I assume you're basing those calculations on a couple inches of algea covering a huge area. Algea farming for biofuels doesn't work that way. You put the algea in large tubes (10 ft tall, 2 ft around) and continuously churn the water until the density of algea reaches your target harvest point. Then drain the water and process the agea.
As for biofuels for jets being a stop gap measure, how do you expect to power jets 50 years from now if (when?) oil begins to run out. I don't see charging up some Li-Ion batteries to fly several hundred people from New York to London.
Call me a techno-optimist, but I have faith we can solve these kinds of problems with research and engineering. We've done it before and we'll do it again.
You can bet that the tests were performed for hundreds of hours in controlled environements, you don't just put a couple hundred million dollar airplane into the air and hope that everything works out ok. Of course, there are a ton of variables still to be tested with real world flights: lower air pressure, oxygen density, and temerature for a start.
The thing people don't realize is that modern jet engines can burn practically anything, gas turbines are remarkably flexible. The real questions are how the new fuel affects range and maintanence issues, if the algea fuel gums up the fuel pumps after a half dozen flights, it's not going to see a whole lot of use until all the issues are resolved.
There are companies putting research funds into the subject, but it's far to expensive for home use so far. The only applications that I have heard being anywhere near release are for heads up displays for commercial airliners.
There may not be concrete, scientific goals in mind, but that says more about our current state of knowledge than it does about our lack of direction. Here's 5 not so concrete goals, which IMO make manned spaceflight worth the cost and the risks.
1) First and foremost, the very basic human desire to explore and achieve, especially achieve things that are difficult to do. You might as well ask "Why climb Mount Everest?".
2) A truly challenging goal is the best way to inspire hearts and minds. During the 60's, thousands of people entered into science and engineering, not just to become a part of the space program, but because the space program inspired them to do so. Education in America is scary-bad today, it wouldn't hurt to inspire a new generation with a new goal.
3) Related but seperate, new technologies. I won't make life easy for you, but it should be easy enough to google for a list of all the technologies that have come out of the space program. There are literally hundreds of things that were developed for space but are used every day now. Enough so that the benifit to the economy easily outweighs the cost of the manned space program.
4) We can't stay here forever. Let's face it, sometime down the road, assuming we survive long enough, humanity is going to want to reach to the stars. It might not be for thousands of years, but you can bet it's gonna happen eventually. If nothing else, having experience getting to and from distant objects will come in handy if we ever need to deflect an astroid or comet away from the planet.
4) Last, but certainly not least, pure science. I'm not saying that rovers and landers don't do amazing science, they do. But I'd be willing to wager that we know more about the moon from the relatively few manned trips than we do from all the rovers and landers that we've sent there since. If nothing else, a manned mission requires a return trip and that means a large sample return mission. Something that is difficult to justify for robotic missions.
You know, this reminds me of an idea that I had a while back. The only reason coal plants get away with releasing the pollution they do (including radioactive waste) is because it is distributed over a seemingly large area and not concentrated in one location.
What would the effects be if we did the same with nuclear waste (i.e. spread it evenly over the pacific ocean)? Would there actually be noticable effects or would the radiation be dilutted below the harmful thresholds? I imagine that things lower on the food chain would be fine, but it would accumulate to dangerious levels in carnivores.
If you're doing oject oriented, there's no better place to start looking when you you're trying to learn good software design. I know, some people say patterns are overused, but they are essential to understanding and designing complex software.
Yes, but only to use the extra RAM and processing time to "cache" all of the crap you never use
I'm confused, you'd rather Windows just didn't do anything with the extra memory and processing power? If you really don't want you hard drive indexed, you can turn off indexing. The memory used to cache frequently used programs is reallocated when necissary, don't let the little graph in the task manager fool you into thinking you don't have enough memory just because your memory is actually being used for a change.
And lets see how well the SLI/Crossfire graphics cards run games while also being called by the desktop window manager and and explorer to redraw aero effects constantly.
Aero is automatically disabled when running any full screen game. If you really hate it that badly, disable it.
Vista has a lot of problems. Having features that many people like, which can be disabled by those who don't, isn't one of them. The only valid complaint you make, in my opinion, is obnoxious UAC prompts.
I don't know why we worry about global warming, we should just go out to Haley's commet once a year, collect a bunch of ice, and drop it into the ocean. Of course, since the warming gets worse every year, the block of ice would also have to increase in size. Thus solving Earth's problems once and for all... 'but what if-' ONCE AND FOR ALL!
The studies in question use several different control groups, including 'sham accupuncture' (i.e. sticking needles randomly), massage, laying in the prone possition, and sugar pills. Usually, the sham accupuncture is shown to have nearly the same effects as 'true accupuncture', which would seem to indicate that being stuck with needles to the problem muscles is the important part. More recently, studies using fMRIs have shown that 'dry needling thearapy' (the research euphamism for accupuncture) temporarily changes the way the brain interpets pain.
Just becasue accupuncture has been around for a long time and has words like 'chi', 'life energy', and 'chakra' associated with the traditional practice doesn't mean that the practice doesn't have merit. The evidence is sufficient that the National Institute of Health has issued a statement that there "is sufficient evidence of acupuncture's value to expand its use into conventional medicine and to encourage further studies of its physiology and clinical value."
It's important to remember that chemistry had its infancy in alchemy; Astronomy grew out of Astrology; Medicine began as a hodge podge of home remedies.
Re:Chiropractic treatment worked for me
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
'You've been seeing chiropractors ever since' would seem to imply that you've had ongoing back problems. Isn't it at least possible that with surgery you wouldn't have the back issues that you do?
I was under the impression that for some conditions acupuncture had been shown to have a small but statistically significant benifit, especially when combined with conventional thearapies. Wikipedia cites several published, peer reviewed articles to that effect, especially in regards to chronic lower back pain.
As I understand it, no it isn't going to cause cancer. This isn't radiation flying about the room, not even in the sense of EM radiation like microwaves. These systems use an alternating magnetic current that produces a sympithetic current in the device being charged. Rather than sending power in the EM spectrum and generating a current based on a photovoltaic effect.
Because if you are misleading the public so that they do what you want them to do, that is unethical. I'm not saying that is the case with global warming, but it is the kind of thing that I hear from people quite often.
The reason there is 'such a passionate movement' against stricter environmental standards is that there is a definate economic cost to those standards, in developing countries the impacts would be quite significant. Also, if Global Warming were shown to be untrue, all the effort we spent capping CO2 emmisions could have been spent reducing sulfer or particulate matter or smog, all of which have an immediate and direct impact on health and comfort.
We realized that it's hard to pick up a desktop and carry it to a meeting. That handheld devices are expensive, with small, hard to read screens. That it's a lot easier to take a pen to a sheet of paper to write notes than it is to type. That there's no good way to distribute copies of a document to everyone at a meeting.
Yeah, there are solutions to all of these things, but none that are as cheap and user fiendly as good old paper. Laptops are large and distracting. PDA's don't have good input devices. Tablet PC's might fit the bill, but they are expensive and have never really caught on, especially important in the meeting scenarios.
True. Look at it this way, if Einstien had known about dark energy and the 'big rip', he probably would have put yet another term in his equations to balance everything out and make the universe last forever.
The point of the constant wasn't science, it was designed to make his science line up with his philosophy. People just don't like to hear that Einstien could fall into the same kind of trap that creationists and and young earthers fall for.
Yep, for right now the cost of a gem quality diamond is about the same whehter it's dug out of the ground by an 'almost-but-not-quite' slave in Africa or produced in a lab on the East coast. Of course, there is the ethical difference to examine there, and for that reason my wife will never recieve another 'natural' diamond ever again.
And yeah, I have told her that, and she was suprisingly fine with it, enthusiastic even after I explained the moral arguments of it.
If the new programs are the best thing to happen to NASA in decades, then it should be trivial for Griffin to find a dozen experts in the field to tell Obama as much. Maybe you haven't noticed, but it really seems to me like Obama listens to his advisors and takes what they say into account.
Throwing a temper-tantrum is not the way this should be handled. Give the president-elect the information he needs to make an informed decision about your organization. If you don't like the dicision later, the throw your hissy-fit. Start a public awareness campaign, lobby congress, whatever. Don't deny the commander-in-chief information just because you disagree with him.
Not to mention 1400 kW is a rate of energy, not an amount. When will journalists at least realize that units are kind of important to understanding what they are talking about? I assume that means 1400 kWh, but it could just as well mean they generate 1400 kW on average throughout the day (which would be a pretty impressive chunk of money).
Even assuming 1400 kWh, I can't imagine that number is correct. That's actually a lot of power, and, if true, this system might actually make sense in certain high traffic situations.
You know, it's stuff like this that reminds me that 9 time out of 10, the Slashdot moderation system actually gets it right. We all know it isn't perfect (and often it is the 1 time out of 10 that is the most important) but it ussually does reward people that are trying to add to the conversation. Meta-Moderation weeds out at least some who would abuse the system. And most importantly, it doesn't actually censor (as in romove) things that are not valued by the community at large.
I think the key is that mod points are relatively rare (at least compared to most other sites). That way, when you get mod points you are more interested in bring good comments forward than you are in moving poor comments to the back. I've never understood why other sites don't use a similar system.
For different challenges you could put them to, I would recommend http://projecteuler.net/. There are a huge variety of programming challenges (most involving math concepts) across a huge range of difficulty. They also provide a good introduction to recursion and cost of complexity since the 'most efficient' algorithm is not always obvious.
You could provide prizes for who completed the most problems as well as a prize for being the first to complete a problem. Then when all or most of the class has completed a problem, you can show them an 'efficient' or 'simple' solution depending on which you want to emphasize.
Yeah, I'm not sure how they can extrapolate from a hot jupiter situation to a terrestrial world in the liquid water zone. We can only just barely detect terestrial planets as it is, and even when we can detect them it's only because of special circumstances.
Is Hubble's replacement really that much better that we can safely say it is sensitive enough to do what Hubble can do, except a few orders of magnitude better?
As a side note, the wikipedia article also mentions that methane was detected. Wasn't finding water and methane in the same place once the litmus test for life on exoplanets? Apparently that needs to be re-examined, or we need to imagine a way that life is possible in the 1000k temperature range.
when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
If we're wrong about the cosmic speed limit, we are wrong about just about everything in our universe; right down to causality itself. We know, for a fact, that some portions of relativity are correct, including time dilation. It has been tested using atomic clocks and our GPS system wouldn't work without the theories being put to real, practical use. Therefore, if FTL travel is possible, then it is possible to travel to your destination and back and return before you have even left.
I can believe many things, but a world without causility is not one of them.
Am I the only one who thinks that a space elevator based on a tethered weight in space(if it actually worked) would drastically alter the Earth's rotation?
Yes.
And as to why, you just don't seem to understand how massive the Earth is compared to anything we are capable of engineering or even moving. The counterweight wouldn't be 1% of 1% of the earth's mass, and certainly wouldn't have any measurable effect on the earth's rotation within the next several thousand years.
In all seriousness, the space elevator gets a lot of press because it's the concept that is easiest for the average person to understand, that doesn't mean it is the only option (or even the best option) to efficiently get stuff into orbit without rockets. I always thought the launch loop made more sense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop/).
The idea is that the moving parts are what keeps the structure stable, rather than tension or compression. In theory it could be built with today's materials and technologies and could be cabable of launching more into orbit in its first month than has been launched to date with conventional rocket launches.
Then of course, there are the non-traditional rockets such as laser propulsion, where a laser is shined up from the ground to superheat the air in the rockets cone, which, in turn, produces thrust. And of course, my personal favorite, there's always Project Orion. Not the wimpy one NASA is using to get to the moon, I'm talking about the original Project Orion. As in, using thermonuclear bombs to launch a city sized spaceship into orbit.
Or your doctor could test your blood for know cancer proteins each time you go in to visit him. Or inspectors could analyze a water samples in real time in third world countries without the infrastructure to do the testing the normal way. Or any number of other things that that the technology could be used for.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you're basing those calculations on a couple inches of algea covering a huge area. Algea farming for biofuels doesn't work that way. You put the algea in large tubes (10 ft tall, 2 ft around) and continuously churn the water until the density of algea reaches your target harvest point. Then drain the water and process the agea.
As for biofuels for jets being a stop gap measure, how do you expect to power jets 50 years from now if (when?) oil begins to run out. I don't see charging up some Li-Ion batteries to fly several hundred people from New York to London.
Call me a techno-optimist, but I have faith we can solve these kinds of problems with research and engineering. We've done it before and we'll do it again.
You can bet that the tests were performed for hundreds of hours in controlled environements, you don't just put a couple hundred million dollar airplane into the air and hope that everything works out ok. Of course, there are a ton of variables still to be tested with real world flights: lower air pressure, oxygen density, and temerature for a start.
The thing people don't realize is that modern jet engines can burn practically anything, gas turbines are remarkably flexible. The real questions are how the new fuel affects range and maintanence issues, if the algea fuel gums up the fuel pumps after a half dozen flights, it's not going to see a whole lot of use until all the issues are resolved.
There are companies putting research funds into the subject, but it's far to expensive for home use so far. The only applications that I have heard being anywhere near release are for heads up displays for commercial airliners.
There may not be concrete, scientific goals in mind, but that says more about our current state of knowledge than it does about our lack of direction. Here's 5 not so concrete goals, which IMO make manned spaceflight worth the cost and the risks.
1) First and foremost, the very basic human desire to explore and achieve, especially achieve things that are difficult to do. You might as well ask "Why climb Mount Everest?".
2) A truly challenging goal is the best way to inspire hearts and minds. During the 60's, thousands of people entered into science and engineering, not just to become a part of the space program, but because the space program inspired them to do so. Education in America is scary-bad today, it wouldn't hurt to inspire a new generation with a new goal.
3) Related but seperate, new technologies. I won't make life easy for you, but it should be easy enough to google for a list of all the technologies that have come out of the space program. There are literally hundreds of things that were developed for space but are used every day now. Enough so that the benifit to the economy easily outweighs the cost of the manned space program.
4) We can't stay here forever. Let's face it, sometime down the road, assuming we survive long enough, humanity is going to want to reach to the stars. It might not be for thousands of years, but you can bet it's gonna happen eventually. If nothing else, having experience getting to and from distant objects will come in handy if we ever need to deflect an astroid or comet away from the planet.
4) Last, but certainly not least, pure science. I'm not saying that rovers and landers don't do amazing science, they do. But I'd be willing to wager that we know more about the moon from the relatively few manned trips than we do from all the rovers and landers that we've sent there since. If nothing else, a manned mission requires a return trip and that means a large sample return mission. Something that is difficult to justify for robotic missions.
You know, this reminds me of an idea that I had a while back. The only reason coal plants get away with releasing the pollution they do (including radioactive waste) is because it is distributed over a seemingly large area and not concentrated in one location.
What would the effects be if we did the same with nuclear waste (i.e. spread it evenly over the pacific ocean)? Would there actually be noticable effects or would the radiation be dilutted below the harmful thresholds? I imagine that things lower on the food chain would be fine, but it would accumulate to dangerious levels in carnivores.
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Object-Oriented-Addison-Wesley-Professional/dp/0201633612/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230057946&sr=8-1/
If you're doing oject oriented, there's no better place to start looking when you you're trying to learn good software design. I know, some people say patterns are overused, but they are essential to understanding and designing complex software.
Yes, but only to use the extra RAM and processing time to "cache" all of the crap you never use
I'm confused, you'd rather Windows just didn't do anything with the extra memory and processing power? If you really don't want you hard drive indexed, you can turn off indexing. The memory used to cache frequently used programs is reallocated when necissary, don't let the little graph in the task manager fool you into thinking you don't have enough memory just because your memory is actually being used for a change.
And lets see how well the SLI/Crossfire graphics cards run games while also being called by the desktop window manager and and explorer to redraw aero effects constantly.
Aero is automatically disabled when running any full screen game. If you really hate it that badly, disable it.
Vista has a lot of problems. Having features that many people like, which can be disabled by those who don't, isn't one of them. The only valid complaint you make, in my opinion, is obnoxious UAC prompts.
I don't know why we worry about global warming, we should just go out to Haley's commet once a year, collect a bunch of ice, and drop it into the ocean. Of course, since the warming gets worse every year, the block of ice would also have to increase in size. Thus solving Earth's problems once and for all... 'but what if-' ONCE AND FOR ALL!
The studies in question use several different control groups, including 'sham accupuncture' (i.e. sticking needles randomly), massage, laying in the prone possition, and sugar pills. Usually, the sham accupuncture is shown to have nearly the same effects as 'true accupuncture', which would seem to indicate that being stuck with needles to the problem muscles is the important part. More recently, studies using fMRIs have shown that 'dry needling thearapy' (the research euphamism for accupuncture) temporarily changes the way the brain interpets pain.
Just becasue accupuncture has been around for a long time and has words like 'chi', 'life energy', and 'chakra' associated with the traditional practice doesn't mean that the practice doesn't have merit. The evidence is sufficient that the National Institute of Health has issued a statement that there "is sufficient evidence of acupuncture's value to expand its use into conventional medicine and to encourage further studies of its physiology and clinical value."
It's important to remember that chemistry had its infancy in alchemy; Astronomy grew out of Astrology; Medicine began as a hodge podge of home remedies.
'You've been seeing chiropractors ever since' would seem to imply that you've had ongoing back problems. Isn't it at least possible that with surgery you wouldn't have the back issues that you do?
I was under the impression that for some conditions acupuncture had been shown to have a small but statistically significant benifit, especially when combined with conventional thearapies. Wikipedia cites several published, peer reviewed articles to that effect, especially in regards to chronic lower back pain.
As I understand it, no it isn't going to cause cancer. This isn't radiation flying about the room, not even in the sense of EM radiation like microwaves. These systems use an alternating magnetic current that produces a sympithetic current in the device being charged. Rather than sending power in the EM spectrum and generating a current based on a photovoltaic effect.
Because if you are misleading the public so that they do what you want them to do, that is unethical. I'm not saying that is the case with global warming, but it is the kind of thing that I hear from people quite often.
The reason there is 'such a passionate movement' against stricter environmental standards is that there is a definate economic cost to those standards, in developing countries the impacts would be quite significant. Also, if Global Warming were shown to be untrue, all the effort we spent capping CO2 emmisions could have been spent reducing sulfer or particulate matter or smog, all of which have an immediate and direct impact on health and comfort.
We realized that it's hard to pick up a desktop and carry it to a meeting. That handheld devices are expensive, with small, hard to read screens. That it's a lot easier to take a pen to a sheet of paper to write notes than it is to type. That there's no good way to distribute copies of a document to everyone at a meeting.
Yeah, there are solutions to all of these things, but none that are as cheap and user fiendly as good old paper. Laptops are large and distracting. PDA's don't have good input devices. Tablet PC's might fit the bill, but they are expensive and have never really caught on, especially important in the meeting scenarios.
True. Look at it this way, if Einstien had known about dark energy and the 'big rip', he probably would have put yet another term in his equations to balance everything out and make the universe last forever.
The point of the constant wasn't science, it was designed to make his science line up with his philosophy. People just don't like to hear that Einstien could fall into the same kind of trap that creationists and and young earthers fall for.
Yep, for right now the cost of a gem quality diamond is about the same whehter it's dug out of the ground by an 'almost-but-not-quite' slave in Africa or produced in a lab on the East coast. Of course, there is the ethical difference to examine there, and for that reason my wife will never recieve another 'natural' diamond ever again.
And yeah, I have told her that, and she was suprisingly fine with it, enthusiastic even after I explained the moral arguments of it.
If the new programs are the best thing to happen to NASA in decades, then it should be trivial for Griffin to find a dozen experts in the field to tell Obama as much. Maybe you haven't noticed, but it really seems to me like Obama listens to his advisors and takes what they say into account.
Throwing a temper-tantrum is not the way this should be handled. Give the president-elect the information he needs to make an informed decision about your organization. If you don't like the dicision later, the throw your hissy-fit. Start a public awareness campaign, lobby congress, whatever. Don't deny the commander-in-chief information just because you disagree with him.
Not to mention 1400 kW is a rate of energy, not an amount. When will journalists at least realize that units are kind of important to understanding what they are talking about? I assume that means 1400 kWh, but it could just as well mean they generate 1400 kW on average throughout the day (which would be a pretty impressive chunk of money).
Even assuming 1400 kWh, I can't imagine that number is correct. That's actually a lot of power, and, if true, this system might actually make sense in certain high traffic situations.
You know, it's stuff like this that reminds me that 9 time out of 10, the Slashdot moderation system actually gets it right. We all know it isn't perfect (and often it is the 1 time out of 10 that is the most important) but it ussually does reward people that are trying to add to the conversation. Meta-Moderation weeds out at least some who would abuse the system. And most importantly, it doesn't actually censor (as in romove) things that are not valued by the community at large.
I think the key is that mod points are relatively rare (at least compared to most other sites). That way, when you get mod points you are more interested in bring good comments forward than you are in moving poor comments to the back. I've never understood why other sites don't use a similar system.
For different challenges you could put them to, I would recommend http://projecteuler.net/. There are a huge variety of programming challenges (most involving math concepts) across a huge range of difficulty. They also provide a good introduction to recursion and cost of complexity since the 'most efficient' algorithm is not always obvious.
You could provide prizes for who completed the most problems as well as a prize for being the first to complete a problem. Then when all or most of the class has completed a problem, you can show them an 'efficient' or 'simple' solution depending on which you want to emphasize.
Yeah, I'm not sure how they can extrapolate from a hot jupiter situation to a terrestrial world in the liquid water zone. We can only just barely detect terestrial planets as it is, and even when we can detect them it's only because of special circumstances.
Is Hubble's replacement really that much better that we can safely say it is sensitive enough to do what Hubble can do, except a few orders of magnitude better?
As a side note, the wikipedia article also mentions that methane was detected. Wasn't finding water and methane in the same place once the litmus test for life on exoplanets? Apparently that needs to be re-examined, or we need to imagine a way that life is possible in the 1000k temperature range.
Asimov said it much better than I ever could.
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm/
when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
If we're wrong about the cosmic speed limit, we are wrong about just about everything in our universe; right down to causality itself. We know, for a fact, that some portions of relativity are correct, including time dilation. It has been tested using atomic clocks and our GPS system wouldn't work without the theories being put to real, practical use. Therefore, if FTL travel is possible, then it is possible to travel to your destination and back and return before you have even left.
I can believe many things, but a world without causility is not one of them.
Am I the only one who thinks that a space elevator based on a tethered weight in space(if it actually worked) would drastically alter the Earth's rotation?
Yes.
And as to why, you just don't seem to understand how massive the Earth is compared to anything we are capable of engineering or even moving. The counterweight wouldn't be 1% of 1% of the earth's mass, and certainly wouldn't have any measurable effect on the earth's rotation within the next several thousand years.
In all seriousness, the space elevator gets a lot of press because it's the concept that is easiest for the average person to understand, that doesn't mean it is the only option (or even the best option) to efficiently get stuff into orbit without rockets. I always thought the launch loop made more sense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop/).
The idea is that the moving parts are what keeps the structure stable, rather than tension or compression. In theory it could be built with today's materials and technologies and could be cabable of launching more into orbit in its first month than has been launched to date with conventional rocket launches.
Then of course, there are the non-traditional rockets such as laser propulsion, where a laser is shined up from the ground to superheat the air in the rockets cone, which, in turn, produces thrust. And of course, my personal favorite, there's always Project Orion. Not the wimpy one NASA is using to get to the moon, I'm talking about the original Project Orion. As in, using thermonuclear bombs to launch a city sized spaceship into orbit.
Or your doctor could test your blood for know cancer proteins each time you go in to visit him. Or inspectors could analyze a water samples in real time in third world countries without the infrastructure to do the testing the normal way. Or any number of other things that that the technology could be used for.