I dunno...do you really think they'd have addressed things like "only 11 out of hundreds" of facilities having intrusion detection measures unless somebody did this?
Re:they basically nailed everyone
on
Reviews: Star Trek
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· Score: 2, Funny
<kirk>Dammit, Bones! Nailing everyone is my job!</kirk>
If I'd heard this before, I'd forgotten it, but in Telsa's Wikipedia article it says, "Shortly before he died, Edison said that his biggest mistake had been in trying to develop direct current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp."
I wonder if Edison honestly believed it was superior, or if he was just sad that he missed out on his share of the metric shit-ton of money that other people made with Tesla's AC ideas.
"Just doesn't work?" Since he was not able to complete his work, yet was able to light up lamps from a quarter mile away and throw mile-long lightning bolts, I think "just doesn't work" is a bit of a facile dismissal from an Internet naysayer.
I have (and have read) a bound copy of his Colorado Springs notes and books of his patents. It's been a long time since I read them, but I never recall seeing any such claims. He did report that he could light up bulbs set some unspecified distance from his lab in Colorado Springs, but the pictures look like they're just out back of the lab, not a quarter mile away. There's also some discussion in the notes that it was tough to take the pictures in enough light to see the coil, background and light at the same time because the bulb was fairly dim.
I can buy lighting bulbs from maybe 100 feet, and maybe 100ft discharges, given that he had a fairly large amount of power at his disposal there. But I can't buy 1/4 mile power transmission and 1 mile discharges.
Time travel? Never heard that one.
Same here--the only place I've seen mention of him talking about time travel is in kook books and websites. Of course, even if he did, I don't see why the GP thinks it makes him a loon; plenty of famous physicists have speculated about it, and as far as I know there's still not a definitive answer about whether it's possible or not.
Here's all you need to know about Tesla's insight: In 1915 he tried to convince everyone that burning petroleum was wasteful and foolish, and that we should develop sources of energy that relied on the great movements of the cosmos - spinning planets, cycling winds, geothermal, solar radiation, etc... and people said "what a loonie!"
Hey, there's still people calling others loonies *now* for saying we should cut back on petroleum use. At least that hasn't changed...;)
One of the professors at my 4-year college was rather amused by all the concern about cheating and whatnot. He thought the simplest, most foolproof way to see whether people had learned anything or not at the end of their program was to stand them up in front of a few teachers, maybe at a board with a piece of chalk when appropriate, and have them answer some questions.
Another professor at the same school, when he had small classes of 10-15 people, would once or twice per class period pick somebody to come work an example problem from the material from recent classes. Personally, I found that a pretty good reason to keep up with the class material instead of just cramming at the end before the exam.
It seems to me that by the time we've paid for custom anti-cheating software, plagiarism detection software, continual redesign of standardized exams, and all the security around standardized exams, we could have just paid for a video camera, some chalk, a chalkboard, and good local teachers to do some sort of individual testing.
But then, I personally think that standardized tests are mainly good for measuring how good you are at taking standardized tests, and not much else, so I guess I'm a bit biased.
As the AC pointed out, the bulk of the radioactivity will be in fission products. For a shiny new reactor that's been operating for only 1 year at 70MW, consider the amount of Sr-90 and Cs-137 (which have half-lives in the neighborhood of 30 years) that is left sitting in the reactor:
(70e6 watts)/(200 MeV per fission)*(31,556,926 seconds) = 6.89370014e25 fissions
(6.89370014e25 fissions)*(.045 Sr-90 atoms per fission +.06 Cs-137 atoms per fission) = 7.4451961512000006e+24 atoms
With a half-life of ~30 years, this amount of two medium-lived isotopes produces
That's already an order of magnitude above 10k curies, and that's just considering two medium-lived isotopes that will be a problem for decades without any cleanup. The shorter-lived isotopes will produce disproportionately more activity due to a shorter half-life, and would easily push the total activity over a million Curies.
Granted, a significant chunk of that million+ Curies will be gone after a year just from decay, but the longer-lived stuff is enough to make a place unusable for many years. Even with a big decontamination effort, it would probably take a long time to get the activity down to levels that would be considered acceptable for public use.
Did you know that your smoke detector in your home contains radioactive material (americium)?
Yep, a whopping 1 microCurie, maximum. Successfully releasing the innards of even a small reactor would release millions of Curies. That's not "a little radioactivity." Spreading that all over a few blocks of a port city probably wouldn't kill anybody on the spot, but it would make it unusable for a long time, because we have laws about how much of that stuff you can have lying around with people wandering about.
Yes, a lot of people are overly scared of any amount of radioactivity and/or radiation, but there are legitimate concerns about the wrong people getting their hands on this stuff.
Even the most harmful radioactive material did come from nature. The real harm is in the vast quantity we can accumulate these things in one place, and this vast quantity is what a nuclear reactor should lack.
If there's not "vast quantities" of radioactive material in an operating nuclear reactor, then there's not vast quantities anywhere on earth.
I'm not surprised that nobody uses nuclear for cargo ships. You need to spend a lot more money on your shipboard engineering crew (more people, higher salaries, more training), you need to build and maintain shore facilities to handle nuclear plant maintenance, and nowadays you'd need a respectably-sized security force on board and at the shore facility to make sure you didn't lose control of your nuclear materials to people that want to do something other than push cargo with it.
The US Navy decided to stop using nuclear power on cruisers because it was cheaper to use conventional power for some of the reasons above. Note that the power requirements for a cruiser and a large container ship are about the same.
The ongoing negative public sentiment towards nuclear is probably another big deciding factor.
Not really. You have to remember that the kind of uranium (only a few percent U-235) that powers a nuclear reactor is different from weapons grade enriched uranium (more than 90% U-235). Chain reaction cannot be produced with such material, although a meltdown that releases the radioactive material into the environment can happen—but how much fuel is a ship going to carry with it?
If you can't produce a chain reaction with the stuff loaded into the reactor, then it's pretty worthless for producing energy. True, you couldn't take it and make a real nuclear weapon, but it would be great for a dirty bomb.
Any terrorist with an ounce of dedication and engineering knowledge could make a big mess with a reactor if they had full control of the vessel long enough. Once the reactor has been operating for any length of time, there's a lot of nasty stuff in there, and if you really tried and knew what you were doing, you could get it out into the local environment.
And it would last a lot longer than the oil spill.
The reactor was not operated by "a guy hunkered over the core with his hands on the rod itself." The rod was manually withdrawn to reconnect it to its control mechanism during a maintenance procedure.
It seems to me they learned the hard way that you shouldn't be yanking on a control rod during a maintenance procedure without having some kind of temporary mechanical stop in place to limit travel.
Forget menus and toolbars. The ribbon is a great thing when you understand that they are somehow like toolbars, but they are dynamic as well. When you realize how the thing work, then you cannot live without it.
This is a serious question from somebody that's never seen this ribbon thing: What does it do for you that was so hard (or impossible) in previous versions of MS Office or in other word processors?
No doubt Alpha is a huge achievement in it's chosen domain of knowledge organization and computation...
Even if it is a huge achievement (and I'm seriously skeptical of that), it's essentially worthless as anything other than a black box that gives responses to queries. I doubt Wolfram will be releasing the source or writing papers on the details of the algorithm(s) it uses, so nobody outside his company will be able to build on any fantastic achievement(s) his company might have made.
I knew I should have looked this up before clicking submit: this makes Wolfram Alpha 1.25 million times more complicated than the entire universe, which Wolfram expects to be expressible in 4 linesof Mathematica.
Probably because there's no discernible difference between them: Alpha is described to be a web page where you type queries into a text box (queries much like you'd type into Google, it appears), click a button, and it gives you answers that are somehow better than Google's.
Or it could that all the tech reporters just like hating on Google and hope that some uber-genius will come along and smack them down David vs. Goliath style. (Disclaimer: In no way am I saying Wolfram is any kind of uber-genius.)
...according to Stephen Wolfram, Alpha is built on top of 5 million lines of Mathematica code which currently run on top of about 10,000 CPUs (though Wolfram is actively expanding its server farm in preparation for the public launch).
5 *million* lines of Mathematica? How many code monkeys does he have working for him?
Gotta appreciate the lazy cowardly policemen that chose to raid a music pirate instead of dealing with serious violent/criminal offenders.
Oh come on--the police are just doing what they're told. There's some guy/gal way up the chain that made the decision to raid the pirate^H^H^H^H^H^Hcopyright infringer's premises.
I agree that it's a stupid use of resources, but don't put that on the folks that are at the bottom of the chain.
When I served in the military, if there was more work to be done, you don't go home. That is part of service. I fail to understand how the police go home after a shift of handing out speeding tickets when there is quite obviously a *lot* more to be done --- that is not what they have sworn to do when joining the force, nor is it what we should permit them to maintain.
I don't know about you, but I got into the military by signing a lengthy contract that essentially obligated me to do whatever the service deemed necessary, whether it was 12 hours of watch every day, marathon sessions to close out monthly maintenance jobs before the clock ran out, or death in combat.
I suspect the police don't sign on the dotted line for anywhere near that level of obligation. Keeping them there "until all the jobs are done" probably requires a declared state of emergency or something similar.
I'm not one to trust a safety device without knowing how it does its job better than what it's supposed to replace. If that makes me look irrational and reactionary, then I'll just be an irrational and reactionary luddite with a flip-down welding visor.
I suppose it's good marketing practice if you're trying to sell electromagnetic damage prevention equipment to fans of Coast to Coast AM or the History Channel. They love them some 2012 "science."
I would say it's not such a great tactic if you're trying to sell to engineers, but let's face it: education doesn't protect you from teh stoopid. Surely most people here know at least one educated person that takes such things seriously.
Yikes...it doesn't go dark until it detects the UV from the welding arc? That would mean there's a short period of time where your eyes are getting a nice blast of UV. Anybody know how short it is?
I think I'll just stick with the manual flip-down glass, thanks.
One of my professors asked some of his former students (who took their PhDs and went on to use them in the financial world) about the role of math in current economic crisis. Their take on it was this: the quants developed algorithms for financial products based on a set of (apparently reasonable) assumptions. The traders weren't told about some of the assumptions that applied to them, and ended up treating these products in an inappropriate fashion.
The management supposedly prohibited any kind of interaction between the quants and the traders, for who knows what reason. Whether the traders had deliberately been given incomplete information or not wasn't really clear.
Whether Tom Smykowski was responsible for carrying things back and forth between quants and traders wasn't clear, either.
You need some sort of hardening and security as well as redundancy, and those are even more expensive.
Sorry, that was kinda my point: redundancy is a minimal effort to defend against attackers, and if they're not even doing *that*, then somebody (government, most likely) is going to have to lean on them to make sure our infrastructure isn't wide open to attack from people with just a little bit of knowledge.
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I dunno...do you really think they'd have addressed things like "only 11 out of hundreds" of facilities having intrusion detection measures unless somebody did this?
<kirk>Dammit, Bones! Nailing everyone is my job!</kirk>
If I'd heard this before, I'd forgotten it, but in Telsa's Wikipedia article it says, "Shortly before he died, Edison said that his biggest mistake had been in trying to develop direct current, rather than the vastly superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp."
I wonder if Edison honestly believed it was superior, or if he was just sad that he missed out on his share of the metric shit-ton of money that other people made with Tesla's AC ideas.
"Just doesn't work?" Since he was not able to complete his work, yet was able to light up lamps from a quarter mile away and throw mile-long lightning bolts, I think "just doesn't work" is a bit of a facile dismissal from an Internet naysayer.
I have (and have read) a bound copy of his Colorado Springs notes and books of his patents. It's been a long time since I read them, but I never recall seeing any such claims. He did report that he could light up bulbs set some unspecified distance from his lab in Colorado Springs, but the pictures look like they're just out back of the lab, not a quarter mile away. There's also some discussion in the notes that it was tough to take the pictures in enough light to see the coil, background and light at the same time because the bulb was fairly dim.
I can buy lighting bulbs from maybe 100 feet, and maybe 100ft discharges, given that he had a fairly large amount of power at his disposal there. But I can't buy 1/4 mile power transmission and 1 mile discharges.
Same here--the only place I've seen mention of him talking about time travel is in kook books and websites. Of course, even if he did, I don't see why the GP thinks it makes him a loon; plenty of famous physicists have speculated about it, and as far as I know there's still not a definitive answer about whether it's possible or not.
Hey, there's still people calling others loonies *now* for saying we should cut back on petroleum use. At least that hasn't changed... ;)
That sounds like as much fun as if everything you touch turns to Glod.
It is rather amazing, isn't it? I honestly don't know why that might be.
One of the professors at my 4-year college was rather amused by all the concern about cheating and whatnot. He thought the simplest, most foolproof way to see whether people had learned anything or not at the end of their program was to stand them up in front of a few teachers, maybe at a board with a piece of chalk when appropriate, and have them answer some questions.
Another professor at the same school, when he had small classes of 10-15 people, would once or twice per class period pick somebody to come work an example problem from the material from recent classes. Personally, I found that a pretty good reason to keep up with the class material instead of just cramming at the end before the exam.
It seems to me that by the time we've paid for custom anti-cheating software, plagiarism detection software, continual redesign of standardized exams, and all the security around standardized exams, we could have just paid for a video camera, some chalk, a chalkboard, and good local teachers to do some sort of individual testing.
But then, I personally think that standardized tests are mainly good for measuring how good you are at taking standardized tests, and not much else, so I guess I'm a bit biased.
As the AC pointed out, the bulk of the radioactivity will be in fission products. For a shiny new reactor that's been operating for only 1 year at 70MW, consider the amount of Sr-90 and Cs-137 (which have half-lives in the neighborhood of 30 years) that is left sitting in the reactor:
(70e6 watts)/(200 MeV per fission)*(31,556,926 seconds) = 6.89370014e25 fissions
(6.89370014e25 fissions)*(.045 Sr-90 atoms per fission + .06 Cs-137 atoms per fission) = 7.4451961512000006e+24 atoms
With a half-life of ~30 years, this amount of two medium-lived isotopes produces
(log 2)/(30 years)*(7.4451961512000006e+24) = 5.451119e15 decays/sec = 147,000 Curies
That's already an order of magnitude above 10k curies, and that's just considering two medium-lived isotopes that will be a problem for decades without any cleanup. The shorter-lived isotopes will produce disproportionately more activity due to a shorter half-life, and would easily push the total activity over a million Curies.
Granted, a significant chunk of that million+ Curies will be gone after a year just from decay, but the longer-lived stuff is enough to make a place unusable for many years. Even with a big decontamination effort, it would probably take a long time to get the activity down to levels that would be considered acceptable for public use.
That's interesting about the early ships: it looks like the Long Beach needed frequent refueling, but that was corrected in later designs, since some of the Virginia class ships went two decades without it.
Did you know that your smoke detector in your home contains radioactive material (americium)?
Yep, a whopping 1 microCurie, maximum. Successfully releasing the innards of even a small reactor would release millions of Curies. That's not "a little radioactivity." Spreading that all over a few blocks of a port city probably wouldn't kill anybody on the spot, but it would make it unusable for a long time, because we have laws about how much of that stuff you can have lying around with people wandering about.
Yes, a lot of people are overly scared of any amount of radioactivity and/or radiation, but there are legitimate concerns about the wrong people getting their hands on this stuff.
Even the most harmful radioactive material did come from nature. The real harm is in the vast quantity we can accumulate these things in one place, and this vast quantity is what a nuclear reactor should lack.
If there's not "vast quantities" of radioactive material in an operating nuclear reactor, then there's not vast quantities anywhere on earth.
I'm not surprised that nobody uses nuclear for cargo ships. You need to spend a lot more money on your shipboard engineering crew (more people, higher salaries, more training), you need to build and maintain shore facilities to handle nuclear plant maintenance, and nowadays you'd need a respectably-sized security force on board and at the shore facility to make sure you didn't lose control of your nuclear materials to people that want to do something other than push cargo with it.
The US Navy decided to stop using nuclear power on cruisers because it was cheaper to use conventional power for some of the reasons above. Note that the power requirements for a cruiser and a large container ship are about the same.
The ongoing negative public sentiment towards nuclear is probably another big deciding factor.
Not really. You have to remember that the kind of uranium (only a few percent U-235) that powers a nuclear reactor is different from weapons grade enriched uranium (more than 90% U-235). Chain reaction cannot be produced with such material, although a meltdown that releases the radioactive material into the environment can happen—but how much fuel is a ship going to carry with it?
If you can't produce a chain reaction with the stuff loaded into the reactor, then it's pretty worthless for producing energy. True, you couldn't take it and make a real nuclear weapon, but it would be great for a dirty bomb.
Any terrorist with an ounce of dedication and engineering knowledge could make a big mess with a reactor if they had full control of the vessel long enough. Once the reactor has been operating for any length of time, there's a lot of nasty stuff in there, and if you really tried and knew what you were doing, you could get it out into the local environment.
And it would last a lot longer than the oil spill.
The reactor was not operated by "a guy hunkered over the core with his hands on the rod itself." The rod was manually withdrawn to reconnect it to its control mechanism during a maintenance procedure.
It seems to me they learned the hard way that you shouldn't be yanking on a control rod during a maintenance procedure without having some kind of temporary mechanical stop in place to limit travel.
Forget menus and toolbars. The ribbon is a great thing when you understand that they are somehow like toolbars, but they are dynamic as well. When you realize how the thing work, then you cannot live without it.
This is a serious question from somebody that's never seen this ribbon thing: What does it do for you that was so hard (or impossible) in previous versions of MS Office or in other word processors?
No doubt Alpha is a huge achievement in it's chosen domain of knowledge organization and computation...
Even if it is a huge achievement (and I'm seriously skeptical of that), it's essentially worthless as anything other than a black box that gives responses to queries. I doubt Wolfram will be releasing the source or writing papers on the details of the algorithm(s) it uses, so nobody outside his company will be able to build on any fantastic achievement(s) his company might have made.
He is, of course, welcome to prove me wrong.
I knew I should have looked this up before clicking submit: this makes Wolfram Alpha 1.25 million times more complicated than the entire universe, which Wolfram expects to be expressible in 4 lines of Mathematica.
Probably because there's no discernible difference between them: Alpha is described to be a web page where you type queries into a text box (queries much like you'd type into Google, it appears), click a button, and it gives you answers that are somehow better than Google's.
Or it could that all the tech reporters just like hating on Google and hope that some uber-genius will come along and smack them down David vs. Goliath style. (Disclaimer: In no way am I saying Wolfram is any kind of uber-genius.)
FTFA:
...according to Stephen Wolfram, Alpha is built on top of 5 million lines of Mathematica code which currently run on top of about 10,000 CPUs (though Wolfram is actively expanding its server farm in preparation for the public launch).
5 *million* lines of Mathematica? How many code monkeys does he have working for him?
Gotta appreciate the lazy cowardly policemen that chose to raid a music pirate instead of dealing with serious violent/criminal offenders.
Oh come on--the police are just doing what they're told. There's some guy/gal way up the chain that made the decision to raid the pirate^H^H^H^H^H^Hcopyright infringer's premises.
I agree that it's a stupid use of resources, but don't put that on the folks that are at the bottom of the chain.
When I served in the military, if there was more work to be done, you don't go home. That is part of service. I fail to understand how the police go home after a shift of handing out speeding tickets when there is quite obviously a *lot* more to be done --- that is not what they have sworn to do when joining the force, nor is it what we should permit them to maintain.
I don't know about you, but I got into the military by signing a lengthy contract that essentially obligated me to do whatever the service deemed necessary, whether it was 12 hours of watch every day, marathon sessions to close out monthly maintenance jobs before the clock ran out, or death in combat.
I suspect the police don't sign on the dotted line for anywhere near that level of obligation. Keeping them there "until all the jobs are done" probably requires a declared state of emergency or something similar.
I'm not one to trust a safety device without knowing how it does its job better than what it's supposed to replace. If that makes me look irrational and reactionary, then I'll just be an irrational and reactionary luddite with a flip-down welding visor.
I suppose it's good marketing practice if you're trying to sell electromagnetic damage prevention equipment to fans of Coast to Coast AM or the History Channel. They love them some 2012 "science."
I would say it's not such a great tactic if you're trying to sell to engineers, but let's face it: education doesn't protect you from teh stoopid. Surely most people here know at least one educated person that takes such things seriously.
Yikes...it doesn't go dark until it detects the UV from the welding arc? That would mean there's a short period of time where your eyes are getting a nice blast of UV. Anybody know how short it is?
I think I'll just stick with the manual flip-down glass, thanks.
<fanboy mode="Google">Dude, because it's from GOOGLE! ZOMG PONIES! SQEEEE!</fanboy>
Honestly, I can't see why I'd ever buy a netbook machine and have it crippled with some non-open OS.
One of my professors asked some of his former students (who took their PhDs and went on to use them in the financial world) about the role of math in current economic crisis. Their take on it was this: the quants developed algorithms for financial products based on a set of (apparently reasonable) assumptions. The traders weren't told about some of the assumptions that applied to them, and ended up treating these products in an inappropriate fashion.
The management supposedly prohibited any kind of interaction between the quants and the traders, for who knows what reason. Whether the traders had deliberately been given incomplete information or not wasn't really clear.
Whether Tom Smykowski was responsible for carrying things back and forth between quants and traders wasn't clear, either.
You need some sort of hardening and security as well as redundancy, and those are even more expensive.
Sorry, that was kinda my point: redundancy is a minimal effort to defend against attackers, and if they're not even doing *that*, then somebody (government, most likely) is going to have to lean on them to make sure our infrastructure isn't wide open to attack from people with just a little bit of knowledge.