I don't believe the claims of the story are even remotely posible, but what about using wavelet lossy compression (eg. jpeg2000) for video? any experts know what kinds of compression it would be able to achieve? as far as I know, all current video compression still uses discrete cosine transformations for the lossy portion of compression.
They used a tank of O2(liquid?), a small tank of Argon or Helium for ballancing appropriate pressures/volumes when using pure O2 for smooth combustion in the diesel engine(this being the only reused gas), a tank of diesel fuel, a condensation loop to remove the H2O vapor from the combustion products (simple, since theres cold seawater surrounding the whole deal) and from the inert pressurizer and a giant canister of Lithium Hydroxide. The LiOH removes the CO2 from the combustion products via:
2 Li(+) + 2 OH(-) + CO2 -------> Li2(CO3) + H2O.
The only "On-board devices that reinfuse oxygen" I'm guessing are going to be O2 tanks. Maybe I'm missing something but there dosen't appear to be anything revolutionary here.
ReChess no, stuff that's actually interesting, yes
on
ASCI's Debutante Debut
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· Score: 2
"So do we get to see this computer beat another chess champion?"
no you get to see it do something useful. go to "MPEG Movies"
no thats fine because objects being attracted to the magnet would shield/cancel the magnetic field above them proportionally to thier attraction, and the magnet attractor would expend energy doing this. a gravity beam could not be shielded like this though, and therefore presents a paradox(so far as i can see).
I saw this in my post after posting and thought 'damn' should've been clearer.
Thought experiment #3 (taking it further):
It would seem that the AHGMD producing the shielding effect would necissarily have to create other impossible effects in order to achieve a situation in which it may escape the thermodynamic paradox (and behave like a normal powered device). Imagine the AHGMD with a fixed power consumption and proportional gravity shield running; when a massive object is positioned over the device in the partially nulled G-field it would also have to some how reinstate the gravity field above IT to compensate for the energy consumed by the AHGMD levitating it!
This seems totally incomprehensible to me and would seem to imply that the AHGMD would by definion, be required to consume an infinite amount of energy (since there is no way you could prevent it from potentially lifting an infinite amount of mass) in order to escape the paradox(therefore precluding it's possibility).
But would not a device which can manipulate gravity and create a gravitational shielding effect, necissarily violate thermodynamic law?
Thought experiment #1:
Imagine a setup in which the claimed charged/superconductor disc setup is activated, manipulating gravity and producing a area above the device where earths' gravity is "shielded". Now, rig a device (weighted buckets on a string for example), one side of which is exposed to normal gravity and the other side of which is suspended above your Average Household Gravity Manipulation Device(tm). The apparatus on the side of normal gravity would be in constant frefall while the side above the shielded area "flows" up. Instant perpetual motion machine and violation of thermodynamic law.
IANAP but it would appear that this is inescapable and would prove gravity manipulation impossible. Any REAL physicists here please feel free to humiliate me mercilessly if I am wrong.:o]
The creation of new heavy elements through heavy element fusion in particle accelerators is real. It is how: seaborgium: 1974, bohrium: 1981, meitnerium: 1982, hassium: 1984, ununnilium: 1994(and others I believe), were all created. The researchers in this case thought they were reaching a so called sea of stability(and had good reason to believe this) where nuclear stability would slightly increase with mass again enough to allow the production of atoms with neasureably long half lives before falling off with increased nuclear mass again.
Why would they have come out retracting thier previous claim 3 years after the fact at a time when no one was questioning thier results if they had falsified data? They went over thier data again and realized something was wrong, they retracted an honest but mistaken claim, this is how science works at it's best. When an astronomer a few years ago at the yearly American Astrophysical meeting found out (WHILE HE WAS AT THE ACTUAL MEETING NO LESS) that he had made a mistake in his calculations and the stars he had been studying were not orbited by any extrasolar planets, he got up in front of the entire congregation of scientists at the meeting and confessed he had made a mistake. He recieved a standing ovation. That is exactly what should happen here.
"They're also NOT red hot, glowing or smoking - they often feel cool to the touch immediately after impact. (The reasons are left as an exercise for the reader;)"
That's true!
It is thought that the reason for this is the outer shell of the meteorite is heated very quickly and blown away ("ablated") as soon as molten material forms on the surface. The trip through earths atmosphere is very short and when it finally impacts the ground it retains most of it's original cryogenic temperature it naturally had in the cold vacuum of space.
My guess is the core temperature would not be as cold as the ~3K CMBE of deep space because it would have to be in our solar system in order to impact earth in the first place(obviously)and the albedo of the average meteorite is not perfect (1.0), so each meteorite must reach a fairly cold equilibrium temperature based on the ratio of solar energy absorbance on the sun facing side to thermal emission on it's cold side.
Sometimes when meteorites are found immediately after falling, they are covered in frost!
"Be shocked and amazed as we investigate the most interesting mysteries and discoveries of our time. Look forward to seeing these latest investigations on In Search Of... soon:
"The Johnson Bigfoot Encounter"
"Zombies"
"Stigmata"
"Earthquake Prediction"
"The Tesla Death Ray"
"Scandanavian Lake Monsters""
Shouldn't this story be under topic Pseudoscience?
Yes, but it would be unbelieveably difficult. Ground telescopes that use so called aperture synthesis can achieve resolutions which approximate the resolution you would expect if you had one huge telescope the size of the separation distance or "baseline" of the two smaller separated telescopes(the basic idea of astronomical interferometery), but there is a (BIG)catch. In order to 'get fringes' or achieve interferometry, you must combine the light from the array of telescopes with the same high tolerances that you would need to use with one giant telescope the size of the baseline. That means the mirrors and beam splitters/combiners of the entire system must be held to within 1/10th of a fraction of the wavelength of light that you are observing with. If you assume yellow light with a wavelength of 5X10^-7 meters you would have to know the positions of the optics in the system to within 50 Nanometers or billionths of a meter. This is possible on earth and is even being done on large scales such as at Keck and the ESO's VLT. If you can figure out a way for two telescopes orbiting the earth 200Km up(and varying in altitude by METERS everyday because of drag with the upper atmosphere) to know their position with respecto to eachother to within a tiny fraction of the diameter of a hair, let me know; the King of Sweden wants to see you. (BTW this trick is not so hard at centemeter wavelenghts; the baseline of this system stretches from Hawaii to New Hampshire and the resolution in this VLBA image is nearly 1000 times higher than the hubble space telescope can achieve.)
The resolving power of an optical instrument is defined by it's ability to separate the images of two adjacent objects. Something called the diffraction limit, inherent to all optical devices prevents infinite resolution from being achieved simply by increasing magnification. The minimum angular separation of two objects that can be resolved by a round aperture is given by the eqation: X=1.22*L/D, where D is the diameter of the aperture L is distance from telescope. Realistically, you can assume an absolute maximum of 3 meters for a primary optic(bigger than hubble), about a 160km orbit and 500nm visible light wavelength measurement. Or X=1.22*5X10^-6*1.6X10^5/3=0.33 meters or 33 centimeters or about a foot. remember that this is not even taking into account atmospheric effects (think looking at a penny on the bottom of a pool) and it does not mean you can see your face because it's about this size, it means your face will show up as a dot.
The one time that the ever inane "CowboyNeal" option would actually be funny and it's not even an option.
Sigh.. I guess I'll just have to choose "Rolling Rock, or maybe it was Heineken" since it did take about 6.
Re:Soon....Sooner than you think even.
on
LED Flashlights
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· Score: 4
take a look at this page especially this graph. LED's surpassed incandescents long ago in terms of efficiency, the only hurdle left is to increase the brightness. When Nick Holonyak (inventor of the LED) won the Japan Prize(the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize) in 1995 and was asked to say a few words, he simply pointed to the celing lights and said "all this is going". I think we'll see this happen within 20 years or so.
Re also in the same line of 'Very Weird Things'...
on
Duct Tape
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· Score: 5
...does anyone else find it just slightly strange that his name is DAVID HAHN!??
there are images of this flight somewhere. you don't spend tens of millions on an X project without doing something as basic as taking video of it's launch. whether or not you will ever get to see them is another story, of course. here is an example of still images and an mpeg video from another pegasus launch.
A keen grasp of the obvious I see. Yeah, everyone here already knows he's a quack promoting pseudoscientific/fraudulent merchandise. It's supposed to be taken as a joke, lighten up. Ask why he didn't use his immortality rings to save mother Theresa or something. It's meant to be funny!
"But: the pendulum has swung too far. The missions now are too fast, too cheap, and better only from the pretty-picture perspective."
huh? thats just plain false. don't buy into the "they don't make em like they used to" type empty arguments coming from impossible to please curmudgeons and so called critics of space science. Some obvious examples that fly in the face of your claim are the Mars Global Surveyor (part of NASAs faster better cheaper program) which has collected more information about Mars than all previous missions combined. The F.B.Cheaper Transition Region and Coronal Explorer probe (75M$!) is now finally helping to uncover the mystery of why the suns corona is so hot. Something not even SOHO has accomplished. The spectacularly successful Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR)probe was the first spacecraft ever to orbit an asteroid and take close up images of its surface. It was the first to land on and take (extremely accurate) close range gamma spectroscopic measurments of an asteroids' composition. It provided invaluable scientific information on the inner morphology of the asteroid which gives insights into the structure of other old large asteroids (and potential NEO's). Mars Pathfinder, another member of the faster better cheaper brigade did not just take "pretty pictures", it gathered huge amounts of info on mineralogy and geochemical processes on the surface using the APXS instrument on the sojourner rover. It also sent back never before seen meterological measurments. Even if a mars mission only did send back images of the surface they would be scientifically valuable, not to mention the huge public interest they gather.
yes... I have visions. Visions of decades long rebuild projects in the heart of manhattan that reduce the already 30 mile an hour average traffic to 15mph, that increase commute times and drive up cab fees to absurd levels. YES! The glorious white elephat visions of bloated disorganized public infrastucture projects that go on aimlessly for years, sucking up billions in tax dollars and showing little in return. The endless political bickering that will ensure the project is never really completed. Oh! the Visions I see!
Yeah, and in case you hadn't noticed, NY is already Disneyfied enough thank you without the "Epcot Ideal" you so childishly whine for it to become.
I too started noticing SciAm getting all "wired" on us about 3 years ago and have since watched it get progressively worse. It's really a shame.
SciAm used to be a refuge for what I had assumed to be the huge demographic of highly scientifically literate geeks who do NOT have doctorates in particle physics (IE. people like me). But, with reporting like this, that's just plain stinking with blatant scientific inaccuracies, it's too late it seems. You've gone the way of Discover and New Scientist, never to return to the pinnacle of respectable scientific journalism you once defined.
Time to let my subscription run out and get some Nature or Science in it's place.
the fact that you actually took the time to bitch about something so trivial as the quality of jokes for one day on/., speaks volumes more about how much of a no-life looser you are than it does about slashdots comedic abilities.
/. kicks ass; who cares if one day out of the year they stop normal reporting.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe the claims of the story are even remotely posible, but what about using wavelet lossy compression (eg. jpeg2000) for video? any experts know what kinds of compression it would be able to achieve? as far as I know, all current video compression still uses discrete cosine transformations for the lossy portion of compression.
"One of my female subjects said this smells like my sister's old sanitary napkins."
Rrrrrright.... Maybe subject #494276 should stay on for a little further testing, hm?
They used a tank of O2(liquid?), a small tank of Argon or Helium for ballancing appropriate pressures/volumes when using pure O2 for smooth combustion in the diesel engine(this being the only reused gas), a tank of diesel fuel, a condensation loop to remove the H2O vapor from the combustion products (simple, since theres cold seawater surrounding the whole deal) and from the inert pressurizer and a giant canister of Lithium Hydroxide. The LiOH removes the CO2 from the combustion products via:
2 Li(+) + 2 OH(-) + CO2 -------> Li2(CO3) + H2O.
The only "On-board devices that reinfuse oxygen" I'm guessing are going to be O2 tanks. Maybe I'm missing something but there dosen't appear to be anything revolutionary here.
"So do we get to see this computer beat another chess champion?"
no you get to see it do something useful. go to "MPEG Movies"
no thats fine because objects being attracted to the magnet would shield/cancel the magnetic field above them proportionally to thier attraction, and the magnet attractor would expend energy doing this. a gravity beam could not be shielded like this though, and therefore presents a paradox(so far as i can see).
I saw this in my post after posting and thought 'damn' should've been clearer.
Thought experiment #3 (taking it further):
It would seem that the AHGMD producing the shielding effect would necissarily have to create other impossible effects in order to achieve a situation in which it may escape the thermodynamic paradox (and behave like a normal powered device). Imagine the AHGMD with a fixed power consumption and proportional gravity shield running; when a massive object is positioned over the device in the partially nulled G-field it would also have to some how reinstate the gravity field above IT to compensate for the energy consumed by the AHGMD levitating it!
This seems totally incomprehensible to me and would seem to imply that the AHGMD would by definion, be required to consume an infinite amount of energy (since there is no way you could prevent it from potentially lifting an infinite amount of mass) in order to escape the paradox(therefore precluding it's possibility).
my head hurts. goodnight.
But would not a device which can manipulate gravity and create a gravitational shielding effect, necissarily violate thermodynamic law?
:o]
Thought experiment #1:
Imagine a setup in which the claimed charged/superconductor disc setup is activated, manipulating gravity and producing a area above the device where earths' gravity is "shielded". Now, rig a device (weighted buckets on a string for example), one side of which is exposed to normal gravity and the other side of which is suspended above your Average Household Gravity Manipulation Device(tm). The apparatus on the side of normal gravity would be in constant frefall while the side above the shielded area "flows" up. Instant perpetual motion machine and violation of thermodynamic law.
IANAP but it would appear that this is inescapable and would prove gravity manipulation impossible. Any REAL physicists here please feel free to humiliate me mercilessly if I am wrong.
would it be so hard to power the camera using a tiny induction coil with a beltpack transmitter?
The creation of new heavy elements through heavy element fusion in particle accelerators is real. It is how: seaborgium: 1974, bohrium: 1981, meitnerium: 1982, hassium: 1984, ununnilium: 1994(and others I believe), were all created. The researchers in this case thought they were reaching a so called sea of stability(and had good reason to believe this) where nuclear stability would slightly increase with mass again enough to allow the production of atoms with neasureably long half lives before falling off with increased nuclear mass again.
Why would they have come out retracting thier previous claim 3 years after the fact at a time when no one was questioning thier results if they had falsified data? They went over thier data again and realized something was wrong, they retracted an honest but mistaken claim, this is how science works at it's best. When an astronomer a few years ago at the yearly American Astrophysical meeting found out (WHILE HE WAS AT THE ACTUAL MEETING NO LESS) that he had made a mistake in his calculations and the stars he had been studying were not orbited by any extrasolar planets, he got up in front of the entire congregation of scientists at the meeting and confessed he had made a mistake. He recieved a standing ovation. That is exactly what should happen here.
"They're also NOT red hot, glowing or smoking - they often feel cool to the touch immediately after impact. (The reasons are left as an exercise for the reader ;)"
That's true!
It is thought that the reason for this is the outer shell of the meteorite is heated very quickly and blown away ("ablated") as soon as molten material forms on the surface. The trip through earths atmosphere is very short and when it finally impacts the ground it retains most of it's original cryogenic temperature it naturally had in the cold vacuum of space.
My guess is the core temperature would not be as cold as the ~3K CMBE of deep space because it would have to be in our solar system in order to impact earth in the first place(obviously)and the albedo of the average meteorite is not perfect (1.0), so each meteorite must reach a fairly cold equilibrium temperature based on the ratio of solar energy absorbance on the sun facing side to thermal emission on it's cold side.
Sometimes when meteorites are found immediately after falling, they are covered in frost!
From the site:
"Be shocked and amazed as we investigate the most interesting mysteries and discoveries of our time. Look forward to seeing these latest investigations on In Search Of... soon:
"The Johnson Bigfoot Encounter"
"Zombies"
"Stigmata"
"Earthquake Prediction"
"The Tesla Death Ray"
"Scandanavian Lake Monsters""
Shouldn't this story be under topic Pseudoscience?
Fermilab already has a Tevatron.
Yes, but it would be unbelieveably difficult. Ground telescopes that use so called aperture synthesis can achieve resolutions which approximate the resolution you would expect if you had one huge telescope the size of the separation distance or "baseline" of the two smaller separated telescopes(the basic idea of astronomical interferometery), but there is a (BIG)catch. In order to 'get fringes' or achieve interferometry, you must combine the light from the array of telescopes with the same high tolerances that you would need to use with one giant telescope the size of the baseline. That means the mirrors and beam splitters/combiners of the entire system must be held to within 1/10th of a fraction of the wavelength of light that you are observing with. If you assume yellow light with a wavelength of 5X10^-7 meters you would have to know the positions of the optics in the system to within 50 Nanometers or billionths of a meter. This is possible on earth and is even being done on large scales such as at Keck and the ESO's VLT. If you can figure out a way for two telescopes orbiting the earth 200Km up(and varying in altitude by METERS everyday because of drag with the upper atmosphere) to know their position with respecto to eachother to within a tiny fraction of the diameter of a hair, let me know; the King of Sweden wants to see you. (BTW this trick is not so hard at centemeter wavelenghts; the baseline of this system stretches from Hawaii to New Hampshire and the resolution in this VLBA image is nearly 1000 times higher than the hubble space telescope can achieve.)
The resolving power of an optical instrument is defined by it's ability to separate the images of two adjacent objects. Something called the diffraction limit, inherent to all optical devices prevents infinite resolution from being achieved simply by increasing magnification. The minimum angular separation of two objects that can be resolved by a round aperture is given by the eqation: X=1.22*L/D, where D is the diameter of the aperture L is distance from telescope. Realistically, you can assume an absolute maximum of 3 meters for a primary optic(bigger than hubble), about a 160km orbit and 500nm visible light wavelength measurement. Or X=1.22*5X10^-6*1.6X10^5/3=0.33 meters or 33 centimeters or about a foot. remember that this is not even taking into account atmospheric effects (think looking at a penny on the bottom of a pool) and it does not mean you can see your face because it's about this size, it means your face will show up as a dot.
..........no it's just too damn easy.
By the same logic couldn't I argue that females are obsolete?
The one time that the ever inane "CowboyNeal" option would actually be funny and it's not even an option.
Sigh.. I guess I'll just have to choose "Rolling Rock, or maybe it was Heineken" since it did take about 6.
take a look at this page especially this graph. LED's surpassed incandescents long ago in terms of efficiency, the only hurdle left is to increase the brightness. When Nick Holonyak (inventor of the LED) won the Japan Prize(the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize) in 1995 and was asked to say a few words, he simply pointed to the celing lights and said "all this is going". I think we'll see this happen within 20 years or so.
...does anyone else find it just slightly strange that his name is DAVID HAHN!??
there are images of this flight somewhere. you don't spend tens of millions on an X project without doing something as basic as taking video of it's launch. whether or not you will ever get to see them is another story, of course. here is an example of still images and an mpeg video from another pegasus launch.
A keen grasp of the obvious I see. Yeah, everyone here already knows he's a quack promoting pseudoscientific/fraudulent merchandise. It's supposed to be taken as a joke, lighten up. Ask why he didn't use his immortality rings to save mother Theresa or something. It's meant to be funny!
"But: the pendulum has swung too far. The missions now are too fast, too cheap, and better only from the pretty-picture perspective."
huh? thats just plain false. don't buy into the "they don't make em like they used to" type empty arguments coming from impossible to please curmudgeons and so called critics of space science. Some obvious examples that fly in the face of your claim are the Mars Global Surveyor (part of NASAs faster better cheaper program) which has collected more information about Mars than all previous missions combined. The F.B.Cheaper Transition Region and Coronal Explorer probe (75M$!) is now finally helping to uncover the mystery of why the suns corona is so hot. Something not even SOHO has accomplished. The spectacularly successful Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR)probe was the first spacecraft ever to orbit an asteroid and take close up images of its surface. It was the first to land on and take (extremely accurate) close range gamma spectroscopic measurments of an asteroids' composition. It provided invaluable scientific information on the inner morphology of the asteroid which gives insights into the structure of other old large asteroids (and potential NEO's). Mars Pathfinder, another member of the faster better cheaper brigade did not just take "pretty pictures", it gathered huge amounts of info on mineralogy and geochemical processes on the surface using the APXS instrument on the sojourner rover. It also sent back never before seen meterological measurments. Even if a mars mission only did send back images of the surface they would be scientifically valuable, not to mention the huge public interest they gather.
"Your lack of vision disturbe me."
yes... I have visions. Visions of decades long rebuild projects in the heart of manhattan that reduce the already 30 mile an hour average traffic to 15mph, that increase commute times and drive up cab fees to absurd levels. YES! The glorious white elephat visions of bloated disorganized public infrastucture projects that go on aimlessly for years, sucking up billions in tax dollars and showing little in return. The endless political bickering that will ensure the project is never really completed. Oh! the Visions I see!
Yeah, and in case you hadn't noticed, NY is already Disneyfied enough thank you without the "Epcot Ideal" you so childishly whine for it to become.
I too started noticing SciAm getting all "wired" on us about 3 years ago and have since watched it get progressively worse. It's really a shame.
SciAm used to be a refuge for what I had assumed to be the huge demographic of highly scientifically literate geeks who do NOT have doctorates in particle physics (IE. people like me). But, with reporting like this, that's just plain stinking with blatant scientific inaccuracies, it's too late it seems. You've gone the way of Discover and New Scientist, never to return to the pinnacle of respectable scientific journalism you once defined.
Time to let my subscription run out and get some Nature or Science in it's place.
the fact that you actually took the time to bitch about something so trivial as the quality of jokes for one day on /., speaks volumes more about how much of a no-life looser you are than it does about slashdots comedic abilities.
/. kicks ass; who cares if one day out of the year they stop normal reporting.