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...demonstrate how you can make a 1GW fusion reactor out of nothing but a sweaty gym sock and the corpse of a field mouse.

It might not be that easy, but this guy seems to be on the right track.

I first surfed the net on a VaxStation VLC http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers/vaxen/vax4000-vlc.html using NCSA Mosaic for VMS http://vaxa.wvnet.edu/vmswww/vms_mosaic.html back I think in 1994.

While it had a 19" Monitor which was cool, it was Monochrome so looking at pictures was a bit disapointing ;)

I think I next used Enhanced Mosaic from Spyglass for VMS which then correct me if I'm wrong turned into IE1.

First Netscape I used was on a DEC Alpha running NT4, I think it was version Netscape 3.01, was a hell of a lot better than the IE bundled with the OS which was IE2 I think.

Now get off my lawn ;)
Jonathan

http://www.irvtheswerve.net/

Elvira.

The perfect girl for your average computer nerd. Not at all standoffish. She's unusual, but so down-to-earth.
Who wouldn't feel right at home with her? A little off the wall for her to be hawking some complicated computer software, I have no idea what is was supposed to do from the advertisement. Must have been something from the old days before Netscape, when computers were supposed to do "office" and "business" stuff.
To see how far we have come, the decendants of Netscape are used everyday, all day in every office and business out there. Nevermind that the new-found purpose is to look on the internet for nice-looking girls like Elvira.
To prove my point, here are a few links to Elvira images for your enjoyment:

• Here's one. Appears to be an autographed picture of Elvira, no doubt sent to some lonely nerd.
  
• This one appears to be another advertisement featuring Elvira.
  
• In this shot, an impersonator does Elvira, right down to the creepy eye-plastic-surgery, which by the way would be a good conversation starter topic for anyone lucky enough to get a date with Elvira.
  
• Here we have Elvira on/in a game. Perhaps some of you have wasted your money on this one.
  
• Supposedly this is a picture of Elvira's car, apparently a T-Bird, with some spooky changes.
  
• Out selling vacuum cleaners, and you ring this doorbell, get greeted by Elvira and friends.
   

• This one was taken in 2003, you can tell it's really Elvira, because of the little dagger on her belt, with the red and green gemstones. (Elvira has been in show business for a while now, and she is not as young as she used to be, but who cares)
  
• Here is a photo of Elvira with her pet snake. Lots of wannabe Elvira's felt they had to have a snake too, mostly a bad idea, only Elvira herself knows how to handle the little varmits.
  
• OK, here's the best for last, showing lots of Elvira's legs, and her car. As you can see, that's a real car, based on a T-Bird, and those are real legs too.
  
• Here's a screenshot of some Elvira software. I have no idea what it does, and am returning to the image above, much more interesting.
  
  
  -- Rapidweather

According to Wikipedia, burning coal will yield around 1.5% of its mass in gallium.

That may be bogus information. It comes from Wikipedia, which got it from LANL's periodic table.

But sources that talk about commercial recovery of gallium from fly ash have far lower numbers. See U.S. Patent #4,686,031, "Beneficiation of gallium in fly ash", which talks about starting from concentrations in the 100ppm (0.01%) range. The state of West Virginia says that the mean concentration of gallium in West Virginia coals is 6.45 ppm. Fly ash is more concentrated than coal, of course, because burning removes the carbon but leaves the non burnable minerals.

If fly ash, which is cheap, contained 1.5% gallium, nobody would be bothering with extracting it from bauxite.

I think the "problem" (if you or I call it that) that many people are facing is that liberal (massive) amounts of interactive and uncencsored media is significantly different than liberal (political belief).

My parents' generation has been subconciously indoctrinated on many issues, from nuclear power, to use of environmental resources, to validity of unions, to educational policies, etc. Now we know that nuclear plants put out less radiation into the atmosphere than coal, that logging and oil drilling are good policies for public land, that the unions don't always represent their constituents, that educational systems are failing and alternatives exist, etc. Only with the internet and bottom-up media distribution can the public hope to see differing philosophies and alternative policies... which is partly why the conservative (commercial) and libertarian (political) parties have fluxed so strongly towards the internet.

Now where did that come from?

Jesus fucking Christ. From the plants that turned into coal, of course.

Now where did that come from?

Coal generally contains concentrations of uranium of from 1 to 10 parts per million, and from 2 to 4 times as much thorium.

Here. Here Here Here.Here.Here.

Those numbers are just a little high for something that is laid down in sediemnts.

Or maybe you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Now where did that come from?

Jesus fucking Christ. From the plants that turned into coal, of course.

Now where did that come from?

Coal generally contains concentrations of uranium of from 1 to 10 parts per million, and from 2 to 4 times as much thorium.

Here. Here Here Here.Here.Here.

Those numbers are just a little high for something that is laid down in sediemnts.

Or maybe you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Googling a bit gives us the statistics of West Virginia Coal association (around 164 million tons in 2003), and trace info on west virginian trace amounts of uranium in coal (1.59ppm mean value). This might be a small fraction, but it's probably accurate.

So we have 1.59 mol uranium per million mol coal. I'll also assume that a ton is a metric ton and that coal exists entirely of carbon.

164M tons at 12.0107 g/mol gives us 13654491411824 mol. At 1.59ppm, we have 21710641 mol of uranium. At 238.0289 g/mol, we get 5167132640g = 5167133kg = 5167 tons.

Looks about right. Now let's do a rougher world estimates. This site says coal accounts for 93 Quadrillion BTUs. The number of BTUs per ton of coal varies, but according to Wikipedia's Coal entry, it's around 20M BTU/ton, so 4650M tons of coal. We'll still assume 1.59ppm U. Doing the same as above gives us 146515653621g=146515 ton. Since we used estimates and estimates of estimates, we'll just say "over 100,000 tons".

The usage of uranium? 42,500 tonnes. I suppose that's different fron tons, but screw that, I'm tired.

So yes, if my calculations hold, it's true. There is a lot more uranium in the coal than what we mine.

Like the Scottish Play, data heavens still seem to be a cursed venture.

nope. didn't you read this handy guide to decide whether you wanted the cd or floppy version? note that it is "less likely that a Windows 95 CD-ROM will become [...] infected with a virus".

This is what happened: Aristotelian physics required that all motions in the heavens to be circular, so some astronomers introduced epicycles to account for retrograde motion. Ptolemy incorporated this in his magnificient theory. Now, the story goes:

The system was finally owerthrown as a result of the complexity which arose when an ever-increasing number of superimposed circles had to be postulated in order to represent the ever-multiplying inequalities in the planetary motions revealed by observational progress

(taken from de Vaucouleurs, Gerard (1957)), it's just that this is wrong! First, where is the evidence that there was any significant observational progress. Have a good look, and you'll see that there wasn't any observational progress, so they had no reason whatsoever to introduce additional epicycles. The observational progress didn't come until Tycho Brahe, after Copernicus.

Now, the whole thing culminated in 1963, Robert Horace Baker wrote an article in the Encyclopedia Britannica stating that 40 to 60 epicycles were added to each planet, which is absurd, they would have needed a Beowulf cluster to compute the positions of the planets if they did that... ;-) At least with the math they had available.

Baker further said that Alfonso X stated that if he had been there at creation, he would have given the good lord a few hints. Alfonse X computed (well, as a patron) the Alfonsine Tables, that astronomers needed to determine the expected positions of the planets.

Owen Gingerich bashed the myth in 1968 by recomputing the Alfonsine Tables, and found that they were based on a pure Ptolemaic model with only minor corrections to the parameters used by Ptolemy.

I have been trying to figure out why this myth came to be and how it propagated. I haven't had time to do much research on it lately, and I won't tire you with my stuff, but I have an old essay about it for those interested.

Now, the myth has been uncritically accepted by a number of canons, most notably Thomas Kuhn. I have read a couple of his books, and I'm a bit uncertain how important it is for his philosophy, but it is clearly motivating him to go in the direction he does. Gingerich told me on the History of Astronomy Discussion List that Kuhn was very embarrased when he told him about it.

It is very important to note, IMHO, that Ptolemy went away from Aristotelian physics a long way, and that allready in the 10th century (i.e. before Aristotle was made compatible with Christianity by Thomas Aquinas), the criticism against him gained strength. Ptolemy had to introduce several concepts, among them, the equant. The epicycle itself is not consistent with Aristotelian physics, because the circular motion should be around the centre of the universe, namely the earth. Now, could it be that Copernicus was mainly motivated by lack of proper physics as opposed to merely mathematical constructs?

Finally, as others has mentioned, Copernican cosmology had no advantage over Ptolemaic cosmology in terms of accuracy, also as shown by Owen Gingerich. The breakthrough in accuracy came with Kepler.

That's why I code. The mental challenge of creating a program which can do x, y, z just to see if it is possible. The best programs I have wrote are the smaller ones which just do one thing, like change the wallpaper every 5 mintues.

West Virginia's educational system relies on a computer network called wvnet. When my sister tried to check her mail on West Virginia U's pop account, no dice. It appears wvnet has taken down all sites (universities, colleges) but their main portal. I'm not sure if this caution is so prudent. Unless all the techies stuck at work want the bandwidth for themselves to play massive quake areans...

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