Yes heat itself can be a source of energy, because heat is a kind of energy and it can be converted into other forms. Objects emit light based solely on their heat, not heat deltas, all the time. Objects that are colder than their surroundings still emit light. A solution that is colder than it's surroundings, but still hot enough to cause certain reactions to occur, still causes those reactions to occur. If these reactions are endothermic then the solution will cool, but the reactions will continue until the solution cools enough.
Heat engines require a heat delta, but that's not the only way of turning heat energy into other forms of energy.
Yeah, funny how people forget that we are social animals. Being social doesn't mean we're always nice and not selfish pricks, but it does mean there is a tendency just as real as selfishness to want to strengthen social bonds, and see to the health of the group.
I once read, on the Internet, an excerpt of a book written about the cabinet meetings held by Truman discussing the possible endings of the war and the use of the atomic bomb, by one of the people who was there. It was a fascinating read. I really wish I could find it again. I suspect it is gone.
I can summarize though each of the options and what the general opinion about them was.
1) Accept conditional surrender -- they were aware that Japan had made an overture for conditional surrender. They were unclear what the terms of this surrender were supposed to be. They considered completely unacceptable anything that allowed Japan to retain the capacity to make war, and were generally against the idea of letting the nation who had initiated an attack on the U.S. get away with a mere conditional surrender.
2) Use the atom bomb to force unconditional surrender.
3) Do an off-shore demonstration of the atomic bomb in the ocean and demand unconditional surrender. While advocated for by some, this was considered highly risky. The chance that the Emperor would see it as some kind of trick, and leave the U.S. with too few weapons to use Option 2.
4) Wait for Russia to engage Japan, forcing conditional surrender. It seemed like everyone believed that once Russia entered the Pacific War, that Japan would quickly surrender. The biggest problem with this option was that it would mean Japan surrendering to both Russia and the U.S. They wanted to be in control, and not have a repeat of the surrender of Germany.
5) Invade the mainland -- this was brought up for completeness, but was clearly the least favored option. In any case, it was believed that Option 4 would occur before this option could realistically be put into play.
I personally don't disagree with Truman's decision to use the bomb. What I disagree with is the revisionist history that creates a false dichotomy between nuke and invade, so that extremely simple moral calculus makes it obvious that the nuke option is better. The real situation was substantially more complex, and it's a disservice to both the people making this difficult decision and to our efforts to learn from history to pretend it was simple.
It isn't violating the second law for the same reason it's not violating the first -- the system in question is bigger than the LED itself. It includes the environment from which it is obtaining its energy. Local decreases in entropy are not disallowed.
No, you (and every other reply that took the GP to mean 'light cannot move things at all whatsoever') are being dumb. Because "short answer accurate enough for this reality" implies that there is a longer answer with greater accuracy (or if talking about the degree of effect, precision), but which is not materially significant to the matter at hand.
At least one person was able to bring up that more precise answer without also misunderstanding the original post. Good for them.
Er, not finding the Higgs Boson -- when we would be able to find it if with the LHC if it existed anywhere in the range allowed by the Standard Model -- would not leave us in the same place we started. We started not knowing if this final prediction of the Standard Model would be borne out or not. We'd end up knowing that the Standard Model was incorrect beyond those predictions that had already been verified, and that there was new physics that would have to be explored in order to find out how massive particles get their mass.
This would be very exciting for many people. Ruling out the Higgs would open the door for a lot of new avenues of research.
Probably the least exciting thing that could happen is that we verify the existence of the Higgs at ~125 GeV, and then find nothing else.
The 27 minutes was in comparison to the 90 minutes of the X37B to orbit the earth you were saying was an advantage.
As far as detection -- the X37B's orbit is already known to amateur stargazers. If hostilities were possible, then you can be assured it would be tracked continuously for any sign of it releasing ordinance -- assuming it isn't already, which I'm not inclined to do.
For difficulty of detection and rapid-strike capability, nuclear submarines have been filling that role far more effectively than anything in orbit could for decades. Nuclear submarines provide a nearly unassailable second-strike capability, ensuring that we still have MAD.
Nearly everything one would want to nuke isn't prone to moving, anyway. The importance of speed isn't to make sure the target is still there but to prevent second-strike capability... which as I already said can't be done if the enemy has submarines. Yes politicians who voted themselves "important" can move but no politician or political leader warrants having a nuke (or equivalent kinetic device) lobbed at them. Especially because unless this is truly a surprise attack completely out of the blue, you should assume they have already been moved to a secure location.
Basically there's no basis for your paranoia focusing on the X37. Anything you fear it might be used for could already be done more effectively by other means.
2023 is the year that the asteroid will either pass through the "keyhole" and be bent into an orbit that will strike the earth, or it won't and we're safe for the foreseeable future.
Deflecting the asteroid so that it misses the keyhole (~300km) is much easier than deflecting it so that it misses the earth (~13000km).
In that timeframe, 18 months can matter.
Also, the time spent developing solutions is anything but a waste. We never know when we'll discover an asteroid that's on a collision course with earth on a much smaller time frame than 28 years. Eventually we will need this capability. I don't see any effort spent getting ready now as a waste.
On the other hand I'm not arguing too hard that we need to start working now. Odds are very good that in 2013 we'll look closer and realize that there's 0 chance of it passing through the keyhole.
Still, we need to take the problem of asteroid impact seriously. It is only a matter of time before it kills us all if we aren't prepared.
It would be about 100MT of energy if it hit us (and a rock with that much energy being slowed by the atmosphere isn't doing us any favors; that energy is still released and it's not like it has to land on you to kill you).
If you're willing to take the bet that a 100MT bomb going off at a random point on earth won't be near enough to civilization to matter, feel free. Me, I'd rather fold than play my luck. (Folding in this case means studying the rock to further analyze its trajectory, and developing a mitigation plan to divert it if necessary).
Funny, those are the exact some advantages the guy at the Ferrari dealership pointed out when it turned out the only car in my price range was one already in space. He forgot to mention how awesome it is to own a car in space! I'm so smart.
27 minutes from launch to impact depends on being able to detect the launch.
Actually it turns out that it takes an ICBM 27 minutes from launch to impact regardless of whether anyone detects the launch! Amazing, I know.
This appears to be the initial implementation of that project.
Uh, no it doesn't. This would be a terrible way to get large masses into orbit.
If you're going to be paranoid -- an endeavor I fully support -- then at least do it right. You should be looking at any of the many shuttle and other heavy-lift rocket launches carrying spy satellites from the last 40 years, any of which could have been carrying a payload of tungsten rods.
That would be a stretch. More like he wasn't completely wrong, in that epigenetics and methylation can be passed along to offspring.
Seems to me like "he wasn't completely wrong" is modern biologists bending over backwards for the guy. Epigenetics seems to resemble Lamarckianism only at the most high-level single-sentence overview of "traits acquired in life can be passed on".
Considering how Lamarckianism was supposed to be the primary driver of inherited traits, I'd say it's more like "his flirtations with reality were due to chance alone".
Not that it's really apropos your post, but this seemed like a good chance to post this for anyone who's interested in what this Quantum Electrodynamics stuff is about.
Turning off the grid doesn't help; it's the induced currents in the power lines that are the problem and they will happen whether or not there's any man-made power flowing in the wires.
To protect the grid you'd have to physically disconnect components from the power lines. Not simple to do with short notice.
What happens is you get large induced currents/voltages in transmission lines (power, cable etc) which smoke things connected to them. This happens because they resonate with the solar radiation.
It seems pretty unlikely that changes in the electron flux from the flare would match the resonant frequency of any given transmission line. Since they're all different lengths, it can match some but necessarily can't match most of them.
Seems like the big problem is simply power lines (and other long wires) acting like antenna for a huge induced current regardless of matching resonant frequency or not.
Hey, they had a host lined up, but their assumption that whatever killed the Tyrannosaur would be big enough for them was off. Give them a break, they're bugs!
like drunk people are suddenly going to start making good decisions?
Yes. Many people want to be responsible but are at the stage of drunkenness where they are in fact impaired yet aren't so impaired that it's obvious even to the drunk person themselves. People who have had a few drinks, but aren't stumbling or slurring their words and so think they're okay when in reality they are not.
Having a quick and easy way to check BAC would be a boon to the large number of people who do in fact want to be responsible but before were limited to either trusting their own judgment when that judgment may be impaired without them realizing it, or just assuming that any amount of alcohol means no driving.
Some bars in the 'States have breathalizers. I think they all should. Giving every car a (non-interlock) breathalizer sounds like a good way to do it too.
But just in case people don't get the joke, this is a terrible way to test if you're too drunk to drive. Loss of motor skills and memory happen well after loss of judgment, reflexes and reaction speed. By the time you fail this test, you're already a danger on the road. If absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happens, you'll probably make it home just fine (like many drunks do every night). Anything that required a snap judgement or normal human reaction time to avoid an accident and suddenly you're another statistic.
It's particularly for those cases where you aren't at the "Oh man I'm so wasted!" point, but are inebriated (yet, because the first effect of alcohol is loss of judgment, not so good at deciding this on your own), that extra info would come in handy. I wish I'd had it when I passed this self-test and ended up with a DUI.
And to the poster who said "what about F = ma?" I'd like to point out that Newton was WRONG.
I'm pretty sure he was right given the precision of the available data.:)
The more salient part though is that he wasn't doing what the article describes, he was dealing with a specific problem he had some intuition about, and could use the time-honored technique of guess-and-check to drastically reduce the search time.
And yet they still have one of the highest profit margins of any industry.
Profit = income - costs
So how terrifying can those costs really be if you're still showering in money after paying them?
Oh and let's not forget that their biggest cost is not R&D but marketing. I wonder why you don't see any articles about "The Terrifying Cost of Marketing!" to justify the prices of pharmaceuticals? Just kidding, it's because that would obviously be stupid.
Yet complaining about the cost of getting a drug to market when that's 1) not even their biggest expense and 2) not preventing them from making Phat Bank is also stupid.
Okay, but now assume we're not talking about some observation Alice (I like Alice as my A name better) made about Bob while Bob was out walking, but some personal information Bob specifically gave to Alice because Alice was doing something for Bob where she needed that information.
Nobody else needs that information. Bob has not agreed to let it be shared with anyone else. He gave it to her because it was necessary, not because he wanted to have everyone know it. You can say "tough shit" and then forced everyone to choose between having every fact of their life known or not getting anything done. I think a reasonable society can find a better middle ground.
Alice doesn't need to be lobotomized. She just needs to respect Bob's wishes that she not share the information with anyone else without his permission.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes heat itself can be a source of energy, because heat is a kind of energy and it can be converted into other forms. Objects emit light based solely on their heat, not heat deltas, all the time. Objects that are colder than their surroundings still emit light. A solution that is colder than it's surroundings, but still hot enough to cause certain reactions to occur, still causes those reactions to occur. If these reactions are endothermic then the solution will cool, but the reactions will continue until the solution cools enough.
Heat engines require a heat delta, but that's not the only way of turning heat energy into other forms of energy.
Yeah, funny how people forget that we are social animals. Being social doesn't mean we're always nice and not selfish pricks, but it does mean there is a tendency just as real as selfishness to want to strengthen social bonds, and see to the health of the group.
Interesting fact: "Telephone sanitizer" is actually a euphemism for toilet cleaner./quote.
What I want to know is whether that is the part of the joke I didn't get because I'm too young, or not British?
I once read, on the Internet, an excerpt of a book written about the cabinet meetings held by Truman discussing the possible endings of the war and the use of the atomic bomb, by one of the people who was there. It was a fascinating read. I really wish I could find it again. I suspect it is gone.
I can summarize though each of the options and what the general opinion about them was.
1) Accept conditional surrender -- they were aware that Japan had made an overture for conditional surrender. They were unclear what the terms of this surrender were supposed to be. They considered completely unacceptable anything that allowed Japan to retain the capacity to make war, and were generally against the idea of letting the nation who had initiated an attack on the U.S. get away with a mere conditional surrender.
2) Use the atom bomb to force unconditional surrender.
3) Do an off-shore demonstration of the atomic bomb in the ocean and demand unconditional surrender. While advocated for by some, this was considered highly risky. The chance that the Emperor would see it as some kind of trick, and leave the U.S. with too few weapons to use Option 2.
4) Wait for Russia to engage Japan, forcing conditional surrender. It seemed like everyone believed that once Russia entered the Pacific War, that Japan would quickly surrender. The biggest problem with this option was that it would mean Japan surrendering to both Russia and the U.S. They wanted to be in control, and not have a repeat of the surrender of Germany.
5) Invade the mainland -- this was brought up for completeness, but was clearly the least favored option. In any case, it was believed that Option 4 would occur before this option could realistically be put into play.
I personally don't disagree with Truman's decision to use the bomb. What I disagree with is the revisionist history that creates a false dichotomy between nuke and invade, so that extremely simple moral calculus makes it obvious that the nuke option is better. The real situation was substantially more complex, and it's a disservice to both the people making this difficult decision and to our efforts to learn from history to pretend it was simple.
It isn't violating the second law for the same reason it's not violating the first -- the system in question is bigger than the LED itself. It includes the environment from which it is obtaining its energy. Local decreases in entropy are not disallowed.
maybe i am just being pedantic...
No, you (and every other reply that took the GP to mean 'light cannot move things at all whatsoever') are being dumb. Because "short answer accurate enough for this reality" implies that there is a longer answer with greater accuracy (or if talking about the degree of effect, precision), but which is not materially significant to the matter at hand.
At least one person was able to bring up that more precise answer without also misunderstanding the original post. Good for them.
God knows what we have in the wings.
Sorry, but God lost his security clearance when we discovered correspondence addressed to him from known terrorists.
Er, not finding the Higgs Boson -- when we would be able to find it if with the LHC if it existed anywhere in the range allowed by the Standard Model -- would not leave us in the same place we started. We started not knowing if this final prediction of the Standard Model would be borne out or not. We'd end up knowing that the Standard Model was incorrect beyond those predictions that had already been verified, and that there was new physics that would have to be explored in order to find out how massive particles get their mass.
This would be very exciting for many people. Ruling out the Higgs would open the door for a lot of new avenues of research.
Probably the least exciting thing that could happen is that we verify the existence of the Higgs at ~125 GeV, and then find nothing else.
The 27 minutes was in comparison to the 90 minutes of the X37B to orbit the earth you were saying was an advantage.
As far as detection -- the X37B's orbit is already known to amateur stargazers. If hostilities were possible, then you can be assured it would be tracked continuously for any sign of it releasing ordinance -- assuming it isn't already, which I'm not inclined to do.
For difficulty of detection and rapid-strike capability, nuclear submarines have been filling that role far more effectively than anything in orbit could for decades. Nuclear submarines provide a nearly unassailable second-strike capability, ensuring that we still have MAD.
Nearly everything one would want to nuke isn't prone to moving, anyway. The importance of speed isn't to make sure the target is still there but to prevent second-strike capability... which as I already said can't be done if the enemy has submarines. Yes politicians who voted themselves "important" can move but no politician or political leader warrants having a nuke (or equivalent kinetic device) lobbed at them. Especially because unless this is truly a surprise attack completely out of the blue, you should assume they have already been moved to a secure location.
Basically there's no basis for your paranoia focusing on the X37. Anything you fear it might be used for could already be done more effectively by other means.
2023 is the year that the asteroid will either pass through the "keyhole" and be bent into an orbit that will strike the earth, or it won't and we're safe for the foreseeable future.
Deflecting the asteroid so that it misses the keyhole (~300km) is much easier than deflecting it so that it misses the earth (~13000km).
In that timeframe, 18 months can matter.
Also, the time spent developing solutions is anything but a waste. We never know when we'll discover an asteroid that's on a collision course with earth on a much smaller time frame than 28 years. Eventually we will need this capability. I don't see any effort spent getting ready now as a waste.
On the other hand I'm not arguing too hard that we need to start working now. Odds are very good that in 2013 we'll look closer and realize that there's 0 chance of it passing through the keyhole.
Still, we need to take the problem of asteroid impact seriously. It is only a matter of time before it kills us all if we aren't prepared.
It would be about 100MT of energy if it hit us (and a rock with that much energy being slowed by the atmosphere isn't doing us any favors; that energy is still released and it's not like it has to land on you to kill you).
If you're willing to take the bet that a 100MT bomb going off at a random point on earth won't be near enough to civilization to matter, feel free. Me, I'd rather fold than play my luck. (Folding in this case means studying the rock to further analyze its trajectory, and developing a mitigation plan to divert it if necessary).
Funny, those are the exact some advantages the guy at the Ferrari dealership pointed out when it turned out the only car in my price range was one already in space. He forgot to mention how awesome it is to own a car in space! I'm so smart.
27 minutes from launch to impact depends on being able to detect the launch.
Actually it turns out that it takes an ICBM 27 minutes from launch to impact regardless of whether anyone detects the launch! Amazing, I know.
This appears to be the initial implementation of that project.
Uh, no it doesn't. This would be a terrible way to get large masses into orbit.
If you're going to be paranoid -- an endeavor I fully support -- then at least do it right. You should be looking at any of the many shuttle and other heavy-lift rocket launches carrying spy satellites from the last 40 years, any of which could have been carrying a payload of tungsten rods.
That would be a stretch. More like he wasn't completely wrong, in that epigenetics and methylation can be passed along to offspring.
Seems to me like "he wasn't completely wrong" is modern biologists bending over backwards for the guy. Epigenetics seems to resemble Lamarckianism only at the most high-level single-sentence overview of "traits acquired in life can be passed on".
Considering how Lamarckianism was supposed to be the primary driver of inherited traits, I'd say it's more like "his flirtations with reality were due to chance alone".
What's all this? I stopped reading after Q.E.D.
Har har!
Not that it's really apropos your post, but this seemed like a good chance to post this for anyone who's interested in what this Quantum Electrodynamics stuff is about.
It's a fantastic lecture series by Richard Feynman explaining QED in detail to non-physicists.
Photons are the EM spectrum, you probably meant to say. :)
Turning off the grid doesn't help; it's the induced currents in the power lines that are the problem and they will happen whether or not there's any man-made power flowing in the wires.
To protect the grid you'd have to physically disconnect components from the power lines. Not simple to do with short notice.
What happens is you get large induced currents/voltages in transmission lines (power, cable etc) which smoke things connected to them. This happens because they resonate with the solar radiation.
It seems pretty unlikely that changes in the electron flux from the flare would match the resonant frequency of any given transmission line. Since they're all different lengths, it can match some but necessarily can't match most of them.
Seems like the big problem is simply power lines (and other long wires) acting like antenna for a huge induced current regardless of matching resonant frequency or not.
Hey, they had a host lined up, but their assumption that whatever killed the Tyrannosaur would be big enough for them was off. Give them a break, they're bugs!
like drunk people are suddenly going to start making good decisions?
Yes. Many people want to be responsible but are at the stage of drunkenness where they are in fact impaired yet aren't so impaired that it's obvious even to the drunk person themselves. People who have had a few drinks, but aren't stumbling or slurring their words and so think they're okay when in reality they are not.
Having a quick and easy way to check BAC would be a boon to the large number of people who do in fact want to be responsible but before were limited to either trusting their own judgment when that judgment may be impaired without them realizing it, or just assuming that any amount of alcohol means no driving.
Some bars in the 'States have breathalizers. I think they all should. Giving every car a (non-interlock) breathalizer sounds like a good way to do it too.
Hehe. Good one!
But just in case people don't get the joke, this is a terrible way to test if you're too drunk to drive. Loss of motor skills and memory happen well after loss of judgment, reflexes and reaction speed. By the time you fail this test, you're already a danger on the road. If absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happens, you'll probably make it home just fine (like many drunks do every night). Anything that required a snap judgement or normal human reaction time to avoid an accident and suddenly you're another statistic.
It's particularly for those cases where you aren't at the "Oh man I'm so wasted!" point, but are inebriated (yet, because the first effect of alcohol is loss of judgment, not so good at deciding this on your own), that extra info would come in handy. I wish I'd had it when I passed this self-test and ended up with a DUI.
And to the poster who said "what about F = ma?" I'd like to point out that Newton was WRONG.
I'm pretty sure he was right given the precision of the available data. :)
The more salient part though is that he wasn't doing what the article describes, he was dealing with a specific problem he had some intuition about, and could use the time-honored technique of guess-and-check to drastically reduce the search time.
It costs billions to get a drug to market:
And yet they still have one of the highest profit margins of any industry.
Profit = income - costs
So how terrifying can those costs really be if you're still showering in money after paying them?
Oh and let's not forget that their biggest cost is not R&D but marketing. I wonder why you don't see any articles about "The Terrifying Cost of Marketing!" to justify the prices of pharmaceuticals? Just kidding, it's because that would obviously be stupid.
Yet complaining about the cost of getting a drug to market when that's 1) not even their biggest expense and 2) not preventing them from making Phat Bank is also stupid.
And yet, it still flies.
Re-read the GP, or a dictionary. Words in natural languages have multiple meanings. This is such a case.
Okay, but now assume we're not talking about some observation Alice (I like Alice as my A name better) made about Bob while Bob was out walking, but some personal information Bob specifically gave to Alice because Alice was doing something for Bob where she needed that information.
Nobody else needs that information. Bob has not agreed to let it be shared with anyone else. He gave it to her because it was necessary, not because he wanted to have everyone know it. You can say "tough shit" and then forced everyone to choose between having every fact of their life known or not getting anything done. I think a reasonable society can find a better middle ground.
Alice doesn't need to be lobotomized. She just needs to respect Bob's wishes that she not share the information with anyone else without his permission.
Why's that so much to ask?