Here's the thing: HFCS is equivalent to what you get when you make an invert sugar syrup from a sucrose solution. Sucrose consists of a glucose and fructose molecule weakly bonded to each other.
For this reason some people assume that a sucrose solution is the same as an invert sugar syrup (a "simple syrup" in bartender jargon), because it consists more or less of the same pieces. But it's not strictly speaking the same thing -- you have to cleave that bond first by heating (as in making a simple syrup).
Does that make any difference at all? I have no idea. Digestion is an insanely complicated process, and while it's entirely plausible that breaking that bond makes no practical difference in vivo, it ain't necessarily so. The rate at which things happen in digestion turns out to be a big deal, which is why the same amount of digestible carbohydrates acts very differently depending on whether you eat it as pure starch or as starch mixed with fat or fiber.
This is a lot like the way that anti-vaxx people assume that all organomercury compounds are tantamount to metallic mercury. They're not. That mercury atom *is* a justification for looking for potential neurotoxic effects, but it doesn't mean that those effects will be there.
It doesn't require its components to be perfect in order for the whole thing to operate.
Science doesn't provide instant truth, any more than the Internet provides instant communication. It detects faulty transmissions and corrects them. Otherwise how would we know those researchers were wrong?
It would be better if researchers were banned from taking funding from companies affected by their research, just as it would be better if politicians were banned from accepting contributions from companies affected by their legislation. But in the case of science the entire enterprise is robust enough to identify and isolate corrupted results -- eventually.
Yes, if you scale a weak explosive enough the size of the shockwave gets arbitrarily large. However if you try this in a cardboard concrete form (sonotube) the sonotube will remain intact. You suspend the tube over an ignition source like a candle and sift flour into the top.
Those books were garbage. I'm actually surprised anyone on slashdot liked them. Cheesy poorly written action books with all the tech so stupidly wrong it's offensive to anyone who knows how computers work.
I have a theory that power and accessibility in books are largely orthogonal. Power comes from having something to say that resonates with someone. Accessibility from from craft. Sometimes you read a book and it passes through your head effortlessly without making a ripple or leaving a trace. That's a very, well written book with nothing interesting to say.
When a book's message and themes hit you in the right spot, you can't see its faults. Lord of the Rings is a brilliant book, but it's a hot mess (with a sprinkling of sublime bits) all the way up to the Council of Elrond. That's painfully obvious for someone who is not getting into the book as he reads it. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is likewise a brilliant book with serious first-novel-itis. And we all know how dreadful the dialog and scene pacing in Twilight is -- but the people who love that book don't. And it's OK. Had Twilight been better written, it might have found a larger audience; but it found a large enough audience, and if they enjoy the book I'm not going rub their nose in its faults.
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's prigs who try to make people ashamed for liking things that they think are bad. If you read hard enough, everything starts looking bad. Someone in my book club recently disparaged a potential novel as "Gun sci-fi". I knew exactly what he meant, and I suspect that book is not for me; but there are people out there who want to read that stuff and if they enjoy it, good for them. Sure it looks better to them than it does to me, but there's stuff I like that they probably would find ridiculous too.
If we're talking pure joy of tech, for me it has to be EE Doc Smith's SPACEHOUNDS OF THE IPC, originally published in Hugo Gernsback's AMAZING STORIES in 1931.
Now remember for readers in 1931 radio was high tech. Ever build a crystal radio set? Did you wonder what the point was? Well if you were a kid in the early 20s, with a wooden plank, a spool of wire, and a hunk of galena, you could build yourself the most advanced, high tech communication instrument on the planet. When the story was published in 1931, the hottest new tech was the vacuum tube radio. This took a few more premanunfactured parts -- the vacuum tubes obviousl, but still if you were ambitious and clever with your hands and could solder wires and cut and bend sheet metal, you still could build the most sophisticated communication receiver on the planet.
The story takes place in a high tech future that seems plausible for someone in '31. There is regular spaceliner service between Earth and Mars. Interesting side note -- these spaceliners operate by a kind of remotely broadcasted power, and use that to power their reactionless drives. If you were *very* sophisticated at the time, you would realize this avoids all the rocket equation related implausibilities of ships that have to carry the reaction mass to maintain constant acceleration. The ships are guided by beacon stations (radio of course!), but the station keepers have been getting sloppy, so the line sends their best computer (a *person* of course!) to pin their ears back.
The liner is attacked by an alien spaceship, cut apart, and towed in pieces to Jupiter.It is built in many small airtight compartments (like an OCEAN liner) so most of the people are still alive, including our hero who is stuck in small piece with a beautiful (yay) rich (double yay) girl. He manages to escape (I forget how), and they crash on Ganymede, which turns out to be just like Earth but with lower gravity.
Now here's the problem: the line is building a new supership; if they only knew everyone was being held at the moons of Jupiter they could rescue them. But as far as they know the liner just disappeared.
So what our hero and is lovely, plucky helpmate must do is something familiar to every red-blooded Depression era nerd: BUILD A RADIO SET! Only they've got nothing; they've got to work their way up from paleolithic tech all the way up to (their) present, figuring out how to smelt metal, blow glass, generate electricity, and reverse engineer the very latest high tech vacuum tube.
This kind of story represents a way of imagining the future of tech that we we never be able to believe in again; one in which a single heroically brilliant nerd can really master everything from banging the rocks together all the way up to the very cutting edge. You can imagine the hero of this book figuring out how to melt silica and blow glass, but you couldn't imagine him improvising a chip fab.
If I recall, technically an "explosion" is supersonic deflagration, which of course is accompanied by a shock wave. It's the shock wave that's the salient feature of an explosion.
Practically anything flammable can explode if it is finely mixed with oxygen (or an oxidizer) and it is *contained*. If you pour the black powder from a bullet into a line and touch it off it's go up pfft! But it won't explode because it's not contained. On the flip side flour or powdered coffee creamer can be sifted into a tube and ignited and it will explode, but not with much force.
A lithium ion cell has plenty of flammable bits inside, a source of O2 (the electrode), and of course it is contained, but it's engineered not to explode. It's engineered not to catch fire too, so you can't rule rule out either possibility since something's gone very wrong.
It's not either/or too: you can get a small explosion that once it escapes its immediate confines dissipates into an expanding cloud of burning gas -- or even a fireball. It can be quite impressive, and while not packing the shattering power it would if all the fuel was consumed at supersonic speed, it can be quite impressive and destructive.
This is a simple-in-principle but hard-in-practice optimization problem. It runs like this: you have X investment dollars to divide between (A) on-line and (B) physical store selling; what is the optimal mix of A and B?
If you can run exactly one of these operations at a profit, the answer is simple. But if you can run *both* of them at a (not necessarily equal) profit, you run into the principle of diminishing returns. You may reach a point where further marginal investment in A pays less than a marginal investment in B would. This is further complicated by the fact that A and B compete with each other.
But the fact that other people tried mixing sales models and got burned proves nothing fundamental, only that they got the mix wrong. This happens with one-channel businesses too: they overextend and then suffer painful contractions. Twenty years ago the land was dotted briefly with Boston Markets. Now they are a rarity. That's because there's a segment of consumers that loves them their rotisserie chicken; it's an easy sell to them and you can grow your business, but you'd better not think you can turn the chicken business into Dunkin' Donuts (which despite its name isn't in the doughnut business; they're caffeine pushers).
These images remind me quite a bit of the Atacama Desert, large parts of which receive almost no rain. The resemblance is almost uncanny, right down to the color. There are two very subtle differences though. Some of the sand slopes on Mars are unusually steep, they almost climb up the rock faces; that suggests there's a steep static critical angle of repose, but of course that depends on the material. I think if you are a sci-fi writer you might be tempted to make detritus slopes on a low-gravity world all steep; that would't be the case because avalanches tend to go on longer so the median slope wouldn't be that different. But some slopes could get very steep.
The second and more obvious difference is how on Mars erosion scars are all horizontal, wind-cut features; the Atacama gets very little rain, but the movement of water down slopes leaves very obvious traces behind in the loose material.
The utter lack of vegetation on Mars is also striking, although I've been in parts of the Atacama where it hadn't rained in five years (which is not unusual). That landscape appeared to be just as lifeless as one sees in the Mars photos, except for a narrow strip of a few hundred yards near the ocean where a few cacti survived off morning sea mists. The Atacama got rain a months after I was there, and a friend sent me a picture of the "moonscape" afterward: literally every inch of it was covered in wildflowers as far as the eye could see. She reported that the fragrance was so overwhelming it'd make you retch. A vast cloud of tiny pollinating insects hovered over the carpet of flowers.
The thing is, when I was there you could take a handful of that sand and without a very close grain-by-grain examination under a magnifying glass you'd swear it was completely sterile. In fact it would be chock full of extremophile life, adapted to a life cycle of a week or two of furious growth and reproduction followed by years of dormancy.
By the way Mars has been very visible in the evening sky for the past few months. If you have clear evening you should go out and look for it in the twilight, before the stars come out. It's easy to identify by its striking red color.
Personal information about a high ranking intelligence official is intrinsically sensitive.
Intelligence agencies put a lot of time in by smart people teasing out deductions from apparently innocuous information about high ranking foreign officials. Back in the Cold War it was called "Kremlinology".
Of course there's only so much you you can do about it. People have private lives and leave traces of information behind. You can never be sure what anyone can do with any piece of data, because it's connecting different data points that generates insight.
I don't think they're doing this out of the goodness of their heart. Samsung had sold about 26 million of the things as of a month ago, which mean that (if their estimates are correct and truthful) there are 650 devices in the wild that have this problem.
This could, very possibly, lead to hundreds of fires and who knows how many actual explosions -- and Samsung would be responsible for ALL the consequences, direct and indirect, of those events. If Samsung knew and failed to take action, then they'd be open to extra punitive damages too.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there's simply no way to value any particular pure science project in any kind of precise terms. In aggregate pure science of course is a big part of our civilization's success.
Putting scare quotes around "static equilibrium" doesn't change the fact that those very impressive structural members can't resist the force of collapse to any significant degree. It doesn't matter how strong a structural member looks, what matters is its strength relative to load.
The problem with your folk-engineering conspiracy theory is that if buildings naturally toppled, then getting the building to act unnaturally would have taken weeks of physical preparation. Don't you think people would notice crews cutting beams and laying explosive charges?
Skyscrapers are extreme engineering. When a practicing structural engineer working on tall buildings says the collapse was a result of deliberate engineering, then I'll listen. Until then it's just more Internet hogwash.
I remember when Li-Ion technology was new -- as in not available to the general public at all. I was an MIT student (back when Disco sucking was a hot cultural issue) and there were a few labs around campus that had them, but they were considered extremely hazardous. It wasn't the electrochemical energy density that made them dangerous (although that's what made them attractive); it's that lithium cobalt oxide is a chemically dangerous electrode material. It's subject to thermal runaway and when heated releases pure oxygen. Heat + pure O2 + any kind of reasonably combustible material = Earth-shattering kaboom.
What makes the technology safe to use in something you carry in the pocket is decades of engineering. It's still the same incredibly dangerous stuff, it's just surrounded by layers of safety measures which collectively deliver (normally) enough of a safety margin. But the overall result is more complex than you'd use with chemically safe materials. Complex systems often have unexpected failure modes, modes that are hard to detect in testing because they're statistically rare. But even though they're rare, the results can be catastrophic.
I do know that Samsung software sucks at power conservation; I have an S6 and that sucker gets really hot and the battery level drops like a stone unless you keep it in ultra-power saving mode. The S7 has a battery that's a 1000mAH larger, so right off the bat you have just that much more potential for generating heat. Add some occasional defects in the battery cell safeguards and you could well have rare cases of thermal runaway.
Well, here's the thing: so much of what we take on faith as solid hangs on the slender thread of engineering. None of this kind of "it stands to reason" bullshit really stands to reason, because it's based on a false and shallow understanding of how the built world behaves.
It might look believable for Godzilla to pick up a ship and use it like a club in a movie, but a real ship would tear like tissue paper. Likewise buildings don't fall over because they have nowhere near the strength it would take to resist the kind of sheering forces involved. A massive structural failure like the WTC collapse consists of millions of extremely rapid, sequential failures; once the building is no long in static equilibrium, it might as well be made of smoke.
Well Snow was cholera. The US has a long history fighting mosquito-borne diseases going right back to the founding of the nation, although clearly they had no idea of what was going on back then.
The titan of vector borne disease research was Walter Reed -- the guy they named the Army Medical Center for.
It helps that Malaria has no animal focus other than humans. It means you can focus on places like peoples' homes, where most malaria infections take place.
People who haven't read 1984, or were forced to read 1984 in high school therefore none of it stuck in their brains, probably shouldn't use it as a metaphor.
They have no choice but to release these restrictions under the treaty. What they have a choice is the degree to which they continue to grant Britain the advantages it enjoyed when it formerly abided by them.
I don't follow European news, but I doubt that very much. The UK is ~14% of the total GDP of the EU (second largest in the EU): it dropping out without replacing the existing trade deals would be a massive economic blow to the EU
You're counting your chickens after the eggs have been broken.
The UK voted its way out of the restrictions that being in the EU. While some sort of arrangement will no doubt be negotiated, it's not going to be anything like the status quo. You can't expect other countries to release the UK from its obligations while still enjoying the benefits those countries have to sacrifice to get. Some form of trade barrier is going to go up between the UK and Europe.
Likewise you have to expect third party countries to drive hard bargains, because they can. The UK will have a lot of clout for an individual country of its size but less than the collective clout of the EU. The flip side of saying the UK is 14% of the EU GDP is that the remaining EU after Brexit will be over 6x larger than the UK.
In all these years the message hasn't gotten out that no website has any need or business or excuse to be storing plaintext passwords???
I wouldn't be surprised. There's an awful lot of stuff you need to know, it's easy to underestimate if you've learned it gradually, over "all these years".
Having teenagers myself, I think their education is much better than mine ever was; and of course they have young and agile brains that absorb new information really, really well. But I wonder how the ones going into software are supposed to get to know all the things I've learned over forty years of working with software. Back in the day if you'd read a handful of important books like The Unix Programming Environment, The Art of Computer Programming, Software Tools in C etc you were in-the-know, especially if you had a subscription to Byte and Dr. Dobbs. You could take a few months off and learn the whole shmeer. Of course today you'd add Applied Cryptography to the canon... but still, could you do that today? Is there a software canon someone could study and be ready to go?
We're looking at colleges now, and nowhere on the computer science curriculum is there a course on "Stuff You're Really Expected to Know." You're supposed to pick that stuff up. Either the engineering departments look just like they did forty years ago, or they've gone radically interdisciplinary, an approach that in general I endorse. But either way, there is no way to tell that someone knows all the stuff he ought to know to develop software.
I'm not big on certifications; perhaps my long life history with software has jaded me; I've seen too many people who've collected commercial certifications that aren't worth a damn because it just shows they can parrot back information; they don't necessarily understand anything. But a basic "fit for service" certification is one that I could get behind.
This is a very simplistic notion for several reasons. First, a company doesn't just have to make a profit to be successful; it has to make at least a normal profit. That means it's very easy for an unsuccessful company to survive indefinitely if proprietors imagine a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
What's more a company in a good cash position can survive for years off their past successes while seldom turning any profit. Sears was once the sole national retailer in the United States, and it dominated the market in a way that even Walmart has never came close to. The decline of Sears took decades, and the reason can be seen across the country in giant yellow brick buildings that dot the landscape. If you are old enough to remember you'll know used to be Sears stores and regional distribution centers. Sears's sunk costs in infrastructure allowed it to spend less cash than other retailers getting goods to consumers. It should have made money forever. But it didn't, because management tried to use their cash cow to leverage their way into unrelated businesses. They let their stores became dirty, dingy places with unattractive merchandise. I remember going to Sears with my mom: all the white people looked greenish under the cheap fluorescent lighting and everything felt grimy. Sears lost money year after year, yet management survived on promises of jam tomorrow.
The theory that the Invisible Hand's ban hammer will come down right away on incompetent companies runs afoul of the fact that the hammer is actually wielded by irrational human beings. Like all human emotions greed is good in limited quantities, but bad in excess because emotions are irrational. Greedy people will willingly break their own rice bowls because they aren't thinking objectively.
Running a company is an exercise in applied social sciences. There probably isn't one way of doing well, nor is one way of doing it necessarily the best way through the entire life of a corporation. Had the employees in Sears store held a veto over management, Sears stores wouldn't have turned into uncompetitive shit holes in the 60s and 70s. Had the employees in HP had a veto on management, it'd still be the company it was in the 60s - early 90s. But on the other hand you wouldn't have successful conglomerates like GE or Unilever either.
I think there's room in the world for different corporate governance models. If everyone has to do it the same way, then "innovation" is just an empty slogan.
The biosphere is big. Really, really big. Sitting in your indoor room on your computer, chances are you have no awareness at all how mind-bogglingly big and complicated it is. Every footprint you leave in the dirt can become a breeding ground for mosquitoes after the next rain. Every crook where a branch meets a tree trunk. Every rain gutter, storm drain, abandoned swimming pool, and man made thing that can catch water during or after a rain. Every piece of vegetation that emerges from a swamp or body of water. Every body of water that isn't rapidly moving. This is ALL breeding ground to one kind of mosquito or another.
And a single female on one blood meal can pump out two to three hundred eggs in some species. And a couple weeks later she can do it again. For an entire year. And if the weather is warm enough those eggs will hatch, the larvae will go through five instars and pupate, emerging as a result in as little as two weeks -- although normally it takes twice as long. But in a hot wet summer, you can start with one gravid female and, well, do the math. Not all those eggs reach maturity, otherwise you'd be talking thousands of billions of descendants, but it is extremely easy to start with a handful of mosquitoes and within a couple of years have them spread across an entire contintent -- as happened when Aedes albopictus was introduces to the United States in 1985 in a shipment of tires. Fifteen years later it in a swath all the way from California to Maine, which is remarkable because it's a tropical species not particularly suited to the climates it was moving in. If you were talking about a species like Culex pipiens which is endemic to temperate climates it'd spread faster. Much, much faster.
So here's what happens in the very best imaginable case: you manage to wipe out most of the individuals of the targeted species in the world. But pockets remain, because the biosphere is huge and you just can't get to all the places they are. Your genetically modified mosquitoes (assuming that's what you're using) die out. The wild mosquitoes in the remaining pockets are now surrounded by vast swaths of unexploited habitat, which won't take long to expand into.
Mosquitoes are simply not eradicable. I don't care if you had something which worked ten times as well as DDT, cost one tenth as much, and was environmentally benign as distilled water. They cannot be eradicated. They can only be controlled until they're a tolerable nuisance. And if you want to keep them tolerable you must continue to control them. Forever.
It doesn't mean you can't do a really good job at controlling them, or that you can't eradicate them from certain relatively small but significant-to-us areas of the Earth. But they will come back.
You have things backwards. If XYZ having no demonstratable benefit was a valid reason to ban XYZ, our world would be veeeery different from what it is today.
It's not a valid reason per se. But you don't make decisions based on one factor. You make decisions by balancing factors. If you had read my post carefully you would have seen that I said there's no reason to ban non-beneficial things if there is no harm.
So to recap every combination of demonstrable benefit vs. no demonstrable benefit crossed with reasonably suspected harm vs. no reasonable basis for harm is a different case. And in each case additional data may change the case a product falls under.
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Here's the thing: HFCS is equivalent to what you get when you make an invert sugar syrup from a sucrose solution. Sucrose consists of a glucose and fructose molecule weakly bonded to each other.
For this reason some people assume that a sucrose solution is the same as an invert sugar syrup (a "simple syrup" in bartender jargon), because it consists more or less of the same pieces. But it's not strictly speaking the same thing -- you have to cleave that bond first by heating (as in making a simple syrup).
Does that make any difference at all? I have no idea. Digestion is an insanely complicated process, and while it's entirely plausible that breaking that bond makes no practical difference in vivo, it ain't necessarily so. The rate at which things happen in digestion turns out to be a big deal, which is why the same amount of digestible carbohydrates acts very differently depending on whether you eat it as pure starch or as starch mixed with fat or fiber.
This is a lot like the way that anti-vaxx people assume that all organomercury compounds are tantamount to metallic mercury. They're not. That mercury atom *is* a justification for looking for potential neurotoxic effects, but it doesn't mean that those effects will be there.
It doesn't require its components to be perfect in order for the whole thing to operate.
Science doesn't provide instant truth, any more than the Internet provides instant communication. It detects faulty transmissions and corrects them. Otherwise how would we know those researchers were wrong?
It would be better if researchers were banned from taking funding from companies affected by their research, just as it would be better if politicians were banned from accepting contributions from companies affected by their legislation. But in the case of science the entire enterprise is robust enough to identify and isolate corrupted results -- eventually.
Yes, if you scale a weak explosive enough the size of the shockwave gets arbitrarily large. However if you try this in a cardboard concrete form (sonotube) the sonotube will remain intact. You suspend the tube over an ignition source like a candle and sift flour into the top.
Those books were garbage. I'm actually surprised anyone on slashdot liked them. Cheesy poorly written action books with all the tech so stupidly wrong it's offensive to anyone who knows how computers work.
I have a theory that power and accessibility in books are largely orthogonal. Power comes from having something to say that resonates with someone. Accessibility from from craft. Sometimes you read a book and it passes through your head effortlessly without making a ripple or leaving a trace. That's a very, well written book with nothing interesting to say.
When a book's message and themes hit you in the right spot, you can't see its faults. Lord of the Rings is a brilliant book, but it's a hot mess (with a sprinkling of sublime bits) all the way up to the Council of Elrond. That's painfully obvious for someone who is not getting into the book as he reads it. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is likewise a brilliant book with serious first-novel-itis. And we all know how dreadful the dialog and scene pacing in Twilight is -- but the people who love that book don't. And it's OK. Had Twilight been better written, it might have found a larger audience; but it found a large enough audience, and if they enjoy the book I'm not going rub their nose in its faults.
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's prigs who try to make people ashamed for liking things that they think are bad. If you read hard enough, everything starts looking bad. Someone in my book club recently disparaged a potential novel as "Gun sci-fi". I knew exactly what he meant, and I suspect that book is not for me; but there are people out there who want to read that stuff and if they enjoy it, good for them. Sure it looks better to them than it does to me, but there's stuff I like that they probably would find ridiculous too.
And not literary sophistication, right?
If we're talking pure joy of tech, for me it has to be EE Doc Smith's SPACEHOUNDS OF THE IPC, originally published in Hugo Gernsback's AMAZING STORIES in 1931.
Now remember for readers in 1931 radio was high tech. Ever build a crystal radio set? Did you wonder what the point was? Well if you were a kid in the early 20s, with a wooden plank, a spool of wire, and a hunk of galena, you could build yourself the most advanced, high tech communication instrument on the planet. When the story was published in 1931, the hottest new tech was the vacuum tube radio. This took a few more premanunfactured parts -- the vacuum tubes obviousl, but still if you were ambitious and clever with your hands and could solder wires and cut and bend sheet metal, you still could build the most sophisticated communication receiver on the planet.
The story takes place in a high tech future that seems plausible for someone in '31. There is regular spaceliner service between Earth and Mars. Interesting side note -- these spaceliners operate by a kind of remotely broadcasted power, and use that to power their reactionless drives. If you were *very* sophisticated at the time, you would realize this avoids all the rocket equation related implausibilities of ships that have to carry the reaction mass to maintain constant acceleration. The ships are guided by beacon stations (radio of course!), but the station keepers have been getting sloppy, so the line sends their best computer (a *person* of course!) to pin their ears back.
The liner is attacked by an alien spaceship, cut apart, and towed in pieces to Jupiter.It is built in many small airtight compartments (like an OCEAN liner) so most of the people are still alive, including our hero who is stuck in small piece with a beautiful (yay) rich (double yay) girl. He manages to escape (I forget how), and they crash on Ganymede, which turns out to be just like Earth but with lower gravity.
Now here's the problem: the line is building a new supership; if they only knew everyone was being held at the moons of Jupiter they could rescue them. But as far as they know the liner just disappeared.
So what our hero and is lovely, plucky helpmate must do is something familiar to every red-blooded Depression era nerd: BUILD A RADIO SET! Only they've got nothing; they've got to work their way up from paleolithic tech all the way up to (their) present, figuring out how to smelt metal, blow glass, generate electricity, and reverse engineer the very latest high tech vacuum tube.
This kind of story represents a way of imagining the future of tech that we we never be able to believe in again; one in which a single heroically brilliant nerd can really master everything from banging the rocks together all the way up to the very cutting edge. You can imagine the hero of this book figuring out how to melt silica and blow glass, but you couldn't imagine him improvising a chip fab.
If I recall, technically an "explosion" is supersonic deflagration, which of course is accompanied by a shock wave. It's the shock wave that's the salient feature of an explosion.
Practically anything flammable can explode if it is finely mixed with oxygen (or an oxidizer) and it is *contained*. If you pour the black powder from a bullet into a line and touch it off it's go up pfft! But it won't explode because it's not contained. On the flip side flour or powdered coffee creamer can be sifted into a tube and ignited and it will explode, but not with much force.
A lithium ion cell has plenty of flammable bits inside, a source of O2 (the electrode), and of course it is contained, but it's engineered not to explode. It's engineered not to catch fire too, so you can't rule rule out either possibility since something's gone very wrong.
It's not either/or too: you can get a small explosion that once it escapes its immediate confines dissipates into an expanding cloud of burning gas -- or even a fireball. It can be quite impressive, and while not packing the shattering power it would if all the fuel was consumed at supersonic speed, it can be quite impressive and destructive.
This is a simple-in-principle but hard-in-practice optimization problem. It runs like this: you have X investment dollars to divide between (A) on-line and (B) physical store selling; what is the optimal mix of A and B?
If you can run exactly one of these operations at a profit, the answer is simple. But if you can run *both* of them at a (not necessarily equal) profit, you run into the principle of diminishing returns. You may reach a point where further marginal investment in A pays less than a marginal investment in B would. This is further complicated by the fact that A and B compete with each other.
But the fact that other people tried mixing sales models and got burned proves nothing fundamental, only that they got the mix wrong. This happens with one-channel businesses too: they overextend and then suffer painful contractions. Twenty years ago the land was dotted briefly with Boston Markets. Now they are a rarity. That's because there's a segment of consumers that loves them their rotisserie chicken; it's an easy sell to them and you can grow your business, but you'd better not think you can turn the chicken business into Dunkin' Donuts (which despite its name isn't in the doughnut business; they're caffeine pushers).
I *is* an alien landscape, after all.
These images remind me quite a bit of the Atacama Desert, large parts of which receive almost no rain. The resemblance is almost uncanny, right down to the color. There are two very subtle differences though. Some of the sand slopes on Mars are unusually steep, they almost climb up the rock faces; that suggests there's a steep static critical angle of repose, but of course that depends on the material. I think if you are a sci-fi writer you might be tempted to make detritus slopes on a low-gravity world all steep; that would't be the case because avalanches tend to go on longer so the median slope wouldn't be that different. But some slopes could get very steep.
The second and more obvious difference is how on Mars erosion scars are all horizontal, wind-cut features; the Atacama gets very little rain, but the movement of water down slopes leaves very obvious traces behind in the loose material.
The utter lack of vegetation on Mars is also striking, although I've been in parts of the Atacama where it hadn't rained in five years (which is not unusual). That landscape appeared to be just as lifeless as one sees in the Mars photos, except for a narrow strip of a few hundred yards near the ocean where a few cacti survived off morning sea mists. The Atacama got rain a months after I was there, and a friend sent me a picture of the "moonscape" afterward: literally every inch of it was covered in wildflowers as far as the eye could see. She reported that the fragrance was so overwhelming it'd make you retch. A vast cloud of tiny pollinating insects hovered over the carpet of flowers.
The thing is, when I was there you could take a handful of that sand and without a very close grain-by-grain examination under a magnifying glass you'd swear it was completely sterile. In fact it would be chock full of extremophile life, adapted to a life cycle of a week or two of furious growth and reproduction followed by years of dormancy.
By the way Mars has been very visible in the evening sky for the past few months. If you have clear evening you should go out and look for it in the twilight, before the stars come out. It's easy to identify by its striking red color.
Personal information about a high ranking intelligence official is intrinsically sensitive.
Intelligence agencies put a lot of time in by smart people teasing out deductions from apparently innocuous information about high ranking foreign officials. Back in the Cold War it was called "Kremlinology".
Of course there's only so much you you can do about it. People have private lives and leave traces of information behind. You can never be sure what anyone can do with any piece of data, because it's connecting different data points that generates insight.
I don't think they're doing this out of the goodness of their heart. Samsung had sold about 26 million of the things as of a month ago, which mean that (if their estimates are correct and truthful) there are 650 devices in the wild that have this problem.
This could, very possibly, lead to hundreds of fires and who knows how many actual explosions -- and Samsung would be responsible for ALL the consequences, direct and indirect, of those events. If Samsung knew and failed to take action, then they'd be open to extra punitive damages too.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there's simply no way to value any particular pure science project in any kind of precise terms. In aggregate pure science of course is a big part of our civilization's success.
Those people are architects -- and one Mechanical Engineer. No structural engineers.
Putting scare quotes around "static equilibrium" doesn't change the fact that those very impressive structural members can't resist the force of collapse to any significant degree. It doesn't matter how strong a structural member looks, what matters is its strength relative to load.
The problem with your folk-engineering conspiracy theory is that if buildings naturally toppled, then getting the building to act unnaturally would have taken weeks of physical preparation. Don't you think people would notice crews cutting beams and laying explosive charges?
Skyscrapers are extreme engineering. When a practicing structural engineer working on tall buildings says the collapse was a result of deliberate engineering, then I'll listen. Until then it's just more Internet hogwash.
I remember when Li-Ion technology was new -- as in not available to the general public at all. I was an MIT student (back when Disco sucking was a hot cultural issue) and there were a few labs around campus that had them, but they were considered extremely hazardous. It wasn't the electrochemical energy density that made them dangerous (although that's what made them attractive); it's that lithium cobalt oxide is a chemically dangerous electrode material. It's subject to thermal runaway and when heated releases pure oxygen. Heat + pure O2 + any kind of reasonably combustible material = Earth-shattering kaboom.
What makes the technology safe to use in something you carry in the pocket is decades of engineering. It's still the same incredibly dangerous stuff, it's just surrounded by layers of safety measures which collectively deliver (normally) enough of a safety margin. But the overall result is more complex than you'd use with chemically safe materials. Complex systems often have unexpected failure modes, modes that are hard to detect in testing because they're statistically rare. But even though they're rare, the results can be catastrophic.
I do know that Samsung software sucks at power conservation; I have an S6 and that sucker gets really hot and the battery level drops like a stone unless you keep it in ultra-power saving mode. The S7 has a battery that's a 1000mAH larger, so right off the bat you have just that much more potential for generating heat. Add some occasional defects in the battery cell safeguards and you could well have rare cases of thermal runaway.
In the cabin of my dirigible!
Well, here's the thing: so much of what we take on faith as solid hangs on the slender thread of engineering. None of this kind of "it stands to reason" bullshit really stands to reason, because it's based on a false and shallow understanding of how the built world behaves.
It might look believable for Godzilla to pick up a ship and use it like a club in a movie, but a real ship would tear like tissue paper. Likewise buildings don't fall over because they have nowhere near the strength it would take to resist the kind of sheering forces involved. A massive structural failure like the WTC collapse consists of millions of extremely rapid, sequential failures; once the building is no long in static equilibrium, it might as well be made of smoke.
Well Snow was cholera. The US has a long history fighting mosquito-borne diseases going right back to the founding of the nation, although clearly they had no idea of what was going on back then.
The titan of vector borne disease research was Walter Reed -- the guy they named the Army Medical Center for.
It helps that Malaria has no animal focus other than humans. It means you can focus on places like peoples' homes, where most malaria infections take place.
People who haven't read 1984, or were forced to read 1984 in high school therefore none of it stuck in their brains, probably shouldn't use it as a metaphor.
They have no choice but to release these restrictions under the treaty. What they have a choice is the degree to which they continue to grant Britain the advantages it enjoyed when it formerly abided by them.
I don't follow European news, but I doubt that very much. The UK is ~14% of the total GDP of the EU (second largest in the EU): it dropping out without replacing the existing trade deals would be a massive economic blow to the EU
You're counting your chickens after the eggs have been broken.
The UK voted its way out of the restrictions that being in the EU. While some sort of arrangement will no doubt be negotiated, it's not going to be anything like the status quo. You can't expect other countries to release the UK from its obligations while still enjoying the benefits those countries have to sacrifice to get. Some form of trade barrier is going to go up between the UK and Europe.
Likewise you have to expect third party countries to drive hard bargains, because they can. The UK will have a lot of clout for an individual country of its size but less than the collective clout of the EU. The flip side of saying the UK is 14% of the EU GDP is that the remaining EU after Brexit will be over 6x larger than the UK.
In all these years the message hasn't gotten out that no website has any need or business or excuse to be storing plaintext passwords???
I wouldn't be surprised. There's an awful lot of stuff you need to know, it's easy to underestimate if you've learned it gradually, over "all these years".
Having teenagers myself, I think their education is much better than mine ever was; and of course they have young and agile brains that absorb new information really, really well. But I wonder how the ones going into software are supposed to get to know all the things I've learned over forty years of working with software. Back in the day if you'd read a handful of important books like The Unix Programming Environment, The Art of Computer Programming, Software Tools in C etc you were in-the-know, especially if you had a subscription to Byte and Dr. Dobbs. You could take a few months off and learn the whole shmeer. Of course today you'd add Applied Cryptography to the canon... but still, could you do that today? Is there a software canon someone could study and be ready to go?
We're looking at colleges now, and nowhere on the computer science curriculum is there a course on "Stuff You're Really Expected to Know." You're supposed to pick that stuff up. Either the engineering departments look just like they did forty years ago, or they've gone radically interdisciplinary, an approach that in general I endorse. But either way, there is no way to tell that someone knows all the stuff he ought to know to develop software.
I'm not big on certifications; perhaps my long life history with software has jaded me; I've seen too many people who've collected commercial certifications that aren't worth a damn because it just shows they can parrot back information; they don't necessarily understand anything. But a basic "fit for service" certification is one that I could get behind.
This is a very simplistic notion for several reasons. First, a company doesn't just have to make a profit to be successful; it has to make at least a normal profit. That means it's very easy for an unsuccessful company to survive indefinitely if proprietors imagine a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
What's more a company in a good cash position can survive for years off their past successes while seldom turning any profit. Sears was once the sole national retailer in the United States, and it dominated the market in a way that even Walmart has never came close to. The decline of Sears took decades, and the reason can be seen across the country in giant yellow brick buildings that dot the landscape. If you are old enough to remember you'll know used to be Sears stores and regional distribution centers. Sears's sunk costs in infrastructure allowed it to spend less cash than other retailers getting goods to consumers. It should have made money forever. But it didn't, because management tried to use their cash cow to leverage their way into unrelated businesses. They let their stores became dirty, dingy places with unattractive merchandise. I remember going to Sears with my mom: all the white people looked greenish under the cheap fluorescent lighting and everything felt grimy. Sears lost money year after year, yet management survived on promises of jam tomorrow.
The theory that the Invisible Hand's ban hammer will come down right away on incompetent companies runs afoul of the fact that the hammer is actually wielded by irrational human beings. Like all human emotions greed is good in limited quantities, but bad in excess because emotions are irrational. Greedy people will willingly break their own rice bowls because they aren't thinking objectively.
Running a company is an exercise in applied social sciences. There probably isn't one way of doing well, nor is one way of doing it necessarily the best way through the entire life of a corporation. Had the employees in Sears store held a veto over management, Sears stores wouldn't have turned into uncompetitive shit holes in the 60s and 70s. Had the employees in HP had a veto on management, it'd still be the company it was in the 60s - early 90s. But on the other hand you wouldn't have successful conglomerates like GE or Unilever either.
I think there's room in the world for different corporate governance models. If everyone has to do it the same way, then "innovation" is just an empty slogan.
The biosphere is big. Really, really big. Sitting in your indoor room on your computer, chances are you have no awareness at all how mind-bogglingly big and complicated it is. Every footprint you leave in the dirt can become a breeding ground for mosquitoes after the next rain. Every crook where a branch meets a tree trunk. Every rain gutter, storm drain, abandoned swimming pool, and man made thing that can catch water during or after a rain. Every piece of vegetation that emerges from a swamp or body of water. Every body of water that isn't rapidly moving. This is ALL breeding ground to one kind of mosquito or another.
And a single female on one blood meal can pump out two to three hundred eggs in some species. And a couple weeks later she can do it again. For an entire year. And if the weather is warm enough those eggs will hatch, the larvae will go through five instars and pupate, emerging as a result in as little as two weeks -- although normally it takes twice as long. But in a hot wet summer, you can start with one gravid female and, well, do the math. Not all those eggs reach maturity, otherwise you'd be talking thousands of billions of descendants, but it is extremely easy to start with a handful of mosquitoes and within a couple of years have them spread across an entire contintent -- as happened when Aedes albopictus was introduces to the United States in 1985 in a shipment of tires. Fifteen years later it in a swath all the way from California to Maine, which is remarkable because it's a tropical species not particularly suited to the climates it was moving in. If you were talking about a species like Culex pipiens which is endemic to temperate climates it'd spread faster. Much, much faster.
So here's what happens in the very best imaginable case: you manage to wipe out most of the individuals of the targeted species in the world. But pockets remain, because the biosphere is huge and you just can't get to all the places they are. Your genetically modified mosquitoes (assuming that's what you're using) die out. The wild mosquitoes in the remaining pockets are now surrounded by vast swaths of unexploited habitat, which won't take long to expand into.
Mosquitoes are simply not eradicable. I don't care if you had something which worked ten times as well as DDT, cost one tenth as much, and was environmentally benign as distilled water. They cannot be eradicated. They can only be controlled until they're a tolerable nuisance. And if you want to keep them tolerable you must continue to control them. Forever.
It doesn't mean you can't do a really good job at controlling them, or that you can't eradicate them from certain relatively small but significant-to-us areas of the Earth. But they will come back.
You have things backwards. If XYZ having no demonstratable benefit was a valid reason to ban XYZ, our world would be veeeery different from what it is today.
It's not a valid reason per se. But you don't make decisions based on one factor. You make decisions by balancing factors. If you had read my post carefully you would have seen that I said there's no reason to ban non-beneficial things if there is no harm.
So to recap every combination of demonstrable benefit vs. no demonstrable benefit crossed with reasonably suspected harm vs. no reasonable basis for harm is a different case. And in each case additional data may change the case a product falls under.