You know, you could switch to *nitrogen* balloons. i don't think they'd work with rubber, but with a thin enough material and a large enough volume, you can get some decent buoyancy out of 100% nitrogen. And you have the added bonus that you only have to worry about oxygen diffusion into the balloon rather than nitrogen diffusion out of it!
Unfortunately, hydrox has some rather explosive risks. Not sure you want to be playing with it in an area where there might be sparks or flame sources, and there aren't many other options: you're looking for a diluent that's less dense than diatomic nitrogen, with an atomic mass of 28. Preferably a lot less. Not a huge range of possibilities there.
Normal minerals don't go anywhere after you use them, they either remain in circulation or end up in a landfill, which we'll eventually mine for resources later. Helium rises through the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere.. until the solar wind or a photon, random collisions gives it enough velocity to bounce off into space, never to return.
It's critical to at least attempt to recover helium since we don't really have it in abundance (like hydrogen, locked as it is in the oceans) and it can so easily be lost forever. At the very least, we should try to keep the annual consumption of helium below the annual production, and I don't mean the rate at which we pull it out of the ground, but the rate at which it forms naturally as a decay product of minerals throughout the earth's crust.
There is a reason that helium deposits are often associated with natural gas deposits. They both take a *long* time under a non-porus rock to accumulate to anywhere near useful levels. Like.. geologic time.
If you think you're just going to get a ton of granite and stick it under a tarp for a few days, you're way, way off base.
Yeah, airships should absolutely no longer be allowed to use helium for buoyancy. They ought to use hydrogen, hot-air, or, heck, even nitrogen.
When there are so many alternatives, there's no good reason to use helium, especially when there are medical and scientific uses that practically require helium to be effective. Ever try diving deep on hydrox? Hydrogen plus oxygen plus pressure is not a cocktail one would recommend lightly.
Uh.. Fluorescent lights put out UV, and if the question is "does it cause cancer" rather than "is the likelihood of it causing cancer greater than 1e-47%" then the answer is emphatically, "yes."
The aggregate in concrete can be anything, and one common choice has a decently high uranium content. So you can get hit with decay products and/or radon, either of which can cause cancer.
Asphalt, the same as concrete, except it's held together with tar instead of quicklime, and surely has a non-zero benzene content. Benzene causes cancer.
Rebar is made from iron or steel, so you've got me on that one. I'm sure there's something in it that can cause cancer or at least be toxic. Perhaps it contains antimony or chromium.
Also, the paint on the warning signs themselves could potentially contain cancer-causing compounds...
I just want to move to a country where that isn't true. Where the leaders aren't so cynical that they just throw up any old thing to appease the masses without any calculations other than the political.
Where can I find this country? Are there jobs? Do they let people in?
1- the LCD-based iPad, e-Ink Kindle, and paper book all scored basically the same. Would a Retina or PixelQi screen score even higher, or does that mean that existing screens are good enough, and further enhancements are superfluous ?
Oh, gah, I hope not. Just because some (many, even, by the conversations I've had) people have crappy visual acuity, I don't want to have to suffer with N dpi is the "standard" that 100% make products to, when anything less than M (M>N) dpi looks aliased and crappy to me, personally. (at least, for the next few years anyway. I'm not under any illusions that I'm going to get to keep my acuity)
"Good enough" for most people leaves a not insignificant number of people who it's "barely passable" for. Why not try and scoop them up, too?
I dunno. Ive got a Nook, and the pages are both smaller than a typical paperback, and take longer to "turn." I would tend to believe the study, but I'd note that I'm still reading more books. The device is more portable than many paperbacks, and has access to a whole slew of classics from project Gutenberg (which I tried to read on my PC and just gave up on.)
With the library offering eBook lending, there are even quite a few contemporary works that are at my fingertips, and it's far more portable than a cellophane-encrusted hardcover library book (which due to the cellophane, also tends to feel icky due to the "this is easy to clean, because a lot of people touch it" construction, just like hand-bars on the subway)
I think it's good for reading more books, but I'm not going to go so far as to say that it's better in every way than real books.
The proper thing to do, in that case, is to make sure you don't actually have any assets that can be recovered. It's not as if there isn't gigantic heap of ways do do that, mostly involving "incorporating" and they very words, "limited liability."
It's definitely not worth the money. For one thing, 9/11 changed the rules of plane hijackings: no longer can you expect that the terrorists will just land and ransom you if you just keep your head down. It was over on the same freakin' day, before the fourth plane ever reached its target.
It's always about costs vs. benefits, and it's about time we did some economic analysis of our security measures on top of the general effectiveness analysis we're also not doing enough of. Especially since all wars are economic: it doesn't matter what resource you cause your enemy to drain; if you can do it disproportionately, you can eventually win.
How you get the books is almost irrelevant to how you dispose of them after the semester is over. I agree that the library option is a good one, though most universities only keep a few copies of the necessary textbooks behind the counter, and won't let them leave the library.
Used books are fine to buy, since it saves money, and with the textbook update shenanigans by the bookstore/colleges, you're unlikely to get one so old and dilapidated that it won't serve.
But I'm suggesting that it's not really in your best interest to donate your book, however you got it, to the bookstore so they can sell it at the still-too-high used-book price.
You can buy a prepaid credit card at the local drug store. They cost $5 plus the face value, though I think you can recharge them.
You need a credit card number to buy from steam, but AFAIK, they don't require that you have an actual line of credit..
The books you described are priced inline, I'm sorry to say, with your typical college text book. Which, as a side note, I suggest that you do not sell back to the school bookstore at the end of the semester. If you have a good professor, the books are chosen to supplement your education, and make a great start to your personal library.
While I'm not sure the books are worth the $100++ that they charge, I'm confident that giving them up is not worth the $5-$20 you'll get for them at the end of the semester. Go ahead and buy the used books if they're available, but don't bother with the buy-back unless you're sure you don't want the book for your library and you need the pittance for something.
Oh, do you have a plan for staunching the flow without drilling?
It better not turn out that the reason they skipped pre-drilling the relief wells is some kind of extra regulatory burden, like a limit on overall number of wells that counts relief wells towards the total...
Every time, really, unless you make your intentions known beforehand and the authorities actually respect them once known. That is why the new NY law (I think it's NY) is so insidious: it changes the default option to "yes" which puts the onus on you to specifically go on record as opting-out, and means that any problems with the record keeping will mean you could donate anyway.
So? change the comparison. 30dB is better than 0, non?
Whenever I see that on my wifi dealy, I always wonder, "70dB below what, exactly?" What are they comparing it to that is 10,000,000 times more powerful?
Oh yeah I feel so bad for them. They only made one little mistake, and all that mistake does is catastrophically degrade signal levels unless the user holds the phone in a way that may be uncomfortable to many or even most users.
All they did was design a device where you have to fundamentally change your own personal habits to fit their phone, rather than spending ten minutes of QA to notice and designing the phone to fit the users instead.
I feel so bad that they're getting guff for this minor flaw, and so many of their customers are such jerks for not wanting to change their habits so apple doesn't have to waste eighty cents to send a f*king rubber band via first class mail.
Yeah, but most businesses can get by on far less than 900k per employee. Very few (Apple, for instance) post revenue figures that look anything like that number, so if you're going to waste money, why not just buy stuff from those businesses and warehouse it?
I didn't know XP had it. I have an apple laptop with multi-touch and a larger-than-many trackpad and the size is really nice.
I've heard that windows 7 has it.
I've gotten *some* multitouch gestures to work on an 8 yr. old laptop by installing Ubuntu on it, so more trackpads than just recent ones are capable of it.
That is the extent of my personal experience, so that's what I wrote about. Mostly I wanted to say that it is in general very nice, and I think Apple made a mistake only including it by default on their laptops and not their PCs (which are otherwise made with laptop parts....)
Both groups are at fault. The anti's, for keeping it from its full potential, and the pro's, for not realizing that sometimes a thing half-done might not be worth doing at all.
But the pro's are worse, because they never offered a compelling argument as to why it should be done with public money, which every man is compelled to contribute regardless of his will.
Indeed. The only failure I can see is that the space station fuel is either not compatible or not mingled with the supply pod fuel. If it were, at least there'd be a chance of salvaging something, (sans the wasted fuel, of course.) a few orbits down the line.
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You know, you could switch to *nitrogen* balloons. i don't think they'd work with rubber, but with a thin enough material and a large enough volume, you can get some decent buoyancy out of 100% nitrogen. And you have the added bonus that you only have to worry about oxygen diffusion into the balloon rather than nitrogen diffusion out of it!
Unfortunately, hydrox has some rather explosive risks. Not sure you want to be playing with it in an area where there might be sparks or flame sources, and there aren't many other options: you're looking for a diluent that's less dense than diatomic nitrogen, with an atomic mass of 28. Preferably a lot less. Not a huge range of possibilities there.
Normal minerals don't go anywhere after you use them, they either remain in circulation or end up in a landfill, which we'll eventually mine for resources later. Helium rises through the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere.. until the solar wind or a photon, random collisions gives it enough velocity to bounce off into space, never to return.
It's critical to at least attempt to recover helium since we don't really have it in abundance (like hydrogen, locked as it is in the oceans) and it can so easily be lost forever. At the very least, we should try to keep the annual consumption of helium below the annual production, and I don't mean the rate at which we pull it out of the ground, but the rate at which it forms naturally as a decay product of minerals throughout the earth's crust.
There is a reason that helium deposits are often associated with natural gas deposits. They both take a *long* time under a non-porus rock to accumulate to anywhere near useful levels. Like.. geologic time.
If you think you're just going to get a ton of granite and stick it under a tarp for a few days, you're way, way off base.
Yeah, airships should absolutely no longer be allowed to use helium for buoyancy. They ought to use hydrogen, hot-air, or, heck, even nitrogen.
When there are so many alternatives, there's no good reason to use helium, especially when there are medical and scientific uses that practically require helium to be effective. Ever try diving deep on hydrox? Hydrogen plus oxygen plus pressure is not a cocktail one would recommend lightly.
Not nearly as corrosive as my bottle of hydric acid!
Uh.. Fluorescent lights put out UV, and if the question is "does it cause cancer" rather than "is the likelihood of it causing cancer greater than 1e-47%" then the answer is emphatically, "yes."
The aggregate in concrete can be anything, and one common choice has a decently high uranium content. So you can get hit with decay products and/or radon, either of which can cause cancer.
Asphalt, the same as concrete, except it's held together with tar instead of quicklime, and surely has a non-zero benzene content. Benzene causes cancer.
Rebar is made from iron or steel, so you've got me on that one. I'm sure there's something in it that can cause cancer or at least be toxic. Perhaps it contains antimony or chromium.
Also, the paint on the warning signs themselves could potentially contain cancer-causing compounds...
I just want to move to a country where that isn't true. Where the leaders aren't so cynical that they just throw up any old thing to appease the masses without any calculations other than the political.
Where can I find this country? Are there jobs? Do they let people in?
I don't have the resources to create it.
sorry, not about goatsee, move along now...
1- the LCD-based iPad, e-Ink Kindle, and paper book all scored basically the same. Would a Retina or PixelQi screen score even higher, or does that mean that existing screens are good enough, and further enhancements are superfluous ?
Oh, gah, I hope not. Just because some (many, even, by the conversations I've had) people have crappy visual acuity, I don't want to have to suffer with N dpi is the "standard" that 100% make products to, when anything less than M (M>N) dpi looks aliased and crappy to me, personally. (at least, for the next few years anyway. I'm not under any illusions that I'm going to get to keep my acuity)
"Good enough" for most people leaves a not insignificant number of people who it's "barely passable" for. Why not try and scoop them up, too?
I dunno. Ive got a Nook, and the pages are both smaller than a typical paperback, and take longer to "turn." I would tend to believe the study, but I'd note that I'm still reading more books. The device is more portable than many paperbacks, and has access to a whole slew of classics from project Gutenberg (which I tried to read on my PC and just gave up on.)
With the library offering eBook lending, there are even quite a few contemporary works that are at my fingertips, and it's far more portable than a cellophane-encrusted hardcover library book (which due to the cellophane, also tends to feel icky due to the "this is easy to clean, because a lot of people touch it" construction, just like hand-bars on the subway)
I think it's good for reading more books, but I'm not going to go so far as to say that it's better in every way than real books.
The proper thing to do, in that case, is to make sure you don't actually have any assets that can be recovered. It's not as if there isn't gigantic heap of ways do do that, mostly involving "incorporating" and they very words, "limited liability."
It's definitely not worth the money. For one thing, 9/11 changed the rules of plane hijackings: no longer can you expect that the terrorists will just land and ransom you if you just keep your head down. It was over on the same freakin' day, before the fourth plane ever reached its target.
It's always about costs vs. benefits, and it's about time we did some economic analysis of our security measures on top of the general effectiveness analysis we're also not doing enough of. Especially since all wars are economic: it doesn't matter what resource you cause your enemy to drain; if you can do it disproportionately, you can eventually win.
How you get the books is almost irrelevant to how you dispose of them after the semester is over. I agree that the library option is a good one, though most universities only keep a few copies of the necessary textbooks behind the counter, and won't let them leave the library.
Used books are fine to buy, since it saves money, and with the textbook update shenanigans by the bookstore/colleges, you're unlikely to get one so old and dilapidated that it won't serve.
But I'm suggesting that it's not really in your best interest to donate your book, however you got it, to the bookstore so they can sell it at the still-too-high used-book price.
You can buy a prepaid credit card at the local drug store. They cost $5 plus the face value, though I think you can recharge them.
You need a credit card number to buy from steam, but AFAIK, they don't require that you have an actual line of credit..
The books you described are priced inline, I'm sorry to say, with your typical college text book. Which, as a side note, I suggest that you do not sell back to the school bookstore at the end of the semester. If you have a good professor, the books are chosen to supplement your education, and make a great start to your personal library.
While I'm not sure the books are worth the $100++ that they charge, I'm confident that giving them up is not worth the $5-$20 you'll get for them at the end of the semester. Go ahead and buy the used books if they're available, but don't bother with the buy-back unless you're sure you don't want the book for your library and you need the pittance for something.
interesting, so when the relief wells shut down the flow in august, it'll be larger than Ixtoc, but still in the same order of magnitude.
Oh, do you have a plan for staunching the flow without drilling?
It better not turn out that the reason they skipped pre-drilling the relief wells is some kind of extra regulatory burden, like a limit on overall number of wells that counts relief wells towards the total...
Every time, really, unless you make your intentions known beforehand and the authorities actually respect them once known. That is why the new NY law (I think it's NY) is so insidious: it changes the default option to "yes" which puts the onus on you to specifically go on record as opting-out, and means that any problems with the record keeping will mean you could donate anyway.
So? change the comparison. 30dB is better than 0, non?
Whenever I see that on my wifi dealy, I always wonder, "70dB below what, exactly?" What are they comparing it to that is 10,000,000 times more powerful?
Oh yeah I feel so bad for them. They only made one little mistake, and all that mistake does is catastrophically degrade signal levels unless the user holds the phone in a way that may be uncomfortable to many or even most users.
All they did was design a device where you have to fundamentally change your own personal habits to fit their phone, rather than spending ten minutes of QA to notice and designing the phone to fit the users instead.
I feel so bad that they're getting guff for this minor flaw, and so many of their customers are such jerks for not wanting to change their habits so apple doesn't have to waste eighty cents to send a f*king rubber band via first class mail.
If you want coal to be more expensive, this is what you do: Buy coal reserves, and sit on them.
If you're not big enough for that, convince others to chip in.
It's really that simple. Anything less voluntary than that is tyranny.
Yeah, but most businesses can get by on far less than 900k per employee. Very few (Apple, for instance) post revenue figures that look anything like that number, so if you're going to waste money, why not just buy stuff from those businesses and warehouse it?
It's clean, but the non-economical part is critical.
It doesn't matter how much you spend on "clean power" if you can't generate enough of it to replace "dirty power" without bankrupting everyone.
I didn't know XP had it. I have an apple laptop with multi-touch and a larger-than-many trackpad and the size is really nice.
I've heard that windows 7 has it.
I've gotten *some* multitouch gestures to work on an 8 yr. old laptop by installing Ubuntu on it, so more trackpads than just recent ones are capable of it.
That is the extent of my personal experience, so that's what I wrote about. Mostly I wanted to say that it is in general very nice, and I think Apple made a mistake only including it by default on their laptops and not their PCs (which are otherwise made with laptop parts....)
Both groups are at fault. The anti's, for keeping it from its full potential, and the pro's, for not realizing that sometimes a thing half-done might not be worth doing at all.
But the pro's are worse, because they never offered a compelling argument as to why it should be done with public money, which every man is compelled to contribute regardless of his will.
Indeed. The only failure I can see is that the space station fuel is either not compatible or not mingled with the supply pod fuel. If it were, at least there'd be a chance of salvaging something, (sans the wasted fuel, of course.) a few orbits down the line.