It makes me sound slightly conspiracy-theorist, but I think that is the most important proof that the hostile treatment of Iran in recent years isn't really about nukes. At the height of the "let's bomb iran" fever when it looked as though it might actually happen, the DPRK ran a series of missile tests over the pacific towards the US, and at another point ground tested a bomb that they claimed was nuclear. In both cases North Korea was almost totally ignored.
I use parasites as my naming scheme for planets I conquer when playing GalCiv. Schistosomiasis is one of the names that goes to a war factory world. After a few games it is quite surprising how many types of worm you can remember the name for.
Spacecraft are extremely fragile things, relatively speaking.
Lightsail craft particularly so. You'd have to think of the final stage of the probe as something like a re-entry capsule on a grand scale. The only really tricky bit of it is the cable itself which has to bear the full force and must be made from a limited range of materials as it must superconduct and flex, both at once.
The moon has a number of advantages for launching raw materials into its local space. The lack of an atmosphere is the major one. You can use even a very weak mass driver to shunt something into a path high enough for a low lunar orbit at which point you could use any slow but efficient electric thrusters of your choice. It helps a lot to save on fuel if you can make a larger gun to fire stuff higher of course, if you can get resources into something approximating a stable orbit with only a tiny thrust of its own power it makes collecting them much easier.
Yes, absolutely. It has been proposed as a part of laser-boosted lightsail missions to other stars. A full sized collector scoop would work in interstellar gas, but you only need a relatively small magnet if you are plowing through solar wind (er... stellar wind, since it isn't Sol?). A superconducting cable spooled out of a probe and given a current could be used as a braking system to decelerate at a destination star. I recall seeing an estimate somewhere that the peak deceleration of a relativistic craft like this hitting the heliopause would be about 12g, not comfortable but very effective and cheap way to slow down.
Magnetic sails have also been proposed as a way to accelerate in the first place, but in that case you are limited to speeds less than that of the solar wind itself, so it is more suited to in-system missions.
Actually it's too dense. At high speeds (significant fractions of lightspeed) a magnetic scoop acts like a very effective braking system in interstellar gas. A Bussard type ramscoop rocket could only be expected to reach about 0.12c even with highly efficient engines.
I think he is referring to the way that Feynmann diagrams allow you to represent an antiparticle as being a particle moving backwards in time. A particle/antiparticle pair then just becomes one particle going forwards and backwards in a loop. There was some talk that this way of looking at it may be physically real and that all particles are one, but taking a really circuitious route through time. It doesn't hold up well because there isn't enough antimatter around to allow it as far as we can see. I'm not sure it was ever supposed to apply to photons in any case.
"All in the UK should pay a £5 per month carTheftTAX, we should also pay £10 per month towards house burglaries...... see where this is going."
Car insurance is a legal requirement. Many landlords require that tenants get home insurance as part of their rent. Those are a good idea because when something goes wrong it is the victim that benefits, the person who paid gets something back. No insurance company in their right mind would offer piracy insurance, our government should perhaps take the time to wonder why.
It isn't bad in operating systems that are currently incapable of abusing a monopoly position because they have such a low market share.
I think that all they are really doing is having fun with the precedents they set way back when they forced MS to release a version of windows without media player. Remember that this isn't yet decided on, it is very likely that this is just a reminder not to complain about penalties imposed being unreasonable, demonstrating in advance that it could have been a lot worse.
Without a theory of quantum gravity, we can't say with certainty what happens when an atom is near a microscopic black hole. The radius in which for practical purposes it is trapped and going to be captured might be several orders of magnitude larger than the event horizon. Granted probably not the 50 orders of magnitude that your numbers imply would be needed, but it's still something I'd hope somebody would have thought of before trying to switch the machine on.
It's the energy density that's the problem. What the LHC will produce is relatively low energy particles by cosmic ray standards but in huge numbers in a tiny space, constantly replenished. Any group of collisions forming a black hole in normal matter won't be able to absorb enough mass for the hole to grow because there simply isn't the density available to counteract its mass loss. The question is whether the beams can supply a black hole with enough mass that it passes the turning point and is able to grow further from the mass absorbed by falling through Earth's crust.
There's more to cynicism than just assuming the worst of people. As several commenters above have pointed out, space tourism is hardly a big moneymaker. It was really more of a way to ensure that the soyuz programme had continuous funding in between state paid missions so that production of rockets didn't have to be inconveniently irregular. The soyuz vehicles themselves are starting to become obsolete so even if the ISS wasn't undergoing changes there would be lessened reason to keep tourist flights going.
The Welsh. I'm told there is one small valley somewhere in South America's northern coast where the Welsh language is still used. It's about the only place where it is.
I've got no idea why this was modded troll, it's perfectly accurate. That's not to say that people's perception of the value of media is accurate, but that there are large numbers of people who believe information is overpriced should be obvious.
Re:Until there is a robot in the kitchen
on
The Best Robots of 2008
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A memristor isn't going to suddenly allow you to make computers that can do more than any other turing-machine-alike.
If it did change the game for mobile AIs, we'd be able to simulate the effect on giant static hardware already.
So you need a way for the external machine to influence parts of your brain. If you can make a computer override the output of any particular neuron then you can burn out and take over the running of one neuron at a time. It's the ship of theseus problem made to work for you. Your identity is not embedded in any particular cell, so you could remain conscious though the duration of the transfer process. I imagine it taking quite a long time, I wouldn't be comfortable with it unless the transfer took a good fraction of a year, but the principle is sound even if you do it more quickly.
Put it this way: as we come closer to a point where we expect our population to increase to over ten billion and oil prices to rise making oil-based fertilisers far more expensive, it is best not to risk adding even more problems with our food supply.
Few people seem to want to accept it but we are already committed to a course of action where we have to mess around even further with the ocean ecosystem to keep it in something like its current state. Global warming's effect on land is in all honesty not going to be too severe. Weather patterns might shift a bit, areas of farmland will probably be lost, but that's about it. Major problem for humanity that needs the farmland, but not so bad for all other life on land. Rising ocean acidity will lead to radical changes in ocean life though. At the very least, we're going to have to be dumping alkalis into areas around coral reefs for a while to come yet.
Look up a company called Reaction Engines Limited, and their Lapcat vehicle project in particular. Real suborbital transport is in the works, although as ever it doesn't seem to be going anywhere very fast. The Lapcat is a derivative project based on an engine originally meant for a full scale horizontal takeoff cargo SSTO. This is how I believe that progress towards true spaceplanes will be made. The designs that Reaction Engines have been producing and refining have been genuinely innovative with the potential to change the game in more fields than just transglobal air travel.
Agreed that SSTOs are not the only goal, any form of cheap access to space would be good. I still don't believe that Virgin Galactic's model is going to change anything though. It is forming a new market, but one that is selling expensive experiences to people, on a low profit margin. All the innovation they will be motivated to attempt will be in terms of lowering their costs to allow them to give roughly the same experience as they can offer now to a larger market.
Reusable SSTO isn't going to develop from continued work on suborbital vehicles like this. They're too small and expensive to use for transport, they're too big and heavy to reach space and stay there, and if engine tech changes either of those facts, it will change for more dedicated vehicles too. Space tourism like this will take us nowhere. The only long term benefit that will come from this is more experience entering atmospheres in an aerodynamic vehicle, and even then it won't be much use immediately as these suborbital planes start their reentry low and slow. For a real spaceship to make a similar reentry would need a lot of propellant used in slowing down.
You just need a few tens of thousands of them stacked together so they can use their wireless as a directional maser array. More than that would be needed against a target that takes less than 24 hours to move out of range.
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It makes me sound slightly conspiracy-theorist, but I think that is the most important proof that the hostile treatment of Iran in recent years isn't really about nukes. At the height of the "let's bomb iran" fever when it looked as though it might actually happen, the DPRK ran a series of missile tests over the pacific towards the US, and at another point ground tested a bomb that they claimed was nuclear. In both cases North Korea was almost totally ignored.
I use parasites as my naming scheme for planets I conquer when playing GalCiv. Schistosomiasis is one of the names that goes to a war factory world. After a few games it is quite surprising how many types of worm you can remember the name for.
Make it the '10s equivalent of the "funniest home videos" shows, now that youtube has rendered the original format pointless.
Spacecraft are extremely fragile things, relatively speaking.
Lightsail craft particularly so. You'd have to think of the final stage of the probe as something like a re-entry capsule on a grand scale. The only really tricky bit of it is the cable itself which has to bear the full force and must be made from a limited range of materials as it must superconduct and flex, both at once.
The moon has a number of advantages for launching raw materials into its local space. The lack of an atmosphere is the major one. You can use even a very weak mass driver to shunt something into a path high enough for a low lunar orbit at which point you could use any slow but efficient electric thrusters of your choice. It helps a lot to save on fuel if you can make a larger gun to fire stuff higher of course, if you can get resources into something approximating a stable orbit with only a tiny thrust of its own power it makes collecting them much easier.
Yes, absolutely. It has been proposed as a part of laser-boosted lightsail missions to other stars. A full sized collector scoop would work in interstellar gas, but you only need a relatively small magnet if you are plowing through solar wind (er... stellar wind, since it isn't Sol?). A superconducting cable spooled out of a probe and given a current could be used as a braking system to decelerate at a destination star. I recall seeing an estimate somewhere that the peak deceleration of a relativistic craft like this hitting the heliopause would be about 12g, not comfortable but very effective and cheap way to slow down. Magnetic sails have also been proposed as a way to accelerate in the first place, but in that case you are limited to speeds less than that of the solar wind itself, so it is more suited to in-system missions.
Actually it's too dense. At high speeds (significant fractions of lightspeed) a magnetic scoop acts like a very effective braking system in interstellar gas. A Bussard type ramscoop rocket could only be expected to reach about 0.12c even with highly efficient engines.
I think he is referring to the way that Feynmann diagrams allow you to represent an antiparticle as being a particle moving backwards in time. A particle/antiparticle pair then just becomes one particle going forwards and backwards in a loop. There was some talk that this way of looking at it may be physically real and that all particles are one, but taking a really circuitious route through time. It doesn't hold up well because there isn't enough antimatter around to allow it as far as we can see. I'm not sure it was ever supposed to apply to photons in any case.
"All in the UK should pay a £5 per month carTheftTAX, we should also pay £10 per month towards house burglaries...... see where this is going."
Car insurance is a legal requirement. Many landlords require that tenants get home insurance as part of their rent. Those are a good idea because when something goes wrong it is the victim that benefits, the person who paid gets something back. No insurance company in their right mind would offer piracy insurance, our government should perhaps take the time to wonder why.
It isn't bad in operating systems that are currently incapable of abusing a monopoly position because they have such a low market share.
I think that all they are really doing is having fun with the precedents they set way back when they forced MS to release a version of windows without media player. Remember that this isn't yet decided on, it is very likely that this is just a reminder not to complain about penalties imposed being unreasonable, demonstrating in advance that it could have been a lot worse.
Without a theory of quantum gravity, we can't say with certainty what happens when an atom is near a microscopic black hole. The radius in which for practical purposes it is trapped and going to be captured might be several orders of magnitude larger than the event horizon. Granted probably not the 50 orders of magnitude that your numbers imply would be needed, but it's still something I'd hope somebody would have thought of before trying to switch the machine on.
It's the energy density that's the problem. What the LHC will produce is relatively low energy particles by cosmic ray standards but in huge numbers in a tiny space, constantly replenished. Any group of collisions forming a black hole in normal matter won't be able to absorb enough mass for the hole to grow because there simply isn't the density available to counteract its mass loss. The question is whether the beams can supply a black hole with enough mass that it passes the turning point and is able to grow further from the mass absorbed by falling through Earth's crust.
There's more to cynicism than just assuming the worst of people. As several commenters above have pointed out, space tourism is hardly a big moneymaker. It was really more of a way to ensure that the soyuz programme had continuous funding in between state paid missions so that production of rockets didn't have to be inconveniently irregular. The soyuz vehicles themselves are starting to become obsolete so even if the ISS wasn't undergoing changes there would be lessened reason to keep tourist flights going.
This summary makes zero Ohms of sense?
The Welsh. I'm told there is one small valley somewhere in South America's northern coast where the Welsh language is still used. It's about the only place where it is.
I've got no idea why this was modded troll, it's perfectly accurate. That's not to say that people's perception of the value of media is accurate, but that there are large numbers of people who believe information is overpriced should be obvious.
A memristor isn't going to suddenly allow you to make computers that can do more than any other turing-machine-alike. If it did change the game for mobile AIs, we'd be able to simulate the effect on giant static hardware already.
So you need a way for the external machine to influence parts of your brain. If you can make a computer override the output of any particular neuron then you can burn out and take over the running of one neuron at a time. It's the ship of theseus problem made to work for you. Your identity is not embedded in any particular cell, so you could remain conscious though the duration of the transfer process. I imagine it taking quite a long time, I wouldn't be comfortable with it unless the transfer took a good fraction of a year, but the principle is sound even if you do it more quickly.
We manufacture more landmines than China.
Put it this way: as we come closer to a point where we expect our population to increase to over ten billion and oil prices to rise making oil-based fertilisers far more expensive, it is best not to risk adding even more problems with our food supply.
Few people seem to want to accept it but we are already committed to a course of action where we have to mess around even further with the ocean ecosystem to keep it in something like its current state. Global warming's effect on land is in all honesty not going to be too severe. Weather patterns might shift a bit, areas of farmland will probably be lost, but that's about it. Major problem for humanity that needs the farmland, but not so bad for all other life on land. Rising ocean acidity will lead to radical changes in ocean life though. At the very least, we're going to have to be dumping alkalis into areas around coral reefs for a while to come yet.
Look up a company called Reaction Engines Limited, and their Lapcat vehicle project in particular. Real suborbital transport is in the works, although as ever it doesn't seem to be going anywhere very fast. The Lapcat is a derivative project based on an engine originally meant for a full scale horizontal takeoff cargo SSTO. This is how I believe that progress towards true spaceplanes will be made. The designs that Reaction Engines have been producing and refining have been genuinely innovative with the potential to change the game in more fields than just transglobal air travel.
Agreed that SSTOs are not the only goal, any form of cheap access to space would be good. I still don't believe that Virgin Galactic's model is going to change anything though. It is forming a new market, but one that is selling expensive experiences to people, on a low profit margin. All the innovation they will be motivated to attempt will be in terms of lowering their costs to allow them to give roughly the same experience as they can offer now to a larger market.
Reusable SSTO isn't going to develop from continued work on suborbital vehicles like this. They're too small and expensive to use for transport, they're too big and heavy to reach space and stay there, and if engine tech changes either of those facts, it will change for more dedicated vehicles too. Space tourism like this will take us nowhere. The only long term benefit that will come from this is more experience entering atmospheres in an aerodynamic vehicle, and even then it won't be much use immediately as these suborbital planes start their reentry low and slow. For a real spaceship to make a similar reentry would need a lot of propellant used in slowing down.
You just need a few tens of thousands of them stacked together so they can use their wireless as a directional maser array. More than that would be needed against a target that takes less than 24 hours to move out of range.