Slashdot Mirror

The development of annular centrifugal contactors began at the National Laboratories more than three decades ago. The first centrifugal contactors were devised at the Savannah River Laboratory (SRL) and, subsequently modified at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) to the form known as the annular centrifugal contactor. A reasonably complete description of the technology has been provided in papers by ANL scientists (1–4). The contactors consist of a vertical centrifuge providing for both the mixing and for the separating of liquids in a single unit. They can be easily interconnected to allow multistage processing. In each contactor, two immiscible liquids are fed into the annulus, formed by the spinning rotor and the stationary housing wall, through different inlets close to the top of the device. The liquids mixed in the annular region are pumped into the rotor bottom. Upon entering the rotor region or separation zone, the liquids are accelerated to the wall with the heavier fluid going to the outside. Each liquid leaves the device through an exit port. Transfer of a species between the two phases depends on the extent of the contacting surface, on the separation between the two phases, and the time of contact between the phases. Centrifugal Contactors: Separation of an Aqueous and an Organic Stream

Seems like he was re-inventing the wheel here, this is COTS, Commercial Of The Shelf, technoloy; and old tech at that. I got interested in it for separating algae from water and for making Biodiesel.

If you follow http://xxx.lanl.gov/list/math/recent there was a fun one *recently*--

"Odd One Out"
http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/1005.2700

Tanya Khovanova
Department of Mathematics, MIT

enjoy

If you follow http://xxx.lanl.gov/list/math/recent there was a fun one *recently*--

"Odd One Out"
http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/1005.2700

Tanya Khovanova
Department of Mathematics, MIT

enjoy

http://xxx.lanl.gov/

(my favourite URL on the web). It only has papers (no data), but almost every paper comes with the LaTeX source. In some fields it has little content. In other fields, (HEP) it has essentially replaced jounals. This is what I can only hope happens to my field.

We have known how to do it for several decades. Scientists at Los Alamos have an active program on using accelerators to transmute nuclear waste, e.g. http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/science21/ATW.html and books have been published on the topic, e.g. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=4912

The problem is simply deciding to build the required facilities and incorporate the cost of making the radioactive material non-radioactive into the cost of producing electricity (which I suspect is the toughest hurdle).

It is also worth noting that if real molecular nanotechnology were available the "separation" part of the equation (producing a stream of pure radioactive isotope ions) would be much easier (and presumably cheaper). All concern regarding long term storage of radioactive isotopes is completely pointless since we will have the technology within this century to completely get rid of them.

They consider 1000x892 pixels high resolution? Last I checked, that was high res circa 1995..

For marketing / PR / Journalist folks that is high-enough res... it'll look OK on a HDTV, a web page, or in a 100 dpi B/W newspaper. They call it a "press" release for a reason, not a science release or a data release.

If you want 2000x1500 or whatever, I think you're asking for the science data, which is not released yet. Usually the way it works with space probes is the folks whom ran it keep the data to themselves for "awhile" before its released to the public. Usually "about a year". No idea how it works with Planck, couldn't even google it.

Since the public doesn't really care (just being honest here) I think the main purpose of early press releases is to intimidate the researchers whom aren't in the inner circle whom have actual data.

I did find a nice description of the HFI "imager" device... Its resolution is about 5 arc minutes depending on frequency, etc.

Your eyes resolution is about 1 arc minute. So, the output of the HFI would be a slightly blurry version of what your eyes see, sort of. Just drink a few beers and drop some acid and look at the stars and you'll be pretty much on your way.

I did not bother researching the other instruments on Planck. Someone with more motivation can do that and gain the karma.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/ftp/astro-ph/papers/0308/0308075.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity

I did wish to point out one of the interesting things about the concept of infinity that some people may not understand... and from your reply it seems that you many not understand, either...

Yes, a set of things that doesn't contain themselves does look a little funny but that is what makes the concept of infinity interesting... (to me, at least... apparently it's just irritating to you).

BTW, found this fun story about infinity that you might enjoy.

http://www.c3.lanl.gov/mega-math/workbk/infinity/inhotel.html

The dominant paradigm since the Apollo Missions was that the Moon was as dry as a bone.

However, a paper was put out recently (before the discovery of water a month ago) proposing a model for water and other volatiles venting out of the interior of the Moon. One of the predictions of this model is that there should be significant subsurface water primarily near the poles. The results from Chandrayaan-1 and LCROSS today confirms that this is true--there is significant subsurface water near the poles. The claims that the water is solely on the surface and due to cometary deposition or solar wind interactions are now blown "out of the water".

This model predicts a lot more water under the surface for potential use in human exploration. w00t!

Check out the paper here: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0909.3832

There's a paper floating around describing a method to use massive amounts of electricity to convert the CO2 in the air to gasoline. They claim that using a nuclear power plant built for the purpose, they can make it a profitable venture at about $5/gallon.

I'm somewhat partial to this one, although it's more conventional.

The water found in these missions is not *necessarily* in small quantities. The research shows that it is present at the near surface, but no one has any clue as to the depth to which it extends. The assumption is being made that the water accumulated there from comet deposition, but there are other mechanisms for water delivery to the surface. A paper posted to the pre-prints server recently shows that there is evidence for water vapor in the interior of the moon that is slowing leaking out along with other volatiles. As the gases reach the upper layers of the regolith, the water freezes out and gets stuck there. Over the course of a few billion years, even a small gas leakage rate could produce large slabs of ice below the surface, exactly the kind of thing that these results confirm. Anyway, it's an interesting idea...

Here is the paper:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0909.3832

Not to mention a certain government lab at the forefront of nuclear research in the world...

Indeed - you are correct by saying geostationary but they are also geosynchronous. GOES and LANL are geosynchronous but are at the zero inclination (this is a special case of geosynchronous orbit - called geostationary). In fact, looking at the LANL satellite page you see they also refer to it as "geosynchronous". Perhaps we use the term loosely but we do use it correctly.

This is wrong. The GOES satellites are geo-synchronous, meaning they remain at continuous location with respect to the Earth. This also means that they are not in polar orbits. These satellites are similar to the LANL satellites but occupy the western hemisphere. You may be thinking of the DMSP satellites.

GOES is useful at measuring the magnetic fields. It does not, however, measure the ionospheric particles such as is done with the SuperDARN coherent scatter radars or the EISCAT or PFISR incoherent scatter radars. The group at the University of Saskatchewan has also received money to build a new radar which is scheduled to be built on the NE corner of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. It will be their 5th radar.

Plan your drive around the missile test schedule http://www.wsmr.army.mil/wsmr.asp?pg=y&page=202

The drive out to the VLA is worth it to see the telescopes, though there's not much in the way of a museum there. http://www.vla.nrao.edu/

I've also heard good things about lanl's Bradbury Museum, but I've never been there. http://www.lanl.gov/museum/

Spaceport America was originally scheduled to have a hangar and terminal in 2010, so there might be something there worth checking out. http://www.spaceportamerica.com/

But:
  "John Singleton of Los Alamos and his collaborators have built a radio transmitter that incorporates a radio wave source that moves superluminally (faster than light). The emitted waves have several unusual properties. For example, they lose much less power over a distance than do ordinary radio waves; thus, they show promise for long-distance, low-power broadcasting applications."

From the link

Ordinary objects can't move faster than light. But consider a line of people where the first person snaps their fingers, then after a delay, the second person snaps theirs, and so on. The "snap" moves down the line with a speed determined by the delay, which can be arbitrarily short. Hence the snap can move arbitrarily fast.

This seems bogus to me - surely the propagation speed of the snap is limited by the speed of light.

radio is light

But: "John Singleton of Los Alamos and his collaborators have built a radio transmitter that incorporates a radio wave source that moves superluminally (faster than light). The emitted waves have several unusual properties. For example, they lose much less power over a distance than do ordinary radio waves; thus, they show promise for long-distance, low-power broadcasting applications."

CC.

Peer reviewed physics paper on CO2 forcing, have fun! :)

A. there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, B. there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, C. the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, D. the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, E. the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, F. thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0707.1161

You're still wrong on "observed" btw, feel free to support your claim.

At what speed do they need to spin in order for them not to collapse?

All current research seems to indicate that eventually -all- orbiting BHs will merge eventually, regardless of spin. When the holes are large and aligned with the orbital angular momentum, it will -delay- merger: the system has to radiate more angular momentum before it can collapse.

One of the first numerical relativity papers to demonstrate this effect can be found here: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0604012

Would you prefer implants to be nuclear powered?

Yes, actually. I'd much rather have a shielded alpha emitter in my chest than a biological organism leaking toxic wastes.

However, if the nanotech sector manages to use magnetics or field manipulation in conjunction with a current in order to induce the fold (with some precision), and can keep the pathways (and the requisite etchers) tiny enough to allow the current to pass, successful micronization of both the assemblers, and the resulting constructions, to the nano level is foreseeable.

One may keep in mind progress (PDF) so far with nanomechanics (HTML).

IBM's recent work with atom manipulation could certainly assist in this endeavor, too.

However, if the nanotech sector manages to use magnetics or field manipulation in conjunction with a current in order to induce the fold (with some precision), and can keep the pathways (and the requisite etchers) tiny enough to allow the current to pass, successful micronization of both the assemblers, and the resulting constructions, to the nano level is foreseeable.

One may keep in mind progress (PDF) so far with nanomechanics (HTML).

IBM's recent work with atom manipulation could certainly assist in this endeavor, too.

http://www.lanl.gov/education/precollege/

Los Alamos (where I work) is always interested in having bright students (of any level, high school and beyond) come and work here. My particular group hosted a high school student last summer. I'm sure the other national labs have similar programs. Just snoop around the website (this might be a place to start for ideas: http://www.lanl.gov/education/profiles/index.shtml), email people who are doing cool things, and you might be surprised at the opportunities that open up.

http://www.lanl.gov/education/precollege/

Los Alamos (where I work) is always interested in having bright students (of any level, high school and beyond) come and work here. My particular group hosted a high school student last summer. I'm sure the other national labs have similar programs. Just snoop around the website (this might be a place to start for ideas: http://www.lanl.gov/education/profiles/index.shtml), email people who are doing cool things, and you might be surprised at the opportunities that open up.

Although that Little Boy replica at Los Alamos might not be as accurate as the previous one they used to have. See here.

... of both Fat Man and Little Boy.

See here, for example.

I just used network x in python, ahref=http://networkx.lanl.gov/rel=url2html-2723http://networkx.lanl.gov/> .
I used network x to visualize graphs. It is pretty simple, but it might be very similar to the ruby solution you described.
It has can interface with many other libraries as here http://networkx.lanl.gov/reference/index.html

Black holes are known to exist in our Galaxy, M31, and NGC 4258. The evidence for black holes is usually provided by ruling out all the other possibilities. An excellent example paper (for M31) is here: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0509839 Actually the slashdot.org crowd could look here for the most relevant science papers on astrophysics: http://xxx.lanl.gov/list/astro-ph/new The people working on this ESO project are all brilliant astronomers.

Black holes are known to exist in our Galaxy, M31, and NGC 4258. The evidence for black holes is usually provided by ruling out all the other possibilities. An excellent example paper (for M31) is here: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0509839 Actually the slashdot.org crowd could look here for the most relevant science papers on astrophysics: http://xxx.lanl.gov/list/astro-ph/new The people working on this ESO project are all brilliant astronomers.

I don't know what field you're in, but LANL pays students pretty well to do lots of things.

An amusing meme, but far from the truth. From a history of Los Alamos Lab :

One resident recalled that "the Hill dwellers were amateur everything: hikers, riders, photographers, ethnographers, mineralogists, musicians, and artists-craftsmen in all assorted fields. Saturday nights they partied and square danced. Sundays they fished or exploited their hobbies."

The parties were frequent and well attended. Resident Jean Bacher recalled that "Saturday nights, the mesa rocked... fenced in as we were, our social life was a pipeline through which we let off steam."

Some of the most brilliant minds of the last century seemed perfectly capable of having fun together and blowing off steam. Maybe this time there will be more LAN parties than square dances, but people will figure out how to get together.

When you mentioned this, I started Googling around but couldn't find any sources for them. Got any favorites?

http://sicortex.com/products/sc072_pds

12 processor chips, 72 (6 cores per chip) 700MHz MIPS64 cores 1.4GLOPS each peak, 48GB RAM, 4GB/s bidirectional peak (yes bytes not bits) Kautz topology RDMA cluster interconnect, less than 300 watts power consumption, the Cray draws up to 1600 watts. Runs MIPS Linux and standard MPI apps. Much much less expensive than the Cray, and this one comes fully loaded. Peak GFLOPS performance is much lower than the Cray "deskside", however the SC072 is a desktop unit, interconnect bandwidth is 4GB/s vs. the Cray's 2.5G/s Infiniband interconnect, meaning a higher percentage of peak parallel performance can be obtained.

Sicortex's really cool machine is this:
http://sicortex.com/products/sc5832

Too bad none of their machines are true shared memory designs. One can perform OpenMP and forking across the 6 cores of a node chip as if it were a 6-way SMP. This opens interesting opportunities for hybrid SMP/MPI code, and some applications have been proven to greatly benefit from such a scheme, one being Parallel Ocean Program, IIRC: http://climate.lanl.gov/Models/POP/

Last February, Los Alamos announced they had a process that converts CO2 to gasoline. The associated white paper proposed using a nuclear reactor to provide the requisite energy to drive the process. They went as far as to estimate the costs of their process and pegged the cost of gasoline at $4.30 gallon at the pump. A significant fraction of their cost estimate was credit costs to finance the plant. They figured 50 cents for every dollar sales given the billions they'd need to start the process. Without factoring the credit costs (which they could do if they could convince enough investors to take an equity position instead of borrowing the capital) they estimated their process produced gasoline at $1.40 per gallon.

You might find this interesting (or might not).

As a preface, "How much physics do you know?": A lot.

Anyway, there was a paper in Astrophysical Journal a few years back, in either 2005 or 2006 from the University of Victoria. They got nice rotation curves for galaxies just from general relativity, without invoking dark matter. Kind of neat.

Mike.

I know a bit of physics too, having studied it at University, and Dark Matter always gave me the impression that when Physicists computed Galactic rotation, they did the typically lazy "good enough for Physics" mathematics and simplified -- they used Newtonian mechanics. I have not seen even one paper or article mentioning relativity. Not surprisingly, at the galactic scale, Newtonian mechanics doesn't quite work out. Soo.. wait for it.. what's the correct answer? There must be a mysterious, magical force out there! It can't possibly be that we used the equations that are generally known to be inaccurate. No sir. No way. This, err.. inaccuracy is caused by something I just discovered! Can I have my Nobel now?

The paper the parent article mentioned is:

General Relativity Resolves Galactic Rotation Without Exotic Dark Matter
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0507619

I think you are still wrong. Inflation happened very early on in the universe - between 1x10-36 seconds and 1x10-32 seconds, which is a very, very short time span. There were no galaxies present to influence at that time. No atoms of any sort as well.

Yes, that's what the authors here are proposing. Differential inflation introduced relative velocities between the particles in the very early universe, which later in turn seeded the primordial density perturbations that formed galaxies. Go read their paper. They state that their theory is about the influence of pre-inflationary inhomogeneities on the motion of current matter. The "dark flow" occurs prior to and during inflation, and persists to this day.

In an earlier paper, the lead author states this more explicitly: "In this scenario, the observed Universe (roughly, the present Hubble volume) represents part of a homogeneous inflated region embedded in an inhomogeneous space-time. On scales beyond the size of this homogeneous patch, the initially inhomogeneous distribution of energy-momentum that existed prior to inflation is preserved, the scale of the inhomogeneities merely being stretched by the expansion".

The point of inflationary theory is not that there were huge parts of the universe causally connected.

Yes, that is the point of inflationary theory (or rather, one of the points): to solve the horizon problem (why was the early universe so uniform on super-horizon scales)? Inflation's answer: because opposite ends of the universe, although they cannot now interact with each other directly, were once in close causal contact. Guth's book is a nice history of this idea. (His original motivation was to solve the monopole problem, but he quickly realized it also solved the horizon, homogeneity, and flatness problems.)

There are preprints of the two relevant papers on astro-ph.

More general version (ApJL)
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0809.3734

More technical version (ApJ)
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0809.3733

There are preprints of the two relevant papers on astro-ph.

More general version (ApJL)
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0809.3734

More technical version (ApJ)
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0809.3733

We need a new moderation: -1 Wikipedia Googlebomb. Yes we know you can look things up in Wikipedia. But every time you make a link to Wikipedia from Slashdot, Wikipedia goes up in the Google Page Rankings. And then people act all surprised when Wikipedia is in the top ten for every Google search. Every time you link to Wikipedia, it gets a little bit more powerful.

So instead, why not link to some other relevant page? In this case, link to the owner of the Roadrunner supercomputer. You can probably even go to Wikipedia to get the link. If Wikipedia has a great page on something, don't link to it, just put the plaintext name in like this: "Search for IBM_Roadrunner on Wikipedia."

Please everybody, stop linking to Wikipedia. You're destroying the internet.

Of course, if it's actually the case that people are dumb, lazy or in marketing, then that would explain why we don't get a full range of stats, even though the tools have existed for many years and are certainly widely known.

My point is that big pharma can afford to pony up for basic research.

They can, but they won't. They'll spend the money on marketing, and making derivitives of existing drugs before they spend much on basic research. Basic research really does need to be publicly funded.

Think about the discovery of GFP, a fluorescent protein that is crucial to a number of revolutionary tools. Do you think any Pharma company would ask their research staff to identify that glowing stuff in jellyfish? Of course not.

Long term, investing in basic research is the best investment a society can make. Unfortunately, companies aren't in it for the long term, or for discoveries they can't control. Public funding is crucial for basic research and the healthy progress of science itself.

Once upon a time in a magical land where sensitive data would from time to time vanish and then reappear, the mainframe WAS the sofa.

Here's a link to the pre-print :

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0105135

jdb2

The geothermal power in America's most accessible locations can be used to drive CO2 from the air into synthetic petrofuels, in large scales, with technologies like Green Freedom (which can also recover old nuke plant infrastructure without wasting it). There is so much geothermal so cheap around the Pacific Rim that we could power everything from it. But even elsewhere in the US the geothermal is plentiful enough that building it there is cost effective. Especially when compared to the pollution from digging up more hydrocarbon, which in the US is coal, which is filthy (both CO2 and radioactive particles). And compared to nukes, the risks are nil.

Before you get down the list to needing to indulge risks and costs like nukes and petrofuels, there's lots of other cheaper, cleaner and less risky alternatives. Wind alone has more power than we consume, if we tap it right. Solar in the Southwest could also make the US a net energy exporter again. And generators like this Anaconda device, or other hydroelectric, could also make more than we consume if deployed correctly with a properly efficient revision.

By the time we get to nukes to produce that much power, we're mining, importing, handling, storing and securing fuel and waste in such large amounts that those costs are much worse than those alternatives. Plus the nuke plants cost a lot to build and demolish. Plus, with such a large number of nukes, built so rapidly by a construction and management industry driven by so much greed and "growing pains", the chances of bad workmanship (especially by the nukes industry, which has such a mafioso record of cutting costs and screwing up) grow very large. And of course the price of any significant failure of a nuke plant is very high, compared to what happens when geothermal, wind, solar or hydroelectric go wrong. And then there's just the overall centralization of nukes, vs the distributed architecture of the alternatives - which also affects efficiency, as electric transmission losses are significant.

Nukes have a compelling power output, and they can indeed be made safer than the ones we've got now (which shows, conversely, that the ones we've got now are riskier than they have to be, yet we build and run them anyway). But they overall fit into an economic and industrial model that started going out a half-century ago: giant, centralized production, a series of single failurepoints stacked in a monopoly of the essential resource. The alternatives have the benefits of distributed systems, of diversity, of localization, as well as their own energetic advantages. Perhaps if the alternatives put us into an "Energy Age" where energy is so cheap that we can afford to invest the huge amounts in nuke tech and fuel management, then nukes could be a dividend. Especially if more plentiful energy makes the world more politically stable, rather than how petrofuels and nukes destabilized the world through the 20th Century. But in the meantime, we must prioritize the lower impact, more reliable alternatives that have better cost:benefit*risk values.

I learned about it at a briefing from John Phillips, chief scientist with the CIA, and I cannot post the distances he was quoting with any more resolution than "surprising" - Sorry.

But be assured that some of the best optics folks in the nation are working stuff like this. And they're really good at it.

Anybody notice the mention of Lockheed Martin in the original article?

Really? Is more outsourcing of sensitive government tasks the way to go? Have we learned nothing from experience...

The federal government outsources just about all of their sensitive science and engineering. Sandia National Lab is run by Lockheed Martin. LANL and LLNL are also run by contractors. Nothing new.

Dear Mr. Znork,

Your post is nearly unique in being short, to the point, totally on target, free of extraneous noise.

I wanted to contact you individually, but didn't see how to do it through your slashdot ID, hence this posted reply.

It appears to me (and to a number of other people who have a bit of reputation in security, which I don't), that self-signed records should be the starting point for "identity" on the network.

"For most purposes it's sufficient to know I'm talking to the same guy I was last time."

You have expressed probably the most important observation in the whole area. Furthermore, without the ability to know that all messages in a conversation come from the same agent, you can't accomplish anything else. And self signature is much easier than chain o' trust. Ergo, identity on the network should be founded on a system of self-signed records, with add-on services as they prove worth the trouble. (Roughly as delivery is founded on best-effort IP, with TCP, ..., HTTP as add-ons.)

I was working on this point some years ago, when I got permanently sick. I am unable to finish a publication without a co-author. On the outside chance that you want to do it, please write.

I think that the essential service is a free (OK, maybe just very cheap, but I bet it turns out free) server for self-signed associations of public keys with addresses (presumably, mostly IP numbers). The sponsor of the server should verify nothing about those who post records, and should ostentatiously deny all responsibility for their identities.

Almost all of the functionality is already provided by DNS implementations, where the domain names contain hashes of public keys. Google could provide the service next week (yes, I've contacted my buddies at Google, but they haven't bit on the hook).

To preview my ideas, you can check out

1. Pages 187-215 in the lecture slides with notes for a course that I cooked up a few years ago:

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/Teacher/Courses/Strategic_Internet/Slides/

(That's at the end, up to but not including the last two pages in case your viewer numbers differently from mine.)

2. a horribly messed up page in progress:

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/Citizen/Network_Identifiers/

3. A published article: "A Proposal to Separate Handles from Names on the Internet." Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 48(12):78-83, December 2005. Slightly longer version:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.NI/0302017

4. An Internet Draft:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.NI/0301011

2-4 describe the application of the same service to provide non-mnemonic free domain names/handles that won't be fought over in court and stolen. During the long wait for the article to appear in CACM, I realized that I should think of it first as Public-Key Infrastructure, with the handle function as a side benefit.

Cheerio,

Mike O'Donnell
michael_odonnell at acm.org

Dear Mr. Znork,

Your post is nearly unique in being short, to the point, totally on target, free of extraneous noise.

I wanted to contact you individually, but didn't see how to do it through your slashdot ID, hence this posted reply.

It appears to me (and to a number of other people who have a bit of reputation in security, which I don't), that self-signed records should be the starting point for "identity" on the network.

"For most purposes it's sufficient to know I'm talking to the same guy I was last time."

You have expressed probably the most important observation in the whole area. Furthermore, without the ability to know that all messages in a conversation come from the same agent, you can't accomplish anything else. And self signature is much easier than chain o' trust. Ergo, identity on the network should be founded on a system of self-signed records, with add-on services as they prove worth the trouble. (Roughly as delivery is founded on best-effort IP, with TCP, ..., HTTP as add-ons.)

I was working on this point some years ago, when I got permanently sick. I am unable to finish a publication without a co-author. On the outside chance that you want to do it, please write.

I think that the essential service is a free (OK, maybe just very cheap, but I bet it turns out free) server for self-signed associations of public keys with addresses (presumably, mostly IP numbers). The sponsor of the server should verify nothing about those who post records, and should ostentatiously deny all responsibility for their identities.

Almost all of the functionality is already provided by DNS implementations, where the domain names contain hashes of public keys. Google could provide the service next week (yes, I've contacted my buddies at Google, but they haven't bit on the hook).

To preview my ideas, you can check out

1. Pages 187-215 in the lecture slides with notes for a course that I cooked up a few years ago:

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/Teacher/Courses/Strategic_Internet/Slides/

(That's at the end, up to but not including the last two pages in case your viewer numbers differently from mine.)

2. a horribly messed up page in progress:

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/Citizen/Network_Identifiers/

3. A published article: "A Proposal to Separate Handles from Names on the Internet." Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 48(12):78-83, December 2005. Slightly longer version:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.NI/0302017

4. An Internet Draft:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.NI/0301011

2-4 describe the application of the same service to provide non-mnemonic free domain names/handles that won't be fought over in court and stolen. During the long wait for the article to appear in CACM, I realized that I should think of it first as Public-Key Infrastructure, with the handle function as a side benefit.

Cheerio,

Mike O'Donnell
michael_odonnell at acm.org

Actually, there is a serious proposal to build out massive amounts of nuclear power (because it's "cheap" if you only count the building and the fuel) and use the energy to synthesize gasoline, closing the loop. So it is not a separate issue.
Green Freedom: http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/story_id/12554

It says, "... for open science."

Here's the actual Fasted Computer in the World.

"Reality is self-induced hallucination. %~P"

This Physics-Domain (Newton, Bohr, Einstein ...) Universe (PDU) is one of many (for my SciFicPhy) much like the bubble containing air in a field of water, atoms ... dimensions, our PDU contains celestial objects in a gravity field, particles ... dimensions. Other PDUs in a levity (anti-gravity) field contain (I suspect) very unique laws of physics.

I have always viewed string theory as a flat analogy for particle relationships to environments. Also, I believe, Steven Hawking is correct that our PDU laws end at the horizon of a black-hole and there is no possible recovery of our PDU laws from the horizon of a black-hole or from beyond this PDU-brane horizon at the levity field where even gravity is dissipated (All PDU are forever expanding, till ...). The interaction of two unique-PDU in the levity field is possible and (I suspect) the result would be a singularity event that would cause another PDU-cosmic egg ... eventually there would be a SciFicPhy cosmic-chick ... [PLEASE, take the humor and run!].

http://slashdot.org/~OldHawk777/journal/186073

http://xxx.lanl.gov/