Al Gore didn't invent the internet, but during his previous song-writing career, he invented something even more important to information processing: the Al Gore Rhythm.
Brazil is beating the pants off the USA in agriculture. And they did it with science, figuring out how to get high productivity out of tropical soils the ecodoomsters had said were unfarmable.
One would have expected that during the last 36 years we would have established permanent manned bases on the Moon, and be establishing a presence on Mars, or maybe even a Moon of Jupiter.
Why would one have expected that? Apollo was expensive enough, and economic limits do matter, bleats about bean counters notwithstanding.
HST also has a much darker background than a ground based scope (the ground scope must cope with airglow). HST also has UV capabilities not available to telescopes down here under the ozone layer.
Actually, there have been repeated attempts to layer non-S-expression syntax on top of Lisp. They have been almost universally rejected by Lisp programmers, since they end up adding nothing and make things like writing macros more difficult.
The experience of Dylan echoes this. They decided S-exprs were no good, went to a more conventional syntax, and found it didn't get them any traction at all.
Lisp has a wonderful syntax. The real shame is the people who slander it.
And, no, grammars and parsers are not hard to write, compared to the real hard part of a compiler (the optimization and code generation.) Grammars and parsers are goddamned *trivial* in comparison to those parts, particularly if you want good code.
In the Moessbauer effect, the excited state that is decaying has a comparatively long lifetime. This is necessary for the spectral line to be so sharp (delta E * delta T being bounded from below due to the uncertainty relation.)
This is not the case for the compound nuclear in nuclear fusion reactions! That nucleus has enough energy to be unbound with respect to particle emission, and therefore has a very short halflife. There simply isn't time for it to 'see' the solid material in which it resides.
Just because you do not understand a phenomenon, does not make it unlikely to exist.
Just because you don't understand my argument, doesn't mean it's incorrect.
Cold fusion has all the hallmarks of pathological science. This is the kind of science that occurs when a group earnestly believes in something that isn't actually there. Errors and artifacts are, in a fit of wishful thinking, interpreted as evidence that something is there.
Cold fusion suffers from being inconsistent with a great deal of establish theory about quantum mechanics and nuclear reactions. This means that, in effect, cold fusion proponents are asking us to disregard the mass of experimental data on which that established theory is based, but to give their own experiments preferential treatment. Not surprisingly, this has not led to anything interesting, and almost certainly never will.
All I can say is 'he never got it to work at anywhere close to the beam current required for significant energy production, and results were published by others showing it wouldn't work due to instabilities, instabilities that were observed in the experiments.'
The assert that 'the energy is released into the lattice as a whole, which is one of the better CF theories...', is pretty damning, since it's a ridiculous theory. The lifetime of an excited nucleus (the intermediate state in a nuclear reaction) is extremely short, shorter than the time required for light to travel interatomic distances in ordinary materials. So that theory violates relativistic causality.
Actually, spending on fusion isn't very high. The total annual magnetic fusion budget in the US is about 1/2 the annual average cost of a single space shuttle launch.
Even with the relatively small budget, fusion has made enormous strides over the past several decades. Relevant plasma parameters have improved by many orders of magnitude. Fusion energy output in reactors has increased even more (at a rate putting Moore's law to shame). Understanding of plasma behavior has massively advanced. Computers are now able to much better simulate plasmas. Engineering concepts for reactors have advanced.
Don't be a binary simpleton and say 'we don't have breakeven reactors yet, therefore no progress has been made'.
One can compute the rate of fusion at low temperature using straightfoward quantum mechanics (it's not even relativistic). Steve Koonin et al. published this in Nature shortly after the ruckus started.
The result? Rates are undetectably low, many orders of magnitude too low to explain the putative results.
But it's actually worse, since once fusion occurs the result (in the sense of the fusion products produced) should be independent of how the nuclei got together (for a given excitation energy). This means cold fusion of deuterium, if by some miracle it could occur, would be pumping out lots of neutrons. Cold fusion of protons + deuterons would be producing energetic gammas. None of these are seen at rates consistent with the putative energy production.
Physics rightly conclude that experimental error, incompetence, or fraud are the most likely explanations, when the phenomena can't be reproduced at will and would require multiple miracles to occur at all.
No, breeder reactors are not terribly 'inefficient'; if anything, they can be more efficient than current pressurized water reactors, since they operate at higher temperature. And they are 'full-blown' nuclear reactors themselves.
Where do you people get these bizarre misconceptions?
Fermi conducted neutron capture tests on various materials. He bombarded uranium with neutrons, among other elements, but did not interpret the results as fission.
Once fission itself was discovered, a critical nuclear reactor was constructed only three years later, and nuclear bombs only six years later.
The analogy between fission and cold fusion is very poor. Fission was a a clear cut, easily demonstrated physical phenomenon. It had an intuitive explanation (using the liquid drop model of the nucleus) that violated no known physical laws. Once the news got out physicists all over the place were confirming it within days. The application to large scale release of energy was immediately obvious. Cold fusion is murky, quirky, irreplicable, and almost certainly some combination of experimental errors, incompetence, and outright fraud.
My guess would be that Microsoft has actually applied random input testing to IE and fixed the resulting problems, and that the other browsers have not yet done that.
Muhammar, you should learn to actually think about these issues before pretending to have an informed opinion.
The volumes involved are certainly large, but they are small on a global scale, and the problem of disposing of these piles is small compared to the potential problems produced by uncontrolled buildup of atmospheric CO2. After all, all the substances in the waste stream are solids, and are already present in very large quantities in the crust.
Re:You are proving my point here.....
on
Can Coal Be Green?
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· Score: 1
Sorry, you're rather confused. CFCs are not broken down in the atmosphere by acids, they are broken down predominantly by short wave UV radiation. This radiation is not present in the troposphere, so the CFCs persist until they reach the stratosphere, where they are decomposed.
The nitrates in the stratosphere actually *inhibit* the effects of liberated chlorine, by tying it up in chlorine nitrate, which is not reactive with ozone. What happened in the polar regions is that the nitrates get removed on ice, preventing this reservoir from having as much of an effect. There are also catalytic reactions of chlorine species on the ice crystals which increase its effectiveness.
There's concern that sulfuric acid droplets could have the same effect at lower lattitudes after a large sulfur-rich volcanic eruption.
Re:Basic chemistry defeats FUD
on
Can Coal Be Green?
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· Score: 2, Informative
React the CO2 with alkali derived from silicates, producing carbonates. Not only are the resulting materials stable over extremely long periods of time, but the reaction is exothermic, so one can get (in principle) extra energy.
Diffraction is how this thing works, and why the telescope is so far back from the shade.
The purpose of the shade is to null out the light from the star without affecting the light from the planet. The shade is extremely effective at doing this, and doing it in a way that is insensitive to wavelength.
I'm not sure they need a hole; using the edge of a large disk should also work.
Slashdot Mirror
Al Gore didn't invent the internet, but during his previous song-writing career, he invented something even more important to information processing: the Al Gore Rhythm.
Brazil is beating the pants off the USA in agriculture. And they did it with science, figuring out how to get high productivity out of tropical soils the ecodoomsters had said were unfarmable.
Because we don't have a space tag, and certainly not one that could reach a Lagrange point even by itself, let alone hauling the HST with it.
Why would one have expected that? Apollo was expensive enough, and economic limits do matter, bleats about bean counters notwithstanding.
Adaptive optics are nice, but...
HST also has a much darker background than a ground based scope (the ground scope must cope with airglow). HST also has UV capabilities not available to telescopes down here under the ozone layer.
Not to mention the first ammendment implications.
Actually, there have been repeated attempts to layer non-S-expression syntax on top of Lisp. They have been almost universally rejected by Lisp programmers, since they end up adding nothing and make things like writing macros more difficult.
The experience of Dylan echoes this. They decided S-exprs were no good, went to a more conventional syntax, and found it didn't get them any traction at all.
Lisp has a wonderful syntax. The real shame is the people who slander it.
And, no, grammars and parsers are not hard to write, compared to the real hard part of a compiler (the optimization and code generation.) Grammars and parsers are goddamned *trivial* in comparison to those parts, particularly if you want good code.
I write language extensions all the time, but then I work in Common Lisp.
This XML thing is just an abomination. What the hell happened, did someone drop a brain-eater bomb on us?
In the Moessbauer effect, the excited state that is decaying has a comparatively long lifetime. This is necessary for the spectral line to be so sharp (delta E * delta T being bounded from below due to the uncertainty relation.)
This is not the case for the compound nuclear in nuclear fusion reactions! That nucleus has enough energy to be unbound with respect to particle emission, and therefore has a very short halflife. There simply isn't time for it to 'see' the solid material in which it resides.
Just because you do not understand a phenomenon, does not make it unlikely to exist.
Just because you don't understand my argument, doesn't mean it's incorrect.
Cold fusion has all the hallmarks of pathological science. This is the kind of science that occurs when a group earnestly believes in something that isn't actually there. Errors and artifacts are, in a fit of wishful thinking, interpreted as evidence that something is there.
Cold fusion suffers from being inconsistent with a great deal of establish theory about quantum mechanics and nuclear reactions. This means that, in effect, cold fusion proponents are asking us to disregard the mass of experimental data on which that established theory is based, but to give their own experiments preferential treatment. Not surprisingly, this has not led to anything interesting, and almost certainly never will.
All I can say is 'he never got it to work at anywhere close to the beam current required for significant energy production, and results were published by others showing it wouldn't work due to instabilities, instabilities that were observed in the experiments.'
The assert that 'the energy is released into the lattice as a whole, which is one of the better CF theories ...', is pretty damning, since it's a ridiculous theory. The lifetime of an excited nucleus (the intermediate state in a nuclear reaction) is extremely short, shorter than the time required for light to travel interatomic distances in ordinary materials. So that theory violates relativistic causality.
Actually, spending on fusion isn't very high. The total annual magnetic fusion budget in the US is about 1/2 the annual average cost of a single space shuttle launch.
Even with the relatively small budget, fusion has made enormous strides over the past several decades. Relevant plasma parameters have improved by many orders of magnitude. Fusion energy output in reactors has increased even more (at a rate putting Moore's law to shame). Understanding of plasma behavior has massively advanced. Computers are now able to much better simulate plasmas. Engineering concepts for reactors have advanced.
Don't be a binary simpleton and say 'we don't have breakeven reactors yet, therefore no progress has been made'.
In the 1950's a lot of aerospace journals were talking about antigravity research (specifically, electro-gravitics).
I bet you can't give 'a lot' of references to back up that statement.
One can compute the rate of fusion at low temperature using straightfoward quantum mechanics (it's not even relativistic). Steve Koonin et al. published this in Nature shortly after the ruckus started.
The result? Rates are undetectably low, many orders of magnitude too low to explain the putative results.
But it's actually worse, since once fusion occurs the result (in the sense of the fusion products produced) should be independent of how the nuclei got together (for a given excitation energy). This means cold fusion of deuterium, if by some miracle it could occur, would be pumping out lots of neutrons. Cold fusion of protons + deuterons would be producing energetic gammas. None of these are seen at rates consistent with the putative energy production.
Physics rightly conclude that experimental error, incompetence, or fraud are the most likely explanations, when the phenomena can't be reproduced at will and would require multiple miracles to occur at all.
No, breeder reactors are not terribly 'inefficient'; if anything, they can be more efficient than current pressurized water reactors, since they operate at higher temperature. And they are 'full-blown' nuclear reactors themselves.
Where do you people get these bizarre misconceptions?
Fermi conducted neutron capture tests on various materials. He bombarded uranium with neutrons, among other elements, but did not interpret the results as fission.
Once fission itself was discovered, a critical nuclear reactor was constructed only three years later, and nuclear bombs only six years later.
The analogy between fission and cold fusion is very poor. Fission was a a clear cut, easily demonstrated physical phenomenon. It had an intuitive explanation (using the liquid drop model of the nucleus) that violated no known physical laws. Once the news got out physicists all over the place were confirming it within days. The application to large scale release of energy was immediately obvious. Cold fusion is murky, quirky, irreplicable, and almost certainly some combination of experimental errors, incompetence, and outright fraud.
So why are hetereosexual marriages allowed in which one or both partners are sterile or past the age of child bearing?
My guess would be that Microsoft has actually applied random input testing to IE and fixed the resulting problems, and that the other browsers have not yet done that.
Muhammar, you should learn to actually think about these issues before pretending to have an informed opinion.
The volumes involved are certainly large, but they are small on a global scale, and the problem of disposing of these piles is small compared to the potential problems produced by uncontrolled buildup of atmospheric CO2. After all, all the substances in the waste stream are solids, and are already present in very large quantities in the crust.
Sorry, you're rather confused. CFCs are not broken down in the atmosphere by acids, they are broken down predominantly by short wave UV radiation. This radiation is not present in the troposphere, so the CFCs persist until they reach the stratosphere, where they are decomposed.
The nitrates in the stratosphere actually *inhibit* the effects of liberated chlorine, by tying it up in chlorine nitrate, which is not reactive with ozone. What happened in the polar regions is that the nitrates get removed on ice, preventing this reservoir from having as much of an effect. There are also catalytic reactions of chlorine species on the ice crystals which increase its effectiveness.
There's concern that sulfuric acid droplets could have the same effect at lower lattitudes after a large sulfur-rich volcanic eruption.
React the CO2 with alkali derived from silicates, producing carbonates. Not only are the resulting materials stable over extremely long periods of time, but the reaction is exothermic, so one can get (in principle) extra energy.
It's not practical yet, but the theory is there.
Diffraction is how this thing works, and why the telescope is so far back from the shade.
The purpose of the shade is to null out the light from the star without affecting the light from the planet. The shade is extremely effective at doing this, and doing it in a way that is insensitive to wavelength.
I'm not sure they need a hole; using the edge of a large disk should also work.
To answer my own question: Isonics is selling 28Si epi wafers. They are not yet selling 28Si bulk wafers (too expensive, I bet.)