I'm a little mistrustful of someone who INSISTS that "white tips... can only be freshly exposed ice"... There could be a number of other explanations, and I'd hope the team would consider those as well.
Given the amount of dut that moves around in the martian atmosphere, it seems reasonable to assume that white tips means new.
However, after flying over America for the first time a couple of years ago (only my second time in an airplane in forty years), I was amazed at how the ground looked either red or brown. I am assuming this isn't how those area's look on the surface, since no-ones ever said to me that America is mostly red, so I'm guessing that it takes a pretty dense covering of other material to hide a dominant subsurface coloration. These white tips on mars might be the same thing, not white at all when viewed close up. Extrapolating from glaciers on earth might not be a good plan, if that's what's occuring.
Actually, perverse though it sounds, global warming is exactly what we have to do on Mars if its ever to be habitable without assisted environments (posh way of saying biodome..) in a thousand yars or so. All that subsurface ice needs to be melted to bring the oceans back and build a decent atmosphere, one better at deflecting solar radiation.
Without it we'd have to wait tens of thousands of years, or more, while specially engineered plant life (very basic plant life) and such worked its slow magic on the atmosphere. With a bit of global warming technology (TM) we can shorten the time considerably. If oceans were brought back the process would be much faster.
The question is how can it be acheived in a way that can be managed, so it doesn't spin out of control. Personally, since I won't be alive in either case, a thing I have in common with everyone reading this, I'd go for the slower option, or even go for the option of spending a few hundred years seeing if there were any remnant native organisms that could be helped back into activity and do the job for us.
That there are active glaciers is fascinating though. What a shame that almost all of the current environment of mars would need to be destroyed or irreversibly altered in order to host our species. It doesn't bode well for our entry into the interstellar club. How ironic if the destructive aliens we worry about so much in fiction turn out to be us.
The term used is shale, since a lot of it is muddy ice, mashed rock in ice, ice, and more ice, did I say mud?
And there are a lot of them, it may even be most, since they've been bashing into each other for donkeys years.
Most of the Mass in the Asteroid belt lies in just a few of the asteroids it contains, the rest are in fact relatively small. Ok in some cases this is small when compared to, say, Brooklyn, but not that big anyway.
Though, couldn't we argue that the position of the planets would have an effect on the behaviour/path of asteroids?
Jupiter certainly does. I spent weeks trying to get an asteroid to leave the Asteroid belt when Jupiter was near and get close to earth in my university final year project simulation, but Jupiter kept pulling them off course. In the end I had to move Jupiter to the other side of its orbit and then it worked.
I writ a lot of C, and don't often find much need for switch statements.
I find if-else statements to be quite sufficient. They might be less efficient when compiled, I'm not sure, but when it comes to the readable code, they're simpler to write and parse most of the time. Conditional jumps of any kind are wasted clock cycle intensive regardless. I suppose I could output the assembly and hand optimise that, I know how to do it (yeah, how sad am I...), but if I wanted to do that I wouldn't be using C in the first place.
No doubt some programming guru will blast me as being a bad coder for saying this:-)
By reform I'm guessing that you mean reform via gravity? And since we are dealing with asteroids would it be safe to say that 'later' is later on an astrological time scale?
On that scale, I can live with a 'temporary' fix. (Live, have children, grow old, die, kids grow old...)
Yes indeed, later could be a long time. However there would be no reason to try such a thing unless the asteroid were an immediate threat, in which case, unless your a fruit fly or something (what are those flies that hover over water?), you likely wouldn't have that option.
Yes, but maybe it's because given an asteroid of a fixed size, mass is a function of its density and density is a function of its mass.
No.
It appears that most asteroids are conglomerates of shale, so they wouldn't be that dense, as in not that densely packed. That's why the idea of blasting them with nukes is a bad idea, they just seperate and reform later.
A closely packed cloud of shale hitting the atmosphere would be devastating, but not so much as a single cohesive mass. I don't know much about asteroid impact, asteroid motion in a vaccuum is more my thing, but I'm not so sure that a cloud of shale would generate the same kind of plasma piller that a single object would. Simulating that is outside of my current abilities, I haven't got the hydrodynamics for it.
It's all relative mind, any large mass hitting the atmosphere would be pretty harsh on the surface of the earth.
I'm speculating here, but I think density would be as important as mass for a smaller asteroid (I mean being solid lumps of hardy material, not the usual shale mix of rock and ice that might seperate out), provided it can last long enough to generate that single column of superheated plasma behind it. Something that might take out a city block on its own could wipe a city off the map if you added in the several mile long column of superheated gas that would impact shortly after, even if the asteroid itself did not make it to the surface, nothing would stop that gas.
I saw a horizon documentary about this last year, with simulations. I don't know if its the same research, (the sites slashdotted for me). It was fascinating all the same.
Yes, but the solar system is not homogeneous. For instance the isotope ratios on Earth are known to be different from other parts of the solar system. Also, the outer planets are gas giants, while the inner planets are rocky.
Those gas giants are theorised to have rocky cores, And it's not too surprising that gas giants form further out. They can't survive too close to a star. That they form isn't surprising, as there is a lot more gas than rocky material, and we're finding them around other stars, so they seem to be common.
The isotope difference is not because there is an uneven share of the isotope in the solar system region. It's because the Earth is geologically active, and most material which contains said isotopes, like for instance, Iridium (of asteroid fame), is now deep in the planets interior. It's not absent so much as inaccessible. Only when we get hit by an asteroid do we get higher than usual levels of Iridium on the surface.
It's not possible that the rock there doesn't have sodium in it, because the rock in Enceladus, like the rock on earth, all comes from the same original cloud of material from which the entire solar system was formed.
It had a fair few billion years to mix (made up time, I have no idea how long the cloud of material existed as just a cloud), and then all the planets were made by the giant mutant star goat or something.
Anyway, it makes it easier to speculate as to the content of the rock.
You're a little wrong there, latex may be that old (I don't know its incept date), but it is the result of many years of gradual improvement and changes. Not all of it is that old.
it's matured into a great tool, with features taking a long time to get just right.
MS office on the other hand keeps being re-invented and added to in a sporadic fashion. Possibly it's a gradual maturity in house, but externally, to the many eyes, it keeps jumping forward to bright shiny new releases and expecting you to pay over and over.
The main difference is that latex matures, whereas each major version of MS office ages. I own a copy of Office, and its bizarre that a program I bought in 2002 is now considered too old and needing to be replaced by it's manufacturer, even though it works perfectly well for me doing a task that hasn't actually changed in the slightest. At least it hasn't for me.
Every GOD DAMNED vendor in the world has their own fuckin' menu! Instead of programs grouped by function or task, you get "Adobe Acrobat" and "Adobe GoLive!" and "Microsoft Office" and "McAfee Virus Scanner" and SO WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF A MENUING SYSTEM?
The problem is one of cultural norms. They do it because everyone else does. Also, no company was interested in letting the shortcut to their product be sat next to that of the competition. I guess this is why some have up to three layers of subfolder in their start menu entry. Microsoft do it too though.
I get annoyed by overuse of modal message boxes (they have their place, but that place should be a rarely visited one) and programs that insist on stealing and in some cases holding focus, even though it has no bearing on the true needs of the program. It's just about 'look at me, I are an important!!!!'.
That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands
Only if they allow these companies to patent the technology so broadly as to stifle competition. By 'only' I of course mean 'when'.
It's crazy talk anyway. The 'Microsoft of DNA'? To Paraphrase Paul Graham, only if there's someone to bend over and be the IBM of DNA.
Seriously though, that's highly unlikely at this stage unless effective monopolies are granted via patent and maintained in perpetuity so as to prevent any competition from establishing.
Also, right at this moment there's not even agreement in science as to what is required to describe a Core Promoter in all cases, and most definitely no clear idea as to how we should best describe some of the conserved sequences which form it, they're pretty darned variable, and that's just one component of a gene. This is like saying you can build a car but you haven't actually discovered how to make a wheel.
If its been fifty years then might I recommend you get the audiobook version? The version I have is narrated by Lloyd James (Audible have it, as do Amazon), and it makes for a surprisingly good listen, all this talk of the book has made me put it back on the iPod for tonights walk. I also have the paperback (a nice old print), which is where I first encountered starship troopers, in my case only 27 years ago, along with Friday (which thoroughly confused me, I was only young...).
I haven't actually studied US history, although I recently bought a 48 lecture history, which I'm slowly working through. Now I'll have to revisit the stuff on Washington, it seems I misunderstood it.
Here in the UK there's a sort of debate (very intermittent), on whether to re-introduce national service. Other European countries have it (with university/college as an alternative), and have an extremely low juvenile crime rate. I'm very much in favor of it myself
Actually, history pretty much neutral on the subject. Military men are not necessarily either authoritarian or pro-war. Witness Carter (he's an Annapolis graduate and served 7 years on active duty) or Colin Powell who seems to have been the only guy in the top rank of the Bush administration who tried to head off the Iraq fiasco. Not that military men are necessarily the best men to put in charge. Some -- Washington, Eisenhower -- did pretty well. Some didn't.
All those men you speak of were elected, and the US system expects a lot more then just military service.
In the Starship troopers he describes a seizure of power by former military (the veterans) when the world neglected them and society was in disrepair, One that went well. I'm sure the plight of the veterans was a reference to the frequent plight of returning veterans, joblessness, disenchantment, unwillingness to accept having no power, stuff like that, although the US has a pretty good record here. I wonder what his inspiration was, perhaps the Civil war? I have a doubt that such a thing would prove stable in the real world.
Actually Washington was offered power whilst still a military man was he not? The kingship if I recall, and he turned it down. Wise fellow that one.
Where will I find information about a tv show that's been on six times a day, every day for years!
Seriously, how necessary is an official site for star trek these days? It's not as if the fan base isn't large enough to do this sort of thing by itself.
Googling for the exact phrase "star trek fan site" brings back 8,040 entries. Sounds like more than enough to me.
Sigh... As usually Heinlein "Starship Troopers" is probably right. We need "History and Moral Philosophy" lessons in school. Though there is noone to teach them in the current generation.
Quite probably, but his main point, which that lesson was supposed to back up, was granting of franchise only on completion of public service. You'd never get that one through.
As much as I like that story, and its one of my all time favorite books, it starts with the premise that returning soldiers would essentially take over the world and everything would be wonderful thereafter. History has shown quite clearly that every time this occurs things go badly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little mistrustful of someone who INSISTS that "white tips ... can only be freshly exposed ice"... There could be a number of other explanations, and I'd hope the team would consider those as well.
Given the amount of dut that moves around in the martian atmosphere, it seems reasonable to assume that white tips means new.
However, after flying over America for the first time a couple of years ago (only my second time in an airplane in forty years), I was amazed at how the ground looked either red or brown. I am assuming this isn't how those area's look on the surface, since no-ones ever said to me that America is mostly red, so I'm guessing that it takes a pretty dense covering of other material to hide a dominant subsurface coloration. These white tips on mars might be the same thing, not white at all when viewed close up. Extrapolating from glaciers on earth might not be a good plan, if that's what's occuring.
I mmay of course be being an inexperienced idiot.
Actually, perverse though it sounds, global warming is exactly what we have to do on Mars if its ever to be habitable without assisted environments (posh way of saying biodome..) in a thousand yars or so. All that subsurface ice needs to be melted to bring the oceans back and build a decent atmosphere, one better at deflecting solar radiation.
Without it we'd have to wait tens of thousands of years, or more, while specially engineered plant life (very basic plant life) and such worked its slow magic on the atmosphere. With a bit of global warming technology (TM) we can shorten the time considerably. If oceans were brought back the process would be much faster.
The question is how can it be acheived in a way that can be managed, so it doesn't spin out of control. Personally, since I won't be alive in either case, a thing I have in common with everyone reading this, I'd go for the slower option, or even go for the option of spending a few hundred years seeing if there were any remnant native organisms that could be helped back into activity and do the job for us.
That there are active glaciers is fascinating though. What a shame that almost all of the current environment of mars would need to be destroyed or irreversibly altered in order to host our species. It doesn't bode well for our entry into the interstellar club. How ironic if the destructive aliens we worry about so much in fiction turn out to be us.
The term used is shale, since a lot of it is muddy ice, mashed rock in ice, ice, and more ice, did I say mud?
And there are a lot of them, it may even be most, since they've been bashing into each other for donkeys years.
Most of the Mass in the Asteroid belt lies in just a few of the asteroids it contains, the rest are in fact relatively small. Ok in some cases this is small when compared to, say, Brooklyn, but not that big anyway.
Though, couldn't we argue that the position of the planets would have an effect on the behaviour/path of asteroids?
Jupiter certainly does. I spent weeks trying to get an asteroid to leave the Asteroid belt when Jupiter was near and get close to earth in my university final year project simulation, but Jupiter kept pulling them off course. In the end I had to move Jupiter to the other side of its orbit and then it worked.
I writ a lot of C, and don't often find much need for switch statements.
:-)
I find if-else statements to be quite sufficient. They might be less efficient when compiled, I'm not sure, but when it comes to the readable code, they're simpler to write and parse most of the time. Conditional jumps of any kind are wasted clock cycle intensive regardless. I suppose I could output the assembly and hand optimise that, I know how to do it (yeah, how sad am I...), but if I wanted to do that I wouldn't be using C in the first place.
No doubt some programming guru will blast me as being a bad coder for saying this
By reform I'm guessing that you mean reform via gravity? And since we are dealing with asteroids would it be safe to say that 'later' is later on an astrological time scale?
On that scale, I can live with a 'temporary' fix. (Live, have children, grow old, die, kids grow old...)
Yes indeed, later could be a long time. However there would be no reason to try such a thing unless the asteroid were an immediate threat, in which case, unless your a fruit fly or something (what are those flies that hover over water?), you likely wouldn't have that option.
ok, that ones there.
:-)
I therefore submit the Chewbacca defense and thus win the argument by default
Yes, but maybe it's because given an asteroid of a fixed size, mass is a function of its density and density is a function of its mass.
No.
It appears that most asteroids are conglomerates of shale, so they wouldn't be that dense, as in not that densely packed. That's why the idea of blasting them with nukes is a bad idea, they just seperate and reform later.
A closely packed cloud of shale hitting the atmosphere would be devastating, but not so much as a single cohesive mass. I don't know much about asteroid impact, asteroid motion in a vaccuum is more my thing, but I'm not so sure that a cloud of shale would generate the same kind of plasma piller that a single object would. Simulating that is outside of my current abilities, I haven't got the hydrodynamics for it.
It's all relative mind, any large mass hitting the atmosphere would be pretty harsh on the surface of the earth.
I'm speculating here, but I think density would be as important as mass for a smaller asteroid (I mean being solid lumps of hardy material, not the usual shale mix of rock and ice that might seperate out), provided it can last long enough to generate that single column of superheated plasma behind it. Something that might take out a city block on its own could wipe a city off the map if you added in the several mile long column of superheated gas that would impact shortly after, even if the asteroid itself did not make it to the surface, nothing would stop that gas.
I saw a horizon documentary about this last year, with simulations. I don't know if its the same research, (the sites slashdotted for me). It was fascinating all the same.
Yes, but the solar system is not homogeneous. For instance the isotope ratios on Earth are known to be different from other parts of the solar system. Also, the outer planets are gas giants, while the inner planets are rocky.
Those gas giants are theorised to have rocky cores, And it's not too surprising that gas giants form further out. They can't survive too close to a star. That they form isn't surprising, as there is a lot more gas than rocky material, and we're finding them around other stars, so they seem to be common.
The isotope difference is not because there is an uneven share of the isotope in the solar system region. It's because the Earth is geologically active, and most material which contains said isotopes, like for instance, Iridium (of asteroid fame), is now deep in the planets interior. It's not absent so much as inaccessible. Only when we get hit by an asteroid do we get higher than usual levels of Iridium on the surface.
It's not possible that the rock there doesn't have sodium in it, because the rock in Enceladus, like the rock on earth, all comes from the same original cloud of material from which the entire solar system was formed.
It had a fair few billion years to mix (made up time, I have no idea how long the cloud of material existed as just a cloud), and then all the planets were made by the giant mutant star goat or something.
Anyway, it makes it easier to speculate as to the content of the rock.
You're a little wrong there, latex may be that old (I don't know its incept date), but it is the result of many years of gradual improvement and changes. Not all of it is that old.
it's matured into a great tool, with features taking a long time to get just right.
MS office on the other hand keeps being re-invented and added to in a sporadic fashion. Possibly it's a gradual maturity in house, but externally, to the many eyes, it keeps jumping forward to bright shiny new releases and expecting you to pay over and over.
The main difference is that latex matures, whereas each major version of MS office ages. I own a copy of Office, and its bizarre that a program I bought in 2002 is now considered too old and needing to be replaced by it's manufacturer, even though it works perfectly well for me doing a task that hasn't actually changed in the slightest. At least it hasn't for me.
Every GOD DAMNED vendor in the world has their own fuckin' menu! Instead of programs grouped by function or task, you get "Adobe Acrobat" and "Adobe GoLive!" and "Microsoft Office" and "McAfee Virus Scanner" and SO WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF A MENUING SYSTEM?
The problem is one of cultural norms. They do it because everyone else does. Also, no company was interested in letting the shortcut to their product be sat next to that of the competition. I guess this is why some have up to three layers of subfolder in their start menu entry. Microsoft do it too though.
I get annoyed by overuse of modal message boxes (they have their place, but that place should be a rarely visited one) and programs that insist on stealing and in some cases holding focus, even though it has no bearing on the true needs of the program. It's just about 'look at me, I are an important!!!!'.
That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands
Only if they allow these companies to patent the technology so broadly as to stifle competition. By 'only' I of course mean 'when'.
It's crazy talk anyway. The 'Microsoft of DNA'? To Paraphrase Paul Graham, only if there's someone to bend over and be the IBM of DNA.
Seriously though, that's highly unlikely at this stage unless effective monopolies are granted via patent and maintained in perpetuity so as to prevent any competition from establishing.
Also, right at this moment there's not even agreement in science as to what is required to describe a Core Promoter in all cases, and most definitely no clear idea as to how we should best describe some of the conserved sequences which form it, they're pretty darned variable, and that's just one component of a gene. This is like saying you can build a car but you haven't actually discovered how to make a wheel.
You're concerned about security, and you're using WINDOWS VISTA???
Thats because is is an hero..
If its been fifty years then might I recommend you get the audiobook version? The version I have is narrated by Lloyd James (Audible have it, as do Amazon), and it makes for a surprisingly good listen, all this talk of the book has made me put it back on the iPod for tonights walk. I also have the paperback (a nice old print), which is where I first encountered starship troopers, in my case only 27 years ago, along with Friday (which thoroughly confused me, I was only young...).
I haven't actually studied US history, although I recently bought a 48 lecture history, which I'm slowly working through. Now I'll have to revisit the stuff on Washington, it seems I misunderstood it.
Here in the UK there's a sort of debate (very intermittent), on whether to re-introduce national service. Other European countries have it (with university/college as an alternative), and have an extremely low juvenile crime rate. I'm very much in favor of it myself
Actually, history pretty much neutral on the subject. Military men are not necessarily either authoritarian or pro-war. Witness Carter (he's an Annapolis graduate and served 7 years on active duty) or Colin Powell who seems to have been the only guy in the top rank of the Bush administration who tried to head off the Iraq fiasco. Not that military men are necessarily the best men to put in charge. Some -- Washington, Eisenhower -- did pretty well. Some didn't.
All those men you speak of were elected, and the US system expects a lot more then just military service.
In the Starship troopers he describes a seizure of power by former military (the veterans) when the world neglected them and society was in disrepair, One that went well. I'm sure the plight of the veterans was a reference to the frequent plight of returning veterans, joblessness, disenchantment, unwillingness to accept having no power, stuff like that, although the US has a pretty good record here. I wonder what his inspiration was, perhaps the Civil war? I have a doubt that such a thing would prove stable in the real world.
Actually Washington was offered power whilst still a military man was he not? The kingship if I recall, and he turned it down. Wise fellow that one.
Ooh, I had no idea he wrote further on the Starship troopers universe. I'll get with the buying right away.
Thanks for that one.
Whatever the fate of StarTrek.com, the decision to fire/reassign the existing staff raises questions about the stewardship of the franchise.
Nah, Enterprise already did that.
The initial setup at the web GUI makes it apparent that it wants to send stats back to home-base. How this can take people by surprise is baffling
Without being cynical. Oh wait, I can't do it that way..
There's one reason, because it makes for a story that seems on first glance to be sensational, and thus survives the firehose.
Don't Paramount have a movie coming out, by the very name "Star Trek", for Xmas next year? Seems like a dumb time to drop the site.
Not if they plan to re-use the domain to promote that film.
ohnoz!
Where will I find information about a tv show that's been on six times a day, every day for years!
Seriously, how necessary is an official site for star trek these days? It's not as if the fan base isn't large enough to do this sort of thing by itself.
Googling for the exact phrase "star trek fan site" brings back 8,040 entries. Sounds like more than enough to me.
Sigh... As usually Heinlein "Starship Troopers" is probably right. We need "History and Moral Philosophy" lessons in school. Though there is noone to teach them in the current generation.
Quite probably, but his main point, which that lesson was supposed to back up, was granting of franchise only on completion of public service. You'd never get that one through.
As much as I like that story, and its one of my all time favorite books, it starts with the premise that returning soldiers would essentially take over the world and everything would be wonderful thereafter. History has shown quite clearly that every time this occurs things go badly.
The problem is in ensuring that the proofs are accurate. That's no trivial task, especially if too many such proofs get added to Wikipedia.
I managed to rile you about something so insignificant as a post on a web page, so yes, silly person....