I live in St. Paul, and in the downtown area, they have a combined heat and power plant. Not only that, but it's run on waste wood, much of it collected as a service... your waste leaves and branches from yardwork are tossed in the furnace instead of just rotting! Three birds (waste, heat, and power), one stone. Granted, this is just for the downtown area, but it's still pretty awesome. I don't think this would work in the suburbs, though... too much wasted heat just in the piping, plus the great expense of installing heavily insulated hot water pipes all over everywhere.
As far as nuclear, I find it hard to believe people will like have nuclear heated water run through their homes. The paranoia factor is just way too high. There are other uses for it, though. People will just have to be creative. Free heated water = efficient fish farm? = year-round tropical oasis in my home state of Minnesnowta?
I was not using Spore as evidence for something like "intelligent design," but instead as an example of a proto-universe, a precurser to a simulated universe. This idea that the universe is a simulation does not mean that evolution did not happen (certainly, it has every appearrance that evolution HAS happened, so evolution shouldn't be doubted).
I am a physicist. I think the world and life are billions of years old. I see videogames as evidence that future humans may indeed desire to simulate worlds for their own pleasure. And, why must they be humans? We can already simulate worlds very different from our own.
It is not an analogy. A programmer is de facto "God" for entities inside a computer system. If you try to imagine which way technology may progress with even only a thousand years of progress (let alone a million years), the level of complexity that computers would be able to simulate would be far beyond what human beings experience in our own world.
Why amusing? It's a perfectly logical, rational conclusion based on the available evidence. No one has ever provided any evidence or test to show that there is a supreme, omnipotent being watching over us. Nor has anyone ever provided any evidence to indicate how such a being could come into existence in the first place. The best anyone has ever offered is simply, "God/Vishnu/Chutulu/whatever has always existed." That is no evidence.
Well, I have evidence for the existence of God that's probably about on par with aliens that we haven't seen yet: Watch technology progress, especially the field of artificial intelligence and various simulations. What happens if we develop a simulation so intricate, inhabited with artificial beings so complex, that we couldn't easily tell the difference between our world and the simulation? Well? The person who made that simulation is like God, just like our life-forms are "like" extraterrestrials. Granted, it doesn't "prove" that God exists, but it does provide that data point that we can use to extrapolate the possibility of the existence of God.
I hear mostly staunch atheists promoting the idea that artificial intelligence will soon be developed (~50 years), but things like artificial intelligence and artificial worlds (things like Spore or World of Warcraft) are the most solid philosophical evidence yet of the existence of God, and the evidence will only get more convincing the more that such technology develops. What happens when there are more artificial entities living inside rich computer environments than there are fleshy entities? You would have to admit that you are most likely INSIDE such a world yourself! And, *gasp* someone PROGRAMMED the world you live in! OH! THE HORROR!
Malaria was endemic in the midwest until the 1930s, therefore Anopheline mosquitos were alive and well in the midwest. (It only needs to be above 68 degrees on average for the parasite to survive.) Anopheline mosquitos are still quite common in the U.S., but malaria has been eradicated there. It takes more than just the vectors to have malaria. Malaria is not a problem if you have any access to quality medical care, and consistent public efforts can basically wipe malaria off the map, if done internationally, just like it has been in the U.S.
"Another major issue is that warming brings a massive increase in the range of mosquitoes and deadly mosquito-born diseases like malaria."
You know what? That's a major misconception. Have you ever been to Alaska? The mosquitoes there are worse than they are here in Minnesota, and here in Minnesota, the mosquitoes are worse than when I was in Indonesia. Sure, you might say that there are no malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the midwest (U.S.), but according to the CDC (and the WHO): "Before the twentieth century, much of the Midwest was endemic for malaria." http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no6/seys.htm According to wikipedia (haha, yeah, I know), the elimination of malaria in the U.S. was a combination mostly of public health efforts and, to some extent, the use of DDT.
I say the major reason we have come to associate malaria with the tropics is because people there are poorer and do not have the public health and sanitation or access to mosquito-control programs that we have in the developed world. While I certainly think that research on climate change should continue, we should really focus more on "loving our neighbor," and if we make some progress with fighting poverty, then we won't have to worry so much about the effects of global warming (not to say that we should ignore them!).
Wait, so does that mean that The Singularity won't happen?!? Say it ain't so! I was so looking forward to the Nerd Rapture by our friend, the Computer!
...examples of how the Catholic church is blundering (big bang?)... Actually, it was a Catholic priest who made the first modern exposition of the idea of the Big Bang, where the previously most popular idea in cosmology was, for philosophical reasons (and perhaps anti-religious reasons?), the Steady-State Theory.
Except that the religious scientific fanatics claim that it means god doesn't exist. Then again, those are the ones who usually know nothing about science. Just like religious church fanatics claim that science has no place and god is some humanoid in the sky, and those are the ones that usually know nothing about spirituality. Every camp has it's share of ignorance and ignorant people. Unfortunately, both camps seem to lack quality enlightened people.
MOD THAT GUY UP!
It is generally true that the amount of hatred one feels towards a group or culture is proportional to one's arrogance and inversely proportional to one's understanding of that particular group or culture. Slashdot readers are not an exception.
Mod parent up! Vacuum tube making is really an intricate art. However, just because it WAS complicated doesn't mean that it HAD to be... It needn't be any more difficult than making a light-bulb (which is much simpler than semiconductor manufacturing).
The chemistry of state-of-the-art tube-making is very complex, but I think that if you were only expecting to switch it less than the kilohertz range (which would still be 100 times faster than a mechanical or relay-based computer), you'd be able to avoid many of the problems you are talking about. I think the reliability issue is the key. You could probably get around the issue by over-engineering the tubes, i.e. making everything larger, with thicker glass and such, and periodic maintenance.
Also, you might have to operate the tubes in a way that actually takes advantage of the residual gas in the tubes. I'm not saying the computer would be a state-of-the-art tube computer, merely that you could make one with pretty rudimentary skills compared to what's required for semiconductor technology. Besides that, your medieval electrical infrastructure would be uniform: vacuum diodes, light-bulbs, and vacuum-tubes.
One big problem is this:
What are you going to use for a filament? Either you need the cathode to be doped with thorium, or you would need to be able to mine and refine tungsten (preferably both thorium and tungsten), which would require some decent chemistry... Yeah, I think you'd have to have a source of tungsten, though I think you could do without thorium.
This site is cool: http://home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/hm-triode.htm It talks about how this guy made a vacuum tube using a light bulb and some other parts, with an inexpensive vacuum pump.
If I were going to make a computer myself from a medieval technological standpoint, I'd make it out of vacuum tubes. It's really the only way (well, discounting relays, but I guess if you can make relays you can pretty much make vacuum tubes...).
The other parts aren't that hard. You have capacitors (just need sheets of metal foil and paper for between them), inductors (coils of wire), resistors (again, wire), and diodes (basically just a simpler version of a vacuum tube... i.e. without the grid).
If you look at some of the intricacies of medieval jewelry and such, I wouldn't think it's too much of a step to make vacuum tubes.
Like this: first, learn to make copper wire. Next, make a chemical battery. Then, use the battery technology to develop permanent magnets... Make a lot of money by selling excellent "artificial lodestone" compasses to everyone. Buy more slaves. Then, wrap the wire into a generator coil, along with the magnets. Using water-wheel technology, you now have a reliable source of (at this point alternating current) electricity.
Next, make diodes:
Learn to blow glass. Put two electrodes in a glass bottle with a heater coil on one of them, and also a valve connected to a tube. Fill the bottle with mercury, then using just gravity, you drain the bottle of mercury without letting air in: this can create a good enough vacuum to make the diode work. The only difference between this and a vacuum tube is that there's no "grid" between the electrodes.
The heater coils can be heated with the AC generator, and these diodes can be used to convert your electricity to direct current, enabling you to more cheaply produce magnetic compasses in order to fund your purchases of slaves.
Simply train them to make you more vacuum tubes, and you can make a computer! In the middle ages! Also, your diode/vacuum tube technology is the same needed in order to make light bulbs.
Really, in order to make a computer using medieval technologies, you'd need slave labor, or serfdoms (which is the same thing).
I mean, there's pretty much no way a man can be expected to make enough vacuum tubes to make even a simple computer... I'm thinking it'd take you thousands of tubes...
This is in the radio range, not the optical range. The summary misled me to thinking it was in the optical range, which would be an impressive achievement, indeed! The news of this story is that it was done in real-time, over a network connection, instead of by shipping data from each radio telescope site on hard-drives to a location be processed later.
It should be an interesting test. If the ID crowd are sincere in their claim that the Desginer doesn't have to be divine, they'll be delighted. If, on the other hand, they're really just a bunch of religious fanatics, they'll be appalled. (I know which way I'm betting.)
The creator *HAS TO BE* divine, or you end up with an infinite regression of designers. Because there is always the question: Who created the designer?
You are right, of course.
If mankind can create complex life inside a completely artificial computer world, Moore's Law poses this question to us: how do we know we aren't inside a computer, "created" by a programmer?
Of course, if the programmer isn't eternal, then it also implies he may have a programmer, and so on and so forth. Following the logic that the ability to create complex beings implies that one may have been created in a similar way, an eternal programmer is the only end for the infinite regression, if there needs to be an end.
"A far more useful analysis would be whether this technology could be made cheap when mass produced."
Well, I did holographic research at my University, and the holographic plates we used were about $5-$10, if I remember correctly. That's a lot less than the $180 dollars, and those $180 disks are made of plastic, not glass like the plates were. Granted, the plates I used were for red light (same price for green light ones, though), not for blue light, but I doubt that if you can produce a million of these disks that it would stay at $180 per disk. My guess is that they'd be about $30-$50 in four years, the same price as magneto-optical disks. The company that I work for used to sell a lot of magneto-optical stuff, and the media looks much the same as these holographic disks (I am referring to the disk sleeve etc.), but I bet that the disk itself is cheaper to make ultimately than magneto-optical disks, at least it appears that way to me (fewer layers of different materials than magneto-optical disks, etc.).
I've done summer research for my Physics degree on Sonoluminescence, and I can definitely attest that it isn't a waste of grant money. I've read Dr. Taleyarkhan's sork, and I can say that a little deuterated water, some radiation detectors, and a piezo-electric speaker is a pretty cheap way to try to do fusion. So what if it never is going to achieve break-even? So what if only a few neutrons of fusion are produced, if any at all?
Sonoluminescence is really one of the easiest, cheapest ways to achieve simultaneously high pressures and high temperatures in a controlled fashion. Seriously. All you need is a jar of (ideally "de-gassed" or boiled) water, a piezo-electric speaker, something to drive it with at a certain frequency, and another microphone to detect when you are in resonance. Heck, you don't even need a microphone (by the end of the summer, I had developed my sense of hearing that I could detect the resonance and achieve the sonoluminescence without a microphone and a scope).
Trust me, people don't understand sonoluminescence well enough yet to actually rule out the possibility that enough heat and pressure occur to produce a few fusion reactions. These are a few of the something like a half-dozen theories on the source of the light of sonoluminescence: the Casimir effect (relativistic accelerating refractive index interfaces... more unlikely than sonofusion), Bremsstrahlung radiation, smeared spectral lines, and plain old Blackbody radiation.
I am glad some research money went to this guy. I say he should get more! I mean, this is NOTHING like cold fusion, and I believe that money should be spread out when it comes to fusion research, not just concentrated into a money-hole like the ITER project, which if it produces any positive net-energy, it will be from burning the $100 bills of the tax-payers (not just US tax-payers, either).
Now there's an idea. Heck, they could fund their own small satellite company with that much money and construct their own platform in international waters. Completely independently. I would join their rogue little nation, just for the fun of it. Heck, if they could have enough commercial satellite launches, they could pay for themselves independently...
Heck, in fifty years they could colonize Mars or something. They very well could get there before anyone else. Who cares about Sealand, how about an entire planet? If it had the same sorts of philosophy as something like Wikipedia, I would definitely contribute! Open-source reprap.org self-replicating machines could be sent to Mars to prepare a colony for nerds... Like a leper colony, I suppose... We nerds would need to find some reliable source of willing females in order to be self-sustaining... Well, I guess it's doomed, then! (Unless we can learn to not call them just "females" all the time and maybe learn a few more social skills...)
If you could get a few million anarchists to cooperate... Nevermind.
"Note that I never said that scientists should "rule". [...]"
I wasn't attacking you post. I was merely responding. The rise of Hitler was partly a result of a backlash against things like Leo Szilard's "Der Bund," and we can all agree that unbalanced power in the hands of the few is going to be a bad thing. One thing is sure: Do not let extreme fear of one thing lead to the rise of an even worse thing.
Fear of Communism in Germany led to Nazism. In the movie Equilibrium (which is basically like the book Farenheit 451, not to be confused with the controversial documentary), a world order has developed which is so afraid of war, that it bans all feeling, which means requiring the citizens to all take emotion-suppressing drugs and banning all art and literature. Too much fear of one thing leads to too much trust in that which fights that fear.
Fear of anything nuclear lead the US away from clean nuclear electric power. Now, fear of global warming is leading us back to it. Fear even leads to the insistence of belief in a young earth for many Christians.
(I believe that there is not necessarily any incompatibility in believing both in the theory of evolution and that God created everything... Maybe God likes the to-be-released game Spore? There IS an incompatibility with believing in both a God who generally doesn't like to trick us and that He decided to make the world only seem to be billions of years old, yet really it's only 10,000 or so years old... God made our intellect to study His creation through science, not young-earth trickery. There's nothing incompatible between evolution and Judaism/Christianity.)
As both a Christian and a physicist, I have no problem trusting scientists to make decisions on scientific issues like global warming and other things (BTW, I'm actually a proponent of global warming... I live in Minnesnowta). Unfortunately, the whole evolution vs. young earth has sown distrust of science in many Christians in America. Perhaps it's because so many secular humanists have tried to piggy-back atheism on top of evolution, which just isn't necessary or helpful.
"The model of using scientists as regulators of policy and such is as old as 1950's Sci-Fi..."
It's older than that. In 1914 H.G. Wells' The World Set Free predicted atomic weapons, but it also predicted that they would be so powerful that, in the words of Wikipedia and Wells himself:
Wells viewed war as the inevitable result of the Modern State; the introduction of atomic energy in a world divided resulted in the collapse of society. The only possibilities left were "either the relapse of mankind to agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order." This led Leo Szilard (who actually was the one who found a way to create atomic bombs of the type Wells had prophecied and we have come to fear) to propose his "Der Bund", which was a society of scientists that would oversee the world. It's strange how these ideas had a strong influence on Anti-Semitism and the rise of Hitler as a response to a fear of Communism and its corresponding ideas of an ideal state which went beyond nationalism to a sort of universal Order... BTW, read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes...
Okay. So, the article says that in 100 years, the sea level will rise by up to 17 inches. Now, I live in Minnesota, the Land of 10000 Lakes. My family's cabin is on a lake north of wear I live, and we have had fluctuations of, like, one or two meters over the last twenty years. Guess what? When the level goes up, we move the dock up. When it goes down, we bring the dock back down. Sometimes we have more beach, sometimes we have less. It's not really that big of a deal.
In the ocean, you already have tides and storms and such. I think that 17 inches would have even LESS of an impact in the ocean, since those other effects already have to be accounted for when finding a good spot to put a dock or a house.
And, if we have 100 years to deal with this, I really don't know why we don't just take a couple billion dollars or so from one of these studies and invest it in some high-growth investment market and just let compound interest give us the solution? If Kyoto would put any significant pressure (like, at least %1) on the $13 trillion American economy, we could just go without Kyoto and put that $130 billion a year for twenty years and then pay every islander in the world a $5000 stipend every year forever from the interest earned? I mean, I could survive on $5000 a year, and I live in America! That amount of money would allow one to pretty much live in luxury in a third world country. Am I the only one who thinks that Kyoto would put more pressure than just 1% on the American economy, assuming it was actually followed?
If a sea level rise of 17 inches is really one of the biggest problems of global warming, then it sure doesn't make me that worried (especially since Minnesota is land-locked and, hey, it gets pretty cold here in the winter...).
Well, to be honest, I think that it is in Minnesota (where I live), Canada, and Russia's best interest for the world to warm up. And maybe someday people will embrace a human-controlled climate, instead of running for the hills. Since we're controlling the climate unintentionally anyways, why not control it intentionally, for much less cost than Kyoto? I mean, reducing energy consumption is important, and we should do that as well, but everyone knows that at best Kyoto can only slow down global warming, right? So why not do something active?
PS. I love the old Soviet determination of triumph over nature, even though it destroyed their country and their environment. Nuclear weapons as practical engineering tools, that's what I'm talking about! (Bad idea on our planet, though.)
PPS. Seriously, though. Even a super-Kyoto-type-thing will only slow global warming. It will NOT stop it, and it can not reverse it. Only geoengineering can do that. It's something people should at least consider.
According to my research, industrial non-peak electricity only costs $.03/kilowatthour, which works out to about $42 per hour to run the thing at 1.4 MW. That's less than a plumber's wage. Residential electricity costs much more, especially during peak hours, but even then it's only like $200 per hour at very most.
"...but why pass what you know is flawed?" Well, for one thing, we live in a world that is flawed. Every software release is flawed to some extent. Every person is flawed. Every bill ever passed is flawed, incomplete, and perhaps inaccurate. That's life.
The Patriot Act provides the same tools for counter-terrorism officials that anti-narcotics officials have been using for years. Perhaps some of you don't remember 9/11. But don't you remember the March 11th train bombing in Madrid or the attacks just this last summer in London? This is not a crime-enforcing bill, it is a counter-terrorism bill. We are fighting a war. Sure, I may be inconvenienced by the Patriot Act, but nothing is more inconvenient than getting blown up on your way to work, like what tragically happened just this last summer. I mean, one of the government's few purposes is to keep the people safe. The US government failed to do that on 9/11. You can hardly blame us for wanting at least slightly better measures to keep such things from happening all the time!
(This is what I honestly think, don't just down-mod me because you don't agree.)
Re:Reg golf ball could orbit at 354km at most 1 ye
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BTW, I meant to write 42.67mm, not 42.67cm for the regulation diameter.
Reg golf ball could orbit at 354km at most 1 year
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Golf in Space
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From the highest point of the ISS orbit (354.2 km), a regulation size golf ball (at least 42.67cm diameter and at most 45.93 grams), the orbit would decay in about 177 days, according to the program in this paper (and assuming no space weather): Satellite Orbital Decay Calculations. The inputs to that program are: 0.04593 kg satellite mass 0.00143 m^2 satellite (frontal) area 354.2 km satellite orbit (no space weather)
Even if the golf ball's effective area (well, the "frontal area", which is what we're concerned with) is reduced by half, the golf ball won't be up for even a year (354 days).
And this is assuming that the cosmonaut will be able to hit the ball in a roughly circular orbit! In other words, the ball must be higher than regulation mass (probably would have to be 200-300 grams, at least) in order to stay up that long (and probably to get the transmitter inside).
In other words, no real records for regulation golf balls will be broken (assuming it will be up there for at least a year).
Slashdot Mirror
I live in St. Paul, and in the downtown area, they have a combined heat and power plant. Not only that, but it's run on waste wood, much of it collected as a service... your waste leaves and branches from yardwork are tossed in the furnace instead of just rotting! Three birds (waste, heat, and power), one stone. Granted, this is just for the downtown area, but it's still pretty awesome. I don't think this would work in the suburbs, though... too much wasted heat just in the piping, plus the great expense of installing heavily insulated hot water pipes all over everywhere.
As far as nuclear, I find it hard to believe people will like have nuclear heated water run through their homes. The paranoia factor is just way too high. There are other uses for it, though. People will just have to be creative. Free heated water = efficient fish farm? = year-round tropical oasis in my home state of Minnesnowta?
I was not using Spore as evidence for something like "intelligent design," but instead as an example of a proto-universe, a precurser to a simulated universe. This idea that the universe is a simulation does not mean that evolution did not happen (certainly, it has every appearrance that evolution HAS happened, so evolution shouldn't be doubted).
I am a physicist. I think the world and life are billions of years old. I see videogames as evidence that future humans may indeed desire to simulate worlds for their own pleasure. And, why must they be humans? We can already simulate worlds very different from our own.
It is not an analogy. A programmer is de facto "God" for entities inside a computer system. If you try to imagine which way technology may progress with even only a thousand years of progress (let alone a million years), the level of complexity that computers would be able to simulate would be far beyond what human beings experience in our own world.
Well, I have evidence for the existence of God that's probably about on par with aliens that we haven't seen yet: Watch technology progress, especially the field of artificial intelligence and various simulations. What happens if we develop a simulation so intricate, inhabited with artificial beings so complex, that we couldn't easily tell the difference between our world and the simulation? Well? The person who made that simulation is like God, just like our life-forms are "like" extraterrestrials. Granted, it doesn't "prove" that God exists, but it does provide that data point that we can use to extrapolate the possibility of the existence of God.
I hear mostly staunch atheists promoting the idea that artificial intelligence will soon be developed (~50 years), but things like artificial intelligence and artificial worlds (things like Spore or World of Warcraft) are the most solid philosophical evidence yet of the existence of God, and the evidence will only get more convincing the more that such technology develops. What happens when there are more artificial entities living inside rich computer environments than there are fleshy entities? You would have to admit that you are most likely INSIDE such a world yourself! And, *gasp* someone PROGRAMMED the world you live in! OH! THE HORROR!
Malaria was endemic in the midwest until the 1930s, therefore Anopheline mosquitos were alive and well in the midwest. (It only needs to be above 68 degrees on average for the parasite to survive.) Anopheline mosquitos are still quite common in the U.S., but malaria has been eradicated there. It takes more than just the vectors to have malaria. Malaria is not a problem if you have any access to quality medical care, and consistent public efforts can basically wipe malaria off the map, if done internationally, just like it has been in the U.S.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9C05E7D81E3EF934A15751C0A9619C8B63
"Another major issue is that warming brings a massive increase in the range of mosquitoes and deadly mosquito-born diseases like malaria."
You know what? That's a major misconception. Have you ever been to Alaska? The mosquitoes there are worse than they are here in Minnesota, and here in Minnesota, the mosquitoes are worse than when I was in Indonesia. Sure, you might say that there are no malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the midwest (U.S.), but according to the CDC (and the WHO): "Before the twentieth century, much of the Midwest was endemic for malaria." http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no6/seys.htm According to wikipedia (haha, yeah, I know), the elimination of malaria in the U.S. was a combination mostly of public health efforts and, to some extent, the use of DDT.
I say the major reason we have come to associate malaria with the tropics is because people there are poorer and do not have the public health and sanitation or access to mosquito-control programs that we have in the developed world. While I certainly think that research on climate change should continue, we should really focus more on "loving our neighbor," and if we make some progress with fighting poverty, then we won't have to worry so much about the effects of global warming (not to say that we should ignore them!).
Wait, so does that mean that The Singularity won't happen?!? Say it ain't so! I was so looking forward to the Nerd Rapture by our friend, the Computer!
...examples of how the Catholic church is blundering (big bang?)... Actually, it was a Catholic priest who made the first modern exposition of the idea of the Big Bang, where the previously most popular idea in cosmology was, for philosophical reasons (and perhaps anti-religious reasons?), the Steady-State Theory.It sold for US $131,700.00
MOD THAT GUY UP!
It is generally true that the amount of hatred one feels towards a group or culture is proportional to one's arrogance and inversely proportional to one's understanding of that particular group or culture. Slashdot readers are not an exception.
Mod parent up! Vacuum tube making is really an intricate art. However, just because it WAS complicated doesn't mean that it HAD to be... It needn't be any more difficult than making a light-bulb (which is much simpler than semiconductor manufacturing).
The chemistry of state-of-the-art tube-making is very complex, but I think that if you were only expecting to switch it less than the kilohertz range (which would still be 100 times faster than a mechanical or relay-based computer), you'd be able to avoid many of the problems you are talking about. I think the reliability issue is the key. You could probably get around the issue by over-engineering the tubes, i.e. making everything larger, with thicker glass and such, and periodic maintenance.
Also, you might have to operate the tubes in a way that actually takes advantage of the residual gas in the tubes. I'm not saying the computer would be a state-of-the-art tube computer, merely that you could make one with pretty rudimentary skills compared to what's required for semiconductor technology. Besides that, your medieval electrical infrastructure would be uniform: vacuum diodes, light-bulbs, and vacuum-tubes.
One big problem is this:
What are you going to use for a filament? Either you need the cathode to be doped with thorium, or you would need to be able to mine and refine tungsten (preferably both thorium and tungsten), which would require some decent chemistry... Yeah, I think you'd have to have a source of tungsten, though I think you could do without thorium.
This site is cool: http://home.earthlink.net/~lenyr/hm-triode.htm It talks about how this guy made a vacuum tube using a light bulb and some other parts, with an inexpensive vacuum pump.
If I were going to make a computer myself from a medieval technological standpoint, I'd make it out of vacuum tubes. It's really the only way (well, discounting relays, but I guess if you can make relays you can pretty much make vacuum tubes...).
The other parts aren't that hard. You have capacitors (just need sheets of metal foil and paper for between them), inductors (coils of wire), resistors (again, wire), and diodes (basically just a simpler version of a vacuum tube... i.e. without the grid).
If you look at some of the intricacies of medieval jewelry and such, I wouldn't think it's too much of a step to make vacuum tubes.
Like this: first, learn to make copper wire. Next, make a chemical battery. Then, use the battery technology to develop permanent magnets... Make a lot of money by selling excellent "artificial lodestone" compasses to everyone. Buy more slaves. Then, wrap the wire into a generator coil, along with the magnets. Using water-wheel technology, you now have a reliable source of (at this point alternating current) electricity.
Next, make diodes:
Learn to blow glass. Put two electrodes in a glass bottle with a heater coil on one of them, and also a valve connected to a tube. Fill the bottle with mercury, then using just gravity, you drain the bottle of mercury without letting air in: this can create a good enough vacuum to make the diode work. The only difference between this and a vacuum tube is that there's no "grid" between the electrodes.
The heater coils can be heated with the AC generator, and these diodes can be used to convert your electricity to direct current, enabling you to more cheaply produce magnetic compasses in order to fund your purchases of slaves.
Simply train them to make you more vacuum tubes, and you can make a computer! In the middle ages! Also, your diode/vacuum tube technology is the same needed in order to make light bulbs.
Really, in order to make a computer using medieval technologies, you'd need slave labor, or serfdoms (which is the same thing).
I mean, there's pretty much no way a man can be expected to make enough vacuum tubes to make even a simple computer... I'm thinking it'd take you thousands of tubes...
This is in the radio range, not the optical range. The summary misled me to thinking it was in the optical range, which would be an impressive achievement, indeed! The news of this story is that it was done in real-time, over a network connection, instead of by shipping data from each radio telescope site on hard-drives to a location be processed later.
You are right, of course.
If mankind can create complex life inside a completely artificial computer world, Moore's Law poses this question to us: how do we know we aren't inside a computer, "created" by a programmer?
Of course, if the programmer isn't eternal, then it also implies he may have a programmer, and so on and so forth. Following the logic that the ability to create complex beings implies that one may have been created in a similar way, an eternal programmer is the only end for the infinite regression, if there needs to be an end.
"A far more useful analysis would be whether this technology could be made cheap when mass produced."
Well, I did holographic research at my University, and the holographic plates we used were about $5-$10, if I remember correctly. That's a lot less than the $180 dollars, and those $180 disks are made of plastic, not glass like the plates were. Granted, the plates I used were for red light (same price for green light ones, though), not for blue light, but I doubt that if you can produce a million of these disks that it would stay at $180 per disk. My guess is that they'd be about $30-$50 in four years, the same price as magneto-optical disks. The company that I work for used to sell a lot of magneto-optical stuff, and the media looks much the same as these holographic disks (I am referring to the disk sleeve etc.), but I bet that the disk itself is cheaper to make ultimately than magneto-optical disks, at least it appears that way to me (fewer layers of different materials than magneto-optical disks, etc.).
I've done summer research for my Physics degree on Sonoluminescence, and I can definitely attest that it isn't a waste of grant money. I've read Dr. Taleyarkhan's sork, and I can say that a little deuterated water, some radiation detectors, and a piezo-electric speaker is a pretty cheap way to try to do fusion. So what if it never is going to achieve break-even? So what if only a few neutrons of fusion are produced, if any at all?
Sonoluminescence is really one of the easiest, cheapest ways to achieve simultaneously high pressures and high temperatures in a controlled fashion. Seriously. All you need is a jar of (ideally "de-gassed" or boiled) water, a piezo-electric speaker, something to drive it with at a certain frequency, and another microphone to detect when you are in resonance. Heck, you don't even need a microphone (by the end of the summer, I had developed my sense of hearing that I could detect the resonance and achieve the sonoluminescence without a microphone and a scope).
Trust me, people don't understand sonoluminescence well enough yet to actually rule out the possibility that enough heat and pressure occur to produce a few fusion reactions. These are a few of the something like a half-dozen theories on the source of the light of sonoluminescence: the Casimir effect (relativistic accelerating refractive index interfaces... more unlikely than sonofusion), Bremsstrahlung radiation, smeared spectral lines, and plain old Blackbody radiation.
I am glad some research money went to this guy. I say he should get more! I mean, this is NOTHING like cold fusion, and I believe that money should be spread out when it comes to fusion research, not just concentrated into a money-hole like the ITER project, which if it produces any positive net-energy, it will be from burning the $100 bills of the tax-payers (not just US tax-payers, either).
Now there's an idea. Heck, they could fund their own small satellite company with that much money and construct their own platform in international waters. Completely independently. I would join their rogue little nation, just for the fun of it. Heck, if they could have enough commercial satellite launches, they could pay for themselves independently...
Heck, in fifty years they could colonize Mars or something. They very well could get there before anyone else. Who cares about Sealand, how about an entire planet? If it had the same sorts of philosophy as something like Wikipedia, I would definitely contribute! Open-source reprap.org self-replicating machines could be sent to Mars to prepare a colony for nerds... Like a leper colony, I suppose... We nerds would need to find some reliable source of willing females in order to be self-sustaining... Well, I guess it's doomed, then! (Unless we can learn to not call them just "females" all the time and maybe learn a few more social skills...)
If you could get a few million anarchists to cooperate... Nevermind.
"Note that I never said that scientists should "rule". [...]"
I wasn't attacking you post. I was merely responding. The rise of Hitler was partly a result of a backlash against things like Leo Szilard's "Der Bund," and we can all agree that unbalanced power in the hands of the few is going to be a bad thing. One thing is sure: Do not let extreme fear of one thing lead to the rise of an even worse thing.
Fear of Communism in Germany led to Nazism. In the movie Equilibrium (which is basically like the book Farenheit 451, not to be confused with the controversial documentary), a world order has developed which is so afraid of war, that it bans all feeling, which means requiring the citizens to all take emotion-suppressing drugs and banning all art and literature. Too much fear of one thing leads to too much trust in that which fights that fear.
Fear of anything nuclear lead the US away from clean nuclear electric power. Now, fear of global warming is leading us back to it. Fear even leads to the insistence of belief in a young earth for many Christians.
(I believe that there is not necessarily any incompatibility in believing both in the theory of evolution and that God created everything... Maybe God likes the to-be-released game Spore? There IS an incompatibility with believing in both a God who generally doesn't like to trick us and that He decided to make the world only seem to be billions of years old, yet really it's only 10,000 or so years old... God made our intellect to study His creation through science, not young-earth trickery. There's nothing incompatible between evolution and Judaism/Christianity.)
As both a Christian and a physicist, I have no problem trusting scientists to make decisions on scientific issues like global warming and other things (BTW, I'm actually a proponent of global warming... I live in Minnesnowta). Unfortunately, the whole evolution vs. young earth has sown distrust of science in many Christians in America. Perhaps it's because so many secular humanists have tried to piggy-back atheism on top of evolution, which just isn't necessary or helpful.
It's older than that. In 1914 H.G. Wells' The World Set Free predicted atomic weapons, but it also predicted that they would be so powerful that, in the words of Wikipedia and Wells himself: Wells viewed war as the inevitable result of the Modern State; the introduction of atomic energy in a world divided resulted in the collapse of society. The only possibilities left were "either the relapse of mankind to agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully or the acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order." This led Leo Szilard (who actually was the one who found a way to create atomic bombs of the type Wells had prophecied and we have come to fear) to propose his "Der Bund", which was a society of scientists that would oversee the world. It's strange how these ideas had a strong influence on Anti-Semitism and the rise of Hitler as a response to a fear of Communism and its corresponding ideas of an ideal state which went beyond nationalism to a sort of universal Order... BTW, read The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes...
Okay. So, the article says that in 100 years, the sea level will rise by up to 17 inches. Now, I live in Minnesota, the Land of 10000 Lakes. My family's cabin is on a lake north of wear I live, and we have had fluctuations of, like, one or two meters over the last twenty years. Guess what? When the level goes up, we move the dock up. When it goes down, we bring the dock back down. Sometimes we have more beach, sometimes we have less. It's not really that big of a deal.
In the ocean, you already have tides and storms and such. I think that 17 inches would have even LESS of an impact in the ocean, since those other effects already have to be accounted for when finding a good spot to put a dock or a house.
And, if we have 100 years to deal with this, I really don't know why we don't just take a couple billion dollars or so from one of these studies and invest it in some high-growth investment market and just let compound interest give us the solution? If Kyoto would put any significant pressure (like, at least %1) on the $13 trillion American economy, we could just go without Kyoto and put that $130 billion a year for twenty years and then pay every islander in the world a $5000 stipend every year forever from the interest earned? I mean, I could survive on $5000 a year, and I live in America! That amount of money would allow one to pretty much live in luxury in a third world country. Am I the only one who thinks that Kyoto would put more pressure than just 1% on the American economy, assuming it was actually followed?
If a sea level rise of 17 inches is really one of the biggest problems of global warming, then it sure doesn't make me that worried (especially since Minnesota is land-locked and, hey, it gets pretty cold here in the winter...).
Well, to be honest, I think that it is in Minnesota (where I live), Canada, and Russia's best interest for the world to warm up. And maybe someday people will embrace a human-controlled climate, instead of running for the hills. Since we're controlling the climate unintentionally anyways, why not control it intentionally, for much less cost than Kyoto? I mean, reducing energy consumption is important, and we should do that as well, but everyone knows that at best Kyoto can only slow down global warming, right? So why not do something active?
http://www.llnl.gov/global-warm/
PS. I love the old Soviet determination of triumph over nature, even though it destroyed their country and their environment. Nuclear weapons as practical engineering tools, that's what I'm talking about! (Bad idea on our planet, though.)
PPS. Seriously, though. Even a super-Kyoto-type-thing will only slow global warming. It will NOT stop it, and it can not reverse it. Only geoengineering can do that. It's something people should at least consider.
http://www.llnl.gov/global-warm/
According to my research, industrial non-peak electricity only costs $.03/kilowatthour, which works out to about $42 per hour to run the thing at 1.4 MW. That's less than a plumber's wage. Residential electricity costs much more, especially during peak hours, but even then it's only like $200 per hour at very most.
n _5.pdf
BTW, I found this at:
http://www.xcelenergy.com/docs/corpcomm/Me_Sectio
"...but why pass what you know is flawed?" Well, for one thing, we live in a world that is flawed. Every software release is flawed to some extent. Every person is flawed. Every bill ever passed is flawed, incomplete, and perhaps inaccurate. That's life.
The Patriot Act provides the same tools for counter-terrorism officials that anti-narcotics officials have been using for years. Perhaps some of you don't remember 9/11. But don't you remember the March 11th train bombing in Madrid or the attacks just this last summer in London? This is not a crime-enforcing bill, it is a counter-terrorism bill. We are fighting a war. Sure, I may be inconvenienced by the Patriot Act, but nothing is more inconvenient than getting blown up on your way to work, like what tragically happened just this last summer. I mean, one of the government's few purposes is to keep the people safe. The US government failed to do that on 9/11. You can hardly blame us for wanting at least slightly better measures to keep such things from happening all the time!
(This is what I honestly think, don't just down-mod me because you don't agree.)
BTW, I meant to write 42.67mm, not 42.67cm for the regulation diameter.
From the highest point of the ISS orbit (354.2 km), a regulation size golf ball (at least 42.67cm diameter and at most 45.93 grams), the orbit would decay in about 177 days, according to the program in this paper (and assuming no space weather): Satellite Orbital Decay Calculations.
The inputs to that program are:
0.04593 kg satellite mass
0.00143 m^2 satellite (frontal) area
354.2 km satellite orbit
(no space weather)
Even if the golf ball's effective area (well, the "frontal area", which is what we're concerned with) is reduced by half, the golf ball won't be up for even a year (354 days).
And this is assuming that the cosmonaut will be able to hit the ball in a roughly circular orbit! In other words, the ball must be higher than regulation mass (probably would have to be 200-300 grams, at least) in order to stay up that long (and probably to get the transmitter inside).
In other words, no real records for regulation golf balls will be broken (assuming it will be up there for at least a year).