Oh, no, it's very practical. What's impractical is removing examination gloves without turning them inside out, so you can reuse them later. Drives me fucking nuts, but when your boss is leaning on you because your facility spends a grand a month on gloves, you don't have much choice.
One of the problems with your statement is that it isn't 80 hours/week of "astronomy." It's 80 hours of astronomy*, classes you don't necessarily want to take, homework, studying, teaching, tutoring, group meetings, safety meetings, department meetings, hiring committee meetings, thesis advisory meetings, seminars, faculty interviews, writing, poster design for conferences, conferences, lab cleaning, fixing the instrument the undergrad broke, fixing the instrument damaged by the leak in the lab above your lab, evacuating the building because the fucking fire alarm keeps getting set off by the HV experiments in the physics lab, and department "fun nights" that you're required to be at for the sake of "fostering intra-departmental communication" or some BS, even if you don't like going to the bar and watching the football/basketball team lose (which they inevitably do). Oddly enough, these outings never occur outside of football/basketball season.
*This describes my chemistry grad school life, but I suspect it applies pretty closely to astronomy, as well.
I did that in my early 20s and it worked great. Now I'm doing it again in my early 30s (third-shift in a QA lab), and fuck, it's hard. I would have never believed how much energy you lose between 22 and 32.
The point of the article, though, is that astronomy grad students (and chemistry grad students, to which I can attest) are not doing this through a few weeks of crunch-time, but for the entirety of their degree (and my institution, average time to PhD was seven years, with a 70% attrition rate).
Crunch-time, it's perfectly understandable - you will see that in many professions for one or three weeks, once or twice a year. But my very first day in grad school, my advisor said to me, "There is no such thing as spring break. Christmas break starts at 8PM on Christmas Eve, and ends on January 2nd. That's your vacation for the year. I expect you here six days a week, including either on Saturdays or Sundays, from 8 AM, until 8 PM, unless you have class or are teaching. And I don't want to see you grading during those hours. If I am here that much, you can be here that much." So while we would often sneak off and pretend to be at class while we were grading, we would still be putting in 75-hour weeks before figuring in study time/unfinished grading/homework, and after accounting for working lunches.
And this was typical in my department, and it's not uncommon in the field at all - when telling my undergrad profs how school was going, most nodded and said, "Yeah, that's why you don't go for a PhD unless you really like chemistry. I loved every minute of grad school!" The ones that didn't say that said instead, "Yeah, that's why you don't go for a PhD unless you really like chem - but you'll be just as miserable at any other school, deal with it."
Everyone else has already said no, but I would like to point out that there is a grain of truth to that statement. . . Einstein's signature on a letter to FDR was the impetus for the Manhattan Project - he was concerned that the Nazis would develop a nuke first.
Cooling would be an issue because you have no air to carry away heat (at least at the LPs, you could build a big heat pipe into the moon). The only reasonable cooling would occur through radiant emittance, and that takes a LONG time to cool things down, and any kind of electrical activity would counteract that without a problem. Sorry, but scifi has lied to you, the cold isn't a problem in space, because the vacuum is very, very insulating.
All modern computers are effectively supercomputers relative to the tech used even as recently as the 90's. A "simple relay station" would be a defacto supercomputer installation simply by using off the shelf parts available at BestBuy.
You can build a supercomputer with cellphones and subscriptions to Rolling Stone and DirecTV?
205.601 Synthetic substances allowed for use in organic crop production.... (a) As algicide, disinfectants, and sanitizer, including irrigation system cleaning systems.
(1) Alcohols.
(i) Ethanol.
(ii) Isopropanol.
(2) Chlorine materials—For pre-harvest use, residual chlorine levels in the water in direct crop contact or as water from cleaning irrigation systems applied to soil must not exceed the maximum residual disinfectant limit under the Safe Drinking Water Act, except that chlorine products may be used in edible sprout production according to EPA label directions.
(i) Calcium hypochlorite.
(ii) Chlorine dioxide.
(iii) Sodium hypochlorite.
(3) Copper sulfate—for use as an algicide in aquatic rice systems, is limited to one application per field during any 24-month period. Application rates are limited to those which do not increase baseline soil test values for copper over a timeframe agreed upon by the producer and accredited certifying agent.
(4) Hydrogen peroxide.
(5) Ozone gas—for use as an irrigation system cleaner only.
(6) Peracetic acid—for use in disinfecting equipment, seed, and asexually propagated planting material.
(7) Soap-based algicide/demossers.
(8) Sodium carbonate peroxyhydrate (CAS #-15630-89-4)—Federal law restricts the use of this substance in food crop production to approved food uses identified on the product label.
(b) As herbicides, weed barriers, as applicable.
(1) Herbicides, soap-based—for use in farmstead maintenance (roadways, ditches, right of ways, building perimeters) and ornamental crops.
(2) Mulches.
(i) Newspaper or other recycled paper, without glossy or colored inks.
(ii) Plastic mulch and covers (petroleum-based other than polyvinyl chloride (PVC)).
(c) As compost feedstocks—Newspapers or other recycled paper, without glossy or colored inks.
(d) As animal repellents—Soaps, ammonium—for use as a large animal repellant only, no contact with soil or edible portion of crop.
(e) As insecticides (including acaricides or mite control).
(1) Ammonium carbonate—for use as bait in insect traps only, no direct contact with crop or soil.
(2) Aqueous potassium silicate (CAS #-1312-76-1)—the silica, used in the manufacture of potassium silicate, must be sourced from naturally occurring sand.
(3) Boric acid—structural pest control, no direct contact with organic food or crops.
(4) Copper sulfate—for use as tadpole shrimp control in aquatic rice production, is limited to one application per field during any 24-month period. Application rates are limited to levels which do not increase baseline soil test values for copper over a timeframe agreed upon by the producer and accredited certifying agent.
(5) Elemental sulfur.
(6) Lime sulfur—including calcium polysulfide.
(7) Oils, horticultural—narrow range oils as dormant, suffocating, and summer oils.
(1) Sulfur dioxide—underground rodent control only (smoke bombs).
(2) Vitamin D3.
(h) As slug or snail bait. Ferric phosphate (CAS # 10045-86-0).
(i) As plant disease control.
(1) Aqueous potassium silicate (CAS #-1312-76-1)—the silica, used in the manufacture of potassium silicate, must be sourced from naturally occurring sand.
I think he's referring to the time Amazon deleted copies of 1984 and Animal Farm, ironically enough. Amazon had sold a version to which it didn't have the rights, so when it discovered the error, it deleted everyone's copies and refunded the cash. While Amazon later promised to never do it again, they do have the capability to do so, which makes people understandably nervous. That is one of several reasons I went with a Nook instead of a Kindle - while B&N probably has the same capability, at least they haven't exercised it yet.
I think my favorite thing about my Nook is that I can get old, out-of-print, and barely-extant scifi books that are acknowledged classics but will probably never be printed again - often for free, because the copyright has expired. My Nook has over 200 ebooks on it, from Gutenberg and Baen and other sites, and I've only bought seven of them, I believe.
Sorry, I don't have and won't have one of the little crappy e-reader devices where I can't even read a fucking book as intended.
You mean a computer? Because they read eBooks as well.
Oh, then what's the point of doing so? Are you homeless and unable to store books anywhere? No?
Then where's the advantage?
Clearly you've never moved your books out of your mother's basement. Once is all it will take to make you appreciate not having to haul seven bookcases-worth to a new home (or even just move them because of a backed-up drain).
Now that the tech is finally usable, and certain readers have backlights (so you can read in bed with someone cuddled up against you asleep), they really are nifty little devices. Especially since I'm out of space for more bookshelves.
She's a pretty valuable research colleague - easily distracted and a bit of prima donna, but she does provide her own lab test animals and she's immune to prosecution for ethics violations.
We have a dog too. He doesn't get credit.
So your dog is the undergrad that does all of the actual experiments?
No, he's telling you that politicians (i.e. the FCC in the US) are the reason even a company like Apple can't just take their cash and launch their own telecom and have any chance of competing alongside the Big Three - because they control the spectrum allocations. Doesn't matter how many iPhone 6s you sell when you only get enough spectrum to support half a million of them.
Same with a cable company. Or a railroad. Or a power company. There are plenty of industries where the government stifles competition.
I believe it would technically be okay, but doubt IUPAC would allow it. We do have yttrium, ytterbium, terbium, and erbium, all named after a tiny village in Sweden, but they were all named 20 or 30 years before IUPAC was formed.
Given that the scientist's last name is Morita, I figured they call it Moratorium, although with a name like that it might be a while before he discovers another one.
A Japanese scientist thought he had discovered technetium in the early 1900s and named it nipponium, but it was actually just an impure sample of rhenium. IUPAC policy states that any name used temporarily or even incorrectly cannot ever be used again, as it would cause confusion with the literature ("Okay, so this paper says nipponium forms an alloy with carbon, iron, and silicon, while this paper says nipponium only alloys with transition metals!").
No, actually, Japan shall not call it that. That's what IUPAC's temporary systematic name for it is, as discovering the transuranics is often hotly contested. IUPAC has a Greek and Latin-based naming scheme that generates names for the undiscovered elements. So even though we've never seen a g-block element, and probably won't for at least a decade or two, IUPAC already has temporary names for them. . . well, names beyond eka-plutonium or whatever floats your Russian bigamist boat. Once the existence of an element has been confirmed "beyond a reasonable doubt," then IUPAC decides what to call it officially, based in part on the recommendations of the discover (but they don't always follow the suggestion).
Some authors and publishers include the temporary names and symbols on periodic tables after someone (or multiple someones) announces they've discovered an element and before IUPAC has fully accepted the existence of the element, but this is technically incorrect.
Micro-USB 5 pin also works on my old Sanyo dumbphone, my Nook, my wireless headset, and my Nikon point & shoot. One plug for four devices (since the dumbphone got retired when I finally got an Android phone about six months ago. The only other things I plug in to charge are my laptop and my 3DS.
Eh, that's not really PETA's style. That's more ALF and ELF. Not saying that the ALF members don't donate to PETA, but they don't get the same kind of organizational support from PETA that they do from federally-acknowledged terrorist organizations.
Or once he arrived he saw the big check they had cut him.
No, I'm not saying PETA is right - I'm just saying that for every time PETA has lied to me, so has a corrupt politician.
Frankly, I'll eat tasty critters even if I know they have suffered. I think the adrenaline in their systems when they are painfully slaughtered makes them tastier.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, no, it's very practical. What's impractical is removing examination gloves without turning them inside out, so you can reuse them later. Drives me fucking nuts, but when your boss is leaning on you because your facility spends a grand a month on gloves, you don't have much choice.
So politics is really hard? Explains the quality of the candidates this year. . .
That stuff all gets done while code is compiling!
One of the problems with your statement is that it isn't 80 hours/week of "astronomy." It's 80 hours of astronomy*, classes you don't necessarily want to take, homework, studying, teaching, tutoring, group meetings, safety meetings, department meetings, hiring committee meetings, thesis advisory meetings, seminars, faculty interviews, writing, poster design for conferences, conferences, lab cleaning, fixing the instrument the undergrad broke, fixing the instrument damaged by the leak in the lab above your lab, evacuating the building because the fucking fire alarm keeps getting set off by the HV experiments in the physics lab, and department "fun nights" that you're required to be at for the sake of "fostering intra-departmental communication" or some BS, even if you don't like going to the bar and watching the football/basketball team lose (which they inevitably do). Oddly enough, these outings never occur outside of football/basketball season.
*This describes my chemistry grad school life, but I suspect it applies pretty closely to astronomy, as well.
I did that in my early 20s and it worked great. Now I'm doing it again in my early 30s (third-shift in a QA lab), and fuck, it's hard. I would have never believed how much energy you lose between 22 and 32.
The point of the article, though, is that astronomy grad students (and chemistry grad students, to which I can attest) are not doing this through a few weeks of crunch-time, but for the entirety of their degree (and my institution, average time to PhD was seven years, with a 70% attrition rate).
Crunch-time, it's perfectly understandable - you will see that in many professions for one or three weeks, once or twice a year. But my very first day in grad school, my advisor said to me, "There is no such thing as spring break. Christmas break starts at 8PM on Christmas Eve, and ends on January 2nd. That's your vacation for the year. I expect you here six days a week, including either on Saturdays or Sundays, from 8 AM, until 8 PM, unless you have class or are teaching. And I don't want to see you grading during those hours. If I am here that much, you can be here that much." So while we would often sneak off and pretend to be at class while we were grading, we would still be putting in 75-hour weeks before figuring in study time/unfinished grading/homework, and after accounting for working lunches.
And this was typical in my department, and it's not uncommon in the field at all - when telling my undergrad profs how school was going, most nodded and said, "Yeah, that's why you don't go for a PhD unless you really like chemistry. I loved every minute of grad school!" The ones that didn't say that said instead, "Yeah, that's why you don't go for a PhD unless you really like chem - but you'll be just as miserable at any other school, deal with it."
Everyone else has already said no, but I would like to point out that there is a grain of truth to that statement. . . Einstein's signature on a letter to FDR was the impetus for the Manhattan Project - he was concerned that the Nazis would develop a nuke first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_letter
Cooling would be an issue because you have no air to carry away heat (at least at the LPs, you could build a big heat pipe into the moon). The only reasonable cooling would occur through radiant emittance, and that takes a LONG time to cool things down, and any kind of electrical activity would counteract that without a problem. Sorry, but scifi has lied to you, the cold isn't a problem in space, because the vacuum is very, very insulating.
All modern computers are effectively supercomputers relative to the tech used even as recently as the 90's. A "simple relay station" would be a defacto supercomputer installation simply by using off the shelf parts available at BestBuy.
You can build a supercomputer with cellphones and subscriptions to Rolling Stone and DirecTV?
Quiet, you! You're shattering the hipsters' fantasies!
A partial list of what's allowed in the US:
205.601 Synthetic substances allowed for use in organic crop production. ...
(a) As algicide, disinfectants, and sanitizer, including irrigation system cleaning systems.
(1) Alcohols.
(i) Ethanol.
(ii) Isopropanol.
(2) Chlorine materials—For pre-harvest use, residual chlorine levels in the water in direct crop contact or as water from cleaning irrigation systems applied to soil must not exceed the maximum residual disinfectant limit under the Safe Drinking Water Act, except that chlorine products may be used in edible sprout production according to EPA label directions.
(i) Calcium hypochlorite.
(ii) Chlorine dioxide.
(iii) Sodium hypochlorite.
(3) Copper sulfate—for use as an algicide in aquatic rice systems, is limited to one application per field during any 24-month period. Application rates are limited to those which do not increase baseline soil test values for copper over a timeframe agreed upon by the producer and accredited certifying agent.
(4) Hydrogen peroxide.
(5) Ozone gas—for use as an irrigation system cleaner only.
(6) Peracetic acid—for use in disinfecting equipment, seed, and asexually propagated planting material.
(7) Soap-based algicide/demossers.
(8) Sodium carbonate peroxyhydrate (CAS #-15630-89-4)—Federal law restricts the use of this substance in food crop production to approved food uses identified on the product label.
(b) As herbicides, weed barriers, as applicable.
(1) Herbicides, soap-based—for use in farmstead maintenance (roadways, ditches, right of ways, building perimeters) and ornamental crops.
(2) Mulches.
(i) Newspaper or other recycled paper, without glossy or colored inks.
(ii) Plastic mulch and covers (petroleum-based other than polyvinyl chloride (PVC)).
(c) As compost feedstocks—Newspapers or other recycled paper, without glossy or colored inks.
(d) As animal repellents—Soaps, ammonium—for use as a large animal repellant only, no contact with soil or edible portion of crop.
(e) As insecticides (including acaricides or mite control).
(1) Ammonium carbonate—for use as bait in insect traps only, no direct contact with crop or soil.
(2) Aqueous potassium silicate (CAS #-1312-76-1)—the silica, used in the manufacture of potassium silicate, must be sourced from naturally occurring sand.
(3) Boric acid—structural pest control, no direct contact with organic food or crops.
(4) Copper sulfate—for use as tadpole shrimp control in aquatic rice production, is limited to one application per field during any 24-month period. Application rates are limited to levels which do not increase baseline soil test values for copper over a timeframe agreed upon by the producer and accredited certifying agent.
(5) Elemental sulfur.
(6) Lime sulfur—including calcium polysulfide.
(7) Oils, horticultural—narrow range oils as dormant, suffocating, and summer oils.
(8) Soaps, insecticidal.
(9) Sticky traps/barriers.
(10) Sucrose octanoate esters (CAS #s—42922-74-7; 58064-47-4)—in accordance with approved labeling.
(f) As insect management. Pheromones.
(g) As rodenticides.
(1) Sulfur dioxide—underground rodent control only (smoke bombs).
(2) Vitamin D3 .
(h) As slug or snail bait. Ferric phosphate (CAS # 10045-86-0).
(i) As plant disease control.
(1) Aqueous potassium silicate (CAS #-1312-76-1)—the silica, used in the manufacture of potassium silicate, must be sourced from naturally occurring sand.
(2) Coppers, fixed—copper hydroxide, coppe
I think he's referring to the time Amazon deleted copies of 1984 and Animal Farm , ironically enough. Amazon had sold a version to which it didn't have the rights, so when it discovered the error, it deleted everyone's copies and refunded the cash. While Amazon later promised to never do it again, they do have the capability to do so, which makes people understandably nervous. That is one of several reasons I went with a Nook instead of a Kindle - while B&N probably has the same capability, at least they haven't exercised it yet.
I think my favorite thing about my Nook is that I can get old, out-of-print, and barely-extant scifi books that are acknowledged classics but will probably never be printed again - often for free, because the copyright has expired. My Nook has over 200 ebooks on it, from Gutenberg and Baen and other sites, and I've only bought seven of them, I believe.
Sorry, I don't have and won't have one of the little crappy e-reader devices where I can't even read a fucking book as intended.
You mean a computer? Because they read eBooks as well.
Oh, then what's the point of doing so? Are you homeless and unable to store books anywhere? No?
Then where's the advantage?
Clearly you've never moved your books out of your mother's basement. Once is all it will take to make you appreciate not having to haul seven bookcases-worth to a new home (or even just move them because of a backed-up drain).
Now that the tech is finally usable, and certain readers have backlights (so you can read in bed with someone cuddled up against you asleep), they really are nifty little devices. Especially since I'm out of space for more bookshelves.
I'd tend to think Gaiman is a wee bit more flexible than either Clancy or Patterson.
So does Amanda Palmer. /rimshot
She's a pretty valuable research colleague - easily distracted and a bit of prima donna, but she does provide her own lab test animals and she's immune to prosecution for ethics violations.
We have a dog too. He doesn't get credit.
So your dog is the undergrad that does all of the actual experiments?
No, he's telling you that politicians (i.e. the FCC in the US) are the reason even a company like Apple can't just take their cash and launch their own telecom and have any chance of competing alongside the Big Three - because they control the spectrum allocations. Doesn't matter how many iPhone 6s you sell when you only get enough spectrum to support half a million of them.
Same with a cable company. Or a railroad. Or a power company. There are plenty of industries where the government stifles competition.
I believe it would technically be okay, but doubt IUPAC would allow it. We do have yttrium, ytterbium, terbium, and erbium, all named after a tiny village in Sweden, but they were all named 20 or 30 years before IUPAC was formed.
Given that the scientist's last name is Morita, I figured they call it Moratorium, although with a name like that it might be a while before he discovers another one.
Better than karatekidium.
A Japanese scientist thought he had discovered technetium in the early 1900s and named it nipponium, but it was actually just an impure sample of rhenium. IUPAC policy states that any name used temporarily or even incorrectly cannot ever be used again, as it would cause confusion with the literature ("Okay, so this paper says nipponium forms an alloy with carbon, iron, and silicon, while this paper says nipponium only alloys with transition metals!").
So unfortunately there will never be a nipponium.
No, actually, Japan shall not call it that. That's what IUPAC's temporary systematic name for it is, as discovering the transuranics is often hotly contested. IUPAC has a Greek and Latin-based naming scheme that generates names for the undiscovered elements. So even though we've never seen a g-block element, and probably won't for at least a decade or two, IUPAC already has temporary names for them. . . well, names beyond eka-plutonium or whatever floats your Russian bigamist boat. Once the existence of an element has been confirmed "beyond a reasonable doubt," then IUPAC decides what to call it officially, based in part on the recommendations of the discover (but they don't always follow the suggestion).
Some authors and publishers include the temporary names and symbols on periodic tables after someone (or multiple someones) announces they've discovered an element and before IUPAC has fully accepted the existence of the element, but this is technically incorrect.
Of course CNN has no news about it, neither Britney Spears nor the likelihood of Hell existing were involved.
You realize Apple's now going to do that on the next model and then sue you for stealing their idea, right?
(And then probably sue me for having this idea)
Micro-USB 5 pin also works on my old Sanyo dumbphone, my Nook, my wireless headset, and my Nikon point & shoot. One plug for four devices (since the dumbphone got retired when I finally got an Android phone about six months ago. The only other things I plug in to charge are my laptop and my 3DS.
So you can read letters on your phone that are 4mm tall, but can't see a connecter that's 7mm tall?
Eh, that's not really PETA's style. That's more ALF and ELF. Not saying that the ALF members don't donate to PETA, but they don't get the same kind of organizational support from PETA that they do from federally-acknowledged terrorist organizations.
Or once he arrived he saw the big check they had cut him.
No, I'm not saying PETA is right - I'm just saying that for every time PETA has lied to me, so has a corrupt politician.
Frankly, I'll eat tasty critters even if I know they have suffered. I think the adrenaline in their systems when they are painfully slaughtered makes them tastier.