In imagining what a chess opponent might do, the player is in fact setting up a dialog between himself and a different role that he takes on for the purpose of having that inner discussion. Reason, in the classical sense, cannot happen without that kind of dialog, either external or internal. It is dependent on using language to make some point or other, either to another person, or to an imaginary person.
The point is that reasoning is always done as a part of communicating with someone else (although that other person may not exist outside of your head). There is no such thing as pure reason; it is always done as an argument. Objective thinkers take this further than others by having inner dialogs where they propose and critique every possible argument for and against some thing, and then choose the strongest as their own (until they find an even stronger one).
The ability to fabricate an imaginary adversary on which to practice one's line of reasoning until you have made all the points as sharp as your command of language allows appears to invalidate the argument in parent post. To what extent do apparently solitatry practices like deductive reasoning depend on the mind's ability to role play an adversary and attempt to pick apart its own logic? To put this in a concrete context, games of chess are not won by dint of reasoning alone; they are won by the ability to imagine what your opponent's reasoned responses to your proposed set of moves might be. The chessmaster's reasoning arises out of an argument with his imaginary opponent.
Reasoning, all types of rational thought, may very well be based on the desire to win arguments. With deductive reasoning and certain other apparently solo activities being entirely dependent on the practitioner's ability to construct imaginary opponents, through the use of meta logic (it is tempting to say "metaphor".)
Check out "theory of mind", and recognize that the ability to imagine what some other person or animal is going to do next is not reasoning. Reasoning can make use of that kind of imagination, but reasoning itself is limited to expressions in language, while imaginary activities are not so bounded.
While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?
That presumes that nuclear fission power is progress. Currently it appears that this has been a 60+ year old wild goose chase, and that progress lies in some other direction. None of the expensive problems associated with nuclear fission power have been resolved yet, and none are significantly closer to resolution than they were in 1951.
Perhaps a blend of renewable resources and reductions in absurdly inefficient life styles, or perhaps fusion, will be the way to true progress. But it is not nuclear fission. Even the lay public can see that, despite the nuclear power industry's 60+ years of trying to fool all the people all the time about their "progress".
"In theory, there is no difference between theoy and practice, but..."
But there are now more than 40 years of spent fuel rods laying around in pools and casks awaiting some form of final disposition. Which rather strongly suggests that all the forty year old theoretical methods of handling the problem, including vitrification and deep sea storage, have been found to have no practical relevance. Gee, it is almost as if reality is more complex or subtle than the simple theories, that were intended as persuasive sales floor patter, would suggest.
There are some things, like responses to hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes, that do not fit anywhere under the theory of capitalism and cannot be effectively managed by the tools of profit-oriented industries. At this point the clearly obvious conclusion is that nuclear power generation is another of these things. I do not believe it is beyond human capability, but it has now become very hard to convince me that it can be done properly with the accounting systems and other tools of profit-oriented industry.
Complementary to parent post's line of reasoning is that the electrochemistry in the synaptic gaps between neurons involve some activities at distances that are within the range of likely quantum effects. There are also aspects about consciouness at a macro level, such as the nature of the way it re-emerges after anesthesia (involving rather large patterns of sensation and cognition emerging simultaneously) that suggest simultaneous re-establishment of patterns in several distant parts of the brain-- one possible mechanism for this would be some kind of controlled quantum entanglement trigger mechanism.
Bear in mind that what we now know about life in general is that if there is any possible way to exploit any aspect of physics or chemistry, somewhere some organism has done that. It is very likely that the brain mixes quantum computing functions in with its electrical and chemical computing functions. Life does things like that; it does not respect the boundaries we impose on our rational, scientific expressions of thought.
Not International Poetry Day, but instead a contnuing acknowledgement of the debt that most modern physicists owe to Dr Seuss, whose patterns, once imposed on a young mind, continue to resonate for decades for reasons that are beyond scientific ken.
Or something like that. I am not a Quantum Mechanic, and in fact I admit to having occasional random thoughts that I cannot connect to anything in the Newtonian Universe with any of the screwdrivers or spanners in my rather meager toolkit. This posting may in fact be one of those random thoughts, especially as on inspection it would seem to have a nearly zero probability of conveying anything meaningful to any reader.
A far cheaper and safer method would be to bury the waste in a deep subduction zone in the Earth's crust.
That only seems to be an option because we are so ignorant about the processes of plate tectonics. Dumping the casks into regions that now appear to be involved in Richter 9+ quakes every so often does not sound reasonable.
Consider that three decades ago one candidate for long term storage was dropping the vitrified waste into mid ocean rifts where it would take millons of years for ocean floor spreading to bring them back into the biosphere, But then we learned about black smokers and that these places were a lot more active, chemically and biologically, than anyone had thought could be the case. Thinking that the subduction zones would be safe repositories simply because we do not know of any risks at the moemnt is not prudent. Not only do we not know of any risks, we do not know very much at all about what is going on there.
Besides, moon shots with unmanned vehicles are pretty cheap, and probably comparable to the costs of developing the deep water surveying and placement technologies needed to set casks in subduction trenches.
I agree with the above, but want to point out that the ultimate failure of the nuclear power industry has nothing to do with a lack of foresight by engineering or science.
The underlying problem is one of an inadequate accounting system. The nuclear power industry is the first time anyone has tried to do cost benefit analysis on processes where the overwhelmingly greatest costs are in managing the waste stream: post-production costs. Early accounting systems were developed to manage costs of feedstocks, production, and moving product to market. Waste was not accounted for, which led to the incredible pollution problems of the last century. Handling the accounting of waste management or post-production costs continues to be a kind of correction tacked on to the basic bookkeeping systems in current use, rather than an integral part of any accounting system.
If it had been otherwise, it is doubtful that any business would have ventured into nuclear power generation. It would have been obvious that the total cost, including handling the waste stream, is too great to justify any reasonable investment.
Nuclear storage must be done in a place which is inherently safe.
While that is the sane approach, the only place within human reach that would meet the criteria would be the surface of the Moon. For although there are regions in the Earth's crust that are isolated enough from any ecosystem in their undisturbed state, building the necessary tunnels and shafts for moving stuff into storage in those regions would permanently break that isolation. Also, those regions are proving to be much harder to identify and much smaller in potential storage capacity than we used to think.
But placing cold nuclear waste on the lunar surface is not that far fetched. We already have the rocket technology to do the lifting at costs comparable to developing any deep Earth storage facility. The design of the casks used during the intermediate cooling period could be modified to handle a soft impact with the regolith, and more importantly to survive a crash back to Earth when a launch needed to be aborted.
There would be a number of long term advantages, too. Today's nuclear waste is probably going be feedstock for some future technology; putting it on the Moon would keep it out of the hands of dirty bomb riffraff while keeping it accessible to future scientists and engineers.
The major problem with this approach is that it threatens the profits of the nuclear power industry. It could be implemented with today's technology, but that means that the costs of long term storage would start coming due now, rather than being put off until after all of today's CEOs and Board Members have retired. That is probably the biggest reason why no money is being put into exploring this approach. It is a direct threat to the bonuses and retirement plans of the people who frame the discussions about the future of nuclear power.
I have been reading up on graphene somewhat; my interest is related to its likely presence in biochar. Which is actually just charcoal, but charcoal intended for use as a carbon sequestering soil amendment in agriculture.
One of the major difficulties in working with graphene is that unless it is somehow attached to a substrate, the graphene molecule is not very stable. It sort of undulates rather than just laying flat, and it very easily rolls itself up into bucky tubes and buckyballs: interesting, but no longer graphene. While graphene molecules can interact with each other in layers such that they stabilize each other, at a macro level what you then have is a kind of graphite. That probably does not have some of the interesting qualities of single layer graphene.
Obviously there are ways to manage this, or Samsung would not be talking about 25 inch displays that use graphene. But can that be done economically in a way that would make graphene electronics possible? How many filaments did Edison try before he had a working light bulb?
But note that the subject of discussion has not been changing the inclination of an orbit while maintaining the same altitude.
The subject of discussion has been dropping from a very high orbit (22,000 miles) to a low orbit (300 - 1,500 miles). There is more than enough potential energy that has to be gotten rid of to handle any change in the inclination of the lower orbit.
Of course if we ever develop a space elevator, the smart thing to do would probably be to build porches at intermediate altitudes, such as 500 miles, 1,500 miles, and so on. Then the LEO satellites could be launched from the porches and would need fewer atmospheric excursions to reach their intended orbits. Why haul something all the way to the top if you can drop it from part way up and still get it to where you want it?
What we seem to have here is a failure to properly conceptualize the orbital mechanics.
I suspect that the underlying error is failing to recognize that the top of a space elevator is in geosynchronous orbit. Moving at orbital velocity, at an altitude of 22,000 miles.
All that is needed to launch another satellite from there into a low Earth orbit of 300 to 1500 miles is a short burn to put the bird into an orbit that grazes the atmosphere, some heat shielding, and some atmospheric control surfaces. And a good computer program that will handle multiple dips into the atmosphere to both shed excess velocity and use the control surfaces to alter direction.
At an orbit of 22,000 miles altitude, there is more than enough potential energy to move a bird into any LEO. The general problem is one of shedding excess energy in a very controlled way.
Orbital mechanics at this level really isn't rocket science. Heck, it isn't even sociology.
...most of the energy to get there coming from electric motors hauling you up to the stationary orbit
There are much cheaper ways of powering a space elevator. You have one heck of a gravity well under control.
Transferring tons of lunar regolith to the top of the elevator will only cost the small amount of energy needed to escape the Moon's gravity; the rest of the ride is down hill. We have already developed good technologies for moving piles of dirt around; modifying those to work in lunar conditions would be a simple thing to do. The lunar launch could be done with a relatively low speed rail gun (and some precision aiming). Once at the top of the elevator, a controlled descent using regenerative braking of the mass stream will provide more than enough energy to lift a smaller mass from the ground to the top. This could probably be engineered so that the space elevator would also be a major power plant. With a very green nature.
There is probably something fundamentally wrong with this concept, but I do not see it. What I see is being able to pour sand down a 22,000 mile long chute in some manner that would capture the kinetic energy of its fall.
I really do not think that a space elevator can be made to work. But if it could, it should be able to produce more energy raw materials down than is needed to move finished goods up.
I confess that I have not read parent post while in full critical analysis mode, but I do not think that is needed here.
All natural languages that I am aware of are based on core objects that have no physical representation. Such as "friendship", a multitude of different kinds of "love", "dishonesty", "truth", and so on. It is nearly impossible to describe anything in any human language without referencing these purely conceptual objects. The references are often buried in tacit assumptions or postulates, but outside of very narrow technical jargons, the references are there. It is definitely impossible to persuade another human being, or even just direct his actions, without making references to these purely conceptual objects.
AI that handles natural language needs much more than an extensive vocabulary of the visual world.
Background: I have done computer programming for a living, most notably in developing perl scripts in data mining applications. But my real interest in AI is as a writer of fiction, who sees some interesting stories in the effects that AI, coupled with enough autonomy to actually be able to do something useful, will have on society.
If such a revision could be worked out, its advantages would be tremendous, in several different ways. At the least, it would move USA politics away from back room horsetrading for tax breaks for special interest groups toward actually addressing revenue and expense issues.
However this is a major change, with greater impact than anything that has been done in the USA since 1775. It would take a real Tea Party movement-- not the play actors who have recently wrapped that name around their petty aspirations-- to make the thing work. That is to say, Trump, Palin, and the Pauls just do not come close to the stature of Jefferson, Franklin, or Thomas Paine. I do not think a massive revolution like shifting the tax structure from a political playing field to something with a rational basis can happen without real leaders doing actual leadership, and without a populace that is willing put aside the pleasures of bitching about the price of gas and take on some of the real risks involved in real world changes.
The problem is that the product of the melt, which I believe is generally called "corium", tends to make crusts that insulate it from the cooling water. Chemists have trouble enough describing low temperature phenomena in systems with limited substrates, like what is really going on in a candle's flame. We are very far from being able to model what happens when a 2500C blob of corium begins melting through different kinds of rock.
Author of parent post and I have very different interpretations of what TFA said.
The way I understood it, instead of 45% of the fuel rods being undamaged and therefore fairly easy to remove and store in one of the waste pools, the top five feet of every single rod has melted. Making the removal of the remaining 8 foot stubs much more difficult. There will be a need to develop new removal procedures from scratch; none of the existing tools for pulling and handling undamaged rods are going to be useable.
Try RTFM. You would find that radioactive iodine is now present in the seaweed crop at several times the level considered safe (to avoid thyroid cancer, especially in kids). Since seaweed is more important to the Japanese diet than peas and broccoli to the American diet, I bet there are a lot of very worried Japanese parents right now.
There is both evidence and theory that strongly suggests these highly toxic isotopes with strong biological activity have continued to be created in chain reactions after the plants were shut down, as the reactions that produce them continued to occur in the corium melt. The ratio of radioactive iodine to radioactive cesium should have started changing as soon as the controlled chain reactions were stopped, but samples taken outside of the plant indicate that new radioactive iodine has been produced through uncontrolled chain reactions.
Everything I know about this I have learned from slashdot.
Well, sometimes through googling about things that were mentioned on slashdot. But I think that counts.
The UK is offering more useful assistance to its poorer citizens than the USA is doing. I do not think that is a surprise to anyone.
The USA is still crippled by a social Darwinism view of economics. That anyone with a bit of intelligence and self-discipline could significantly improve their circumstances; rise to the top. The unfortunate flip side of this world view is that anyone in poorer circumstances than your own is unfit for survival in a progressive economy and deserves whatever exploitation you can come up with that would benefit you.
An alternative world view is that through cooperation and better exploitation of current and emerging technologies, we can make the whole pie bigger,. That the appropriate way to measure one's success is not by comparing what you've got with what other people have, but by comparing what you've got now with what you had yesterday, and what would be possible tomorrow if people will work to make that happen.
Reading parent post triggered an insight: Wikileaks does in fact serve us well.
Persons who rose to powerful positions in governments and organizations had only had to avoid being obviously incompetent while devoting their cleverness toward getting one rung higher on the ladder. But now Wikileaks has made things more difficult since from now on since it has become much more difficult to avoid a public display of incompetence.
There is the possibility that in the future those who are selected for higher levels of responsibility will be persons who are somewhat more competent in making decisions than those who we are now reading about on Wikileaks.
Facts are right in parent post, but it is presented from a very limited point of view.
For someone starting out with no credit history, these "no credit, no problem" retailers are often the least expensive way of establishing that all important credit history in a short time span. Buy a computer from Aaron's, pay it off in full after making 12 monthly payments on time, and then apply for a credit card that will give you a reasonable maximum, a reasonable APR, and none of the unreasonable extra fees that so many banks are now using as major revenue streams.
A good credit history is critical to having a good life in the USA. If parents are in an underwater mortgage or otherwise unable to cosign on a decent credit card account, "no credit, no problem" deals on durable goods can make long term financial sense.
Another aspect of this is that the only way to establish a good credit history is to buy on credit. For a youngster just starting out, a good route is a credit card account shared with a parent, and instructions to buy all groceries and such, everything possible, on credit and pay the account down to zero balance every month.
But if you do not have a parent who can do this, then paying the premium for credit at a place like Aarons for something that you need no matter what makes sense. The high interest rate you pay for a laptop in your freshman year assures that you will qualify for a mortgage when you graduate.
Using Aarons appropriately can be a good way to achieve something much more important than having money in the bank: it can buy you a good credit rating.
If a company would guarantee that a DVD (or even Blu Ray) player would last 20 years, what's the maximum you would pay?
I would not pay very much for it. The thing would be obsolete for 15+ years of its projected service life.
Now I would consider paying a bit more for a DVD player that could be repurposed into something more useful than a paperweight when I have moved to the next thing in media storage. You got any thoughts about that?
Slashdot Mirror
In imagining what a chess opponent might do, the player is in fact setting up a dialog between himself and a different role that he takes on for the purpose of having that inner discussion. Reason, in the classical sense, cannot happen without that kind of dialog, either external or internal. It is dependent on using language to make some point or other, either to another person, or to an imaginary person.
The point is that reasoning is always done as a part of communicating with someone else (although that other person may not exist outside of your head). There is no such thing as pure reason; it is always done as an argument. Objective thinkers take this further than others by having inner dialogs where they propose and critique every possible argument for and against some thing, and then choose the strongest as their own (until they find an even stronger one).
The ability to fabricate an imaginary adversary on which to practice one's line of reasoning until you have made all the points as sharp as your command of language allows appears to invalidate the argument in parent post. To what extent do apparently solitatry practices like deductive reasoning depend on the mind's ability to role play an adversary and attempt to pick apart its own logic? To put this in a concrete context, games of chess are not won by dint of reasoning alone; they are won by the ability to imagine what your opponent's reasoned responses to your proposed set of moves might be. The chessmaster's reasoning arises out of an argument with his imaginary opponent.
Reasoning, all types of rational thought, may very well be based on the desire to win arguments. With deductive reasoning and certain other apparently solo activities being entirely dependent on the practitioner's ability to construct imaginary opponents, through the use of meta logic (it is tempting to say "metaphor".)
Check out "theory of mind", and recognize that the ability to imagine what some other person or animal is going to do next is not reasoning. Reasoning can make use of that kind of imagination, but reasoning itself is limited to expressions in language, while imaginary activities are not so bounded.
While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?
That presumes that nuclear fission power is progress. Currently it appears that this has been a 60+ year old wild goose chase, and that progress lies in some other direction. None of the expensive problems associated with nuclear fission power have been resolved yet, and none are significantly closer to resolution than they were in 1951.
Perhaps a blend of renewable resources and reductions in absurdly inefficient life styles, or perhaps fusion, will be the way to true progress. But it is not nuclear fission. Even the lay public can see that, despite the nuclear power industry's 60+ years of trying to fool all the people all the time about their "progress".
"In theory, there is no difference between theoy and practice, but..."
But there are now more than 40 years of spent fuel rods laying around in pools and casks awaiting some form of final disposition. Which rather strongly suggests that all the forty year old theoretical methods of handling the problem, including vitrification and deep sea storage, have been found to have no practical relevance. Gee, it is almost as if reality is more complex or subtle than the simple theories, that were intended as persuasive sales floor patter, would suggest.
There are some things, like responses to hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes, that do not fit anywhere under the theory of capitalism and cannot be effectively managed by the tools of profit-oriented industries. At this point the clearly obvious conclusion is that nuclear power generation is another of these things. I do not believe it is beyond human capability, but it has now become very hard to convince me that it can be done properly with the accounting systems and other tools of profit-oriented industry.
Complementary to parent post's line of reasoning is that the electrochemistry in the synaptic gaps between neurons involve some activities at distances that are within the range of likely quantum effects. There are also aspects about consciouness at a macro level, such as the nature of the way it re-emerges after anesthesia (involving rather large patterns of sensation and cognition emerging simultaneously) that suggest simultaneous re-establishment of patterns in several distant parts of the brain-- one possible mechanism for this would be some kind of controlled quantum entanglement trigger mechanism.
Bear in mind that what we now know about life in general is that if there is any possible way to exploit any aspect of physics or chemistry, somewhere some organism has done that. It is very likely that the brain mixes quantum computing functions in with its electrical and chemical computing functions. Life does things like that; it does not respect the boundaries we impose on our rational, scientific expressions of thought.
Not International Poetry Day, but instead a contnuing acknowledgement of the debt that most modern physicists owe to Dr Seuss, whose patterns, once imposed on a young mind, continue to resonate for decades for reasons that are beyond scientific ken.
As testimony to this absurdity, there is Cecil Adams' provision of the Straight Dope on Erwin's and Al's argument about dice.
Or something like that. I am not a Quantum Mechanic, and in fact I admit to having occasional random thoughts that I cannot connect to anything in the Newtonian Universe with any of the screwdrivers or spanners in my rather meager toolkit. This posting may in fact be one of those random thoughts, especially as on inspection it would seem to have a nearly zero probability of conveying anything meaningful to any reader.
A far cheaper and safer method would be to bury the waste in a deep subduction zone in the Earth's crust.
That only seems to be an option because we are so ignorant about the processes of plate tectonics. Dumping the casks into regions that now appear to be involved in Richter 9+ quakes every so often does not sound reasonable.
Consider that three decades ago one candidate for long term storage was dropping the vitrified waste into mid ocean rifts where it would take millons of years for ocean floor spreading to bring them back into the biosphere, But then we learned about black smokers and that these places were a lot more active, chemically and biologically, than anyone had thought could be the case. Thinking that the subduction zones would be safe repositories simply because we do not know of any risks at the moemnt is not prudent. Not only do we not know of any risks, we do not know very much at all about what is going on there.
Besides, moon shots with unmanned vehicles are pretty cheap, and probably comparable to the costs of developing the deep water surveying and placement technologies needed to set casks in subduction trenches.
I agree with the above, but want to point out that the ultimate failure of the nuclear power industry has nothing to do with a lack of foresight by engineering or science.
The underlying problem is one of an inadequate accounting system. The nuclear power industry is the first time anyone has tried to do cost benefit analysis on processes where the overwhelmingly greatest costs are in managing the waste stream: post-production costs. Early accounting systems were developed to manage costs of feedstocks, production, and moving product to market. Waste was not accounted for, which led to the incredible pollution problems of the last century. Handling the accounting of waste management or post-production costs continues to be a kind of correction tacked on to the basic bookkeeping systems in current use, rather than an integral part of any accounting system.
If it had been otherwise, it is doubtful that any business would have ventured into nuclear power generation. It would have been obvious that the total cost, including handling the waste stream, is too great to justify any reasonable investment.
Nuclear storage must be done in a place which is inherently safe.
While that is the sane approach, the only place within human reach that would meet the criteria would be the surface of the Moon. For although there are regions in the Earth's crust that are isolated enough from any ecosystem in their undisturbed state, building the necessary tunnels and shafts for moving stuff into storage in those regions would permanently break that isolation. Also, those regions are proving to be much harder to identify and much smaller in potential storage capacity than we used to think.
But placing cold nuclear waste on the lunar surface is not that far fetched. We already have the rocket technology to do the lifting at costs comparable to developing any deep Earth storage facility. The design of the casks used during the intermediate cooling period could be modified to handle a soft impact with the regolith, and more importantly to survive a crash back to Earth when a launch needed to be aborted.
There would be a number of long term advantages, too. Today's nuclear waste is probably going be feedstock for some future technology; putting it on the Moon would keep it out of the hands of dirty bomb riffraff while keeping it accessible to future scientists and engineers.
The major problem with this approach is that it threatens the profits of the nuclear power industry. It could be implemented with today's technology, but that means that the costs of long term storage would start coming due now, rather than being put off until after all of today's CEOs and Board Members have retired. That is probably the biggest reason why no money is being put into exploring this approach. It is a direct threat to the bonuses and retirement plans of the people who frame the discussions about the future of nuclear power.
I have been reading up on graphene somewhat; my interest is related to its likely presence in biochar. Which is actually just charcoal, but charcoal intended for use as a carbon sequestering soil amendment in agriculture.
One of the major difficulties in working with graphene is that unless it is somehow attached to a substrate, the graphene molecule is not very stable. It sort of undulates rather than just laying flat, and it very easily rolls itself up into bucky tubes and buckyballs: interesting, but no longer graphene. While graphene molecules can interact with each other in layers such that they stabilize each other, at a macro level what you then have is a kind of graphite. That probably does not have some of the interesting qualities of single layer graphene.
Obviously there are ways to manage this, or Samsung would not be talking about 25 inch displays that use graphene. But can that be done economically in a way that would make graphene electronics possible? How many filaments did Edison try before he had a working light bulb?
But note that the subject of discussion has not been changing the inclination of an orbit while maintaining the same altitude.
The subject of discussion has been dropping from a very high orbit (22,000 miles) to a low orbit (300 - 1,500 miles). There is more than enough potential energy that has to be gotten rid of to handle any change in the inclination of the lower orbit.
Of course if we ever develop a space elevator, the smart thing to do would probably be to build porches at intermediate altitudes, such as 500 miles, 1,500 miles, and so on. Then the LEO satellites could be launched from the porches and would need fewer atmospheric excursions to reach their intended orbits. Why haul something all the way to the top if you can drop it from part way up and still get it to where you want it?
What we seem to have here is a failure to properly conceptualize the orbital mechanics.
I suspect that the underlying error is failing to recognize that the top of a space elevator is in geosynchronous orbit. Moving at orbital velocity, at an altitude of 22,000 miles.
All that is needed to launch another satellite from there into a low Earth orbit of 300 to 1500 miles is a short burn to put the bird into an orbit that grazes the atmosphere, some heat shielding, and some atmospheric control surfaces. And a good computer program that will handle multiple dips into the atmosphere to both shed excess velocity and use the control surfaces to alter direction.
At an orbit of 22,000 miles altitude, there is more than enough potential energy to move a bird into any LEO. The general problem is one of shedding excess energy in a very controlled way.
Orbital mechanics at this level really isn't rocket science. Heck, it isn't even sociology.
...most of the energy to get there coming from electric motors hauling you up to the stationary orbit
There are much cheaper ways of powering a space elevator. You have one heck of a gravity well under control.
Transferring tons of lunar regolith to the top of the elevator will only cost the small amount of energy needed to escape the Moon's gravity; the rest of the ride is down hill. We have already developed good technologies for moving piles of dirt around; modifying those to work in lunar conditions would be a simple thing to do. The lunar launch could be done with a relatively low speed rail gun (and some precision aiming). Once at the top of the elevator, a controlled descent using regenerative braking of the mass stream will provide more than enough energy to lift a smaller mass from the ground to the top. This could probably be engineered so that the space elevator would also be a major power plant. With a very green nature.
There is probably something fundamentally wrong with this concept, but I do not see it. What I see is being able to pour sand down a 22,000 mile long chute in some manner that would capture the kinetic energy of its fall.
I really do not think that a space elevator can be made to work. But if it could, it should be able to produce more energy raw materials down than is needed to move finished goods up.
I confess that I have not read parent post while in full critical analysis mode, but I do not think that is needed here.
All natural languages that I am aware of are based on core objects that have no physical representation. Such as "friendship", a multitude of different kinds of "love", "dishonesty", "truth", and so on. It is nearly impossible to describe anything in any human language without referencing these purely conceptual objects. The references are often buried in tacit assumptions or postulates, but outside of very narrow technical jargons, the references are there. It is definitely impossible to persuade another human being, or even just direct his actions, without making references to these purely conceptual objects.
AI that handles natural language needs much more than an extensive vocabulary of the visual world.
Background: I have done computer programming for a living, most notably in developing perl scripts in data mining applications. But my real interest in AI is as a writer of fiction, who sees some interesting stories in the effects that AI, coupled with enough autonomy to actually be able to do something useful, will have on society.
Quite possibly true.
If such a revision could be worked out, its advantages would be tremendous, in several different ways. At the least, it would move USA politics away from back room horsetrading for tax breaks for special interest groups toward actually addressing revenue and expense issues.
However this is a major change, with greater impact than anything that has been done in the USA since 1775. It would take a real Tea Party movement-- not the play actors who have recently wrapped that name around their petty aspirations-- to make the thing work. That is to say, Trump, Palin, and the Pauls just do not come close to the stature of Jefferson, Franklin, or Thomas Paine. I do not think a massive revolution like shifting the tax structure from a political playing field to something with a rational basis can happen without real leaders doing actual leadership, and without a populace that is willing put aside the pleasures of bitching about the price of gas and take on some of the real risks involved in real world changes.
The problem is that the product of the melt, which I believe is generally called "corium", tends to make crusts that insulate it from the cooling water. Chemists have trouble enough describing low temperature phenomena in systems with limited substrates, like what is really going on in a candle's flame. We are very far from being able to model what happens when a 2500C blob of corium begins melting through different kinds of rock.
Author of parent post and I have very different interpretations of what TFA said.
The way I understood it, instead of 45% of the fuel rods being undamaged and therefore fairly easy to remove and store in one of the waste pools, the top five feet of every single rod has melted. Making the removal of the remaining 8 foot stubs much more difficult. There will be a need to develop new removal procedures from scratch; none of the existing tools for pulling and handling undamaged rods are going to be useable.
Yeah, just like what was done with Chernobyl, which is the other nuclear accident that is similar to this one.
Oh, wait....
Try RTFM. You would find that radioactive iodine is now present in the seaweed crop at several times the level considered safe (to avoid thyroid cancer, especially in kids). Since seaweed is more important to the Japanese diet than peas and broccoli to the American diet, I bet there are a lot of very worried Japanese parents right now.
Radioactive iodine, for one.
Radioactive cesium, for another.
There is both evidence and theory that strongly suggests these highly toxic isotopes with strong biological activity have continued to be created in chain reactions after the plants were shut down, as the reactions that produce them continued to occur in the corium melt. The ratio of radioactive iodine to radioactive cesium should have started changing as soon as the controlled chain reactions were stopped, but samples taken outside of the plant indicate that new radioactive iodine has been produced through uncontrolled chain reactions.
Everything I know about this I have learned from slashdot.
Well, sometimes through googling about things that were mentioned on slashdot. But I think that counts.
The UK is offering more useful assistance to its poorer citizens than the USA is doing. I do not think that is a surprise to anyone.
The USA is still crippled by a social Darwinism view of economics. That anyone with a bit of intelligence and self-discipline could significantly improve their circumstances; rise to the top. The unfortunate flip side of this world view is that anyone in poorer circumstances than your own is unfit for survival in a progressive economy and deserves whatever exploitation you can come up with that would benefit you.
An alternative world view is that through cooperation and better exploitation of current and emerging technologies, we can make the whole pie bigger,. That the appropriate way to measure one's success is not by comparing what you've got with what other people have, but by comparing what you've got now with what you had yesterday, and what would be possible tomorrow if people will work to make that happen.
Reading parent post triggered an insight: Wikileaks does in fact serve us well.
Persons who rose to powerful positions in governments and organizations had only had to avoid being obviously incompetent while devoting their cleverness toward getting one rung higher on the ladder. But now Wikileaks has made things more difficult since from now on since it has become much more difficult to avoid a public display of incompetence.
There is the possibility that in the future those who are selected for higher levels of responsibility will be persons who are somewhat more competent in making decisions than those who we are now reading about on Wikileaks.
If that happens, it would be a good thing.
Facts are right in parent post, but it is presented from a very limited point of view.
For someone starting out with no credit history, these "no credit, no problem" retailers are often the least expensive way of establishing that all important credit history in a short time span. Buy a computer from Aaron's, pay it off in full after making 12 monthly payments on time, and then apply for a credit card that will give you a reasonable maximum, a reasonable APR, and none of the unreasonable extra fees that so many banks are now using as major revenue streams.
A good credit history is critical to having a good life in the USA. If parents are in an underwater mortgage or otherwise unable to cosign on a decent credit card account, "no credit, no problem" deals on durable goods can make long term financial sense.
Another aspect of this is that the only way to establish a good credit history is to buy on credit. For a youngster just starting out, a good route is a credit card account shared with a parent, and instructions to buy all groceries and such, everything possible, on credit and pay the account down to zero balance every month.
But if you do not have a parent who can do this, then paying the premium for credit at a place like Aarons for something that you need no matter what makes sense. The high interest rate you pay for a laptop in your freshman year assures that you will qualify for a mortgage when you graduate.
Using Aarons appropriately can be a good way to achieve something much more important than having money in the bank: it can buy you a good credit rating.
If a company would guarantee that a DVD (or even Blu Ray) player would last 20 years, what's the maximum you would pay?
I would not pay very much for it. The thing would be obsolete for 15+ years of its projected service life.
Now I would consider paying a bit more for a DVD player that could be repurposed into something more useful than a paperweight when I have moved to the next thing in media storage. You got any thoughts about that?