Israel actually has a free press. If missiles were falling into populated areas and killing a bunch of Israelis, we'd hear about it.

And beyond that, I'd expect to hear about it *from the government*. On one hand, there's embarassment from deploying a defense system that doesn't do what it's supposed to do, and a morale cost from the failure to meet the expectations of the citizenry. On the other hand, there's a bit of a propaganda benefit from showing the world a bunch of people who died because Palestinians or Egyptians fired rockets at their homes. I suspect the math there works out in favor of not concealing the bodies.

No you don't. If that's all you wanted, you'd fly first class or business class and get it. What you want is more leg and elbow room and the same amount of money left in your wallet after you buy the ticket.

It's sad to see that even National Geographic now has to tart up the very real risks of this attempt with dramatic bullshit like the first sentence: "the atmosphere above 12 miles, or 63,000 feet (19,200 meters)—known as the Armstrong line (named for Harry George Armstrong, who founded the U.S. Air Force's Department of Space Medicine in 1947)—is so thin that, if not protected, human blood will literally boil. To prevent that, Baumgartner's airtight suit and the capsule around him will be continuously pressurized to create a personal atmosphere that isolates him from the void surrounding him."

Nonsense. Even if you're in an environment of pure vacuum, your circulatory system is *pressurized*. This is called "blood pressure." Your blood will not boil in space. It will outgas, as dissolved gases in it come out of solution, but that's not boiling; Scuba divers who ascend too rapidly get the bends as N2 leaves solution, but their blood doesn't boil, they don't die. Fluids exposed to atmosphere, like the water on the surface of the eyes and lining the mucous membranes will boil, but not the blood.

"The smallest crack in this protective layer would cause almost immediate death."

Again, why tart this up? The guy who holds the current record and who's helping with this jump, Joe Kittinger? He suffered a "crack" in his "protective layer," in one of his gloves. His hand swelled up like a balloon, and it hurt, and he had some bruising/soft tissue damage, but he continued with the mission and his hand returned to normal size when he descended and healed normally.

Sad to see National Geographic turning into Discover.

"They won't be willing to wait and it's not exactly a simple thing to change the power output of a Rankine cycle nuclear power plant at a whim."

Actually, it is, it's called a throttle. When you're in a nuclear submarine puttering along at 5 knots and someone drops a torpedo on you, and you want to get up to 30+ knots as fast as you can, you do it. You take more heat out of the coolant, which cools down the water in the reactor, which increases the reaction rate, which produces more power, this relationship is very tight and the changes can happen very rapidly. Way more rapidly than shoveling in more coal.

The power source is a non-issue. Gas turbine, nuclear, whatever, there's plenty of available power. A single destroyer carries 4 gas turbine engines that are each capable of 40,000+ shaft horsepower. It's generation capacity that's more of an issue, but even that just means "wait for a longer period of time between shots."

The means of delivering electrical power to the projectile without arcing destroying the rails is an issue. Ideally you want all the current in the world at as low a voltage as you can manage it, so capacitors aren't as good as a magnetohomopolar generator. But getting the power to put into the capacitors of MHG is not a complex problem.

This article is horrible.

"The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is in part an embodiment of the idea that in the quantum world, the mere act of observing an event changes it."

That's not the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. That's just the observer effect, and it's not something peculiar to quantum mechanics. You want to measure the temperature of a system, so you stick a thermometer in there. Okay, the mercury in the thermometer absorbs a bit of heat from the system, providing you with a temperature measurement at the same time it changes the temperature of the system. If you want to measure the parameters of a particle, you stick a bubble chamber in the way, and as the particle flies through the chamber it smacks into hydrogen molecules, showing you what it's doing but also taking a different path than it would have if none of those hydrogen molecules were in the way. Big fat hairy deal.

The HUP doesn't just say that you can't simultaneously measure the position and momentum of a particle, it says that a particle *does not simultaneously possess* a well-defined position and momentum. If the particle's doing something in a system and is interacting in such a way that you can define its position to arbitrary precision, then it *does not have* a well-defined momentum for you to measure, and vice versa. Position and momentum are what are called quantum conjugate variables, and the HUP says that when you have a pair of those variables, then the product of their uncertainties is greater than or equal to a constant. There is *no state* in which that particle is even *allowed* to exist in which it possesses both a well-defined position and well-defined momentum.

A signal processing analogy, for any analog people. A particle's wavefunction carries information about its position and its momentum. Where the wave exists is where the particle actually is, and the wavelength is the particle's momentum. Take a particle whose momentum you know to the utmost precision, and graph that. Range of momentums on the x axis, probability of the particle having that momentum on the y axis. You'll get a graph that looks like a Dirac function, a value of 0 everywhere except for a single spike corresponding to the particle momentum, area under the curve of 1.

Now switch domains, change from the momentum to the position domain, this is mathmatically the same thing as changing from a time domain to a frequency domain, which means you can use your old friend the Fourier Transform.

What do you get when you do an FT of a Dirac function? You get a constant value everywhere, from -infinity to +infinity. If you know exactly where that particle is, you have no idea *where* it is, and it's not because you disturbed it in measuring it, it's because *it* has no idea where it is, a well-defined position does not exist; since the uncertainty in the momentum measurement approaches zero than the uncertainty in the position measurement has to approach infinity so that the product of those uncertainties remains greater than a constant.

The "you change the system by measuring it" is an analogy, and it's one that Heisenberg himself used to explain the HUP, but *that is not what it says*. The HUP is not a statement about the process of measuring things, it is a statement about the nature of the universe, and finding a way to improve a measuring system to reduce the disturbance it creates in the system it's measuring has nothing to do with the HUP.

This is a very silly comparison. 1700 PBq of the Chernobyl release was in the form of I-131, which has a half-life of 8 days. Which means that 3 months after the disaster, it was effectively gone. Thousands more Pbq of Xenon-133 were released, but Xe133 has a half-life of 5 days. So after 2 months, that was effectively gone, 99.98% of it had decayed to stable cesium.

The only radioisotopes released from Chernobyl that are still exist in significant amounts, 26 years after the release, are Sr90 and Cs137, with half-lives of about 30 years. Total release of those isotopes was 100 Pbq. So about equal to the total radioactive release from burning coal for 100 years. But that stuff from burning coal? That's going to last for many thousands of years. (And that's just the radioactive release, the arsenic, mercury, etc? That stuff's forever.)

Meanwhile, 300,000 people a year die to air pollution. That beats Chernobyl's total by a factor of 75.

"Same thing applies to guns in the home. Even if your kids are perfectly safe around the guns, you need to be cognisant that their friends may not have the same education."

There's a flip-side to that coin.

Even if you don't have a pool in the backyard, teaching your kids to swim is a good idea. Likewise, even if you don't keep guns in your house, you should teach your kids about them and about gun safety. Imagine how you'd feel if your kid kills himself or another kid with a gun he found in a neighbor's house.

"But as for the airframe ... as long as they can confirm that the fuselage is sound and in good shape, there's no reason why they can't continue to fly"

The life-limiting factor on the B-52 isn't the fuselage, it's the upper wing, which has a maximum life of 37,500 flight hours.

Given how many flight hours are on the airframes (at *most* 21,000) and the rate of accumulation, the mid-2040s is when we can't maintain the required numbers.

I wish people would cut this out.

Have you ever seen a high-energy mirror? It's not something you pick up at Bed, Bath & Beyond. They are expensive, they are fragile, they must be kept completely clean. The reflective surface has to be on the *front* of the mirror, not the rear, because there aren't materials transparent enough to pass high-energy laser light through without absorbing enough of it to react unpleasantly and spoil the reflection. So if there's something like a fingerprint, or a dust speck, on the reflective surface, that bit of crud absorbs the incident light, heats up/explodes, and damages the mirror coating. Which means it's not reflective anymore, which means that area of mirror coating now heats up/explodes and damages adjacent areas, leading to catastrophic failure of the mirror.

You are not going to put mirrors on your greasy *boats* that go bouncing around the surface of the *ocean* and have them remain clean enough to offer protection against a multi-kilowatt laser beam.

He Tweeted, and I quote: "LOL, Fuck Muamba. He's dead."

There's nothing racist in that statement. He might be an asshole, but on what basis are the elements of a charge of "inciting racial hatred" met?

And, no, the UK doesn't have the first amendment. But the UK is a member state of the EU, and the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights specifically states that:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."

The mental gymnastics required to reconcile a recognition of such a fundamental freedom with throwing a guy in jail for two months for saying "LOL, Fuck [guy]. He's dead." probably warrant at least a 9.8 from the Romanian judge.

Seriously, this shit's disgusting, nobody can pretend anything even slightly resembling freedom of expression exists in the UK.

I don't think that's right.

It is right. A DCMA takedown notice is a legal document that has to comply with the specific requirements of the act. You can't just write "Yo, doodz, take this off your webs" on a post-it and expect it to have legal weight. From the actual law:

Probably most crucially, one of the things the takedown notice must have is:

(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Basically, whichever person at Wastelands or its legal counsel who put his signature on this takedown notice either didn't include this statement, in which case Flickr is entirely free to ignore it, or committed perjury. What would be nice is if a few DAs hungry for media attention started nailing some of these fraudulent claimants to the wall pour encourager les autres.

I didn't say steam can't be much hotter than 212F. The described technologies don't include pressurizing or superheating the steam, so it will be at 212F.

Considering 80% of my cooking is at 350F, that's sufficient.

It looks like a number of these designs can't even come close to that:

For night cooking, water passes through the system, becomes steam and enters the kitchen through PVC pipes....
At night, the cook pours water into a spout on the side of the device, the water trickles through channels surrounded by the hot oil, converts to steam and rises to heat a hotplate for cooking...
The device stores excess heat in an insulated chamber filled with salt and can continue to heat water for steam cooking at night...

You can't heat a hotplate to 350F with 212F steam, let alone steam that's cooled off substantially by expanding through PVC pipe to enter your kitchen. People want to cook their food, not just warm it up.

"They're not talking about scanning random people on the street and taking their guns"

Of course they're not talking about that. Do you seriously believe that's not what they're doing to do?

"Granted, they certainly could use this device to scan random people. But that's an unconstitutional search which the Supreme Court would slap the Hell out of."

Awww, that's sweet.

Skin effect is frequency-dependent, and at at 50/60 Hz is pretty thick; in copper at those frequencies it's 8.5 millimeters, so you're definitely carrying current in the steel core, not just in the cladding.