You seriously need to get a life. Like, bad. Posting absurdly long winded pseudoscience apologia on slashdot because a skeptic here once offended one of your delicate irrational beliefs is incredibly pathetic. Elaborate troll is elaborate.
You are obviously completely clueless and wrong. Doppler shift speed measurement is present in ALL off the shelf GPS chips now sold. Maybe check next time before posting and making a fool of yourself.
um no. But it does seem "these days" that more and more people who, despite obviously knowing fuck all about science or how evidence bound scientific inquiry functions, nonetheless feel entitled to pontificate endlessly on whatever heavily scientifically related subject they like in total blissful, laughable ignorance.
oh I think that's him alright. I accidentally replied to someone below posting the same link first and....WOW I literally loled when that picture popped up.
You want me to believe a wildly high superconductor Tc claim using a link to a shady website that looks like it was designed in 1996, without any link to a paper or an author, without any reference to where the discovery was made, without any notes about secondary confirmation, without any other reference in the media except one lamo blog and without any real formal publication at all? Here's what every physicist reading this article right now is thinking: STFU. If you get a near room temp Tc superconductor working, you better be on the front page of a rushed to print edition of Nature that someone just ran down the hall to shove in my hand, or I'm not even going to give you the time of day.
FYI Slashdot, one of this decade's genuine breakthroughs in science has been finally breaking the diffraction limit for visible light microscopy. The results in the past couple years alone have been nothing short of stunning. Specifically the techniques which are capable of doing this are confocal microscopy, near-field scanning microscopy, stimulated emission depletion microscopy, stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy and structured illumination microscopy. All of these techniques use visible light and can image at below the diffraction limit of ~250nm resolution, but most use complicated techniques using lasers etc. to do so. Except that last one, structured illumination. This technology is going to literally revolutionize microscopy and probably biology as a whole in the coming years. It is a very clever technique and produces unbefuckingleivably amazingimages. With it, full 3D reconstructions of individual living cells with ~10 nanometer resolution, at frame rates in the several Hz range can be taken using a relatively simple LCD retrofit to a high quality transmission light microscope which is installed between the light source and the stage. Look at some of these movies taken of cell processes using the technique and try to keep your jaw off the floor. While the resolution may be higher, none of this is possible with SEM or TEMs due to the necessity of imaging in vacuo.
not really, no. Satellite radar altimetry is just simple time domain reflectometry. Send a pulse of light, microwaves, whatever and use the elapsed time (along with knowledge of the speed of light) until hearing the echo to determine distance, subtract ephemeris data describing the satellite's orbit and get alitmetry out. Done. That is not at all what is being done here. So far as I know, there is no way of directly measuring snow depth from a satellite. If you're in orbit at 400 miles up trying to measure snowpack with even a ridiculously huge +/-1 foot accuracy, you're going to need less than 0.5ppm precision measurements on your reflectometry time - I have to think that the atmospheric-transit pulse broadening alone would smear that type of precision to hell, even with LIDAR. No, this technique uses a very clever, much more nuanced method to detect snow depth. They're modeling multi-path reflections of GPS signals off the ground using knowledge of the dielectric constant and surface roughness of the material being reflected off of, and the satellite elevation angle and antenna gain profile of the receiver, among other things, to model the effects of snow cover on signal to noise ratio, which is directly measurable by the GPS reciever. It's really a very solid piece of work http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL039430.shtml . We already have the SNOTEL network of meteorology and snow depth detection stations in the western US, which is made up of several hundred individual sites. However, while SNOTEL is a large system (really a gorgeously designed piece of parsimonious engineering if you ask me - small solar powered stations sitting out in the middle of nowhere patiently listen for reflections of radio waves off of meteors in the upper atmosphere, and upon hearing them, send a quick burst of the day's collected data out, which reflects off of the few-second-lived plasma tail of the burnt-up meteoroid, which is then detected by a central ground station in Boise. fantastic!) but the US is BIG, and getting more accurate detailed maps of snow cover over larger areas using already in place equipment is a very cute trick that could have important implications for monitoring, for instance, global warming effects over long periods of time.
The thing that is 'already obvious to others' is that you are a pretentious dolt with vainglorious delusions and a gross ignorance of the existence of confirmation bias.
Interesting, because you sound like a pompous, ignorant dick who hasn't met a single atheist in his life, knows virtually nothing about what they believe or don't, and appears to know even less about forming cogent, lettered sentences to express your stupid, laughably caricatured opinions.
"So what I'm asking is, do you think homosexuality was magically created by a process other than evolution?"
uh, no. duh.
"Look kin selection is a very common, very well understood, fundamental concept in genetics. It's as close to proven as you're ever going to get. Homosexuality has been well demonstrated in numerous studies to have a genetic component in numerous species"
Fine, great, so SHOW ME THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE supporting your IDEA that kin selection is the actual mechanism for the continuance of homosexuality in animals. Because until you collect the evidence and do the statistical analysis on the data for, eg., homosexuality in a particular species, your idea is just as good as any other. And just because YOU can't come up with an "other evolutionary mechanism we don't know about that is likely to have caused it" (and there ACTUALLY ARE SEVERAL other highly plausible theories for the evolution of homosexuality BTW), doesn't in any way mean that the theory you shat out over your lunch break must be the right one.
Oh, and you should probably start taking your own advice when you snidely chastise other people because you think THEY "haven't bothered to look at the hundreds of studies" on a particular scientific issue. Because it just so happens that Bobrow and Bailey DID look into the theory of whether kin selection explained homosexuality in humans in a paper from 2001 entitled "Is male homosexuality maintained via kin selection?", and guess what, they RULED IT OUT as the causative mechanism. you ass.
Well, that's a nice hypothesis, and it very well may be right. But I want empirical evidence. For instance with the case of the eye, we see examples of all of the evolutionary intermediate stages and we have computer programs that very nicely simulate eye evolution. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ybWucMx4W8 I don't see anything near that level of rigor yet when it comes to the evolution of homosexuality. Trust me, as a gay uncle myself, I'm eager to know how it all works! But I am strongly scientifically skeptical too, and I want hard evidence first.
"You seem like you respect Alan Turing, ergo I assume you pride yourself in logic thinking and sense. Would you argue that from a scientific, logic point of view, homosexuality is not a flaw?"
Yes.
"I mean, if ever I saw a trait that evolution would suppress, this would be it."
And the reason you think that, is because you are unimaginative and ignorant. The fact that the phenomenon in question is found WIDESPREAD in nature, in many other species of vertebrate and invertebrate, means there is an indisputably adaptively advantageous aspect to its existence. It has obviously been selected for over hundreds of millions of years. The onus is on you to explain how it evolved, in the same way that it was on us to imagine the way in which the eye evolved. We solved that problem and we will solve this one, eventually, in the exact same way, using science and reason.
"*sigh* Can't we design some virus or some such that forces the right half of the brain to be the dominant one already?"
Indeed. Though as you've demonstrated, we'll obviously still have to contend with the general dimwittedness of said same brains.
also, it doesn't have shit to do with using "two lasers", the story writer at PC Authority is just retarded. In addition, if I might editorialize, is this really necessary? How hard is it to just grab a piece of paper or something and use that, or, GASP, use a mousepad! What's Logitech going to come out with next, a raman scattering microscopy, mid-infrared quantum cascade utilizing wireless mouse, for those times when you simply must do your mousing on an atomically pure, sub-angstrom microroughness telescope mirror in a class 1 cleanroom? cmon now.
I don't understand why they need the computing power either.
here's work on active stabilization. See "Active-Feedback Control of the Magnetic Boundary for Magnetohydrodynamic Stabilization of a Fusion Plasma" [aip.org]. That's a 2006 paper on a scheme involving 192 active feedback coils to stabilize a plasma. There's other work like that, and hope that one of the designs that's almost stable might be nudged into stability with active control.
Yes but that work was done on the reverse field pinch device called RFX-mod ( http://www.igi.cnr.it/rfxmod2009/ ). It's a tokamak-like magnetic confinement device so it probably has shot times measured in the multi-second range. Plenty of time for active stabilization but way different from this new MTF approach.
I am in agreement with most of your thoughts except the polywell neutron claim. Have they published with statistically significant neutron yields? I'd like to read it if so. The General Fusion guys will definitely have to deal with severe Richtmyer-Meshkov instability when the shockwave breaks out of the molten metal into the plasma at the center, and then Rayleigh-Taylor instability when the plasma itself if compressed. Question is, how uniform of a shockwave will they need? Who knows. The CDX-U and LTX tokamaks at PPPL http://www.pppl.gov/lithiumtokamak.cfm have run, apparently with some success, using a liquid lithium limiter. But liquid lead? Yeah yikes, I'm not aware of any liquid Pb-using fusion experiments. The stated values for the vapor pressures of molten Li and Pb at their melting points are 1.63E-08 Pa and 4.21E-07 Pa respectively, I'm surprised that lead's VP is 26 times HIGHER than that of Li's. Scary. On the other hand, vortex rings can apparently be very stable and remain highly segregated from the medium they are propagating in over surprising amounts of time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJk8ijAUCiI
I won't sugarcoat my thoughts on that one, I'd say it's nothing more than a fraud. The lowest of the low, vastly kookier than even Bussard's Polywell. I have followed discussions about Eric Lerner and focus fusion VERY closely on the wikipedia pages and I have little to no respect for that man's ideas about fusion or his tactics of argument. He does not have a PhD and he is not a physicist. His ideas about the "electric universe" are idiotic pseudoscience. I will refer you specifically to the plasma physicist Art Carlson's highly thoughtful and reasonable objections to unconventional fusion schemes in general on this issue, and his objections to focus fusion in particular (all on the wiki pages). His credentials and intellectual honesty in these debates seem, to me anyway, to be impeccable.
Robert Bussard can be forgiven for his sin of the polywell. He was a really good scientist who achieved some truly admirable things in his career, but at the end I think he realized that he was getting old and would never live to see his dream of fusion power come true, and he started making wacky claims when things became desperate (like extrapolating his supposed observation of three -count em- THREE fusion neutrons from one of his setups to commercial scale power cost estimates, that's just pain nutty). It's unfortunate but entirely forgivable. Art Carlson's criticism of the polywell device as a non-starter due to its being classified as a reactor whose plasma is in thermodynamic disequilibrium (Todd Rider's MIT thesis on this showed that the bremsstrahlung losses are insurmountable) are highly convincing, and the waffling and flouncing about that the polywell supporters do in the face of these criticisms seem highly dubious.
Uhhhh, what are you talking about? The plasma parameters are not by any means, in so far as I can see, actively controlled in any way in this scheme. Their plan is to launch two colliding toroidal vortex rings of hot plasma into the vorticular void of a large sphere or rapidly spinning molten LiPb metal. Then, using pistons, they launch an imploding spherically symmetric shockwave into the metal to converge upon the merged spheromaks at the center of the setup. The TOTAL confinement time looks like it'll be measured in microseconds at most on this thing, no way is there time for active control of the plasma during a shot like that.
As fusion schemes go, I am obligated to express my opinion that this one is way fucking wacky, however, it is significantly less wacky than a lot of other ideas out there (polywell, I'm looking at you) and it does not appear to have any immediate show stoppers associated with it which would allow me to dismiss it out of hand. I am not a physicist, but I did just get home from my job working on one of the nation's largest conventional (laser driven) inertial confinement fusion reactors and I have a very deep enthusiast's interest on these matters. On the laser fusion device that I work on, we have recently begun shooting MTF targets (we call it MIF or magneto-inertial fusion though) on our system as well, and the results are quite interesting. We use a centimeter scale, single loop Helmholtz coil setup with a conventionally laser-driven fusion microcapsule sitting at the center of the coils. The laser fires, compressing the D-T fuel to tremendous pressure and temperature (higher than in the sun's core) and just before the exact moment of maximum compression and fusion burn (bang time) the Helmholtz coils are fired with power from a couple hundred Joule capacitor bank, thereby producing a huge magnetic field in the compressed target capsule and hopefully increasing the plasma confinement time from a mere few picoseconds to several times longer (the Larmor radius of charged particles in a magnetic field of the intensity we produce is on the order of the size of the compressed capsule, it effectively suppresses electron thermal conductivity and confines the hot plasma within itself). Proton deflectrometry has been successfully used to validate the expected ~.2 megagauss magnetic fields in our setups. The work ahead of the guys with this piston driven shockwave idea is enormous, but the field of plasma and fusion physics is still rich with exciting discovery. I wish these gentlemen the very best of luck.
Future generations of historians will be studying the journals of whoever does go on the first Mars mission for decades.
Day: 428
I tossed off Dave again today for what must've been the 50th time. Jesus he produces an ungodly amount o..... oh shit, the computer's just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours. Damnit!
Slashdot Mirror
You seriously need to get a life. Like, bad. Posting absurdly long winded pseudoscience apologia on slashdot because a skeptic here once offended one of your delicate irrational beliefs is incredibly pathetic. Elaborate troll is elaborate.
mhmmm old news http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b7siH1Ausc
You are obviously completely clueless and wrong. Doppler shift speed measurement is present in ALL off the shelf GPS chips now sold. Maybe check next time before posting and making a fool of yourself.
http://nujournal.net/HighAccuracySpeed.pdf
http://www.locosystech.com/product.php?id=5&zln=en
um no. But it does seem "these days" that more and more people who, despite obviously knowing fuck all about science or how evidence bound scientific inquiry functions, nonetheless feel entitled to pontificate endlessly on whatever heavily scientifically related subject they like in total blissful, laughable ignorance.
oh I think that's him alright. I accidentally replied to someone below posting the same link first and ....WOW I literally loled when that picture popped up.
lololooooooooooollllll oh my fucking god, you win the internets sir! that is HILARIOUS. Mod above up.
You want me to believe a wildly high superconductor Tc claim using a link to a shady website that looks like it was designed in 1996, without any link to a paper or an author, without any reference to where the discovery was made, without any notes about secondary confirmation, without any other reference in the media except one lamo blog and without any real formal publication at all? Here's what every physicist reading this article right now is thinking: STFU. If you get a near room temp Tc superconductor working, you better be on the front page of a rushed to print edition of Nature that someone just ran down the hall to shove in my hand, or I'm not even going to give you the time of day.
FYI Slashdot, one of this decade's genuine breakthroughs in science has been finally breaking the diffraction limit for visible light microscopy. The results in the past couple years alone have been nothing short of stunning. Specifically the techniques which are capable of doing this are confocal microscopy, near-field scanning microscopy, stimulated emission depletion microscopy, stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy and structured illumination microscopy. All of these techniques use visible light and can image at below the diffraction limit of ~250nm resolution, but most use complicated techniques using lasers etc. to do so. Except that last one, structured illumination. This technology is going to literally revolutionize microscopy and probably biology as a whole in the coming years. It is a very clever technique and produces unbefuckingleivably amazing images. With it, full 3D reconstructions of individual living cells with ~10 nanometer resolution, at frame rates in the several Hz range can be taken using a relatively simple LCD retrofit to a high quality transmission light microscope which is installed between the light source and the stage. Look at some of these movies taken of cell processes using the technique and try to keep your jaw off the floor. While the resolution may be higher, none of this is possible with SEM or TEMs due to the necessity of imaging in vacuo.
not really, no. Satellite radar altimetry is just simple time domain reflectometry. Send a pulse of light, microwaves, whatever and use the elapsed time (along with knowledge of the speed of light) until hearing the echo to determine distance, subtract ephemeris data describing the satellite's orbit and get alitmetry out. Done. That is not at all what is being done here. So far as I know, there is no way of directly measuring snow depth from a satellite. If you're in orbit at 400 miles up trying to measure snowpack with even a ridiculously huge +/-1 foot accuracy, you're going to need less than 0.5ppm precision measurements on your reflectometry time - I have to think that the atmospheric-transit pulse broadening alone would smear that type of precision to hell, even with LIDAR. No, this technique uses a very clever, much more nuanced method to detect snow depth. They're modeling multi-path reflections of GPS signals off the ground using knowledge of the dielectric constant and surface roughness of the material being reflected off of, and the satellite elevation angle and antenna gain profile of the receiver, among other things, to model the effects of snow cover on signal to noise ratio, which is directly measurable by the GPS reciever. It's really a very solid piece of work http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL039430.shtml . We already have the SNOTEL network of meteorology and snow depth detection stations in the western US, which is made up of several hundred individual sites. However, while SNOTEL is a large system (really a gorgeously designed piece of parsimonious engineering if you ask me - small solar powered stations sitting out in the middle of nowhere patiently listen for reflections of radio waves off of meteors in the upper atmosphere, and upon hearing them, send a quick burst of the day's collected data out, which reflects off of the few-second-lived plasma tail of the burnt-up meteoroid, which is then detected by a central ground station in Boise. fantastic!) but the US is BIG, and getting more accurate detailed maps of snow cover over larger areas using already in place equipment is a very cute trick that could have important implications for monitoring, for instance, global warming effects over long periods of time.
The thing that is 'already obvious to others' is that you are a pretentious dolt with vainglorious delusions and a gross ignorance of the existence of confirmation bias.
Interesting, because you sound like a pompous, ignorant dick who hasn't met a single atheist in his life, knows virtually nothing about what they believe or don't, and appears to know even less about forming cogent, lettered sentences to express your stupid, laughably caricatured opinions.
Your daughter is going to be a very butch lesbian.
lol, wtf? defensive much?
"So what I'm asking is, do you think homosexuality was magically created by a process other than evolution?"
uh, no. duh.
"Look kin selection is a very common, very well understood, fundamental concept in genetics. It's as close to proven as you're ever going to get. Homosexuality has been well demonstrated in numerous studies to have a genetic component in numerous species"
Fine, great, so SHOW ME THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE supporting your IDEA that kin selection is the actual mechanism for the continuance of homosexuality in animals. Because until you collect the evidence and do the statistical analysis on the data for, eg., homosexuality in a particular species, your idea is just as good as any other. And just because YOU can't come up with an "other evolutionary mechanism we don't know about that is likely to have caused it" (and there ACTUALLY ARE SEVERAL other highly plausible theories for the evolution of homosexuality BTW), doesn't in any way mean that the theory you shat out over your lunch break must be the right one.
Oh, and you should probably start taking your own advice when you snidely chastise other people because you think THEY "haven't bothered to look at the hundreds of studies" on a particular scientific issue. Because it just so happens that Bobrow and Bailey DID look into the theory of whether kin selection explained homosexuality in humans in a paper from 2001 entitled "Is male homosexuality maintained via kin selection?", and guess what, they RULED IT OUT as the causative mechanism. you ass.
Well, that's a nice hypothesis, and it very well may be right. But I want empirical evidence. For instance with the case of the eye, we see examples of all of the evolutionary intermediate stages and we have computer programs that very nicely simulate eye evolution. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ybWucMx4W8 I don't see anything near that level of rigor yet when it comes to the evolution of homosexuality. Trust me, as a gay uncle myself, I'm eager to know how it all works! But I am strongly scientifically skeptical too, and I want hard evidence first.
"You seem like you respect Alan Turing, ergo I assume you pride yourself in logic thinking and sense. Would you argue that from a scientific, logic point of view, homosexuality is not a flaw?"
Yes.
"I mean, if ever I saw a trait that evolution would suppress, this would be it."
And the reason you think that, is because you are unimaginative and ignorant. The fact that the phenomenon in question is found WIDESPREAD in nature, in many other species of vertebrate and invertebrate, means there is an indisputably adaptively advantageous aspect to its existence. It has obviously been selected for over hundreds of millions of years. The onus is on you to explain how it evolved, in the same way that it was on us to imagine the way in which the eye evolved. We solved that problem and we will solve this one, eventually, in the exact same way, using science and reason.
"*sigh* Can't we design some virus or some such that forces the right half of the brain to be the dominant one already?"
Indeed. Though as you've demonstrated, we'll obviously still have to contend with the general dimwittedness of said same brains.
oh that's nerdy! I tip my hat sir.
204? jesus. And I thought I was old.
No it should work fine, most window(s) installations are usually pretty dirty.
also, it doesn't have shit to do with using "two lasers", the story writer at PC Authority is just retarded. In addition, if I might editorialize, is this really necessary? How hard is it to just grab a piece of paper or something and use that, or, GASP, use a mousepad! What's Logitech going to come out with next, a raman scattering microscopy, mid-infrared quantum cascade utilizing wireless mouse, for those times when you simply must do your mousing on an atomically pure, sub-angstrom microroughness telescope mirror in a class 1 cleanroom? cmon now.
I don't understand why they need the computing power either.
here's work on active stabilization. See "Active-Feedback Control of the Magnetic Boundary for Magnetohydrodynamic Stabilization of a Fusion Plasma" [aip.org]. That's a 2006 paper on a scheme involving 192 active feedback coils to stabilize a plasma. There's other work like that, and hope that one of the designs that's almost stable might be nudged into stability with active control.
Yes but that work was done on the reverse field pinch device called RFX-mod ( http://www.igi.cnr.it/rfxmod2009/ ). It's a tokamak-like magnetic confinement device so it probably has shot times measured in the multi-second range. Plenty of time for active stabilization but way different from this new MTF approach.
I am in agreement with most of your thoughts except the polywell neutron claim. Have they published with statistically significant neutron yields? I'd like to read it if so. The General Fusion guys will definitely have to deal with severe Richtmyer-Meshkov instability when the shockwave breaks out of the molten metal into the plasma at the center, and then Rayleigh-Taylor instability when the plasma itself if compressed. Question is, how uniform of a shockwave will they need? Who knows. The CDX-U and LTX tokamaks at PPPL http://www.pppl.gov/lithiumtokamak.cfm have run, apparently with some success, using a liquid lithium limiter. But liquid lead? Yeah yikes, I'm not aware of any liquid Pb-using fusion experiments. The stated values for the vapor pressures of molten Li and Pb at their melting points are 1.63E-08 Pa and 4.21E-07 Pa respectively, I'm surprised that lead's VP is 26 times HIGHER than that of Li's. Scary. On the other hand, vortex rings can apparently be very stable and remain highly segregated from the medium they are propagating in over surprising amounts of time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJk8ijAUCiI
I won't sugarcoat my thoughts on that one, I'd say it's nothing more than a fraud. The lowest of the low, vastly kookier than even Bussard's Polywell. I have followed discussions about Eric Lerner and focus fusion VERY closely on the wikipedia pages and I have little to no respect for that man's ideas about fusion or his tactics of argument. He does not have a PhD and he is not a physicist. His ideas about the "electric universe" are idiotic pseudoscience. I will refer you specifically to the plasma physicist Art Carlson's highly thoughtful and reasonable objections to unconventional fusion schemes in general on this issue, and his objections to focus fusion in particular (all on the wiki pages). His credentials and intellectual honesty in these debates seem, to me anyway, to be impeccable.
Robert Bussard can be forgiven for his sin of the polywell. He was a really good scientist who achieved some truly admirable things in his career, but at the end I think he realized that he was getting old and would never live to see his dream of fusion power come true, and he started making wacky claims when things became desperate (like extrapolating his supposed observation of three -count em- THREE fusion neutrons from one of his setups to commercial scale power cost estimates, that's just pain nutty). It's unfortunate but entirely forgivable. Art Carlson's criticism of the polywell device as a non-starter due to its being classified as a reactor whose plasma is in thermodynamic disequilibrium (Todd Rider's MIT thesis on this showed that the bremsstrahlung losses are insurmountable) are highly convincing, and the waffling and flouncing about that the polywell supporters do in the face of these criticisms seem highly dubious.
Uhhhh, what are you talking about? The plasma parameters are not by any means, in so far as I can see, actively controlled in any way in this scheme. Their plan is to launch two colliding toroidal vortex rings of hot plasma into the vorticular void of a large sphere or rapidly spinning molten LiPb metal. Then, using pistons, they launch an imploding spherically symmetric shockwave into the metal to converge upon the merged spheromaks at the center of the setup. The TOTAL confinement time looks like it'll be measured in microseconds at most on this thing, no way is there time for active control of the plasma during a shot like that.
As fusion schemes go, I am obligated to express my opinion that this one is way fucking wacky, however, it is significantly less wacky than a lot of other ideas out there (polywell, I'm looking at you) and it does not appear to have any immediate show stoppers associated with it which would allow me to dismiss it out of hand. I am not a physicist, but I did just get home from my job working on one of the nation's largest conventional (laser driven) inertial confinement fusion reactors and I have a very deep enthusiast's interest on these matters. On the laser fusion device that I work on, we have recently begun shooting MTF targets (we call it MIF or magneto-inertial fusion though) on our system as well, and the results are quite interesting. We use a centimeter scale, single loop Helmholtz coil setup with a conventionally laser-driven fusion microcapsule sitting at the center of the coils. The laser fires, compressing the D-T fuel to tremendous pressure and temperature (higher than in the sun's core) and just before the exact moment of maximum compression and fusion burn (bang time) the Helmholtz coils are fired with power from a couple hundred Joule capacitor bank, thereby producing a huge magnetic field in the compressed target capsule and hopefully increasing the plasma confinement time from a mere few picoseconds to several times longer (the Larmor radius of charged particles in a magnetic field of the intensity we produce is on the order of the size of the compressed capsule, it effectively suppresses electron thermal conductivity and confines the hot plasma within itself). Proton deflectrometry has been successfully used to validate the expected ~.2 megagauss magnetic fields in our setups. The work ahead of the guys with this piston driven shockwave idea is enormous, but the field of plasma and fusion physics is still rich with exciting discovery. I wish these gentlemen the very best of luck.
I found a new dark spot on my pole last week and you don't see me running to the science press about it! media whore!
Future generations of historians will be studying the journals of whoever does go on the first Mars mission for decades.
Day: 428
I tossed off Dave again today for what must've been the 50th time. Jesus he produces an ungodly amount o..... oh shit, the computer's just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours. Damnit!