What about the Water Memory? Does this membrane erase all this information or is a there a mechanism to determine which information to be deleted? Would be an invaluable Material for all that homeopathy stuff...
Indeed. This may finally give homeopaths a weapon against the dread pirate Refillers.
(Refillers propagate the notion that, to be consistent with their beliefs, homeopathy users need only ever buy one sample of each preparation. Consume 90%, refill from the tap, shake to activate, and you have an as-new bottle of magic water. In perpetuity. Even more potent than the original. Make bottles to give away to friends and neighbours for free.)
For anyone who's curious, the whole "wet steam" vs "dry steam" thing sounds bizarre and petty.
The issue is the way Rossi measures his output. He measures the flow rate of water going into his device, then takes point measurements on a thermocouple somewhere inside his device. If he gets a reading above 100C on the thermocouple, he assumes 100% of the water was turned into steam. So he multiplies the input flow rate by the energy required to turn each 1L of water into steam, and assumes that's his devices output.
The problem is if only some of the water is turned to steam, then his calculations can be wildly inaccurate. In fact, it may be the dumbest way to measure the output of what is, basically, just a water heater.
The best way to do the measurements is just to heat up a container of water. Not boil. Just measure how long it takes to heat it by, say, 20C.
Pedantically, Cold Fusion and LENR are two different things. The reason is a dispute within the field over the cause of the "heat anomalies". Pons and Fleischmann, and their faction, believed it was true hydrogen fusion (ie, hydrogen/deuterium into tritium/helium/unicorns). Another faction believed the hydrogen fused with the test metal (originally platinum, more recently nickel) in some way that-physic-does-not-yet-understand, and they use the name LENR to brand their faction.
For people who think it's all crap, it's The South Philadelphia Cat Society vs The Cat Society of Southern Philadelphia.
Keep in mind even all of the "demonstrations" that Rossi has done only lasted 24 hours, perhaps two days at most.
None of Rossi's demos have lasted a full day. Certainly none have gone beyond a day. Most were a few hours, with the "self-sustain" mode always lasting less time than the "warm-up". For example, the "1MW" demonstration had a 4 hour warm-up time, and a 3.5 hour "self-sustain" time. In a prior (August?) test of a single unit, there was a 2hr "warm-up" and 90min "self-sustain" time.
I only submitted the story because of the original headline "MS damage washed away by a stream of young blood", in anticipation of Microsoft jokes. (Curse you, competent editors.) Glad to see I got my jokes after all.
By "inflatable greenhouse", I assume you mean one with transparent walls that uses natural sunlight? The one in all the Mars Base artist's impressions?
According to NASA's Mars rover designers, the atmosphere on Mars is just thick enough to conduct away heat, making thermal control harder on Mars than in a vacuum. A greenhouse is a high surface area, low density volume, so apparently it would take less energy to use grow-lights in a fully underground chamber than to heat a surface-exposed greenhouse at night. (You'll have the same problem with all surface modules and vehicles on Mars.)
Inflatable greenhouses make for a good Mars Base artist's impression, but a lousy actual Mars Base.
This might be a priority for colonization but not necessarily for exploration.
However, if we knew that a small amount gravity (such as 1%) in addition to exercise, could eliminate most of the effects of weightlessness if would make designing a Mars mission that much easier. Ie, if most of the problem is fluid balance, which, as with a fuel tank, is settled by even a small force. It would not take much to generate 0.01g spin, plus we'd know there'd be no further damage on the surface.
But if you had to generate nearly a full g to offset harm, it would be difficult to build a large enough centripetal ship with current technology, so you probably wouldn't bother. That means designing a mission around the knowledge that the astronauts are going to suffer more and more damage as the mission goes on.
It would be nice to know before we started spending money on designs.
Looking at the sample images on TFA, this doesn't make you unrecognisable (or untrackable) for human observers. On the contrary, it makes you stand out like crazy. So people enforcing "don't cover your face" rules wouldn't bother with this, because you'd be seen as highly distinctive and therefore retroactively identifiable if you do something like rob a bank. (Unlike a mask, or hoody+sunglasses; because they are generic and interchangeable.)
Instead, it makes it harder for automated systems to create easily searchable location databases, and eliminates real-time automated tracking. Which means someone would have to manually go through recorded footage, which raises the cost and effort, which limits such searches to specific crimes after the event.
(OTOH, if you need facial recognition for accessing bank accounts and government services, you're screwed. But then, during trials and roll-out, the failure rate will affect the rate of expansion of the technology. So if you're willing to take one for the team, being as hard to identify as possible increases the failure rate, slowing the rate of uptake for the rest of us.)
For example the system rolled out in Australia is an incredible economic reform and some say it will cost the nation over $1trillion in GDP over the next 38 years.
You ask for a source for his claim, then throw that out there in the same post without any hint of a source? (And Andrew Bolt isn't a source. Indeed, he's an anti-Source. He (and his ilk) suck the validity out of any claim they make.)
The Carbon Credit scheme is supposedly revenue negative, that is, the amount of "compensation" and tax cuts exceeds the amount of carbon tax added. It will have a minimal effect on long term revenue, and therefore a minimal effect on the GDP. How would it somehow cost us $26 billion per year?
But think about, it's just moving taxes from one part of the economy to another, even with a small net change (positive or negative), how could it have any greater effect on GDP than any other future policy change? Or than major policy changes in the past, like floating the dollar, bank deregulation, the GST, or the Resources Super-Profits Tax? So how does someone come up with such a general number (a trillion) over such a specific timeframe (exactly 38 years, not 35, not 40, 38!) Doesn't any of it ring your bullshit alarm? Mine's going like a firehouse choir.
No worse than converting lunar calendar holidays like Easter each year. And unlike Easter, most people won't care about the solstice. They mention that farmers will want a yearly "agrarian" calendar to show season-starts each year. Astronomers, fishermen, and the like would use the same calendar.
Not just that, but for at least a century you'll need to be able to accept and convert historical (Georgian) dates and post-Reform dates and transitional dates for people who learnt to convert their historical dates (eg, date-of-birth) to the new system.
Christ, you can't get Americans to use a globally standard single-unit measuring system in the same number base they learned to count in (and identical to the counting system they use already for currency and anything digital), but you expect them to learn a new metric system and a new base system?
April Fool's Day was created when Catholics and Protestants pranked each other on their respective April 1st after the Gregorian reform. So it would be very traditional to exploit the confusion during the change over to prank people by messing with dates/calenders. "This office will be closed from August 29th to August 29th (HH/G)".
"This is a very effective tactic that we did last year, it was so effective that the whalers went home over a month early and called it quits and we saved 858 whales out of a possible 1,035", Sea Shepherd's Jeff Hansen. (Although the Japanese claimed they only had a quota last season of 850, out of a limit of 945, so god knows where any of the numbers come from.)
I should have done a google search for an article with images. Here's one with a picture of the UAV and the low quality images they're using to track the Nisshin Maru.
details on the commercially-available drone capable of being launched from a ship
The UAV is small, catapult- or hand-launched (aka "throw'n'go".). Looks like a 2m or so wingspan. Possibly a SeaScan, which is a small civilian UAV intended for commercial fishing boats, but I'm just guessing based on the shape.
2% failure per use. Average two starts per trip, average one trip per day. One failure every 25 days. About 290 failures over a 20yr period. Say the average person who buys a car with this system would otherwise have one car stolen from them every 20 years, now with a 98% chance the car thief will be detected.
That gives you 0.98 successes for every 290 failures. Or a greater than 99.5% false positive rate.
(And that assumes the system can't be quickly bypassed by by a competent thief. Which would reduce the immobil-ass-er's success rate by whatever proportion of car thieves know the work-around. Say it's 50%, that doubles the false positive rate to around 99.8%.)
How does that help? Reducing the population doesn't reduce the proportion of that population competing for jobs. All you're doing is changing from children being the non-working part of the population, to the elderly.
"Defence" has a specific legal meaning. The two reasons you listed aren't a "defence" against a guilty verdict. But it may be used to mitigate the sentence, if you plead guilty and get a soft magistrate and unmotivated police-prosecutor.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the Water Memory? Does this membrane erase all this information or is a there a mechanism to determine which information to be deleted? Would be an invaluable Material for all that homeopathy stuff...
Indeed. This may finally give homeopaths a weapon against the dread pirate Refillers.
(Refillers propagate the notion that, to be consistent with their beliefs, homeopathy users need only ever buy one sample of each preparation. Consume 90%, refill from the tap, shake to activate, and you have an as-new bottle of magic water. In perpetuity. Even more potent than the original. Make bottles to give away to friends and neighbours for free.)
By drowning.
Asbestos was, after all, a wonder substance in its day.
"looked like a disk, a black flap, and a scorpion"
Is that like one of those drafting exercises where an object looks like a black flap from the front, a scorpion from the side, and a disk from above?
And it turns out it was an elephant all along?
Global warming deniers are the new creationists
Many are also the old creationists.
For anyone who's curious, the whole "wet steam" vs "dry steam" thing sounds bizarre and petty.
The issue is the way Rossi measures his output. He measures the flow rate of water going into his device, then takes point measurements on a thermocouple somewhere inside his device. If he gets a reading above 100C on the thermocouple, he assumes 100% of the water was turned into steam. So he multiplies the input flow rate by the energy required to turn each 1L of water into steam, and assumes that's his devices output.
The problem is if only some of the water is turned to steam, then his calculations can be wildly inaccurate. In fact, it may be the dumbest way to measure the output of what is, basically, just a water heater.
The best way to do the measurements is just to heat up a container of water. Not boil. Just measure how long it takes to heat it by, say, 20C.
Pedantically, Cold Fusion and LENR are two different things. The reason is a dispute within the field over the cause of the "heat anomalies". Pons and Fleischmann, and their faction, believed it was true hydrogen fusion (ie, hydrogen/deuterium into tritium/helium/unicorns). Another faction believed the hydrogen fused with the test metal (originally platinum, more recently nickel) in some way that-physic-does-not-yet-understand, and they use the name LENR to brand their faction.
For people who think it's all crap, it's The South Philadelphia Cat Society vs The Cat Society of Southern Philadelphia.
Keep in mind even all of the "demonstrations" that Rossi has done only lasted 24 hours, perhaps two days at most.
None of Rossi's demos have lasted a full day. Certainly none have gone beyond a day. Most were a few hours, with the "self-sustain" mode always lasting less time than the "warm-up". For example, the "1MW" demonstration had a 4 hour warm-up time, and a 3.5 hour "self-sustain" time. In a prior (August?) test of a single unit, there was a 2hr "warm-up" and 90min "self-sustain" time.
I only submitted the story because of the original headline "MS damage washed away by a stream of young blood", in anticipation of Microsoft jokes. (Curse you, competent editors.) Glad to see I got my jokes after all.
Thank you sir and/or madam.
On top of that, they were paid at least 3 times my salary.
So they were better at selling their value to the boss than you were. Turns out you really did lack an essential skill.
By "inflatable greenhouse", I assume you mean one with transparent walls that uses natural sunlight? The one in all the Mars Base artist's impressions?
According to NASA's Mars rover designers, the atmosphere on Mars is just thick enough to conduct away heat, making thermal control harder on Mars than in a vacuum. A greenhouse is a high surface area, low density volume, so apparently it would take less energy to use grow-lights in a fully underground chamber than to heat a surface-exposed greenhouse at night. (You'll have the same problem with all surface modules and vehicles on Mars.)
Inflatable greenhouses make for a good Mars Base artist's impression, but a lousy actual Mars Base.
This might be a priority for colonization but not necessarily for exploration.
However, if we knew that a small amount gravity (such as 1%) in addition to exercise, could eliminate most of the effects of weightlessness if would make designing a Mars mission that much easier. Ie, if most of the problem is fluid balance, which, as with a fuel tank, is settled by even a small force. It would not take much to generate 0.01g spin, plus we'd know there'd be no further damage on the surface.
But if you had to generate nearly a full g to offset harm, it would be difficult to build a large enough centripetal ship with current technology, so you probably wouldn't bother. That means designing a mission around the knowledge that the astronauts are going to suffer more and more damage as the mission goes on.
It would be nice to know before we started spending money on designs.
I'd like to know the name of the tiny penis'd little man who came up with the name "VIPR Teams"?
Looking at the sample images on TFA, this doesn't make you unrecognisable (or untrackable) for human observers. On the contrary, it makes you stand out like crazy. So people enforcing "don't cover your face" rules wouldn't bother with this, because you'd be seen as highly distinctive and therefore retroactively identifiable if you do something like rob a bank. (Unlike a mask, or hoody+sunglasses; because they are generic and interchangeable.)
Instead, it makes it harder for automated systems to create easily searchable location databases, and eliminates real-time automated tracking. Which means someone would have to manually go through recorded footage, which raises the cost and effort, which limits such searches to specific crimes after the event.
(OTOH, if you need facial recognition for accessing bank accounts and government services, you're screwed. But then, during trials and roll-out, the failure rate will affect the rate of expansion of the technology. So if you're willing to take one for the team, being as hard to identify as possible increases the failure rate, slowing the rate of uptake for the rest of us.)
For example the system rolled out in Australia is an incredible economic reform and some say it will cost the nation over $1trillion in GDP over the next 38 years.
You ask for a source for his claim, then throw that out there in the same post without any hint of a source? (And Andrew Bolt isn't a source. Indeed, he's an anti-Source. He (and his ilk) suck the validity out of any claim they make.)
The Carbon Credit scheme is supposedly revenue negative, that is, the amount of "compensation" and tax cuts exceeds the amount of carbon tax added. It will have a minimal effect on long term revenue, and therefore a minimal effect on the GDP. How would it somehow cost us $26 billion per year?
But think about, it's just moving taxes from one part of the economy to another, even with a small net change (positive or negative), how could it have any greater effect on GDP than any other future policy change? Or than major policy changes in the past, like floating the dollar, bank deregulation, the GST, or the Resources Super-Profits Tax? So how does someone come up with such a general number (a trillion) over such a specific timeframe (exactly 38 years, not 35, not 40, 38!) Doesn't any of it ring your bullshit alarm? Mine's going like a firehouse choir.
No worse than converting lunar calendar holidays like Easter each year. And unlike Easter, most people won't care about the solstice. They mention that farmers will want a yearly "agrarian" calendar to show season-starts each year. Astronomers, fishermen, and the like would use the same calendar.
Not just that, but for at least a century you'll need to be able to accept and convert historical (Georgian) dates and post-Reform dates and transitional dates for people who learnt to convert their historical dates (eg, date-of-birth) to the new system.
Makes Y2K look like a cakewalk.
Christ, you can't get Americans to use a globally standard single-unit measuring system in the same number base they learned to count in (and identical to the counting system they use already for currency and anything digital), but you expect them to learn a new metric system and a new base system?
Good luck, Mr. Coward, good luck.
April Fool's Day was created when Catholics and Protestants pranked each other on their respective April 1st after the Gregorian reform.
So it would be very traditional to exploit the confusion during the change over to prank people by messing with dates/calenders. "This office will be closed from August 29th to August 29th (HH/G)".
You are correct, I was wrong. Thank you, sir.
"This is a very effective tactic that we did last year, it was so effective that the whalers went home over a month early and called it quits and we saved 858 whales out of a possible 1,035", Sea Shepherd's Jeff Hansen. (Although the Japanese claimed they only had a quota last season of 850, out of a limit of 945, so god knows where any of the numbers come from.)
I should have done a google search for an article with images. Here's one with a picture of the UAV and the low quality images they're using to track the Nisshin Maru.
details on the commercially-available drone capable of being launched from a ship
The UAV is small, catapult- or hand-launched (aka "throw'n'go".). Looks like a 2m or so wingspan. Possibly a SeaScan, which is a small civilian UAV intended for commercial fishing boats, but I'm just guessing based on the shape.
It activates the "Probe".
2% failure per use. Average two starts per trip, average one trip per day. One failure every 25 days. About 290 failures over a 20yr period. Say the average person who buys a car with this system would otherwise have one car stolen from them every 20 years, now with a 98% chance the car thief will be detected.
That gives you 0.98 successes for every 290 failures. Or a greater than 99.5% false positive rate.
(And that assumes the system can't be quickly bypassed by by a competent thief. Which would reduce the immobil-ass-er's success rate by whatever proportion of car thieves know the work-around. Say it's 50%, that doubles the false positive rate to around 99.8%.)
How does that help? Reducing the population doesn't reduce the proportion of that population competing for jobs. All you're doing is changing from children being the non-working part of the population, to the elderly.
The former should be defensible by
Mitigation != Defence.
"Defence" has a specific legal meaning. The two reasons you listed aren't a "defence" against a guilty verdict. But it may be used to mitigate the sentence, if you plead guilty and get a soft magistrate and unmotivated police-prosecutor.
(IANAL, IANYL, ASPLA)