Actually it can be cheaper in some cases.
Say 1 square yard (hey just using the units in the article) of solar cells costs $100. Then if you can focus 20 times the light on it you're generating slightly less than 20X the power for that $100 bucks plus the cost of the concentrator. If said concentrator costs less than $100 bucks * 19 you win. If it costs more, you don't win.
But no cost announced so I'm guessing its stupid expensive or they'd be shouting it from the rooftops.
I read the article (yes yes I know). But in summary, your hypothesis (temperature fluctations0 was what everyone thought, but the groundbreaking bit was that they did an experiment that provides a LOT of evidence to the contrary.
The sun has a cycle of it's own (about 1 month). They did a much more accurate study and found the decay rate is tightly correlated to the sun's cycle.
Longer version:
The theory now is that it has to do with the neutrino flux. As we move further from the sun the flux goes down by 1/R^2. We saw that fluctuation first. But the neutrino flux also varies with the solar cycle which is independent of the earth's temperature.
This is very very cool experimental physics. Kudo's to them!
The story told to me by Dr. Jackson (of electrodynamics fame):
It's catalyzed fusion because the muon isn't used up, it is released to catalyze again. When they discovered this, people were really excited because the muon *does* live long enough to get past the break-even point even when you consider the energy used to create the muon in the first place. There was all kinds of talk of cold fusion (this was back in the 60s I think). The catch is about a 1% chance that the muon gets ejected in such a way from the fusion such that it can't catalyze the next one. That argument is a bit more subtle, but it is apparently what causes the whole thing to fall apart when talking about a net energy gain. It just takes more energy to produce a muon than ~100 fusing hydrogen atoms will provide.
I'm out west (Aurora), but I'm reasonably happy with AT&T's dsl service. I get 6.0 Mbps for $35/mo and I can substain pretty close to that all the time. About 500-600KB/s average download speed every time I do something that maxes it out. I've only had the service go out once (for 10 minutes) in the last 6 months, so I'm pretty happy with that too.
The corp/alliance structure will really help with this I think. From the article, it sounds like as a merc you'll be hired personally. So yes, you might get hired to lead a random bunch of morons who won't do anything you say. OR you get hired along with the rest of your corp/alliance to beat up on the members of another corp.
In the second case, if the grunts you are commanding don't follow orders, kick them out the corp. Put black marks by their names. Tell everyone how much they suck. Refuse to command them again.
The question, I think, comes down to the DUST players. How many serious players will get involved in the corp/alliance structure? How many halo players will just want some laughs screwing everyone over? If there are enough of the former that you can avoid hiring the latter, this will be awesome. If the *only* way to populate your battlefield is to hire the casual players, then I agree, the RTS side of things will degenerate quickly.
But as long as there are some rewards for winning a fight, I imagine the serious players will gravitate towards the serious generals and form groups that are very hard for casual players to beat. All in all a win for user-driven content.
Eh, on the LHC at full steam, we have collisions at 40MHz. The ATLAS pixel detector, is an 80M pixel chunk (or rather ~28k chunks) of silicon. Admitedly, most of that data never makes it out of the on chip electronics, and it has to be triggered, and the pictures are VERY sparse (a few thousand pixels fireing in an event out of the 80M), but still. We can take those snapshots damn fast.
Check out the sales of Eve online on march 10th. They are putting it out in a box set for the first time (well practically the first time). Before now it's been download only. If the number of people playing shoot up, that's a good indicator. Likewise if the box set falls flat.
Superfluid He is also wickedly cool. If you can build something to house it, and pump on it until it gets cold enough, you should be able to do some cool experiments with it.
Though not as visually appealing as a cloud chamber, building a detector to measure the lifetime of a muon was one of my favorite undergrad experiments. Three scientilators stacked on top of each other wired into a bunch of electronics, along with the right formulas, and you can get a reasonable measurement. My prof gave us a Phys Rev paper describing how it was done years ago, access to the parts we needed, a scope, and a computer that had a labview application set up for counting experiments. We figured out the electronic logic from the paper, used the scope to debug and set all the triggers correctly, then had to figure out how to actually calcuate the lifetime from what we measured (along with systematic + statistical errrors). Hard, yes, but man we learned a good deal about real nuts and bolts experimental physics that quarter.
I am one of those students waiting for data actually. I was even at the talk in question. One thing though is that the 2010 plan is just a proposed plan, nothing in stone. Apparently it has less support than the plan starting this summer, but they are still debating which is the best way to go.
There was another announcement recently as well pointing towards the summer 2009 plan, so it is probably more likely. We'll know more in Feb once they've had more chance to study the data from the incident.
Actually he's not completely wrong. When you say an object is at a given tempature, you are refering to the average tempature of the whole object. Individual atoms can be moving faster/slower than the average so really there is a whole spectrum of tempatures (this is very well known for an ideal gas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaxwellBoltzmann_distribution/ )
While the same formulas won't hold for a metal, the same ideas will be true. Another example. When you sweat, your skin is cooled by the fact the water is vaporizing (evaporating) off of your skin. But of course your skin is far from 100C, however some of the water will still vaporize.
I don't know the specifics for lead, but there will still be some fraction of the lead that will vaporize off at well below 2000 degrees. If that fraction is big or so small that it doesn't matter is another point all together.
Interesting. I like the idea, though I think it swings too far the other way to ever be adopted. A more moderate suggestion might be:
All works are copyrighted for X years for free with no registration (X on the order of 5 years). After the X years are up you can file to extend it for another X years by paying a filing fee + tax rate as you suggested.
As far as allowing people to buy the works away from the creator's, I would suggest that you allow someone to buy full rights to the work (to be able to reproduce it at will) for something like twice the value set by the creator. The original creator also retains full rights to the work as well. This still keeps people honest, but should mean that if the creator sets a legitimate price as to what they think they will make over the work's lifetime, they will be happy to have twice that and still be able to sell their work. You need the original creator to retain the right, because you can imagine a poor artist who performs for very little money and writes a good song that could be 'stolen' by the music labels etc etc.
I like the idea that a copyright holder should only hold onto copyrights that they really intend to use, but in addition to the RIAA, MPAA, and Disney, there are lots of small time artists and writers who I think we should still be careful to offer some protection to.
*shrug* Not that it will ever happen, but interesting ideas.
Beer and coffee mostly. Depending on how much work one needs to get done after drinking said beverage. The amount of coffee (espresso mostly) consumed at cern is staggering really. And yes, I'm writing this from my desk at cern while drinking my 5th cup of espresso and waiting for my code to finish compiling.
I fought with the libpangocairo issue as well. Running on a lesser used redhat variation at work, I didn't want to start doing major upgrades only to break everything and have to reinstall (boss would be less than thrilled about the loss of a day). But I found a nifty trick on one of the forums.
Install the package frysk and you get libpangocairo free. And frysk is small enough I didn't mind.
For me at least it was as simple as switching to root, and doing:
yum install frysk
I'm not sure I completly agree with you. 'The Big U' had an ending, and it I enjoyed and laughed all through it. Sure the book is not anywhere as briliant as his new stuff, but the ending was fun.
Once again, with formating (really need to hit that preview button)...
I'm a student here working on ATLAS (and I'll be one of the volunteers on the 6th) and I agree with the parent. The two big 'Must sees' are the detectors and the accelerators. The detectors are going to be much more impresive looking. That said, here's my $0.02
ATLAS (point1). This is the biggest detector (and my favorite, though I'm not biased or anything....) but it will also be the most crowded by far.
CMS (point5). Almost as big as ATLAS and still damn impressive. It won't be as crowded because it's a lot further away. It will still be packed though I'm sure.
ALICE (point2). Smaller detector for heavy ions. My guess is this will be pretty crowded to since St Genis is close to CERN
LHCb (point8). Another smaller detector for b quark physics. Between Ferney and Meyrin... no idea if people will go see it.
Those are the 4 detectors ranked (in my opinion) in order of coolness. I'd try to go see 2 of them if you can. Look up info on them online (they all have websites), find out which ones you want to visit. You should also try to see the accelerator somewhere. Point 6 would be my recomendation since the beam dump is also located there (this is where the beam is evacuated in case of emergency. When you realize the energy stored in the beam, this becomes pretty impressive).
There are a lot of other things open, but most of them you can still go and visit when the LHC is running (and the crowds aren't there). One last recomendation. I'd start out going to see things out on the ring, then come back to point1 (Meyrin) and explore it with all the rest of your time. That way you should be able to get the most out of it. See you Sunday!
I'm a student here working on ATLAS (and I'll be one of the volunteers on the 6th) and I agree with the parent. The two big 'Must sees' are the detectors and the accelerators. The detectors are going to be much more impresive looking. That said, here's my $0.02
ATLAS (point1). This is the biggest detector (and my favorite, though I'm not biased or anything....) but it will also be the most crowded by far.
CMS (point5). Almost as big as ATLAS and still damn impressive. It won't be as crowded because it's a lot further away. It will still be packed though I'm sure.
ALICE (point2). Smaller detector for heavy ions. My guess is this will be pretty crowded to since St Genis is close to CERN
LHCb (point8). Another smaller detector for b quark physics. Between Ferney and Meyrin... no idea if people will go see it.
Those are the 4 detectors ranked (in my opinion) in order of coolness. I'd try to go see 2 of them if you can. Look up info on them online (they all have websites), find out which ones you want to visit.
You should also try to see the accelerator somewhere. Point 6 would be my recomendation since the beam dump is also located there (this is where the beam is evacuated in case of emergency. When you realize the energy stored in the beam, this becomes pretty impressive).
Another thing I recomend is the acelerator chain tour (point1):
http://lhc2008.web.cern.ch/LHC2008/OpenDaysE/accelerators.html
There are a lot of other things open, but most of them you can still go and visit when the LHC is running (and the crowds aren't there).
One last recomendation. I'd start out going to see things out on the ring, then come back to point1 (Meyrin) and explore it with all the rest of your time. That way you should be able to get the most out of it.
See you Sunday!
1) How do they solve the problem with Bremsstrahlung?
What problem ?
Bremsstrahlung occurrs when electrons are decelerated. Does this laser use some kind of electron accelerator ?
But if a photon has more than a few MeV of energy it can split to an electron-positron pair which can brem, throwing off more photons which will split etc etc. Until the individual bits run out of the energy needed to form more particles. In other words, EM showering. However this requires VERY high energy photons (gamma rays). My understanding was that a laser like this achieves it's power by using lots of photons (in the IR range), so it won't have a problem with Bremsstrahlung at all. Thermal blooming on the other hand is probably a bigger issue. As the laser heats the air, it causes the water vapor to convect which acts as a lens and defocuses the beam.
Just so you're aware. There already IS a comics section, it's just become rather out of date IMHO. In you're preferences you can look at the slashboxes and there's one called "funnies" and one for "webcomics". Add them and they'll show up on your front page just like any other slashbox.
Rob,
You talked about how XKCD and other comics are high up on your list of external websites to go to. Could I make the recomendation that you add them to the 'Funnies' slashbox? It seems to have been years since any links have been added (though maybe I'm the only one left who still uses it....) If you put your favorite webcomics onto it, I know I'd like to check out what you like. And if I can add my own $0.02 http://www.xkcd.com/, http://schlockmercenary.com/, and http://www.phdcomics.com/ are all 'geek' enough they would do well on the funnies slashbox.
Disclaimer, I use gmail and love it most of the time.... BUT
Search would be great if it was fully function, however it is not yet fully functional in gmail. Here are some cases:
Looking for an email from a college with an Czech name... I have no idea how to spell it, but it starts with a BZ
Solution: Let me search for the string "from:BZ*"
My quota is full (hey it happens, even on gmail) and I need to clear some space
Solution: Let me search for emails larger than 100Kb "size>100KB"
On this same topic, gmail should let you delete just the attatchments, and also let you delete one message in a thread without deleting the whole thread.
I emailed myself that ppt file months ago. I know it was called june_meeting.ppt but damned if I can find it three months later
Solution: Let me search in the filename field "filename:june*.ppt"
I'm sure there are more things, but those three drive me crazy to no end.
Not that I have 'sundiver' by David Brin on the mind or anything..... BUT if you're powering a huge friggin laser beam, maybe you could dump some of the extra heat energy away in that beam.
If you have accumulated a large amount of karma (your posts are regularly moderated up, no down), then your posts will start with a rating of 2, not 1. You can choose to not apply that bonus if you don't think you want it (for instance if you think your comment will just get moderated down). It's all in the FAQ too. Spelled out much clearer.
http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm800
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it can be cheaper in some cases. Say 1 square yard (hey just using the units in the article) of solar cells costs $100. Then if you can focus 20 times the light on it you're generating slightly less than 20X the power for that $100 bucks plus the cost of the concentrator. If said concentrator costs less than $100 bucks * 19 you win. If it costs more, you don't win. But no cost announced so I'm guessing its stupid expensive or they'd be shouting it from the rooftops.
BUT WAIT! If you order in the next 4 seconds I'll triple your offer.
The sun has a cycle of it's own (about 1 month). They did a much more accurate study and found the decay rate is tightly correlated to the sun's cycle.
Longer version:
The theory now is that it has to do with the neutrino flux. As we move further from the sun the flux goes down by 1/R^2. We saw that fluctuation first. But the neutrino flux also varies with the solar cycle which is independent of the earth's temperature.
This is very very cool experimental physics. Kudo's to them!
It's catalyzed fusion because the muon isn't used up, it is released to catalyze again. When they discovered this, people were really excited because the muon *does* live long enough to get past the break-even point even when you consider the energy used to create the muon in the first place. There was all kinds of talk of cold fusion (this was back in the 60s I think). The catch is about a 1% chance that the muon gets ejected in such a way from the fusion such that it can't catalyze the next one. That argument is a bit more subtle, but it is apparently what causes the whole thing to fall apart when talking about a net energy gain. It just takes more energy to produce a muon than ~100 fusing hydrogen atoms will provide.
I'm out west (Aurora), but I'm reasonably happy with AT&T's dsl service. I get 6.0 Mbps for $35/mo and I can substain pretty close to that all the time. About 500-600KB/s average download speed every time I do something that maxes it out. I've only had the service go out once (for 10 minutes) in the last 6 months, so I'm pretty happy with that too.
The real question on all of our minds though: "How far will it launch a pumpkin?"
The corp/alliance structure will really help with this I think. From the article, it sounds like as a merc you'll be hired personally. So yes, you might get hired to lead a random bunch of morons who won't do anything you say. OR you get hired along with the rest of your corp/alliance to beat up on the members of another corp.
In the second case, if the grunts you are commanding don't follow orders, kick them out the corp. Put black marks by their names. Tell everyone how much they suck. Refuse to command them again.
The question, I think, comes down to the DUST players. How many serious players will get involved in the corp/alliance structure? How many halo players will just want some laughs screwing everyone over? If there are enough of the former that you can avoid hiring the latter, this will be awesome. If the *only* way to populate your battlefield is to hire the casual players, then I agree, the RTS side of things will degenerate quickly.
But as long as there are some rewards for winning a fight, I imagine the serious players will gravitate towards the serious generals and form groups that are very hard for casual players to beat. All in all a win for user-driven content.
Eh, on the LHC at full steam, we have collisions at 40MHz. The ATLAS pixel detector, is an 80M pixel chunk (or rather ~28k chunks) of silicon. Admitedly, most of that data never makes it out of the on chip electronics, and it has to be triggered, and the pictures are VERY sparse (a few thousand pixels fireing in an event out of the 80M), but still. We can take those snapshots damn fast.
PONIEZ FOR EVERYONE!!!
Check out the sales of Eve online on march 10th. They are putting it out in a box set for the first time (well practically the first time). Before now it's been download only. If the number of people playing shoot up, that's a good indicator. Likewise if the box set falls flat.
Superfluid He is also wickedly cool. If you can build something to house it, and pump on it until it gets cold enough, you should be able to do some cool experiments with it.
Though not as visually appealing as a cloud chamber, building a detector to measure the lifetime of a muon was one of my favorite undergrad experiments. Three scientilators stacked on top of each other wired into a bunch of electronics, along with the right formulas, and you can get a reasonable measurement. My prof gave us a Phys Rev paper describing how it was done years ago, access to the parts we needed, a scope, and a computer that had a labview application set up for counting experiments. We figured out the electronic logic from the paper, used the scope to debug and set all the triggers correctly, then had to figure out how to actually calcuate the lifetime from what we measured (along with systematic + statistical errrors). Hard, yes, but man we learned a good deal about real nuts and bolts experimental physics that quarter.
There was another announcement recently as well pointing towards the summer 2009 plan, so it is probably more likely. We'll know more in Feb once they've had more chance to study the data from the incident.
While the same formulas won't hold for a metal, the same ideas will be true. Another example. When you sweat, your skin is cooled by the fact the water is vaporizing (evaporating) off of your skin. But of course your skin is far from 100C, however some of the water will still vaporize.
I don't know the specifics for lead, but there will still be some fraction of the lead that will vaporize off at well below 2000 degrees. If that fraction is big or so small that it doesn't matter is another point all together.
Interesting. I like the idea, though I think it swings too far the other way to ever be adopted. A more moderate suggestion might be: All works are copyrighted for X years for free with no registration (X on the order of 5 years). After the X years are up you can file to extend it for another X years by paying a filing fee + tax rate as you suggested. As far as allowing people to buy the works away from the creator's, I would suggest that you allow someone to buy full rights to the work (to be able to reproduce it at will) for something like twice the value set by the creator. The original creator also retains full rights to the work as well. This still keeps people honest, but should mean that if the creator sets a legitimate price as to what they think they will make over the work's lifetime, they will be happy to have twice that and still be able to sell their work. You need the original creator to retain the right, because you can imagine a poor artist who performs for very little money and writes a good song that could be 'stolen' by the music labels etc etc. I like the idea that a copyright holder should only hold onto copyrights that they really intend to use, but in addition to the RIAA, MPAA, and Disney, there are lots of small time artists and writers who I think we should still be careful to offer some protection to. *shrug* Not that it will ever happen, but interesting ideas.
Beer and coffee mostly. Depending on how much work one needs to get done after drinking said beverage. The amount of coffee (espresso mostly) consumed at cern is staggering really. And yes, I'm writing this from my desk at cern while drinking my 5th cup of espresso and waiting for my code to finish compiling.
Install the package frysk and you get libpangocairo free. And frysk is small enough I didn't mind.
For me at least it was as simple as switching to root, and doing:
yum install frysk
Hope that helps you!
I'm not sure I completly agree with you. 'The Big U' had an ending, and it I enjoyed and laughed all through it. Sure the book is not anywhere as briliant as his new stuff, but the ending was fun.
I'm a student here working on ATLAS (and I'll be one of the volunteers on the 6th) and I agree with the parent. The two big 'Must sees' are the detectors and the accelerators. The detectors are going to be much more impresive looking. That said, here's my $0.02
ATLAS (point1). This is the biggest detector (and my favorite, though I'm not biased or anything....) but it will also be the most crowded by far.
CMS (point5). Almost as big as ATLAS and still damn impressive. It won't be as crowded because it's a lot further away. It will still be packed though I'm sure.
ALICE (point2). Smaller detector for heavy ions. My guess is this will be pretty crowded to since St Genis is close to CERN
LHCb (point8). Another smaller detector for b quark physics. Between Ferney and Meyrin... no idea if people will go see it.
Those are the 4 detectors ranked (in my opinion) in order of coolness. I'd try to go see 2 of them if you can. Look up info on them online (they all have websites), find out which ones you want to visit. You should also try to see the accelerator somewhere. Point 6 would be my recomendation since the beam dump is also located there (this is where the beam is evacuated in case of emergency. When you realize the energy stored in the beam, this becomes pretty impressive).
Another thing I recomend is the acelerator chain tour (point1):
http://lhc2008.web.cern.ch/LHC2008/OpenDaysE/accelerators.html
There are a lot of other things open, but most of them you can still go and visit when the LHC is running (and the crowds aren't there). One last recomendation. I'd start out going to see things out on the ring, then come back to point1 (Meyrin) and explore it with all the rest of your time. That way you should be able to get the most out of it. See you Sunday!
I'm a student here working on ATLAS (and I'll be one of the volunteers on the 6th) and I agree with the parent. The two big 'Must sees' are the detectors and the accelerators. The detectors are going to be much more impresive looking. That said, here's my $0.02 ATLAS (point1). This is the biggest detector (and my favorite, though I'm not biased or anything....) but it will also be the most crowded by far. CMS (point5). Almost as big as ATLAS and still damn impressive. It won't be as crowded because it's a lot further away. It will still be packed though I'm sure. ALICE (point2). Smaller detector for heavy ions. My guess is this will be pretty crowded to since St Genis is close to CERN LHCb (point8). Another smaller detector for b quark physics. Between Ferney and Meyrin... no idea if people will go see it. Those are the 4 detectors ranked (in my opinion) in order of coolness. I'd try to go see 2 of them if you can. Look up info on them online (they all have websites), find out which ones you want to visit. You should also try to see the accelerator somewhere. Point 6 would be my recomendation since the beam dump is also located there (this is where the beam is evacuated in case of emergency. When you realize the energy stored in the beam, this becomes pretty impressive). Another thing I recomend is the acelerator chain tour (point1): http://lhc2008.web.cern.ch/LHC2008/OpenDaysE/accelerators.html There are a lot of other things open, but most of them you can still go and visit when the LHC is running (and the crowds aren't there). One last recomendation. I'd start out going to see things out on the ring, then come back to point1 (Meyrin) and explore it with all the rest of your time. That way you should be able to get the most out of it. See you Sunday!
But if a photon has more than a few MeV of energy it can split to an electron-positron pair which can brem, throwing off more photons which will split etc etc. Until the individual bits run out of the energy needed to form more particles. In other words, EM showering. However this requires VERY high energy photons (gamma rays). My understanding was that a laser like this achieves it's power by using lots of photons (in the IR range), so it won't have a problem with Bremsstrahlung at all. Thermal blooming on the other hand is probably a bigger issue. As the laser heats the air, it causes the water vapor to convect which acts as a lens and defocuses the beam.
Just so you're aware. There already IS a comics section, it's just become rather out of date IMHO. In you're preferences you can look at the slashboxes and there's one called "funnies" and one for "webcomics". Add them and they'll show up on your front page just like any other slashbox.
Rob, You talked about how XKCD and other comics are high up on your list of external websites to go to. Could I make the recomendation that you add them to the 'Funnies' slashbox? It seems to have been years since any links have been added (though maybe I'm the only one left who still uses it....) If you put your favorite webcomics onto it, I know I'd like to check out what you like. And if I can add my own $0.02 http://www.xkcd.com/, http://schlockmercenary.com/, and http://www.phdcomics.com/ are all 'geek' enough they would do well on the funnies slashbox.
Search would be great if it was fully function, however it is not yet fully functional in gmail. Here are some cases:
Looking for an email from a college with an Czech name... I have no idea how to spell it, but it starts with a BZ
Solution: Let me search for the string "from:BZ*"
My quota is full (hey it happens, even on gmail) and I need to clear some space
Solution: Let me search for emails larger than 100Kb "size>100KB" On this same topic, gmail should let you delete just the attatchments, and also let you delete one message in a thread without deleting the whole thread.
I emailed myself that ppt file months ago. I know it was called june_meeting.ppt but damned if I can find it three months later
Solution: Let me search in the filename field "filename:june*.ppt"
I'm sure there are more things, but those three drive me crazy to no end.
Not that I have 'sundiver' by David Brin on the mind or anything..... BUT if you're powering a huge friggin laser beam, maybe you could dump some of the extra heat energy away in that beam.
If you have accumulated a large amount of karma (your posts are regularly moderated up, no down), then your posts will start with a rating of 2, not 1. You can choose to not apply that bonus if you don't think you want it (for instance if you think your comment will just get moderated down). It's all in the FAQ too. Spelled out much clearer. http://slashdot.org/faq/com-mod.shtml#cm800