The news media is lazy, and if you give them a story they'll run it. Thus is one has the money to produce a story and distribute it to reporters, you can shape public perception. I'm shocked that money buys influence.
Look at those cheeses again. Are they aged? Read my comment again. Also, just because a young, soft cheese doesn't say it was made with pasturized milk on the package doesn't mean it wasn't.
I could have a bit of a bias because I live in a bit of California (Santa Cruz, which is about an hour south of San Francisco for those unfamiliar with California geography) where the artisnal foods movement is big. I can think of a couple of places where I can get cheese made with raw milk (a fact that they advertize). This is also the case with milk. California has different requirements for milk sold in the state than the rest of the U.S. so ultra pasteurized milk is rare here (of course, milk fortified with additional milk solids to meet state protein requirements is common, so there's a good and a bad). But, at least in some parts of the US, you can get raw milk. My big gripe is that ever since Odwalla sold a bad batch of orange juice and started pasteurizing its juices, it's been harder to get unpasteurized orange juice around here.
In Europe you're allowed to make and sell things that contain non-pasturized dairy products. In the US, you're not. Apparently americans aren't allowed to determine for themselves what is or isn't an acceptable risk. So the best European young cheeses and chocolates have poor substitutes as their namesakes in the US.
Not so. Unpasteurized milk and cheeses made from it are widely available at high end and natural grocery stores. You might have trouble finding such things in Des Moines, but in any real city you shouldn't have a hard time finding either the original european product or a close substitute of American orgin. There are also a bunch of crappy equivalents of the these products, but you can get the good ones if you look
To make matters worse, they've convinced people here that "ultra-pasturized" means "better", even though it just means they used extra high temperatures to get it done more quickly and save money at the expense of flavor. That means the milk here doesn't taste nearly as good as it could under the current regulations.
Again, you are spreading misinformation. The only thing that I see routinely ultrapasteurized is heavy cream. And the reason for doing that is to extend the shelf life, not to reduce costs. I don't often see ultra-pasteurized milk in stores because the normally pasteurized stuff is cheaper.
All this in the name of safety, yet at the same time, you can't get irradiated beef...
On this one, you are correct. There is an irrational fear of food irradiation (I miss irradiated milk, which was better than ultra pasteurized milk if you're going to buy milk that doesn't need refrigeration until its open).
How about this then: they're not dead yet, but they will be
Should medical experiments also be performed on condemmed prisoners? They will be killed shortly too? For that matter, the above statement applies to all of us. Both you and I will somday be dead, so should we be medical test subjects? There are better arguments for allowing experiments on human embryos (or for that matter killing them outright). I think there are two good routes to this. One is to claim that embryos in an early stage of development aren't people (say, because of no brain activity (no brain at this stage)), but this kind of argument is dangerous. It was this sort of argument that was used to justify the "final solution" to the Jewish "problem" in the 1940's. The other kind of argument is to claim that killing people is OK under some circumstances, and that these circumstances apply in this case (for example, from a greater good perspective)
I think that the best argument in favor of early term abortion or embryonic stem cell research is that without a brain you aren't a person, because the cessation of brain activity is what we often call death. But I'm leary of other arguments such as arguing that it serves the greater good or arguing that it they're going to die anyway because that same logic can lead to things that most of us would consider very bad./P
Scientists built a car today that doesn't require any fuel at all!!
All you do is put the car in neutral, grab a buddy and stand behind the car. Then, placing your hands on the rear bumper...push. Scientists believe it's such a simple process we may all be getting around in these miracle cars any day now!/
There is, however, considerable debate among scientists weather this cooperative mode of operation is superior to the single operator mode in which the user places his feet through a hole in the floor and runs really fast that has been proposed by F. Flintstone and B. Rubble
Mac users may or may not be smarter than PC users, but Paul Murphy is evidently not any smarter than the average slashdot poster.
Or at least his writing is no less obfuscated.
Re:No point "breathing air" at that temperature.
on
X43-A on to Mach 10
·
· Score: 1
Is there any point in doing any sort of "air breathing engine" experiments at mach 10? In such a short flight, what's the benefit over rocket engines or over simple ballistic projection?
This "experiment" just seems like a pointless attempt to cross a line that doesn't need crossing. They aren't likely to learn anything from it at all. They should just tell it like it is and call it a "stunt".
There's a really big point to it. A rocket engine needs both a fuel and an oxidizer to work. If you can get rid of the oxidizer you get rid of a big chunk of the mass you need to accelerate, mabye half (it depends on the fuel and oxidizer chosen). More than 90% of the mass of a launch vehicle is fuel and oxidizer, meaning that you could lift much bigger payloads (think a factor of 4 or so bigger) with the same size (read similarly expensive) vehicle. Such vehicles might also be safer because you only have the fuel, which won't burn nearly as well without having an unnaturally high concentration of oxygen.
It always escaped me why the US (or someone else) didn't simply mass produce gun-type bombs, rather than apply the tremendous amount of science and engineering to perfect the implosion assembly type, of which Fat Man was the first design of many.
The answer is contained in your comment. Little boy required 140 lbs of U-235, which is a hell of alot of enriched uranium. I believe that it was much cheaper to produce the 20 or so lbs of plutonium needed for Fat man.
That's exactly right. Even worse, most recycled products that are generated to satisfy 'green' consumer demand use more energy to produce than normal products and so are worse for the environment.
Essentially you're right. The big exceptions are metals, especially steel, aluminum, copper and lead, all of which are profitibly recycled. Of these, only aluminum recycling really benefits from consumer action. There is one big benefit to deposits on bottles though, and that is that some people find it worthwhile to pick up litter.
Dunno about gas mark, Broil is the setting past the highest setting on most american ovens, which is tpically 500 or 550F. It actually turns off the bottom burners but runs the top ones at full blast. It is often thought of as the highest setting because it is what you get when you turn the knob all the way to the right.
Europe has vehicle taxes based on engine size, in addition to extremely strict emissions regulations, so manufacturers are encouraged to provide hi-tech engines with smaller volumes but higher performance.
You're right about the first part, but entirely wrong about the second. European emissions regulations are VERY week. In fact many cars that are allowed everywhere in europe are illegal anywhere in the U.S. The difference is that European regulations emphasize fuel economy and U.S. regulations emphasize human health. Its a trade off. Europe went for efficient pollutionmobiles (especially in terms of smog forming emissions and particulates) and the U.S. went for fairly clean cars that burn alot of gas, but are good about everything except CO2.
Is it safe to assume that the energy is being absorted by pollution and thus heating the planet?
Not really. The question is one of total energy ballance.
Think about it as (mass)*(heat capicity)*(temperature change)=(incoming energy from radiation)-(reflected energy)-(re-emitted energy)
The atmosphere could be becomming more reflective, too. The mechanism proposed for global warming ignores this in its simplest form. CO2 is pretty transparant to visible light, but likes to absorb heat, meaning that the total emissivity of the earth is assumed to be being reduced at long wavelengths and left the same at short ones. This research says that something is happening at the shorter wavelenghths as well.
I'm curious as to why diesel powered cars aren't more popular in the US, they can be much more efficient, and with recent advances in catalytic converters, and technology, these new diesel engines run very clean and very quietly.
While much cleaner than they used to be, they are still an order of magnitude higher in NOx emissions than spark ignition engines. Most european diesels don't meet U.S. regulations, much less the more stringent California regulations. This is fundamentally related to the reason why they get better fuel economy. The reason is that the engine runs at higher temperatures (which is nearly the same thing as saying that the compression ratios are higher) than a spark ignition engine
Also, in the U.S. we use a pretty poor grade of diesel compared to Europe, which is higher in sulfur and doesn't burn as well as does European diesel
The difference in approach is because U.S. air quality regulations are largely based on improving public health, which means fighting smog and particulates, while european regulations are focused on reducing carbon emissions.
It seems to me that there are two good approaches to running Windows and Linux programs on the same box without switching between operating systems. One is to use Wine under Linux and the other is to use Cygwin under Windows. What are the advantages of each approach?
When people send me Excel files, I kindly ask them to re-send the file in CSV or some other format. Yes, there are things you can only do in native file format. But the vast majority of users never do those things.
Ah, yes. I can't remember the last time I saw someone use excel to create a chart or calculate something. The fact is that calculation and presentation of data are the two main points of spreadsheets and neither works with CSV files.
One application for this might be using a video card to handle mp3/ogg encoding/decoding. Those are basically frequency space calculations, so the math is similar. You might be able to encode data really quickly this way or use a pci video card to handle this leaving the processor free for other things.
Re:So instead
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What I'm trying to get at is that if some factor (say cloud seeding from aircraft exhaust, a known phenomenon) is causing more cloud cover, it could well be that the total solar energy absorbed by the ground+atmosphere is substantially less than it used to be. The article wasn't clear on this point.
I agree with you. One thing that was hinted at (the mention that evaporation rates had decreased), but not discussed in the article is the possiblity of increased average humidity and the resultant cloud formation due to global warming. Higher humidity levels would tend to increase both reflection and absorption of solar radiation.
This is, of course, just a guess. I'd like to see more research into this.
Re:Well of course
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Although you probably meant this as a joke, it might be. The amount of light people recieve affects lots of physical things. Chronically light deprived people (such as those who work night shifts) are heavier on average than those who don't. Lack of sufficient light also affects alertness and mood, and not only in those who have seasonal affective disorder.
That being said, I don't think a 10% reduction in light would cause a significant increase in obesity, but it might be an interesting experiment.
The GSM mobile telephony system (used everywhere but except in USA and colonies, may God protect their industries from competition), does indeed support cryptography since its very design.
AT&T Wireless, and Cingular and several small companies will be supprised to learn that their cell phone networks don't exist. One of the reasons that cell phone coverage in the U.S. is fairly poor is that there are 3 major competing and incompatable cell phone networks (strictly speaking there are several more because some providers stick you with either 800 or 1900 MHz only).
Unlike most countries, the U.S. never decreed a standard for cell phones and allows a variety of networks to exist. This has been a mixed blessing. On one hand, cell phone coverage is worse in the U.S., leading to low rates of cell phone use, on the other, there are innovative features on some networks (Nextel's push to talk walkie talkie feature, which can be handy in some lines of work, comes to mind) that don't work well on GSM or on the newer 3G networks.
Slashdot Mirror
So will this make it easier or harder to find porn?
Because there's a shortage of porn on the web?
The news media is lazy, and if you give them a story they'll run it. Thus is one has the money to produce a story and distribute it to reporters, you can shape public perception. I'm shocked that money buys influence.
"Open the pod bay doors HAL."
"I'm sorry, Dave, you have reached your credit limit."
But, hey, I've had too much coffee today.
Well-known retailer + pr0n + no shame of walking out of the adult section with it = 3. profit!
I'm suddenly qeuasy thinking of sticky DVD sleeves. eeeew
And at that scale, I imagine the question "Is it in yet?" may never be answered to anyone's satisfaction, given quantum tunneling and such like. :-)
Also, in this situation, it would be possible to be a little bit pregnant.
Look at those cheeses again. Are they aged? Read my comment again. Also, just because a young, soft cheese doesn't say it was made with pasturized milk on the package doesn't mean it wasn't.
I could have a bit of a bias because I live in a bit of California (Santa Cruz, which is about an hour south of San Francisco for those unfamiliar with California geography) where the artisnal foods movement is big. I can think of a couple of places where I can get cheese made with raw milk (a fact that they advertize). This is also the case with milk. California has different requirements for milk sold in the state than the rest of the U.S. so ultra pasteurized milk is rare here (of course, milk fortified with additional milk solids to meet state protein requirements is common, so there's a good and a bad). But, at least in some parts of the US, you can get raw milk. My big gripe is that ever since Odwalla sold a bad batch of orange juice and started pasteurizing its juices, it's been harder to get unpasteurized orange juice around here.
In Europe you're allowed to make and sell things that contain non-pasturized dairy products. In the US, you're not. Apparently americans aren't allowed to determine for themselves what is or isn't an acceptable risk. So the best European young cheeses and chocolates have poor substitutes as their namesakes in the US.
Not so. Unpasteurized milk and cheeses made from it are widely available at high end and natural grocery stores. You might have trouble finding such things in Des Moines, but in any real city you shouldn't have a hard time finding either the original european product or a close substitute of American orgin. There are also a bunch of crappy equivalents of the these products, but you can get the good ones if you look
To make matters worse, they've convinced people here that "ultra-pasturized" means "better", even though it just means they used extra high temperatures to get it done more quickly and save money at the expense of flavor. That means the milk here doesn't taste nearly as good as it could under the current regulations.
Again, you are spreading misinformation. The only thing that I see routinely ultrapasteurized is heavy cream. And the reason for doing that is to extend the shelf life, not to reduce costs. I don't often see ultra-pasteurized milk in stores because the normally pasteurized stuff is cheaper.
All this in the name of safety, yet at the same time, you can't get irradiated beef...
On this one, you are correct. There is an irrational fear of food irradiation (I miss irradiated milk, which was better than ultra pasteurized milk if you're going to buy milk that doesn't need refrigeration until its open).
How about this then: they're not dead yet, but they will be
Should medical experiments also be performed on condemmed prisoners? They will be killed shortly too? For that matter, the above statement applies to all of us. Both you and I will somday be dead, so should we be medical test subjects? There are better arguments for allowing experiments on human embryos (or for that matter killing them outright). I think there are two good routes to this. One is to claim that embryos in an early stage of development aren't people (say, because of no brain activity (no brain at this stage)), but this kind of argument is dangerous. It was this sort of argument that was used to justify the "final solution" to the Jewish "problem" in the 1940's. The other kind of argument is to claim that killing people is OK under some circumstances, and that these circumstances apply in this case (for example, from a greater good perspective)
I think that the best argument in favor of early term abortion or embryonic stem cell research is that without a brain you aren't a person, because the cessation of brain activity is what we often call death. But I'm leary of other arguments such as arguing that it serves the greater good or arguing that it they're going to die anyway because that same logic can lead to things that most of us would consider very bad./P
Scientists built a car today that doesn't require any fuel at all!!
All you do is put the car in neutral, grab a buddy and stand behind the car. Then, placing your hands on the rear bumper...push. Scientists believe it's such a simple process we may all be getting around in these miracle cars any day now!/
There is, however, considerable debate among scientists weather this cooperative mode of operation is superior to the single operator mode in which the user places his feet through a hole in the floor and runs really fast that has been proposed by F. Flintstone and B. Rubble
No, I can't spell
Mac users may or may not be smarter than PC users, but Paul Murphy is evidently not any smarter than the average slashdot poster.
Or at least his writing is no less obfuscated.
Is there any point in doing any sort of "air breathing engine" experiments at mach 10? In such a short flight, what's the benefit over rocket engines or over simple ballistic projection?
This "experiment" just seems like a pointless attempt to cross a line that doesn't need crossing. They aren't likely to learn anything from it at all. They should just tell it like it is and call it a "stunt".
There's a really big point to it. A rocket engine needs both a fuel and an oxidizer to work. If you can get rid of the oxidizer you get rid of a big chunk of the mass you need to accelerate, mabye half (it depends on the fuel and oxidizer chosen). More than 90% of the mass of a launch vehicle is fuel and oxidizer, meaning that you could lift much bigger payloads (think a factor of 4 or so bigger) with the same size (read similarly expensive) vehicle. Such vehicles might also be safer because you only have the fuel, which won't burn nearly as well without having an unnaturally high concentration of oxygen.
It always escaped me why the US (or someone else) didn't simply mass produce gun-type bombs, rather than apply the tremendous amount of science and engineering to perfect the implosion assembly type, of which Fat Man was the first design of many.
The answer is contained in your comment. Little boy required 140 lbs of U-235, which is a hell of alot of enriched uranium. I believe that it was much cheaper to produce the 20 or so lbs of plutonium needed for Fat man.
That's exactly right. Even worse, most recycled products that are generated to satisfy 'green' consumer demand use more energy to produce than normal products and so are worse for the environment.
Essentially you're right. The big exceptions are metals, especially steel, aluminum, copper and lead, all of which are profitibly recycled. Of these, only aluminum recycling really benefits from consumer action. There is one big benefit to deposits on bottles though, and that is that some people find it worthwhile to pick up litter.
Dunno about gas mark, Broil is the setting past the highest setting on most american ovens, which is tpically 500 or 550F. It actually turns off the bottom burners but runs the top ones at full blast. It is often thought of as the highest setting because it is what you get when you turn the knob all the way to the right.
Europe has vehicle taxes based on engine size, in addition to extremely strict emissions regulations, so manufacturers are encouraged to provide hi-tech engines with smaller volumes but higher performance.
You're right about the first part, but entirely wrong about the second. European emissions regulations are VERY week. In fact many cars that are allowed everywhere in europe are illegal anywhere in the U.S. The difference is that European regulations emphasize fuel economy and U.S. regulations emphasize human health. Its a trade off. Europe went for efficient pollutionmobiles (especially in terms of smog forming emissions and particulates) and the U.S. went for fairly clean cars that burn alot of gas, but are good about everything except CO2.
Is it safe to assume that the energy is being absorted by pollution and thus heating the planet?
Not really. The question is one of total energy ballance.
Think about it as (mass)*(heat capicity)*(temperature change)=(incoming energy from radiation)-(reflected energy)-(re-emitted energy)
The atmosphere could be becomming more reflective, too. The mechanism proposed for global warming ignores this in its simplest form. CO2 is pretty transparant to visible light, but likes to absorb heat, meaning that the total emissivity of the earth is assumed to be being reduced at long wavelengths and left the same at short ones. This research says that something is happening at the shorter wavelenghths as well.
I'm curious as to why diesel powered cars aren't more popular in the US, they can be much more efficient, and with recent advances in catalytic converters, and technology, these new diesel engines run very clean and very quietly.
While much cleaner than they used to be, they are still an order of magnitude higher in NOx emissions than spark ignition engines. Most european diesels don't meet U.S. regulations, much less the more stringent California regulations. This is fundamentally related to the reason why they get better fuel economy. The reason is that the engine runs at higher temperatures (which is nearly the same thing as saying that the compression ratios are higher) than a spark ignition engine
Also, in the U.S. we use a pretty poor grade of diesel compared to Europe, which is higher in sulfur and doesn't burn as well as does European diesel
The difference in approach is because U.S. air quality regulations are largely based on improving public health, which means fighting smog and particulates, while european regulations are focused on reducing carbon emissions.
It seems to me that there are two good approaches to running Windows and Linux programs on the same box without switching between operating systems. One is to use Wine under Linux and the other is to use Cygwin under Windows. What are the advantages of each approach?
When people send me Excel files, I kindly ask them to re-send the file in CSV or some other format. Yes, there are things you can only do in native file format. But the vast majority of users never do those things.
Ah, yes. I can't remember the last time I saw someone use excel to create a chart or calculate something. The fact is that calculation and presentation of data are the two main points of spreadsheets and neither works with CSV files.
Does the "poly" really change it all that much?
In a word, yes. Here are the Material Safety Data Sheets for both chemicals:
ethylene glycol
polyethylene glycol
Labyrinth fit in occasionally, but even back then we knew there was just something wrong with David Bowie's pants.
Well, thanks for making me relive THAT trauma!
One application for this might be using a video card to handle mp3/ogg encoding/decoding. Those are basically frequency space calculations, so the math is similar. You might be able to encode data really quickly this way or use a pci video card to handle this leaving the processor free for other things.
What I'm trying to get at is that if some factor (say cloud seeding from aircraft exhaust, a known phenomenon) is causing more cloud cover, it could well be that the total solar energy absorbed by the ground+atmosphere is substantially less than it used to be. The article wasn't clear on this point.
I agree with you. One thing that was hinted at (the mention that evaporation rates had decreased), but not discussed in the article is the possiblity of increased average humidity and the resultant cloud formation due to global warming. Higher humidity levels would tend to increase both reflection and absorption of solar radiation.
This is, of course, just a guess. I'd like to see more research into this.
Although you probably meant this as a joke, it might be. The amount of light people recieve affects lots of physical things. Chronically light deprived people (such as those who work night shifts) are heavier on average than those who don't. Lack of sufficient light also affects alertness and mood, and not only in those who have seasonal affective disorder.
That being said, I don't think a 10% reduction in light would cause a significant increase in obesity, but it might be an interesting experiment.
The GSM mobile telephony system (used everywhere but except in USA and colonies, may God protect their industries from competition), does indeed support cryptography since its very design.
AT&T Wireless, and Cingular and several small companies will be supprised to learn that their cell phone networks don't exist. One of the reasons that cell phone coverage in the U.S. is fairly poor is that there are 3 major competing and incompatable cell phone networks (strictly speaking there are several more because some providers stick you with either 800 or 1900 MHz only).
Unlike most countries, the U.S. never decreed a standard for cell phones and allows a variety of networks to exist. This has been a mixed blessing. On one hand, cell phone coverage is worse in the U.S., leading to low rates of cell phone use, on the other, there are innovative features on some networks (Nextel's push to talk walkie talkie feature, which can be handy in some lines of work, comes to mind) that don't work well on GSM or on the newer 3G networks.