If killing an "unarmed and innocent man, woman or child" is an absolute wrong, I'm curious how you feel about any military operation that may have civilian casualties. If it's truly an "absolute wrong", then there is no justification in taking any action that will lead to it happening. So, how do you feel about, for example, the war in Iraq?
Hmm, I guess if the vacuum insulates well enough, you might be able to have a relatively thin insulated conduit with the cable suspended in the middle. I can see why the idea of a nice, localized nuclear reactor appeals.
The problem with burying the lines is, what happens if you want to push the voltage very high, as you need to in order to send power long distances with less cables and without lots of substations. At those voltages, won't the power ground out?
Getting very, very off-topic here. But aside from not being made fun of in the locker-room because everyone else is circumcised and not looking unusual to women who are used to circumcised men, what are the benefits of this unnecessary surgery (1 death in something like 6000 back in the 1940s and probably much safer today, so not very risky as surgery goes, but still unnecessary)? The social "benefits" I mentioned may seem like enough, but if you think about it, that kind of social feedback mechanism is what made things like footbinding happen. If nearly everyone around you had their left hand chopped off at birth and you didn't you would feel like a freak for having two hands too.
You only think that Fahrenheit is human scaled because you're used to it. I've heard this scale argument for measuring people's heights in imperial units vs metric and it managed to sound a little convincing. When you apply the same argument to Celsius vs. Fahrenheit it becomes obviously ridiculous. The scale of Celsius degrees is only 1.8 times that of Fahrenheit degrees. That's not enough of a scale difference to believe that one unit really is scaled better than the other. Unless Fahrenheit somehow discovered some sort of perfect human usable scale for temperature, I'm going to have to believe that the reason you think that Fahrenheit units fit and Celsius units are somehow the wrong size is because you're used to one and not the other.
Incidentally, the Fahrenheit scale is based on the temperature of an ice/water/ammonium chloride mixture as 0 degrees, a mixture of ice and water as 32 degrees, and human body temperature as 96 degrees (as if that's not idiosyncratic). He designed the scale so that there would be 64 degrees between freezing and body temperature to make it easy to mark the intervals on his instruments through subdivision. So, in a sense, the Fahrenheit scale is literally human-scaled, but the actual scale is still arbitrary, since he could have put freezing at 32 and body temperature at 64 instead, or all sorts of other possibilities and you'd still insist that the scale were just right if you grew up with it. The scale he developed is not actually the one that is still used and referred to as the Fahrenheit scale, however. Other scientists altered his scale to put freezing more exactly at 32 degrees (idiosyncratic, as you observed) and boiling more exactly at 212 degrees (idiosyncratic) with 180 degrees separating them because 180 was a nice round number. This ended up shifting human body temperature to about 98.6 degrees.
Also, I need to ask. What kind of cooking are you doing that stays under the boiling point of water? I don't think my oven even has a temperature setting that low. You must make a lot of sauces.
The problem with power at the poles is that you might want to explore regions other than the poles. Of course, I suppose you can start at the poles and start manufacturing infrastructure. You would need high tension lines 5,450 kilometers or less long to reach any other point on the moon from where you generate the power. If you can actually get mining and manufacturing going, that's pretty doable. Especially when you consider that due to the lower gravity, relative geological stability, and lack of wind and rain on the moon, the towers carrying the lines could be very flimsy and spaced much further apart than towers on earth. I wonder if anyone has studied the problem of long distance power transmission on the moon. I imagine the major obstacle would be micrometeorite damage to the lines themselves. If they're say two centimeters wide, and 5,450 km long, that's 109000 square meters of surface area. I can't find any actual numbers on frequency of meteorite strikes on the moon, but I'm starting to think transmission lines would need to be buried.
Either way, even if you can get the solar cells and power transmission system up and running from scratch, you have to start with something. Making nuclear reactors on the moon is probably more difficult and requires a larger industrial base than making solar cells, but, to get the energy to start making solar cells in the first place, you have to have brought something to generate power with you, and a nuclear reactor would be able to generate a lot more power than the same mass of solar cells (unless maybe one of those super-thin film, high-efficiency solar cell stories we see all the time actually bears viable fruit someday). So, the logical progression is probably going to be to bring along a nuclear reactor, use its power to make the infrastructure to build solar cells, then use those to power further development of the infrastructure until it's capable of building nuclear reactors.
I think you're a little confused. The so-called "dark side" of the moon is just the half of the moon that is always facing away from us, which had never been seen before we started firing things off into space. It gets just as much sunlight as the other half (very slightly more, actually, since it's not eclipsed by the Earth). When it's dark on the side of the moon we can see, it's day on the "dark side" and when there's a full moon, the "dark side" actually is dark.
I should add to this that the dark side of the moon is actually only about 41% of the moon. The moons orbit is slightly elliptical, so it appears to tilt slightly side to side from our viewpoint. Another fun moon fact is that the moons orbit is not declining, it's actually getting further and further away from Earth at the moment. The energy to do this is stolen from the rotational energy of Earth via tidal effects.
If it does turn out that operating out of microgravity, but still at less than 1G is bad for you, it still might be the case that you can simply keep things at.5G and strap on 75 kilos of weights.
That's why you have more than one spinning ring and you have them rotate in opposite directions to counteract each other. Obviously it's not that simple, you need to dynamically balance the forces carefully to avoid the ship tumbling, but you don't need to use any thrust to do it. You would need energy, yes, but you wouldn't need to use any thrust.
On the other hand, it may turn out that an hour or two a day of artificial gravity counteracts the deleterious effects of microgravity. If that's the case, then motion sickness isn't really an issue. Astronauts could spend a small amount of their time in a relatively small spinning section and the rest in microgravity.
Patent 6,000,000 looks to be a bit like that. A patent on syncing data from a mobile device to a computer with a single button press. Still, looking at the patents listed in the article, they seem surprisingly valid. I'm getting the feeling that the USPTO is gaming the numbers on these patents so that they aren't really a random sampling. I imagine rather that they sat around in a conference room for a bit going over eligible applications and decided which ones to grant for these milestones.
Well, except for the "machine vision" thing he does even after being blinded, the abilities he displays could be explained by there being two copies of Neo. Just as there were multiple copies of Smith, including one in a meat body outside the Matrix, there could have been some version of Neo merged with the matrix and the entire network of the machine intelligences. So, when he holds up his hand and the hunter-killer squid things stop in mid-air and fry, it's not some kind of telekinesis, it's the in-Matrix copy of Neo, watching through the squids eyes and helping out his flesh counterpart. It doesn't explain the seeing while blind thing unless those brain implants of theirs have some sort of wireless link he can get information from, in which case he could be pulling in telemetry from Smith himself. Without a wireless link, it's kind of magic though. On the other hand, if you take the humans as batteries thing at face value and don't assume it's a lie, then mental superpowers are already part of the "real world" of the Matrix universe in the form of brains producing more energy than they get from their nutrient intake. So, how much of a hop from there is it to telekinesis and various forms of ESP?
For that matter, as long as we're doing solar system scale engineering, split the difference between making Dyson spheres and planets and make lots of orbitals, which are mini Dyson rings. They can achieve the living area of a planet and simulate the gravity of one with a tiny fraction of the material. As for the sun, forget about collecting its energy, just kill it. Once we've stopped the wasteful runaway fusion going on inside the sun, we can mine it for hydrogen to power our fusion reactors and only produce power on demand in the quantities we need. The individual orbitals can have a hub sunlet that shines at precise angles so no energy is wastefully cast out into space.
There are a lot of advantages to this approach. For one thing, it doesn't put all of our eggs in one basket with a massive feat of engineering like a Dyson sphere (or ring). Secondly, killing the sun saves a huge amount of otherwise wasted energy. Not wasting solar energy is pretty much the whole point behind a Dyson sphere in the first place, right? As for actual power output. The power output of solar fusion from our sun is actually pretty dismal. Even at the core of our sun, its power output by volume is about that of a compost heap. And we're talking about very dense volume here. In order to power say Manhattan you would need a reactor bigger than the entire island and several times as massive if you had typical solar fusion output. So, if we could actually create fusion reactors that use regular hydrogen and have useful power output, they would need to be tremendously more active than the sun (so we'd be powering Manhattan with a reactor the size of a house instead). So, if we're imagining a universe where we have this kind of technology, a bunch of individual fusion reactors, spread out all over the solar system in various habitats, collectively massing somewhere near the mass of the Earth could output as much energy as the entire sun without the need to surround the sun with anything. Any individual planets (that we haven't demolished for material to build habitats) that we want to preserve in their natural state, we could just give orbiting fusion powered directional sunlets to simulate the sun.
Obviously we're going to need a few months to get all of this set up. We might have to start small with building cloud cities on Saturn first... Maybe we should attempt a basic space station with simulated gravity from rotation and a moon or mars colony first, just to cut our teeth. Then we can get started completely reshaping the solar system.
Yes, I'm sure it's a vast conspiracy against good old traditional values. After all, the millenia of propaganda against such sinful women is nothing, but a few portrayals of single mothers as not being horrible is obviously a vast conspiracy against decency.
The problem is, the "problem" Quayle was speaking to actually was trivial. Let me be more clear. The problem of children abandoned by one or more parents is _not_ trivial. Concern that the fictional activities of a fictional character "doesn't help matters" is trivial. It's one thing to speak about the problem of children who are essentially abandoned, it's another to attack women who choose to have children on their own in a responsible fashion, and then quite another entirely to attack fictional women who have fictional babies out of fictional wedlock.
Huh. Funny. I must have skimmed past the "EU theory" line when I read that the first time. I read the first sentence and it seemed pretty obvious that the poster was a fan of so called "Plasma Cosmology". As it happens, I do live in the US, but I'm not actually a US citizen, I didn't grow up here. Anyway, perhaps I'm ignorant, but if you could enlighten me, I would appreciate it. What exactly is European Union theory?:)
Well, actually, in a way, Dark matter is "Hell, I don't know". It's just that it's a bunch of "Hell, I don't know" that fills certain holes in a theory. I'd list all the things that we now understand (better than we did, at least) that were once just "Hell, I don't know" fitting into a hole in a theory, except that I want to finish this post some time this year.
Of course, this theory is about "gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum". I don't know about you, but for me it's hard to tell the difference between the quantum vacuum and a more refined version of the aether. It's sort of like the idea of elemental transmutation as envisioned by ancient alchemists and by modern nuclear physicists. Neither the ancient alchemists nor modern physicists actually have a full explanation for everything that's going on. The modern physicists know a lot more about what's going on, to the point that they can actually transmute lead or other elements into gold in random, but statistically predictable processes, but they still don't know it all. Maybe it will turn out that dark matter is just gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum but then we'll find out that the phenomenon we know as baryonic matter is also just gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum.
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If killing an "unarmed and innocent man, woman or child" is an absolute wrong, I'm curious how you feel about any military operation that may have civilian casualties. If it's truly an "absolute wrong", then there is no justification in taking any action that will lead to it happening. So, how do you feel about, for example, the war in Iraq?
You are educated and stupid!
Hmm, I guess if the vacuum insulates well enough, you might be able to have a relatively thin insulated conduit with the cable suspended in the middle. I can see why the idea of a nice, localized nuclear reactor appeals.
The problem with burying the lines is, what happens if you want to push the voltage very high, as you need to in order to send power long distances with less cables and without lots of substations. At those voltages, won't the power ground out?
Getting very, very off-topic here. But aside from not being made fun of in the locker-room because everyone else is circumcised and not looking unusual to women who are used to circumcised men, what are the benefits of this unnecessary surgery (1 death in something like 6000 back in the 1940s and probably much safer today, so not very risky as surgery goes, but still unnecessary)? The social "benefits" I mentioned may seem like enough, but if you think about it, that kind of social feedback mechanism is what made things like footbinding happen. If nearly everyone around you had their left hand chopped off at birth and you didn't you would feel like a freak for having two hands too.
Sorry, not to be rude, but for some reason, based on your writing style, I keep expecting you to start espousing the value of 4 days in one rotation.
You only think that Fahrenheit is human scaled because you're used to it. I've heard this scale argument for measuring people's heights in imperial units vs metric and it managed to sound a little convincing. When you apply the same argument to Celsius vs. Fahrenheit it becomes obviously ridiculous. The scale of Celsius degrees is only 1.8 times that of Fahrenheit degrees. That's not enough of a scale difference to believe that one unit really is scaled better than the other. Unless Fahrenheit somehow discovered some sort of perfect human usable scale for temperature, I'm going to have to believe that the reason you think that Fahrenheit units fit and Celsius units are somehow the wrong size is because you're used to one and not the other.
Incidentally, the Fahrenheit scale is based on the temperature of an ice/water/ammonium chloride mixture as 0 degrees, a mixture of ice and water as 32 degrees, and human body temperature as 96 degrees (as if that's not idiosyncratic). He designed the scale so that there would be 64 degrees between freezing and body temperature to make it easy to mark the intervals on his instruments through subdivision. So, in a sense, the Fahrenheit scale is literally human-scaled, but the actual scale is still arbitrary, since he could have put freezing at 32 and body temperature at 64 instead, or all sorts of other possibilities and you'd still insist that the scale were just right if you grew up with it. The scale he developed is not actually the one that is still used and referred to as the Fahrenheit scale, however. Other scientists altered his scale to put freezing more exactly at 32 degrees (idiosyncratic, as you observed) and boiling more exactly at 212 degrees (idiosyncratic) with 180 degrees separating them because 180 was a nice round number. This ended up shifting human body temperature to about 98.6 degrees.
Also, I need to ask. What kind of cooking are you doing that stays under the boiling point of water? I don't think my oven even has a temperature setting that low. You must make a lot of sauces.
The problem with power at the poles is that you might want to explore regions other than the poles. Of course, I suppose you can start at the poles and start manufacturing infrastructure. You would need high tension lines 5,450 kilometers or less long to reach any other point on the moon from where you generate the power. If you can actually get mining and manufacturing going, that's pretty doable. Especially when you consider that due to the lower gravity, relative geological stability, and lack of wind and rain on the moon, the towers carrying the lines could be very flimsy and spaced much further apart than towers on earth. I wonder if anyone has studied the problem of long distance power transmission on the moon. I imagine the major obstacle would be micrometeorite damage to the lines themselves. If they're say two centimeters wide, and 5,450 km long, that's 109000 square meters of surface area. I can't find any actual numbers on frequency of meteorite strikes on the moon, but I'm starting to think transmission lines would need to be buried.
Either way, even if you can get the solar cells and power transmission system up and running from scratch, you have to start with something. Making nuclear reactors on the moon is probably more difficult and requires a larger industrial base than making solar cells, but, to get the energy to start making solar cells in the first place, you have to have brought something to generate power with you, and a nuclear reactor would be able to generate a lot more power than the same mass of solar cells (unless maybe one of those super-thin film, high-efficiency solar cell stories we see all the time actually bears viable fruit someday). So, the logical progression is probably going to be to bring along a nuclear reactor, use its power to make the infrastructure to build solar cells, then use those to power further development of the infrastructure until it's capable of building nuclear reactors.
I think you're a little confused. The so-called "dark side" of the moon is just the half of the moon that is always facing away from us, which had never been seen before we started firing things off into space. It gets just as much sunlight as the other half (very slightly more, actually, since it's not eclipsed by the Earth). When it's dark on the side of the moon we can see, it's day on the "dark side" and when there's a full moon, the "dark side" actually is dark.
I should add to this that the dark side of the moon is actually only about 41% of the moon. The moons orbit is slightly elliptical, so it appears to tilt slightly side to side from our viewpoint. Another fun moon fact is that the moons orbit is not declining, it's actually getting further and further away from Earth at the moment. The energy to do this is stolen from the rotational energy of Earth via tidal effects.
If it does turn out that operating out of microgravity, but still at less than 1G is bad for you, it still might be the case that you can simply keep things at .5G and strap on 75 kilos of weights.
That's why you have more than one spinning ring and you have them rotate in opposite directions to counteract each other. Obviously it's not that simple, you need to dynamically balance the forces carefully to avoid the ship tumbling, but you don't need to use any thrust to do it. You would need energy, yes, but you wouldn't need to use any thrust.
On the other hand, it may turn out that an hour or two a day of artificial gravity counteracts the deleterious effects of microgravity. If that's the case, then motion sickness isn't really an issue. Astronauts could spend a small amount of their time in a relatively small spinning section and the rest in microgravity.
Um, huh? Ever been to a carnival?
Private companies which are currently doing their best to unmake the Internet and turn it into an AOL redux.
Patent 6,000,000 looks to be a bit like that. A patent on syncing data from a mobile device to a computer with a single button press. Still, looking at the patents listed in the article, they seem surprisingly valid. I'm getting the feeling that the USPTO is gaming the numbers on these patents so that they aren't really a random sampling. I imagine rather that they sat around in a conference room for a bit going over eligible applications and decided which ones to grant for these milestones.
Well, except for the "machine vision" thing he does even after being blinded, the abilities he displays could be explained by there being two copies of Neo. Just as there were multiple copies of Smith, including one in a meat body outside the Matrix, there could have been some version of Neo merged with the matrix and the entire network of the machine intelligences. So, when he holds up his hand and the hunter-killer squid things stop in mid-air and fry, it's not some kind of telekinesis, it's the in-Matrix copy of Neo, watching through the squids eyes and helping out his flesh counterpart. It doesn't explain the seeing while blind thing unless those brain implants of theirs have some sort of wireless link he can get information from, in which case he could be pulling in telemetry from Smith himself. Without a wireless link, it's kind of magic though. On the other hand, if you take the humans as batteries thing at face value and don't assume it's a lie, then mental superpowers are already part of the "real world" of the Matrix universe in the form of brains producing more energy than they get from their nutrient intake. So, how much of a hop from there is it to telekinesis and various forms of ESP?
For that matter, as long as we're doing solar system scale engineering, split the difference between making Dyson spheres and planets and make lots of orbitals, which are mini Dyson rings. They can achieve the living area of a planet and simulate the gravity of one with a tiny fraction of the material. As for the sun, forget about collecting its energy, just kill it. Once we've stopped the wasteful runaway fusion going on inside the sun, we can mine it for hydrogen to power our fusion reactors and only produce power on demand in the quantities we need. The individual orbitals can have a hub sunlet that shines at precise angles so no energy is wastefully cast out into space.
There are a lot of advantages to this approach. For one thing, it doesn't put all of our eggs in one basket with a massive feat of engineering like a Dyson sphere (or ring). Secondly, killing the sun saves a huge amount of otherwise wasted energy. Not wasting solar energy is pretty much the whole point behind a Dyson sphere in the first place, right? As for actual power output. The power output of solar fusion from our sun is actually pretty dismal. Even at the core of our sun, its power output by volume is about that of a compost heap. And we're talking about very dense volume here. In order to power say Manhattan you would need a reactor bigger than the entire island and several times as massive if you had typical solar fusion output. So, if we could actually create fusion reactors that use regular hydrogen and have useful power output, they would need to be tremendously more active than the sun (so we'd be powering Manhattan with a reactor the size of a house instead). So, if we're imagining a universe where we have this kind of technology, a bunch of individual fusion reactors, spread out all over the solar system in various habitats, collectively massing somewhere near the mass of the Earth could output as much energy as the entire sun without the need to surround the sun with anything. Any individual planets (that we haven't demolished for material to build habitats) that we want to preserve in their natural state, we could just give orbiting fusion powered directional sunlets to simulate the sun.
Obviously we're going to need a few months to get all of this set up. We might have to start small with building cloud cities on Saturn first... Maybe we should attempt a basic space station with simulated gravity from rotation and a moon or mars colony first, just to cut our teeth. Then we can get started completely reshaping the solar system.
Yes, I'm sure it's a vast conspiracy against good old traditional values. After all, the millenia of propaganda against such sinful women is nothing, but a few portrayals of single mothers as not being horrible is obviously a vast conspiracy against decency.
Of course, 1000 miles of driving an SUV doesn't do as much road damage as 1 mile driven by a large truck.
That horse had it coming.
The problem is, the "problem" Quayle was speaking to actually was trivial. Let me be more clear. The problem of children abandoned by one or more parents is _not_ trivial. Concern that the fictional activities of a fictional character "doesn't help matters" is trivial. It's one thing to speak about the problem of children who are essentially abandoned, it's another to attack women who choose to have children on their own in a responsible fashion, and then quite another entirely to attack fictional women who have fictional babies out of fictional wedlock.
Huh. Funny. I must have skimmed past the "EU theory" line when I read that the first time. I read the first sentence and it seemed pretty obvious that the poster was a fan of so called "Plasma Cosmology". As it happens, I do live in the US, but I'm not actually a US citizen, I didn't grow up here. Anyway, perhaps I'm ignorant, but if you could enlighten me, I would appreciate it. What exactly is European Union theory? :)
Well, actually, in a way, Dark matter is "Hell, I don't know". It's just that it's a bunch of "Hell, I don't know" that fills certain holes in a theory. I'd list all the things that we now understand (better than we did, at least) that were once just "Hell, I don't know" fitting into a hole in a theory, except that I want to finish this post some time this year.
Of course, this theory is about "gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum". I don't know about you, but for me it's hard to tell the difference between the quantum vacuum and a more refined version of the aether. It's sort of like the idea of elemental transmutation as envisioned by ancient alchemists and by modern nuclear physicists. Neither the ancient alchemists nor modern physicists actually have a full explanation for everything that's going on. The modern physicists know a lot more about what's going on, to the point that they can actually transmute lead or other elements into gold in random, but statistically predictable processes, but they still don't know it all. Maybe it will turn out that dark matter is just gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum but then we'll find out that the phenomenon we know as baryonic matter is also just gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum.
"Electric Universe" theorist I take it? Or is it "Plasma Cosmology" now?