The latin alphabet. The point is that the names are supposed to encode the order. Certainly you can easily dream up another set of 21 names. But then 'CmdrTaco' could be the third as well as the 24th hurricane in the season ('Zonk' is excluded by their rules although it seems a good choice for using it twice).
I remember when Grissom, White, and Chaffee died in the Apollo fire.
Surely a tragedy, especially since this was not a space mission but rather a checklist routine training. But this one does not count as a point against the overall design of the launch system. The main reasons were the design of the hatch and the pressurised pure oxygen atmosphere inside Apollo 1.
This shows once more that tragedies like this one can be caused by seemingly minor design decisions. Maybe NASA could benefit from making the whole detailed design process public so outsiders could raise concerns.
Building the eye the "right" way would prevent damaged cells from being replenished and result in an eventual loss of function.
Sounds interesting, could you point me to some resource that explains this in more detail?
He would if his device was organic and had a operational lifespan of up to 120 years.
If natural selection somehow leads to longer lifespans of individuals it is merely an accident. This is not the 'purpose' or 'goal'. There is no purpose. There is no goal. There are frequencies of genes (or, more generally, replicators, whatever the exact defintion might be) and that is it.
But be this is as it may, this was not my main point. The main point is that natural selection is not a mechanism that produces ultimate perfection in finite time. This is due to nature of the process: Gradual accumulation of small changes allows not to leap from one 'design' to another one that is fundamentally different. At least the chance of ending up dead without reproducing is vastly higher than being more successful.
I agree with your main point that people able to use Windows are usually also able to use GNU/Linux/Gnome/KDE (or whatever system with fairly modern GUI).
However, all of these systems are flawed. Most people just do not want to use a computer per se. What they really want is writing documents, sending and receiving email, maybe play some games and so on. With the exception of developers nobody wants to know about hierachical file systems. Nobody, except developers, wants to learn the the difference between RAM and HDD storage before she can work towards her goal. The list can be easily enlarged, you get the point.
Actually, you listed an intersting cast of characters. I believe the cop, the housewife and the foreign exchange student are pretty computer savvy without noticing. Or, to put it differently, they already have encountered a huge amount of computer interfaces (VCR, cell phone...) and accepted their roles as victims of an inhumane technology that makes them feel stupid.
Modern computers are amazingly powerful. Yet most applications are developed in a way that makes these powerful machines sit idling most of the time instead of using this power to make life easy. I could tell you the long story of my mother's experience with her new VCR (or should I say her new computer?)... oh well.
Although all current systems fail to fullfil the needs of ordinary humans, I think open systems like Linux and *BSD at least offer the chance that somebody will finally come up with something that does not make people feel stupid.
I agree that the best replacement for a lost human hand is probably a human hand. However:
I doubt we're going to come up with a better design than millions of years of natural selection.
I think it is actually easy sometimes. The 'design' of the human eye for instance is crap. No sane engineer would start from a light sensitive sensor, drill a hole through it (thereby creating a blind spot), draw some wires though it and place the readout devices in front of the light sensitive surface (thereby reducing the light sampling ability of the whole device). Octopusses are better off.
Natural selection does not strive for perfection. It works by accumulating small changes. Thus, when you start from a given 'design' only a small subset of all possible 'designs' are in reach.
They thought to moon could be a big ball of loose powder, too.
Hmm, I find this hard to believe. After all, quite a number of probes successfully landed on the Moon before the Apollo 11 mission in 1969:
Lunar Missions (Surprisingly many failed, though.)
Neil Armstrong says he didn't know if they were going to land on the surface, or sink into it never to be seen again.
Could be. But more likely because they were not sure about the terrain of the landing site.
But then again, we all know he would have sunk into the floor of a studio...
I think that it is relatively losely bound does not mean it is something like a cloud. If it were like that you would not have to worry about a collision in the first place. (As usual, depending on the energy -- with sufficient energy a 'dust cloud' can also kill you.)
When you shoot a projectile at such a comet, parts if of it can become more compactified. (This is actually one scenario proposed for the formation of small yet compact objects in space.) It would be very hard to predict what exactly would happen in such a collision. You could end up with some dangerous debris heading towards your home planet.
Another problem is that very likely not all the comets have exactly the same composition. As long as you do not know, you can not predict the outcome of the blow-it-up mission. And it takes some time to find out...
PRC is a country which practices the death penalty for theft.
True. And bad enough. What is even worse, is that every country practicing death penalty at all has good chance of practicing death penalty for innocence.
Following science to the exclusion of anything else is also a religion.
This not true. Unfortunately, statements like this all to often remain unchallenged. The false assumption behind it is that every approach to the mysteries of the world we are living in qualifies as a religion. Science is different, however.
As opposed to religion, science is based on evidence. It is about making informed choices. These are not necessarily the right choices (in hindsight). But they are the only ones you can come up with without simply relying on tradition, authority or 'revelation'. Usually, adopting the scientific method is an informed choice in itself.
How much different are religions! The vast majority of religious people did not pick their specific religion based on an informed choice. Most just believe what their parents believe or what was planted in their minds by other authorities when they were children.
Like the GP I'll also take science any day of the week. Not because I am converted but because I am convinced.
You are perfectly right in critisising the concept that stars just release the energy gained in their gravitational collaps.
However, this is really not about atoms. A hydrogen atom is a bound state of a proton and an electron, bound by the electromagnetic force. The energy needed to destroy the atom (i.e. seperating the electron from the proton) is only 13.6 eV. In nuclear reactions we are talking about MeV, a completely different order of magnitude.
Consequently, as long as you consider the proton an elementary particle (which is fine for the energy regime at hand), no energy is stored in a nuclear force field in the hydrogen atom. The energy yield of stellar fusion has a different reason: during the fusion cycle 6 protons are transformed to one 4He plus 2 protons and some lighter particles. The important point is that 4He is a system tightly bound by nuclear forces. This is were the energy comes from, it is just like dropping a rock from a cliff: while the earth and the rock become bound more tightly energy is released from the system.
The important role of the gravitation in stellar fusion, by the way, is not so much the ignition of the fusion -- that, telling from TFA, can be done on a tabletop. The important thing is, that it counterbalances the pressure resulting from the fusion reaction, thereby maintaining the reaction.
"Some energy should have already been spent combining and 'creating' the hydrogen from the Big Bang soup of protons, neutrons and electrons."
This needs some clarification. We are talking about nuclei here, not atoms. A hydrogen nucleus is nothing but a proton (p) and thus is not 'created' from the particles listed in the quote. The fact that protons themselves are bound states of quarks is not very relevant here. The energy scale of the processes discussed here is to low.
"To release that energy you would need to break the nuclear bonds of hydrogen and then it will become helium"
Since hydrogen is just a proton there are no nuclear bonds to break up here.
Here is what happens in the sun. The first step in the suns fusion cycle is actually a weak interaction process:
p + p -> d + e+ + nu
Where d denotes deuterium (pn) and nu a neutrino. There is more than one continuation of the cycle but the most important one is the following.
d + p -> 3He + photon 3He + 3He -> 4He + p + p
The numbers in front of the He symbol are not multipliers but indicate the isotope. 3He is (ppn) and 4He is (ppnn). This process yields about 26.7 MeV free energy.
The reaction rate of the weak interaction process in the first step is far too low to use this cycle in fusion reactors. That is why one rather tries to use d + 3H -> 4He + n which yields about 17.6 MeV. Where 3H is tritium (pnn). One could also think of d + d -> 3H + p and d + d -> 3He + n but these yield only 4 MeV and 3 MeV, respectivlely.
Somewhat offtopic but, unfortunately, your gravitiy example is flawed. In the situation described by you it is perfectly correct to deduce the presence of gravitiy. Accelleration forces *are* gravity. There is no experiment able to distiguish the two in your proposed reference frame.
You could argue that this Equivalence Principle does not necessarily hold. However, it is the very basis of the most successful theory of gravitation as of today, namely Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.
Slashdot Mirror
Money makes every person on the planet greedy
Mr. Jobs, certainly, is immune.
And who decided on 21 reserved names?
The latin alphabet. The point is that the names are supposed to encode the order. Certainly you can easily dream up another set of 21 names. But then 'CmdrTaco' could be the third as well as the 24th hurricane in the season ('Zonk' is excluded by their rules although it seems a good choice for using it twice).
I remember when Grissom, White, and Chaffee died in the Apollo fire.
Surely a tragedy, especially since this was not a space mission but rather a checklist routine training. But this one does not count as a point against the overall design of the launch system. The main reasons were the design of the hatch and the pressurised pure oxygen atmosphere inside Apollo 1.
This shows once more that tragedies like this one can be caused by seemingly minor design decisions. Maybe NASA could benefit from making the whole detailed design process public so outsiders could raise concerns.
not able to offer anything more then standard responses (such as "really?" "I see" "that's good news" "that's bad news".
Why do you say that?
At least one made it:
Mark Shuttleworth
Btw. he started and funds Ubuntu. A geek, indeed!
At first, I misread the title "20 Things you don't want to know".
I thought "Wow, Zonk is working to increase his dupe-posting efficiency!"
Building the eye the "right" way would prevent damaged cells from being replenished and result in an eventual loss of function.
Sounds interesting, could you point me to some resource that explains this in more detail?
He would if his device was organic and had a operational lifespan of up to 120 years.
If natural selection somehow leads to longer lifespans of individuals it is merely an accident. This is not the 'purpose' or 'goal'. There is no purpose. There is no goal. There are frequencies of genes (or, more generally, replicators, whatever the exact defintion might be) and that is it.
But be this is as it may, this was not my main point. The main point is that natural selection is not a mechanism that produces ultimate perfection in finite time. This is due to nature of the process: Gradual accumulation of small changes allows not to leap from one 'design' to another one that is fundamentally different. At least the chance of ending up dead without reproducing is vastly higher than being more successful.
I agree with your main point that people able to use Windows are usually also able to use GNU/Linux/Gnome/KDE (or whatever system with fairly modern GUI).
...) and accepted their roles as victims of an inhumane technology that makes them feel stupid.
However, all of these systems are flawed. Most people just do not want to use a computer per se. What they really want is writing documents, sending and receiving email, maybe play some games and so on. With the exception of developers nobody wants to know about hierachical file systems. Nobody, except developers, wants to learn the the difference between RAM and HDD storage before she can work towards her goal. The list can be easily enlarged, you get the point.
Actually, you listed an intersting cast of characters. I believe the cop, the housewife and the foreign exchange student are pretty computer savvy without noticing. Or, to put it differently, they already have encountered a huge amount of computer interfaces (VCR, cell phone
Modern computers are amazingly powerful. Yet most applications are developed in a way that makes these powerful machines sit idling most of the time instead of using this power to make life easy. I could tell you the long story of my mother's experience with her new VCR (or should I say her new computer?)... oh well.
Although all current systems fail to fullfil the needs of ordinary humans, I think open systems like Linux and *BSD at least offer the chance that somebody will finally come up with something that does not make people feel stupid.
I agree that the best replacement for a lost human hand is probably a human hand. However:
I doubt we're going to come up with a better design than millions of years of natural selection.
I think it is actually easy sometimes. The 'design' of the human eye for instance is crap. No sane engineer would start from a light sensitive sensor, drill a hole through it (thereby creating a blind spot), draw some wires though it and place the readout devices in front of the light sensitive surface (thereby reducing the light sampling ability of the whole device). Octopusses are better off.
Natural selection does not strive for perfection. It works by accumulating small changes. Thus, when you start from a given 'design' only a small subset of all possible 'designs' are in reach.
Just noticed that the link is trivially broken. Since it is a nice list, I felt I should re-post it for added convenience:
Lunar Missions
They thought to moon could be a big ball of loose powder, too.
Hmm, I find this hard to believe. After all, quite a number of probes successfully landed on the Moon before the Apollo 11 mission in 1969: Lunar Missions (Surprisingly many failed, though.)
Neil Armstrong says he didn't know if they were going to land on the surface, or sink into it never to be seen again.
Could be. But more likely because they were not sure about the terrain of the landing site.
But then again, we all know he would have sunk into the floor of a studio...
Water's density is 1000 kg/m^3, so 600 kg/m^3 is pretty dense.
I think that it is relatively losely bound does not mean it is something like a cloud. If it were like that you would not have to worry about a collision in the first place. (As usual, depending on the energy -- with sufficient energy a 'dust cloud' can also kill you.)
When you shoot a projectile at such a comet, parts if of it can become more compactified. (This is actually one scenario proposed for the formation of small yet compact objects in space.) It would be very hard to predict what exactly would happen in such a collision. You could end up with some dangerous debris heading towards your home planet.
Another problem is that very likely not all the comets have exactly the same composition. As long as you do not know, you can not predict the outcome of the blow-it-up mission. And it takes some time to find out...
PRC is a country which practices the death penalty for theft.
True. And bad enough. What is even worse, is that every country practicing death penalty at all has good chance of practicing death penalty for innocence.
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice.
"Yeah, all of those Tetris clones mean a lot... oh, and don't forget emacs M-x doctor."
Emacs? Hah! I would appreciate it if you would continue.
Following science to the exclusion of anything else is also a religion.
This not true. Unfortunately, statements like this all to often remain unchallenged. The false assumption behind it is that every approach to the mysteries of the world we are living in qualifies as a religion. Science is different, however.
As opposed to religion, science is based on evidence. It is about making informed choices. These are not necessarily the right choices (in hindsight). But they are the only ones you can come up with without simply relying on tradition, authority or 'revelation'. Usually, adopting the scientific method is an informed choice in itself.
How much different are religions! The vast majority of religious people did not pick their specific religion based on an informed choice. Most just believe what their parents believe or what was planted in their minds by other authorities when they were children.
Like the GP I'll also take science any day of the week. Not because I am converted but because I am convinced.
Incidentally, Richard Dawkins illustrates an important fact in relation to evolution like this:
"There are vastly more ways to be dead than alive."
You are perfectly right in critisising the concept that stars just release the energy gained in their gravitational collaps.
:)
However, this is really not about atoms. A hydrogen atom is a bound state of a proton and an electron, bound by the electromagnetic force. The energy needed to destroy the atom (i.e. seperating the electron from the proton) is only 13.6 eV. In nuclear reactions we are talking about MeV, a completely different order of magnitude.
Consequently, as long as you consider the proton an elementary particle (which is fine for the energy regime at hand), no energy is stored in a nuclear force field in the hydrogen atom. The energy yield of stellar fusion has a different reason: during the fusion cycle 6 protons are transformed to one 4He plus 2 protons and some lighter particles. The important point is that 4He is a system tightly bound by nuclear forces. This is were the energy comes from, it is just like dropping a rock from a cliff: while the earth and the rock become bound more tightly energy is released from the system.
The important role of the gravitation in stellar fusion, by the way, is not so much the ignition of the fusion -- that, telling from TFA, can be done on a tabletop. The important thing is, that it counterbalances the pressure resulting from the fusion reaction, thereby maintaining the reaction.
Ok, enough lecturing for today
"Some energy should have already been spent combining and 'creating' the hydrogen from the Big Bang soup of protons, neutrons and electrons."
This needs some clarification. We are talking about nuclei here, not atoms. A hydrogen nucleus is nothing but a proton (p) and thus is not 'created' from the particles listed in the quote. The fact that protons themselves are bound states of quarks is not very relevant here. The energy scale of the processes discussed here is to low.
"To release that energy you would need to break the nuclear bonds of hydrogen and then it will become helium"
Since hydrogen is just a proton there are no nuclear bonds to break up here.
Here is what happens in the sun. The first step in the suns fusion cycle is actually a weak interaction process:
p + p -> d + e+ + nu
Where d denotes deuterium (pn) and nu a neutrino.
There is more than one continuation of the cycle but the most important one is the following.
d + p -> 3He + photon
3He + 3He -> 4He + p + p
The numbers in front of the He symbol are not multipliers but indicate the isotope. 3He is (ppn) and 4He is (ppnn). This process yields about 26.7 MeV free energy.
The reaction rate of the weak interaction process in the first step is far too low to use this cycle in fusion reactors. That is why one rather tries to use d + 3H -> 4He + n which yields about 17.6 MeV. Where 3H is tritium (pnn). One could also think of d + d -> 3H + p and d + d -> 3He + n but these yield only 4 MeV and 3 MeV, respectivlely.
Still I would like to argue that the passenger actually reaches the right answer. :)
But, again, this is really offtopic. I got your point -- and I do agree.
Somewhat offtopic but, unfortunately, your gravitiy example is flawed. In the situation described by you it is perfectly correct to deduce the presence of gravitiy. Accelleration forces *are* gravity. There is no experiment able to distiguish the two in your proposed reference frame.
You could argue that this Equivalence Principle does not necessarily hold. However, it is the very basis of the most successful theory of gravitation as of today, namely Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.
(Sorry, could not hold back.)
"Yea, well, you do realize that 88.3247910% of all statistics are made up on the spot."
Isn't that the exact market share of IE from three month ago?