Where are you pulling the figure "currently six orders of magnitude from breakeven" from? I don't really buy that. What I've heard of Rusi's sonofusion results is they have barely got things going over a thousand neutrons/pulse if that. (I don't believe its real yet anyway, but for the sake of argument) ICF schemes currently put the breakeven and ignition regime at around 10^16 - 10^17 neutrons/pulse so I'd say we're more like a factor of nearly a QUADRILLION off.
"If this ever did achieve better than breakeven, it would make triggering a fusion bomb much easier. Currently fission is used to trigger a fusion bomb. This might make it easier, although I doubt it would be as compact."
Stupid. The imploding fusing bubble IS the fusion "bomb"! You might also have trouble with the fact that it occurs on the MICROSCOPIC scale and you need conditions equivalent to that on the cm to METER scale to set off a conventional fusion bomb. This has absoluelty no weapons applications whatsoever.
"Even if it doesn't reach breakeven, it still has weapons potential. This thing gives off neutrons. If it's portable, it could be set up someplace and used to spray neutron radiation in a city. At low levels of efficiency, it would just be a weapon of terror. At high levels, it's a dirty bomb."
OH NOES TEH TERRORISTS, AHHH!! Even if fusion yeild were scaled up by a million fold you would have to sit right on top of the damn thing for hours in order to get any kind of noticeable dose at all. Strapping a piece of explosives to a chunk of Cs-137 from some medical deviece to make a dirty bomb would be, oh jeez I don't know, about a billion times easier and more effective!?!
Does anyone have a brain anymore? I saw this story on PBS's Scientific Americain frontiers a few weeks ago and Alan Alda (in his ever unplumbed depths of cluelessness) had the same comment. WHO CARES how many times you are using the carbon!! It doesn't matter how many times it's used! All that matters is that its being used at all. All the guy is doing is using the CO2 as an energy store for a (hideously inefficient, photosynthesis based) solar power scheme. The amount of bullshit you have to go through to circulate the water, treat the algae, collect the algae, ferment it and turn it into ETOH, transport it and then burn it again VASTLY outweighs any CO2 savings benefit you could possibly get back with such a scheme. The guy would be ten thousand times more efficient at doint the exact same thing if he merely let the CO2 exhaust fly out into the sky and covered the same area as the current aglae farm takes up with solar cells instead! I mean DUH!! He would be achieving the exact same result at hugely higher efficiencies of solar energy collection.
They do nice hardware reviews but are otherwise clueless (admittedly like most of us are outside the respective areas of our individual expertise). Weren't these the same people who tried to liquid nitrogen cool a fluorinert loop for overclocking and didn't think before buying it whether the fluorinert might just freeze solid at LN2 temps (77K)? Duh. It would not matter in the least if the boards were rinsed before this was tried. Ultrapure deionized water has a theoretical resistivity of 18 MOhm/cm, pretty high yes. But add just one single part per million ionized contamination (ie. 500 MICROgrams of salt per liter (one mol NaCl dissociates into TWO mols of ions in soln!)) and your resistivity plummets to 500 KOhm/cm. In other words, conductivity skyrockets instantly as soon as the smallest mote of contamination enters the water, this of course causes a runaway effect in that the more conductive the water is the more electrolysis occurs at the metal contacts with voltage on them in the water and the more metal ions are leached into the surrounding water. I would've expected this to all occur within mere seconds of them switching the thing on and the fact that they say they got minutes of use out of it is absolutely shocking(heh). The only way this could possibly work is if the mobo were submerged in a running loop of DI water which is consistently replenished by a contaminant removal system and even then I highly doubt it because you would still get little pools where the water wouldn't be circulating fast enough and would have time to contaminate and become just normal conductive water.
Articles like "George Bush" and "Hitler" are precisely the articles which need this protection THE LEAST!! Those articles must be on like a thousand users watchlists, there's no way vandalism even lasts a few minutes there. It is small obscure articles that aren't watched by anyone hardly that have vandalism last for months and need this kind of protection most! That is impossible however because there are thousands of times more of those articles than there are high profile ones. That is why all totaly anon editing needs to be stopped and a mandatory wait period of say, a week for new users wanting to begin editing articles needs to be put in place. Wiki is already VAST, it doesn't need huge numbers of new articles anymore, it needs to fix the errors in the article it already has and that is the only way it can be semi-reliably accomplished. (full disclosure:I have over 3000 wiki edits and am very familliar with the system used there)
Re:From TFA (and other materials on the subject)
on
HAARP Amping It Up
·
· Score: 1
"Are you interested in the basic methodology? I have some open source cites, you will probably have to go to an engineering university library to find the journals though. It's tough reading but interesting."
YES. The few googled tidbits on Helliwell and Siple Station are very interesting. So do you work here:):)..? I work here and so I have access to Nature, Science, PRL and am somewhat familliar with the techniques it appears you are using (electron cyclotron resonance heating....?)...
Re:From TFA (and other materials on the subject)
on
HAARP Amping It Up
·
· Score: 1
uhmm wow. my hat's off to clearly a superior depth of knowledge. you obviously work on this sort of thing.....
Holy shit, that is the funniest thing I have seen all week. He starts to say "fuck" but then censors himself and says "oh fshit" instead and that hopelessly tactless idiot host they have just rambles on like "oh well, whatever". Great!
"Really, its sort of like saying "Yeah I hacked my box", where the non-geek will take it as what we take to mean "skr1ptk1dd13" crap, when we actually mean, "it didn't work right, so I rewrote my OS" We're so used to talking to ourselves, that we forget that people use these words differently in the real (non/., non serverfarm) world."
mm yes, I suspect that the non-geek will think something rather different.....
Even though they are considered "surprisingly good quality" by the standards of the time they are still horrible by any other standard today. True, many of these recordings are quite rare and there is only perhaps one copy known. However, I'd imagine that for many of the more popular things it should be somewhat easy to find more than one copy. Couldn't you just digitize more than one cylinder and compare the waveforms to remove anything that doesn't appear in both of the copies thereby removing a great majority of the hiss/pops? It would kind of be the audio counterpart to the optical technique of cosmic ray rejection.
Re:This only works at night?
on
HAARP Amping It Up
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Supposedly the HAARP-aurora interaction DOES create naked eye visible scintillations when at 1 MW.....
Re:From TFA (and other materials on the subject)
on
HAARP Amping It Up
·
· Score: 5, Informative
HAARP is being upgraded by the DOD as a "defense measure against nuclear warfare", but not in the sense that you or the other hundred odd Art Bell quoting posters here seem to think. Specifically, it is not being used to "jam" or "shoot down" any ICBMs or some such nonsense because that is impossible and is well...what's the phrase here that I'm looking for...oh right...fucking retardedly impossible.
So why is the Pentagon interested in upgrading HAARP to ~4 GW? Well, if you do some research on HANEs (high altitude nuclear explosions) you will find that a nuclear explosion of even modest energy (100 KTons) is sufficient, when detonated at an altitude of greater than a couple 100 Km, of flooding the Van Allen belts with high energy electrons. (the native electron population of the radiation belts is "heated" via inverse bremsstrahlung from the hard X-rays emitted by the nuclear detonation) It is even capapble of creating NEW radiation belts at lower altitudes than normally found and it is thus estimated, extrapolating from experiments such as starfish prime in the 50's, that virtually ALL sattelites in LEO would be destroyed within days by ESD and radiation damage if an event like this were to occur. HOWEVER! HAARP is capable of irradiating the ionosphere with VLF EM radiation of quite high intensity and thus can alter the so called "auroral electrojet", creating a ginormous "virtual VLF antenna" in it by altering its temperature (and thus its conductance). The HAARP is thereby capable of depopulating the radiation belts of high energy charged particles in a fraction of the time it would ordinarilly take for them to calm down on thier own and thus potentially saving the many sattelites in LEO. Sound crazy? Well, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and THAT is why the Pentagon is interested in this thing, not for some kooky mind control/weather control/ray gun type kookery.
"...recent Mars "search for signs of life" missions as a combination PR stunt and the space equivalent of the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost..."
The fact that you think NASAs "recent Mars signs of life missions" are a worthless PR stunt merely belies your embarrasing ignorance of what NASA missions actually do. NASA hasn't flown a mission to Mars expressly looking for life in 30 YEARS! (the viking missions). Recent missions like the Rovers were only sent to look for evidence of past water which they found in missions that are only described as resounding sucesses. Get a clue.
ehhh? I think the sun is in a thermal equilibrium. Not with the 3K of space its in but internally. locally. When the term thermal equilibrium is used in the paper I think it is referring to the temperature distribution of the reactants of the fusion reaction. ie. the D and P and T ions all assume a maxwellian energy distribution at the same temperature. They are not in a state of non-equilibrium such as a beam of, for instance, 5 MeV deuterons and 2 MeV tritons fired at eachother would have.
It looks like you drew that diagram in MS paint and none of your plots or graphs have any labels on the axes! some of them don't even have scales, they're just squiggly lines on a grey box! You don't even have a section explaining what types of detectors and other intstruments (models, names, etc.) were used! What a joke, no wonder no one takes you seriously and you've never been published.
Story submitted: Alternative to Toamak Fusion Reactor. --->send to trash? --->post to front page?
ScuttleMonkey: Hey Taco what do you think of this story on "Focus Fusion" from Open Source energy?
CmdrTaco: Ohhh looks good1!!1 Ps0t it!
ScuttleMonkey: But this Lerner guy looks pretty disreputable...
CmdrTaco: Yeah but it has the words open source right in the reviewer's name!! Ps0t it!!
ScuttleMonkey: I don't know, it seems specious that a small company is claiming to solve the world's energy problems and is being ignored by "Big Science" such as the...
CmdrTaco: Open Source! Open Source! Open Source! Open Source! Open Source !!!! POST NOW NOW NOW!!!
What ever happened to the "huge" discovery 3 years ago of the large bandgap of InGaN which is convieniently tuned to the solar spectrum. They were claiming a theoretical efficiency of >50% in a single dual junction cell, 70% for multilayer junctions! Then......nothing. Not a single thing. Haven't heard a word about it since. wtf.
"Transient nonequilibrium burning systems [are ruled out] which try to produce enough fusion power before the particle distributions equiligrate (eg. ICF, bombs, and pulsed beam methods)."
That is bizzare. I'm really at a loss to explain such a statement, though, IANAP. Obviously fusion bombs work and DO produce far more energy than they consume and ICF is capable of doing the same or this would not be currently under construction. I can't understand what he may have meant by such a statement. weird.
That's not now how I read it. It looks to me like he is saying "ID" is challenging the prejudices of mainstream science and is therefore fostering its progress. And that, of course, is idiotic.
You are missing the point. Science does not deal in complete and utter absolutes but in order to supplant a VERY firmly entreched theory a person must supply highly convincing evidence which contradicts it. Lerner presents nothing more than wacky ramblings which, as Wolfgang Pauli would say, is not even wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
right now.
The answer is JFGI!!!
Where are you pulling the figure "currently six orders of magnitude from breakeven" from? I don't really buy that. What I've heard of Rusi's sonofusion results is they have barely got things going over a thousand neutrons/pulse if that. (I don't believe its real yet anyway, but for the sake of argument) ICF schemes currently put the breakeven and ignition regime at around 10^16 - 10^17 neutrons/pulse so I'd say we're more like a factor of nearly a QUADRILLION off.
Oh damn, my nocluebie-o-meter just exploded!
"If this ever did achieve better than breakeven, it would make triggering a fusion bomb much easier. Currently fission is used to trigger a fusion bomb. This might make it easier, although I doubt it would be as compact."
Stupid. The imploding fusing bubble IS the fusion "bomb"! You might also have trouble with the fact that it occurs on the MICROSCOPIC scale and you need conditions equivalent to that on the cm to METER scale to set off a conventional fusion bomb. This has absoluelty no weapons applications whatsoever.
"Even if it doesn't reach breakeven, it still has weapons potential. This thing gives off neutrons. If it's portable, it could be set up someplace and used to spray neutron radiation in a city. At low levels of efficiency, it would just be a weapon of terror. At high levels, it's a dirty bomb."
OH NOES TEH TERRORISTS, AHHH!! Even if fusion yeild were scaled up by a million fold you would have to sit right on top of the damn thing for hours in order to get any kind of noticeable dose at all. Strapping a piece of explosives to a chunk of Cs-137 from some medical deviece to make a dirty bomb would be, oh jeez I don't know, about a billion times easier and more effective!?!
Why isn't there a "clueless -1" mod?
Does anyone have a brain anymore? I saw this story on PBS's Scientific Americain frontiers a few weeks ago and Alan Alda (in his ever unplumbed depths of cluelessness) had the same comment. WHO CARES how many times you are using the carbon!! It doesn't matter how many times it's used! All that matters is that its being used at all. All the guy is doing is using the CO2 as an energy store for a (hideously inefficient, photosynthesis based) solar power scheme. The amount of bullshit you have to go through to circulate the water, treat the algae, collect the algae, ferment it and turn it into ETOH, transport it and then burn it again VASTLY outweighs any CO2 savings benefit you could possibly get back with such a scheme. The guy would be ten thousand times more efficient at doint the exact same thing if he merely let the CO2 exhaust fly out into the sky and covered the same area as the current aglae farm takes up with solar cells instead! I mean DUH!! He would be achieving the exact same result at hugely higher efficiencies of solar energy collection.
wow cool you're the stupidest physicist I've ever met
They do nice hardware reviews but are otherwise clueless (admittedly like most of us are outside the respective areas of our individual expertise). Weren't these the same people who tried to liquid nitrogen cool a fluorinert loop for overclocking and didn't think before buying it whether the fluorinert might just freeze solid at LN2 temps (77K)? Duh. It would not matter in the least if the boards were rinsed before this was tried. Ultrapure deionized water has a theoretical resistivity of 18 MOhm/cm, pretty high yes. But add just one single part per million ionized contamination (ie. 500 MICROgrams of salt per liter (one mol NaCl dissociates into TWO mols of ions in soln!)) and your resistivity plummets to 500 KOhm/cm. In other words, conductivity skyrockets instantly as soon as the smallest mote of contamination enters the water, this of course causes a runaway effect in that the more conductive the water is the more electrolysis occurs at the metal contacts with voltage on them in the water and the more metal ions are leached into the surrounding water. I would've expected this to all occur within mere seconds of them switching the thing on and the fact that they say they got minutes of use out of it is absolutely shocking(heh). The only way this could possibly work is if the mobo were submerged in a running loop of DI water which is consistently replenished by a contaminant removal system and even then I highly doubt it because you would still get little pools where the water wouldn't be circulating fast enough and would have time to contaminate and become just normal conductive water.
Articles like "George Bush" and "Hitler" are precisely the articles which need this protection THE LEAST!! Those articles must be on like a thousand users watchlists, there's no way vandalism even lasts a few minutes there. It is small obscure articles that aren't watched by anyone hardly that have vandalism last for months and need this kind of protection most! That is impossible however because there are thousands of times more of those articles than there are high profile ones. That is why all totaly anon editing needs to be stopped and a mandatory wait period of say, a week for new users wanting to begin editing articles needs to be put in place. Wiki is already VAST, it doesn't need huge numbers of new articles anymore, it needs to fix the errors in the article it already has and that is the only way it can be semi-reliably accomplished. (full disclosure:I have over 3000 wiki edits and am very familliar with the system used there)
"Are you interested in the basic methodology? I have some open source cites, you will probably have to go to an engineering university library to find the journals though. It's tough reading but interesting."
:) :)..? I work here and so I have access to Nature, Science, PRL and am somewhat familliar with the techniques it appears you are using (electron cyclotron resonance heating....?)...
YES. The few googled tidbits on Helliwell and Siple Station are very interesting. So do you work here
uhmm wow. my hat's off to clearly a superior depth of knowledge. you obviously work on this sort of thing.....
Because all the mods are humorless losers today.
Holy shit, that is the funniest thing I have seen all week. He starts to say "fuck" but then censors himself and says "oh fshit" instead and that hopelessly tactless idiot host they have just rambles on like "oh well, whatever". Great!
"Really, its sort of like saying "Yeah I hacked my box", where the non-geek will take it as what we take to mean "skr1ptk1dd13" crap, when we actually mean, "it didn't work right, so I rewrote my OS" We're so used to talking to ourselves, that we forget that people use these words differently in the real (non /., non serverfarm) world."
mm yes, I suspect that the non-geek will think something rather different.....
Even though they are considered "surprisingly good quality" by the standards of the time they are still horrible by any other standard today. True, many of these recordings are quite rare and there is only perhaps one copy known. However, I'd imagine that for many of the more popular things it should be somewhat easy to find more than one copy. Couldn't you just digitize more than one cylinder and compare the waveforms to remove anything that doesn't appear in both of the copies thereby removing a great majority of the hiss/pops? It would kind of be the audio counterpart to the optical technique of cosmic ray rejection.
Supposedly the HAARP-aurora interaction DOES create naked eye visible scintillations when at 1 MW.....
HAARP is being upgraded by the DOD as a "defense measure against nuclear warfare", but not in the sense that you or the other hundred odd Art Bell quoting posters here seem to think. Specifically, it is not being used to "jam" or "shoot down" any ICBMs or some such nonsense because that is impossible and is well...what's the phrase here that I'm looking for...oh right...fucking retardedly impossible.
So why is the Pentagon interested in upgrading HAARP to ~4 GW? Well, if you do some research on HANEs (high altitude nuclear explosions) you will find that a nuclear explosion of even modest energy (100 KTons) is sufficient, when detonated at an altitude of greater than a couple 100 Km, of flooding the Van Allen belts with high energy electrons. (the native electron population of the radiation belts is "heated" via inverse bremsstrahlung from the hard X-rays emitted by the nuclear detonation) It is even capapble of creating NEW radiation belts at lower altitudes than normally found and it is thus estimated, extrapolating from experiments such as starfish prime in the 50's, that virtually ALL sattelites in LEO would be destroyed within days by ESD and radiation damage if an event like this were to occur.
HOWEVER! HAARP is capable of irradiating the ionosphere with VLF EM radiation of quite high intensity and thus can alter the so called "auroral electrojet", creating a ginormous "virtual VLF antenna" in it by altering its temperature (and thus its conductance). The HAARP is thereby capable of depopulating the radiation belts of high energy charged particles in a fraction of the time it would ordinarilly take for them to calm down on thier own and thus potentially saving the many sattelites in LEO. Sound crazy? Well, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, and THAT is why the Pentagon is interested in this thing, not for some kooky mind control/weather control/ray gun type kookery.
"...recent Mars "search for signs of life" missions as a combination PR stunt and the space equivalent of the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost ..."
The fact that you think NASAs "recent Mars signs of life missions" are a worthless PR stunt merely belies your embarrasing ignorance of what NASA missions actually do. NASA hasn't flown a mission to Mars expressly looking for life in 30 YEARS! (the viking missions). Recent missions like the Rovers were only sent to look for evidence of past water which they found in missions that are only described as resounding sucesses. Get a clue.
ehhh? I think the sun is in a thermal equilibrium. Not with the 3K of space its in but internally. locally. When the term thermal equilibrium is used in the paper I think it is referring to the temperature distribution of the reactants of the fusion reaction. ie. the D and P and T ions all assume a maxwellian energy distribution at the same temperature. They are not in a state of non-equilibrium such as a beam of, for instance, 5 MeV deuterons and 2 MeV tritons fired at eachother would have.
what are you talking about? that is the exact opposite of what the paper says.
It looks like you drew that diagram in MS paint and none of your plots or graphs have any labels on the axes! some of them don't even have scales, they're just squiggly lines on a grey box! You don't even have a section explaining what types of detectors and other intstruments (models, names, etc.) were used! What a joke, no wonder no one takes you seriously and you've never been published.
I found the secret conversation!
Story submitted: Alternative to Toamak Fusion Reactor. --->send to trash? --->post to front page?
ScuttleMonkey: Hey Taco what do you think of this story on "Focus Fusion" from Open Source energy?
CmdrTaco: Ohhh looks good1!!1 Ps0t it!
ScuttleMonkey: But this Lerner guy looks pretty disreputable...
CmdrTaco: Yeah but it has the words open source right in the reviewer's name!! Ps0t it!!
ScuttleMonkey: I don't know, it seems specious that a small company is claiming to solve the world's energy problems and is being ignored by "Big Science" such as the...
CmdrTaco: Open Source! Open Source! Open Source! Open Source! Open Source !!!! POST NOW NOW NOW!!!
ScuttleMonkey: Sigh...*click*.
What ever happened to the "huge" discovery 3 years ago of the large bandgap of InGaN which is convieniently tuned to the solar spectrum. They were claiming a theoretical efficiency of >50% in a single dual junction cell, 70% for multilayer junctions! Then......nothing. Not a single thing. Haven't heard a word about it since. wtf.
"Transient nonequilibrium burning systems [are ruled out] which try to produce enough fusion power before the particle distributions equiligrate (eg. ICF, bombs, and pulsed beam methods)."
That is bizzare. I'm really at a loss to explain such a statement, though, IANAP. Obviously fusion bombs work and DO produce far more energy than they consume and ICF is capable of doing the same or this would not be currently under construction. I can't understand what he may have meant by such a statement. weird.
That's not now how I read it. It looks to me like he is saying "ID" is challenging the prejudices of mainstream science and is therefore fostering its progress. And that, of course, is idiotic.
You are missing the point. Science does not deal in complete and utter absolutes but in order to supplant a VERY firmly entreched theory a person must supply highly convincing evidence which contradicts it. Lerner presents nothing more than wacky ramblings which, as Wolfgang Pauli would say, is not even wrong.