This whole discussion seems to have turned into an excuse for people to trot out their sex-stereotype preconceptions about the husband and wife's personalities and the nature of their relationship.
What if his wife is also a gamer?* What if there is no other suitable room? What if they feel "the living room is the wife's domain" is twaddle? What if using the large screen TV for gaming is important to them?
* disliking a very loud gaming PC is not the same as disliking all gaming PCs.
silentpcreview.com is a web site dedicated to quiet and silent computing, with extensive reviews and forums. They have very recently posted a sample build of a quiet gaming PC.
You can take that as a base and adjust according to taste. (For example, I'm more obsessed by quiet and less by frames per second, so my gaming PC has a single GTX760Ti GPU.) If you have questions, take them to the forums.
Emissivity and absorptivity are the same thing. One way to look at this is the time-reversibility of physics on a microscopic scale, another is that something that was really absorptive but not emissive or vice-versa would give you a really easy way to beat the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Emissivity can, however, vary with wavelength, which is the trick here.
I think the second photograph in the article is the researchers reflected in their piece of film, so the answer is it is reflective like a mirror. I imagine you could put some translucent layer over it at the cost of some efficiency.
Not really - the 40Wm^2 of cooling is only useful if it is in contact with something that can move that cold to where it is needed. (Hand-wavy explanation, really we are shifting heat to the film.) It also needs to see mostly sky, which windows usually don't. You'd put it on your roof and run water behind it to shift the heat around.
Would you care to be more specific? My explanation is pop-science simplified, but I don't see an error in it.
More detailed explanation: In the 8-13 micron (wavelength) window, atmospheric transmittance averages about 80% (estimated from a plot in the paper.) So the energy received is about 20% of what you'd get from a black body at atmospheric temperature (plus 80% of what you'd get from space, which is negligible in comparison.) So the brightness temperature at 8-13 microns is lower than ground level atmospheric temperature. How much lower depends on the average temperature of the atmosphere along the line of sight, and where 8-13 microns falls on the black body curve at that temperature (even this is oversimplifying) and I can't be bothered figuring that out. However, if we can reflect/insulate all energy except 8-13 micron radiation, then our thermal equilibrium temperature will be the brightness temperature at 8-13 microns to which we are exposed. This is, as noted, less than atmospheric temperature at ground level.
It is possible, because the environment is not in thermal equilibrium. In particular, the film 'sees' colder temperatures at some wavelengths than at others.
Did you not think before you posted that just maybe a bunch of scientists publishing in this area and the reviewers for one of the worlds top scientific journals might possibly have a better understanding of thermodynamics than you do?
The (paywalled) research paper states: "The use of HfO2 is, however, not essential, and can be replaced with titanium dioxide (TiO2), which is less expensive."
For those fortunate enough to have institutional access, the research paper is here.
Quickly picking some highlights: The atmospheric transmission window is between 8 and 13 microns. They achieved 4.9C below ambient in direct sunlight at 850 watts per square metre. Cooling power was 40.1 watts per square metre. Emissivity (equivalently absorptivity) averages about 70% in the 8-13 micron window (estimated from a plot.)
Here's a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation 90% reflective white paint: absorbs 85W/m^2 97% reflective foil: absorbs 25.5W/m^2, an improvement over white paint of ~60W/m^2 This film: emits 40W/m^2, an improvement over simple foil of ~60W/m^2. So in this scenario, the special film gives twice the benefit compared to just going for something simple and reflective. (The 90% for white paint is guess-work. The 97% for 'foil' is just matching the special film. Perhaps someone can update the calculations with better founded values.)
The summary title is highly misleading.
It is not paint, it is a manufactured film. It cools buildings, not planets. Yes, with enough you could cool the planet, but if you wanted to take that route, it would be much more cost effective to just use aluminium foil and use a marginally larger area of it (or, indeed, white paint.) Back in the real world, the way this invention cools the planet is by reducing electricity demand for air conditioning. (I saw another article about this in which one of the authors makes exactly this point.)
And you can absolutely guarantee that the three letter agencies remember every one of them. They can look at who you've made transactions with and usually get a very good idea just from that who you are. I imagine they get more from fronts and hacked/infiltrated organizations. If they need more and you've ever transacted with a commercial entity within their jurisdiction, you are a National Security Letter or local equivalent away from being identified.
This IP address thing is like discovering that the back door is unlocked and open when the front door is secured by a piece of string.
The market capitalization of Hewlett Packard leapt something like 10 billion dollars on the news that she had been fired. That is to say, the stock market values her at negative 10 billion dollars. If she enters the race, how long can it be until someone labels her 'the minus ten billion dollar woman', and how long can she stay in the race with that label?
Wooden houses as opposed to what? I don't think a well built wooden house is at all a problem in an earthquake zone. It is better than brick, probably worse than reinforced concrete or steel, but who builds single dwellings from reinforced concrete or steel?
I'm from New Zealand, where we have quite high earthquake hazard, and an overwhelming majority of our houses are wooden. Fatalities in the Christchurch earthquake were (mostly? entirely?) not due to wooden buildings but to poor quality 1980s high-rise and ~100 year old brick low-rise commercial buildings. People did die in wooden houses, but in the cases I am aware of this was due to boulders or cliffs falling on them, which no reasonable house would withstand, or heavy furniture falling on them, again independent of house construction.
Planes are essentially self-driving now, at least runway-to-runway.
No, they are not. That is like saying a company is self-running just because it has an automated production line. Much of the flight is under auto-pilot, but the human pilots are frequently changing the auto-pilot's instructions. There is a lot of training and skill maintaining in being a pilot. They aren't just there to keepen das hander in das pockets und watschen der blinkenlichten.
All take-offs are manual. Nearly all landings are manual. Mostly 'auto land' just takes the plane to just short of the runway, at which point a pilot takes over for the actual touchdown. Full auto land is possible, but with good visibility it is simply less work to manually land than to set up the auto land.
It doesn't work like that, it isn't a chemical fuel you can burn or save. The amount of Pu-238 you need is dictated by your peak power demand. How long it lasts is dictated by nuclear physics (the half life of Pu-238.) You have no control over how fast the plutonium is used up.
You're trying to study a temperature-sensitive environment in its natural state. An RTG produces lots of heat. (They are only about 5% efficient, so they produce twenty times as much heat as electrical power.) The presence of the RTG might perturb or destroy the environment you're there to study. I don't have the detailed knowledge to say if this is the case.
Plus the issues others have raised: mass, scarcity of suitable isotopes, and launching highly radioactive material on top of hundreds of tonnes of potentially explosive fuel is something you'd rather avoid if possible.
I would expect that Orbital Sciences is liable for damage to the payload and had insured themselves, but I have no direct knowledge. Even if they are covered for direct costs, it is still bad for them.
OK, lets rephrase a little, and concentrate on the Challenger failure mode, rather than the actual shuttle.
Imagine a rocket that was compatible with an LES, and also compatible with the Challenger failure mode. (Remove the shuttle, put the liquid fuel engines on the bottom of the external tank, throw a capsule on the top, keep the solid rockets.) Now have the boosters fail in the same way they did with Challenger. Would the LES have sufficient notice to get the capsule to safety?
And here is the problem in a nutshell. Some women are pictured because they achieved something significant, and some idiot immediately derails the conversation with comments on how attractive they are.
... would be if you walked into the company's hospitality suite at a conference, put on the VR headset, looked around you... and couldn't tell the difference.
An alien landscape is very cool and photogenic, but might be hiding flaws because we don't know what it is supposed to look like. It is a fair demonstration of immersive game worlds, which will be one of the big initial uses of VR, so the demonstration is not invalidated by this.
Scenario A: Notch sells Mojang to a respected community friendly company for a reasonable price of a few hundred million. Mojang's employees and customers are reasonably happy. Scenario B: Notch sells Mojang to Microsoft for $2B. Mojang's employees are very unhappy. The customers are fairly unhappy but if they get too unhappy there are clones out there to migrate to, or they can just play the current version without further updates. Scenario C: Notch sells Mojang to Microsoft for $2B and gives each of his employees $1M as a present. Notch is still way richer than in scenario A, employees are happier, customers still have the migrate or no updates options.
If I had a cheap effective cure for malaria and a company I didn't trust offered me 10 times what I thought it was worth, I'd likely not sell. But for a smallish computer game company, I can do more good with $2B than any plausible evil that could come of the sale.
However, I am going to download the latest Minecraft development snapshot tonight so as to not miss out on slime blocks should I need to abandon updates.
I've expressed this sentiment as: you should be allowed to patent (non-obvious) solutions, you should never be allowed to patent a problem.
However, my expression of the issue is poorly defined as the problem/solution boundary is not clear. Is the problem "reusing rocket hardware" and "landing at sea" the solution, or is "reusing rocket hardware which is naturally coming down into the sea" the problem and "guiding it to the landing platform and securing it" the solution?
You use "concept" and "implementation" where I use "problem" and "solution", but the boundary issue will still exist. (Which is not to say that we shouldn't try.)
Slashdot Mirror
This whole discussion seems to have turned into an excuse for people to trot out their sex-stereotype preconceptions about the husband and wife's personalities and the nature of their relationship.
What if his wife is also a gamer?* What if there is no other suitable room? What if they feel "the living room is the wife's domain" is twaddle? What if using the large screen TV for gaming is important to them?
* disliking a very loud gaming PC is not the same as disliking all gaming PCs.
silentpcreview.com is a web site dedicated to quiet and silent computing, with extensive reviews and forums. They have very recently posted a sample build of a quiet gaming PC.
You can take that as a base and adjust according to taste. (For example, I'm more obsessed by quiet and less by frames per second, so my gaming PC has a single GTX760Ti GPU.) If you have questions, take them to the forums.
Emissivity and absorptivity are the same thing. One way to look at this is the time-reversibility of physics on a microscopic scale, another is that something that was really absorptive but not emissive or vice-versa would give you a really easy way to beat the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Emissivity can, however, vary with wavelength, which is the trick here.
I think the second photograph in the article is the researchers reflected in their piece of film, so the answer is it is reflective like a mirror. I imagine you could put some translucent layer over it at the cost of some efficiency.
Not really - the 40Wm^2 of cooling is only useful if it is in contact with something that can move that cold to where it is needed. (Hand-wavy explanation, really we are shifting heat to the film.) It also needs to see mostly sky, which windows usually don't.
You'd put it on your roof and run water behind it to shift the heat around.
Would you care to be more specific? My explanation is pop-science simplified, but I don't see an error in it.
More detailed explanation:
In the 8-13 micron (wavelength) window, atmospheric transmittance averages about 80% (estimated from a plot in the paper.) So the energy received is about 20% of what you'd get from a black body at atmospheric temperature (plus 80% of what you'd get from space, which is negligible in comparison.) So the brightness temperature at 8-13 microns is lower than ground level atmospheric temperature. How much lower depends on the average temperature of the atmosphere along the line of sight, and where 8-13 microns falls on the black body curve at that temperature (even this is oversimplifying) and I can't be bothered figuring that out. However, if we can reflect/insulate all energy except 8-13 micron radiation, then our thermal equilibrium temperature will be the brightness temperature at 8-13 microns to which we are exposed. This is, as noted, less than atmospheric temperature at ground level.
It is possible, because the environment is not in thermal equilibrium. In particular, the film 'sees' colder temperatures at some wavelengths than at others.
Did you not think before you posted that just maybe a bunch of scientists publishing in this area and the reviewers for one of the worlds top scientific journals might possibly have a better understanding of thermodynamics than you do?
Been there, done that.
The (paywalled) research paper states: "The use of HfO2 is, however, not essential, and can be replaced with titanium dioxide (TiO2), which is less expensive."
For those fortunate enough to have institutional access, the research paper is here.
Quickly picking some highlights:
The atmospheric transmission window is between 8 and 13 microns. They achieved 4.9C below ambient in direct sunlight at 850 watts per square metre. Cooling power was 40.1 watts per square metre. Emissivity (equivalently absorptivity) averages about 70% in the 8-13 micron window (estimated from a plot.)
Here's a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation
90% reflective white paint: absorbs 85W/m^2
97% reflective foil: absorbs 25.5W/m^2, an improvement over white paint of ~60W/m^2
This film: emits 40W/m^2, an improvement over simple foil of ~60W/m^2.
So in this scenario, the special film gives twice the benefit compared to just going for something simple and reflective. (The 90% for white paint is guess-work. The 97% for 'foil' is just matching the special film. Perhaps someone can update the calculations with better founded values.)
The summary title is highly misleading.
It is not paint, it is a manufactured film. It cools buildings, not planets. Yes, with enough you could cool the planet, but if you wanted to take that route, it would be much more cost effective to just use aluminium foil and use a marginally larger area of it (or, indeed, white paint.) Back in the real world, the way this invention cools the planet is by reducing electricity demand for air conditioning. (I saw another article about this in which one of the authors makes exactly this point.)
And you can absolutely guarantee that the three letter agencies remember every one of them. They can look at who you've made transactions with and usually get a very good idea just from that who you are. I imagine they get more from fronts and hacked/infiltrated organizations. If they need more and you've ever transacted with a commercial entity within their jurisdiction, you are a National Security Letter or local equivalent away from being identified.
This IP address thing is like discovering that the back door is unlocked and open when the front door is secured by a piece of string.
The market capitalization of Hewlett Packard leapt something like 10 billion dollars on the news that she had been fired. That is to say, the stock market values her at negative 10 billion dollars. If she enters the race, how long can it be until someone labels her 'the minus ten billion dollar woman', and how long can she stay in the race with that label?
Wooden houses as opposed to what? I don't think a well built wooden house is at all a problem in an earthquake zone. It is better than brick, probably worse than reinforced concrete or steel, but who builds single dwellings from reinforced concrete or steel?
I'm from New Zealand, where we have quite high earthquake hazard, and an overwhelming majority of our houses are wooden. Fatalities in the Christchurch earthquake were (mostly? entirely?) not due to wooden buildings but to poor quality 1980s high-rise and ~100 year old brick low-rise commercial buildings. People did die in wooden houses, but in the cases I am aware of this was due to boulders or cliffs falling on them, which no reasonable house would withstand, or heavy furniture falling on them, again independent of house construction.
Planes are essentially self-driving now, at least runway-to-runway.
No, they are not. That is like saying a company is self-running just because it has an automated production line. Much of the flight is under auto-pilot, but the human pilots are frequently changing the auto-pilot's instructions. There is a lot of training and skill maintaining in being a pilot. They aren't just there to keepen das hander in das pockets und watschen der blinkenlichten.
All take-offs are manual. Nearly all landings are manual. Mostly 'auto land' just takes the plane to just short of the runway, at which point a pilot takes over for the actual touchdown. Full auto land is possible, but with good visibility it is simply less work to manually land than to set up the auto land.
It doesn't work like that, it isn't a chemical fuel you can burn or save. The amount of Pu-238 you need is dictated by your peak power demand. How long it lasts is dictated by nuclear physics (the half life of Pu-238.) You have no control over how fast the plutonium is used up.
You're trying to study a temperature-sensitive environment in its natural state. An RTG produces lots of heat. (They are only about 5% efficient, so they produce twenty times as much heat as electrical power.) The presence of the RTG might perturb or destroy the environment you're there to study. I don't have the detailed knowledge to say if this is the case.
Plus the issues others have raised: mass, scarcity of suitable isotopes, and launching highly radioactive material on top of hundreds of tonnes of potentially explosive fuel is something you'd rather avoid if possible.
You can insure against loss of payload on launch.
I would expect that Orbital Sciences is liable for damage to the payload and had insured themselves, but I have no direct knowledge. Even if they are covered for direct costs, it is still bad for them.
OK, lets rephrase a little, and concentrate on the Challenger failure mode, rather than the actual shuttle.
Imagine a rocket that was compatible with an LES, and also compatible with the Challenger failure mode. (Remove the shuttle, put the liquid fuel engines on the bottom of the external tank, throw a capsule on the top, keep the solid rockets.) Now have the boosters fail in the same way they did with Challenger. Would the LES have sufficient notice to get the capsule to safety?
But once the battery has informed you it is about to explode, you may be able to buy some time by teaching it phenomenology.
I really don't think trademark and copyright are mutually exclusive. Please provide evidence.
And here is the problem in a nutshell. Some women are pictured because they achieved something significant, and some idiot immediately derails the conversation with comments on how attractive they are.
... would be if you walked into the company's hospitality suite at a conference, put on the VR headset, looked around you ... and couldn't tell the difference.
An alien landscape is very cool and photogenic, but might be hiding flaws because we don't know what it is supposed to look like. It is a fair demonstration of immersive game worlds, which will be one of the big initial uses of VR, so the demonstration is not invalidated by this.
Scenario A:
Notch sells Mojang to a respected community friendly company for a reasonable price of a few hundred million. Mojang's employees and customers are reasonably happy.
Scenario B:
Notch sells Mojang to Microsoft for $2B. Mojang's employees are very unhappy. The customers are fairly unhappy but if they get too unhappy there are clones out there to migrate to, or they can just play the current version without further updates.
Scenario C:
Notch sells Mojang to Microsoft for $2B and gives each of his employees $1M as a present. Notch is still way richer than in scenario A, employees are happier, customers still have the migrate or no updates options.
If I had a cheap effective cure for malaria and a company I didn't trust offered me 10 times what I thought it was worth, I'd likely not sell. But for a smallish computer game company, I can do more good with $2B than any plausible evil that could come of the sale.
However, I am going to download the latest Minecraft development snapshot tonight so as to not miss out on slime blocks should I need to abandon updates.
I've expressed this sentiment as: you should be allowed to patent (non-obvious) solutions, you should never be allowed to patent a problem.
However, my expression of the issue is poorly defined as the problem/solution boundary is not clear. Is the problem "reusing rocket hardware" and "landing at sea" the solution, or is "reusing rocket hardware which is naturally coming down into the sea" the problem and "guiding it to the landing platform and securing it" the solution?
You use "concept" and "implementation" where I use "problem" and "solution", but the boundary issue will still exist. (Which is not to say that we shouldn't try.)