...Google "remember souvenir" (the words on the coin)...
It's worth pointing out that "souvenir" on the coin does not mean that it is a souvenir 25-cent piece. The coin is legal tender, and souvenir is the infinitive form of the verb to remember in French.
The ABC is, in fact, Australia's equivalent of the BBC or CBC: a crown corporation that acts as a national and international broadcaster. There is no direct equivalent in the United States, where it would be dismissed as "state-run television".
That's it! I propose the Wisconsin 100-point scale for measuring the oddness of foreign fruit: the percentage of people from Wisconsin who have seen the fruit three or fewer times.
Due to the expense of polling, we will only ever know Wisconsin numbers for very few fruits, and those will be known only to very low accuracy. Many of them will really only be wild guesses. For example, did you know that the kumquat is a 62 on the Wisconsin scale?
If you live in Vancouver, consider joining the Cooperative Auto Network, a non-profit car rental cooperative. Although they mostly have small sedans, they also have trucks and minivans, cars with bike racks, &c. If you join under the "flex" plan, and don't happen to use one of the cars then the cost is less than C$10 for that month, about the cost of sending you a bill (after all, it's non-profit).
If the range really is three feet, then I want to hang a transmitter in the middle of my Christmas tree, and clip on a bunch of LEDs attached to receivers on the branches. Those Christmas tree light wires are a pet peeve.
I have an idea! We could refine the fat and burn it in an enclosed cylinder with a movable piston. Then, we'll attach a rod to the piston, and attach a crank to the rod. We'll call it an "engine" and extract useful work from the chemical energy in the fat!
Sorry, took a while to answer. I think most solar thermal plants use a funny kind of black body.
It's double-walled can with a liquid thermal mass between the walls, like molten salt. In one end of the can, there is an opening that is small compared to the dimensions of the can. The walls of the can are somewhat absorptive, but the bulk of the absorptivity of the device comes from multiple reflections once light gets inside.
Light from the sun is reflected from a number of mirrors on the ground, which form an indistinct image of the sun at the opening of the can suspended in the air. There's no "screen" to project the image on, so the light passes through the hole, strikes the inner wall and is partly absorbed, partly reflected. The reflected ray strikes another wall, and the process is repeated until the ray finally gets back out the hole in the can.
The hole in the end of the can behaves like a really black disk. If the inside of the can is 20% reflective, and the light reflects five times on average, then the escaping light is (0.2)^5 = 0.00032 as strong as the incident light. That's really black.
There is reflection at a dielectric boundary. A dielectric is something that is not a metal, like glass. If you focus your eyes on a window, you can see a reflection of yourself because air and glass are dielectrics with different indices of refraction.
The amplitude of the reflected light wave for light that strikes perpendicular to the dielectric boundary is (n1 - n2)/(n1 + n2) - the "n's" are indices of refraction. For a boundary between air and this stuff, the reflection is (1.05 - 1.0) / (1.05 + 1.0) = (0.05/2.05) = 1/41. Compare with glass, with an index of 1.4: (1.4 - 1.0) / (1.4 + 1.0) = 0.4/2.4 = 1/6. (The difference in intensity is the square of this, though, which diminishes the difference.)
The equation for non-normal incident light is more complicated*, but even light that is a long way off normal incidence reflects by about the same amount. It's only when you start approaching 90 degrees off normal that a dielectric boundary starts reflecting lots of light. Try it with a large window pane: you have to get your head right up there and view something with a glancing reflection to see it clearly.
They're saying that they can coat a semiconductor, like an LED or a photovoltaic cell, with this stuff. Then about (1/6 - 1/41) more light either strikes the PV, or leaves the clear stuff that surrounds the LED.
This will not work as well as a magnesium fluoride coating for lenses, though. That kind of antireflective coating relies on destructive interference with the reflected light from the two dielectric boundaries, which is why they only work at a certain wavelength.
* Google "reflected light at a dielectric boundary" for the gory details.
Re:a scripting language that targets the java vm !
on
Groovy in Action
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Embed Groovy in your Java application to provide scripting extensions, and call the methods from inside your Java code.
This argument, that since they were not used they were not abused, drives me nuts! Every time someone says it, I hear this: these rules haven't been abused yet, so just give us one more chance. Lets renew them and see if we can figure out how to abuse them.
Oh, and how's this for abuse: the Prime Minister calls into question the reputation of the father-in-law of an Opposition Member of Parliament who is allegedly about to be compelled to testify, even though the identities of those questioned without charge are supposed to be kept secret.
VT-xxx machines were all character-mapped and text-only.
This is not entirely true. The VT-320 had graphics capability. I never used one, but I did use the VT-320 terminal emulation in PC-Kermit to connect to unixg at the University of BC. Matlab was able to draw graphs on the screen. (No GUIs, though, which is what I think you were getting at.)
This is an excellent point. Part of the guarantee for buyers in an auction is this: there is another buyer in the market who is willing to pay one bid increment less than the winner pays. The second-highest bidder is the "market maker".
Shilling takes this guarantee away. The second-highest bidder ceases to be the market maker, and the seller takes that role. This is the fraud.
The problem really has to do with the rate of consumption. If you consume water faster than it can be excreted to the bladder, then you will start to suffer from hyponatremia. This can cause individual cells to swell, due to osmotic pressure accross the cell membrane. If enough cells succumb, then organs or the nervous system can fail.
When I was an undergrad Physics student, I used the student machine shop at the University of British Columbia, which was all imperial. Another student had a work term where the shop was metric.
Neither of us were dummies (he was smarter than me), but we were nearly unable to communicate about making apparatus in a shop. Fifteen years later, I still have trouble visualizing anything in microns: I have to divide by 25 to turn it into "thous" before I can really feel it.
I think that one of the benefits of this system is that it heats the swimming pool. One could use still use the pool water as the heat sink, rather than lose the heat to the air. If the radiator is in a water bath, it doesn't have to be a truck radiator. It could be an old heat register from a hot water heating system, or even just a pipe. You could paint it with pool paint and keep it clean.
Well, before Linux (by about a three years) making Unix available to the common man, there was A/UX. (I have to admit, though, that it was unlikely for a pre-teen to know about A/UX, let alone find it "easy".)
A/UX was based on an early AT&T version, maybe SysV R2? The first release was in the late 1980s, and the last release was in the mid 1990s. It ran on the Motorola 680x0. Link to a page hosted by A/UX.
Jurassic Park, which IMDB has being released in 1993, had a Macintosh running Unix. People groaned; I can remember a project manager at work complaining about it, but it was plausible, at least. Except for the fact that the system was under active developement by the fat guy and he said that it would be dangerous to restart the system because it had never been down. And all the dinosaurs running around.
Slashdot Mirror
...Google "remember souvenir" (the words on the coin)...It's worth pointing out that "souvenir" on the coin does not mean that it is a souvenir 25-cent piece. The coin is legal tender, and souvenir is the infinitive form of the verb to remember in French.
The ABC is, in fact, Australia's equivalent of the BBC or CBC: a crown corporation that acts as a national and international broadcaster. There is no direct equivalent in the United States, where it would be dismissed as "state-run television".
You should be able to connect up a SED in your own home. I know that I've done it.
That's it! I propose the Wisconsin 100-point scale for measuring the oddness of foreign fruit: the percentage of people from Wisconsin who have seen the fruit three or fewer times.
Due to the expense of polling, we will only ever know Wisconsin numbers for very few fruits, and those will be known only to very low accuracy. Many of them will really only be wild guesses. For example, did you know that the kumquat is a 62 on the Wisconsin scale?
If you live in Vancouver, consider joining the Cooperative Auto Network, a non-profit car rental cooperative. Although they mostly have small sedans, they also have trucks and minivans, cars with bike racks, &c. If you join under the "flex" plan, and don't happen to use one of the cars then the cost is less than C$10 for that month, about the cost of sending you a bill (after all, it's non-profit).
If the range really is three feet, then I want to hang a transmitter in the middle of my Christmas tree, and clip on a bunch of LEDs attached to receivers on the branches. Those Christmas tree light wires are a pet peeve.
I have an idea! We could refine the fat and burn it in an enclosed cylinder with a movable piston. Then, we'll attach a rod to the piston, and attach a crank to the rod. We'll call it an "engine" and extract useful work from the chemical energy in the fat!
Wait... what?
Sure. Using UTC avoids all these problems. This could never, ever happen:
"That's strange, the time's an hour off..."
"Much better."
Sorry, took a while to answer. I think most solar thermal plants use a funny kind of black body.
It's double-walled can with a liquid thermal mass between the walls, like molten salt. In one end of the can, there is an opening that is small compared to the dimensions of the can. The walls of the can are somewhat absorptive, but the bulk of the absorptivity of the device comes from multiple reflections once light gets inside.
Light from the sun is reflected from a number of mirrors on the ground, which form an indistinct image of the sun at the opening of the can suspended in the air. There's no "screen" to project the image on, so the light passes through the hole, strikes the inner wall and is partly absorbed, partly reflected. The reflected ray strikes another wall, and the process is repeated until the ray finally gets back out the hole in the can.
The hole in the end of the can behaves like a really black disk. If the inside of the can is 20% reflective, and the light reflects five times on average, then the escaping light is (0.2)^5 = 0.00032 as strong as the incident light. That's really black.
There is reflection at a dielectric boundary. A dielectric is something that is not a metal, like glass. If you focus your eyes on a window, you can see a reflection of yourself because air and glass are dielectrics with different indices of refraction.
The amplitude of the reflected light wave for light that strikes perpendicular to the dielectric boundary is (n1 - n2)/(n1 + n2) - the "n's" are indices of refraction. For a boundary between air and this stuff, the reflection is (1.05 - 1.0) / (1.05 + 1.0) = (0.05/2.05) = 1/41. Compare with glass, with an index of 1.4: (1.4 - 1.0) / (1.4 + 1.0) = 0.4/2.4 = 1/6. (The difference in intensity is the square of this, though, which diminishes the difference.)
The equation for non-normal incident light is more complicated*, but even light that is a long way off normal incidence reflects by about the same amount. It's only when you start approaching 90 degrees off normal that a dielectric boundary starts reflecting lots of light. Try it with a large window pane: you have to get your head right up there and view something with a glancing reflection to see it clearly.
They're saying that they can coat a semiconductor, like an LED or a photovoltaic cell, with this stuff. Then about (1/6 - 1/41) more light either strikes the PV, or leaves the clear stuff that surrounds the LED.
This will not work as well as a magnesium fluoride coating for lenses, though. That kind of antireflective coating relies on destructive interference with the reflected light from the two dielectric boundaries, which is why they only work at a certain wavelength.
* Google "reflected light at a dielectric boundary" for the gory details.
Embed Groovy in your Java application to provide scripting extensions, and call the methods from inside your Java code.
This argument, that since they were not used they were not abused, drives me nuts! Every time someone says it, I hear this: these rules haven't been abused yet, so just give us one more chance. Lets renew them and see if we can figure out how to abuse them.
Oh, and how's this for abuse: the Prime Minister calls into question the reputation of the father-in-law of an Opposition Member of Parliament who is allegedly about to be compelled to testify, even though the identities of those questioned without charge are supposed to be kept secret.
Proven false by example: surgery.
You are right, burning methane produces lots of CO2. Other hydrocarbons are worse.
...
Reactions:
Methane CH4 + 202 -> CO2 + 2H20
Ethane 2C2H6 + 7O2 -> 4CO2 + 6H20
Propane C3H8 + 5O2 -> 3CO2 + 4H2O
Carbon Dioxide-to-Water ratios:
Methane: 1:2
Ethane: 2:3
Propane: 3:4
n-ane: n:n+1
Methane, with a single carbon atom and four hydrogen, is the best hydrocarbon to burn if you want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.
-- Carl Sagan
Q. Why can 3½" floppies hold more data than 5¼" floppies?
A. They're smaller.
This is not entirely true. The VT-320 had graphics capability. I never used one, but I did use the VT-320 terminal emulation in PC-Kermit to connect to unixg at the University of BC. Matlab was able to draw graphs on the screen. (No GUIs, though, which is what I think you were getting at.)
This is an excellent point. Part of the guarantee for buyers in an auction is this: there is another buyer in the market who is willing to pay one bid increment less than the winner pays. The second-highest bidder is the "market maker".
Shilling takes this guarantee away. The second-highest bidder ceases to be the market maker, and the seller takes that role. This is the fraud.
The problem really has to do with the rate of consumption. If you consume water faster than it can be excreted to the bladder, then you will start to suffer from hyponatremia. This can cause individual cells to swell, due to osmotic pressure accross the cell membrane. If enough cells succumb, then organs or the nervous system can fail.
You're going to want to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ED-209.
Then you're going to want to see this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870
Who you got: ED-209 or NXT?
He was right.
It takes a teacher to figure it out, and a rocket scientist to blow it.
When I was an undergrad Physics student, I used the student machine shop at the University of British Columbia, which was all imperial. Another student had a work term where the shop was metric. Neither of us were dummies (he was smarter than me), but we were nearly unable to communicate about making apparatus in a shop. Fifteen years later, I still have trouble visualizing anything in microns: I have to divide by 25 to turn it into "thous" before I can really feel it.
I think that one of the benefits of this system is that it heats the swimming pool. One could use still use the pool water as the heat sink, rather than lose the heat to the air. If the radiator is in a water bath, it doesn't have to be a truck radiator. It could be an old heat register from a hot water heating system, or even just a pipe. You could paint it with pool paint and keep it clean.
Headline: Parasites Makes Us Dumber or Sexier. I'm going with "dumber".
Well, before Linux (by about a three years) making Unix available to the common man, there was A/UX. (I have to admit, though, that it was unlikely for a pre-teen to know about A/UX, let alone find it "easy".)
A/UX was based on an early AT&T version, maybe SysV R2? The first release was in the late 1980s, and the last release was in the mid 1990s. It ran on the Motorola 680x0. Link to a page hosted by A/UX.
Jurassic Park, which IMDB has being released in 1993, had a Macintosh running Unix. People groaned; I can remember a project manager at work complaining about it, but it was plausible, at least. Except for the fact that the system was under active developement by the fat guy and he said that it would be dangerous to restart the system because it had never been down. And all the dinosaurs running around.