it is supposed to be either expand and freeze, or collapse and crunch.
Actually there is a third possibility: the big rip. The expansion of the universe is accelerating and, if this continues and the Dark Energy driving it is of the right type, then space-time might literally rip itself apart.
Personally I would much rather have my tax money bail out a company like Tesla than GM/Ford/Chrysler. If Tesla can get their technology and business model to work then society will benefit in the long term from less pollution and less hassle purchasing cars. I'm not really sure what, if any, the long term benefits are of propping up a company like GM is. It might save job losses in the short term but given their reluctance to change and modernize I expect it is just postponing the inevitable.
Can those neutrino oscillations be modulated at will so as to transfer data?
Technically yes they could. When neutrinos pass through matter the electron-neutrino part of them interacts differently to the muon and tau parts because matter contains electrons (something called the MSW effect). However because at typical energies neutrinos interact only very weakly with matter the effect is very tiny and so far is only significant when neutrinos pass though objects like the Earth or the Sun. This means that you would need an extraordinarily sensitive detector, very high energy neutrinos [at energies 1000+ times greater than the LHC neutrinos start to interact a lot more readily with matter] and/or an incredibly intense neutrino beam.
A better way to modulate the neutrino beam would be to change the way it is generated assuming it is created from an accelerator. By altering the polarity of the magnets selecting the muons which then decay you could flip the beam back and forth between muon neutrino and anti-neutrino. This would not be a fast process though and you still need an extremely large detector (thousands of tons or more) to detect them and then there is stil the issue of analysis to get the signal. This makes it impractical for HFT applications although if it could be made to work you'd actually beat the competition by a lot more than a femtosecond: the gain is up to 45 milliseconds if you were transmitting straight through the centre of the Earth.
Actually the summary is wrong. Neutrino oscillations have been detected before from atmospheric neutrinos, solar neutrinos and beam neutrinos (e.g. the T2K experiment). The linked article technically gets it right, but is somewhat misleading, calling it "our first observation" where 'our' refers to the Nova experiment and not humanity in general i.e. it is the first time that the Nova experiment has detected oscillating neutrinos.
This is an important milestone for them but just indicates that their detector works in much the same way that we measured known Standard Model processes at the LHC before going after the higgs boson. If you can't see the physics that we know is there first nobody will believe you if you claim to see something new. Hopefully this is just the precursor for some interesting results from Nova...and hopefully they can get the Fermilab PR machine to write less misleading/hyped press releases when they do have some exciting results to announce!
I thought they used concrete for that now? I guess we will find out for sure a few thousand years when archaeologists are exploring the ancient ruins of what is now Chicago.
Having just stayed in a very new looking Premier Inn in London last week I was not at all impressed. The check-in kiosk failed to provide any keys so we had to wait for the one guy with a laptop. The room had no phone but they did helpfully provide an external number for the reception which, for an international destination like London, meant that they expected guests to both to have a mobile with them and be willing to pay exorbitant roaming fees just to call reception. As for remote control by Apple watch they solved that in a way which is platform independent: the room was so small you could stand in the middle of it and touch all the controls without having to move. It was very clear that the aim of any "improvements" was to make things cheaper and not to improve guests' experience.
Not true - you already had the basic technology required to get there. All that was needed was the political will to spend the money to put it all together. Also, more importantly, cost was not a project constraint: the aim was simply to get there (largely) regardless of the price.
Renewable energy is a different problem: how do we switch to renewable energy without massively increasing the cost of electricity or generating more CO2 in creating the infrastructure than we save by operating it. This imposes constraints which require new technology and ideas to solve. All politics can provide is money and there is no guarantee that this will translate into the technology required. Indeed I would argue that it will not since there is already a strong financial incentive to develop green technology.
Nuclear plants still have the requirement of access to an uninterruptible source of water for cooling. They also have security concerns which is not the same thing as safety. I would have no worries about living near a nuclear plant but I would have a lot of concerns about every neighbourhood having their own. Depleted uranium is easy to obtain and all it takes to convert it into plutonium is a strong source of low energy neutrons like a reactor.
Actually it does: Canada already has a legal requirement for one year of p/maternity leave which can be shared between parents as wanted. However your salary will drop if you take more than some number of months off depending on your company.
I also suspect that if you actually tried to take that year of paid leave (especially if you're a father), they would suddenly find a way to fire you or cut your pay.
I doubt it - a year of p/maternity leave is actually a legal requirement in places like Canada. Finding a way to fire someone after returning would get a company into very hot water very quickly. However, depending on your company, you do not get your full salary for the year and it drops after some number of months to the statutory p/maternity leave pay. I took a week off when our kids were born without any issues.
How many gigawatts will that thing run on, though?
Actually none - it uses liquid nitrogen to keep the superconducting pads below critical temperature. Hence the wisps of condensation from the feet of the rider in the video. The superconductor is then essentially quantum locked into the magnetic field produced by the buried track: any change in field would induce a current in the superconductor to oppose that change. This is actually a common physics demo they have just improved the presentation. Still it would be a fantastic way to make an entrance for a relevant lecture - I wonder if they offer academic pricing for the board and track installation...
The line losses are a NIMBY problem, people don't want power plants near their houses.
That's not really true. Coal-fired power plants need to be located near a large, reliable water source for cooling and the closer they are to their fuel source the less energy is used to transport the coal. They also have to be of a certain size in order to operate efficiently. Hence even if everyone was willing to tolerate a coal fired power station in their neighbourhood most locations would be unsuitable for their construction, rural communities would be too small to warrant a power station even if suitable and even then there would be an increase in the energy to ship the coal the larger distances required. This means that only small reductions in transmission losses would be possible and since this is already one of the most efficient steps in the power consumption process you'd lose a lot more than you would gain.
It wouldn't last a week before we'd be seeing attacks against competitors.
It's not competitors I'd be worried about but the copyright trolls. Using their interpretation of copyright law practically everyone would be guilty of "stealing" their data in some form or other and so would be open to be hacked "just to check". The truly ironic thing of course is that by acting under a letter of marque they would actually be far more like a pirate than those they accuse.
It's the people with the "can do" attitude that lead us to the future.
A can-do attitude is useful when you have an idea about how to do something new and nay-sayers then argue against that idea ever working. What we have here is a political goal with no clue about how to achieve it which is not the same thing. The problem with a 100 % 'renewable' energy solution is that the power is very variable. Show me a plan to deal with that and I'll be interested. Until then this appears nothing more than political hot air.
that would be much harder with other larger and/or denser bodies like Jupiter, the Sun, and white dwarfs.
Actually the argument also used pulsars. These have densities at, or above, that of a nucleus. A blackhole produced at the surface of one would swallow the entire star due to the phenomenally large cross-section. Pulsars are easy to detect and since we have never yet observed a pulsar winking out of existence we can exclude dangerous black hole production.
Just look at how dangerous "natural" intelligence is and all the problems and disasters it has caused when it goes wrong - either through making mistakes or through mental disorders. Why should the artificial version be different? The question is will the benefits outweigh the downsides? Clearly for "natural" intelligence the answer is a resounding yes and I expect this will also be the case for the artificial version too.
The whole system is designed for people having stuff "they only sometimes need".
That is the result of technology which has massively reduced the cost to produce items. Once the cost to purchase and store the item becomes less than the cost to rent the item (factoring in something extra for the convenience of ownership) people will buy it rather than rent it. However it is not clear to me that the rental model is more efficient: there is an energy cost to moving the device around as well as the cost of the people to manage everything.
Even if you think of massively advanced technology which might let you 3d-print tools, use them, and then break them down and reuse the raw material to build your next item it is still not a given that the energy cost of that would be less than just storing different objects for occasional use.
You do realize, right, that every GMO is required to undergo years of testing?
True but the testing they undergo is less rigorous than drugs and yet every so often a new drug has to be recalled because of either rare side effects or long term effects that were not known at the time of release. That is not a reason to ban GMO since, as with drugs, the benefits can outweigh the risks. However we would never dream of giving someone a new drug without telling them what they were taking so why should it be ok to let people eat GMO without telling them?
If GMO labelling were mandatory then companies would be forced to pass the benefits onto consumers: if GMO strawberries are cheaper to grow then they should be cheaper in the shops. This combined with an education campaign would mean that people would see and understand the benefits of GMO and so be more supportive of it. By hiding it the corporations can pocket the savings instead of us and they don't have to bother educating anyone which perpetuates the resistance to the technology.
This is not the first time that someone has claimed to observe pentaquarks. I'd suggest holding off the welcome until this result is confirmed by several other experiments. Last time there was a confusing mixture of confirmations and non-confirmations until the consensus emerged that there was no evidence to support the existence of pentaquarks.
Why would you rather do the email, read journals, etc on a BUS rather than do those things in the comfort of your home, or even you desk at your office?
Sorry I thought I made that clear: because it wastes less time. Bus/LRT I waste ~5-10 minutes each way, driving I waste ~25-30 minutes each way. So I get more done and have more free time. It might be nicer to do email etc. in the office/home but then I have to spend an extra hour each day doing it so less free time. I suppose it helps that I have a job where there are no real fixed hours and I just have to get things done. If I just had to be in an office from 9-5 then it would be less of an advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
it is supposed to be either expand and freeze, or collapse and crunch.
Actually there is a third possibility: the big rip. The expansion of the universe is accelerating and, if this continues and the Dark Energy driving it is of the right type, then space-time might literally rip itself apart.
Don't knock it, it worked for the other ostensibly American automakers, producing many of their cars and parts in Canada
True, and to keep it that way they got a as well and they are not even Canadian companies!
Personally I would much rather have my tax money bail out a company like Tesla than GM/Ford/Chrysler. If Tesla can get their technology and business model to work then society will benefit in the long term from less pollution and less hassle purchasing cars. I'm not really sure what, if any, the long term benefits are of propping up a company like GM is. It might save job losses in the short term but given their reluctance to change and modernize I expect it is just postponing the inevitable.
Can those neutrino oscillations be modulated at will so as to transfer data?
Technically yes they could. When neutrinos pass through matter the electron-neutrino part of them interacts differently to the muon and tau parts because matter contains electrons (something called the MSW effect). However because at typical energies neutrinos interact only very weakly with matter the effect is very tiny and so far is only significant when neutrinos pass though objects like the Earth or the Sun. This means that you would need an extraordinarily sensitive detector, very high energy neutrinos [at energies 1000+ times greater than the LHC neutrinos start to interact a lot more readily with matter] and/or an incredibly intense neutrino beam.
A better way to modulate the neutrino beam would be to change the way it is generated assuming it is created from an accelerator. By altering the polarity of the magnets selecting the muons which then decay you could flip the beam back and forth between muon neutrino and anti-neutrino. This would not be a fast process though and you still need an extremely large detector (thousands of tons or more) to detect them and then there is stil the issue of analysis to get the signal. This makes it impractical for HFT applications although if it could be made to work you'd actually beat the competition by a lot more than a femtosecond: the gain is up to 45 milliseconds if you were transmitting straight through the centre of the Earth.
Actually the summary is wrong. Neutrino oscillations have been detected before from atmospheric neutrinos, solar neutrinos and beam neutrinos (e.g. the T2K experiment). The linked article technically gets it right, but is somewhat misleading, calling it "our first observation" where 'our' refers to the Nova experiment and not humanity in general i.e. it is the first time that the Nova experiment has detected oscillating neutrinos.
This is an important milestone for them but just indicates that their detector works in much the same way that we measured known Standard Model processes at the LHC before going after the higgs boson. If you can't see the physics that we know is there first nobody will believe you if you claim to see something new. Hopefully this is just the precursor for some interesting results from Nova...and hopefully they can get the Fermilab PR machine to write less misleading/hyped press releases when they do have some exciting results to announce!
Cars lose most of their value from being driven not from just sitting parked. I don't think the switchover point will come as quickly as you think.
I thought they used concrete for that now? I guess we will find out for sure a few thousand years when archaeologists are exploring the ancient ruins of what is now Chicago.
Having just stayed in a very new looking Premier Inn in London last week I was not at all impressed. The check-in kiosk failed to provide any keys so we had to wait for the one guy with a laptop. The room had no phone but they did helpfully provide an external number for the reception which, for an international destination like London, meant that they expected guests to both to have a mobile with them and be willing to pay exorbitant roaming fees just to call reception. As for remote control by Apple watch they solved that in a way which is platform independent: the room was so small you could stand in the middle of it and touch all the controls without having to move. It was very clear that the aim of any "improvements" was to make things cheaper and not to improve guests' experience.
Not true - you already had the basic technology required to get there. All that was needed was the political will to spend the money to put it all together. Also, more importantly, cost was not a project constraint: the aim was simply to get there (largely) regardless of the price.
Renewable energy is a different problem: how do we switch to renewable energy without massively increasing the cost of electricity or generating more CO2 in creating the infrastructure than we save by operating it. This imposes constraints which require new technology and ideas to solve. All politics can provide is money and there is no guarantee that this will translate into the technology required. Indeed I would argue that it will not since there is already a strong financial incentive to develop green technology.
...or the magnetic field is really strong!
Nuclear plants still have the requirement of access to an uninterruptible source of water for cooling. They also have security concerns which is not the same thing as safety. I would have no worries about living near a nuclear plant but I would have a lot of concerns about every neighbourhood having their own. Depleted uranium is easy to obtain and all it takes to convert it into plutonium is a strong source of low energy neutrons like a reactor.
It could.
Actually it does: Canada already has a legal requirement for one year of p/maternity leave which can be shared between parents as wanted. However your salary will drop if you take more than some number of months off depending on your company.
I also suspect that if you actually tried to take that year of paid leave (especially if you're a father), they would suddenly find a way to fire you or cut your pay.
I doubt it - a year of p/maternity leave is actually a legal requirement in places like Canada. Finding a way to fire someone after returning would get a company into very hot water very quickly. However, depending on your company, you do not get your full salary for the year and it drops after some number of months to the statutory p/maternity leave pay. I took a week off when our kids were born without any issues.
How many gigawatts will that thing run on, though?
Actually none - it uses liquid nitrogen to keep the superconducting pads below critical temperature. Hence the wisps of condensation from the feet of the rider in the video. The superconductor is then essentially quantum locked into the magnetic field produced by the buried track: any change in field would induce a current in the superconductor to oppose that change. This is actually a common physics demo they have just improved the presentation. Still it would be a fantastic way to make an entrance for a relevant lecture - I wonder if they offer academic pricing for the board and track installation...
The line losses are a NIMBY problem, people don't want power plants near their houses.
That's not really true. Coal-fired power plants need to be located near a large, reliable water source for cooling and the closer they are to their fuel source the less energy is used to transport the coal. They also have to be of a certain size in order to operate efficiently. Hence even if everyone was willing to tolerate a coal fired power station in their neighbourhood most locations would be unsuitable for their construction, rural communities would be too small to warrant a power station even if suitable and even then there would be an increase in the energy to ship the coal the larger distances required. This means that only small reductions in transmission losses would be possible and since this is already one of the most efficient steps in the power consumption process you'd lose a lot more than you would gain.
Just curious but how do you post such pictures to a group which requires a Facebook login if you have been blocked or banned from Facebook?
It wouldn't last a week before we'd be seeing attacks against competitors.
It's not competitors I'd be worried about but the copyright trolls. Using their interpretation of copyright law practically everyone would be guilty of "stealing" their data in some form or other and so would be open to be hacked "just to check". The truly ironic thing of course is that by acting under a letter of marque they would actually be far more like a pirate than those they accuse.
"Jigawat" is the accepted pronunciation for the term involving electricity. according to Webster's dictionary
That dictionary can't even spell colour correctly so it's hardly surprising it doesn't know how to pronounce the words either.
It's the people with the "can do" attitude that lead us to the future.
A can-do attitude is useful when you have an idea about how to do something new and nay-sayers then argue against that idea ever working. What we have here is a political goal with no clue about how to achieve it which is not the same thing. The problem with a 100 % 'renewable' energy solution is that the power is very variable. Show me a plan to deal with that and I'll be interested. Until then this appears nothing more than political hot air.
that would be much harder with other larger and/or denser bodies like Jupiter, the Sun, and white dwarfs.
Actually the argument also used pulsars. These have densities at, or above, that of a nucleus. A blackhole produced at the surface of one would swallow the entire star due to the phenomenally large cross-section. Pulsars are easy to detect and since we have never yet observed a pulsar winking out of existence we can exclude dangerous black hole production.
Just look at how dangerous "natural" intelligence is and all the problems and disasters it has caused when it goes wrong - either through making mistakes or through mental disorders. Why should the artificial version be different? The question is will the benefits outweigh the downsides? Clearly for "natural" intelligence the answer is a resounding yes and I expect this will also be the case for the artificial version too.
The whole system is designed for people having stuff "they only sometimes need".
That is the result of technology which has massively reduced the cost to produce items. Once the cost to purchase and store the item becomes less than the cost to rent the item (factoring in something extra for the convenience of ownership) people will buy it rather than rent it. However it is not clear to me that the rental model is more efficient: there is an energy cost to moving the device around as well as the cost of the people to manage everything.
Even if you think of massively advanced technology which might let you 3d-print tools, use them, and then break them down and reuse the raw material to build your next item it is still not a given that the energy cost of that would be less than just storing different objects for occasional use.
On the basis of this perhaps Microsoft can sue Samsung?
You do realize, right, that every GMO is required to undergo years of testing?
True but the testing they undergo is less rigorous than drugs and yet every so often a new drug has to be recalled because of either rare side effects or long term effects that were not known at the time of release. That is not a reason to ban GMO since, as with drugs, the benefits can outweigh the risks. However we would never dream of giving someone a new drug without telling them what they were taking so why should it be ok to let people eat GMO without telling them?
If GMO labelling were mandatory then companies would be forced to pass the benefits onto consumers: if GMO strawberries are cheaper to grow then they should be cheaper in the shops. This combined with an education campaign would mean that people would see and understand the benefits of GMO and so be more supportive of it. By hiding it the corporations can pocket the savings instead of us and they don't have to bother educating anyone which perpetuates the resistance to the technology.
This is not the first time that someone has claimed to observe pentaquarks. I'd suggest holding off the welcome until this result is confirmed by several other experiments. Last time there was a confusing mixture of confirmations and non-confirmations until the consensus emerged that there was no evidence to support the existence of pentaquarks.
Why would you rather do the email, read journals, etc on a BUS rather than do those things in the comfort of your home, or even you desk at your office?
Sorry I thought I made that clear: because it wastes less time. Bus/LRT I waste ~5-10 minutes each way, driving I waste ~25-30 minutes each way. So I get more done and have more free time. It might be nicer to do email etc. in the office/home but then I have to spend an extra hour each day doing it so less free time. I suppose it helps that I have a job where there are no real fixed hours and I just have to get things done. If I just had to be in an office from 9-5 then it would be less of an advantage.