.. with no supporting facts. Important things like how long can you "fly" a device that weighs 100 mg? How do you control the device with even a 3 mph wind?
You obviously don't know how science works. Here you go:
1) When you have unusually hot or volatile weather, that's evidence of man-made climate change.
No. One hot summer (in one place) or one warm winter (in one place) is not due to climate change. Say this over and over, this is important. Climate change is real, but it is global and it is long term.
No single event, no single warm summer, is evidence of climate change (nor is a single cool summer evidence against it.)
A continuous series of record breaking temperature, on the other hand, might be something to point at. But, again, even there, look for global temperatures-- regional temperatures (even regional temperature records) are just weather.
The thing to look at is not merely the carbon dioxide being emitted from the northern hemisphere-- it's fascinating to look at the plume of carbon-dioxide depleted air wafting off of the rain forests of south America.
One unit of burnt coal or gas produces 1 unit of CO2 and one of H2O! Yes, water is a greenhouse gas.
Indeed, water is a greenhouse gas. But.
But water precipitates out of the atmosphere very very fast, so the water actually emitted by humans doesn't really contribute for very long. The carbon dioxide, on the other hand, sticks around for an estimated lifetime of about a hundred years. More to the point, the hundred and fifty million square miles of ocean surface evaporates so much water into the atmosphere that the amount emitted by humans really is, in this case, trivial-- the equilibrium water content of the atmosphere is driven by evaporation, not by direct emission.
For the most part, the humidity in the atmosphere is driven by the temperature, not vice versa.
We don't really consider an asteroid "found" until there are more two observations; otherwise you don't where it is.
However measuring it's colour (a hint to composition) and taking a reflection spectrum (a better hint to composition and classification) can theoretically take place in the first observation run (if your imager system can switch between imaging and spectroscopy without significant reconstruction).
"theoretically" maybe. Practically: no. You simply need a lot more photons to do spectroscopy than you need to just see something is there. You can only get spectra from astwroids that are reasonably bright, which, for asteroids this tiny, means reasonably close.
Also, why an absolute magnitude of 22.0 or greater? What about the big, dark iron asteroid with an H of 23 who's MOID is 10^-5 au?
Because absolute magnitudes can be measured as soon as an asteroid is found, when an asteroid is far away, while what an asteroid is made of, and what its color is, cannot.
The phrase "potentially hazardous" does not mean that it will be hazardous on this particular pass. It means that it is in a orbit that makes repeated close passes near Earth, so it potentially may be hazardous on a future pass.
the asteroid hasn't been this close to Earth since 1890, and it won't be this close again until 2500. How much closer will it be 483 years from now? We've got a lot more shit to worry about than this...
That's the definition of the word. The word is not defined as "objects to panic about right now."
If you don't want to worry about a potentially hazardous object, you don't have to. That does not mean it is not potentially hazardous. It just means you're not worrying about it.
If this asteroid is classified as a "Potentially Hazardous Object", then why is it being reported two days *AFTER* the pass?
it is a potentially hazardous object because it is in a orbit that makes repeated close passes near Earth, and therefore it may intersect the Earth's orbit at some time in the future (beyond the time frame in which we can make exact predictions, due to chaos). It is potentially hazardous.
it's 550 Earth diameters away!!!! Only a ninny bureaucrat with too much time on her hands would classify that as "potentially hazardous".
The phrase "potentially hazardous" does not mean that it will be hazardous on this particular pass. It means that it is in a orbit that makes repeated close passes near Earth, so it potentially may be hazardous on a future pass.
When it comes to global warming, Fido and Fluffy are part of the problem, a new study by UCLA indicates. Pet ownership in the United States creates about 64 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, UCLA researchers found.
That's a weird definition of "significant" given that fossil fuel emissions of CO2 alone are around 10 billion tons per year.
That's ten billion tons of carbon, which comes out to about 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide. (Increased to about 40 billion (metric) tons now.) https://www.livescience.com/47...
I will repeat what I just said in the headline: Dealing with problems and trade-offs is what engineers do for living. We're good at it. We can solve technical problems.
Idealogues like you who are trying to take away my ability to choose-- now, that's harder.
Read the article. You posted the link, read it. The article was about the social problems. The technical ones were solvable.
Basically, you just said that you want to take away choice. You're telling me that you don't want people to have the ability to buy a safer guns, because you are afraid that the government may mandate them.
You think you're in favor of choice, but that is actually just argued for: taking away the ability to choose.
By the way, you're wrong. The NRA is the most powerful lobby in America, bar none. What you are afraid of simply is not going to happen. (And the only way the silly law in NJ was allowed to pass was because the NRA allowed it to pass because it was irrelevant.)
The story in question was about cars that incorporate safety features. Nobody is going to force you to wear a seatbelt, dude. Nobody is going to make it illegal to disable an airbag. You're just paranoid, man.
Wait, what? You are arguing that cars should not have any safety features because you're afraid that if if somebody makes a safer car, the safer cars might be mandated?
Do you really actually believe that cars should not have any safety features? Or are you just making an argument you don't actually believe, because you're blowing smoke because you like arguing?
Nice article, Mr. coward. Do you only read article supporting what you already believe, or do you ever read articles that might confront your opinions?
Before you blame "gun nuts" for the lack of smart guns, educate yourself a bit about the engineering challenges involved... Whatever strategy you choose, you're going to face problems and tradeoffs.
Wow. Problems and trade-offs.
Dealing with problems and trade-offs is what engineers do for living.
Very interesting article. You did read it, right? It basically says that the hardest problems with smart guns are not technical:
But the hurdles aren’t only technical; they are sociopolitical as well. The National Rifle Association and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which represents the gun industry, say they’re not against smart guns per se, just for consumer choice. But in practice they have formed a united front against smart guns, after abortive efforts to develop them in the 1990s by companies like Smith and Wesson and Colt faltered, in part thanks to an NRA boycott...
...gun-rights true believers made it a holy mission to bar smart guns from the marketplace and stop the New Jersey ban from kicking in.
Good for you, but most gun owners don't. They say "I need a gun for self defense! A gun isn't any good if it takes me more than a few seconds to get to!"
Besides-- what if your safe malfunctions? This whole thread is saying "if my safety device malfunctions, I'm going to DIE!" So: safes can malfunction. You trust mechanisms on safes, but not on guns?
How would a proximity control prevent a toddler reaching in his mom's purse and shooting her point blank?
Depends on the range that the proximity sensor is programmed for. I'd say that the optimal range would be about six inches,a bracelet or ring on the gun hand. This is an engineering trade-off, like any other.
In any case, though, the fact that it wouldn't stop every shooting doesn't mean it's not valuable in saving some lives.
Even, if as you say "I mean, having a firearm that my life may depend on in a home invasion, that may not fire if I'm not wearing a watch" -- that's actually a good thing, because the thing that you should most be worried about in a home invasion is getting killed by your own gun.
Most of the home invasions I'm seeing reported, the criminals are bringing their own weapons to the party.
I'd like to see the source of that data. From what I've seen, the vast majority are cases of burglars who had incorrectly expected that nobody would be home.
And at the very least, shouldn't it be MY decision to make?
Of course. You should be able to decide whether to buy a gun with electronic safety features.
But you can't decide that now, because you can't buy the gun with the safety features.
You have to read very closely, but unintended fatal shootings in the US from 2005-2010 resulted in 3800 deaths, or roughly 760 per year. As a frame of reference, approximately 250,000 people die from medical mistakes at hospitals every year, yet there aren't any politicians trying to ban hospitals or regulate doctors.
But this discussion isn't about "banning" guns (nor doctors). It's about implementing a technology to reduce the number of unintentional deaths. Implementing technologies to reduce the number of unintentional deaths is something hospitals do all the time.
I find the whole idea of smart guns mostly silly. Even plain old guns, brand new designs or designs that have been tweaked and fine tuned for 100+ years, misfire sometimes. Adding another level of failure is pretty absurd.
It's useful to have a background in error analysis. You should think about Type I errors versus Type II errors. A Type-I error, here, will mean the gun not firing when you want it to. A Type-II error is the gun firing when you do NOT want it to. For this particular safety mechanism, the type-II error can be considered to consist of the case "the gun fires when somebody else has it", and the worst-case type II error is "the gun fires when somebody else has it and is pointing it at you or your family".
It turns out that the cases in which the Type-II error will be deadly turn out to be much, much more common than the Type-I errors. There just aren't that many home invasions that are solved by the homeowner shooting the burglar, outside of Hollywood. For the most part, a Type-I error will mean that a piece of paper with circles on it will have fewer holes in it.
A Type-II error, on the other hand, means that somebody you love gets shot. You want to avoid that.
Slashdot Mirror
.. with no supporting facts. Important things like how long can you "fly" a device that weighs 100 mg? How do you control the device with even a 3 mph wind?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/rise-insect-drones#page-2
You obviously don't know how science works. Here you go:
1) When you have unusually hot or volatile weather, that's evidence of man-made climate change.
No. One hot summer (in one place) or one warm winter (in one place) is not due to climate change. Say this over and over, this is important. Climate change is real, but it is global and it is long term.
No single event, no single warm summer, is evidence of climate change (nor is a single cool summer evidence against it.)
A continuous series of record breaking temperature, on the other hand, might be something to point at. But, again, even there, look for global temperatures-- regional temperatures (even regional temperature records) are just weather.
Massive deforestation is not being considered? Seriously.
indeed. A fascinating image of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere here: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g...
The thing to look at is not merely the carbon dioxide being emitted from the northern hemisphere-- it's fascinating to look at the plume of carbon-dioxide depleted air wafting off of the rain forests of south America.
One unit of burnt coal or gas produces 1 unit of CO2 and one of H2O! Yes, water is a greenhouse gas.
Indeed, water is a greenhouse gas. But.
But water precipitates out of the atmosphere very very fast, so the water actually emitted by humans doesn't really contribute for very long. The carbon dioxide, on the other hand, sticks around for an estimated lifetime of about a hundred years. More to the point, the hundred and fifty million square miles of ocean surface evaporates so much water into the atmosphere that the amount emitted by humans really is, in this case, trivial-- the equilibrium water content of the atmosphere is driven by evaporation, not by direct emission.
For the most part, the humidity in the atmosphere is driven by the temperature, not vice versa.
We don't really consider an asteroid "found" until there are more two observations; otherwise you don't where it is.
However measuring it's colour (a hint to composition) and taking a reflection spectrum (a better hint to composition and classification) can theoretically take place in the first observation run (if your imager system can switch between imaging and spectroscopy without significant reconstruction).
"theoretically" maybe. Practically: no. You simply need a lot more photons to do spectroscopy than you need to just see something is there. You can only get spectra from astwroids that are reasonably bright, which, for asteroids this tiny, means reasonably close.
Uh, that's not quite the way hurricanes work. They don't "slam into" something and stop. Caribbean islands are small compared to hurricanes!
They stop when they traverse a region where they are separated from the warm ocean, which is (in essence) their power source.
Also, why an absolute magnitude of 22.0 or greater? What about the big, dark iron asteroid with an H of 23 who's MOID is 10^-5 au?
Because absolute magnitudes can be measured as soon as an asteroid is found, when an asteroid is far away, while what an asteroid is made of, and what its color is, cannot.
The phrase "potentially hazardous" does not mean that it will be hazardous on this particular pass. It means that it is in a orbit that makes repeated close passes near Earth, so it potentially may be hazardous on a future pass.
the asteroid hasn't been this close to Earth since 1890, and it won't be this close again until 2500. How much closer will it be 483 years from now? We've got a lot more shit to worry about than this...
That's the definition of the word. The word is not defined as "objects to panic about right now."
If you don't want to worry about a potentially hazardous object, you don't have to. That does not mean it is not potentially hazardous. It just means you're not worrying about it.
More detailed definition here: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/neo_groups.html
If this asteroid is classified as a "Potentially Hazardous Object", then why is it being reported two days *AFTER* the pass?
it is a potentially hazardous object because it is in a orbit that makes repeated close passes near Earth, and therefore it may intersect the Earth's orbit at some time in the future (beyond the time frame in which we can make exact predictions, due to chaos). It is potentially hazardous.
it's 550 Earth diameters away!!!! Only a ninny bureaucrat with too much time on her hands would classify that as "potentially hazardous".
The phrase "potentially hazardous" does not mean that it will be hazardous on this particular pass. It means that it is in a orbit that makes repeated close passes near Earth, so it potentially may be hazardous on a future pass.
This is a literal example of the case example known in economics as "tragedy of the commons."
When it comes to global warming, Fido and Fluffy are part of the problem, a new study by UCLA indicates. Pet ownership in the United States creates about 64 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, UCLA researchers found.
That's a weird definition of "significant" given that fossil fuel emissions of CO2 alone are around 10 billion tons per year.
That's ten billion tons of carbon, which comes out to about 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide. (Increased to about 40 billion (metric) tons now.)
https://www.livescience.com/47...
I will repeat what I just said in the headline: Dealing with problems and trade-offs is what engineers do for living. We're good at it. We can solve technical problems.
Idealogues like you who are trying to take away my ability to choose-- now, that's harder.
Read the article. You posted the link, read it. The article was about the social problems. The technical ones were solvable.
Basically, you just said that you want to take away choice. You're telling me that you don't want people to have the ability to buy a safer guns, because you are afraid that the government may mandate them.
You think you're in favor of choice, but that is actually just argued for: taking away the ability to choose.
By the way, you're wrong. The NRA is the most powerful lobby in America, bar none. What you are afraid of simply is not going to happen. (And the only way the silly law in NJ was allowed to pass was because the NRA allowed it to pass because it was irrelevant.)
The story in question was about cars that incorporate safety features. Nobody is going to force you to wear a seatbelt, dude. Nobody is going to make it illegal to disable an airbag. You're just paranoid, man.
Wait, what? You are arguing that cars should not have any safety features because you're afraid that if if somebody makes a safer car, the safer cars might be mandated?
Do you really actually believe that cars should not have any safety features? Or are you just making an argument you don't actually believe, because you're blowing smoke because you like arguing?
Nice article, Mr. coward.
Do you only read article supporting what you already believe, or do you ever read articles that might confront your opinions?
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506
http://archive.jsonline.com/news/opinion/are-you-safer-owning-a-gun-for-home-protection-b9912440z1-207958831.html/
https://law.stanford.edu/2015/10/12/professor-john-donohue-facts-do-not-support-claim-that-guns-make-us-safer/
https://www.bustle.com/articles/92454-does-owning-guns-make-you-safer-statistics-say-youre-actually-at-much-higher-risk-of-being
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2015/01/good_guy_with_a_gun_myth_guns_increase_the_risk_of_homicide_accidents_suicide.html
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/slightly-blighty/201601/does-owning-gun-protect-you
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0804-hemenway-defensive-gun-home-20150730-story.html
Before you blame "gun nuts" for the lack of smart guns, educate yourself a bit about the engineering challenges involved...
Whatever strategy you choose, you're going to face problems and tradeoffs.
Wow. Problems and trade-offs.
Dealing with problems and trade-offs is what engineers do for living.
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/...
Very interesting article. You did read it, right? It basically says that the hardest problems with smart guns are not technical:
1300 children get killed by firearms per year.
So?
So a device which means that only the owner can fire a gun would save lives.
Be a parent and keep your guns out of reach of said toddlers and you won't need to rely on laws to do your parenting for you. . . .
Who was talking about "laws"?
The story in question was about guns that incorporate safety features.
Good for you, but most gun owners don't. They say "I need a gun for self defense! A gun isn't any good if it takes me more than a few seconds to get to!"
Besides-- what if your safe malfunctions? This whole thread is saying "if my safety device malfunctions, I'm going to DIE!" So: safes can malfunction. You trust mechanisms on safes, but not on guns?
I disagree with the fact that gun nuts are making sure that safer guns cannot be sold.
To the contrary, smart guns are a good thing to have, and the fact that they can be hacked is almost irrelevant.
The primary useful thing about smart guns is that they prevent your toddler from finding your gun and killing you, themselves, or each other.
The fact that I, like many adult, gun-owning Americans, have no children, makes this point moot.
Uh, why does the fact that you have no children mean that you get to prevent other people who do have children from obtaining safer guns?
Also, pretty sure the "more likely to be killed with your own gun" myth has been debunked, or at least, proven inaccurate.
I believe the phrase "pretty sure" is a synonym for "I have no idea whatsoever." Cite data.
How would a proximity control prevent a toddler reaching in his mom's purse and shooting her point blank?
Depends on the range that the proximity sensor is programmed for. I'd say that the optimal range would be about six inches,a bracelet or ring on the gun hand. This is an engineering trade-off, like any other.
In any case, though, the fact that it wouldn't stop every shooting doesn't mean it's not valuable in saving some lives.
Most of the home invasions I'm seeing reported, the criminals are bringing their own weapons to the party.
I'd like to see the source of that data. From what I've seen, the vast majority are cases of burglars who had incorrectly expected that nobody would be home.
And at the very least, shouldn't it be MY decision to make?
Of course. You should be able to decide whether to buy a gun with electronic safety features.
But you can't decide that now, because you can't buy the gun with the safety features.
You have to read very closely, but unintended fatal shootings in the US from 2005-2010 resulted in 3800 deaths, or roughly 760 per year. As a frame of reference, approximately 250,000 people die from medical mistakes at hospitals every year, yet there aren't any politicians trying to ban hospitals or regulate doctors.
But this discussion isn't about "banning" guns (nor doctors). It's about implementing a technology to reduce the number of unintentional deaths. Implementing technologies to reduce the number of unintentional deaths is something hospitals do all the time.
So your analogy fails.
I find the whole idea of smart guns mostly silly. Even plain old guns, brand new designs or designs that have been tweaked and fine tuned for 100+ years, misfire sometimes. Adding another level of failure is pretty absurd.
It's useful to have a background in error analysis. You should think about Type I errors versus Type II errors. A Type-I error, here, will mean the gun not firing when you want it to. A Type-II error is the gun firing when you do NOT want it to. For this particular safety mechanism, the type-II error can be considered to consist of the case "the gun fires when somebody else has it", and the worst-case type II error is "the gun fires when somebody else has it and is pointing it at you or your family".
It turns out that the cases in which the Type-II error will be deadly turn out to be much, much more common than the Type-I errors. There just aren't that many home invasions that are solved by the homeowner shooting the burglar, outside of Hollywood. For the most part, a Type-I error will mean that a piece of paper with circles on it will have fewer holes in it.
A Type-II error, on the other hand, means that somebody you love gets shot. You want to avoid that.