Fantastic tech, but needs some improvement. It uses a fusible wire to activate the blade brake, which must apparently be replaced when it gets a "false positive" (which is apparently common when cutting wet wood). If this is to be adopted on a consumer scale, it needs an easily-resettable safety system, more like a circuit breaker than a fuse. Depending on the scope of his patent claim, there may be room for a number of competing improved safety mechanisms based on his idea, which could solve some of the problems with government's mandating use of an exclusive patented product.
Out of curiosity, can the government use an "eminent domain" style procedure to take control of a patent or force it into the public domain, in the interest of public safety or national security?
Looking at their website (google for it), they look like the sort of video production company that's more at home doing weddings and corporate training tapes than Serious TV.
Meh. I though a bit more about the size of the transmitter, and there's no way to actually focus the power that tightly with an array this small in acreage. You'd need something that stretched for miles. The upgrade will cover more ground, but not *that* much more, if it's just more of the same.
So I worked a few numbers, assuming that the radio transmitters had a wavelength of 100 meters (shortwave), which puts a limit on how tightly you could focus the radio beam. If tightly focused, this array could create an electromagnetic wave with an intensity orders of magnitude more powerful than sunlight, and the electric fields associated with the radio waves would amount to millions of volts per meter. With this kind of power, your goal isn't to zap sensitive microchips: you're thinking about vaporizing thick copper wiring in milliseconds. Maybe even damaging the exterior structure of the warhead.
fifteen megawatts. Where does the extra power come from? Capacitors?
Duty cycle. Charge up capacitors at 15 MW for a couple seconds, zap at 10GW for a couple milliseconds, cook one missile, find another one, recharge another couple seconds, zap again. You might not have time to take out an entire World War III strike this way, but a handful of North Korean nukes? Not a problem.
And anyway, it's possible that the generators are just local redundant backups. Wouldn't be too hard to hook this thing up to a civilian power grid and have access to gigawatts of electrical power. (Okay, Alaska doesn't exactly have gigawatts lying around on street corners, but still, delivering power a few hundred miles from Anchorage is probably doable.)
In Slashdot, always read TFA, not just the comments on it. In politics, always read TFB (The F'ing Bill). What it says, and what people *say* it says, are often two different things.
The bill doesn't say "bloggers can post what they like." It says "all Internet communications are immune from federal election rules." That includes not just bloggers, but major media corporations and advertisers.
The community here knows that there's nothing magical about the Internet. Why should CNN or Fox be restricted in what they show on cable TV, but be unrestricted in streaming live online video to me over the same damned cable?
TFB needs to be more precise. But amendments weren't allowed, so it was voted down.
PathScale has released InfiniPath which can be used with an Infiniband switch to make a high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect for a supercomputer cluster.
This is news? We've been using an Infiniband-connected Opteron cluster for almost a year now. I got bids from half a dozen companies willing to sell us one. This is old, established tech.
The Europeans posting here with comparisons to the Netherlands fail to understand the problem. New Orleans *is* built like the Netherlands. But a really bad North Sea storm surge (like the 1953 surge which killed 2000 people) raises sea level by 3 meters. New Orleans has had *two* storm surges *twice* that high in the last 50 years.
The people saying "it's their own damn fault for building below sea level" don't understand how cities grow over centuries. When New Orleans was founded, it *was* well above sea level -- the original settlers found it a bit risky, but acceptable. The city is sinking, and the people living in lowlying neighborhoods have always been among the poorest -- for them, it's a choice between a home which might flood, or no home at all. Tight city planning restrictions might have prevented this, but the decisions were made 50-150 years ago, in a climate of intense racism and class division. It's specious to say "it's their own fault", since those at fault aren't the same "they" as those who suffer.
People who suggest jacking up the city like Chicago are on the right track, but fail to understand the magnitude of the problem. Chicago did this in the 1850s, when its population was 30-60,000. Something like half a square mile of downtown Chicago is now raised above the river. Here, we're talking about half a million people, and 50 square miles of city. And even then, remember that Chicago's basement level totally flooded due to a tunnel rupture in 1992.
New Orleans is an engineering and planning failure, but probably not one which could have been prevented. People have no choice but to make the best of existing situations, and what seems wise at one point in a city's long history may only be proven foolish years or centuries down the road. Long-term plans also conflict with short-term needs, and short-term needs usually win.
There is no silver lining to this tragedy, except that it gives us a chance to start over, essentially completely from scratch, and do things right this time. New Orleans is now more or less a horribly blank slate: almost all the buildings in the city will need to be torn down after soaking in water for weeks. As I see it, there are three long-term ways to solve the problem of New Orleans.
1) Abandon the city. This is almost inconceivable. In addition to the massive impact on Mississippi River and Gulf Coast commerce, what do you do with the million people displaced? Even if they scatter across the country, a million poor homeless refugees will be catastrophic to the already-struggling state and national poverty programs. If they all move only to neighboring states, state governments will collapse under the load. Nevertheless, this might actually be the cheapest long-term solution.
2) Stilt houses. No, don't laugh. In Hawaii where I grew up, many coastal houses are built on 10-foot timber or concrete stilts to keep them above the height of storm surges and tidal waves. We could rebuild every single house in New Orleans as a stilt house. It would make the houses more costly to rebuild, but not by much. The next flood would still destroy roads and utilities, but the houses and their residents could be saved.
3) Jack and fill. Like Chicago, but more so. Demolish all the flooded houses. Grab every dredge, barge, and dump truck you can, and start on one end of the city, dumping Missisippi Delta mud onto the ground ten feet deep. On the other end of the city, start building houses with sturdy frames on concrete pier foundations. When the landfill reaches a rebuild neighborhood, jack up the houses ten feet, dump in ten feet of landfill, and continue on to the next neighborhood. As the city keeps sinking over the next centuries, keep jacking up houses and dumping more dirt. It's probably a $100-$200 billion project (it'd be more, but most of New Orleans' houses are very cheap), but it's a solid long-term solution for keeping New Orleans above water forever.
The one thing we can't afford to do is the one thing that will almost certainly happen. The levees will be plugged, the pumps repaired, and the city rebuilt as it stood a week ago. And forty years from now, this will happen again.
From the e-mail Apple sent registered Powerbook users:
Apple received six consumer reports of these batteries overheating.
We can argue about the difference between "overheat" and "catch fire", but the point is, this really is a danger to consumers, and not just a precautionary recall.
To frame replication of scientific results as an "open source" debate is both a no-brainer and misleading. A no-brainer because if an investigator does not provide enough information to allow their colleagues to replicate their work, they are not doing science -- in that sense, all science is "open source". Misleading because scientific ethics do not require totally open sharing of source code: it is sufficient to verbally describe the algorithms and data used in enough detail that someone else can repeat the experiment. In practice, journal article page limits often require that this description happens on a person-to-person level, rather than in published literature.
Most of the "arguments against open-source science" mentioned here are not about science at all. The secrecy surrounding commericial and national-security "science" is good only in a financial or political sense: they do not help science, per se, at all. And personality conflicts are a factor as well: I suspect that Mann et al's reluctance to release source stems from an extreme personal frustration at McKitrick et al's persistent and (in my view) not always well-supported attacks.
The website solicits campaign donations. If it's accessible from overseas, one might argue that they're soliciting donations from foreigners. Perhaps they're concerned about the legal repercussions of that.
Phewey Lewis and the News: the Power of Sludge
on
The Power of Sewage
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The power of sludge is a curious thing Make one man reek, and another man stink But take some sewage, just a little bit o' fudge More than a nuisance, that's the power of sludge
You don't need diesel, don't take methane Don't need plutonium to run this train. It smells and it's nasty and it's rude sometimes but it might just turn on your lights That's the power of sludge That's the power of sludge
Partial pressure of salt solutions
on
Brine on Mars?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Re environmentalist concerns about nuclear material on spacecraft:
I'm a pretty strong environmentalist, but regarding plutonium, I say: "the more plutonium we send to Jupiter, the more there is here on Earth."
Also, the flap over Cassini happened while there was a Democrat in the White House. Now that the Republicans are in charge, the more nucular, the better. There's also a post-9/11 geopolitical purpose: the plutonium will be bought from Russia, with a view towards reducing the supply available to Bad Guys.
Less visceral than Perdido Street Station
on
The Scar
·
· Score: 1
Perdido Street Station impressed me with its well-crafted descriptions of unique places and characters, but what really impressed me was the way it sucked me into the story and made me feel the horror, anguish, and excitement of the characters. The monsters in the story were truly terrifying, and Lin's situation hit me especially hard.
The Scar has much of the same ornate yet gritty texture as PSS, and the prose is equally well-crafted, but I didn't have a strong emotional response to it. I found the bad guys and monsters more ordinary than those in PSS, and nothing in the book really scared or excited me.
The Scar is still worlds better than most of the sci-fi I've read recently, but it seemed somehow shallower than Perdido Street Station.
Northern lights are currently visible in New England. They're bright, vivid, and right overhead, so they ought to be visible much farther south as well.
The gas from the flare reached us this afternoon (EST); a geomagnetic storm is now underway. Auroras are very likely to be visible as soon as it gets dark. Skies over most of the eastern U.S. should be clear tonight. Check spaceweather.com for more info.
Riight... Like the U.S. would let anyone else even participate in a race. Any country going in that direction will first be nudged lightly with reminders of economic sanctions, and if that doesn't stop them, nudged lightly with a sledgehammer.
Well, India and Pakistan seem to have an eye on the checkered flag. The U.S. has given a few gentle nudges, but no sledgehammer is forthcoming.
Slashdot Mirror
Fantastic tech, but needs some improvement. It uses a fusible wire to activate the blade brake, which must apparently be replaced when it gets a "false positive" (which is apparently common when cutting wet wood). If this is to be adopted on a consumer scale, it needs an easily-resettable safety system, more like a circuit breaker than a fuse. Depending on the scope of his patent claim, there may be room for a number of competing improved safety mechanisms based on his idea, which could solve some of the problems with government's mandating use of an exclusive patented product.
Out of curiosity, can the government use an "eminent domain" style procedure to take control of a patent or force it into the public domain, in the interest of public safety or national security?
"Organized crime?"
"Hah. Don't kid yourself. They're not very organized."
With a *bike lock*? Come *on*! Picking that style of lock is practically an MIT graduation requirement.
Oh christ, not Podkletnov again.
Looking at their website (google for it), they look like the sort of video production company that's more at home doing weddings and corporate training tapes than Serious TV.
My hovercraft is full of eels!
Meh. I though a bit more about the size of the transmitter, and there's no way to actually focus the power that tightly with an array this small in acreage. You'd need something that stretched for miles. The upgrade will cover more ground, but not *that* much more, if it's just more of the same.
So I worked a few numbers, assuming that the radio transmitters had a wavelength of 100 meters (shortwave), which puts a limit on how tightly you could focus the radio beam. If tightly focused, this array could create an electromagnetic wave with an intensity orders of magnitude more powerful than sunlight, and the electric fields associated with the radio waves would amount to millions of volts per meter. With this kind of power, your goal isn't to zap sensitive microchips: you're thinking about vaporizing thick copper wiring in milliseconds. Maybe even damaging the exterior structure of the warhead.
fifteen megawatts. Where does the extra power come from? Capacitors?
Duty cycle. Charge up capacitors at 15 MW for a couple seconds, zap at 10GW for a couple milliseconds, cook one missile, find another one, recharge another couple seconds, zap again. You might not have time to take out an entire World War III strike this way, but a handful of North Korean nukes? Not a problem.
And anyway, it's possible that the generators are just local redundant backups. Wouldn't be too hard to hook this thing up to a civilian power grid and have access to gigawatts of electrical power. (Okay, Alaska doesn't exactly have gigawatts lying around on street corners, but still, delivering power a few hundred miles from Anchorage is probably doable.)
In Slashdot, always read TFA, not just the comments on it. In politics, always read TFB (The F'ing Bill). What it says, and what people *say* it says, are often two different things.
The bill doesn't say "bloggers can post what they like." It says "all Internet communications are immune from federal election rules." That includes not just bloggers, but major media corporations and advertisers.
The community here knows that there's nothing magical about the Internet. Why should CNN or Fox be restricted in what they show on cable TV, but be unrestricted in streaming live online video to me over the same damned cable?
TFB needs to be more precise. But amendments weren't allowed, so it was voted down.
PathScale has released InfiniPath which can be used with an Infiniband switch to make a high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect for a supercomputer cluster.
This is news? We've been using an Infiniband-connected Opteron cluster for almost a year now. I got bids from half a dozen companies willing to sell us one. This is old, established tech.
In my experience, Apple's warrantee attitude is "here, have a new one." Not quite the same thing.
Many papers have recaptioned the photo of the young black man to say he's "carrying groceries" or something less accusatory than "looting".
In both cases, while it's pretty obvious they were looting, there's no proof. Maybe they bought the stuff last week.
The Europeans posting here with comparisons to the Netherlands fail to understand the problem. New Orleans *is* built like the Netherlands. But a really bad North Sea storm surge (like the 1953 surge which killed 2000 people) raises sea level by 3 meters. New Orleans has had *two* storm surges *twice* that high in the last 50 years.
The people saying "it's their own damn fault for building below sea level" don't understand how cities grow over centuries. When New Orleans was founded, it *was* well above sea level -- the original settlers found it a bit risky, but acceptable. The city is sinking, and the people living in lowlying neighborhoods have always been among the poorest -- for them, it's a choice between a home which might flood, or no home at all. Tight city planning restrictions might have prevented this, but the decisions were made 50-150 years ago, in a climate of intense racism and class division. It's specious to say "it's their own fault", since those at fault aren't the same "they" as those who suffer.
People who suggest jacking up the city like Chicago are on the right track, but fail to understand the magnitude of the problem. Chicago did this in the 1850s, when its population was 30-60,000. Something like half a square mile of downtown Chicago is now raised above the river. Here, we're talking about half a million people, and 50 square miles of city. And even then, remember that Chicago's basement level totally flooded due to a tunnel rupture in 1992.
New Orleans is an engineering and planning failure, but probably not one which could have been prevented. People have no choice but to make the best of existing situations, and what seems wise at one point in a city's long history may only be proven foolish years or centuries down the road. Long-term plans also conflict with short-term needs, and short-term needs usually win.
There is no silver lining to this tragedy, except that it gives us a chance to start over, essentially completely from scratch, and do things right this time. New Orleans is now more or less a horribly blank slate: almost all the buildings in the city will need to be torn down after soaking in water for weeks. As I see it, there are three long-term ways to solve the problem of New Orleans.
1) Abandon the city. This is almost inconceivable. In addition to the massive impact on Mississippi River and Gulf Coast commerce, what do you do with the million people displaced? Even if they scatter across the country, a million poor homeless refugees will be catastrophic to the already-struggling state and national poverty programs. If they all move only to neighboring states, state governments will collapse under the load. Nevertheless, this might actually be the cheapest long-term solution.
2) Stilt houses. No, don't laugh. In Hawaii where I grew up, many coastal houses are built on 10-foot timber or concrete stilts to keep them above the height of storm surges and tidal waves. We could rebuild every single house in New Orleans as a stilt house. It would make the houses more costly to rebuild, but not by much. The next flood would still destroy roads and utilities, but the houses and their residents could be saved.
3) Jack and fill. Like Chicago, but more so. Demolish all the flooded houses. Grab every dredge, barge, and dump truck you can, and start on one end of the city, dumping Missisippi Delta mud onto the ground ten feet deep. On the other end of the city, start building houses with sturdy frames on concrete pier foundations. When the landfill reaches a rebuild neighborhood, jack up the houses ten feet, dump in ten feet of landfill, and continue on to the next neighborhood. As the city keeps sinking over the next centuries, keep jacking up houses and dumping more dirt. It's probably a $100-$200 billion project (it'd be more, but most of New Orleans' houses are very cheap), but it's a solid long-term solution for keeping New Orleans above water forever.
The one thing we can't afford to do is the one thing that will almost certainly happen. The levees will be plugged, the pumps repaired, and the city rebuilt as it stood a week ago. And forty years from now, this will happen again.
From the e-mail Apple sent registered Powerbook users:
Apple received six consumer reports of these batteries overheating.
We can argue about the difference between "overheat" and "catch fire", but the point is, this really is a danger to consumers, and not just a precautionary recall.
Most of the "arguments against open-source science" mentioned here are not about science at all. The secrecy surrounding commericial and national-security "science" is good only in a financial or political sense: they do not help science, per se, at all. And personality conflicts are a factor as well: I suspect that Mann et al's reluctance to release source stems from an extreme personal frustration at McKitrick et al's persistent and (in my view) not always well-supported attacks.
The website solicits campaign donations. If it's accessible from overseas, one might argue that they're soliciting donations from foreigners. Perhaps they're concerned about the legal repercussions of that.
The power of sludge is a curious thing
Make one man reek, and another man stink
But take some sewage, just a little bit o' fudge
More than a nuisance, that's the power of sludge
You don't need diesel, don't take methane
Don't need plutonium to run this train.
It smells and it's nasty and it's rude sometimes
but it might just turn on your lights
That's the power of sludge
That's the power of sludge
Indeed, I've found an abstract from the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on the subject.
Re environmentalist concerns about nuclear material on spacecraft:
I'm a pretty strong environmentalist, but regarding plutonium, I say: "the more plutonium we send to Jupiter, the more there is here on Earth."
Also, the flap over Cassini happened while there was a Democrat in the White House. Now that the Republicans are in charge, the more nucular, the better. There's also a post-9/11 geopolitical purpose: the plutonium will be bought from Russia, with a view towards reducing the supply available to Bad Guys.
Perdido Street Station impressed me with its well-crafted descriptions of unique places and characters, but what really impressed me was the way it sucked me into the story and made me feel the horror, anguish, and excitement of the characters. The monsters in the story were truly terrifying, and Lin's situation hit me especially hard.
The Scar has much of the same ornate yet gritty texture as PSS, and the prose is equally well-crafted, but I didn't have a strong emotional response to it. I found the bad guys and monsters more ordinary than those in PSS, and nothing in the book really scared or excited me.
The Scar is still worlds better than most of the sci-fi I've read recently, but it seemed somehow shallower than Perdido Street Station.
Northern lights are currently visible in New England. They're bright, vivid, and right overhead, so they ought to be visible much farther south as well.
The gas from the flare reached us this afternoon (EST); a geomagnetic storm is now underway. Auroras are very likely to be visible as soon as it gets dark. Skies over most of the eastern U.S. should be clear tonight. Check spaceweather.com for more info.
Keep in mind that:
Well, India and Pakistan seem to have an eye on the checkered flag. The U.S. has given a few gentle nudges, but no sledgehammer is forthcoming.
Unlikely in theory, and in practice, nobody's got any bioweapons that vaccines and quarantine can't stop.
The U.S. doesn't have chemical or biological weapons
If that's the case, what are their chemical weapons incinerators for? Don't blame a conspiracy theory for your own ignorance.