I'm not sure what the civilian to 'dissident' ratio was in our kills for Vietnam.
I fear not only have we killed more iraqi civilians, but we have also killed much less enemy than we did in Vietnam. The ratio of US soldiers killed to assumed enemy would be the quantitiy we'd like to compare - have we really killed 35k+ enemy to get a 10:1?
I am sceptical.
You, my friend, have made the funniest post I have read on slashdot in ages.
Must comment...
Though to analyze is to destroy funny.
Dang.
The Alaskan is a *complete* boob. We are frustrated with his assertions because they are founded upon inscrutably, inconceivably, tragically,... massive ignorance.
The 'physicist' or 'mathematician'... not sure which camp I want to insult by including Penrose in - is anything but ignorant. With great knowledge and an almost brilliant intelligence he asserts things that we find abhorent to our cores - that all things are physically possibly with these cool stringy-math things... *almost* unprovable - one can only create *thought* experiments to shoot down string theory - but physical experiments are so much harder. His theory walks the edge of what is and is not a scientific theory like a skiddoo on November lake ice (sorry - Canadian).
He also believes (as he asserts in his two Hofstadter wannabe books) that a mathematician 'in principle' can prove or disprove any statement for which a proof platonicly exists... since no machine can, by Turing's and Godel's arguments, be able to prove or disprove any (ie: every) assertion. Penrose argues that mathematicians must have an extra-mechanical physical element providing their ability to prove anything. Penrose, bizarrely, argues strongly that artificial intelligence is impossible because no computer could ever do math like a person.
The intense hatred for the two human failings that drive these personalities, my feelings, my hatred, render the equation of seething ignorance and transcendent idealism - they render it totally fucking hilarious.
I hope the mods don't read this - what does it say about me that if I only had one bullet and a hall with the two boobs at opposite ends it I would be deadlocked? Who to 'save' the world from - so hard...
... of the theoretical maximum strength of a material.
Nearly perfect crystals (what TFA is whining about) have been known to fail catastrophically, and quickly for as long as people have associated the word 'brittle' with 'crystal'.
Now, many *amorpheous* covalent structures (eg: window glass - although it is often weak) can have both extreme strength - as strong as a perfect crystal, perfectly aligned - and extreme thoughness (robustness in the face of damage).
Extremely complicated - although not amorpheous, materials can also be as strong as their constituent carbon bonds, and can (not usually at the same time in nature though) be even more forgiving of damage. Most woods (particularly the softwoods we are surounded by) for example, will react to penetrations (like nails) by bending around the damage, and with the massive crosslinking, the column of fibres damaged is only weakened for a short distance near the damage.
This means that we only can be sure that the *largest* hole in the material will cause significant weakening as the others should not be right next to it and thus would be 'second and subsequent' links in an analagous chain, and thus of much lesser consequence. Amusingly, a hole wouldn't neccessarily even cause weakening proportionally to its fraction of the cross-sectional area of the material.
TFAuthor noticed that a single carbon tube is weakened after losing a Carbon, way weakened by two, and toast shortly after... then used his own 'secret recipe math' to 'prove' that big piles of nanotubes would be statistically likely to fail.
Without defining the *exact* nature of the cross-linking reinforcing the tubes you can make almost no statements about how forgiving the material is going to be of damage. The researchers quoted in TFA who are working with actual buckytubes, trying to actually build something, are correct to shrug off the TFA as being both theoretical, and wrong. They have more pressing problems (like getting past the 1 GPa point) than worrying about the theoretical maximal properties of layouts of tubes that they were not even *considered* using.
And, yes, it is freaking idiotic to say something technological is impossible, when the physics do not rule it out. It is merely *daft* to assume that something prohibited by current physics is impossible - but that is not the case here.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what the civilian to 'dissident' ratio was in our kills for Vietnam.
I fear not only have we killed more iraqi civilians, but we have also killed much less enemy than we did in Vietnam. The ratio of US soldiers killed to assumed enemy would be the quantitiy we'd like to compare - have we really killed 35k+ enemy to get a 10:1?
I am sceptical.
You, my friend, have made the funniest post I have read on slashdot in ages.
...
... massive ignorance.
... not sure which camp I want to insult by including Penrose in - is anything but ignorant. With great knowledge and an almost brilliant intelligence he asserts things that we find abhorent to our cores - that all things are physically possibly with these cool stringy-math things... *almost* unprovable - one can only create *thought* experiments to shoot down string theory - but physical experiments are so much harder. His theory walks the edge of what is and is not a scientific theory like a skiddoo on November lake ice (sorry - Canadian).
Must comment
Though to analyze is to destroy funny.
Dang.
The Alaskan is a *complete* boob. We are frustrated with his assertions because they are founded upon inscrutably, inconceivably, tragically,
The 'physicist' or 'mathematician'
He also believes (as he asserts in his two Hofstadter wannabe books) that a mathematician 'in principle' can prove or disprove any statement for which a proof platonicly exists... since no machine can, by Turing's and Godel's arguments, be able to prove or disprove any (ie: every) assertion. Penrose argues that mathematicians must have an extra-mechanical physical element providing their ability to prove anything. Penrose, bizarrely, argues strongly that artificial intelligence is impossible because no computer could ever do math like a person.
The intense hatred for the two human failings that drive these personalities, my feelings, my hatred, render the equation of seething ignorance and transcendent idealism - they render it totally fucking hilarious.
I hope the mods don't read this - what does it say about me that if I only had one bullet and a hall with the two boobs at opposite ends it I would be deadlocked? Who to 'save' the world from - so hard...
... of the theoretical maximum strength of a material.
:)
Nearly perfect crystals (what TFA is whining about) have been known to fail catastrophically, and quickly for as long as people have associated the word 'brittle' with 'crystal'.
Now, many *amorpheous* covalent structures (eg: window glass - although it is often weak) can have both extreme strength - as strong as a perfect crystal, perfectly aligned - and extreme thoughness (robustness in the face of damage).
Extremely complicated - although not amorpheous, materials can also be as strong as their constituent carbon bonds, and can (not usually at the same time in nature though) be even more forgiving of damage. Most woods (particularly the softwoods we are surounded by) for example, will react to penetrations (like nails) by bending around the damage, and with the massive crosslinking, the column of fibres damaged is only weakened for a short distance near the damage.
This means that we only can be sure that the *largest* hole in the material will cause significant weakening as the others should not be right next to it and thus would be 'second and subsequent' links in an analagous chain, and thus of much lesser consequence. Amusingly, a hole wouldn't neccessarily even cause weakening proportionally to its fraction of the cross-sectional area of the material.
TFAuthor noticed that a single carbon tube is weakened after losing a Carbon, way weakened by two, and toast shortly after... then used his own 'secret recipe math' to 'prove' that big piles of nanotubes would be statistically likely to fail.
Without defining the *exact* nature of the cross-linking reinforcing the tubes you can make almost no statements about how forgiving the material is going to be of damage. The researchers quoted in TFA who are working with actual buckytubes, trying to actually build something, are correct to shrug off the TFA as being both theoretical, and wrong. They have more pressing problems (like getting past the 1 GPa point) than worrying about the theoretical maximal properties of layouts of tubes that they were not even *considered* using.
And, yes, it is freaking idiotic to say something technological is impossible, when the physics do not rule it out. It is merely *daft* to assume that something prohibited by current physics is impossible - but that is not the case here.
I bow down in shame.