Under the assumption of constant average population, you can simply assume 2 offspring per female (that there are actually ~100 and ~98 die means, like a high-gain amplifier with a highly attenuated signal, there's a lot of noise).
There's no disease pressure to speak of on Western populations, yet the developed West is characterized by zero to slightly negative population growth.
If you want to get Africa's population growth in check, eliminate disease and eliminate famine. One you take away the visible and very real threat of most of a mother's children not living to reproductive age, she'll stop having half a dozen of them.
Might the Germans have used aluminum calculating machines for more accurate V1 and V2 missiles? Could that have made a difference in the Space Race, or would that still have to wait for the weight-saving economy of the transistor and integrated circuits?
The V2's accuracy was set by the onboard integrating accelerometer, already a precision mechanical device, which integrated an error of some hundreds of meters over the course of its flight. No mechanical computer, in the sense of a gear-based version of the digital control computer, would've been fast enough so it would've still been a PIGA style device; There's a lot of room for the improvement of the PIGA over the V2's version so if mechanical integrators in general had been moved up the V2 would've likely been more accurate.
As for the Apollo flight computer, a very limited orbit-tracking version might have been possible but integrating error would have made it deeply suspect over such a long time period I think. In terms of all the other things the Apollo computer did in terms of attitude control and timing the firing of thrusters correctly, I doubt you could make a one cubic foot mechanical or electromechanical computer do that.
the size and complexity of the problems they could solve was probably more easily worked out on paper than set (programmed) onto the machine.
Obviously not or they'd not have gone to the difficulty of building machines which tax the limits of precision mechanical engineering to solve them. And part of what the mechanical FC computers did - stabilize the guns on a ship that's pitching and turning and rolling - can't be done with a precomputed table.
"Not that the conditions were amazing?" Read some accounts of what the Soviets did in the Gulags, particularly during the 1934-1944 period. To paraphrase (because books don't have Ctrl-F) Solzhenitsyn: "Before you are too harsh condemning the stool pigeons, keep in mind that virtually anyone you congratulate for having survived their ten-year sentence in Gulag was a stoolie."
During the Cold War, cockblocking the Soviets at every turn was America's raison d'etre, to hell with the consequences down the road. Most of the unpleasantness currently playing out (or that has played out) in the middle east, northern africa and south america is a direct result of either that. That or Europe deliberately drawing the lines poorly during decolonization to keep the former colonial areas economically subservient.
those who effected communist policies leading to mass death proudly waved the communist banner, conscious of their ideology, their supposed counterparts (Custer? English landlords?) were not consciously waving some "capitalist" flag.
Hitler's genocide was committed in the name of eugenics, anti-semitism and a generalized virulent racism. He did not send the Jews, the Roma, gays, the disabled and so many others to death camps while chanting "All hail capitalism and the free market!" At worst, "capitalism" (if you wish to lump all economic activity under such) was a tertiary beneficiary of the reduced cost of medicine/care due to the eugenics aspect.
The Nazis were many things - are all of those things evil because of what the Nazis did?
Go buy a copy of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and try to tell us that any crimes remotely resembling such were ever organized and committed in the name of capitalism. Just for reference, we're talking about a nontrivial fraction of the entire population of a very large nation being sent off to be deliberately worked to death while they starved.
Being in great shape at launch means that your heart and skeletal muscles take longer to atrophy (and your bones longer to demineralize) to the point that it's dangerous to return to gravitating conditions.
Also, takeoff is a rather stressful condition to endure for minutes on end.
That appears rather unlikely, seeing as the point at which they'd tap the grid to run their own systems would be the same point at which their turbines feed power onto it.
Now, pointing out that there shouldn't be a single switchboard in a place it can get flooded which will cut off all power everywhere if it gets flooded I can get behind. Also, I've got some notes from Hurricane Katrina here... "do not put emergency generators in basement"
Because it'd be a shame if all our channels stopped playing your campaign ads, and all our "news" anchors started shitting on your name, Mr. Congressperson. Yeah, that'd be a real shame wouldn't it?
Now, we're not saying that anything like that will actually happen, perish the thought, but it would be very nice of you to pass this bill of ours...
Why should there be a government entity doing what is every congress critter's job, that being informed on the topics s/he is facing and having to vote upon.
For the same reason we send 535 people to the White House every two years rather than directly voting ourselves - because the complexity of the world has grown beyond the point where even one whose entire job is to know about and vote on "issues" would be utterly lying if they claimed to have time to genuinely research and understand of every issue they vote on.
So they delegate the job of researching issues to another group who can provide an informed executive summary, rather than using the human fuzzy decision process that, unaided, fails so horribly in the modern world.
The Fukushima disaster did not spread an amount of radiation comparable to Chernobyl. Not even bloody close. Nearly the entire Fukushima evacuation zone (which, stupidly, is a circle even though we now know the plume is a teardrop facing northwest; 80% of that zone has little to virtually nil contamination) would fit inside the big red exceeds-40Ci/sq. km. splotch centered on Chernobyl NPP.
Estimates are that roughly 10% as much radioactivity escaped from Fukushim as from Chernobyl. Furthermore, Chernobyl released vast amounts of plutonium/uranium/graphite/fission product materials while it burned; The only things to escape in any quantity from Fukushima were volatile cesium and iodine.
The problem managing the Fukushima reactors wasn't caused by them being near to each other, it was caused by the earthquake knocking out power and damaging the roads so that emergency services couldn't get there for days, and the tsunami flooding the emergency generators & emergency switchboard (which were both in the basements).
How would the spacing between RBs have changed anything?
And given the nature of redshifting, simply observing things near the surface of last scattering in the radio presents what would've originally been visible light images.
Perhaps not to the same extent, but it's true across most of the hard sciences and engineering fields that a lot of what is today's basic knowledge - the existence GR or E&M, semiconductor theory & practical application, most basic electronics circuits, broad ideas of brain functionality, DNA/RNA functionality - is the "low hanging fruit" that was largely harvested by agile young minds in the early to mid 20th century, and as time passes one needs longer and longer to become well enough acquainted with existing results to discover/derive new ones.
It's Newton's "on the shoulders of giants" all over again: Each new generation builds on the knowledge of the old. What's interesting now is that we're approaching "saturation" for unaugmented minds; The previous stack of knowledge has reached sufficient magnitude that we're seeing ever increasing specialization in the sciences in order for a single unaided brain to be able to hold and correlate enough data to be able to extend it. In the Renaissance and before, you could have the "everyman" who was able to master most or all fields of human intellectual endeavor. By the 1600s we started seeing the emergence of masters of engineering, math, natural philosophy, etc. Today, no one is a researcher in "mathematics" because no one could possibly learn all of mathematics in sufficient detail, there are researchers in specific abstract topological spaces, or in certain aspects of group theory, etc.
Because PCs are and always have been devices that enable content creation - from the beginning, the main use of PCs was for you to sit down on and create new stuff. Be it entering data into a spreadsheet, writing programs, editing graphics or talking on a BBS, the PC isn't a device that's intended to facilitate passive consumption.
And as you point out, the majority of people are just that - passive consumers.
The reason all the physics academics in the early 20th century did their important work in their 20s is because they were working in brand new fields - general relativity and quantum mechanics / quantum field theory - where the Nobels went to the first person to pick the low-laying fruit. Meanwhile, as a modern physics graduate, some of the problems I'm expected to solve for homework and/or self-edification originally got Nobel Prizes when Schrodinger, Dirac, Einstein and Feynman worked them out.
Those were good times, man... In the 1800s, it was like "hey guys, some alpha rays bounce back from the gold foil" and the Royal Society said "Cherry-o, you have discovered the atomic nucleus, my good fellow!" In the 1930s, it was all "Hey, you need this chargeless, massless particle to save energy & momentum conservation during radioactive decay" and everyone was like "woa, shit, you discovered the neutrino! Nobel for you!", or you went "guys, particles have to have antipartners to annihilate into photons" and shit was all "omg, you discovered antimatter! Fuckin 'eh!" In the 21st century, there's no more low-hanging fruit to be had. New discoveries go more like "If we spend 15 years constructing the largest, most expensive machine in history, we might be able to winnow down the dozens of theories that make the same predictions at any lower energy level."
I'm probably being a tad unfair to the LHC, but it's no exaggeration to say that in many cases basic physics discoveries can no longer realistically be made in your garage, or in many cases with the resources of a single university.
Yes the system's state will eventually wander around these kinds of penny-wise pound-foolish decisions. What's being stated here is that with a small investment up front you can remove the 'eventually' by preventing the need for a foolish duplication of effort in the first place.
But of course, this would imply a corporation with the ability to see beyond the tip of its own nose, which is rare.
Ohm's law applies just as much to AC as DC. A sine wave of a given RMS voltage will put the same power into a resistive load as DC of the same voltage.
You're right that high voltage leads to lower current and lower heat loss (quadratically, not linearly. P=I^2R). The reason AC was originally chosen is that there's no way to effectively transform DC voltage to take advantage of the above without modern semiconductors: mogens are inefficient and require constant maintainence, while MARs are inefficient, and huge, and fragile, and full of lots of hot mercury.
There is no evidence at present that the proton is unstable, only the Standard Model's implication that it is. Current attempts to observe a decay have pushed the lower limit on the proton lifetime out to ~1e34 years.
If anything, one can actually argue that by letting a freezer's temp drift back up a bit during long off periods it would work slightly less hard on average since the mean temperature would be higher and therefore the mean heat diffusion rate smaller, all else being equal.
Probably the same way every maker of guns, or claw hammers, or rope, lock jimmys, or any other physical item does: It's a tool which has no moral standing. It's your fault if you are a douchebag, pedo or sociopath, not the tool's.
You can tell you're wrong when attempts to follow a belief lead to obviously absurd/insane outcomes.
For the belief that data can be handled/restricted like physical objects, that absurdity became fully apparent with that new "resale your used digital music" service, and the MAFIAA (of course) suing it. Reading such nonsense forces you to ask at what point does it become impossible to deny the obvious: The existence of computers and networks between computers renders duplication of data so easy that the ideas of supply-limited economics can no longer meaningfully be applied to data?
Seriously... read that sentence again: "Resell your used digital music." And try to keep a straight face.
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Under the assumption of constant average population, you can simply assume 2 offspring per female (that there are actually ~100 and ~98 die means, like a high-gain amplifier with a highly attenuated signal, there's a lot of noise).
There's no disease pressure to speak of on Western populations, yet the developed West is characterized by zero to slightly negative population growth.
If you want to get Africa's population growth in check, eliminate disease and eliminate famine. One you take away the visible and very real threat of most of a mother's children not living to reproductive age, she'll stop having half a dozen of them.
The V2's accuracy was set by the onboard integrating accelerometer, already a precision mechanical device, which integrated an error of some hundreds of meters over the course of its flight. No mechanical computer, in the sense of a gear-based version of the digital control computer, would've been fast enough so it would've still been a PIGA style device; There's a lot of room for the improvement of the PIGA over the V2's version so if mechanical integrators in general had been moved up the V2 would've likely been more accurate.
As for the Apollo flight computer, a very limited orbit-tracking version might have been possible but integrating error would have made it deeply suspect over such a long time period I think. In terms of all the other things the Apollo computer did in terms of attitude control and timing the firing of thrusters correctly, I doubt you could make a one cubic foot mechanical or electromechanical computer do that.
Obviously not or they'd not have gone to the difficulty of building machines which tax the limits of precision mechanical engineering to solve them. And part of what the mechanical FC computers did - stabilize the guns on a ship that's pitching and turning and rolling - can't be done with a precomputed table.
"Not that the conditions were amazing?" Read some accounts of what the Soviets did in the Gulags, particularly during the 1934-1944 period. To paraphrase (because books don't have Ctrl-F) Solzhenitsyn: "Before you are too harsh condemning the stool pigeons, keep in mind that virtually anyone you congratulate for having survived their ten-year sentence in Gulag was a stoolie."
During the Cold War, cockblocking the Soviets at every turn was America's raison d'etre, to hell with the consequences down the road. Most of the unpleasantness currently playing out (or that has played out) in the middle east, northern africa and south america is a direct result of either that. That or Europe deliberately drawing the lines poorly during decolonization to keep the former colonial areas economically subservient.
Hitler's genocide was committed in the name of eugenics, anti-semitism and a generalized virulent racism. He did not send the Jews, the Roma, gays, the disabled and so many others to death camps while chanting "All hail capitalism and the free market!" At worst, "capitalism" (if you wish to lump all economic activity under such) was a tertiary beneficiary of the reduced cost of medicine/care due to the eugenics aspect.
The Nazis were many things - are all of those things evil because of what the Nazis did?
Go buy a copy of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and try to tell us that any crimes remotely resembling such were ever organized and committed in the name of capitalism. Just for reference, we're talking about a nontrivial fraction of the entire population of a very large nation being sent off to be deliberately worked to death while they starved.
Being in great shape at launch means that your heart and skeletal muscles take longer to atrophy (and your bones longer to demineralize) to the point that it's dangerous to return to gravitating conditions.
Also, takeoff is a rather stressful condition to endure for minutes on end.
That appears rather unlikely, seeing as the point at which they'd tap the grid to run their own systems would be the same point at which their turbines feed power onto it.
Now, pointing out that there shouldn't be a single switchboard in a place it can get flooded which will cut off all power everywhere if it gets flooded I can get behind. Also, I've got some notes from Hurricane Katrina here... "do not put emergency generators in basement"
Because it'd be a shame if all our channels stopped playing your campaign ads, and all our "news" anchors started shitting on your name, Mr. Congressperson. Yeah, that'd be a real shame wouldn't it?
Now, we're not saying that anything like that will actually happen, perish the thought, but it would be very nice of you to pass this bill of ours...
For the same reason we send 535 people to the White House every two years rather than directly voting ourselves - because the complexity of the world has grown beyond the point where even one whose entire job is to know about and vote on "issues" would be utterly lying if they claimed to have time to genuinely research and understand of every issue they vote on.
So they delegate the job of researching issues to another group who can provide an informed executive summary, rather than using the human fuzzy decision process that, unaided, fails so horribly in the modern world.
The Fukushima disaster did not spread an amount of radiation comparable to Chernobyl. Not even bloody close. Nearly the entire Fukushima evacuation zone (which, stupidly, is a circle even though we now know the plume is a teardrop facing northwest; 80% of that zone has little to virtually nil contamination) would fit inside the big red exceeds-40Ci/sq. km. splotch centered on Chernobyl NPP.
Estimates are that roughly 10% as much radioactivity escaped from Fukushim as from Chernobyl. Furthermore, Chernobyl released vast amounts of plutonium/uranium/graphite/fission product materials while it burned; The only things to escape in any quantity from Fukushima were volatile cesium and iodine.
The problem managing the Fukushima reactors wasn't caused by them being near to each other, it was caused by the earthquake knocking out power and damaging the roads so that emergency services couldn't get there for days, and the tsunami flooding the emergency generators & emergency switchboard (which were both in the basements).
How would the spacing between RBs have changed anything?
It's all photons, so it's quite comparable.
And given the nature of redshifting, simply observing things near the surface of last scattering in the radio presents what would've originally been visible light images.
Perhaps not to the same extent, but it's true across most of the hard sciences and engineering fields that a lot of what is today's basic knowledge - the existence GR or E&M, semiconductor theory & practical application, most basic electronics circuits, broad ideas of brain functionality, DNA/RNA functionality - is the "low hanging fruit" that was largely harvested by agile young minds in the early to mid 20th century, and as time passes one needs longer and longer to become well enough acquainted with existing results to discover/derive new ones.
It's Newton's "on the shoulders of giants" all over again: Each new generation builds on the knowledge of the old. What's interesting now is that we're approaching "saturation" for unaugmented minds; The previous stack of knowledge has reached sufficient magnitude that we're seeing ever increasing specialization in the sciences in order for a single unaided brain to be able to hold and correlate enough data to be able to extend it. In the Renaissance and before, you could have the "everyman" who was able to master most or all fields of human intellectual endeavor. By the 1600s we started seeing the emergence of masters of engineering, math, natural philosophy, etc. Today, no one is a researcher in "mathematics" because no one could possibly learn all of mathematics in sufficient detail, there are researchers in specific abstract topological spaces, or in certain aspects of group theory, etc.
Because PCs are and always have been devices that enable content creation - from the beginning, the main use of PCs was for you to sit down on and create new stuff. Be it entering data into a spreadsheet, writing programs, editing graphics or talking on a BBS, the PC isn't a device that's intended to facilitate passive consumption.
And as you point out, the majority of people are just that - passive consumers.
The reason all the physics academics in the early 20th century did their important work in their 20s is because they were working in brand new fields - general relativity and quantum mechanics / quantum field theory - where the Nobels went to the first person to pick the low-laying fruit. Meanwhile, as a modern physics graduate, some of the problems I'm expected to solve for homework and/or self-edification originally got Nobel Prizes when Schrodinger, Dirac, Einstein and Feynman worked them out.
Those were good times, man... In the 1800s, it was like "hey guys, some alpha rays bounce back from the gold foil" and the Royal Society said "Cherry-o, you have discovered the atomic nucleus, my good fellow!" In the 1930s, it was all "Hey, you need this chargeless, massless particle to save energy & momentum conservation during radioactive decay" and everyone was like "woa, shit, you discovered the neutrino! Nobel for you!", or you went "guys, particles have to have antipartners to annihilate into photons" and shit was all "omg, you discovered antimatter! Fuckin 'eh!" In the 21st century, there's no more low-hanging fruit to be had. New discoveries go more like "If we spend 15 years constructing the largest, most expensive machine in history, we might be able to winnow down the dozens of theories that make the same predictions at any lower energy level."
I'm probably being a tad unfair to the LHC, but it's no exaggeration to say that in many cases basic physics discoveries can no longer realistically be made in your garage, or in many cases with the resources of a single university.
Yes the system's state will eventually wander around these kinds of penny-wise pound-foolish decisions. What's being stated here is that with a small investment up front you can remove the 'eventually' by preventing the need for a foolish duplication of effort in the first place.
But of course, this would imply a corporation with the ability to see beyond the tip of its own nose, which is rare.
Ohm's law applies just as much to AC as DC. A sine wave of a given RMS voltage will put the same power into a resistive load as DC of the same voltage.
You're right that high voltage leads to lower current and lower heat loss (quadratically, not linearly. P=I^2R). The reason AC was originally chosen is that there's no way to effectively transform DC voltage to take advantage of the above without modern semiconductors: mogens are inefficient and require constant maintainence, while MARs are inefficient, and huge, and fragile, and full of lots of hot mercury.
The electrochemical redox reaction between the two is what completes the circuit. Don't worry, the loop integral of voltage is still zero.
There is no evidence at present that the proton is unstable, only the Standard Model's implication that it is. Current attempts to observe a decay have pushed the lower limit on the proton lifetime out to ~1e34 years.
If anything, one can actually argue that by letting a freezer's temp drift back up a bit during long off periods it would work slightly less hard on average since the mean temperature would be higher and therefore the mean heat diffusion rate smaller, all else being equal.
Probably the same way every maker of guns, or claw hammers, or rope, lock jimmys, or any other physical item does: It's a tool which has no moral standing. It's your fault if you are a douchebag, pedo or sociopath, not the tool's.
You can tell you're wrong when attempts to follow a belief lead to obviously absurd/insane outcomes.
For the belief that data can be handled/restricted like physical objects, that absurdity became fully apparent with that new "resale your used digital music" service, and the MAFIAA (of course) suing it. Reading such nonsense forces you to ask at what point does it become impossible to deny the obvious: The existence of computers and networks between computers renders duplication of data so easy that the ideas of supply-limited economics can no longer meaningfully be applied to data?
Seriously... read that sentence again: "Resell your used digital music." And try to keep a straight face.