There are better options if you want to go nuclear for propulsion. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/718391main_Werka_2011_PhI_FFRE.pdf
It’s not an unreasonable amount of mass to get into LEO, and so very elegant as a drive.
Izeinwinter
Karma: 1,206
Eh.. There is indeed work being done on this. Google seawater greenhouse—Which is basically a way to engineer a cooler, wetter micro-climate and turn a net profit.
In this case they would have to change already existing law in a way that is blatantly against the interests of the majority and manage to do so it globally—because if any country defects from a policy of limiting top mods to the upper class, every country has to, or get buried 20 years later. This is not a winnable political struggle.
It can’t actually—Medical patents are already borderline in terms of “political viability”. A system of patents that gave the rich this kind of advantage would result in the end of patents. Heck, it is already law in many places that you cannot hold IP in human genes.
People are in general very, very bad at spotting signs of interest. This is not unique to you. - The non-verbal communication channel for “I’d like to get to know you in a romantic fashion” just does not work very well at all.
Trying to become adept at reading it is, of course, possible but unless you have sky high social intelligence to begin with, I do not recommend it.
What you need to do instead is figure out how to express unambiguous, unmistakable interest in a way that does not scare the shit out of potential romantic partners. If someone doesn’t do this, the both of you are potentially running around as the unwitting participants in a real-life romantic comedy where everyone is interested, but also assume that the other party is not.
So, someone has to use their words. Be clear, be honest, be flattering (but still honest), don’t make it an ultimatum, and leave their lines of retreat open, both literally and socially. Feeling cornered isn’t a turnon for anyone.
Rejection is not the end of the world. You are asking a question, that is all, and unless you do so in quite uniquely repulsive a manner, all that will result is that you get an honest answer, which can only leave you better off.
First option doesn’t exist. The third world is well and truely aware that science is a thing. As for the second.. Writing someone who is old, but not impaired by decay is very, very difficult, due to lack of examples, but I think this might be less of a leap than it seems. Necessity will force mobility upon our protag, and contact with various cultures will immunize against believing received wisdom without proof. Going from there to “reality is the final arbiter” isn’t much of a leap.
.. Now I am trying to think what applicable skills someone really old might have to bring to the project of science, assuming she didn’t win the cosmic lottery trice over and is both a genius and highly creative on top of unageing..
“Social-Fu, ninth dan”? Hypercompetency at organizing a group of people into working smoothly together is something which she could with very high plausibility have picked up simply from endless practice. Setting up a carpentry shop in Milan one decade, a china production in venice the next and so on conferring skills that do tranfer quite well to running a lab within budget and with abnormally low social frictions.
The thing is, how would you distinguish a world in which the female population of said high-school are missing five centimeters and 4 points of IQ due to dieting from the one we inhabit? Where do we get a baseline from? Arrgh.
Evo psyc is always bullshit, so what else could be causing this?
Two minutes of thinking later… and now I am suddenly getting extremely worried about teen and earlier eating habits among women.
Caloric deficits negatively impact height and a slew of other outcomes. To a first approximation, noone in the first world is short of calories growing up due to inability to get enough food.
But there is immense social pressure on women to be thin. Anorexia skews female to a very extreme degree.
It’s entirely, and frighteningly, plausible that women are diverging in height because they are not eating enough during their teen years. Even short of outright disorder, just not eating their fill when it is available would not only cost them a fair few centimeters of height, but also, and far worse, points of IQ, focus during critical educational years.. Ugh.
This is a very bloody worrying possibility, which needs investigating, and stopping.
Honestly, I think almost all media treatments of this entire topic will be extremely problematic in hindsight once an actual cure for senescence is found.
In this particular case, I’d expect her to become… very interested in biochemistry. That would be a much better plot, wouldn’t it? One woman’s fight to cure ageing because she knows for a fact it can be done, but at the same time trying to not end up strapped to a lab table. Heck, for the first period, the fact that women were massively overlooked in science would be outright helpful. - Getting hired at a place which does whatever she was currently investigating would be fairly simple, and then just have some random dude steal credit for whatever results she manages. Paper trail? What paper trail?
.. Clothes made by people with any sense of pride in craft? I sew for a hobby, and for the purpose of making gifts. - for example I just finished a nice summer jacket for my brothers birthday, english wool, silk lining. Cost to me: <70 euro. (and time, but eh.) I learned to what to do largely by reading on the internet and taking old clothes apart to see how they were built.
The clothes sold to women is depressing as all hell in that regard. Materials, build, functionality—Lowest bidder doesn’t begin to describe it. “I don’t think you even tried at all” about covers it.
I think this happens because womens clothing stores sell a ridiculously tiny fraction of the stock they purchase. The price tag on a shirt or skirt has to pay not only for that piece of clothes, but also for the 5 to nine other items on that rack nobody buys before they go hopelessly out of style. In order for that to work out to a net profit, the items on selection need to be nearly worthless. And they are.
Men’s Jeans are the perfect opposite clothing item—a store can buy those home in bulk, and be assured that every single item in that consignment will eventually be sold because they are a commodity, so the gap between price and worth is much smaller.
So, in order to make better womens clothes, you need to design something which is as guaranteed a sale as a pair of mens jeans. And to not hate women. Eh.. This really does look like something I could do…
Sure it is, if you are in the vicinity of a donation site on a regular basis anyway. Pop in, donate, read while doing so, pop out again. Warm fuzzies during pleasure reading time.
Warning, my opinion on this may be influenced rather heavily by the fact that I essentially don’t notice the donation, nor do I mind needles.
Bad prior. Gang violence is a major murder statistic, but it’s pretty far from being “most”. Quick googling says: “1 in 6 murders”. The most common motive, at 50% is “Argument”. So.. men are more likely to escalate those to homocide?
.. The thing that puzzles me here is why Knox was ever prosecuted at all. The prosecution had Guede. Who left his fingerprints all over the scene, fled the country, had a history of burglary and knives and changed his story repeatedly. That’s a pretty simple and very solid case. Why the heck the prosecution insisted on trying to pin the crime on two more people who could have no plausible reason at all for conspiring with him is just inexplicable to me. I mean, traces of dna from people who lived in the apartment? Wtf? All that proves is that they indeed, lived there.
It does address it. What we call heroic action is high combat ability and resources deployed for good. Hermione’s point is that privileging that particular class of good works is an error—The proper measure of virtue is if you do the things which fall within your reach. Thinking in terms of heroes is a distraction,
Note that wizarding britain still largely fails hard on this count.
The description of the founding of the wizengamot. War is probably not a very descriptive term for what was going on before it—The political structure implies that it is what came after a period of feuding families. In this case, feuding families with magical might backing up the kind of stupidity bloodfeuds cause.
Actually, the one wow I really do not get all wizards are not under is very simple. Merlin laid down his interdict due to a crisis of magic being used in wars in utterly unrestrained ways. Blocking people from learning certain kinds of magic is a daft way of stopping that. What you do is you take every single wizarding child of 8, and make them swear to never use any magic that would harm more than one person. Still free to fight, still free to defend themselves, just noone capable of area effect magics of destruction anymore.
Mostly, resurrecting dead children. The population used to be lower, but kids also used to have piss-poor odds of making it to adult-hood. In terms of QALY, this would have been the best use, and if a child goes missing from a sickbed only to wander into the kitchen feeling chipper and fine, noone would even think twice.
It occurs to me that this limit means Flame could, in theory, have been using the stone flat out for five hundred years without anyone catching on. 56 million people died this year. If the stone was used to save as many of them as possible, at random, then with only moderate use of magic for coverup purposes compared to shit we already know the magical world is pulling of, that is just going to be utterly undetectable. “Here have a second chance at life. Also a magical compulsion to keep your mouth shut”.
Eh.. Voldemort is a legimens. But he isn’t an unusually good one at all. He actively dislikes actually reading peoples minds. He simply had a very impressive talent for entirely non-magical cold reading and inference. The wizarding public heard tales of that, and in the same way they failed to consider “hidden broomstick enchantments!” credited him with scary superpowers he didn’t actually have.
This is an inference from the text, but a high probability one. - However, it is also stated outright in the text that Harry’s mental defenses are nothing special. He’s an occlumens, but according to his teacher in that art, who bloody well should know, not a perfect one.
This is wrong—The body isn’t a closed system, but an ongoing exporter of entrophy. There is no fundamental reason why “better repair mechanisms” wouldn’t result in an permanent health. I don’t like calling this immortality, because.. well, mishap and violence will still get you eventually, but the whole decay and slow dying thing isn’t written into the laws of physics or even biology. It’s just that Azathoth never had a reason to fix it.