Good question. The answer is no: Radium and Radon are different elements alltogether.
Radium (symbol Ra) is a solid metal. It vaporizes only at about 1100 C, so when we are breathing it, it's always in the form of microscopic solid particles. Happens if you cut granite or live downwind from a coal mining operation making a lot of dust.
Now, radon (symbol Rn) is an inert gas. It's chemically inactive, like all noble gases, but it's very heavy and thus susceptible to spontaneous decay. It is therefore radioactive. Its half-life is only four days, which is very short compared to, say, Uranium, so radon's radioactivity per mass unit is quite high. Fortunately, radon produces mostly alpha particles and doesn't generate much gamma rays, so it's pretty safe unless you breath it in high concentrations.
and if you get radium, a radioactive gas, in your lungs, well, its less than good for you
You mean radon. Radium is a solid which glows noticeably, as illustrated by the
famous photograph
that Marie Curie took when she isolated radium from a huge amount (three tons) of pitchblend.
C'mon, we all know what you need to have on a cover art. Look, think about the EverQuest cover art. Yes, there is a girl. Now, can you tell me what *else*that cover depicts?
TThank you for your reference. I agree that Mozart could retranscribe pieces from memory. There are references about him being able to play pieces after hearing them once.
The trial portion is, I believe, a legend or an invention. I couldn't find references to music being kept locked by the Vatican -- it would have been rather pointless considering that retranscribing music was very common, and a lot of people were doing it informally, even if they didn't have Mozart's memory. And I didn't even find any reference to young Mozard visiting the Vatican.
Actually, from a PR standpoint, the legend would tend to accredit the idea that Microsoft's tactics are OK, because authorities had been using them in the past. Even the Pope used it, right? Wrong. It turns out that the legend is untrue. For all we know, the Pope would have dragged Bill Gates to court for obstructing progress.:-)
Can you please mention the source? I read a couple of biographies of Mozart and neither of them mentioned that episode. Either the biographers missed something, or the article is wrong.
Please see other comments that detail his two (at least) math mistakes. He basically thinks you can get a force of more than F=P/c from radiation pressure generated by a photon source of power P, c being the speed of light. You can't.
The maths is wrong and the theory is fishy, but the inventor could skip all the hubub and get a Nobel just by doing this:
Get a vaccuum chamber
Hang the drive on a rope from the chamber's ceiling
Hang a plumb line next to the rope
Turn the thing on
Report any deviation from the vertical.
If so... Profit! Seriously.
If there is a sustained, measurable deviation not explained by known physics, the guy will get a Nobel. That's 1.1 million dollars. If I was sure I had a winner for getting a million, I'd certainly be ready to invest into a vaccum chamber and build a prototype.
If we don't see this happen, then the drive doesn't work. End of story.
"I started getting a bunch of stock-tout spam in the last month or so. The other day, I happened to look and see it was coming in to an email address I had dedicated to my online trading account account. I've spoken to the online trading company, and I've given them the info on these spams. It turns out there is an 'ongoing investigation,'
Is the trading company called Ameritrade by any chance? They got a leak problem, maybe an insider job. Look at this thread on spamgourmet (an anti-spam site that I help with):
http://bbs.spamgourmet.com/viewtopic.php?t=81&star t=60
Well, the same can be said of doctors, CEOs, Drug Companies, etc. etc. etc.
The thing is that there's not as much of a self-interest for entities with very deep pockets to go on an image-assasination binge against those groups.
Bad mone-grubbing trial lawyers are actually worse, because of the way the US system works. Each trial lawyer that attempts to game the system has a non-zero probability of hitting pay dirt, and that's why they routinely file ridiculous claims. And sometimes they *do* hit pay dirt. For them, it's a way to keep themselves in whores and coke. But for society, it's another abuse of the system that is now a precedent, and thus yet another weakness point in the social system. And social system deficiencies are ALWAYS detrimental to the layman and the individual. The rich and powerful find ways around them.
So ridiculous perversions of the courts are actually insidiously ruining society, mostly making it worse for individuals. On another hand, bad practioners of other trades don't have such a chance to pervert the system, and that's why they are more easily dealt with.
A bad CEO or a bad doctor has but one chance to profit from you or kill you. But bad legal precedents are effectively forever.
Today, thanks to that extortion attempt, trial lawyers have lost a little bit more of whatever goodwill they still had in the public's mind.
Good lawyers are great. Unfortunately, for each good fight you hear about, there are a dozen disgusting abuse of the judicial system that are turning US courts into a mockery.
Absolutely Darn Everybody (TM) is using electricity and paying for it. If a guy is not able to distinguish between power (watts) and consumed or produced power quantity (watts hours), he's probably going to be robbed blind by the utility companies, among others. What next? Rate car efficiency is miles? Or is that in gallons? Oh no, wait, it's that "per" thing. Yeah, that's it.
I've been a freelance writer. There is no excuse for ignorance when you are making a living reporting about simple stuff. None.
"Learn the basics of your subject before you hack your piece, or find another line of business" has always been a motto around newsrooms. Glad to see that modern media is doing away with these old, stupid traditions.
Wow, I didn't know that. I did know that burning coal releases considerable radioactivity, which makes nuclear power much safer than coal burning even if you factor in some accidental radiation leaks in nuclear power plants. See http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html.
Although burning less coal is a step in the right direction, the mercury vapor in fluorescent lights remains a concern. Do you know if the old fluorescent tubes removed from offices are recycled today?
I have been an early adopter of CFLs. I use them especially on multi-bulb fixtures. I used to leave one incandescence bulb in the fixture and replace the others with CFLs. That way, some light came on instantly when the switch was flipped while the CFLs were warming up. Nowadays, the warm up takes 1-2 seconds.
One major concern: CFLs are made with a drop of mercury vaporized in the tube's vaccuum. What happens when 110 millions households start throwing away burnt CFLs? Manufacturers like GE should have a dumpster at big stores where these bulbs can be trashed. Better than ending up with mercury poisoning, which isn't a pretty sight.
IAU head Owen Gingerich is quoted as saying that he was only peripherally aware of the definition, and because it didn't show up on MS Word's spell check, he didn't think it was that important."
In other news, the International Geologist Union unanimously decided to use the word "quasar" to describe the sticky, gooey layer of dead animals found under large volcanic boulders falling around erupting volcanos. Geologists say it comes from an obscure South American swear word uttered mostly when you have to scrap this goo off excavation tools.
Also, the latest International Geology Summit announced that it would leverage its notoriety to market household items as a fund raising program. The first announced product is a new douchebag called "The Telescope" -- slogan: "Comfortable to your Black Hole!"
A ticked off International Astronomical Union spokeman said that the geologists were acting out of spite. To which the International Geology Summit replied, "Spite? You mean this basaltic sand formation that you find between Early Chewonitbitchian and Upper Youdumbasstic ?"
This came up last year alreaady, when the Virtual Case system was officially written off. Why on Earthis it news? It is ONE YEAR OLD, for crying out loud. Are they that slow at the Washington Post?
More likely, they are just tools for the FBI's PR branch. As in:
FBI IT boss: "We need a new IT budget for a project that will really work, this time, we swear."
FBI director: "Errr, that's risky. The previous two were embarrasing failures."
PR manager: "Let's revive last year's VCFS story and put a "lesson learned" positive spin on it!"
FBI director: "Positive spin??? On a $170 million piece of crud? Come on! Who would be stupid enough to print it?"
PR manager: "You obviously haven't opened the Washington Post recently..."
Perhaps he meant that fire and water are complicated at infinitesimal scales. Which they are.
Perhaps, but the proper expression is "complex at a MICROSCOPIC scale" anyway. I am afraid you are too kind.
In your gmtm.org site, your writing sounds definitely British. In that case, you should be doubly offended by the BBC's bad writing, because they buy and publish these rubbish texts with your tax money!:-)
The lame content of the article is not helped by its bad grammar. TFA says: Certainly mother nature has always been difficult to recreate. Fire and water are so infinitesimally complicated to model that animators can only create rough approximations on screen.
Last time I checked, "infinitesimal" meant "extremely small, negligeable", which is the exact opposite of the notion the writer has in mind (that is, that water is hard to animate).
And it went right through the BBC editors, who are apparenlty easily dazzled by latinate words,
Jobs come and go. A wife and kids... they're bloody hard to replace.
I have a 3 hours/day commute (90 mins each way, sometimes it takes 2 hours to get there) and it's really eating into my productivity and my life. My advice: move to someplace closer, even if it's a smaller place, with your family.
Then again, consider that aerospace isn't the most stable kind of carrer today. Right up with microelectronics for cycles. Boeing has a huge bad rap for mistreating its engineers nowadays. Where are you moving to? Chicago?
The trick is to escape from academia and land an engineering job. The pay is good, and you get a chance to influence the world. Bonus point if your engineering job is in the R&D division of a company that regularly changes the technological or scientific landscape (yes, there are still some).
If today, you are working on perfecting data sharing in clusters, you're not just doing an engineering job. You're giving the world faster parallel computing, and the applications are many and far-reaching. You're changing the world.
Academia is not the only outlet for bright people. Actually, I'd go further and say that many bright minds are wasted in unrewarding, uninspiring academic jobs.
Embrace the dark side, work in R&D instead of teachning.
I wrote this in a discussion about what the New York Time's IT did to Adrian Lamo -- they threw the FBI at him when he reported multiple vulnerabilities in their web server, proving that that their network as wide open as their mind are closed.
The morale is: when you get hold of a bunch of stuffed, arrogant fools who have high self-esteem and low common sense, and push their nose into their own poo, they will not clean off the poo, they will splash it all over you.
Notice the similarity with your situation. Maybe it's because they read the NYT?:-)
Some people might argue that reporting networking vulnerabilities on Windows is like shooting fish in a barrel. But nevertheless, from what you wrote, you seem to have done the right thing. I'd strongly suggest that next time you find a flaw in that institution's network (was it your school?), you just post it anonymously on the Internet. Preferably on a high traffic site.
If people start doing that, maybe the notion that you shouldn't shoot the messenger will slowly sink into the thick skull of the IT departments in schools and academia.
Or maybe it will just give them an excuse to ask for more money and hire more control freaks.:-)
I disagree with the troll moderation here. What Disasm said is true: "Open Source projects don't interrogate and try to prosecute you if you find a security problem and report it."
Not all closed-source owners are evil, though.
Some companies are even reasonable. I remember an episode when a guy working at a NY university reported a HUGE flaw in an IBM mainframe product, and the IBM support people thanked that person -- before opening a severity 1, priority 1 problem!
Slashdot Mirror
Good question. The answer is no: Radium and Radon are different elements alltogether.
Radium (symbol Ra) is a solid metal. It vaporizes only at about 1100 C, so when we are breathing it, it's always in the form of microscopic solid particles. Happens if you cut granite or live downwind from a coal mining operation making a lot of dust.
Now, radon (symbol Rn) is an inert gas. It's chemically inactive, like all noble gases, but it's very heavy and thus susceptible to spontaneous decay. It is therefore radioactive. Its half-life is only four days, which is very short compared to, say, Uranium, so radon's radioactivity per mass unit is quite high. Fortunately, radon produces mostly alpha particles and doesn't generate much gamma rays, so it's pretty safe unless you breath it in high concentrations.
You mean radon. Radium is a solid which glows noticeably, as illustrated by the famous photograph that Marie Curie took when she isolated radium from a huge amount (three tons) of pitchblend.
At last, a portable zap gun! About freakin" time!
C'mon, we all know what you need to have on a cover art. Look, think about the EverQuest cover art. Yes, there is a girl. Now, can you tell me what *else*that cover depicts?
Didn't think so. Case closed.
And even female artists agree.
TThank you for your reference. I agree that Mozart could retranscribe pieces from memory. There are references about him being able to play pieces after hearing them once.
The trial portion is, I believe, a legend or an invention. I couldn't find references to music being kept locked by the Vatican -- it would have been rather pointless considering that retranscribing music was very common, and a lot of people were doing it informally, even if they didn't have Mozart's memory. And I didn't even find any reference to young Mozard visiting the Vatican.
Actually, from a PR standpoint, the legend would tend to accredit the idea that Microsoft's tactics are OK, because authorities had been using them in the past. Even the Pope used it, right? Wrong. It turns out that the legend is untrue. For all we know, the Pope would have dragged Bill Gates to court for obstructing progress. :-)
Can you please mention the source? I read a couple of biographies of Mozart and neither of them mentioned that episode. Either the biographers missed something, or the article is wrong.
Too bad if it's wrong, it's a pretty story.
Please see other comments that detail his two (at least) math mistakes. He basically thinks you can get a force of more than F=P/c from radiation pressure generated by a photon source of power P, c being the speed of light. You can't.
If there is a sustained, measurable deviation not explained by known physics, the guy will get a Nobel. That's 1.1 million dollars. If I was sure I had a winner for getting a million, I'd certainly be ready to invest into a vaccum chamber and build a prototype.
If we don't see this happen, then the drive doesn't work. End of story.
"I started getting a bunch of stock-tout spam in the last month or so. The other day, I happened to look and see it was coming in to an email address I had dedicated to my online trading account account. I've spoken to the online trading company, and I've given them the info on these spams. It turns out there is an 'ongoing investigation,'
Is the trading company called Ameritrade by any chance? They got a leak problem, maybe an insider job. Look at this thread on spamgourmet (an anti-spam site that I help with): http://bbs.spamgourmet.com/viewtopic.php?t=81&star t=60
Well, the same can be said of doctors, CEOs, Drug Companies, etc. etc. etc. The thing is that there's not as much of a self-interest for entities with very deep pockets to go on an image-assasination binge against those groups.
Bad mone-grubbing trial lawyers are actually worse, because of the way the US system works. Each trial lawyer that attempts to game the system has a non-zero probability of hitting pay dirt, and that's why they routinely file ridiculous claims. And sometimes they *do* hit pay dirt. For them, it's a way to keep themselves in whores and coke. But for society, it's another abuse of the system that is now a precedent, and thus yet another weakness point in the social system. And social system deficiencies are ALWAYS detrimental to the layman and the individual. The rich and powerful find ways around them.
So ridiculous perversions of the courts are actually insidiously ruining society, mostly making it worse for individuals. On another hand, bad practioners of other trades don't have such a chance to pervert the system, and that's why they are more easily dealt with.
A bad CEO or a bad doctor has but one chance to profit from you or kill you. But bad legal precedents are effectively forever.
The people who come out the strongest against 'trial lawyers' are the big corporations' PR departments.
Not just that. Today, for example, we heard that a woman is sueing a coffee shop chain for $114 millions after they refused a self-printed coupon for a free drink. She obviously found a trial lawyer to accept the job and file the ridiculous lawsuit for a ridiculous amount.
Today, thanks to that extortion attempt, trial lawyers have lost a little bit more of whatever goodwill they still had in the public's mind.
Good lawyers are great. Unfortunately, for each good fight you hear about, there are a dozen disgusting abuse of the judicial system that are turning US courts into a mockery.
Absolutely Darn Everybody (TM) is using electricity and paying for it. If a guy is not able to distinguish between power (watts) and consumed or produced power quantity (watts hours), he's probably going to be robbed blind by the utility companies, among others. What next? Rate car efficiency is miles? Or is that in gallons? Oh no, wait, it's that "per" thing. Yeah, that's it.
I've been a freelance writer. There is no excuse for ignorance when you are making a living reporting about simple stuff. None.
"Learn the basics of your subject before you hack your piece, or find another line of business" has always been a motto around newsrooms. Glad to see that modern media is doing away with these old, stupid traditions.
Wow, I didn't know that. I did know that burning coal releases considerable radioactivity, which makes nuclear power much safer than coal burning even if you factor in some accidental radiation leaks in nuclear power plants. See http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html.
Although burning less coal is a step in the right direction, the mercury vapor in fluorescent lights remains a concern. Do you know if the old fluorescent tubes removed from offices are recycled today?
I have been an early adopter of CFLs. I use them especially on multi-bulb fixtures. I used to leave one incandescence bulb in the fixture and replace the others with CFLs. That way, some light came on instantly when the switch was flipped while the CFLs were warming up. Nowadays, the warm up takes 1-2 seconds.
One major concern: CFLs are made with a drop of mercury vaporized in the tube's vaccuum. What happens when 110 millions households start throwing away burnt CFLs? Manufacturers like GE should have a dumpster at big stores where these bulbs can be trashed. Better than ending up with mercury poisoning, which isn't a pretty sight.
In other news, the International Geologist Union unanimously decided to use the word "quasar" to describe the sticky, gooey layer of dead animals found under large volcanic boulders falling around erupting volcanos. Geologists say it comes from an obscure South American swear word uttered mostly when you have to scrap this goo off excavation tools.
Also, the latest International Geology Summit announced that it would leverage its notoriety to market household items as a fund raising program. The first announced product is a new douchebag called "The Telescope" -- slogan: "Comfortable to your Black Hole!"
A ticked off International Astronomical Union spokeman said that the geologists were acting out of spite. To which the International Geology Summit replied, "Spite? You mean this basaltic sand formation that you find between Early Chewonitbitchian and Upper Youdumbasstic ?"
More likely, they are just tools for the FBI's PR branch. As in:
FBI IT boss: "We need a new IT budget for a project that will really work, this time, we swear."
FBI director: "Errr, that's risky. The previous two were embarrasing failures."
PR manager: "Let's revive last year's VCFS story and put a "lesson learned" positive spin on it!"
FBI director: "Positive spin??? On a $170 million piece of crud? Come on! Who would be stupid enough to print it?"
PR manager: "You obviously haven't opened the Washington Post recently..."
...cartoonist. No, seriously. Bill Amend of Foxtrot fame is a Physics major and is the only strip to have real, working equations and code.
No they don't. Not personally owning a television, I pay no TV licence fee :)
YOU GO, MAN! I don't watch TV either. Although I watched all the "Jeeves and Wooster" and the "Black Adder" episodes on DVD.
Perhaps, but the proper expression is "complex at a MICROSCOPIC scale" anyway. I am afraid you are too kind.
In your gmtm.org site, your writing sounds definitely British. In that case, you should be doubly offended by the BBC's bad writing, because they buy and publish these rubbish texts with your tax money! :-)
Last time I checked, "infinitesimal" meant "extremely small, negligeable", which is the exact opposite of the notion the writer has in mind (that is, that water is hard to animate).
And it went right through the BBC editors, who are apparenlty easily dazzled by latinate words,
Poor Beeb.
I suggest that the author of the article, Spencer Kelly, should be replaced by a random tech news generator.
I have a 3 hours/day commute (90 mins each way, sometimes it takes 2 hours to get there) and it's really eating into my productivity and my life. My advice: move to someplace closer, even if it's a smaller place, with your family.
Then again, consider that aerospace isn't the most stable kind of carrer today. Right up with microelectronics for cycles. Boeing has a huge bad rap for mistreating its engineers nowadays. Where are you moving to? Chicago?
If today, you are working on perfecting data sharing in clusters, you're not just doing an engineering job. You're giving the world faster parallel computing, and the applications are many and far-reaching. You're changing the world.
Academia is not the only outlet for bright people. Actually, I'd go further and say that many bright minds are wasted in unrewarding, uninspiring academic jobs.
Embrace the dark side, work in R&D instead of teachning.
The morale is: when you get hold of a bunch of stuffed, arrogant fools who have high self-esteem and low common sense, and push their nose into their own poo, they will not clean off the poo, they will splash it all over you.
Notice the similarity with your situation. Maybe it's because they read the NYT? :-)
Some people might argue that reporting networking vulnerabilities on Windows is like shooting fish in a barrel. But nevertheless, from what you wrote, you seem to have done the right thing. I'd strongly suggest that next time you find a flaw in that institution's network (was it your school?), you just post it anonymously on the Internet. Preferably on a high traffic site.
If people start doing that, maybe the notion that you shouldn't shoot the messenger will slowly sink into the thick skull of the IT departments in schools and academia.
Or maybe it will just give them an excuse to ask for more money and hire more control freaks. :-)
Not all closed-source owners are evil, though. Some companies are even reasonable. I remember an episode when a guy working at a NY university reported a HUGE flaw in an IBM mainframe product, and the IBM support people thanked that person -- before opening a severity 1, priority 1 problem!