In my opinion, the single greatest achievement of humanity
... but every vaccine since then has been prevented from achieving its final goal...
Many diseases are not eradicable by current vaccine technology. We can't (currently) hope to eliminate diseases that mutate very quickly (influenza and HIV) or which have wild animal reservoirs (influenza, black death.) I'm not a pathologist, so I'm not sure which diseases are eradicable. Certainly polio (which nearly killed my mother), perhaps malaria, measles, chickenpox, whooping cough.
... through the effort of anti-vax forces of one kind or another.
We'd probably have polio by now if not for anti-vaxers (muslim conspiracy theorists in this case.) We'll probably never get the coverage to eradicate measles, chickenpox, whooping cough because of them - these diseases don't have the scare factor of smallpox or polio. We might get malaria, especially because we have many other avenues of attack beyond vaccination. There will however be the threat that a related bug will do a species jump to give us back a 'new' malaria.
I had a similar idea a while ago. Play Go (or Chess or Shogi or similar) while running on a treadmill. As you run 'distance', your time available on the chess clock goes up. You can win either by winning the board game, or by sufficiently 'outrunning' your opponent (e.g. by having 30 minutes more to spare on your clock than they have.)
For the record: I put this idea in the public domain. (Not that anyone will notice.)
All you need is a booster rocket (and a cargo) which can stand 1670 g of acceleration (possibly higher, if the gun does not provide uniform acceleration.)
The range of electric cars is only a major issue because it takes a long time to recharge them (and because there isn't a publicly available infrastructure to recharge away from home, but that is a technically easier problem.) If recharging away from home is very slow and/or difficult, then whether the range is 200 miles or 500 won't have a huge effect on demand: if you believe you'll want to take trips longer than the battery range, you won't buy one as your primary car. If you expect to take trips over 200 miles, chances are fairly good you also expect to take trips over 500 miles.
If easy recharge is available, a 200 mile range is also not a big deal: you want to take a break from driving that often anyhow, and extra time on long trips will more than be made up for by time saved by recharging at home instead of going to a petrol station to refuel. (Note: the alternative range of 200 miles is just a guess on my part.)
Conclusion: long range is nice to have, but is not make-or-break for electric cars, so long as you have enough to drive around town.
Changing the topic, the article is about using lithium air batteries with the air contact area made very high by nanoscale structure. I'd expect this to require some serious air filtering to avoid gumming up that nanoscale structure with particulates.
Finally, lithium-air batteries might be safer. A (charged) standard battery needs to have an oxidizing agent and a reducing agent in close proximity to each other (a bit like a rocket) whereas the air battery only holds a reducing agent (like a standard fuel tank). In any catastrophic failure, the energy release rate will be limited by access to air (i.e. it will burn, like petrol does.) (Any concentrated source of easily available energy will have dangers almost by definition.)
The distribution engine as it is called is responsible for reading the information passed from the game or application to DirectX before it gets to the NVIDIA or AMD drivers.
So presumably it will work only in Windows, and only with DirectX games (e.g. not with OpenGL.) I'm guessing that supporting OpenGL would require a big programming effort so we won't see it soon if at all. I suspect there aren't many OpenGL games out there anyway, but I don't follow such things.
Unless the OS market changes drastically, I expect we'll never see non-Windows drivers.
(Aside:...combine the performance of an AMD and NVIDIA card in the same system. This is truly the killer feature that will make you want, no NEED, a HYDRA-based motherboard very soon. My GPU selection strategy is to buy the most powerful GPU available... that needs no power connector and is passively cooled. I don't think I'm in the market segment they are addressing here.)
I watched the video of the three people walking the streets with leg exoskeletons.
Argh! It just abounds in wrongness! They are all in black, with white exoskeletons. There should be a red one, a blue one and a yellow one or some such! Don't these people watch Sentai shows?
I remember thinking this while watching the movie 'Deep Impact': providing enough extra fuel to get back afterwards is exponentially* more costly. With a short time available and the extinction of humanity on the line, those astronauts would have been sent on a one way trip.
However, this came rather low on the list of impossibilities and implausibilities in that movie.
* I use this word in a mathematically accurate sense.
I was thinking the same: 100 years of technology and only 10% faster? However, at the end the article says "... the team is planning another run on Wednesday, to try to get even closer to the car's theoretical top speed of 274 km/hr (170 mph)." My interpretation is that they didn't want to go flat-out right away so that any engineering problems could show up at lower speed first. So they are doing progressively faster runs, and this just happened to be the first that was faster than the old record.
I have thought about this. I had 'low capital costs and low labour costs' in my first draft and edited it out for simplicity. You either need to have few enough workers you can pay them when not operating, or have something else for them to do. (Call center?) To some extent you can do maintenance when electricity is expensive, but there are limits to this.
Wind power has lots of advantages, but one major drawback - it is intermittent. If you have an industry which is very energy intensive but has low capital cost, this presents an opportunity: build your plant, and run it only when the wind is blowing and power is very cheap. This works especially well if your product is easily storable. This process is clearly energy intensive and produces an easily storable product - whether it has the required low capital cost is much less clear. (Although the interest of the navy suggests they're wanting to use aircraft carrier nuclear power, but once developed it could find wind-powered civilian use.) Water desalination and aluminium smelting might also qualify (I don't know the capital costs of these). Recharging electric cars certainly does (given that you're buying the car anyhow), except that you have a very limited storage capacity. Despite not being low capital, data centres are even starting to go this way, being built with the intention of only running them when electricity is cheap (or less is required for air conditioning.) In this case the product is extremely transportable rather than easily storable.
The company's site is very light on detail, but I did find this in one of their (two) press releases: Novacem's revolutionary technology is based on magnesium silicates rather than limestone (calcium carbonate) as is used in traditional Portland cement. Global reserves of magnesium silicates are estimated to be in excess of 10,000 billion tonnes. The company's technology converts magnesium silicates into magnesium oxide using a low carbon, low temperature process, and then adds special mineral additives to produce Novacem cement.
I still have many questions, beyond the strength and durability issues others have raised. Are suitable magnesium silicate deposits common, or will this require shipping bulky material over long distances? Will the process be a simple (quarry->grind up->heat) sequence or will some refining be required? What about those "special mineral additives": are they abundant and non-toxic?
The algae aren't doing anything new, they are just doing much more of what they can already do. If this made them more able to survive in the wild than current algae, evolution would have produced them already. Instead, we have a bunch of algae which waste most of their energy pointlessly making and leaking ethanol - they won't survive long. Also, ethanol won't cause any harm unless in high concentrations. There are already lots of natural critters who produce ethanol, especially yeasts.
You could make an LED night light with a timer shut-off. This would be about as simple as you can get with active components. Probably best to use a potentiometer to adjust the time delay - in real use, you'd want >30 minutes, but the kids will want to try it out with 30 seconds.
This reminds me of a "Not the Nine O'Clock News"* skit interviewing a spokesman for a centrist terrorist group.
"All we want is peace and tolerance, and we're prepared to maim and kill to achieve our ends."
Straying off-topic, another favourite quote from the show: "Political scientists think they have finally understood current [Reagan era] American foreign and defence policy. Having been late for the last two world wars, they want to make sure they are extra early for the next one."
(Both quotes from ~25 year old memories and are therefore unreliable in detail.)
* A British 1980's politics/satire/skit comedy TV show.
We were playing "Grim", where the PCs are children transported into a dark fairytale world. (Just about the first thing that happened to us was that Hansel and Gretel tried to eat us.) This is a world full of Big Bad Wolves, evil princesses etc, and we were just children. I very quickly developed an aphorism which proved very useful:
If the international situation gets so bad that you can no longer count on the ability to import food, then NZ is going to be in trouble for many other reasons: We have very limited mineral resources, very little oil and not much industry (e.g. no pharmaceuticals). Without imports (especially oil), food production would go way down (although I still can't see it going below subsistence.) I suppose we're OK for coal, and you can make oil from that if you don't care about the greenhouse effect.
Australia is much better off for mineral resources, and still produces way more food than it consumes. On the other hand, Indonesia is right next door with 10 times the population, and in a global crisis may no longer be friendly. At least NZ has little anyone wants, is a long way from anywhere, and isn't on the way to anywhere. We may rate as the least likely to be invaded country on Earth, at least until Easter Island or Tahiti get independence.
As a New Zealander currently in Australia, I'd agree with this. Here, I have to present (and have recorded) ID to get a cell phone, or to post an international parcel, and the government has been trying to bring in compulsary internet filtering. I'd rate NZ better than Australia better than USA better than UK.
As another poster has noted, Fiji is very much 'too bad.' The current governemnt was installed by military coup, and no longer even has a free press.
It is hard to know how accurate your criticisms are without reading the article, which doesn't seem to be on the website yet (http://www.plosgenetics.org/). Given the limited information available, however, what you say is sensible.
As you note, you can pick your number of clusters, and the software will happily produce that many for you. However, some numbers of clusters are more natural than others - if the closest pair of clusters in the 3-cluster analysis are much more distant than the closest pair in a 4-cluster analysis, then there is some logic in picking 3 clusters as a natural number. (But two clusters would seem even more natural in the human data.) I think this analysis is about interbreeding between subpopulations: they're saying that (e.g.) within Africa, neighbouring populations frequently interbred, so that genes flowed easily throughout the African population, but there was very much less interbreeding between Africa and West Eurasia.
(Also, in your speculations about what the 4th, 5th etc clusters would be, you've forgotten the Australians, who have been here for about 40,000 years - by comparison, the Americans split off perhaps 13,000 years ago.)
(I have done population genetics and evolution research, but not specifically on human populations.)
So first they splash out staggering amounts of money in a very hastily drawn up 'fiscal stimulus' package, and then they cut back on the basic, well thought out* spending in the budget? Am I the only one who thinks this doesn't make sense?
And I have a pair of shoes with less than 1% of the TCO of a car. I used them to get to work today.
Comparing the cost of this to a car is pretty much pointless, as, like my shoes, this doesn't achieve the same thing as a car.
If I'm in the market for such a vehicle, I'll be comparing it to the cost of some other low capacity, low speed, low range vehicle such as an electric tricycle. (Example from the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5)
Slashdot Mirror
We killed smallpox outright, ...
In my opinion, the single greatest achievement of humanity
... but every vaccine since then has been prevented from achieving its final goal ...
Many diseases are not eradicable by current vaccine technology. We can't (currently) hope to eliminate diseases that mutate very quickly (influenza and HIV) or which have wild animal reservoirs (influenza, black death.) I'm not a pathologist, so I'm not sure which diseases are eradicable. Certainly polio (which nearly killed my mother), perhaps malaria, measles, chickenpox, whooping cough.
We'd probably have polio by now if not for anti-vaxers (muslim conspiracy theorists in this case.) We'll probably never get the coverage to eradicate measles, chickenpox, whooping cough because of them - these diseases don't have the scare factor of smallpox or polio. We might get malaria, especially because we have many other avenues of attack beyond vaccination. There will however be the threat that a related bug will do a species jump to give us back a 'new' malaria.
For example, nitroglycerine is used as a heart medicine, yet if you ingest 100ml of it pure, your life expectency will be greatly reduced.
(Actually there are gazillions of examples. Most pharmaceuticals are lethal in high doses, even over-the-counter ones like paracetamol or vitamin D.)
I had a similar idea a while ago. Play Go (or Chess or Shogi or similar) while running on a treadmill. As you run 'distance', your time available on the chess clock goes up. You can win either by winning the board game, or by sufficiently 'outrunning' your opponent (e.g. by having 30 minutes more to spare on your clock than they have.)
For the record: I put this idea in the public domain. (Not that anyone will notice.)
All you need is a booster rocket (and a cargo) which can stand 1670 g of acceleration (possibly higher, if the gun does not provide uniform acceleration.)
v^2 = u^2 + 2*a*S
u=0, v=6000, S=1100 => a=16,364 m/s^2 = 1670g
The range of electric cars is only a major issue because it takes a long time to recharge them (and because there isn't a publicly available infrastructure to recharge away from home, but that is a technically easier problem.) If recharging away from home is very slow and/or difficult, then whether the range is 200 miles or 500 won't have a huge effect on demand: if you believe you'll want to take trips longer than the battery range, you won't buy one as your primary car. If you expect to take trips over 200 miles, chances are fairly good you also expect to take trips over 500 miles.
If easy recharge is available, a 200 mile range is also not a big deal: you want to take a break from driving that often anyhow, and extra time on long trips will more than be made up for by time saved by recharging at home instead of going to a petrol station to refuel. (Note: the alternative range of 200 miles is just a guess on my part.)
Conclusion: long range is nice to have, but is not make-or-break for electric cars, so long as you have enough to drive around town.
Changing the topic, the article is about using lithium air batteries with the air contact area made very high by nanoscale structure. I'd expect this to require some serious air filtering to avoid gumming up that nanoscale structure with particulates.
Finally, lithium-air batteries might be safer. A (charged) standard battery needs to have an oxidizing agent and a reducing agent in close proximity to each other (a bit like a rocket) whereas the air battery only holds a reducing agent (like a standard fuel tank). In any catastrophic failure, the energy release rate will be limited by access to air (i.e. it will burn, like petrol does.) (Any concentrated source of easily available energy will have dangers almost by definition.)
The distribution engine as it is called is responsible for reading the information passed from the game or application to DirectX before it gets to the NVIDIA or AMD drivers.
So presumably it will work only in Windows, and only with DirectX games (e.g. not with OpenGL.) I'm guessing that supporting OpenGL would require a big programming effort so we won't see it soon if at all. I suspect there aren't many OpenGL games out there anyway, but I don't follow such things.
Unless the OS market changes drastically, I expect we'll never see non-Windows drivers.
(Aside: ...combine the performance of an AMD and NVIDIA card in the same system. This is truly the killer feature that will make you want, no NEED, a HYDRA-based motherboard very soon. My GPU selection strategy is to buy the most powerful GPU available ... that needs no power connector and is passively cooled. I don't think I'm in the market segment they are addressing here.)
I watched the video of the three people walking the streets with leg exoskeletons.
Argh! It just abounds in wrongness! They are all in black, with white exoskeletons. There should be a red one, a blue one and a yellow one or some such! Don't these people watch Sentai shows?
I remember thinking this while watching the movie 'Deep Impact': providing enough extra fuel to get back afterwards is exponentially* more costly. With a short time available and the extinction of humanity on the line, those astronauts would have been sent on a one way trip.
However, this came rather low on the list of impossibilities and implausibilities in that movie.
* I use this word in a mathematically accurate sense.
If the payload is 500 packets of 3 minute noodles and 200kg of water, then yes, some failure will be tolerated.
But I agree, it does seem premature to be throwing around multi-billion dollar contracts.
I was thinking the same: 100 years of technology and only 10% faster? However, at the end the article says "... the team is planning another run on Wednesday, to try to get even closer to the car's theoretical top speed of 274 km/hr (170 mph)." My interpretation is that they didn't want to go flat-out right away so that any engineering problems could show up at lower speed first. So they are doing progressively faster runs, and this just happened to be the first that was faster than the old record.
I have thought about this. I had 'low capital costs and low labour costs' in my first draft and edited it out for simplicity.
You either need to have few enough workers you can pay them when not operating, or have something else for them to do. (Call center?)
To some extent you can do maintenance when electricity is expensive, but there are limits to this.
Wind power has lots of advantages, but one major drawback - it is intermittent. If you have an industry which is very energy intensive but has low capital cost, this presents an opportunity: build your plant, and run it only when the wind is blowing and power is very cheap. This works especially well if your product is easily storable.
This process is clearly energy intensive and produces an easily storable product - whether it has the required low capital cost is much less clear. (Although the interest of the navy suggests they're wanting to use aircraft carrier nuclear power, but once developed it could find wind-powered civilian use.)
Water desalination and aluminium smelting might also qualify (I don't know the capital costs of these). Recharging electric cars certainly does (given that you're buying the car anyhow), except that you have a very limited storage capacity.
Despite not being low capital, data centres are even starting to go this way, being built with the intention of only running them when electricity is cheap (or less is required for air conditioning.) In this case the product is extremely transportable rather than easily storable.
The company's site is very light on detail, but I did find this in one of their (two) press releases:
Novacem's revolutionary technology is based on magnesium silicates rather than limestone
(calcium carbonate) as is used in traditional Portland cement. Global reserves of magnesium
silicates are estimated to be in excess of 10,000 billion tonnes. The company's technology
converts magnesium silicates into magnesium oxide using a low carbon, low temperature process,
and then adds special mineral additives to produce Novacem cement.
I still have many questions, beyond the strength and durability issues others have raised.
Are suitable magnesium silicate deposits common, or will this require shipping bulky material over long distances? Will the process be a simple (quarry->grind up->heat) sequence or will some refining be required? What about those "special mineral additives": are they abundant and non-toxic?
for bots. Poor little things think they're in the real world.
The algae aren't doing anything new, they are just doing much more of what they can already do. If this made them more able to survive in the wild than current algae, evolution would have produced them already. Instead, we have a bunch of algae which waste most of their energy pointlessly making and leaking ethanol - they won't survive long. Also, ethanol won't cause any harm unless in high concentrations. There are already lots of natural critters who produce ethanol, especially yeasts.
You could make an LED night light with a timer shut-off. This would be about as simple as you can get with active components. Probably best to use a potentiometer to adjust the time delay - in real use, you'd want >30 minutes, but the kids will want to try it out with 30 seconds.
They are both great heroes to me - but then I'm an astronomer/evolutionary biologist.
(I really am. Would I lie to you?)
This reminds me of a "Not the Nine O'Clock News"* skit interviewing a spokesman for a centrist terrorist group.
"All we want is peace and tolerance, and we're prepared to maim and kill to achieve our ends."
Straying off-topic, another favourite quote from the show: "Political scientists think they have finally understood current [Reagan era] American foreign and defence policy. Having been late for the last two world wars, they want to make sure they are extra early for the next one."
(Both quotes from ~25 year old memories and are therefore unreliable in detail.)
* A British 1980's politics/satire/skit comedy TV show.
We were playing "Grim", where the PCs are children transported into a dark fairytale world. (Just about the first thing that happened to us was that Hansel and Gretel tried to eat us.) This is a world full of Big Bad Wolves, evil princesses etc, and we were just children. I very quickly developed an aphorism which proved very useful:
"A problem run away from is a problem solved."
If the international situation gets so bad that you can no longer count on the ability to import food, then NZ is going to be in trouble for many other reasons: We have very limited mineral resources, very little oil and not much industry (e.g. no pharmaceuticals). Without imports (especially oil), food production would go way down (although I still can't see it going below subsistence.) I suppose we're OK for coal, and you can make oil from that if you don't care about the greenhouse effect.
Australia is much better off for mineral resources, and still produces way more food than it consumes. On the other hand, Indonesia is right next door with 10 times the population, and in a global crisis may no longer be friendly. At least NZ has little anyone wants, is a long way from anywhere, and isn't on the way to anywhere. We may rate as the least likely to be invaded country on Earth, at least until Easter Island or Tahiti get independence.
As a New Zealander currently in Australia, I'd agree with this. Here, I have to present (and have recorded) ID to get a cell phone, or to post an international parcel, and the government has been trying to bring in compulsary internet filtering. I'd rate NZ better than Australia better than USA better than UK.
As another poster has noted, Fiji is very much 'too bad.' The current governemnt was installed by military coup, and no longer even has a free press.
It is hard to know how accurate your criticisms are without reading the article, which doesn't seem to be on the website yet (http://www.plosgenetics.org/). Given the limited information available, however, what you say is sensible.
As you note, you can pick your number of clusters, and the software will happily produce that many for you. However, some numbers of clusters are more natural than others - if the closest pair of clusters in the 3-cluster analysis are much more distant than the closest pair in a 4-cluster analysis, then there is some logic in picking 3 clusters as a natural number. (But two clusters would seem even more natural in the human data.) I think this analysis is about interbreeding between subpopulations: they're saying that (e.g.) within Africa, neighbouring populations frequently interbred, so that genes flowed easily throughout the African population, but there was very much less interbreeding between Africa and West Eurasia.
(Also, in your speculations about what the 4th, 5th etc clusters would be, you've forgotten the Australians, who have been here for about 40,000 years - by comparison, the Americans split off perhaps 13,000 years ago.)
(I have done population genetics and evolution research, but not specifically on human populations.)
I saw this on someone's blog:
"Every time someone asks when the next book is coming out, GRRM kills another Stark."
It explains a lot.
So first they splash out staggering amounts of money in a very hastily drawn up 'fiscal stimulus' package, and then they cut back on the basic, well thought out* spending in the budget? Am I the only one who thinks this doesn't make sense?
* compared to the fiscal stimulus package anyway
And I have a pair of shoes with less than 1% of the TCO of a car. I used them to get to work today.
Comparing the cost of this to a car is pretty much pointless, as, like my shoes, this doesn't achieve the same thing as a car.
If I'm in the market for such a vehicle, I'll be comparing it to the cost of some other low capacity, low speed, low range vehicle such as an electric tricycle. (Example from the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_C5)