Old Man

Re: Musings on Random Musings Is that a long ton, a short ton, or metric?

Re: Musings on Random Musings You mean Law of Gravity.

Re: The cranky thread Is the contract for graveyard shift work or something? If so you really need to control your light exposure and otherwise take care of your circadian rhythms. To the point of duct taping black plastic over your windows if necessary. Otherwise what you'll have is five months of jet lag.

Re: Another anti-gravity / FTL concept for your SF campaigns I've done a lot of looking into Extended Heim Theory and it does seem to hold promise. The problem is that part of the reason it holds promise is that it's vague and incomplete. Tajmar is taking the lead on attempting to verify some of the predictions experimentally. Interestingly his results so far do not contradict EHT.

Re: Musings on Random Musings Kind of a reach, you mean?

Re: "Neat" Pictures Wow. A bulette, beholder, lich, type ii demon... that is a really high level coloring book.

Re: More space news! Yeah, that's the one. Monks get all the luck, I tell ya.

Re: More space news! That would indeed be incredible to see. I vaguely recall that there was some written evidence of a witnessed lunar impact from the 17th century or thereabouts... something about a bright light on the moon, then it getting blurry and sprouting "horns". Damned if I can remember who wrote it though.

Re: More space news! Aircraft carrier sized asteroid to narrowly miss Earth on Tuesday (we hope)

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) Oh yes, since the science of climate change has now had over three decades to mature, we can just blow off tens of thousands of scientists as "chicken littles". They've never been right about the environment before. Like that ozone hole that was getting bigger and bigger until the ridiculous CFC ban took effect, that was just a coincidence. Or when acid rain was killing all the fish and forests until we forced those outrageously expensive catalytic converters on Detroit, that was surely a mistake. And I'm sure we all yearn for the good old days when we could put lead in our gasoline on purpose. How dare these scientist types tell us things we don't want to hear?

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) Unfortunately, I think a Hothouse Earth would not be quite so warm and inviting. Oceanic acidification will kill off the coral, so there will be no new coral seas. A drastic, rapid warming would probably tax existing ecosystems faster than they could adjust, resulting in a mass extinction event even more severe than the one we're already living through. Desertification will greatly reduce food output in a world that just reached a population of seven billion. The big concern, as I have posted before, is that the warming trend will continue until a tipping point is reached that sets off some feedback loop that kicks the warming into overdrive. The thawing Siberian permafrost could release many tons of methane into the atmosphere. The lack of ice caps could reduce planetary albedo to where significantly more solar energy is absorbed instead of reflected. Rising ocean temps could kill off the plankton that otherwise sink a lot of the carbon out of the atmosphere. If one of these feedback loops starts, all bets are off.

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) That's how science works, dude. You post this without irony in a thread about FTL neutrino measurements? Because no good science has ever come of approximations or simulations, right? All that testing we perform on lab rats and humps tells us nothing about potential effects on humans? Galileo's dropping two balls of different mass off the tower, we learned nothing from that because he didn't work out the partial differential equations to take wind resistance into account?

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) I know the shipping companies are banking on the Northwest Passage becoming a reality. I'd be all for it, but I also like living in a world that has polar bears.

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) Yup. Now expect the goalposts to get walked back to "sure global temps are increasing, but we don't know whyyyy". After that it will be walked back to some sort of free market right-to-pollute position, or even a global-warming-is-actually-good-for-you theory.

Re: Dehydrated Water? There have been some experiments with rotating superconducting discs (e.g. those by Podkletnov and Tajmar) that at one point seemed to suggest that they provided a gravitational shielding or antigravity effect. This explanation seems to have been discarded in favor of a heretofore unobserved force related to gravity similar to how magnetism is related to electricity. This is completely different from the Meissner effect and magnetic flux pinning that are shown in the (still really cool) video.

Re: Dehydrated Water? I'm not seeing how magnetic flux pinning could reduce mass.

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) Yeah... Waiting to be sprung on SCIENCE. I don't think the FTL result will be confirmed either, but just imagine if it is.

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) Not to rerail the thread, but they're planning to rerun the experiment to try and eliminate some possible causes of experimental error. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2395513,00.asp#fbid=GtmVbkv9Kpd

Re: "Neat" Pictures There's a really abrupt increase in quality around 1880. Can you imagine driving your ironclad around using one of those 1853 maps?

Re: Castle Bathory I concur. It's a pity, though, since Bathory looks like it would have a very interesting layout compared to the more typical concentric wall-and-keep type.

Re: "Neat" Pictures I'd watch that.

Re: Science: Particles seen moving at FTL speeds (CERN) Yes, it could, but then you also have to explain why we aren't seeing the expected warming from the increased atmospheric CO2. Because H2O ppm are not increasing the way CO2 ppm is. Well, yeah. We have estimations of CO2 produced by the burning of rainforests, we have very good models of human CO2 emissions, we have models of how quickly nature can scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere with oceanic sinking and vegetation growth, and we have direct records of atmospheric composition going back decades as well as indirect measurements from ice cores. I say "spew" because the other suggested mechanisms are usually handwaving speculation that is rarely backed up with any real science. Sure, climate change could be driven by sunspot cycles, or cosmic rays, or atmospheric dust or whatever, but these mechanisms rarely account for the observed warming when you do the math. Whereas, if you burn x fossil fuels, you will put y tons of CO2 into the air, and you will expect to see z increase in global temperature due to the well understood greenhouse effect. And z does turn out to closely match the observed warming trend. So again, if climate change skeptics want to suggest natural causes for the warming trend, great--but they must also explain why our expected figures for the warming caused by fossil fuel emissions are incorrect.

Re: Dehydrated Water? Liquid water is the densest practical state. The amorphous solid might be denser but as cited above, the pressure requirements negate the marginal benefit. You can't compress a gas to a point where it is denser than the liquid state. There really isn't much point to maximizing the density of the water anyway. Once you're in space, there's virtually no benefit to minimizing the overall volume of your craft. It might help you get it off the ground and through the atmosphere, but even then liquid water is going to be the best you can do.

Re: The cranky thread And now they cancelled the meeting we were planning for!!! FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU--

Re: "Neat" Pictures Word.