Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

hodj

hodj

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Famm_sl said:
What's up with this six inch long mutant human mummy? That shit's some sort of hoax right?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...cumentary.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3135628.html
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Difficult call without being able to study the remains directly but homo floresiensis existed at one pointhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis(note, not in Chile, actually on the other side of the globe practically in Indonesia) so its not outside the realm of possibility to have living humans who are surprisingly small. However this specimen did not live in an environment or area with the proper selective pressures which would promote the miniturization of a species, such as Homo Floresiensis underwent.

I seriously doubt that it was something which survived outside the womb, regardless what Nolan thinks. It is incredible small, underdeveloped (missing ribs, strange malformation on the skull) and I can't conceive of a situation where this individual could survive outside the womb for very long without medical care that we probably don't have in the modern day and age.

It is human, as DNA tests have confirmed that and its lineage, so I would wager the best guess is still that it is an aborted (probably miscarried) still birth fetus who was fortunate enough due to being in an incredibly dry area to be preserved very well. This is a rare occurance, the bones of fetus' and children tend to degrade very rapidly (much of bone tissue below about age 12 still consists of at least partially of cartilage, ossification continues in the long bones until sometime in the late teens to early 20s) in conditions which promote growth of bacteria in the remains, but despite being rare, it is not unheard of.

Edit: Stanford concludes it lived to 6-8 years of age. Its certainly a possibility, but it would be the most surprising result. I'd be less surprised if it ended up being an alien. Living for 6-8 years that small, with those types of deformities, I dunno. If it did actually live that long its a testament to the culture that provided and cared for its well being. The only possible way it could survive is if it was being cared for and protected, so maybe it did survive outside the womb for a time, was revered by a somewhat primitive culture as some sort of god like being or some sort of special being, and so they protected it and cared for it until it died naturally. I dunno. You see this in India a lot where children are born with horrible maladies and the Indians revere them as symbols of their deities.

All this is entirely within the realm of possibility, its just the likelihood of this thing surviving for 6-8 years, in a desert, without modern medicine and technology, seems very low. It would not be the first time, however, that such an event occurred.
 
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Dabamf_sl

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How do rockets keep from tipping during ascent? All that force at the very bottom of a long thin object seems like it would lean one way or another ridiculously easy, and once that happens even a bit, it snowballs...like driving a real wheel drive car around a snowy corner while accelerating.
 
iannis

iannis

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They do tip a little bit. The trick is in controlling the direction of the force, and doing it extremely strictly. That's one reason they'd scrap shuttle launches if too many pigeons were farting that day. Even as ungodly heavy as those things are, windshear can still fuck 'em up.

That's the idea of it at least. The math of it is out of my depth. But it took teams of people back in the 30's, 40's, and 50's to master it. And even still with 50 years of perfecting it every now and then one of them blows up or goes spinny.

Edit: The little cardboard rockets you made as a kid had stabilizer fins if you remember. And if you ever launched one without those fins, or it lost a fin halfway up, it turned into a whirlygig!
 
Tuco

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Seems like all the fuel necessary to allow a safe descent would prevent it from being useful.
 
T

The Ancient_sl

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Dabamf_sl said:
How do rockets keep from tipping during ascent? All that force at the very bottom of a long thin object seems like it would lean one way or another ridiculously easy, and once that happens even a bit, it snowballs...like driving a real wheel drive car around a snowy corner while accelerating.
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BRO, Do you even October Sky with Jake Gyllenhal?
 
Eomer

Eomer

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Dabamf_sl said:
How do rockets keep from tipping during ascent? All that force at the very bottom of a long thin object seems like it would lean one way or another ridiculously easy, and once that happens even a bit, it snowballs...like driving a real wheel drive car around a snowy corner while accelerating.
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I would assume that either the main engines can swivel, and/or there's secondary engines/nozzles that stabilize. Or more likely, a combination of the two.

Tuco_sl said:
Seems like all the fuel necessary to allow a safe descent would prevent it from being useful.
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It's SpaceX, so I don't imagine they're doing it just for funzies. While it might limit the payloads it's able to deliver, that might well be offset by the rocket itself being much, much cheaper to launch since they don't have to rebuild it every time and/or fish it out of the ocean.

And I would think mastering that kind of thing is going to be very important if humans are ever going to visit and return from other planets or large moons in our solar system.
 
Eomer

Eomer

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Read about SpaceX's plans and goals with reusable rockets here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_...unching_system

Basically they're trying to do what NASA tried and failed to do with the Space Shuttle.

One quote that kind of addresses what Tuco was talking about:

If the technology is used on a reusable Falcon 9 rocket, the first stage separation would occur at Mach 6 (4,027 mph; 6,480 km/h) rather than the much faster Mach 10 (6,900 mph; 11,100 km/h) for an expendable Falcon 9, in order to provide the residual fuel necessary to complete the deceleration and turnaround maneuver, as well as the controlled descent and landing
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Kind of neat, to say the least, that even the boost stages are intended to fly back to the launch pad, with other stages re-entering and flying back after delivering the payload.
 
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Remmy

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I was thinking about the possible big bang and big crunch infinite loop. I'm aware that it currently doesn't look like the big crunch will ever happen, but had a few thoughts about what would happen if it did.

Assuming two things:
1. The big bang and big crunch loop infinitely.
2. That life was spawned through physical circumstances and not a deity.

Given the power of infinity to force the odds, wouldn't we all exist again eventually since the universe would be infinitely re-rolled? And one day I would be again typing about re-rolling the universe on rerolled.org?
 
Lenas

Lenas

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It's not an impossibility, but considering there can be an infinite number of "you" in an infinite configuration of lives, very unlikely that you'd be here in the exact spot typing the exact shit ever again. You also have to consider all of the infinite possibilities in which your parents never fuck to make you; or the infinite possibilities in which they're never born, either... etc.
 
Burnem Wizfyre

Burnem Wizfyre

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We don't even know what consciousness even is or even really how to properly define it. You can have an exact copy (twin/clone) and you are entirely separate entities based completely on your own consciousness, so say the universe is in a constant loop like you proposed whose to say you will be you again. On the bright side our consciousness is some form of energy and the one thing we know about the universe is that energy is never truly lost only transformed.
 
TheBeagle

TheBeagle

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BurnemWizfyre_sl said:
On the bright side our consciousness is some form of energy and the one thing we know about the universe is that energy is never truly lost only transformed.
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I'm not accusing you of doing this, but it is a huge pet peeve of mine when people use pseudo science to try to make the argument that conscience is energy, energy is never lost, therefore our psychic energy is somehow still floating around in the ether and this is 'proof' of a soul.

No, your consciousness is just a serious of action potentials being stimulated by an electrochemical gradient across the plasma membrane in your neurons. The tiny amount of voltage (+100mV) propagated down the axon is no different, or no more special than what any other electronic device might produce. It's not magic. The only 'transformation' going on is when ATP is converted to ADP in order to actively pump those sodium and potassium ions back out of the axon once the neuron has fired to create an electrochemical gradient in preparation for the next nerve impulse.
 
iannis

iannis

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True, but that only explains what it explains. What it doesn't explain is the basic phenomena of self-awareness, which there are some possible indications (which may also be an ignorance in our observation) occurs even down to the cellular level. That self-awareness is what the pseudoscience is trying to get at, I think. That's largely inexplicable. So far at least. I guess a person could talk about emerging complexities... but that really doesn't explain shit, either. Better to just get straight to that than beat around the bush with mumbo jumbo.

It's not a subject that can be easily approached. Maybe we can clone jesus off the shroud of turin and have him explain it to us. Seriously though, once our great grandchildren start to play around with genetic sculpting of complex forms -- I bet they get a few answers we never even thought to look for.
 
TheBeagle

TheBeagle

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Wow good read. It's nice to see a CERN-level project tackle nuclear fusion instead of the usual obscure crackpots coming out with wild claims of achieving cold fusion. it kind of sucks that it won't be online for another 15 years, but that kind of time scale tells me that they are doing it right and success is likely.
 
U

UnobservantBastard_sl

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Tuco_sl said:
Seems like all the fuel necessary to allow a safe descent would prevent it from being useful.
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Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner. The extra fuel required for the delta-V needed to turn around a first stage that's heading down range away from the launch site at many thousands of mph, then have it do a powered decent like that would make it prohibitively heavy, or make it's payload throw weight too low to be useful.

Space launch rockets are extremely weight efficient machines. Typical ones in operation today have first stage fuel mass to total mass ratios over 90%, and that's for a one way expendable first stage.

A better idea is to design a rocket which can put the first stage into orbit, and descend coming around on the first full orbit. The delta-V required to reenter is much less than to turn it around from the initial ascent. Maybe that's what they are aiming for, but then you have the concerns with an unmanned autonomous rocket stage descending over land to come back to the original launch pad.
 
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