All the accelerated aging tests seem to concentrate on light and heat. This study is no exception. Is there any validity to my supposition the reverse is indicated?
I tend to keep things (like CDs) that I regard as archival in my freezer. Dark and cold... the reerse of light and heat.
I did RTFA. The first pipe on a pipe organ is a triumph, subsequent pipes are redundant, a matter of how many you can afford. Percussion instruments are similarly unimpressive; from a technological perspective, a simple solenoid can achieve any percussion effect you want.
The robotic guitar was far more impressive, but that too has been "done" electromechanically (see the banjo on the orchestrion). A robotic violin would be most impressive, as that is an instrument that would require feedback to accomplish "feel" but so far I don't see one.
Instruments played by machine are hardly new. More impresive than a robot that plays guitar, a robot that plays piano, or "a collection of robotic percussion instruments" would be a robot that plays "a piano, two ranks of organ pipes (flute and violin), mandolin, snare drum, bass drum, timpani, cymbal, and triangle." Now that would be really impressive, especially since you would have to travel all the way to The National Music Museum" Vermillion, South Dakota to see one that was made in 1913! The machine is called an "Orchestrion" and they were common in the early part of the last century, as the musical accompaniment to a ride on a merry-go-round.
Although the clock is set to read in 5 or 10 minute intervals, depending on the time of year it could still be up to 16 minutes fast or slow compared to your watch or clock because of the Equation of time. Our sense of time is so conditioned by our dependence on the mechanical/digital that solar time is now percieved to be "wrong".
IANAM (meteorologist) but if the sea surface is getting warmer then it seems to me that it will support hurricane paths further north. This means that the hurricanes that are aimed at the gulf will be stronger but there will be hurricanes hitting further north as well.
Right now the northern limit for hurricane strikes seems to be Hatteras, with very rare exceptions. If the SSTs are higher, then the whole curve may be lifted a notch and in addition to more force 5s in the Gulf region we may start seeing force 1 and force 2 hurricanes making landfall between Hatteras and New Jersey and New York.
Hurricane Karl recently travelled nearly to ICELAND while maintaining tropical characteristics!
This guy did not call ZDNet out of the blue or the goodness of his heart. It reads to me like pure FUD and when I hear FUD, I know what company springs instantly to my mind!
I probably should not have included the link as it is peripheral to my point that they could have prevented this merely by scheduling the required reboots at any interval short of the maximum to give themselves the least bit of redundancy.
Most failure analyses show a chain of trivial mistakes all of which had to be made to cause the failure. Correct any of these trivial mistakes and the disaster does not happen.
Forgetting all the talk about Microsoft and Win95/98 and the defect in the OS that has been well known for years and for which a patch has also been available for years....
If you have a system that has a known failure point at 49 days,when do you perform the mandatory reset?
For the failure that is described the scheduled reset must have been "every 30 days" which is, frankly, INSANE!
If they had scheduled a mandaory reset every 14 or 15 days, they would have had to have had three failures before disaster struck. As it seems, one failure was all it took.
The magic words in the CNet article are "starts at", the advertised price out the door at the Alienware site is over $5K. I've bought OTS machines for a bit less and a bit more but it works as a general rule.
The exact number of chips on a CPU has not exactly doubled every 18 months on the dot either, but as a general rule they do double at roughly that frequency and the price of the machine you lust after will be on the order of $5K.
Once again proving both the truth of Moore's law (data density doubles approximately every 18 months) and Dolan's corollary (the computer you want costs approximately $5,000) The IBM PC cost $5,000 in 1980, the Alienware Area-51 ALX costs $5,000 in 2004.
The problem is not to beat a human....
The problem is to stay on the course!
I'll bet there would be real problems flying these things in the "real world", you know the one with power lines and flag poles.
Re:No point "breathing air" at that temperature.
on
X43-A on to Mach 10
·
· Score: 1
Achieving escape using an air-breathing vehicle is important because, as big breaker said, you save a lot of weight by not having to carry an oxidizer. If it could be accomplished then it might be possible with a hybrid turbo/SCRAM vehicle you could get from the ground to another planet in one step, using a vehicle which would be reusable.
I went for escape velocity rather than LEO velocity because I want to get out of the "pit", not just climb to a higher level. Hoisting fuel to LEO to put in a second vehicle to achieve escape velocity is just an improvement on the old Saturn V, not a practical interplanitary vehicle.
I want to go to Mars (or Jupiter or Saturn)!!! Not just to a tourist trap space station. I'm willing to refuel there, but practical space travel will require single-stage, planet-to-planet vehicles and this X10 plane is another step along the path.
A Third of the Way There...
on
X43-A on to Mach 10
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"At Mach 10 -- or 10 times the speed of sound -- the X-43A is traveling at about two miles per second. Thats in the range of 7,500 miles per hour."
Which sounds really impressive until you realize that escape velocity is 25,000 miles per hour and we are less than a third of the way to an air-breathing launch vehicle.
186,000 mi/sec... it's not just a good idea, it's the law!
I am sorry to say I disagree with your deflating points, Jeff.
First, bacterial can be and are found in the stratosphere, in the far reaches of Antarctica, and deep in oil well shafts. There are species that not only survise 100 degrees C, they must have temperatures over that to survive . In deep sea vent communities, bacteria live at 200+C! They are truly ubiquitous.
Second, humans are far more delicate than bacteria, much less bacterial spores. I do think that a bacterial spore in the center of even a moderately (1-2 meter) sized chunk of rock could survive entry into the Earth's gravity well. As a result surviving an entry on Mars would be a doddle.
And, third, you would be suprised ar just how ubiquitous bacteria are. YES! In the middle of rocks! Not very rock, true, but pretty much every one within a kilometer of the surface.
And on the orbital mechanics, well... once you reach escape velocity, you are "leaving the building"! The sun is certainly one possibility, but one Mars-bound rock in a million years (that's 4,000 rocks in 4 billion years) is plenty for my hypothesis to work out.
True, the escape velocity of this planet is higher than that of Mars but that only means that it would take a bigger meteorite strike to kick a chunk toward Mars. We have evidence of plenty of strikes big enough to have done so, however.... Chicxulub springs immediately to mind.
Once at escape velocity, the odds of any given rock hitting Mars are low but given 4 billion years (the oldest fossil evidence for life) a lot can happen.
I am not at all suprised at this. I always regarded life on Mars as being inevitable for the following reasons:
There is no place on this planet that we have not found bacterial life,
we know that meteorites can travel between the two planets as we have found rocks of Martian origin in Antarctica.
if all rocks of earth origin contain bacteria and rocks from Mars can reach earth I would *expect* that life had travelled from earth to Mars via the same mechanism in reverse.
That the meteorites found in Antarctica contained fossil bacteria only makes the case stronger.
Slashdot Mirror
I like this, but prefer the lad vampire at the same site. There is something somehow more satisfying about watching the images flash by.
Just put it in a browser tab and let it run!
I tend to keep things (like CDs) that I regard as archival in my freezer. Dark and cold... the reerse of light and heat.
Interestingly, comparing copies from the Cairo Geniza with current texts, the rate of "bit rot" has been very low.
Just think, Odorama that you could (if you dared) EAT!
right after you get the hollow bones, the 1m deep sternum and lose 50kg!
Oh... and that opposable thumb.... OUTAHERE!
I did RTFA. The first pipe on a pipe organ is a triumph, subsequent pipes are redundant, a matter of how many you can afford. Percussion instruments are similarly unimpressive; from a technological perspective, a simple solenoid can achieve any percussion effect you want.
The robotic guitar was far more impressive, but that too has been "done" electromechanically (see the banjo on the orchestrion). A robotic violin would be most impressive, as that is an instrument that would require feedback to accomplish "feel" but so far I don't see one.
Instruments played by machine are hardly new. More impresive than a robot that plays guitar, a robot that plays piano, or "a collection of robotic percussion instruments" would be a robot that plays "a piano, two ranks of organ pipes (flute and violin), mandolin, snare drum, bass drum, timpani, cymbal, and triangle." Now that would be really impressive, especially since you would have to travel all the way to The National Music Museum" Vermillion, South Dakota to see one that was made in 1913! The machine is called an "Orchestrion" and they were common in the early part of the last century, as the musical accompaniment to a ride on a merry-go-round.
set voice = "Crocodile Dundee"
Electric Razor? That's not bizarre. Vibrator! Now that's bizarre!
/set voice
Plus... it gives a whole new meaning to "/.ed" :-)
Although the clock is set to read in 5 or 10 minute intervals, depending on the time of year it could still be up to 16 minutes fast or slow compared to your watch or clock because of the Equation of time. Our sense of time is so conditioned by our dependence on the mechanical/digital that solar time is now percieved to be "wrong".
Right now the northern limit for hurricane strikes seems to be Hatteras, with very rare exceptions. If the SSTs are higher, then the whole curve may be lifted a notch and in addition to more force 5s in the Gulf region we may start seeing force 1 and force 2 hurricanes making landfall between Hatteras and New Jersey and New York.
Hurricane Karl recently travelled nearly to ICELAND while maintaining tropical characteristics!
And who is paying the bill?
This guy did not call ZDNet out of the blue or the goodness of his heart. It reads to me like pure FUD and when I hear FUD, I know what company springs instantly to my mind!
Absolutely correct... my bad :-(
I probably should not have included the link as it is peripheral to my point that they could have prevented this merely by scheduling the required reboots at any interval short of the maximum to give themselves the least bit of redundancy. Most failure analyses show a chain of trivial mistakes all of which had to be made to cause the failure. Correct any of these trivial mistakes and the disaster does not happen.
Forgetting all the talk about Microsoft and Win95/98 and the defect in the OS that has been well known for years and for which a patch has also been available for years....
If you have a system that has a known failure point at 49 days,when do you perform the mandatory reset?
For the failure that is described the scheduled reset must have been "every 30 days" which is, frankly, INSANE!
If they had scheduled a mandaory reset every 14 or 15 days, they would have had to have had three failures before disaster struck. As it seems, one failure was all it took.
Only Heisenburg knows for sure!
The magic words in the CNet article are "starts at", the advertised price out the door at the Alienware site is over $5K. I've bought OTS machines for a bit less and a bit more but it works as a general rule.
The exact number of chips on a CPU has not exactly doubled every 18 months on the dot either, but as a general rule they do double at roughly that frequency and the price of the machine you lust after will be on the order of $5K.
Once again proving both the truth of Moore's law (data density doubles approximately every 18 months) and Dolan's corollary (the computer you want costs approximately $5,000) The IBM PC cost $5,000 in 1980, the Alienware Area-51 ALX costs $5,000 in 2004.
And if history is any indicator of the future, it should reach Ver. 1.0 in 2015!
Would that be women on the same planet?
Hit by the same asteroid?
Whoops! All fried! So Sorry!
Let me correct: OFF SITE backup.
(1) Avoiding single points of failure for the entire human race (e.g., giant asteroid nails Earth)
Don't think of it as "colonization", think of it as "making a backup copy."
The problem is not to beat a human....
The problem is to stay on the course!
I'll bet there would be real problems flying these things in the "real world", you know the one with power lines and flag poles.
Achieving escape using an air-breathing vehicle is important because, as big breaker said, you save a lot of weight by not having to carry an oxidizer. If it could be accomplished then it might be possible with a hybrid turbo/SCRAM vehicle you could get from the ground to another planet in one step, using a vehicle which would be reusable.
I went for escape velocity rather than LEO velocity because I want to get out of the "pit", not just climb to a higher level. Hoisting fuel to LEO to put in a second vehicle to achieve escape velocity is just an improvement on the old Saturn V, not a practical interplanitary vehicle.
I want to go to Mars (or Jupiter or Saturn)!!! Not just to a tourist trap space station. I'm willing to refuel there, but practical space travel will require single-stage, planet-to-planet vehicles and this X10 plane is another step along the path.
"At Mach 10 -- or 10 times the speed of sound -- the X-43A is traveling at about two miles per second. Thats in the range of 7,500 miles per hour."
Which sounds really impressive until you realize that escape velocity is 25,000 miles per hour and we are less than a third of the way to an air-breathing launch vehicle.
186,000 mi/sec... it's not just a good idea, it's the law!
I am sorry to say I disagree with your deflating points, Jeff.
First, bacterial can be and are found in the stratosphere, in the far reaches of Antarctica, and deep in oil well shafts. There are species that not only survise 100 degrees C, they must have temperatures over that to survive . In deep sea vent communities, bacteria live at 200+C! They are truly ubiquitous.
Second, humans are far more delicate than bacteria, much less bacterial spores. I do think that a bacterial spore in the center of even a moderately (1-2 meter) sized chunk of rock could survive entry into the Earth's gravity well. As a result surviving an entry on Mars would be a doddle.
And, third, you would be suprised ar just how ubiquitous bacteria are. YES! In the middle of rocks! Not very rock, true, but pretty much every one within a kilometer of the surface.
And on the orbital mechanics, well... once you reach escape velocity, you are "leaving the building"! The sun is certainly one possibility, but one Mars-bound rock in a million years (that's 4,000 rocks in 4 billion years) is plenty for my hypothesis to work out.
True, the escape velocity of this planet is higher than that of Mars but that only means that it would take a bigger meteorite strike to kick a chunk toward Mars. We have evidence of plenty of strikes big enough to have done so, however.... Chicxulub springs immediately to mind.
Once at escape velocity, the odds of any given rock hitting Mars are low but given 4 billion years (the oldest fossil evidence for life) a lot can happen.
I am not at all suprised at this. I always regarded life on Mars as being inevitable for the following reasons:
That the meteorites found in Antarctica contained fossil bacteria only makes the case stronger.