This guy need a little education about interpolation. Due to multiplexed color elements, a 6-megapixel camera is only generating a color image which is at best about half as large (i.e. 3 megapixels). The picture you get out is 6 megapixels due to interpolation.
You are wrong about this connection. The white paper is a fluff piece pushing Baystar's prime busines interest: PIPEs. As such, the numbers mostly refer to the whole PIPEs industry to make it look like Baystar has a much bigger interest than they actually have. It's like Charter Communications claiming that they are part of the "XXX billion dollar cable TV industry" when they only have a small percentage of the market.
In one chart, you can see that there have been thousands of PIPEs since 1995, including 612 in the latest year (2002). Of those thousands, Vulcan Ventures and Microsoft Corporation are in the top ten in dollars invested.
However, Baystar claims to have been involved with 90 out of those thousands of deals ($400M total). They do not detail their clients and cusotmers in this document, but they do list their "partners:"
Larry Goldfarb Steven Lamar
and "strategic partners:" Thomas Hicks (Hicks, Must, Tate, & Furst) Steven Hicks (Hicks Capital) Andrew L Farkas (Insignia Financial) Louis C. Gerken (Gerken Capital) Kianfilippo Cuneo (Baystar)
Borrowing from some other threads, what is the worlds biggest machine? How about the corporate+government+media machine?
With government generating law in phase with corporate interest, you can bet that the engineers are not being heard. With media generating information in phase with corporations, you won't hear about it (unless you read slashdot!).
Edward Tufte might be great at "envisioning information," but he's no statistician. His plot contains as much misleading information as Tiokol's graph contained hidden information.
Here's why: That pretty curve-fit line in Tufte's graph is crap. It is based on an incredibly small number of samples, especially at lower temperatures. The curve fit is completely useless unless it is presented with error bars. Furthermore, the curve fit is misleading since attracts the eye and leads attention away from the factual data.
Look at the "real" data points, without being distracted by the pretty line. Without the line, the graph illustrates the problem very well- the challenger launch was much colder than any other previous attempt, and the launches at colder temperatures indicate that o-ring failure was a problem at such a cold temperature.
I deliberately chose controversial examples so that I could later make a point.
In the 80s and 90s, tech companies have been 'spinning off' and terminating their research in favor of revenue-generating products. Thus, we get companies like Agilent (HP) and Lucent (AT&T), which laid off most of their employees (and all of my friends who worked for them) in the telecom crunch.
Anyway, I followed a couple of the links you recommended, and looked at their published papers. Guess what I found? Here's an exerpt:
"The authors gratefully acknowledge H. Wiersma, T. Ha, P. Beck, and S.-H. Leung for experimental assistance, T. I. Kamins, P. J. Kuekes, Y. Luo, C. P. Collier, and J. R. Heath for valuable discussions, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States and by the Carlsbergfondet in Denmark for partial support."
Government funding for research is inarguably the #1 reason why the United States is the technological world leader. Unfortunately, this is way too much of a fuzzy concept for the average American to understand.
Americans see technology soming from "Sony," or "HP," or "Dell." These companies do, at best, very little science research (I'm not counting product development as research). They don't understand that the technological concepts are developed far from the private sector in government-fundded research labs and universities.
Americans are constantly barraged with the notion that all money spent by the government is "wasted." Thus, our politicians are pressured to cut everything they can. The degree to which a project is 'safe' from cutting depends only on the strength of the lobby defending it.
For politicians, cutting pure science is a no-brainer. There is no lobby to defend pure science research. There is no apparent downside to cutting the research since practical application is in the distant future (i.e. longer than one term of office). I think NASA is a perfect example. For 20 years, NASA's budget has gotten smaller. It is an easy target.
So, how do you justify science expense to the masses? Call it "military research," and fund it though semi-military organizations like DARPA. It's bulletproof, because Americans will support any military expense (if you doubt me, I refer you to Bush's $87 billion request this week).
As a scientist, I have absolutely no problem with this arrangement.
Let us not also forget that superconductors have numerous applications besides power transmission. I'm in optics, so this is my example:
Have you ever heard of a superconductor bolometer? It is an excellent far-infrared detector. Its a detector made out of superconducting material. The temperature is stabilized at exactly the threshold of superconductivity. Its resistivity changes slightly when exposed to light (of any frequency).
For any given attack, there are going to be a lot of people who know about it beforehand. Some of those people are going to be stupid enough to try to profit on it.
When the futures fluctuate dramatically due to the new 'interest,' everyone at the pentagon knows that something is going to happen. The SEC uses it to catch insider trading, the NCAA uses it to catch game fixing. Q: Why can't the government use futures to catch terrorists?
A: Great idea, bad diplomacy. Hello! This is the US government we're talking about! We don't care how the rest of the world feels anymore.
I wouldn't worry about range. Since the RFID reflects power from the interrogator, the signal falls off proportional to the 4th power of the distance. For the mathematically challenged, if you move the tag from 1m to 10m, the signal drops by 10000 times.
Any battery which might be included is only to power the internal logic, not to create a return signal.
If you want a directional tag, you need a DOT (dynamic optical tag). The added directionality of the DOT gives it a much longer range than RFID.
The analogy is correct, but you have identified a flaw in my statement. The earth is in equilibrium with its surroundings (not just the sun), and the same is true for a solar sail.
CV
I will pick on this one scientifically ignorant claim:
"Would it be better to place a black sheet there instead of a mirror-faced one? Unlike the mirror, this could absorb energy and the momentum associated with that. But it would do this only from the moment of its exposure until it reached thermal equilibrium with the available radiation. Then energy absorption would cease, and with that the delivery of momentum to the sheet would also cease. For any lightweight sheet, this time would be only seconds."
Energy absorption does not cease in equilibrium! Rather, the amount of energy absorbed by the sail from the sun is equal to the amount of energy emitted by the sail into space.
Allow me to make an analogy: The earth is in thermal equlibrium with the sun (close enough). Would you like to go outside on a sunny day in Las Vegas and tell me that energy absorption has ceased? Why is your skin turning red?
Re:See outside the bubble?
on
Mastering Light
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Infrared-pass filters transmit IR light and absorb all visible light. Silicon CCDs (all commercial digital cameras use silicon) have a peak response in the near IR, so you can get a very bright image through the IR filter. The problem is that color digital CCDs have color filters on them which block IR light.
You are suggesting that the average car only travels 2.5 miles per day? It is easy to calculate that each gallon of gasoline produces 18 pounds of CO2.
The US and Russia have massive stockpiles of chemical weapons. That is mainly because the weapons are very difficult to destroy. There are several depots in the US for these weapons. The only one I can name offhand is Anniston, Alabama.
The recent Treaty of Moscow does not require the destruction of nuclear weapons, only mothballing. It will not reduce the total number of nukes in either country's stockpile.
With China's introduction of heavy-lift rocketry, does anyone sane think that the number of nuclear weapons is going to fall to 200?
Re:We probably won't see the AF images
on
Latest Columbia News
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There are many telescopes in New Mexico which are capable of doing this, for example:
http://www.de.afrl.af.mil/Factsheets/35meter.htm l
These telescopes (or ones similar to them) are used by the scientific community for published research, so I doubt that their capabilities and locations are secret.
I find it hard to believe that stills from this video will not be included in the final report about the disaster.
Actually, if you add all of that stuff up, it doesn't even come close to accounting for Arizona's total (human) land usage, predominantly cattle grazing (more) and cotton growing (less).
I've hiked back into some pretty remote areas in Arizona. It is nearly impossible to go somewhere and not find a cowpie.
The risk of damage caused by diffuse scatter of this laser is quite small. In a typical lab-setting, you would expose your retina to about 6 W/mm^2 by looking directly into a 3 mW laser at 1/2 meter. Unfortunately, I don't know the exact damage threshold, but I suspect that it is near this level of exposure.
Using the numbers from the article (100 KW, 30cm diameter beam), the Irradiance on the target (E0) is only about 1 W/ mm^2 (only 1000x sunlight, incidentally). Assume a diffuse surface and you may apply the camera equation to get the Irradiance on the retina:
E = E0/(4*pi*F/#^2)
The F/# of the eye is about 4 in darkness, but much larger in sunlight. Plugging in,
Emax = 5 mW/mm^2
Factoring in speckle you would get roughly double this number, which is still totally irrelevant compared to the eye's damage threshold.
The real danger comes from specular reflection, which is harder to quantify. I would have to know the angular deviation of the laser beam. However, remember that the laser irradiance is only ~1000x brighter than the sun. Specular reflectance from the sun hurts, but does not cause damage in short exposures at very close range. By the 1/r^2 rule, I would still not expect to have any permanent damage from this laser at distances larger than 30m (this distance is increased because the laser undoubtedly has a smaller angular deviation than the sun).
Things would be very different for a Far-IR laser.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy need a little education about interpolation. Due to multiplexed color elements, a 6-megapixel camera is only generating a color image which is at best about half as large (i.e. 3 megapixels). The picture you get out is 6 megapixels due to interpolation.
CV
I thought that I had put enough cynicism into the comment to override the dearth of conspiracy.
CV
You are wrong about this connection. The white paper is a fluff piece pushing Baystar's prime busines interest: PIPEs. As such, the numbers mostly refer to the whole PIPEs industry to make it look like Baystar has a much bigger interest than they actually have. It's like Charter Communications claiming that they are part of the "XXX billion dollar cable TV industry" when they only have a small percentage of the market.
In one chart, you can see that there have been thousands of PIPEs since 1995, including 612 in the latest year (2002). Of those thousands, Vulcan Ventures and Microsoft Corporation are in the top ten in dollars invested.
However, Baystar claims to have been involved with 90 out of those thousands of deals ($400M total). They do not detail their clients and cusotmers in this document, but they do list their "partners:"
Larry Goldfarb
Steven Lamar
and "strategic partners:"
Thomas Hicks (Hicks, Must, Tate, & Furst)
Steven Hicks (Hicks Capital)
Andrew L Farkas (Insignia Financial)
Louis C. Gerken (Gerken Capital)
Kianfilippo Cuneo (Baystar)
Borrowing from some other threads, what is the worlds biggest machine? How about the corporate+government+media machine?
With government generating law in phase with corporate interest, you can bet that the engineers are not being heard. With media generating information in phase with corporations, you won't hear about it (unless you read slashdot!).
Edward Tufte might be great at "envisioning information," but he's no statistician. His plot contains as much misleading information as Tiokol's graph contained hidden information.
Here's why: That pretty curve-fit line in Tufte's graph is crap. It is based on an incredibly small number of samples, especially at lower temperatures. The curve fit is completely useless unless it is presented with error bars. Furthermore, the curve fit is misleading since attracts the eye and leads attention away from the factual data.
Look at the "real" data points, without being distracted by the pretty line. Without the line, the graph illustrates the problem very well- the challenger launch was much colder than any other previous attempt, and the launches at colder temperatures indicate that o-ring failure was a problem at such a cold temperature.
CV
In the 80s and 90s, tech companies have been 'spinning off' and terminating their research in favor of revenue-generating products. Thus, we get companies like Agilent (HP) and Lucent (AT&T), which laid off most of their employees (and all of my friends who worked for them) in the telecom crunch.
Anyway, I followed a couple of the links you recommended, and looked at their published papers. Guess what I found? Here's an exerpt:
"The authors gratefully acknowledge H. Wiersma, T. Ha, P. Beck, and S.-H. Leung for experimental assistance, T. I. Kamins, P. J. Kuekes, Y. Luo, C. P. Collier, and J. R. Heath for valuable discussions, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States and by the Carlsbergfondet in Denmark for partial support."
The results of some online poll is irrelevant to the point, which is that Bush will be getting his money for the war. CV
Don't forget that almost every single piece of technology you use was brought to you by United States military spending.
Would all of you purist "I won't benefit from military spending" types stop using your cell phones and computers, please?
CV
Government funding for research is inarguably the #1 reason why the United States is the technological world leader. Unfortunately, this is way too much of a fuzzy concept for the average American to understand.
Americans see technology soming from "Sony," or "HP," or "Dell." These companies do, at best, very little science research (I'm not counting product development as research). They don't understand that the technological concepts are developed far from the private sector in government-fundded research labs and universities.
Americans are constantly barraged with the notion that all money spent by the government is "wasted." Thus, our politicians are pressured to cut everything they can. The degree to which a project is 'safe' from cutting depends only on the strength of the lobby defending it.
For politicians, cutting pure science is a no-brainer. There is no lobby to defend pure science research. There is no apparent downside to cutting the research since practical application is in the distant future (i.e. longer than one term of office). I think NASA is a perfect example. For 20 years, NASA's budget has gotten smaller. It is an easy target.
So, how do you justify science expense to the masses? Call it "military research," and fund it though semi-military organizations like DARPA. It's bulletproof, because Americans will support any military expense (if you doubt me, I refer you to Bush's $87 billion request this week).
As a scientist, I have absolutely no problem with this arrangement.
CV
Let us not also forget that superconductors have numerous applications besides power transmission.
r e% 20superconducting%20bolometer
I'm in optics, so this is my example:
Have you ever heard of a superconductor bolometer? It is an excellent far-infrared detector. Its a detector made out of superconducting material. The temperature is stabilized at exactly the threshold of superconductivity. Its resistivity changes slightly when exposed to light (of any frequency).
http://www.google.com/search?q=high%20temperatu
For any given attack, there are going to be a lot of people who know about it beforehand. Some of those people are going to be stupid enough to try to profit on it.
When the futures fluctuate dramatically due to the new 'interest,' everyone at the pentagon knows that something is going to happen. The SEC uses it to catch insider trading, the NCAA uses it to catch game fixing. Q: Why can't the government use futures to catch terrorists?
A: Great idea, bad diplomacy. Hello! This is the US government we're talking about! We don't care how the rest of the world feels anymore.
I wouldn't worry about range. Since the RFID reflects power from the interrogator, the signal falls off proportional to the 4th power of the distance. For the mathematically challenged, if you move the tag from 1m to 10m, the signal drops by 10000 times.
Any battery which might be included is only to power the internal logic, not to create a return signal.
If you want a directional tag, you need a DOT (dynamic optical tag). The added directionality of the DOT gives it a much longer range than RFID.
http://www.darpa.mil/ato/solicit/DOTS/overview.
The analogy is correct, but you have identified a flaw in my statement. The earth is in equilibrium with its surroundings (not just the sun), and the same is true for a solar sail. CV
I will pick on this one scientifically ignorant claim:
"Would it be better to place a black sheet there instead of a mirror-faced one? Unlike the mirror, this could absorb energy and the momentum associated with that. But it would do this only from the moment of its exposure until it reached thermal equilibrium with the available radiation. Then energy absorption would cease, and with that the delivery of momentum to the sheet would also cease. For any lightweight sheet, this time would be only seconds."
Energy absorption does not cease in equilibrium! Rather, the amount of energy absorbed by the sail from the sun is equal to the amount of energy emitted by the sail into space.
Allow me to make an analogy: The earth is in thermal equlibrium with the sun (close enough). Would you like to go outside on a sunny day in Las Vegas and tell me that energy absorption has ceased? Why is your skin turning red?
Infrared-pass filters transmit IR light and absorb all visible light. Silicon CCDs (all commercial digital cameras use silicon) have a peak response in the near IR, so you can get a very bright image through the IR filter. The problem is that color digital CCDs have color filters on them which block IR light.
You are suggesting that the average car only travels 2.5 miles per day? It is easy to calculate that each gallon of gasoline produces 18 pounds of CO2.
The US and Russia have massive stockpiles of chemical weapons. That is mainly because the weapons are very difficult to destroy. There are several depots in the US for these weapons. The only one I can name offhand is Anniston, Alabama.
The recent Treaty of Moscow does not require the destruction of nuclear weapons, only mothballing. It will not reduce the total number of nukes in either country's stockpile.
With China's introduction of heavy-lift rocketry, does anyone sane think that the number of nuclear weapons is going to fall to 200?
There are many telescopes in New Mexico which are capable of doing this, for example:
m l
http://www.de.afrl.af.mil/Factsheets/35meter.ht
These telescopes (or ones similar to them) are used by the scientific community for published research, so I doubt that their capabilities and locations are secret.
I find it hard to believe that stills from this video will not be included in the final report about the disaster.
Actually, if you add all of that stuff up, it doesn't even come close to accounting for Arizona's total (human) land usage, predominantly cattle grazing (more) and cotton growing (less). I've hiked back into some pretty remote areas in Arizona. It is nearly impossible to go somewhere and not find a cowpie.
I assume that we are discussing an NIR laser.
The risk of damage caused by diffuse scatter of this laser is quite small. In a typical lab-setting, you would expose your retina to about 6 W/mm^2 by looking directly into a 3 mW laser at 1/2 meter. Unfortunately, I don't know the exact damage threshold, but I suspect that it is near this level of exposure.
Using the numbers from the article (100 KW, 30cm diameter beam), the Irradiance on the target (E0) is only about 1 W/ mm^2 (only 1000x sunlight, incidentally). Assume a diffuse surface and you may apply the camera equation to get the Irradiance on the retina:
E = E0/(4*pi*F/#^2)
The F/# of the eye is about 4 in darkness, but much larger in sunlight. Plugging in,
Emax = 5 mW/mm^2
Factoring in speckle you would get roughly double this number, which is still totally irrelevant compared to the eye's damage threshold.
The real danger comes from specular reflection, which is harder to quantify. I would have to know the angular deviation of the laser beam. However, remember that the laser irradiance is only ~1000x brighter than the sun. Specular reflectance from the sun hurts, but does not cause damage in short exposures at very close range. By the 1/r^2 rule, I would still not expect to have any permanent damage from this laser at distances larger than 30m (this distance is increased because the laser undoubtedly has a smaller angular deviation than the sun).
Things would be very different for a Far-IR laser.