mistermack

Is kinetic energy a special case, when it comes to bending space time etc? Since it's different in every inertial frame, I can't see how it translates into an equivalent of matter.

They are shipping the stuff in some pretty big tankers. I believe they are cooled. Obviously they reckon they can manage the risk : http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4276348/ns/us_news-security/t/are-natural-gas-ships-boat-bombs-terror/#.XeGOjJP7Sos

Something like that. When I said "or an ancestor of both" I didn't mean an ancestor of the species, I meant an ancestor of the modern population, which with crossbreeding between wolves and dogs could be a fairly messy lineage anyway. Of course, this pup was nobody's ancestor. It's amazingly well preserved. Maybe it drowned. Otherwise, you would think that the crows would have got at it.

This was a sad case and it's just got sadder. A UK cop has been charged with murder for the death of a former professional footballer, Dalian Atkinson, after police were called to the home of his father. Atkinson died of a heart attack on the way to hospital. I can't shed any light on the actual sequence of incidents that led to him being tasered. It's a very odd situation where a cop is charged with murder. A second cop, a woman pc, is charged with causing Actual Bodily Harm. Wikipedia says this about his death "Police had responded to a call as Atkinson threatened to kill his father, Ernest. Atkinson's older brother Kenroy said "My brother had lost it. He was in a manic state and depressed – out of his mind and ranting. He had a tube in his shoulder for the dialysis and he had ripped it out and was covered in blood. He got dad by the throat and said he was going to kill him. He told dad he had already killed me, our brother Paul and sister Elaine and he had come for him."[20] After being tasered, Atkinson went into cardiac arrest on the way to the Princess Royal Hospital",19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalian_Atkinson#Death https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-50333081 Taking a cynical view, this looks like the good old tried and tested way of clearing cops of possible wrongdoing, by charging them and then mounting a deliberately inept prosecution, putting them beyond sanction when they get found not guilty. It's as old as the hills. What makes me wonder about this case though, is that at first sight, you wouldn't automatically blame the cops for deploying a taser. I've heard of them being deployed for far less than what was occurring in this case. Maybe it's race, and they are super sensitive to the charge of protecting a white officer who tasered a black man. Whatever, I'd give it a one-in-a-hundred chance of a guilty verdict. On the known facts, anyway.

It sounds like you've been getting far too close to both. You need to be careful, there are laws against it, you know.

I read somewhere recently that the modern wolf might be much more distantly related to the widespread remains that turn up regularly. A bit like how modern humans replaced Neanderthals. Can't give chapter and verse. I think it was in a study trying to establish the origin of the dog. If I find it again I'll post it.

That's pretty amazing. Obviously, the evidence of the pup said that something was not what you would imagine, but I didn't expect that. So Dublin was buried deep under the ice, while parts of Siberia were ice-free. So the pup is more probably a wolf than a dog, or an ancestor of both.

I'm trying to make sense of this, in the context of the last major glaciation, which peaked about 22,000 years ago. I recently posted this illustration of calculated depths of ice around 21,000 years ago. But here it is again, as it's what's relevant to this find : Given that this is Siberia, it's surprising to find such remains so far north as Siberia dated to 18,000 years ago. The last glaciation is quoted as ending about 11,500 years ago, so it's a mystery what such animals were finding to eat in Siberia 18,000 years ago. You wouldn't think that there was grazing on land to support reindeer etc. that far north at the time. Maybe it IS a dog, and they were kept by people living like modern Inuit, so they were being fed by humans who were hunting seals and fishing. Or an inland fishing community. I haven't found any online record of the extent of glaciation in Siberia for that period.

i would think that that "unidentified" could be sometimes be the result of poor storage of the hair samples. A lot of these samples are historic, and have been kept as souvenirs for years, and possibly changed hands a few times, before somebody decides to get it tested. Bacterial action due to poor storage could contaminate and destroy what original dna existed. "Unknown" would be a surprising finding, it seems to say that the dna is there, but not of a known type. Maybe a poor choice of words, rather than an accurate description of the result.

Keep looking. Don't give up now.

"I say old chap, I've just made a model on my computer, and it says your car will be uncomfortably warm in 80 years time, and most of my friends agree." 😭

That's partly why the FAA reputation has taken a big hit over this. And they are in a bit of a tight spot. If the "cure" for another MCAS failure is to turn it off, then what they are saying is you need to turn a certified plane into an un-certified one, with the flick of a switch, to stop it from crashing. It's a hell of a position to be in.

Reading a bit more of what wiki says about the plane doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. "The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) is a flight control software system developed for the Boeing 737 MAX to provide handling qualities similar to the Boeing 737 NG, especially in low-speed and high angle of attack (AoA) flight. It lowers the nose without pilot action when it determines the aircraft is too nose-high, based on input from airspeed, altitude and angle of attack sensors. However, it is susceptible to erroneous activation, as evidenced in the deadly crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. The 737 MAX is indefinitely grounded until regulators decide the aircraft is airworthy, pending software and instrumentation updates and revisions to information for flight crews. They may also be required to undergo MCAS training sessions in flight simulators." This is the real meat of the problem. The change in weight distribution, by moving the engines forward and upwards, have given the plane worse handling characteristics, and MCAS is designed to take over from the pilot, when things are going wrong. When they say "especially in low speed and high angle of attack flight" they are obviously talking about low altitudes, just after take off, or just before landing. The very times when there is no margin for error, no time to pull out of a dive, even if you could. The MCAS is a clear admission that the plane isn't safe enough to trust to the pilot to fly it, and that's why I won't be getting in one. They didn't develop that system just for fun. There must be a real risk of stalling, if it's not there. On the commercial side, I guess if they can get a good work around, and can get some accident-free air miles behind it, people will stop worrying. That's the optimistic view. A lot depends on the media, and how they treat it.

Just to add a bit of history to the issue, I saw this representation the other day, of what the climate looked like 20,000 years ago, and I think it's a bit mind-blowing. That's the only real reason I'm posting it, it's so graphic it's worth sharing. It just shows the depths of ice at the named locations :

Another way is to give the bush a good spraying while it is in leaf with a strong mix, at least six hours without rain before you cut it. Or preferably a day or two before, so that it can transport the stuff down into the roots before you cut it. Even if it doesn't kill it first time, it severely weakens it, and spraying any shoots once they put out leaves will finish it off.

Theoretically that's right, but in practice, the emphasis is on airspeed. This is what wikipedia says about stalling : "This graph shows the stall angle, yet in practice most pilot operating handbooks (POH) or generic flight manuals describe stalling in terms of airspeed. This is because all aircraft are equipped with an airspeed indicator, but fewer aircraft have an angle of attack indicator. An aircraft's stalling speed is published by the manufacturer (and is required for certification by flight testing) for a range of weights and flap positions, but the stalling angle of attack is not published." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stall_(fluid_dynamics) What happens in practice is that if the nose is wrongly pointed up, the plane loses airspeed AND the angle of attack is increased towards the stall angle, so both factors are going in the stall direction. The airspeed indicator should still give an indication of imminent stalling for that reason. You would think that the angle of attack could be measured using a mechanical indicator, since the wings are fixed in line with the body of the plane. A pendulum would show if the plane is level or nose up or down. Maybe in a severe updraught the effective angle of attack could be changed though.

My procedure is to cut them down level with the soil, and then to spray whatever grows regularly with roundup. That works if you don't need to dig the spot where the bush was. Even works on small Ash trees.

I'm guessing here, obviously, but it looks likely that a real stall is just as dangerous as a fake one. So the electronics in that situation are vital, to take action quicker than a pilot would. Otherwise, you could easily fix as above. Just when a stall is indicated, play a recorded message to the pilots, indicating the proper series of actions for that situation. It can only be time that prevents that from being the solution. The best answer is to have a plane that doesn't want to stall. How do other planes survive without electronic anti-stall? ( I don't know ). My own fix, off the top of my head, is to design a visible air speed indicator that works on physical principles rather than electronic. I would put a carbon fibre bendy rod, like a fishing rod, on the nose, where the pilots can always see it. The bend in the rod would give an unmistakable indication of air speed, and as it's always there, the pilots would know at a glance if the plane was about to stall, or not. After a few hours flying, your mind would match the shape of the rod to the indicated air speed.

There's a big difference though, in the miles and flying hours that fighter jets clock up in their lifetime compared to passenger jets. And the requirements are different. Manoeuvrability isn't a requirement for passengers. But stability and safety is. Fighter jets don't have people walking around not strapped in for one thing. And they have ejector seats and parachutes. They are a bit like formula 1 cars, compared to family saloons. The odd crash doesn't really matter, it's performance that counts. It will be interesting to see what they propose as a fix. They are due to start flying again soon. There's going to be mega-scrutiny this time of what measures have been taken, unlike after the first crash, so it will have to not just be good, but be seen to be good. I still won't be flying in one. When I get on a plane, it's comforting to tell yourself that it's safer than driving etc, when you get up to 300 mph and a thousand feet up. The last thing you want is the thought of diving head first into the ground in your head.

All of that applied before the last crash though. After the first crash, Boeing and the FAA said it's safe, and the pilots continued to fly it till they were all grounded after the second crash. If I was getting a pilot's salary, instead of paying for a ticket, I might be more willing. What's quite disturbing, is that when they tried to shift the blame onto the pilots, it emerged that in the event of the anti-stall forcing the nose of the plane down, the pilots have only four seconds to decide what the problem is, and flick the switches to disable the electrical power to the trim on the tail. After that point, the force is so great on the trim, that the manual override can't be worked by hand. Four seconds to include thinking time, diagnosing the problem and acting on it. It's just not reasonable. It obviously can be done, and has been done. But it's not a great margin for error.

I'm not here to knock Boeing. They have achieved fabulous stuff in the past. Great planes, breaking new ground, setting records. But there is no way I'm ever going to take off in a 737 Max. From what I can glean from the two crashes that grounded the fleet, the design is cobble up, and needs everything to be right, in order to keep flying. I want a plane that nearly flies itself, not one that needs special software, and top quality piloting just to keep it from crashing. I believe that the whole problem is due to moving the engines forward, and enlarging the intakes, in an effort to compete with the equivalent Airbus A320. This apparently affects the handling so much, that a special bit of software had to be installed, to prevent stalling. The software is triggered by a sensor, and when it goes into action, it overrides the pilot, and pushes the nose of the plane down. If the sensor fails, down you go, and that's what happened in the two crashes. And, I believe, it happened in other cases, where the pilots were able to cope with it and a crash was averted. I'm usually fairly trusting of technology. In cases like this, if a fix could be demonstrated to be foolproof, I would normally have no qualms about flying in the plane. But the way that this scandal has developed has created a picture of today's Boeing having a fundamentally flawed culture, where big money is more important than safety. This was a known problem, very well understood by the company, but the fundamental fix, to redesign the plane, would cost absolute megabucks. The fix that they came up with might have worked, with a thorough foolproof anti-stall system, but that cost too much as well. And it could even have worked if they had TOLD the pilots of the problem, and retrained them on how to fly through the problem. But that was too much money as well, (and might have looked bad, if it had leaked out). So they crossed their fingers and hoped. And even after the two crashes, they STILL didn't want to do anything, till they were forced to. So no, no bargain price would get me up in a 737 Max, when they start flying again. And I have a feeling that a lot of people will be saying the same when they book.

Not necessarily. Nitrogen can be a liquid, and so can Copper. It depends on temperature and pressure. So what you are really asking, is why they have different boiling and melting points. Can't help you on that. Something to do with the intermolecular forces.

The wikipedia page for Bacillus Subtilis is actually very misleading. But down the page, it does show a gram stained picture, with the purple colour similar to your pictures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis

Damn it, I got that the wrong way around, sorry. The purple colour is gram positive. So this looks gram positive, not negative. The prominent rod shapes are definitely purple.

That's certainly how it looks.