There are very few foods that have been continually consumed and remained biologically identical for the amount of time you suggest. Anything stemming from agriculture is continually being selectively bred-- it's not the same critter or plant that people were eating even a century ago, nor was it fed or grown in the same way things were a century ago. Wild animals, likewise, have suffered selection and diet changes resulting from the grown of urban humanity, and thus don't have the same nutritional value precisely that similar animals might have had a century ago.
Of course, they're close enough as to be practically the same thing. But using an identical definition of 'the same thing', so are synthetic foods.
Also, people will not throw out a food that's bad for them unless it kills people immediately. If you want a food source that has been selected by years of weeding out bad stuff, you actually want less-natural food, as it were, because people are paid to make weeding out bad producs their life's work. Contrast this to, say, your grandmother. Sure, she can cook things that taste good, but she either makes up recipes out of nowhere or makes the same horrible casserole everyone hates every week, because that's what her mother did. Both approaches are inferior to the constant review by trained professional method that synthetic/processed foods go through, from a quality-control standpoint.
So, yeah. Your assumptions are completely inaccurate.
No, now we regulate people that make things so that they have to find out in advance, and inform us, wether their stuff cuses problems. Seems reasonable to me.
Since, looking at other countries with laxer regulations, the choice seems to come down to either really expensive new drugs or no new developments in pharmaceuticals at all, I'll go with the former.
Or, if you want to use the calculus explanation, it has an infinite number of corners whose shape diverges only infinitessimally form the planar.
Assuming, of course, that the world is perfectly spherical, which it isn't. Realistically, anyplace with a pointy hill or pyramidal landmark is a corner of the world.
This moment in taking too literally a reply to a comment that the parent took too personally has been brought to you by James Callahan. Thank you, I'll be here all week.
Troll? Come on, guys, you know this fellow was making a joke, albeit at our Microsoft-hating expense... wait... maybe you don't. I think that's actually scaring me./shiver
Seriously, though. "overrated", yes. "troll", no, unless you think people are actually that easy to bait. Use the mod system to some approximaiton of correctly, please.
I'd imagine that the jet fuel set other things in the building on fire, I doubt that it was the only source of heat. And, again, steel softens significantly at well below its melting point-- to take an extreme case, it converts to its austenite phase at 750ish (exact temp varies with C content) centigrade, making it significantly less capable of bearing a large load, such as the upper half of a building. This is why structural beams in buildings are generally insulated as much as possible-- unfortunately, running a plane into a building at high speed has a tendency to rip this insulation away in a manner that your average building fire does not.
Regarding cockpit voice recorders, from what data I could find on ye olde internets (tried several sources, they all seemed to generally agree with Wikipedia on the subject), wire-recording hasn't been used in the things since the mid 70s. Since then, it's been analog tape or (more recently) solid-state storage. Magnetic tape (generally mylar with embedded magnetic metals) is subject to the kind of magnetic randomization I cited in GP. Any solid-state device dependent on magnetic storage suffers similar problems: not having researched eough to know the specific type of solid-state storage prevalent in CPRs, I can't comment on their reliabiliy in the event that the insulating protection on the black box is overcome and the data is exposed to increased heat.
I'm not attacking your point as far as "steel doesn't melt at the combustion temperature of jet fuel", by the way-- I don't know about that one way or another, as temperatures in a combustion reaction vary a lot with the transfer properties of the system-- I'm just telling you that they don't have to melt to make the building fall down, even neglecting the ballistic damage to the building.
I have now spent half an hour researching for a forum post when I should be doing related, but not related enough, research for my job. I'm not sure if I should just turn the computer off or if I should go all the way and commit seppuku to redeem my lost self-esteem.
Eh, I suppose you're right overall. I tend to give the guy the benefit of the doubt because he posted the stress-strain curves of steel and how they vary with temperature, which kind of summed up my reaction to that section of Loose Change, too. It would definitely have been a better piece if he'd refrained from the direct insults, though.
Yeah, magnetic domains on, say, a recording tape or hard-drive type disk are also destroyed way below the temperature required to melt steel. However, bending metal also produces local heating, this is something you have to watch out for in industrial metal forming, as localized melting can weaken or harden your material locally. A third point to consider is that the main destructive force when ramming a large object against a barrier is probably not the increase in temperature, but the deforming force of flinging the fucking object into a barrier at high speed. Things whose scattering pattern did not put them between harder objects which would rip or crush them, and were not exposed to the fire long enough to catch themselves(flammable), or conduct the heat to a point where a significant part of the pbject might melt (nonflammable) would survive.
So, yeah, it's entirely possible that the black boxes were both wiped of magnetic data/crushed between moving debris (it would have been designed to survive a normal crash, which would be significantly slower than the 'ramming speed' stuff the hijackers pulled off) while a passport or letter to grandma might fly free and land unharmed nearby. (Unfortunately for us, a human who is similarly flung free will go splat while a piece of paper will go whoosh and gently settle on the lawn. It's the price we pay for being made of water and membranes.) Just so you know.
On a side-note, what does the melting point of steel have to do with anything? The steel content of airplanes is kept as low as possible to reduce weight, they're mostly aluminium, or, more recently, magnesium-based alloys. And even for the steel parts, increase in temperature reduces the material's resistance to deformation, which is, again, the majority of your destructive occurence when ramming an object into a barrier at high speed. You don't have to melt something to bend it into crazy shapes or shred it like a newspaper at a poodle convention.
And Loose Change's first referenced source (if you don't count the picture of the engine part that the idiots making the film didn't bother taking two seconds to look up properly) is a con artist who pretends to be a big man in business on the internet for a living. Report based on the findings of thousands of professional investigators in relevant fields... con man... wow, that's a hard one.
"As a skeptical, open-minded outsider, who has not already taken a position, how do I know which side I should treat less critically?"
By following the money. And by this I don't mean it in the conspiracy theorist "any vague benefit means the government is going to eat your babies" kind of way, I mean that, if you want, say, an trustworthy opinion on the failure point of steel, you ask someone whose livelihood depends on knowing about the failure behaviors of steel, not someone who runs dummy corporations on the internet or is a professional writer.
One of these "debunking" reports references a con artist claiming to work with nonferrous materials for a living and a political novelist, as well as a man specializing in water treatment, regarding mechanical failure in metal buildings. The other references reports released by civil and mechanical engineers. Since this pattern extends throughout the entirety of the report in both cases, we know to trust the latter over the former.
Exceptions to this method of evaluation can be made if you know all of the individuals involved, and have the technical expertise (evidenced by successful practice in the relevant field) to evaluate their knowledge as being either above or below what would be expected of their category (successful practicer of their craft vs. random loser off the internet with no experience, in this case). Since literally thousands of people were referenced between the two documents, of a variety of professions, I'd imagine that that's not the case here.
I'll agree with the basic thrust of your argument, that evaluating something on tone alone is a poor means of evaluating the "professionalism" of a given work. I would tend to say that the fact that "Loose Change" is almost completely unreferenced (and the quotes are also undated and not even marked for context, which gave me a headache when i first watched the damned thing), while the counterargument linked above is fully referenced, is the best way to compare the relative reliability of the two works (as, if you haven't noticed, they both have far too many snarky asides to be considered remotely neutral in tone).
Re:It's not like they EVER landed there anyway!
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Back to the Moon
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· Score: 1
In the conspiracy nuts' defense, the composition of the moon is held to be similar overall to that of the earth, with a little higher surface iron content from meteors. So realistically if I was really committed I probably could find rocks on the Earth's surface similar in composition to those brought back from the moon. Atmospheric wear would probably give the game away, though.
Um, they're commited to over-engineering and risk avoidance because if the astronauts die or the spacecraft fail, then a bunch of money and lives have just been wasted. The whole point of exploration is that you don't know what conditions are going to be like, exactly, in the places you explore. Over-engineering in such cases isn't even really over-engineering. It's just "not being a complete fucking moron".
That said, NASA is still a government organization (worse, it's now become a sort of international government organization), and as a result it suffers from the $1000000 toilet-seat effect you see in any government organization.
Re:I might even be inclined to be sympathetic...
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Back to the Moon
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· Score: 1
NASA has always been one of the more multinational project groups. If you look closely, for instance, you'll notice a Canadian flag marking the manipulating arm on most of the space shuttles. NASA takes advantage of other countries' expertise and manufacturing capabilities, and everyone in world has by now somehow benefitted from NASA-funded research, which gets put into everything from automobiles to food-packaging for refugees and supply drops. So, in short, I don't see what you're bitching about... oh, right, something you made up, because you're too lazy to actually do basic research.
Also, booster-rockets are not generally reusable. The closest they generally get is being recyclable/salvageable. So if the rockets have already been manned by indians, they'd need to be rebuilt to be manned again by anyone else... this is true even of the boosters for shuttle missions. In conclusion, please know something about something before going off and making random assertions. Either knowing something about how spacecraft are designed and built or about scientific and technological cooperation would be acceptible... I'm not foolish enough to expect you to manage both. Or either, actually. Never mind.
Switzerland is pretty tightly controlled, you know. Maintaining neutrality is not the same as being some sort of hippie "it's all good, man" guy. In fact, it's pretty much exactly the opposite (on a national level, anyhow. I'm sure they have hippies, too).
This said with all love for switzerland. Foreign policy run like a business, and all decisions made in terms of economic leverage... mm, tasty.
Meanwhile, every other country in Europe has elected a socialist party (that's what the Nazis were, if you'll recall) for a greater degree of government control, and have had absolutely no problems with it (beyond the ordinary problems of keeping a country going, of course). I think your analogy just fell off a cliff. Onto some sharp rocks. With... um... LASERs.
Wow, I'm glad I live in the USA and not whatever US you live in. Over here, there are plenty of jobs which don't involve being a target, even with minimal education, and being poor, as in actually being unable to afford food, is so rare as to be essentially nonexistent. Even the jobless usually plenty of support... hell, most of them can afford televisions, cell phones, and cigarettes!
Our military is all-volunteer, and has plenty of people from rural areas as well as the cities, roughly according to population. National law means that even a minimal tour of duty ensures an excellent secondary education, and as a result people with an interest in protecting their fellows in the country get a leg-up over those that don't, which pretty much everyone agrees is reasonable. My family on both sides has benefitted greatly from this system.
You really should consider immigration, just petition the local embassy to 'reality' in your country.
Yeah, I'm sure the author and proponent of the Alien & Sedition acts is REAL worried about potential abuse of the law to suppress dissent./goes off and laughs in the corner
Or shooting them to death, then suing his next of kin for the cost of cleaning the blood out of your rug and 'emotional distress'. Oh, yeah, and calling the cops so you don't have to cart the body off yourself.
Of course, you have to wait for the police to confirm that it wasn't all an elaborate setup on your part to kil some guy, which takes anywhere from a day to a week, but that's a relatively small price to pay for being the one still standing at the end of the evening.
It's conservative because giant money-sucking black-hole governments are now the tradition and standard, so conserving that standard involves piling tax money into small mountains and lighting it on fire.
When the two drives you cite come into conflict, one has to be chosen. As someone who would rather see people generally allowed to do what they want as a drive for progress, I tend to think that "not violating rights" should be generally preferred. However, as someone who would have no hesitation shooting a tresspasser to death if I thought he intended harm to myself or my fellows (regardless of wether he technically had the right to be there), I can also sympathize with the other view, if not necessarily approve it.
While the template you've designed for government action is laudably nice-sounding, it also involves somehow electing God into all government offices at once, as it requires reality-warping powers to prevent your two criterion from ever conflicting.
No, the constitution is only a series of phrases strung together which holds force of law, the paper/ink itself is rather irrelevant. Compare this to money, where the physical material is itself the symbol/data.
You've made a mistake similar to people who think 'the church' means a pretty building in Italy.
Slashdot Mirror
Except all the Good guys would get blown up while designing the software for it as soon as the first list of errors came back from the compiler.
There are very few foods that have been continually consumed and remained biologically identical for the amount of time you suggest. Anything stemming from agriculture is continually being selectively bred-- it's not the same critter or plant that people were eating even a century ago, nor was it fed or grown in the same way things were a century ago. Wild animals, likewise, have suffered selection and diet changes resulting from the grown of urban humanity, and thus don't have the same nutritional value precisely that similar animals might have had a century ago.
Of course, they're close enough as to be practically the same thing. But using an identical definition of 'the same thing', so are synthetic foods.
Also, people will not throw out a food that's bad for them unless it kills people immediately. If you want a food source that has been selected by years of weeding out bad stuff, you actually want less-natural food, as it were, because people are paid to make weeding out bad producs their life's work. Contrast this to, say, your grandmother. Sure, she can cook things that taste good, but she either makes up recipes out of nowhere or makes the same horrible casserole everyone hates every week, because that's what her mother did. Both approaches are inferior to the constant review by trained professional method that synthetic/processed foods go through, from a quality-control standpoint.
So, yeah. Your assumptions are completely inaccurate.
No, now we regulate people that make things so that they have to find out in advance, and inform us, wether their stuff cuses problems. Seems reasonable to me.
Since, looking at other countries with laxer regulations, the choice seems to come down to either really expensive new drugs or no new developments in pharmaceuticals at all, I'll go with the former.
I agree, old chap. The GP surely owes me a new monocle.
Or, if you want to use the calculus explanation, it has an infinite number of corners whose shape diverges only infinitessimally form the planar.
Assuming, of course, that the world is perfectly spherical, which it isn't. Realistically, anyplace with a pointy hill or pyramidal landmark is a corner of the world.
This moment in taking too literally a reply to a comment that the parent took too personally has been brought to you by James Callahan. Thank you, I'll be here all week.
Troll? Come on, guys, you know this fellow was making a joke, albeit at our Microsoft-hating expense... wait... maybe you don't. I think that's actually scaring me. /shiver
Seriously, though. "overrated", yes. "troll", no, unless you think people are actually that easy to bait. Use the mod system to some approximaiton of correctly, please.
I'd imagine that the jet fuel set other things in the building on fire, I doubt that it was the only source of heat. And, again, steel softens significantly at well below its melting point-- to take an extreme case, it converts to its austenite phase at 750ish (exact temp varies with C content) centigrade, making it significantly less capable of bearing a large load, such as the upper half of a building. This is why structural beams in buildings are generally insulated as much as possible-- unfortunately, running a plane into a building at high speed has a tendency to rip this insulation away in a manner that your average building fire does not.
Regarding cockpit voice recorders, from what data I could find on ye olde internets (tried several sources, they all seemed to generally agree with Wikipedia on the subject), wire-recording hasn't been used in the things since the mid 70s. Since then, it's been analog tape or (more recently) solid-state storage. Magnetic tape (generally mylar with embedded magnetic metals) is subject to the kind of magnetic randomization I cited in GP. Any solid-state device dependent on magnetic storage suffers similar problems: not having researched eough to know the specific type of solid-state storage prevalent in CPRs, I can't comment on their reliabiliy in the event that the insulating protection on the black box is overcome and the data is exposed to increased heat.
I'm not attacking your point as far as "steel doesn't melt at the combustion temperature of jet fuel", by the way-- I don't know about that one way or another, as temperatures in a combustion reaction vary a lot with the transfer properties of the system-- I'm just telling you that they don't have to melt to make the building fall down, even neglecting the ballistic damage to the building.
I have now spent half an hour researching for a forum post when I should be doing related, but not related enough, research for my job. I'm not sure if I should just turn the computer off or if I should go all the way and commit seppuku to redeem my lost self-esteem.
Eh, I suppose you're right overall. I tend to give the guy the benefit of the doubt because he posted the stress-strain curves of steel and how they vary with temperature, which kind of summed up my reaction to that section of Loose Change, too. It would definitely have been a better piece if he'd refrained from the direct insults, though.
Yeah, magnetic domains on, say, a recording tape or hard-drive type disk are also destroyed way below the temperature required to melt steel. However, bending metal also produces local heating, this is something you have to watch out for in industrial metal forming, as localized melting can weaken or harden your material locally. A third point to consider is that the main destructive force when ramming a large object against a barrier is probably not the increase in temperature, but the deforming force of flinging the fucking object into a barrier at high speed. Things whose scattering pattern did not put them between harder objects which would rip or crush them, and were not exposed to the fire long enough to catch themselves(flammable), or conduct the heat to a point where a significant part of the pbject might melt (nonflammable) would survive.
So, yeah, it's entirely possible that the black boxes were both wiped of magnetic data/crushed between moving debris (it would have been designed to survive a normal crash, which would be significantly slower than the 'ramming speed' stuff the hijackers pulled off) while a passport or letter to grandma might fly free and land unharmed nearby. (Unfortunately for us, a human who is similarly flung free will go splat while a piece of paper will go whoosh and gently settle on the lawn. It's the price we pay for being made of water and membranes.) Just so you know.
On a side-note, what does the melting point of steel have to do with anything? The steel content of airplanes is kept as low as possible to reduce weight, they're mostly aluminium, or, more recently, magnesium-based alloys. And even for the steel parts, increase in temperature reduces the material's resistance to deformation, which is, again, the majority of your destructive occurence when ramming an object into a barrier at high speed. You don't have to melt something to bend it into crazy shapes or shred it like a newspaper at a poodle convention.
And Loose Change's first referenced source (if you don't count the picture of the engine part that the idiots making the film didn't bother taking two seconds to look up properly) is a con artist who pretends to be a big man in business on the internet for a living. Report based on the findings of thousands of professional investigators in relevant fields... con man... wow, that's a hard one.
"As a skeptical, open-minded outsider, who has not already taken a position, how do I know which side I should treat less critically?"
By following the money. And by this I don't mean it in the conspiracy theorist "any vague benefit means the government is going to eat your babies" kind of way, I mean that, if you want, say, an trustworthy opinion on the failure point of steel, you ask someone whose livelihood depends on knowing about the failure behaviors of steel, not someone who runs dummy corporations on the internet or is a professional writer.
One of these "debunking" reports references a con artist claiming to work with nonferrous materials for a living and a political novelist, as well as a man specializing in water treatment, regarding mechanical failure in metal buildings. The other references reports released by civil and mechanical engineers. Since this pattern extends throughout the entirety of the report in both cases, we know to trust the latter over the former.
Exceptions to this method of evaluation can be made if you know all of the individuals involved, and have the technical expertise (evidenced by successful practice in the relevant field) to evaluate their knowledge as being either above or below what would be expected of their category (successful practicer of their craft vs. random loser off the internet with no experience, in this case). Since literally thousands of people were referenced between the two documents, of a variety of professions, I'd imagine that that's not the case here.
I'll agree with the basic thrust of your argument, that evaluating something on tone alone is a poor means of evaluating the "professionalism" of a given work. I would tend to say that the fact that "Loose Change" is almost completely unreferenced (and the quotes are also undated and not even marked for context, which gave me a headache when i first watched the damned thing), while the counterargument linked above is fully referenced, is the best way to compare the relative reliability of the two works (as, if you haven't noticed, they both have far too many snarky asides to be considered remotely neutral in tone).
In the conspiracy nuts' defense, the composition of the moon is held to be similar overall to that of the earth, with a little higher surface iron content from meteors. So realistically if I was really committed I probably could find rocks on the Earth's surface similar in composition to those brought back from the moon. Atmospheric wear would probably give the game away, though.
Um, they're commited to over-engineering and risk avoidance because if the astronauts die or the spacecraft fail, then a bunch of money and lives have just been wasted. The whole point of exploration is that you don't know what conditions are going to be like, exactly, in the places you explore. Over-engineering in such cases isn't even really over-engineering. It's just "not being a complete fucking moron".
That said, NASA is still a government organization (worse, it's now become a sort of international government organization), and as a result it suffers from the $1000000 toilet-seat effect you see in any government organization.
NASA has always been one of the more multinational project groups. If you look closely, for instance, you'll notice a Canadian flag marking the manipulating arm on most of the space shuttles. NASA takes advantage of other countries' expertise and manufacturing capabilities, and everyone in world has by now somehow benefitted from NASA-funded research, which gets put into everything from automobiles to food-packaging for refugees and supply drops. So, in short, I don't see what you're bitching about... oh, right, something you made up, because you're too lazy to actually do basic research.
Also, booster-rockets are not generally reusable. The closest they generally get is being recyclable/salvageable. So if the rockets have already been manned by indians, they'd need to be rebuilt to be manned again by anyone else... this is true even of the boosters for shuttle missions. In conclusion, please know something about something before going off and making random assertions. Either knowing something about how spacecraft are designed and built or about scientific and technological cooperation would be acceptible... I'm not foolish enough to expect you to manage both. Or either, actually. Never mind.
No, but it means that using europe as a counterexample, or having a high horse about it as a european, only makes one look like an idiot.
On a side note, I was in a clinical trial for a lym disease vaccine a few years ago. It was in the final stages, so it's probably on the market now.
Switzerland is pretty tightly controlled, you know. Maintaining neutrality is not the same as being some sort of hippie "it's all good, man" guy. In fact, it's pretty much exactly the opposite (on a national level, anyhow. I'm sure they have hippies, too).
This said with all love for switzerland. Foreign policy run like a business, and all decisions made in terms of economic leverage... mm, tasty.
Meanwhile, every other country in Europe has elected a socialist party (that's what the Nazis were, if you'll recall) for a greater degree of government control, and have had absolutely no problems with it (beyond the ordinary problems of keeping a country going, of course). I think your analogy just fell off a cliff. Onto some sharp rocks. With... um... LASERs.
Wow, I'm glad I live in the USA and not whatever US you live in. Over here, there are plenty of jobs which don't involve being a target, even with minimal education, and being poor, as in actually being unable to afford food, is so rare as to be essentially nonexistent. Even the jobless usually plenty of support... hell, most of them can afford televisions, cell phones, and cigarettes!
Our military is all-volunteer, and has plenty of people from rural areas as well as the cities, roughly according to population. National law means that even a minimal tour of duty ensures an excellent secondary education, and as a result people with an interest in protecting their fellows in the country get a leg-up over those that don't, which pretty much everyone agrees is reasonable. My family on both sides has benefitted greatly from this system.
You really should consider immigration, just petition the local embassy to 'reality' in your country.
Wow, sorry. Mixing up Jefferson and Frankiln, I really DO need a civics course.
Yeah, I'm sure the author and proponent of the Alien & Sedition acts is REAL worried about potential abuse of the law to suppress dissent. /goes off and laughs in the corner
Or shooting them to death, then suing his next of kin for the cost of cleaning the blood out of your rug and 'emotional distress'. Oh, yeah, and calling the cops so you don't have to cart the body off yourself.
Of course, you have to wait for the police to confirm that it wasn't all an elaborate setup on your part to kil some guy, which takes anywhere from a day to a week, but that's a relatively small price to pay for being the one still standing at the end of the evening.
It's conservative because giant money-sucking black-hole governments are now the tradition and standard, so conserving that standard involves piling tax money into small mountains and lighting it on fire.
When the two drives you cite come into conflict, one has to be chosen. As someone who would rather see people generally allowed to do what they want as a drive for progress, I tend to think that "not violating rights" should be generally preferred. However, as someone who would have no hesitation shooting a tresspasser to death if I thought he intended harm to myself or my fellows (regardless of wether he technically had the right to be there), I can also sympathize with the other view, if not necessarily approve it.
While the template you've designed for government action is laudably nice-sounding, it also involves somehow electing God into all government offices at once, as it requires reality-warping powers to prevent your two criterion from ever conflicting.
No, the constitution is only a series of phrases strung together which holds force of law, the paper/ink itself is rather irrelevant. Compare this to money, where the physical material is itself the symbol/data.
You've made a mistake similar to people who think 'the church' means a pretty building in Italy.