There's virtually no free oxygen in Titan's atmosphere.
Without plenty of oxygen, methane has problems burning or exploding.
Tune Back to the Late Late Show, kiddies
on
3000-year-old Microbes
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Let's see... How many umpteen-thousand-year-old woolly mammoths have been dug out of Siberian ice? How many slow-moving glaciers are drooling ancient bits of organic crud all the time? How many deep old aquifers have been drilled & pumped by water-hungry people?
How many times have ancient supergerms from these Not-Meant-To-Be-Touched-By-Man sources nearly wiped humanity from the face of the Earth?
There's really no need to fear for the future, folks. Our handsome hero, his beautiful babe, and their nerdy sidekick will save the world before bedtime.
We'll return to tonight's feature - "Purple Doom From The Ice Continent" - after a quick message from our sponsors...
The articles don't mention if anyone's tried to do a light curve (graph optical brightness vs. time) on the 3 pieces. If it was wrecked & broke up, all 3 pieces are probably tumbling at various rates.
Tumbling (of anything without a very smooth shape & coloration) is obvious from a light curve, and it would be a pretty good indicator of "no hope - don't waste your time".
Flip-side, a flat light curve (or an almost-always-flat one) strongly suggests a functioning attitude control system.
Fear is a very big part of how evil despots maintain their grip on power. A fearless army wouldn't be afraid of their evil dictator leader or his secret police.
Maybe we should "accidentally" leak the secrets to our favorite evil despots...
The first paragraph of the article notes all sorts of nasty smells - from a variety of sources - in the coffee roaster's neighborhood. Reading through the article, i didn't see ANYTHING beyond the accusation of one local resident to show that the "burning plastic" smell actually comes from the coffee place.
Reading the article again, there may only be ONE person who even claims that the smell exists. Sounds like entertaining local color & gossip with a bare minimum of real facts.
I was thinking more about the political situation.
If the "pro-Native American" law is BS, but the (low emotional appeal) scientists are the victims, i don't see much chance of the law changing. Ditto judges using an "if Congress had a brain" alternate version of the law.
Now, if: (1) Science was sure (and had good average-Joe-understands-it skull-shape & DNA evidence) that some set of bones claimed by "current" Native Americans were actually Ainu. (2) Some real, live, determined, liberal/victim-politics-savvy Ainu were trying to claim the bones. -then we could have a SERIOUS political fight.
There are two issues here:
1.) Is it okay to dig up ancient graves, remains, etc. to learn about long-gone humans, cultures, etc.? It seems fairly well accepted that it *is* okay when there are nothing remotely resembling next-of-kin to object.
2.) How much of a (scientific) reality check should there be on any group claiming next-of-kin legal rights over the ancient graves, remains, etc.? You often have to study to determine whether someone has the right to forbid any study...
This find is being interpreted as (very preliminary) evidence for a newer theory - that the Americas were inhabited by people related to the Ainu, long BEFORE the people we now call "Native Americans" showed up.
What happens to that 'Native Americans get dibs on any old bones found in the U.S.' law if the earlier-Ainu theory pans out? This could get into some really interesting "politically unacceptable scientific facts"...
Look at how well coyotes are doing in America vs. how poorly the (superficially superior) wolf is. How "wild animals vs. man" turns out is more a matter of the animals' MO, attitude, & flexibility than of any sort of fight-in-the-arena Toughness Quotient. A "king of the beasts" that tries standing up to a human tribe's spears & arrows is far less a threat than a cunning bunch of snatch-the-weak-&-run opportunists.
I agree that this theory doesn't have enough evidence behind it to do more than sound interesting. And the "bone crushing" stuff is mostly hype - a hyena's victim is long-gone dead before the bone crushing stage.
After the first few home-brew ebola knock-off viruses get loose, the surviving politicians & lawyers may clamp down pretty effectively on basement genetic engineering. How many amateur home nuclear reactor operators do you know?
(Keeping the toys away from larger criminal organizations, governments, etc. is a seperate subject. Volunteer your kids-to-be for genetic experiments to harden humans against bioweapons & hope that some will survive.)-:
Our ISP bought an old legal office building for their HQ and colo facility. The place was built with file rooms to safeguard tons of irreplaceable paper documents - imagine thick concrete walls & ceilings, with heavy steel fire doors, rated to preserve the contents through an EVERYTHING-else-burned-to-the-ground fire.
Critical stuff is spread between the file rooms, with metal conduit, etc. protecting the few small holes they added for wiring.
Bullcrap. BOTH towers had been exposed as very vulnerable to ONE bomb in the underground parking garage long before. BOTH towers were connected to the same small pieces of the electrical, telecom, water, sewer, gas, etc. systems, and Chicago demonstrated the dangers of that a few year ago.
The only [gag] good [retch] reasons to have the backup in the other tower are spelled "lazy" and "stupid".
If a large (star-like mass) black hole ever gets close enough to the solar system for us to seriously contemplate doing cool things with it, then the solar system will be destroyed without any wormhole, time-travel, super-electricity-generation or other cool things happening. Further, no technology we can plausably forecast could possibly let any humans survive the event.
Executive summary: we ain't near old enough to play with this kinda toy.
I read the article...you're missing my point. It doesn't matter if the new cells can get 95% efficient - i'm looking at the SPREAD in efficiency between "Made on Earth" and "Made in Space" cells. There is just plain NO WAY that "Made in Space"'s small efficiency boost can justify the MUCH larger cost of manufacture in orbit.
Making panels in space for use in space is interesting...but hard to reconcile with his comment about competing with fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels for electricity in space has been rather unpopular & uneconomical for quite a few years now.
I don't think this is about (cool idea) large-scale generation of electricity in space to be beamed down to Earth. Nothing i've seen suggests that efficiency of full-spectrum solar cells has anything to do with why that idea isn't flying.
The article noted that current-best solar cells are about 25% efficient, vs. 30% max. theoretical. How many percent more efficient are you figuring on the new solar cells being if space-made (vs. Earth-made)?
Check out the $billions$ that the dinky space station costs just to keep up. Ditto launch costs for your raw materials & totally unproven zero-grav solar cell factory equipment.
Now spread the extra costs of space-made solar cells out over the number of cells that you think will actually pass QC & reentry. Where do you see the high-volume market willing to pay the $HUGE$ price premium for a few percent better efficiency?
As gbell notes further down, efficiency doesn't mean too much, especially competing against fossil fuels. Cost per watt (call it financial efficiency) is what really matters.
Low-energy alpha & beta are easily blocked with century-old technology. Their explanation of how they block X and gamma sounds like smoke & mirrors to me.
BTW, '0.00% of gamma gets through' may be worse than nothing, since the secondary shower (from whatever the gamma ray hit) is often worse than the gamma.
Re:Send the Sales VP to California!
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 1
Relax - spending every last penny (that they get back from the energy companies) on solar cells wouldn't pave more than some microscopic fraction of the Mojave.
Send the Sales VP to California!
on
Solar Power Play
·
· Score: 1
California could spends the $$$ it's getting back from energy companies (that robbed it blind during Enron's heyday) to pave the Mojave Desert with solar cells, thus both earning the state money every year for the electricity and providing insurance against future energy market "irregularities".
(Yeah - the big news here is "Sharp thinks growing U.S. solar cell demand makes it worth opening a local factory that'll employ a few dozen workers".)
Ummm...when you're smashing gold nuclei together fast, there are hundreds or thousands of particles involved - plenty to talk about temperature in the statistical sense. (The two gold nuclei contain hundreds of neutrons & protons, each made up of several quarks and held together by other particles... Nuclei don't act like immutable little ball bearings at the impact speeds these folks are using; it's more like shooting paintballs into each other.)
America doesn't have to chose between "free" and "secure" - i'm now offering unlimited use of my own solid, secure, proven Vote-o-Matic Gold v2.1 (Local, State, & National editions) software (closed source) for FREE! This includes all tabulation, tallying, and certified final election results from my ultra-secure servers, available within seconds of the polls closing!
In other news, i'm now accepting bids from candidates, parties, and PAC's for my exclusive get-out-the-vote campaign consulting services. Potential bidders should be aware that my campaign consulting clients won't need to finance convential political & media campaigns (due to under-50% historical voter turn-out & other factors) and bid accordingly!
The current iBooks use the new IBM 750fx "G3" CPU's. What's holding them back is *marketing* - the 750fx goes up to 1GHz (25% faster) with 200MHz (100% faster) bus, but Apple's too afraid of eating into (more profitable) TiBook sales to ship faster iBooks.
IBM did a *really* nice job designing the 750fx CPU. Back in May/June (when Apple introduced it in the iBook) one of the Apple hardware sites did some G3(750fx) vs. G4(Moto) comparison benchmarks. Bottom line: for anything that wasn't written to use AltiVec, the IBM G3 was just as fast as the Moto G4 (at same MHz).
Weak video systems really slowed older iBooks down in (eye-candy-full) OSX. It's far less a problem in the new iBooks.
Understand what you'll be using it for and do your homework BEFORE spending the $$$ to get a G4.
Purchasing vs. leasing has a bunch of implication for the company's tax & financial situation - you'll want to ask your Money Dept. Some businesses even set up their own dummy leasing companies to buy stuff (which the business then leases from its pet leasing company) - sounds stupid, but tax law can make it a smart financial move.
If you lease, make sure you compare your vendor, your bank, and a decent leasing company to get the best deal. (Again, you may want to check with the Money Dept. on apples vs. oranges.)
Ultra-sexy fantasy technology vs. close to real
on
Antimatter Space Drive
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Last time i checked, it took megawatt-hours of electricity and an expensive atom-smasher to make one microwatt-hour worth of antimatter. Without a fantastic advance in antimatter production technology, talking about *any* use for non-microscopic quantities of antimatter is just blowin' smoke.
It would be workable to pump the megawatts into a bank of lasers and let the lasers push on the probe's small light sail. (And you could tap the military budget for a good hunk of the cost of those space-based laser batteries.)
Slashdot Mirror
The New Scientist article noted that they put the liver in a Teflon bag for the trip to the nuclear reactor.
Just in case, it was a BUBBLEWRAP Teflon bag.
In the future, they'll switch to Styrofoam packing peanuts to save money.
There's virtually no free oxygen in Titan's atmosphere.
Without plenty of oxygen, methane has problems burning or exploding.
Let's see... How many umpteen-thousand-year-old woolly mammoths have been dug out of Siberian ice? How many slow-moving glaciers are drooling ancient bits of organic crud all the time? How many deep old aquifers have been drilled & pumped by water-hungry people?
How many times have ancient supergerms from these Not-Meant-To-Be-Touched-By-Man sources nearly wiped humanity from the face of the Earth?
There's really no need to fear for the future, folks. Our handsome hero, his beautiful babe, and their nerdy sidekick will save the world before bedtime.
We'll return to tonight's feature - "Purple Doom From The Ice Continent" - after a quick message from our sponsors...
The articles don't mention if anyone's tried to do a light curve (graph optical brightness vs. time) on the 3 pieces. If it was wrecked & broke up, all 3 pieces are probably tumbling at various rates.
Tumbling (of anything without a very smooth shape & coloration) is obvious from a light curve, and it would be a pretty good indicator of "no hope - don't waste your time".
Flip-side, a flat light curve (or an almost-always-flat one) strongly suggests a functioning attitude control system.
Fear is a very big part of how evil despots maintain their grip on power. A fearless army wouldn't be afraid of their evil dictator leader or his secret police.
Maybe we should "accidentally" leak the secrets to our favorite evil despots...
The first paragraph of the article notes all sorts of nasty smells - from a variety of sources - in the coffee roaster's neighborhood. Reading through the article, i didn't see ANYTHING beyond the accusation of one local resident to show that the "burning plastic" smell actually comes from the coffee place.
Reading the article again, there may only be ONE person who even claims that the smell exists. Sounds like entertaining local color & gossip with a bare minimum of real facts.
I was thinking more about the political situation.
If the "pro-Native American" law is BS, but the (low emotional appeal) scientists are the victims, i don't see much chance of the law changing. Ditto judges using an "if Congress had a brain" alternate version of the law.
Now, if:
(1) Science was sure (and had good average-Joe-understands-it skull-shape & DNA evidence) that some set of bones claimed by "current" Native Americans were actually Ainu.
(2) Some real, live, determined, liberal/victim-politics-savvy Ainu were trying to claim the bones.
-then we could have a SERIOUS political fight.
There are two issues here:
1.) Is it okay to dig up ancient graves, remains, etc. to learn about long-gone humans, cultures, etc.? It seems fairly well accepted that it *is* okay when there are nothing remotely resembling next-of-kin to object.
2.) How much of a (scientific) reality check should there be on any group claiming next-of-kin legal rights over the ancient graves, remains, etc.? You often have to study to determine whether someone has the right to forbid any study...
This find is being interpreted as (very preliminary) evidence for a newer theory - that the Americas were inhabited by people related to the Ainu, long BEFORE the people we now call "Native Americans" showed up.
What happens to that 'Native Americans get dibs on any old bones found in the U.S.' law if the earlier-Ainu theory pans out? This could get into some really interesting "politically unacceptable scientific facts"...
Look at how well coyotes are doing in America vs. how poorly the (superficially superior) wolf is. How "wild animals vs. man" turns out is more a matter of the animals' MO, attitude, & flexibility than of any sort of fight-in-the-arena Toughness Quotient. A "king of the beasts" that tries standing up to a human tribe's spears & arrows is far less a threat than a cunning bunch of snatch-the-weak-&-run opportunists.
I agree that this theory doesn't have enough evidence behind it to do more than sound interesting. And the "bone crushing" stuff is mostly hype - a hyena's victim is long-gone dead before the bone crushing stage.
High-end astronomy tools aren't very dangerous.
After the first few home-brew ebola knock-off viruses get loose, the surviving politicians & lawyers may clamp down pretty effectively on basement genetic engineering. How many amateur home nuclear reactor operators do you know?
(Keeping the toys away from larger criminal organizations, governments, etc. is a seperate subject. Volunteer your kids-to-be for genetic experiments to harden humans against bioweapons & hope that some will survive.)-:
Our ISP bought an old legal office building for their HQ and colo facility. The place was built with file rooms to safeguard tons of irreplaceable paper documents - imagine thick concrete walls & ceilings, with heavy steel fire doors, rated to preserve the contents through an EVERYTHING-else-burned-to-the-ground fire.
Critical stuff is spread between the file rooms, with metal conduit, etc. protecting the few small holes they added for wiring.
Steel & reinforced concrete aren't quite obsolete.
Bullcrap. BOTH towers had been exposed as very vulnerable to ONE bomb in the underground parking garage long before. BOTH towers were connected to the same small pieces of the electrical, telecom, water, sewer, gas, etc. systems, and Chicago demonstrated the dangers of that a few year ago.
The only [gag] good [retch] reasons to have the backup in the other tower are spelled "lazy" and "stupid".
If a large (star-like mass) black hole ever gets close enough to the solar system for us to seriously contemplate doing cool things with it, then the solar system will be destroyed without any wormhole, time-travel, super-electricity-generation or other cool things happening. Further, no technology we can plausably forecast could possibly let any humans survive the event.
Executive summary: we ain't near old enough to play with this kinda toy.
I read the article...you're missing my point. It doesn't matter if the new cells can get 95% efficient - i'm looking at the SPREAD in efficiency between "Made on Earth" and "Made in Space" cells. There is just plain NO WAY that "Made in Space"'s small efficiency boost can justify the MUCH larger cost of manufacture in orbit.
Making panels in space for use in space is interesting...but hard to reconcile with his comment about competing with fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels for electricity in space has been rather unpopular & uneconomical for quite a few years now.
I don't think this is about (cool idea) large-scale generation of electricity in space to be beamed down to Earth. Nothing i've seen suggests that efficiency of full-spectrum solar cells has anything to do with why that idea isn't flying.
The article noted that current-best solar cells are about 25% efficient, vs. 30% max. theoretical. How many percent more efficient are you figuring on the new solar cells being if space-made (vs. Earth-made)?
Check out the $billions$ that the dinky space station costs just to keep up. Ditto launch costs for your raw materials & totally unproven zero-grav solar cell factory equipment.
Now spread the extra costs of space-made solar cells out over the number of cells that you think will actually pass QC & reentry. Where do you see the high-volume market willing to pay the $HUGE$ price premium for a few percent better efficiency?
As gbell notes further down, efficiency doesn't mean too much, especially competing against fossil fuels. Cost per watt (call it financial efficiency) is what really matters.
Low-energy alpha & beta are easily blocked with century-old technology. Their explanation of how they block X and gamma sounds like smoke & mirrors to me.
BTW, '0.00% of gamma gets through' may be worse than nothing, since the secondary shower (from whatever the gamma ray hit) is often worse than the gamma.
Relax - spending every last penny (that they get back from the energy companies) on solar cells wouldn't pave more than some microscopic fraction of the Mojave.
California could spends the $$$ it's getting back from energy companies (that robbed it blind during Enron's heyday) to pave the Mojave Desert with solar cells, thus both earning the state money every year for the electricity and providing insurance against future energy market "irregularities".
(Yeah - the big news here is "Sharp thinks growing U.S. solar cell demand makes it worth opening a local factory that'll employ a few dozen workers".)
Ummm...when you're smashing gold nuclei together fast, there are hundreds or thousands of particles involved - plenty to talk about temperature in the statistical sense. (The two gold nuclei contain hundreds of neutrons & protons, each made up of several quarks and held together by other particles... Nuclei don't act like immutable little ball bearings at the impact speeds these folks are using; it's more like shooting paintballs into each other.)
Considering how many similar prior collisions there have been in the history of the universe, this doesn't sounds like a rational prediction.
Probably a scare rumor started by a neighbor worried that the big atom smasher would goof up his TV reception.
America doesn't have to chose between "free" and "secure" - i'm now offering unlimited use of my own solid, secure, proven Vote-o-Matic Gold v2.1 (Local, State, & National editions) software (closed source) for FREE! This includes all tabulation, tallying, and certified final election results from my ultra-secure servers, available within seconds of the polls closing!
In other news, i'm now accepting bids from candidates, parties, and PAC's for my exclusive get-out-the-vote campaign consulting services. Potential bidders should be aware that my campaign consulting clients won't need to finance convential political & media campaigns (due to under-50% historical voter turn-out & other factors) and bid accordingly!
The current iBooks use the new IBM 750fx "G3" CPU's. What's holding them back is *marketing* - the 750fx goes up to 1GHz (25% faster) with 200MHz (100% faster) bus, but Apple's too afraid of eating into (more profitable) TiBook sales to ship faster iBooks.
IBM did a *really* nice job designing the 750fx CPU. Back in May/June (when Apple introduced it in the iBook) one of the Apple hardware sites did some G3(750fx) vs. G4(Moto) comparison benchmarks. Bottom line: for anything that wasn't written to use AltiVec, the IBM G3 was just as fast as the Moto G4 (at same MHz).
Weak video systems really slowed older iBooks down in (eye-candy-full) OSX. It's far less a problem in the new iBooks.
Understand what you'll be using it for and do your homework BEFORE spending the $$$ to get a G4.
Purchasing vs. leasing has a bunch of implication for the company's tax & financial situation - you'll want to ask your Money Dept. Some businesses even set up their own dummy leasing companies to buy stuff (which the business then leases from its pet leasing company) - sounds stupid, but tax law can make it a smart financial move.
If you lease, make sure you compare your vendor, your bank, and a decent leasing company to get the best deal. (Again, you may want to check with the Money Dept. on apples vs. oranges.)
Last time i checked, it took megawatt-hours of electricity and an expensive atom-smasher to make one microwatt-hour worth of antimatter. Without a fantastic advance in antimatter production technology, talking about *any* use for non-microscopic quantities of antimatter is just blowin' smoke.
It would be workable to pump the megawatts into a bank of lasers and let the lasers push on the probe's small light sail. (And you could tap the military budget for a good hunk of the cost of those space-based laser batteries.)