So the ridiculously flagrant persecution complex the author of that page opens with in the very first paragraph didn't set off any alarm bells for you?
Maybe because it's so trivially easy to find the sources for everything I said they're all in the damn wikipedia page for Cevarix and included in just about every news article published on the thing in the past 5 years.
I don't have the slightest clue as to why you're modded at +5, but I do know that you have literally no clue as to what in the hell you're talking about. I assume you're referring to the anti HPV vaccine Cevarix rather than Gardasil because you mention "the Australian taxpayer" and some of the technology used in Cevarix was discovered at Uni. Queensland. You conveniently neglect to mention that the Queensland researchers were collaborating with others at Georgetown, the Uni. of Rochester and the US National Cancer Institute, among others. The technology behind the discoveries made at these places was licensed to GlaxoSmithKline, a British company. The idea that the Australian taxpayer footed the bill for the FDA trials in the US is, frankly, idiotic. The trials were conducted by Glaxo, obviously. Additionally, there is no "US drug company that licenced [sic] it", it's being sold by Glaxo here just as it is everywhere else.
I know it's a crying shame that none of this fits into your wacky worldview where all corporations represent the nexus of evil and steal all their product ideas from "the people", but I guess you'll just have to find some way to get over it. I suggest you take some of your own advice about "paying more attention before writing" before your next post.
Oh, I guess/. doesn't render =/= signs, like the ones that were supposed to appear in between all those terms in my last msg. Megalamesville. C'mon, what is this 1997?
Mmmmmno, they don't. The fish are FLUORescent, not PHOSPHORescent. They're transfected with GFP like these cats. Hence the name GFP: green fluorescent protein.
Nope, not saying any of that hilariously absurd, contrived, strawman bullshit at all. But I genuinely appreciate that you saw my totally unrelated point sufficient reason to fire up your obviously well oiled Chomskybot, such that you could spout your long, soporific list of dimestore, cryptofascist mewlings. Better luck next time in arguing against a transparently ridiculous point opposite to the one I was obviously making, though. Have a nice day:)
I work on its scaled testbed twin. I think I'm slightly more familiar with its priorities than you. Thermonuclear ignition in a pure fusion fueled microcapsule is now, and has always been the primary endpoint goal for building the device.
Patriotism may have no place in science, but science unquestionably has a place in patriotism. I'm proud that my country built and operates the Tevatron which discovered the top quark, I'm proud we built the world's most powerful laser, the National Ignition Facility which is on the verge of demonstrating controlled thermonuclear fusion in a laboratory, I'm proud we were the first to decipher the 3 billion letter sequence of the human genome, I'm proud we invented the transistor, the laser, the nuclear reactor and the Polio vaccine that is on the verge of wiping that disease from the face of the Earth forever, I'm proud we engineered the microcomputer revolution and invented the internet those machines operate on, I'm proud we were the first to robotically explore every planet in the solar system with the exception of Venus and sent probes into interstellar space, and I'm proud of a thousand other things my country did to push back the darkness of ignorance about the physical world, thereby elevating the human condition to previously unimagined heights. And I hope that someday, instead of being proud of something as stupid as military might, or the number of gold medals we win in the Olympics, that my countrymen can join me in the more nuanced and altruistic flavor of patriotism that I am proudly guilty of indulging in. My style of patriotism is anything but the last refuge of scoundrels, and scientific achievement plays a central role in its maintenance.
Well, I'm from liberal about-to-legalize-gay-marriage (wo0t!) New York and I think it's a ridiculous waste of money too. 2 Billion dollars for a 500 megawatt generating plant? Please. This is some kind of sick joke.
The 500 MW is obviously peak power output, meaning that average power is going to be 200 MW, TOPS. 2 BILLION dollars for a 150 MW generating station. That's beyond pathetic. A natural gas fired station that provided that kind of power output could be built for 5% of that kind of money. The argument for this being a good investment into the technology is even more absurd. It's just a solar thermal plant using hot oil/molten salt. We've been doing this stone-age level crap since the early 70's.
Do I really need to explain what kind of advancements the nuclear fusion community could do with 2 billion dollars? We're right on the edge (like, this year) of demonstrating fusion ignition in the laboratory at the National Ignition Facility, a lab that houses the most powerful laser in the world and the largest, most complicated optical system ever constructed, at a cost barely more than 50% of this useless, make-work, feelgood project. $2 billion could go a long way toward building a gigawatt level power plant demonstration reactor after NIF achieves ignition, instead of wasting it on this nonsense that produces laughably insignificant amounts of energy.
Yeah, I guess that's why he just co-authored "Unification of gravity, gauge fields, and Higgs bosons" with Perimeter Institute physicist Lee Smolin then, huh.....'cause he's just such a joke.
Nice use of ridiculous hyperbole to claim things I never said and simultaneously ignore my points about the paper's poor, and largely absent data. This is Slashdot though, so I'm sure scientific skepticism plays second fiddle to your desire to believe in the latest cold fusion/room temp superconductor/martian microbe/supercapacitor/infinite capacity data storage scheme claptrap that comes down the pike, so please carry on as I'm sure you will regardless. Judging from the way this thread is being moderated, you're apparently in good, like-minded company.
Actually, everything I said was relevant and it's called considering the source. Something Slashdot editors, and apparently yourself, care little for. Single author papers in the twenty-first century are the hundred decibel alarm bells of pseudoscience and there is NO WAY in a million years that a paper with a substantial result about something as earth-shattering as room temperature superconductivity is going to be single author (and it sure as hell isn't going to first appear on the freakin' ArXiv).
Your claim that the paper itself is somehow mischaracterized in this story's post is a joke. The title of the paper is "Indications of room-temperature superconductivity at a metal-PZT interface", it's practically identical to what the story here claims. I read the paper and the author is clearly claiming RTSC effects in a PZT transducer, an extraordinary claim if there ever was one. Furthermore, he pompously refers to himself as "we" throughout the paper, even though he's the only author. Credible physicists who are NOT CRACKPOTS, do not put the phrase "room temperature superconductivity" in the title of a paper without making sure the rest of that fucker is filled to the brim with the most spectacularly extraordinary evidence that anyone in the field has seen in years, in order to support such a wildly sensationalistic claim. This paper has exactly none of that kind of evidence and because of it, the author deserves to have his name now associated with a certain Pons and a certain Fleischmann. It doesn't even have a plot showing K vs. ohms at the Tc, the paper is a joke, it's not even fit for burning.
Lisi's E8 paper has been cited like 17 times. I'd say that's pretty good and hardly constitutes "no scientists commenting on it in 3 years". It's usually a good bet, but overhyped media publicity doesn't ALWAYS automatically mean someone's work is shit. Lisi's theory makes concrete falsifiable predictions for new particles that will either be confirmed or ruled out using the LHC's dataset.
Uhhhm no, you don't have to wait for replication. All you have to do is move on to the next story and ignore this stupidity. It's a SINGLE AUTHOR PAPER from some dude at the University of North Bengal, which was reported by a laughably sensationalistic pseudoscience mongering blog and regurgitated here by perhaps the dumbest, most credulous editor on/.'s staff: kdawson (who posts trumpet-blaring room temperature superconductivity stories with such regularity that you could probably set your watch by it). Hang your head in shame/.
I don't know why the post above responding to you is at +3 insightful. It is not. Because if you "multiply that by the number of all other people doing such experiments / fun and telling themselves that they don't have an impact" as Sznupi says, you still only end up with a trivial fraction of He use overall, since only 7% of all He production is used in "fill" applications for buoyancy etc. I'm pretty sure the majority of that 7% is going to fill weather balloons and blimps and the like as you note, and the overwhelming majority ISN'T being used as kid's party decoration.
So don't worry, go out, get your kid one of those small $40 tanks and have fun. Better still, use your imagination and take the opportunity to teach your kids about some physics / chemistry. Start with the phenomenon of buoyancy and how that works (look at how a He filled balloon weirdly behaves in a car), show how helium is non-flammable and explain where its inertness comes from (electron valency - It's already "happy" with the number of e- it has), pick up a cheapo $10 vacuum thermos from Wal-mart or wherever and have your local welding supply shop fill it with liquid nitrogen ($5) so you can demonstrate how gasses expand/contract with temperature changes (the air in a balloon that has been manually blown full will liquefy in LN2, but a He filled balloon won't - explain WHY!), show them some videos about liquid helium on youtube and how much colder it is than LN2, explain how breathing it shifts the speed of sound - thereby shifting the pitch of your voice, etc. etc. etc. etc.
Is some of this well beyond the level of your 8yr old? Hell yes, and that's why you should do it! It doesn't matter if kids "get it" 100% all the time as so many stultifying grammar school teachers stupidly seem to believe. It matters much more that they are exposed to new things that make them think about familiar phenomena in new ways. They'll remember how fun and interesting the experience was, and the curiosity bred from that will stick with them forever. [/tangent]
Ya still around, stopped editing wikipedia a while ago though. Seemed like a futile waste of time with all the vandals. Maybe I'll start again after ignition on NIF. Sad to see you have seemingly gone to the dark side of wind/solar advocacy though;))
"Your response was to go to known anti-nuclear environmental web sites and show that, in fact, they are anti-nuclear. This is about as insightful as going to a vegetarian web site to show that some people are against eating meat."
Um no genius. I was providing links to show that anti-fusion environmentalist organizations do in fact, exist; you know, that thing you specifically asked to be proven to you to exist because you didn't believe there was such a thing!!? I've obviously wasted my time with you here though, as you're now simply moving the goalposts and incapable of logical reasoning.
And there's another one. The issue of implosion symmetry in direct drive irradiation schemes was solved like, oh, a decade ago by using spectral smoothing by dispersion and distributive phase plate modulation of the drive beams. Get with the times honey, we're regularly down to 1-2% RMS drive inhomogenity these days. Going from indirect to direct drive alone gives you a TENFOLD irradiation intensity for capsule drive. The latest hydrocode simulations indicate 1MJ drive shots at the second harmonic (532nm green light) should be capable of producing up to 300MJ yields.
Slashdot Mirror
So the ridiculously flagrant persecution complex the author of that page opens with in the very first paragraph didn't set off any alarm bells for you?
Maybe because it's so trivially easy to find the sources for everything I said they're all in the damn wikipedia page for Cevarix and included in just about every news article published on the thing in the past 5 years.
Well, as long as you make sure not to provide any citations for any of that.
I don't have the slightest clue as to why you're modded at +5, but I do know that you have literally no clue as to what in the hell you're talking about. I assume you're referring to the anti HPV vaccine Cevarix rather than Gardasil because you mention "the Australian taxpayer" and some of the technology used in Cevarix was discovered at Uni. Queensland. You conveniently neglect to mention that the Queensland researchers were collaborating with others at Georgetown, the Uni. of Rochester and the US National Cancer Institute, among others. The technology behind the discoveries made at these places was licensed to GlaxoSmithKline, a British company. The idea that the Australian taxpayer footed the bill for the FDA trials in the US is, frankly, idiotic. The trials were conducted by Glaxo, obviously. Additionally, there is no "US drug company that licenced [sic] it", it's being sold by Glaxo here just as it is everywhere else.
I know it's a crying shame that none of this fits into your wacky worldview where all corporations represent the nexus of evil and steal all their product ideas from "the people", but I guess you'll just have to find some way to get over it. I suggest you take some of your own advice about "paying more attention before writing" before your next post.
Oh, I guess /. doesn't render =/= signs, like the ones that were supposed to appear in between all those terms in my last msg. Megalamesville. C'mon, what is this 1997?
Mmmmmno, they don't. The fish are FLUORescent, not PHOSPHORescent. They're transfected with GFP like these cats. Hence the name GFP: green fluorescent protein.
FLUORESCENCE PHOSPHORescence ELECTROluminescence GALVANOluminescence BIOLUMinescence
All these phenomena are distinct. I'm wondering if anyone has ever heard of any naturally occurring PHOSphorescent molecules.
Oh fer cri, it's 2011 people, we've been doing this kind of thing for DECADES. The cat isn't self luminous, it's NOT BIOLUMINESCENT, IT'S FLUORESCENT.
It does get me to thinking though, are there any phosphorescent proteins known?
Nope, not saying any of that hilariously absurd, contrived, strawman bullshit at all. But I genuinely appreciate that you saw my totally unrelated point sufficient reason to fire up your obviously well oiled Chomskybot, such that you could spout your long, soporific list of dimestore, cryptofascist mewlings. Better luck next time in arguing against a transparently ridiculous point opposite to the one I was obviously making, though. Have a nice day :)
I work on its scaled testbed twin. I think I'm slightly more familiar with its priorities than you. Thermonuclear ignition in a pure fusion fueled microcapsule is now, and has always been the primary endpoint goal for building the device.
"....Patriotism has no place in science."
Patriotism may have no place in science, but science unquestionably has a place in patriotism.
I'm proud that my country built and operates the Tevatron which discovered the top quark, I'm proud we built the world's most powerful laser, the National Ignition Facility which is on the verge of demonstrating controlled thermonuclear fusion in a laboratory, I'm proud we were the first to decipher the 3 billion letter sequence of the human genome, I'm proud we invented the transistor, the laser, the nuclear reactor and the Polio vaccine that is on the verge of wiping that disease from the face of the Earth forever, I'm proud we engineered the microcomputer revolution and invented the internet those machines operate on, I'm proud we were the first to robotically explore every planet in the solar system with the exception of Venus and sent probes into interstellar space, and I'm proud of a thousand other things my country did to push back the darkness of ignorance about the physical world, thereby elevating the human condition to previously unimagined heights. And I hope that someday, instead of being proud of something as stupid as military might, or the number of gold medals we win in the Olympics, that my countrymen can join me in the more nuanced and altruistic flavor of patriotism that I am proudly guilty of indulging in. My style of patriotism is anything but the last refuge of scoundrels, and scientific achievement plays a central role in its maintenance.
Well, I'm from liberal about-to-legalize-gay-marriage (wo0t!) New York and I think it's a ridiculous waste of money too. 2 Billion dollars for a 500 megawatt generating plant? Please. This is some kind of sick joke.
The 500 MW is obviously peak power output, meaning that average power is going to be 200 MW, TOPS. 2 BILLION dollars for a 150 MW generating station. That's beyond pathetic. A natural gas fired station that provided that kind of power output could be built for 5% of that kind of money. The argument for this being a good investment into the technology is even more absurd. It's just a solar thermal plant using hot oil /molten salt. We've been doing this stone-age level crap since the early 70's.
Do I really need to explain what kind of advancements the nuclear fusion community could do with 2 billion dollars? We're right on the edge (like, this year) of demonstrating fusion ignition in the laboratory at the National Ignition Facility, a lab that houses the most powerful laser in the world and the largest, most complicated optical system ever constructed, at a cost barely more than 50% of this useless, make-work, feelgood project. $2 billion could go a long way toward building a gigawatt level power plant demonstration reactor after NIF achieves ignition, instead of wasting it on this nonsense that produces laughably insignificant amounts of energy.
Wow, Lubos Motl posts on /. too?
Yeah, I guess that's why he just co-authored "Unification of gravity, gauge fields, and Higgs bosons" with Perimeter Institute physicist Lee Smolin then, huh.....'cause he's just such a joke.
Nice use of ridiculous hyperbole to claim things I never said and simultaneously ignore my points about the paper's poor, and largely absent data. This is Slashdot though, so I'm sure scientific skepticism plays second fiddle to your desire to believe in the latest cold fusion/room temp superconductor/martian microbe/supercapacitor/infinite capacity data storage scheme claptrap that comes down the pike, so please carry on as I'm sure you will regardless. Judging from the way this thread is being moderated, you're apparently in good, like-minded company.
Actually, everything I said was relevant and it's called considering the source. Something Slashdot editors, and apparently yourself, care little for. Single author papers in the twenty-first century are the hundred decibel alarm bells of pseudoscience and there is NO WAY in a million years that a paper with a substantial result about something as earth-shattering as room temperature superconductivity is going to be single author (and it sure as hell isn't going to first appear on the freakin' ArXiv).
Your claim that the paper itself is somehow mischaracterized in this story's post is a joke. The title of the paper is "Indications of room-temperature superconductivity at a metal-PZT interface", it's practically identical to what the story here claims. I read the paper and the author is clearly claiming RTSC effects in a PZT transducer, an extraordinary claim if there ever was one. Furthermore, he pompously refers to himself as "we" throughout the paper, even though he's the only author. Credible physicists who are NOT CRACKPOTS, do not put the phrase "room temperature superconductivity" in the title of a paper without making sure the rest of that fucker is filled to the brim with the most spectacularly extraordinary evidence that anyone in the field has seen in years, in order to support such a wildly sensationalistic claim. This paper has exactly none of that kind of evidence and because of it, the author deserves to have his name now associated with a certain Pons and a certain Fleischmann. It doesn't even have a plot showing K vs. ohms at the Tc, the paper is a joke, it's not even fit for burning.
Lisi's E8 paper has been cited like 17 times. I'd say that's pretty good and hardly constitutes "no scientists commenting on it in 3 years". It's usually a good bet, but overhyped media publicity doesn't ALWAYS automatically mean someone's work is shit. Lisi's theory makes concrete falsifiable predictions for new particles that will either be confirmed or ruled out using the LHC's dataset.
Uhhhm no, you don't have to wait for replication. All you have to do is move on to the next story and ignore this stupidity. It's a SINGLE AUTHOR PAPER from some dude at the University of North Bengal, which was reported by a laughably sensationalistic pseudoscience mongering blog and regurgitated here by perhaps the dumbest, most credulous editor on /.'s staff: kdawson (who posts trumpet-blaring room temperature superconductivity stories with such regularity that you could probably set your watch by it). Hang your head in shame /.
I don't know why the post above responding to you is at +3 insightful. It is not. Because if you "multiply that by the number of all other people doing such experiments / fun and telling themselves that they don't have an impact" as Sznupi says, you still only end up with a trivial fraction of He use overall, since only 7% of all He production is used in "fill" applications for buoyancy etc. I'm pretty sure the majority of that 7% is going to fill weather balloons and blimps and the like as you note, and the overwhelming majority ISN'T being used as kid's party decoration.
So don't worry, go out, get your kid one of those small $40 tanks and have fun. Better still, use your imagination and take the opportunity to teach your kids about some physics / chemistry. Start with the phenomenon of buoyancy and how that works (look at how a He filled balloon weirdly behaves in a car), show how helium is non-flammable and explain where its inertness comes from (electron valency - It's already "happy" with the number of e- it has), pick up a cheapo $10 vacuum thermos from Wal-mart or wherever and have your local welding supply shop fill it with liquid nitrogen ($5) so you can demonstrate how gasses expand/contract with temperature changes (the air in a balloon that has been manually blown full will liquefy in LN2, but a He filled balloon won't - explain WHY!), show them some videos about liquid helium on youtube and how much colder it is than LN2, explain how breathing it shifts the speed of sound - thereby shifting the pitch of your voice, etc. etc. etc. etc.
Is some of this well beyond the level of your 8yr old? Hell yes, and that's why you should do it! It doesn't matter if kids "get it" 100% all the time as so many stultifying grammar school teachers stupidly seem to believe. It matters much more that they are exposed to new things that make them think about familiar phenomena in new ways. They'll remember how fun and interesting the experience was, and the curiosity bred from that will stick with them forever. [/tangent]
Ya still around, stopped editing wikipedia a while ago though. Seemed like a futile waste of time with all the vandals. Maybe I'll start again after ignition on NIF. Sad to see you have seemingly gone to the dark side of wind/solar advocacy though ;))
truly, you've shattered through the final boundaries of what humans have heretofore known as the limits of megadouche pedantry.
"Your response was to go to known anti-nuclear environmental web sites and show that, in fact, they are anti-nuclear. This is about as insightful as going to a vegetarian web site to show that some people are against eating meat."
Um no genius. I was providing links to show that anti-fusion environmentalist organizations do in fact, exist; you know, that thing you specifically asked to be proven to you to exist because you didn't believe there was such a thing!!? I've obviously wasted my time with you here though, as you're now simply moving the goalposts and incapable of logical reasoning.
Thank you both. My thoughts exactly. I consider MYSELF an environmentalist, just one with a clue about nuclear physics.
are you at pppl?
And there's another one. The issue of implosion symmetry in direct drive irradiation schemes was solved like, oh, a decade ago by using spectral smoothing by dispersion and distributive phase plate modulation of the drive beams. Get with the times honey, we're regularly down to 1-2% RMS drive inhomogenity these days. Going from indirect to direct drive alone gives you a TENFOLD irradiation intensity for capsule drive. The latest hydrocode simulations indicate 1MJ drive shots at the second harmonic (532nm green light) should be capable of producing up to 300MJ yields.
They weren't his words, they were mine. Anyway it's a perfectly cromulent term. Used all the time: http://euobserver.com/843/30103