FYI, the CEO of this new company (Bob Mumgaard) and CTO (Dan Brunner) helped answer the questions asked in the Ask MIT Fusion Researchers About Fusion Power in April 2012: https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
Prof. Dennis Whyte and Dr. Martin Greenwald were also on that thread and are now core members of the founding team of the new startup (although they remain employed by MIT).
It would be one thing if the cuts ("sequestration") really happened as planned, equally distributed between defense and non-defense discretionary spending.
Except that the defense industry has been on top of it for months now, and have a very good lobbying campaign going to scare the shit out of Washington about what will happen if the defense cuts go through. So I fear that what will happen is either the defense cuts will be reversed, and the other cuts will still happen, or else none of the cuts will happen.
People are pretty excited about Operation Chimichanga and the thought of a real shooting war with China. They should be horrified and disgusted.
Fusion scientists often get criticized for making unrealistic promises ("Fusion has been thirty years away, for fifty years!" or some variation on that). But take a look at the graph here. The graph shows the funding estimates from a 1976 fusion development plan, with various paths to a reactor. The black curve way at the bottom is the actual funding profile.
Ph.D student in fusion here. (I was one of the authors of this Ask Slashdot.)
It's important to note that there are a range of opinions on this. Everyone thinks ITER is a good idea, at the right price. That price was originally quoted at $5-billion (with the U.S. picking up 9% of that) when the U.S. made the decision to join in 2003; today the construction cost is estimated at somewhere north of $20-billion. Hopefully now with Motojima as Director-General, this cost will stop rising. (From what I hear, he's being very rigorous about cost and schedule control and pushing the team hard on these fronts.)
The problem for the U.S. is that participation in ITER doesn't make sense without a strong domestic program in place to take advantage of the results that come out of it. And without a (temporary) surge in U.S. fusion funding to get over the ITER construction "hump", the entire domestic program might be "squeezed" out of existence. Check out the graph here:
So it's not so much a matter of "is ITER good science?" (it is!). The question is: "is ITER the right path for the U.S. at a cost of 9% of $20-billion or $25-billion, without a commitment to sustain the domestic program through the ITER construction phase?"
I urge everyone here to go to our website that we set up at fusionfuture.org, which has a lot of information about this issue. We still need your help - the House has restored funding for the domestic fusion program, but the current Senate version of the bill still has the domestic fusion budget slashed (and the fusion experiment at MIT entirely closed down). There is still work to do!
Wow, that looks extremely similar to the red light created by the Starfish Prime thermonuclear bomb detonation in space! In that case, it was fast electrons from the nuclear explosion, spiralling along magnetic field lines and eventually colliding with oxygen atoms in the atmosphere, which emit a red glow when excited.
Eugene: My "little friend". (No, not my dick as you might have thought! Just my guinea pig). If I'm not mistaken - you still didn't tell me where you live. OR it's a secret?:-)
It's probably because of the high-resolution screen - you need to use the new API because it's the only one that forces you to make your GUI resolution-indpendent. (that said, IANAAD - I am not an Apple developer)
Hi all, Geoff Olynyk here, one of the interview participants.
It was linked in the interview, but I wanted to point out that some of us have put together a website, fusionfuture.org with information about fusion and a really easy-to-use link to urge Congress not to cut fusion funding in the 2013 budget. They are planning to shut down the MIT fusion experiment (Alcator C-Mod) this fall!
If you go to the website (www.fusionfuture.org), and click the "Contact Congress Now" button at right, it literally only takes a minute to send letters to the Department of Energy and your Representative and Senators. We need your help to ensure that this important research continues in the United States!
1. Photos and documents are on my RAID-5 array (4 × 1 TB Hitachi enterprise drives) in my desktop, backed up occasionally (every month or so) to a Toshiba 1 TB eSATA external drive sitting on my desk
2. Music, movies, TV shows, are on the RAID-5 array, not backed up
3. Windows and programs are on my 80 GB SSD, not backed up.
So I'm not protected at all against my house burning down, but this has worked for me for the past 10 years. (For my old system, which ran 2003–2010, it was a WD Raptor, not an SSD. And the RAID 5 was 4 × 200 GB.)
Haha, I guess that's true. Maybe what it most says is that Canadians are insecure because we wring our hands over a single big company falling from greatness:) But on the other hand, didn't Nortel go much the same way?
I guess it's a problem for smaller countries where their is only one world-class player in a given market. China or the U.S. doesn't agonize over a single big enterprise stagnating because there are several more waiting in the wings.
There must be consternation in Finland over Nokia akin to the parochial concern for RIM in Canada? Or are the Finns more confident.
Having only recently gotten into the smartphone game (July 2011), I didn't really know anything about the industry back when RIM/Blackberry was king.
But now, having read some about it... wow, what a waste. They basically had huge, fat, margins, essentially no competition in the smartphone arena, for almost five years - and freaking sat on it and did almost nothing. Meanwhile Apple and Google were in the lab inventing the future. Unbelievable.
Like most Canadians the story concerns me because what does it say about the country? I sometimes wonder - even if RIM had had a clue and tried to come up with something iPhone- or Android-like, could they have done it without the California engineer and developer community? They had the money, but could they have enticed the brilliant graduates of top American schools to move to Ontario? And I don't mean to say that Canadian engineers aren't good, but that Apple and Google have access to a global talent pool - did/does RIM? (Fascinating question: How much does snow and ice have to do with the fortunes of a mobile phone developer?)
It's a sad but interesting story all around. I hope they can turn things around but I don't see much chance of it at this point.
Workable high-temperature (i.e. room-temperature) superconductors would make magnetic fusion reactors (tokamaks) a lot cheaper. This is one of the things that would be a game-changer for fusion.
On a 24" 16:10 monitor that's a resolution of 5376x3360, well above the capabilities of DisplayPort 1.2. Unfortunately! I would love a high-ppi screen. People always complain about how apps break, blah blah blah, get some high-ppi screens into the hands of vocal consumers and app makers will fix that shit right quick.
What I want is (say) a 1920x1440 monitor (4:3 ratio). If I want to "mask" a 16:9 monitor to do that, I'll need it to be 2560x1440. One example of such a monitor is the Dell U2711, which is nearly $900!
Dammit, accidentally posted this as AC just now. Reposting as myself.
Honestly I'm fine with the idea that someday my phone will be my main computer, and that I'll "dock" it to a keyboard and monitor at home. (As long as everything is constantly backed up to some cloud storage somewhere so when eventually I drop my phone or a jackass friend pushes me in a lake, I don't lose the past few days of work!)
But one thing I do wonder about is what this will do to the price of "real" workstation class equipment. Already, 4:3 monitors (which are much better for engineering work, spreadsheets, etc. -- think MATLAB, COMSOL Multiphysics, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, CST Microwave Studio...) are far more expensive than to 16:9 panels (which have the economies of scale from being the aspect ratio of broadcast TV). Even Dell's fantastic U2410 and U3011 LCD panels are 16:10, not 4:3.
So yeah. I'm fine with the day that most people's only computers will be a phone and a tablet, with a docking station for a mouse/keyboard/monitor. But for those of us that need more horsepower than a mobile processor can provide, it's not going to be good. Hopefully there'll still be enough gamers to subsidize the high-power graphics card and desktop processors so that technical people can afford them!
The problem is that such reforms will probably (in order from most to least important): (a) break EU rules, (b) break some treaties that Finland has signed with other non-EU countries on required length of copyright, (c) piss off the U.S..
Other than that, I fully support you, and I hope that something exactly like what you suggest goes ahead!
While the commercial uses of these UAVs are cool (hunting feral pigs tearing up your crops using an IR camera on a drone and then radioing the location to your brother with a shotgun! That would be something that only a few militaries in the world could do a decade ago...) the real impact is going to be on the complete loss of privacy for just being anywhere outside in public.
I've long thought that the ease by which something can be obtained really does matter. I mean, things like divorce records have always been "public", but for most of history, that meant going to the city offices and having some surly clerk find the records for you in a basement filing cabinet. Which meant that strictly speaking, they were public, but in practice most people would never go to that trouble. With online records, finding out juicy details about your neighbour's divorce can be as easy as clicking a link. So the change in ease of obtaining records really does change the meaning of "public", even if it doesn't change the definition in a strictly legal sense.
It's the same thing with being outside. The advent of huge networks of computerized cameras on the street, on business fronts, and now perhaps on ubiquitous flying unmanned vehicles... it means that while you had no expectation of privacy in public before, in practice it meant that you could generally go places without anybody knowing about it, as long as you didn't just happen to run into somebody that knows you. Before long, an unblinking computer eye will see you everywhere. The idea of going somewhere without anybody knowing about it will be a thing of the past.
Now, is this, overall, a good thing? That I'm not sure about. Good and bad sides to it, I guess. (I'll be very interested to see its impact on strip clubs and massage parlours, though! Especially if divorce lawyers can subpoena the records.)
Insurance companies typically force the insured company to be proactive, i.e. start thinking about cyber-security (or fire safety, or employee driver training, etc.) *before* something catastrophic happens. Like think of how your home fire insurance rates are lower if you install an automatic sprinkler system... same idea here with cyber-security. I have no doubt that the big insurance companies will be looking closely at companies' security policies before writing them a $200-million policy.
Or double the cost of construction and twenty years of operation for ITER, the tokamak that will demonstrate magnetic fusion energy for the first time. If it doesn't get cancelled because of government budget shortages, that is...
Sure, a tablet or mobile phone is useless for those of us that actually do non-trivial things with the computer (video editing, Photoshop, finite element analysis, coding, even heavy MS Excel work), but for that cousin you have that only uses it for uploading photos to Facebook and emailing?
I can almost see such a person getting by fine with a modern smartphone (one of the more powerful dual-core ones), with an MHL output allowing it to be hooked up to a monitor when at home, and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Heavy storage is done in the cloud; you pay for data through your mobile provider (or if this isn't enough, get a home cable connection and WiFi). Polaris Office is fine for the one word-processing task such a person does per week (making birthday invitations or Please Don't Steal Food From The Fridge signs).
We're only a few years away from this being a common use case, I think.
Hyperspectral imaging (viewing electromagnetic radiation across a much wider wavelength/frequency range than the human eye can see) is one of these things that just boggles the mind with the possibilities. For a system to be able to simultaneously "see" in far IR or even terahertz or microwaves, all the way up to X- and gamma-rays.... Well, it's like Predator. But doing cool things like monitoring the health of rainforests or quickly identifying explosives.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, the CEO of this new company (Bob Mumgaard) and CTO (Dan Brunner) helped answer the questions asked in the Ask MIT Fusion Researchers About Fusion Power in April 2012: https://hardware.slashdot.org/... Prof. Dennis Whyte and Dr. Martin Greenwald were also on that thread and are now core members of the founding team of the new startup (although they remain employed by MIT).
It would be one thing if the cuts ("sequestration") really happened as planned, equally distributed between defense and non-defense discretionary spending.
Except that the defense industry has been on top of it for months now, and have a very good lobbying campaign going to scare the shit out of Washington about what will happen if the defense cuts go through. So I fear that what will happen is either the defense cuts will be reversed, and the other cuts will still happen, or else none of the cuts will happen.
People are pretty excited about Operation Chimichanga and the thought of a real shooting war with China. They should be horrified and disgusted.
Fusion scientists often get criticized for making unrealistic promises ("Fusion has been thirty years away, for fifty years!" or some variation on that). But take a look at the graph here. The graph shows the funding estimates from a 1976 fusion development plan, with various paths to a reactor. The black curve way at the bottom is the actual funding profile.
Ph.D student in fusion here. (I was one of the authors of this Ask Slashdot.)
It's important to note that there are a range of opinions on this. Everyone thinks ITER is a good idea, at the right price. That price was originally quoted at $5-billion (with the U.S. picking up 9% of that) when the U.S. made the decision to join in 2003; today the construction cost is estimated at somewhere north of $20-billion. Hopefully now with Motojima as Director-General, this cost will stop rising. (From what I hear, he's being very rigorous about cost and schedule control and pushing the team hard on these fronts.)
The problem for the U.S. is that participation in ITER doesn't make sense without a strong domestic program in place to take advantage of the results that come out of it. And without a (temporary) surge in U.S. fusion funding to get over the ITER construction "hump", the entire domestic program might be "squeezed" out of existence. Check out the graph here:
http://fire.pppl.gov/FusionFuture_USbudget_profile.jpg
So it's not so much a matter of "is ITER good science?" (it is!). The question is: "is ITER the right path for the U.S. at a cost of 9% of $20-billion or $25-billion, without a commitment to sustain the domestic program through the ITER construction phase?"
I urge everyone here to go to our website that we set up at fusionfuture.org, which has a lot of information about this issue. We still need your help - the House has restored funding for the domestic fusion program, but the current Senate version of the bill still has the domestic fusion budget slashed (and the fusion experiment at MIT entirely closed down). There is still work to do!
Wow, that looks extremely similar to the red light created by the Starfish Prime thermonuclear bomb detonation in space! In that case, it was fast electrons from the nuclear explosion, spiralling along magnetic field lines and eventually colliding with oxygen atoms in the atmosphere, which emit a red glow when excited.
I'm going to guess that this is a picture of oxygen being excited by runaway electrons produced by lightning. Cool!
Very first thing I tried asking their online bot.
Me: What is your least favorite food?
Eugene: My "little friend". (No, not my dick as you might have thought! Just my guinea pig). If I'm not mistaken - you still didn't tell me where you live. OR it's a secret?:-)
Fantastic work, Princeton AI lab.
I mean, it's a bit expensive ($2199 in stock configuration), but how can you look at these five lines:
2880x1800 resolution screen (this is insane)
256 GB solid-state hard drive
2.3 GHz quad-core Intel i7
8 GiB memory
7-hour battery life
and not want one?
It's probably because of the high-resolution screen - you need to use the new API because it's the only one that forces you to make your GUI resolution-indpendent. (that said, IANAAD - I am not an Apple developer)
This is fantastic news. I don't care what you think of space policy or anything, this is a good day for everybody.
Now, let's see NASA make good on their promise to hand over LEO to the private sector so they can think about Mars and beyond!
Hi all, Geoff Olynyk here, one of the interview participants.
It was linked in the interview, but I wanted to point out that some of us have put together a website, fusionfuture.org with information about fusion and a really easy-to-use link to urge Congress not to cut fusion funding in the 2013 budget. They are planning to shut down the MIT fusion experiment (Alcator C-Mod) this fall!
If you go to the website (www.fusionfuture.org), and click the "Contact Congress Now" button at right, it literally only takes a minute to send letters to the Department of Energy and your Representative and Senators. We need your help to ensure that this important research continues in the United States!
Thanks everyone.
I use just a three-level hierarchy:
1. Photos and documents are on my RAID-5 array (4 × 1 TB Hitachi enterprise drives) in my desktop, backed up occasionally (every month or so) to a Toshiba 1 TB eSATA external drive sitting on my desk
2. Music, movies, TV shows, are on the RAID-5 array, not backed up
3. Windows and programs are on my 80 GB SSD, not backed up.
So I'm not protected at all against my house burning down, but this has worked for me for the past 10 years. (For my old system, which ran 2003–2010, it was a WD Raptor, not an SSD. And the RAID 5 was 4 × 200 GB.)
Haha, I guess that's true. Maybe what it most says is that Canadians are insecure because we wring our hands over a single big company falling from greatness :) But on the other hand, didn't Nortel go much the same way?
I guess it's a problem for smaller countries where their is only one world-class player in a given market. China or the U.S. doesn't agonize over a single big enterprise stagnating because there are several more waiting in the wings.
There must be consternation in Finland over Nokia akin to the parochial concern for RIM in Canada? Or are the Finns more confident.
Having only recently gotten into the smartphone game (July 2011), I didn't really know anything about the industry back when RIM/Blackberry was king.
But now, having read some about it... wow, what a waste. They basically had huge, fat, margins, essentially no competition in the smartphone arena, for almost five years - and freaking sat on it and did almost nothing. Meanwhile Apple and Google were in the lab inventing the future. Unbelievable.
Like most Canadians the story concerns me because what does it say about the country? I sometimes wonder - even if RIM had had a clue and tried to come up with something iPhone- or Android-like, could they have done it without the California engineer and developer community? They had the money, but could they have enticed the brilliant graduates of top American schools to move to Ontario? And I don't mean to say that Canadian engineers aren't good, but that Apple and Google have access to a global talent pool - did/does RIM? (Fascinating question: How much does snow and ice have to do with the fortunes of a mobile phone developer?)
It's a sad but interesting story all around. I hope they can turn things around but I don't see much chance of it at this point.
Workable high-temperature (i.e. room-temperature) superconductors would make magnetic fusion reactors (tokamaks) a lot cheaper. This is one of the things that would be a game-changer for fusion.
iPad 3 resolution = 264 ppi
On a 24" 16:10 monitor that's a resolution of 5376x3360, well above the capabilities of DisplayPort 1.2. Unfortunately! I would love a high-ppi screen. People always complain about how apps break, blah blah blah, get some high-ppi screens into the hands of vocal consumers and app makers will fix that shit right quick.
What I want is (say) a 1920x1440 monitor (4:3 ratio). If I want to "mask" a 16:9 monitor to do that, I'll need it to be 2560x1440. One example of such a monitor is the Dell U2711, which is nearly $900!
Dammit, accidentally posted this as AC just now. Reposting as myself.
Honestly I'm fine with the idea that someday my phone will be my main computer, and that I'll "dock" it to a keyboard and monitor at home. (As long as everything is constantly backed up to some cloud storage somewhere so when eventually I drop my phone or a jackass friend pushes me in a lake, I don't lose the past few days of work!)
But one thing I do wonder about is what this will do to the price of "real" workstation class equipment. Already, 4:3 monitors (which are much better for engineering work, spreadsheets, etc. -- think MATLAB, COMSOL Multiphysics, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, CST Microwave Studio...) are far more expensive than to 16:9 panels (which have the economies of scale from being the aspect ratio of broadcast TV). Even Dell's fantastic U2410 and U3011 LCD panels are 16:10, not 4:3.
So yeah. I'm fine with the day that most people's only computers will be a phone and a tablet, with a docking station for a mouse/keyboard/monitor. But for those of us that need more horsepower than a mobile processor can provide, it's not going to be good. Hopefully there'll still be enough gamers to subsidize the high-power graphics card and desktop processors so that technical people can afford them!
The problem is that such reforms will probably (in order from most to least important): (a) break EU rules, (b) break some treaties that Finland has signed with other non-EU countries on required length of copyright, (c) piss off the U.S..
Other than that, I fully support you, and I hope that something exactly like what you suggest goes ahead!
While the commercial uses of these UAVs are cool (hunting feral pigs tearing up your crops using an IR camera on a drone and then radioing the location to your brother with a shotgun! That would be something that only a few militaries in the world could do a decade ago...) the real impact is going to be on the complete loss of privacy for just being anywhere outside in public.
I've long thought that the ease by which something can be obtained really does matter. I mean, things like divorce records have always been "public", but for most of history, that meant going to the city offices and having some surly clerk find the records for you in a basement filing cabinet. Which meant that strictly speaking, they were public, but in practice most people would never go to that trouble. With online records, finding out juicy details about your neighbour's divorce can be as easy as clicking a link. So the change in ease of obtaining records really does change the meaning of "public", even if it doesn't change the definition in a strictly legal sense.
It's the same thing with being outside. The advent of huge networks of computerized cameras on the street, on business fronts, and now perhaps on ubiquitous flying unmanned vehicles... it means that while you had no expectation of privacy in public before, in practice it meant that you could generally go places without anybody knowing about it, as long as you didn't just happen to run into somebody that knows you. Before long, an unblinking computer eye will see you everywhere. The idea of going somewhere without anybody knowing about it will be a thing of the past.
Now, is this, overall, a good thing? That I'm not sure about. Good and bad sides to it, I guess. (I'll be very interested to see its impact on strip clubs and massage parlours, though! Especially if divorce lawyers can subpoena the records.)
Insurance companies typically force the insured company to be proactive, i.e. start thinking about cyber-security (or fire safety, or employee driver training, etc.) *before* something catastrophic happens. Like think of how your home fire insurance rates are lower if you install an automatic sprinkler system... same idea here with cyber-security. I have no doubt that the big insurance companies will be looking closely at companies' security policies before writing them a $200-million policy.
Or double the cost of construction and twenty years of operation for ITER, the tokamak that will demonstrate magnetic fusion energy for the first time. If it doesn't get cancelled because of government budget shortages, that is...
Nano-steampunk means gluing non-functional pico-watch parts to it.
Sure, a tablet or mobile phone is useless for those of us that actually do non-trivial things with the computer (video editing, Photoshop, finite element analysis, coding, even heavy MS Excel work), but for that cousin you have that only uses it for uploading photos to Facebook and emailing?
I can almost see such a person getting by fine with a modern smartphone (one of the more powerful dual-core ones), with an MHL output allowing it to be hooked up to a monitor when at home, and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Heavy storage is done in the cloud; you pay for data through your mobile provider (or if this isn't enough, get a home cable connection and WiFi). Polaris Office is fine for the one word-processing task such a person does per week (making birthday invitations or Please Don't Steal Food From The Fridge signs).
We're only a few years away from this being a common use case, I think.
Why not, I don't know, just run the "don't stress out the human" program from the beginning? Why wait until they're already pissed off?
Hyperspectral imaging (viewing electromagnetic radiation across a much wider wavelength/frequency range than the human eye can see) is one of these things that just boggles the mind with the possibilities. For a system to be able to simultaneously "see" in far IR or even terahertz or microwaves, all the way up to X- and gamma-rays.... Well, it's like Predator. But doing cool things like monitoring the health of rainforests or quickly identifying explosives.