No one seems to have picked up the one thing that city hall seems to be worried about, which is real, which is congestion. In a free market the streets would be extremely full of taxis (broadly defined) hanging around hoping to be closest at hand when someone needs transport, to the point where this is a significant nuisance for everyone else. It is for this reason (at least originally) that most cities limit the number of vehicles allowed to pick up "street hail" custom. In London (and probably elsewhere in the UK) there is a separate category of vehicles which are allowed to do pre-booked runs (originally you'd have been booking by phone from a landline, so it was really quite different). There is, apparently a phenomenon of professional Uber drivers hanging around near likely pickup points (stations, airports) to the point where it does or might cause congestion, so the same rationale as applied to taxis would argue for somehow restricting this (eg the 5 minute rule would make it more sensible to be parked rather than cruising).
An alternative solution though would be to increase the congestion charge (a generic daily charge for using central London roads) and extend its reach until congestion dropped to acceptable levels. The money could be used to reduce other taxes. Even more extremely, they could just decide the number of vehicles they like in central London and auction off that many daily (or hourly) tickets instead of having a flat charge.
This is true. However, within the next 10 years I suspect they will start finding galaxies older than the big bang.
You can, of course, suspect what you like, but out of curiousity why? What we see is remarkably consistent with a big bang. The very old galaxies we see are small and poorly structured, as we would expect, the CMB is still there, etc.
Clearly it is at a good height now for imaging the whole surface, but as there is no atmosphere could it get down to a mountain scraping orbit? Just high enough to get round the lumps and bumps and variability in the roundness of the object? Would that enable it to image things at a really small pixel size?
Not really. The lower your orbit, the faster your spacecraft has to fly to maintain that orbit.
True, but in zero gee and with no atmosphere that isn't really a problem. It would take some time and reaction mass to get into such a low orbit. The problem is the uneven gravity field -- see my other post,
as there is no atmosphere could it get down to a mountain scraping orbit? Just high enough to get round the lumps and bumps and variability in the roundness of the object? Would that enable it to image things at a really small pixel size?
Apart from the question of what range the instruments were designed tooperaqte best at, the other problem is the unevenness of Ceres gravity. They are mapping that now, but it's unlikely the mass of Ceres is perfectly symmetrically arranged, so the gravity will be uneven. Those unevennesses distort the orbit and cause it to change over time. If you're 300 km away that's not a big problem, except that you occasionally have to use up some reaction mass to get back where you want to be. At 10km it would probabl;y be disasterous.
For the same reason it's very hard to keep a probe in a stable orbit less than 100km or so above Earth's moon.
Demand is generally higher during the day, so at least for a while this will mean a less variable demand on other supplies, not more.
Moving water up hills (or not letting it down -- letting hydro reservoirs fill up) is quite a good storage option on this scale.
Demand can also be shifted to some extent. You can within certain limits, choose when to cool a refrigerated warehouse, or charge an electric car. I imagine tarifs that make electricity cheap in the few hours after dawn and expensive in the few hours after sunset, for instance.
For the last awkward gaps, methane plant can be built that is designed to switch on and off quickly and run at a relatively low duty cycle. If you're that desperate you can make the methane from CO2 (or food waste).
I've seen reports significant gains in efficiency of making diesel from CO2 and electricity, to the point where that may become a storage option.
Have you seen RECENT figures on the infrastructure cost of large scale solar? It's pretty cheap and getting cheaper. The cost of generated power is falling about 16% each time the built capacity doubles.
That is precisely what the paper linked in the article is about. They identify about 50 GHz of bandwidth (separately for uplink, downlink and interlink) at frequencies between 10 and 250 GHz. At those frequencies beams can easily be kept pretty narrow, so multiple beams will not interfere.
Tracking a few thousand active satellites is trivial, especially as they are radio transmitters and are probably telling their base stations where they are pretty often to allow groundstations to aim their beams.
Since they are in LEO they will not last long once they are out of use. Even if they all failed catastrophically it would be a problem for a few years at most.
Small ones are, for basically the same reason that small steam engines were hard to develop initially -- too much surface to leak heat compared to the volume of interior. Big ones are expensive and technical to build, but there is currently no evidence that they won't be energy-positive. This article reports some theoretical engineering progress that might move the trade-offs usefully.
There was some discussion of using what is eupemistically called "lithobraking" to put a probe down on, or more accurately in, Pluto's surface. Apparantly you really can make a probe that has a reasonable chance of still sending back useful science after hitting Pluto at 15 km/s or so.
I think the Dutch government have something similar to the UK Human Rights Act. This makes the rights defined in the European Convention on Human Rights enforceable in the Dutch courts. The parliament could change that law but unless it does the courts can instruct the executive in how to apply the law so as to maintain those rights.
A quick google also suggests that international treaties which the Netherlands has ratified may be directly enforcable in the Dutch courts without needing additional laws to be passed implementing them (as would be the case in the UK). This seems to be a confused area, but it sounds like the court is taking this line.
Mainly embarrass them publicly. Perhaps as the date gets closer if there is no realistic plan and/or no progress they will start issuing more specific instructions. A bit like the US federal courts when states don't do things they are constitutionally required to -- they start out saying "make it so" and get as detailed as they are forced to.
The other complication is that all surgeries in a cycle have to be simultaneous -- to avoid allowing donors to opt out after their relative has received a new kidney. So in this case you need 18 operating theatres and 18 surgical teams.
This made headlines because it's the longest cycle ever, but the people who run these programmes see long cycles as undesirable -- what they mostly do is identify hundreds of opportunities for two or three way swaps, or for "open" chains where one altruistic donor can result in two or three people getting kidneys. The maths behind it is quite interesting.
Can you explain why it is found acceptable for the standard model to allow calculation of probabilities greater than one . . . to me that indicates it is some kind of simplified approximation that breaks down at high energies
To everyone else as well. The question is how high and in what way?
Worth considering if the asteroid doesn't rotate too much or in the wrong plane.. However you can get a much higher momentum/energy ratio by using a reaction mass that is expelled at a few tens of km/second, rather than light.
Comes to timing. The K-12 CS students are not going to fill the vacancies advertised today, but they might fill the ones advertised in 4-15 years time, reducing the need for H-1Bs at that time
If you have enough lead time then I think the gravity tug works well. You rendezvous with the asteroid and fly alongside it, using solar-electric or some other slow but mass-efficient drive to hold station on the same side of the asteroid. The gravity of the probe VERY SLOWLY accelerates the asteroid and over a few decades (perhaps with a few refueling missions to bring more xenon or whatever) the asteroid's orbit is changed enough to miss the Earth,.
You are making a classic error of comparing the normal progress of the disease with the rare side-effects of the vaccine. This is the (false) argument against measles vaccination -- "I (or most people, or my kids or my parents) had measles. It was uncomfortable for a while, but it got better. A tiny fraction of children have a bad reaction to the vaccine which is really nasty. It's not worth that tiny fraction getting the bad reaction to save everyone the mild disease". What's missing is the larger but still small fraction of people who have nasty complications of the disease and are left handicapped or dead.
There is no evidence for risks of clustering that I am aware of. On the other hand not clustering means, at least, more risk of individual children missing shots due to greater complexity, more visits to doctors with more risk of infection with unrelated diseases and more cost, which could be spent on other public health measures that would presumably reduce other risks.
If you do think clustering vaccines adds risk, there is a fairly straightforward, if somewhat lengthy, route to address this.
First get a PhD in virology or some other appropriate discipline and a suitable job.
Next, carefully design a series of experiments that will help answer your question and get relevant approvals for it (ethics, safety,....)
Now apply for an NIH (or your country's equivalent) grant to perform it.
Perform it, analyse the results, publish them.
If they show significant extra risk from clustering, then, after a little bit of bureaucratic inertia while people find out about and understand your study and try and work out what changes to procedures would reflect it without risk elsewhere, the chances are clustering would be reduced.
Slashdot Mirror
No one seems to have picked up the one thing that city hall seems to be worried about, which is real, which is congestion.
In a free market the streets would be extremely full of taxis (broadly defined) hanging around hoping to be closest at hand when someone needs transport, to the point where this is a significant nuisance for everyone else. It is for this reason (at least originally) that most cities limit the number of vehicles allowed to pick up
"street hail" custom. In London (and probably elsewhere in the UK) there is a separate category of vehicles which are allowed to do pre-booked runs (originally you'd have been booking by phone from a landline, so it was really quite different). There is, apparently a phenomenon of professional Uber drivers hanging around near likely pickup points (stations, airports) to the point where it does or might cause congestion, so the same rationale as applied to taxis would argue for somehow restricting this (eg the 5 minute rule would make it more sensible to be parked rather than cruising).
An alternative solution though would be to increase the congestion charge (a generic daily charge for using central London roads) and extend its reach until congestion dropped to acceptable levels. The money could be used to reduce other taxes. Even more extremely, they could just decide the number of vehicles they like in central London and auction off that many daily (or hourly) tickets instead of having a flat charge.
This is true. However, within the next 10 years I suspect they will start finding galaxies older than the big bang.
You can, of course, suspect what you like, but out of curiousity why? What we see is remarkably consistent with a big bang. The very old galaxies we
see are small and poorly structured, as we would expect, the CMB is still there, etc.
Clearly it is at a good height now for imaging the whole surface, but as there is no atmosphere could it get down to a mountain scraping orbit? Just high enough to get round the lumps and bumps and variability in the roundness of the object? Would that enable it to image things at a really small pixel size?
Not really. The lower your orbit, the faster your spacecraft has to fly to maintain that orbit.
True, but in zero gee and with no atmosphere that isn't really a problem. It would take some time and reaction mass to get into such a low orbit. The problem is the uneven gravity field -- see my other post,
as there is no atmosphere could it get down to a mountain scraping orbit? Just high enough to get round the lumps and bumps and variability in the roundness of the object? Would that enable it to image things at a really small pixel size?
Apart from the question of what range the instruments were designed tooperaqte best at, the other problem is the unevenness of Ceres gravity. They are mapping that now, but it's unlikely the mass of Ceres is perfectly symmetrically arranged, so the gravity will be uneven. Those unevennesses distort the orbit and cause it to change over time. If you're 300 km away that's not a big problem, except that you occasionally have to use up some reaction mass to get back where you want to be. At 10km it would probabl;y be disasterous.
For the same reason it's very hard to keep a probe in a stable orbit less than 100km or so above Earth's moon.
Demand is generally higher during the day, so at least for a while this will mean a less variable demand on other supplies, not more.
Moving water up hills (or not letting it down -- letting hydro reservoirs fill up) is quite a good storage option on this scale.
Demand can also be shifted to some extent. You can within certain limits, choose when to cool a refrigerated warehouse, or charge an electric car. I imagine tarifs that make electricity cheap in the few hours after dawn and expensive in the few hours after sunset, for instance.
For the last awkward gaps, methane plant can be built that is designed to switch on and off quickly and run at a relatively low duty cycle. If you're that desperate you can make the methane from CO2 (or food waste).
I've seen reports significant gains in efficiency of making diesel from CO2 and electricity, to the point where that may become a storage option.
Have you seen RECENT figures on the infrastructure cost of large scale solar? It's pretty cheap and getting cheaper. The cost of generated power is falling about 16% each time the built capacity doubles.
That is precisely what the paper linked in the article is about. They identify about 50 GHz of bandwidth (separately for uplink, downlink and interlink) at frequencies between 10 and 250 GHz. At those frequencies beams can easily be kept pretty narrow, so multiple beams will not interfere.
Tracking a few thousand active satellites is trivial, especially as they are radio transmitters and are probably telling their base stations where they are pretty often to allow groundstations to aim their beams.
Since they are in LEO they will not last long once they are out of use. Even if they all failed catastrophically it would be a problem for a few years at most.
Small ones are, for basically the same reason that small steam engines were hard to develop initially -- too much surface to leak heat compared to the volume of interior. Big ones are expensive and technical to build, but there is currently no evidence that they won't be energy-positive. This article reports some theoretical engineering progress that might move the trade-offs usefully.
Planck lengths are the only truly natural measure
http://www.flicker.space/pluto...
Basically like dim daylight or bright twilight on Earth.
There was some discussion of using what is eupemistically called "lithobraking" to put a probe down on, or more accurately in, Pluto's surface. Apparantly you really can make a probe that has a reasonable chance of still sending back useful science after hitting Pluto at 15 km/s or so.
I think the Dutch government have something similar to the UK Human Rights Act. This makes the rights defined in the European Convention on Human Rights enforceable in the Dutch courts. The parliament could change that law but unless it does the courts can instruct the executive in how to apply the law so as to maintain those rights.
A quick google also suggests that international treaties which the Netherlands has ratified may be directly enforcable in the Dutch courts without needing additional laws to be passed implementing them (as would be the case in the UK). This seems to be a confused area, but it sounds like the court is taking this line.
Mainly embarrass them publicly. Perhaps as the date gets closer if there is no realistic plan and/or no progress they will start issuing more specific instructions. A bit like the US federal courts when states don't do things they are constitutionally required to -- they start out saying "make it so" and get as detailed as they are forced to.
The other complication is that all surgeries in a cycle have to be simultaneous -- to avoid allowing donors to opt out after their relative has received a new kidney. So in this case you need 18 operating theatres and 18 surgical teams.
This made headlines because it's the longest cycle ever, but the people who run these programmes see long cycles as undesirable -- what they mostly do is identify hundreds of opportunities for two or three way swaps, or for "open" chains where one altruistic donor can result in two or three people getting kidneys. The maths behind it is quite interesting.
Most people who die naturally probably don't have very healthy kidneys by the time they die.
Can you explain why it is found acceptable for the standard model to allow calculation of probabilities greater than one . . . to me that indicates it is some kind of simplified approximation that breaks down at high energies
To everyone else as well. The question is how high and in what way?
Worth considering if the asteroid doesn't rotate too much or in the wrong plane.. However you can get a much higher momentum/energy ratio by using a reaction mass that is expelled at a few tens of km/second, rather than light.
Comes to timing. The K-12 CS students are not going to fill the vacancies advertised today, but they might fill the ones advertised in 4-15 years time, reducing the need for H-1Bs at that time
If you have enough lead time then I think the gravity tug works well. You rendezvous with the asteroid and fly alongside it, using solar-electric or some other slow but mass-efficient drive to hold station on the same side of the asteroid. The gravity of the probe VERY SLOWLY accelerates the asteroid and over a few decades (perhaps with a few refueling missions to bring more xenon or whatever) the asteroid's orbit is changed enough to miss the Earth,.
You are making a classic error of comparing the normal progress of the disease with the rare side-effects of the vaccine. This is the (false) argument against measles vaccination -- "I (or most people, or my kids or my parents) had measles. It was uncomfortable for a while, but it got better. A tiny fraction of children have a bad reaction to the vaccine which is really nasty. It's not worth that tiny fraction getting the bad reaction to save everyone the mild disease". What's missing is the larger but still small fraction of people who have nasty complications of the disease and are left handicapped or dead.
There is no evidence for risks of clustering that I am aware of. On the other hand not clustering means, at least, more risk of individual children missing shots due to greater complexity, more visits to doctors with more risk of infection with unrelated diseases and more cost, which could be spent on other public health measures that would presumably reduce other risks.
If you do think clustering vaccines adds risk, there is a fairly straightforward, if somewhat lengthy, route to address this.
First get a PhD in virology or some other appropriate discipline and a suitable job.
Next, carefully design a series of experiments that will help answer your question and get relevant approvals for it (ethics, safety,....)
Now apply for an NIH (or your country's equivalent) grant to perform it.
Perform it, analyse the results, publish them.
If they show significant extra risk from clustering, then, after a little bit of bureaucratic inertia while people find out about and understand your study and try and work out what changes to procedures would reflect it without risk elsewhere, the chances are clustering would be reduced.
http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs...
If "intriguing" isn't a feeling, what is?