stratomorph

"Your goals should be to effect positive change in the world."

Should it? Why? What makes positive change a more valid goal than making more mans? (http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2481) And in turn, what's so morally bankrupt about the pursuit of fun? With a focus on the individual, it would seem to value human life more than simply measuring the size of the shadow you cast.

On the other hand, you've disregarded the possibility of continuing to browse after doing three things (or stopping prior to three things). If browsing is an endless stream, then facebook has to be followed by one of the other two, which is the angle he was working from. Depends how you frame the question and what assumptions you make; it's ill-defined right now.

Edit: On another note, in his place I would have sanitized my own history; a screenshot showing redtube and tube8 in the "visited" style is tacky, to say the least.

It's a bit misleading to flatly cite the 100km Karman line as if there was no room to debate "where does space begin?" The boundary could be lower: NASA gives out astronaut wings at 50 miles (264000 feet). Or maybe it should be higher: Orbits decay pretty quickly under atmospheric drag at that altitude, and drag is a factor even at ISS altitude, requiring a bit of fuel now and again to replace energy lost to drag. The point at which reasonable flying speed equals orbital speed (~100 km) is just one demarcation, chosen by convention from many possibilities.

>In tracking the sensors on each of the phones, we observed that the GPS in Nexus S could function up to altitudes of about 60,000 ft. and would actually start working again on the balloon’s descent. ... Maximum Speed: 139 mph

The unit shut itself off passing 600 at low speed, which is more restrictive than required. The rule is receivers that work above 60,000ft and 1000kt require export licenses as munitions (http://www.armscontrol.org/documents/mtcr), but there's no reason a phone's civilian-grade (unrestricted) receiver shouldn't work up high at that low forward speed. I suppose the most conservative possible interpretation keeps companies safe.

>"an angle" refers to any angle other than the angle directly from the sun.

So do these conceptual glasses have a way to find the direction of the sun, and adjust the moire patterns in real time? Based on the description, it sounded like it would always block rays normal to the plane of the lens, while allowing rays to pass through at any other angle. Rays from the sun will only rarely be normal to the lens, and so they will only rarely be blocked, without an active adjustment to change the "rejection angle." Short of that, I don't follow how the glasses can "tell" sunlight from ambient light, and I don't think it can be done without active logic.

That still won't work the way I think you intend. This will block light that enters perpendicularly, while passing some of the light that enters at an angle. The problem is that light entering at an angle is not aimed at your pupils. Allowing ambient light to pass at an angle only lights up your eye socket, while blocking everything (sun and ambient) that was bound to fall anywhere you could detect it.

I don't think that will work the way you intend. Direct sunlight is (on average) unpolarized. Polarized lenses only block glare off, for example, the surface of a body of water, because reflection affects polarization. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specular_reflection). If the design blocks direct sunlight via polarization, it must necessarily block ambient light to a similar degree.

One of my favorite stories is about perhaps the most conscientious counterfeiter: http://www.snopes.com/business/money/mister880.asp.

Depends on how you look at it. Yeah, they're "worth" $100 apiece because they can be exchanged for goods and services "worth" $100. (Let the chicken and egg lie.) So it's $110 billion worth of cash that can't circulate. Good or bad thing? That's over my head.

On the other hand, they don't cost that much to print, only 12 cents. But there's 1.1 billion of them. So that's $132 million of work that's not doing any good right now. Still a good-sized problem, without considering the time and expense of sorting and replacing bad notes.

Well, 94% mortality and 6% for which there is insufficient data to draw a conclusion. We'll have to wait a while to be sure if any of them are immortal.

>The B-1 and B-52 also have low observability characteristics

I'd challenge the B-52 bit. The airframe had pretty well reached its final form by 1950. Radar was still in its infancy, let alone radar countermeasures. The plane is all radar-inviting angles (like the giant vertical stab), and there wasn't even an attempt to shield the engine exhausts from IR sensors, as IR homing weapons didn't exist at the time. I'd go so far as to say the B-52 is about as high-observable as an airplane gets.

Edit: Maybe you mean active countermeasures?

Being predictable isn't easy to avoid. We put so much hardware in the sky, and quickly neutralize so many of the surface-to-air threats, that aircraft are far more likely to have a close call with another friendly aircraft than to be deliberately targeted. (Not true for rotary wing aircraft.) So they're predictable, because that's the easiest way to keep two airplanes from occupying the same piece of sky, because midair collision is the greater threat. There are other ways to deconflict traffic, since so little use is made of the real capabilities of modern electronics, but being predictable also allows military air traffic to fit into the civilian air traffic control system. It's a tradeoff, and following predictable procedures resolves it while simultaneously covering a lot of asses.

Of course, as soon as one sortie aborts for a SAM threat, a concerted effort should be put into finding the source (and redoubled if it isn't found but reports keep coming in). You can be as predictable as you like if you really do own the sky.

>Where in the Bill of Rights are you guaranteed the right to air travel?

Right here in the ninth amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The ninth probably should have come first, because that worldview is far more important than any list of specific rights. A free man does as he pleases.

I either don't agree with your point, or don't understand it. Why is it a bad thing (and who is it bad for) to make money hard to track? I'm also pretty sure payment is difficult for far more reasons than just tracking.

I'd point out that those programs don't silently install themselves without the owner's knowledge or consent, which makes a world of difference.

Yeah, but I also didn't account for any sort of inefficiency in the electric drivetrain. 90% conversion efficiency is a good rule of thumb, and there's one step from house panel to storage, another from house storage to car storage, and one more step from car storage to motors, so you'd only get about 75% out of each joule that comes out of the solar panel. Even adjusting gasoline efficiency down to 20% on average, that's less than a factor of 2 off my first set of numbers. We're in the ballpark, close enough to know it can't fit on a car, and impractically large for a house.

Sure, the assumption that I need a full tank every day is pushing it, but that's partially balanced by the fact that I used a fuel-efficient car for a baseline. Someone who drives 100 miles a day with the electrical equivalent of 15-20 mpg would need significantly more. My point is that a fully-capable vehicle is an aggressive target for solar energy. Our houses use much less, so let's start by aiming there.

I stand by the approximation. 300 m^2 is about 17.3m on a side, 17.3 m in feet is a touch under 57 ft. Rounded to one sig fig because I'm not carrying any sort of precision through these estimates.

Edit: Or are you talking about the "60 feet square" bit? I don't mean 60 square feet, I mean 60 feet on a side. I suppose I could have picked a clearer idiom.

While I agree with you about decentralization, onboard solar cells won't ever do the trick. Even for a home-sized array, I'm not sure it can be made practical. Here are some back-of-the-envelope figures:

To really replace a gasoline-powered vehicle, an electric car needs a similar amount of energy at its disposal. My car (a 92 Accord) holds about 16 gallons of gas. Figure it's about 50% efficient, and gasoline holds about 45 MJ/kg, and that's about 1 gigajoule of usable energy in a full tank. So to charge my car (without running the house at all) I have to collect and store 1e9 joules during the daylight hours. That's about 12 kW, if it could run 24 hours a day. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cells), a solar system can produce about 20% of its peak rating, so I need a system rated for about 60 kW at noon, in order to average 12 kW through the night. Assuming a reasonable conversion efficiency of 20%, that means I need to actually intercept 300 kW of sunlight. Wikipedia uses a figure of 1000 W/m^2 in that article, so I'd need a 300 square meter panel. In units familiar to me, that's pushing 60 feet square. Large for a house, never will fit the car.

Such a large system just to charge a car seems impractical to me. We can tweak parameters and dramatically shrink that size, since after all I would hardly ever need to charge the car from an empty battery, but someone who drives a larger vehicle over a longer commute might realistically have such high demand. (We could also argue about the size of the vehicles, but this is America: Suburbans aren't going away in my lifetime.)

That said, charging the car overnight would use vastly more energy than my house does on a daily basis. Solarizing the house is getting more practical, especially since the grid's always connected.

The resemblance is entirely coincidental. The two words have unrelated etymologies. We might as well advise people to avoid words like "luck" and "truck," which are not technically profane, but obviously sound very close to a very bad word.

  The Soviet aeronautic industry is far ahead of the West, though due to the shroud of secrecy surrounding the designs, this is not known to many.

The Yak-4 was a contemporary of the British de Havilland Mosquito. The bomber variant of the British aircraft entirely outclasses the Russian airplane.

As for the M-4 Molot, of which it's claimed "Though there were truly only 18 aircraft in prototype stage, the hoax of circling the same 18 planes fooled the unsuspecting US," I think it wasn't a good plan to parade the small force as if it were much larger, prompting the deployment of the B-52 fleet, which really could deliver an intercontinental strike, and practiced it daily.

Finally, I'm going to pick on the Tu-160. I won't go into the details (long and boring), but reading this bit about a long patrol, http://mn.ru/russia/20100610/187867766.html, realize that Western aircraft have been doing this continually for decades, while the Soviets (and now Russians) lost the skill to disuse. It's pretty disingenuous to claim that the Soviets were far ahead.

Of course, it's linkbait, what with the frequent flyer rewards push at the bottom, but it's frustratingly at odds with reality. I prefer my linkbait to be bland puff pieces.

It looks like gcc can be used (http://mspgcc.sourceforge.net/). I'll have to brush up on my C.

Bingo, birth rate is a consequence, not a cause. He's trying to put the cart before the horse.

A country gets rich before the birth rate falls, so just driving down the birth rate of a poor country doesn't affect the underlying mechanism. You can't just copy the superficial aspects of a successful society and expect the rest to just fall into place, for the same reason that simply holding elections doesn't magically turn a dictatorship into a stable functioning democracy. You have to address the root causes, if they are amenable to analysis.

It's pretty disingenuous to say it's that simple. Some poverty-ridden heavily populated areas have been poor since they were lightly populated. It is in the nature of humans to make babies everywhere, rich and poor areas alike. Being snarky doesn't advance anyone's understanding.

A "properly sized" conventional explosive would be impractically enormous: nukes are measured in kiloton or megaton yields. There is no way to effectively detonate (say) twenty million pounds of conventional explosives all at once, never mind the non-trivial challenge of emplacing that amount. As I understand it, you'd place it below the sea floor, into the well, so the surrounding water would be shielded by all the rock above the blast site. For the same reason, there would be no fallout plumes, because all that solid mass would prevent the newly-created radioactive material from going anywhere. And it can't ignite the reservoir, because there's no oxygen to burn down there.

All that said, it's still probably not a good idea. Hopefully it doesn't become the only idea.

I wonder if human nature might help make robot trucks safer on the road, by the magic of risk compensation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation). A robot truck will most certainly be marked distinctively so the human drivers know there's a computer at the wheel. Human drivers will perceive this robot truck as dangerous (at least I would, and I doubt I'm alone in that prejudice) and thus drive a little safer in its vicinity to compensate. Possibly, driving a robot truck down a street would even reduce the human-on-human accident rate.

And the robot truck companies would be insane not to protect themselves. They would be wise to take a page out of the commercial aircraft industry's playbook, and instrument the hell out of each vehicle. Continuous engine telemetry and redundant camera views of the immediate vicinity recorded on a 30-minute loop, frozen after a crash and a core dump of the "driver" appended to the record for crash reconstruction. It'll be a tough sell emotionally, that the robot truck was following the speed limit and stop lights, but we'll get there.

You may want to get a different link; that one threatens goatse in response to hotlinking.

Edit: Praise internets, link is fixed!

This is some pretty sweet technology, I've always wanted the ability to reach out and touch an insect without having to chase it with a flyswatter. That said...

This is a technological stop-gap to a bigger problem. Malaria will continue to be a problem as long as we fail to develop an effective vaccine for it. Treatments are terrific for those of us in the developed world, but will always be impractically faraway or too expensive for those hit hardest. The disease has adapted quite well to us as long-lived carriers; only a vaccine can kill it for good.

I can't find the source I wanted, but I recall reading about post-WWII efforts to eradicate malaria on a worldwide scale with DDT, touched on at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ddt#DDT_use_against_malaria. The people involved were racing against the clock to eradicate Anopheles, because the longer they took, the more resistant the mosquitoes became, the more likely the funding was to dry up, and the more objections cropped up about the wholesale destruction of swampy wetlands involved. The project could only succeed if we could maintain the will to destroy on a massive scale, and because we half-assed it, we're worse off: land was drained and nature massively disrupted, and the disease wasn't wiped out completely and the mosquitoes are more tolerant to DDT now.

Zapping a few mosquitoes, or even a few billion, will only put a little more selection pressure on the skeeters and the parasite. I continue to hold out hope for a universally effective vaccine.

You see, that's my point. How do we know there are serious negative consequences at all? Because of the anecdotes she mentions? She didn't cite any rigorous study that concludes pornography is harmful, but simply appealed to our gut feeling that it's got to be hurting us somehow. While I may agree or disagree, my complaint is that her anecdotal evidence is somehow supposed to sweep away the presumably well-designed study cited at the start. That's the opposite of science.

Edit: My tone here is a little combative. Sorry, it's not intended as an attack on you.