I agree. Yes, global warming is a potentially species ending issue... I guess. But 1 or 2 degrees over how many decades?
1 to 2 degrees, times the mass of the atmosphere (really, really big number) is a frickin' huge amount of additional energy available that's just waiting to cause storms and other extreme weather.
And tell me the world isn't better off being even 10 degrees warmer (less snow, less infrastructure costs).
The problem is that not only does the average temperature rise, but the standard deviation rises, too. So you'll end up with even more extreme temperature swings. The increase also isn't evenly distributed (some areas will actually end up becoming colder). You'll have to deal with tropical and subtropical diseases in areas that were formerly temperate. I don't want to have to deal with frikkin' malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever and whatnot. Then you have ocean acidification from the CO2 that starts negatively impacting (read: killing) useful (read: valuable) fish and seafood stocks. Coastal areas will become flooded, making people move further inland.
"Oh, but then in 200 years, we'll turn into Venus" Meh, prove it.
We don't need to turn into Venus to make Earth a really shitty place to live.
What I'm referring to as a seeming "paradox" is not only the fact that the base of the food chain is dramatically expanded by nutrients --
but that the organisms making up this foundation produce _oxygen_ from photosynthesis supporting algae grazers with both food _and_ oxygen.
Why don't the smaller, rapidly-reproducing zooplankton take up the gauntlet?
Because algae consume oxygen when there is no sunlight, just like any other plant. If there's sufficient quantities of algae, they will suffocate any higher life form that requires oxygen.
Biodiversity is declining and that's a bad thing even if more weeds are growing in Oshkosh.
That's a good point. I read an article a while ago stating that some parts of the oceans are experiencing a "return of the slime" - the higher life forms are disappearing, while simpler life forms are booming.
Probably not something we want to have. I'd rather have fish and seafood than algae slime, thank you very much.
Well, it was *believed* to be the best strategy based on not much more than guesswork, and certainly not on any real historical data.
Yeah, right, because there have been no hijackings every before 9/11. Geez, don't you read the paper or watch the news ?
In most previous organized hijackings, the hijackers were usually heavily armed, and passengers who proved to be a nuisance usually ended up dead on the tarmac during a refueling stop. Heck, there were fairly massive casualties even when planes were stormed by special forces (that have way more firepower than the passengers could bring to bear against the hijackers). There were some instances of passengers overpowering the hijacker, but that usually only happened when there was only a single hijacker, armed with a knife.
Most people would rather live on their knees than die on their feet, I guess.
Given the chance, I'd rather "live on my knees" for a short while (hijackings don't last forever, y'know) then be dead forever. A few hours, or even days, don't determine how someone lives.
There was no reason for those planes to crash, except the herd-like mentality of the people on those planes who followed the governments advice to 'just do what they say, you'll be released later after they negotiate'.
Well, believe it or not, that was the best strategy for survival for the majority of airplane hijackings.
Remember that OTHER plane? The one that crashed? The one where the civilians on the plane, in a time of national crises, defended their country with their lives? Notice that nobody mentions THAT plane, they just babble about the twin towers and the Pentagon. In my mind there was one plane full of Heroes, and three planes full of sheep that, quite frankly, deserved to die for their apathy.
The passengers on "that OTHER plane" had a distinct advantage over the the two planes that hit the twin towers: They fscking _knew_ what had happened to the first two planes. In your mind is pure delusion, nothing else. In each plane, the passengers acted according to the information that was available to them.
A name that rings with the sounds of two recent so called enemies.
They voted for a guy called George ealier. A name that rings with the sound of one of the very few people in history that had a realistic chance of utterly destroying the US of A as a country.
...and, of course, if your antimatter-powered airship crashes, the phrase "Oh, the Humanity!" is going to be even more applicable. Maybe without the "the".
In fact the curvature can even be negative, if we have negative mass density.
Isn't a negative mass density also necessary to create stable wormholes ? As far as I remember, wormholes are possible... if you can find something that creates a negative curvature of spacetime.
So, if antimatter falls up, we're one step (of, um, billions, probably) closer to creating artificial wormholes.
... that there was any question about how antimatter behaves in a gravitational field. I thought that it had mass just like anything else, and is therefore affected by gravity just like any other particle with mass.
Wouldn't "falling up" mean that antimatter has negative mass ? And if so, how does this comply with energy/mass conservation laws ?
and the only thing that is a problem is metal in, on or around the body, they get ripped straight out into the bore as soon as you pass the.5 Gauss line.
Erm... no. Most metals are not ferromagnetic, and therefore will not be ripped anywhere by a magnetic field.
The other precaution is when body parts form loops (like crossed arms or legs or arms/hands holding other body parts) they could potentially cause electric shocks and minor burns.
*citation needed*
I've never heard about anything like that despite having had numerous MRI scans in the last 25 years. It should be easy to cross-check that with the law for electromagnetic induction. A conducting loop experiencing a static magnetic field will not have any current induced, and I believe given the parameters (magnetic field strength, usual areas formed by human appendages, usual human movement speeds, electric resistance of the human body), the induced currents would be way below the level needed to cause shocks and burns. Things might be different if the MRI machine has to undergo an emergency shutdown and and the magnetic field goes from 3T to 0T in a short time. That might induce quite a bit of current.
If you were to get close to such an intense magnetic field... say 10,000 kilometers... the force would begin to pull the iron out of your hemoglobin right through your tissue.
Bzzt. Sorry, single atoms of iron, or compounds containing iron, usually do not exhibit ferromanetism. The much, much weaker effects of dia- and paramagnetism apply here.
They call that one a "planet" and its 70% larger than Jupiter.
70% larger is still in the same ball park as Jupiter, at least as far as astronomers are concerned. Heck, anything below a brown dwarf is in the same ball park as Jupiter. (Astronomers also have weird definitions of "metal" and "ice" that may not quite correspond to their meanings in other fields of science).
A planet 70% more massive than Earth would count as an Earth-sized planet, too. Sure, we may not find the gravity there too appealing, but that may not bother any life that has evolved there.
I liked that part... how the hell do they know it will be more than 1,000?
Statistics. We now know that planetary systems are fairly common.
And how do they know what size?
Well, the lower size limit is given by the detection sensitivity ("If we're lucky, we can find an Earth-sized rock, but not a Mars- or Mercury-sized one."). The upper limit is given by the mass at which a lump of gas and rock starts initiating nuclear fusion and doesn't count as a planet anymore.
If they are already aware that there is these planets, then wouldnt it be more accurate to say "and finally see over 1,000 planets that we already assume exist mathematically"?
No, we don't know anything about these planets yet, but from our current knowledge about the likelihood of planetary systems we can guess how many planets we're likely to find if we examine X million stars.
HST has been working for many years and to my knowledge was only able to determine the locations of planets that were larger than Jupiter.
HSTs primary mission isn't planet-hunting, so it was neither designed for that nor does it spend most of its time doing it.
Meanwhile, discoveries of "Earth-sized" planets remain rare despite the technology that has been developed within the decade.
How much of that technology has reached space in the last decade ? Off the top of my head, I can name only one planet-hunting mission - COROT (and that's an ESA mission, not a NASA one).
So my only choices are jail or to pick up and leave at my expense?
And paying your taxes, of course. If you feel so overtaxed, then leaving might be the more economical choice in the long run. And no one said that fighting for your rights needed to be effortless or free. Heck, if you're the type of person that usually has reason to feel overtaxed, the place you're moving to might even offer you incentives for doing so.
If I cannot freely choose not to pay without incurring some other much larger expense and loss of productivity (jail or unemployment+deportation), then the taxation is being forced.
Sorry. If you're discounting the viable alternatives just because the choice you'd like to have isn't offered, then you're basically just whining. If you feel so badly violated in your rights, then moving to a place that offers better conditions, even at your own expense, is the rational thing to do. Especially in cases where it doesn't involve getting past barbed wire, attack dogs, anti-personnel mines, and goons with guns trying to shoot you in the back while you're trying to leave.
Do you still disagree?
Yes, as long as you don't have any reasons other than inconvenience and cost not to take remedial action.
It's called a passport. Only if your country won't give you one you can say that you're truly forced to do things at gunpoint. It's pretty much typical for scumbag regimes to keep their citizens from leaving. If you live in such a place, then I feel truly sorry for you, if not, then you're overlooking the blaringly obvious solution.
Do you really want Engineers in charge of designing machines?
Yes. However, I'd let someone else design the user interface for the machine.
They have a vested interest not in good machines, but in more machines.
Engineers usually want to build the perfect machine. Unfortunately, it will then require another engineer to operate it.
If engineers designed machines like lawyers made laws, you'd need to hire an engineer to operate even the most trivial machine (car, elevator, TV). We don't let the engineers get away with that. Why do we let lawyers ?
For the first time in my life, I'm living in a Democratic Republic at the moment (Germany),
Erm. The GDR ceased to exist almost two decades ago. And you certainly don't want to live in a country that mentions more than once in its name that that the government is somehow controlled by the people (i.e. "democratic", "republic", "people's"), since that's a sure sign that it is not.
The terms you're looking for (which will also be understood by someone in Germany and generally outside the US) are "direct democracy" (where people vote on stuff itself) and "indirect/representative democracy" (where people vote on representatives which then vote on / decide about stuff). Of course, the two types can also coexist in the same country.
Challenger and Columbia. I think that counts as two LOV accidents. Challenger was also a LOM, and Columbia was a partial LOM.
Those were LOCV accidents. That means they're not counted as LOV, because none of the crew survived. If they had managed to crash the shuttle during landing with the crew still getting out alive, that would have been a LOV accident.
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1 to 2 degrees, times the mass of the atmosphere (really, really big number) is a frickin' huge amount of additional energy available that's just waiting to cause storms and other extreme weather.
And tell me the world isn't better off being even 10 degrees warmer (less snow, less infrastructure costs).
The problem is that not only does the average temperature rise, but the standard deviation rises, too. So you'll end up with even more extreme temperature swings. The increase also isn't evenly distributed (some areas will actually end up becoming colder). You'll have to deal with tropical and subtropical diseases in areas that were formerly temperate. I don't want to have to deal with frikkin' malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever and whatnot. Then you have ocean acidification from the CO2 that starts negatively impacting (read: killing) useful (read: valuable) fish and seafood stocks. Coastal areas will become flooded, making people move further inland.
"Oh, but then in 200 years, we'll turn into Venus" Meh, prove it.
We don't need to turn into Venus to make Earth a really shitty place to live.
Why don't the smaller, rapidly-reproducing zooplankton take up the gauntlet?
Because algae consume oxygen when there is no sunlight, just like any other plant. If there's sufficient quantities of algae, they will suffocate any higher life form that requires oxygen.
That's a good point. I read an article a while ago stating that some parts of the oceans are experiencing a "return of the slime" - the higher life forms are disappearing, while simpler life forms are booming.
Probably not something we want to have. I'd rather have fish and seafood than algae slime, thank you very much.
The moon in general would be a good place for some big-frikkin-huge telescopes.
Yeah, right, because there have been no hijackings every before 9/11. Geez, don't you read the paper or watch the news ?
In most previous organized hijackings, the hijackers were usually heavily armed, and passengers who proved to be a nuisance usually ended up dead on the tarmac during a refueling stop. Heck, there were fairly massive casualties even when planes were stormed by special forces (that have way more firepower than the passengers could bring to bear against the hijackers). There were some instances of passengers overpowering the hijacker, but that usually only happened when there was only a single hijacker, armed with a knife.
Most people would rather live on their knees than die on their feet, I guess.
Given the chance, I'd rather "live on my knees" for a short while (hijackings don't last forever, y'know) then be dead forever. A few hours, or even days, don't determine how someone lives.
Well, believe it or not, that was the best strategy for survival for the majority of airplane hijackings.
Remember that OTHER plane? The one that crashed? The one where the civilians on the plane, in a time of national crises, defended their country with their lives? Notice that nobody mentions THAT plane, they just babble about the twin towers and the Pentagon. In my mind there was one plane full of Heroes, and three planes full of sheep that, quite frankly, deserved to die for their apathy.
The passengers on "that OTHER plane" had a distinct advantage over the the two planes that hit the twin towers: They fscking _knew_ what had happened to the first two planes. In your mind is pure delusion, nothing else. In each plane, the passengers acted according to the information that was available to them.
They voted for a guy called George ealier. A name that rings with the sound of one of the very few people in history that had a realistic chance of utterly destroying the US of A as a country.
GP clearly said "most of us in Europe", and the UK doesn't quite consider itself part of the club, anyway.
There's an anti-photon ... it's the photon. There's anti-versions of several other particles (antineutrino, antiquarks, antineutron, etc).
Quite possibly also without the "Humanity".
Isn't a negative mass density also necessary to create stable wormholes ? As far as I remember, wormholes are possible
So, if antimatter falls up, we're one step (of, um, billions, probably) closer to creating artificial wormholes.
it had mass just like anything else, and is therefore affected by gravity just like any other particle with mass.
Wouldn't "falling up" mean that antimatter has negative mass ? And if so, how does this comply with energy/mass conservation laws ?
Erm ... no. Most metals are not ferromagnetic, and therefore will not be ripped anywhere by a magnetic field.
The other precaution is when body parts form loops (like crossed arms or legs or arms/hands holding other body parts) they could potentially cause electric shocks and minor burns.
*citation needed*
I've never heard about anything like that despite having had numerous MRI scans in the last 25 years. It should be easy to cross-check that with the law for electromagnetic induction. A conducting loop experiencing a static magnetic field will not have any current induced, and I believe given the parameters (magnetic field strength, usual areas formed by human appendages, usual human movement speeds, electric resistance of the human body), the induced currents would be way below the level needed to cause shocks and burns. Things might be different if the MRI machine has to undergo an emergency shutdown and and the magnetic field goes from 3T to 0T in a short time. That might induce quite a bit of current.
If you were to get close to such an intense magnetic field... say 10,000 kilometers... the force would begin to pull the iron out of your hemoglobin right through your tissue.
Bzzt. Sorry, single atoms of iron, or compounds containing iron, usually do not exhibit ferromanetism. The much, much weaker effects of dia- and paramagnetism apply here.
a.k.a. electromagnetic radiation. A "pulsed magnetic field" can be anything from RF to microwaves to visible light to gamma rays.
70% larger is still in the same ball park as Jupiter, at least as far as astronomers are concerned. Heck, anything below a brown dwarf is in the same ball park as Jupiter. (Astronomers also have weird definitions of "metal" and "ice" that may not quite correspond to their meanings in other fields of science).
A planet 70% more massive than Earth would count as an Earth-sized planet, too. Sure, we may not find the gravity there too appealing, but that may not bother any life that has evolved there.
Statistics. We now know that planetary systems are fairly common.
And how do they know what size?
Well, the lower size limit is given by the detection sensitivity ("If we're lucky, we can find an Earth-sized rock, but not a Mars- or Mercury-sized one."). The upper limit is given by the mass at which a lump of gas and rock starts initiating nuclear fusion and doesn't count as a planet anymore.
If they are already aware that there is these planets, then wouldnt it be more accurate to say "and finally see over 1,000 planets that we already assume exist mathematically"?
No, we don't know anything about these planets yet, but from our current knowledge about the likelihood of planetary systems we can guess how many planets we're likely to find if we examine X million stars.
HSTs primary mission isn't planet-hunting, so it was neither designed for that nor does it spend most of its time doing it.
Meanwhile, discoveries of "Earth-sized" planets remain rare despite the technology that has been developed within the decade.
How much of that technology has reached space in the last decade ? Off the top of my head, I can name only one planet-hunting mission - COROT (and that's an ESA mission, not a NASA one).
And paying your taxes, of course. If you feel so overtaxed, then leaving might be the more economical choice in the long run. And no one said that fighting for your rights needed to be effortless or free. Heck, if you're the type of person that usually has reason to feel overtaxed, the place you're moving to might even offer you incentives for doing so.
If I cannot freely choose not to pay without incurring some other much larger expense and loss of productivity (jail or unemployment+deportation), then the taxation is being forced.
Sorry. If you're discounting the viable alternatives just because the choice you'd like to have isn't offered, then you're basically just whining. If you feel so badly violated in your rights, then moving to a place that offers better conditions, even at your own expense, is the rational thing to do. Especially in cases where it doesn't involve getting past barbed wire, attack dogs, anti-personnel mines, and goons with guns trying to shoot you in the back while you're trying to leave.
Do you still disagree?
Yes, as long as you don't have any reasons other than inconvenience and cost not to take remedial action.
It's called a passport. Only if your country won't give you one you can say that you're truly forced to do things at gunpoint. It's pretty much typical for scumbag regimes to keep their citizens from leaving. If you live in such a place, then I feel truly sorry for you, if not, then you're overlooking the blaringly obvious solution.
Yes. However, I'd let someone else design the user interface for the machine.
They have a vested interest not in good machines, but in more machines.
Engineers usually want to build the perfect machine. Unfortunately, it will then require another engineer to operate it.
If engineers designed machines like lawyers made laws, you'd need to hire an engineer to operate even the most trivial machine (car, elevator, TV). We don't let the engineers get away with that. Why do we let lawyers ?
Erm. The GDR ceased to exist almost two decades ago. And you certainly don't want to live in a country that mentions more than once in its name that that the government is somehow controlled by the people (i.e. "democratic", "republic", "people's"), since that's a sure sign that it is not.
The terms you're looking for (which will also be understood by someone in Germany and generally outside the US) are "direct democracy" (where people vote on stuff itself) and "indirect/representative democracy" (where people vote on representatives which then vote on / decide about stuff). Of course, the two types can also coexist in the same country.
Read the whole posting.
Challenger and Columbia. I think that counts as two LOV accidents. Challenger was also a LOM, and Columbia was a partial LOM.
Those were LOCV accidents. That means they're not counted as LOV, because none of the crew survived. If they had managed to crash the shuttle during landing with the crew still getting out alive, that would have been a LOV accident.