Slashdot Mirror
The Year In Ideas
popo writes "The New York Times Magazine has a review of the year's most original and interesting ideas. They include "The Tornado in a Can" ("A contained cyclone, it turns out, is very useful for pulverizing things") and David Stevenson's real-life proposal to dig to the center of the Earth. by sinking heavy iron through the Earth's mantle."
somehow this doesn't seem like a good idea....
Let's start melting holes in it!
And why? So somebody can get an 'A'!
Which reminds me of that great scene in Star Trek TNG Evolution where Guinan busts Wesley crawling around her 10-forward, and after mumbling something about Dr. Frankenstein, asks him about the grades he's getting.
He replies that he always gets an 'A'.
And she replies, "So did Dr. Frankenstein."
(and lest anybody think my using the word fuck in the subject is out of line, I refer you to none other than the FCC who says it isn't such a bad word afterall.)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Discover Magazine has the "top 100 scientific achievements of '03". It also has the most convuluted index possible for said achievements!
if you don't feel better tomorrow, we'll just cut your legs off about here. - Theodoric of York
...on the tornado in a can
SourceForge's new donation system?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
On the moon and call it a "Death Star." Then we hold the world ransom for....one million dollars!
Plus, even if the laser heats the earth, it doesn't exert any force on it; the molten iron heats and then presses down on the crust to allow it to break through.
I'm also not sure what a laser would accomplish once you break through the crust. Since at that point the temperature is already really hot, and the earth is, if I remember right, molten, the issue is presumably the pressure to get your probes down farther (which the iron accomplishes), not the ability to break through the earth itself.
But I think the farmer (with his Tornado in a Can idea) has been watching too many Roadrunner cartoons.
anchor
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
It looks like you have to register to read the article :(
Here is a more helpful link to the table of contents, not to the introduction.
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Wow, it's a device that violates conservation of mass!
The one thing i did not understand about the journey to the center of the earth proposal is how would you attach a sensor package with telemetry to a pile of goo at several thousands of degrees f.
Seems like a rather minor snag.
Here's another page with some pictures of it.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
I just cannot see how, in any conceivable way, creating a tunnel to the centre of the Earth could be a good idea.
Speaking of top ideas, check out SlipHead.com. Its an open forum for the free exhange of ideas - similar to the way the open software movement works. Get recognized for having the best ideas, and who knows, maybe you'll even catch the eye of an investor!
I tried to invent a heavy iron in a can, but it did a terrible job of pressing my pants.
One thing I did not see in the comments on the original Tornado in a Can story is this:
A garbage-processing plant in Pennsylvania will go online with its Windhexe next month; the machine can turn two tons of trash into one ton of sterile powder.
Guess what. That other ton of material isn't getting destroyed. That doesn't happen. It's probably going into the air as (very tiny) solid particles. Now, since these particles are created from the very beginning of the process, are they also sterile? I would think not. I'm not saying this process is environmentally bad. I'm only saying that waste disposal never has a simple, clean solution.
Sorry for being off-topic but I couldn't find a contact email at sammcgees.com and the FAQs didn't help me. Do you ship overseas (specifically, to the UK)?
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
That article you posted says that fuck can only be used as an adjective, which u clearly did not do. I fail to see why you would bother citing evidence that doesnt even support your position.
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
They include "The Tornado in a Can" ("A contained cyclone, it turns out, is very useful for pulverizing things")
In other news, I have just concluded a study that has found that a glass of water, it turns out, is very useful for quenching thirst.
Come one now, if they can clear trailer parks in 30 seconds, isn't this just a progression of logic?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You're right. It's only acceptible as an adjective. For instance, I can call you a fucking asshole, and that's OK.
Thank you for that clarification.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
An award dealing with ideas and inventions in 2003 that the iTunes Music Store didn't win? Won't be seeing too many of those...
I'm pretty sure Icelanders are looking forward to this. After all, who doesn't want to live in a nuclear bomb test area? ;-)
where's all that Karma?
I thought you guys had freedom of speech in the US. In many other nations, we have no such restrictions at all on what you can or can't say on the radio or TV. People are just expected to be sensible.
What about nudity?
I'm going to take a stab that "Sarah" didn't "write" that article on Virginia Tech's website. Instead, I'm guessing she took the story that the Washington Post wrote, and rephrased it a little.
Nearly every sentence in Sarah's article is a clear, direct ripoff of the Washington Post article.
Please help metamoderate.
This is basically a high-powered cyclone dryer. Cyclone dryers have been around for decades, but they're not usually run at power levels high enough to get grinding effects.
Anyone remeber those from the movie Mystery Men? :-)
Shoveler: A canned tornado, huh?
Heller: Totally non-lethal, but totally effective.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
How is this flamebait?
Rush Limbaugh is a junkie! He said so himself!
but the iron is not going to get heavier on its way to the core. As far as I can remember the gravity that the iron feels is just the gravity from the sphere of mass below the iron, and so the thing should become lighter, regardless of its mass being the same.
Yeah, nudity on the radio is ok over here.
It's sort of neat to see a story like this, because Dr. Stevenson was one of my advisors at Caltech. He's a great guy with a cool New Zealand accent and a wide assortment of knowledge about almost everything. But I can shed a little light on this, both because I know him and because I have a geology background.
First, for the credulous, he's semi-joking. The physics of the iron sinking into the core is actually plausible, but his tone when talking about "generating a crack in the crust" is tongue-in-cheek. This would require a much larger nuclear detonation, say, than has ever been tested by anybody. The seismic consequences would be... bad. What's more, we aren't anywhere even close to being able to design probes that could survive such an environment and send messages back.
To dispel a common misconception, the interior of the earth is NOT molten. Omitting some interesting boundary layers, the Earth is composed of the following chunks from the inside out: the inner core (solid iron alloy), the outer core (molten iron alloy), the mantle (solid rock), and the crust (we live on it). If you're curious as to how we know, it's because liquids and solids have dramatically different properties as far as transmitting seismic waves. I just found a decent site at JPL here that illustrates the earth's structure nicely, although it appears to have been written for grade schoolers.
The idea that the mantle is liquid is one of the most widely held misconceptions about major geological concepts. It exhibits ductile deformation, so it flows something like a liquid, with a speed of centimeters or meters per year. Magma, however, results when rock is pushed up into the crust from the mantle - the decrease in pressure lowers the melting temperature. It can also be generated when water seeps into hot rocks - wet rock has a lower melting temperature. It is NOT evidence that the mantle itself is liquid.
So why would this work? A large body of iron would be much denser than mantle rock, and at a hundred million kilograms, the net downward force would be considerable enough to force mantle rock out of the way. I'm too lazy to figure out the physics for this post, but I would imagine this is the content of the Nature article. The interesting question would be, "would ductile deformation occur quickly enough to get the iron down in a reasonable amount of time?" The answer, apparently, is 'yes'.
Regardless, I don't think the plan is to get that far in that this really becomes an issue, but I don't know enough about geology to know how far down they plan to go. But assuming that the earth is molten once they break through the chewy, chocolate-coated outer crust (sorry, I haven't yet had breakfast), I suppose the amount of force needed wouldn't be as great anyway.
If you can't tell, this was all speculation, i.e. I'm pulling it out of my ass. But that's my best guess.
But somehow the powdered brocoli just doesn't seem right. "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it."
If it works as claimed though, I can think of lots and lots of uses for it. Like maybe you could build something like a rototiller out of it (though you probably would have to mix in some larger bits to keep the powder from turning into cement when it gets wet).
http://www.vortexdehydration.com/id28.htm
This is from: billboards that watch you
Mobiltrak's technology relies on a little-known fact about car radios: they don't just receive signals; they also emit them. A car radio tunes to a particular station by mixing the signal from the ether with its own internally generated signal. It's that faint internal signal that the Mobiltrak dish picks up.
Can someone explain this? From Mobiltrak's FAQ, it implies the "internal signal" is just RF noise - and that its noise signature is different depending upon the station you're tuned into. Is RF noise really that loud? If so, does it also mean its also theoretically possible to determine what any electronic appliance is doing?
Or I could just settle for filling her crack with molten rock-gravy. Yup, great ideas indeed!
When the vortext pulverizes dead birds into a powder, it it actually ground finely enough that bacteria are destroyed?
Also, I wonder: If you throw fibrous material like cloth scraps from a clothing factory into the windhexe, will you get useful fibers, or just dust out of the process? I'm thinking of recycling those scraps either into paper, or spinning them into thread again.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
yes but doesnt "drilling holes" fufill the definition of the verb "to fuck" which he appears to be using in the past tense ?
If the word 'fuck' isn't, according to you, considered such a bad word after all, then what's the point in using it anymore?
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Here is my favorite article of the collection.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Yeah, but the iron would stay at the center of the earth, and with a laser you could build a tunnel right through the middle (since we're tossing out improbable scenarios anyway). Then with some "clever engineering" it could be stabilized and you could transport stuff through it. Such as flying pigs.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
For those with too little time to read an admittedly informative and interesting comment, here's a quick summary: Earth has a crunchy center surrounded by creamy nougat and a crisp shell. Heavy stuff sinks slowly, but it's probably not a good idea to go breaking the planet.
- fader
Why not use your whore mother?
original article
Seriously, amen to that. I'm an engineer, and I see similar examples everyday - decisions being made (and grants being awarded) on the basis of who has the flashier slides. I think we have finally brought Attention Deficit Disorder to the corporate level.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Here's a link without login:
- 20 02Dec8?language=printer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28285
I thought you guys had freedom of speech in the US. In many other nations, we have no such restrictions at all on what you can or can't say on the radio or TV. People are just expected to be sensible.
The restrictions on TV only apply to general broadcast stations. Essentially it's a tradeoff that a broadcaster makes in exchange for being able to broadcast over a public resource (the airwaves). Channels that broadcast over privately owned channels (like cable or satellite) have fewer restrictions, although most don't go wild with it in consideration of their audiences.
What about nudity?
On regular broadcast ("free" channels), no. On "premium" channels, sure.
You guys are all absolutely right. Which is why the proposal is a way to dig to the OUTER CORE which lies just beneath the mantle. That is, the mass of iron only gets through the first major layer beneath the crust. The Slashdot blurb, as usual, misses the crucial detail.
Once it gets to the outer core, which is mostly iron, it doesn't get any deeper because the buoyancy of the iron will keep it at roughly the same level.
Freedom of speech means the government is not going to come down on you for saying the "f-word". You are more than welcome to say the word. But that does not mean they are going to allow it to be broadcast to millions who more than likely would rather not hear it.
Liberals have long complained that the right overwhelms them with personal attacks and vicious allegations, while the left tries, naively, to make a more noble and substantive case...The various expressions of liberal fury are a direct imitation of what the right has been doing for more than a decade.
Could they for Christ's sake refrain from injecting liberal politics into every article they write? As if Liberals haven't overwhelmed the right with personal attacks and vicious allegations ever. That's right, according to the article, they just started doing it while the right has been doing it for who knows how long.
No comment.
Oh really, how's that working out?
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
How about more accurate science in mass media science fiction? Case in point: the recent remake of Battlestar Galactica which featured more believable space flight.
> (if I'm not mistaken, if you had a perfect sphere, any object
> inside of the sphere feels zero gravitational force
Err... did you mean to say this? It's not zero-gravitational force, otherwise coal-miners would float around!
You only feel the gravitational force of the sphere below your feet. As you get closer to the centre of the sphere, the force drops towards zero. As you say, the mass above you cancels the distant mass on the other side, so if you were inside a hollow sphere, you'd feel no net force at all. Being underground is like being just inside hollow sphere A, which is filled with solid sphere B. A's field cancels out, and B is all that's left; as you go deeper, B becomes smaller, and so does its gravity.
I suspect you already know this, because of the way you phrased the rest of the post, so I'll just shut up now...
But, as I pointed out in a response above, if the earth were a perfect hollow sphere, there'd be no effective force of gravity inside the sphere. So the pigs would fly just fine.
Actually, that wouldn't be ok either because you can't use asshole. Of course, you could say the following to describe a big hole:
That's one fucking big ass hole.
United States Patent Application
20020027173 Apparatus and method for circular vortex air flow material grinding
To download it as a pdf document try pat2pdf
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I just found a decent site at JPL here that illustrates the earth's structure nicely, although it appears to have been written for grade schoolers.
Thanks, and please let us know when you find a link to a more simple explanation.
Knowing this was slashdot, I am sure he assumed noone would bother actually reading the cited resource.
Yes, but they would only be able to fly in one side, and not back out the other. We don't want to replace the Earth's core with stacks of flying pigs!
Ceci n'est pas une sig
We have this poster from Tufte posted outside some of the conference rooms at work.
I thought you guys had freedom of speech in the US.
In the US the standard view is that the most important part of "freedom of speech" is "freedom of expression." The FCC regulations (which apply only to broadcasters using the public airwaves) limit 'obscenity' but do not limit freedom of expression.
This is different from the broadcasting rules in Canada and in some European nations that prohibit 'hate speech'. Some examples of hate speech: "women are dumb and should be kept barefoot and pregnant," or "gay people should be locked up," or neo-Nazi ideas or whatever. In the US, people have a constitutionally guaranteed right to express any opinion, no matter how disgusting it may be.
Guinan busts Wesley crawling around her '10-forward'
Is that what they're calling it now?
Can you please put that message after the link (e.g.: link [nytimes.com]) so that we know that it is a link to New York Times?
My psychological experience is akin to clicking in a goatse link, since I don't wanna register!
Thank you.
PS: I removed the many times written f_word from this response. Do you see how good my manners are? Now move your asses!
Oh, and the project itself sounds cool as hell.
This is not my sandwich.
I've been reading it "Winhexe" all this time and thinking about a hexadecimal resource editor I used to use back in the Windows 3.1 days. I'm old and blind.
This is not my sandwich.
sounds like a story I read on IBM and powerpoints. Went along the lines of person X in PM would have a better chance than person Y of promotion by producing a *gee whiz* talk, along with accompanied powerpoint ... then on the basis of the talk, etc being promoted leaving their mess behind.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Such conceit...
Making the planet uninhabitable for human-kind is not destroying it. It may be the best thing we could do for the earth is to remover ourselves from it.
Mankind lacks the skills and the technology to destroy the earth. The earth will still be "alive" long after we've wiped ourselves out.
Life sucks, but death doesn't put out at all. -- Thomas J. Kopp
And if you launch two rocket strapped monkeys simultaneously on each side of the tunnel you have an instant super monkey collider. But if noone's there at the core to listen, do they make a sound?
You don't even need the rockets, you could just drop them in at either end, and they would still collide. In fact, not having the rocket reduces the risk of blowing up the monkeys partway down.
Anyway, monkeys are too funny to drop down a tunnel, let's keep them on the surface where we can laugh at them.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Now someone on /. is claiming government permission is a good reason to do something? I thought the prevailing attitude here was to reject authority and make up your own mind??!?!?!?
However, regardless of the prevailing attitude here (or anywhere else for that matter), I think that making up my own mind is what I'll stick with.
And IMHO (which FAR outweighs the government's as far as I am concerned) if you can't express yourself well without profanity, then you can't express your self well.
In closeing let me just add that (while you already know my opinion of profanity) what really offended me was you citing the FCC (a wholly owned subsidary of whoever has the most money at the moment) as a source of good moral judgement.
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
Magma, however, results when rock is pushed up into the crust from the mantle - the decrease in pressure lowers the melting temperature. It can also be generated when water seeps into hot rocks - wet rock has a lower melting temperature. It is NOT evidence that the mantle itself is liquid.
I was with you right up to this point. The presence of water reducing the melting point makes no sense to me. Wouldn't water absorb heat and boil away? So what I'm getting at is this, unless the presence of water reduces the melting point of rock to less than 212F it wouldn't make a difference. If the melting point of the rock in question is above 212F, then all of the water would boil away, leaving dry rock behind.
I realize that we're not talking about a ladel full of hot rock in a furnace somewhere, we're takling about miles below the surface of the earth where the pressures involved are more than most people can comprehend, but if there is a path for liquid water to get in, there would be a path for hot water vapor to exit. Right?
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The mantle is at really absurd pressures, on the order of millions of atmospheres. Water at this pressure does not become vapor, but rather Something Weird.
Oh ok, how about: like we haven't screwed up the fucking planet.
Ah, so much better...
Let's try it with a big lump of neutronium and a big lump of anti-neutronium instead. Good clean fun.
So you can say niggers should be put down like dogs, but you can't say fuck? Wow.
Isn't that how the slashdot effect comes about?
Then again, I guess people go look at the shiny webpage, then leave again.
Didn't they, like, try to dig a "whole to China", or at least drill a hole down to the crust/mantle boundary named after that Croatian dude whose name I can't pronounce let alone spell? And wasn't there an NSF grant to dig the whole, and they subcontracted the drilling to Halliburton or Brown and Root or somebody, and they burned through all the money before they got very far and the grant didn't get refunded?
Sorry...the article is "top 100 Science Stories of 2003".
if you don't feel better tomorrow, we'll just cut your legs off about here. - Theodoric of York
But his wing allows him to travel four feet horizontally for every foot he descends, which meant he could cover 22 miles in this six-minute flight.
4:1 glide ratio? Errrr... a modern paraglider gets 8:1, never mind hanggliders at 12:1 or gliders at 40:1. A paragliding wing weighs less than 15 pounds, costs less than 3000 US$, and is safe, easy, and comfortable to fly, none of which can be said of this contraption. Tens of thousands of paragliding pilots worldwide routinely use their wings to stay in the air for hours at a time, and fly distances far in excess of 22 miles. I'm substantially underwhelmed by this clunky thing.
He had become the first person to fly across the English Channel without using an engine.
Conveniently ignoring the airplane that brought him to 30'000 feet first. From that altitude, he probably could have covered the same distance on his parachute, or just using a flying suit. Fun it may be, one of the great ideas of 2003 it ain't.
- nic
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
Popular Science also has a best of what's new: including the pet translator: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/bown/2003/article/0,1 8881,535988,00.html
and this handy thing for watching people have sex (again and again):
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/bown/2003/article/0,1 8881,536011,00.html
By the way, haven't Jules Verne and the recent movie "the core," taught us to stay the hell away from the center of the earth - someone slap this guy.
Interview with Stanley Fish