Thanks for the explanation. I 've found a picture of SCALPEL (the competing Bell Labs effort) here. As an electron spectroscopist in a previous life, I found your reply to be the most informative article in this topic so far.
That said, a couple of questions:
What's their electron source? Surely not a heated filament, as you imply. Thermal noise from even a low amperage filament overwhelms space-charge effects, e.g., about 1.5 eV for heating v.s. about 0.5 eV for space-charge in a microamp beam. Are they using field-emission sources?
Secondly, is the limitation on "brightness" a space-charge/energy effect or simply low-flux sources?
Kind Regards,
Re:If you enjoyed this book ...
on
Inversions
·
· Score: 1
Any other suggestions out there for books to explore?
Anything by Gene Wolfe, but particularly his Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete. Also, The Book of the New Sun must not be missed.
Cordwainer Smith aka Paul M. A. Linebarger, just beacuse. A short story collection, The Rediscovery of Man was reprinted by Orion/Millenium last year.
Stanislaw Lem clearly inspiered Banks. Read especially Memoirs Found In a Bathub.
Of course, you already know about Philip K. Dick, "James Triptree Jr.", Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin and Roger Zelazny, Right?
is how fast this process is. No one disputes that electron lithography is better than photolithographic techniques (no stepper needed! arbitarily fine beams!), but it's always been bog slow compared to photolithography.
Electron lithography is essentially a raster process; a beam sweeps across the wafer "cutting" away silicon. In contrast, photolithorgaphy is like taking a picture; the whole wafer gets exposed at once. Until now, at least, using a photresist has been orders of magnitude faster than beam-etching techniques.
So I wonder, how have they done this? Multiple beams per wafer? Arrays of emmiters? Super-fast HV electron optics? What?
Kind Regards,
Re:Structure in writing
on
Inversions
·
· Score: 1
If you're new to Iain M Banks work, read "Use of Weapons" or "Consider Pheblas" first of his culture novels. "Inversions" and Excession" are much better read once you understand the culture background.
Very true. Much of Inversions will not resonate properly without an appreciation of (M.) Bank's earlier work.
I suggest that Player of Games is a better introduction to the Culture though. Use of Weapons, also my favourite so far, is another that I would save for a second or third book. Start with Consider Pheblas or Player, in my opinion.
I am not a LitCrit (no do I play one on TV), but let me try to explain.
Calling something <em>crypto-fascist</em> implies that it advocates fascism without being overt about it. Fascism requires unswerving loyalty to a strong leader (or nation), exaults military virtues above all else and considers democracy and a diversity of opinion to be weaknesses.
A <em>subtext</em> is a literary term for the hidden meaning of a work, which is often more important that the story. It is the "message" of the movie. if you will.
So, consider a pair of examples:
"The Matrix" has an "awakening "subtext; its message is "open your eyes and take control of your life". A "good-hearted" message, Gibson calls it.
"T2" tells us that we can only be saved by super-robots from the future, and that by following its orders we will survive.
Deciding which is crypto-fascist is left as an excersice for the reader.
I was talk about this with my local indie bookdealer/sf critic the other day. It's true; she guessed she saw about a 10:1 fantasy to new sf ratio last year. Her theory was that the pace of technological change now is so rapid that authors can't keep up or are afraid of being out-of-date next year.
And you know, I agree with her. As science and technology twists and turns into our future, our present becomes ever more fantastic than most writers' best stories. I think of how outdated even much stuff from the eighties seems today. For example, a small few even thought something like the 'net would exist, but it's hard to imagine a future without one now. Biotech may or may not be right around the corner and no-one has any idea what that will do to society.
1. Precipitate carbonates (calcium, magnesium) from seawater.
There is not enough salt in the world to do this, but I suppose the salt could be recycled at a higher energy cost. This isn't the real problem though.
2.Roast carbonates to oxides, capture CO2. The real problem is the energy cost of doing this.
No kidding. It's not as expensive as preparing the metal ions for you first step though. But this isn't the real problem either.
3.Dump any undesired oxides back into the ocean, raising the pH, converting bicarbonate ion to carbonate ion, and helping absorb more CO2. (MgO may be worth saving for conversion to metal.)
You've got this step more or less right; use the CO2/CO3[2-](aq) equillibrium to drive CO2 out of the atmosphere into seawater. You could, in principle, do this.
4.Convert CO2 to CH4 or MeOH using whatever process is desirable. Use as fuel elsewhere.
This is the step that makes no sense at all. The energy requirements will be big, but probably not as much as the salt processing in your steps 1 and 2. No, the real problem is what you do with all the methanol. You know you'll have to produce enough to fill the Great Lakes to make a difference, right? Every decade or so?
Methanol is not the worst chemical in the world to handle, by any means, but it is toxic to almost every form of life on the planet.
Never mind that you would need horrific amounts of energy (probably more than the world currently produces).
Adding more steps just makes the process less efficient. The point you're forgetting is that you don't get the CO2 for free; it takes considerable energy to drive the enzyme reaction in bulk.
It looks seductive, but you're falling into a "perpetual motion" trap here.
The key point here is the energy efficiency of the first two reduction steps. If they can't get that efficient enough (i.e. less than the energy difference between the original fuel and methanol), then the process will lose energy. That is, you would need battery to run your gas-powered, zero-emission car. At the very least, this process would eat up a very significant amount of your fuel.
Anyway, what happens to the methanol? Is it burnt? That releases the carbon into the atmosphere anyway. Given that both burning processes (fuel->MeoH, MeOH->CO2) are less than 100% efficient (closer to 30%), you would burn more fuel this way, not less.
This only makes sense if you do something to sequester the methanol, like make it into plastic, which costs more energy. Of course, this is at the cost of making burning hydrocarbons considerably more expensive. I'd guess that you would use at least two to three times the fuel you do now.
You are confused because because the article is, shall we say, less than clear. Here is a better one from Science News. Note that this is a year old. The gene sequence appears to be underway or near completion. There have been no results of the remediation studies posted to the web. Here is the ab stract of the study referred to by the CNN article. It's fairly preliminary. The researchers have made the bug and done a few lab tests. Now they need to do some field trials.
The US DOE has a huge problem; they need to clean up thousands of contaminated sites, all with significant radiation levels. Cleaning up the heavy metals and organo-chlorines is tough enough without the radiation hazard.
The brute-force-and-ignorance approach is to "scoop and bag", remove the contaminated soil and put it in a sealed landfill. This is enormously expensive.
Bio-remediation offers a partial solution. You clean up the organic compounds, mostly clenaing fluids very similar to dry-cleaning solvent, by breaking them down on site. Heavy metal clean-up involves changing the chemical form of the pollutant to something less toxic or easy to get out of the soil by washing. The microbes have no effect on radioactivity. You still need to remove the radiation hazards, it's just less (chemically) toxic after the bugs have chewed on it.
New strains of D. radiodurans have been engineered to do both jobs. In optimal conditions with a really good innoculum, microbial remediation can almost entirely destroy the pollutants. In poor conditions (cold, no food or water) or with the wrong bugs, very little may happen. Training innocula, as microbial cultures are called, for a specific pollutant is time consuming and difficult.
What he says in his article an on his web site is confused, to put it mildly. It's quite difficult to even understand what physical "laws" he calims to have discovered. His "orbitsphere" and contracted atoms sound like he read a paper on muonium at some point.
My gut reaction is that it looks very unlikely. Hydrogen is the favorite toy of the QM community. As a species, we have been banging on it for more than a century now. It is very hard to believe we would have missed a whole family of atomic states, as is claimed by Mr. Mills.
My guess is that he has a calibration error in his heat measurements, a very easy mistake to make. Measuring heat is really hard.
There is one and only one way to clear this up. He *must* publish his theory and experimental method in sufficient detail for someone to verify his results. Until then no-one can say if he is the next Edison or Archimedes Plutonium.
As has been pointed out by other posters, the alphabet soup of external lab tests are nothing more than bog standard analytical work. Only one of the tests is related to energy measurements.
His reputation, origin and presentation ultimately mean nothing. His critics reputations mean nothing. The only thing that matters is what happens in the lab. THAT is real science.
That said, this does look a great deal like Pons and Fleichman again.
So Sony and RedHat are both The Next MicroSoft (tm, pat. pend.). Does this mean RedHat buys Sony or should Mr. Young start brushing up on his japanese?
Oh! Oh! Also, does this mean that Casio will, buy Caldera (or the other way around), sell it (or get sold) to Novell, get crushed by SonyHat flooding the market with cheap Palunix devices, then change their name to Emprise and hope everyone forgets?
Colour would be an excellent visual hint for seeing an article's score. For example, keep the headers neutral comments (0-1) gray, as now. Down-graded comments (-1) have black headers with dark gray text. Up-graded comments could be a single colour, say/. green, or a progression of colours: yellow->orange->red.
Coloured headers would make it easy to quickly scan through a flat- or nested-mode comment listing and pick out the significant comments.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the explanation. I 've found a picture of SCALPEL (the competing Bell Labs effort) here. As an electron spectroscopist in a previous life, I found your reply to be the most informative article in this topic so far.
That said, a couple of questions:
Kind Regards,
Anything by Gene Wolfe, but particularly his Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete. Also, The Book of the New Sun must not be missed.
Cordwainer Smith aka Paul M. A. Linebarger, just beacuse. A short story collection, The Rediscovery of Man was reprinted by Orion/Millenium last year.
Stanislaw Lem clearly inspiered Banks. Read especially Memoirs Found In a Bathub.
Of course, you already know about Philip K. Dick, "James Triptree Jr.", Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin and Roger Zelazny, Right?
Kind Regards,
is how fast this process is. No one disputes that electron lithography is better than photolithographic techniques (no stepper needed! arbitarily fine beams!), but it's always been bog slow compared to photolithography.
Electron lithography is essentially a raster process; a beam sweeps across the wafer "cutting" away silicon. In contrast, photolithorgaphy is like taking a picture; the whole wafer gets exposed at once. Until now, at least, using a photresist has been orders of magnitude faster than beam-etching techniques.
So I wonder, how have they done this? Multiple beams per wafer? Arrays of emmiters? Super-fast HV electron optics? What?
Kind Regards,
Very true. Much of Inversions will not resonate properly without an appreciation of (M.) Bank's earlier work.
I suggest that Player of Games is a better introduction to the Culture though. Use of Weapons, also my favourite so far, is another that I would save for a second or third book. Start with Consider Pheblas or Player, in my opinion.
Kind Regards,
You missed one reason: noise.
My computer is noisier than my car. The P/S fan, processor fan, case fan, HD, CD, all whirr, grunt and groan.
Grumbles &c....
Kind Regards,
I am not a LitCrit (no do I play one on TV), but let me try to explain.
Calling something <em>crypto-fascist</em> implies that it advocates fascism without being overt about it. Fascism requires unswerving loyalty to a strong leader (or nation), exaults military virtues above all else and considers democracy and a diversity of opinion to be weaknesses.
A <em>subtext</em> is a literary term for the hidden meaning of a work, which is often more important that the story. It is the "message" of the movie. if you will.
So, consider a pair of examples:
"The Matrix" has an "awakening "subtext; its message is "open your eyes and take control of your life". A "good-hearted" message, Gibson calls it.
"T2" tells us that we can only be saved by super-robots from the future, and that by following its orders we will survive.
Deciding which is crypto-fascist is left as an excersice for the reader.
Kind Regards,
A physics tech: "We don't know what language we'll be using fifty years from now, but we know it'll be called FORTRAN."
Kind Regards,
I was talk about this with my local indie bookdealer/sf critic the other day. It's true; she guessed she saw about a 10:1 fantasy to new sf ratio last year. Her theory was that the pace of technological change now is so rapid that authors can't keep up or are afraid of being out-of-date next year.
And you know, I agree with her. As science and technology twists and turns into our future, our present becomes ever more fantastic than most writers' best stories. I think of how outdated even much stuff from the eighties seems today. For example, a small few even thought something like the 'net would exist, but it's hard to imagine a future without one now. Biotech may or may not be right around the corner and no-one has any idea what that will do to society.
So, did science kill sf?
Kind Regards,
Some points:
1. Precipitate carbonates (calcium, magnesium) from seawater.
There is not enough salt in the world to do this, but I suppose the salt could be recycled at a higher energy cost. This isn't the real problem though.
2.Roast carbonates to oxides, capture CO2.
The real problem is the energy cost of doing this.
No kidding. It's not as expensive as preparing the metal ions for you first step though. But this isn't the real problem either.
3.Dump any undesired oxides back into the ocean, raising the pH, converting bicarbonate ion to carbonate ion, and helping absorb more CO2. (MgO may be worth saving for conversion to metal.)
You've got this step more or less right; use the CO2/CO3[2-](aq) equillibrium to drive CO2 out of the atmosphere into seawater. You could, in principle, do this.
4.Convert CO2 to CH4 or MeOH using whatever process is desirable. Use as fuel elsewhere.
This is the step that makes no sense at all. The energy requirements will be big, but probably not as much as the salt processing in your steps 1 and 2. No, the real problem is what you do with all the methanol. You know you'll have to produce enough to fill the Great Lakes to make a difference, right? Every decade or so?
Methanol is not the worst chemical in the world to handle, by any means, but it is toxic to almost every form of life on the planet.
Never mind that you would need horrific amounts of energy (probably more than the world currently produces).
Kind Regards,
Sorry.
Adding more steps just makes the process less efficient. The point you're forgetting is that you don't get the CO2 for free; it takes considerable energy to drive the enzyme reaction in bulk.
It looks seductive, but you're falling into a "perpetual motion" trap here.
Kind Regards,
The key point here is the energy efficiency of the first two reduction steps. If they can't get that efficient enough (i.e. less than the energy difference between the original fuel and methanol), then the process will lose energy. That is, you would need battery to run your gas-powered, zero-emission car. At the very least, this process would eat up a very significant amount of your fuel.
Anyway, what happens to the methanol? Is it burnt? That releases the carbon into the atmosphere anyway. Given that both burning processes (fuel->MeoH, MeOH->CO2) are less than 100% efficient (closer to 30%), you would burn more fuel this way, not less.
This only makes sense if you do something to sequester the methanol, like make it into plastic, which costs more energy. Of course, this is at the cost of making burning hydrocarbons considerably more expensive. I'd guess that you would use at least two to three times the fuel you do now.
Kind Regards,
You are confused because because the article is, shall we say, less than clear. Here is a better one from Science News. Note that this is a year old. The gene sequence appears to be underway or near completion. There have been no results of the remediation studies posted to the web. Here is the ab stract of the study referred to by the CNN article. It's fairly preliminary. The researchers have made the bug and done a few lab tests. Now they need to do some field trials.
The US DOE has a huge problem; they need to clean up thousands of contaminated sites, all with significant radiation levels. Cleaning up the heavy metals and organo-chlorines is tough enough without the radiation hazard.
The brute-force-and-ignorance approach is to "scoop and bag", remove the contaminated soil and put it in a sealed landfill. This is enormously expensive.
Bio-remediation offers a partial solution. You clean up the organic compounds, mostly clenaing fluids very similar to dry-cleaning solvent, by breaking them down on site. Heavy metal clean-up involves changing the chemical form of the pollutant to something less toxic or easy to get out of the soil by washing. The microbes have no effect on radioactivity. You still need to remove the radiation hazards, it's just less (chemically) toxic after the bugs have chewed on it.
New strains of D. radiodurans have been engineered to do both jobs. In optimal conditions with a really good innoculum, microbial remediation can almost entirely destroy the pollutants. In poor conditions (cold, no food or water) or with the wrong bugs, very little may happen. Training innocula, as microbial cultures are called, for a specific pollutant is time consuming and difficult.
Kind Regards,
What he says in his article an on his web site is confused, to put it mildly. It's quite difficult to even understand what physical "laws" he calims to have discovered. His "orbitsphere" and contracted atoms sound like he read a paper on muonium at some point.
My gut reaction is that it looks very unlikely. Hydrogen is the favorite toy of the QM community. As a species, we have been banging on it for more than a century now. It is very hard to believe we would have missed a whole family of atomic states, as is claimed by Mr. Mills.
My guess is that he has a calibration error in his heat measurements, a very easy mistake to make. Measuring heat is really hard.
Kind Regards,
There is one and only one way to clear this up. He *must* publish his theory and experimental method in sufficient detail for someone to verify his results. Until then no-one can say if he is the next Edison or Archimedes Plutonium.
As has been pointed out by other posters, the alphabet soup of external lab tests are nothing more than bog standard analytical work. Only one of the tests is related to energy measurements.
His reputation, origin and presentation ultimately mean nothing. His critics reputations mean nothing. The only thing that matters is what happens in the lab. THAT is real science.
That said, this does look a great deal like Pons and Fleichman again.
Kind Regards,
So Sony and RedHat are both The Next MicroSoft (tm, pat. pend.). Does this mean RedHat buys Sony or should Mr. Young start brushing up on his japanese?
Oh! Oh! Also, does this mean that Casio will, buy Caldera (or the other way around), sell it (or get sold) to Novell, get crushed by SonyHat flooding the market with cheap Palunix devices, then change their name to Emprise and hope everyone forgets?
Enquiring Minds Want to Know!
Kind Regards,
Colour would be an excellent visual hint for seeing an article's score. For example, keep the headers neutral comments (0-1) gray, as now. /. green, or a progression of colours: yellow->orange->red.
Down-graded comments (-1) have black headers with dark gray text. Up-graded comments could be a single colour, say
Coloured headers would make it easy to quickly scan through a flat- or nested-mode comment listing and pick out the significant comments.
Kind Regards,
Bruce
Kind Regards,