I don't doubt for a second that most animals can count small numbers, although birdwatchers have been known to run in and out of hides to confuse birds about how many people are left inside.
There have been experiments of that sort with crows.
Apparently crows can keep track of the number of people inside till more than seven go in. After eight or more are inside, if seven leave they behave as if the blind is empty, suggesting very strongly that they can count to seven.
Is that 1g the whole way there? or is that assuming that you only hit max speed when you are half the trip away and must brake at -1g for the other half?
The latter. It's pretty pointless to fly by at >95%c.
Unless, of course, you're planning on ramming the inhabited planet to wipe out those godless bemmies....
The US President can also issue normal Executive Orders, which just bypass Congress and are instantly law
An Executive Order by the President does not have the power of law. If Congress passes a law contradicting an Executive Order, the Executive Order loses.
Either that, or we can just figure out how to get really close to the speed of light, and reap the benefits of time dilation to make the journey only last hours from the traveller's point of view.
Hours?
1g to Alpha Centauri - 3years, 205 days.
Compress that trip to, say, sixty hours...
2575g.
It gets worse fast. 1g only gets us to 95% lightspeed. Higher acceleration pushes us way up into relativistic effects.
3 burglaries in 6 weeks. Awesome. Gun control stops crime.
In one small village.
I've never heard of a burglary happening at all in the small village my brother lives in.
Course, I couldn't swear that anyone in that village owns a firearm, but opening day of hunting season is a holiday there, so I'm willing to bet there are a few....
What I don't get is why these exchanges (which happen constantly) were never reported when Bush was in office. What makes them "news" now when they weren't "news" a year ago?
I suspect that Bush wasn't in the habit of giving tacky gifts.
Most likely, he listened to those Foreign Service weenies who had a clue what was appropriate.
Sounds like Obama is still trying to show he's young enough to understand technology and the youths of our nation. Which is all well and good when picking gifts for the youth of our nation, not so much for foreign dignitaries.
There is a pretty theory stating that societies with cheap labor don't industrialize as there is no incentive to do so. The theory is typically in reference to the question of why the Roman empire failed to industrialize.
Labor in the south was practically free through slaves, preventing the degree of industrialization seen in the north. In that light, the south lost because of its flawed ideology.
An intriguing theory. Alas, slave labour was NOT "practically free". If it was, you wouldn't have seen slaveowner complaining about the costs of keeping slaves as far back as Washington's day.
The problem with slave labour is that you have to feed, house, and clothe your slaves even when they weren't earning their keep. Like after harvest season was over. Four or five months of field hands plus women and children doing essentially nothing.
In the North, of course, you hired extra men for the harvest, and sent them on their way when the harvest was done.
The South didn't industrialize because there was no need to - cotton paid the bills nicely (and would have paid the bills even better if they'd freed the slaves back in 1787).
Note, by the way, that what made cotton "King" wasn't slave labour, but the cotton gin. If there had been no cotton gin, and the South would have industrialized just to pay the bills for the rich white guys mansions.
The South started with more soldiers, officers, and munitions, because southerners were disproportionately represented in the military then to (when the "standing army" was basically an officer corp that you conscripted soldiers for).
An intriguing idea. But wrong. In the USA, we had a very tiny "long service professional" army before WW2. We didn't go the Officer Corps with conscript troops technique so common in Europe at the time.
And the South did NOT start the war with more soldiers. More officers, perhaps, but not more infantrymen.
Each southern state confiscated the Federal weapons caches in their territory, and held it for their defense.
The USA didn't maintain large Federal arsenals. Which is one reason that in First Manassas, some Confederate soldiers went into battle without weapons (and with instructions to pick up a rifle from the guy in front of them when he was killed). Or with flintlocks, or smoothbore percussion muskets (both obsolete for decades, but common as hunting weapons). Or even with shotguns.
Lee's Army of Northern Virginia did most of the fighting, with the deep south states providing limited troops to the border.
Umm, no. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia fought the Army of the Potomac for years. But most of the fighting was actually going on further west, between Grant/Sherman and various Southern generals. Keep in mind that the "Glorious Fourth of July" was as much about the surrender of Vicksburg to Grant as it was about the retreat of Lee from Gettysburg.
Had Lee had all the munitions and troops at his disposal and went on the offensive, the war would have ended quickly with a southern victory. If DC and Maryland fell to CSA control, Tennessee held, and Kentucky captured, you'd have likely had a quick resolution.
If Lee had had every soldier in Confederate service under his command, he'd have sat outside the siege lines at Washington while Grant and Sherman destroyed the Confederacy behind him. Contrary to popular rumour, the war wasn't just between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia. It wasn't even mostly about them - those two Armies fought over an area that wouldn't make three good counties in west Texas, while the rest of the war went on elsewhere.
Note also that Lee wasn't the military wizard he's usually portrayed as being (and I'm a Southerner saying this). If you want the real military wizard, look carefully at General Jackson, who, unfortunately, was killed early in the fighting. Or General Forrest, perhaps, who was an unmitigated scoundrel, but a hell of a cavalry officer.
Right now the southern and agrarian ideas of free trade carry the day but the thing is, any study of history shows that free trade and a lack of workers rights makes you lose wars. Just ask the south.
The South lose, in large part, because they had 1/2 the population of the North.
Then there was the railroad thing - the South didn't have much, and what it did wasn't connected conveniently for internal travel by rail.
And of course the lack of heavy industry - no cannon foundries means no cannons but what can be bought overseas.
And the State's Rights issues made federal level taxation nearly impossible, so the Confederacy had a bitch of a time paying for food, weapons, ammo for their armies. Which is why the Confederate armies were starving in the midst of a prosperous agrarian society.
Lot of reasons the South lost. Free Trade wasn't among them, nor was lack of workers' rights (note that they were significantly absent in the Union, Europe, and basically everywhere at that time).
Its proposed use is to carry up to 6 astronauts to the space station, and from there, 4 to the Moon. For the Moon missions, Orion will travel along with the Altair lunar lander.
Umm, no.
It will be used to carry up to six astronauts to the ISS, OR four to the moon. A Moon mission will NOT include a stop at the ISS. At least according to this handy manual my wife brought home from Stennis Space Center.
It also screams failure to me. The ride to the moon was a sunday drive in a car, the trip to mars is quite a bit longer. Cramming 6 guys in a soupcan for that long is a BAD IDEA. why cant we build something larger?
TFA is long on hype, and short on details.
But further reading in this handy manual that my wife brought back from Stennis Space Center the other day shows that Orion is used to take off from Earth, rendezvous with the REAL "Mars-capable" spacecraft, then get turned off for the three+ years of the Mars mission.
Then, when the REAL Mars-capable spacecraft gets close to Earth, they turn the Orion back on, climb in, separate from the REAL Mars-capable spacecraft, and reenter the atmosphere in Orion.
In other words, TFA is a pile of steaming horse-*....
The best one can do is to extrapolate on data from about a hundred Soyuz missions. Soyuz seems to be slightly safer than shuttle and has in common with the Orion both the 60's tech and the mostly expendable architecture (IIRC, some systems are transferred from a used Soyuz to a new one after being recertified).
No.
Soyuz has flown fewer times than the Shuttle. About 100 flights, as opposed to Shuttle's 124.
Depending on how one counts "safety", Soyuz is almost as safe as Shuttle (they've both had two catasrophic missions resulting in loss of all crews - 2% failure rate for Soyuz vs 1.6% failure rate for Shuttle), or not even in the timezone (if you consider the nine or so failed missions that Soyuz suffered with no loss of life).
Soyuz is only safer in that since it carries a smaller crew, fewer people have died on Soyuz. Which isn't really a good measure of safety.
Of course, fewer people have gone up in Soyuz too (about 300 in Soyuz, about 900 in Shuttle).
What Orion is is a souped up Apollo. The only thing it will do in a Mars mission is carry the crew up to the real Mars-capable spacecraft, and bring them back down to Earth when the real Mars-capable spacecraft gets close to earth at the end of the mission.
Orion isn't even "Moon-capable", in that it doesn't (yet) have a Lunar Lander analog to take the crew from Lunar orbit down to the surface and back.
The last time the US decided not to participate in a world council, World War II happened. Perhaps it would have occurred even if the League of Nations had worked out, but without the U.S. support the whole thing fell apart.
WW2 would have happened anyway. Pre-WW2, the USA didn't have the clout it had post-WW2 - and it didn't have the relative wealth and military strength either.
The USA would have added no real ability to coerce would-be dictators into behaving, so they would have continued misbehaving.
If you don't believe me look at world war II and see how the manufacturing of weapons increased by an incredible margin almost overnight.
Well, if by "almost overnight" you mean "anywhere from a few months to a few years", I agree with you.
If you actually check, you'll find that the usual run-up in WW2 was on the order of a year. Oddly enough, that's pretty close to the period discussed in TFA.
One should also keep in mind that what happened in WW2 included an infrastructure that was pretty much fully functional - way easier to shift production from cars to tanks when electricity works, you still get steel delivered pretty regularly, gasoline is plentiful, that sort of thing. As opposed to a situation where there's no electricity, no gasoline, no steel deliveries....
A somewhat more balanced media is in everyone's interest.
And this would produce that how?
There is little reason to suspect that tax-exempt status affects bias in any organization. Churches, which have been tax-exempt forever are notorious for bias (and not just to the right), as just one example.
Being unable to endorse a candidate does not constitute "balanced media" - it's easy enough to unbalance things by carefully choosing what you report, and how.
It seems to me that, when faced with a proposal that makes, say, a 5% improvement on a problem, a common negative response is that the solution doesn't entirely correct the problem so why bother? A 5% improvement gets us to a 5% better world.
You seem to be assuming that this proposal will, in fact, make things better. Is there some evidence of this? Or is it just wishful thinking on your part?
Seriously, it shouldn't be that hard to check - pick a model/year car, get one white, one black, drive them together for a month, see if there is any noticable difference in gasoline usage. Has anyone bothered to do this?
In another year, most of the US wont remember who she is either.
I'm starting to wonder - the Dems seem to have a vested interest in keeping her name in the news. Not sure why, since the only thing to be gained would be to keep her from running for President. And if she's the disaster the Dems decribe her as, she's the perfect Republican candidate for President.
Off the top of your head, how many VP picks of the party that didn't make it can you name.
I can't even remember all the VP picks of the party that DID make it in my lifetime. And I can't remember a single one other than Palin who didn't make it.
Am I going to show my ignorance of naval engineering if I ask what the MSW pump is?
Main SeaWater Pump. It pumps sea water through the main turbine condensers. It pumps a LOT of seawater....
I'd also be curious to know (although not at all surprised if you can't answer) if we can operate our naval reactors on convection cooling throughout the whole operating range or only at lower power outputs/speeds?
No comment. Note that the post you're responding to was willing to provide more information than I was willing to.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the Federal government owns the rights to waters offshore.
There have been experiments of that sort with crows.
Apparently crows can keep track of the number of people inside till more than seven go in. After eight or more are inside, if seven leave they behave as if the blind is empty, suggesting very strongly that they can count to seven.
The latter. It's pretty pointless to fly by at >95%c.
Unless, of course, you're planning on ramming the inhabited planet to wipe out those godless bemmies....
So Voyager will pass Alpha Centauri in hours? 1,130,000,000 or so of them?
An Executive Order by the President does not have the power of law. If Congress passes a law contradicting an Executive Order, the Executive Order loses.
Hours?
1g to Alpha Centauri - 3years, 205 days.
Compress that trip to, say, sixty hours...
2575g.
It gets worse fast. 1g only gets us to 95% lightspeed. Higher acceleration pushes us way up into relativistic effects.
Sort of the way the Founding Fathers envisioned the Federal legislature - not a full-time job.
The main thing you get out of a part-time legislature is less time spent screwing things up.
In one small village.
I've never heard of a burglary happening at all in the small village my brother lives in.
Course, I couldn't swear that anyone in that village owns a firearm, but opening day of hunting season is a holiday there, so I'm willing to bet there are a few....
I suspect that Bush wasn't in the habit of giving tacky gifts.
Most likely, he listened to those Foreign Service weenies who had a clue what was appropriate.
Sounds like Obama is still trying to show he's young enough to understand technology and the youths of our nation. Which is all well and good when picking gifts for the youth of our nation, not so much for foreign dignitaries.
An intriguing theory. Alas, slave labour was NOT "practically free". If it was, you wouldn't have seen slaveowner complaining about the costs of keeping slaves as far back as Washington's day.
The problem with slave labour is that you have to feed, house, and clothe your slaves even when they weren't earning their keep. Like after harvest season was over. Four or five months of field hands plus women and children doing essentially nothing.
In the North, of course, you hired extra men for the harvest, and sent them on their way when the harvest was done.
The South didn't industrialize because there was no need to - cotton paid the bills nicely (and would have paid the bills even better if they'd freed the slaves back in 1787).
Note, by the way, that what made cotton "King" wasn't slave labour, but the cotton gin. If there had been no cotton gin, and the South would have industrialized just to pay the bills for the rich white guys mansions.
An intriguing idea. But wrong. In the USA, we had a very tiny "long service professional" army before WW2. We didn't go the Officer Corps with conscript troops technique so common in Europe at the time.
And the South did NOT start the war with more soldiers. More officers, perhaps, but not more infantrymen.
The USA didn't maintain large Federal arsenals. Which is one reason that in First Manassas, some Confederate soldiers went into battle without weapons (and with instructions to pick up a rifle from the guy in front of them when he was killed). Or with flintlocks, or smoothbore percussion muskets (both obsolete for decades, but common as hunting weapons). Or even with shotguns.
Umm, no. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia fought the Army of the Potomac for years. But most of the fighting was actually going on further west, between Grant/Sherman and various Southern generals. Keep in mind that the "Glorious Fourth of July" was as much about the surrender of Vicksburg to Grant as it was about the retreat of Lee from Gettysburg.
If Lee had had every soldier in Confederate service under his command, he'd have sat outside the siege lines at Washington while Grant and Sherman destroyed the Confederacy behind him. Contrary to popular rumour, the war wasn't just between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia. It wasn't even mostly about them - those two Armies fought over an area that wouldn't make three good counties in west Texas, while the rest of the war went on elsewhere.
Note also that Lee wasn't the military wizard he's usually portrayed as being (and I'm a Southerner saying this). If you want the real military wizard, look carefully at General Jackson, who, unfortunately, was killed early in the fighting. Or General Forrest, perhaps, who was an unmitigated scoundrel, but a hell of a cavalry officer.
The South lose, in large part, because they had 1/2 the population of the North.
Then there was the railroad thing - the South didn't have much, and what it did wasn't connected conveniently for internal travel by rail.
And of course the lack of heavy industry - no cannon foundries means no cannons but what can be bought overseas.
And the State's Rights issues made federal level taxation nearly impossible, so the Confederacy had a bitch of a time paying for food, weapons, ammo for their armies. Which is why the Confederate armies were starving in the midst of a prosperous agrarian society.
Lot of reasons the South lost. Free Trade wasn't among them, nor was lack of workers' rights (note that they were significantly absent in the Union, Europe, and basically everywhere at that time).
TFA is long on hype, and short on details.
But further reading in this handy manual that my wife brought back from Stennis Space Center the other day shows that Orion is used to take off from Earth, rendezvous with the REAL "Mars-capable" spacecraft, then get turned off for the three+ years of the Mars mission.
Then, when the REAL Mars-capable spacecraft gets close to Earth, they turn the Orion back on, climb in, separate from the REAL Mars-capable spacecraft, and reenter the atmosphere in Orion.
In other words, TFA is a pile of steaming horse-*....
It's a suicide mission if they send you on a one-way trip to Mars with two years of supplies.
If they send you on a one-way trip to Mars with 50 years of supplies, it's a very tiny colony.
And if they're looking for volunteers for the latter, I'll go.
No.
Soyuz has flown fewer times than the Shuttle. About 100 flights, as opposed to Shuttle's 124.
Depending on how one counts "safety", Soyuz is almost as safe as Shuttle (they've both had two catasrophic missions resulting in loss of all crews - 2% failure rate for Soyuz vs 1.6% failure rate for Shuttle), or not even in the timezone (if you consider the nine or so failed missions that Soyuz suffered with no loss of life).
Soyuz is only safer in that since it carries a smaller crew, fewer people have died on Soyuz. Which isn't really a good measure of safety.
Of course, fewer people have gone up in Soyuz too (about 300 in Soyuz, about 900 in Shuttle).
Orion is NOT "Mars-capable".
What Orion is is a souped up Apollo. The only thing it will do in a Mars mission is carry the crew up to the real Mars-capable spacecraft, and bring them back down to Earth when the real Mars-capable spacecraft gets close to earth at the end of the mission.
Orion isn't even "Moon-capable", in that it doesn't (yet) have a Lunar Lander analog to take the crew from Lunar orbit down to the surface and back.
WW2 would have happened anyway. Pre-WW2, the USA didn't have the clout it had post-WW2 - and it didn't have the relative wealth and military strength either.
The USA would have added no real ability to coerce would-be dictators into behaving, so they would have continued misbehaving.
Well, if by "almost overnight" you mean "anywhere from a few months to a few years", I agree with you.
If you actually check, you'll find that the usual run-up in WW2 was on the order of a year. Oddly enough, that's pretty close to the period discussed in TFA.
One should also keep in mind that what happened in WW2 included an infrastructure that was pretty much fully functional - way easier to shift production from cars to tanks when electricity works, you still get steel delivered pretty regularly, gasoline is plentiful, that sort of thing. As opposed to a situation where there's no electricity, no gasoline, no steel deliveries....
And this would produce that how?
There is little reason to suspect that tax-exempt status affects bias in any organization. Churches, which have been tax-exempt forever are notorious for bias (and not just to the right), as just one example.
Being unable to endorse a candidate does not constitute "balanced media" - it's easy enough to unbalance things by carefully choosing what you report, and how.
You seem to be assuming that this proposal will, in fact, make things better. Is there some evidence of this? Or is it just wishful thinking on your part?
Seriously, it shouldn't be that hard to check - pick a model/year car, get one white, one black, drive them together for a month, see if there is any noticable difference in gasoline usage. Has anyone bothered to do this?
I'm starting to wonder - the Dems seem to have a vested interest in keeping her name in the news. Not sure why, since the only thing to be gained would be to keep her from running for President. And if she's the disaster the Dems decribe her as, she's the perfect Republican candidate for President.
I can't even remember all the VP picks of the party that DID make it in my lifetime. And I can't remember a single one other than Palin who didn't make it.
No, the problem is that most people believe that an AI would see us as as much a threat to it as we see it as a threat to us.
And, frankly, and AI wouldn't be very intelligent if it did NOT see us as a threat to it. And vice versa.
Sixty years later, NASA manages an extra 10000- lbs. Wake me when they manage 100000 lbs.
Main SeaWater Pump. It pumps sea water through the main turbine condensers. It pumps a LOT of seawater....
No comment. Note that the post you're responding to was willing to provide more information than I was willing to.