Green Baron

I had too much time this morning: global _start section .text _start: mov rax, 1 mov rdi, 1 mov rsi, message mov rdx, 13 syscall mov eax, 60 xor rdi, rdi syscall message: db "Hello, World", 10 From: http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/nasmtutorial/ Hey, if someone knows a good assembler book (64 bit pls.) please let me know ! Always eager to learn ...

Here is the announcement. I never trust Wikipedia :-) Planets may be en vogue these days, but this is introduced as an eclipsing binary system.

Same in G., public transportation as well as road or rail construction is mostly paid by the taxpayers. Btw., who pays the new LA underground ? Boring company alone ? Hard to imagine ...

Between 2 and 6. But you have a tram every 3-5min. That's throughput ;-) No conductor, you buy a ticket and enter. If caught without, you're shot, no, it's Germany, you pay ;-) I think it is the most cost effective method to transport many people in a dense area with a lot of employee traffic etc. Single cars won't manage that. You park outside (parking ticket is included in tram ticket), enter the tram, drive into the city. Much faster than by car and less stressful. Same in Tübingen on the main lines. But they can't go everywhere, so smaller buses are still needed. Self driving is not that far yet, it may work on wide open roads, but cars, pedestrians, bikes, buses etc. are mixed, roads are narrow with a lot changing lanes, traffic lights, etc.. No automatic driving (Ottopilot :-)) in sight ... It does. It has priority switch at crossing, traffic lights, etc. It is much faster in Stuttgart than going by car, search (and pay !) a parking lot .... The tram goes underground in several levels in the center. Edit: basic operations of the systems are described in the links. Back on topic, i think, the boring thing is a nice technological play and i hope it works, but it's surely not effective throughput- and cost-wise compared to light rail.

Like this. Partly subway, partly together with car traffic, partly own tracks. And runs on regular train rails as well. Or this. Not a subway.

Drivers are expensive. As are buses. You can do the math, a bus that stops everywhere-1 goes not faster than 30km/h/18mph in a city. Hell, i used to catch up with a bike. On a 50km track (buses connect the outskirts), in a medium town with 20 lines that is a large stable of buses (and drivers) :-) Newer cities (like e.g. Karlsruhe, constructed 18th century) have trams and buses to connect the hinterland (yes, that's German :-)). They could have the space for wide roads but in the late 20th century that was built back, the main roads don't enter the city any more. Sorry to talk old, but that is mostly valid for the towns and cities in countries with space. In a typical German town, even cities, most roads are single lane. The main veins for in and out can be 2 lanes but the trend has been to build that back and keep the cars outside. See for example pictures of Tübingen (typical medieval University town) with different kinds of buses. Main roads do not enter the town any more, they go along outside. But, as said, that is a newer trend to add quality of life to the cities. Sounds very expensive to me, but if you say so ... Because of distances i assume ? Bikes would be nice in these cities ? To me this sounds much more expensive with much less throughput than a bus system, a classic tube or a tram could manage. I think there is a lot of "freakyness" involved. Which i can understand :-)

All things rail are subsidized in Europe, but it is much more heterogeneous than in the US. Rails do play a vital role e.g. in Germany, France and Switzerland. French have the sexy TGV (renamed i read), speed up to 300km/h overland, Germany a dense ICE network, speeds up to 280km/h. That makes a flight between lets say München and Frankfurt more of an ego decision. And trains between the centers usually are crowded in the morning and in the evening, without a seat reservation people loiter in the corridors. In Germany the company that own the rail network is different from the carrier companies. The former state owned monopolistic rail organisation was forced to split up. But rails, as well as almost all of the roads are built by the taxpayers (biggest part) and/or through toll systems (overland motorways in France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany for trucks, sooner or later cars as well). Interesting thing: In Spain trains don't play a vital role. Probably because it was still a dictatorship until the 70's. But the economy is catching up fast. They'll leave the brits behind to pray if the Basques or Catalans don't separate ;-) ok, sorry, politics, i love the British, but couldn't resist :-))

...and companion in a binary system :-)

Sad to hear that. Give home to a new one :-)

Nice example :-) "Soil" on earth indeed has the connotation of "biology and small grained mineralogy mixed up, covering the geology". If used to describe the blanket on other bodies one has to define what is meant by "soil". I i was asked (which is not the case but nevertheless) i would suggest to leave "soil" to it's original meaning for a subcategory of regolith on earth and find something more specific for the moon's cover. It is not that thrilling and varied anyway ... :-)

Well, Regolith encompasses everything that is on top of an otherwise solid body, regardless of chemistry and composition and history. Earthly soil in whatever appearance is regolith, as is every loose sediment(*) regardless of where it lingers about, or the billion year old dust on celestial bodies. But nobody would assume that they have a connection other than that they are "loose and on top". Otoh classification of sediments on Earth is one tough field, i can tell you, i once had to do the exam twice and others were less lucky :-) So OPs question maybe wasn't meant in that way but on second thought is worth thinking over because one day we will have to describe Mars' cover as well, the "dirt" that lies on the "marsology". Apparently there were sedimentary processes on Mars billions of years ago, maybe very slow still in some places today, there are visually different surface chemisms e.g. on Ceres. I'm not speaking of structures that were possibly formed by internal processes (like Europa's surface, or Pluto) but really "stuff on top". That may sound trivial, but like on earth, if processes work/worked similar on Mars, we could by finding an appropriate classifaction, judge how those landscapes formed. So it is shrug shoulder regolith as long as viewed from far away, but when actually there it'll turn into debris flow, river bed, moraine, drift line, etc. pp. (*) "sediment" is one basic category of three for the classification of rocks on Earth, maybe not or only partly applicable on Mars.

I like the cat :-) I've been out watching visually yesterday with the neighbours and my 8" TS Newton. Nice design, the RC, TS is getting really good at this. Only the fat spider might produce hefty spikes. We should ask for a discount next time since we make so much advertisement for them :-) cs !

Yes. And especially microorganisms. A clay is a weathering product at the distal end of weathering processes. Yes, a pure clay would be inorganic. But in reality, if it is somewhere in a soil horizon, it is inhabited :-)

That "dirt" or in your language (not necessarily everywhere on Earth) "earth" is the product of a combination of biosphere activity as well as weathering in different forms, physical/mechanical, chemical, by gravity, etc. pp. These processes don't exist in that form on other planets and right now it is not quite clear if the principle of uniformity that serves more or less well on earth Earth can be applied to ET stuff as well. It may be safe to assume that this can be doubted. But "dirt" and "earth" are colloquial terms, in principle you can use them freely. Edit: soil science (pedology) is an own branch in geosciences, if you are interested ....

Too little education: life on mars

I would suggest to do it as a training and transfer results to the making of the 10". In case you meet more difficulties you could look for solutions on a sample where it doesn't hurt that much ... Just a suggestion

Well, it still stands that predictions are difficult, especially those regarding the future :-) We're in a time where a lot of space hype meets a slow technological process. I doubt that during the lifetime of most people in this forum anybody will really live outside earth.

OT, i wouldn't go that far (those were the days of the mainframes, ibm 360/370 and clones, steampunk by our measurements :-)), but, indeed, the massive power of today's 8*4GHz chips plus the massive parallel power in a decent gpu allow real time realistic rendering and simulation games in high resolution. But what do we do with it ? Browse stuff on the internet :-)

There were no relays those days. And even today the relay had to be overhead in time (besides the need of a proper rocket). They landed near the terminator line because they had to eyeball the last meters down and that is best done when there are shadows as a visual reference. And they landed towards earth to be able to assist in case of difficulties (and to have the show live of course).

Sure, why not. Apollo didn't do it because there's no radio contact.

But they have to be taken from the environment. A storage lasts only until it is empty. The skin exchanges elements, we breathe, we take food and water in and not little. It'll soon (days) be poisonous inside. You can wear a suit for a few hours only or you must dispose off the products of the metabolism, died off hairs, skin, etc. peepee You mean the cuba crisis ? Much has been written about it. Too much probably. This is not a computer game ! Large parts of the world would have been uninhabitable, at least centuries, it doesn't matter how many. You can look up half life of the elements and radiation levels. Survivors would have a hard time gathering food, they would have a very low life expectancy and lead a miserable life of disabilities, if they were still able to procreate and the offspring was fertile they would soon start to battle over the rare resources that aren't too much poisoned. This isn't fun, i would say humankind would not be able to recover from such a holocaust and build something new.

Not only but also. Depending on intensity and wavelength there are different outcomes, from just a few radicals over damaged dna (vivible next generation) to direct effects on the tissue. This may result in no immediate effect, an slightly shortened life expectancy, cancer years later or even death in the course of weeks or days. The effects are quantifiable when looking at large numbers. Though there are no reliable numbers estimations are that of the half million of the mentioned Chernobyl liquidators roughly 10% died from the exposure to the radiation (according to wik, which i don't necessarily believe in). Of course "we" are. Brain shrinks and senses get lost for example. It is not a question of belief. Aquarium fish-, cat- or dog-breeders use its principles every day creating more or less "fit" creatures, where "fitness" means "fulfills the breeders criteria". Evolution is not only visible, one can work with it. Now, that is a question of belief :-) Global disasters themselves have little direct influence on evolution, they only kill on a momentary basis. There is no time to adapt or adaptation is impossible. Photosynthetic plants can't adapt to a year long winter with cloudy skies and animals like us can't adapt to living without food and warmth for more than a few days. It is outside our material's specification :-) And irl we cannot live in a radiation suit, there is too much exchange with the environment. Global disasters have been hiatuses in the past, but not like a switch that is put from one position to another. @Steel is right, the changes are not directly visible in terms of human lifetimes. Once the initial dying is over, in the course of 10.000s to millions years species vanish, niches are closed new niches open, new species show up. But in terms of a span of an individual human lifetime this is uninteresting. I would very much like to do a game one day that tries to simulate an evolution by applying what palaeontology has found out until now :-)

I partly agree and i will not get into a political discussion :-) Radiation sterilises and kicks the human males out of the reproduction game. If you had several unshielded x-rays at young age you have a good chance of not having a chance. So, yes, it could be a fitness criteria if selection pressure went in that direction (sorting out the more receptive ones). Let's go on with this borderless guessing: very early such a pressure existed apparently, that is why some basic organisms actually developed such an ability, but it wasn't traded over to more complex organisms. I am referring to the rather young fashion of setting the first life forms on earth near submarine extreme environments (but nobody exclude other possibilities). The reason might be that such an ability might not be in favour of building a complex organism because it has other, more grave disadvantages. And / or that it is, as you say, not a fitness criteria. I cannot exclude that and it even seems probable to me.

You can't isolate a single feature out of a complex organism and say "now the organism is adapted to a new condition". Some archaea developed these repair mechanisms because they helped survive near hot geysers were life is harsh and chemistry runs fast. A more complex organism like a vertebrate always has to trade between a lot of features that make it function and "fit" for given conditions as a whole. Changing a single feature (adding a "repair mechanism") might as well lead to a being that is "unfit" in other areas, like can't grow to a larger age, looses vital body functions, can't have a brain, looses ability to procreate, whatever. I exaggerate: you can't take a tardigrade's temperature resistance, a human's brain and a bacteria's radiation tolerance and make a chimaera out if it. If such a thing was possible it would probably exist, or at least nature's tries in that direction would be somehow visible in the geological records. All these organisms work in their respective configuration for a given organism and a limited time only. So, one could rather suppose that humans would not exist. OT: This is, btw., a thing palaeontologists are more aware of than geneticists. A single event does not lead to a resistant fully functional organism. Maybe one far day one can make a radiation resistant individual that even survives some time, but intermixture with the natural gene pool (i.e. humans) will sort the "faulty trait" out at once. That's why artificially bread organisms must not mix with the natural populations. The only solution would be to get rid of the "natural" ones, but that touches politics.

Physics is physics. If e.g. fast neutrons wouldn't damage atoms and molecules then matter/energy as we know it wouldn't exist. Also transmission of energy by radiation is real. We can't switch it off for x-rays and keep it intact for complex biological organisms. Edit: so one could as well say, nuclear weapons / energy wouldn't exist, even an open fire might be problem because of lack of energy transport through radiation. Sorry :-)