StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Surlethe wrote:Is there anything about the landslide that is necessarily caused by Heaven? It may be that humans start blaming Heaven for any catastrophe, even though Yahweh's angels might've had nothing to do with it.

"In a way, yes. DIMO(N) were interested of course and Baines knows Revelations and all the derivative material intimately. Unhealthily intimately in my opinion, but he's the best we've got for tracking down this sort of thing.

XaLEv wrote:How exactly is any sort of mitochondrial analysis applicable to anthrax? I'm not aware of any prokaryotes having mitochondria.

Stuart wrote:Arden's work area filled up as the investigators crowded around to look at the display. The green line left on it was remarkable. The baseline showed a small amount of grass, random noise that couldn’t be predicted or ever quite eliminated but the spike that was left had, quite definitely never been seen before. It was a straight line, up and down.

"There's no sidebands, no resonance, no echoes nothing." Gail's voice was awed. "It’s a completely pure note."

"That's right. Every musical note there has ever been has been mixed up with all sorts of distortions. Look at them using this equipment and it’s a ragged peak. It goes up in a jagged line, there's a plateau at the top that shows cyclic variations and it goes down in a jagged line. Then there's side-bands and resonances at different frequencies. Lots of them. All the energy transmitted in the note is spread across the area under that line, dispersed, weakened and generally dissipated. Even so, sound's got a lot of punch, we broke things with it quite regularly."

"Like theater manager's hearts?"

"Those too, although most of them deserved it. Some of them never even read the contract, hence the no-green-jellybean rule. Anyway, that's not the case here. The sound is one perfect pulse. Straight up, point, straight down. A perfectly pure note and all the energy is concentrated in that note. Talk about a slam, the energy here," he tapped the screen with a switchblade, "is incredible. This thing, its coherent sound. It's the sonic equivalent of a laser and I'd guess that its just as destructive. It's got about as much resemblance to a musical note as a high-powered laser has to a flashlight."

GrandMasterTerwynn wrote: Mitochondria are, essentially, prokaryotes that entered into a symbiotic relationship with eukaryotes hundreds of millions of years ago, and were gradually shaped into the internal cellular structures they are now by the guiding hand of evolution. This is why mitochondria have DNA that we can use to date eukaryotes. Fortunately for our intrepid heroes, the anthrax genome was fully decoded six years ago. We know that there are just a couple of places on the anthrax genome that put it apart from its harmless soil bacteria relatives. The upshot of this is that our intrepid heroes needed only to extract and analyze the DNA of the angelic anthrax, compare it with those of known strains, and would've come up with the result.

Erik_t wrote:Um, this is painful. Please rethink your explanation, using TK if you have to. I'd prefer no physics to buttfucked physics.

Stuart wrote:

GrandMasterTerwynn wrote: Mitochondria are, essentially, prokaryotes that entered into a symbiotic relationship with eukaryotes hundreds of millions of years ago, and were gradually shaped into the internal cellular structures they are now by the guiding hand of evolution. This is why mitochondria have DNA that we can use to date eukaryotes. Fortunately for our intrepid heroes, the anthrax genome was fully decoded six years ago. We know that there are just a couple of places on the anthrax genome that put it apart from its harmless soil bacteria relatives. The upshot of this is that our intrepid heroes needed only to extract and analyze the DNA of the angelic anthrax, compare it with those of known strains, and would've come up with the result.

Well. if you'd like to rewrite the paragraph (I'm not a molecular biologist), that would be fine.

Force Lord wrote:Why I'm seeing SDN people in that story?

Vehrec wrote: One of the other problems with this is that by the time you run a Polymerase Chain Reaction and sequencing of the strain's genome, several days or a week may have passed, putting many of the sensitives out of commission before anything is known. On the other hand, without any antibiotic resistance at all, the anthrax would have gone down very quickly in the face of treatment. So given the nature of the disease and the research that needs to be done on it, it's very likely that this is after the majority of cases have run their course.

Stuart wrote:

Erik_t wrote:Um, this is painful. Please rethink your explanation, using TK if you have to. I'd prefer no physics to buttfucked physics.

Actually, its what we've been doing with sonar equipment for the last forty years. Using signal processing to compress the transmission pulse to as brief and intense a level as possible, tightening it up so that it is spread over the smallest possible range of frequences and eliminating sidelobes and harmonics. All of that with teh specific intent of concentrating as much energy as possible into the smallest possible pulse in terms of frequency coverage. I've just pushed it to the ultimate level where the energy in the pulse is concentrated into a single frequency spike with no spread or harmonics.

Stuart wrote: Actually, its what we've been doing with sonar equipment for the last forty years. Using signal processing to compress the transmission pulse to as brief and intense a level as possible, tightening it up so that it is spread over the smallest possible range of frequences and eliminating sidelobes and harmonics. All of that with teh specific intent of concentrating as much energy as possible into the smallest possible pulse in terms of frequency coverage. I've just pushed it to the ultimate level where the energy in the pulse is concentrated into a single frequency spike with no spread or harmonics.

Stan wrote:Keep it up, Stuart. I'm really liking it so far.

Would you like some semi-professional editing?

Baughn wrote:Thanks for the compliment, but my professional field is informatics, not physics. That's just a hobby.

That actually makes my comments stronger, though. If a non-physicist can see this, you can be a lot of other readers will too.

Darth Wong wrote:Excellent! It's nice to see that there is indeed evidence of each nation developing its own covert portal program.

As for the possibility of opening a portal to Heaven, has anyone considered the possibility of going after one of Heaven's weak spots, ie- Yahweh's enormous ego? We still don't know how to get a portal open to Heaven, but I get the impression that Yahweh can still sense human praise (he seems to live on the stuff). So what if we convinced millions of people worldwide to gather together at a specified time and all chant in unison "Yahweh is a coward. He hides in Heaven." over and over? Would he hear it? Would we be able to goad him into opening a portal?

Sidewinder wrote:As Mr. Slade noted, the A-10 is a single-role aircraft, i.e., near useless against a Su-27 or MiG-29, which will get the first shot, as they can fly higher & use air-to-air radar, & the A-10 cannot. As much as you & I love the bird, the only thing it can do against Starscream, Thundercracker, & Skywarp, is run & hide.

erik_t wrote:A long-range Brown Note would be highly disruptive.

Baughn wrote:You could literally send a self-tuning beam of sound towards the aircraft, which will interact with the aircraft to find the best resonance points and dump its energy in there.

As a bonus, this could be why it's staying as a beam at all. It's a living creature.. well, as much as our missiles are.

I know I'd do a double-take on seeing something like that. I might not believe it's possible in real life, but hell, I wouldn't care.