I used to think like that, but it occurred to me to just look at it differently.
Steampunk aesthetic is producing modern outcomes with archaic (generally 19th century) means and/or styling. Generally it involves overly complicated mechanisms (as complex as needed to achieve the outcome mechanically, only 'overly complicated' when compared to a solution using electronics.)
Using rotating turntables, vinyl and needles to reproduce sound fits this description neatly. So all those people who like vinyl are just a variety of steampunks (whether or not they realize it.) And I'm cool with steampunks.
I know that US radar tracks lots of stuff in orbit. Other countries must do the same. Do we have any indications from them whether or not an appropriately sized object appeared in an orbit consistent with Zuma a the right time?
Combine the name of your first pet with the name of the street you grew up on, be amused by the result, post it all over the internet (and encourage others to do the same.)
I confess it took me a while to notice that these posts were gold for identity thieves. If this meme was invented by an identity thief, I am in awe of their brilliance.
I was having troubles seeing how this could work. Unless you are very close indeed, a 5 solar mass black hole interacts with other stars in exactly the same way as a 5 solar mass star, as the only force in action is gravity. So how can these stellar mass black holes gather near the galactic core?
The first sentence of the paper is: "The existence of a ‘density cusp’—a localized increase in number—of stellar-mass black holes near a supermassive black hole is a fundamental prediction of galactic stellar dynamics".
I looked up the reference for this (Bahcall and Wolf, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/doi/...). It is late at night and decades since I studied stuff like this, so mostly I'm going on that paper's abstract plus a bit of background knowledge.
The important assumption of Bahcall and Wolf is that the stars are much less massive than the small black holes (SBH), which are much less massive than the galactic black hole (GBH). (My error was in not considering this.) Now when you have a mixture of stars and SBHs near the GBH, they are zipping around and sometimes have close encounters where they gravitationally interact. These interactions on average will shift kinetic energy from the higher energy object to the lower energy object. Due to the mass difference, this means in a SBH/star interaction, the SBH will (more often than not) transfer energy to the star, so it will slow and fall deeper into the gravitational well of the GBH.
A good analogy is a gas with heavy and light molecules. The heavy molecules will move more slowly and at the bottom of the container the gas will be richer in heavy molecules compared to at the top of the container.
Guess how many "unsafe" products would be released? Zero
You are way to idealistic. I'm developing a product. If it is safe (99%) I'll make millions, otherwise (1%) it will kill people. It isn't easy to determine which case holds. So I have a choice: 99% chance of becoming a multimillionaire along with 1% chance of a prison sentence, or I can just drop it (and all the funds I've put in to development up to this point.) If I'm a psychopath, I'll leap at this chance. If I'm not, I'll likely fool myself into believing the 1% chance is really zero, and go for it.
History abounds with cases where people have done unsafe things, even when it was their own lives at stake, when pressured by bosses or prospects of financial bounty or ruin.
What you suggest might well help, but it won't magic away unsafe products.
That is a really silly calculation. If the Dow went down by 0.01% and on the same day TSLA went down by 1%, that would be 9900% worse, but it doesn't tell you anything useful. It makes even less sense if TSLA went up by 1% on that day, now your 'difference' would be -9900% or -10100% (I can't even decide which one makes more sense.) Using a number (Dow) that is the sum of lots of positives and negatives as a denominator is silly. TSLA underperformed the Dow by 3.2% is the correct way of looking at this.
However, their methods are inexact. They are doing the best they can without access to inside knowledge. Musk has inside knowledge, and there are laws against lying to the stock market.
And one partial failure (Launch 4, CRS-1, lost one booster engine, primary mission succeeded but secondary payload was not delivered to a useful orbit.)
One could argue that Full Thrust (v1.2) is enough of an evolution from the early Falcon 9s that we should keep separate score for this model, especially as this is the model which will be used for the foreseeable future. Then the score would be 32 launches with one pre-launch failure.
I feel that a third major failure any time soon will have a heavy psychological weight, whatever the success rate statistics. Three failures looks like a pattern, and I think it would cause the public and new media to perceive the F9 as dangerous and unreliable.
SpaceX is doing great - although that greatness is going into funding development on the BFR. Tesla is looking shaky. If it goes bankrupt, I expect the battery and solar panel parts would survive under new ownership.
Dark matter's properties are inferred from observations in gravitational lensing, from the cosmic microwave background, which shows the structure of the universe early in its history, from astronomical observations of the observable universe's current structure, and from evidence about the formation and evolution of galaxies, from mass location during galactic collisions, and from the motion of stars within galaxies, and of galaxies within galactic clusters.
That is way more than a kludge. That is many observations explainable by a simple hypothesis - that is, a scientific theory.
I wondered what they assumed about transmission losses. From the paper, last paragraph of introductory section:
Perfect transmission and energy storage, with no losses or constraints, was assumed, yielding a best-case scenario for realizing the benefits of geographic anti-correlation of the resources and to allow isolation of the limitations associated purely with geophysical characteristics of wind and solar energy resources. Specific transmission constraints, higher-resolution resource data, energy storage inefficiencies, optimization of the choice of generation locations to minimize their mutual correlation as opposed to maximization of local energy production, and operational limits and market dynamics, among other practical considerations, will play important roles in determining the details of system- and site-specific design and operation of an actual electricity system of this magnitude.
Looking up transmission losses in Wikipedia . A few numbers: 160km of 765kV transmission line has losses of 1.1% to 0.5%. Transmission losses in the USA were estimated at 6.5% in 2007.
As this plan will require more transmission, losses would be higher, and you'd need to spend quite a lot to upgrade transmission lines. I think this study is a useful starting point, but should be read as "getting beyond 80% renewable is really hard" rather than "getting to 80% renewable is easy".
Here is an interesting bit from the "discussion" section:
One proposed, and modeled, U.S.-wide transmission system consists of an estimated 34 000 km (21 000 miles; 7 lengths of the US from Los Angeles, CA to Portland, Maine) of line with a capacity of up to 12 GW. An installed cost of $1 MM GW^-1 km^-1 implies a capital expenditure on the order of $410 billion, as compared to >$1 trillion that would be required to install 12 hours of storage in the US (mean demand is ~450 GW) assuming an installed cost at present of $200 per kW h (pumped hydro; most other systems (e.g. batteries, flywheels, etc.) have current costs in excess of $500 per kW h).
"Later that day, Ying excised all his available stock options." Excise: to remove by cutting Exercise: an action or actions intended to improve something or make something happen (both from https://dictionary.cambridge.o...
As I understand it, to exercise a stock option would be to pay the option's strike price and take possession of the shares. This would not in itself be of benefit if you expected the share price to fall, but it would be a necessary step prior to selling the shares. To excise stock options means nothing to me, but it might be some jargon I am unaware of.
Here is more context from the ZDNet story:
Jun Ying, who was slated to become the company's next chief information officer, allegedly used confidential information that the company's systems had been hacked to sell his stock before the news was made public.
According to a Justice Department statement, Ying sent a text message to a colleague two weeks before Equifax revealed the hack, in which he said the breach "sounds bad." Three days later, Ying searched the web to research the effect of Experian's 2015 own breach on its stock price.
Later that day, Ying excised all his available stock options.
The former executive made more than $1 million from the sale, according to a federal complaint, avoiding more than $117,000 in losses.
The word "own" in "the effect of Experian's 2015 own breach on its stock price" lends weight to the hypothesis that ZDNet has lousy editing and meant "exercise".
You could finish the summary right there, and it would be news. President takes advice, rather than just going with the first thing to pop out of his head, or whatever got the biggest cheer at a political rally.
Here is something for you hackers out there to try. The simple version: In a room with no exterior windows, set a large TV/monitor into a wall. Surround it by a window frame. Display the view you'd expect to see from your building, if there actually was a window there. Elaboration 0: Use a camera to feed a live view of outside to the 'window'. Elaboration 1: Have weird things happen occasionally in the view: UFO, Godzilla attack, albatross flying into the "window", tsunami, pyroclastic flow, spiderman. Elaboration 2: Have some cameras inside the room and some AI to identify and track human heads. By whatever method, pick one head as the victim. Feed the location of that head to the display software, so it will display the view with the correct parallax for that viewpoint.
Once you add the parallax, I think this could be very convincing to any unsuspecting viewer.
I disclaim any responsibility for the effects this could have on the viewer, or consequences that the viewer or others might visit upon the trickster. Consult your own ethics and lawyers and (if relevant) your institution's ethics review board.
Here is another. Late 2016, low power EEPROM (electronically erasable programmable read only memory) using RRAM technology. In this case, it looks like they are pushing low power consumption as their niche.
Courtesy of following links in the Wikipedia RRAM page, I find this, an Panasonic 8 bit CPU with embedded RRAM memory. According to Wikipedia, this was around in mid 2016. (RRAM = resistive RAM, a more general term which would include HP's memristor.)
This is just crying out to be applied to some famous texts to amuse us with what it comes up with.
The Hunting of the Snark. Fox in Socks. We're Going on a Bear Hunt. Ulysses. 50 Shades of Grey. Titus Andronicus. Sonnet 130. Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash. The Magna Carta. Genesis. Terms and Conditions for iTunes.
It will have so much glue and additives in it that it will even be fireproof and waterproof, bugs certainly won't like it.
Buildings eventually need to be demolished. What can be done with this engineered wood at that point? If we chop it up small and burn it, or dump it in a landfill, will the additives cause pollution? For that matter, if you drill a hole in a new piece of engineered wood, can you treat the debris like ordinary wood chips, or does it require special disposal?
Not enough ignition fluid to light the outer two engines after several three engine relights. Fix is pretty obvious.
Somebody then turned those 19 words into an article, which/. then summarized to about 200 words. Furthermore, Musk's tweet didn't tell us anything he hadn't already said in the post-launch press conference.
There actually was some news in Musk's recent twittering, however: An extra drone ship is being constructed for the east coast, to be named A Shortfall of Gravitas.
To save people video watching: In the post-flight press conference, Musk said that the titanium grid fins are hard to manufacture and expensive and they currently don't have many, so he was very pleased to get these ones back. Also, the titanium grid fins are larger, and the side boosters need the bigger fins because the nose cone (rather than blunt end) reduces the effectiveness of the fins.
Tesla makes batteries, cars and solar panels (and roof tiles which act as solar panels.) The cars are the highest profile and highest risk part of the business. Their first big problem is that they are struggling very much to get car production up to the theoretical capabilities of their factory. A second big problem is that they have competitors with very very deep pockets (and who know how to make their factories work well) in the existing car manufacturers.
If they solve their manufacturing problems, and keep some combination of technical and marketing edge over the big car manufacturers, Tesla could hit the big time. However, they might also crash into bankruptcy, or less drastically, they might be forced to abandon car manufacture to stay in batteries and solar panels.
So, how are the battery and solar panel parts of the business doing? Might they emerge (like a smoking detached wheel rolling down the road) from a crash of the car business?
(My take: I am generally very impressed by what Musk has done, and I think the haters who paint him as a con man are either delusional or trolls. However, he is not an angel (he is not morally impeccable) nor a god (he is not omnipotent) so he can fail, and he and his companies can legitimately be criticized. In particular, I'm very dubious about hyperloop, somewhat dubious about tunnels, and cautious about the cars.)
I agree with what you are saying here, but there is a big gap in the current system. When a potentially useful drug is patented by a pharma company, that company has an incentive to do the drug trials. When a potentially useful drug is for some reason not patentable (as in this case) there is nobody to pay for trials. Stage I and stage II trials can probably get done on academic grants, but it would be hard to fund a stage III trial like that.
I am not a pharmaceutical researcher or funder, I am happy to accept correction from more knowledgeable people.
Source: Elon Musk twitter. "Third burn successful. Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt. " There is a diagram, showing aphelion 2.61AU, perihelion 0.98 AU, nearly reaching the orbit of Ceres. (By comparison, Mars has apohelion 1.67 AU, perihelion 1.38 AU.)
This surprises me. All the material I'd seen prior to this showed an orbit with aphelion at Mars orbit. I'd have thought they'd be a whole lot more organized than just "lets put peddle to the metal and see how far it goes."
Slashdot Mirror
I used to think like that, but it occurred to me to just look at it differently.
Steampunk aesthetic is producing modern outcomes with archaic (generally 19th century) means and/or styling. Generally it involves overly complicated mechanisms (as complex as needed to achieve the outcome mechanically, only 'overly complicated' when compared to a solution using electronics.)
Using rotating turntables, vinyl and needles to reproduce sound fits this description neatly. So all those people who like vinyl are just a variety of steampunks (whether or not they realize it.) And I'm cool with steampunks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I know that US radar tracks lots of stuff in orbit. Other countries must do the same. Do we have any indications from them whether or not an appropriately sized object appeared in an orbit consistent with Zuma a the right time?
Combine the name of your first pet with the name of the street you grew up on, be amused by the result, post it all over the internet (and encourage others to do the same.)
I confess it took me a while to notice that these posts were gold for identity thieves. If this meme was invented by an identity thief, I am in awe of their brilliance.
I was having troubles seeing how this could work. Unless you are very close indeed, a 5 solar mass black hole interacts with other stars in exactly the same way as a 5 solar mass star, as the only force in action is gravity. So how can these stellar mass black holes gather near the galactic core?
The first sentence of the paper is: "The existence of a ‘density cusp’—a localized increase in number—of stellar-mass black holes near a supermassive black hole is a fundamental prediction of galactic stellar dynamics".
I looked up the reference for this (Bahcall and Wolf, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/doi/...). It is late at night and decades since I studied stuff like this, so mostly I'm going on that paper's abstract plus a bit of background knowledge.
The important assumption of Bahcall and Wolf is that the stars are much less massive than the small black holes (SBH), which are much less massive than the galactic black hole (GBH). (My error was in not considering this.) Now when you have a mixture of stars and SBHs near the GBH, they are zipping around and sometimes have close encounters where they gravitationally interact. These interactions on average will shift kinetic energy from the higher energy object to the lower energy object. Due to the mass difference, this means in a SBH/star interaction, the SBH will (more often than not) transfer energy to the star, so it will slow and fall deeper into the gravitational well of the GBH.
A good analogy is a gas with heavy and light molecules. The heavy molecules will move more slowly and at the bottom of the container the gas will be richer in heavy molecules compared to at the top of the container.
Guess how many "unsafe" products would be released? Zero
You are way to idealistic. I'm developing a product. If it is safe (99%) I'll make millions, otherwise (1%) it will kill people. It isn't easy to determine which case holds. So I have a choice: 99% chance of becoming a multimillionaire along with 1% chance of a prison sentence, or I can just drop it (and all the funds I've put in to development up to this point.) If I'm a psychopath, I'll leap at this chance. If I'm not, I'll likely fool myself into believing the 1% chance is really zero, and go for it.
History abounds with cases where people have done unsafe things, even when it was their own lives at stake, when pressured by bosses or prospects of financial bounty or ruin.
What you suggest might well help, but it won't magic away unsafe products.
Your point is well made. And the people who sell satellite launch insurance are even better grounded in statistics.
Sorry, I meant to write "news media", not "new media".
That is a really silly calculation. If the Dow went down by 0.01% and on the same day TSLA went down by 1%, that would be 9900% worse, but it doesn't tell you anything useful. It makes even less sense if TSLA went up by 1% on that day, now your 'difference' would be -9900% or -10100% (I can't even decide which one makes more sense.) Using a number (Dow) that is the sum of lots of positives and negatives as a denominator is silly. TSLA underperformed the Dow by 3.2% is the correct way of looking at this.
https://www.bloomberg.com/grap...
However, their methods are inexact. They are doing the best they can without access to inside knowledge. Musk has inside knowledge, and there are laws against lying to the stock market.
And one partial failure (Launch 4, CRS-1, lost one booster engine, primary mission succeeded but secondary payload was not delivered to a useful orbit.)
One could argue that Full Thrust (v1.2) is enough of an evolution from the early Falcon 9s that we should keep separate score for this model, especially as this is the model which will be used for the foreseeable future. Then the score would be 32 launches with one pre-launch failure.
I feel that a third major failure any time soon will have a heavy psychological weight, whatever the success rate statistics. Three failures looks like a pattern, and I think it would cause the public and new media to perceive the F9 as dangerous and unreliable.
SpaceX is doing great - although that greatness is going into funding development on the BFR. Tesla is looking shaky. If it goes bankrupt, I expect the battery and solar panel parts would survive under new ownership.
From Wikipedia:
Dark matter's properties are inferred from observations in gravitational lensing, from the cosmic microwave background, which shows the structure of the universe early in its history, from astronomical observations of the observable universe's current structure, and from evidence about the formation and evolution of galaxies, from mass location during galactic collisions, and from the motion of stars within galaxies, and of galaxies within galactic clusters.
That is way more than a kludge. That is many observations explainable by a simple hypothesis - that is, a scientific theory.
I wondered what they assumed about transmission losses. From the paper, last paragraph of introductory section:
Perfect transmission and energy storage, with no losses or
constraints, was assumed, yielding a best-case scenario for
realizing the benefits of geographic anti-correlation of the
resources and to allow isolation of the limitations associated
purely with geophysical characteristics of wind and solar energy
resources. Specific transmission constraints, higher-resolution
resource data, energy storage inefficiencies, optimization of the
choice of generation locations to minimize their mutual correlation
as opposed to maximization of local energy production, and
operational limits and market dynamics, among other practical
considerations, will play important roles in determining the details
of system- and site-specific design and operation of an actual
electricity system of this magnitude.
Looking up transmission losses in Wikipedia . A few numbers: 160km of 765kV transmission line has losses of 1.1% to 0.5%. Transmission losses in the USA were estimated at 6.5% in 2007.
As this plan will require more transmission, losses would be higher, and you'd need to spend quite a lot to upgrade transmission lines. I think this study is a useful starting point, but should be read as "getting beyond 80% renewable is really hard" rather than "getting to 80% renewable is easy".
Here is an interesting bit from the "discussion" section:
One proposed, and modeled,
U.S.-wide transmission system consists of an estimated
34 000 km (21 000 miles; 7 lengths of the US from Los Angeles,
CA to Portland, Maine) of line with a capacity of up to 12 GW.
An installed cost of $1 MM GW^-1 km^-1 implies a capital
expenditure on the order of $410 billion, as compared to >$1
trillion that would be required to install 12 hours of storage in
the US (mean demand is ~450 GW) assuming an installed cost
at present of $200 per kW h (pumped hydro; most other
systems (e.g. batteries, flywheels, etc.) have current costs in
excess of $500 per kW h).
So that gives some idea of the costs involved.
"Later that day, Ying excised all his available stock options."
Excise: to remove by cutting
Exercise: an action or actions intended to improve something or make something happen
(both from https://dictionary.cambridge.o...
As I understand it, to exercise a stock option would be to pay the option's strike price and take possession of the shares. This would not in itself be of benefit if you expected the share price to fall, but it would be a necessary step prior to selling the shares. To excise stock options means nothing to me, but it might be some jargon I am unaware of.
Here is more context from the ZDNet story:
Jun Ying, who was slated to become the company's next chief information officer, allegedly used confidential information that the company's systems had been hacked to sell his stock before the news was made public.
According to a Justice Department statement, Ying sent a text message to a colleague two weeks before Equifax revealed the hack, in which he said the breach "sounds bad." Three days later, Ying searched the web to research the effect of Experian's 2015 own breach on its stock price.
Later that day, Ying excised all his available stock options.
The former executive made more than $1 million from the sale, according to a federal complaint, avoiding more than $117,000 in losses.
The word "own" in "the effect of Experian's 2015 own breach on its stock price" lends weight to the hypothesis that ZDNet has lousy editing and meant "exercise".
You could finish the summary right there, and it would be news. President takes advice, rather than just going with the first thing to pop out of his head, or whatever got the biggest cheer at a political rally.
Here is something for you hackers out there to try.
The simple version: In a room with no exterior windows, set a large TV/monitor into a wall. Surround it by a window frame. Display the view you'd expect to see from your building, if there actually was a window there.
Elaboration 0: Use a camera to feed a live view of outside to the 'window'.
Elaboration 1: Have weird things happen occasionally in the view: UFO, Godzilla attack, albatross flying into the "window", tsunami, pyroclastic flow, spiderman.
Elaboration 2: Have some cameras inside the room and some AI to identify and track human heads. By whatever method, pick one head as the victim. Feed the location of that head to the display software, so it will display the view with the correct parallax for that viewpoint.
Once you add the parallax, I think this could be very convincing to any unsuspecting viewer.
I disclaim any responsibility for the effects this could have on the viewer, or consequences that the viewer or others might visit upon the trickster. Consult your own ethics and lawyers and (if relevant) your institution's ethics review board.
Here is another. Late 2016, low power EEPROM (electronically erasable programmable read only memory) using RRAM technology. In this case, it looks like they are pushing low power consumption as their niche.
Courtesy of following links in the Wikipedia RRAM page, I find this, an Panasonic 8 bit CPU with embedded RRAM memory. According to Wikipedia, this was around in mid 2016. (RRAM = resistive RAM, a more general term which would include HP's memristor.)
This is just crying out to be applied to some famous texts to amuse us with what it comes up with.
The Hunting of the Snark. Fox in Socks. We're Going on a Bear Hunt. Ulysses. 50 Shades of Grey. Titus Andronicus. Sonnet 130. Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash. The Magna Carta. Genesis. Terms and Conditions for iTunes.
It will have so much glue and additives in it that it will even be fireproof and waterproof, bugs certainly won't like it.
Buildings eventually need to be demolished. What can be done with this engineered wood at that point? If we chop it up small and burn it, or dump it in a landfill, will the additives cause pollution? For that matter, if you drill a hole in a new piece of engineered wood, can you treat the debris like ordinary wood chips, or does it require special disposal?
Elon Musk tweeted:
Not enough ignition fluid to light the outer two engines after several three engine relights. Fix is pretty obvious.
Somebody then turned those 19 words into an article, which /. then summarized to about 200 words. Furthermore, Musk's tweet didn't tell us anything he hadn't already said in the post-launch press conference.
There actually was some news in Musk's recent twittering, however: An extra drone ship is being constructed for the east coast, to be named A Shortfall of Gravitas.
To save people video watching:
In the post-flight press conference, Musk said that the titanium grid fins are hard to manufacture and expensive and they currently don't have many, so he was very pleased to get these ones back. Also, the titanium grid fins are larger, and the side boosters need the bigger fins because the nose cone (rather than blunt end) reduces the effectiveness of the fins.
Tesla makes batteries, cars and solar panels (and roof tiles which act as solar panels.) The cars are the highest profile and highest risk part of the business. Their first big problem is that they are struggling very much to get car production up to the theoretical capabilities of their factory. A second big problem is that they have competitors with very very deep pockets (and who know how to make their factories work well) in the existing car manufacturers.
If they solve their manufacturing problems, and keep some combination of technical and marketing edge over the big car manufacturers, Tesla could hit the big time. However, they might also crash into bankruptcy, or less drastically, they might be forced to abandon car manufacture to stay in batteries and solar panels.
So, how are the battery and solar panel parts of the business doing? Might they emerge (like a smoking detached wheel rolling down the road) from a crash of the car business?
(My take: I am generally very impressed by what Musk has done, and I think the haters who paint him as a con man are either delusional or trolls. However, he is not an angel (he is not morally impeccable) nor a god (he is not omnipotent) so he can fail, and he and his companies can legitimately be criticized. In particular, I'm very dubious about hyperloop, somewhat dubious about tunnels, and cautious about the cars.)
I agree with what you are saying here, but there is a big gap in the current system. When a potentially useful drug is patented by a pharma company, that company has an incentive to do the drug trials. When a potentially useful drug is for some reason not patentable (as in this case) there is nobody to pay for trials. Stage I and stage II trials can probably get done on academic grants, but it would be hard to fund a stage III trial like that.
I am not a pharmaceutical researcher or funder, I am happy to accept correction from more knowledgeable people.
The roadster, or something in it, is Musk's horcrux. He wanted to put it somewhere safe.
(Yes, I have been reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.)
Source: Elon Musk twitter.
"Third burn successful. Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt. "
There is a diagram, showing aphelion 2.61AU, perihelion 0.98 AU, nearly reaching the orbit of Ceres. (By comparison, Mars has apohelion 1.67 AU, perihelion 1.38 AU.)
This surprises me. All the material I'd seen prior to this showed an orbit with aphelion at Mars orbit. I'd have thought they'd be a whole lot more organized than just "lets put peddle to the metal and see how far it goes."