The gas is brown so it's not nitrous oxide(N2O) it's nitrogen dioxide (NO2). looks like there might be enough in that fishbowl to make that whippet your last.
hello?
perhaps you should pull your head out of your ass. there is no WAY the transmission losses for power lines is 70%. noone would ever use electricity if it were. line loss accounts for about 15% at most of wasted energy in power transmission. and everyone already knows that you are moving the power generation from one place to another by going electic thanks anyway but that wasnt the point of the article.
it's NOT informative it's DIS-informative and the person who posted it dosent have a clue, sorry to say.
"Unfortunately, cooling something to 1K will require something along the lines of laser cooling in order to achieve, and this turns out to not be very practical."
uhh, no. optical molasses type laser cooling only works for a handfull of atoms at once and only when in the gaseous state.
"Superconductors with a very low critical temperature cannot conduct much current before they exceed their critical energy level and "go normal"."
uhm no. type I superconductors which have low Tc's conduct huge amounts of current and withstand large magnetic fields(read MRI nobium electromagnet wire)
"Useful superconductors are more in the line of HTC's, high temperature superconductors"
not really. metal superconductors are used far more often and cooled to 4K with Liquid He. ductility of the metal superconductors beats brittle high temperature capable ones.
"If I recall correctly, the highest published HTC was around 175K"
no the highest Tc is 135K for a mercury based ceramic.
"Superconductors aren't too useful for their property of not conducting current, since they have a critical maximum current level anyway."
what? im assuming you meant their ability to conduct without resistance and not high resistance, in which case you'd better check your sources because thats just about all theyre ever used for in commercial applications.
"cooled by liquid helium, which is somewhere down on the order of 10K"
liquid He is at 4K.
". They are mostly used for their diamagnetic properties (they repel magnetic flux lines). This is the basis for how an MRI works"
no, it dosent matter that the nobium wire in the MRI machine is a perfect diamagnet because no one cares about that property in an MRI. the superconducting Nb is used to more easily create a high magnetic field to flip the spins of protons in your body.
but what about the transfer speed. would the technology to get the x-fer speed off the disk fast enough to stream an mp3 to a decoder for example, end up costing as much as the memory stick in the end anyway?
Re:Don't be surprised by how........
on
The Pledge
·
· Score: 3
unbelieveably horrible this movie is when you get to go see it. The ending of the movie is told below however it is not a spoiler because it is near impossile to spoil something which is already completely rotted through. I honestly cannot remember any other movie i've seen recently that can top this one for it's excrutiating banality and sheer stupidity. It's truely terrible, and if it werent for being with a friend when I saw it, I wouldve undoubtedly walked out. There are so many cliches in this movie I could not begin to count them all, but what the hell, lets try anyway; at one point Nicholson's character uses a map of the murders to determine where the killer will strike next(ohh brilliantly original plot device there eh?)and then you see nothing of the map for the rest of the movie. That one not overused and dull enough for you? oh well then don't despair, recall the "Jerry Black" detective character? it's his last day on the job you see, they've even thrown him a retirement party! but wouldnt you know it he just HAS to solve one last crime that pops up right before he leaves. wow! I've never seen that twist used in a movie before! (kill me now please). Still interested in seeing it? let me help. When Black tells the family of the first victim what happened to their daughter, the mom character deadpans her lines to the camera an formulaically has a breakdown right on queue(the father also fills his expected duty by throwing a fit at Black when he's told that it might not be the best thing for him to see his daughters chopped off head right now). 5 minutes later the mom then makes the detective SWEAR ON HIS LIFE WHILE HOLDING A CRUCIFIX THAT HE WILL FIND THEIR DAUGHTERS KILLER!(incredulous much?) the rest of the "movie" seems to wander along at a turtles pace revolving around the "dont take candy from strangers" type childish storyline. Black eventually uses his girlfriends daughter as bait for the killer(that could happen! right?!) and nearly catches him before the killer dies in a car wreck(with a comically hackneyed portrayal of a burning body in the car for extra emphasis). Do yourself a favor and substitute seeing this movie by poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick.
"It is not irrelevant to note that Aristotle was a pagan and Aquinas was a Christian"
yes it is. it's as irrelevant as noting that Aristotle had something like the hydrologic cycle(in his writings "meteorology") all but figured out; while several treatises on the false theory of alchemy are attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. The point is, it does not matter what the religious beliefs of either person were, the correct insights they gained stand on their own. Your implication that since Aquinas was christian, therefore his ideas must have been superior to that oh-so-evil-pagan Aristotles' are plain old post hoc ergo propter hoc and guilt by association logical fallacies.
and uhm.. hello? how could Aristotle be considered a pagan if he lived before christianity existed.
storage does not merely mean layered storage, as in the scotch tape and multi layer DVD examples.
In holographic storage a photosensitive medium is exposed to the interference pattern that is generated when an object laser beam, with the data encoded in it, is intersected by a second, coherent laser beam. The photosensitive medium will then replicate these interference fringes as a change in optical absorption. Data is retrieved from the medium by exposing it to light from one laser beam.
In the scotch tape laser burning and multi layer DVD examples, the laser merely burns holes on a 2D surface in many stacked surfaces. To read back you just focus the diode lasers' objective lens on whichever surface you want to read. This is considered inferior to the data densities possible with holography.
just tune any quality FM reciever to a dead area(no signal and quiet) at the lowest freq. you can; and listen close. you might hear something like this.
New Scientist is a joke. If/. reporting on science wants to approach anything near journalistic integrity when it comes to science, they should be very wary of refrencing the infamous new scientist. The magazine will constantly publish any story they think will be the most sensationalistic, seemingly without even an attempt at fact checking. They still do stories touting so called cold fusion BS as "just around the corner" to providing the worlds energy. Other stories for instance on EMF's and cancer are totally biased and even get into using scare tactics to sell more copies. According to James Randi New Scientist even ran articles in the 70's and early 80's touting the validity of DOWSING! pardon but this magazine is almost total shit.
"....This threshold corresponds to 7.2 × 10^25 W/m2 at our finest frequency resolutions, or the equivalent of detecting a cell phone on one of the moons of Saturn...."
Holy $hit! thats one powerful cell phone! Nokia's new feature: instant user incineration upon pressing the "send" button.:o]
musta meant 7.2 × 10^-25 W/m2.
When can you get your own superconductor?
on
Superconducting DNA
·
· Score: 2
Why not make your own? If you have acess to a chemistry lab you almost certainly have the chemicals to do so.
First measure out the proper stoichiometric amounts of chemicals to satisfy the final Y BA2 Cu3 O7-X formula. Your amounts could be: Yttrium Oxide, Y2O3 11.29 grams, Barium Carbonate, BaCO3 39.47 grams, and Cupric Oxide, CuO 23.86 grams for one example.
Then grind together and heat the mix to 950 degrees Celsius for about a day. After you let it cool grind it again and heat back up to about 1000C if you can, pass pure oxygen over the sample and now cool it very slowly at no more than 100C/hour. If you like press the final powder into a pellet.
Voila, your very own superconductor. I did it over a weekend once it's really easy and kinda fun once you get it to work. Get some liquid nitrogen from your local welding shop and nab one of the superstrong samarium cobalt magnets from an old pair of headphones to do the meissener demo.:o]
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/. pick your planet, then pick a spacecraft observation, then find a pic you like, then click on "more options" and choose your format for a full resolution image.:-D
Why did this trivial crap get posted while.....
on
Beer In Space
·
· Score: 5
IMHO this is pretty serious, if Cassini is forced to use the Reaction Control Subsystem instead of it's gyros for the rest of the mission, I dont see how it could possibly have enough fuel to complete the original length Saturnian tour. And would therefore put the entire 3.4 Billion mission in jeopardy.
The name "Beagle" (it's actually called the Beagle 2) is a tip of the hat to the great explorer/scientist C. Darwin. In 1831 Darwin joined the HMS Beagle as the ship's naturalist, much to his fathers consternation, who said to him "it's a wild scheme and no good would come of it".
Of course the observations made on that particular voyage of 170 years ago would be used to write "On the Origin of Species" and subsequently turn the western world on it's head with the realization of Evolution.
Hence, the high hopes for revolutionary discovery that lead to the probes name "Beagle 2".
"Plutonium power generators have 87 year halflife, so power decreases by a factor of 2 every 87 years. So power would probably not be the limiting factor there, like in the case of Galileo for example."
actually they will not last that long. yes, radiation(and therefore available energy) will decrease by half every 87 years, but the property that determines the AVAILABLE power to the spacecraft will not really be the half-life. it will be the degredation of the thermoelectric junction by dopant migration(due to heat). galileos RTG's already produce far less then half of what they did at launch. and they are only about 10 years old.
that Pioneer6 is a posterboy for spacecraft durability of the 60's, while todays probes are plagued with fatal problems. This is not the case.
In fact the reason two identical spacecraft were sent on the same mission so often (voyager 1&2, and the many Pioneer probes for instance)was precisely because they were so prone to failure and malfunction(not to mention exploding on the launch pad), that it was economical to ASSUME one of the probes would fail and send two as a redundancy.
as to why they block things like sci.archaeology, is it? Remember that almost all censorware out there has a Christian Fundie slant, and it's easy to see that if junior discovers archaeology then dinosaurs, biology and evolution are next, and then from there you'd might as well write him off as another anti-creationism devil worshiping Darwinist!
"This would have been a very bad thing. Plutonium oxidizes readily into a very fine powder which can remain suspended in the air for amazing periods of time. Inhaling even one microscopic particle of...."
uhm, right, which is why they already oxidized it and melted the oxide into solid glassy chunks. it's not going to powderize any more easily than a coffee cup.
i suspect, contain an unlikely assumption that the Po battery on a spacecraft, would be fully 'atomized' or powderized on reentry to the atmosphere. however i would think that chunks and bits might survive intact(assuming that in the unlikely event the Ir capsule and ablative shield even broke open at all in the first place) and these would obviously pose considerable hazard.
"....from a meteor strike than from a failed mission with a thermo-nuclear battery."
Whoa! thermonuclear battery! i didnt even know they were invented yet! did you mean nuclear thermoelectric battery?....maybe?
....go to the IMAGE (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration) "WIC image" site at: http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/im age/latest_wic.html. The pictures of the nothern hemisphere aurora are updated every few minutes directly from the Far Ultra Violet (FUV) Instrument aboard the sattelite.
""only two possible explanations. [...] organisms have been lifted from the earth to great heights in the skies and have somehow multiplied there and changed over time." The second, he said, is "that this is an example of primitive alien life."
I fail to see what the first explanation is not the more reasonable!"
And I fail to see why a scientist (who's ideas i am supposed to find credible) refuses to admit that the most probable explanation for his findings is CONTAMINATION! No matter how incredibly stringent your reqirements for having sterile sampling equipment are, it must be noted that the expirament was carried out ON EARTH. you know....that place where there are on average Billions of living organisms per square meter.
Re:quantum security and the new elite
on
Quantum Security
·
· Score: 2
obviously.....i mean, why else was the first protocol (Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard's "BB84") for quantum key distribution created in 1984!!!:0)
almost all types of RF tags carry no power source of their own.
they are merely a number encoded chip connected to an induction coil. when the coil is brought near an oscilating magnetic field it induces a current that drives the IC and emits a small amount of coded RF energy from a tiny antenna. simply make the driver field strong enough to cause the ohmic heating in the tag's induction coil to burn it out and no more "the gubment's trackin' me!" delusions to worry about.
Slashdot Mirror
The gas is brown so it's not nitrous oxide(N2O) it's nitrogen dioxide (NO2). looks like there might be enough in that fishbowl to make that whippet your last.
hello?
perhaps you should pull your head out of your ass. there is no WAY the transmission losses for power lines is 70%. noone would ever use electricity if it were. line loss accounts for about 15% at most of wasted energy in power transmission. and everyone already knows that you are moving the power generation from one place to another by going electic thanks anyway but that wasnt the point of the article.
it's NOT informative it's DIS-informative and the person who posted it dosent have a clue, sorry to say.
"Unfortunately, cooling something to 1K will require something along the lines of laser cooling in order to achieve, and this turns out to not be very practical."
uhh, no. optical molasses type laser cooling only works for a handfull of atoms at once and only when in the gaseous state.
"Superconductors with a very low critical temperature cannot conduct much current before they exceed their critical energy level and "go normal"."
uhm no. type I superconductors which have low Tc's conduct huge amounts of current and withstand large magnetic fields(read MRI nobium electromagnet wire)
"Useful superconductors are more in the line of HTC's, high temperature superconductors"
not really. metal superconductors are used far more often and cooled to 4K with Liquid He. ductility of the metal superconductors beats brittle high temperature capable ones.
"If I recall correctly, the highest published HTC was around 175K"
no the highest Tc is 135K for a mercury based ceramic.
"Superconductors aren't too useful for their property of not conducting current, since they have a critical maximum current level anyway."
what? im assuming you meant their ability to conduct without resistance and not high resistance, in which case you'd better check your sources because thats just about all theyre ever used for in commercial applications.
"cooled by liquid helium, which is somewhere down on the order of 10K"
liquid He is at 4K.
". They are mostly used for their diamagnetic properties (they repel magnetic flux lines). This is the basis for how an MRI works"
no, it dosent matter that the nobium wire in the MRI machine is a perfect diamagnet because no one cares about that property in an MRI. the superconducting Nb is used to more easily create a high magnetic field to flip the spins of protons in your body.
but what about the transfer speed. would the technology to get the x-fer speed off the disk fast enough to stream an mp3 to a decoder for example, end up costing as much as the memory stick in the end anyway?
unbelieveably horrible this movie is when you get to go see it. The ending of the movie is told below however it is not a spoiler because it is near impossile to spoil something which is already completely rotted through. I honestly cannot remember any other movie i've seen recently that can top this one for it's excrutiating banality and sheer stupidity. It's truely terrible, and if it werent for being with a friend when I saw it, I wouldve undoubtedly walked out. There are so many cliches in this movie I could not begin to count them all, but what the hell, lets try anyway; at one point Nicholson's character uses a map of the murders to determine where the killer will strike next(ohh brilliantly original plot device there eh?)and then you see nothing of the map for the rest of the movie. That one not overused and dull enough for you? oh well then don't despair, recall the "Jerry Black" detective character? it's his last day on the job you see, they've even thrown him a retirement party! but wouldnt you know it he just HAS to solve one last crime that pops up right before he leaves. wow! I've never seen that twist used in a movie before! (kill me now please). Still interested in seeing it? let me help. When Black tells the family of the first victim what happened to their daughter, the mom character deadpans her lines to the camera an formulaically has a breakdown right on queue(the father also fills his expected duty by throwing a fit at Black when he's told that it might not be the best thing for him to see his daughters chopped off head right now). 5 minutes later the mom then makes the detective SWEAR ON HIS LIFE WHILE HOLDING A CRUCIFIX THAT HE WILL FIND THEIR DAUGHTERS KILLER!(incredulous much?) the rest of the "movie" seems to wander along at a turtles pace revolving around the "dont take candy from strangers" type childish storyline. Black eventually uses his girlfriends daughter as bait for the killer(that could happen! right?!) and nearly catches him before the killer dies in a car wreck(with a comically hackneyed portrayal of a burning body in the car for extra emphasis). Do yourself a favor and substitute seeing this movie by poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick.
"It is not irrelevant to note that Aristotle was a pagan and Aquinas was a Christian"
yes it is. it's as irrelevant as noting that Aristotle had something like the hydrologic cycle(in his writings "meteorology") all but figured out; while several treatises on the false theory of alchemy are attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. The point is, it does not matter what the religious beliefs of either person were, the correct insights they gained stand on their own. Your implication that since Aquinas was christian, therefore his ideas must have been superior to that oh-so-evil-pagan Aristotles' are plain old post hoc ergo propter hoc and guilt by association logical fallacies.
and uhm.. hello? how could Aristotle be considered a pagan if he lived before christianity existed.
yoink
storage does not merely mean layered storage, as in the scotch tape and multi layer DVD examples.
In holographic storage a photosensitive medium is exposed to the interference pattern that is generated when an object laser beam, with the data encoded in it, is intersected by a second, coherent laser beam. The photosensitive medium will then replicate these interference fringes as a change in optical absorption. Data is retrieved from the medium by exposing it to light from one laser beam.
In the scotch tape laser burning and multi layer DVD examples, the laser merely burns holes on a 2D surface in many stacked surfaces. To read back you just focus the diode lasers' objective lens on whichever surface you want to read. This is considered inferior to the data densities possible with holography.
For a better explanation of how it works go here.
just tune any quality FM reciever to a dead area(no signal and quiet) at the lowest freq. you can; and listen close. you might hear something like this.
e r.html
for an explanation of whats going on and a link to NASA's radio meteor detection system at Marshall Space Flight Center go here: http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/forwardscatt
no, proactive and paradigm are words dumb people use to sound smart.
New Scientist is a joke. If /. reporting on science wants to approach anything near journalistic integrity when it comes to science, they should be very wary of refrencing the infamous new scientist. The magazine will constantly publish any story they think will be the most sensationalistic, seemingly without even an attempt at fact checking. They still do stories touting so called cold fusion BS as "just around the corner" to providing the worlds energy. Other stories for instance on EMF's and cancer are totally biased and even get into using scare tactics to sell more copies. According to James Randi New Scientist even ran articles in the 70's and early 80's touting the validity of DOWSING! pardon but this magazine is almost total shit.
"....This threshold corresponds to 7.2 × 10^25 W/m2 at our finest frequency resolutions, or the equivalent of detecting a cell phone on one of the moons of Saturn...."
:o]
Holy $hit! thats one powerful cell phone! Nokia's new feature: instant user incineration upon pressing the "send" button.
musta meant 7.2 × 10^-25 W/m2.
Why not make your own? If you have acess to a chemistry lab you almost certainly have the chemicals to do so.
:o]
First measure out the proper stoichiometric amounts of chemicals to satisfy the final Y BA2 Cu3 O7-X formula. Your amounts could be: Yttrium Oxide, Y2O3 11.29 grams, Barium Carbonate, BaCO3 39.47 grams, and Cupric Oxide, CuO 23.86 grams for one example.
Then grind together and heat the mix to 950 degrees Celsius for about a day. After you let it cool grind it again and heat back up to about 1000C if you can, pass pure oxygen over the sample and now cool it very slowly at no more than 100C/hour. If you like press the final powder into a pellet.
Voila, your very own superconductor. I did it over a weekend once it's really easy and kinda fun once you get it to work. Get some liquid nitrogen from your local welding shop and nab one of the superstrong samarium cobalt magnets from an old pair of headphones to do the meissener demo.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/. pick your planet, then pick a spacecraft observation, then find a pic you like, then click on "more options" and choose your format for a full resolution image. :-D
an important space story like THIS gets ignored?
IMHO this is pretty serious, if Cassini is forced to use the Reaction Control Subsystem instead of it's gyros for the rest of the mission, I dont see how it could possibly have enough fuel to complete the original length Saturnian tour. And would therefore put the entire 3.4 Billion mission in jeopardy.
The name "Beagle" (it's actually called the Beagle 2) is a tip of the hat to the great explorer/scientist C. Darwin. In 1831 Darwin joined the HMS Beagle as the ship's naturalist, much to his fathers consternation, who said to him "it's a wild scheme and no good would come of it".
Of course the observations made on that particular voyage of 170 years ago would be used to write "On the Origin of Species" and subsequently turn the western world on it's head with the realization of Evolution.
Hence, the high hopes for revolutionary discovery that lead to the probes name "Beagle 2".
"Plutonium power generators have 87 year halflife, so power decreases by a factor of 2 every 87 years. So power would probably not be the limiting factor there, like in the case of Galileo for example."
actually they will not last that long. yes, radiation(and therefore available energy) will decrease by half every 87 years, but the property that determines the AVAILABLE power to the spacecraft will not really be the half-life. it will be the degredation of the thermoelectric junction by dopant migration(due to heat). galileos RTG's already produce far less then half of what they did at launch. and they are only about 10 years old.
that Pioneer6 is a posterboy for spacecraft durability of the 60's, while todays probes are plagued with fatal problems. This is not the case.
In fact the reason two identical spacecraft were sent on the same mission so often (voyager 1&2, and the many Pioneer probes for instance)was precisely because they were so prone to failure and malfunction(not to mention exploding on the launch pad), that it was economical to ASSUME one of the probes would fail and send two as a redundancy.
as to why they block things like sci.archaeology, is it? Remember that almost all censorware out there has a Christian Fundie slant, and it's easy to see that if junior discovers archaeology then dinosaurs, biology and evolution are next, and then from there you'd might as well write him off as another anti-creationism devil worshiping Darwinist!
"This would have been a very bad thing. Plutonium oxidizes readily into a very fine powder which can remain suspended in the air for amazing periods of time. Inhaling even one microscopic particle of...."
uhm, right, which is why they already oxidized it and melted the oxide into solid glassy chunks. it's not going to powderize any more easily than a coffee cup.
i suspect, contain an unlikely assumption that the Po battery on a spacecraft, would be fully 'atomized' or powderized on reentry to the atmosphere. however i would think that chunks and bits might survive intact(assuming that in the unlikely event the Ir capsule and ablative shield even broke open at all in the first place) and these would obviously pose considerable hazard.
"....from a meteor strike than from a failed mission with a thermo-nuclear battery."
Whoa! thermonuclear battery! i didnt even know they were invented yet! did you mean nuclear thermoelectric battery?....maybe?
....go to the IMAGE (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration) "WIC image" site at: http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/im age /latest_wic.html. The pictures of the nothern hemisphere aurora are updated every few minutes directly from the Far Ultra Violet (FUV) Instrument aboard the sattelite.
""only two possible explanations. [...] organisms have been lifted from the earth to great heights in the skies and have somehow multiplied there and changed over time." The second, he said, is "that this is an example of primitive alien life."
I fail to see what the first explanation is not the more reasonable!"
And I fail to see why a scientist (who's ideas i am supposed to find credible) refuses to admit that the most probable explanation for his findings is CONTAMINATION! No matter how incredibly stringent your reqirements for having sterile sampling equipment are, it must be noted that the expirament was carried out ON EARTH. you know....that place where there are on average Billions of living organisms per square meter.
obviously.....i mean, why else was the first protocol (Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard's "BB84") for quantum key distribution created in 1984!!! :0)
almost all types of RF tags carry no power source of their own.
they are merely a number encoded chip connected to an induction coil. when the coil is brought near an oscilating magnetic field it induces a current that drives the IC and emits a small amount of coded RF energy from a tiny antenna. simply make the driver field strong enough to cause the ohmic heating in the tag's induction coil to burn it out and no more "the gubment's trackin' me!" delusions to worry about.