While Cleopatra of Egypt and Helen of Troy were very beautiful women, you may find it difficult or deadly to pursue even an introduction. Intervention in deadly situations may cause you to be just as dead as the famous target.
In Illium, the time traveler who goes to bed with Helen (under the apparency of Paris) is surprised to learn that she figured it out from the very first seconds and just went with it for kicks.
The very best time-travel book is The Man Who Folded Himself, where many of the paradoxes and consequences of time-travel discussed here are addressed.
To give you an example, a small glacier was recently discovered where I live (in the Alps). It took a small landslide to expose the layer of ice under what everybody thought to be just a rock field. And there are still debates on whether the boulderfield under Long's Peak summit (Colorado) is a glacier or not. Some glaciers are so covered with rocks as to make the ice impossible to reach. And let's not even get into the glacier vs neve debate (a glacier flows, a neve doesn't). And, like I stated in my original post, add 10cm on fresh snow on top and it becomes even harder.
I wonder, do you have anybody at hand there who is quite into survival gear and would find it entertaining to contemplate what would be needed for a human to survive in such environment?:)
Well, (raises hand), I have an idea... I'm into mountain climbing as well, so I can combine polar experience, mountain experience and hackery. The longest walk I took at -75C was about 4 hours long (the details are somewhere on my site) . As long as you have a warm place to go back to, you are fine, but for instance we couldn't even drink at those temps, so we came back parched. At -100C a helmet with adequate ventilation to avoid icing would be a good idea. As for clothing and footwear, I don't think heating would be necessary, down suits are quite adequate at -80C and with an extra layer they could go farther down (as long as you don't have to sleep in them). BTW, where do I sign up for Titan ?!?
-78 C? I don't think I'd trust anything with moving parts in those conditions. Materials don't behave the way you expect in extreme cold: steel cables become brittle, lubricants freeze and shatter, thermal contraction messes with tolerances, and everything gets coated with ice.
Correct. We stopped using snowmachines below -55C. And the only mechanical thing we kept using outdoors was the (Caterpilar) loader for the snow melter (to produce water). Even the soles of our special shoes would turn hard as rock below that. Sorry about the bad link in the previous post.
What I find even more impressive is how NASA, ESA and others manages space probes I think, that's really extreme conditions in every way.
Antarctica can be meaner in several ways:
- you don't have a direct line of communication with the rest of the world (space probes do). Hell, you can't even have a direct comm with geosync satellites.
- water ! Take thin crystals of ice, add lots of wind and you end up with water deep inside even sealed boxes; hence shorts and very quick rusting of components.
- temperature changes. In space you surround your satellite with some heat conductive sheets and the temp basically never changes (unless you go into the earth shadow). In antarctica you can have -80C in winter, -10 in summer. To say nothing that the cold has unforeseen effects on materials (dielectric changes, materials becoming brittle...)
- unstable power: the power comes from big diesel generators and is shared between experiments, people, etc... It goes out, the temp of the room where your computer is falls to -60 in 15 minutes. Power comes back, computer tries to boot. Bye, bye hard drive.
- budget: experiments for Antarctica have much less than 1/10 the budget of equivalent space experiments. And most of it is eaten by logistics. So you end up with standard computers and a few hack and a guy standing nearby (me) to kick it if necessary.
I'll give this guy the Uber geek crown if he adds a 200 foot vertical climb to his trip to the "datacenter"
Well, let's see if I can take that crown: I managed a bunch of experiments (and their associated computers and comm systems) at Dome C in 2005. It's higher than South Pole. And colder to boots (we had -78C). And some instruments were atop a 100ft tower (now raised to 200ft) were it was windy as hell in addition to being as cold as stated. In winter it was physically next to impossible to climb: hard-packed snow covered the scale (you had to clean every step), your breath would freeze your clothing solid around your head, your glasses would fog in a few seconds turning you blind, and if you exposed a blip of skin it would feel like a knife went through it immediately. Gosh, I miss that place: the view was fantastic.
It happened ONCE. BECAUSE I had to follow a long line going below an already slow speed limit on a perfectly straight road in the middle of the desert where you aren't even allowed to pass. And by the way: FUCK YOU and your high horse.
Your comment is an excellent example of why robot cars will be a damned good thing
Yes.
you're a really, really shitty driver and shouldn't be behind the wheel.
That is uncalled. I never caused an accident in 20 years of driving (although I've been hit several times while stopped). The incident I mention didn't result in anything more than a tow bill to get back on the road.
Except that if everybody scrupulously follows the rules, and the rules themselves can then be modeled based on the expectation of perfect behavior - then deadlocks can't happen in the first place.
Hah! You are telling that to a guy who just gave up after 3 months debugging deadlocks in a multithreaded app...
I spent several month searching for something like this. Open-source voice recognition is in really infant stages, and there does not seem to be much interested in improving the few things we have.
Funny, I had the exact same thought 25 years ago when playing with speech recognition software on the Apple ][... I don't know if things have improved much since, as I use 3 languages daily, there's just no software that can handle my accents and language changes.
The cars will be scrupulous about obeying traffic laws and speed limits. But even with a small part self-driving cars, they will act as pace cars and slow and smooth traffic for everyone. Even more so, as they'll be recording everything happening around them, and other drivers know it. Pace will be slower, but people will arrive sooner.
I agree with everything else you wrote but the above. Some experiments have shown that a few outliers (read, poor drivers: too fast or disregard of others) can actually better the flow of traffic. One example: you have an intersection in complete deadlock; the asshole who drives on the sidewalk to escape can actually free a spot that will end the deadlock. If everybody follows the rules in this case, nobody comes out. There are other cases.
The other point is that driving slower doesn't necessarily always make it safer: I've fallen asleep and gone off the road while following a long unpassable line of 'just a notch under the speed limit' cars. Driving off the road doesn't meet the definition of 'arriving sooner' but I eagerly wait the day when I don't have to waste concentration at the tedious and dangerous task of driving.
...in this age of terrorism and child pornography...
I always quote the law passed by a roman emperor (Augustus?) that banned prostitution of children less than 3 years old. It was considered an improvement. Now again, what 'age' were you thinking about ?!?
If you pick an anti glare film up and try to look through it, you will notice that it is hazy. This means that applying an AG/AR will lose you some Distinctness Of Image
Thanks, but for this I already have the stupid anti-aliased fonts of Linux that are so blurry they make my eyes water. The one thing I miss from Windows are the sharp fonts.
Talking as a mountain climber, and trying to put the discussion back on topic (I see 141 comments, mostly trolling and inevitable answers), I'll just say that comparing pictures for snow covers is misleading, even when taken at the same time of the year. A few inches of snow can be enough to make it appear as if you have lots more. Only depth samples and yearly layer comparisons can give you hindsight. Even comparing the length of a given glacier over time can be misleading: if it rains a lot, it will lubricate the bottom interface between ice and rock and the ice will flow faster, hence a longer glacier (for a while).
In Italy a couple decades ago there were many restaurants that had a seating fee, a silverware-use fee and a bread fee. They could amount for the same as a pizza. Those fees are mostly gone now but I think they are still legal.
Solution, start weighing every passenger and charge them by weight.
Except that my excess weight goes into the trunk of the plane, while the excess weight of my seat neighbors overspills into my seat in the form of a couple rolls of lard.
Slashdot's moderation system works because it has a huge army of visitors that can be tapped for mod duties. Most newspaper websites have nowhere near enough visitors to do this.
Maybe a simple solution like: "Thank you for your post, but before your message is posted you must first meta-mod the following 2 messages".
One of the most accurate, and depressing, summaries of the reality behind science reporting that I've ever seen.
I work in science labs, and the above is why half of scientists absolutely refuse to talk to journalists while the other half punches them on sight. The only time I did talk with them, I ended up on prime-time falling on my ass (slipping on ice, yup, that's the segment they kept).
Estimates place the ratio of explored caves at some 5% of total caves.
I recently moved to a place renowned for its caving (the Vercors, which held the deepest known cave for many years, the Gouffre Berger). On the cliff along the Furon road, in some places there's indeed about a cave entrance every 10 meters !
When you ask a russian his opinion on some leader (either russian or otherwise), whenever he wants to praise that leader, he'll always add 'he's a strong leader'. It seems that russians only recognize leadership when it is associated with strength, so do not be surprised that they go from dictatorship to dictatorship. It's mostly self-inflicted.
Slashdot Mirror
While Cleopatra of Egypt and Helen of Troy were very beautiful women, you may find it difficult or deadly to pursue even an introduction. Intervention in deadly situations may cause you to be just as dead as the famous target.
In Illium, the time traveler who goes to bed with Helen (under the apparency of Paris) is surprised to learn that she figured it out from the very first seconds and just went with it for kicks.
The very best time-travel book is The Man Who Folded Himself, where many of the paradoxes and consequences of time-travel discussed here are addressed.
'Dead simple', huh !?! Are you an economist or an administrative policy writer by any chance ?
To give you an example, a small glacier was recently discovered where I live (in the Alps). It took a small landslide to expose the layer of ice under what everybody thought to be just a rock field. And there are still debates on whether the boulderfield under Long's Peak summit (Colorado) is a glacier or not. Some glaciers are so covered with rocks as to make the ice impossible to reach. And let's not even get into the glacier vs neve debate (a glacier flows, a neve doesn't). And, like I stated in my original post, add 10cm on fresh snow on top and it becomes even harder.
Think about it. You like to have sex, but would you like to make a job of it ?!?
I wonder, do you have anybody at hand there who is quite into survival gear and would find it entertaining to contemplate what would be needed for a human to survive in such environment? :)
Well, (raises hand), I have an idea... I'm into mountain climbing as well, so I can combine polar experience, mountain experience and hackery. The longest walk I took at -75C was about 4 hours long (the details are somewhere on my site) . As long as you have a warm place to go back to, you are fine, but for instance we couldn't even drink at those temps, so we came back parched. At -100C a helmet with adequate ventilation to avoid icing would be a good idea. As for clothing and footwear, I don't think heating would be necessary, down suits are quite adequate at -80C and with an extra layer they could go farther down (as long as you don't have to sleep in them). BTW, where do I sign up for Titan ?!?
-78 C? I don't think I'd trust anything with moving parts in those conditions. Materials don't behave the way you expect in extreme cold: steel cables become brittle, lubricants freeze and shatter, thermal contraction messes with tolerances, and everything gets coated with ice.
Correct. We stopped using snowmachines below -55C. And the only mechanical thing we kept using outdoors was the (Caterpilar) loader for the snow melter (to produce water). Even the soles of our special shoes would turn hard as rock below that. Sorry about the bad link in the previous post.
What I find even more impressive is how NASA, ESA and others manages space probes I think, that's really extreme conditions in every way.
Antarctica can be meaner in several ways: - you don't have a direct line of communication with the rest of the world (space probes do). Hell, you can't even have a direct comm with geosync satellites. - water ! Take thin crystals of ice, add lots of wind and you end up with water deep inside even sealed boxes; hence shorts and very quick rusting of components. - temperature changes. In space you surround your satellite with some heat conductive sheets and the temp basically never changes (unless you go into the earth shadow). In antarctica you can have -80C in winter, -10 in summer. To say nothing that the cold has unforeseen effects on materials (dielectric changes, materials becoming brittle...) - unstable power: the power comes from big diesel generators and is shared between experiments, people, etc... It goes out, the temp of the room where your computer is falls to -60 in 15 minutes. Power comes back, computer tries to boot. Bye, bye hard drive. - budget: experiments for Antarctica have much less than 1/10 the budget of equivalent space experiments. And most of it is eaten by logistics. So you end up with standard computers and a few hack and a guy standing nearby (me) to kick it if necessary.
I'll give this guy the Uber geek crown if he adds a 200 foot vertical climb to his trip to the "datacenter"
Well, let's see if I can take that crown: I managed a bunch of experiments (and their associated computers and comm systems) at Dome C in 2005. It's higher than South Pole. And colder to boots (we had -78C). And some instruments were atop a 100ft tower (now raised to 200ft) were it was windy as hell in addition to being as cold as stated. In winter it was physically next to impossible to climb: hard-packed snow covered the scale (you had to clean every step), your breath would freeze your clothing solid around your head, your glasses would fog in a few seconds turning you blind, and if you exposed a blip of skin it would feel like a knife went through it immediately. Gosh, I miss that place: the view was fantastic.
It happened ONCE. BECAUSE I had to follow a long line going below an already slow speed limit on a perfectly straight road in the middle of the desert where you aren't even allowed to pass. And by the way: FUCK YOU and your high horse.
Your comment is an excellent example of why robot cars will be a damned good thing
Yes.
you're a really, really shitty driver and shouldn't be behind the wheel.
That is uncalled. I never caused an accident in 20 years of driving (although I've been hit several times while stopped). The incident I mention didn't result in anything more than a tow bill to get back on the road.
Thirty seconds after California legalized pot (from Craption)
I do when I'm on it, but can _you_ tell the difference at a distance or even looking at a picture ? Certainly not.
Except that if everybody scrupulously follows the rules, and the rules themselves can then be modeled based on the expectation of perfect behavior - then deadlocks can't happen in the first place.
Hah! You are telling that to a guy who just gave up after 3 months debugging deadlocks in a multithreaded app...
I spent several month searching for something like this. Open-source voice recognition is in really infant stages, and there does not seem to be much interested in improving the few things we have.
Funny, I had the exact same thought 25 years ago when playing with speech recognition software on the Apple ][... I don't know if things have improved much since, as I use 3 languages daily, there's just no software that can handle my accents and language changes.
The cars will be scrupulous about obeying traffic laws and speed limits. But even with a small part self-driving cars, they will act as pace cars and slow and smooth traffic for everyone. Even more so, as they'll be recording everything happening around them, and other drivers know it. Pace will be slower, but people will arrive sooner.
I agree with everything else you wrote but the above. Some experiments have shown that a few outliers (read, poor drivers: too fast or disregard of others) can actually better the flow of traffic. One example: you have an intersection in complete deadlock; the asshole who drives on the sidewalk to escape can actually free a spot that will end the deadlock. If everybody follows the rules in this case, nobody comes out. There are other cases.
The other point is that driving slower doesn't necessarily always make it safer: I've fallen asleep and gone off the road while following a long unpassable line of 'just a notch under the speed limit' cars. Driving off the road doesn't meet the definition of 'arriving sooner' but I eagerly wait the day when I don't have to waste concentration at the tedious and dangerous task of driving.
...in this age of terrorism and child pornography...
I always quote the law passed by a roman emperor (Augustus?) that banned prostitution of children less than 3 years old. It was considered an improvement. Now again, what 'age' were you thinking about ?!?
If you pick an anti glare film up and try to look through it, you will notice that it is hazy. This means that applying an AG/AR will lose you some Distinctness Of Image
Thanks, but for this I already have the stupid anti-aliased fonts of Linux that are so blurry they make my eyes water. The one thing I miss from Windows are the sharp fonts.
Talking as a mountain climber, and trying to put the discussion back on topic (I see 141 comments, mostly trolling and inevitable answers), I'll just say that comparing pictures for snow covers is misleading, even when taken at the same time of the year. A few inches of snow can be enough to make it appear as if you have lots more. Only depth samples and yearly layer comparisons can give you hindsight. Even comparing the length of a given glacier over time can be misleading: if it rains a lot, it will lubricate the bottom interface between ice and rock and the ice will flow faster, hence a longer glacier (for a while).
Can you imagine if McDonalds did this shit?
In Italy a couple decades ago there were many restaurants that had a seating fee, a silverware-use fee and a bread fee. They could amount for the same as a pizza. Those fees are mostly gone now but I think they are still legal.
Solution, start weighing every passenger and charge them by weight.
Except that my excess weight goes into the trunk of the plane, while the excess weight of my seat neighbors overspills into my seat in the form of a couple rolls of lard.
Slashdot's moderation system works because it has a huge army of visitors that can be tapped for mod duties. Most newspaper websites have nowhere near enough visitors to do this.
Maybe a simple solution like: "Thank you for your post, but before your message is posted you must first meta-mod the following 2 messages".
That's why again, the meta-mod system on /. is a great equilibrator...
Was. It was a great equilibrator. Nobody understands how the new 'web 2.0' meta-mod system works anymore.
One of the most accurate, and depressing, summaries of the reality behind science reporting that I've ever seen.
I work in science labs, and the above is why half of scientists absolutely refuse to talk to journalists while the other half punches them on sight. The only time I did talk with them, I ended up on prime-time falling on my ass (slipping on ice, yup, that's the segment they kept).
Estimates place the ratio of explored caves at some 5% of total caves.
I recently moved to a place renowned for its caving (the Vercors, which held the deepest known cave for many years, the Gouffre Berger). On the cliff along the Furon road, in some places there's indeed about a cave entrance every 10 meters !
When you ask a russian his opinion on some leader (either russian or otherwise), whenever he wants to praise that leader, he'll always add 'he's a strong leader'. It seems that russians only recognize leadership when it is associated with strength, so do not be surprised that they go from dictatorship to dictatorship. It's mostly self-inflicted.