Interesting, perhaps the remaining highly concentrated sludge of soda and CO2 had enough dissolved solutes to force the freezing point depression a little below the temperature of the freezer and when the it was opened the process of of further cooling (adiabatic expansion of the gas?) caused the extra viscous solution to rather suddenly freeze forming a slush with a fairly unfiorm distribution of only small ice crystals (like ice cream) suspended in it so it remained somewhat deformable. This conversation is extremely nerdy....:)
The problem with rapid cooling of carbonated drinks is that the solubility of CO2 in water decreases at low temperatures.
You have this backwards, solubilityincreases with decreasing temperature. The lower the temperature the more stable the CO3 ion is and the lower the average kinetic energy of CO2 gas molecules in the liquid are therefore decreasing the likelyhood that any one molecule will have enough energy to escape the solivated state. I suspect what has happened to his Dr.Pepper is that the LN2 cooled it so fast that the outer parts touching the can froze. This freezing had the effect of increasing the solute concentration in the remaining liquid (the ice was more pure than the liquid of course just like icebergs etc.) and when the solute concentration exceeded a certain threshold the CO2 was forced out of solution. So you can cool the drink as fast as you want, so long as you don't start freezing it.
Interesting stuff, what kind of ion temperatures did you get (if you can remember such a thing from 30 years ago), how large was the experiment, what kind of heating techniques did you use on the plasma, did you ever go to D-T, did you see neutrons etc.? Sorry for so many questions but Trisops only gets like 14 hits on google and I dont have a subscription to PRL!:)
The difference is that in the toy plasma ball the plasma is allowed to touch the glass it is encased in. In this LDX device there is a superconducting magnet(very powerfull) floating in the center of the vacuum chamber. Since a plasma consists of free charged particles floating around it is affected by this magentic field and is confined to the field lines of the magnet which allows it to exist in an extremely HOT state without touching the walls of the vacuum chamber and loosing all its energy. If a fusing plasma were to be contained merely in a glass bulb it would soon melt and vaporize due to the tremendous heat deposited by fast moving ions and electrons in the plasma(actually it would cool and "quench" the plasma fusion reaction long before this happened but supposing you could sustain its energy and temperature...then it would destroy its container).
Perhaps I miscalculated in thinking that slashdot would be a good place to submit this news to. I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than, judging from comments here, it clearly is, and who would be a group which would enjoy hearing detailed news of an albeit small step toward a possible clean and infinite energy source of the future. Here we are ~150 posts in, and most are along the lines of "why are we wasting our time on this", "cold fusion is being suppressed", "it'll never work, we're wasting money", "ugh, too much reading" and all manner of other pseudoscientifically inclined rubbish. It's not merely that these posts exist that's depressing, it's that it's being MODDED UP.
Is this truly the state of disaffection and ignorance that exists in the general public (and this is slashdot!) today toward fundamental scientific research and technological achievement? I simply can not imagine that this is actually the case and I stronly hope that what is seen here is not merely a product of intellectual laziness but is, instead, a result of a deep failure on the part of the scientific community to excite and educate the public about its pursuits. At least I HOPE this is the case, then perhaps something might be done to remedy the situation.
Though, a small part of me suspects that this is not the case and that in the ever richer and more comfortable "west" we truly are slowly but surely slipping down a slope of scientific indifference and even hostility; and that subsequent generations may curse our graves for allowing a wide margin of the public to consistently indulge in such shameful, wilfull ignorance.
Yeah, the term was invented in an obscure paper where very few people noticed or used it until the fiasco of Stanley / Pons in '89 it was virtually unknown.
hmm interesting. I think the future here is going to ultimately be custom wavefront corrections using fully intrastromal ablations without the use of a flap. Where ultrashort laser pulses are used to "photodisrupt" tissue at controlled distances below the corneal surface so there won't be any opening of the cornea at all. That said, it will obviously be a long time before this is a reality and in the meantime there are still huge improvments being made in traditional LASIK with wavefront modelling and such, there are actually people who specialise in modelling the dynamics of the vapor plume created by the individual pulses of the laser spot!
Ouch! What a terrible story! May I ask where you had it done? And what laser (if you recall) they used on you? Did they at least give you an explanation as to why you had such a bad experience?
This is IMPORTANT, mod parent up! The parent is referring to a laser called intralase which completely eliminates the process of using a microkeratome to cut the flap, the part of the procedure that is by far the most prone to induce complications. The laser cuts the flap for the procedure by using thousands of ultrafast femtosecond pulses of light focused just below the surface of the cornea in a radial pattern. Depth and thickness of the flap can be controlled with exquisite precision and since nothing physically touches the intracorneal tissue, risk of infection is grealty reduced. While you're at it, since you're probable a technical guy, what with posting to slashdot and all, why not check out the laser itself? Manufacturers are all different with respect to the spot size of the laser pulses, the method which they use to track tiny eye movments and compensate for them, and the range of astig. and correction they are intended to treat. Also, see if they do customized ablations to reduce higher order abberations as well. If you're going to check out the doctor before you have the prcedure done WHY NOT CHECK OUT THE TECHNOLOGY TOO?!
uh, no. doses are low for the west coast and at the southern border because most tests were done in Nevada or New Mexico and winds in the US generally blow East North East. Dose from cosmic ray electron/muon air showers does increase with altitude but not by massive amounts, and it wouldn't explain the high doses in the midwest and the plains states. Besides they're mostly measuring I-131 doses in this map which is a measurement unaffected by cosmic ray doses.
That map is interesting but this one is even more interesting. It is the total fallout for the US, by county, over the entire continental atmospheric testing period. The doses are somewhat high in places, but not outrageously so when you consider it is summed over a period of ~20(?) or so years. The site nuclearfiles.org is obviously grossly biased but this section of it is absolutely fascinating. It contains I-131 fallout maps for justa about every aboveground test done in the US.
thickness of the rings increases with distance from saturn from meters to >1000Km for the outer rings. It's a gap in the outer rings that cassini passed through.
I highly doubt the salinity of water bodies has anything to do with the aboveground attenuation of radio signals. unless you're under water, why would it make a difference.
no, I'm afraid Huygens is totaly unsterilized as well. It is clean but not sterile by any means. From ESA "The European Space Agency-built probe was not sterilized to a high standard". We are relying on the cryogenic temperatures of it's final resting place on the surface to do the sterilizing.
Don't know where you got that....but it's too high. From JPL: "3-axis stabilized; power supplied by 3 RTG (628W at EOM); 4 meter HGA supporting S-, X-,Ku-, Ka-band signals, X-band telemetry at 249 kbps, 2 backup LGAs for emergency commanding..."
So ~250kbps max but I doubt they get that at saturn orbit, it's probably more like ~120-140kbps. Compare to mars rovers direct to earth 11kbps and 256kbps for the through-orbiter relay.
Slashdot Mirror
*snicker* ...Others from 150 years ago:
"I know why the caged bird is quiet and subservient."
"The new joy of...proper wifely housekeeping and cleaning"
"What's happening to my body? Shameful and filthy wicked things."
"Where's E.A. Poe?"
"Heather has an upper class mommy and an Irish daddy!"
"It's perfectly abnormal and wrong!"
"Saying no! to 'sex'!"
"The Whig's cookbook"
"A brave new world of corsets and revealed ankles!"
Interesting, perhaps the remaining highly concentrated sludge of soda and CO2 had enough dissolved solutes to force the freezing point depression a little below the temperature of the freezer and when the it was opened the process of of further cooling (adiabatic expansion of the gas?) caused the extra viscous solution to rather suddenly freeze forming a slush with a fairly unfiorm distribution of only small ice crystals (like ice cream) suspended in it so it remained somewhat deformable. This conversation is extremely nerdy....:)
I'm sorry, that graph may have been misleading since it gave concentration as p(negative log). Here is clearer graph http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/images2/174 solublegas.gif.
The problem with rapid cooling of carbonated drinks is that the solubility of CO2 in water decreases at low temperatures.
You have this backwards, solubility increases with decreasing temperature. The lower the temperature the more stable the CO3 ion is and the lower the average kinetic energy of CO2 gas molecules in the liquid are therefore decreasing the likelyhood that any one molecule will have enough energy to escape the solivated state. I suspect what has happened to his Dr.Pepper is that the LN2 cooled it so fast that the outer parts touching the can froze. This freezing had the effect of increasing the solute concentration in the remaining liquid (the ice was more pure than the liquid of course just like icebergs etc.) and when the solute concentration exceeded a certain threshold the CO2 was forced out of solution. So you can cool the drink as fast as you want, so long as you don't start freezing it.
Very interesting! It almost sounds (remotely anyway) like magnetized target fusion (MTF). Everything old is new again I suppose...
Interesting stuff, what kind of ion temperatures did you get (if you can remember such a thing from 30 years ago), how large was the experiment, what kind of heating techniques did you use on the plasma, did you ever go to D-T, did you see neutrons etc.? Sorry for so many questions but Trisops only gets like 14 hits on google and I dont have a subscription to PRL! :)
The difference is that in the toy plasma ball the plasma is allowed to touch the glass it is encased in. In this LDX device there is a superconducting magnet(very powerfull) floating in the center of the vacuum chamber. Since a plasma consists of free charged particles floating around it is affected by this magentic field and is confined to the field lines of the magnet which allows it to exist in an extremely HOT state without touching the walls of the vacuum chamber and loosing all its energy. If a fusing plasma were to be contained merely in a glass bulb it would soon melt and vaporize due to the tremendous heat deposited by fast moving ions and electrons in the plasma(actually it would cool and "quench" the plasma fusion reaction long before this happened but supposing you could sustain its energy and temperature...then it would destroy its container).
Perhaps I miscalculated in thinking that slashdot would be a good place to submit this news to. I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than, judging from comments here, it clearly is, and who would be a group which would enjoy hearing detailed news of an albeit small step toward a possible clean and infinite energy source of the future. Here we are ~150 posts in, and most are along the lines of "why are we wasting our time on this", "cold fusion is being suppressed", "it'll never work, we're wasting money", "ugh, too much reading" and all manner of other pseudoscientifically inclined rubbish. It's not merely that these posts exist that's depressing, it's that it's being MODDED UP.
Is this truly the state of disaffection and ignorance that exists in the general public (and this is slashdot!) today toward fundamental scientific research and technological achievement? I simply can not imagine that this is actually the case and I stronly hope that what is seen here is not merely a product of intellectual laziness but is, instead, a result of a deep failure on the part of the scientific community to excite and educate the public about its pursuits. At least I HOPE this is the case, then perhaps something might be done to remedy the situation.
Though, a small part of me suspects that this is not the case and that in the ever richer and more comfortable "west" we truly are slowly but surely slipping down a slope of scientific indifference and even hostility; and that subsequent generations may curse our graves for allowing a wide margin of the public to consistently indulge in such shameful, wilfull ignorance.
Yeah, the term was invented in an obscure paper where very few people noticed or used it until the fiasco of Stanley / Pons in '89 it was virtually unknown.
Wow was he also able to see into the future? Feynman died in '88, the cold fusion nonsense didn't start until '89.
high power "AM radio" (usually commercial) is commonly taken to mean 100's of KHz range.
Seriously, it's 'orrid! There's a reason designs go out of style.
Check out the author list on the paper in the arxiv, it's like 2 pages long!!! When did author lists get so long?
If it's video of the inside of "decomissioned" reactors you're interested in, why not take a trip straight into hell......
hmm interesting. I think the future here is going to ultimately be custom wavefront corrections using fully intrastromal ablations without the use of a flap. Where ultrashort laser pulses are used to "photodisrupt" tissue at controlled distances below the corneal surface so there won't be any opening of the cornea at all. That said, it will obviously be a long time before this is a reality and in the meantime there are still huge improvments being made in traditional LASIK with wavefront modelling and such, there are actually people who specialise in modelling the dynamics of the vapor plume created by the individual pulses of the laser spot!
Ouch! What a terrible story! May I ask where you had it done? And what laser (if you recall) they used on you? Did they at least give you an explanation as to why you had such a bad experience?
This is IMPORTANT, mod parent up! The parent is referring to a laser called intralase which completely eliminates the process of using a microkeratome to cut the flap, the part of the procedure that is by far the most prone to induce complications. The laser cuts the flap for the procedure by using thousands of ultrafast femtosecond pulses of light focused just below the surface of the cornea in a radial pattern. Depth and thickness of the flap can be controlled with exquisite precision and since nothing physically touches the intracorneal tissue, risk of infection is grealty reduced. While you're at it, since you're probable a technical guy, what with posting to slashdot and all, why not check out the laser itself? Manufacturers are all different with respect to the spot size of the laser pulses, the method which they use to track tiny eye movments and compensate for them, and the range of astig. and correction they are intended to treat. Also, see if they do customized ablations to reduce higher order abberations as well. If you're going to check out the doctor before you have the prcedure done WHY NOT CHECK OUT THE TECHNOLOGY TOO?!
uh, no. doses are low for the west coast and at the southern border because most tests were done in Nevada or New Mexico and winds in the US generally blow East North East. Dose from cosmic ray electron/muon air showers does increase with altitude but not by massive amounts, and it wouldn't explain the high doses in the midwest and the plains states. Besides they're mostly measuring I-131 doses in this map which is a measurement unaffected by cosmic ray doses.
uh.... hello? fusion is still a nuclear reaction last I checked.
That map is interesting but this one is even more interesting. It is the total fallout for the US, by county, over the entire continental atmospheric testing period. The doses are somewhat high in places, but not outrageously so when you consider it is summed over a period of ~20(?) or so years. The site nuclearfiles.org is obviously grossly biased but this section of it is absolutely fascinating. It contains I-131 fallout maps for justa about every aboveground test done in the US.
thickness of the rings increases with distance from saturn from meters to >1000Km for the outer rings. It's a gap in the outer rings that cassini passed through.
I highly doubt the salinity of water bodies has anything to do with the aboveground attenuation of radio signals. unless you're under water, why would it make a difference.
no, I'm afraid Huygens is totaly unsterilized as well. It is clean but not sterile by any means. From ESA "The European Space Agency-built probe was not sterilized to a high standard". We are relying on the cryogenic temperatures of it's final resting place on the surface to do the sterilizing.
s _020103.html
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/lifesigns_spot
Don't know where you got that....but it's too high. From JPL: "3-axis stabilized; power supplied by 3 RTG (628W at EOM); 4 meter HGA supporting S-, X-,Ku-, Ka-band signals, X-band telemetry at 249 kbps, 2 backup LGAs for emergency commanding..."
So ~250kbps max but I doubt they get that at saturn orbit, it's probably more like ~120-140kbps. Compare to mars rovers direct to earth 11kbps and 256kbps for the through-orbiter relay.
Does anyone who knows a thing or two about CCD's know why these preliminary unprocessed images are so badly banded (horizontally)?