Also, I would bet the reactor is, at *best*, 25% efficient. If there are no moving parts, then it's probably much, much worse than this. In any case, I would like to see how something the size of a bathtub can reject 20 MW of heat.
If the average bathtub is 3 cubic meters, that's almost 70 kw/liter of heat generation. That requires some serious flow rates of water to cool it.
Oh, come on.. I can't believe it's not more like 90 or 95 percent. In fact, I'm typing this while "borrowing" my neighbor's linksys network. The admi--
$$%110113944 NO CARRIER
While your attempt to shield the poor from rising costs of energy is laudable, I submit that basic economics says it won't happen that way. The only way nuclear is going to gain a strong foothold in the market is if the price of coal goes up. Currently, the production of power from coal is about 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. The production of nuclear, including and amortizing the cost of construction over the next 10 years, is approximately twice that. Coal is not going to get more expensive until cap-and-trade economics (or just a flat-out CO2 tax) are introduced into the market. (The aforementioned numbers are based on speeches given two days ago by John Sununu at the American Nuclear Society's winter meeting, a man for whom I have a lot more respect now that I've heard him speak. Did anyone else know he has a PhD in MechE from MIT?)
Secondly, reprocessing. The US's main focus for reprocessing is wrapped up in the Bush Administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). This is a freaking scam, and the National Academy of Sciences backs me up. Basically, the types of reactors envisioned require materials science that just isn't there yet, requires funding that just isn't there yet, and requires an infrastructure that Just Isn't There Yet.
The solution is to turn Yucca Mountain into a medium-term repository. Bury it, safely, for 100 to 200 years, let the exceptionally hot stuff decay away, and I'm pretty darned sure civilization will be able to find some use for the energy stored in there in 100 years. But until then, let the technology mature. The commercial industry (and, by extension, every person in the U.S. who pays for electricity) has been paying into the Yucca fund for too long not to see any return on that investment.
Oh, one more snarky comment. Please provide support via links for your assertions; it's not hard. I would like to see evidence that after 30 years, the spent fuel coming out of a burner like envisioned for GNEP is actually less radioactive than the original ore.
No, no, the "Aleph" brand of memory tape just came out with their new model. It's called Aleph One Memory... but the spool it comes on is pretty large.
Seconded. This post is written on a 5 year old TiBook that has spent 4 years on a boat in a humid environment, countless times in a bag being lugged literally around the world, dropped three or four times, had a hinge replaced because of one of those drops, and is still reasonably snappy.
After this "event" on September 5th, I will be purchasing another MacBook Pro (dang, I still *hate* that name). The screen on this machine has started to flicker and I'm worried about nearing the hard drive's MTBF. The value of buying quality: spend some $$$ up front and not have to worry for the next 5 years. Not bad for a laptop.
My only concern is the new MB Pro's are too wide-screenish. The screen is really wide and not very tall, which seems optimized for watching movies. OK, but has anyone tried reading text documents on a screen like that? You're continually scrolling, and doing two pages side-by-side makes the text too small.
I'm a huge fan of solar power, so this thread has motivated me to run some numbers...
According to this (thanks go to Mr. Sketch, who provided the link earlier in this thread), the average incident solar energy per day for most of the U.S. is ABOUT 200 W/m^2. According to the caption, that figure already includes average cloud cover over three years. Given 15% efficiency, that translates to a measly 30 W/m^2. Run that for 24 hours and you get 720 W-hr per day per m^2.
Say you devote a patch of your roof that's approximately 2 meters by 3 meters. I'm just guessing here, but that seems a reasonable amount. 720 W-hr per day per m^2 times 6 square meters gives 4,320 kW-hr per day.
My electric company tells me that an average household consumes about 1000 kW-hr per month, or 33 kW-hr per day.
So, am I missing something? Would I really be generating 130x more electricity than I use? That's much, much higher than I expected when I started this.
In addition to being the king at failing, this 'beleaguered' company has also been very good at trying. (We zealots prefer beleaguered to 'doomed.')
Witness, for example, KidSafe. QuicktimeTV. iCards. OpenDoc (for you old folks out there). All innovations that, for one reason or another, didn't take off.
TFA talks about network innovation -- and Apple certainly does its fair share of that. But they're also willing to try and are willing to accept a few failures here and there. Because of that risk-taking, they're able to quickly capitalize on things like the iPod, the iMac, and the iHateThisMeme. Kudos to them for having the cojones to do that; it seems like many other organizations are too risk-averse.
Still more can be found here, on Damn Interesting, which provides an entertaining read on the things he claims to have done, and the efforts to debunk them. From what I've read, they haven't ALL been debunked.
His spoon covered cadillac, however, is laughable.
Here's why the US government is so concerned about someone hiding a trojan horse inside sensitive code: The U.S. has done it to other countries before.
Click here for a fascinating article describing how the CIA and FBI managed to sell to the Soviets some chips with bungled operations "hidden" in the chips, to be used for their shiny, new Trans-Siberian natural gas pipeline. The result was the largest non-nuclear explosion ever seen from space.
What goes around, comes around, and the government is getting nervous...
I was on a selection committee for DARPA to look into this stuff a few years ago.
Negative Index of refraction Materials (NIMs), metamaterials, or whatever you want to call them, are relatively easy to make in the microwave region, since the wavelengths are on the order of centimeters. Thus, using a special arrangement of rings, loops, and wires, you can craft a lattice-like material that exhibits negative refraction. Technically, it has a negative magnetic permeability (mu) and negative permittivity (epsilon).
This has all kinds of weird implications. The group velocity is still in the forward direction, but the phase velocity goes in reverse. Evanescent waves propogate, not die off. Perfect lenses can be made. Measurements LESS than the wavelength of light can be taken. There was a list of implications in the August issue of Scientific American, I believe.
Anyhow, this works great at the ~cm scale. Visible light is hard as hell: the scale there is on the order of nanometers. And the copper or silver or tungsten wires used to make the metamaterials have MISERABLE magnetic losses at these small scales, so mu is no longer negative. The energy no longer propagates in the medium. As of three years ago, there were no promising candidates for solving this problem. There was an outside hack at using carbon nanotubes -- which may or may not maintain their permeability down to small scales -- but it was a long shot at best. Arranging the little guys would have been devilishly difficult.
Glad to see that Pendry, who's been in this field almost as long as Veselago, is still making good strides. Even if they can't get to the visible wavelength, NIM's have spectacular applications for microwave antennae.
Welcome to the crowd of planet has-beens. And quit bitchin'... at least you have one of those newfangled Earth satellites coming to greet you. I have yet to get a greeting card from those Earthilngs.
Yeah, we tried the Apple store here in town, but didn't have the contract number to verify that she was going to use it for school purposes. The DC public school system was too disorganized to be able to get her the number we needed. All around, it was a disappointing experience.
As the poster below notes, it's a low price per machine, at the $300 Educational Discount price. Nevertheless, it's still steep. I can dream, can't I?
My gf was a teacher in an inner-city school last year. Apple and the school administration worked out a deal where they outfitted her room with 30 eMacs -- she became the de facto computer admin. "Great," I thought, "This could be a good opportunity for the kids."
ARD did not come with the eMacs. The school would not pay for it. When _I_ saw the price tag, I obtained it through... other means. Given that these kids were 7th graders, her ability to shut down every computer when class was over (as well as perform other functions like upgrades, monitor which websites they were surfing, etc.) was invaluable.
If the admin was $100, I would have bought it myself and taken the tax write-off, no questions asked. Heck, I'd even consider getting it just for my own personal use. $500 is just too steep.
I can only assume Apple has done the Business Case Analysis and determined that they would NOT sell 4.5x more at $129. Nevertheless, for a company that puts such a strong emphasis on Ease Of Use and Simplicity, I would have expected a tool as spectacular as Apple Remote Desktop to be more accessible to the masses.
mmm, I'm going to have to disagree with you and agree with the grandparent. Some subtle things come out when firing real weapons:
Empty 15 rounds of a Baretta, or better yet, a Colt.45, at a target. Unless you're really steady, the recoil will have caused the gun to walk up on you considerably. Under pressure / under fire, you unload much faster and the gun walks up more. That's hard to really 'practice' for. The effect is worse for SAWs and.50 cals.
Hearing bullets *zing* by and richochet off of rocks makes you sick. You don't get a game over & insert more quarters to play again. That realization comes in rather suddenly to the pit of your stomach.
I could never get used to the sound and feel of the blood rushing past my ears. Never actually *got* shot, but a few times were close. The pounding in my ears was distracting... it's funny what you focus on during times like that.
I'd say, "Mod Parent Up", but it's already at +5. Cheers nonetheless.
Another shining example of where solid, technical management has proven to be spectacularly successful: Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. He is single-handedly responsible for building the United States Nuclear Navy, and he did it by getting his hands dirty, looking for and finding the devil in the details, and sweating the small stuff. (okay, I admit, there was a strong cadre of very smart engineers and scientists behind him, but they would never have been so successful without him) In 1982, he gave a great speech about how to do a job right, and how to manage it properly.
He eschewed fancy management techiniques, deriding them as smoke and mirrors. Simply requiring his subordinates to understand their jobs and holding them responsible, for everything.
Rickover could never make it today; he was too much of an irascible fellow. I don't think anyone enjoyed working for him WHILE they were working for him. But, then again, couldn't the same be said of Steve Jobs 1? By that I mean the head of Apple Computer from 1976 to 1984. What of those stories where people would get on an elevator with him and be fired by the time the elevator stopped? Or throwing engineers against the wall for falling asleep in front of their computers at 11 pm?
Teh Jobs has come a long way, and has found another management "front" that allows him to be head of a successful company again. Kudos to him.
Also keep in mind that Steve Jobs *almost died* from some form of pancreatic cancer a year ago.
I have to agree with the parent post. The little "mini headlines" should be their own, distinct oval or some other such shape... having the 'upward sweeping curve' really does seem to attach it to the previous story.
Otherwise, nice feature. I'm not 'fanboi'-level acceptance yet, but I imagine it'll grow on me over the next few days.
When I'm drunk, I have this irrational and very strong urge to hook up with whatever woman looks strikingly attractive in the room. Raging ball of hormones.
When I'm waking up? are you kidding? I'm usually annoyed that the ugly troll of a thing sleeping next to me (who was strikingly attractive last night) has the nerve to have her arm draped over me.
Your point is well taken, but I'm not sure I 100% agree. Look at some other developments in the very broad category of science:
The internet. [while not specifically hard-core science, it is a radical development, with a lot of science behind it.]
Hybrid cars. [nothing radical here, but an important marriage of existing technologies.]
Fluorishing of cell phones & cell infrastructure.
-----
One last point: With the exception of the Trinity shot, when the first atomic bomb was dropped and *OMG it worked!*, the breakthroughs you listed from the 1930's weren't immediately adopted by society at the time. FM radio didn't take off, it still took about 20 years for nuclear fission to be adopted for any real peaceful purposes (Shippingport reactor in... what, 1958?), and 8-tracks... well, I won't go there. I contend that some of the lower-level things we read about on slashdot like carbon nanotubes being drawn into 6 inch lengths, or Ruby on Rails development, or the $100 laptop -- that we'll look back on THESE things twenty years from now and say, "Wow! What a period of expansion!"
Slashdot Mirror
Also, I would bet the reactor is, at *best*, 25% efficient. If there are no moving parts, then it's probably much, much worse than this. In any case, I would like to see how something the size of a bathtub can reject 20 MW of heat.
If the average bathtub is 3 cubic meters, that's almost 70 kw/liter of heat generation. That requires some serious flow rates of water to cool it.
So does your mom. With velociraptors. And Richard Stallman.
Oh, come on .. I can't believe it's not more like 90 or 95 percent. In fact, I'm typing this while "borrowing" my neighbor's linksys network. The admi--
$$%110113944 NO CARRIER
Secondly, reprocessing. The US's main focus for reprocessing is wrapped up in the Bush Administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). This is a freaking scam, and the National Academy of Sciences backs me up. Basically, the types of reactors envisioned require materials science that just isn't there yet, requires funding that just isn't there yet, and requires an infrastructure that Just Isn't There Yet.
The solution is to turn Yucca Mountain into a medium-term repository. Bury it, safely, for 100 to 200 years, let the exceptionally hot stuff decay away, and I'm pretty darned sure civilization will be able to find some use for the energy stored in there in 100 years. But until then, let the technology mature. The commercial industry (and, by extension, every person in the U.S. who pays for electricity) has been paying into the Yucca fund for too long not to see any return on that investment.
Oh, one more snarky comment. Please provide support via links for your assertions; it's not hard. I would like to see evidence that after 30 years, the spent fuel coming out of a burner like envisioned for GNEP is actually less radioactive than the original ore.
No, no, the "Aleph" brand of memory tape just came out with their new model. It's called Aleph One Memory ... but the spool it comes on is pretty large.
After this "event" on September 5th, I will be purchasing another MacBook Pro (dang, I still *hate* that name). The screen on this machine has started to flicker and I'm worried about nearing the hard drive's MTBF. The value of buying quality: spend some $$$ up front and not have to worry for the next 5 years. Not bad for a laptop.
My only concern is the new MB Pro's are too wide-screenish. The screen is really wide and not very tall, which seems optimized for watching movies. OK, but has anyone tried reading text documents on a screen like that? You're continually scrolling, and doing two pages side-by-side makes the text too small.
According to this (thanks go to Mr. Sketch, who provided the link earlier in this thread), the average incident solar energy per day for most of the U.S. is ABOUT 200 W/m^2. According to the caption, that figure already includes average cloud cover over three years. Given 15% efficiency, that translates to a measly 30 W/m^2. Run that for 24 hours and you get 720 W-hr per day per m^2.
Say you devote a patch of your roof that's approximately 2 meters by 3 meters. I'm just guessing here, but that seems a reasonable amount. 720 W-hr per day per m^2 times 6 square meters gives 4,320 kW-hr per day.
My electric company tells me that an average household consumes about 1000 kW-hr per month, or 33 kW-hr per day.
So, am I missing something? Would I really be generating 130x more electricity than I use? That's much, much higher than I expected when I started this.
Witness, for example, KidSafe. QuicktimeTV. iCards. OpenDoc (for you old folks out there). All innovations that, for one reason or another, didn't take off.
TFA talks about network innovation -- and Apple certainly does its fair share of that. But they're also willing to try and are willing to accept a few failures here and there. Because of that risk-taking, they're able to quickly capitalize on things like the iPod, the iMac, and the iHateThisMeme. Kudos to them for having the cojones to do that; it seems like many other organizations are too risk-averse.
His spoon covered cadillac, however, is laughable.
Obligatory wiki quote.
Click here for a fascinating article describing how the CIA and FBI managed to sell to the Soviets some chips with bungled operations "hidden" in the chips, to be used for their shiny, new Trans-Siberian natural gas pipeline. The result was the largest non-nuclear explosion ever seen from space.
What goes around, comes around, and the government is getting nervous...
Sorry, had to...
Negative Index of refraction Materials (NIMs), metamaterials, or whatever you want to call them, are relatively easy to make in the microwave region, since the wavelengths are on the order of centimeters. Thus, using a special arrangement of rings, loops, and wires, you can craft a lattice-like material that exhibits negative refraction. Technically, it has a negative magnetic permeability (mu) and negative permittivity (epsilon).
This has all kinds of weird implications. The group velocity is still in the forward direction, but the phase velocity goes in reverse. Evanescent waves propogate, not die off. Perfect lenses can be made. Measurements LESS than the wavelength of light can be taken. There was a list of implications in the August issue of Scientific American, I believe.
Anyhow, this works great at the ~cm scale. Visible light is hard as hell: the scale there is on the order of nanometers. And the copper or silver or tungsten wires used to make the metamaterials have MISERABLE magnetic losses at these small scales, so mu is no longer negative. The energy no longer propagates in the medium. As of three years ago, there were no promising candidates for solving this problem. There was an outside hack at using carbon nanotubes -- which may or may not maintain their permeability down to small scales -- but it was a long shot at best. Arranging the little guys would have been devilishly difficult.
Glad to see that Pendry, who's been in this field almost as long as Veselago, is still making good strides. Even if they can't get to the visible wavelength, NIM's have spectacular applications for microwave antennae.
I'm actually fairly confident that you don't design them. How's the quote board?
Welcome to the crowd of planet has-beens. And quit bitchin' ... at least you have one of those newfangled Earth satellites coming to greet you. I have yet to get a greeting card from those Earthilngs.
Ceres
This will open up at least two new ways to win in John Siracusa's bingo...
As the poster below notes, it's a low price per machine, at the $300 Educational Discount price. Nevertheless, it's still steep. I can dream, can't I?
ARD did not come with the eMacs. The school would not pay for it. When _I_ saw the price tag, I obtained it through ... other means. Given that these kids were 7th graders, her ability to shut down every computer when class was over (as well as perform other functions like upgrades, monitor which websites they were surfing, etc.) was invaluable.
If the admin was $100, I would have bought it myself and taken the tax write-off, no questions asked. Heck, I'd even consider getting it just for my own personal use. $500 is just too steep.
I can only assume Apple has done the Business Case Analysis and determined that they would NOT sell 4.5x more at $129. Nevertheless, for a company that puts such a strong emphasis on Ease Of Use and Simplicity, I would have expected a tool as spectacular as Apple Remote Desktop to be more accessible to the masses.
Empty 15 rounds of a Baretta, or better yet, a Colt .45, at a target. Unless you're really steady, the recoil will have caused the gun to walk up on you considerably. Under pressure / under fire, you unload much faster and the gun walks up more. That's hard to really 'practice' for. The effect is worse for SAWs and .50 cals.
Hearing bullets *zing* by and richochet off of rocks makes you sick. You don't get a game over & insert more quarters to play again. That realization comes in rather suddenly to the pit of your stomach.
I could never get used to the sound and feel of the blood rushing past my ears. Never actually *got* shot, but a few times were close. The pounding in my ears was distracting ... it's funny what you focus on during times like that.
Britain has just launched the HMS Daring, a 600 million pound-sterling (umm ... roughly US$ 1 Billion) battleship complete with iPod docks.
That single ship effectively doubles the total market for "iPod Accessories."
It's worth noting that Tetris is still the #1 selling game for most cellphones.
Another shining example of where solid, technical management has proven to be spectacularly successful: Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. He is single-handedly responsible for building the United States Nuclear Navy, and he did it by getting his hands dirty, looking for and finding the devil in the details, and sweating the small stuff. (okay, I admit, there was a strong cadre of very smart engineers and scientists behind him, but they would never have been so successful without him) In 1982, he gave a great speech about how to do a job right, and how to manage it properly.
He eschewed fancy management techiniques, deriding them as smoke and mirrors. Simply requiring his subordinates to understand their jobs and holding them responsible, for everything.
Rickover could never make it today; he was too much of an irascible fellow. I don't think anyone enjoyed working for him WHILE they were working for him. But, then again, couldn't the same be said of Steve Jobs 1? By that I mean the head of Apple Computer from 1976 to 1984. What of those stories where people would get on an elevator with him and be fired by the time the elevator stopped? Or throwing engineers against the wall for falling asleep in front of their computers at 11 pm?
Teh Jobs has come a long way, and has found another management "front" that allows him to be head of a successful company again. Kudos to him.
Also keep in mind that Steve Jobs *almost died* from some form of pancreatic cancer a year ago.
Otherwise, nice feature. I'm not 'fanboi'-level acceptance yet, but I imagine it'll grow on me over the next few days.
When I'm drunk, I have this irrational and very strong urge to hook up with whatever woman looks strikingly attractive in the room. Raging ball of hormones.
When I'm waking up? are you kidding? I'm usually annoyed that the ugly troll of a thing sleeping next to me (who was strikingly attractive last night) has the nerve to have her arm draped over me.
Way, way different.
The internet. [while not specifically hard-core science, it is a radical development, with a lot of science behind it.]
Hybrid cars. [nothing radical here, but an important marriage of existing technologies.]
Fluorishing of cell phones & cell infrastructure.
-----
One last point: With the exception of the Trinity shot, when the first atomic bomb was dropped and *OMG it worked!*, the breakthroughs you listed from the 1930's weren't immediately adopted by society at the time. FM radio didn't take off, it still took about 20 years for nuclear fission to be adopted for any real peaceful purposes (Shippingport reactor in ... what, 1958?), and 8-tracks ... well, I won't go there. I contend that some of the lower-level things we read about on slashdot like carbon nanotubes being drawn into 6 inch lengths, or Ruby on Rails development, or the $100 laptop -- that we'll look back on THESE things twenty years from now and say, "Wow! What a period of expansion!"
Just my $0.02. Your mileage may vary.