I always run into this problem. I try to get a job that wants me to have certain training. Yay, I have that. Now it wants x years of experience. Um, I'm trying to get that experience. So now, I just claim I'm trained in kung fu and advanced lovemaking techniques and I have 10 years experience as President of the United States.
Some of what I've learned from playing video games:
1. Shoot everything that moves, even after it's dead. 2. Pick every pocket you can. There's gold in them there asses! 3. Blowing up barrels is fun! 4. Break every crate you see. You'll need that extra amunition. 5. You can get into a shoot-out with the National Guard, take 20 bullets and wake up several hours later to continue your rampage. 6. Aliens are attracted to ammo power-ups for some reason. 7. Break into every house you can. Cool spells are often found within. 8. Nukes are far more effective than diplomacy.
Additionally, Inflation theory posits that spacetime expanded dramatically in the first few seconds of the universe. Since spacetime can expand faster than the speed of light, the Theory of Relativity is not violated.
I would like to point out that the proper Spanish name for a citizen of the United States is "estadounidense" which literally means "United-Statesian". It doesn't roll off the tongue very well.
Personally, it doesn't bother me. I call myself an "American" just as most of the people of this country do, but it's not really a surprise that other countries call us different names.
I'm glad we're finally going to reprocess this waste rather than letting it just accumulate. In the long run, reprocessing will reduce the amount of waste that would need to be put in Yucca Mountain (or wherever). Unfortunately, it looks like they're going about it half-assed. They'll be reprocessing waste, but the reprocessed uranium won't be usable by our own reactors. That's kinda like taking Europe's used beer cans and our own and turning them into chain mail for the troops. It's expensive and is pretty much useless. It would probably be easier to reprocess most of it into something usable in our own reactors and the rest into something "secure" for foreign reactors.
I've been reading about alternative theories of gravity, including MOND. Every day, there's at least one paper posted on http://arxiv.org/ dealing with MOND and other theories. To me, MOND seems rather ad hoc. At some acceleration a0 gravity acts linearly? Why? There's really no physical reason for it, though the mathematics work out. Dark matter, by comparison, is much less ad hoc, at least in the case of MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects). That at least invokes normal matter, though it can't account for all of the observed effects. I find WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) to be a little more ad hoc since unknown particles are invoked. Dark Energy also strikes me as rather ad hoc, being the resurrection of Einstein's idea of a cosmological constant. I'm not completely up to speed on the concept, so I could be wrong though (I am not a physicist, but I have a degree in physics). I do find all this interesting, though, because it seems that no one really knows what's going on, which makes for interesting debates. It's like a cage match. MOND vs. general relativity! Two go in, one comes out. We'll have to wait a while before the dust settles on this one.
This guy sounds like a complete jackass, but it's not just conservatives who think this way. Some states have huge taxes on cigarettes (though that's a bipartisan thing, it seems) I've heard quite a few liberals clamoring for huge increases in taxes on gasoline (cuz it would only hurt SUV drivers... never mind the truck drivers who deliver goods and people who ride the bus etc) and increasing taxes on guns and other things conservatives like.
The fact is, both sides say they want to keep property, sales, and income taxes low while jacking up the taxes on "sinful" or "wasteful" things they disagree with. Where does it end? High taxes on Bibles or Korans because they incite violence? High taxes on fatty foods because they cause fat people (spontaneous generation and all that) and then they find out peanuts cause tumors, so they gotta tax the shit out of that too.
The maddening thing is, I find myself thinking along the same lines, though more modestly. Sure, increase the gas tax maybe 10%, but at the same time, offer more incentives for hybrid or alternative fuel vehicles. Cap out any "sin" tax at 25% of the value of the item. I wouldn't add a "fat" tax to junk food, just remove the taxes on healthy foods (if it hasn't already been done). The system can work, but there needs to be some sanity injected into it.
I don't know if this is the same site, but I saw one a couple months ago that determines how interesting your social security number is. The funny thing is, my SSN was deemed completely uninteresting because "we could not find any accounts with any money in them". Seriously, though, one has to wonder if a site like this could be used in phishing. How interesting is your credit card number? How interesting is your drivers license number? How interesting is your social security number, etc. I'd be willing to bet people will willingly input all those numbers...at will.
Get your point across the passive-agressive way (cuz being aggressive-aggressive in this day and age gets you a one-way trip to Guantanamo Bay). I, for one, am going to be running Google queries like "Fuck you, Bush!" or "Get your hands off me, you damned dirty ape!" or "I am the very model of a modern major general" (just to establish my insanity plea). I wonder how much porn will be returned by these searches and how many poor, innocent children will have their minds shattered as they somehow watch behind my back despite the fact that I don't associate with children.
Of course, gun laws don't prevent people from obtaining firearms. It does, though, make it harder for people to get them and it prevents large numbers of people from having them. If you were an unpopular leader, what would you rather have? A large number of people who were pissed off but had no real means of revolt or a large number of people who were pissed off and a significant percentage of them just happened to have guns for other reasons? Even if that relatively small number of people didn't stand a chance, they'd still be a handful to deal with and certainly an incentive to either "deal" with them in an unpopular way or to step back from your unpopular policies that pissed them off in the first place.
As for criminals obtaining firearms, well, yeah, that's gonna happen whether or not guns are completely banned. The solution is not to completely ban guns (and thereby preventing the vast majority of law-abiding people from owning them), but to increase the penalties of using a gun in a crime, i.e. calling any crime involving a firearm attempted murder.
Governments seem to be waging a war on people's rights. What is the aim of a war? To remove the enemy's fighting ability. How do you do that in this war? Remove their ability to arm themselves, reduce their education so they don't even know they're losing their rights. Just think about it. A few decades from now, we won't have many rights left (following current trends), and people will start to notice, uneducated or not, but they won't be able to do anything about it because they are armed merely with votes, which probably won't be worth anything anymore. I think gun violence isn't the problem, it's merely a symptom of a larger problem. Removing guns from the populace isn't the solution to gun violence, though it just so happens to remove the people's ability to defend themselves from the government, so....
This isn't science. Jim Wayman, a biometrics researcher, says "It's hocus pocus, not serious science, but it's good for a laugh, and it doesn't hurt anybody." He's right, though this is right up there with those studies that find an equation for the perfect ice cream cone, or whatever. The annoying thing is, people take this shit seriously.
Furthermore, from the link, "it couldn't detect the hint of sexual suggestion or disdain many have read into Mona Lisa's eyes". It occurs to me that the Mona Lisa, like all art, is subject to the interpretation of the viewer as well as the intent of the artist. Maybe the enigma WAS da Vinci's intent. In which case, studies like this are just blowing smoke up our asses. We all put a little of ourselves into the art.
Sirius B is pretty typical, though there is still a lot of variation. If I remember correctly, their masses can range from about half solar to 1.4 solar with a radius similar to Earth's.
It's all relative. For years, astronomers have known that Sirius B was about 1 solar mass, plus or minus maybe a tenth. They found this by observing the size of its orbit and its period. This time, using spectroscopy, they can estimate the surface gravity of Sirius B, which will give its radius and mass. There's still uncertainty in the measurement, as in all measurements, but that uncertainty is smaller than previous measurements. Who knows, 20 years from now new techniques could give an even more accurate measure of Sirius B's mass, but one could still say "measured accurately for the first time" since it's better than previous measurements. This is not revolutionary, it's evolutionary.
Not really. We'd still see it. Astronomers have a pretty good inventory of stars down to quite low magnitudes. Anything that close would show up in one of the big all-sky surveys. Granted, our known inventory of stars within 10 parsecs is lacking, but it's still pretty safe to say that our inventory of stars within 1 parsec is limited to just one.
As far as I know, the only things that can circularize orbits are tidal forces and drag from gas, neither of which are significant in that region of the solar system. Possibly the orbit was perturbed twice, once by Neptune to put it in a highly inclined, highly elliptical orbit and once by another body (possibly a star or another KB object). That last one would have to occur at the right time and place, though, and would be quite rare. Maybe this is the freak of the solar system.
Actually, they've discovered several hundred objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. They're called Kuiper Belt objects. The ones that get the press are big ones, oddly shaped ones, or in this case, ones with weird orbits.
A brown dwarf companion of the sun would probably have been discovered by now. The closest known brown dwarves are Epsilon Indi Ba and Epsilon Indi Bb, located 11.8 light years (3.63 parsecs) away. While they have very low visual luminosities (I haven't seen any published figures), they are relatively bright in the infrared (11.9 in the J band). Now, let's say a conjectured companion of the sun is 10,000 AU away. That's 0.05 parsecs, or 72.6 times closer than the Epsilon Indi brown dwarves. Since brightness is proportional to the square of the distance, that makes it 5271 times brighter or about 9.3 magnitudes brighter, giving a magnitude of 2.6 in the J band. There just aren't that many stars that bright in the infrared. It would have been noticed by now by the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey. Similarly, nearby stars are usually discovered by proper motion surveys since nearby stars will appear to move faster against the background than far stars. Any companions of the sun would have been noticed. So there, in a nutshell, is a nail in the coffin of the Nemesis theory.
Every day, I hear about it. Global warming this, global warming that, doom, gloom, and FUD. Got a hurricane problem? Well, it's obviously because of global warming, not a long-term, unrelated trend. Hot day? Well, that's global warming too, not just a high-pressure system. Global warming is even getting blamed for allergies:
What's next, missing socks blamed on global warming?
Seriously, though, I'm not saying that there's no human factor in the current climate change, I'm just saying that the climate change is probably not as bad as some people are trying to make it out to be (FUD sells) and a significant portion of the climate change is probably natural. The fact is, we don't know for sure, and to make grandiose proclamations about climate change is unscientific.
And now, to the relevant portion, here's this link.
Yes, the Arctic has been warming, but then again, it also cooled for a while, (and the last few years haven't even been the warmest on record) according to these guys. Granted, they seem to be biased in the anti-global warming direction, but at least it's an alternative voice in a din of FUD.
It's obvious that market forces just don't apply, no scarcity, blah blah blah. I'm not likely to pay 99 cents for the latest Britney Spears single, and I'm sure as hell not going to buy it if it's 5 bucks just because it's popular. On the other hand, it might help out lesser-known bands. I'm more likely to buy a 25 cent song from an unknown than a 99 cent song from the same unknown. In fact, since the music I like is not that popular, I'd stand to save a metric fuckton of money, that is, if I were inclined to buy music at all. As far as I know, it's hard to improve on 0 cents per download.
I know a lot of vehicles out there have rev-limiting and speed-limiting chips. I also know that there are mod-chips out there that remove those limits. So, we get this new GPS system for new cars. Shortly afterwards, someone develops a chip to get around that or posts instructions on how to disable it. If I ever had to buy a car with this system installed, the very next purchase I would make would be a mod-chip. Fuck the system.
You can't really build a nuclear reactor with the radioisotopes in smoke detectors. Yes, you can collect the Americium-241 found in smoke detectors, but you won't get much. You could even collect quite a bit of it, if you collected, say, several tens of thousands of smoke detectors, but it would be useless. The isotope is found in an oxide form. Those oxygen atoms would act as neutron absorbers, immediately damping any reactions. One would have to purify the element, something that's beyond the abilities of a kid. Even then, you wouldn't get enough neutron emission to create a chain reaction. You'd just have a pile of stuff emitting low level gamma rays and alpha particles.
I read the link and it is very obviously fake. I mean, come on, the kid had the same last name as one of the discoverers of nuclear fission, Otto Hahn. And really, with the steps outlined in the article, you'd only get a few grams at most of any of the materials. Certainly not enough for a reactor.
Slashdot Mirror
Because some other asshole will be asked to step into his place.
I always run into this problem. I try to get a job that wants me to have certain training. Yay, I have that. Now it wants x years of experience. Um, I'm trying to get that experience. So now, I just claim I'm trained in kung fu and advanced lovemaking techniques and I have 10 years experience as President of the United States.
I'm not "white" or "Caucasian", I'm Norse-Midwest-American.
Some of what I've learned from playing video games:
1. Shoot everything that moves, even after it's dead.
2. Pick every pocket you can. There's gold in them there asses!
3. Blowing up barrels is fun!
4. Break every crate you see. You'll need that extra amunition.
5. You can get into a shoot-out with the National Guard, take 20 bullets and wake up several hours later to continue your rampage.
6. Aliens are attracted to ammo power-ups for some reason.
7. Break into every house you can. Cool spells are often found within.
8. Nukes are far more effective than diplomacy.
Additionally, Inflation theory posits that spacetime expanded dramatically in the first few seconds of the universe. Since spacetime can expand faster than the speed of light, the Theory of Relativity is not violated.
I would like to point out that the proper Spanish name for a citizen of the United States is "estadounidense" which literally means "United-Statesian". It doesn't roll off the tongue very well.
i can
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_the_word_Amer
Personally, it doesn't bother me. I call myself an "American" just as most of the people of this country do, but it's not really a surprise that other countries call us different names.
I'm glad we're finally going to reprocess this waste rather than letting it just accumulate. In the long run, reprocessing will reduce the amount of waste that would need to be put in Yucca Mountain (or wherever). Unfortunately, it looks like they're going about it half-assed. They'll be reprocessing waste, but the reprocessed uranium won't be usable by our own reactors. That's kinda like taking Europe's used beer cans and our own and turning them into chain mail for the troops. It's expensive and is pretty much useless. It would probably be easier to reprocess most of it into something usable in our own reactors and the rest into something "secure" for foreign reactors.
I forgot to add this link:
p df
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0601/0601055.
This one rules out the Pioneer Anomaly resulting from an anomalous force field in the outer solar system (we'd see the effects on planetary orbits).
I've been reading about alternative theories of gravity, including MOND. Every day, there's at least one paper posted on http://arxiv.org/ dealing with MOND and other theories. To me, MOND seems rather ad hoc. At some acceleration a0 gravity acts linearly? Why? There's really no physical reason for it, though the mathematics work out. Dark matter, by comparison, is much less ad hoc, at least in the case of MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects). That at least invokes normal matter, though it can't account for all of the observed effects. I find WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) to be a little more ad hoc since unknown particles are invoked.
Dark Energy also strikes me as rather ad hoc, being the resurrection of Einstein's idea of a cosmological constant. I'm not completely up to speed on the concept, so I could be wrong though (I am not a physicist, but I have a degree in physics). I do find all this interesting, though, because it seems that no one really knows what's going on, which makes for interesting debates. It's like a cage match. MOND vs. general relativity! Two go in, one comes out. We'll have to wait a while before the dust settles on this one.
This guy sounds like a complete jackass, but it's not just conservatives who think this way. Some states have huge taxes on cigarettes (though that's a bipartisan thing, it seems) I've heard quite a few liberals clamoring for huge increases in taxes on gasoline (cuz it would only hurt SUV drivers... never mind the truck drivers who deliver goods and people who ride the bus etc) and increasing taxes on guns and other things conservatives like.
The fact is, both sides say they want to keep property, sales, and income taxes low while jacking up the taxes on "sinful" or "wasteful" things they disagree with. Where does it end? High taxes on Bibles or Korans because they incite violence? High taxes on fatty foods because they cause fat people (spontaneous generation and all that) and then they find out peanuts cause tumors, so they gotta tax the shit out of that too.
The maddening thing is, I find myself thinking along the same lines, though more modestly. Sure, increase the gas tax maybe 10%, but at the same time, offer more incentives for hybrid or alternative fuel vehicles. Cap out any "sin" tax at 25% of the value of the item. I wouldn't add a "fat" tax to junk food, just remove the taxes on healthy foods (if it hasn't already been done). The system can work, but there needs to be some sanity injected into it.
I don't know if this is the same site, but I saw one a couple months ago that determines how interesting your social security number is. The funny thing is, my SSN was deemed completely uninteresting because "we could not find any accounts with any money in them". Seriously, though, one has to wonder if a site like this could be used in phishing. How interesting is your credit card number? How interesting is your drivers license number? How interesting is your social security number, etc. I'd be willing to bet people will willingly input all those numbers...at will.
Get your point across the passive-agressive way (cuz being aggressive-aggressive in this day and age gets you a one-way trip to Guantanamo Bay). I, for one, am going to be running Google queries like "Fuck you, Bush!" or "Get your hands off me, you damned dirty ape!" or "I am the very model of a modern major general" (just to establish my insanity plea). I wonder how much porn will be returned by these searches and how many poor, innocent children will have their minds shattered as they somehow watch behind my back despite the fact that I don't associate with children.
Of course, gun laws don't prevent people from obtaining firearms. It does, though, make it harder for people to get them and it prevents large numbers of people from having them. If you were an unpopular leader, what would you rather have? A large number of people who were pissed off but had no real means of revolt or a large number of people who were pissed off and a significant percentage of them just happened to have guns for other reasons? Even if that relatively small number of people didn't stand a chance, they'd still be a handful to deal with and certainly an incentive to either "deal" with them in an unpopular way or to step back from your unpopular policies that pissed them off in the first place.
As for criminals obtaining firearms, well, yeah, that's gonna happen whether or not guns are completely banned. The solution is not to completely ban guns (and thereby preventing the vast majority of law-abiding people from owning them), but to increase the penalties of using a gun in a crime, i.e. calling any crime involving a firearm attempted murder.
Governments seem to be waging a war on people's rights. What is the aim of a war? To remove the enemy's fighting ability. How do you do that in this war? Remove their ability to arm themselves, reduce their education so they don't even know they're losing their rights. Just think about it. A few decades from now, we won't have many rights left (following current trends), and people will start to notice, uneducated or not, but they won't be able to do anything about it because they are armed merely with votes, which probably won't be worth anything anymore. I think gun violence isn't the problem, it's merely a symptom of a larger problem. Removing guns from the populace isn't the solution to gun violence, though it just so happens to remove the people's ability to defend themselves from the government, so....
I read this write-up of the study in question:
_ lisa.html
http://www.livescience.com/history/ap_051215_mona
This isn't science. Jim Wayman, a biometrics researcher, says "It's hocus pocus, not serious science, but it's good for a laugh, and it doesn't hurt anybody." He's right, though this is right up there with those studies that find an equation for the perfect ice cream cone, or whatever. The annoying thing is, people take this shit seriously.
Furthermore, from the link, "it couldn't detect the hint of sexual suggestion or disdain many have read into Mona Lisa's eyes". It occurs to me that the Mona Lisa, like all art, is subject to the interpretation of the viewer as well as the intent of the artist. Maybe the enigma WAS da Vinci's intent. In which case, studies like this are just blowing smoke up our asses. We all put a little of ourselves into the art.
Sirius B is pretty typical, though there is still a lot of variation. If I remember correctly, their masses can range from about half solar to 1.4 solar with a radius similar to Earth's.
It's all relative. For years, astronomers have known that Sirius B was about 1 solar mass, plus or minus maybe a tenth. They found this by observing the size of its orbit and its period. This time, using spectroscopy, they can estimate the surface gravity of Sirius B, which will give its radius and mass. There's still uncertainty in the measurement, as in all measurements, but that uncertainty is smaller than previous measurements. Who knows, 20 years from now new techniques could give an even more accurate measure of Sirius B's mass, but one could still say "measured accurately for the first time" since it's better than previous measurements. This is not revolutionary, it's evolutionary.
Not really. We'd still see it. Astronomers have a pretty good inventory of stars down to quite low magnitudes. Anything that close would show up in one of the big all-sky surveys. Granted, our known inventory of stars within 10 parsecs is lacking, but it's still pretty safe to say that our inventory of stars within 1 parsec is limited to just one.
As far as I know, the only things that can circularize orbits are tidal forces and drag from gas, neither of which are significant in that region of the solar system. Possibly the orbit was perturbed twice, once by Neptune to put it in a highly inclined, highly elliptical orbit and once by another body (possibly a star or another KB object). That last one would have to occur at the right time and place, though, and would be quite rare. Maybe this is the freak of the solar system.
Actually, they've discovered several hundred objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. They're called Kuiper Belt objects. The ones that get the press are big ones, oddly shaped ones, or in this case, ones with weird orbits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt
A brown dwarf companion of the sun would probably have been discovered by now. The closest known brown dwarves are Epsilon Indi Ba and Epsilon Indi Bb, located 11.8 light years (3.63 parsecs) away. While they have very low visual luminosities (I haven't seen any published figures), they are relatively bright in the infrared (11.9 in the J band). Now, let's say a conjectured companion of the sun is 10,000 AU away. That's 0.05 parsecs, or 72.6 times closer than the Epsilon Indi brown dwarves. Since brightness is proportional to the square of the distance, that makes it 5271 times brighter or about 9.3 magnitudes brighter, giving a magnitude of 2.6 in the J band. There just aren't that many stars that bright in the infrared. It would have been noticed by now by the 2 Micron All-Sky Survey.
Similarly, nearby stars are usually discovered by proper motion surveys since nearby stars will appear to move faster against the background than far stars. Any companions of the sun would have been noticed. So there, in a nutshell, is a nail in the coffin of the Nemesis theory.
Every day, I hear about it. Global warming this, global warming that, doom, gloom, and FUD. Got a hurricane problem? Well, it's obviously because of global warming, not a long-term, unrelated trend. Hot day? Well, that's global warming too, not just a high-pressure system. Global warming is even getting blamed for allergies:
l ergy_rise.html
http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/051122_al
What's next, missing socks blamed on global warming?
Seriously, though, I'm not saying that there's no human factor in the current climate change, I'm just saying that the climate change is probably not as bad as some people are trying to make it out to be (FUD sells) and a significant portion of the climate change is probably natural. The fact is, we don't know for sure, and to make grandiose proclamations about climate change is unscientific.
And now, to the relevant portion, here's this link.
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Arctic.htm
Yes, the Arctic has been warming, but then again, it also cooled for a while, (and the last few years haven't even been the warmest on record) according to these guys. Granted, they seem to be biased in the anti-global warming direction, but at least it's an alternative voice in a din of FUD.
It's obvious that market forces just don't apply, no scarcity, blah blah blah. I'm not likely to pay 99 cents for the latest Britney Spears single, and I'm sure as hell not going to buy it if it's 5 bucks just because it's popular. On the other hand, it might help out lesser-known bands. I'm more likely to buy a 25 cent song from an unknown than a 99 cent song from the same unknown. In fact, since the music I like is not that popular, I'd stand to save a metric fuckton of money, that is, if I were inclined to buy music at all. As far as I know, it's hard to improve on 0 cents per download.
I know a lot of vehicles out there have rev-limiting and speed-limiting chips. I also know that there are mod-chips out there that remove those limits. So, we get this new GPS system for new cars. Shortly afterwards, someone develops a chip to get around that or posts instructions on how to disable it. If I ever had to buy a car with this system installed, the very next purchase I would make would be a mod-chip. Fuck the system.
You can't really build a nuclear reactor with the radioisotopes in smoke detectors. Yes, you can collect the Americium-241 found in smoke detectors, but you won't get much. You could even collect quite a bit of it, if you collected, say, several tens of thousands of smoke detectors, but it would be useless. The isotope is found in an oxide form. Those oxygen atoms would act as neutron absorbers, immediately damping any reactions. One would have to purify the element, something that's beyond the abilities of a kid. Even then, you wouldn't get enough neutron emission to create a chain reaction. You'd just have a pile of stuff emitting low level gamma rays and alpha particles.
I read the link and it is very obviously fake. I mean, come on, the kid had the same last name as one of the discoverers of nuclear fission, Otto Hahn. And really, with the steps outlined in the article, you'd only get a few grams at most of any of the materials. Certainly not enough for a reactor.