Perl is the only programming language that supports writing poetry that will compile properly: Black Perl. Also google on the Annual Perl Poetry Contest.
A good way to judge the quality of an applicant for a programming job is to give him some discrete task from your company's problem space and half a day to develop a perl script solution. Then have a couple of your better programmers evaluate his work--- not on whether he finished the task, but on whether they would be comfortable picking up the work where the candidate left off.
Perl gets dismissed because so much garbage has been written in it. But the reason why so much garbage has been written in Perl is because that's the best that Joey ---you know Joey, that kid in the mailroom who has been learning to program computers--- could produce. And that POS actually works so here it is 20 years later and we are still using it.
And Joey? He left the mailroom job after a couple of years and now he's some kind of High Mucky-Muck in IT at Corporate HQ.
Don't judge a computer language's goodness by the amount of garbage that has been written in it. Any decent language will allow an idjit to write bad code.
Do judge how limited a language might be by the number and type of arbitrary rules a programmer must deal with. No programmer should have to be concerned with meeting some arbitrary whitespace convention, not while he is actually working on the code. He, or better yet some apprentice programmer, should make the code look pretty after the problems are solved. "While coding, just code."
Oh, fsck Python. There are more important things to think about than levels of indentation.
The point of my earlier post got lost in the reverie.
Python is nothing like the Basic of the 1980s. Basic's development was strongly shaped by the limitations of the hardware it was run on. Python's development is shaped by the self-imposed limitations of the minds of its developers. Two very different things.
I worked with a couple of different varieties of Business Basic between 1986 and 1993. Hewlett-Packard's version was particularly easy to work with.
Basic's two primary advantages in the business office were that
1. it was the first and best developed interpreted language. If your business was successful enough to have a couple of dedicated IT employees, it could afford a minicomputer and could make good use of compiled languages. But compiled languages suck on the PCs that were affordable to small businesses of that time period. The RAM was too tiny and limiting, hard drives were too small and slow for an efficient compiler environment. Some form of Basic was your only way forward.
2. With a good business Basic you could get the point of sales pizzabox PCs generating data for the back office accounting PC while your competitor down the street was still working on how to build a string variable in Pascal. You didn't worry about the other competitors who were trying to use C. Their development cycles were constantly broken as bigger businesses hired away their C programming staff.
Those were the wild and wooly days of cheapernet, LANtastic, and sneakernet, when we were all still buying huge 40 megabyte hard drives that had to be partitioned since DOS was limited to 32 MB. Back when "Windows was a 16-bit GUI running on an 8-bit operating system, written for a 4-bit processor, by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition".
Umm, some things haven't changed that much I guess. I just came across this definition of Windows 10:
Windows 10 (n): A 64-bit "upgrade" to a 32-bit patch for a 16-bit GUI shell running on an 8-bit operating system, written for a 4-bit processor by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition!
I of course use Linux. It's true that during the first decade of switching from Windows to Ubuntu I had a few miserable moments, but now it's all smooth sailing.
True enough. In talking about horizontal speed, I was oversimplifying by ignoring atmospheric drag, which remains a critical factor until about 300,000 feet. I was justified in so doing since the post I was responding to was talking about accelerating straight up as the only requirement to getting to orbit.
On a planet with the mass of Earth and no atmosphere, a horizontal acceleration to 17,770 mph would achieve a (very low) orbit. On the other hand, if we built a levitation device that would take a satellite from Earth's surface to LEO, we would have to move far out of the way when it came crashing back down. You do need 300,000 feet height to clear almost all the atmosphere, but you still need 17,770 mph to achieve an orbit. And as Rutan showed us in Spaceship One, you can get outside of the atmosphere with a lot less fuel than it takes to get into orbit.
The gain in altitude comes mostly from the horizontal acceleration as Earth "falls away" beneath the rocket. The wings on Pegasus provided aerodynamic lift and were not used to "convert the horizontal speed into vertical speed". That would be a silly waste of velocity. Note that the Shuttle bends to a horizontal attitude soon after lift-off. So do all other rockets to orbit.
All you need to get to orbit is 17,770 mph ground speed, and it doesn't matter whether you apply that from ground ---maybe using a rail gun--- or you go up a little ways first. Of course there are advantages in using aerodynamic lift (basically horizontal flight) and in getting above the troposphere asap. But those things just make it easier to get to 17,770 mph ground speed.
The height is not the major problem. When the ISS passes over your head, it is less than 250 miles away from you, if it were on the ground you could drive to it in half a day. The major problem is getting to orbital velocity. A rocket's payload has to be accelerated to 17,700 mph in the right direction to achieve orbit.
Allen's Stratolaunch will provide the first 3% of that speed. Compared to a traditional 10 ton rocket to place 1 ton in LEO, there would be a savings of 0.25 tons of rocket fuel. Since Stratolaunch is designed to launch three rockets per trip, there are considerable savings in preparation and maintenance costs. And of course jet fuel is much less expensive than rocket fuel, especially when you consider the special handling rocket fuels require.
Air launch to orbit make a lot of sense.
French is one of the official languages of Mali, which was once a French colony. There are numerous native languages with official status. English is NOT an official language.
However in Mali English is the common language for trade, business, and technology.
The same seems to be true for the other impoverished, post-french-colony nations.
Parent post is touching on what is truly important, which is which language, outside of each speaker's native language, is the speaker's audience most likely to be competent in? Unfortunately, author of parent post failed to understand the importance of a common second language.
English is by far the most common second language in the world.
The number of persons for whom English is a second language now far outnumbers the number of persons who speak English as their native tongue. Within business and technology, the overwhelming amount of communication is done in English. There is vastly more publication and correspondence in English between non-native speakers of English than there is between native English speakers.
When a Finn, a Frenchman, and a Brazilian collaborate on some FOSS project like Blender or LibreOffice, they do so in their common tongue, which is English.
English is now used by a larger percentage of the world's population than any other language. It is used by a much larger absolute number of speakers that ever before. And, do to the influence of all the inputs from other languages, it is evolving faster than any other language has ever done.
The obdurate francophile who abhors "le hotdog", and "la weekend" has a point: if there is any artistic value in preserving the french language then outlawing foreign words must be done. But some of those francophiles are being purposely blind to the benefits of having a common global language for business and technology. That kind of purposeful bigotry is destructively stupid.
(As an aside, the French that is spoken in Quebec is relatively unchanged from the historic French of the 1600s, It is the French language spoken in Paris that has been corrupted over time.)
Yes, but its first use would not be to move factory-built houses, but pieces of windmills.
A major limitation and expense on wind farms is the need to transport oversize blades to the sites, which requires some serious road building, considering that many of the best sites are in rugged terrain, and maneuvering a truck with a 36m payload means you need to build a route without any sharp turns. If the airship can also function as a sky crane, then erecting the windmill's mast and attaching the blades is a lot less expensive, too. Very likely the only roads that a wind farm would need would be the kind of dirt roads that would service the power lines.
Other low hanging fruit would include moving lightweight but bulky produce like lettuce from farm to market, a lower cost alternative to helicopter logging, installation and servicing of cell towers in remote sites, and use in regional emergencies such as floods (Katrina) or earthquakes.
We are 20 years overdue for a new airship industry. We had the technology to produce commercially viable airships before the turn of the century. It is long past time to see these air whales overhead.
But the problem with standard English is that it does not exist, has never existed, and is becoming ever more unreal as more and more ESL users force English to grow faster than any language has ever grown before. "Standard English" has never been spoken outside of the classroom, with the exception of talking heads and radio announcers who were trained to use it for sometimes several minutes without a break., and got big paychecks for being able to pull that off. We are now close to the point where more ESL users are using English to get around their lack of a common native tongue than there are native English speakers who are talking to each other. When Chinese businessmen are negotiating deals with Russians, Argentinians, Vietnamese or anyone else who doesn't speak the common Chinese dialect, they do so in English. When a Finn, an Italian, and a Sumatran collaborate on a software project, they use English.
To repeat: the only place where "standard English" has ever existed is in the imagination of grammar nazis. In the real world, so long as you can be understood, your English is considered on a par with everyone else's, no matter how mangled it may seem to a grammar nazi.
The next step in improving English is to return to the older usage of second person singular with singular verb forms. "You is pedantic" was once common and continues to be in use in relict dialects of English as spoken in some isolated communities of southern Appalachia and near the headwaters of the Suwanee River. When Pogo said "We have met the enemy and they is us" (circa My Lai Massacre, 1968) Walt Kelly was using the appropriate verb form to show "they" was the third person singular whose antecedant was "enemy". In much the same way in the construction, "You is an obstinate, pedantic obstructionist" the singular form of "to be" clarifies that "You" is being used as second person singular pronoun. The "You is a buffoon" construction deserves to be brought back from the relict dialogs into mainstream English. Millions of English-as-a-second-language people (who now greatly outnumber native English speakers) would thank us for doing that.
I could go on, but that was sufficient to make my point, and to deliver a bazinga or two to boot.
The Dean might be woman. There is not enough context to tell. So "What did they say?" is the best choice.
The prom queen might be queer. So "What is they wearing?" is completely appropriate.
We now live in a world where there are more than just two genders. That alone is reason enough to use "they" as third person singular in all those instances where the gender cannot be determined by the preceding context.
Yes, the AC has proved his point about the difficulty of learning English by demonstrating that even they* does not know proper English usage, even though they* are self-acknowledged English experts.
*Note that "they" in the above sentence is appropriate under even the more stringent style guides as there is insufficient data in the context to determine if the antecedent of the pronoun is a male with hemorrhoids or a female with PMS.
Nope, "everyone" is single. It is a contraction of "every one", where "every" is a modifier of "one" and means that you must iterate through the collection persons, performing the same operation on each one in turn. (When the collection is not defined by the earlier context, it is assumed to be the entire universe of "ones", which is usually a gross over generalization, so do try to avoid the "everyone" construction).
Don't try to out nazi a grammar nazi unless you know English better than your demonstrated weakness with that language.
Seconker is correct since the noun antecedent of the pronoun 'they' is 'guides' which is plural. The sentence contracts to "Style guides are fucking stupid". "Style guides is fucking stupid" is just plain stupid, stupid.
So basically for Microsoft in this day and age, the end user is not the customer? The end user is a commodity that Microsoft sells to other corporations who are the customers?
Gee, that sounds familiar. I left Microsoft for Linux in 1999 because of it. I have never looked back.
--"Windows is not the answer. Windows is the question. The answer is 'No'." As true now as it was then.
I've been using FF since it was new. I have occasionally looked at other browsers and several are faster than my FF, at least partially because the plugins and modifications that I use slow FF down somewhat. But FF is fast enough that changing to a faster browser would not improve my productivity. And I've got a nice set of plugins and extensions on it that I would have to put together from scratch if I changed browsers. That is, assuming other browsers offered similar features, which as near as I can tell, they do not.
Speed isn't the only criterion for measuring a browser's goodness. The ability to tailor it to your personal workload is much more important these days. And once you've got a browser tweaked to your best practices, do you really need to take the massive hit of finding, installing, and configuring the plugins of some other browser that would duplicate what you've already set up in your old FF?
If you really need a faster browser, most of us who have been around the block would be better off running the same browser and OS on faster hardware. But this doesn't apply to young'uns who have yet to establish productive work habits. Their best approach would be to talk with some older guy who knows what he is doing about which browser he uses, how he has it set up, and what his workflow is.
You don't bother to look up anything you've never been taught, I guess.
The magnetospheres of the planets that have them are several times the radius of the physical planet. But even greater than that, the field effects of standing waves and turbulence in the solar wind extend well beyond the magnetospheres that shape them. Remember (or look it up since it seems like you've never been taught about it) that the solar wind is composed of mono-atomic ions and free electrons moving at very high speeds. What lies within the disk of the heliopause is not some simple outgassing of a steady breeze in all directions, like water welling up from a feeder pipe at the bottom of a circular pond. It is a highly complex dynamo continuously stirred up by Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth.
The same electromagnetic forces that bend and fray comet tails (and cause comets to outgas for that matter) also influence the Sun's corona and possibly deeper structures. The question is not whether there is an influence, but how great is that influence. The correlation between the full solar cycle and the heliocentric conjunctions of Jupiter with Saturn suggest that in some way that influence is rather large.
This is my last post on the subject. Trying to talk sense to someone who does not read up on the topic he claims expertise in is not worthwhile, and I have said everything that is worth saying to the silent audience of this conversation.
As I know I mentioned before, I doubt that there is a gravitationally mediated interaction between Jupiter and the solar cycle, and if there is a electromagnetic interaction, then that would involve Saturn as well as Jupiter, and probably Earth. Both Saturn and Jupiter have a strong impact on the solar wind. During the years when they are in close heliocentric conjunction, Jupiter's magnetotail and the bow wave of Saturn's magnetosphere are trying to occupy the same space. There has got to be some interesting things happening there. I leave it to the Reader to look up the big words.
The Jupiter - Saturn heliocentric conjunction occurs on the average every 20 years, plus or minus 1 year. The last 18 solar cycles occurred on an average every 11.0 years with standard deviation of 1.03 years. But NOTE THIS: what we call the 11 year solar cycle is only half of the full cycle as it takes another half to reverse the Sun's magnetic poles yet again and return Sol to the same state. Running the numbers on the last 8 completed full cycles, the average time is 22 years with a standard deviation of 1.3 years.
This is using a simple model that excludes a third planet that affects the heliosphere, which is Earth. While Earth's magnetosphere is much smaller than Jupiter's or Saturn's, it is active in a nearer-to-the-Sun region where the solar wind is more dense, and it sweeps through the solar wind at a much higher velocity than the more distant planets. I do not pretend to be competent at building a model that would incorporate Earth's possible effects. It is however a reasonable supposition that Earth could bring about the difference between the 22 year full solar cycle and the 20 year Jup - Sat cycle, as well as the occasional breaks in rhythm of the solar cycles, such as the Maunder and Dalton Minimums.
This stuff is not my area of expertise. However I know how to do basic research which is now quite easy with the internet, and I know how to use simple math tools. I also know my limits. I am good for casting doubt on the verbiage of persons who think they know more than is actually within our current universe of knowledge. I am good for suggesting avenues of exploration, especially those that lie between defined areas of study. I refrain from doing anything more than suggesting the possibility of a different, and maybe better, mind map of What's Really Out There.
My thinking has been too Earth-bound to consider the Sol - Jupiter relationship. But I see others are thinking about it; there are several lay articles and apparently some more serious articles on the web. But I haven't done any critical reading on the subject.
There does seem to be a correlation between Jupiter's orbital period and the sunspot cycle as both are roughly 11 years. But if there is an underlying mechanism (not conveniently dismissible as "coincidence"), it seems more likely that the mechanisms are electromagnetic rather than gravitational. Which would suggest a 3 body problem, with Saturn's impact on the electrodynamics modifying any solar - jovian model.
This is not some resurrection of an "electric universe" theory. Jupiter, Saturn, and even Earth all create distortions in the solar wind, and it should hardly be surprising if these large scale distortions did not feedback in some way to the coronal events. Whether this feedback is a significant moderator of coronal activity should be the question; that there is some feedback can be stipulated.
That's one of those foolish rules put forth by the idiocy contingent of the IAU.
The barycenter of the Earth - Moon binary is outside of the Earth's hard inner core, in the region of the liquid outer core. This is the center or neutral point of the tidal forces acting on the Earth. No one has yet looked at the effects of these tides on the outer core's liquidity, or its electromagnetic properties, mostly because astronomers look upward and geologists look downward and there is a very serious failure for either to look at what the other group is finding.
How significant is the displacement of the Earth's core from the barycenter? It is significant enough to cause the Earth's orbit about the Sun to deviate 6,000 miles twelve times a year from what it would be if the Earth was a solitary body, instead of part of a binary system. Depending on your frame of reference, that deviation is twice to four times as much as the radius of the Moon.
In practical terms up until now this has had no direct impact on human activity. That now changes: when we start using laser beams to communicate and control exploration vehicles beyond Earth orbits, we will have to take the binary nature of the Earth - Moon pair into account or the lasers will miss their targets by thousands of miles.
TL;DR but I got through enough of it to realize that most, and maybe all, the points are cogent. Above post should be stuffed down the throats of every IAU member who voted for their absurd definition of planet until they can regurgitate those points, with meaning.
Some astronomers are stupid. The phrase "educated beyond the level of their intelligence" comes to mind. This idiots should have been taught somewhere along the way that their expertise in one narrow field does not endow them with the authority to mess about in other disciplines like linguistics.
It doesn't matter one whit what terms scientists use in their cloistered jargons. That's why they have jargons.
It does matter when a body of scientists attempts to mold the common tongue to their narrow purposes. Which is what happened with the IAU: they overstepped their area of authority, which is astronomy, to dabble in an area where none of them have any training or standing, which is the study of natural languages, or linguistics. It makes them look like a troop of highly educated baboons, and is one more proof that some people with advanced degrees have been educated beyond the level of their intelligence.
Scientific communities do have an appropriate role in shaping the common tongue, but that is done through education and continued discussion. Never by fiat.
Truth, justice, and The American Way are not science either. Yet these irrational things have more impact on your life than the tiny little subset of the universe that is all that science can ever know.
I do not disagree with you, but I find that your statement has no inherent value and that you are contributing nothing worthwhile to the conversation.
Any "space-trash" that demands to be listed as something else needs to be immediately identified as a "sentient being", and on behalf of all of us Earthlings the UN needs to publicly apologize to him/her/it. That is simple playground rules: you don't want to insult anybody that much bigger than you are.
As to everything else, I think the planetary geologists have it right. If it is big enough to be rounded of its own volition, it is a planet. And planets that go around another planet more quickly than they go around their star are also moons.
Corollary: that makes Earth the larger part of a binary planetary system. Which puts proper emphasis on the way the Moon creates tides that keeps the hydrosphere stirred up, which has had a major impact on how life has evolved here. Exoplanetary explorers should look for other binary planets in the Goldilocks zone as these are much more likely to have life that is similar to Earth life.
(Is a "bazinga!" called for here? Was this just another Sheldon impersonation, or did I accidentally say something insightful?)
Slashdot Mirror
Perl is the only programming language that supports writing poetry that will compile properly: Black Perl. Also google on the Annual Perl Poetry Contest.
A good way to judge the quality of an applicant for a programming job is to give him some discrete task from your company's problem space and half a day to develop a perl script solution. Then have a couple of your better programmers evaluate his work--- not on whether he finished the task, but on whether they would be comfortable picking up the work where the candidate left off.
Perl gets dismissed because so much garbage has been written in it. But the reason why so much garbage has been written in Perl is because that's the best that Joey ---you know Joey, that kid in the mailroom who has been learning to program computers--- could produce. And that POS actually works so here it is 20 years later and we are still using it.
And Joey? He left the mailroom job after a couple of years and now he's some kind of High Mucky-Muck in IT at Corporate HQ.
Don't judge a computer language's goodness by the amount of garbage that has been written in it. Any decent language will allow an idjit to write bad code.
Do judge how limited a language might be by the number and type of arbitrary rules a programmer must deal with. No programmer should have to be concerned with meeting some arbitrary whitespace convention, not while he is actually working on the code. He, or better yet some apprentice programmer, should make the code look pretty after the problems are solved. "While coding, just code."
Oh, fsck Python. There are more important things to think about than levels of indentation.
The point of my earlier post got lost in the reverie.
Python is nothing like the Basic of the 1980s. Basic's development was strongly shaped by the limitations of the hardware it was run on. Python's development is shaped by the self-imposed limitations of the minds of its developers. Two very different things.
I worked with a couple of different varieties of Business Basic between 1986 and 1993. Hewlett-Packard's version was particularly easy to work with.
Basic's two primary advantages in the business office were that
1. it was the first and best developed interpreted language. If your business was successful enough to have a couple of dedicated IT employees, it could afford a minicomputer and could make good use of compiled languages. But compiled languages suck on the PCs that were affordable to small businesses of that time period. The RAM was too tiny and limiting, hard drives were too small and slow for an efficient compiler environment. Some form of Basic was your only way forward.
2. With a good business Basic you could get the point of sales pizzabox PCs generating data for the back office accounting PC while your competitor down the street was still working on how to build a string variable in Pascal. You didn't worry about the other competitors who were trying to use C. Their development cycles were constantly broken as bigger businesses hired away their C programming staff.
Those were the wild and wooly days of cheapernet, LANtastic, and sneakernet, when we were all still buying huge 40 megabyte hard drives that had to be partitioned since DOS was limited to 32 MB. Back when "Windows was a 16-bit GUI running on an 8-bit operating system, written for a 4-bit processor, by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition".
Umm, some things haven't changed that much I guess. I just came across this definition of Windows 10:
Windows 10 (n): A 64-bit "upgrade" to a 32-bit patch for a 16-bit GUI shell running on an 8-bit operating system, written for a 4-bit processor by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition!
I of course use Linux. It's true that during the first decade of switching from Windows to Ubuntu I had a few miserable moments, but now it's all smooth sailing.
True enough. In talking about horizontal speed, I was oversimplifying by ignoring atmospheric drag, which remains a critical factor until about 300,000 feet. I was justified in so doing since the post I was responding to was talking about accelerating straight up as the only requirement to getting to orbit.
On a planet with the mass of Earth and no atmosphere, a horizontal acceleration to 17,770 mph would achieve a (very low) orbit. On the other hand, if we built a levitation device that would take a satellite from Earth's surface to LEO, we would have to move far out of the way when it came crashing back down. You do need 300,000 feet height to clear almost all the atmosphere, but you still need 17,770 mph to achieve an orbit. And as Rutan showed us in Spaceship One, you can get outside of the atmosphere with a lot less fuel than it takes to get into orbit.
The gain in altitude comes mostly from the horizontal acceleration as Earth "falls away" beneath the rocket. The wings on Pegasus provided aerodynamic lift and were not used to "convert the horizontal speed into vertical speed". That would be a silly waste of velocity. Note that the Shuttle bends to a horizontal attitude soon after lift-off. So do all other rockets to orbit.
All you need to get to orbit is 17,770 mph ground speed, and it doesn't matter whether you apply that from ground ---maybe using a rail gun--- or you go up a little ways first. Of course there are advantages in using aerodynamic lift (basically horizontal flight) and in getting above the troposphere asap. But those things just make it easier to get to 17,770 mph ground speed.
The height is not the major problem. When the ISS passes over your head, it is less than 250 miles away from you, if it were on the ground you could drive to it in half a day. The major problem is getting to orbital velocity. A rocket's payload has to be accelerated to 17,700 mph in the right direction to achieve orbit. Allen's Stratolaunch will provide the first 3% of that speed. Compared to a traditional 10 ton rocket to place 1 ton in LEO, there would be a savings of 0.25 tons of rocket fuel. Since Stratolaunch is designed to launch three rockets per trip, there are considerable savings in preparation and maintenance costs. And of course jet fuel is much less expensive than rocket fuel, especially when you consider the special handling rocket fuels require. Air launch to orbit make a lot of sense.
French is one of the official languages of Mali, which was once a French colony. There are numerous native languages with official status. English is NOT an official language.
However in Mali English is the common language for trade, business, and technology.
The same seems to be true for the other impoverished, post-french-colony nations.
English rulz.
Parent post is touching on what is truly important, which is which language, outside of each speaker's native language, is the speaker's audience most likely to be competent in? Unfortunately, author of parent post failed to understand the importance of a common second language.
English is by far the most common second language in the world.
The number of persons for whom English is a second language now far outnumbers the number of persons who speak English as their native tongue. Within business and technology, the overwhelming amount of communication is done in English. There is vastly more publication and correspondence in English between non-native speakers of English than there is between native English speakers.
When a Finn, a Frenchman, and a Brazilian collaborate on some FOSS project like Blender or LibreOffice, they do so in their common tongue, which is English.
English is now used by a larger percentage of the world's population than any other language. It is used by a much larger absolute number of speakers that ever before. And, do to the influence of all the inputs from other languages, it is evolving faster than any other language has ever done.
The obdurate francophile who abhors "le hotdog", and "la weekend" has a point: if there is any artistic value in preserving the french language then outlawing foreign words must be done. But some of those francophiles are being purposely blind to the benefits of having a common global language for business and technology. That kind of purposeful bigotry is destructively stupid.
(As an aside, the French that is spoken in Quebec is relatively unchanged from the historic French of the 1600s, It is the French language spoken in Paris that has been corrupted over time.)
Yes, but its first use would not be to move factory-built houses, but pieces of windmills.
A major limitation and expense on wind farms is the need to transport oversize blades to the sites, which requires some serious road building, considering that many of the best sites are in rugged terrain, and maneuvering a truck with a 36m payload means you need to build a route without any sharp turns. If the airship can also function as a sky crane, then erecting the windmill's mast and attaching the blades is a lot less expensive, too. Very likely the only roads that a wind farm would need would be the kind of dirt roads that would service the power lines.
Other low hanging fruit would include moving lightweight but bulky produce like lettuce from farm to market, a lower cost alternative to helicopter logging, installation and servicing of cell towers in remote sites, and use in regional emergencies such as floods (Katrina) or earthquakes.
We are 20 years overdue for a new airship industry. We had the technology to produce commercially viable airships before the turn of the century. It is long past time to see these air whales overhead.
But the problem with standard English is that it does not exist, has never existed, and is becoming ever more unreal as more and more ESL users force English to grow faster than any language has ever grown before. "Standard English" has never been spoken outside of the classroom, with the exception of talking heads and radio announcers who were trained to use it for sometimes several minutes without a break., and got big paychecks for being able to pull that off. We are now close to the point where more ESL users are using English to get around their lack of a common native tongue than there are native English speakers who are talking to each other. When Chinese businessmen are negotiating deals with Russians, Argentinians, Vietnamese or anyone else who doesn't speak the common Chinese dialect, they do so in English. When a Finn, an Italian, and a Sumatran collaborate on a software project, they use English.
To repeat: the only place where "standard English" has ever existed is in the imagination of grammar nazis. In the real world, so long as you can be understood, your English is considered on a par with everyone else's, no matter how mangled it may seem to a grammar nazi.
The next step in improving English is to return to the older usage of second person singular with singular verb forms. "You is pedantic" was once common and continues to be in use in relict dialects of English as spoken in some isolated communities of southern Appalachia and near the headwaters of the Suwanee River. When Pogo said "We have met the enemy and they is us" (circa My Lai Massacre, 1968) Walt Kelly was using the appropriate verb form to show "they" was the third person singular whose antecedant was "enemy". In much the same way in the construction, "You is an obstinate, pedantic obstructionist" the singular form of "to be" clarifies that "You" is being used as second person singular pronoun. The "You is a buffoon" construction deserves to be brought back from the relict dialogs into mainstream English. Millions of English-as-a-second-language people (who now greatly outnumber native English speakers) would thank us for doing that.
I could go on, but that was sufficient to make my point, and to deliver a bazinga or two to boot.
The Dean might be woman. There is not enough context to tell. So "What did they say?" is the best choice.
The prom queen might be queer. So "What is they wearing?" is completely appropriate.
We now live in a world where there are more than just two genders. That alone is reason enough to use "they" as third person singular in all those instances where the gender cannot be determined by the preceding context.
Yes, the AC has proved his point about the difficulty of learning English by demonstrating that even they* does not know proper English usage, even though they* are self-acknowledged English experts.
*Note that "they" in the above sentence is appropriate under even the more stringent style guides as there is insufficient data in the context to determine if the antecedent of the pronoun is a male with hemorrhoids or a female with PMS.
Nope, "everyone" is single. It is a contraction of "every one", where "every" is a modifier of "one" and means that you must iterate through the collection persons, performing the same operation on each one in turn. (When the collection is not defined by the earlier context, it is assumed to be the entire universe of "ones", which is usually a gross over generalization, so do try to avoid the "everyone" construction).
Don't try to out nazi a grammar nazi unless you know English better than your demonstrated weakness with that language.
Seconker is correct since the noun antecedent of the pronoun 'they' is 'guides' which is plural. The sentence contracts to "Style guides are fucking stupid". "Style guides is fucking stupid" is just plain stupid, stupid.
So basically for Microsoft in this day and age, the end user is not the customer? The end user is a commodity that Microsoft sells to other corporations who are the customers?
Gee, that sounds familiar. I left Microsoft for Linux in 1999 because of it. I have never looked back.
--"Windows is not the answer. Windows is the question. The answer is 'No'." As true now as it was then.
I've been using FF since it was new. I have occasionally looked at other browsers and several are faster than my FF, at least partially because the plugins and modifications that I use slow FF down somewhat. But FF is fast enough that changing to a faster browser would not improve my productivity. And I've got a nice set of plugins and extensions on it that I would have to put together from scratch if I changed browsers. That is, assuming other browsers offered similar features, which as near as I can tell, they do not.
Speed isn't the only criterion for measuring a browser's goodness. The ability to tailor it to your personal workload is much more important these days. And once you've got a browser tweaked to your best practices, do you really need to take the massive hit of finding, installing, and configuring the plugins of some other browser that would duplicate what you've already set up in your old FF?
If you really need a faster browser, most of us who have been around the block would be better off running the same browser and OS on faster hardware. But this doesn't apply to young'uns who have yet to establish productive work habits. Their best approach would be to talk with some older guy who knows what he is doing about which browser he uses, how he has it set up, and what his workflow is.
You don't bother to look up anything you've never been taught, I guess.
The magnetospheres of the planets that have them are several times the radius of the physical planet. But even greater than that, the field effects of standing waves and turbulence in the solar wind extend well beyond the magnetospheres that shape them. Remember (or look it up since it seems like you've never been taught about it) that the solar wind is composed of mono-atomic ions and free electrons moving at very high speeds. What lies within the disk of the heliopause is not some simple outgassing of a steady breeze in all directions, like water welling up from a feeder pipe at the bottom of a circular pond. It is a highly complex dynamo continuously stirred up by Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth.
The same electromagnetic forces that bend and fray comet tails (and cause comets to outgas for that matter) also influence the Sun's corona and possibly deeper structures. The question is not whether there is an influence, but how great is that influence. The correlation between the full solar cycle and the heliocentric conjunctions of Jupiter with Saturn suggest that in some way that influence is rather large.
This is my last post on the subject. Trying to talk sense to someone who does not read up on the topic he claims expertise in is not worthwhile, and I have said everything that is worth saying to the silent audience of this conversation.
As I know I mentioned before, I doubt that there is a gravitationally mediated interaction between Jupiter and the solar cycle, and if there is a electromagnetic interaction, then that would involve Saturn as well as Jupiter, and probably Earth. Both Saturn and Jupiter have a strong impact on the solar wind. During the years when they are in close heliocentric conjunction, Jupiter's magnetotail and the bow wave of Saturn's magnetosphere are trying to occupy the same space. There has got to be some interesting things happening there. I leave it to the Reader to look up the big words.
The Jupiter - Saturn heliocentric conjunction occurs on the average every 20 years, plus or minus 1 year. The last 18 solar cycles occurred on an average every 11.0 years with standard deviation of 1.03 years. But NOTE THIS: what we call the 11 year solar cycle is only half of the full cycle as it takes another half to reverse the Sun's magnetic poles yet again and return Sol to the same state. Running the numbers on the last 8 completed full cycles, the average time is 22 years with a standard deviation of 1.3 years.
This is using a simple model that excludes a third planet that affects the heliosphere, which is Earth. While Earth's magnetosphere is much smaller than Jupiter's or Saturn's, it is active in a nearer-to-the-Sun region where the solar wind is more dense, and it sweeps through the solar wind at a much higher velocity than the more distant planets. I do not pretend to be competent at building a model that would incorporate Earth's possible effects. It is however a reasonable supposition that Earth could bring about the difference between the 22 year full solar cycle and the 20 year Jup - Sat cycle, as well as the occasional breaks in rhythm of the solar cycles, such as the Maunder and Dalton Minimums.
This stuff is not my area of expertise. However I know how to do basic research which is now quite easy with the internet, and I know how to use simple math tools. I also know my limits. I am good for casting doubt on the verbiage of persons who think they know more than is actually within our current universe of knowledge. I am good for suggesting avenues of exploration, especially those that lie between defined areas of study. I refrain from doing anything more than suggesting the possibility of a different, and maybe better, mind map of What's Really Out There.
My thinking has been too Earth-bound to consider the Sol - Jupiter relationship. But I see others are thinking about it; there are several lay articles and apparently some more serious articles on the web. But I haven't done any critical reading on the subject.
There does seem to be a correlation between Jupiter's orbital period and the sunspot cycle as both are roughly 11 years. But if there is an underlying mechanism (not conveniently dismissible as "coincidence"), it seems more likely that the mechanisms are electromagnetic rather than gravitational. Which would suggest a 3 body problem, with Saturn's impact on the electrodynamics modifying any solar - jovian model.
This is not some resurrection of an "electric universe" theory. Jupiter, Saturn, and even Earth all create distortions in the solar wind, and it should hardly be surprising if these large scale distortions did not feedback in some way to the coronal events. Whether this feedback is a significant moderator of coronal activity should be the question; that there is some feedback can be stipulated.
That's one of those foolish rules put forth by the idiocy contingent of the IAU.
The barycenter of the Earth - Moon binary is outside of the Earth's hard inner core, in the region of the liquid outer core. This is the center or neutral point of the tidal forces acting on the Earth. No one has yet looked at the effects of these tides on the outer core's liquidity, or its electromagnetic properties, mostly because astronomers look upward and geologists look downward and there is a very serious failure for either to look at what the other group is finding.
How significant is the displacement of the Earth's core from the barycenter? It is significant enough to cause the Earth's orbit about the Sun to deviate 6,000 miles twelve times a year from what it would be if the Earth was a solitary body, instead of part of a binary system. Depending on your frame of reference, that deviation is twice to four times as much as the radius of the Moon.
In practical terms up until now this has had no direct impact on human activity. That now changes: when we start using laser beams to communicate and control exploration vehicles beyond Earth orbits, we will have to take the binary nature of the Earth - Moon pair into account or the lasers will miss their targets by thousands of miles.
Wow.
TL;DR but I got through enough of it to realize that most, and maybe all, the points are cogent. Above post should be stuffed down the throats of every IAU member who voted for their absurd definition of planet until they can regurgitate those points, with meaning.
Some astronomers are stupid. The phrase "educated beyond the level of their intelligence" comes to mind. This idiots should have been taught somewhere along the way that their expertise in one narrow field does not endow them with the authority to mess about in other disciplines like linguistics.
Good points. But they are basically off topic.
It doesn't matter one whit what terms scientists use in their cloistered jargons. That's why they have jargons.
It does matter when a body of scientists attempts to mold the common tongue to their narrow purposes. Which is what happened with the IAU: they overstepped their area of authority, which is astronomy, to dabble in an area where none of them have any training or standing, which is the study of natural languages, or linguistics. It makes them look like a troop of highly educated baboons, and is one more proof that some people with advanced degrees have been educated beyond the level of their intelligence.
Scientific communities do have an appropriate role in shaping the common tongue, but that is done through education and continued discussion. Never by fiat.
Truth, justice, and The American Way are not science either. Yet these irrational things have more impact on your life than the tiny little subset of the universe that is all that science can ever know.
I do not disagree with you, but I find that your statement has no inherent value and that you are contributing nothing worthwhile to the conversation.
Any "space-trash" that demands to be listed as something else needs to be immediately identified as a "sentient being", and on behalf of all of us Earthlings the UN needs to publicly apologize to him/her/it. That is simple playground rules: you don't want to insult anybody that much bigger than you are.
As to everything else, I think the planetary geologists have it right. If it is big enough to be rounded of its own volition, it is a planet. And planets that go around another planet more quickly than they go around their star are also moons.
Corollary: that makes Earth the larger part of a binary planetary system. Which puts proper emphasis on the way the Moon creates tides that keeps the hydrosphere stirred up, which has had a major impact on how life has evolved here. Exoplanetary explorers should look for other binary planets in the Goldilocks zone as these are much more likely to have life that is similar to Earth life.
(Is a "bazinga!" called for here? Was this just another Sheldon impersonation, or did I accidentally say something insightful?)