Did anyone ever conclusively prove
that power lines caused brain tumors? If not, I
think we've found them a volunteer...
Yeah, really. 8^)
Short answer: Despite looking since the '80s,
there is no solid evidence that any kind of EM
field from power lines cause cancer of any sort.
There is a slight correlation between
working in an electrical profession and cancer,
but that is probably due to the chemicals used, or
something.
Check out the Power Lines and Cancer FAQs
maintained by John E. Moulder, Ph.D, Radiation
Oncology prof of the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Doc Moulder also has some other EMF / cancer
websites. --
The story mentions TI's DLP (Digital Light Processing, AKA Micro Mirror) process. I wonder what happened to it? I haven't seen it used in anything but expensive video projectors.
Rather than a linear raster, the TI chips are a rectangular array of mirrors and can display a whole screen at once. They are binary devices, but can do intensities using pulse width modulation, thanks to the mirrors' 50 kHz (or better) switching rate.
All in all, I thought TI had a cool hack. Too bad it hasn't become popular.
--
They have. I remember looking at the FTP binary in
Windows 95 (B or earlier) and seeing BSD copyright
strings. Lots of the networking utilities (ftp,
ping, netstat, route...) function very similarly
to the Unix versions, right down to the command
line options....
A big "yup" to that, although another post claimed
that those strings were due to including
socket.h Still, the "great innovator"
(8-P) seems to have snatched those programs
outright, which is allowed by BSD.
... I think the TCP/IP stack is even BSD-derived
(if true, I don't think it's a secret).
Here I disagree. WinXX's TCP/IP stack is screwed
up enough to indicate that it wasn't derived from BSD code (much). Note how easily Nmap can identify M$FT systems in it's OS fingerprinting mode by the RFCs that they don't follow.
Not once have I seen the obligatory "This product
includes software developed by the University of
California, Berkeley and its contributors."
message in any Microsoft OS-related advertising,
even before the advertising clause was withdrawn.
Of course it's a moot point now.
Dern straight, although I admit that I never ran
it under a debugger to see if the required message
was displayed for 10 milliseconds or so.
--
Let's not forget that even after we've solved
the problems associated with manufacturing, and
the logistics involved in transporting the
materials, we still have to come up with some
means of preventing sabotage. We don't want
to [attempt to] live through the effects of a 20k+
km cable wrapping around the earth, because
somebody smuggled a suitcase nuke on board and cut
the anchor free.
Hmmm.... That would be bad juju for sure, but I
wonder which would cause more deaths:
Using the suitcase nuke to cut a skyhook, part
of which may come down at near orbital velocities
along the equator; some hits at sub-orbital
speeds, and the rest stays in orbit.
Detonating the bomb at the top of the World
Trade Center and trying for an airburst + fire
storm.
... Also, it could be used as a future point
from which to launch spacecraft. If we could
harvest fuel from the moon or from space debris,
and transport all the materials up to the moon,
then it would be very efficient to do continuous
lauches from the moon.
A big "yup" to the need to find a source of
volatiles on the moon or to import them from the
Near Earth Asteroids before we could afford the
cost of a lunar base. Hopefully, the presumed
water at the moon's poles will be recoverable.
And, the NEAs should be explored anyway, as a
matter of self-defense.
I'm not sure what you mean by launching from the
moon. There's no point in escaping from one
gravity well, then dropping down into another.
Maybe you're thinking of O'Neil and company's
lunar mass driver plan for build solar power
satellites. Launching fiber-glass bags of moon
dust is one thing (a useful thing), but launching
missions from the moon's surface is another.
--
Leave it to us humans to deny to lonely, lifeless
planets the joy of happy, bouncing robotic
goodness.
For, what is beauty without a viewer, even if only a mechanical one?
Does not the unobserved particle live in a
confused superposition of quantum states without
an observer to collapse them?
Nay, it is the selfish species self-hate of we
pathetic humans that prevents us from delivering
to as many planets as possible the rich, abundant
delight of sapient appreciation.
Write to your Congressdroids today!
Tell them in no uncertain terms that you will not accept any more delay in spreading our aegis over the entire Solar System!
No doubt L-M was properly roasted for its mistake,
but I think it is time for the mission planners to
go back to sending out pairs of probes again.
Just like the Viking missions, two spacecraft give
you two chances to succeed. They are launched at
different times, in slightly different orbits. The
arrival times are usually set to be a couple of
weeks apart, mostly because of limited ground crew
resources.
If there had been two such Mars probes, after the
first one crashed there might have been enough
time to diagnose the bug and upload a fix before
the second one arrived.
Also, two probes do not cost twice as much as one.
Only the launch costs are duplicated. The R&D
costs are the same, and the money needed to build
two one-off engineering prototypes (the probes) is
less than twice that for building one.
Ob disclaimer: I realize that some persistent
defects in two mechanically and electrically
similar probes will fail in the same way, and may
very well not be fixable from the ground.
But, that's no reason not to try.
--
They've been noticing more instances of brain
cancer in the area where a cell phone's antena is
next to the head, often times in the general shape
of the antena.
Wasn't that on Oprah or one of those other talk
shows that are long on emotion and short on facts?
8^)
Anyway, I'm very, very suspicious of cancers "in
the general shape of the antenna." Why? Because if
you could see radio waves, you'd see that the
entire antenna and some parts of the phone are
"glowing" and emitting RF energy.
In other words, it would be like holding one of
those rod shaped fluorescent trouble lights up
next to your head and expecting the light to cast
a shadow of the rod. But, that's silly. The light
illuminates the entire side of your head.
No, if that cancer were really caused by the cell
phone, it would be a broad splash across the side
of the head, centered around the phone's usual
position.
So, what's really the cause? We'll never know for
sure, but I betcha that you're looking at the
`Elvis' Face on a Tortilla' phenomenon. Out of the
zillions of tortillas made, a few have blotches on
them vaguely in the shape of Elvis' face.
Likewise, of the tens (or hundreds) of millions of
people who use cell phones, at least a few will
have skin cancers that are roughly in an oblong
shape of about the dimensions of a cell phone
antenna.
Basically, physics doesn't necessarily work the
same way on the nano-scale!
Not quite. Physics works the way it always does.
That was the point of Feynman's lecture,
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and
Drexler's The Engines of Creation.
The catch is that the "rules of thumb" that we
have used at larger scales don't apply any more.
Those will have to be rederived from basic quantum
mechanics.
(E.g. the quick-and-dirty equation for friction
generally used in engineering laughably
over-simplifies what happens at the molecular
level.)
It's a bit ironic that, in this world of
massively accelerating computer development, we
are going back to our roots in mechanical
engineering to solve the problems of the
future.
Yup. All kinds of fun is a' coming.
It makes me want to go back and read some Golden
Age science fiction full of steely-jawed heroes
and heroines, driving their massive engines of
destruction forward at 110% of the rated maximum.
Something by E. E. "Doc" Smith should do...;-)
--
First off they didn't replace evolution with
creationism, they gave school districts the right
to choose to teach it or not and removed it from
state testing standards.
I don't know how it was in your school, but in
mine (rural school district in the NW USA) we
never entirely finished the assigned curriculum.
Never.
In such a school, removing a topic from the state
curriculum and removing it from the state
testing standards guarantees that it will not be
taught. Period.
Any surplus time (which I never experienced) would
be used for extra drilling on tested topics.
I believe that the proponents of this change in
Kansas knew about this little tendency in the
schools and counted on it to promote their
religous agenda.
--
That's microevolution. That "micro" prefix is
important: small changes within a species. It is
well documented and has not been seriously
refuted....
I should hope not, those kind of changes happen all around us, all the time.
The only question is whether we pay attention to
them or not.
... Macroevolution, on the other hand, is
different. It is an assumption that small changes
across a long period of time could create huge
changes eventually. This has not been proven or
disproven, as it requires large periods of time to
work.
Here's why I pressed the "Reply" button.
The "micro" vs. "macro" distinctions are not used
by real biologists.
They were coined by creationists who could no
longer deny that evolution took place and wanted
to distance themselves from its larger
implications.
In other words, they since they could no longer
deny that it was possible to walk down the street,
they claimed it was impossible to walk from San
Francisco to New York City. 8-)
However, in general, the trend appears to be to
more simplicity (specifically in the case of
vestigual organs) than more compelxity. If anyone
has evidence to counter this, I would be
interested to see it.
Maybe I can help you there.
Check out Observed
Instances of Speciation and
Some
More Observed Speciation Events.
The first link especially may interest you.
It gives numerous examples of polyploidy in
plants, in which the number of chromosomes double.
This, while a relatively simple genetic change,
is an increase in complexity.
Is that what you were looking for?
--
Evolution has been observed, speciation has not. (arguable)
Pardon the nitpick, but while perhaps speciation is arguable, there is no small amount of evidence for it, both in the lab and in the field. Check out Observed Instances of Speciation and Some More Observed Speciation Events from the Talk.Origins Archive. Some of the examples given occurred relatively near to me in Northern Idaho and Eastern Oregon. --
I don't know what Velikovsky was smoking when he concocted his theories, but I want some. 8^)
Example: Bacteria from Venus? Nothing remotely Earth-like could survive there. The surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, the clouds are made of sulfuric acid droplets, and there is no water.
There isn't any steam, either. Venus is quite depleted of hydrogen compounds compared to what you'd expect for an Earth-sized planet. Though controversial, there's some evidence (high D:H ratios measured by one of the Mariner probes) that Venus may once have had more water, but lost it due to photo-disassociation by solar UV and escape to space.
This means that the big V's claims in Worlds in Collision that rains of Venusian hydrocarbons (could he have meant carbohydrates?) formed the Israeli's mana in the Old Testament are bogus. There are no measurable hydrocarbons in Venus' atmosphere. If you dumped some hydrocarbons (say crude oil) there, the temperature, acid, and UV would soon break the oil down into non-hydrocarbons.
Didn't happen. Can't happen. Velikovsky was wrong. End of story.
And, that's just one point. V may have been a good scholar, but he was a lousy astrophysicist. (To be fair, he wasn't an astrophysicist at all, just some guy who wanted to relate Old Testament writings and certain other myths to a game of cosmic billiards. Far from "being right in every area tested so far," he was wrong on nearly every point that hadn't already been nailed down by the "conventional science" that he derided so much. Example: When V was writing WiC, Venus was thought to be much cooler with a heavy layer of water or hydrocarbon clouds covering the surface. Guess what V wrote into WiC? Hmmmm....)
Velikovksy's claims have been hashed out and mostly refuted on numerous Usenet news groups over the years. There's no point in trying to drag him over to/. unless as an excuse to start a new flame war or a new variety of trolling. --
Surviving in a hard vacuum and radiation is one thing, but surviving a re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere is quite another.
Not really. If the germs are on the inside of a porous rock, then they could ride out the reentry quite nicely. While the outer surface of a meteroid is heated to incandescence, the burn time is so short and thermal conductivity of most rocks so poor that meteorites found soon after their fall have been covered by a layer of frost.
Why? The flaming exterior is soon cooled by the air on one side and the icy chill of the interior rock on the other. (The temperature in the shade around Earth's orbit is about 80 K, nearly the temp of liquid nitrogen. This assumes you've got something to do the shading, if only the other side of the rock.) See John S. Lewis' Rain of Iron and Ice for details.
Not to mention the state the artifact must have been in when it was ejected from Mars in the first place. As I understand it, the theory is that significant meteor strikes on Mars can propel martian fragments outside of its gravity well. From all I've read about meteor strikes on Earth, any 'shrapnel' from a blast that large is molten rock when it ejects.
Yes, but Mars is a much smaller planet than Earth, with a smaller escape velocity. It would take a coorespondingly smaller asteroid strike to blast rocks off the planet at >= escape velocity. The almost total lack of air (less than 1% of ours) would mean little velocity would be lost to air friction.
Yet, I agree with you. I'd like to see some better simulations of these Mars rock ejections.
So the real question is: Can microbial life survive a molten host environment, then frozen, irradiated, and exposed to a hard vacuum (the microbes on the exterior, that is), then heated to near-molten levels again when it reenters the atmosphere? If so, we'd better not go to Io!
Skip the molten host launch and the molten reentry and you've got a situation that bacteria just might survive. Maybe.
And, what's Io got to do with it? Conditions suitable for life are postulated for Europa, but not Io. There's no evidence of water and loads of evidence for constant volcanic eruptions, searing radiation, etc. Io is not a friendly place. --
Regardless of the water's quality, a real spring or seep of water would be very good news.
Besides all of the biological possibilities, think about Zubrin's The Case for Mars. A Mars mission becomes much easier if we don't have to carry hydrogen all the way from Earth to make the return fuel using Zubrin's automated fuel factory.... --
I knew someone was going to come across and take apart my simple explanation.
I think we're arguing at cross-purposes here, mostly in agreement, yet not catching the other's meaning. As such, I will now pick apart your "simple explanation." 8-)
Firstly, Mars lander was not using Plasma propulsion. Do you know how much it is going to cost? Obviously not...but i doubt it is going to be cheaper, most likely a great deal more expensive.
More expensive than what? Existing chemical propulsion? If so, then the answer is both yes and no.
No: Every pound launched into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) costs at least US $2000, typically much more. The much higher specific impulse of those engines mean they can do more with less fuel. If a nuclear powered, plasma engine ship can cut the total launch mass of a Mars mission, then it will cost less. Unless, that is, the engines and reactors are so expensive that they outweigh the cost savings from the fuel reductions.
If they'd consider refueling and returning the cargo ship (say using water steamed from a hole bored in Mars' moon Phobos), then the costs could be spread out over several trips. How much would you pay for an interplanetary freighter?
Yes: NASA has done very little real propulsion development work in the past few decades. Sure, they've done some paper studies, like the plasma thing we're discussing, but how much real research have they carried through to the point of bending iron and launching a test mission?
Dern little. There's the DS-1 test of ion engines (which have been proposed for decades), the linear aero-spike work, and what else? Nothing comes to mind. And, that's for the 30 years after Apollo.
So, yes, developing these engines and charging all of the R&D costs to one or two Mars missions can't help but be more expensive than just using the tried and true relicts developed by their ancestors.
NASA has become bureaucratic and calcified. They're coasting on the work done in the past. NASA really needs to push a project like these plasma engines through to completion and build up some psychological (not to mention technological) momentum again.
When I say "NASA," I mean the organization as a whole. They definitely have some good scientists and engineers working for NASA (at a substantial pay cut over what they'd get in private industry), folks who are up to the challenge of the 21st century. It's the bureaucrats and politicians who have stifled NASA. It is now politically infeasible to make a mistake in space. But, how can anyone learn if they aren't allowed to make mistakes, to build equipment then test it to destruction? For that matter, how long has it been since NASA has launched probes in pairs, and instead has been betting the farm on one spacecraft? Too long.
Secondly, the goal of the nuclear strike wasn't to creat enuclear power, i agree, but cheap, cost effective power was a result. We had to spend alot of money and resources to get it refined and where it is now.
Dern straight. We've made the investment, we should claim the payoff. If certain fringe political groups make that hard to do on Earth, then we should do it in space, which is already as radioactive as hell. Plus, we really need nuclear propulsion in space. Chemical rocket engines are too feeble to do the job.... --
By "cost effective manor", I meant that eventually the process would be tweaked and refined so that it doesn't cost billions apon trillions of dollars to send another lander to mars to incinerate in the atmosphere. Everyhting comes at a cost. We killed alot of people in World War II, so we can have cheap, effecitent power. That was the cost for us to have Nuclear Power. But we also didn't launch 3-4 nukes at random to prove it.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make here. Let me check off the parts I disagree with before I try to find our points of agreement:
The recent failed Mars probes didn't cost "billions apon[sic] trillions of dollars". As parts of NASA's `better, faster, cheaper' program, they cost just a couple of hundred million bucks each. This isn't chicken feed, but is several orders of magnitude lower than your complaint; around the size of the US Federal government's office supplies cost overruns.;-)
The object of the Allies' participation in WWII was neither to "kill alot[sic] of people" nor to "have Nuclear Power." It was to keep the Nazis from killing many more people and taking over the world. And, while the US didn't "launch 3-4 nukes at random", they did detonate three (count 'em: 3) at very precise targets: the Trinity test in New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Please note that they tried a test in a safe location (NM), even though their calculations indicated that the bombs should work just fine.
Now, where do we agree?
So long as launch costs remain high, yes, researchers should do as much of the R&D on the ground as possible. However, soon or later, the paper studies, computer simulations, and test beds run in vacuum chambers will no longer be able to teach us anything useful. At that point, we can and should invest in engineering space probes, like those in the Deep Space series. The DS results can be used to finish the R&D, hopefully resulting in one or more space-rated products, ready for wider use.
You can't skip the R&D and expect a reliable product, and there's no point in pretending that you can. Nor is there any guarantee of getting a worthwhile result at the end. That's why it's called `research.' --
Believe me.. if they had the ability to actually 'store' antimatter in any kind of quantity, someone would have one *HELL* of a bomb on their hand. It would meak nukes look like firecrackers.
Yes and no. Let's work it out, suppose you drop one gram of antimatter on the floor. How many megatons worth of energy would it release?
First of all, from the classic: E = mc**2 you get 1 kg * 3e8 m/s ** 2 = 9e16 Joules for each kilogram of matter annihilated.
From/usr/share/units.dat, one ton of TNT releases 4.184e9 J when exploded.
That gram of antimatter will react with another gram of matter, so we are really are annihilating 2 grams of mass.
Thus, we get (9e16 * 0.002 / 4.184e9) = 43021 tons-TNT.
430 kilotons is nothing to sneeze at, but is hardly unprecedented in the military arsenals around the world.
Now, considering that a gram of anti-hydrogen, if it could be made at all, would cost tens or hundreds of billions of US dollars, it is safe to conclude that until antimatter is vastly cheaper, don't worry about terrorists sneaking around with pocket anti-bombs. --
How long until the military gets ahold of the specs and builds a new kind of bomb? Obviously it would not be anywhere near as powerful as even an old-fashioned nuke, but maybe it will be easier to deliver than a fuel-air bomb, and without the pesky radiation of a nuke.
Let's start the cold war all over again. Come on, it'll be fun.
At the risk of replying to a troller, I'll comment lest some folks who didn't pay attention be deceived.
Notice those three cone shaped things on the end of the booms in the animation? Those are nuclear fission reactors. They produce the comparatively huge amount of power (~10 MW or so) that this spaceship will require.
There's no magic power source, no secret explosive, just good ol' Atoms For Progress(TM).;^)
But, not to worry. Space is already riddled with all-natural solar and cosmic radiation, enough to kill quickly during solar storms. A little more won't matter. --
we couldn't set up an extraction plant on Mars, mainly because NASA has not found any evidence of hydrogen on mars, and until there is evidence of it, there couldn't be any extraction plants. That's why we would have to take the hydrogen with us.
Not quite, Mars' atmosphere contains 0.03% water, which can be electrolyzed to release hydrogen. Some of the Viking lander pictures showed a dusting of frost on the nearby rocks. So, there is "some evidence" of hydrogen. It's possible that a fuel processing plant at one of Mars' polar caps could steam quite a lot of water out of the dust/ice/dry ice terraces there.
However, you are right in another sense. Zubrin and company, in planning Mars Direct, didn't want to rely on the traces of atmospheric water, or the chancy terrain around the poles. So, he proposed carrying the hydrogen to Mars, at least for the first few missions.
That's a pain. It's extra mass to carry, and LH2 needs large tanks as it is not very dense. Keeping it liquid for the duration of a trip to Mars requires refrigeration. If there were a rich, guaranteed source of hydrogen compounds on Mars, the cost of Mars Direct could be reduced even further.
Another possible source of hydrogen in the Mars system are its moons: Phobos and Deimos. The Soviet probe Phobos 2 found that Phobos was outgassing some volatile or another, but failed before it had identified the substance. Both moons have the surface spectra of C-type asteroids, but without the chemically bound water, and are less dense than ordinary rock. The odds are that while the surface may have been baked free of water, their interiors might contain a fair amount of ice and/or other carbon/hydrogen compounds. (See the chemistry of the carbonaceous chondrite meteorites for details.)
So, Phobos was probably outgassing water vapor, or maybe hydrogen cracked from the water by solar UV light.
A manned mission to either or both of those moons would be a good idea. After a small investment, they might turn out to be filling stations in space, handy for spacecraft returning to Earth. --
I believe you've confused Cassini, which was launched to Saturn, with the Pluto Express (AKA Fire and Ice, etc.), which has not been built AFAIK.
The incentive for getting a flyby probe out to Pluto quickly was that its atmosphere will be freezing out in a few years, now that Pluto has passed the closest, and thus warmest, part of its orbit. Even though Pluto is the only planet of our Solar System that hasn't been visited by a probe, it always seems to come up a bit short when it is time for funding.... --
That was probably a reference to the volcanic hot-spot that burned its way from eastern Oregon through southern Idaho, and now is under Yellowstone park. Check out a good topographic map of the area and you'll see the big difference in terrain between, say, northern and southern Idaho.
Field studies dating a number of volcanos in the three states has supported this idea. The farther west you go along the Snake River plateau, the older the volcanos get. The oldest ones in Oregon butt up against the Columbia Flood basalts. Anything older was buried under the unbelievably huge number of cubic miles of lava that flowed over most of Oregon, etc.
For a easily readable review of this evidence and more -- a rather controversial theory that tries to tie together several major features of the US West, see Roadside Geology of Idaho by David Alt and Donald W. Hyndman, ISBN: 0878422196. I don't necessarily buy Alt's and Hyndman's hypothesis, but it's a cool one to think about.
The same two authors have written other books in the "Roadside Geology" series, Montana, Oregon, Northern and Central California, and Washington.
Roadside Geology of Wyoming was written by Darwin R. Spearing and David R. Lageson (ISBN: 0878422161). It may not have the quirky unifying hypothesies found in the introductary chapters of the other books, but can't help but cover the hot-spot theory of Yellowstone's formation.
PS: I'm only mentioning the Roadside Geology book series as a satisfied customer. The books give a nice, casual overview of the respective states' geologies, sorted by major highways. Each book tells you what you're seeing out the windshield as you drive through the West. --
Slashdot Mirror
Short answer: Despite looking since the '80s, there is no solid evidence that any kind of EM field from power lines cause cancer of any sort. There is a slight correlation between working in an electrical profession and cancer, but that is probably due to the chemicals used, or something.
Check out the Power Lines and Cancer FAQs maintained by John E. Moulder, Ph.D, Radiation Oncology prof of the Medical College of Wisconsin. Doc Moulder also has some other EMF / cancer websites.
--
Rather than a linear raster, the TI chips are a rectangular array of mirrors and can display a whole screen at once. They are binary devices, but can do intensities using pulse width modulation, thanks to the mirrors' 50 kHz (or better) switching rate.
All in all, I thought TI had a cool hack. Too bad it hasn't become popular.
--
--
(Yes, I know that M$FT sometimes does very silly and/or stupid things but I'd expect their coder minions to not miss a sure bet like this....)
--
Hmmm.... That would be bad juju for sure, but I wonder which would cause more deaths:
--
A big "yup" to the need to find a source of volatiles on the moon or to import them from the Near Earth Asteroids before we could afford the cost of a lunar base. Hopefully, the presumed water at the moon's poles will be recoverable. And, the NEAs should be explored anyway, as a matter of self-defense.
I'm not sure what you mean by launching from the moon. There's no point in escaping from one gravity well, then dropping down into another. Maybe you're thinking of O'Neil and company's lunar mass driver plan for build solar power satellites. Launching fiber-glass bags of moon dust is one thing (a useful thing), but launching missions from the moon's surface is another.
--
For, what is beauty without a viewer, even if only a mechanical one?
Does not the unobserved particle live in a confused superposition of quantum states without an observer to collapse them?
Nay, it is the selfish species self-hate of we pathetic humans that prevents us from delivering to as many planets as possible the rich, abundant delight of sapient appreciation.
Write to your Congressdroids today! Tell them in no uncertain terms that you will not accept any more delay in spreading our aegis over the entire Solar System!
--
Just like the Viking missions, two spacecraft give you two chances to succeed. They are launched at different times, in slightly different orbits. The arrival times are usually set to be a couple of weeks apart, mostly because of limited ground crew resources.
If there had been two such Mars probes, after the first one crashed there might have been enough time to diagnose the bug and upload a fix before the second one arrived.
Also, two probes do not cost twice as much as one. Only the launch costs are duplicated. The R&D costs are the same, and the money needed to build two one-off engineering prototypes (the probes) is less than twice that for building one.
Ob disclaimer: I realize that some persistent defects in two mechanically and electrically similar probes will fail in the same way, and may very well not be fixable from the ground. But, that's no reason not to try.
--
Wasn't that on Oprah or one of those other talk shows that are long on emotion and short on facts? 8^)
Anyway, I'm very, very suspicious of cancers "in the general shape of the antenna." Why? Because if you could see radio waves, you'd see that the entire antenna and some parts of the phone are "glowing" and emitting RF energy.
In other words, it would be like holding one of those rod shaped fluorescent trouble lights up next to your head and expecting the light to cast a shadow of the rod. But, that's silly. The light illuminates the entire side of your head.
No, if that cancer were really caused by the cell phone, it would be a broad splash across the side of the head, centered around the phone's usual position.
So, what's really the cause? We'll never know for sure, but I betcha that you're looking at the `Elvis' Face on a Tortilla' phenomenon. Out of the zillions of tortillas made, a few have blotches on them vaguely in the shape of Elvis' face. Likewise, of the tens (or hundreds) of millions of people who use cell phones, at least a few will have skin cancers that are roughly in an oblong shape of about the dimensions of a cell phone antenna.
--
And a big medal for Courage. 8^)
Loki is a big reason for that, and everybody to chip in and buy their stuff. Because they deserve our support.
Dern straight. I bought a copy of every Linux game they released, and look forward to the ones they are about to release.
--
Not quite. Physics works the way it always does. That was the point of Feynman's lecture, There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and Drexler's The Engines of Creation.
The catch is that the "rules of thumb" that we have used at larger scales don't apply any more. Those will have to be rederived from basic quantum mechanics. (E.g. the quick-and-dirty equation for friction generally used in engineering laughably over-simplifies what happens at the molecular level.)
It's a bit ironic that, in this world of massively accelerating computer development, we are going back to our roots in mechanical engineering to solve the problems of the future.
Yup. All kinds of fun is a' coming. It makes me want to go back and read some Golden Age science fiction full of steely-jawed heroes and heroines, driving their massive engines of destruction forward at 110% of the rated maximum. Something by E. E. "Doc" Smith should do... ;-)
--
I don't know how it was in your school, but in mine (rural school district in the NW USA) we never entirely finished the assigned curriculum. Never.
In such a school, removing a topic from the state curriculum and removing it from the state testing standards guarantees that it will not be taught. Period. Any surplus time (which I never experienced) would be used for extra drilling on tested topics.
I believe that the proponents of this change in Kansas knew about this little tendency in the schools and counted on it to promote their religous agenda.
--
I should hope not, those kind of changes happen all around us, all the time. The only question is whether we pay attention to them or not.
Here's why I pressed the "Reply" button. The "micro" vs. "macro" distinctions are not used by real biologists. They were coined by creationists who could no longer deny that evolution took place and wanted to distance themselves from its larger implications.
In other words, they since they could no longer deny that it was possible to walk down the street, they claimed it was impossible to walk from San Francisco to New York City. 8-)
However, in general, the trend appears to be to more simplicity (specifically in the case of vestigual organs) than more compelxity. If anyone has evidence to counter this, I would be interested to see it.
Maybe I can help you there. Check out Observed Instances of Speciation and Some More Observed Speciation Events. The first link especially may interest you. It gives numerous examples of polyploidy in plants, in which the number of chromosomes double. This, while a relatively simple genetic change, is an increase in complexity. Is that what you were looking for?
--
Pardon the nitpick, but while perhaps speciation is arguable, there is no small amount of evidence for it, both in the lab and in the field. Check out Observed Instances of Speciation and Some More Observed Speciation Events from the Talk.Origins Archive. Some of the examples given occurred relatively near to me in Northern Idaho and Eastern Oregon.
--
Example: Bacteria from Venus? Nothing remotely Earth-like could survive there. The surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, the clouds are made of sulfuric acid droplets, and there is no water.
There isn't any steam, either. Venus is quite depleted of hydrogen compounds compared to what you'd expect for an Earth-sized planet. Though controversial, there's some evidence (high D:H ratios measured by one of the Mariner probes) that Venus may once have had more water, but lost it due to photo-disassociation by solar UV and escape to space.
This means that the big V's claims in Worlds in Collision that rains of Venusian hydrocarbons (could he have meant carbohydrates?) formed the Israeli's mana in the Old Testament are bogus. There are no measurable hydrocarbons in Venus' atmosphere. If you dumped some hydrocarbons (say crude oil) there, the temperature, acid, and UV would soon break the oil down into non-hydrocarbons.
Didn't happen. Can't happen. Velikovsky was wrong. End of story.
And, that's just one point. V may have been a good scholar, but he was a lousy astrophysicist. (To be fair, he wasn't an astrophysicist at all, just some guy who wanted to relate Old Testament writings and certain other myths to a game of cosmic billiards. Far from "being right in every area tested so far," he was wrong on nearly every point that hadn't already been nailed down by the "conventional science" that he derided so much. Example: When V was writing WiC, Venus was thought to be much cooler with a heavy layer of water or hydrocarbon clouds covering the surface. Guess what V wrote into WiC? Hmmmm....)
Velikovksy's claims have been hashed out and mostly refuted on numerous Usenet news groups over the years. There's no point in trying to drag him over to /. unless as an excuse to start a new flame war or a new variety of trolling.
--
Not really. If the germs are on the inside of a porous rock, then they could ride out the reentry quite nicely. While the outer surface of a meteroid is heated to incandescence, the burn time is so short and thermal conductivity of most rocks so poor that meteorites found soon after their fall have been covered by a layer of frost.
Why? The flaming exterior is soon cooled by the air on one side and the icy chill of the interior rock on the other. (The temperature in the shade around Earth's orbit is about 80 K, nearly the temp of liquid nitrogen. This assumes you've got something to do the shading, if only the other side of the rock.) See John S. Lewis' Rain of Iron and Ice for details.
Not to mention the state the artifact must have been in when it was ejected from Mars in the first place. As I understand it, the theory is that significant meteor strikes on Mars can propel martian fragments outside of its gravity well. From all I've read about meteor strikes on Earth, any 'shrapnel' from a blast that large is molten rock when it ejects.
Yes, but Mars is a much smaller planet than Earth, with a smaller escape velocity. It would take a coorespondingly smaller asteroid strike to blast rocks off the planet at >= escape velocity. The almost total lack of air (less than 1% of ours) would mean little velocity would be lost to air friction.
Yet, I agree with you. I'd like to see some better simulations of these Mars rock ejections.
So the real question is: Can microbial life survive a molten host environment, then frozen, irradiated, and exposed to a hard vacuum (the microbes on the exterior, that is), then heated to near-molten levels again when it reenters the atmosphere? If so, we'd better not go to Io!
Skip the molten host launch and the molten reentry and you've got a situation that bacteria just might survive. Maybe.
And, what's Io got to do with it? Conditions suitable for life are postulated for Europa, but not Io. There's no evidence of water and loads of evidence for constant volcanic eruptions, searing radiation, etc. Io is not a friendly place.
--
Besides all of the biological possibilities, think about Zubrin's The Case for Mars. A Mars mission becomes much easier if we don't have to carry hydrogen all the way from Earth to make the return fuel using Zubrin's automated fuel factory....
--
I think we're arguing at cross-purposes here, mostly in agreement, yet not catching the other's meaning. As such, I will now pick apart your "simple explanation." 8-)
Firstly, Mars lander was not using Plasma propulsion. Do you know how much it is going to cost? Obviously not...but i doubt it is going to be cheaper, most likely a great deal more expensive.
More expensive than what? Existing chemical propulsion? If so, then the answer is both yes and no.
No: Every pound launched into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) costs at least US $2000, typically much more. The much higher specific impulse of those engines mean they can do more with less fuel. If a nuclear powered, plasma engine ship can cut the total launch mass of a Mars mission, then it will cost less. Unless, that is, the engines and reactors are so expensive that they outweigh the cost savings from the fuel reductions.
If they'd consider refueling and returning the cargo ship (say using water steamed from a hole bored in Mars' moon Phobos), then the costs could be spread out over several trips. How much would you pay for an interplanetary freighter?
Yes: NASA has done very little real propulsion development work in the past few decades. Sure, they've done some paper studies, like the plasma thing we're discussing, but how much real research have they carried through to the point of bending iron and launching a test mission?
Dern little. There's the DS-1 test of ion engines (which have been proposed for decades), the linear aero-spike work, and what else? Nothing comes to mind. And, that's for the 30 years after Apollo.
So, yes, developing these engines and charging all of the R&D costs to one or two Mars missions can't help but be more expensive than just using the tried and true relicts developed by their ancestors.
NASA has become bureaucratic and calcified. They're coasting on the work done in the past. NASA really needs to push a project like these plasma engines through to completion and build up some psychological (not to mention technological) momentum again.
When I say "NASA," I mean the organization as a whole. They definitely have some good scientists and engineers working for NASA (at a substantial pay cut over what they'd get in private industry), folks who are up to the challenge of the 21st century. It's the bureaucrats and politicians who have stifled NASA. It is now politically infeasible to make a mistake in space. But, how can anyone learn if they aren't allowed to make mistakes, to build equipment then test it to destruction? For that matter, how long has it been since NASA has launched probes in pairs, and instead has been betting the farm on one spacecraft? Too long.
Secondly, the goal of the nuclear strike wasn't to creat enuclear power, i agree, but cheap, cost effective power was a result. We had to spend alot of money and resources to get it refined and where it is now.
Dern straight. We've made the investment, we should claim the payoff. If certain fringe political groups make that hard to do on Earth, then we should do it in space, which is already as radioactive as hell. Plus, we really need nuclear propulsion in space. Chemical rocket engines are too feeble to do the job....
--
Everyhting comes at a cost. We killed alot of people in World War II, so we can have cheap, effecitent power. That was the cost for us to have Nuclear Power. But we also didn't launch 3-4 nukes at random to prove it.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make here. Let me check off the parts I disagree with before I try to find our points of agreement:
- The recent failed Mars probes didn't cost "billions apon[sic] trillions of dollars". As parts of NASA's `better, faster, cheaper' program, they cost just a couple of hundred million bucks each. This isn't chicken feed, but is several orders of magnitude lower than your complaint; around the size of the US Federal government's office supplies cost overruns.
;-) - The object of the Allies' participation in WWII was neither to "kill alot[sic] of people" nor to "have Nuclear Power." It was to keep the Nazis from killing many more people and taking over the world. And, while the US didn't "launch 3-4 nukes at random", they did detonate three (count 'em: 3) at very precise targets: the Trinity test in New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Please note that they tried a test in a safe location (NM), even though their calculations indicated that the bombs should work just fine.
Now, where do we agree?- So long as launch costs remain high, yes, researchers should do as much of the R&D on the ground as possible. However, soon or later, the paper studies, computer simulations, and test beds run in vacuum chambers will no longer be able to teach us anything useful. At that point, we can and should invest in engineering space probes, like those in the Deep Space series. The DS results can be used to finish the R&D, hopefully resulting in one or more space-rated products, ready for wider use.
You can't skip the R&D and expect a reliable product, and there's no point in pretending that you can. Nor is there any guarantee of getting a worthwhile result at the end. That's why it's called `research.'--
The paper reference provided by an A-C above, http://www.citi.umich.edu/te chreports/citi-tr-00-3.pdf claims a 26% to 36% performance loss due to the swap space encryption in their benchmarks.
--
Yes and no. Let's work it out, suppose you drop one gram of antimatter on the floor. How many megatons worth of energy would it release?
- First of all, from the classic: E = mc**2 you get 1 kg * 3e8 m/s ** 2 = 9e16 Joules for each kilogram of matter annihilated.
- From
/usr/share/units.dat, one ton of TNT releases 4.184e9 J when exploded. - That gram of antimatter will react with another gram of matter, so we are really are annihilating 2 grams of mass.
Thus, we get (9e16 * 0.002 / 4.184e9) = 43021 tons-TNT.430 kilotons is nothing to sneeze at, but is hardly unprecedented in the military arsenals around the world.
Now, considering that a gram of anti-hydrogen, if it could be made at all, would cost tens or hundreds of billions of US dollars, it is safe to conclude that until antimatter is vastly cheaper, don't worry about terrorists sneaking around with pocket anti-bombs.
--
Let's start the cold war all over again. Come on, it'll be fun.
At the risk of replying to a troller, I'll comment lest some folks who didn't pay attention be deceived.
Notice those three cone shaped things on the end of the booms in the animation? Those are nuclear fission reactors. They produce the comparatively huge amount of power (~10 MW or so) that this spaceship will require.
There's no magic power source, no secret explosive, just good ol' Atoms For Progress(TM). ;^)
But, not to worry. Space is already riddled with all-natural solar and cosmic radiation, enough to kill quickly during solar storms. A little more won't matter.
--
Not quite, Mars' atmosphere contains 0.03% water, which can be electrolyzed to release hydrogen. Some of the Viking lander pictures showed a dusting of frost on the nearby rocks. So, there is "some evidence" of hydrogen. It's possible that a fuel processing plant at one of Mars' polar caps could steam quite a lot of water out of the dust/ice/dry ice terraces there.
However, you are right in another sense. Zubrin and company, in planning Mars Direct, didn't want to rely on the traces of atmospheric water, or the chancy terrain around the poles. So, he proposed carrying the hydrogen to Mars, at least for the first few missions.
That's a pain. It's extra mass to carry, and LH2 needs large tanks as it is not very dense. Keeping it liquid for the duration of a trip to Mars requires refrigeration. If there were a rich, guaranteed source of hydrogen compounds on Mars, the cost of Mars Direct could be reduced even further.
Another possible source of hydrogen in the Mars system are its moons: Phobos and Deimos. The Soviet probe Phobos 2 found that Phobos was outgassing some volatile or another, but failed before it had identified the substance. Both moons have the surface spectra of C-type asteroids, but without the chemically bound water, and are less dense than ordinary rock. The odds are that while the surface may have been baked free of water, their interiors might contain a fair amount of ice and/or other carbon/hydrogen compounds. (See the chemistry of the carbonaceous chondrite meteorites for details.)
So, Phobos was probably outgassing water vapor, or maybe hydrogen cracked from the water by solar UV light.
A manned mission to either or both of those moons would be a good idea. After a small investment, they might turn out to be filling stations in space, handy for spacecraft returning to Earth.
--
The incentive for getting a flyby probe out to Pluto quickly was that its atmosphere will be freezing out in a few years, now that Pluto has passed the closest, and thus warmest, part of its orbit. Even though Pluto is the only planet of our Solar System that hasn't been visited by a probe, it always seems to come up a bit short when it is time for funding....
--
Field studies dating a number of volcanos in the three states has supported this idea. The farther west you go along the Snake River plateau, the older the volcanos get. The oldest ones in Oregon butt up against the Columbia Flood basalts. Anything older was buried under the unbelievably huge number of cubic miles of lava that flowed over most of Oregon, etc.
For a easily readable review of this evidence and more -- a rather controversial theory that tries to tie together several major features of the US West, see Roadside Geology of Idaho by David Alt and Donald W. Hyndman, ISBN: 0878422196. I don't necessarily buy Alt's and Hyndman's hypothesis, but it's a cool one to think about.
The same two authors have written other books in the "Roadside Geology" series, Montana, Oregon, Northern and Central California, and Washington.
Roadside Geology of Wyoming was written by Darwin R. Spearing and David R. Lageson (ISBN: 0878422161). It may not have the quirky unifying hypothesies found in the introductary chapters of the other books, but can't help but cover the hot-spot theory of Yellowstone's formation.
PS: I'm only mentioning the Roadside Geology book series as a satisfied customer. The books give a nice, casual overview of the respective states' geologies, sorted by major highways. Each book tells you what you're seeing out the windshield as you drive through the West.
--