Funny thing how so many earthquakes are on a "previously undiscovered fault."

The only things we know about earthquakes are: (1) little ones seem to happen after bigger ones, and (2) they roughly occur in the same place as previous ones.

Is it a people mover....

                            or a murdering twin-maker?

Whispered under breath:

      Eppure si raffredda.

The specs on that unit give some idea of what's possible with a miniature peltier dehumidifier:

Weight: 3-1/2 pounds
Rate: 8 oz per day at 80% RH
Power: 22.5 W

That's a lot of weight, and it would take quite a bit of solar panel to get that much power. And all that for a thimble-full of water in an hour's ride.

The reason there is Something, is that Nothing is unstable.

Libraries are not, and cannot be, archival repositories of books. A library uses its fixed resources (in money, personnel, and space) to house a collection which is useful to its patrons. It's silly to complain about a library discarding books. How else would they have room for anything new? The librarians and administrators are the ones responsible for choosing and maintaining the collection. That's their call. If you think the collection should move in a different direction, send a letter to the librarian--you'll probably be pleasantly surprised with a coherent and reasoned response. This "outrage" is just dumb.

A fairly complete description of this complex, its occupants, methods, and procedures was already published in 1961:
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, by Stanislaw Lem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
All hail the Building, set in opposition to the Anti-Building!

Anyone remember from Gödel, Escher, Bach:
"I cannot be played on record player X"

Who will win, Tortoise or the Crab?

doi:10.1016/j.ijhydene.2009.04.012
Limits for hydrogen leaks that can support stable flames, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy Volume 34, Issue 12, June 2009, Pages 5174–5182

Hydrogen is an unusual fuel. It has a high leak propensity and wide flammability limits, 4–75% by volume. Among all fuels, hydrogen has the lowest molecular weight, the lowest quenching distance (0.51 mm), the smallest ignition energy in air (28 mJ), the lowest auto-ignition temperature by
a heated air jet (640C), the highest laminar burning velocity in air (2.91 m/s), and the highest heat of combustion (119.9 kJ/g). Hydrogen flames are the dimmest of any fuel. Hydrogen embrittles and attacks metals more than any other fuel.

Mind you, this is from researchers generally inclined towards the use of hydrogen.

Funny that the rise in shingles cases has occurred since varicella vaccination became common.

What's changed is that there is no longer a large amount of chicken pox virus floating around the community, constantly challenging folks' immune systems. To get exposed you now have to go to a doctor and buy it. (This is the "shingles vaccine".)

For many diseases, such as polio and measles, vaccination is undoubtedly a huge good, preventing a huge number of deaths and tragic illness. But for varicella, the vaccine may result in more harm than good.

The one gTLD that makes sense would be .rad, though I haven't seen this proposed. The idea is to link nationally or internationally assigned radio call signs, to a URL: call_sign.rad.

This is sensible as a gTLD, as there is a one-one correspondence between call signs and legitimate owners. There is a need and value to having a (somewhat) reliable or trustable way to locate the radio stations on the web.

I wonder about the climate impact of the series of multi-megaton surface blasts by the US and USSR in the 1950's and 1960's. These tests put both dust and radionuclides into the atmosphere in large, possibly globally-significant quantities. When we see surface temperature changes over the last 50 years, how much of that is a recovery from an abnormal climate?

Why haven't radiation oncologists produced good data on this? Many, many people are exposed to substantial radiation doses in the treatment of cancer. And their progress and outcomes is tracked by the tremendous statistical measurements of modern oncology. (This statistical rigor is a big chunk of the improvement in cancer treatment over the last generation or two).

Of course there are huge confounding factors, including that the patient already has cancer, is exposed to carcinogenic chemotherapy regimens, and so on. But it would seem to me that with such a large dataset--along with the long-term tracking--the quantitative danger and damage due to smaller and smaller doses of radiation would be measurable.