Mplayer, libavcodec and x264 are examples of successfull patent-violating software products that have laster for a long while, and not been killed off by patent lawsuits. So it is clearly possible. The key is probably to be distributed, open source and not predominantly based in the USA.
Experiments to breed fruit flies for longevity by only letting them breed after a certain age has produced flies which lived three times as long as normal, if I recall correctly. These had much the same symptoms as the mice: Stronger and more active, even after normal fruit flies would be dead. But with significantly reduced metabolism. This is also similar to how humans who live on a diet that is on the verge of starving them also seem to live longer, but have lower metabolism.
So lowering the metabolism, and making the cells live in slow motion, essentially, seems to be the easiest way to increase life span. But I think it is a boring dead-end in that there is a limit to how much the metabolism can be lowered, and it does not really solve any of the real issues with old age, such as failing repair mechanisms, lack of new cells, telomer limits vs. cancer, etc.
Finance is a huge brain-drain from science, and many young physicists do give up and turn to finance because there aren't enough permanent positions in physics. Personally, I would not have the counscience to work in a field as detrimental to society as finance, though, not matter how high the salary is.
Unlike a fission reactor, only a tiny amount of fuel is held inside a fusion reactor chamber at any time. What happens when containment is lost is that the plasma hits the reactor wall and causes some damage to it, but there is not enough energy in the dilute plasma to breach the wall or even exert much of a push on it. It would be expensive to repair, I'm sure, but definitely no fireball.
But yes, you do end up with a radioactive reactor that needs decommissioning in the end, much like with fission power, though one has some degree of freedom in choosing how long-lived the radioactivity will be based on the composition of the reactor wall coating.
A first generation fusion reactor would take deuterium (from seawater) and lithium (from mining. It is turned into tritium in the reactor walls) as inputs, and produces helium and heat as outputs. So like fission reactors, it still depends on mining for its inputs, though the energy density is higher than for fission.
But when people dream about using fusion to solve the Earth's energy problems, they are probably thinking of using deuterium-deuterium burning or similar, where the input to the power plant is simply sea water, from which deuterium is extracted and fused, producing helium as the waste product. A power plant that needs only small amounts of sea water as input is quite appealing.
Regarding ramscoops, I thought those were considered to be unrealistic due to the difficulty in producing more thrust than the drag from the scoop.
How does creating an element that lasts all of a few hundred milliseconds at most telling us interesting things from the early universe?
Because, oddly enough, many of the things in the early universe are postulated to have been elements which last a few hundred milliseconds.:-P
No heavy elements were created during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, though. Even something as light as lithium was only created in minute amounts, and as far as i know, no elements with millisecond-class halflives were important in this process. Ununpentium is moderately interesting in its own right, but it will not teach us anything about Big Bang Nucleosyntehsis.
Didn't the very video you linked to cast doubt over the Syrian government being responsible for this? After watching that video, I think the case for attacking Syria is weaker, not stronger than before. It is plausible that the responsible for the attack that makes you itch for action are actually the other side in the civil war, the FSA, which the US is supporting.
That was a very interesting comment. I have not been following this case other than what has seeped in by osmosis, but what you are saying sounds both plausible and very different from the picture the media are painting. I'm trying to track down some of your sources, so I can read more about it (it would have been helpful if you had included URLs in your post).
As for the 'collective will of the nations', I'd like to point out that the USA provides the lion's share of expeditionary support to forces in situations like this. We might not have more fighter planes than the rest of the world, but we have more aerial refuelers, more cargo airlift, more transport.
Yes, but you do not have the lion's share of the collective will of the nations. You're basically arguing that one who pays more tax should have more votes. Or possibly that might makes right. You don't think that the richest person in a country should be allowed to override democracy and do whatever he wants, do you? Why should it be OK internationally?
In my opinion, an intervention in Syria would only be legitimate with a mandate from the UN (ideally after disbanding the security concil and the veto rights, and adding some sort of population-weighted voting (not necessarily strictly proportional)).
Germany is one of the worst places in the world for solar power, partially due to the latitude, but mostly due to the cloud coverage. These maps show the effective insolation, taking into account cloud coverage and sun position averaged over a year: Insolation world map, and Germany compared with the USA.
34% is remarkably high when taking into account how cloudy Germany is (and most months do worse than that). It is amazing that Germany has made solar power work as well as it has. Solar power in California would automatically be 2.5 times as economical as it is in Germany, and it would be 3+ times as cheap per W in Australia.
So people shouldn't be thinking "Germany is showing us that solar power is inefficient", but rather "If even Germany can make solar power work, then it will be trivial for everybody else".
I mentioned freenet in the post you just replied to. I like the concept of freenet, but I think anonymity and distributed storage has too great an overhead to be a viable http replacement. But perhaps I'm being pessimistic here.
I agree. A peer-to-peer http replacement would also mean many more websites could get by without advertisements. With the current centralized model, your traffic load and bandwidth expenses grow as your site gets more popular, meaning that most of them end up having to add advertisements as they get big enough (which isn't necessarily that big), not out of any wish to exploit the users to get rich, but to avoid ruining themselves.
The bittorrent protocol solved this problem for large files by making downloaders participate in uploading too, meaning that a single, low-capacity server can serve a practically unlimited number of concurrent downloads. But bittorrent has too high a start-up cost and too high latency to replace http. I am not sure how easy it would be to build a peer-to-peer http replacement that has low enough latency to be useable for html pages etc., and it would not work for cases sites like slashdot etc., where each user sees the site slightly differently.. And of course, there would be the problem of getting enough users for it to be viable. But I think it could be done, and would be valuable once in place.
Of course, one could try to go a bit further too, and make the site data itself distributed and encrypted, to make it censorship-resistant and anonymous. But that would add a huge amount of overhead, as demonstrated by freenet, which has even larger latency issues than bittorrent (if I recall correctly) due to the need to obsufcate the routing. So while something like freenet is good to have, it would also be nice to have something simpler and faster like what you suggested.
No, it does not depend on relative motion. I don't think charging your laptop based on this is going to be a problem, though. Your electric car will have a power outlet for devices like hands free and laptops anyway, so you won't have to invent anything to use this system to charge your laptop - just plug it into your car, and let the car charge the laptop for you. The extra power draw will be equivalent to simply having a slightly bigger car.
Monopoles are predicted by some of the unified theories, so if they exist how come we don't see any?
I think the standard explanation for this is cosmic inflation combined with a high monopole mass.
Inflation, which is hypothesized to have happened very early in the history of the universe, makes the universe expand extremely quickly in a very short period of time, which has the effect of diluting all the particle content in the universe prior to inflation into insignificance. At the end of inflation, the energy that drove the expansion is converted into particles, re-populating the universe with matter.
But what particles can be created this way is limited by the temperature of the universe after inflation. Hence, if magnetic monopoles are too massive, they would not be created after inflation, and the only ones present in the universe would be those that were present originally. And those would be so diluted that one would expect less than one of them inside the visible universe. The same mechanism also deals with other exotic structures such as cosmic strings and domain walls, etc.
Are you assuming that a signal needs to be able to propagate across a whole chip for each clock cycle? Otherwise, I don't see why the speed of light should be a problem here.
Right. And then there are the issues of resolution and survey area. Planck covers the same frequency range as ALMA, but measures the whole sky in total intensity and polarization, for example, and is much better at measuring the CMB than ALMA. So the term "powerful" is an over-simplification.
The Square Kilometer Array will have a *collecting area* of one square kilometer. That means that if you add up the area of all the detectors, you get one square kilometer. Since there is some distance between each detector, the SKA will cover a ground area *much* larger than a square kilometer.
Part of the SKA will be built in the MRO-area in Australia. But it is far from finished - construction won't begin in earnest until 2016 I think. So the most powerful radio telescope in the world is not at MRO now. It is LOFAR in Europe.
I'm also annoyed about the name, and we may now end up in a confusing situation with two independent x265 programs if the x264 developers eventually start working on a h265 encoder too.
Normally 0.25% of the 1973 people (i.e. 4.9325 people) would get thyroid cancer from natural causes. The extra radiation increased this rate by 2%, turning it into 0.255% instead (i.e. 5.0312), with the difference being 0.25%*2% = 0.005% (0.987 people). An increase from 0.25% to 2.25% (which I think is what you're thinking of) would correspond to an 800% increase. While it is conceivable that that is what the grandparent meant, I think it is unlikely. In that case he should have said a 2 percentage point increase, not a 2% increase.
If the grandparent had quoted his sources, it would have been easier to check this.
Doesn't the problem of the muon sticking to the resulting helium nucleus too often pose a more important problem for muon catalyzed fusion than the muon life-time? Would the impossible increase in muon life-time suggested here help muon-catalyzed fusion at all?
You answered exactly what I was planning to ask about, and it is pretty awful journalism that the numbers you quote were omitted from TFA. If I'm interpreting your numbers correctly, that would result in 1973*0.25%*2%*(1-95%) = 0.005 extra thyroid cancer deaths total. Not exactly the picture the article was painting.
Slashdot Mirror
Mplayer, libavcodec and x264 are examples of successfull patent-violating software products that have laster for a long while, and not been killed off by patent lawsuits. So it is clearly possible. The key is probably to be distributed, open source and not predominantly based in the USA.
Experiments to breed fruit flies for longevity by only letting them breed after a certain age has produced flies which lived three times as long as normal, if I recall correctly. These had much the same symptoms as the mice: Stronger and more active, even after normal fruit flies would be dead. But with significantly reduced metabolism. This is also similar to how humans who live on a diet that is on the verge of starving them also seem to live longer, but have lower metabolism.
So lowering the metabolism, and making the cells live in slow motion, essentially, seems to be the easiest way to increase life span. But I think it is a boring dead-end in that there is a limit to how much the metabolism can be lowered, and it does not really solve any of the real issues with old age, such as failing repair mechanisms, lack of new cells, telomer limits vs. cancer, etc.
Ah, the problem being that it doesn't check for negative i, allowing you to write before the start of a. That took me a while to see, actually.
Finance is a huge brain-drain from science, and many young physicists do give up and turn to finance because there aren't enough permanent positions in physics. Personally, I would not have the counscience to work in a field as detrimental to society as finance, though, not matter how high the salary is.
Unlike a fission reactor, only a tiny amount of fuel is held inside a fusion reactor chamber at any time. What happens when containment is lost is that the plasma hits the reactor wall and causes some damage to it, but there is not enough energy in the dilute plasma to breach the wall or even exert much of a push on it. It would be expensive to repair, I'm sure, but definitely no fireball.
But yes, you do end up with a radioactive reactor that needs decommissioning in the end, much like with fission power, though one has some degree of freedom in choosing how long-lived the radioactivity will be based on the composition of the reactor wall coating.
A first generation fusion reactor would take deuterium (from seawater) and lithium (from mining. It is turned into tritium in the reactor walls) as inputs, and produces helium and heat as outputs. So like fission reactors, it still depends on mining for its inputs, though the energy density is higher than for fission.
But when people dream about using fusion to solve the Earth's energy problems, they are probably thinking of using deuterium-deuterium burning or similar, where the input to the power plant is simply sea water, from which deuterium is extracted and fused, producing helium as the waste product. A power plant that needs only small amounts of sea water as input is quite appealing.
Regarding ramscoops, I thought those were considered to be unrealistic due to the difficulty in producing more thrust than the drag from the scoop.
Because, oddly enough, many of the things in the early universe are postulated to have been elements which last a few hundred milliseconds. :-P
No heavy elements were created during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, though. Even something as light as lithium was only created in minute amounts, and as far as i know, no elements with millisecond-class halflives were important in this process. Ununpentium is moderately interesting in its own right, but it will not teach us anything about Big Bang Nucleosyntehsis.
I'm not an expert on USA politics, but many of the small party candidates I've seen seem like they would qualify. How about voting for them?
why we keep spending money interfering with civil wars 1/2 way around the world??
Watch this and tell me if you still think this?
Didn't the very video you linked to cast doubt over the Syrian government being responsible for this? After watching that video, I think the case for attacking Syria is weaker, not stronger than before. It is plausible that the responsible for the attack that makes you itch for action are actually the other side in the civil war, the FSA, which the US is supporting.
That was a very interesting comment. I have not been following this case other than what has seeped in by osmosis, but what you are saying sounds both plausible and very different from the picture the media are painting. I'm trying to track down some of your sources, so I can read more about it (it would have been helpful if you had included URLs in your post).
1. Obama's red line.
2. I can't find the cat video in question on youtube, it seems to drown in videos of the more recent gassing episodes.
3. I think I found a source for the leaked emails, though the paste referred to in that article had been deleted.
4. I found this source for the Feburary home-made Sarin usage by the FSA
5. I this this is the FSA Sarin transport episode. I also did found other similar news from the same source: FSA chemical weapon factory discovered.
6. I found plenty of sources for the kidnapping indicent, including this
As for the 'collective will of the nations', I'd like to point out that the USA provides the lion's share of expeditionary support to forces in situations like this. We might not have more fighter planes than the rest of the world, but we have more aerial refuelers, more cargo airlift, more transport.
Yes, but you do not have the lion's share of the collective will of the nations. You're basically arguing that one who pays more tax should have more votes. Or possibly that might makes right. You don't think that the richest person in a country should be allowed to override democracy and do whatever he wants, do you? Why should it be OK internationally?
In my opinion, an intervention in Syria would only be legitimate with a mandate from the UN (ideally after disbanding the security concil and the veto rights, and adding some sort of population-weighted voting (not necessarily strictly proportional)).
They produced 5.1 TWh/month = 7.1 MW. I wish they had produced 5 TW, but you're off by a factor of 720!
Germany is one of the worst places in the world for solar power, partially due to the latitude, but mostly due to the cloud coverage. These maps show the effective insolation, taking into account cloud coverage and sun position averaged over a year: Insolation world map, and Germany compared with the USA.
34% is remarkably high when taking into account how cloudy Germany is (and most months do worse than that). It is amazing that Germany has made solar power work as well as it has. Solar power in California would automatically be 2.5 times as economical as it is in Germany, and it would be 3+ times as cheap per W in Australia.
So people shouldn't be thinking "Germany is showing us that solar power is inefficient", but rather "If even Germany can make solar power work, then it will be trivial for everybody else".
I mentioned freenet in the post you just replied to. I like the concept of freenet, but I think anonymity and distributed storage has too great an overhead to be a viable http replacement. But perhaps I'm being pessimistic here.
I agree. A peer-to-peer http replacement would also mean many more websites could get by without advertisements. With the current centralized model, your traffic load and bandwidth expenses grow as your site gets more popular, meaning that most of them end up having to add advertisements as they get big enough (which isn't necessarily that big), not out of any wish to exploit the users to get rich, but to avoid ruining themselves.
The bittorrent protocol solved this problem for large files by making downloaders participate in uploading too, meaning that a single, low-capacity server can serve a practically unlimited number of concurrent downloads. But bittorrent has too high a start-up cost and too high latency to replace http. I am not sure how easy it would be to build a peer-to-peer http replacement that has low enough latency to be useable for html pages etc., and it would not work for cases sites like slashdot etc., where each user sees the site slightly differently.. And of course, there would be the problem of getting enough users for it to be viable. But I think it could be done, and would be valuable once in place.
Of course, one could try to go a bit further too, and make the site data itself distributed and encrypted, to make it censorship-resistant and anonymous. But that would add a huge amount of overhead, as demonstrated by freenet, which has even larger latency issues than bittorrent (if I recall correctly) due to the need to obsufcate the routing. So while something like freenet is good to have, it would also be nice to have something simpler and faster like what you suggested.
No, it does not depend on relative motion. I don't think charging your laptop based on this is going to be a problem, though. Your electric car will have a power outlet for devices like hands free and laptops anyway, so you won't have to invent anything to use this system to charge your laptop - just plug it into your car, and let the car charge the laptop for you. The extra power draw will be equivalent to simply having a slightly bigger car.
Monopoles are predicted by some of the unified theories, so if they exist how come we don't see any?
I think the standard explanation for this is cosmic inflation combined with a high monopole mass.
Inflation, which is hypothesized to have happened very early in the history of the universe, makes the universe expand extremely quickly in a very short period of time, which has the effect of diluting all the particle content in the universe prior to inflation into insignificance. At the end of inflation, the energy that drove the expansion is converted into particles, re-populating the universe with matter.
But what particles can be created this way is limited by the temperature of the universe after inflation. Hence, if magnetic monopoles are too massive, they would not be created after inflation, and the only ones present in the universe would be those that were present originally. And those would be so diluted that one would expect less than one of them inside the visible universe. The same mechanism also deals with other exotic structures such as cosmic strings and domain walls, etc.
Are you assuming that a signal needs to be able to propagate across a whole chip for each clock cycle? Otherwise, I don't see why the speed of light should be a problem here.
Right. And then there are the issues of resolution and survey area. Planck covers the same frequency range as ALMA, but measures the whole sky in total intensity and polarization, for example, and is much better at measuring the CMB than ALMA. So the term "powerful" is an over-simplification.
The Square Kilometer Array will have a *collecting area* of one square kilometer. That means that if you add up the area of all the detectors, you get one square kilometer. Since there is some distance between each detector, the SKA will cover a ground area *much* larger than a square kilometer.
Part of the SKA will be built in the MRO-area in Australia. But it is far from finished - construction won't begin in earnest until 2016 I think. So the most powerful radio telescope in the world is not at MRO now. It is LOFAR in Europe.
I'm also annoyed about the name, and we may now end up in a confusing situation with two independent x265 programs if the x264 developers eventually start working on a h265 encoder too.
That should have been 0.0987 people corresponding to 0.005%, of course.
Normally 0.25% of the 1973 people (i.e. 4.9325 people) would get thyroid cancer from natural causes. The extra radiation increased this rate by 2%, turning it into 0.255% instead (i.e. 5.0312), with the difference being 0.25%*2% = 0.005% (0.987 people). An increase from 0.25% to 2.25% (which I think is what you're thinking of) would correspond to an 800% increase. While it is conceivable that that is what the grandparent meant, I think it is unlikely. In that case he should have said a 2 percentage point increase, not a 2% increase.
If the grandparent had quoted his sources, it would have been easier to check this.
Doesn't the problem of the muon sticking to the resulting helium nucleus too often pose a more important problem for muon catalyzed fusion than the muon life-time? Would the impossible increase in muon life-time suggested here help muon-catalyzed fusion at all?
You answered exactly what I was planning to ask about, and it is pretty awful journalism that the numbers you quote were omitted from TFA. If I'm interpreting your numbers correctly, that would result in 1973*0.25%*2%*(1-95%) = 0.005 extra thyroid cancer deaths total. Not exactly the picture the article was painting.
Very interesting article. Thanks for the link!