npts2020

Any adjustments I could suggest would just be quibbling over what seems like a pretty valid exercise. All in all it seems like it would be a relative bargain to do this.

You eventually end up with a steady state of weeds or whatever grows there. After some period of time you will not end up with any more than can possibly be there to begin with.

I see you don't like cost/benefit comparisons of terrorism to other similarly destructive causes that result in just as gruesome deaths, so lets approach the question from a different angle. I haven't seen anyone claim that it is possible to protect civilization 100% from terrorist attacks, so what exactly is an acceptable level? One Oklahoma City or 9-11 attack every ten years? One city in a century, thousand years? IMO Those who perpetrate terrorism ought to be pusued with the same vigor as any similarly malintented criminal. The question is at what point does further spending not measurably decrease risk? I see that CaptainPanic is asking basically the same thing.

Well, it will probably be a couple of years before any comparison with the Great Depression is valid but IMO all of the conditions for equalling or exceding it are present in today's economy. Whether this actually happens or not depends on how fast and effectively insolvent financial institutions are dealt with. The current downturn can only get worse until an accounting for their assets (hint there aren't (m)any) has occurred. The current "stress tests" of the banks should have been done prior to the first "bailout". If this had been done, I think many of the corporations "too big to fail" would have been put in recievership to fail. All of this is related to trying not to lose hundreds of trillions of dollars by a collapse of the derivative market which almost certainly will occur when as few as six or eight of their underwriters default (I can think of that many in financial trouble i.e. having gotten bailout money, off the top of my head). What will have to happen is that either the market is propped up ala even bigger bank bailouts until economic conditions return to friendlier conditions (tilting at windmills IMO) or admission that the market is basically worthless and starting over from scratch (with maybe a regulation or two). I say the sooner we get the accounting over and weed out failure, the better off we will be. The consequences of losing hundreds of trillions of dollars in wealth will not be trivial, however......

Transits of Mercury (and Venus) across the sun are interesting to observe. The planet appears as a tiny but visible dark spot on the sun, in fact tinier than many sunspots. Do not attempt this without appropriate filters for looking at the sun, as the amount of sunlight cut off by the planet is immeasurable without fairly high-tech devices.

You are equating mass with photons. Until the time when some mechanism converts one to the other, they behave in very different manners.

SH3RLOCK; Solar power may require backup but once installed requires little maintainence. Also, peak use is almost always during daylight hours, meaning it may be most useful as a power supplement rather than the main source. For more than that, a storage system of some kind is necessary but the problem is not intractable as there are many proven ways of doing it. According to Scientific American, if a wind grid is well designed and large enough (size of Australia, U.S. or E.U.), it will not require backup, since there is always wind somewhere. Other notes; If the transportation system is automated, enclosure will be necessary to enable high-speed travel. IMO speeds are too high to be safe on current roads mostly because of mixing vehicular and non-vehicular traffic and incompetent human drivers. Some people will object to not being able to look out the window of their vehicle to see scenery but I think most will "get over it" in a short time and accept the utility of the system as being better. If it is desired, an image of the surroundings can be projected on the inside of the vehicle. In automating the system, it may turn out that rubber on asphalt is not our best option. The reason this is used now is mainly for ability to change direction quickly (i.e. friction) and smoother, quieter rides. It may be that something more similar to steel on steel like railroads will be better. IMO the only way to build quickly is to prefab sections of roadway and connect sections like Hot Wheels or model railroad tracks. This should enable construction crews to measure progress in miles per day instead of days or weeks per mile.

Therein is the problem. "Acceptable losses" is largely a matter of perception. More than ten times the number of people who died in the 9-11 attacks die every single year on our highways but you don't see ten times the money spent on terrorism put toward making our highways safer. It is mostly a scam for someone to make big $$$$ from an "unlimited" government pocketbook. Why do you think the same reaction did not happen after Tim McVeigh demonstrated an alternative use for a rental truck in Oklahoma City?

Seems to me that it is mainly anti-scientists that cannot find any evidence of evolution.

......True, but American and English can seem to be two entirely different languages sometimes.

I don't know if this is helpful but it brings to my mind cycles like the food chain, birth/death, nitrogen cycle in ecological systems etc.

At this point in time, most cosmologists believe the universe will expand forever (in human terms) until in something like 10 to the hundredth power years there will be a uniform steady state of immeasurability (or nothingness to some). Of course this view is always subject to change as we get better and different measurements of the universe around us.

Yep, and even more around one on an aircraft carrier (bigger reactors) but afaik that is the only place any ship has large lead components.

I have read in Scientific American that it will take about 40,000 square miles of solar panels to provide half of all of America's energy needs in 2050. By coincidence there are about 40,000 square miles of roadway in America according to USDoT. I would like to see the entire road/rail system automated, enclosed, and powered with wind and solar energy. I don't think that it will be practical to put solar panels anywhere on the road, they will have to be elevated above or beside, as pointed out by others. You would have to figure out places where it would be a waste to put a solar panel because of lack of direct sunlight, though (between tall buildings in a city, behind a mountain, etc.). All of the technology required is in existence today and only needs to be refined for this specific application. I haven't written much in the past couple of months but if you are interested here is much of what I have written about automated transportation, if you are interested. I recommend starting with the oldest posts first.

Thanks for the info one and all. The single google search I did was not very successful but you guys have managed to give me enough to think about.

Another system I kind of like is where instead of voting for a single candidate (you could anyway if you liked) you vote for all acceptable candidates with the highest total winning. That way you could vote for both John McCain and Bob Barr with no penalty for doing so. The problem with this system is correlating vote totals with voter turn out, IOW there would have to be high confidence the system couldn't be rigged.

Actually, in the American dialect of English they are considered the same to the point that Webster's gives "chiefly British spelling of analyze" as the only definition for analyse.

Thanks for the clarification Klaynos. That's what I get for depending on memory and not looking it up. Now that I have looked, it seems as if the shortest lightpulse is under a femtosecond, aiming for around 600 attoseconds. I have a related question that may be better answered in the biology forum, is there any shortest pulse of light that is required to be visible to the human eye or will any visible light be detected?

I would be the last one to tell you that such a thing is impossible. The problem is that springs are more suited to applying steady smaller force over a longer time than applying the sudden large force from stopping and starting that is required for operation of vehicles large enough to carry people or freight. I will have to think about it for a while but I don't believe many small springs would have any energy advantage over a single large spring.

ecoli; You are correct that banks would not be able to function by retaining all of their deposits. The real question is how much of those deposits should have to be kept in reserve (IIRC it was 10% but may have been changed when banks were deregulated). IMO as soon as they allowed banks to do things like trading in derivatives, the amount of "reserve" became meaningless. Here is an FDIC summary of the derivative market from 2003 that pretty much explains what is happening now. Basically,1) banks were given permission to go into the derivative market according to a complex risk assessment model come up with by federal regulators. 2) some banks jumped in with both feet, notably; JP Morgan-Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Bank One, Wachovia (I wonder if any of these 5 banks are in trouble) 3) the risk assessment models are prone to widely variant outcomes with even small changes in some of the variables, and I would think also have more susceptibility to manipulation 4) the derivative market grows so quickly, it dwarfs (all?) other financial markets and even regulators can't assess the total value of the market (the best current estimates I can get range from a little more than $300 trillion to well over a quadrillion dollars U S) although $500 trillion is most often cited. How can anyone claim to be regulating a market they don't even know the value of? 5) the inevitable situation that is the result of the above that we are faced with today. I feel like I have a fair grasp of what derivatives are but can anyone tell me why they are necessary? It seems to me like it is just a back door of being able to borrow more money than you are able to borrow to begin with, i.e. the subprime lending of the corporate world.

buttacup's middle reference pretty much covers the transportation uses. From the looks of it nothing has ever been put into production, which is in agreement with what little I have seen written about the subject.

You can build a device to measure events down to the nano-second (maybe even pico-second by now) range. Your eyes would notice no period of time when there wasn't light at that speed of flashing. After about 8-10 cycles per second, afterimages remain in your eyes longer than the light is off. As I stated above, flourescent lights turn on and off 60 times a second (50 for those on 50Hz grids). By the time you have gotten to this relatively slow on/off speed your eyes will not notice any increase in the frequency.

iNow; allowing 1:7 leveraging would be a far cry from what exists now. As you point out, many (I believe most) of our financial institutions (and others) are operating in the 1:20-30+ range, which is exceeding the approximately 1:20 leveraging of the average financial institution just prior to the Great Depression. Thus far I have seen no concrete proposals for addressing this situation and very little discussion of it. It seems to me that the main thrust of all of the "bailouts/giveaways" has been to keep the derivative markets, which have been the lever for many if not most of these companies, from completely crashing. If there is $500 trillion+ of these IOU's out there how much of that amount will we have to put up to be able to make any significant difference and where does the money come from and how will it help?

Bascule; The problem with your scenario is that the craftsman did work his whole life to get the money to build that factory, he just did it by proxy (i.e. his parents, neighbors, etc. worked enough to accumulate the required wealth to do it--savings). This leads to one of the conundrums of economics I have never seen adequately explained, how can you have more "credit" available than there has been wealth produced and why don't they seem to be interconnected? As long as people have faith in the system it doesn't seem to matter but there has been enough Enron/AIG/Bernie Madoff/Lehman/WaMu/etc. scams in close enough succession to shake that faith. As long as there is a back-door way of manufacturing money, derivatives and government "printing" in our present case, it will be nearly impossible to keep from ending up with financial "lever" that doesn't end up so long (assets to debt ratio) as to break at the first shock. The question I have for any takers is, how long is it prudent to make the lever? IOW what kind of assets to debt ratio should financial (and maybe other) institutions be allowed to have?

Much as I would like to see light shed on the activities of the Bush2 administration, I tend to agree with waitforufo that it isn't going to happen. Even if the Dems in congress had the intestinal fortitude to do it (they probably don't), there is a strong recent (past 50 years) history of glossing over possible criminal activity of the outgoing administrations. Iran-contra was the last time anything close to this magnitude was in popular consciousness, what happened then?