>Some extreme mental gymnastics is required to make a claim like that. Interesting toy without clear way for improvement.
Perhaps so. But it doesn't take any mental gymnastics at all to realize that the one sure way to be certain there's no improvement is to simply ignore the technology.
It's an interesting technology. Probably makes more sense with lighter-than-air vehicles than aircraft at the commercial scale, at least for now. However, for now they appear to be looking at developing the technology for small-scale vehicles - consumer/delivery drones that operate nearly silently, rather than filling the skies with their annoying buzzing as they become more common. Maybe they succeed in optimizing it to that point, maybe not. Either way the technology has that much more research behind it against the day the right technologies come together to make it useful. And a bunch of engineering students have some hands-on experience doing genuine cutting-edge research towards developing a potentially useful technology.
>In this case your fuel is electricity stored in batteries
Not necessarily - it could be hydrocarbons powering a highly efficient generator. Or a hydrogen fuel cell, or...
The thing about electric vehicles of all types, is that they're really easy to power from whatever energy source happens to be best suited to the situation. One possibility - the military recently invested in the development of a scaled up, multifuel version of the 3hp "Liquid Piston" non-Wankell rotary engine, targeting a 30lb, 30kW generator running at something like 45% thermodynamic fuel efficiency - that'd be a considerably more efficient energy source than electricity from the grid, much less a typical diesel engine (to say nothing of gasoline powered cars), squeezed into 10"(I think?) cube package you can carry with one hand. (For comparison, a Tesla consumes about 15kW cruising at highway speeds).
If you can control a mouse, you already have the interface, all you need is the app. One mouse movement in any of 8 different directions, you can output 3 bits at a time. And no reason you have to limit it to just 8 directions.
Use fiber-optics so that never touch the cells you're monitoring. Perhaps genetically engineer the brain cells you want to monitor to fluoresce when firing. If you want two-way communication, then you engineer them to make the cell walls produce chloroplasts in two different colors, so that you can shine one color light on them to make them fire, and another to suppress firing.
The fun part? The chloroplast thing has actually already been done - watched an interesting TED talk years ago. They used the ability to study what exactly the cells do by selectively activating or suppressing certain cell types in tightly focused spots in the brain. The scary part? The fact that they seemingly took no particular precautions to contain the virus used to modify the cells, reasoning that they were using a harmless virus that usually caused no symptoms, at worst a minor sniffle. My thought was no, it WAS a harmless virus, now it makes peoples brain's grow two kinds of chloroplasts, with non-zero metabolic costs and unknown long-term consequences, especially on developing embryos. (Yes, I immediately investigated when Zika hit the media. Unrelated virus)
It lets Amazon and random app- and malware- makers perform unlimited surveillance on you and your home for fun and profit. Why's that so hard to understand?
Oh, you mean for the people paying for the privilege of installing them in their home? It lets them set timers, toggle lamps and fans, and change the "radio" station, all just by giving verbal commands! Oh, and it lets you get variably accurate answers to random questions without having to type them in to google by hand, or activate your phone's voice assistant. Now using a more authoritative voice to make it easier to believe the answer unquestioningly. Progress!
Yep, monsters. Not like America, which conducts their invasions honestly, with overwhelming military power against grossly outmatched opponents, who we falsely accuse of having "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and drag a bunch of other militaries into the fracas as well.
Face it, all the global superpowers (and a lot of the minor ones) are all constantly throwing their weight around to try to take what they want from other countries - the big differences from a moral standpoint are mostly in how many people die in the process, and how much important infrastructure is destroyed.
Are you trying to claim that it's not possible for Russian, Indian, American, etc. hackers to make it look like their attacks on Australia are coming from China? Or vice-versa?
Why would you bring your spacesuit inside the facility? Seems like all the recent spacesuit designs developed for Mars, the Moon,etc. are designed to remain permanently outside the habitat - the entry hatch on the back of the suit mates with a similar hatch in the habitat airlock, minimizing habitat contamination.
Or he was being paid to act excited - he's a media personality after all. The on-screen persona he presents doesn't necessarily have anything to do with his personal beliefs. He gets paid to read the script, not express his own opinions.
Don't know which one to blame for the abysmal "Bill Nye saves the World" , but it takes real skill to take a position with decades of science and virtually all the evidence on it's side, and then present it in a manner that makes it look like you're playing just as fast and loose with the truth as the deniers. (In fairness I only watched the first episode, and not even all of that. Maybe it got better, it wasn't worth the risk to find out)
"IP" laws are irrelevant to science - only patents are remotely relevant, and those only apply to trying to sell finished inventions. They have no effect whatsoever on researching new basic principles, or even the pre-market invention process.
The reason so much old school science was done in garages (or labs that weren't much better) is because it was *easy* - the charge of the electron was first accurately measured using little more than a a pair of charged plates and a leaky oil can. The telescope was created using just carefully ground lumps of high-quality glass. You want to measure the color-charge of a quark though? You need a powerful particle accelerator to even look at them.
Are there any? I'm trying to think if I've ever heard of any reputable evidence of anything beyond the predictable effects of being simultaneously acted on by multiple sources of gravitational force (or alternately, the more complex curvature of space they create). Not coming up with anything.
How about doing something proactive, instead of just pointing out the problem after they've already wasted time that could have been spent doing something more valuable? Start putting those old papers online, so that younger researchers can easily learn from them, rather than leaving them hidden in an unlit stairless cellar in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'.
>The electron is more important than some quark or higgs boson or whatever.
Are you sure? It is today, but electricity was widely considered to be a useless novelty for a very long time after it's discovery (which was long before the discovery of the electron as the charge carrier). Then we learned how to manipulate them in novel ways - first for things like lights and motors and crude calculating devices, and then, with the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, via the diodes and transistors that are the basis of modern computers.
The Higgs boson is confirmation of the existence of the Higgs field as the basis for inertia, opening the door to the possibility that we may eventually be able to manipulate inertia, which would totally upend many current limitations on what we can accomplish in physics. No reason to believe it would allow antigravtiy directly, but a rocket with inertial dampeners (or amplifiers for the exhaust) would revolutionize the field. And if we're able to manipulate inertial mass independently of gravitational mass it would open the door to all kinds of new research into gravity, and who knows where that might lead - gravity is in many ways still one of the "black boxes" of physics.
Really, trying to judge the value of a thing when it hasn't even been known about for a few centuries yet just seems grossly short-sighted.
The problem with the "increasingly esoteric stuff", is that's where new *all* physics is discovered. How did we discover magnetism? We found weird rocks that would always point North/South when allowed to rotate freely, and some people decided to try to figure out *why* (scientists) instead of just how to use them well (technologists). Electricity? We noticed sparks of static electricity, and investigated that useless esoteric oddity (1600). Electromagnetism was discovered once we had harnessed electricity and happened to notice that flowing electricity made a compass move (1820). Once we had all three pieces of the puzzle it still took another 71 years before Tesla invented the AC motor, which made it efficient and useful enough to power civilization as more than a novelty. A task by the way that had been tried and failed by many others, it took a madman to invent it, and doing so nearly killed him. (Mental illness is one of the apparent risks of excessive intelligence and creativity.)
Quantum mechanics, foundation of modern computers and so much else? Would never have existed except for those individuals studying the esoteric anomalies of light - black-body radiation, spectral lines, and the photoelectric effect.
If you want to "defeat gravity" (you're talking some sort of antigravity I assume?), you first need to figure out how gravity works - we really have no clue. We can describe it, but don't understand the underlying mechanisms, and don't have any conveniently testable anomalies to investigate. We have galactic rotation curves, universal expansion, etc. to give us hints, but we can't exactly tinker with things at that scale to see what happens. We have Dark Matter and Energy as potential explanations, and we are trying to confirm their existence and nature independently - but that's ferociously expensive research. We've only just (probably) discovered the Higgs boson, confirmation of the Higgs field, theoretical key to the existence of inertial mass - and we may one day figure out how to harness the Higgs field to allow inertial dampeners or other such incredibly handy tools - but we can't exactly sit down with a jar full of Higgs and start tinkering - just producing the things is enormously expensive, and they last infinitesimal amount of time, making any experiments extremely difficult and costly.
The problem is not so much that we lack the intelligence and creativity - but that we're running out of esoteric anomalies to investigate, and the ones we have are extremely difficult and expensive to investigate, so that intelligence and creativity is useless without also having vast amounts of wealth. Brilliance is great and all, but it needs something to work with - esoteric anomalies in the behavior of the universe.
And then of course, there's putting new discoveries to work - that's a completely separate field, and wholly dependent on the "useless" research for new tools to work with. Inventors can't work on developing antigrav drives, because we have no physics to even hint that it's possible. What are you going to do, just start building random shit in your garage and hope something magically works?
>In this case whether or not the discussion occurs is also pre-determined along with the outcome.
Quite - so, *if* I have a choice, I choose not to have the conversation, since my choice disproves the premise. And if I don't have a choice, it doesn't matter.
Nope. At least not in general - there's a lot of vertical wind vane designs. In general though a vertical wind will not cause such a device to spin, which is something this is specifically designed to do, since unlike steady winds, turbulent winds among tall buildings can blow in any direction, not just parallel to the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
As I said - it's already been done. Years ago.
>Some extreme mental gymnastics is required to make a claim like that. Interesting toy without clear way for improvement.
Perhaps so. But it doesn't take any mental gymnastics at all to realize that the one sure way to be certain there's no improvement is to simply ignore the technology.
It's an interesting technology. Probably makes more sense with lighter-than-air vehicles than aircraft at the commercial scale, at least for now. However, for now they appear to be looking at developing the technology for small-scale vehicles - consumer/delivery drones that operate nearly silently, rather than filling the skies with their annoying buzzing as they become more common. Maybe they succeed in optimizing it to that point, maybe not. Either way the technology has that much more research behind it against the day the right technologies come together to make it useful. And a bunch of engineering students have some hands-on experience doing genuine cutting-edge research towards developing a potentially useful technology.
>In this case your fuel is electricity stored in batteries
Not necessarily - it could be hydrocarbons powering a highly efficient generator. Or a hydrogen fuel cell, or...
The thing about electric vehicles of all types, is that they're really easy to power from whatever energy source happens to be best suited to the situation. One possibility - the military recently invested in the development of a scaled up, multifuel version of the 3hp "Liquid Piston" non-Wankell rotary engine, targeting a 30lb, 30kW generator running at something like 45% thermodynamic fuel efficiency - that'd be a considerably more efficient energy source than electricity from the grid, much less a typical diesel engine (to say nothing of gasoline powered cars), squeezed into 10"(I think?) cube package you can carry with one hand. (For comparison, a Tesla consumes about 15kW cruising at highway speeds).
If you can control a mouse, you already have the interface, all you need is the app. One mouse movement in any of 8 different directions, you can output 3 bits at a time. And no reason you have to limit it to just 8 directions.
Use fiber-optics so that never touch the cells you're monitoring. Perhaps genetically engineer the brain cells you want to monitor to fluoresce when firing. If you want two-way communication, then you engineer them to make the cell walls produce chloroplasts in two different colors, so that you can shine one color light on them to make them fire, and another to suppress firing.
The fun part? The chloroplast thing has actually already been done - watched an interesting TED talk years ago. They used the ability to study what exactly the cells do by selectively activating or suppressing certain cell types in tightly focused spots in the brain. The scary part? The fact that they seemingly took no particular precautions to contain the virus used to modify the cells, reasoning that they were using a harmless virus that usually caused no symptoms, at worst a minor sniffle. My thought was no, it WAS a harmless virus, now it makes peoples brain's grow two kinds of chloroplasts, with non-zero metabolic costs and unknown long-term consequences, especially on developing embryos. (Yes, I immediately investigated when Zika hit the media. Unrelated virus)
It lets Amazon and random app- and malware- makers perform unlimited surveillance on you and your home for fun and profit. Why's that so hard to understand?
Oh, you mean for the people paying for the privilege of installing them in their home? It lets them set timers, toggle lamps and fans, and change the "radio" station, all just by giving verbal commands! Oh, and it lets you get variably accurate answers to random questions without having to type them in to google by hand, or activate your phone's voice assistant. Now using a more authoritative voice to make it easier to believe the answer unquestioningly. Progress!
Win this week's trivia quiz, and you too can have Carl Kassell's voice on your home surveillance device!
Yep, monsters. Not like America, which conducts their invasions honestly, with overwhelming military power against grossly outmatched opponents, who we falsely accuse of having "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and drag a bunch of other militaries into the fracas as well.
Face it, all the global superpowers (and a lot of the minor ones) are all constantly throwing their weight around to try to take what they want from other countries - the big differences from a moral standpoint are mostly in how many people die in the process, and how much important infrastructure is destroyed.
Not at all.
Are you trying to claim that it's not possible for Russian, Indian, American, etc. hackers to make it look like their attacks on Australia are coming from China? Or vice-versa?
It's a good thing it's not possible for hackers to spoof their origin to make it look like it's their competitors doing the hacking.
I wasn't aware that Many Worlds addressed entanglement at all.
Same place we always have - our imaginations.
Why would you bring your spacesuit inside the facility? Seems like all the recent spacesuit designs developed for Mars, the Moon,etc. are designed to remain permanently outside the habitat - the entry hatch on the back of the suit mates with a similar hatch in the habitat airlock, minimizing habitat contamination.
Or he was being paid to act excited - he's a media personality after all. The on-screen persona he presents doesn't necessarily have anything to do with his personal beliefs. He gets paid to read the script, not express his own opinions.
Don't know which one to blame for the abysmal "Bill Nye saves the World" , but it takes real skill to take a position with decades of science and virtually all the evidence on it's side, and then present it in a manner that makes it look like you're playing just as fast and loose with the truth as the deniers. (In fairness I only watched the first episode, and not even all of that. Maybe it got better, it wasn't worth the risk to find out)
Actually "we" already have several different models to choose from - you and I just can't afford to even look at the price tag.
I had somehow missed that very important detail. Thanks.
"IP" laws are irrelevant to science - only patents are remotely relevant, and those only apply to trying to sell finished inventions. They have no effect whatsoever on researching new basic principles, or even the pre-market invention process.
The reason so much old school science was done in garages (or labs that weren't much better) is because it was *easy* - the charge of the electron was first accurately measured using little more than a a pair of charged plates and a leaky oil can. The telescope was created using just carefully ground lumps of high-quality glass. You want to measure the color-charge of a quark though? You need a powerful particle accelerator to even look at them.
Are there any? I'm trying to think if I've ever heard of any reputable evidence of anything beyond the predictable effects of being simultaneously acted on by multiple sources of gravitational force (or alternately, the more complex curvature of space they create). Not coming up with anything.
How about doing something proactive, instead of just pointing out the problem after they've already wasted time that could have been spent doing something more valuable? Start putting those old papers online, so that younger researchers can easily learn from them, rather than leaving them hidden in an unlit stairless cellar in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'.
>The electron is more important than some quark or higgs boson or whatever.
Are you sure? It is today, but electricity was widely considered to be a useless novelty for a very long time after it's discovery (which was long before the discovery of the electron as the charge carrier). Then we learned how to manipulate them in novel ways - first for things like lights and motors and crude calculating devices, and then, with the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, via the diodes and transistors that are the basis of modern computers.
The Higgs boson is confirmation of the existence of the Higgs field as the basis for inertia, opening the door to the possibility that we may eventually be able to manipulate inertia, which would totally upend many current limitations on what we can accomplish in physics. No reason to believe it would allow antigravtiy directly, but a rocket with inertial dampeners (or amplifiers for the exhaust) would revolutionize the field. And if we're able to manipulate inertial mass independently of gravitational mass it would open the door to all kinds of new research into gravity, and who knows where that might lead - gravity is in many ways still one of the "black boxes" of physics.
Really, trying to judge the value of a thing when it hasn't even been known about for a few centuries yet just seems grossly short-sighted.
The problem with the "increasingly esoteric stuff", is that's where new *all* physics is discovered. How did we discover magnetism? We found weird rocks that would always point North/South when allowed to rotate freely, and some people decided to try to figure out *why* (scientists) instead of just how to use them well (technologists). Electricity? We noticed sparks of static electricity, and investigated that useless esoteric oddity (1600). Electromagnetism was discovered once we had harnessed electricity and happened to notice that flowing electricity made a compass move (1820). Once we had all three pieces of the puzzle it still took another 71 years before Tesla invented the AC motor, which made it efficient and useful enough to power civilization as more than a novelty. A task by the way that had been tried and failed by many others, it took a madman to invent it, and doing so nearly killed him. (Mental illness is one of the apparent risks of excessive intelligence and creativity.)
Quantum mechanics, foundation of modern computers and so much else? Would never have existed except for those individuals studying the esoteric anomalies of light - black-body radiation, spectral lines, and the photoelectric effect.
If you want to "defeat gravity" (you're talking some sort of antigravity I assume?), you first need to figure out how gravity works - we really have no clue. We can describe it, but don't understand the underlying mechanisms, and don't have any conveniently testable anomalies to investigate. We have galactic rotation curves, universal expansion, etc. to give us hints, but we can't exactly tinker with things at that scale to see what happens. We have Dark Matter and Energy as potential explanations, and we are trying to confirm their existence and nature independently - but that's ferociously expensive research. We've only just (probably) discovered the Higgs boson, confirmation of the Higgs field, theoretical key to the existence of inertial mass - and we may one day figure out how to harness the Higgs field to allow inertial dampeners or other such incredibly handy tools - but we can't exactly sit down with a jar full of Higgs and start tinkering - just producing the things is enormously expensive, and they last infinitesimal amount of time, making any experiments extremely difficult and costly.
The problem is not so much that we lack the intelligence and creativity - but that we're running out of esoteric anomalies to investigate, and the ones we have are extremely difficult and expensive to investigate, so that intelligence and creativity is useless without also having vast amounts of wealth. Brilliance is great and all, but it needs something to work with - esoteric anomalies in the behavior of the universe.
And then of course, there's putting new discoveries to work - that's a completely separate field, and wholly dependent on the "useless" research for new tools to work with. Inventors can't work on developing antigrav drives, because we have no physics to even hint that it's possible. What are you going to do, just start building random shit in your garage and hope something magically works?
Not really - he just clarified the mechanism.
I've had that impression as well. Perhaps the recent election results have stirred up the trolls?
>In this case whether or not the discussion occurs is also pre-determined along with the outcome.
Quite - so, *if* I have a choice, I choose not to have the conversation, since my choice disproves the premise. And if I don't have a choice, it doesn't matter.
Nope. At least not in general - there's a lot of vertical wind vane designs. In general though a vertical wind will not cause such a device to spin, which is something this is specifically designed to do, since unlike steady winds, turbulent winds among tall buildings can blow in any direction, not just parallel to the ground.