Agreed. I seem to recall the bizarre story of an american woman in the seventies and eighties, who happened to have the highest registered IQ in Mensa (her succesor was Marilyn Vos Savant - two females in a row!). This lady, who suffered from manic-depressive disorder, became obsessed with water and made herself force-drink ridiculous amounts of it. She died one day from what was classified as something like 'internal drowning', which is to say, without being submerged in the stuff itself. And she wasn't even trying to hold it in.
It's quite possible that this story may be an urban legend, so if anybody has the facts on had to prove or disprove it, please post!
But let's be glad we don't face annihilation today like we did during the cold war. Think about it, at the time there was a real risk of humanity being set back a thousand years, or according to some theories even disappearing.
Two words for you, sir: Vassily Arkhipov.
This man, a commissioned officer in the soviet navy, was aboard a soviet submarine making it's way to the naval blockade imposed upon Cuba by the United States in October of 1963. Unknown to the Kennedy government, the Kremlin had authorized soviet submarines to fire nuclear weapons at will, as long as the three main officers concurred unanimously.
For a period of aproximately 24 hours, this particular soviet submarine was subjected to a barrage of depth charges. The level of tension was beyond the breaking point, they were running out of oxygen and the temperature was running at about 125 degrees farenheit, so the captain basically said "fuck it, we're at war, we have to launch". The other officer concurred, but Vassily Arkhipov, under incredible pressure, put his foot down and said NO. We can only imagine the amount of pressure Mr Arkhipov was subjected to (a Hollywood representation would be the film 'Crimson Tide'), but he held his ground, and when the submarine finally emerged to the surface, the world was not at war, so that they would have precipitated nuclear war if they had launched.
Now consider this: the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy, Robert MacNamara, has been quoted as saying that he went to bed that night not knowing if there would be a world to wake up to next morning (I doubt he got much sleep), even as he did not know that the Kremlin had delegated authority to their submarine officers to launch nuclear weapons, MacNamara found out a quarter of a century later, in the late eighties.
How's that for a close call nobody knew about?
With that said, I have a question: why aren't there monuments to Vassily Arkhipov being erected all over the place? I hope you'll be happy to know that Mr Arkhipov died peacefully of old age in the late nineties. Bless you, Mr Arkhipov, I truly hope that your wife made the best borscht with oxtail in the world and that you slowly enjoyed every time you dipped it with your freshly baked bread, for years and years and years. Yum.
Seriously though, processing something the equivalent of 3/4th's of the LoC every night is nothing to be sneezed at.
Yeah. Let's keep in mind that all astronomical observatory images are taken in a standardized lossless format, which is to say tiff. There's a helluva lot of data in every image, each individual file is huge.
BTW, Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
Die ist ein Kinnerhunder und zwei Mackel über und der bitte schön is der Wunderhaus sprechensie... "Nein" sprecht der Herren, "Ist aufern borger mit zweitingen"!
Oops, sorry about the italics, I messed up the html code. Here it goes again:
The article says that contrary to the prediction of some computer models.... There it is, some computer models. Obviously, not everything was factored in these simulations. Also, the article says that the black hole detected is calculated to contain 400 solar masses. Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned that since a black hole was detected in the second cluster they looked at, it's a fifty-fifty proposition as of now. I would imagine that it's closer to a hundred percent probability, they need to look again in the first cluster with more sensitive instruments or more closely - why would the same mechanism generate different results (black hole/no black hole) in different clusters? The improbable alternative is that different mechanisms generate the same result. I just don't see it.
The article says that contrary to the prediction of some computer models.... There it is, some computer models. Obviously, not everything was factored in these simulations. Also, the article says that the black hole detected is calculated to contain 400 solar masses. Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned that since a black hole was detected in the second cluster they looked at, it's a fifty-fifty proposition as of now. I would imagine that it's closer to a hundred percent probability, they need to look again in the first cluster with more sensitive instruments or more closely - why would the same mechanism generate different results (black hole/no black hole) in different clusters? The improbable alternative is that different mechanisms generate the same result. I just don't see it.
I want to post before I go to edge.org and read the article.
1. The ever increasing number of people who are converting to the latest generation solar energy to heat their homes. The trendsetter in the United States is California, where these homes are not only self sufficient, but feed their excess production of electricity to the grid, thereby receiving a check from the energy companies. As more people convert, three things will go down: equipment costs, energy costs and environmental impact.
2. People like Richard Dawkins fighting to stem the tide of fundamentalism, finding that everywhere they go, there are many who were previously cowed into silence and are now ready to stand and speak up, even in the so-called bible belt.
3. The clear and shining example, or should I say beacon, set by a country like Ireland, who turned their country around in ten years and made it the most prosperous nation in Europe, a process that included implementing free education at all levels to its' citizens.
4. The swift kick in the pants to the complacent and increasingly irrelevant United States mass media, supplied by the new independent journalism of the blogosphere. The media should be about keeping transparency going, and now they are under a scrutiny they have only been used to applying and not receiving.
And finally:
5. The ever increasing cross-disciplinary dialogue in science, as exemplified by the fruits of NASA's Origins program, which is helping to create a coherent map of knowledge while not getting in the way of specialization in research.
So you read the Asimov novel where an entire planet was populated by a small number of people, each with a huge plantation and an army of robots to work it? That planet sucked.
That planet was Solaria and the novel was "The Naked Sun", the second Elijah Bailey / R Daneel Olivaw detective story. The premise in quite intriguing. A man is found murdered in his plantation. It couldn't have been a human, since there is no contact between people, as the population is reproduced in vitro and every person is raised alone with his "army of robots", so the very thought of human contact is found repulsive in this culture, let alone violent contact. Out of the question. Then again, it couldn't have been a robot, as they are bound by the Three Laws Of Robotics. Nuff' said on the matter. So who did it?
Hey, it's point-counterpoint time! In a civilized manner, of course. I apologize beforehand, as this post is huge.
The Republicans strike me as more responsive to terrorism and such things than the Democrats.
It could seem that way, but zoom in closer on Afghanistan: 1. The US Army had their chance to get Osama at Tora Bora yet fumbled the ball, at the administration's behest to use afghan troops in the caves. 2. Precious resources were diverted to invade Iraq, and as a result 3. The Taliban is back again in full force. 4. Opium production is at an all-time high, under the noses of the relatively few US troops left there.
Now let's zoom in on Iraq: 1. Iraq had nothing to do with September 11, which confirms suspicions of US imperialism (oil). 2. Saddam the secularist and Osama the zealot hated each other, had nothing to do with each other. 3. By using a pre-emptive attack, the United States has stirred up a hornet's nest of hatred in the region. 4. By miscalculating and/or ignoring the consequences of their actions, the US is now stuck in the middle of a civil war, by which in turn 5. Iraq has become the world's premier guerrilla-combat training ground.
As a morbid bonus, taxes are way down yet spending is way up, a recipe for disaster, but when a democratic president inherits this ticking time bomb, all blame will be put squarely on his/her shoulders. Collective amnesia, force-fed by the hysterical mass media, rules the day today and will rule the day in a few year's time.
Speaking of collective amnesia: 1. Iraq has become the new Vietnam, with mounting casualties and "collateral damage", no cleara-cut plans and no exit strategy. 2. Saddam Hussein was Reagan's baby, pumped full of weapons and money during the eighties. 3. Osama bin Laden was Reagan's baby, trained in Afghanistan by US "advisors" during the eighties. 4. It was the senior Bush who decided to keep troops in Saudi Arabia, prompting al-Quaeda's campaign against the west. 5. It's the junior Bush who created the current debacle and quagmire.
Granted, Clinton kept the status quo, but look closer, three republicans presidencies created and escalated the mess, while one democrat has inherited it and kept it relatively contained, even with his hands tied by an antagonistic and do-nothing republican congress and a blank-eyed press on a feeding frenzy (wag the dog, anyone?). One of the gigantic problems with republicans, when it comes to foreign policy, is that they adhere to the dogma the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which always creates worse problems in the long run, yet they keep on doing it! If it was a game of chess, they'd drool when nailing an exposed rook, while exposing the queen.
By the way, Osama bin Laden is still out there. What was it that Bush said a couple of years ago, when asked about bin Laden? "To tell you the truth, I really don't spend too much time thinking about the man". And what was the Pentagon report's conclusion last year? "The bin Laden tape came out to influence the 2004 US presidential elections in Bush's favor". It seems that al-Quaeda hearts the current republican administration, whose policies play right into their hands.
Now here's the clincher: the big winner here has been Iran, who got rid of its' mortal enemy Saddam without firing a single shot. Saddam kept Iran contained, but now counts the Iraqi government as a sympathetic neighbour.
The Democrats handle social issues and education as well as foreign policies that require cooperation with allied countries while the Republicans handle economic matters and military matters. Two words: Slobodan Milosevic. Here's a tyrant overthrown through US and UN forces with minimum casualties, and tried in The Hague, with the overwhelming applause of the world, even.
A Democrat president would have been incapable in the 9/11 affair, but would have handled some other matters a little better like the Katrina Hurricane disas
Put in another way: the one-party monopoly is over, so a great measure of oversight will return to the United States government. As a bonus on the Cracker Jack box, the newly elected democrat-majority congress has announced that they will go into session about a week from now, instead of the traditional last week of January (after the presidential address to the nation), so it seems that these people are ready to roll up their sleeves and get some real work done.
However, the bullying will stop, but the hysteria and whining will not, all over the mass media. There's gonna be a LOT of noise, but hey, anything is better than how it was.
After cleaning the water filter the Yanmar diesel started again. Thank God! Without wind we would have been stuck in a sea of stone if the motor had failed. Next thing to check was the other water inlets. Some minor pumice particles but nothing serious. But the bottom paint were scrubbed away at places along the waterline, Maiken has an ablative paint so it was just doing what is supposed to do. Like we'd sailed through sandpaper.
So you're right of course, and in case of doubt, one should err on the side of caution. But in a situation like this, the opportunity to witness a spectacular one in a million event, then to see a gigantic patch of pumice floating by...whew... that's gotta be a flood of adrenaline. Most sailors don't even dream of witnessing something like this, it's so far out there. Hell man, you just gotta inspect that thing up-close, you take as many precautions as possible, but some safety will get thrown to the winds. Chalk another one up for curiosity.
You will only find them by pure chance, but I have managed to find them and record them but I would say that for every 6 or 8 months of listening to short wave radio I will hear only 1 of these broadcasts.
Some years ago, while scanning the shortwave dial, I bumped into one of these without knowing what it was. I found it so intriguing that I decided on the spot to write down the numbers the girl was transmitting. Even my cats had their ears pricked up, not unlike antennas. Since that fateful night, we have remained dormant, awaiting further instructions...
Here's another one: "Reservations", off the Wilco album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot". In fact, the numbers station sampled repeats the words "Yanke Hotel Foxtrot" over and over again.
For my money, the most disturbing numbers station messages are: 1. The Swedish Rhapsody, with a music box-style version of the musical piece, followed by a little girls' voice that sounds positively robotic. 2. "Nancy Adam Susan" over and over again. 3. The High Pitch Polytone, although this one has no numbers being transmitted.
I found the most famous compilation of numbers stations, The Conet Project, on an online store under the tag aural terror and dammit, that's not too far from nailing it right in the bullseye. There was one station that broadcasted a single tone being repeated for something like thirty years, then one day in the early nineties suddenly transmitted numbers for a couple of minutes, and then it was back to the single tone ever since. Firty five years, and one single two minute burst of numbers! Holy cow, that must have been quite an important message.
In criminology, the perfect crime consists of the police not being able to identify three things: 1. The identity of the victim. 2. The identity of the perpetrator. 3. The motive for the murder.
Similarly, the three main pieces of data for numbers stations remain a mystery to the general population: 1. The identity of the broadcaster. 2. The identity of the recepient. 3. The content of the message. There you have it, numbers stations are a perfect mystery.
There is definitely a sinister undercurrent in these stations, but they are also one of the greatest examples of accidental art in history. I mean, the most avant-garde artists in the world could not have come up with something like this in their wildest and most ambitious dreams.
Good news, everybody: Irdial has made available the full Conet Project audio files in low-fi mp3, so you can jump to their archives page and start downloading - http://irdial.hyperreal.org/the%20conet%20project/. Have fun while scared sh*tless, in a ghost-stories-by-the-campfire sort of way.
Neutrons in a neutron star are held together by gravity
To complete the implicit concept in your sentence: whereas to qualify as an atom, it would have to be bound by the Strong Force. Cool and poetic ideas, though, both your concept and your brother's explanation.
But as always, questions like these make the mind race and create more questions, such as: Is it possible for quarks to pile up until there's a massive proton or neutron? Put in another way, what is the upper mass limit, if any, for the quantum mechanism that creates and maintains the building blocks of atoms? I'm under the impression that we can't even refer to mass or matter when talking about the quantum realm, anyway, so it all gets pretty iffy.
And just what kind of matter composes a singularity, anyhow? I think it was George Gamow who refered to it as Ylem, but what is it, raw quarks?
The previous theory I heard about in a documentary about traffic in major cities, said that density waves, the same phenomenon that causes many galaxies to have perfectly defined spiral arms, also cause traffic jams, which is to say, the mathematics are the same.
As a sidenote, I once read an anecdotal story about a guy who always got stuck in the road while driving home from work, and one day he thought about how everybody's trying to get home fast yet everybody gets stuck in traffic, so he decided to experiment by driving a bit slower. After a few minutes he was amazed to find how the traffic behind him was neat and orderly, instead of the usual jumble, which implies (I emphasize: anecdotally) that the behaviour of a single car can not only create, but also avoid the creation of density waves.
Don't expect anything and you won't be dissappointed
In Mexico, the Christmas bonus is guaranteed by law. If you've worked the full year for the company, you are legally entitled to a cash bonus of two weeks' salary, to be given during the course of December, up until the 20th I believe. If you've worked for the company for less than the full year, you are entitled to the proportional amount. And then, on June, the company must share a percentage (I can't remember what the exact figure is) of the previous year's profits with employees. You have to admit that on paper it's a great idea, unless you're the owner of the company, of course, yet consider that many companies throw a dinner party or give a bonus on top of the legally required bonus, so in reality it seems that it's not too much of a strain.
As a humorous sidenote, there's a chain of three gas stations in my hometown, whose management decided some years ago to throw a Christmas party. After a few too many beers and/or cuba libres, accentuated by the DJ playing fast-paced ranchero music, inter-station rivalries kicked into gear (my station rules, your station sucks, etc), culminating in a spectacular riot, wild west saloon style, with chairs flying about and everything. There was quite a bit of blood and broken noses that night, and still the employees grumbled when there was no Christmas party the following year! Unbelievable. Really, you're pissed off because there's no company party this year? Why do you think that is (you moron)?
You're right of course, the link to lostcosmonauts.com was a weak one, yet keep in mind that PBS took it seriously enough to run a show on the Ilyushin incident, which brings the ballgame to a higher level. BTW, correcting three mistakes of mine, proving that memory isn't as strong as a bit of research: a) It's Ilyushin, not Ilushyn, b) It was on PBS, but not on Nova, and c) The show was run in 1999, not the early nineties.
If it's not too late, I would like to add a jetpack to my Xmas list.
In case Santa doesn't have time to check his inbox today, you can always try the Three Wise Men on January 6th. You gotta be in a spanish-speaking country, however, 'cause that's where the Three Zoroastrian Magi (Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar) show up with gifts for children (of all ages).
I'll wait until Virgin offers sub-orbital parachute diving. That's falling with class!
Inspired by my one and only skydiving adventure, which included a forty-five second solo freefall, I once wrote a short story (in a notebook I can't seem to find anywhere) about a guy who re-enters the atmosphere from an orbital flight and becomes a human meteorite. Obviously the person is breathing through canned oxygen, and once a certain speed has been attained through deacceleration, the heat shield is jettisoned so that the final minutes become an ultra-high-altitude skydiving experience.
I got the idea from reading about how the first cosmonauts had to eject from their capsules several thousand meters before hitting the ground. There's even a story that was broadcast on PBS's Nova in the early nineties about how two months before Yuri Gagarin, Vladimir Ilushyn, the soviet man who broke the sound barrier, passed out in outer space and was in mortal peril. Since Ilushyn was not anonymous and could not be erased from the books (http://www.lostcosmonauts.com/), he was wanted alive by the soviet authorities and was crash-landed one orbit before he could land within the USSR, thereby landing inside China, pretty banged up as he was passed out and still inside the capsule. For a time, Ilushyn was a patient in a chinese hospital, after which he became a "guest" of the People's Republic, before being swapped back to the motherland for a couple of spies.
Anyways, my points are that 1) Gagarin was not the first, and 2) what you describe in your post is very similar to what the soviets did during the first days of the space program, with nasty, embarassing and covered-up results.
May I recommend giving yourself a treat and purchasing a bottle of Caol Ila. "It's like drinking fookin' seawater, mate" is what the liquor store clerk gushingly told me, and he was right, you know. From Islay, it's supposed to contain both the flavour of the mountain (peat carried downstream) and the sea (salty breeze from the nearby shore). As for me, bring a bottle of super peaty ten-year Laphroaig and I'm more than content. Also, in keeping with the seasonal (ahem) spirit, Laphroaig makes a fantastic Christmas gift for good friends uninitiated to the pleasures of single-malts, sure to raise an eyebrow and bring about a smile.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that a Kids In The Hall reference?
"I'm crushing your head I'm crushing your head I'm crushing your head!"
"You flatheads!"
Water poisoning isn't that well known.
Agreed. I seem to recall the bizarre story of an american woman in the seventies and eighties, who happened to have the highest registered IQ in Mensa (her succesor was Marilyn Vos Savant - two females in a row!). This lady, who suffered from manic-depressive disorder, became obsessed with water and made herself force-drink ridiculous amounts of it. She died one day from what was classified as something like 'internal drowning', which is to say, without being submerged in the stuff itself. And she wasn't even trying to hold it in.
It's quite possible that this story may be an urban legend, so if anybody has the facts on had to prove or disprove it, please post!
But let's be glad we don't face annihilation today like we did during the cold war. Think about it, at the time there was a real risk of humanity being set back a thousand years, or according to some theories even disappearing.
Two words for you, sir: Vassily Arkhipov.
This man, a commissioned officer in the soviet navy, was aboard a soviet submarine making it's way to the naval blockade imposed upon Cuba by the United States in October of 1963. Unknown to the Kennedy government, the Kremlin had authorized soviet submarines to fire nuclear weapons at will, as long as the three main officers concurred unanimously.
For a period of aproximately 24 hours, this particular soviet submarine was subjected to a barrage of depth charges. The level of tension was beyond the breaking point, they were running out of oxygen and the temperature was running at about 125 degrees farenheit, so the captain basically said "fuck it, we're at war, we have to launch". The other officer concurred, but Vassily Arkhipov, under incredible pressure, put his foot down and said NO. We can only imagine the amount of pressure Mr Arkhipov was subjected to (a Hollywood representation would be the film 'Crimson Tide'), but he held his ground, and when the submarine finally emerged to the surface, the world was not at war, so that they would have precipitated nuclear war if they had launched.
Now consider this: the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy, Robert MacNamara, has been quoted as saying that he went to bed that night not knowing if there would be a world to wake up to next morning (I doubt he got much sleep), even as he did not know that the Kremlin had delegated authority to their submarine officers to launch nuclear weapons, MacNamara found out a quarter of a century later, in the late eighties.
How's that for a close call nobody knew about?
With that said, I have a question: why aren't there monuments to Vassily Arkhipov being erected all over the place?
I hope you'll be happy to know that Mr Arkhipov died peacefully of old age in the late nineties. Bless you, Mr Arkhipov, I truly hope that your wife made the best borscht with oxtail in the world and that you slowly enjoyed every time you dipped it with your freshly baked bread, for years and years and years. Yum.
As in, 'wonder how much cash those damned trekkies gonna fork over for this trainwreck so we can make the payments on our Beamers'?
Scratch the Beamers and make that Priuses, and now we're cookin'.
Seriously though, processing something the equivalent of 3/4th's of the LoC every night is nothing to be sneezed at.
Yeah. Let's keep in mind that all astronomical observatory images are taken in a standardized lossless format, which is to say tiff. There's a helluva lot of data in every image, each individual file is huge.
BTW,
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
Die ist ein Kinnerhunder und zwei Mackel über und der bitte schön is der Wunderhaus sprechensie...
"Nein" sprecht der Herren, "Ist aufern borger mit zweitingen"!
Oops, sorry about the italics, I messed up the html code. Here it goes again:
The article says that contrary to the prediction of some computer models.... There it is, some computer models. Obviously, not everything was factored in these simulations. Also, the article says that the black hole detected is calculated to contain 400 solar masses.
Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned that since a black hole was detected in the second cluster they looked at, it's a fifty-fifty proposition as of now. I would imagine that it's closer to a hundred percent probability, they need to look again in the first cluster with more sensitive instruments or more closely - why would the same mechanism generate different results (black hole/no black hole) in different clusters? The improbable alternative is that different mechanisms generate the same result. I just don't see it.
They could be in a stable orbit around the black hole.
1 095940634&q=%22galactic+center%22&hl=en
Considering that the density of stars in a globular cluster and the galactic center would be quite similar, I would imagine that in time-lapse it would look something like this:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=468457626
The article says that contrary to the prediction of some computer models.... There it is, some computer models. Obviously, not everything was factored in these simulations. Also, the article says that the black hole detected is calculated to contain 400 solar masses.
Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned that since a black hole was detected in the second cluster they looked at, it's a fifty-fifty proposition as of now. I would imagine that it's closer to a hundred percent probability, they need to look again in the first cluster with more sensitive instruments or more closely - why would the same mechanism generate different results (black hole/no black hole) in different clusters? The improbable alternative is that different mechanisms generate the same result. I just don't see it.
I want to post before I go to edge.org and read the article.
1. The ever increasing number of people who are converting to the latest generation solar energy to heat their homes. The trendsetter in the United States is California, where these homes are not only self sufficient, but feed their excess production of electricity to the grid, thereby receiving a check from the energy companies. As more people convert, three things will go down: equipment costs, energy costs and environmental impact.
2. People like Richard Dawkins fighting to stem the tide of fundamentalism, finding that everywhere they go, there are many who were previously cowed into silence and are now ready to stand and speak up, even in the so-called bible belt.
3. The clear and shining example, or should I say beacon, set by a country like Ireland, who turned their country around in ten years and made it the most prosperous nation in Europe, a process that included implementing free education at all levels to its' citizens.
4. The swift kick in the pants to the complacent and increasingly irrelevant United States mass media, supplied by the new independent journalism of the blogosphere. The media should be about keeping transparency going, and now they are under a scrutiny they have only been used to applying and not receiving.
And finally:
5. The ever increasing cross-disciplinary dialogue in science, as exemplified by the fruits of NASA's Origins program, which is helping to create a coherent map of knowledge while not getting in the way of specialization in research.
So you read the Asimov novel where an entire planet was populated by a small number of people, each with a huge plantation and an army of robots to work it? That planet sucked.
That planet was Solaria and the novel was "The Naked Sun", the second Elijah Bailey / R Daneel Olivaw detective story. The premise in quite intriguing. A man is found murdered in his plantation.
It couldn't have been a human, since there is no contact between people, as the population is reproduced in vitro and every person is raised alone with his "army of robots", so the very thought of human contact is found repulsive in this culture, let alone violent contact. Out of the question.
Then again, it couldn't have been a robot, as they are bound by the Three Laws Of Robotics. Nuff' said on the matter.
So who did it?
Check it out, it's a good read.
Hey, it's point-counterpoint time! In a civilized manner, of course. I apologize beforehand, as this post is huge.
The Republicans strike me as more responsive to terrorism and such things than the Democrats.
It could seem that way, but zoom in closer on Afghanistan:
1. The US Army had their chance to get Osama at Tora Bora yet fumbled the ball, at the administration's behest to use afghan troops in the caves.
2. Precious resources were diverted to invade Iraq, and as a result
3. The Taliban is back again in full force.
4. Opium production is at an all-time high, under the noses of the relatively few US troops left there.
Now let's zoom in on Iraq:
1. Iraq had nothing to do with September 11, which confirms suspicions of US imperialism (oil).
2. Saddam the secularist and Osama the zealot hated each other, had nothing to do with each other.
3. By using a pre-emptive attack, the United States has stirred up a hornet's nest of hatred in the region.
4. By miscalculating and/or ignoring the consequences of their actions, the US is now stuck in the middle of a civil war, by which in turn
5. Iraq has become the world's premier guerrilla-combat training ground.
As a morbid bonus, taxes are way down yet spending is way up, a recipe for disaster, but when a democratic president inherits this ticking time bomb, all blame will be put squarely on his/her shoulders. Collective amnesia, force-fed by the hysterical mass media, rules the day today and will rule the day in a few year's time.
Speaking of collective amnesia:
1. Iraq has become the new Vietnam, with mounting casualties and "collateral damage", no cleara-cut plans and no exit strategy.
2. Saddam Hussein was Reagan's baby, pumped full of weapons and money during the eighties.
3. Osama bin Laden was Reagan's baby, trained in Afghanistan by US "advisors" during the eighties.
4. It was the senior Bush who decided to keep troops in Saudi Arabia, prompting al-Quaeda's campaign against the west.
5. It's the junior Bush who created the current debacle and quagmire.
Granted, Clinton kept the status quo, but look closer, three republicans presidencies created and escalated the mess, while one democrat has inherited it and kept it relatively contained, even with his hands tied by an antagonistic and do-nothing republican congress and a blank-eyed press on a feeding frenzy (wag the dog, anyone?).
One of the gigantic problems with republicans, when it comes to foreign policy, is that they adhere to the dogma the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which always creates worse problems in the long run, yet they keep on doing it! If it was a game of chess, they'd drool when nailing an exposed rook, while exposing the queen.
By the way, Osama bin Laden is still out there. What was it that Bush said a couple of years ago, when asked about bin Laden? "To tell you the truth, I really don't spend too much time thinking about the man". And what was the Pentagon report's conclusion last year? "The bin Laden tape came out to influence the 2004 US presidential elections in Bush's favor". It seems that al-Quaeda hearts the current republican administration, whose policies play right into their hands.
Now here's the clincher: the big winner here has been Iran, who got rid of its' mortal enemy Saddam without firing a single shot. Saddam kept Iran contained, but now counts the Iraqi government as a sympathetic neighbour.
The Democrats handle social issues and education as well as foreign policies that require cooperation with allied countries while the Republicans handle economic matters and military matters.
Two words: Slobodan Milosevic. Here's a tyrant overthrown through US and UN forces with minimum casualties, and tried in The Hague, with the overwhelming applause of the world, even.
A Democrat president would have been incapable in the 9/11 affair, but would have handled some other matters a little better like the Katrina Hurricane disas
The defeat of the Neo-Cons
Put in another way: the one-party monopoly is over, so a great measure of oversight will return to the United States government. As a bonus on the Cracker Jack box, the newly elected democrat-majority congress has announced that they will go into session about a week from now, instead of the traditional last week of January (after the presidential address to the nation), so it seems that these people are ready to roll up their sleeves and get some real work done.
However, the bullying will stop, but the hysteria and whining will not, all over the mass media. There's gonna be a LOT of noise, but hey, anything is better than how it was.
So you're right of course, and in case of doubt, one should err on the side of caution. But in a situation like this, the opportunity to witness a spectacular one in a million event, then to see a gigantic patch of pumice floating by...whew... that's gotta be a flood of adrenaline. Most sailors don't even dream of witnessing something like this, it's so far out there. Hell man, you just gotta inspect that thing up-close, you take as many precautions as possible, but some safety will get thrown to the winds. Chalk another one up for curiosity.
You will only find them by pure chance, but I have managed to find them and record them but I would say that for every 6 or 8 months of listening to short wave radio I will hear only 1 of these broadcasts.
Some years ago, while scanning the shortwave dial, I bumped into one of these without knowing what it was. I found it so intriguing that I decided on the spot to write down the numbers the girl was transmitting. Even my cats had their ears pricked up, not unlike antennas. Since that fateful night, we have remained dormant, awaiting further instructions...
Here's another one: "Reservations", off the Wilco album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot". In fact, the numbers station sampled repeats the words "Yanke Hotel Foxtrot" over and over again.
/ . Have fun while scared sh*tless, in a ghost-stories-by-the-campfire sort of way.
For my money, the most disturbing numbers station messages are:
1. The Swedish Rhapsody, with a music box-style version of the musical piece, followed by a little girls' voice that sounds positively robotic.
2. "Nancy Adam Susan" over and over again.
3. The High Pitch Polytone, although this one has no numbers being transmitted.
I found the most famous compilation of numbers stations, The Conet Project, on an online store under the tag aural terror and dammit, that's not too far from nailing it right in the bullseye. There was one station that broadcasted a single tone being repeated for something like thirty years, then one day in the early nineties suddenly transmitted numbers for a couple of minutes, and then it was back to the single tone ever since. Firty five years, and one single two minute burst of numbers! Holy cow, that must have been quite an important message.
In criminology, the perfect crime consists of the police not being able to identify three things:
1. The identity of the victim.
2. The identity of the perpetrator.
3. The motive for the murder.
Similarly, the three main pieces of data for numbers stations remain a mystery to the general population:
1. The identity of the broadcaster.
2. The identity of the recepient.
3. The content of the message.
There you have it, numbers stations are a perfect mystery.
There is definitely a sinister undercurrent in these stations, but they are also one of the greatest examples of accidental art in history. I mean, the most avant-garde artists in the world could not have come up with something like this in their wildest and most ambitious dreams.
Good news, everybody: Irdial has made available the full Conet Project audio files in low-fi mp3, so you can jump to their archives page and start downloading - http://irdial.hyperreal.org/the%20conet%20project
Of course, a funeral procession is very calm and orderly.
/.
Unless, of course, you bump into a traffic jam!
My God! Its full of Bugs!
I don't care what anybody says otherwise, this sig just strikes me as one of the best on
Kudos.
Neutrons in a neutron star are held together by gravity
To complete the implicit concept in your sentence: whereas to qualify as an atom, it would have to be bound by the Strong Force. Cool and poetic ideas, though, both your concept and your brother's explanation.
But as always, questions like these make the mind race and create more questions, such as:
Is it possible for quarks to pile up until there's a massive proton or neutron?
Put in another way, what is the upper mass limit, if any, for the quantum mechanism that creates and maintains the building blocks of atoms?
I'm under the impression that we can't even refer to mass or matter when talking about the quantum realm, anyway, so it all gets pretty iffy.
And just what kind of matter composes a singularity, anyhow? I think it was George Gamow who refered to it as Ylem, but what is it, raw quarks?
The previous theory I heard about in a documentary about traffic in major cities, said that density waves, the same phenomenon that causes many galaxies to have perfectly defined spiral arms, also cause traffic jams, which is to say, the mathematics are the same.
As a sidenote, I once read an anecdotal story about a guy who always got stuck in the road while driving home from work, and one day he thought about how everybody's trying to get home fast yet everybody gets stuck in traffic, so he decided to experiment by driving a bit slower. After a few minutes he was amazed to find how the traffic behind him was neat and orderly, instead of the usual jumble, which implies (I emphasize: anecdotally) that the behaviour of a single car can not only create, but also avoid the creation of density waves.
Don't expect anything and you won't be dissappointed
In Mexico, the Christmas bonus is guaranteed by law. If you've worked the full year for the company, you are legally entitled to a cash bonus of two weeks' salary, to be given during the course of December, up until the 20th I believe. If you've worked for the company for less than the full year, you are entitled to the proportional amount. And then, on June, the company must share a percentage (I can't remember what the exact figure is) of the previous year's profits with employees. You have to admit that on paper it's a great idea, unless you're the owner of the company, of course, yet consider that many companies throw a dinner party or give a bonus on top of the legally required bonus, so in reality it seems that it's not too much of a strain.
As a humorous sidenote, there's a chain of three gas stations in my hometown, whose management decided some years ago to throw a Christmas party. After a few too many beers and/or cuba libres, accentuated by the DJ playing fast-paced ranchero music, inter-station rivalries kicked into gear (my station rules, your station sucks, etc), culminating in a spectacular riot, wild west saloon style, with chairs flying about and everything. There was quite a bit of blood and broken noses that night, and still the employees grumbled when there was no Christmas party the following year! Unbelievable.
Really, you're pissed off because there's no company party this year? Why do you think that is (you moron)?
Tin foil hat time.
You're right of course, the link to lostcosmonauts.com was a weak one, yet keep in mind that PBS took it seriously enough to run a show on the Ilyushin incident, which brings the ballgame to a higher level. BTW, correcting three mistakes of mine, proving that memory isn't as strong as a bit of research:
a) It's Ilyushin, not Ilushyn,
b) It was on PBS, but not on Nova, and
c) The show was run in 1999, not the early nineties.
Here's a stronger link: http://www.astronautix.com/astros/ilyushin.htm
Dear Santa,
If it's not too late, I would like to add a jetpack to my Xmas list.
In case Santa doesn't have time to check his inbox today, you can always try the Three Wise Men on January 6th. You gotta be in a spanish-speaking country, however, 'cause that's where the Three Zoroastrian Magi (Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar) show up with gifts for children (of all ages).
This guy is looking for sponsors.
:)
Tip for this guy: try the Swiss Navy.
The last shot in the video is inspiring.
Agreed. The image will haunt me for a long time, in the best possible way. I'm glad I saw this.
I'll wait until Virgin offers sub-orbital parachute diving. That's falling with class!
Inspired by my one and only skydiving adventure, which included a forty-five second solo freefall, I once wrote a short story (in a notebook I can't seem to find anywhere) about a guy who re-enters the atmosphere from an orbital flight and becomes a human meteorite. Obviously the person is breathing through canned oxygen, and once a certain speed has been attained through deacceleration, the heat shield is jettisoned so that the final minutes become an ultra-high-altitude skydiving experience.
I got the idea from reading about how the first cosmonauts had to eject from their capsules several thousand meters before hitting the ground. There's even a story that was broadcast on PBS's Nova in the early nineties about how two months before Yuri Gagarin, Vladimir Ilushyn, the soviet man who broke the sound barrier, passed out in outer space and was in mortal peril. Since Ilushyn was not anonymous and could not be erased from the books (http://www.lostcosmonauts.com/), he was wanted alive by the soviet authorities and was crash-landed one orbit before he could land within the USSR, thereby landing inside China, pretty banged up as he was passed out and still inside the capsule. For a time, Ilushyn was a patient in a chinese hospital, after which he became a "guest" of the People's Republic, before being swapped back to the motherland for a couple of spies.
Anyways, my points are that 1) Gagarin was not the first, and 2) what you describe in your post is very similar to what the soviets did during the first days of the space program, with nasty, embarassing and covered-up results.
Not too far from William Blake, though. To paraphrase, using his terms and images:
Oh Nobodaddy, who farts and belches in heaven...
...my favorite Scotch, Glenmorangie 18 year.
May I recommend giving yourself a treat and purchasing a bottle of Caol Ila. "It's like drinking fookin' seawater, mate" is what the liquor store clerk gushingly told me, and he was right, you know. From Islay, it's supposed to contain both the flavour of the mountain (peat carried downstream) and the sea (salty breeze from the nearby shore). As for me, bring a bottle of super peaty ten-year Laphroaig and I'm more than content. Also, in keeping with the seasonal (ahem) spirit, Laphroaig makes a fantastic Christmas gift for good friends uninitiated to the pleasures of single-malts, sure to raise an eyebrow and bring about a smile.
Merry Christmas!
>Please don't kill Douglas Adams for me, and others.
Too late.
Well then, gynnan tonnix all around, I suppose.