I have not bought any music in years, because I have enough already (3000 tracks ripped to my winamp player). Maybe other people are in a similar state? And in my opinion, "Rap is Crap", most of it I refuse to listen to.
There are two physical facts which are not changing: the mass of the Earth, and the chemical bonds in water. The first requires 30MJ/kg to get to orbit. The second gives you 15 MJ/kg in the best rocket fuel we have (H2 + O2 = H20). Since the best fuel only has half the energy to get *itself* to orbit, much less any payload, we are forced to use terribly inefficient contraptions to get into space. They burn a huge amount of fuel to get a smaller amount of fuel halfway to orbit, from which point that fuel can get an even smaller payload the rest of the way.
Efficient transportation systems like cars, trucks, and airplanes, have small fuel tanks and relatively large cargo/passenger areas. Rockets are the reverse, huge fuel tanks, teeny tiny payload area. So they are incredibly expensive to use. If you define insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, our space program has been insane for a long time. "Hey rockets are expensive, lets build another rocket!!, and it will be cheap this time!!"
The rational answer is to use another way to partially or completely replace rockets in getting to orbit. There are a number of options, and this comment space is too small to discuss them all, but the short version is "you are doing it wrong, try something else".
The answer is to collect sales tax at the point of shipment wherever the seller is. Then they only have one rate to worry about. Amazon and other internet retailers get away with not paying at either end for interstate sales, which is unfair. They want to continue that break.
For "Lawsuit Insurance". If you worry about getting nuisance suits, which is what these are, pay a small fee and be covered for them (either hiring a lawyer, or getting reimbursed for paying the demanded amount, whichever you choose). Since the odds are small that you will be sued, the fee will be small too. The insurer has an incentive to work out the best response letters, legal tactics, etc, and supply them to their customers.
Guns are an effective way to get things going, but not all the way to orbit, or escape velocity, as in his book. They are good for 50-75% of orbital speed, and the rest you do by some other method. Half orbital speed guns have already been built, decades ago, I got to visit several over the years. They just have not been built big enough to deliver useful payloads to space. That would require not trillions, not billions, but about the cost of one rocket launch (~100 M$).
One big reason the major aerospace companies have not pursued things like this is that nobody ever got promoted by developing a scheme to launch stuff for 90% cheaper, which would cut your revenues by 90%. It has to be done by someone outside the current crop of vested interests whose *current* launch business would be decimated.
Concentrated sunlight can be used for a number of other things where you need a lot of heat, like cooking rocks to make cement, which is what then holds concrete together.
That should be more like the title of the news story. We already had found hundreds of planet candidates by other means. Now with this report we have added a bunch more using the transit method. Kepler is only scanning one patch of the sky, and only catches planets whose orbits are edge on, so they pass in front of their star (transit). So it's a pretty small sample percentage wise. Extrapolating the Kepler results to the whole sky, and all orbit angles, means there's a LOT of planets out there, millions of them. That's probably the most important news - that there are lots of planets out there. The details of orbits, masses, temperature, etc will come eventually with better instruments, but from sheer random statistics, some of them will end up with the right mass, and distance from their star to be "possibly Earthlike".
Note that by the time we could visit such planets, we won't need them. We will have learned to live on the Moon, Mars, the Asteroids, and other non-Earthlike places long before we attempt an interstellar mission. All we really need is raw materials and sunlight. Habitable planets just make for cool news stories.
You don't *have* to make assumptions, but the data we have says the constants are not changing much, and the easiest assumption is they don't change at all either in time or space. In other words, the same everywhere and everywhen.
The primordial ratios of the elements (about 24% helium, 1% heavier elements, the rest hydrogen) tells us the nuclear forces were the same at the time of the "big bang nucleosynthesis" about 3 minutes after the big bang. The spectral lines by which we measure redshifts out to about 96% of the age of the universe tell us the electromagnetic force still works the same. The fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation (1 part in 100,000) versus the clumpiness of galaxy clusters today tells us gravity has not changed much over that time. So the four forces of nature that we know about seem to have stayed about the same for approximately the whole life of the universe so far, and in every direction we look.
One theory is that there are "phase boundaries" where natural constants change, much like orientation of crystal lattices changes at a crystal boundary, but so far we haven't seen evidence of any. The currently accepted reason is cosmic inflation has "inflated away" any phase boundaries beyond where we can see. Our current observable universe started out something like 1 cm in size before cosmic inflation grew it to something huge.
There are also theories of multiple universes existing in higher dimensions than the 4 we see, like multiple pieces of paper (2 dimensional) can exist in a 3 dimensional room. Those other universes could have different physical constants, but right now we have no way to detect them.
Sounds like it's time to cut off Mubarak from *his* communication and see how he likes it. How hard would it be to cut off his TV, phone, etc links to the outside world?
The cosmic background radiation we observe today has taken 13 Gigayears to get here. In all that time, the gas which emitted that radiation has not been running away from us at near lightspeed. Rather it has had random motion relative to it's neighborhood of around 0.001c., and the geometry of space has been expanding about 1000-fold since that time. That expansion of the geometry both stretches the wavelength of light from visible at 3000 Kelvin down to microwave at 3 Kelvin, and also adds to the volume of space both behind and ahead of a traveling photon. No part of space is stretching locally very fast, but the total stretching of space across the universe can exceed apparent lightspeed without violating relativity, because relativity operates locally, not globally across the universe.
Similarly, conservation of energy applies locally, but not to the universe as a whole. If dark energy is constant per volume of space (the theory of how it works), then the total energy of the universe increases as it grows. If that sounds weird, it is. Modern physics is just not intuitive to us humans that mostly deal with non-quantum, non-relativistic stuff on a daily basis.
A french company that makes nuclear submarines is proposing a modified version as a power plant. Instead of driving around underwater like subs, this will just sit on the bottom of the ocean making power, and sending it to nearby land via power line. Combine that with the molten salt technology and you have a real winner. If the reactor is 100m underwater, you will never run out of coolant, get a free 100m of shielding, pretty much is terrorist immune. Humans will still do maintenance, the main pressure vessel is 4 stories tall and 100m long, and reached by normal diving methods or submersibles. Since the reactor is built elsewhere, and only dropped into place and plugged in at the end, there is a lot less exposure for nuclear activists to complain at. Not many news reporters will go 12 miles offshore to photograph a protest boat.
Intermodal containers are good for ship -> rail -> truck systems, but they would be a bit big for ropeways. I suggest the standard 4 ft shipping pallets as the unit for a ropeway. They already are designed to fit in intermodal containers, and would even be large enough to carry one or two people at a time. You just need "stations" within walking distance, and ways to route stuff between stations by switching from one ropeway to another.
The distance record for directional wifi is over 300km. So the answer is to have Isp's fund a mobile relay station (land or sea) that sets up when the network goes down, outside the affected country/area, and then people can tune up their pringle's can antenna skills, or whatever to link up. This would be helpful with unintentional outages, like earthquakes or hurricanes, too. The mobile relay stations could be on call to get set up wherever they are needed rather than each Isp having to buy them.
No more internet for you, since you failed to actually read my post. I was talking about cutting off *their* communications as a symmetrical power to them wanting to cut off *our* communications.
But the peaceful way to remove their power is to stop giving them money through taxes. Do more for yourself, and swap favors and stuff locally, and work less at a paid job where they take their cut before you see it. I retired 5 years ago at age 47, and now just live off my savings. So my taxes have dropped dramatically, but my living standards not so much. Gas prices are now mostly irrelevant, cause I don't drive to work any more. I don't eat out as much, and have more time to cook for myself, so food expenses have been cut in half. If people wised up and paid cash for their living space instead of being in hock to the banks all their working lives, they could do what I did, and quit early, or work half as much to cover expenses.
The Congress can pass all the laws it wants, but without money to pay the bureaucrats and FBI thugs, they would be, in Shakespeare's words: "a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
When an individual breaks the law 3 times?......Habitual Offender or 3 time loser When a small groups breaks the law 100 times?..... Gang or organized crime When a large group breaks the law 40,000 times?.....A government agency
Disclosure: I was an astrophysics major in college.
Plot the mass of gravitationally bound objects vs number of objects from small groups up to the largest galaxies. If there are clumps in the mass distribution, then give names to the clumps (cluster, galaxy, etc). If it's a smooth distribution by mass, then call them all the same general kind of object, and distinguish them by mass classes. For example "10 million solar mass cluster".
If you can determine some other distinguishing characteristic like presence of a central black hole, or significant dark matter, then use that to determine what you call it, even if allows overlap in mass classes. For example:
10 million solar mass, no dark matter, no black hole = cluster 10 million solar mass, dark matter and black hole = galaxy
I don't know if my examples are correct examples, but the idea is look at the data, and see if there is some characteristic in common among the objects that makes it useful to describe that set with a unique name.
The amount of excess CO2 in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is easy to calculate: 110 parts per million x atmospheric pressure x area of the earth. It comes to 600 Gigatons. If 10% of the land area of the planet is devoted to growing trees to sequester CO2, at average productivity, you can remove about 6 Gigatons per year, so it would take a century to reverse the additions so far. That might be too long, so on second thought we might need those nuclear scrubbers, but the trees can still do their part.
@ Solandri - "We can build plants which do nothing but scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, pumping energy in to convert it back into oxygen and residual carbon (soot, which is a heckuva lot easier to sequester than gaseous CO2)."
That should have been written we can *grow* plants which do nothing but scrub CO2.....and then use pyrolisis to convert it to biochar (basically charcoal), which can be sequestered in the soil for on the order of centuries, and improves the ability of the soil to grow stuff. Alternatively, if you grow trees, they temporarily will store quite a bit of carbon. Then harvest the trees to store the carbon as useful objects made of wood, and then grow more trees. A nuclear powered CO2 scrubber might be cool and all, but when I owned a tree farm, I was removing 150 tons of it per year from the atmosphere simply by not cutting the trees down and letting them grow.
Shipping companies or marine insurers hire security forces with adequate weapons and station them on a few fast boats in the Somali waters along the shipping route. As cargo ships enter the hazard zone, the fast boat rendezvous and transfers the security crew onboard. As it leaves the hazard zone, they meet up with another fast boat and get off. Later they ride another cargo boat going the other way.
This way the security forces and weapons are always where they are needed, in the dangerous waters. They are never where they are not needed or wanted, around peaceful ports or safe parts of shipping lanes.
The fast boats can protect themselves, as they are full of armed security forces.
They are doing a lot of R&D to prepare for this specific challenge. It's not like the Jeopardy show is charging them to appear, they probably both benefit from the free publicity.
Our economy runs on the idea that you specialize in one task (your job) that you do efficiently, and buy everything else. If taxes are too high a burden, though, it may actually be more efficient to do more for yourself. Since stuff you do for yourself (build your own furniture, for example), isn't taxed, then less for the bureaucrats to dine on.
Free software is an example of "doing for yourself" by leveraging modern technology. In the coming era of robots and 3D printers, more things could be "made at home", and thus less need to work for pay, and thus get taxed.
An individual can't make everything for themselves, so a kind of "community building cooperative" with shared equipment and labor to take care of bigger projects, with some amount of outside work for pay to cover the rest would still cut down the "overhead" of taxes feeding the bureaucrats.
How many TSA agents would be left to oppress us if we didn't supply them with paychecks?
Slashdot Mirror
This will let you see how things look from any spacecraft: http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/
I have not bought any music in years, because I have enough already (3000 tracks ripped to my winamp player). Maybe other people are in a similar state? And in my opinion, "Rap is Crap", most of it I refuse to listen to.
There are two physical facts which are not changing: the mass of the Earth, and the chemical bonds in water. The first requires 30MJ/kg to get to orbit. The second gives you 15 MJ/kg in the best rocket fuel we have (H2 + O2 = H20). Since the best fuel only has half the energy to get *itself* to orbit, much less any payload, we are forced to use terribly inefficient contraptions to get into space. They burn a huge amount of fuel to get a smaller amount of fuel halfway to orbit, from which point that fuel can get an even smaller payload the rest of the way.
Efficient transportation systems like cars, trucks, and airplanes, have small fuel tanks and relatively large cargo/passenger areas. Rockets are the reverse, huge fuel tanks, teeny tiny payload area. So they are incredibly expensive to use. If you define insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, our space program has been insane for a long time. "Hey rockets are expensive, lets build another rocket!!, and it will be cheap this time!!"
The rational answer is to use another way to partially or completely replace rockets in getting to orbit. There are a number of options, and this comment space is too small to discuss them all, but the short version is "you are doing it wrong, try something else".
The answer is to collect sales tax at the point of shipment wherever the seller is. Then they only have one rate to worry about. Amazon and other internet retailers get away with not paying at either end for interstate sales, which is unfair. They want to continue that break.
For "Lawsuit Insurance". If you worry about getting nuisance suits, which is what these are, pay a small fee and be covered for them (either hiring a lawyer, or getting reimbursed for paying the demanded amount, whichever you choose). Since the odds are small that you will be sued, the fee will be small too. The insurer has an incentive to work out the best response letters, legal tactics, etc, and supply them to their customers.
Guns are an effective way to get things going, but not all the way to orbit, or escape velocity, as in his book. They are good for 50-75% of orbital speed, and the rest you do by some other method. Half orbital speed guns have already been built, decades ago, I got to visit several over the years. They just have not been built big enough to deliver useful payloads to space. That would require not trillions, not billions, but about the cost of one rocket launch (~100 M$).
One big reason the major aerospace companies have not pursued things like this is that nobody ever got promoted by developing a scheme to launch stuff for 90% cheaper, which would cut your revenues by 90%. It has to be done by someone outside the current crop of vested interests whose *current* launch business would be decimated.
The farmers turning part of the Sahara green again would disagree with you:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=farmers-in-sahel-beat-back-drought-and-climate-change-with-trees
So would Roth Capital Partners, who estimate 18 GW of photovoltaic power installations this year:
http://international.pv-tech.org/news/roth_capital_partners_forecast_pv_demand_of_18gw_in_2011_bankable_products
We are learning how to live on Earth, but it will take a generation or two to clean up all the non-sustainable crap we have at the moment.
I applaud his effort in making an amateur solar-thermal device, but somewhat larger versions are being put to practical use generating electricity:
http://www.renewablepowernews.com/wp-content/uploads/Solar-thermal-Sterling-dish1.jpg
http://cdn.venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/brightsource2_620px.jpg
Concentrated sunlight can be used for a number of other things where you need a lot of heat, like cooking rocks to make cement, which is what then holds concrete together.
That should be more like the title of the news story. We already had found hundreds of planet candidates by other means. Now with this report we have added a bunch more using the transit method. Kepler is only scanning one patch of the sky, and only catches planets whose orbits are edge on, so they pass in front of their star (transit). So it's a pretty small sample percentage wise. Extrapolating the Kepler results to the whole sky, and all orbit angles, means there's a LOT of planets out there, millions of them. That's probably the most important news - that there are lots of planets out there. The details of orbits, masses, temperature, etc will come eventually with better instruments, but from sheer random statistics, some of them will end up with the right mass, and distance from their star to be "possibly Earthlike".
Note that by the time we could visit such planets, we won't need them. We will have learned to live on the Moon, Mars, the Asteroids, and other non-Earthlike places long before we attempt an interstellar mission. All we really need is raw materials and sunlight. Habitable planets just make for cool news stories.
You don't *have* to make assumptions, but the data we have says the constants are not changing much, and the easiest assumption is they don't change at all either in time or space. In other words, the same everywhere and everywhen.
The primordial ratios of the elements (about 24% helium, 1% heavier elements, the rest hydrogen) tells us the nuclear forces were the same at the time of the "big bang nucleosynthesis" about 3 minutes after the big bang. The spectral lines by which we measure redshifts out to about 96% of the age of the universe tell us the electromagnetic force still works the same. The fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation (1 part in 100,000) versus the clumpiness of galaxy clusters today tells us gravity has not changed much over that time. So the four forces of nature that we know about seem to have stayed about the same for approximately the whole life of the universe so far, and in every direction we look.
One theory is that there are "phase boundaries" where natural constants change, much like orientation of crystal lattices changes at a crystal boundary, but so far we haven't seen evidence of any. The currently accepted reason is cosmic inflation has "inflated away" any phase boundaries beyond where we can see. Our current observable universe started out something like 1 cm in size before cosmic inflation grew it to something huge.
There are also theories of multiple universes existing in higher dimensions than the 4 we see, like multiple pieces of paper (2 dimensional) can exist in a 3 dimensional room. Those other universes could have different physical constants, but right now we have no way to detect them.
Sounds like it's time to cut off Mubarak from *his* communication and see how he likes it. How hard would it be to cut off his TV, phone, etc links to the outside world?
The cosmic background radiation we observe today has taken 13 Gigayears to get here. In all that time, the gas which emitted that radiation has not been running away from us at near lightspeed. Rather it has had random motion relative to it's neighborhood of around 0.001c., and the geometry of space has been expanding about 1000-fold since that time. That expansion of the geometry both stretches the wavelength of light from visible at 3000 Kelvin down to microwave at 3 Kelvin, and also adds to the volume of space both behind and ahead of a traveling photon. No part of space is stretching locally very fast, but the total stretching of space across the universe can exceed apparent lightspeed without violating relativity, because relativity operates locally, not globally across the universe.
Similarly, conservation of energy applies locally, but not to the universe as a whole. If dark energy is constant per volume of space (the theory of how it works), then the total energy of the universe increases as it grows. If that sounds weird, it is. Modern physics is just not intuitive to us humans that mostly deal with non-quantum, non-relativistic stuff on a daily basis.
A french company that makes nuclear submarines is proposing a modified version as a power plant. Instead of driving around underwater like subs, this will just sit on the bottom of the ocean making power, and sending it to nearby land via power line. Combine that with the molten salt technology and you have a real winner. If the reactor is 100m underwater, you will never run out of coolant, get a free 100m of shielding, pretty much is terrorist immune. Humans will still do maintenance, the main pressure vessel is 4 stories tall and 100m long, and reached by normal diving methods or submersibles. Since the reactor is built elsewhere, and only dropped into place and plugged in at the end, there is a lot less exposure for nuclear activists to complain at. Not many news reporters will go 12 miles offshore to photograph a protest boat.
Intermodal containers are good for ship -> rail -> truck systems, but they would be a bit big for ropeways. I suggest the standard 4 ft shipping pallets as the unit for a ropeway. They already are designed to fit in intermodal containers, and would even be large enough to carry one or two people at a time. You just need "stations" within walking distance, and ways to route stuff between stations by switching from one ropeway to another.
The distance record for directional wifi is over 300km. So the answer is to have Isp's fund a mobile relay station (land or sea) that sets up when the network goes down, outside the affected country/area, and then people can tune up their pringle's can antenna skills, or whatever to link up. This would be helpful with unintentional outages, like earthquakes or hurricanes, too. The mobile relay stations could be on call to get set up wherever they are needed rather than each Isp having to buy them.
No more internet for you, since you failed to actually read my post. I was talking about cutting off *their* communications as a symmetrical power to them wanting to cut off *our* communications.
But the peaceful way to remove their power is to stop giving them money through taxes. Do more for yourself, and swap favors and stuff locally, and work less at a paid job where they take their cut before you see it. I retired 5 years ago at age 47, and now just live off my savings. So my taxes have dropped dramatically, but my living standards not so much. Gas prices are now mostly irrelevant, cause I don't drive to work any more. I don't eat out as much, and have more time to cook for myself, so food expenses have been cut in half. If people wised up and paid cash for their living space instead of being in hock to the banks all their working lives, they could do what I did, and quit early, or work half as much to cover expenses.
The Congress can pass all the laws it wants, but without money to pay the bureaucrats and FBI thugs, they would be, in Shakespeare's words: "a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
When an individual breaks the law 3 times?......Habitual Offender or 3 time loser
When a small groups breaks the law 100 times?..... Gang or organized crime
When a large group breaks the law 40,000 times?.....A government agency
Disclosure: I was an astrophysics major in college.
Plot the mass of gravitationally bound objects vs number of objects from small groups up to the largest galaxies. If there are clumps in the mass distribution, then give names to the clumps (cluster, galaxy, etc). If it's a smooth distribution by mass, then call them all the same general kind of object, and distinguish them by mass classes. For example "10 million solar mass cluster".
If you can determine some other distinguishing characteristic like presence of a central black hole, or significant dark matter, then use that to determine what you call it, even if allows overlap in mass classes. For example:
10 million solar mass, no dark matter, no black hole = cluster
10 million solar mass, dark matter and black hole = galaxy
I don't know if my examples are correct examples, but the idea is look at the data, and see if there is some characteristic in common among the objects that makes it useful to describe that set with a unique name.
In case of emergency, it would let us cut off all government computers and communication. Seems fair to me.
Shows how outdated the study is.
The amount of excess CO2 in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is easy to calculate: 110 parts per million x atmospheric pressure x area of the earth. It comes to 600 Gigatons. If 10% of the land area of the planet is devoted to growing trees to sequester CO2, at average productivity, you can remove about 6 Gigatons per year, so it would take a century to reverse the additions so far. That might be too long, so on second thought we might need those nuclear scrubbers, but the trees can still do their part.
@ Solandri - "We can build plants which do nothing but scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, pumping energy in to convert it back into oxygen and residual carbon (soot, which is a heckuva lot easier to sequester than gaseous CO2)."
That should have been written we can *grow* plants which do nothing but scrub CO2.....and then use pyrolisis to convert it to biochar (basically charcoal), which can be sequestered in the soil for on the order of centuries, and improves the ability of the soil to grow stuff. Alternatively, if you grow trees, they temporarily will store quite a bit of carbon. Then harvest the trees to store the carbon as useful objects made of wood, and then grow more trees. A nuclear powered CO2 scrubber might be cool and all, but when I owned a tree farm, I was removing 150 tons of it per year from the atmosphere simply by not cutting the trees down and letting them grow.
Shipping companies or marine insurers hire security forces with adequate weapons and station them on a few fast boats in the Somali waters along the shipping route. As cargo ships enter the hazard zone, the fast boat rendezvous and transfers the security crew onboard. As it leaves the hazard zone, they meet up with another fast boat and get off. Later they ride another cargo boat going the other way.
This way the security forces and weapons are always where they are needed, in the dangerous waters. They are never where they are not needed or wanted, around peaceful ports or safe parts of shipping lanes.
The fast boats can protect themselves, as they are full of armed security forces.
They are doing a lot of R&D to prepare for this specific challenge. It's not like the Jeopardy show is charging them to appear, they probably both benefit from the free publicity.
Our economy runs on the idea that you specialize in one task (your job) that you do efficiently, and buy everything else. If taxes are too high a burden, though, it may actually be more efficient to do more for yourself. Since stuff you do for yourself (build your own furniture, for example), isn't taxed, then less for the bureaucrats to dine on.
Free software is an example of "doing for yourself" by leveraging modern technology. In the coming era of robots and 3D printers, more things could be "made at home", and thus less need to work for pay, and thus get taxed.
An individual can't make everything for themselves, so a kind of "community building cooperative" with shared equipment and labor to take care of bigger projects, with some amount of outside work for pay to cover the rest would still cut down the "overhead" of taxes feeding the bureaucrats.
How many TSA agents would be left to oppress us if we didn't supply them with paychecks?