... "aging" was a process that happened by shortening of the telomeres with each cell division, as one of the natural defenses against uncontrolled cell growth (e.g. cancer).
Yep, the same thing that kills you around the age of 100 is probably one of the reasons why you're not all that likely to die of cancer at the age of 25.
At Duke I was pretty much told "Go buy the textbook [$200+] and come to class if you have questions [which probably won't be answered]." The profs were just that. Profs. Not teachers. They were more interested in their research than educating the lowly undergrads.
That's horrible, especially when considering that the word "professor" implies that this is someone who's allowed to teach publicly at a university/college. If they're just interested in their research, they completely fail at being professors.
Human brains just do not generate or remember random strings very well,
If you keep your password in your brain by remembering a random string, you're either a genius or you're doing it wrong.
The brain is bad a remembering random strings, but it's excellent at remembering sequences of movements, like the one necessary to type those random strings. If you wanted to know one of my passwords, I'd have to ask you for a keyboard first.
Computers store dates in binary. Fancy thing with binary, the upper limit (or rather, one above the upper limit) never ends on a zero. It always ends on a 2, 4, 6 or 8. Note how 2000 doesn't fit this pattern.
Well, actually it had to do with AMD not putting any thermal protection into the CPU and instead relying on the motherboard to detect the CPU getting too hot and shutting down.
Back then, "thermal protection" was a brand new feature - earlier processors had done just fine without. Unfortunately, that was also the time when everyone and their dog started slapping together their own computers and occasionally thought that the heat sink requirement was more of a recommendation than an actual requirement.
Another phrasing is "Getting one bit wrong is generally indistinguishable from randomizing all of memory".
Err... yikes. That's just wrong.
Getting one bit wrong is much, much worse than randomizing all memory. Having your memory randomized results in pretty obvious faulty behavior and is easy to catch even with the most superficial testing. Getting one bit wrong, on the other hand, may result in a bug that slips through testing and rears its ugly head at the customers' sites.
If you want to write bug-free software, then you also need a bug-free compiler, bug-free libraries, and a bug-free OS.
And even if your software is perfectly bug-free, it won't help you if there are unknown CPU bugs or if the external circuitry of your system is buggy.
Bees are not a good example here. Their genome contains two fairly fixed paths (queen bee, worker bee) that are chosen depending on what kind of food the bee is fed as a larva. The individual cannot "transcend" its set of genes, it's just that the bee genome contains these two paths.
... with a stock version that got 80 mpg (diesel). Since the body of the car is made from lightweight material, it presumably makes an excellent starting point for modifications (towards all-electric or hybrid).
Unfortunately, this also caused it to be less than successful commercially. Due to the expensive materials, it was way more expensive than your average small car - and the price difference was enough to nullify the lower fuel consumption.
Daimler learned from this when designing the Smart, btw. It uses mostly plain-vanilla steel for the body of the car, which makes the little thing surprisingly heavy for its size, but also keeps the price down in bearable regions.
solar isn't energy dense enough. The mining of fissionable materials in space is the future.
Once we get energy-positive D-D fusion working, fission will fall out of fashion quite quickly. To top off your tank, just stick a large straw in the nearest gas giant. Once we get H-H fusion working, you won't even need to do isotope separation.
... with a stock version that got 80 mpg (diesel).
Unfortunately, too few people wanted to spend >$20k on a small car. Economically, it didn't make sense, either - the price difference to a competitively priced small car would buy _lots_ of gasoline/diesel.
I've heard that gold makes a fine shield material against cosmic rays.
It's not much better in this regard than, say, lead.
It reflects infrared and visible light quite well and is therefore used in thermal insulation of satellites against overheating, but its properties are hardly unique (especially when you start assembling things in space and don't have to worry about corrosion).
In space, it becomes just yet another metal, and not a particularly useful one at that (as opposed to things like silver, platinum, palladium, etc).
And transporting the stuff back to Earth would be more expensive than its value, and hence quite uneconomical.
"Ivy Mike" begs to disagree with you on this point. 10-15 Megaton fusion blast, ignited by a standard fission bomb "next to" (technically above) a huge canister of liquid deuterium, with no tritium used at all.
77% of the energy released by this bomb came from fissioning the natural uranium tamper (with fast neutrons provided by the fusion reaction).
First, it's "Tokamak".
And then this isn't the "first fusion reactor" in France. I'm sure you can find a few Fusors used as neutron sources, as well as these fusion reactors:
fast enough to kill a human. I may be mistaken, but I am pretty sure that is the case.
It's not. Velocity doesn't kill, but excessive velocity changes do. Keep dv/dt within certain limits, and a human will be fine all the way up to a fraction of c.
... in its original meaning (the science of regulatory systems). Without reacting to external stimuli and changing it s internal and sometimes external environment towards more favorable conditions, life would not exist.
Cybernetics is about mechanical/electronic devices just like astronomy is about telescopes.
No. The orientations are random. Consequently most are probably non-transiting.
However, if the orientations are random, then the transiting planets we detect give us a good random sample of all planets and allows us to make a very educated guess about the abundance of planets in the galaxy.
No.
Yes. There's a way to detect planets that orbit perpendicular to our line of view (astrometrics - measuring the "wobble" this causes in the parent start), and one that detects planets that are almost, but not quite, transiting from our point of view (doppler shift of the parent stars spectrum).
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Yep, the same thing that kills you around the age of 100 is probably one of the reasons why you're not all that likely to die of cancer at the age of 25.
That's horrible, especially when considering that the word "professor" implies that this is someone who's allowed to teach publicly at a university/college. If they're just interested in their research, they completely fail at being professors.
Err ... no. "The Prince" endorses tyranny about as much as a book on physics endorses dropping nukes on someones head.
And don't forget that Machiavelli also wrote about how to build and structure a republic:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macchiavelli#Discourses_on_Livy
If you keep your password in your brain by remembering a random string, you're either a genius or you're doing it wrong.
The brain is bad a remembering random strings, but it's excellent at remembering sequences of movements, like the one necessary to type those random strings. If you wanted to know one of my passwords, I'd have to ask you for a keyboard first.
... do the judges of the Supreme Court have a problem with?
Offsets. You do know about those, right?
Back then, "thermal protection" was a brand new feature - earlier processors had done just fine without. Unfortunately, that was also the time when everyone and their dog started slapping together their own computers and occasionally thought that the heat sink requirement was more of a recommendation than an actual requirement.
Err ... yikes. That's just wrong.
Getting one bit wrong is much, much worse than randomizing all memory. Having your memory randomized results in pretty obvious faulty behavior and is easy to catch even with the most superficial testing. Getting one bit wrong, on the other hand, may result in a bug that slips through testing and rears its ugly head at the customers' sites.
If you want to write bug-free software, then you also need a bug-free compiler, bug-free libraries, and a bug-free OS. And even if your software is perfectly bug-free, it won't help you if there are unknown CPU bugs or if the external circuitry of your system is buggy.
Don't forget: - User interface designed by programmer
In particle physics, that's still about half an eternity.
Bees are not a good example here. Their genome contains two fairly fixed paths (queen bee, worker bee) that are chosen depending on what kind of food the bee is fed as a larva. The individual cannot "transcend" its set of genes, it's just that the bee genome contains these two paths.
Unfortunately, this also caused it to be less than successful commercially. Due to the expensive materials, it was way more expensive than your average small car - and the price difference was enough to nullify the lower fuel consumption.
Daimler learned from this when designing the Smart, btw. It uses mostly plain-vanilla steel for the body of the car, which makes the little thing surprisingly heavy for its size, but also keeps the price down in bearable regions.
Once we get energy-positive D-D fusion working, fission will fall out of fashion quite quickly. To top off your tank, just stick a large straw in the nearest gas giant. Once we get H-H fusion working, you won't even need to do isotope separation.
Unfortunately, too few people wanted to spend >$20k on a small car. Economically, it didn't make sense, either - the price difference to a competitively priced small car would buy _lots_ of gasoline/diesel.
Mentioning "nanny-state" is kind of ironic when comparing the US to Japan.
It's not much better in this regard than, say, lead.
It reflects infrared and visible light quite well and is therefore used in thermal insulation of satellites against overheating, but its properties are hardly unique (especially when you start assembling things in space and don't have to worry about corrosion).
In space, it becomes just yet another metal, and not a particularly useful one at that (as opposed to things like silver, platinum, palladium, etc). And transporting the stuff back to Earth would be more expensive than its value, and hence quite uneconomical.
77% of the energy released by this bomb came from fissioning the natural uranium tamper (with fast neutrons provided by the fusion reaction).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tore_Supra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_de_Fontenay_aux_Roses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LULI2000
It's not. Velocity doesn't kill, but excessive velocity changes do. Keep dv/dt within certain limits, and a human will be fine all the way up to a fraction of c.
Cybernetics is about mechanical/electronic devices just like astronomy is about telescopes.
On earth, finding traces of life that existed here millions of years ago does require a bit of effort.
I'd settle with keeping anything that's blindingly obviously unhealthy out - sugared sodas and candy bars, for example.
However, if the orientations are random, then the transiting planets we detect give us a good random sample of all planets and allows us to make a very educated guess about the abundance of planets in the galaxy.
No.
Yes. There's a way to detect planets that orbit perpendicular to our line of view (astrometrics - measuring the "wobble" this causes in the parent start), and one that detects planets that are almost, but not quite, transiting from our point of view (doppler shift of the parent stars spectrum).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet#Detection_methods