As a Physicist I am quite aware of the laws of thermodynamics.
However, neither these laws or any of your "arguments" can be used to support the use of dirty fuels like oil and coal. The use of nuclear power is also questionable. It has low efficiency and serious environmental problems.
Furthermore, even if we didn't have cleaner and morally more justifiable energy source (which we do), continuing the use of energy sources we NOW know are damaging the environment is just outragous.
Your argument against windmills is just ridiculous. Check out the statistics on European nations like Denmark which are serious about wind energy and see how many casualties they have had from blades... FUD, pure FUD.
you seem to put experiment on a pedastal and theory in the dumpster
This is something I've run into before.
Experimental work and theory/simulation are, in priciple, equivalent. However, the final arbitrator for the scientific truth is always the observation. Don't you agree?
In that sense, the experimental work does have an edge. If the observation doesnt fit the existing theoretical predictions you have to modify the theory. If the theory doesn't agree with the existing experimental data, it's failed.
I'm quite aware that I am somewhat biased against simulations and come out rather strongly sometimes. This is simply because I feel that many of the Physical Review Letters articles, for instance, in theoretical/computational solid state physics, for instance, actually get published because they cannot be refereed properly. When we submit an experimental paper, the referees can rip the work apart because the experimental limitations are too well known and tend to be taken seriously. Bad experimental data leads to bad science. On the other hand, I have seen "state-of-the-art" simulations published in PRL even though the agreement with experimental data is non-existent. "Well, we know that DFT has fundamental problems. Let's publish it anyway". Ok, I can accept that for a single publication that demonstrates the limits of the current state-of-the-art, but after dozens of similar articles are published, then I have a problem.
That was actually a very interesting link. Thanks.
It was particularly interesting because I deal with the Pd surfaces at an atomic level on a daily basis and, quite frankly, the author of the article seems to have missed several important features unique to the Pd-H interaction. I have to read all those cited papers before contacting anyone, though.
And no, I'm not going to comment those features here...;-)
any scientist worth his salt sees the value of theory AND experiment
Exactly! That was just my point!
Space elevators and solar sails are, at present, merely theoretical contraptions. Before you can publish anything serious concerning them, you MUST have validating experimental in situ work included.
Mere theory or simulation doesnt cut it. Pure experimental work is a wild stab in the dark. Both are required.
If you had read my earlier posts before your knee-jerk reply, you would have seen that I am a professional Physicist.
I am not anti-science. I just want the funding to benefit real science; preferably experimental science. Most of the funding should go to well established fields like solid state physics, optics and materials science. A small part (2-5%) of the total funding could be spent on "venture research" on the scientific fringe.
It's the job of theory to create the basis for the technologies (in this case, most likely automated nanotech) to allow the engineers to weave
Hence, the tech IS NOT available. Especially if it still in the theory phase. Practical considerations might make any theoretical "recipe" useless. Hell, even the state-of-the-art ab initio theories and simulations cannot quantitatively reproduce not to mention predict the growth of semiconductor materials these days.
knocking on the dreamers working on them. Why?
As long as you cannot provide experimental means for producing these materials and testing them, its all a pipe-dream.
Von Braun was able to kick peoples asses and got them to implement the stuff.
This is serious research which is getting substantial investment from NASA, the ESA, and the aerospace industry.
Just like the fusion research and colliders (aka Big Science) are siphoning funding from real science with no real promise of delivering anything useful anytime within the next few decades.
worked long and hard to use the science they had to create the technology they needed to realize their dreams.
Hence, the tech was available. Like with the atomic bomb the theory might have been difficult but engineering was simply out of this world. Yet they did it. Hence it was within the grasp of the minds of the time.
I dont see this happening with solar sails or space elevators.
What I want to do with my strict attitude towards "dreamers" is to keep the signal-to-noise ratio in science as low as possible. Its becoming nearly impossible to follow literature these days because of all the CRAP that gets published!
As a matter of fact I have a PhD in Physics and I do research for a living.
People like you fail to see how these wacky theories can ever be profitable.
I dont have a problem with commercialism.
I have a problem with the dreamers. Maybe it has something to do with my being an experimentalist. I just dont trust the theory and computational guys.
The foundation of natural sciences rests on the experimental falsifiability of the theories. Theories as such as are simply worthless. You can dream up anything you want. You can simulate anything you want. However, none of this is real and acceptable as mainstream science until the predictions have been experimentally tested.
Bring me optimally reflective material that can withstand heavy radiation, micrometeorites, damage and stress for decades and let me test it.
Bring me carbon nanotubes that are thousands of feet long and let me measure their strength for real. I dont give a damn about your theoretical predictions.
IBM is doing exactly this with quantum computing and kudos to them for doing things the right way and not the "cold fission" way.
As long as it has not been experimentally tested it really doesnt deserve public exposure.
Von Braun was a real scientist. Yes, he had a dream but his dream was within the reach of the current technology.
What the solar sail or space elevator people are currently proposing requires technology way beyond our current level. Thus, its pretty much irrelevant dreaming. Yeah, you could try publishing it in a journal but if I were a referee Id reject these manuscripts straight away on the grounds that: "The theories proposed in the manuscript cannot be tested with current technology and no such tests are proposed by the authors. Therefore the research does not deserve to be published".
Solar sails and space elevators intrigue certain kind people. Unfortunately these people are most of the time dreamers with no capability in scientific reasoning. They get excited about the "romantic" idea of "sailing" to the stars or building a "bean stalk" to the orbit. Pretty childish.
Face it. Until the use of anti-gravity is discovered the chemical propulsion to orbit and ion/nuclear drives beyond that are the only practical means of space travel.
global standard of living is low because there is insufficient capitalism around
I guess you missed my point.
I don't care if there's only little or massive amounts of oil in the Earth. The use of oil MUST STOP -- right now. Alternative energy sources with no CO2, NOx, CH4, H2O or nuclear waste production must be employed instead.
As far as the standard of living goes, I don't care if it is low (which is just an absurd claim!) or not. If using alternative energy sources means that the living standards should be lower, then so be it. Id rather live in a cave than live knowing that the future generations have no hope of surviving.
You can live with less heating (15C by night is just fine and even healthier than "normal" room temperature!), you can stop running your computer 24h/day and you can switch off all electrical equipment you dont need. You can also recycle your waste and use public transportation. Its all very easy -- claiming anything else just tells me that youre being an irresponsible asshole bent on only your own "wellbeing" and making money.
Hey, dont diss Monica! She looks like she could deliver hell of a blow-job.
Besides, I like women with a healthy amount of meat on their bones -- not these anorectic excuses for a woman you tend to meet today. Hell, I'm only 32 and yet today's freshman university girls I see on my lectures every day quite frankly horrify me. Every day there's like a row of skeletons with makeup greeting me on the front-row.
GWBs latest alternative to the Kyoto treaty is nothing but a sell-out to the big money and industry. What these people dont seem to realise that lowering the world wide energy consumption (and thus also the standard of living!) is not negotiable or voluntary -- it is inevitable and obligatory if our species is to survive!
I am prepared to lower my standards of living -- are you?
Uhhuh. I still can remember typing in page after page of that kind of code from magazines. Imagine. The code and graphics like sprites and character sets were loaded in from DATA statements.
But wasn't all in vain. I can still outtype the younger hackers both in speed and accuracy.;-)
Re:My 1541 drive was a speaker too!
on
Harddrive Speakers
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Youve got it all wrong.
Computer stuff is for work. What Ive got in my pants is for fun.
Now, the most important rule is: never mix fun and work. If youre working, dont let the pretty women screw with your head. Women don't deserve any better advice on technical matters than the worst male PHB or slob of a co-worker. On the other hand, if youre having fun out with the ladies, don't talk shop. You're a "technical consultant", not an engineer or a scientist.
I also once wrote a machine code program that polled the cassette player read-bit (dont remember specifics anymore) and changed the background color and clicked the audio for every bit change. It was pretty cool to play your tapes "digitally" on a C64.
I cant stand computer noise anymore. Maxtor and WD drives are almost quiet enough, but as you point out they are seriously lacking in latency. IDE isn't that great bus either (no disconnect ability). Desktop computers also have a problem with noisy power sources as well.
If by civilization you mean your own bigoted "pure race" (racial purity == genetic rot), then good riddance. Ill be laughing when your kind will be tried and executed by the international court of justice for crimes against humanity. I just hope theyll bring back the death penalty so that the genetic waste like you is finally eliminated from the gene pool.
Researchers claimed today that they have found evidence that the goatse.cx guy is still alive!
The world famous goatse.cx guy was recently declared deceased both on Slashdot and K5, but now a research team that prefers to remain nameless has found that our favourite anus stretching hero is indeed still alive here.
The news have been received with overwhelming relief and joy in the open source community the symbol of which the stretched anus had become. Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond are preparing a joint statement and a press conference next week. Developing...
Slashdot Mirror
However, neither these laws or any of your "arguments" can be used to support the use of dirty fuels like oil and coal. The use of nuclear power is also questionable. It has low efficiency and serious environmental problems.
Furthermore, even if we didn't have cleaner and morally more justifiable energy source (which we do), continuing the use of energy sources we NOW know are damaging the environment is just outragous.
Your argument against windmills is just ridiculous. Check out the statistics on European nations like Denmark which are serious about wind energy and see how many casualties they have had from blades... FUD, pure FUD.
This is something I've run into before.
Experimental work and theory/simulation are, in priciple, equivalent. However, the final arbitrator for the scientific truth is always the observation. Don't you agree?
In that sense, the experimental work does have an edge. If the observation doesnt fit the existing theoretical predictions you have to modify the theory. If the theory doesn't agree with the existing experimental data, it's failed.
I'm quite aware that I am somewhat biased against simulations and come out rather strongly sometimes. This is simply because I feel that many of the Physical Review Letters articles, for instance, in theoretical/computational solid state physics, for instance, actually get published because they cannot be refereed properly. When we submit an experimental paper, the referees can rip the work apart because the experimental limitations are too well known and tend to be taken seriously. Bad experimental data leads to bad science. On the other hand, I have seen "state-of-the-art" simulations published in PRL even though the agreement with experimental data is non-existent. "Well, we know that DFT has fundamental problems. Let's publish it anyway". Ok, I can accept that for a single publication that demonstrates the limits of the current state-of-the-art, but after dozens of similar articles are published, then I have a problem.
It was particularly interesting because I deal with the Pd surfaces at an atomic level on a daily basis and, quite frankly, the author of the article seems to have missed several important features unique to the Pd-H interaction. I have to read all those cited papers before contacting anyone, though.
And no, I'm not going to comment those features here... ;-)
Exactly! That was just my point!
Space elevators and solar sails are, at present, merely theoretical contraptions. Before you can publish anything serious concerning them, you MUST have validating experimental in situ work included.
Mere theory or simulation doesnt cut it. Pure experimental work is a wild stab in the dark. Both are required.
If you had read my earlier posts before your knee-jerk reply, you would have seen that I am a professional Physicist.
I am not anti-science. I just want the funding to benefit real science; preferably experimental science. Most of the funding should go to well established fields like solid state physics, optics and materials science. A small part (2-5%) of the total funding could be spent on "venture research" on the scientific fringe.
Hence, the tech IS NOT available. Especially if it still in the theory phase. Practical considerations might make any theoretical "recipe" useless. Hell, even the state-of-the-art ab initio theories and simulations cannot quantitatively reproduce not to mention predict the growth of semiconductor materials these days.
knocking on the dreamers working on them. Why?
As long as you cannot provide experimental means for producing these materials and testing them, its all a pipe-dream.
Von Braun was able to kick peoples asses and got them to implement the stuff.
Just like the fusion research and colliders (aka Big Science) are siphoning funding from real science with no real promise of delivering anything useful anytime within the next few decades.
Oh joy.
Hence, the tech was available. Like with the atomic bomb the theory might have been difficult but engineering was simply out of this world. Yet they did it. Hence it was within the grasp of the minds of the time.
I dont see this happening with solar sails or space elevators.
What I want to do with my strict attitude towards "dreamers" is to keep the signal-to-noise ratio in science as low as possible. Its becoming nearly impossible to follow literature these days because of all the CRAP that gets published!
As a matter of fact I have a PhD in Physics and I do research for a living.
People like you fail to see how these wacky theories can ever be profitable.
I dont have a problem with commercialism.
I have a problem with the dreamers. Maybe it has something to do with my being an experimentalist. I just dont trust the theory and computational guys.
The foundation of natural sciences rests on the experimental falsifiability of the theories. Theories as such as are simply worthless. You can dream up anything you want. You can simulate anything you want. However, none of this is real and acceptable as mainstream science until the predictions have been experimentally tested.
Bring me optimally reflective material that can withstand heavy radiation, micrometeorites, damage and stress for decades and let me test it.
Bring me carbon nanotubes that are thousands of feet long and let me measure their strength for real. I dont give a damn about your theoretical predictions.
IBM is doing exactly this with quantum computing and kudos to them for doing things the right way and not the "cold fission" way.
As long as it has not been experimentally tested it really doesnt deserve public exposure.
Which would obviously require censorship.
Nothing like broadcasts of a global killer pandemic of a killer virus or a nuclear war to boost the morale of the ship...
What the solar sail or space elevator people are currently proposing requires technology way beyond our current level. Thus, its pretty much irrelevant dreaming. Yeah, you could try publishing it in a journal but if I were a referee Id reject these manuscripts straight away on the grounds that: "The theories proposed in the manuscript cannot be tested with current technology and no such tests are proposed by the authors. Therefore the research does not deserve to be published".
Its currently being ratified by the EU.
Solar sails and space elevators intrigue certain kind people. Unfortunately these people are most of the time dreamers with no capability in scientific reasoning. They get excited about the "romantic" idea of "sailing" to the stars or building a "bean stalk" to the orbit. Pretty childish.
Face it. Until the use of anti-gravity is discovered the chemical propulsion to orbit and ion/nuclear drives beyond that are the only practical means of space travel.
I guess you missed my point.
I don't care if there's only little or massive amounts of oil in the Earth. The use of oil MUST STOP -- right now. Alternative energy sources with no CO2, NOx, CH4, H2O or nuclear waste production must be employed instead.
As far as the standard of living goes, I don't care if it is low (which is just an absurd claim!) or not. If using alternative energy sources means that the living standards should be lower, then so be it. Id rather live in a cave than live knowing that the future generations have no hope of surviving.
You can live with less heating (15C by night is just fine and even healthier than "normal" room temperature!), you can stop running your computer 24h/day and you can switch off all electrical equipment you dont need. You can also recycle your waste and use public transportation. Its all very easy -- claiming anything else just tells me that youre being an irresponsible asshole bent on only your own "wellbeing" and making money.
Besides, I like women with a healthy amount of meat on their bones -- not these anorectic excuses for a woman you tend to meet today. Hell, I'm only 32 and yet today's freshman university girls I see on my lectures every day quite frankly horrify me. Every day there's like a row of skeletons with makeup greeting me on the front-row.
Does he have a CRACK WHORE fetish? Is that why he moved to Harlem?
Indeed.
GWBs latest alternative to the Kyoto treaty is nothing but a sell-out to the big money and industry. What these people dont seem to realise that lowering the world wide energy consumption (and thus also the standard of living!) is not negotiable or voluntary -- it is inevitable and obligatory if our species is to survive!
I am prepared to lower my standards of living -- are you?
Uhhuh. I still can remember typing in page after page of that kind of code from magazines. Imagine. The code and graphics like sprites and character sets were loaded in from DATA statements.
But wasn't all in vain. I can still outtype the younger hackers both in speed and accuracy. ;-)
Computer stuff is for work. What Ive got in my pants is for fun.
Now, the most important rule is: never mix fun and work. If youre working, dont let the pretty women screw with your head. Women don't deserve any better advice on technical matters than the worst male PHB or slob of a co-worker. On the other hand, if youre having fun out with the ladies, don't talk shop. You're a "technical consultant", not an engineer or a scientist.
If my girlfriend had a vibrator, Id end it. Period.
I and my one-eyed trouser snake should be more than enough for her. No more silly talk about tongues, fingers or vibrators, please.
I also once wrote a machine code program that polled the cassette player read-bit (dont remember specifics anymore) and changed the background color and clicked the audio for every bit change. It was pretty cool to play your tapes "digitally" on a C64.
I cant stand computer noise anymore. Maxtor and WD drives are almost quiet enough, but as you point out they are seriously lacking in latency. IDE isn't that great bus either (no disconnect ability). Desktop computers also have a problem with noisy power sources as well.
Anyway, I finally . A totally silent laptop is the way to go.
If by civilization you mean your own bigoted "pure race" (racial purity == genetic rot), then good riddance. Ill be laughing when your kind will be tried and executed by the international court of justice for crimes against humanity. I just hope theyll bring back the death penalty so that the genetic waste like you is finally eliminated from the gene pool.
Too bad it caused serious head misalignment after a while.
The world famous goatse.cx guy was recently declared deceased both on Slashdot and K5, but now a research team that prefers to remain nameless has found that our favourite anus stretching hero is indeed still alive here.
The news have been received with overwhelming relief and joy in the open source community the symbol of which the stretched anus had become. Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond are preparing a joint statement and a press conference next week. Developing...