Yes, I agree it is highly suspicious that the predictions are down in
the noise level in any test conditions that can be reasonably
obtainable in an existing laboratory. That is one of the reasons I am
so highly skeptical of there being any actual effect. One thing is
certain, if there is an effect then it is so small it is very
difficult to measure when the device is powered with a 700 watt
magnetron. Basically, they produced enough lift to levitate a
snowflake. Also, please remember that the first results from China
were orders of magnitude greater than what was measured here so we
also know that those first results were completely bogus.
The/. title is still BS. Results that warrant further investigation
(which is a boiler-plate phrase used in a vast number of research
papers) is very different from results that confirm an effect. It
is usually very bad from to not include such a phrase because
by omitting it you make it more difficult to get further research
funding.
Here is the first
page of the actual paper, including the abstract which says:
Our test campaign can not confirm or refute the claims of the EMDrive
but intends to independently assess possible side-effects in the
measurement methods used so far.
So the/. title says pretty much the exact opposite of what the actual
paper says.
I am still extremely skeptical that there is any actual effect. They
powered their device with a 700 watt magnatron and measured plus or
minus 20 micro-newtons of thrust. To put this in perspective,
one Newton is roughly the weight of an apple near the surface of the
Earth. If the thrust scales linearally with input power then you
would need 50,000 x 700 Watts = 35 Megawatts to levitate a single
apple. Of course the inventor claims that the thrust to power ratio
is highly non-linear so at these higher power levels you would get
a lot more thrust. I have not seen any sensible theoretical model
that explains why this would be so.
If you are using hundreds of watts to produce a handful of micro-newtons
then it is extremely likely there is no actual effect and what is being
measured is just some form of noise. This is especially true when the
so-called effect violates a primary law of physics.
And again, I reiterate what I said earlier. Where do rights come
from?
If they come from God, well, the religions practiced by virtually
all people worldwide have consistently said throughout their
history that such a marriage is not a marriage.
Religions are human-made institutions and thus, unlike God, are
fallible. Your confusion of human-made institutions with God
is the epitome of hubris. If you believe believe basic human
rights came from God then why do you think humans running
religions have a right to take them away?
This was the basic point the Founding Fathers were making when
using the terms "Nature's God" and "their Creator" in the
Declaration of Independence:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one
people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them
with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the
separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of
Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel
them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.
So what you are saying, that human-made religious institutions
can take away inalienable rights bestowed by a Creator or by
Nature's God, is the exact opposite of what the Founding
Fathers said in their Declaration if Independence.
Don't you remember the riots and food shortages and the
collapse of the entire infrastructure due to all of the
Y2K bugs bringing down civilization as we know it?
Snowden was starting to get some very begrudging props for his
role in the limited NSA reforms passed by the US Congress.
This laughably ridiculous and unsubstantiated attack on him was
deployed to help keep Snowden trapped in the traitor role.
The real danger here is that if the powers that be keep
destroying their own credibility like this, eventually
they will start to lose control and then all Hell will
break loose. They seem to be reacting emotionally, not
rationally and they seem to be losing touch with reality.
It reminds me of the craziness of the last days of the
Nixon White House. Only this time the problem goes much
deeper. It is no longer a single person and the tight knit
group surrounding him. The insanity has metastasized.
I was living on Cape Cod near the beach with a good view of
Martha's Vineyard which was three or four miles away. Sometimes
(very rarely) we would see a deer either swimming towards the
island or getting out of the ocean from the direction of the
island.
Whatever urge the deer had to swim across miles of ocean was
probably not beneficial for survival of the individual so why
would they do that? I concluded that although it was bad for
survival of the individual, it was terrific for survival of the
species since they would tend to not be locked into a specific
geographical location and could migrate across significant
barriers.
I think many humans have this same built-in wanderlust. In this
sense many animals, including humans, have adapted to deal with
climate change.
I have even wondered if our inclination to warfare was beneficial
because it caused the creative peace-loving types to spread out
away from the crowds. I think the real problem is that we are
not genetically prepared for a finite Earth. If the Earth were
infinite then I think many of the grave challenges we face which
threaten our species would not exist.
If I'm reading this right, Google incorporated Oracle's Standard
Library wholesale, instead of re-implementing the Standard
Library from scratch.
You are not reading it right. The standard library was
re-implemented using the same API. That's why the government's
stance would destroy the software industry as we know it because
a complete re-implementation would still be covered by the
copyright of the original implementation. This is exactly
copyrighting an idea instead of a particular expression of an
idea.
My guess is that the reason for this idiotic position is to
intentionally kill off Linux and all independent software
development in order to stop terrorism.
The Oxford Electric Bell or Clarendon Dry Pile is an experimental
electric bell that was set up in 1840 and which has run almost
continuously ever since, apart from occasional short
interruptions caused by high humidity.
[...] The Oxford Electric Bell does not demonstrate perpetual
motion. The bell will eventually stop when the dry piles have
distributed their charges equally if the clapper does not wear
out first.
On one hand, oil is HEAVILY TAXED from the consumer...
Which is ostensibly a use tax on roads and transportation infrastructure.
Would you prefer a more Socialist approach to funding
transportation and have people who walk, or bicycle, or drive
less, or use a more fuel efficient vehicle subsidize people who
get the most direct benefit from the roads and bridges? Or would
you prefer to let our transportation infrastructure crumble?
In addition, since exhaust from motor vehicles is a large
contributor to air pollution, a tax on gasoline can be seen as
compensation for the external costs of burning fossil fuels.
Laissez-faire free markets are notoriously bad at dealing with
externalities fairly or efficiently. The lack of a gasoline tax
or too low of a gasoline tax would be in effect a huge subsidy
for fossil fuels.
An example of the tremendous economic inefficiencies of subsidies
through insufficient taxing of externalities was the near total
destruction of light rail in the United States. The fuel tax for
commercial buses did not adequately reflect the advantage given
to buses over rail due to the road infrastructure provided by the
government. This led to the downfall and destruction of most of
the light rail in the United States even though it is extremely
more efficient than using buses.
All observed phenomena obey the laws of physics. By definition.
Bullshit. All correctly observed phenomena obey the laws
of physics. Funny thing is that the vast majority of observations
that apparently violate the laws of physics turn out to be
incorrect.
The current case is a good example. NASA used 100 watts and
measured a force of 50 microNewtons. You would need a force
20,000 times larger than that to levitate an apple. Unless
you increase the efficiency of the effect by many orders of
magnitude then, even if it exists at all, it has no practical
application.
In these sorts of situations where experimentalists measure a
very very small effect (the measurement made in China, which
was not in a vacuum, was over 100 times larger) and there is
no reasonable theoretical explanation for the effect and
the effect contradicts the established laws of physics then
the explanation is almost always experimental error.
Those conjectures are based on the author's explanations of the
mechanism, which we already know to be largely bunk.
Bzzt. Wrong. Those conjectures were from from Paul March
who is "an engineer at NASA Eagleworks". None of the authors
are named March.
Compared to the actual momentum imparted by 1kW worth of photons,
which is what current physics suggests would be the only source
of momentum, the amount of force measured is much more
significant. Hence, fairly efficient by comparison.
It is true that the small force that was measured was much
greater than the even smaller force of a photon drive (hence my
post and the quote therein) but it was still very small compared
to the energy that was used and was orders of magnitude smaller
(per kilowatt) than what March said would be needed for a
practical device.
The NASA tests measured the same force in both vacuum and
non-vacuum environments. Any results from China are suspect since
falsification is much more rampant there.
I agree that the result from China should not be trusted. On the
other hand, the NASA results measured a significantly smaller
force per kilowatt than what was measured in China. The article
implies the NASA experiments measured 50 microNewtons with a 100
watt input. Or 2 Megawatts per Newton. So you would need 2
Megawatts of power to levitate an apple:
The simulation for the 100 Watts input power (as used in the
latest tests at NASA) predicted only ~50 microNewtons (in
agreement with the experiments) [...]
I trust the extrapolations of the computer model even less than I
trust the experimental results from China. I think it is overly
optimistic to pin one's hopes of a viable method of propulsion on
a measurement of a force of 50 microNewtons from a device that is
putting out 100 watts. Extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence. I see no signs of such evidence here. I
think the laws of physics as we know them still hold and they
experimentalists made a mistake, just like with Pons and Fleischmann
(even though their claims did not violate basic laws of physics
like these so-called results do).
They didn't actually put in that much energy compared to the
thrust they measured.
The fine article says otherwise:
[...] assuming a 500 to 1,000 Newton/kW efficiency EM Drive system.
While the current maximum reported efficiency is close to only 1
Newton/kW (Prof. Yang's experiments in China), Mr. March noted
that such an increase in efficiency is most likely achievable
within the next 50 years provided that current EM Drive
propulsion conjectures are close to accurate.
Best case scenario here is that 1,000 Newton/kW is 100%
efficiency
in which case their current efficiency is 0.1% or worse. If
1,000 N/kW is not 100% then their current efficiency is even
worse than 0.1% in all experiments.
Also, note that Newtons measure force while kilowatts measure
power so it makes no sense to express efficiency as a ratio of
Newtons to kilowatts. For example, a c-clamp rated at 10,000
pounds-force will produce 44,000 Newtons for an indefinite period
of time without consuming any energy/power after the initial
tightening.
BTW, a 108 gram apple feels a force of roughly one Newton on
the surface of the earth. Using 1 kilowatt to keep an apple
suspended does seem extremely inefficient to me. Also note
that I can keep an apple suspended indefinitely with a table
and no ongoing energy expenditure.
Finally note that the one experiment that got close to one Newton/kW
was not done in a vacuum. It would not surprise me if that one
Newton of force could be explained by the
light-mill effect.
The expulsion (should that not be expulsion or something?) are micro waves...
hence the name: EM drive.
What you are describing is a photon drive where photons are the
propellant. But the fine article explains:
After consistent reports of thrust measurements from EM Drive
experiments in the US, UK, and China -- at thrust levels several
thousand times in excess of a photon rocket, and now under hard
vacuum conditions -- the question of where the thrust is coming
from deserves serious inquiry.
The reason I don't believe it is real is the same reason I
don't believe cold fusion is real. They put in metric ton-loads
of energy and measure a very small effect. They say they will need to
increase the efficiency by many orders of magnitude to create a
practical device. I say they probably made a mistake somewhere
and the tiny effect they measured is either noise or due to
something else they haven't yet accounted for.
They say one of the limiting factors (aside from violating the
laws of physics) is the political will to launch a large nuclear
power plant into space. The solution is obvious: use Cold Fusion
to power the EM drive. There is great efficiency here because
they can get two Nobel prizes with only one gadget.
Given the way traders think that is the damage that they caused.
A few more cases like that and perhaps they will consider that
they need to spend a couple of billion on making the bots not
panic.
Wall Street will never police itself. It is entirely geared
around making as much money as possible with absolutely no
concern whatsoever about what is good for society or for the
economy in general.
The only real solution is very simple and very easy. Simply tax
the transactions. It can be a tiny fraction of a cent per
transaction. This will add friction which will slow down this
hypersonic trading. The whole thing is ridiculous. These
superfast computerized trades are not providing a benefit to
society. In fact, they lead to instability which is the exact
opposite of what is good for society as a whole.
If we don't do this than the instability will lead to Wall
Street crashing our economy again. It is like the RIAA wanting
to be paid to make it difficult for people to listen to music.
Wall Street is making money hand over fist by making our entire
economic system unstable.
A quick Google(makerspace) brought me to the Wikipedia:
A hackerspace (also referred to as a hacklab, makerspace or
hackspace) is a community-operated workspace where people with
common interests, often in computers, machining, technology,
science, digital art or electronic art, can meet, socialize and
collaborate.
I'd like to highlight the entire quote. It explains concisely
how a makerspace is a particular kind of workshop in terms of
what kind of work is focused on and especially the community
aspects of socialization and collaboration. The distinction
is important because people are encouraged to come to makerspaces
to participate and socialize while workshops in general tend to
be closed to the public and usually won't even lend you tools.
A car analogy would be you complaining about the new-fangled term
"ATV" which refers to certain kinds of vehicles and you suggesting
the older and more generic term "vehicle" be used instead.
I'm not sure I understand what prevents me from transmitting FTL.
If I take it to the extreme and use very distant particles, what
happens between when I measure one and the time at which light
would reach one from the other?
The part you are missing is that the effect is very subtle. It
only shows up in a statistical analysis after the fact. You can
only notice/measure the effect if you repeat the experiment many
times and compare the statistics of what is happening with
particle B to the measurements made on particle A. If you look
only at particle B then you have no clue about what was going on
with particle A and if you only look at particle A then you have
no clue about particle B. It is only when you combine
information from particle B with information from particle A,
after the fact, that you see any effect at all.
To learn more search for "EPR paradox". Basically what happens
is that quantum mechanics violates locality without violating
causality. This violates our common sense which is based
on classical mechanics. Since wormholes are also non-local,
connecting entangled particles with wormholes is more appealing to
our common sense (for certain values of "common sense"). The
interesting thing is that quantum mechanics already explains
(predicts the outcomes of) entanglement experiments without any
wormholes. So if you add wormholes (in any meaningful way) then
you might need to change quantum mechanics. This is interesting
because it might lead to a way of combining relativity with
quantum mechanics which has been the unobtainable holy grail of
theoretical physics for many years.
The chances of this working out are very very small. The chances
of getting a Nobel prize if it does work out are very high.
1. Why have vaccines and autism rates both grown exponentially in
the last 25 years? (no, detection does not come close to
answering)
Oh for goodness sake, are you claiming these are the only things
that have grown rapidly over the past 25 years. Sugar
consumption has grown rapidly. Maybe, just maybe, the mother's
freakin' diet has something to do with autism. Why,
yes it does. That one study does not explain the majority of
cases of autism but it is a big red flashing neon sign pointing in
a direction to look. In addition to eating too much sugar,
which we now know can trigger autism, there are many many other
things mothers are exposed to on a daily basis in modern
societies that may also be detrimental to the health of their
babies such as: an overabundance of drugs (in food and water),
other highly processed foods, chemicals from plastics that get
into food and water, and many forms of pollution. Perhaps it
is related to increased stress or lack of sleep.
Many years ago, some shyster dickhead of a scientist made a
bunch of money (from a firm that was already planning a law
suit over the MMR vaccine) by concocting lies about a connection
between the MMR vaccine and autism. The science system worked,
the lies were caught, the paper was retracted and the shyster
lost his "scientist" badge.
What baffles me is that so many people cling to the results from
the exposed shyster who truly was only in it to make a bunch of
bucks while they ignore all the reputable scientific studies that
don't agree with the conclusion they have already jumped to. I'm
reminded of Feynman's description of cargo
cult science. One problem with your completely irrational
position (on the fence or not) is that it causes us to waste
valuable and limited resources following up on things we already
know are dead ends so we can't use those resources to look for
the real cause of the increase in autism.
Great post! But I take exception to this statement especially in
the current context where people think it is wrong that we have
the best government money can buy:
You have to accept that we are a competitive species, not a
collaborative one. We may do things together, but only in the
perspective of self-fulfillment. It's as if individual growth is
hard-coded in our genes. Maybe not you, certainly not me, but in
average, yes.
I agree that in general we all want to improve our lot in life.
I disagree that it is built into our genes for us to screw over
our fellow humans in the process. It has been documented in
books such as Mutual Aid: a factor of Evolution that
cooperation within a species is a much more effective (and
prevalent) strategy than competition within a species.
In addition, even if some mild forms of competition within a
species are beneficial, I totally reject the carte-blanche you
offer to even the most sadistic and psychopathic behavior in the
name of "my genes made me do it".
If your assumption that we are for the most part all
psychopaths is true then we as a species are completely and
totally fucked. The overwhelming evidence is the vast majority
of humans are not psychopaths. The problem is that almost
literally by hook and by crook we have developed a system
where psychopaths tend to rise to positions of leadership in
corporations and they have used their power to almost totally
subvert the government to their antisocial whims.
If you look up the definition of "psychopath":
a personality disorder characterized by enduring antisocial
behavior, diminished empathy and remorse, and disinhibited or
bold behavior.
you will see that what you described is psychopathic behavior.
While this aberration may have a genetic component, that doesn't
make it right; it doesn't mean it is widespread; and it certainly
doesn't mean we should develop a system that puts psychopaths
in positions of great power.
The distance to Mars is the same in English or Mandarin.
Sure. Tell that to the people who caused the
Mars Climate Orbiter to disintegrate in the Martian atmosphere.
They are now painfully aware of the fact that the distance to Mars depends
on the locale being used.
Slashdot Mirror
Typing this on a day-old Chromebook that has a search key mapped to that position [Caps Lock, I presume]. Anyone know how I can map that to Ctrl?
On Linux I use:
setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps
Yes, I agree it is highly suspicious that the predictions are down in the noise level in any test conditions that can be reasonably obtainable in an existing laboratory. That is one of the reasons I am so highly skeptical of there being any actual effect. One thing is certain, if there is an effect then it is so small it is very difficult to measure when the device is powered with a 700 watt magnetron. Basically, they produced enough lift to levitate a snowflake. Also, please remember that the first results from China were orders of magnitude greater than what was measured here so we also know that those first results were completely bogus.
The /. title is still BS. Results that warrant further investigation
(which is a boiler-plate phrase used in a vast number of research
papers) is very different from results that confirm an effect. It
is usually very bad from to not include such a phrase because
by omitting it you make it more difficult to get further research
funding.
Here is the first page of the actual paper, including the abstract which says:
Our test campaign can not confirm or refute the claims of the EMDrive but intends to independently assess possible side-effects in the measurement methods used so far.
So the /. title says pretty much the exact opposite of what the actual
paper says.
I am still extremely skeptical that there is any actual effect. They powered their device with a 700 watt magnatron and measured plus or minus 20 micro-newtons of thrust. To put this in perspective, one Newton is roughly the weight of an apple near the surface of the Earth. If the thrust scales linearally with input power then you would need 50,000 x 700 Watts = 35 Megawatts to levitate a single apple. Of course the inventor claims that the thrust to power ratio is highly non-linear so at these higher power levels you would get a lot more thrust. I have not seen any sensible theoretical model that explains why this would be so.
If you are using hundreds of watts to produce a handful of micro-newtons then it is extremely likely there is no actual effect and what is being measured is just some form of noise. This is especially true when the so-called effect violates a primary law of physics.
I will stop buying things from Airbus. That'll show 'em!
And again, I reiterate what I said earlier. Where do rights come from?
If they come from God, well, the religions practiced by virtually all people worldwide have consistently said throughout their history that such a marriage is not a marriage.
Religions are human-made institutions and thus, unlike God, are fallible. Your confusion of human-made institutions with God is the epitome of hubris. If you believe believe basic human rights came from God then why do you think humans running religions have a right to take them away?
This was the basic point the Founding Fathers were making when using the terms "Nature's God" and "their Creator" in the Declaration of Independence:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
So what you are saying, that human-made religious institutions can take away inalienable rights bestowed by a Creator or by Nature's God, is the exact opposite of what the Founding Fathers said in their Declaration if Independence.
Don't you remember the riots and food shortages and the collapse of the entire infrastructure due to all of the Y2K bugs bringing down civilization as we know it?
Me neither.
Snowden was starting to get some very begrudging props for his role in the limited NSA reforms passed by the US Congress. This laughably ridiculous and unsubstantiated attack on him was deployed to help keep Snowden trapped in the traitor role.
The real danger here is that if the powers that be keep destroying their own credibility like this, eventually they will start to lose control and then all Hell will break loose. They seem to be reacting emotionally, not rationally and they seem to be losing touch with reality. It reminds me of the craziness of the last days of the Nixon White House. Only this time the problem goes much deeper. It is no longer a single person and the tight knit group surrounding him. The insanity has metastasized.
I was living on Cape Cod near the beach with a good view of Martha's Vineyard which was three or four miles away. Sometimes (very rarely) we would see a deer either swimming towards the island or getting out of the ocean from the direction of the island.
Whatever urge the deer had to swim across miles of ocean was probably not beneficial for survival of the individual so why would they do that? I concluded that although it was bad for survival of the individual, it was terrific for survival of the species since they would tend to not be locked into a specific geographical location and could migrate across significant barriers.
I think many humans have this same built-in wanderlust. In this sense many animals, including humans, have adapted to deal with climate change. I have even wondered if our inclination to warfare was beneficial because it caused the creative peace-loving types to spread out away from the crowds. I think the real problem is that we are not genetically prepared for a finite Earth. If the Earth were infinite then I think many of the grave challenges we face which threaten our species would not exist.
If he had noticably dark skin then he might have been shot dead instead of simply being arrested.
I feel your paean.
If I'm reading this right, Google incorporated Oracle's Standard Library wholesale, instead of re-implementing the Standard Library from scratch.
You are not reading it right. The standard library was re-implemented using the same API. That's why the government's stance would destroy the software industry as we know it because a complete re-implementation would still be covered by the copyright of the original implementation. This is exactly copyrighting an idea instead of a particular expression of an idea.
My guess is that the reason for this idiotic position is to intentionally kill off Linux and all independent software development in order to stop terrorism.
The Wikipedia explains:
The Oxford Electric Bell or Clarendon Dry Pile is an experimental electric bell that was set up in 1840 and which has run almost continuously ever since, apart from occasional short interruptions caused by high humidity.
[...] The Oxford Electric Bell does not demonstrate perpetual motion. The bell will eventually stop when the dry piles have distributed their charges equally if the clapper does not wear out first.
On one hand, oil is HEAVILY TAXED from the consumer ...
Which is ostensibly a use tax on roads and transportation infrastructure.
Would you prefer a more Socialist approach to funding transportation and have people who walk, or bicycle, or drive less, or use a more fuel efficient vehicle subsidize people who get the most direct benefit from the roads and bridges? Or would you prefer to let our transportation infrastructure crumble?
In addition, since exhaust from motor vehicles is a large contributor to air pollution, a tax on gasoline can be seen as compensation for the external costs of burning fossil fuels. Laissez-faire free markets are notoriously bad at dealing with externalities fairly or efficiently. The lack of a gasoline tax or too low of a gasoline tax would be in effect a huge subsidy for fossil fuels.
An example of the tremendous economic inefficiencies of subsidies through insufficient taxing of externalities was the near total destruction of light rail in the United States. The fuel tax for commercial buses did not adequately reflect the advantage given to buses over rail due to the road infrastructure provided by the government. This led to the downfall and destruction of most of the light rail in the United States even though it is extremely more efficient than using buses.
All observed phenomena obey the laws of physics. By definition.
Bullshit. All correctly observed phenomena obey the laws of physics. Funny thing is that the vast majority of observations that apparently violate the laws of physics turn out to be incorrect.
The current case is a good example. NASA used 100 watts and measured a force of 50 microNewtons. You would need a force 20,000 times larger than that to levitate an apple. Unless you increase the efficiency of the effect by many orders of magnitude then, even if it exists at all, it has no practical application.
In these sorts of situations where experimentalists measure a very very small effect (the measurement made in China, which was not in a vacuum, was over 100 times larger) and there is no reasonable theoretical explanation for the effect and the effect contradicts the established laws of physics then the explanation is almost always experimental error.
Those conjectures are based on the author's explanations of the mechanism, which we already know to be largely bunk.
Bzzt. Wrong. Those conjectures were from from Paul March who is "an engineer at NASA Eagleworks". None of the authors are named March.
Compared to the actual momentum imparted by 1kW worth of photons, which is what current physics suggests would be the only source of momentum, the amount of force measured is much more significant. Hence, fairly efficient by comparison.
It is true that the small force that was measured was much greater than the even smaller force of a photon drive (hence my post and the quote therein) but it was still very small compared to the energy that was used and was orders of magnitude smaller (per kilowatt) than what March said would be needed for a practical device.
The NASA tests measured the same force in both vacuum and non-vacuum environments. Any results from China are suspect since falsification is much more rampant there.
I agree that the result from China should not be trusted. On the other hand, the NASA results measured a significantly smaller force per kilowatt than what was measured in China. The article implies the NASA experiments measured 50 microNewtons with a 100 watt input. Or 2 Megawatts per Newton. So you would need 2 Megawatts of power to levitate an apple:
The simulation for the 100 Watts input power (as used in the latest tests at NASA) predicted only ~50 microNewtons (in agreement with the experiments) [...]
I trust the extrapolations of the computer model even less than I trust the experimental results from China. I think it is overly optimistic to pin one's hopes of a viable method of propulsion on a measurement of a force of 50 microNewtons from a device that is putting out 100 watts. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I see no signs of such evidence here. I think the laws of physics as we know them still hold and they experimentalists made a mistake, just like with Pons and Fleischmann (even though their claims did not violate basic laws of physics like these so-called results do).
They didn't actually put in that much energy compared to the thrust they measured.
The fine article says otherwise:
[...] assuming a 500 to 1,000 Newton/kW efficiency EM Drive system.
While the current maximum reported efficiency is close to only 1 Newton/kW (Prof. Yang's experiments in China), Mr. March noted that such an increase in efficiency is most likely achievable within the next 50 years provided that current EM Drive propulsion conjectures are close to accurate.
Best case scenario here is that 1,000 Newton/kW is 100% efficiency in which case their current efficiency is 0.1% or worse. If 1,000 N/kW is not 100% then their current efficiency is even worse than 0.1% in all experiments.
Also, note that Newtons measure force while kilowatts measure power so it makes no sense to express efficiency as a ratio of Newtons to kilowatts. For example, a c-clamp rated at 10,000 pounds-force will produce 44,000 Newtons for an indefinite period of time without consuming any energy/power after the initial tightening.
BTW, a 108 gram apple feels a force of roughly one Newton on the surface of the earth. Using 1 kilowatt to keep an apple suspended does seem extremely inefficient to me. Also note that I can keep an apple suspended indefinitely with a table and no ongoing energy expenditure.
Finally note that the one experiment that got close to one Newton/kW was not done in a vacuum. It would not surprise me if that one Newton of force could be explained by the light-mill effect.
Oops, I meant PMM. I have Lexdysia. My ships travel backward.
I think you mean Lexxdysia. (link)
The expulsion (should that not be expulsion or something?) are micro waves ...
hence the name: EM drive.
What you are describing is a photon drive where photons are the propellant. But the fine article explains:
After consistent reports of thrust measurements from EM Drive experiments in the US, UK, and China -- at thrust levels several thousand times in excess of a photon rocket, and now under hard vacuum conditions -- the question of where the thrust is coming from deserves serious inquiry.
The reason I don't believe it is real is the same reason I don't believe cold fusion is real. They put in metric ton-loads of energy and measure a very small effect. They say they will need to increase the efficiency by many orders of magnitude to create a practical device. I say they probably made a mistake somewhere and the tiny effect they measured is either noise or due to something else they haven't yet accounted for.
They say one of the limiting factors (aside from violating the laws of physics) is the political will to launch a large nuclear power plant into space. The solution is obvious: use Cold Fusion to power the EM drive. There is great efficiency here because they can get two Nobel prizes with only one gadget.
Given the way traders think that is the damage that they caused. A few more cases like that and perhaps they will consider that they need to spend a couple of billion on making the bots not panic.
Wall Street will never police itself. It is entirely geared around making as much money as possible with absolutely no concern whatsoever about what is good for society or for the economy in general.
The only real solution is very simple and very easy. Simply tax the transactions. It can be a tiny fraction of a cent per transaction. This will add friction which will slow down this hypersonic trading. The whole thing is ridiculous. These superfast computerized trades are not providing a benefit to society. In fact, they lead to instability which is the exact opposite of what is good for society as a whole.
If we don't do this than the instability will lead to Wall Street crashing our economy again. It is like the RIAA wanting to be paid to make it difficult for people to listen to music. Wall Street is making money hand over fist by making our entire economic system unstable.
A quick Google(makerspace) brought me to the Wikipedia:
A hackerspace (also referred to as a hacklab, makerspace or hackspace) is a community-operated workspace where people with common interests, often in computers, machining, technology, science, digital art or electronic art, can meet, socialize and collaborate.
I'd like to highlight the entire quote. It explains concisely how a makerspace is a particular kind of workshop in terms of what kind of work is focused on and especially the community aspects of socialization and collaboration. The distinction is important because people are encouraged to come to makerspaces to participate and socialize while workshops in general tend to be closed to the public and usually won't even lend you tools.
A car analogy would be you complaining about the new-fangled term "ATV" which refers to certain kinds of vehicles and you suggesting the older and more generic term "vehicle" be used instead.
I'm not sure I understand what prevents me from transmitting FTL. If I take it to the extreme and use very distant particles, what happens between when I measure one and the time at which light would reach one from the other?
The part you are missing is that the effect is very subtle. It only shows up in a statistical analysis after the fact. You can only notice/measure the effect if you repeat the experiment many times and compare the statistics of what is happening with particle B to the measurements made on particle A. If you look only at particle B then you have no clue about what was going on with particle A and if you only look at particle A then you have no clue about particle B. It is only when you combine information from particle B with information from particle A, after the fact, that you see any effect at all.
To learn more search for "EPR paradox". Basically what happens is that quantum mechanics violates locality without violating causality. This violates our common sense which is based on classical mechanics. Since wormholes are also non-local, connecting entangled particles with wormholes is more appealing to our common sense (for certain values of "common sense"). The interesting thing is that quantum mechanics already explains (predicts the outcomes of) entanglement experiments without any wormholes. So if you add wormholes (in any meaningful way) then you might need to change quantum mechanics. This is interesting because it might lead to a way of combining relativity with quantum mechanics which has been the unobtainable holy grail of theoretical physics for many years.
The chances of this working out are very very small. The chances of getting a Nobel prize if it does work out are very high.
1. Why have vaccines and autism rates both grown exponentially in the last 25 years? (no, detection does not come close to answering)
Oh for goodness sake, are you claiming these are the only things that have grown rapidly over the past 25 years. Sugar consumption has grown rapidly. Maybe, just maybe, the mother's freakin' diet has something to do with autism. Why, yes it does. That one study does not explain the majority of cases of autism but it is a big red flashing neon sign pointing in a direction to look. In addition to eating too much sugar, which we now know can trigger autism, there are many many other things mothers are exposed to on a daily basis in modern societies that may also be detrimental to the health of their babies such as: an overabundance of drugs (in food and water), other highly processed foods, chemicals from plastics that get into food and water, and many forms of pollution. Perhaps it is related to increased stress or lack of sleep.
Many years ago, some shyster dickhead of a scientist made a bunch of money (from a firm that was already planning a law suit over the MMR vaccine) by concocting lies about a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. The science system worked, the lies were caught, the paper was retracted and the shyster lost his "scientist" badge.
What baffles me is that so many people cling to the results from the exposed shyster who truly was only in it to make a bunch of bucks while they ignore all the reputable scientific studies that don't agree with the conclusion they have already jumped to. I'm reminded of Feynman's description of cargo cult science. One problem with your completely irrational position (on the fence or not) is that it causes us to waste valuable and limited resources following up on things we already know are dead ends so we can't use those resources to look for the real cause of the increase in autism.
Great post! But I take exception to this statement especially in the current context where people think it is wrong that we have the best government money can buy:
You have to accept that we are a competitive species, not a collaborative one. We may do things together, but only in the perspective of self-fulfillment. It's as if individual growth is hard-coded in our genes. Maybe not you, certainly not me, but in average, yes.
I agree that in general we all want to improve our lot in life. I disagree that it is built into our genes for us to screw over our fellow humans in the process. It has been documented in books such as Mutual Aid: a factor of Evolution that cooperation within a species is a much more effective (and prevalent) strategy than competition within a species.
In addition, even if some mild forms of competition within a species are beneficial, I totally reject the carte-blanche you offer to even the most sadistic and psychopathic behavior in the name of "my genes made me do it".
If your assumption that we are for the most part all psychopaths is true then we as a species are completely and totally fucked. The overwhelming evidence is the vast majority of humans are not psychopaths. The problem is that almost literally by hook and by crook we have developed a system where psychopaths tend to rise to positions of leadership in corporations and they have used their power to almost totally subvert the government to their antisocial whims.
If you look up the definition of "psychopath":
a personality disorder characterized by enduring antisocial behavior, diminished empathy and remorse, and disinhibited or bold behavior.
you will see that what you described is psychopathic behavior. While this aberration may have a genetic component, that doesn't make it right; it doesn't mean it is widespread; and it certainly doesn't mean we should develop a system that puts psychopaths in positions of great power.
The distance to Mars is the same in English or Mandarin.
Sure. Tell that to the people who caused the Mars Climate Orbiter to disintegrate in the Martian atmosphere. They are now painfully aware of the fact that the distance to Mars depends on the locale being used.