A 2-km-wide ring of superconducting magnets would contain and propel a payload, accelerating it over a period of hours,
So it's wasting all that energy making it go around in circles (it's changing direction, thus accelerating) while it ever-so-slowly ("a period of hours"!? ye gods and little fishes!) to escape velocity. I got news for you -- a low acceeration rocket like the Shuttle makes orbital velocity in 8 minutes at a modest 3 Gs.
Orbital velocity is about 7km/sec. Say 10km/sec to allow for drag losses escaping the atmosphere and gaining altitude. Accelerate at 1000 G and you can reach that speed in 1 second, in a distance of 5 km.
They're talking about a ring 2 km wide; take that as the diameter and they're talking a 6.28 km circumference. With fewer magnets and less total energy they could do it with a linear accelerator.
What idiot wasted taxpayer dollars thinking this up?
Nope, it's a noisy channel, and good ol' midwest boy that Neil is, he slurs it a litte:
"That's one small step f'r a man" etc. And then Walter Cronkite tells everybody he said "for man", and everyone believes it.
If the channel is slightly noisy, you can "hear" whatever you think you're going to hear in it. Consider how often people misperceive song lyrics into something totally different. Once Cronkite told them that - and it hit the headlines that way - that's what people think they hear. Try hearing it as "step f'ra man".
The incident five years ago cost the life of one of the two Chinese escort pilots.
Well, that's an interesting spin on it, accurate but misleading.
The US plane was over international waters (or possibly disputed waters depending on the exact distance from the coast). The Chinese sent up fighters to keep an eye on them (no big deal, US and Canada used to routinely do this with Russian aircraft approaching the North American coasts, and no doubt vice versa). One of them was either hot dogging (playing chicken) or just not paying attention, failed to maintain safe distance and crashed into the recon plane. The Chinese pilot was killed, the US recon plane couldn't maintain altitude, declared an emergency and landed at the nearest airfield -- which happend to be a Chinese military airfield.
Someone will eventually come up with a ground based weapon that will destroy a sattelite (not a missle).
That's a little unclear -- did you mean a ground based weapon that will destroy a satellite but not a missile, or a ground based weapon that is not a missile that will destroy a satellite?
The USSR and US both successfully tested anti-satellite weapons in the 80s. The Soviet version was a ground-launched orbital weapon that sidled up to the target and then suicide-bombed it. The US version was a direct-attack missile air-launched from an F-15. Both sides stopped testing after proving the systems worked and they realized they were creating an orbital debris problem.
Your analysis makes the mistake of assuming that there's only one enemy (or "potential opponent", if you prefer that term). You also underestimate the value of doubt.
Even if nations A, B, and C know your secret, there's still D thru Z that don't unless you publish it. Furthermore, A, B and C may not know for sure that they know your secret until you confirm it by publishing. Confirming it tells them not only your secret, but it also tells them that the channel by which they obtained it originally is reliable. At least, assuming you're not just publishing the phony secret that you already know they've obtained, in order to "confirm" a tainted channel.
Nitpick: The Mac II was the first machine capable of running A/UX.
Right, my bad. The Lisa had a port of AT&T Version 7 Unix that Apple paid UniSoft to do. I just remembered seeing a Unix on a Lisa at a Usenix (or UniForum?) conference a couple of years before the Mac II.
Do you think if we rapidly built 1,360 (or 650 or 390) new nuclear reactors and bring them online in 10 years - that this would have an effect on the price of uranium ore (and the related assumptions about how much electricity $9 would buy)?
Undoubtedly, but that's an enormous 'if'. The assumption underlying that demand is that we convert all gas-using automobiles to supercapacitor (or equivalent electric storage) electric automobiles over that same 10 year period. Ain't gonna happen, for multiple reasons.
Should we look again at breeder reactors?
Yes. Plenty of thorium around. We could process coal ash, for starters... (Half joking. There are no doubt better thorium ores, but the fission energy in the thorium in coal is greater than the oxidation energy in the coal's carbon. Dirty stuff, coal.)
Will environmentalists get on board to permit nuclear power plant construction to resume?
At least a few of them are coming around to the idea. It's much easier to handle nuclear waste than carbon dioxide, given the relative volumes for the same energy output.
That says one nuclear plant unit can simultaneously drive only 306 "electric gas pumps".
That's a fairly significant assumption when propagated through the rest of your analysis.
It's a very rare gas station (usually the one with the lowest price in town) that is operating at full capacity 24/7.
You also need to consider the overall reduction in "pump" demand if people can recharge overnight at home.
That's about 1,360 new nuclear plants to feed 'em.
You mean reactors. A plant can have multiple -- as you point out with Canyon Diablo. The CANDU reactors near Toronto put out somewhat about 600 (Pickering) and 900 (Darlington) MWe each, but Pickering has 8 and Darlington 4 reactors. And the actual number required would be less.
And those reactors (or equivalents) would eliminate the need for how many billions of barrels of oil and the consequent political ramificaitions?
Assume a 42-gal barrel of oil makes 42 gal of gasoline (it doesn't, more like about 20 gallons plus diesel, kerosene, and other stuff), your number of reactors putting out 1 GW each for a year is equivalent to 7.8 trillion (7,805 billion) barrels of oil. This compares with current (2005) consumption of 8,004 billion barrels/year, of which 4,822 billion is imported. Given that not all that oil is used as gasoline, your reactor numbers are somewhat high (perhaps double), so call it 650 reactors to replace all gasoline use, or about 390 to replace all gasoline from imported oil. This compares to 103 power reactors currently operating in the US. 400 reactors -- say, 100 plants -- to totally wean the US off of foreign oil? Sounds like a deal.
For a small car it takes about 170kwh to go 500 miles on average.
I assume you're talking input power (ie, gasoline equivalent), not power output as motion (vs wasted as heat, noise, etc). In which case you need to take the ~90% efficiency of electric motors vs the ~30% efficiency of internal combustion engines into account. That drops the instantaneous demand in your hypothetical station to 8 MW right there.
That means If there were 12 electrical "gas pumps" to charge 12 such ultra capacitor cars in 5 minutes, it would take a power line that could carry 24 million watts of electricity to service ONE such station!
How often do you see a station with 12 cars filling up simultaneously? Most stations can only handle four or six at peak -- and they're rarely at peak. (Interstate stops can typically handle a few more, certainly.) And even at peak, the time between "fills" is not the bare minimum 5 minutes. The car has to move up to the charging outlet, park, connect up, charge, disconnect, pay for it somewhere in there, and drive off. Figure a few minutes for non-charging activity, which the station can be using to charge up its local storage from the grid.
5 MW should handle peak load at a very large recharge station. Much less than that (a few hundred kW) could handle a typical neighborhood station with local storage -- and in practise the demand on those would be lower because of folks recharging at home.
If your're running full throttle, probably more like 4 hours. Your mileage may vary;-)
so total energy consumed = 200 x 10 = 2000 kWh.
Or 800 kWh. Of course that's with about 6 times the drag (125 MPH vs 50 MPH), which dominates at high speed. So call it 125 kWh to do the trip in 10 hours at 50 MPH, and 1.5 MW to recharge in 5 minutes.
Except that electric motors are a lot more efficient than internal combustion engines (about 90% vs 30%) so it would only take an electric about 42 kWh to do that trip, and 500 kW for 5 min to recharge.
Still a serious amount of energy, but more than an order of magnitude less than your initial estimate.
there are times when I wonder if Niven knows something the rest of us don't.
Of course he does. Think about "What Can You Say About Chocolate-Covered Manhole Covers?".
Interestingly enough (well, to me, anyway), shortly after the original Pons-Fleischmann "cold fusion" announcements and all that buzz about palladium cathodes, I was rereading a Niven story and noticed the reference to "crystal zinc fusion tubes". Note that the symbol for zinc, Zn, is a simple rotation cipher (rot10) for the symbol for palladium, Pd. Obviously Niven knew something.
As it also happened, Niven was going to be in town for a con a couple of days after I had this epiphany. I confronted him with a short-short, "What Can You Say About Chocolate-Covered Fusion Tubes?". He apparently didn't think anyone would publish it (although he gave permission) -- which is probably just as well, else I might right now be stranded on some alien planet, having long ago finished off the chocolate covering from the fusion tube.
It's gotten bad enough that too many real videos are considered fake because it "doesn't look real"
Yeah, I recall a number of complaints about news footage from a war zone that the explosions "looked fake" because there was no fireball, etc. Thanks, Hollywood, for decades of explosion FX made more cinematic by including a few containers of kerosene or whatever along with the low explosives you use.
(And on a related note, don't you just love those scenes where the hero (often with distressed damsel in tow) outruns the fireball from an explosion, or the exhaust from a launching rocket?)
not likely have access to UNIX since it was almost entirely only available at universities, government offices and large businesses.
UNIX was twice as old as the kid back in 1993. UNIX and Unix-like OS's had beed around for PCs for six or seven years at that point -- including PC's like the Tandy Color Computer (OS/9 - also available for the Atari ST series). Other 'nix flavors included Minix, QNX, Xenix, Coherent, and, by '93, BSD and Linux. Plus, in the mid-80's everyone and his brother were making comparatively cheap 'nix workstations (based on M68K, Z8000, NC32032, or what have you) running a real port of System V. You could get Apple Unix (A/UX) for the Lisa.
Anyone familiar with any of those would recognize a unix system, and they all ran on affordable hardware. (For various values of affordable).
And there was very limited net access back then so learning remotely would be difficult too.
The "net" in those days was mostly dial-up modems and UUCP. Ever hear of Usenet? That goes back many years too. And there were plenty of books around -- I taught myself Unix back around 1983 from a paperback book by Que publishing (forget the title). Well, that and man pages and access to a PDP 11/34 (128K of memory, 10MB of disk!) running Version 7.
It can be, but your situation A oversimplifies in that it doesn't look at what the individual drivers in "A" might be doing in addition to stopping at the distribution center -- taking kids to/from school or some activity, coming home from work, doctor visit, etc, etc. Most people I know combine errands.
It makes the oveall outcome a little harder to simulate.
I suspect it isn't a sign of anything human myself, or any of the "global warming" stuff.
Well, it wouldn't surprise me if the planet is getting a little warmer -- ie gobal warming -- but it would surprise me if humans had anything to do with it. Of course as you imply by your quotes, "global warming" has become a catch-phrase for "global warming due to the greenhouse effect of anthropogenic carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels", and thus makes nice shorthand for the demagogs, since "global warming" is a lot harder to argue with than the longer phrase which can be knocked down on any of four points.
all that is really happening is that we are finally fulling coming out of the Little Ice Age.
Indeed. Which could well be due to the Sun increasing its output by about 0.05%, or any number of other reasons that humans have nothing to do with and frankly, aren't in much of a position to do anything about yet. We already know that the Sun is a slightly variable star, as witness sunspot cycles.
but that is not what it really is. 2+3 works for most cases, but there will be edges where the simpler math breaks down and if you do not realize that you are dealing with quantum particles instead of a few apples,
Case in point: let X be 0.25 critical masses of plutonium. 2X + 3X doesn't equal 5X, at least not for very long.
you may become very frustrated.
Or dead.
(And for the nuclear physicists and engineers: yes, I know it's more complicated than that because of factors like shape, etc. substitue "plutonium" with "a solution of enriched uranyl nitrate" and you get something like the accident that happened in a Japanese reprocessing facility (at Tokai, Ibaraki) a few years ago.)
Yeah, like I said "Granted, the record wears out pretty fast".
Actually they usually last at least two playings, as long as you don't mind losing all the high frequencies after the first time;-)
Then there are those folks -- I've heard of a couple of them -- who could recognize a recording just by looking at the grooves on the disc. Mind you, even I could recognize Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture", the cannon fire is a dead giveaway.
You missed out some major steps there between recording the vibrations and playing them back again.
gives each slice a value between 0 and 65535....[then a miracle occurs]... Then they convert those values into voltages to drive the electromagnet in a speaker.
And since when to turntables digitize the signal first?
There is something eceedingly warm about the sound of vinyl.
If you really like it, I'm sure that kind of distortion can be programmed into the DSP. (Actually it's more of a roll off of the high frequencies, a simple RC filter circuit can do that for you.)
Nice thing about vinyl records is that they can be played with a pin, a paper cone, and something to turn the record on. Granted, the record wears out pretty fast, but it does give kids a much better grasp of what's going on than does magical mp3 players. (Magic? Sure -- how many people -- even here on Slashdot -- can really explain how those things work down at the physics level? Converting vibrations to wiggly grooves and back to vibrations is easy.)
Slashdot Mirror
A 2-km-wide ring of superconducting magnets would contain and propel a payload, accelerating it over a period of hours,
So it's wasting all that energy making it go around in circles (it's changing direction, thus accelerating) while it ever-so-slowly ("a period of hours"!? ye gods and little fishes!) to escape velocity. I got news for you -- a low acceeration rocket like the Shuttle makes orbital velocity in 8 minutes at a modest 3 Gs.
Orbital velocity is about 7km/sec. Say 10km/sec to allow for drag losses escaping the atmosphere and gaining altitude. Accelerate at 1000 G and you can reach that speed in 1 second, in a distance of 5 km.
They're talking about a ring 2 km wide; take that as the diameter and they're talking a 6.28 km circumference. With fewer magnets and less total energy they could do it with a linear accelerator.
What idiot wasted taxpayer dollars thinking this up?
Nope, it's a noisy channel, and good ol' midwest boy that Neil is, he slurs it a litte:
"That's one small step f'r a man" etc. And then Walter Cronkite tells everybody he said "for man", and everyone believes it.
If the channel is slightly noisy, you can "hear" whatever you think you're going to hear in it. Consider how often people misperceive song lyrics into something totally different. Once Cronkite told them that - and it hit the headlines that way - that's what people think they hear. Try hearing it as "step f'ra man".
Yes, but only if you route the plasma conduits through the Heisenberg compensators.
From the time stamps, looks like you beat me by a few hours.
Surprizing how similar the formats, I swear I didn't see yours first. As you say, great minds.
exploring Mars since January 2004" - no where near the three years reported
Let's see:
Jan 04 to Jan 05: one year
Jan 05 to Jan 06: another year
Jan 06 to now: add three/quarters of a year
I'd say 2.75 years is pretty close to 3 years. Throw in the transit time and you're well over that.
The incident five years ago cost the life of one of the two Chinese escort pilots.
Well, that's an interesting spin on it, accurate but misleading.
The US plane was over international waters (or possibly disputed waters depending on the exact distance from the coast). The Chinese sent up fighters to keep an eye on them (no big deal, US and Canada used to routinely do this with Russian aircraft approaching the North American coasts, and no doubt vice versa). One of them was either hot dogging (playing chicken) or just not paying attention, failed to maintain safe distance and crashed into the recon plane. The Chinese pilot was killed, the US recon plane couldn't maintain altitude, declared an emergency and landed at the nearest airfield -- which happend to be a Chinese military airfield.
We blew up a derelict russian satellite with a F15 firing a special missle in the '80s
No we didn't. We blew up an American scientific satellite that was past its end of mission.
and it caused all sorts of issues,
That's because although the satellite was passed end of mission, it was still returning data. The scientists were pissed.
Someone will eventually come up with a ground based weapon that will destroy a sattelite (not a missle).
That's a little unclear -- did you mean a ground based weapon that will destroy a satellite but not a missile, or a ground based weapon that is not a missile that will destroy a satellite?
The USSR and US both successfully tested anti-satellite weapons in the 80s. The Soviet version was a ground-launched orbital weapon that sidled up to the target and then suicide-bombed it. The US version was a direct-attack missile air-launched from an F-15. Both sides stopped testing after proving the systems worked and they realized they were creating an orbital debris problem.
Your analysis makes the mistake of assuming that there's only one enemy (or "potential opponent", if you prefer that term). You also underestimate the value of doubt.
Even if nations A, B, and C know your secret, there's still D thru Z that don't unless you publish it. Furthermore, A, B and C may not know for sure that they know your secret until you confirm it by publishing. Confirming it tells them not only your secret, but it also tells them that the channel by which they obtained it originally is reliable. At least, assuming you're not just publishing the phony secret that you already know they've obtained, in order to "confirm" a tainted channel.
Nitpick: The Mac II was the first machine capable of running A/UX.
Right, my bad. The Lisa had a port of AT&T Version 7 Unix that Apple paid UniSoft to do. I just remembered seeing a Unix on a Lisa at a Usenix (or UniForum?) conference a couple of years before the Mac II.
Do you think if we rapidly built 1,360 (or 650 or 390) new nuclear reactors and bring them online in 10 years - that this would have an effect on the price of uranium ore (and the related assumptions about how much electricity $9 would buy)?
Undoubtedly, but that's an enormous 'if'. The assumption underlying that demand is that we convert all gas-using automobiles to supercapacitor (or equivalent electric storage) electric automobiles over that same 10 year period. Ain't gonna happen, for multiple reasons.
Should we look again at breeder reactors?
Yes. Plenty of thorium around. We could process coal ash, for starters... (Half joking. There are no doubt better thorium ores, but the fission energy in the thorium in coal is greater than the oxidation energy in the coal's carbon. Dirty stuff, coal.)
Will environmentalists get on board to permit nuclear power plant construction to resume?
At least a few of them are coming around to the idea. It's much easier to handle nuclear waste than carbon dioxide, given the relative volumes for the same energy output.
That says one nuclear plant unit can simultaneously drive only 306 "electric gas pumps".
That's a fairly significant assumption when propagated through the rest of your analysis.
It's a very rare gas station (usually the one with the lowest price in town) that is operating at full capacity 24/7.
You also need to consider the overall reduction in "pump" demand if people can recharge overnight at home.
That's about 1,360 new nuclear plants to feed 'em.
You mean reactors. A plant can have multiple -- as you point out with Canyon Diablo. The CANDU reactors near Toronto put out somewhat about 600 (Pickering) and 900 (Darlington) MWe each, but Pickering has 8 and Darlington 4 reactors. And the actual number required would be less.
And those reactors (or equivalents) would eliminate the need for how many billions of barrels of oil and the consequent political ramificaitions?
Assume a 42-gal barrel of oil makes 42 gal of gasoline (it doesn't, more like about 20 gallons plus diesel, kerosene, and other stuff), your number of reactors putting out 1 GW each for a year is equivalent to 7.8 trillion (7,805 billion) barrels of oil. This compares with current (2005) consumption of 8,004 billion barrels/year, of which 4,822 billion is imported. Given that not all that oil is used as gasoline, your reactor numbers are somewhat high (perhaps double), so call it 650 reactors to replace all gasoline use, or about 390 to replace all gasoline from imported oil. This compares to 103 power reactors currently operating in the US. 400 reactors -- say, 100 plants -- to totally wean the US off of foreign oil? Sounds like a deal.
For a small car it takes about 170kwh to go 500 miles on average.
I assume you're talking input power (ie, gasoline equivalent), not power output as motion (vs wasted as heat, noise, etc). In which case you need to take the ~90% efficiency of electric motors vs the ~30% efficiency of internal combustion engines into account. That drops the instantaneous demand in your hypothetical station to 8 MW right there.
That means If there were 12 electrical "gas pumps" to charge 12 such ultra capacitor cars in 5 minutes, it would take a power line that could carry 24 million watts of electricity to service ONE such station!
How often do you see a station with 12 cars filling up simultaneously? Most stations can only handle four or six at peak -- and they're rarely at peak. (Interstate stops can typically handle a few more, certainly.) And even at peak, the time between "fills" is not the bare minimum 5 minutes. The car has to move up to the charging outlet, park, connect up, charge, disconnect, pay for it somewhere in there, and drive off. Figure a few minutes for non-charging activity, which the station can be using to charge up its local storage from the grid.
5 MW should handle peak load at a very large recharge station. Much less than that (a few hundred kW) could handle a typical neighborhood station with local storage -- and in practise the demand on those would be lower because of folks recharging at home.
A sedan has an engine power of around 200kW;
;-)
Yes, at max RPM.
to travel 500 miles, say it takes 10 hours,
If your're running full throttle, probably more like 4 hours. Your mileage may vary
so total energy consumed = 200 x 10 = 2000 kWh.
Or 800 kWh. Of course that's with about 6 times the drag (125 MPH vs 50 MPH), which dominates at high speed. So call it 125 kWh to do the trip in 10 hours at 50 MPH, and 1.5 MW to recharge in 5 minutes.
Except that electric motors are a lot more efficient than internal combustion engines (about 90% vs 30%) so it would only take an electric about 42 kWh to do that trip, and 500 kW for 5 min to recharge.
Still a serious amount of energy, but more than an order of magnitude less than your initial estimate.
there are times when I wonder if Niven knows something the rest of us don't.
Of course he does. Think about "What Can You Say About Chocolate-Covered Manhole Covers?".
Interestingly enough (well, to me, anyway), shortly after the original Pons-Fleischmann "cold fusion" announcements and all that buzz about palladium cathodes, I was rereading a Niven story and noticed the reference to "crystal zinc fusion tubes". Note that the symbol for zinc, Zn, is a simple rotation cipher (rot10) for the symbol for palladium, Pd. Obviously Niven knew something.
As it also happened, Niven was going to be in town for a con a couple of days after I had this epiphany. I confronted him with a short-short, "What Can You Say About Chocolate-Covered Fusion Tubes?". He apparently didn't think anyone would publish it (although he gave permission) -- which is probably just as well, else I might right now be stranded on some alien planet, having long ago finished off the chocolate covering from the fusion tube.
It's gotten bad enough that too many real videos are considered fake because it "doesn't look real"
Yeah, I recall a number of complaints about news footage from a war zone that the explosions "looked fake" because there was no fireball, etc. Thanks, Hollywood, for decades of explosion FX made more cinematic by including a few containers of kerosene or whatever along with the low explosives you use.
(And on a related note, don't you just love those scenes where the hero (often with distressed damsel in tow) outruns the fireball from an explosion, or the exhaust from a launching rocket?)
not likely have access to UNIX since it was almost entirely only available at universities, government offices and large businesses.
UNIX was twice as old as the kid back in 1993. UNIX and Unix-like OS's had beed around for PCs for six or seven years at that point -- including PC's like the Tandy Color Computer (OS/9 - also available for the Atari ST series). Other 'nix flavors included Minix, QNX, Xenix, Coherent, and, by '93, BSD and Linux. Plus, in the mid-80's everyone and his brother were making comparatively cheap 'nix workstations (based on M68K, Z8000, NC32032, or what have you) running a real port of System V. You could get Apple Unix (A/UX) for the Lisa.
Anyone familiar with any of those would recognize a unix system, and they all ran on affordable hardware. (For various values of affordable).
And there was very limited net access back then so learning remotely would be difficult too.
The "net" in those days was mostly dial-up modems and UUCP. Ever hear of Usenet? That goes back many years too. And there were plenty of books around -- I taught myself Unix back around 1983 from a paperback book by Que publishing (forget the title). Well, that and man pages and access to a PDP 11/34 (128K of memory, 10MB of disk!) running Version 7.
I find your lack of faith...disturbing.
Nicely put.
why wouldn't situation B be more efficient?
It can be, but your situation A oversimplifies in that it doesn't look at what the individual drivers in "A" might be doing in addition to stopping at the distribution center -- taking kids to/from school or some activity, coming home from work, doctor visit, etc, etc. Most people I know combine errands.
It makes the oveall outcome a little harder to simulate.
I suspect it isn't a sign of anything human myself, or any of the "global warming" stuff.
Well, it wouldn't surprise me if the planet is getting a little warmer -- ie gobal warming -- but it would surprise me if humans had anything to do with it. Of course as you imply by your quotes, "global warming" has become a catch-phrase for "global warming due to the greenhouse effect of anthropogenic carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels", and thus makes nice shorthand for the demagogs, since "global warming" is a lot harder to argue with than the longer phrase which can be knocked down on any of four points.
all that is really happening is that we are finally fulling coming out of the Little Ice Age.
Indeed. Which could well be due to the Sun increasing its output by about 0.05%, or any number of other reasons that humans have nothing to do with and frankly, aren't in much of a position to do anything about yet. We already know that the Sun is a slightly variable star, as witness sunspot cycles.
but that is not what it really is. 2+3 works for most cases, but there will be edges where the simpler math breaks down and if you do not realize that you are dealing with quantum particles instead of a few apples,
Case in point: let X be 0.25 critical masses of plutonium. 2X + 3X doesn't equal 5X, at least not for very long.
you may become very frustrated.
Or dead.
(And for the nuclear physicists and engineers: yes, I know it's more complicated than that because of factors like shape, etc. substitue "plutonium" with "a solution of enriched uranyl nitrate" and you get something like the accident that happened in a Japanese reprocessing facility (at Tokai, Ibaraki) a few years ago.)
Yeah, like I said "Granted, the record wears out pretty fast".
;-)
Actually they usually last at least two playings, as long as you don't mind losing all the high frequencies after the first time
Then there are those folks -- I've heard of a couple of them -- who could recognize a recording just by looking at the grooves on the disc. Mind you, even I could recognize Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture", the cannon fire is a dead giveaway.
You missed out some major steps there between recording the vibrations and playing them back again.
...[then a miracle occurs]... Then they convert those values into voltages to drive the electromagnet in a speaker.
gives each slice a value between 0 and 65535.
And since when to turntables digitize the signal first?
There is something eceedingly warm about the sound of vinyl.
If you really like it, I'm sure that kind of distortion can be programmed into the DSP. (Actually it's more of a roll off of the high frequencies, a simple RC filter circuit can do that for you.)
Nice thing about vinyl records is that they can be played with a pin, a paper cone, and something to turn the record on. Granted, the record wears out pretty fast, but it does give kids a much better grasp of what's going on than does magical mp3 players. (Magic? Sure -- how many people -- even here on Slashdot -- can really explain how those things work down at the physics level? Converting vibrations to wiggly grooves and back to vibrations is easy.)