Except sediment generally becomes stone over geologic timescales. Those delicate fossils spent a long time embedded in stone before being broken free by weathering.
Yep, a brittle, non-crystaline stone very likely to be broken or deformed beyond recognition as the ground around it gets remade by geologic forces.
Here's a sample of glass plates from a paltry 2200 years ago - now, imagine what it would look like after enduring 10,000x as much damage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You might be able to recognize it as an artifact - but probably not unless you were actually expecting to find one.
True. But if you fracture a rock containing a fossil, the fracture will tend to travel around the outside of it, leaving the fossil and its impression as two pieces, which makes them easy to find anyplace rock crumbles. If you fracture a rock containing a glass inclusion, the glass is likely to be fractured as well - just another glassy inclusion unless the glass is clear enough and the break clean enough to let you see through to the surface.
Isn't year-round icecaps the defining feature of an ice age? Sufficient global warming will likely eliminate at least the summer Arctic icecap. Antarctica on the other hand would take considerably greater warming - there's a lot less thermal transfer with the rest of the globe without an ocean underneath you.
Indeed, that does seem like the most likely place to find evidence - probably the Moon since it's close, pretty much geologically inert, and full of useful raw materials. The down side is that the natural place to build is underground, for radiation and impact shielding, which means you'd have to happen across just the right place to have any chance of finding it.
On the plus side - there's a relatively small set of "prime" spots for a moonbase that have remained so for many millions of years: Peaks of extended sunlight and craters of eternal darkness are both potentially resource-rich locations, and in very short supply. And then there's the spots directly beneath the L1 and L2 points - the only two places you can build a "traditional" space elevator on the moon.
First it would have to survive long enough without breaking to end up in a deposit of sediment. And then it would have to survive immense the pressures that convert that sediment to stone - which would very likely shatter or deform it beyond recognition.
Assuming it somehow survived all that, someone would still have to randomly crack open a rock, notice the now-broken glass artifact that was cracked apart, and do more than think it was some sort of unusual natural glass inclusion. After all, fossils are usually a lot harder than the surrounding stone, so fractures will tend to travel around them - glass is brittle enough that the fractures will tend to travel right through it, if not "spider web" it into a lot of pieces.
Glass rarely survives intact after even a century of neglect. After millions of years of earthquakes, hailstorms, wild-fires, hurricanes,etc,etc,etc - how would you recognize leaded sand in amongst all the other grains? Metals rust, plastics degrade. Hard stone is about the only thing we could reasonably expect to survive intact.
Mining tunnels would probably be one of the few things we could reasonably expect to find evidence of - and you'd have to be looking really hard to recognize the telltale geologic anomalies distinguishing a tunnel that collapsed millions of years ago.
Why would you assume space junk would stay up for many millions of years? Anything remotely close to Earth would have long since deorbitted due to atmospheric and/or magnetic drag. Even out near geostationary, millions of years of perturbations by the moon's gravity and solar wind could easily have destabilized the orbits.
There's an option on either the panel or window-button module - I think the options are horizontal, vertical, and deskbar, or something like that. I forget which one does the trick. As I recall you also need to set up the panel to be several columns wide to get "bookshelves" of window buttons. That does mean your bar needs to be considerably wider, but an inch-wide bar still doesn't eat a lot of screen space, and makes room for lots of quick-launch icons for your most frequent programs, and maybe a few folder-menu buttons to quick-browse your most commonly used folders.
It's not perfect, but it's the best I've found so far.
Or they disable VPN entirely unless you're paying the extra $150/month for a "VPN capable" connection. I mean it's not *that* much more, not after paying the $10/month for access to Slashdot, the $20/month for Netflix access, the $7.95 for email service access, etc,etc,etc. (fine print: access charge does NOT cover any applicable fees for the various sites/services, just your ISP allowing you to access them)
That is a good one. But... if the standing person is the entire focus of the video, what exactly is the point of adding in a bunch of fake bandwidth-wasting background around them?
Agreed. One of the biggest annoyances with widescreen is all the OS interfaces still default to the "control bar(s) across the top/bottom" layout from the 4:3 days. Move those bars to the side of the screen where they consume plentiful horizontal space instead of precious vertical and things improve dramatically.
My all time favorite task bar has to be XFCE, not because it's especially great, but because it's configurable enough to actually be able to efficiently use vertical bar space - I love having my open program buttons in "bookshelf mode", with titles rotated 90 degrees - all the joys of a multi-row taskbar with nice long legible buttons for managing lots of open windows, just rotated to run along one side so it's not crowding everything out vertically.
Hey, I have (very occasionally) seen, and even recorded, video where portrait mode is appropriate. It looks a little ridiculous being played back, but if your subject matter is vertical, why would you want to waste precious pixel data recording irrelevant background?
I do. I've got a proper desktop computer with a 40" screen for use indoors. One of the main reasons I like having a laptop as well is so that I can spend time outside on a beautiful day, even if I want to be working/playing on the computer.
As it is, I pretty much have to sit under a dark canopy of some sort, out of direct sunlight, if I want to be able to see the screen.
Man I wish those Pixel Qi transflective screens had caught on.
But only for the instant of the measurement - as soon as you look away to write your report it'll be infinite again.
What does the plank length have to do with anything? I'm not talking about fractal limits, in which case it would most certainly would put an upper bound on length (though at ~10^25 plank lengths across a hydrogen atom, it's going to be a VERY high bound)
I'm talking about the fact that we know with certainty that every quarticle in a baseball has infinite "size", but you want me to believe the ball itself has a well defined finite size?
It's important for all sorts of different reasons, the "problem" (for the article) is that any particular reason comes with a certain level of relevant spatial resolution, which then allows you to determine a definite answer.
If you want to build a coastal barrier 10 feet in from the high water (or 1 mile out from the low-water mark) - the resulting elimination of fine detail makes the measurement comparatively simple. Basically, it's a question whose answer is entirely context dependent - trying to eliminate the context to get "the one true answer" is about as useful as trying to answer "How heavy is red?"
Except quarks, like all quarticles, don't have a well-defined circumference. Instead they have a quantum wave function that extends to infinity with non-zero probability. To make any non-infinite measurement you must first impose an arbitrary cut-off point on that probability.
They nailed it down the concept, but never provided a useful answer - other than the fact that for any well-formulated fractal the answer is likely "infinity".
Ah, but atoms are composed of quantum particles, which strictly speaking have neither a definite size nor position, but rather a wave-function that extends to the farthest reaches of the universe with non-zero probability. The circumference of even a single electron is thus exactly equal to that of the entire universe, which may or may not be infinite.
Unless you impose some completely arbitrary cut off point (e.g. there's a 99.99999999% chance that the atom will resolve as being within this area when its wavefunction momentarily collapses), *all* truly accurate measurements of size will be infinite.
Almost as though when you win a war and carve up the spoils, the losers feel like they've been unjustly robbed and seek restitution by the only avenue open to them.
Don't really see a whole lot of alternatives though, aside from avoiding warfare or not pillaging the loser while they're down. Not sure which is more unlikely...
>That all depends on the price of the cure, and the price of the treatment.
Indeed, and IF you are confident you can get people and/or their insurance companies to cough up 10-20x as much money the first year for a cure, then maybe the cure is worth it.
But, you need to be that confident BEFORE you even begin to develop the cure - AND you need to be confident that you can develop a cure for the same price as developing a treatment (good luck - cures are generally a lot more challenging). Because if it costs you 5x as much to develop a cure, then to get the same return on investment you'll need to charge 50-100x as much for it instead of just 10-20x. Given that outlook, developing treatments is easily the safer and more profitable investment. You don't even need to explicitly collude with the competition to not develop a cure, you just need to rely on them doing the same basic risk/reward calculation.
Slashdot Mirror
Except sediment generally becomes stone over geologic timescales. Those delicate fossils spent a long time embedded in stone before being broken free by weathering.
Yep, a brittle, non-crystaline stone very likely to be broken or deformed beyond recognition as the ground around it gets remade by geologic forces.
Here's a sample of glass plates from a paltry 2200 years ago - now, imagine what it would look like after enduring 10,000x as much damage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You might be able to recognize it as an artifact - but probably not unless you were actually expecting to find one.
True. But if you fracture a rock containing a fossil, the fracture will tend to travel around the outside of it, leaving the fossil and its impression as two pieces, which makes them easy to find anyplace rock crumbles. If you fracture a rock containing a glass inclusion, the glass is likely to be fractured as well - just another glassy inclusion unless the glass is clear enough and the break clean enough to let you see through to the surface.
Agreed - but "moon junk" is no more "space junk" than "Earth junk" is. Maybe we'll find it once we're established on the moon, but not before.
2000 years is not a long time on the scales we're talking.
Isn't year-round icecaps the defining feature of an ice age? Sufficient global warming will likely eliminate at least the summer Arctic icecap. Antarctica on the other hand would take considerably greater warming - there's a lot less thermal transfer with the rest of the globe without an ocean underneath you.
Indeed, that does seem like the most likely place to find evidence - probably the Moon since it's close, pretty much geologically inert, and full of useful raw materials. The down side is that the natural place to build is underground, for radiation and impact shielding, which means you'd have to happen across just the right place to have any chance of finding it.
On the plus side - there's a relatively small set of "prime" spots for a moonbase that have remained so for many millions of years: Peaks of extended sunlight and craters of eternal darkness are both potentially resource-rich locations, and in very short supply. And then there's the spots directly beneath the L1 and L2 points - the only two places you can build a "traditional" space elevator on the moon.
First it would have to survive long enough without breaking to end up in a deposit of sediment. And then it would have to survive immense the pressures that convert that sediment to stone - which would very likely shatter or deform it beyond recognition.
Assuming it somehow survived all that, someone would still have to randomly crack open a rock, notice the now-broken glass artifact that was cracked apart, and do more than think it was some sort of unusual natural glass inclusion. After all, fossils are usually a lot harder than the surrounding stone, so fractures will tend to travel around them - glass is brittle enough that the fractures will tend to travel right through it, if not "spider web" it into a lot of pieces.
Glass rarely survives intact after even a century of neglect. After millions of years of earthquakes, hailstorms, wild-fires, hurricanes,etc,etc,etc - how would you recognize leaded sand in amongst all the other grains? Metals rust, plastics degrade. Hard stone is about the only thing we could reasonably expect to survive intact.
Mining tunnels would probably be one of the few things we could reasonably expect to find evidence of - and you'd have to be looking really hard to recognize the telltale geologic anomalies distinguishing a tunnel that collapsed millions of years ago.
Why would you assume space junk would stay up for many millions of years? Anything remotely close to Earth would have long since deorbitted due to atmospheric and/or magnetic drag. Even out near geostationary, millions of years of perturbations by the moon's gravity and solar wind could easily have destabilized the orbits.
There's an option on either the panel or window-button module - I think the options are horizontal, vertical, and deskbar, or something like that. I forget which one does the trick. As I recall you also need to set up the panel to be several columns wide to get "bookshelves" of window buttons. That does mean your bar needs to be considerably wider, but an inch-wide bar still doesn't eat a lot of screen space, and makes room for lots of quick-launch icons for your most frequent programs, and maybe a few folder-menu buttons to quick-browse your most commonly used folders.
It's not perfect, but it's the best I've found so far.
Or they disable VPN entirely unless you're paying the extra $150/month for a "VPN capable" connection. I mean it's not *that* much more, not after paying the $10/month for access to Slashdot, the $20/month for Netflix access, the $7.95 for email service access, etc,etc,etc. (fine print: access charge does NOT cover any applicable fees for the various sites/services, just your ISP allowing you to access them)
That is a good one. But... if the standing person is the entire focus of the video, what exactly is the point of adding in a bunch of fake bandwidth-wasting background around them?
Agreed. One of the biggest annoyances with widescreen is all the OS interfaces still default to the "control bar(s) across the top/bottom" layout from the 4:3 days. Move those bars to the side of the screen where they consume plentiful horizontal space instead of precious vertical and things improve dramatically.
My all time favorite task bar has to be XFCE, not because it's especially great, but because it's configurable enough to actually be able to efficiently use vertical bar space - I love having my open program buttons in "bookshelf mode", with titles rotated 90 degrees - all the joys of a multi-row taskbar with nice long legible buttons for managing lots of open windows, just rotated to run along one side so it's not crowding everything out vertically.
Hey, I have (very occasionally) seen, and even recorded, video where portrait mode is appropriate. It looks a little ridiculous being played back, but if your subject matter is vertical, why would you want to waste precious pixel data recording irrelevant background?
I do. I've got a proper desktop computer with a 40" screen for use indoors. One of the main reasons I like having a laptop as well is so that I can spend time outside on a beautiful day, even if I want to be working/playing on the computer.
As it is, I pretty much have to sit under a dark canopy of some sort, out of direct sunlight, if I want to be able to see the screen.
Man I wish those Pixel Qi transflective screens had caught on.
But only for the instant of the measurement - as soon as you look away to write your report it'll be infinite again.
What does the plank length have to do with anything? I'm not talking about fractal limits, in which case it would most certainly would put an upper bound on length (though at ~10^25 plank lengths across a hydrogen atom, it's going to be a VERY high bound)
I'm talking about the fact that we know with certainty that every quarticle in a baseball has infinite "size", but you want me to believe the ball itself has a well defined finite size?
It's important for all sorts of different reasons, the "problem" (for the article) is that any particular reason comes with a certain level of relevant spatial resolution, which then allows you to determine a definite answer.
If you want to build a coastal barrier 10 feet in from the high water (or 1 mile out from the low-water mark) - the resulting elimination of fine detail makes the measurement comparatively simple. Basically, it's a question whose answer is entirely context dependent - trying to eliminate the context to get "the one true answer" is about as useful as trying to answer "How heavy is red?"
Except quarks, like all quarticles, don't have a well-defined circumference. Instead they have a quantum wave function that extends to infinity with non-zero probability. To make any non-infinite measurement you must first impose an arbitrary cut-off point on that probability.
Actually, it's exactly 5.72938473829. Determining the units is left as an exercise for the reader.
They nailed it down the concept, but never provided a useful answer - other than the fact that for any well-formulated fractal the answer is likely "infinity".
Ah, but atoms are composed of quantum particles, which strictly speaking have neither a definite size nor position, but rather a wave-function that extends to the farthest reaches of the universe with non-zero probability. The circumference of even a single electron is thus exactly equal to that of the entire universe, which may or may not be infinite.
Unless you impose some completely arbitrary cut off point (e.g. there's a 99.99999999% chance that the atom will resolve as being within this area when its wavefunction momentarily collapses), *all* truly accurate measurements of size will be infinite.
I can't think of any even vaguely tenuous reason why it would.
However, you might be able to trick Facebook into giving you EU-resident treatment anyway.
Which itself was just a continuation of WWI.
Almost as though when you win a war and carve up the spoils, the losers feel like they've been unjustly robbed and seek restitution by the only avenue open to them.
Don't really see a whole lot of alternatives though, aside from avoiding warfare or not pillaging the loser while they're down. Not sure which is more unlikely...
>That all depends on the price of the cure, and the price of the treatment.
Indeed, and IF you are confident you can get people and/or their insurance companies to cough up 10-20x as much money the first year for a cure, then maybe the cure is worth it.
But, you need to be that confident BEFORE you even begin to develop the cure - AND you need to be confident that you can develop a cure for the same price as developing a treatment (good luck - cures are generally a lot more challenging). Because if it costs you 5x as much to develop a cure, then to get the same return on investment you'll need to charge 50-100x as much for it instead of just 10-20x. Given that outlook, developing treatments is easily the safer and more profitable investment. You don't even need to explicitly collude with the competition to not develop a cure, you just need to rely on them doing the same basic risk/reward calculation.