User: Spamalamadingdong

Coriolis force is not a killer

On: NASA Asks the Public For Advice On Goals

Coriolis effects on the inner ear are proportional to the angular speed of rotation, or (omega, radians/second). Centripetal acceleration a = r. For any given max value of , there is a value of r which will give you any desired value of a.

Of course, for a small station or vehicle it's more difficult to have a large value of r. Fortunately, there are at least two ways around this:

1. Use a counterweight on a tether, so that you can make r relatively large without needing a big heavy structure, or
2. Select your crew from people who've shown that they can adapt to a high- environment without getting motion sick all the time.

The public has no say on the most important things

On: NASA Asks the Public For Advice On Goals

Unfortunately, NASA is tied to established projects with established constituencies; without the lobbying of those interests, NASA does not get its budget. Moving money from today's cash cows to tomorrow's research projects is like pulling teeth, and this only seems to change when there is some issue of national prestige at stake (between 1957 and 1969, it was showing that we were better than the Russians on the stage of international grandstanding). Don't believe me? Consider the following:

1. The established Saturn booster production line was scrapped to eliminate competition for the Space Shuttle and its lucrative R&D contracts.
2. The various incarnations of the space station keep losing size, personnel and research capabilities, but the whole thing is never tossed out and re-done from scratch. Apparently it suits the entrenched interests more to have a white elephant in orbit sucking up every available dollar than to take the budget and see what can be accomplished with it. The effort to quash the Lawrence Livermore Labs "community space suit" space station is a case in point.
3. The DC-1 project was on track to produce an SSTO launch vehicle which could fly far more frequently and cheaply than the Shuttle. Of course, it was developed by SDIO (it could never have been built at NASA). The established interests got it taken away from SDIO and handed over to NASA, which completed the test program and promptly crashed and destroyed the DC-X test vehicle.
4. Rather than pursuing the development of the DC-Y using the results of the DC-X test program, NASA scratched it and instead decided to fund a completely new vehicle, the VentureStar (which promised a lot more development money). Of course, the VentureStar's future is now in doubt as its fuel tanks apparently cannot be built.

Unless we the public can get behind some program which demands results instead of pork, we are going to be dumping more billions and tens of billions on projects which leave us little or even nothing to show for them; meanwhile, all the cutting-edge stuff like DC-Y and Deep Space One will be done on a shoestring if they can be done at all. Our future in space depends on shouldering the pigs away from the money trough and demanding results.

If only it were that simple...

On: U.S. to Rejoin the ITER Fusion Project

... some people have suggested using helium-3. The reasons for this is that although you get less energy out, you also get far less neutron radiation. Mostly gamma rays.

It was my impression that He-3 + D -> He-4 + p + yielded all of its energy in the charged reactants, which further heats the plasma instead of being lost to the chamber wall (as photons and neutrons are). BTW, thanks for reminding me of He-3, I'd missed that earlier.

Gamma rays matter less than neutrons because they don't cause what they hit to become reactive.

I hate to break this to you, but depending on the energy of the photon and the composition of the target, it can. If the gamma ray has enough energy to eject a nucleon from a nucleus in the target yielding a radioisotope, rest assured that some fraction (however infinitesimally small) will do so. Photons can also raise nuclei into metastable states, from which they decay some time later with the emission of some other form of radiation (usually another gamma ray, IIRC). If you go through a table of the isotopes, you'll find a bunch of curious things regarding various elements; you might want to do that on your own, just to make sure that your schooling isn't interfering with your education.

Over-simplification

On: U.S. to Rejoin the ITER Fusion Project

A common misconception about fusion reactor is that there are no negative byproducts of its use. this is simply not true.

Is there any technology which has no negative byproducts?

The tokamak fusion reactor would have extremely dangerous core due to neutron and proton radiation. You would have to have one heck of a system of shielding for this to be useful.

You could say the same thing about a solar furnace; the focus would be extremely dangerous due to thermal radiation. It doesn't mean that it isn't trivial to keep yourself safe from it. Direct neutron and proton radiation is simply not a problem. Indirect exposure, say from leakage of tritium or corrosion of used reactor parts, is another issue. Lots of chemical processes have nasty intermediate products, so it's not like industry doesn't have plenty of experience managing such things.

Any thoughts on what would work best in the fuel?

The easiest fuel to ignite is deuterium-tritium. If you are concerned about radioactive byproducts and you don't mind building a much bigger and more expensive reactor, you could use boron-11 and protium; B-11 + p -> 3 He-4 + . This would give you a neutron-free reaction, at the cost of very high temperatures required to ignite the plasma and very rapid heat loss due to X-rays from the multiply-ionized boron nuclei.

Yes, I think we do.

On: U.S. to Rejoin the ITER Fusion Project

As you run up Q, doesn't the radioactive output also rise?

Depends what the reactants are. If you are burning deuterium with tritium (or D-D) you are emitting neutrons (D-D yields He-3 and a neutron, D-T yields He-4 and a neutron). Whether you create radioactives or not depends what those neutrons hit. You can get some neutron spallation (neutron hits something in a nucleus and tosses it out, transmuting the nucleus into something radioactive) or just neutron capture; however, you could control the results by selecting the composition of the materials exposed to the neutron flux. In a D-T burner you are going to have to replace the tritium you burn, which is usually done by capturing the neutrons with lithium. IIRC, Li-6 + n -> He-4 + tritium.

The antinukes would have to be crazy to be worried about neutrinos; their favorite energy source (old Sol) streams countless numbers of them through their bodies every second. This is not to claim that some of these people aren't crazy...

Fusion plasma won't melt a hole in the ground. By the time you dump air into the vacuum of the tokamak torus, the plasma will have been quite thoroughly quenched; you might have a few micrograms of tritium to worry about, but it has a half-life of about 12 years so it isn't much of a concern except over a relatively short term.

It would have more impact with better grammar

On: Respond To The Tunney Act

Not to quibble excessively, but you persist in using "it's" (the contraction of "it is") instead of "its" (the third person singular possessive pronoun) throughout. This will be read by people whose business is clarity of writing. Like it or not, they will think less of your opinion because it comes from someone who obviously does not consider it important enough to express in proper English.

Yes, I've sent my own comment off already, stressing the national security aspects of the failure to stop Microsoft's lock-in tactics leading to overwhelming market dominance of insecure software. I am considering whether I should write and submit a revision.

Possible advantage of smart-card access

On: New Thoughts in Public Transportation

If people could report dirt, etc. in the vehicles or have security cameras take snapshots before and after each use of the vehicle (to avoid privacy issues with monitoring people), you could tell who left what and charge them for being slobs. You could use the extra fees to keep the system neat, or ban chronic offenders from using the network.

Fail-safing

On: New Thoughts in Public Transportation

The biggest problem we found was what would happen if the cars were going really fast, and the power suddenly went off... We used the term "Mass Death". :^)

I don't suppose it occurred to your crew to have batteries on board the vehicles to take them to the next stop, or just use regenerative braking to power the vehicle systems while the de-powered part of the network came to a stop and shut down gracefully? (I really hate contrived disaster scenarios.)

More feasible than heavy rail.

On: New Thoughts in Public Transportation

You can put ultra-light rails overhead, instead of having to condemn property at grade level or dig tunnels. For safety reasons you'd probably want to keep the tracks away from grade level anyway (leave the ground free for bicycles and pedestrians, avoid collisions).

Something this light would be very nice for other reasons; large buildings could have a mezannine-level entrance for rail vehicles, keeping ground level less cluttered and making it easier to get people in and out.

You don't say....

On: Selling Open Source on the Campaign Trail

There seems to be a general perception in the middle/upper class that poverty is the fault of the poor for not uplifting themselves. This is a good sign of a complete misunderstanding of the socioeconomic system.

There seems to be a general perception among the political left that economic systems are arbitrary, and that they have no relationship to human nature. This is a good sign of a complete misunderstanding of both and of game theory. People aren't completely rational actors, but they are close enough that you can't expect them not to take advantage of biases in the system. If you bias the system toward the subsidy of uneducated, unskilled labor over skills and education, that's what you'll get.

Let's start with minimum wage. You're right: its a minumum. It has nothing to do with the cost of living, but with the cost of surviving. It is set according to the requirements of a statistically average poor household (2.5 kids, high density housing, 1 working parent), and should allow them to maintain basic human standards of living according to the International Declaration of Human Rights.

It is? "Should", according to whom? And according to what standard? Survival is priced very differently from place to place. There's a huge difference between NYC or SF and the hinterlands of Mississippi or the Florida panhandle; how's one minimum wage supposed to address that?

Let me tell you how it really works: the minimum wage is set by the legislature according to the pressures of trade unions and populists (the former want labor priced higher to decrease competitive pressure on their members, the latter so that they can talk up "all that they've done" for that fraction of their constituents who remain employable at the higher minimum) versus the employers, particularly small business (who are responsible for a lot of the entry-level employment opportunities and whose competitiveness is most affected by the minimum wage). The political class uses the minimum wage to extort contributions from the competing interests so that they don't get trampled in the process.

"Now is the time that men work quietly in the fields, and women weep softly in the kitchen; the Legislature is in session, and no man's property is safe." - Daniel Webster

The paradox that arises is that you can train unskilled people, but that leaves a vacuum for unskilled labour and an abundance of low-skill labour.

It's no paradox; it's called "non-monetary interest" or "deferred gratification". People do what they find rewarding. People (mostly women, but both sexes) remove themselves from the workforce to raise children. People live on poverty-level stipends as graduate students, in the interest of getting more education and a better position later. (Need I mention that highly-paid unskilled labor tends to be replaced by automation, and automation is created by highly-skilled people? Should I add that automation increases the productivity per hour of work and raises the general standard of living?)

If people would rather work at a low-skill position than an unskilled position despite the latter paying more, it obviously has some other kind of reward. Prospects for advancement are one such reward, emotional gratification is another. However, one usually finds such situations where wages are set by government fiat, such as the higher wages of bus drivers over doctors in the (defunct) Soviet Union.

An ecnonomic system, like a political system, is a compromise between government and individuals. Some individuals want complete equity in distribution, some want complete anarchy. The compromise is the point at which restrictions are placed: with capatalism the point is close to anarchy.

Not in the USA, it's not; it's more of an oligarchy. But this is a symptom of the political class holding out laws for sale to the highest bidder; if the political class had no such power (such as if it was forbidden to exercise such powers), the problem would cease to exist.

This compromise is needed because in a pure capatalist society, those with money can dictate to those without. Even a highly skilled individual cannot earn a good salary if companies are not prepared to pay one.

Hah! A highly-skilled individual can earn whatever people are willing to pay, unless the government steps in and forbids individuals from running their own businesses and effectively chains them to one other another s\l\a\v\e\m\a\s\t\e\r corporate employer. The political class has a strong interest in doing this, because a few large organizations are much easier to shake down and/or control than a horde of small ones.

Democracy is not about listening to the rule of the majority. It is about accomodating the majority while protecting them and the rights of all minorities.

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch, and don't delude yourself otherwise. Constitutional democracy is better, but still not perfect. The political class is too good at finding its way around constraints on its power.

In other words, the job of a capatalist government is (amongst others) to ensure that there is an unlimited ability to grow money, but that must be balanced against the rights of individuals to earn money, and the cost and value of services that need to be provided to society. The prevention of collusion and the use of minimum wage are extremely effective in creating such a balance.

As practiced in Europe, this appears to set up against the "right" of the individual to be unemployed even if they would prefer to have a job; the unemployment rate in Europe was running over twice that of the USA the last time I checked. The minimum wage is one of the things keeping people from getting jobs, as any job which doesn't produce enough value to exceed the minimum wage will not exist even if a job-seeker would happily take it.

Capatalism is inherently at odds with democracy, which is why most first world countries tend towards socialism (especially in Europe).

Of course capitalism is anti-democratic. Capitalism is about liberty, the freedom to do things without having to obtain someone else's approval first. Democracy as practiced by socialist states in Europe has ossified, but few of its citizens seem to be able to see the source of their troubles, and fewer still are ready to make the required changes.

That's all right, the USA can use the influx of your disaffected entrepreneurs.

(OT) Supposes whom?

On: Selling Open Source on the Campaign Trail

Last point re: minumum wage - while 15 is rather high, minumum wage is supposed to be a LIVING wage.

(emphasis added)

Really? Who supposes that, and why? I propose the radical concept that anyone who does so is misled or misinformed. The minimum wage is just that, a minimum. It covers the entire nation, not just the high-cost-of-living areas. And it isn't adjusted for personal circumstances; it has nothing whatsoever to do with how much it actually costs to live.

And it shouldn't. The minimum wage is effectively a floor wage for people who aren't making tips and have few or no useful skills. Raising the purchasing power of the minimum wage decreases the incentive to develop better skills, which indisputably decreases the wealth of society as a whole. While raising the minimum wage has its advocates, the people who march to that drum fall into four groups:

1. The disaffected and powerless, looking for a leader (not unlike the radical Islamic youth).
2. Leaders of group 1.
3. People afraid of competition from group 1 if they were to find a clue.
4. People without the brains or experience to see through fallacious feel-good arguments.

I assume that you fall into group 3 or 4 here.

Fold the board in half, maybe?

On: Improving Computer Form Factors?

So long as you don't require access to the "back" of the board, it could be folded or piggy-backed with another board with a similar number of layers. This would reduce the number of vias to something not much more than current designs.

Hmmm. Perhaps the folded board could be wrapped around an aluminum plate with heat-pipe channels for fanless cooling. If the CPU could be put in close thermal contact with that plate, the system could dump heat directly to the environment without a single moving (or noisy) part. Quiet might help sell these micro-systems as much as small size.

What you as a non-programmer can do

On: Bridging the Digital Divide with Linux

If you want to really DO SOMETHING to help the less fortunate get wired...this is what it takes. I'm not a programmer, so I really can't be a part of this. But not being a programmer doesn't mean I can't see the need.

Not at all. Even as a non-programmer you can do two things that the effort really can't do without:

1. Write specifications, and
2. Write documentation.

In case you hadn't noticed, these are areas where the hard-core geeks sometimes have difficulty (or just don't want to bother). If you have skills in those areas, being unable to program is probably no handicap so long as you can think and write clearly.

Re:Democracy is not a requirement (MOD PARENT UP)

On: The Drone War

True, but in the long term Russia still expended its human capital trying to uphold totalitarianism instead of continuing to improve, and collapsed economically. I'm concerned about the long term here; I don't think there are going to be any totalitarian states left in the world in 20 years, and if so the next 20 years are going to be the crucial ones.

No, it means the end of armed conflict.

On: The Drone War

If two technologically advanced nations have a conflict, using arms quickly becomes very expensive (for at least the less-advanced side, or both if they are similarly advanced). The goals of neither nation would be advanced by such a techno-war, so you'd expect them to settle quickly or move to (or never come to the armed phase from) some other form of conflict.

It's fortunate that the most technologically advanced nations are also democratic, because democracies do not start wars with each other as a rule. If dictatorship is incompatible with the maintenance of such a technological edge (because of the human capital required) maybe the world will become a safer place; however, I'd worry if a nation like China can get to the point of building such weapons systems without also liberalizing its political and economic system.

You missed a fuel-cell issue - terrorism

On: 20 Factors That Will Change PCs In 2002

Hydrogen fuel cells offer the possibility of dumping the hydrogen into the air in a confined space and igniting it, making a wonderful little bomb. This would be just the thing to take down an airliner. (It just occurred to me that the same could possibly be done with regular old NiMH batteries, if you had enough of them; how much H2 does one of those store?) I wonder if anyone is analyzing these possibilities, and if so, if the FAA is ready to restrict problematic technologies from commercial aircraft. Methanol fuel cells, by contrast, don't appear to be abusable in this way and ought to be clear to fly; if you're looking for a technology which is going to take off and make money, the one which will be permitted on commercial aircraft seems like a better bet if all else is equal.

Where does this leave Virginia?

On: Driver's Licenses to Become National ID Cards

Virginia, if you didn't know, is a state which once required only an affidavit of residency to get a driver's license. If it is that easy to get a DL in even one state, it's a piece of cake to have "legitimate ID" that is utterly bogus in truth.

The danger is that such a bogus ID will be taken as valid in more places and for more things due to its "national scope", and it'll be easier to get into things and do more damage than it is now (difficult concept, I know).

Now you're freezin' with "gas" (but not gas)

On: Light Stopped, Held And Re-emitted By A Crystal

It has been done, but not with anything in the "gas" state as is commonly understood. The light-freezing trick was done, IIRC, with a Bose-Einstein condensate. This much-ballyhooed creation is made from a bit of ultracold sodium gas, but it isn't in the same physical state as a gas any more than superfluid helium is.

You need hardware your software will run on.

On: Selecting Computing Hardware for CFD Research?

Looks to me like your requirement for use of your commercial package limits your options. NASA and others have had great success with schemes like Beowulf, but if you can't get your package to run on whatever architecture you build you might as well have saved your money. I suppose you could reduce this to:

1. What kind of hardware do you need to run your software,
2. How much money can you save by going with the home-grown solution, and
3. How much time and risk do you take by avoiding the COTS solution? (This depends in part on your own expertise.)

There have got to be people who've tried to do things with their own neato system and failed, but we don't hear as much about the failures as we do about the successes. This does not mean that your own situation will be better, or be swept under the rug more quietly, if you try to build your own and fail. 'Syour life.

You want a return; how about paying your supplier?

On: Perception of Linux Among IT Undergrads

All honesty im not a beliver in opensource because i belive time *IS* money which means my time should be worth a return in cold hard cash.

So don't write OSS software for anyone else unless they're paying you for your time (or fixed-price for a solution). That way you get paid.

But don't complain about having to release the source code to the customer under the GPL. If the customer paid you, they have a right to have someone else work on the code. And if they decide to hand "your" work (which they paid for) back to the world, tough noogies: you got your starting material from someone who gave it to you for essentially nothing (in cash) under the GPL, so giving back to the world is how you compensate the community which gave you that leg-up to your goal. Capisce?

I think you missed the point

On: Universal to Copyprotect All CDs

I bet you don't have a daughter who loves Britney Spears...

I bet you didn't understand me: I don't want any money to go to the hucksters who created Britney Spears, even if they do manage to create some demand for their lousy product (notice I say product, not artist). As a parent I don't want my money going to things which I think are bad for my kids.

Note to anyone else who might decide to d/l a couple of Britney Spears videos off Morpheus for a younger child.... About half are really pornos in disguise.

Would you blame me for wanting to starve the sources of such junk?

You've got to want this for size or coolness...

On: 1GB USB Drive on a Keychain

... because CD-R media are a heck of a lot cheaper until you've burned quite a few. At least the price will eventually come down.

But I really don't see what it's good for. Storing lots of stuff? CD-R or CD-RW; your computer probably has a drive already, and you can stash more data than even the 1/2 GB drive. Holding encryption keys? You want something a lot smaller, cheaper and more rugged. Having something neat to put in your pocket? Okay, but that's not going to sell lots of them.

Re:To quote, the REAL problem...

On: Universal to Copyprotect All CDs

Someone mod that up as "insightful".

I liked this terror-scenario from the article:

Such rules let consumers enjoy music on an array of consumer electronics devices -- from PCs to portable players. But it would discourage 15 high school friends from getting together and pooling their money to buy a single music CD and a spindle of blank discs and making dubs for everyone in the group -- with a few extras to sell at school.

Speaking for myself, I don't want to keep the kids from copying the bubble-gum stuff and throwing it all around the school. I want the market for that to dry up, because the whole concept of a manufactured youth-culture is destructive to society as a whole and it deserves to be destroyed.

Oxygen doesn't mean spit

On: Mars Odyssey Detects Signs of Water

Better than 2/3 of the mass of CO2 (dry ice) is oxygen, and there's plenty of that at the poles. A large fraction of the mass of rock is silicon dioxide, which is full of (would you ever have guessed it?)... oxygen. An oxygen detector will find it everywhere on any rocky object.

The stuff that's hard to find in accessible form off of Earth isn't oxygen, it's hydrogen. Once you've got the hydrogen it's not difficult to turn it into whatever other form you need. On a planet-like body the most likely form in which you'll find hydrogen is going to be water, though you might find traces of ammonia if it's cold enough.

The other thing about water is that it dissolves things and leaves other things. Movement of water tends to create useful ores, placer deposits of insoluble stuff like gold, and other things you could get an earful about by asking a mining engineer or geologist. Knowing where water is tells you where to look for those things.

Economic use doesn't need a colony

On: Mars Odyssey Detects Signs of Water

The return on investment on Earth in economic terms would probably be close to nil due to the cost of transport.

Yeah, down on Earth surface you're right. But suppose you need large amounts of stuff in orbit, or on the Moon? Mars' smaller gravity well might actually make it cheaper to ship water and such from there than to haul it up from the ground on ol' Terra; if I recall correctly Olympus Mons is effectively outside the Martian atmosphere, so you could build a mass-driver on the slope and launch almost directly to orbit from there without so much as an Estes motor (you'd need some kind of apogee kick or it would fall back). Tossing stuff electrically vs. using rockets might be cheap enough to make it worth going to Mars to get the stuff to toss in the first place.