In the deep dark days before butylated hydroxytoululene and butylated hydroxyanisole (may have mispelled that, apologies to the ghost of Doc Smith) or that Napoleonic military invention known as "The Can", foods, especially cooked foods, were wrapped in pastry and baked to preserve them. You just have to go the hard l^Hyards to find something good to put in them. Apples and pears were routinely wrapped in pastry just to keep the bugs out. Cooked lamb and rosemary pies, for example, will generally safely last a week unrefrigerated if properly prepared, without modern antioxidants such as BHA & BHT et.al. (Thank you Master Del, they were delicious).
Salt and pepper were the other major preservatives in the middle ages, with the latter being ungodly expensive and the source of much of the Italian city-states' prosperity. There was this guy, once, named Colombo or some such who had an idea for getting the pepper cheaply, but that didn't work out so well. Twinkies make you glow in the dark and make you want to shoot Mayors of Major Cities. God bless Vespucciland!
Ok, let's cross over to a place where "other cultures" live, i.e. Welsh and Old Folks. I be nothing like the former (although I do have friends who say only Welsh can spell a sneeze phonetically) and definitely an early entrant in the latter, so let's get down to it:
Welsh "dd" is kind of a shortish "th" sound, so I "R'd" meaning "Readtha".
"F" is silent, although some folk say it stands for "Fine".
And a long time ago in the IT profession (back when it was known as "Programming") we had these innovations held together by thin strips of razor blade called "printed Manuals" with words like "PL/I" and "CORGZ" and "DBOMP" on them. ("Paper" is kind of like a blank.html file, only well, sort of entirely different. Ours had holes punched in them and the odd bloodstain). So RTFM meant, loosely, "Read The Fine Manual". I wrote that abbreviation (and why is "abbreviation" such a long word?) so many times my fingers kind of took over there for a moment. Perils of old age slipping into me dotage. Apologies to all you young nerds who couldn't make the linguistic transition there. But brush up on your "old", if you're lucky you'll need to speak that language some day.
Iffn' ye don't like that explanation, give me a few and I'll invent another one. In the mean time, "dddd" to the lot of ye.
I only know about Dr. Bussard by the many times I have read and re-read Niven's Known Space series. If he's the true source of the "Bussard Ramjet" then whether or not it's a workable concept, I laud the man for thinking further out of the box than anyone since R.B.Fuller.
We need minds like that, I'm glad to see he's being fed.
It's all data structures and interrupts nowdays laddie! Data structures and interrupts. Why back in my day we had nice chrome-plated algorithms and fat polling intervals and liked it!
You pesky young folk who think yer flash ram is better than good old reliable ferrite donuts have at with ye! We had disk drives that could pull yer filings out from two feet away on a max seek. Do ya get technology like that nowdays? Do ya? Nuuuuu.....
Mind ye what we had for an OS scheduler was a smiling polish gennelmun who wore too much after shave, and he was a bit much, but we knew which program ran after which we did! Off with ye now, come back when you have a *real* algorithm.
Hardness; 0=talc, 10=diamond. It's a measure of a material's resistance to deformation. An extremely hard substance may be very easy to shatter. Add a bit of ductility to a material and it may be slightly less hard, but more tough. Toughness in a stone like say, serpentine jade (which is essentially petrified asbestos) has an interlinked fibre mesh structure that makes it much tougher than diamond, although not as hard (I think it's somewhere around 8-8.2 from rapidly dwindling memory). Thus, diamond can easily scratch a material that is much tougher than it.
Try whacking a pebble of serpentine jade some time with a hammer and see how hard it is to break. Wear eye protection over remaining eye...
Yes -- it's hard to teach people a lesson by taking your ball and going home, when someone comes up with another ball and they keep playing on. Sucks, really.
I think I'd like to see a mobile phone that interrupted you with "Watch the road you insensitive clod!" at high volume if it determined (integrating accelerometer perhaps?) that you were (a) driving and (b) not using a hands-free unit. In fact, Attribute (b) might be optional in some cases.
(Political incorrectness alert -->) You hear about the Italian who drove into a tree when he answered his phone? He had to take the other hand off the wheel to talk.
Well, three monkeys in a sleazy motel for the night is still better than Margaret Thatcher and Celine Dion in a five star hotel for the night. Much better sex.
And it's pretty certain Maggie and Celine wouldn't do it for washers (op.cit).
I thought it was Australia who was falling behind? Maybe it's all of us? Just who's in charge of setting the speed of that rabbit all us dogs are chasing?
Ummmm, they had mobile phone access in a tunnel???
There's an RF repeater and antenna system in the tunnel so people can get their radio. And it's blanketed on all bands when they do tunnel status announcements, which they do a lot. I've never tried it (I don't answer mobiles on the road, hands-free setup or not) but a cellphone is just a two-way radio at heart.
WHY on Earth would you connect two nations, both of which have many viable ports, with a massive tunnel to their least populated and most distant parts?
It's all about costs.
It's cheaper in fuel to move goods electrically, especially when the electricity is generated without fossil fuels or fissionables (op.cit). It's cheaper in terms of opportunity cost (MBA 101) because delivery times are faster by road than by ship. It's cheaper and more reliable to deliver goods without the intervention of the maritime unions.
You can ship electricity via the rails, I'd think. Unless there's a plan for using isolating segments.
Actually, since we're talking about all that infrastructure and electricity, why not use stabilized welded track and run a bullet train? And perhaps keep the tunnel in a partial vacuum (ok, working on that line WOULD suck) whenever possible. It wouldn't take many hectopascals of pressure reduction to amount to a fair amount of drag reduction, would it? The trains could use venturi perhaps to keep the inside pressure right (it works for aircraft, right?) With dedicated passage for trains you could evac it right down to the economical limit and lower the risk of fire as well. Auto and truck drivers, however, would need to pop their ears a bit;P
I hope they've got a good emergency plan for when the inevitable disaster happens in the tunnel, such as the recent vehicle crash in a tunnel in Melbourne.
It wasn't pretty. The cause was a combination of a mismatch of truck widths and lane widths, the lack of an escape lane, tailgating trucks and a driver with a panic attack. If the tunnel is properly designed, it's workable. If costs drive down the ultimate width relative to the planned capacity, you will have deaths. I wish, I really wish hard, that Australia (particularly Melbourne, where I live) had California's road engineering standards. I know we don't have the tax base to afford the infrastructure, but good design isn't about length or number of roads, and we haven't realised that yet. The equation is dollars per death.
Having lived (and driven) in both places for a significant number of years, I can honestly say the roads are the only thing I still miss about California (waves).
Interesting tangential thought about dogmatic teachers, non-orthagonal rooms and furniture fitting and highly stable structures. Amazing how the mind works...
If you'll forgive my -3.14~ Offtopic here, I'd like to raise the question -- is Hell round or square? Is there a place for mathematicians where transcendental numbers aren't allowed? If the rooms are all Bucky hemispheres, then where is Fuller now? If the rooms are triangular, where is Pythagoras? I suspect that for at least one CEO the chairs will be fastened securely to the floor, though, and probably densely populated with poo-flinging monkeys with flying spreadsheets. But that's neither here nor there. Well, here, anyway.
The rivers run free, but your use of them isn't. At least in Australia, you'll get busted for using them inappropriately. In Texas, well, you just get Westerns.
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At least in Hollywood, anyhow. Or maybe it's lawn grass, not sure. Which has the better publicity?
FTHI = for the humour-impaired, you insensitive clod!
--
FTHI not really a flame/troll, folks ... just a pre-Goddard media quote
Salt and pepper were the other major preservatives in the middle ages, with the latter being ungodly expensive and the source of much of the Italian city-states' prosperity. There was this guy, once, named Colombo or some such who had an idea for getting the pepper cheaply, but that didn't work out so well. Twinkies make you glow in the dark and make you want to shoot Mayors of Major Cities. God bless Vespucciland!
Ok, make that two things I miss about the USA.
So let's do it like they do on the telly Myth Busters.
---
A fractured Haiku
Makes the old geek tremble so
Like water torture.
Yes, it should. Funnily enough, I'd only meant that as prose. I will trim that little root, thank you.
Welsh "dd" is kind of a shortish "th" sound, so I "R'd" meaning "Readtha".
"F" is silent, although some folk say it stands for "Fine".
And a long time ago in the IT profession (back when it was known as "Programming") we had these innovations held together by thin strips of razor blade called "printed Manuals" with words like "PL/I" and "CORGZ" and "DBOMP" on them. ("Paper" is kind of like a blank .html file, only well, sort of entirely different. Ours had holes punched in them and the odd bloodstain). So RTFM meant, loosely, "Read The Fine Manual". I wrote that abbreviation (and why is "abbreviation" such a long word?) so many times my fingers kind of took over there for a moment. Perils of old age slipping into me dotage. Apologies to all you young nerds who couldn't make the linguistic transition there. But brush up on your "old", if you're lucky you'll need to speak that language some day.
Iffn' ye don't like that explanation, give me a few and I'll invent another one. In the mean time, "dddd" to the lot of ye.
And there should be plenty of Boron about.
We need minds like that, I'm glad to see he's being fed.
You pesky young folk who think yer flash ram is better than good old reliable ferrite donuts have at with ye! We had disk drives that could pull yer filings out from two feet away on a max seek. Do ya get technology like that nowdays? Do ya? Nuuuuu.....
Mind ye what we had for an OS scheduler was a smiling polish gennelmun who wore too much after shave, and he was a bit much, but we knew which program ran after which we did! Off with ye now, come back when you have a *real* algorithm.
(Walks away muttering at his shoes)
Try whacking a pebble of serpentine jade some time with a hammer and see how hard it is to break. Wear eye protection over remaining eye...
Yes -- it's hard to teach people a lesson by taking your ball and going home, when someone comes up with another ball and they keep playing on. Sucks, really.
I think I'd like to see a mobile phone that interrupted you with "Watch the road you insensitive clod!" at high volume if it determined (integrating accelerometer perhaps?) that you were (a) driving and (b) not using a hands-free unit. In fact, Attribute (b) might be optional in some cases.
(Political incorrectness alert -->) You hear about the Italian who drove into a tree when he answered his phone? He had to take the other hand off the wheel to talk.
And it's pretty certain Maggie and Celine wouldn't do it for washers (op.cit).
I thought it was Australia who was falling behind? Maybe it's all of us? Just who's in charge of setting the speed of that rabbit all us dogs are chasing?
There's an RF repeater and antenna system in the tunnel so people can get their radio. And it's blanketed on all bands when they do tunnel status announcements, which they do a lot. I've never tried it (I don't answer mobiles on the road, hands-free setup or not) but a cellphone is just a two-way radio at heart.
It's all about costs.
It's cheaper in fuel to move goods electrically, especially when the electricity is generated without fossil fuels or fissionables (op.cit). It's cheaper in terms of opportunity cost (MBA 101) because delivery times are faster by road than by ship. It's cheaper and more reliable to deliver goods without the intervention of the maritime unions.
Actually, since we're talking about all that infrastructure and electricity, why not use stabilized welded track and run a bullet train? And perhaps keep the tunnel in a partial vacuum (ok, working on that line WOULD suck) whenever possible. It wouldn't take many hectopascals of pressure reduction to amount to a fair amount of drag reduction, would it? The trains could use venturi perhaps to keep the inside pressure right (it works for aircraft, right?) With dedicated passage for trains you could evac it right down to the economical limit and lower the risk of fire as well. Auto and truck drivers, however, would need to pop their ears a bit ;P
It wasn't pretty. The cause was a combination of a mismatch of truck widths and lane widths, the lack of an escape lane, tailgating trucks and a driver with a panic attack. If the tunnel is properly designed, it's workable. If costs drive down the ultimate width relative to the planned capacity, you will have deaths. I wish, I really wish hard, that Australia (particularly Melbourne, where I live) had California's road engineering standards. I know we don't have the tax base to afford the infrastructure, but good design isn't about length or number of roads, and we haven't realised that yet. The equation is dollars per death.
Having lived (and driven) in both places for a significant number of years, I can honestly say the roads are the only thing I still miss about California (waves).
To consider just how lethal boredom can be, I suggest a trip down the Nullarbor Highway at the legal speed limit.
No way. It has to be his Triphibian Atomicar.
If you'll forgive my -3.14~ Offtopic here, I'd like to raise the question -- is Hell round or square? Is there a place for mathematicians where transcendental numbers aren't allowed? If the rooms are all Bucky hemispheres, then where is Fuller now? If the rooms are triangular, where is Pythagoras? I suspect that for at least one CEO the chairs will be fastened securely to the floor, though, and probably densely populated with poo-flinging monkeys with flying spreadsheets. But that's neither here nor there. Well, here, anyway.
Don't mind me folks, it's been a 3 Sudafed day...
The rivers run free, but your use of them isn't. At least in Australia, you'll get busted for using them inappropriately. In Texas, well, you just get Westerns.