I don't see how this follows. The jobs aren't moving to Japan, they're moving to India, Mexico, and China. Not to mention that the logical leap from a "difference in attitudes toward attendance" to it being a cause for why jobs are leaving America is about as large and random as it gets. Wild guess is that the reason just might have to do with drastically different wages... and if you can propose a mechanism how better attendance in school leads to lower wages, I'll be very impressed.
Note: I'm an American, and I skipped classes from time to time. For what it's worth, in a number of classes I did *worse* in classes where I attended recitations (quantum mechanics in particular) because they just gave out all the answers to the homework and I had no reason to actually try to learn anything. Sure, I did better on the homework, but what's the point in getting an "A" if you don't remember a thing four years later?
FWIW, I figured out how to fix this for pidgin specifically. I kind of like it popping up a message when someone says something and the window doesn't have focus, but I don't need a notification every time someone comes online -- you can change this behavior in Pidgin's Tools->Plugins->Libnotify Popups->Configure Plugin.
Once it stopped doing that, I found that I mind much less, and having coherency between the volume control, email notification, etc, etc is sort of nice. I expect that the customizability will improve in the future, because otherwise the feature seems very sane; it's silly for every application to have their own way of displaying messages.
The virus they're using has been approved for use in the human body by the FDA, if I recall correctly.
But even then, the virus is obliterated after forming the materials, isn't it? I mean, don't they heat treat it at pretty high temperatures to burn out the residual organics?
Wind speed goes up as you get higher above ground, and the power in the wind goes up as the cube of the wind speed.
Big wind turbines can extract much more power from the wind than small turbines closer to the ground; especially turbines only barely above the tops of the surrounding trees.
Yes, but the effect is not readily noticeable. Around very large wind farms they seem temperature increases of ~1C due to the air not circulating as well as in the surrounding area. This is equivalent to the effect of a city on the local climate.
As far as removing energy from the overall climate, the scales are not even close to what would seem to cause a problem (although who knows, right?). Plus, global warming is injecting lots of energy into the weather system right now... so at least the change is in a good direction.
As a datapoint, my roomate and I (both MIT grads, for all that says about our geography skills?) were at a restaurant before the election and for shits tried to name every US state (which we both could in high school).
Graphene is a (basically) 2-D sheet that can be fairly large. Imagine the sheet the size of a blanket. Now make a mobius strip out of it.
The fact that it's "one sided" should only really come into play in that long range hybridization of the pi orbitals will interfere with each other -- presumably causing the weird effects their model predicts.
Well, it will still be made up of graphene when it comes to looking at atomic energy levels. Band gap is the primary source of light interactions, and as it will still be close to zero band gap (unless the asymmetry thrown into long range hybridization screws it up in ways I am not thinking of), and should be absorbing most photons.
So, it'll probably look the same as graphite, but would probably diffract photons with wavelenghts like 10nm due to it having a longer-range crystal structure than normal crystals (which only diffract in the X-rays). The crystals might do things like diffract in the high energy UV, assuming the UV doesn't all get absorbed by the graphite.
Basically, you're exactly right. You read through the literature to see if anyone else has found something that "sort of" works, try to guess why it works at all, and then try to come up with ways to make it more than "sort of" work.
Most of the time, my thought process goes something like this:
1. It sure would be nice if we could use ethanol in a fuel cell. 2. Hey, that's great, Dr. Booringhouse found a catalyst that let him use ethanol in a fuel cell, but it's not very efficient. 3. Hmm, it's supported on cerium oxide. I can make cerium oxide *way* better than anyone else. Maybe it'll work better if I try it with my method of making cerium oxide. 4. 1 year goes by. 5. Well, the difference is noticeable, but only barely. But hey, Dr. Suresh found that making nanowires instead of using nanoparticles improved performance in methanol conversion. Maybe if I use nanowires of this other material, it will also improve performance in ethanol conversion. 6. etc.
Actually, this is surprisingly close to what I do, although names have been made up to protect the innocent. And that is why it takes forever =) No one really seems to know why catalyst behave the way they do, except in extremely isolated cases, so there's surprisingly little predictive ability.
Sorry, apparently my first paragraph is based on an urban legend, not facts. Ethanol does usually have a very tiny amount of methanol in it, and ethanol will compete for the alcohol dehydrogenase that will make the methanol toxic, but ethanol is not sufficient treatment by itself to make the methanol safe.
I think. I'm not totally sure I trust wikipedia more than the postdocs in my lab. Meh. Better safe than sorry though.
Ethanol always has methanol in it. In the presence of ethanol, methanol is not toxic because the ethanol prevents it from being converted into formaldehyde. The treatment for methanol poisoning is an ethanol drip.
Methanol is used because ethanol fuel cells don't exist technologically yet. Methanol is a much simpler molecule.
Methanol is more toxic than gasoline in the sense that methanol has a very low vapor pressure and so if there were a spill in an enclosed area, you would breathe in a good amount of it, which could cause blindness.
Um, they limit it to 85% because if it's higher than that, most gasoline internal combustion engines will not be able to ignite it. In many cars, it's limited to 10% because the O-rings will degrade in the presence of ethanol.
Further, getting ethanol higher than 90% is extremely expensive and typically requires adding toxic chemicals such as benzene....
Methanol is better because there aren't any carbon-carbon bonds to cleave. This makes it easier to find catalysts that will functionally convert it into CO2 and H+ ions. Smaller molecules are just generally simpler to work with.
In the end, methanol based fuel cells exist. Ethanol based fuel cells don't. I'm working on it, but it'll be a while =)
As far as safety, methanol is mostly dangerous because if it is ingested or inhaled, it will be converted into formaldehyde in the body and cause blindness. Methanol is not particularly more corrosive than ethanol/water, and while it has a lower vapor pressure than ethanol, the quantity of methanol present in a battery form factor is likely to be far too small to produce a serious hazard.
You have glossed over the distinction the parent was making. Everyone is free to an opinion, and should be encouraged to espouse it whenever they feel the need. However, when these opinions start restricting other people's ability to function in society, they have crossed a line and need to be examined using a more rigorous test.
Your freedom of speech ends where it limits my freedoms. Tolerance should be encouraged, except for tolerance of intolerance.
The point was that scientists have lost their voice in the process because they haven't been as involved in shaping political and social policies until they prevent them from functioning. Our government was founded on principles of limiting the impact religious views could be allowed to have on public decisions (like where to spend the public's tax money). The "logic and reason" crowd doesn't seem to have noticed, and got caught with their pants down when Bush got elected. Now they are trying to correct this by not being such pansies about expressing *their* views.
There is no reason for a scientist to couch their views so as to not offend people who believe in invisible, all knowing, all powerful, and all loving beings which impact our daily lives in important, but only in utterly unmeasurable ways. Certainly, there is no reason to do so when religious "zealots" are constantly spouting vile bitumen about the scientists and personally attacking them and their beliefs.
And for the record, I say this as someone who is deeply spiritual (although I don't believe in the Christian God). I just don't think there's any reason why me believing that we have energy spiraling in our bodies should have any relevance to anyone else when I can't prove it, they haven't experienced it, and there are no externally significant effects.
180 degrees to choose from, say it has to be within.18 degrees from planer with the earth, and you get a 0.1% chance of a random star having the orbital plane of planets coplanar with us.
Now multiply by the number of stars in the field of view (\infty), and you get an infinite number of stars will potentially show this effect.
I know with certainty that MIT only takes ownership of student inventions if they are made using real resources. Students still paying tuition (unlike grad students) actually get even more leeway with keeping their inventions because they are paying for the resources they are using. If you invent something for a class project, even if you use class resources, you have first dibs to patent it.
The only time this is not the case is if you are a grad student getting money from the university (i.e. you're an employee and required to sign an agreement handing over rights to your inventions), or if you're an undergraduate who invented something in a research lab you're working for.
It sounds to me like the fellow referenced above is working as a graduate student, and so signed the agreement just like anyone else. If he doesn't like it now, that's sorta tough... he's getting paid for his time, he gets a fraction of the royalties (MIT is particularly generous with these), and he has first dibs on licensing the patent. It's pretty fair, except that government money was probably used for it, so the IP should *probably* belong to everyone.
Yes, it does have an effect. There is data showing that in wind farms the average temperature is slightly higher, and of course the wind speed is lower.
Very large wind farms will probably cause local temperature increases of 1-2 degrees centigrade. This could, of course, be mitigated by planting lots of trees all around them...
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I don't see how this follows. The jobs aren't moving to Japan, they're moving to India, Mexico, and China. Not to mention that the logical leap from a "difference in attitudes toward attendance" to it being a cause for why jobs are leaving America is about as large and random as it gets. Wild guess is that the reason just might have to do with drastically different wages... and if you can propose a mechanism how better attendance in school leads to lower wages, I'll be very impressed.
Note: I'm an American, and I skipped classes from time to time. For what it's worth, in a number of classes I did *worse* in classes where I attended recitations (quantum mechanics in particular) because they just gave out all the answers to the homework and I had no reason to actually try to learn anything. Sure, I did better on the homework, but what's the point in getting an "A" if you don't remember a thing four years later?
Wouldn't this be obviously the case if attendance is part of the grade...?
FWIW, I figured out how to fix this for pidgin specifically. I kind of like it popping up a message when someone says something and the window doesn't have focus, but I don't need a notification every time someone comes online -- you can change this behavior in Pidgin's Tools->Plugins->Libnotify Popups->Configure Plugin.
Once it stopped doing that, I found that I mind much less, and having coherency between the volume control, email notification, etc, etc is sort of nice. I expect that the customizability will improve in the future, because otherwise the feature seems very sane; it's silly for every application to have their own way of displaying messages.
Alright, I suppose I do.
http://www.webelements.com/lithium/biology.html
But only 2.7mg... it'd take 20 times that much hydrogen cyanide to kill me (for reference).
=)
This is not a battery, it is a perpetual motion machine.
perhaps you could call it a bio-fuel?
The virus they're using has been approved for use in the human body by the FDA, if I recall correctly.
But even then, the virus is obliterated after forming the materials, isn't it? I mean, don't they heat treat it at pretty high temperatures to burn out the residual organics?
And lithium ions floating around in their bloodstream.
Wind speed goes up as you get higher above ground, and the power in the wind goes up as the cube of the wind speed.
Big wind turbines can extract much more power from the wind than small turbines closer to the ground; especially turbines only barely above the tops of the surrounding trees.
Yes, but the effect is not readily noticeable. Around very large wind farms they seem temperature increases of ~1C due to the air not circulating as well as in the surrounding area. This is equivalent to the effect of a city on the local climate.
As far as removing energy from the overall climate, the scales are not even close to what would seem to cause a problem (although who knows, right?). Plus, global warming is injecting lots of energy into the weather system right now... so at least the change is in a good direction.
As a datapoint, my roomate and I (both MIT grads, for all that says about our geography skills?) were at a restaurant before the election and for shits tried to name every US state (which we both could in high school).
Nebraska was the only one we couldn't remember.
It's meta funny because the comic's claimed grammar rules actually make it sound like "it's" can be either "it is" or "its" (possessive)
Doubt it. Things can still react on both sides of the locally 2-sided graphene sheet.
Graphene is a (basically) 2-D sheet that can be fairly large. Imagine the sheet the size of a blanket. Now make a mobius strip out of it.
The fact that it's "one sided" should only really come into play in that long range hybridization of the pi orbitals will interfere with each other -- presumably causing the weird effects their model predicts.
Well, it will still be made up of graphene when it comes to looking at atomic energy levels. Band gap is the primary source of light interactions, and as it will still be close to zero band gap (unless the asymmetry thrown into long range hybridization screws it up in ways I am not thinking of), and should be absorbing most photons.
So, it'll probably look the same as graphite, but would probably diffract photons with wavelenghts like 10nm due to it having a longer-range crystal structure than normal crystals (which only diffract in the X-rays). The crystals might do things like diffract in the high energy UV, assuming the UV doesn't all get absorbed by the graphite.
Basically, you're exactly right. You read through the literature to see if anyone else has found something that "sort of" works, try to guess why it works at all, and then try to come up with ways to make it more than "sort of" work.
Most of the time, my thought process goes something like this:
1. It sure would be nice if we could use ethanol in a fuel cell.
2. Hey, that's great, Dr. Booringhouse found a catalyst that let him use ethanol in a fuel cell, but it's not very efficient.
3. Hmm, it's supported on cerium oxide. I can make cerium oxide *way* better than anyone else. Maybe it'll work better if I try it with my method of making cerium oxide.
4. 1 year goes by.
5. Well, the difference is noticeable, but only barely. But hey, Dr. Suresh found that making nanowires instead of using nanoparticles improved performance in methanol conversion. Maybe if I use nanowires of this other material, it will also improve performance in ethanol conversion.
6. etc.
Actually, this is surprisingly close to what I do, although names have been made up to protect the innocent. And that is why it takes forever =) No one really seems to know why catalyst behave the way they do, except in extremely isolated cases, so there's surprisingly little predictive ability.
Thank you rcw-home, yes, I meant 190 proof, not 90%.
Sorry, apparently my first paragraph is based on an urban legend, not facts. Ethanol does usually have a very tiny amount of methanol in it, and ethanol will compete for the alcohol dehydrogenase that will make the methanol toxic, but ethanol is not sufficient treatment by itself to make the methanol safe.
I think. I'm not totally sure I trust wikipedia more than the postdocs in my lab. Meh. Better safe than sorry though.
Ethanol always has methanol in it. In the presence of ethanol, methanol is not toxic because the ethanol prevents it from being converted into formaldehyde. The treatment for methanol poisoning is an ethanol drip.
Methanol is used because ethanol fuel cells don't exist technologically yet. Methanol is a much simpler molecule.
Methanol is more toxic than gasoline in the sense that methanol has a very low vapor pressure and so if there were a spill in an enclosed area, you would breathe in a good amount of it, which could cause blindness.
Um, they limit it to 85% because if it's higher than that, most gasoline internal combustion engines will not be able to ignite it. In many cars, it's limited to 10% because the O-rings will degrade in the presence of ethanol.
Further, getting ethanol higher than 90% is extremely expensive and typically requires adding toxic chemicals such as benzene. ...
(I study this for a living.)
Methanol is better because there aren't any carbon-carbon bonds to cleave. This makes it easier to find catalysts that will functionally convert it into CO2 and H+ ions. Smaller molecules are just generally simpler to work with.
In the end, methanol based fuel cells exist. Ethanol based fuel cells don't. I'm working on it, but it'll be a while =)
As far as safety, methanol is mostly dangerous because if it is ingested or inhaled, it will be converted into formaldehyde in the body and cause blindness. Methanol is not particularly more corrosive than ethanol/water, and while it has a lower vapor pressure than ethanol, the quantity of methanol present in a battery form factor is likely to be far too small to produce a serious hazard.
You have glossed over the distinction the parent was making. Everyone is free to an opinion, and should be encouraged to espouse it whenever they feel the need. However, when these opinions start restricting other people's ability to function in society, they have crossed a line and need to be examined using a more rigorous test.
Your freedom of speech ends where it limits my freedoms. Tolerance should be encouraged, except for tolerance of intolerance.
The point was that scientists have lost their voice in the process because they haven't been as involved in shaping political and social policies until they prevent them from functioning. Our government was founded on principles of limiting the impact religious views could be allowed to have on public decisions (like where to spend the public's tax money). The "logic and reason" crowd doesn't seem to have noticed, and got caught with their pants down when Bush got elected. Now they are trying to correct this by not being such pansies about expressing *their* views.
There is no reason for a scientist to couch their views so as to not offend people who believe in invisible, all knowing, all powerful, and all loving beings which impact our daily lives in important, but only in utterly unmeasurable ways. Certainly, there is no reason to do so when religious "zealots" are constantly spouting vile bitumen about the scientists and personally attacking them and their beliefs.
And for the record, I say this as someone who is deeply spiritual (although I don't believe in the Christian God). I just don't think there's any reason why me believing that we have energy spiraling in our bodies should have any relevance to anyone else when I can't prove it, they haven't experienced it, and there are no externally significant effects.
180 degrees to choose from, say it has to be within .18 degrees from planer with the earth, and you get a 0.1% chance of a random star having the orbital plane of planets coplanar with us.
Now multiply by the number of stars in the field of view (\infty), and you get an infinite number of stars will potentially show this effect.
I know with certainty that MIT only takes ownership of student inventions if they are made using real resources. Students still paying tuition (unlike grad students) actually get even more leeway with keeping their inventions because they are paying for the resources they are using. If you invent something for a class project, even if you use class resources, you have first dibs to patent it.
The only time this is not the case is if you are a grad student getting money from the university (i.e. you're an employee and required to sign an agreement handing over rights to your inventions), or if you're an undergraduate who invented something in a research lab you're working for.
It sounds to me like the fellow referenced above is working as a graduate student, and so signed the agreement just like anyone else. If he doesn't like it now, that's sorta tough... he's getting paid for his time, he gets a fraction of the royalties (MIT is particularly generous with these), and he has first dibs on licensing the patent. It's pretty fair, except that government money was probably used for it, so the IP should *probably* belong to everyone.
Yes, it does have an effect. There is data showing that in wind farms the average temperature is slightly higher, and of course the wind speed is lower.
Very large wind farms will probably cause local temperature increases of 1-2 degrees centigrade. This could, of course, be mitigated by planting lots of trees all around them...