This and many similar issues would be understood to have obvious solutions if the term "Health Insurance" were replaced with a "Health Care Subscription." Because of the structure of the health care "marketplace," health care access is very difficult without using an insurance company to negotiate payments. Health care providers appear to be unable or unwilling to provide access to health care on a pay-as-you-go basis - hospitals and doctors can't or won't quote prices for procedures. This has led to hospitals, doctors and insurance providers growing to enormous size in order to negotiate payments between them - locking out individual health care providers and individual patients from effective access. In the current corporate structure, individuals need to subscribe to health care from what we now call an insurance carrier in order to obtain care. If we understood these carriers to be providing a "Health Care Subscription" we would understand that it is essential for the carriers to offer access to all, so that everyone can obtain health care. Denial of insurance coverage is tantamount to denying health care - that's an unacceptable result.
I have observed many black actors appear on film and video with bloodshot eyes - that is, their eyes appear to have prominent blood vessels. Perhaps it's because blood vessels in the eyes are simply more noticable in black actors, but I'd suspect that it's a side effect of the lighting and filtering changes photographers are making. If photographers are bumping up color channels to make black faces appear less grey, a special emphasis on turning this off in the eyes might make this effect disappear. I could imagine adding a feature to photo and video processing, similar in principle to red-eye removal, that reduces redness within eyes to make the blood vessels less prominent.
The point of the linked article is the question of how rapidly a gas shock wave gets dissipated. The heavy protection of a rigid enclosed thoraco-abdominal protector is against debris, of which there is supposed to not be any. The threshold expressed in the article is lung damage from the overpressure - while I didn't see a description of the mechanism, I'm presuming that it involves the pressure entering the nose & mouth, for which the protective gear would have limited effect.
"Steam" presumes that the vaporization is accomplished by heating to temperatures above 100C, which is not required to create water vapor. Think of freeze-dried coffee.
Don't just assume, work it out from some real data. According to the US Army, you can survive an explosion just a few feet away with no lung damage if you don't get hit with any debris: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA286212
In another posting, I worked out that if you turn a body into gas at room temperature, you get about 100m^3 of gas. Alternatively, consider that the 12kg of non-water "dried pork" has as much energy as 48kg of TNT. (Since the energy density of "dried pork" at (4 kcal/g) 4 times that of TNT (at 1 kcal/g) http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/physics10/old%20physics%2010/chapters%20(old)/1-Explosions.htm Its enough energy to vaporize the remaining 66kg of water without raising the temperature too much.
But the real issue is how fast does a phaser do it's work? If it takes a few seconds to "Vaporize," there won't be a shock wave at all. On Star Trek, we see the victim glow for a few seconds, then disappear. Unless you're in a tiny room, you might only get a gentle breeze as the gases flow by. That's important, because otherwise those hand phasers would set everything around the target on fire. As I calculate it thermodynamically, turning a body to gas requires very little net energy - in fact, about 120MJ gets released. The trick is somehow the phaser has to make the reactions happen quickly, but not too quickly.
What I appreciate most about the Star Trek hand phaser is how it maps out the region to apply it's mechanism to just impact the target and nothing around it. There'd have to be some excellent imaging software so that the phaser ray is applied in just the right pattern, and to recognize when to stop so it doesn't burn the wall behind the victim. To do so, it must recognize when the phaser ray has disintegrated the back edge of the victim.
I obsessively calculated the energy from expansion of the gases, working it out for 78kg of water. I'm not going to bother working out the "dried pork" factors....
The expansion of the gas: assume 78kg of water is changed to gas at STP. Water vapor is 18g/mol (O=16,H=1*2), and each mol is 22.4l, so 78kg of water vapor takes up 78kg/(18g/mol)=4.3kmol, 4.3kmol*(22.4l/mol)=97kl=97m^3. The original volume is 78 liters, so the volume ratio is 1244. W=p*v*ln(ratio)=(0.1MPa*97m^3)*ln(1244)=69MJ.
So in addition to the 50MJ net energy calculated earlier, you can add 69MJ from expansion of the gas, a total net of 120MJ. This is about -4% of the 2.99GJ figure (i.e. one twenty-fifth and opposite sign).
The Transporter can't just disintegrate everything willy-nilly. All those particles need to have the position and momentum measured precisely in violation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, then recreated on the remote end after communicating all the information at faster-than-light-speed in violation of the Speed-of-Light limit. That ain't gonna be cheap. But it's made easier by physics telling us that all those elementary particles are interchangable, so you can use just any collection of quarks on the other end to recreate you on the other end. I'm forever impressed that the Star Trek transporter somehow only needs specialized equipment on one end of the transport.
I'm going to do some rough calculations - the paper's computation is also pretty rough - just to get the right order of magnitude.
First of all, to vaporize water, you don't even need to boil it. Spill some water on the floor and it vaporizes pretty darn quick just from the ambient environment - it changes from liquid water at room temperature to water vapor at room temperature. The only heat that needs to be added is the "Enthalpy of vaporization" which is 2260 kJ/Kg. For the 78kg human described in the paper, if it were all water, that would only be 176 Megajoules. Given that a human is normally at about 37C and room temperature about 25C, you can also take away 4kJ/Kg*78Kg*(37-25) = 4 Megajoules that the water vapor releases as you cool it from 37C to 25C. The net result is that with 172 Megajoules, you can turn a human body's mass of water to vapor.
However, as the paper suggests, the body isn't all water - it's about 85% water and 15% "dried pork." That means 172MJ*0.7 for the water, 146MJ, and the 11.7Kg of pork releases about 4KCal/g when oxidized (4 dietary Calories/g), 1 Kcal=4.2KJ, so burning the "dried pork" releases 196MJ. Assuming the "dried pork" gets fully oxidized (i.e burned) into CO2, the result is a gas. So overall, vaporizing a human body (in the sense of turning all the body into a gas) can release more energy than you started with - about 50MJ.
The paper estimates the energy required to break every molecular bond. However, all those bonds are going to reassemble into something else, whether into H2, O2, or H2O, or including the "dried pork," CO2, releasing much of the energy back.
Two NMOS transistors and a resistor can perform an XOR in Si. I remember interviewing at Intel in 1980, and every damn interview question was about XOR gates. First was an XOR gate in TTL, then an XOR gate in CMOS, and finally an XOR gate in NMOS. Apparently I passed all three questions, 'cause they offered me a job.
No, if your taxes increase by less than 2% per year, future increases an make it up later. 2% per year over the purchase (or revaluation from development) is the limit, not 2% per year over any previous assessment.
It's not correct that a decline in property values becomes a lower base for the 2% annual tax increase. Any decline in taxation due to lower valuation can be reversed immediately when valuation returns.
How's about until they upgrade their computer system, they just stop charging for out-of-pocket expenses altogether. Problem solved - entirely compliant.
More seriously, they could have (1) enforced the out-of-pocket limit per policy (so no policy individually charges more than the limit), and (2) let anyone whose totals are over the limit apply for a refund by submitting the bills from any other policies manually.
So instead, apparently while the limit for major medical expenses will be in place, there's (1) no limits on out-of-pocket expenses for prescription drug plans, and (2) no mechanism for refunding costs over the limits.;-(
"Tuesday afternoon, CHP officers received information that an automatic license reader along the northbound 57 in Santa Ana, a toll road, has spotted DiMaggio's license plate.
That hopeful lead ultimately turned out to to be false, according to the sheriff's department."
And Linux has a similar problem. I've seen several different motherboards where the reverse-engineered nvidia ethernet driver didn't work after an upgrade and had to throw in an aftermarket card to work around it. Linux is strongly susceptible to bit-rot on old drivers.
And the magnitude of the seasonal oscillation demonstrates how powerful this uptake of carbon by plants is in relation to the 400ppm of CO2. Recovering a significant amount of the carbon uptake from seasonal plant growth and sequestering it into soil (thereby improving soil fertility), as can be accomplished with Biochar processing, is one of the very few technologies that could be employed to bring Earth back to the relatively safe levels of 350ppm that climate scientists have recommended as a goal. See http://venearth.com/ , http://www.biochar-international.org/ and http://350.org/ for relevant information.
Are you serious? Do you really think I could corner the market by buying ten textbooks at the usual unit retail pricing? Besides - I made it clear that the books were to be donated, not "scalped."
I recently attempted to purchase multiple textbooks for a donation to a teacher offering a non-profit course, and was blocked from purchasing new textbooks because, according to Amazon.com, multiple purchases of a single book are forbidden by the publisher. Amazon.com had plenty of copies available, they just weren't allowed to sell them to me.
I contacted Elsevier on their website, and they were unavailing.
My response was to purchase used copies instead, for which the teacher was very grateful, but I had wanted to do better for her.
So, if there 80 million of these Apollo Asteroids, and 500 known, there's 160,000 unknown asteroids for every known one. I'd presume that there's recording of prior observations of the Apollo Asteroids, and it would be interesting to discover whether this asteroid has been observed in the past. We hear all this publicity about near-hits (near-miss is a term that makes no sense) that have been tracked, but this was a hit that wasn't tracked. This high ratio of unknown Apollo asteroids suggests that reliably tracking asteroids to determine which will hit is a tough problem.
Unless hits can be tracked with high probability, coming up with ways to adjust the orbits of planet-killing hits is not worth worrying about. We won't need to send in the drilling team if we can't see them coming. Michio Kaku went to the trouble of telling us that if the orbit was a few seconds different, it could have been a big catastrophe, but how is that relevant if we can't track them?
He was at a "regular" charging station, not a supercharging station. It was an unscheduled stop and he charged it for an hour, which he says Tesla support staff told him would be enough to get back to the supercharging station. Reportedly, they said that the lost range would be recovered as he continued to drive, warming the batteries. It would have taken as much as five hours to fully charge the car at that station.
This overnight loss of range had been previously reported by Consumer Reports, and Tesla reportedly told them the same story- that the range will recover as driving is resumed and the batteries are warmed up. This was also in the vicinity of the Milford supercharging station.
"The night before my voyage back to work, I had 88 miles left, according to the car's computation. I knew that would be cutting it pretty close, so I planned on a 30-minute supercharging session in Milford to gain some juice and added peace of mind. But while parked outside my house overnight, the temperature dipped and so did the indicated range, which now read only 58 miles. (Yes, a little range anxiety began to set in.) How can 30 miles evaporate just like that? According to Tesla, the car's computer takes into account the freezing temperature and readjusts the remaining range. The company also said that, upon restarting, the battery warms up and the computer once again updates the range. I didn't notice it adding miles to the range but the range remained steady for most of my 28-mile drive back to the supercharger. I connected to the charger with 50 miles on the meter and after 30 minutes, I was back to 150 miles—more than ample range to get back to our East Haddam test track."
kill -9 doesn't work when the process is stuck on an I/O operation such as a read/write to an NFS or failed md (RAID) device. Plus when it happens on an md device, you can't fix the md device (such as by doing an mdadm --stop and mdadm --assemble --force) because the device is marked busy. Reboot time.
Slashdot Mirror
This and many similar issues would be understood to have obvious solutions if the term "Health Insurance" were replaced with a "Health Care Subscription." Because of the structure of the health care "marketplace," health care access is very difficult without using an insurance company to negotiate payments. Health care providers appear to be unable or unwilling to provide access to health care on a pay-as-you-go basis - hospitals and doctors can't or won't quote prices for procedures. This has led to hospitals, doctors and insurance providers growing to enormous size in order to negotiate payments between them - locking out individual health care providers and individual patients from effective access. In the current corporate structure, individuals need to subscribe to health care from what we now call an insurance carrier in order to obtain care. If we understood these carriers to be providing a "Health Care Subscription" we would understand that it is essential for the carriers to offer access to all, so that everyone can obtain health care. Denial of insurance coverage is tantamount to denying health care - that's an unacceptable result.
I have observed many black actors appear on film and video with bloodshot eyes - that is, their eyes appear to have prominent blood vessels. Perhaps it's because blood vessels in the eyes are simply more noticable in black actors, but I'd suspect that it's a side effect of the lighting and filtering changes photographers are making. If photographers are bumping up color channels to make black faces appear less grey, a special emphasis on turning this off in the eyes might make this effect disappear. I could imagine adding a feature to photo and video processing, similar in principle to red-eye removal, that reduces redness within eyes to make the blood vessels less prominent.
The point of the linked article is the question of how rapidly a gas shock wave gets dissipated. The heavy protection of a rigid enclosed thoraco-abdominal protector is against debris, of which there is supposed to not be any. The threshold expressed in the article is lung damage from the overpressure - while I didn't see a description of the mechanism, I'm presuming that it involves the pressure entering the nose & mouth, for which the protective gear would have limited effect.
"Steam" presumes that the vaporization is accomplished by heating to temperatures above 100C, which is not required to create water vapor. Think of freeze-dried coffee.
Don't just assume, work it out from some real data. According to the US Army, you can survive an explosion just a few feet away with no lung damage if you don't get hit with any debris:
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA286212
In another posting, I worked out that if you turn a body into gas at room temperature, you get about 100m^3 of gas. Alternatively, consider that the 12kg of non-water "dried pork" has as much energy as 48kg of TNT. (Since the energy density of "dried pork" at (4 kcal/g) 4 times that of TNT (at 1 kcal/g)
http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/physics10/old%20physics%2010/chapters%20(old)/1-Explosions.htm
Its enough energy to vaporize the remaining 66kg of water without raising the temperature too much.
But the real issue is how fast does a phaser do it's work? If it takes a few seconds to "Vaporize," there won't be a shock wave at all. On Star Trek, we see the victim glow for a few seconds, then disappear. Unless you're in a tiny room, you might only get a gentle breeze as the gases flow by. That's important, because otherwise those hand phasers would set everything around the target on fire. As I calculate it thermodynamically, turning a body to gas requires very little net energy - in fact, about 120MJ gets released. The trick is somehow the phaser has to make the reactions happen quickly, but not too quickly.
What I appreciate most about the Star Trek hand phaser is how it maps out the region to apply it's mechanism to just impact the target and nothing around it. There'd have to be some excellent imaging software so that the phaser ray is applied in just the right pattern, and to recognize when to stop so it doesn't burn the wall behind the victim. To do so, it must recognize when the phaser ray has disintegrated the back edge of the victim.
I obsessively calculated the energy from expansion of the gases, working it out for 78kg of water. I'm not going to bother working out the "dried pork" factors....
The expansion of the gas: assume 78kg of water is changed to gas at STP. Water vapor is 18g/mol (O=16,H=1*2), and each mol is 22.4l, so 78kg of water vapor takes up 78kg/(18g/mol)=4.3kmol, 4.3kmol*(22.4l/mol)=97kl=97m^3. The original volume is 78 liters, so the volume ratio is 1244. W=p*v*ln(ratio)=(0.1MPa*97m^3)*ln(1244)=69MJ.
So in addition to the 50MJ net energy calculated earlier, you can add 69MJ from expansion of the gas, a total net of 120MJ. This is about -4% of the 2.99GJ figure (i.e. one twenty-fifth and opposite sign).
The Transporter can't just disintegrate everything willy-nilly. All those particles need to have the position and momentum measured precisely in violation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, then recreated on the remote end after communicating all the information at faster-than-light-speed in violation of the Speed-of-Light limit. That ain't gonna be cheap. But it's made easier by physics telling us that all those elementary particles are interchangable, so you can use just any collection of quarks on the other end to recreate you on the other end. I'm forever impressed that the Star Trek transporter somehow only needs specialized equipment on one end of the transport.
The expansion of the mixed gases isothermally releases even more energy, making the net energy balance even "better."
AC: ++! The next sci-fi show should have a recycler instead of a vaporizer - otherwise you'd be wasting your enemies.
[NB: there's a typo in my previous calculation: the 85% water is 172MJ*0.85=146MJ - it doesn't affect the other results]
I'm going to do some rough calculations - the paper's computation is also pretty rough - just to get the right order of magnitude.
First of all, to vaporize water, you don't even need to boil it. Spill some water on the floor and it vaporizes pretty darn quick just from the ambient environment - it changes from liquid water at room temperature to water vapor at room temperature. The only heat that needs to be added is the "Enthalpy of vaporization" which is 2260 kJ/Kg. For the 78kg human described in the paper, if it were all water, that would only be 176 Megajoules. Given that a human is normally at about 37C and room temperature about 25C, you can also take away 4kJ/Kg*78Kg*(37-25) = 4 Megajoules that the water vapor releases as you cool it from 37C to 25C. The net result is that with 172 Megajoules, you can turn a human body's mass of water to vapor.
However, as the paper suggests, the body isn't all water - it's about 85% water and 15% "dried pork." That means 172MJ*0.7 for the water, 146MJ, and the 11.7Kg of pork releases about 4KCal/g when oxidized (4 dietary Calories/g), 1 Kcal=4.2KJ, so burning the "dried pork" releases 196MJ. Assuming the "dried pork" gets fully oxidized (i.e burned) into CO2, the result is a gas. So overall, vaporizing a human body (in the sense of turning all the body into a gas) can release more energy than you started with - about 50MJ.
The paper estimates the energy required to break every molecular bond. However, all those bonds are going to reassemble into something else, whether into H2, O2, or H2O, or including the "dried pork," CO2, releasing much of the energy back.
Two NMOS transistors and a resistor can perform an XOR in Si. I remember interviewing at Intel in 1980, and every damn interview question was about XOR gates. First was an XOR gate in TTL, then an XOR gate in CMOS, and finally an XOR gate in NMOS. Apparently I passed all three questions, 'cause they offered me a job.
No, if your taxes increase by less than 2% per year, future increases an make it up later. 2% per year over the purchase (or revaluation from development) is the limit, not 2% per year over any previous assessment.
It's not correct that a decline in property values becomes a lower base for the 2% annual tax increase. Any decline in taxation due to lower valuation can be reversed immediately when valuation returns.
How's about until they upgrade their computer system, they just stop charging for out-of-pocket expenses altogether. Problem solved - entirely compliant.
More seriously, they could have (1) enforced the out-of-pocket limit per policy (so no policy individually charges more than the limit), and (2) let anyone whose totals are over the limit apply for a refund by submitting the bills from any other policies manually.
So instead, apparently while the limit for major medical expenses will be in place, there's (1) no limits on out-of-pocket expenses for prescription drug plans, and (2) no mechanism for refunding costs over the limits. ;-(
As a matter of fact ... http://www.cbs8.com/story/23053156/amber-alert-for-missing-children-linked-to-deadly-house-fire
"Tuesday afternoon, CHP officers received information that an automatic license reader along the northbound 57 in Santa Ana, a toll road, has spotted DiMaggio's license plate.
That hopeful lead ultimately turned out to to be false, according to the sheriff's department."
And Linux has a similar problem. I've seen several different motherboards where the reverse-engineered nvidia ethernet driver didn't work after an upgrade and had to throw in an aftermarket card to work around it. Linux is strongly susceptible to bit-rot on old drivers.
The standing ovation was inappropriate. At the low partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere, CO2 would not precipitate at -78C. See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/13/results-lab-experiment-regarding-co2-snow-in-antarctica-at-113%C2%B0f-80-5%C2%B0c-not-possible/
And the magnitude of the seasonal oscillation demonstrates how powerful this uptake of carbon by plants is in relation to the 400ppm of CO2. Recovering a significant amount of the carbon uptake from seasonal plant growth and sequestering it into soil (thereby improving soil fertility), as can be accomplished with Biochar processing, is one of the very few technologies that could be employed to bring Earth back to the relatively safe levels of 350ppm that climate scientists have recommended as a goal. See http://venearth.com/ , http://www.biochar-international.org/ and http://350.org/ for relevant information.
Are you serious? Do you really think I could corner the market by buying ten textbooks at the usual unit retail pricing? Besides - I made it clear that the books were to be donated, not "scalped."
I recently attempted to purchase multiple textbooks for a donation to a teacher offering a non-profit course, and was blocked from purchasing new textbooks because, according to Amazon.com, multiple purchases of a single book are forbidden by the publisher. Amazon.com had plenty of copies available, they just weren't allowed to sell them to me.
I contacted Elsevier on their website, and they were unavailing.
My response was to purchase used copies instead, for which the teacher was very grateful, but I had wanted to do better for her.
The end result was zero direct revenue.
So, if there 80 million of these Apollo Asteroids, and 500 known, there's 160,000 unknown asteroids for every known one. I'd presume that there's recording of prior observations of the Apollo Asteroids, and it would be interesting to discover whether this asteroid has been observed in the past. We hear all this publicity about near-hits (near-miss is a term that makes no sense) that have been tracked, but this was a hit that wasn't tracked. This high ratio of unknown Apollo asteroids suggests that reliably tracking asteroids to determine which will hit is a tough problem.
Unless hits can be tracked with high probability, coming up with ways to adjust the orbits of planet-killing hits is not worth worrying about. We won't need to send in the drilling team if we can't see them coming. Michio Kaku went to the trouble of telling us that if the orbit was a few seconds different, it could have been a big catastrophe, but how is that relevant if we can't track them?
++points. Thank you.
The car was adapted to accomodate his disability so he could operate the basic controls of the car, presumably not including the handbrake.
Saving the transmission is secondary to saving the human being at the wheel.
He was at a "regular" charging station, not a supercharging station. It was an unscheduled stop and he charged it for an hour, which he says Tesla support staff told him would be enough to get back to the supercharging station. Reportedly, they said that the lost range would be recovered as he continued to drive, warming the batteries. It would have taken as much as five hours to fully charge the car at that station.
This overnight loss of range had been previously reported by Consumer Reports, and Tesla reportedly told them the same story- that the range will recover as driving is resumed and the batteries are warmed up. This was also in the vicinity of the Milford supercharging station.
http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2013/01/rapid-charging-at-a-tesla-ev-supercharge-station.html
"The night before my voyage back to work, I had 88 miles left, according to the car's computation. I knew that would be cutting it pretty close, so I planned on a 30-minute supercharging session in Milford to gain some juice and added peace of mind. But while parked outside my house overnight, the temperature dipped and so did the indicated range, which now read only 58 miles. (Yes, a little range anxiety began to set in.) How can 30 miles evaporate just like that? According to Tesla, the car's computer takes into account the freezing temperature and readjusts the remaining range. The company also said that, upon restarting, the battery warms up and the computer once again updates the range. I didn't notice it adding miles to the range but the range remained steady for most of my 28-mile drive back to the supercharger. I connected to the charger with 50 miles on the meter and after 30 minutes, I was back to 150 miles—more than ample range to get back to our East Haddam test track."
kill -9 doesn't work when the process is stuck on an I/O operation such as a read/write to an NFS or failed md (RAID) device. Plus when it happens on an md device, you can't fix the md device (such as by doing an mdadm --stop and mdadm --assemble --force) because the device is marked busy. Reboot time.