Sure it moves without atmosphere, in fact it would move a lot faster. It would drop to the ground as fast as a ten pound lead weight, so there would be no lingering dust cloud to see.
This is the second time I've seen this crap posted in this thread. The last time it was modded up +5 funny (gag) at least the second time it's getting modded like it deserved.
Not to belabor this discussion but you are wrong about how weather and meteorology works. Historical records are pretty much useless for day to day weather prediction and provide ambiguous data at best about the future.
You are clearly misreading what i said, because that's mostly what i claimed, although you're wrong about the long term predictions. If we had models that could predict the effects of atmospheric composition to the same detail that you are claiming that we would need to model meteor activity within the solar system then there wouldn't be any controversy about global warming, we could just let the model run and we'd know the answer. You're claiming that such an accurate model is impossible, and i'm agreeing, and claiming that that's not what is used to calculate meteorite frequencies.
One of the primary reasons there is controversay over global warming is because of the human input into the equation. According to the statistics bassed off of historical records we're heading into an ice age if anything, however we have no long term historical records of a society pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which would allow us to accuratly predict the effects. We do however have long term historical records of meteor impacts, and no one has any rason to suspect that the human race is currently doing anything to change the rate of impacts, so those records remain statistically valid.
And yes, models do play a big role in short term forcasting, you're basically supporting my point. Models are for short term forcasts, historic records are used for long term forcasts. No one runs a model to predict that it will get colder in the winter, we know that from milenia of historical records. We can even tell on average how cold it will probably get. We may be wrong for this winter or the next, but averaged over the next ten years we'll be pretty close. We can't predict if a meteor will hit somewhere tomorrow, but we can predict with fair accuracy how many meteors will hit in the coming year, and with even more accuracy how many will hit in the next decade, etc.
If insurance companies use models, it is only in very limited circumstances. For the most part they use known rates of accident occurance statistically calculated from historic records. They know that about x% of houses will burn down because about x% did last year. That number changes slightly from year to year as technology and conditions changes, but they continuously update their statistics to stay current. They don't really make assumptions about anything, they just go by statistics. They don't expect everyone to go nuts and start lighting houses on fire because statistically only a small number of people do that every year. Sure, there's a small probability that everyone in the world will go nuts next year and every building on the planet will go up in flames, probably about the same probability that a giant meteor storm like you were talking about will hit us.
NASA _has_ calculated the probability of certain asteroids hitting us, hence the big fuss a month or two ago when they found one that was slightly more likely than a "random" asteroid to hit us. How do they know how likely a "random" asteroid is to hit us? Statistics.
Um, again, depends on your definition of mutation. An initial mutation is rare, but if the genome as a whole survives, it propogates. Hemophelia was a mutation at one point, a potentially fatal one, but for something that kills people it seems to be doing fairly well. Same with child onset diabetes, probably most allergies, and just about every gene varation that makes someone prone to a particular kind of cancer.
Now if you want to limit it to "mutations that happened in my body in my lifetime" then sure, they're incredibly rare.
As someone else pointed out earlier, "Direct to Video" titles are becoming more and more common.
Although most DtV titles are on the cheaper end of the movie scale, i think on average they still cost more to produce than the average CD, yet they sell for less.
Depends on what you mean by mutation. The space radiation hitting a gene and making a change is pretty rare true. However if the change isn't fatal, it stays around in the gene pool getting passed down to new generations. The whole purpose of sexual reproduction is to collect all these mutations and shuffle them around. The idea isn't that our DNA somehow knows what is coming up next so that it can prepare, but that if it's collected enough mutations in the past and kept them around then some combination of those mutations may just happen to provide protection.
A more blatant example is why most scientists expect that diseases from another planet couldn't hurt us if we ever encountered any. It's not that our DNA was somehow expecting an attack by aliens, it's just that by the virture of having evolved completly seperatly the diseases have no idea what do with us.
The problem with earth diseases is that they've grown up with us of course, so once we've shuffled our mutations around and discovered a way to block the disease, the disease shuffles it's mutations around till it finds a way to get around the defense, or goes extinct trying. Wash, rinse, repeat.
First the weather, sure they can't predict the weather perfectly, which is why you'll notice that they often provide a probability. They're not perfect, but they're right more often than they're wrong, and they know the have a certain margin of error. Although you may not remember it the times when it was indeed 75-80 degrees and partly cloudy far outnumber the times when there was a freak snowstorm instead.
Secondly, a lot of probabilities are not calculated by exhaustive modeling of the situation, they're calculated by examining past examples. If they're going to make a long term prediction about the weather, say the number of days it will rain in the next year or the average temperature over that time, they don't pull out a weather model and run it ahead 12 months. They pull out the records for the past few decades, check those, and figure out an average. Sure, the sun can could go nova due to some astronomical phenomena that we don't understand yet and their prediction will be off by a few million degrees, but the _probability_ is that next year will be mostly the same as the previous years once all known factors are taken into account (El Nino and such)
Predicting the chances of getting hit by a meteor is the same thing. They've got fairly detailed records going back decades, and more general records going back centuries. Using those we can make fairly accurate predictions about what the number of meteors expected next year.
True, an unexpected group of meteors could show up out of nowhere and kill hundreds of people, but there have been no records of anything like that happening in the last thousand years to the best of my knowledge, so the odds of it happening next year without anything else to indicate it's likelyhood is less than one in one thousand.
If we had the kind of exact model you're talking about it would be a certainty, not a probability. The probability is used because it's what we expect based on past events, and most of the time it's right. When insurance companies calculate the odds of carious acidents and disasters do you think they have some giant country or world wide really detailed version of the Sims running? (If so, why don't they warn the people who are going to have their house burn down ahead of time!) They don't do any kind of physics modeling at all, they just look at historical records, and calculate the odds, and they're usually pretty close, it's how they stay in buisness.
But aren't you then assuming that there is a "magic size" at which the meteor will neither burn up completely nor cause massive impact damage?
Nope, not making that assumption at all. I'm assuming that there is a wide range of meteor sizes and speeds, both before and after entering the atmosphere. Terminal velocity for a rock that size is probably somewhere on the order of 10 - 50 mph, enough to hurt if it hit you, but probably not enough to do any serious damage (given it's small size)
Terminal velocity for a meteor large enough to make a crater is much higher. And because of it's larger mass it may also have not had time to bleed off enough energy to slow down to terminal velocity by the time it hits. Larger object with higher speed equals more damage. Smaller rock has lower speed, not much damage. Even smaller rock burns up completly and the dust gently floats to the ground and no one even notices.
Looking at the meteorites in scientific collections there seem to be quite a large number of them that are in that size range, large enough to survive entry, but not large enough to cause any real damamge.
Or how bout, makes medium big ball of fire (when it was higher up in the atmosphere) and then lands on a girls foot? You're getting kinda caught up in that whole either/or thing. There's no magic size where below it a meteor completly disintigrates and above it it causes a giant crater:)
I'm just pointing out that past performance in meteors is no guarantee of future results. So:
How many meteors hit the earth over a given period?
is exactly what I'm disputing. Given recent stories like this one [slashdot.org], we clearly can't make many predictions about the chances of a huge influx of small meteors
This is why it's called probability, not history. Who knows, maybe in the next lottery everyone who buys at least one ticket will get a winning number, and then they'd all get killed by a freak meteor storm. However the odds of either one of those things happening, together or seperatly, is pretty darn low.
Actually, we _can_ make a lot of predictions about huge influxes of small meteors, we have at least two such events a year that i know of, and they're well documented. All the stealth asteroids that have been speeding by weren't noticed before because we didn't see them and they didn't hit. Meteor showers tend to have this kind of obvious effect however that happens everytime they pass by, becuase some (relatively) small number of them always hit.
And of course we've got astronomy observations going back for centuries to give us a pretty good idea of what the odds are of a new (and particularly large, if a significant number of people are going to get hit by the remains) meteor shower showing up out of the blue, and they're not very big.
No, that's not the term that's being looked for, or at least not exactly. From the article itself:
"Most obviously, how do you design a pusher plate that won't shake itself apart or ablate under repeated impacts of nuclear plasma? (answer: with a thin coat of oil, reapplied between each atomic pulse.)"
So the ship itself isn't really undergoing any ablation. I'm not sure if the term could be properly applied to a continuously resupplied coat of oil.
So if by the time it hits the mass market the 40 GB disk costs $1 to manufacture, and the 50 GB disk costs $2 to manufacture, exactly how much difference can we expect to see in the $15 - $20 price of the final product that gets sold in stores?
Then again, given that they'll be packing whole seasons of a show onto one disk, they may be charging about $50 - $150 for it.
How much cheaper is the 40 GB version supposed to be that the end consumer will see any difference?
Every contract i've ever signed with a company has a clause like that. However in California there are state laws that state that regardless of any contract you sign, any ideas that you come up with in your own time (not at work and not using company resources) remain your own.
They even seem to be legally required to state that such is the case, or at least every contract i've signed has a footnote after the clause describing the state law.
Um, smartypants, the soda and the ice aren't at the same temperature to start with. Have you ever had soda at "zero degrees celsius"? I sure haven't.
You haven't? You mean you've never had pop with ice in it? Way to demonstrate your ignorance there.
Shortly after you put the ice in the pop the pop _does_ hit zero degrees celsius, or very close to it. The reason it doesn't feel quite as cold as the ice is because of the phase transition. It actually takes quite a bit of energy to convert ice at zero degrees celsius to water at zero degrees celsius. This amount of energy is actually more than the amount needed to heat water from zero degrees to one degree. This is exactly the reason why ice is good at keeping stuff cold.
The pop in the cup bumps into the ice, and "donates" any extra energy it has towards melting the ice, which keeps the liquid pop from rising above zero degrees.
Actually, they _do_ have ice samples from the last ice age, and they provide a lot of information about the climate at the time.
Really, look at your own arguments, yous ay we know nothing about the climate 30,000 years ago. If that's the case, how do we know there was an Ice Age then? If geological data isn't giving us very good data, then how do we know that Antartica was near the equator a few hundred million years ago?
They've got estimates of temperatures from ice core samples going back to the last ice age. The fossils and geologic samples from Antartica might not tell scientists much about conditions at the pole that long ago but it tells them a _lot_ about what conditions were like near the equator. If they want to to know about polar conditions they look at geologic data from other continents.
Did you know that the smog in London used to kill people? Not just get cancer thirty years down the road die, but right there that day not being able to breathe die? England didn't decide to get rid of all the factories, yet they don't have that problem today. Humans affect the enviroment, but if those changes are harmfull they can mitigate or eliminate those changes without giving up technology, but you have to admit to the problem first and look into what causes it and how to fix it.
That having been said, this article certainly wasn't alarmist. They said that they observed those effects unfor those conditions, and really have no idea at all how it might afect larger scale issues in the weather or climate.
As for "tribal segments" the real crap is believing that they are somehow specially adapted to their enviroment and cause no harm. The middle east used to have trees and vegetation, before ancient tribes chopped down all the trees for firewood and their goats ate all the grass. It's strongly suspected that a lot of the extinctions of big mammals about 10,000 years ago are due to the spread of ancient humans around the globe.
The only difference between "tribal" people and technologically advanced people is the rate at which we can make those changes to the enviroment.
Geting to a store in suburbia is not a problem. However I live about 35 miles from work. This is because the property/apartments near work are really damn expensive. The gas to drive to work and back is far less than the money i save by living where i do.
Now if life were to change such that cars were no longer economical or possible for some reason, i would look into moving or changing jobs. However for the sake of a one month experiment, no way.
And while i've heard that it's different in some other countries, in America at least without gasoline everyone who lives in a city or major suburbs would have to move. With out current infrastructure we don't have the means to deliver the food we produce to the people who eat it without petroleum products. Most people in cities or suburbs may be within walking distance of a supermarket, but it doesn't do much good if the supermarket doesn't have any food.
Sure we could fix all those issues, between alternate fuel supplys and alternate methods of transporation, but it's a bit too entrenched to be refered to as just a lifestyle. Whether or not i can go down to the mall and buy a cd or some new clothes is a lifestyle, the method by which the food necessary to my life is delievered isn't so much.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it moves without atmosphere, in fact it would move a lot faster. It would drop to the ground as fast as a ten pound lead weight, so there would be no lingering dust cloud to see.
They did, they said the US would be held responsible for all US corporations. (Or close enough for government work =)
You clearly have not spent much time in the American desert.
This is the second time I've seen this crap posted in this thread. The last time it was modded up +5 funny (gag) at least the second time it's getting modded like it deserved.
You are clearly misreading what i said, because that's mostly what i claimed, although you're wrong about the long term predictions. If we had models that could predict the effects of atmospheric composition to the same detail that you are claiming that we would need to model meteor activity within the solar system then there wouldn't be any controversy about global warming, we could just let the model run and we'd know the answer. You're claiming that such an accurate model is impossible, and i'm agreeing, and claiming that that's not what is used to calculate meteorite frequencies.
One of the primary reasons there is controversay over global warming is because of the human input into the equation. According to the statistics bassed off of historical records we're heading into an ice age if anything, however we have no long term historical records of a society pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which would allow us to accuratly predict the effects. We do however have long term historical records of meteor impacts, and no one has any rason to suspect that the human race is currently doing anything to change the rate of impacts, so those records remain statistically valid.
And yes, models do play a big role in short term forcasting, you're basically supporting my point. Models are for short term forcasts, historic records are used for long term forcasts. No one runs a model to predict that it will get colder in the winter, we know that from milenia of historical records. We can even tell on average how cold it will probably get. We may be wrong for this winter or the next, but averaged over the next ten years we'll be pretty close. We can't predict if a meteor will hit somewhere tomorrow, but we can predict with fair accuracy how many meteors will hit in the coming year, and with even more accuracy how many will hit in the next decade, etc.
If insurance companies use models, it is only in very limited circumstances. For the most part they use known rates of accident occurance statistically calculated from historic records. They know that about x% of houses will burn down because about x% did last year. That number changes slightly from year to year as technology and conditions changes, but they continuously update their statistics to stay current. They don't really make assumptions about anything, they just go by statistics. They don't expect everyone to go nuts and start lighting houses on fire because statistically only a small number of people do that every year. Sure, there's a small probability that everyone in the world will go nuts next year and every building on the planet will go up in flames, probably about the same probability that a giant meteor storm like you were talking about will hit us.
NASA _has_ calculated the probability of certain asteroids hitting us, hence the big fuss a month or two ago when they found one that was slightly more likely than a "random" asteroid to hit us. How do they know how likely a "random" asteroid is to hit us? Statistics.
Now if you want to limit it to "mutations that happened in my body in my lifetime" then sure, they're incredibly rare.
Although most DtV titles are on the cheaper end of the movie scale, i think on average they still cost more to produce than the average CD, yet they sell for less.
A more blatant example is why most scientists expect that diseases from another planet couldn't hurt us if we ever encountered any. It's not that our DNA was somehow expecting an attack by aliens, it's just that by the virture of having evolved completly seperatly the diseases have no idea what do with us.
The problem with earth diseases is that they've grown up with us of course, so once we've shuffled our mutations around and discovered a way to block the disease, the disease shuffles it's mutations around till it finds a way to get around the defense, or goes extinct trying. Wash, rinse, repeat.
First the weather, sure they can't predict the weather perfectly, which is why you'll notice that they often provide a probability. They're not perfect, but they're right more often than they're wrong, and they know the have a certain margin of error. Although you may not remember it the times when it was indeed 75-80 degrees and partly cloudy far outnumber the times when there was a freak snowstorm instead.
Secondly, a lot of probabilities are not calculated by exhaustive modeling of the situation, they're calculated by examining past examples. If they're going to make a long term prediction about the weather, say the number of days it will rain in the next year or the average temperature over that time, they don't pull out a weather model and run it ahead 12 months. They pull out the records for the past few decades, check those, and figure out an average. Sure, the sun can could go nova due to some astronomical phenomena that we don't understand yet and their prediction will be off by a few million degrees, but the _probability_ is that next year will be mostly the same as the previous years once all known factors are taken into account (El Nino and such)
Predicting the chances of getting hit by a meteor is the same thing. They've got fairly detailed records going back decades, and more general records going back centuries. Using those we can make fairly accurate predictions about what the number of meteors expected next year.
True, an unexpected group of meteors could show up out of nowhere and kill hundreds of people, but there have been no records of anything like that happening in the last thousand years to the best of my knowledge, so the odds of it happening next year without anything else to indicate it's likelyhood is less than one in one thousand.
If we had the kind of exact model you're talking about it would be a certainty, not a probability. The probability is used because it's what we expect based on past events, and most of the time it's right. When insurance companies calculate the odds of carious acidents and disasters do you think they have some giant country or world wide really detailed version of the Sims running? (If so, why don't they warn the people who are going to have their house burn down ahead of time!) They don't do any kind of physics modeling at all, they just look at historical records, and calculate the odds, and they're usually pretty close, it's how they stay in buisness.
Nope, not making that assumption at all. I'm assuming that there is a wide range of meteor sizes and speeds, both before and after entering the atmosphere. Terminal velocity for a rock that size is probably somewhere on the order of 10 - 50 mph, enough to hurt if it hit you, but probably not enough to do any serious damage (given it's small size)
Terminal velocity for a meteor large enough to make a crater is much higher. And because of it's larger mass it may also have not had time to bleed off enough energy to slow down to terminal velocity by the time it hits. Larger object with higher speed equals more damage. Smaller rock has lower speed, not much damage. Even smaller rock burns up completly and the dust gently floats to the ground and no one even notices.
Looking at the meteorites in scientific collections there seem to be quite a large number of them that are in that size range, large enough to survive entry, but not large enough to cause any real damamge.
Ah! You have failed to see the insidious nature of their newest invasion! Rocks don't get sick! :)
Or how bout, makes medium big ball of fire (when it was higher up in the atmosphere) and then lands on a girls foot? You're getting kinda caught up in that whole either/or thing. There's no magic size where below it a meteor completly disintigrates and above it it causes a giant crater :)
These people.
1. Make up some stupid list.
2. Add one more item that just says "???"
3. Add one more item that just says "Profit"
4. ???
5. Modded up
It must be this guy, and i can see why he's retiring if his rain dances have gotten that far out of whack :)
How many meteors hit the earth over a given period?
is exactly what I'm disputing. Given recent stories like this one [slashdot.org], we clearly can't make many predictions about the chances of a huge influx of small meteors
This is why it's called probability, not history. Who knows, maybe in the next lottery everyone who buys at least one ticket will get a winning number, and then they'd all get killed by a freak meteor storm. However the odds of either one of those things happening, together or seperatly, is pretty darn low.
Actually, we _can_ make a lot of predictions about huge influxes of small meteors, we have at least two such events a year that i know of, and they're well documented. All the stealth asteroids that have been speeding by weren't noticed before because we didn't see them and they didn't hit. Meteor showers tend to have this kind of obvious effect however that happens everytime they pass by, becuase some (relatively) small number of them always hit.
And of course we've got astronomy observations going back for centuries to give us a pretty good idea of what the odds are of a new (and particularly large, if a significant number of people are going to get hit by the remains) meteor shower showing up out of the blue, and they're not very big.
Sounds like spam to me. Next thing I know I'll be getting a hundred of these a day
Getting a hundred what a day? Full length penises? :)
"Most obviously, how do you design a pusher plate that won't shake itself apart or ablate under repeated impacts of nuclear plasma? (answer: with a thin coat of oil, reapplied between each atomic pulse.)"
So the ship itself isn't really undergoing any ablation. I'm not sure if the term could be properly applied to a continuously resupplied coat of oil.
Wow, the planet earth apparently has more Jedi by several orders of magnitude than the entire galaxy did in Attack of the Clones :)
Then again, given that they'll be packing whole seasons of a show onto one disk, they may be charging about $50 - $150 for it.
How much cheaper is the 40 GB version supposed to be that the end consumer will see any difference?
They even seem to be legally required to state that such is the case, or at least every contract i've signed has a footnote after the clause describing the state law.
You haven't? You mean you've never had pop with ice in it? Way to demonstrate your ignorance there.
Shortly after you put the ice in the pop the pop _does_ hit zero degrees celsius, or very close to it. The reason it doesn't feel quite as cold as the ice is because of the phase transition. It actually takes quite a bit of energy to convert ice at zero degrees celsius to water at zero degrees celsius. This amount of energy is actually more than the amount needed to heat water from zero degrees to one degree. This is exactly the reason why ice is good at keeping stuff cold.
The pop in the cup bumps into the ice, and "donates" any extra energy it has towards melting the ice, which keeps the liquid pop from rising above zero degrees.
Here's a web page that covers some of the basics of phase changes and energy.
This is a real-world situation, try not to let your lack of knowledge get in the way of concepts that have been well known for a few hundred years.
Really, look at your own arguments, yous ay we know nothing about the climate 30,000 years ago. If that's the case, how do we know there was an Ice Age then? If geological data isn't giving us very good data, then how do we know that Antartica was near the equator a few hundred million years ago?
They've got estimates of temperatures from ice core samples going back to the last ice age. The fossils and geologic samples from Antartica might not tell scientists much about conditions at the pole that long ago but it tells them a _lot_ about what conditions were like near the equator. If they want to to know about polar conditions they look at geologic data from other continents.
That having been said, this article certainly wasn't alarmist. They said that they observed those effects unfor those conditions, and really have no idea at all how it might afect larger scale issues in the weather or climate.
As for "tribal segments" the real crap is believing that they are somehow specially adapted to their enviroment and cause no harm. The middle east used to have trees and vegetation, before ancient tribes chopped down all the trees for firewood and their goats ate all the grass. It's strongly suspected that a lot of the extinctions of big mammals about 10,000 years ago are due to the spread of ancient humans around the globe.
The only difference between "tribal" people and technologically advanced people is the rate at which we can make those changes to the enviroment.
Now if life were to change such that cars were no longer economical or possible for some reason, i would look into moving or changing jobs. However for the sake of a one month experiment, no way.
And while i've heard that it's different in some other countries, in America at least without gasoline everyone who lives in a city or major suburbs would have to move. With out current infrastructure we don't have the means to deliver the food we produce to the people who eat it without petroleum products. Most people in cities or suburbs may be within walking distance of a supermarket, but it doesn't do much good if the supermarket doesn't have any food.
Sure we could fix all those issues, between alternate fuel supplys and alternate methods of transporation, but it's a bit too entrenched to be refered to as just a lifestyle. Whether or not i can go down to the mall and buy a cd or some new clothes is a lifestyle, the method by which the food necessary to my life is delievered isn't so much.