Yup, as soon as I read the first line of this article I felt my gorge rising - bad science reporting AGAIN.
My understanding from school chemistry was that the c-c sp2 bonds in graphite were stronger than the c-c sp3 bonds in diamond (well shorter at least). The difference in hardness is due to the fact that the c-c sp2 bonds in graphite are only in one plane, and the sheets of carbon atoms are only losely bonded together. The reason why diamind is so much harder is that the tetrahedral arrangement of the sp3 bonds means that diamond is very hard in all directions whereas forces applied to graphite simply cause the very strong sheets of atoms to slide over each other.
Now, if you could somehow roll the graphite sheets into a tube, why they would have enormous tensile strength - I wonder why no-one else has thought of this? You could possible build a space elevator out of them, if you could make them long enough...
A guy called Christian Pinder successfully re-engineered a C version of Elite from the original Assembler source. It uses the Allegro library.
I spent many hours reliving my misspent youth a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, David Braben, who had been turning a blind eye to what was a possible infringement of his IP, asked him to pull the source and binaries as someone had ported CP's Elite:TNK to the GBA. The timing couldn't have been much worse as Braben's company frontier had just released a game called 'Darxide' for the GBA that was itself very similar to Elite, and Breadbin didn't want the (free) competition.
Since then Chris Pinder started work on a sequel to Elite:TNK called 'Darkness Rising' which later changed to 'the Dark-kind' (http://www.darkkind.co.uk) - I played an early Alpha about a year ago, but everything has all gone very quiet on that front. Interestingly enough, the last few messages Christian posted on his forum (now defunct - domain name expired) mentioned the fact that he was getting programming help from none other than Ian Bell, the other co-creator of the original.
After Elite, David Braben's company (Frontier) created Frontier Elite (Elite 2) and then 'Frontier: first encounters' (Elite 3). This last title was released by the publisher's before it was ready, and was riddled with bugs. People still play all the versions, and a guy called John Jordan has re-engineered FFE to run in Windows. http://www.jaj22.demon.co.uk/
Well I guess you or anyone else will never get to read this but..
No I don't make fun of leather-wearing vegetarians, just the ones who eat fish (and even chicken) and claim they are still vegetarian.
But I don't find it necessary to criticise people who lead an environmental life, I think it is highly laudable and I think that the environmental damage we are wreaking on this planet is probably the single greatest danger mankind as a whole is facing.
I'm not about to get into a pissing contest about who has the best eco-friendly credentials, but I'm sure I'm not as bad as you think I am.
Maybe you haven't realised this but nearly everyone is concerned about the state of the planet and the damage we are doing to it, but given the chance they will point the finger at hypocritical, impractical, eco-evangelists and laugh, mainly because the whole holier-than-thou attitude is really grating.
You, my freind, seem to be a typical example of the humourless, do-as-I-say hypocrite that makes it easy for Joe Public to feel better about being environmentally lazy, simply because they don't want to be like you.
A pedant writes: The biggest problem is the CSS support in IE. Tables were only supposed to display tables of scientifc data. Before CSS came along web designers used tables to control the layout of their pages - not what they were originally designed for - with the consequences that they had to use myriad nested tables, colspans, rowspans, spacer gifs and all sorts of inelegant hacks to make their sites cross-browser compatable.
When CSS1 and later CSS2 came along designers had the chance to re-write the way sites were made without having to use such a limited, slow and cross-browser-unfriendly way of laying out their sites.
But what do you know, ALL the browser manufacturers stuffed up the implementation of CSS. While every other browser manufacturer has tried and mostly succeeded in living up to the agreed W3C specification by improving their browser's CSS support, MicroSuck haven't bothered.
The developers are complaining that they have to create non-standards compliant websites because 95% of the userbase use a non-standards compliant browser.
You make it sound like it's the web developer's fault that MicroSoft have produced a crappy browser.
To belabour the point: developers produce sites that work best with the most widely used browser - if the browser doesn't work in the logical and 'correct' manner, then a lot of time is spent hacking and trial-and-erroring trying to get the effect that the client wants. Clients aren't going to give a sh*t whether their site is fully W3C compliant and looks exactly as it should in Opera, Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror or whatever if it doesn't look as promised in IE
It's a lot more laid back, much more of a family affair.
However I'm not too sure how popular people tapping away on laptops would be - my experience of the Big Green Gathering would lend me to expect they would get lots of pitying looks from most of the crusties.
I went to one outside Leeds a couple of years back, and it was great fun. All electricity used is generated on site, using solar panels, windmills and pedal power - which means that unless a band has lots of energetic fans, they tend not to get too loud.
On a side note, some Greenpeace reps were trying to get donations to get their vehicles back after they'd been impounded at an anti-GM protest the week before. They didn't seem to take too kindly to the suggestion that they should use public transport, cycle or walk instead of ride around in clapped-out diesel-guzzling second-hand ambulances and buses.
I can't believe that the Norwegians are so irresponsible - don't they realise that by harnessing tidal power they are going to make the moon recede from us even faster than it is already!
For every year that passes the moon recedes (on average) by half an inch a year. This can only make things worse!
Don't blame me if your kid asks you one day "What's this moon thing you keep talking about?... Don't cry Dad please, you're embarrasing me"
Besides tossing-off animals for artificial insemination purposes, it is apparently quite a common practice for humans to relieve stress (police dogs), make them loyal (sheepdogs) or just to stop them getting too frisky (horses etc.).
Apparently the latest logical extension of this is doting japanese mothers taking upon themselves to help out their stressed-out sons during the exam period*
* This is undoubtedly total bull, but worth repeating
For example the breaktroughs in [...]rocket science came from scientists that we hired from Germany. They helped us develop the first stages of our rocket program.
For 'hired', read 'OK guys, you either work for us, or we put you on trial at Nuremburg.'
What really stimulated the western allies and the Russians to go hell for leather once the final offensive started in WWII was the understanding that once the Nazis were out of the way there would be a possible confrontation between the western allies on one side and the Russians on the other.
Both sides knew that the Nazis had developed intercontinental ballistic missile technology decades in advance of their own and were very keen to get their hands on it. This desire and the successful capture of nazi rocket scientists and technology significantly fuelled the Cold War and Space Race.
The Americans managed to get their hands on Werner Von Braun before the Ruskies and this was a major coup for them. Without Von Braun and his Saturn V design there would never have been a moon landing.
I believe the Russians, although they missed Von Braun, managed to capture some prototype engines that the nazis were working on. These engines used an exhaust recycling technique that the russians tried to get to work for decades, in the end they succeeded, but the project was mothballed before they could really get off the ground, but pound for pound they were the most efficient chemical rocket engines there have ever been.
*The last paragraph may or may not be the result of a cheese-dream
I read 'Strata' by Terry Pratchett a long time ago, then I read Larry Niven's Ringworld.
All I can say is that when I read Ringworld I was puzzled. Either Pratchett was a brazen plagiarist, or it was an homage or something because Pratchett basically changed a few names, swapped a few characters round and made the world a disc instead of a ring.
I used to think 'Strata' was a great SF novella, now I know it to be stunningly unoriginal.
Good point, well made. But I still feel the need to wave the Union Jack and say:
The Steam engine
The Jet engine
The lightbulb - yes you read that right - Joseph Swann beat Edison by several years
The Electric motor
Radar and Sonar
Television
the World Wide Web
The telephone
Penicillin
The decimal point!
Cordite
tarmac
polyester
And many more I've missed. I don't think you could call any of these inventions impractical. As for reality checks, several inventions were condemned as pointless at inception, it just goes to show you never can tell...
personally I think this amphibious car will sink without trace.
'The telephone is such a marvelously useful invention that I can see the time when every town in America will have one!' - Mayor of Chicago, some time long ago.
Hey, there's fish in the Thames and all now so it can't be THAT bad.
Having said that, it's probably brimming with Wiel's disease from all the rats. It kind of takes the fun out of being able to drive/boat/drive across the Thames if you need to take a shower everytime you do it.
You have e.coli in your intestines, are you going to worry about that too?
Escherisha Coli is considered part of normal gut flora (Coli - refers to where it was first 'discovered' - the human colon). Some variants of e.coli are harmful though - but these are normally outcompeted by the usually benign resident population of e.coli.
If you don't have a resident population of e.coli - you in trouble.
Re:American spellings, definitions taking over?
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
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· Score: 1
I always thought that an american billion was 10^8 (100 thousand) and that was why billionaires and billion dollar budgets were so much more common in the US. I've always been taught that a billion (in the UK) is 10^9 - I mean it makes sense
What I would like to know is why the curious American propensity for screwing up date formats - Month/Day/Year - what the Hell is that about?
Re:If you need another grudge to hold against them
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I can't find an 18 Oz steak dipped in cheese and deep-fried - twice for love nor money here
Actually, I've heard that Aluminum was the original spelling and pronounciation of the word, until it was decided to end it in -ium to conform to the rest of the periodic table.
http://chemistry.about.com/library/blal.htm
However, after the name aluminium was agreed by international convention - someone decided that in America it should be known as Aluminum.
Who is right is a matter of opinion - as the song goes - 'you say tomahtow I say tomaytow, who gives a shit'
Aside from the fact that this would require a superhuman effort to piece together an intact genome - assuming it's even possible given the state of 20,000 year old DNA - how many Elephant ova would need to be harvested, transformed and then implanted?
Don't elephants have really long gestation cycles? (the figure 17 months comes to mind - but I'm not sure about this) And you can be sure as anything that elephant multiple births are extremely rare, if not unrecorded.
How many aborted sheep foetuses did there have to be to create Dolly? OK the techniques may have improved a little since then, but you're still looking at a huge failure rate.
And anyway, assuming you could after this huge effort, create a single clone - what the hell are you going to breed it with? You'd need to start all over again with a different mammoth carcass (preferrably of the opposite sex - although you could get around this, maybe double up the X sex chromosomes if the original carcass is male - but that's a recipe for disaster in the long term too).
So if you want to create a breeding pair, you're going to have to at least double your efforts. And no matter what bible literalists would say - a single breeding pair does not a healthy, stable population make.
It just seems like a huge waste of time, money and expertise for a doomed enterprise to recreate a hairy elephant that died out so long ago that there are probably no viable ecological niches it could occupy.
Still, mammoth steak must be pretty tasty - or they might still be around today
While I'm at it, one thing that puzzled me about 'The Roads Must Roll' is that the fastest strip (going at 100 mph I think) had restaurants etc. on it.
When I first read the story I assumed they were on massive long looped conveyer belts, which would have made things interesting at the end of the belt when the strip, and all it's attached restaurants etc. would suddenly be hurled round the final drum and spend the return journey upside down, that is if they hadn't been thrown off by the sudden change in momentum (delta V of 200 mph?).
reading it again, heinlein seems to say that the 'Roads' complete a circular circuit - now how in heck would that work?
I was reading this just last night (in an anthologised version called 'the man who sold the moon') and the same thoght about the segway occured to me then. Although Heinlein's unicycles used a large gyroscope to keep them oriented I imagine instead of tricky circuitry - amazing what we can do with triode valves these days.
You can't seriously think that water on the moon will become a viable source of clean water for us on earth? can you? really?
The energy, let alone the $$$s that you will expend going to the moon and hauling back water would be more than enough to purify and distill a helluva lot of water on earth.
Water on the moon would be useful for a colony, cos, you won't have to haul it up there from here. You can use it (providing you have the energy) to provide you with oxygen and hydrogen/deuterium/tritium (apparently the moon's regolith is full of tritium too), or as reaction mass for the fleet of space arks that I am currently building in my lunar-orbiting shipyard. Do you want to come too? Because I've heard the world is about to end, something to do with a huge intergallactic space-goat. I think I might have a space on the 'B' ark for you. you don't mind going first do you? We need people with bright ideas about ultra-pure water from space on our new home
Anyway, it's all about energy and don't let anyone tell you that water from space is any different from water on earth - especially if they're homeopaths
I would think that having UT2003 projected onto your retinas anywhere you like is a recipe for disaster!
Some... impressionable types might find it even harder to divorce reality from virtuality. Imagine people massacring scores of 'n00bs' before attempting a rocket jump only to realise that they are in real life and have no legs left.
Ona side note, I should be getting my three 3G mobile fone next week (my partner works for three) and am looking forward to seeing just how the downlaod speeds measure up to the hype
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, as soon as I read the first line of this article I felt my gorge rising - bad science reporting AGAIN.
My understanding from school chemistry was that the c-c sp2 bonds in graphite were stronger than the c-c sp3 bonds in diamond (well shorter at least). The difference in hardness is due to the fact that the c-c sp2 bonds in graphite are only in one plane, and the sheets of carbon atoms are only losely bonded together. The reason why diamind is so much harder is that the tetrahedral arrangement of the sp3 bonds means that diamond is very hard in all directions whereas forces applied to graphite simply cause the very strong sheets of atoms to slide over each other.
Now, if you could somehow roll the graphite sheets into a tube, why they would have enormous tensile strength - I wonder why no-one else has thought of this? You could possible build a space elevator out of them, if you could make them long enough...
http://www.cjpinder.clara.co.uk/elite.html
A guy called Christian Pinder successfully re-engineered a C version of Elite from the original Assembler source. It uses the Allegro library.
I spent many hours reliving my misspent youth a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, David Braben, who had been turning a blind eye to what was a possible infringement of his IP, asked him to pull the source and binaries as someone had ported CP's Elite:TNK to the GBA. The timing couldn't have been much worse as Braben's company frontier had just released a game called 'Darxide' for the GBA that was itself very similar to Elite, and Breadbin didn't want the (free) competition.
Since then Chris Pinder started work on a sequel to Elite:TNK called 'Darkness Rising' which later changed to 'the Dark-kind' (http://www.darkkind.co.uk) - I played an early Alpha about a year ago, but everything has all gone very quiet on that front. Interestingly enough, the last few messages Christian posted on his forum (now defunct - domain name expired) mentioned the fact that he was getting programming help from none other than Ian Bell, the other co-creator of the original.
After Elite, David Braben's company (Frontier) created Frontier Elite (Elite 2) and then 'Frontier: first encounters' (Elite 3). This last title was released by the publisher's before it was ready, and was riddled with bugs. People still play all the versions, and a guy called John Jordan has re-engineered FFE to run in Windows. http://www.jaj22.demon.co.uk/
my uncle's cousin, or something - I can confirm she is a humourless old bag. (although I've never actually met her)
Am I completely wrong, or was Saturn V not designed by Werner von Braun?
He was a teensy-weensy bit nazi nein?
Well I guess you or anyone else will never get to read this but..
No I don't make fun of leather-wearing vegetarians, just the ones who eat fish (and even chicken) and claim they are still vegetarian.
But I don't find it necessary to criticise people who lead an environmental life, I think it is highly laudable and I think that the environmental damage we are wreaking on this planet is probably the single greatest danger mankind as a whole is facing.
I'm not about to get into a pissing contest about who has the best eco-friendly credentials, but I'm sure I'm not as bad as you think I am.
Maybe you haven't realised this but nearly everyone is concerned about the state of the planet and the damage we are doing to it, but given the chance they will point the finger at hypocritical, impractical, eco-evangelists and laugh, mainly because the whole holier-than-thou attitude is really grating.
You, my freind, seem to be a typical example of the humourless, do-as-I-say hypocrite that makes it easy for Joe Public to feel better about being environmentally lazy, simply because they don't want to be like you.
Disclaimer: Yes I am a Friend of the Earth
A pedant writes:
The biggest problem is the CSS support in IE. Tables were only supposed to display tables of scientifc data. Before CSS came along web designers used tables to control the layout of their pages - not what they were originally designed for - with the consequences that they had to use myriad nested tables, colspans, rowspans, spacer gifs and all sorts of inelegant hacks to make their sites cross-browser compatable.
When CSS1 and later CSS2 came along designers had the chance to re-write the way sites were made without having to use such a limited, slow and cross-browser-unfriendly way of laying out their sites.
But what do you know, ALL the browser manufacturers stuffed up the implementation of CSS. While every other browser manufacturer has tried and mostly succeeded in living up to the agreed W3C specification by improving their browser's CSS support, MicroSuck haven't bothered.
What?
The developers are complaining that they have to create non-standards compliant websites because 95% of the userbase use a non-standards compliant browser.
You make it sound like it's the web developer's fault that MicroSoft have produced a crappy browser.
To belabour the point: developers produce sites that work best with the most widely used browser - if the browser doesn't work in the logical and 'correct' manner, then a lot of time is spent hacking and trial-and-erroring trying to get the effect that the client wants. Clients aren't going to give a sh*t whether their site is fully W3C compliant and looks exactly as it should in Opera, Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror or whatever if it doesn't look as promised in IE
It's a lot more laid back, much more of a family affair.
However I'm not too sure how popular people tapping away on laptops would be - my experience of the Big Green Gathering would lend me to expect they would get lots of pitying looks from most of the crusties.
I went to one outside Leeds a couple of years back, and it was great fun. All electricity used is generated on site, using solar panels, windmills and pedal power - which means that unless a band has lots of energetic fans, they tend not to get too loud.
On a side note, some Greenpeace reps were trying to get donations to get their vehicles back after they'd been impounded at an anti-GM protest the week before. They didn't seem to take too kindly to the suggestion that they should use public transport, cycle or walk instead of ride around in clapped-out diesel-guzzling second-hand ambulances and buses.
I can't believe that the Norwegians are so irresponsible - don't they realise that by harnessing tidal power they are going to make the moon recede from us even faster than it is already!
... Don't cry Dad please, you're embarrasing me"
For every year that passes the moon recedes (on average) by half an inch a year. This can only make things worse!
Don't blame me if your kid asks you one day "What's this moon thing you keep talking about?
Besides tossing-off animals for artificial insemination purposes, it is apparently quite a common practice for humans to relieve stress (police dogs), make them loyal (sheepdogs) or just to stop them getting too frisky (horses etc.).
Apparently the latest logical extension of this is doting japanese mothers taking upon themselves to help out their stressed-out sons during the exam period*
* This is undoubtedly total bull, but worth repeating
For 'hired', read 'OK guys, you either work for us, or we put you on trial at Nuremburg.'
What really stimulated the western allies and the Russians to go hell for leather once the final offensive started in WWII was the understanding that once the Nazis were out of the way there would be a possible confrontation between the western allies on one side and the Russians on the other.
Both sides knew that the Nazis had developed intercontinental ballistic missile technology decades in advance of their own and were very keen to get their hands on it. This desire and the successful capture of nazi rocket scientists and technology significantly fuelled the Cold War and Space Race.
The Americans managed to get their hands on Werner Von Braun before the Ruskies and this was a major coup for them. Without Von Braun and his Saturn V design there would never have been a moon landing.
I believe the Russians, although they missed Von Braun, managed to capture some prototype engines that the nazis were working on. These engines used an exhaust recycling technique that the russians tried to get to work for decades, in the end they succeeded, but the project was mothballed before they could really get off the ground, but pound for pound they were the most efficient chemical rocket engines there have ever been.
*The last paragraph may or may not be the result of a cheese-dream
I read 'Strata' by Terry Pratchett a long time ago, then I read Larry Niven's Ringworld.
All I can say is that when I read Ringworld I was puzzled. Either Pratchett was a brazen plagiarist, or it was an homage or something because Pratchett basically changed a few names, swapped a few characters round and made the world a disc instead of a ring.
I used to think 'Strata' was a great SF novella, now I know it to be stunningly unoriginal.
What's an ass-titty? Please mr. Casanova, enlighten us poor geeks who can't get laid. Share your knowledge of this mystery called wo-man
Nah, Escherisha (or eschericha - can't remember fizzackly) definitely.
Finally, a use for my MicroBiology degree
And many more I've missed. I don't think you could call any of these inventions impractical. As for reality checks, several inventions were condemned as pointless at inception, it just goes to show you never can tell...
personally I think this amphibious car will sink without trace.
'The telephone is such a marvelously useful invention that I can see the time when every town in America will have one!' - Mayor of Chicago, some time long ago.
Hey, there's fish in the Thames and all now so it can't be THAT bad.
Having said that, it's probably brimming with Wiel's disease from all the rats. It kind of takes the fun out of being able to drive/boat/drive across the Thames if you need to take a shower everytime you do it.
You have e.coli in your intestines, are you going to worry about that too?
Escherisha Coli is considered part of normal gut flora (Coli - refers to where it was first 'discovered' - the human colon). Some variants of e.coli are harmful though - but these are normally outcompeted by the usually benign resident population of e.coli.
If you don't have a resident population of e.coli - you in trouble.
I always thought that an american billion was 10^8 (100 thousand) and that was why billionaires and billion dollar budgets were so much more common in the US. I've always been taught that a billion (in the UK) is 10^9 - I mean it makes sense
What I would like to know is why the curious American propensity for screwing up date formats - Month/Day/Year - what the Hell is that about?
Yeah, I can't find an 18 Oz steak dipped in cheese and deep-fried - twice for love nor money here
Actually, I've heard that Aluminum was the original spelling and pronounciation of the word, until it was decided to end it in -ium to conform to the rest of the periodic table.
http://chemistry.about.com/library/blal.htm
However, after the name aluminium was agreed by international convention - someone decided that in America it should be known as Aluminum.
Who is right is a matter of opinion - as the song goes - 'you say tomahtow I say tomaytow, who gives a shit'
But why bother?
Aside from the fact that this would require a superhuman effort to piece together an intact genome - assuming it's even possible given the state of 20,000 year old DNA - how many Elephant ova would need to be harvested, transformed and then implanted?
Don't elephants have really long gestation cycles? (the figure 17 months comes to mind - but I'm not sure about this) And you can be sure as anything that elephant multiple births are extremely rare, if not unrecorded.
How many aborted sheep foetuses did there have to be to create Dolly? OK the techniques may have improved a little since then, but you're still looking at a huge failure rate.
And anyway, assuming you could after this huge effort, create a single clone - what the hell are you going to breed it with? You'd need to start all over again with a different mammoth carcass (preferrably of the opposite sex - although you could get around this, maybe double up the X sex chromosomes if the original carcass is male - but that's a recipe for disaster in the long term too).
So if you want to create a breeding pair, you're going to have to at least double your efforts. And no matter what bible literalists would say - a single breeding pair does not a healthy, stable population make.
It just seems like a huge waste of time, money and expertise for a doomed enterprise to recreate a hairy elephant that died out so long ago that there are probably no viable ecological niches it could occupy.
Still, mammoth steak must be pretty tasty - or they might still be around today
While I'm at it, one thing that puzzled me about 'The Roads Must Roll' is that the fastest strip (going at 100 mph I think) had restaurants etc. on it.
When I first read the story I assumed they were on massive long looped conveyer belts, which would have made things interesting at the end of the belt when the strip, and all it's attached restaurants etc. would suddenly be hurled round the final drum and spend the return journey upside down, that is if they hadn't been thrown off by the sudden change in momentum (delta V of 200 mph?).
reading it again, heinlein seems to say that the 'Roads' complete a circular circuit - now how in heck would that work?
I was reading this just last night (in an anthologised version called 'the man who sold the moon') and the same thoght about the segway occured to me then.
Although Heinlein's unicycles used a large gyroscope to keep them oriented I imagine instead of tricky circuitry - amazing what we can do with triode valves these days.
You can't seriously think that water on the moon will become a viable source of clean water for us on earth? can you? really?
The energy, let alone the $$$s that you will expend going to the moon and hauling back water would be more than enough to purify and distill a helluva lot of water on earth.
Water on the moon would be useful for a colony, cos, you won't have to haul it up there from here. You can use it (providing you have the energy) to provide you with oxygen and hydrogen/deuterium/tritium (apparently the moon's regolith is full of tritium too), or as reaction mass for the fleet of space arks that I am currently building in my lunar-orbiting shipyard. Do you want to come too? Because I've heard the world is about to end, something to do with a huge intergallactic space-goat. I think I might have a space on the 'B' ark for you. you don't mind going first do you? We need people with bright ideas about ultra-pure water from space on our new home
Anyway, it's all about energy and don't let anyone tell you that water from space is any different from water on earth - especially if they're homeopaths
I would think that having UT2003 projected onto your retinas anywhere you like is a recipe for disaster!
Some... impressionable types might find it even harder to divorce reality from virtuality. Imagine people massacring scores of 'n00bs' before attempting a rocket jump only to realise that they are in real life and have no legs left.
Ona side note, I should be getting my three 3G mobile fone next week (my partner works for three) and am looking forward to seeing just how the downlaod speeds measure up to the hype