Radiation accounts for a very small amount of heat transfer. I'm trying to find quantification for that, but Google isn't being helpful. Even if this weren't the case, it'd be trivial to line the the suit with inward-facing shiny reflective (reflecting IR is the important part) stuff, the kind you get on newer rolls of house insulation. Only without the bubble wrap.
Ah, but you forget that condensation is a warming process, and you're right back where you started. Only by permanently (or at least until the excursion is over) evaporating the water would this work. And given how precious water is in space, I don't think disposing of it would be a terribly good idea in the first place. No, the water-cooling idea is probably a no-go.
As for lead traces---is it the presence of lead or the presence of a big chunky mass that makes it into a good radiation shield?
So... they're demanding to sue en masse like this? Using lawsuits and demanding massive settlements? Isn't this the definition of barratry---abuse of the legal system for extortion? If so, do smartcard reader owners have the basis for a class action?
Do you really need bulky armor-plate, or are there gels that can absorb small-mass, high-energy impact like that?
The thermal problem has nothing to do with cold---if it's four kelvin in a vacuum, how's the heat going to leave your body?---and everything to do with heat, both body heat (remember, it has nowhere to go) and solar. So the temperature gradient isn't really an issue---there's no way half of the body is going to be at -100---but heat dissipation is.
These are engineering problems, and while I can't think of any out-of-hand solutions to them, I'll bet that other people have given it some thought. How do NASA space suits deal with these things?
Wouldn't the water all boil off, making you very, very cold? (Evaporation is, after all, a cooling process.)
Then again, a tank of water to be evaporated might be an effective method of dissipating the heat you generate. Doesn't seem very reliable or sustainable, though.
Mmm, true. That, the micrometorite problem and heat dissipation are rather tricky. It should be possible to line the suit with lead, I'd think. It'd be like wearing one of those aprons they put over your genitals when you get an x-ray, but covering the whole body. Still not nearly as bulky as the traditional space suit, and doesn't require pressurizing the whole body.
Are you sure you read my original comment? The point is that the human body can survive in a vacuum, if its volume is held constant. You'd still need a fishbowl for your head (as someone else pointed out) and ways of dealing with both radiation and heat, but stop and think about what you said:
What exactly is the problem with people being in a vacuum? Aside from ears popping and lungs deflating (this is why we have the fishbowl), the skin expands, depressurizing the blood and causing it to boil, and this is what's fatal. If the blood can't depressurize, what would be fatal about a vacuum?
I know that "the human body cannot survive inside of a vacuum" is something of an article of faith, and we've gotten accustomed to the idea, but I don't see what exactly is so hostile about one that can't be overcome with a fishbowl and wetsuit. Is there a real reason other than "it's a very complex problem"?
Well, the point of using a wetsuit is just that it's form-fitting and so keeps the body's volume constant.
Technically, space is very cold, but it's also very empty. There's really nothing out there to absorb the heat from the body, so your biggest problem (as someone else has already pointed out) is getting rid of both the body heat you generate and the heat you get from being in the sun. (Of course, if you're going to be in the sun, you're going to need either a personal magnetic field or some sort of armor for the radiation.)
Of course, if you're walking on the moon, you need some sort of insulation. "The Forever War" talked about the problems with dissipating heat from a space suit.
You know, stuff like this really inspires me. I'm in the middle of reading Kings of the High Frontier, which was first published in the mid-nineties. A major plot point is a wealthy industrialist offering a half-billion dollar prize similar to the X-Prize. Even a few years ago, I never thought we'd be seeing so many groups trying for their own cheap launch. It should have been done years ago.
Some people complain that the X-Prize doesn't really get anywhere---that tossing yourself a hundred kilometers above sea level is a far cry from low earth orbit. This is true. Maybe the X-Prize will be the first in a series of cash prizes to spur even more invention. First single-stage to orbit, first real space station, first craft assembled in space... I don't know what the next milestones will be, but we'll get there faster if there's cash money incentive.
Oh, and would wetsuits work as space suits? There's no way the heat would really bleed off, and if you could lead-line them for heat shielding...
The quote from KOTHF is "Space suits for NASA cost a million bucks a shot and are about as comfortable as wearing pork barrels. I found this research report from the nineteen-sixties by a team that ought to have won the contract bid, except that their suits only cost a thousand dollars each and could be done by any seamstress. NASA probably figured that would have looked cheap, so for three decades astronauts have been lugging around thirty layers of cloth and a refrigerator when they could have been dressed in Spandex tights." [...] "The difference between down here and up there is only one measly atmosphere of pressure. Our skin is strong enough to withstand that gradient. It has quite a bit of tensile strength. The only problem is that it stretches too well. That means we swell up, which drops the pressure in our bloodstream, so our blood outgasses and vapor-locks our hearts. With just this second skin to keep our body volume constant, we don't expand. So we don't boil." (From ch. 11.)
Can anyone with a background in anything relating to that confirm or deny?
But audiophiles are inbred retards who have too much fucking money and don't want to buy Porsches like any decent rich kid. They care about the size of their audiovisual wang much more than their actual audio quality. If you say "double-blind listening test", their heads explode.
Remember to tell the nontechie to reverse the polarity, it always works in Star Trek...
"Oh, I see, your P4 chipset's not going to work with this PC133. We're going to have to get you some DDR, which will have the benefit of detecting tachyons and reversing the starboard shield antimatter polarity nutation."
Impressionable young people who like sweaty boobs. Hell, impressionable everyone. What does it say when humanity is saved through the destruction of its greatest works?
Gee, those ivory-tower scientist really aren't smart at all. See, squirting out a jam-faced sprog really is better and more honorable than expanding the field of human knowledge. Hyuk.
I always thought that the series, especially the second, had an underlying moral that was offensive to me. That moral is that technology, beyond a certain point, should not be researched, that there are sanctimoniously-pronounced Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. The morality is over a hundred years old (except Frankenstein's monster had much better dialogue), but the presentation has the advantage of technological wizardry. Oh, sweet irony.
I can imagine the offscreen dialogue at the end of "T2":
World-Saving Heroes: Well, we've saved your asses. Unwittingly Evil Scientists: Thanks! WSH: Now, remember, no more robotics or artificial intelligence; it'll destroy humanity, and there's no way we can ensure that it doesn't. UES: Umm. Right. So, guys, you want to... uh, take up pottery? [rumble of sanctimonious approval]
And did I mention that Linda Hamilton's speech about the wonders of childbirth was possibly the most disgusting thing committed to celluloid in the last ten years? I think "T2" probably did as much for a shortage of kids becoming scientists as anything else.
Wow, I never knew that my brand-X keyboard was made by "SOLID YEAR CO LTD", from "CHANGHWA HSIEN, TAIWAN".
One note: my keyboard, for instance, doesn't have a UL logo on it, but has a backwards "UR" (is it a backwards "LR"? the letters are smushed together). It's pretty interesting that I can actually look up the fire rating on my model...
Fileservers themselves tend to be rooted boxen on.edu connections. Go check out the bots on ZeroLimit or any other network, and they'll all be chewing up some poor university's bandwidth.
Yes, some people do run fileservers off their own machines, but the XDCCs---the main distribution points---are mildly untraceable.
"I'll show you politics in America: 'I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs' 'I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking' hey, wait a minute there's one guy holding up both puppets... 'Shut up!' go back to bed America, your government is in control. Here's Love Connection, watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way, keep drinking beer you fucking morons."
Okay, you're retarded. Look at this table. USB 1.1 supports low- and full-speed (1.5 and 12 Mbit), and USB 2.0 supports low-, full- and high-speed (1.5, 12 and 480 Mbit).
There exist confusing standards out there, but USB ain't one of 'em.
The One (Neo) is the machines' last system of control; he's the result of those in the matrix having a choice---Zion or the matrix---and is part of the cycle in which Zion is created and destroyed. Neo is the sixth version of the One.
Perhaps your friend has some different, PhD version of "nothing" he meant.
While everyone may use LaTeX, PDF has become more and more popular for web distribution of papers. PS works fine when you're just sending it to the printer, but because Adobe didn't include PS support in Acrobat, Windows users don't bother.
But TeX/LaTeX has the advantage of being pretty much immutable, second only to plain TXT on that count. The standard hasn't changed since, what, 1982? Hopefully we'll be able to process the same documents with the same tools fifty years from now.
I think the important distinction between, say, Word format and TeX is that TeX is a piece of systems programming---it performs a well-defined task in a well-defined matter, much like lex or yacc do. An attempt to add 'features' is nonsensical. (Though functionality can be extended through the use of, say, pdftex.)
This was a red herring when it was first brought up, and it's a red herring now. The amount of money spent on space research and space flight is miniscule next to the amounts of money spent on social programs and "defense". It's a drop in the bucket, and tends to have quite an impressive return on investment. (All that R&D NASA did paid off here on earth too.)
There are reasons to support space flight, and reasons not to, but "stealing the bread from the mouths of hungry babes" ain't one of 'em.
I'm sick and tired of being told that some kind of philosophy is "pulp", or "amateur", or "freshman". This happened with The Matrix's exploration of the brain-in-vat idea, and no one could explain what they meant to me then.
So, come on. What's an example of "un-pulp", or "professional", or "graduate-level" philosophy?
Well, Liebniz would have probably had a few words with Newton about that, and Newton, being the scrooge that he was, would have set fire to Liebniz, or something similarly pissy.
Knuth didn't invent algorithmic analysis; his innovations are mostly in how the data is presented, in an incredibly dense and informative manner. (TAoCP.) If he'd patented literate programming, it'd be even less popular than it is now, and if he'd patented TeX, it'd just be another proprietary format that no one used after 1985 or so.
Knuth did say "I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. [...] There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science." Great guy. Says he's gonna write Book Four any day now, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Radiation accounts for a very small amount of heat transfer. I'm trying to find quantification for that, but Google isn't being helpful. Even if this weren't the case, it'd be trivial to line the the suit with inward-facing shiny reflective (reflecting IR is the important part) stuff, the kind you get on newer rolls of house insulation. Only without the bubble wrap.
--grendel drago
Ah, but you forget that condensation is a warming process, and you're right back where you started. Only by permanently (or at least until the excursion is over) evaporating the water would this work. And given how precious water is in space, I don't think disposing of it would be a terribly good idea in the first place. No, the water-cooling idea is probably a no-go.
As for lead traces---is it the presence of lead or the presence of a big chunky mass that makes it into a good radiation shield?
--grendel drago
So... they're demanding to sue en masse like this? Using lawsuits and demanding massive settlements? Isn't this the definition of barratry---abuse of the legal system for extortion? If so, do smartcard reader owners have the basis for a class action?
--grendel drago
Do you really need bulky armor-plate, or are there gels that can absorb small-mass, high-energy impact like that?
The thermal problem has nothing to do with cold---if it's four kelvin in a vacuum, how's the heat going to leave your body?---and everything to do with heat, both body heat (remember, it has nowhere to go) and solar. So the temperature gradient isn't really an issue---there's no way half of the body is going to be at -100---but heat dissipation is.
These are engineering problems, and while I can't think of any out-of-hand solutions to them, I'll bet that other people have given it some thought. How do NASA space suits deal with these things?
--grendel drago
Wouldn't the water all boil off, making you very, very cold? (Evaporation is, after all, a cooling process.)
Then again, a tank of water to be evaporated might be an effective method of dissipating the heat you generate. Doesn't seem very reliable or sustainable, though.
--grendel drago
Mmm, true. That, the micrometorite problem and heat dissipation are rather tricky. It should be possible to line the suit with lead, I'd think. It'd be like wearing one of those aprons they put over your genitals when you get an x-ray, but covering the whole body. Still not nearly as bulky as the traditional space suit, and doesn't require pressurizing the whole body.
--grendel drago
Are you sure you read my original comment? The point is that the human body can survive in a vacuum, if its volume is held constant. You'd still need a fishbowl for your head (as someone else pointed out) and ways of dealing with both radiation and heat, but stop and think about what you said:
What exactly is the problem with people being in a vacuum? Aside from ears popping and lungs deflating (this is why we have the fishbowl), the skin expands, depressurizing the blood and causing it to boil, and this is what's fatal. If the blood can't depressurize, what would be fatal about a vacuum?
I know that "the human body cannot survive inside of a vacuum" is something of an article of faith, and we've gotten accustomed to the idea, but I don't see what exactly is so hostile about one that can't be overcome with a fishbowl and wetsuit. Is there a real reason other than "it's a very complex problem"?
--grendel drago
Well, the point of using a wetsuit is just that it's form-fitting and so keeps the body's volume constant.
Technically, space is very cold, but it's also very empty. There's really nothing out there to absorb the heat from the body, so your biggest problem (as someone else has already pointed out) is getting rid of both the body heat you generate and the heat you get from being in the sun. (Of course, if you're going to be in the sun, you're going to need either a personal magnetic field or some sort of armor for the radiation.)
Of course, if you're walking on the moon, you need some sort of insulation. "The Forever War" talked about the problems with dissipating heat from a space suit.
--grendel drago
You know, stuff like this really inspires me. I'm in the middle of reading Kings of the High Frontier, which was first published in the mid-nineties. A major plot point is a wealthy industrialist offering a half-billion dollar prize similar to the X-Prize. Even a few years ago, I never thought we'd be seeing so many groups trying for their own cheap launch. It should have been done years ago.
Some people complain that the X-Prize doesn't really get anywhere---that tossing yourself a hundred kilometers above sea level is a far cry from low earth orbit. This is true. Maybe the X-Prize will be the first in a series of cash prizes to spur even more invention. First single-stage to orbit, first real space station, first craft assembled in space... I don't know what the next milestones will be, but we'll get there faster if there's cash money incentive.
Oh, and would wetsuits work as space suits? There's no way the heat would really bleed off, and if you could lead-line them for heat shielding...
The quote from KOTHF is "Space suits for NASA cost a million bucks a shot and are about as comfortable as wearing pork barrels. I found this research report from the nineteen-sixties by a team that ought to have won the contract bid, except that their suits only cost a thousand dollars each and could be done by any seamstress. NASA probably figured that would have looked cheap, so for three decades astronauts have been lugging around thirty layers of cloth and a refrigerator when they could have been dressed in Spandex tights." [...] "The difference between down here and up there is only one measly atmosphere of pressure. Our skin is strong enough to withstand that gradient. It has quite a bit of tensile strength. The only problem is that it stretches too well. That means we swell up, which drops the pressure in our bloodstream, so our blood outgasses and vapor-locks our hearts. With just this second skin to keep our body volume constant, we don't expand. So we don't boil." (From ch. 11.)
Can anyone with a background in anything relating to that confirm or deny?
--grendel drago
Anyone else having a "Kings of the High Frontier" moment lately? It's quite a time to be alive.
--grendel drago
But audiophiles are inbred retards who have too much fucking money and don't want to buy Porsches like any decent rich kid. They care about the size of their audiovisual wang much more than their actual audio quality. If you say "double-blind listening test", their heads explode.
--grendel drago
Since I mostly burn 350MB (half-CD) TV eps, I'm familiar with 1GB being very close to 1.5 (700MB) CDs. (It's 26MB too small.)
Just being nitpicky.
--grendel drago
Remember to tell the nontechie to reverse the polarity, it always works in Star Trek...
"Oh, I see, your P4 chipset's not going to work with this PC133. We're going to have to get you some DDR, which will have the benefit of detecting tachyons and reversing the starboard shield antimatter polarity nutation."
--grendel drago
Impressionable young people who like sweaty boobs. Hell, impressionable everyone. What does it say when humanity is saved through the destruction of its greatest works?
Gee, those ivory-tower scientist really aren't smart at all. See, squirting out a jam-faced sprog really is better and more honorable than expanding the field of human knowledge. Hyuk.
Gag me with a fucking sack of razor blades.
--grendel drago
I always thought that the series, especially the second, had an underlying moral that was offensive to me. That moral is that technology, beyond a certain point, should not be researched, that there are sanctimoniously-pronounced Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. The morality is over a hundred years old (except Frankenstein's monster had much better dialogue), but the presentation has the advantage of technological wizardry. Oh, sweet irony.
I can imagine the offscreen dialogue at the end of "T2":
World-Saving Heroes: Well, we've saved your asses.
Unwittingly Evil Scientists: Thanks!
WSH: Now, remember, no more robotics or artificial intelligence; it'll destroy humanity, and there's no way we can ensure that it doesn't.
UES: Umm. Right. So, guys, you want to... uh, take up pottery?
[rumble of sanctimonious approval]
And did I mention that Linda Hamilton's speech about the wonders of childbirth was possibly the most disgusting thing committed to celluloid in the last ten years? I think "T2" probably did as much for a shortage of kids becoming scientists as anything else.
--grendel drago
Wow, I never knew that my brand-X keyboard was made by "SOLID YEAR CO LTD", from "CHANGHWA HSIEN, TAIWAN".
One note: my keyboard, for instance, doesn't have a UL logo on it, but has a backwards "UR" (is it a backwards "LR"? the letters are smushed together). It's pretty interesting that I can actually look up the fire rating on my model...
--grendel drago
Half of the people in the world are stupider than the median person. Then again, maybe Carlin figured his audience wouldn't know what a median is...
--grendel drago
Fileservers themselves tend to be rooted boxen on .edu connections. Go check out the bots on ZeroLimit or any other network, and they'll all be chewing up some poor university's bandwidth.
Yes, some people do run fileservers off their own machines, but the XDCCs---the main distribution points---are mildly untraceable.
--grendel drago
"I'll show you politics in America: 'I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs' 'I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking' hey, wait a minute there's one guy holding up both puppets... 'Shut up!' go back to bed America, your government is in control. Here's Love Connection, watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way, keep drinking beer you fucking morons."
--Bill Hicks.
Okay, you're retarded. Look at this table. USB 1.1 supports low- and full-speed (1.5 and 12 Mbit), and USB 2.0 supports low-, full- and high-speed (1.5, 12 and 480 Mbit).
There exist confusing standards out there, but USB ain't one of 'em.
--grendel drago
Bullshit. [Spoilers. Piss off.]
The One (Neo) is the machines' last system of control; he's the result of those in the matrix having a choice---Zion or the matrix---and is part of the cycle in which Zion is created and destroyed. Neo is the sixth version of the One.
Perhaps your friend has some different, PhD version of "nothing" he meant.
--grendel drago
While everyone may use LaTeX, PDF has become more and more popular for web distribution of papers. PS works fine when you're just sending it to the printer, but because Adobe didn't include PS support in Acrobat, Windows users don't bother.
But TeX/LaTeX has the advantage of being pretty much immutable, second only to plain TXT on that count. The standard hasn't changed since, what, 1982? Hopefully we'll be able to process the same documents with the same tools fifty years from now.
I think the important distinction between, say, Word format and TeX is that TeX is a piece of systems programming---it performs a well-defined task in a well-defined matter, much like lex or yacc do. An attempt to add 'features' is nonsensical. (Though functionality can be extended through the use of, say, pdftex.)
--grendel drago
This was a red herring when it was first brought up, and it's a red herring now. The amount of money spent on space research and space flight is miniscule next to the amounts of money spent on social programs and "defense". It's a drop in the bucket, and tends to have quite an impressive return on investment. (All that R&D NASA did paid off here on earth too.)
There are reasons to support space flight, and reasons not to, but "stealing the bread from the mouths of hungry babes" ain't one of 'em.
--grendel drago
I'm sick and tired of being told that some kind of philosophy is "pulp", or "amateur", or "freshman". This happened with The Matrix's exploration of the brain-in-vat idea, and no one could explain what they meant to me then.
So, come on. What's an example of "un-pulp", or "professional", or "graduate-level" philosophy?
--grendel drago
Well, Liebniz would have probably had a few words with Newton about that, and Newton, being the scrooge that he was, would have set fire to Liebniz, or something similarly pissy.
Knuth didn't invent algorithmic analysis; his innovations are mostly in how the data is presented, in an incredibly dense and informative manner. (TAoCP.) If he'd patented literate programming, it'd be even less popular than it is now, and if he'd patented TeX, it'd just be another proprietary format that no one used after 1985 or so.
Knuth did say "I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. [...] There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science." Great guy. Says he's gonna write Book Four any day now, too.
--grendel drago