...and this line of thought applies to *most* colleges, and most of the colleges getting shafted in the funding process aren't historically black. There are just a lot of colleges out there (mostly crappy), of all colors.
The institution of a grant applicant matters a *lot* (probably more than the scientific merit of the grant application itself or the applicant writing it). The vast majority of funding goes to the largest, most famous, and (in a somewhat circular manner) most successful research universities. Due to this skewing, if that small pool of top-ranked schools have relatively few black faculty, then the funding will end up going to faculty who aren't black.
From my experience in academia, this seems like a "pirates prevent global warming" situation -- there may be a correlation, but probably not a causative one. There is *definitely* bias in how grants are awarded, but it's bias toward specific institutions rather than a racial bias (given that color is hard or impossible to infer from grant application paperwork anyway).
It's too bad they didn't have this censorship implemented back in WWII, or Hitler might not have been able to use Google to figure out how to commit a genocide. Live & learn, I guess...
"If they were homo sapiens both before and after this genetic trait occurred, then technically, evolution hasn't occurred, just adaptation."
The word you're looking for is "speciation" -- it is not equivalent to "evolution". From Wikipedia: "Speciation is the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise." However, not all evolutionary changes imply speciation, though over time the effects of evolution can result in speciation.
"Being a theist isn't a barrier to accepting most of the scientific community's conclusions"
Very true. I've seen graduate students & professors claim that evolution is false one moment, and then go innoculate antibiotic-containing media with transformed bacteria (to select for those bacteria that properly took up a plasmid giving them resistance). It's double-think, but the human intellect is capable of some amazing gymnastics.
What can I say -- as an American, this is just embarrassing. Argh! Then again, I suppose every country has it's idiots, and a country of 3e8 people is going to have quite a few of them...
"Which is just a polite way of saying that people will abuse technology for their benefit to the detriment of others."
Isn't that just being realistic though? That is exactly how many people behave -- and it doesn't take more than a handful of such people to wreck that type of business model (assuming that they can evade or circumvent government interference through increasingly-advanced technology).
To some extent I agree with this. I have no problem voting with my wallet on this issue: I don't like Apple's practices with regards to IP/DRM, and consequently I haven't given them a dime since the 80's.
As I understand the terms, evolution usually only refers to the process by which one type of living thing changes into another type of living thing through natural selection. As for the origin of life (the chance encounter of amino acids or RNA nucleotides or whatever), that would not fall under the term "evolution."
"you must consider the energy budget of the entire process. This includes but is not limited to: the fabrication of the plant itself and all of its component parts, transportation of all of its component parts to the plant's location, etc."
...kinda like building thousands of giant wind turbines in the middle of the countryside, eh? Even the technology Greenpeace *likes* would require lots of diesel to construct.
As a PhD student in chemical engineering, I second this post.
Re:Unknown Error In The Submission
on
Nuclear Batteries
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· Score: 2, Informative
There's actually a fundamental difference between the behavior of a reactor (moderated critical) and a bomb (fast super-critical). The reactor cannot behave like a bomb because the critical-mass required is different for the two designs -- especially considering how poorly enriched reactor fuel is. You'd have to have a huge core and yank the control rods out insaneley fast. I doubt it could be done with any reactors now in existance.
If I recall my thermo class (which I may not), carbonated pop is "globally unstable", so if it has nucleation sites it will form bubbles and become less carbonated. When you added the nitrogen, it evaporated (due to the warm pop) forming bubbles of nitrogen gas which acted as nucleation sites for the dissolved CO2. This likely produced the foaming. If you could find a way so that the two did not mix -- say, a heat exchanger like an aluminum tube submerged in the pop that you poured the LN2 into, that might work. Just 2 cents worth from a chem-engineer.
You could do the same thing with liquid CO2 -- not only would it cool the beer, but it'd give it more foam. Of course, CO2 liquifies at something like 900 psi if I recall, so it might be a bit violent...
I live in Minnesota -- very snowy. Lost a cell phone one February in a parking lot during a blizzard. Apparantly the snow-plow pushed it (along with the recent 6-inches of snowfall) into a huge pile in the corner of the lot. When that pile melted in the spring (2 months later) I recovered the cell phone. After a rinse in distilled water, the thing worked perfectly. I'll certainly be buying Nokia again.
Might be a good solution for anyone who sees this lawsuit as silly... If these *were* in the wild, then the lawsuit would be moot and could be dismissed.
Why don't we make reactors with FLIP fuel? I worked at a reactor on my campus (U Wisconsin - Madison) and we used a fuel with a prompt negative temperature coefficient. It can't really melt down because if it gets hotter, it gets less reactive, so you can do pretty much anything you like with the control rods, but you can't melt the core (like TMI or Chernobyl). Because meltdown is physically impossible, it was safe enough to put in the middle of campus without a special containment building. Of course, this was 1 MW thermal, so maybe the technology doesn't scale well. I'm a chemical engineer, not nuclear, so this is a bit out of my specialty.
I have to agree. Personally, I think that weapons like this are FAR worse than pretty much anything else -- nuclear included. If a terrorist or other destructive individual/group wants to build x nuclear bombs, he/she would need to steal x*y kilos of plutonium/uranium. If you want to wipe out a country, you'd need a lot of it. With biological weapons, it could take only 1 release to start an epidemic that we may not be able to stop. If one of these viruses escaped into the wild -- even accidentally -- and it happened to be a communicable strain... Well, adios amigos. And the research line is kinda hard to buy too. It's a hell of a lot easier to make something like this than to make a cure for it. It may only take a week or two to grow a new recombinant strain (girlfriend is a cellular biology grad student -- they harmless strains of recombinent bacteria/yeast all the time), but finding a cure may take years if it's even possible. It's just best that it not exist in the first place.
yea -- any low Z elements will moderate (slow) neutrons through repeated collisions (scattering). Both light hydrogen and deuterium are excellent moderators (carbon is also often used). It's just that deuterium absorbs fewer neutrons than light hydrogen in the process (but it's waaaaay more expensive).
Here at the UWisconsin Madison we have a SNAP-TRIGA rxr with 70% enriched fuel. Tech. Info and Photos Of course, there isn't enough material to make a bomb (takes more to go fast-critical than thermal-critical).
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Life by itself is not valuable. Bacteria are alive -- that doesn't stop me from washing my hands before I eat.
...and this line of thought applies to *most* colleges, and most of the colleges getting shafted in the funding process aren't historically black. There are just a lot of colleges out there (mostly crappy), of all colors.
The institution of a grant applicant matters a *lot* (probably more than the scientific merit of the grant application itself or the applicant writing it). The vast majority of funding goes to the largest, most famous, and (in a somewhat circular manner) most successful research universities. Due to this skewing, if that small pool of top-ranked schools have relatively few black faculty, then the funding will end up going to faculty who aren't black.
From my experience in academia, this seems like a "pirates prevent global warming" situation -- there may be a correlation, but probably not a causative one. There is *definitely* bias in how grants are awarded, but it's bias toward specific institutions rather than a racial bias (given that color is hard or impossible to infer from grant application paperwork anyway).
It's too bad they didn't have this censorship implemented back in WWII, or Hitler might not have been able to use Google to figure out how to commit a genocide. Live & learn, I guess...
"If they were homo sapiens both before and after this genetic trait occurred, then technically, evolution hasn't occurred, just adaptation."
The word you're looking for is "speciation" -- it is not equivalent to "evolution". From Wikipedia: "Speciation is the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise." However, not all evolutionary changes imply speciation, though over time the effects of evolution can result in speciation.
"Being a theist isn't a barrier to accepting most of the scientific community's conclusions"
Very true. I've seen graduate students & professors claim that evolution is false one moment, and then go innoculate antibiotic-containing media with transformed bacteria (to select for those bacteria that properly took up a plasmid giving them resistance). It's double-think, but the human intellect is capable of some amazing gymnastics.
What can I say -- as an American, this is just embarrassing. Argh! Then again, I suppose every country has it's idiots, and a country of 3e8 people is going to have quite a few of them...
"Which is just a polite way of saying that people will abuse technology for their benefit to the detriment of others."
Isn't that just being realistic though? That is exactly how many people behave -- and it doesn't take more than a handful of such people to wreck that type of business model (assuming that they can evade or circumvent government interference through increasingly-advanced technology).
To some extent I agree with this. I have no problem voting with my wallet on this issue: I don't like Apple's practices with regards to IP/DRM, and consequently I haven't given them a dime since the 80's.
As I understand the terms, evolution usually only refers to the process by which one type of living thing changes into another type of living thing through natural selection. As for the origin of life (the chance encounter of amino acids or RNA nucleotides or whatever), that would not fall under the term "evolution."
"you must consider the energy budget of the entire process. This includes but is not limited to: the fabrication of the plant itself and all of its component parts, transportation of all of its component parts to the plant's location, etc."
...kinda like building thousands of giant wind turbines in the middle of the countryside, eh? Even the technology Greenpeace *likes* would require lots of diesel to construct.
brilliant
As a PhD student in chemical engineering, I second this post.
There's actually a fundamental difference between the behavior of a reactor (moderated critical) and a bomb (fast super-critical). The reactor cannot behave like a bomb because the critical-mass required is different for the two designs -- especially considering how poorly enriched reactor fuel is. You'd have to have a huge core and yank the control rods out insaneley fast. I doubt it could be done with any reactors now in existance.
If I recall my thermo class (which I may not), carbonated pop is "globally unstable", so if it has nucleation sites it will form bubbles and become less carbonated. When you added the nitrogen, it evaporated (due to the warm pop) forming bubbles of nitrogen gas which acted as nucleation sites for the dissolved CO2. This likely produced the foaming. If you could find a way so that the two did not mix -- say, a heat exchanger like an aluminum tube submerged in the pop that you poured the LN2 into, that might work. Just 2 cents worth from a chem-engineer.
Come to lovely Wisconsin where beer is sold cold, by the can, in gas stations.
You could do the same thing with liquid CO2 -- not only would it cool the beer, but it'd give it more foam. Of course, CO2 liquifies at something like 900 psi if I recall, so it might be a bit violent...
I live in Minnesota -- very snowy. Lost a cell phone one February in a parking lot during a blizzard. Apparantly the snow-plow pushed it (along with the recent 6-inches of snowfall) into a huge pile in the corner of the lot. When that pile melted in the spring (2 months later) I recovered the cell phone. After a rinse in distilled water, the thing worked perfectly. I'll certainly be buying Nokia again.
Might be a good solution for anyone who sees this lawsuit as silly... If these *were* in the wild, then the lawsuit would be moot and could be dismissed.
Why don't we make reactors with FLIP fuel? I worked at a reactor on my campus (U Wisconsin - Madison) and we used a fuel with a prompt negative temperature coefficient. It can't really melt down because if it gets hotter, it gets less reactive, so you can do pretty much anything you like with the control rods, but you can't melt the core (like TMI or Chernobyl). Because meltdown is physically impossible, it was safe enough to put in the middle of campus without a special containment building. Of course, this was 1 MW thermal, so maybe the technology doesn't scale well. I'm a chemical engineer, not nuclear, so this is a bit out of my specialty.
I have to agree. Personally, I think that weapons like this are FAR worse than pretty much anything else -- nuclear included. If a terrorist or other destructive individual/group wants to build x nuclear bombs, he/she would need to steal x*y kilos of plutonium/uranium. If you want to wipe out a country, you'd need a lot of it. With biological weapons, it could take only 1 release to start an epidemic that we may not be able to stop. If one of these viruses escaped into the wild -- even accidentally -- and it happened to be a communicable strain... Well, adios amigos. And the research line is kinda hard to buy too. It's a hell of a lot easier to make something like this than to make a cure for it. It may only take a week or two to grow a new recombinant strain (girlfriend is a cellular biology grad student -- they harmless strains of recombinent bacteria/yeast all the time), but finding a cure may take years if it's even possible. It's just best that it not exist in the first place.
yea -- any low Z elements will moderate (slow) neutrons through repeated collisions (scattering). Both light hydrogen and deuterium are excellent moderators (carbon is also often used). It's just that deuterium absorbs fewer neutrons than light hydrogen in the process (but it's waaaaay more expensive).
Most rxr's here in the US use light water. Ours at U-Wisconsin does ( is a pool of light water -- not heavy water.
Sorry: that's FLIP not SNAP -- too many damn acronyms... ;)
Here at the UWisconsin Madison we have a SNAP-TRIGA rxr with 70% enriched fuel. Tech. Info and Photos Of course, there isn't enough material to make a bomb (takes more to go fast-critical than thermal-critical).