I may be wrong about this and am not going to google it from work given the search terms I'd be using, but I'm pretty sure the Nazis invented methamphetamines and gave them in large quantities to their soldiers -- not for overcoming scruples, but for overcoming exhaustion. I'm pretty sure I remember reading that the Goering was a complete meth-head by the end of the war.
I used to be a serious bike racer, and had a lot of encounters with cars. One thing I learned was that when you get hit and you have any headache at all, call someone and tell them everything that happened and get them to write it down because the next day and particularly the day after, you might THINK you remember what happened but you don't really. All the details have changed and you're re-creating the accident based on what you know, a posteriori, happened. One time someone drove across the road and hit me head-on at about 45 mph (our speeds combined) and I went through her windshield. Three days later I was describing the incident to an insurance person, reading my notes, and realized that I incorrectly remembered the car's color, what time the accident had happened, and almost every identifying characteristic of the car's driver, but my notes had it all correct.
The biggest crash I had, I was in a car and got rear-ended by a semi. I was stopped, the semi was doing about 85mph before he started braking. I don't remember that entire week, literally not a bit of it. But even so, I still don't ever drive in front of a semi truck anymore.
To maul an Oscar Wilde quote: you have to be somewhat comfortable before you can be really miserable. People who are right at the edge of survival have dulled responses: losing a limb, a child, is only a little worse than the day-to-day struggle to live. Nothing focusses a person's attention like starvation.
I'm not saying rape, or any other crisis, is less horrible depending on the person's circumstances. I'm saying that *everything* is *more* horrible for many millions of people in the world, so something that people sitting in an office reading words on a computer screen consider incredibly scarring and awful, seems only a little worse than everything else to someone who has lost several children from malaria, typhus, and cholera and is going to have to beg or steal food from the neighbors tonight or not eat.
I wish I had mod points to give to you. When the media yells about antiseptics breeding super-bugs Now With Extra Resistance this is what they don't understand. It's possible (and probable, given evolutionary pressure) that bacteria will become resistant to drugs that just barely kill them, like antibiotics. It's much less likely that they'll become resistant to blowtorches or bleach. They're not very intelligently designed, are they?
Of course I read it: I linked it.
The octopus design is superior to ours. There's no indication beyond that guy that the octopus has lower need for visual acuity: it just needs to see different things. The specialization around the mammalian fovea and foveola makes it better than the REST of the eye, but still doesn't make it GOOD. The rest of his article is good but that part's smokin' the crack. Some insect and fish eyes can detect as low as three photons. Humans are lucky if they can pick up 100. (as in that's what it takes to get one rod to depolarize: cones are worse yet.) If we wanted low-light viewing, we'd have octopus-design eyes. If we want acute viewing we'd have, well, the same eye fronts we currently have, with a flexible lens.
You could just design eyes intelligently, like our Intelligent Designer didn't do for us but did for octopi,, and put the rods and cones on the FRONT of the eye instead of making the photons go through the nerve layers and the physical support layers before getting to the optic nerves. Funny how the Intelligent Designer did our eyes just like all the other vertebrates, which is to say: stupidly.
The backbone makes a lot of sense in four-legged animals, but not so much in upright ones. Same with the intestinal mesentary. They could stand some redesign.
I'd like to see animals with the ability to break down cellulose, so we could digest grass in case of starvation. (Yes, like cattle do, but they rely on massive populations of intestinal microflora to do the work for them.)
It'd also be nice if we could convert two carbon units to three carbon units and regenerate sugars from fats. If we could sustain our glycogen stores by burning triglycerides, it'd be impressive both from what we could do (and for how long) AND how much skinnier people could be. It'd also increase metabolic efficiency, though, so people could gain more weight on the same amount of food: maybe not so great.
While I'm dreaming, being able to control our cholesterol reuptake in the lower intestine could help with heart disease. It'd be cool to be able to change sexes, like some fish and frogs can. It'd be cool to regenerate body parts, like starfish do. It'd be cool to have an interface so I could stick a Tagalog thumbdrive in before flying to Manila. And immortality, and pyrokinesis, and...
AND I found another article he wrote about trading off safety and convenience, which is an even better illustration of what you're talking about. "The orthodoxy of that time held that safety was about reducing accidents--educating drivers, training them, making them slow down. To Haddon, this approach made no sense. His goal was to reduce the injuries that accidents caused. In particular, he did not believe in safety measures that depended on changing the behavior of the driver, since he considered the driver unreliable, hard to educate, and prone to error. Haddon believed the best safety measures were passive." (By passive, they mean technologic fixes rather than educational ones: ABS and traction control are not considered 'passive' safety measures in the context of car design.) (This article includes the single most amazing bit of Gladwell's writing I've ever read, the part about the basketball game and the gorilla.)
From another article of his: this gem: "The reason we don't like drunk drivers is that by making the decision to drink and drive an individual deliberately increases his or her chance of killing someone else with a vehicle. But how is the moral culpability of the countless Americans who have walked into a dealership and made a decision to buy a fifty-six- hundred-pound sport utility any different?"
I've read an essay, and I thought it was his, specifically about the tradeoff we've made between safety and convenience, discussing how we introduced seat belt legislation and airbags, saw the death rate drop, and then chose to raise the speed limit, knowing full well that it would raise the death rate. In other words: we, as a culture, have decided that the convenience of rapid transport is worth a certain, specific number of deaths each year, and we'd rather keep the death rate constant to support and increase our sense of convenience, than reduce the death rate and keep our sense of convenience the same. Brutal analysis, and I'll keep looking to see if I can find that article somewhere else.
Malcolm Gladwell has written about this in this article. Among the choice quotes: "internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills."
One of the things he talks about is why minivans, which are roughly the same size and weight as SUV's, have nearly twice as good a safety record -- a little because of the design, but primarily because the people who choose to drive a minivan are likely to drive carefully, while the people who choose an SUV tend to drive like idiots, and buy the SUV in an attempt to ameliorate their stupid driving: "But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe" and "Jettas are safe because they make their drivers feel unsafe. S.U.V.s are unsafe because they make their drivers feel safe. That feeling of safety isn't the solution; it's the problem."
It's a brilliant article, like everything else he's ever written.
As other people have posted, companies DO switch shifts. A local Kodak plant has the worst of all I've heard of: you switch shifts every week, starting with morning, then going to evening, then going to graveyard, then back to morning. They've been doing this for 20 years. Employees all loathe it. I think it's unconscionable to ask people to work this way. But they claim it's the only way to be fair about who works what shift: everyone works every shift. Some parts of the company do something even weirder, and have unequal shift lengths, so you might work 4 tens one week, five 8's the next, three twelves the third.
It's a horrible idea. I don't know how well it'd work for/. but it sure isn't pleasant IRL.
>It takes more energy to make H than what you get from burning it. Therefore it is an energy sink, esp. if you get it from cracking H2O.
I was trying to shut up and not post, but I can't help it. Yes, you're right, it takes more energy to make H2 than you get from burning it. That's called entropy. Oddly enough, every other system where you do work to go from A -> B, and then recover that work as you push B -> A, also is an energy sink. Batteries? take more energy to make than you get out of them. Shall we stop using them? Coal took more energy to make than we get from it. So does gasoline. And, news flash, uranium, too, took more energy to make than we'll ever recover from fission. The nice thing about hydrogen is that it's considerably more portable: you can build a car that has a hydrogen fuel tank a lot more easily and safely than a nuclear-powered car, and somewhat more easily than a coal-powered car. Propane or methane are probably better choices than hydrogen. But hydrogen is a viable alternative, with many advantages in some situations -- just like nuclear power is a viable alternative to coal-fired power plants, probably a better alternative for big power-generation. They all have their place.
But to diss hydrogen simply because entropy exists is a stupid argument against hydrogen.
You're right that it's not a perfect solution. There are certainly things we could do to mitigate it. Just flying through clouds produces an *insane* amount of static electricity, which is why big planes and blimps have static discharge wicks. Internal electrics, and sparks from them causing fires, are a big problem. That's probably what destroyed the jetliner that blew up over new york city in 2003. (spark in center fuel tank, caused Jet A to combust: unexpected. Now they're going to pressurize the tanks with nitrogen or maybe argon.) The first generation of non-metallic aircraft -- fiberglass and carbon -- had problems with lightning strikes, so they started including a layer of metallic foil or mesh in with the composite layers to help keep them safe. The point being: these are all problems that have affected heavier-than-air machines and have been fixed, and in some cases, those same fixes would work for updated LTA aircraft as well.
I'd like to see in-flight recovery systems on all passenger aircraft, personally. They work wonders for the Cirrus 22, which I believe is the best-selling light airplane in the US right now. Why not on jetliners too, and on blimps? Much easier on slower-moving airships than on jetliners. My uncle flew an airplane that could successfully eject its personnel at Mach 2.5, so it is doable. We just need to put the engineering into it.
It's not clear from your example that you know about diatomic gases. Both nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere are diatomic, as is hydrogen: the hydrogen that filled the Hindenberg had an atomic mass of about two, helium is four, nitrogen is about 28, and oxygen about 32.
This doesn't invalidate what you're saying, but it does change the numbers somewhat.
I'm famous among my friends and even people who barely know me, for saying "John McPhee wrote about that" for almost any topic. Baby bears? Forensic geology? WWII Japanese balloon bombs? Shad? Precision excavation using shaped nuclear charges? Stopping flowing lava with seawater? Bush flying in remote Alaska wilderness? Life on Mississippi tugboats? Philosophy of environmental activism? Yep, he wrote a book about that.
One of my friends took a graduate-level course in English Composition, purely focussing on McPhee. How cool is that, to have a major college teaching a semester class about your writing?
But still: the Hindenburg burned. It burned like a bomb. And yet, most of the people lived. How many lived through the Towers crash? The thing about hydrogen is that it goes up, really really fast, especially when it's hot hydrogen. In comparison, Jet A isn't easy to light on fire. But when it does burn, it burns hot and deep and for a long time. You have a few seconds of severe excitement in a big hydrogen fire and then everything's done. It's almost like using explosives in coalmines: if the blast is fast enough, it won't ignite flammable gases. If I had my choice, I'd much rather crash in a hydrogen-filled blimp than a jet airliner.
>Cheap, comfortable, fuel efficent. Pick 2.
Tramp steamer.
Try: fast, cheap, comfortable, fuel efficient.
Rigid airships could be fast, actually: they can be built in the ideal streamlined form, so all your drag is due to wetted area rather than induced and separation drag. Strap some big jets on, and off you go. In the 1930's, the German Zeppelins were flying nonstop from Germany to Argentina. In the NINETEEN THIRTIES. Back when flying across the Atlantic in an airplane was a somewhat big deal. And talk about comfort: full cabins, beds, a dude playing the piano.
in a brilliant book called "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed." He writes about an extraordinary variety of subjects, from rustlers to growing orange trees in Florida, although much of his work is about geology. But TDPS was/is entirely about this airframe and its evolution through the '60's and '70's, and includes some great material about flight into known icing conditions, the stuff that dooms small aircraft. blimps and dirigibles can often accumulate eight inches of ice and keep flying. (A small Cessna is screwed if you put on 1/2" of ice, and a jetliner isn't much better.) McPhee also wrote a lot about the quarter-scale and tenth-scale flying models of the hybrid lifting body. It's a fantastic book, and as is usual with McPhee, turns into a book about obsession and human devotion to ideas, rather than just being about the ideas themselves.
Well, more than that, only a fraction of the people died in the Hindenburg crash, and fewer would've died if they hadn't jumped out of the cabin and slammed into the ground, there to be hit by falling debris, but waited in the cabin until it hit the ground, and then ran. Sounds a whole lot better than being on the last five or ten big jetliner crashes, which have an average mortality rate of about 80%. And plus it's a lot harder to ram a blimp into a building and do a lot of damage.
Maybe you're getting your data from some other place than I am, but my ex-gf is in China right now, has lived there for two years, and she has some alarming things to tell me about their health care system. They do NOT have universal health care or anything even like it: you either go to a local doctor, whose qualifications can be (as in the case of the person who lives down the street from her) that you've submitted papers (that you haven't even written) indicating you know enough about medicine to be licensed, or you go to a big hospital with Western medicine, where they ask for cash up front and without that, you don't get treated. There was a Wall Street Journal article about that two weeks ago, actually: a child who had cancer and since his parents couldn't continue to make payments on his biweekly chemo, treatment was discontinued. My friend who has lived there, who teaches classes and meets hundreds of people, indicates many cases of easily curable diseases (particularly STD's) that go untreated for lack of money and lack of any sort of routine health care for rural communities.
It's trickier than that. It's highly unlikely that there was only one woman. (Your post doesn't explicitly make that claim, but a lot of people misunderstand the subject to mean that.) It's possible for there to have been lots and lots of women, but because mitochondria are only passed from women to children, and because roughly half the kids are boys, it's possible to have, over a fifteen or twenty generation sequence, only one woman's mitochondria passed through. I'm working from "Patterns In Evolution" by Roger Lewin here, and, as a demo, he posits 16 couples, each of whom have two children, and tracking those through 15 generations. "At each generation, one quarter of the mothers will have two male offspring, one quarter will have two females, and one half will have one of each. The mitochondrial lineages of mothers that have only males will come to an end and eventually one lineage will dominate the entire population." In other words, the Eve hypothesis shows the region of origin of modern humanity, which is pretty clearly Africa, and tells us roughly when, assuming mitochondrial DNA information drift is relatively constant. It does not require a big population bottleneck. People probably assumed a bottleneck from an incomplete understanding of genetics and a certain wish to have a correlation with a well-known story (in the West) about a single mother of all humans. The dude who did the original research, Alan Wilson, estimated there were probably over 10,000 women in the breeding community that contained the ancestral Eve. Other critics of the theory say you can't even make THAT claim.
First off, once people say they believe in micro-evolution, they believe in evolution and they're just drawing arbitrary lines past which they say they no longer believe in evolution. That's plain silly. (Besides, they don't really: if you proposed teaching nothing but micro-evolution in schools they'd be as pissed. They know perfectly well that if you show a child micro-evolution and then you show a child a series of pictures of prosimians, chimps, and humans, the kids will connect the dots.)
Second off, you're entirely right about the bacteria can't digest certain proteins. The bacteria that are used in these tests are deficient -- normal bacteria CAN digest the material in question, and these have a very slight mutation in the relevant enzyme such that it doesn't work. Exposure to mutagens reverses the mutation and allows the bacterium to regain the activity that its distant siblings have. So, in a way you're right: it's not doing something magnificent, something that's never been done before. However, we're talking a single generation. It's going from gonna-die-of-the-starvations to life-on-easy-street in a single generation. Multiply that by a trillion generations and it's not hard for me to believe in development of eyes, or the current ID holy grails of ATP synthase and rotor/stator flagellae. For a while the ID crowd was all on about how the blood clotting sequence, or the immune complement activation sequence, were both so unbelievably complex -- but both of them consist of lots of similar proteins, each of which activates the next one in the sequence. If you accept that DNA can get duplicated sequentially, which is seen quite often in plants, then you can probably accept that a strand of DNA might pick up three or four copies of the same gene (there are good reasons for this to happen, and it's seen regularly in developing drug-resistance in bacteria coz it's a fast way to produce lots of material to help the bacterium overcome an antibiotic) and then you have exactly the sort of minor changes that we're talking about in my example, where a protein is produced that no longer does exactly what the other proteins do, and you have the basic building block for a cascade signaling system. (that sentence was way too long.) You get the general point: for most systems, we can point at a series of developmental steps, all of which are in evidence elsewhere, from which you can get from near-nothing to a spectacularly complex system. As I said, bacterial flagellae are currently a big deal in the ID theory wonk crowd, so let's talk about that. There are two proteins that make up the stator -- the part solidly attached to the bacterium's butt -- and both are required for the bacterial flagellum to work. They look a WHOLE lot like one another; there are long stretches of their sequences that are identical. It's hard to look at the sequence or the overall topology and come to any other conclusion than that at one point they were the same protein and maybe the flagellum didn't work as well back then. Likewise, if you put a severe mutation in one of the proteins -- substitute an amino acid called proline for an existing aa in the sequence, which puts a big kink in a protein chain and makes it unable to take the shape it used to -- the bacterium which bears this mutation has an inoperable flagellum, and presumably will die young and bitter. However, if you then do exactly what I was talking about earlier, and splice in two or three more copies of the other protein, the one that looks very much like the now-screwed-up one, the bacterium will overproduce the second protein and its flagellum will use THAT protein, doubled-up, in place of the mutated one, and lo and behold, the flagellum works again. (not well, as it happens, but better than nothing at all.) So, by duplication, it overcomes its problem. I grant you that's not something brand new either. But let's go a bit further afield: in order for bacteria to assemble a flagellar structure they need to essentially drill a hole in their skin to shove
If you're curious, you should check out the book "Free Flight" by James Fallows: it's largely about the building of the Cirrus (a composite airplane that's outselling Cessna in the small general aviation field) and the Eclipse. The Eclipse company was started by a couple Microsoft executives: they're planning on making jets for just about $1M. Cessna and Raytheon and others make comparable stuff starting at about twice that, although Adam Aircraft and a few others are hoping to field things similiar to the Eclipse. Obviously none of them are made in 6 minutes. I've seen estimates of between 400 and 3000 hours construction time per aircraft for most light jets. One of the huge advantages of the construction of the Eclipse is stir-friction welding, which gets rid of most of the rivetting that is a massively labor-intensive part of making most metal airplanes.
>The problem is that on first glance it doesn't seem useful to have only one wing, or wings too short to lift your mass.
PENGUINS!
The rest of my reply is a little tautological: if you have a bunch of molecules that are halfway alive, groupings that have characteristics that allow them to last longer... last longer. And after a while, they're all that there is, because they've outlasted the others.
Slashdot Mirror
I may be wrong about this and am not going to google it from work given the search terms I'd be using, but I'm pretty sure the Nazis invented methamphetamines and gave them in large quantities to their soldiers -- not for overcoming scruples, but for overcoming exhaustion. I'm pretty sure I remember reading that the Goering was a complete meth-head by the end of the war.
I used to be a serious bike racer, and had a lot of encounters with cars. One thing I learned was that when you get hit and you have any headache at all, call someone and tell them everything that happened and get them to write it down because the next day and particularly the day after, you might THINK you remember what happened but you don't really. All the details have changed and you're re-creating the accident based on what you know, a posteriori, happened. One time someone drove across the road and hit me head-on at about 45 mph (our speeds combined) and I went through her windshield. Three days later I was describing the incident to an insurance person, reading my notes, and realized that I incorrectly remembered the car's color, what time the accident had happened, and almost every identifying characteristic of the car's driver, but my notes had it all correct.
The biggest crash I had, I was in a car and got rear-ended by a semi. I was stopped, the semi was doing about 85mph before he started braking. I don't remember that entire week, literally not a bit of it. But even so, I still don't ever drive in front of a semi truck anymore.
To maul an Oscar Wilde quote: you have to be somewhat comfortable before you can be really miserable.
People who are right at the edge of survival have dulled responses: losing a limb, a child, is only a little worse than the day-to-day struggle to live. Nothing focusses a person's attention like starvation.
I'm not saying rape, or any other crisis, is less horrible depending on the person's circumstances. I'm saying that *everything* is *more* horrible for many millions of people in the world, so something that people sitting in an office reading words on a computer screen consider incredibly scarring and awful, seems only a little worse than everything else to someone who has lost several children from malaria, typhus, and cholera and is going to have to beg or steal food from the neighbors tonight or not eat.
And another one here. Wiki, oddly, has nothing about it. I could change that, I guess...
I wish I had mod points to give to you. When the media yells about antiseptics breeding super-bugs Now With Extra Resistance this is what they don't understand. It's possible (and probable, given evolutionary pressure) that bacteria will become resistant to drugs that just barely kill them, like antibiotics. It's much less likely that they'll become resistant to blowtorches or bleach. They're not very intelligently designed, are they?
Of course I read it: I linked it. The octopus design is superior to ours. There's no indication beyond that guy that the octopus has lower need for visual acuity: it just needs to see different things. The specialization around the mammalian fovea and foveola makes it better than the REST of the eye, but still doesn't make it GOOD. The rest of his article is good but that part's smokin' the crack. Some insect and fish eyes can detect as low as three photons. Humans are lucky if they can pick up 100. (as in that's what it takes to get one rod to depolarize: cones are worse yet.) If we wanted low-light viewing, we'd have octopus-design eyes. If we want acute viewing we'd have, well, the same eye fronts we currently have, with a flexible lens.
That's *unsanitary* and then I'd be speaking in a funny voice, which isn't gonna get me far with those hot Filipina chicks.
You could just design eyes intelligently, like our Intelligent Designer didn't do for us but did for octopi,, and put the rods and cones on the FRONT of the eye instead of making the photons go through the nerve layers and the physical support layers before getting to the optic nerves. Funny how the Intelligent Designer did our eyes just like all the other vertebrates, which is to say: stupidly.
The backbone makes a lot of sense in four-legged animals, but not so much in upright ones. Same with the intestinal mesentary. They could stand some redesign.
I'd like to see animals with the ability to break down cellulose, so we could digest grass in case of starvation. (Yes, like cattle do, but they rely on massive populations of intestinal microflora to do the work for them.)
It'd also be nice if we could convert two carbon units to three carbon units and regenerate sugars from fats. If we could sustain our glycogen stores by burning triglycerides, it'd be impressive both from what we could do (and for how long) AND how much skinnier people could be. It'd also increase metabolic efficiency, though, so people could gain more weight on the same amount of food: maybe not so great.
While I'm dreaming, being able to control our cholesterol reuptake in the lower intestine could help with heart disease. It'd be cool to be able to change sexes, like some fish and frogs can. It'd be cool to regenerate body parts, like starfish do. It'd be cool to have an interface so I could stick a Tagalog thumbdrive in before flying to Manila. And immortality, and pyrokinesis, and...
AND I found another article he wrote about trading off safety and convenience, which is an even better illustration of what you're talking about.
"The orthodoxy of that time held that safety was about reducing accidents--educating drivers, training them, making them slow down. To Haddon, this approach made no sense. His goal was to reduce the injuries that accidents caused. In particular, he did not believe in safety measures that depended on changing the behavior of the driver, since he considered the driver unreliable, hard to educate, and prone to error. Haddon believed the best safety measures were passive." (By passive, they mean technologic fixes rather than educational ones: ABS and traction control are not considered 'passive' safety measures in the context of car design.) (This article includes the single most amazing bit of Gladwell's writing I've ever read, the part about the basketball game and the gorilla.)
From another article of his: this gem: "The reason we don't like drunk drivers is that by making the decision to drink and drive an individual deliberately increases his or her chance of killing someone else with a vehicle. But how is the moral culpability of the countless Americans who have walked into a dealership and made a decision to buy a fifty-six- hundred-pound sport utility any different?"
I've read an essay, and I thought it was his, specifically about the tradeoff we've made between safety and convenience, discussing how we introduced seat belt legislation and airbags, saw the death rate drop, and then chose to raise the speed limit, knowing full well that it would raise the death rate. In other words: we, as a culture, have decided that the convenience of rapid transport is worth a certain, specific number of deaths each year, and we'd rather keep the death rate constant to support and increase our sense of convenience, than reduce the death rate and keep our sense of convenience the same. Brutal analysis, and I'll keep looking to see if I can find that article somewhere else.
Malcolm Gladwell has written about this in this article. Among the choice quotes: "internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills."
One of the things he talks about is why minivans, which are roughly the same size and weight as SUV's, have nearly twice as good a safety record -- a little because of the design, but primarily because the people who choose to drive a minivan are likely to drive carefully, while the people who choose an SUV tend to drive like idiots, and buy the SUV in an attempt to ameliorate their stupid driving: "But that's the puzzle of what has happened to the automobile world: feeling safe has become more important than actually being safe" and "Jettas are safe because they make their drivers feel unsafe. S.U.V.s are unsafe because they make their drivers feel safe. That feeling of safety isn't the solution; it's the problem."
It's a brilliant article, like everything else he's ever written.
As other people have posted, companies DO switch shifts. A local Kodak plant has the worst of all I've heard of: you switch shifts every week, starting with morning, then going to evening, then going to graveyard, then back to morning. They've been doing this for 20 years. Employees all loathe it. I think it's unconscionable to ask people to work this way. But they claim it's the only way to be fair about who works what shift: everyone works every shift. Some parts of the company do something even weirder, and have unequal shift lengths, so you might work 4 tens one week, five 8's the next, three twelves the third. It's a horrible idea. I don't know how well it'd work for /. but it sure isn't pleasant IRL.
>It takes more energy to make H than what you get from burning it. Therefore it is an energy sink, esp. if you get it from cracking H2O.
I was trying to shut up and not post, but I can't help it.
Yes, you're right, it takes more energy to make H2 than you get from burning it. That's called entropy. Oddly enough, every other system where you do work to go from A -> B, and then recover that work as you push B -> A, also is an energy sink. Batteries? take more energy to make than you get out of them. Shall we stop using them? Coal took more energy to make than we get from it. So does gasoline. And, news flash, uranium, too, took more energy to make than we'll ever recover from fission.
The nice thing about hydrogen is that it's considerably more portable: you can build a car that has a hydrogen fuel tank a lot more easily and safely than a nuclear-powered car, and somewhat more easily than a coal-powered car. Propane or methane are probably better choices than hydrogen. But hydrogen is a viable alternative, with many advantages in some situations -- just like nuclear power is a viable alternative to coal-fired power plants, probably a better alternative for big power-generation. They all have their place.
But to diss hydrogen simply because entropy exists is a stupid argument against hydrogen.
You're right that it's not a perfect solution. There are certainly things we could do to mitigate it. Just flying through clouds produces an *insane* amount of static electricity, which is why big planes and blimps have static discharge wicks. Internal electrics, and sparks from them causing fires, are a big problem. That's probably what destroyed the jetliner that blew up over new york city in 2003. (spark in center fuel tank, caused Jet A to combust: unexpected. Now they're going to pressurize the tanks with nitrogen or maybe argon.) The first generation of non-metallic aircraft -- fiberglass and carbon -- had problems with lightning strikes, so they started including a layer of metallic foil or mesh in with the composite layers to help keep them safe. The point being: these are all problems that have affected heavier-than-air machines and have been fixed, and in some cases, those same fixes would work for updated LTA aircraft as well.
I'd like to see in-flight recovery systems on all passenger aircraft, personally. They work wonders for the Cirrus 22, which I believe is the best-selling light airplane in the US right now. Why not on jetliners too, and on blimps? Much easier on slower-moving airships than on jetliners. My uncle flew an airplane that could successfully eject its personnel at Mach 2.5, so it is doable. We just need to put the engineering into it.
It's not clear from your example that you know about diatomic gases. Both nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere are diatomic, as is hydrogen: the hydrogen that filled the Hindenberg had an atomic mass of about two, helium is four, nitrogen is about 28, and oxygen about 32.
This doesn't invalidate what you're saying, but it does change the numbers somewhat.
I'm famous among my friends and even people who barely know me, for saying "John McPhee wrote about that" for almost any topic. Baby bears? Forensic geology? WWII Japanese balloon bombs? Shad? Precision excavation using shaped nuclear charges? Stopping flowing lava with seawater? Bush flying in remote Alaska wilderness? Life on Mississippi tugboats? Philosophy of environmental activism? Yep, he wrote a book about that.
One of my friends took a graduate-level course in English Composition, purely focussing on McPhee. How cool is that, to have a major college teaching a semester class about your writing?
But still: the Hindenburg burned. It burned like a bomb. And yet, most of the people lived. How many lived through the Towers crash? The thing about hydrogen is that it goes up, really really fast, especially when it's hot hydrogen. In comparison, Jet A isn't easy to light on fire. But when it does burn, it burns hot and deep and for a long time. You have a few seconds of severe excitement in a big hydrogen fire and then everything's done. It's almost like using explosives in coalmines: if the blast is fast enough, it won't ignite flammable gases. If I had my choice, I'd much rather crash in a hydrogen-filled blimp than a jet airliner.
Damn, should've previewed. Imagine a carriage return between "Pick 2" and "Tramp steamer".
>Cheap, comfortable, fuel efficent. Pick 2. Tramp steamer. Try: fast, cheap, comfortable, fuel efficient. Rigid airships could be fast, actually: they can be built in the ideal streamlined form, so all your drag is due to wetted area rather than induced and separation drag. Strap some big jets on, and off you go. In the 1930's, the German Zeppelins were flying nonstop from Germany to Argentina. In the NINETEEN THIRTIES. Back when flying across the Atlantic in an airplane was a somewhat big deal. And talk about comfort: full cabins, beds, a dude playing the piano.
in a brilliant book called "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed." He writes about an extraordinary variety of subjects, from rustlers to growing orange trees in Florida, although much of his work is about geology. But TDPS was/is entirely about this airframe and its evolution through the '60's and '70's, and includes some great material about flight into known icing conditions, the stuff that dooms small aircraft. blimps and dirigibles can often accumulate eight inches of ice and keep flying. (A small Cessna is screwed if you put on 1/2" of ice, and a jetliner isn't much better.) McPhee also wrote a lot about the quarter-scale and tenth-scale flying models of the hybrid lifting body. It's a fantastic book, and as is usual with McPhee, turns into a book about obsession and human devotion to ideas, rather than just being about the ideas themselves.
Well, more than that, only a fraction of the people died in the Hindenburg crash, and fewer would've died if they hadn't jumped out of the cabin and slammed into the ground, there to be hit by falling debris, but waited in the cabin until it hit the ground, and then ran. Sounds a whole lot better than being on the last five or ten big jetliner crashes, which have an average mortality rate of about 80%. And plus it's a lot harder to ram a blimp into a building and do a lot of damage.
Maybe you're getting your data from some other place than I am, but my ex-gf is in China right now, has lived there for two years, and she has some alarming things to tell me about their health care system. They do NOT have universal health care or anything even like it: you either go to a local doctor, whose qualifications can be (as in the case of the person who lives down the street from her) that you've submitted papers (that you haven't even written) indicating you know enough about medicine to be licensed, or you go to a big hospital with Western medicine, where they ask for cash up front and without that, you don't get treated. There was a Wall Street Journal article about that two weeks ago, actually: a child who had cancer and since his parents couldn't continue to make payments on his biweekly chemo, treatment was discontinued. My friend who has lived there, who teaches classes and meets hundreds of people, indicates many cases of easily curable diseases (particularly STD's) that go untreated for lack of money and lack of any sort of routine health care for rural communities.
It's trickier than that. It's highly unlikely that there was only one woman. (Your post doesn't explicitly make that claim, but a lot of people misunderstand the subject to mean that.) It's possible for there to have been lots and lots of women, but because mitochondria are only passed from women to children, and because roughly half the kids are boys, it's possible to have, over a fifteen or twenty generation sequence, only one woman's mitochondria passed through. I'm working from "Patterns In Evolution" by Roger Lewin here, and, as a demo, he posits 16 couples, each of whom have two children, and tracking those through 15 generations.
"At each generation, one quarter of the mothers will have two male offspring, one quarter will have two females, and one half will have one of each. The mitochondrial lineages of mothers that have only males will come to an end and eventually one lineage will dominate the entire population."
In other words, the Eve hypothesis shows the region of origin of modern humanity, which is pretty clearly Africa, and tells us roughly when, assuming mitochondrial DNA information drift is relatively constant. It does not require a big population bottleneck. People probably assumed a bottleneck from an incomplete understanding of genetics and a certain wish to have a correlation with a well-known story (in the West) about a single mother of all humans.
The dude who did the original research, Alan Wilson, estimated there were probably over 10,000 women in the breeding community that contained the ancestral Eve. Other critics of the theory say you can't even make THAT claim.
First off, once people say they believe in micro-evolution, they believe in evolution and they're just drawing arbitrary lines past which they say they no longer believe in evolution. That's plain silly. (Besides, they don't really: if you proposed teaching nothing but micro-evolution in schools they'd be as pissed. They know perfectly well that if you show a child micro-evolution and then you show a child a series of pictures of prosimians, chimps, and humans, the kids will connect the dots.)
Second off, you're entirely right about the bacteria can't digest certain proteins. The bacteria that are used in these tests are deficient -- normal bacteria CAN digest the material in question, and these have a very slight mutation in the relevant enzyme such that it doesn't work. Exposure to mutagens reverses the mutation and allows the bacterium to regain the activity that its distant siblings have. So, in a way you're right: it's not doing something magnificent, something that's never been done before. However, we're talking a single generation. It's going from gonna-die-of-the-starvations to life-on-easy-street in a single generation. Multiply that by a trillion generations and it's not hard for me to believe in development of eyes, or the current ID holy grails of ATP synthase and rotor/stator flagellae. For a while the ID crowd was all on about how the blood clotting sequence, or the immune complement activation sequence, were both so unbelievably complex -- but both of them consist of lots of similar proteins, each of which activates the next one in the sequence. If you accept that DNA can get duplicated sequentially, which is seen quite often in plants, then you can probably accept that a strand of DNA might pick up three or four copies of the same gene (there are good reasons for this to happen, and it's seen regularly in developing drug-resistance in bacteria coz it's a fast way to produce lots of material to help the bacterium overcome an antibiotic) and then you have exactly the sort of minor changes that we're talking about in my example, where a protein is produced that no longer does exactly what the other proteins do, and you have the basic building block for a cascade signaling system. (that sentence was way too long.) You get the general point: for most systems, we can point at a series of developmental steps, all of which are in evidence elsewhere, from which you can get from near-nothing to a spectacularly complex system. As I said, bacterial flagellae are currently a big deal in the ID theory wonk crowd, so let's talk about that. There are two proteins that make up the stator -- the part solidly attached to the bacterium's butt -- and both are required for the bacterial flagellum to work. They look a WHOLE lot like one another; there are long stretches of their sequences that are identical. It's hard to look at the sequence or the overall topology and come to any other conclusion than that at one point they were the same protein and maybe the flagellum didn't work as well back then. Likewise, if you put a severe mutation in one of the proteins -- substitute an amino acid called proline for an existing aa in the sequence, which puts a big kink in a protein chain and makes it unable to take the shape it used to -- the bacterium which bears this mutation has an inoperable flagellum, and presumably will die young and bitter. However, if you then do exactly what I was talking about earlier, and splice in two or three more copies of the other protein, the one that looks very much like the now-screwed-up one, the bacterium will overproduce the second protein and its flagellum will use THAT protein, doubled-up, in place of the mutated one, and lo and behold, the flagellum works again. (not well, as it happens, but better than nothing at all.) So, by duplication, it overcomes its problem. I grant you that's not something brand new either. But let's go a bit further afield: in order for bacteria to assemble a flagellar structure they need to essentially drill a hole in their skin to shove
If you're curious, you should check out the book "Free Flight" by James Fallows: it's largely about the building of the Cirrus (a composite airplane that's outselling Cessna in the small general aviation field) and the Eclipse. The Eclipse company was started by a couple Microsoft executives: they're planning on making jets for just about $1M. Cessna and Raytheon and others make comparable stuff starting at about twice that, although Adam Aircraft and a few others are hoping to field things similiar to the Eclipse. Obviously none of them are made in 6 minutes. I've seen estimates of between 400 and 3000 hours construction time per aircraft for most light jets. One of the huge advantages of the construction of the Eclipse is stir-friction welding, which gets rid of most of the rivetting that is a massively labor-intensive part of making most metal airplanes.
>The problem is that on first glance it doesn't seem useful to have only one wing, or wings too short to lift your mass.
PENGUINS!
The rest of my reply is a little tautological: if you have a bunch of molecules that are halfway alive, groupings that have characteristics that allow them to last longer... last longer. And after a while, they're all that there is, because they've outlasted the others.