For those of us who learned how to type on manual typewriters, with the notice bell that dinged 5 spaces before the end of the line, and the platen return arm that you had to thwack, pressing a key with anything less than an authoritative clunk would just get you laughed at. Sure it bruised the fingertips, but we liked it that way! When a man was typing back then, he knew it, by God! Then came the newfangled electric typewriters, that only took a minicing little tap, and then these nutty TV-typewriter "word processor" things (with a keyboard that's not even decently attached to the rest of it, I might add!) that hardly even need you to push the keys at all! And now, a laser-typewriter type thing that doesn't even *have* keys? You might as well just dictate to the thing and have it magically type up your words for you like some kind of plastic secretary!
You kids think you're so smart with your rams and drivers and codes and all. I, for one, still keep my trusty can of 3-in-1 oil next to my computer. I haven't had to use it much lately, but just wait till something jams in this thing, and that smart-ass punk Corey is stumped... then we'll see who knows how to fix a broken office machine, by God!
I used OS/2 3.0, waited impatiently for OS/2 Warp, and used it for years, with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS and QuattroPro 4.0 for DOS and ProComm and, greatest of all, Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. Difficult to set up and keep running, but more stable than Windows, and besides, I could always reboot to run Win apps that wouldn't run under OS/2.
Finally, though, I needed to run Windows more and more, and more and more, the software that I need to work with wouldn't run under OS/2. Eventually, the only thing I used OS/2 for was GalCiv.
OS/2 was picky about hardware, and drivers for OS/2 were rare and rarely good. When I bought a motherboard and associated parts to build a new machine, I gave up and never quite got around to installing OS/2. I was pro-OS/2, certainly, and it hurt to finally admit defeat.
I still have the 3.0 and Warp disks in the back of the closet. A friend called me up last year and wanted to install OS/2 on his laptop, and knew that I had experience with it. I suggested Linux as an alternative to Win98, but he said he wasn't technical enough and didn't want something that complex. It hurt more than I expected to tell him that he was wasting his time looking at OS/2, and that he should install Win98.
This would be entertaining for anyone who isn't running a distributed computing project (d.net, SETI@home, Folding@Home, etc.). If you are, the thing would be pegged at 100%, all the time, maybe with a slight twitch when you load or terminate an app.
While you might think it would be cool to have your tach pegged in the far red all the time, my first milisecond-scale reaction would be "Broken gauge", and my second milisecond-scale reaction would be "I just lost all my oil while driving at high speed and my engine will seize up in three... two... one...".
Either way, I'd have that little viceral moment of panic each time I looked at the thing.
I think this is a pre-emptive move on Sun's part to make sure that, even if the Justice Department drops its case, the word "Microsoft" will continue to be associated with "anti-trust lawsuit" in press coverage.
As many people have already pointed out, GPS has been used for years, but what it's been used for is not large-scale precision application of fertilizers or pesticides, but for yield mapping. With a GPS on the tractor, and a dynamic load-sensor on the harvester, you can determine how many pounds of product you're getting off of any given square yard. The application of fertilizers is still much broader scale than that, and the reason has to do with the soil.
During a post-doc at Michigan State, I helped develop a grant proposal to develop a precision-ag system back in 1998. The biggest sticking point in the whole project was the fact that the efficacy of fertilizers is strongly influenced by the soil characteristics: drainage, % organic matter, ratios of sand/silt/clay, etc. Maybe in Kansas the soil is completely uniform on a meter-scale, but in most areas, it varies significantly. A given section of a corn field may be underproducing, not becasue it coudl use more fertilizer, but because it's sitting on top of a two-meter clay lens that won't allow it to use the fertilizer you've been giving it.
To make meter-scale chemical application worth the extra effort (and information management is a big effort/cost), you have to have soil profiling done on a meter-scale, and that is a hell of a lot of soil samples that have to be processed. Unlike yield mapping, you can't just turn on the laptop in the cab of the tractor and start rolling.... in a precision soil-mapping project, that's thousands of little bags of soil to be sent back to the lab for chemical and physical analysis, in addition to any nematode or insect tests.
To top it off, the soil profile of a given field changes with time, so the hugely expensive detailed soil map that you made three years ago? Gotta go do it again.
I got one, installed a Celeron 900MHz with the low-profile fan that came with the case. It's over in the lab, not my office, so I don't have to listen to any noise from it (it's pretty quiet anyway), but one bad spot on the tight case.... everything fit in very well, EXCEPT for the Zip drive I installed in the floppy bay. Because the bay was sized for a floppy drive, there's no spare room behind the drive bay, so my Zip drive sticks out about a half an inch. runs fine, but it spoils the aesthetics of the thing.
Still, though, a very sweet little case. I give it a thumbs up, even if you do need to install a Zip drive.
You said: "The answer is that Cringely's (sp?) collection of processors is not a real supercomputer for the kinds of applications that are associated with traditional machines.... Clusters are great for embarassingly parallel applications (ie ones that have threads which don't communicate with each other much. This includes things like SETI@home and batch rendering of images."
Cringley said: "Beyond using it to heat my office, I plan to keep the supercomputer busy with a video compression project I'm doing as well as further experiments in wireless communication."
Sounds like he's using the right tool for the job, then. I think he's using the term "supercomputer" to refer to a machine that is many, many times more powerful than the PC that a typical user would have sitting on his/her desk. By this definition, my PIII-600 is a supercomputer compared to the 486SX-25 I started with in 1992.
"Can anyone think of any other substances that behave as dynamically as water in different temperature ranges?"
How about a low molecular weight alcohol, like methanol or 2-propanol (isopropyl alcohol)? MeOH is liquid from -93C to 65C, density 0.75 and is polar enough to dissolve a lot of stuff. Iso is liquid from -90 to 85C, density 0.78 (thanks CRC!) and is similarly polar. The downside is that once the hydroxyl group gets cracked off in a redox reaction, it tends to scavenge a proton and you're left with a gas that leaves the solution. In contrast, in a water solution, when the hydryoxyl groups splits, what's left is... a proton, which immediately goes looking for another hydroxyl.
You might be able to stabilize the base carbon molecule with some electron-rich side group, like an amino or a bromine. 1-bromo-2-propanol boils at 145C, and apparently doesn't freeze at all. Substitue a proton for the hydroxyl and you get, uh, 2-(bromomethyl)-propane, which I don't have any info on.
Generally, though, it needs to polar enough to allow the dissolution of a range of biologically important materials, but not *so* polar that it won't let them go for use by the organism. The working temperature range can be adjusted by adding various stuff to depress the freezing/boiling point, or by metabolic thermogenesis by the organism.
Re:1982 World's Fair proposed this
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Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 1
...the beam would have to continuously move to stay on target. It can only be on one target about 12 hrs/day or so too...
That's not really a problem, though. You can set up receiver stations all around the globe, and whoever's in a position to receive would be the one getting the power. Ground based power plants would know when to ramp up or ramp down production to keep the grid fully functional.
Rather than dropping rocky asteroids onto the Martian surface, which would have a pretty uncontrolled effect on the surface, I think it might be more effective to throw comets into shallow, grazing trajectories. They'd disintegrate in the atmosphere, contributing lots of heat along with their water. I suggest comets rather than the icy bodies around Saturn because they're already moving, so you don't need to provide the energy for acceleration, just that required to nudge their orbit to inersect with Mars. Also, you can pick the large, fast-moving comets, to get the biggest kinetic bang possible.
Space elevators need more advances in materials science before they'll become pratical.
Cyanobacteria as they currently exist wouldn't be able to handle the cold and dessication. There are various forms of mosses and lichens that survive in Antarctica, but only because they spend the winter as spores, and live in snowless areas that actually warm up a bit in the summer. With continuous bright sunshine on dark colored rock in sheltered valleys, the microclimate gets warm enough that the plants get access to liquid water and can actually survive, grow and reproduce. Is there anyplace like that on Mars, even part of the year? I don't know, but I'd tend to doubt it.
However, you could set up permanent glasshouses, insulated and filled a bit of water, dark rock and some hardy lichens. Make the dome out of UV-tolerant glass and sit it out in the sun, a little home away from home. Put a gas permiable (but not water permiable) film on it, engineered to regulate the oxygen and carbon dioxide permiability rates, and I might envision this as a little oxygen factory, driven by the weak Martian sunlight, releasing the O2 as it gets generated and drawing in fresh CO2 from the surrounding environment. Set up a factory to make these out of local materials, and I could see that after a couple of hundred thousand of these are in place, you'd start to see some increase in the O2 partial pressure.
Plants are great, but they don't generate new oxygen, they just recycle the old stuff. If you start with 10^100 moles of CO2 and 10^100 moles of H2O, that works out to, 2*10^100 moles of C, 2*10^100 moles of H and 3*10^100 moles of O (1.5*10^100 moles of O2), right? So, all you need to do is:
a) find a massive source of CO2 (in the gigaton range, to start with) that will give you something close to earth atmospheric pressure
b) find a massive source of water (in the petaton range, to start with) to help with the atmospherics and the temperature stabilization
c) increase a and b to account for losses due to soil mineralization of the O
d) find a lichen that will grow (and reproduce) on Mars
oh yeah,
e) find some way to stimulate some plate tectonics to recycle the minerals and crack the O off the Fe in the crust (this is a long term goal, though)
That's my bet, either that or complete vapor. These pictures look like CGI to me, and the arrangement of the binary digits is just plain ugly. No prices, no shipping info... I say hoax.
the fool and the wise man
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Review: K-PAX
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· Score: 1
This isn't really about K-Pax, but about the lead in on the review:
"idea that lunatics in asylums are the only really sane people in this crazy world has become a staple of American movies"
This is a very old theatrical convention in Western storytelling, at least 500 years (the fool in "King Lear") or 2500 years old (the various travelling companions in Aristophanes' "Clouds", "Frogs", "Birds", etc.), and even the ancient Greek theater was drawing on older traditions.
Standard plot: the sane people do bad things to each other, but the rules of social convention prevent them from recognizing the depth of the stupidity, deception, evil, etc. The only person who really knows what's going on and can really see the world for what it is gets regarded as a fool, insane, etc., and is either locked up or disregarded. Usually, but not always, the rational world ends up being so unfair, unpleasant, or harmful, that the protagonist is forced to realize that the irrational viewpoint is the clearer one, the saner one. At that point, he will either become an overt outcast, or a covert convert.
I've read Zubrin's plans for Mars colonies, and all of his stuff sure sounds great... make the necessary food, water and fuel out of the Martian atmosphere and dust using solar panels and nuclear reactors. Save all that weight and brew your own supplies when you get there.
Yep, sure sounds great... until you get to the part where he says that all you need to bring with you from Earth is a boatload of compressed hydrogen. During a SciAm Frontiers interview, e dismisses this as a trivial issue. It's my understanding that it's almost impossible to keep a tank of hydrogen without leaks. His plans call for lifting a couple of million cubic feet of liquid hydrogen, shipping it to Mars, aerobraking it down to the surface, and living off of it for a year or so. This doesn't strike me as a trivial detail.
This is madness. I irradiate bacteria for a living... I couldn't find any data for anthrax spores, but for irradiation of Clostridium botulinum spores, the D-10 value (dose needed to kill 90% of population) is something like 2 kiloGray. The FDA requires 5 logs for a food treatment, and if you're talking about sterility, that's 9 logs, or 18 kGy, a dose transit time of hours, even in the most powerful irradiators available.
Paper is essentially wood pulp, and a stack of mail has a density about twice that of water, 2g/cc. How many thousands, millions of kilograms would need to be irradiated every week, and to get the right max/min ratios to assure kill, the doses would have to be up in the 40-50 range.
I wish I had moderator status to mod this suggestion as "-1 Knucklehead".
If they go this route, I'd suggest getting a local mirror for the webpages the students will be using as part of the official usage. It's been a while since I checked, but I don't think it would be that expensive to be able to store a few thousand pages, including images, sound, etc., for local serving. (The local server checks to see if a copy is stored locally before going out onto the web to get it.)
This would accomplish a few things:
1) Latency wouldn't be an issue for classroom use, as the teacher would have arranged for the pages of interest to be mirrored locally. Even for one of those "let's go on the web and find out what we can" exercises, the first kid to get a particular page would get it slowly, but after that, every other kid looking for the same page would get it instantly. Thirty kids looking for info on the Loyalists would probably overlap in their search results.
2) Latency *would* get pretty bad for the lunchtime downloading of fresh pR0n and new music videos from www.brittneyspearsismyfaveofaves.com, making that a self-limiting activity.
3) Since locally mirrored pages are easily managed by the IT guy, he/she can exclude porn sites, etc. from the mirror, or put them on a no-access list through the school's link. [NOTE: This isn't a freedom-of-access/censorship thing... if kids want to get the porn and violence, they still can, just not on the taxpayer's nickle.]
For remote sites, with one thin, slow link to the net, a local cache should be a definite part of the project.
Re:Canadian Editorial
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More WTC News
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There's a reason the US-Canadian border is the longest, continuously undefended international border in the world. The self-confident little brother with the strange sense of humor and the loud-mouthed and often overbearing big brother with the good intentions can look on each other with affection and goodwill, working through our areas of disagreement to our mutual benefit and dignity.
The problem with this comment, IMHO, is that fundamentally, we know what makes electrons move in response to potentials, and how DNA gets transcribed, etc. so sci-fi that builds on this in constructing an imagined advanced technology builds on understanding. With magic, no matter how codified its instruction and application, the fundamental processes by which it works remain, by definition, a mystery.
The latin root of the word "science" is scientia, knowledge; the technology in sci-fi is impressive, but it's basis is understood, in contrast to magic... just as impressive, but it works by, well, magic.
Re:Why buy them hardback when you can get softcove
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Harry Potter Wins Hugo
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· Score: 1
The simple anser is, hardcovers last longer, and for a book that you know you want to keep for a while (like, say until your kids get old enough to read and appreciate them), this is important.
I bought Cryptonomicon in softcover, and I wish I'd spent the extra $15 for the hardback edition. The softcover on this thick book curls and cracks terribly, especially after repeated readings of the book. I am definitely *not* someone who folds the covers back... I like to keep my books in good shape, but it's pretty hard when the publisher chooses material so susceptible to deformation. From everything I could see of the Potter books, the softcover versions of them are just as bad as Crytonomicon.
For the average user who just wants to keep track of christmas lists, play some Solitare and surf the web, local processors are sufficient; even for most scientific calculations, a desktop system is adequate. The folks who would be interested in massive computing power, though, are people with Big Computational Challenges. The difference between now and the 1960s (or '70s or '80s or even '90s) is that many more people are starting to dream really big, coming up with potential calculations to run that they wouldn't have even considered in the past. Simulations of turbulence, climate modelling, risk analyses, astrophysics, genomics (and its horrendously bigger and more complex brother, proteomics)... where people used to say, "Forget it, that would take years to calculate, don't bother to even fully define the problem as a computation to be solved", now they say, "Don't worry about how complex the calculation is, the computing power will be available sooner or later." Of course, nobody wants to wait 10 years for a Pentium XVI when a cluster of Pentium IIIs could do the job now.
It seems to me that for desktop use, the current crop of processors/systems is adequate for 90% of the user base (the e.mail/Solitare/web browsers). The power users probably won't ever be satisfied - I'd expect to see a lot more work going into developing methods of reformulating the computations to best take advantage of parallel processing clusters, rather than builing UberHyperPetaFLOP single processors.
Every other page will be an ad
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Books on Demand
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· Score: 1
1) The "books" this thing will produce will look more like magazines, with the owners of the text subsidizing the cover price by selling ads. Want the ad-free version? That's gonna cost you extra.
2) For those of you who argue that 8.5 x 11 is a lousy size for a book, there's no earthly reason why the thing can't be loaded with multiple sizes of paper, from foolscap-octavo up to crown-double-quad-folio and just select the most appropriate size to minimize trimming.
One of the hurdles has been the relatively short lifespan of the blue dyes, i.e. 1000-2000 hours, vs. 6000+ for green and 10,000+ for red. While the best solution would be to develop longer-lived dyes, a kludgy workaround is to have more blue pixels than green or red, possibly with three or more blues for every green or red, and alternate which blue pixels you light up. This will even out the runtime on a lot of blue pixels and their lifespans become effectively additive.
The downsides to this are a) in a GRBBB pixel pattern, 40% of your pixels will be dark at any one time, reducing overall screen brightness and resolution, b) the processing overhead of keeping track of which blue pixels have been lit recently and which have been dark, c) potential problems with screen flicker as the blue light comes from different pixels, and d) spending $100M to develop the necessary technology to work around short-lived blue dyes, only to have some smartass announce a new, long-lived blue dye.
Hmmmm... now that I've said it out loud, it doesn't sound like such a great idea anymore.
Why South Africa is using the pebble bed reactor
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Fission in a Box
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· Score: 1
Just my luck... I've been reading up on the pebble bed reactor recently, and the one day when I could have scored a "5 - informative" with this link, http://www.uilondon.org/sym/1999/kemm.htm, I'm in the lab instead of the office. Great page - discusses the science, the politics, the economics of coal vs. pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR).
Briefly, SA has lots of coal and uranium, but neither is near where the power demands are. You can't realistically stretch power lines across those open distances without unacceptable losses, so the power plant needs to be local. A localized coal-fired plant would mean endless trainloads of coal to be shipped in, thousands of tons of soot and CO2 in the air. The PBMR can store a year's supply of fuel on site, has lots of passive safety features, and fuel elements that are really difficult to reprocess into anything especially dangerous. It's quiet, no smokestack, the turbines can be water- or air-cooled (flexible siting), and run by technicians without MS's in nuclear physics.
Like I said, just my luck to post this after the discussion has already died down. No karma boost.
I hope this isn't off-topic, but rather than a mini-Wankel fueled by hydrogen (combining the worst of both worlds... a noisy fuel-to-electricity system and a hard to handle fuel), why not a have fuel cell with butane as the fuel? It's liquid at room temperature, vaporizes easily, the technology to deliver it in compact, durable, disposable containers is fully developed (cigarette lighters), and has a respectable energy density.
At 26 kJ/cc, to get the amount of energy in these big batteries (160 W-hr), you'd need about 22cc of liquid butane. Figure a 30% efficiency for the reformer to remove the carbon, and that's 73cc, figure 80% efficiency for the fuel cell and that's about 91cc, or 3.1 fluid ounces of liquid butane. The heat from the reformer will help to vaporize the fuel and the rest can be dissipated though the case. Running low on fuel? Pop in another cartridge, or refill your laptop's tank from the handy coin-operated dispensers in every airport, located right near the Internet kiosks. One day soon, one day soon....
Slashdot Mirror
For those of us who learned how to type on manual typewriters, with the notice bell that dinged 5 spaces before the end of the line, and the platen return arm that you had to thwack, pressing a key with anything less than an authoritative clunk would just get you laughed at. Sure it bruised the fingertips, but we liked it that way! When a man was typing back then, he knew it, by God! Then came the newfangled electric typewriters, that only took a minicing little tap, and then these nutty TV-typewriter "word processor" things (with a keyboard that's not even decently attached to the rest of it, I might add!) that hardly even need you to push the keys at all! And now, a laser-typewriter type thing that doesn't even *have* keys? You might as well just dictate to the thing and have it magically type up your words for you like some kind of plastic secretary!
You kids think you're so smart with your rams and drivers and codes and all. I, for one, still keep my trusty can of 3-in-1 oil next to my computer. I haven't had to use it much lately, but just wait till something jams in this thing, and that smart-ass punk Corey is stumped... then we'll see who knows how to fix a broken office machine, by God!
I used OS/2 3.0, waited impatiently for OS/2 Warp, and used it for years, with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS and QuattroPro 4.0 for DOS and ProComm and, greatest of all, Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. Difficult to set up and keep running, but more stable than Windows, and besides, I could always reboot to run Win apps that wouldn't run under OS/2.
Finally, though, I needed to run Windows more and more, and more and more, the software that I need to work with wouldn't run under OS/2. Eventually, the only thing I used OS/2 for was GalCiv.
OS/2 was picky about hardware, and drivers for OS/2 were rare and rarely good. When I bought a motherboard and associated parts to build a new machine, I gave up and never quite got around to installing OS/2. I was pro-OS/2, certainly, and it hurt to finally admit defeat.
I still have the 3.0 and Warp disks in the back of the closet. A friend called me up last year and wanted to install OS/2 on his laptop, and knew that I had experience with it. I suggested Linux as an alternative to Win98, but he said he wasn't technical enough and didn't want something that complex. It hurt more than I expected to tell him that he was wasting his time looking at OS/2, and that he should install Win98.
This article was painful to read.
This would be entertaining for anyone who isn't running a distributed computing project (d.net, SETI@home, Folding@Home, etc.). If you are, the thing would be pegged at 100%, all the time, maybe with a slight twitch when you load or terminate an app.
While you might think it would be cool to have your tach pegged in the far red all the time, my first milisecond-scale reaction would be "Broken gauge", and my second milisecond-scale reaction would be "I just lost all my oil while driving at high speed and my engine will seize up in three... two... one...".
Either way, I'd have that little viceral moment of panic each time I looked at the thing.
I think this is a pre-emptive move on Sun's part to make sure that, even if the Justice Department drops its case, the word "Microsoft" will continue to be associated with "anti-trust lawsuit" in press coverage.
As many people have already pointed out, GPS has been used for years, but what it's been used for is not large-scale precision application of fertilizers or pesticides, but for yield mapping. With a GPS on the tractor, and a dynamic load-sensor on the harvester, you can determine how many pounds of product you're getting off of any given square yard. The application of fertilizers is still much broader scale than that, and the reason has to do with the soil.
During a post-doc at Michigan State, I helped develop a grant proposal to develop a precision-ag system back in 1998. The biggest sticking point in the whole project was the fact that the efficacy of fertilizers is strongly influenced by the soil characteristics: drainage, % organic matter, ratios of sand/silt/clay, etc. Maybe in Kansas the soil is completely uniform on a meter-scale, but in most areas, it varies significantly. A given section of a corn field may be underproducing, not becasue it coudl use more fertilizer, but because it's sitting on top of a two-meter clay lens that won't allow it to use the fertilizer you've been giving it.
To make meter-scale chemical application worth the extra effort (and information management is a big effort/cost), you have to have soil profiling done on a meter-scale, and that is a hell of a lot of soil samples that have to be processed. Unlike yield mapping, you can't just turn on the laptop in the cab of the tractor and start rolling.... in a precision soil-mapping project, that's thousands of little bags of soil to be sent back to the lab for chemical and physical analysis, in addition to any nematode or insect tests.
To top it off, the soil profile of a given field changes with time, so the hugely expensive detailed soil map that you made three years ago? Gotta go do it again.
I wish them luck.
I got one, installed a Celeron 900MHz with the low-profile fan that came with the case. It's over in the lab, not my office, so I don't have to listen to any noise from it (it's pretty quiet anyway), but one bad spot on the tight case.... everything fit in very well, EXCEPT for the Zip drive I installed in the floppy bay. Because the bay was sized for a floppy drive, there's no spare room behind the drive bay, so my Zip drive sticks out about a half an inch. runs fine, but it spoils the aesthetics of the thing.
Still, though, a very sweet little case. I give it a thumbs up, even if you do need to install a Zip drive.
Actually, I think he'll be the one to be embraced and subsequently extended.
However, if he brings his Clio or his GBA on the honeymoon, she has every right to kill him.
Congratulations.
You said: "The answer is that Cringely's (sp?) collection of processors is not a real supercomputer for the kinds of applications that are associated with traditional machines. ... Clusters are great for embarassingly parallel applications (ie ones that have threads which don't communicate with each other much. This includes things like SETI@home and batch rendering of images."
Cringley said: "Beyond using it to heat my office, I plan to keep the supercomputer busy with a video compression project I'm doing as well as further experiments in wireless communication."
Sounds like he's using the right tool for the job, then. I think he's using the term "supercomputer" to refer to a machine that is many, many times more powerful than the PC that a typical user would have sitting on his/her desk. By this definition, my PIII-600 is a supercomputer compared to the 486SX-25 I started with in 1992.
"Can anyone think of any other substances that behave as dynamically as water in different temperature ranges?"
... a proton, which immediately goes looking for another hydroxyl.
How about a low molecular weight alcohol, like methanol or 2-propanol (isopropyl alcohol)? MeOH is liquid from -93C to 65C, density 0.75 and is polar enough to dissolve a lot of stuff. Iso is liquid from -90 to 85C, density 0.78 (thanks CRC!) and is similarly polar. The downside is that once the hydroxyl group gets cracked off in a redox reaction, it tends to scavenge a proton and you're left with a gas that leaves the solution. In contrast, in a water solution, when the hydryoxyl groups splits, what's left is
You might be able to stabilize the base carbon molecule with some electron-rich side group, like an amino or a bromine. 1-bromo-2-propanol boils at 145C, and apparently doesn't freeze at all. Substitue a proton for the hydroxyl and you get, uh, 2-(bromomethyl)-propane, which I don't have any info on.
Generally, though, it needs to polar enough to allow the dissolution of a range of biologically important materials, but not *so* polar that it won't let them go for use by the organism. The working temperature range can be adjusted by adding various stuff to depress the freezing/boiling point, or by metabolic thermogenesis by the organism.
...the beam would have to continuously move to stay on target. It can only be on one target about 12 hrs/day or so too...
That's not really a problem, though. You can set up receiver stations all around the globe, and whoever's in a position to receive would be the one getting the power. Ground based power plants would know when to ramp up or ramp down production to keep the grid fully functional.
Rather than dropping rocky asteroids onto the Martian surface, which would have a pretty uncontrolled effect on the surface, I think it might be more effective to throw comets into shallow, grazing trajectories. They'd disintegrate in the atmosphere, contributing lots of heat along with their water. I suggest comets rather than the icy bodies around Saturn because they're already moving, so you don't need to provide the energy for acceleration, just that required to nudge their orbit to inersect with Mars. Also, you can pick the large, fast-moving comets, to get the biggest kinetic bang possible.
Space elevators need more advances in materials science before they'll become pratical.
Cyanobacteria as they currently exist wouldn't be able to handle the cold and dessication. There are various forms of mosses and lichens that survive in Antarctica, but only because they spend the winter as spores, and live in snowless areas that actually warm up a bit in the summer. With continuous bright sunshine on dark colored rock in sheltered valleys, the microclimate gets warm enough that the plants get access to liquid water and can actually survive, grow and reproduce. Is there anyplace like that on Mars, even part of the year? I don't know, but I'd tend to doubt it.
However, you could set up permanent glasshouses, insulated and filled a bit of water, dark rock and some hardy lichens. Make the dome out of UV-tolerant glass and sit it out in the sun, a little home away from home. Put a gas permiable (but not water permiable) film on it, engineered to regulate the oxygen and carbon dioxide permiability rates, and I might envision this as a little oxygen factory, driven by the weak Martian sunlight, releasing the O2 as it gets generated and drawing in fresh CO2 from the surrounding environment. Set up a factory to make these out of local materials, and I could see that after a couple of hundred thousand of these are in place, you'd start to see some increase in the O2 partial pressure.
Um, yeah, well....
Plants are great, but they don't generate new oxygen, they just recycle the old stuff. If you start with 10^100 moles of CO2 and 10^100 moles of H2O, that works out to, 2*10^100 moles of C, 2*10^100 moles of H and 3*10^100 moles of O (1.5*10^100 moles of O2), right? So, all you need to do is:
a) find a massive source of CO2 (in the gigaton range, to start with) that will give you something close to earth atmospheric pressure
b) find a massive source of water (in the petaton range, to start with) to help with the atmospherics and the temperature stabilization
c) increase a and b to account for losses due to soil mineralization of the O
d) find a lichen that will grow (and reproduce) on Mars
oh yeah,
e) find some way to stimulate some plate tectonics to recycle the minerals and crack the O off the Fe in the crust (this is a long term goal, though)
That's my bet, either that or complete vapor. These pictures look like CGI to me, and the arrangement of the binary digits is just plain ugly. No prices, no shipping info... I say hoax.
This isn't really about K-Pax, but about the lead in on the review:
"idea that lunatics in asylums are the only really sane people in this crazy world has become a staple of American movies"
This is a very old theatrical convention in Western storytelling, at least 500 years (the fool in "King Lear") or 2500 years old (the various travelling companions in Aristophanes' "Clouds", "Frogs", "Birds", etc.), and even the ancient Greek theater was drawing on older traditions.
Standard plot: the sane people do bad things to each other, but the rules of social convention prevent them from recognizing the depth of the stupidity, deception, evil, etc. The only person who really knows what's going on and can really see the world for what it is gets regarded as a fool, insane, etc., and is either locked up or disregarded. Usually, but not always, the rational world ends up being so unfair, unpleasant, or harmful, that the protagonist is forced to realize that the irrational viewpoint is the clearer one, the saner one. At that point, he will either become an overt outcast, or a covert convert.
God bless that liberal arts education.
I've read Zubrin's plans for Mars colonies, and all of his stuff sure sounds great... make the necessary food, water and fuel out of the Martian atmosphere and dust using solar panels and nuclear reactors. Save all that weight and brew your own supplies when you get there.
Yep, sure sounds great... until you get to the part where he says that all you need to bring with you from Earth is a boatload of compressed hydrogen. During a SciAm Frontiers interview, e dismisses this as a trivial issue. It's my understanding that it's almost impossible to keep a tank of hydrogen without leaks. His plans call for lifting a couple of million cubic feet of liquid hydrogen, shipping it to Mars, aerobraking it down to the surface, and living off of it for a year or so. This doesn't strike me as a trivial detail.
This is madness. I irradiate bacteria for a living... I couldn't find any data for anthrax spores, but for irradiation of Clostridium botulinum spores, the D-10 value (dose needed to kill 90% of population) is something like 2 kiloGray. The FDA requires 5 logs for a food treatment, and if you're talking about sterility, that's 9 logs, or 18 kGy, a dose transit time of hours, even in the most powerful irradiators available.
Paper is essentially wood pulp, and a stack of mail has a density about twice that of water, 2g/cc. How many thousands, millions of kilograms would need to be irradiated every week, and to get the right max/min ratios to assure kill, the doses would have to be up in the 40-50 range.
I wish I had moderator status to mod this suggestion as "-1 Knucklehead".
If they go this route, I'd suggest getting a local mirror for the webpages the students will be using as part of the official usage. It's been a while since I checked, but I don't think it would be that expensive to be able to store a few thousand pages, including images, sound, etc., for local serving. (The local server checks to see if a copy is stored locally before going out onto the web to get it.)
This would accomplish a few things:
1) Latency wouldn't be an issue for classroom use, as the teacher would have arranged for the pages of interest to be mirrored locally. Even for one of those "let's go on the web and find out what we can" exercises, the first kid to get a particular page would get it slowly, but after that, every other kid looking for the same page would get it instantly. Thirty kids looking for info on the Loyalists would probably overlap in their search results.
2) Latency *would* get pretty bad for the lunchtime downloading of fresh pR0n and new music videos from www.brittneyspearsismyfaveofaves.com, making that a self-limiting activity.
3) Since locally mirrored pages are easily managed by the IT guy, he/she can exclude porn sites, etc. from the mirror, or put them on a no-access list through the school's link. [NOTE: This isn't a freedom-of-access/censorship thing... if kids want to get the porn and violence, they still can, just not on the taxpayer's nickle.]
For remote sites, with one thin, slow link to the net, a local cache should be a definite part of the project.
There's a reason the US-Canadian border is the longest, continuously undefended international border in the world. The self-confident little brother with the strange sense of humor and the loud-mouthed and often overbearing big brother with the good intentions can look on each other with affection and goodwill, working through our areas of disagreement to our mutual benefit and dignity.
O Canada! America, America! God bless us both!
The problem with this comment, IMHO, is that fundamentally, we know what makes electrons move in response to potentials, and how DNA gets transcribed, etc. so sci-fi that builds on this in constructing an imagined advanced technology builds on understanding. With magic, no matter how codified its instruction and application, the fundamental processes by which it works remain, by definition, a mystery.
The latin root of the word "science" is scientia, knowledge; the technology in sci-fi is impressive, but it's basis is understood, in contrast to magic... just as impressive, but it works by, well, magic.
The simple anser is, hardcovers last longer, and for a book that you know you want to keep for a while (like, say until your kids get old enough to read and appreciate them), this is important.
I bought Cryptonomicon in softcover, and I wish I'd spent the extra $15 for the hardback edition. The softcover on this thick book curls and cracks terribly, especially after repeated readings of the book. I am definitely *not* someone who folds the covers back... I like to keep my books in good shape, but it's pretty hard when the publisher chooses material so susceptible to deformation. From everything I could see of the Potter books, the softcover versions of them are just as bad as Crytonomicon.
For the average user who just wants to keep track of christmas lists, play some Solitare and surf the web, local processors are sufficient; even for most scientific calculations, a desktop system is adequate. The folks who would be interested in massive computing power, though, are people with Big Computational Challenges. The difference between now and the 1960s (or '70s or '80s or even '90s) is that many more people are starting to dream really big, coming up with potential calculations to run that they wouldn't have even considered in the past. Simulations of turbulence, climate modelling, risk analyses, astrophysics, genomics (and its horrendously bigger and more complex brother, proteomics)... where people used to say, "Forget it, that would take years to calculate, don't bother to even fully define the problem as a computation to be solved", now they say, "Don't worry about how complex the calculation is, the computing power will be available sooner or later." Of course, nobody wants to wait 10 years for a Pentium XVI when a cluster of Pentium IIIs could do the job now.
It seems to me that for desktop use, the current crop of processors/systems is adequate for 90% of the user base (the e.mail/Solitare/web browsers). The power users probably won't ever be satisfied - I'd expect to see a lot more work going into developing methods of reformulating the computations to best take advantage of parallel processing clusters, rather than builing UberHyperPetaFLOP single processors.
1) The "books" this thing will produce will look more like magazines, with the owners of the text subsidizing the cover price by selling ads. Want the ad-free version? That's gonna cost you extra.
2) For those of you who argue that 8.5 x 11 is a lousy size for a book, there's no earthly reason why the thing can't be loaded with multiple sizes of paper, from foolscap-octavo up to crown-double-quad-folio and just select the most appropriate size to minimize trimming.
One of the hurdles has been the relatively short lifespan of the blue dyes, i.e. 1000-2000 hours, vs. 6000+ for green and 10,000+ for red. While the best solution would be to develop longer-lived dyes, a kludgy workaround is to have more blue pixels than green or red, possibly with three or more blues for every green or red, and alternate which blue pixels you light up. This will even out the runtime on a lot of blue pixels and their lifespans become effectively additive.
The downsides to this are a) in a GRBBB pixel pattern, 40% of your pixels will be dark at any one time, reducing overall screen brightness and resolution, b) the processing overhead of keeping track of which blue pixels have been lit recently and which have been dark, c) potential problems with screen flicker as the blue light comes from different pixels, and d) spending $100M to develop the necessary technology to work around short-lived blue dyes, only to have some smartass announce a new, long-lived blue dye.
Hmmmm... now that I've said it out loud, it doesn't sound like such a great idea anymore.
Just my luck... I've been reading up on the pebble bed reactor recently, and the one day when I could have scored a "5 - informative" with this link, http://www.uilondon.org/sym/1999/kemm.htm, I'm in the lab instead of the office. Great page - discusses the science, the politics, the economics of coal vs. pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR).
Briefly, SA has lots of coal and uranium, but neither is near where the power demands are. You can't realistically stretch power lines across those open distances without unacceptable losses, so the power plant needs to be local. A localized coal-fired plant would mean endless trainloads of coal to be shipped in, thousands of tons of soot and CO2 in the air. The PBMR can store a year's supply of fuel on site, has lots of passive safety features, and fuel elements that are really difficult to reprocess into anything especially dangerous. It's quiet, no smokestack, the turbines can be water- or air-cooled (flexible siting), and run by technicians without MS's in nuclear physics.
Like I said, just my luck to post this after the discussion has already died down. No karma boost.
I hope this isn't off-topic, but rather than a mini-Wankel fueled by hydrogen (combining the worst of both worlds... a noisy fuel-to-electricity system and a hard to handle fuel), why not a have fuel cell with butane as the fuel? It's liquid at room temperature, vaporizes easily, the technology to deliver it in compact, durable, disposable containers is fully developed (cigarette lighters), and has a respectable energy density.
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At 26 kJ/cc, to get the amount of energy in these big batteries (160 W-hr), you'd need about 22cc of liquid butane. Figure a 30% efficiency for the reformer to remove the carbon, and that's 73cc, figure 80% efficiency for the fuel cell and that's about 91cc, or 3.1 fluid ounces of liquid butane. The heat from the reformer will help to vaporize the fuel and the rest can be dissipated though the case. Running low on fuel? Pop in another cartridge, or refill your laptop's tank from the handy coin-operated dispensers in every airport, located right near the Internet kiosks. One day soon, one day soon....
http://www.millennial.org/mail/talk/fmf-eng/hyp