For those of us who do not live near a body of water, you can get considerable savings from a Ground Source (Geothermal) Heat Pump. This system uses an air conditioner/heat pump which uses ground water as a heat sink in the summer and a heat source in the winter. Because ground water is a steady temperature ( usually 50-60 degrees F) you get an energy saveing of 20-40% over conventional systems which use the air as a heat source and sink. The air is hot in the summer and cold in the winter, which is exactly what you don't want.
Bioenergy is wonderful. Solar energy is wonderful, Wind energy is wonderful. I am all in favor of them, but a current article in Physics Today shows that none of them can completely supply our energy needs. See Physics Today -- the site is down right now and I cannot get the articles's URL.
Just one example which I remember from the article. To supply 10% of the current US energy consumption from solar cells, one would need enough collectors with an area equal to the state of Massachusetts.
We need to rethink our whole life style. Low cost energy fueled the economic boom of the last two centuries. The party is over. We are near the worldwide peak in oil production. See Hubbert Peak. As this is happening, China, India and other developing countries are increasing thier consumption.
We have enough coal to last a century or so, but we cannnot afford to put that much carbon dioxide into the air with making global warming totally intolerable.
If you think this is far into the future, check the current price of oil. Not only in dollars but in instability. While I do not think that oil is our chief reason for being in Iraq, it is obvious that if Saddam Hussein's chief export had been pistachio nuts, we would not be there.
The 'standard' mistranslation , made by translating from English to Russian and then back to English. starts with "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" after the two translations comes out as "The whisky is strong, but the
meat is rotten"
This story has been circulating as some sort of urban legend for over 40 years. For more details
see
The whisky was invisible (pdf).
In the 1950s, fusion power was about 25 years in the future, it is now about 50 years away. I have worked a a research scientist and program manager in the US fusion program and predict it will never become economically, let alone technologically feasible. The last two large research Tokamak projects died while still in the planning stage because they could not even get a design that worked on paper. I predict that ITER will have the same fate.
For more details, you can check out an earlier post I made on the same subject.
Not true if it is an AC transmission line. In that case, even if you sit still, the alternating current will cause the magnetic field inside the conducting loop of your bicycle frame to vary and change direction. This will induce an emf and drive a current in the frame.
Check out Paul Koloc's Plasmak site where he has been producing ball lightning for years in his garage. Ball lightning is a naturally occuring stable plasma structure. He hopes to compress these to heat up to fusion temperature
This would not solve any problem. While PGP encryption is (probably) impossible to break, it is very easy to detect. PGP usage is so uncommon that your emails would stand out like a sore thumb, and immediately direct attention to you. They government can then use a
keyboard sniffing or other means such as
monitor emanations to get your passphrase.
If you want to be "secure", you are better to say something like "we can go to Jerry's house as we agreed" where the meaning of this phrase was previously agreed on. Avoid any keyword searches by writing "bo-mb" instead of the real word.
Your message will pass among the billions of other messages without setting off any alarms.
In Cities and the Wealth of Nations Jane Jacobs points out that many techonolgies were first introduced as toys.
This
posting quotes from the book to make this point.
Most households were first introduced to computers by video games. It does not surprise me that the first introduction to AI for many people is computer games. I realize that spell checking and grammer checking, a form of AI, may be in many houses too.
Even the military is using game-developed technology for combat simulators.
Starpower gives me a $35/mo cable modem when bundled with basic cable ($31/month), local phone service ( a few dollars/month less than Verizon charges), and 7cents/min long distance service.
If not bundled, the cable modem costs $40/month.
I have the luck to live in an area, Silver Spring MD, where there is cable competition. Both Comcast and Starpower have wired our neighborhood.
We had a discussion on the neighborhood listserve about Comcast and Starpower service. Both had satisfied users, and very dissatisfied users.
I am happy with Starpower. Except for losing my phone service for a day during the installation, my connection has worked well, and I get prompt replies when I call their customer service number.
CPU Fans are hard to sway
on
Swaying CPU Fans
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Most CPU fans that I know are dedicated to their favorite CPU and it is very difficult to sway their opinion
The WTC towers had a distinctive structural system which utilized
the exterior wall framing for lateral bracing -- a so-called lattice
framework. This allowed minimization of internal lateral bracing
and opened up the floor plans. You can see the effect of that when
the buildings collapsed, with the lattice framework crumbling and
the interior imploding. The lattice works so long as it remains
intact as a system: if a part of it goes, then the whole system
goes.
The planes punched holes in the lattice, one tower punched
on two sides, maybe the other too. Portions of the lattice of
the second tower briefly remained standing after the collapse,
then fell.
The system was considered daring at the time of construction, for
it distributed loads more efficiently than legacy column-and-beam-
supported systems. Probably the legacy systems would not have
totally collapsed due to damage at upper floors, although floors
above the damage would have come down if columns were
weakened.
Below is a comment by me.
The designers could never have forseen a terrorist attack, but the should have forseen
an airplace collision. One happened in 1945 at the Empire State Building
"Simultaneous Electron Density and Ion Temperature Measurements of a Moderately Dense Plasma Using Doppler and Stark Broadened He-II Lines" (with others), Applied Optics (Letters) v 17, p1481, 1978.
"High Temperature, High Density Plasma Production by Vortex Ring Compression" (with others), Physical Review Letters, v 41 #3, p166, 1978. "
The Interaction between Two Force Free Plasma Vortices in the TRISOPS III Machine" (with others), Physics of Fluids, v 22, p379, 1979.
There are other Trisops papers, but I do not have the references here at work.
I do not have references to the Plasmak work.
My understanding of ITER, is that even on paper they did not solve the first wall problem, and with a diverter heat load of 1-20 MWatts/M**2
I do not know too much about the ICF (Inertial Confinement Fusion) program.
My impression is that the main motivation behind the program is the nuclear weapons programs. ICF is not a weapon, but the tiny fireballs it produces can be used a models for real nuclear fireballs, and allow research to be done without weapons tests.
Unless something has changed, the very poor coupling (i.e. the inefficient transfer of energy) between the laser or particle beams, and the plasma dooms it as an energy generation technology.
I post this as a former fusion researcher and a former project manager for the Office of Fusion Energy (OFE) of the Department of Energy (DOE)
Many decades ago the international fusion community put all of its chips on the Tokamak. It has been a disaster.
Even if a Tokamak could produce break-even fusion ( getting more energy out than you put in) the engineering obstacles to creating an economically successful reactor are daunting.
Many years ago, the OFE sponsored a study, Project Aries, of the costs of a Tokamak reactor. Even using the usual optimistic assumptions, the cost came in way above solar and wind power, let alone fossil fuels.
Another symptom of the problem is that three times in a row, projects to build larger Tokamak have collapsed in the design stage. That is, even before anything was build, none could come up with a working design. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the latest attempt, collapsed as the price tag spiraled above $20 billion (US)
The whole OFE degenerated into a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" process where the lab directories divvied up the pie. All non-Tokamak ideas were cut off, including the one I worked on.( more below).Congress cut the OFE budget almost in half a few years ago in response to this.
That being said, I respect the findings of the DIII-D team. The DIII-D is very well run research project, the their accomplishment is to be applauded.
Now for a blatant plug. In the 70s I worked on a small project at the University of Miami, the Trisops project, which was defunded. The amount of money was not an issues ( our request was quite small), but the non-Tokamak nature, and the nerve of the principal investigator, Dan Wells, to point out that the Tokamac was unworkable.
The Trisops machine was recently moved from the University of Miami, to Lanham Md, with a small NASA grant, but there is not money to run it. You can see a report on it.
Another interesting project, the Plasmak(TM) project that is being run by Paul Koloc ( out of his garage!!).
The holy grail on fusion research is a stable plasma structure. The Trisops project achieved it one way. Paul has noted that ball lightning, which has been known for millennia, is a stable plasma structure. He has machine that produces ball lightning, and is measuring it. He gets no DOE funding of course.
Before you start shipping Playstations to Africa, read what Wayne Marshal wrote in the Linux Journal discussing all the pitfalls of technical aid to Africa.
I give a short quote:
In the developing world--where most of the population still cook with firewood and carry water in buckets--the practical value of focusing foreign assistance on IT projects would seem negligible, if not ludicrous entirely. Given the more serious fundamental issues facing developing nations--health care (AIDS, TB and malaria), nutrition, sanitation, education, poverty, pollution and political corruption--providing the means to surf the Web should probably fall fairly low on any reasonable scale of human priorities.
This reply has real physics, not blather. It should get a higher score than 2.
More Technical Details are Available
on
Longitude
·
· Score: 1
The review notes the lack of technical details on Harrison's chronometer.
David Landes has written a great book, A Revolution in Time which gives a detailed history replete with enough technical details on timekeeping to make my head spin.
One reason ball lightning is important is that it is a naturally stable plasma structure. The multi-billon multi-decade attempt to contain plasmas for fusion artifically has failed. A friend of mine, and a fellow plasma physicist, Paul Koloc, is producing ball lightning in his garage lab in White Oak Md. He uses no silicon. (The balls do pick up copper from the electrodes) He has written a number of papers on it.
See See http://www.google.com/search?q=paul+koloc" for some references.
The balls probably have a stucture similar to the structure of the plasmas rings in the TRISOPS experiment that I worked on 25 years ago. Dan Wells was the principal investigator. This experiment's funding was dropped because it conflicted with the then current emphasis on the Tokamak. Since then the Tokamak program has turned into an expensive white elephant. Last year, on a NASA grant, the experiment was moved from its home at the University of Miami to Lanham MD and reassembled. It is still to early to have any results.
See http://www.aps.org/BAPSDPP98/abs/S3 2 00.html#SG4S.062for more information . There are efforts to raise more funds to continue research into both efforts. Joe Davidson
As a plasma physicist who has followed Cold Fusion carefully, Mills' claims smells very fishy for the following reason.
The claims, if true, would be as great if not greater, than the earlier breakthroughs of quantum mechanics and relativitiy. Both of these breakthroughs were preceeded by a series of unexplained phonemena (which they then explained).
In the case of Quantam theory there was the photoelectric effect, superconductivity, the van Der Waals force (molecular attraction) and atomic spectra.
In the case of relativity we had the precession of the orbit of Mercury and the measured constancy of the speed of light (The Michaelson-Morley Experiment).
There a few unresolved issues now such as the missing (dark) matter in the Universe, but it is too early to tell how real it is.
If "hydrinoized" hydrogen atoms really exist, someone would have seen some anomalous effect by now. I suspect that the only thing Mills is shrinking is his investors' wallets.
The official Department of Energy (DOE) Fusion program is in real trouble - trouble it deserves. Fifty years ago usable controlled thermonuclear fusion was 25 years in the future. Now it is 40 years in the future. They brought it on themselves.
A short bit of history. The Princeton University research team always dominated the program. They area brilliant but stubborn group. No idea that wasn't invented by them had a snowball's chance in hell. The problem is very tricky, heating a plasma (ionized gas) to tens on millions of degrees, and confining it with a magnetic field - as no material could withstand the heat. The Princeton Plasma Lab (PPL) came up with the concept of a Stellarator, a figure-8 shaped magnetic confinement field. This never worked. In the sixties it was scrapped in favor or the Tokamak. - a doughnut shaped field. While this was not invented at Princeton, it was accepted there because it came out of the Soviet Union, not from a rival US group.
The Tokamak was a great advance, and it has been the center of the US, European and Japanese programs for the last four decades. In spite of its improvement it is fatally flawed for a number of engineering reasons. Note that the last three Tokamak projects have been scrapped as unworkable in the design stage, the latest being the ITER project mentioned in the Fresno Bee article ).
The prime damage the Tokamak has done over the decades, besides eating billions of dollars, has been the suppression of research into alternative fusion technology. I can comment on this from two points of view. First I did some of the alternative research before we were de-funded. Second, I was later a Program Manager at the Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy for a year before I was let go as part of the massive cutback of the Fusion program.
During the 70's , after receiving my degree, I assisted Dr. Daniel Wells in his TRISOPS project at the University of Miami. The TRISOPS concept was that instead of trying to confine a hot plasma in a magnetic field (which is the mathematical equivalent of confining a ball of angry Jell-O in a cage of rubber bands), we should let the plasma form its own stable vortex structure and then compress it. An example of a stable vortex structure is a smoke ring. The equipment, by fusion standards, was simple. The lab was the size of a small suburban house. We were getting impressive results. See refs (1) at the bottom for a summary. Our funding was cut off because we were out of the mainstream. Also, Dan Wells, the principal investigator, was not good at the politics of science. I understand that the Wells' equipment has been recently moved to Lahnam MD where the experiment is being re-tried (by John Brandenberg under NASA funding - not DOE). I do not what results he has reached.
Another alternative project is being done by Paul Koloc (pmk@plasmak.com ), a plasma physicist formerly at the University of Maryland. He is looking into another stable plasma structure, ball lightning . Ball lightning has been witnessed for millennia, can sometimes last for minutes, and has killed people. Paul creates and measures ball lightning in a lab in a garage in his back yard ( no kidding ). The stable plasma structure lasts several milliseconds (It's is small so it has a short lifetime). He plans later to heat the plasma to fusion temperatures by compressing the atmosphere around the ball. His work is self-funded, with surplus equipment from the national labs, and some volunteer help from scientists there. He has presented several papers, the most recent at the 6th International Symposium on Ball Lightning. It has a small chance of working out, but at least as big a chance of the multi-hundred-million dollar DOE program. The abstracts are at http://home.wxs.nl/~icblsec/pg_abstracts.html under Koloc 1 and Koloc 2 You can write to Paul for the papers themselves.
I have described two alternative research schemes that I know of directly, I'm sure there are many others going on. Now that I have left physics to become an Internet geek, I no longer follow the field carefully. For I time I tracked Cold Fusion, until that fizzled out. As a final note: I do not believe that fusion energy of any sort will be able to compete economically with wind or solar power. There are many good comments and questions on fusion in this Slashdot thread that I will be glad to address on or of line if requested.
Ref (1) "High Temperature, High Density Plasma Production by Vortex Ring Compression" D. Wells (with others), Physical Review Letters, v 41 #3, p166, 1978. "The Interaction between Two Force Free Plasma Vortices in the TRISOPS III Machine" J. Davidson (with others), Physics of Fluids, v 22, p379, 1979.
Peter Singer starts from a premise (utilitarianism) I do not agree with, works his logic flawlessly, and comes to conclusions that make me shiver. Yet he is doing all of us a service. He unflinchingly deals with issues that we all think about, but seldom speak about. In our silence we often toy with the same ideas he expounds, but fear to speak them.
Sometimes we come close to practicing them. Everyday, grieving parents and doctors agree that a baby is so deformed that they should not take heroic measures to save it. This is only a short step away from euthanasia. What of an encephalitic baby (one that is born without a brain?). Would it be a sin to kill such a baby? Why?
Peter Singer forces us to confront the issues that modern medicine is throwing into our lap. For that we should be grateful.
Remember the uproar when states tried to sell driver's license photos. This one will be even worst. The people who proposed it either have been living on the other side of the moon or have IQ's lower than the room temperature.
Slashdot Mirror
You can find more infomation here and here
Just one example which I remember from the article. To supply 10% of the current US energy consumption from solar cells, one would need enough collectors with an area equal to the state of Massachusetts. We need to rethink our whole life style. Low cost energy fueled the economic boom of the last two centuries. The party is over. We are near the worldwide peak in oil production. See Hubbert Peak. As this is happening, China, India and other developing countries are increasing thier consumption.
We have enough coal to last a century or so, but we cannnot afford to put that much carbon dioxide into the air with making global warming totally intolerable.
If you think this is far into the future, check the current price of oil. Not only in dollars but in instability. While I do not think that oil is our chief reason for being in Iraq, it is obvious that if Saddam Hussein's chief export had been pistachio nuts, we would not be there.
The 'standard' mistranslation , made by translating from English to Russian and then back to English. starts with "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" after the two translations comes out as "The whisky is strong, but the meat is rotten" This story has been circulating as some sort of urban legend for over 40 years. For more details see The whisky was invisible (pdf).
In the 1950s, fusion power was about 25 years in the future, it is now about 50 years away. I have worked a a research scientist and program manager in the US fusion program and predict it will never become economically, let alone technologically feasible. The last two large research Tokamak projects died while still in the planning stage because they could not even get a design that worked on paper. I predict that ITER will have the same fate.
For more details, you can check out an earlier post I made on the same subject.Not true if it is an AC transmission line. In that case, even if you sit still, the alternating current will cause the magnetic field inside the conducting loop of your bicycle frame to vary and change direction. This will induce an emf and drive a current in the frame.
It echos my thought exactly.
He has funding for other uses of his device.
If you want to be "secure", you are better to say something like "we can go to Jerry's house as we agreed" where the meaning of this phrase was previously agreed on. Avoid any keyword searches by writing "bo-mb" instead of the real word.
Your message will pass among the billions of other messages without setting off any alarms.
This posting quotes from the book to make this point.
Most households were first introduced to computers by video games. It does not surprise me that the first introduction to AI for many people is computer games. I realize that spell checking and grammer checking, a form of AI, may be in many houses too.
Even the military is using game-developed technology for combat simulators.
Starpower gives me a $35/mo cable modem when bundled with basic cable ($31/month), local phone service ( a few dollars/month less than Verizon charges), and 7cents/min long distance service.
If not bundled, the cable modem costs $40/month.
I have the luck to live in an area, Silver Spring MD, where there is cable competition. Both Comcast and Starpower have wired our neighborhood.
We had a discussion on the neighborhood listserve about Comcast and Starpower service. Both had satisfied users, and very dissatisfied users.
I am happy with Starpower. Except for losing my phone service for a day during the installation, my connection has worked well, and I get prompt replies when I call their customer service number.
Most CPU fans that I know are dedicated to their favorite CPU and it is very difficult to sway their opinion
quoted in Dave Farber's Newsletter
Below is a comment by me.
The designers could never have forseen a terrorist attack, but the should have forseen
an airplace collision.
One happened in 1945 at the Empire State Building
Here are my papers.
"Simultaneous Electron Density and Ion Temperature Measurements of a Moderately Dense Plasma Using Doppler and Stark Broadened He-II Lines" (with others), Applied Optics (Letters) v 17, p1481, 1978.
"High Temperature, High Density Plasma Production by Vortex Ring Compression" (with others), Physical Review Letters, v 41 #3, p166, 1978. "
The Interaction between Two Force Free Plasma Vortices in the TRISOPS III Machine" (with others), Physics of Fluids, v 22, p379, 1979.
There are other Trisops papers, but I do not have the references here at work.
I do not have references to the Plasmak work.
My understanding of ITER, is that even on paper they did not solve the first wall problem, and with a diverter heat load of 1-20 MWatts/M**2
My impression is that the main motivation behind the program is the nuclear weapons programs. ICF is not a weapon, but the tiny fireballs it produces can be used a models for real nuclear fireballs, and allow research to be done without weapons tests.
Unless something has changed, the very poor coupling (i.e. the inefficient transfer of energy) between the laser or particle beams, and the plasma dooms it as an energy generation technology.
I post this as a former fusion researcher and a former project manager for the Office of Fusion Energy (OFE) of the Department of Energy (DOE)
Many decades ago the international fusion community put all of its chips on the Tokamak. It has been a disaster.
Even if a Tokamak could produce break-even fusion ( getting more energy out than you put in) the engineering obstacles to creating an economically successful reactor are daunting.
Many years ago, the OFE sponsored a study, Project Aries, of the costs of a Tokamak reactor. Even using the usual optimistic assumptions, the cost came in way above solar and wind power, let alone fossil fuels.
Another symptom of the problem is that three times in a row, projects to build larger Tokamak have collapsed in the design stage. That is, even before anything was build, none could come up with a working design. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the latest attempt, collapsed as the price tag spiraled above $20 billion (US)
The whole OFE degenerated into a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" process where the lab directories divvied up the pie. All non-Tokamak ideas were cut off, including the one I worked on.( more below).Congress cut the OFE budget almost in half a few years ago in response to this.
That being said, I respect the findings of the DIII-D team. The DIII-D is very well run research project, the their accomplishment is to be applauded. Now for a blatant plug. In the 70s I worked on a small project at the University of Miami, the Trisops project, which was defunded. The amount of money was not an issues ( our request was quite small), but the non-Tokamak nature, and the nerve of the principal investigator, Dan Wells, to point out that the Tokamac was unworkable.
The Trisops machine was recently moved from the University of Miami, to Lanham Md, with a small NASA grant, but there is not money to run it. You can see a report on it.
Another interesting project, the Plasmak(TM) project that is being run by Paul Koloc ( out of his garage!!).
The holy grail on fusion research is a stable plasma structure. The Trisops project achieved it one way. Paul has noted that ball lightning, which has been known for millennia, is a stable plasma structure. He has machine that produces ball lightning, and is measuring it. He gets no DOE funding of course.
I give a short quote:
The packet steamers of the 19th century were the first example of packet pier to peer communication.
This reply has real physics, not blather. It should get a higher score than 2.
David Landes has written a great book, A Revolution in Time which gives a detailed history replete with enough technical details on timekeeping to make my head spin.
Harrison's work is covered there
See See http://www.google.com/search?q=paul+koloc" for some references.
The balls probably have a stucture similar to the structure of the plasmas rings in the TRISOPS experiment that I worked on 25 years ago. Dan Wells was the principal investigator. This experiment's funding was dropped because it conflicted with the then current emphasis on the Tokamak. Since then the Tokamak program has turned into an expensive white elephant. Last year, on a NASA grant, the experiment was moved from its home at the University of Miami to Lanham MD and reassembled. It is still to early to have any results.
See http://www.aps.org/BAPSDPP98/abs/S3 2 00.html#SG4S.062for more information . There are efforts to raise more funds to continue research into both efforts. Joe Davidson
The claims, if true, would be as great if not greater, than the earlier breakthroughs of quantum mechanics and relativitiy. Both of these breakthroughs were preceeded by a series of unexplained phonemena (which they then explained).
In the case of Quantam theory there was the photoelectric effect, superconductivity, the van Der Waals force (molecular attraction) and atomic spectra.
In the case of relativity we had the precession of the orbit of Mercury and the measured constancy of the speed of light (The Michaelson-Morley Experiment).
There a few unresolved issues now such as the missing (dark) matter in the Universe, but it is too early to tell how real it is.
If "hydrinoized" hydrogen atoms really exist, someone would have seen some anomalous effect by now. I suspect that the only thing Mills is shrinking is his investors' wallets.
The official Department of Energy (DOE) Fusion program is in real trouble - trouble it deserves. Fifty years ago usable controlled thermonuclear fusion was 25 years in the future. Now it is 40 years in the future. They brought it on themselves.
A short bit of history. The Princeton University research team always dominated the program. They area brilliant but stubborn group. No idea that wasn't invented by them had a snowball's chance in hell. The problem is very tricky, heating a plasma (ionized gas) to tens on millions of degrees, and confining it with a magnetic field - as no material could withstand the heat. The Princeton Plasma Lab (PPL) came up with the concept of a Stellarator, a figure-8 shaped magnetic confinement field. This never worked. In the sixties it was scrapped in favor or the Tokamak. - a doughnut shaped field. While this was not invented at Princeton, it was accepted there because it came out of the Soviet Union, not from a rival US group.
The Tokamak was a great advance, and it has been the center of the US, European and Japanese programs for the last four decades. In spite of its improvement it is fatally flawed for a number of engineering reasons. Note that the last three Tokamak projects have been scrapped as unworkable in the design stage, the latest being the ITER project mentioned in the Fresno Bee article ).
The prime damage the Tokamak has done over the decades, besides eating billions of dollars, has been the suppression of research into alternative fusion technology. I can comment on this from two points of view. First I did some of the alternative research before we were de-funded. Second, I was later a Program Manager at the Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy for a year before I was let go as part of the massive cutback of the Fusion program.
During the 70's , after receiving my degree, I assisted Dr. Daniel Wells in his TRISOPS project at the University of Miami. The TRISOPS concept was that instead of trying to confine a hot plasma in a magnetic field (which is the mathematical equivalent of confining a ball of angry Jell-O in a cage of rubber bands), we should let the plasma form its own stable vortex structure and then compress it. An example of a stable vortex structure is a smoke ring. The equipment, by fusion standards, was simple. The lab was the size of a small suburban house. We were getting impressive results. See refs (1) at the bottom for a summary. Our funding was cut off because we were out of the mainstream. Also, Dan Wells, the principal investigator, was not good at the politics of science. I understand that the Wells' equipment has been recently moved to Lahnam MD where the experiment is being re-tried (by John Brandenberg under NASA funding - not DOE). I do not what results he has reached.
Another alternative project is being done by Paul Koloc (pmk@plasmak.com ), a plasma physicist formerly at the University of Maryland. He is looking into another stable plasma structure, ball lightning . Ball lightning has been witnessed for millennia, can sometimes last for minutes, and has killed people. Paul creates and measures ball lightning in a lab in a garage in his back yard ( no kidding ). The stable plasma structure lasts several milliseconds (It's is small so it has a short lifetime). He plans later to heat the plasma to fusion temperatures by compressing the atmosphere around the ball. His work is self-funded, with surplus equipment from the national labs, and some volunteer help from scientists there. He has presented several papers, the most recent at the 6th International Symposium on Ball Lightning. It has a small chance of working out, but at least as big a chance of the multi-hundred-million dollar DOE program. The abstracts are at http://home.wxs.nl/~icblsec/pg_abstracts.html under Koloc 1 and Koloc 2 You can write to Paul for the papers themselves.
I have described two alternative research schemes that I know of directly, I'm sure there are many others going on. Now that I have left physics to become an Internet geek, I no longer follow the field carefully. For I time I tracked Cold Fusion, until that fizzled out. As a final note: I do not believe that fusion energy of any sort will be able to compete economically with wind or solar power. There are many good comments and questions on fusion in this Slashdot thread that I will be glad to address on or of line if requested.
Ref (1) "High Temperature, High Density Plasma Production by Vortex Ring Compression" D. Wells (with others), Physical Review Letters, v 41 #3, p166, 1978. "The Interaction between Two Force Free Plasma Vortices in the TRISOPS III Machine" J. Davidson (with others), Physics of Fluids, v 22, p379, 1979.
Peter Singer starts from a premise (utilitarianism) I do not agree with, works his logic flawlessly, and comes to conclusions that make me shiver. Yet he is doing all of us a service. He unflinchingly deals with issues that we all think about, but seldom speak about. In our silence we often toy with the same ideas he expounds, but fear to speak them.
Sometimes we come close to practicing them. Everyday, grieving parents and doctors agree that a baby is so deformed that they should not take heroic measures to save it. This is only a short step away from euthanasia. What of an encephalitic baby (one that is born without a brain?). Would it be a sin to kill such a baby? Why?
Peter Singer forces us to confront the issues that modern medicine is throwing into our lap. For that we should be grateful.
Remember the uproar when states tried to sell driver's license photos. This one will be even worst. The people who proposed it either have been living on the other side of the moon or have IQ's lower than the room temperature.