The author has some valid points (i.e. people criticise business decisions made to appease shareholders without realising they may be the shareholders in a roundabout way) but chose some rather odd examples as proof.
Relativistic effects are observed with many other 6th and 7th period elements. For example, the yellow colour of gold and caesium comes from altered electron energy levels due to relativistic orbital contraction, so are the special catalytic and bonding properties of platinum.
OP claimed relativistic effects explain why mercury is liquid at room temperature. That may be part of the story, but it isn't the whole thing, since other heavy elements are not liquid at room temperature.
Explaining relativistic effects in plain text forums to a general audience is a big ask, but here is a link to the first study[0] that gave evidence but it has long expected.
That still doesn't answer why these relativistic effects don't cause neighbouring elements to be liquid. Electron velocities should be quite similar for them. There must be something apart from relativistic effects that makes mercury special in that regard.
Gold is right next door, relativistic effects shrink both Gold and Mercury’s 6s orbitals.
In gold it changes the color, in Mercury it changes freezing temperature.
Gallium has a low melting point 29.76C but that is due to unique chemical bonding.
"relativistic contraction" (shrinking of s and p orbitals) and "relativistic expansion" (destabilization of d and f orbitals) causes many observed phenomena.
Relativistic contraction of the 6s orbital and expansion of the 5d orbital lower the energy required to excite electrons. Consequently, gold absorbs blue light.
Strong relativistic contraction of the outer 6s electrons leaves them tightly bound and unavailable for metallic bonding. This results in incredibly weak atomic interactions, thus mercury a liquid at room temperature.
Lead also has 6s, which is what makes lead acid batteries work as well as they do.
So while the observed effects change, there are relativity effects with several nearby neighbors.
I think you still misunderstood the question. Noone asked if there are relativistic effects with neighbors. In fact, it was said at the very beginning that they certainly have these relativistic effects too. The actual question is why are gold/thallium/cadmium etc. not liquid. There must be something apart from relativistic effects that explains why mercury turns into liquid at room temperature and these others don't.
I think a relatively simple explanation is that on one hand mercury is liquid due to its closed-shell (a bit "noble-gas-like") electron configuration: [Xe] 4f14 5d10 6s2 and that it since its electrons are paired it makes it less energetically favorable to create strong bonds. So consequently Hg does not form conventional, strong covalent bonds (although it probably does form some weak van der Waals complex) like, for example, gold (with the unpaired electron on 6s orbital so [Xe] 4f14 5d10 6s1 configuration) and other "horizontally neighboring" elements which consequently create stronger bonds. However, this alone is not enough and would not explain why Cd isn't liquid.
And here come the relativistic effects, which essentially scale with nuclear charge of the nucleus come to play and they are significantly stronger for Hg than Cd. If I remember correctly (although I read about it a long time ago so I may be a bit rusty) these strong relativistic effects cause something called "relativistic contraction of the 6s orbital" which results in the electrons on this orbital being more strongly bound than they would be, if there would be no relativistic effects (which can be theoretically compared by setting c -> infinity in the equations used to solve electronic structure theory). AFAIR Copernicium should also be liquid in room temperature for similar reasons, but since it is not very long lived and it is difficult to produce testing this will likely be very hard if not impossible to check (though if I remember correctly there was something called "relativistic maximum" which happens in the 6th and not 7th row of periodic table for some reason, so it should be higher than for mercury; though I can't remember the details why this is so).
Of course this is a bit simplified picture and there are surely more details regarding how exactly relativistic effects influence the energies and consequently how this influences the melting temperature of mercury (I suppose they are in the Calvo, Pahl, Wormit and Schwerdtfeger paper linked earlier in this thread), but I think the combination of the electron configuration and strong relativistic effects explain why other neighbors are not liquid.
A lot of earlier digital timepieces come with arbitrary date range limits and I have always wondered what is the reason behind such limitations.
For example, a lot of camera date backs (used to physically embed time and date on film) could not be set to any date post a certain year, most commonly 2020 but I’ve also seen 2019 and 2029 as cutoffs. Even models that has a 4 digit year format isn’t immune from this issue, and sometimes it’s possible to bypass it by setting the date to Dec 31 2020, let the it roll over naturally to Jan 1 2021 and you will then be free to fast forward the date.
Maybe it’s similar to the YEAR 10000 bug on modern Windows OS where many internal variables could overflow beyond a certain datum so it would make sense to prevent it in the front end.
This paper you linked does not even involve aspartame. The only sweetener they experimented with is saccharin. You can check out the main figures from the link below:
I would be very reluctant to read too deep into this given saccharin is known to behave very differently in animal models - for a long time it was thought to cause bladder cancer, but follow up studies proved that it’s an idiosyncratic reaction only found in female lab rats and no other gender/species combination. Not to mention the dose used was unrealistic to begin with.
It’s entirely plausible that sugar analogs like sucralose and non-calorific sugar alcohols such as erythritol and maltitol can cause long term changes in the gut biome but high quality evidence is still lacking.
Scenario C is more likely the culprit. I have seen multiple examples of prebuilt PCs and laptops defaulting to software RAID mode for reasons unknown, and they did not always have a toggle just like in OP’s case.
The only time I have come across scenario B was with a VAIO laptop from around 2011. The machine was advertised to come with “fastest SSD on the market” which turned out to be four (!) off the shelf eMMC modules in RAID 0 through a hardware controller. As janky as it sounds, OS compatibility was never an issue because the controller was a fairly common model with well established driver support rather than some bespoke mystery.
IMO this is still a passive type of security through obfuscation. Active defence would be more like returning zip bombs to known intruders in order to crash the process.
It appears it can be configured to actively return attacks:
> Portspoof can be used as an 'Exploitation Framework Frontend', that turns your system into responsive and aggressive machine. In practice this usually means exploiting your attackers' tools and exploits
There's tons of client software that can be exploited if you send a dangerous payload to it. Think of an exploitable version of Curl that will fail if it receives a bad http header.
I would guess that it fingerprints the scanning software (e.g. metasploit), then feeds a payload back to it that has a known exploit in the scanning script.
The other parties you mentioned would probably have less motivation to preserve it, let alone restore it to a fully functional state. I find it rather bizarre that many posters here seem to think that it’s morally preferable for the TV set to rot in Japan rather than getting the proper care in the hands of an American collector, all because of some imaginary cultural baggage.
Heh it strikes me that while the stakes of this "relic" are kinda low, it echos the conversations about institutions like the British Museum possessing historic artefacts :) some claim there is moral argument for it keeping its artefacts, because Britain can best preserve them and protect them from damage.
Responsibility and autonomy to preserve one's own heritage (with the associated risk of failing to do so) is a longstanding ethical dilemma between cultures, and the answers aren't so clear imho! (This argument is much more compelling for museums, rather than Sony)
Yes, I am aware of those arguments and I am inclined to agree with you. Compared to cultural artifacts which are mostly neutral in terms of externalities, relics of the industrial era suffer more from the cobra effect.
Others in this thread have bought up the future of ICEs and classic car preservation. Back in the early 2000s the US government offered people cash incentives to dispose of their fuel inefficient cars, and by disposal they meant running the engine with an abrasive liquid instead of oil until it is totally ruined beyond repair. Mechanics will tell you horror stories of rare car models being destroyed this way so the owners can claim a few hundred bucks from the DOT. I'm sure car collectors had a field day back then but with such a glut in the market they could not save everything that's worth saving.
Shank Mods was able to obtain a copy of the service manual in English from somebody in the US. This fact probably means that the TV was sold on (or imported to) the domestic US market for a while. (Sony have always allowed individuals to order parts through an authorised service centre, and the latter often insist on requesting a repair manual first even if you are 100% sure of the part number) It's very likely that a number of them existed in the US only to be unceremoniously thrown out by their owners when LCD TVs became more popular. I bet nobody batted an eyelid when that happened.
> Others in this thread have bought up the future of ICEs and classic car preservation. Back in the early 2000s the US government offered people cash incentives to dispose of their fuel inefficient cars, and by disposal they meant running the engine with an abrasive liquid instead of oil until it is totally ruined beyond repair. Mechanics will tell you horror stories of rare car models being destroyed this way so the owners can claim a few hundred bucks from the DOT. I'm sure car collectors had a field day back then but with such a glut in the market they could not save everything that's worth saving.
But what else happened with that?
The glut ended. Used cars got more expensive relative to quality.
And now the cost of a 'reliable used car' is far more than inflation adjusted for the time passed.
getting back on topic...
> unceremoniously thrown out by their owners when LCD TVs became more popular. I bet nobody batted an eyelid when that happened.
IDK about all that, during the 'LCD Phase-in' everyone I knew either donated theirs and/or moved CRTs into smaller rooms when they replaced a working one.
Especially if it was 'Decent' TV, i.e. Progressive scan and component input...
Let alone if the thing cost as much new as a very nice car of the day. The sheer responsibility of it (thinking more, you really can't throw this thing out unceremoniously, at minimum it's part of a house or business space eviction proceeding...) has some weight, ironically.
> everyone I knew either donated theirs and/or moved CRTs into smaller rooms when they replaced a working one.
That might have happened for a while but by 2008-ish CRTs were being dumped left right and center. My city runs a annual kerbside collection program for large appliances and furniture, and I distinctly remember metal scavengers cruising the street gutting old CRTs people have left out for the copper coils, leaving whatever remains to be collected as hazardous e-waste. Around the same time, my parents got rid of a 16:10 CRT IDTV they bought in the 90s and semi-forced me to throw out a 21 inch IBM P275 I had because "it's using too much power".
In any case I doubt any corporate (or rich household) owner of a 47 inch CRT back then would think too much about replacing it with a larger screen that took up less space. After all it's just another piece of asset that has depreciated to zero value on their books.
> That might have happened for a while but by 2008-ish CRTs were being dumped left right and center.That might have happened for a while but by 2008-ish CRTs were being dumped left right and center.
Maybe I just grew up poorer than you but it took longer than that in my world.
> my parents got rid of a 16:10 CRT IDTV they bought in the 90s
Yeah meanwhile some of us had to deal with a Zenith TV that would 'jump' with a PS1 and other consoles on the RF/AV output because 'lord knows why'.
> and semi-forced me to throw out a 21 inch IBM P275 I had because "it's using too much power".
Given the other context of your comments I doubt this is a confession of contribution of hubristic affluence contributing to our modern disposable society but I feel like this underscores the point I'm trying to make in my reply.
Resourceful not-well-off people used to really appreciate repairable things, and the worst thing C4C did was get rid of a lot of not-fuel-efficient vehicles that were at least cheap to repair.
The video of that TV and the pair further underscores it. Everything on decently laid out boards. Nowadays an LCD tv, sometimes a part can go bad and it's so integrated that even 15 years ago it could be a 30 min solder job, nowadays it's cuck the whole shebang.
> In any case I doubt any corporate (or rich household) owner of a 47 inch CRT back then would think too much about replacing it with a larger screen that took up less space. After all it's just another piece of asset that has depreciated to zero value on their books.
Corporate maybe but I'd guess any smart corporation would try to load the 'disposal' costs of a 440 pound object onto the taker somehow. Similar for any rich household that wanted to keep wealth for more than a generation or two.
> Given the other context of your comments I doubt this is a confession of contribution of hubristic affluence contributing to our modern disposable society but I feel like this underscores the point I'm trying to make in my reply.
Let me assure you that none of what I said was meant to diminish your point of view which I agree with mostly.
What I was trying to convey was that people’s mindsets were rather different during the last decade of CRT. CRT had been around since the end of WWII, it may have gotten bigger over the years but the form it took on largely remained the same so there was a sense of continuity as people handed down old TVs when they got something nicer.
When cheap LCD TVs came to the market it represented something more akin to a paradigm shift as people with limited space at home could now easily own screens 30 inches and up. My parents are actually rather frugal with my dad borders on being a tech hoarder who insist on keeping every single cell phone and laptop he ever owned somewhere in his garage. However even he was unable to justify the sheer bulk and running cost of CRT TVs back in that period. Even if he were to give it away there would have been very few takers of any.
Therefore it’s not inconceivable that this model could have been sold in the US or even few more places outside Japan. Most of them simply disappeared without a trace because at some point they were probably worth less than the space it occupies, and people were overly eager to embrace the flat panels without realising that they are not getting some of the utilities back.
I keep all my old cell phones too, but I had to get rid of a run of them from around 1998 - 2008 because the plastic started turning sticky a while back.
> not-fuel-efficient vehicles that were at least cheap to repair.
You don’t need to drive that much for fuel inefficiency to get really expensive. Even 10k miles/year which is well below average at 10MPH vs 30MPH @ 3$ / gallon is an extra 2,000$ / year, and adjusted for inflation gas is currently fairly cheap. Inflation adjusted in 2011 and 2012 gas was over 5$/gallon.
We might see consistent low gas prices intended to delay the EV transition (or the could spike), but these cars were already old 15 years ago when the program happened.
> Others in this thread have bought up the future of ICEs and classic car preservation. Back in the early 2000s the US government offered people cash incentives to dispose of their fuel inefficient cars, and by disposal they meant running the engine with an abrasive liquid instead of oil until it is totally ruined beyond repair.
Those were wild times. I remember they also had a similar scheme in Germany. Absolute madness (and that's even if you ignore the useless damage to old cars.)
They should have just printed more money to juice the economy, instead of these wild schemes to give subsidies to specific industries.
> Back in the early 2000s the US government offered people cash incentives to dispose of their fuel inefficient cars, and by disposal they meant running the engine with an abrasive liquid instead of oil until it is totally ruined beyond repair.
So. Fucking. Stupid. As though Joe Consumer with a V8 Mustang he puts a few thousand miles on per year is the boogeyman of climate change, and not, hell just off the dome:
> "As though Joe Consumer with a V8 Mustang he puts a few thousand miles on per year is the boogeyman of climate change"
Scrappage schemes target the smokey, rusty shit-boxes that are worth next to nothing. Not Joe Mustang's prized V8, which would be worth far more than the value of the incentive anyway.
And when it comes to old cars, reducing local air pollution is often the major concern. Not just climate change.
Cash for Clunkers did exactly what it was intended to do: It screwed up the used car market for a very long time, simply by decreasing supply while demand remained.
People still needed cars, and everything is relative. When used car prices go up relative to that of new cars, then new cars become relatively inexpensive.
This helps sell more new cars. And back in the time of "too big to fail" auto industry bailouts, selling more new cars was kind of important.
edit: And remember, there were restrictions for Cash for Clunkers. The car had to be less than 25 years old, it had to run, and it had to have been registered and insured for the last 12 months. It was deliberately designed to thin the pool of functional used vehicles.
This program claimed revered cars like Audi Quattros and BMW E30s...along with V8 Mustangs. And once turned in, they were all quite purposefully destroyed: Sodium silicate replaced the engine oil and they were run at WOT until they seized, and then they were crushed just to be sure.
According to Wikipedia only about 677k vehicles were takes out of the market. In 2009 there were about 254 million registered cars in the US so did it really put a dent in the market?
That's the number of "registered vehicles" in the US, which is going to include everything from Joe Everyman's Mazda to every single truck AT&T uses to maintain what they assert strongly is a data network (sorry little snark there). A better thing to compare to would be the number of used cars sold. A quick google says about 35 million sales are known for 2008, comprising dealer, private, and independent sales. Taking the 677k figure at face value, that would amount to roughly 2% of the "moving" supply of vehicles being removed from the market, and worth noting, the taxpayer paid for that. Also worth noting that figure is going to be inherently conservative, because that's "all used vehicle sales" which includes things like rental companies unloading older inventory, logistics companies selling trucks, that sort of thing.
That isn't a ton but it also isn't nothing, and however you feel about it, that's 677,000 vehicles that were, according to the requirements laid out by the program, perfectly serviceable daily-driver vehicles that were in active use, that taxpayers paid to buy from consumers, strictly to destroy them. Irrespective of if it ruined the used market as the GP says, that's still a shit ton of perfectly usable machines that our government apportioned tax money to buy, and then paid contractors to destroy, on purpose.
maybe the used market salesman used it as an excuse to sell used cars more expensive.
how much did the price go up because of 2%? and all other factors excluded. even inflation is 2% a year. so thats one year. sorry but i dont buy it made a dent in the used car market. proof it to me with numbers etc please otherwise it sounds like the usual useless rant about „everything is getting worse without proof“
On aggregate, in a ridiculously-competitive market like commodity used cars that is generally free of collusion, salesmen do not get to determine sale prices.
That's simply not a thing when the other guy down the block will sell a similar car for $300 less and have his money today.
Any salesman can ask for whatever price they wish to ask for, and if it doesn't sell then there is simply no sale. (The annals of Ebay, to name one dataset that can be poked at, is rife with asking prices for things that simply did not sell.)
(This is one of the very few things that the "invisible hand of the free market" actually assures us of: Sure! A salesperson can ask $16000 for a car that is worth $6000. But if they sit on that car for years and years hoping for a bite that never comes, then maybe they can eventually sell it for $3000 -- losing money the entire time, for ever step of the process.
And while that's an example of how sales can happen, it is not an example of how sales both work and make money.
Used car salesmen do not butter their bread by losing money on sales. That's not a thing at all.)
I don't know the details of the US programme, but London's recent successful scrappage scheme had a limit of £2000 for cars/vans and £1000 for motorcycles [1].
Only "dirty" vehicles that do not meet modern emissions standards qualified. And it only makes sense to scrap your vehicle if it's worth less than the £2000 payment you'd get by scrapping it. So nobody is scrapping modern, good quality vehicles: you'd just sell it instead and get more money.
hmmm i dont know. ancient artifacts sometimes highlight the technical and artistic possibilities of the time. In my opinion this tv represents very good consumer culture in the 80s as do amphitheaters in rome and greece their consumer culture.
Though I don't think anyone would have wanted it, I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy there. Maybe in theory there would have been a place for this in a curated space in Japan... if not for it being so massive at least.
Ultimately if it was a TV designed in Japan, having it on display at a local tech museum would be nice. I just don't know where it would go that could deal with the space and the weight.
Closest thing I could think of is the NTT museum, which is ginormous... but it's mostly about NTT's stuff. "Some other company in Japan made big TVs" is a bit less interesting than, say, some older tabulation machines they have there.
> I love gaming, and I destress by playing games, but it's not worth the now much higher opportunity cost to play the newer (usually worse) stuff.
This appears to be the reason with all the recent remakes of “not so old” games. People like us are much more likely to pay to relive our past joys in 4K resolution.
However a part of me often wonders if video games have got to the point where every viable idea has been attempted and it’s only downhill from here. When I was a teen, I definitely did NOT envision myself still playing Age of Empires 2 PvP with strangers online but scene is still here.
There is a system wide setting that changes all non-Unicode text encoding to another code page e.g CP932 for Shift-JIS. Third party tools are available to do the same conversion on a per application basis.
It’s not as bad as trying to load some really old CJK web pages on mobile devices: few mobile browser has an accessible option to select character encoding and there appears to be none on iOS. The only option is to change the system language and that didn’t always work for more obscure character codes.
