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A. Gulf Stream OFF image of US vegetation (Ice Age conditions)

or

B. Gulf Stream ON image of US vegetation (present day conditions)

During combustion, the volume of coal is reduced by over 85%, which increases the concentration of the metals originally in the coal. Although significant quantities of ash are retained by precipitators, heavy metals such as uranium tend to concentrate on the tiny glass spheres that make up the bulk of fly ash. This uranium is released to the atmosphere with the escaping fly ash, at about 1.0% of the original amount, according to NCRP data. The retained ash is enriched in uranium several times over the original uranium concentration in the coal because the uranium, and thorium, content is not decreased as the volume of coal is reduced.

Mr_Dyqik:
But the cost of developing fusion power is tiny to the cost of breeding that much uranium (especially if you take security into account)
The cost of security is negligible.

The cost of running breeders (Advanced Light Metal Reactors {AMLRs}, in this case the General Electric design {a modular fast reactor concept consisting of three modules with a modular power of 496 megawatts each and using a break-even fuel scheme}) vs. the cost of fusion (in this case the tokomak magnetic fusion energy {MFE} Advanced Reactor Innovation and Evaluation Studies {ARIES} design studies, the ARIES-RS and Aries-ST) is 9.32 cents/kilowatt-hour for ARIES-ST, 8.74 cents/kilowatt-hour for ARIES-RS, and 5.13 cents for ALMR, all in 1999 dollars and assuming this is taking place around 2050.

This makes the cost of breeding uranium substantially lower than the cost of fusion.

These costs include capital (design and construction), O&M (operation and maintenance), fuel and decommissioning. All of these are significantly higher in the case of the ALMR except the capital category, where it is less than half. With these types of power plants, the capital cost is the cost that matters the most and fusion does very badly here, thus losing overall very badly.

Notice that the things you mentioned in your previous posts like fuel cost and decommissioning (where fusion is clearly superior) hardly make a dent in the overall cost. Decommissioning the ALMR cost 0.19 cents vs. 0.09 cents for both tyoes of fusion plant. Fuel is 0.88 cents for the ALMR vs. 0.54 and 0.38 cents respectively for the RS and ST fusion plants. Fusion saves at best half a penny per kilowatt-hour in these categories.

Source: The Oak Ridge National Laboratory report: An Assessment of the Economics of Future Electric Power Generation Options and the Implications for Fusion

Since the 1960s particulate precipitators have been used by U.S. coal-fired power plants to retain significant amounts of fly ash rather than letting it escape to the atmosphere. When functioning properly, these precipitators are approximately 99.5% efficient. Utilities also collect furnace ash, cinders, and slag, which are kept in cinder piles or deposited in ash ponds on coal-plant sites along with the captured fly ash.

Trace quantities of uranium in coal range from less than 1 part per million (ppm) in some samples to around 10 ppm in others. Generally, the amount of thorium contained in coal is about 2.5 times
greater than the amount of uranium. For a large number of coal samples, according to Environmental
Protection Agency figures released in 1984, average values of uranium and thorium content have been determined to be 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively. Using these values along with reported consumption and projected consumption of coal by utilities provides a means of calculating the amounts of potentially recoverable breedable and fissionable elements (see sidebar). The concentration of fissionable uranium-235 (the current fuel for nuclear power plants) has been
established to be 0.71% of uranium content.

by collecting the uranium residue from coal combustion, significant quantities of fissionable
material can be accumulated. In a few year's time, the recovery of the uranium-235 released by coal
combustion from a typical utility anywhere in the world could provide the equivalent of several World War II-type uranium-fueled weapons. Consequently, fissionable nuclear fuel is available to any country that either buys coal from outside sources or has its own reserves. The material is potentially employable as weapon fuel by any organization so inclined. Although technically complex, purification and enrichment technologies can provide high-purity, weapons-grade uranium-235. Fortunately, even though the technology is well known, the enrichment of uranium is an expensive and time-consuming process.

Because electric utilities are not high-profile facilities, collection and processing of coal ash for recovery of minerals, including uranium for weapons or reactor fuel, can proceed without attracting outside attention, concern, or intervention. Any country with coal-fired plants could collect combustion by-products and amass sufficient nuclear weapons material to build up a very powerful arsenal, if it has or develops the technology to do so. Of far greater potential are the much larger quantities of thorium-232 and uranium-238 from coal combustion that can be used to breed fissionable isotopes. Chemical separation and purification of uranium-233 from thorium and
plutonium-239 from uranium require far less effort than enrichment of isotopes. Only small fractions of these fertile elements in coal combustion residue are needed for clandestine breeding of fissionable fuels and weapons material by those nations that have nuclear reactor technology and the inclination to carry out this difficult task.

Energy Content: Coal vs Nuclear

An average value for the thermal energy of coal is approximately 6150 kilowatt-hours(kWh)/ton. Thus, the expected cumulative thermal energy release from U.S. coal combustion over this period totals about 6.87 x 10E14 kilowatt-hours. The thermal energy released in nuclear fission produces about 2 109 kWh/ton. Consequently, the thermal energy from fission of uranium-235 released in coal combustion amounts to 2.1 x 10E12 kWh. If uranium-238 is bred to plutonium-239, using these data, the thermal energy from fission of this isotope alone constitutes about 2.9 x 10E14 kWh, or about half the anticipated energy of all the utility coal burned in this country through the year 2040. If the thorium-232 is bred to uranium-233 and fissioned, the thermal energy capacity of this isotope is approximately 7.2 x 10E14 kWh, or 105% of the thermal energy released from U.S. coal combustion for a century. The total of the thermal energy capacities from each of these three fissionable isotopes is about 10.1 x 10E14 kWh, 1.5 times more than the total from coal. World combustion of coal has the same ratio, similarly indicating that coal combustion wastes more energy than it produces.

Consequently, the energy content of nuclear fuel released in coal combustion is more than that of the coal consumed! Clearly, coal-fired power plants are not only generating electricity but are also releasing nuclear fuels whose commercial value for electricity production by nuclear power plants is over $7 trillion, more than the U.S. national debt. This figure is based on current nuclear utility fuel costs of 7 mils per kWh, which is about half the cost for coal. Consequently, significant quantities of nuclear materials are being treated as coal waste, which might become the cleanup nightmare of the future, and their value is hardly recognized at all.

How does the amount of nuclear material released by coal combustion compare to the amount consumed as fuel by the U.S. nuclear power industry? According to 1982 figures, 111 American nuclear plants consumed about 540 tons of nuclear fuel, generating almost 1.1 x 10E12 kWh of electricity. During the same year, about 801 tons of uranium alone were released from American coal-fired plants. Add 1971 tons of thorium, and the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels. The same conclusion applies for worldwide nuclear fuel and coal combustion.

-- Alex Gabbard of the Metals and Ceramics Division of ORNL

Energy Content: Coal vs Nuclear

An average value for the thermal energy of coal is approximately 6150 kilowatt-hours(kWh)/ton. Thus, the expected cumulative thermal energy release from U.S. coal combustion over this period totals about 6.87 x 10E14 kilowatt-hours. The thermal energy released in nuclear fission produces about 2 109 kWh/ton. Consequently, the thermal energy from fission of uranium-235 released in coal combustion amounts to 2.1 x 10E12 kWh. If uranium-238 is bred to plutonium-239, using these data, the thermal energy from fission of this isotope alone constitutes about 2.9 x 10E14 kWh, or about half the anticipated energy of all the utility coal burned in this country through the year 2040. If the thorium-232 is bred to uranium-233 and fissioned, the thermal energy capacity of this isotope is approximately 7.2 x 10E14 kWh, or 105% of the thermal energy released from U.S. coal combustion for a century. The total of the thermal energy capacities from each of these three fissionable isotopes is about 10.1 x 10E14 kWh, 1.5 times more than the total from coal. World combustion of coal has the same ratio, similarly indicating that coal combustion wastes more energy than it produces.

Consequently, the energy content of nuclear fuel released in coal combustion is more than that of the coal consumed! Clearly, coal-fired power plants are not only generating electricity but are also releasing nuclear fuels whose commercial value for electricity production by nuclear power plants is over $7 trillion, more than the U.S. national debt. This figure is based on current nuclear utility fuel costs of 7 mils per kWh, which is about half the cost for coal. Consequently, significant quantities of nuclear materials are being treated as coal waste, which might become the cleanup nightmare of the future, and their value is hardly recognized at all.

How does the amount of nuclear material released by coal combustion compare to the amount consumed as fuel by the U.S. nuclear power industry? According to 1982 figures, 111 American nuclear plants consumed about 540 tons of nuclear fuel, generating almost 1.1 x 10E12 kWh of electricity. During the same year, about 801 tons of uranium alone were released from American coal-fired plants. Add 1971 tons of thorium, and the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels. The same conclusion applies for worldwide nuclear fuel and coal combustion.

-- Alex Gabbard of the Metals and Ceramics Division of ORNL

Energy Content: Coal vs Nuclear

An average value for the thermal energy of coal is approximately 6150 kilowatt-hours(kWh)/ton. Thus, the expected cumulative thermal energy release from U.S. coal combustion over this period totals about 6.87 x 10E14 kilowatt-hours. The thermal energy released in nuclear fission produces about 2 109 kWh/ton. Consequently, the thermal energy from fission of uranium-235 released in coal combustion amounts to 2.1 x 10E12 kWh. If uranium-238 is bred to plutonium-239, using these data, the thermal energy from fission of this isotope alone constitutes about 2.9 x 10E14 kWh, or about half the anticipated energy of all the utility coal burned in this country through the year 2040. If the thorium-232 is bred to uranium-233 and fissioned, the thermal energy capacity of this isotope is approximately 7.2 x 10E14 kWh, or 105% of the thermal energy released from U.S. coal combustion for a century. The total of the thermal energy capacities from each of these three fissionable isotopes is about 10.1 x 10E14 kWh, 1.5 times more than the total from coal. World combustion of coal has the same ratio, similarly indicating that coal combustion wastes more energy than it produces.

Consequently, the energy content of nuclear fuel released in coal combustion is more than that of the coal consumed! Clearly, coal-fired power plants are not only generating electricity but are also releasing nuclear fuels whose commercial value for electricity production by nuclear power plants is over $7 trillion, more than the U.S. national debt. This figure is based on current nuclear utility fuel costs of 7 mils per kWh, which is about half the cost for coal. Consequently, significant quantities of nuclear materials are being treated as coal waste, which might become the cleanup nightmare of the future, and their value is hardly recognized at all.

How does the amount of nuclear material released by coal combustion compare to the amount consumed as fuel by the U.S. nuclear power industry? According to 1982 figures, 111 American nuclear plants consumed about 540 tons of nuclear fuel, generating almost 1.1 x 10E12 kWh of electricity. During the same year, about 801 tons of uranium alone were released from American coal-fired plants. Add 1971 tons of thorium, and the release of nuclear components from coal combustion far exceeds the entire U.S. consumption of nuclear fuels. The same conclusion applies for worldwide nuclear fuel and coal combustion.

-- Alex Gabbard of the Metals and Ceramics Division of ORNL

It also can't be the "only power source which has little" environmental impact since the consensus of energy scientists including solar power researchers is that fission is one such power source

It also can't be the "only power source which has little" environmental impact since the consensus of energy scientists including solar power researchers is that fission is one such power source

ash5g:
The only real way to generate electicity is to simply passively collect it eg. wind turbines...

Wind turbines require large amounts of land, pollute visually and sonically, kill birds, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor (as opposed to nuclear fission which is relatively hazard-free) need to be located in windy places, and in the most plausible scenarios require gas turbines for back-up power when the wind isn't blowing.

...solar cells...
(Solar cells can't provide base-load power, so they wouldn't be competing with fission or fusion, but since you brought them up...)
Solar cells require large amounts of land, pollute visually, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor, burn 3% of their lifetime output of energy as coal when they are manufactured, and produce large amounts of chemical waste in their manufacture and decommissioning, principally but not limited to cadmium sulfide which will kill 80 people eventually per large solar power plant operation year.

BTW the burning of coal in the manufacture of solar cells is the reason solar PV plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants; i.e. the burning of coal releases radiation. It's also the reason solar PV power plants present a nuclear proliferation danger.

ash5g:
The only real way to generate electicity is to simply passively collect it eg. wind turbines...

Wind turbines require large amounts of land, pollute visually and sonically, kill birds, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor (as opposed to nuclear fission which is relatively hazard-free) need to be located in windy places, and in the most plausible scenarios require gas turbines for back-up power when the wind isn't blowing.

...solar cells...
(Solar cells can't provide base-load power, so they wouldn't be competing with fission or fusion, but since you brought them up...)
Solar cells require large amounts of land, pollute visually, require large amounts of hazardous construction and maintenance labor, burn 3% of their lifetime output of energy as coal when they are manufactured, and produce large amounts of chemical waste in their manufacture and decommissioning, principally but not limited to cadmium sulfide which will kill 80 people eventually per large solar power plant operation year.

BTW the burning of coal in the manufacture of solar cells is the reason solar PV plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants; i.e. the burning of coal releases radiation. It's also the reason solar PV power plants present a nuclear proliferation danger.

rainer_d:
The fossile energy-resources will be used up very quickly.

"The world has about 1500 years of known coal resources at the current use rate."

Anxiously awaiting your clarification...
--

User Bio
Visual effects programmer/animator/supervisor Developing visual effects tools for Linux

While that's a nice thing for Thagg to be doing, I can confidently say that he's talking out of his ass. NASA has been doing good things with its ever shrinking budget and the directions it is given. If you want to point to politics, look in the mirror.

The X-33 was a risk, but not nearly such a stunt as the Delta Clipper, which had a marked tenedncy to explode. Think about vertical landing for a minute. Parachutes and gliders can be made stable much easier than the DC. Vertical landers are also the least efficient of rockets. If it took a Saturn 5 to get to escape velocity, it will take a Saturn 5 to stop a vertical lander at escape velocity. Now what would it take to get a fully loaded Saturn 5 to escape velocity? Orion, that's what.

The X-33 was not all worked out when it started, what is? The technologies being tried are mostly involved with new materials. They have benifits that could greatly reduce weight and that equals cost to put things in orbit.

Carbon fiber technology has great promise and has worked it's way into all sorts of parts already. Fiber is to aluminum what aluminum was to steel. Parts can have 1/5 th the mass of their aluminum equivalent. I'm not sure why they have been having so much trouble with those tanks, but I know from a friend that works at Michaud that there have been problems like this for the last three years. I suspect heat curring just induces too much strain for cryrogenic tanks, and I wonder why they have not tried to use E Beam curring another Lockheed Martin technology. Oh well.

As for politics, we could have used Appolo technology to get to Mars by now, or Orion to get even further. But, we the public are full of bad advice.

To learn more visit and or join:

AIAA

SPE

Anyway, a little teeny tiny effort and of course comprehension is necessary to find out about Condor and Globus. Condor utilizes idle workstation resources for parallel applications. Kind of like PVM or MPI, but designed for clusters of workstations. It provides a mechanism to link several computers together. Globus, built on Nexus, it is a GPL system that runs on just about any grid (such as what Condor/MPI/PVM can be). It provides a consistent API and is useful for much more than standard parallel work. It is still being developed, but you can get the tools and server stuff.

Most people around here including the asker of the question obviously don't know a parallel app from Microsoft Word. I see this alot. "I will run SETI in parallel!" Huh? Not exactly.

I'll explain... I am all for running process independent stuff by rsh script, but it is not a true use of distribution. That is the whole point. SETI is allocated chunks of non-dependent data out to systems. You then send back results, no messaging. It is simplicity and not a multipurpose distributed system. It is pre-distributed and requires only a yes or no result. This is fine and great for embarassingly parallel applications such as number searches. Your adding more monkeys on typewriters, but they're only monkeys.

Real message passing like that of a Beowulf class server is when there is boundary data required between processes. One computer changes a row on a matrix that row is the boundary so it must send the process it shares the boundary with the updated row. This is usually the real crap, what people buy 100's of nodes to do. See MPI and PVM. These programs must be explicitly written in parallel to be efficient and utilize parallel code structures. They are built on top of message passing libraries (MPI/PVM) that are pre-ported to systems.

Systems like Mosix are OK and they exist now. They give you use of a network of linux workstations with process migration. However, it is very low level and will remain so since it works on x86 process explicitly. It also must have non-I/O bound process to export or it will be limited in utilization. A great project they are working on is the utilization of the networks memory space for large processes. If you ran a 2000x2000 matrix you could solve it using just plain Matlab and 4 256MB systems. It distributes the process state to where the data is. Mosix also is quite useful in dynamic scheduling. PVM and MPI both have very limited use of dynamic scheduling, but thanks to Mosix's peer to peer load balancing it can be utilized as a dynamic scheduler. PVM and MPI issue static process allocation to the nodes, as usage fluxes (finished or waiting process nodes) Mosix can move loads to increase efficiency.

Condor is used on groups of workstations and is heterogenous (NT is getting a port). You can build parallel apps for it just like MPI or PVM, it uses other technologies than them however.

Now Globus, Globus is a huge project utilizing a message passing/thread library called Nexus it can run on any grid. That grid then will connect to other distributed grid resources across the net. The user is presented with a web interface and a secure login. They upload the program and request an allocation of resources. They get the results back when done. It uses whatever servers are availible and can use explicit parallelism through the thread library to make it faster. It is for all purposes a worldwide supercomputer. It goes beyond this to also share all data resources available to the system by database through its directory system. This system allows anyone to join, but you have to be allowed to use other peoples resources.

So if you seriously are thinking about playing with this stuff, figure a real use, figure how much power usage you will be using (NODESx250W 24x7 can be quite a power bill). Then decide what parallel system PVM/MPI/Mosix/Condor you want to use. If you have a whole department of computers Condor might be good, if you have a specific parallel app and a few non-workstation nodes use pvm/mpi. If you run lots of processes or have lots of people logging on, Mosix code be useful. Also, Mosix on MPI/PVM would give probably an efficient cluster. Then you could submit it to Globus so others could utilize it. However, it sounds rather elitest and probably won't use two P133s when they got Cray T3Ds. Also, don't think about actually using Globus yourself. Hey, I guess it would be just about like SETI and others. You could be helping science or at least some grad-student piddle around.

I've heard good things about the AltaVista tunneling software from some people who were looking at a very similar situation. It appears to be abandoned, although it may just be hiding.

I found links to it on Tom Dunigan's VPN page, which has a number of good links for the problem at hand.

A link to AltaVista tunnel info that does work is found on this Digital link in Russia, which is oddly, in English.

Again, I haven't tried this myself, so caveat emptor.

• ...how can this information be unleashed in a society which hasn't even seriously considered these issues?

Although I do agree that most of the research will be patented by corporations for profit, I think the above statement is way off. Discussion of the ethics of altering human (and other animal's) genetics has been going on for years.

Although I'm sure someone has already posted it, here is a link to the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues (ELSI) of the Human Genome Project page.

--RB

• When Katz writes, "Politicians and exultant scientists were quick to sound caveats and talk about the need for safeguards and ethical standards, but the fact is there aren't any." what he really means is "I'm going to write a warning about the potential misuse of genetics. I don't know if anyone else has thought of any such concerns and I'm not going to do any research to find out, so I'll just write that no one cares." The fact is that Human Genome Project has had an Ethical, Legal and Social Implications division since almost the beginning. (It's only a huge link at the top of the HGP site!) I can tell you, as a genome center scientist, that nothing happens without consideration of ethical issues.
• When recombinant DNA technology was first developed, scientists declared a voluntary moratorium on it until safety procedures had been fully discussed and established. Molecular biology has a unique place in science for displaying that level of caution.
• Despite the hype, there's nothing fundamentally new today that wasn't an issue years ago -- it's just more complete. As usual, it seems clear that Katz doesn't really begin to understand the technology he's insisting is going to bring us to paradise or destruction.
• It took me a while to figure out why the USA topic was used here before coming to lines like "The U.S., the world capital of technological hubris and arrogance.." It's funny -- there's the stereotype that Americans assume that anything here is automatically superior to everyplace else. There are Americans like that, but there are also Americans who assume that the US necessarily outdoes everyplace else in all negatives, that sexism, racism, pollution, greed here are all the worst in the world. What's funny is that both those mindsets come out of the same parochialism and ignorance.

We'll finally have the script to our bodies. Whether you believe in God or Evolution or some combination thereof, this is a landmark event. For the first time, a species will have the ability to view and eventually change its own blueprint.

My fondest hope is that our society will be able to catch up enough with technology, so we can deal with this the Right Way(tm). I think Gattaca had some very relevant messages, that need to be discussed as we move into this technology. We the public need to be very aware right now of what is happening with the patenting of genes. There is a great potential for abuse.

I'm glad that both the public project and the private sector will be announcing this together. The Human Genome Project immediately publishes their data on every night. You can be sure that Celera's downloads it every morning. It would be an affront to the scientists who did so much work in the public project if Celera tried to steal all the credit.

Be sure to check out the Charlie Rose show this week on PBS. He has been running a week long special on all this. I highly recommend it.

I'm surprised I haven't seen any mention of this here yet. I submitted it as a story a bit ago but it got rejected (it's only marginally on-topic anyway).

Here's the gist: Celera is getting massively sued in at least three class-action suits. Shareholders claim that Celera has a bogus business plan and which "is dependent upon its ability to protect its database [of genomic] information through patent protection."

These upcoming lawsuits look ugly, and apparently the shareholders don't appear to think Celera is on the up-and-up with their claims of IP protection for the human genome.

Now dig this. The reason why the class-action litigants feel that Celera's business plan is flawed is that the Human Genome Project has already "open sourced" significant parts of the human genome.

Here is the full article from law.com.

First, you partially chop up the length of DNA in question using commercially available enzymes. This produces a bunch of segments of different lengths which you then label with 4 different fluorescent tags (each color is specific for one particular base -- A, C, T, or G). You then load these segments into a thin, flat gel. An electric current is applied to the gel, and DNA (being negatively charged) moves toward the positive terminal (small segments move more quickly than long ones). Each segment, on its way to the end of the gel, is illuminated by a laser and the resulting color is noted by a detector. The sequence is then reconstructed by computer based on the colors passing through the detector in a specific order.

The technique was first figured out in 1977 by Frederick Sanger (it's called the Sanger Dideoxy sequencing method). There's a similar method that works by base destruction described by Maxam and Gilbert around the same time. Big difference now is that you don't have to read the gells with their hundreds of little bands by hand anymore... and that's where the sequencers come in. Imagine sequencing the human genome by hand...

Check out http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/faq/seqfacts.html for more information about sequencing techniques and the genome project in general.

For the gadget geeks among us: http://www.pebio.com/ga/dna/377specs.html

(Too bad there aren't any prices there... the one that we had in my old lab was over $100,000 though...)

The more disturbing trend to me is patenting the genes themselves... you can patent the camera that takes my picture, but don't patent the stuff that makes me me.

Ironic, aint it?

Or we could just regulate coal ash like we would nuclear waste containing 200ppm uranium. Of course, we can't have that, it might make nuclear power economically viable.

Coal has uranium impurities that average around 1ppm, when burned, the ash remaining is about 1% of the mass, and almost all of the uranium remains in the ash (the fly ash, which is (mostly) caught in the filters in the smokestacks). For more information, read ths article on Coal Combustion

actually.. this is very much a reality. check out The Stone Soup Cluster . It uses all kinds of machines from 486's to Pentiums all in one cluster.


...and the geek shall inherit the earth...

It's been done. Check this link.

--

To understand genetic engineering you need to understand the technology and also the organism on which it is being used. A fair grounding in general biology, the model organisms used to develop the technology, the basics of molecular biology, some genetics and cell biology is needed. Most genetic engineering is developed by finding out how some portion of biology works, and then imitating it for human purposes. Genetic engineering is like copying source code--scientists study the organism (the original code), and then crudely copy it giving a new genetic engineering technology.

These links can give you a start, but if you are seriously interested, pick up an introductory college text with molecular biology, cell biology, or genetics in the title.

Here are some resources available on the web:

Primer on Molecular Genetics (Department of Energy)

MIT Biology Hypertextbook

Primer on Molecular Genetics from the U.S. Department of Energy

Biotech Applied follow the Biotech Applied and Biotech Chronicles links

(Small) glossary of genetic terms put together by the National Human Genome Research Institute

Info on research (with great graphics) funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Jim Lund

Human Genome Project Information:
http://www.ornl.gov/TechRe sources/Human_Genome/home.html

Human Genome Program, Genome Research:
http://www.er.doe.gov/production /ober/hug_top.html

National Human Genome Research Institute:
http://www.nhgri.nih.gov/

On a more philosophical note, when those who are in their adolescence find themselves looking at a generation which has had their genes tampered, there will be prejudice. Lots of it. It can't be avoided.

But what about those who got vaccines at birth? Those who never had to worry about smallpox, polio, etc.? Every generation we go through is healthier than the last, constantly improving. Genetic research will be an issue, obviously, but it's not that unbelivable or radical. Just another step in the same direction.
------------

Au contraire Mon capitan! (pardon me =)
Pattern recognition has already reached a significant level of compexity but, what is not public at this moment is an integrated personality. A Machine Intelligence might even exist today, if it does you definately don't know about it and neither do I. To know of such a thing would very logically be a death warrent or at least permanent house arrest.
I think therefore I am. The prefrontal cortex is one of Gödel's islands of consistancy, reverse-engineering of that structure is well under way on many fronts: here, here, here and too many other places to mention. Gaming AI doesn't have a trillionish dollar distributed budget behind it simply because games don't generate that kind of revenue. Besides this hardware is woefully inadequate, a few very fast processor versus my billions of slow ones. I simply have more chances to stumble across something.
Hmm. So a compressed dictionary is the key to creating a true intelligence? Well! Step right over to those fine folks at Cyc who have been doing just that! To bad the darn thing is a lot more brittle than you or I. Although I really like the semantics they're developing - someday it could make good baby food for the real thing. I've spent many sleepless nights researching this field and the only thing I've learned is that there are a whole lot of distractions. The proof of that lies in the fact that HAL didn't come online on schedule.

The Night Angel

Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sixteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens, and, last but not least, a single !

This is impossible. You cannot remove the profit motive from scientific research except in periods of war or other danger.

Unfortunately for your argument, as the U.S. Human Genome Project home page points out,

Begun in 1990, the U.S. Human Genome Project is a 13-year effort coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health.

Aparently, there is no profit motive here... instead, there is a rare glimpse into a government (well, OK, pone government, but I suspect other countries of the same benevolence) actually doing what most people think it should do: support and enhance the common good. Let's stop and savor that for a moment...

Mmmmmmmmm.

OK, that out of the way, I have to admit that in some senses, you're right. For the individual researchers on the project, this is the meal ticket! The mother lode! After working on this baby, they'll be able to get a job anywhere in the industry... as long as their work is recognized. As long as other people can examine it and judge it as worthy. As long as it is - dare I say it? - open .

Look at the Human Genome Project not as an excercise in biotechnology, but a bunch of gene hackers trying to earn a reputation and build something they can be proud of, and I think you'll find a lot of parallels between these folks and the ones who created the foundation of the internet lo so many moons ago.

A heavy-lift booster in this class could throw a pretty good-sized payload to Mars for a "Mars Direct" type of manned mission.

One such technology being worked on right now is plasma engines. A proposed 2002 mission that would test this type of engine is mentioned at http://www.qu est.arc.nasa.gov/space/team/journals/petro/01-29-9 9.html. Also mentioned is an ion engine. A bit more about the plasma (or RF) engine can be found at http://www.ornl.gov/orcmt/success/rf- eng.html.

I've heard engineers at NASA refer to the plasma engine as the engine that'll take us to Mars.

This stuff has been around for a long time. I have a friend who works at the Oak Ridge Nat'l Lab, and is collaborating with the Berkeley guys. The link is here. This page dates from 98. I went in to see Eli last December, and saw a working photobioreactor. They were calibrating it when I got there.

Be happy NASA did that work, or you wouldn't have low orbits possible from aircraft.

Also, NASA would love to forget about this low earth orbit crap. Carl Sagan and others have been haranguing it for years to do some Real Work. Funding has been cut, so they have been required to change to the "faster, better, cheaper" model. It's a good idea; some $200 million probes will be lost. But no $5 billion probes are lost.

The Soviets beat the US into orbit, were damn close for the moon, yet none of their Mars probes survived. That NASA has been successful shows a great deal of technichal excellence.

The greatest hope for space exploration is China. They have a big space program, which will, hopefully, scare the Americans into spending more on space to beat the "Communists", like they did against the Soviet Union.

Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger?

Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium

I only found this out recently from a chapter in one of Dr Karl Kruszelnicki's New Moments in Science books. And there's a whole lot of other nasty emissions besides. It makes nuclear power look safer than baby wipes in comparison.

Actually, I'd recommend that if you are actually seriously interested you'd take a look at ELSI which is the ethics body attached to the HGP and funded by the US government. Gordon

There's an entry in their FAQ that gives an answer to the question. Is the FAQ correct?

There's an entry in their FAQ that gives an answer to the question. Is the FAQ correct?

This is pretty much obligatory here, so...

Check out the Human Genome Project's website at http://www.ornl.gov/TechRe sources/Human_Genome/home.html

------

True, but from the tone of the original question it really doesn't appear that this person should be responsible for making the decision. He's acting like the Slashdot poster child "they want to use NT but I know Linux is better".

And why hasn't anyone mentioned PVM? It works to cluster/parallel heterogeneous networks (thats mixed unix/win32 for the less educated among you). http://www.epm.ornl.gov/pvm/pvm_home.html

• Beowulf clusters have to be useful for the kind of scientific projects your university undertakes. Large science (physics, astronomy) projects, usually coded in Fortran and involving lots of calculations that can be computed in parallel, are ideal applications for them. Other applications may be a lot less interesting. A Beowulf cluster, depsite its power, is not always the perfect solution.
  
• If your University is short on cash, you may want to investigate the "Stone Soup" cluster -- recycled old Pentiums and 486s can find a second lease on life in a Beowulf cluster. Pros: cheap. Cons: require a lot of labor and patience and is less powerful than Beowulf cluster using up-to-date CPUs and network connections.
  
• To be truly effective, Beowulf clusters require at least a couple of very powerful servers and very advanced network hardware -- be sure to compute this into the total cost.
  
• Beowulf clusters are not for the faint of heart. They require quite a lot of skills, as far as the network configuration, machine configuration and traffic optimization are concerned. It's not surprising the first Beowulf were born at NASA -- It did require rocket scientists to make them work! =) Once they are up and running, though, their performances are close or better than dedicated supercomputers -- for a small fraction of the price.
  
• Another good side of Beowulf is the fail-safe possibilities and evolution capacities of such a machine. If a "node" goes down, the machine does not crash, and the node share of the task(s) can be assigned by the main server to another machine. If you need a more powerful machine, simply add a dozen new PCs to your mix and watch those MIPS/Gigaflops go up!
  
• Finally, never forget the one argument that wins them all: price, price, price, price! Linux is free, Intel PCs are dirt cheap, all you need is a lot of space and a dedicated team to make it work. Oh, and lots of network cards & cables... =)
  

...richie

• TreadMarks
• The Quarks DSM System (ports to other platforms are here and my port to Linux is here.)
• DIPC (or try here)
• SHRIMP, a high performance parallel system for Linux.
• PVM -- a message passing approach to parallel programming.

There have been some interesting recent experiments in cooperative robotics; maybe extending the slug-eater model to incorporate slug-herders and zone-quartering isn't such a bad idea...

--

US taxpayers are helping too
Govt. HGP budget numbers

One thing I find sorely lacking in many books on algorithms is any discussion of why you would select one over another

Do you mean GA versus say a Newton search method? GA is sometimes referred to as a method of last resort. This may be unfair, because many practical problems are not mathematically "nice". I am just getting into GA and I have very complicated simulations underlying my objective functions. We previously computed derivatives for these; it was a huge effort both computationally and for the programmer. One thing that I like about GA is that wrapping the optimizer around an arbitrarily complex objective function is really easy. Also, the parallelism is really good ("embarassing"), especially for distributed computing with message-passing (think beowulf).

For me, the bad thing is that convergence isn't nice and quadratic like some derivative based methods out there. On the other hand, quadratic convergence generally works only near the optimum and derivative based optimizers really only find local minimums (no guarantees about the optimum being globally optimal). Derivative based methods can blow up if you pick a bad guess objective too. Perhaps a good strategy is a combination -- use GA to get into the neighborhood of the global optimum and then use derivative based methods to find it.

I should stress that all this is for my particular application (groundwater). YMMV. Others with different objectives living in differently constrained control spaces will have different experiences. Also, to be fair I should point out that programs like ADIFOR make derivative computations easy to program.

Some helpful optimization links:

Decision Tree for Optimization Software

GA Archives

One thing I find sorely lacking in many books on algorithms is any discussion of why you would select one over another

Do you mean GA versus say a Newton search method? GA is sometimes referred to as a method of last resort. This may be unfair, because many practical problems are not mathematically "nice". I am just getting into GA and I have very complicated simulations underlying my objective functions. We previously computed derivatives for these; it was a huge effort both computationally and for the programmer. One thing that I like about GA is that wrapping the optimizer around an arbitrarily complex objective function is really easy. Also, the parallelism is really good ("embarassing"), especially for distributed computing with message-passing (think beowulf).

For me, the bad thing is that convergence isn't nice and quadratic like some derivative based methods out there. On the other hand, quadratic convergence generally works only near the optimum and derivative based optimizers really only find local minimums (no guarantees about the optimum being globally optimal). Derivative based methods can blow up if you pick a bad guess objective too. Perhaps a good strategy is a combination -- use GA to get into the neighborhood of the global optimum and then use derivative based methods to find it.

I should stress that all this is for my particular application (groundwater). YMMV. Others with different objectives living in differently constrained control spaces will have different experiences. Also, to be fair I should point out that programs like ADIFOR make derivative computations easy to program.

Some helpful optimization links:

Decision Tree for Optimization Software

GA Archives

so where's the link? argh..

well, here's a starting link I found real quick...

http://www.ornl.gov/TechReso urces/Human_Genome/home.html

What really scares me is how nobody has yet pointed out the way Fairfax describes open source in their article:

Open Source is an increasingly valuable marketing position that has grown from a philosophy that software and its programming code should be shared among all programmers.

(Emphasis added.)

That really is the way quite a few companies view it -- not as a philosophy or even a "new business model", but as a marketing tactic.

It seems that, where we had to do some education last year on the meaning of the word "free" in "free software", we now have to do some education about the meaning of the word "open" in "open source".

An earlier post under the subject line "Poor Us" stated:

>I say, if you can see the source code, its open source.

I don't mean to jump down that person's throat, but that is only one small part of what's necessary for something to be open source. I use an alternative MTA, Qmail, which comes in source form, so you can definitely see the source, but the author keeps tight control over what actually goes into it -- nobody else can check things into the source tree, even suggestions for improvements or alterations are generally rejected. There are lots and lots of patches, but nobody but the author gets to fuck with Qmail's source.

There have been discussi ons on the Qmail mailing list about just how free (or open) Qmail is, based partly on that requirement. (Follow Vern Hart's reply from the link.)

Apparently, the proliferation of patches to Qmail (and, more importantly, the fact that the author places no restrictions on such patches!) allows it to meet the OSD, but it's a close shave.

I use this as an example, and especially refer readers to Dave Sill and Vern Hart's "more free/less free" phrasing in the referenced thread on the Qmail mailing list. Freedom or openness is a continuum, and supplying source is only one step along it.

If we let corporations get away with promoting the idea that "if you can see the source, it's open source software" -- and especially if we start believing it ourselves -- then the movement is finished as a significant force in computing. That's the first step toward letting it become the mere "marketing position" that Fairfax claims.