Cardivascular disease is the number one cause of death in your country, accounting for just shy of 40% of all deaths. (For 2001 figures, see this link here.)
Far as I can find, the NIH allocates roughly a billion dollars a year into heart disease research. The Homeland Security Agency has a budget of what, forty billion dollars? Or has it gone up since then?
You think that a breakthrough which brings down the number one killer of Americans (more naughty than Usama bin Ladin and Saddam Hussain combined) won't put a dent in the stockmarket? I know I'd invest in whoever found it.
If people _sign up_ for spam, then they asked for what they get.
What I have a problem with is spambots skimming my web page for my email address, and then sending me unsolicited crap. The honeypot will defeat this method, or rather, will at least dilute its effectiveness.
Okay, I'll take your word for it, but I don't think I want to ever visit a country where guns are legal and it's okay to kill people so long as you're really really angry...
I'd be quite interested if there were any studies comparing the rate of re-offences of white collar criminals to the general population. I'm really not sure whether I'd expect to see a high re-offending rate or not.
Battlefleet Gothic is basically a remake of their old Space Fleet game. Necromunda is largely a remake of the beta-published-in-White-Dwarf Confrontation skirimish game.
I stopped playing GW stuff several years ago, when I realised I could get much more stuff for the same money by buying non-GW games at the Other Games Store In Town. But I have many friends who still play them and greatly enjoy them (in their early to mid twenties).
Now, what I really miss is Space Hulk. There was a game.
Aren't we supposed to be the good guys, to whom such acts are abhorrent?
Your example makes a strong Utilitarian case to justify torture there, but I'm sure the Iraqi Army could use a similar argument to justify torturing the poor PoWs they've taken, to reveal the location of Coalition forces, maybe save many lives and much property. And I'm reasonably sure we back here would raise absolute screaming hell if they did.
Even if it was, it would still remain under the control of the Russian military, just as GPS is under the control of the Pentagon.
The whole point (well, one of the major ones, anyway) of Galileo was to create a network which wouldn't be under military control, and so could be relied upon not to be switched off at inconvenient moments.
I agree are amazing, but the chances that you'll ever get to see them are pretty slim. (Unless you're an academic.)
The caves are closed to the public to prevent humidity and bacteria from destroying the fragile paintings. However, Lascaux II, a milimetre-accurate replica, is open nearby. And it's every bit as awesome.
While the main theme is animal (and the Bulls' Chamber is incredible), there's also an astronomy element which might appeal more to geeks. This link is a BBC site explaining how maps of various constellations are visible in the paintings on the roof of the Bulls's Chamber - and painted 16,500 years ago!
Perhaps not efficient, but necessary. The problem here isn't one of physics - it's engineering.
The two big problems with renewables are:
a) Where the energy is generally doesn't have good grid connections. For example, there is enough wave energy off the west coast of Scotland to run the entire UK, and enough wind to run about half the country. There are simply no Supergrid connections to the entire region. It would be very expensive and fairly difficult to build them. But we already have gas pipelines to supply the towns with natural gas.
b) You can't regulate them by demand, as you can with fossil powered turbines. When the wind blows, you get electricity, regardless of whether you want it or not. The Grid can't store electricity - it has to produce exactly as much as is being used at any one time. Any imbalance is taken out of the kinetic energy in the spinning turbines, which leads to a.c. frequency fluctuations. Too much wind/wave/solar power feeding straight into the Grid would rapidly lead to desynchronisation.
However, both these problems could be solved by using Hydrogen, as it's a simple method of storing energy, which could be piped ashore/around using existing natural gas pipelines and stored until needed (porosity issues aside).
Or by using deep-sea wave power extraction. (Which, as it happens, my Masters project was about.)
It's relatively easy to build cheap and efficient devices to extract wave energy from deap-sea regions, but one of the two big problems at the moment is transferring the power back to land as electricity - mainly because of grid synchronisation issues.
However, if we were in a position where we could make use of hydrogen, the generators could locally distil sea water (energy hungry but necessary to get rid of the chlorine) and then electrolyse it, whereupon we pipe the hydrogen back to shore and release the oxygen into the atmosphere.
I have a pacemaker. Ignoring the electronics, it's basically a loop antenna with the two ends connected to my heart muscles. Induction fields make me decidedly nervous.
So personally, I'd have to say that I like Big Wall Jacks. You can readily include the same mechanical safeguards that we have on normal wall socket points. (Well - that we have on our 230v ones. I gather that you Yanks manage without.)
It was their experience that a pure electric car is very inefficient; for example it's not good at low-speed acceleration. But a combination electric/chemical power system with an intelligent control system allows you to reach very high effiency levels.
The car does indeed use retarders to recharge its batteries when braking, but the majority of battery charging comes from other sources. Besides, retarders radically drop in efficiency as speed falls, so they still have conventional brakes as well.
Say what you like about Microsoft's software/market policy/lawyers, they look like they genuinely take care of their employees. The pay is good (damn good for an intern - about twice what I earned as a student engineer on a vaguely similar scheme in the UK). The working conditions are good. They appear to offer considerable freedom in your working practices.
All of these things are genuinely attractive to a graduating student. Hey, if I was thinking of switching jobs now, they're high up on the list of things I'd be looking for too. Working for a company which actually seems to care about you is a very fulfilling experience.
I was always told by my physics teacher that centrifugal force was imaginary. But then he also told me that when an aeroplane stalls, it's very difficult to restart the engine, so I don't trust him overly much. Help me here, physicists...
So if I'm in one of those big fairground rides; the ones like big centrifuges, where you stand inside a spinning drum:
Centripetal force is the inward axial force that makes an object move in a circular path, right?
The drum is spinning, so I'm undergoing a constant inward acceleration 'cos I'm moving in a circular path. This acceleration is provided by the wall pressing into me. Fine. That's a centripetal force.
But there's an equal and opposite reaction on the wall. Isn't that force, acting on the wall, a cetrifugal force? It's not a centripetal force, because it's not what's constraining the wall to a circular path. The wall section's centripetal force comes from the girders supporting it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that was a post that made me glad I read slashdot at a 0 threshold.
Cardivascular disease is the number one cause of death in your country, accounting for just shy of 40% of all deaths. (For 2001 figures, see this link here.)
Far as I can find, the NIH allocates roughly a billion dollars a year into heart disease research. The Homeland Security Agency has a budget of what, forty billion dollars? Or has it gone up since then?
You think that a breakthrough which brings down the number one killer of Americans (more naughty than Usama bin Ladin and Saddam Hussain combined) won't put a dent in the stockmarket? I know I'd invest in whoever found it.
And many Americans seem to think Iraq was responsible for the September IIth attacks.
Surely this misses the point.
If people _sign up_ for spam, then they asked for what they get.
What I have a problem with is spambots skimming my web page for my email address, and then sending me unsolicited crap. The honeypot will defeat this method, or rather, will at least dilute its effectiveness.
Bloody hell!
Okay, I'll take your word for it, but I don't think I want to ever visit a country where guns are legal and it's okay to kill people so long as you're really really angry...
I disagree. If somebody's wife cheaten on them, I would expect them to be angry.
But simply being very very angry does not excuse you killing somebody.
Hey, I'm an engineer.
Five failures _IS_ proof that something's impossible, isn't it?
I'd be quite interested if there were any studies comparing the rate of re-offences of white collar criminals to the general population. I'm really not sure whether I'd expect to see a high re-offending rate or not.
Mmm....criminal psychology...
Battlefleet Gothic is basically a remake of their old Space Fleet game. Necromunda is largely a remake of the beta-published-in-White-Dwarf Confrontation skirimish game.
I stopped playing GW stuff several years ago, when I realised I could get much more stuff for the same money by buying non-GW games at the Other Games Store In Town. But I have many friends who still play them and greatly enjoy them (in their early to mid twenties).
Now, what I really miss is Space Hulk. There was a game.
Surely it's not hypocrisy if they admit to that motive.
The hypocrisy would arise if they claimed in each case that they were doing it for some moral reason.
In my view.
It scares me that you say that.
Aren't we supposed to be the good guys, to whom such acts are abhorrent?
Your example makes a strong Utilitarian case to justify torture there, but I'm sure the Iraqi Army could use a similar argument to justify torturing the poor PoWs they've taken, to reveal the location of Coalition forces, maybe save many lives and much property. And I'm reasonably sure we back here would raise absolute screaming hell if they did.
Rules we apply, we should apply to ourselves.
Good luck persuading the EC member nations to agree on anything!
I think the current political situation neatly illustrates the difficulties that would be involved...
Even if it was, it would still remain under the control of the Russian military, just as GPS is under the control of the Pentagon.
The whole point (well, one of the major ones, anyway) of Galileo was to create a network which wouldn't be under military control, and so could be relied upon not to be switched off at inconvenient moments.
Well, there's always GLONASS.
[sigh] Poor Russian space program.
Who modded that 'Insightful'?
I agree are amazing, but the chances that you'll ever get to see them are pretty slim. (Unless you're an academic.)
The caves are closed to the public to prevent humidity and bacteria from destroying the fragile paintings. However, Lascaux II, a milimetre-accurate replica, is open nearby. And it's every bit as awesome.
While the main theme is animal (and the Bulls' Chamber is incredible), there's also an astronomy element which might appeal more to geeks. This link is a BBC site explaining how maps of various constellations are visible in the paintings on the roof of the Bulls's Chamber - and painted 16,500 years ago!
Perhaps not efficient, but necessary. The problem here isn't one of physics - it's engineering.
The two big problems with renewables are:
a) Where the energy is generally doesn't have good grid connections. For example, there is enough wave energy off the west coast of Scotland to run the entire UK, and enough wind to run about half the country. There are simply no Supergrid connections to the entire region. It would be very expensive and fairly difficult to build them. But we already have gas pipelines to supply the towns with natural gas.
b) You can't regulate them by demand, as you can with fossil powered turbines. When the wind blows, you get electricity, regardless of whether you want it or not. The Grid can't store electricity - it has to produce exactly as much as is being used at any one time. Any imbalance is taken out of the kinetic energy in the spinning turbines, which leads to a.c. frequency fluctuations. Too much wind/wave/solar power feeding straight into the Grid would rapidly lead to desynchronisation.
However, both these problems could be solved by using Hydrogen, as it's a simple method of storing energy, which could be piped ashore/around using existing natural gas pipelines and stored until needed (porosity issues aside).
Or by using deep-sea wave power extraction. (Which, as it happens, my Masters project was about.)
It's relatively easy to build cheap and efficient devices to extract wave energy from deap-sea regions, but one of the two big problems at the moment is transferring the power back to land as electricity - mainly because of grid synchronisation issues.
However, if we were in a position where we could make use of hydrogen, the generators could locally distil sea water (energy hungry but necessary to get rid of the chlorine) and then electrolyse it, whereupon we pipe the hydrogen back to shore and release the oxygen into the atmosphere.
I don't like the idea of big inductive chargers.
I have a pacemaker. Ignoring the electronics, it's basically a loop antenna with the two ends connected to my heart muscles. Induction fields make me decidedly nervous.
So personally, I'd have to say that I like Big Wall Jacks. You can readily include the same mechanical safeguards that we have on normal wall socket points. (Well - that we have on our 230v ones. I gather that you Yanks manage without.)
And asssuming an electrical system which is twice as good as the theoretical best case.
My university engineering department were doing some work on a hybrid car.
It was their experience that a pure electric car is very inefficient; for example it's not good at low-speed acceleration. But a combination electric/chemical power system with an intelligent control system allows you to reach very high effiency levels.
The car does indeed use retarders to recharge its batteries when braking, but the majority of battery charging comes from other sources. Besides, retarders radically drop in efficiency as speed falls, so they still have conventional brakes as well.
A sizeable portion from renewable energy?
If you're in the US, that's about 6%.
The UK sits at an embarrassing 2.3%.
If you're in Canada, then it's a much more respectable 60% - gotta love that Hydropower.
Unless you're in Canada, I don't think it's fair to say that a healthy chunk of your electrical power is from clean sources. Not yet, anyway.
Uhh...isn't the whole point of Echelon that it monitors pretty much everything?
Whether it gets acted upon is another matter, but the privacy issue is right there at the heart of it.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-Benjamin Franklin
Few crumbs? Did you read the article?
Say what you like about Microsoft's software/market policy/lawyers, they look like they genuinely take care of their employees. The pay is good (damn good for an intern - about twice what I earned as a student engineer on a vaguely similar scheme in the UK). The working conditions are good. They appear to offer considerable freedom in your working practices.
All of these things are genuinely attractive to a graduating student. Hey, if I was thinking of switching jobs now, they're high up on the list of things I'd be looking for too. Working for a company which actually seems to care about you is a very fulfilling experience.
I was always told by my physics teacher that centrifugal force was imaginary. But then he also told me that when an aeroplane stalls, it's very difficult to restart the engine, so I don't trust him overly much. Help me here, physicists...
So if I'm in one of those big fairground rides; the ones like big centrifuges, where you stand inside a spinning drum:
Centripetal force is the inward axial force that makes an object move in a circular path, right?
The drum is spinning, so I'm undergoing a constant inward acceleration 'cos I'm moving in a circular path. This acceleration is provided by the wall pressing into me. Fine. That's a centripetal force.
But there's an equal and opposite reaction on the wall. Isn't that force, acting on the wall, a cetrifugal force? It's not a centripetal force, because it's not what's constraining the wall to a circular path. The wall section's centripetal force comes from the girders supporting it.
Explanations gratefully received.