First of all: the atmospheric pressure is crushingly dense ( like 80 atmospheres or something. ) How would you propose to GET RID OF an atmosphere? Any lifeforms you might introduce there to sequester CO2 would have to be able to survive without water ( but plenty of sulfuric acid ) at temps that would melt lead.
Next: Venus unlike Mars has a day that is over 100 Earth days long. This means your side of the planet will face the searing venusian sun for months at a time followed by months of night. This messes up weather needless to say and will make the range of temps you would have to deal with probably unbearable. ( The superthick atmosphere of Venus does probably act like a blanket to keep the night side toasty molten lead warm even at night )
Lastly: There is NO WATER on Venus. Dry as a bone.
Mars is a better prospect of living on
Mars has a day almost the same length as ours
Mars has plenty of water.
Mars' atmosphere is fairly nontoxic
Mars' atmosphere is too thin rather than too thick. Nothing to get rid of, only needs building up.
A few well aimed ice/CO2/rock meteorites aimed at Mars could thicken the atmosphere, thereby warming the place up. Introduced earth life would soon create a biosphere we could tolerate.
How big-ass would your telescope mirror have to be in order to count the zits on the ass of an armadillo on mars? Seriously, how big would it have to be to be able to recognise a human face?
I don't think he does overestimate the average/.-er age. Think about it: the project books that you read probably came from a dusty old bookshelf or from your local public library and were written pre-1960. Any new project books had crappy projects because they didn't want to get sued. The books from the first half of the 20th century had the really neet Van-Der-Spark generators and the X-Ray machine plans ( COOL! I can make my own X-Ray machine! All I need is copper pipe - check, tons of wire - check, a vacuum tube - check, tin foil - check, a distributer cap from a Model T - Bummer.. )
I got it immediately, but then, I grew up reading Asimov books including I, Robot. However, my wife ( not a big sf fan ) had no idea what it was even after the 3 laws safe part. The trailer isn't going to mean a thing to anyone that has never read Isaac Asimov which is pretty dumb IMHO for a marketing campaign targeted at the general public. Big budget movies based on books reach a broader audience than the books do. Something like 50 million copies of Lord Of the Rings have been sold, but many more than 50 million people have seen the first two movies and will see the third one.
I, Robot was a book of short stories. I wonder which one ( if any ) this movie will be actually be based on.. They used to have good books of short stories, I really don't see that format in the bookstore anymore... I wonder what happened?
But I think battery life is one of the main reasons we don't see more robotic gizmos for sale. That vacuum cleaner disc that they sell on TV looks like it wouldn't hold more than a cup of dirt, and probably has less power than a dust buster. But if it were equivalent to my 12 amp dirt devil upright, then it would look interesting. Batteries are the stumbling block. Blind people already keep their houses 'just so' so that they can use robot-like algorithms to find stuff. ( i.e. the refrigerator is 10 steps to the left of the bedroom door, follow the wall right 3 1/2 steps turn left open a door, one step ahead is the kitchen table, feel it, the fridge is directly behind the secondof four chairs. Quadraplegics might keep their houses Asimo-friendly so that it would be able to fetch things out of the fridge for them or whatever. You could have a simple 'bot for kids that moves any item with a 'toy' rfid tag from the floor to a toybox. If there were decent batteries, one might see an Asimo type 'bot around the house or even a segway-style stair climbing vaccum cleaner with decent amps right now.
Wouldn't it be cool to grow clones which have had their budding brains surgically removed when they were just a few cells and replaced by a AI computer which will control the zombie android in it's place? The computer, programmed to reproduce would print off numererous copies of its electronic brain. Then, instead of growing humans from stem cells, and humanely removing their brains before they could develop, it would grab them in dark alleys, drag them to his lair, saw open their skulls without anesthesia, scoop out the brains, eat them ( have to power that flesh walking around machinery ya know ) and replace it with one of his cloned electronic brains.
If he were worried about infection, he could instead, design some kind of centipede-bot to house the electronic brain. Then, instead of sawing open the skulls of his victims, there could be a scene where he shoves a coat hanger hook up their nose to scoop the brains out. Then the centipede bot could just crawl up their nose and take up residence.
Whoever bans a type research will guarantee that it is conducted in some other country.
This is just a case where Bush can pander to the christian fringe ( where in the bible does it say 'thou shalt not clone?' ) that donate so much money without pissing the rest of us off too bad. Sure, he could attack gay marriages or something instead, but like 5% of us are gay or something, better to attack stem cell research and only piss of the much smaller minority of sick/disabled people that could really use some of the results of that research.
Iron reducing bacteria that live in anerobic conditions need somewhere for electrons to go in order to have a metabolism. Basically for them these metals are food, and the methane/hydrogen etc around them is the 'air'. The reduced metals are then edible for other bacteria if the surrounding environment should become aerobic. If it wasn't for bacteria metabolising metals we would probably have no ores to mine on earth and still be in the stone age.
Since any chemical reaction that is not allowed to go to completion causes isotopic enrichment ( presumably the lighter isotope is the preferred reactant ) and metabolism by bacteria is really just a chemical reaction there is some enrichment there.
Since any chemical reaction not completed results in some isotopic enrichment one might enrich U235 by, feeding the dissolved Uranium oxide produced by Thiobacillus Ferrooxidans from raw ore to the anaerobic Desulfovibrio ferrireducens where it would reprecipitate. Then feed the precipitated uranium oxide back to thiobacillus ferrooxidans to produce more uranium liquor to feed to desulfovibrio ferrireducens forming cascaded stages which would gradually enrich the U235 until it was useful for fuel rods etc.
The question is: how much energy does this take, and how efficient is the enrichment? How much sugar/light/whatever-these-bugs-eat do you need to feed them per stage and is it more economical energy-wise than other uranium enrichment methods already in use?
A home experimenter interested in developing this into a patentable process would be breaking the law by enriching uranium. After learning how to grow these beasties ( I'm sure they'd sell them to you since they are not dangerous ) you would have to measure the enrichment achieved bu sending a sample off to a mass spectometry lab. It would behove one to send the depleted uranium rather than the enriched uranium so as not to piss anyone off ( hope it wasn't the heavy isotope the bugs liked better! ). Then you could measure how much it costs you to feed the bacteria per kilo of metabolized uranium and compare it to the cost of existing enrichment methods by looking it up, and decide if you have something worth patenting. Profit.
I remember this guy, he wants to be able to send a neutron into the past. Because a neutron is a piece of matter, a person might even be feasible someday if the engineering challenges are overcome. Unless that is, that the advent of the much easier Temporal Network Card brings progress to a standstill. Let me explain:
The creation of one of Mallet's light vortexes allows one to send matter into the past. It is no leap, in fact it is probably even easier to send a radio, or infrared light signal into the past using that technique.
It would be easy to write software that saves all outbound network traffic to the hard disk together with a 'do not deliver till X-Mas' send date. The computer would then on say next Christmas, send the packets out to the internet.
When the computer, on X-Mas, recieved the inbound response, it would then send them back in time to the present through the time vortex.
So little Jill could promise to send herself an email when she opened her presents detailing what she got, and then read that email a month before she wrote it.
One could in effect browse the web of the future.
I wonder what would happen to the stock market if anyone who made money from inside knowlege could be scooped by a leach from the past?
I wonder if anyone would bother to get a patent when someone from the past could steal it from them before they even thought of it?
Would anyone write books, or record songs? What would happen to the RIAA?
Would anyone write the next big game when it is already available for download?
Would anyone even publish their opinions at all when anyone could steal the credit? How about free software?
I think most of these questions are forms of the: "If I promise to send an apple into the past, and *poof*, an apple pops out of the machine, and then I wait a day and send that same apple back to myself through the machine, then where did the apple come from?" paradox.
Alternate realities seems the only paradigm ( i hate that word ) that might possibly provide an answer. Maybe, in an alternate reality, no apple popped out into the past and I scratched my head wondering why my time machine didn't work, went to the store, bought an apple and threw it into the machine wondering where the hell it went.
Then in another ( past ) reality the apple popped out seemingly from nowhere. The apple traveled between realities. How many realities does it travel through though? If it pops out once and I throw it back into the machine a day later, then it pops out again, waits a day, and then pops out the machine and then a day later gets thrown back into the past ad nauseam, the apple, which gets a day older (apple time) each time it waits a day to be sent back will soon turn into apple ad nauseum. ( could be good for aging wine though.. )
If I promise to, if no bottle pops out, send a new bottle of wine back, but if a bottle does pop out wait ten years, and send it back to myself after putting a tick mark on it unless there are ten ticks in which case I will drink the 100 year old wine then what are my odds of getting 100 year old wine to pop out?
There are eleven possibilities: either 100, 90, 80, 70.. or no wine pops out. I'd say my chances of being in the reality where the 100 year old wine pops out are 1/11.
What if I promise that if I do not get any bottle of wine, I will send 2 bottles of wine? What are the odds that at least some wine pops out? P(2 bottles) + p(1st bottle) + p(2nd bottle) = 3/4?
I bet you could increas your odds of getting at least one bottle out as much as you wanted provided you had the ready cash and commitment to fulfill the promises to buy new bottles of wine. Unless there is a problem here....
Problem 1: If there are 3 chances out of four that you will get at least one bottle out if you promise to send 2 bottles through if you don't get any bottles back, then you have one unlucky you th
Is that it's what I used to download uuencoded segments of 60 Kb pr0n files from my local BBS which I pasted together using MS Word and decoded so I could veiw them on my Macintosh II si.
Blotter: A bearded armed thug wearing a stylish black blouse was killed while trying to hi-jack the daily armored car. The purp was struck with a.357 caliber round which entered his chest and left his back.
Witnesses report that upon falling to the ground the woman's blouse was missing. Apparently, the robber thought the high tensile strength of Jaquline Smith's new line of clothes would protect him from any bullets. What he didn't consider was that the nylon stitches that held it together would tear and that the round would pull the entire blouse off his back, taking it in through the bullet hole and out a grapefruit sized hole in his back eventually ending up imbedded in the door of an Oldsmobile in the parking lot.
Police finding the round still wrapped in the pretty - if bloodsoaked, blouse, impounded it as evidence.
They said it was basically the same process used to make Kevlar. If you were a chemist that knew how to make Kevlar it seems fairly logical to try and apply that technique to carbon nanotubes.
Who the hell cares if the talking head on the news has a weather degree? I mean the station can probably subscribe to a ready made weather forecast for the weather bunny to read. It seems pointless to get a PhD to point at imaginary pictures on a blue screen for a living. They should do theory or design weather/climate modeling software for a living and leave the pointing at imaginary pictures to someone with a nicer rack.
What happens when Gift Services type companies occupy the first 10 pages of search results for a commercially interesting phrase ( like PRON )?
The answer is that people will start to look at the list of ( different ) sponsored links as a source of information. My eyes gloss over them normally, but if the search results themselves are nothing but the useless aftermath of a google ranking war, the sponsored links can sometimes have what you want.
This is of course good for google, and fine when you are shopping.
When you are NOT shopping, this becomes a problem. I might have bought an empty basket to use to make my own gift basket. I may have some fake grass in the bottom, and some fruit and nuts and an electric razor, but I typed "Gift Basket Ideas" because I want ideas for more stuff to put in the basket for the guy who has everything.
I get 10 pages of links to the same company selling pre-filled gift baskets, and some sponsored links to other companies selling pre-made gift baskets, but I don't get the link I was looking for.
Links to "Martha Stewart's how to put together a homemade gift basket that is so 'perfect' that it looks manufactured and the person you give it to thinks you bought it at some overpriced yuppie store" and "Some random person's home page with their arts and crafts projects that happens to have great ideas for basket filler", are conspicuously absent.
It seems that making computers small and efficient makes them fast as hell. Small = less distance for signals to travel = shorter times to wait for the signals to travel, and efficient = less heat given off = higher possile clock speeds.
EBomb: To subscribe to many free-porn and gambling sites using someone else's email address so that the address will be sold to as many spammers as possible thereby e-bombing the owner of the email address with spam.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone set up us the bomb!
First of all: the atmospheric pressure is crushingly dense ( like 80 atmospheres or something. ) How would you propose to GET RID OF an atmosphere? Any lifeforms you might introduce there to sequester CO2 would have to be able to survive without water ( but plenty of sulfuric acid ) at temps that would melt lead.
Next: Venus unlike Mars has a day that is over 100 Earth days long. This means your side of the planet will face the searing venusian sun for months at a time followed by months of night. This messes up weather needless to say and will make the range of temps you would have to deal with probably unbearable. ( The superthick atmosphere of Venus does probably act like a blanket to keep the night side toasty molten lead warm even at night )
Lastly: There is NO WATER on Venus. Dry as a bone.
Mars is a better prospect of living on
Mars has a day almost the same length as ours
Mars has plenty of water.
Mars' atmosphere is fairly nontoxic
Mars' atmosphere is too thin rather than too thick. Nothing to get rid of, only needs building up.
A few well aimed ice/CO2/rock meteorites aimed at Mars could thicken the atmosphere, thereby warming the place up. Introduced earth life would soon create a biosphere we could tolerate.
See this article
How big-ass would your telescope mirror have to be in order to count the zits on the ass of an armadillo on mars? Seriously, how big would it have to be to be able to recognise a human face?
I don't think he does overestimate the average /.-er age. Think about it: the project books that you read probably came from a dusty old bookshelf or from your local public library and were written pre-1960. Any new project books had crappy projects because they didn't want to get sued. The books from the first half of the 20th century had the really neet Van-Der-Spark generators and the X-Ray machine plans ( COOL! I can make my own X-Ray machine! All I need is copper pipe - check, tons of wire - check, a vacuum tube - check, tin foil - check, a distributer cap from a Model T - Bummer.. )
Point taken, but I usually have so much clutter and junk on the floor that my house would be a deathtrap were I blind.
I got it immediately, but then, I grew up reading Asimov books including I, Robot. However, my wife ( not a big sf fan ) had no idea what it was even after the 3 laws safe part. The trailer isn't going to mean a thing to anyone that has never read Isaac Asimov which is pretty dumb IMHO for a marketing campaign targeted at the general public. Big budget movies based on books reach a broader audience than the books do. Something like 50 million copies of Lord Of the Rings have been sold, but many more than 50 million people have seen the first two movies and will see the third one. I, Robot was a book of short stories. I wonder which one ( if any ) this movie will be actually be based on.. They used to have good books of short stories, I really don't see that format in the bookstore anymore... I wonder what happened?
But I think battery life is one of the main reasons we don't see more robotic gizmos for sale. That vacuum cleaner disc that they sell on TV looks like it wouldn't hold more than a cup of dirt, and probably has less power than a dust buster. But if it were equivalent to my 12 amp dirt devil upright, then it would look interesting. Batteries are the stumbling block. Blind people already keep their houses 'just so' so that they can use robot-like algorithms to find stuff. ( i.e. the refrigerator is 10 steps to the left of the bedroom door, follow the wall right 3 1/2 steps turn left open a door, one step ahead is the kitchen table, feel it, the fridge is directly behind the secondof four chairs. Quadraplegics might keep their houses Asimo-friendly so that it would be able to fetch things out of the fridge for them or whatever. You could have a simple 'bot for kids that moves any item with a 'toy' rfid tag from the floor to a toybox.
If there were decent batteries, one might see an Asimo type 'bot around the house or even a segway-style stair climbing vaccum cleaner with decent amps right now.
And where's Scott? He's a dick.
It's like, the British Invasion of Mars...
If he were worried about infection, he could instead, design some kind of centipede-bot to house the electronic brain. Then, instead of sawing open the skulls of his victims, there could be a scene where he shoves a coat hanger hook up their nose to scoop the brains out. Then the centipede bot could just crawl up their nose and take up residence.
This is just a case where Bush can pander to the christian fringe ( where in the bible does it say 'thou shalt not clone?' ) that donate so much money without pissing the rest of us off too bad. Sure, he could attack gay marriages or something instead, but like 5% of us are gay or something, better to attack stem cell research and only piss of the much smaller minority of sick/disabled people that could really use some of the results of that research.
Dude
Iron reducing bacteria that live in anerobic conditions need somewhere for electrons to go in order to have a metabolism. Basically for them these metals are food, and the methane/hydrogen etc around them is the 'air'. The reduced metals are then edible for other bacteria if the surrounding environment should become aerobic. If it wasn't for bacteria metabolising metals we would probably have no ores to mine on earth and still be in the stone age.
Their bacteria Shenwala alga, reduces the iron from Fe(III) to Fe(II) ( uses the iron as oxygen in it's metabolism ) . Other bacteria ( Desulfovibrio Ferrireducens ( sp ) ) have shown to reduce uranium from U(VI) to the less soluable U(IV) and have been used to clean up mine tailing drainage by making all the uranium insoluable.
Since any chemical reaction that is not allowed to go to completion causes isotopic enrichment ( presumably the lighter isotope is the preferred reactant ) and metabolism by bacteria is really just a chemical reaction there is some enrichment there.
Other bacteria which oxidize iron like Thiobacillus Ferrooxidans have been used to leach uranium out of ores by oxidizing it to a soluable state.
Since any chemical reaction not completed results in some isotopic enrichment one might enrich U235 by, feeding the dissolved Uranium oxide produced by Thiobacillus Ferrooxidans from raw ore to the anaerobic Desulfovibrio ferrireducens where it would reprecipitate. Then feed the precipitated uranium oxide back to thiobacillus ferrooxidans to produce more uranium liquor to feed to desulfovibrio ferrireducens forming cascaded stages which would gradually enrich the U235 until it was useful for fuel rods etc.
The question is: how much energy does this take, and how efficient is the enrichment? How much sugar/light/whatever-these-bugs-eat do you need to feed them per stage and is it more economical energy-wise than other uranium enrichment methods already in use?
A home experimenter interested in developing this into a patentable process would be breaking the law by enriching uranium. After learning how to grow these beasties ( I'm sure they'd sell them to you since they are not dangerous ) you would have to measure the enrichment achieved bu sending a sample off to a mass spectometry lab. It would behove one to send the depleted uranium rather than the enriched uranium so as not to piss anyone off ( hope it wasn't the heavy isotope the bugs liked better! ). Then you could measure how much it costs you to feed the bacteria per kilo of metabolized uranium and compare it to the cost of existing enrichment methods by looking it up, and decide if you have something worth patenting. Profit.
The creation of one of Mallet's light vortexes allows one to send matter into the past. It is no leap, in fact it is probably even easier to send a radio, or infrared light signal into the past using that technique.
It would be easy to write software that saves all outbound network traffic to the hard disk together with a 'do not deliver till X-Mas' send date. The computer would then on say next Christmas, send the packets out to the internet.
When the computer, on X-Mas, recieved the inbound response, it would then send them back in time to the present through the time vortex.
So little Jill could promise to send herself an email when she opened her presents detailing what she got, and then read that email a month before she wrote it.
One could in effect browse the web of the future.
I wonder what would happen to the stock market if anyone who made money from inside knowlege could be scooped by a leach from the past?
I wonder if anyone would bother to get a patent when someone from the past could steal it from them before they even thought of it?
Would anyone write books, or record songs? What would happen to the RIAA?
Would anyone write the next big game when it is already available for download?
Would anyone even publish their opinions at all when anyone could steal the credit? How about free software?
I think most of these questions are forms of the: "If I promise to send an apple into the past, and *poof*, an apple pops out of the machine, and then I wait a day and send that same apple back to myself through the machine, then where did the apple come from?" paradox.
Alternate realities seems the only paradigm ( i hate that word ) that might possibly provide an answer. Maybe, in an alternate reality, no apple popped out into the past and I scratched my head wondering why my time machine didn't work, went to the store, bought an apple and threw it into the machine wondering where the hell it went.
Then in another ( past ) reality the apple popped out seemingly from nowhere. The apple traveled between realities. How many realities does it travel through though? If it pops out once and I throw it back into the machine a day later, then it pops out again, waits a day, and then pops out the machine and then a day later gets thrown back into the past ad nauseam, the apple, which gets a day older (apple time) each time it waits a day to be sent back will soon turn into apple ad nauseum. ( could be good for aging wine though.. )
If I promise to, if no bottle pops out, send a new bottle of wine back, but if a bottle does pop out wait ten years, and send it back to myself after putting a tick mark on it unless there are ten ticks in which case I will drink the 100 year old wine then what are my odds of getting 100 year old wine to pop out?
There are eleven possibilities: either 100, 90, 80, 70.. or no wine pops out. I'd say my chances of being in the reality where the 100 year old wine pops out are 1/11.
What if I promise that if I do not get any bottle of wine, I will send 2 bottles of wine? What are the odds that at least some wine pops out? P(2 bottles) + p(1st bottle) + p(2nd bottle) = 3/4?
I bet you could increas your odds of getting at least one bottle out as much as you wanted provided you had the ready cash and commitment to fulfill the promises to buy new bottles of wine. Unless there is a problem here....
Problem 1: If there are 3 chances out of four that you will get at least one bottle out if you promise to send 2 bottles through if you don't get any bottles back, then you have one unlucky you th
Ahh the memories of being 14....
Year: 2009
Place: Wal*Mart
Blotter: A bearded armed thug wearing a stylish black blouse was killed while trying to hi-jack the daily armored car. The purp was struck with a .357 caliber round which entered his chest and left his back.
Witnesses report that upon falling to the ground the woman's blouse was missing. Apparently, the robber thought the high tensile strength of Jaquline Smith's new line of clothes would protect him from any bullets. What he didn't consider was that the nylon stitches that held it together would tear and that the round would pull the entire blouse off his back, taking it in through the bullet hole and out a grapefruit sized hole in his back eventually ending up imbedded in the door of an Oldsmobile in the parking lot.
Police finding the round still wrapped in the pretty - if bloodsoaked, blouse, impounded it as evidence.
They said it was basically the same process used to make Kevlar. If you were a chemist that knew how to make Kevlar it seems fairly logical to try and apply that technique to carbon nanotubes.
Who the hell cares if the talking head on the news has a weather degree? I mean the station can probably subscribe to a ready made weather forecast for the weather bunny to read. It seems pointless to get a PhD to point at imaginary pictures on a blue screen for a living. They should do theory or design weather/climate modeling software for a living and leave the pointing at imaginary pictures to someone with a nicer rack.
If you're like me and have almost no intuitive notion about how big metric measurements are.
The answer is that people will start to look at the list of ( different ) sponsored links as a source of information. My eyes gloss over them normally, but if the search results themselves are nothing but the useless aftermath of a google ranking war, the sponsored links can sometimes have what you want.
This is of course good for google, and fine when you are shopping.
When you are NOT shopping, this becomes a problem. I might have bought an empty basket to use to make my own gift basket. I may have some fake grass in the bottom, and some fruit and nuts and an electric razor, but I typed "Gift Basket Ideas" because I want ideas for more stuff to put in the basket for the guy who has everything.
I get 10 pages of links to the same company selling pre-filled gift baskets, and some sponsored links to other companies selling pre-made gift baskets, but I don't get the link I was looking for.
Links to "Martha Stewart's how to put together a homemade gift basket that is so 'perfect' that it looks manufactured and the person you give it to thinks you bought it at some overpriced yuppie store" and "Some random person's home page with their arts and crafts projects that happens to have great ideas for basket filler", are conspicuously absent.
hhehehehe
It seems that making computers small and efficient makes them fast as hell. Small = less distance for signals to travel = shorter times to wait for the signals to travel, and efficient = less heat given off = higher possile clock speeds.
EBomb: To subscribe to many free-porn and gambling sites using someone else's email address so that the address will be sold to as many spammers as possible thereby e-bombing the owner of the email address with spam.