The thing's going to be under tension 60x60x24x7 anyway. The problem with tying it off to a fire hydrant is that it and probably a considerable amount of other utility structure would be casually torn out of the ground long before the initial stabilising tension (few hundred tonnes at ground level, I guess) was completely put on.
let your wife do the map-reading. You'll get there quicker even if she's near-terminally dyslexic.
Being able to bridge Gibraltar to Africa in a single span would be a comparably technical - albeit much smaller - engineering feat. You would probably have to provide oxygen to keep the cars running at the top of the span if you built it as an arch rather than suspension. But the view would absolutely rock.
A bridge from Perth (one potential Elevator site) to orbit would only have to deal with wind, rain, lightning, corrosion and really big waves for the first dozen or so kilometers, and would have practically all of the tension running along the structure rather than across it. That's an enormous difference in structural problems right there, and it's only the start.
Forex, bridging from a floating platform would mean that unexpected waves could be dealt with by simply maintaining even tension on the cable and riding over (more or less) the peak. You could probably continue operating right through the wave, but I imagine that rubbernecking would significantly impede stuff efficiency for the duration, especially as they watched the wave wander off to engulf Rottnest and then Perth.
In point of fact, the article does discuss something akin to building the bridge you demand, but as a big loopy thing going via orbit rather than as the ultimate engineering response to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
It'd be a bugger to paint, though.
This implies that a clever milestone...
on
Space Elevator Update
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...would be to cable a suspension bridge with this stuff, and use that as a bellwether for issues with the real deal. It'd look kind of odd, because the carbon ribbon would be thread-thin compared with the normal steel cables.
35,786km / 3m == 11,928,666 stops ("I say, that's devilish slow!") at say 30 seconds a stop == roughly 6 million minutes == 100,000 hours == 4200 days == 11.5 years. And probably several hundred new sets of doors plus countless motor and drive assembly swapouts.
Wouldn't take forever, but would certainly seem that way.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go do my religion homework. Oops, I meant to say science homework. I have such a hard time keeping those two subjects separate...
Given how sternly Orthodox Materialism is policed within the scientific community, your confusion is easily understood.
WRT the homework, the secret method for achieving clarity is to look for but not be fazed or fascinated by the religious underpinnings, which are always there. You need to be careful to remember that the concept of religion is not to be confused with sacerdotalism. Sacerdotalism is what all of the robes and stained glass is for. Materialism or Strict Atheism is just as much a religion as any form of Supernaturalism, from the world-worshipping Gaia sects who climb Cheops every Solstice and the spectacular demon-deafening funereals in Thailand to the sternest, quietest Quaker enclave, it's just as much religious as the "enlightened" and hard-nosed BMW-driving Rolex-wearing competitionalist YUPPIE or driest, most "rational" paleobiologist struggling to fit "wet" and supple T Rex bones into a 68-megayear timescale because (s)he prefers to believe Orthodoxy than evidence.
First, determine what brand of religion underlies the lessons in your science book. Next, find out if the material makes allowance for any competing memes. If it either refuses to admit that any exist, or if it admits them but then lampoons them with hollow caricatures instead of addressing their very real challenges, first note that this is precisely the method and attitude used by the Church of the Dark Ages, and second realise that what you are facing is no longer science, but religious dogmatism.
Once you detect religious dogmatism, it's much easier to correctly interpret whatever is before you. It doesn't magically make the material complete, but it does alert you to look for the gaps, omissions, and oversights.
You can also turn into squirrel food fairly rapidly by redlining your paranoia and seeing methodological gaps where merely human lapses were the cause. Simply satisfy the innate (if not always acknowledged) human need for controversy with a few manageably small doses of material from a competing ideology, and move on, knowing that your understanding will never be perfect, but that "if you shoot for the stars you may hit the Moon."
...they do guided tours, rent out the names of stars, and get most of their ancilliary equipment donated to them and off the books.
I do wish some of the PHB industrialists funding the pork-barrelling would wake up to the incredible industrial potential of space, and decide that they have to take a risk and get a piece of pie in the sky right now rather than when they die (and they've got a rude shock coming at that point, along the lines of: "Oi! I left you lot with a perfectly good planet, and now look at it!").
There's no gentler way to put it. It simply will not fly.
Why not?
We have here two basically opposing world-views, one called Materialism and one loosely called Deism. Materialism, most simply put, says that no miracles occur. At all.
If no miracles occur, then we need something like evolution to explain how superheated hydrogen plasma could possibly turn into Kelly Hu or Nicola Tesla. And it must explain all of it, else miracles are required.
Sometimes a distinction is drawn between "chemical evolution", which gets us from H2 to, arguably, cells - and "biological evolution" which gets us from cells (more or less) to astronauts.
The line separating the two concepts must necessarily be vague until everyone agrees on a clear-cut definition of what is alive and what is not, but the whole shebang is "molecules to man evolution" as we know it and any distinction is inherently artificial since essentially identical principles must be in operation for both stages.
Trying to saw off biological evolution and treat it separately is utterly pointless if chemical evolution is insufficient to get us from hydrogen to biology in the first place.
Both processes must be driven by random perturbations of some of the existing materials filtered (selected) by interactions with other existing materials, else we're in miracle territory again.
It turns out that we're in miracle territory anyway, since chemical evolution requires either a miracle of structure, or a miraculously high number of chemical interactions between the roughly 10^81 atoms in our universe during the roughly 10^18 seconds it may have existed in order to form even relatively simple organic molecules, the precursors to proteins.
Afficiondos of the Miller and Urey experiments are referred to any competent history of Miller since then.
The one argument against this dilemma which appears to make any kind of sense is "the anthropic principle", which says, in essence, "we're here because we're here". It postulates a more-or-less infinite number of universes, the vast majority of which are in one way or another off-stage and failed to produce life. The foolishness of this kind of reasoning can be shown by examining the likelihood of an anthropically produced universe being such a well-matched place for life to have developed in.
Our universe is both well-matched to supporting life and extremely unlikely to have developed life. Change any of hundreds of physical parameters very much and life becomes impossible (in most cases, even planets and stars become impossible). If we had arrived at thgis universe by chance, the odds are fairly extreme that the it would be far more hostile to life, that the "tweakable" paramaters would be off by a fair amount rather than being a cosmic bullseye.
If, on the other hand, you allow supernatural intervention, there is no need for any kind of molecules-to-man evolution at all. People will inevitable go on and argue (this is one of Eugenie Scott's favourite hobby-horses) that supernatural intervention renders science impossible, but that's mere rhetorical twaddle. Engineers and statisticians have been dealing with that kind of imponderable quite calmly for centuries now.
the bible says NOTHING that a wiseman goat-herder would/could have known 2,000 years ago
Iff you allow that the said goatherds knew stuff about astronomy that you can't detect with the naked eye, then sure. <<thwack!>>
nothing about biology, germs
Re-read Leviticus. Why do you think so many Jews survived the Black Plague? (Only to be executed by their Catholic brothers for being in league with the Devil, 'coz that's the only way they could possibly have survived, or similar weighs-the-same-as-a-duck logic) <<thwack!>>
maybe you haven't noticed, but the account of creation in the bible LITERALLY/UNEQUIVOCALLY does NOT expound on any long time-scale,
I noticed. When you can reconcile the fresh, flexible organic structures in Mary Scheitzer's fossilised T Rex leg-bone with the 68 million year age assigned to it, maybe we can begin to rationally talk about timescales. Or perhaps getting sensible dates out of ice cores once you eliminate the diffusion varves and such-like, or demonstrating that there's a way to reliably differentiate the whacky dates so easily obtained with every known kind of radioisotope dating from "real" dates would be enough of a start. Meanwhile, <<thwack!>>
Your one good point is that a timescale of some random number of gigayears between about 10 and about 30 is kind of difficult to reconcile with 6 days. It's not just the gigayears, it's that the phraseology in question (along with the entire literary context) leaves absolutely no room for anything other than literal days. They are indeed irreconcilable.
...forex, the co-development of neurons and supporting cogitative power to do something useful with this new information (get the flock out of here when a predator arrives, while not making a target of yourself by leaping about every time some flake of debris gets between you and the light) isn't even mentioned, let alone calculated.
Foranotherex, the step from, for example, a skin-covered depression to a genuinely useful lens is a lot more than 1%.
Forathirdex, even ignoring all other genetic factors to do with viability and such-like, the likelihood of 1829 random mutations in a row all producing the "correct" result tending towards an eye are just stupidly low.
It wouldn't take long to stumble over more problems, but the talkorigins crew never seem to trouble themselves with doing that. Can't imagine why.
"Rundown" imples at full bore. None of the low-current devices do that, ergo the newer battery type will last longer in them.
If you were to switch the torch on and leave it on until it died then the new type of battery would lose.
My digital answering machine (the whole 'phone system, actually) uses batteries in the base-station to remember stuff like messages and last-dialled numbers when the power goes away. You can pull the batteries while the mains is on and it doesn't forget - you need to both unplug it and unload the batteries to give it amnesia. The handsets are all rechargeable.
The perceived neutrality could be an artefact of the measuring environment, or any one of a number of other assumptions that go into it. If it does turn out to be charged, that may have all manner of useful practical implications.
They've already provided us with one major trajectory mystery, confirmable because there are two of them. They're also supposed to be reaching the heliopause soonish, which should provide even more information that would be slow and very costly to acquire otherwise.
Especially if they bash into that great big crystal sphere with the galaxies painted into it. (-:
You can "bust out of it" essentially whereever you like and do whatever you like.
Twenty-five years ago when as a BASIC programmer (think C-BASIC, MBASIC, GWBASIC, sBASIC), I first saw C. It was a revolution. Variable scoping, easy recursion, inline ifs, direct access to all kinds of stuff. Now as a programmer of lots of languages (C, C++, Java, Python, PHP, PERL, BASH, GAWK, assorted BASICs and scripts, assorted assemblers, Forth, yadda yadda), Ruby evokes that same feeling of "Ah! So this is what was missing all along!"
Ruby is dead simple. Ruby on Rails is dead simple. It'll make you wonder why you bother with all of those other languages./ME is looking forward to Ruby on Greased Rails, the optimised version. (-:
...is tomorrow's shredder output. Progress munches on. (-:
Heed the tale of the physics exam: tourists at a large American univeristy are being shown through the Physics Department. As the group enters, one of them notices a large document mounted in a glass case against the wall.
After the tour, back in the foyer, the guide asks "are there any questions?"
The chap raises his hand, and when called upon, indicates the document and asks, "What's this?"
The guide explains that it's their physics exam.
"What?" exclaims the horrified tourist, "Don't people cheat? Do you change the questions every year, or something?"
"No," explains the guide, "our approach is much simpler. We change the answers."
An ID advocate at least acknowledges that certain things are impossible for evolution to accomplish. Even if their assertion of an Intelligent Designer turns out to be wrong, they will at least look past the dogma of "arbitraro mutatia et selectae naturo omnes", which many scientists won't do.
An Evolutionist's approach is forced by his religious assumptions. Regardless of whether they're an Atheist or not, an Evolutionist has to at least assume that any putative God either won't or can't intervene in mundane affairs. This means that they are duty bound to jam everything through an Orthodox Materialism filter before accepting it. But then that have no way of telling whether Materialism itself is correct or not, or even their understanding of it. It is true by definition and therefore not falsifiable and not susceptible to scientific examination.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops, was that the sound of a greybeard detector springing to life?
The thing's going to be under tension 60x60x24x7 anyway. The problem with tying it off to a fire hydrant is that it and probably a considerable amount of other utility structure would be casually torn out of the ground long before the initial stabilising tension (few hundred tonnes at ground level, I guess) was completely put on.
let your wife do the map-reading. You'll get there quicker even if she's near-terminally dyslexic.
Being able to bridge Gibraltar to Africa in a single span would be a comparably technical - albeit much smaller - engineering feat. You would probably have to provide oxygen to keep the cars running at the top of the span if you built it as an arch rather than suspension. But the view would absolutely rock.
A bridge from Perth (one potential Elevator site) to orbit would only have to deal with wind, rain, lightning, corrosion and really big waves for the first dozen or so kilometers, and would have practically all of the tension running along the structure rather than across it. That's an enormous difference in structural problems right there, and it's only the start.
Forex, bridging from a floating platform would mean that unexpected waves could be dealt with by simply maintaining even tension on the cable and riding over (more or less) the peak. You could probably continue operating right through the wave, but I imagine that rubbernecking would significantly impede stuff efficiency for the duration, especially as they watched the wave wander off to engulf Rottnest and then Perth.
In point of fact, the article does discuss something akin to building the bridge you demand, but as a big loopy thing going via orbit rather than as the ultimate engineering response to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
It'd be a bugger to paint, though.
...would be to cable a suspension bridge with this stuff, and use that as a bellwether for issues with the real deal. It'd look kind of odd, because the carbon ribbon would be thread-thin compared with the normal steel cables.
35,786km / 3m == 11,928,666 stops ("I say, that's devilish slow!") at say 30 seconds a stop == roughly 6 million minutes == 100,000 hours == 4200 days == 11.5 years. And probably several hundred new sets of doors plus countless motor and drive assembly swapouts.
Wouldn't take forever, but would certainly seem that way.
WRT the homework, the secret method for achieving clarity is to look for but not be fazed or fascinated by the religious underpinnings, which are always there. You need to be careful to remember that the concept of religion is not to be confused with sacerdotalism. Sacerdotalism is what all of the robes and stained glass is for. Materialism or Strict Atheism is just as much a religion as any form of Supernaturalism, from the world-worshipping Gaia sects who climb Cheops every Solstice and the spectacular demon-deafening funereals in Thailand to the sternest, quietest Quaker enclave, it's just as much religious as the "enlightened" and hard-nosed BMW-driving Rolex-wearing competitionalist YUPPIE or driest, most "rational" paleobiologist struggling to fit "wet" and supple T Rex bones into a 68-megayear timescale because (s)he prefers to believe Orthodoxy than evidence.
First, determine what brand of religion underlies the lessons in your science book. Next, find out if the material makes allowance for any competing memes. If it either refuses to admit that any exist, or if it admits them but then lampoons them with hollow caricatures instead of addressing their very real challenges, first note that this is precisely the method and attitude used by the Church of the Dark Ages, and second realise that what you are facing is no longer science, but religious dogmatism.
Once you detect religious dogmatism, it's much easier to correctly interpret whatever is before you. It doesn't magically make the material complete, but it does alert you to look for the gaps, omissions, and oversights.
You can also turn into squirrel food fairly rapidly by redlining your paranoia and seeing methodological gaps where merely human lapses were the cause. Simply satisfy the innate (if not always acknowledged) human need for controversy with a few manageably small doses of material from a competing ideology, and move on, knowing that your understanding will never be perfect, but that "if you shoot for the stars you may hit the Moon."
...it was written in this weird language?
...they do guided tours, rent out the names of stars, and get most of their ancilliary equipment donated to them and off the books.
I do wish some of the PHB industrialists funding the pork-barrelling would wake up to the incredible industrial potential of space, and decide that they have to take a risk and get a piece of pie in the sky right now rather than when they die (and they've got a rude shock coming at that point, along the lines of: "Oi! I left you lot with a perfectly good planet, and now look at it!").
There's no gentler way to put it. It simply will not fly.
Why not?
We have here two basically opposing world-views, one called Materialism and one loosely called Deism. Materialism, most simply put, says that no miracles occur. At all.
If no miracles occur, then we need something like evolution to explain how superheated hydrogen plasma could possibly turn into Kelly Hu or Nicola Tesla. And it must explain all of it, else miracles are required.
Sometimes a distinction is drawn between "chemical evolution", which gets us from H2 to, arguably, cells - and "biological evolution" which gets us from cells (more or less) to astronauts.
The line separating the two concepts must necessarily be vague until everyone agrees on a clear-cut definition of what is alive and what is not, but the whole shebang is "molecules to man evolution" as we know it and any distinction is inherently artificial since essentially identical principles must be in operation for both stages.
Trying to saw off biological evolution and treat it separately is utterly pointless if chemical evolution is insufficient to get us from hydrogen to biology in the first place.
Both processes must be driven by random perturbations of some of the existing materials filtered (selected) by interactions with other existing materials, else we're in miracle territory again.
It turns out that we're in miracle territory anyway, since chemical evolution requires either a miracle of structure, or a miraculously high number of chemical interactions between the roughly 10^81 atoms in our universe during the roughly 10^18 seconds it may have existed in order to form even relatively simple organic molecules, the precursors to proteins.
Afficiondos of the Miller and Urey experiments are referred to any competent history of Miller since then.
The one argument against this dilemma which appears to make any kind of sense is "the anthropic principle", which says, in essence, "we're here because we're here". It postulates a more-or-less infinite number of universes, the vast majority of which are in one way or another off-stage and failed to produce life. The foolishness of this kind of reasoning can be shown by examining the likelihood of an anthropically produced universe being such a well-matched place for life to have developed in.
Our universe is both well-matched to supporting life and extremely unlikely to have developed life. Change any of hundreds of physical parameters very much and life becomes impossible (in most cases, even planets and stars become impossible). If we had arrived at thgis universe by chance, the odds are fairly extreme that the it would be far more hostile to life, that the "tweakable" paramaters would be off by a fair amount rather than being a cosmic bullseye.
If, on the other hand, you allow supernatural intervention, there is no need for any kind of molecules-to-man evolution at all. People will inevitable go on and argue (this is one of Eugenie Scott's favourite hobby-horses) that supernatural intervention renders science impossible, but that's mere rhetorical twaddle. Engineers and statisticians have been dealing with that kind of imponderable quite calmly for centuries now.
Your one good point is that a timescale of some random number of gigayears between about 10 and about 30 is kind of difficult to reconcile with 6 days. It's not just the gigayears, it's that the phraseology in question (along with the entire literary context) leaves absolutely no room for anything other than literal days. They are indeed irreconcilable.
...when the atmosphere had lots of both H2 and O2 would have been, well, a blast.
...molecules, film at eleven?
Hey! I touched molecules with my bare hands while I was typing this. Am I gunna get arrested too?
Erk! Oh, no... I've just noticed these air molecule thingies that I'm constantly touching... they're everywhere! How can I escape?
"Well chosen handle" seems to encompass it all. (-:
Replicators aren't standalone. No replicators without life. No life without replicators. Paradox. Thank you for playing. Next!
Oops.
How did that ability evolve?
...benchmarks into a print-string-and-exit monitor call plus a string corresponding to the final answer. This was back in MicroVAX days. Hi, Jeremy!
...forex, the co-development of neurons and supporting cogitative power to do something useful with this new information (get the flock out of here when a predator arrives, while not making a target of yourself by leaping about every time some flake of debris gets between you and the light) isn't even mentioned, let alone calculated.
Foranotherex, the step from, for example, a skin-covered depression to a genuinely useful lens is a lot more than 1%.
Forathirdex, even ignoring all other genetic factors to do with viability and such-like, the likelihood of 1829 random mutations in a row all producing the "correct" result tending towards an eye are just stupidly low.
It wouldn't take long to stumble over more problems, but the talkorigins crew never seem to trouble themselves with doing that. Can't imagine why.
"Rundown" imples at full bore. None of the low-current devices do that, ergo the newer battery type will last longer in them.
If you were to switch the torch on and leave it on until it died then the new type of battery would lose.
My digital answering machine (the whole 'phone system, actually) uses batteries in the base-station to remember stuff like messages and last-dialled numbers when the power goes away. You can pull the batteries while the mains is on and it doesn't forget - you need to both unplug it and unload the batteries to give it amnesia. The handsets are all rechargeable.
Boot Knoppix, open (BASH) shell, type:
/dev/null \; ; done ) &
for cpu in 1 2 3 4; do
( while true; do true; done ) &
done
If you want to exercise the disks a bit too, replace the middle line with:
( while true; do find / -type f -exec cp {}
The perceived neutrality could be an artefact of the measuring environment, or any one of a number of other assumptions that go into it. If it does turn out to be charged, that may have all manner of useful practical implications.
They've already provided us with one major trajectory mystery, confirmable because there are two of them. They're also supposed to be reaching the heliopause soonish, which should provide even more information that would be slow and very costly to acquire otherwise.
Especially if they bash into that great big crystal sphere with the galaxies painted into it. (-:
...made according to the BoBo the Dark Clown standard, or something different?
You can "bust out of it" essentially whereever you like and do whatever you like.
Twenty-five years ago when as a BASIC programmer (think C-BASIC, MBASIC, GWBASIC, sBASIC), I first saw C. It was a revolution. Variable scoping, easy recursion, inline ifs, direct access to all kinds of stuff. Now as a programmer of lots of languages (C, C++, Java, Python, PHP, PERL, BASH, GAWK, assorted BASICs and scripts, assorted assemblers, Forth, yadda yadda), Ruby evokes that same feeling of "Ah! So this is what was missing all along!"
Ruby is dead simple. Ruby on Rails is dead simple. It'll make you wonder why you bother with all of those other languages. /ME is looking forward to Ruby on Greased Rails, the optimised version. (-:
...is tomorrow's shredder output. Progress munches on. (-:
Heed the tale of the physics exam: tourists at a large American univeristy are being shown through the Physics Department. As the group enters, one of them notices a large document mounted in a glass case against the wall.
After the tour, back in the foyer, the guide asks "are there any questions?"
The chap raises his hand, and when called upon, indicates the document and asks, "What's this?"
The guide explains that it's their physics exam.
"What?" exclaims the horrified tourist, "Don't people cheat? Do you change the questions every year, or something?"
"No," explains the guide, "our approach is much simpler. We change the answers."
An ID advocate at least acknowledges that certain things are impossible for evolution to accomplish. Even if their assertion of an Intelligent Designer turns out to be wrong, they will at least look past the dogma of "arbitraro mutatia et selectae naturo omnes", which many scientists won't do.
An Evolutionist's approach is forced by his religious assumptions. Regardless of whether they're an Atheist or not, an Evolutionist has to at least assume that any putative God either won't or can't intervene in mundane affairs. This means that they are duty bound to jam everything through an Orthodox Materialism filter before accepting it. But then that have no way of telling whether Materialism itself is correct or not, or even their understanding of it. It is true by definition and therefore not falsifiable and not susceptible to scientific examination.