Your inability to survive re-entry in just a space suit is due to a failure of imagination, too.
Bzzt. Bum rap.
Back in February I wrote, in detail, about what I found out about the Emergency egress system put in after the Challenger crash. (Only useful if the orbiter could be slowed to sub-sonic speeds. Explosive bolts blew the door. Then a pole was extended that the astronauts would hook up to, and slide down, that would guide them out of the slipstream, much like a ww2 paratroopers static line.) I earned myself a bunch of moderation points for these comments.
Sometimes the parameters of the circumstance are just too tough no matter how much we all want Plan B.
I know this. In an earlier article in this thread I
said " Even if Columbia's hidden damage was so profound this change of descent profile could not have saved her, let me suggest that there would be some lower amount of damage where the decision to abandon the vehicle and save the crew should be considered." And, in the article you responded to, I said, "Would Columbia have survived if the control software had been prepared to recognize that the unbalanced drag implied serious damage portside, and adapted to it? This seems unlikely. It looks like the damage was too profound."
...
left them with no path to the runway, since their energy expendature just gets them to Florida.
So? I know the last orbiter cost over $5 billion dollars. I know it used up crucial spare parts, so a new orbiter would cost even more. But, assuming those with the authority to make the decision know the orbiter is unlikely to survive re-entry if it has to land at Cape Kennedy, surely it is worth considering other descent profiles?
The orbiters do have those emergency egress systems. The crew has a chance of survival if they bail out, and ditch the shuttle, if the oribiter's speed can be reduced to subsonic.
As I said before, it now looks like the hidden damage was so profound that this change of profile would not have been enough to preserve the orbiter.
But I maintain that it was a failure of imagination that no provision was made for orbiters to adopt a profile optomized to try to preserve the life of the crew, at the expense of the orbiter, when profound damage was detected.
Someone else mentioned those "s" turns, I think it was with the idea that they could have somehow changed those to favor the left wing. Those s turns are very precise and are designed to reduce orbiter speed. They already plot a course for maximum reduction of speed and therefore exposure to higher temperatures.
I am sorry, but I don't think you have given the suggestion of abandoning the "S" turns a real answer. Answering that NASA has plotted the descent profile with great precision is not a meaningful answer at all.
Yes, I am sure that NASA has some of the best engineers, technicians and technologists working in America. I read the assertion that the programs that control the orbiter's descent are among the most reliable realtime control software ever written -- that they have terrificly well thought-out test-suites, bench-checks, and so on. I am ready to believe that.
But, none of that prevented Columbia sticking with a descent profile that was wildly inappropriate for an Orbiter with a damaged wing.
Let me suggest that what we saw was a failure of imagination.
What did those famous programs do? Information flowed from the Orbiter's sensors that it was having trouble following the descent profile. Information flowed from those sensors that could have been interpreted to mean, "The left wing is experiencing unexpected and alarming drag". But the famous programs apparently were not written to recognize the implications of this unexpected drag. So the program doggedly kept trying to fly level, and bring that lazy left wing back into line, so it was carrying its fair share of the burden of re-entry.
This was exactly what it should have been doing if the wing was undamaged, and the primary goals of the descent profile were to maintain the orbiter's working life to the 100 missions it was designed for, and to make sure it arrived at Kennedy.
In a press conference a week or two after Columbia's loss I heard Ron Dittemore speak about Columbia's reaction to that increased drag. I heard him say that when the flight control surfaces were insufficient to deal with the mounting extra drag on the left wing, the control programs would have kicked in with the attitude control jets, until they were exhausted.
And I thought to myself, "And when the jets are exhausted, boom, Columbia tumbles out of control."
This reflects a clear failure of imagination during the specification of the descent control software. I am ready to believe that NASA engineers made sure that the Orbiter's descent software is marvellously within spec. But, it seems to me, that the specifications were deficient, and that no shuttles should fly until the software can cope better with this kind of damage.
Would Columbia have survived if the control software had been prepared to recognize that the unbalanced drag implied serious damage portside, and adapted to it? This seems unlikely. It looks like the damage was too profound.
But I remain disturbed that the software didn't try adapting.
And trying to reduce heat by keeping the orbiter in a less steep descent would have been just as disasterous because it would have meant a longer period of time, even if in slightly lower temperatures. That was just as risky, and possibly more, than the descent carried out.
Excuse me, you expressed this opinion very authoritatively. Can you justify this opinion?
I am not a rocket scientist. Nor do I claim to be. I give my opinions here. And I have explained my reasoning. You haven't.
"Just as risky" you say? Risky to the 100 mission goal of the shuttle design team? Or risky for the life of the crew?
Tossing stuff sounds like you have been watching too many old movies. Maybe they could have ditched hundreds of pounds, but it isn't likely they could reduced the mass more than a percentage or two. It would not have been a significant enough reduction in friction or heat to make any difference. Worse is all that debris doesn't just fall to earth over night, it creates hazards of future space flights.
Wasn't Columbia carrying a big Science Module in the Cargo Bay, something of a size similar to Hubble? I don't know whether it was possible to ditch it, but if so, surely it weighed tons, not hundreds of pounds.
IIRC the shuttle orbiters weigh in at something like 50 tons.
Re-entry is already optimized to minimize heat and structural stresses.
IANA Rocket Scientist, but, the Columbia descent program put it through a several "S" turns. Wouldn't doing so have put favoured first one wing, then the other?
May I suggest that abandoning this profile, abandoning the idea that Columbia must land at Cape Kennedy, replacing it with a profile that continually favoured the left wing, may have made survival slightly more likely.
Even if Columbia's hidden damage was so profound this change of descent profile could not have saved her, let me suggest that there would be some lower amount of damage where the decision to abandon the vehicle and save the crew should be considered.
IANA Rocket Scientist, but I spent quite a bit of time looking into this in February. I came across a web-site that talked about something called "soak-through". If I understood this problem, the tiles could only protect the aluminum structure of the orbiters for a limited amount of time. If I understood this problem, too much heat, or heat for too long a period, would "soak-through the tiles, and allow the Aluminum beams to heat, and warp. If I understood this problem, the soak-through damage could happen after the orbiter landed.
Are the current descent profiles designed to minimize this soak-through? If the orbiter is damaged, and their is a seriously increased risk to the crew-member's lives, would you agree that considering a descent profile that ignores long-term damage to the orbiter's structural elements would be worthwhile?
Re:Same criticism applies as to "cold pasteurizati
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Antibody Food Spices
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... composting removes acidic material that might otherwise destroy plant growth, not promote it. Composting is definitely a key step if you want to use sewage as fertilizer. Of course if you had some raw minerals laying around you wouldn't have to compost them. But most of us have to get those minerals from the shit of other animals, or ourselves.
IANA Organic Farmer, so this is not an exhaustive list, but my understanding is that composting increases the value of manure in several ways. [1] Fibrous organic component of manure unbound, and can act to hold water, and tie soil together. [2] Plants need to build themselves from basic building blocks. These aren't available in raw manure, as they are already built. Friendly microbes unbuild them during the process of composting making them accessible again. [3] Done right composting kills many unfriendly microbes.
Just dump raw minerals? There is some value in dumping "raw minerals" on crop soil. But it lacks the aerating, fibrous, mixture of composted manure.
And it is important to dispose of manure wisely. Flushed away in our waterways it results in algal blooms, bad smells, water that is no longer suitable for drinking, reduces the value of fisheries, and so on.
Buried and forgotten compostable waste does eventually rot away. But anaerobically. Anaerobic composting is a long term source of methane. Methane is something like 30 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2.
There is a lot of frozen bog, which will rot, anaerobically, and produce methane, locked up in the permafrost in Siberia and Arctic Canada -- which is now melting on us, due to global warming. In some places the permafrost is hundreds of metres thick. Locked up in the permafrost we will also find klathrate, a mixture of methane and water ice.
Yeah, I know this has crept off topic, but it is important, goldarnit.
Today's NY Times has an article about analyzing those recently found tapes.
It says that there was something like 20 seconds from the loss of voice contact, and the shuttle's breakup.
Re:Same criticism applies as to "cold pasteurizati
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Antibody Food Spices
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And a batch of lettuce gets tainted by the very same fecal matter applied as fertilizer.
Food crops are not tainted by being fertilized by manure, if that manure has been properly composted first.
It is my understanding that composting is not a step a lazy organic farmer would want to skip. It is my understanding that composted manure is much better fertilizer than raw sewage.
Same criticism applies as to "cold pasteurization"
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Antibody Food Spices
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"Cold pasteurization" is the term some in the USA would like to use for
bombarding food with a killing dose of radiation.
This irradiation prevents fresh food like Potatoes, from sprouting. The potato is still alive. This kills it.
This irradiation also kills microbes within the food, or on its surface, that could cause it to go bad.
One of the criticisms of irradiating food is that the knowledge that the food will eventually be irradiated will cause those responsible for maintaining cleanliness in the preparation of the food to relax their standards.
And I believe the same criticism could be applied here.
The article that drew this to my attention talked, in detail, about how modern slaughterhouses work. Apparently a batch of meat gets tainted by E.coli when an intestine gets nicked, and fecal matter leaks out. Yuck.
I'd prefer my food to be safe to eat even if some high tech wonder failed, or that step was skipped.
Re:Returning Home, by Ian Watson.
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AI in Sci-Fi
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If I was an author, and I found one of my copyrighted works ripped, and reproduced, I would be really furious. If you liked his article reproducing his work is a poor way to show it. You might be rationalizing that doing so is a favour to him, because it brings a sample of his work to potential readers who haven't heard of him. But that is not your decision to make. It is his decision.
Well, I looked up your web-page, so I think I ought to be prepared to defer to you. Maybe I mis-spoke. Pluto, and those other recently discovered big Kuiper Belt objects? Aren't their orbits all 1.5 times that of Neptune? That is what I meant by harmony. Bode's law, there you have me. I couldn't restate it. I thought it merely described how the orbits of the Sun's smaller satellites were synchronized with Jupiter.
I visited your web-site, and looked at your talk about Pluto and Charon. I saw that your summary for your colleagues stated that the Gas giants were believed to move inwards. But I didn't quite follow the mechanism. Was this just due to friction with the gas surrounding the infant sun?
HD 209458 is roughly similar to Sol. What would have been the effect of a "hot jupiter" boosting itself to a higher orbit in the early Solar System?
Bode's law: Tidal forces influenced the smaller planet's orbits to be in harmony with the real Jupiter. The same thing would happen if there were a hot jupiter in an inner orbin, wouldn't it?
And, as "hot jupiter" slowly boosted itself to the orbit of a merely "warm jupiter", would these smaller planets move outward too?
They aren't ejecting 90% of their mass?
No, that is not right. At some point in their history, they were 95% of their Hydrogen and Helium too. But, with their small mass, they would have lost their H and He more quickly.
Anyhow, what happens to you, if you are a ball of rock, in a stable orbit, when a big, "hot jupiter" slowly bears down on you?
IANAPhysicist, but is seems to me there is an implication of this suggestion that the articles don'e mention.
Short version: Losing all that mass will boost "hot jupiter" to a higher orbit. Wouldn't a "hot jupiter" become a merely "warm jupiter" before it lost its entire atmosphere?
This is the same phenomenon that stripped out the Hydrogen and Helium from the Earth's atmosphere. The individual gas molecules in a planet's atmosphere, have a range of velocities -- depending on their temperature and pressure. Those molecules that random collisions to the extreme upper range of velocities can acheive escape velocity for that planet.
The rate at which the planet loses gas depends on how hot the atmosphere is. Our own "cold" Jupiter would be losing some gas to this phenomenon too.
But this "hot jupiter" is losing 10,000 tons a second. Jupiter is 318 times the mass of the Earth, and this "hot jupiter" is, according to the article, 2/3 of that. Again, according to the speculation mentioned in the article, it may lose all its gas, and be reduced to a cinder 10 times the mass of the Earth.
In other words it is going to lose 95% of its mass.
May I suggest more gas will reach escape velocity and leave from the hot side of the planet than the cold side?
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If the overall vector of the escaping gas is towards HD 209458, then it will be slowly pushing "Hot Jupiter" away from HD 209458.
May I suggest that a "Hot Jupiter", ejecting 10,000 tons of gas per second is going to boost itself to a higher orbit, and cool enough to be a merely "Warm Jupiter", before it loses its entire atmosphere?
Can you imagine what kind of weather it would have?
It would be receiving much more energy from its primary.
Much more significant tides, too.
The storms on this "Hot Jupiter" would make our Jupiter's Great Red Spot look like a spit in a bucket.
(If it comes from a star other than the Sun, would you still call it "insolation"?)
I like to quote something I heard Adam Osborne say:
"Those who ride technology's cutting edge frequently find themselves sacrificed upon its blade."
Ironic, maybe. That was before the Osborne computer company went bust. So he knew the dangers of blazing a trail.
Wellvis said:
He was a brilliant, charismatic leader with enough ego for four people. A member of MENSA, he had a beautiful house in the Berkeley Hills (spared from the Oakland Hills fire by feet, IIRC), a lovely wife, and he threw marvelous parties.
I can verify the brilliant part. I heard him speak a couple of times. And I can verify the marvelous parties too.
I got taken to a party he hosted in his suite at a computer show in
October 1979. He was there to speak, and his publishing company had a booth. I talked with a fabulously, memorably, beautiful, friendly gal at this party, one of his employees. All three of the workers from his publishing company that he brought with him were absolutely stunning.
Jon Draper (aka Captain Crunch) and Ted Nelson (another American icon, the guy who invented hypertext.) were also at that party.
I introduced myself to him when he was speaking at another computer event at York University in Toronto, about eight months later. (He blew me off. Well big deal.) But the thing that struck me was that he seemed to have lost about thirty pounds. He had been lean and handsome before. By the summer of 1980 he looked ill.
That would be about fourteen years before this mysterious, long illness. What a horrible way to go. I've got a morbid curiousity about it.
I made a couple of mistakes. I called him Rob Mashey. Actually, it is John R. Mashey. And he felt the PWB shell he worked on was still a Thompson shell. I found a reference where he graciously said he was the third of three people to work on what he disliked hearing called "the Mashey shell".
It has been something like twenty years since I looked into the Joy(*) shell, to see if I should spend the energy to try to master it.
As I recall, one of the drawbacks to writing shell scripts(**) in the Joy shell was serious awkwardness in redirecting a program's standard error. And redirecting of higher file descriptors was not possible. Although I can't recall every seeing a shell procedure that used this feature.
Rob Mashey wrote a shell for PWB/UNIX (the "Programmer's Workbench UNIX"), which was about the same vintage as version seven UNIX, the version that introduced the Bourne shell. I read a paper he wrote, for a journal called "Software Practice and Experience", called something like, "Using the command line interpreter as a programming tool".
In his paper Mashey described an experiment the PWB team conducted, in writing a compiler for shell procedures. It was a waste of time. The compiled versions were larger, were unreadable, and they didn't run any faster. Profiling revealed that most of the time the shell took was spent invoking the two system calls fork() and exec(). Back in those days test was a separate binary.
(*) If the Bourne Shell is named after Steve Bourne, and the Korn Shell is named after David Korn, then the C shell should be referred to as the Joy shell, since Bill Joy wrote it.
(**) Actually Steve Bourne doesn't call them "shell scripts". He calls them "Shell Procedures". So that's what I call them. I figure he should know.
I'll pretend you're serious, but I'm not doing to respond to any responses to this message...
A newborn baby must go on the next shuttle mission!
I am serious damn it!...
Newborn babies have to drive over bridges, as do 103 year old grandmothers. That's one of the main reasons bridges are as safe as they are. If the mindset for designing bridges was that they only had to be useable by people in top physical condition, how safe do you think they'd be? If that seems to stretch the point too much, consider comercial aircraft instead. Or elevators. Or cars.
I am going to pretend you are serious too.
America used to have a conscription program, where young adult males
were forced to serve in the Armed Forces. It wasn't very popular.
Babies and 103 year old grannies take medicines. Would you advocate drafting random people, including babies and 103 year old grannies in to drug trials.
Leo Szilard, Atomic pioneer, gave up Physics after participating in the development of the Atomic Bomb in World War 2,
He had a suggestion for how to react to the preseence of Nuclear weapons.
His suggestion was an alternative to drafting 1 million young men, and wasting a year of productivity, putting them in the Armed Forces, and spending a huge fraction of the Nation's revenue building expensive weapons for them. He was still going to draft them, but rather than wasting their time in the Armed Forces, he suggested the USA and the USSR merely exchange hostages.
Each country would be responsible for feeding, housing, and putting said hostages to work, within agreed upon limits.
If one of the countries attacked the other, the attacked country was authorized to kill some of all of their hostages.
One of the long term advantages of Szilard's plan was, if Soviet hostages were billeted in American homes, and vice versa, hostages returning after their hitch would have a much better understanding of the other Nation's people and culture. They would have friends over there, maybe would have fallen in love. All of which would make it a lot harder to imagine launching a nuclear exchange.
Why did I bring up Szilard? His conscription program is unconventional, like MarkusQ's. But I think it held a lot more merit.
99.99% percent of the recipients toss it without even looking at the content...
I can give a report on how ineffective SPAM must be.
Last December I found that a SPAM artist was using an old, inactive
email address of mine, as the "Reply-to" field of some of their SPAM.
I got a flood of bounce messages. At its height I was receiving 100 bounce messages per day.
I looked at every message associated with this SPAM. Only one single message was written by a real live human being.
How many SPAM messages got through, if I got 776 bounce messages? I dunno.
But the bounce messages were from a limited number of ISPs. I surmised that most ISPs mail servers can tell when a header is forged, and don't bother reporting non-delivery to a forged address. Some of the bounce messages reported dozens of bad addresses.
I am going to guess hundreds of thousands of SPAM went out.
If there are any potential SPAM artists out there, learn the lesson. Don't bother. Something like 99.99% of them get tossed without being read.
Back in MSDOS days there were companies that sold you cards that let you run a 2nd, 3rd, and so on user. Each card had a CPU, keyboard connection, video connection. The different users shared the disk drives, printers. Cheap networking was one of the claimed advantages.
The idea seemed cool to me, at first. But the inconveniences didn't seem to balance the cost-savings.
And with powerful new computers so cheap now, I think it makes even less sense today. How much did an ethernet card cost back then? A couple of hundred bucks? And now, $10.
Besides, aren't USB mice terrible resource hogs? If your computer is so powerful that it can handle a second user, and all the overhead of this system, why they heck didn't you buy a slower, less capable one for a fraction of the price? If you have two people who want to use the computer, why hte heck didn't you just buy two in the first place?
Isn't Windows already unstable enough, without this extra layer? If the system crashes, it crashes for both of you. Will running two computers make the inevitable windows crashes come twice as often? Will this layer add more crashes?
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow I suspect an April Fool's spoof.
Bzzt. Bum rap.
Back in February I wrote, in detail, about what I found out about the Emergency egress system put in after the Challenger crash. (Only useful if the orbiter could be slowed to sub-sonic speeds. Explosive bolts blew the door. Then a pole was extended that the astronauts would hook up to, and slide down, that would guide them out of the slipstream, much like a ww2 paratroopers static line.) I earned myself a bunch of moderation points for these comments.
I know this. In an earlier article in this thread I said " Even if Columbia's hidden damage was so profound this change of descent profile could not have saved her, let me suggest that there would be some lower amount of damage where the decision to abandon the vehicle and save the crew should be considered." And, in the article you responded to, I said, "Would Columbia have survived if the control software had been prepared to recognize that the unbalanced drag implied serious damage portside, and adapted to it? This seems unlikely. It looks like the damage was too profound."So? I know the last orbiter cost over $5 billion dollars. I know it used up crucial spare parts, so a new orbiter would cost even more. But, assuming those with the authority to make the decision know the orbiter is unlikely to survive re-entry if it has to land at Cape Kennedy, surely it is worth considering other descent profiles?
The orbiters do have those emergency egress systems. The crew has a chance of survival if they bail out, and ditch the shuttle, if the oribiter's speed can be reduced to subsonic.
As I said before, it now looks like the hidden damage was so profound that this change of profile would not have been enough to preserve the orbiter.
But I maintain that it was a failure of imagination that no provision was made for orbiters to adopt a profile optomized to try to preserve the life of the crew, at the expense of the orbiter, when profound damage was detected.
Surely it is worth mentioning in a list of the top 100 hoaxes?
I am sorry, but I don't think you have given the suggestion of abandoning the "S" turns a real answer. Answering that NASA has plotted the descent profile with great precision is not a meaningful answer at all.
Yes, I am sure that NASA has some of the best engineers, technicians and technologists working in America. I read the assertion that the programs that control the orbiter's descent are among the most reliable realtime control software ever written -- that they have terrificly well thought-out test-suites, bench-checks, and so on. I am ready to believe that.
But, none of that prevented Columbia sticking with a descent profile that was wildly inappropriate for an Orbiter with a damaged wing.
Let me suggest that what we saw was a failure of imagination.
What did those famous programs do? Information flowed from the Orbiter's sensors that it was having trouble following the descent profile. Information flowed from those sensors that could have been interpreted to mean, "The left wing is experiencing unexpected and alarming drag". But the famous programs apparently were not written to recognize the implications of this unexpected drag. So the program doggedly kept trying to fly level, and bring that lazy left wing back into line, so it was carrying its fair share of the burden of re-entry.
This was exactly what it should have been doing if the wing was undamaged, and the primary goals of the descent profile were to maintain the orbiter's working life to the 100 missions it was designed for, and to make sure it arrived at Kennedy.
In a press conference a week or two after Columbia's loss I heard Ron Dittemore speak about Columbia's reaction to that increased drag. I heard him say that when the flight control surfaces were insufficient to deal with the mounting extra drag on the left wing, the control programs would have kicked in with the attitude control jets, until they were exhausted.
And I thought to myself, "And when the jets are exhausted, boom, Columbia tumbles out of control."
This reflects a clear failure of imagination during the specification of the descent control software. I am ready to believe that NASA engineers made sure that the Orbiter's descent software is marvellously within spec. But, it seems to me, that the specifications were deficient, and that no shuttles should fly until the software can cope better with this kind of damage.
Would Columbia have survived if the control software had been prepared to recognize that the unbalanced drag implied serious damage portside, and adapted to it? This seems unlikely. It looks like the damage was too profound.
But I remain disturbed that the software didn't try adapting.
Excuse me, you expressed this opinion very authoritatively. Can you justify this opinion?
I am not a rocket scientist. Nor do I claim to be. I give my opinions here. And I have explained my reasoning. You haven't.
"Just as risky" you say? Risky to the 100 mission goal of the shuttle design team? Or risky for the life of the crew?
Wasn't Columbia carrying a big Science Module in the Cargo Bay, something of a size similar to Hubble? I don't know whether it was possible to ditch it, but if so, surely it weighed tons, not hundreds of pounds.
IIRC the shuttle orbiters weigh in at something like 50 tons.
IANA Rocket Scientist, but, the Columbia descent program put it through a several "S" turns. Wouldn't doing so have put favoured first one wing, then the other?
May I suggest that abandoning this profile, abandoning the idea that Columbia must land at Cape Kennedy, replacing it with a profile that continually favoured the left wing, may have made survival slightly more likely.
Even if Columbia's hidden damage was so profound this change of descent profile could not have saved her, let me suggest that there would be some lower amount of damage where the decision to abandon the vehicle and save the crew should be considered.
IANA Rocket Scientist, but I spent quite a bit of time looking into this in February. I came across a web-site that talked about something called "soak-through". If I understood this problem, the tiles could only protect the aluminum structure of the orbiters for a limited amount of time. If I understood this problem, too much heat, or heat for too long a period, would "soak-through the tiles, and allow the Aluminum beams to heat, and warp. If I understood this problem, the soak-through damage could happen after the orbiter landed.
Are the current descent profiles designed to minimize this soak-through? If the orbiter is damaged, and their is a seriously increased risk to the crew-member's lives, would you agree that considering a descent profile that ignores long-term damage to the orbiter's structural elements would be worthwhile?
IANA Organic Farmer, so this is not an exhaustive list, but my understanding is that composting increases the value of manure in several ways.
[1] Fibrous organic component of manure unbound, and can act to hold water, and tie soil together.
[2] Plants need to build themselves from basic building blocks. These aren't available in raw manure, as they are already built. Friendly microbes unbuild them during the process of composting making them accessible again.
[3] Done right composting kills many unfriendly microbes.
Just dump raw minerals? There is some value in dumping "raw minerals" on crop soil. But it lacks the aerating, fibrous, mixture of composted manure.
And it is important to dispose of manure wisely. Flushed away in our waterways it results in algal blooms, bad smells, water that is no longer suitable for drinking, reduces the value of fisheries, and so on. Buried and forgotten compostable waste does eventually rot away. But anaerobically. Anaerobic composting is a long term source of methane. Methane is something like 30 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2.
There is a lot of frozen bog, which will rot, anaerobically, and produce methane, locked up in the permafrost in Siberia and Arctic Canada -- which is now melting on us, due to global warming. In some places the permafrost is hundreds of metres thick. Locked up in the permafrost we will also find klathrate, a mixture of methane and water ice.
Yeah, I know this has crept off topic, but it is important, goldarnit.
Today's NY Times has an article about analyzing those recently found tapes. It says that there was something like 20 seconds from the loss of voice contact, and the shuttle's breakup.
Food crops are not tainted by being fertilized by manure, if that manure has been properly composted first.
It is my understanding that composting is not a step a lazy organic farmer would want to skip. It is my understanding that composted manure is much better fertilizer than raw sewage.
This irradiation prevents fresh food like Potatoes, from sprouting. The potato is still alive. This kills it.
This irradiation also kills microbes within the food, or on its surface, that could cause it to go bad.
One of the criticisms of irradiating food is that the knowledge that the food will eventually be irradiated will cause those responsible for maintaining cleanliness in the preparation of the food to relax their standards.
And I believe the same criticism could be applied here.
The article that drew this to my attention talked, in detail, about how modern slaughterhouses work. Apparently a batch of meat gets tainted by E.coli when an intestine gets nicked, and fecal matter leaks out. Yuck.
I'd prefer my food to be safe to eat even if some high tech wonder failed, or that step was skipped.
If I was an author, and I found one of my copyrighted works ripped, and reproduced, I would be really furious. If you liked his article reproducing his work is a poor way to show it. You might be rationalizing that doing so is a favour to him, because it brings a sample of his work to potential readers who haven't heard of him. But that is not your decision to make. It is his decision.
The article said they were slightly larger than the smallest bacteria. Can you see a bacteria with your naked eye?
If you win, by killing more of your opponents, you don't get the money, it gets credited back on to the credit card you stole.
I visited your web-site, and looked at your talk about Pluto and Charon. I saw that your summary for your colleagues stated that the Gas giants were believed to move inwards. But I didn't quite follow the mechanism. Was this just due to friction with the gas surrounding the infant sun?
Bode's law: Tidal forces influenced the smaller planet's orbits to be in harmony with the real Jupiter. The same thing would happen if there were a hot jupiter in an inner orbin, wouldn't it?
And, as "hot jupiter" slowly boosted itself to the orbit of a merely "warm jupiter", would these smaller planets move outward too?
They aren't ejecting 90% of their mass?
No, that is not right. At some point in their history, they were 95% of their Hydrogen and Helium too. But, with their small mass, they would have lost their H and He more quickly.
Anyhow, what happens to you, if you are a ball of rock, in a stable orbit, when a big, "hot jupiter" slowly bears down on you?
IANAPhysicist, but is seems to me there is an implication of this suggestion that the articles don'e mention.
Short version: Losing all that mass will boost "hot jupiter" to a higher orbit. Wouldn't a "hot jupiter" become a merely "warm jupiter" before it lost its entire atmosphere?
This is the same phenomenon that stripped out the Hydrogen and Helium from the Earth's atmosphere. The individual gas molecules in a planet's atmosphere, have a range of velocities -- depending on their temperature and pressure. Those molecules that random collisions to the extreme upper range of velocities can acheive escape velocity for that planet.
The rate at which the planet loses gas depends on how hot the atmosphere is. Our own "cold" Jupiter would be losing some gas to this phenomenon too.
But this "hot jupiter" is losing 10,000 tons a second. Jupiter is 318 times the mass of the Earth, and this "hot jupiter" is, according to the article, 2/3 of that. Again, according to the speculation mentioned in the article, it may lose all its gas, and be reduced to a cinder 10 times the mass of the Earth.
In other words it is going to lose 95% of its mass.
May I suggest more gas will reach escape velocity and leave from the hot side of the planet than the cold side?
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If the overall vector of the escaping gas is towards HD 209458, then it will be slowly pushing "Hot Jupiter" away from HD 209458.
May I suggest that a "Hot Jupiter", ejecting 10,000 tons of gas per second is going to boost itself to a higher orbit, and cool enough to be a merely "Warm Jupiter", before it loses its entire atmosphere?
It would be receiving much more energy from its primary. Much more significant tides, too. The storms on this "Hot Jupiter" would make our Jupiter's Great Red Spot look like a spit in a bucket.
(If it comes from a star other than the Sun, would you still call it "insolation"?)
Ironic, maybe. That was before the Osborne computer company went bust. So he knew the dangers of blazing a trail.
Wellvis said:
I can verify the brilliant part. I heard him speak a couple of times. And I can verify the marvelous parties too.
I got taken to a party he hosted in his suite at a computer show in October 1979. He was there to speak, and his publishing company had a booth. I talked with a fabulously, memorably, beautiful, friendly gal at this party, one of his employees. All three of the workers from his publishing company that he brought with him were absolutely stunning. Jon Draper (aka Captain Crunch) and Ted Nelson (another American icon, the guy who invented hypertext.) were also at that party.
I introduced myself to him when he was speaking at another computer event at York University in Toronto, about eight months later. (He blew me off. Well big deal.) But the thing that struck me was that he seemed to have lost about thirty pounds. He had been lean and handsome before. By the summer of 1980 he looked ill.
That would be about fourteen years before this mysterious, long illness. What a horrible way to go. I've got a morbid curiousity about it.
I made a couple of mistakes. I called him Rob Mashey. Actually, it is John R. Mashey. And he felt the PWB shell he worked on was still a Thompson shell. I found a reference where he graciously said he was the third of three people to work on what he disliked hearing called "the Mashey shell".
As I recall, one of the drawbacks to writing shell scripts(**) in the Joy shell was serious awkwardness in redirecting a program's standard error. And redirecting of higher file descriptors was not possible. Although I can't recall every seeing a shell procedure that used this feature.
Rob Mashey wrote a shell for PWB/UNIX (the "Programmer's Workbench UNIX"), which was about the same vintage as version seven UNIX, the version that introduced the Bourne shell. I read a paper he wrote, for a journal called "Software Practice and Experience", called something like, "Using the command line interpreter as a programming tool".
I just did a google search for Mashey, and I came across the man page for the Thompson shell. Interesting.
In his paper Mashey described an experiment the PWB team conducted, in writing a compiler for shell procedures. It was a waste of time. The compiled versions were larger, were unreadable, and they didn't run any faster. Profiling revealed that most of the time the shell took was spent invoking the two system calls fork() and exec(). Back in those days test was a separate binary.
(*) If the Bourne Shell is named after Steve Bourne, and the Korn Shell is named after David Korn, then the C shell should be referred to as the Joy shell, since Bill Joy wrote it.
(**) Actually Steve Bourne doesn't call them "shell scripts". He calls them "Shell Procedures". So that's what I call them. I figure he should know.
I am going to pretend you are serious too.
America used to have a conscription program, where young adult males were forced to serve in the Armed Forces. It wasn't very popular.
Babies and 103 year old grannies take medicines. Would you advocate drafting random people, including babies and 103 year old grannies in to drug trials.
Leo Szilard , Atomic pioneer, gave up Physics after participating in the development of the Atomic Bomb in World War 2, He had a suggestion for how to react to the preseence of Nuclear weapons.
His suggestion was an alternative to drafting 1 million young men, and wasting a year of productivity, putting them in the Armed Forces, and spending a huge fraction of the Nation's revenue building expensive weapons for them. He was still going to draft them, but rather than wasting their time in the Armed Forces, he suggested the USA and the USSR merely exchange hostages.
Each country would be responsible for feeding, housing, and putting said hostages to work, within agreed upon limits.
If one of the countries attacked the other, the attacked country was authorized to kill some of all of their hostages.
One of the long term advantages of Szilard's plan was, if Soviet hostages were billeted in American homes, and vice versa, hostages returning after their hitch would have a much better understanding of the other Nation's people and culture. They would have friends over there, maybe would have fallen in love. All of which would make it a lot harder to imagine launching a nuclear exchange.
Why did I bring up Szilard? His conscription program is unconventional, like MarkusQ's. But I think it held a lot more merit.
I can give a report on how ineffective SPAM must be.
Last December I found that a SPAM artist was using an old, inactive email address of mine, as the "Reply-to" field of some of their SPAM. I got a flood of bounce messages. At its height I was receiving 100 bounce messages per day.
I looked at every message associated with this SPAM. Only one single message was written by a real live human being.
How many SPAM messages got through, if I got 776 bounce messages? I dunno.
But the bounce messages were from a limited number of ISPs. I surmised that most ISPs mail servers can tell when a header is forged, and don't bother reporting non-delivery to a forged address. Some of the bounce messages reported dozens of bad addresses.
I am going to guess hundreds of thousands of SPAM went out.
If there are any potential SPAM artists out there, learn the lesson. Don't bother. Something like 99.99% of them get tossed without being read.
And the grandparent comment has another groaner. Plants don't use UV for photosythesis either. Plants use visible light, just like we do.
The idea seemed cool to me, at first. But the inconveniences didn't seem to balance the cost-savings.
And with powerful new computers so cheap now, I think it makes even less sense today. How much did an ethernet card cost back then? A couple of hundred bucks? And now, $10.
Besides, aren't USB mice terrible resource hogs? If your computer is so powerful that it can handle a second user, and all the overhead of this system, why they heck didn't you buy a slower, less capable one for a fraction of the price? If you have two people who want to use the computer, why hte heck didn't you just buy two in the first place?
Isn't Windows already unstable enough, without this extra layer? If the system crashes, it crashes for both of you. Will running two computers make the inevitable windows crashes come twice as often? Will this layer add more crashes?
Until you get another Soyuz or two up there...