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It reminds me years ago we had the same problem to access MathsExamResults.com or something, because there is the word "sex" in the url.
I had the same problem 20 years ago to access https://xxx.lanl.gov/ and had to reach the right guy to bypass the damn filtering of name.

What is the lethal dose of plutonium? I went to look it up. About 22 milligrams.
http://www.newworldencyclopedi...

This is just plain false.

Here is a citation from The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments:

In July 1945, Wright Langham insisted that the 5-microgram standard be reduced
by a factor of 5 on the basis of animal experiments that showed that plutonium was
distributed in the bone differently, and more dangerously, than radium. Thus, the
maximum permissible body burden for plutonium was set at 1 microgram.

That's because they began to understand that assessing the lethal dose of plutonium is far more complicated than just swallowing or injecting purified plutonium. Do we find purified plutonium in the environment, no we don't because it's man made. Once plutonium gets into the environment that is when it forms other compounds that are more readily absorbed and organically bound in the body.

These are the salient details that you haven't communicated.

Body Burden = internal amount.

Max Permissable = much much lower than is actually known to cause harm.

What you won't do is present one plausible scenario where a person internally takes on an unsafe amount of plutonium.

What is the lethal dose of plutonium? I went to look it up. About 22 milligrams. http://www.newworldencyclopedi...

This is just plain false.

Here is a citation from The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments:

In July 1945, Wright Langham insisted that the 5-microgram standard be reduced by a factor of 5 on the basis of animal experiments that showed that plutonium was distributed in the bone differently, and more dangerously, than radium. Thus, the maximum permissible body burden for plutonium was set at 1 microgram.

That's because they began to understand that assessing the lethal dose of plutonium is far more complicated than just swallowing or injecting purified plutonium. Do we find purified plutonium in the environment, no we don't because it's man made. Once plutonium gets into the environment that is when it forms other compounds that are more readily absorbed and organically bound in the body.

These are the salient details that you haven't communicated.

Okay... This is what it's supposed to emulate.

This thing has more than nine hundred thousand processor chips and two petabytes of memory. Current x64 chips are limited to 256 TB (wikipedia) of physical address space; so these chips either [a] have larger than usual physical address space (I doubt), or [b] isn't a shared memory system.

So, dumbnuts, this isn't a shared memory system. Go read about the Cray XC40. Or even this document -- clearly showing it's a multi-node system with a fast interconnect. (It talks of each node running different OS images, so that means it isn't one shared OS image - which means it isn't shared memory).

Summary: What evidence do you have that the target system is shared memory? It looks to me like it's non-shared-memory (i.e., message passing); while with an extremely fast interconnect, I'm sure it's still slower than the CPU internal busses. The same is true with this Raspberry Pi - the interconnect (ordinary Ethernet) is still significantly slower than the ARM chip itself; and THAT environment is what's being emulated.

It doesn't really matter that other architectures could be faster - the GOAL is to replicate how the Cray XC supercomputers work - albeit at a fraction of the performance and price.

Yeah, I was thinking more in terms of 'end user does something stupid, now somebody gets to collect the plutonium dust' type problems. I suppose that the major advantage is that people are somewhat less likely to do dumb things to electronics that they'd need to cut open their abdomens to get at.

It's really the end-user/disposal problem that makes me nervous about nuclear batteries, not the 'will the engineers screw it up?' aspect. 'Sealed sources', containing various isotopes neatly packaged as radiation sources, are even simpler to implement than nuclear batteries; and generally aren't an engineering problem; but the DoE has gone to a lot of trouble hunting down 'orphan sources' that have left responsible supervision for one reason or another; and it's hardly unheard of for those to end up in some 3rd world junkyard being crowbared open by people who have no idea what a mistake they are making.

Pacemakers have the advantage of a more or less automatic paper trail(since the diagnosis of cardiac abnormality and implantation surgery tend not to be handled in cash and off the books) and people don't tend to cut through their own bodies in order to do stupid things to their gadgets; but I'd be rather pessimistic about the possibility of sound lifecycle management for nuclear batteries in broader application.

It's too bad; because they'd be extremely useful for a variety of low power off-grid stuff; but when people can't even be bothered to separate their trash from their recyclables; it's hard to be optimistic about their safe disposal of nuclear batteries.

1) It's already being done. Commonly.

2) Something closer to this. The one you linked produces 128W continuously, plus 2KW of thermal energy. On that kind of power you could run continuous communication with Earth, not just bursts for a couple seconds per day.

3) The probes being small, can be considerably accelerated - rocket equation works in both directions; tiny dry mass can afford a lot of extra delta-V. And you could use colloid thrusters or other similar extreme-ISp ion microthrusters to accelerate them a lot over long time using the RTG energy before it's needed to power the radio.

4) I'm not willing to ballpark the number of the probes, because that number is precisely dependent on precision of ground stations to determine their position. Suffice to say Jupiter definitely exerts clearly detectable influence on probes in LEO - not something on the margin of detection threshold but actual clear readouts. So your ballpark (0.06AU) is way off. Consider each probe covering a "corridor" of 10AU radius a more likely figure and a rather conservative estimate.

citation required. Pu238 has never been used in a pacemaker.

Citation

From that page: "Common markings: Pu-238".

First, Scott does not mention, that most dangerous asteroids are found

>95% of 1 km size asteroids
>90% for 500 m size asteroids
~60-70% 300 m size asteroids

so yes, we know 1% of asteroids, but still - the danger now for a person to be killed by asteroid is more than 100 times less, than it was two decades ago

another problem with his video, that he omits to mention, that inner asteroids are either harmless, or if they intersect earth orbit - they could be tracked at dusk/dawn ( just like venus is visible - and venus is quite far from being able to hit earth, so closer asteroids and relatively big asteroids are easier to find )

then about finding inner asteroids with space crafts - it is not just B612 foundation, which deals with that , but there are other proposals

http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.0794... - which is really cheap ( though idea requires some more development )
or http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1501.0... neocam - the paper has a proof that it is somewhat more realistic than B612 proposal and is not less efficient.

Technically you don't even need a range finder.

It's possible to do autofocus through-the-lens with phase detection or contrast detection:

Contrast detection places different constraints on lens design when compared with phase detection. While phase detection requires the lens to move its focus point quickly and directly to a new position, contrast detection autofocus instead employs lenses which can quickly sweep through the focal range, stopping precisely at the point where maximum contrast is detected. This means that lenses designed for phase detection often perform poorly on camera bodies which use contrast detection.

From a link in TFA:

They figured out that if they discarded a lot of the old code on board their distant subject, they could make room for software that could command the instrument to take the nine images on its own and analyze them on-board to find the best focus.

I guess they didn't have room on the device to code up a binary search of the contrast method before acquiring a single image?

Routine solar wind experiments don't look for Nitrogen, but there is plenty of it there. The data linked below isn't adjusted for sensitivity differences. The solar wind composition, high speed streams especially, is expected to be essentially the same as that of the source nebula for our system. The nebula came from an exploding star which makes our sun second (or later?) generation, resulting in added heavy elements.

http://umtof.umd.edu/pub/full_...

The Genesis mission collected samples from the solar wind to return to Earth for more precise analysis. Not all made it, but in spite of a crash landing in Utah, some good science resulted.

http://genesis.lanl.gov/public...

Well, you can look at error bars on galaxy rotation curve results like this, which is old enough to end up in an intro cosmology course. If it were just visible matter, it would be the curve labeled "disk". If you add the curve "halo" you get the total, with the small measurement error bars shown. Surveys like this show the limits of such halos being just from compact but dark objects.

To be accurate, the search in Gran Sasso is a search for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), which are one microphysical explanation for dark matter. I personally do not like the common conflation of dark matter (for which there is abundant evidence) with WIMPs (for which there is no evidence at all).

A lot of the interest in WIMPs comes from particle physics, due to the "WIMP miracle" (that hypothetical particles at the electro-weak scale, i.e., ~ 100 GeV, apparently have the right mass to explain dark matter) and the hypothesized connection between WIMPs and supersymmetry (i.e., that the WIMP could be a supersymmetric neutralino). After much experimental work, the WIMP miracle is almost dead experimentally, and the supposed connection to supersymmetry is not doing so well either.

However (not that you would know from reading most articles on the subject), there are a number of other viable theories for dark matter. These include axions, primordial black holes (maybe), and macroscopic quark nuggets, which would have important practical implications should they be detected.

It was no secret that the NSA was working on quantum computer technology then as well.

Speaking of it being "no secret," here is the public website for the quantum computing initiative at the Los Alamos National Laboratory:
http://quantum.lanl.gov/
That page says:

Quantum information science and technology research is conducted at several outstanding universities and laboratories around the world, including LANL. At Los Alamos, however, even the most basic quantum research often has national security implications or connections.

Although the Quantum Initiative's national security mission at Los Alamos is manifest in many areas, it is perhaps most evident in two of the Laboratory's most successful quantum technology initiatives— quantum cryptography and the race for a quantum computer.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, of course, is owned and operated by the U.S. Federal Government. The fact that the Government has been working on this for some time (since the 90s) has not been a secret.

The Laboratory also revealed recently, as was reported on /. that it has been operating a quantum network for 2 1/2 years. Though I feel certain I read about that in Technology Review or the like a couple years ago, but cannot find any such article now.

The scientists currently at Los Alamos are some of the world's leading experts in sea ice. They know that ice floats and what that physically means.

Let me guess: 9th grade physics teaches that floating ice displaces its own weight in water and therefore its melting does not contribute to sea level rise. But it's not floating ice that people worry about for sea level rise. It's melting land ice. (Which Los Alamos scientists are also world experts in.)

The scientists currently at Los Alamos are some of the world's leading experts in sea ice. They know that ice floats and what that physically means.

Let me guess: 9th grade physics teaches that floating ice displaces its own weight in water and therefore its melting does not contribute to sea level rise. But it's not floating ice that people worry about for sea level rise. It's melting land ice. (Which Los Alamos scientists are also world experts in.)

You bring up a good point and part of the reason why Livermore, Sandia and Los Alamos have those nice big supercomputers testing decay rates and doing simulations on warheads.

There's an interesting device in the Bradbury Science Museum aka the Atomic Museum in Los Alamos, It's a phone..

Anyway, from this: http://www.nationaltlcservice.us/2013/05/report-from-the-hilltop-highlights-of-the-los-alamos-bradbury-science-museum-museum-profile-1/

A phone analogy inaugurated the display: Adjacent to a clear-plastic telephone (which reminded me of those see-through Swatch phones of the 80s), a placard explains: “Like many of the weapons currently in the nuclear arsenal, this phone was manufactured in the late 1960s and was designed to last about 15 years. You were asked to verify that this phone will work—but you weren’t allowed to make or receive a call to fully test it.” Nearby, the question “What does this phone have to do with nuclear weapons?” is answered with the motto: “safe, secure, and reliable nuclear weapons.” The exhibit further explains the connection to LANL’s mission: “We are asked to verify that the weapons in the stockpile are safe and reliable—but without performing underground nuclear tests. Instead, we use an integrated set of scientific tools to inspect and evaluate individual parts and subsystems. The military counts on us to guarantee that US nuclear weapons will perform as designed if they are ever needed. That’s our mission, and that’s a call we can make.”

The DOE still has quite a few on the Top 500 List..

No. They may have detected something, and it's not gone through the pipeline yet, but Bert and Ernie were much before this event.

They were August 8, 2011 (Bert) and January 3, 2012 (Ernie).

  Even if they didn't see a thing, I am sure there will be an IceCube press release about this in a few months, as they will be able to improve the GRB neutrino limit.

Not all nuclear powered pace makers are powered by betavoltaics.

Some indeed *are* small RTGs.

What the hell is the problem anyway? For fifteen minutes at the beginning and end of a flight you can't use your iWhatever or eWhatsis. Big deal.

Because if these tiny sources (cube law, hello?) of random RF noise really were a problem, they don't suddenly become less of a problem while flying in the air at over 10,000 ft. Or when flying through or even remotely near a thunderstorm that produces many times that RF. Heaven help the poor pilots that get painted by a military radar or even the radar from the airport.

It's not like an airplane needs reliable controls when say, hurtling through the air at a couple hundred miles an hour over populated areas, is it?

At the best we can blame the aircraft designers for not doing their due diligence in properly shielding the route between servos and controllers and cockpit. After all, shielding is precious weight in paying passengers you'd have to give up in fuel. And we obviously don't have lighter weight communication medium that isn't RF sensitive.

But I do know just a little about it.

Which seems to be the amount you know about everything.
That's not helpful.

GPS recievers indeed solve a 4D problem (3D space + time) which requires
4 sats. As expensive as the military units are, they may be able to bridge reception
gaps by keeping time by themselves for a while, so may for a while work with
only three sat signals.

But without a local timer with the precision of an atomic clock, that's the digital
equivalent to dead reckoning, and will only get you so far until you need your fourth
sat again.

Of course, if you are the Navy, one of your coordinates is known by default (at least
plus or minus a couple of meters), so maybe their gear is permanently set to a dedicated
2D mode. That would indeed work with 3 signals - but you still need four inputs for a 3D
position, it's just that in this case one of those inputs doesn't come from space, but from
looking out the window.

Maybe you will believe the Los Alamos Labs' GIS unit?
"If you require 3-dimensional coordinates (northerning, easting, and elevation), a minimum of four satellites is needed."

NIF has three missions:

- National security (stockpile stewardship
- Basic fusion science
- Understanding the origins of the basic building blocks of the universe

That's it.

I hate to break it you you, but much of what we do in basic science research is dual-use. It can be used for military applications, or purely scientific applications. Doing stockpile stewardship without nuclear tests is not "getting around" nuclear test ban treaties. It's maintaining the integrity of our increasingly smaller nuclear stockpile as a credible deterrent.

This overwhelming deterrent capability is part of the reason why the world has seen no major global conflict for seven decades, and has had the longest period of peace without global conflict for over five centuries. Tens of millions of people died in WWI and WWII.

We maintain a credible deterrent so it's clear that no one can ever strike us first without the certainty of themselves also being destroyed -- and if our principles and ideals and those of our allies are something you care about, then that should be important to you.

The world is changing, and some might say that the general "cyber" and information threats will more important than nuclear. China certainly seems to think so. Then again, China is also building out its nuclear weapons capabilities and stockpiles as the rest of the world, including the US, disarms. No worries, right? Delivery systems that can rain down nuclear warheads on targets anywhere in the world is just for "peaceful regional defense", right?

A world where the US doesn't maintain an overwhelming deterrent to forces which espouse principles and ideals counter to those of freedom and liberal democracy is not a pretty place.

(Note to people who think that the US is what's wrong with the world: you are sorely in need of historical perspective -- or, any perspective. The US is not perfect, but the US and West has done far more for the benefit of human life and humanity, on the whole, than any other nation, especially those with Communist, Socialist, or totalitarian systems of government. Wake up.)

Back in the 1990s this was developed at Los Alamos and a few other accelerator centers. it's not new or unique to belgium.
http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/science21/ATW.html

http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/1999/venneri.htm

Ugh ....
Maryland - Goddard Space Flight Center
New Mexico - AF Research Lab - Space Vehicles, Sandia Labs, Los Alamos Labs
Colorado - Ball, Raytheon, etc
California - JPL, Livermore Labs and way too many others to list
Virginia - Navy Research Lab, Wallops Island
Texas - UT Dallas, Texas A&M, Johnson Space Center, many more
Arizona - Orbital Sciences Corp., GD, etc
Tennessee - Oakridge
Alabama - U.S. Space and Rocket Center
Utah -Space Dynamics Laboratory, L3
Florida - Kennedy, ATK and many more
Alaska - Kodiak Island

The space industry is spread out over the entire country. This list could go on and on. Saying it is only Florida and Texas that benefit is mildly absurd. I agree with the idea, but it isn't nearly as narrow as that.

The article hardly talks about climate research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which develops the ocean (POP) and ice (CICE and CISM) components of one of the world's leading climate models, CESM. The climate group at Los Alamos got started studying nuclear winter (related work was mentioned in TFA), and built its strength in ocean modeling with new ideas in high performance computing for parallel partial differential equation solvers (fishing for new applications, since they had all these giant supercomputers lying around for nuclear hydrodynamics.). More history here.

The article hardly talks about climate research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which develops the ocean (POP) and ice (CICE and CISM) components of one of the world's leading climate models, CESM. The climate group at Los Alamos got started studying nuclear winter (related work was mentioned in TFA), and built its strength in ocean modeling with new ideas in high performance computing for parallel partial differential equation solvers (fishing for new applications, since they had all these giant supercomputers lying around for nuclear hydrodynamics.). More history here.

The article hardly talks about climate research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which develops the ocean (POP) and ice (CICE and CISM) components of one of the world's leading climate models, CESM. The climate group at Los Alamos got started studying nuclear winter (related work was mentioned in TFA), and built its strength in ocean modeling with new ideas in high performance computing for parallel partial differential equation solvers (fishing for new applications, since they had all these giant supercomputers lying around for nuclear hydrodynamics.). More history here.

The article hardly talks about climate research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which develops the ocean (POP) and ice (CICE and CISM) components of one of the world's leading climate models, CESM. The climate group at Los Alamos got started studying nuclear winter (related work was mentioned in TFA), and built its strength in ocean modeling with new ideas in high performance computing for parallel partial differential equation solvers (fishing for new applications, since they had all these giant supercomputers lying around for nuclear hydrodynamics.). More history here.

The article hardly talks about climate research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which develops the ocean (POP) and ice (CICE and CISM) components of one of the world's leading climate models, CESM. The climate group at Los Alamos got started studying nuclear winter (related work was mentioned in TFA), and built its strength in ocean modeling with new ideas in high performance computing for parallel partial differential equation solvers (fishing for new applications, since they had all these giant supercomputers lying around for nuclear hydrodynamics.). More history here.

While the authors (as they always do) consider this landmark, I was unable to find any comment on their letter or the preprint (apparently this) in the usual places. This could be in part because it is a) not 'real' and b) doesn't have the words 'Higgs' or 'superluminal neutrino' in the title.

We had an article in New Scientist, which is pretty high profile. Also this truly was a landmark calculation: it was the first realistic decay computed entirely from first principles, combining 40 years of theoretical and computational development and will have a significant impact upon the search for new physics. You are, however, right in that some of the more sensationalist science publishers were likely not interested in this calculation, deeming it not 'sexy' enough compared to the latest untestable-but-cool-sounding theories emerging from the string theory community.

While the authors (as they always do) consider this landmark, I was unable to find any comment on their letter or the preprint (apparently this) in the usual places. This could be in part because it is a) not 'real' and b) doesn't have the words 'Higgs' or 'superluminal neutrino' in the title.

Pure and innocent Scientific Inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge generally hits a pretty thick wall pretty quickly as soon as it steps into the realm of things that already being researched, with the qualification that they are things the military is researching, or has researched within the past decade.

Even now, just to use the results of certain types of this research -- such as very accurate nuclear interaction cross-sections (discovered for the purposes of nuclear weapons, but) used for the purposes of cancer treatment -- puts you under the watchful eye of the FBI.

Yes, not everything falls under this category, and no, nobody needs to be reminded of the benefits of such research like how our microwave ovens defeated the germans, but just think about some of the examples we DO know about:
WWII to Cold war era: Nuclear Science
Cryptography (Government mandated PGP backdoor, anyone?)

Sources:
MCNP:
http://mcnpx.lanl.gov/
PGP:
http://books.google.com/books?id=cSe_0OnZqjAC&pg=PA352&lpg=PA352&dq=pgp+government+mandated+backdoor&source=bl&ots=cVtmm3vwYK&sig=fwjn6mfbXVWngTS0pgHIFWFV9bE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=5OyZT8_pLsXUgAf3gNX1DQ&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=pgp%20government%20mandated%20backdoor&f=false)

Which is why modern reactors depends on gravity; which to the best of my knowledge has never been turned off.

Ah, you've never heard of the Podkletnov Effect? Read
"Weak gravitation shielding properties of composite bulk YBa_2Cu_3O_{7-x} superconductor below 70 K under e.m. field"
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/9701074

If you are into paleontology or geology you might want to look at the Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, New Mexico. There are many exposed strata in the area, and Ghost Ranch has a small museum and tour of the ranch, which, not surprisingly, is largely focused not on science but on the art of Georgia O'keeffe.

And don't forget Spaceport America. I have not been, but they evendtly have weekend tours for a not so nominal fee.\

Also, if you are going by the Gulf Coast, don't forget Johnson Space center. The visitor center is kind of lame, to be kind, but the tour is good. Make sure to get off the bus and see the rocket.

And, of course, unlike arizona, you can travel without papers and not be subject to random police inspections. Ha Ha. It is a joke.

Simply put, the neutrino emission starts before the emission of light. This article has details: http://library.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/getfile?25-14.pdf

It's worse than that. It may not be possible to get a handle on the variables. There was a slashdot article recently where someone took a perfect model (it generated the data) then tried to determine the variables given the data. Despite a perfect functional form, and data with 0 errors in measurement, he found that several alternate sets of variables fit the existing data well enough, but would have diverged from the actual model significantly.

[NOTE: edited for readability]


Most people do not appreciate the role energy plays within the economy. Whether it is the fuel oil in that tanker that has brought those manufactured goods across the Pacific, or the fuel in your gas tank that has allowed you to drive to work this morning, energy plays a fundamental role in economic activity.

We have a plan to develop a special machine that will allow us to synthesize carbon-neutral petroleum replacements cheaply using nuclear fission as a primary input. With this safe technology, we can drastically reduce waste through efficiency, avoid the use of water for cooling, reduce manufacturing costs by avoiding the use of a high-pressure cooling system, and scale to many thousands of reactors over the coming decades. With this, we can exceed the current world energy consumption of roughly 15 TW. We can sequester a century's worth of carbon from the atmosphere, safeguarding our shorelines for generations to come. And we can end water shortages the world over through massive efficient desalination.

This Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor is Green Nuclear, and it is THE silver bullet.

The White House petition for LFTR

More information regarding the technology.

Green Freedom - industrial scale synthesis of fuel from nuclear energy

Most people to not appreciate the role energy plays within the economy. Whether it is the fuel oil in that tanker that has brought those manufactured goods across the Pacific, or the fuel in your gas tank that has allowed you to drive to work this morning, energy plays a fundamental role in economic activity.

We have a plan to develop a special machine that will allow us to synthesize carbon-neutral petroleum replacements cheaply using nuclear fission as a primary input. With this safe technology, we can drastically reduce waste through efficiency, avoid the use of water for cooling, reduce manufacturing costs by avoiding the use of a high-pressure cooling system, and scale to many thousands of reactors over the coming decades. With this, we exceed the current world energy consumption of roughly 15 TW. We can sequester a century's worth of carbon from the atmosphere, safeguarding our shorelines for generations to come. And we can end water shortages the world over through massive efficient desalination.

This Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor is Green Nuclear, and it is THE silver bullet.

The White House petition for LFTR

More information regarding the technology.

Green Freedom - industrial scale synthesis of fuel from nuclear energy

The Department of Energy operates the labs, not the NSA .

They also need to update their SSL Certificate... I went to go look at the Event Calendar at https://lanleventsext.lanl.gov/ off their main page to see if the Fire was a planned event and wouldn't you know, the Cert expired on 6/2/11.. Doh!

LANL says you're wrong.

http://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/index.shtml

Those guys came up with the idea; now they get to deal with it first hand.

seems to my memory the one in 2004 in indonesia wrapped around islands and got concentrated in some parts, dissipated in others, depending on the layout of the seabed and the channels. of course, somebody at UBC has probably devoted their entire professional career to that question already...

A number of people at uVic have I believe (can't recall the source material location offhand). The seabed in Indonesia is significantly different to that around Vancouver Island and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. However, at least one researcher disagrees:

From http://library.lanl.gov/tsunami/ts274.pdf:

To understand the threat to western Canada, it is important to understand the geological
features off the coast of British Columbia. From northern Vancouver Island to northern
California, the Cascadia subduction zone marks the boundary between the smaller offshore
Juan de Fuca Plate that is sliding under the much larger North American Plate. The
Cascadia subduction zone has the potential to generate very large earthquakes, with
magnitude 9.0 or greater, if the fault ruptures over its entire area. The January 26, 1700,
Cascadia earthquake produced a fault rupture with a length of 1000 km. This type of event
is similar to the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, were the fault ruptured along an estimated
length of 1300 km. Interestingly, both subduction zones run predominantly in a north-south
direction, thus having the potential to trigger major tsunamis in the east-west direction. For
Cascadia, this means that tsunami waves would propagate towards Vancouver Island.
Popular belief suggests that major nearby cities, including Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, and
Portland, which are located on inland waterways rather than on the coast, would be
sheltered from the full brunt of a tsunami wave. Meanwhile, numerical modeling has shown
that tsunami waves would travel around Vancouver Island through diffraction and impact
Victoria and Vancouver significantly (Xie et al., 2007). This is consistent with observations
following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, particularly on the west coast of Sri Lanka
which was devastated by the tsunami as a result of wave propagation and diffraction around
the island. Therefore, a megathrust earthquake along the Cascadia subduction zone has the
potential to generate a major tsunami which would travel into the Juan de Fuca Straight,
affecting communities along its shores.
Understanding the tsunami hazard is a major challenge in the design of near-shoreline
structures. However, hazard maps, which would provide inundation depths and velocities
for design in the case of a tsunami with a given magnitude and a given return period, are
currently not available. At present, numerical modeling is employed to provide expected
inundation depths for a given earthquake. Xie et al. (2007) conducted numerical modeling
of tsunamis generated from a Cascadia Fault earthquake to assess the potential tsunami risk
for western Canada. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake, similar to the event of 1700, was assumed
in their model. The numerical model TSUNAMI N2 was employed. The model estimated a
maximum wave run-up of 25 m along the western shore of Vancouver Island, with an
estimated arrival time for the first wave of 1 hour and 20 minutes.

How do you tell the difference between a blob of dark matter and a black hole?

Gravitational pull is probably the biggest factor. A black hole simply gets so massive that at one point the gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape. It will have objects orbitting around it like planets orbit stars except at distances far greater than a star would normally hold.

Dark Matter, on the other hand, simply seems to have the gravitational pull of a regular star, but doesn't emit any light.

No, this is completely wrong. A black hole doesn't have stronger gravity than the star or stars that it formed out of.

One thing to note is that when we observe things out there, it's not just a 2D plane we're observing but a great deal of depth is involved. When observing a black hole, the light behind the black hole will get sucked into the black hole if it happens to cross the event horizon. This will create a nice black circle in the sky. However dark matter, on the other hand, would not stop the light behind it from reaching our eyes, it might bend it a little but nothing too extreme.

This is also wrong. Gravitational lensing occurs both for black holes and for other objects that aren't black holes. The black hole in the sky that you're describing is not what is predicted for a black hole either.

For anyone who wants to see the actual paper, here it is: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1101.0815

aluminium

Here's my counter-citation.

"In 1807, Davy proposed the name aluminium for the metal, undiscovered at that time, and later agreed to change it to aluminum."

RoadRunner, http://www.lanl.gov/discover/roadrunner_fastest_computer

has over 13,000 PowerXCell 8i chips which are 4 times faster than the PS3 Cell chip on FP code. RR executes Linpack at 1.04 PetaFLOPS/s, just over double what AFRL is claiming for their little bullshit 1760 Cell cluster. If AFRL is quoting PEAK hardware performance, their 1760 PS3s would hit a mere 180 TFLOPS/s, far short of that 500 figure. The head nodes they mention would add another 10 TFLOPS/s peak. They didn't specify the number and type of GPUs in the cluster. Even so, they're still not going to hit 500 TFLOPS/s, nowhere close to it running any application, and not close to it if quoting PEAK hardware numbers.

Those Air Force boys must be smoking some good weed these days to hallucinate that 500 TFLOPS/s figure.

Some links that have more information, without having to give money to the Chemistry of Materials:

http://news.discovery.com/tech/material-could-collect-sunlight-from-roof-and-windows.html

http://www.lanl.gov/news/releases/scientists_produce_transparent_light-harvesting_material.html

Oh, and one more thing:
Buckminster Fuller strikes again! AHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahaha... hah.

--
I want my Dymaxion

http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/science21/LaserCooling.html

For just one example.

The book Optical Refrigeration by Mansoor Sheik-Bahai and R.I. Epstein is an overview of this field that cools semiconductors and other macroscopic objects with lasers.

(disclaimer: I used to work as a grad student for Sheik-Bahai long ago. Very cool guy.)

but look - http://www.lanl.gov/news/index.php/fuseaction/home.story/story_id/12554 - you may make gasoline ( and all higher products you mentioned ) out of air ( and out of biomass too ) and the price ... lower than nowday oil on market, so how it could be more pricely in future?. Even now china produces a lot of chemicals from coal instead of oil. The relative price for higher order products is much lower, than it is for transportations. So even if the plastics will be done out of air ( not biomass not coal ) then the final price will change dramatically. Last - 'peak oil' does not mean end of oil, so there are hundreds of years before end of oil - so no need to replace all and at once now. and transportation gets now 60% of all oil. so reducing this part - will resolve problem to change to new ways to produce plastics for hundreds of years at least.

Having participated in the first of the Student Cluster Challenges at SC07 when I was still in undergrad, I can attest that there's far more to this than what the summary lets on. Not only are you limited to 26 Amps, which is the significant limiting factor, but you're located on the show floor and running your system for 36 hours straight in front of the conference attendees. Moreover, all hardware must be in production and unmodified and fit within a single rack. The Taiwanese team lucked out in this regard as they were using the (then new) 45nm Intel Xeons that were announced the day before the competition started. The only thing you can modify is the code for the programs you have to run (except for the HPC benchmarks).

Some of you might be thinking "pfff...I can stay awake for 36 hours, no problem". That's true, but you're not allowed to be in your booth for more than 12 hours straight and after you leave you must take an 8 hour break. Furthermore, the machines are firewalled from all incoming connections and do not share the same internet connection that the rest of the conference uses.

At SC07, there was a significant power failure on the second day of the competition which brought most teams to their knees. The applications we were running (GAMESS, POP, POV-RAY) are not designed to pick up from a power failure. While the Taiwanese had by far the most powerful system, they couldn't recover from the power failure that had corrupted their SAN in time to win.

To your point, I'm not sure you could get 158 Atoms in a set of off-the-shelf servers that would fit in a single rack to equal a cluster running the latest E series Xeons that perform at top clock but have a lower TDP.

27 you say?

Batteries are not DVDs. Batteries have been a stumbling block for EVs ever since EVs were invented in the late 1800s. It has not been for want of investment that batteries haven't managed to store more than a 50th the amount of energy that's in gasoline.

My hunch is that as oil supplies wind down we'll end up manufacturing hydrocarbons because of their energy density. Moreover, manufacturing hydrocarbons will mitigate the advantage that China has accrued in cornering the rare earth market.