Came here to say this. Still running a late-2011 17-inch MBP, and I'd be completely satisfied with it if the fans didn't howl so much every time I enabled Flash, and if it did honest 4K video out. Bought it refurb, put in 16GB of RAM for $90, and recently upgraded to a 960GB SSD. As long as Apple's new laptops don't support RAM or disk upgrades, they're going to have a really hard time convincing me to buy into the new shiny. Because, see, buying a new machine every two years is a WASTE OF TIME, RESOURCES AND MONEY.
I've been an Apple user since 1985, but if they can't make a go of it without forcing people onto disposable hardware with a two-year lifespan, I'm not going to help save them.
Problem is, this is a lot more "just the beginning" than "in the end".
How many such systems do you suppose have been penetrated by folks who do know what they're doing, and are just sitting on their access until the next political party convention, or major sporting event, or...?
This explains the explosive intellectual development that resulted from the introduction of Twitter. Or, for that matter, Usenet.
Waxing a bit more serious, written correspondence does afford the opportunity for depth, precision, complexity, and refinement. Unfortunately, it in no way enforces them.
It's also worth clarifying that we're talking about US silver coins of standard composition, not Franklin Mint "sterling" or "layered" or "gold/platinum edition" dreck. US silver is reliably 90% silver, 10% copper.
The US Mint does (still) produce official commemorative coins each year. Usually, it's half-dollars minted in copper-nickel clad composition, dollars minted in the same size and composition as traditional silver dollars (26.73 g of 90% silver, 10% copper), and gold $5 coins minted in the same size and composition as traditional half eagles (8.36 g of 90% gold, 10% copper). There are also oddities like the First Spouse series (1/2 troy ounce of.999 gold), last year's Kennedy commemorative half (3/4 troy ounce of.999 gold), and whatnot.
So instead of "stop, drop and roll", it's presumably "stand perfectly still so the flames will starve quickly"?
On the other hand, since astronauts aren't routinely passing out in a cloud of their own exhaled CO2, I guess there's enough forced air circulation to keep the flames going more than long enough.
My serious question is: what is to prevent individual researchers from just publishing what they have as a PDF or WordPress article on a random site on the Internet?
Several things and this is by no means an exhaustive list.
Valid points, all. Some more thoughts on each:
1) It's hard to cite articles not published in the standard fashion. Citations matter for professional reputation and advancement in academia.
Arxiv.org is pretty well standardized at this point. So are DOIs. As for the reputation of the cited medium, well, that's a chicken-and-egg problem, but there are signs of increasing fertility among the open-access chickens.
2) Being published in professional journals (especially key ones for their field) is a big part of their ability to get tenure and grants. (publish or perish)
Again, chicken-and-egg. Big, reputable journals attract and publish big, reputable work, which boosts and maintains their size and reputation. But sucking away resources for the profit of the journal owners adds significant friction to scientific progress.
3) Journals are distributed to interested parties. Just putting a PDF on a web server doesn't mean interested parties will know it exists.
Arxiv.org is pretty well known. Paid subscription models, especially very expensive subscriptions, confound "interest" with "wealth" and/or "affiliation with a large institution".
4) Continued availability - journals are maintained by libraries and publishing companies so future researchers can find them. Easy for a URL to just vanish.
Paper archives are not immortal and indestructible, either. They've proven durable for hundreds of years when well-maintained, but they're vulnerable to fire, theft, vandalism, and other physical risks. Any one particular digital storage medium is unlikely to be as durable as paper -- but digital information is much easier to losslessly copy, distribute, and store, and generational migrations to new storage media can make it as permanent as we want.
It may be because fluid-based heat-piping systems rely on vaporizing a working fluid to absorb heat and condensing it to dispose of that heat. Evaporation and condensation tend to happen at a fixed temperature (varying with pressure) for a given working fluid. I don't know how well such a system would let you keep a wide surface at a uniform arbitrary temperature. In other words, it might be easy to build a plate that would keep your food warm for serving at a perfect 60 C, or one to fry things at 180 C, but not one that could be adjusted to both.
If you're looking to "invest capital in your company's future", you don't have to buy legislators in all 50 states; you can just buy the right ones at the federal level, and the courts will take care of the rest.
It might prove to be the case, especially if somebody comes up with a clever way of producing the stuff in bulk, that these microfluidic interfaces will end up being used in larger cooling applications as well;
Never mind cooling applications -- make this cheap enough, and I want to see it in cookware.
Not to be flip, but there are quite a few applications where keeping a uniform temperature across a surface with widely varying heat loads would be a big win. The mind boggles.
I... I'm not sure what you're trying to say. What's "more extreme" than what? Why are "old copper pennies" an "outlier" for having a face value less than their melt value, when the same is true of all silver coins and all gold coins?
The spot value of the silver in $1.00 worth of silver quarters (or dimes or half dollars) is around $11. If you melted them down, refined them into.999 silver, and cast that silver as part of a "good delivery bar", that's how much you'd get for it in the big exchanges. (Note that "good delivery bars" are a lot bigger than that, though, generally around 1000 troy ounces, currently about $15K per bar.)
However, the coins are worth more if you DON'T melt and refine them in the current market. Gather enough silver coins to be worth $1000 or $10000 at today's silver price -- that's actual value, not face value -- and you can sell them to the big dealers for 12 or more times face value. To buy them back from those same big dealers, you'll pay 13 or 14 times face value, because the dealers need to make money.
Gold coins currently have a melt value about 61.5 times their face value. You can sometimes buy common $5, $10 or $20 gold coins for not too much more than melt value. $1 and $2.5 coins have more numismatic value unless they're severely damaged, $3 coins are quite expensive, and $4 patterns and $50 commemoratives are stratospheric.
...well, hopefully not fuel that you burn all at once.
Sooner or later, helium is going to be too expensive for even the military to use it in large lighter-than-air craft. We'll have to move to using hydrogen. As long as we've got a big bag of hydrogen, why not use some of it for fuel?
I wanted to do something like this when I first learned about fuel cells back in middle school. I didn't know much about fuel cells, as it turned out. I also didn't have a platinum budget.
If you've got the technology, highly directional transmissions have advantages over broadcast, and higher-frequency transmissions (including or perhaps surpassing optical frequencies) have advantages over lower-frequency spectrum. If your civilization is blasting out easily-demodulated radio transmissions across the cosmos, it's not really that advanced.
Couple that with the observation that colonists in another solar system would have to wait years to see Kanye West's lastest tweets, and you have all the answer you need to "where ARE they?" -- they're clustered within the bounds of lower planetary orbit, constantly upgrading the bandwidth of their network connections, desperately trying to make sure that they don't miss the latest cat video.
Copper was selling for $3.65/lb at its peak, years ago. It's now down to $2.20/lb. Further, that price is for "Grade A" pure copper. The 95% copper found in pre-1982 cents would get you less, even if it were legal to melt them down.
Coinflation reports current "melt prices" (the amount you could be paid for metal content, assuming you could separate the component metals for free) of current and obsolete US coins. For US clad coins to be "worth" more than face value, the dollar price of their nickel and copper would have to rise to almost nine times its current value.
Silver coins are another story. They actually trade at more than the value of the silver they contain -- their "melt price" is just over 11 times face value, but you can sell them in quantity for more than 12x, and you'll generally need to pay more than that to buy them.
If the linked article can't even get basic math right -- 12V * 3A = 36W, not 60W -- I'm not sure how much I should trust the rest of its unsourced numbers.
I went off to Google looking for these "thorins", but had little luck beyond this very press release. It turns out that the term is actually tholin, originally attributed to our old friend Carl Sagan.
It's almost as though there were a Mandarin speaker somewhere in the publicity chain...
Eh, maybe. I guess I was thinking of "intercept" in the sense of "x-intercept" on a graph. You're in the way of about half of the radiation, but you're absorbing only a tiny fraction of that. As you say, phones wouldn't work well if it were otherwise.
You seem to be thinking of a different wavelength. We're talking about 80GHz here. I actually get less than 60cm, but that's assuming 100% antenna efficiency.
Well, I was replying to a post about "fried birds falling from the sky", but sure, go ahead and point to a study that shows higher increases in cancer rate with lower levels of radiation -- it's a miracle life ever arose on Earth, apparently, what with our exposure to the homeopathic death aura of cosmic background microwave radiation.
As far as actual risk, you're more likely to be killed by flying goalposts, at least in this thread, apparently.
You must get really tired of frying the side of your head with your cell phone, then; its maximum transmit power is more than one watt, and if you're holding it to your ear, you're intercepting close to half of that power.
This isn't a high-power transmitter. This is a low-power, but hyperdirectional transmitter. Think cantenna on steroids.
According to TFA, the highly directional antenna gives a peak effective power of 96kW along its lobe, but total radiated power is 500mW -- half a watt. So the comparison to "powerful FM radio transmitters" is kind of silly. In fact, it's even sillier than that, because FM broadcasts (at least here in the US) are around 100MHz, and this transmitter will be in the range of 70-80GHz, with completely different propagation characteristics.
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Came here to say this. Still running a late-2011 17-inch MBP, and I'd be completely satisfied with it if the fans didn't howl so much every time I enabled Flash, and if it did honest 4K video out. Bought it refurb, put in 16GB of RAM for $90, and recently upgraded to a 960GB SSD. As long as Apple's new laptops don't support RAM or disk upgrades, they're going to have a really hard time convincing me to buy into the new shiny. Because, see, buying a new machine every two years is a WASTE OF TIME, RESOURCES AND MONEY.
I've been an Apple user since 1985, but if they can't make a go of it without forcing people onto disposable hardware with a two-year lifespan, I'm not going to help save them.
Problem is, this is a lot more "just the beginning" than "in the end".
How many such systems do you suppose have been penetrated by folks who do know what they're doing, and are just sitting on their access until the next political party convention, or major sporting event, or...?
This explains the explosive intellectual development that resulted from the introduction of Twitter. Or, for that matter, Usenet.
Waxing a bit more serious, written correspondence does afford the opportunity for depth, precision, complexity, and refinement. Unfortunately, it in no way enforces them.
That would be 0.00000000000055 light-fortnights, of course.
It's also worth clarifying that we're talking about US silver coins of standard composition, not Franklin Mint "sterling" or "layered" or "gold/platinum edition" dreck. US silver is reliably 90% silver, 10% copper.
The US Mint does (still) produce official commemorative coins each year. Usually, it's half-dollars minted in copper-nickel clad composition, dollars minted in the same size and composition as traditional silver dollars (26.73 g of 90% silver, 10% copper), and gold $5 coins minted in the same size and composition as traditional half eagles (8.36 g of 90% gold, 10% copper). There are also oddities like the First Spouse series (1/2 troy ounce of .999 gold), last year's Kennedy commemorative half (3/4 troy ounce of .999 gold), and whatnot.
Tell me more about this concept of "society" that does not entail any degree of mutual obligation or reciprocity.
So instead of "stop, drop and roll", it's presumably "stand perfectly still so the flames will starve quickly"?
On the other hand, since astronauts aren't routinely passing out in a cloud of their own exhaled CO2, I guess there's enough forced air circulation to keep the flames going more than long enough.
My serious question is: what is to prevent individual researchers from just publishing what they have as a PDF or WordPress article on a random site on the Internet?
Several things and this is by no means an exhaustive list.
Valid points, all. Some more thoughts on each:
1) It's hard to cite articles not published in the standard fashion. Citations matter for professional reputation and advancement in academia.
Arxiv.org is pretty well standardized at this point. So are DOIs. As for the reputation of the cited medium, well, that's a chicken-and-egg problem, but there are signs of increasing fertility among the open-access chickens.
2) Being published in professional journals (especially key ones for their field) is a big part of their ability to get tenure and grants. (publish or perish)
Again, chicken-and-egg. Big, reputable journals attract and publish big, reputable work, which boosts and maintains their size and reputation. But sucking away resources for the profit of the journal owners adds significant friction to scientific progress.
3) Journals are distributed to interested parties. Just putting a PDF on a web server doesn't mean interested parties will know it exists.
Arxiv.org is pretty well known. Paid subscription models, especially very expensive subscriptions, confound "interest" with "wealth" and/or "affiliation with a large institution".
4) Continued availability - journals are maintained by libraries and publishing companies so future researchers can find them. Easy for a URL to just vanish.
Paper archives are not immortal and indestructible, either. They've proven durable for hundreds of years when well-maintained, but they're vulnerable to fire, theft, vandalism, and other physical risks. Any one particular digital storage medium is unlikely to be as durable as paper -- but digital information is much easier to losslessly copy, distribute, and store, and generational migrations to new storage media can make it as permanent as we want.
It may be because fluid-based heat-piping systems rely on vaporizing a working fluid to absorb heat and condensing it to dispose of that heat. Evaporation and condensation tend to happen at a fixed temperature (varying with pressure) for a given working fluid. I don't know how well such a system would let you keep a wide surface at a uniform arbitrary temperature. In other words, it might be easy to build a plate that would keep your food warm for serving at a perfect 60 C, or one to fry things at 180 C, but not one that could be adjusted to both.
If you're looking to "invest capital in your company's future", you don't have to buy legislators in all 50 states; you can just buy the right ones at the federal level, and the courts will take care of the rest.
It might prove to be the case, especially if somebody comes up with a clever way of producing the stuff in bulk, that these microfluidic interfaces will end up being used in larger cooling applications as well;
Never mind cooling applications -- make this cheap enough, and I want to see it in cookware.
Not to be flip, but there are quite a few applications where keeping a uniform temperature across a surface with widely varying heat loads would be a big win. The mind boggles.
If he told you where the goal-posts were, you wouldn't be able to know how fast they're moving.
Um... by catching them in the act of making or distributing child pornography? Maybe?
Wimp. My graphics card is my furnace.
I... I'm not sure what you're trying to say. What's "more extreme" than what? Why are "old copper pennies" an "outlier" for having a face value less than their melt value, when the same is true of all silver coins and all gold coins?
The spot value of the silver in $1.00 worth of silver quarters (or dimes or half dollars) is around $11. If you melted them down, refined them into .999 silver, and cast that silver as part of a "good delivery bar", that's how much you'd get for it in the big exchanges. (Note that "good delivery bars" are a lot bigger than that, though, generally around 1000 troy ounces, currently about $15K per bar.)
However, the coins are worth more if you DON'T melt and refine them in the current market. Gather enough silver coins to be worth $1000 or $10000 at today's silver price -- that's actual value, not face value -- and you can sell them to the big dealers for 12 or more times face value. To buy them back from those same big dealers, you'll pay 13 or 14 times face value, because the dealers need to make money.
Gold coins currently have a melt value about 61.5 times their face value. You can sometimes buy common $5, $10 or $20 gold coins for not too much more than melt value. $1 and $2.5 coins have more numismatic value unless they're severely damaged, $3 coins are quite expensive, and $4 patterns and $50 commemoratives are stratospheric.
...well, hopefully not fuel that you burn all at once.
Sooner or later, helium is going to be too expensive for even the military to use it in large lighter-than-air craft. We'll have to move to using hydrogen. As long as we've got a big bag of hydrogen, why not use some of it for fuel?
I wanted to do something like this when I first learned about fuel cells back in middle school. I didn't know much about fuel cells, as it turned out. I also didn't have a platinum budget.
If you've got the technology, highly directional transmissions have advantages over broadcast, and higher-frequency transmissions (including or perhaps surpassing optical frequencies) have advantages over lower-frequency spectrum. If your civilization is blasting out easily-demodulated radio transmissions across the cosmos, it's not really that advanced.
Couple that with the observation that colonists in another solar system would have to wait years to see Kanye West's lastest tweets, and you have all the answer you need to "where ARE they?" -- they're clustered within the bounds of lower planetary orbit, constantly upgrading the bandwidth of their network connections, desperately trying to make sure that they don't miss the latest cat video.
Copper was selling for $3.65/lb at its peak, years ago. It's now down to $2.20/lb. Further, that price is for "Grade A" pure copper. The 95% copper found in pre-1982 cents would get you less, even if it were legal to melt them down.
Coinflation reports current "melt prices" (the amount you could be paid for metal content, assuming you could separate the component metals for free) of current and obsolete US coins. For US clad coins to be "worth" more than face value, the dollar price of their nickel and copper would have to rise to almost nine times its current value.
Silver coins are another story. They actually trade at more than the value of the silver they contain -- their "melt price" is just over 11 times face value, but you can sell them in quantity for more than 12x, and you'll generally need to pay more than that to buy them.
If the linked article can't even get basic math right -- 12V * 3A = 36W, not 60W -- I'm not sure how much I should trust the rest of its unsourced numbers.
It looks like QuickCharge 3.0 will support voltages up to 20V, but I don't know when that'll become available in commercial products.
I think there may be more concern about electrolytically-accellerated corrosion. That can happen even at very low voltages and leakage currents.
I went off to Google looking for these "thorins", but had little luck beyond this very press release. It turns out that the term is actually tholin , originally attributed to our old friend Carl Sagan.
It's almost as though there were a Mandarin speaker somewhere in the publicity chain...
Eh, maybe. I guess I was thinking of "intercept" in the sense of "x-intercept" on a graph. You're in the way of about half of the radiation, but you're absorbing only a tiny fraction of that. As you say, phones wouldn't work well if it were otherwise.
You seem to be thinking of a different wavelength. We're talking about 80GHz here. I actually get less than 60cm, but that's assuming 100% antenna efficiency.
Well, I was replying to a post about "fried birds falling from the sky", but sure, go ahead and point to a study that shows higher increases in cancer rate with lower levels of radiation -- it's a miracle life ever arose on Earth, apparently, what with our exposure to the homeopathic death aura of cosmic background microwave radiation.
As far as actual risk, you're more likely to be killed by flying goalposts, at least in this thread, apparently.
You must get really tired of frying the side of your head with your cell phone, then; its maximum transmit power is more than one watt, and if you're holding it to your ear, you're intercepting close to half of that power.
This isn't a high-power transmitter. This is a low-power, but hyperdirectional transmitter. Think cantenna on steroids.
According to TFA, the highly directional antenna gives a peak effective power of 96kW along its lobe, but total radiated power is 500mW -- half a watt. So the comparison to "powerful FM radio transmitters" is kind of silly. In fact, it's even sillier than that, because FM broadcasts (at least here in the US) are around 100MHz, and this transmitter will be in the range of 70-80GHz, with completely different propagation characteristics.