Alright! You win the prize for most inane comment of the entire day! For while other comments may demonstrate greater trollishness, stupidity, or meaninglessness, this post surpassess them all in the extent to which it is unlike anything even resembling a cogent thought of any kind. Congratulations!
On a related note, coal -- having one of the highest energy-densities of any chemicals known -- has been banned, since it must also therefore be a bomb. Likewise with wood. Anyone found transporting wood on their person into a government building or office will be shot on sight as a terrorist. Upon realizing that hydrogen, by virtue of its capacity to fuse releasing energy, has a high energy density too, our handsomest politicians have seem to it that water and all other hydrogen-containing compounds are banned. It was then helpfully pointed out that all matter is also energy, and therefore has enormous energy density. All matter is therefore bombs. Anyone found purchasing matter will be requird to have the appropriate paperwork for dealing with explosives. Unregistered transport of matter-bombs is a terrorist act of the worst kind, and will be tortured to death in a CIA information-collection centre until saftety happens.
Yeah, those ultra-high-energy particles that crash into the upper atmosphere are supposed to be millions of times more energetic than anything that the LHC could even produce.
Also, as far as micro-black-holes go, aren't they supposed to have mass comparable to an electron? That doesn't seem like very much risk of sucking in anything at all. In fact, aren't microscopic-black-holes supposed to be incapable of actually making contact with anything, because their gravitational tidal forces render incoming particles into pure energy long before they ever reach the event horizon? I remember reading that black holes of all scales could convert as much as 50% of incoming matter into energy simply by the tremendous tidal forces exerted.
Plasma had better not give off gamma rays, since plasmas are produced by all of the following phenomena: lightning bolts, plasma televisions, fluorescent and neon lights, and fire. FIRE. Have you ever heard of anyone being irradiated by the gamma rays from a candle? Probably not. Also, heating things up does not increase their tendency to undergo fission even slightly. Seeing as how naturally occurring radiation consistently fails to cause large-scale nuclear reactions in plasma televisions, I'd say that plasma incinerators are probably not at much risk.
Incidentally, 6 inches of lead is sufficient to stop almost all radiation, except neutrinos which are too low-energy to affect anything in any significant way whatsoever. Neutron radiation will go through lead, but get stopped pretty quickly by air or water. When scientists talk about radiation that requires a light-year of lead to block, they're talking about neutrinos. Nothing else (except maybe dark matter) even comes close.
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to explain all this, since it seems fairly evident that you're trolling and playing stupid (for some reason), but if at least one person learns something from this, it ought to be worthwhile.
This isn't fusion. It's just plasma. In a plasma that nuclei are all still intact, but the electrons are free. So all atomic bonds disappear. Once you let it cool, the electrons reassociate themselves with nuclei, and you have atoms again.
It'd sure be nice. Perfect recycling is one of the things that futurists totally love. To have it now... it'll definitely make the industrial/consumer age much more sustainable. It might turn out to be possible to gentrify the entire planet.
Supposedly the temperatures are so high that everything is reduced to a plasma. That is, there can't BE any carcingonic fumes, toxins, or anything else, because all of those things are molecular. Plasmas are totally lacking in anything resembling an atomic bond. If one had an unlimited supply of energy available, reducing things to a plasma and then seperating the components would be the ideal way of recycling while simultaneously refining vast quanities of new feedstock for industrial purposes. It's just that energy isn't unlimited. I'm pretty leery of the idea that these folk can generate energy from this process, but I'd be pretty damn glad to be proven wrong. The consequences of this project being successfull are rather significant.
Indeed. This seems pretty far-fetched. I'll tip my hat to American ingenuity if it works... can you conceive of how many cities are going to want one of these plants if it's for real? The money to be made is unimaginable. Landfill space is expensive. Dealing with "sludge" is expensive and suffers from severe NIMBY issues. If you could just incinerate it all and generate power to boot... I just need to see some proof. It's just so incredible, you know? What kind of hideous gotchas does this plan hide? And for it to not produce any significant quantity of noxious byproducts? Hard to believe.
Anyway, suffice to say, it's good that there are people getting out there and trying wild new ideas. Isn't that what made western society great in the first place? It's time for some more of that.
My claim was a bit of a hyperbole, but nevertheless, there's a strong tendency for the upper management of businesses to avoid prosecution for crimes. And of course, being a tendency or trend (rather than a universal law), counterexamples are meaningless. There are, by definition, counterexamples to anything that isn't universal.
The comment on the twelve year old certainly qualifies as hyperbole. But calling it hysteria is itself hyperbole. Hysteria involves actually acting hysterically. Granted, it's entirely possible that I'm running around and screaming my head off right now... but it's not likely, as those behaviours tend to inhibit proper typing.
Nevertheless, people in the lower case frequently are convicted and given very harsh sentences based on evidence that is incredibly flimsy. Owning a Marilyn Manson CD or listening to Korn or anything else that causes one to fail to fit into the community will often increase the chances of an accused being found guilty. I presume you're already aware of this though, since you referred to my comment as "hyperbole" rather than, say, "delusion" or "nonsense".
Wow, using single biggest financial scandal in American history as an example. Very scientific. And even then, only nineteen people ever saw the inside of a courtroom as defendants. And of the only two people to receive serious sentences, one died WHILE ON VACATION. What kind of barbarous nation lets a man who helped to drag down the entire global economy go on vacation? It'll be fun to see, five years from now, what kind of sentences actually get served.
So how long did she spend in jail? How many times longer would her sentence have been if she had been poor and stolen the same amount in, say, cars? If I tried to steal a mere $100,000 in cars I'd probably spend decades in prison. Martha Stuart is a perfect example of what a joke the justice system is when it comes to dealing with the wealthy and powerful.
Firstly, it's most definitely not an American phenomenon. I singled out America because of the simple fact that this is taking place in America. But you're obviously American, since it's almost invariably Americans that assume people are singling their country out because of some grudge against it. How on Earth did the American people develop such an grossly overblown persecution complex?
Secondly, I am cynical AND angry. I'm angry because it's wrong, and cynical because I have no power to change any aspect of it. This situation has existed throughout all of Human history in every society that has ever existed. I am not a lawyer, nor am I a judge, so I have no influence on the interpretation of law. I'm not an uneducated jobless bigot from a rural area, so I'll never be on a jury. I don't have enough money to lobby anyone about anything. I live in a region with well-established voting proclivities, so I receive absolutely no say in any political matter whatsoever. The only chance I have of enacting change is to make other people aware of the problem, which is exactly what I'm doing. Meanwhile, what YOU are doing -- criticizing others for seeming too cynical -- is exactly the opposite of helpful. It encourages people to stay silent, when discussion and complaint is one of the only tools available to them, no matter how feeble a tool it actually is (mass-media having made public discourse nearly irrelevant).
Seriously though -- suits don't go to jail. It's so fantastically rare as to border on mythical. Not quite as rare as politicians going to jail, but still pretty rare. America is a nation where you are judged by what you have. A top executive has a great deal of wealth, and so the burden of proof for any criminal proceeding against him or her will be set so high that a successful prosecution is impossible. Meanwhile a 12 year old kid from the ghetto will get the needle based on hearsay and the fact that he once listened to a Marilyn Manson CD.
First, redshifting is not about distance, it's about how fast things are moving away from you. It's about distance increasng, not just distance. Second, light waves don't stretch out as they age, so age isn't really at issue here either. Red shifting would occur even if the radiation sources in question were only ten seconds old and only ten metres away, so long as they were moving away from us at a goodly speed. Thirdly the phrase "if and only if" doesn't mean what you think it does. All of physics could be completely wrong, and the universe could still be exactly the age that the big bang model predicts. If it truly were if-and-only-if, then disproving the big bang model would actually mean that it is impossible for the universe to be 13 billion years old while any other age whatsoever would still acceptable. That's insane. The term you are looking for here is "implies". If-and-only-if is a very, very different relationship. Don't worry, it's a common mistake among people who haven't actually studied reasoning, logic, mathematics, or computer science (all subjects in which one eventually has to learn what words like "if", "implies", "only", and "unless" actually MEAN).
Well of course someone has to be wrong. And as in most cases where reality and religion conflict, reality is correct. When I mentioned those who attack the big bang, I was referring to scientists who attack it. That is, scientists who propose alternative models, alternative mechanisms, alternative timelines for the initial minutes of the universe, and so on.
I think the big bang gets attacked more in the sense of attacks on exactly what the initial thingy was. There's no real doubt that the universe is exploding and has been for most of physically evident history. It may not be the initial event, the universe could be eternal, cyclical, or whatever -- but it's certainly exploding now, and seems to have been for at least 12 billion years.
There isn't so much an attacking of the big bang as trying to nail down what exactly the big bang was. In other words, it's the same kind of attacks that people like Stephen Gould and Lynn Margulis make on evolution. They don't doubt that evolution is a real phenomenon for a second; they just want to nail down what exactly evolution is, what makes it tick, how it happens. It's the good kind of attacking, and it's what makes science jump.
Fundies, in turn, seem to assume that the big bang was invented for the sole purpose of trying to support evolution, which is so ridiculous that it defies the belief of real people. In fact, they seem to think that every branch of science exists solely to provide support for an otherwise untenable theory of evolution. This despite the fact that many of these ideas preceded Darwin (in a few cases by millenia).
Don't forget the part where we exile them to the bottom of the Marianas Trench with only a tazer and an oily blanket. I've already worked out a cheap and effective transport system for getting them down there -- the CCBMD, or "Concrete Cinder-Block Marine Descender".
You're kidding right? Their policy is to automatically grant every patent application, and let the courts figure out validity later. Basically, in order to show that they've reduced their budget, they fired all their patent analysts and let them work as consultants to civil courts at one hundred times the overall cost, once you factor in all the legal costs associated with resolving patent disputes the hard way. In a reasonable enlightened nation, this would get the government officials responsible for this decision horsewhipped in a public square before being exiled. In America, the people responsible were instead paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their efforts and will live some of the cushiest lives in the entire world, while the tax payer grapples the massive extra costs introduced by this monstrous decision (as well as paying for the officials' pensions, rather than for a few bullwhips and an exile-barge at a fraction the price). Nice, huh?
It would be interesting to do a poll to see how many slashdot readers are working in the biological sciences right now, and were at least partially inspired by mister Irwin's fanatastic zeal and passion for the wee (and not so wee) beasts of the Earth. I'll be it's more than a few. You can have your Jane Goodall's and whatnot -- Steve Irwin made you want to get out there and see things up close. He got you excited. If we could just put five or six people with that kind of enthusiasm into universities and schools taking the students out on field-trips, we could usher in a golden-age of scientific field-work.
Well, they're certainly words that one uses with regards to people when discussing evolution. And given that Steve Irwin's passion for animals is part of what got me into biology (where I learned a lot of what I know about evolution) in the first place, it's not entirely unwarranted.
Finally, I doubt his family is expressing their grief by looking at Slashdot right now. And if they are, they're probably the kind of people that can take a bit of good-natured discussion on the topic of evolutionary success.
You know that Mister Irwin has already reproduced successfully, right? And that he will leave quite a bit of money to his offspring? I'll lay 10-to-1 odds that his offspring will be more successfull than any of ours. They'll have their father's wealth, outstanding physical health, and at least a shred of his fame.
They don't wrestle the gators? Phht. Bunch of pussies. The fightin' spirit has gone out of you yankees, I swear. Back in my day, if some gator came for us, we'd beat it to death with the packs full of rocks that we had to lug from place to place, rock-transport being the principal economic activity at the time. Damn gators didn't get uppity after that, I tell you what. Good old fashion gumption is better than an MP5 any day. Unless that day happens to involve triffids or a really scary spider or something.
People may not have liked the US, but at least there was some grudging respect. But when you vote for a guy who stole the previous election... when you take an illiterate retard seriously... when you let a near-dictator start a war based on lies and then let your children die in it... you become acknowledged as standing among the STUPIDEST people in all of history. Americans collectively behave in the way that one imagines a down-syndrome-club would.
You may want to have your home's electrical system checked. Sometimes these kinds of things are indicative of a more serious fault in the building's wiring. I had a place where just the opposite happened -- incandescents would burn out in a matter of days. Fluorescents worked fine. In that case we KNEW it was bad wiring, since a) everything about the house was bad, b) a testing device told us so, and c) we were all students, and no one rents a building with anything even remotely intact to students, since students by definition exist solely to be bilked and robbed blind by landlords.
Slashdot Mirror
On a related note, coal -- having one of the highest energy-densities of any chemicals known -- has been banned, since it must also therefore be a bomb. Likewise with wood. Anyone found transporting wood on their person into a government building or office will be shot on sight as a terrorist. Upon realizing that hydrogen, by virtue of its capacity to fuse releasing energy, has a high energy density too, our handsomest politicians have seem to it that water and all other hydrogen-containing compounds are banned. It was then helpfully pointed out that all matter is also energy, and therefore has enormous energy density. All matter is therefore bombs. Anyone found purchasing matter will be requird to have the appropriate paperwork for dealing with explosives. Unregistered transport of matter-bombs is a terrorist act of the worst kind, and will be tortured to death in a CIA information-collection centre until saftety happens.
Also, as far as micro-black-holes go, aren't they supposed to have mass comparable to an electron? That doesn't seem like very much risk of sucking in anything at all. In fact, aren't microscopic-black-holes supposed to be incapable of actually making contact with anything, because their gravitational tidal forces render incoming particles into pure energy long before they ever reach the event horizon? I remember reading that black holes of all scales could convert as much as 50% of incoming matter into energy simply by the tremendous tidal forces exerted.
Incidentally, 6 inches of lead is sufficient to stop almost all radiation, except neutrinos which are too low-energy to affect anything in any significant way whatsoever. Neutron radiation will go through lead, but get stopped pretty quickly by air or water. When scientists talk about radiation that requires a light-year of lead to block, they're talking about neutrinos. Nothing else (except maybe dark matter) even comes close.
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to explain all this, since it seems fairly evident that you're trolling and playing stupid (for some reason), but if at least one person learns something from this, it ought to be worthwhile.
This isn't fusion. It's just plasma. In a plasma that nuclei are all still intact, but the electrons are free. So all atomic bonds disappear. Once you let it cool, the electrons reassociate themselves with nuclei, and you have atoms again.
It'd sure be nice. Perfect recycling is one of the things that futurists totally love. To have it now... it'll definitely make the industrial/consumer age much more sustainable. It might turn out to be possible to gentrify the entire planet.
Supposedly the temperatures are so high that everything is reduced to a plasma. That is, there can't BE any carcingonic fumes, toxins, or anything else, because all of those things are molecular. Plasmas are totally lacking in anything resembling an atomic bond. If one had an unlimited supply of energy available, reducing things to a plasma and then seperating the components would be the ideal way of recycling while simultaneously refining vast quanities of new feedstock for industrial purposes. It's just that energy isn't unlimited. I'm pretty leery of the idea that these folk can generate energy from this process, but I'd be pretty damn glad to be proven wrong. The consequences of this project being successfull are rather significant.
Anyway, suffice to say, it's good that there are people getting out there and trying wild new ideas. Isn't that what made western society great in the first place? It's time for some more of that.
My claim was a bit of a hyperbole, but nevertheless, there's a strong tendency for the upper management of businesses to avoid prosecution for crimes. And of course, being a tendency or trend (rather than a universal law), counterexamples are meaningless. There are, by definition, counterexamples to anything that isn't universal.
The comment on the twelve year old certainly qualifies as hyperbole. But calling it hysteria is itself hyperbole. Hysteria involves actually acting hysterically. Granted, it's entirely possible that I'm running around and screaming my head off right now ... but it's not likely, as those behaviours tend to inhibit proper typing.
Nevertheless, people in the lower case frequently are convicted and given very harsh sentences based on evidence that is incredibly flimsy. Owning a Marilyn Manson CD or listening to Korn or anything else that causes one to fail to fit into the community will often increase the chances of an accused being found guilty. I presume you're already aware of this though, since you referred to my comment as "hyperbole" rather than, say, "delusion" or "nonsense".
Wow, using single biggest financial scandal in American history as an example. Very scientific. And even then, only nineteen people ever saw the inside of a courtroom as defendants. And of the only two people to receive serious sentences, one died WHILE ON VACATION. What kind of barbarous nation lets a man who helped to drag down the entire global economy go on vacation? It'll be fun to see, five years from now, what kind of sentences actually get served.
So how long did she spend in jail? How many times longer would her sentence have been if she had been poor and stolen the same amount in, say, cars? If I tried to steal a mere $100,000 in cars I'd probably spend decades in prison. Martha Stuart is a perfect example of what a joke the justice system is when it comes to dealing with the wealthy and powerful.
Secondly, I am cynical AND angry. I'm angry because it's wrong, and cynical because I have no power to change any aspect of it. This situation has existed throughout all of Human history in every society that has ever existed. I am not a lawyer, nor am I a judge, so I have no influence on the interpretation of law. I'm not an uneducated jobless bigot from a rural area, so I'll never be on a jury. I don't have enough money to lobby anyone about anything. I live in a region with well-established voting proclivities, so I receive absolutely no say in any political matter whatsoever. The only chance I have of enacting change is to make other people aware of the problem, which is exactly what I'm doing. Meanwhile, what YOU are doing -- criticizing others for seeming too cynical -- is exactly the opposite of helpful. It encourages people to stay silent, when discussion and complaint is one of the only tools available to them, no matter how feeble a tool it actually is (mass-media having made public discourse nearly irrelevant).
Seriously though -- suits don't go to jail. It's so fantastically rare as to border on mythical. Not quite as rare as politicians going to jail, but still pretty rare. America is a nation where you are judged by what you have. A top executive has a great deal of wealth, and so the burden of proof for any criminal proceeding against him or her will be set so high that a successful prosecution is impossible. Meanwhile a 12 year old kid from the ghetto will get the needle based on hearsay and the fact that he once listened to a Marilyn Manson CD.
Redshifting implies increasing distance.
First, redshifting is not about distance, it's about how fast things are moving away from you. It's about distance increasng, not just distance. Second, light waves don't stretch out as they age, so age isn't really at issue here either. Red shifting would occur even if the radiation sources in question were only ten seconds old and only ten metres away, so long as they were moving away from us at a goodly speed. Thirdly the phrase "if and only if" doesn't mean what you think it does. All of physics could be completely wrong, and the universe could still be exactly the age that the big bang model predicts. If it truly were if-and-only-if, then disproving the big bang model would actually mean that it is impossible for the universe to be 13 billion years old while any other age whatsoever would still acceptable. That's insane. The term you are looking for here is "implies". If-and-only-if is a very, very different relationship. Don't worry, it's a common mistake among people who haven't actually studied reasoning, logic, mathematics, or computer science (all subjects in which one eventually has to learn what words like "if", "implies", "only", and "unless" actually MEAN).
Well of course someone has to be wrong. And as in most cases where reality and religion conflict, reality is correct. When I mentioned those who attack the big bang, I was referring to scientists who attack it. That is, scientists who propose alternative models, alternative mechanisms, alternative timelines for the initial minutes of the universe, and so on.
I think the big bang gets attacked more in the sense of attacks on exactly what the initial thingy was. There's no real doubt that the universe is exploding and has been for most of physically evident history. It may not be the initial event, the universe could be eternal, cyclical, or whatever -- but it's certainly exploding now, and seems to have been for at least 12 billion years.
There isn't so much an attacking of the big bang as trying to nail down what exactly the big bang was. In other words, it's the same kind of attacks that people like Stephen Gould and Lynn Margulis make on evolution. They don't doubt that evolution is a real phenomenon for a second; they just want to nail down what exactly evolution is, what makes it tick, how it happens. It's the good kind of attacking, and it's what makes science jump.
Fundies, in turn, seem to assume that the big bang was invented for the sole purpose of trying to support evolution, which is so ridiculous that it defies the belief of real people. In fact, they seem to think that every branch of science exists solely to provide support for an otherwise untenable theory of evolution. This despite the fact that many of these ideas preceded Darwin (in a few cases by millenia).
Don't forget the part where we exile them to the bottom of the Marianas Trench with only a tazer and an oily blanket. I've already worked out a cheap and effective transport system for getting them down there -- the CCBMD, or "Concrete Cinder-Block Marine Descender".
You're kidding right? Their policy is to automatically grant every patent application, and let the courts figure out validity later. Basically, in order to show that they've reduced their budget, they fired all their patent analysts and let them work as consultants to civil courts at one hundred times the overall cost, once you factor in all the legal costs associated with resolving patent disputes the hard way. In a reasonable enlightened nation, this would get the government officials responsible for this decision horsewhipped in a public square before being exiled. In America, the people responsible were instead paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their efforts and will live some of the cushiest lives in the entire world, while the tax payer grapples the massive extra costs introduced by this monstrous decision (as well as paying for the officials' pensions, rather than for a few bullwhips and an exile-barge at a fraction the price). Nice, huh?
It would be interesting to do a poll to see how many slashdot readers are working in the biological sciences right now, and were at least partially inspired by mister Irwin's fanatastic zeal and passion for the wee (and not so wee) beasts of the Earth. I'll be it's more than a few. You can have your Jane Goodall's and whatnot -- Steve Irwin made you want to get out there and see things up close. He got you excited. If we could just put five or six people with that kind of enthusiasm into universities and schools taking the students out on field-trips, we could usher in a golden-age of scientific field-work.
Finally, I doubt his family is expressing their grief by looking at Slashdot right now. And if they are, they're probably the kind of people that can take a bit of good-natured discussion on the topic of evolutionary success.
You know that Mister Irwin has already reproduced successfully, right? And that he will leave quite a bit of money to his offspring? I'll lay 10-to-1 odds that his offspring will be more successfull than any of ours. They'll have their father's wealth, outstanding physical health, and at least a shred of his fame.
They don't wrestle the gators? Phht. Bunch of pussies. The fightin' spirit has gone out of you yankees, I swear. Back in my day, if some gator came for us, we'd beat it to death with the packs full of rocks that we had to lug from place to place, rock-transport being the principal economic activity at the time. Damn gators didn't get uppity after that, I tell you what. Good old fashion gumption is better than an MP5 any day. Unless that day happens to involve triffids or a really scary spider or something.
People may not have liked the US, but at least there was some grudging respect. But when you vote for a guy who stole the previous election ... when you take an illiterate retard seriously ... when you let a near-dictator start a war based on lies and then let your children die in it ... you become acknowledged as standing among the STUPIDEST people in all of history. Americans collectively behave in the way that one imagines a down-syndrome-club would.
You may want to have your home's electrical system checked. Sometimes these kinds of things are indicative of a more serious fault in the building's wiring. I had a place where just the opposite happened -- incandescents would burn out in a matter of days. Fluorescents worked fine. In that case we KNEW it was bad wiring, since a) everything about the house was bad, b) a testing device told us so, and c) we were all students, and no one rents a building with anything even remotely intact to students, since students by definition exist solely to be bilked and robbed blind by landlords.
That's odd. I have ancient discount CFLs that have been operating reliably for four years and three different homes (ah, the life of a student...).