It should have been apparent from the context of the discussion that selfishly clinging to life meant things living past their appropriate time to die. That entire paragraph was meant to give a few counter-examples to Daniel_Dvorkin's erroneous statements "it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live" and "the urge to live is part of our every cell". The two examples, fetal cells and spiders, made it apparent that the appropriate time to die varies widely depending on the situation. If humans have an appropriate time to die, it is most certainly not before they have successfully reared their children (or even their grandchildren), and nowhere did I say anything to the contrary. Just because those few counter-examples were cases of self-destruction does not imply that I think humans should commit self-destruction (a.k.a. suicide). The key word that you missed was "selfishly". Organisms clinging to life before they've reproduced are not selfishly clinging. Cells still performing a useful function within an organism are not selfishly clinging.
The fact that you found my statement "silly" should have been a big clue that you did not understand it. By replying half-cocked, without carefully reading my comment and its parent, you have misrepresented what I said. The discussion would have been better off had you not replied at all.
I didn't say "afraid to die", I said "live in fear of death". It's a matter of degree. Those of us who are young should be afraid of death when danger is nigh, but should not dwell on it. If you're obsessed enough with your death in the distant future that you're popping the most recently over-hyped and over-priced anti-oxidant or flaming on about how you'll drink a toast on other peoples' graves, then your death has already affected you in a negative way.
Programmed cell death (which occurs throughout life, BTW, not just in fetal development) contributes to the survival of the organism, and sacrifical mating contributes to the survival of the species. In both cases the overall purpose is to ensure that life goes on.
Yes. I'm aware of apoptosis, as I have a degree in biology. I gave a few counter-examples (not meant to be exhaustive) to your statements "it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live" and "the urge to live is part of our every cell". I'm still waiting for a cogent argument that explains how the survival of the species is helped by people who live to be a thousand years old. Trees do it, but that's because they rely on wasteful methods of reproduction.
As an added bonus, I don't think you'll find a more succinct (and utterly British) answer to overpopulation objections to life extension than the one at the end of this article!"
If that refers to the Forbes article, most of us won't see it due to the appeal for $4.95 for those of us with no subscription to Forbes. The last article was free, but tried to justify age-extension based on economics. Ha! That ignores the biological reasons for death, like clearing out the bade genes that crop up in every generation. Also, money doesn't necessarily make people happy. There's quite a few people who are better off dead for other reasons. I'll mention Stalin because naming the other great homicidal maniac of his era would theoretically terminate the thread.
...is that we're going to find out that nanotech is over-hyped and that the promises of extreme longevity are bunk. Then the last moments of your life will be psychologically agonizing. In fact, the stress of worrying about your impending death is going to hasten it (we'll drink a toast on your grave). The rest of us will be happy until the moment we die, and the total quality of our lives will be greater than yours. How horrible to live in fear of death. Perhaps you should see a shrink about your problem.
But of course people don't do this, because it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live
Oh, yeah, and your appeal to biology is quite wrong. During fetal development certain cells are programmed to die. During mating the male of certain species of spider intentionally touches the female in a way that triggers her to eat him starting with the head, his reproductive parts still locked on to hers. A species that decides to selfishly cling to life will soon become extinct.
I'm wondering why they are launching things into polar orbit from a nearly equatorial launch site. Seems to me they'd have an extra 460 m/s velocity eastward velocity that they'd need to dispose of (though I'm not recommending launching from the South Pole).
There you have it. Proof that at least this/. poster doesn't have the technical expertise to discuss rockets.
To all moon hoax "experts" I have a simple question. Thousands of people directly watched the launches of the 363 foot tall, 6 million ton rockets. What was the point of creating and launching a vehicle capable of reaching the moon if they didn't actually go there?
Quarks themselves are held together by gluons. Quarks have mass, so they interact by exchanging gravitons. And of course the quarks are charged, so they exchange virtual photons. Suddenly your three quarks have turned into a menagerie of particles all packed into a single proton.
The idea of a black hole 'sucking' things in is wrong. If our own sun was to turn into a black hole, the planets wouldn't suddenly get ripped out of their orbits and inexorably dragged (kicking and screaming) into it. Black holes, like all other massive accreting objects, have to wait for stuff to come their way. At the center of a galaxy, where matter is denser (more stars, more gas), things around the black hole can get involved in a massive traffic jam. The losers are sent by collisions or gravitational interactions on orbits straight towards the hole. Eventually the hole eats so much of the traffic that there's no longer a traffic jam. The objects orbiting around it don't interact with each other enough to get sent towards the hole, and the hole is now on a strict diet. This is the state of our own Milky Way. If our galaxy were to collide with another, a density wave of stars and gas might get sent towards the black hole, and it would start to eat again. So, yes, there are active and passive black holes.
If your doctor has been telling you drink 8 glasses a day, get a different doctor. It's a myth. But apparently a lot of people actually follow this extreme regimen.. Just look at how big corp.s can sell bottled tap water.
Although one of the Voyager probes whizzed through Saturn's ring plane (which is only about a km or so thick), no such daring maneuver is planned for Cassini.
The ring plane extends out to infinity, and so even the Earth passes through it occasionally. The ring plane is considerably tilted with respect to the ecliptic, so it would have been impossible for the Voyagers to not pass through the ring plane. Both went well outside the rings, not, as you imply, through the rings (In Saturn radii: closest approaches V1=3.09 & V2=2.67, outer ring lies at ~2.3) Someone has already pointed out your misinformation about the Cassini orbit. Your links are interesting, but none support your assertions.
about so-called "obligatory" jokes. If you repeat them over and over, they are no longer funny, and thus aren't jokes. Just mindless filler, waste of mod points, etc..
Yes, I know that, but there's still that question of intent. Since we've added to the thread, Adolf_Hitler must be aware of Godwin's Law and intentionally trying to invoke it. His plan is doomed to fail.
Thanks for the new (to my vocabulary) word 'codicil'. I like it when I'm forced to look something up in the dictionary.
Your point stands? It doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Dr. Philip Diamond, Director of the MERLIN/VLBI National Facility added: "In combination with the newly resurfaced 76m Lovell telescope, the upgrade will give a 30-fold increase in sensitivity.
In fact, there are no references to the resolution increasing. This stems from the fact that the telescopes are already being combined together for interferometry and so the system is already at its max resolution. As/. user R_caley correctly noted, "They aren't, so far as I can see, adding extra, further away, telescopes to the array which is what would be needed for better resolution." Your confusion stems from the fact that the light-gathering area of two average scopes on the current network is only 1.005 times that of a single average scope (95.5% of the data from one is lost as it's transferred to the other), while you naively assume that the light gathering area is doubled.
I'd say "have a nice day" if I didn't think you should have the kind of day you deserve.
The boilers of the power plant are typically designed very well to remove as much heat as possible from the fuel and resulting gaseous waste. Easly over 80% efficient. (80% is par for most large commercial boilers as used in schools and office buildings. Some can get up to 90%).
The article mentions 35% effficiency, so somebody's smoking some crack, and I suspect it's you.
Anyone who has seeded a sterile medium with bacteria realizes that growth is only quasi-exponential. After a while the population hits carrying capacity, stalls out, then crashes.
Space.com muddled this, but you yourself seem to be think that radiation can't be particles (even electromagnetic radiation is released as massless particles). Calling cosmic rays "high energy radiation" does little to clarify the issue. They are high speed ions, mostly protons but also a measure of heavier nuclei right on up to iron mixed in. When cosmic rays slam into our atmosphere they hit the nuclei of oxygen or nitogen, which actually do fragment into a mix of protons, neutrons, pions, and kaons, some of which further decay into muons, neutrinos, electrons, positrons, gammas, etc.
The real reason to use liquid hydrogen is to slow down protons and neutrons efficiently. In perfectly elastic collisions, momentum and energy are most easily transferred between objects of equal mass. To visualize this, imagine trying to play a game of pool using a cue ball made of styrofoam. It bounces off the other balls without imparting much energy to them, right? The hydrogen will quickly slow down the protons and neutrons until they are "thermalized", i.e. have the same kinetic energy spectrum as the hydrogen. Then a secondary process occurs. Protons happen to have the largest thermal neutron absorption cross section known. The protons eat the slow neutrons, releasing gamma rays and becoming deuterons in the process, or the neutrons will just spontaneously decay. Secondary shielding might be necessary, and yes, layers of metal will do the job. They pack enough electrons into a small space that they can slow down the electrons and the negatively charged members of the muon and pion families and absorb the gamma rays.
I beg to differ. The data could be used for interferometry, or they could be simply added together for increased sensitivity. Calling the network an interferometer ignores one if its possible uses.
The ability to see great distances requires a large number of photons to be collected (to pick up faint signals and better separate signal from noise), which requires a large aperture area. They're not getting that here, so they won't be able to see much farther.
If you RTFAs you should have noticed numerous references to the increased sensitivity of the new system in addition to the increased resolution. Only 0.5% of the data can be transferred from one telescope to another over the current microwave link. The telescopes can't be effectively utilized together as one giant collecting area, thus limiting to the sensitivity to the collecting area of the individual telescopes. The microwave link wasn't for increasing the sensitivity, it was for interferometry. The fiber optics will allow the combination of all the data from all the telescopes, thus allowing increased sensitivity. That said, some of the new increase in sensitivity comes from improvement of the Jodrell Bank telescope's surface.
(S)he assumed that 2k meant 2048 and 4k meant 4096. So both sets of numbers came from the same source and the difference comes from confusion over what 'k' means.
Astronomers have radio telescopes that are extremely sensitive. Some areas of the frequency spectrum are more interesting than others (those that can pass through the ionosphere, for example). So let's pretend these scientists are dogs with hearing so acute that someone blowing an ultrasonic dog whistle 1000s of miles away is painful, or hides the sounds made by rare pelagic squirrels. They're glad ultrasonic whistles are banned but willing to tolerate whistles at other frequencies.
The article wasn't science, but your idea isn't either. The only way for you to be sure is if somebody packages caffeine or caffeine/taurine into indistinguishable capsules and then feeds them to you over successive nights in a double-blind experiment (they can't know what they're giving to you either until afterwards). Otherwise you're just testing the placebo effect. Perhaps your experience with Red Bull is influenced by Red Bull's massive marketing campaign. Coffee advertising tends to advertise its flavor, not its stimulant properties.
It's pronounced 'Churengkof' but it's spelled Cerenkov. And it occurs when a charged particle is moving faster than the speed of light within a medium other than a vacuum (light travels slower in non-vacuums). Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.
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The fact that you found my statement "silly" should have been a big clue that you did not understand it. By replying half-cocked, without carefully reading my comment and its parent, you have misrepresented what I said. The discussion would have been better off had you not replied at all.
Programmed cell death (which occurs throughout life, BTW, not just in fetal development) contributes to the survival of the organism, and sacrifical mating contributes to the survival of the species. In both cases the overall purpose is to ensure that life goes on.
Yes. I'm aware of apoptosis, as I have a degree in biology. I gave a few counter-examples (not meant to be exhaustive) to your statements "it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live" and "the urge to live is part of our every cell". I'm still waiting for a cogent argument that explains how the survival of the species is helped by people who live to be a thousand years old. Trees do it, but that's because they rely on wasteful methods of reproduction.
If that refers to the Forbes article, most of us won't see it due to the appeal for $4.95 for those of us with no subscription to Forbes. The last article was free, but tried to justify age-extension based on economics. Ha! That ignores the biological reasons for death, like clearing out the bade genes that crop up in every generation. Also, money doesn't necessarily make people happy. There's quite a few people who are better off dead for other reasons. I'll mention Stalin because naming the other great homicidal maniac of his era would theoretically terminate the thread.
But of course people don't do this, because it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live
Oh, yeah, and your appeal to biology is quite wrong. During fetal development certain cells are programmed to die. During mating the male of certain species of spider intentionally touches the female in a way that triggers her to eat him starting with the head, his reproductive parts still locked on to hers. A species that decides to selfishly cling to life will soon become extinct.
I'm wondering why they are launching things into polar orbit from a nearly equatorial launch site. Seems to me they'd have an extra 460 m/s velocity eastward velocity that they'd need to dispose of (though I'm not recommending launching from the South Pole).
There you have it. Proof that at least this /. poster doesn't have the technical expertise to discuss rockets.
To all moon hoax "experts" I have a simple question. Thousands of people directly watched the launches of the 363 foot tall, 6 million ton rockets. What was the point of creating and launching a vehicle capable of reaching the moon if they didn't actually go there?
Quarks themselves are held together by gluons. Quarks have mass, so they interact by exchanging gravitons. And of course the quarks are charged, so they exchange virtual photons. Suddenly your three quarks have turned into a menagerie of particles all packed into a single proton.
The idea of a black hole 'sucking' things in is wrong. If our own sun was to turn into a black hole, the planets wouldn't suddenly get ripped out of their orbits and inexorably dragged (kicking and screaming) into it. Black holes, like all other massive accreting objects, have to wait for stuff to come their way. At the center of a galaxy, where matter is denser (more stars, more gas), things around the black hole can get involved in a massive traffic jam. The losers are sent by collisions or gravitational interactions on orbits straight towards the hole. Eventually the hole eats so much of the traffic that there's no longer a traffic jam. The objects orbiting around it don't interact with each other enough to get sent towards the hole, and the hole is now on a strict diet. This is the state of our own Milky Way. If our galaxy were to collide with another, a density wave of stars and gas might get sent towards the black hole, and it would start to eat again. So, yes, there are active and passive black holes.
If your doctor has been telling you drink 8 glasses a day, get a different doctor. It's a myth. But apparently a lot of people actually follow this extreme regimen.. Just look at how big corp.s can sell bottled tap water.
The ring plane extends out to infinity, and so even the Earth passes through it occasionally. The ring plane is considerably tilted with respect to the ecliptic, so it would have been impossible for the Voyagers to not pass through the ring plane. Both went well outside the rings, not, as you imply, through the rings (In Saturn radii: closest approaches V1=3.09 & V2=2.67, outer ring lies at ~2.3) Someone has already pointed out your misinformation about the Cassini orbit. Your links are interesting, but none support your assertions.
about so-called "obligatory" jokes. If you repeat them over and over, they are no longer funny, and thus aren't jokes. Just mindless filler, waste of mod points, etc..
Thanks for the new (to my vocabulary) word 'codicil'. I like it when I'm forced to look something up in the dictionary.
Thanks for the clarification. Sorry about the crack comment.
Completey OT: I'm surprised this user's name has such a high /. id#. Does a comment from this user automatically invoke Godwin's Law?
Dr. Philip Diamond, Director of the MERLIN/VLBI National Facility added: "In combination with the newly resurfaced 76m Lovell telescope, the upgrade will give a 30-fold increase in sensitivity.
In fact, there are no references to the resolution increasing. This stems from the fact that the telescopes are already being combined together for interferometry and so the system is already at its max resolution. As /. user R_caley correctly noted, "They aren't, so far as I can see, adding extra, further away, telescopes to the array which is what would be needed for better resolution." Your confusion stems from the fact that the light-gathering area of two average scopes on the current network is only 1.005 times that of a single average scope (95.5% of the data from one is lost as it's transferred to the other), while you naively assume that the light gathering area is doubled.
I'd say "have a nice day" if I didn't think you should have the kind of day you deserve.
The article mentions 35% effficiency, so somebody's smoking some crack, and I suspect it's you.
Anyone who has seeded a sterile medium with bacteria realizes that growth is only quasi-exponential. After a while the population hits carrying capacity, stalls out, then crashes.
The real reason to use liquid hydrogen is to slow down protons and neutrons efficiently. In perfectly elastic collisions, momentum and energy are most easily transferred between objects of equal mass. To visualize this, imagine trying to play a game of pool using a cue ball made of styrofoam. It bounces off the other balls without imparting much energy to them, right? The hydrogen will quickly slow down the protons and neutrons until they are "thermalized", i.e. have the same kinetic energy spectrum as the hydrogen. Then a secondary process occurs. Protons happen to have the largest thermal neutron absorption cross section known. The protons eat the slow neutrons, releasing gamma rays and becoming deuterons in the process, or the neutrons will just spontaneously decay. Secondary shielding might be necessary, and yes, layers of metal will do the job. They pack enough electrons into a small space that they can slow down the electrons and the negatively charged members of the muon and pion families and absorb the gamma rays.
I beg to differ. The data could be used for interferometry, or they could be simply added together for increased sensitivity. Calling the network an interferometer ignores one if its possible uses.
If you RTFAs you should have noticed numerous references to the increased sensitivity of the new system in addition to the increased resolution. Only 0.5% of the data can be transferred from one telescope to another over the current microwave link. The telescopes can't be effectively utilized together as one giant collecting area, thus limiting to the sensitivity to the collecting area of the individual telescopes. The microwave link wasn't for increasing the sensitivity, it was for interferometry. The fiber optics will allow the combination of all the data from all the telescopes, thus allowing increased sensitivity. That said, some of the new increase in sensitivity comes from improvement of the Jodrell Bank telescope's surface.
(S)he assumed that 2k meant 2048 and 4k meant 4096. So both sets of numbers came from the same source and the difference comes from confusion over what 'k' means.
Astronomers have radio telescopes that are extremely sensitive. Some areas of the frequency spectrum are more interesting than others (those that can pass through the ionosphere, for example). So let's pretend these scientists are dogs with hearing so acute that someone blowing an ultrasonic dog whistle 1000s of miles away is painful, or hides the sounds made by rare pelagic squirrels. They're glad ultrasonic whistles are banned but willing to tolerate whistles at other frequencies.
The article wasn't science, but your idea isn't either. The only way for you to be sure is if somebody packages caffeine or caffeine/taurine into indistinguishable capsules and then feeds them to you over successive nights in a double-blind experiment (they can't know what they're giving to you either until afterwards). Otherwise you're just testing the placebo effect. Perhaps your experience with Red Bull is influenced by Red Bull's massive marketing campaign. Coffee advertising tends to advertise its flavor, not its stimulant properties.
According to "Moons and Planets" by W. Hartmann, the total mass of asteroids is 3x10^21 kg, "only about 4% the mass of the moon."
It's pronounced 'Churengkof' but it's spelled Cerenkov. And it occurs when a charged particle is moving faster than the speed of light within a medium other than a vacuum (light travels slower in non-vacuums). Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.