We are using more energy today than actually arrives from the sun.
Sorry guy, you lose, play again.
World fossil energy consumption for 1995 was in the neighborhood of 340 quads (1 quad = 10^12 BTU). 1 BTU = 1054.4 joules, so call it 3.58*10^17 J. The Sun delivers about 1360 watts of power per square meter of surface, or about 1.18*10^8 J/m^2/day. The Earth presents a disk roughly 3200 km in radius, for an area of about 3.22*10^13 square meters. 1.18*10^8 J/m^2 * 3.22*10^13 m^2 = 3.80*10^19 J/day.
Conclusion: The Earth receives more energy from the sun every fourteen minutes than humanity uses (from fossil sources) in a year. (Nowhere near that amount is stored in fossil form, but that's not what you said.)
You should qualify your statements and check your numbers. You should also note that your claims assume current technology; if someone starts farming green algae to produce hydrogen and feeds that to a Haber-process plant to make ammonia, bingo, you've got non-fossil nitrogen fertilizer! --
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Can you imagine how much a kid would get picked on in school once the other children learned they were genetically modified? Or even the reaction from adults?
You're talking about a test-tube baby here, not some kind of freak. There's nothing abnormal about them; if anything, they are more normal (because of the lack of the mitochondrial disease) than their mothers. Unless you go probing around in their mDNA you are going to have no idea that they are the slightest bit different. I doubt that anyone's going to tell those kids that they inherited anything out of the ordinary, and I'll bet that those parents who live in areas with narrow-minded bigots who'd single them out for something like that are smart enough to keep their mouths shut. --
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Wow, is it just me, or is this article really down on genetic engineering?
Not only that, but most of the criticisms appeared (to me) to be utterly clueless. There are a number of known mitochondrial diseases, and there's no real difference between transplanting a mitochondrion to fix that and transplanting a kidney to fix kidney failure. If anything, there are fewer issues; we don't have to pay for any drugs to keep the patient from rejecting the mitochondria, and we know that there's no ill effect on the recipient's health (because the donor was living well with the same mitochondria).
It looks to me like the people quoted in this article were trying to score points with the Catholic church; maybe the authors were too. --
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Charging a handfull of holy warriors with transporting it into the US in one of the millions of containers that enter that country every day is so much easyer. Just getting the thing into New York Harbour would be enaugh just sail it to the pier and detonate the thing.
The only way to prevent that is to search every vessel that comes into the USA's EEZ with a geiger counter.
No, there are plenty of other ways. All you have to do is scan the vessels with a gamma spectrometer (and you really only need to scan the ones coming into port; a bomb going off several miles offshore is going to do minimal damage compared to the political benefits to the USA's hawk faction). You don't have to board anything, and you can turn away craft which are carrying bomb materials and/or intercept and search them offshore (which we do have the right to do, because we have every right to defend ourselves against an act of war).
The US Navy has got to have hundreds or thousands of sonar monitoring stations on the sea bed. If a substantial fraction of those aren't equipped with gamma spectrometers to detect bomb-carrying ships, I'd be very surprised. --
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How will the star wars project be able to distinguish between a suitcase with a nuke in it, and any other suitcase in a New York subway, bus, airport etc?
Oh boy, where to begin...
That's not the job of the anti-missile defense. The anti-missile defense handles... missiles!
If you want to find a suitcase with a nuke in it, you could start with the nice X-ray opacity of heavy metals like uranium and plutonium. The elements of a bomb would stand out really well at any airport baggage-checker. Then there is the background radioactivity of the bomb materials; use a gamma spectrometer and you're going to find the bomb even in a ship-load of containers. Use a gamma camera and you can pick the individual container. You can do this without having to board the ship.
This stuff is all old hat; the kind of detectors required have been in use at nuclear plants for about 20 years (they even detect radon on people's clothes). Saddam Hussein has had nukes for about ten years now. He hasn't nuked the USA yet (I'm sure we would have all heard of that). If it's so easy to put a nuke on a ship and blow up a port city, why hasn't he? Maybe it's not quite as easy to sneak things in as some people think, and finding a nuke on a ship would be the excuse for the US military to march into Baghdad and carry his head out on a bayonet. That's why nobody has tried this: it's not likely to work, and it's suicide regardless. --
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Consider that the energy in compressed air is in the form of heat. Unless they insulate this cavern, there is going to be appreciable heat transfer. What are the losses going to be?
They'll be enough at first, but they'll also shrink with time as the rock in and around the mine heats up. A body of rock as big as that mine will store heat energy on the time-scale of years; once it's hot you're not going to have much in the way of losses from it.
Some people have already tried to answer the "how much energy" question, but haven't actually taken the compressibility of air into account. There are also a number of assumptions you need to make, such as the temperature of the air at various points in the compression (you will have to cool the air between stages of the compressor or the temperature and energy requirements go out of sight, and your efficiency goes into the mud). Suffice it to say that the numbers in #13 and #14 are in the ballpark (the real figure will be within -50%/+100%), but nowhere near good enough for engineering purposes --
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... burning coal releases radiation into the air. You ask, how so? Well besides there being naturally occurring Carbon 14....
No there isn't. Carbon-14 is created by cosmic ray bombardment of atmospheric nitrogen. It decays with a half-life of less than 6000 years. Coal is many millions of years old; no matter how much C-14 there was in it when it was laid down, it's gone now.
...nuclear plants only break down because of being in disrepair.
Really? Three Mile Island was in disrepair? The Japanese fuel-fabrication plant which had the uncontrolled reaction a short while ago was in disrepair? Get real. They both had mis-operation and human error; they could have operated just fine had the people done the things they were supposed to do, and not do the things they shouldn't (like shutting off backup cooling pumps or adding several times the proper amount of uranium to a tank).
Of organisms can eat pieces of MIR for breakfast, we should be able to find something to chew on radioactive waste =)
How's an organism going to convert radwaste into energy for itself? It only takes a little knowledge of basic biology; if you're willing to make such a broad statement you ought to be able to answer that. --
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Cloning yourself to mow the lawn is stupid; would you really want someone with your smarts in a subservient position where they would want to knock you off the top? You'd have to be on guard every minute.
If you want a half-height clone for menial work, you want to start from stock that has very little in the way of intelligence and no gifts in the way of looks either. I suggest you get a sample from Spencer Abraham or Teddy Kennedy and work from there; nobody is going to have the slightest bit of sympathy for copies of either of them, and your lawn will be looking great for the next 50 years. --
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Yes. Leave the flash circuits separate, but connect the trigger lines in parallel to a common switch. Trigger the switch, all the flash units go off. Make absolutely certain that you have all the polarities the same, and use only a single model of flash unit. --
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I built a unit with a voltage doubler (two caps and two diodes) that ran off line current. It was current-limited by the caps and could recharge the unit in about five seconds. I hooked an SCR to the neon "ready" light to make it self-triggering, so it would flash continuously.
This only works with some varieties of flash unit; the polarity or wiring of the "ready" light versus the trigger circuit is wrong on some others. --
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I've taken some of those flash units apart, and the caps are only rated at about 350 volts. They don't store a heck of a lot of energy, but 350 volts is more than enough to give you a nasty poke. --
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The technical term for the little transformer built into a plug (so you can only get one into a wall outlet, or half as many on your power strip as it has outlets) is "wall wart". Their efficiency is often hideously low, and it's a pity that there aren't Federal regulations restricting how much power they're allowed to waste (especially when the device they are powering is in the off or standby state). --
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The full text of the paper was leaked, and was the subject of a Slashdot article a few days ago. Click on the "Cryptome" link. --
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As an orbiting object decreases speed, it falls in its orbital path.
Which is correct as far as it goes (it only applies to single-impulse velocity changes). However, after losing speed the object falls into a lower orbit (it no longer has the velocity to maintain its original orbit), and the trade of potential energy for kinetic energy increases the orbital speed.
Total energy/mass of an object in orbit is 1/2 v^2 - GM(earth)/r; you get a circular orbit when the kinetic energy is equal to half the (negative) potential energy, i.e. v = sqrt(GM(earth)/r). The total energy of an object in an orbit (as opposed to an escape trajectory) is always negative. --
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Is ripping DVDs really necessary? I mean, is it really that much of a pain in the ass to find a DVD if you're properly organized? I'd much rather cut $300 off the price by dropping the 200-gig HD and buying a $20 DVD rack.
Suppose you have small children. Do you really want to:
Have to keep track of DVDs in a household where everything is being continuously scrambled by noisy agents of entropy, and
Have to depend on them still being in playable condition when you can find them?
Ripping to disk would be a godsend for parents. The originals go on a high shelf, the copies can't be lost (they're inside the machine), and the kidlets might even be able to play their own movies by pointing at icons on the screen instead of having to ask mommy and daddy to do it for them. --
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Also, keep in mind that the appearance of surveilance is actually more important than the actual surveilance.
Which is probably a good reason to put a couple old or empty security camera housings on the barge, with wires going into a conduit and anchored somewhere. Then hide the real cameras.
At any rate, the threat of identifying someone as a perpetrator is more important than just having the camera there.
This is on a barge in the bay. The perps have to arrive in a boat, which probably has some kind of ID number on it. If you can make out that number you've got at least one of the perps; you don't have to recognize faces if you can get a license plate. --
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The news has been full of stories about people graduating from education schools who can barely read and write, let alone do what they're supposedly trained to do. These are people who are supposed to educate our kids, for crying out loud. Making entrants pass an aptitude test to get into ed schools is an idea which is long overdue. If we have to pay signing bonuses, decent salaries, scholarships and stipends to get enough qualified applicants, it's almost certainly cheaper than having people graduate from schools where they learned nothing because the "teachers" knew nothing. --
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Oh, boy, what an opportunity!
on
First Arcology?
·
· Score: 1
Skyscraper proyects in China routinely use bamboo as a substitute for the steel wire used to strenghen concrete in the western world.
Only a short distance away in Vietnam, there are fungi which just love eating cellulose. If some variant of those fungi got loose - or were planted - in those bamboo-reinforced beams, I could see whole districts falling down in the next storm or tremblor.
If I were looking for a way to discredit the butchers of Beijing, I don't think I could come up with a better one than to make them look corrupt and self-serving at the expense of the people. --
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It's not entrapment if you aren't trying to prosecute anyone. It's more like videotaping a burglar's activities at your door to find out how burglars break in, and analyzing the tool marks to see how to make the door secure against other burglars. --
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China has quite a reputation for buildings that collapse due to poor construction.
And the building is supposed to be a symbol of national (read government, read party) achievement. If it fell down, who'd fall with it? Right, and not a moment too soon either.
Democracy for China! --
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Check your loss calculations
on
First Arcology?
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· Score: 1
Do you know how air powered bank tubes work? Several designers have made elevator designs on the same concept.
Unless you have a way of making shaft doors which seal better than anything known to date, the power you spend keeping that thing pressurized is going to make your savings from eliminating the cable look penny-wise, pound-foolish. (Okay, it might not apply to an express elevator. But you are still going to have large losses due to air drag and turbine inefficiency during the descent phase; a cabled elevator will be much more efficient.) --
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Couple of numbers on tall buildings
on
First Arcology?
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There is no way for them to pump the water directly up that far. To get any sort of water pressure at the top would require a solid column of water in pipes 3700 feet tall.
33 feet of water column = one atmosphere of pressure. 3700 ft * 14.7 psi / 33 feet = 1650 PSI. That's not even a challenge; steam powerplants pump water to pressures several times that high all the time. Doing it all at once also lets you put the pumps on the ground, where you don't have to build co$tly structure to support them.
Someone flushes at the top, then their waste goes into FREEFALL for thousands of feet. How long do you think the pipes at the bottom could support those sorts of stresses?
Maybe the pipes take a jog every story or two. Or maybe there's a separate set of waste pipes for every dozen stories or so, and they are kept completely full up to a point; at the bottom the waste is blown through Pelton turbines to recover the energy used to pump the water up in the first place. Or maybe you have a set of pipes running to a turbine and a reservoir, then another set of pipes going to the next tier down...
Water treatment requires a lot of heavy stuff, and that's without considering the water itself. It probably makes more sense to do that down on (or under) the ground. Blowing stuff through nozzles and turbines on the way will give the bacteria a good head start on decomposing it. --
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Just take your hang glider and launch from a convenient spot (probably meaning wherever you can get the glass open). If the wind was just right and you were near the top, you might even be able to soar on the air curving up and over the top. You could stay up there for hours.
(Then you could zip off downwind and land someplace, avoid the cops and get your ass on a ship outta there where you could peddle the helmet-recorder videotapes.) --
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... have a problem, because having your tissue nitrogen levels low enough to be safe at sea level doesn't mean you might not have a problem at 4000 feet. You're supposed to allow extra time to purge nitrogen between diving and going on a commercial airliner if you were close to the limits, too. --
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Hong Kong is more efficient?
on
First Arcology?
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The most densely populated place on the planet is Mong Kok District in Hong Kong with over 250,000 people per square mile.
I make that as a bit under 1 person per square foot. But the Shanghai high-rise wouldn't be a huge improvement; its 3000-foot diameter support circle removes a lot of area from play. It's only a bit more than twice as densely populated, and bound to be far more expensive.
Looks like the Shanghai tower will be a hugely expensive publicity stunt. Just what a developing nation crying for investment capital needs... </sarcasm> --
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Slashdot Mirror
World fossil energy consumption for 1995 was in the neighborhood of 340 quads (1 quad = 10^12 BTU). 1 BTU = 1054.4 joules, so call it 3.58*10^17 J. The Sun delivers about 1360 watts of power per square meter of surface, or about 1.18*10^8 J/m^2/day. The Earth presents a disk roughly 3200 km in radius, for an area of about 3.22*10^13 square meters. 1.18*10^8 J/m^2 * 3.22*10^13 m^2 = 3.80*10^19 J/day.
Conclusion: The Earth receives more energy from the sun every fourteen minutes than humanity uses (from fossil sources) in a year. (Nowhere near that amount is stored in fossil form, but that's not what you said.)
You should qualify your statements and check your numbers. You should also note that your claims assume current technology; if someone starts farming green algae to produce hydrogen and feeds that to a Haber-process plant to make ammonia, bingo, you've got non-fossil nitrogen fertilizer!
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It looks to me like the people quoted in this article were trying to score points with the Catholic church; maybe the authors were too.
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The US Navy has got to have hundreds or thousands of sonar monitoring stations on the sea bed. If a substantial fraction of those aren't equipped with gamma spectrometers to detect bomb-carrying ships, I'd be very surprised.
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- That's not the job of the anti-missile defense. The anti-missile defense handles... missiles!
- If you want to find a suitcase with a nuke in it, you could start with the nice X-ray opacity of heavy metals like uranium and plutonium. The elements of a bomb would stand out really well at any airport baggage-checker. Then there is the background radioactivity of the bomb materials; use a gamma spectrometer and you're going to find the bomb even in a ship-load of containers. Use a gamma camera and you can pick the individual container. You can do this without having to board the ship.
This stuff is all old hat; the kind of detectors required have been in use at nuclear plants for about 20 years (they even detect radon on people's clothes). Saddam Hussein has had nukes for about ten years now. He hasn't nuked the USA yet (I'm sure we would have all heard of that). If it's so easy to put a nuke on a ship and blow up a port city, why hasn't he? Maybe it's not quite as easy to sneak things in as some people think, and finding a nuke on a ship would be the excuse for the US military to march into Baghdad and carry his head out on a bayonet. That's why nobody has tried this: it's not likely to work, and it's suicide regardless.--
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Some people have already tried to answer the "how much energy" question, but haven't actually taken the compressibility of air into account. There are also a number of assumptions you need to make, such as the temperature of the air at various points in the compression (you will have to cool the air between stages of the compressor or the temperature and energy requirements go out of sight, and your efficiency goes into the mud). Suffice it to say that the numbers in #13 and #14 are in the ballpark (the real figure will be within -50%/+100%), but nowhere near good enough for engineering purposes
--
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If you want a half-height clone for menial work, you want to start from stock that has very little in the way of intelligence and no gifts in the way of looks either. I suggest you get a sample from Spencer Abraham or Teddy Kennedy and work from there; nobody is going to have the slightest bit of sympathy for copies of either of them, and your lawn will be looking great for the next 50 years.
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This only works with some varieties of flash unit; the polarity or wiring of the "ready" light versus the trigger circuit is wrong on some others.
--
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I've taken some of those flash units apart, and the caps are only rated at about 350 volts. They don't store a heck of a lot of energy, but 350 volts is more than enough to give you a nasty poke.
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The technical term for the little transformer built into a plug (so you can only get one into a wall outlet, or half as many on your power strip as it has outlets) is "wall wart". Their efficiency is often hideously low, and it's a pity that there aren't Federal regulations restricting how much power they're allowed to waste (especially when the device they are powering is in the off or standby state).
--
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The full text of the paper was leaked, and was the subject of a Slashdot article a few days ago. Click on the "Cryptome" link.
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Total energy/mass of an object in orbit is 1/2 v^2 - GM(earth)/r; you get a circular orbit when the kinetic energy is equal to half the (negative) potential energy, i.e. v = sqrt(GM(earth)/r). The total energy of an object in an orbit (as opposed to an escape trajectory) is always negative.
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- Have to keep track of DVDs in a household where everything is being continuously scrambled by noisy agents of entropy, and
- Have to depend on them still being in playable condition when you can find them?
Ripping to disk would be a godsend for parents. The originals go on a high shelf, the copies can't be lost (they're inside the machine), and the kidlets might even be able to play their own movies by pointing at icons on the screen instead of having to ask mommy and daddy to do it for them.--
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The news has been full of stories about people graduating from education schools who can barely read and write, let alone do what they're supposedly trained to do. These are people who are supposed to educate our kids, for crying out loud. Making entrants pass an aptitude test to get into ed schools is an idea which is long overdue. If we have to pay signing bonuses, decent salaries, scholarships and stipends to get enough qualified applicants, it's almost certainly cheaper than having people graduate from schools where they learned nothing because the "teachers" knew nothing.
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If I were looking for a way to discredit the butchers of Beijing, I don't think I could come up with a better one than to make them look corrupt and self-serving at the expense of the people.
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It's not entrapment if you aren't trying to prosecute anyone. It's more like videotaping a burglar's activities at your door to find out how burglars break in, and analyzing the tool marks to see how to make the door secure against other burglars.
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Democracy for China!
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Water treatment requires a lot of heavy stuff, and that's without considering the water itself. It probably makes more sense to do that down on (or under) the ground. Blowing stuff through nozzles and turbines on the way will give the bacteria a good head start on decomposing it.
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(Then you could zip off downwind and land someplace, avoid the cops and get your ass on a ship outta there where you could peddle the helmet-recorder videotapes.)
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... have a problem, because having your tissue nitrogen levels low enough to be safe at sea level doesn't mean you might not have a problem at 4000 feet. You're supposed to allow extra time to purge nitrogen between diving and going on a commercial airliner if you were close to the limits, too.
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Looks like the Shanghai tower will be a hugely expensive publicity stunt. Just what a developing nation crying for investment capital needs... </sarcasm>
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