I just glanced at this article title on the right sidebar, and it showed that there were 666 comments. Spooky, considering it is an article about vehicle tracking. Hmmmmm.
I'd love to see rapid advances in DC power distribution systems. Other areas would benefit, too. Consider alone the reduction in RF noise in electronic systems that would be achieved by eliminating all those transformers and switching power supplies. Granted, DC/DC converters still use switching power supplies - but there lies my wish for advancement.
Shhhh! I'm in the process of drafting an article about my Open-Source, DRM-enabled, Rootkit Deployable Space Elevator Control Module complete with Socket-F support and Carbon Nanotube flux control. It's cool. And it's 50% more efficient than anything being done today. The only thing holding me back is the RIAA and MPAA. . .
Keep in mind that Kw=power and Kw-hour=energy. If it takes 5 days to generate 1 _Kw-hour_ then it would just be an unusable apparatus.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled program. . .
I enjoyed the humor of the parent post's link. However, what it misses is that Intelligent Design doesn't discount evolution "just because we don't like it," rather, because it simply does not accurately describe the diversity of life on the planet - nor does it sufficiently explain the complexity of the molecular mechanisms required to produce even the simplest of proteins.
What evolution really says is that amino acids were formed from simple organic compounds, chemically combined in the presence of sufficient activation energy (lightning). After that, DNA "evolves" and small evolutionary changes in DNA over the ages result in the life we see now. That's a pretty big leap - from amino acids, to complex proteins to DNA - each of which represent a many order-of-magnitude increase in complexity. In fact, more "evolution" would have to take place to go from simple amino acids to DNA than it would to go from single-cell organizms to human beings! How long did it take for all this to happen? I'm afriad that 3 billion years (the time from when the first single-celled fossils appear until beginning of the paleozoic era where complex life first shows up) is simply not enough time - probabilistically, mathmatically, realistically.
Intelligent Design has everything to do with the periodic table. If the quantum mechanical states didn't exist as they do, atomic structures could not exist to form the molecules which result in our proteins and amino acids in the first place. No periodicity, no life. The periodic table accurately shows how the physical properties of matter exist in the universe and how they relate to each other. Proponents of Intelligent Design believe that it accurately explains the diversity and complexity of life on the planet - something that evolution does not. As such, it takes more faith to believe in evolution than it does to believe in Intelligent Design - faith in a remote probabilistic outcome as opposed to a deliberate, reasoned existence.
I'm not asking you to believe in Intelligent Design - I'm just pointing out that taking cheap shots without the underlying background knowledge are a reflection of ignorance - and bigotry. Moreover, Intelligent Design is not associated with most other creationist organizations - we are not all the same.
Did you mean "studying in the _US_ as an alternative to a U.K university. .."? Granted Cambridge and Oxford are in a class by themselves. What I'm talking about is universities like New Mexico State University. We have on the order of 10% of our enrollment (out of 16,000 or so on the main campus) coming from countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, Kuwait, China, etc. There are hundreds of universities in the US with similar stats.
We currently run a huge deficit. All economists tell you this isn't good for the country. Although most economists will tell you that a short-term deficit is a good thing. We have historically payed back EVERY debt our country has owed - even Reagan's. We'll pay back this one, too.
Our healthcare system is in shambles. .. No amount of money thrown at the system will fix that. Maybe if we targeted the lawyers and insurance companies. ..
Our education system is in disarray. Students are non-achievers these days. We are also un-able to attract bright students from abroad! See above - but your third statement is simply not true. The best and brightest from all countries still come to the US to attend college and graduate school.
Out-sourcing is out of hand. We are exporting our manufacturing base. .. That isn't the government's fault - it's the American consumer who pays bottom-dollar for the cheapest goods.
Need I mention immigration? No, please don't. They come here because we have things they don't.
The heat rates induced by this technology won't do much for the overall thermal gradients in the ocean. What it will do is actually _cool_ the surface of the ocean around where you pump the water back in. If you're taking advantage of the temperature difference between the top and bottom layers of the sea, the water you dump will always be cooler than the top layer.
This is just using the ocean as a giant solar pond. Their main trouble isn't going to be what to do with the waste heat, but what to do about salt crystals precipitating on their plumbing as the salinity of the process water changes. Deep seawater is much saltier than surface water.
I read it as saying that they were using the cold water through a chiller tower of some sort to condense water from the moist tropical atmosphere. They're not "desalinating" at all - just performing a localized dehumidification and collecting the condensate.
I posted an "Ask Slashdot" question almost identical to this one about 6-months ago - but it was rejected (go figure). Regardless, I got what I wanted from this one! Thanks folks.
We now seem to have a well-behaved and intelligent discussion going on from what started off as a jab against God from the original parent. I don't mind well thought-out arguments, I just don't like jabs.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, and I could not have said it better. As (I think it was) Hawking said, the multiple higher dimensions allow for a universe in which God has nothing to do, although I don't think the average Slashdot reader understands the more advanced cosmological theories as clearly as you do.
Nevertheless, I don't believe in God because I believe He created the universe, I belive in God because my heart tells me to. That may sound funny coming from a scientist/engineer, but that's who I am. It still doesn't stop me from learning and wondering.
Intelligent Design is just as threatening to the "young earth" Christian as it is to the evolutionist. If ID starts to take off, you'll actually start seeing more evolution taught in churches. ID doesn't say that evolution doesn't happen, it just says that it is a more complicated process than can result from pure natural selection - hence the need for a deliberate creative force to "get everything going."
It is that argument precisely that has lead to the philosophical concept of an "un-caused cause." Causality can be reasoned back to infinity, which is a paradox of the same flavor as Zeno's Bridge and others. The solution to this and other paradoxes is to reason that an infinite sequence of events can in fact take place in a finite amount of time. For Christians (and other monotheists), this is the notion that God has always existed, that he is "un-caused" and outside of our understanding of space and time. For nonthesists (atheists and others), they use this paradox solution as evidence against God - that there was nothing for him to do in creation, it just happened as a natural consequence of fundamental physical laws to be yet discovered and understood. However, the philosophical weight actually goes against the naturalist in this argument, as we need to know what caused the events which caused the events which caused the universe to come into being. In short, God can be un-caused, but nature can't be.
Either way, I don't see a problem with the definition of science as presented in the article. It sounds a lot like what I was taught in public school in New Mexico - a state not known for its conservative education policies.
1. Regenerative power systems (the kind you can deplete and re-charge, whether that be solar cells and batteries, solar cells and closed-loop fuel cells, etc.) need to mature far beyond what is currently capable in order to make these craft work. Consider that the solar panels need to not only power all the essential equipment (radios, drive motors, wifi, etc.), but they also need to have enough excess to recharge batteries for night operations. For something very flat like the Stratellite(TM), this means they won't be able to operate too far north (or south) because the angle the airship makes with the sun will be too great - too few photons will be striking the cells. For the kinds of power densities they will need, this may mean not operating north of New York City, for example.
2. Now consider what happens at night. You have zero solar power - 100% comes from your storage bank (batteries, fuel cells, hyper-flywheels, etc). In the northern hemisphere at winter, you will need to plan on about 16-hours of power storage capacity before the sun gets high enough in the sky to start powering the ship AND recharge the batteries.
3. Assuming the nominal drag coefficient numbers others have talked about (~.05), an average airspeed of 40-knots, and assuming that the electric motors are 90% efficient at converting electricity to mechanical power, and that the propellers are 60% efficient at converting the mechanical power to useful work (thrust), this craft will need 45kW of power available 24-7 JUST FOR PROPULSION at 70,000 feet.
4. Assuming that their regenerative storage system has a power density of 100 Watt-hours per pound (which is optimistic), this equals 7,200 POUNDS OF POWER STORAGE REQUIRED!
5. Again, at 70,000 feet, assuming the structure weighs in at around 1,000 pounds (I'd like to see that. ..) then they have a lift deficit of 3,750 pounds. They'll never get to 70,000 feet. They might get to 60,000 feet, but then they'll only have around 100-pounds of payload capacity available. Plus, the air is denser at 60,000 feet, the propulsive power is greater, the battery weight is higher, etc etc etc.
While witty, that scenario doesn't hold up if you consider that either the star or the galaxy had to undergo a (relatively) brief period of acceleration in order to exhibit the behavior we currently see. The probability of every star in the galaxy except this one undergoing that kind of acceleration is minuscule - however, the probability of one star meeting the conditions of the proposed hypothesis is quite high.
That's how we solve these kinds of paradox problems in relativity. The classic "Twin Paradox" is solved in a similar manner. For those who need a refresher, it is the 'paradox' whereby one twin takes a trip at some substantial fraction of the speed of light and returns to find the other several decades older than himself (or herself) due to the time dilation effects encountered during the trip. The paradox is: From the point of view of the twin on the trip, it is the twin on Earth and everything else that ends up going very fast. Why shouldn't they be the ones to experience time dilation? The answer is, a deliberate acceleration is applied to the twin on the spaceship (reaction mass burning, converting energy to momentum). This defines the reference frame for the experiment, resulting in the correct application of the time dilation effect.
For our wayward star, its reference frame was defined by its proximity to our galactic center, and the probability that a super-massive black hole smacked it out of the galaxy's gravitational hole.
Think about it this way. . .
If your 2 lightyear long hose was a solid piece of, say, brass and you hit one end with a hammer, how long would it take for you to notice something (vibration, movement, etc.) at the other end? We know that for even short pieces of metal on Earth, there is not an instantaneous response. Your marble example is very much the same - any mechanical setup that relies upon one object (marble, molecule, electron, etc.) bumping into another to transfer energy can only do that at a finite rate. I think the above-average person has a pretty good grasp of the Speed of Sound. Your marble example would transfer energy at some fixed rate analogous to the "speed of sound" of your marble/hose medium. You would not be transmitting information faster than the speed of light. Not even close, unfortunately.
You make good points. This is something I've become increasingly aware of while watching TV with my (almost) 4-year-old daughter. For her, computer-generated "reality" is, in fact, reality. She's never known anything else. I had to explain how the men "dying" in the new 007-GoldenEye commercial weren't real men - muting the commercials isn't enough anymore. Concerned parents either need to completely change the channel during commercials (with the risk that something worse might be on an adjacent channel) - or stop watching live TV altogether.
Then again, I wonder if there are enough of us to make a difference to the ad revenue generated by such commercials.
to get you all riled up like that, eh kid? I'm just impressed that out of around 2700 comments (mostly pro-Kerry) - somebody cared enough to read through them, mod me down (twice) AND reply!
I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it. (--paraphrased quote)
SO, it will be interesting to see how the final certified vote counts go. We may find that other swing states were closer than we thought. It only takes two or three of them to shift the other way and counter Ohio. In my county in New Mexico, there were still 20,000 uncounted votes as of this morning (about 40% of the total cast). It'd be a shame if JK quit too soon. ..
Slashdot Mirror
I just glanced at this article title on the right sidebar, and it showed that there were 666 comments. Spooky, considering it is an article about vehicle tracking. Hmmmmm.
I once put the Cotton Balls into the "T Remover." Poor little guy. . .
I'd love to see rapid advances in DC power distribution systems. Other areas would benefit, too. Consider alone the reduction in RF noise in electronic systems that would be achieved by eliminating all those transformers and switching power supplies. Granted, DC/DC converters still use switching power supplies - but there lies my wish for advancement.
Shhhh! I'm in the process of drafting an article about my Open-Source, DRM-enabled, Rootkit Deployable Space Elevator Control Module complete with Socket-F support and Carbon Nanotube flux control. It's cool. And it's 50% more efficient than anything being done today. The only thing holding me back is the RIAA and MPAA. . .
Keep in mind that Kw=power and Kw-hour=energy. If it takes 5 days to generate 1 _Kw-hour_ then it would just be an unusable apparatus.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled program. . .
Okay, I'll try.
Q: Where did the Beagle 2 go on its vacation?
A: All over the Martian countryside!
I enjoyed the humor of the parent post's link. However, what it misses is that Intelligent Design doesn't discount evolution "just because we don't like it," rather, because it simply does not accurately describe the diversity of life on the planet - nor does it sufficiently explain the complexity of the molecular mechanisms required to produce even the simplest of proteins.
What evolution really says is that amino acids were formed from simple organic compounds, chemically combined in the presence of sufficient activation energy (lightning). After that, DNA "evolves" and small evolutionary changes in DNA over the ages result in the life we see now. That's a pretty big leap - from amino acids, to complex proteins to DNA - each of which represent a many order-of-magnitude increase in complexity. In fact, more "evolution" would have to take place to go from simple amino acids to DNA than it would to go from single-cell organizms to human beings! How long did it take for all this to happen? I'm afriad that 3 billion years (the time from when the first single-celled fossils appear until beginning of the paleozoic era where complex life first shows up) is simply not enough time - probabilistically, mathmatically, realistically.
Intelligent Design has everything to do with the periodic table. If the quantum mechanical states didn't exist as they do, atomic structures could not exist to form the molecules which result in our proteins and amino acids in the first place. No periodicity, no life. The periodic table accurately shows how the physical properties of matter exist in the universe and how they relate to each other. Proponents of Intelligent Design believe that it accurately explains the diversity and complexity of life on the planet - something that evolution does not. As such, it takes more faith to believe in evolution than it does to believe in Intelligent Design - faith in a remote probabilistic outcome as opposed to a deliberate, reasoned existence.
I'm not asking you to believe in Intelligent Design - I'm just pointing out that taking cheap shots without the underlying background knowledge are a reflection of ignorance - and bigotry. Moreover, Intelligent Design is not associated with most other creationist organizations - we are not all the same.
Bart: "Dad, You Killed zombie Flanders!"
Homer: "He was a zombie?."
Did you mean "studying in the _US_ as an alternative to a U.K university. . ."? Granted Cambridge and Oxford are in a class by themselves. What I'm talking about is universities like New Mexico State University. We have on the order of 10% of our enrollment (out of 16,000 or so on the main campus) coming from countries like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iraq, Kuwait, China, etc. There are hundreds of universities in the US with similar stats.
Of course, I imagine England is similar, too.
"bogaboga" writes:
. .
.
We currently run a huge deficit. All economists tell you this isn't good for the country.
Although most economists will tell you that a short-term deficit is a good thing. We have historically payed back EVERY debt our country has owed - even Reagan's. We'll pay back this one, too.
Our healthcare system is in shambles. .
No amount of money thrown at the system will fix that. Maybe if we targeted the lawyers and insurance companies. .
Our education system is in disarray. Students are non-achievers these days. We are also un-able to attract bright students from abroad!
See above - but your third statement is simply not true. The best and brightest from all countries still come to the US to attend college and graduate school.
Out-sourcing is out of hand. We are exporting our manufacturing base. .
That isn't the government's fault - it's the American consumer who pays bottom-dollar for the cheapest goods.
Need I mention immigration?
No, please don't. They come here because we have things they don't.
Let me stop...
Thank you.
The heat rates induced by this technology won't do much for the overall thermal gradients in the ocean. What it will do is actually _cool_ the surface of the ocean around where you pump the water back in. If you're taking advantage of the temperature difference between the top and bottom layers of the sea, the water you dump will always be cooler than the top layer.
This is just using the ocean as a giant solar pond. Their main trouble isn't going to be what to do with the waste heat, but what to do about salt crystals precipitating on their plumbing as the salinity of the process water changes. Deep seawater is much saltier than surface water.
I read it as saying that they were using the cold water through a chiller tower of some sort to condense water from the moist tropical atmosphere. They're not "desalinating" at all - just performing a localized dehumidification and collecting the condensate.
I posted an "Ask Slashdot" question almost identical to this one about 6-months ago - but it was rejected (go figure). Regardless, I got what I wanted from this one! Thanks folks.
Q: . . .when Luke takes Vaders mask off at the end of Jedi, no scar.
.Luke and Leia also discuss their mother in Jedi
A: Bacta. Lots of Bacta.
Q: . .
A: More Bacta.
We now seem to have a well-behaved and intelligent discussion going on from what started off as a jab against God from the original parent. I don't mind well thought-out arguments, I just don't like jabs.
My work here is done.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, and I could not have said it better. As (I think it was) Hawking said, the multiple higher dimensions allow for a universe in which God has nothing to do, although I don't think the average Slashdot reader understands the more advanced cosmological theories as clearly as you do.
Nevertheless, I don't believe in God because I believe He created the universe, I belive in God because my heart tells me to. That may sound funny coming from a scientist/engineer, but that's who I am. It still doesn't stop me from learning and wondering.
Intelligent Design is just as threatening to the "young earth" Christian as it is to the evolutionist. If ID starts to take off, you'll actually start seeing more evolution taught in churches. ID doesn't say that evolution doesn't happen, it just says that it is a more complicated process than can result from pure natural selection - hence the need for a deliberate creative force to "get everything going."
It is that argument precisely that has lead to the philosophical concept of an "un-caused cause." Causality can be reasoned back to infinity, which is a paradox of the same flavor as Zeno's Bridge and others. The solution to this and other paradoxes is to reason that an infinite sequence of events can in fact take place in a finite amount of time. For Christians (and other monotheists), this is the notion that God has always existed, that he is "un-caused" and outside of our understanding of space and time. For nonthesists (atheists and others), they use this paradox solution as evidence against God - that there was nothing for him to do in creation, it just happened as a natural consequence of fundamental physical laws to be yet discovered and understood. However, the philosophical weight actually goes against the naturalist in this argument, as we need to know what caused the events which caused the events which caused the universe to come into being. In short, God can be un-caused, but nature can't be.
Either way, I don't see a problem with the definition of science as presented in the article. It sounds a lot like what I was taught in public school in New Mexico - a state not known for its conservative education policies.
I am an aerospace engineer. A few thoughts. . .
.) then they have a lift deficit of 3,750 pounds. They'll never get to 70,000 feet. They might get to 60,000 feet, but then they'll only have around 100-pounds of payload capacity available. Plus, the air is denser at 60,000 feet, the propulsive power is greater, the battery weight is higher, etc etc etc.
1. Regenerative power systems (the kind you can deplete and re-charge, whether that be solar cells and batteries, solar cells and closed-loop fuel cells, etc.) need to mature far beyond what is currently capable in order to make these craft work. Consider that the solar panels need to not only power all the essential equipment (radios, drive motors, wifi, etc.), but they also need to have enough excess to recharge batteries for night operations. For something very flat like the Stratellite(TM), this means they won't be able to operate too far north (or south) because the angle the airship makes with the sun will be too great - too few photons will be striking the cells. For the kinds of power densities they will need, this may mean not operating north of New York City, for example.
2. Now consider what happens at night. You have zero solar power - 100% comes from your storage bank (batteries, fuel cells, hyper-flywheels, etc). In the northern hemisphere at winter, you will need to plan on about 16-hours of power storage capacity before the sun gets high enough in the sky to start powering the ship AND recharge the batteries.
3. Assuming the nominal drag coefficient numbers others have talked about (~.05), an average airspeed of 40-knots, and assuming that the electric motors are 90% efficient at converting electricity to mechanical power, and that the propellers are 60% efficient at converting the mechanical power to useful work (thrust), this craft will need 45kW of power available 24-7 JUST FOR PROPULSION at 70,000 feet. 4. Assuming that their regenerative storage system has a power density of 100 Watt-hours per pound (which is optimistic), this equals 7,200 POUNDS OF POWER STORAGE REQUIRED! 5. Again, at 70,000 feet, assuming the structure weighs in at around 1,000 pounds (I'd like to see that. .
While witty, that scenario doesn't hold up if you consider that either the star or the galaxy had to undergo a (relatively) brief period of acceleration in order to exhibit the behavior we currently see. The probability of every star in the galaxy except this one undergoing that kind of acceleration is minuscule - however, the probability of one star meeting the conditions of the proposed hypothesis is quite high.
That's how we solve these kinds of paradox problems in relativity. The classic "Twin Paradox" is solved in a similar manner. For those who need a refresher, it is the 'paradox' whereby one twin takes a trip at some substantial fraction of the speed of light and returns to find the other several decades older than himself (or herself) due to the time dilation effects encountered during the trip. The paradox is: From the point of view of the twin on the trip, it is the twin on Earth and everything else that ends up going very fast. Why shouldn't they be the ones to experience time dilation? The answer is, a deliberate acceleration is applied to the twin on the spaceship (reaction mass burning, converting energy to momentum). This defines the reference frame for the experiment, resulting in the correct application of the time dilation effect.
For our wayward star, its reference frame was defined by its proximity to our galactic center, and the probability that a super-massive black hole smacked it out of the galaxy's gravitational hole.
Think about it this way. . . If your 2 lightyear long hose was a solid piece of, say, brass and you hit one end with a hammer, how long would it take for you to notice something (vibration, movement, etc.) at the other end? We know that for even short pieces of metal on Earth, there is not an instantaneous response. Your marble example is very much the same - any mechanical setup that relies upon one object (marble, molecule, electron, etc.) bumping into another to transfer energy can only do that at a finite rate. I think the above-average person has a pretty good grasp of the Speed of Sound. Your marble example would transfer energy at some fixed rate analogous to the "speed of sound" of your marble/hose medium. You would not be transmitting information faster than the speed of light. Not even close, unfortunately.
You make good points. This is something I've become increasingly aware of while watching TV with my (almost) 4-year-old daughter. For her, computer-generated "reality" is, in fact, reality. She's never known anything else. I had to explain how the men "dying" in the new 007-GoldenEye commercial weren't real men - muting the commercials isn't enough anymore. Concerned parents either need to completely change the channel during commercials (with the risk that something worse might be on an adjacent channel) - or stop watching live TV altogether.
Then again, I wonder if there are enough of us to make a difference to the ad revenue generated by such commercials.
You don't have to shake a Mac to clear the screen.
MINE goes up to eleven.
to get you all riled up like that, eh kid? I'm just impressed that out of around 2700 comments (mostly pro-Kerry) - somebody cared enough to read through them, mod me down (twice) AND reply!
.
I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it. (--paraphrased quote)
SO, it will be interesting to see how the final certified vote counts go. We may find that other swing states were closer than we thought. It only takes two or three of them to shift the other way and counter Ohio. In my county in New Mexico, there were still 20,000 uncounted votes as of this morning (about 40% of the total cast). It'd be a shame if JK quit too soon. .