Re:What bookstore are you from?
on
Star In A Jar
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· Score: 1
Well, let's see...if you take away the mythology, political propoganda, and various nuttiness
Well, I'd say there's just a wee bit of suspicion and prejudice in the mind of someone who may or may not have read the literature in question.
On the other two points, you are essentially correct. If one billion people say that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, that doesn't mean that it's necessarily so! If Mr. Armstrong himself attests to the fact however, we have a different question altogether.
The difference is that the scholarly attestations to the mundane events in the Torah (Joseph's life in Egypt), the rape of Tamar, Absalom's seisure of power, the Babylonian captivities) are accompanied by eyewitness accounts, people who claimed to have actually been there when it took place. The same is true of many of the extrordinary events (Joshua's military campain in Canaan, the Fall of the Babylonian Empire, the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple under Darius and Artaxerxes). Of course, after two or more milennia, after everybody who saw or wrote about the supposed event is dead, it's fairly easy to arbitrarily believe or disbelieve anything.
When I was in the Navy (No, for real, I was in the Navy), my Reactor Principles instructor clearly pointed out that depleted uranium cannot be induced into a fission reaction that produces harmful levels of radiation. It's almost as safe as steel, just a LOT heavier. (Even if it IS hazardous, I'd rather have my life shortened by radiation exposure than by an anti-shipping missile. Good ol' R2D2)
Also, the army uses a similar type of ammunition on the A-10 Warthog, in its main gun as a heavy armor-piercing round. I saw test video of the cannon when I was still in grade school, and I thought it was the coolest thing.
Relax, Mr. Ryan. My morse is so rusty I'm probably giving him dimensions on Playmate of the Month.
There's a book, a SciFi novel, about a microscopic black hole that starts chewing up the earth, called "The Lazarus Effect", available at your local library (I hope).
We interrupt this flame war with some comedy
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 1
Just being curious, but is the laser containment field of the same type and design as the one used by the Ghostbusters?
We interrupt this flame war with some news.
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 4
First a bit of background. Commercial nuclear powerplants and naval propulsion plants operate on the principle of nuclear fission, the splitting of very heavy atoms to yield thermal energy, which heats steam, which turns an electric turbine or propeller shaft. What the_crowbar is talking about is nuclear fusion, the slamming together of very light atoms, i.e. heavy hydrogen or helium, in a chamber of superheated (in a star's case, superdense) plasma, thus heating steam and turning a turbine.
There was a major international experiment called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER. A russian-invented device called a tokamak, or magnetic bottle, can be used to contain plasma in a doughnut-shaped chamber. These are in use at several research labs and universities, including Harvard University and Lawrence Livermore Labs. The ITER was concieved as a prototype reactor to spearhead the way for commercially run nuclear fusion electricity plants, as proof-of-concept. The reactor was expected to cost over $4 TRILLION dollars. Therefore, the U.S. Congress, not wanting to any more money than necessary to get re-elected, withdrew U.S. support in 1998, and the project is expected to fail without U.S. funding. Go to Scientific American Magazine for more information on this project.
Real risks with this string, err... thread.
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 1
PLEEAASSEE. I am not going to waste my time correcting the ignorance of the participants on current cosmological theory and speculation. Most of what is being talked about comes from extrapolation and playing calculus origami, and is not conceptual insight.
There was a very good point made about the fears that the atomic bomb would create a plasma fire in the earth's atmosphere. Then the scientists who knew better, and the generals who didn't, actually set the damn thing off, and WOAH, MAN, WE'RE STILL HERE!!! The conditions created in the laboratory are neither as exotic, nor as dangerous, as the pop-science magazines and the press make them out to be. They are laboratories. Dangerous and unpredictable conditions are shunned in favor of something called the controlled experiment. And the idea that the experiment made in I-forget-which-particle-accelerator to create neutronic matter could potentially create a microscopic black hole was examined aforehand, and dismissed by those conducting the experiment. I have a letter to the editor in some issue of Scientific American (which I will not reproduce to save time and the copyrights of the editors) addressing that very concern, and the response was candid and informed, stating that the conditions of the experiment gave the best odds of a black hole forming in the cyclotron to be something like one in 1X10^60. You see, most scientists aren't power-mad Dr. Frankensteins trying to play God and create horrible monsters. They have careers, personal interests, personal beliefs, and generally comphrehend what kind of experiments they are rigging up.
If a man does not love [or trust] his brother, whom he has seen, how can he love [or trust] God, whom he has not seen? --Excerpt from first letter of St. John the Apostle, brackets mine
What bookstore are you from?
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 1
BTW, I hope you are not insulting roughly 40% of the world population by implying that the Torah (a.k.a. Old Testament), attested to by over three Hundred original copies and the writings of Babylonian, Persian, and Greek historians and record keepers, is 100% fiction.
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance! -
American bumper sticker
That's not what he meant, and that's not the point. The intended meaning is not the economic phrase, it's the more general statement that 'a continued expenditure of resources and effort will not yield any noticable results. Without a lot of boring and distracting dissertation, I am here to say that the purpose of ANY home, car, or theater audio system, whoever you are, however much money you spend, whatever you know or don't know about sound recording, processing, and reproduction, is so that the person who owns or regularly uses the system can
Come in, sit down, relax, and
enjoy the music.
Why the hell would you spend six hundred dollars on an antique Beatles record when you can spend ten dollars on a CD?
Reason number one, I am a Beatles maniac. Reason number two; these sound better. --Nicolas Cage, The Rock
First, any physics student knows it takes Less expended energy to lift 100 million-odd tons of mass straight up than it does to move it up a gradual incline.
Second, it is actually EASIER to mount a rocket on a custom-engineered launch pad than mount it onto an airplane, which may not have been designed for the purpose.
Third, projectiles propelled off of sleds must be far more aerodynamic in order to achieve lift than brute-force vertical rockets. Look at the vast difference between the German V-1 and the V-2.
Fourth, and final, we would never have gotten to the moon if you had to mount a Titan IV or Saturn V booster onto a 707!!
By the way, if any conspiracy wacko has watched Capricorn One (available at most video rental stores), such a person might have figured out that it would be a suicidal risk to let Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually live through the mission!?
And there are people with wierder ideas than that. Ever hear of
There is so much space junk floating around above earth, that more often than not they REPLACE the windows on the space shuttle, because they have been damaged by so many micrometeoroid impacts.
I actually OWN an authenticated copy of The Space Shuttle Operator's Manual, complete with archetypical mission overviews and step-by-step procedures, published 1988. It's really interesting, for anyone who has operated research or industrial equipment. Anyways, the ultimate re-usable vehicle would be a built-in-space extended-lifetime solar transit vehicle, a.k.a. starship. It won't depart from or re-enter the atmosphere, so all the aerodynamic and weight-stress problems can be ditched. Its size and mass can be expanded proportionately to the thrust of its powerplant (Scientific American has a marvelous article about Nuclear Propulsion in Space. Finally, such a spacecraft could concieveably carry its own hydroponics, waste recyclers, and recreational facilities, in addition to mission-oriented facilities, to support a 14- to 30-person team. Gentlemen, we can build it. We have the technology.
Meanwhile the Gecko is having a blast, trying to hang on to the cold, dry exterior of the 43rd floor while telling pesky hand-held cell-phone callers "I am a Gecko, not Geico!!"
Don't rely on Yahoo to get anything technical in some sort of accurate or approximatingly close format. I'll read about it in Astronomy magazine, which I highly recommend.
From said article;
"But Roger Thompson, technical director of malicious code research for security services firm TruSecure, stressed such programs are generally a bad idea.
'I would rather not have anything that comes in uninvited and messes with my computers,' he said. "
I feel the same way, but I applaud whoever thought of using a WORM to do something useful for society! Commendation for original thinking!!
Besides, 1i0n sounds like one of those obscure infectants that you find weeks or months after the fact.
Ok, so only 6 RELEVANT complaints were filed.
That is, only six complaints were filed that pertained to australia-based servers or service providers. Therefore, out of 139 instances of objectionable content, only 6 could be dealt with inside the authority of the project. I call that a DISMAL FAILURE.
Only six complaints were filed, according to antic, the writer of the article. So probably six individuals complained about one site each, and they were all different. Considering the proportion of six complaints to many million internet users in Australia, either; the system works brilliantly, meaning the Australian government has thoroughly searched out all of the "objectionable" content (whatever the hell THAT means), or nobody cares what someone else is doing on the internet, which would make the attempt to block or censor content a dismal failure due to lack of individual participation.
Which sounds more like the modern mindset?
What do you see American users doing?, Conscientously forming advocacy groups and making intelligent demands on the authorities, lawmakers, and the software industry?, or going off on knee-jerk reactions to the aforementioned "objectionable" content (again, WHATEVER the hell that means!)? My answer is, about 5% of the former, and 95% of the latter.
Slashdot is a clever and practicable example of Free Speech and independent thought, but is dismally inadequate as a governing system, because it's ALWAYS the same group of people who decides what gets done. Same editors, same reviewers, same webmaster... until someone dies and some other unspecified person, by some unspecified means, replaces them. Where's your fine governmental system then?!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'd say there's just a wee bit of suspicion and prejudice in the mind of someone who may or may not have read the literature in question.
On the other two points, you are essentially correct. If one billion people say that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, that doesn't mean that it's necessarily so! If Mr. Armstrong himself attests to the fact however, we have a different question altogether.
The difference is that the scholarly attestations to the mundane events in the Torah (Joseph's life in Egypt), the rape of Tamar, Absalom's seisure of power, the Babylonian captivities) are accompanied by eyewitness accounts, people who claimed to have actually been there when it took place. The same is true of many of the extrordinary events (Joshua's military campain in Canaan, the Fall of the Babylonian Empire, the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple under Darius and Artaxerxes). Of course, after two or more milennia, after everybody who saw or wrote about the supposed event is dead, it's fairly easy to arbitrarily believe or disbelieve anything.
When I was in the Navy (No, for real, I was in the Navy), my Reactor Principles instructor clearly pointed out that depleted uranium cannot be induced into a fission reaction that produces harmful levels of radiation. It's almost as safe as steel, just a LOT heavier. (Even if it IS hazardous, I'd rather have my life shortened by radiation exposure than by an anti-shipping missile. Good ol' R2D2)
Also, the army uses a similar type of ammunition on the A-10 Warthog, in its main gun as a heavy armor-piercing round. I saw test video of the cannon when I was still in grade school, and I thought it was the coolest thing.
THX for the technical correction. I wasn't aware of that. BTW, that's not a national secret or anything, is it?
There's a book, a SciFi novel, about a microscopic black hole that starts chewing up the earth, called "The Lazarus Effect", available at your local library (I hope).
Just being curious, but is the laser containment field of the same type and design as the one used by the Ghostbusters?
First a bit of background. Commercial nuclear powerplants and naval propulsion plants operate on the principle of nuclear fission, the splitting of very heavy atoms to yield thermal energy, which heats steam, which turns an electric turbine or propeller shaft. What the_crowbar is talking about is nuclear fusion, the slamming together of very light atoms, i.e. heavy hydrogen or helium, in a chamber of superheated (in a star's case, superdense) plasma, thus heating steam and turning a turbine.
There was a major international experiment called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER. A russian-invented device called a tokamak, or magnetic bottle, can be used to contain plasma in a doughnut-shaped chamber. These are in use at several research labs and universities, including Harvard University and Lawrence Livermore Labs. The ITER was concieved as a prototype reactor to spearhead the way for commercially run nuclear fusion electricity plants, as proof-of-concept. The reactor was expected to cost over $4 TRILLION dollars. Therefore, the U.S. Congress, not wanting to any more money than necessary to get re-elected, withdrew U.S. support in 1998, and the project is expected to fail without U.S. funding. Go to Scientific American Magazine for more information on this project.
Dammit, JigaWatt!!!
PLEEAASSEE. I am not going to waste my time correcting the ignorance of the participants on current cosmological theory and speculation. Most of what is being talked about comes from extrapolation and playing calculus origami, and is not conceptual insight.
There was a very good point made about the fears that the atomic bomb would create a plasma fire in the earth's atmosphere. Then the scientists who knew better, and the generals who didn't, actually set the damn thing off, and WOAH, MAN, WE'RE STILL HERE!!! The conditions created in the laboratory are neither as exotic, nor as dangerous, as the pop-science magazines and the press make them out to be. They are laboratories. Dangerous and unpredictable conditions are shunned in favor of something called the controlled experiment. And the idea that the experiment made in I-forget-which-particle-accelerator to create neutronic matter could potentially create a microscopic black hole was examined aforehand, and dismissed by those conducting the experiment. I have a letter to the editor in some issue of Scientific American (which I will not reproduce to save time and the copyrights of the editors) addressing that very concern, and the response was candid and informed, stating that the conditions of the experiment gave the best odds of a black hole forming in the cyclotron to be something like one in 1X10^60. You see, most scientists aren't power-mad Dr. Frankensteins trying to play God and create horrible monsters. They have careers, personal interests, personal beliefs, and generally comphrehend what kind of experiments they are rigging up.
Dammit man, don't you know? All the Jews are going to Israel!! Get a clue.
Sounds like he was a wise and formidable man. Too bad there aren't many more like him.
* ESPECIALLY ON /. !! *
That's not what he meant, and that's not the point. The intended meaning is not the economic phrase, it's the more general statement that 'a continued expenditure of resources and effort will not yield any noticable results. Without a lot of boring and distracting dissertation, I am here to say that the purpose of ANY home, car, or theater audio system, whoever you are, however much money you spend, whatever you know or don't know about sound recording, processing, and reproduction, is so that the person who owns or regularly uses the system can
Yup. You are. (so am I, because I know the entymology of at least 5,000 unusual words in the English language, which makes me less of a dork, I think.
I don't think the flight director would take kindly to a systems crash or accidental erasure in mid-procedure without a hard copy.
"Hey Boss, the computer crashed."
"Did you save your checkoff lists?"
"Uhhh,,,........"
"OKAY, EVERYBODY START OVER."
First, any physics student knows it takes Less expended energy to lift 100 million-odd tons of mass straight up than it does to move it up a gradual incline.
Second, it is actually EASIER to mount a rocket on a custom-engineered launch pad than mount it onto an airplane, which may not have been designed for the purpose.
Third, projectiles propelled off of sleds must be far more aerodynamic in order to achieve lift than brute-force vertical rockets. Look at the vast difference between the German V-1 and the V-2.
Fourth, and final, we would never have gotten to the moon if you had to mount a Titan IV or Saturn V booster onto a 707!!
There is so much space junk floating around above earth, that more often than not they REPLACE the windows on the space shuttle, because they have been damaged by so many micrometeoroid impacts.
I actually OWN an authenticated copy of The Space Shuttle Operator's Manual, complete with archetypical mission overviews and step-by-step procedures, published 1988. It's really interesting, for anyone who has operated research or industrial equipment.
Anyways, the ultimate re-usable vehicle would be a built-in-space extended-lifetime solar transit vehicle, a.k.a. starship. It won't depart from or re-enter the atmosphere, so all the aerodynamic and weight-stress problems can be ditched. Its size and mass can be expanded proportionately to the thrust of its powerplant (Scientific American has a marvelous article about Nuclear Propulsion in Space . Finally, such a spacecraft could concieveably carry its own hydroponics, waste recyclers, and recreational facilities, in addition to mission-oriented facilities, to support a 14- to 30-person team.
Gentlemen, we can build it. We have the technology.
Meanwhile the Gecko is having a blast, trying to hang on to the cold, dry exterior of the 43rd floor while telling pesky hand-held cell-phone callers "I am a Gecko, not Geico!!"
Cary Grant? I thought Grace Kelly looked rather appealing in a black jumpsuit, and was a much better rooftop runner too.
Don't rely on Yahoo to get anything technical in some sort of accurate or approximatingly close format. I'll read about it in Astronomy magazine, which I highly recommend.
From said article;
"But Roger Thompson, technical director of malicious code research for security services firm TruSecure, stressed such programs are generally a bad idea.
'I would rather not have anything that comes in uninvited and messes with my computers,' he said. "
I feel the same way, but I applaud whoever thought of using a WORM to do something useful for society! Commendation for original thinking!!
Besides, 1i0n sounds like one of those obscure infectants that you find weeks or months after the fact.
Ok, so only 6 RELEVANT complaints were filed. That is, only six complaints were filed that pertained to australia-based servers or service providers. Therefore, out of 139 instances of objectionable content, only 6 could be dealt with inside the authority of the project. I call that a DISMAL FAILURE.
Only six complaints were filed, according to antic, the writer of the article. So probably six individuals complained about one site each, and they were all different. Considering the proportion of six complaints to many million internet users in Australia, either; the system works brilliantly, meaning the Australian government has thoroughly searched out all of the "objectionable" content (whatever the hell THAT means), or nobody cares what someone else is doing on the internet, which would make the attempt to block or censor content a dismal failure due to lack of individual participation.
Which sounds more like the modern mindset?
What do you see American users doing?, Conscientously forming advocacy groups and making intelligent demands on the authorities, lawmakers, and the software industry?, or going off on knee-jerk reactions to the aforementioned "objectionable" content (again, WHATEVER the hell that means!)? My answer is, about 5% of the former, and 95% of the latter.
Slashdot is a clever and practicable example of Free Speech and independent thought, but is dismally inadequate as a governing system, because it's ALWAYS the same group of people who decides what gets done. Same editors, same reviewers, same webmaster... until someone dies and some other unspecified person, by some unspecified means, replaces them. Where's your fine governmental system then?!