The basic model of education in the USA has been based in large part on creative thinking.
And what in the world do you base that on? Is this from your particular experience, or is there a study somewhere that shows that US schools teach creative thinking? I've never seen such an emphasis, so my anecdotal evidence cancels yours out.:)
There's over 25 million of us, you insensitive clod!
Re:Electricity cost may be more/less than you thin
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AMD 90nm Evaluated
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100% of the power used in the PC becomes heat (I think). So that is 150 W of heat. Your A/C, however is not 100% efficient. I really have no idea what the numbers are there. But it can't be more than 100% efficient so that is another 150 Watts (at least)
I can't remember the name of the measure of effectiveness of an air conditioning (or heat pump) system, but it's not 'efficiency.' There is no thermodynamic law saying that it takes at least 150 watts of input power to your heat transfer machine to reject 150 watts of thermal input (from your computer) to the outside world.
I believe most A/C units or heat pumps are capable of rejecting many kW of input heat load for every kW of power required by the refrigerant compressor.
It's a good or bad thing, depending on how you wish to look at it.
In the same way that getting a deep discount on your first two hits of crack can be a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it, right?:P (Sorry, couldn't resist).
I would like to see some open-source based companies do exactly what Microsoft is doing; after all, if pre-loading school kids with Microsoft product experience is considered beneficial to Microsoft in the long run, why would the same model not apply to RedHat? Granted, RedHat and others don't have lots of expensive products to sell, but having more people in the population that have been exposed to open source will probably (long-term) create more demand for their services and products.
You'd think they could have come up with another problem before trying the same technique in another part of the country. After all, they have no shortage of smart people to think of cool math problems, right? It was rather disappointing to solve their first two problems only to (1) land on a publicly accessible page about how to apply for a job and (2) realize that the answers were already spammed all over the internet.
Maybe they will give your resume extra consideration if you send in the code you write to solve the first two problems, but they didn't seem to think about saying that on their "congrats" page. At this point their signal-to-noise ratio probably sucks since they're just getting resumes from people that know how to use a search engine or read Slashdot.
From TFA: And with the fuel sealed inside layers of graphite and impermeable silicon carbide...
All the discussions I've ever seen of pebble bed reactors incorporated the concept of encasing the fuel and graphite (if used as a moderator) in tough ceramic that can handle really high temperatures. The ceramic prevents oxygen from coming into contact with the graphite, so there's no fire risk unless you can come up with some event that could break a significant number of pebbles open.
But a brush with computers has made Sharma look beyond cooking and washing.
"I want to work and make a name for myself. I want to see the world," she said, adding that she hopes to get a job in the city and then travel more widely.
Sharma said she has not disclosed her plans to her parents lest they stop her from attending computer classes, "But I know what I will do."
Perhaps I am reading more into these 3 paragraphs than I should be, but I think giving somebody like Sharma a hint that she can be something other than somebody's homemaker and wife can be damned effective.
These devices have been used by fleet operators to keep tabs on their drivers, and there are security mechanisms built into the device to show if there was any tampering. You cannot just "upload" a bunch of data the day you need to turn over your driving record, you cannot just disconnect the unit for 3 months to underreport mileage. Gaps will appear and logs are kept of the device usage aside from the mileage/speed report (disconnects, connects, downloads, settings changes and memory clears are all recorded). Besides, the car still has an odometer that is recorded at service intervals and emissions testing.
Super; that just means I'll have to be a bit smarter and come up with an inline device that can make sure that the modified speed integrates to match the odometer reading over the long term. I'm sure that wouldn't be too difficult.
The insurance companies can only afford to spend so much on these boxes, so there will be a point at which they can't afford to implement enough security to catch all the cheaters.
While we're at it, we'd better evolve programs that can explain the operation of the code they write. The "best" solution might indeed be fast/efficient/whatever, but it might also be completely incomprehensible to humans - especially if the problem to be solved is even slightly complex.
I recall seeing some comments on this topic from researchers using genetic algorithms to evolve circuits. The evolved circuits worked really well, but nobody could get a grip on how they actually worked (at least, that was the case as of the time the article was written). A drawback of having code or circuits that are human-incomprehensible is that you don't know how they will respond to unexpected external inputs (of course, that's often the case with human-written, human-incomprehensible code as well).
I agree that it's really interesting. I expect there's a lot of good research to be done in this area, and we'll probably see some really cool stuff come out of it.
A nice destination would be the spent-fuel rod storage facilities at Indian Point or another plant... Blowing the wall up, releasing the water. Instant overheating and subsequent fire....
I think not. Yes, spent fuel assemblies release heat for a long time, but by the time you get them out of the core and into a storage facility the output is not high enough to cause "instant overheating and subsequent fire." I expect you'd have to provide a powerful explosion or a large/hot fire if you wanted to produce a significant radiological incident.
Keeping in mind the recent Slashdot story about a Hafnium bomb, more security measures are needed, and fast.
Yes, better get right on that. And while you're at it, make sure you hide all the palladium and water so those crafty terrorists can't make a cold fusion bomb...
Which makes an interesting point; why not set up an in-house file sharing program? With a big enough Uni, people could set up their FS on their machines so they can get music from everyone. Network guys are happy because the internet connection isn't being taxed, and the students are happy because they get free tunes.
Wow, I'm sold! And here's why:
1. Because I'm sure most university admins would love to have their network bogged down by music streams flowing hither and yon on the campus. Nobody needs that bandwidth for anything useful anyway.
2. Because I'm also sure that most university admins would love to deal with an enviroment where almost every computer has wide-open file shares. And they'd probably all be Windows file shares at that!
3. Most of all, because the recording industry would just love a system that allowed thousands of students to listen to music without having to buy a CD. Obviously there's a vast fundamental difference between "ripping it and making it available to everyone in the world" and "ripping it and making it available to everyone on the campus." I just can't think of one right now.:)
I don't think this project can (or should) be looked at anything other than a "cool research project" and/or status symbol. It runs from a parking lot on one side of the campus to somewhere on the other side (dorms, I think), with one stop near the center of the campus. You could probably walk the entire length of the track in 10 minutes at a brisk pace. If it works it could conceivably be convenient for people that happen to live near either end, but that's it, so there's not a lot of practical use for the project as it's currently planned.
Whether or not we're going to get $14 million worth of research out of this, I don't know. All I can say is that it seems pretty steep to me. Even if you allow $8 million for materials, the remaining $6 million would pay for ~50 man-years at $75/hr. Since this is a project at an academic facility, you should be able to get a lot of additional grad student labor for next to nothing.
So, in my naïveté, I will say that this seems like a lot of money being spent on such a small project. There are other maglev prototypes in operation, so I can't buy the "it's expensive to come up with new technology" excuse without a really good reason, like somebody involved here has a radically new vision of how maglev should work.
Sorry to be so cynical, but it looks to me like somebody had a radical new vision of how to get a fat federal grant to live on for a few years.
It's because the executives of companies hate their workforce. Spite and loathing are the basic forces in the laws of executive motion.
This may be a bit naive on my part, but I'd say it's more fear and a lack of trust than anything else. I know managers who fear that Johnny Employee won't be productive if there's nobody looking over his shoulder or monitoring his web access. They don't understand what he does, but they feel better knowing that they can see him working busily in his cubicle or in the shop. No, they may not actually be able to tell if he's really working, but at least they aren't as worried that he's "getting away" with something.
I think the picture you paint is a little bleak and hyperbolic. Yes, there are executives that have the attitudes you describe, but I don't think it's fair to paint the majority that way. There are many who work just as hard as everybody else, and I've been fortunate enough to work with some who appreciate the fact that you can get a lot more work done if you trust people enough to let them do their job (whether it's at home or in an office).
"While combat will be part of the game, 'the emphasis in the artificial Earth will be on human interaction rather than conflicts involving lots of military hardware.'"
Yes, I expect you do need a lot of super-accurate physics to figure out the various aspects of "human interaction," like....um....well...simulating football games and handing out relief packages. ????
Maybe they're talking about military tactics or something when they say "human interaction," but to me it seems like they're trying to say "no, really, it's not a military-oriented project." Come on people, this is the Army. If this system is mainly for military purposes, then just come out and say it, ok? Really, we pay you guys to worry about situations that involve "lots of military hardware." There's no need to pretend that you're really trying to solve world hunger or something.
For some reason those ads always have "testimonials" from graduates of these schools with their shiny new job titles that I've never heard of, such as "Computer Detailaing Specialist" and "Equipment Engineering Technician." Now I know why.
There's no asymptote; the pH/pOH scales are logarithmic, so the ion concentrations change exponentially with pH and pOH. Asymptotes occur for functions like 1/x^n, not 10^x.
Apparently the shirt is made from the same stuff as the Hulk's pants. It cuts down on the special-effects budget for Superman movies, and eliminates the fuzzy blue dot and R-rating budgets for Hulk movies.
In the older Superman TV shows, it was funny that he could stand there and deflect bullets, and yet he ducked when the shooter ran out of bullets and threw the gun at him.
Good post; I agree with your comment about moderation of the parent.
I just have a minor nit: IIRC, the high air temperatures at these speeds are generated by shock compression of the air incident on the vehicle, not by friction.
If the reactor were properly designed it's exhaust would be the same air that was put in the engine. It wouldn't be radioactive unless pieces of the uranium were breaking off and it wasn't shielded by anything.
There's several reasons you'd have to worry about radioactivity in the exhaust:
(1) The neutron flux in the reactor can interact with stuff in the air to produce radioactive materials. If I recall correctly, one of the isotopes of oxygen can absorb a neutron and become nitrogen-16, which is a strong gamma emitter. It's not long-lived (half life ~7sec), but that does mean that you'd have a radioactive exhaust plume, which could represent a hazard to the contents of the craft.
(2) To get any kind of decent heat transfer rate and thermal efficiency out of the engine, some portions of the reactor would probably be very hot (easily 1000F+). Depending on reactor materials, you might get some surface corrosion or erosion; while this wouldn't be the nuclear fuel (in a well-designed engine), this material would have been exposed to a neutron flux for a long time, and would most likely be radioactive.
(3) Air is not a perfectly clean mixture of 80/20 nitrogen/oxygen. There's other stuff in it, including particulate matter that can't be perfectly filtered out; this would be bombarded with neutrons as it passed through the reactor and could become radioactive. Any material that became lodged in the engine would be irradiated for longer periods of time and could, if knocked loose later, be a very nasty hazard.
In all your description of how turbojet/ramjet/scramjet engines work, I don't see anything that tells why a nuclear reaction could not be used to heat the air inside the engine. That's all you're doing by burning fuel in an engine; there's nothing special about combustion so far as I am aware.
The main point is to add thermal energy to the compressed air so that the expanding gas at the exhaust is traveling faster (relative to the vehicle) than the air at the inlet. Whether that thermal input comes from a reactor or a chemical flame really doesn't matter from a thermodynamic point of view. There are other considerations (like shielding, the expense of managing a radioactive engine, control issues, flow obstructions, safety issues, etc.) that make a chemical reaction preferable from a practical standpoint, but there's really nothing magical about combustion.
Ah, yes, the old "there's a workaround, so we're not gonna fix it" ploy. When presented with "it crashes or produces strange behavior when I do ," just say "Then don't do that," "The workaround isn't that inconvenient," or (my favorite) "Why would you want to do that?" Problem solved!
Slashdot Mirror
There's over 25 million of us, you insensitive clod!
I believe most A/C units or heat pumps are capable of rejecting many kW of input heat load for every kW of power required by the refrigerant compressor.
I would like to see some open-source based companies do exactly what Microsoft is doing; after all, if pre-loading school kids with Microsoft product experience is considered beneficial to Microsoft in the long run, why would the same model not apply to RedHat? Granted, RedHat and others don't have lots of expensive products to sell, but having more people in the population that have been exposed to open source will probably (long-term) create more demand for their services and products.
You'd think they could have come up with another problem before trying the same technique in another part of the country. After all, they have no shortage of smart people to think of cool math problems, right? It was rather disappointing to solve their first two problems only to (1) land on a publicly accessible page about how to apply for a job and (2) realize that the answers were already spammed all over the internet.
Maybe they will give your resume extra consideration if you send in the code you write to solve the first two problems, but they didn't seem to think about saying that on their "congrats" page. At this point their signal-to-noise ratio probably sucks since they're just getting resumes from people that know how to use a search engine or read Slashdot.
All the discussions I've ever seen of pebble bed reactors incorporated the concept of encasing the fuel and graphite (if used as a moderator) in tough ceramic that can handle really high temperatures. The ceramic prevents oxygen from coming into contact with the graphite, so there's no fire risk unless you can come up with some event that could break a significant number of pebbles open.
While we're at it, we'd better evolve programs that can explain the operation of the code they write. The "best" solution might indeed be fast/efficient/whatever, but it might also be completely incomprehensible to humans - especially if the problem to be solved is even slightly complex.
I recall seeing some comments on this topic from researchers using genetic algorithms to evolve circuits. The evolved circuits worked really well, but nobody could get a grip on how they actually worked (at least, that was the case as of the time the article was written). A drawback of having code or circuits that are human-incomprehensible is that you don't know how they will respond to unexpected external inputs (of course, that's often the case with human-written, human-incomprehensible code as well).
I agree that it's really interesting. I expect there's a lot of good research to be done in this area, and we'll probably see some really cool stuff come out of it.
1. Because I'm sure most university admins would love to have their network bogged down by music streams flowing hither and yon on the campus. Nobody needs that bandwidth for anything useful anyway.
2. Because I'm also sure that most university admins would love to deal with an enviroment where almost every computer has wide-open file shares. And they'd probably all be Windows file shares at that!
3. Most of all, because the recording industry would just love a system that allowed thousands of students to listen to music without having to buy a CD. Obviously there's a vast fundamental difference between "ripping it and making it available to everyone in the world" and "ripping it and making it available to everyone on the campus." I just can't think of one right now. :)
I don't think this project can (or should) be looked at anything other than a "cool research project" and/or status symbol. It runs from a parking lot on one side of the campus to somewhere on the other side (dorms, I think), with one stop near the center of the campus. You could probably walk the entire length of the track in 10 minutes at a brisk pace. If it works it could conceivably be convenient for people that happen to live near either end, but that's it, so there's not a lot of practical use for the project as it's currently planned.
Whether or not we're going to get $14 million worth of research out of this, I don't know. All I can say is that it seems pretty steep to me. Even if you allow $8 million for materials, the remaining $6 million would pay for ~50 man-years at $75/hr. Since this is a project at an academic facility, you should be able to get a lot of additional grad student labor for next to nothing.
So, in my naïveté, I will say that this seems like a lot of money being spent on such a small project. There are other maglev prototypes in operation, so I can't buy the "it's expensive to come up with new technology" excuse without a really good reason, like somebody involved here has a radically new vision of how maglev should work.
Sorry to be so cynical, but it looks to me like somebody had a radical new vision of how to get a fat federal grant to live on for a few years.
This may be a bit naive on my part, but I'd say it's more fear and a lack of trust than anything else. I know managers who fear that Johnny Employee won't be productive if there's nobody looking over his shoulder or monitoring his web access. They don't understand what he does, but they feel better knowing that they can see him working busily in his cubicle or in the shop. No, they may not actually be able to tell if he's really working, but at least they aren't as worried that he's "getting away" with something.
I think the picture you paint is a little bleak and hyperbolic. Yes, there are executives that have the attitudes you describe, but I don't think it's fair to paint the majority that way. There are many who work just as hard as everybody else, and I've been fortunate enough to work with some who appreciate the fact that you can get a lot more work done if you trust people enough to let them do their job (whether it's at home or in an office).
Corrected link: http://www.maa.org/editorial/mathgames/mathgames_1 2_22_03.html
Maybe they're talking about military tactics or something when they say "human interaction," but to me it seems like they're trying to say "no, really, it's not a military-oriented project." Come on people, this is the Army. If this system is mainly for military purposes, then just come out and say it, ok? Really, we pay you guys to worry about situations that involve "lots of military hardware." There's no need to pretend that you're really trying to solve world hunger or something.
I'll take "The Penis Mightier" for $500, Alex....
For some reason those ads always have "testimonials" from graduates of these schools with their shiny new job titles that I've never heard of, such as "Computer Detailaing Specialist" and "Equipment Engineering Technician." Now I know why.
There's no asymptote; the pH/pOH scales are logarithmic, so the ion concentrations change exponentially with pH and pOH. Asymptotes occur for functions like 1/x^n, not 10^x.
Apparently the shirt is made from the same stuff as the Hulk's pants. It cuts down on the special-effects budget for Superman movies, and eliminates the fuzzy blue dot and R-rating budgets for Hulk movies.
In the older Superman TV shows, it was funny that he could stand there and deflect bullets, and yet he ducked when the shooter ran out of bullets and threw the gun at him.
Good post; I agree with your comment about moderation of the parent.
I just have a minor nit: IIRC, the high air temperatures at these speeds are generated by shock compression of the air incident on the vehicle, not by friction.
There's several reasons you'd have to worry about radioactivity in the exhaust:
(1) The neutron flux in the reactor can interact with stuff in the air to produce radioactive materials. If I recall correctly, one of the isotopes of oxygen can absorb a neutron and become nitrogen-16, which is a strong gamma emitter. It's not long-lived (half life ~7sec), but that does mean that you'd have a radioactive exhaust plume, which could represent a hazard to the contents of the craft.
(2) To get any kind of decent heat transfer rate and thermal efficiency out of the engine, some portions of the reactor would probably be very hot (easily 1000F+). Depending on reactor materials, you might get some surface corrosion or erosion; while this wouldn't be the nuclear fuel (in a well-designed engine), this material would have been exposed to a neutron flux for a long time, and would most likely be radioactive.
(3) Air is not a perfectly clean mixture of 80/20 nitrogen/oxygen. There's other stuff in it, including particulate matter that can't be perfectly filtered out; this would be bombarded with neutrons as it passed through the reactor and could become radioactive. Any material that became lodged in the engine would be irradiated for longer periods of time and could, if knocked loose later, be a very nasty hazard.
In all your description of how turbojet/ramjet/scramjet engines work, I don't see anything that tells why a nuclear reaction could not be used to heat the air inside the engine. That's all you're doing by burning fuel in an engine; there's nothing special about combustion so far as I am aware.
The main point is to add thermal energy to the compressed air so that the expanding gas at the exhaust is traveling faster (relative to the vehicle) than the air at the inlet. Whether that thermal input comes from a reactor or a chemical flame really doesn't matter from a thermodynamic point of view. There are other considerations (like shielding, the expense of managing a radioactive engine, control issues, flow obstructions, safety issues, etc.) that make a chemical reaction preferable from a practical standpoint, but there's really nothing magical about combustion.
Ah, yes, the old "there's a workaround, so we're not gonna fix it" ploy. When presented with "it crashes or produces strange behavior when I do ," just say "Then don't do that," "The workaround isn't that inconvenient," or (my favorite) "Why would you want to do that?" Problem solved!
Quel fromage!
:)
Is that a common French saying? "What a cheese!" ??? I can't say that I've ever heard that one before.