Totally agree with this. Martial arts are perfect for nerds.
I can't stand things like running because even though I know that in principle there are lots of details to pay attention to, I want something where both my mind and body are engaged.
Now I teach karate at MIT, and it's awesome teaching to people who are also nerds. My favorite is describing that a punch works like a torsional wave where an impulse is put into your spinal column at your hip level and then it moves up your body to your shoulders and then out your arms. Explaining karate techniques in terms of energy and momentum is incredibly helpful when you know those concepts. Learning kata and bunkai is also very interesting, particularly when you get to the point that you're making up new bunkai for existing kata. This is very interesting creative, intellectual, and physical work that nicely integrates all aspects of your fitness.
I also love that martial arts are the one sport where you continue to get better and better as you age. If I'm sparring with some 60 year old, odds are I will lose and lose badly. Sometimes hilariously badly. I like the idea of a sport where in 30 years I will actually be better than I am in my "prime" for most sports.
This is basically the best reason to read the Honor Harrington series of novels. It blows every other science fiction writer away in terms of portraying reasonable space combat.
Rules: 1. Always wear a space suit in combat. Duh. 2. You don't know where your enemy is until c*\Delta x has passed. This is both advantageous and disadvantageous. 3. Surprise! You can only decellerate as fast as you can accelerate! What? You mean I have to spend half of my time rushing at my opponent slowing down? 4. Laser beams hit at the moment you know they've been fired (not that they're used much, lasers are weak). 5. Lots of people die all the time. I think they killed billions of soldiers in a major war. 6. Yes, even your friends and main characters. Stray missiles suck.
I don't know if this is the best solution for everyone, but I just have my computer generate pink noise. It's got roughly the quality of a rain storm, and after a few minutes I don't even notice it anymore. I can use it to sleep through anything, and I live with roomates who are, shall we say, active at night.
This seems from the reports I've read to be pretty spot on. I would add an addendum to an earlier comment about this being why no nuclear plants will ever be built in the US again though; the current designs are generally "passive fail", meaning that unless electricity is supplied to the control systems, the plant will just... stop being just sub-critical and will go non-critical very quickly. For instance the pebble bed designs. My (somewhat, I'm probably giving myself a little too little credit) understanding is that these plants use nuclear fuel that just... can't react on it's own due to the sheathing materials. I think those are pyrolytic carbon still though, so of course there will still be problems with burning if they are exposed to air, the accompanying release of hydrogen, etc (I think).
This seems very honestly to be the entire focus of the nuclear industry -- designing plants which are safe to operate no matter what, which maintain reasonable cost-effectiveness. It's basically the holy grail.
I think the current problem is: 1. Natural gas is cheap, coal is cheap, they are cheaper to build and easier to maintain. 2. The regulatory process and validation work to get a new plant design is intimidating. Probably even intimidating as compared to the design of fighter jets. 3. Nuclear *is* scary to the vast majority of people. This is residual in large part from Long Island, and based in concerns over running reactors commissioned in the 60s still being operated. *That* part I am scared of. But as a scientist and engineer, I think that these are solvable problems so long as safety and the concepts of "fail safe" systems engineering based on the Therac-25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25) which seem to have very permanently changed the way that people fundamentally think about how to do system engineering. These problems had not arisen and become understood when those plants went into operation. A current plant definitely would do a far better job of that.
Heck, it even effects me on a daily basis (at this point in my career I would classify myself as a systems engineer); I think all the time "What happens if all this equipment just stops working" and the answer is always "go to a safe operational mode". The are different ways to do that. You have the F-16 style of doing that, which includes crazy amounts of unstable control algorithms. But by *far* the preferred mechanism is physical. For instance, if I have a furnace I expect to go to 2000C, and monitor the temperature with one thermocouple while I use a single additional thermocouple as a safety, is not really enough. I would *far* rather have a thermal fuse that blows hard when a temperature exceeds some set ultimate super failure limit and shuts everything off immediately. I don't trust thermocouples to be reliable, and I don't trust the controls equipment to respond properly in an emergency.
But in one of these pebble beds, the sorts of controls they are integrating are way beyond "having power", by far the best safety integration is to design it such that electricity failing causes large physical things to happen. Dumping the pebble bed entirely, or dumping immediately a mediator into the reactor that is only prevented from triggering by constant electricity. Some of the designs I've seen literally place the reactor under a ridiculously large tank of water held closed by electricity. I don't know in what way that would fail, but it would be far superior to what happened in fukoshima.
This is true about patents in some areas, but not others.
I say this as someone who has easily worked around patents before, and nonetheless has heard repeatedly from investors that *some* IP is critical for self-defense and protection of core technologies.
Yes, absolutely. I'm a startup founder (not a web startup, which actually seems to make it much harder to find VC's nowadays, by the by).
I've got tons of impressive credentials, but if my startup idea sucks, or I've got serious issues with my team ability to implement it, of course I would want to know! I can't fix a problem I am too inexperienced to understand. If the solution is a search for a new co-founder who has more experience, then heck yes I want to know that so that I can do it! I want my startup to succeed, not flounder forever.
Even more, if it's got serious fatal flaws then it's worth me seriously thinking about whether or not I should be doing it. I can make an extremely nice salary at a regular job, even a job at another startup to learn really useful stuff at in terms of doing my own. Why would I want to waste tons of my time and spirit on a project that makes no sense, or won't work for team reasons?
I have gotten far more negative feedback than positive feedback from potential funders. I have never taken offense; the criticism isn't about me as a person, it is about me in the context of my startup. If the feedback I got was about how my religion or gender or sexual orientation or race was wrong or something ridiculous like that it would be one thing (although I am easy going enough that frankly I probably still wouldn't take offense). But if it's practical concerns about my skills with leadership, or my team's lack of expertise, or whatever that's incredibly valuable to know! Anyone that gets offended by free advice is doing it wrong. Yeah, the VC may be wrong, but you get what you pay for.
The problem I was talking about is where a schematic with 50 parts on it is a giant rats nest of stuff all on a single page that someone then tries to fit onto a single page/monitor, making extensive panning and zooming necessary to understand what's going on. Following the rules I outlined prevents that problem by making it so you can simply print out the images on a normal sized piece of paper and find everything completely legible (and similarly with most monitors).
The problem that you are talking about is one that can be solved with any moderately competent image viewer. Even firefox's automatic image scaling is perfectly capable of handling it, within reason. If that's all that this javascript tool accomplishes, then it is incredibly sad how slow it is. On my computer it hangs for a good 20 seconds when trying to zoom in or out, and god forbid I try to drag the image. Surely a better tool for dynamic image viewing already exists -- the one on amazon.com seems to work fine, after all, for the same task.
And yes, the PNG image is 2952x2202 pixels, but it's also 70kB... this isn't exactly an unwieldy image. And if it were a vector graphic or pdf, it'd probably be even smaller. I only chose not to do that because there is less support for it in browsers... like how I can't open PDFs inline in firefox very pleasantly.
If it had labels for logical blocks, I think that the schematic you linked to would be perfectly legible. A bit overkill, but at least it's not messy. What if there were two LEDs? Three? Four? There is definitely a limit where no matter how obvious the connection is, it increases legibility to use named nets.
Yeah, I definitely agree with this. This seems to be a solution to the problem "how can I make illegible and amateurish schematic drawings more readable without learning anything?"
Use a frame that limits the total schematic size to a standard paper size. Use named nets and labels on nets instead of actually connecting wires between parts (except for trivial connections like capacitors). Put lines in your schematic that separate logical blocks of your schematic. Label logical blocks with a title (AC Rectifier, Boost Converter, Control System, ADCs, Filters, etc). This makes it trivial for someone to look at your schematic and rapidly identify errors. It makes it simpler for *you* to rapidly identify errors!
Just follow these four simple rules and your schematics (pretty much regardless of software used to make them) will suddenly appear to be fairly professional (if not perfect). For examples, take a look at this. I'm not an EE by any means, but the more you separate functionality into logical blocks and limit your size with frames, the closer it looks to "professional".
(for the last link, some fairly complex schematics are shown in the "New Schematics and Diagrams" section. The ones near the top are duplicates of what I published on the other website.)
You can either have academic labs researching things which are commercially interesting, and then give the professors working on it the perk of having the opportunity to commercialize it first (or at least royalties), or you can have academic labs researching things which the professor is academically interested in, and hope that it is commercially interesting. It is difficult to get both.
Either you get people complaining that publicly funded research isn't free to the public to use, or you get people complaining that stuff invented in academia has no practical application. And since there aren't any industrial research labs left, that means either no commercially interesting research, or encumbered research.
Not to mention that it would be *damn* hard to get professors to work for peanuts (seriously, I've seen what these people make for their qualifications) while training basically all high-skill future scientists, and under a contract where all work they do they can't even commercialize because some big company will snap it up underneath them.
No, I'm afraid that I have to disagree with your position. Yes, I have a bias because I am working very hard to commercialize technology that my lab invented, but I also think that is is more than fair to give the actual inventors first dibs on trying to commercialize something. I would have left academia in a hurry and just did all my work as a trade secret pretty quickly otherwise.
National labs of course are a totally different story. Usually their inventions are licensed under reasonable terms in only non-exclusive licenses. But those inventors are *working* for the government as opposed to just having a small fraction of their costs paid for by a government grant.
I dunno, they seem to manage fine with iOS and android. We're talking about netbooks, so the different form factor makes people intuitively not expect it to be *exactly* the same as what they've always used. And Unity is closer to looking like android/iOS than windows, which makes even more sense if the device is looking more like a phone than a desktop... although I definitely agree that not including Unity is an obvious choice. That stuff is just a disaster at present.
If memory serves, the giant flywheel that MIT uses to spark their fusion test reactor is rigged with explosive charges to blow it to pieces if it ever came loose. I believe the calculations show that without detonating it, it would likely continue *through* several buildings before landing in the Charles River... could have been an urban legend though.
I have heard from electric companies that they have absolutely no problem with this. People doing "energy arbitrage" are essentially helping the power companies even out the grid, which means said power company doesn't have to turn on the expensive natural gas generators as often (or purchase less natural gas power when they are on). You're just getting into the business of providing space and equipment to do grid leveling informally.
The efficiency of an electric motor can be in excess of 90%. Energy is transferred to a flywheel via electric motor, and extracted (mostly likely) through the same electric motor, so your maximum theoretical efficiency is going to be your motor efficiency squared. If they tried hard, probably something like (92%)^2 or something like 85% total storage efficiency.
This is of course assuming that mechanical losses are zero, but given the design they are very likely to be close to perfect. There will also of course be some energy lost indirectly in levitation/cooling/ohmic stuff outside of the flywheel.
I think the thing about this article that bugs me the most is they say that the flywheels can store 20MW. What on earth kind of way to measure an energy storage device is that? 20MW for 0.5 seconds? 20MW for three days? Embarrassing.
Hopefully someone who is on an academic IP address can explain why this is any different than the standard wet-embossing techniques that we've been using to do this kind of thing for the last decade and a half... those SEM images sure look awfully similar to the stuff I was doing back in 2001. Maybe they're just saying that they crush the porous substrate whereas with standard techniques we suck up solvents in substrate inks? That would be kind of neat, although it seems like it'd be limited in utility so I imagine it's more clever than that... do they crush some porous substrate and then manage to lift off the pattern or otherwise remove the crushed portion? Do they have a technique to deposit different substrates on the same device? Otherwise, it's not really going to be useful for most electronics right? I mean, making a pattern of n-type silicon isn't going to make a useful device unless you can deposit p-type and conductor on the same device and manage high degrees of alignment... maybe they mean that this can be used as memory? DIffraction gratings by themselves are rather boring...
A shame that the article doesn't say what the substrates actually are. I do like the photos of the little tubes, although without a scale bar I'm not sure what I'm looking at.
Wow, I'm glad that my TI-89 from literally 1998 still works perfectly... I use that thing *all* the time at work. I would be furious if I could no longer use the eigenvalue and eigenvector solving software. Did they cripple it in any other ways since then? As is with the stock OS I can solve fairly complex integrals without even simplifying them...
Indeed. I found the Unity interface to be "just another option", and one that makes a great deal of sense for computers with minimal screen real estate. However, I confess to switching back to normal gnome even on my netbook because of stability issues and graphical glitches. Very annoying ones, including stupid stuff like lost windows which I can no longer access despite them being visible and such. I would personally have thought it to be much more sane to make it a "special option" for one more release so that it gets troubleshot and tested by bleeding edge users before bothering to pretend it's actually ready for the mainstream.
I dunno, I was able to communicate reasonably effectively with nothing more than some nouns, verbs, and prepositions. Of course, word order doesn't matter much in Japanese either, but just making gestures while saying a noun is often enough to get across a simple concept. Granted, I couldn't hold a conversation about why someone hates their boss at work, but I could definitely ask for directions, purchase things, ask what things were, and managed to muddle through ordering a pretty complicated train ticket with someone who knew zero english...
Yeah, you'll sound like an idiot, but knowing the word for "rice" and making eating gestures goes a long way.
As another academic, this is also why I don't spend much *effort* contributing, although I do make the occasional edit to articles which are sorely lacking in value. I am one of perhaps 100 of the worlds top experts on cerium oxide (being conservative because I can't read Chinese papers). However, while I was perfectly fine with writing the basic outline of the article, there's no way I'm going to waste my time checking things that others add unless I know offhand if they are correct. Besides, the edits others make to scientific articles are generally what *I* would consider to be valuable, even if they don't meet Wikipedia's high standards. For instance, I would consider it eminently valuable to have a list of companies producing cerium oxide high surface area foams, or what chemicals can be used in ceria atomic layer deposition. However, I doubt that these things would be seen as "on-topic" by Wikipedia editors.
Another issue is that there is some stuff that I consider to be frankly common knowledge. However, according to wikipedia standards, it probably isn't and I would have to waste my valuable time going through my textbooks from undergrad to find a reference for that information. I will not be doing that. But maybe some of the undergrads I mentor will do it for me? For instance, I could write a lot about how you can use fourier transforms on the concentration gradients (well, technically the chemical potential) of a solute in a matrix in order to rapidly estimate the periodicity of the final crystal structures. This is extremely cool, and I use it all the time intuitively when I am predicting crystallization behavior where sharp edges rapidly disappear, and where final structures have a well established dimensionality to them (spinodal decomposition for instance). However, I'm not going to spend hours finding my old kinetics textbook to provide a properly referenced article.
I wish I could find the original research done into these alternative systems, but I don't seem to be able to find the articles (and, well, don't care enough to try to find them).
My favorite concept from these was that as technology causes individual humans to be more efficient, there should be less labor requirement. For instance, if the use of a tractor makes a human 10 times as efficient in harvesting food, then you should need to employ 1/10th as many people. Ignoring the second-order correction from the tractor manufacturer (who is improved by more robots and more robots and so on), as technology makes us more efficient, it is *natural* that we would work less.
The failure of capitalism here is that if you *don't* work your 40 hours a week, you don't get enough money to eat. However, society doesn't actually *need* people to work that 40 hours a week to accomplish everything that needs doing. So what you end up with is people employed who are doing essentially useless tasks, and who essentially spend their time increasing the complexity of the bureaucratic system without adding efficiency. Quite literally, many of these people consume more resources in getting to work and "working" than they produce. I am sure everyone knows these people.
Wouldn't society be better off if these people just *stayed the heck home* and did something that they were even remotely passionate about, and might someday even become good at instead of slowing those of us who actually naturally enjoy being productive down? Maybe that's art, or music, or cooking, or caring for kids, or who knows what. But at least they'll be doing *something*.
So, the proposals to deal with this messy transitional period between an industrial and post-industrial economy was to basically provide enough of a welfare safety net that if people didn't want to work, they didn't need to do so in order to live a satisfying (if frugal) life. Meanwhile, people have a standard economy on top of that for other items -- so people can spend all their time being musicians and actually maybe even become good at it -- without having to worry about starving in the interim. I guess you could say it's sort of half way between socialist and capitalist? It's really neither. It's capitalist in the sense that the free market is clearly there and providing incentives to produce value. On the other hand, the free market is limited to "luxury" items beyond the base necessities that people need.
Now, I'm not saying I necessarily think this would work -- I, like many, am inclined to believe that people are not as good as I would hope. On the other hand, maybe that's only because we treat them that way? I'd certainly love to believe that if you give people security in their food and shelter, they'll be a lot more likely to adventure in doing more productive things with their time. Or maybe they'll just shoot heroin in the back alley.
BUT, the big issue remains. Our current system is designed to rapidly increase efficiency, but not give people more free time to balance it out. Certainly most of us feel that we are working as many hours as ever we were, even if the amount of work we can accomplish in a week hasn't really changed much (exceptions exist, of course, especially in computers). If our efficiency is 10 times higher than it was in 1920, then our EMPLOYMENT rate should be only 10%! Yes, 90% unemployment is a perfectly natural state for a post-industrial society! Why else do we have robot maids and trains if not to make it so that we can spend our time doing things we are more passionate about like.........
Anyway, just wanted to throw that out as food for thought. Capitalism is all well and good, but there seems to need to be some fine tuning at the unproductive bottom of the capitalist food chain if we want to improve the value of our society. After all, as John F. Kennedy said in 1968:
"Our gross national product... counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It
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Totally agree with this. Martial arts are perfect for nerds.
I can't stand things like running because even though I know that in principle there are lots of details to pay attention to, I want something where both my mind and body are engaged.
Now I teach karate at MIT, and it's awesome teaching to people who are also nerds. My favorite is describing that a punch works like a torsional wave where an impulse is put into your spinal column at your hip level and then it moves up your body to your shoulders and then out your arms. Explaining karate techniques in terms of energy and momentum is incredibly helpful when you know those concepts. Learning kata and bunkai is also very interesting, particularly when you get to the point that you're making up new bunkai for existing kata. This is very interesting creative, intellectual, and physical work that nicely integrates all aspects of your fitness.
I also love that martial arts are the one sport where you continue to get better and better as you age. If I'm sparring with some 60 year old, odds are I will lose and lose badly. Sometimes hilariously badly. I like the idea of a sport where in 30 years I will actually be better than I am in my "prime" for most sports.
This is basically the best reason to read the Honor Harrington series of novels. It blows every other science fiction writer away in terms of portraying reasonable space combat.
Rules:
1. Always wear a space suit in combat. Duh.
2. You don't know where your enemy is until c*\Delta x has passed. This is both advantageous and disadvantageous.
3. Surprise! You can only decellerate as fast as you can accelerate! What? You mean I have to spend half of my time rushing at my opponent slowing down?
4. Laser beams hit at the moment you know they've been fired (not that they're used much, lasers are weak).
5. Lots of people die all the time. I think they killed billions of soldiers in a major war.
6. Yes, even your friends and main characters. Stray missiles suck.
It's fantastic.
I don't know if this is the best solution for everyone, but I just have my computer generate pink noise. It's got roughly the quality of a rain storm, and after a few minutes I don't even notice it anymore. I can use it to sleep through anything, and I live with roomates who are, shall we say, active at night.
This seems from the reports I've read to be pretty spot on. I would add an addendum to an earlier comment about this being why no nuclear plants will ever be built in the US again though; the current designs are generally "passive fail", meaning that unless electricity is supplied to the control systems, the plant will just... stop being just sub-critical and will go non-critical very quickly. For instance the pebble bed designs. My (somewhat, I'm probably giving myself a little too little credit) understanding is that these plants use nuclear fuel that just... can't react on it's own due to the sheathing materials. I think those are pyrolytic carbon still though, so of course there will still be problems with burning if they are exposed to air, the accompanying release of hydrogen, etc (I think).
This seems very honestly to be the entire focus of the nuclear industry -- designing plants which are safe to operate no matter what, which maintain reasonable cost-effectiveness. It's basically the holy grail.
I think the current problem is:
1. Natural gas is cheap, coal is cheap, they are cheaper to build and easier to maintain.
2. The regulatory process and validation work to get a new plant design is intimidating. Probably even intimidating as compared to the design of fighter jets.
3. Nuclear *is* scary to the vast majority of people. This is residual in large part from Long Island, and based in concerns over running reactors commissioned in the 60s still being operated. *That* part I am scared of. But as a scientist and engineer, I think that these are solvable problems so long as safety and the concepts of "fail safe" systems engineering based on the Therac-25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25) which seem to have very permanently changed the way that people fundamentally think about how to do system engineering. These problems had not arisen and become understood when those plants went into operation. A current plant definitely would do a far better job of that.
Heck, it even effects me on a daily basis (at this point in my career I would classify myself as a systems engineer); I think all the time "What happens if all this equipment just stops working" and the answer is always "go to a safe operational mode". The are different ways to do that. You have the F-16 style of doing that, which includes crazy amounts of unstable control algorithms. But by *far* the preferred mechanism is physical. For instance, if I have a furnace I expect to go to 2000C, and monitor the temperature with one thermocouple while I use a single additional thermocouple as a safety, is not really enough. I would *far* rather have a thermal fuse that blows hard when a temperature exceeds some set ultimate super failure limit and shuts everything off immediately. I don't trust thermocouples to be reliable, and I don't trust the controls equipment to respond properly in an emergency.
But in one of these pebble beds, the sorts of controls they are integrating are way beyond "having power", by far the best safety integration is to design it such that electricity failing causes large physical things to happen. Dumping the pebble bed entirely, or dumping immediately a mediator into the reactor that is only prevented from triggering by constant electricity. Some of the designs I've seen literally place the reactor under a ridiculously large tank of water held closed by electricity. I don't know in what way that would fail, but it would be far superior to what happened in fukoshima.
I thought they were happy endings...ish?
Not as happy as the lord of the rings, but way happier than brazil.
Jeez man, spoiler alert?
The movie isn't even out yet!
Trolling. How is that not obvious?
This is true about patents in some areas, but not others.
I say this as someone who has easily worked around patents before, and nonetheless has heard repeatedly from investors that *some* IP is critical for self-defense and protection of core technologies.
Yes, absolutely. I'm a startup founder (not a web startup, which actually seems to make it much harder to find VC's nowadays, by the by).
I've got tons of impressive credentials, but if my startup idea sucks, or I've got serious issues with my team ability to implement it, of course I would want to know! I can't fix a problem I am too inexperienced to understand. If the solution is a search for a new co-founder who has more experience, then heck yes I want to know that so that I can do it! I want my startup to succeed, not flounder forever.
Even more, if it's got serious fatal flaws then it's worth me seriously thinking about whether or not I should be doing it. I can make an extremely nice salary at a regular job, even a job at another startup to learn really useful stuff at in terms of doing my own. Why would I want to waste tons of my time and spirit on a project that makes no sense, or won't work for team reasons?
I have gotten far more negative feedback than positive feedback from potential funders. I have never taken offense; the criticism isn't about me as a person, it is about me in the context of my startup. If the feedback I got was about how my religion or gender or sexual orientation or race was wrong or something ridiculous like that it would be one thing (although I am easy going enough that frankly I probably still wouldn't take offense). But if it's practical concerns about my skills with leadership, or my team's lack of expertise, or whatever that's incredibly valuable to know! Anyone that gets offended by free advice is doing it wrong. Yeah, the VC may be wrong, but you get what you pay for.
The problem I was talking about is where a schematic with 50 parts on it is a giant rats nest of stuff all on a single page that someone then tries to fit onto a single page/monitor, making extensive panning and zooming necessary to understand what's going on. Following the rules I outlined prevents that problem by making it so you can simply print out the images on a normal sized piece of paper and find everything completely legible (and similarly with most monitors).
The problem that you are talking about is one that can be solved with any moderately competent image viewer. Even firefox's automatic image scaling is perfectly capable of handling it, within reason. If that's all that this javascript tool accomplishes, then it is incredibly sad how slow it is. On my computer it hangs for a good 20 seconds when trying to zoom in or out, and god forbid I try to drag the image. Surely a better tool for dynamic image viewing already exists -- the one on amazon.com seems to work fine, after all, for the same task.
And yes, the PNG image is 2952x2202 pixels, but it's also 70kB... this isn't exactly an unwieldy image. And if it were a vector graphic or pdf, it'd probably be even smaller. I only chose not to do that because there is less support for it in browsers... like how I can't open PDFs inline in firefox very pleasantly.
If it had labels for logical blocks, I think that the schematic you linked to would be perfectly legible. A bit overkill, but at least it's not messy. What if there were two LEDs? Three? Four? There is definitely a limit where no matter how obvious the connection is, it increases legibility to use named nets.
Yeah, I definitely agree with this. This seems to be a solution to the problem "how can I make illegible and amateurish schematic drawings more readable without learning anything?"
Use a frame that limits the total schematic size to a standard paper size. Use named nets and labels on nets instead of actually connecting wires between parts (except for trivial connections like capacitors). Put lines in your schematic that separate logical blocks of your schematic. Label logical blocks with a title (AC Rectifier, Boost Converter, Control System, ADCs, Filters, etc). This makes it trivial for someone to look at your schematic and rapidly identify errors. It makes it simpler for *you* to rapidly identify errors!
Just follow these four simple rules and your schematics (pretty much regardless of software used to make them) will suddenly appear to be fairly professional (if not perfect). For examples, take a look at this. I'm not an EE by any means, but the more you separate functionality into logical blocks and limit your size with frames, the closer it looks to "professional".
http://saikoled.com/lightshield/
http://saikoled.com/lightbrick/
http://web.mit.edu/neltnerb/www/artwork/design.html
(for the last link, some fairly complex schematics are shown in the "New Schematics and Diagrams" section. The ones near the top are duplicates of what I published on the other website.)
You can either have academic labs researching things which are commercially interesting, and then give the professors working on it the perk of having the opportunity to commercialize it first (or at least royalties), or you can have academic labs researching things which the professor is academically interested in, and hope that it is commercially interesting. It is difficult to get both.
Either you get people complaining that publicly funded research isn't free to the public to use, or you get people complaining that stuff invented in academia has no practical application. And since there aren't any industrial research labs left, that means either no commercially interesting research, or encumbered research.
Not to mention that it would be *damn* hard to get professors to work for peanuts (seriously, I've seen what these people make for their qualifications) while training basically all high-skill future scientists, and under a contract where all work they do they can't even commercialize because some big company will snap it up underneath them.
No, I'm afraid that I have to disagree with your position. Yes, I have a bias because I am working very hard to commercialize technology that my lab invented, but I also think that is is more than fair to give the actual inventors first dibs on trying to commercialize something. I would have left academia in a hurry and just did all my work as a trade secret pretty quickly otherwise.
National labs of course are a totally different story. Usually their inventions are licensed under reasonable terms in only non-exclusive licenses. But those inventors are *working* for the government as opposed to just having a small fraction of their costs paid for by a government grant.
I dunno, they seem to manage fine with iOS and android. We're talking about netbooks, so the different form factor makes people intuitively not expect it to be *exactly* the same as what they've always used. And Unity is closer to looking like android/iOS than windows, which makes even more sense if the device is looking more like a phone than a desktop... although I definitely agree that not including Unity is an obvious choice. That stuff is just a disaster at present.
If memory serves, the giant flywheel that MIT uses to spark their fusion test reactor is rigged with explosive charges to blow it to pieces if it ever came loose. I believe the calculations show that without detonating it, it would likely continue *through* several buildings before landing in the Charles River... could have been an urban legend though.
I have heard from electric companies that they have absolutely no problem with this. People doing "energy arbitrage" are essentially helping the power companies even out the grid, which means said power company doesn't have to turn on the expensive natural gas generators as often (or purchase less natural gas power when they are on). You're just getting into the business of providing space and equipment to do grid leveling informally.
The efficiency of an electric motor can be in excess of 90%. Energy is transferred to a flywheel via electric motor, and extracted (mostly likely) through the same electric motor, so your maximum theoretical efficiency is going to be your motor efficiency squared. If they tried hard, probably something like (92%)^2 or something like 85% total storage efficiency.
This is of course assuming that mechanical losses are zero, but given the design they are very likely to be close to perfect. There will also of course be some energy lost indirectly in levitation/cooling/ohmic stuff outside of the flywheel.
I think the thing about this article that bugs me the most is they say that the flywheels can store 20MW. What on earth kind of way to measure an energy storage device is that? 20MW for 0.5 seconds? 20MW for three days? Embarrassing.
Hopefully someone who is on an academic IP address can explain why this is any different than the standard wet-embossing techniques that we've been using to do this kind of thing for the last decade and a half... those SEM images sure look awfully similar to the stuff I was doing back in 2001. Maybe they're just saying that they crush the porous substrate whereas with standard techniques we suck up solvents in substrate inks? That would be kind of neat, although it seems like it'd be limited in utility so I imagine it's more clever than that... do they crush some porous substrate and then manage to lift off the pattern or otherwise remove the crushed portion? Do they have a technique to deposit different substrates on the same device? Otherwise, it's not really going to be useful for most electronics right? I mean, making a pattern of n-type silicon isn't going to make a useful device unless you can deposit p-type and conductor on the same device and manage high degrees of alignment... maybe they mean that this can be used as memory? DIffraction gratings by themselves are rather boring...
A shame that the article doesn't say what the substrates actually are. I do like the photos of the little tubes, although without a scale bar I'm not sure what I'm looking at.
Wow, I'm glad that my TI-89 from literally 1998 still works perfectly... I use that thing *all* the time at work. I would be furious if I could no longer use the eigenvalue and eigenvector solving software. Did they cripple it in any other ways since then? As is with the stock OS I can solve fairly complex integrals without even simplifying them...
Indeed. I found the Unity interface to be "just another option", and one that makes a great deal of sense for computers with minimal screen real estate. However, I confess to switching back to normal gnome even on my netbook because of stability issues and graphical glitches. Very annoying ones, including stupid stuff like lost windows which I can no longer access despite them being visible and such. I would personally have thought it to be much more sane to make it a "special option" for one more release so that it gets troubleshot and tested by bleeding edge users before bothering to pretend it's actually ready for the mainstream.
Also, asking the bartender how to pick up the ladies is usually an entertaining conversation starter.
I dunno, I was able to communicate reasonably effectively with nothing more than some nouns, verbs, and prepositions. Of course, word order doesn't matter much in Japanese either, but just making gestures while saying a noun is often enough to get across a simple concept. Granted, I couldn't hold a conversation about why someone hates their boss at work, but I could definitely ask for directions, purchase things, ask what things were, and managed to muddle through ordering a pretty complicated train ticket with someone who knew zero english...
Yeah, you'll sound like an idiot, but knowing the word for "rice" and making eating gestures goes a long way.
As another academic, this is also why I don't spend much *effort* contributing, although I do make the occasional edit to articles which are sorely lacking in value. I am one of perhaps 100 of the worlds top experts on cerium oxide (being conservative because I can't read Chinese papers). However, while I was perfectly fine with writing the basic outline of the article, there's no way I'm going to waste my time checking things that others add unless I know offhand if they are correct. Besides, the edits others make to scientific articles are generally what *I* would consider to be valuable, even if they don't meet Wikipedia's high standards. For instance, I would consider it eminently valuable to have a list of companies producing cerium oxide high surface area foams, or what chemicals can be used in ceria atomic layer deposition. However, I doubt that these things would be seen as "on-topic" by Wikipedia editors.
Another issue is that there is some stuff that I consider to be frankly common knowledge. However, according to wikipedia standards, it probably isn't and I would have to waste my valuable time going through my textbooks from undergrad to find a reference for that information. I will not be doing that. But maybe some of the undergrads I mentor will do it for me? For instance, I could write a lot about how you can use fourier transforms on the concentration gradients (well, technically the chemical potential) of a solute in a matrix in order to rapidly estimate the periodicity of the final crystal structures. This is extremely cool, and I use it all the time intuitively when I am predicting crystallization behavior where sharp edges rapidly disappear, and where final structures have a well established dimensionality to them (spinodal decomposition for instance). However, I'm not going to spend hours finding my old kinetics textbook to provide a properly referenced article.
Err... yes, that is what I meant.
Thanks =)
I wish I could find the original research done into these alternative systems, but I don't seem to be able to find the articles (and, well, don't care enough to try to find them).
My favorite concept from these was that as technology causes individual humans to be more efficient, there should be less labor requirement. For instance, if the use of a tractor makes a human 10 times as efficient in harvesting food, then you should need to employ 1/10th as many people. Ignoring the second-order correction from the tractor manufacturer (who is improved by more robots and more robots and so on), as technology makes us more efficient, it is *natural* that we would work less.
The failure of capitalism here is that if you *don't* work your 40 hours a week, you don't get enough money to eat. However, society doesn't actually *need* people to work that 40 hours a week to accomplish everything that needs doing. So what you end up with is people employed who are doing essentially useless tasks, and who essentially spend their time increasing the complexity of the bureaucratic system without adding efficiency. Quite literally, many of these people consume more resources in getting to work and "working" than they produce. I am sure everyone knows these people.
Wouldn't society be better off if these people just *stayed the heck home* and did something that they were even remotely passionate about, and might someday even become good at instead of slowing those of us who actually naturally enjoy being productive down? Maybe that's art, or music, or cooking, or caring for kids, or who knows what. But at least they'll be doing *something*.
So, the proposals to deal with this messy transitional period between an industrial and post-industrial economy was to basically provide enough of a welfare safety net that if people didn't want to work, they didn't need to do so in order to live a satisfying (if frugal) life. Meanwhile, people have a standard economy on top of that for other items -- so people can spend all their time being musicians and actually maybe even become good at it -- without having to worry about starving in the interim. I guess you could say it's sort of half way between socialist and capitalist? It's really neither. It's capitalist in the sense that the free market is clearly there and providing incentives to produce value. On the other hand, the free market is limited to "luxury" items beyond the base necessities that people need.
Now, I'm not saying I necessarily think this would work -- I, like many, am inclined to believe that people are not as good as I would hope. On the other hand, maybe that's only because we treat them that way? I'd certainly love to believe that if you give people security in their food and shelter, they'll be a lot more likely to adventure in doing more productive things with their time. Or maybe they'll just shoot heroin in the back alley.
BUT, the big issue remains. Our current system is designed to rapidly increase efficiency, but not give people more free time to balance it out. Certainly most of us feel that we are working as many hours as ever we were, even if the amount of work we can accomplish in a week hasn't really changed much (exceptions exist, of course, especially in computers). If our efficiency is 10 times higher than it was in 1920, then our EMPLOYMENT rate should be only 10%! Yes, 90% unemployment is a perfectly natural state for a post-industrial society! Why else do we have robot maids and trains if not to make it so that we can spend our time doing things we are more passionate about like.........
Anyway, just wanted to throw that out as food for thought. Capitalism is all well and good, but there seems to need to be some fine tuning at the unproductive bottom of the capitalist food chain if we want to improve the value of our society. After all, as John F. Kennedy said in 1968:
"Our gross national product ... counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It