This is not the case in Afghanistan. It is a very, very tribal mindset over there. For the most part people care about what is good for them and their tribe. There is little sense of national identity, little cohesion. To them, freedom means freedom to take your neighbour's shit and make your tribe richer/stronger. As such liberation is near impossible. They aren't willing to work for it.
In other words, if your tribe expands to what the rest of the world considers some sort of border with other tribes, then you have a "national identity".
It seems that the rest of the world just needs to shrink down Afghanistan's borders to surround mainly Dari speakers, and mainly Pashto speakers, and we'd have two cohesive nations.
... AND if that energy can be reasonably released. Gasoline, for example, contains about 45 MJ / kg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg) -- all you need is a 3 liter bottle of it on your desk. It'll be physically stable for a good long time. But you need a large, wasteful engine to release it.
Someone tell me I'm not the only one questioning that "magazine" title. Do they mention super-strong glues anywhere, or can no one get those html pages apart to read them?
I dunno. Try coming to the "Cowboy Breakfast"s in Los Alamos. I guarantee that if you strike up a conversation with a random stranger, he or she will have worked on some wacky stuff -- and might even be allowed to talk about it!
Bull. You're touting the Graeme Bird (look him up yourself, slashdotters) line (though he also thinks that light must travel instantaneously) line about "unstable gravitational orbits". It's bunk.
I work in one of the National Labs. Our particular group uses a smattering of Macs, but the vast majority (at least 99%, and every last percentage point there is justified) of data acquisition---in OUR group, of about 70 people---is done by PCs. My guess is that 95% run Win98, Win2k (neither allowed on the network), or WinXP (allowed on the network with heavy institutional patching), simply because strange acquisition cards and analyzer hardware is best supported under Windows (plus the QWERTY lock-in effect).
I try to use linux for all of my work, but a lot of our equipment doesn't play nice with it. I find it hard to do hardware support in one OS and then switch over to another for the software support.
One area where both linux and OSX are beating the pants off of Windows is in not being impeded by the institution's security policies (though OSX is going to get a much closer look in the coming year). We recently had a kerfluffle where people's Win PCs were being rebooted by the security system to apply MS patches. A lot of people follow the "early-warning" announcements, so they know not to do critical acquisition/analysis work on the days when it could happen, but emergency patching isn't unknown, and a lot of people's data got trashed, on some very difficult experiments, because they run Windows and didn't disconnect from the network.
Dude, refer to your high school chem books. Some crudes (especially from Mexico and S. America) are remarkably heavy, with densities equal to or greater than water. Dispersants can change that relative density. Yes, the API of this particular crude is generally higher than 10, but it's pretty easy to get it to sink (given enough chemicals).
MATLAB is often very much faster than SciPy/NumPy at the moment, but the latter programs are very much more capable (and, the vast majority of the time, free). My colleagues use MATLAB; I'm perfectly happy producing better results in Python.
Fullerenes are ridiculously common in soot. Besides, you don't think "manmade" means going in and arranging atoms one-by-one in arrangements that aren't stable, do you? If the atoms are in a stable arrangement, it's because it minimizes the free energy of the system, and I guarantee that nature has figured out a way to get there first.
OH, Jesus Fucking Christ. Not that old tripe again. Does no one attempt to research claims (even if they're ad hominems and have nothing to do with the argument) before making them?
I don't disagree. I work in a facility in which nuclear weapons and chemical/biological weapons research is done, but I am nowhere near it. The fact that all of the researchers have to go through nominal background investigations despite having nothing to do with the "behind-the-fence" stuff is pretty annoying. It makes life pretty difficult for everyone.
Since when is Secret a "low-level clearance"? Yes, different agencies have different classification schemes, but Secret is nearly as high as one can get. Even Restricted and Confidential (the only two levels for which *I* have undergone background checks) required check-ups with friends and family by an FBI agent before I was granted need-to-know at that level.
"Secret" level clearance requires a LOT of money (probably on the order of $50k - $150k) and at least several months (sometimes two years) worth of investigation time for a single background check.
In one of my high school English classes, we were tasked with delving into the real meaning of various poems. I chose Dodgson's Hunting of the Snark, since it had been one of my favorites for a while, and the ending, after all the build-up and so on, is brilliant.
After doing some rather extensive phil-awful-sizing into the "meaning" of Snark, I finally had to rely on a series of letters that Dodgson wrote to several acquaintances. In those letters he was explicitly asked "What is the meaning?". His reply: Fun. No hidden meaning. No euphemisms, comments on current events, politics, theatre. Just random fun.
Luckily, it's pretty well-known that Alice and Looking Glass and some of his other works are a bit deeper.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, if your tribe expands to what the rest of the world considers some sort of border with other tribes, then you have a "national identity".
It seems that the rest of the world just needs to shrink down Afghanistan's borders to surround mainly Dari speakers, and mainly Pashto speakers, and we'd have two cohesive nations.
Does not parse, does not parse. Bleeble-whoop.
... AND if that energy can be reasonably released. Gasoline, for example, contains about 45 MJ / kg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg) -- all you need is a 3 liter bottle of it on your desk. It'll be physically stable for a good long time. But you need a large, wasteful engine to release it.
Someone tell me I'm not the only one questioning that "magazine" title. Do they mention super-strong glues anywhere, or can no one get those html pages apart to read them?
Gentlemen, we have our next President.
I dunno. Try coming to the "Cowboy Breakfast"s in Los Alamos. I guarantee that if you strike up a conversation with a random stranger, he or she will have worked on some wacky stuff -- and might even be allowed to talk about it!
That would be an interesting question, if you didn't actually mean affect.
http://www.shoeboxblog.com/?p=17653
This stuff prevents heart muscle? Sweet!
Bull. You're touting the Graeme Bird (look him up yourself, slashdotters) line (though he also thinks that light must travel instantaneously) line about "unstable gravitational orbits". It's bunk.
I work in one of the National Labs. Our particular group uses a smattering of Macs, but the vast majority (at least 99%, and every last percentage point there is justified) of data acquisition---in OUR group, of about 70 people---is done by PCs. My guess is that 95% run Win98, Win2k (neither allowed on the network), or WinXP (allowed on the network with heavy institutional patching), simply because strange acquisition cards and analyzer hardware is best supported under Windows (plus the QWERTY lock-in effect).
I try to use linux for all of my work, but a lot of our equipment doesn't play nice with it. I find it hard to do hardware support in one OS and then switch over to another for the software support.
One area where both linux and OSX are beating the pants off of Windows is in not being impeded by the institution's security policies (though OSX is going to get a much closer look in the coming year). We recently had a kerfluffle where people's Win PCs were being rebooted by the security system to apply MS patches. A lot of people follow the "early-warning" announcements, so they know not to do critical acquisition/analysis work on the days when it could happen, but emergency patching isn't unknown, and a lot of people's data got trashed, on some very difficult experiments, because they run Windows and didn't disconnect from the network.
Ah. Rush Limbaugh. That would be the parsimonious explanation.
blast hot air out of the radio? That's one wicked hack!
That's what she said.
Yeah, the flame from a candle or match? Plasma.
Dude, refer to your high school chem books. Some crudes (especially from Mexico and S. America) are remarkably heavy, with densities equal to or greater than water. Dispersants can change that relative density. Yes, the API of this particular crude is generally higher than 10, but it's pretty easy to get it to sink (given enough chemicals).
MATLAB is often very much faster than SciPy/NumPy at the moment, but the latter programs are very much more capable (and, the vast majority of the time, free). My colleagues use MATLAB; I'm perfectly happy producing better results in Python.
Fullerenes are ridiculously common in soot. Besides, you don't think "manmade" means going in and arranging atoms one-by-one in arrangements that aren't stable, do you? If the atoms are in a stable arrangement, it's because it minimizes the free energy of the system, and I guarantee that nature has figured out a way to get there first.
OH, Jesus Fucking Christ. Not that old tripe again. Does no one attempt to research claims (even if they're ad hominems and have nothing to do with the argument) before making them?
I don't disagree. I work in a facility in which nuclear weapons and chemical/biological weapons research is done, but I am nowhere near it. The fact that all of the researchers have to go through nominal background investigations despite having nothing to do with the "behind-the-fence" stuff is pretty annoying. It makes life pretty difficult for everyone.
Since when is Secret a "low-level clearance"? Yes, different agencies have different classification schemes, but Secret is nearly as high as one can get. Even Restricted and Confidential (the only two levels for which *I* have undergone background checks) required check-ups with friends and family by an FBI agent before I was granted need-to-know at that level.
"Secret" level clearance requires a LOT of money (probably on the order of $50k - $150k) and at least several months (sometimes two years) worth of investigation time for a single background check.
I mean why is god more easily to swallow than infinite regress?
Hey, once one is on one's knees, god goes down *smoothly*.
'fuck'. Presumably the step function was a signum function, with the x-axis forming the smaller horizontal leg of the eff.
Yes but 99.9% of the world is not populated by mathematicians.
Maybe even twice that percentage!
In one of my high school English classes, we were tasked with delving into the real meaning of various poems. I chose Dodgson's Hunting of the Snark, since it had been one of my favorites for a while, and the ending, after all the build-up and so on, is brilliant.
After doing some rather extensive phil-awful-sizing into the "meaning" of Snark, I finally had to rely on a series of letters that Dodgson wrote to several acquaintances. In those letters he was explicitly asked "What is the meaning?". His reply: Fun. No hidden meaning. No euphemisms, comments on current events, politics, theatre. Just random fun.
Luckily, it's pretty well-known that Alice and Looking Glass and some of his other works are a bit deeper.