The 775 C-14 spike is 20 times the normal level. According to this paper the closest recent supernova (the Crab Nebula supernova in 1054) was only capable of producing a spike 8% more than normal.
To get a 2000% increase over normal you need a supernova 16 times closer, about 400 light years away, and 250 times brighter than 1054. The angular diameter of such a remnant today would be larger than the full moon, it seems unlikely that there are any dense dust clouds of this visible size for an object like this to hide behind. An obscure reference in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle does no a credible supernova make.
Cyanide production is very widespread in plants - which is why all mammals have multiple detoxification mechanisms. A human can detoxify in an hour a dose that would be immediately fatal if administered all at once.
I was very skeptical of the original headline claiming this was "GM" when I saw it, and thus not surprised at all to see it was bogus. The one thing that GM is (in comparison to conventional breeding) is it is very precise and selective in its effects.
Cyanide is widely distributed in plants, which is why all mammals have multiple mechanisms to detoxify it (a human can detoxify in an hour a dose that would be immediately fatal if administered all at once). Cyanide poisoning in forage is hardly unknown, and the leap to try to connect it (based on zero evidence) to genetic engineering as some sort of Frankenstein's monster is sheer ignorance and scare mongering.
Recall the CIA's experience with recon drones - they quickly discovered that the ability to occasionally take out something seen in real time is very desirable.
It is unlikely this lesson has been forgotten, and 450 lb is an awful lot of weight for just a camera system, however sophisticated. A small precision strike missile (like the 110 lb Hellfire) is very likely to be a payload option for one of these.
The UV capability of Hubble was nice, but for looking into the early Universe - the current focus of research (understanding the Big Bang; understanding dark energy and dark matter) it is useless - everything of interest has been red-shifted into the IR. The whole design focus of the James Webb Telescope is IR operation, that is why it will be sent far from that big glowing heat-ball called Earth (it will have a sun shield of course).
In longer articles (Washington Post, NY Times) they are proposing that these could be James Webb Jr. telescopes, providing some of its capability earlier, and then increasing the value of Webb by observing the "easy" stuff, leaving Webb to do what only it can do.
Which has been systematically corrected for since the discovery of variation in 1958 (9 years after C-14 dating was invented). This article was about discoveries made while refining that C-14 correction method.
Even if your books are 54 years out of date, you could have at least read TFA.
Also it would have required about 15,000 megatons of nuclear weapons be expended when the survivors of Atlantis destroyed themselves and their island of Mu.
I leave to others to calculate how a large a supply of antimatter fuel was involved when an alien spacecraft crashed and exploded.
What one finds is that the normal rate of C-14 production is around 2.5 C-14 atoms cm^2/sec, normally 95% of it from solar protons. The large solar flare of 1956 Feb 23, if at an opportune time of reduced shielding (the effective shielding fluctuates), would produce an annualized equivalent of 2.33, which would about double the normal production. The closest recent supernova of 1054 on the other hand is only capable of producing up to perhaps 0.2, only 8% more than normal.
To get a 2000% increase over normal you either need a supernova 16 times closer and 250 times brighter than 1054, or you need one 20-fold super-solar flare, or 20 big normal solar flares at an opportune low shielding period. Whether or not anyone saw or recorded a supernova this close, the remnant would be glaring obvious today - it would be a naked eye object larger than the full moon. On the other hand no one even noticed a solar flare before 1857, except for the auroras seen. It suggests a rare abnormal solar flare, or a rare abnormal series of more typical solar flares is by far the most likely candidate.
As others have noted on this thread, records do exist of strange events in the sky from that time, which might possibly refer to unusual auroras, and records from that time are terribly spotty anyway so the evidence would be expected to be thin, if present at all.
Out of curiosity how to you refer to stories of recounted in the Hindu Vedas, the Zoroastrian Avesta, or the oral narratives of indigenous peoples around the world? Have you ever even thought of any of the accounts of Rama or Vishnu, say, as being "Hindu myths"?
... SciAm used to be a pretty cool magazine, well, 50 years ago. When I was a high school kid I spent about two weeks one summer reading on microfilm pretty much every Amateur Scientist column from the 30s (when it was all telescopes) until the 70s when it started sucking....
The era of its sucking can be traced to 1986, when the its publisher - the U.S. owned textbook company WH Freeman - was sold to the German media conglomerate Holtzbrinck Group. After that its conversion into a light science entertainment magazine proceeded in a number of stages, each sadder than the last. I had a subscription continuously from 1968 (when I was a child) until about 1990 when it finally started printing pretty pictures to illustrate articles that were mere wallpaper, without any informational content whatsoever, and material that seemed simply to have been lifted from a website by a non-technical writer.
There's a very legitimate question of jurisdiction. The U.S. has no legal authority over the moon, any more than they do venus or mars.
Says who? If the US claims Jurisdiction over the moon landing sites who has the authoritiy to tell them otherwise? The U.N?
If (when) the U.S. declares jurisdiction (which is NOT a claim of ownership, just legal authority) then the U.N. will undoubtedly endorse that claim, as it is a necessary step toward making it a World Heritage Site. The Apollo artifacts ownership by the U.S. is already recognized by a U.N.treaty (the 1967 Outer Space Treaty).
There's a very legitimate question of jurisdiction. The U.S. has no legal authority over the moon, any more than they do venus or mars.
In essence, it would be kind of a dickish thing to do to mess with historical sites on the moon, but the U.S. government has no legal authority over the moon.,,,,
There is already an established legal framework with regard to those artifacts - it is in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty:
Article VIII
A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body. Ownership of objects launched into outer space, including objects landed or constructed on a celestial body, and of their component parts, is not affected by their presence in outer space or on a celestial body or by their return to the Earth.
So those artifacts belong to the U.S. and the U.S. in simply reminding people that those property rights are not being relinquished.
Eventually the landing site needs to become a World Heritage Site, but before that happens the U.S. will have to declare jurisdiction (but not ownership) of the site (though it owns the artifacts). The U.S. has not taken this step yet.
Sorry to be a whiny bitch, but the MiG-25 was actually designed to shoot down the XB-70 Valkyrie. The XB-70 project may appear to be a failure in that it only produced two prototypes at enormous cost, but it achieved what it was supposed to in that the USSR spent a fortune building a fleet of interceptors to shoot it down.
This analysis is flawed - the threat of the XB-70 accounts only for the development of the Mig-25, not its production. The B-70 program was cancelled in 1962 but production of the Mig-25 did not begin until 1969.
It is debatable whether the money spent on the full 1100 Mig-25 production run was the best investment in air power that could have been made, but the Mig-25 has proved to be of historic importance as a reconnaissance aircraft. Overflights of Israel were pivotal moments leading up the Six Day War, India uses them regularly to monitor Pakistan in peacetime and in war. Its ability to outrun opponents has proven to be valuable in battle.
Your post and the GP's post are in agreement, I think. The XB-70 Valkyrie was designed to drop nuclear bombs on Soviet cities. The MiG-25 was designed to shoot it down. If one XB-70 dropped a nuclear bomb, and the EMP disabled the transistor-based radars of all nearby MiG-25s, then the other XB-70s would be able to reach their targets unmolested. So the MiG-25 radar was built with vacuum tubes instead.
And in addition, it was a tremendously powerful radar - 600 kilowatt continuous beam - well beyond the capability of solid state electronics of the day.
It was an extremely well designed radar system - it is hard to see how any possible design of the period could have improved upon its many advantages.
Lets see - the lunar railgun design launches a 1 tonne payload, at a cost of half a million dollars, and delivers 14 ton HE equivalent in kinetic energy to the Earth's upper atmosphere. Since the energy has to get to the ground to be destructive, we are looking a narrow dense penetrator, that will punch a (narrow) hole through anything it encounters, but does not really explode until it is buried in something massive. Basically a double-sized version of the Grand Slam "earthquake bomb" from WWII. Not exactly an Armageddon weapon.
The system is designed to last 10,000 launches before needing refurbishment. If those launch capacitors can cycle once an hour, sustained use, then it would be capable of a very slow and drawn out bombing campaign lasting 15 months, delivering about as much bomb tonnage as the 11-day Operation Linebacker II bombing campaign over Hanoi. Or until someone decides to crash a booster stage on to the launcher, which would probably not take very long to happen.
...So if the USPS goes, so does complete national mail service.
And is should be remembered that this national universal communication service was viewed as so important by the Founding Fathers that is one of the very few agencies written into the United States Constitution: Article I, Section 8, Clause 7, which specifically empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads".
Bizarrely the "Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act" (in keeping with the tradition of Orwellian bill mis-naming) was passed by voice votes with not record kept of how individual legislators voted in either the House or Senate.
You are probably thinking of Glen Canyon Dam, which is upstream from it. Lake Powell, behind Glen Canyon, was 150 feet below full pool 7 years ago with a fraction of its maximum volume, and is 50 feet below full pool now which makes it 2/3 full. Due to declining precipitation and increased water usage demands, some think that it will never reach full pool again.
I could imagine an Apple under Woz turning out much the same way as the Bell Labs story: Lots of world-changing technology, very little profit.
...
Or more to the point - like Xerox PARC.
I notice at least one post (as usual) dissing Apple/Jobs for not inventing the GUI - but what was stopping Xerox from beating Apple to market with a killer consumer level computer with a GUI? Or from dominating the Ethernet networking market (routers, etc.)?
The point was that 20 seconds isn't actually long enough to do anything else of import anyways
It isn't actually long enough to do much else. However, when you accidentally bump the eject button instead of the pause button and you end up having to wait for the disc to load, followed by that twenty seconds of crap, followed by the time to find where you were, that twenty seconds will make a big difference in how pissed off you get.
...
And add that to the unskippable ads that last several minutes. I already have the practice of "pre-loading" a Blu-Ray before viewing it - sticking it in the player several minutes BEFORE I am ready to sit down and watch it, then come back once it has reached the selection menu and then turn on the TV.
As the linked comment suggests the Irish PM de Valera did not trust Churchill's secret promise - and he had some very good reasons not to.
In WWI Britain had made public expansive promises of autonomy to India in exchange for that nation's vigorous support of the war effort - only to be met with the extremely repressive Rowlatt Act in 1919, followed by the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, Punjab.
In the massacre Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer had the British Army block all escape routes for a large crowd of men, women and children gathered for the festival of Baisakhi, then open fire into the crowd for 10 minutes. 1,500 Indians were casualties, the British later claimed that 379 were killed (a curiously exact number since they did not count the bodies), historians believe the number killed was much higher, Indians estimate it at 1000. Dyer was forced to retire, but was received as a hero in Britain.
In Ireland itself, home rule was promised in 1914 - but suspended when the war broke out, during which the British tried conscripting the Irish to fight in the trenches, and after the end of the war no action to deliver the promised home rule was taken, leading to the Irish War of Independence.
With this recent history in mind (only 20 years before) de Valera had little reason to trust Churchill's secret promise.
Molten sodium and other light metals are highly erosive and destroy the containment pipes they flow through. There are so far no materials that can withstand the corrosion.
Huh? Liquid Sodium cooled reactors are nothing new.
And none of them have been run successfully as a commercial unit. If someone could build one successful sodium cooled power reactor, and have it run for a decade with decent availability then sodium-cooling might be viable. Based on current evidence, the technology for a successful plant does not exist.
The only states with operational SSBNs are the US, UK, France, Russia, and China.
And you can leave China off the list for the time being. No Chinese submarine has ever made a deterrent patrol, even in the Pacific, much less "round the Horn" into the Atlantic. At present China seems to treat its 3 subs as floating Chinese missile fields - more mobile and stealthy than land-based mobile ICBMs, but still operated only where China can provide its own military protection.
Slashdot Mirror
I looked into the literature on supernovas and carbon-14 and found this: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19690024196_1969024196.pdf also see: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469(1964)021%3C0134%3APOCBSP%3E2.0.CO%3B2
The 775 C-14 spike is 20 times the normal level. According to this paper the closest recent supernova (the Crab Nebula supernova in 1054) was only capable of producing a spike 8% more than normal.
To get a 2000% increase over normal you need a supernova 16 times closer, about 400 light years away, and 250 times brighter than 1054. The angular diameter of such a remnant today would be larger than the full moon, it seems unlikely that there are any dense dust clouds of this visible size for an object like this to hide behind. An obscure reference in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle does no a credible supernova make.
Cyanide production is very widespread in plants - which is why all mammals have multiple detoxification mechanisms. A human can detoxify in an hour a dose that would be immediately fatal if administered all at once.
I was very skeptical of the original headline claiming this was "GM" when I saw it, and thus not surprised at all to see it was bogus. The one thing that GM is (in comparison to conventional breeding) is it is very precise and selective in its effects.
Cyanide is widely distributed in plants, which is why all mammals have multiple mechanisms to detoxify it (a human can detoxify in an hour a dose that would be immediately fatal if administered all at once). Cyanide poisoning in forage is hardly unknown, and the leap to try to connect it (based on zero evidence) to genetic engineering as some sort of Frankenstein's monster is sheer ignorance and scare mongering.
the lines that the Republicans tow?
That would be toe, as in lining up the ends of your feet with a chosen line.
He is coining a new figure of speech - we imagine legions of Republicans faithfully towing weighty barges of ideology.
Quote apt, really.
Recall the CIA's experience with recon drones - they quickly discovered that the ability to occasionally take out something seen in real time is very desirable.
It is unlikely this lesson has been forgotten, and 450 lb is an awful lot of weight for just a camera system, however sophisticated. A small precision strike missile (like the 110 lb Hellfire) is very likely to be a payload option for one of these.
The UV capability of Hubble was nice, but for looking into the early Universe - the current focus of research (understanding the Big Bang; understanding dark energy and dark matter) it is useless - everything of interest has been red-shifted into the IR. The whole design focus of the James Webb Telescope is IR operation, that is why it will be sent far from that big glowing heat-ball called Earth (it will have a sun shield of course).
In longer articles (Washington Post, NY Times) they are proposing that these could be James Webb Jr. telescopes, providing some of its capability earlier, and then increasing the value of Webb by observing the "easy" stuff, leaving Webb to do what only it can do.
Which has been systematically corrected for since the discovery of variation in 1958 (9 years after C-14 dating was invented). This article was about discoveries made while refining that C-14 correction method.
Even if your books are 54 years out of date, you could have at least read TFA.
Also it would have required about 15,000 megatons of nuclear weapons be expended when the survivors of Atlantis destroyed themselves and their island of Mu.
I leave to others to calculate how a large a supply of antimatter fuel was involved when an alien spacecraft crashed and exploded.
The original article links don't provide any useful data to assess the likelihood of either suggested potential cause (supernova or solar flare).
Here is a nice report that does:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19690024196_1969024196.pdf also see: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469(1964)021%3C0134%3APOCBSP%3E2.0.CO%3B2
What one finds is that the normal rate of C-14 production is around 2.5 C-14 atoms cm^2/sec, normally 95% of it from solar protons. The large solar flare of 1956 Feb 23, if at an opportune time of reduced shielding (the effective shielding fluctuates), would produce an annualized equivalent of 2.33, which would about double the normal production. The closest recent supernova of 1054 on the other hand is only capable of producing up to perhaps 0.2, only 8% more than normal.
To get a 2000% increase over normal you either need a supernova 16 times closer and 250 times brighter than 1054, or you need one 20-fold super-solar flare, or 20 big normal solar flares at an opportune low shielding period. Whether or not anyone saw or recorded a supernova this close, the remnant would be glaring obvious today - it would be a naked eye object larger than the full moon. On the other hand no one even noticed a solar flare before 1857, except for the auroras seen. It suggests a rare abnormal solar flare, or a rare abnormal series of more typical solar flares is by far the most likely candidate.
As others have noted on this thread, records do exist of strange events in the sky from that time, which might possibly refer to unusual auroras, and records from that time are terribly spotty anyway so the evidence would be expected to be thin, if present at all.
Out of curiosity how to you refer to stories of recounted in the Hindu Vedas, the Zoroastrian Avesta, or the oral narratives of indigenous peoples around the world? Have you ever even thought of any of the accounts of Rama or Vishnu, say, as being "Hindu myths"?
... SciAm used to be a pretty cool magazine, well, 50 years ago. When I was a high school kid I spent about two weeks one summer reading on microfilm pretty much every Amateur Scientist column from the 30s (when it was all telescopes) until the 70s when it started sucking. ...
The era of its sucking can be traced to 1986, when the its publisher - the U.S. owned textbook company WH Freeman - was sold to the German media conglomerate Holtzbrinck Group. After that its conversion into a light science entertainment magazine proceeded in a number of stages, each sadder than the last. I had a subscription continuously from 1968 (when I was a child) until about 1990 when it finally started printing pretty pictures to illustrate articles that were mere wallpaper, without any informational content whatsoever, and material that seemed simply to have been lifted from a website by a non-technical writer.
In which case it is a much earlier fake? The authentic article would have been created around AD 32.
Unless it is in Russian. Any translation runs the risk of not being "as the author intended".
There's a very legitimate question of jurisdiction. The U.S. has no legal authority over the moon, any more than they do venus or mars.
Says who? If the US claims Jurisdiction over the moon landing sites who has the authoritiy to tell them otherwise? The U.N?
If (when) the U.S. declares jurisdiction (which is NOT a claim of ownership, just legal authority) then the U.N. will undoubtedly endorse that claim, as it is a necessary step toward making it a World Heritage Site. The Apollo artifacts ownership by the U.S. is already recognized by a U.N.treaty (the 1967 Outer Space Treaty).
There's a very legitimate question of jurisdiction. The U.S. has no legal authority over the moon, any more than they do venus or mars.
In essence, it would be kind of a dickish thing to do to mess with historical sites on the moon, but the U.S. government has no legal authority over the moon.,,,,
There is already an established legal framework with regard to those artifacts - it is in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty:
So those artifacts belong to the U.S. and the U.S. in simply reminding people that those property rights are not being relinquished.
Eventually the landing site needs to become a World Heritage Site, but before that happens the U.S. will have to declare jurisdiction (but not ownership) of the site (though it owns the artifacts). The U.S. has not taken this step yet.
Sorry to be a whiny bitch, but the MiG-25 was actually designed to shoot down the XB-70 Valkyrie. The XB-70 project may appear to be a failure in that it only produced two prototypes at enormous cost, but it achieved what it was supposed to in that the USSR spent a fortune building a fleet of interceptors to shoot it down.
This analysis is flawed - the threat of the XB-70 accounts only for the development of the Mig-25, not its production. The B-70 program was cancelled in 1962 but production of the Mig-25 did not begin until 1969.
It is debatable whether the money spent on the full 1100 Mig-25 production run was the best investment in air power that could have been made, but the Mig-25 has proved to be of historic importance as a reconnaissance aircraft. Overflights of Israel were pivotal moments leading up the Six Day War, India uses them regularly to monitor Pakistan in peacetime and in war. Its ability to outrun opponents has proven to be valuable in battle.
Your post and the GP's post are in agreement, I think. The XB-70 Valkyrie was designed to drop nuclear bombs on Soviet cities. The MiG-25 was designed to shoot it down. If one XB-70 dropped a nuclear bomb, and the EMP disabled the transistor-based radars of all nearby MiG-25s, then the other XB-70s would be able to reach their targets unmolested. So the MiG-25 radar was built with vacuum tubes instead.
And in addition, it was a tremendously powerful radar - 600 kilowatt continuous beam - well beyond the capability of solid state electronics of the day.
It was an extremely well designed radar system - it is hard to see how any possible design of the period could have improved upon its many advantages.
Lets see - the lunar railgun design launches a 1 tonne payload, at a cost of half a million dollars, and delivers 14 ton HE equivalent in kinetic energy to the Earth's upper atmosphere. Since the energy has to get to the ground to be destructive, we are looking a narrow dense penetrator, that will punch a (narrow) hole through anything it encounters, but does not really explode until it is buried in something massive. Basically a double-sized version of the Grand Slam "earthquake bomb" from WWII. Not exactly an Armageddon weapon.
The system is designed to last 10,000 launches before needing refurbishment. If those launch capacitors can cycle once an hour, sustained use, then it would be capable of a very slow and drawn out bombing campaign lasting 15 months, delivering about as much bomb tonnage as the 11-day Operation Linebacker II bombing campaign over Hanoi. Or until someone decides to crash a booster stage on to the launcher, which would probably not take very long to happen.
...So if the USPS goes, so does complete national mail service.
And is should be remembered that this national universal communication service was viewed as so important by the Founding Fathers that is one of the very few agencies written into the United States Constitution: Article I, Section 8, Clause 7, which specifically empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads".
Bizarrely the "Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act" (in keeping with the tradition of Orwellian bill mis-naming) was passed by voice votes with not record kept of how individual legislators voted in either the House or Senate.
You are probably thinking of Glen Canyon Dam, which is upstream from it. Lake Powell, behind Glen Canyon, was 150 feet below full pool 7 years ago with a fraction of its maximum volume, and is 50 feet below full pool now which makes it 2/3 full. Due to declining precipitation and increased water usage demands, some think that it will never reach full pool again.
I could imagine an Apple under Woz turning out much the same way as the Bell Labs story: Lots of world-changing technology, very little profit.
...
Or more to the point - like Xerox PARC.
I notice at least one post (as usual) dissing Apple/Jobs for not inventing the GUI - but what was stopping Xerox from beating Apple to market with a killer consumer level computer with a GUI? Or from dominating the Ethernet networking market (routers, etc.)?
It isn't actually long enough to do much else. However, when you accidentally bump the eject button instead of the pause button and you end up having to wait for the disc to load, followed by that twenty seconds of crap, followed by the time to find where you were, that twenty seconds will make a big difference in how pissed off you get.
...
And add that to the unskippable ads that last several minutes. I already have the practice of "pre-loading" a Blu-Ray before viewing it - sticking it in the player several minutes BEFORE I am ready to sit down and watch it, then come back once it has reached the selection menu and then turn on the TV.
As the linked comment suggests the Irish PM de Valera did not trust Churchill's secret promise - and he had some very good reasons not to.
In WWI Britain had made public expansive promises of autonomy to India in exchange for that nation's vigorous support of the war effort - only to be met with the extremely repressive Rowlatt Act in 1919, followed by the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, Punjab.
In the massacre Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer had the British Army block all escape routes for a large crowd of men, women and children gathered for the festival of Baisakhi, then open fire into the crowd for 10 minutes. 1,500 Indians were casualties, the British later claimed that 379 were killed (a curiously exact number since they did not count the bodies), historians believe the number killed was much higher, Indians estimate it at 1000. Dyer was forced to retire, but was received as a hero in Britain.
In Ireland itself, home rule was promised in 1914 - but suspended when the war broke out, during which the British tried conscripting the Irish to fight in the trenches, and after the end of the war no action to deliver the promised home rule was taken, leading to the Irish War of Independence.
With this recent history in mind (only 20 years before) de Valera had little reason to trust Churchill's secret promise.
Huh? Liquid Sodium cooled reactors are nothing new.
And none of them have been run successfully as a commercial unit. If someone could build one successful sodium cooled power reactor, and have it run for a decade with decent availability then sodium-cooling might be viable. Based on current evidence, the technology for a successful plant does not exist.
The only states with operational SSBNs are the US, UK, France, Russia, and China.
And you can leave China off the list for the time being. No Chinese submarine has ever made a deterrent patrol, even in the Pacific, much less "round the Horn" into the Atlantic. At present China seems to treat its 3 subs as floating Chinese missile fields - more mobile and stealthy than land-based mobile ICBMs, but still operated only where China can provide its own military protection.