What's the point of having this data anyway?
on
Profit vs. Science
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· Score: 1
This data just consists of a long string of quaternary digits (is this the right term for base four?). It doesn't actually mean anything by itself, except we know that the end result of this string being processed by an egg cell is a human.
What will be more important is the decoding of this DNA, to work out exactly which bit does what and how all the digits interact. At the moment it's looking a bit like trying to learn to code from a binary dump of a kernel, or to speak egyptian from the heiroglyphics in the great pyramid. What wil be important and must not be patented/trade secreted is the results and methods of decoding DNA, which is going to require some serious mathematical and computer effort, hopefully leading to new insights into information theory. (can you imagine how compressed all the information involved in the formation of a human body is to fit into only 3 billion or so bases?)
The real problem involved in keeping this data secret is if the methods by which they got it are also secret, which means that other people can't reproduce the data.
To further explain the checking of data thing to some degree.
If the data can't be checked by an independent researcher then it's not science.
Noone can tell if they've actually done this research or not, unless the data is available and able to be checked. The techies around here have a name for this kind of thing in engineering - vapourware. A product is vapourware until you can buy one and have it delivered. A acientific theory/result is vapourware until it has been checked.
There was a related problem in maths around 1990 about a purported proof of Fermat's last theorem. After the proof was released, it was found to be flawed, but the original author of the proof denied the flaw, and carried on publishing related articles and giving lectures on his proof. This all kind of went away when Wiles published a correct proof a few years later, but I don't know if this guy has ever retracted his proof.
It's even more fun here in Britain. all of the last mile line is owned by British Telecom (who used to be part of the General Post Office, whose sole owner was the government. The post office and BT were split and privatised about ten years ago, BT were supposed to have allowed other providers access to the last mile of line about June this year. The current timetable is looking like being June next year, and even then, there's no space in the telephone exchanges for all the providers who want access. Therefore, who gets access will be decided on a beauty contest (i.e. whoever offers the best prospective services, which is in no way related to who can actually provide these services), with a roll of a dice settling any ties.
It would have been a lot better if the government watchdog over seeing all this actually did anything (see any days version of www.theregister.co.uk for more sarcastic details)
The problem with the motor is that the field has to be continuously switched to produce a continuos rotation, so what ever you gain in one direction you lose in the other. The model I was using is only really for the initial jolt reported, if it turns out to have no obvious explanation, (friction, interaction with other objects etc.)
Obviously you should really solve for the field strength tensor and allow for the non linearities of any materials present and for the inherent nonlinearity of free space produced by QFT to get a good idea what's going on, but I'm not going to attempt that in my head. (I'm not even sure it's possible on paper) Physical reasoning/intuition is what we use when we can't do the maths.
I was only really thinking out loud (well straight into a comment) to try and think of a mechanism that would give a fast build up of field with an assymetric radiation pattern. If you include the possibilities of nonlinear susceptibility of free space, then a slow decay of the field wouldn't give as much of an opposing impulse (momentum integrated over time) when the magnet is switched off.
My mp3z skip in a very similar way, when windows tries to play a sound (or do anything else complicated) at the same time as playing it. Probably because I'm not running it on the top of range computer availabel now and haven't reinstalled in the last 3 months. (Hey great antipiracy policy, if it isn't reinstalled every 3 months it goes to shit).
Currently attempting to get sound on my semi unsupport sound card in debian, and then the only need for windoze is Red Alert 2
Actually it falls off with the cube of distance from it. The inverse square law only applies for monopole forces, whereas all magnets are dipoles at least
It probably hasn't been tested yet, because the switch they need would have to have the ability to switch a very high current at very low voltages, very rapidly. The other way round is a lot easier.
The superconductor antigravity thing was debunked because the effect wasn't reproducible in experiments specifically designed to look for it. That's how science works.
these are superconducting electrommagnets not your run of the mill ceramic magnets. It's quite possible to fields of >10T from something the size of a computer case, if you have a large current supply handy. Power isn't that much of a problem as the magnets are superconducting and therefore have no resistance. The only power loss comes from interactions between the Magnetic field and external objects
It would almost certainly do so, if the field was a wave.
This is the principle behind optical tweezers, where a small (cell sized or below) object can be held in place in a sharply converging beam of laser light.
The relevant thing here would be the law of conservation of momentum.
Pedantry aside, the only effect I could think of that might cause this, outside of an external field (due to sun, earth etc) would be the time delay between one end of the coil carrying a current and the other end carrying a current due to light travel time difference effects between the superconductor and the free space inside the coil. One end of the coil would be magnetised to a fairly high field and and the other would not, for the time it takes the current to build up in the coil. This time would be at tleast the time it takes for an EM wave to propagate down the coil (including going around all the loops). In the meantime a large magnetic field would build up in the space inside coil, with the speed of build up of the field limited only by the light travel time from one end of the coil to the other, and be expelled by the build up of eddy currents in the superconductor coil, before the driving current got there.
As for the law of conservation of momentum, the above effect, could possibly cause a large EM pulse to be emitted, which would have a momentum in one direction, and so there would be an impulse in the other direction. I don't know if the same effect would be observed on suddenly switching off the current, as I think the impulse produced _may_ depend on the switching speed, and if the magnet isn't switched off as quickly as it is switched on, a net momentum may develop. If this isn't the case, the magnet will just sit there and vibrate.
This is all just thinking straight into the comment, so I've got quite a high chance of being wrong. (more so than usual)
But the cost of developing fusion power is tiny to the cost of breeding that much uranium (especially if you take security into account) and there aren't any fundamental physics issues to overcome.
This has been taken into account. Given that Uranium supplies almost none of the worlds electricity, and that the rate of increase of demand is growing at the moment there's not actually that much there. I don't have the actual figures to hand, but these are the conclusions of a paper published by some EC scientists/economists.
Basically, the same way as the ceiling can get dusty.
They're carried up along with the air in updrafts at the centre of anticyclones, and then get spread about by the turbulence in the atmosphere.
Their extra weight would also cause them to slightly tend to collect at the poles, where the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation is less, but this is probably a small effect.
There's very little uranium in the earth's crust though, only enough for about 20 years of fission power supplying the entire world is available cheaply.
There's enough deuterium in the oceans (1 part in ~1000 hydrogen atoms), and lithium in the earth's crust (used to make tritium, by neutron capture and decay) for about 1 billion years.
Plus the fuel for fusion power is more evenly distributed over the globe than uranium. (Water is available everwhere people live, especially in the tiny quantities required, about 2250 tonnes a year, and lithium is common as well)
Fusion is amazingly efficient in terms of mass of fuel used. The figures I saw at JET over the summer (I was doing some plasma imaging work there) were, for a 1.5 GW power station running for a year, Coal 100 million tons, Fusion 350 kg (0.35 tonnes).
Fusion power is the only source capable of supplying electricity to meet demands (projected from the current rate of increase in demands) for more than 250 years, which is when coal would run out. There's only enough easily accessible uranium for 20 years of operation, with fission supplying the entire world's demand, and most of that is located in politically unstable places (Siberia, Congo), although Canada has large reserves as well.
And the radioactivity due to the decommissioning of a tokamak power plant after it's useful life ~50 years + maintenance waste is much less than that from a nuclear fission power station (they're much bigger, and nearly all solid, whereas a tokamak is a big vacuum chamber)
Plus a 1.5 GW reactor would only use 350kg of fuel a year, compared to a coal power plants 100 million tons, and there is enough fuel on earth to supply electricity to the entire world (at current rate of increwase in demand) for 1 billion years, compared to 250 years for coal.
No, science didn't get us into this mess. People taking the results of science that they liked, and then using it to make money by selling products on a large scale, and then not stopping when the scientists came back and said, "Maybe you shouldn't do that, it's destroying the ozone layer.", got us into this mess.
It really annoys me when people blame the effects of some craze in rampant consumerism on science.
Science doesn't actually do anything much, unless someone markets and sell products (this includes weapons etc. even though it's often not technically selling) based on bits of it.
Two of which are no longer in print, and one of which isn't really a newspaper, in that you you can't buy it in a newsagent's shop, without ordering it or something. I think this is a useful definition of newspaper for the purpose of this post, and the post two levels up.
Guy Fawkes isn't glorified, he's blown up. I don't think 30,000 people marching through the streets of Lewes shouting "Burn him" while letting off enough firecrackers to pave the streets with debris (and set off most car alarms in the surrounding few miles) and then packing his effigy with 8x 6 inch ground mines is glorification.
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This data just consists of a long string of quaternary digits (is this the right term for base four?). It doesn't actually mean anything by itself, except we know that the end result of this string being processed by an egg cell is a human.
What will be more important is the decoding of this DNA, to work out exactly which bit does what and how all the digits interact. At the moment it's looking a bit like trying to learn to code from a binary dump of a kernel, or to speak egyptian from the heiroglyphics in the great pyramid. What wil be important and must not be patented/trade secreted is the results and methods of decoding DNA, which is going to require some serious mathematical and computer effort, hopefully leading to new insights into information theory. (can you imagine how compressed all the information involved in the formation of a human body is to fit into only 3 billion or so bases?)
The real problem involved in keeping this data secret is if the methods by which they got it are also secret, which means that other people can't reproduce the data.
To further explain the checking of data thing to some degree.
If the data can't be checked by an independent researcher then it's not science.
Noone can tell if they've actually done this research or not, unless the data is available and able to be checked. The techies around here have a name for this kind of thing in engineering - vapourware. A product is vapourware until you can buy one and have it delivered. A acientific theory/result is vapourware until it has been checked.
There was a related problem in maths around 1990 about a purported proof of Fermat's last theorem. After the proof was released, it was found to be flawed, but the original author of the proof denied the flaw, and carried on publishing related articles and giving lectures on his proof. This all kind of went away when Wiles published a correct proof a few years later, but I don't know if this guy has ever retracted his proof.
It's even more fun here in Britain. all of the last mile line is owned by British Telecom (who used to be part of the General Post Office, whose sole owner was the government. The post office and BT were split and privatised about ten years ago, BT were supposed to have allowed other providers access to the last mile of line about June this year. The current timetable is looking like being June next year, and even then, there's no space in the telephone exchanges for all the providers who want access. Therefore, who gets access will be decided on a beauty contest (i.e. whoever offers the best prospective services, which is in no way related to who can actually provide these services), with a roll of a dice settling any ties.
It would have been a lot better if the government watchdog over seeing all this actually did anything (see any days version of www.theregister.co.uk for more sarcastic details)
The problem with the motor is that the field has to be continuously switched to produce a continuos rotation, so what ever you gain in one direction you lose in the other. The model I was using is only really for the initial jolt reported, if it turns out to have no obvious explanation, (friction, interaction with other objects etc.)
Obviously you should really solve for the field strength tensor and allow for the non linearities of any materials present and for the inherent nonlinearity of free space produced by QFT to get a good idea what's going on, but I'm not going to attempt that in my head. (I'm not even sure it's possible on paper) Physical reasoning/intuition is what we use when we can't do the maths.
I was only really thinking out loud (well straight into a comment) to try and think of a mechanism that would give a fast build up of field with an assymetric radiation pattern. If you include the possibilities of nonlinear susceptibility of free space, then a slow decay of the field wouldn't give as much of an opposing impulse (momentum integrated over time) when the magnet is switched off.
My mp3z skip in a very similar way, when windows tries to play a sound (or do anything else complicated) at the same time as playing it. Probably because I'm not running it on the top of range computer availabel now and haven't reinstalled in the last 3 months. (Hey great antipiracy policy, if it isn't reinstalled every 3 months it goes to shit).
Currently attempting to get sound on my semi unsupport sound card in debian, and then the only need for windoze is Red Alert 2
Actually it falls off with the cube of distance from it. The inverse square law only applies for monopole forces, whereas all magnets are dipoles at least
It probably hasn't been tested yet, because the switch they need would have to have the ability to switch a very high current at very low voltages, very rapidly. The other way round is a lot easier.
The superconductor antigravity thing was debunked because the effect wasn't reproducible in experiments specifically designed to look for it. That's how science works.
these are superconducting electrommagnets not your run of the mill ceramic magnets. It's quite possible to fields of >10T from something the size of a computer case, if you have a large current supply handy. Power isn't that much of a problem as the magnets are superconducting and therefore have no resistance. The only power loss comes from interactions between the Magnetic field and external objects
It would almost certainly do so, if the field was a wave.
This is the principle behind optical tweezers, where a small (cell sized or below) object can be held in place in a sharply converging beam of laser light.
The relevant thing here would be the law of conservation of momentum.
Pedantry aside, the only effect I could think of that might cause this, outside of an external field (due to sun, earth etc) would be the time delay between one end of the coil carrying a current and the other end carrying a current due to light travel time difference effects between the superconductor and the free space inside the coil. One end of the coil would be magnetised to a fairly high field and and the other would not, for the time it takes the current to build up in the coil. This time would be at tleast the time it takes for an EM wave to propagate down the coil (including going around all the loops). In the meantime a large magnetic field would build up in the space inside coil, with the speed of build up of the field limited only by the light travel time from one end of the coil to the other, and be expelled by the build up of eddy currents in the superconductor coil, before the driving current got there.
As for the law of conservation of momentum, the above effect, could possibly cause a large EM pulse to be emitted, which would have a momentum in one direction, and so there would be an impulse in the other direction. I don't know if the same effect would be observed on suddenly switching off the current, as I think the impulse produced _may_ depend on the switching speed, and if the magnet isn't switched off as quickly as it is switched on, a net momentum may develop. If this isn't the case, the magnet will just sit there and vibrate.
This is all just thinking straight into the comment, so I've got quite a high chance of being wrong. (more so than usual)
Weight of air molecule is (assuming N2) 2x14=28 and weight of CF4 is 12+4x18=84, and that's just the lightest fluorocarbon.
But the cost of developing fusion power is tiny to the cost of breeding that much uranium (especially if you take security into account) and there aren't any fundamental physics issues to overcome.
This has been taken into account. Given that Uranium supplies almost none of the worlds electricity, and that the rate of increase of demand is growing at the moment there's not actually that much there. I don't have the actual figures to hand, but these are the conclusions of a paper published by some EC scientists/economists.
Basically, the same way as the ceiling can get dusty.
They're carried up along with the air in updrafts at the centre of anticyclones, and then get spread about by the turbulence in the atmosphere.
Their extra weight would also cause them to slightly tend to collect at the poles, where the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation is less, but this is probably a small effect.
There's very little uranium in the earth's crust though, only enough for about 20 years of fission power supplying the entire world is available cheaply.
There's enough deuterium in the oceans (1 part in ~1000 hydrogen atoms), and lithium in the earth's crust (used to make tritium, by neutron capture and decay) for about 1 billion years.
Plus the fuel for fusion power is more evenly distributed over the globe than uranium. (Water is available everwhere people live, especially in the tiny quantities required, about 2250 tonnes a year, and lithium is common as well)
Fusion is amazingly efficient in terms of mass of fuel used. The figures I saw at JET over the summer (I was doing some plasma imaging work there) were, for a 1.5 GW power station running for a year, Coal 100 million tons, Fusion 350 kg (0.35 tonnes).
Fusion power is the only source capable of supplying electricity to meet demands (projected from the current rate of increase in demands) for more than 250 years, which is when coal would run out. There's only enough easily accessible uranium for 20 years of operation, with fission supplying the entire world's demand, and most of that is located in politically unstable places (Siberia, Congo), although Canada has large reserves as well.
And the radioactivity due to the decommissioning of a tokamak power plant after it's useful life ~50 years + maintenance waste is much less than that from a nuclear fission power station (they're much bigger, and nearly all solid, whereas a tokamak is a big vacuum chamber)
Plus a 1.5 GW reactor would only use 350kg of fuel a year, compared to a coal power plants 100 million tons, and there is enough fuel on earth to supply electricity to the entire world (at current rate of increwase in demand) for 1 billion years, compared to 250 years for coal.
No, science didn't get us into this mess. People taking the results of science that they liked, and then using it to make money by selling products on a large scale, and then not stopping when the scientists came back and said, "Maybe you shouldn't do that, it's destroying the ozone layer.", got us into this mess.
It really annoys me when people blame the effects of some craze in rampant consumerism on science.
Science doesn't actually do anything much, unless someone markets and sell products (this includes weapons etc. even though it's often not technically selling) based on bits of it.
Two of which are no longer in print, and one of which isn't really a newspaper, in that you you can't buy it in a newsagent's shop, without ordering it or something. I think this is a useful definition of newspaper for the purpose of this post, and the post two levels up.
Well, the electric to midi conversion is out there (roland G8, Synth-Axe etc) so I guess someone just need to hack together a kernel module.
Guy Fawkes isn't glorified, he's blown up. I don't think 30,000 people marching through the streets of Lewes shouting "Burn him" while letting off enough firecrackers to pave the streets with debris (and set off most car alarms in the surrounding few miles) and then packing his effigy with 8x 6 inch ground mines is glorification.
I can think of many fields that would find this useful.
Ski Boxing for a start. Now about that extra head...
All velocities in astronamy are measured relative to the cosmic microwave background, which defines an absolute stationary frame for all observers.