phon · HackerTrans

قبل 11 سنةdiscuss

I believe that they could have quickly confirmed the ship's identity by measuring the chrysanthemum seal that is mounted on its prow and checking to see if it's dimensions match those of the one found on her sister ship Yamato. (More information: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/supership/producer.html)

phon

قبل 12 سنةdiscuss

A few hours before their second date, my father dropped the tray containing his final project in statistical programming down a stairwell. My mother stayed up all night helping him sort and resort all of the punch cards and get everything back into order. They have been married for 38 years.

phon

قبل 13 سنةdiscuss

This practice was not unique to the City of Chicago.

The city of Naples was rebuilt at great expense after the a terrible cholera epidemic in 1884 carried off a large number of victims. In response the government funded major effort to raise the city's streets as proscribed by the then current Miasmatic Theory of Disease. The thinking was along of the lines of low lying 'bad air' caused illnesses and thus the raising of the city's infrastructure would improve the general health.

Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory_of_disease

phon

قبل 13 سنةdiscuss

I believe Iron Dome is designed to deal with what would be traditionally termed short range weapons like mortars and light-rockets. These weapons are light weight, can be fabricated in comparatively primitive conditions and can be deployed by irregular forces.

The conventional weapons that North Korea could use against Seoul are from the other end of the spectrum. Nearly all of them are patterned after Soviet versions which were designed to fit in a doctrine that favored the deployment and use of large numbers of heavy tube and rocket artillery. North Korea possesses large numbers of 153mm and 170mm guns and 240mm multiple unguided rocket launchers. Many of these are in fortified positions that are within range of Seoul.

Source: http://www.iiss.org/publications/strategic-dossiers/north-ko...

phon

قبل 13 سنةdiscuss

This gets even more attractive when you factor in the possibility of taking an overnight train and booking a sleeper berth.

When I worked in Beijing, trips to Shanghai were greatly improved by booking sleeper berths and catching a night express trains out and back. The entire experience was generally extremely low stress and utterly reliable.

phon

قبل 14 سنةdiscuss

If someone cites some of your programming work 50 years after you finished working on it then you must have done something right.

From what I have heard from my father and others, editing punch cards was hell itself. The fact that TECO managed to bridge the punch card and hard disk storage eras could be viewed as some sort of miracle.

On another note, it it seems that Dan Murphy, who created TECO at DEC in 1962 - 1963, is still going strong. In 2009 The IEEE Annals of Computing History published this article authored by him (warning: pdf): http://tenex.opost.com/anhc-31-4-anec.pdf and earlier this year he updated his personal website: http://www.opost.com/dlm/

phon

قبل 14 سنةdiscuss

I live and work in Manhattan. The blasting on the second avenue subway project is so regular that I recently caught myself unconsciously timing my work day by the shaking of the building.

phon

قبل 14 سنةdiscuss

In running similar events in the past, I have found adding a single checkbox to the sign up form labeled 'Please include my name and contact information in the official attendee list' is both simple and effective.

phon

قبل 14 سنةdiscuss

Perhaps this feature or one like it could be incorporated in to a future colony by sealing up the hole and artificially stabilizing the interior structure? I know similar ideas have been floated in the past for the conversion of lunar lava tubes into habitable space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_lava_tube

phon

قبل 14 سنةdiscuss

Sure thing.

Frist, the NPT is part of a larger system of treaties, alliances and agreements that grew during the Cold War and its aftermath. 'Cornerstones of Security: Arms Control Treaties in the Nuclear Era' (2003) by Thomas Graham and Damien J. Lavera is somewhat dry but exhaustive.

Secondly, here is an interesting over view of US Government thinking on weapons of mass destruction at the end of the cold war:

http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk1/1993/9341/9341.PDF

Finally, Nigel Ashton's 'The Cold War in the Middle East: Regional Conflict and the Superpowers 1967-73' covers the actions of many international actors in the middle east during the critical years during which the Non-Proliferation Treaty was put into effect.

With luck both of these books should be available via inter-library loan.

phon

قبل 14 سنةdiscuss

It should be noted that nuclear weapons weapons were used twice during a war that is almost universally thought of as 'conventional'. Furthermore, they were used against a state that arguably had ceased to act as a rational entity quite some time before August 6, 1945.

Later the increasing quantity and quality of nuclear weapons combined with the de-fusion of the underlaying technologies to a growing number of international actors in the 1950's and 1960's lead to the Soviets and Americans backing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty regiem. This was done to avoid an August 1914 Nuclear-Redux in which the super powers would be pulled into a full scale nuclear exchange. Thus the situation in the middle east today can be traced back to actions taken almost 50 years ago.

phon

قبل 14 سنةdiscuss

wget http://www.usconstitution.net/const.txt; grep "democracy" const.txt | wc -l

The United States is a Federal Republic that has become progressively more democratic over time. As originally set out in the United States Constitution (ratified in 1788), the only part of the federal government that was to be directly elected was the House of Representatives. The direct election of Senators did not become the law of the land until the 20th century while the Supreme Court and, technically, the Presidency are still not directly elected. These controls were put in place to buffer the entire system from popular fads and hysterias.

phon

قبل 14 سنةdiscuss

For anyone unfamiliar with the Thorium fission cycle, the first five minutes of this Creative Commons film give a good overview with a more detailed exploration of the topic later in the film:

http://thoriumremix.com/2011/

phon

قبل 14 سنةdiscuss

Although I find this development far from unexpected, one cannot feel a pang of sadness to see an institution as celebrated the Encyclopedia Britannica going ever so gently into the good night.

Even today, I remember using the venerable (1911) eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as a starting point for numerous research papers on topics as diverse as the r the history of classical mathematics to the repeal of the English Corn Laws. While the information was often far from definitive, it always provided an excellent starting point for subsequent research. An added pleasure of a well used set of those volumes was the traces of previous seekers of knowledge. A forgotten piece of pater here and a faint underlining there could be a great reassurance when you though your were off in the weeds alone.

While the physical print runs fo the Britannica have come to an end, happily several of the classic editions are now in the public domain and are thus accessible to a vastly greater portion of humanity than was every envisioned by the founders of this noble project.

comments