Well I have to support part of what you've said, and contradict part.
I support you in that it is stupid NASA uses Imperial ever, anywhere...
United States customary system, not "imperial" actually.
Having discussed this with NASA engineers before (circa 1990), there is an explanation for why spacecraft are still (?) designed using this system at least. Their very highly skilled technicians are trained using the U.S. system, and their tools are calibrated in it. In the type of custom hand building used for space craft manual dexterity and the "feel" of the fit is important - components manufactured in thousandths of an inch increments are different from ones manufactured to, say, hundredths of a millimeter. It is actually a painful transition to go from using hardware designed using one system to the other.
There is an example of this issue when the Soviet Union attempted to copy the B-29 after WWII and built the TU-4. The problem was the B-29 was designed using the U.S. system, and sheet metal for the skin for example was some fraction of an inch. Skin being a major structural component, if the Soviets used the closest Metric thickness from below the airplane was too weak and would not fly. It the Soviets used the closest Metric thickness from above (as they did) made it too heavy with compromised perfromance.
That all being said, the flight control system should still be done Metric (it isn't dependent on the tooling of the spacecraft), and at some point NASA is going to have to bite the bullet on this (if they haven't already).
I'd prefer to slap someone for saying "Imperial vs. Metric" when they're talking about US standards vs the SI -- which one certainly is when talking about the mars spacecraft failure. After all, the US system -- while derived from the Imperial System -- is not the same thing. Quick: how many l in a gal? Well, it depends, doesn't it? Did you mean Imperial gallon or US gallon? How many m^2 in an acre? What's the mass of a ton(ne)? And as I like to point out to people -- because I'm a pedantic nerd like everyone else here -- the US system is a metric system . . . see what I did there? I didn't use a capital "M" or say SI there?
I have yet to see anyone on this thread use the actual name of the system of weights and measures peculiar to the United States. It is called the "United States customary system".
Feb 25th is my birthday, I was watching the television here in the UK before going out with friends. I remember well the footage of 'incoming' as they were broadcast live on the BBC. I've always been curious about this tale though. What I saw was not a Scud coming down (pretty unlikely) but a number of Patriots launching and one of them suddenly veering off-course and smashing into the adjoining part of the base. It was in the air for approximately 1/2 a second before it turned left (on my screen) and walloped into the middle-distance, behind some low-level buildings I took for barracks.
Nothing to corroborate this apart from my memory, but was surprised to find out later about the 'Scud'.
There were quite a number of Patriot diving intercepts (tracking SCUD debris from SCUDs that were breaking up) and several of them did dive into the ground. Theodore Postol of MIT has video of five such occurrences and there were surely many more.
You are probably remembering one of these occurrences, but it was not the cause of the Dhahran barracks fatalities. Television is often pretty bad about showing only vaguely related videos to illustrate a story (so is the History Channel) and it is not impossible that one of the diving intercepts was used when covering the Dhahran barracks disaster.
Given how small cameras are today, it seems like a no-brainer.
Perhaps the name "NanoSail-D" will give a hint on how small this satellite is.
However, the camera size itself is not all that matters. In order to send telemetry down there must exist a telemetry transmitter on board. It might surprise you to know that even large satellites often transmit telemetry at 1 kbps or so.
Transmitting wide band, such as needed by a video signal, requires higher power. Sending high power down needs a bulkier and heavier transmitter. More power in the telemetry beacon requires more DC power, which means bigger batteries and bigger solar panels.
...
The camera would not be on the "NanoSail-D", it would be on the mother satellite FASTSAT which weighs 148 kg. How much does a simple solid state camera weigh these days? It couldn't be more than several grams I would think. And what's this about a "video signal"? To confirm satellite deployment they would need only one single still frame which would only be transmitted if they needed it. And so what if it takes a dayor two to transmit the image along with its other data streams? They are going to be wondering about this for months or years.
Hmm, the recent report about microbes eating iron on the Titanic makes me wonder if there are aluminum eating microbes? It might not be quick, but think of the terror caused by planes breaking apart in flight in a few years after being infected with and partly digested by those aluminum gobbling microbes. And I'll bet I could smuggle them on a plane even if I were naked!
Probably not. Elemental iron exists in nature - it occurs as inclusions in volcanic gabbros that erupt in constant massive quantities from the Mid Atlantic Ridge. The iron-eating microbes are likely evolved to consume these sources. There is no elemental aluminium in nature.
Aluminum is already subject to stress corrosion cracking - and aircraft must be regularly checked for this.
And then there are the body cavity bombs that have already been used. These are more powerful and are actually easier to engineer than irregular pancake "Woochie" bombs (a special effects prosthetic maker).
Only body cavity searches or medical scanners will detect these by imaging.
And there are also the possibility of weapons being passed via the concourse services - is the news stand supply chain truly secure against penetration?
There is a point where trying to completely eliminate one category of threat passes the point of futility - when the residual threat is dwarfed by other unaddressed ones - we are surely there now, as we are also past the point where further intrusive measures reduce risks by such tiny amounts that other considerations must take precedence.
I can certainly respect this. It's true altruism, quite unlike when government takes money by force and redistributes it. This is 100% voluntary, and therefore much more impressive and worthy of respect than any government program.
That they are able to accumulate this is because of the favorable laws and regulations of the government written to benefit them, the services the government provides, and the protections it gives them, not just because they have great personal virtue. They have a moral obligation (as well as a legal one) to support the government that enables them to become rich. It is "taking money by force" only in the sense that everybody obeys the law because of the ultimate threat of force.
True altruism is paying your taxes without bitching about the government "stealing" from you.
A foundation allows him to know the donation is spent the way he intends it rather than how some other "charitable" organization deems fit.
Right - the wealth is transferred to a privately held entity that runs in perpetuity according to the choices of its founder. Note that the poster above puts scare quotes around "charitable" when it is not a billionaire's own private charity. I guess only billionaires know what is best for the common good?
You should aware that due in large part to the U.S. having the lowest taxes on the incomes of the rich in the industrialized world essentially all of the economic growth of the last 30 years has flowed exclusively into their pockets, causing the income inequality in the U.S. to rise to the highest in the industrialized world by a large margin.* Only third world plutocracies match us in this (and some do better). Wealth concentration at the top is now about equal to the age of the 19th century Robber Barons.
So what are the super-rich doing to give back? They are locking this enormous wealth permanently into tax-sheltered foundations that act according to the desires of the founder. This means that an increasingly large share of the national wealth, remains under the control of a tiny group of private individuals whose decisions control the behavior of the economy, even when most of the profits are devoted to public-spirited activities (some are retained to grow the foundation further). And it means that the control will either pass to their dynasty, or else to simply be in the control of the dead hand -- fulfilling the wishes/whims of individual long after they pass from the scene. Even with the best public spirited intentions in the world this a serious problem for a healthy society. For one thing it destroys the dynamism of an adaptable growth-oriented economy.
In the lot so long run -- this process is well along its course already -- the economy will be largely controlled by a tiny group of private individuals. The economy will be largely owned in fact either by them directly or by the foundation they control.
This is called plutocracy - it is the death of the democracy and the Republic.
* The standard metric for this is called GINI. See: this chart for the history. It was 0.395 in 1974, already the highest in the industrialized world, to 0.466 in 2001, and has risen further throughout the past decade.
As far as I can see "uploaders don't think that what they're doing should be illegal", and "uploaders don't see what they're doing as immoral" are exactly the same. I cant think of any circumstances where a reasonable person would think that the law should be immoral.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here - you could not possibly have thought this thing through to make such a statement.
First off the premise already removes the possible idea that immorality derives from illegality, i.e.simply because a law was passed it becomes immoral to do a thing, since we are talking about what the law should be.
Lots of things are illegal without being at all immoral - is it "immoral" to park on the left side of the street on Tuesdays due to street sweeping? More seriously, is consuming alcohol intrinsically immoral? It is illegal any many countries, and once was in the U.S.
Lots of things are almost universally thought immoral without being illegal - adultery for one in most legal systems today.
Well this proves the questionable value of the "troll" marking - I'm actually a recognized expert on this subject and everything I have said here can be verified.
Check out Carson Mark's (former head of the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos) treatise on exactly this topic "Reactor-Grade Plutonium's
Explosive Properties": www.nci.org/NEW/NT/rgpu-mark-90.pdf.
Correct, no joke. A sheet of paper weighs ~5 g, a chemical balance is good to 0.1 mg (if cheap) and 0.1 mcg (if really not cheap), so the accuracy is no problem./p>
Ever heard of a planimeter? This is a mechanical gadget that measures areas when you trace out an outline with a pointer - basically doing the exact same thing the paper-weighing does. Much cheaper if you don't already have a chemical balance.
Concur. It is one of a number of devastating critiques by Borges of the various foibles of literary criticism itself - all told as very short delightful stories. "Pierre Menard" attacks the idea that examining the life of the author is necessary to evaluate a literary work -- that the work itself cannot stand on its own. He destroys the opposite extreme of literary criticism -- essentially the whole approach of deconstructionism - in "The Library of Babel" in which interpretations are read into works independent of any intended meaning of the authors (the books in the story are simply random combinations of symbols), and this was written in the late 1940s, 20 years before "deconstruction" was coined. Taken together he is defending the idea that books actually convey meaning themselves that a reader can apprehend.
And "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius" is possible the most idea-dense work in the history of literature, it is a short story that plays with more concepts (with striking effect) than most "novels of ideas" (at the end of the 20th century the New York Times picked it as the greatest short story of the century). I am amused that the Wikipedia entry on the story (last time I checked) is longer than the story itself, but still fails to do justice to all the ideas presented.
Borges was easily the greatest writer of the 20th Century never to receive a Nobel Prize, and I would argue the greatest writer of the 20th Century, period.
Sure, "only" 800-900K people have a top secret security clearance...
Wow! I didn't know the number had sky-rocketed like that. IIRC. back during the Cold War, when we had an enemy that actually could destroy us, there were only 250,000 TS holders.
Radioactive waste is a false argument. Breeder reactors would allow you to use up radioactive "waste" until it reached a point where it could be safely landfilled....
You're right it is a false argument, but for an entirely different reason.
The current method of storing spent fuel - in 10 ton concrete casks on the surface (currently co-located with the power reactor) - is inexpensive and entirely adequate for the foreseeable future. There is no need to remove the fuel from the casks.
Breeder reactors still produce high level waste and thus do not fix any waste problems. An even more serious problem - no one has ever successfully operated one.
The problem with Pu is that only the 239 isotope is suitable for weapons, and if you have too much 240 or 241 (more than about 3%) then it isn't stable enough to fission when you want it to. Pu-240 and -241 spontaneously fission, leaving daughter products that absorb your neutrons.
Isotopic separation isn't done with Plutonium because the atomic weights of the isotopes are too similar. Cascading centrifuges won't get the job done, and chemical separation won't get the job done.
In order to create Pu-239 for weapons purposes, you have to use a ridiculously short fuel cycle in a specially configured reactor - it's quite obvious to the inspectors that will undoubtedly be required to be present should you sign contracts with the IAEA to get this fuel.
Remarkably - not a single statement in the above post is correct.
There are reasons why nations with large nuclear weapons programs prefer low burn-up plutonium but nuclear weapons can be made from high-burn-up power reactor plutonium, it is simply more complex to do so, and the weapons themselves are need shielding in storage to keep soldiers from exceeding occupational safety limits. A nation only with fuel grade plutonium can still develop adn make weapons with it.
Plutonium can be isotopically enriched, in fact since you simply removing impurities, rather than trying to extract weapon fuel present in trace amounts in natural sources (the usual case), it is actually much easier. Ony 4 kg of feedstock is needed for processing to make one bomb if plutonium is being isotopically purified vs 3000 kg of natural uranium for a U-235 weapon. Electromagnetic separation would be the method of choice, but gas centrifuges can be adapted to this.
Here is what Wikipedia says about the previous discovery of Unbibium by this the team:
In 2008, it was claimed to have been discovered in natural thorium samples[1] but that claim has now been dismissed by recent repetitions of the experiment using more accurate techniques.
This is like the guy who keeps claiming new record-shattering high temperature superconductors which are are never confirmed by anyone (and who keeps showing up on Slashdot). Far-fetched claims from Arxiv.org should be prominently flagged as suspect if they are going t get posted here. I have yet to see one pan out.
This is neat and clearly an important discovery and all, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit disappointed.
Cheer up, the broadcast is still going. They're just using the phosphorus-free DNA as a red herring to make the final part more shocking. You know, the last minute where they reveal Bush tied to a chair, take a good grip on his nose, and pull off the human mask to reveal a reptilian overlord beneath.
You are mistaken - it is Dick Cheney who will reveal a reptilian overlord when his mask is removed. Removing Bush's mask only reveals... Dick Cheney.
Would that happen though? Presumably the reason arsenic is poisonous is because it's more reactive than the phosphorous.
No, arsenic is poisonous because it resembles phosphorous enough to get incorporated into the phosphorus-based energy metabolism system in its place, but not similar enough to phosphorous to actually work and produce bio-available energy. It effectively shuts down energy supply, producing waste heat instead.
An enzyme system tuned to rely on arsenic though would overcome this problem.
Themes for research in EECS tend to have about 25-35 year cycles while being updated with the technology du jour at each peak. I think it has something to do with the dying out/retiring of academic advisers and industrial lab directors who think a field is "mined out". Bubble memory is about that old. Mercury delay lines twice that...
Magnetic bubble "racetrack" memory seems a much closer parallel than the delay lines. MBM had some things going for it - solid state, non-volatile and extremely rugged. So mostly it got used in niche military applications. Introduced in the 1970s it was "revived" in 1989 with the U. S. Army's AN/UGC-144 portable battlefield communication terminal. At the time it was said to be "the first time a high-volume, off-the-shelf magnetic bubble memory system will be a component in a production model military computer" (as opposed to specialized avionic devices for example).
...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Jobs . ..
You got to give it the Jobs. Back in the 80s everyone was second-guessing him. How much of Apple's success was due to Jobs alone? Was really a good leader? A good manager? Did he just get lucky? Jobs brought in another guy as CEO himself, and then of course the board kicked him out.
Then they brought him back. A nifty natural experiment.
The contrast between Apple's performance during both"Jobs" eras and the "No Jobs" era is astonishing.
Yes, and people with money to spend are those with jobs. Quite a few employers are small businessmen who pay personal income tax on their business income, and end up with a figure over $200-250k (the $250k bit is only for couples, the $200k is for individual filers.) If you tax the hell out of the people who own the business, guess what?...
Let us suppose we have a small businessman who makes $250,000, and the tax cut for the bracket and above returns to the 2001 level (only 3% of small businessmen make this much or more, BTW) climbing from 33 to 36%. This means he gets hit with a whopping tax increase of... zero! This is because only income above this level is taxed at 36%. Let us say then, that he makes $350,000. Then he gets hit with an additional 3% tax on that next $100,000, or $3000 (less than 1% of his total income). Just think, he could hire 0.05 skilled workers with that!
There are a lot of factors involved and balances to be struck, but we shouldn't sit around and thank rich people for sending crumbs down. That's a recipe for becoming a third-world economy.
So is taxing the snot out of everything and spending the money on socialist programs, if Europe is any indication.
So Europe is a third-world socialist hell-hole? Funny, the socialist economies of Sweden and Germany are out-performing ours, pulling out the recession faster, and are on track to turn in a higher per-capita GDP then the U.S. this year (highly socialized Netherlands and Denmark regularly outperform us).
One area where the U.S. already resembles a third world country is in its highly skewed income distribution, with the top few percent taking in far more than in any other industrialized nation. As a result - the standard of living in the U.S. for anyone not in the economic elite is actually lower than that of most Western nations.
Slashdot Mirror
My personal office space is 36 square feet; I am lucky enough to have a window along one edge....
The next step will be to define the section of walkway in front of your cubicle as "part of the your office space".
Well I have to support part of what you've said, and contradict part.
I support you in that it is stupid NASA uses Imperial ever, anywhere...
United States customary system, not "imperial" actually.
Having discussed this with NASA engineers before (circa 1990), there is an explanation for why spacecraft are still (?) designed using this system at least. Their very highly skilled technicians are trained using the U.S. system, and their tools are calibrated in it. In the type of custom hand building used for space craft manual dexterity and the "feel" of the fit is important - components manufactured in thousandths of an inch increments are different from ones manufactured to, say, hundredths of a millimeter. It is actually a painful transition to go from using hardware designed using one system to the other.
There is an example of this issue when the Soviet Union attempted to copy the B-29 after WWII and built the TU-4. The problem was the B-29 was designed using the U.S. system, and sheet metal for the skin for example was some fraction of an inch. Skin being a major structural component, if the Soviets used the closest Metric thickness from below the airplane was too weak and would not fly. It the Soviets used the closest Metric thickness from above (as they did) made it too heavy with compromised perfromance.
That all being said, the flight control system should still be done Metric (it isn't dependent on the tooling of the spacecraft), and at some point NASA is going to have to bite the bullet on this (if they haven't already).
...
I'd prefer to slap someone for saying "Imperial vs. Metric" when they're talking about US standards vs the SI -- which one certainly is when talking about the mars spacecraft failure. After all, the US system -- while derived from the Imperial System -- is not the same thing. Quick: how many l in a gal? Well, it depends, doesn't it? Did you mean Imperial gallon or US gallon? How many m^2 in an acre? What's the mass of a ton(ne)? And as I like to point out to people -- because I'm a pedantic nerd like everyone else here -- the US system is a metric system . . . see what I did there? I didn't use a capital "M" or say SI there?
I have yet to see anyone on this thread use the actual name of the system of weights and measures peculiar to the United States. It is called the "United States customary system".
What surprises me is that we have no proper first class fractional numbers, everything is done in decimals and suffers rounding error eventually....
You are requiring that this be handled in hardware? Why? Programming languages that do this are available - Mathematica for one.
Feb 25th is my birthday, I was watching the television here in the UK before going out with friends. I remember well the footage of 'incoming' as they were broadcast live on the BBC. I've always been curious about this tale though. What I saw was not a Scud coming down (pretty unlikely) but a number of Patriots launching and one of them suddenly veering off-course and smashing into the adjoining part of the base. It was in the air for approximately 1/2 a second before it turned left (on my screen) and walloped into the middle-distance, behind some low-level buildings I took for barracks.
Nothing to corroborate this apart from my memory, but was surprised to find out later about the 'Scud'.
There were quite a number of Patriot diving intercepts (tracking SCUD debris from SCUDs that were breaking up) and several of them did dive into the ground. Theodore Postol of MIT has video of five such occurrences and there were surely many more.
You are probably remembering one of these occurrences, but it was not the cause of the Dhahran barracks fatalities. Television is often pretty bad about showing only vaguely related videos to illustrate a story (so is the History Channel) and it is not impossible that one of the diving intercepts was used when covering the Dhahran barracks disaster.
Given how small cameras are today, it seems like a no-brainer.
Perhaps the name "NanoSail-D" will give a hint on how small this satellite is.
However, the camera size itself is not all that matters. In order to send telemetry down there must exist a telemetry transmitter on board. It might surprise you to know that even large satellites often transmit telemetry at 1 kbps or so.
Transmitting wide band, such as needed by a video signal, requires higher power. Sending high power down needs a bulkier and heavier transmitter. More power in the telemetry beacon requires more DC power, which means bigger batteries and bigger solar panels.
...
The camera would not be on the "NanoSail-D", it would be on the mother satellite FASTSAT which weighs 148 kg. How much does a simple solid state camera weigh these days? It couldn't be more than several grams I would think. And what's this about a "video signal"? To confirm satellite deployment they would need only one single still frame which would only be transmitted if they needed it. And so what if it takes a dayor two to transmit the image along with its other data streams? They are going to be wondering about this for months or years.
Hmm, the recent report about microbes eating iron on the Titanic makes me wonder if there are aluminum eating microbes? It might not be quick, but think of the terror caused by planes breaking apart in flight in a few years after being infected with and partly digested by those aluminum gobbling microbes. And I'll bet I could smuggle them on a plane even if I were naked!
Probably not. Elemental iron exists in nature - it occurs as inclusions in volcanic gabbros that erupt in constant massive quantities from the Mid Atlantic Ridge. The iron-eating microbes are likely evolved to consume these sources. There is no elemental aluminium in nature.
Aluminum is already subject to stress corrosion cracking - and aircraft must be regularly checked for this.
And then there are the body cavity bombs that have already been used. These are more powerful and are actually easier to engineer than irregular pancake "Woochie" bombs (a special effects prosthetic maker). Only body cavity searches or medical scanners will detect these by imaging. And there are also the possibility of weapons being passed via the concourse services - is the news stand supply chain truly secure against penetration? There is a point where trying to completely eliminate one category of threat passes the point of futility - when the residual threat is dwarfed by other unaddressed ones - we are surely there now, as we are also past the point where further intrusive measures reduce risks by such tiny amounts that other considerations must take precedence.
I can certainly respect this. It's true altruism, quite unlike when government takes money by force and redistributes it. This is 100% voluntary, and therefore much more impressive and worthy of respect than any government program.
That they are able to accumulate this is because of the favorable laws and regulations of the government written to benefit them, the services the government provides, and the protections it gives them, not just because they have great personal virtue. They have a moral obligation (as well as a legal one) to support the government that enables them to become rich. It is "taking money by force" only in the sense that everybody obeys the law because of the ultimate threat of force.
True altruism is paying your taxes without bitching about the government "stealing" from you.
A foundation allows him to know the donation is spent the way he intends it rather than how some other "charitable" organization deems fit.
Right - the wealth is transferred to a privately held entity that runs in perpetuity according to the choices of its founder. Note that the poster above puts scare quotes around "charitable" when it is not a billionaire's own private charity. I guess only billionaires know what is best for the common good?
You should aware that due in large part to the U.S. having the lowest taxes on the incomes of the rich in the industrialized world essentially all of the economic growth of the last 30 years has flowed exclusively into their pockets, causing the income inequality in the U.S. to rise to the highest in the industrialized world by a large margin.* Only third world plutocracies match us in this (and some do better). Wealth concentration at the top is now about equal to the age of the 19th century Robber Barons.
So what are the super-rich doing to give back? They are locking this enormous wealth permanently into tax-sheltered foundations that act according to the desires of the founder. This means that an increasingly large share of the national wealth, remains under the control of a tiny group of private individuals whose decisions control the behavior of the economy, even when most of the profits are devoted to public-spirited activities (some are retained to grow the foundation further). And it means that the control will either pass to their dynasty, or else to simply be in the control of the dead hand -- fulfilling the wishes/whims of individual long after they pass from the scene. Even with the best public spirited intentions in the world this a serious problem for a healthy society. For one thing it destroys the dynamism of an adaptable growth-oriented economy.
In the lot so long run -- this process is well along its course already -- the economy will be largely controlled by a tiny group of private individuals. The economy will be largely owned in fact either by them directly or by the foundation they control.
This is called plutocracy - it is the death of the democracy and the Republic.
* The standard metric for this is called GINI. See: this chart for the history. It was 0.395 in 1974, already the highest in the industrialized world, to 0.466 in 2001, and has risen further throughout the past decade.
As far as I can see "uploaders don't think that what they're doing should be illegal", and "uploaders don't see what they're doing as immoral" are exactly the same. I cant think of any circumstances where a reasonable person would think that the law should be immoral.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here - you could not possibly have thought this thing through to make such a statement.
First off the premise already removes the possible idea that immorality derives from illegality, i.e.simply because a law was passed it becomes immoral to do a thing, since we are talking about what the law should be.
Lots of things are illegal without being at all immoral - is it "immoral" to park on the left side of the street on Tuesdays due to street sweeping? More seriously, is consuming alcohol intrinsically immoral? It is illegal any many countries, and once was in the U.S.
Lots of things are almost universally thought immoral without being illegal - adultery for one in most legal systems today.
So how are they the same?
Well this proves the questionable value of the "troll" marking - I'm actually a recognized expert on this subject and everything I have said here can be verified.
Check out Carson Mark's (former head of the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos) treatise on exactly this topic "Reactor-Grade Plutonium's Explosive Properties": www.nci.org/NEW/NT/rgpu-mark-90.pdf.
Correct, no joke. A sheet of paper weighs ~5 g, a chemical balance is good to 0.1 mg (if cheap) and 0.1 mcg (if really not cheap), so the accuracy is no problem./p>
Ever heard of a planimeter? This is a mechanical gadget that measures areas when you trace out an outline with a pointer - basically doing the exact same thing the paper-weighing does. Much cheaper if you don't already have a chemical balance.
Concur. It is one of a number of devastating critiques by Borges of the various foibles of literary criticism itself - all told as very short delightful stories. "Pierre Menard" attacks the idea that examining the life of the author is necessary to evaluate a literary work -- that the work itself cannot stand on its own. He destroys the opposite extreme of literary criticism -- essentially the whole approach of deconstructionism - in "The Library of Babel" in which interpretations are read into works independent of any intended meaning of the authors (the books in the story are simply random combinations of symbols), and this was written in the late 1940s, 20 years before "deconstruction" was coined. Taken together he is defending the idea that books actually convey meaning themselves that a reader can apprehend.
And "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius" is possible the most idea-dense work in the history of literature, it is a short story that plays with more concepts (with striking effect) than most "novels of ideas" (at the end of the 20th century the New York Times picked it as the greatest short story of the century). I am amused that the Wikipedia entry on the story (last time I checked) is longer than the story itself, but still fails to do justice to all the ideas presented.
Borges was easily the greatest writer of the 20th Century never to receive a Nobel Prize, and I would argue the greatest writer of the 20th Century, period.
Sure, "only" 800-900K people have a top secret security clearance...
Wow! I didn't know the number had sky-rocketed like that. IIRC. back during the Cold War, when we had an enemy that actually could destroy us, there were only 250,000 TS holders.
Radioactive waste is a false argument. Breeder reactors would allow you to use up radioactive "waste" until it reached a point where it could be safely landfilled....
You're right it is a false argument, but for an entirely different reason.
The current method of storing spent fuel - in 10 ton concrete casks on the surface (currently co-located with the power reactor) - is inexpensive and entirely adequate for the foreseeable future. There is no need to remove the fuel from the casks.
Breeder reactors still produce high level waste and thus do not fix any waste problems. An even more serious problem - no one has ever successfully operated one.
The problem with Pu is that only the 239 isotope is suitable for weapons, and if you have too much 240 or 241 (more than about 3%) then it isn't stable enough to fission when you want it to. Pu-240 and -241 spontaneously fission, leaving daughter products that absorb your neutrons.
Isotopic separation isn't done with Plutonium because the atomic weights of the isotopes are too similar. Cascading centrifuges won't get the job done, and chemical separation won't get the job done.
In order to create Pu-239 for weapons purposes, you have to use a ridiculously short fuel cycle in a specially configured reactor - it's quite obvious to the inspectors that will undoubtedly be required to be present should you sign contracts with the IAEA to get this fuel.
Remarkably - not a single statement in the above post is correct.
There are reasons why nations with large nuclear weapons programs prefer low burn-up plutonium but nuclear weapons can be made from high-burn-up power reactor plutonium, it is simply more complex to do so, and the weapons themselves are need shielding in storage to keep soldiers from exceeding occupational safety limits. A nation only with fuel grade plutonium can still develop adn make weapons with it.
Plutonium can be isotopically enriched, in fact since you simply removing impurities, rather than trying to extract weapon fuel present in trace amounts in natural sources (the usual case), it is actually much easier. Ony 4 kg of feedstock is needed for processing to make one bomb if plutonium is being isotopically purified vs 3000 kg of natural uranium for a U-235 weapon. Electromagnetic separation would be the method of choice, but gas centrifuges can be adapted to this.
Here is what Wikipedia says about the previous discovery of Unbibium by this the team:
In 2008, it was claimed to have been discovered in natural thorium samples[1] but that claim has now been dismissed by recent repetitions of the experiment using more accurate techniques.
This is like the guy who keeps claiming new record-shattering high temperature superconductors which are are never confirmed by anyone (and who keeps showing up on Slashdot). Far-fetched claims from Arxiv.org should be prominently flagged as suspect if they are going t get posted here. I have yet to see one pan out.
Cheer up, the broadcast is still going. They're just using the phosphorus-free DNA as a red herring to make the final part more shocking. You know, the last minute where they reveal Bush tied to a chair, take a good grip on his nose, and pull off the human mask to reveal a reptilian overlord beneath.
You are mistaken - it is Dick Cheney who will reveal a reptilian overlord when his mask is removed. Removing Bush's mask only reveals... Dick Cheney.
Would that happen though? Presumably the reason arsenic is poisonous is because it's more reactive than the phosphorous.
No, arsenic is poisonous because it resembles phosphorous enough to get incorporated into the phosphorus-based energy metabolism system in its place, but not similar enough to phosphorous to actually work and produce bio-available energy. It effectively shuts down energy supply, producing waste heat instead.
An enzyme system tuned to rely on arsenic though would overcome this problem.
Themes for research in EECS tend to have about 25-35 year cycles while being updated with the technology du jour at each peak. I think it has something to do with the dying out/retiring of academic advisers and industrial lab directors who think a field is "mined out". Bubble memory is about that old. Mercury delay lines twice that...
Magnetic bubble "racetrack" memory seems a much closer parallel than the delay lines. MBM had some things going for it - solid state, non-volatile and extremely rugged. So mostly it got used in niche military applications. Introduced in the 1970s it was "revived" in 1989 with the U. S. Army's AN/UGC-144 portable battlefield communication terminal. At the time it was said to be "the first time a high-volume, off-the-shelf magnetic bubble memory system will be a component in a production model military computer" (as opposed to specialized avionic devices for example).
The AN/UGC-144 is still in service, BTW.
...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Jobs . . .
You got to give it the Jobs. Back in the 80s everyone was second-guessing him. How much of Apple's success was due to Jobs alone? Was really a good leader? A good manager? Did he just get lucky? Jobs brought in another guy as CEO himself, and then of course the board kicked him out.
Then they brought him back. A nifty natural experiment.
The contrast between Apple's performance during both"Jobs" eras and the "No Jobs" era is astonishing.
Brings back the magnetic bubble memories!
Yes, and people with money to spend are those with jobs. Quite a few employers are small businessmen who pay personal income tax on their business income, and end up with a figure over $200-250k (the $250k bit is only for couples, the $200k is for individual filers.) If you tax the hell out of the people who own the business, guess what? ...
Let us suppose we have a small businessman who makes $250,000, and the tax cut for the bracket and above returns to the 2001 level (only 3% of small businessmen make this much or more, BTW) climbing from 33 to 36%. This means he gets hit with a whopping tax increase of ... zero! This is because only income above this level is taxed at 36%. Let us say then, that he makes $350,000. Then he gets hit with an additional 3% tax on that next $100,000, or $3000 (less than 1% of his total income). Just think, he could hire 0.05 skilled workers with that!
Is that your definition of "hell"?
There are a lot of factors involved and balances to be struck, but we shouldn't sit around and thank rich people for sending crumbs down. That's a recipe for becoming a third-world economy.
So is taxing the snot out of everything and spending the money on socialist programs, if Europe is any indication.
So Europe is a third-world socialist hell-hole? Funny, the socialist economies of Sweden and Germany are out-performing ours, pulling out the recession faster, and are on track to turn in a higher per-capita GDP then the U.S. this year (highly socialized Netherlands and Denmark regularly outperform us).
One area where the U.S. already resembles a third world country is in its highly skewed income distribution, with the top few percent taking in far more than in any other industrialized nation. As a result - the standard of living in the U.S. for anyone not in the economic elite is actually lower than that of most Western nations.