I hate to be blunt, but do you actually have any evidence to support your contention that what happened to your family was caused by radiation? Plenty of people not exposed to fallout from nuclear accidents get eyesight problems, and autoimmune problems. I should know - I've got one (thankfully a pretty mild case, but it still put me in hospital twice).
Scientific studies have generally failed to show is unusual rates of this kind of disease in areas affected by Chernobyl fallout. The one clear health effect has been the increase in thyroid cancer. If the Soviet government had have distributed and used the iodine tablets available to it, or stopped the distribution of contaminated milk, even that may have been avoided.
2:45 for a 230-mile journey? That's barely 83 MPH average speed. It's barely faster than the British rail system. The TGV does Paris-Lyon - a 291-mile journey - in 1 hour and 51 minutes. That's a 157 MPH average speed.
When Acela is doing New York-Washington in under two hours, then talk to me about having "high speed rail".
I cannot for the life of me understand why there isn't a TGV-style fast train between Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC. Next step would probably be a line from New York or Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and from there on to Detroit.
Here in Australia we have private and public health care systems coexisting - not perfectly, but reasonably well. If you want LASIK, cosmetic surgery, or your knee reconstruction done tomorrow rather than in a month's time, the private sector is happy to offer the service for a big enough fee.If not, our single-payer system, Medicare, covers you. You won't get a private room, and you might have to wait for elective surgery, but you'll get treated.
By the way, you have an excellent point about the artificially restricted supply of health services. The AMA and its equivalents around the world are the last of the guilds.
This guy's engine design is quite different to the BMW design. BMW basically doesn't touch the combustion engine. Essentially, it runs a separate steam engine off the exhaust and engine heat. This guy's design modifies the four-stroke cycle to add another cycle where water is injected into the cylinder, to be turned into steam, thus cooling the engine and turning more of the available heat energy into mechanical energy.
In a theoretical sense, the Crower design is considerably more elegant. As people were pointing out when the initial announcement was made, the thing hadn't been properly tested. Until there's some actual numbers to back up the theory, it's a curiosity, nothing more.
As for retrofitting BMW, I'll bet you London to a brick that even if BMW perfects its technology, bugger-all retrofits will happen.
I'm not a professional musician, but I'd have to agree with the parent poster.
On the plus side, your band sounds quite tight and professional, and it seems to come across nicely in the recording (at least through the crappy headphones I've got available to me at the moment). However, the parent was spot-on about the way the singer was recorded, and his voice sounds a little thin as well.
When you submit a paper for publication in a journal, it gets sent away for peer review. If the peer reviewers like it and say it should be published, there will customarily be a delay between when you're notified and when it is actually published, sometimes a very substantial delay. You can then, generally, put the paper in your CV as "accepted for publication" in whatever journal it is, or, if necessary, cite it as such.
This paper sounds like it had reached the "accepted for publication" stage, which means it had indeed undergone, and passed, peer review. It's a bit embarrassing to have a paper make it through peer review with a serious mistake, caught soon after, but it does happen (if I recall correctly, it happened to Donald Knuth once).
Funnily enough, people have thought of that. The requirements of the level 2 challenge is roughly akin to what they'd actually need to land on the moon for real. One of the major novelties is the requirement for repeated flights; as far as I know no space mission has ever really achieved that kind of turnaround.
In some ways, it's probably tougher on Earth, because you don't have the wind to deal with on the moon.
There are several advantages space solar power has:
higher intensity sunlight than even a cloudless day, 24 hours a day
you've always got direct sunlight, so you can use cheap mirrors to focus the light on a very expensive but efficient solar cell (you can do this on Earth as well, but it doesn't work as soon as you get clouds)
No need for backup power. That's worth a lot of money.
The ground based gear is much smaller and lighter than equivalently-powerful terrestrial solar panels. This is a big advantage for the military, who are the proposed initial customers.
I'm skeptical too, but it's not quite as crazy as it sounds.
Unfortunately, the need to cut carbon emissions is likely to make petroleum derivative fuelled internal combustion engines infeasibly expensive for the average Joe in the next 10-20 years.
The alternatives - batteries, fuel cells, and biofuels - are perfectly acceptable for powering ground vehicles, are either unlikely to be available in sufficient quantities, or aren't energy dense enough, for everyone to have a flying car.
No contact with other boats, hence no collision. You could aim it at the sails or the structural components of the boat, hence no interference with the "electronic components".
Now all we need is the sharks to mount the lasers on:)
I did this exercise repeatedly in Beijing, China, a couple of weeks ago. When the atmospheric pollution was bad, I could only see two stars - though I suppose they may have been planets. This increased radically to three on a windy day where some of the smoke blew away.
From an Australian perspective, it's important because we're just about to a) buy a couple of dozen Super Hornets from the same guys who sold us the originals - and then a bunch more F-35's, and b) a lot of the same people Beazley was arguing with then - Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz - are the same people running the shop now. So it's important from our perspective that we don't make the same mistakes again.
Secondly, don't you think it's fascinating that one of the US's closest allies felt like it had to resort to spying/hacking to decripple US-purchased military hardware?
One the truly puzzling things about most Chinese that I meet is there bottomless capacity to defend the snake of a government they have - even the ones that have already immigrated away. I find that the upper-middle class tends to be the worst - the ridiculously rich are too educated to fall for the government's lies, while the poorest suffer too much to believe anything the government says. It's the people who fall down the middle that actually believe the things the government teaches them.
Everything you just said could equally be said about American tourists, particularly middle-aged ones from flyover country. Certainly up to about 2006, at least.
But solar takes up vast areas of land, which is an environmental issue too.
If you crunch the numbers, the area is pretty minimal compared to that we grow crops on. Most people in detached houses easily have enough roof space to provide their energy needs; it's just uneconomic at current prices.
If the US Government was feeling ornery, they'd probably find a pretext under ITAR, the rules on exporting American armament technology, to arrest you if and when you set foot on US soil - or when the CIA picks you up, bundles you in a van, sticks a needle in your arm and you wake up in the FBI office in Lubbock, Texas...
So if you're going to try the Guatemala option (or, more realistically, China, India, or Russia), you'd better get on friendly terms with your local Congressman - preferably a Republican one - before you go...:/
Not everybody needs super-duper charts (though I may need something fancier for my current project). For most of my previous charts, either using Gnuplot or Excel produced acceptable output. Excel was quicker for very basic purposes. But if your graph doesn't have error bars on it when you present at a conference, the attendees laugh at you, and there's nothing more disconcerting to be laughed at presenting a conference paper!
As for data analysis, there are innumerable other packages available for that, all the way up to stuff like GNU R (or writing your own code).
Openoffice's charts have been pretty much useless for any scientific work because they don't support proper error bars.Apparently the new charting tool will have full error bar support.
With any luck, I won't have to fire up MSOffice ever again...
My home newspaper and the Wikipedia are also blocked.
And, surprisingly enough, the vast majority of Chinese people can't read English. So the existence of English-language media discussing controversial topics is largely irrelevant to all but a relatively small elite.
This article is a few years old, but I very much doubt anything has changed except the technology has improved even further. And there's this incident.
The Chinese spy on us. We spy on them. While it's inane, expensive, and annoying, it will go on for a long time yet. Heck, the CIA spies on various European countries too...
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Scientific studies have generally failed to show is unusual rates of this kind of disease in areas affected by Chernobyl fallout. The one clear health effect has been the increase in thyroid cancer. If the Soviet government had have distributed and used the iodine tablets available to it, or stopped the distribution of contaminated milk, even that may have been avoided.
When Acela is doing New York-Washington in under two hours, then talk to me about having "high speed rail".
I cannot for the life of me understand why there isn't a TGV-style fast train between Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC. Next step would probably be a line from New York or Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and from there on to Detroit.
By the way, you have an excellent point about the artificially restricted supply of health services. The AMA and its equivalents around the world are the last of the guilds.
In a theoretical sense, the Crower design is considerably more elegant. As people were pointing out when the initial announcement was made, the thing hadn't been properly tested. Until there's some actual numbers to back up the theory, it's a curiosity, nothing more.
As for retrofitting BMW, I'll bet you London to a brick that even if BMW perfects its technology, bugger-all retrofits will happen.
On the plus side, your band sounds quite tight and professional, and it seems to come across nicely in the recording (at least through the crappy headphones I've got available to me at the moment). However, the parent was spot-on about the way the singer was recorded, and his voice sounds a little thin as well.
There's potential, but you're not there yet.
This paper sounds like it had reached the "accepted for publication" stage, which means it had indeed undergone, and passed, peer review. It's a bit embarrassing to have a paper make it through peer review with a serious mistake, caught soon after, but it does happen (if I recall correctly, it happened to Donald Knuth once).
That may have been the original purpose, but these days it's just corporate welfare for people in politically important districts.
In some ways, it's probably tougher on Earth, because you don't have the wind to deal with on the moon.
Previous story here, which also notably mentioned the process by which the report was developed (hint: it might be a familiar one to Linux users).
I'm skeptical too, but it's not quite as crazy as it sounds.
The alternatives - batteries, fuel cells, and biofuels - are perfectly acceptable for powering ground vehicles, are either unlikely to be available in sufficient quantities, or aren't energy dense enough, for everyone to have a flying car.
No contact with other boats, hence no collision. You could aim it at the sails or the structural components of the boat, hence no interference with the "electronic components".
Now all we need is the sharks to mount the lasers on :)
I did this exercise repeatedly in Beijing, China, a couple of weeks ago. When the atmospheric pollution was bad, I could only see two stars - though I suppose they may have been planets. This increased radically to three on a windy day where some of the smoke blew away.
Secondly, don't you think it's fascinating that one of the US's closest allies felt like it had to resort to spying/hacking to decripple US-purchased military hardware?
So if you're going to try the Guatemala option (or, more realistically, China, India, or Russia), you'd better get on friendly terms with your local Congressman - preferably a Republican one - before you go... :/
If their gadget for doing the z-pinch thingy is anything like the Z machine at Sandia you won't be putting it on a spacecraft any time soon...
As for data analysis, there are innumerable other packages available for that, all the way up to stuff like GNU R (or writing your own code).
With any luck, I won't have to fire up MSOffice ever again...
As others have noted, you generally get much more militarily useful effect with multiple small weapons rather than one large one.
Hence, everyone in China who uses the internet is a criminal...
And, surprisingly enough, the vast majority of Chinese people can't read English. So the existence of English-language media discussing controversial topics is largely irrelevant to all but a relatively small elite.
The Chinese spy on us. We spy on them. While it's inane, expensive, and annoying, it will go on for a long time yet. Heck, the CIA spies on various European countries too...