The labeling system is not fundamentally important. Whether one chooses to encode information about the animal's ancestry into it, describe morphological differences that may have nothing to do with ancestry, or just assign random unique strings of alphanumeric characters, they're just labels, not the facts themselves. But when you start redefining the meanings of existing labels, you degrade the ability to communicate.
When you say humans are specialized fish, you're stretching the commonly-used word 'fish' so far from its ordinary meaning that it is completely unrecognizable. When communicating with mere mortals, 'fish' does not mean 'descended from the common ancestor of all living vertebrates except the lamprey'. That is unlikely to change, as calling those bony water-breathing swimming things actinopterygii is unlikely to catch on.
In fact we belong Craniata > Vertebrata > Osteichthyes > Sarcopterygii > Tetrapoda > Mammalia > Primates > Hominidae etc. (Of course this is simplified and open to change)
As long as you're being consistent. I was going to be really annoyed if you resorted to a "humans are special" argument. Now we're just down to a disagreement about whether "is descended from" is the same thing as "is a kind of". And that distinction is just a matter of labeling, which is far less important than getting to the "is descended from" facts in the first place.
The move from red (DVD) to blue-violet (Blu-ray disc and HD-DVD) lasers cut the wavelength from 650 nm to 405 nm. This means smaller features can be imaged on the disc, and thus data can be stored more compactly. UV has a shorter wavelength still. Next up are x-rays (
Any such move will have to wait for laser technology to catch up. The blue laser discs had to wait for the development of cheap semiconductor lasers in the relevant wavelength.
Warning: From sources I'm too lazy too look up, I hear a very small percentage of people are not susceptible to the HIV virus.
Mutation of the CCR5 gene (CCR5 delta 32). The mutation is present in some 10% of Europeans and provides a level of resistance to HIV infection (but not total immunity). The mutation seems to decrease susceptibility to smallpox and bubonic plague, while increasing susceptibility to West Nile virus.
Below that is Li which is slightly heavier than H, but just as unstable as H.
Not a gas at standard temperature and pressure (STP).
Though if you look at the noble gasses below Helium is Neon, which has a weight of 10. In other words 5 times heavier. Actually heavier than air because air is O, and N, which are both lighter than Ne.
Neon is lighter than air at STP. It has a density of 0.9002 kg/m^3, compared to air's 1.292 kg/m^3.
If all mammals, except the bats for example, went extinct, your favorite bat would not seize or stop being a mammal. And the number of very specific adaptations of the bats would NOT set them apart (sonar, leathery wings, wrinkled noses, large ears, etc). The bats would remain inside the mammal group, just as all the bird species remain inside the dinosaurs. Bats are specialized mammals and birds are specialized dinosaurs.
By that argument, humans are specialized fish. At some point, you have to say a line of descent has left the bounds of the definition.
Interesting, but impractical. One option is to build a giant central stirling engine, which is not a developed technology. We know a lot more about building big steam turbines. The other is to stick a small engine at the focus of every mirror. Effective, but increases the complexity enormously. More complexity equals more cost and lower reliability.
More complexity does not always equal lower reliability. Just look at modern engines - electronic fuel injection and electronic ignition add to the complexity and result in greatly increased reliability.
Stirling engines may be more reliable, but we're talking about multiplying that low problem rate by the sheer quantity of them required. It's the old "airplane rule": a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane. When you've got 20,000 stirling engines (as in the Stirling Energy Systems project for Southern California Edison), you're going to have a decent rate of mechanical problems. And they're all out in the field, where you'll need to drive a crane out to get them down off the reflector dish.
And this project is a go - it will be the largest solar plant in the US when completed.
What project? The steam-turbine designs that are the subject of the article? What does that have to do with stirling engine reliability concerns?
The problem with steam turbines is that they require a great deal of maintenance. Without care they have to potential to explode. And examining a steam turbine is a non-trivial task. A sterling engine requires very little maintenance - just a fraction of what an internal combustion engine requires.
A great deal of maintenance for a handful of turbines, vs very little maintenance multiplied by thousands of stirling engines.
Even if you can only convert 5% of that energy into electricity it is still a pile of energy.
The question is, will it cost more to extract that 5% than simply building the plant 5% larger? Probably not, or such systems would likely already be commonplace.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But will it require boiling the oceans to fully populate IPv6 space?
No, but you could make a good effort of trying.
Both ZFS and IPv6 are 128-bit systems. Populating an IPv6 address can probably be defined as a one-bit operation, unlike the multiple bits required for each ZFS block allocation. Adjusting his math for a one-bit allocation of an IPv6 address gives us an energy of 3.06x10^24 J, and thus 1.3x10^18 kg of water. This works out to 13 million km^3 of water that we can boil. This is roughly comparable to the volume of the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and Mediterranean Sea combined.
But what about using a heat engine in place of a turbine?
A steam turbine is a heat engine.
There was a story on/. a while back about using sterling engines in a solar plant. They talked of placing a small sterling engine at the center of a large parabolic dish - sounded interesting.
Interesting, but impractical. One option is to build a giant central stirling engine, which is not a developed technology. We know a lot more about building big steam turbines. The other is to stick a small engine at the focus of every mirror. Effective, but increases the complexity enormously. More complexity equals more cost and lower reliability.
I like the idea of sterling engines and wonder if they could be used in conjunction with a steam turbine. The steam turbine operates as expected but a sterling engine is present where the stream in turned back into water. In essence, the waste heat from the turbine could be harvested instead of being discarded.
The term you're looking for is "combined cycle" power plant. I can't answer whether a steam turbine-stirling combined cycle would provide enough efficiency to justify its construction. You would again need to build a very large stirling engine.
Why is molten salt used instead of something else?
Because molten salts have a high capacity for storing heat. They're almost as good at it as water, and have a wider range of operating temperatures, meaning you can store more heat in practice.
Isn't that dangerous?
No more than storing any other liquid at a similar temperature. Probably even less, since they're not likely to be using it at any kind of pressure. The nitrate salts typically used in these things are oxidizers, which can be dangerous if flammable materials are around. Otherwise, if there's a leak, you've just got hot salt on your dirt, which quickly becomes cold salty dirt.
Can't birds get zapped if they fly too close to the collector where thousands of mirrors are pointing?
This isn't a single-focus setup like the old Solar One (in California). Nevada Solar One has a bunch of small linear collectors. I can't see birds flying inside the things in any significant numbers
Do we even care?
The covering of large areas with mirrors will likely have a far greater environmental impact than the reflected sunlight.
Why is it so expensive to build an array of a bunch of mirrors and a collector?
You have to buy a decent-sized chunk of land to start. Covering a large area of land with anything adds up quickly. Then you have to build the heat storage system, and the actual power generators.
Is it dangerous to be near this thing, where I suppose you could be blinded if you glanced in the wrong direction?
If you can be blinded, that pretty much means you're standing in the focus of one of the mirrors. Remember, the design goal is that the collector sees the sun from all parts of the mirror. Reflecting sunlight away from the collectors means wasted energy, and wasted investment in mirrors. It's not economical to blind people, even when you don't include lawsuits.
Applied here (I live in the US), would it not make sense to take a chunk of land within each state, devote it to this, and have that provide the power for that state?
Not really. Available power drops off significantly with increasing latitude. It also drops off with cloud cover. Which means we have to get into insolation maps. The northeastern US gets less than half the solar power per unit area the desert southwest does. Same for the northwest.
Solar-derived electricity is going to have to be shipped around, even if you build enough plants to locally generate power. A nor'easter will come in, block out the sun for a few days, and dump several inches of snow on top of the mirrors of solar plants across a wide area of the country. Other parts of the country have their own meteorological issues.
Is this a useful technology? Yes. Is it a silver bullet for the world's energy needs? No.
You do not have to cover 3% of Morocco all at once. You'd establish a solar array in Morocco sufficient to power, say, the city of Gibraltar itself. If it paid off to do so, you'd extend it. It's not as if the land's all that expensive. Keep adding more panels and stringing more cables as your business grows.
Of course this is how you'd do it in practice. I was just a bit preoccupied with the OP's "greed and corruption" hyperbole. It'd still be expensive and take a while though. It's a lot of land.
I thought it was sodium heated to a liquid state. Not "Molten Salt".
Nope, molten salts. I don't know what these guys are using, but the National Solar Thermal Test Facility has settled on a mix of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate.
On a more serious note, 3% of Moroccos land mass could provide power for ALL of Western Europe? Can I ask what possible reason there could be beyond corruption and greed for this NOT to be used?
The fact that 3% of Morocco's land mass is 13,000 square kilometers might have something to do with it. It's not a trivial project.
Somehow I think that this kind of technology, no matter the initial cost, would be an absolute boon and can see no reason why it shouldn't be adopted.
Let's take the literal idea of using 3% of Morocco and look for flaws.
Massive initial infrastructure cost (your indifference is unrealistic). Having to string hundred gigawatt power lines across the Strait of Gibraltar. Placing one's economic well-being in the hands of a single foreign nation. Overly-optimistic promises from the people selling the technology.
Even if you spread the sites out across north Africa to avoid being dependent on Morocco, you have the problem of finding a route to Europe. It's either back through Morocco (single point of failure!), around through Israel, Lebanon, and Syria (multiple single points of failure!), or across hundreds of kilometers of open water (Captain Hazelwood to the bridge).
Placing the sites in Europe would solve the "foreign nation" and power lines problems, but the higher latitude would require a significant increase in collector size, especially in winter.
The cost is unavoidable.
Marketing exaggeration (lies) on the part of the sellers can be avoided by building a few decent-sized pilot plants. That is, assuming a lack of corruption and greed in awarding contracts if they underperform.
We can finally move, at least on the consumer side, to mainly electric (no hybrid BS) vehicles
Increasing electrical consumption massively, thus requiring a far larger solar power infrastructure.
I'm not saying this can't be built. I'm not even saying it shouldn't be built. I'm saying it's not going to happen overnight, even if everyone agrees it's a good idea. And it won't be cheap, even if it's cheaper in the long run.
Wait a second, if the probe is called "Deep Impact", shouldn't it, you know, impact on something? I don't think flybys count.
The probe carried a 370 kg (815 lb) impactor. It "dropped" the impactor on comet 9P/Tempel back in 2005. The still-operating part of the probe carries the cameras that took pictures of the impact.
Deep Impact now has an "extended mission", which is NASA-speak for "whatever useful stuff we can do with this probe we've already launched".
Why? it's extremely difficult to ignite liquid gasoline, or jet fuel. An air-fuel mix ignites quite easily, however. So moral of the story: if you're paranoid that wires in your fuel tank are freyed, keep your fuel tank full.
One cannot keep the fuel tanks on any operating vehicle continuously full without shape-changing tanks. Even if one allows for a partial drop in fuel level (with the resulting fuel-air mixture being too rich to burn), this will result in reduced range, and hauling a lot of extra fuel around.
Better to remove potential ignition sources from the tank.
When did you take your driver's test? I took mine in 1994 in Texas (have also been a Texan from birth) -- it was 25 to get the learner's permit, yes. I was taking a driver's ed course, which was a joke -- taught by the coach at the high school.
I got my driver's license in 1996 under similar circumstances (Texas, high school, driver's ed taught by a coach). A (basic) road test was part of the course. I don't know whose requirement it was.
Re:Death of Unicies predictions becoming a reality
on
NYSE Moves to Linux
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· Score: 1
I found this comment far more interesting when I read the 'subject' as "Death of Unicycles predictions becoming a reality".
Ok, I can see Orion as viable for trips to the ISS and the moon - but Mars? Does anyone really think this is an adequate vehicle for that?
The Block I Orion module is indeed completely inadequate for a trip to Mars. Which is why further down the page it says:
It will be able to rendezvous with [..] Mars-bound vehicles assembled in low-Earth orbit. Orion will be the Earth entry vehicle for lunar and Mars returns.
To use a really awful car analogy, the Orion CEV capsule is like a minivan. When they decide to go to Mars, astronauts will drive the minivan out to the LEO RV park to pick up their Winnebago.
Poster has repeated the same sentiment twice without identifying a source. Why did it win +2?
The other responders gave true, but not particularly useful answers. What you probably really want to know is that the quote in question is from Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra".
The translation quoted appears as color text in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, as already noted. The original poster is a gimmick account that posts said text in comments to relevant articles.
I've always read that cat blood glows in the dark, something I've always wanted to see
Cat urine fluoresces under UV light.
I've never verified it myself, but I'm not kidding. A Google search turns up UV lights marketed specifically for the purpose of finding and cleaning it up.
Slashdot Mirror
The labeling system is not fundamentally important. Whether one chooses to encode information about the animal's ancestry into it, describe morphological differences that may have nothing to do with ancestry, or just assign random unique strings of alphanumeric characters, they're just labels, not the facts themselves. But when you start redefining the meanings of existing labels, you degrade the ability to communicate.
When you say humans are specialized fish, you're stretching the commonly-used word 'fish' so far from its ordinary meaning that it is completely unrecognizable. When communicating with mere mortals, 'fish' does not mean 'descended from the common ancestor of all living vertebrates except the lamprey'. That is unlikely to change, as calling those bony water-breathing swimming things actinopterygii is unlikely to catch on.
In fact we belong Craniata > Vertebrata > Osteichthyes > Sarcopterygii > Tetrapoda > Mammalia > Primates > Hominidae etc. (Of course this is simplified and open to change)
As long as you're being consistent. I was going to be really annoyed if you resorted to a "humans are special" argument. Now we're just down to a disagreement about whether "is descended from" is the same thing as "is a kind of". And that distinction is just a matter of labeling, which is far less important than getting to the "is descended from" facts in the first place.
I'm going to answer this seriously. Yes.
The move from red (DVD) to blue-violet (Blu-ray disc and HD-DVD) lasers cut the wavelength from 650 nm to 405 nm. This means smaller features can be imaged on the disc, and thus data can be stored more compactly. UV has a shorter wavelength still. Next up are x-rays (
Any such move will have to wait for laser technology to catch up. The blue laser discs had to wait for the development of cheap semiconductor lasers in the relevant wavelength.
Mutation of the CCR5 gene (CCR5 delta 32). The mutation is present in some 10% of Europeans and provides a level of resistance to HIV infection (but not total immunity). The mutation seems to decrease susceptibility to smallpox and bubonic plague, while increasing susceptibility to West Nile virus.
Not a gas at standard temperature and pressure (STP).
Though if you look at the noble gasses below Helium is Neon, which has a weight of 10. In other words 5 times heavier. Actually heavier than air because air is O, and N, which are both lighter than Ne.Neon is lighter than air at STP. It has a density of 0.9002 kg/m^3, compared to air's 1.292 kg/m^3.
By that argument, humans are specialized fish. At some point, you have to say a line of descent has left the bounds of the definition.
More complexity does not always equal lower reliability. Just look at modern engines - electronic fuel injection and electronic ignition add to the complexity and result in greatly increased reliability.
Stirling engines may be more reliable, but we're talking about multiplying that low problem rate by the sheer quantity of them required. It's the old "airplane rule": a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane. When you've got 20,000 stirling engines (as in the Stirling Energy Systems project for Southern California Edison), you're going to have a decent rate of mechanical problems. And they're all out in the field, where you'll need to drive a crane out to get them down off the reflector dish.
And this project is a go - it will be the largest solar plant in the US when completed.What project? The steam-turbine designs that are the subject of the article? What does that have to do with stirling engine reliability concerns?
The problem with steam turbines is that they require a great deal of maintenance. Without care they have to potential to explode. And examining a steam turbine is a non-trivial task. A sterling engine requires very little maintenance - just a fraction of what an internal combustion engine requires.A great deal of maintenance for a handful of turbines, vs very little maintenance multiplied by thousands of stirling engines.
Even if you can only convert 5% of that energy into electricity it is still a pile of energy.The question is, will it cost more to extract that 5% than simply building the plant 5% larger? Probably not, or such systems would likely already be commonplace.
No, but you could make a good effort of trying.
Both ZFS and IPv6 are 128-bit systems. Populating an IPv6 address can probably be defined as a one-bit operation, unlike the multiple bits required for each ZFS block allocation. Adjusting his math for a one-bit allocation of an IPv6 address gives us an energy of 3.06x10^24 J, and thus 1.3x10^18 kg of water. This works out to 13 million km^3 of water that we can boil. This is roughly comparable to the volume of the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and Mediterranean Sea combined.
Although I probably hosed the math somewhere.
A steam turbine is a heat engine.
There was a story onInteresting, but impractical. One option is to build a giant central stirling engine, which is not a developed technology. We know a lot more about building big steam turbines. The other is to stick a small engine at the focus of every mirror. Effective, but increases the complexity enormously. More complexity equals more cost and lower reliability.
I like the idea of sterling engines and wonder if they could be used in conjunction with a steam turbine. The steam turbine operates as expected but a sterling engine is present where the stream in turned back into water. In essence, the waste heat from the turbine could be harvested instead of being discarded.The term you're looking for is "combined cycle" power plant. I can't answer whether a steam turbine-stirling combined cycle would provide enough efficiency to justify its construction. You would again need to build a very large stirling engine.
Practical enough to build a few test plants.
Why is molten salt used instead of something else?Because molten salts have a high capacity for storing heat. They're almost as good at it as water, and have a wider range of operating temperatures, meaning you can store more heat in practice.
Isn't that dangerous?No more than storing any other liquid at a similar temperature. Probably even less, since they're not likely to be using it at any kind of pressure. The nitrate salts typically used in these things are oxidizers, which can be dangerous if flammable materials are around. Otherwise, if there's a leak, you've just got hot salt on your dirt, which quickly becomes cold salty dirt.
Can't birds get zapped if they fly too close to the collector where thousands of mirrors are pointing?This isn't a single-focus setup like the old Solar One (in California). Nevada Solar One has a bunch of small linear collectors. I can't see birds flying inside the things in any significant numbers
Do we even care?The covering of large areas with mirrors will likely have a far greater environmental impact than the reflected sunlight.
Why is it so expensive to build an array of a bunch of mirrors and a collector?You have to buy a decent-sized chunk of land to start. Covering a large area of land with anything adds up quickly. Then you have to build the heat storage system, and the actual power generators.
Is it dangerous to be near this thing, where I suppose you could be blinded if you glanced in the wrong direction?If you can be blinded, that pretty much means you're standing in the focus of one of the mirrors. Remember, the design goal is that the collector sees the sun from all parts of the mirror. Reflecting sunlight away from the collectors means wasted energy, and wasted investment in mirrors. It's not economical to blind people, even when you don't include lawsuits.
Not really. Available power drops off significantly with increasing latitude. It also drops off with cloud cover. Which means we have to get into insolation maps. The northeastern US gets less than half the solar power per unit area the desert southwest does. Same for the northwest.
Solar-derived electricity is going to have to be shipped around, even if you build enough plants to locally generate power. A nor'easter will come in, block out the sun for a few days, and dump several inches of snow on top of the mirrors of solar plants across a wide area of the country. Other parts of the country have their own meteorological issues.
Is this a useful technology? Yes. Is it a silver bullet for the world's energy needs? No.
Of course this is how you'd do it in practice. I was just a bit preoccupied with the OP's "greed and corruption" hyperbole. It'd still be expensive and take a while though. It's a lot of land.
Nope, molten salts. I don't know what these guys are using, but the National Solar Thermal Test Facility has settled on a mix of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate.
The fact that 3% of Morocco's land mass is 13,000 square kilometers might have something to do with it. It's not a trivial project.
Somehow I think that this kind of technology, no matter the initial cost, would be an absolute boon and can see no reason why it shouldn't be adopted.Let's take the literal idea of using 3% of Morocco and look for flaws.
Massive initial infrastructure cost (your indifference is unrealistic). Having to string hundred gigawatt power lines across the Strait of Gibraltar. Placing one's economic well-being in the hands of a single foreign nation. Overly-optimistic promises from the people selling the technology.
Even if you spread the sites out across north Africa to avoid being dependent on Morocco, you have the problem of finding a route to Europe. It's either back through Morocco (single point of failure!), around through Israel, Lebanon, and Syria (multiple single points of failure!), or across hundreds of kilometers of open water (Captain Hazelwood to the bridge).
Placing the sites in Europe would solve the "foreign nation" and power lines problems, but the higher latitude would require a significant increase in collector size, especially in winter.
The cost is unavoidable.
Marketing exaggeration (lies) on the part of the sellers can be avoided by building a few decent-sized pilot plants. That is, assuming a lack of corruption and greed in awarding contracts if they underperform.
We can finally move, at least on the consumer side, to mainly electric (no hybrid BS) vehiclesIncreasing electrical consumption massively, thus requiring a far larger solar power infrastructure.
I'm not saying this can't be built. I'm not even saying it shouldn't be built. I'm saying it's not going to happen overnight, even if everyone agrees it's a good idea. And it won't be cheap, even if it's cheaper in the long run.
</obvious>
Just don't call him "Catpain". I hear he hates that almost as much as I do.
The 2nd category is redundant with the 1st.
It's redundant with weasels, not rats. A common mistake.
The probe carried a 370 kg (815 lb) impactor. It "dropped" the impactor on comet 9P/Tempel back in 2005. The still-operating part of the probe carries the cameras that took pictures of the impact.
Deep Impact now has an "extended mission", which is NASA-speak for "whatever useful stuff we can do with this probe we've already launched".
The system to do that would weigh a lot more and require more maintenance than a redesigned sensor.
One cannot keep the fuel tanks on any operating vehicle continuously full without shape-changing tanks. Even if one allows for a partial drop in fuel level (with the resulting fuel-air mixture being too rich to burn), this will result in reduced range, and hauling a lot of extra fuel around.
Better to remove potential ignition sources from the tank.
Might as well ask the almighty Google. Google says 39p.
A very basic road test has been required by Texas law since at least 2000 (that's when the current rule was adopted, at least).
I got my driver's license in 1996 under similar circumstances (Texas, high school, driver's ed taught by a coach). A (basic) road test was part of the course. I don't know whose requirement it was.
I found this comment far more interesting when I read the 'subject' as "Death of Unicycles predictions becoming a reality".
The Block I Orion module is indeed completely inadequate for a trip to Mars. Which is why further down the page it says:
It will be able to rendezvous with [..] Mars-bound vehicles assembled in low-Earth orbit. Orion will be the Earth entry vehicle for lunar and Mars returns.To use a really awful car analogy, the Orion CEV capsule is like a minivan. When they decide to go to Mars, astronauts will drive the minivan out to the LEO RV park to pick up their Winnebago.
The other responders gave true, but not particularly useful answers. What you probably really want to know is that the quote in question is from Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra".
The translation quoted appears as color text in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, as already noted. The original poster is a gimmick account that posts said text in comments to relevant articles.
Cat urine fluoresces under UV light.
I've never verified it myself, but I'm not kidding. A Google search turns up UV lights marketed specifically for the purpose of finding and cleaning it up.