If you'd RTFA you'd have known that that was the precision given in the internal CERN presentation. That mentions "summer" because the machine shuts down during winter anyway to leave the Swiss with enough electricity. Hence the important question is for which operating seaon the repairs can be done.
getting your water through the air, or wireless (sic) if you will
How about "tubeless"?
Just the other day I opened the tap and there was no water. Why? Why? Apparently something was connected the wrong way, sort of like bad routing.
This water supply thing is like, complicated. It's not like just transferring. It's not a big hard drive you can dump things on, it's more like a wired network. And you got to understand, it can go low on bandwidth by anyone torrenting enourmous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Evolution could be disproven. Intelligent design can never be disproven. Ergo, its status as a scientific theory is highly questionable
I'd be a lot more comfortable with Intelligent Design if the proponents didn't try to sell it as a scientific theory. What they ought to say is: "Evolution can be disproven - and we've done so!" That would be a rational starting point for discussion, even if I don't expect much of that from either side of this question.
are they all engineers afraid to get their hands dirty?
They might be engineers afraid to get their product dirty. Semiconductor nanofilms seem like the kind of product that might be sensible to contamination. Besides, they have to aim for economies of scale. The testing cells they can make in little labs, one square mm at a time.
I find it funny how the people who have never been formally trained with writing in a language (Mathematics, and just science in general) write the best codes
Having seen the code floating around a couple of physics labs I can tell you that there's plenty of crap code. Heck, I've written some of it myself!
Of course, some people are good at it (several because they're just so freaking smart), but in many cases you've got people who would rather focus on something else write a quick kludge to get data from instrument X into plot Y. Not much wrong with that really, until you have to debug/extend it...
So, I actually e-mailed this to the corresponding author. The reply:
Thank you for your message which we have heard previously. The answer is
that there is no problem: If your read the BNL paper you seen that the time
standard in their paper was not the power company but a precision quartz
crystal. For the PTB data they were not counting events but measuring
currents, so again there would be no problem. In addition we would expect
the scientists at PTB to be fully aware of these issues.
Under ordinary situations it shouldn't cost much energy simply to pump a charge back and forth between what are essentially two capacitors.
Really? How do you do that?
If we look at it from the heat pump perspective, it's obvious that you have to add work somewhere. It's a little less obvious where, but the answer is that the permitivity of the material drops with temperature (and from the thermodynamic Maxwell relations it HAS to be that way for the material to show this effect). Now if you apply a field, and then let the stuff cool, before discharging, you'll charge at high capacitance, and discharge a low, which of course gives a net work.
All that aside, I don't know how you're going to charge and discharge a capacitor, without losing a lot of the charging energy in the process. You could of course use several capacitors charged at intermediate voltages and then discharge to each of them in steps, but even so you'll have losses unless you've got infinitely many. How would you do it? (I'm really not an electronics geek).
Yeah, it's fun coming up with these ideas:-) One problem though: If your electrode is fixed to the material, the only way to cycle it is to switch the field on the electrode. But as I mentioned, I think this is hard to do without losing a lot of power.
Acknowledge that life in pre-China Tibet was absolutely terrible for the average person, acknowledge that life for the average Tibetan has improved dramatically in terms of education, quality of life, etc., and then, from this more realistic position, demand more.
I know very little about Tibet, but I suspect you could make the exact same argument about pre-1950 China. Not that it's been all singing and dancing along the way, mind you, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were quite bad as I understand.
It might. But you also have to contact it with some kind of cooling fluid. Either you put the fluid in the field (wasting the precious narrow space there) or you put it outside the field, in which case the heat has to leak through the electrical contacts. Then it needs to touch, and that makes it hard to pull through. Probably not impossible, likely to be difficult.
Actually from a comment by Urkki, I got the idea of suspending the material in a fluid, that could be pumped through the field. Might work, but you'd need several 100 kV across the fluid, and I'm not sure how easy that is to implement in household apparatus.
Anyway, this particular substance is solid, but just imagine if they managed to make a liquid version... No more compressor, just passing the liquid through electric field at one point of a simple closed loop with heat sinks attached to it... Elegant.
That's actually a good point, but I'd take a wild guess and say it's hard to develop it to show this effect while being liquid. Instead, make a powder of this plastic, and put it in a suspension. There'll be a few problems with the field though - in the article they use 200 MV/m, so you'd need to put 100s of kV over a pipe of a few mm diameter, and a length of many cm. There'd be some NASTY caps to burn yourself on if you take a fridge like that apart!
A third problem is that this effect only works in a very limited temperature range (above 70ÃC). A fourth problem is hysteretic heating due to ferroelectricity...
I wouldn't be so worried by that. If you look at fig. 1 you'll see that the hysteresis isn't so horrible, and that the electrocaloric effect is roughly constant in the range 70-100C. Of course that's the wrong temperature range, but this is very new, and it's quite likely that changing the composition will give materials with the same effect around room temperature.
I very much agree with all the rest you said, though.
Then flip their states again; the outer one will dump most of that absorbed heat to the outside, since the inner one is currently rejecting heat.
I'm sorry, but there's no such thing as "rejecting heat". If the inner one is colder, it will take heat from the outer period. Your system will be nicely wasting electricity while moving heat from inner to outer and back again.
You need to set up some kind of touch/non-touch configuration, which means moving parts.
It sounds like this can absorb and release heat as fast as an electrical switch can be flipped and mankind has made some pretty snappy switches that could repeat REALLY fast.
Yeah, great. Now you just have to put in the whole thermodynamic cycle:
1. Switch on
2. Establish thermal contact to hot side, wait for heat to leak.
3. Cut thermal contact to hot side.
4. Switch off.
5. Establish thermal contact to cold side, wait for "cold" to leak.
6. Cut thermal contact to cold side.
7. GOTO 1.
8. ????
9. Profit!!
I work in a group researching magnetocaloric refrigeration at room temperature. I read the Science paper, and this is about the same, except with electrical polarization instead of magnetic. It's promising in some ways, but have some potentially fatal problems.
1. 12 deg C is a really large temperature change, we have to do with 1-3C. My group would kill for a material like that, $EVIL_GENIUS_LAUGHTER. (With a design like this, it's possible to have a much greater cumulative change of temperature than what any single piece of material does, so that's how to cool from +25 to -18 C).
2. The hysteresis is not too high, look at fig. 1 in the paper. This is important, because hysteresis means you're converting electricity to heat inside your fridge. Many materials have great change in entropy and temperature when you put an electric or magnetic field on them, but it's killed for practical purposes by hysteresis.
3. You need a really high electric field. The curves in the paper are done at 100-200 MegaV/m, meaning that you need 100-200 kV to polarize a layer of 1 mm thickness. A CRT uses voltages of around 20 kV, and so it's plausible to use thin layers, or just live with the fact that you'll only get 1-2 C temperature change. (Which means it has to compete with magnetic refrigeration on an even footing).
4. It's hard to polarize and depolarize the material without electric losses. (This is a problem for ferroelectric cooling in general). You're basically charging and discharging a huge capacitor, and you'll lose the charge on the capacitor every round. This could be fixed by putting it as the "C" in an oscillating (LCR) circuit with some inductance, but it's not easy to get an inductance (L) high enough, unless you run at high frequency. This material looks to work at high frequency (the hysteresis curves are taken at 1kHz), but how do you transport the heat into/out of it? If you run at 1kHz, you'll have less than half a ms to transfer heat to the cooling fluid, which means you'll need to use a very thin layer indeed. (Incidentally this will make it easier to get a strong field gradient). Then there's the problem of moving the cooling fluid back and forth over many layers of sub-mm thickness polymer. I'm not saying it can't be done, and there might very well be smart solutions I haven't thought of, but it's not trivial. (And btw, magnetic cooling doesn't have this problem, because we can use a permanent magnet with a several cm gap, and balance material moving into the gap with material moving out.)
Why is that? I mean once you have high temp water and you need it to be low temp water, and you have more water that needs to be high temp water why not transfer the energy from the now distilled water to the needs to be distilled water. Energy requirements in that case are equal to energy lost to transfer efficiency constraints.
The principle is well known and called "regeneration" - you pass the incoming fluid through a heat exchanger with the outgoing fluid. For instance it's mentioned here in connection with the important Haber-Bosch ammonia process. It's also used by penguins to keep them from losing heat from the bloodstream through their feet! If the engineers are not doing it, they are really really poorly educated, or they have some decent reason. I suspect mainly the latter...
This is not titanium, it's titanium dioxide which can be mined from the ground in some places. Wikipedia says that "The relatively high market value of titanium is mainly due to its processing" from oxide. Besides that, it's only needed in the surface, no need to fill the whole concret slab, just the layer that'll wear.
having encryption without authentication is pointless, because man in the middle attacks are too easy to set up
I strongly disagree. Maybe my surfing passes through Sweden, China or USA?
If I surf encrypted sites there's quite a good chance they won't log more than some traffic from that IP to mine. Unencrypted they'll get the whole URL and cookie history. Yes, they could man-in-the-middle me, but that's likely to remain an exception for some time. For now,"encrypt first, sign later" sounds like moving in the right direction to me.
Is called '39 and it's really beautiful. It's about an astronaut leaving Earth and coming back a year later to meet the daughter of him and his deceased love - a hundred years has passed on Earth in the mean time, see twin paradox.
It's on A night at the opera, you might as well purchase the whole album. It Will Be Worth It.
CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, and about every one else in the world. I saw it you must have heard of it somewhere too or you wouldn't have been able to post about it.
Then when is justice served? I suspect it might happen a bit more efficiently if someone had an "18 minutes" tape with Cheney and friends discussing where to put the dough. Fat chance of catching that on your cell phone though:-/
Slashdot Mirror
If you'd RTFA you'd have known that that was the precision given in the internal CERN presentation. That mentions "summer" because the machine shuts down during winter anyway to leave the Swiss with enough electricity. Hence the important question is for which operating seaon the repairs can be done.
getting your water through the air, or wireless (sic) if you will
How about "tubeless"?
Just the other day I opened the tap and there was no water. Why? Why? Apparently something was connected the wrong way, sort of like bad routing.
This water supply thing is like, complicated. It's not like just transferring. It's not a big hard drive you can dump things on, it's more like a wired network. And you got to understand, it can go low on bandwidth by anyone torrenting enourmous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
That has to be the most unfair troll mod I've ever seen.
Evolution could be disproven. Intelligent design can never be disproven. Ergo, its status as a scientific theory is highly questionable
I'd be a lot more comfortable with Intelligent Design if the proponents didn't try to sell it as a scientific theory. What they ought to say is: "Evolution can be disproven - and we've done so!" That would be a rational starting point for discussion, even if I don't expect much of that from either side of this question.
are they all engineers afraid to get their hands dirty?
They might be engineers afraid to get their product dirty. Semiconductor nanofilms seem like the kind of product that might be sensible to contamination. Besides, they have to aim for economies of scale. The testing cells they can make in little labs, one square mm at a time.
I find it funny how the people who have never been formally trained with writing in a language (Mathematics, and just science in general) write the best codes
Having seen the code floating around a couple of physics labs I can tell you that there's plenty of crap code. Heck, I've written some of it myself!
Of course, some people are good at it (several because they're just so freaking smart), but in many cases you've got people who would rather focus on something else write a quick kludge to get data from instrument X into plot Y. Not much wrong with that really, until you have to debug/extend it...
Thank you for your message which we have heard previously. The answer is that there is no problem: If your read the BNL paper you seen that the time standard in their paper was not the power company but a precision quartz crystal. For the PTB data they were not counting events but measuring currents, so again there would be no problem. In addition we would expect the scientists at PTB to be fully aware of these issues.
Under ordinary situations it shouldn't cost much energy simply to pump a charge back and forth between what are essentially two capacitors.
Really? How do you do that?
If we look at it from the heat pump perspective, it's obvious that you have to add work somewhere. It's a little less obvious where, but the answer is that the permitivity of the material drops with temperature (and from the thermodynamic Maxwell relations it HAS to be that way for the material to show this effect). Now if you apply a field, and then let the stuff cool, before discharging, you'll charge at high capacitance, and discharge a low, which of course gives a net work.
All that aside, I don't know how you're going to charge and discharge a capacitor, without losing a lot of the charging energy in the process. You could of course use several capacitors charged at intermediate voltages and then discharge to each of them in steps, but even so you'll have losses unless you've got infinitely many. How would you do it? (I'm really not an electronics geek).
Yeah, it's fun coming up with these ideas :-) One problem though: If your electrode is fixed to the material, the only way to cycle it is to switch the field on the electrode. But as I mentioned, I think this is hard to do without losing a lot of power.
Pussy! Liquid nitrogen all the way!!!1!!111! (Or maybe liquid helium, but I'm not sure you'll manage to throw it before it blows).
Acknowledge that life in pre-China Tibet was absolutely terrible for the average person, acknowledge that life for the average Tibetan has improved dramatically in terms of education, quality of life, etc., and then, from this more realistic position, demand more.
I know very little about Tibet, but I suspect you could make the exact same argument about pre-1950 China. Not that it's been all singing and dancing along the way, mind you, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were quite bad as I understand.
It might. But you also have to contact it with some kind of cooling fluid. Either you put the fluid in the field (wasting the precious narrow space there) or you put it outside the field, in which case the heat has to leak through the electrical contacts. Then it needs to touch, and that makes it hard to pull through. Probably not impossible, likely to be difficult.
Actually from a comment by Urkki, I got the idea of suspending the material in a fluid, that could be pumped through the field. Might work, but you'd need several 100 kV across the fluid, and I'm not sure how easy that is to implement in household apparatus.
Anyway, this particular substance is solid, but just imagine if they managed to make a liquid version... No more compressor, just passing the liquid through electric field at one point of a simple closed loop with heat sinks attached to it... Elegant.
That's actually a good point, but I'd take a wild guess and say it's hard to develop it to show this effect while being liquid. Instead, make a powder of this plastic, and put it in a suspension. There'll be a few problems with the field though - in the article they use 200 MV/m, so you'd need to put 100s of kV over a pipe of a few mm diameter, and a length of many cm. There'd be some NASTY caps to burn yourself on if you take a fridge like that apart!
A third problem is that this effect only works in a very limited temperature range (above 70ÃC). A fourth problem is hysteretic heating due to ferroelectricity...
I wouldn't be so worried by that. If you look at fig. 1 you'll see that the hysteresis isn't so horrible, and that the electrocaloric effect is roughly constant in the range 70-100C. Of course that's the wrong temperature range, but this is very new, and it's quite likely that changing the composition will give materials with the same effect around room temperature.
I very much agree with all the rest you said, though.
Then flip their states again; the outer one will dump most of that absorbed heat to the outside, since the inner one is currently rejecting heat.
I'm sorry, but there's no such thing as "rejecting heat". If the inner one is colder, it will take heat from the outer period. Your system will be nicely wasting electricity while moving heat from inner to outer and back again.
You need to set up some kind of touch/non-touch configuration, which means moving parts.
It sounds like this can absorb and release heat as fast as an electrical switch can be flipped and mankind has made some pretty snappy switches that could repeat REALLY fast.
Yeah, great. Now you just have to put in the whole thermodynamic cycle:
1. Switch on
2. Establish thermal contact to hot side, wait for heat to leak.
3. Cut thermal contact to hot side.
4. Switch off.
5. Establish thermal contact to cold side, wait for "cold" to leak.
6. Cut thermal contact to cold side.
7. GOTO 1.
8. ????
9. Profit!!
The switching is really the easy thing.
I work in a group researching magnetocaloric refrigeration at room temperature. I read the Science paper, and this is about the same, except with electrical polarization instead of magnetic. It's promising in some ways, but have some potentially fatal problems.
1. 12 deg C is a really large temperature change, we have to do with 1-3C. My group would kill for a material like that, $EVIL_GENIUS_LAUGHTER. (With a design like this, it's possible to have a much greater cumulative change of temperature than what any single piece of material does, so that's how to cool from +25 to -18 C).
2. The hysteresis is not too high, look at fig. 1 in the paper. This is important, because hysteresis means you're converting electricity to heat inside your fridge. Many materials have great change in entropy and temperature when you put an electric or magnetic field on them, but it's killed for practical purposes by hysteresis.
3. You need a really high electric field. The curves in the paper are done at 100-200 MegaV/m, meaning that you need 100-200 kV to polarize a layer of 1 mm thickness. A CRT uses voltages of around 20 kV, and so it's plausible to use thin layers, or just live with the fact that you'll only get 1-2 C temperature change. (Which means it has to compete with magnetic refrigeration on an even footing).
4. It's hard to polarize and depolarize the material without electric losses. (This is a problem for ferroelectric cooling in general). You're basically charging and discharging a huge capacitor, and you'll lose the charge on the capacitor every round. This could be fixed by putting it as the "C" in an oscillating (LCR) circuit with some inductance, but it's not easy to get an inductance (L) high enough, unless you run at high frequency. This material looks to work at high frequency (the hysteresis curves are taken at 1kHz), but how do you transport the heat into/out of it? If you run at 1kHz, you'll have less than half a ms to transfer heat to the cooling fluid, which means you'll need to use a very thin layer indeed. (Incidentally this will make it easier to get a strong field gradient). Then there's the problem of moving the cooling fluid back and forth over many layers of sub-mm thickness polymer. I'm not saying it can't be done, and there might very well be smart solutions I haven't thought of, but it's not trivial. (And btw, magnetic cooling doesn't have this problem, because we can use a permanent magnet with a several cm gap, and balance material moving into the gap with material moving out.)
Why is that? I mean once you have high temp water and you need it to be low temp water, and you have more water that needs to be high temp water why not transfer the energy from the now distilled water to the needs to be distilled water. Energy requirements in that case are equal to energy lost to transfer efficiency constraints.
The principle is well known and called "regeneration" - you pass the incoming fluid through a heat exchanger with the outgoing fluid. For instance it's mentioned here in connection with the important Haber-Bosch ammonia process. It's also used by penguins to keep them from losing heat from the bloodstream through their feet! If the engineers are not doing it, they are really really poorly educated, or they have some decent reason. I suspect mainly the latter...
Funny, I don't actually read Digg
Yeah, like those magazines "no one" reads :P
the pollution incurred from mining the titanium
This is not titanium, it's titanium dioxide which can be mined from the ground in some places. Wikipedia says that "The relatively high market value of titanium is mainly due to its processing" from oxide. Besides that, it's only needed in the surface, no need to fill the whole concret slab, just the layer that'll wear.
having encryption without authentication is pointless, because man in the middle attacks are too easy to set up
I strongly disagree. Maybe my surfing passes through Sweden, China or USA?
If I surf encrypted sites there's quite a good chance they won't log more than some traffic from that IP to mine. Unencrypted they'll get the whole URL and cookie history. Yes, they could man-in-the-middle me, but that's likely to remain an exception for some time. For now,"encrypt first, sign later" sounds like moving in the right direction to me.
At least I think this is his (free download). It's from 1974 and on the topic of the thesis. Isn't that research a little dated for a dissertation?
Is called '39 and it's really beautiful. It's about an astronaut leaving Earth and coming back a year later to meet the daughter of him and his deceased love - a hundred years has passed on Earth in the mean time, see twin paradox.
It's on A night at the opera, you might as well purchase the whole album. It Will Be Worth It.
CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, and about every one else in the world. I saw it you must have heard of it somewhere too or you wouldn't have been able to post about it.
Then when is justice served? I suspect it might happen a bit more efficiently if someone had an "18 minutes" tape with Cheney and friends discussing where to put the dough. Fat chance of catching that on your cell phone though :-/
Come to Denmark, go to a beach or a park in the city. Summer's short though.