I would think that it would be better to stay a liquid at all times and pump the liquid though a heat exchanger to be cooled using conventional refrigeration methods.
The thing is, you typically move immensely more heat via phase changes than by simply raising and lowering a liquid's temperature. For water, heating one mole (about 18g, or 18 ml, or 1.2 tablespoons) of liquid from the freezing point to the boiling point takes about 7.5 kJ; converting that same amount of water from liquid at the boiling point to gas at the boiling point takes over 40 kJ. (Standard pressure, etc, etc.)
That confers a huge advantage in two-phase systems. Yes, you have to deal with bubbles and vapor barriers, but you also get free vigorous agitation, reducing the risks of boundary layers and poor mixing that complicate all-liquid systems.
The difference with this approach is two-phase cooling, where they're actually boiling the heat transfer fluid. That can remove heat a lot more quickly, as long as you can keep a few issues under control:
1) Getting a working fluid with an appropriate boiling point and otherwise acceptable physical parameters (non-flammable, doesn't dissolve your circuitry, etc). 3M has already stepped up to the plate on that.
2) Recondensing the vapor fast enough. This is a lot easier than cooling the circuits directly.
3) Preventing the hot chips from forming a vapor barrier, which insulates the chips from the coolant. The Leidenfrost effect is an example of this, but you can lose efficiency long before you reach the droplets-skittering-around level, especially if there are lots of nooks and crannies where bubbles can get stuck. Presumably the designers have handled this as well.
If they go with a transparent enclosure and some gratuitous lighting, this could become the new mad-scientist/Big Scary Computer visual trope. Let's face it, lab coats, blinking lights and reel-to-reel tape drives are really tired...
If it's generating enough magnetic force to lift a person, it seems like the induced currents must be pretty high. Wonder how hot it gets the substrate, especially if you hover in one place for a bit?
Perhaps you could flip it over and use it as a portable four-element induction stovetop...
It's a small molecule, and therefore not hard to make via random processes (mix elements together and irradiate, for example).
Ethanol is manufactured commercially, within Earth's biosphere by fermentation, but there are lots of other ways to form it. Partially oxidize hydrocarbons, combine ethylene (ethene) with water, reduce carbon dioxide or monoxide with hydrogen -- and those are just three off the top of my head that start with molecules common in space.
...when editors were so very incompetent at displaying non-printing characters that "try deleting the line and retyping it" was a standard debugging technique. It worked often enough to stay in the toolbox. (Helping this was one compiler bug that occasionally wrote into the source file.)
I like to think that we have passed that stage. For many years, I believe that was true. Perhaps the dark times are about to return.
Some things are eternal, though; if you're editing machine code in hex or octal, you're probably safe.
Yeah, I have to say that living forever would really suck if we don't make significant progress against cancer. So if the super-billionaires want immortality for themselves, they're going to need to do something about cancer, and it seems likely that at least some of that success would trickle down to the 99.9999 percent.
Businesses’ growing reliance upon the Internet, and preference to house their data and applications in close proximity to their offices.
The growth of bandwidth-intensive consumer applications like video and gaming, where content must move closer to end users to avoid “lag” and poor performance.
Not exactly the same forces that drove the movement from large, centralized mainframes to small, distributed desktop computers, but really, didn't we see this coming all along?
The retirement of Rep. Rush Holt (D., N.J.), who for 16 years was the House’s resident astrophysicist, represents the latest in a string of departures by members trained in the sciences.
His exit leaves Reps. Bill Foster (D., Ill.) and Jerry McNerney (D., Calif.) as the only remaining members who hold doctorates in the natural and hard sciences out of the 535 senators and representatives in the 114th Congress, according to the Congressional Research Service.
One caveat: this information is taken from that liberal rag, The Wall Street Journal, which is probably just parroting "reality's well-known liberal bias".
Remember when it was not only permissible, but actually admirable to perform chemical experiments? To the point where even legislators would do so, as part of their well-rounded intellectual life?
No? Neither do today's legislators and law-enforcement officials, apparently.
Yes, that's right. TWO-THIRDS of my battery use can be attributed to Web ads and ridiculous Javascript idiocy.
Furthermore, all that activity sets my laptop fans to howling, where they're whisper-quiet without it.
Between the battery wear and the heat-related stress on my hardware, I don't need any more reasons to block ads. The reduction in stress and distraction (from trying to ignore squirming, writhing, strobing fields in my motion-sensitive peripheral vision) is just a bonus.
Or, vice versa. The perceptual/cognitive stuff is the important part, and I get a quieter laptop with three times the battery life as a bonus. Either way works for me.
“[Full automation is] just proven to be a loser of an approach in a lot of other domains,” Mindell says. “I’m not arguing this from first principles. There are 40 years’ worth of examples.”
For how many of those 40 years have today's sensors, computing hardware, and AI been available?
It's possible that fully automated driving will turn out to be hard like commercial fusion power, or like commercial space travel. I think it's more likely, though, that it will turn out to be hard like speech recognition or cheap, lightweight flying drones -- each popularly regarded to be "a few years away" for decades, until suddenly it was here, courtesy of a few research advances and a great deal of exponential improvement in computer hardware.
> The specific activities involved in the computer you used to type your message require quantum mechanics.
So is basic chemistry, looked at closely enough. The idea that something cannot be created or functionally replicated because it's quantum mechanical is, I'm afraid, a nonsensical one.
Precisely. Even if you can't reproduce the precise quantum state of a macroscopic system, you can produce a "functional equivalent" without doing so. If the two systems can only be distinguished by observing quantum-level detail -- which, of course, alters that detail anyhow -- does that distinction matter?
Whether the complex interaction of state and process between a brain and its senses, between physical layout of neurons and ongoing biochemical interatctions, can be replicated to an electromechanical system seems unlikely in the extreme. Complex analog interactions are difficult to model precisely, much less replicate to the kind of essentially "digital" structure of modern computer systems.
Again, though, does it matter? Isn't it possible that there's some threshold below which detailed distinction doesn't matter, any more than the detailed distinction between you-this-second and you-one-second-ago makes you a different person?
The entire concept of uploading/duplicating is based on a deterministic view of the universe - one without quantum mechanics.
This viewpoint is false. Not only is quantum mechanics part of the universe, but the specific reactions involved in the brain require quantum mechanics.
As such, the concept of a physical copy or uploading is nonsensical. It can not be done. The best we can do is make a poor copy - one that will NOT react the way the real you would.
What?
The specific activities involved in the computer you used to type your message require quantum mechanics. Perhaps that explains whey the poor copy that appears on my screen seems somehow incomplete or off-base.
It's possible that quantum activities in the brain make the processes of consciousness somehow non-classical and incapable of replication, but not only is the jury still out on that, I'm not even sure we've finished arraigning the suspects.
According to the FEC, contributions to Democrats so far total US$64.2 million, while contributions to Republicans total US$61.2 million. Hillary Clinton has received US$47.1 million, more than the top three Republican candidates combined. (Not surprising, given the fragmentation of the Republican field).
The summary's breathless implication that "rich Republican bankers are buying the Presidency" doesn't appear to reflect the facts.
"Insightful"? Okay, I'll admit I was kind of nervous that that might happen.
No, I haven't seen a joint in a long time, so I'm not sure what one actually weighs. I figured it would be more than a gram, counting paper (which is also plant material that gets burned).
Yes, I was referring to ignorant-American "Calories" (kcal), not one-water-gram-degree-C calories.
So, if you go for (say) an hour's hard run, you're burning many hundreds of extra calories. That translates into "burning" (converting to carbon dioxide and water) a hundred or more grams of carbohydrate and protein, and/or tens of grams of fats. Worse, you need to replenish that energy with food-grade material, which most often has been farmed, trucked, and packaged, all of which consumes more energy. That one-hour run ends up cranking out hundreds of grams of carbon dioxide.
If, on the other hand, you simply burn through one medium-sized joint, you're only combusting a few grams of plant material. I'll bet the total CO2 output is less than ten grams.
Admittedly, there are health benefits to running. But at what cost to the health of the planet?
Ancient scrolls of dubious provenance hint darkly that DDR4 was not the first inhabitant of the RAM slots we consider so permanent. Debased cultists still sometimes mutter chants mentioning "PC100", or even uncouth syllables such as "korr"...
I'm not sure what a historic timeline of these ratios (not "differences", please) would gain you.
These ratios can have a big impact on what algorithms and implementations you choose to maximize performance. I suppose if, say, the ratio of RAM to disk speed increased by a factor of 10 over the decade before last, then decreased back to its original ratio in the last decade, it might be worth trawling through some old papers (or old source trees) to revisit lessons learned in the earlier period -- but that seems like a bit of a stretch.
If you're just curious, it shouldn't be too hard to generate timelines of CPU cycle speeds, cache and RAM latencies and bandwidths, disk performance, and so on. But really, each of those has enough factors that a simple "ratio" would probably conceal more than it illuminates.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think that it would be better to stay a liquid at all times and pump the liquid though a heat exchanger to be cooled using conventional refrigeration methods.
The thing is, you typically move immensely more heat via phase changes than by simply raising and lowering a liquid's temperature. For water, heating one mole (about 18g, or 18 ml, or 1.2 tablespoons) of liquid from the freezing point to the boiling point takes about 7.5 kJ; converting that same amount of water from liquid at the boiling point to gas at the boiling point takes over 40 kJ. (Standard pressure, etc, etc.)
That confers a huge advantage in two-phase systems. Yes, you have to deal with bubbles and vapor barriers, but you also get free vigorous agitation, reducing the risks of boundary layers and poor mixing that complicate all-liquid systems.
The difference with this approach is two-phase cooling, where they're actually boiling the heat transfer fluid. That can remove heat a lot more quickly, as long as you can keep a few issues under control:
1) Getting a working fluid with an appropriate boiling point and otherwise acceptable physical parameters (non-flammable, doesn't dissolve your circuitry, etc). 3M has already stepped up to the plate on that.
2) Recondensing the vapor fast enough. This is a lot easier than cooling the circuits directly.
3) Preventing the hot chips from forming a vapor barrier, which insulates the chips from the coolant. The Leidenfrost effect is an example of this, but you can lose efficiency long before you reach the droplets-skittering-around level, especially if there are lots of nooks and crannies where bubbles can get stuck. Presumably the designers have handled this as well.
If they go with a transparent enclosure and some gratuitous lighting, this could become the new mad-scientist/Big Scary Computer visual trope. Let's face it, lab coats, blinking lights and reel-to-reel tape drives are really tired...
If it's generating enough magnetic force to lift a person, it seems like the induced currents must be pretty high. Wonder how hot it gets the substrate, especially if you hover in one place for a bit?
Perhaps you could flip it over and use it as a portable four-element induction stovetop...
It's clearly guilty of Orbiting While Black. It should count itself lucky if it doesn't get the full Tempel 1 treatment.
It's a small molecule, and therefore not hard to make via random processes (mix elements together and irradiate, for example).
Ethanol is manufactured commercially, within Earth's biosphere by fermentation, but there are lots of other ways to form it. Partially oxidize hydrocarbons, combine ethylene (ethene) with water, reduce carbon dioxide or monoxide with hydrogen -- and those are just three off the top of my head that start with molecules common in space.
...when editors were so very incompetent at displaying non-printing characters that "try deleting the line and retyping it" was a standard debugging technique. It worked often enough to stay in the toolbox. (Helping this was one compiler bug that occasionally wrote into the source file.)
I like to think that we have passed that stage. For many years, I believe that was true. Perhaps the dark times are about to return.
Some things are eternal, though; if you're editing machine code in hex or octal, you're probably safe.
Welp, we're screwed.
Yeah, I have to say that living forever would really suck if we don't make significant progress against cancer. So if the super-billionaires want immortality for themselves, they're going to need to do something about cancer, and it seems likely that at least some of that success would trickle down to the 99.9999 percent.
You sound like someone who's never encountered the tenure process.
I see no social-media links for him in the article. No Twitter, no Facebook, not even a Slashdot ID. How can he possibly be anyone of importance?
"That's how he preserves his mental capacity"? I don't understand. Is that a meme?
Someone, of course, will have to mount that device to an airplane made from a drone registration form.
FTFA:
This is being driven by two trends:
Not exactly the same forces that drove the movement from large, centralized mainframes to small, distributed desktop computers, but really, didn't we see this coming all along?
Since Ben Carson isn't actually a legislator, I think you're supporting my point.
To be fair, we do have a very few contemporary counterexamples to my cynical comment:
The retirement of Rep. Rush Holt (D., N.J.), who for 16 years was the House’s resident astrophysicist, represents the latest in a string of departures by members trained in the sciences.
His exit leaves Reps. Bill Foster (D., Ill.) and Jerry McNerney (D., Calif.) as the only remaining members who hold doctorates in the natural and hard sciences out of the 535 senators and representatives in the 114th Congress, according to the Congressional Research Service.
One caveat: this information is taken from that liberal rag, The Wall Street Journal, which is probably just parroting "reality's well-known liberal bias".
Remember when it was not only permissible, but actually admirable to perform chemical experiments? To the point where even legislators would do so, as part of their well-rounded intellectual life?
No? Neither do today's legislators and law-enforcement officials, apparently.
Yes, that's right. TWO-THIRDS of my battery use can be attributed to Web ads and ridiculous Javascript idiocy.
Furthermore, all that activity sets my laptop fans to howling, where they're whisper-quiet without it.
Between the battery wear and the heat-related stress on my hardware, I don't need any more reasons to block ads. The reduction in stress and distraction (from trying to ignore squirming, writhing, strobing fields in my motion-sensitive peripheral vision) is just a bonus.
Or, vice versa. The perceptual/cognitive stuff is the important part, and I get a quieter laptop with three times the battery life as a bonus. Either way works for me.
If you believe that any unfamiliar USB stick looks "harmless", you clearly haven't been paying attention.
From the article:
“[Full automation is] just proven to be a loser of an approach in a lot of other domains,” Mindell says. “I’m not arguing this from first principles. There are 40 years’ worth of examples.”
For how many of those 40 years have today's sensors, computing hardware, and AI been available?
It's possible that fully automated driving will turn out to be hard like commercial fusion power, or like commercial space travel. I think it's more likely, though, that it will turn out to be hard like speech recognition or cheap, lightweight flying drones -- each popularly regarded to be "a few years away" for decades, until suddenly it was here, courtesy of a few research advances and a great deal of exponential improvement in computer hardware.
> The specific activities involved in the computer you used to type your message require quantum mechanics.
So is basic chemistry, looked at closely enough. The idea that something cannot be created or functionally replicated because it's quantum mechanical is, I'm afraid, a nonsensical one.
Precisely. Even if you can't reproduce the precise quantum state of a macroscopic system, you can produce a "functional equivalent" without doing so. If the two systems can only be distinguished by observing quantum-level detail -- which, of course, alters that detail anyhow -- does that distinction matter?
Whether the complex interaction of state and process between a brain and its senses, between physical layout of neurons and ongoing biochemical interatctions, can be replicated to an electromechanical system seems unlikely in the extreme. Complex analog interactions are difficult to model precisely, much less replicate to the kind of essentially "digital" structure of modern computer systems.
Again, though, does it matter? Isn't it possible that there's some threshold below which detailed distinction doesn't matter, any more than the detailed distinction between you-this-second and you-one-second-ago makes you a different person?
The entire concept of uploading/duplicating is based on a deterministic view of the universe - one without quantum mechanics.
This viewpoint is false. Not only is quantum mechanics part of the universe, but the specific reactions involved in the brain require quantum mechanics.
As such, the concept of a physical copy or uploading is nonsensical. It can not be done. The best we can do is make a poor copy - one that will NOT react the way the real you would.
What?
The specific activities involved in the computer you used to type your message require quantum mechanics. Perhaps that explains whey the poor copy that appears on my screen seems somehow incomplete or off-base.
It's possible that quantum activities in the brain make the processes of consciousness somehow non-classical and incapable of replication, but not only is the jury still out on that, I'm not even sure we've finished arraigning the suspects.
According to the FEC, contributions to Democrats so far total US$64.2 million, while contributions to Republicans total US$61.2 million. Hillary Clinton has received US$47.1 million, more than the top three Republican candidates combined. (Not surprising, given the fragmentation of the Republican field).
The summary's breathless implication that "rich Republican bankers are buying the Presidency" doesn't appear to reflect the facts.
"Insightful"? Okay, I'll admit I was kind of nervous that that might happen.
No, I haven't seen a joint in a long time, so I'm not sure what one actually weighs. I figured it would be more than a gram, counting paper (which is also plant material that gets burned).
Yes, I was referring to ignorant-American "Calories" (kcal), not one-water-gram-degree-C calories.
No, I wasn't serious.
So, if you go for (say) an hour's hard run, you're burning many hundreds of extra calories. That translates into "burning" (converting to carbon dioxide and water) a hundred or more grams of carbohydrate and protein, and/or tens of grams of fats. Worse, you need to replenish that energy with food-grade material, which most often has been farmed, trucked, and packaged, all of which consumes more energy. That one-hour run ends up cranking out hundreds of grams of carbon dioxide.
If, on the other hand, you simply burn through one medium-sized joint, you're only combusting a few grams of plant material. I'll bet the total CO2 output is less than ten grams.
Admittedly, there are health benefits to running. But at what cost to the health of the planet?
Phonetic rendering of "core".
Ancient scrolls of dubious provenance hint darkly that DDR4 was not the first inhabitant of the RAM slots we consider so permanent. Debased cultists still sometimes mutter chants mentioning "PC100", or even uncouth syllables such as "korr"...
I'm not sure what a historic timeline of these ratios (not "differences", please) would gain you.
These ratios can have a big impact on what algorithms and implementations you choose to maximize performance. I suppose if, say, the ratio of RAM to disk speed increased by a factor of 10 over the decade before last, then decreased back to its original ratio in the last decade, it might be worth trawling through some old papers (or old source trees) to revisit lessons learned in the earlier period -- but that seems like a bit of a stretch.
If you're just curious, it shouldn't be too hard to generate timelines of CPU cycle speeds, cache and RAM latencies and bandwidths, disk performance, and so on. But really, each of those has enough factors that a simple "ratio" would probably conceal more than it illuminates.