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Comment: Re:How about the death of cities? (Score 1) 102

by Fusselwurm (#43460063) Attached to: Book Review: The Death of the Internet

That's the 'noble primitive' myth. It's only a myth.

I wasn't talking about the idea that people in smaller tribes were inherently more moral people (which is what the noble primitive myth deals with), but that crime is low because of social pressures in small groups (where everyone knows everyone, and it is harder to get away with crime) or for other reasons. My point was that crime rate is smaller in a smaller social group, but more and more people prefer to live in/around cities.

depends on the type of crime, i guess.

i know that at least homicide is much lower in today's "western" society (about one in a hundred thousand per year) in comparison to contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes (one in a hundred to one in three thousand).

Comment: Re:It could be built by the neanderthals (Score 2) 50

by Fusselwurm (#42382207) Attached to: World's Oldest Wooden Water Wells Discovered

Has the timeline been changed by better archaeology or dating, or reclassification of remains? when I was at school (only 2 decades ago, in the UK) I was taught that the last Neanderthals died out around the time of the construction of the Pyramids in Egypt, no more than 6000 years ago

Just asked my sis (who sports a B.A. in prehistoric archaeology )... according to her, you must've had a very strange teacher -- historically, the figure for "how long ago did they die out" has been creeping down as more and more recent specimen were found. At no time did people think it was just 6ka ago.

Sci-Fi

+ - How to Make an 'Energy Efficient' Warp Drive->

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes "Sonny White, of NASA's Johnson Space Center, presented his warp drive calculations at the 100 Year Starship symposium earlier this month. By White's reckoning, his design of starship — that is "adjusted into more of a rounded doughnut, as opposed to a flat ring" and oscillates the warp intensity — could be powered by the approximate mass-energy of the Voyager 1 space probe. Of course, this is a lot of energy, but how does it compare to previous estimates? In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre — who is widely considered the first to formalize the physical theory behind the warp drive — found that his warp drive would need all the mass-energy in the Universe to function. But in 2009, Baylor University physicist Richard Obousy applied our current understanding of quantum dynamics, dark energy and string theory to the warp drive. His system could theoretically be powered by the rest-mass energy of Jupiter. Better, but still not great. Although White's warp drive would still need the entire annual energy usage of the United States, suddenly (assuming all the "exotic" assumptions are proven) warp speed doesn't seem so prohibitively power hungry."
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Force has no place where there is need of skill. -- Herodotus

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