This is quite similar to psychokinetic and telekinetic powers. About 200 years ago, mediums could use the 'power of the mind' to move very heavy objects such as tables or people. And somehow, during the 20th century, the 'movable' size decreased while the ability to detect frauds increased. Nowadays people with powers can barely move teeny weeny objects and only when the conditions are good (aka no expert watching them to detect frauds).

UFOs are a bit like that. They are still sittings but most of the proofs, usually videos, do not resist a careful analysis by a CGI specialist or anyone with a true critical mind. See for instance the Oskar Jungell videos on YT. https://www.youtube.com/user/O...

Of course, one could argue that aliens want to remain undetected (e.g. the Star-Trek Prime Directive) and consequently they stopped visiting us when the risk of being caught on camera became too high. That is a reasonable argument but that does not help to prove that aliens really exist and have visited us.

You are probably right but if there is an excess of mutations in the male sex cells then that means that the Y chromosomes are on average more subject to mutations than the X chromosome. Another way to see the problem is to consider that the 'ancestors' of a Y chromosomes were all males while the 'ancestors' of a X chromosome were 1/3 males and 2/3 females. By 'ancestor', I of course mean from which parent that chromosome was inherited. So over multiple generations the Y chromosomes should accumulate more mutations than the X chromosomes. This is of course assuming that the effect described in the research paper can be generalized in time and to larger populations.

The 'ancestors' of non-sexual chromosomes should be 1/2 males and 1/2 females and so should not be affected.

I think that you put too much faith in the old generations. As far as I can remember, most companies have been releasing products containing shit codes. Most managers do not understand technical issues and that has nothing to do with millennials.

The test track is short so a huge acceleration is currently needed to reach a significant speed. The final version, if it ever exists, will probably require a smaller acceleration but for a longer time.

Let's assume a desired speed S = 700km/h ~= 200m/s at a constant acceleration A = 0.1g = 1m/s^2 (that is a typical acceleration in a train). The acceleration time is T = S / A = 200 / 1 = 200s = 3m20s. Also the average speed during the acceleration phase is S/2 = 100m/s so the required distance is 100m/s * 200s = 20000m = 20km.

I am pretty sure that an acceleration of more than 0.1g can be achieved without being too inconvenient. After all, unlike in a classical train, the passengers are supposed to remain sited during 'takeoff' and 'landing'.

Though, I am wondering how well the hyperloop would be able to manage altitude changes. At 200m/s, each 1% of slope would cause a vertical acceleration of 200*0.01 = 2m/s = 0.2g. At 5% you get 1g. Yeah! Zero gravity if the train goes downhill.

It seems to me that the cosmic engineer fucked up its aesthetically design. The apparent sizes of the Moon and of the Sun vary significantly (because orbits are elliptical instead of circular) so their relative apparent sizes vary by -10% to 10%. Also, if the moon orbit was aligned with the ecliptic, solar eclipses would be a lot more frequent.

"There's a simple solution to this - tax profits in the country where they originate. If a multinational wants to trade in a country, they pay her taxes. End of."

Actually, this is already the case. The problem is that the companies are designed to minimize their profit by moving the money between various legal entities in other countries. For instance "Starbucks reportedly paid just £8.6m in corporation tax in the UK over 14 years and nothing in the last four years - despite sales of £400m last year ... As part of its tax affairs, the firm (i.e. Starbucks UK) transferred some money to a Dutch sister company in royalty payments, bought coffee beans from Switzerland and paid high interest rates to borrow from other parts of the business." ( http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-pol... )

The FORTRAN origin of the code is obvious.

The original code was written in 1977 and so was probably using Fortran 66 (or a derivative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Compared to modern languages and even to K&R C, the Fortran 66 language had very of the features that we all take for granted.

Variable names were case insensitive (so UPPER CASE in practice) and limited to 6 characters

The IF statement was applied to a SINGLE statement so any complex behavior had to be implemented using conditional GOTOs ( no ELSE, no SWITCH-CASE, ....) .

For example, in Fortran77 you can write structured codes such as

            IF ( X .EQ. 42 ) THEN
                  A=1
            ELSE
                  A=2
          ENDIF

but in Fortran 66 you had to write something like

            IF ( X .NE. 42 ) GOTO 666
            A=1
            GOTO 777
        666 A=2
        777 CONTINUE

And of course, no stack, no recursivity, no dynamic allocation nor pointers, no function prototypes, no struct nor classes, no strings of variable length, ...
 

This is because clock_gettime() is POSIX but not C99. The option -std=c99 enforced a strict respect to the C99 standard and so ignores POSIX features.

As of now, -std=c99 is only needed to compile the 'compile' program. I recommend to do it manually and to compile the rest without C99.

If you did not change the Makefile then the following should work:

make clean
gcc -std=c99 -o compile compile.c
make

In Asimov mind, "Twist the genetics" probably did not have the same meaning that it has today. The science of the "genetics" so the study of heredity was already well established in the 50s (see Mendel, William Bateson, ...).

As far as I can tell, this code is syntactically correct (if executed by a Perl interpreter).

Unless something goes terribly wrong with Perl, the code behavior is pretty well defined. It shall output the following 2 lines:

> This is the header of the output
> where are the entries?

So the only sensible answer to the question"why doesn't this work" is "it works"

The Moon Escape velocity is 2.38 km/s while on Earth it is 11.186 km/s.

Since energy is proportional to the square of the speed (E=1/2*m*v^2) we can conclude that it is (11.186/ 2.38)^2 = 2 time easier to reach free space from the Moon than from Earth.

However, even if a rock is launched from the Moon at 2.38 km/s, it still inherits the inertia of the Moon. Simply speaking, the rock would not fall to Earth. It would be in an orbit similar to the Moon orbit.

The orbital speed of the Moon is about 1km/s so the rock must be given that additional acceleration to cancel its orbital speed.

At that point, the rock is immobile (from the Earth point of view) and it will start falling toward Earth because of ... gravity.

When it reaches Earth, its speed will be equal to the Earth Escape velocity (a bit less in fact since the rock did not start falling from an infinite distance) so 11.186 km/s.

The kinetic energy is given by the formula 1/2 * m * V^2 so for 1kg the kinetic energy at 11km/s is 1/2 * 1 * 11000^2 = 60 * 10^6 Joules

As a comparison, 1kg of TNT provides 4 * 10^6 Joules so each kg of moon rock would be equivalent to approximatively 15kg of TNT

The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons of TNT = 15 * 10^6 Kg so a similar effect would require a 1000 tons of Moon rock and the ability to accelerate that rock to a speed of 2.38+1 = 3.38 km/s.

The answer is likely in there: http://news.nationalgeographic...

The relevant bit is "At that time African elephants branched off first. Then just 440,000 years later, a blink of an eye in evolutionary time, Asian elephants and mammoths diverged into their own separate species."

The 1mm/1000 years figure is flawed. It is based on an incorrect value of 14 millions tons of dust per year computed in the early 60th. More recent figures are 100 to 1000 time smaller.

Even creationists websites do not use anymore moon dust as an argument. For instance look at the last paragraph in the Conclusion section of https://answersingenesis.org/a...

"Calculations show that the amount of meteoritic dust in the surface dust layer, and that which trace element analyses have shown to be in the regolith, is consistent with the current meteoritic dust influx rate operating over the evolutionists’ timescale. While there are some unresolved problems with the evolutionists’ case, the moon dust argument, using uniformitarian assumptions to argue against an old age for the moon and the solar system, should for the present not be used by creationists."

I could almost agree with you except that my critic was not against religion as a whole but against a literal interpretation of religious texts.

The issue is not science vs religion but reality vs blind faith in an absolute truth.

More generally, the same problem is found in non-religious contexts such as flat earth and other conspiracy theories where people will first assert a truth and then will ignore any evidence against it.

What you are suffering from is called a displacement.
More precisely you appear to assume that scientists, like the creation myth in your favorite holy book, are claiming an absolute trust.

That does not work like that in the real world. Scientists create models and then try to invalidate them by comparing to reality.

Eventually all models become invalidated and are replaced by newer models that fit better with reality.

No sane scientist will ever claim that a specific model is absolutely true. That is why the article is full of "may" and "suggests". Same for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... page that describes the single large collision model.

The only thing that is correct in your post is that from the 5 scientists involved in your short story, the last one is probably the one that merits the most to be fired.

Why? Because scientists #1 and #3 are both proposing a model. Scientists #2 and #4 are defending those models. The only one that is not contributing in any useful way is scientist #5.