A noble gas, argon is inert and colorless until an electric current excites it to a rich sky-blue glow. As one of the least expensive noble gases, dense argon is often used as a shield gas to protect against oxidation.

Scroll down to see examples of Argon.

My book The Elements is based on photographs I've been collecting at my website periodictable.com for many years. The website includes not just pictures, but also more detailed descriptions than we could fit in the book, and most importantly, it includes full 360-degree rotating videos of almost all the objects. You really won't find this kind of resources anywhere else for any other subject, so please enjoy.

After many unworkable suggestions for proving whether the gasses were still in there, several people came up with the idea of using a high voltage transformer, such as one finds in those now inexpensive plasma ball novelty lights, to try to set up an arc inside the flask, and identify the gas from the color of the discharge. Whether this is possible is sensitive to the pressure of the gas, which is not known.

Fortunately, it worked beautifully on three out of the five, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt that those three at least contain the gas claimed. The others almost certainly failed because the type and pressure of gas in them does not support an arc, not because they are empty. In fact, if they were empty, I would have gotten an arc, because the arc works through up to about half an inch of ordinary air.

You can see the arcs from each of the five flasks on the right.

WILDLIFE AS CANON SEES IT
This advertisements were featured in National Geographic.

The Amazon Kindle is an ebook reading computer that poses very serious dangers to society. When you purchase a Kindle, you are subject to Amazon's Digital Restriction Management (DRM), a system designed to take away rights you would typically have when reading a book.

Your basic rights to share, sell, or donate a book are subject to fights with Amazon over the legal and technological restrictions they try to impose. If you try to exercise these rights anyway, you might be violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -- which could bring severe criminal penalties -- and Amazon can try to revoke your ability to use all the books you've bought.

After you read a physical book, you can give it to a friend or sell it. Not so with a Kindle book. You can donate a physical book to a library -- an institution whose purpose is to continue sharing it for as long as possible. The Kindle's DRM, however, is designed explicitly to prevent sharing and the public benefit that institutions like libraries provide.[1]

Amazon has a web page about e-book lending, which explains that only certain "lendable" books ("lendability" being determined by the publisher) can be lent at most one time, only within the United States, for a period of exactly 14 days. That's a pathetic (and failed) attempt to replicate what was always a very natural aspect of printed books.

Internet reader's rights

Some people think that every Internet user is a copyright violator. Downloading a document means making a copy of it, they say; and copying generally isn't legal without the author's permission. They argue about whether making material available through FTP or HTTP or USENET grants some sort of ``implied license'' to download the material---or whether an author can demand payment for the reader's copies.

Other people advocate a much simpler theory. When an author tells his FTP server to send a document to anyone who asks, he is the one making copies. In legal jargon, the author's command to the computer is the ``proximate cause'' of the copying. The reader is merely requesting a copy, not making it.

I don't know which of these theories will succeed in court. I also don't think you should have to care. So I promise I won't sue you for copyright violation for downloading documents from my server.

Does it bother you that this should even be an issue? Check out Richard Stallman's essay on The Right to Read.

Fighting patents

Notes on writing papers
Please put your papers online!
Don't publish with IEEE!
Document IDs
The importance of copyediting a scientific paper
Transcending the visual appearance of a paper
The devil's guide to citing the literature
The devil's guide to choosing new mathematical terminology
The devil's guide to organizing a paper
The devil's guide to conclusions

5.0 out of 5 stars Held its own against competition!
Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2013
Verified Purchase

I was recently in need of closed headphones and curious about what the market offers. I thought I might share my findings with someone in a similar situation. The Tascam TH-02 turns out to be an excellent value among the eight headphone models that I have compared. Below is my review of these headphones. //

Shure SRH440
Without doubt, these are the best of the bunch. In terms of clarity, they are in a different league---perhaps, the KNS6400 is close but also with weaknesses (see above). Treble is sometimes a little on the bright side, but not as bright as the KNS6400's. Some people may find them bright with bright recordings, but the headphones should not be blamed for that. These produce very neutral and accurate sound. Bass is sufficient and often pleasantly strong in the mid- and upper bass regions, but deeper bass is not covered by these cans. Most music recordings do not contain this deep bass, anyway.

I summarize my findings with the following top two picks:

1. Shure SRH440: These are the headphones you can safely choose under $100 if what you are looking for is accurate, neutral sound.

2. Tascam TH-02: This is a secret gem. At $30, you get really good closed cans. Its overall presentation is not as clear as the SRH440's, but with their price factored in, you cannot complain. They are definitely in the same league as the AKG K518LE (foam pads removed) and the Creative Aurvana Live. It may depend on personal preference, but among the three, my pick is the Tascam. The Creative has a better look and feel, but I'd choose the Tascam for its sound.

As the green energy dominoes continue to fall, one of the major climate cult propaganda machines falls with them. //

As we enter the year’s final phase, I am becoming more hopeful that 2023 may be remembered as an essential point in human civilization as the threat to critical and efficient energy supplies begins to recede.

Sweden’s government has ditched plans to go all-in on “green energy,” green-lighting the construction of new nuclear power plants. Fossil fuel giant Shell announced it was scaling back its energy transition plans to focus on . . . gas and oil! Specific wind farm projects began to topple due to strong economic headwinds because the cost of generating electricity was deemed too high.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his decision to open the North Sea to more oil and gas drilling. French President Emmanuel Macron is surrendering to reality and asked for a “regulatory pause.”. More recently, the US and the United Kingdom have committed to expanding nuclear energy, and offshore windfarm projects are going kaput.

Now comes intriguing confirmation that there may be an end to the mindless and unscientific promotion of green energy sooner rather than later. One of the climate crisis propaganda machines is closing its climate desk. //

Neo | November 24, 2023 at 7:57 pm
The dam on Climate Change hysteria seem to break after ExxonMobil broke ranks saying that to reach NetZero 2050 would require sacrifices that society would not accept. //

broomhandle | November 24, 2023 at 8:14 pm
How much advanced nuclear technology could have been developed with all the resources wasted on green energy follies? Maybe that was the point all along.

Gordian Knot News just turned two. The number of posts is over 100. Way too many. Our new subscribers need to understand that most of these posts are redundant detail. If they are truly interested in solving the Gordian Knot, they should focus on the A List.

The core argument is simple. Humanity needs cheap nuclear power. Cheap nuclear power is the only way the species can prosper. If and only if we have cheap nuclear power, can we lift billions of humans out of poverty. If and only if we have cheap nuclear power, can we stop polluting out planet's atmosphere and conserve its land.

It is a simple argument based on dispatchability, energy density, natural resources required, and the amount of CO2 and other pollutants generated. The numbers are so overwhelmingly obvious, they beg the question: why is nuclear not our totally dominant source of electricity? Why has nuclear power been such a tragic flop?

You do not need 100 posts to answer this question. I need twelve. Everything else is redundant detail.

With the introduction of SAS 12Gbps, seems like "it's time" to do a braindump on SAS.

Work in progress, as usual.

History

By the late '90's, SCSI and PATA were the dominant technologies to attach disks. Both were parallel bus multiple drop topologies and this kind of sucked. SATA and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) evolved from those, using a serial bus and hub-and-spoke design.

Early SATA/150 and SATA/300 were a bit rough and had some issues, as did SAS 3Gbps. You probably want to avoid older controllers, cabling, expanders, etc. that doesn't support 6Gbps because some of it has "gotchas" in it. In particular a lot of it has 2TB size limitations. Most 3Gbps hard drives are fine though.

Similarities, Differences, Interoperability

SAS and SATA operate at the same link speeds and use similar cabling. SAS normally operates at a higher voltage than SATA and can run over longer cabling.

SAS and SATA use different connectors on the drive. The SATA drive connector has a gap between the signal and power sections, which allows separate power and data cables to be easily connected. The SAS drive connector does not have a gap, and instead has a second set of pins on top. This second set of pins is the second (redundant) SAS port. There are pictures of the top and the bottom of the drive connector.

SATA drives can be attached to a SAS port. Electrically, the SAS port is designed to allow attachment of a SATA drive, and will automatically run at SATA-appropriate voltages. Physically, the SAS backplane connector has an area that will allow either the gapless SAS or the gapped SATA connector to fit. See picture of SAS backplane socket.

SAS drives are incompatible with SATA ports, however, and a SATA connector will not attach to an SAS drive. Don't try. The gap is there to block a SAS drive from being connected to typical SATA cabling, or to a SATA backplane socket.

When a SATA drive is attached to a SAS port, it is operated in a special mode using the Serial ATA Tunneling Protocol (STP).

Once we open the path to the stars, we set humans on a quest for eternity that this life can never fulfill. //

All but a small few have no idea whether we can colonize Mars. The technological subjects overawe most minds. But all must consider whether we should colonize Mars and eventually other planets in distant solar systems.

We, indeed, face a fork in the road of human destiny, and we should consciously plot our course. //

Musk has given a compelling philosophical defense of multiplanetary colonization. In an interview with Google co-founder Larry Page, Musk said that “human consciousness is a precious flicker of light in the universe, and we should not let it be extinguished.” //

In Perelandra, the second book of his Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis described the motivation behind humanity’s quest for interplanetary colonization.

“It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start.”

He warned that if man ever had “the power … put into its hands” to reach distant planets, then it would “open a new chapter of misery for the universe.” //

Maybe we can tolerate some losses of native extraterrestrial species for the preservation of the human species. And maybe humans will perpetually land on worlds with nothing but raw materials. But we need to determine whether God gave us our native terrestrial ball to govern, as Lewis contended, or whether he gave us a universe to govern. //

Once we open the path to the stars, however, we set humans on a quest for eternity that this life can never fulfill. The only hope of eternally maintaining the light of human consciousness is in the Holy Spirit. Musk’s dream for mankind might turn into a nightmare that stretches across galaxies and millennia.

anon-y65w frylock234
42 minutes ago
So, pandas with the bamboo may be with the koalas in the obligate herbivore category. Slow and derpy is a great description! //

What other evidence do we need that this isn't about peaceful Muslims just seeking a secular utopia? It is clear that this is about the "Palestinian" pursuit of genocide against Jews, and they keep telling everyone that. Why else would they go out of their way to partially destroy a memorial to a man whose only sin is being Jewish? That wasn't a memorial to the State of Israel they threw red paint on and scrawled "free Palestine" on.

Understand that these people do not want to assimilate and live in unity. They want to conquer. Unable to do so militarily, Islamists have settled on activism as a means to enact their will, and they've found willing allies in naive, vapid leftists who see everything through the prism of the oppressed and the oppressor. It doesn't matter that no entity in history has oppressed and colonized more people than Islam. Muslims are generally poor and generally not white (at least not in the contemporary sense). Thus, according to liberal orthodoxy, they garner a high-ranking position on the intersectional hierarchy.

PETA
@peta
·
Follow
We’re lucky turkeys would never do this to us—you don’t have to do it to them, either.

Art by @freebison
Readers added context
Turkeys are not vegetarians. Turkeys eat mice, lizards, frogs, and just about anything they can fit in their mouth. If turkeys were larger or had the technological means to farm and eat humans, their current diet reveals they likely would.

ipm.ucanr.edu/home-and-lands…
Context is written by people who use X, and appears when rated helpful by others. Find out more.
6:00 PM · Nov 22, 2023

Dr. Tororu
@DrTororu
·
Follow
Replying to @peta and @FREEBISON
This picture is fake .

Turkeys don’t celebrate Thanksgiving sitting around a table. They sit on a table resting on a platter.
7:57 PM · Nov 22, 2023 //

#ThePersistence
@ScottPresler
·
Follow
Do you ever post about how many birds are killed by wind turbines?
8:22 PM · Nov 23, 2023 //

frylock234
an hour ago
The dirty little secret most vegans would like to ignore is that while there are a decent number of obligate carnivores in the world (felines being the most obvious that people know of), there are very, very few obligate herbivores. "Obligate" here means they subsist on a diet consisting solely of that type of food. Cats need exclusively meat, but most of the animals we tend to think of herbivores are not obligate. They can and will snack on animal protein if the opportunity presents ... it's just that it doesn't happen often and we seldom catch them at it. Birds like turkeys, chickens, etc., are more likely to be caught at it because they're fairly active hunters. Chickens are great at keeping insect pests out of your garden and they'll eat mice and other small animals they can catch. But your average cow is not above nibbling on the meat on a fresh kill if they come across it; they just don't possess the machinery or instincts to hunt effectively so you almost never see that happen.

If you want an obligate herbivore, try koalas for one of the few. They have to eat eucalyptus, and as a consequence, they are pretty slow and derpy as a survival mechanism.

anon-y65w frylock234
42 minutes ago
So, pandas with the bamboo may be with the koalas in the obligate herbivore category. Slow and derpy is a great description!

We picked 20 time-travel movies and rated them by scientific logic and entertainment value.

When you've gotta go, you've gotta go. In the case of a Glendale, Wisconsin, car thief, while fleeing police last Wednesday, he picked not only the wrong time and the wrong place but the wrong witnesses. //

Now, consider if you will, the structure of your basic port-a-potty. Having spent a week in Army Basic Training cleaning these receptacles while our company was on "detail week," I can safely say I'm very familiar with how they work, and the basic structure of these things has not changed since the early '80s; there is, of course, the tall plastic shell, with a door that locks from the inside, the appropriate receptacles for both setters and pointers and a tank beneath filled with chemicals into which the products of micturition and defecation are deposited. (When I was a kid back in Northeast Iowa we had the kind that just went over a hole in the ground, but the images of the port-a-potty in this case are clearly of the more modern sort.) //

With that firmly in mind, consider the likely consequences of one of these being tipped on its side, and what might happen to a person within that unit when it is tipped over. Yes, that's right; stuff that one would expect to find on the streets of San Francisco would instead be covering the fleeing felon, along with the other aforementioned chemicals and by-products. Not that I have a lot of sympathy for a car thief, even if he is dealing with a lot of crap. It is, however, appropriate to feel some sympathy for the police officers who had to transport the befouled perpetrator, covered as he almost certainly was in the stuff sometimes cast on City Hall steps as a form of protest. //

Clearly, the suspect pitted himself against the wits and willingness of the golfer, and the suspect came off Number Two. He was arrested and taken to jail, where, presumably, he was given a towel to wipe away his worries. Still, a car was stolen, and that stinks. //

Kudos to the quick-thinking golfer who knew at a glance how to deal with a sticky situation. At least the thief and his less-smelly compatriots were caught; in that, at least, everything came out all right. //

pat
2 days ago
You forgot to mention, the soup pours out of the bowl onto the backside of the now door which is the floor that the fleeing feces is now laying on, unable to stand up. I am sure when the police finally had him, he refused to come clean, though he needed to. They probably gave him the turd degree before they did the final paperwork. //

Mark-0
2 days ago
I bet I know what his first two words were.

For storing rarely used secrets that should not be kept on a networked computer, it is convenient to print them on paper. However, ordinary barcodes can store not much more than 2000 octets of data, and in practice even such small amounts cannot be reliably read by widely used software (e.g. ZXing).

In this note I show a script for splitting small amounts of data across multiple barcodes and generating a printable document. Specifically, this script is limited to less than 7650 alphanumeric characters, such as from the Base-64 alphabet. It can be used for archiving Tarsnap keys, GPG keys, SSH keys, etc.

On 18/03/2022 00:07, Colin Percival wrote:

On 3/17/22 08:17, Arthur Chance wrote:

Is it possible to invalidate an existing tarsnap key so it cannot be
used in future. I have a key for a decommissioned machine so it's no
longer needed and hypothetically it could be used for DoS attack (by
creating bogus archives and draining the account funds). Obviously this
is impossible unless the key leaks somehow, but operational paranoia
would suggest invalidating it would be a good idea.

The API for disabling keys is "send Colin an email". ;-)

So API = Application Programmer's Initiative. :-)

On Sun, Apr 04, 2021 at 10:37:47AM -0700, jerry wrote:

Ideas?  Right now, I'm experimenting with printed barcodes.

You might be interested in:
https://lab.whitequark.org/notes/2016-08-24/archiving-cryptographic-secrets-on-paper/
which was written specifically for tarsnap keys.

Cheers,

• Graham Percival