They're pumping air into the ground. it's not really all that bad.
Of course, if they fracture the roof of the salt dome, and it caves in and a sink hole swallows up whatever town is above them on the surface, that could beconsidered to be bad.
People have been storing electrical energy using water for a long time (over a century). The basic idea is the same, but in the case of water and hydroelectric dams, the solution is easier (you just run the turbines as pumps, putting water into the resevoir instead of letting it drain out). According to the wikipedia article on Pumped-storage hydroelectricity :
In 2009 the United States had 21.5 GW of pumped storage generating capacity, accounting for 2.5% of baseload generating capacity. PHS generated (net) -6288 GWh of energy in 2008...
In 2007 the EU had 38.3 GW net capacity of pumped storage out of a total of 140 GW of hydropower and representing 5% of total net electrical capacity in the EU.
And, yes, people have considered using pumped-storage hydroelectric to even out the variation in wind power.
I myself doubt that compressed air storage would ever amount to more than a fraction of pumped hydro-electric storage, but it might be useful in very dry or very flat regions.
When you are only meeting once in a given location, get access to the venue a few days in advance, and also don't have the ability to rewire things, putting in jacks and wiring for 1000+ people is not competitive. It's hard enough just giving them a power jack (an IETF requirement).
Plus, people much prefer the wireless. Even in areas where wireline Ethernet is available, most people use the wireless.
Verilan and Swisscom are the IETF's providers at the present, for when the sponsor doesn't want to do it themselves.
When sponsors do do it themselves (generally because they sell wireless gear) I would advise them to be afraid. I still remember a poor sales-engineer from a previous meeting (that did not go well in a wireless sense) being told they had implemented some piece of the standard wrong, by engineers who had helped to write the standard. After a few rounds of that, he started visibly flinching whenever someone else came up to complain.
IETF meetings are larger (1200+ typically), and basically everyone has an uses a laptop / pda, so they make for a demanding wireless environment. After some really bad experiences, resources were put into this, and the last few years, things have really improved.
What we have found is that
- it is necessary to have good gear (not all access points are created equal) - To serve a lot of people, lower the power per access point, and put in a lot of them. Raising the power because of poor reception is a mistake. - having both 2 GHz and 5 GHz networks really helps. - telling attendees how to turn off "ad hoc" mode on their computers really helps. - tracking down ill-configured boxes doing bad things on the network really helps.
Having said that, most recent IETF meeting sponsors have chosen to pay for professional wireless network providers. This is not trivial, and there is no better way to cause a flame war than to have the WLAN melt down.
The submitter doesn't appear to know enough to say why he wants to do this. If this were a consulting job, I would say, what are you really trying to do ? My guess is that, whatever that is, there is a better way to do it.
You would need to go back to a system of copyright registration (which I would support) to make this work for copyright. You know if a patent exists by seeing if it has been issued; generally the only way to know if a copyright exists is to go to court.
Also very useful in an error message is what the user should not do. If, say, rerunning the program without doing some clean-up will corrupt its database, you had better say so, in letters about 1 foot high.
When calculating the density, this gives a surprising figure because it
seems that parts of Phobos may be hollow...
There was a 50 year old hypothesis that Phobos was hollow, with a very low density, in order to explain the anomalous drag on the satellite, which has now been shown to be due to the tidal bulge raised on Mars by Phobos. The measured density is about 1.9 gm/cm^3, which is a little low, but not unusual compared to the asteroids, especially small asteroids.
These are probably just all rock piles, repeatedly fractured by collisions and without enough self-gravity to smush things back together, so some internal voids would not be surprising.
If it is new science, and it is not at least "3 sigma," it is simply not proven IMHO.
Things are different if you are talking about using scientific results to guide action. Part of the art of leadership is making decisions in the face of incomplete information. So if my oncologist, say, says that there is a 75% chance that my cancer may respond to some new treatment, that may well be good enough. Heck, even 50% may be good enough, depending on how dire my case is. But for the new treatment to be considered to be proven effective, I would like to see a study with at least 3 sigma (or 99.75%) confidence level. And this is after increasing the normal statistical errors by whatever systematic errors might be present (an art in and of itself).
You never see "naked" particles in QFT - they are always surrounded by a cloud of virtual particles attracted to them by various forces. The particle you can measure (say, an electron in a cathode ray tube) is always really a composite - the naked particle and its cloud of hangers on. So, the answer to your question is "yes" in both cases.
The Higgs field was invented to give bosons mass (in the context of the standard model). The story (which I have heard several times, but don't know if it's true) is that Higgs' original paper, on the field, was rejected for not having enough new physics. So, he resubmitted it saying, at the end, by the way this field might give rise to a new particle (i.e., the Higgs Boson), and that version sailed through.
One big piece of FUD here is the notion that Microsoft programmers are paid, while open source programmers are not. The open source projects I know of advance mostly because of paid programmers, and I suspect that that is the case in general. That gives them the usual capitalist incentives for finding and removing bugs.
At one level, all you need to know is that the Standard Model "needs" this particle - no Higgs Boson, and the Standard Model may fall. Finding the Higgs (and thus its mass) should also help in making predictions in other areas, such as cosmology.
As for why the Higgs Boson is needed, you might find this interesting.
Not entirely true - suppose you wanted to estimate something on a macroscopic scale, such as the effects on a spacecraft or asteroid from absorbing a Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (as do exist). Knowing that the biggest one yet detected carried about 50 Joules of energy is likely to be more informative than knowing it was 3 x 10^11 GeV.
The new data mandates that the Higgs boson mass within the standard model lies between 115 and 150 GeV."
No, it doesn't. Look at this graph. At a "3 sigma" level (and don't believe any new science that is not at the 3 sigma level or better), the mass of the Higgs (assuming it exists) is roughly between 115 and 225 GeV. To put it another way, a mass greater than the Tevatron exclusion zone at ~160 GeV is by no means ruled out.
Slashdot Mirror
They're pumping air into the ground. it's not really all that bad.
Of course, if they fracture the roof of the salt dome, and it caves in and a sink hole swallows up whatever town is above them on the surface, that could be considered to be bad.
People have been storing electrical energy using water for a long time (over a century). The basic idea is the same, but in the case of water and hydroelectric dams, the solution is easier (you just run the turbines as pumps, putting water into the resevoir instead of letting it drain out). According to the wikipedia article on Pumped-storage hydroelectricity :
In 2009 the United States had 21.5 GW of pumped storage generating capacity, accounting for 2.5% of baseload generating capacity. PHS generated (net) -6288 GWh of energy in 2008
In 2007 the EU had 38.3 GW net capacity of pumped storage out of a total of 140 GW of hydropower and representing 5% of total net electrical capacity in the EU.
And, yes, people have considered using pumped-storage hydroelectric to even out the variation in wind power.
I myself doubt that compressed air storage would ever amount to more than a fraction of pumped hydro-electric storage, but it might be useful in very dry or very flat regions.
Why do people write like this?
"Words that write themselves for you."
I would suggest you start with George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and graduate to Victor Klemperer's "The Language of the Third Reich".
Nor, I suspect, that of many other slashdotters.
I expect this to be rapidly crowdsourced into the dust.
When you are only meeting once in a given location, get access to the venue a few days in advance, and also don't have the ability to rewire things, putting in jacks and wiring for 1000+ people is not competitive. It's hard enough just giving them a power jack (an IETF requirement).
Plus, people much prefer the wireless. Even in areas where wireline Ethernet is available, most people use the wireless.
I believe that every Mac laptop since 2006 has supported 802.11a. Joining an "a" network is seamless, and much of the time you won't even notice it.
Verilan and Swisscom are the IETF's providers at the present, for when the sponsor doesn't want to do it themselves.
When sponsors do do it themselves (generally because they sell wireless gear) I would advise them to be afraid. I still remember a poor sales-engineer from a previous meeting (that did not go well in a wireless sense) being told they had implemented some piece of the standard wrong, by engineers who had helped to write the standard. After a few rounds of that, he started visibly flinching whenever someone else came up to complain.
IETF meetings are larger (1200+ typically), and basically everyone has an uses a laptop / pda, so they make for a demanding wireless environment. After some really bad experiences, resources were put into this, and the last few years, things have really improved.
What we have found is that
- it is necessary to have good gear (not all access points are created equal)
- To serve a lot of people, lower the power per access point, and put in a lot of them. Raising the power because of poor reception is a mistake.
- having both 2 GHz and 5 GHz networks really helps.
- telling attendees how to turn off "ad hoc" mode on their computers really helps.
- tracking down ill-configured boxes doing bad things on the network really helps.
Having said that, most recent IETF meeting sponsors have chosen to pay for professional wireless network providers. This is not trivial, and there is no better way to cause a flame war than to have the WLAN melt down.
The submitter doesn't appear to know enough to say why he wants to do this. If this were a consulting job, I would say, what are you really trying to do ? My guess is that, whatever that is, there is a better way to do it.
You would need to go back to a system of copyright registration (which I would support) to make this work for copyright. You know if a patent exists by seeing if it has been issued; generally the only way to know if a copyright exists is to go to court.
Also very useful in an error message is what the user should not do. If, say, rerunning the program without doing some clean-up will corrupt its database, you had better say so, in letters about 1 foot high.
I have had similar problems, and have found that
- a full screen fatal error message and
- a stop of all activity
is necessary to get most people to pay attention to an error message. Otherwise, people will ignore even the most dire warnings.
Not very likely - it would escape rapidly. There might be pockets of ice, though.
When calculating the density, this gives a surprising figure because it
seems that parts of Phobos may be hollow...
There was a 50 year old hypothesis that Phobos was hollow, with a very low density, in order to explain the anomalous drag on the satellite, which has now been shown to be due to the tidal bulge raised on Mars by Phobos. The measured density is about 1.9 gm/cm^3, which is a little low, but not unusual compared to the asteroids, especially small asteroids.
These are probably just all rock piles, repeatedly fractured by collisions and without enough self-gravity to smush things back together, so some internal voids would not be surprising.
The Soviet Phobos-2 mission returned some cool pictures before its computer failed. I especially like the ones with Mars in the background.
The author of the original article clearly doesn't understand what a molecule is, and the article is not very informative.
Does anyone have an actual link to a scientific article about this ? ArXiv would do just fine.
If it is new science, and it is not at least "3 sigma," it is simply not proven IMHO.
Things are different if you are talking about using scientific results to guide action. Part of the art of leadership is making decisions in the face of incomplete information. So if my oncologist, say, says that there is a 75% chance that my cancer may respond to some new treatment, that may well be good enough. Heck, even 50% may be good enough, depending on how dire my case is. But for the new treatment to be considered to be proven effective, I would like to see a study with at least 3 sigma (or 99.75%) confidence level. And this is after increasing the normal statistical errors by whatever systematic errors might be present (an art in and of itself).
You never see "naked" particles in QFT - they are always surrounded by a cloud of virtual particles attracted to them by various forces. The particle you can measure (say, an electron in a cathode ray tube) is always really a composite - the naked particle and its cloud of hangers on. So, the answer to your question is "yes" in both cases.
The Higgs field was invented to give bosons mass (in the context of the standard model). The story (which I have heard several times, but don't know if it's true) is that Higgs' original paper, on the field, was rejected for not having enough new physics. So, he resubmitted it saying, at the end, by the way this field might give rise to a new particle (i.e., the Higgs Boson), and that version sailed through.
One big piece of FUD here is the notion that Microsoft programmers are paid, while open source programmers are not. The open source projects I know of advance mostly because of paid programmers, and I suspect that that is the case in general. That gives them the usual capitalist incentives for finding and removing bugs.
At one level, all you need to know is that the Standard Model "needs" this particle - no Higgs Boson, and the Standard Model may fall. Finding the Higgs (and thus its mass) should also help in making predictions in other areas, such as cosmology.
As for why the Higgs Boson is needed, you might find this interesting.
Not entirely true - suppose you wanted to estimate something on a macroscopic scale, such as the effects on a spacecraft or asteroid from absorbing a Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (as do exist). Knowing that the biggest one yet detected carried about 50 Joules of energy is likely to be more informative than knowing it was 3 x 10^11 GeV.
You should consider cosmology. That's the only field I know of where errors at the 10^54 level might be acceptable.
The new data mandates that the Higgs boson mass within the standard model lies between 115 and 150 GeV."
No, it doesn't. Look at this graph. At a "3 sigma" level (and don't believe any new science that is not at the 3 sigma level or better), the mass of the Higgs (assuming it exists) is roughly between 115 and 225 GeV. To put it another way, a mass greater than the Tevatron exclusion zone at ~160 GeV is by no means ruled out.
If the X Serve isn't aimed at Enterprise users, I don't know what is. I use both X Serves and Dell Linux servers, and rate them about equal overall.
Oh, there is no major scientific benefit to SDO going through a lunar eclipse, but I still think it should make for some cool pictures.