I am rather grateful every time I go to fetch something that has slipped down into the drain that my garbage disposal is not evaluating the probability my fingers should constitute moving to the Destroy All Matter mode on its internal state diagram.

See the image on this page.

I can't remember if there was a wand in every version of the tricorder, but I could have sworn I saw McCoy using the wand also.

Not that we want to get TOO bound up in limiting a really useful medical device to the exact form factor of a TV show prop...

And this device will be able to test for these conditions in a few seconds? That would be really cool, since current tests for some of these take a day or more.

How did you think Spock learned to stand so still?

They've been dead in a lot of our worlds for years.

I guess you must be the modern equivalent to the Amish, shunning useful technology because it is the work of something you designate arbitrarily to be the Devil.

How sad for you and your kind, though I look forward to buying whatever the equivalent is of fine wooden furniture from your group of castaways at some point in the future.

Yes, very true. I'm just not sure the 15" will be updated very soon; I was thinking fall...

One specific one, is the tactic that some guys use of standing in a doorway and blocking it, so that whne the woman finally gets tired of his bs, she has to rub against him as she leaves the room.

Not overtly sexual, but at times, rubbing against someone is definitely sensual. A guy I used to work with used to do that to ladies he wanted to boink all the time.

Warning - I am an inveterate Rocket slut......

The difference between different Rockets is astounding. My post isn't trying to contradict - I have some fun examples to enjoy

Freedom 7 Mercury launchL

http://voyagerslog.blogspot.co... Alomost unbelievably single. A retaining ring, and a pivoted gantry.

This is almost shocking. There was a tower and elevator that owuld pull away before launch - probably because those early ones were so explodey. But this is darn simple. And we were learning as we went at the same time.

Gemini program. The rocket was more powerful, and thrust effects were getting getting to be a problem, they could wreck a rocket.

Here is a cool photo I'd not seen before - a time exposure photo of Gemini 10 put in place and launched - Love it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Back to the launchpad itself, now you'll see it is built up some. I'll note that this was a repurposed launch pad, having been used for Titan II rockets. It was abandoned at the end of the Gemini program. The larger thrust required thrust deflectors to avoid damage to both the Pad and rocket. http://www.honeysucklecreek.ne...

Then we move onto the Saturn 1, but lett's ski ahead to the Saturn V.

This was one serious big sumbitch rocket. The days of taking a little rocket out horizontally were gone, replaced with the vertical transport. The sizes were so different that in addition to handling the amount of thrust, everything was bigger.

Which brings us to Launch complex 39 Of Apollo and Shuttle fame.

Now we can repurpose things if needed. The pads are large enough to handle Saturn V's, so they could be modified for shuttle use, and at present 39A is being modified for Spacex Falcon Rockets, and 39B launchpad is going to be used for SLS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

That's the long version with pictures. The tl;dr version is that the early launch pads were rendered useless as the Rocket power grew, and building new pads was happening whaile th eold ones were in use. Even getting the Rocket for the Apollo-Soyuz mission gusseted up required changes The Saturn 5 Rocket was just too much oomph to send a stripped down Apollo to low earth orbit, the pads that were used for the Saturn 5 launchpad were used because the Pads normally used for that Rocket were not operational any longer, so they strapped on a Saturn 1-B with what was called a milkstool. The photo shows the concept.

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/ga...

Thanks to this page I can tell you your friend was in at most a 2.4 PSI overpressure situation, which is more than adequate to break bricks (2-3 PSI), without causing eardrum rupture ( > 2.4PSI). So there's your "Hydrogen Explosion" overpressure.

RDX, which is a real explosive, detonates at 25 times the speed of sound, or about 8500 m/s. It devolves about 900 liters of gas per kilogram during detonation, creating overpressures close to the detonation center that can exceed 3000PSI, which will reduce concrete to dust and melt metal to slag through compression heating.

This versus the H2 + 2O2 --> 2H2O reaction where three liters of gas at STP become 2 liters of gas, which expand to about 200 liters because of heating to 2800C (100:1 expansion). The flame speed of hydrogen/oxygen is about 50 m/s maximum. The expansion of the gas pressures the container until something breaks (a few bricks in the wall, some windows, or in the case of Fukushima Daishi, the failure of some corrugated metal siding and roofing materials.) Then the pressure escapes into the environment, and no further damage is done.

This is the difference between something burning, like a HydrOx reaction, and something exploding. This is what you can't seem to grasp here. There was an "explosion" in the colloquial sense that a surrounding building was rapidly disassembled. But in the pure physics sense, there was a contained burn that ruptured its container. The H/O reaction may seem fast in our everyday experience, but in the realm of explosives and explosions, it's moving at a snail's pace.

The BWR3/4 reactors were designed for operation in excess of 1000PSI operating pressures - in fact, the primary coolant loop in the U.S. PWRs typically runs at 2250PSI. Meaning that your "EXPLOSIONS" (caps doesn't make it true) wouldn't have had the slightest effect on the reactor or the coolant loops.

Additionally, the corrugated steel outer walls would have failed at a 2 PSI overpressure, which they did. Again, because this is a burn (deflagration) and not an explosion (detonation) there would be no point in the process where the reactor would have been exposed to a higher pressure than 2-3PSI in the containment building.

Much like putting a garbage bag filled with hydrogen/oxygen on a bank vault inside a glass building, you blew out all the windows, but you're no closer to the money.

So, again, there might be someone out of their depth in their conversation, but it's not me.

Go read the report. They support technologies that do the least amount of damage, acknowledging that none are zero impact.

So, again a straw man, even after I posted a link to their manifesto.

So buy another one next year after the next jump, and then it will someone who bought the 2015 MBP will be all sad they are missing whatever.

As it stands, I have a late 2013 MBP. I accepted when I bought it, that things would advance without me... eventually I will get a new laptop, and the balance will be restored.

Personally I'm really looking forward to a Force Touch version of the MBP, so I would be kind of sad to buy a 2015 MBP knowing that very soon I'd have a strong reason to buy a newer version. At least you will get a good bit of use out of your MPB before the next one with that and other nice features comes out.

It could be better. In our state it's considered mediocre among comparable towns, but to give you an example of what that means 86% of students score as "proficient" or "advanced" by national math standards. In most states that'd be accounted as a pretty good school.

I'd be very interested to know which city and state you taught in, and whether you were regular faculty. But I think your approach to reasoning about this is misguided. Rather than taking your experiences in dysfunctional school and generalizing from that, you should be looking at how the top performing schools operate.

Special needs isn't just squirming kids. Despite having lackluster marks, our daughter was screened by the school system as gifted, which in my state is considered "special needs". The school brought in a cognitive psychologist to run an elaborate battery of tests, including a comprehensive neurological assessment. What they found was very specific, narrow deficit: slow processing speed. She was capable of solving complex math problems and generating sophisticated answers to open response questions, but even simple questions took her a long time to answer. So the action plan was to put her on a more challenging course load, but to give her longer time if necessary to complete tests. On top of that we paid for training with an educational psychologist who specializes in learning disabilities. Eighteen months later she no longer required any special accommodations and was near the top of her class.

In a nutshell, all that new-fangled bullshit worked. 30 years ago she'd have been tracked into an easy CP courseload based on her marks, but the school actually put the effort into finding out that what she really needed was to be tracked into honors and AP courses. And the school system manages to do this while spending about the national average per student -- $11,505.

I didn't have time to do full-blown research with cites and datapoints, so I had to rely on relatively recent experience as an actual teacher... but then, you've proven my point admirably - thank you.

As far as special needs, that's a complex subject, but...

There are better ideas, many of which were long-abandoned. However, there is also a need to stop defining every squirming kid who refuses to sit still in kindergarten as a 'special needs' case. Most students that I've seen (secondary level) which were classified as "special needs" were most often teens who lacked any sense of discipline (9/10, it was never imposed in childhood), and were either drugged into submission after a quick diagnosis of ADD or similar (thus needing special assistance just to help them study through the chemical fog that kept them quiet), or were simply not cut out for the classes they were assigned to (or, most accurately, the classes their parents demanded they take.)

Don't get me wrong - there were definitely students who needed the extra instruction and/or assistance, usually though mental retardation or physical disability. Then again, they used to have special schools built for these needs. For those who weren;t quite that far gone, the public schools simply held back those students who were otherwise too able for special schooling, but were not quite mentally capable (or willing). They'd be held back for another year or more until their minds grew into the curricula, the progressed from there.

There were also some damned sharp students who could not only keep up, but excel - provided that they had access to something that helped them work around the disability (I had a student who was completely blind, but he blazed through class with a braille keyboard and a braille line monitor, coupled with a screen-reading device.) But, those cases aside, there are (or at least from what I've seen, were) far too many kids who were shoved onto the prozac/adderall pill mill and called 'special needs' just to get them out of the teachers' collective hair. It was convenient for the teachers, and in way too many cases convenient for the parents (it got them both sympathy and and a quiet household.)

To sum all that up? Let's try with this sentence: Not every kid who goes to school is going to graduate, let alone go to college. The sooner parents realize that (and schools begin enforcing the concept), the sooner we can restructure curriculum to teach the less able and other kids a trade that is within their abilities, and can actually give them a decent shot at a livable wage after school.