I am not the original poster but I understood what he meant immediately.
I have systemic gout causing rheumatoid arthritis in both knees (and most other joints too)... some days the 1.3 mile drive to work is really painful. If I lived farther away I'd definitely be telecommuting or on disability. As it is, cruise control is the only way I get to the grocery store most weeks.
Many gout sufferers only have it in one leg. And gout isn't the only cause of arthritis.
In one orbital period (maybe half depending on which direction you push it) the two objects will be in the exact same position with the exact opposite relative velocity. In other words it'll be coming straight at your airlock door just as hard as you threw it. ugh what a mess!!!
You don't even need a micro meteorite. In exactly one orbital period, the two objects (in the case, ISS and human fecal matter) will be in the exact same position relative to each other. Basic orbital mechanics; Newton's 2nd law and Kepler's laws of planetary motion are all you need to derive this solution, for any two objects regardless of their respective mass, and for any moment of inertia less than escape velocity.
Wow. Great insight there. I had never considered that angle; you must be right.
As to whether or not its true, on further research I found that some sources agree, some disagree, but noone seems to have any hard figures posted online either way. I'm considering ordering a labtech DSP and checking it out for myself.
It started with the Sims, I would spend hours watching them go through their lives.
The a friend would come over. I would now spend hours watching them watch their sims go through their lives.
Now I'm putting yet another layer of abstraction between myself and any semblence of a real social life. I watched the entry movie three times before I realized what I was doing.
I'm now doomed to eagerly wait to watch someone I don't even know playing the Sims.
it's a little known secret that when you expose a Jiffy-pop package to microwave energy it's resulting expansion act's like a very powerful rocket.
The military took advantage of that side effect and used it to win a bar bet against the German V-II rocket engineers who said that they could not make it to space on popcorn power.
It's amazing what you discover about history using the freedom of information Act.
You might need to adjust your tinfoil act if you really believe that FOIA disclosure isn't doctored before release.
I mean this little scenario is so obviously falsified, how can you believe for a second that its true?
The bet was with Roswell aliens, not some hypothetical "German rocket engineers" Do you really expect me to believe they were in a bar with GERMANS????
Heat is random kinetic energy. This energy can be transferred by electrons in a conductor, termed electric convective heat transfer, and this is why most good conductors of electricity are also good conductors of heat.
I tried to google for references; some indicated that this was the case, while others specifically counter-indicated it! I don't know what to believe any more... one source specifically indicated that Cooper pairs interact poorly with their host material and this is the reason for poor heat conductivity... but HT superconductors aren't based on Cooper pairs. I couldn't find any real world studies of actual rate of heat transfer through HTS.
Guess I'm gonna have to find my superconductors and USB ADC box for thermal probes and do some research on it...
Why does everyone say with superconducting wire in the power grid that the cooling is the hard task?
That's not it, it's raw current carrying capability. Superconductors break down at high currents. Cooling a superconducting wire isn't as hard as you might think.
Superconductors conduct heat as well as electricity. The Newtonian description of the heat of a superconductor is the net average of all the temperature deltas it's exposed to integrated over the area of exposure. A superconducting wire is (in a non-relative universe) always the exact same temperature throughout.
Make the wires thin (don't need thick wires if you're super conducting), they're probably brittle so you'll have to clad it in a fairly rigid material... and just make that material a pretty good insulator. With a thin enough wire you can have practically zero surface area. And your cladding will probably be cheaper than high tension cable. You'll have to bury it because superconductors have a catastrophic failure mode; if a high temperature event happens, the entire wire will stop superconducting immediately, and all that electricity in the wire converts to thermal/kinetic energy, as the electric field damping generates a huge magnetic field and basically turns the entire wire into a railgun pointed radially outwards.
At both ends, have a heatsink of superconductor material embedded in liquid nitrogen. As long as any liquid nitrogen remains, the entire wire will be at the temperature of the liquid nitrogen. The only reason you need a heatsink is to spread out the area of contact so you don't boil the liquid nitrogen so fast that large air bubbles form on the surface of the heatsink.
The more insulation you have the less liquid nitrogen you'll need on an ongoing basis to replenish the system. But compressing liquid nitrogen out of the air is a relatively cheap activity in terms of energy expenditure. Especially if you have superconducting wire to make the compressor out of. No reason not to just submerge it in the liquid nitrogen with the power distribution wires.
Though you might want some of the motors to be a more traditional design... startup on a system like this is a bitch. The wire doesn't go superconducting all at once, there's a travelling wavefront that moves along it, speed dictated by the rate of heat conduction at the interface. In the case of a blackout, you'd have to have traditional compressors with backup generators (or just big power storage caps) in the mix just to get the whole system back online as quickly as possible, otherwise you're stuck waiting for the heat to travel through the system, building up reservoirs of liquid nitrogen and removing progressively more heat as each distribution station comes back online.
This is something the Russians have done to surveillance aircraft several times; US and Canadian helicopters in the early 80's, and this incident in 1997-- including painting the Space Shuttle Challenger in orbit in 1984, temporarily blinding the crew and causing equipment malfunctions.
Assholes.
I mean really, just assholes. I could see if we were actually at war or something, but this is just bullshit. Especially the shuttle; once it's in order space it's officially off limits from a military perspective. I think that's Geneva Convention, but not sure...
Day dreaming of the Mycon and thinking of the Juffo-Wup?
Juffo-Wup fills my fibers and I grow turgid.
A single spore lands, finds nourishment in decay and attains maturity.. In turn it exhales a cloud of life, a thousand spores land... so progresses Juffo-Wup.
A cold rock, spinning silently in the Void, a womb for the Children.
In the dark they grow, the deep fire feeds the Children. Their birth breathes warmth across a cold world.
When we encounter the Non, we must absorb the Non or reject the Non so that it is no longer Non.
Juffo-Wup acknowledges the existence of un-Voidable Non when we are faced with such, we join, absorb and wait for our opportunity to learn the weakness that will allow us to Void the Non.
Any chance if I surrender to this giant fungus and offer my life, that my thoughts might be preserved and added and then we'll build a giant red sphere space ship that spits organic plasmas and has practically no turning ability? Which we'll then use to gravity whip around a planet, face backwards, and just start firing?
I'm a private pilot, so I certainly won't make light of this problem. But please...is every new way to hurt somebody going to be another weapon in the terrorist arsenal? Are we going to assume that everytime something happens to someone, a terrorist is behind it? I for one am tired of our leaders trying to make us afraid.
Read the article. This wasn't a quote from any leader; its from a retired Navy airman who was hit in the eye with a laser during a recon mission and is arguing with the Navy Appeals committee to try and get a purple heart for it.
In other words, he has a vested interest in making the incident sound as scary and threatening as possible.
Is there any way to make glass opaque to coherent light while still passing visible light? Or are pilots going to have to fly by instruments and video screens to protect themselves? (Can a readily available laser damage a CCD?)
Unfortunately, anything you do to affect visibility of coherent light is going to affect the visibility of diffuse light. But you can do smart things with polarization and embedded diffraction filters; you'll get some amount of distortion, but you can probably tune the distortion only to the frequencies that matter to you (off the top of my head, 532, 635, 650... maybe a few of the argon lines)
Even a 5mw red pointer can damage a CCD; it's focused by the lens to a spot small enough to cause intense heating.
And there are handheld laser diodes and DPSS lasers that are far more powerful than that.
Additionally, Microsoft announced in this article that the upgrade of free email accounts from 2 MB to 250 MB had run into a snag with Microsoft not anticipating the storage that user of the free email accounts.
Complete sentences people. This statement doesn't even parse lexically, let alone make sense.
I'm going to assume the poster meant '... not anticipating the amount of storage that users with free email accounts would utilize' or something to that effect...
And remember, nyquist frequency for visual aliasing is double the frame rate... (that is to say, the frequency below which events have to occur to have a significant s:n ratio to be reconstructed with fidelity in the playback)
Meaning if the vid cam is recording the nominal 60 fields per second of NTSC, the most lag it is possible to observe would be one of...
9 milliseconds.
If it's a high end webcam of 30 fps, that's 17 ms.
And if it's a cheap webcam of 15 fps, that's 33 ms...
Of course the video is slashdotted or I'd give you a rough estimate of exactly how much the lag is... but meh... here's some figures. If you can see the difference, these are the minimum amounts of lag that are easily observable given the framerate, and assuming a 1:1 match between camera pixels and screen pixels.
Of course that's lag for 1-pixel features (in this case, the amount of in-frame disparity caused by dragging a window). If the features are, say, 5-pixels in size, then the... oh wait the math gets tough there, as the amount of time light is being collected on the imaging sensor is an integral related to several variables, including the speed of change, the framerate of the display device itself, and the baud of the mouse... but you get the idea. Larger features = smaller lag.
Now is the lag real? Who knows; I can't see the video. If I had to guess I would say that the answer is yes and that the solution is related to drivers. Or maybe using an analog instead of digital connection like you should... and poor ADC design on the part of the manufacturer. If I was having problems like that, these are the places I would look. Might wanna check that your video card can push out those amazing 1.9 Million pixels at something greater than 30 Hz...
Of course I think we should do away entirely with the myth of refresh rate in LCDs. Why not have a per-pixel addressing bus? Then issues like lag due to refresh rate just disappear. Then "refresh rate" is dependent on how fast you can push the clock chip in the bus...
Imagine, your video card pushes out pixels whenever they're finalized. Sure won't affect 2D performance that well, and will make video rendering slightly more GPU intensive... but 3D performance. Assuming your algorithm does hidden edge detection in some smarter way than z-buffering, you can push those pixels out to the monitor in order of calculation; design your algorithm right and you can draw only the changing parts of the screen. Then all of a sudden you have dynamically adjustable refresh rates for different areas of the screen. That wall not changing very often? Bullets flying at you? Well I guess we know which pixels should be updated more often than others...
So if we can change the spin of electrons, and the ratio of up vs. down electrons creates magnatism, does this mean that magnetic plastics are feasable? Simply align enough electrons up to create a positive charge?
Well probably not, for the simple reason that plastics are non magnetic because their electrons are very stable in a spin-matched orientation, and very unstable in any other orientation.
For that to work you'd have to have a way to change the spin of all the electrons in the atom and then somehow lock them in that state.
Even this would not create magnetic plastics in the usual sense.
What it would create is magnetic monopoles; a north pole without a south pole. Magnetic monopoles are intrinsically longer range than dipoles... with a dipole you have not only the inverse square law, but an opposing field right next to it. Get far enough away, and the combined magnetic field from both poles rapidly approaches zero. A monopole isn't like that; it's just a north (or a south) pole.
Quantum physics doesn't prohibit a monopole from existing. But chaotic processes probably don't create them too often. And we don't know of any material that would be stable in a monopole configuration.
But 100 years ago we didn't know of any materials that were superconducting or superfluidic. Ditto on Bose-Einstein condensates (a special phase of matter that is both superconducting and superfluidic)... I'm not sure when it was decided that lightning was just normal matter in a new phase where electrons and nuclei are completely disassociated... but you get the idea...
Look at all the things we do with plasma today. Chip etching, welding, cool party effects.
How long until superconduction/superfluidics are used to that level?
How long after that until monopoles are used to that level?
This is the first step on a long road. But by showing that it can be done, IBM has opened the doors. And just like a better understanding of plasmas has led to better theories about atomic state, in turn leading to a better understand of superconductive materials, in turn leading to a better ability to study plasma dynamics... I'm sure this breakthrough will encourage a similar synergy...
As always, it's the materials science lagging behind the theory. Our current formulation of basic scientific principles doesn't really lend itself to synthesis; its a description of properties, and still relies on human intuition (or, in many cases, sheer luck) to find sets of physical properties with novel, unusual, or useful features.
That is the degenerate or lowest energy state. If the only thing in the universe is two electrons, that is.
Materials are grouped according to how they respond to external magnetic fields as follows:
paramagnetic materials tend (usually strongly) to line up such that their spins are opposing the existing magnetic field, and therefore attracted to it. In classical terms, magnetic field lines permeate this material and cause attraction.
diamagnetic materials tend (usually extremely weakly) to line up such that their spins are aligned to the existing magnetic field, and therefore opposed to it. This effect is so small it usually can't be measured without very strong magnets or a carefully balanced system. Water is one of the most diamagnetic materials; if you're careful you can see the effect in one of those glitter lamps; let it settle down and still and hold a very strong magnet to the side, you can see the flow as the glitter moves away.
ferromagnetic materials tend, like paramagnetic materials, to line up such that their spins are opposed to external magnetic fields. However, they also tend to retain that orientation when the magnetic field is removed.
EVERY single material is one of the above. There's a proof (I forget who wrote it) saying that no static combination of electric, magnetic, and gravitational fields can be stable; that is, there is no combination of the above forces where something can be seen to levitate and balance the forces perfectly. The proof is almost correct; he didn't know there was such a thing as materials with a negative magnetic permeability (even though the permeability is slight it's enough in extreme circumstances)
Couple cool tricks:
1. If you've got a hugely strong electromagnet, you can float low size organic material in it. I once saw a video of a frog in a bubble of water levitating in apparent microgravity.
2. Certain kinds of graphite are strongly diamagnetic. The dust isn't, but the graphite layers are. You can shave flat little disks off and watch them float over an array of magnets.
3. Using bismuth and a couple neodymium magnets with a clever little gadget to help in positioning, you can make a frictionless bearing. Google if curious.
For those curious in playing around with strong magnets... forcefield.com is your friend...
So you're saying... (Score:2) by FooAtWFU (699187) on Friday September 17, @03:01PM (#10279235) (http://fennec.homedns.org/) that for the next twenty years no one will be able to search for an image based on those sorts of similarities without money going to these people? TANJ. -- You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means. [ Reply to This ]
Not a surprise (Score:2) by HotNeedleOfInquiry (598897) on Friday September 17, @03:02PM (#10279246) About a year ago it occured to me that this concept would be patentable. Of course, I had neither the time, inclination or business plan to follow up on it.
Slashdot Mirror
And your website sign-up form is broken, by the way. At least it doesnt work in Mozilla on Linux. Would like to sign-up, but can't.
Honest question:
Did you really expect it to work on a non-IE product? They can't make their flagship product compatible, why would they bother with the website?
I am not the original poster but I understood what he meant immediately.
I have systemic gout causing rheumatoid arthritis in both knees (and most other joints too)... some days the 1.3 mile drive to work is really painful. If I lived farther away I'd definitely be telecommuting or on disability. As it is, cruise control is the only way I get to the grocery store most weeks.
Many gout sufferers only have it in one leg. And gout isn't the only cause of arthritis.
It's even worse than that.
In one orbital period (maybe half depending on which direction you push it) the two objects will be in the exact same position with the exact opposite relative velocity. In other words it'll be coming straight at your airlock door just as hard as you threw it. ugh what a mess!!!
You don't even need a micro meteorite. In exactly one orbital period, the two objects (in the case, ISS and human fecal matter) will be in the exact same position relative to each other. Basic orbital mechanics; Newton's 2nd law and Kepler's laws of planetary motion are all you need to derive this solution, for any two objects regardless of their respective mass, and for any moment of inertia less than escape velocity.
Wow. Great insight there. I had never considered that angle; you must be right.
As to whether or not its true, on further research I found that some sources agree, some disagree, but noone seems to have any hard figures posted online either way. I'm considering ordering a labtech DSP and checking it out for myself.
It started with the Sims, I would spend hours watching them go through their lives.
The a friend would come over. I would now spend hours watching them watch their sims go through their lives.
Now I'm putting yet another layer of abstraction between myself and any semblence of a real social life. I watched the entry movie three times before I realized what I was doing.
I'm now doomed to eagerly wait to watch someone I don't even know playing the Sims.
Must... Interact... With... Real... People...
Ah screw it. strangerhood.com here I come.
60 bucks and a couple of Jiffy-pop packages.
it's a little known secret that when you expose a Jiffy-pop package to microwave energy it's resulting expansion act's like a very powerful rocket.
The military took advantage of that side effect and used it to win a bar bet against the German V-II rocket engineers who said that they could not make it to space on popcorn power.
It's amazing what you discover about history using the freedom of information Act.
You might need to adjust your tinfoil act if you really believe that FOIA disclosure isn't doctored before release.
I mean this little scenario is so obviously falsified, how can you believe for a second that its true?
The bet was with Roswell aliens, not some hypothetical "German rocket engineers" Do you really expect me to believe they were in a bar with GERMANS????
Heat is random kinetic energy. This energy can be transferred by electrons in a conductor, termed electric convective heat transfer, and this is why most good conductors of electricity are also good conductors of heat.
I tried to google for references; some indicated that this was the case, while others specifically counter-indicated it! I don't know what to believe any more... one source specifically indicated that Cooper pairs interact poorly with their host material and this is the reason for poor heat conductivity... but HT superconductors aren't based on Cooper pairs. I couldn't find any real world studies of actual rate of heat transfer through HTS.
Guess I'm gonna have to find my superconductors and USB ADC box for thermal probes and do some research on it...
Just cooling the ends isn't likely to work well, but cooling is still not a fatal problem.
Can you please elaborate? What problems do you see with this?
Why does everyone say with superconducting wire in the power grid that the cooling is the hard task?
That's not it, it's raw current carrying capability. Superconductors break down at high currents. Cooling a superconducting wire isn't as hard as you might think.
Superconductors conduct heat as well as electricity. The Newtonian description of the heat of a superconductor is the net average of all the temperature deltas it's exposed to integrated over the area of exposure. A superconducting wire is (in a non-relative universe) always the exact same temperature throughout.
Make the wires thin (don't need thick wires if you're super conducting), they're probably brittle so you'll have to clad it in a fairly rigid material... and just make that material a pretty good insulator. With a thin enough wire you can have practically zero surface area. And your cladding will probably be cheaper than high tension cable. You'll have to bury it because superconductors have a catastrophic failure mode; if a high temperature event happens, the entire wire will stop superconducting immediately, and all that electricity in the wire converts to thermal/kinetic energy, as the electric field damping generates a huge magnetic field and basically turns the entire wire into a railgun pointed radially outwards.
At both ends, have a heatsink of superconductor material embedded in liquid nitrogen. As long as any liquid nitrogen remains, the entire wire will be at the temperature of the liquid nitrogen. The only reason you need a heatsink is to spread out the area of contact so you don't boil the liquid nitrogen so fast that large air bubbles form on the surface of the heatsink.
The more insulation you have the less liquid nitrogen you'll need on an ongoing basis to replenish the system. But compressing liquid nitrogen out of the air is a relatively cheap activity in terms of energy expenditure. Especially if you have superconducting wire to make the compressor out of. No reason not to just submerge it in the liquid nitrogen with the power distribution wires.
Though you might want some of the motors to be a more traditional design... startup on a system like this is a bitch. The wire doesn't go superconducting all at once, there's a travelling wavefront that moves along it, speed dictated by the rate of heat conduction at the interface. In the case of a blackout, you'd have to have traditional compressors with backup generators (or just big power storage caps) in the mix just to get the whole system back online as quickly as possible, otherwise you're stuck waiting for the heat to travel through the system, building up reservoirs of liquid nitrogen and removing progressively more heat as each distribution station comes back online.
This is something the Russians have done to surveillance aircraft several times; US and Canadian helicopters in the early 80's, and this incident in 1997-- including painting the Space Shuttle Challenger in orbit in 1984, temporarily blinding the crew and causing equipment malfunctions.
Assholes.
I mean really, just assholes. I could see if we were actually at war or something, but this is just bullshit. Especially the shuttle; once it's in order space it's officially off limits from a military perspective. I think that's Geneva Convention, but not sure...
Day dreaming of the Mycon and thinking of the Juffo-Wup?
Juffo-Wup fills my fibers and I grow turgid.
A single spore lands, finds nourishment in decay and attains maturity..
In turn it exhales a cloud of life, a thousand spores land... so progresses Juffo-Wup.
A cold rock, spinning silently in the Void, a womb for the Children.
In the dark they grow, the deep fire feeds the Children.
Their birth breathes warmth across a cold world.
When we encounter the Non, we must absorb the Non or reject the Non so that it is no longer Non.
Juffo-Wup acknowledges the existence of un-Voidable Non
when we are faced with such, we join, absorb and wait for our opportunity
to learn the weakness that will allow us to Void the Non.
Any chance if I surrender to this giant fungus and offer my life, that my thoughts might be preserved and added and then we'll build a giant red sphere space ship that spits organic plasmas and has practically no turning ability? Which we'll then use to gravity whip around a planet, face backwards, and just start firing?
Man I need to stop playing that game.
I'm a private pilot, so I certainly won't make light of this problem. But please...is every new way to hurt somebody going to be another weapon in the terrorist arsenal? Are we going to assume that everytime something happens to someone, a terrorist is behind it? I for one am tired of our leaders trying to make us afraid.
Read the article. This wasn't a quote from any leader; its from a retired Navy airman who was hit in the eye with a laser during a recon mission and is arguing with the Navy Appeals committee to try and get a purple heart for it.
In other words, he has a vested interest in making the incident sound as scary and threatening as possible.
Is there any way to make glass opaque to coherent light while still passing visible light? Or are pilots going to have to fly by instruments and video screens to protect themselves? (Can a readily available laser damage a CCD?)
Unfortunately, anything you do to affect visibility of coherent light is going to affect the visibility of diffuse light. But you can do smart things with polarization and embedded diffraction filters; you'll get some amount of distortion, but you can probably tune the distortion only to the frequencies that matter to you (off the top of my head, 532, 635, 650... maybe a few of the argon lines)
Even a 5mw red pointer can damage a CCD; it's focused by the lens to a spot small enough to cause intense heating.
And there are handheld laser diodes and DPSS lasers that are far more powerful than that.
Additionally, Microsoft announced in this article that the upgrade of free email accounts from 2 MB to 250 MB had run into a snag with Microsoft not anticipating the storage that user of the free email accounts.
Complete sentences people. This statement doesn't even parse lexically, let alone make sense.
I'm going to assume the poster meant '... not anticipating the amount of storage that users with free email accounts would utilize' or something to that effect...
For that matter, what about Flash? J2ME? Compact Framework?
And no I didn't RTFA...
and having observable(with a vid cam..)
...
And remember, nyquist frequency for visual aliasing is double the frame rate... (that is to say, the frequency below which events have to occur to have a significant s:n ratio to be reconstructed with fidelity in the playback)
Meaning if the vid cam is recording the nominal 60 fields per second of NTSC, the most lag it is possible to observe would be one of
9 milliseconds.
If it's a high end webcam of 30 fps, that's 17 ms.
And if it's a cheap webcam of 15 fps, that's 33 ms...
Of course the video is slashdotted or I'd give you a rough estimate of exactly how much the lag is... but meh... here's some figures. If you can see the difference, these are the minimum amounts of lag that are easily observable given the framerate, and assuming a 1:1 match between camera pixels and screen pixels.
Of course that's lag for 1-pixel features (in this case, the amount of in-frame disparity caused by dragging a window). If the features are, say, 5-pixels in size, then the... oh wait the math gets tough there, as the amount of time light is being collected on the imaging sensor is an integral related to several variables, including the speed of change, the framerate of the display device itself, and the baud of the mouse... but you get the idea. Larger features = smaller lag.
Now is the lag real? Who knows; I can't see the video. If I had to guess I would say that the answer is yes and that the solution is related to drivers. Or maybe using an analog instead of digital connection like you should... and poor ADC design on the part of the manufacturer. If I was having problems like that, these are the places I would look. Might wanna check that your video card can push out those amazing 1.9 Million pixels at something greater than 30 Hz...
Of course I think we should do away entirely with the myth of refresh rate in LCDs. Why not have a per-pixel addressing bus? Then issues like lag due to refresh rate just disappear. Then "refresh rate" is dependent on how fast you can push the clock chip in the bus...
Imagine, your video card pushes out pixels whenever they're finalized. Sure won't affect 2D performance that well, and will make video rendering slightly more GPU intensive... but 3D performance. Assuming your algorithm does hidden edge detection in some smarter way than z-buffering, you can push those pixels out to the monitor in order of calculation; design your algorithm right and you can draw only the changing parts of the screen. Then all of a sudden you have dynamically adjustable refresh rates for different areas of the screen. That wall not changing very often? Bullets flying at you? Well I guess we know which pixels should be updated more often than others...
But to be successful rescuers, they must be able to home in on victims and signal their position to waiting rescue teams."
And, you know, not try to eat them before the rescue team gets there...
So if we can change the spin of electrons, and the ratio of up vs. down electrons creates magnatism, does this mean that magnetic plastics are feasable? Simply align enough electrons up to create a positive charge?
Well probably not, for the simple reason that plastics are non magnetic because their electrons are very stable in a spin-matched orientation, and very unstable in any other orientation.
For that to work you'd have to have a way to change the spin of all the electrons in the atom and then somehow lock them in that state.
Even this would not create magnetic plastics in the usual sense.
What it would create is magnetic monopoles; a north pole without a south pole. Magnetic monopoles are intrinsically longer range than dipoles... with a dipole you have not only the inverse square law, but an opposing field right next to it. Get far enough away, and the combined magnetic field from both poles rapidly approaches zero. A monopole isn't like that; it's just a north (or a south) pole.
Quantum physics doesn't prohibit a monopole from existing. But chaotic processes probably don't create them too often. And we don't know of any material that would be stable in a monopole configuration.
But 100 years ago we didn't know of any materials that were superconducting or superfluidic. Ditto on Bose-Einstein condensates (a special phase of matter that is both superconducting and superfluidic)... I'm not sure when it was decided that lightning was just normal matter in a new phase where electrons and nuclei are completely disassociated... but you get the idea...
Look at all the things we do with plasma today. Chip etching, welding, cool party effects.
How long until superconduction/superfluidics are used to that level?
How long after that until monopoles are used to that level?
This is the first step on a long road. But by showing that it can be done, IBM has opened the doors. And just like a better understanding of plasmas has led to better theories about atomic state, in turn leading to a better understand of superconductive materials, in turn leading to a better ability to study plasma dynamics... I'm sure this breakthrough will encourage a similar synergy...
As always, it's the materials science lagging behind the theory. Our current formulation of basic scientific principles doesn't really lend itself to synthesis; its a description of properties, and still relies on human intuition (or, in many cases, sheer luck) to find sets of physical properties with novel, unusual, or useful features.
You click the opt-out link, bad things happen. Before it was even more spam, now it's malicious attacks.
How many people really trust spammers to honor an opt-out?
And I would imagine that pros would quickly spot a bots' tactics and learn to anticipate them...
I'm not sure about your spin directions - I thought that ferromagnets aligned with the field. Could be wrong though.
Like spins repel, different spins attract. That's why degenerate electron pairs have opposite spins...
CORRECTION:
forcefield.com is one of those sleezy popup squatters. The site you want is now hosted at http://www.wondermagnet.com/
That is the degenerate or lowest energy state. If the only thing in the universe is two electrons, that is.
Materials are grouped according to how they respond to external magnetic fields as follows:
paramagnetic materials tend (usually strongly) to line up such that their spins are opposing the existing magnetic field, and therefore attracted to it. In classical terms, magnetic field lines permeate this material and cause attraction.
diamagnetic materials tend (usually extremely weakly) to line up such that their spins are aligned to the existing magnetic field, and therefore opposed to it. This effect is so small it usually can't be measured without very strong magnets or a carefully balanced system. Water is one of the most diamagnetic materials; if you're careful you can see the effect in one of those glitter lamps; let it settle down and still and hold a very strong magnet to the side, you can see the flow as the glitter moves away.
ferromagnetic materials tend, like paramagnetic materials, to line up such that their spins are opposed to external magnetic fields. However, they also tend to retain that orientation when the magnetic field is removed.
EVERY single material is one of the above. There's a proof (I forget who wrote it) saying that no static combination of electric, magnetic, and gravitational fields can be stable; that is, there is no combination of the above forces where something can be seen to levitate and balance the forces perfectly. The proof is almost correct; he didn't know there was such a thing as materials with a negative magnetic permeability (even though the permeability is slight it's enough in extreme circumstances)
Couple cool tricks:
1. If you've got a hugely strong electromagnet, you can float low size organic material in it. I once saw a video of a frog in a bubble of water levitating in apparent microgravity.
2. Certain kinds of graphite are strongly diamagnetic. The dust isn't, but the graphite layers are. You can shave flat little disks off and watch them float over an array of magnets.
3. Using bismuth and a couple neodymium magnets with a clever little gadget to help in positioning, you can make a frictionless bearing. Google if curious.
For those curious in playing around with strong magnets... forcefield.com is your friend...
So you're saying... (Score:2)
by FooAtWFU (699187) on Friday September 17, @03:01PM (#10279235)
(http://fennec.homedns.org/)
that for the next twenty years no one will be able to search for an image based on those sorts of similarities without money going to these people? TANJ.
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You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.
[ Reply to This ]
Not a surprise (Score:2)
by HotNeedleOfInquiry (598897) on Friday September 17, @03:02PM (#10279246)
About a year ago it occured to me that this concept would be patentable. Of course, I had neither the time, inclination or business plan to follow up on it.
Are all image searching folks niven geeks?