Probably was the catalytic converter - I've seen them nearly white hot before. It happens when for some reason unburnt fuel is getting pumped into the exhaust, often when the engine is not running on all cylinders due to an ignition problem but sometimes just because the mixture or the timing is set way off. The catalyst then oxidizes the unburnt fuel like it's supposed to but overheats because there's so much of it.
'm certain people do all sorts of stupid shit because they think that "we're only going 50km/h, how bad can an accident be", completely ignorant to the fact that if you happen to hit someone going on the other direction at that same speed, the contact is equivalent to hitting a wall at 100km/h.
Not quite, it's pedantic but since we're talking about the physics here I thought I'd butt in. Two cars at 50 km/h have half the kinetic energy of one car at 100 km/h since this energy goes up as the square of the velocity. At first this seems stupid because that means driving at 100 km/h into a stationary car should be worse than a head on collision between two cars traveling at 50 km/h but when you think about the detail this is not the case. Two cars of similar mass and speeds colliding head on end up near stationary (treating the collision as inelastic - the energy is absorbed by the cars crumpling, etc). On the other hand if you drive into the back of a parked car at 100 km/h you'll slow down but not stop, and the parked car will gain some velocity. The movement of the two cars after the collision carries away some of the energy making this exactly equivalent to the head on collision as you would expect. Of course since after the crash you're still moving relative to the road you could hit a stationary object like a tree or something but we'll ignore that here
If you'd said equivalent to hitting a parked car at 100 km/h you'd have been correct but a wall would be different. Hitting a solid immobile wall would be worse since all of the energy would be absorbed by your car, hitting a single layer of brickwork that you'd plough straight through might theoretically be safer (if you ignore the flying brickwork coming through the windscreen).
requiring the user to e.g. enter the last four digits of the recipient account of a transfer after the code sent by the bank would mitigate that very much. Then a MIM would only work if their account ends with the same four digits. Otherwise the bank would have a challenge/response mismatch.
I think this is a very good idea and I hope that someone in bank security thinks of it and implements it
The Von Neumann-Landauer limit suggests that each bit of information lost requires ln(2)*kT of energy which is released as heat. Assuming that, as a minimum, it is necessary to flip through all the bits in the key to brute force it then a 512 bit key which requires 2^512 - 1 bit flips corresponding to an energy of 4*10^133 Joules if done at room temperature or around 6*10^121 Joules if done at the coldest temperature yet achieved which is 450 pico Kelvin. Given a universe of mass 1.6*10^55 kg Einstein's relation suggests than if this were entirely converted to energy then only 1.4*10^72 Joules would be available. So even converting the entire universe to energy and using it to run your computer you'd still fall short (by a factor of 10^49) of the energy required to brute force that 512 bit key.
It's worth trying several different types of the compact fluorescents - The older ones tended to have a 100 Hz flicker but the newer ones work in the range of 10's of kHz which the persistence of the phosphor should smooth out. Cheap ones tend to have a worse spectrum - I like the Phillips ones but GE make some reasonable bulbs too. Some of the really crappy ones may also have a 100 Hz modulation caused by insufficient or dried out smoothing capacitors in the input section.
Other than that incandescent light bulbs are still available. Retailers are allowed to sell existing stock (and the rules only came into effect 20 days ago so I'm not sure why you've been struggling to find them for so long, where do you live?). What has been banned are bulbs over 100 W and all frosted bulbs (since these are deemed more easy to replace with fluorescent). This doesn't apply to anything other than standard general purpose lighting so spotlights, candle bulbs, etc are unaffected. Also there are replacements which include a halogen capsule in a standard glass envelope like this.
Where I live in southern England there is no trouble getting incandescent bulbs at the moment - hardware shops, supermarkets, poundland, and DIY shops such as B&Q are all still selling them. Failing that I'd recommend you go to a decent electrical wholesalers such as TLC direct
50 A at 110 V is 5.5 kW, 30 A at the same voltage is 3.3 kW. Still plenty for an RV. Where I live most houses have 100 A at 230 V and I know only one person who's ever managed to exceed that in a domestic setting. Most parks here supply 16 A at 230 V which is roughly the same amount of power as your smaller 30 A supplies
Whether you carry oxygen and hydrogen up there or water doesn't really make a difference, does it?
Just the small difference that you need pretty heavy metal cylinders to transport liquid gases and the risks of leakage/explosion etc. are just a tad higher. But other than that....no.
Those are the disadvantages, the advantages however are that transporting hydrogen and oxygen provides a very large amount of energy with a moderate increase in mass over transporting water. This obviously assumes there are suitable fuel cells on board which can convert this to electrical energy.
While it's defiantly much harder to make a bomb from civilian nuclear material it's still possible and I'd guess a few skilled engineers (with no regard for their long-term health) could make one in less than 6 months. Spent nuclear fuel contains plutonium which is far easier to separate than the different isotopes of uranium as it can be done by chemical means. The plutonium would be heavily contaminated with Pu-240 which would cause some, not insurmountable, problems.
Implosion devices are out since they're so complicated to design and build which leaves us with the gun type bomb. This is usually considered impractical since the spontaneous fission of the Pu-240 causes the core to blow apart before it's maximum density is reached (fizzle), however a gun type device can be made, it just has to be much longer in order to bring the halves of the core together in a short enough time. This makes it impractical to drop from an aircraft or mount on a missile but such a device could be assembled inside, for example, a high rise office block on a floor chosen to match the airburst altitude for expected yield.
The bomb would probably still fizzle and produce a yield maybe a tenth that if pure Pu-239 could be used but that would be enough, maybe somewhere in the region of one kilo tonne.
Having said that I don't think that this list leaking is of much significance, all of this information was already available.
In all likelihood the oxygen is obtained by fractional distillation of liquid air and the hydrogen by steam reforming natural gas. All of the oxygen is likely to have been urine at some point in history, as is the steam that supplies a third of the hydrogen. The methane which supplies the other two thirds of the hydrogen was certainly involved in biological processes, just not in humans because they had yet to evolve.
I'm not going to comment on whether that counts as recycled or not.
I'm guessing you were expecting an explosion, as I read that I was thinking that as the plutonium chips built up they'd get hot and melt the grease before it gets that far. would probably work well right until they all collect in a settling tank at the sewage plant.
You'd be surprised how difficult it is to ignite diesel, a flare would do it in the area where the flare landed but it wouldn't really spread that quickly. Besides, most large ships use heavier fuel oils than that. On the other hand it'd be fairly easy to justify having a few cans of petrol around for small outboards, etc but by just pouring it you stand a pretty good chance of a) missing them entirely or b) setting the side of your ship on fire. Molotov cocktails would be better.
One firecracker: one small pop. Lots of firecrackers: lots of small pops. You don't get a big pop. Methinks the same would apply to bullets.
Probably. But that may cease to be true when you pack them all together in a sealed container (ammo box/locker/strongroom - how many were you thinking?). I see the potentially very hot and hard to extinguish fire being more of a problem although not an insurmountable one.
In the UK that's a pretty common power rating for a kettle. A quick search seems to suggest they range between 2.2 and 3.1 kW though in my experience most people seem to buy the 3 Kw ones because they boil quicker. One advantage of having a decent 240 V electrical system (and yes, it's still 240 V in practice).
I think you're mistaken there, gram-Hertz has dimensions of mass over time. Clearly if we know the mass of a byte then we can translate this into bytes per second, which is probably the data rate of the ram or the cache or something. Since a 32 GB SD card is available with a mass of 2 grams this puts an upper limit of the mass of a byte of 6.25e-11 grams. This means 350 mgHz is at least 5.6 Gigabytes per second. Obviously since an SD card also contains plastic and magic smoke the true mass of a byte is lower and hence this is only a lower limit of the his machines capabilities.
It seems to me that adding 1,000kg*C^2 energy to a universe would result in a horrendous explosion the likes of which our galaxy rarely sees.
You'd think so wouldn't you, but for comparison crunch the numbers on how much mass the sun looses to energy each second, it works out as about 4e9 kg. Horrendous explosion on human scales, but to the galaxy nothing.
I'm on Virgin Media. I can't see anything not working in archive.org so either they aren't blacklisting it or their blacklisting isn't working.
Same here. Maybe it depends on where in the country you are (I'm in Exeter). I'm pretty much stuck with virgin because my only alternative is to pay BT £130+ for a new landline so I can get ADSL. In a rental property which I'm probably leaving in June it's just not worth it. If it wasn't for that there are a number of much better ISPs to choose from. People used to moan when the cable was run by NTL but at least then once it was working it tended to stay that way and they didn't pull any of this crap. May the flying spaghetti monster help anyone who has to use their helpcentre (or virgin media's) though.
So we can drop off that 'not much' waste in your backyard? Nuclear waste is bad stuff, even in small amounts.
If you seal it in a stainless steel tube, wrap some copper pipe around it and encase it in a big concrete cube you'd be welcome to drop some off in my back yard, I'll pump some water through it and keep my house nice and warm (Seriously, I'd be happy to do that).
Anything that takes thousands of years to decay isn't particularly radioactive and anything highly radioactive has a correspondingly short half life. The stuff in between might need storage for a few hundred years, not nearly such a problem. Besides, if it's still significantly radioactive it's a source of energy to be used rather than dumped.
The UK doesn't have proper health care and just last week two ambulancemen were arrested for letting a man die because "he was not worth saving" ( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article5420921.ece )
There are far more serious issues the UK should deal with than cutlery.
It does seem slightly unfair to judge the 3rd largest employer in the world based on two individuals - you get nutjobs and morons in every large organization.
I personally know someone who has returned to the UK after 20 years in Florida because they were bankrupted by the cost of cancer treatment, she basically had a choice of come home or die. My mother spent a long time in an NHS hospital after a kidney transplant and she has no complaints. The most I've heard anyone moaning about is waiting times in A&E but then treatment there is prioritized by the urgency of the problem. The only thing in the NHS I would consider unacceptable are the problems of hospital acquired infections in specific hospitals
On the other hand I'd agree that banning kitchen knives would be totally pointless and widely ignored. Most of the gun laws are pretty nuts too - a few years ago they banned privately owned handguns in response to the shooting of a policeman with a shotgun (can't see the connection there really), and they're having to write exceptions into the laws for the 2012 Olympics so that the shooting events can be held. Given that only a tiny fraction of all the gun crime in Britain involves (or ever involved) legally owned firearms it doesn't accomplish anything.
Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.
I find it interesting that notification from the ISP always seems to be by email. I'm pretty sure neither of mine have my email address - I don't use the one they provide me with and they've never asked for another. Not sure they'd be too keen on the cost of printing and posting tens of thousands of infringement notices on behalf of a media company.
Did you really mean to link to an *unclyclopedia* article on Benjamin Franklin? I hope you weren't mistaking it for a serious source anyway (although the narrowboat article is quite entertaining).
At my university (Exeter, UK) we were told that liquid nitrogen costs about the same as milk, liquid helium 4 was about the same as supermarket wine, and liquid helium 3 was a similar price to vintage whiskey. They run their own liquefiers for He4 and nitrogen there though.
Particles of far higher energies occur naturally
on
LHC Flips On Tomorrow
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Has anyone here read about the "Oh-My-God particle"? A proton detected in 1991 with an energy of 3.2±0.9×10^20 eV - that's 51 Joules, an energy you'd expect for a macroscopic object and 10 million times more than the maximum the LHC can produce (7 Tev).
The linked page has some of the relativistic properties calculated for that proton including that "After traveling one light year, the particle would be only 0.15 femtoseconds -- 46 nanometres -- behind a photon that left at the same time."
Slashdot Mirror
Probably was the catalytic converter - I've seen them nearly white hot before. It happens when for some reason unburnt fuel is getting pumped into the exhaust, often when the engine is not running on all cylinders due to an ignition problem but sometimes just because the mixture or the timing is set way off. The catalyst then oxidizes the unburnt fuel like it's supposed to but overheats because there's so much of it.
'm certain people do all sorts of stupid shit because they think that "we're only going 50km/h, how bad can an accident be", completely ignorant to the fact that if you happen to hit someone going on the other direction at that same speed, the contact is equivalent to hitting a wall at 100km/h.
Not quite, it's pedantic but since we're talking about the physics here I thought I'd butt in. Two cars at 50 km/h have half the kinetic energy of one car at 100 km/h since this energy goes up as the square of the velocity. At first this seems stupid because that means driving at 100 km/h into a stationary car should be worse than a head on collision between two cars traveling at 50 km/h but when you think about the detail this is not the case. Two cars of similar mass and speeds colliding head on end up near stationary (treating the collision as inelastic - the energy is absorbed by the cars crumpling, etc). On the other hand if you drive into the back of a parked car at 100 km/h you'll slow down but not stop, and the parked car will gain some velocity. The movement of the two cars after the collision carries away some of the energy making this exactly equivalent to the head on collision as you would expect. Of course since after the crash you're still moving relative to the road you could hit a stationary object like a tree or something but we'll ignore that here
If you'd said equivalent to hitting a parked car at 100 km/h you'd have been correct but a wall would be different. Hitting a solid immobile wall would be worse since all of the energy would be absorbed by your car, hitting a single layer of brickwork that you'd plough straight through might theoretically be safer (if you ignore the flying brickwork coming through the windscreen).
requiring the user to e.g. enter the last four digits of the recipient account of a transfer after the code sent by the bank would mitigate that very much. Then a MIM would only work if their account ends with the same four digits. Otherwise the bank would have a challenge/response mismatch.
I think this is a very good idea and I hope that someone in bank security thinks of it and implements it
The Von Neumann-Landauer limit suggests that each bit of information lost requires ln(2)*kT of energy which is released as heat. Assuming that, as a minimum, it is necessary to flip through all the bits in the key to brute force it then a 512 bit key which requires 2^512 - 1 bit flips corresponding to an energy of 4*10^133 Joules if done at room temperature or around 6*10^121 Joules if done at the coldest temperature yet achieved which is 450 pico Kelvin. Given a universe of mass 1.6*10^55 kg Einstein's relation suggests than if this were entirely converted to energy then only 1.4*10^72 Joules would be available. So even converting the entire universe to energy and using it to run your computer you'd still fall short (by a factor of 10^49) of the energy required to brute force that 512 bit key.
That electrical wholesalers I linked to still has up to 200 W available and deliver to most of Britain. I'm sure there must be many others as well.
It's worth trying several different types of the compact fluorescents - The older ones tended to have a 100 Hz flicker but the newer ones work in the range of 10's of kHz which the persistence of the phosphor should smooth out. Cheap ones tend to have a worse spectrum - I like the Phillips ones but GE make some reasonable bulbs too. Some of the really crappy ones may also have a 100 Hz modulation caused by insufficient or dried out smoothing capacitors in the input section.
Other than that incandescent light bulbs are still available. Retailers are allowed to sell existing stock (and the rules only came into effect 20 days ago so I'm not sure why you've been struggling to find them for so long, where do you live?). What has been banned are bulbs over 100 W and all frosted bulbs (since these are deemed more easy to replace with fluorescent). This doesn't apply to anything other than standard general purpose lighting so spotlights, candle bulbs, etc are unaffected. Also there are replacements which include a halogen capsule in a standard glass envelope like this.
Where I live in southern England there is no trouble getting incandescent bulbs at the moment - hardware shops, supermarkets, poundland, and DIY shops such as B&Q are all still selling them. Failing that I'd recommend you go to a decent electrical wholesalers such as TLC direct
50 A at 110 V is 5.5 kW, 30 A at the same voltage is 3.3 kW. Still plenty for an RV. Where I live most houses have 100 A at 230 V and I know only one person who's ever managed to exceed that in a domestic setting. Most parks here supply 16 A at 230 V which is roughly the same amount of power as your smaller 30 A supplies
Sounds about right, but to the rest of the world capital M is 1,000,000
Whether you carry oxygen and hydrogen up there or water doesn't really make a difference, does it?
Just the small difference that you need pretty heavy metal cylinders to transport liquid gases and the risks of leakage/explosion etc. are just a tad higher. But other than that....no.
Those are the disadvantages, the advantages however are that transporting hydrogen and oxygen provides a very large amount of energy with a moderate increase in mass over transporting water. This obviously assumes there are suitable fuel cells on board which can convert this to electrical energy.
While it's defiantly much harder to make a bomb from civilian nuclear material it's still possible and I'd guess a few skilled engineers (with no regard for their long-term health) could make one in less than 6 months. Spent nuclear fuel contains plutonium which is far easier to separate than the different isotopes of uranium as it can be done by chemical means. The plutonium would be heavily contaminated with Pu-240 which would cause some, not insurmountable, problems.
Implosion devices are out since they're so complicated to design and build which leaves us with the gun type bomb. This is usually considered impractical since the spontaneous fission of the Pu-240 causes the core to blow apart before it's maximum density is reached (fizzle), however a gun type device can be made, it just has to be much longer in order to bring the halves of the core together in a short enough time. This makes it impractical to drop from an aircraft or mount on a missile but such a device could be assembled inside, for example, a high rise office block on a floor chosen to match the airburst altitude for expected yield.
The bomb would probably still fizzle and produce a yield maybe a tenth that if pure Pu-239 could be used but that would be enough, maybe somewhere in the region of one kilo tonne.
Having said that I don't think that this list leaking is of much significance, all of this information was already available.
In all likelihood the oxygen is obtained by fractional distillation of liquid air and the hydrogen by steam reforming natural gas. All of the oxygen is likely to have been urine at some point in history, as is the steam that supplies a third of the hydrogen. The methane which supplies the other two thirds of the hydrogen was certainly involved in biological processes, just not in humans because they had yet to evolve. I'm not going to comment on whether that counts as recycled or not.
I'm guessing you were expecting an explosion, as I read that I was thinking that as the plutonium chips built up they'd get hot and melt the grease before it gets that far. would probably work well right until they all collect in a settling tank at the sewage plant.
You'd be surprised how difficult it is to ignite diesel, a flare would do it in the area where the flare landed but it wouldn't really spread that quickly. Besides, most large ships use heavier fuel oils than that. On the other hand it'd be fairly easy to justify having a few cans of petrol around for small outboards, etc but by just pouring it you stand a pretty good chance of a) missing them entirely or b) setting the side of your ship on fire. Molotov cocktails would be better.
One firecracker: one small pop. Lots of firecrackers: lots of small pops. You don't get a big pop. Methinks the same would apply to bullets.
Probably. But that may cease to be true when you pack them all together in a sealed container (ammo box/locker/strongroom - how many were you thinking?). I see the potentially very hot and hard to extinguish fire being more of a problem although not an insurmountable one.
That's a hell of a kettle.
In the UK that's a pretty common power rating for a kettle. A quick search seems to suggest they range between 2.2 and 3.1 kW though in my experience most people seem to buy the 3 Kw ones because they boil quicker. One advantage of having a decent 240 V electrical system (and yes, it's still 240 V in practice).
I think you're mistaken there, gram-Hertz has dimensions of mass over time. Clearly if we know the mass of a byte then we can translate this into bytes per second, which is probably the data rate of the ram or the cache or something. Since a 32 GB SD card is available with a mass of 2 grams this puts an upper limit of the mass of a byte of 6.25e-11 grams. This means 350 mgHz is at least 5.6 Gigabytes per second. Obviously since an SD card also contains plastic and magic smoke the true mass of a byte is lower and hence this is only a lower limit of the his machines capabilities.
Yes, because making a rocket go a few extra thousand miles is such a challenge compared to developing a nuclear bomb.
It is, a few thousand miles in a shipping container on the other hand....
It seems to me that adding 1,000kg*C^2 energy to a universe would result in a horrendous explosion the likes of which our galaxy rarely sees.
You'd think so wouldn't you, but for comparison crunch the numbers on how much mass the sun looses to energy each second, it works out as about 4e9 kg. Horrendous explosion on human scales, but to the galaxy nothing.
I'm on Virgin Media. I can't see anything not working in archive.org so either they aren't blacklisting it or their blacklisting isn't working.
Same here. Maybe it depends on where in the country you are (I'm in Exeter). I'm pretty much stuck with virgin because my only alternative is to pay BT £130+ for a new landline so I can get ADSL. In a rental property which I'm probably leaving in June it's just not worth it. If it wasn't for that there are a number of much better ISPs to choose from. People used to moan when the cable was run by NTL but at least then once it was working it tended to stay that way and they didn't pull any of this crap. May the flying spaghetti monster help anyone who has to use their helpcentre (or virgin media's) though.
So we can drop off that 'not much' waste in your backyard? Nuclear waste is bad stuff, even in small amounts.
If you seal it in a stainless steel tube, wrap some copper pipe around it and encase it in a big concrete cube you'd be welcome to drop some off in my back yard, I'll pump some water through it and keep my house nice and warm (Seriously, I'd be happy to do that).
Anything that takes thousands of years to decay isn't particularly radioactive and anything highly radioactive has a correspondingly short half life. The stuff in between might need storage for a few hundred years, not nearly such a problem. Besides, if it's still significantly radioactive it's a source of energy to be used rather than dumped.
The UK doesn't have proper health care and just last week two ambulancemen were arrested for letting a man die because "he was not worth saving" ( http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article5420921.ece ) There are far more serious issues the UK should deal with than cutlery.
It does seem slightly unfair to judge the 3rd largest employer in the world based on two individuals - you get nutjobs and morons in every large organization.
I personally know someone who has returned to the UK after 20 years in Florida because they were bankrupted by the cost of cancer treatment, she basically had a choice of come home or die. My mother spent a long time in an NHS hospital after a kidney transplant and she has no complaints. The most I've heard anyone moaning about is waiting times in A&E but then treatment there is prioritized by the urgency of the problem. The only thing in the NHS I would consider unacceptable are the problems of hospital acquired infections in specific hospitals
On the other hand I'd agree that banning kitchen knives would be totally pointless and widely ignored. Most of the gun laws are pretty nuts too - a few years ago they banned privately owned handguns in response to the shooting of a policeman with a shotgun (can't see the connection there really), and they're having to write exceptions into the laws for the 2012 Olympics so that the shooting events can be held. Given that only a tiny fraction of all the gun crime in Britain involves (or ever involved) legally owned firearms it doesn't accomplish anything.
Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.
I find it interesting that notification from the ISP always seems to be by email. I'm pretty sure neither of mine have my email address - I don't use the one they provide me with and they've never asked for another. Not sure they'd be too keen on the cost of printing and posting tens of thousands of infringement notices on behalf of a media company.
Did you really mean to link to an *unclyclopedia* article on Benjamin Franklin? I hope you weren't mistaking it for a serious source anyway (although the narrowboat article is quite entertaining).
At my university (Exeter, UK) we were told that liquid nitrogen costs about the same as milk, liquid helium 4 was about the same as supermarket wine, and liquid helium 3 was a similar price to vintage whiskey. They run their own liquefiers for He4 and nitrogen there though.
Has anyone here read about the "Oh-My-God particle"? A proton detected in 1991 with an energy of 3.2±0.9×10^20 eV - that's 51 Joules, an energy you'd expect for a macroscopic object and 10 million times more than the maximum the LHC can produce (7 Tev).
The linked page has some of the relativistic properties calculated for that proton including that "After traveling one light year, the particle would be only 0.15 femtoseconds -- 46 nanometres -- behind a photon that left at the same time."