored, requiring no action on my part unless it told me something I need to know. The TV alert user interface is much more in tune with the users than those radios that have to be poked every time the same storm moves from Wibblestown to Bumblyburg to Pugsleyville.
What TV does that radio cannot is deliver information through two channels at once. To announce that a storm is passing through a town 60 miles north of me, the radio station has to stop broadcasting the program I was enjoying. TV can paste the information at the bottom of the screen, emit a modest "beep", and go on with the program concurrently for the vast majority of its viewers who are unaffected by the moment's announcement.
Actually, these days I think we could do even better. Local agencies produce detailed plots as severe storms pass through, and mostly do nothing with the information. What if, five minutes ahead of the near-certain arrival of damaging weather, every telephone in your neighborhood rang to deliver the news that it's time to seek shelter? What if the local government's emergency management office had a page up showing a map of the city with the projected storm track and "greatest likelihood of damage here" plotted and updated every 60 seconds? What if it also showed locations of significant damage reports (road closed due to high water/tree down/powerline down/fire/police or EMTs/car crash)? We have *much* better spatial data available these days than when the WeatherAlert system was designed, and a much more powerful and flexible communication infrastructure too. We can do a lot better than broadcasts that are much too broad and too intrusive to boot.
Pick up any recent Sunday newspaper from Indianapolis and check the big wad of ad. inserts. See any DTV converters? Neither do I. But thanks for the link -- if the local stores don't want my money maybe someone else does.
Come to the Midwest and enjoy all of the severe-weather notices that overlay or interrupt our programming every other day in summer. Emergency notification is essential and television is the medium most likely to be playing in the average household when one goes out.
At my home in Outer Suburbia we are just barely close enough to hear the Civil Defense sirens when *outside*. Inside -- forget it. If they didn't put it on TV nobody would know until the walls started shaking.
And those decoders may even be available in stores by then. I keep hearing about them but I've never seen one. It always turns out that I have to buy a $3000.00 75-inch screen with my digital tuner, which is about $2750.00 and 50 inches more than I want.
Please. You still have another FOUR YEARS for your old TV to wear out and need replacement whether DTV is mandated or not.
Hey, our local public libraries don't charge *anything* to borrow a DVD (although really recent ones can only be kept for 3 days).
Actually I think the problem with the seven-day Creation thing is that it takes too *long*. You can recite the whole story in under a minute, monologues included, and God didn't have the narrative to deal with.
Any organization that refuses to attempt to answer questions it cannot is thinking clearly. We get no end of trouble when science and religion try to address each other's questions. They can't do it, and the smart practitioners in both camps won't try to make them.
Please note that I distinguish here between "cannot answer" as in cannot *ever* answer for structural reasons, vs. "will not answer" as in don't know the answer *yet*.
The Law of Conservation of Matter/Energy has only been observed to hold within the Universe. "Before the Big Bang" is not within the Universe so we haven't much reason to insist that such laws operate there.
We'll have a lot more to go on once we figure out how to point telescopes at right angles to reality.
Indeed. It takes a lot of hard work to turn a raw idea into a "mere theory", and a well-crafted theory is (on average) about the most reliable thing you can find. A theory is an idea that has survived multiple, merciless attacks by logic and observation of how things actually behave, and while it may not be the whole truth or nothing but the truth, a good theory is a darned close approximation of truth.
Far too many people misuse "theory" when they mean "guess", just as some confuse "believing what someone else told me to believe" with "thinking".
Beats me. I don't know as much French history as I should. Whoever they were, one party were seated on the left side of the chamber and the other on the right. The labels you give sound like they correspond somewhat to the general meanings of "liberal" and "conservative", although those words are today in the U.S. merely arbitrary symbols and don't describe the thinking or the actions of the people to whom they are usually applied.
What I like about this, aside from reminding me of several Larry Niven stories that I liked, is that it is much more controllable over the short term than anything previously proposed. Because if we're going to start tweaking the biosphere *intentionally*, sooner or later we'll make mistakes we have to correct, and I'd like to be able to change course in less than 100 years. Remixing the atmosphere of a planet takes a lot longer than moving some spaceships around.
Sealand is indeed pretty small. Consider, however, that it was designed and built for one purpose: a defensive structure. It would be somewhat harder to crack than an office block of similar size.
My recollection is that the "left" and "right" labels refer to where representatives were seated in the French legislature at the time.
I think the point is that some reporters, and some organizations, don't even try. That's not news; it's advertising, and it shouldn't receive the same respect or legal protection that news does.
"while with cnn etc. you would have 1 or 2 reporters who same a similar point of view (aligned with the station) and the a editor or so would pick the one article that fits with his and the stations bias the mosts and let the reader read that, thereby forcing that bias onto the reader."
And then the reader hops over to BBC or Ha'aretz or Pravda or the like to see if the story is told differently elsewhere. Right? Even if you prefer major-brand news, you can compare and learn more than you would from *any* one article.
Even if it is a total loss, we got something for $4 million: evidence that $4 million is too little to do a successful space shot. It would be useful to know that, if true. We might avoid sinking a whole lot more on a plethora of bargain-basement missions doomed from the start by insufficient funding.
Spending more doesn't always get you better. But it may be that the "sweet spot" is $40 million, not $4 million or $4 billion.
Per ardua. Hang in there.
You've been reading Niven, haven't you. (See the First Man-Kzin War.)
Let's see. On the illuminated side of the sail we have pressure X. On the unilluminated side we have, uh zero. Sounds like a low-pressure area to me. The problem must be somewhat different from what you describe.
I should look it up, but I thought that tacking was basically a lot of vector addition that winds up cancelling out all the side-to-side motion and keeping the forward component. The wind tries to push the sail back, but the sail mostly wants to go sideways. The keel will let the hull go sideways but only if it also goes forward. Switch bearing frequently to get rid of the sideways motion and you wind up oscillating forward around your desired course.
But I've never operated a sailing vessel so I'm probably (heh heh) all wet.
You never actually stop accelerating; it's just that as the photon flux thins out you reach a point beyond which the acceleration is so small that you may as well ignore it, even over long stretches of time. After all, we get a measurable amount of light from objects 14 billion light years away, and every one of those photons accelerates the object that absorbs it by a tiny amount. It's just not enough to feel and nobody's yet thought of any use for them other than imaging.
Why bother to furl the sail? It's a lot more complex than unfurling it and you may not be able to unfurl a second time when you need it. Either leave it be, or jettison the "outbound sail" and have a second "inbound sail" for the deceleration phase.
Orbit the star until you cancel enough energy, then go snag the planet?