I used the Crayon Physics demo to try Johnny Lee's whiteboard hack. I was primarily interested in the whiteboard hack and wanted something interesting running so I could watch different people using the IR pen I had built to see what limitations it had. The game drew enough people into it that they completely forgot about how they were interacting with it that I figured the hack as a win.
fwiw, I used a key ring led to house the IR Led and battery. It took about 5 minutes to swap the white light led with an IR led. My cell phone could see the IR led light up which told me I had done that part of the hack right later on when I had problems with a Broadcom Bluetooth driver.
The thing about the Columbia disaster is Nasa management willfully ignored evidence that there might be a major problem. Unlike the Challenger explosion, the Columbia was intact after the initial problem arose and yet Nasa management refused to allow staff to gather data that would show whether or not the foam impact had caused any damage.
Management claimed that even had they known that there was a problem, there would not have been anything they could have done to save the crew. One thing that's true about Nasa's engineers is that they are amazingly creative. When Apollo 13's oxygen tank blew up, within a day, engineering came up with a hack that enabled the crew to use the co2 scrubbers on the LEM. It literally saved the astronaut's lives. Had engineering been given a chance to solve the problem of how to get the crew back safely, there's simply no way, a priori, to know whether engineering would have succeeded. And yet, management denied engineering the opportunity to attack the problem.
For the life of me, I don't understand why the managers who turned down requests to take a look at Columbia's heat shield weren't charged with criminal negligence. They failed to examine all the options that may have been available to save the astronauts. The astronauts died because Nasa management was bull headed.
I'm not sure what the DA's office could have done to protect itself. Sure, they could have made copies. But if the DVD substrate is shitty, you'll have multiple degraded copies instead of one degraded original. Perhaps you spread your risk by putting the backup copy on a hard drive somewhere. Hard drives are subject to jarring, power surges, etc so that's no guarantee either.
When data really, really matters, how do you ensure it'll be there when you need it? What's the optimal backup strategy?
I like Chrome for one primary reason and that is I'm looking at a web page within seconds of opening the browser. Both Firefox and IE take anywhere between 20-30 seconds on my computer to load first time out. That means the later two browsers either stay open my entire session just so I can switch to them when needed and I have to put up with the clutter they add to my desktop/task bar or I put up with a sluggish environment.
Chrome doesn't make me make that choice. Since I'm not a big fan of add-ons, I don't miss them.
Instead of throwing money at healthcare, figure out why health care is expensive.
That's easy - train more doctors, dentists and nurses. If the U.S. isn't producing enough qualified students, we could easily import them from China and India.
I finished the book, thought a bit about what he said in it and picked it back up for a second read to see what I missed the first time through. I liked it that much.
The made-up words? Big deal - he was just illustrating how we imbue meaning into symbols that we've never come across before. Sometimes we guess wrong, sometimes we're right. The book in a sense is recursive in the way it describes how we figure things out - the reader is actually engaging in the same process the story's characters are.
The question is why Mars would have oceans then and not now. Put water on the surface today and that which doesn't freeze will evaporate due to the low atmospheric pressure. The atmospheric pressure is low because Mars doesn't have that strong a gravitational field to sustain an atmosphere. So the question becomes, how did Mars ever manage to have an ocean in the first place? It's not likely that it was more massive earlier on so it's not likely to have ever had an earth-like atmosphere that recycles the water back to the oceans. Sans gravity, you don't get a steady-state atmosphere. Sans atmosphere, you don't get to keep your water.
Bottom line - it's a problem full of paradoxes. Weird.
Re:Nope, sorry
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The article you link to links to Card's essay on homosexual marriage. Reading the original Card essay, I didn't find the quoted statement. I find that a bit odd since the quote is quite lengthy. So it appears either the quote was never there and the article's author is fabricating a story or the quote was redacted. I'm curious what the truth is.
You've got to remember that there was an awful lot that was obvious to Feynman - hell he won the Putnam without breaking a sweat. He ran into a classmate who wondered why he wasn't taking the Putnam exam and Feynman told him he'd finished the exam. The interchange took place when there were a couple of hours left on the exam clock and none of the other contenders completed the test in the allotted time.
He felt that Mathematicians spent an awful lot of energy developing stuff that was obvious, and hence a waste of his time. He used to harangue math graduate students that if they could clearly state what they were working on, he could reproduce and finish what they were doing within the evening. The thing was, he could do it. He was far more interested in why things worked the way they did rather than proving that the math he was using was correctly applied - the results mattered to him far more than the technique.
He used to say that the renormalization techniques he used developing QED which won him the Nobel Prize probably weren't kosher math but they produced the right answer to the tenth decimal place.
In the end, that's what doomed the Feynman Physics Undergraduate books - they were simply too advanced for the vast majority of their intended audience. While he was giving the lectures, the undergraduate attendance declined while the graduate attendance increased thereby keeping the room full which misled him as to how clearly he was teaching his intended audience. It wasn't until the mid terms came in that he realized something was amiss. If the average Caltech student couldn't suss what he was saying, it's a fair bet few other physics undergrads would be able to. The graduate students, and other faculty, on the other hand, loved the class because it gave them insights into topics they thought they completely understood.
Here's a real flying car. At 80mph, it doesn't have the airspeed that DARPA is looking for but it does hit all the other check items and supposedly it's easy to fly.
The paper may have something to say to Monte Carlo simulation programmers but the article didn't convey what it was.
Cards differ from Monte Carlo simulations in that the physical card has a memory of where it was in the deck prior to the first shuffle, hence the need for multiple card shuffles.
If your random number generator is truly random, a single pass will scatter your dataset. The problem Monte Carlo simulations can run into is not the number of passes through the randomizer but relying on a crappy non-random generator.
It sounds like all they did was allow you to store a Hibernate to Disk...
I don't think so. I routinely use hibernate and it takes around 20 seconds to boot back up. They're doing something beyond hibernate.
In my case it doesn't really matter because I use a Sony CRT that takes 15 seconds to power on. So this feature would only save me around 5 seconds on boot.
You can't demonstrate anything if you can't show what you've done under what conditions. Kind of tough to reproduce the results.
There are however, other events where we intentionally disposed of radioactive waste in the sea. When Apollo 13 was coming home from its ill-fated mission, NASA had to figure out what to do with the power supply on the lunar lander. They ended up jettisoning it so that it would hit the Marianna's Trench. If it eroded, there was plenty of sea water to dilute the radioactivity to background levels. If it's buried in the sediment, it'll be millions of years before it resurfaces in a volcano.
In the early days of nuclear submarines, the Navy intentionally, and unintentionally, sank some radioactive waste in the ocean. That disposal would probably serve as a better experiment because we know where the waste is and could go measure the radiation gradient. It wouldn't surprise me if the Navy has been doing that experiment all these years.
Having said that, burying highly radioactive waste may not be the smartest thing to do. An option is to burn the waste in a specially designed reactor and extract energy from the process while disposing of the problem. President Carter shut down all research along those lines in the 70's when he shut down the PUREX work. Carter wanted the world to get by using less energy. It was a favorite topic of his which he and his wife would proselytize about from Camp David - a retreat they reached by helicopter. Funny how politicians like making rules they don't have to live by.
It takes at least thousands, probably millions of years for species to actually adapt.
Not true. Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Island show adaption taking place in a single generation.
Re:Looks Like The "Good Old Days"
on
How We Used To Vote
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Funny. That's not what the labor law websites are saying. For example,
Card Check Process: Section 2 of EFCA would establish a mandatory card-check recognition process under which an employer would be required to recognize a union as its employees' exclusive bargaining representative once the union presents signed authorization cards from a simple majority of the employees in the work unit the union seeks to represent. The card-check process would take the place of NLRB-supervised secret ballot elections currently used to determine whether a majority of employees want union representation.
Perhaps you'd be willing to provide a citation? And while you're at it, who gets to elect whether a secret ballot or open card signature will be the process used?
Looks Like The "Good Old Days"
on
How We Used To Vote
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If card check legislation gets signed into law by the next administration, we'll see a return of the "good old days."
Greed and chutzpah causes litigation as well. To wit:
When the dust settled, Schaeffer had traded 13% of Cogent for $132 million in net cash and all of Allied Riser's fiber network. As a kicker, the pugnacious Schaeffer sued Allied Riser's board for having agreed to merge with Cogent. The suit cited the duty of loyalty owed to the bondholders. Allied Riser's insurers settled, paying Cogent $5 million from its directors' and officers' insurance policy.
Depending on where you live, you might be able to make do with an antenna.
Admittedly, very retro in this day of ubiquitous cable but the photons are still out there in the ether.
Speaking of antennas, the last half of this segment from last night's NOVA broadcast has a sidebar on the application of fractals in shrinking antenna designs.
The idea I'm suggesting has drafting and steadier speeds working for it. Drafting is a huge win as air drag becomes a major factor at high speed. You gain steadier speeds because people aren't over-reacting to speed ups and slow downs and you're eliminating propagation delays.
Currently, if you're in a mile long queue of cars that has completely stopped, it takes over 2 minutes for the tail car to get the message that the lead car is moving. That's two minutes for one complete stop that a car could be moving but can't because it takes time for people to react to a change. Multiply that by the number of times the queue comes to a complete stop to see how much just reaction times alone add to your commute time. This proposal eliminates all that and smooths out the commute. Smoothing out the commute gives you a steadier speed.
So that's two out of 4 advantages that trains would give up. On the negative side, trains are damn heavy and it takes energy to get them moving and to stop them. Their weight makes them much more expensive to build and to maintain as well as maintaining their infrastructure. Moreover, they only go to designated locations.
The European trains only work because they're subsidized. Take away their subsidies and the trains become too expensive a means to carry people. Dynamic trains would be self-funded. Tax the fuel the cars consume that use the system places the cost on the people who actually use it. Down the road, as the federal budget gets squeezed by Medicare and Social Security, self-funded programs will be the ones that survive.
You're right that liability issues would have to be addressed.
It's a soluble problem if it's taken on at a Federal level. Congress would have to lay out a program that handled liability pre-emptively. For example, there could be a tax levied on gas that funded a no-fault insurance program similar to the way vaccine liability is being handled. If you're injured, you're entitled to a payout from the fund. Sans courts and lawyers, it's much cheaper than the way tort litigation is handled.
America is one of very few places in the world with sprawling suburbs that make transportation projects like this unfeasible. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it will be exponentially more difficult than for us than for a country like Japan, or even most Eastern European countries.
The 'exponentially more difficult' part is why we shouldn't try to use rail to solve transportation problems. We're just too spread out. Rail only connects a very narrow corridor of people, and moreover, fixes their location indefinitely. If cities re-configure, the rail can't be reconfigured without lots of money.
If, on the other hand, we reconfigured cars so that they were capable of forming dynamic trains, we could get a lot of the benefit of trains without the drawbacks. For instance, trains move lots of vehicles more cheaply than a single vehicle because the locomotive bears the cost of pushing air out of the way. That not inconsiderable expense rises exponentially with speed. In a train, it's spread out over the vehicles following the locomotive but in a car, the single car bears the entire expense.
If cars drafted behind each other, they could share that savings that trains have. For that to work, it would require the cars to be able to communicate between themselves to sort out common destinations and speeds.
In practice, you'd jump on the highway per normal and your car would start querying other cars how far down the road they're going. When it found another car that was headed the same way for more than a mile or so, they'd sort out who would be lead car and who would draft and arrange themselves accordingly. The person in the lead car would continue to drive, but all the cars trailing him would be tucked in within an inch or two of each other. Their car's computers would be telegraphing to each other what the lead car was doing in terms of accelerating/decelerating so that they would do the same at the same time. When someone's destination exit arrived, the car would telegraph to the following cars that it was peeling off and the other cars would momentarily disconnect while the car pulled out of the train and then the remaining cars would re-connect. In the case of the leader, second car up would become the leader. Tail car peeling off wouldn't affect the train at all.
For a car to be allowed to join a train, it would have to carry a digitally signed certificate saying when the last time it was checked out for safety so members of the train would be confident that one of the cars wouldn't fall apart while they're within inches of it and that it was able to stop itself within a standard distance. If you didn't want to join a train, or you joined a train that made you uncomfortable for some reason, you'd turn off the feature and just drive yourself. But if you're a commuter, letting someone else drive the same route day after day, has a lot of appeal. A common commute of 20 miles would give you 20 minutes to yourself to do whatever while someone else drove.
With reaction times removed and cars bunched up within inches of each other, highways can carry more cars at higher speeds. Currently, we slow down when the highways get congested because we have to account for reaction times to propagate down the road. With the cars handling reaction time issues, they can speed up quite a bit.
Add a little intelligence to our cars and suddenly our highways become much greener.
The Japanese have solved the vibration problem along with a host of others. There have been a few other problems that crept up like quenching and the not insignificant problem of cost.
Quenching appears in magnets when they're jiggled enough that the atoms lose their orientation and the material stops being magnetic. According to their blog, that happened to them at least once a few years back (around 2001-2002). At the time, one of the American inventors, Jim Powell, told me that his partner and co-inventor of superconducting maglev, Gordon Danby, thought that the Japanese had not used pure enough aluminum. Using purer aluminum, of course, drives up the already high cost of the technology.
Contrary to what you might think, the roadbed is not magnetic as that would have made the cost far too high. Instead, they line the roadbed with aluminum plates that become magnetic in the presence of a moving magnetic field. The magnetic field is provided by superconductors on the train. When the train is moving slowly, it runs on rubber tires as the roadbed can't generate enough lift to support the train.
Cost has been the key factor that his stalled this technology. I've seen cost estimates as high as almost $1 billion/mile. The Tokyo-Osaka link was estimated at $200 billion. This proposal coming in at $50 billion for the short route from Tokyo to Nagoya of 160 miles is saying they can build it at.3 $billion/mile. The detours, of course, will drive the cost up as well as slow the train down.
So if nothing else, the Japanese will provide the world with real data for both construction and operating costs. Their test bed already provides lots of interesting video. Best part is at 5:30.
I'm surprised Google isn't using water cooling and either dumping the heat via an underground reservoir or using it to heat the company swimming pool. Water's ability to extract heat exceeds that of air by 4 to 1 so you don't need to do as much work to cool the chips.
This guy buried a water tank to cool his Athlon 1400 which ran very hot. It was a bit extreme but it more than met his cooling requirements. A properly engineered design could do the same thing for a large datacenter. The only cost associated with cooling is overcoming the friction losses in the plumbing. Of course, if your data center is next to a river or ocean, you can just dump the heat in the river/ocean instead. San Onofre powerplant in southern california does that but before the heated water goes out to sea, they used to run it over a lobster pen. The lobsters grew to table size much faster than they do in the wild.
Slashdot Mirror
I used the Crayon Physics demo to try Johnny Lee's whiteboard hack. I was primarily interested in the whiteboard hack and wanted something interesting running so I could watch different people using the IR pen I had built to see what limitations it had. The game drew enough people into it that they completely forgot about how they were interacting with it that I figured the hack as a win.
fwiw, I used a key ring led to house the IR Led and battery. It took about 5 minutes to swap the white light led with an IR led. My cell phone could see the IR led light up which told me I had done that part of the hack right later on when I had problems with a Broadcom Bluetooth driver.
The thing about the Columbia disaster is Nasa management willfully ignored evidence that there might be a major problem. Unlike the Challenger explosion, the Columbia was intact after the initial problem arose and yet Nasa management refused to allow staff to gather data that would show whether or not the foam impact had caused any damage.
Management claimed that even had they known that there was a problem, there would not have been anything they could have done to save the crew. One thing that's true about Nasa's engineers is that they are amazingly creative. When Apollo 13's oxygen tank blew up, within a day, engineering came up with a hack that enabled the crew to use the co2 scrubbers on the LEM. It literally saved the astronaut's lives. Had engineering been given a chance to solve the problem of how to get the crew back safely, there's simply no way, a priori, to know whether engineering would have succeeded. And yet, management denied engineering the opportunity to attack the problem.
For the life of me, I don't understand why the managers who turned down requests to take a look at Columbia's heat shield weren't charged with criminal negligence. They failed to examine all the options that may have been available to save the astronauts. The astronauts died because Nasa management was bull headed.
When you're low on oxygen, it's tough to know you're low on oxygen. You start making dumb choices and in an unforgiving environment, it can be fatal.
>Now that is incompetence at its finest.
I'm not sure what the DA's office could have done to protect itself. Sure, they could have made copies. But if the DVD substrate is shitty, you'll have multiple degraded copies instead of one degraded original. Perhaps you spread your risk by putting the backup copy on a hard drive somewhere. Hard drives are subject to jarring, power surges, etc so that's no guarantee either.
When data really, really matters, how do you ensure it'll be there when you need it? What's the optimal backup strategy?
I like Chrome for one primary reason and that is I'm looking at a web page within seconds of opening the browser. Both Firefox and IE take anywhere between 20-30 seconds on my computer to load first time out. That means the later two browsers either stay open my entire session just so I can switch to them when needed and I have to put up with the clutter they add to my desktop/task bar or I put up with a sluggish environment.
Chrome doesn't make me make that choice. Since I'm not a big fan of add-ons, I don't miss them.
Instead of throwing money at healthcare, figure out why health care is expensive.
That's easy - train more doctors, dentists and nurses. If the U.S. isn't producing enough qualified students, we could easily import them from China and India.
I finished the book, thought a bit about what he said in it and picked it back up for a second read to see what I missed the first time through. I liked it that much.
The made-up words? Big deal - he was just illustrating how we imbue meaning into symbols that we've never come across before. Sometimes we guess wrong, sometimes we're right. The book in a sense is recursive in the way it describes how we figure things out - the reader is actually engaging in the same process the story's characters are.
The question is why Mars would have oceans then and not now. Put water on the surface today and that which doesn't freeze will evaporate due to the low atmospheric pressure. The atmospheric pressure is low because Mars doesn't have that strong a gravitational field to sustain an atmosphere. So the question becomes, how did Mars ever manage to have an ocean in the first place? It's not likely that it was more massive earlier on so it's not likely to have ever had an earth-like atmosphere that recycles the water back to the oceans. Sans gravity, you don't get a steady-state atmosphere. Sans atmosphere, you don't get to keep your water. Bottom line - it's a problem full of paradoxes. Weird.
The article you link to links to Card's essay on homosexual marriage. Reading the original Card essay, I didn't find the quoted statement. I find that a bit odd since the quote is quite lengthy. So it appears either the quote was never there and the article's author is fabricating a story or the quote was redacted. I'm curious what the truth is.
You've got to remember that there was an awful lot that was obvious to Feynman - hell he won the Putnam without breaking a sweat. He ran into a classmate who wondered why he wasn't taking the Putnam exam and Feynman told him he'd finished the exam. The interchange took place when there were a couple of hours left on the exam clock and none of the other contenders completed the test in the allotted time.
He felt that Mathematicians spent an awful lot of energy developing stuff that was obvious, and hence a waste of his time. He used to harangue math graduate students that if they could clearly state what they were working on, he could reproduce and finish what they were doing within the evening. The thing was, he could do it. He was far more interested in why things worked the way they did rather than proving that the math he was using was correctly applied - the results mattered to him far more than the technique.
He used to say that the renormalization techniques he used developing QED which won him the Nobel Prize probably weren't kosher math but they produced the right answer to the tenth decimal place.
In the end, that's what doomed the Feynman Physics Undergraduate books - they were simply too advanced for the vast majority of their intended audience. While he was giving the lectures, the undergraduate attendance declined while the graduate attendance increased thereby keeping the room full which misled him as to how clearly he was teaching his intended audience. It wasn't until the mid terms came in that he realized something was amiss. If the average Caltech student couldn't suss what he was saying, it's a fair bet few other physics undergrads would be able to. The graduate students, and other faculty, on the other hand, loved the class because it gave them insights into topics they thought they completely understood.
Here's a real flying car. At 80mph, it doesn't have the airspeed that DARPA is looking for but it does hit all the other check items and supposedly it's easy to fly.
If your random number generator is truly random, a single pass will scatter your dataset. The problem Monte Carlo simulations can run into is not the number of passes through the randomizer but relying on a crappy non-random generator.
It sounds like all they did was allow you to store a Hibernate to Disk ...
I don't think so. I routinely use hibernate and it takes around 20 seconds to boot back up. They're doing something beyond hibernate. In my case it doesn't really matter because I use a Sony CRT that takes 15 seconds to power on. So this feature would only save me around 5 seconds on boot.
There are however, other events where we intentionally disposed of radioactive waste in the sea. When Apollo 13 was coming home from its ill-fated mission, NASA had to figure out what to do with the power supply on the lunar lander. They ended up jettisoning it so that it would hit the Marianna's Trench. If it eroded, there was plenty of sea water to dilute the radioactivity to background levels. If it's buried in the sediment, it'll be millions of years before it resurfaces in a volcano.
In the early days of nuclear submarines, the Navy intentionally, and unintentionally, sank some radioactive waste in the ocean. That disposal would probably serve as a better experiment because we know where the waste is and could go measure the radiation gradient. It wouldn't surprise me if the Navy has been doing that experiment all these years. Having said that, burying highly radioactive waste may not be the smartest thing to do. An option is to burn the waste in a specially designed reactor and extract energy from the process while disposing of the problem. President Carter shut down all research along those lines in the 70's when he shut down the PUREX work. Carter wanted the world to get by using less energy. It was a favorite topic of his which he and his wife would proselytize about from Camp David - a retreat they reached by helicopter. Funny how politicians like making rules they don't have to live by.
It takes at least thousands, probably millions of years for species to actually adapt.
Not true. Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Island show adaption taking place in a single generation.
Card Check Process: Section 2 of EFCA would establish a mandatory card-check recognition process under which an employer would be required to recognize a union as its employees' exclusive bargaining representative once the union presents signed authorization cards from a simple majority of the employees in the work unit the union seeks to represent. The card-check process would take the place of NLRB-supervised secret ballot elections currently used to determine whether a majority of employees want union representation.
Perhaps you'd be willing to provide a citation? And while you're at it, who gets to elect whether a secret ballot or open card signature will be the process used?
If card check legislation gets signed into law by the next administration, we'll see a return of the "good old days."
Gamma ray does not in fact imply much about energy (although they can be incredibly high energy). It is just another photon.
Huh!? Does Planck's constant ring a bell? ...
E = h * f
Gamma rays are very high frequency, hence they're highly energetic.
Greed and chutzpah causes litigation as well. To wit:
Depending on where you live, you might be able to make do with an antenna.
Admittedly, very retro in this day of ubiquitous cable but the photons are still out there in the ether.
Speaking of antennas, the last half of this segment from last night's NOVA broadcast has a sidebar on the application of fractals in shrinking antenna designs.
Trains currently have 4 key advantages over cars
The idea I'm suggesting has drafting and steadier speeds working for it. Drafting is a huge win as air drag becomes a major factor at high speed. You gain steadier speeds because people aren't over-reacting to speed ups and slow downs and you're eliminating propagation delays.
Currently, if you're in a mile long queue of cars that has completely stopped, it takes over 2 minutes for the tail car to get the message that the lead car is moving. That's two minutes for one complete stop that a car could be moving but can't because it takes time for people to react to a change. Multiply that by the number of times the queue comes to a complete stop to see how much just reaction times alone add to your commute time. This proposal eliminates all that and smooths out the commute. Smoothing out the commute gives you a steadier speed.
So that's two out of 4 advantages that trains would give up. On the negative side, trains are damn heavy and it takes energy to get them moving and to stop them. Their weight makes them much more expensive to build and to maintain as well as maintaining their infrastructure. Moreover, they only go to designated locations.
The European trains only work because they're subsidized. Take away their subsidies and the trains become too expensive a means to carry people. Dynamic trains would be self-funded. Tax the fuel the cars consume that use the system places the cost on the people who actually use it. Down the road, as the federal budget gets squeezed by Medicare and Social Security, self-funded programs will be the ones that survive.
You're right that liability issues would have to be addressed.
It's a soluble problem if it's taken on at a Federal level. Congress would have to lay out a program that handled liability pre-emptively. For example, there could be a tax levied on gas that funded a no-fault insurance program similar to the way vaccine liability is being handled. If you're injured, you're entitled to a payout from the fund. Sans courts and lawyers, it's much cheaper than the way tort litigation is handled.
America is one of very few places in the world with sprawling suburbs that make transportation projects like this unfeasible. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it will be exponentially more difficult than for us than for a country like Japan, or even most Eastern European countries.
The 'exponentially more difficult' part is why we shouldn't try to use rail to solve transportation problems. We're just too spread out. Rail only connects a very narrow corridor of people, and moreover, fixes their location indefinitely. If cities re-configure, the rail can't be reconfigured without lots of money.
If, on the other hand, we reconfigured cars so that they were capable of forming dynamic trains, we could get a lot of the benefit of trains without the drawbacks. For instance, trains move lots of vehicles more cheaply than a single vehicle because the locomotive bears the cost of pushing air out of the way. That not inconsiderable expense rises exponentially with speed. In a train, it's spread out over the vehicles following the locomotive but in a car, the single car bears the entire expense.
If cars drafted behind each other, they could share that savings that trains have. For that to work, it would require the cars to be able to communicate between themselves to sort out common destinations and speeds.
In practice, you'd jump on the highway per normal and your car would start querying other cars how far down the road they're going. When it found another car that was headed the same way for more than a mile or so, they'd sort out who would be lead car and who would draft and arrange themselves accordingly. The person in the lead car would continue to drive, but all the cars trailing him would be tucked in within an inch or two of each other. Their car's computers would be telegraphing to each other what the lead car was doing in terms of accelerating/decelerating so that they would do the same at the same time. When someone's destination exit arrived, the car would telegraph to the following cars that it was peeling off and the other cars would momentarily disconnect while the car pulled out of the train and then the remaining cars would re-connect. In the case of the leader, second car up would become the leader. Tail car peeling off wouldn't affect the train at all.
For a car to be allowed to join a train, it would have to carry a digitally signed certificate saying when the last time it was checked out for safety so members of the train would be confident that one of the cars wouldn't fall apart while they're within inches of it and that it was able to stop itself within a standard distance. If you didn't want to join a train, or you joined a train that made you uncomfortable for some reason, you'd turn off the feature and just drive yourself. But if you're a commuter, letting someone else drive the same route day after day, has a lot of appeal. A common commute of 20 miles would give you 20 minutes to yourself to do whatever while someone else drove.
With reaction times removed and cars bunched up within inches of each other, highways can carry more cars at higher speeds. Currently, we slow down when the highways get congested because we have to account for reaction times to propagate down the road. With the cars handling reaction time issues, they can speed up quite a bit.
Add a little intelligence to our cars and suddenly our highways become much greener.
The Japanese have solved the vibration problem along with a host of others. There have been a few other problems that crept up like quenching and the not insignificant problem of cost.
Quenching appears in magnets when they're jiggled enough that the atoms lose their orientation and the material stops being magnetic. According to their blog, that happened to them at least once a few years back (around 2001-2002). At the time, one of the American inventors, Jim Powell, told me that his partner and co-inventor of superconducting maglev, Gordon Danby, thought that the Japanese had not used pure enough aluminum. Using purer aluminum, of course, drives up the already high cost of the technology.
Contrary to what you might think, the roadbed is not magnetic as that would have made the cost far too high. Instead, they line the roadbed with aluminum plates that become magnetic in the presence of a moving magnetic field. The magnetic field is provided by superconductors on the train. When the train is moving slowly, it runs on rubber tires as the roadbed can't generate enough lift to support the train.
Cost has been the key factor that his stalled this technology. I've seen cost estimates as high as almost $1 billion/mile. The Tokyo-Osaka link was estimated at $200 billion. This proposal coming in at $50 billion for the short route from Tokyo to Nagoya of 160 miles is saying they can build it at .3 $billion/mile. The detours, of course, will drive the cost up as well as slow the train down.
So if nothing else, the Japanese will provide the world with real data for both construction and operating costs. Their test bed already provides lots of interesting video. Best part is at 5:30.
I'm surprised Google isn't using water cooling and either dumping the heat via an underground reservoir or using it to heat the company swimming pool. Water's ability to extract heat exceeds that of air by 4 to 1 so you don't need to do as much work to cool the chips.
This guy buried a water tank to cool his Athlon 1400 which ran very hot. It was a bit extreme but it more than met his cooling requirements. A properly engineered design could do the same thing for a large datacenter. The only cost associated with cooling is overcoming the friction losses in the plumbing. Of course, if your data center is next to a river or ocean, you can just dump the heat in the river/ocean instead. San Onofre powerplant in southern california does that but before the heated water goes out to sea, they used to run it over a lobster pen. The lobsters grew to table size much faster than they do in the wild.