I disagree a bit.
WETA and Gollum was a direct result of skill, care, and craftmanship. These will always transcend the run-of-the-mill crowd working with the same technology.
You might as well say, Jack Nicholson got it right with acting...there is just no excuse for poor acting performances now.
Thanks, the original poster was very ambiguous though, suggesting that "200 mile square" was "easily doable today" which it certainly wouldn't be easy if he had meant 200x200.
I just assumed that it was the easier 200 sq miles, I'm a serious pedant for unit consistency.
Re:Interesting Statistic
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No, finding the size of area required to supply the US energy needs is a common text problem in almost any college astronomy or phsics course.
Here is a link to a calculation example. Assuming 10% efficiency, the area required to power the US would require an installation half the size of Colorado . This is vastly larger than 200 sq miles.
http://www.colorado.edu/GeolSci/courses/GEOL3520/T opic6/Topic6.html
My camera also, owned it for 20 years with heavy use and it has never let me down. I'll never need to buy another SLR. The only awkwardness I've had is in very cold temps (sub-freezing) when the battery can't pull its weight. A trick I discovered...since the batteries are small, you just store one down in your briefs. I get strange looks when I stuff my hands down my crotch and pull out a battery to stick in the camera, though. But those pics i got of the ice caverns were worth the embarrassment!
To pick an additional nit, a ballistic missile doesn't follow an elliptical path either, as it is under constant thrust during its boost phase. An idealized object in an idealized orbital path (i.e. in vacuum, earth of uniform density, and in a free fall under no external forces such as thrust or friction) would describe an ellipse intersecting the surface of the earth.
It's like the old physics joke, "First, assume a spherical cat in a perfect vacuum..."
...is from Frank Herbert (Chapterhouse: Dune)
"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that power is a magnet to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
I had a similar "college T-shirt" experience. My roommate was a huge fan of the movie Real Genius, and had a custom T-Shirt made reading "I *heart* Toxic Waste" as in the film.
In one of his classes, I witnessed him being verbally assaulted by a granola-breathed-sandal-slapper-chick (I'm not biased;-) ) who actually thought that his T-Shirt was serious and that he did indeed support the "Toxic Waste Lobby", whatever that is.
Later, he received a notice from his dorm advisor that, because of his public display of cultural insensitivity (wearing a T-Shirt), he would have to cease wearing the shirt or not be allowed to continue living in on campus housing. He went and had a "Nuke the Whales" T-Shirt made as a replacement.
This was at the University of Washington, a school that has a reputation for obsessive kowtowing to every fringe opinion in the name of "cultural sensitivity", no matter how absurd or ridiculous.
I used to live on a street that was suffixed to death. All within a couple of miles, there were "Ave", "Cir", "Ct", "Pl", "Plc", "Way" variants of the same street. At one stretch, the "Ct" went for half a block, turned 90 degrees and changed into "Pl", then went about 2 houses and turned 90 degrees changing into "Way". "Plc" also existed as a one block zig-zag parallel to "Pl" only 2 blocks away.
Mapquest, UPS, FedEx, Pizza dudes, no one was ever able to find my apt without having to resort to a desparate spiralling search pattern.
Seattleite here also...
I feel you have unwittingly made what I feel is the greatest argument to support the monorail. Simply, that Seattle is indeed hamstrung when it comes to mammoth projects. Given that Sound Transit is perpetually stuck in approval/budgeting/impact-study limbo, the only alternative is to seek alternatives! Common sense.
The monorail isn't a panacea, and it isn't intended to be at this early stage. It is simply a start in the right direction, which is far more than Sound Transit can offer.
Not exactly (Physics/Astronomy grad here, so I'm somewhat "qualified")...
You are confusing the Scwarzchild Radius with the physical properties of the black hole. The S.Radius refers to the gravitational threshold where gravity overcomes the ability of light to escape (i.e. escape velocity = 'c'). It has nothing to do with the physical radius or volume. Density is calculated from the physical radius of an object, not from the radius of its gravitational effects. Your statement would be akin to saying that the Earth's density is calculated from some arbitrary point beyond the radius of the earth that met an arbitrary gravitational value, which would of course be incorrect.
Granted, no one exactly knows what the structure beyond the S.Radius is exactly, but assuming that the black hole is a singularity, it would have infinite density by definition.
When I was doing astronomy in college, I had more than one professor tell me that the YER-inus pronunciation by the scientific community was actually a deliberate mispronunciation of the common yer-AY-nus. They said that the giggly way of pronouncing it was actually the correct way, but astronomers at some point just got fed up with the snickering and introduced the safe 'n sane pronunciation.
Rest assured that it will always be ok to say that there are Rings Around Your Anus. Besides, it's fun making stodgy scientists blush.
I played an online WW2 flight sim for many years called Warbirds. We have done similar tributes for online friends who have passed on. We have had a few "volcano dive" tributes where the masses of players would gather in a vast flying formation, circle the arena, and everyone dive their aircraft in tribute into the crater of a volcano located on one of the islands in the arena. It was a surprisingly moving and emotional gesture to participate in.
"Untrue. Sound travels slower because the air is colder, not thinner.."
No. First off (for qualification's sake), I have degrees in Physics and Astronomy and work professionally as an engineer.
You are misunderstanding the pressure/volume/temperature relationships of the gas laws (freshman physics material). One can express mach number in terms of a pressure dependency, a temperature dependency, or a density dependency. For an ideal gas, the parameters are interrelated. Go back and really read the equations on the web page you quoted.
It is equally as true to say mach is density dependent as it is to say it is temperature dependent for a given gas.
Very valuable:-)
Unearthed Arcana and the Monster Manual 2 fetch a tidy sum for pristine editions, well over $100. The _really_ old soft-cover editions of AD&D go for even higher. The old original "series" adventure modules (Slave Pits, Drow series, et al) also go for a high price.
The holy grail of them all is the Dieties & Demigods "Elric" edition that was never reprinted due to copyright disputes with Michael Moorcock's publisher. I remember the days when my friend and I would have Elric vs Thor duels...ahh those were the days...
That is a common complaint from us lovers of the Dune books until we take an honest objective look at how Duncan was portrayed in just the first book. With the hindsight of all six books, he is a key (perhaps THE key) character of the series. But if you confine your viewpoint to book one, he is really just a minor sideline character, window dressing for larger events, that Herbert didn't expand upon until Dune Messiah.
With that in mind, I think the insignificance of his role and lack of screen time in the TV series was perfectly appropriate.
I also recently visited China, spent two weeks there this October (traveled thru Beijing-Jinan-TaiAn-Suzhou-Shanghai).
Internet Cafe's were indeed everywhere in the medium-to-largish cities. What was especially interesting was that while all of the cafe's had to operate thru China's firewall, in a few of the Cafe's I went to they allowed me unrestricted access being a foreigner, I just had to show my passport and could then get to any website under the sun.
Also, China was (contrary to all of the propagandizing I've received in the States) far from repressive. It was a flourishing capitalist boom-town. In the last five years they have...
--De-communized the farms and land ownership, giving away land to work privately for profit
--Opened up free business ownership, American style, with a graduated income tax. Those that choose (that's right, it's a choice now) to work for the government are a flat 10 percent tax rate.
--Government industry/facility is still regulated though, government commercial plants however now compete directly with private corporations
--Government is subsidizing home mortgages, how "oppressive" does a 20-year at one percent sound to you?
--Have been passing radical sweeping environmental cleanup laws, this is not your 50's grey and dingy country anymore. Shanghai was far cleaner than LA or New York at twice the population!
--Single child policy is slowly being relaxed and will in a likelyhood be a thing of the past within 5-10 years due to the gentrification of the population
--Everywhere was optimism, optimism, optimism as well as a love for their new progressive administration from the people.
Slashdot Mirror
Those new-fangled talkies wouldn't be so popular if the sound hadn't been so good!
I disagree a bit. WETA and Gollum was a direct result of skill, care, and craftmanship. These will always transcend the run-of-the-mill crowd working with the same technology. You might as well say, Jack Nicholson got it right with acting...there is just no excuse for poor acting performances now.
Thanks, the original poster was very ambiguous though, suggesting that "200 mile square" was "easily doable today" which it certainly wouldn't be easy if he had meant 200x200. I just assumed that it was the easier 200 sq miles, I'm a serious pedant for unit consistency.
No, finding the size of area required to supply the US energy needs is a common text problem in almost any college astronomy or phsics course. Here is a link to a calculation example. Assuming 10% efficiency, the area required to power the US would require an installation half the size of Colorado . This is vastly larger than 200 sq miles. http://www.colorado.edu/GeolSci/courses/GEOL3520/T opic6/Topic6.html
My camera also, owned it for 20 years with heavy use and it has never let me down. I'll never need to buy another SLR. The only awkwardness I've had is in very cold temps (sub-freezing) when the battery can't pull its weight. A trick I discovered...since the batteries are small, you just store one down in your briefs. I get strange looks when I stuff my hands down my crotch and pull out a battery to stick in the camera, though. But those pics i got of the ice caverns were worth the embarrassment!
To pick an additional nit, a ballistic missile doesn't follow an elliptical path either, as it is under constant thrust during its boost phase. An idealized object in an idealized orbital path (i.e. in vacuum, earth of uniform density, and in a free fall under no external forces such as thrust or friction) would describe an ellipse intersecting the surface of the earth. It's like the old physics joke, "First, assume a spherical cat in a perfect vacuum..."
...is from Frank Herbert (Chapterhouse: Dune) "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that power is a magnet to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
I had a similar "college T-shirt" experience. My roommate was a huge fan of the movie Real Genius, and had a custom T-Shirt made reading "I *heart* Toxic Waste" as in the film. In one of his classes, I witnessed him being verbally assaulted by a granola-breathed-sandal-slapper-chick (I'm not biased ;-) ) who actually thought that his T-Shirt was serious and that he did indeed support the "Toxic Waste Lobby", whatever that is.
Later, he received a notice from his dorm advisor that, because of his public display of cultural insensitivity (wearing a T-Shirt), he would have to cease wearing the shirt or not be allowed to continue living in on campus housing. He went and had a "Nuke the Whales" T-Shirt made as a replacement.
This was at the University of Washington, a school that has a reputation for obsessive kowtowing to every fringe opinion in the name of "cultural sensitivity", no matter how absurd or ridiculous.
I used to live on a street that was suffixed to death. All within a couple of miles, there were "Ave", "Cir", "Ct", "Pl", "Plc", "Way" variants of the same street. At one stretch, the "Ct" went for half a block, turned 90 degrees and changed into "Pl", then went about 2 houses and turned 90 degrees changing into "Way". "Plc" also existed as a one block zig-zag parallel to "Pl" only 2 blocks away. Mapquest, UPS, FedEx, Pizza dudes, no one was ever able to find my apt without having to resort to a desparate spiralling search pattern.
Seattleite here also... I feel you have unwittingly made what I feel is the greatest argument to support the monorail. Simply, that Seattle is indeed hamstrung when it comes to mammoth projects. Given that Sound Transit is perpetually stuck in approval/budgeting/impact-study limbo, the only alternative is to seek alternatives! Common sense. The monorail isn't a panacea, and it isn't intended to be at this early stage. It is simply a start in the right direction, which is far more than Sound Transit can offer.
Not exactly (Physics/Astronomy grad here, so I'm somewhat "qualified")... You are confusing the Scwarzchild Radius with the physical properties of the black hole. The S.Radius refers to the gravitational threshold where gravity overcomes the ability of light to escape (i.e. escape velocity = 'c'). It has nothing to do with the physical radius or volume. Density is calculated from the physical radius of an object, not from the radius of its gravitational effects. Your statement would be akin to saying that the Earth's density is calculated from some arbitrary point beyond the radius of the earth that met an arbitrary gravitational value, which would of course be incorrect. Granted, no one exactly knows what the structure beyond the S.Radius is exactly, but assuming that the black hole is a singularity, it would have infinite density by definition.
When I was doing astronomy in college, I had more than one professor tell me that the YER-inus pronunciation by the scientific community was actually a deliberate mispronunciation of the common yer-AY-nus. They said that the giggly way of pronouncing it was actually the correct way, but astronomers at some point just got fed up with the snickering and introduced the safe 'n sane pronunciation. Rest assured that it will always be ok to say that there are Rings Around Your Anus. Besides, it's fun making stodgy scientists blush.
I played an online WW2 flight sim for many years called Warbirds. We have done similar tributes for online friends who have passed on. We have had a few "volcano dive" tributes where the masses of players would gather in a vast flying formation, circle the arena, and everyone dive their aircraft in tribute into the crater of a volcano located on one of the islands in the arena. It was a surprisingly moving and emotional gesture to participate in.
"Untrue. Sound travels slower because the air is colder, not thinner.." No. First off (for qualification's sake), I have degrees in Physics and Astronomy and work professionally as an engineer. You are misunderstanding the pressure/volume/temperature relationships of the gas laws (freshman physics material). One can express mach number in terms of a pressure dependency, a temperature dependency, or a density dependency. For an ideal gas, the parameters are interrelated. Go back and really read the equations on the web page you quoted. It is equally as true to say mach is density dependent as it is to say it is temperature dependent for a given gas.
Janice Ian is, without hyperbole, a Patrick Henry for our times.
Very valuable :-)
Unearthed Arcana and the Monster Manual 2 fetch a tidy sum for pristine editions, well over $100. The _really_ old soft-cover editions of AD&D go for even higher. The old original "series" adventure modules (Slave Pits, Drow series, et al) also go for a high price.
The holy grail of them all is the Dieties & Demigods "Elric" edition that was never reprinted due to copyright disputes with Michael Moorcock's publisher. I remember the days when my friend and I would have Elric vs Thor duels...ahh those were the days...
That is a common complaint from us lovers of the Dune books until we take an honest objective look at how Duncan was portrayed in just the first book. With the hindsight of all six books, he is a key (perhaps THE key) character of the series. But if you confine your viewpoint to book one, he is really just a minor sideline character, window dressing for larger events, that Herbert didn't expand upon until Dune Messiah. With that in mind, I think the insignificance of his role and lack of screen time in the TV series was perfectly appropriate.
I also recently visited China, spent two weeks there this October (traveled thru Beijing-Jinan-TaiAn-Suzhou-Shanghai).
Internet Cafe's were indeed everywhere in the medium-to-largish cities. What was especially interesting was that while all of the cafe's had to operate thru China's firewall, in a few of the Cafe's I went to they allowed me unrestricted access being a foreigner, I just had to show my passport and could then get to any website under the sun.
Also, China was (contrary to all of the propagandizing I've received in the States) far from repressive. It was a flourishing capitalist boom-town. In the last five years they have...
--De-communized the farms and land ownership, giving away land to work privately for profit
--Opened up free business ownership, American style, with a graduated income tax. Those that choose (that's right, it's a choice now) to work for the government are a flat 10 percent tax rate.
--Government industry/facility is still regulated though, government commercial plants however now compete directly with private corporations
--Government is subsidizing home mortgages, how "oppressive" does a 20-year at one percent sound to you?
--Have been passing radical sweeping environmental cleanup laws, this is not your 50's grey and dingy country anymore. Shanghai was far cleaner than LA or New York at twice the population!
--Single child policy is slowly being relaxed and will in a likelyhood be a thing of the past within 5-10 years due to the gentrification of the population
--Everywhere was optimism, optimism, optimism as well as a love for their new progressive administration from the people.
"Gargoyle"