I vaguely remember about two years ago reading that real car makers (with big factories & stuff) were planning on introducing continuously variable-speed transmissions where the whole thing was computer-controlled and no actual discrete "shifting" occurred, or something like that. Anyway, the article I was reading didn't have any schematics and I haven't heard a peep about it since. Anyone know anything about it?
The screeens wouldn't necessarily be smaller, but just think of the mind-blowing monitors that could be made with this. Have some of the incandescent traffic lights in your town been replaced by LEDs? Notice how bright they are? Now imagine if you could make a monitor that bright with nanocrystals with supertunable pixels the size of, well, nanocrystals. The resolution and color gradients are mindboggling. Think 32-bit color is neat? Wait 'til you see 1024-bit color on a monitor that uses half the power of your current one. (I'm just making those numbers up, but it's very likely the actual properties could be that revolutionary.)
Please note, though, that this has nothing to do with making faster Si-based MOSFETs (i.e. smaller transistors). If you're interested in that, look here, here (great story), or here to see just a handful of the ideas people have. With all of these things in development, don't expect anything to overtake Si as the dominant technology for a long, long time (~10 years, maybe even).;-)
There was a quote on the Web ages & ages ago from someone's Mage: the Ascension campaign where someone said to the scientist guy after he commented on some maneuver, "That's why you're the metallurgist and he's the ninja." And for some reason I'm reminded of that.:-) Good luck in your heat-treating endeavors.
The fact that you admit to never having heard of cementite exposes you to a lot of criticism. Cementite (chemical formula Fe3C, that's three irons and one carbon) is one of the two microconstituents of pearlite, alpha-Fe being the other.
However, your earlier points regarding heat treating of steel are correct and leads me to assume that you do, in fact, probably know what you are talking about.
ASM is republishing the so-called "Red Books," which contain a lot of the amassed treasure of Soviet thermodynamic data. Quite honestly, the West never really came close to the thorough and intelligent approach the Soviets took to metallurgy. Phase diagram data that should've been taken long ago is missing (lots of ternary oxides in this situation, among others). The Soviets, with the vast and exotic mix of metals native to Siberia and with their "dialectical materialist" attitude (Prof. J. O. McCaldin, Caltech, private communication) managed to do far better than the West in terms of producing excellent nonferrous alloys. However, I bet most of the information you need is in these Red Books, along with the other random bits of data strewn about the world. The rest was mostly trial and error.
It's really bizarre sometimes how occasionally countries tend to outperform each other in specific alloy types (US in Al, USSR in Ti, FRG in Fe, etc), but IMHO it is true to an extent.
The secret of the Iron Pillar, AFAICR, (been a long time since that JOM article) is that it's made from high-purity wrought iron. Actually, elemental iron is very corrosion-resistant. It's the carbon (and up until 1900, phosphorus) which kills the corrosion resistance. This is because rusting is a diffusion-limited process, and the presence of impurities "opens up" the lattice somewhat, in a matter of speaking.
Maybe one day, just maybe, someone somewhere will get serious about space exploration, and instead of our continuing destruction of the planet and the people on it, and civilization will be able to obtain the minerals it wants from asteroids, airless moons, and all these treasure troves in the sky.
If the people of the developed world could just see past their greed and cynicism and maybe recapture just a kernel of the vision that we used to have not too long ago, perhaps the lands of Brazil and Siberia (and Alaska?) and the people of Congo and Nigeria and all the other places of the world unfortunate enough to have some useful industrial substance could begin to heal.
So, try to do something useful with your tax refund and give it to an organization which is trying to do something. Please.
The danger of the "Geeks are interested in *" argument is that geeks are interested in lots of nontechnological things--literature, RPGs, sex, football, local weather, whatever.
Also, why should Katz get to post his movie reviews here, whereas if a reader just submitted his/her review, there's probably zero chance it would make it on the page? I don't think Katz's writing about non-sociopolitical topics is sufficiently unique to get put up for public consumption. Thousands of readers are just as capable of generating such observations. Maybe this is criticism of all movie critics, but I don't read their sites, where Katz's reviews belong, either.:-)
I would turn off Katz myself if there was some way to turn off his movie reviews but still see his actual opinion pieces. Those actually have some business on Slashdot...but WTH do movie reviews have to do with science & technology reviews? Especially something like Rush Hour 2? I can understand an A.I. review, but this is a ridiculous waste of resources. I thought he/Taco/etc. would've learned their lesson after all the flames resulting from his review of Scream 3...
The LANL preprint server. Despite the somewhat suggestive prefix, it is where a huge number of exciting new results in physics, engineering sciences, astronomy, and mathematics first see the light of day.
Of course, the obvious and oft-mentioned drawback of this kind of thing is the lack of peer review (hey, you get what you pay for), but it's really incredibly neat, and there are precedents for papers on this site being cited in accepted journals.
It is my opinion that peer review isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be--lots of good papers never get seen because of politics or one really dense reviewer out of, say, ten, and lots of redundant and low-quality papers get published, often in conference proceedings. The journal system has to change. It's way out of hand.
Toy stores sell thousands of abaci. It disgusts me that scientists have become lazy and whiny and demand access to fancy US$500 solid-state electronic 'computers' to perform calculations. Abaci were perfectly accepted for centuries. Why should institutions (and by extension, governments) have to pay for these lavish luxuries when all that's necessary is available for much, much less.
Seriously, don't you think (or better yet, hope) that we researchers have better things to do than crawl around libraries for hours on end? It's called "productivity."
But if you want to give me $10 for an abacus, I'll sure as heck take it.;-)
2 cm is about 13/16", and that's not as thin, as, say, the LCD on my laptop, which is almost two years old, and I'm happy with.
Everyone talks about "flat panel," but in my opinion we won't have true flat panel until we get something that you have trouble seeing viewed end-on.;-) What are some candidates for this? I know there are nanoparticle-spray ideas out there which have a lot of promise, though I think the obstacle there might be addressing the "pixels" (would you call them "nixels"?) Things like nanoparticle II-VIs, organics, carbon nanotubes, etc. are all candidates. I also know there's been a lot of work on "black silicon" (more technically silicon microcolumns) by Pedraza and Lowndes at ORNL/Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville and Mazur at Harvard, and high-intensity electroluminescence was one application of this, though I think photodetectors, solar cells, etc. are supposed to be the real "killer app" for that stuff.
Somehow I don't think the fact that pouring molten lead into this would melt the plastic, thus rendering the whole thing unrecognizable as a computer at all, would even slow this guy down...
I think the thing people overlook about In Search Of... is its amazing sense of style. If you look at the era in which In Search Of... arose, it was certainly a masterpiece of Zeitgeist. It was just magnificent. If I had to make a quasi-documentary show today with the same budget, I'd be happy to come up with something having half the ambience and surreality that ISO did. The music, Nimoy's incredible gravelly narration...Wow. Forget the subject matter. I'm not sure that it was the point at all.;-)
In Search Of..., I believe, also stylistically influenced some really cool documentaries in the mid-Eighties. Specifically, I'm thinking of Michael Wood's In Search of the Trojan War and several other works in a similar vein. Think of the mass-produced documentaries we get on TLC and Discovery nowadays here in the States and then contrast this utter gem to those servicable but bland affairs. (In fact, I've been dying to get a copy of the score to In Search of the Trojan War for years....)
FWIW, JPL has changed directors since this time. The new director is Charles Elachi, a scientist who was promoted to the position from within the ranks.
Several of my friends work at JPL at some capacity, and all of them tell me that the tech boom really hurt JPL badly; obviously, the government jobs could not compete salary-wise with dot-coms and tech start-ups.
Now that the bubble has burst I don't know if there's been a rush back to JPL, but considering that many of the start-ups in the Pasadena area are doing well (this was a cover story in 19 July's print version of the LA times) I'm not sure the incentive's there to rush back.
...lots of research just as interesting as this gets published all the time. ZnO is a wide-bandgap material enjoying a renaissance of interest, and might compete with SiC, DLC, and GaN, but I'm not sure this is worthy of a full-blown/. article. Now combinatorial MBE to explore the TiO2:Co system, that was/. worthy;-)
E-beam lith is far, far more expensive than your stock CMOS fab. While you can do some nifty things, the fact remains it is a slow batch process that, in order to be scaled up to the same production level as the standard process, would probably require at least an order of magnitude larger capital investment.
This will be a nice toy for chip designers and exotic devices, but any feasible mass-production 'nano'tech will almost certainly require a high degree of self-assembly, which e-beam lith is not.
The Stainless Steel Rat works were by Harry Harrison, not Ellison.
Ellison has written mostly nothing but scripts and short stories (a button distributed at a con once said "Harlan Ellison: Fifty Years of Short Fiction," which was a dig at both his lack of novels and his really diminuitive stature. IIRC, he's under five feet (150 cm).
My favorite among his works are "The Deathbird" and "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream," both of which are must-reads. The rest I can take or leave.
Actually, a 712-GHz device was published in the early Nineties. It was an antimonide-based nonlinear amplifier (not really usable for switches). 1 THz devices do exist now, but they are based on AlSb-InAs heterostructures and as such are pricey.
Here's an abstract from 1991:
"Oscillations have been obtained at frequencies from 100 to 712 GHz in InAs/AlSb double-barrier resonant-tunneling diodes at room temperature. The measured power density at 360 GHz was 90 W cm-2, which is 50 times that generated by GaAs/AlAs diodes at essentially the same frequency. The oscillation at 712 GHz represents the highest frequency reported to date from a solid-state electronic oscillator at room temperature."
from E. R. Brown et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 58 2291-2293 (1991).
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I like being an empirical scientist. 9.999 = 1 (order of magnitude estimates, don't ya know). ;-)
I vaguely remember about two years ago reading that real car makers (with big factories & stuff) were planning on introducing continuously variable-speed transmissions where the whole thing was computer-controlled and no actual discrete "shifting" occurred, or something like that. Anyway, the article I was reading didn't have any schematics and I haven't heard a peep about it since. Anyone know anything about it?
Please note, though, that this has nothing to do with making faster Si-based MOSFETs (i.e. smaller transistors). If you're interested in that, look here, here (great story), or here to see just a handful of the ideas people have. With all of these things in development, don't expect anything to overtake Si as the dominant technology for a long, long time (~10 years, maybe even). ;-)
There was a quote on the Web ages & ages ago from someone's Mage: the Ascension campaign where someone said to the scientist guy after he commented on some maneuver, "That's why you're the metallurgist and he's the ninja." And for some reason I'm reminded of that. :-) Good luck in your heat-treating endeavors.
However, your earlier points regarding heat treating of steel are correct and leads me to assume that you do, in fact, probably know what you are talking about.
It's really bizarre sometimes how occasionally countries tend to outperform each other in specific alloy types (US in Al, USSR in Ti, FRG in Fe, etc), but IMHO it is true to an extent.
Excellent post, too bad you were AC'ing and didn't pick up some nice karma.
The secret of the Iron Pillar, AFAICR, (been a long time since that JOM article) is that it's made from high-purity wrought iron. Actually, elemental iron is very corrosion-resistant. It's the carbon (and up until 1900, phosphorus) which kills the corrosion resistance. This is because rusting is a diffusion-limited process, and the presence of impurities "opens up" the lattice somewhat, in a matter of speaking.
If the people of the developed world could just see past their greed and cynicism and maybe recapture just a kernel of the vision that we used to have not too long ago, perhaps the lands of Brazil and Siberia (and Alaska?) and the people of Congo and Nigeria and all the other places of the world unfortunate enough to have some useful industrial substance could begin to heal.
So, try to do something useful with your tax refund and give it to an organization which is trying to do something. Please.
Also, why should Katz get to post his movie reviews here, whereas if a reader just submitted his/her review, there's probably zero chance it would make it on the page? I don't think Katz's writing about non-sociopolitical topics is sufficiently unique to get put up for public consumption. Thousands of readers are just as capable of generating such observations. Maybe this is criticism of all movie critics, but I don't read their sites, where Katz's reviews belong, either. :-)
I would turn off Katz myself if there was some way to turn off his movie reviews but still see his actual opinion pieces. Those actually have some business on Slashdot...but WTH do movie reviews have to do with science & technology reviews? Especially something like Rush Hour 2? I can understand an A.I. review, but this is a ridiculous waste of resources. I thought he/Taco/etc. would've learned their lesson after all the flames resulting from his review of Scream 3...
Of course, the obvious and oft-mentioned drawback of this kind of thing is the lack of peer review (hey, you get what you pay for), but it's really incredibly neat, and there are precedents for papers on this site being cited in accepted journals.
It is my opinion that peer review isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be--lots of good papers never get seen because of politics or one really dense reviewer out of, say, ten, and lots of redundant and low-quality papers get published, often in conference proceedings. The journal system has to change. It's way out of hand.
Seriously, don't you think (or better yet, hope) that we researchers have better things to do than crawl around libraries for hours on end? It's called "productivity."
But if you want to give me $10 for an abacus, I'll sure as heck take it. ;-)
Actually, what I really want are cheaper and more powerful Xybernaut-type things. Maybe I too could actually use my desk for writing again...
Everyone talks about "flat panel," but in my opinion we won't have true flat panel until we get something that you have trouble seeing viewed end-on. ;-) What are some candidates for this? I know there are nanoparticle-spray ideas out there which have a lot of promise, though I think the obstacle there might be addressing the "pixels" (would you call them "nixels"?) Things like nanoparticle II-VIs, organics, carbon nanotubes, etc. are all candidates. I also know there's been a lot of work on "black silicon" (more technically silicon microcolumns) by Pedraza and Lowndes at ORNL/Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville and Mazur at Harvard, and high-intensity electroluminescence was one application of this, though I think photodetectors, solar cells, etc. are supposed to be the real "killer app" for that stuff.
Somehow I don't think the fact that pouring molten lead into this would melt the plastic, thus rendering the whole thing unrecognizable as a computer at all, would even slow this guy down...
In Search Of..., I believe, also stylistically influenced some really cool documentaries in the mid-Eighties. Specifically, I'm thinking of Michael Wood's In Search of the Trojan War and several other works in a similar vein. Think of the mass-produced documentaries we get on TLC and Discovery nowadays here in the States and then contrast this utter gem to those servicable but bland affairs. (In fact, I've been dying to get a copy of the score to In Search of the Trojan War for years....)
Thank you, Spock.
Several of my friends work at JPL at some capacity, and all of them tell me that the tech boom really hurt JPL badly; obviously, the government jobs could not compete salary-wise with dot-coms and tech start-ups.
Now that the bubble has burst I don't know if there's been a rush back to JPL, but considering that many of the start-ups in the Pasadena area are doing well (this was a cover story in 19 July's print version of the LA times) I'm not sure the incentive's there to rush back.
...lots of research just as interesting as this gets published all the time. ZnO is a wide-bandgap material enjoying a renaissance of interest, and might compete with SiC, DLC, and GaN, but I'm not sure this is worthy of a full-blown /. article. Now combinatorial MBE to explore the TiO2:Co system, that was /. worthy ;-)
This will be a nice toy for chip designers and exotic devices, but any feasible mass-production 'nano'tech will almost certainly require a high degree of self-assembly, which e-beam lith is not.
Ellison has written mostly nothing but scripts and short stories (a button distributed at a con once said "Harlan Ellison: Fifty Years of Short Fiction," which was a dig at both his lack of novels and his really diminuitive stature. IIRC, he's under five feet (150 cm).
My favorite among his works are "The Deathbird" and "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream," both of which are must-reads. The rest I can take or leave.
Here's an abstract from 1991:
"Oscillations have been obtained at frequencies from 100 to 712 GHz in InAs/AlSb double-barrier resonant-tunneling diodes at room temperature. The measured power density at 360 GHz was 90 W cm-2, which is 50 times that generated by GaAs/AlAs diodes at essentially the same frequency. The oscillation at 712 GHz represents the highest frequency reported to date from a solid-state electronic oscillator at room temperature."
from E. R. Brown et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 58 2291-2293 (1991).