At a client of mine from my old freelance days, the old UPS for the server room had 2 Farad 1200V caps in it.
About fifty of them wired in parallel to a bus bar.
If you were to brush against the bus bar it would definitely kill you. They had to have a professional come out and discharge it because they needed to swap some of the caps into the new UPS (same model chosen for compatible caps). He said the bus was still reading 250V on it... this was five years after it ws retired.
Is that comparable to a power supply? No, but it is possible for caps to hold their charge for a LONG time... especially in heavy duty industrial designs, which Sun was fond of using (not sure about clones however)
Sure, there are big capacitors in there, but after a couple of days, even these have trickled to a full discharge.
On some industrial designs the voltage regulator caps can hold quite a large charge with very little leakage current. I've seen people play around with 5 year old power supplies in our equipment graveyard and get shocked badly (when you can smell burnt hair, it's bad)
Flip side, the discharge procedure is simple. Buy a rubber gripped insulated screwdriver (make SURE it says that on the package) and use it to discharge all the caps before you start work. If you want to get super fancy I made a tool with a low ohm high wattage resistor built in and rubberized the handle with layers of liquid latex and epoxy (the epoxy provides a discharge barrier as well as a firm grip... liquid latex can be porous...)
And it comes with a stereo handsfree kit (for the MP3 player, obviously, but it works for phone calls too)
$50 with a contract at the time I got it (simultaneously Cingular was offering $0 with a contract)
Complaints: the screen is 128x128. The O/S is kind of clunky (Series 40). It's only running J2ME MIDP 1.0 (with some extensions to access the MP3 playing circuitry and send SMS messages). The phone is not really suited to speaking into like a normal phone. It's shaped like the N-Gage but it's NOT a sidetalker. Still, the headphones are infinitely more comfortable to use for any period of time.
Downside: it's discontinued now
Plus: they've released the new version. I believe the new version fixes most of the issues above, including running Series 40 2.0 (J2ME MIDP 2.0)
Ok I know this is probably the kind of question you answer all day long, but I thought I'd ask anyways as I'm sure there are members of the slashdot community that are interested in the answer:
What's it take to get you to look at my indie / small design team game? I've always enjoyed your "game round up" posts and wondered how the little guy gets in, or is this an invitation only kind of event? And I'm not trying to infer that you would make a dishonest review with this following question, only that I understand your time is probably stretched thin, so... What kind of bribe is required to ensure coverage? Bottles of liquor, prostitutes, free hardware?
In order to tack, you need to be able to hold a sail at 45 degrees to the wind, while holding your vessel pointing towards the wind, with a predisposition to move in that direction (supplied by the hull/daggerboard) which, while feasibly possible with a solar sail, would be an engineering feat, to say the very least.
not feasibly possible the way you describe it. There is no hull, there's no viscuous medium. Sailboats tack by transferring momentum to the water through the keel or whatever.
Solar sails can't do that. If we could build a solar sail that could do that, we could build a warp drive, because what you're talking about is a reactionless thruster.
Now what we CAN do is in fact even easier. Through out the sailboat metaphor. You've got a flat sheet with a significant amount of radiation pressure on it, with a central mass with quite a bit of orbital inertia.
You *can* tack against that orbital inertia, using the radiation pressure to keep the sail taut. Change the lengths of the cables connecting the sail to the inertial mass and you can change the direction that the radiation pressure is thrusting you in, up to about 45 degrees away from out in either direction.
See my other post in this story for a discussion of how to use that thrust to move closer to the sun.
How can they brink it back? The sail catches the particles emitted by the sun, and is driven forward by them. Inside the solar system, the direction of these particles is outward. Their speed/impuls is larger than that of extra solar system particles coming in. Anyway, the net effect is a wind blowing out of the solar system. No way to bring it back in the same way it got there.
That would be true if everything didn't orbit the sun.
Which it does.
Remember, when you're orbiting, if you increase velocity in the direction of orbit, you move out. If you decrease velocity in the direction of orbit, you move in.
How do you do that with a solar wind that blows in neither direction?
Same way that landsails go three times the speed of the wind that drives them; vector math.
Put more appropriately, the vector force on the craft is related to the incident angle at which the particles impact the sail. Tilt the sail, tilt that angle. By reflecting the solar wind partially ahead of you, you slow your orbital velocity, causing your orbit to shrink.
That's how a solar sail navigates in a solar system. Remember that if you thrust straight away from the sun, you just make your orbit more and more elliptical until you reach escape velocity. You can't just catch the solar wind and ride it out, you have to use it to increase your orbital velocity.
Hives are pretty warm places. Fermenting pollen is an exothermic reaction. I wonder if that helps bees survive in suboptimal temperatures?
Responding to the parent, insects don't generally die when their metabolic rate slows down. They're not wind up clocks, ticking at the same rate day after day. Colder outside? Okay, not as much energy to work with... that doesn't mean there's NO energy and that death is the next logical step. Sure there may not even be enough energy to fly, but the great thing about honey is that it keeps for a long time, and an insect in low metabolic mode doesn't need to eat that much.
Mammals need special chemicals and hormones to hibernate. Insects and other cold blooded animals don't. And some of these animals do have "idle speeds", basic levels of metabolic activity that have to be maintained for cellular life and self-repair to occur at a sufficient rate. Most insects do not have a metabolism that requires a certain base level of activity, and that's why you can thaw an insect and watch it get up and run around.
And let's not delude ourselves. It's not that pollinating plants died out. It's that they became extremely scarce. As I'm sure honeybees and most other life did as well.
Who knows? That's like asking if I smell greener than the average person... it's a subjective measurement.
What I do know is that many people don't feel they have the analytical skills necessary to do what I do. And I also know that many people try and are mentally incapable of reaching the skill level that I clearly demonstrate.
So yeah, if you define that as "smarter", then there's pretty good evidence that programmers are smarter than the average person.
Personally, and this is something I am intimately aware of, I think that everyone has roughly the same capacity for intelligence, and it's all about what everything is devoted to. I was born with a mind that devoted most of its resources to recall, at the expense of some of the communication circuitry. In fields where memory recall is king, I excel. In everything else I seem at times to be quite unintelligent.
Pardon, but every organism in the world does DNA self-repair. If they didn't there would be almost NO succesful reproduction. von Neumann considered self-repair to be one of the three crucial elements of a self-preproducing machine (the other two are reproduction and self-diagnosis).
I was unaware of that. However, this is still unique in that its a virus that does DNA self-repair...
If you look carefully, you'll notice that the body itself is an airfoil, with two horizontal control surfaces out of the back.
I'm guessing the handle plus the square dome on top (which if you notice is completely hollow) function as vertical stabilizers.
But yeah if you look at his flight, his stall angle is very close to vertical. I'd say about a 80 degree angle of attack... indicating that the engine is in fact providing most of the lift throughout flight... he's definitely doing some fancy tricks with those stabilizers to keep the lift up. When he goes into level flight is in the middle of the video when he bounces off the ground hahaha
Amazing research, though when they talk about reaching fusion temperatures, it looks to me like they're talking about modeling the fusion reaction of a Hydrogen Bomb, not creating a safe, clean power source.
They recognize as a side effect that they are refining plasma physics models and if you look at their experimental logs (troll around on their site a little and you'll see it), you can find experiments being run that are definitely designed to measure the physics of fusion temperature plasmas, with the stated goal of developing control algorithms for tokamaks.
ok now onto the <rant type=biased>
Tokamaks are fundamentally stupid ideas for two reasons. First off, ALL of the designs that are currently being discussed for funding and prototyping suffer transmutation of structural members. It takes a huge energy cost to get a tokamak started, and the designs that're being discussed undergo transmutation due to neutron and proton bombardment. Structural elements that are vital to the safe operating of the reactor will have to be replaced on a regular (6-18mo) basis to prevent a failure mode.
Which brings us to the second reason. You've got a big ring of extremely high-temperature, high-pressure, high-charge fluid material. Due to that charge, that ring is going to be fundamentally unstable. They're talking about controlling that with dynamic feedback electromagnet rings. The problem being that there's a stability jumping problem. And at the energies involved, quantum effects are very nearly on the scale necessary to jump to different stability modes.
Of course all the alternative stability modes result in the plasma stream contacting the reactor wall. Which will result in burn-through. I don't think the behaviour will be bomb-like (unlike a fission reactor, this failure mode is self-quenching), but it's still a catastrophic failure mode and probably will spread radioactive material all over the place. Think chernobyl-style quarantine without the explosion at the beginning.
Combine the two and I think you'll see why I say that a tokamak is a fundamentally stupid idea. </rant>
Not that there's anything wrong with rewriting MULE. Personally I'd love to see a slightly more open MMO game based on it. The only real addition to the model would be to have multiple town centers, and let the players do inter-center trading themselves (for whatever profit they can eke out)
Hmmm DNA computer template?
on
A Truly Alive Virus
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Wow this virus is self contained, has 800 kilobase pairs, can replicate its own proteins, uses a circular genome (think of a turing machine tape), and is capable of DNA self-repair, unlike every other organism in the world. And the scientists believe that over 90% of its DNA is actively used throughout its lifecycle.
Sounds like an ideal building block for a genetic computer. I'm half-seriously wondering based on that 90% figure if it is in fact the left over of some pre-historic genetic computer?
There are more mysteries here; the virus has genes common to all cellular life, but it itself is clearly not cellular. Unless this virus is a close relative of some precursor virus that initially combined with a bacteria to from the first nucelied cell, then this is an EXTREMELY improbable occurance.
I mean form follows function, but in this case the form is present but not necessarily the function... parallel evolution doesn't really explain that...
All the same, if I was a genetic computing microbiologist I'd be very interested in this guy...
From the stationary twin's perspective, the high speed twin slowed down. From the high speed twin's perspective, the stationary twin (who wasn't stationary from the high speed twin's perspective) slowed down. Yet both cannot be true.
So Einstein reasoned out that the ONLY difference between the twins was who felt the acceleration - that twin would slow down.
It's not about who felt the acceleration, well it is but in a round about way...
It's about whose frame of reference they meet in. For either twin to meet the other, that twin must come into the other's frame of reference.
Of course the only way to do so is to accelerate. But this way of looking at it better explains WHY that is so.
There's tons of open-source, free, and moderately priced (three different categories) software for this out there. And they all get around the issue you describe by supporting an IR transmitter, letting it control the digital cable / sattelite receiver.
There's even plans for building your own transmitter homebrew for about $10
Any interest in possible future movie deals? Are you in talks with anyone at the moment? I imagine a SCIFI miniseries of cryptonomicon would be quite well received; though my secret wish is to see Snow Crash incarnate (without looking like a cheap attempt to work the words "Virtual Reality" into the plot as much as possible)
If you were looking at a visual representation of any of your fiction, which would you choose to pursue, assuming that the studio was adept enough to render any of your works true to your vision? What format (feature-length / mini-series / series) ? Any favorites for leading roles? Would you retain creative control? Would you update any story elements? (for instance, the MetaVerse)
The efficiency and capacity of the fuel cell is based on how much hydrogen you can push through it. methanol is a lot easier to catalyse into raw hydrogen than ethanol is, and that's why you see it and not ethanol in fuel cell designs... IIRC from my AP organic chem:
methanol: CH4COOH
ethanol: C2H6COOH (more like H3CCH3COOH in diagramatic form)
God I hope I remembered those right. I'm just askin for a beatdown...
1. The car will be driven continuously 2. The car will be driven only during sunlight
And left out one big fact:
photvoltaics are only about 20% efficient
If they can cheaply make photovoltaics closer to 50% efficiency I think the spreadsheet starts looking quite good. I drive about 20 minutes per workday. When I used to live out of town I would drive about an hour and a half on a workday.
During the winter solstice, most everywhere in america can expect at least eight hours of insolation. Assume that half the days I run at zero efficiency and half the days I run at maximum efficiency, and I'm still at... 20 hours of good sunlight a workweek. Assuming a 50% pv efficiency that gives me (assuming I live in Seattle, which I don't) about 500 kWh a workweek to play with.
My moderately fuel efficient Saturn will therefore be able to go approximately 400 miles on that. How many people drive 400 miles in a workweek? Will the spare (plus what gets generated over the weekend) be enough for whatever leisure activities you want to do in the weekend?
Hmm let's look at it from a different standpoint...
Assumptions: 1. The average daily length yearlong is 12 hours 2. The weather is good 50% of the time. The rest of the time, zero power is generated. This happens with a random distribution throughout the year (i.e. no rainy season) 3. The insolation a car experiences is 49.5 kW 4. The car targetted gets a 30 mpg gas
Assuming a 100% end to end conversion efficiency (PV, storage, gasoline vs. hydrogen efficiency in burning in the internal combustion engine), that's 240 miles a day. I would expect current systems are more like %10 efficient, with a total of about %25 efficiency possible using current or near-future technologies.
That's marginally acceptable. But even then, the storage system is the real limit. Sure you might get a surplus of about 100 miles a week, but that doesn't help you if you can't store it...
I'm wondering why they didn't go completely closed system on it... store the oxygen and the hydrogen, inject them together into the pistons, run the exhaust through a condenser...
If not that, I hope they're still recovering the water vapor with a condensor, though it seems wasteful to just outgas that oxygen...
Doesn't it make sense to just run a small electric motor with, wich would make the vehicle weigh much less. I guess this would work only if they plan this to be an add-on modules to the already existing hydrogen cars.
Batteries have very poor power densities compared to chemical fuels. Not only that, but this energy storage system is built of base metals and plastics. Batteries usually have pretty toxic components (like the two major components in lead-acid batteries)
When you add in memory effects... most automotive batteries are not meant to EVER be discharged fully... hydrogen as an energy storage medium makes more sense.
And it's even better that you can convert an existing car for it. Please note: this was *not* a hydrogen engine when they bought it, they modified it for hydrogen. It'll still run gasoline too. Next time try to RTFA before you post...
Now all that said, there is no one "ideal" alternative fuel car. But if I were to build one, I'd probably use hydrogen for energy storage, fuel cells for energy conversion, and inline motors/generators integrated into each wheel hub. Oh and scrap the two tons of steel, replace it with a couple hundred pounds of polystyrene and fiberglass ala Burt Rutan...
I guess expecting intelligent engineering out of a software company that is MS-centric is a bit of a stretch, though.
Ummm... maybe, just maybe, other users don't matter to them? It may surprise you but if you write a programming tool that only runs in Windows on IE, isn't it realistic to expect that your potential customers will be running some flavor of the same?
And I take umbrage at your comment. I work for an MS-centric software company. I happen to think we do quite intelligent engineering.
There are slashdot readers that run *gasp* the best operating system around. Argue about Linux all day long. Sure its open source. Sure its better for some things. But when you want all around ease of use and integration, you can't beat a monolithic software company just by throwing more code monkeys at the problem. Bizzar building makes sense in some cases, but Cathedrals are still damn nice at the end of the day, even if they cost more.
Slashdot Mirror
At a client of mine from my old freelance days, the old UPS for the server room had 2 Farad 1200V caps in it.
About fifty of them wired in parallel to a bus bar.
If you were to brush against the bus bar it would definitely kill you. They had to have a professional come out and discharge it because they needed to swap some of the caps into the new UPS (same model chosen for compatible caps). He said the bus was still reading 250V on it... this was five years after it ws retired.
Is that comparable to a power supply? No, but it is possible for caps to hold their charge for a LONG time... especially in heavy duty industrial designs, which Sun was fond of using (not sure about clones however)
Sure, there are big capacitors in there, but after a couple of days, even these have trickled to a full discharge.
On some industrial designs the voltage regulator caps can hold quite a large charge with very little leakage current. I've seen people play around with 5 year old power supplies in our equipment graveyard and get shocked badly (when you can smell burnt hair, it's bad)
Flip side, the discharge procedure is simple. Buy a rubber gripped insulated screwdriver (make SURE it says that on the package) and use it to discharge all the caps before you start work. If you want to get super fancy I made a tool with a low ohm high wattage resistor built in and rubberized the handle with layers of liquid latex and epoxy (the epoxy provides a discharge barrier as well as a firm grip... liquid latex can be porous...)
Nokia 3300 is what I use.
alphabetic keyboard, E-mail, IM, SMS, phone, MP3, voice recorder, wireless web, and J2ME.
And it comes with a stereo handsfree kit (for the MP3 player, obviously, but it works for phone calls too)
$50 with a contract at the time I got it (simultaneously Cingular was offering $0 with a contract)
Complaints: the screen is 128x128. The O/S is kind of clunky (Series 40). It's only running J2ME MIDP 1.0 (with some extensions to access the MP3 playing circuitry and send SMS messages). The phone is not really suited to speaking into like a normal phone. It's shaped like the N-Gage but it's NOT a sidetalker. Still, the headphones are infinitely more comfortable to use for any period of time.
Downside: it's discontinued now
Plus: they've released the new version. I believe the new version fixes most of the issues above, including running Series 40 2.0 (J2ME MIDP 2.0)
Of course I haven't held one in my hands, so YMMV
There HAS been some success in using high intensity visible and short-wave em to photograph the chips inside smartcards, reading out the ROMs.
I even seem to remember someone who had developped a method to read the contents of flash RAM inside the smartcard...
Ok I know this is probably the kind of question you answer all day long, but I thought I'd ask anyways as I'm sure there are members of the slashdot community that are interested in the answer:
What's it take to get you to look at my indie / small design team game? I've always enjoyed your "game round up" posts and wondered how the little guy gets in, or is this an invitation only kind of event? And I'm not trying to infer that you would make a dishonest review with this following question, only that I understand your time is probably stretched thin, so... What kind of bribe is required to ensure coverage? Bottles of liquor, prostitutes, free hardware?
In order to tack, you need to be able to hold a sail at 45 degrees to the wind, while holding your vessel pointing towards the wind, with a predisposition to move in that direction (supplied by the hull/daggerboard) which, while feasibly possible with a solar sail, would be an engineering feat, to say the very least.
not feasibly possible the way you describe it. There is no hull, there's no viscuous medium. Sailboats tack by transferring momentum to the water through the keel or whatever.
Solar sails can't do that. If we could build a solar sail that could do that, we could build a warp drive, because what you're talking about is a reactionless thruster.
Now what we CAN do is in fact even easier. Through out the sailboat metaphor. You've got a flat sheet with a significant amount of radiation pressure on it, with a central mass with quite a bit of orbital inertia.
You *can* tack against that orbital inertia, using the radiation pressure to keep the sail taut. Change the lengths of the cables connecting the sail to the inertial mass and you can change the direction that the radiation pressure is thrusting you in, up to about 45 degrees away from out in either direction.
See my other post in this story for a discussion of how to use that thrust to move closer to the sun.
How can they brink it back?
The sail catches the particles emitted by the sun, and is driven forward by them.
Inside the solar system, the direction of these particles is outward. Their speed/impuls is larger than that of extra solar system particles coming in.
Anyway, the net effect is a wind blowing out of the solar system.
No way to bring it back in the same way it got there.
That would be true if everything didn't orbit the sun.
Which it does.
Remember, when you're orbiting, if you increase velocity in the direction of orbit, you move out. If you decrease velocity in the direction of orbit, you move in.
How do you do that with a solar wind that blows in neither direction?
Same way that landsails go three times the speed of the wind that drives them; vector math.
Put more appropriately, the vector force on the craft is related to the incident angle at which the particles impact the sail. Tilt the sail, tilt that angle. By reflecting the solar wind partially ahead of you, you slow your orbital velocity, causing your orbit to shrink.
That's how a solar sail navigates in a solar system. Remember that if you thrust straight away from the sun, you just make your orbit more and more elliptical until you reach escape velocity. You can't just catch the solar wind and ride it out, you have to use it to increase your orbital velocity.
For a second I thought a hot nightclub got wiped off the planet and my chances of procreating in this world went down a notch or something...*phew*
That statement presumes that if there was said nightclub, some girl in it might want to procreate with you in the first place!
*zing*
Hives are pretty warm places. Fermenting pollen is an exothermic reaction. I wonder if that helps bees survive in suboptimal temperatures?
Responding to the parent, insects don't generally die when their metabolic rate slows down. They're not wind up clocks, ticking at the same rate day after day. Colder outside? Okay, not as much energy to work with... that doesn't mean there's NO energy and that death is the next logical step. Sure there may not even be enough energy to fly, but the great thing about honey is that it keeps for a long time, and an insect in low metabolic mode doesn't need to eat that much.
Mammals need special chemicals and hormones to hibernate. Insects and other cold blooded animals don't. And some of these animals do have "idle speeds", basic levels of metabolic activity that have to be maintained for cellular life and self-repair to occur at a sufficient rate. Most insects do not have a metabolism that requires a certain base level of activity, and that's why you can thaw an insect and watch it get up and run around.
And let's not delude ourselves. It's not that pollinating plants died out. It's that they became extremely scarce. As I'm sure honeybees and most other life did as well.
it has an Antec quiet case and a SATA (that I like to think is quiter than a standard IDE 7200 RPM ChugMaster).
Hmmm let's think about this for a second...
SATA is Serial ATA, a bus format.
Other formats are IDE, E-IDE, etc.
Do SATA drives spin? Sure they do...
Do they spin as fast as non-SATA drives? Sure they do...
What's different on them? The bus...
Does the bus make any noise? No...
So why exactly do you think that SATA matters one way or the other on noise?
Oh and these drives, if they ever become more than a pipe dream, would almost certainly vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies.
Am I smarter than the average person?
Who knows? That's like asking if I smell greener than the average person... it's a subjective measurement.
What I do know is that many people don't feel they have the analytical skills necessary to do what I do. And I also know that many people try and are mentally incapable of reaching the skill level that I clearly demonstrate.
So yeah, if you define that as "smarter", then there's pretty good evidence that programmers are smarter than the average person.
Personally, and this is something I am intimately aware of, I think that everyone has roughly the same capacity for intelligence, and it's all about what everything is devoted to. I was born with a mind that devoted most of its resources to recall, at the expense of some of the communication circuitry. In fields where memory recall is king, I excel. In everything else I seem at times to be quite unintelligent.
In addition, FC-77 liquid is chemically stable, nonflammable and practically non-toxic
It's also a couple hundred dollars a gallon
Pardon, but every organism in the world does DNA self-repair. If they didn't there would be almost NO succesful reproduction. von Neumann considered self-repair to be one of the three crucial elements of a self-preproducing machine (the other two are reproduction and self-diagnosis).
I was unaware of that. However, this is still unique in that its a virus that does DNA self-repair...
If you look carefully, you'll notice that the body itself is an airfoil, with two horizontal control surfaces out of the back.
I'm guessing the handle plus the square dome on top (which if you notice is completely hollow) function as vertical stabilizers.
But yeah if you look at his flight, his stall angle is very close to vertical. I'd say about a 80 degree angle of attack... indicating that the engine is in fact providing most of the lift throughout flight... he's definitely doing some fancy tricks with those stabilizers to keep the lift up. When he goes into level flight is in the middle of the video when he bounces off the ground hahaha
Amazing research, though when they talk about reaching fusion temperatures, it looks to me like they're talking about modeling the fusion reaction of a Hydrogen Bomb, not creating a safe, clean power source.
They recognize as a side effect that they are refining plasma physics models and if you look at their experimental logs (troll around on their site a little and you'll see it), you can find experiments being run that are definitely designed to measure the physics of fusion temperature plasmas, with the stated goal of developing control algorithms for tokamaks.
ok now onto the <rant type=biased>
Tokamaks are fundamentally stupid ideas for two reasons. First off, ALL of the designs that are currently being discussed for funding and prototyping suffer transmutation of structural members. It takes a huge energy cost to get a tokamak started, and the designs that're being discussed undergo transmutation due to neutron and proton bombardment. Structural elements that are vital to the safe operating of the reactor will have to be replaced on a regular (6-18mo) basis to prevent a failure mode.
Which brings us to the second reason. You've got a big ring of extremely high-temperature, high-pressure, high-charge fluid material. Due to that charge, that ring is going to be fundamentally unstable. They're talking about controlling that with dynamic feedback electromagnet rings. The problem being that there's a stability jumping problem. And at the energies involved, quantum effects are very nearly on the scale necessary to jump to different stability modes.
Of course all the alternative stability modes result in the plasma stream contacting the reactor wall. Which will result in burn-through. I don't think the behaviour will be bomb-like (unlike a fission reactor, this failure mode is self-quenching), but it's still a catastrophic failure mode and probably will spread radioactive material all over the place. Think chernobyl-style quarantine without the explosion at the beginning.
Combine the two and I think you'll see why I say that a tokamak is a fundamentally stupid idea.
</rant>
Not that there's anything wrong with rewriting MULE. Personally I'd love to see a slightly more open MMO game based on it. The only real addition to the model would be to have multiple town centers, and let the players do inter-center trading themselves (for whatever profit they can eke out)
Wow this virus is self contained, has 800 kilobase pairs, can replicate its own proteins, uses a circular genome (think of a turing machine tape), and is capable of DNA self-repair, unlike every other organism in the world. And the scientists believe that over 90% of its DNA is actively used throughout its lifecycle.
Sounds like an ideal building block for a genetic computer. I'm half-seriously wondering based on that 90% figure if it is in fact the left over of some pre-historic genetic computer?
There are more mysteries here; the virus has genes common to all cellular life, but it itself is clearly not cellular. Unless this virus is a close relative of some precursor virus that initially combined with a bacteria to from the first nucelied cell, then this is an EXTREMELY improbable occurance.
I mean form follows function, but in this case the form is present but not necessarily the function... parallel evolution doesn't really explain that...
All the same, if I was a genetic computing microbiologist I'd be very interested in this guy...
From the stationary twin's perspective, the high speed twin slowed down. From the high speed twin's perspective, the stationary twin (who wasn't stationary from the high speed twin's perspective) slowed down. Yet both cannot be true.
So Einstein reasoned out that the ONLY difference between the twins was who felt the acceleration - that twin would slow down.
It's not about who felt the acceleration, well it is but in a round about way...
It's about whose frame of reference they meet in. For either twin to meet the other, that twin must come into the other's frame of reference.
Of course the only way to do so is to accelerate. But this way of looking at it better explains WHY that is so.
There's tons of open-source, free, and moderately priced (three different categories) software for this out there. And they all get around the issue you describe by supporting an IR transmitter, letting it control the digital cable / sattelite receiver.
There's even plans for building your own transmitter homebrew for about $10
Any interest in possible future movie deals? Are you in talks with anyone at the moment? I imagine a SCIFI miniseries of cryptonomicon would be quite well received; though my secret wish is to see Snow Crash incarnate (without looking like a cheap attempt to work the words "Virtual Reality" into the plot as much as possible)
If you were looking at a visual representation of any of your fiction, which would you choose to pursue, assuming that the studio was adept enough to render any of your works true to your vision? What format (feature-length / mini-series / series) ? Any favorites for leading roles? Would you retain creative control? Would you update any story elements? (for instance, the MetaVerse)
The efficiency and capacity of the fuel cell is based on how much hydrogen you can push through it. methanol is a lot easier to catalyse into raw hydrogen than ethanol is, and that's why you see it and not ethanol in fuel cell designs... IIRC from my AP organic chem:
methanol: CH4COOH
ethanol: C2H6COOH (more like H3CCH3COOH in diagramatic form)
God I hope I remembered those right. I'm just askin for a beatdown...
You make a few assumptions that may be invalid:
1. The car will be driven continuously
2. The car will be driven only during sunlight
And left out one big fact:
photvoltaics are only about 20% efficient
If they can cheaply make photovoltaics closer to 50% efficiency I think the spreadsheet starts looking quite good. I drive about 20 minutes per workday. When I used to live out of town I would drive about an hour and a half on a workday.
During the winter solstice, most everywhere in america can expect at least eight hours of insolation. Assume that half the days I run at zero efficiency and half the days I run at maximum efficiency, and I'm still at... 20 hours of good sunlight a workweek. Assuming a 50% pv efficiency that gives me (assuming I live in Seattle, which I don't) about 500 kWh a workweek to play with.
My moderately fuel efficient Saturn will therefore be able to go approximately 400 miles on that. How many people drive 400 miles in a workweek? Will the spare (plus what gets generated over the weekend) be enough for whatever leisure activities you want to do in the weekend?
Hmm let's look at it from a different standpoint...
Assumptions:
1. The average daily length yearlong is 12 hours
2. The weather is good 50% of the time. The rest of the time, zero power is generated. This happens with a random distribution throughout the year (i.e. no rainy season)
3. The insolation a car experiences is 49.5 kW
4. The car targetted gets a 30 mpg gas
Assuming a 100% end to end conversion efficiency (PV, storage, gasoline vs. hydrogen efficiency in burning in the internal combustion engine), that's 240 miles a day. I would expect current systems are more like %10 efficient, with a total of about %25 efficiency possible using current or near-future technologies.
That's marginally acceptable. But even then, the storage system is the real limit. Sure you might get a surplus of about 100 miles a week, but that doesn't help you if you can't store it...
I'm wondering why they didn't go completely closed system on it... store the oxygen and the hydrogen, inject them together into the pistons, run the exhaust through a condenser...
If not that, I hope they're still recovering the water vapor with a condensor, though it seems wasteful to just outgas that oxygen...
Doesn't it make sense to just run a small electric motor with, wich would make the vehicle weigh much less. I guess this would work only if they plan this to be an add-on modules to the already existing hydrogen cars.
Batteries have very poor power densities compared to chemical fuels. Not only that, but this energy storage system is built of base metals and plastics. Batteries usually have pretty toxic components (like the two major components in lead-acid batteries)
When you add in memory effects... most automotive batteries are not meant to EVER be discharged fully... hydrogen as an energy storage medium makes more sense.
And it's even better that you can convert an existing car for it. Please note: this was *not* a hydrogen engine when they bought it, they modified it for hydrogen. It'll still run gasoline too. Next time try to RTFA before you post...
Now all that said, there is no one "ideal" alternative fuel car. But if I were to build one, I'd probably use hydrogen for energy storage, fuel cells for energy conversion, and inline motors/generators integrated into each wheel hub. Oh and scrap the two tons of steel, replace it with a couple hundred pounds of polystyrene and fiberglass ala Burt Rutan...
I guess expecting intelligent engineering out of a software company that is MS-centric is a bit of a stretch, though.
Ummm... maybe, just maybe, other users don't matter to them? It may surprise you but if you write a programming tool that only runs in Windows on IE, isn't it realistic to expect that your potential customers will be running some flavor of the same?
And I take umbrage at your comment. I work for an MS-centric software company. I happen to think we do quite intelligent engineering.
There are slashdot readers that run *gasp* the best operating system around. Argue about Linux all day long. Sure its open source. Sure its better for some things. But when you want all around ease of use and integration, you can't beat a monolithic software company just by throwing more code monkeys at the problem. Bizzar building makes sense in some cases, but Cathedrals are still damn nice at the end of the day, even if they cost more.