Well, a black hole with a mass of a satellite evaporating as Hawking radiation would be a pretty bad... That much mass converting into gamma rays in a second would probably fry half of the Earth.
In addition to having a remarkable immune system, they also have perhaps the best heart on Earth (not only 4-chambered like us, but also able to shut down blood circulation in the lungs while diving).
Lucky for us mammals that they're so highly specialized into their wet environment...:-)
Birds are not special. Many species that I would guess (IANAPaleontologist) are as closely related to dinosaurs as birds are also survived and thrived (think lizards, snakes, turtles, alligators, crocodiles, and Republicans).
Nope, those aren't particularily closely related to dinosaurs/birds. Well, I don't know about Republicans, but the other reptiles you mention are almost as distant as mammals. They're also very distant fro meach otthers (except snakes/lizards are close, and so are alligators/crocodiles) We're talking about splits happening between 300 and 200 million years ago from today.
And it's a bit misleading to say that birds are just related to dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs even though they don't look like what we typically think dinosaurs look like. It's the same as with penguins, they don't look very much like your typical bird, and they are penguins, but they're still birds too (possibly even the best birds).
God forbid the earth revert to a state it existed in before the last ice age. About as scary as, not being scary at all.
It's not the new state that is scary, it's the change of state.
Sort of like, being in an area before or after a big earthquake is not scary, but being there in the middle of it would be scary (if you'd be lucky enough to not be dead).
I bet we don't know 10% of what we think we know about the -only- source of energy in our solar system.
Not sure if you're serious or just trolling, but I'll still point out that any energy from radioactive decay or nuclear fission doesn't come from the Sun.
And radioactive decay is what keeps the interior of the Earth hot, for example. Without it, there would be no continental drift, no mountain building, no land, everything eroded so that there would be only ocean, and therefore no land life. So our very existence partly depends on energy that is not coming from the Sun.
This non-solar radioactive energy can also be tapped as geothermal energy. And then there are nuclear reactors for getting energy out of nuclear fission (which doesn't happen in nature, except very rarely).
Vater vapour is not a problem (except maybe very locally, helping from smog etc, and in special cases like the exhaust of airplanes putting H2O up there directly as reflective clouds).
We have these huge open bodies of water covering most of our planet, evaporating and receiving rain. So if we put water vapour into the atmosphere, any excess will just rain down. And I think that any increase in raining caused by our new H2O is totally insignificant, and any ocean level increase because of new H2O is also totally insignificant. There's just so much water circulating in the system, and oceans are essentially limitless "water sinks" that it just doesn't matter.
CO2 is a different matter, because there is so little of it in the system, that the amount we put out can make a difference.
This becomes embarressing when things like the carbon retention of the Sahara are studied, as we discussed weaks ago, and suddenly billions of tons of carbon disappear from the air in our models, but the temperature hasn't changed at all.
What carbon has "disappeared"? CO2 in atmosphere is measured quantity. Discovering new carbon sinks doesn't make any of it disappear. It does raise the question of why is it increasing so much even if these newly discovered sinks have been in action all the time... And I'm not sure the answer is very comforting.
Well, in Braid there are few places where you have to exit and restart the level if you screw up, which is essentially same as dying in the context of that game.
But yeah, Braid is awesome! Even the few puzzles where I first *thought* they need precise timing with buttons and got seriously frustrated with my not-for-Mario fingers, in the end I discovered that they could be solved by using smarts too, no need for serious finger acrobatics:-)
Ooh, but what sick, sadistic levels you *could* make with that game engine... Start with getting player stuck while giving them the illusion they're just about to solve the puzzle, and keep 'em trying again and again with no hope of success without restarting the level... Then on top of that make the level very hard, requiring precise button action with complex timing.;-)
This is just a mass-mailed request to receive money, hoping to get some suckers to send some. Whatever the reason given for sending money, it's a scam. Just 'cos the reason given by this scam is a threat of violence, it doesn't stop it from being a scam, it just makes it also extortion.
It's time to call bullshit. You've objected to this like five times already and I've made all of your objections silly. Could you at least disclose for us which company you're defending here?
I'm not even going to justify this objection with an answer because it's "Change! Change is bad!"
I didn't really pay attention to who I was objecting to, I was objecting to the issues. And above is the only time I'm objecting to your suggestion that flash disks shouldn't have a standard interface, not five times. Consider re-counting your fingers;-).
I understand that you feel that a device should require a device-specific software driver, so that the driver could be optimized for specific uses. I just disagree, because I don't see that making any sense in the real world. Any device that works without drivers has a huge advantage in the mass market over a similar device that requires drivers.
Hiding the gritty details behind a standard interface is especially huge advantage in a field that is progressing very rapidly (such as SSD technology). That way you can essentially put the device to market around the time a competitor with a driver solution is just starting to test the drivers against the final version of the hardware (as well as testing the latest driver against all the previous generations of the same product).
With video hardware, there is no alternative. There is and can't be standard interface, it's just too complex, new features appearing all the time that couldn't possibly be included in any existing standard. We're still years, maybe decades away from video hardware that can just take a world description over a standard interface, and then efficiently draw it with only internal optimizations.
However, with data access, it's possible to have a good general standard, because the communication is essentially "gimme these sectors" and "write these sectors", and let the storage device internally figure where those sectors are, how the error correction is done, etc.
Yes, we're very much talking in the silicon level. The transistors, the "bits" are in the same scale as the wires, so it doesn't matter how wide a wire (or is it "lead" when talking about silicon, or what?), what matter is the ratio of physical wire width vs. physical bit size.
Let's take a megabit in the middle of a gigabit flash chip. How many wires do you suggest this "center megabit" should have connecting it to the outside world? Where would the wires physically be?
And just what do you mean by "avoiding wires completely"? If you're talking about external copper wiring, then never mind, since that's not what I meant by wires, sorry for confusion... But if you're talking about avoiding "wires" on the silicon chip, then please clarify.
I think the motivation for selecting this particular project was, that improving these techniques will likely have applications here on Earth too.
But looking for DNA is a pretty good guess for life for any planet that might have life on Earth-like conditions. It might very well be that DNA is the best molecule for genetic information in this kind of environment, and possibly even the only viable molecule in more extreme conditions like current Mars. It has, after all, "enslaved" RNA, and completely wiped out even traces of any other possible progenitors here on Earth...
Why appeal to such an ugly thing? Why not appeal to humanity?
Appeal to humanity, as in appeal to remove the wrong part of humanity by a bloody war? Yes, that might work too, but appealing to plain nationalism without war is almost as effective,and has less side-effects...
Plasmids are "small" DNA molecules, usually ring shaped. Using plasmids would be introducing new DNA into the cell. This article is about activating existing DNA.
Quite interesting implications in treating any disease that is caused by body cells no longer doing what they're supposed to do (such as diabetes)... And probably deactivation would be about as easy as activation, so also implications for diseases that are caused by cells doing stuff they aren't supposed to do (maybe even generic cancer treatment, simply stopping any tumor from growing, no matter what type of tumor it is), or doing too much of the stuff they're normally supposed to do (thyroid hyperfunction).
There's no good reason for your SSD to come perfectly honest about that either.
Is there a reason for it not to?
How about providing a consistent interface to the software driver? Do you *really* want solid state disks that all require a different driver? Sort of like current video hardware, which is plagued by buggy drivers, missing specs of the chip, missing open source drivers...
I'd much rather have a standard interface, so that when I buy a disk, I know it'll work.
More wires means they need more space, which means the wires have to be longer. Longer wires use more power as plain resistance, and also being more susceptibe to noise they need more power for the same s/n ratio.
So you're suggesting more wires? Not only they'd use more power, but most importantly they take up valuable real estate on the silicon chip. And with longer distances you also have to run at lower clock frequency.
So it is actually a limit of the technology, and a very physical limit inherent of all electronic matrix-like components, including such mundane things as keyboards.
I do not think that biology is 'merely' applied chemistry, and therefore somehow less 'pure'.
Not yet anyway. But we're getting there, and maybe some day we understand biology well enough that it can be reduced to just applied chemistry... At that point biology will be as pure as chemistry, because it will be same as chemistry.
And one day we can perhaps make any arbitary universe just based on the maths of it. At that point everything will be as pure as maths, because everything will be maths (from scientific point of view).
(No, I'm not entirely serious with above, just letting my mind wander with fingers on keyboard.)
I don't think anyone thinks that self-signed certs should be blindly accepted.
What's the alternative? Unless it's a cert issued by somebody you can actually contact to verify the checksum before accepting, how can you accept a self-signed certificate "non-blindly"? You can think carefully wether to accept it blindly or not, but still it's accepting it blindly if you choose to accept it (like blind people crossing the street still do it blindly, no matter how carefully they do it).
It is basically just systems evolving into different systems, some more complex, others more simple. Life could well be just our noun for extremely complex (all self-replicant in this planet...) systems. But the fact is that we don't have the slightest clue of what extraterrestrial life looks like. We don't even know if it replicates itself...
Random chance can't produce anything very complex, because as soon as you start to get even a bit complex, there are such a vast number of possibilities, most of which just won't work, that getting such a complex system "right" by random chance within the lifetime of a single universe is just impossible in any practical sense.
By this logic, it can't all happen at once by random chance. For complexity you need accumulation of information with modification.
But if there is only random chance to generate new information, then it will eventually produce just a single fatal change, ending the story of that particular copy of the life-like system. So it better not be the only copy...
So you need a way to have multiple copies of an existing system, so changes can happen without danger of total loss of accumulated information. To produce copies, self-replication is needed. Only then it's possible to evolve towards higher complexity, only then destruction of "bad" copies actually drives evolution towards more complex (better in higher variety of environments) systems, towards anything that could be called "life" and not just any chemistry.
Or well, it doesn't have to be self-replication, any replication will do. I mean, even the DNA in our cells isn't really self-replicating, but needs RNA and proteins to replicate. And there's mutual replication at higher levels too (just think, what if humans were self-replicating, instead of requiring help of another human of opposite sex...;-).
Of course if you want to call a mundane computer program "life", then there's your example of "life" that doesn't have to replicate... But can you come up with a way for anything as complex as a computer program to appear without a programmer (of a programmer (of a...)) that appeared through evolution based on self-replication?
The moving mass of the upper part of the building was considerably less than the inertial mass of the building below the break. The weight and inertial energy of the falling upper part of the buildings could theoretically have overcome the strength of the lower support structure, but not its much larger inertia.
To put it simply, assume the top of the building starting to fall from standstill above the floor(s) where structures break. Now it comes down at least height of a full floor (3 meters?), in other words that much potential energy (mass * height * G-constant) gets converted into different forms of energy, mostly momentum and breaking the structures inside that floor.
Then this moving mass is going to hit the first intact floor.
If the top of the building was heavy enough, it now has enough momentum (after falling that 3 meters) to break the intact floor and have some momentum left. The breaking floor adds to the mass of the falling top, and any momentum left also gives some initial velocity instead of starting from standstill. If this is the case, then of course the next floor will break because it'll be hit harder than the floor above it, leaving even more momentum after breaking and adding to the mass again. Repeat until bottom of the building is demolished down to the ground level. And then finally any intact floors at the top will be hitting the debris pile at ground at some velocity (in WTC case, at high enough velocity to destroy them too).
On the other hand, if the top of the building is too light, it won't have enough momentum after falling the first 3 meters. Then it's not going to fully break the first intact floor, and so it willhit the next floor with less force, quickly halting the pancaking collapse after the weakened floors have collapsed (maybe after that the top would fall sideways, or just stick up there, I don't know).
You're free to believe that the latter case is true for WTC, and there were additional explosives to cause pancaking. But the collapse accelerating faster and faster on it's own, is quite inevitable with enough mass (I mean, this is common sense, with enough mass there's enough force to pulverize the concrete slab of a floor below). And I'm sure in this case the top floors had plenty enough mass to initiate the accelerating collapse (which is self-maintaining after it starts, as more mass and momentum gets added every floor).
But feel free to show me the math demonstrating that the first intact floor's concreate slab would have had enough strength to halt the entire moving top of the building. Also feel free to believe that there wasn't enough mass even if you can't show the math. But don't go about saying that a pancaking collapse would always stop, 'cos that's essentially saying that the every floor can withstand impact of infinite force.
If I buy a cell phone, it does absolutely nothing at all until I purchase a subscription to a cellular network.
FYI, most modern phones work just fine without a cellular subscription. The applications (camera, calendar, stored messages, games, navigation, PC syncing...) work normally, and you'll even be able to make emergency calls (isn't this a mandatory feature of phones and cellular networks, at least in some countries?). And if the phone has WLAN, you'll even be able to make VOIP calls without any subscription (if you find an open WLAN), as well as use any other Internet application of the phone.
It really disturbs me how ignorant scientists really are about the universe. All these guesses that get passed around as facts until we realize we've been totally wrong and replace broken "facts" with updated "facts" that are still wrong.
Just what do you mean by this, in connection with this article? To me it says that they have a bunch of "facts", ie. observations, and now they have a simulation that produces results that look like said facts. What is your complaint?
When record breaking cold temperatures are touted as evidence of "global warming", what do you think?
From TFA: "Even so, 2008 is set to be about the 10th warmest year since 1850, and Met Office scientists say temperatures will rise again as La Nina conditions ease."
And I thought the flat earthers were persistent in their beliefs!
I'd say that if we call "record cold" something that is top 10 warmest in over 150 years, some kind of warming is going on... Are you sure it's not you that is flat-earther persistent in their belief that the whole thing is just balooney? Just think for a moment about your own reasons for jumping the gun and touting a record cold year before cheching the facts and seeing that it's still a very warm year though it's record cold for this century...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, a black hole with a mass of a satellite evaporating as Hawking radiation would be a pretty bad... That much mass converting into gamma rays in a second would probably fry half of the Earth.
Didn't do the math though, could be wrong.
In addition to having a remarkable immune system, they also have perhaps the best heart on Earth (not only 4-chambered like us, but also able to shut down blood circulation in the lungs while diving).
Lucky for us mammals that they're so highly specialized into their wet environment... :-)
Birds are not special. Many species that I would guess (IANAPaleontologist) are as closely related to dinosaurs as birds are also survived and thrived (think lizards, snakes, turtles, alligators, crocodiles, and Republicans).
Nope, those aren't particularily closely related to dinosaurs/birds. Well, I don't know about Republicans, but the other reptiles you mention are almost as distant as mammals. They're also very distant fro meach otthers (except snakes/lizards are close, and so are alligators/crocodiles) We're talking about splits happening between 300 and 200 million years ago from today.
And it's a bit misleading to say that birds are just related to dinosaurs. Birds are dinosaurs even though they don't look like what we typically think dinosaurs look like. It's the same as with penguins, they don't look very much like your typical bird, and they are penguins, but they're still birds too (possibly even the best birds).
God forbid the earth revert to a state it existed in before the last ice age. About as scary as, not being scary at all.
It's not the new state that is scary, it's the change of state.
Sort of like, being in an area before or after a big earthquake is not scary, but being there in the middle of it would be scary (if you'd be lucky enough to not be dead).
I bet we don't know 10% of what we think we know about the -only- source of energy in our solar system.
Not sure if you're serious or just trolling, but I'll still point out that any energy from radioactive decay or nuclear fission doesn't come from the Sun.
And radioactive decay is what keeps the interior of the Earth hot, for example. Without it, there would be no continental drift, no mountain building, no land, everything eroded so that there would be only ocean, and therefore no land life. So our very existence partly depends on energy that is not coming from the Sun.
This non-solar radioactive energy can also be tapped as geothermal energy. And then there are nuclear reactors for getting energy out of nuclear fission (which doesn't happen in nature, except very rarely).
Vater vapour is not a problem (except maybe very locally, helping from smog etc, and in special cases like the exhaust of airplanes putting H2O up there directly as reflective clouds).
We have these huge open bodies of water covering most of our planet, evaporating and receiving rain. So if we put water vapour into the atmosphere, any excess will just rain down. And I think that any increase in raining caused by our new H2O is totally insignificant, and any ocean level increase because of new H2O is also totally insignificant. There's just so much water circulating in the system, and oceans are essentially limitless "water sinks" that it just doesn't matter.
CO2 is a different matter, because there is so little of it in the system, that the amount we put out can make a difference.
This becomes embarressing when things like the carbon retention of the Sahara are studied, as we discussed weaks ago, and suddenly billions of tons of carbon disappear from the air in our models, but the temperature hasn't changed at all.
What carbon has "disappeared"? CO2 in atmosphere is measured quantity. Discovering new carbon sinks doesn't make any of it disappear. It does raise the question of why is it increasing so much even if these newly discovered sinks have been in action all the time... And I'm not sure the answer is very comforting.
Well, in Braid there are few places where you have to exit and restart the level if you screw up, which is essentially same as dying in the context of that game.
But yeah, Braid is awesome! Even the few puzzles where I first *thought* they need precise timing with buttons and got seriously frustrated with my not-for-Mario fingers, in the end I discovered that they could be solved by using smarts too, no need for serious finger acrobatics :-)
Ooh, but what sick, sadistic levels you *could* make with that game engine... Start with getting player stuck while giving them the illusion they're just about to solve the puzzle, and keep 'em trying again and again with no hope of success without restarting the level... Then on top of that make the level very hard, requiring precise button action with complex timing. ;-)
This is just a mass-mailed request to receive money, hoping to get some suckers to send some. Whatever the reason given for sending money, it's a scam. Just 'cos the reason given by this scam is a threat of violence, it doesn't stop it from being a scam, it just makes it also extortion.
It's time to call bullshit. You've objected to this like five times already and I've made all of your objections silly. Could you at least disclose for us which company you're defending here?
I'm not even going to justify this objection with an answer because it's "Change! Change is bad!"
I didn't really pay attention to who I was objecting to, I was objecting to the issues. And above is the only time I'm objecting to your suggestion that flash disks shouldn't have a standard interface, not five times. Consider re-counting your fingers ;-).
I understand that you feel that a device should require a device-specific software driver, so that the driver could be optimized for specific uses. I just disagree, because I don't see that making any sense in the real world. Any device that works without drivers has a huge advantage in the mass market over a similar device that requires drivers.
Hiding the gritty details behind a standard interface is especially huge advantage in a field that is progressing very rapidly (such as SSD technology). That way you can essentially put the device to market around the time a competitor with a driver solution is just starting to test the drivers against the final version of the hardware (as well as testing the latest driver against all the previous generations of the same product).
With video hardware, there is no alternative. There is and can't be standard interface, it's just too complex, new features appearing all the time that couldn't possibly be included in any existing standard. We're still years, maybe decades away from video hardware that can just take a world description over a standard interface, and then efficiently draw it with only internal optimizations.
However, with data access, it's possible to have a good general standard, because the communication is essentially "gimme these sectors" and "write these sectors", and let the storage device internally figure where those sectors are, how the error correction is done, etc.
Yes, we're very much talking in the silicon level. The transistors, the "bits" are in the same scale as the wires, so it doesn't matter how wide a wire (or is it "lead" when talking about silicon, or what?), what matter is the ratio of physical wire width vs. physical bit size.
Let's take a megabit in the middle of a gigabit flash chip. How many wires do you suggest this "center megabit" should have connecting it to the outside world? Where would the wires physically be?
And just what do you mean by "avoiding wires completely"? If you're talking about external copper wiring, then never mind, since that's not what I meant by wires, sorry for confusion... But if you're talking about avoiding "wires" on the silicon chip, then please clarify.
I think the motivation for selecting this particular project was, that improving these techniques will likely have applications here on Earth too.
But looking for DNA is a pretty good guess for life for any planet that might have life on Earth-like conditions. It might very well be that DNA is the best molecule for genetic information in this kind of environment, and possibly even the only viable molecule in more extreme conditions like current Mars. It has, after all, "enslaved" RNA, and completely wiped out even traces of any other possible progenitors here on Earth...
Why appeal to such an ugly thing? Why not appeal to humanity?
Appeal to humanity, as in appeal to remove the wrong part of humanity by a bloody war? Yes, that might work too, but appealing to plain nationalism without war is almost as effective,and has less side-effects...
I'd put a smiley here if it wasn't so sad.
Plasmids are "small" DNA molecules, usually ring shaped. Using plasmids would be introducing new DNA into the cell. This article is about activating existing DNA.
Quite interesting implications in treating any disease that is caused by body cells no longer doing what they're supposed to do (such as diabetes)... And probably deactivation would be about as easy as activation, so also implications for diseases that are caused by cells doing stuff they aren't supposed to do (maybe even generic cancer treatment, simply stopping any tumor from growing, no matter what type of tumor it is), or doing too much of the stuff they're normally supposed to do (thyroid hyperfunction).
There's no good reason for your SSD to come perfectly honest about that either.
Is there a reason for it not to?
How about providing a consistent interface to the software driver? Do you *really* want solid state disks that all require a different driver? Sort of like current video hardware, which is plagued by buggy drivers, missing specs of the chip, missing open source drivers...
I'd much rather have a standard interface, so that when I buy a disk, I know it'll work.
More wires means they need more space, which means the wires have to be longer. Longer wires use more power as plain resistance, and also being more susceptibe to noise they need more power for the same s/n ratio.
So you're suggesting more wires? Not only they'd use more power, but most importantly they take up valuable real estate on the silicon chip. And with longer distances you also have to run at lower clock frequency.
So it is actually a limit of the technology, and a very physical limit inherent of all electronic matrix-like components, including such mundane things as keyboards.
I do not think that biology is 'merely' applied chemistry, and therefore somehow less 'pure'.
Not yet anyway. But we're getting there, and maybe some day we understand biology well enough that it can be reduced to just applied chemistry... At that point biology will be as pure as chemistry, because it will be same as chemistry.
And one day we can perhaps make any arbitary universe just based on the maths of it. At that point everything will be as pure as maths, because everything will be maths (from scientific point of view).
(No, I'm not entirely serious with above, just letting my mind wander with fingers on keyboard.)
I don't think anyone thinks that self-signed certs should be blindly accepted.
What's the alternative? Unless it's a cert issued by somebody you can actually contact to verify the checksum before accepting, how can you accept a self-signed certificate "non-blindly"? You can think carefully wether to accept it blindly or not, but still it's accepting it blindly if you choose to accept it (like blind people crossing the street still do it blindly, no matter how carefully they do it).
It is basically just systems evolving into different systems, some more complex, others more simple. Life could well be just our noun for extremely complex (all self-replicant in this planet...) systems. But the fact is that we don't have the slightest clue of what extraterrestrial life looks like. We don't even know if it replicates itself...
Random chance can't produce anything very complex, because as soon as you start to get even a bit complex, there are such a vast number of possibilities, most of which just won't work, that getting such a complex system "right" by random chance within the lifetime of a single universe is just impossible in any practical sense.
By this logic, it can't all happen at once by random chance. For complexity you need accumulation of information with modification.
But if there is only random chance to generate new information, then it will eventually produce just a single fatal change, ending the story of that particular copy of the life-like system. So it better not be the only copy...
So you need a way to have multiple copies of an existing system, so changes can happen without danger of total loss of accumulated information. To produce copies, self-replication is needed. Only then it's possible to evolve towards higher complexity, only then destruction of "bad" copies actually drives evolution towards more complex (better in higher variety of environments) systems, towards anything that could be called "life" and not just any chemistry.
Or well, it doesn't have to be self-replication, any replication will do. I mean, even the DNA in our cells isn't really self-replicating, but needs RNA and proteins to replicate. And there's mutual replication at higher levels too (just think, what if humans were self-replicating, instead of requiring help of another human of opposite sex... ;-).
Of course if you want to call a mundane computer program "life", then there's your example of "life" that doesn't have to replicate... But can you come up with a way for anything as complex as a computer program to appear without a programmer (of a programmer (of a...)) that appeared through evolution based on self-replication?
Windsor Tower
Widsor Tower was not steel skyscraper, it had concrete core holding it up. Try again.
Also see the picture at wiki artickle and try to imagine what it would look like if the core was steel too...
The moving mass of the upper part of the building was considerably less than the inertial mass of the building below the break. The weight and inertial energy of the falling upper part of the buildings could theoretically have overcome the strength of the lower support structure, but not its much larger inertia.
To put it simply, assume the top of the building starting to fall from standstill above the floor(s) where structures break. Now it comes down at least height of a full floor (3 meters?), in other words that much potential energy (mass * height * G-constant) gets converted into different forms of energy, mostly momentum and breaking the structures inside that floor.
Then this moving mass is going to hit the first intact floor.
If the top of the building was heavy enough, it now has enough momentum (after falling that 3 meters) to break the intact floor and have some momentum left. The breaking floor adds to the mass of the falling top, and any momentum left also gives some initial velocity instead of starting from standstill. If this is the case, then of course the next floor will break because it'll be hit harder than the floor above it, leaving even more momentum after breaking and adding to the mass again. Repeat until bottom of the building is demolished down to the ground level. And then finally any intact floors at the top will be hitting the debris pile at ground at some velocity (in WTC case, at high enough velocity to destroy them too).
On the other hand, if the top of the building is too light, it won't have enough momentum after falling the first 3 meters. Then it's not going to fully break the first intact floor, and so it willhit the next floor with less force, quickly halting the pancaking collapse after the weakened floors have collapsed (maybe after that the top would fall sideways, or just stick up there, I don't know).
You're free to believe that the latter case is true for WTC, and there were additional explosives to cause pancaking. But the collapse accelerating faster and faster on it's own, is quite inevitable with enough mass (I mean, this is common sense, with enough mass there's enough force to pulverize the concrete slab of a floor below). And I'm sure in this case the top floors had plenty enough mass to initiate the accelerating collapse (which is self-maintaining after it starts, as more mass and momentum gets added every floor).
But feel free to show me the math demonstrating that the first intact floor's concreate slab would have had enough strength to halt the entire moving top of the building. Also feel free to believe that there wasn't enough mass even if you can't show the math. But don't go about saying that a pancaking collapse would always stop, 'cos that's essentially saying that the every floor can withstand impact of infinite force.
If I buy a cell phone, it does absolutely nothing at all until I purchase a subscription to a cellular network.
FYI, most modern phones work just fine without a cellular subscription. The applications (camera, calendar, stored messages, games, navigation, PC syncing...) work normally, and you'll even be able to make emergency calls (isn't this a mandatory feature of phones and cellular networks, at least in some countries?). And if the phone has WLAN, you'll even be able to make VOIP calls without any subscription (if you find an open WLAN), as well as use any other Internet application of the phone.
It really disturbs me how ignorant scientists really are about the universe. All these guesses that get passed around as facts until we realize we've been totally wrong and replace broken "facts" with updated "facts" that are still wrong.
Just what do you mean by this, in connection with this article? To me it says that they have a bunch of "facts", ie. observations, and now they have a simulation that produces results that look like said facts. What is your complaint?
When record breaking cold temperatures are touted as evidence of "global warming", what do you think?
From TFA: "Even so, 2008 is set to be about the 10th warmest year since 1850, and Met Office scientists say temperatures will rise again as La Nina conditions ease."
And I thought the flat earthers were persistent in their beliefs!
I'd say that if we call "record cold" something that is top 10 warmest in over 150 years, some kind of warming is going on... Are you sure it's not you that is flat-earther persistent in their belief that the whole thing is just balooney? Just think for a moment about your own reasons for jumping the gun and touting a record cold year before cheching the facts and seeing that it's still a very warm year though it's record cold for this century...