The Minoan people of ancient Crete were well on the way to an industrial revolution of of their own that predated that of England by a couple of thousand years. If it wasn't for an inopportune volcanic eruption which completely wiped the Minoans out back around 1400 BCE,
A volcano... or the horrific results of their experimentation with bio-engineering and the creation of a man-bull hybrid?!
BP has made a lot of noise about how they've paid more than that already, $300 mil+ I remember reading.
But speaking of closing the barn door, if that sounds like it's just PR, well the PR loss of having this spill go on right as they're talking about expanding off-shore drilling is costing them a lot more money than they're worried about spending on cleanup. Higher liability for this spill means little compared to losing out on profits from a bunch of future wells. Even if they're only delayed.
Of course the fact that they are in fact, umm, drilling the relief well is quickly lost on mostly everyone.
Um, no it isn't forgotten. It's very good they're doing that for the most likely case that nothing else will work, which makes sense given what an enormous task it is doing anything that deep.
But you're damn right I'd go ape-shit if they did nothing else, because it's unacceptable for them to not do everything possible to try to stop it earlier.
You're also right, they're laughing all the way to the bank either way.
If they want to keep laughing, they'd best get to proving that we have a solution to massive spills like this than letting them spew for months.
There are serious risks for BP here, and serious costs too.
Politically, there are big risks. It's one thing to dump a bunch of oil and ruin the lives of a bunch of fishermen on a coast in Alaska with a drunken captain for a scapegoat. There are major population centers along the gulf that are going to notice and care if their coast gets slimed. If they can't stop this soon while the damage is minimal, and the ultimate culprit isn't even human error but the difficulty caused by the insane pressures deep in the ocean? Yeah there goes their drilling plans, future profits from future rigs *poof*, up in smoke.
And forget the cleanup, they are losing serious money right now! You think BP doesn't really want to reclaim 85% of the spilling oil by putting a dome over the spill asap? Then they can spend the next few months making money off this well before the relief well is done and they seal it off. Make more money and secure their future by reassuring people that the risk of future drilling is minimal?
Yeah, I have every reason to believe that BP is doing everything they can to stop the leak asap. They have every incentive to do so, and I doubt any of it is just a show. It's still true that it's not extremely likely there's anything they can do. We're all resigned to that, though we all have motivation to try.
But don't worry, I realize BP will still end up making money, and that they don't fundamentally give a shit about oil spills other than as factors in a spreadsheet.
The California seafloor leaks are much larger. I don't think they know exactly how much, but this source quotes "8-80 Exxon Valdez spills", I would guess they mean annually. That's somewhere between 86.4 and 864 million gallons.
They're talking about the total volume of oil residue contained in the down-stream sediments in the seabed, deposited over an unknown period of time. And it seems like they're talking equivalent pre-biodegraded volume, but I'm not sure.
The statement about the rate of seepage was slightly further down:
There is an oil spill everyday at Coal Oil Point (COP), the natural seeps off Santa Barbara, where 20-25 tons of oil have leaked from the seafloor each day for the last several hundred thousand years.
That's my understanding as well, yep. It's a brilliant way to compensate for drag without having to measure the drag, just the resulting deviation from freefall.
The NASA and JPL mission pages don't make it clear that this is unfunded as of yet either, which is annoying since I've been reading up on this experiment for some time and am pretty excited about it!
I, too, would love to see LISA fly. We really do need robust tests of gravity waves, and a whole new world of observations will open up to us if it pans out.
One of the coolest things about the mission itself that I read about is the 'drag free' aspect. To ensure that the test masses are in free-fall around the sun without interference by things like the pesky solar wind, they're housed free-floating in a chamber inside the LISA spacecrafts themselves. The spacecraft absorbs the solar wind or other outside forces while measuring any change in relative position to the test mass and using micro-thrusters to keep itself centered on the mass and thus in the same free-fall drag-less orbit. Effin cool imo, even if I don't think it's first time it's been done.:)
OK, let's ignore for a moment the fact that water vapor is a greenhouse gas responsible for up to 76% of the greenhouse effect (as opposed to CO2 which is responsible for 1/3) of that.
Water vapor traps in a lot of heat on the earth, but water vapor in the form of clouds reflects a lot of energy; raising albedo by seeding clouds for a net loss of heat could actually work. Better yet the amount of water vapor in the air is naturally regulated, so excess water vapor and clouds are not so difficult to remove as CO2.
Let's also ignore the magical energy source required to pump all this water into the air.
Clean Coal, with the magic of Mr. Clean! =D
What could possibly go wrong? Where can I buy stock?/sarcasm
Yeah, cus Bill Gates has never been wrong before! Wait, what was that about a chasm? Yaaaaaaaah!
Studies seem to always show that a population always had those traits. To put it another way: We've never had an experiment that produced a new trait previously impossible to express with the existing genetic encoding.
That's simply wrong. We've observed mutations creating new features in the lab. "Seems" is an insufficient weasel word for a lack of looking.
I'll give you that. But the counter-point is that the bible, God's Word, makes claims and implications about speciation. So creationists are not about to say "oh, it looks like we observe something contrary to what God says" and just take that at face value.
No it doesn't. Nothing in the Bible can possibly be construed as something as specific as a limit on the mutability of DNA and a declaration that mutations cannot happen ergo new traits cannot arise. That's just a ludicrous amount to read into the word "kinds". The Bible and evolutionary science don't contradict each other at all.
But yes I'm aware you aren't going to believe any science that you think does contradict, that's very clear. Mutations don't exist, or are necessarily bad, whatever it takes, got it.
Well, talking about it like it was a "pre-enumerated list" is really a disservice to God and an underestimation of what the genetic code is capable of.
It's your description, and a really big static list is still a big static list, inherently simpler than the same incredibly expressive source of information but with the capability to change over time. Which it demonstrably does. Not my fault you don't like me pointing out this is putting an arbitrary limit God.
And they come away with a solid foundation, both fulfilled scientifically and amazed and delighted in what their God has done.
I am fulfilled scientifically and delighted by what God has done. Every time I learn about the increasing complexity and sophistication yet elegance of this universe I'm more amazed by Him. I'm more amazed by an ancient earth, where whole classes of animals with unique traits arose, then vanished never to be seen again, and things the earth has never seen before arose after them. I'm not going to disbelieve the evidence of the world He created because it doesn't match what I think a 500-word summary of the creation of the universe was trying to say. I believe God wanted me to read those words and see His hands in forming of the universe, not read it like a biology textbook.
You ignore inconvenient science and call yourself fulfilled because the box made of words you've put God in hasn't been disturbed.
Don't pretend those are the same.
God and His universe is more amazing than you think.
Any bacteria, etc. that we might transfer to Mars should cause us no worries.
Oh yeah. Because these organisms might have the same origins, we shouldn't concern ourselves with the consequences of introducing earth bacteria.
Just like introducing species into new ecosystems on earth, because hey all the life came from earth, is something you can do willy-nilly with no care since it never has negative consequences.
So okay, what happens when we figure out that life on Mars and earth did have a common ancestor, but the Martian life was different enough that it was worth preserving and studying? Only now it's gone because nobody cared to preserve it?
I'm not saying anything is or isn't going to happen, but acting like the issue of damaging an extra-terrestrial environment is irrelevant because of panspermia isn't sophisticated, it's retarded.
Let's at least get to the point where we know if there is life on Mars, and then what it looks like, how robust the ecosystem is, before we just abandon all consideration of contaminating Mars, okay?
It's always the case that a minority population, with a trait that makes them more suitable to their environment, survives better than the majority population lacking the traits to survive in their environment.
How did that trait appear?
It actually gives more credit to God's than any other ideas we might have had about it.
I think it gives Him more credit to accept the existence of both natural selection to choose among traits, and with a mechanism for new traits to arise. It takes both to achieve the tremendous and changing diversity of the world's life, where life that exists now has features completely new and never seen in previous life.
It's an interesting new line for Creationists to draw in the sand, where trait selection is okay and species changing over time is okay, but God must have had a fixed set of possible features all laid out in advance and that list can never change. Such a pre-enumerated list carried down through the ages seems to lack the elegance that you so admire in natural selection, but whatever. Point is it's just another way for the narrow-minded to place a completely artificial limitation on the capabilities of God and His plan, and thereby claim reality could not work that way.
But the common idea of evolution, when used in contexts like this, is that progressive genetic changes are occurring causing a gain of a trait that did not previously exist in the genetic code. This is never the case.
It is frequently the case, observable in the human record, in the lab, and elsewhere. New traits arise that did not exist before. Some of them are bad traits, some are good traits, and which survive is based on natural selection.
Natural selection selects only from traits that exist, this is true and I'm glad you're comfortable with it. However there are traits that demonstrably did not exist at one time, and which later did. It's not a mystery how this happens. Mutations happen all the time. Once the mutation exists, then Natural Selection happens.
The process is described in horticulture textbooks, and is known to be important in at least a few species. This provides a path that internal parasites can use to spread among a clump of trees.
Stands of Live Oaks in particular are susceptible to the spread of oak wilt due to interconnected root systems. That's why often times the first thing arborists will do when combating oak wilt is dig a circular trench around the affected trees in order to cut any roots that might spread the fungus elsewhere.
Sometimes it doesn't work since the fungus has already spread to more trees that just haven't shown symptoms yet. Oak wilt is a serious problem, especially if you're trying to preserve the remaining habitat of species like the Golden-cheeked Warbler.
The myth that interbreedability is the defining characteristic of a species is common, but it's a myth nonetheless.
Well, the reality is that species is not a terribly well defined entity. Attempts to create precise definitions arise from the human desire for neat classifications, not any requirement of nature. Inter-breedability is a definition, but not one that is heavily used anymore because it fails to capture a great deal of nuance.
So it's not a good definition, but it is a useful metric in one respect, which is that if two populations biologically can't interbreed then they are definitely different species since there's no way for genetic information to pass between them.
Ring species are an interesting corner case because sometimes the groups at the two ends of the ring can't interbreed directly, but they are interebreeding indirectly as they hybridize with neighbors going the other direction around the ring, eventually sharing their genetic material.
A blow from the side though (and usually a 2nd cartridge wedged into the unit to hold the loaded one against the contacts tighter) would get it going in a jiffy.
Seems the NES was the only system with this problem though (no doubt due to their goofy front-load spring-loaded design).
As the proud owner of a still-working but quite wonkey NES, and I can tell you that you are correct on both counts. In reverse order:
The connector does in fact suck, and makes poor contact because of the spring design. This is basically the entirety of the problem right there. The top-loader NES doesn't have this issue like every other console didn't, and if you used a Game Genie in your NES the problem would mostly go away as well (since it was designed to make contact with the connector when the cartridge holder was up).
Blowing definitely works, but the reason it works has nothing to do with dust or anything. It's because the humidity in your breath increases the conductivity so the crappy contact the cartridge makes will be enough.
Once I learned this, I stopped doing focused blowing from the side to try to get non-existent dust out, and instead use big open-mouth puffs. Works much better.
This is one of the main reasons that military weapons are designed to wound rather than kill.
Wounding may be more likely due to the choice of smaller fmj rounds for assault rifles, but they were not designed specifically to be less than lethal. The vast majority of military weapons are clearly designed for killing not wounding, and weapons designed for such are prohibited by convention. A hollowpoint of the same caliber may be more likely to kill, but they are banned for every caliber because they cause severe wounds.
Assault rifles may use punier rounds than hunting weapons* because militaries figured out that you don't need high-caliber rounds to disable or kill an enemy soldier, what you need is to hit them. The needs of an assault rifle are very different than a hunting rifle. Rate of fire, clip size, and weight are the most important things in an infantry weapon, not stopping power of individual rounds. NATO settled on the 5.53 not because the 7.6mm was too big and more likely to kill someone, they settled on the smaller one because they found little to no loss in effectiveness from doing so.
The military happily uses vehicle-mounted.50 cal machine guns (or sniper rifles, which are an exception to the non-use of hollow points) against infantry when they can, plus plenty of other lethal weapons.:P
* I guess. The.22 is still popular for hunting, is it not?
Yeah but what good is it going to do NASA when the pirates figure out how to work Voyager's data into a playable version of AC3? They want the science data!
[Updated at 12:11 p.m.] A patch of oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been found on Louisiana's Freemason Island Thursday, the Coast Guard reported.
[Updated at 12:27 p.m.] Two Coast Guard teams were scrambled to reset protective booms around Louisiana's Freemason Island after it was reported oil had reached there from the Gulf of Mexico. The area is located the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana's St. Bernard Parish. The amount of oil that reached shore was not immediately known.
Trace amounts of sheen from the undersea gusher have been reported to have reached the shores of southeastern Louisiana over the past week, but the landfall reported Thursday marks the first confirmation of oil hitting the shore, said John Curry, a spokesman for well owner BP.
And guess what's in the process of breeding on Freemason Island right now?
Go Coast Guard. Here's hoping they succeed, and they can stop the damage while it's still minimal. Let's hope the booms stay this time. Not that this will help when the adult birds go to fish beyond the booms as seabirds are wont to do.
But hey I bet you think the Coast Guard is wasting their time since the spill will just clean itself up naturally and not hurt anything, just like natural oil seeps, right?
Slashdot Mirror
The Minoan people of ancient Crete were well on the way to an industrial revolution of of their own that predated that of England by a couple of thousand years. If it wasn't for an inopportune volcanic eruption which completely wiped the Minoans out back around 1400 BCE,
A volcano... or the horrific results of their experimentation with bio-engineering and the creation of a man-bull hybrid?!
Food for thought.
BP has made a lot of noise about how they've paid more than that already, $300 mil+ I remember reading.
But speaking of closing the barn door, if that sounds like it's just PR, well the PR loss of having this spill go on right as they're talking about expanding off-shore drilling is costing them a lot more money than they're worried about spending on cleanup. Higher liability for this spill means little compared to losing out on profits from a bunch of future wells. Even if they're only delayed.
Of course the fact that they are in fact, umm, drilling the relief well is quickly lost on mostly everyone.
Um, no it isn't forgotten. It's very good they're doing that for the most likely case that nothing else will work, which makes sense given what an enormous task it is doing anything that deep.
But you're damn right I'd go ape-shit if they did nothing else, because it's unacceptable for them to not do everything possible to try to stop it earlier.
You're also right, they're laughing all the way to the bank either way.
If they want to keep laughing, they'd best get to proving that we have a solution to massive spills like this than letting them spew for months.
There are serious risks for BP here, and serious costs too.
Politically, there are big risks. It's one thing to dump a bunch of oil and ruin the lives of a bunch of fishermen on a coast in Alaska with a drunken captain for a scapegoat. There are major population centers along the gulf that are going to notice and care if their coast gets slimed. If they can't stop this soon while the damage is minimal, and the ultimate culprit isn't even human error but the difficulty caused by the insane pressures deep in the ocean? Yeah there goes their drilling plans, future profits from future rigs *poof*, up in smoke.
And forget the cleanup, they are losing serious money right now! You think BP doesn't really want to reclaim 85% of the spilling oil by putting a dome over the spill asap? Then they can spend the next few months making money off this well before the relief well is done and they seal it off. Make more money and secure their future by reassuring people that the risk of future drilling is minimal?
Yeah, I have every reason to believe that BP is doing everything they can to stop the leak asap. They have every incentive to do so, and I doubt any of it is just a show. It's still true that it's not extremely likely there's anything they can do. We're all resigned to that, though we all have motivation to try.
But don't worry, I realize BP will still end up making money, and that they don't fundamentally give a shit about oil spills other than as factors in a spreadsheet.
The California seafloor leaks are much larger. I don't think they know exactly how much, but this source quotes "8-80 Exxon Valdez spills", I would guess they mean annually. That's somewhere between 86.4 and 864 million gallons.
They're talking about the total volume of oil residue contained in the down-stream sediments in the seabed, deposited over an unknown period of time. And it seems like they're talking equivalent pre-biodegraded volume, but I'm not sure.
The statement about the rate of seepage was slightly further down:
There is an oil spill everyday at Coal Oil Point (COP), the natural seeps off Santa Barbara, where 20-25 tons of oil have leaked from the seafloor each day for the last several hundred thousand years.
25 tons/day * 7.3 bbl/ton * 42 gal/bbl = 7665 gallons/day.
That's tiny compared to this spill at 200,000 gal/day.
I thought this was a random troll, but I looked into it and the figures check out looking back as far as 1960. I guess I'll add this one to the list:
* Global warming is inversely proportional to number of pirates.
* Global warming is directly proportional to cultural acceptance of homosexuality.
Thus explaining how the Pirates of the Caribbean series failed to have the expected cooling effect.
But wouldn't that mean the cube's trajectory lead into the sun?
It'll be orbiting the sun, in an orbit much like earth's.
That's my understanding as well, yep. It's a brilliant way to compensate for drag without having to measure the drag, just the resulting deviation from freefall.
The NASA and JPL mission pages don't make it clear that this is unfunded as of yet either, which is annoying since I've been reading up on this experiment for some time and am pretty excited about it!
I, too, would love to see LISA fly. We really do need robust tests of gravity waves, and a whole new world of observations will open up to us if it pans out.
One of the coolest things about the mission itself that I read about is the 'drag free' aspect. To ensure that the test masses are in free-fall around the sun without interference by things like the pesky solar wind, they're housed free-floating in a chamber inside the LISA spacecrafts themselves. The spacecraft absorbs the solar wind or other outside forces while measuring any change in relative position to the test mass and using micro-thrusters to keep itself centered on the mass and thus in the same free-fall drag-less orbit. Effin cool imo, even if I don't think it's first time it's been done. :)
OK, let's ignore for a moment the fact that water vapor is a greenhouse gas responsible for up to 76% of the greenhouse effect (as opposed to CO2 which is responsible for 1/3) of that.
Water vapor traps in a lot of heat on the earth, but water vapor in the form of clouds reflects a lot of energy; raising albedo by seeding clouds for a net loss of heat could actually work. Better yet the amount of water vapor in the air is naturally regulated, so excess water vapor and clouds are not so difficult to remove as CO2.
Let's also ignore the magical energy source required to pump all this water into the air.
Clean Coal, with the magic of Mr. Clean! =D
What could possibly go wrong? Where can I buy stock? /sarcasm
Yeah, cus Bill Gates has never been wrong before! Wait, what was that about a chasm? Yaaaaaaaah!
Relativity makes a mess of our sense of "now".
Yes, it can be very confusing.
Sounds like (Academic) Publisher's Clearinghouse:
You may have already won a PhD!
A bunch of galaxies in an image != galaxy cluster.
But hey, links to the Hubble UDF are always enjoyed. :)
Studies seem to always show that a population always had those traits. To put it another way: We've never had an experiment that produced a new trait previously impossible to express with the existing genetic encoding.
That's simply wrong. We've observed mutations creating new features in the lab. "Seems" is an insufficient weasel word for a lack of looking.
I'll give you that. But the counter-point is that the bible, God's Word, makes claims and implications about speciation. So creationists are not about to say "oh, it looks like we observe something contrary to what God says" and just take that at face value.
No it doesn't. Nothing in the Bible can possibly be construed as something as specific as a limit on the mutability of DNA and a declaration that mutations cannot happen ergo new traits cannot arise. That's just a ludicrous amount to read into the word "kinds". The Bible and evolutionary science don't contradict each other at all.
But yes I'm aware you aren't going to believe any science that you think does contradict, that's very clear. Mutations don't exist, or are necessarily bad, whatever it takes, got it.
Well, talking about it like it was a "pre-enumerated list" is really a disservice to God and an underestimation of what the genetic code is capable of.
It's your description, and a really big static list is still a big static list, inherently simpler than the same incredibly expressive source of information but with the capability to change over time. Which it demonstrably does. Not my fault you don't like me pointing out this is putting an arbitrary limit God.
And they come away with a solid foundation, both fulfilled scientifically and amazed and delighted in what their God has done.
I am fulfilled scientifically and delighted by what God has done. Every time I learn about the increasing complexity and sophistication yet elegance of this universe I'm more amazed by Him. I'm more amazed by an ancient earth, where whole classes of animals with unique traits arose, then vanished never to be seen again, and things the earth has never seen before arose after them. I'm not going to disbelieve the evidence of the world He created because it doesn't match what I think a 500-word summary of the creation of the universe was trying to say. I believe God wanted me to read those words and see His hands in forming of the universe, not read it like a biology textbook.
You ignore inconvenient science and call yourself fulfilled because the box made of words you've put God in hasn't been disturbed.
Don't pretend those are the same.
God and His universe is more amazing than you think.
Any bacteria, etc. that we might transfer to Mars should cause us no worries.
Oh yeah. Because these organisms might have the same origins, we shouldn't concern ourselves with the consequences of introducing earth bacteria.
Just like introducing species into new ecosystems on earth, because hey all the life came from earth, is something you can do willy-nilly with no care since it never has negative consequences.
So okay, what happens when we figure out that life on Mars and earth did have a common ancestor, but the Martian life was different enough that it was worth preserving and studying? Only now it's gone because nobody cared to preserve it?
I'm not saying anything is or isn't going to happen, but acting like the issue of damaging an extra-terrestrial environment is irrelevant because of panspermia isn't sophisticated, it's retarded.
Let's at least get to the point where we know if there is life on Mars, and then what it looks like, how robust the ecosystem is, before we just abandon all consideration of contaminating Mars, okay?
It's always the case that a minority population, with a trait that makes them more suitable to their environment, survives better than the majority population lacking the traits to survive in their environment.
How did that trait appear?
It actually gives more credit to God's than any other ideas we might have had about it.
I think it gives Him more credit to accept the existence of both natural selection to choose among traits, and with a mechanism for new traits to arise. It takes both to achieve the tremendous and changing diversity of the world's life, where life that exists now has features completely new and never seen in previous life.
It's an interesting new line for Creationists to draw in the sand, where trait selection is okay and species changing over time is okay, but God must have had a fixed set of possible features all laid out in advance and that list can never change. Such a pre-enumerated list carried down through the ages seems to lack the elegance that you so admire in natural selection, but whatever. Point is it's just another way for the narrow-minded to place a completely artificial limitation on the capabilities of God and His plan, and thereby claim reality could not work that way.
But the common idea of evolution, when used in contexts like this, is that progressive genetic changes are occurring causing a gain of a trait that did not previously exist in the genetic code. This is never the case.
It is frequently the case, observable in the human record, in the lab, and elsewhere. New traits arise that did not exist before. Some of them are bad traits, some are good traits, and which survive is based on natural selection.
Natural selection selects only from traits that exist, this is true and I'm glad you're comfortable with it. However there are traits that demonstrably did not exist at one time, and which later did. It's not a mystery how this happens. Mutations happen all the time. Once the mutation exists, then Natural Selection happens.
The process is described in horticulture textbooks, and is known to be important in at least a few species. This provides a path that internal parasites can use to spread among a clump of trees.
Stands of Live Oaks in particular are susceptible to the spread of oak wilt due to interconnected root systems. That's why often times the first thing arborists will do when combating oak wilt is dig a circular trench around the affected trees in order to cut any roots that might spread the fungus elsewhere.
Sometimes it doesn't work since the fungus has already spread to more trees that just haven't shown symptoms yet. Oak wilt is a serious problem, especially if you're trying to preserve the remaining habitat of species like the Golden-cheeked Warbler.
The myth that interbreedability is the defining characteristic of a species is common, but it's a myth nonetheless.
Well, the reality is that species is not a terribly well defined entity. Attempts to create precise definitions arise from the human desire for neat classifications, not any requirement of nature. Inter-breedability is a definition, but not one that is heavily used anymore because it fails to capture a great deal of nuance.
So it's not a good definition, but it is a useful metric in one respect, which is that if two populations biologically can't interbreed then they are definitely different species since there's no way for genetic information to pass between them.
Ring species are an interesting corner case because sometimes the groups at the two ends of the ring can't interbreed directly, but they are interebreeding indirectly as they hybridize with neighbors going the other direction around the ring, eventually sharing their genetic material.
A blow from the side though (and usually a 2nd cartridge wedged into the unit to hold the loaded one against the contacts tighter) would get it going in a jiffy.
Seems the NES was the only system with this problem though (no doubt due to their goofy front-load spring-loaded design).
As the proud owner of a still-working but quite wonkey NES, and I can tell you that you are correct on both counts. In reverse order:
The connector does in fact suck, and makes poor contact because of the spring design. This is basically the entirety of the problem right there. The top-loader NES doesn't have this issue like every other console didn't, and if you used a Game Genie in your NES the problem would mostly go away as well (since it was designed to make contact with the connector when the cartridge holder was up).
Blowing definitely works, but the reason it works has nothing to do with dust or anything. It's because the humidity in your breath increases the conductivity so the crappy contact the cartridge makes will be enough.
Once I learned this, I stopped doing focused blowing from the side to try to get non-existent dust out, and instead use big open-mouth puffs. Works much better.
This is one of the main reasons that military weapons are designed to wound rather than kill.
Wounding may be more likely due to the choice of smaller fmj rounds for assault rifles, but they were not designed specifically to be less than lethal. The vast majority of military weapons are clearly designed for killing not wounding, and weapons designed for such are prohibited by convention. A hollowpoint of the same caliber may be more likely to kill, but they are banned for every caliber because they cause severe wounds.
Assault rifles may use punier rounds than hunting weapons* because militaries figured out that you don't need high-caliber rounds to disable or kill an enemy soldier, what you need is to hit them. The needs of an assault rifle are very different than a hunting rifle. Rate of fire, clip size, and weight are the most important things in an infantry weapon, not stopping power of individual rounds. NATO settled on the 5.53 not because the 7.6mm was too big and more likely to kill someone, they settled on the smaller one because they found little to no loss in effectiveness from doing so.
The military happily uses vehicle-mounted .50 cal machine guns (or sniper rifles, which are an exception to the non-use of hollow points) against infantry when they can, plus plenty of other lethal weapons. :P
* I guess. The .22 is still popular for hunting, is it not?
The long answer requires recourse to general relativity, which I'm far too tired for I'm afraid.
Which is another prediction of general relativity!
I wonder if it's trying to speak to the dolphins but got the language wrong?
Yeah but what good is it going to do NASA when the pirates figure out how to work Voyager's data into a playable version of AC3? They want the science data!
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/06/latest-updates-gulf-oil-spill/
[Updated at 12:11 p.m.] A patch of oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been found on Louisiana's Freemason Island Thursday, the Coast Guard reported.
[Updated at 12:27 p.m.] Two Coast Guard teams were scrambled to reset protective booms around Louisiana's Freemason Island after it was reported oil had reached there from the Gulf of Mexico. The area is located the Chandeleur Islands off Louisiana's St. Bernard Parish. The amount of oil that reached shore was not immediately known.
Trace amounts of sheen from the undersea gusher have been reported to have reached the shores of southeastern Louisiana over the past week, but the landfall reported Thursday marks the first confirmation of oil hitting the shore, said John Curry, a spokesman for well owner BP.
And guess what's in the process of breeding on Freemason Island right now?
Go Coast Guard. Here's hoping they succeed, and they can stop the damage while it's still minimal. Let's hope the booms stay this time. Not that this will help when the adult birds go to fish beyond the booms as seabirds are wont to do.
But hey I bet you think the Coast Guard is wasting their time since the spill will just clean itself up naturally and not hurt anything, just like natural oil seeps, right?
Admiral Burkebar says: It's a trap!