Posts by Chemist

From "Hitchhikers..."

"In Relativity, Matter tells Space how to curve, and Space tells Matter how to move.

The Heart of Gold told space to get knotted, and parked itself neatly within the inner steel perimeter of the Argabuthon Chamber of Law"

Incest

With enough inbreeding you get genetically very similar people who are then all susceptible to the same environmental challenges ( infectious diseases for example )

Just think about it a little..

*Even* if antimatter was repelled by gravity how are you going to contain it so that it doesn't interact with the matter you want to fly through. The containment is going to be extremely sophisticated matter weighing a considerable amount more than the anti-matter.

The idea doesn't get off he ground

And all 6 of mine...

run Linux

"copy someone's OS "

Nonsense !

Why by hand ?

Hi Lars,

Did you have no dissassembler in the 1970s ?. One of the first 'big' FORTH programs I wrote was a 6809 dissassembler which only took about 8K od source code including ~ 4K of data table. Given that the 6809 had anything up to ~6000 op codes ( it had multi-byte op codes for some addressing modes before anyone asks ) depending on how you looked at it I thought that was quite neat. Mind it ran a tad slowly but served it's purpose.

Just trying to emphasise the point...

that even switching desktop sessions is easy. It's still the same amount of typing - username & password

KERNEL PANIC ??

I've been using Linux since 1.2 and I've not seen a Kernel Panic for years certainly since before Suse 5.0

Re : "more immune"

I take your point however immunity does in fact vary, individuals immune response varies as does the amount of infectious agent they are subjected to. So generally a person can't be said to be just immune or susceptible but will form part of a distribution when the population as a whole is measured.

Glass is one of the names used..

for these disorder states of matter. Amorphous could also be applied. Most non-crystalline materials are not transparent. One of the routine challenges most organic chemists face when synthesising new compounds is to convert an often mass of sticky gum or stiff glass into a crystalline material.

What !

Early 8-bit computers had 8K BASICs or smaller. My home-brew FORTH system will run a 4K FORTH system with ~8K RAM and 1.5MHz clock on a 6809.

8-bit PICS are quirky but plenty powerful enough and they are available in 0.1" pin packages that can still be easily hand-soldered.

Have you a reference ...

for this ?

Try...

http://www.opencores.org

And indeed I started electronics using them..

but getting much below 22mm proved rather difficult !

openSUSE

Well said - never a moment's problem (running on 6 quite different machines here)

"The sender may have given us a 24hour burst before pointing at another star"

and if we'd replied would they would have had to wait up to a gazillion years to receive it

They all contain

benzene rings but as you say there's a wealth of variation in their properties and hence carcinogenicity.

Certainly my experience at various research labs is ..

that Windows was used by the computer illiterate or for 'corporate ' use (HR, marketing, managers, e-mither ) the hard scientific stuff was done generally on Unix or increasingly Linux.

That'd be

~1.9 tonnes diesel -> ~ 5.8 tonnes CO2

1.9 tonnes ~ 2300L

~45 L /week of diesel equivalent to ~500 miles in my Touran

You may be certain that the average vehicle on USA roads is not achieving 50 mpg

The point about it

was that an attempt on open source was caught quickly because it was open source.

FUD FUD FUD

What a load of apparently wishful thinking ( and paranoia)

LibreOffice can apparently handle a million

Agreed.2^20

I used to handle 6-7 million rows in JMP but at that time Excel could manage 64k. JMP ran on Linux as well.

Very roughly from "Foundation .."

"..threw a hyperspace relay and the ship died. For one of the characteristics of the Religion of Science is that its curses really work."

Sorry can't remember it too well and I don't have the books to hand

"people in ancient times"

Well the ancient Greeks knew it was sperical

Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth without leaving Egypt in ~250BC

Any seafaring nation would know. Your dad's ship drops over the horizon and a couple of days later he's back - great - well it is if you like him. The Chinese theorists thought the Earth was flat but I bet their sailors had other ideas.

unforgiving of bad code ?!

I had one of the original 8K BASICS ; it had a dreadful garbage collection bug that made string manipulations almost impossible..

split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen does NOT require a catalyst

Electrolysis it doesn't require a catalyst but this isn't electrolysis.

If we're being pedantic a catalyst does NOT alter an equilibrium only the kinetics.

2H2 + O2 > 2H2O + energy : the equilibrium lies heavily to the right, a catalyst allows the reaction to proceed usefully at low temperatures rather than needing a match - the match will give rather a large increase in rate !!

Read about Pittsburgh SC's Blacklight

Blacklight, the World’s Largest Coherent Shared-Memory Computing System, is Up and Running at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

http://www.psc.edu/publicinfo/news/2010/101110_Blacklight.php

Featuring 512 eight-core Intel Xeon 7500 (Nehalem) processors (4,096 cores) with 32 terabytes of memory, Blacklight is partitioned into two connected 16-terabyte coherent shared-memory systems — creating the two largest coherent shared-memory systems in the world.

Running 2 Linux images on 2048 cores each

"I wonder what the equivalent of the BSOD is?"

Moths !

Only

if you live in them !

Xenon is "inoffensive

TRUE

" one tends to get a breakdown............ hydrogen and oxygen"

NO! Not again ! One does not !

Water reacting with hot zirconium of the fuel rod assemblies to generate hydrogen

The thermodynamics of water are almost totally in the direction of water unless the temperatures are VERY high.

Think - what does a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen do when you apply a match

Indeed drivel

I've posted this elsewhere but after Chernobyl the pharmaceutical research site I worked at in NW England ( >2000 km) from Chernobyl, spotted the radiation very quickly as it was concentrated on the ventilation filters. The news got around VERY quickly.

"because seen from outside the universe"

I take my hat off to you - what a hitchhiker !