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Let's try to keep things in perspective – last year the Royals started 6-2 and I was equally excited. (They then lost 11 of their next 14 games.) Still, there's a lot to like here.
- You know all that concern about the quality of the team's defense? The Royals seem to have hit upon a really effective solution to that problem – simply keep the defense from being involved. Through eight games, the pitching staff has struck out 76 batters – which leads the majors, comfortably – in just 71 innings. That is, in a word, sick. Just two years ago the Royals were next-to-last in the league in strikeouts; the year before that they were dead last. Last season the Royals ranked 7th in the league, which was their highest ranking since Cone and Appier led the Royals to 6th in strikeouts in 1994. From 1999 to 2006, the Royals ranked in the bottom three in the league in whiffs every single year.
They're not going to continue to strike out more than a batter an inning, but this is a genuine power staff. The bullpen, in particular, is ridiculous – in 23 innings, they've whiffed 28 and surrendered just 14 hits. I've said this before, but in terms of "power stuff", however that's defined, Joakim Soria is only the fourth-most overpowering guy in the pen. If the Royals only have to rely on their defense for 65-70% of their outs instead of their usual 75-80%, suddenly the idea of Mark Teahen at second base or Mike Jacobs anywhere on the field is a lot more palatable.
- Ever since Gerald V. Hern coined a little ditty in the Boston Post about Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain, sportswriters have felt the need to come up with cheesy slogans for any team that heavily relies on two starting pitchers. Hence, the 2001 Diamondbacks were "Johnson and Schilling and then, God Willing."
For the Royals, we've got to come up with a rhyme that incorporates three pitchers. "Meche, Greinke, and Davies, then Hide the Women and Babies?" "Meche, Davies, and Greinke, then For Two Days We'll Be Cranky"? Clearly, this is a work in progress. Just as clearly, we're going to need a slogan before long. The Royals are 5-1 when the Big Three start, and collectively they're 3-0 with a 1.91 ERA, 41 strikeouts in 37.2 innings, and no homers allowed. The Little Two are 0-2 with a 6.61 ERA.
- The Little Two might just be the Microscopic One. Sidney Ponson gave another yeoman's effort this afternoon. The Royals may be in the market for another starter this summer – if the Royals are in the race, a trade of Kila Ka'aihue for a good starter in the last year or two of his contract is a distinct possibility – but in the short term, if Hochevar or Bannister (three hits in seven scoreless for Omaha yesterday) replaces Horacio Ramirez, I have no qualms with seeing Ponson in the #5 role in the near term.
Remember, the sensation that was Lima Time! in Kansas City stemmed from the fact that Jose Lima, a refugee from the Atlantic League, was effectively the team's #2 starter down the stretch in 2003. Ponson isn't likely to do much worse than Lima's 4.91 ERA that year – yet Ponson is at best the team's #4 starter. In case you were looking for a reason to take this team more seriously than the 2003 squad, there you go.
- You know what's even more amazing than the strikeout ratio? The pitching staff has surrendered two homers in nine games – that's as many all year as John Buck hit in one game. That's two homers in 80 innings. Yeah, that won't last. But it's still impressive.
- Davies' performance to date has been the most important development to date, but the goings-on behind the plate aren't far behind. It got quickly lost in the shuffle with all the money thrown at HoRam and The Professor and The Spork, but the decision to bring Miguel Olivo back was mystifying at the time, and only more so today. Olivo and John Buck have remarkably similar profiles; Olivo has the much better arm, but Buck does everything else behind the plate just as well if not better. As hitters they have identical records, but Buck is younger, he has a clue about the strike zone, and he had those two months in 2007 that make you think, hmmm...throw in Brayan Pena, whose talents are such that the Royals have made room for him as their third catcher, and you have to wonder why the Royals didn't just keep Pena as their backup to Buck, let Olivo walk, and pocket the difference.
Instead, they not only kept Olivo, they anointed him the starter – or at least, the dominant half of a job-sharing arrangement. Given the context, then, what's happened during the first nine games has a lot of significance. As I write this, Olivo is 3-for-21 with 13 strikeouts – and he looks so lost at the plate that I'm beginning to wonder if the LASIK doctors operated on the wrong patient this winter. Buck, given precious few opportunities to start, has taken every advantage, homering and doubling in his second start, and homering twice in his third. He's back in the lineup as the DH against a lefty today, but he's poised to take over the lion's share of the duties behind the plate if Olivo doesn't learn to wait until the pitcher has actually released the ball before deciding whether he should swing at the pitch. I wrote barely two weeks ago that "If the Royals do go to the playoffs, I'm guessing Buck, not Olivo, will be the starter behind the plate." No reason to delay the inevitable.
- I was all for getting Brayan Pena more playing time in my last post, but starting him at DH wasn't what I meant. But hey, it worked out. Pena's double off of Phil Coke on Sunday, with a man on first and the Royals down a run in the eighth, is probably the biggest hit of the season to date. According to baseball-reference.com, prior to Pena's at-bat the Royals had a 24% chance of winning the game – and the odds were certainly less when you consider the Royals were one out away from facing the greatest reliever of all time in the ninth. After his hit, the odds improved to 58%. Instead of being swept at home in the first series at the Kougar (hat tip: Sam), the Royals got back to .500.
What's easy to forget about the three-run rally that inning was how it started: with two outs and no one on, Billy Butler pinch-hit for Mike Jacobs against Jose Veras…and walked. Credit Trey Hillman for the move – Jacobs was due to face Damaso Marte, who has been annihilating left-handed hitters for most of the decade.
But if
- A double, a popout, a tie-breaking single, a balk, and a walk. Ladies and Gentlemen, Kyle Farnsworth! I can't pin this one on Hillman; it's a tie game in the seventh inning, Juan Cruz threw two shutout innings last night, and someone has to pitch. No, Dayton Moore can try to dodge the overripe vegetables this time around. That sound you hear is Farnsworth sliding down the reliever totem pole; the next time the Royals need a middle reliever in a tie game in the middle innings, I suspect Robinson Tejeda will be that someone.
- Since Opening Day, Hillman has done a very solid job with the bullpen. Some may question having Ron Mahay start the ninth with a 4-0 lead on Monday, then switching to Soria after the first two batters reached base and lefties coming up. I'm fine with this move, though. Soria is more effective against lefties than righties, and Mahay doesn't have a huge platoon split, so this is a situation where platoon considerations take a backseat to the game situation – and with the tying run on deck against an intradivision rival, a rival who was considered the favorite to win the division when the season started but who are three outs away from being 1-5…I say you go for the jugular. And what better weapon is there to cut the jugular than The Guillotine?
Cruz has now pitched two full innings twice this season, which is more times than he pitched two innings all of last year. To repeat: the cookie-cutter, by-the-numbers approach to the bullpen is the worst thing about baseball strategy today. If a reliever has the hot hand, why not ride him? Hillman did, and he got a second shutout inning each time.
- If Bloomquist and Tony Pena are ever in the same lineup again, there better be a good reason. Like, say, a breakout of impetigo in the clubhouse. Granted, with Ponson on the mound the infield defense is a greater consideration than usual – and with the Royals losing, Hillman pinch-hit for both of them to give us the much more imposing Mike Aviles-Alberto Callaspo combination late in the game.
- Mike Jacobs has done the impossible: he's made Royals fans excited to see Billy Butler playing first base. And Butler has done the impossible: he's giving us reason to think he might actually progress to adequate out there. I've been advocating all winter that Butler should be allowed to start at first base – he hasn't played the position long enough to prove he can't play it, while Jacobs has. He's made enough good plays this month to prolong this experiment a little longer – like, say, all season. If the Royals approach the aesthetic ideal of using Jacobs purely as a DH, and solely against RHP, the Jacobs acquisition almost starts to make sense.
- Teahen has the reputation (at least with Royals fans) of being an excellent baserunner, and deservedly so, but…man. Getting thrown out trying to extend a single when you're down two runs in the eighth is just dumb. Doing so immediately before Jacobs hits another homer is just heart-breaking.
It's a tough loss. But the Royals were never going to go undefeated in one-run games this year. They're still in first place. They put together rallies in three straight innings and just fell a run short. If I may tempt fate and quote Herm Edwards, the Royals can build on this. I just hope they also learn not to let Farnsworth destroy it.


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Pandemic Fuels Interest in Careers in Infectious Disease
MONDAY, Dec. 21, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- As scientists have labored to understand COVID-19 and develop a vaccine to combat it, interest in infectious disease careers seems to be growing.
Academic leaders from the United States and Israel have noted the increased interest among medical students.
"We just went through an applications season for fellows, and we had more applicants than in recent years," said Richard D'Aquila, director of the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute at Northwestern University, in Chicago.
D'Aquila spoke at a recent webinar — "In the Aftermath of COVID-19: The Impact on Science and Research" — sponsored by the Israel Innovation Project.
Itai Benhar, director of the Center for Combating Pandemics at Tel Aviv University, said, "We had registration for undergraduate studies in life and biomedical sciences almost double from last year to this year."
Benhar said students in Israel haven't been able to take their usual gap year due to travel restrictions and the disappearance of temporary jobs during the economic crisis. Many entered the university directly instead, which could be driving those high numbers.
He added that he expects a long-term increase in science, medicine and pandemic-related research in Israel, as well as increased interest in certain scientific fields.
"Virology had been considered a profession of the past. This has changed," Benhar said. "The same is true with immunology. Epidemiology also came to the forefront of the medical professions, because statistics based on large sample sizes are now becoming more and more important."
One positive that has come from these changes is a boost in international collaboration, D'Aquila said.
"A lot of long-distance collaborations are actually working much better," he said in a university news release. "I think we're going to stick with some hybrid scientific workplace, partly remote and partly in-person."
But, D'Aquila added, there is a tendency to be nationalistic about the vaccines that could become a problem.
"We're all in this together," he said. "To me, knowledge is global and we have to take advantage of every brilliant person in the world."
Though laboratory work was reduced early on due to pandemic lockdowns, experiments are almost back to normal levels now, D'Aquila and Benhar said.
Neither saw regular research areas face funding cuts. Support for COVID-related research has come from additional sources, according to Benhar. D'Aquila added that many HIV researchers pivoted to COVID-19 work and have made major contributions.
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about COVID-19 research.
SOURCE: Northwestern University, news release, Dec. 14, 2020
The news stories provided in Health News and our Health-E News Newsletter are a service of the nationally syndicated HealthDay® news and information company. Stories refer to national trends and breaking health news, and are not necessarily indicative of or always supported by our facility and providers. This information is provided for informational and educational purposes only, and is not intended to be a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

subset: commoncrawl


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Flame War On! A Response to Cameron English
My Christian friend and fellow writer Cameron English is living proof that believers and nonbelievers can disagree with one another on fundamental worldviews and still argue our beliefs without being shrill douchebags about it. So I was very happy when he offered to read and review my book Nailed, and was interested in starting an online dialogue about his take on the book - which he has, here. I can't guarantee how long or how often we'll be able to maintain this conversation, but in any case it should be interesting. So, game on!
To begin, I should note that Cameron does make some positive comments about Nailed, and even recommends the book (sort of), which is nice to hear. Especially since for a Christian, there's not a great deal one can say about the thesis that their personal Lord and Savior never actually existed.
Before getting to specifics, I have to call him on one problem with his critique: the repeated assurances that, although he can't provide the refutation just now, all my arguments have been disproven - elsewhere... for example:
"What follows isn't a comprehensive refutation of all Fitzgerald's arguments. That's been done elsewhere, and it seems that doing so would be redundant and even unhelpful at this point."
"Bart Ehrman, who Fitzgerald cites many times throughout the book, has taken a few swings at the mythicists for their special pleading..."
"... both Phillip Jenkins and Ben Witherington III destroyed Fitzgerald's arguments years before he decided to start making them."
Actually, it would be helpful for Cameron to provide them - any of them. But let's start with what he does have to say.
Bucking the Consensus
Cameron rightly notes that skeptics like me freely attack creationists for denying scientific consensus. But when it comes to the Christ myth, he declares "snubbing the consensus is problematic," and feels it's blatantly hypocritical:
"They don't hesitate to throw around the consensus argument in that context. But when it comes to biblical history, tossing aside the consensus point of view is acceptable, because (conveniently) the evidence is on their side."
But Cameron has just answered his own dilemma: it's precisely because Mythicists have evidence that we challenge the current majority opinion - just as the evidence for natural selection challenged the dominant paradigm in Darwin's time. Creationism isn't wrong simply because it's in the minority, and Evolution isn't true just because the overwhelming majority of scientists say so; it's true because it's multiply attested by strong and compelling lines of evidence and has withstood, and continues to withstand, all rival theories. By contrast, there is nothing in Biblical studies that stands confirmed on anywhere near the level of certainty we get in any other branch of science.
Repudiated?Cameron says:
"Even if we were to throw out the work of evangelical scholars, the experts without a religious ax to grind, including those openly hostile to Christianity, have repudiated the Christ myth. For example, Bart Ehrman, who Fitzgerald cites many times throughout the book, has taken a few swings at the mythicists for their special pleading and suggestions that the early church would invent such an unpalatable messiah like Jesus."
First of all, I don't "toss out" anyone's work because they're evangelical, or any other religious persuasion. In fact, as I mention in the book, I rely on the work of historians from all across the theological spectrum. For example, Bruce Metzger has done brilliant work on the formation of the New Testament canon, which I cite frequently (see ch. 7 of Nailed) - even against some of his own conclusions.
Secondly, no one has "repudiated" the Myth Theory arguments, least of all Bart Ehrman. For such a staunch non-Mythicist, few historians have done as much to point out the flaws in majority biblical opinion as Ehrman. That's why I continue to recommend his books, and am even looking forward to his next one that will present his case for why he thinks there was an actual historical Jesus - albeit one who was only a failed apocalyptic prophet. And as for the idea that the early church would never invent such an unlikely messiah as Jesus, our mutual friend Richard Carrier has more than debunked that notion in his book Not The Impossible Faith by demonstrating that there were first century Jews who expected precisely such a messiah.
Jesus Inconsistant? So What?
Cameron's reaction to the chapter asking "Is the Image of Jesus Consistent?" is:
"So what?
It's undeniable that the evangelists give diverging accounts of the life of Jesus. Most apologists will grant this, too. But this same "problem" affects a lot of history. In fact, if you were to read four different accounts of any historical figure, chances are that they'd contradict each other in similar ways the Gospels contradict each other.
No rational individual would conclude, then, that those biographies are worthless, or that their subject never actually existed. Why reach such a conclusion when we're talking about the Gospels?"
This is why: because the ways our four canonical Gospels contradict each other are not at all typical of other historical figures. To begin with, these are not independent accounts; all are based off of Mark, who is a neither an eyewitness nor claims to be, writing a generation or more after the events he describes, descriptions that are completely uncorroborated historically, filled with unhistorical mistakes and inadvertent anachronisms, and which by every indication appears to be written not as a biography at all but as an allegory for a Jewish version of the pagan mystery faiths.
What's worse, the later gospel writers who reworked Mark added information of their own without regard for if it contradicted their original source or each other (and in the case of the second century writings of Luke and John, any of the myriad other non-canonical Gospels that were also written around that time). And if that weren't already enough, for the first 300 years of Christianity we have abundant evidence that rival Christian factions had no compunctions to routinely alter scripture and did so. For the first 150 - 200 years we have nothing but tiny scraps and much later, partial chapters of NT manuscripts, and therefore no way to verify how much our texts matched the originals. And for the entire first century, we have no manuscript evidence whatsoever.
So there is no "biography" to reconstruct from the Gospels in the first place, and any reconstruction we attempt to make from them - and there have been dozens - would be completely disconnected to anyone who lived at all. As Rbt. Price has pointed out, even if there had been a real Jesus at the core of Christianity, there isn't one any more.
Christianity or Christianities?
My friend Cameron also says the best I can do is point to the diversity among early Christians as proof that the religion didn't start with Jesus, but this isn't quite right either. To begin with, the diversity of early Christianity is truly astounding already if Christianity is meant to have begun with a founder of a small group in Jerusalem. In addition to the problematic textual evidence for Jesus himself, there're plenty of other problems: the equally sparse and conflicting info on the Twelve apostles, the curious geographic distribution of early Christianity, the identity of all the "other Christs" mentioned in both Paul and the Gospels are all just a few. Another more fundamental problem are the differences between the first generation of Christianity and post-Gospel Christianity (See my essay "Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?" for more all these issues)
That seems plenty to get us started. Over to you, Cam...


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Lionsgate's Saw Will Get The Maze Treatment at Universal Studios' "Halloween Horror Nights"8/14/2017 The SAW series – one of the highest grossing horror film franchises of all time – makes its return to "Halloween Horror Nights," bringing the blockbuster's most terrifying traps to life in an all-new original maze opening at Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Orlando Resort, beginning September 15, 2017.
Based on the Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures hit horror film franchise, "SAW: The Games of Jigsaw" will bring to life the scariest game yet. In this all-new maze guests will come face-to-face with the work of master craftsman "Jigsaw" and a collection of his most infamous traps from the SAW film series and upcoming eighth installment JIGSAW. "We're thrilled to be partnering again with Universal Studios on an immersive experience that celebrates everything that our SAW fans love," said Lionsgate Senior Vice President of Global Live and Location Based Entertainment Jenefer Brown. "The maze features the most terrifying traps that made the SAWfranchise such a Halloween tradition, including some of the best from our upcoming film JIGSAW. What better way to complement the film's release this Halloween than taking audiences into the over-the-top action at Halloween Horror Nights." "SAW is one of the top grossing horror film franchises, and we're thrilled that the fan-favorite is making its return to 'Halloween Horror Nights,'" said John Murdy, Creative Director at Universal Studios Hollywood and Executive Producer of "Halloween Horror Nights." "'SAW: The Games of Jigsaw' will encompass the greatest collection of traps featured in all eight SAW movies to bring to life the most twisted SAW maze ever produced, and we can't wait for our fans to relive moments from the films." "We're excited to bring SAW back to Halloween Horror Nights and to take fans even deeper into the mind of 'Jigsaw,'" said Charles Gray, Show Director for Creative Development, "Halloween Horror Nights" at Universal Orlando Resort. "Filled with unimaginable horrors from the hit saga and the upcoming filmJIGSAW, this maze is truly a trap in itself." Created by James Wan and Leigh Whannell, the SAW film series has ratcheted up tension and invention with each successive film, while rattling millions of nerves worldwide. The eighth film of the powerhouse franchise is scheduled to hit theatres on October 27, 2017 - in its traditional opening weekend slot leading into Halloween. JIGSAW is written by Josh Stolberg & Peter Goldfinger and directed by The Spierig Brothers Universal Studios' "Halloween Horror Nights" is the ultimate Halloween event. For more than 20 years, guests from around the world have visited Halloween Horror Nights in Hollywood and Orlando to become victims inside their own horror film. The streets of each coast's event are transformed into highly-themed scare zones where menacing "scare-actors" lunge from every darkened corner. Multiple movie-quality haunted houses are erected throughout the event, based on everything from iconic slasher films to hit horror television series to haunting original stories. Additional details about Universal Studios' "Halloween Horror Nights" will be revealed soon. For more information about Halloween Horror Nights at either Universal Studios Hollywood or Universal Orlando Resort, visit www.HalloweenHorrorNights.com. CLICK HERE for a Look at the Terror that Awaits Leave a Reply. |


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Win A $250 Overton's Gift Card Sweepstakes
The Win A $250 Overton's Gift Card Sweepstakes (the "Sweepstakes") is sponsored by WAKEBOARDING Magazine, a publication of Bonnier Corporation ("Sponsor").
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TO ENTER: To enter electronically, visit our website at http://wakeboardingmag.com/contests/2010/06/09/win-an-overtons-250-gift-card/. To enter by mail, mail your entry to Win A $250 Overton's Gift Card, WAKEBOARDING magazine, 460 N. Orlando Ave. #200, Winter Park, FL 32789. All information provided by entrant must be complete, true and correct. Submissions to the Sweepstakes must be received by 8/31/2010 in order to be eligible; entries received after the deadline will be deemed ineligible to win. All submitted entries become the property of Sponsor and will not be acknowledged or returned; Sponsor is not responsible for lost, late, inaccurate, incomplete, damaged, illegible, or misdirected entries. Entry is limited to one entry per household; no photocopied or mechanically reproduced entries will be accepted. Multiple entries will be disqualified. Online entries will be deemed submitted by the authorized account holder of the email address submitted at time of entry. By entering, you agree to be bound by these Official Rules.
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In 1998, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent 5,718,632, on a method for avoiding "unnecessary wastage of time" in video games. What's transpired in the 17 years since then can best be described as an unnecessary wastage of time.
Namco's patent covers "auxiliary games" that a player can enjoy while the main game is loading. The patent expired on November 27, which has generated a lot of excitement in the gaming world, and even inspired a Loading Screen Jam where developers create their own loading screen games.
In the midst of all the excitement, it's worth taking a moment to ask whether Patent 5,718,632 should have been issued in the first place. It's emblematic of a big problem with a lot of patents, particularly software patents.
How Loading Screen Games Weren't Invented
The first Sony PlayStation was introduced in 1994. Its graphical capabilities blew predecessors like the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo out of the water, but it had one big disadvantage. It replaced the game cartridges of the previous generation with CD-ROMs. When you booted up a PlayStation game, you had to wait for the console to load game data from the disc into its own memory. And that. Took. For. Ever. Watching a loading screen was boring, especially when you were used to the instant gratification of cartridge games.
Namco's Ridge Racer addressed the problem by including a second game, the 80s classic Galaxian. It took no time at all for a PlayStation to load Galaxian. Suddenly, the player wasn't thinking about how boring it was to wait for a game to load; she could have fun playing Galaxian while the console took its time loading Ridge Racer. If she beat Galaxian before Ridge Racer was done loading, she'd be rewarded in Ridge Racer with access to some in-game bonuses.
Should Loading Screen Games Be Patentable?
What's the big deal? Namco thought of loading screen games first, so they earned the patent, right? Well, let's look at how U.S. law defines a patentable invention.
According to the law, a person isn't entitled to a patent if the claimed invention already existed when the application was filed or would have been obvious to someone skilled in the relevant technology area. The idea of playing a small game while the larger one loads has been around for a very long time. In 1987, many years before Namco filed its patent application, Richard Aplin created Invade-a-Load, a utility for developers who wrote games for the Commodore 64 computer. As a game developer, you could package Invade-a-Load with your game; while players waited for the game, they'd be treated to a mini-game similar to Space Invaders. Given the breadth of Namco's claims, there is a very strong case that its application should have been rejected as anticipated or obvious in light of Invade-a-Load.
Does the Loading Screen Game Patent Promote Innovation?
The purpose of patents, as spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, is to promote innovation. Inventors are rewarded with a temporary monopoly on their invention in exchange for giving the public information on how it works.
The Supreme Court has said that patents should only be granted for "those inventions which would not be disclosed or devised but for the inducement of a patent." In other words, if the inventor isn't trading information of real value for the patent, then it's not a good patent. Unfortunately, many software patents do just the opposite. They offer no real information about how to implement a feature, only a vaguely worded description of the feature itself. In court, vagueness is often rewarded over specificity, as plaintiffs stretch the boundaries of their inventions to cover the defendants' products.
As for the auxiliary game patent, it simply describes the idea of loading a separate game while the player waits for the main game. Namco gave no information of value in return for its monopoly on auxiliary games.
Last year, the Supreme Court struck down a patent for describing nothing but an abstract idea performed on a computer. If Namco had sued someone over its patent, there's a good chance it would have lost. But it didn't matter: even the existence of these low quality, abstract software patents is enough to deter a lot of innovators.
Fixing the Patent System Means Fixing Patents
There are two patent reform bills currently in Congress, the PATENT Act and the Innovation Act. EFF supports both bills, and we hope you'll take a moment to encourage your members of Congress to support them too.
Those bills mostly only address patent litigation, though. If we really want to make the patent system the agent of innovation that the Constitution calls for, we need to tackle the problem of patent quality.
Right now, software patents are the loading screen of the intellectual property world. They add nothing of value to the game. They just force everyone to sit and wait before we can do anything.


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This material has 2 associated documents. Select a document title to view a document's information.
written by
Michael R. Gallis
The Merry Mixer Ride Model shows the motion of two superimposed circular motions. The main frame of the ride rotates in one direction, while a second rotation at the ends of the frame arms carries the riders in an additional circular motion, ususally in the opposite direction.
In this simulation, the operator controls the two rotation rates as well as the radii of the two orbits. The systems response to changes in controls is lagged to prevent unphysical accelerations of riders. Remember to let the simulation run for several seconds after adjusting controls for the changes to settle in.
The Merry Mixer Ride Model was created using the Easy Java Simulations (EJS) modeling tool. It is distributed as a ready-to-run (compiled) Java archive. Double clicking the jar file will run the program if Java is installed.
Last Modified June 10, 2014
This file has previous versions.
The source code zip archive contains an XML representation of the Merry Mixer Ride Model. Unzip this archive in your Ejs workspace to compile and run this model using Ejs.
Last Modified January 15, 2012


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Irvine, Calif., Dec. 14, 2009 – New space observations reveal that since October 2003, the aquifers for California's primary agricultural region – the Central Valley – and its major mountain water source – the Sierra Nevada – have lost nearly enough water combined to fill Lake Mead, America's largest reservoir. The findings, based on satellite data, reflect California's extended drought and increased pumping of groundwater for human uses such as irrigation.
At the American Geophysical Union meeting this week in San Francisco, UC Irvine and NASA scientists detailed the state's groundwater changes and outlined research on other global aquifers conducted via twin satellites called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. GRACE monitors tiny month-to-month differences in Earth's gravity field primarily caused by the movement of water in the planet's land, ocean, ice and atmosphere. Its ability to "weigh" changes in water content provides new insights into how climate change is affecting Earth's water cycle.
Combined, California's Sacramento and San Joaquin drainage basins have shed more than 30 cubic kilometers of water since late 2003, said Jay Famiglietti, UCI Earth system science professor and director of the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling. A cubic kilometer is about 264.2 billion gallons, enough to fill 400,000 Olympic-size pools. The bulk of the loss occurred in the state's agricultural Central Valley. The Central Valley depends on irrigation from both groundwater wells and diverted surface water.
"GRACE data reveal groundwater in these basins is being pumped for irrigation at rates that are not sustainable if current trends continue," Famiglietti said. "This is leading to declining water tables, water shortages, decreasing crop sizes and continued land subsidence. The findings have major implications for the U.S. economy, as California's Central Valley is home to one-sixth of all U.S. irrigated land and the state leads the nation in agricultural production and exports."
"By providing data on large-scale groundwater depletion rates, GRACE can help California water managers make informed decisions about allocating water resources," said project scientist Michael Watkins of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Preliminary studies show most of the water loss is coming from the more southerly located San Joaquin basin, which gets less precipitation than the Sacramento River basin farther north. Initial results indicate the Sacramento River basin is losing about 2 cubic kilometers of water a year. Surface water losses account for half of this, while groundwater losses in the northern Central Valley add another 0.6 cubic kilometers annually. The San Joaquin basin is losing 3.5 cubic kilometers a year. More than 75 percent of this is due to groundwater pumping in the southern Central Valley, primarily to irrigate crops.
Famiglietti said recent California legislation decreasing the allocation of surface water to the San Joaquin basin is likely to further increase the region's reliance on groundwater for irrigation. "This suggests the decreasing groundwater storage trends seen by GRACE will continue for the foreseeable future," he said.
The California results come just months after Matt Rodell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Isabella Velicogna of UCI, and Famiglietti found groundwater levels in northwest India declining by 17.7 cubic kilometers per year between October 2002 and August 2008, a loss attributed almost entirely to pumping and consumption of groundwater by humans.
"California and India are just two of many regions around the world where GRACE data are being used to study droughts, which can have devastating impacts on societies and cost the U.S. economy $6 billion to $8 billion annually," said Rodell, who was Famiglietti's doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin.
Other regions under study include the southeastern U.S., where GRACE clearly captured the evolution of an extended drought that ended this spring; Australia; and the Middle East-North Africa region. There, Rodell is leading an effort to assess regional water resources by using GRACE and other data to systematically map water and weather-related variables. He said GRACE may also help predict droughts, since it can identify pre-existing conditions favorable to the start of a drought, such as a deficit of water deep below ground.
GRACE is a NASA/German Aerospace Center (DLR) partnership. The University of Texas Center for Space Research has overall mission responsibility. JPL developed the satellites; DLR provided the launch; and GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Germany, operates the mission. For more on GRACE, see http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/ and http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/.
About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is a top-ranked university dedicated to research, scholarship and community service. Led by Chancellor Michael Drake since 2005, UCI is among the fastest-growing University of California campuses, with more than 27,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 1,100 faculty and 9,200 staff. The top employer in dynamic Orange County, UCI contributes an annual economic impact of $4.2 billion. For more UCI news, visit www.today.uci.edu.
News Radio: UCI maintains on campus an ISDN line for conducting interviews with its faculty and experts. Use of this line is available for a fee to radio news programs/stations that wish to interview UCI faculty and experts. Use of the ISDN line is subject to availability and approval by the university.
UCI maintains an online directory of faculty available as experts to the media. To access, visit www.today.uci.edu/experts. For UCI breaking news, visit www.zotwire.uci.edu.


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This dental procedure is carried out when the innermost part of the tooth 'the pulp' becomes badly decayed or infected. If left untreated, the tooth will begin to die which could lead to the loss of the tooth. To save the tooth, the infected pulp needs to be removed to prevent the formation of an abscess. In dental terms this procedure is called 'Endodontics'
The tooth is made up of
- Enamel – The hard outer layer of the tooth.
- Dentine – This forms the core and gives the basic shape to the tooth which supports the enamel, it is softer than enamel but harder than bone.
- Pulp – Is the central part of the tooth which contains nerves and blood vessels and lies within the root canal
The reason the pulp would die
- Caries – If caries 'decay' is left it will travel through the enamel and dentin down into the pulp chamber.
- Trauma – A severe knock that affects the pulp.
- Severe Gum Disease – The gum detaches itself from the tooth creating a gap between the tooth and the gum, bacteria then gets trapped causing an infection which can infect the pulp.
The symptoms
- Pain – This can be anything form a constant dull ache to severe pain or pain only when biting
- A spot sometimes appears on the gum in the area of the infected tooth, this is where the collection of puss from the root tip is draining which will leave a bad taste in your mouth.
- Swelling in the gum area surrounding your tooth


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From Kentucky State Police Post 10 -
The Kentucky State Police would like to offer periodic reminders to drivers who travel our roadways. Our agency strives daily to ensure the safety of the motoring public. Some of these proactive measures include various roadside safety checkpoints and saturating known problematic areas in the district through general patrol tactics.
The Kentucky State Police utilizes traffic safety checkpoints to promote safety for motorists using the public roadways and to provide a deterrent for those who violate laws contained in the Kentucky Revised Statutes.
The intent of a traffic safety checkpoint is to provide for a high visibility, public safety service, focusing on operator impairment, vehicular equipment deficiencies (confirming appropriate registration and insurance of vehicles) and the valid licensing of drivers. Other violations of law and/or other public safety issues that arise will be addressed.
These checkpoints will allow the Kentucky State Police the opportunity to periodically concentrate its efforts in checking for violations of Kentucky traffic and regulatory laws that will ultimately increase the safety of the citizens within the Commonwealth.
Post 10 serves the following counties: Harlan, Bell and Knox County.
For a list of Post 10 road check locations, visit our website: KentuckyStatePolice.org
Citizens can contribute to highway safety by calling KSP toll-free at: (1-800-222-5555). Citizens can call to confidentially report impaired drivers or any criminal activity. You may also download the free KSP mobile phone app. The app provides quick, direct access to KSP including weather, road and traffic information as well as text, voice and photo tip capabilities to report criminal behavior. The app is available for iPhone, iPad and Android applications and can be easily downloaded free of charge through Apple and Google Play stores.


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Facebook Inc has so far suspended around 200 apps in the first stage of its review into apps that had access to large quantities of user data, in a response to a scandal around political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
The apps were suspended pending a thorough investigation into whether they misused any data, said Ime Archibong, Facebook's vice president of product partnerships.
Facebook said it has looked into thousands of apps till date as part of an investigation that Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced on March 21.
Zuckerberg had said the social network will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before the company curtailed data access in 2014.
"There is a lot more work to be done to find all the apps that may have misused people's Facebook data – and it will take time," Archibong said.
"We have large teams of internal and external experts working hard to investigate these apps as quickly as possible."
Facebook was hit by the privacy scandal in mid-March after media reports that Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed data to build profiles on American voters and influence the 2016 presidential election.
The incident led to backlash from celebrities and resulted in the company losing billions in market value. Zuckerberg apologized for the mistakes his company made and testified before the U.S. lawmakers.
The company, however, regained much of its lost market value after it reported a surprisingly strong 63 percent rise in profit and an increase in users when it announced quarterly results on April 25.
Shares of the company were up 0.4 percent at $87.65 in premarket trading on Monday.


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Just as surely as it made good sense for government scientists to declare an endangered species listing for Puget Sound orcas, you could also predict the reaction from right-wing business interests, who would "inform us sternly that there are plenty of orcas in the world, so this population doesn't really need protecting. And besides, the new restrictions are costing us jobs, and Americans more oil for their SUVs. And a few hundred other phony talking points designed to let the orcas go extinct here."
Sure enough, the battle lines are being drawn along these parameters. Last week, the P-I's Lisa Stiffler reported on the opposition to the listing from exactly the corporate interests expected:
- But this month, the Building Industry Association of Washington filed a 60-day notice declaring their intent to sue to the government for that decision.
"It's an unlawful listing," said Tim Harris, an attorney with the group.
The association, which works to limit taxes and regulations, is concerned that making the orcas endangered will result in severe restrictions on the development and use of property on or near the Sound.
The notice states that because there are other orcas in the region -- including Alaska, the Bering Sea and Russia -- the local killer whales don't merit special protection.
"You can almost say any individual school of fish can be listed," Harris said.
This is, of course, nothing but malignant misinformation. The ESA provides protection for distinct populations like the resident Puget Sound orcas. Some quick facts, just to make plain the BIAW's mendacity:
- -- The Southern Resident population of killer whales comprises some 90 orcas, divided into three pods, designated J, K, and L. One of these pods, J pod (with 24 members), resides in these waters year-around. The other two pods, K pod (21 members) and L Pod (45 members) spend their winters in open Pacific west of British Columbia.
-- This population is genetically and culturally distinct from the "transient" killer whale population that travels the Pacific Coast from Baja to Alaska, as well as other resident populations in British Columbia and Alaska.
-- The transients in particular are quite distinct: while residents appear to be strictly fish eaters (the vast majority of their diet being salmon), transients appear to be strictly mammal eaters, feasting particularly on seals and sea lions.
-- The languages that residents and transients, respectively, use are so distinct as to scarcely even resemble the other. Likewise, behavioral observation makes clear that the two populations strive to avoid each other
-- Genetic studies have established that there has been no interaction between the two populations for at least 300,000 years, and perhaps longer. The Southern Residents, in fact, are completely isolated genetically.
-- The chief threat to the orcas' survival as a viable population comes from the lack of salmon -- the causes of which center mostly around rampant development and the concomitant destruction of their habitat, particularly the streambeds in which they spawn.
-- Other threats to the orcas also emanate from industrial activity and development, including the toxins that are dribbled steadily into Puget Sound waters. Orcas' bodies are so laden with these toxins that when one dies and washes up on a beach, it has to be treated as a toxic spill and disposed of by an emergency response team.
Facts matter little to organizations like the BIAW. Their ability to ensure that developers have as few restrictions as possible in bringing pavement to every corner of the state is all that counts.
Even if, in the end, every last orca simply vanishes from these waters. If the BIAW has its way, that outcome is not just predictable, it's guaranteed.
It may be a death by a thousand cuts, slow and incremental. But groups like the BIAW are killing orcas just as certainly as someone out hunting them with guns.
The right wing's big gorilla
The Building Industry Association of Washington is an organization that not only is ruthless to the point of consciencelessness, it also has become an extraordinarily significant player in Washington state politics. They are, in fact, one of the most powerful funders of the conservative movement's agenda here.
And, perhaps unsurprisingly, they also boast a history of dalliances with (and underwriting of) right-wing extremism, particularly the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s.
The BIAW was perhaps best noted in the 2004 election for underwriting and driving the gubernatorial campaign of Republican nominee Dino Rossi, and was one of the chief financiers of his misbegotten challenge to the election of Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire.
They're also gearing up to run Rossi against Gregoire again in 2008. Some enterprising reporter should, between now and then, ask Rossi where he stands on orca preservation.
Meanwhile, as David Goldstein pointed out, the BIAW also heavily financed the eventually successful campaign of an industry lawyer and lobbyist named Jim Johnson to win election to the state Supreme Court.
With that win under their belt, the BIAW plans to finance a slate of candidates for next year's Washington State Supreme Court races -- a plan that could place the court essentially in their pocket. Already, there's a great deal of concern over this development and its ramifications for the historical independence of the Supreme Court, since the course for any justices elected this way is fraught with real conflicts of interest.
If you want a look at what the future holds as far as BIAW-backed candidates go, take a gander at Stephen Johnson, who has already announced his candidacy.
It's especially worth noting that a source of the BIAW's revenue stream -- and thus of their power -- is their bellying up to the taxpayer trough via a municipal employees' industrial insurance fund that they operate.
A dark history
If you go back even farther, though, you can find an even darker side to the BIAW. As Jay Taber at Skookumgeoduck has explained at some length, the BIAW has been involved in some of the ugliest political organizing in Washington state, including the formation of militias back in the early 1990s.
During this time, Taber also worked with my old friend Paul deArmond, who compiled an exhaustive record of this activity at his Public Good Special Reports site. DeArmond was recording in detail many of the same events I was observing and reporting on as a newspaper reporter back then.
What we saw happening was, in response to the state's passage of a Growth Management Act in 1990, a bevy of so-called "grass-roots" reactionary movements who were actually being underwritten and organized by a network of industry organizations, with the BIAW in a lead role. These movements ran the gamut from "property rights" groups to county-secession efforts to antitax agitation to anti-New World Order militia organizing, all under the larger umbrella of "Wise Use."
Samantha Sanchez in The American Prospect described how these dynamics played a key role in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994:
- When one environmental group, 1000 Friends of Washington, finally succeeded in putting a land-use measure on the ballot in 1990, the developers met the challenge. An alliance of corporate interests--not just timber companies but also such corporations as Boeing, Darigold, and U.S. West--spent nearly $1.8 million on advertising and grassroots organizing to block the measure, which promised to affect both real estate and logging. Groups such as the Washington Contract Loggers Association organized rallies of angry timber workers; the American Pulpwood Association provided public speaking and lobbying training to potential activists. Meanwhile, the development interests poured more than $2.5 million into the campaign coffers of state legislature candidates; nearly 70 percent of that money went to eventual winners and much of it was directed at a group of 20 candidates particularly friendly to industry.
The industry coalition won their initiative fight, but ironically their failure to dislodge a Democratic legislature gave the environmentalists an opportunity to achieve through legislation what they could not through the ballot measure. Sure enough, the legislature adopted a growth management act while defeating four property rights bills--three dealing with wetlands and one takings measure--that had strong industry backing.
But the story does not end there. Heavy lobbying had already neutered some of the act's more ambitious provisions anyway: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that developer pressure frightened the legislature into cutting $4.5 million from the program's funding and stripping some key provisions. Now, the industry groups concentrated on organizing at the county level, where the planning would actually take place. Organizations such as the Snohomish County Property Rights Alliance began to crop up and make their presence known at local meetings. The Snohomish group billed itself as "a grassroots group concerned about environmental regulation" while taking money from construction interests, such as the Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties. Jim Klauser, the director of Seattle Master Builders, became the alliance's director.
Klauser is the chief figure in this activity; until recently he remained associated with the BIAW by sitting on its Legal Trust Committee. Klauser ran one of the BIAW's major subgroups, the Master Builders Association of King County, and the Snohomish County office of the BIAW just north of Seattle.
He also founded an organization called the Snohomish County Property Rights Alliance, which became a front for militia organizing and other far-right activity, which deArmond describes thus:
- The next property-rights group to appear was the Snohomish County Property Rights Alliance, known as SNOCO PRA. In the summer of 1990, Jeannette Burrage of the Northwest Legal Foundation represented them in an assault on a Snohomish critical areas ordinance. The standard Wise Use strategy for preserving developers' subsidies and tax advantages: protest, lawsuit, referendum, lawsuit, election, lawsuit. SNOCO PRA hired Terre Harris as a political consultant to run a referendum campaign to take most of the starch out of the ordinance. By October 1990, Harris announced that SNOCO PRA had enough signatures to put the referendum on the ballot. A complex series of legal maneuvers began that would ultimately lead to Snohomish County suing the PRA members over the referendum campaign, a lawsuit which would not be settled by the Supreme Court until January 27, 1994.24,28
SNOCO PRA's executive director, Jim Klauser, had two interesting connections. First of all, he was on the board of the Northwest Legal Foundation. Secondly, like Harris, he had been an official with the Master Builders Association, their president.
A March 4, 1993 letter from Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties (associated with National Assn. of Home Builders) stated that "While we have worked within the governmental process, we have also supported the formation and development of a strong property rights movement in Snohomish County. We've provided major funding to these efforts, which are more sophisticated than any other county in Washington. ...The county wide policies themselves, later this spring, may be the subject of a referendum campaign. This depends on the outcome of litigation between county elected officials and citizens who have filed a referendum to repeal the policies." The letter is signed by Mike Echelbarger, MBA President and Rick Lennon, MBA First Vice President. Klauser's later activities with the Washington Property Rights Network would underscore the important role of the development industry in creating the property rights organizations in Puget Sound.
One of SNOCO PRA's leaders was a fellow named Ben Sams, who organized an "anti-New World Order" militia meeting in Maltby, Wash. The keynote speaker at the meeting was a fellow from the Militia of Montana named Bob Fletcher, who displayed maps describing a planned United Nations takeover of the northern Cascades region. [It was in fact the first militia meeting I ever attended; I describe it a bit more here.]
As Paul recalled in an e-mail:
- The dynamics were like this:
1) The GMA triggered a backlash because county governments had to pass critical areas ordinances. Klauser starts a "property rights" group -- Snohomish Co Property Rights Alliance. This is a spinoff of a previous "umbrella" group called the Washington Property Rights Network. WPRN has Arnold's fingerprints all over it, but I was never able to get specific proof of his involvment except through Klauser.
2) Klauser sent out a letter to the MBA claiming credit for setting up property rights front groups -- this being the most damning evidence of BIA involvement and clearly establishing all the the "property rights" groups as fronts.
3) The property rights groups got exposed to the Catron strategy of local sovereignty through the National Federal Lands Conference (Ron Arnold is one of their board of advisors). The NFLC had all sorts of tenuous links to [the racist and anti-Semitic] Posse Comitatus -- mostly because they were all birds of the same Far Right feather in the Southwest. Some of these connect back directly to William Potter Gale and his Committee of the States tax resistance nonsense.
4) Klauser and Stokes (working through SNOCO PRA) start Freedom and Skykomish secession groups inside of SNOCOPRA. There is 100% overlap, which is to say that the secession groups were subsets of the property rights stuff.
5) Skip Richards [a Whatcom County activist] immediately copies the secession groups in Whatcom with Pioneer and Independence county groups. Likewise, the (King County) Property Rights Alliance started up Cedar County. Again, key players were previous partners with [Wise Use founders Alan] Gottlieb and [Ron] Arnold, especially Ted Cowan.
6) All of the county secession groups are heavily interlinked with Posse and Christian Patriots. The major characters are Ben Hinkle in Whatcom and Ben Sams in Snohomish. Sams was part of John Trochmann's "United for Justice" group that Trochmann formed during the Weaver standoff. So the secession groups were also being used for militia recruiting.
Klauser's chief partner in organizing the Snohomish County secessionists was a local rabble-rouser named John Stokes, who ran an organization called the Freedom County Committee. Stokes later claimed he had gathered enough signatures to force a secession vote, but he vamoosed to Montana at about this time and the signatures were not submitted for several more months; when they finally were, the numbers validated didn't come close to meeting the requirement.
Of course, Stokes has continued to foment right-wing extremist politics in Montana, where he bought a radio station and began broadcasting the home addresses of local environmentalists, a la Radio Rwanda. His attacks on liberals are especially disturbing as potential precursors to similar attacks elsewhere.
One of Klauser's chief allies, a former Whatcom County BIAW official named Art Castle, went on to cofound a local Bellingham group that engaged in similar far-right recruitment. Castle now operates the Kitsap Home Builders Association listed as a local resource by the BIAW.
It was in Whatcom County that Castle and Hinkle's organizational work soon led to the formation of the Washington State Militia, whose career I describe in some detail in my first book, In God's Country (and is likewise told in Jane Kramer's excellent Lone Patriot). That group, you may recall, ended in complete collapse as a number of leaders and members were eventually convicted for their roles in a scheme to build and deploy pipe bombs.
In one of his appendices, deArmond explains how these local organizations provide the logistical traction for the national "Wise Use" program:
- When we asked Ron Arnold about the secession movement, his recollection was that Jim Klauser -- exec.director of SNOCO PRA and founder of the Washington Property Rights Network -- was the first to tell him of the county secession movement:
- "...the secession thing came up and I said, 'Come on, give me a break, are you kidding?' Because I didn't know anything about the legal structure for doing that. 'Is that legal?', 'Oh yes, the constitution has provisions for it.' 'Oh really!', so I read it."
Asked why he supported people like Klauser, Arnold said,- "Because I intend to win. I don't fight to lose. And because I know that movement theory is right, that if I help segments along, I'd create leaders. I help leaders. ...There are so many people doing what I need done, but I don't have to sit at their desk."
The situation goes much deeper than this, since Arnold is working at the top level of Wise Use. Below him and the other national Wise Use organizations is a middle level of regional trade associations, business groups and industry lobbying organizations. These groups, such as the Master Builders Association, the various county chapters of the Affordable Housing Council, the local Chambers of Commerce, and realtor's associations, provide the leadership and funding for creating front groups like the Property Rights Alliance, SNOCO PRA, Whatcom CLUE and other so-called grass-roots groups.
Organizations like the Building Industry Association of Washington represent, in many ways, the essential face of modern conservatism: their bottom line is money and power, by any means necessary.
This means playing a major role in electoral politics and political organizing, while also quietly encouraging the role of extremists within the broader mainstream of conservatism. They are, in effect, organizational "transmitters".
Their poisonous effects on the body politic are bad enough. Unfortunately, their toxicity also extends well into the natural world too.


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© 2006 All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute or repurpose this work without written permission from the copyright holder(s).
Printed from https://www.damninteresting.com/the-gravity-express/
About four hundred years ago—sometime in the latter half of the 17th century—Isaac Newton received a letter from the brilliant British scientist and inventor Robert Hooke. In this letter, Hooke outlined the mathematics governing how objects might fall if dropped through hypothetical tunnels drilled through the Earth at varying angles. Though it seems that Hooke was mostly interested in the physics of the thought experiment, an improbable yet intriguing idea fell out of the data: a dizzyingly fast transportation system.
Hooke's calculations showed that if the technology could be developed to bore such holes through the Earth, a vehicle with sufficiently reduced friction could use such a tunnel to travel to another point anywhere on the on Earth within three quarters of an hour, regardless of distance. Even more amazingly, the vehicle would require negligible fuel. The concept is known as the Gravity Train, and though it seems inconceivably difficult to construct, it has received some serious scientific attention and research in the intervening centuries.
The basic concept behind the gravity train is straightforward: At each end of the tunnel, an observer looking into the hole would see a downhill slope. If a train at one end of the tunnel were to release its brakes, the force of gravity would immediately pull the train downhill and cause the train to accelerate much like a roller coaster. Steeper slopes would result in more speed, with the highest acceleration occurring in the straight-down tunnels which cross the Earth's center. The train would continue to accelerate until reaching the halfway point, at which time its inertia would be at odds with gravity and it would begin to decelerate. As Hooke's data indicates, if the train operated in a frictionless environment it would reach the surface on the opposite end of the tunnel at the exact moment that its speed reached zero. Naturally, a gravity train operating in a real-world environment would need to bring along enough horsepower to make up the friction loss.
One interesting property of the Gravity Express is that its transit time would always be very, very close to forty-two minutes regardless of the distance travelled. In fact, if the Earth were a perfect sphere, the trip time would always be exactly forty-two minutes and twelve seconds. Greater distances would be traversed in the same amount of time as short ones because the train's maximum speed would be increased enough to exactly make up the difference. Due to nature of gravity, this forty-two minute trip time would be consistent for any size of vehicle.
Consider a hypothetical Gravity Express station in Spain which connects to a sister station in New Zealand. The tunnel would be straight down because its route would intersect with the Earth's center, making for an interesting departure as the train entered sudden free-fall. The vehicle would accelerate to a maximum velocity of about 17,670 miles per hour before beginning to decelerate, and it would travel in a straight line for 7,920 miles—a trip which would be 12,440 miles on the surface. Forty-two minutes after their stomach-turning departure, the train and its passengers would pull to a gentle stop at their destination on the other side of the world.
Though Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton corresponded on the subject of objects falling through the Earth, they did so merely as an intellectual exercise. The first serious suggestion to build a gravity train wasn't put forward until the 1800s, presented to the Paris Academy of Sciences by a group of scientific optimists. Unsurprisingly, the Academy opted to defer the ambitious suggestion. The concept was lost to obscurity until the 1960s, when physicist Paul Cooper published a paper in the American Journal of Physics suggesting that gravity trains be considered for a future transportation project. Though the article sparked some lively debate, the proposal was not taken very seriously.
While friction does put a damper on the gravity train concept, clearly the biggest technical hurdle would be in creating such massive tunnels in the first place. A hole with a ten foot radius which passed through the Earth's center would displace over twelve billion cubic feet of rock, all of which would need to be hauled away somewhere. Furthermore, the Earth's mantle and core writhe with extreme pressure and heat, so any tunnel would have to be lined with a protective shield to keep it intact. Unfortunately no currently known materials can even withstand the hostile environment, let alone insulate the tunnel from the intense heat. Due to these extreme temperatures, the trip may never be survivable by humans. But the technology would be extremely useful for rapid, unmanned cargo delivery between continents, essentially becoming a massive global dumbwaiter.
Those who find sport in reflecting on such wild ideas have suggested that the tunnel could be evacuated of air to eliminate wind resistance, though such a feat would prove almost as challenging as the drilling itself. Some have also postulated that such a train could be magnetically levitated to eliminate friction in situations where the tunnel does not pass through the Earth's center; though if electromagnets were used, the amount of energy consumed by the apparatus would rise drastically. A more viable location for the gravity train would be on a celestial body which is not troubled by an atmosphere, plate tectonics, and magma, such as the Earth's moon. The concept would be the same, though a planet with a density different from that of Earth would also have a different standard trip length.
Though the Gravity Express may seem impossible—or at best absurdly impractical—it is appealing to consider the possibility of extremely rapid transit across the planet with very little expenditure of energy per trip. Certainly the creation and reinforcement of such tunnels is well beyond the reach of our current technology, but the future is full of surprises.
© 2006 All Rights Reserved. Do not distribute or repurpose this work without written permission from the copyright holder(s).
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I don't believe in coding design tools. I've been programming for more than 30 years now (40 years if you go back to my first class in programming). I think in code. Code is my design language and procrastination is my friend.
When you hit a breakpoint in Visual Studio, everything stops. If you'd rather other processes keep running, you can enable that.
There's more (and some less) in Entity Framework Core compared to Entity Framework 6, at least in version 1.0. While you can move to Entity Framework Core now, it might be too early for you.
If you run an automated test and your test fails then you want to know that it's your fault -- not a problem in someone else's code or the result of a change in your test data. Moq lets you do that in two lines of code, even if your code uses the ASP.NET Session object.
Document databases are a form of NoSQL database that may store all of the information for a given object in a single instance in the database.
Every once in a while you'll need to use the LINQ Join to get the data you want.
If you're using Skip and Take in LINQ to page through your data, a tweak to your syntax can cut your response time by as much as 10 percent as you page through your data.
A .NET port of the Ruby library allows for experimental testing of code that's gone to production.
When you're testing an ASP.NET MVC controller (or, really, any class at all) you want to make sure the code that fails is the code you're testing. Moq provides a simple way to isolate the code you're testing and lets you generate test cases.
Sometimes you want child objects retrieved with the parent object, and sometimes you don't. What you NEVER want is to retrieve child objects accidentally. Here's Peter's advice on how to get the best performance when loading child objects.
Script bundling speeds up your application by reducing the time it takes to download all of your JavaScript code. But you'll need another object to get your files added to the page in the order you want.
In test-driven development, you have to decide how you'll divide your test methods between your test classes. The best solution is the one that requires the least effort on your part and implements the Single Responsibility Principle for tests.
There are two attributes you can put on your entity class properties: one is a convenience, the other is essential, and both are required when the primary key for a table consists of two columns.
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Sell My Car in Tolworth
Sell my car in Tolworth, Sell car Tolworth, Buy my car now in Tolworth.
Sell car fast in Tolworth, Sell your car today in Tolworth?
Do you want to sell a car, but don't want the inconvenience of trying to sell it in an increasingly difficult market?
We provide a quick and easy solution, a hassle free way to sell your car in Tolworth. We buy all makes and models from £500 – £50,000.
We buy most Left–hand drive (LHD) cars, Right–hand drive (RHD) cars, People carriers, Mini Buses & 7 seaters, Imported cars, Vans, Trucks & 4x4's.
With over 30 years experience within many areas of the motor industry, and the expertise and knowledge to assist and advise you, we provide a friendly, polite and courteous service.
We do business the old fashioned way – we are honest and professional – an efficient way to sell car in Tolworth
We are the best buyers of Audi, Bentley, BMW, Ferrari, Ford, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lexus, Mercedes–Benz, Porsche, Rolls Royce, Toyota, TVR, Volkswagen & Volvo.
How does it work?
Simply contact us with a description of your car and we will provide your free quote – specific to your actual car, once accepted, we will arrange to collect your car free from you in Tolworth at a time and place to suit you.
You will not be held in a call centre queue or fobbed off with a computer generated quote – we research your actual car.
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