Copper is in demand because it has a lot of uses. SOME of those uses can be replaced by other metals, such as aluminum. One of the biggest uses is in wiring for residential/commercial construction. They used to allow aluminum wiring, but dropped it when fires could be traced to it --aluminum is softer than copper, when screwed down in an electrical connection, the metal tends to flow, so the connection loosens, and sparks start happening. If you have aluminum wiring in your house, you need to have the electrical connections re-tightened annually. However, if they could devise a generic and simple solution to that problem, then they could start using aluminum wiring again, the demand for copper would go down, and therefore the price would go down along with the incentive to steal. One possibility for a better aluminum connector involves a double-crimp. In-between the two crimps, the metal can't flow anywhere and would stay solidly in contact with the exterior harder-metal tube (usually a copper-aluminum alloy) that had been crimped onto the wire.
There are different ways to teach. Consider Isaac Asimov's method of writing lots and lots of nonfiction books. Even science fiction can be educational (and fun for the author, too).
While intended to be humorous, that title is actually a CRITICAL point. Remember Global Warming and Carbon emissions? Isn't switching to nuclear supposed to be a solution to that problem? How can we do that globally and NOT proliferate?
I suppose it depends on the type of "nuclear". Suppose we required all the Big Oil companies to invest in Nuclear Fusion?
Here's some speculative science that might be worthy of modeling: Ionic Kinetic Energy Conversion Effect
Are there limits to the fact that when a charged particle is accelerated, it emits a photon? I was once told that below a certain point, the charge does not emit a photon. Really? Why? A possibly useful phenomenon needs relevant data! Thanks!
While to some extent we hopefully recognize some value in human creativity, such that copyrights and other IP deserve to be respected for an appropriate LIMITED time, excess greed is trying to create "Artificial Scarcity". ALWAYS a bad thing.
Current hybrids include storage batteries that weigh a lot. They can be replaced with a much lighter flywheel that also has a higher efficiency than batteries, at storing and releasing energy (and also works with regenerative braking). Do not confuse this with other decades-old ideas of using flywheels to fully replace the car engine; we cannot make them strong enough to hold energy for 300 miles of travel. But we can easily make them able to hold enough energy for a few bursts of rapid acceleration. The only reason a smallish car has a 100HP engine is to get rapid acceleration. Any hybrid can replace that with a much lighter 15-20HP engine, which produces plenty for cruising at a fixed speed, plus some extra to charge up the storage unit for the desired rapid acceleration. A hybrid that uses a flywheel might weigh about the same as the ordinary car, but it will get better gas mileage because of the smaller engine.
Considering the masses of the stars involved, I'd say that the pulsar captured one member of an approaching pair of stars, and ejected the other. However, this doesn't explain why the pulsar is flickering at a millisecond rate. A young pulsar (like the one in the Crab Nebula) can be expected to pulse that fast, but if it was young, then where is the nebula (supernova remnant expanding gas cloud)? If it is older, then it can only (so far as we know) flicker at millisecond rate by getting a boost (typically by sucking in gas from a second and very close star). Depending on how crowded the stars are in that region, we could speculate about a SMALL star that got completely sucked by the pulsar, after which the pulsar captured one of a pair...
I predicted this more than three years ago, at the HalfBakery. I confess I didn't think it would take this long to get some decent quantity measurements.
I like that; didn't know this before. However, just because we have good reason to believe that the gravity waves generated-due-to-relativistic-effects-between-close-orbiting-extremely-massive-objects travel at about the speed of light, this does not automatically mean all other gravity waves, generated by different means (like a supernova explosion), must also travel at about the speed of light. Electromagnetic waves travel at different speeds in different regions of space-time (slower in an extreme gravitational field), and water waves don't all travel at the same speed (tsunami waves are lots lots faster than pond ripples), so to arbitrarily declare that all gravity waves must travel at one particular speed is the same as sticking one's neck out. Do note I'm not declaring any of them must travel at different speeds than c, but I AM saying that if some of them can, then that can be an explanation for the failure of this particular LIGO experiment.
Chris Burke quoted: "See, there is a fundamental and unproved ASSUMPTION in Physics that gravity waves must travel at the speed of light"
Chris Burke wrote: "Well, if you're referring to gravity waves being limited to at most c, then that's a pretty safe assumption."
You could have phrased that better. If c is the limiting velocity for a gravity wave, that does not mean the gravity wave must travel as fast as c; it might be slower, a lot slower, and causality would have absolutely no problem with that. So why is everyone chewing over all that faster-than-light stuff, eh? Maybe gravity waves from the gamma burst will arrive here 10 billion millenia from now. What we need is a closer source. I hear the star Eta Carinae is due to go supernova (if it hasn't already done it), and it's close enough that if we can just keep our technological civilization alive for a few thousand more years, then we can find out for sure what one possible speed for gravity waves can be. (For all we KNOW at this time, different gravity waves might travel at different speeds.)
Actually, ONE possible problem with the experiment has nothing to do with the sensitivity of the detector. See, there is a fundamental and unproved ASSUMPTION in Physics that gravity waves must travel at the speed of light, and therefore when a gamma-ray burst happens, we expect any gravity waves from the event to arrive at the same time as the gamma-ray photons. But if they don't have to travel at light-speed, then they can exist and be detectable, just not at the same time as the gamma rays.
The key point is that such experiments allow us to prove to us adults that all the prejudice in the world is the fault of people older than toddlers. To end racial prejudice, toddlers of different human breeds need to be raised together. And so on.
Read to your kids when they are too young to be able to do it themselves. This will at least teach them that fun things can be found in books. If you can then direct them toward science fiction, such as Tom Swift or Heinlein's juveniles, an interest in math and science becomes a likely side-effect.
WAIT. Eventually a Martian dust-devil will pass over a rover, and after this "cleaning event" occurs, THEN is the time to start significant operations again.
A number of years ago the late Dr. Robert L. Forward published some notions about this Question:
"How did the Big Bang get around the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy?"
The suggested answer involves "negative" mass/energy, a thing which is very different from "anti-matter".
One conclusion is that the huge voids in the Universe (there are many many more than just that big one) hold superclusters of galaxies made of negative mass/energy; it doesn't mix well with ordinary mass/energy because the two types gravitationally repel each other --and we can't see those superclusters because our eyes and current instruments don't register negative-energy photons.
For more about negative-mass/energy theory, you might read this.
Not so much because of their storage capacity limit, but because the process of converting electrical energy into chemical energy (charge the battery) and the process of converting chemical energy into electrical energy (use the battery) is not extremely efficient. Somewhere from 70%-85% each way, depending on the battery technology employed. We CAN do rather better than that, with kinetic energy storage.
Something like 95% conversion efficiency is routine for electric motors/generators, between electrical and mechanical energy.
If you are deliberately designing a short-range vehical, then flywheels can fill the bill MUCH better than batteries. They even weigh less, too.
Here's a related idea, needing implementation/testing.
Just don't subject to severe shock.
Re:But will they be cheaper?
on
Dell Linux Details
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't care how much junk software they add, so long as Micheal Dell has read "World Domination 201" and decides to offer for sale a disk full of licensed codecs. Dell has the clout to put such a disk together, faster than Linspire.
According to Bussard, practical fusion power is nearly as available as the money we decide to put into his system. He specifically says in the video that "the physics is done" --which means that only engineering problems remain.
"An alternative explanation of the Two-slits experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-slit_experiment) could be possible with the aether thing."
That "aether thing" spells out in detail how the Two-slits experiment can do its thing. It also explicitly states that nothing is Real for very long, and why, and was supposedly written in 1995. According to archive.org the prediction has been posted on the Web since 2004.
That's what it means, if filing first is all you need to do. Just steal somebody else's idea and file it first.
Also, I'm curious to know what provision there is, if somebody deliberately puts something into the Public Domain, and somebody else applies for a patent on it afterward.
Slashdot Mirror
Copper is in demand because it has a lot of uses. SOME of those uses can be replaced by other metals, such as aluminum. One of the biggest uses is in wiring for residential/commercial construction. They used to allow aluminum wiring, but dropped it when fires could be traced to it --aluminum is softer than copper, when screwed down in an electrical connection, the metal tends to flow, so the connection loosens, and sparks start happening. If you have aluminum wiring in your house, you need to have the electrical connections re-tightened annually. However, if they could devise a generic and simple solution to that problem, then they could start using aluminum wiring again, the demand for copper would go down, and therefore the price would go down along with the incentive to steal. One possibility for a better aluminum connector involves a double-crimp. In-between the two crimps, the metal can't flow anywhere and would stay solidly in contact with the exterior harder-metal tube (usually a copper-aluminum alloy) that had been crimped onto the wire.
Actually the price should be at least double that, because if they really want to ressurect the species, they need two, a male and a female.
There are different ways to teach. Consider Isaac Asimov's method of writing lots and lots of nonfiction books. Even science fiction can be educational (and fun for the author, too).
While intended to be humorous, that title is actually a CRITICAL point. Remember Global Warming and Carbon emissions? Isn't switching to nuclear supposed to be a solution to that problem? How can we do that globally and NOT proliferate?
I suppose it depends on the type of "nuclear". Suppose we required all the Big Oil companies to invest in Nuclear Fusion?
Here's some speculative science that might be worthy of modeling: Ionic Kinetic Energy Conversion Effect
Are there limits to the fact that when a charged particle is accelerated, it emits a photon? I was once told that below a certain point, the charge does not emit a photon. Really? Why? A possibly useful phenomenon needs relevant data! Thanks!
While to some extent we hopefully recognize some value in human creativity, such that copyrights and other IP deserve to be respected for an appropriate LIMITED time, excess greed is trying to create "Artificial Scarcity". ALWAYS a bad thing.
Current hybrids include storage batteries that weigh a lot. They can be replaced with a much lighter flywheel that also has a higher efficiency than batteries, at storing and releasing energy (and also works with regenerative braking). Do not confuse this with other decades-old ideas of using flywheels to fully replace the car engine; we cannot make them strong enough to hold energy for 300 miles of travel. But we can easily make them able to hold enough energy for a few bursts of rapid acceleration. The only reason a smallish car has a 100HP engine is to get rapid acceleration. Any hybrid can replace that with a much lighter 15-20HP engine, which produces plenty for cruising at a fixed speed, plus some extra to charge up the storage unit for the desired rapid acceleration. A hybrid that uses a flywheel might weigh about the same as the ordinary car, but it will get better gas mileage because of the smaller engine.
Here: Orbiting Mirror Ribbon
Considering the masses of the stars involved, I'd say that the pulsar captured one member of an approaching pair of stars, and ejected the other. However, this doesn't explain why the pulsar is flickering at a millisecond rate. A young pulsar (like the one in the Crab Nebula) can be expected to pulse that fast, but if it was young, then where is the nebula (supernova remnant expanding gas cloud)? If it is older, then it can only (so far as we know) flicker at millisecond rate by getting a boost (typically by sucking in gas from a second and very close star). Depending on how crowded the stars are in that region, we could speculate about a SMALL star that got completely sucked by the pulsar, after which the pulsar captured one of a pair...
Here's a Web page that should work under Linux; it can be loaded from a hard disk instead of the Web:
(javascript "mastermind" program, entirely client-side)
I predicted this more than three years ago, at the HalfBakery. I confess I didn't think it would take this long to get some decent quantity measurements.
I like that; didn't know this before. However, just because we have good reason to believe that the gravity waves generated-due-to-relativistic-effects-between-close-orbiting-extremely-massive-objects travel at about the speed of light, this does not automatically mean all other gravity waves, generated by different means (like a supernova explosion), must also travel at about the speed of light. Electromagnetic waves travel at different speeds in different regions of space-time (slower in an extreme gravitational field), and water waves don't all travel at the same speed (tsunami waves are lots lots faster than pond ripples), so to arbitrarily declare that all gravity waves must travel at one particular speed is the same as sticking one's neck out. Do note I'm not declaring any of them must travel at different speeds than c, but I AM saying that if some of them can, then that can be an explanation for the failure of this particular LIGO experiment.
Chris Burke quoted: "See, there is a fundamental and unproved ASSUMPTION in Physics that gravity waves must travel at the speed of light"
Chris Burke wrote: "Well, if you're referring to gravity waves being limited to at most c, then that's a pretty safe assumption."
You could have phrased that better. If c is the limiting velocity for a gravity wave, that does not mean the gravity wave must travel as fast as c; it might be slower, a lot slower, and causality would have absolutely no problem with that. So why is everyone chewing over all that faster-than-light stuff, eh? Maybe gravity waves from the gamma burst will arrive here 10 billion millenia from now. What we need is a closer source. I hear the star Eta Carinae is due to go supernova (if it hasn't already done it), and it's close enough that if we can just keep our technological civilization alive for a few thousand more years, then we can find out for sure what one possible speed for gravity waves can be. (For all we KNOW at this time, different gravity waves might travel at different speeds.)
Actually, ONE possible problem with the experiment has nothing to do with the sensitivity of the detector. See, there is a fundamental and unproved ASSUMPTION in Physics that gravity waves must travel at the speed of light, and therefore when a gamma-ray burst happens, we expect any gravity waves from the event to arrive at the same time as the gamma-ray photons. But if they don't have to travel at light-speed, then they can exist and be detectable, just not at the same time as the gamma rays.
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Vertigible#1154238348
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Balloon_20Notions#1154531591
The key point is that such experiments allow us to prove to us adults that all the prejudice in the world is the fault of people older than toddlers. To end racial prejudice, toddlers of different human breeds need to be raised together. And so on.
Read to your kids when they are too young to be able to do it themselves. This will at least teach them that fun things can be found in books. If you can then direct them toward science fiction, such as Tom Swift or Heinlein's juveniles, an interest in math and science becomes a likely side-effect.
WAIT. Eventually a Martian dust-devil will pass over a rover, and after this "cleaning event" occurs, THEN is the time to start significant operations again.
A number of years ago the late Dr. Robert L. Forward published some notions about this Question:
"How did the Big Bang get around the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy?"
The suggested answer involves "negative" mass/energy, a thing which is very different from "anti-matter".
One conclusion is that the huge voids in the Universe (there are many many more than just that big one) hold superclusters of galaxies made of negative mass/energy; it doesn't mix well with ordinary mass/energy because the two types gravitationally repel each other --and we can't see those superclusters because our eyes and current instruments don't register negative-energy photons.
For more about negative-mass/energy theory, you might read this.
Not so much because of their storage capacity limit, but because the process of converting electrical energy into chemical energy (charge the battery) and the process of converting chemical energy into electrical energy (use the battery) is not extremely efficient. Somewhere from 70%-85% each way, depending on the battery technology employed. We CAN do rather better than that, with kinetic energy storage.
Something like 95% conversion efficiency is routine for electric motors/generators, between electrical and mechanical energy. If you are deliberately designing a short-range vehical, then flywheels can fill the bill MUCH better than batteries. They even weigh less, too.
Here's a related idea, needing implementation/testing.
Just don't subject to severe shock.
I don't care how much junk software they add, so long as Micheal Dell has read "World Domination 201" and decides to offer for sale a disk full of licensed codecs. Dell has the clout to put such a disk together, faster than Linspire.
Slashdot is News for Nerds, not just programmers.
According to Bussard, practical fusion power is nearly as available as the money we decide to put into his system. He specifically says in the video that "the physics is done" --which means that only engineering problems remain.
"An alternative explanation of the Two-slits experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-slit_experiment) could be possible with the aether thing."
That "aether thing" spells out in detail how the Two-slits experiment can do its thing. It also explicitly states that nothing is Real for very long, and why, and was supposedly written in 1995. According to archive.org the prediction has been posted on the Web since 2004.
That's what it means, if filing first is all you need to do. Just steal somebody else's idea and file it first.
Also, I'm curious to know what provision there is, if somebody deliberately puts something into the Public Domain, and somebody else applies for a patent on it afterward.