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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."
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
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.
anchor
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
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.
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
Using the Leidenfrost effect. The temperature of the iron will hold steady at whatever the melting point of iron is. Another blob of metal at the center of the iron will hold at its melting point. Continue with a couple more layers of shielding of this type, and your sensor pack can be held at an operable temperature for long enough to reach the center of the earth.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
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.
The signal that is being picked up is not "noise" in the sense of "random noise" but rather "noise" in the sense of "unintentional emission."
The signal that is being picked up is the "local oscillator" of the receiver in the car radio. Essentially, almost every radio receiver uses a heterodyne receiving technique. The incoming radio waves from all sources are "mixed" in a non-linear circuit with a "local oscillator" signal produce within the receiver. The non-linear nature of the mixing circuit means that signals appear at the frequencies which are the difference between the incoming radio waves and the LO frequency.
For example, if you are tuning to FM frequency 104.1 MHz, the LO is tuned to a frequency of 114.8 MHz, creating a "copy" of the FM stations' signal at 10.7 MHz. This 10.7 MHz is called the "intermedicate frequency". Then, the actual circuitry to decode the radio modulation and create sound is designed to work off of the 10.7 MHz IF signal.
That way, the actual tuning of the radio is done by changing the LO frequency over a range of about 90 MHz to 120 MHz, using digital synthesis techniques. The LO is a sine wave, so it is easy to generate. Whatever gets mixed to the 10.7 MHz gets turned into sound coming from your speakers.
The way Mobiltrak appears to work is that most radios are not that well shielded, so the 114.8 MHz LO signal leaks out and can be detected by the Mobiltrak receiver. That LO signal contains no information, so it can't really tell if you are listening, but most people don't emit MHz signals from their car for any other reason.