On the Nature of Things | Forum

. . I posted elsewhere about the research into quadrotor 'micro drones'. We may be on the verge of a miniaturization revolution in weapons, similar to he transition from 'big iron' computers to personal computers. Imagine present day drones as support platforms, some acting as an AWACS type system ...

I posted elsewhere about the research into quadrotor 'micro drones'. We may be on the verge of a miniaturization revolution in weapons, similar to he transition from 'big iron' computers to personal computers. Imagine present day drones as support platforms, some acting as an AWACS type system and o...

Drones are as inevitable as the sunrise, either develop and employ them or be killed by those who do. Of course, the Muslim world is free to develop: drones, computer viruses, democracy, rule of law, video games, biotech... But they don't. This is obviously because they are too moral to do so, or ma...

Oh he's mostly in his element here but I find it more than a little disingenuous that he talks about falsification for ID: "If the Intelligent Design argument cannot be proved, as the Darwinians claim, neither can it be refuted. Science as such has no stake in the argument: Something that neith...

Ya' know, it's been several years since I first heard that several years from now the US was going to take over oil production because of shale 'insert compound of the week'... That was before fracking the Marcellus and the Barnett reduced worldwide gas prices by 2/3 at the same time as big new pip...

Ya' know, it's been several years since I first heard that several years from now the US was going to take over oil production because of shale 'insert compound of the week'...

Nonc Hilaire wrote:I read we need old style reactors so we can manufacture bomb material. Seems thorium reactors do not do that.

Only thing they don't do better!

IEEE Spectrum | Nuclear Fuel From the Sea 14 September 2012—Next time you go to the beach, think about this: You’re swimming in nuclear fuel. Our oceans contain an estimated 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium, diluted down to a minuscule 3.3 parts per billion. The idea of extracting uranium from se...

As the women says in HB's post above, and as this guy says below, what umma? lMNu6Rs2orI And this is where Islam seems to fail over and over, not in how they treat non-muslims but in how they treat each other. IOW, all these discussions about how Islam persecutes others raise good, and entirely true...

The committee won't give it to someone who is dead but they will give it to something that isn't alive!
Hmmmm.

Arguments as to who held the high ground in history remind me of some unemployed loser who brags about their aristocratic ancestry. What counts is now and now there is not one Islamic society on earth that has civilizational bragging rights. Ever been to Turkey or Malaysia? Neither one is a Greece,...

If you want to see the closest thing to simulating human brain that we have now it's a Google server farm. This includes the redundancy; when one of Google's servers breaks they don't replace it or repair it.

Arguments as to who held the high ground in history remind me of some unemployed loser who brags about their aristocratic ancestry.
What counts is now and now there is not one Islamic society on earth that has civilizational bragging rights.

I took art history from a professor who's specialty was art psychology. He once mentioned during a lecture that subtractive methods, such as chiseling rock, are inherently stressful psychologically; when you make a mistake there's no way to correct it, except removing yet more and kind of falling d...

I took art history from a professor who's specialty was art psychology. He once mentioned during a lecture that subtractive methods, such as chiseling rock, are inherently stressful psychologically; when you make a mistake there's no way to correct it, except removing yet more and kind of falling do...

Harper is just telling the Chinese what they want to hear. He knows that the treaty is essentially unenforceable because the provinces will reject anything that they don't like anyway. Undoubtedly his rich backers, and he himself, are getting some baksheesh out of it in the long run as well.

Focusing on a narrative of Obama as a disaster is the Republicans attempt to draw attention away from the fact that their candidate is a member of a nutbar cult.

As of today Obama has 271 electoral votes wrapped up, there are a total of 538 electors. Romney has 206 wrapped up.

http://goo.gl/d1qSj

This means that Romney has no realistic chance at all of winning.

You're welcome.

Quebec will never separate, because it is impossible for them to do so. For example, most of their land is owned by aboriginals and so isn't even under provincial jurisdiction. There are plenty of other excellent reasons to think that separatism is no more than a fashionable political designer label...

Interesting point about bigger and bigger numbers, I take a certain sick pride in being the first person on the planet to use tera ton to describe the mass of a certain substance being released from the Chutchki sea, all that came before have used giga ton, including Semiletov and Shakov. HNy9uxcRe...

IP only protects you when it's cost effective for it to do so. The entertainment companies have mostly given up trying, because they lost money on it. Nothing saying that can't apply to 3DP's output too. I've been told that advances in printer capacity have been in line with Moore's law. Extrapolate...

This Mr. Hempher crap has been debunked a tiresome number of times.

Let's say for the sake of argument that the critical number is 150% debt to gdp, then what exactly is the chain of events, including recession, that would result in "America is finished"? Without presenting a detailed scenario, I think such claims have little value as I've been reading th...

I think trade without any foreign security presence would be even more difficult for the US than pure isolationism. That said, I don't think either option is practically possible, though certain desirable in many ways. Let the market handle it. If a country is too fucked up to trade with them the i...

So as far as the Milo doctrine goes we will just be watching on tv the thousands of women and children being chopped to pieces by the various crackdown dickators, ethno-religious fanatics rising up or down at each others throat, a regional war perhaps with juicy big rockets .... being oh so happy w...