... Not only would Bush have won then, he would have won last Tuesday...
Which is why, of course, that Bush was so prominent on the campaign trail for both McCain and Romney. Indeed his endorsement speeches at both Republican National Conventions were the stuff of legend.
Writing was invented only twice.... All the writing systems of the Old World were either derived from linear-b or inspired by it.
While this may be true, a once only invention in the Old World is only a plausible guess, because there are several ancient writing systems that show no commonality in origin: Mespotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, and China. None of these writing systems are derived from the others (linear-b is demonstrably derived from Mesopotamian writing however).
The main reason why the guess is plausible is that the writing systems were invented at different times, and the farther they were from Mesopotamia (the first) the later they appeared, so we guess this is the result of cultural diffusion of an idea, but not a system.
Anyone else tired of seeing comparisons between a massive capacity magnestic drive and SSDs?
Indeed. The whole question of " should you pay three times as much for an SSD for twice the performance" is mis-formulated. The question really is would I pay 20% more for a laptop that boots twice as fast, never has data access lag from a sleeping drive, performs noticeably better on frequent persistent storage access scenarios, and has substantially better battery life?
Real asteroid detection systems employ infrared space-based telescopes, since asteroids of all types glow brightly in the infrared.
But where a radar would come in handy is accurately determining the orbital elements of an asteroid once detected. With infrared telescopes all you get with a detection is the brightness and direction. Successive observations as the asteroid and satellite move over the course of months is required to develop enough data for decent orbit, and if it is one that will come close to Earth it can take years to get enough data to tell that it will not hit the Earth.
A specially designed radar to fire pulses at asteroids to get accurate ranges and velocity along the line of sight would make generating accurate orbits much faster. That is what I was hoping this article would describe.
Organic farming is also about food security. Having food at all. Conventional farming uses fertilizer made from oil. A finite resource that is running out. Making artificial fertilizer has been polluting and destroying our environment........including farm land and drinkable water.
...
Fertilizer is not made from oil. It is made from natural gas. And fertilizer production consumes only 1.5% of U.S. natural gas production (world-wide it is 5%). Only 2% of world energy consumption goes into fertilizer. So the energy savings here aren't making more than a small dent in energy usage, and synthetic fertilizer can use any energy source at all via the Haber Process to fix nitrogen from the air (if talk about energy and fertilizer it is nitrogen we are talking about). So as long as humankind has some modest source of energy synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is an unlimited resource. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#High_energy_consumption
Potassium and phosphorous fertilizers really are a limited resource, that must be mined to produce. But organic farming permits the use of these fertilizers and so does not help with resource depletion here much, if at all.
Now overuse of nitrogen fertilizer is a real problem since it runs off if irrigation is poorly managed and pollutes the environment (the annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is due to farming nitrogen run-off). So restricting nitrogen fertilizer use and managing run-off is important, but it does not require organic farming to do so.
The principal problem for modern farming is loss of organic material from soil. Organic practices can help here, but they are not required. Simply allowing fields to grow cover crops in rotation, but following regular commercial practices otherwise can address this.
Are property rights uniformly enforced in the absence of government?
Who pays for the enforcement of property rights in this theoretical construct of an governmentless world?
Can you point to any concrete examples of a society based on this existing at any time or place? (To show that this isn't like Marxism - a philosophical pipe dream divorced from reality and impossible to actually create).
Yes, it's a complex world and we must work with limited information. You seem quite smug about the banning of CFCs; do you feel the same way about the banning of DDT? This has killed an estimated 100MM people via malaria.....
I call B.S. on this. Please provide a citation for this claim. DDT was NEVER banned for malaria control in any area where malaria was a serious endemic. It is explicitly permitted today (as it always has been) for the purposes of malaria vector control in affected regions. About 4000 tonnes are produced and used annually for this purpose. The Wikipedia page is a convenient place to start informing yourself about the facts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT.
Oh man - Exhibit A here. The aptly self-identified (by not logging in) Coward treats science as simply a process of advocacy for political (or other ideological ) positions. All money being spent on climate research is "pro-warmist" (since that is what actual science shows). That is so-o-o-o unfair to people who want to believe things contrary to the evidence.
Ok, I did a lot of reading recently on the water pruifications system on the ISS. Astronauts need about 9 pounds of water a day. ~3 pounds gets reclaimed in urine, ~5 pounds from their breathing and sweat with a recovery rate of 97% overall.
On the other hand metabolizing 2000 kilocalories of food a day produces about half a pound of water as a by-product. This is more than the 3% lost.
Already, Cooper's team of three has come up with about 100 recipes, all vegetarian because the astronauts will not have dairy or meat products available. It isn't possible to preserve those products long enough to take to Mars - and bringing a cow on the mission is not an option, Cooper jokes.
I'd say the filibuster-proof supermajority lasted only 5 weeks in effect. From the time Franken was sworn in until the death of Sen. Kennedy was 7 weeks, but the Senate was only in session for five of those weeks. Oh - and that "supermajority" exists ONLY if you count two Independents as being Democrats, which they weren't.
I'm a former office-supply store sales guy who dealt with these machines and all the pros and cons of HPs, Epsons, and Lexmarks and Lexmark is the most economical. They have a couple of models that print about a penny-a-page for the ink. That's a significant savings, even when compared to laserjet printers. Most mid-to-high end laserjets print for 1.5 to 2 cents per page. Lexmark's inkjets print for less money than that.
In my experience, with one Lexmark printer if you did not print for a couple of weeks the cartridge clogged and could not be unclogged. Sure, there was a cleaning cycle, it just did not work. A cartridge that does not print cleanly is useless, so unless I remembered to print regularly and did not go on vacation, after a liitle bit of use the cartridges had to be thrown out. A theoretical 2 cents a page becomes 20 cents a page, or even $2 a page if you did not print much before the clog set in (this happened to me in fact shortly after I bought it and before I discovered its clogging problem).
It was an all-in-one so I used it just as a scanner for awhile, until its drive mechanism broke and it started slamming the scanner across the platen instead of, well, scanning. What a piece of junk. Naturally I have no experience with a second LexMark.
I saw this earlier and this thought immediately came to mind: Why send probes on dangerous cave missions when a machine that bores holes and analyses the sample could be built instead?
Exactly.
Further, lava tubes, oddly enough, are lined with lava.
Not that informative.
A German designed drill is scheduled for the next lander in 2016 and drill 16 feet into the surface.
Nothing you can put in a cave will be able come close to that, and at best it might be able to drill a few inches into solid lava.
The hole named "Jeanne" here is more than 178 meters deep, no way a drill can come close to that. And many of the holes detected on Mars are not lava tubes but sink holes, i.e. created by some process of erosion. This is often involves water, and "follow the water" is exactly what Mars exploration wants to do. We are much more likely to find interesting water-related geology and chemistry hundreds of meters down a water-erosion tunnel than a few meters down under the surface.
Bear in mind that as a population ages, the ones that were accident prone are removed from the population, so this doesn't work linearly.
This comment posits the existence of intrinsically "accident prone" individuals that will be eliminated, thus lowering the death rate by a significant factor. Most popular notions of "accident proneness" is simply blaming the people at the high end of random accident bell curve. Real accident proneness is rare enough that its mere existence has been controversial for decades, and is difficult to detect statistically. But it seems there actually are people who are substantially more prone to accidents than the general population: researchers at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands in a 2007 meta-analysis of 79 studies covering 150,000 people found one out of every 29 people has a 50 percent or higher chance of having an accident than others, but they are too few to drive the overall accident rates (they are hard to detect statistically in fact), and they all only die once. Eliminating them all has a trivial effect on the overall accident rate.
Accident rates are not markedly different from early adulthood until advanced age (over 70), bouncing around between 35 and 57 per 100,000 for 50 years with no trend. There is thus little real evidence to suppose that accident rates will drop due to some natural attrition process.
But accident rates are malleable as I said - so yes, the average lifespan limit can be extended beyond this 2,000 year estimate, but how much enters into a lot of speculation. Training people to avoid accidents is probably one of the most effective (i.e. altering behavior), and building in safeguards to prevent avoidable ones is another.
According to the CDC for 2009 there were 118,021 accidental deaths and 36,909 suicides for a population of 307 million. As a first approximation this gives a death rate from non-disease causes of one per 1,982 Americans. This suggests a non-disease lifespan of about 2,000 years with a 25% chance of suicide being your ultimate end. Suicide rates are quite variable though (and suggests that women will outlive men due to lower suicide rates alone). Accident rates can be lowered of course with properly enforced safety standards (that means "laws" and "government").
I assume US regulation is far too extreme to pursue such ventures. Gates can get more bang for his buck in a country where it doesn't take 20 years just to get approval to move forward.
Glad you made it clear that it is only an assumption you have.
The real reason is obvious - South Korea has no native or cheap sources of energy (like natural gas) and has a government sponsored development corporation (KOPEC) to develop and build nuclear power plants, which already supply 45% of the nation's electricity.
In the U.S. nuclear power plants have to compete with cheap natural gas plants, which on straight-up business investment grounds they routinely lose out. To overcome the financial handicap nuclear power has of high capital costs, requiring much longer pay-back timelines, generally some sort of active government role in promoting (or requiring) their construction is needed.
Unfortunately such public-private partnerships are ideologically unacceptable to a powerful political bloc in the U.S.
Twenty years ago I was a program officer at the Office of Fusion Energy, US Department of Energy. The ITER planning had started. My take -- there is no way on Earth that a tokamak can be cost competitive. Even if it works, even if the first wall problem is solved as may be indicated above, the engineering costs are so prohibitive as to price the whole concept out of consideration.
...
Right you are, and the economics are even worse than what you suggest. Consider the breeding blanket problem. Putting aside the immense difficulty of creating a blanket that meets its stringent neutron economy and heat transfer issues (it may be as hard as the break-even problem, and may not even be possible), the capital cost for such a blanket - just price din term of the raw materials - makes fusion power more expensive than conventional nuclear power, and nuclear power's high capital cost is already the key factor preventing new plants from being built.
No - it is not unfavorable regulations, or those dirty hippies, holding nuclear power back (the regulatory environment has been very favorable toward nuclear power since Reagan was elected 32 years ago) is is simply that competing power plant types provide a faster return on investment. Only government intervention in the marketplace (of which the right wing now professes absolute horror) can bring more nuclear power (which the right loves) into existence.
It as been argued that an engineering program on the same scale as ITER is needed to build a full-scale breeding blanket prototype (using a nuclear reactor for the neutron and thermal load) to prove it can be done and validate a design if it can. The absence of such an effort fusion power is not going to materialize even if ITER is a smashing success.
And even if this happens, fusion power will be by far the most expensive source of electricity of any proposed technology.
Slashdot Mirror
... Not only would Bush have won then, he would have won last Tuesday...
Which is why, of course, that Bush was so prominent on the campaign trail for both McCain and Romney. Indeed his endorsement speeches at both Republican National Conventions were the stuff of legend.
Or was that "fantasy"?
All things considered he was fairly accurate on the 2008 election as well. I think he got one state wrong if that as well.
So as far as I know he is 2 for 2.
Actually that would be 99 for 100, the electoral college result for each individual state. And the one he missed was very close, and under-polled.
It was Megyn Kelly's finest hour. It really says something when even SHE gets fed up with right-wing BS and insists on looking at the facts!
Writing was invented only twice.... All the writing systems of the Old World were either derived from linear-b or inspired by it.
While this may be true, a once only invention in the Old World is only a plausible guess, because there are several ancient writing systems that show no commonality in origin: Mespotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, and China. None of these writing systems are derived from the others (linear-b is demonstrably derived from Mesopotamian writing however).
The main reason why the guess is plausible is that the writing systems were invented at different times, and the farther they were from Mesopotamia (the first) the later they appeared, so we guess this is the result of cultural diffusion of an idea, but not a system.
Anyone else tired of seeing comparisons between a massive capacity magnestic drive and SSDs?
Indeed. The whole question of " should you pay three times as much for an SSD for twice the performance" is mis-formulated. The question really is would I pay 20% more for a laptop that boots twice as fast, never has data access lag from a sleeping drive, performs noticeably better on frequent persistent storage access scenarios, and has substantially better battery life?
Worse still - this is a formula tailored to create lethal crowd-crush ("stampede") catastrophes, like the Baghdad Bridge Stampede which killed 953:
Real asteroid detection systems employ infrared space-based telescopes, since asteroids of all types glow brightly in the infrared.
But where a radar would come in handy is accurately determining the orbital elements of an asteroid once detected. With infrared telescopes all you get with a detection is the brightness and direction. Successive observations as the asteroid and satellite move over the course of months is required to develop enough data for decent orbit, and if it is one that will come close to Earth it can take years to get enough data to tell that it will not hit the Earth.
A specially designed radar to fire pulses at asteroids to get accurate ranges and velocity along the line of sight would make generating accurate orbits much faster. That is what I was hoping this article would describe.
The ESA radar systems are for tracking space debris orbiting the Earth not for tracking asteroids.
Sheesh - can't the summary writer at least read TFA? (I know, I know, this is /.)
Organic farming is also about food security. Having food at all. Conventional farming uses fertilizer made from oil. A finite resource that is running out. Making artificial fertilizer has been polluting and destroying our environment........including farm land and drinkable water.
...
Fertilizer is not made from oil. It is made from natural gas. And fertilizer production consumes only 1.5% of U.S. natural gas production (world-wide it is 5%). Only 2% of world energy consumption goes into fertilizer. So the energy savings here aren't making more than a small dent in energy usage, and synthetic fertilizer can use any energy source at all via the Haber Process to fix nitrogen from the air (if talk about energy and fertilizer it is nitrogen we are talking about). So as long as humankind has some modest source of energy synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is an unlimited resource. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#High_energy_consumption
Potassium and phosphorous fertilizers really are a limited resource, that must be mined to produce. But organic farming permits the use of these fertilizers and so does not help with resource depletion here much, if at all.
Now overuse of nitrogen fertilizer is a real problem since it runs off if irrigation is poorly managed and pollutes the environment (the annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is due to farming nitrogen run-off). So restricting nitrogen fertilizer use and managing run-off is important, but it does not require organic farming to do so.
The principal problem for modern farming is loss of organic material from soil. Organic practices can help here, but they are not required. Simply allowing fields to grow cover crops in rotation, but following regular commercial practices otherwise can address this.
Ford is an unusual case though - he was never elected to the office in the first place so he was running for election not re-election.
So you are saying that your theories are so profound they transcend evidence, and are true because of their evident trueness to yourself?
Giving something a Greek name doesn't give substance.
Sounds like the post-modernism of the right. We don't need no stinkin' evidence!
Are property rights uniformly enforced in the absence of government?
Who pays for the enforcement of property rights in this theoretical construct of an governmentless world?
Can you point to any concrete examples of a society based on this existing at any time or place? (To show that this isn't like Marxism - a philosophical pipe dream divorced from reality and impossible to actually create).
Yes, it's a complex world and we must work with limited information. You seem quite smug about the banning of CFCs; do you feel the same way about the banning of DDT? This has killed an estimated 100MM people via malaria.....
I call B.S. on this. Please provide a citation for this claim. DDT was NEVER banned for malaria control in any area where malaria was a serious endemic. It is explicitly permitted today (as it always has been) for the purposes of malaria vector control in affected regions. About 4000 tonnes are produced and used annually for this purpose. The Wikipedia page is a convenient place to start informing yourself about the facts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT .
Oh man - Exhibit A here. The aptly self-identified (by not logging in) Coward treats science as simply a process of advocacy for political (or other ideological ) positions. All money being spent on climate research is "pro-warmist" (since that is what actual science shows). That is so-o-o-o unfair to people who want to believe things contrary to the evidence.
Ok, I did a lot of reading recently on the water pruifications system on the ISS. Astronauts need about 9 pounds of water a day. ~3 pounds gets reclaimed in urine, ~5 pounds from their breathing and sweat with a recovery rate of 97% overall.
On the other hand metabolizing 2000 kilocalories of food a day produces about half a pound of water as a by-product. This is more than the 3% lost.
TFA:
Can anyone suggest to me why powdered milk, and freeze-dried or liquid nitrogen frozen meat would not last for the three year voyage? One vendor freeeze-dired meat entrees claims they last 7 years: http://www.mtnhse.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=M&Category_Code=MHDL
Is there some constraint that they are not telling us about?
I'd say the filibuster-proof supermajority lasted only 5 weeks in effect. From the time Franken was sworn in until the death of Sen. Kennedy was 7 weeks, but the Senate was only in session for five of those weeks. Oh - and that "supermajority" exists ONLY if you count two Independents as being Democrats, which they weren't.
There is no lunar night. There's a dark side and a light side...
Despite what certain progressive rock bands would have you believe, there is no "dark side of the moon".
I'm a former office-supply store sales guy who dealt with these machines and all the pros and cons of HPs, Epsons, and Lexmarks and Lexmark is the most economical. They have a couple of models that print about a penny-a-page for the ink. That's a significant savings, even when compared to laserjet printers. Most mid-to-high end laserjets print for 1.5 to 2 cents per page. Lexmark's inkjets print for less money than that.
In my experience, with one Lexmark printer if you did not print for a couple of weeks the cartridge clogged and could not be unclogged. Sure, there was a cleaning cycle, it just did not work. A cartridge that does not print cleanly is useless, so unless I remembered to print regularly and did not go on vacation, after a liitle bit of use the cartridges had to be thrown out. A theoretical 2 cents a page becomes 20 cents a page, or even $2 a page if you did not print much before the clog set in (this happened to me in fact shortly after I bought it and before I discovered its clogging problem).
It was an all-in-one so I used it just as a scanner for awhile, until its drive mechanism broke and it started slamming the scanner across the platen instead of, well, scanning. What a piece of junk. Naturally I have no experience with a second LexMark.
I saw this earlier and this thought immediately came to mind: Why send probes on dangerous cave missions when a machine that bores holes and analyses the sample could be built instead?
Exactly.
Further, lava tubes, oddly enough, are lined with lava. Not that informative.
A German designed drill is scheduled for the next lander in 2016 and drill 16 feet into the surface. Nothing you can put in a cave will be able come close to that, and at best it might be able to drill a few inches into solid lava.
The hole named "Jeanne" here is more than 178 meters deep, no way a drill can come close to that. And many of the holes detected on Mars are not lava tubes but sink holes, i.e. created by some process of erosion. This is often involves water, and "follow the water" is exactly what Mars exploration wants to do. We are much more likely to find interesting water-related geology and chemistry hundreds of meters down a water-erosion tunnel than a few meters down under the surface.
Bear in mind that as a population ages, the ones that were accident prone are removed from the population, so this doesn't work linearly.
This comment posits the existence of intrinsically "accident prone" individuals that will be eliminated, thus lowering the death rate by a significant factor. Most popular notions of "accident proneness" is simply blaming the people at the high end of random accident bell curve. Real accident proneness is rare enough that its mere existence has been controversial for decades, and is difficult to detect statistically. But it seems there actually are people who are substantially more prone to accidents than the general population: researchers at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands in a 2007 meta-analysis of 79 studies covering 150,000 people found one out of every 29 people has a 50 percent or higher chance of having an accident than others, but they are too few to drive the overall accident rates (they are hard to detect statistically in fact), and they all only die once. Eliminating them all has a trivial effect on the overall accident rate.
Accident rates are not markedly different from early adulthood until advanced age (over 70), bouncing around between 35 and 57 per 100,000 for 50 years with no trend. There is thus little real evidence to suppose that accident rates will drop due to some natural attrition process.
But accident rates are malleable as I said - so yes, the average lifespan limit can be extended beyond this 2,000 year estimate, but how much enters into a lot of speculation. Training people to avoid accidents is probably one of the most effective (i.e. altering behavior), and building in safeguards to prevent avoidable ones is another.
...
The only answer to the original question that makes sense to me is "live forever", because I'm not suicidal.
Yet.
According to the CDC for 2009 there were 118,021 accidental deaths and 36,909 suicides for a population of 307 million. As a first approximation this gives a death rate from non-disease causes of one per 1,982 Americans. This suggests a non-disease lifespan of about 2,000 years with a 25% chance of suicide being your ultimate end. Suicide rates are quite variable though (and suggests that women will outlive men due to lower suicide rates alone). Accident rates can be lowered of course with properly enforced safety standards (that means "laws" and "government").
I assume US regulation is far too extreme to pursue such ventures. Gates can get more bang for his buck in a country where it doesn't take 20 years just to get approval to move forward.
Glad you made it clear that it is only an assumption you have.
The real reason is obvious - South Korea has no native or cheap sources of energy (like natural gas) and has a government sponsored development corporation (KOPEC) to develop and build nuclear power plants, which already supply 45% of the nation's electricity.
In the U.S. nuclear power plants have to compete with cheap natural gas plants, which on straight-up business investment grounds they routinely lose out. To overcome the financial handicap nuclear power has of high capital costs, requiring much longer pay-back timelines, generally some sort of active government role in promoting (or requiring) their construction is needed.
Unfortunately such public-private partnerships are ideologically unacceptable to a powerful political bloc in the U.S.
Twenty years ago I was a program officer at the Office of Fusion Energy, US Department of Energy. The ITER planning had started. My take -- there is no way on Earth that a tokamak can be cost competitive. Even if it works, even if the first wall problem is solved as may be indicated above, the engineering costs are so prohibitive as to price the whole concept out of consideration.
...
Right you are, and the economics are even worse than what you suggest. Consider the breeding blanket problem. Putting aside the immense difficulty of creating a blanket that meets its stringent neutron economy and heat transfer issues (it may be as hard as the break-even problem, and may not even be possible), the capital cost for such a blanket - just price din term of the raw materials - makes fusion power more expensive than conventional nuclear power, and nuclear power's high capital cost is already the key factor preventing new plants from being built.
No - it is not unfavorable regulations, or those dirty hippies, holding nuclear power back (the regulatory environment has been very favorable toward nuclear power since Reagan was elected 32 years ago) is is simply that competing power plant types provide a faster return on investment. Only government intervention in the marketplace (of which the right wing now professes absolute horror) can bring more nuclear power (which the right loves) into existence.
It as been argued that an engineering program on the same scale as ITER is needed to build a full-scale breeding blanket prototype (using a nuclear reactor for the neutron and thermal load) to prove it can be done and validate a design if it can. The absence of such an effort fusion power is not going to materialize even if ITER is a smashing success.
And even if this happens, fusion power will be by far the most expensive source of electricity of any proposed technology.