You're right;unfortunately for the analogy our internal "I'm falling" detectors work based on something similar to the uranium-pellet-dropping loophole I mentioned.
In a cell though the molecules don't have finely tuned internal instruments to detect and react to freefall, just like they don't have uranium pellets.
Besides that there are also other problems with the analogy like how some parts of our body can be heavier than others, and water provides little resistance to things as huge as ourselves, so we would probably tend towards having our heaviest parts lowest (our heads tend to float), so we would feel water flowing across us as the ball rotated which we wouldn't feel if in zero-G.
But it's another problem with the analogy, because rather than being one large fluid-filled ball an embryo is a huge number of fluid-filled balls, and on the scale of each individual ball the fluid will be fairly viscous. Unlike the imaginary person in the ball the molecules will move with the water, and the water will move with the cell wall.
Really an organic molecule in a cell would behave more like a small piece of honeycomb in a jar of honey, whereas a human in a ball of water would behave more like a goldfish in a water-filled sandwich bag.
A bad analogy yes but I don't see any reason an embryo would function differently being rotated evenly than it would in zero-G.
It's like people are so amazed by how awesome zero-g is that they can't accept that working against it might be the best option.
That's probably what influences the designers of spacecraft.. the awesomeness of zero-g...
Either that or because systems involving artificial gravity are too costly to justify themselves, and the "brain dead" solutions are actually smart solutions which save money/make missions possible.
Perhaps a spaceflight engineer would respond "problem: no gravity in orbit, we're not used to this. brain dead solution: create artificial gravity! price/practicality is no object if it means we have no new problems to solve!"
Maybe at some point there will be a zero-g problem which really is easier to solve with centrifuges than with anything else, and you can bet when that point comes centrifuges will be chosen.
You are saying having a G-force spread in all directions is harmful in a way that zero-G wouldn't be. That makes sense for chicken-eggs in gently rotating glass blenders, but not for the embryonic cells within gently rotating chicken-eggs:
Imagine you're at the center of a giant plastic ball full of water. You have to tell whether or not you're in zero-G.
If the ball was sitting on the surface of the earth you might sink or float to the top, and you'd know right away you're not in zero-G.
Now imagine the ball is being rotated so that you don't sink in any direction (or you sink equally in every direction, if you prefer). As long as the fluid you're in is viscous enough and you are around the same density you couldn't tell whether you were in orbit or on earth.
Of course if you had a handful of uranium pellets you could drop them and they'd fall straight through the water; it only works as a decent zero-G analogue if everything inside was of the same density and/or the liquid is viscous enough to slow the fall in any direction.
On the scale of an embryonic cell there are no uranium pellets, the DNA in your cells isn't lying on the "floor" of the cell after all, and because on a microscopic scale water would seem a lot "thicker" it'd be like falling through syrup for a cell's organic molecules.
If the direction of gravity is changing fast enough from gentle rotation it'd be hard for the cell to "know" whether it was in zero-G or not.
tl;dr: If it's either you or the team of scientists who have had a "logic fail" it's probably going to be you..
Well no, people who aren't buddies still need to be able to communicate, and you'd hope such communication would be checked extra thoroughly.
I'm on Windows and use Pidgin only because I hate Windows Live Messenger, the ads and tabs and needless features and static "Vista-esque" window borders make it feel like 90's RealPlayer's take on IM. When Pidgin was crashing all the time during the last major update I gave Windows Live Messenger another honest go, but couldn't bear it.
I even tried to get Pidgin compiling in Eclipse to lend my eyeballs and shallow out a few bugs, but it's very unix-oriented unfortunately and I also found the code very difficult to navigate. I think that's because I use it for MSN and it's supposed to be multi-client, but even so the module interfaces were far from self-explanatory.
More than anything I feel like C just isn't an appropriate language for something that'd have such an impact if a hole is found, why not Java, or Mono?
Can you imagine the chaos if a similar bug was found in Windows Live Messenger? Even if it was "only" limited to people on your friends list it'd be the biggest worm since Blaster.
Maybe I'll try again now, since at the moment I have to have Pidgin offline, but I really wish there was an FOSS MSN client for Windows that gets the basics right and is secure (and not just because no-one has heard of it).
Of course this is a crappy thing to get at a celebratory new release time, and if Pidgin devs are reading I do appreciate the work a lot, but more than any network enabled app that I have running 24/7 Pidgin is by far the most concerning.
tl;dr: Pidgin need to sort their shit out regarding security, but thanks for keeping the updates coming
I wish they'd do some more research into Orion. It's the only way we can feasibly get truly large payloads into space and it's completely shelved. They projected 10 people would die of cancer from a launched, based on old predictions based on old radiation models.
An 8 year old living in the pre-internet era maybe. An 8 year old who knows about the net and is interested enough to look will find just about anything they're interested to look for really. Parents are kidding themselves if they think parent controls work, I remember as a kid getting around the duke nukem parental control, it just made you more interested
The PHB's at Xcel Energy need a whack with a cluestick. Nickel and diming people who are giving you expensive peak power for the price of base load is petty at best.
Maybe, but maybe (just maybe) you're not in the electricity business and Xcel Energy are, and you're the one who needs "a whack with a cluestick".
It's another industry I just wish could be more open and involved with their users via the web. It'll happen, but not without a lot of misunderstandings like this coming first.
If the title was "Electric Company Wants Power Sellers To Help Maintain Grid" maybe I'd agree with you. But the title is "Electric Company Wants Monthly Fee For Solar Users", so down with the EVIL power companies!! Boycott!
It isn't trivial to have a night rate and a day rate just like that. I was thinking about getting a meter that supported such a thing myself, but you have to take into account the cost of the meter and whether you think you can save money with different rates. This will vary from place to place, but night/day rates are something that everyone would benefit from if it was as easy as flicking a switch, but unfortunately it needs different equipment.
The logic is that even if the customer isn't using the power from the electric company, they will still be using the companies lines when the meter runs backwards. With that logic, why should the power company be able to use land for their poles and such without compensation to the who don't use their electricity?
Because everyone uses it, because the power companies bought the poles when the power company was privatized (assuming yours was), and becase the cost of the land that these poles are standing on is nothing compared to the cost of maintaining the poles.
Just yesterday I was joking with friends: Forget about stealing the rounded pennies from bank accounts, criminals could re-program the PTPv2 implementation in switches to steal milliseconds of time during trading!
You're not stuck with that 2GB-maximum 32-bit [...]
Yeah, this guy is clearly in a position to advise about the benefits of Windows 7 to gaming.. He must be a hardcore gamer/IT genius to know that 2GB is the 32-bit upper limit on memory
Compared to Apollo the Shuttle really was very safe. The safety of it is largely why so few people take an active interest in it, and saying that it's still not safe enough is a bit of an insult to NASA, which have a remarkable record of around 2 accidents in 120. People can ride an enormous explosion into Earth orbit, and a wave of plasma back down, and still rate their chances of death at less than 2%. In Apollo it was more like 15%.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right;unfortunately for the analogy our internal "I'm falling" detectors work based on something similar to the uranium-pellet-dropping loophole I mentioned.
In a cell though the molecules don't have finely tuned internal instruments to detect and react to freefall, just like they don't have uranium pellets.
Besides that there are also other problems with the analogy like how some parts of our body can be heavier than others, and water provides little resistance to things as huge as ourselves, so we would probably tend towards having our heaviest parts lowest (our heads tend to float), so we would feel water flowing across us as the ball rotated which we wouldn't feel if in zero-G.
But it's another problem with the analogy, because rather than being one large fluid-filled ball an embryo is a huge number of fluid-filled balls, and on the scale of each individual ball the fluid will be fairly viscous. Unlike the imaginary person in the ball the molecules will move with the water, and the water will move with the cell wall.
Really an organic molecule in a cell would behave more like a small piece of honeycomb in a jar of honey, whereas a human in a ball of water would behave more like a goldfish in a water-filled sandwich bag.
A bad analogy yes but I don't see any reason an embryo would function differently being rotated evenly than it would in zero-G.
It's like people are so amazed by how awesome zero-g is that they can't accept that working against it might be the best option.
That's probably what influences the designers of spacecraft.. the awesomeness of zero-g...
Either that or because systems involving artificial gravity are too costly to justify themselves, and the "brain dead" solutions are actually smart solutions which save money/make missions possible.
Perhaps a spaceflight engineer would respond "problem: no gravity in orbit, we're not used to this. brain dead solution: create artificial gravity! price/practicality is no object if it means we have no new problems to solve!"
Maybe at some point there will be a zero-g problem which really is easier to solve with centrifuges than with anything else, and you can bet when that point comes centrifuges will be chosen.
You are saying having a G-force spread in all directions is harmful in a way that zero-G wouldn't be. That makes sense for chicken-eggs in gently rotating glass blenders, but not for the embryonic cells within gently rotating chicken-eggs:
Imagine you're at the center of a giant plastic ball full of water. You have to tell whether or not you're in zero-G.
If the ball was sitting on the surface of the earth you might sink or float to the top, and you'd know right away you're not in zero-G.
Now imagine the ball is being rotated so that you don't sink in any direction (or you sink equally in every direction, if you prefer). As long as the fluid you're in is viscous enough and you are around the same density you couldn't tell whether you were in orbit or on earth.
Of course if you had a handful of uranium pellets you could drop them and they'd fall straight through the water; it only works as a decent zero-G analogue if everything inside was of the same density and/or the liquid is viscous enough to slow the fall in any direction.
On the scale of an embryonic cell there are no uranium pellets, the DNA in your cells isn't lying on the "floor" of the cell after all, and because on a microscopic scale water would seem a lot "thicker" it'd be like falling through syrup for a cell's organic molecules.
If the direction of gravity is changing fast enough from gentle rotation it'd be hard for the cell to "know" whether it was in zero-G or not.
tl;dr: If it's either you or the team of scientists who have had a "logic fail" it's probably going to be you..
Hush, we're trying to be bitter about NASA here if you don't mind..
Well no, people who aren't buddies still need to be able to communicate, and you'd hope such communication would be checked extra thoroughly.
I'm on Windows and use Pidgin only because I hate Windows Live Messenger, the ads and tabs and needless features and static "Vista-esque" window borders make it feel like 90's RealPlayer's take on IM. When Pidgin was crashing all the time during the last major update I gave Windows Live Messenger another honest go, but couldn't bear it.
I even tried to get Pidgin compiling in Eclipse to lend my eyeballs and shallow out a few bugs, but it's very unix-oriented unfortunately and I also found the code very difficult to navigate. I think that's because I use it for MSN and it's supposed to be multi-client, but even so the module interfaces were far from self-explanatory.
More than anything I feel like C just isn't an appropriate language for something that'd have such an impact if a hole is found, why not Java, or Mono?
Can you imagine the chaos if a similar bug was found in Windows Live Messenger? Even if it was "only" limited to people on your friends list it'd be the biggest worm since Blaster. Maybe I'll try again now, since at the moment I have to have Pidgin offline, but I really wish there was an FOSS MSN client for Windows that gets the basics right and is secure (and not just because no-one has heard of it).
Of course this is a crappy thing to get at a celebratory new release time, and if Pidgin devs are reading I do appreciate the work a lot, but more than any network enabled app that I have running 24/7 Pidgin is by far the most concerning.
tl;dr: Pidgin need to sort their shit out regarding security, but thanks for keeping the updates coming
I wish they'd do some more research into Orion. It's the only way we can feasibly get truly large payloads into space and it's completely shelved. They projected 10 people would die of cancer from a launched, based on old predictions based on old radiation models.
Please lets vote Turnbull in, enough is enough (already)
Exactly, this seems more like Wikipedia is approaching completeness and gaining quality than a bunch of assholes keeping people out without reason
And how is that a right? (Go ahead mods, mod me "Redundant" because you disagree as with the GP)
An 8 year old living in the pre-internet era maybe. An 8 year old who knows about the net and is interested enough to look will find just about anything they're interested to look for really. Parents are kidding themselves if they think parent controls work, I remember as a kid getting around the duke nukem parental control, it just made you more interested
Didn't you notice that you install from browserballot.eu , and I wonder what sort of software technology you need to access such a website?
It's a bit cheeky really, the browser ballot site shown in IE8. How many people with think "wait what's a browser/why do I need 2?"
When dealing with something as expensive as space travel the question "why not?" is a lot less pressing than the question of "why?"
CAs are incorruptible, we all know this.
You can do it even in a suburban home if you plan well enough.
And have access to an electricity storage device that no-one else has conceived of yet.
The PHB's at Xcel Energy need a whack with a cluestick. Nickel and diming people who are giving you expensive peak power for the price of base load is petty at best.
Maybe, but maybe (just maybe) you're not in the electricity business and Xcel Energy are, and you're the one who needs "a whack with a cluestick".
It's another industry I just wish could be more open and involved with their users via the web. It'll happen, but not without a lot of misunderstandings like this coming first.
Do the poles come onto your lawn where you live?
If the title was "Electric Company Wants Power Sellers To Help Maintain Grid" maybe I'd agree with you. But the title is "Electric Company Wants Monthly Fee For Solar Users", so down with the EVIL power companies!! Boycott!
It isn't trivial to have a night rate and a day rate just like that. I was thinking about getting a meter that supported such a thing myself, but you have to take into account the cost of the meter and whether you think you can save money with different rates. This will vary from place to place, but night/day rates are something that everyone would benefit from if it was as easy as flicking a switch, but unfortunately it needs different equipment.
The logic is that even if the customer isn't using the power from the electric company, they will still be using the companies lines when the meter runs backwards. With that logic, why should the power company be able to use land for their poles and such without compensation to the who don't use their electricity?
Because everyone uses it, because the power companies bought the poles when the power company was privatized (assuming yours was), and becase the cost of the land that these poles are standing on is nothing compared to the cost of maintaining the poles.
Just yesterday I was joking with friends: Forget about stealing the rounded pennies from bank accounts, criminals could re-program the PTPv2 implementation in switches to steal milliseconds of time during trading!
You must be quite the wit at parties ;-)
(j/k)
Oh, my bad. *Wipes egg off face*
You're not stuck with that 2GB-maximum 32-bit [...]
Yeah, this guy is clearly in a position to advise about the benefits of Windows 7 to gaming.. He must be a hardcore gamer/IT genius to know that 2GB is the 32-bit upper limit on memory
Compared to Apollo the Shuttle really was very safe. The safety of it is largely why so few people take an active interest in it, and saying that it's still not safe enough is a bit of an insult to NASA, which have a remarkable record of around 2 accidents in 120. People can ride an enormous explosion into Earth orbit, and a wave of plasma back down, and still rate their chances of death at less than 2%. In Apollo it was more like 15%.
It was a lot easier when people accepted it was a dangerous job