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I came acrosss this semmingly more respected anti grav device within a few link clicks of the article. Though IANAP.

The Podkletnov Effect

Search engine Google relates this guy to the alternative science section...

...somebody claims this. IIRC, someone in the early 80s had claimed to have done this (with "Radio Shack" parts) - I wish I remember where I read this - and of course there's Podkletnov, though the jury's still out on whether it was a hoax or not. Mind you, NASA has its own programme researching this...I'd be curious to hear their take on the issue.

In any case, I'm not sure I believe any of this, but I think it's good that there are people thinking outside the mainstream.

Isn't this just a new take on the Podkletnov effect?

There's the original paper, written in 1992.

There's the Wired article by Charles Platt which goes into detail exactly what happened after he published the first paper.

And finally there's a web site on Gravity called Quantum Cavorite. It seems to be rational, although somewhat optimistic. The main lanl.gov site also has some great material on the two big approaches to G: spin foams & loops (general relativity guys) and noncommutative string geometry (particle physics guys).

What I find really strange about this paper is that after being ignored for years, not having anyone being able to repeat his results reliably and refusing to help out NASA in verifying his methods, the guy is not only back for more, but he's proposing a theory which he says invalidates General Relativity. This looks as suicidal as <obSlash>a startup company proposing to wipe out Microsoft</obSlash>...

There's the original paper, written in 1992.

There's the Wired article by Charles Platt which goes into detail exactly what happened after he published the first paper.

And finally there's a web site on Gravity called Quantum Cavorite. It seems to be rational, although somewhat optimistic. The main lanl.gov site also has some great material on the two big approaches to G: spin foams & loops (general relativity guys) and noncommutative string geometry (particle physics guys).

What I find really strange about this paper is that after being ignored for years, not having anyone being able to repeat his results reliably and refusing to help out NASA in verifying his methods, the guy is not only back for more, but he's proposing a theory which he says invalidates General Relativity. This looks as suicidal as <obSlash>a startup company proposing to wipe out Microsoft</obSlash>...

You want reactionless propulsion, I refer you to James Woodward's application of Mach's Principle. A good rundown can be found at http://inetarena.com/~noetic/pls/woodward.html.

In practice, it's difficult but not inconceivable. The effect gets stronger with the cube of the vibration rate. You need a very fast vibration, and experimentally it's really hard to accurately measure force on something vibrating that fast. So experiments so far have been somewhat inconclusive. The interesting thing is that there's no new physics postulated here--it's all a natural consequence of general relativity.

In practice, it's difficult but not inconceivable. The effect gets stronger with the cube of the vibration rate. You need a very fast vibration, and experimentally it's really hard to accurately measure force on something vibrating that fast. So experiments so far have been somewhat inconclusive. The interesting thing is that there's no new physics postulated here--it's all a natural consequence of general relativity.

'Buckyballs' are molecules of buckminsterfullerene, the third allotrope of carbon (graphite and diamond being the first two). It consists of 60 carbon atoms in a geodesic dome arrangement.

This link has an article all about the discovery and naming of buckminsterfullerene.

Here is a mirror of the MP3 Player portion of the site. The links to the on-line store and the non MP3 player material will still take you back to our (very slow) server, but at least you'll be able to browse the info about the player.

Please use this mirror instead of the google cache, because there were a large number of additions to the web pages in the last couple days, including the GPL'd firmware source code.

I hope you find the player interesting, perhaps even uber pimp (whatever that means?)

I have a fractional T1 service... but "fractional" can mean a lot of different speeds, and in my case it's only 128 kbps. It is expensive to set up a T1 service, but at least in Portland Oregon, it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be.

The most expensive part is the upstream service from an ISP. Most ISPs are quite expensive. I did quite a bit of searching in my area, and I found two with competitive prices. I went with Internet Arena, because the other was some christian place with filtering at their router, and we've all heard about how well filtering software works.

Not far behind the ISP is the telco. In my area, it's GTE. A year ago their prices were lower... it seems strange that they're increased. Unlike the ISP, at least where I live, you're stuck with your local telco. The service is Frame Relay. In Oregon, and probably in many other places, there's no room for a bargain, since the rates are set by a utility commission.

Of course, you then need equipment. I wanted a low cost Linux based solution. At the time, the only real option was Sangoma. They sell a card that goes in your PC that more or less does everything you need. The mounting bracket has one 8 pin jack (same size and shape as an 10baseT ethernet connector) but it's for a T1 line. Like ethernet, only four wires are used, a pair for transmit and a pair for receive. I'll give more details about the wiring below. You can always email me if you're trying to set it up and have a question.

Indeed it is expensive. I don't recall all the costs down to the penny, but here's more or less how it worked out:

• Setup: Samgoma card, $950
• Setup: Telco install fee, $350
• Reoccur: Telco, $123
• Reoccur: ISP, $150

Now I could go on about why I decided to spring for an expensive T1 service, but that's really getting off-topic from and already slightly off-topic post. The main point of this post was to respond with the actual costs of setting up a low speed fractional T1 service.... or at least the actual costs in my area, as they were about a year ago. A secondary purpose was to give a little bit of info about how to do it. To that end, I'll ramble on just a bit more about the setup.

I called both the ISP and the telco and asked about how to set things up. My experience was that it's better and easier to deal with the ISP. Finding a cool ISP is not easy, but they're out there. Dave at Internet Arena is a great guy, so if you're in the Portland area, I'd suggest you give Dave a call. He's got a bunch of other really high speed/moderate cost options for certain areas, using leased T1 lines instead of the telco. Anyway, the point is to talk with ISPs and make a visit to any you want to do business with.

Often times the ISP will call the telco for you to set up all the details, but you can get involved if you want. I did. Each T1 line has a circuit ID number. Your new service will get a number. When you hear your new number, be sure to write it down and don't lose it. You may never need it again, but it's a pain to find someone at the telco who knows enough to look it up if you ever have a problem with the line.

Frame Relay is a protocol, much like the ethernet 802.3 frames. Like IPv4 gives 32 bit IP addresses, frame relay provides DLCI numbers. Unlike IP, a DLCI number is a short integer which is unique only on your line. The phone company establishes Permanent Virtual Connections (PVC) through the frame relay network, by adding routes and doing who knows what else. Ultimately, the PVC will link a DLCI number (short integer) on your your circuit ID (big long number) to a DLCI number on the ISP's circuit ID. You'll probably never use the circuit ID number, but you do need to know the DLCI number to set up the sangoma card.

Since I bought my card, Sangoma has made some major improvements in the setup process (I set up another card for someone a couple months ago). The installer looks a lot like RedHat's text based installation program. It will ask you about for various bit of information, and it'll want to know about each DLCI you have. You'd probably only establish one PVC to your ISP, but it's possible to have lots of PVC to other people, all running on the same line. After the installation, each PVC will appear as an interface. I named mine "fr16", and it looks like this when I run ifconfig:

fr16 Link encap:Frame Relay DLCI HWaddr 4096
inet addr:207.149.244.8 P-t-P:207.149.244.1 Mask:255.255.255.224
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4889031 errors:0 dropped:12 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7655668 errors:136874 dropped:51 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
Interrupt:7 Base address:0x360 Memory:c00de000-c00dffff

From here it's just the usual linux routing things.

Well, that's probably enough rambling on. If anyone reading this is looking to set up a T1 service on linux, on a budget, hopefully this has helped a bit instead of just creating more confusion. It's not cheap, but also not as bad as some people make it out to be.

Actually, embarrassment doesn't do jack to keep people from looking up porn. I work at an ISP that also runs a storefront with internet access by the hour (inetarena.com).

Even though we expressly forbid people to look at porn in the store, they always do... in the window, while sitting next to little kids, and oblivious to the crowds gathering outside the window (seriously!)

Most physicists haved scoffed at the idea because according to known physics, gravity cannot be shielded or amplified. That sort of ridicule strikes me as being terribly close-minded though--any physicist who believes with 100% certainly that everything we think we know about physics is true is a fool. I remember back in university, our final-year physics professor spent an entire class telling us how something that he and his colleagues were teaching us is fundamentally wrong because general relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which work beautifully within their own scope of the universe, simply do not mesh together.

Anyway, see here for all the info you could want on the subject of Podkletnov's experiments as well as papers written by other physicists to explain his results.

__________

Well, there's Woodward's work. Basically, as a result of Mach's principle, it predicts a transient mass fluctuation in an LRC circuit.
It could be the "impulse engine" of ST fame, or the hover cars off the Jetsons...

(Just maybe, it could also provide a large enough mass fluctuation for more exotic uses, like temporary wormhole stabilisation...)

NB. IANAP (I am not a Physicist (...and boy, does it show...))

Woodward carried out a test, which seemed to confirm the theory. However, an unforseen non-linear response in some of the experimental equipment casts doubt on the first results. Even if the fluctuations were a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than observed, it would still be a major breakthrough. NASA seems to think so too, and are, AFAIK, quietly working on a repeat test in their breakthrough propulsion labs...

Anyway, the theory makes interesting reading.

Here's the relevant links:

chaos.fullerton.edu/Woodward.html

www.inetarena.com/~noetic/pls/wo odward.html

Were still seeing physics like this is the 1960's. No we don't have free energy but, some physics labs are having luck, or at least mesureable results with Zero-Point energy devices, working on EM theory based on Tesla. And speaking of the wacky world of electromagnetics here's theory for a reactionless drive: Reactionless Drive. Just because it sounds like Scifi doesn't mean that little green men are at the source of the future. I don't know about antimatter (and why anyone would experiment with it in atmosphere is beyond me, as dangerous as nanotech if we ever get there) but, just because '60's physics can't handle it doesn't mean it can't happen.

These images are mirrored at:

The Force.net

and

My ISP

The second link will only be live for a day or so....just doing my part to offset the slashdot effect. Cheers.