Thomas Kirby

In case you just wanted an indicator light on the low voltage side of a power transformer to let you know that it has power. Experimenters who have low budgets have a real interest in saving a few cents here and there. In this case, you want to spend the few cents for the rectifier diode. Another alternative is to wire the two LEDs in parallel but not in the same direction. There are uses for indicators like this, including if you want to test for polarity or if you have AC or DC. They are also good for RS-232 lines which can run up to plus or minus 30 volts.

In this case I would be happy to find out that he is a troll. It is by far the lesser of two evils.

How about glass fiber for the construction of space habitats? Manufacture the fiber on the moon, wind it on spools, run it through a fabricator that can "weave" the fiber into structural parts and impregnate it with some kind of silicone or similar material to seal in air. Can we then manufacture a space habitat that can maintain its structural integrity for thousands of years? The trouble with any metal is that it will eventually corrode away, and silicon dioxide and silicate minerals are a lot more common and may be easier to use this way. A thick matrix of fiberglass would be very hard for anything to pierce. If the material is "woven" using fibers of lengths of hundreds of meters, it will distribute impact energies very well. And talk about resistance to ripping. Any puncture is going to stay its original size.

The hatred is everywhere.

That is exactly what it is, but it doesn't like much reverse voltage. I've seen an LED die while being powered by AC through an appropriate resistor.

Pangloss: I didn't say that all of us hate sex offenders. Those of us who do are a danger to society. Anyone who could turn a person out in a raging storm to die because he bears the label "sex offender" is himself or herself a much greater danger to society than the sex offender is. Hatred is like cancer. It is no more controllable than an aggressive cancer was a century ago. It takes things and territory that do not belong to it. If you think I am saying that hating sex offenders causes people to hate a lot of people who are not sex offenders, you are absolutely right. The key to that is in the word "potential" in the context that you just used it in. It is one of the buzzwords most often used in the early 21st century to deliberately mislead people, the way it was used to mislead people into the war against Iraq. When someone starts babbling about the "potential harm" that might be caused by sexual predators, Saddam Hussein, pitbull dogs, pet snakes, any of those things, society would be better off if that person had their larynx removed and were banned from access to all keyboards. I may well get killed for saying it, but these people are causing us massive damage. I don't even care who sees it anymore. It's futile to even talk about it. Bandwagons, jingoism, blind patriotism, obedience to authority and complete trust in liars are the morality of this day.

Swanson, the way you abused the term "conspiracy theorist" was rude. If you don't have the information, please just say so. It's hard to believe that you are some kind of expert when you don't behave with the decorum and maturity that one would expect of an expert. Using personal attacks, even one so "subtle" as labelling me a conspiracy theorist, to distract me from my topic and to possibly get me in trouble for answering back, is not indicative of emotional maturity, scientific knowledge, any intent to behave like an adult, or, really, anything that would validate you as a person of status. The whole point of playing such games would seem to be to make me think that there is a conspiracy where none exists. Which actually is a conspiracy, but you get to pretend it isn't and I'm crazy and you're honest. Now, a conspiracy theorist would definitely think, when they see something like this, that you were indeed one of the conspirators. He might not want to take the time to try to figure out whether you are a real conspirator, or someone who just wants "loonies" to think that there is one. As you already know, what angers an honest man about this is that you get to dis me and I will be punished, maybe banned from this board eventually, if I answer back.

Why did you take the comment personally?

Learn how not to hate. Not even the advent of the atomic bomb has taught enough of us to truly understand or respect the dangers of hate, so we have to teach it to ourselves or perish. It's a lot easier to kill the messenger, though.

How about remembering that a little common courtesy goes a long way? Flesh in which particles of DU are embedded receive their dose of alpha rays in a volume at least 12 million times smaller than the human body. Perhaps in the interest of being on topic you can reassure me that a couple of hundred micrograms embedded in lung tissue is still quite harmless. Perhaps you can show me the studies that show that the damage caused by thousands or millions of inhaled particles of DU is still not a health threat.

Meaning we humans have got ourselves in a bind.

The way we treat the least of us is the way we will learn to treat all of us. The way we treat those who we hate becomes the way we treat those who we love and trust.

What were their own standards supposed to be?

With your comments against Americans who apologize for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you have already overloaded this discussion. It's a slightly fancier way of saying that they should be shot in a horrible manner. What are you trying to say? Are you trying to say that people should be shot to death for thinking that those bombings were war crimes and acting on those opinions? The biggest tragedy of such bombings is the fact that they prove that we chose three times not to take the high road. I say three times because we did it to Dresden too, with even more casualties even though the bombing was not atomic. If you ask me, and I'm going to tell you whether you ask me or not, it would have been a lot more humiliating to the enemy to show them that we were better than they were than it was to show them that we would choose to be more evil than they were, more deserving of contempt, and that we could get away with murder. We neglect to consider the kind of behavior that we want others to emulate. We have validated the bombing of civilian targets as normal in the course of war, in spite of agreements and declarations to the contrary. It also wasn't long after declarations against bombing nuclear reactors that the U.S. and Israel went around bombing every one of them that they could excuse. Do we mean anything we say? Do we want everyone wanting to do these things to us and each other? We have to set an example. I realize that there is heavy contempt against people who try to take the high road. That's part of the problem. (edited in a bit later) OK, let me reverse myself a bit on this. Pangloss, your comment about riding the subways was way too easy to misinterpret, and I had to try several times to catch on to what you were saying. I still can't agree that the apologies have no value. If the police who shot the bombing suspect apologized it would be one helpful sign that they weren't going to do it again. A real apology acknowledges that the offending party did wrong and it includes an implicit promise to not do it again, or make ones best effort. Thus I apologize for the harshness of my tone and promise to do my best not to do it again. At least here we are fighting using words instead of fists, rocks, or firearms.

I agree that it's a failure. I haven't seen anyone jump on it and really disagree. But you would be right to say that I haven't given the matter nearly enough thought.

Insane Alien: What is a malteser? I'll take the live forever pill. I want to sit by the river long enough to see the bodies of my enemies float by. It might also be long enough to get my book written.

I don't happen to know the names of any of the others. Yes, pipes and stuff are unsightly, and I love beautiful places, but I would like to live to be able to enjoy what beauty there is. Our trouble here is just like with asteroid strikes. We don't know when we are going to hit the jackpot. Even the hazards are similar. If we knew for sure it would be more than 10,000 years from now, we could completely stop worrying about it. We won't know for sure with the current state of science until a few days before the eruption. 50 years would probably be enough time to engineer the problem away. Once we can deal with the first cubic kilometer of it, we can repeat the process a few dozen to a few hundred times. Most of the reason to talk about Yellowstone, like I said, is that it is the most famous and has the best name recognition. Talking about its effects on America is because most of the immediate kill radius is in the United States, and all of it is in North America. Maybe we can do the same kind of engineering with other volcanoes. Maybe more even than with asteroids, we need to work out the supervolcanoes to give this species greater permanency. It's not so much that I'm worried that it's going to go off tomorrow, even if the chance of it going off within the next two weeks is probably the same as the chance of it going off 10,000 years from now. It's that we very likely have a huge amount of time to head off the disaster and to prepare for it, and ride it out with minimal losses. If we were just going to be wiped out and we could do nothing about it, I wouldn't worry about it at all. It can be an easy win, amortizing the preparations over centuries, plus we become better engineers and smarter human beings. We become competent. We invest in ourselves. If we're really good at it we can fix the problem without destroying the beauty of the place, too, but yes, we probably will have to give up something for the safety of future generations. It might also be better to do that than later on have to figure out how to make air filtering machines that rise all the way to the stratosphere and precipitate dust.

The only problem here is that I don't think that anyone disagrees. It's nice when people can agree on something but it makes for short discussions.

This is an engineering problem. The idea, and I think we are up for it, is to engineer a device that can render the supervolcano under Yellowstone park inert, or at least a lot safer than it is right now. Hopefully time is on our side, but we don't know more than we do know about when it will go off, covering most of North America in ash. We even have the potential ability to cover the area with cubic miles of rock and dirt. It's not impossible, it's just difficult. We could try to do a controlled release of pressure through pipes. Again, not impossible, just difficult. If we could harvest the volcanic ash produced by controlled release, the project might pay for itself in fertilizer sales. We could try to build some kind of structure over the potential release points and cover them with something that will absorb the impact, sort of like putting out a fire with wet blankets. There is also the possibility of building new chambers near the old chambers to make more space for the magma. Or, many smaller tubes might be better, to divide the problem. These would be easier to extract energy from, would be less likely to cause land subsidence, and would be able to contain more pressure. If we were good enough at building something to take heat and pressure away from the site, we could count on human voraciousness to simply consume enough of the energy and materials produced to leave us with the problem of cooling the volcano down too much. Take enough kilowatthours out of a few hundred cubic kilometers of magma, you have cold rock.

More than one well-known possibility comes to mind. One is magma travelling close enough to the surface there to cause that much heating. Another is a pocket of steam under pressure. There could even be an underground fire. Heated organic matter that is below the ignition point becomes more and more flammable if it is situated so that vapors and oils can accumulate. Eventually a hard look will set them off. Volcanoes do happen this way. They sneak up once in a while and appear somewhere like in a farmer's field where before there was flat ground, like Paricutin. These hills look like some of the land has slipped before. Magma rides pretty close to the surface in some places. The Santa Barbara area is geothermally active, with a number of hot springs. The magma under Yellowstone is 8000 feet down, and that's only moderately deep for oil well drilling. The deepest hand-dug water well in the world is 12,500 feet deep.

How do we know that there is no state below the normal ground state that we see in hydrogen atoms?