mpyne

422 ms·

4321.
by mpyne 15y ago
It wouldn't leave a vacuum, as the air on the outside of the fan would rush in to replace it. I think the point is that (if this works), the boundary layer itself will also be moving instead of sitting there stagnant.
4322.
by mpyne 16y ago
> They knew about the meltdowns and the leakages all along, but choose to deny it until months later. I don't know about leakage, but they've been very clear that the fuel had melted down for a very long time now, at least since after t
4323.
by mpyne 16y ago
> And yet many on meta.math also felt they were distinctly unconstructive, to the point of overt rudeness -- including the most highly upvoted answer to that question. You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to. I cannot disagree in the slighte
4324.
by mpyne 16y ago
Usenet is not the only community that uses '>' for quotes. I wasn't aware that Reddit or open-source mailing lists were so unusual, but I can certainly claim no lineage with Usenet. I will, however, take that assumption as a compliment
4325.
by mpyne 16y ago
> The Stack Exchange community places a rather high value on "being nice." It's an important part of our values and we think it makes the Internet a better place. OK. That's a fair viewpoint, also espoused by many open source communitie
4326.
by mpyne 16y ago
> Never refer to a Dr. as Mr./Mrs./Ms. It just isn't done. In fairness to Prof. Clark, it's not like he was pointing out that faux pas to someone who didn't know of his position. Jeff Atwood by this point would be well aware of Prof.
4327.
by mpyne 16y ago
The headline is misleading IMO: Simply tallying up numbers of problems noted by a regulatory agency is useless from the perspective of judging safety. Remember when Microsoft tried to make Firefox look like a buggy piece of shit by simply n
4328.
by mpyne 16y ago
> > There is only one worst-case scenario, so although I very much agree that the information coming out of Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the Japanese national government is inconsistent, that doesn't mean new "worst-case" scenarios
4329.
by mpyne 16y ago
Man, wtf happened at Unit 2? I keep repeating the NHK broadcast and I'm not sure whether the suppression pool itself suffered damage and not the reactor vessel, or both, or what. They mentioned radiation going up right after the explosion,
4330.
by mpyne 16y ago
Now these are better questions. :) As far as hydrogen goes, the building itself was not designed to be the containment (instead there's a hefty steel containment around the reactor and primary piping from what I understand), so I don't thin
4331.
by mpyne 16y ago
> During most of the TMI accident the core was being actively cooled. Steam is not a coolant, which is why I went into so much detail on my first point. In fact steam has such atrocious heat conduction properties compared to water tha
4332.
by mpyne 16y ago
> Repeatedly we've seen commentators and outside observers saying "this can be no Chernobyl because...". Yes, because this can't be a Chernobyl. I do understand that you don't exactly have time to train yourself on the ins and outs of n
4333.
by mpyne 16y ago
> i.e. 100 miles away they measured 0.2 mSv/h which, if we assume a r-squared dependency. You can't assume an r-squared dependency, as the radiation they were measuring came from the radioactive steam that had drifted out to sea (i.e. t
4334.
by mpyne 16y ago
Well the batteries are exactly the "electric backup" that was mentioned, although you're also right in that it was never designed to solve the entire casualty, only to last long enough to get other sources of power online.
4335.
by mpyne 16y ago
> Conflicting information keeps coming out about possible worst case scenarios (and their relative likelihoods) with the nuclear reactors. There is only one worst-case scenario, so although I very much agree that the information coming
4336.
by mpyne 16y ago
> He claims that TMI showed that there is no risk of nuclear fuel melting through the steel containment structure. But at TMI, the core was actively cooled through the entire incident, and the temperatures were not even high enough to m
4337.
by mpyne 16y ago
Nuclear energy is actually the safest form of energy generation we have (in terms of "deaths per gigawatt-hour"), although wind and hydro energy is approximately the same. This is as presented by the ExternE project financed by the "EU Comm
4338.
by mpyne 16y ago
Tritium betas are about 0.005 MeV, not 1.000, and can penetrate only 6mm of air. The only real threat from tritium is ingestion where you don't have air or dead skin layer to block them, but even then they would have to be present in vast,
4339.
by mpyne 16y ago
True, although in fairness it's a fairly weak beta emitter. The 100,000 picocuries of Potassium-40 your body has emits betas that are about 120 times more energetic, or sometimes emits gamma rays instead. Probably better to not get exposed
4340.
by mpyne 16y ago
As a KDE developer myself, I have to admit to being very disappointed by the very first section regarding the development of the StatusNotifier specification. Dave complains that there was no problem statement, points out a quote relating t
4341.
by mpyne 16y ago
> However, spinning it off (as some are suggesting in the comment thread) has major difficulties. In particular, since buying Trolltech, Nokia has LGPLed Qt. That seems to me to drastically change the situation for prospective commercia
4342.
by mpyne 16y ago
> If I'm not mistaken they're not general purpose computers. If they were what would be the point? Why not use a math coprocessor? They are not general-purpose, but that doesn't mean they're not easily re-programmable either. Consider t
4343.
by mpyne 16y ago
> but gecko was also around before KHTML. Actually, KHTML pre-dates even Gecko, given that it descended from the "KDE HTML Widget" KHTMLW. Even in 1997 this library was being developed (example email: http://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&