APOD and General Astronomy Discussion Forum
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owlice wrote:So, beyond, you got a bedtime story, hmmm?
Well, actually it was more of an anti-bedtime story. It woke me up. I had to play some solitaire on the computer to get drowsy again.
Solitaire is just a tool developed by your computer to make you wake it from hibernation periodically...Beyond wrote::lol: Well, actually it was more of an anti-bedtime story. It woke me up. I had to play some solitaire on the computer to get drowsy again.owlice wrote:So, beyond, you got a bedtime story, hmmm? :ssmile:
I don't feel completely convinced that the scenario described in the story wouldn't allow someone to do just that..."Why has no one ever been able to take over billions of human brains and create an army of zombies that way?"
Ha-Ha-Ha. IF that's the case, mine doesn't really get to hibernate. In the 3 1/2 years that i've had a computer, i've played around 100,000 games of Klondike solitaire. Not so many Mahjong Titans, and not too many games of Hearts. The computer started cheating at Hearts!!Chris Peterson wrote:Solitaire is just a tool developed by your computer to make you wake it from hibernation periodically...Beyond wrote:owlice wrote:So, beyond, you got a bedtime story, hmmm?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle wrote:The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel to portray the life of the immigrant in the United States, but readers were more concerned with the large portion pertaining to the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early-20th century, and the book is now often interpreted and taught as only an exposure of the industry of meatpacking. This was not Sinclair's intention for the book though and not what he would have liked it to be famous for. The novel depicts in harsh tones poverty, absence of social programs, unpleasant living and working conditions, and hopelessness prevalent among the working class, which is contrasted with the deeply-rooted corruption on the part of those in power. Sinclair's observations of the state of turn-of-the-century labor were placed front and center for the American public to see, suggesting that something needed to be changed to get rid of American wage slavery. The novel was first published in serial form in 1905 in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. It was based on undercover work done in 1904: Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering information while working incognito in the meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards at the behest of the magazine's publishers. He then started looking for a publisher who would be willing to print it in book form. After five rejections by publishers who found it too shocking for publication, he funded the first printing himself. It was published by Doubleday, Page & Company on February 28, 1906 and has been in print ever since.
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One night, while looking for a warm and dry refuge, [Jurgis] wanders into a lecture being given by a charismatic Socialist orator, and finds a sense of community and purpose. Socialism and strong labor unions are the answer to the evils that he, his family and their fellow sufferers have had to endure. A fellow Socialist employs him, and he resumes his support of his wife's family, although some of them are damaged beyond repair.
The book ends with another Socialist rally, which comes on the heels of several recent political victories. The speaker encourages his comrades to keep fighting for victories, chanting "Chicago will be ours!"
Hi Chris,Chris Peterson wrote:They seem to have space elevators at an airport in Australia. That must be a real trick. Maybe the robots can rewrite the laws of physics!
Yes. A space elevator is a counterweighted tether with its center of mass in geostationary orbit. You can only do that over the equator. I can imagine something that eliminates this requirement by consuming a lot of power and reaction mass, and there are some very speculative alternatives similar to a space elevator that don't need to be on the geostationary band, but I think in this case the author just screwed up.rstevenson wrote:As a fan of space elevators, but no expert on their physics, I'm curious what the problem would be with having at least one of them in Australia -- assuming, of course, we ever figure out how to build one. Is it just the fact that no part of Australia is on the equator?
Well, the vast majority of the mass would be in the tether itself which would be held taut (around its center of mass at geostationary equatorial orbit) by centrifugal force as much as anything else... so why not have the ends somewhat non-equatorial.rstevenson wrote:"geostationary" - right... I forgot about that little detail. A little off the equator might be fine, so long as the wobble at the top wasn't extreme, but I don't imagine you could get very far off the equator, and the closest Australia gets is about 1000 km. Waltzing Matilda, indeed!Chris Peterson wrote:
A space elevator is a counter weighted tether with its center of mass in geostationary orbit. You can only do that over the equator. I can imagine something that eliminates this requirement by consuming a lot of power and reaction mass, and there are some very speculative alternatives similar to a space elevator that don't need to be on the geostationary band, but I think in this case the author just screwed up.
But having said that, I went Googling and found this quote from physicist Bradley Edwards, from a 2007 Q&A on the PBS Nova site... "The elevator can be placed anywhere within 20 degrees of the equator due to the dynamics, but the performance is best at the equator." He's talking about a space elevator anchored to something like an oil rig platform out in the Pacific.
