So my physics teacher taught me. Doesn't that mean that while this doohickey might allow you to tweak the orbit, you can't actually raise or lower the orbit's semimajor axis?
Re 1), we can rule out any sort of random sampling of "1's" and "2's" for section three. "2" occurs frequently, but you almost never see two "2's" in a row.
Trinary/hex/binary Rosetta Stone seems likely on the face of it....
However, if Section 1 is trinary, its information content is equal to 180 bits (113 symbols times log2(3) bits per symbol). The second section, in hex, has 96 bits, and the third, if in binary, has 266 bits. Unless one symbol set has a huge amount of redundancy, they're not the same length.
----------
A casual glance at the "binary" third section suggests it's unlikely to be any sort of ASCII-like binary substitution cipher, and possibly not a binary-encoded language of any kind. A "1" can be followed by either another "1" or a "2" (equal probability), but you never see "22" except for one string of "222" on line 5.
This pattern is way too regular to represent a binary encoding of any large symbol-set like an alphabet.
-----------------
Section 2 is absolutely a hexadecimal code: the symbols are a simple substitution for the hex characters below them. The symbols look a little bit like the "pigpen" cipher, but only vaguely.
I can't find any correspondence between the hexadecimal numbers in section 3 and the "trinary" in section 1.
Current best guess: this is a joke, with no actual information content.
There's no question that what this woman did was wrong and morally repugnant. But was it a crime?
Yes. In most states, it would qualify as child abuse, though Missouri doesn't seem to have a statute for emotional abuse cases.
But this is without a doubt a case of involuntary manslaughter as an absolute minimum, and probably murder. A sufficient criterion for murder is a death caused when (forgive me for quoting Wikipedia) "the perpetrator acts with a "depraved heart" showing lack of care for human life"
Ooo! I forgot to mention the best part of this code:
C ***** REPLACE HOLLERITH LABELS WITH SPECIES NUMBERS IN JCHEM *****
IF(JCHEM(M,J).NE.ISPEC(I)) GO TO 6
JCHEM(M,J) = I
It replaces the Hollerith string (stored in an integer-typed variable) with an actual integer. Because hell, the string "H2O2" and the number 6 are the same type, so why not?
Typecasting is easy when your only type's an integer.
This isn't the oldest code ever, but it is the oldest code *I've* ever used. A few years ago, I was working with an atmosphere photochemistry model written in FORTRAN when I came across:
(Too lazy to read the Wiki link? A Hollerith constant is what you do in FORTRAN 66 and earlier when you want a string but your compiler doesn't have a character type: you shoehorn up to 8 bytes worth of ASCII into an integer and pray.)
It ran nice and fast on one node of my dual-core Athlon Beowulf cluster...
(I'm a physics professor teaching electronics to undergraduates this term.)
I'll second Horowitz and Hill.
But if you want a gentler sunday school introduction before you pick up the Bible, get "Getting Started in Electronics" by Forrest M. Mims III. This is the book I taught myself with, bought it from Radio Shack when I was twelve. Text-and-drawings done "lab notebook" style, very basic approach.
You'll need Horowitz and Hill to get the math, but for basic concepts Mims can't be beat.
Hang on a second. A little random wiggling in a "wire" does no real harm -- it lengthens the path a little, maybe introduces a little more heating, but the electrons still go where they're supposed to.
The problem comes when the random wiggles cause two wires to touch, creating a short. Then you've got an actual dead chip.
But if this self-perfection thing works the way I think it does, it should cause that "bridge" to become stronger, just as two drops of water on a window merge when they touch.
In other news, Mothers Against Capping Cops in the Ass also lodged a protest, as did Mothers Against Driving Semis on the Sidewalk, Mothers Against Jacking Fire Trucks, Mothers Against Machinegunning City Hall, Mothers Against Random Sniper Terrorism...
A phone has to do two things: draw as little power as possible when it's not being used, and accomplish one mission-critical real-time task with zero lag (Be A Phone).
If there's one thing I've found in my many years of using third-party apps, it's that third-party developers *cannot* be trusted to play nice in the background. They will use polling with absurd polling rates. They will refuse to sleep or go idle unless forced. They will be utterly selfish of system resources. I've seen this from Mac system extensions in 1990 to web pages with embedded javascript in 2008.
And when the device suddenly slows to a crawl and starts producing choppy audio, dropping calls, and having the battery life of a wind-up toy, who does the user blame? Not the third party developer, I can tell you that.
Ladies and gentlemen, a bit of math. Amount of mercury in 1 CFL light bulb: 5 milligrams (source: TFA)
Amount of energy saved by using a CFL bulb instead of incandescent, over the lifetime of the CFL: 10,000 hours * 75 watts * 75% energy savings = 0.6 megawatt-hours (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp#Lifespan)
Fraction of that energy that would be generated by coal-fired power plants: about 50%. (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html)
Coal power plant energy savings: 0.3 megawatt-hours
Annual emission of mercury by US coal-fired power plants: 48 tons/year in 1999 (http://www.nescaum.org/documents/rpt031104mercury.pdf) Power output of US coal-fired power plants: 1,900,000 gigawatt-hours in 1999 (about the same today)
Mercury emitted by coal plants: 48 tons / 19000000 GWh = 23 milligrams per megawatt-hour
Power-plant mercury emissions avoided by using a CFL bulb over its lifetime: 7 milligrams
So it's a wash. The amount of mercury in the bulb is roughly the same as what would be emitted by a coal-burning power plant, if you stuck with incandescent bulbs.
But the mercury in a CFL bulb is a lot easier to clean up than the stuff spewed into the atmosphere by power plants.
This is a pretty cool tech demo, but at the moment, its battlefield utility is zero. That two-stroke engine buzz is going to alert every bad guy for miles around.
Since it needs to be able to exert pretty big forces very quickly, I doubt they're going to lower the power requirements, so I highly doubt they're going to be able to use a quieter power source like batteries or fuel cells. Nothing beats the power-to-weight ratio of internal combusion.
Me, I'd go with a real live mule instead for all applications you'd use this in. Same payload capacity, not much bigger, totally silent, self-refuelling, costs $hundreds rather than $hojillions.
George Herbert first suggested this about 12 years ago, back when I was reading sci.space.policy. The linked article is too slashdotted for me to tell whether it cites Herbert, but pretty much everything in this thread was discussed 12 years ago on Usenet. Including the wisecracks.
Internet Explorer has always been standards-compliant by default, because Internet Explorer has always been the default standard. Whether you, me, or the W3C like it or not.
Should the government subsidize a project to create open, free, up-to-date electronic maps? Surely there is a public benefit available from such a project."
This is a great idea. We could have some federal government institution which deals with lots of maps anyway take the initiative and create digitized map data for the whole country, using information from USGS quads. For "fact checking", they could mail out the map data to every municipality in the country, who would make corrections which would be incorporated into the system. The data would be publicly available from the government for free, to be used by open-source or commercial makers of maps and map tools.
Congrats! You've just re-invented TIGER, run by the U.S. Census Bureau. If you use map software, it probably uses TIGER data. If the data in your town is inaccurate, it's because your local government sucks.
wouldn't an international super power war pretty much immediately mean the downing of every satellite in orbit?
Yes, and the debris might take out any satellites that hadn't been deliberately destroyed, forming even more debris in a chain reaction... The resulting cloud of shrapnel could damage or destroy any *new* satellites launched into orbit within hours, leaving us planet-bound for thousands of years.
Ladies and gentlemen, a solution to the Fermi Paradox ("If extraterrestrial life is common, why hasn't it come to visit?"): The little green men had themselves a little space war, and now they're stuck on their planet.
(This horror story isn't my idea, I read it in a sci-fi novel somewhere. If someone can remember the source, I'd appreciate a posted reply.)
Sibling poster is right to point out the banana. Agricultural bananas have no seeds, and are propagated asexually. Essentially, all banana plants are clones.
In the early 20th century, a single banana "clone" was used for almost all commercial banana growing in the Americas. It was totally wiped out by a fungus in the '50s, devastating the industry. So the banana companies switched to the Cavendish banana, which isn't as tasty, but was resistant to the virus. Today, this single "clone" is used for almost all commercial banana crops *globally*. And guess what? That same fungus from the 50s has mutated to a form that affects Cavendishes, and is beginning to wipe out banana plantations throughout Asia.
Paging Dr. Carnot, Dr. Nicolas Carnot, call for you on line 2...
Human body thermal output is about 120 watts on average, skin surface area is 2 m^2, so a 50-cm^2 cell phone body can intercept 0.6 watts of body heat. BUT, the laws of thermodynamics place a limit on how much of that heat can be converted into useful work to charge the batteries in the phone. That limit depends on the temperature of the heat source and sink.
Suppose one side of the phone is in contact with your skin at 32 C (305 Kelvin), and the other side is in contact with room-temperature air at 27 C (300 K). (In practice, the temperature difference will be smaller, because the air near your body will be warmed above room temp.) The maximum efficiency one could get from these thermodynamic efficiency is (305-300)/300 = 1.7%.
And that's the theoretical maximum possible conversion efficiency. Real systems rarely come close to that.
SO, the most energy we could possibly get out of this generation system is 0.6 * 1.7% = 10 milliwatts. My iPhone's battery holds about 2400 mW-hours of juice, so if I installed this charging system and held it against my skin 24/7, it would take about 10 days to charge in the theoretical best case... and in practice, much longer than that.
This idea's dead in the water at the basic physics stage, before we even get to the engineering considerations.
Thanks for a good summary. Here's what I haven't been able to figure out, though: Switchgrass cellulosic ethanol has a greater energy gain (ethanol energy out per unit manmade energy in) compared to sugar-fermentation corn ethanol. But that's comparing apples and oranges: if you have cellulosic ethanol technology, you can stick the corn stalks in there too! From a chemical perspective, switchgrass is just a corn plant without the kernels.
So, if we assume the existence of cellulosic ethanol plants capable of processing both, how does switchgrass compare to corn?
The problem with wireless power transmission is that it's hard to control where your electromagnetic fields go. They tend diverge as an inverse square law, scatter and bounce all over and be absorbed by things that are not your antenna. This is wasteful, because your wireless power ends up heating up trees, grass, and rivers rather than powering your city, and dangerous, because if a human absorbs even a tiny fraction of a gigawatt power transmission from a generation plant, he'll be cooked.
In recent years, engineers have come up with several schemes to prevent the scattering and leakage of electromagnetic energy. The most clever involves the use of a long strand of copper, which acts as a "guide" to shape and direct the EM fields and keep the power tightly focused and moving in the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
So my physics teacher taught me. Doesn't that mean that while this doohickey might allow you to tweak the orbit, you can't actually raise or lower the orbit's semimajor axis?
Doesn't sound very useful.
Re 1), we can rule out any sort of random sampling of "1's" and "2's" for section three. "2" occurs frequently, but you almost never see two "2's" in a row.
3) seems likely.
Trinary/hex/binary Rosetta Stone seems likely on the face of it....
However, if Section 1 is trinary, its information content is equal to 180 bits (113 symbols times log2(3) bits per symbol). The second section, in hex, has 96 bits, and the third, if in binary, has 266 bits. Unless one symbol set has a huge amount of redundancy, they're not the same length.
----------
A casual glance at the "binary" third section suggests it's unlikely to be any sort of ASCII-like binary substitution cipher, and possibly not a binary-encoded language of any kind. A "1" can be followed by either another "1" or a "2" (equal probability), but you never see "22" except for one string of "222" on line 5.
This pattern is way too regular to represent a binary encoding of any large symbol-set like an alphabet.
-----------------
Section 2 is absolutely a hexadecimal code: the symbols are a simple substitution for the hex characters below them. The symbols look a little bit like the "pigpen" cipher, but only vaguely.
I can't find any correspondence between the hexadecimal numbers in section 3 and the "trinary" in section 1.
Current best guess: this is a joke, with no actual information content.
There's no question that what this woman did was wrong and morally repugnant. But was it a crime?
Yes. In most states, it would qualify as child abuse, though Missouri doesn't seem to have a statute for emotional abuse cases.
But this is without a doubt a case of involuntary manslaughter as an absolute minimum, and probably murder. A sufficient criterion for murder is a death caused when (forgive me for quoting Wikipedia) "the perpetrator acts with a "depraved heart" showing lack of care for human life"
Sounds about right, eh?
Does it still work when there's rain or snow on the roof?
Ooo! I forgot to mention the best part of this code:
C ***** REPLACE HOLLERITH LABELS WITH SPECIES NUMBERS IN JCHEM *****
IF(JCHEM(M,J).NE.ISPEC(I)) GO TO 6
JCHEM(M,J) = I
It replaces the Hollerith string (stored in an integer-typed variable) with an actual integer. Because hell, the string "H2O2" and the number 6 are the same type, so why not?
Typecasting is easy when your only type's an integer.
This isn't the oldest code ever, but it is the oldest code *I've* ever used. A few years ago, I was working with an atmosphere photochemistry model written in FORTRAN when I came across:
C ***** SPECIES DEFINITIONS *****
ISPEC(1) = 4HH2CO
ISPEC(2) = 1HO
ISPEC(3) = 3HH2O
ISPEC(4) = 2HOH
ISPEC(5) = 3HHO2
ISPEC(6) = 4HH2O2
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, those are Hollerith constants.
(Too lazy to read the Wiki link? A Hollerith constant is what you do in FORTRAN 66 and earlier when you want a string but your compiler doesn't have a character type: you shoehorn up to 8 bytes worth of ASCII into an integer and pray.)
It ran nice and fast on one node of my dual-core Athlon Beowulf cluster...
(I'm a physics professor teaching electronics to undergraduates this term.)
I'll second Horowitz and Hill.
But if you want a gentler sunday school introduction before you pick up the Bible, get "Getting Started in Electronics" by Forrest M. Mims III. This is the book I taught myself with, bought it from Radio Shack when I was twelve. Text-and-drawings done "lab notebook" style, very basic approach.
You'll need Horowitz and Hill to get the math, but for basic concepts Mims can't be beat.
Hang on a second. A little random wiggling in a "wire" does no real harm -- it lengthens the path a little, maybe introduces a little more heating, but the electrons still go where they're supposed to.
The problem comes when the random wiggles cause two wires to touch, creating a short. Then you've got an actual dead chip.
But if this self-perfection thing works the way I think it does, it should cause that "bridge" to become stronger, just as two drops of water on a window merge when they touch.
Doesn't sound too useful to me!
In other news, Mothers Against Capping Cops in the Ass also lodged a protest, as did Mothers Against Driving Semis on the Sidewalk, Mothers Against Jacking Fire Trucks, Mothers Against Machinegunning City Hall, Mothers Against Random Sniper Terrorism...
A phone has to do two things: draw as little power as possible when it's not being used, and accomplish one mission-critical real-time task with zero lag (Be A Phone).
If there's one thing I've found in my many years of using third-party apps, it's that third-party developers *cannot* be trusted to play nice in the background. They will use polling with absurd polling rates. They will refuse to sleep or go idle unless forced. They will be utterly selfish of system resources. I've seen this from Mac system extensions in 1990 to web pages with embedded javascript in 2008.
And when the device suddenly slows to a crawl and starts producing choppy audio, dropping calls, and having the battery life of a wind-up toy, who does the user blame? Not the third party developer, I can tell you that.
When your church reeks of brimstone, maybe it's time to look for a new church. Was there a pentagram in the basement too?
That'd be a great argument if we all heated our homes with electric heat. But we don't, because it's incredibly wasteful, and therefore expensive.
Ladies and gentlemen, a bit of math.
Amount of mercury in 1 CFL light bulb: 5 milligrams (source: TFA)
Amount of energy saved by using a CFL bulb instead of incandescent, over the lifetime of the CFL:
10,000 hours * 75 watts * 75% energy savings = 0.6 megawatt-hours
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp#Lifespan)
Fraction of that energy that would be generated by coal-fired power plants: about 50%.
(http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html)
Coal power plant energy savings: 0.3 megawatt-hours
Annual emission of mercury by US coal-fired power plants: 48 tons/year in 1999
(http://www.nescaum.org/documents/rpt031104mercury.pdf)
Power output of US coal-fired power plants: 1,900,000 gigawatt-hours in 1999 (about the same today)
Mercury emitted by coal plants: 48 tons / 19000000 GWh = 23 milligrams per megawatt-hour
Power-plant mercury emissions avoided by using a CFL bulb over its lifetime:
7 milligrams
So it's a wash. The amount of mercury in the bulb is roughly the same as what would be emitted by a coal-burning power plant, if you stuck with incandescent bulbs.
But the mercury in a CFL bulb is a lot easier to clean up than the stuff spewed into the atmosphere by power plants.
This is a pretty cool tech demo, but at the moment, its battlefield utility is zero. That two-stroke engine buzz is going to alert every bad guy for miles around.
Since it needs to be able to exert pretty big forces very quickly, I doubt they're going to lower the power requirements, so I highly doubt they're going to be able to use a quieter power source like batteries or fuel cells. Nothing beats the power-to-weight ratio of internal combusion.
Me, I'd go with a real live mule instead for all applications you'd use this in. Same payload capacity, not much bigger, totally silent, self-refuelling, costs $hundreds rather than $hojillions.
George Herbert first suggested this about 12 years ago, back when I was reading sci.space.policy. The linked article is too slashdotted for me to tell whether it cites Herbert, but pretty much everything in this thread was discussed 12 years ago on Usenet. Including the wisecracks.
Herbert's OneWay paper:
http://www.retro.com/employees/gherbert/Space/OneWay/1way.paper.5.txt
Internet Explorer has always been standards-compliant by default, because Internet Explorer has always been the default standard. Whether you, me, or the W3C like it or not.
This is a great idea. We could have some federal government institution which deals with lots of maps anyway take the initiative and create digitized map data for the whole country, using information from USGS quads. For "fact checking", they could mail out the map data to every municipality in the country, who would make corrections which would be incorporated into the system. The data would be publicly available from the government for free, to be used by open-source or commercial makers of maps and map tools.
Congrats! You've just re-invented TIGER, run by the U.S. Census Bureau. If you use map software, it probably uses TIGER data. If the data in your town is inaccurate, it's because your local government sucks.
Yes, and the debris might take out any satellites that hadn't been deliberately destroyed, forming even more debris in a chain reaction... The resulting cloud of shrapnel could damage or destroy any *new* satellites launched into orbit within hours, leaving us planet-bound for thousands of years.
Ladies and gentlemen, a solution to the Fermi Paradox ("If extraterrestrial life is common, why hasn't it come to visit?"): The little green men had themselves a little space war, and now they're stuck on their planet.
(This horror story isn't my idea, I read it in a sci-fi novel somewhere. If someone can remember the source, I'd appreciate a posted reply.)
Oh, lord. A story that brings together the Mac-vs-PC debate and the Conservative-vs-Liberal fight.
It's the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups of Internet flame wars. I predict a global meltdown of the entire Net within a week.
Enough already. You "won".
Can be? Have been!
Sibling poster is right to point out the banana. Agricultural bananas have no seeds, and are propagated asexually. Essentially, all banana plants are clones.
In the early 20th century, a single banana "clone" was used for almost all commercial banana growing in the Americas. It was totally wiped out by a fungus in the '50s, devastating the industry. So the banana companies switched to the Cavendish banana, which isn't as tasty, but was resistant to the virus. Today, this single "clone" is used for almost all commercial banana crops *globally*. And guess what? That same fungus from the 50s has mutated to a form that affects Cavendishes, and is beginning to wipe out banana plantations throughout Asia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease
Paging Dr. Carnot, Dr. Nicolas Carnot, call for you on line 2...
Human body thermal output is about 120 watts on average, skin surface area is 2 m^2, so a 50-cm^2 cell phone body can intercept 0.6 watts of body heat. BUT, the laws of thermodynamics place a limit on how much of that heat can be converted into useful work to charge the batteries in the phone. That limit depends on the temperature of the heat source and sink.
Suppose one side of the phone is in contact with your skin at 32 C (305 Kelvin), and the other side is in contact with room-temperature air at 27 C (300 K). (In practice, the temperature difference will be smaller, because the air near your body will be warmed above room temp.) The maximum efficiency one could get from these thermodynamic efficiency is (305-300)/300 = 1.7%.
And that's the theoretical maximum possible conversion efficiency. Real systems rarely come close to that.
SO, the most energy we could possibly get out of this generation system is 0.6 * 1.7% = 10 milliwatts. My iPhone's battery holds about 2400 mW-hours of juice, so if I installed this charging system and held it against my skin 24/7, it would take about 10 days to charge in the theoretical best case... and in practice, much longer than that.
This idea's dead in the water at the basic physics stage, before we even get to the engineering considerations.
Thanks for a good summary. Here's what I haven't been able to figure out, though: Switchgrass cellulosic ethanol has a greater energy gain (ethanol energy out per unit manmade energy in) compared to sugar-fermentation corn ethanol. But that's comparing apples and oranges: if you have cellulosic ethanol technology, you can stick the corn stalks in there too! From a chemical perspective, switchgrass is just a corn plant without the kernels.
So, if we assume the existence of cellulosic ethanol plants capable of processing both, how does switchgrass compare to corn?
The problem with wireless power transmission is that it's hard to control where your electromagnetic fields go. They tend diverge as an inverse square law, scatter and bounce all over and be absorbed by things that are not your antenna. This is wasteful, because your wireless power ends up heating up trees, grass, and rivers rather than powering your city, and dangerous, because if a human absorbs even a tiny fraction of a gigawatt power transmission from a generation plant, he'll be cooked.
In recent years, engineers have come up with several schemes to prevent the scattering and leakage of electromagnetic energy. The most clever involves the use of a long strand of copper, which acts as a "guide" to shape and direct the EM fields and keep the power tightly focused and moving in the right direction.