IIRC, commercial heavy water plants do something that takes advantage of the slight difference in boiling point between D2O and H2O, and do a very delicate fractional distillation, over and over and over. The energy involved to do it is pretty immense, and it would be tough to do except under very carefully controlled conditions. Hydrogen sulfide may also be involved at some point in the process, as well, at least according to this WP article.
Very true - but so what? The OP is correct - deuterium can be refined from water by electrolysis. Electrolysis was the original method, which was later replaced with the fractional distillation method and chemical extraction processes.
Wind or solar energy-farms should be build in gargantuan scales. If one is dubious about such large scaling, just think of Google, they use tens of thousands of computers to power the search machine, all are centrally controlled and maintained.
To that the comparison is apples and oranges is to vastly understate the reality.
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results
on
An Inconvenient Truth
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Of all the nations who agreed to Kyoto, which have kept with their commitments?
Fewer than many people suspect - both the UK and Japan for example, haven't.
I don't know who wrote this (ScuttleMonkey or the OP), but I'll take a swing:
I think that how one reacts to this decision is basically a litmus test for how much one cares about the rule of law.
Not really - because the phrase "the rule of law" does not mean what you think it does. It emphatically does not mean that the law is (as you imply) applied in a mindless manner. It means that a legal framework exists and is followed as the basis for society, and that the law is applied procedurally and equally to all. (We, as a nation, are certainly not perfect at it - but we try pretty hard and mostly suceed.) Our (US, Common Law) system by design allows judges some limited freedom in interpreting and applying the law, they are meant to consider (to some degree) the spirit, meaning, and intent of the law - not merely what is spelled out precisely in black letters. (I.E. the law is not a programming language.)
The reality is that judges make this judgement call on a daily basis - whether to interpret the law in one way, or whether to interpret it in another and toss the problem back into the lap of legislature. Our system even provides the defendant relief from the decisions of an individual judge via the appeals process - where other judges apply their interpretations. And though it provides no relief for the individual, society itself is still protected because the legislature can clarfy its meaning through additional laws or changing existing ones.
Ironically, this court decision may partly help the ACLU and other groups when they challenge other state laws that prohibit the communication of certain types of material "by e-mail" -- they could argue that the definition of "e-mail" is unconstitutionally vague. If the judge peers down at them and says "What the hell are you talking about? Everybody knows what e-mail is", the ACLU can argue, "Not necessarily. The Florida Supreme Court thinks that it includes instant messages. And, Your Honor, since judges are the wisest beings in the universe, if even they can't figure it out, what chance do the rest of us have?"
Again - this is part of the 'rule of law', the appeal to the collective wisdom of judges across time and space. All those books you see in lawyers offices (both IRL and on TV)? Those aren't collections of laws, they are collections of legal decisions. Lawyers study these to learn the logic applied in other cases - and to see how it applies to the case at hand.
Parenthetically speaking - while I'm no longer surprised by the ignorance of the law prevalent among the/. hivemind, this article is a particularly egregious example.
Are SSME and RS-68 both booster engines on LOX/LH2 or not?
Indeed they can be called 'booster engines' I guess, though that is a nonstandard term. But I used the term 'booster', which is a standard one - and doesn't mean engines. To provide an example using this terminology: The F-1 was a 'booster engine', the Saturn V was a booster.
No the OP was right. It is also true of accelerometers. And the fact that they are measuring data during a dog fight it irrelevant, it is the amount of time/distance they are measuring data. They include a random walk error that is small for a short time/distance, but compounds over time. You will find that typically this is corrected with something that can give an absolute position (eg GPS). Your absolute positioning device typically also has a know error. The values from both of these are generally married using a Kalman Filter or Extented Kalmna Filter.
Here's a free clue for you, since you seem to need one so badly. Try actually reading my message and think real hard on what the words means. (Hint: Concentrate on the terms "engineering your system properly". What do you think they means?)
I suggest that you also do some. 4 years of Mechatronic Engineering would be good start.
I've got more than sufficient education on inertial systems, when you get out of high school, look me up.
Oh noes! He was shouting at them to stop harassing him! Get out the billy clubs!
Here in the real world someone who has been resisting arrest - and who continues to resist and maintains the presence of mind after being tazered to argue with the police is a man who is a threat. Period. I don't know how it works in your fuzzy little care bear world though, only that it bears no relation or connection to the real one.
Arguing and yelling aren't fighting. Make the distinction; it's not that hard.
In your cute and fuzzy little world maybe. Sadly, your world bears little relation to reality - as people arguing and fighting, especially after being tazered, are people prone to violence.
Yes, for people who lose their cool when things get loud (as you probably suffer from), it can be hectic.
Your asinine assumption about me is incorrect. Your assement of the situation is once again based on some fuzzy carebear world.
Those people shouldn't be cops.
He swings for the fences and hits three for three!
"Silicon spring" is misleading because it implies there are moving parts within the accelerometer that can break. In actuality, the proof mass is held perfectly still using a feedback loop to cancel the externally applied force. The magnitude of this applied force is read out as the acceleration. No calibration is ever needed thanks to the feedback loop.
Actually - you are only partly right. You still need to calibrate the device in order to determine what magnitude of applied (feedback) force correlates to what magnitude of applied acceleration. (Which I doubt they do for the Wii-mote, as it probably doesn't need that level of accuracy.)
What's up with all the sheeple standing around watching? It's shameful that such a large crowd was too timid to stop the police from doing something so obviously wrong. What exactly would it take to get the crowd to intervene?
Probably two things:
If you watch the video - you can hear the individual abusing the police and resisting them before the tazering, and continuing to do so after the tazering. (I.E. the actions of the police are not 'obviously wrong', even from just the video.)
From the various accounts posted here - the individual was a known troublemaker, (rightly or wrongly) someone unlikely to gain much sympathy.
I will say about this what I said about Rodney King: there is nothing that could have happened before the camera started rolling that could justify what those cops did. I don't care if this guy was Hannibal Lecter; once a suspect is incapacitated, further use of this kind of force is torture, not restraint.
Did you actually watch the video? Because it does not show an incapacitated man - but who after being tasered continued to fighting/arguing and resisting the police.
Now there will no doubt be a flood of whining along the lines of, "Oh cops have such a tough job, and they deal with scumbags all day, and you just don't understaaaand!" Whatever. About, oh, fifteen years ago it was my job to render medical care to a group of people who had quite actively been trying to kill me a little while before, and who would have kept trying if they'd had the chance. And I did it, no tasers or billy clubs or attack dogs or waterboarding required.
Ah - yes. Comparing apples to oranges is so useful. (Remainder of rant, even less related to the topic at hand, snipped.)
It would be cool to incorporate this type of controller into a portable device. You could have portable laser-tag like games with real-time mapping
While it would definitely be cool, you can't really use accelerometers as location devices.
I guess then all those inertial guidance and navigation systems the military has deployed don't really work then? (Or, IOW, you are incorrect. Considerably.) Accelerometers by themselves can't be used as location devices - but if you use a clock and a computer and integrate acceleration over time..., they work just dandy. (For real-world use, you need a stable platform (I.E. gyros) as well.)
They'll generally give you pretty good readings for a single movement, like 'the object just moved 1 meter forwards', however as soon as you turn or travel a long distance, they suffer from drifting, skidding, and general measurement errors.
That's true of odometers, but again with accelerometers it's just a matter of engineering your system properly. (The USAF equips its fighters with inertial navigation systems - and they remain accurate through a bloody dogfight!.)
A different sort of tech would be needed for mapping. You can do some research into Robotics, such Markov Localization, for some more information. GPS and related techs are better for real time location reporting.
I suggest that you do some research on inertial navigation and inertial guidance - because what you say is true at the level of the casual gamer, its not true (as you imply) of accelerometers in general.
The ones used in, say the Trident-II's MK6 guidance, are certainly much larger than these (about the size of a film can) and are 'old style' (asymmetrical floats in fluid) - they are also much more robust and less sensitive to vibration.
Now that's interesting. Is it the fluid that makes them less sensitive to vibration? (It seems like it would be.) In effect, the fluid would be working as a low-pass filter, so only large movements would be detected.
It's partly the fluid, partly the suspension system (the float is partly suspended by it's bouyancy, partly by a magnetic field).
Does the Wii-mote get around the vibration issue by doing the same thing in software? It seems like a Kalman filter would work more or less perfectly, and those are very simple to implement.
I have no idea how (or even if) the Wii-mote isolates vibration. I'd say they want a certain amount of vibration to filter through - as that could determine if player 'x' hooks instead of slices. Tuneable vibration isolation can also be used to set the difficulty level - less isolation as the level increases.
Given the 10+ year development and 20+ year use lifecycles of military equipment it's surprising to see consumer gear _behind_ military tech.
It's hard to actually say who is ahead or behind, partly because tech in the real world isn't a linear scale (like it is in various games), partly because the military deploys such a wide variety of accelerometers. The ones used in, say the Trident-II's MK6 guidance, are certainly much larger than these (about the size of a film can) and are 'old style' (asymmetrical floats in fluid) - they are also much more robust and less sensitive to vibration. (The accelerometers in the MK6 Guidance System are also a neat illustration of the nonlinearity of tech in the real world. It uses an advanced form of the same type used in Polaris - because they are more sensitive and accurate than an advanced form of the (quite advanced in and of themselves) ones used in the MK5 guidance of the Trident-I.)
Why not ask questions of the people at NASA? They have been designing, building, and testing rockets for decades.
Actually - they haven't. The last booster designed by NASA was the Shuttle, back in the 70's. What few efforts they've undertaken since then have been more to keep the teams busy and employed than actually producing useful hardware.
Most arm-chair rocket scientists have no practical experience in doing things on the scale NASA does.
As I state above - they real problem is that NASA doesn't have any practical experience at any scale. The guys who last handled these kinds of problems/systems were the guys who did Apollo - and they are all retired. The Shuttle guys have been all about operations, not R&D on a new[ish] booster system.
The hard reality is that nobody has recent experience in designing new[ish] large boosters. Even the Russians have limited themselves to modest stretches of existing designs, or doing minor retooling on designs from the late 80's or early 90's. The Chinese are using a stretch of either the Long March II ICBM (vintage late 80's or early 90's in design, even earlier in technology) or modifications of the same Soyuz booster the Soviets rely so much on. Niether the Japanese, nor the Indians or the Brazilians have anything this size. Nor is anything better on the ESA side of the house - the Ariane V design also stretches back over fifteen years.
I was terrified by the traffic signs and rules in California. I found the 4 way cross-roads with a stop sign on each entry particularly confusing. It seemed to work on the principle of "everyone knows when it's their turn to go".
In other words - you didn't know the rules, and couldn't be bothered to learn them. (How else do you think everyone knows when its their turn?) There are a few formal rules, and few informal rules - and off you go.
Unbelievably to me, some sites can already ascertain your character using little real info. For example, "www.LikeBetter.com guesses your physical and personality characteristics just by which pictures you like. Every 10 or so pictures you can click on the brain at the bottom and it tells you what it knows about you. I couldn't believe how accurate it was... After about 10 rounds, it had given me 20 characteristics, only 1 was incorrect.
I started from scratch 20 times - not once was what it "knew" (the first time) correct. (And I made no attempt to mislead it.) A further 30 rounds of testing (10 each of clicking all left, all right, or by the roll of a dice) actually was correct 5 times!
This suggests that this is a very crude program that makes it's guesses based on nothing more complex than 'x number of people have picked picture y over picture z - thus you must be _____'. It's not learning or knowing anything - it's merely guessing. (And badly at that.)
As an exercise for my high-school physics students studying energy and momentum conservation, I had them run the numbers on the scenario from the movie "Armageddon" for an asteroid "the size of Texas", taking this to mean in separate cases the area of Texas with a range of densities, etc.
Giving the astronauts every benefit of the doubt (able to intercept it twice as far out as they did in the movie, bomb able to be placed at the center of mass, the bomb having ten times the yield of largest nuke ever exploded by man, perfectly elastic explosion, etc. etc. etc.) they not only couldn't make the asteroid miss the Earth, they would only have changed impact points by about a meter!
Actually - that's pretty sad to hear. Because it means however many classes you've 'taught' this material now go forth into the world more ignorant of asteroid diversion as they were when they came into your classroom. Why? Because you've utterly mislead them about how it works, as your brief description above contains multiple errors.
Your first error - it matters very much when you apply the differential force. Sure, doing it at the last moment won't move the impact point much - duh. In real life, you perform the diversion months, or years before the impact - and orbital mechanics dictates that it doesn't actually take much force (proportionally) to make a huge difference in the impact point over time.
The second error is that you don't bury the bomb in the asteroid - you detonate it at a point some distance over the asteroid. (Why? We'll see that in the next error.)
Lastly the size of the bomb on Earth is nearly irrelevant. The effects of the bomb that we interpret as yield are a direct result of the interaction of the energy (various forms of radiation) released from the bomb with the atmosphere. This is why, by the way, you detonate the bomb away from the asteroid, that energy now interacts with the surface of the asteroid across a broad area - evaporating it and providing the thrust (via Newton's 3rd law) as the evaporated material moves away from the asteroid. (Probably using a bomb with a shaped case to direct the X-rays from the bomb towards the asteroid, much like an Orion pulse unit. Or you could use such a pulse unit directly.)
I love sci-fi movies and like to give my students problems from popular films that illustrate the absurdity of Hollywood stories.
At least in this example - I would not be too proud. You've merely substituted your own absurdity for Hollywood's.
I don't know enough to be able to evaluate the ideas. But from what I know of Tokamak research, it deserves every helping of scorn that he heaps upon it. It has been a ridiculously expensive failure. About as useful for advancing the cause of fusion power as string theory has been for advancing our understanding of physics.
I just love it when people say "I dont know crap about x" - and then proceed to have an opinion on x anyhow, and act as if it should be taken as a valid one.
This post of yours is very elegantly written and completely trashes Mr. Bussard. In its way, it's exactly the same level of attack as he levels against other fusion research.
No - it's exactly *different* than Mr Bussard's attack, in that it lays out his specific failures and behaviors that trip the 'kook' flag. Whereas Mr Bussard's attack is nothing but mudflinging and blaming unspecified others in the goverment for not funding his research - even though he cannot (or will not) actually demonstrate he has something worth funding. (This is, in and of itself, reason to apply the 'kook' label.)
Especially when traditional fusion research has been promising results in 20 years for upwards of 40 years.
I just knew this petulant and ignorant whine would show up [whiny voice] But the promised, they did! They did![/whiny voice] Grow the fuck up - R&D isn't amenable to precise scheduling and prediction, especially when working at the frontiers of science and technology.
Mr. Bussard wants 1/75th of the budget. Let him have it and see if he can produce something repeatable.
At best he deserves a couple of thousand for a few copies for a paper ready to be submitted for peer review. Demanding money, and refusing to supply the data required to determine what that funding is to be used for is ludicrous.
One last point that I remember from the article was a discussion of the quenching fluids. For the final quenching, the poem describes killing a slave by driving the steel into his chest. The authors, noting the current shortage of slaves, concluded that a saline solution held at 98 degrees Fahrenheit was the salient factor in the quenching fluid.
Which is interesting - because water doesn't really quench all that well. (The boiling process forms a layer of steam that reduces the heat transfer rate - you have to stir vigourously to reduce this effect.)
No, Nationalism will carry the day in the exploration of space; Capitalism takes the easiest route to profit while Nationalism appeals to group notions of one-upmanship and achievement: witness China, who's 'Communist' ideology is strongly nationalist. They are putting people into space to show how fantastic they are, and don't care much less about the bottom line.
Actually, the Chinese demonstrably do care about the bottom line. They spend just enough on manned space to show that they can do it, and thus are a Great Nation - and not a yuan more. (The pace of their program is so slow that it cannot even properly be called 'glacial' - as that implies actual motion howsoever slow.)
Slashdot Mirror
Very true - but so what? The OP is correct - deuterium can be refined from water by electrolysis. Electrolysis was the original method, which was later replaced with the fractional distillation method and chemical extraction processes.
To that the comparison is apples and oranges is to vastly understate the reality.
Fewer than many people suspect - both the UK and Japan for example, haven't.
Not really - because the phrase "the rule of law" does not mean what you think it does. It emphatically does not mean that the law is (as you imply) applied in a mindless manner. It means that a legal framework exists and is followed as the basis for society, and that the law is applied procedurally and equally to all. (We, as a nation, are certainly not perfect at it - but we try pretty hard and mostly suceed.) Our (US, Common Law) system by design allows judges some limited freedom in interpreting and applying the law, they are meant to consider (to some degree) the spirit, meaning, and intent of the law - not merely what is spelled out precisely in black letters. (I.E. the law is not a programming language.)
The reality is that judges make this judgement call on a daily basis - whether to interpret the law in one way, or whether to interpret it in another and toss the problem back into the lap of legislature. Our system even provides the defendant relief from the decisions of an individual judge via the appeals process - where other judges apply their interpretations. And though it provides no relief for the individual, society itself is still protected because the legislature can clarfy its meaning through additional laws or changing existing ones.
Again - this is part of the 'rule of law', the appeal to the collective wisdom of judges across time and space. All those books you see in lawyers offices (both IRL and on TV)? Those aren't collections of laws, they are collections of legal decisions. Lawyers study these to learn the logic applied in other cases - and to see how it applies to the case at hand.
Parenthetically speaking - while I'm no longer surprised by the ignorance of the law prevalent among the
Both are stretches of existing equipment - the only thing 'new' on the Delta-IV is the CBC.
Indeed they can be called 'booster engines' I guess, though that is a nonstandard term. But I used the term 'booster', which is a standard one - and doesn't mean engines. To provide an example using this terminology: The F-1 was a 'booster engine', the Saturn V was a booster.
ROTFLMAO.
Here's a free clue for you, since you seem to need one so badly. Try actually reading my message and think real hard on what the words means. (Hint: Concentrate on the terms "engineering your system properly". What do you think they means?)
I've got more than sufficient education on inertial systems, when you get out of high school, look me up.
Here in the real world someone who has been resisting arrest - and who continues to resist and maintains the presence of mind after being tazered to argue with the police is a man who is a threat. Period. I don't know how it works in your fuzzy little care bear world though, only that it bears no relation or connection to the real one.
In your cute and fuzzy little world maybe. Sadly, your world bears little relation to reality - as people arguing and fighting, especially after being tazered, are people prone to violence.
Your asinine assumption about me is incorrect. Your assement of the situation is once again based on some fuzzy carebear world.
He swings for the fences and hits three for three!
Actually - you are only partly right. You still need to calibrate the device in order to determine what magnitude of applied (feedback) force correlates to what magnitude of applied acceleration. (Which I doubt they do for the Wii-mote, as it probably doesn't need that level of accuracy.)
Probably two things:
Right - that's why I've seen videos of people being tazered, and continuing to stand.
Given that he was in a mental state to talk (shout) clearly, and to respond clearly to the officers - I'd say the answer is yes.
Did you actually watch the video? Because it does not show an incapacitated man - but who after being tasered continued to fighting/arguing and resisting the police.
Ah - yes. Comparing apples to oranges is so useful. (Remainder of rant, even less related to the topic at hand, snipped.)
Apples, oranges. Lightbulb, shopping mall. Engines, boosters.
I guess then all those inertial guidance and navigation systems the military has deployed don't really work then? (Or, IOW, you are incorrect. Considerably.) Accelerometers by themselves can't be used as location devices - but if you use a clock and a computer and integrate acceleration over time..., they work just dandy. (For real-world use, you need a stable platform (I.E. gyros) as well.)
That's true of odometers, but again with accelerometers it's just a matter of engineering your system properly. (The USAF equips its fighters with inertial navigation systems - and they remain accurate through a bloody dogfight!.)
I suggest that you do some research on inertial navigation and inertial guidance - because what you say is true at the level of the casual gamer, its not true (as you imply) of accelerometers in general.
It's partly the fluid, partly the suspension system (the float is partly suspended by it's bouyancy, partly by a magnetic field).
I have no idea how (or even if) the Wii-mote isolates vibration. I'd say they want a certain amount of vibration to filter through - as that could determine if player 'x' hooks instead of slices. Tuneable vibration isolation can also be used to set the difficulty level - less isolation as the level increases.
It's hard to actually say who is ahead or behind, partly because tech in the real world isn't a linear scale (like it is in various games), partly because the military deploys such a wide variety of accelerometers. The ones used in, say the Trident-II's MK6 guidance, are certainly much larger than these (about the size of a film can) and are 'old style' (asymmetrical floats in fluid) - they are also much more robust and less sensitive to vibration. (The accelerometers in the MK6 Guidance System are also a neat illustration of the nonlinearity of tech in the real world. It uses an advanced form of the same type used in Polaris - because they are more sensitive and accurate than an advanced form of the (quite advanced in and of themselves) ones used in the MK5 guidance of the Trident-I.)
Actually - they haven't. The last booster designed by NASA was the Shuttle, back in the 70's. What few efforts they've undertaken since then have been more to keep the teams busy and employed than actually producing useful hardware.
As I state above - they real problem is that NASA doesn't have any practical experience at any scale. The guys who last handled these kinds of problems/systems were the guys who did Apollo - and they are all retired. The Shuttle guys have been all about operations, not R&D on a new[ish] booster system.
The hard reality is that nobody has recent experience in designing new[ish] large boosters. Even the Russians have limited themselves to modest stretches of existing designs, or doing minor retooling on designs from the late 80's or early 90's. The Chinese are using a stretch of either the Long March II ICBM (vintage late 80's or early 90's in design, even earlier in technology) or modifications of the same Soyuz booster the Soviets rely so much on. Niether the Japanese, nor the Indians or the Brazilians have anything this size. Nor is anything better on the ESA side of the house - the Ariane V design also stretches back over fifteen years.
In other words - you didn't know the rules, and couldn't be bothered to learn them. (How else do you think everyone knows when its their turn?) There are a few formal rules, and few informal rules - and off you go.
I started from scratch 20 times - not once was what it "knew" (the first time) correct. (And I made no attempt to mislead it.) A further 30 rounds of testing (10 each of clicking all left, all right, or by the roll of a dice) actually was correct 5 times!
This suggests that this is a very crude program that makes it's guesses based on nothing more complex than 'x number of people have picked picture y over picture z - thus you must be _____'. It's not learning or knowing anything - it's merely guessing. (And badly at that.)
Actually - that's pretty sad to hear. Because it means however many classes you've 'taught' this material now go forth into the world more ignorant of asteroid diversion as they were when they came into your classroom. Why? Because you've utterly mislead them about how it works, as your brief description above contains multiple errors.
Your first error - it matters very much when you apply the differential force. Sure, doing it at the last moment won't move the impact point much - duh. In real life, you perform the diversion months, or years before the impact - and orbital mechanics dictates that it doesn't actually take much force (proportionally) to make a huge difference in the impact point over time.
The second error is that you don't bury the bomb in the asteroid - you detonate it at a point some distance over the asteroid. (Why? We'll see that in the next error.)
Lastly the size of the bomb on Earth is nearly irrelevant. The effects of the bomb that we interpret as yield are a direct result of the interaction of the energy (various forms of radiation) released from the bomb with the atmosphere. This is why, by the way, you detonate the bomb away from the asteroid, that energy now interacts with the surface of the asteroid across a broad area - evaporating it and providing the thrust (via Newton's 3rd law) as the evaporated material moves away from the asteroid. (Probably using a bomb with a shaped case to direct the X-rays from the bomb towards the asteroid, much like an Orion pulse unit. Or you could use such a pulse unit directly.)
At least in this example - I would not be too proud. You've merely substituted your own absurdity for Hollywood's.
I just love it when people say "I dont know crap about x" - and then proceed to have an opinion on x anyhow, and act as if it should be taken as a valid one.
No - it's exactly *different* than Mr Bussard's attack, in that it lays out his specific failures and behaviors that trip the 'kook' flag. Whereas Mr Bussard's attack is nothing but mudflinging and blaming unspecified others in the goverment for not funding his research - even though he cannot (or will not) actually demonstrate he has something worth funding. (This is, in and of itself, reason to apply the 'kook' label.)
I just knew this petulant and ignorant whine would show up [whiny voice] But the promised, they did! They did![/whiny voice] Grow the fuck up - R&D isn't amenable to precise scheduling and prediction, especially when working at the frontiers of science and technology.
At best he deserves a couple of thousand for a few copies for a paper ready to be submitted for peer review. Demanding money, and refusing to supply the data required to determine what that funding is to be used for is ludicrous.
Which is interesting - because water doesn't really quench all that well. (The boiling process forms a layer of steam that reduces the heat transfer rate - you have to stir vigourously to reduce this effect.)
Actually, the Chinese demonstrably do care about the bottom line. They spend just enough on manned space to show that they can do it, and thus are a Great Nation - and not a yuan more. (The pace of their program is so slow that it cannot even properly be called 'glacial' - as that implies actual motion howsoever slow.)