Asimov wasn't the only author to strain to tie all their stories together into a coherent whole. Heinlein tried to do so too. I am one reader who thinks this was a wasted effort.
I will read this latest Niven too. I can't remember the last Niven work I have read, although I think I read all of his work when he was young.
About authors who haven't published anything new for a long time...
About ten years ago John Varley published his first novel in a decade or so -- "The Steel Beach". In the front matter he acknowledged that it wasn't entirely consistent with his earlier novels. But I didn't detect any inconsistencies.
The first two thirds or three quarters of this novel were great! The ending however really, really sucked.
Varley tried to address a deep, serious, philosophical question. In a depressing Universe, filled with pain and suffering, why go on? It was a great question. I could barely wait to read his answer.
What I think went wrong with this novel is that he couldn't come up with an answer. I suspect this depressing topic really depressed him. And he couldn't come up with an ending.
I think the sales of his older works flagged, and he couldn't afford not to finish it. Maybe Gordie Dickson gave him some cynical advice. And so he threw together a shallow, cynical, ending; that "played to the house".
Most of the Universe is Hydrogen. Hydrogen is very light. That means that hydrogen molecules move more quickly.
It is like Maxwell's daemon. Some of the hydrogen at the edge of the planet's atmosphere will be slower than average, and some will be faster then average. A less massive planet with less powerful gravitational field has a slower escape velocity. If that fast moving hydrogen, at the edge of the atmosphere, is moving at greater than the planet's escape velocity, and it doesn't hit another gas molecule to slow it down, its lost for good.
This is why Earth's atmosphere has no free hydrogen. Ditto Venus, Mars and Mercury. This is why Mars has such a puny atmosphere. If the Earth had formed out near Pluto it may have retained a huge amount of hydrogen.
If the temperature of this 14x planet is not too high, maybe its escape velocity is high enough that it retained a lot of hydrogen and helium too.
However, if it is orbiting its Primary in just ten days, maybe the temperature of its gas is high enough that it will lose its atmosphere as I described above anyhow.
Lol. Do large buildings leave their Air Conditioning on in the winter time where you live? With a very few exceptions most buildings here turn their heating systems on, and their Air Conditioning off, when the weather gets cold.
That is interesting. Maybe Baldwin isn't only a fan, but he is also plans to be an developer of this technology for profit? Maybe he was already an investor in en-wave?
Before I was paying full attention the interviewer asked him why this technology was being developed in Toronto first. He made some flattering noises about the co-operation between foresightful Toronto politicians and foresightful Toronto real-estate and property management types.
Maybe there are legal or administrative reasons that prevent the widespread adoption of deep lake water cooling in Chicago?
There are large buildings that could have signed on board this system, and chose not to. Here in Ontario large users of electricity pay a much lower rate than ordinary consumers. One of the documentaries I saw about this system, a year or so ago, quoted an energy conservation expert who said that if large commercial users had to pay the same rate for their electricity as ordinary consumers they would start to take energy conservation more seriously.
Does Northwestern University have its own private water system for some reason?
If you find that link, please post it. Thanks.
but in the long run the lake will evapourate, making the climate in the region less stable (water holding a lot of heat is one of the main reasons the earth has such a (relatively) mild climate) with hotter summers and colder winters, leading to the requirement of more heating in winter and more air conditioning in summer... brilliant
Lake Erie and Lake Ontario have about the same surface area. But Lake Ontario is much deeper and so has a greater volume. I have links here to charts showing the temperatures, at various depths across various slices of Lake Erie and
Lake Ontario.
Note that Lake Erie is much warmer. But most of the water in Lake Ontario came from Lake Erie? Why is it so much colder? It cools off in the winter time. It takes water from the Niagara River six years before it flows down the St Lawrence.
If, for the sake of argument, Rochester, Kingston, Hamilton all used deep lake cooling, and they all grew so much that they exhausted the Lake's deep layer, Lake Ontario would still not evaporate, any more than Lake Erie evaporates away to nothing.
Yes, there are deep areas of Lake Ontario that have been at 4 degrees celsius for a long time. How long? Since the last ice age? The glaciers covered the entire Great Lake basin a few tens of thousands of years ago. So that is how long a unique deep lake water ecosystem would have had to evolve.
How much water would the cities have to draw from the deep layer to use up all the cold layer? I don't think you understand how deep the Lake is, and how great its volume. Look at these three maps.
WestCentreEast. So, lets say the deep layer is currently something like half to one third of the volume of the lake. The cities would have to use up the equivalent of the flow of two or three niagaras worth of water in order to drain all the deep cold water.
So long as our winters continue to get cold enough for the lake to cool to 4 degrees the cold layer gets regenerated every winter.
I think it could be argued, if Global warming every gets bad enough that using deep lake cooling exhausts the cold layer in mid-summer that, since we have the infrastructure in place, we use it every summer until it is exhausted. What about the cold deep lake water ecosystem? I am all for preserving interesting, unique ecosystems. But I doubt that a few tens of thousands of years is long enough for it to become interesting and unique.
There is one advantage of this system that I haven't seen mentioned yet.
Have you ever had an errand in the downtown office area, and walked through a big blast of hot air?
Not only does this save energy. But because those downtown buildings are not using conventional air conditioners for cooling, they are not dumping megawatts of waste heat into the outside air. I read that the use of this technique should reduce the local ambient air temperature on the downtown streets, where it is used, by several degrees.
Your link is interesting. I have one
too. It took me a minute or two to figure out this page. The map of lake michigan in the lower right hand corner has five lines drawn through it. The five color coded temperature charts each illustrate the temperature at various depths through a slice of the lake.
The one closest to Chicago is slice "A", correct?
There was an interview on the morning news yesterday with a guy who is a big fan of this technology. The interviewer asked him if this technology could be used in other cities on the Great Lakes. Yes, he said. There were various cities where it could be used. Rochester and Milwaukee were two examples he offered. But, he said, it could not be used in Chicago. Presumably because Chicago doesn't have easy access to a deep cold layer.
Here in Toronto we have always taken our water from deep in the lake too. As you can see from this map the depth drops precipitously just off Toronto Island.
The American fan of this technology was Alec Baldwin, the actor.
The interviewer next asked him if any of those other cities were considering following Toronto's example. He replied that he was flying to Chicago that afternoon to make a presentation.
In this case, we're heating a very cold (and potentially very isolated part of the lake)
You don't have to guess. Google is your friend.
Here is a
map. Note:
The inlets are just inside the green zone. The deeper part of the lake doesn't seem to be broken up into isolated pockets.
... set off a bunch of other Tsunami so phased your major
cities were all in the spots where the interference cancelled the wave...
How tall did the article say this superwave might be? Ah. Maybe 300 feet -- at the Canary Island. How tall will it be when it strikes New York, Boston, Charleston, Savanah, Miami? Let's say 90 feet -- 30 yards.
Well, the wavelength of a wave is something like ten times its height. So, how large is the area where the natural superwave, and your artifical superwave cancel one another out? Do you think New Yorkers would thank you if you preserved the Battery, but the rest of New York got twice the damage?
Oh wait. A quarter of an hour later the battery is hit by the 20 yard wave you set off to protect Boston. And then it gets hits by the remains of the other big waves you set off.
this might be kind of cool. Of course the "less-valuable" areas between the cities, would get two or three times the damage, but this could still be a win. I'm not sure we have enough explosives (and yes, I'm counting nukes) to create waves on the necessary scale, however.
Following World War 2 the USN experimented with the effects of an underwater explosions on fleets of Naval vessels. That was the fate of the Prinz Eugen, the consort to the Bismark. Clips of those explosions are public. You may have seen them. How tall would you say the wave created by those explosions were?
My estimate? Less than ten yards.
Those would have been Hiroshima scale bombs -- 10 kilotons. So, how big a blast would be required to make a wave just twice as tall?
Remember, the volume of water in a wave is the cube of the dimensions. So, wouldn't a wave twice as tall require 16 times the blast energy? By my naive calculations your counter-waves would each require blasts of tens of megatons.
The radiation burden of this many explosions would rival that of a Nuclear War.
Say, how big is this slab, anyhow? And where did anyone get the idea it would make a 300 foot wave?
What happens when two waves meet, and cross? When the peaks cross you get a wave with a height that is the sum of the waves. When the troughs cross you get a trough with a depth that is the sum. When the peak of one crosses the trough of the other they cancel out temporarily.
But, once they have crossed, they go merrily on their way as if nothing had happened.
So you explode a missile in the path of the big wave? All you have done is add a second big wave to worry about. That doesn't sound like such a good idea to me.
Is there some way to break the big slab into smaller peices? Let them drop into the ocean one at a time?
How about building a coffer dam right under where we expect the slab to fall, and then pumping out all the water? No water, no big wave.
Offtopic, I know, but the thread where you and I discussed the Florida voting mess has expired, and I wanted to direct your attention to
this article on that topic.
...the ballot in question was NOT designed by "partisan amateurs, one from each party" but by partisan amateurs from ONE party. The counties in question were all Democratic strongholds and the officials that designed & approved the ballot were all Democrats. There was no "outsmarting" by Republicans, aside from perhaps doing a more competent job in those counties where they were the ones in charge.
Since what you have written here runs directly counter to the homework I did at the time, I am going to paraphrase it, to make sure I understand what you meant.
Are you saying that whatever party has been elected to hold the offices that control the County aparatus, appoints all the ballot design commissioners?
Weren't Republican Party officials saying "The Democrats signed off on the ballot design too!"
Every independent recount using every method of dealing with pregnant/hanging chad have almost always come back with victories for Bush.
Really? And what methods were those?
How many of those recounts were done bearing in mind Dr Jones work? IMO, All recounts that were done without considering Dr Jones examination of the mechanical design flaws of the voting machines were a waste of time.
If I were an American I would be really embarrassed by the
dubious election practices that were exposed to World scrutiny during your last Presidential election. Putin's last election was questionable. It could be argued that your mess had undermined your moral authority to point a finger over his fraud.
These obsolete punch card ballots were a disaster, but at least they provide some kind of audit trail. One the long running RISKS digest one of the topics discussed is the implementation of new technology for voting. There is universal agreement there that voting machines provide an audit trail. The old mechanically interlocked lever voting machines dont' provide an audit trail. Neither do the new systems, like the Diebold.
And yet various American jurisdictions have recently adopted the unsafe, unverifiable electronic systems.
There is a saying, "out of sight, out of mind". Mattintosh seems to believe it.
Look at
another comment he posted here. It is in response to a comment about how it is illegal to throw out monitors in Washington state. He brags about getting away with doing so anyhow.
Then he goes on to suggest we follow his example of dumping our surplus electronics in the dumpsters of local small businesses. He suggests we prey on smaller businesses, because they are less likely to have surveilance cameras.
So, Mattintosh, if your friendly local small business gets charged with having toxic waste in its garbage, who gets charged? And you are OK with that?
Mattintosh, I refrain from calling correspondents names. No comment I have read here this year has tempted me more to break this rule than yours.
Are you counting the votes of overseas military/civvies?
I dunno. Does the USA have 16 million overseas voters? Lol.
Also, the dems brought out the 'hanging chad' and 'voters are too fucking stupid to read candidates' names' ploys. I found it totally freaking hilarious that it was only Al Gore supporters who claimed to have been 'confused' by the voting slips.
The ballot design put the location to punch for Gore right over top of the structural bar. Duh!
Down in the USA you follow the foolish practice of letting every county design its own ballots. Amateurs design them. Partisan amateurs, one from each Party. Here in Canada there is a standard, simple, ballot design.
If you were paying attention during the followup to the election you might have noticed that the Republicans were not defending the ballot design. Instead they merely pointed out that the Democrats signed off on it too.
Ballot designs that resulted in disproportionate numbers of chads for one candidate had been observed in previous Florida elections. It appears to me that the Republicans ballot designers were better informed than the Democrat ballot designers, and outsmarted them.
We found you left a mess of toxic waste on the Arctic radar bases we allowed you to set up during the cold war. It is going to cost a lot to clean up -- close to a billion dollars.
When asked to help clean it up, the US response was basically, "Oh, that. Just think of the clean-up costs as part of your contribution to fighting communism."
This toxic waste was not accidentally spilled. It was dumped out of an unwillingness to be responsbile.
Yes, Toronto was shipping Michigan trash. Yes, this was very questionable, from an environmental point of view. But the difference between this and the fallout from the US nuclear tests, and the toxic waste you dumped in the Arctic, is that the USA did the dirty deed without consulting with us. Whereas, Toronto paid money to ship that trash. And there were parties in Michigan who were willing to receive payment to receive that trash.
There is something wrong with this map. Two things actually.
The election was extremely close. Gore won the popular vote, ie he got more votes over-all. Yet, apparently, on 11/20/00, at 02:15 PM ET, CNN was reporting Bush won 16 million more votes than Gore.
The second thing wrong with it is that the CNN graphic designers foolishly used similar colours to mark the county boundaries and to show counties that voted for Bush. CNN can be so unprofessional. The apparent resemblance to the fallout map is just an artifact of the counties in the east being smaller than those in the west.
Not all of the Gitmo detainees were captured on the battlefield, even using a loose definition of battlefield.
A lot them seem to have been just innocent bystanders. One of the British detainees was studying for his MSCE in pakistan. He says he and some of his fellow students went to Afghanistan following, the invasion, to provide humanitarian aid. He was rounded up by Northern Alliance forces because, unlike all native Afghanis, he was clean-shaven. Afghani men wear beards. The USA was paying the Northern Alliance a bounty for handing over prisoners to them.
Did you hear how many Gitmo detainees are going to face charges? So far only 15.
...The term gained widespread popularity during the Cold War when many poorer nations adopted the category to describe themselves as neither being aligned with NATO or the USSR, but instead composing a non-aligned "third world" (in this context, the term "First World" was generally understood to mean the United States and its allies in the Cold War, which would have made the Communist bloc the "Second World" by default; however, the latter term was very seldom actually used).
Dago is correct, as part of the former Yugoslavia , Macedonia was not part of the Soviet Bloc. My main point was that, with the disappearance of the Soviet Bloc the term "third world" should be deprecated.
No, they don't call it the 3rd world for nothing.
Originally, the term 3rd world was introduced to acknowledge that there were nations in the worlds beyond the west... basically Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia and NZ. And the west was at odds with the Soviet Bloc and Red China. The term "3rd world" referred to all the other nations that weren't part of the West or the Soviet Bloc.
So Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria would be part of the 2nd world, to the extent these terms retain any of their original meaning.
But pretty pictures are important too. Though sad, if it takes some fluff to keep/get people excited about science and to help get funding for efforts to expand human knowledge then so be it.
You got something against pretty pictures? Pretty pictures are inspirational. Pretty pictures that let someone who is not hugely scientifically literate stare deep into the awe-inspiring Universe we live in, and share the sense of wonder with us geeks? It seems like an excellent idea. The public paid for it. Why not continue sharing that sense of wonder with the whole World?
So, no, I don't think it a low-brow love of awe-inspiring pictures is sad at all.
During the middle ages they built huge, beautiful, monumental cathedrals. Ordinary people paid for them too. They took decades to build. But they too let ordinary people share in a sense of awe and wonder.
Heck, if the reason they won't send a shuttle to service Hubble is that one shuttle isn't safe, then spend $1,000,000,000 and send two. I am serious. The Hubble is worth $1,000,000,000.
Slashdot Mirror
I will read this latest Niven too. I can't remember the last Niven work I have read, although I think I read all of his work when he was young.
About authors who haven't published anything new for a long time...
About ten years ago John Varley published his first novel in a decade or so -- "The Steel Beach". In the front matter he acknowledged that it wasn't entirely consistent with his earlier novels. But I didn't detect any inconsistencies.
The first two thirds or three quarters of this novel were great! The ending however really, really sucked.
Varley tried to address a deep, serious, philosophical question. In a depressing Universe, filled with pain and suffering, why go on? It was a great question. I could barely wait to read his answer.
What I think went wrong with this novel is that he couldn't come up with an answer. I suspect this depressing topic really depressed him. And he couldn't come up with an ending.
I think the sales of his older works flagged, and he couldn't afford not to finish it. Maybe Gordie Dickson gave him some cynical advice. And so he threw together a shallow, cynical, ending; that "played to the house".
If you look at the density of the planets in our solar system you will see that the smaller rocky planets are more dense than the more massive planets.
Most of the Universe is Hydrogen. Hydrogen is very light. That means that hydrogen molecules move more quickly.
It is like Maxwell's daemon. Some of the hydrogen at the edge of the planet's atmosphere will be slower than average, and some will be faster then average. A less massive planet with less powerful gravitational field has a slower escape velocity. If that fast moving hydrogen, at the edge of the atmosphere, is moving at greater than the planet's escape velocity, and it doesn't hit another gas molecule to slow it down, its lost for good.
This is why Earth's atmosphere has no free hydrogen. Ditto Venus, Mars and Mercury. This is why Mars has such a puny atmosphere. If the Earth had formed out near Pluto it may have retained a huge amount of hydrogen.
If the temperature of this 14x planet is not too high, maybe its escape velocity is high enough that it retained a lot of hydrogen and helium too.
However, if it is orbiting its Primary in just ten days, maybe the temperature of its gas is high enough that it will lose its atmosphere as I described above anyhow.
Lol. Do large buildings leave their Air Conditioning on in the winter time where you live? With a very few exceptions most buildings here turn their heating systems on, and their Air Conditioning off, when the weather gets cold.
That is interesting. Maybe Baldwin isn't only a fan, but he is also plans to be an developer of this technology for profit? Maybe he was already an investor in en-wave?
Before I was paying full attention the interviewer asked him why this technology was being developed in Toronto first. He made some flattering noises about the co-operation between foresightful Toronto politicians and foresightful Toronto real-estate and property management types.
Maybe there are legal or administrative reasons that prevent the widespread adoption of deep lake water cooling in Chicago?
There are large buildings that could have signed on board this system, and chose not to. Here in Ontario large users of electricity pay a much lower rate than ordinary consumers. One of the documentaries I saw about this system, a year or so ago, quoted an energy conservation expert who said that if large commercial users had to pay the same rate for their electricity as ordinary consumers they would start to take energy conservation more seriously.
Does Northwestern University have its own private water system for some reason? If you find that link, please post it. Thanks.
Lake Erie and Lake Ontario have about the same surface area. But Lake Ontario is much deeper and so has a greater volume. I have links here to charts showing the temperatures, at various depths across various slices of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.
Note that Lake Erie is much warmer. But most of the water in Lake Ontario came from Lake Erie? Why is it so much colder? It cools off in the winter time. It takes water from the Niagara River six years before it flows down the St Lawrence.
If, for the sake of argument, Rochester, Kingston, Hamilton all used deep lake cooling, and they all grew so much that they exhausted the Lake's deep layer, Lake Ontario would still not evaporate, any more than Lake Erie evaporates away to nothing.
Yes, there are deep areas of Lake Ontario that have been at 4 degrees celsius for a long time. How long? Since the last ice age? The glaciers covered the entire Great Lake basin a few tens of thousands of years ago. So that is how long a unique deep lake water ecosystem would have had to evolve.
How much water would the cities have to draw from the deep layer to use up all the cold layer? I don't think you understand how deep the Lake is, and how great its volume. Look at these three maps. West Centre East. So, lets say the deep layer is currently something like half to one third of the volume of the lake. The cities would have to use up the equivalent of the flow of two or three niagaras worth of water in order to drain all the deep cold water.
So long as our winters continue to get cold enough for the lake to cool to 4 degrees the cold layer gets regenerated every winter.
I think it could be argued, if Global warming every gets bad enough that using deep lake cooling exhausts the cold layer in mid-summer that, since we have the infrastructure in place, we use it every summer until it is exhausted. What about the cold deep lake water ecosystem? I am all for preserving interesting, unique ecosystems. But I doubt that a few tens of thousands of years is long enough for it to become interesting and unique.
Have you ever had an errand in the downtown office area, and walked through a big blast of hot air?
Not only does this save energy. But because those downtown buildings are not using conventional air conditioners for cooling, they are not dumping megawatts of waste heat into the outside air. I read that the use of this technique should reduce the local ambient air temperature on the downtown streets, where it is used, by several degrees.
As a pedestrian I welcome this.
There was an interview on the morning news yesterday with a guy who is a big fan of this technology. The interviewer asked him if this technology could be used in other cities on the Great Lakes. Yes, he said. There were various cities where it could be used. Rochester and Milwaukee were two examples he offered. But, he said, it could not be used in Chicago. Presumably because Chicago doesn't have easy access to a deep cold layer.
Here in Toronto we have always taken our water from deep in the lake too. As you can see from this map the depth drops precipitously just off Toronto Island.
The American fan of this technology was Alec Baldwin, the actor.
The interviewer next asked him if any of those other cities were considering following Toronto's example. He replied that he was flying to Chicago that afternoon to make a presentation.
You don't have to guess. Google is your friend. Here is a map. Note: The inlets are just inside the green zone. The deeper part of the lake doesn't seem to be broken up into isolated pockets.
Note: The lake gets a lot deeper.
How tall did the article say this superwave might be? Ah. Maybe 300 feet -- at the Canary Island. How tall will it be when it strikes New York, Boston, Charleston, Savanah, Miami? Let's say 90 feet -- 30 yards.
Well, the wavelength of a wave is something like ten times its height. So, how large is the area where the natural superwave, and your artifical superwave cancel one another out? Do you think New Yorkers would thank you if you preserved the Battery, but the rest of New York got twice the damage?
Oh wait. A quarter of an hour later the battery is hit by the 20 yard wave you set off to protect Boston. And then it gets hits by the remains of the other big waves you set off.
Following World War 2 the USN experimented with the effects of an underwater explosions on fleets of Naval vessels. That was the fate of the Prinz Eugen, the consort to the Bismark. Clips of those explosions are public. You may have seen them. How tall would you say the wave created by those explosions were?
My estimate? Less than ten yards.
Those would have been Hiroshima scale bombs -- 10 kilotons. So, how big a blast would be required to make a wave just twice as tall? Remember, the volume of water in a wave is the cube of the dimensions. So, wouldn't a wave twice as tall require 16 times the blast energy? By my naive calculations your counter-waves would each require blasts of tens of megatons.
The radiation burden of this many explosions would rival that of a Nuclear War.
Say, how big is this slab, anyhow? And where did anyone get the idea it would make a 300 foot wave?
What happens when two waves meet, and cross? When the peaks cross you get a wave with a height that is the sum of the waves. When the troughs cross you get a trough with a depth that is the sum. When the peak of one crosses the trough of the other they cancel out temporarily .
But, once they have crossed, they go merrily on their way as if nothing had happened.
So you explode a missile in the path of the big wave? All you have done is add a second big wave to worry about. That doesn't sound like such a good idea to me.
Is there some way to break the big slab into smaller peices? Let them drop into the ocean one at a time?
How about building a coffer dam right under where we expect the slab to fall, and then pumping out all the water? No water, no big wave.
Offtopic, I know, but the thread where you and I discussed the Florida voting mess has expired, and I wanted to direct your attention to this article on that topic.
Yipes! What are they doing there? Is that the Darl Vader pawing them?
Since what you have written here runs directly counter to the homework I did at the time, I am going to paraphrase it, to make sure I understand what you meant.
Are you saying that whatever party has been elected to hold the offices that control the County aparatus, appoints all the ballot design commissioners?
Weren't Republican Party officials saying "The Democrats signed off on the ballot design too!"
Really? And what methods were those?
How many of those recounts were done bearing in mind Dr Jones work? IMO, All recounts that were done without considering Dr Jones examination of the mechanical design flaws of the voting machines were a waste of time.
If I were an American I would be really embarrassed by the dubious election practices that were exposed to World scrutiny during your last Presidential election. Putin's last election was questionable. It could be argued that your mess had undermined your moral authority to point a finger over his fraud.
These obsolete punch card ballots were a disaster, but at least they provide some kind of audit trail. One the long running RISKS digest one of the topics discussed is the implementation of new technology for voting. There is universal agreement there that voting machines provide an audit trail. The old mechanically interlocked lever voting machines dont' provide an audit trail. Neither do the new systems, like the Diebold.
And yet various American jurisdictions have recently adopted the unsafe, unverifiable electronic systems.
I am curious leadsling. Since you didn't answer my response to your Journal Entry on F911 I will repeat my question here. Have you actually seen this film?
Look at another comment he posted here. It is in response to a comment about how it is illegal to throw out monitors in Washington state. He brags about getting away with doing so anyhow.
Then he goes on to suggest we follow his example of dumping our surplus electronics in the dumpsters of local small businesses. He suggests we prey on smaller businesses, because they are less likely to have surveilance cameras.
So, Mattintosh, if your friendly local small business gets charged with having toxic waste in its garbage, who gets charged? And you are OK with that?
Mattintosh, I refrain from calling correspondents names. No comment I have read here this year has tempted me more to break this rule than yours.
I dunno. Does the USA have 16 million overseas voters? Lol.
Are you familiar with what detailed examination of the voting machines revealed? Dr Jones disassembled one each of the two different machines in question. Here is a picture showing the structural bar that caused the problem. Here is a picture showing how the chads can be jammed behind the bar. Here is a picture of Pregnant chad resulting from punching into a firmly packed chad jam.
The ballot design put the location to punch for Gore right over top of the structural bar. Duh!
Down in the USA you follow the foolish practice of letting every county design its own ballots. Amateurs design them. Partisan amateurs, one from each Party. Here in Canada there is a standard, simple, ballot design.
If you were paying attention during the followup to the election you might have noticed that the Republicans were not defending the ballot design. Instead they merely pointed out that the Democrats signed off on it too.
Ballot designs that resulted in disproportionate numbers of chads for one candidate had been observed in previous Florida elections. It appears to me that the Republicans ballot designers were better informed than the Democrat ballot designers, and outsmarted them.
When asked to help clean it up, the US response was basically, "Oh, that. Just think of the clean-up costs as part of your contribution to fighting communism."
This toxic waste was not accidentally spilled. It was dumped out of an unwillingness to be responsbile.
Yes, Toronto was shipping Michigan trash. Yes, this was very questionable, from an environmental point of view. But the difference between this and the fallout from the US nuclear tests, and the toxic waste you dumped in the Arctic, is that the USA did the dirty deed without consulting with us. Whereas, Toronto paid money to ship that trash. And there were parties in Michigan who were willing to receive payment to receive that trash.
The second thing wrong with it is that the CNN graphic designers foolishly used similar colours to mark the county boundaries and to show counties that voted for Bush. CNN can be so unprofessional. The apparent resemblance to the fallout map is just an artifact of the counties in the east being smaller than those in the west.
A lot them seem to have been just innocent bystanders. One of the British detainees was studying for his MSCE in pakistan. He says he and some of his fellow students went to Afghanistan following, the invasion, to provide humanitarian aid. He was rounded up by Northern Alliance forces because, unlike all native Afghanis, he was clean-shaven. Afghani men wear beards. The USA was paying the Northern Alliance a bounty for handing over prisoners to them.
Did you hear how many Gitmo detainees are going to face charges? So far only 15.
I said "Soviet Bloc", and you used the term "communist bloc", as if you thought they were synonymous.
But perhaps we can agree that the Cold War is over? So this is of largely historical interest?
Dago is correct, as part of the former Yugoslavia , Macedonia was not part of the Soviet Bloc. My main point was that, with the disappearance of the Soviet Bloc the term "third world" should be deprecated.
So Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria would be part of the 2nd world, to the extent these terms retain any of their original meaning.
You got something against pretty pictures? Pretty pictures are inspirational. Pretty pictures that let someone who is not hugely scientifically literate stare deep into the awe-inspiring Universe we live in, and share the sense of wonder with us geeks? It seems like an excellent idea. The public paid for it. Why not continue sharing that sense of wonder with the whole World?
So, no, I don't think it a low-brow love of awe-inspiring pictures is sad at all.
During the middle ages they built huge, beautiful, monumental cathedrals. Ordinary people paid for them too. They took decades to build. But they too let ordinary people share in a sense of awe and wonder.
Heck, if the reason they won't send a shuttle to service Hubble is that one shuttle isn't safe, then spend $1,000,000,000 and send two. I am serious. The Hubble is worth $1,000,000,000.
There are dangers in relying on electronic information. Particularly when it is used without any exercise of common sense.