Actually, the HHG0A was ideal. Sucker the bomb squad in, make them think it's a false alarm and then kill them as they stand around the HHGOA laughing.
Years ago, there was a mass casualty drill at PNC Park in Pittsburgh. Near the end of the drill, someone put a large bag in the decon area. I don't know if this was something the Feds did as part of the drill or if someone just left a bag in the wrong place.
Someone attempted to declare an emergency and cordon off the area. By that point, most people were exhausted and sick of the drill--and they simply ignored the cordon. The drill fell apart at that point. They "knew" it wasn't a bomb.
I was cold, soaked from d-con and only wearing a pair of swim trunks when I walked past the suspicious bag. I remember thinking that if someone had wanted to kill a whole lot of EMS, police and fire (even most of the victims were off-duty public safety), a bomb in that bag would have done it. And at that point, I didn't care.
That's exactly the sort of stuff that gets you hurt or killed.
I did a calculation a while back, assuming that the rule of thumb on earth held on Titan: reaction rates drop 50% for 10 degree drop in temperature. Using an estimate for the time required to develop life on Earth, the calc indicated it would be unlikely to have developed on Titan within the lifetime of the universe.
Of course, there are quite a few problems with that analysis:
Different chemical system might make the reaction rate different.
That's a long way to push a law that obviously fails at the freezing temp of water.
If life formed on Earth much sooner than the estimate I used, again the number might be off.
Then again, what would be the information molecule? DNA is a polymer with subunits that can encode information. There aren't a lot of methane-soluble polymers that would make for good information storage.
Then again, maybe I'm not thinking outside the box and something radically different would be used.
Life on Titan is unlikely, but I think we'd be making a big mistake assuming it's impossible.
Not all environments provide unlimited food at all times. Don't forget, in Australia, parrots are often considered agricultural pests. Until significant farming took place, they didn't have such an availability of food as they do now. Macaws in the Amazon have to eat clay to be able to deal with the toxins in their environment. Picking undigested food out of their poop may provide an advantage, the clay having leached many of the toxins out already.
Many parrots are ground birds (African greys have a digging instinct that's hysterical) or live in such large groups that poop is unavoidable (budgerigars).
Our African greys are fastidious about their poop, although they're surprisingly fond of getting their poop on other birds or humans (my grey targets me--never does it to my wife, of whom she's jealous.
There are significant variations between individual birds, various species,health and possibly even "pecking order" in the flock.
Note: If you own a pet bird, cleanliness of the bird and the bird's environment is very important. In this discussion, I've mixed a combination of wild behaviors with what parrots often instinctively do in captivity. Poop does provide healthy bacteria, but it can also provide a vector for diseases. Except for rare cases like treatment with powerful antibiotics or hand-feeding from day 1, keep all dirt to a minimum to keep your parrot and you healthy.
Our two African greys don't seem to like regular TV. They may need HD, too.
The cockatoo loves TV. He will watch Barney the dinosaur until my eyes and ears bleed, and hates raptors on Animal Planet. Strangely, he likes Corwin Presents, except for that episode with the anaconda.
He hates the weather channel, too, but he was rescued Hurricane Andrew. Not a fan of big winds.
Parrots can engage in corporophagia--they eat parrot poop. If they didn't digest the food completely the first time, they'll get it the second. Their guts are short so their food has a short residence time. The things you do for flight!
It's also how they spread good intestinal bacteria among the flock. If we are forced to hand-feed a parrot chick from day one, we mix some of the mother's feces in the formula for the first week or so. Survival rate improves dramatically, although feeding a bird the size of your little fingernail is still iffy (parakeets and bourkes).
If the recent information on termites is correct, sharing feces may be one strategy for forming societies.
Finally, if you really want to get freaked out, read about treating intestinal infections with feces transplants.
In the 1940s, 61 Cygni was thought to have planets a planet -- then several planets, then none, and now, at least one.It's another example of science correcting itself more than once!
The majority of countries don't spell it either way.
I live in the United States. I write for a living for people in the United States. For me, it's wrong.
For the record, it appears that it's only some birds that have four color cones. Budgerigars (parakeets for us Americans) see UV -- you can ruin a bird's sex life by putting sunscreen on its forehead.
Your Canon digital is a black and white camera with filters that make approximate color images.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to photoshop to make the photograph of a color chart come out close to the same on the screen as it looks in real life. Then there's the real fun -- getting the thing to print out so that it's close to the chart and the computer screen.
There are times when I'm about ready to switch to all black-and-white.
My Nikon D50 captures some of the UV and IR as well. That's the other reason everyone uses a UV filter on their lenses (the first being, it's a cheap way to protect the camera lens that might well be worth more than the camera). With a special filter, I can take IR pictures with my Nikon. Even your eyes pick up a bit of the UV -- if you look at a blacklight bulb, it's hard to focus on -- the lenses in your eyes focus visible light and don't do as good a job on the UV.
"Hmmm? How do you know so much lingo and detailed information about this psychiatric disorder?"
I used to teach the Behavioral Emergency module in addition to ACLS and airway maintenance. "Cluster B" is also known as the "Drama Queens," and thus disproportionately represented in the patients seen in emergency rooms.
And, after working with a few histrions, a supervisor with a gaping narcissistic wound, and a trainee who was a classic example of borderline personality disorder, it's a little hard to forget the basic definitions. Yes, my copy of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual is III-R. Some things just haven't changed that much.
"Anyway, it was a muslim. So much for your theory"
Uh...yeah. Sure.
[Shrugs, walks away, reminding self that arguing with drunks or the intellectually stunted never works and just leads to frustration.]
"there is a subculture in NASA of pure antisocial losers hiding out as ubertechs at contractors. one flipped and cut a bunch of wires is how I see it."
The above post was rude and thus modded "troll," but think about it for a second. What's more likely: a vast conspiracy to destroy the space station by sabotaging something non-life-threatening or someone with narcissistic or borderline personality disorder (or some sort of "Cluster B" personality disorder combination) who has difficulty relating to others and who decided to act out passive-aggressively by cutting some wires?
And let's be honest: how many technogeeks have you met in your life that are complete knee-biters?
If you look at the equation for the temperature of a planet, it's:
Ts*(Rs/2D)^.5=Tb
where Ts is the temperature of the sun, Tb the temperature of the body you're concerned with (both temperatures in an absolute scale), Rs is the radius of the sun, and D is the distance to the sun. If you don't know what 2, ^ and.5 mean, please go away.
You'd think temperature would be inversely related to the square of the distance, but temperature based on radiation is a fourth-power function, so when you actually grind through everything, temperature is related to the inverse square root, not the square.
In other words, the Moon should have the same average temperature as the Earth. It's actually a bit lower, because Earth is warmed by radioactive decay in the Earth's interior, greenhouse gases and there's cloud effects and stuff.
The people working on the lunar habitats estimate the temperature would actually be about -22C. That's cold, but stable. Designing equipment to keep the temperature livable with the outside being a constant -22C is far easier than trying to deal with the wild fluctuations.
BTW: If you want to have some fun, assume that temperature rises on Pluto and Titan are the result of changes in solar output that are causing global warming on Earth. Plug in the numbers and ask what increase in solar temperature would correspond to that -- and then ask what the change in Earth temperature would be. Oopsie.
As someone goes unconscious, muscles relax and the compressions will provide enough air movement to pop the obstruction. It's still not moving a tremendous amount of air. On top of that, think about how you do the head tilt, chin lift for mouth-to-mouth. You can pop something out, but not much air will come back in.
A good way to think of it is by those pieces of rubber kids used to blow in to make a "bilabial fricative" (aka. raspberry, aka farting noise). You can blow air out fairly easily -- but have you ever tried breathing in through one without holding it properly?
CPR simply won't move enough air back and forth do do anything significant -- if anything at all.
Most people, doing just compressions, will not be able to maintain an open airway in the patient. The changes in volume of the lungs are not that great from compressions, and given the amount of dead air space in the bronchi, trachea, oropharynx and mouth, it's doubtful there's any new oxygenation. There is a trick where you can oxygenate someone with pulses of oxygen so that the lungs almost don't move, but the frequency is high enough you can hear it. If you're doing compressions that fast, you're not doing good CPR.
If that's it, then I don't feel so bad, heartless bastard that I am. He lived to get over the pain.
Probably it was just a brain malfunction.
I guess part of the problem is, I didn't ask him when he did it. Would I have gotten an answer then? Unfortunately, my brain was too busy thinking "There's a dead guy trying to kill me!" I was more concerned about not accidentally pushing those little red buttons on the Lifepack paddles than about what was going through the dude's brain. "Clear!" I wasn't!
Then again, maybe I don't want to know why he tried to stop me. Anyone else remember Larry Niven's Chirpsithra story "The Subject is Closed"?
Just to be pedantic, as a paramedic, I watched a few people who were breathing while in cardiac arrest. It's not common, but it can happen. The thing is, they won't breathe for long while in cardiac arrest. One guy in a witnessed arrest for 5 minutes, no pulse, not breathing, v-fib on the monitor, grabbed me and screamed "NO!" when I tried to defibrillate him. I almost shocked both of us. After I got his hands pried off my collar, I sparked him and got him back into a decent rhythm. When he woke up a couple hours later, he didn't know why he screamed "NO!" I've always wondered what was going on in his mind....
The ability to move blood decreases dramatically with time when blood isn't flowing. This result may indicate that stopping compressions for anything short of a return of cardiac activity isn't worth it. In the field and in the hospital, it's not uncommon for the person doing chest compressions to stop occasionally to perform an intervention. This result may change how CPR is done by the medical professionals as well.
On the other hand, if rescue breathing is being done poorly in the field, perhaps it's complications like air in the stomach that results in vomiting and thus aspiration pneumonia that's causing the problem.
More work will definitely need to be done on this question.
Mirror neurons are neurons that fire in response to what we see someone else experience. The other person picks up a pot, part of our brain that would be needed to pick up the pot fires as well. Pick up a hot pot without protection, and the person screams -- and part of your brain feels the burn. We're hard-wired for sympathy.
The computer program is triggering mirror neurons in the human observer.
I'd bet the researchers that wrote the computer program would have exhibited some signs of distress at the computer NPC being tortured -- even though they, better than anyone, would know that no human was involved.
Well, if I get a free laptop with Linux, then the answer is no, I didn't know you very well. Otherwise, I suspect I'm spot on with a tendency toward obscure humor.
I think the Linux community should fight back by sending out free laptops to bloggers with Linux installed.
I would consider participating, especially since I do not have any machines running Linux at this time and would see this as a useful learning experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the HHG0A was ideal. Sucker the bomb squad in, make them think it's a false alarm and then kill them as they stand around the HHGOA laughing.
Years ago, there was a mass casualty drill at PNC Park in Pittsburgh. Near the end of the drill, someone put a large bag in the decon area. I don't know if this was something the Feds did as part of the drill or if someone just left a bag in the wrong place.
Someone attempted to declare an emergency and cordon off the area. By that point, most people were exhausted and sick of the drill--and they simply ignored the cordon. The drill fell apart at that point. They "knew" it wasn't a bomb.
I was cold, soaked from d-con and only wearing a pair of swim trunks when I walked past the suspicious bag. I remember thinking that if someone had wanted to kill a whole lot of EMS, police and fire (even most of the victims were off-duty public safety), a bomb in that bag would have done it. And at that point, I didn't care.
That's exactly the sort of stuff that gets you hurt or killed.
I'm in a new line of work now.
Of course, there are quite a few problems with that analysis:
Then again, what would be the information molecule? DNA is a polymer with subunits that can encode information. There aren't a lot of methane-soluble polymers that would make for good information storage.
Then again, maybe I'm not thinking outside the box and something radically different would be used.
Life on Titan is unlikely, but I think we'd be making a big mistake assuming it's impossible.
Note: If you own a pet bird, cleanliness of the bird and the bird's environment is very important. In this discussion, I've mixed a combination of wild behaviors with what parrots often instinctively do in captivity. Poop does provide healthy bacteria, but it can also provide a vector for diseases. Except for rare cases like treatment with powerful antibiotics or hand-feeding from day 1, keep all dirt to a minimum to keep your parrot and you healthy.
Our two African greys don't seem to like regular TV. They may need HD, too.
The cockatoo loves TV. He will watch Barney the dinosaur until my eyes and ears bleed, and hates raptors on Animal Planet. Strangely, he likes Corwin Presents, except for that episode with the anaconda.
He hates the weather channel, too, but he was rescued Hurricane Andrew. Not a fan of big winds.
Parrots can engage in corporophagia--they eat parrot poop. If they didn't digest the food completely the first time, they'll get it the second. Their guts are short so their food has a short residence time. The things you do for flight!
It's also how they spread good intestinal bacteria among the flock. If we are forced to hand-feed a parrot chick from day one, we mix some of the mother's feces in the formula for the first week or so. Survival rate improves dramatically, although feeding a bird the size of your little fingernail is still iffy (parakeets and bourkes).
If the recent information on termites is correct, sharing feces may be one strategy for forming societies.
Finally, if you really want to get freaked out, read about treating intestinal infections with feces transplants.
In the 1940s, 61 Cygni was thought to have planets a planet -- then several planets, then none, and now, at least one.It's another example of science correcting itself more than once!
...I can learn to live like you did, Randy. Thank you, you will be missed, remembered, honored and followed.
The majority of countries don't spell it either way. I live in the United States. I write for a living for people in the United States. For me, it's wrong.
For the record, it appears that it's only some birds that have four color cones. Budgerigars (parakeets for us Americans) see UV -- you can ruin a bird's sex life by putting sunscreen on its forehead.
Your Canon digital is a black and white camera with filters that make approximate color images.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to photoshop to make the photograph of a color chart come out close to the same on the screen as it looks in real life. Then there's the real fun -- getting the thing to print out so that it's close to the chart and the computer screen.
There are times when I'm about ready to switch to all black-and-white.
Every digital camera uses black and white sensors with filters to make pretty coloured pictures.
Frack it, now you got me spelling "coloured" wrong. Took me years to break myself of the "haemoglobin" habit...
It might be the shield that got jettisoned. Darned if I remember where I read that...
Situated atop an extended mast, SSI will provide images at a height two meters above the ground, roughly the height of a tall person. SSI simulates the human eye with its two optical lens system that will give three-dimensional views of the arctic plains. The instrument will also simulate the resolution of human eyesight using a charged-coupled device that produces high density 1024 x 1024 pixel images. But SSI exceeds the capabilities of the human eye by using optical and infrared filters, allowing multispectral imaging at 12 wavelengths of geological interest and atmospheric interest.
My Nikon D50 captures some of the UV and IR as well. That's the other reason everyone uses a UV filter on their lenses (the first being, it's a cheap way to protect the camera lens that might well be worth more than the camera). With a special filter, I can take IR pictures with my Nikon. Even your eyes pick up a bit of the UV -- if you look at a blacklight bulb, it's hard to focus on -- the lenses in your eyes focus visible light and don't do as good a job on the UV.
Scientific American has a good article on how these detectors work. The detector doesn't have to see the radiation from the isotope involved.
I used to teach the Behavioral Emergency module in addition to ACLS and airway maintenance. "Cluster B" is also known as the "Drama Queens," and thus disproportionately represented in the patients seen in emergency rooms.
And, after working with a few histrions, a supervisor with a gaping narcissistic wound, and a trainee who was a classic example of borderline personality disorder, it's a little hard to forget the basic definitions. Yes, my copy of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual is III-R. Some things just haven't changed that much.
"Anyway, it was a muslim. So much for your theory"
Uh...yeah. Sure.
[Shrugs, walks away, reminding self that arguing with drunks or the intellectually stunted never works and just leads to frustration.]
The above post was rude and thus modded "troll," but think about it for a second. What's more likely: a vast conspiracy to destroy the space station by sabotaging something non-life-threatening or someone with narcissistic or borderline personality disorder (or some sort of "Cluster B" personality disorder combination) who has difficulty relating to others and who decided to act out passive-aggressively by cutting some wires?
And let's be honest: how many technogeeks have you met in your life that are complete knee-biters?
Ts*(Rs/2D)^.5=Tb
where Ts is the temperature of the sun, Tb the temperature of the body you're concerned with (both temperatures in an absolute scale), Rs is the radius of the sun, and D is the distance to the sun. If you don't know what 2, ^ and .5 mean, please go away.
You'd think temperature would be inversely related to the square of the distance, but temperature based on radiation is a fourth-power function, so when you actually grind through everything, temperature is related to the inverse square root, not the square.
In other words, the Moon should have the same average temperature as the Earth. It's actually a bit lower, because Earth is warmed by radioactive decay in the Earth's interior, greenhouse gases and there's cloud effects and stuff.
The people working on the lunar habitats estimate the temperature would actually be about -22C. That's cold, but stable. Designing equipment to keep the temperature livable with the outside being a constant -22C is far easier than trying to deal with the wild fluctuations.
BTW: If you want to have some fun, assume that temperature rises on Pluto and Titan are the result of changes in solar output that are causing global warming on Earth. Plug in the numbers and ask what increase in solar temperature would correspond to that -- and then ask what the change in Earth temperature would be. Oopsie.
A good way to think of it is by those pieces of rubber kids used to blow in to make a "bilabial fricative" (aka. raspberry, aka farting noise). You can blow air out fairly easily -- but have you ever tried breathing in through one without holding it properly?
CPR simply won't move enough air back and forth do do anything significant -- if anything at all.
Most people, doing just compressions, will not be able to maintain an open airway in the patient. The changes in volume of the lungs are not that great from compressions, and given the amount of dead air space in the bronchi, trachea, oropharynx and mouth, it's doubtful there's any new oxygenation. There is a trick where you can oxygenate someone with pulses of oxygen so that the lungs almost don't move, but the frequency is high enough you can hear it. If you're doing compressions that fast, you're not doing good CPR.
If that's it, then I don't feel so bad, heartless bastard that I am. He lived to get over the pain.
Probably it was just a brain malfunction.
I guess part of the problem is, I didn't ask him when he did it. Would I have gotten an answer then? Unfortunately, my brain was too busy thinking "There's a dead guy trying to kill me!" I was more concerned about not accidentally pushing those little red buttons on the Lifepack paddles than about what was going through the dude's brain. "Clear!" I wasn't!
Then again, maybe I don't want to know why he tried to stop me. Anyone else remember Larry Niven's Chirpsithra story "The Subject is Closed"?
Just to be pedantic, as a paramedic, I watched a few people who were breathing while in cardiac arrest. It's not common, but it can happen. The thing is, they won't breathe for long while in cardiac arrest. One guy in a witnessed arrest for 5 minutes, no pulse, not breathing, v-fib on the monitor, grabbed me and screamed "NO!" when I tried to defibrillate him. I almost shocked both of us. After I got his hands pried off my collar, I sparked him and got him back into a decent rhythm. When he woke up a couple hours later, he didn't know why he screamed "NO!" I've always wondered what was going on in his mind.... The ability to move blood decreases dramatically with time when blood isn't flowing. This result may indicate that stopping compressions for anything short of a return of cardiac activity isn't worth it. In the field and in the hospital, it's not uncommon for the person doing chest compressions to stop occasionally to perform an intervention. This result may change how CPR is done by the medical professionals as well. On the other hand, if rescue breathing is being done poorly in the field, perhaps it's complications like air in the stomach that results in vomiting and thus aspiration pneumonia that's causing the problem. More work will definitely need to be done on this question.
Mirror neurons are neurons that fire in response to what we see someone else experience. The other person picks up a pot, part of our brain that would be needed to pick up the pot fires as well. Pick up a hot pot without protection, and the person screams -- and part of your brain feels the burn. We're hard-wired for sympathy. The computer program is triggering mirror neurons in the human observer. I'd bet the researchers that wrote the computer program would have exhibited some signs of distress at the computer NPC being tortured -- even though they, better than anyone, would know that no human was involved.
Well, if I get a free laptop with Linux, then the answer is no, I didn't know you very well. Otherwise, I suspect I'm spot on with a tendency toward obscure humor.
I bet it would sell....
I would consider participating, especially since I do not have any machines running Linux at this time and would see this as a useful learning experience.