Yes, but the simplest such process is to wipe out the source of the problem. If we mess up the ecosystem badly enough, we may find ourselves starving to death because we can't grow enough food to feed five billion people. Once our civilization has collapsed and the population has dropped by four or five billion, the ecosystem will recover and the Earth will be nice and healthy again. Problem solved.
I would rather find a solution that involves less loss of human life. Ultimately taking care of the environment is about ensuring our future, not the Earth's. The Earth will go on, with or without us.
10. Everyone has the right on arrest or detention a) to be informed promptly of the reasons therefor; b) to retain and instruct counsel without delay and to be informed of that right; and c) to have the validity of the detention determined by way of habeas corpus and to be released if the detention is not lawful. Period, end of sentance, no "except."
You missed paragraph 33, which allows a federal or provincial parliament to make any law they pass immune to the charter at will. The only restriction is that laws with that designation have to be renewed by a new vote of the legislature every five years or they expire.
Yes, but one also has to be careful when dealing with AC systems. For example, P=I*V is only true for instantaneous quantities in general. People often get into trouble by measuring the RMS voltage and current and assuming that the average power is equal to the product of the two. This is sometimes true, but not always.
Quantum mechanical wavefunctions are complex. You could define them as two real wavefunctions and work out the appropriate algebra, but it's exactly complex algebra. So i could correspond to the phase difference of two wavefunctions, which would be observable via interference effects.
There is an easier and better way. Quantum mechanical states are points in Hilbert space. All of quantum mechanics can be reduced to mathematics in Hilbert space, eliminating the need for wavefunctions. Any property of a quantum mechanical state that can actually be observed or measured can be represented by a real number (or a collection of real numbers). Mathematically, every possible observation can be represented by an operator which has real eigenvalues.
Wavefunctions are a convenient abstraction that allows us to apply our intuitive understanding of waves to solving quantum problems.
Don't put too much importance on the whole "rubber sheet" thing. It's just a model, designed to give non-physicists a sense of how general relativity works. It's not an accurate description of things.
You are quite right that the model assumes you have gravity to pull things towards the depressions in the rubber sheet. The point of the model is to express how, in GR, gravity does not directly act from one object on another, but rather the gravitational field of an object distorts the space around it in such a way as to cause other objects to be pulled toward it.
"Infrared" is not a sufficient description when considering eye safety. There is a big difference in safety between sources of the same power at 1 micron, 1.5 microns, 5 microns and 10 microns, even though all are "infrared".
I'm pretty sure modern remotes are designed according to the goverment safety standards for light emitting devices. I still wouldn't recommend putting one up against your eye, though.
I'm not sure, but they aren't lasers so the beam is not well collimated (i.e. it spreads out very fast.) This makes it a lot less dangerous since unless you hold the remote right up to your eye only a small fraction of the IR light will pass through your pupil. Even if you do that, though, the lens in your eye won't focus the beam into a small spot on your retina since the source is too close, besides the fact that non-laser sources typically can't be focused as well as laser beams can. (I won't go into why that is the case here.)
You wouldn't want to use a laser for an IR remote anyway, since then you would have to aim the remote exactly at the receiver. A less collimated source doesn't have to be aimed as precisely.
In fact the most dangerous lasers for eye damage are the ones in the near-infrared (around 1 micron wavelength). The beam is invisible so it doesn't trigger your blink response, but your cornea and lens are nicely transparent to the beam and focus it into a nice tight spot on the retina. Casual exposure to near infrared laser beams can damage your retina badly, without you knowing anything has happened until much later.
Not necessarily. There are other reasons why someone might be aiming a laser at the sky. (Light show, scientific experiment, weather measurements, mere amusement...) If you aim a laser at the sky near an airport and leave it on for long enough, eventually an airplane will fly through it. There have been past incidents of pilots being exposed accidentally to light from laser light shows. There are regulations to cover this now.
Remember that with a continuous-beam laser you only have to aim it. If the laser is powerful enough, you don't even have to hold it on the target. Simply sweeping it over the target might be sufficient. This is a lot easier than aiming and firing a rifle.
Would it be practical to make the windows in the cockpit able to filter out laser light?
Sure, just paint them black.
You can't filter out every possible laser without blocking the whole spectrum. You could, however, block some of the more commonly available laser lines selectively. A good start would be to block out all infrared.
There are special coatings and materials that can block intense light while passing regular light unattenuated. I'm not sure if these are ready for commercial deployment though.
I wonder what they do in hybrid autos, where the gas engine is designed to shut down and start up frequently while the car is running. Do they use the electrical system to keep the oil pressurized?
Case in point: A cousin of mine was recently endowed with a driver's license. However, nobody thought it necessary to tell him how in certain vehicles under certain conditions, pumping the brake pedal is necessary to stop.
He may have learned about "threshold braking" instead. That was what was taught when I took defensive driving many years ago (before ABS). The idea is to ease up on the brakes slightly when the wheels start to lock, and then hold the brake at that threshold. If done right, this will stop you more quickly than pumping the brakes. It is never necessary to pump the brakes to stop. Pumping is just a response to people's instinctive urge to slam the brakes on full when they need to stop quickly.
Of course, the US has not properly disposed of any reactor waste primarily because of environmentalists and the NIMBY lobby. The problem of nuclear waste disposal is political, not technological. There is no technological reason why we couldn't replace all our dirty, polluting coal and oil-fired plants with nuclear plants and safely dispose of the waste.
Environmentalists need to think outside the box a little more.
Re:We've been seeing a lot of this "safe" nukes st
on
Port-A-Nuke
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Do you know what kinds of radiation are emitted by nuclear waste, and what kinds are pumped into the atmosphere by a coal plant? If not, I think you had better shut up. Your reply is really ignorant.
I'm skeptical about cold fusion too, but unlike most "free energy" schemes, if cold fusion worked as claimed it would not violate the second law of thermodynamics, for the same reasons other nuclear reactions don't.
It is impossible to say with scientific rigor that cold fusion is "impossible". It doesn't seem likely under current theory, but one can never rule out errors in our current theoretical understanding. The quantum mechanics of solids (like the palladium lattice) are complicated. It's possible (though unlikely) that there is something going on there that we don't yet understand.
I don't think cold fusion is likely, but if researchers are now getting reproducible results, the effect they are observing merits a second look. It might not be fusion. It might be some other interesting effect. Whatever is going on, if it is reproducible it can be studied by science, and will become better understood with time. If the effects turn out not to be reproducible still it will quickly die again, and little will have been lost by checking.
It's not that easy to exactly duplicate a setup, nor is that what you usually want to do. The whole point of reproducing an experiment is to show the same effect with different equipment (and different researchers) to show that the effect isn't some equipment artifact (or experimenter error).
The problem is that if you don't know what details of the apparatus are important, you may inadvertently make an apparatus that is inferior to the original.
From this, it seems like the problem wasn't that the experiment was made up, but that the problem was the researchers had no precise concept of what steps and requirements were necessary to repeat it accurately.
Unfortunately, that is precisely the hallmark of junk science: experiments that appear to show amazing results that cannot be explained by conventional theory and as a result the exact requirements to duplicate the experiment are unclear. The crackpots are then free to argue that negative results by other researchers are due to a problem with their experiment. Scientists have good reason to be skeptical of discoveries with these characteristics.
Now, Pons and Fleischman may have just been unlucky in having discovered a real effect that happened to have these characteristics. On the bright side, if they turn out to have been right their place in history is secure.
Yes, most of Canada is empty, but the population is a tenth the US's. That thin belt that runs through southern Ontario and Quebec has population densities comparable to the eastern US and the west coast. (See here. Note metric vs. US units.) The Canadian prairies have similar population density to the US midwest and southwest.
Because Guthrie not only published the work in 1945, he put a copyright notice on it. There's a scan of the original songbook on the website linked by the article. That makes Ludlow's 1956 copyright invalid.
Software companies own the copyright to code written by their employees.
I don't think this is at all new, nor even really unfair. If someone hires you to create something, they own the copyrights to what you created on their dime. Copyright law has always been that way. I believe patents have too, though I don't know for sure.
We are approaching the point where there's no value in being a programmer, because the only value is in owning the rights that enable a certain application.
Welcome to the club. There's no value in being an engineer. There's no value in being a scientist. If you want that kind of value, create your product on your own and then go be an entrepreneur.
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I would rather find a solution that involves less loss of human life. Ultimately taking care of the environment is about ensuring our future, not the Earth's. The Earth will go on, with or without us.
You missed paragraph 33, which allows a federal or provincial parliament to make any law they pass immune to the charter at will. The only restriction is that laws with that designation have to be renewed by a new vote of the legislature every five years or they expire.
I don't think latitude and longitude are a Cartesian coordinate system. I agree with you otherwise, though.
Yes, but one also has to be careful when dealing with AC systems. For example, P=I*V is only true for instantaneous quantities in general. People often get into trouble by measuring the RMS voltage and current and assuming that the average power is equal to the product of the two. This is sometimes true, but not always.
There is an easier and better way. Quantum mechanical states are points in Hilbert space. All of quantum mechanics can be reduced to mathematics in Hilbert space, eliminating the need for wavefunctions. Any property of a quantum mechanical state that can actually be observed or measured can be represented by a real number (or a collection of real numbers). Mathematically, every possible observation can be represented by an operator which has real eigenvalues.
Wavefunctions are a convenient abstraction that allows us to apply our intuitive understanding of waves to solving quantum problems.
You are quite right that the model assumes you have gravity to pull things towards the depressions in the rubber sheet. The point of the model is to express how, in GR, gravity does not directly act from one object on another, but rather the gravitational field of an object distorts the space around it in such a way as to cause other objects to be pulled toward it.
I'm pretty sure modern remotes are designed according to the goverment safety standards for light emitting devices. I still wouldn't recommend putting one up against your eye, though.
I'm not sure, but they aren't lasers so the beam is not well collimated (i.e. it spreads out very fast.) This makes it a lot less dangerous since unless you hold the remote right up to your eye only a small fraction of the IR light will pass through your pupil. Even if you do that, though, the lens in your eye won't focus the beam into a small spot on your retina since the source is too close, besides the fact that non-laser sources typically can't be focused as well as laser beams can. (I won't go into why that is the case here.) You wouldn't want to use a laser for an IR remote anyway, since then you would have to aim the remote exactly at the receiver. A less collimated source doesn't have to be aimed as precisely.
In fact the most dangerous lasers for eye damage are the ones in the near-infrared (around 1 micron wavelength). The beam is invisible so it doesn't trigger your blink response, but your cornea and lens are nicely transparent to the beam and focus it into a nice tight spot on the retina. Casual exposure to near infrared laser beams can damage your retina badly, without you knowing anything has happened until much later.
Not necessarily. There are other reasons why someone might be aiming a laser at the sky. (Light show, scientific experiment, weather measurements, mere amusement...) If you aim a laser at the sky near an airport and leave it on for long enough, eventually an airplane will fly through it. There have been past incidents of pilots being exposed accidentally to light from laser light shows. There are regulations to cover this now.
Remember that with a continuous-beam laser you only have to aim it. If the laser is powerful enough, you don't even have to hold it on the target. Simply sweeping it over the target might be sufficient. This is a lot easier than aiming and firing a rifle.
Sure, just paint them black.
You can't filter out every possible laser without blocking the whole spectrum. You could, however, block some of the more commonly available laser lines selectively. A good start would be to block out all infrared.
There are special coatings and materials that can block intense light while passing regular light unattenuated. I'm not sure if these are ready for commercial deployment though.
I wonder what they do in hybrid autos, where the gas engine is designed to shut down and start up frequently while the car is running. Do they use the electrical system to keep the oil pressurized?
He may have learned about "threshold braking" instead. That was what was taught when I took defensive driving many years ago (before ABS). The idea is to ease up on the brakes slightly when the wheels start to lock, and then hold the brake at that threshold. If done right, this will stop you more quickly than pumping the brakes. It is never necessary to pump the brakes to stop. Pumping is just a response to people's instinctive urge to slam the brakes on full when they need to stop quickly.
Sounds like fraud to me.
Environmentalists need to think outside the box a little more.
Do you know what kinds of radiation are emitted by nuclear waste, and what kinds are pumped into the atmosphere by a coal plant? If not, I think you had better shut up. Your reply is really ignorant.
Pakistan already has nuclear weapons, and the US and UN don't seem to be doing much about it. Where have you been?
It is impossible to say with scientific rigor that cold fusion is "impossible". It doesn't seem likely under current theory, but one can never rule out errors in our current theoretical understanding. The quantum mechanics of solids (like the palladium lattice) are complicated. It's possible (though unlikely) that there is something going on there that we don't yet understand.
I don't think cold fusion is likely, but if researchers are now getting reproducible results, the effect they are observing merits a second look. It might not be fusion. It might be some other interesting effect. Whatever is going on, if it is reproducible it can be studied by science, and will become better understood with time. If the effects turn out not to be reproducible still it will quickly die again, and little will have been lost by checking.
The problem is that if you don't know what details of the apparatus are important, you may inadvertently make an apparatus that is inferior to the original.
Unfortunately, that is precisely the hallmark of junk science: experiments that appear to show amazing results that cannot be explained by conventional theory and as a result the exact requirements to duplicate the experiment are unclear. The crackpots are then free to argue that negative results by other researchers are due to a problem with their experiment. Scientists have good reason to be skeptical of discoveries with these characteristics.
Now, Pons and Fleischman may have just been unlucky in having discovered a real effect that happened to have these characteristics. On the bright side, if they turn out to have been right their place in history is secure.
Yes, most of Canada is empty, but the population is a tenth the US's. That thin belt that runs through southern Ontario and Quebec has population densities comparable to the eastern US and the west coast. (See here. Note metric vs. US units.) The Canadian prairies have similar population density to the US midwest and southwest.
This is why everyone else thinks Americans are weird. Nobody else thinks this way.
Because Guthrie not only published the work in 1945, he put a copyright notice on it. There's a scan of the original songbook on the website linked by the article. That makes Ludlow's 1956 copyright invalid.
I don't think this is at all new, nor even really unfair. If someone hires you to create something, they own the copyrights to what you created on their dime. Copyright law has always been that way. I believe patents have too, though I don't know for sure.
We are approaching the point where there's no value in being a programmer, because the only value is in owning the rights that enable a certain application.
Welcome to the club. There's no value in being an engineer. There's no value in being a scientist. If you want that kind of value, create your product on your own and then go be an entrepreneur.