While it is unsurprising that someone who thinks "intelligent design" is a relevant criticism of real science also thinks the Big Bang is "just a theory" (said as if it had been merely dreamt up by a drunk on his way home from the bar last night), it is a huge HUGE tipoff to nuttery when a supposed astrophysicst rejects one of the most successful theories ever devised in all of cosmology. And when respected UCLA physicists start pointing out the glaringly obvious mistakes in said anti-big bang theories, well, that's pretty much when the house of cards comes tumbling down isn't it? No your comment is not insigtful in the least. Rather, it is an appeal to ignorance. Though if you realy do require a specific refutation of this focus fusion bullshit (and that's what it is so why mince words) you need only look to this 1995 doctoral thesis by Todd Rider which effectively kills off any possiblity of nonequilibrium fusion reactions (such as Fusors and pyroelectric fusion devieces) of ever producing net energy. The Focus Fusion device even if it actually DID achieve the temperatures claimed (and no, it does not) would belong to this class of non-starters.
Wow Baldrson this must only be what, the 500th time you've posted this nothing letter here as being something that "blows the doors off" the government's past projects in fusion energy? Goodness, are you perhaps hoping to get a better response here this time than you did when you posted nearly the exact same nuttery to the hyper-racist "Stormfront.org" where you apparently tried to tie the "inhibition of pioneering culture in the US" to..... wait for it.... yep THE JEWS!? Hat's off to you! You truly are a first rate interweb whackjob!
I guess that's what I get for overestimating the level of the room. The reason I did not spell things out explicitly is because I figured the common fact that gas=more volume than liquid and hence boiling liquid in container = boom is so blindingly obvious that it didn't need even mentioning. My objection to the BBC article that I was making a joke about lies in the fact that they seem to suggest the fire was CAUSED by an LN2 tank explosion, which is extraordinarily unlikely for obvious reasons.
Holy crap people, how many "OMG didn't you like totally know that pressure and temperature are directly related in gasses and that LN2 can like BOIL an' junk!!? Like wow ur so 14m3!".
DUH!! Wow, congrats to you, you remembered something from high school chemistry. Why do I picture you patting yourself on the back right now? The point is that an exploding container of liquid nitrogen will NOT create a fire! Which is what the the BBC article implies.
yeah it can explode. Its time people understood that explode does not necessarily = explode (thank heavens for moronic kids who produce endlessly amusing videos like these, what would we do without them?).
"Francis Chee, a postgraduate student at the university, was at the scene of the fire. He said: "There are a lot of liquid nitrogen tanks outside the building and they use liquid nitrogen heavily there. "I did hear several explosions sounding like gas canisters going off.""
Hmm, not knowing that liquid nitrogen is completely non-flamable and ~200 degrees below zero...? Priceless. Way to go BBC, bang on science reporting as usual.
Mmmmhmm. because when terrorists want to make a point and wreak havok they often go the the most non-sensational, subtle and long term but slowly effective methods available. Right. But let's continue thinking along the lines of OH NOES! won't someone think of the terrorists?!! Because, you know, even though its irrational, that's more exciting. Right?
his pont was that you are someone who can not discern the difference between superstitious beliefs and falsifiable ideas as in science. you then proved his point for him. hand.
"You cannot prove anything using using science, and any good scientist would be the first to admit that."
No they wouldn't, what a dumb thing to say. I don't think I've ever met a scientist who would say such a ridiculous thing (and I work at a lab with about 300 of them!). You have it the wrong way around. Prove that an invisible dragon DOESN'T live in my garage. Can't do it can you? Now prove that light is a form of energy. done.
"This particular machine is of course targeted at LANL, and weapons development (oops, did I say that? I mean 'stockpile stewardship')"
Just to expand on that, it is worth noting that the ASCI Blue Pacific supercomputer at LLNL was the first to run a fully three dimensional simulation of a nuclear trigger (plutonium fission) implosion and shortly thereafter was the first to run a full 3D simulation of the secondary fusion stage in a thermonuclear device. This computer was capable of ~3 teraflops and took something like 20 days to run those sims. Blue Gene is ~100 times faster than that computer and judging from the time it took ASCI White (~10 Tflops) to complete a simulation of a full thermonuclear detonation, it would therefore probably not be unreasonable to assume this new computer is capable of full 3D simulation of a complete thermonuclear bomb detonation (primary and secondary) in mere hours to a couple days. It is a shame that we even "need" nuclear weapons, but if we're going to have them I for one would much rather see tests of them done in silicon instead of in a big mushroom cloud!
Yes, it is also sad that while other countries use thier supercomputing power mostly to investigate protien folding and earthquake propagation and other purposes generally recognized as peaceful we mainly use ours for simulation nuclear weapons designs; but it is not all bad. The simulations of imploding fusion fuel can (and will) also be used to simulate the implosion of the tiny fusion microcapsules which are imploded in laboratory laserfusion facilities like NIF. This has the potential to eventually result in laserfusion (inertial confinement fusion) as a power source. Supercomputers which were mainly intended to be used for weapons research in the past have occasionally also served up a few surprises in completely unrelated fields. The supercomputer Cray X-MP (?) at Sandia (?) labs in the mid 80s was where the first simulations of the giant impact theory of the formation of the moon were validated. Its now the predominant theory of the moon's origin. It is hard to imagine that this new computer won't have a few surprises of its own to reveal even if it only donates a small amount of time to non-defense related research.
Why did I say they are idiotic? I didn't think I'd actually have to spell it out but...well, here we go. They are idiotic complaints for the same reason every other religious/superstitious complaint against the advancement of science is entertained these days. They are idiotic because when the progress of science and rational inquiry into the workings of the universe are held to the fickle whims and fears of irrational belief systems, then in my opinion that is an embarrassing and gross failure of the pursuit of human betterment.
I'm afraid your rhetorical question of what I would think if the proposed building site would be the Wailing Wall or Saint Catherine's Monastery, would get the same response. I honestly wouldn't shed a tear. That these religions (juadism, christianity) are merely more widespread and accepted than the native religious belief of Hawaiians affords them no more protection against being recognized as completely foolish and worthy of scorn when they attempt to snub the pursuit of knowledge of our world.
It baffles me beyond words that a (ANY) religious belief system could be so unbelievably willfully ignorant, nearsighted and completely arrogant as to assume their mythical belief system, unsupported by evidence nor reason could even hope to compare to the fantastic wonders of the cosmos which are revealed by actually studying it through the use of telescopes at the top of Mauna Kea. There have been something like 100 planets outside of our solar system which have been discovered using the telescopes on that mountain. Ponder that for a moment. That's sacred.
The Kecks, though they are capable of nulling interferometry, are not capable of imaging interferometry. Or at least they will not be capable of it until they complete the construction of the 4(?) small "outrigger" telescopes around the two Kecks currently on the top of the mountain. The completion of these small outriggers has been delayed for several years however because of the (idiotic) cries of "oh noes it will disturb the sacred mountain spirits so you can't build anything there ever anymore!!" from native Hawaiian tribe organizations. The binocular telescope in Arizona, when finished, will be ready right away to perform full imaging aperture synthesis with a ~22 meter baseline and simultaneous adaptive optics correction (with future capability for advanced multi-conjugate adaptive optics correction). This should (theoretically) allow near.005 arcsecond resolution in the visible spectrum to be achieved. Very exciting.
Such as? I think Mythbusters is one of the best science-related programs on tv today. No not because all of the shows are done with an exacting precision and logical rigorousness reminiscent of the Cavendish lab, but rather because it shows the core of the scientific method IN ACTION. They have an idea that needs testing, they make a guess at what might happen if they try X, they build an experiment to actually try X, then they run the experiment and draw some conclutions from the results. I can not recall a more apt application of the Baconian method ever being shown on any TV show (save for perhaps Bill Nye or Mr. Wizard or something). Who cares if thier guesses about how precisely the experiment should be set up are wrong, that's (a HUGE) part of science! At the end of the show they usually even discuss where thier experiments could've gone wrong or what might be done better if they tried it again. What more could you ask for in a tv show?! I think it is an especially excellent show for kids to watch. Numerous scientific principals are explained in an accessable and interesting manner (bouyancy, properties of heat and light, mechanical levers and mech. advantage, electrical circuts, flamability of vapours vs. liquids, properties of density, inertia, and on and on). The show can do a great job of keeping them simultaneously entertained with the odd explosion but also teaching the rigorous and logical thought processes necessary for the foundation of a scientific mindset. I really can't say enough good about it.
"They were about $7 a bulb, and are rated to last 100K hours, or about 50 times as long the bulbs they replaced. Since the bulb is actually made of up 18 individual LEDs inside, I believe the rating is for the mean time until 50% of the LEDs are no longer functioning."
The individual leds themselves will actually probably 'never' totally fail. The 100K hours refers instead to the time it will take brightness to decrease by 50%.
"They don't get that slapping down a load of facts *isn't* the same as writing a good article; I'm not sure that they care, they're simply writing for the sake of it- if it's about anything, it's about their pet interest."
Sigh.... spoken like so many others who just don't get it at all. I honestly don't understand your bizzare objections to additions to disambiguation pages at all. Who cares if there are some things added to those pages which people might not use abbreviations for? It doesn't matter that you think MC should always be assumed to stand for such and such. Maybe I was looking for "midnight commander". Get it? That's the beauty of a disambiguation page. Also, the fact that there are obsessive nerds out there who spend hours inserting facts on ulta-obscure and unknown and forgotten corners of human knowldge which just happen to be thier "pet interest" is precisely what makes wikipedia amazing and great. This is the reason there are articles on "tea sucking", heavy metal umlauts, ampelmännchen, list of laser types, geology of the death valley area, Pizza delivery and literally thousands upon thousands more like them. You certainly won't find any information on these things in other encyclopedias and without hyer-obsessive geeks with pet interests these articles and many others wouldn't exist at all. Despite whether or not you think they "belong" in an encyclopedia is also irrelevant. They're fascinating and informative bits of information. That's really all that matters for some wiki articles.
Yes the issues of accuracy in wikipedia do exist and are a problem that needs to be seriously studied and fixed. However, as long as wiki is only used as a "jumping off point" to get other information (the only way any sensible person WOULD should be using it in its current state) then what's the problem?
Maybe you need to stop navel gazing about whether adding to wikipedia is done for egotism or nerrdy obsessing or "social onanastic" purposes and realize that most people just like to do it because its fun!
"If such chemicals, such as peroxy radical, superoxide, etc are in fact produced, then to the extent that they get past your outer skin and react with live cells, the chemicals will produce cancerous and mutagenic lesions. If the chemcals get to the layer of living cells which is continously gowing and dividing to produce new skin, you would have to worry about skin cancers......"
What tosh. By this reasoning the hydrogen peroxide solutions available in every drug store in the world are horribly carcinogenic brews just waiting to induce nasty insidious tumors at the slightest touch to the skin.
This is one thing I don't understand about these ginormous bridges. Yeah ok there was an earthquake during construction and they added a few feet to the span to compensate. But what if one happens now?? Wouldn't such an event that expands the length of the main span by FEET put tremendous tensile stress on the roadway? How would it not just rip apart in such a circumstance?
Slashdot Mirror
While it is unsurprising that someone who thinks "intelligent design" is a relevant criticism of real science also thinks the Big Bang is "just a theory" (said as if it had been merely dreamt up by a drunk on his way home from the bar last night), it is a huge HUGE tipoff to nuttery when a supposed astrophysicst rejects one of the most successful theories ever devised in all of cosmology. And when respected UCLA physicists start pointing out the glaringly obvious mistakes in said anti-big bang theories, well, that's pretty much when the house of cards comes tumbling down isn't it? No your comment is not insigtful in the least. Rather, it is an appeal to ignorance. Though if you realy do require a specific refutation of this focus fusion bullshit (and that's what it is so why mince words) you need only look to this 1995 doctoral thesis by Todd Rider which effectively kills off any possiblity of nonequilibrium fusion reactions (such as Fusors and pyroelectric fusion devieces) of ever producing net energy. The Focus Fusion device even if it actually DID achieve the temperatures claimed (and no, it does not) would belong to this class of non-starters.
Wow Baldrson this must only be what, the 500th time you've posted this nothing letter here as being something that "blows the doors off" the government's past projects in fusion energy? Goodness, are you perhaps hoping to get a better response here this time than you did when you posted nearly the exact same nuttery to the hyper-racist "Stormfront.org" where you apparently tried to tie the "inhibition of pioneering culture in the US" to..... wait for it.... yep THE JEWS!? Hat's off to you! You truly are a first rate interweb whackjob!
So by that you must mean you want to just say "yes"?
I guess that's what I get for overestimating the level of the room. The reason I did not spell things out explicitly is because I figured the common fact that gas=more volume than liquid and hence boiling liquid in container = boom is so blindingly obvious that it didn't need even mentioning. My objection to the BBC article that I was making a joke about lies in the fact that they seem to suggest the fire was CAUSED by an LN2 tank explosion, which is extraordinarily unlikely for obvious reasons.
Holy crap people, how many "OMG didn't you like totally know that pressure and temperature are directly related in gasses and that LN2 can like BOIL an' junk!!? Like wow ur so 14m3!".
DUH!! Wow, congrats to you, you remembered something from high school chemistry. Why do I picture you patting yourself on the back right now? The point is that an exploding container of liquid nitrogen will NOT create a fire! Which is what the the BBC article implies.
yeah it can explode. Its time people understood that explode does not necessarily = explode (thank heavens for moronic kids who produce endlessly amusing videos like these, what would we do without them?).
"Francis Chee, a postgraduate student at the university, was at the scene of the fire.
He said: "There are a lot of liquid nitrogen tanks outside the building and they use liquid nitrogen heavily there.
"I did hear several explosions sounding like gas canisters going off.""
Hmm, not knowing that liquid nitrogen is completely non-flamable and ~200 degrees below zero...? Priceless. Way to go BBC, bang on science reporting as usual.
Mmmmhmm. because when terrorists want to make a point and wreak havok they often go the the most non-sensational, subtle and long term but slowly effective methods available. Right. But let's continue thinking along the lines of OH NOES! won't someone think of the terrorists?!! Because, you know, even though its irrational, that's more exciting. Right?
his pont was that you are someone who can not discern the difference between superstitious beliefs and falsifiable ideas as in science. you then proved his point for him. hand.
"You cannot prove anything using using science, and any good scientist would be the first to admit that."
No they wouldn't, what a dumb thing to say. I don't think I've ever met a scientist who would say such a ridiculous thing (and I work at a lab with about 300 of them!). You have it the wrong way around. Prove that an invisible dragon DOESN'T live in my garage. Can't do it can you? Now prove that light is a form of energy. done.
"This particular machine is of course targeted at LANL, and weapons development (oops, did I say that? I mean 'stockpile stewardship')"
Just to expand on that, it is worth noting that the ASCI Blue Pacific supercomputer at LLNL was the first to run a fully three dimensional simulation of a nuclear trigger (plutonium fission) implosion and shortly thereafter was the first to run a full 3D simulation of the secondary fusion stage in a thermonuclear device. This computer was capable of ~3 teraflops and took something like 20 days to run those sims. Blue Gene is ~100 times faster than that computer and judging from the time it took ASCI White (~10 Tflops) to complete a simulation of a full thermonuclear detonation, it would therefore probably not be unreasonable to assume this new computer is capable of full 3D simulation of a complete thermonuclear bomb detonation (primary and secondary) in mere hours to a couple days. It is a shame that we even "need" nuclear weapons, but if we're going to have them I for one would much rather see tests of them done in silicon instead of in a big mushroom cloud!
Yes, it is also sad that while other countries use thier supercomputing power mostly to investigate protien folding and earthquake propagation and other purposes generally recognized as peaceful we mainly use ours for simulation nuclear weapons designs; but it is not all bad. The simulations of imploding fusion fuel can (and will) also be used to simulate the implosion of the tiny fusion microcapsules which are imploded in laboratory laserfusion facilities like NIF. This has the potential to eventually result in laserfusion (inertial confinement fusion) as a power source. Supercomputers which were mainly intended to be used for weapons research in the past have occasionally also served up a few surprises in completely unrelated fields. The supercomputer Cray X-MP (?) at Sandia (?) labs in the mid 80s was where the first simulations of the giant impact theory of the formation of the moon were validated. Its now the predominant theory of the moon's origin. It is hard to imagine that this new computer won't have a few surprises of its own to reveal even if it only donates a small amount of time to non-defense related research.
Why did I say they are idiotic? I didn't think I'd actually have to spell it out but...well, here we go. They are idiotic complaints for the same reason every other religious/superstitious complaint against the advancement of science is entertained these days. They are idiotic because when the progress of science and rational inquiry into the workings of the universe are held to the fickle whims and fears of irrational belief systems, then in my opinion that is an embarrassing and gross failure of the pursuit of human betterment.
I'm afraid your rhetorical question of what I would think if the proposed building site would be the Wailing Wall or Saint Catherine's Monastery, would get the same response. I honestly wouldn't shed a tear. That these religions (juadism, christianity) are merely more widespread and accepted than the native religious belief of Hawaiians affords them no more protection against being recognized as completely foolish and worthy of scorn when they attempt to snub the pursuit of knowledge of our world.
It baffles me beyond words that a (ANY) religious belief system could be so unbelievably willfully ignorant, nearsighted and completely arrogant as to assume their mythical belief system, unsupported by evidence nor reason could even hope to compare to the fantastic wonders of the cosmos which are revealed by actually studying it through the use of telescopes at the top of Mauna Kea. There have been something like 100 planets outside of our solar system which have been discovered using the telescopes on that mountain. Ponder that for a moment. That's sacred.
Goodness, thank heavens you cracked that mind boggling enigma for us.
The Kecks, though they are capable of nulling interferometry, are not capable of imaging interferometry. Or at least they will not be capable of it until they complete the construction of the 4(?) small "outrigger" telescopes around the two Kecks currently on the top of the mountain. The completion of these small outriggers has been delayed for several years however because of the (idiotic) cries of "oh noes it will disturb the sacred mountain spirits so you can't build anything there ever anymore!!" from native Hawaiian tribe organizations. The binocular telescope in Arizona, when finished, will be ready right away to perform full imaging aperture synthesis with a ~22 meter baseline and simultaneous adaptive optics correction (with future capability for advanced multi-conjugate adaptive optics correction). This should (theoretically) allow near .005 arcsecond resolution in the visible spectrum to be achieved. Very exciting.
Such as? I think Mythbusters is one of the best science-related programs on tv today. No not because all of the shows are done with an exacting precision and logical rigorousness reminiscent of the Cavendish lab, but rather because it shows the core of the scientific method IN ACTION. They have an idea that needs testing, they make a guess at what might happen if they try X, they build an experiment to actually try X, then they run the experiment and draw some conclutions from the results. I can not recall a more apt application of the Baconian method ever being shown on any TV show (save for perhaps Bill Nye or Mr. Wizard or something). Who cares if thier guesses about how precisely the experiment should be set up are wrong, that's (a HUGE) part of science! At the end of the show they usually even discuss where thier experiments could've gone wrong or what might be done better if they tried it again. What more could you ask for in a tv show?! I think it is an especially excellent show for kids to watch. Numerous scientific principals are explained in an accessable and interesting manner (bouyancy, properties of heat and light, mechanical levers and mech. advantage, electrical circuts, flamability of vapours vs. liquids, properties of density, inertia, and on and on). The show can do a great job of keeping them simultaneously entertained with the odd explosion but also teaching the rigorous and logical thought processes necessary for the foundation of a scientific mindset. I really can't say enough good about it.
Certain things on a space probe do not particularly like being contaminated, such as ohhhh I don't know, lenses?
Riiiiight, mmmhmm, because you are incapable of ever being incorrect.
where have you been for the past 2 years?
"They were about $7 a bulb, and are rated to last 100K hours, or about 50 times as long the bulbs they replaced. Since the bulb is actually made of up 18 individual LEDs inside, I believe the rating is for the mean time until 50% of the LEDs are no longer functioning."
The individual leds themselves will actually probably 'never' totally fail. The 100K hours refers instead to the time it will take brightness to decrease by 50%.
oh goodness, have you forgotten your little blue pill again today sweetie? now what did we talk about...?
"They don't get that slapping down a load of facts *isn't* the same as writing a good article; I'm not sure that they care, they're simply writing for the sake of it- if it's about anything, it's about their pet interest."
Sigh.... spoken like so many others who just don't get it at all. I honestly don't understand your bizzare objections to additions to disambiguation pages at all. Who cares if there are some things added to those pages which people might not use abbreviations for? It doesn't matter that you think MC should always be assumed to stand for such and such. Maybe I was looking for "midnight commander". Get it? That's the beauty of a disambiguation page. Also, the fact that there are obsessive nerds out there who spend hours inserting facts on ulta-obscure and unknown and forgotten corners of human knowldge which just happen to be thier "pet interest" is precisely what makes wikipedia amazing and great. This is the reason there are articles on "tea sucking", heavy metal umlauts, ampelmännchen, list of laser types, geology of the death valley area, Pizza delivery and literally thousands upon thousands more like them. You certainly won't find any information on these things in other encyclopedias and without hyer-obsessive geeks with pet interests these articles and many others wouldn't exist at all. Despite whether or not you think they "belong" in an encyclopedia is also irrelevant. They're fascinating and informative bits of information. That's really all that matters for some wiki articles.
Yes the issues of accuracy in wikipedia do exist and are a problem that needs to be seriously studied and fixed. However, as long as wiki is only used as a "jumping off point" to get other information (the only way any sensible person WOULD should be using it in its current state) then what's the problem?
Maybe you need to stop navel gazing about whether adding to wikipedia is done for egotism or nerrdy obsessing or "social onanastic" purposes and realize that most people just like to do it because its fun!
Are people really this clueless about even the simplest facts of human spaceflight in the 21st. century? HELLO!?? They're called retro-rockets people.
+5 insightful for unsubstantiated super ultra wacky conspiracy theories on /.? Why I'm shocked I tell you, just shocked! not.
"If such chemicals, such as peroxy radical, superoxide, etc are in fact produced, then to the extent that they get past your outer skin and react with live cells, the chemicals will produce cancerous and mutagenic lesions. If the chemcals get to the layer of living cells which is continously gowing and dividing to produce new skin, you would have to worry about skin cancers......"
What tosh. By this reasoning the hydrogen peroxide solutions available in every drug store in the world are horribly carcinogenic brews just waiting to induce nasty insidious tumors at the slightest touch to the skin.
This is one thing I don't understand about these ginormous bridges. Yeah ok there was an earthquake during construction and they added a few feet to the span to compensate. But what if one happens now?? Wouldn't such an event that expands the length of the main span by FEET put tremendous tensile stress on the roadway? How would it not just rip apart in such a circumstance?