For the record, I spend a *lot* of time riding my bike in rural areas, where the only town in a county larger than the state of Rhode Island only has 4000 people in it, and a *lot* of time riding in fairly urban areas, where one county contains over a million people, and the only place I've ever seen open fires of garbage, couches, and cars, was urban. There are big fires in rural areas on a regular basis, but they're mostly burning weeds. In both the city I live in and the rural county where I spend time biking, there are piles of derelict buildings. The difference is that in the rural environments they're usually wood, and empty, and going away quickly, whereas in the city they're usually concrete, full of winos and junkies who use the outside walls as bathrooms, and filled with refuse that locals who can't afford garbage collection have stashed there. It's been my observation that while people have the space to make much larger messes in rural environments, the really astoundingly nasty messes are urban.
Read frankschwab's link above about multiphase buck converters -- I learned some stuff from it (and I help design buck converters...) These are synchronous buck converters, so they have a high and low side mosfet, no freewheeling diode, and by putting several in parallel and then running them in round-robin style, you can reduce your power supply output ripple. It's a pretty sophisticated technique, and it's possible that they need 12 to get both the efficiency they want and the ripple they need. (If you're working with a synch buck, an efficiency limitation is the equivalent series resistance of the output capacitor, which also determines your output ripple, so by going to parallel converters you can tolerate smaller output caps without increasing output ripple.)
>AT&T also said an open-access network would deprive taxpayers of billions of dollars, and inhibit the growth of wireless broadband in the country.
Yeah, well, if AT&T doesn't pay me $20897678937 per year for being a smart guy, they're depriving the employees of a bunch of airplane and bicycle companies *enormous* incomes, which is immoral and unethical. I'm sure AT&T will see the righteousness of this stance.
If Google manages to get the value of licensed spectrum licences reduced, then at value *is* the market value, right? They're not trying to get something at below-market value, they're trying to reduce the market's evaluation of the value so that they can get in the game. That's the very basis of an economy-based market, right?
They support Bush because they believe that either what he's doing is being done for a worthwhile goal or because they believe he's a good person. The first reason is a restatement of the end justifying the means: if they believed that it was necessary to light babies on fire to keep America safe, they'd approve of him lighting babies on fire. The second is simply admiration/fanboyism. Both blind people to the consequences of actions, and both are (part of ) the reason that laws, and following the written laws, is the basis for civilization.
I've never heard of that. That's *awesome*. So by running the saw backwards you effectively reduce the rake angle of the teeth, making it steel-capable. What a fabulous idea. Next time I have a dying skilsaw I will try that.
Yeah, another thing I learned was to be *very* careful when you're cutting big graphite blocks (for machining into high-temp casting dies) on a cutoff saw. Big clouds of carbon also conduct electricity pretty amazingly well and you get some seriously spectacular arcing.
>This stuff isn't about opinion. There is a right answer.
I agree with you. But, see, here's the thing: they do, too. It's just that their 'right answer' is different than yours because they're starting from different base assumptions.
If you assume that the Bible is literally true, then all the evidence of geology must be wrong, because it contradicts something that's true. It's no use arguing about geology with someone who assumes the Bible is literally true, because you're arguing about the wrong thing: you're arguing about a symptom. In the same way, the Reagan administration assumed that fighting AIDS was either a waste of money or wasn't affecting their constituents, so spending time on it was, objectively speaking, a bad idea, regardless of its effects. Clinton wouldn't dabble about in needle exchange because polls showed that more people who voted weren't in favor of it than were. That's a fundamental problem with democracy: the people we elect aren't interested in doing what's right, they're interested in keeping their jobs, and as such, the Right Answer is the one that keeps them their jobs.
I spend a lot of time in metal yards, buying scrap for various art projects. One of the frightening things to watch is people using stock woodworking equipment on aluminum, and I'm talking running a 2" thick plate of aluminum 5" wide and 10' long through a radial arm saw with a standard carbide blade on it. The noise is incredible, especially when they're running, say, huge sheets of 1/8" plate aluminum through tablesaws. I have yet to buy/use one, but people are selling blades that are rated to cut steel using a standard cutoff/skilsaw, one of those handheld ones. It's hard to describe the showers of sparks coming off these things. My neighbor across the street and I both have abrasive cutoff saws, and we can easily throw sparkstreams across the street into each other's yards cutting heavy steel tubing. But of course those are *designed* for cutting steel. It's frightening watching woodworking tools that can tolerate/handle steel.
actually now I'm reminded of a time when my brother was cutting a hole for a garage door in a building, with a skilsaw, and someone came up and set a storm sewer grating against the wall where he was working. He said the cut speed really slowed down and there were a *lot* of sparks, but he got through several of the crossmembers, which were probably 3/4" square, before the skilsaw really started acting unhappy. He said he thought he'd just hit some nails. (it wasn't HIS skilsaw so he didn't stop immediately: the tragedy of rental tools writ large.)
I haven't read the article because for some reason our corporate firewall doesn't like it (but it's cool with slashdot: ??!?)
Anyway, I know there are multiple paths for drug resistance. Generally speaking, antibiotics target a specific enzyme or pathway. Take penicillin: it inhibits an enzyme used in linking sugars used in building the cell wall. To evade this, some bacteria make beta-lactamases, enzymes that specifically attack and break down penicillin, while other bacteria just massively overproduce the enzyme that the penicillin targets, so that even under high penicillin dosages, there is enough enzyme activity left that the bacterium can build strong cell walls. Those are completely different forms of resistance, and one drug is unlikely to manage to stop both (unless it just kills the cell, which will of course stop both mechanisms, but that's not what we're talking about.) If you're interested, here's an interesting article that discussses a bunch of issues related to developing antibiotic-resistance, including quick takes on how it's not really related to massive widespread antibiotic use, to length of time using the antibiotic, and some other widely-held misunderstandings.
I know this will probably mark me as pedantic, but, for all intents and purposes, *every* substance that has health benefits is toxic in large quantities. As such, we've shown toxic substances to have health benefits for probably 100000 compounds or so. The big question is the dosage: what's the distance between the effective amount and the concentration that'll kill 50% of the test subjects.
One of the things I found interesting when I was taking microbiology is the reason for 70% rubbing alcohol. More is always better, right? so they're just being cheap, giving us 70% rather than 95% concentration? Actually, there's a good reason for it, which is similar to what the article discusses: the material on the outside, that can protect the bacteria underneath. Pure or near-pure alcohol is so strong it coagulates the bacteria and material on the outside, forming a mostly-impermeable protective layer over the underlying bacteria, whereas 70% concentration seems to be as lethal as possible while still allowing the alcohol ready access to the interior of the protective slime layer.
So if you're doctorin' someone up, well, don't, but if you DO, forego the everclear in favor of whiskey. (although in many locales, everclear is apparently restricted by law to 50% alcohol concentration.)
Interesting side-note: if the alcohol burns, it's over 45% concentrated/90 proof. I don't know of a quick way to detect if it's *under* some percentage, but I suppose you could pour two shots in a tumbler, add a shot of water, and try burning it, and if it does, you're probably pretty good.
Where 'wants' == 'spends enough time using the tool to make learning the shortcuts worthwhile.'
Using a mouse is nice because someone who only uses the tool once a month, or who just started using it, can use it successfully and somewhat efficiently. However, people who use the program all the time, for hours a day, run into a whole other set of problems: their wrists hurt, and if they have keyboard shortcuts they learn to use them much more efficently than doing the same work with a mouse.
I think it's like learning to touch-type. Yeah, it's a big pain in the butt to memorize a keyboard and force the keybindings into your muscle memory, and a lot of people refuse to do it, but once you DO, it's much more efficient.
Now, it's entirely possible that anyone who uses programs enough to get to the point where learning and getting comfortable with keyboard shortcuts is, by virtue of that amount of use, defined as a geek. But I think that that's an effect, not a cause.
For the record that's the case with most small planes. You can get a C152 or Piper Tri-Pacer to go where you want via weightshift, if you're willing to spend some time doing it: climb/dive, turn, just fly slow so your turning radius is tighter. It does require a well-rigged aircraft, however. On one of my cross-countries in a particularly foul 152 we called Pumpkin-Butt (it had a truly horrible orange/white paint scheme from 1978) the plane, which had encountered a building during a bad landing and had been poorly repaired, continually wanted to turn left. It had elevator trim, but no rudder/aileron, so it just kept turning left. I found that by hanging a lunchbag on the right horn of the right control input, and loading it with one orange, one 6" crescent wrench, and one pair of pliers, I could trim it to fly straight for over 80 miles with only a few degrees' divergence, which I could easily counteract by leaning.
Now, the claim that a 'chute plane could do this is more impressive: most chute planes are considerably heavier. Some people use 182's, which are still pretty beefy airplanes, but most jump planes weigh well more than a ton and a little bit of weightshift isn't going to go very far. But I've read terrifying stories about aircraft crashing because of weight-shift disasters: poorly loaded I-beams shifting backwards on takeoff, leaving the airplane in an uncorrectable nose-up and stalling, or airplanes with loads of goats that get loose, let each other loose, and then begin running in groups back and forth in the plane, causing uncontrollable oscillations. (and let me tell you from personal experience, having a dog loose in an airplane when you hit any actual turbulence is an Incredibly Bad Idea. And, by 'actual turbulence' I don't mean light chop, the sort that everyone gets upset about in jets, I mean the sort of turbulence where the dog is bouncing alternately off the seats and the ceiling of the plane, which is only 'moderate' turbulence. Actual, honest-to-goodness 'severe' turbulence means the plane is no longer able to stay either wings-level or on-course, which is to say it's tumbling.)
I don't know how big the earth tide is, but I do know from personal experience that you can hear creaks run the length of timbered mineshafts, and my friends who used to have their own mines say they're strongest when the moon is going overhead, and they run in one direction while the moon's coming up, and another when it's setting. (And vice-versa when it's on the opposite side of the Earth.) I'd read in other places that earthtide was more like an inch or so.
That's an interesting one. Most of the captured Enigma machines were captured by the British, or given to them, and then they used them for diplomatic encryption for several decades afterwards (since they were the only people who had the facilities to decrypt them.) More interesting is that they successfully kept the whole program: enigma, decryption, capture and reuse, a nearly complete secret for 30 years, one of the few cases I know where a large-scale secret has been successfully kept. (People often talk about how impossible it is for large-scale secrets to be maintained, because so many have gotten out, but the ones that haven't gotten out, we don't know about, which is why it appears that they are impossible to keep. This simultaneously makes it look like secrets always escape, and better hides the ones that ARE kept, because we increasingly believe they can't be kept.)
4130 steel (and the slightly less common 4340) using chromium and molybdenum as alloying elements, was developed just before and during WWII by US metallurgists for use in aircraft, and was classified until the early 1960's. Now it's used for golf clubs and bicycle frames.
I said that for a reason. I grant you that in the history of the USA that prior to invading Iraq we've never before launched a pre-emptive attack on a country that has not made any belligerent moves towards the USA, so the claim that we're acting like bullies *now* is reasonable. But let's make a comparison: what we did in Iraq is like beating the crap out of a kid on the playground because he was being a small bully who might some day try to trip us. What we did in the USSR was more like going over to the other elementary school and stealing every kid's lunch money, while telling the kid "I could kill you any time I want to" every day for ten years. I think that's far scarier behavior.
>Of course western intelligence services knew all about this but the public was for the most part blissfully unaware. Of course the USA and the Europeans did the exact same thing if possibly on a smaller scale.
In the book "Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, he says (and provides evidence to support) that from roughly 1949 to the day Frances Gary Powers was shot down, there were US aircraft flying in Russian airspace twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. He goes on to say that every year throughout the early 1950's the US would do trial bombing runs with several dozen bombers and accompanying fighters over major Russian cities, during broad daylight, because the Russians didn't have anything that could stop them, and says that throughout the '50's the US recon aircraft were clearly visible, flying over, and the best the Russians could do was fly mass numbers of airplanes below the US recon aircraft to try and physically block views of things they wanted to keep secret. If you read a bit about Curtis LeMay, you'll end up A: amazed that WWIII didn't happen, and B: with a much better understanding of why the USSR didn't like the USA very much. We were acting like the biggest bullies on the block, unashamedly.
>Thus, the eye has arisen independently some 22 times in the tree of life, IIRC.
This was, basically, the claim of the incredibly brilliant and prolific biologist Ernst Mayr (who was still doing award-winning research when he was 96.) However, other sources have indicated that one of the opsin molecules involved only evolved once, so one of the core processes for vision is unique, rather than the full visual system having evolved 22 times in different ways. However, opsin-deficient, blind animals can get their sight restored with algal light-harvesting pigments used in photosynthesis. So, whether or not vision *did* evolve multiple times, it's sufficiently redundant it doesn't seem to rely on specific photoreceptors very much.
I just thought that was interesting. It also probably means the claim of many totally separate evolutions of the eye is false, but it's quite possible there were a couple related evolutions.
Your fingers are formed by apoptosis, in fact. Well, so is most everything: it all grows as tissue, and programmed cell death is what allows tissues to separate. (One interesting area of research is how the body forms hormone concentration gradients that rsult in regional apoptosis, leading to formation of eg fingers from continuous tissue.) But of course that's way prior to birth. Once you're born, having injured or marked cells commit suicide is, generally speaking, a very good thing, and messing with their ability to do so has some interesting implications.
Cessation of programmed cell death is often called cancer. I'm sure they have all sorts of good research and know lots about this, and I freely grant that a 10x increase in your chances of getting cancer somewhere down the line beats Parkinson's, but this still sounds really scary.
>Composites tend to exhibit much more strain (deflection under stress) than traditional materials.
Out of curiosity, why? It seems like this is a measure of the bulk modulus of elasticity, isn't it? and carbon fiber's modulus of elasticity is hugely massive compared to, say, Al -- but is it the epoxy adhesive that determines the bulk modulus, and the carbon fiber just determines the tensile strength? Or is it because it's anisotropic and the deflection's happening in a different plane than the carbon fiber's best strength?
There's an interesting article in this week's New Yorker about using fMRI to detect lies, because, as lots and lots of research indicates, people are terrible at it. They THINK they're good, but they suck: the studies indicated that people correctly guessed when someone was lying about 53% of the time. People look for outward signs, as you say, but the problem is that they make assumptions about what those signs are, and many other people either don't make those signs, or don't, apparently, make any sort of unconscious nonverbal-communication signs whatsoever that they're lying. They just do it. As the article says, the feedback mechanism is terrible: 99% of the time people tell the truth so you don't have an attentive filter, you never know if you've been fooled by a good lie, and false positives and false negatives overwhelm actual lies.
I have. He used to live in this area and I've run into him in the audience at several other concerts: he's a nice guy and nowhere near as frighteningly intense as the 16Horsepower/Woven Hand guy (I sort of class them together since they're both Christian freak-folk-rockers.) Next time he plays in your area, see it if you can.
GY!BE is just too weird, I guess? Plus they never tour and a lot of their songs are WAY too long for radioplay. My gf has seen them a couple of times and says it's an incredible show. I've gotten to see Silver Mount Zion, which is related (somehow) to GY!BE and they were excellent.
>> As I said, I've walked a total of 4km on that particular railroad, and there isn't a gap anywhere. So, uh, whatever.
> 4 Km on an average railroad is a trivial distance. Having no gaps in a distance that short is all but meaningless.
1. 4 Km is much, much longer than the tracks they're hauling out to the site when they're putting a railroad bed in. Which is to say: they are converting sectional track into continuous track.
2. The TCOE of mild steel is 0.00000645in/in/deg F, or thereabouts, which means in a 4 km stretch, that sees a 40 degree temp swing, the track will lengthen by about 100 cm, if my math is right. That's one *hell* of a thermal expansion gap. Which is to say: clearly, in this environment, gaps are *not* required for thermal expansion. That's because the tracks aren't straight: they have lots of curves and the roadbed/tie plate mountings are sufficiently loose that the rail line can expand and contract like an accordion. If the tracks are dead straight, like the 1600 km straight shot across the Australian desert, then yes, they have lots and lots of thermal expansion gaps. But if the roadbed has even a slight amount of curve, they dispense with gaps, particularly because they're damaging to the rails, the wheels, and the wheel bearings.
>> kewise, as I said in another bit of this thread, my understanding of the space elevator is that the fibers are not intended to >> be 36,000 miles long. They're intended to be meters long, and attached one-to-another by adhesives, just as current composite >> construction is performed.
> Well, no. Current composite construction embeds fibers in a matrix, which is not quite the same thing as attaching them to each > other. (I.E., in current composite construction the fibers function more like rebar in concrete construction.)
Current composite construction consists of taking fibers, and attaching them one-to-another by adhesives. The fibers are kevlar, S-glass, E-glass, or carbon fiber (which is selectively oxidized polyacrylonitrile, rather than nanotubes) and the adhesive is epoxy or vinylester, at least on the systems I've built. My description is factually accurate. They would *like* to weld -- by which I mean an attachment method that uses the base material as the adhesive -- their fibers together, but as far as I know they are not proposing doing that, they're proposing attachment precisely as I described it.
> well. This is why most current plans rely on minimizing joints by maximizing fiber lengths - and hoping that in addition to > developing fibers more than a few millimeters long (and being able to produce them in megaton lots), someone comes up with the > appropriate adhesive (and production process for the ribbon/cable).
I think what they're hoping for is to figure out a way to attack the ends of the nanotubes and attach some labile species to those, then somehow join them at their ends, which is going to take a miracle. In the meantime, they're probably going to try to get sufficently good fiber/adhesive bonding that, stretched over the length of the joint, it'll hold together, which is possible since the joint's tensile/shear strength per unit area will be many orders of magnitude less than the fiber's, but the area might be measured in tens of square meters, at which point it's possible they might get something that can keep the fibers together under the weight of the whole cable. I think it's very unlikely, but their system doesn't rely on 36Mm strands, just on strands that are sufficiently long that the adhered area between them exceeds the strand tensile strength. (Which implies a bunch of things about how it would have to be made -- lots of 2-dimensional pressure, vacuum degassing, anything to reduce the strand-strand distance.)
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For the record, I spend a *lot* of time riding my bike in rural areas, where the only town in a county larger than the state of Rhode Island only has 4000 people in it, and a *lot* of time riding in fairly urban areas, where one county contains over a million people, and the only place I've ever seen open fires of garbage, couches, and cars, was urban. There are big fires in rural areas on a regular basis, but they're mostly burning weeds.
In both the city I live in and the rural county where I spend time biking, there are piles of derelict buildings. The difference is that in the rural environments they're usually wood, and empty, and going away quickly, whereas in the city they're usually concrete, full of winos and junkies who use the outside walls as bathrooms, and filled with refuse that locals who can't afford garbage collection have stashed there.
It's been my observation that while people have the space to make much larger messes in rural environments, the really astoundingly nasty messes are urban.
Read frankschwab's link above about multiphase buck converters -- I learned some stuff from it (and I help design buck converters...) These are synchronous buck converters, so they have a high and low side mosfet, no freewheeling diode, and by putting several in parallel and then running them in round-robin style, you can reduce your power supply output ripple. It's a pretty sophisticated technique, and it's possible that they need 12 to get both the efficiency they want and the ripple they need. (If you're working with a synch buck, an efficiency limitation is the equivalent series resistance of the output capacitor, which also determines your output ripple, so by going to parallel converters you can tolerate smaller output caps without increasing output ripple.)
>AT&T also said an open-access network would deprive taxpayers of billions of dollars, and inhibit the growth of wireless broadband in the country.
Yeah, well, if AT&T doesn't pay me $20897678937 per year for being a smart guy, they're depriving the employees of a bunch of airplane and bicycle companies *enormous* incomes, which is immoral and unethical. I'm sure AT&T will see the righteousness of this stance.
If Google manages to get the value of licensed spectrum licences reduced, then at value *is* the market value, right? They're not trying to get something at below-market value, they're trying to reduce the market's evaluation of the value so that they can get in the game. That's the very basis of an economy-based market, right?
They support Bush because they believe that either what he's doing is being done for a worthwhile goal or because they believe he's a good person.
The first reason is a restatement of the end justifying the means: if they believed that it was necessary to light babies on fire to keep America safe, they'd approve of him lighting babies on fire.
The second is simply admiration/fanboyism.
Both blind people to the consequences of actions, and both are (part of ) the reason that laws, and following the written laws, is the basis for civilization.
I've never heard of that. That's *awesome*. So by running the saw backwards you effectively reduce the rake angle of the teeth, making it steel-capable. What a fabulous idea. Next time I have a dying skilsaw I will try that.
Yeah, another thing I learned was to be *very* careful when you're cutting big graphite blocks (for machining into high-temp casting dies) on a cutoff saw. Big clouds of carbon also conduct electricity pretty amazingly well and you get some seriously spectacular arcing.
>This stuff isn't about opinion. There is a right answer.
I agree with you. But, see, here's the thing: they do, too. It's just that their 'right answer' is different than yours because they're starting from different base assumptions.
If you assume that the Bible is literally true, then all the evidence of geology must be wrong, because it contradicts something that's true. It's no use arguing about geology with someone who assumes the Bible is literally true, because you're arguing about the wrong thing: you're arguing about a symptom. In the same way, the Reagan administration assumed that fighting AIDS was either a waste of money or wasn't affecting their constituents, so spending time on it was, objectively speaking, a bad idea, regardless of its effects. Clinton wouldn't dabble about in needle exchange because polls showed that more people who voted weren't in favor of it than were. That's a fundamental problem with democracy: the people we elect aren't interested in doing what's right, they're interested in keeping their jobs, and as such, the Right Answer is the one that keeps them their jobs.
I spend a lot of time in metal yards, buying scrap for various art projects. One of the frightening things to watch is people using stock woodworking equipment on aluminum, and I'm talking running a 2" thick plate of aluminum 5" wide and 10' long through a radial arm saw with a standard carbide blade on it. The noise is incredible, especially when they're running, say, huge sheets of 1/8" plate aluminum through tablesaws.
I have yet to buy/use one, but people are selling blades that are rated to cut steel using a standard cutoff/skilsaw, one of those handheld ones. It's hard to describe the showers of sparks coming off these things. My neighbor across the street and I both have abrasive cutoff saws, and we can easily throw sparkstreams across the street into each other's yards cutting heavy steel tubing. But of course those are *designed* for cutting steel. It's frightening watching woodworking tools that can tolerate/handle steel.
actually now I'm reminded of a time when my brother was cutting a hole for a garage door in a building, with a skilsaw, and someone came up and set a storm sewer grating against the wall where he was working. He said the cut speed really slowed down and there were a *lot* of sparks, but he got through several of the crossmembers, which were probably 3/4" square, before the skilsaw really started acting unhappy. He said he thought he'd just hit some nails. (it wasn't HIS skilsaw so he didn't stop immediately: the tragedy of rental tools writ large.)
I haven't read the article because for some reason our corporate firewall doesn't like it (but it's cool with slashdot: ??!?)
Anyway, I know there are multiple paths for drug resistance.
Generally speaking, antibiotics target a specific enzyme or pathway. Take penicillin: it inhibits an enzyme used in linking sugars used in building the cell wall. To evade this, some bacteria make beta-lactamases, enzymes that specifically attack and break down penicillin, while other bacteria just massively overproduce the enzyme that the penicillin targets, so that even under high penicillin dosages, there is enough enzyme activity left that the bacterium can build strong cell walls. Those are completely different forms of resistance, and one drug is unlikely to manage to stop both (unless it just kills the cell, which will of course stop both mechanisms, but that's not what we're talking about.)
If you're interested, here's an interesting article that discussses a bunch of issues related to developing antibiotic-resistance, including quick takes on how it's not really related to massive widespread antibiotic use, to length of time using the antibiotic, and some other widely-held misunderstandings.
I know this will probably mark me as pedantic, but, for all intents and purposes, *every* substance that has health benefits is toxic in large quantities. As such, we've shown toxic substances to have health benefits for probably 100000 compounds or so. The big question is the dosage: what's the distance between the effective amount and the concentration that'll kill 50% of the test subjects.
One of the things I found interesting when I was taking microbiology is the reason for 70% rubbing alcohol. More is always better, right? so they're just being cheap, giving us 70% rather than 95% concentration?
Actually, there's a good reason for it, which is similar to what the article discusses: the material on the outside, that can protect the bacteria underneath. Pure or near-pure alcohol is so strong it coagulates the bacteria and material on the outside, forming a mostly-impermeable protective layer over the underlying bacteria, whereas 70% concentration seems to be as lethal as possible while still allowing the alcohol ready access to the interior of the protective slime layer.
So if you're doctorin' someone up, well, don't, but if you DO, forego the everclear in favor of whiskey. (although in many locales, everclear is apparently restricted by law to 50% alcohol concentration.)
Interesting side-note: if the alcohol burns, it's over 45% concentrated/90 proof. I don't know of a quick way to detect if it's *under* some percentage, but I suppose you could pour two shots in a tumbler, add a shot of water, and try burning it, and if it does, you're probably pretty good.
>because no one wants to do that except geeks.
Where 'wants' == 'spends enough time using the tool to make learning the shortcuts worthwhile.'
Using a mouse is nice because someone who only uses the tool once a month, or who just started using it, can use it successfully and somewhat efficiently. However, people who use the program all the time, for hours a day, run into a whole other set of problems: their wrists hurt, and if they have keyboard shortcuts they learn to use them much more efficently than doing the same work with a mouse.
I think it's like learning to touch-type. Yeah, it's a big pain in the butt to memorize a keyboard and force the keybindings into your muscle memory, and a lot of people refuse to do it, but once you DO, it's much more efficient.
Now, it's entirely possible that anyone who uses programs enough to get to the point where learning and getting comfortable with keyboard shortcuts is, by virtue of that amount of use, defined as a geek. But I think that that's an effect, not a cause.
For the record that's the case with most small planes. You can get a C152 or Piper Tri-Pacer to go where you want via weightshift, if you're willing to spend some time doing it: climb/dive, turn, just fly slow so your turning radius is tighter. It does require a well-rigged aircraft, however. On one of my cross-countries in a particularly foul 152 we called Pumpkin-Butt (it had a truly horrible orange/white paint scheme from 1978) the plane, which had encountered a building during a bad landing and had been poorly repaired, continually wanted to turn left. It had elevator trim, but no rudder/aileron, so it just kept turning left. I found that by hanging a lunchbag on the right horn of the right control input, and loading it with one orange, one 6" crescent wrench, and one pair of pliers, I could trim it to fly straight for over 80 miles with only a few degrees' divergence, which I could easily counteract by leaning.
Now, the claim that a 'chute plane could do this is more impressive: most chute planes are considerably heavier. Some people use 182's, which are still pretty beefy airplanes, but most jump planes weigh well more than a ton and a little bit of weightshift isn't going to go very far. But I've read terrifying stories about aircraft crashing because of weight-shift disasters: poorly loaded I-beams shifting backwards on takeoff, leaving the airplane in an uncorrectable nose-up and stalling, or airplanes with loads of goats that get loose, let each other loose, and then begin running in groups back and forth in the plane, causing uncontrollable oscillations. (and let me tell you from personal experience, having a dog loose in an airplane when you hit any actual turbulence is an Incredibly Bad Idea. And, by 'actual turbulence' I don't mean light chop, the sort that everyone gets upset about in jets, I mean the sort of turbulence where the dog is bouncing alternately off the seats and the ceiling of the plane, which is only 'moderate' turbulence. Actual, honest-to-goodness 'severe' turbulence means the plane is no longer able to stay either wings-level or on-course, which is to say it's tumbling.)
I don't know how big the earth tide is, but I do know from personal experience that you can hear creaks run the length of timbered mineshafts, and my friends who used to have their own mines say they're strongest when the moon is going overhead, and they run in one direction while the moon's coming up, and another when it's setting. (And vice-versa when it's on the opposite side of the Earth.) I'd read in other places that earthtide was more like an inch or so.
That's an interesting one. Most of the captured Enigma machines were captured by the British, or given to them, and then they used them for diplomatic encryption for several decades afterwards (since they were the only people who had the facilities to decrypt them.) More interesting is that they successfully kept the whole program: enigma, decryption, capture and reuse, a nearly complete secret for 30 years, one of the few cases I know where a large-scale secret has been successfully kept. (People often talk about how impossible it is for large-scale secrets to be maintained, because so many have gotten out, but the ones that haven't gotten out, we don't know about, which is why it appears that they are impossible to keep. This simultaneously makes it look like secrets always escape, and better hides the ones that ARE kept, because we increasingly believe they can't be kept.)
4130 steel (and the slightly less common 4340) using chromium and molybdenum as alloying elements, was developed just before and during WWII by US metallurgists for use in aircraft, and was classified until the early 1960's. Now it's used for golf clubs and bicycle frames.
I said that for a reason. I grant you that in the history of the USA that prior to invading Iraq we've never before launched a pre-emptive attack on a country that has not made any belligerent moves towards the USA, so the claim that we're acting like bullies *now* is reasonable. But let's make a comparison: what we did in Iraq is like beating the crap out of a kid on the playground because he was being a small bully who might some day try to trip us. What we did in the USSR was more like going over to the other elementary school and stealing every kid's lunch money, while telling the kid "I could kill you any time I want to" every day for ten years. I think that's far scarier behavior.
>Of course western intelligence services knew all about this but the public was for the most part blissfully unaware. Of course the USA and the Europeans did the exact same thing if possibly on a smaller scale.
In the book "Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb" by Richard Rhodes, he says (and provides evidence to support) that from roughly 1949 to the day Frances Gary Powers was shot down, there were US aircraft flying in Russian airspace twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. He goes on to say that every year throughout the early 1950's the US would do trial bombing runs with several dozen bombers and accompanying fighters over major Russian cities, during broad daylight, because the Russians didn't have anything that could stop them, and says that throughout the '50's the US recon aircraft were clearly visible, flying over, and the best the Russians could do was fly mass numbers of airplanes below the US recon aircraft to try and physically block views of things they wanted to keep secret. If you read a bit about Curtis LeMay, you'll end up A: amazed that WWIII didn't happen, and B: with a much better understanding of why the USSR didn't like the USA very much. We were acting like the biggest bullies on the block, unashamedly.
>Thus, the eye has arisen independently some 22 times in the tree of life, IIRC.
This was, basically, the claim of the incredibly brilliant and prolific biologist Ernst Mayr (who was still doing award-winning research when he was 96.) However, other sources have indicated that one of the opsin molecules involved only evolved once, so one of the core processes for vision is unique, rather than the full visual system having evolved 22 times in different ways. However, opsin-deficient, blind animals can get their sight restored with algal light-harvesting pigments used in photosynthesis. So, whether or not vision *did* evolve multiple times, it's sufficiently redundant it doesn't seem to rely on specific photoreceptors very much.
I just thought that was interesting. It also probably means the claim of many totally separate evolutions of the eye is false, but it's quite possible there were a couple related evolutions.
Your fingers are formed by apoptosis, in fact. Well, so is most everything: it all grows as tissue, and programmed cell death is what allows tissues to separate. (One interesting area of research is how the body forms hormone concentration gradients that rsult in regional apoptosis, leading to formation of eg fingers from continuous tissue.) But of course that's way prior to birth. Once you're born, having injured or marked cells commit suicide is, generally speaking, a very good thing, and messing with their ability to do so has some interesting implications.
Cessation of programmed cell death is often called cancer.
I'm sure they have all sorts of good research and know lots about this, and I freely grant that a 10x increase in your chances of getting cancer somewhere down the line beats Parkinson's, but this still sounds really scary.
>Composites tend to exhibit much more strain (deflection under stress) than traditional materials.
Out of curiosity, why? It seems like this is a measure of the bulk modulus of elasticity, isn't it? and carbon fiber's modulus of elasticity is hugely massive compared to, say, Al -- but is it the epoxy adhesive that determines the bulk modulus, and the carbon fiber just determines the tensile strength? Or is it because it's anisotropic and the deflection's happening in a different plane than the carbon fiber's best strength?
There's an interesting article in this week's New Yorker about using fMRI to detect lies, because, as lots and lots of research indicates, people are terrible at it. They THINK they're good, but they suck: the studies indicated that people correctly guessed when someone was lying about 53% of the time. People look for outward signs, as you say, but the problem is that they make assumptions about what those signs are, and many other people either don't make those signs, or don't, apparently, make any sort of unconscious nonverbal-communication signs whatsoever that they're lying. They just do it. As the article says, the feedback mechanism is terrible: 99% of the time people tell the truth so you don't have an attentive filter, you never know if you've been fooled by a good lie, and false positives and false negatives overwhelm actual lies.
I have. He used to live in this area and I've run into him in the audience at several other concerts: he's a nice guy and nowhere near as frighteningly intense as the 16Horsepower/Woven Hand guy (I sort of class them together since they're both Christian freak-folk-rockers.) Next time he plays in your area, see it if you can.
GY!BE is just too weird, I guess? Plus they never tour and a lot of their songs are WAY too long for radioplay. My gf has seen them a couple of times and says it's an incredible show. I've gotten to see Silver Mount Zion, which is related (somehow) to GY!BE and they were excellent.
>> As I said, I've walked a total of 4km on that particular railroad, and there isn't a gap anywhere. So, uh, whatever.
> 4 Km on an average railroad is a trivial distance. Having no gaps in a distance that short is all but meaningless.
1. 4 Km is much, much longer than the tracks they're hauling out to the site when they're putting a railroad bed in. Which is to say: they are converting sectional track into continuous track.
2. The TCOE of mild steel is 0.00000645in/in/deg F, or thereabouts, which means in a 4 km stretch, that sees a 40 degree temp swing, the track will lengthen by about 100 cm, if my math is right. That's one *hell* of a thermal expansion gap. Which is to say: clearly, in this environment, gaps are *not* required for thermal expansion. That's because the tracks aren't straight: they have lots of curves and the roadbed/tie plate mountings are sufficiently loose that the rail line can expand and contract like an accordion. If the tracks are dead straight, like the 1600 km straight shot across the Australian desert, then yes, they have lots and lots of thermal expansion gaps. But if the roadbed has even a slight amount of curve, they dispense with gaps, particularly because they're damaging to the rails, the wheels, and the wheel bearings.
>> kewise, as I said in another bit of this thread, my understanding of the space elevator is that the fibers are not intended to
>> be 36,000 miles long. They're intended to be meters long, and attached one-to-another by adhesives, just as current composite
>> construction is performed.
> Well, no. Current composite construction embeds fibers in a matrix, which is not quite the same thing as attaching them to each
> other. (I.E., in current composite construction the fibers function more like rebar in concrete construction.)
Current composite construction consists of taking fibers, and attaching them one-to-another by adhesives. The fibers are kevlar, S-glass, E-glass, or carbon fiber (which is selectively oxidized polyacrylonitrile, rather than nanotubes) and the adhesive is epoxy or vinylester, at least on the systems I've built. My description is factually accurate. They would *like* to weld -- by which I mean an attachment method that uses the base material as the adhesive -- their fibers together, but as far as I know they are not proposing doing that, they're proposing attachment precisely as I described it.
> well. This is why most current plans rely on minimizing joints by maximizing fiber lengths - and hoping that in addition to
> developing fibers more than a few millimeters long (and being able to produce them in megaton lots), someone comes up with the
> appropriate adhesive (and production process for the ribbon/cable).
I think what they're hoping for is to figure out a way to attack the ends of the nanotubes and attach some labile species to those, then somehow join them at their ends, which is going to take a miracle. In the meantime, they're probably going to try to get sufficently good fiber/adhesive bonding that, stretched over the length of the joint, it'll hold together, which is possible since the joint's tensile/shear strength per unit area will be many orders of magnitude less than the fiber's, but the area might be measured in tens of square meters, at which point it's possible they might get something that can keep the fibers together under the weight of the whole cable. I think it's very unlikely, but their system doesn't rely on 36Mm strands, just on strands that are sufficiently long that the adhered area between them exceeds the strand tensile strength. (Which implies a bunch of things about how it would have to be made -- lots of 2-dimensional pressure, vacuum degassing, anything to reduce the strand-strand distance.)
My favorite: Intel, where quality is job #0.99997863456!