Why would you want to estimate such a small resolution? Where on your body do you estimate 1/2"? Meanwhile using traditional body-based sizes: 1 fingerbreadth ~= 20mm 1 hand ~= 100mm 1 foot ~= 300mm
Neither can most us customary units. What's 1/6 of an inch? 1/3? Ditto cups or pounds.
The only time you get nice multiples of 3 is when converting feet to inches - and even then you need a nice even number for it to work out. Whats one third of 1'2"?
Meanwhile, if you're using metric to measure something on the same scale, 1 foot = 300mm (near enough - there's nothing magical about a foot), which is indeed easily divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,25, etc.
Most importantly - any math you need to do in metric is simple integer arithmetic, while in US customary you have to constantly juggle mixed fractions in your head to accomplish anything. You can't even fall back to simpler improper fractions because there's not a ruler on the planet with a 317/8ths label.
What's 1/4 of 37-1/2 inches? Versus 1/4 of 950mm? Or scaling up - you want 7 shelves 13-3/4" apart - what's the total distance? Now try the same thing with 350mm per shelf. If 1/4 inch accuracy is enough, then all your metric measurements can be rounded to multiples of 5. At 1/8th inch, they can all be even. Keeps the math easy. About the only claim I've heard where customary actually has an advantage is that you can specify the precision along with the measurement - but realistically you rarely hear people give measurements of 2-32/64ths or 37-0/16ths
And frankly, weight and volume are an even uglier mess in customary. Not to mention the endless confusion and headaches caused by the fact that we measure things by weight rather than mass, rather than letting the scale do the conversion into a far more general unit for us.
>If you really want to see the US move to the metric system, make using anything else illegal punishable by jail time and a big fine.
Or, for a less drastic start - the government could just stop using customary units. If all the highway signs were only labeled in terms of km, people would get used to using them. Municipal water and gas services could charge by the liter as well, though I'm not sure how many people actually pay attention to the details there. Or the biggest one - stop using customary units in public schools. Make every math, science, home economics, etc. book use exclusively metric units and within 20 years customary units would fade to niche uses.
Actually, there are a few examples of the contrary - I think it was the Dutch that eliminated patents at one point, and ushered in years of technological growth and prosperity, lasting until they reinstated patents.
Actually no. Skin and lung/throat/mouth cancers are perhaps the easiest to smell, but dogs have been shown capable of relyably detecting a wide range of other cancers as well, along with a wide range of other diseases with no obvious surface symptoms. Presumably anything that alters your body's chemistry has a fair chance of introducing telltale molecules into your sweat, breath, urine, etc. And cancer uses metabolic pathways not normally used by healthy cells (most produce energy in the cytoplasm rather than the mitochondria), which probably means unusual waste products dumped into the blood stream.
I admit I initially assumed that would be a minor effect, but my initial investigation suggests that it's a relatively uninvestigated but potentially substantial change in carbohydrate production.
I suspect breeding for higher yields at the expense of all else is a larger part of the problem, but this sounds like something that warrants a lot more attention.
They're omnivores, like other bears. Nobody posts Youtube videos of them eating berries, digging up ant mounds, or licking moths off the bottom of loose shale because it's just not that dramatic, but that's where they tend to get the bulk of their calories from. They will eat pretty much anything they can get their paws on though, especially in the months leading up to hibernation, where their life depends on them building up enough fat reserves to survive the winter. Calves and the injured especially are textbook examples of opportunistic predation - hunt what's easy to catch if the opportunity presents itself. But like humans in survival situation, hunting can easily become a net loss in calories, so that you'd be better off going hungry unless they prey is easy to catch.
Human, or other terrestrial species. Modern humans are relative newcomers after all, could be there's other intelligent species native to this world as well. Seems like most every culture on the planet has legends of some variety of elves/gnomes/etc. that can only be found when they wish too. There's also the possibility of beings from a parallel universe - in some ways the possibility of traveling between universes poses fewer theoretical problems than interstellar travel. Though I suppose ancient Martian cultures might offer the potential for non-interstellar aliens.
And of course as a more pedestrian explanation, it's not impossible that these are some form of natural phenomena - either a "simple" phenomena whose explanation has thus far been overlooked, or possibly even clues to as-yet undiscovered physics.
Or for yet another possibility, they might be alien, but not intelligent. "Space-fish" or other creatures might have evolved interesting mechanisms for moving and/or minimizing their inertia. Relatively unintelligent species might also explain a lot of the sightings, where there seems to be evidence of intentional behavior, but no apparent objectives or desire for more meaningful contact.
Can't say I trust the agricultural industry either. Your average chunk of limp, fatty beef/pork/chicken/etc. would be barely recognizable as meat to our ancestors of a few centuries ago. Ditto most of our modern flavorless, low-nutrient fruits and vegetables.
Are there carnivorous bears? Other than the polar bears, who live in a basically plant-free environment at least? Everything I've heard is that bears are mostly plant-heavy omnivores whose diets are primarily fruits, nuts, and insects. Though they're also opportunistic predators and not above scavenging.
There's no silver bullets, but there are a lot of different sectors that have a 10-20% contribution. If we can halve several of them we'll be well on our way to solving the problem. Or at least buying enough time to come up with more thorough solutions.
Indeed - I actually prefer it to the greasy mess that is normal chorizo. If you're looking for excuses to eat it, I find it quite tasty fried up and poured into a waffle iron before adding the batter.
No, SRAM uses a bistable flip-flop which is stable so long as power is supplied, an - DRAM actually needs an external memory refresh circuit to regularly read/write the stored data before the capacitors discharge so much that 1s and 0s can't be reliably distinguished. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
He, don't give yourself too little credit - have you seen some of the tripe out there tha's made real money? I've heard from several sources that in many genres it comes down to telling certain kinds of stories that the audience can't get enough of, even if you do it badly.
Sure, the alphabetical names are clever aid in comparing codenames - but useless when all you know is that you're running 16.04. Which is all the information you see in 90% of contexts.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure what you've been looking for, but I've had a LOT more luck Googling "how to do/fix X in Ubuntu YY.ZZ" than using code names - for the simple reason that the vast majority of discussions of non-trivial issues don't use the codenames, and thus can't possibly be found by searching for them. Code names will reliably get me to the marketing page - but once I've got it installed the marketing page is useless.
I agree that having a distinctive *product name* is important for searching - but for individual versions? They don't get used enough to actually be helpful.
Don't think of it as retiring - think of it as finally having enough discretionary time to spend on the projects that *you* want to work on.
Vacations usually exist in that limbo-time where they're long enough to start getting boring, but not enough time to even get a project properly started.
That would depend entirely on the flight path of the asteroids.
If you slowed them just enough to fall in to Mars' orbit, then you're correct. If instead you slowed them about twice as much, so the semimajor axis of their new orbit was the same as Mars', then there would be no net change in distance, and the eccentricity changes could be averaged out. Slow them even further and you could actually shrink the orbit of Mars.
Of course we're still only talking a 0.45% change in mass, so the differences would only be apparent to extremely sensitive instruments.
An interesting idea, unfortunately probably completely unrealistic - there just aren't enough asteroids to make a difference. The combined mass of the entire asteroid belt is estimated at only about 4% that of the moon, or 0.45% that of Mars. Not enough to noticeably alter it's mass. As for re-liquefying its core - you're applying energy from the outside, and heat can only flow form areas of higher temperature to those of lower temperature. So you'd have to liquefy the surface long before you liquefied the core. And while that might eventually be useful, you're likely talking multi-million cooldown period before the surface solidified again.
Depends on the severity of the dent, cosmetic dents will not bridge the gap. (Also a good thermos is vacuum-gapped, not air-gapped).
Even if the outer wall does make contact with the inner one, it may only have a small incremental loss in insulating properties - after all the inner and outer walls are already in full contact in the structural joint around the rim of the thermos - and it's a rare thermos that has significant thermal isolation insulation at that joint.
But why is write-lock a niche use case? In the floppy days everybody I knew used the lock tabs on a regular basis - and if anything the reasons for doing so have increased dramatically. Why should you risk getting infected by whatever's on your friend/coworkers/etc. computer just to give them a copy of some file or other? Or risk your backups when you want to retrieve something? Same thing with early USB drives - using the write-lock was just common sense. Then they just sort of disappeared.
I also suspect a lot of the price has to do with the 256-bit hardware encryption and other limited-use features that increase the sophistication of the hardware. A simple toggle-switch and "if lock line is high, report error, else write data" line in the embedded software should cost well under a dollar to add.
Really? Was there an advantage to those that I'm missing compared to modern solutions?
Writing to EEPROM is typically a very rare activity - to the point that any particular write has a good chance of having been unintentional/unauthorized by the owner. Seriously - how many people do you know who actually, for example, update their motherboard's BIOS? And of those who do - how many do so for reasons that haven't already cost them enough problem-solving effort that the added effort of changing a jumper is trivial in comparison?
For bonus points - of those who resort to flashing their BIOS to fix a problem - how many of the problems do you suppose are caused by BIOS corruption that could have been prevented with hardware write protection?
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Why stop at a half-meter ya wimp? ;-D. You haven't lived till you've had a meter-long chili cheese dog and a few liters of beer for lunch.
Why would you want to estimate such a small resolution? Where on your body do you estimate 1/2"?
Meanwhile using traditional body-based sizes:
1 fingerbreadth ~= 20mm
1 hand ~= 100mm
1 foot ~= 300mm
Neither can most us customary units. What's 1/6 of an inch? 1/3? Ditto cups or pounds.
The only time you get nice multiples of 3 is when converting feet to inches - and even then you need a nice even number for it to work out. Whats one third of 1'2"?
Meanwhile, if you're using metric to measure something on the same scale, 1 foot = 300mm (near enough - there's nothing magical about a foot), which is indeed easily divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,25, etc.
Most importantly - any math you need to do in metric is simple integer arithmetic, while in US customary you have to constantly juggle mixed fractions in your head to accomplish anything. You can't even fall back to simpler improper fractions because there's not a ruler on the planet with a 317/8ths label.
What's 1/4 of 37-1/2 inches? Versus 1/4 of 950mm? Or scaling up - you want 7 shelves 13-3/4" apart - what's the total distance? Now try the same thing with 350mm per shelf. If 1/4 inch accuracy is enough, then all your metric measurements can be rounded to multiples of 5. At 1/8th inch, they can all be even. Keeps the math easy. About the only claim I've heard where customary actually has an advantage is that you can specify the precision along with the measurement - but realistically you rarely hear people give measurements of 2-32/64ths or 37-0/16ths
And frankly, weight and volume are an even uglier mess in customary. Not to mention the endless confusion and headaches caused by the fact that we measure things by weight rather than mass, rather than letting the scale do the conversion into a far more general unit for us.
>If you really want to see the US move to the metric system, make using anything else illegal punishable by jail time and a big fine.
Or, for a less drastic start - the government could just stop using customary units. If all the highway signs were only labeled in terms of km, people would get used to using them. Municipal water and gas services could charge by the liter as well, though I'm not sure how many people actually pay attention to the details there. Or the biggest one - stop using customary units in public schools. Make every math, science, home economics, etc. book use exclusively metric units and within 20 years customary units would fade to niche uses.
Actually, there are a few examples of the contrary - I think it was the Dutch that eliminated patents at one point, and ushered in years of technological growth and prosperity, lasting until they reinstated patents.
Actually no. Skin and lung/throat/mouth cancers are perhaps the easiest to smell, but dogs have been shown capable of relyably detecting a wide range of other cancers as well, along with a wide range of other diseases with no obvious surface symptoms. Presumably anything that alters your body's chemistry has a fair chance of introducing telltale molecules into your sweat, breath, urine, etc. And cancer uses metabolic pathways not normally used by healthy cells (most produce energy in the cytoplasm rather than the mitochondria), which probably means unusual waste products dumped into the blood stream.
It'd certainly cut down on the number of hypochondriacs wasting doctors' time...
I admit I initially assumed that would be a minor effect, but my initial investigation suggests that it's a relatively uninvestigated but potentially substantial change in carbohydrate production.
I suspect breeding for higher yields at the expense of all else is a larger part of the problem, but this sounds like something that warrants a lot more attention.
https://defenders.org/grizzly-...
They're omnivores, like other bears. Nobody posts Youtube videos of them eating berries, digging up ant mounds, or licking moths off the bottom of loose shale because it's just not that dramatic, but that's where they tend to get the bulk of their calories from. They will eat pretty much anything they can get their paws on though, especially in the months leading up to hibernation, where their life depends on them building up enough fat reserves to survive the winter. Calves and the injured especially are textbook examples of opportunistic predation - hunt what's easy to catch if the opportunity presents itself. But like humans in survival situation, hunting can easily become a net loss in calories, so that you'd be better off going hungry unless they prey is easy to catch.
Human, or other terrestrial species. Modern humans are relative newcomers after all, could be there's other intelligent species native to this world as well. Seems like most every culture on the planet has legends of some variety of elves/gnomes/etc. that can only be found when they wish too. There's also the possibility of beings from a parallel universe - in some ways the possibility of traveling between universes poses fewer theoretical problems than interstellar travel. Though I suppose ancient Martian cultures might offer the potential for non-interstellar aliens.
And of course as a more pedestrian explanation, it's not impossible that these are some form of natural phenomena - either a "simple" phenomena whose explanation has thus far been overlooked, or possibly even clues to as-yet undiscovered physics.
Or for yet another possibility, they might be alien, but not intelligent. "Space-fish" or other creatures might have evolved interesting mechanisms for moving and/or minimizing their inertia. Relatively unintelligent species might also explain a lot of the sightings, where there seems to be evidence of intentional behavior, but no apparent objectives or desire for more meaningful contact.
Can't say I trust the agricultural industry either. Your average chunk of limp, fatty beef/pork/chicken/etc. would be barely recognizable as meat to our ancestors of a few centuries ago. Ditto most of our modern flavorless, low-nutrient fruits and vegetables.
Are there carnivorous bears? Other than the polar bears, who live in a basically plant-free environment at least? Everything I've heard is that bears are mostly plant-heavy omnivores whose diets are primarily fruits, nuts, and insects. Though they're also opportunistic predators and not above scavenging.
There's no silver bullets, but there are a lot of different sectors that have a 10-20% contribution. If we can halve several of them we'll be well on our way to solving the problem. Or at least buying enough time to come up with more thorough solutions.
Indeed - I actually prefer it to the greasy mess that is normal chorizo. If you're looking for excuses to eat it, I find it quite tasty fried up and poured into a waffle iron before adding the batter.
Interesting idea - but how does it relate to things that taste like meat?
No, SRAM uses a bistable flip-flop which is stable so long as power is supplied, an - DRAM actually needs an external memory refresh circuit to regularly read/write the stored data before the capacitors discharge so much that 1s and 0s can't be reliably distinguished. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
He, don't give yourself too little credit - have you seen some of the tripe out there tha's made real money? I've heard from several sources that in many genres it comes down to telling certain kinds of stories that the audience can't get enough of, even if you do it badly.
Sure, the alphabetical names are clever aid in comparing codenames - but useless when all you know is that you're running 16.04. Which is all the information you see in 90% of contexts.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure what you've been looking for, but I've had a LOT more luck Googling "how to do/fix X in Ubuntu YY.ZZ" than using code names - for the simple reason that the vast majority of discussions of non-trivial issues don't use the codenames, and thus can't possibly be found by searching for them. Code names will reliably get me to the marketing page - but once I've got it installed the marketing page is useless.
I agree that having a distinctive *product name* is important for searching - but for individual versions? They don't get used enough to actually be helpful.
Don't think of it as retiring - think of it as finally having enough discretionary time to spend on the projects that *you* want to work on.
Vacations usually exist in that limbo-time where they're long enough to start getting boring, but not enough time to even get a project properly started.
Yeah, I thought you were being a smartass, comparing the headaches around the hardware you mentioned to the nuisance of an EEPROM protection jumper.
My apologies. Those where good days.
That would depend entirely on the flight path of the asteroids.
If you slowed them just enough to fall in to Mars' orbit, then you're correct. If instead you slowed them about twice as much, so the semimajor axis of their new orbit was the same as Mars', then there would be no net change in distance, and the eccentricity changes could be averaged out. Slow them even further and you could actually shrink the orbit of Mars.
Of course we're still only talking a 0.45% change in mass, so the differences would only be apparent to extremely sensitive instruments.
An interesting idea, unfortunately probably completely unrealistic - there just aren't enough asteroids to make a difference. The combined mass of the entire asteroid belt is estimated at only about 4% that of the moon, or 0.45% that of Mars. Not enough to noticeably alter it's mass. As for re-liquefying its core - you're applying energy from the outside, and heat can only flow form areas of higher temperature to those of lower temperature. So you'd have to liquefy the surface long before you liquefied the core. And while that might eventually be useful, you're likely talking multi-million cooldown period before the surface solidified again.
Depends on the severity of the dent, cosmetic dents will not bridge the gap. (Also a good thermos is vacuum-gapped, not air-gapped).
Even if the outer wall does make contact with the inner one, it may only have a small incremental loss in insulating properties - after all the inner and outer walls are already in full contact in the structural joint around the rim of the thermos - and it's a rare thermos that has significant thermal isolation insulation at that joint.
But why is write-lock a niche use case? In the floppy days everybody I knew used the lock tabs on a regular basis - and if anything the reasons for doing so have increased dramatically. Why should you risk getting infected by whatever's on your friend/coworkers/etc. computer just to give them a copy of some file or other? Or risk your backups when you want to retrieve something? Same thing with early USB drives - using the write-lock was just common sense. Then they just sort of disappeared.
I also suspect a lot of the price has to do with the 256-bit hardware encryption and other limited-use features that increase the sophistication of the hardware. A simple toggle-switch and "if lock line is high, report error, else write data" line in the embedded software should cost well under a dollar to add.
Really? Was there an advantage to those that I'm missing compared to modern solutions?
Writing to EEPROM is typically a very rare activity - to the point that any particular write has a good chance of having been unintentional/unauthorized by the owner. Seriously - how many people do you know who actually, for example, update their motherboard's BIOS? And of those who do - how many do so for reasons that haven't already cost them enough problem-solving effort that the added effort of changing a jumper is trivial in comparison?
For bonus points - of those who resort to flashing their BIOS to fix a problem - how many of the problems do you suppose are caused by BIOS corruption that could have been prevented with hardware write protection?