Pretty much this. I think it was Intel who started the fashion for cramming more cores onto a die to save power (by slowing them down as well so a dual 1.6 would report to some apps as a single 3.0 or thereabouts), they also found it to be a great moneymaker, as now you could market the Core Duo and say "Hey, this thing is TWICE AS GOOD as a single core Pentium 3.0!". The juries are still out on this one, as for some apps (thread heavy ones) dual core is fantastic, for others (process heavy like video rendering) single core is better but the faster the better. Source: own experience with a dual 1.6 next to a 2.66 P4 - in nearly every "real world usage" benchmark the P4 pisses all over the dual core, the only thing the dual core excels in is database processing, which the P4 really struggles with. My son has a quad core, each core clocks at 3.2GHz and he's still refusing to lend a core (that doesn't get used) for me to use for rendering.
I could run off a collective list of people to investigate:
Every police officer Every politician Every individual with any ties to British Royalty Every social worker Every teacher Every doctor Every judge Every other individual who has regular contact with OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN.
The eccentricity of the orbit does not need to be high, but because a tidally locked body tends to circularize its orbit, you need another moon or body that sustains the orbital eccentricity. Saturn has several dozen moons.
So what happens then is that as the body comes closer to the primary, it gets stretched more due to gravitational gradient and when it orbits further away, it reshapes itself to more closely resemble a sphere.
Io's crust raises and drops about 100 meters as it orbits around Jupiter. Its eccentricity is sustained by a 1:2:4 resonance with Europa and Callisto and is tidally locked with Jupiter.
If you think of tides as rising and falling surface, then yes, a tidally locked body can have tides.
As Titan is also in an eccentric orbit, the tidal influence pulls the moon into weird contortions - those tides are between 60 and 96 times stronger than Luna's influence on Earth. There will also be a bulge which moves, considering the orbital speed which changes constantly and the rotation which is constant, the net visual effect from Titan's surface is that Saturn librates. From the surface of Saturn (stick with me), we see way more of Titan's surface than we would if it were in a perfectly circular orbit. ALSO: consider Titan's atmosphere, which is half again the density of Earth's. All that fluid will be even more affected by tides, as will any liquid bodies such as seas of methane - no matter how fairly static those tidal influences, they are still moving, and moving against a superrotating atmosphere.
there's apparently no reason why life can't be silicon based. We would be in trouble though, as it would be completely toxic to us. The decider was pretty much on the relative abundance of silicon and carbon.
both. Probably why it came back inconclusive - certainly there was trace of organic chemistry, but whether it was intelligent, Voyager couldn't determine. I think Sagan mentions it in "Cosmos", in the same bit as his "Pale Blue Dot".
uh... because we are outdoor creatures, and outdoors is where white skin doesn't do so well. Which is why we ordinarily tan, but coupled with lifestyle our diets don't equip us with the requisite raw materials to synthesise enough melanin to cope with solar radiation - and slapping on UV block isn't doing you any favours. Incidentally, the 25-hour circadian rhythm myth is just that - a myth. The experiment was faulty in that it failed to isolate the test subjects from artificial light (which they were allowed to control hence throw the experiment by artificially delaying their internal clocks).
Silicon based life? (ref: David Darling) Germanium? (ref: Sagan) How about tin? (can we hear some L. Frank Baum, here, the only example of tin based life in literature I can think of) Lead? Flerovium? Ununquadium?
(OK, the last three are extremely unlikely given the low reactivity of lead and the short half lives of flerovium (half a millisecond) and ununquadium (2-30 seconds?) coupled with their inability to form a tetrafluoride (which is apparently kind of important in organic chemistry)
oh dear, except angels are extracorporeal for the first point, and for the second they're not allowed to interact with any of God's creations. Nothing stopping aliens from interacting with any of God's creations, but that itself would open up a whole new mess - like, what happened to giving Man dominion over all he surveys (Genesis 26, Psalm 8)? How can you hold dominion over something which is demonstrably superior to you in every way?
read it again: when God created Man he gave him dominion over ALL THINGS. Including aliens.
If that is an acceptable premise, then God lied to Man if he made aliens superior to Man to the point where a guy in a rubber suit and a torch for a finger lands in the middle of Central Park using a propulsion system nobody on this planet has even conceived of.
we have it on Earth: sea terrain that's only visible at low tide - think sandbars to mountain ranges. The Mid Atlantic Ridge is the prime example of the latter (some islands submerge during high tide), the only example I can think of of a semi-permanent sandbar feature is Dogger Bank in the North Sea which during storm surges has been known to exposure to the air from several dozen feet down. Don't forget also that Titan orbits a primary that's quite a bit more massive than Earth and is itself twice as massive as Luna. Tidal effects will necessarily be more pronounced.
A few passages to whet your appetite for knowledge:
You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet - Psalms 8:6 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. - Genesis 1:26 (KJV)
Commentary: when God created Man in His own image, he didn't just do it for appearance's sake, he made Man to be one step below the Angels, to be gifted with a body that could interact with his great creation (Earth), but he hobbled them - he didn't give Man the one thing that would have (and did) made Man imperfect: free will. That was defeated by the simple expedient of a woman, a serpent and temptation, and described in a footnote.
Given the passage from Psalm 8, it would follow that aliens were created by God hence being beneath Man-"Dominion over all things"-Kind hence would lag permanently behind us technologically. It follows, therefore, that either God lied or aliens were not created by God but by someone else and landed here for the simple purpose of extending dominion over us.
oh, consider (and I'll vastly simplify the math here):
A bullet weighs 1kg The gun weighs 1000kg (not counting mass of ammo) The gun is moving in a prograde direction (in the direction the barrel is facing) at 1,000m/s
The gun fires 1000 bullets each at 1000m/s muzzle velocity
Each bullet pushes back on the gun with an equal force to that which ejected it (1000m/s of delta v divided by 1) in the opposite direction (1000m/s divided by 1000). Those thousand bullets push back on the gun with a combined total of 1,000,000m/s of delta v, divided by the mass of the gun (1,000kg) which gives 1,000m/s.
The gun *stops*.
The A10 Warthog is moving at 165m/s in a typical attack dive. That's about 370mph. When it fires its slugs from its.69kg cartridges (it doesn't send the brass, it polices that and dumps it back into the magazine rack so what it's firing is necessarily lighter and moving a LOT faster than it would if it were firing the entire cartridge), it's firing them out with sufficient force in fifty rounds to stop 23 tonnes (fully loaded) of airframe in midair. The thing ain't subtle.
alternatively, you could just hang around a bombing range and watch as the A10s rip dead tanks to shreds. Off the coast of Lincolnshire there's just such an air range (it's actually on a tidal marsh) where A10s go into vertical dives, all you hear is a "BRAP!" and that was fifty rounds each the size of a milk bottle - and the aircraft, if you spot it before it goes for a pullout, is literally just hanging there with its arse pointing toward space. From a 400mph dive, it's sitting still with smoke pouring out of the cannon. I used to spend many an idle hour just watching these things, it was poetry in destruction. Eventually got to the point where I could spot them on pass approaches long before they started their attack dives.
And yes, they are full throttle when they fire those cannons.
A satellite would have similar problem particularly if it's firing prograde or retrograde. Firing prograde would slow it down and it would fall out of orbit, firing retrograde it would speed up and possibly achieve escape, so the ideal is to have a heavy satellite (as heavy as you can get away with and still be able to gimbal the entire vehicle) and light ammunition (OK, this is a satellite in orbit, which will making replenishment awkward if not very difficult, so you want your ammunition to be as light as possible but still be confident in its effectiveness - and for a spray and pray, in space, all you really need is something carrying enough kinetic energy to puncture a pressurised tank/hull, and for that and considering there's no air to slow it down during flight, you can get away with firing a cloud of ball bearings and Kessler the fucker to death. Just don't be there on the next orbital rendezvous with your new Death Cloud).
I thought that might grab your attention - practising religious or not (I am not. Disclosure: I am a nihilistic fatalist agnostic and proud), it is a very controversial statement to make. What I'm about to follow that with is probably nowhere near, but still, controversial.
According to the one religion I'm somewhat familiar with, and possibly others as well, humans are the most intelligent (on a sliding scale) form of life in the Universe (not counting the monotheistic God who is apparently omniscient and omnipotent which would give him an unfair advantage). Were that the case, and considering God gave Man ultimate domain over all he surveyed, then any alien landing on this rock would automatically become the property of the first human who set across it. I believe that any alien intelligent enough and technologically advanced enough to actually make the journey is immediately and demonstrably superior to us in every way, putting Mankind in defiance of God and itself in danger of being instantly rendered vapours by a jealous deity - who would then set to making any who saw it either forget or drop dead/spontaneously combust/lose the faculty to speak or otherwise articulate thought. Either way, said alien would not take kindly to being abducted and probed (I'm sure he would have his own equipment for that), and would be equipped with the ability (and will?) to defend himself and his honour with all manner of weaponry or even turn that spanky engine of his into some exotic bomb capable of reducing the entire solar system to ash.
When someone makes a prediction based on events and it comes true.
Example: fly an infected person to a densely populated place and expose people not infected to him, those uninfected will eventually be contaminated and the pathogen will go feral.
it's not a trivial amount of force. Ever fire a.50 Cal Barratt? You need to be *anchored* or the thing will snap you in half. They kill patrol boats with those things. Hell, you could kill a Bradley with little trouble with one. To bump the scale, the GAU-8 chain gun mounted in an A10 Warthog is 20 feet long and will stop the aircraft dead in a power dive.
Jurgen Prochnow (and yes he was in Das Boot as well which is another submarine movie - no wait, it was the seminal submarine movie, I think he was reliving his role in that). I actually laughed at that entire sequence (decked runway and hangar, AG field, torpedoes??), because it was screamingly obvious to any war movie geek what they were actually trying to do - the sad thing it it was kind of working in a suspension-of-disbelief-because-by-that-point-you-were-mesmerised-by-the-ridiculousness-of-it-all kind of twisted way...
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what happened to their Auschwitz counting machines?
Pretty much this. I think it was Intel who started the fashion for cramming more cores onto a die to save power (by slowing them down as well so a dual 1.6 would report to some apps as a single 3.0 or thereabouts), they also found it to be a great moneymaker, as now you could market the Core Duo and say "Hey, this thing is TWICE AS GOOD as a single core Pentium 3.0!". The juries are still out on this one, as for some apps (thread heavy ones) dual core is fantastic, for others (process heavy like video rendering) single core is better but the faster the better. Source: own experience with a dual 1.6 next to a 2.66 P4 - in nearly every "real world usage" benchmark the P4 pisses all over the dual core, the only thing the dual core excels in is database processing, which the P4 really struggles with. My son has a quad core, each core clocks at 3.2GHz and he's still refusing to lend a core (that doesn't get used) for me to use for rendering.
Bullshit.
I could run off a collective list of people to investigate:
Every police officer
Every politician
Every individual with any ties to British Royalty
Every social worker
Every teacher
Every doctor
Every judge
Every other individual who has regular contact with OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN.
The eccentricity of the orbit does not need to be high, but because a tidally locked body tends to circularize its orbit, you need another moon or body that sustains the orbital eccentricity. Saturn has several dozen moons.
So what happens then is that as the body comes closer to the primary, it gets stretched more due to gravitational gradient and when it orbits further away, it reshapes itself to more closely resemble a sphere.
Io's crust raises and drops about 100 meters as it orbits around Jupiter. Its eccentricity is sustained by a 1:2:4 resonance with Europa and Callisto and is tidally locked with Jupiter.
If you think of tides as rising and falling surface, then yes, a tidally locked body can have tides.
As Titan is also in an eccentric orbit, the tidal influence pulls the moon into weird contortions - those tides are between 60 and 96 times stronger than Luna's influence on Earth. There will also be a bulge which moves, considering the orbital speed which changes constantly and the rotation which is constant, the net visual effect from Titan's surface is that Saturn librates. From the surface of Saturn (stick with me), we see way more of Titan's surface than we would if it were in a perfectly circular orbit. ALSO: consider Titan's atmosphere, which is half again the density of Earth's. All that fluid will be even more affected by tides, as will any liquid bodies such as seas of methane - no matter how fairly static those tidal influences, they are still moving, and moving against a superrotating atmosphere.
there's apparently no reason why life can't be silicon based. We would be in trouble though, as it would be completely toxic to us. The decider was pretty much on the relative abundance of silicon and carbon.
whew, good job I didn't read that out loud, Aldebaran is up.
both. Probably why it came back inconclusive - certainly there was trace of organic chemistry, but whether it was intelligent, Voyager couldn't determine. I think Sagan mentions it in "Cosmos", in the same bit as his "Pale Blue Dot".
the Bible doesn't say anything about us blowing up cities with nuclear fire either -didn't stop us from doing it twice.
uh... because we are outdoor creatures, and outdoors is where white skin doesn't do so well. Which is why we ordinarily tan, but coupled with lifestyle our diets don't equip us with the requisite raw materials to synthesise enough melanin to cope with solar radiation - and slapping on UV block isn't doing you any favours. Incidentally, the 25-hour circadian rhythm myth is just that - a myth. The experiment was faulty in that it failed to isolate the test subjects from artificial light (which they were allowed to control hence throw the experiment by artificially delaying their internal clocks).
Silicon based life? (ref: David Darling)
Germanium? (ref: Sagan)
How about tin? (can we hear some L. Frank Baum, here, the only example of tin based life in literature I can think of)
Lead?
Flerovium?
Ununquadium?
(OK, the last three are extremely unlikely given the low reactivity of lead and the short half lives of flerovium (half a millisecond) and ununquadium (2-30 seconds?) coupled with their inability to form a tetrafluoride (which is apparently kind of important in organic chemistry)
Repeat after me:
"Hallowed are the Ori."
What could possibly go wrong?
oh dear, except angels are extracorporeal for the first point, and for the second they're not allowed to interact with any of God's creations. Nothing stopping aliens from interacting with any of God's creations, but that itself would open up a whole new mess - like, what happened to giving Man dominion over all he surveys (Genesis 26, Psalm 8)? How can you hold dominion over something which is demonstrably superior to you in every way?
they did that with Voyager: turned it back on Earth and the answer came back "Inconclusive". I don't think they were that far away, either.
...that's providing you survive the wonderful new diseases they've brought with them.
read it again: when God created Man he gave him dominion over ALL THINGS. Including aliens.
If that is an acceptable premise, then God lied to Man if he made aliens superior to Man to the point where a guy in a rubber suit and a torch for a finger lands in the middle of Central Park using a propulsion system nobody on this planet has even conceived of.
uh... angels don't live among us nor do they interact with any other of God's creations - they're not allowed to. Your point is invalid.
we have it on Earth: sea terrain that's only visible at low tide - think sandbars to mountain ranges. The Mid Atlantic Ridge is the prime example of the latter (some islands submerge during high tide), the only example I can think of of a semi-permanent sandbar feature is Dogger Bank in the North Sea which during storm surges has been known to exposure to the air from several dozen feet down. Don't forget also that Titan orbits a primary that's quite a bit more massive than Earth and is itself twice as massive as Luna. Tidal effects will necessarily be more pronounced.
Why, Christianity, of course.
A few passages to whet your appetite for knowledge:
You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet - Psalms 8:6
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. - Genesis 1:26 (KJV)
Commentary: when God created Man in His own image, he didn't just do it for appearance's sake, he made Man to be one step below the Angels, to be gifted with a body that could interact with his great creation (Earth), but he hobbled them - he didn't give Man the one thing that would have (and did) made Man imperfect: free will. That was defeated by the simple expedient of a woman, a serpent and temptation, and described in a footnote.
Given the passage from Psalm 8, it would follow that aliens were created by God hence being beneath Man-"Dominion over all things"-Kind hence would lag permanently behind us technologically. It follows, therefore, that either God lied or aliens were not created by God but by someone else and landed here for the simple purpose of extending dominion over us.
oh, consider (and I'll vastly simplify the math here):
A bullet weighs 1kg
The gun weighs 1000kg (not counting mass of ammo)
The gun is moving in a prograde direction (in the direction the barrel is facing) at 1,000m/s
The gun fires 1000 bullets each at 1000m/s muzzle velocity
Each bullet pushes back on the gun with an equal force to that which ejected it (1000m/s of delta v divided by 1) in the opposite direction (1000m/s divided by 1000).
Those thousand bullets push back on the gun with a combined total of 1,000,000m/s of delta v, divided by the mass of the gun (1,000kg) which gives 1,000m/s.
The gun *stops*.
The A10 Warthog is moving at 165m/s in a typical attack dive. That's about 370mph. When it fires its slugs from its .69kg cartridges (it doesn't send the brass, it polices that and dumps it back into the magazine rack so what it's firing is necessarily lighter and moving a LOT faster than it would if it were firing the entire cartridge), it's firing them out with sufficient force in fifty rounds to stop 23 tonnes (fully loaded) of airframe in midair. The thing ain't subtle.
alternatively, you could just hang around a bombing range and watch as the A10s rip dead tanks to shreds. Off the coast of Lincolnshire there's just such an air range (it's actually on a tidal marsh) where A10s go into vertical dives, all you hear is a "BRAP!" and that was fifty rounds each the size of a milk bottle - and the aircraft, if you spot it before it goes for a pullout, is literally just hanging there with its arse pointing toward space. From a 400mph dive, it's sitting still with smoke pouring out of the cannon. I used to spend many an idle hour just watching these things, it was poetry in destruction. Eventually got to the point where I could spot them on pass approaches long before they started their attack dives.
And yes, they are full throttle when they fire those cannons.
A satellite would have similar problem particularly if it's firing prograde or retrograde. Firing prograde would slow it down and it would fall out of orbit, firing retrograde it would speed up and possibly achieve escape, so the ideal is to have a heavy satellite (as heavy as you can get away with and still be able to gimbal the entire vehicle) and light ammunition (OK, this is a satellite in orbit, which will making replenishment awkward if not very difficult, so you want your ammunition to be as light as possible but still be confident in its effectiveness - and for a spray and pray, in space, all you really need is something carrying enough kinetic energy to puncture a pressurised tank/hull, and for that and considering there's no air to slow it down during flight, you can get away with firing a cloud of ball bearings and Kessler the fucker to death. Just don't be there on the next orbital rendezvous with your new Death Cloud).
I thought that might grab your attention - practising religious or not (I am not. Disclosure: I am a nihilistic fatalist agnostic and proud), it is a very controversial statement to make. What I'm about to follow that with is probably nowhere near, but still, controversial.
According to the one religion I'm somewhat familiar with, and possibly others as well, humans are the most intelligent (on a sliding scale) form of life in the Universe (not counting the monotheistic God who is apparently omniscient and omnipotent which would give him an unfair advantage). Were that the case, and considering God gave Man ultimate domain over all he surveyed, then any alien landing on this rock would automatically become the property of the first human who set across it. I believe that any alien intelligent enough and technologically advanced enough to actually make the journey is immediately and demonstrably superior to us in every way, putting Mankind in defiance of God and itself in danger of being instantly rendered vapours by a jealous deity - who would then set to making any who saw it either forget or drop dead/spontaneously combust/lose the faculty to speak or otherwise articulate thought. Either way, said alien would not take kindly to being abducted and probed (I'm sure he would have his own equipment for that), and would be equipped with the ability (and will?) to defend himself and his honour with all manner of weaponry or even turn that spanky engine of his into some exotic bomb capable of reducing the entire solar system to ash.
(It's what I'd do).
When someone makes a prediction based on events and it comes true.
Example: fly an infected person to a densely populated place and expose people not infected to him, those uninfected will eventually be contaminated and the pathogen will go feral.
Called it.
it's not a trivial amount of force. Ever fire a .50 Cal Barratt? You need to be *anchored* or the thing will snap you in half. They kill patrol boats with those things. Hell, you could kill a Bradley with little trouble with one. To bump the scale, the GAU-8 chain gun mounted in an A10 Warthog is 20 feet long and will stop the aircraft dead in a power dive.
Jurgen Prochnow (and yes he was in Das Boot as well which is another submarine movie - no wait, it was the seminal submarine movie, I think he was reliving his role in that). I actually laughed at that entire sequence (decked runway and hangar, AG field, torpedoes??), because it was screamingly obvious to any war movie geek what they were actually trying to do - the sad thing it it was kind of working in a suspension-of-disbelief-because-by-that-point-you-were-mesmerised-by-the-ridiculousness-of-it-all kind of twisted way...
you're welcome.