Can we ban water as well? if you drink 6 gallons in an hour it will kill you!
You've got your metric and imperial systems mixed up. Six _liters_ of water in an hour will kill you (especially if you don't keep up with the electrolyte supply, and aren't sweating like a river). That's only about one fourth of six gallons. And now you can feel guilty about all the people you just sent to their deaths because they only drank one and a half gallons, thinking it was way below the deadly dose.
I have often wondered why the tablets aren't sold with the antidote, acetylcysteine,
Can you even get acetylcysteine in the US? It a damn good expectorant, and since I always wind up with a cold after transatlantic flights, I end up looking for the stuff in the US but never find any.
Specifically, Acetaminophen causes nausea and vomiting in large doses.
It causes vomiting if you've managed to poison yourself with it. If you're vomiting from acetaminophen, go the ER ASAP.
500mg of Acetaminophen is a large dose.
500mg is a regular dose for an adult. It's not a large dose by any means. Look at regular strength Tylenol, for example - its directions say take two 325mg tablets every four to six hours.
I call BS. The therapeutic dose of aspirin when used as a painkiller is about 500 mg. 10g of the stuff can be deadly. That's a ratio of 1:20. Of course, if you're using aspirin for other reasons (stroke prevention, etc), the therapeutic dose is much smaller, but most people don't use aspirin this way.
Banning Acetaminophen Pain killers sounds like a dumb idea.
They're not planning to ban OTC acetaminophen pain killers, because most people realize that popping a handful of pills is usually a bad idea. They're planning to ban medications containing enough acetaminophen that three or four pills can kill you.
The thing out-lived its expected service duration by how much now, a factor of ten?
Had spirit had a mini wiper, (no, it doesn't damage the panels, lol),
Yeah, sure, moving abrasive dust across a surface isn't going to scratch it. And you'll have to move the dust across the surface since you're not going to be able to blow it off in the thin Martian atmosphere, at least not with any pump/air tank system that can fit on a rover and doesn't suck more energy than it makes available.
Oh, and then you might run into the problem of the wiper getting stuck in mid-operation, disabling the whole solar panel for good (these things don't produce any power even if they're only partially shaded, unless you add even more circuitry and complexity to circumvent that problem).
we wouldn't have had to wait for months while it was on just enough power to stay alive.
Of course, adding a wiper contraption will magically cause the sun to be farther above the horizon during the Martian winter. News flash: Solar panel output really sucks during a time where the sun doesn't rise all that much above the horizon. All the wipers in world aren't going to change that.
You really, really need to get a clue on what you're talking about.
Mentioning the Phoenix mission makes even less sense, as it wasn't supposed to survive the Martian winter, making the solar panels even less of a concern. When the thing is frozen in a block of CO2, it doesn't matter how dirty the solar panels are.
I talked about solar panels, and yes, it's evident that cleaning them off is a fucking great thing.
And now it's evident that any contraptions for doing so are somewhere between unnecessary and actually harmful for the mission.
Uh, if you look, them being briskly cleared of most of the dust on them had a significant impact on their performance.
Yep, and apparently this happens even if the rover doesn't include a cleaning mechanism.
When the science is "poke at the soil, put dirt on a conveyer belt of mini ovens, fail", yeah, I'd like to see some windshield wipers.
Are you sure you're not getting your Mars missions mixed up? None of the rovers had any mini ovens with them. Not sure if including any would be of much use for a rover mission in a place where any organic chemicals are buried deep underground, if they exist at all.
And with a conventional pair of windshield wipers, all you'll accomplish is scratch the solar panels to hell and back. And remember, every gram of launch weight counts.
Where's that douche that insisted that solar panels don't need to be cleaned?
Err. The rovers have been running for years now without any extra cleaning. That "douche" was probably more right than even he imagined.
Also, would you like to tack on a few more million dollars to the project to develop a way to clean the solar panels? Add more weight to the whole thing that could be used for extra science, and another gizmo that might fail and disable the rover for good?
The best plan I've read so far about colonization was one where we send robots along with...many many samples of sperm and eggs.
Forget about that. By the time we have robots advanced enough to do all the travelling and terraforming, we'll just need to give them instructions to whip up human cells from their constituent elements. No need to send the actual thing, just instructions on how to make it.
Of course, during their thousands of years of transit, the robot might actually get the idea to skip the biological mess altogether. It's bulky and inefficient, and the resources spent on terraforming and creating biology might be much better spent on just making more robots.
We have to get over the CO2 thing too, we exhale the stuff for crying out loud.
What we don't do is eat coal and drink crude oil, though. (Or at least we haven't been doing so until recently - now, we kind of are thanks to artifical fertilizers).
There is far less energy in 1 ton of lunar soil that 1 ton of coal.(about 5x less).
That's why you don't ship lunar soil to Earth in order to extract the He3 - you extract is on site and just ship the finished product. That is, if you get He3 fusion to work in the first place.
Musks and Carmack's ventures are profitable already, by their own accounts.
I've only done superficial checking, but it seems neither is about manned spaceflight.
And the employees of Armadillo Aerospace are volunteers. There's a name for a business whose employees work for free and that almost manages to be profitable: money sink. Even if building rockets is some seriously cool stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got your metric and imperial systems mixed up. Six _liters_ of water in an hour will kill you (especially if you don't keep up with the electrolyte supply, and aren't sweating like a river). That's only about one fourth of six gallons. And now you can feel guilty about all the people you just sent to their deaths because they only drank one and a half gallons, thinking it was way below the deadly dose.
Can you even get acetylcysteine in the US? It a damn good expectorant, and since I always wind up with a cold after transatlantic flights, I end up looking for the stuff in the US but never find any.
It causes vomiting if you've managed to poison yourself with it. If you're vomiting from acetaminophen, go the ER ASAP.
500mg of Acetaminophen is a large dose.
500mg is a regular dose for an adult. It's not a large dose by any means. Look at regular strength Tylenol, for example - its directions say take two 325mg tablets every four to six hours.
Nausea is a side effect of the hydrocodone (and other opiates). It has absofrickinlutely nothing to do with acetaminophen.
That is solely a side effect of the acetaminophen.
No. It's a typical side effect of opiates. Whoever told you otherwise is lying.
That would only work under the condition that people who are in severe pain can still act rationally all the time. I wouldn't consider this valid.
Acetaminophen is not a very effective anti-inflammatory drug. Which is one difference from, say, aspirin or ibuprofen.
Yeah, right, combine an opiate with a hallucinogenic drug. Way to go.
I call BS. The therapeutic dose of aspirin when used as a painkiller is about 500 mg. 10g of the stuff can be deadly. That's a ratio of 1:20. Of course, if you're using aspirin for other reasons (stroke prevention, etc), the therapeutic dose is much smaller, but most people don't use aspirin this way.
Banning Acetaminophen Pain killers sounds like a dumb idea.
They're not planning to ban OTC acetaminophen pain killers, because most people realize that popping a handful of pills is usually a bad idea. They're planning to ban medications containing enough acetaminophen that three or four pills can kill you.
If the card customers are bearing the full cost of the additional lines, is it really a bribe?
No, it's more like a protection racket. You pay and get protected from a possibly lengthy and intrusive search of your person and your stuff.
How is that evident?
The thing out-lived its expected service duration by how much now, a factor of ten?
Had spirit had a mini wiper, (no, it doesn't damage the panels, lol),
Yeah, sure, moving abrasive dust across a surface isn't going to scratch it. And you'll have to move the dust across the surface since you're not going to be able to blow it off in the thin Martian atmosphere, at least not with any pump/air tank system that can fit on a rover and doesn't suck more energy than it makes available.
Oh, and then you might run into the problem of the wiper getting stuck in mid-operation, disabling the whole solar panel for good (these things don't produce any power even if they're only partially shaded, unless you add even more circuitry and complexity to circumvent that problem).
we wouldn't have had to wait for months while it was on just enough power to stay alive.
Of course, adding a wiper contraption will magically cause the sun to be farther above the horizon during the Martian winter. News flash: Solar panel output really sucks during a time where the sun doesn't rise all that much above the horizon. All the wipers in world aren't going to change that.
You really, really need to get a clue on what you're talking about.
Then maybe they can ask the nice wolves down the street to look after our hens while we're on that vacation.
They're probably going to outsource that job to their fox buddies and go looking for lucrative sheep-watching contracts.
'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon.'
Soylent Green, anyone?
Mentioning the Phoenix mission makes even less sense, as it wasn't supposed to survive the Martian winter, making the solar panels even less of a concern. When the thing is frozen in a block of CO2, it doesn't matter how dirty the solar panels are.
I talked about solar panels, and yes, it's evident that cleaning them off is a fucking great thing.
And now it's evident that any contraptions for doing so are somewhere between unnecessary and actually harmful for the mission.
And with a conventional pair of windshield wipers, all you'll accomplish is scratch the solar panels to hell and back. And remember, every gram of launch weight counts.
Err. The rovers have been running for years now without any extra cleaning. That "douche" was probably more right than even he imagined.
Also, would you like to tack on a few more million dollars to the project to develop a way to clean the solar panels? Add more weight to the whole thing that could be used for extra science, and another gizmo that might fail and disable the rover for good?
The stars might be the same, but things get much more interesting if you have less distant object (planets, moons) in the picture.
Forget about that. By the time we have robots advanced enough to do all the travelling and terraforming, we'll just need to give them instructions to whip up human cells from their constituent elements. No need to send the actual thing, just instructions on how to make it.
Of course, during their thousands of years of transit, the robot might actually get the idea to skip the biological mess altogether. It's bulky and inefficient, and the resources spent on terraforming and creating biology might be much better spent on just making more robots.
I'm not sure I'd WANT to be fist director....
What, you don't want total freedom to punch whoever you feel appropriate? Sometimes, that's the only way to get a bureaucracy moving.
If (when?) the world becomes that broken, though, we won't be able to leave it.
What we don't do is eat coal and drink crude oil, though. (Or at least we haven't been doing so until recently - now, we kind of are thanks to artifical fertilizers).
That's why you don't ship lunar soil to Earth in order to extract the He3 - you extract is on site and just ship the finished product. That is, if you get He3 fusion to work in the first place.
On Earth, you have about 6 billion people to work _against_. On Mars, about ten orders of magnitude less.
(Though, the average surface temperature on Earth is just about 57F).
Unfortunately, the majority of the worlds population does not live in first-world countries.
Musks and Carmack's ventures are profitable already, by their own accounts.
I've only done superficial checking, but it seems neither is about manned spaceflight.
And the employees of Armadillo Aerospace are volunteers. There's a name for a business whose employees work for free and that almost manages to be profitable: money sink. Even if building rockets is some seriously cool stuff.