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Comment Re:Bought fake Insluin, hope someone has some info (Score 2) 543

Perhaps if you'd taken a regular, non-fucking chemistry class you would have learned of hydrogen peroxide- two hydrogen and two oxygen will bond all right. The mono part is unnecessary for reasons other than the one you stated.

That being said, it's too bad they didn't offer a fucking chemistry class when I went to school, that sounds like an interesting topic.

Comment Re:What happens after though (Score 2) 62

It's a closed system, not an outlet per the article. Anyhow, the nearest river is a few blocks away - the Columbia. It's within the Hanford Site, but at the very last edge of it, adjacent to the town of Richland. A supercomputer's worth of heat sink there will be negligible in comparison to nuclear heat sinks just upstream. Also, depleting ground water reserves adjacent to a very large river seems unlikely.

Comment Re:Geothermal heat pumps (Score 1) 62

Here's an aerial photo of the lab at the top of this flier. The blue in the upper right of the picture is the Columbia River. If you can drain all the groundwater from this particular site then I think you would have better things to do than shutting down a supercomputer. Where would you put several thousand cubic meters of water per second?

Comment Re:Police comments don't make sense. (Score 1) 485

Ah, a history question! When Vancouver was established in 1824 it was under joint occupation by the U.S. and Britain, per the Anglo-American Convention of 1818. Along with the rest of the Oregon Territory, it became officially part of the U.S. in 1846 per the Oregon Treaty. It has been ever since. So, the answer is actually somewhat complicated, it was jointly occupied by the U.S. since 1824, but has been unambiguously part of the U.S since 1846.

Many years later, in 1886 the townsite of Granville in the British Dominion of Canada was incorporated to become the city of Vancouver, in British Columbia. Of course, Canada itself wouldn't become a nation for many more years.

Comment Re:Well, good thing I didn't research this area. (Score 1) 251

That would greatly facilitate the process of buying votes! A great 'weakness' of the current system is anonymity of voting, which makes it difficult for the purchaser to verify that someone selling their vote has voted as requested. When a large corporation purchases someone's vote under your system, all they would need to do to verify that the voter 'stayed bought' would be to have them use a corporate email account as 'their' secret code. We could get rid of all the political advertising and simply make it possible to buy votes directly- it would be much more efficient!

Comment Re:Isn't the problem c? (Score 1) 412

Interesting, I wasn't aware that the energy of the SN1987A neutrinos had been measured. As an aside, I'm not at all sure that "rest mass" is the right phrase if they are indeed tachyons - perhaps "infinite speed mass?"

Let's roll with it, though, and assume they're really tachyons- how sure are we that we're observing the same kind of neutrinos? If the SN1987A tachyons had less than 10^-10 of the imaginary "rest mass" than the ones from CERN then they might travel closer to the speed of light even with much less total energy.

Comment Re:Isn't the problem c? (Score 1) 412

Two things: since the velocity of tachyonic neutrinos would depend on their energy it's plausible that the ones from a supernova were very high energy indeed, and thus traveled very close to the speed of light, albeit very very slightly faster rather than very very slightly slower.

The second thing is that it may well be that we don't understand the chronology of events within a supernova very well- what if the burst of neutrinos actually happened some time after the burst of light, but then outran it? After all, our current supernova models were designed to try to fit the data that appeared at the time to indicate that the neutrinos were emitted first...

Comment Re:artificial (Score 1) 207

There's a simpler and more paranoid explanation available. This is an alien home planet, and it's actually emitting huge amounts of various types of light. Our astronomical instruments, however, have been hacked to not show any of that- we're not supposed to know about alien civilizations, as it would stunt our development. Somealien didn't think this through and simply removed all the light from our data on that planet, resulting in an anomalously dark appearance. It's a software bug. Perhaps it'll be fixed by the next time we look at that planet, and it'll appear as a boring planet of standard appearance.

Comment Re:Why John Kerry lost (Score 1) 504

Every losing candidate, with the possible exception of sitting presidents, looks weak in retrospect. Let's look at a few more of them: Dole, Dukakis, Mondale - all of them now perceived as weak candidates.

This isn't a grand coincidence that one party always happens to nominate a weak candidate, but a byproduct of the fact that the process and result of losing the election makes them be perceived as much weaker in retrospect than they actually were during the campaign.

Comment Re:Oath (Score 1) 307

The grandparent was discussing war- your link does not address the topic. The US Constitution is quite specific about the process required to declare war, and the last time the United States declared war was June 5, 1942. The "Korean War", the "Vietnam War", heck even the absurdly named "War on Poverty", "War on Drugs", and "War on Terrorism" - none of them are war under the constitution. Note that the subject under discussion was the interpretation of the law, so the legal definition of "war" is precisely the point.

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