Cold fusion was seductive when first announced, but hasn't panned out. It has all the hallmarks of Langmuir's "pathological science".
I guess that's what would make it attractive to the Bush administration, whose science policy has been called into question. Backing bogus research allows them to point at support of alternative energy sources without taking a risk of actually finding something that might threaten their oil company bedmates.
So where does the rest go? Is it processing of the mash? Distillation of the ethanol? If the latter, why is it so much more expensive to distill ethanol than to distill benzine?
I haven't seen specific numbers (that PDF file cited above seems to be slashdotted) but almost certainly most of the energy goes into the distillation step.
Dilute ethanol in water takes a lot of energy to heat up, and the heat of vaporization of ethanol is a lot higher than benzene (because both water and ethanol are highly self-associated due to hydrogen bonding).
The energy for distillation is going to be the same for corn based or straw based ethanol, as will be the energy to cart the biomass to your processing site. The only energy savings here is that you can get away with not counting the tractors, etc, since you're now using waste product, and the real product gets charged for all that stuff.
I can top that. I've done Monte Carlo simulation of free radical polymerization in Excel. Worked fine, albeit slow as a dog. It let me prove the concept so I could justify taking enough time to 1) learn rudiments of C programming and 2) recode the problem in C.
wal-mart near where I live recently stopped allowing me to use the credit method of using my credit/debit card. They force you to use debit. What is the difference?
Transaction fees are significantly lower to the retailer for debit transactions. I've heard that this is because of the enhanced security (PIN code required) which reduces the number of fraudulant transactions.
Lower transaction fee = higher profit = happy Sam Walton.
When I downloaded TBE about an hour ago, what I got was version 1.10.2004020802. FWIW, seems to be working fine in Firefox for me. Looks like it was updated since you got your copy.
Managed to get through and found new TBE version 1.10, which that seems to be Foxfire friendly. Nice turnaround on Hiroshi's part; I was missing TBE badly after only 30 minutes with Foxfire.
Most commercial grade ICs can handle up to 70 deg celcius. It's not terribly uncommon for ICs to be able to handle 100C+.
Actually, almost all ICs see higher temperatures than 100C during their fabrication - oxide growing, ion implant, plasma etching, resist removal, solder bumping; lots of high temp processes.
You know, everyone seems to love Nye, and he is exposing lots of kids to science, which is a Good Thing. That said, as a scientist, I end up cringing anytime I watch his program. The science on the show often gets submerged under the painful quick-cut MTV-style editing. Call me an old fogey, but after watching more than about 5 minutes, I start feeling ill.
Although it may not be eye- or rating-catching, an important part of science is cultivating an attention span that allows observation and rational thought. His frenetic style is more about infotainment than showing what science is about. IMHO.
Notes might not be the most elegant piece of software in the world, but one thing that astounds me is the insistence of people to just classify it as 'email.'
This is absolutely true, but at my company (and I suspect many others) Notes' only use is as an email/calendar tool.
Notes (at least as I've experienced it) acts like a mediocre mail/calendar tool implemented on top of some incomprehensible other thing that you can never quite understand, but which keeps leaking through the bad mail client interface.
While I applaud the news of more of Miyazaki's work finding appreciation in the western world, the Nausicaa film is a pale shadow compared to the original manga.
I absolutely agree that the Nausicaa manga is at once longer, richer and more multilevel. However to be fair, one must note that the manga was written over something like a decade, and the anime was produced fairly early on, before the complete story had been fleshed out.
The color work in the anime brings some moodiness difficult to capture in the black and white manga, though. I'm thinking of the images of the golum-things wreaking havoc surrounded by blood red flames.
That's part of it, but you've missed the most important part; there's only a fixed dynamic range. What you want is for the loudest part of the music to be below the top of the dynamic range.
Everything you say is true, but I think you missed the humorous intent of the original poster, who was making a reference to This is Spinal Tap .
Nothing beats a good HP calculator. PDA's are for management weenies. Purposely designed calc's are for engineers.
...and scientists.
I use my vintage HP-15C every day. In my mind, this model was the pinacle of calculator design, and nothing marketed since has tempted me to change. This from a geek that loves new gadgets, and ends up buying a new PDA about once a year even though the old one is still working.
The 15C has a great, easy-to-read segmented display with an exceptionally wide viewing angle and high contrast, unrivaled in any pixel-oriented calculator display I've seen. Every function on the device is exposed on a button, and the number of buttons is low enough that you don't waste time scanning through stuff you'll never use to find what you do need.
I'm not looking to do symbolic math or graphing on a calculator. I'm not even particularly interested in programability (although I've still got the source code for an HP-41 program I wrote to do deconvolution of NMR spectra back in grad school...). For stuff like that, I'm going to use my workstation, not a handheld device.
How can water be a lot easier to find than hydrogen? If you have found water, have you not then also found hydrogen?
Water is easier to find, because it's less volatile, and can exist in the solid state in vacuum, given low enough temperatures. H2 is a gas under any conditions where we can survive, and unless there's a very heavy gravitational field, it bleeds off into the vacuum, where it's too diffuse to recover.
The only reason the parent poster wanted hydrogen was to use it to make water. My point was "why bother, when you're much more likely to find water itself?"
I don't think Hydrogen would be hard to come by, but Oxygen might be. Perhaps we could construct oxygen molecules from carbon?
This is so far out in the weeds it reminds me of that quote from Pauli - "This is not right. It's not even wrong."
Let's see:
1. Unless you're going to dip into the sun or one of the gas giants, water is going to be a lot easier to find than hydrogen.
2. Oxygen is easy to find on the moon, albeit tied up as aluminosilicates. Energy is cheap on the moon (lots of sunlight) so getting O2 out would be relatively simple.
3. Making oxygen molecules from carbon would either involve alchemy (doesn't work) or particle physics (works, but you have to do it one atom at a time, and trust me, it'd be significantly simpler and cheaper to get it on the moon (see 2) or boost it up using disposable launch vehicles.)
The best strategy is probably to get your oxygen on the moon, and send up hydrogen by rocket.
I saw the dubbed version at the Ritz in Philadelphia with my 6 & 8 year old daughters, and a seven year old boy (friend of the family). All were captivated to the point of absolute silence. You need to be a parent of small children to appreciate what this says about the quality of the movie.
FWIW, there was a perhaps 4 year old girl sitting behind us who spent much of the movie whispering to her dad "I'm scared". However, as near as I can tell, her eyes never left the screen, and the couple times I looked back to check, she was smiling widely.
I strongly suspect that these early "used" copies are unread review copies that the publisher passed out in the thousands to anyone who might concievably review the book in print.
If you're ever in NYC, stop by the Strand bookstore; shelf after shelf of like-new review copies of books that you can buy full price down the street.
Any other halfway decent good book that has ever been made into a movie/film absolutely can not hold a candle to the book
I can think of a few counter-examples. Catch-22. Slaughterhouse Five. A handful of others.
Now granted, the movies were not as rich as the original novels, but then again, in most people can't read novels like those in 2 hours or so (and if they did, their experience wouldn't be as rich as if they worked through thoughtfully).
Given the constraints of the format, movie version of novels can be every bit as good or better than the original, albeit different.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that's what would make it attractive to the Bush administration, whose science policy has been called into question. Backing bogus research allows them to point at support of alternative energy sources without taking a risk of actually finding something that might threaten their oil company bedmates.
I haven't seen specific numbers (that PDF file cited above seems to be slashdotted) but almost certainly most of the energy goes into the distillation step.
Dilute ethanol in water takes a lot of energy to heat up, and the heat of vaporization of ethanol is a lot higher than benzene (because both water and ethanol are highly self-associated due to hydrogen bonding).
The energy for distillation is going to be the same for corn based or straw based ethanol, as will be the energy to cart the biomass to your processing site. The only energy savings here is that you can get away with not counting the tractors, etc, since you're now using waste product, and the real product gets charged for all that stuff.
I can top that. I've done Monte Carlo simulation of free radical polymerization in Excel. Worked fine, albeit slow as a dog. It let me prove the concept so I could justify taking enough time to 1) learn rudiments of C programming and 2) recode the problem in C.
Transaction fees are significantly lower to the retailer for debit transactions. I've heard that this is because of the enhanced security (PIN code required) which reduces the number of fraudulant transactions.
Lower transaction fee = higher profit = happy Sam Walton.
Ok, as a chemist, I can't take it any more. Silicon is a hard brittle semiconductor. It makes great CPUs, but poor breast implants.
Silicone is a low glass transition polymer. It's soft and floppy, isn't suitable for making CPUs, but does a reasonable job of imitating human tissue.
So it would seem.
Arsenic tastes like almonds.
Close, but not quite.
Hydrogen cyanide smells like almonds. Arsenic has a metallic taste. Not surprising, given that it is a metal.
JWST is being dropped into the L2 point. The space shuttle is not capable of even getting there.
When I downloaded TBE about an hour ago, what I got was version 1.10.2004020802. FWIW, seems to be working fine in Firefox for me. Looks like it was updated since you got your copy.
Managed to get through and found new TBE version 1.10, which that seems to be Foxfire friendly. Nice turnaround on Hiroshi's part; I was missing TBE badly after only 30 minutes with Foxfire.
I wish there were different flavors of icons to distinguish between the program and url files, though.
Most of my extensions were there too, but for some reason, TabBrowser Extensions disappeared. And texturizer.net is slashdotted.
Actually, almost all ICs see higher temperatures than 100C during their fabrication - oxide growing, ion implant, plasma etching, resist removal, solder bumping; lots of high temp processes.
Although it may not be eye- or rating-catching, an important part of science is cultivating an attention span that allows observation and rational thought. His frenetic style is more about infotainment than showing what science is about. IMHO.
This is absolutely true, but at my company (and I suspect many others) Notes' only use is as an email/calendar tool.
Notes (at least as I've experienced it) acts like a mediocre mail/calendar tool implemented on top of some incomprehensible other thing that you can never quite understand, but which keeps leaking through the bad mail client interface.
I absolutely agree that the Nausicaa manga is at once longer, richer and more multilevel. However to be fair, one must note that the manga was written over something like a decade, and the anime was produced fairly early on, before the complete story had been fleshed out.
The color work in the anime brings some moodiness difficult to capture in the black and white manga, though. I'm thinking of the images of the golum-things wreaking havoc surrounded by blood red flames.
Oops, my bad. I misread the indentation level, and thought you were responding to the "turning it up to eleven comment".
I do concur with your point about dynamic range.
I use my vintage HP-15C every day. In my mind, this model was the pinacle of calculator design, and nothing marketed since has tempted me to change. This from a geek that loves new gadgets, and ends up buying a new PDA about once a year even though the old one is still working.
The 15C has a great, easy-to-read segmented display with an exceptionally wide viewing angle and high contrast, unrivaled in any pixel-oriented calculator display I've seen. Every function on the device is exposed on a button, and the number of buttons is low enough that you don't waste time scanning through stuff you'll never use to find what you do need.
I'm not looking to do symbolic math or graphing on a calculator. I'm not even particularly interested in programability (although I've still got the source code for an HP-41 program I wrote to do deconvolution of NMR spectra back in grad school...). For stuff like that, I'm going to use my workstation, not a handheld device.
Water is easier to find, because it's less volatile, and can exist in the solid state in vacuum, given low enough temperatures. H2 is a gas under any conditions where we can survive, and unless there's a very heavy gravitational field, it bleeds off into the vacuum, where it's too diffuse to recover.
The only reason the parent poster wanted hydrogen was to use it to make water. My point was "why bother, when you're much more likely to find water itself?"
This is so far out in the weeds it reminds me of that quote from Pauli - "This is not right. It's not even wrong."
Let's see:
1. Unless you're going to dip into the sun or one of the gas giants, water is going to be a lot easier to find than hydrogen.
2. Oxygen is easy to find on the moon, albeit tied up as aluminosilicates. Energy is cheap on the moon (lots of sunlight) so getting O2 out would be relatively simple.
3. Making oxygen molecules from carbon would either involve alchemy (doesn't work) or particle physics (works, but you have to do it one atom at a time, and trust me, it'd be significantly simpler and cheaper to get it on the moon (see 2) or boost it up using disposable launch vehicles.)
The best strategy is probably to get your oxygen on the moon, and send up hydrogen by rocket.
...take the kids.
I saw the dubbed version at the Ritz in Philadelphia with my 6 & 8 year old daughters, and a seven year old boy (friend of the family). All were captivated to the point of absolute silence. You need to be a parent of small children to appreciate what this says about the quality of the movie.
FWIW, there was a perhaps 4 year old girl sitting behind us who spent much of the movie whispering to her dad "I'm scared". However, as near as I can tell, her eyes never left the screen, and the couple times I looked back to check, she was smiling widely.
I strongly suspect that these early "used" copies are unread review copies that the publisher passed out in the thousands to anyone who might concievably review the book in print.
If you're ever in NYC, stop by the Strand bookstore; shelf after shelf of like-new review copies of books that you can buy full price down the street.
I can think of a few counter-examples. Catch-22. Slaughterhouse Five. A handful of others.
Now granted, the movies were not as rich as the original novels, but then again, in most people can't read novels like those in 2 hours or so (and if they did, their experience wouldn't be as rich as if they worked through thoughtfully).
Given the constraints of the format, movie version of novels can be every bit as good or better than the original, albeit different.
Although usually they aren't.
Kodak developed a "me-too" instant photo technology, and was (rightly) hammered for patent infringement.