Assault weapons are designed to wound.
on
Battlefield Lasers
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· Score: 2
So what are you looking for, a "humane" way to kill people?
The ideal antipersonell weapon doesn't kill the target.
It wounds him sufficiently that it takes him out of action, along with about six other people to take care of him.
It wounds him badly enough that the other people WILL take care of him (so essentially that means he probably dies if he doesn't get help), but
It wounds him in a way that, if he gets help and survives, he achieves essentially a full recovery - after a convalescence that keeps him out of the fighting until it's over.
Permanently blinding a hundred-thousand-man army with lasers is trivial. But after you win the war you have a hundred thousand blind people to take care of - and a hundred thousand families that will be itching to make war on your grandchildren.
There's LOTS of stuff you can burn...
on
Battlefield Lasers
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· Score: 5, Interesting
"These lasers also have a drawback--their energy comes from large tanks of industrial chemicals, which have to be mixed until they glow, like an outsize high-school science project. And they are so bulky that one weapon fills a large aircraft, or a small building. "
Does this jive with the fox news article?
Yes. But it doesn't tell the whole story.
The lasers they're talking about are spinoffs of the Star Wars missile defense system. They had to get a LOT of energy into a beam quickly, to shoot down missiles while still in space, or to bounce off a mirror in space to get them on their way up. One shot, one dead nuke, so cost wasn't much of an object.
Neither was portability: You had either a fortified underground bunker as big as you wanted, or a satellite in zero-G.
So they did something very strong, effective, big, and expensive.
But lasers are EASY. Excluding superradiants (which are easier, if you've got the materials) all you need is a couple of well-alligned mirrors, one of 'em slightly leaky, with an "inverted population amplification light amplification medium" between them.
For "inverted population light amplification medium" read "smoke from a fire".
The medium must have the following characteristics:
It has a state transistion (an "excited state", a "ground state" or less-excited state, and an allowed transition between them) with an energy difference corresponding to a usefully energetic photon.
It must have significantly more of its atoms or molecules in the more-excited state than in the less-excited state. (This is the "inverted population" part.)
It must have ENOUGH of a surplus of more-excited particles to produce a usable amount of power if you extracted the energy difference by de-exciting enough that you're down to 50/50 (or de-exciting them all if there's a further transition that drains the less-excited state).
It must be transparent and reasonably uniform (i.e. non-distorting) at the light frequency corresponding to the state transition.
When you burn darn near ANYTHING the resulting molecules start out excited. If they meet the other criteria you've got a suitable medium for a chemically-pumped laser.
Burn a suitable fuel in a long, thin, rocket flame and run the exhaust at right angles between the pair of mirrors. You'll have a laser beam coming out as long as the flame lasts. Chose the right material and a large fraction of what would have been the heat of combustion ends up in the laser beam.
Now there are some fancy and deadly fuels (fluorine comes to mind) that make an exhaust where the bulk of the energy can be extracted by a single transition. This is nice and efficient. And you don't want to be ANYWHERE NEAR them when in use, due to the toxic nature of the exhaust. So if you're going to be shooting down a nuke from a fort in the desert they're fine.
But there are LOTS of others that are simpler, and might be more suitable for a battlefield.
I expect that eventually we'll see a chemically-pumped laser rifle or pistol, about the same size as a normal rifle or pistol, with an optical cavity where the barrel would be, powered by cartridges of solid fuel that are fed by a mechanism similar to the one that feeds cartridges consisting of case/primer/powder/bullet.
Such "dazzle" weapons were developed during the 80's, and were apparently used.
True. And there are moves to outlaw them (like poision gas and biological weapons) as inhumane (and counterproductive).
But what I'm talking about is accidental dazzle. When you're sending a light pulse that can vaporize metal in miliseconds, even a tiny splinter of that energy, focussed by an eye's lens, can wreak havoc on retinal cells.
Colloids, proteins, and DNA are a lot more fragile than metal.
If they use any wavelength that is well-focussed by eyeball optics you'll blind anybody without eye protection tuned to the laser that looks in the direction of anything the laser is shining on.
If they get hit in the face with a specular reflection they might have eye damage beyond merely going blind.
I would also be reluctant to "buy in" because RJ45 connectors are not road worthy....those locking tabs always break off!
That's what the plastic hoods on ethernet cables prevent.
I'm also guessing that once you pass the signal though your array "stomp boxes" (for me: compressor, fuzz, wah-wah), there will be no need for a digital delay!
Rather than passing it though the stomp boxes, build new stomp boxes that send their settings to a single effects box as MIDI-in-Magic. Then the effects box applies all the effects at once. One hop, negligible latencey. (When expressed in digital form most interesting stomp box effects are trivial computations.)
It seems to me (as a guitarist, computer programmer, and amp builder) that part of the purpose, if not the MAIN purpose, of the guitar amp is to color the sound of the guitar in pleasing ways. So if tubes produce better colorations than "technically-superior digital solid state amps", then the tubes are technically superior, n'est pas?
The bias for tube instead of transistor amplifiers stemmed from the crossover distortion of early Class-B transistor amplifiers. Tube amps also had Class-B output stages, but the crossover cutoff in tubes is smoother and more linear, handing the current from one of the output tubes to the other more cleanly. There was also a different sort of distortion in the Class-A preamp stages, resulting from the nonlinearity of the response of transistors to input voltages.
Later generations of amps have improved the situation, and no doubt substuted (or exposed) other, more subtle, distinctions in how they distort (and thus "color") a signal.
But that doesn't necessarily mean the effect you want is out of reach, or even expensive, with this system.
If you cleanly digitize an audio signal, with a sampling rate high enough to keep "images" out of your ear and a word size big enough to keep quantization error below the noise of the analog components (or at least below the threshold of hearing when the instrument is silent) and with extra room for roundoff error in later computations, you have a faithful digital representation of the original signal.
You can then DIGITALLY apply any "coloration" distortions that would have been applied by a tube amp, transistor amp, mismatched cabling/load impedence, blown-out speaker cone, or whatever floats your band's boat. Also echoes off the back of the speaker cabinet, the walls of a virtual "concert hall", the T-shirts of the front row of groupies, etc. Also a whole floor covered with virtual wah/fuzz/you-name-it boxes.
About all that's missing is the ability of the sound from the speakers to drive the strings of your axe, to pull Hendrix-style feedback guitar effects. (And I have a few ideas on how that could be faked up, too.)
So if your "effects mixer" throws a little CPU power at the problem you can get the same effect you would have gotten from a tube amp. (First-order distortions can be handled by a table lookup or a very simple function.)
Throw some more CPU power at it and you can do everything that's ever been done in a concert or studio, plus a lot of new stuff that was just too complicated to do when it was build-a-box, but is trivial when it's write-a-few-lines-of-code.
Of COURSE you won't put Ethernet in your (existing) Gibson - though I bet you'll plug it into an analog-guitar-to-Magic adapter box, if only to check that they got it working right. But I won't be surprised if the bulk of the next generation of instruments has Magic, or something like it, onboard, and makes music at least as wonderful as (if perhaps slightly different from) what we have now.
This is an enabling technology. Once music is running down the cable as open-standard UDP packets, a whole generation of music hackers can start hammering it into any shape they want.
Three things can be supposed by not finding bodies.
They had time to get away.
They were incinerated
Any dead left were cremated indicating that the dwellers were Indo-Europeans and not aboriginal Italians who usually buried their dead.
Or:
They didn't leave the bodies to rot in downtown Nola.
After all, they were only digging up the area of a parking structure (so far). American Indians have a lot to say about the hygene (or lack thereof) of Europeans. But even bronze-age Europeans didn't normally leave the dead lying around on downtown streets.
Pompei is a special case: They were killed and buried all in one event by a natural disaster.
So let's hang in there until they've dug up enough of the area to find the graveyard, eh?
Is anyone else sick and tired of 20 year old technology getting slapped together into some cheezy consumer product and being heralded as the cure for cancer?
The improved interface design IS revolutionary.
So is the improved "footrpint" - you could use this in a crowd.
Is a gyrosco-ped supposed to make me go out and spend a ton of money on something that is functionally useless?
Functionally useless? No. Like other vehicles, it's a foot-amplifier.
A "ton of money"? Depends on the denomination. How much would you pay for a good motorcycle? Now how much would you pay if you could use it on the sidewalk without getting busted? Now how much LESS would you pay if you couldn't use it at highway speed?
Like most new tech it will start with an early-adopter gee-whiz pay-off-the-development look-how-rich-I-am premium. Let's see whether they can make it affordable in a couple years.
Project a bit further - how long is it going to be before your handheld instantly becomes a guest on other companies' networks when you are visiting them, so you get a broadband internet connection through that?
As soon as they install an internet-connected 802.11b and you install something like Air Snort on your handheld.
Even from this you can see what the problem was....
Capacity for 5 million, while servicing only 10% of that is not a good business plan.
Not necessarily.
Suppose (hypothetically):
Your network will support 5,000,000 subscribers,
Your non-recurring costs are $1/subscriber-month,
Your per-subscriber costs are $10/subscriber-month, and
You charge $50/subscriber-month.
This:
Breaks even at 125,000 subscribers,
Makes $195,000,000/month ($2.3 Billion/yr) at 5,000,000 subscribers, and
Breaks down at 5,000,001 subscribers.
Of course that's not what they did. Nevertheless, they were up to 73.4% of the design capacity of the network by 7/11. So (unless their business model didn't include making a profit until their capacity was saturated) I don't think lack of customers was the problem.
With no data but that timeline I'd wonder if they underestimated their per-user recurring costs (such as support) or their network capacity (which maps back into per-user recurring costs through extra support when they saturate and the connections start to degrade).
So we're not immediately facing the prospect of watching athletes bred especially for their performance but, with our desire to win at all costs, this too can't be far off.
WHAT?
Athletes have been "breeding for athletic performance" for thousands of years! That's what it's ABOUT!
Haven't you noticed, even now, that the Jocks get the Cheerleaders, along with their pick of the female fans? Cheerleaders who are themselves athletic and exhibiting all the characteristics of healthy and extremely fertile young women just hiting breeding age? And Olympic Jockettes get to pick among several healthy multimillionaires, if they don't pair off with a prime Olympic Jock?
The only thing different here is that technology can now meddle directly in the process to direct and accelerate it by selecting particular genes or adding new ones from outside, rather than leaving it to the luck of the genetic draw among the genes currently in the particular Jocks and Jockettes.
What gets me about the Scientific American article is the apparent claim that the efficiency of batteries is ten times worse. Batteries and fuel cells can approach 100% efficiency.
A lot of the destuctive force of explosives has less to do with the energy released than it does with how quickly it is released. Compare the speed of propogation of a shock wave traveling through a hand grenade (6-10,000 Meters per second)to the speed of flame propagation through an ideal hydrogen/oxygen mixture at 1 atmosphere of pressure (~300 Meters per second). A room filled with hydrogen would probably blow out the windows and singe the furniture when it exploded.
Let's see...
300 meters/sec = 1,080 kilometers/hour. About the speed of sound in air. So it's a shock wave, and all the energy of the mixture's burn (a LOT) is concentrated in the wave front. That should be adequate to blow the building apart. (Of course that's the number for a free-air reaction speed, and a mix inside a building is confined by the building.)
Of course turning the gas mixture into superheated steam behind the shock front is hardly a trivial matter, either. Superheated steam is just dandy for setting anything on fire - and it doesn't get much more superheated than the temperature of steam that has just been formed by an oxidation-reduction reaction. It's only short of the disassociation temperature by the bonding energy of H2 and O2. It transfers the heat nicely to whatever it touches, too, and also releases the heat of vaporization as it condenses on anything that's still below 212 F.
Try putting your hand in a jet of ordinary (not superheated) steam and then tell me how cool it is.
The burning of the hydrogen in hydrocarbon fuels provides the bulk of the heat, you know. The carbon is mostly there to hold the hydrogen together in a convenient package, and slow the reaction speed down to something convenient to handle. Hydrogen burns quite quickly.
Also, in my experience, hydrogen doesn't burn so hot that the resulting steam would even light a match.
That doesn't square with NASA's experience. B-) They find hydrogen leaks by walking slowly and holding out a piece of corrigated cardboard in front. When the cardboard suddenly catches fire they've found the leak. ("There's no such thing as a hydrogen leak that ISN'T on fire.")
Didn't Nikola Tesla work on a turbine for a while? Basically it could be held in one hand and generate enough electricity to power a house.
Yes he did. But it rotates at a VERY high speed - high enough that the centripital force on the working fluid matches the pressure difference between the input and output ports. Tough to balance. Lots of friction between the gas and the outer housing to create inefficiencies. Enormous forces in the turbine material itself.
Bladed designs have proven more practical for general use.
Even there there's an interesting instability problem: The shaft has a resonance - the frequency it would "ring" in the oscilatory mode where the bar is beneding up at the ends and down in the middle. When the turbine's rotational speed approaches this resonance it pumps energy into it and tends to tear the turbine apart. The trick is to provide support that can damp this vibration for long enough to get the rotational speed up beyond the magic rate.
This design seems to sidestep the problem by flattening the turbine into a pancake.
... even if the H2 tank ruptures there is not going to be enough H2 to do anything. It might burn for a second or two and thats about it, most likely not enough H2 mass there to really do any damage (beyond the device it's in). Certainly not enough to cause an explosive misture in a large enough volume of air to matter.
Sorry, wrong answer. You're underestimating the size of the tank.
Existing lithium cells have "the energy density of a hand grenade" - and weigh about as much as one, so they also have about the energy of one. This has ten times that energy - look at the run time numbers. That's because it's using an external oxidizer in combination with tanked hydrogen. That means it's got a LOT of hydrogen - essentially a small tank of liquid H2.
If you mix the H2 with the appropriate amount of air to burn it efficiently you get the energy of ten hand grenades - call it a couple sticks of dynamite. If it leaks (without initially igniting) inside a building, it will light when it reaches lower explosive limit at a nearby source of ignition - a close approximation to the ideal mixture. The pressure will couple efficiently to the walls and roof, blowing the building apart. The superheated steam left behind will ignite the fragments.
If, on the other hand, it leaks and ignites, you'll have a welding-hot needle flame which is ultraviolet, and thus invisible, poking out some hole in your laptop or playing against something inside it. And it will burn much longer than a butane torch with the same weight of fuel and same flame power.
Meanwhile, hydrogen is a very small molecule and can thus flow rapidly through very small holes - like between the atoms of a steel tank. This means it's much less forgiving about the quality of your tankage, gas plumbing, and valves. Leaks are MUCH more likely to occur.
The exhaust is water vapor, unused combustion air, and heat. That shouldn't be a problem. Well, you won't want 20W to 40W of heat running in your pocket, but other than that it should be fine.
The 20-40 watts is the power delivered by the device to the laptop and eventually (except for a miniscule amount leaving as light, radio waves, telephone modem signals, etc.) disipated as heat by the laptop's circuitry.
But the generator is a HEAT ENGINE and this one runs at 10% efficiency. So to generate 40 watts it burns fuel at a 400 watt rate. 40 watts to the laptop, 400-40 = 360 watts of heat in the exhaust.
And you CAN'T improve it very much. It's a heat engine. Perfect efficiency for a heat engine is the carnot cycle limit: 100% * (Th - Tc)/Th.
Call that about 30% for a fuel-burning engine at room temperature, and you're still talking 133 watts of heat sitting on your lap for a 40 watt load. But you can't get anywhere near carnot cycle in a practical device, and the smaller and faster the device the more you'll fall short - you need something like a power-plant to approach it. So back to 10% and 400 watts.
What gets me about the Scientific American article is the apparent claim that the efficiency of batteries is ten times worse. Batteries and fuel cells can approach 100% efficiency.
I think what happened is they confused efficiency with energy density. A battery contains both its fuel and its oxidizer - and oxidizers tend to be heavy, due to heavy atoms and extra atoms to hold them down. Heat engines and fuel cells, on the other hand, can get their oxidizer from the ambient air, and expell the combustion products. So they only need the engine/cell proper plus the fuel tankage. Yes a heat engine would probably beat a battery by a factor of ten on energy density. But a fuel cell, if it can be adequately miniaturized, might do still better.
Nevertheless this engine looks like a good solution (if you're willing to put up with the waste heat), at least until fuel cell technology approaches it in power density.
The use of hydrogen is curious. Handling it is a real bitch. It crawls right through steel and burns with an invisible, super-hot, ultraviolet flame. Very dangerous.
They are probably using it, rather than a liquid hydrocarbon like butane, to simplify the design and to get the maximum energy-density numbers for the engine/tank system. With butane/air you need to do emission control for NOx, CO, and unburned hydrocarbon. With hydrogen/air you only need to sweat NOx. Hydrogen's energy/ounce of fuel is higher and it's easier to light. Liquid hydrocarbons - especially impure and "odorized" formulations - produce a number of combustion products that can potentially foul the engine or its exhaust as well. You don't need fancy controls for a hydrogen engine, while a butane engine might need a catalytic converter and some serious compute power.
What I'd like to know is whatever happened to the ceramic oxygen-concentration fuel cell - the one that uses the same basic cycle as the exhaust-gas oxygen sensor in a car?
I think they are trying to extend the monopoly and get Apple and others out of the schools...
Providing low-cost or free computing equipment to schools and universities - so a generation of graduates comes up pre-trained on your stuff - is an old hack.
IBM did it. DEC did it. Amdahl did it. Cray did it. Apple did it.
But to use such an anti-competitive activity as a SETTLEMENT of an anti-trust conviction... Now THAT takes GUTS!
If they get away with it, it will qualify as the legal hack of the century.
There are additional reasons (besides targeting of radiation and susceptability of dividing cells to DNA damage due to activation of otherwise-idle genes) for cancer cells to be more susceptable to radiaion damage.
Because cancer cells are dividing all the time, they tend to be less robust than other cells. Many therapies (including some of the earlier chemotherapy regimens) take advantage of this by poisoning cells ALMOST to the point of death - which pushes cancer cells over the edge. (An exception to this rule is Melanoma, which gets extra energy as a side-effect of making the brown pigment Melanin. This makes it STRONGER than the typical cell.)
Radiation therapy can provoke some of the further-damaged cancer cells into triggering an immune reaction against both themselves and their still-undamaged-but-cancerous neighbors.
========
It's nice to see that the monoclonal-antibody-attached-to-local-poison approach is getting into the field. But I'd like to know what happened to:
- Monoclonal antibodies plus radio-iodine for Melanoma. (Sounds like this is the same stunt further tuned, with a different radioactive element for more localized effect.)
- Monoclonal antibodies plus a catalytic poison from a bacterial toxin. (I don't recall the exact toxin used. But it worked by destroying all the copies of one of the enzymes that attached a particular amino-acid to its T-RNA, shutting down protein synthesys. One molecule, one dead cell. And the molecule ended up inside the cell when the cell recycled the part of the surface with the antibody attached. Perhaps that had a variable effectiveness depending on what the antibody targeted. Radiation works from OUTSIDE too, even if you need a lot more copies of it.)
If magic was reliable and repeatable ...
on
Review: Harry Potter
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· Score: 5, Insightful
... it would be science.
And given that, in this series, magic IS reliable and repeatable (and thus is really a science and its asscoiated technology), the rest of the story becomes:
- Child from broken home is abused.
- Child escapes from broken home through institutional opportunity for children like him to enter higher learning institution.
- Child enrolls in a "science/technology" degree program, in a "science" for which he has a talent (and which is thus fun).
- Child grows up, learning about good and evil, human relations, etc., making friends (and enemies) and having a good time along the way.
- Child breaks rules (as adolescents must do at least once), getting in an appropriate amount of trouble and finding an appropriate amount of opportunity as a result.
- Child learns more family history.
- Child and friends solve serious adult-world problem.
- Child and friends make progress exposing and combatting the plans of evil/psychopathic persons.
etc.
Substitute "science" for "magic", and the whole thing turns into a real-world growing-up success story, with lots of useful lessons about attitudes and behaviors useful for achieving success, morals, and social standing. But using the technology of magic allows the young reader to easily transfer these lessons to the real-world without the distraction of technical particulars from the author's understanding of a PARTICULAR technology's CURRENT state-of-the-art.
Meanwhile it's a very fun read, keeping the reader engaged and encouraged to continue.
So in addition to teaching kids to read, this series seems likely to teach a lot of good stuff, all the while making it LOADS of fun (as learning SHOULD be).
I'm glad to hear it made it to the silver screen with its guts intact.
The surgeon is being trained to keep cutting until the knife warns him that the tissue he's about to cut is important.
So if the knife DOESN'T warn him - even for a couple miliseconds, he cuts right through arteries or nerves.
The potential for trouble is enormous.
And unlike VR built from MRI imaging, there's no indication that a failure is in progress until the damage is done.
I sure hope the authors of any software involved, and the designers of any hardware, are VERY good at building a VERY robust product.
I remember a certain radiation therapy machine, which operated in two modes - one with an attenuation shield, one without it. If you typed too fast on the touch-panel control, it would go through the whole cycle normally, but with the shield OUT rather than IN. Killed several patients before they figured out what was happening.
I hear they had done a marvelous faiure analysis on the hardware. But they had assumed the software would be perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
The ideal antipersonell weapon doesn't kill the target.
It wounds him sufficiently that it takes him out of action, along with about six other people to take care of him.
It wounds him badly enough that the other people WILL take care of him (so essentially that means he probably dies if he doesn't get help), but
It wounds him in a way that, if he gets help and survives, he achieves essentially a full recovery - after a convalescence that keeps him out of the fighting until it's over.
Permanently blinding a hundred-thousand-man army with lasers is trivial. But after you win the war you have a hundred thousand blind people to take care of - and a hundred thousand families that will be itching to make war on your grandchildren.
Does this jive with the fox news article?
Yes. But it doesn't tell the whole story.
The lasers they're talking about are spinoffs of the Star Wars missile defense system. They had to get a LOT of energy into a beam quickly, to shoot down missiles while still in space, or to bounce off a mirror in space to get them on their way up. One shot, one dead nuke, so cost wasn't much of an object.
Neither was portability: You had either a fortified underground bunker as big as you wanted, or a satellite in zero-G.
So they did something very strong, effective, big, and expensive.
But lasers are EASY. Excluding superradiants (which are easier, if you've got the materials) all you need is a couple of well-alligned mirrors, one of 'em slightly leaky, with an "inverted population amplification light amplification medium" between them.
For "inverted population light amplification medium" read "smoke from a fire".
The medium must have the following characteristics:
It has a state transistion (an "excited state", a "ground state" or less-excited state, and an allowed transition between them) with an energy difference corresponding to a usefully energetic photon.
It must have significantly more of its atoms or molecules in the more-excited state than in the less-excited state. (This is the "inverted population" part.)
It must have ENOUGH of a surplus of more-excited particles to produce a usable amount of power if you extracted the energy difference by de-exciting enough that you're down to 50/50 (or de-exciting them all if there's a further transition that drains the less-excited state).
It must be transparent and reasonably uniform (i.e. non-distorting) at the light frequency corresponding to the state transition.
When you burn darn near ANYTHING the resulting molecules start out excited. If they meet the other criteria you've got a suitable medium for a chemically-pumped laser.
Burn a suitable fuel in a long, thin, rocket flame and run the exhaust at right angles between the pair of mirrors. You'll have a laser beam coming out as long as the flame lasts. Chose the right material and a large fraction of what would have been the heat of combustion ends up in the laser beam.
Now there are some fancy and deadly fuels (fluorine comes to mind) that make an exhaust where the bulk of the energy can be extracted by a single transition. This is nice and efficient. And you don't want to be ANYWHERE NEAR them when in use, due to the toxic nature of the exhaust. So if you're going to be shooting down a nuke from a fort in the desert they're fine.
But there are LOTS of others that are simpler, and might be more suitable for a battlefield.
I expect that eventually we'll see a chemically-pumped laser rifle or pistol, about the same size as a normal rifle or pistol, with an optical cavity where the barrel would be, powered by cartridges of solid fuel that are fed by a mechanism similar to the one that feeds cartridges consisting of case/primer/powder/bullet.
Such "dazzle" weapons were developed during the 80's, and were apparently used.
True. And there are moves to outlaw them (like poision gas and biological weapons) as inhumane (and counterproductive).
But what I'm talking about is accidental dazzle. When you're sending a light pulse that can vaporize metal in miliseconds, even a tiny splinter of that energy, focussed by an eye's lens, can wreak havoc on retinal cells.
Colloids, proteins, and DNA are a lot more fragile than metal.
If they use any wavelength that is well-focussed by eyeball optics you'll blind anybody without eye protection tuned to the laser that looks in the direction of anything the laser is shining on.
If they get hit in the face with a specular reflection they might have eye damage beyond merely going blind.
War is about to beome H.E.L.
I would also be reluctant to "buy in" because RJ45 connectors are not road worthy....those locking tabs always break off!
That's what the plastic hoods on ethernet cables prevent.
I'm also guessing that once you pass the signal though your array "stomp boxes" (for me: compressor, fuzz, wah-wah), there will be no need for a digital delay!
Rather than passing it though the stomp boxes, build new stomp boxes that send their settings to a single effects box as MIDI-in-Magic. Then the effects box applies all the effects at once. One hop, negligible latencey. (When expressed in digital form most interesting stomp box effects are trivial computations.)
1. [most] effects boxes ... cannot be uploaded
2. the few that can have proprietary formats ...
3. the few that allow algorithm creation are like $3,000 US (i.e. Eventide.).
conclusion: the creation of a guitar you could upload effects algorithms to is unlikely.
So don't put it in the guitar. (You didn't put the fuzz box, wah-wah, pedal, reverb, etc. in the guitar, did you?)
Once the signal is a digital sample in UDP on Ethernet you can run it through a cheap PC and compute any effect you want.
It seems to me (as a guitarist, computer programmer, and amp builder) that part of the purpose, if not the MAIN purpose, of the guitar amp is to color the sound of the guitar in pleasing ways. So if tubes produce better colorations than "technically-superior digital solid state amps", then the tubes are technically superior, n'est pas?
The bias for tube instead of transistor amplifiers stemmed from the crossover distortion of early Class-B transistor amplifiers. Tube amps also had Class-B output stages, but the crossover cutoff in tubes is smoother and more linear, handing the current from one of the output tubes to the other more cleanly. There was also a different sort of distortion in the Class-A preamp stages, resulting from the nonlinearity of the response of transistors to input voltages.
Later generations of amps have improved the situation, and no doubt substuted (or exposed) other, more subtle, distinctions in how they distort (and thus "color") a signal.
But that doesn't necessarily mean the effect you want is out of reach, or even expensive, with this system.
If you cleanly digitize an audio signal, with a sampling rate high enough to keep "images" out of your ear and a word size big enough to keep quantization error below the noise of the analog components (or at least below the threshold of hearing when the instrument is silent) and with extra room for roundoff error in later computations, you have a faithful digital representation of the original signal.
You can then DIGITALLY apply any "coloration" distortions that would have been applied by a tube amp, transistor amp, mismatched cabling/load impedence, blown-out speaker cone, or whatever floats your band's boat. Also echoes off the back of the speaker cabinet, the walls of a virtual "concert hall", the T-shirts of the front row of groupies, etc. Also a whole floor covered with virtual wah/fuzz/you-name-it boxes.
About all that's missing is the ability of the sound from the speakers to drive the strings of your axe, to pull Hendrix-style feedback guitar effects. (And I have a few ideas on how that could be faked up, too.)
So if your "effects mixer" throws a little CPU power at the problem you can get the same effect you would have gotten from a tube amp. (First-order distortions can be handled by a table lookup or a very simple function.)
Throw some more CPU power at it and you can do everything that's ever been done in a concert or studio, plus a lot of new stuff that was just too complicated to do when it was build-a-box, but is trivial when it's write-a-few-lines-of-code.
Of COURSE you won't put Ethernet in your (existing) Gibson - though I bet you'll plug it into an analog-guitar-to-Magic adapter box, if only to check that they got it working right. But I won't be surprised if the bulk of the next generation of instruments has Magic, or something like it, onboard, and makes music at least as wonderful as (if perhaps slightly different from) what we have now.
This is an enabling technology. Once music is running down the cable as open-standard UDP packets, a whole generation of music hackers can start hammering it into any shape they want.
They had time to get away.
They were incinerated
Any dead left were cremated indicating that the dwellers were Indo-Europeans and not aboriginal Italians who usually buried their dead.
Or:
They didn't leave the bodies to rot in downtown Nola.
After all, they were only digging up the area of a parking structure (so far). American Indians have a lot to say about the hygene (or lack thereof) of Europeans. But even bronze-age Europeans didn't normally leave the dead lying around on downtown streets.
Pompei is a special case: They were killed and buried all in one event by a natural disaster.
So let's hang in there until they've dug up enough of the area to find the graveyard, eh?
Is anyone else sick and tired of 20 year old technology getting slapped together into some cheezy consumer product and being heralded as the cure for cancer?
The improved interface design IS revolutionary.
So is the improved "footrpint" - you could use this in a crowd.
Is a gyrosco-ped supposed to make me go out and spend a ton of money on something that is functionally useless?
Functionally useless? No. Like other vehicles, it's a foot-amplifier.
A "ton of money"? Depends on the denomination. How much would you pay for a good motorcycle? Now how much would you pay if you could use it on the sidewalk without getting busted? Now how much LESS would you pay if you couldn't use it at highway speed?
Like most new tech it will start with an early-adopter gee-whiz pay-off-the-development look-how-rich-I-am premium. Let's see whether they can make it affordable in a couple years.
Project a bit further - how long is it going to be before your handheld instantly becomes a guest on other companies' networks when you are visiting them, so you get a broadband internet connection through that?
As soon as they install an internet-connected 802.11b and you install something like Air Snort on your handheld.
... and got cheese and quackers.
When I said "non-recurring costs" I meant "recurring fixed overhead" (i.e. recurring costs that are not per-user).
Sorry 'bout that.
Capacity for 5 million, while servicing only 10% of that is not a good business plan.
Not necessarily.
Suppose (hypothetically):
Your network will support 5,000,000 subscribers,
Your non-recurring costs are $1/subscriber-month,
Your per-subscriber costs are $10/subscriber-month, and
You charge $50/subscriber-month.
This:
Breaks even at 125,000 subscribers,
Makes $195,000,000/month ($2.3 Billion/yr) at 5,000,000 subscribers, and
Breaks down at 5,000,001 subscribers.
Of course that's not what they did. Nevertheless, they were up to 73.4% of the design capacity of the network by 7/11. So (unless their business model didn't include making a profit until their capacity was saturated) I don't think lack of customers was the problem.
With no data but that timeline I'd wonder if they underestimated their per-user recurring costs (such as support) or their network capacity (which maps back into per-user recurring costs through extra support when they saturate and the connections start to degrade).
So we're not immediately facing the prospect of watching athletes bred especially for their performance but, with our desire to win at all costs, this too can't be far off.
WHAT?
Athletes have been "breeding for athletic performance" for thousands of years! That's what it's ABOUT!
Haven't you noticed, even now, that the Jocks get the Cheerleaders, along with their pick of the female fans? Cheerleaders who are themselves athletic and exhibiting all the characteristics of healthy and extremely fertile young women just hiting breeding age? And Olympic Jockettes get to pick among several healthy multimillionaires, if they don't pair off with a prime Olympic Jock?
The only thing different here is that technology can now meddle directly in the process to direct and accelerate it by selecting particular genes or adding new ones from outside, rather than leaving it to the luck of the genetic draw among the genes currently in the particular Jocks and Jockettes.
What gets me about the Scientific American article is the apparent claim that the efficiency of batteries is ten times worse. Batteries and fuel cells can approach 100% efficiency.
Oops. I meant "the Popular Science article".
A lot of the destuctive force of explosives has less to do with the energy released than it does with how quickly it is released. Compare the speed of propogation of a shock wave traveling through a hand grenade (6-10,000 Meters per second)to the speed of flame propagation through an ideal hydrogen/oxygen mixture at 1 atmosphere of pressure (~300 Meters per second). A room filled with hydrogen would probably blow out the windows and singe the furniture when it exploded.
Let's see...
300 meters/sec = 1,080 kilometers/hour. About the speed of sound in air. So it's a shock wave, and all the energy of the mixture's burn (a LOT) is concentrated in the wave front. That should be adequate to blow the building apart. (Of course that's the number for a free-air reaction speed, and a mix inside a building is confined by the building.)
Of course turning the gas mixture into superheated steam behind the shock front is hardly a trivial matter, either. Superheated steam is just dandy for setting anything on fire - and it doesn't get much more superheated than the temperature of steam that has just been formed by an oxidation-reduction reaction. It's only short of the disassociation temperature by the bonding energy of H2 and O2. It transfers the heat nicely to whatever it touches, too, and also releases the heat of vaporization as it condenses on anything that's still below 212 F.
Try putting your hand in a jet of ordinary (not superheated) steam and then tell me how cool it is.
The burning of the hydrogen in hydrocarbon fuels provides the bulk of the heat, you know. The carbon is mostly there to hold the hydrogen together in a convenient package, and slow the reaction speed down to something convenient to handle. Hydrogen burns quite quickly.
Also, in my experience, hydrogen doesn't burn so hot that the resulting steam would even light a match.
That doesn't square with NASA's experience. B-) They find hydrogen leaks by walking slowly and holding out a piece of corrigated cardboard in front. When the cardboard suddenly catches fire they've found the leak. ("There's no such thing as a hydrogen leak that ISN'T on fire.")
Didn't Nikola Tesla work on a turbine for a while? Basically it could be held in one hand and generate enough electricity to power a house.
Yes he did. But it rotates at a VERY high speed - high enough that the centripital force on the working fluid matches the pressure difference between the input and output ports. Tough to balance. Lots of friction between the gas and the outer housing to create inefficiencies. Enormous forces in the turbine material itself.
Bladed designs have proven more practical for general use.
Even there there's an interesting instability problem: The shaft has a resonance - the frequency it would "ring" in the oscilatory mode where the bar is beneding up at the ends and down in the middle. When the turbine's rotational speed approaches this resonance it pumps energy into it and tends to tear the turbine apart. The trick is to provide support that can damp this vibration for long enough to get the rotational speed up beyond the magic rate.
This design seems to sidestep the problem by flattening the turbine into a pancake.
... even if the H2 tank ruptures there is not going to be enough H2 to do anything. It might burn for a second or two and thats about it, most likely not enough H2 mass there to really do any damage (beyond the device it's in). Certainly not enough to cause an explosive misture in a large enough volume of air to matter.
Sorry, wrong answer. You're underestimating the size of the tank.
Existing lithium cells have "the energy density of a hand grenade" - and weigh about as much as one, so they also have about the energy of one. This has ten times that energy - look at the run time numbers. That's because it's using an external oxidizer in combination with tanked hydrogen. That means it's got a LOT of hydrogen - essentially a small tank of liquid H2.
If you mix the H2 with the appropriate amount of air to burn it efficiently you get the energy of ten hand grenades - call it a couple sticks of dynamite. If it leaks (without initially igniting) inside a building, it will light when it reaches lower explosive limit at a nearby source of ignition - a close approximation to the ideal mixture. The pressure will couple efficiently to the walls and roof, blowing the building apart. The superheated steam left behind will ignite the fragments.
If, on the other hand, it leaks and ignites, you'll have a welding-hot needle flame which is ultraviolet, and thus invisible, poking out some hole in your laptop or playing against something inside it. And it will burn much longer than a butane torch with the same weight of fuel and same flame power.
Meanwhile, hydrogen is a very small molecule and can thus flow rapidly through very small holes - like between the atoms of a steel tank. This means it's much less forgiving about the quality of your tankage, gas plumbing, and valves. Leaks are MUCH more likely to occur.
The exhaust is water vapor, unused combustion air, and heat. That shouldn't be a problem. Well, you won't want 20W to 40W of heat running in your pocket, but other than that it should be fine.
The 20-40 watts is the power delivered by the device to the laptop and eventually (except for a miniscule amount leaving as light, radio waves, telephone modem signals, etc.) disipated as heat by the laptop's circuitry.
But the generator is a HEAT ENGINE and this one runs at 10% efficiency. So to generate 40 watts it burns fuel at a 400 watt rate. 40 watts to the laptop, 400-40 = 360 watts of heat in the exhaust.
And you CAN'T improve it very much. It's a heat engine. Perfect efficiency for a heat engine is the carnot cycle limit: 100% * (Th - Tc)/Th.
Call that about 30% for a fuel-burning engine at room temperature, and you're still talking 133 watts of heat sitting on your lap for a 40 watt load. But you can't get anywhere near carnot cycle in a practical device, and the smaller and faster the device the more you'll fall short - you need something like a power-plant to approach it. So back to 10% and 400 watts.
What gets me about the Scientific American article is the apparent claim that the efficiency of batteries is ten times worse. Batteries and fuel cells can approach 100% efficiency.
I think what happened is they confused efficiency with energy density. A battery contains both its fuel and its oxidizer - and oxidizers tend to be heavy, due to heavy atoms and extra atoms to hold them down. Heat engines and fuel cells, on the other hand, can get their oxidizer from the ambient air, and expell the combustion products. So they only need the engine/cell proper plus the fuel tankage. Yes a heat engine would probably beat a battery by a factor of ten on energy density. But a fuel cell, if it can be adequately miniaturized, might do still better.
Nevertheless this engine looks like a good solution (if you're willing to put up with the waste heat), at least until fuel cell technology approaches it in power density.
The use of hydrogen is curious. Handling it is a real bitch. It crawls right through steel and burns with an invisible, super-hot, ultraviolet flame. Very dangerous.
They are probably using it, rather than a liquid hydrocarbon like butane, to simplify the design and to get the maximum energy-density numbers for the engine/tank system. With butane/air you need to do emission control for NOx, CO, and unburned hydrocarbon. With hydrogen/air you only need to sweat NOx. Hydrogen's energy/ounce of fuel is higher and it's easier to light. Liquid hydrocarbons - especially impure and "odorized" formulations - produce a number of combustion products that can potentially foul the engine or its exhaust as well. You don't need fancy controls for a hydrogen engine, while a butane engine might need a catalytic converter and some serious compute power.
What I'd like to know is whatever happened to the ceramic oxygen-concentration fuel cell - the one that uses the same basic cycle as the exhaust-gas oxygen sensor in a car?
Water would be the exhaust, just have a little vent....
Water?
Try superheated steam.
I don't want a jet of THAT coming out of something sitting on my lap. B-)
I think they are trying to extend the monopoly and get Apple and others out of the schools...
Providing low-cost or free computing equipment to schools and universities - so a generation of graduates comes up pre-trained on your stuff - is an old hack.
IBM did it. DEC did it. Amdahl did it. Cray did it. Apple did it.
But to use such an anti-competitive activity as a SETTLEMENT of an anti-trust conviction... Now THAT takes GUTS!
If they get away with it, it will qualify as the legal hack of the century.
There are additional reasons (besides targeting of radiation and susceptability of dividing cells to DNA damage due to activation of otherwise-idle genes) for cancer cells to be more susceptable to radiaion damage.
Because cancer cells are dividing all the time, they tend to be less robust than other cells. Many therapies (including some of the earlier chemotherapy regimens) take advantage of this by poisoning cells ALMOST to the point of death - which pushes cancer cells over the edge. (An exception to this rule is Melanoma, which gets extra energy as a side-effect of making the brown pigment Melanin. This makes it STRONGER than the typical cell.)
Radiation therapy can provoke some of the further-damaged cancer cells into triggering an immune reaction against both themselves and their still-undamaged-but-cancerous neighbors.
========
It's nice to see that the monoclonal-antibody-attached-to-local-poison approach is getting into the field. But I'd like to know what happened to:
- Monoclonal antibodies plus radio-iodine for Melanoma. (Sounds like this is the same stunt further tuned, with a different radioactive element for more localized effect.)
- Monoclonal antibodies plus a catalytic poison from a bacterial toxin. (I don't recall the exact toxin used. But it worked by destroying all the copies of one of the enzymes that attached a particular amino-acid to its T-RNA, shutting down protein synthesys. One molecule, one dead cell. And the molecule ended up inside the cell when the cell recycled the part of the surface with the antibody attached. Perhaps that had a variable effectiveness depending on what the antibody targeted. Radiation works from OUTSIDE too, even if you need a lot more copies of it.)
... it would be science.
And given that, in this series, magic IS reliable and repeatable (and thus is really a science and its asscoiated technology), the rest of the story becomes:
- Child from broken home is abused.
- Child escapes from broken home through institutional opportunity for children like him to enter higher learning institution.
- Child enrolls in a "science/technology" degree program, in a "science" for which he has a talent (and which is thus fun).
- Child grows up, learning about good and evil, human relations, etc., making friends (and enemies) and having a good time along the way.
- Child breaks rules (as adolescents must do at least once), getting in an appropriate amount of trouble and finding an appropriate amount of opportunity as a result.
- Child learns more family history.
- Child and friends solve serious adult-world problem.
- Child and friends make progress exposing and combatting the plans of evil/psychopathic persons.
etc.
Substitute "science" for "magic", and the whole thing turns into a real-world growing-up success story, with lots of useful lessons about attitudes and behaviors useful for achieving success, morals, and social standing. But using the technology of magic allows the young reader to easily transfer these lessons to the real-world without the distraction of technical particulars from the author's understanding of a PARTICULAR technology's CURRENT state-of-the-art.
Meanwhile it's a very fun read, keeping the reader engaged and encouraged to continue.
So in addition to teaching kids to read, this series seems likely to teach a lot of good stuff, all the while making it LOADS of fun (as learning SHOULD be).
I'm glad to hear it made it to the silver screen with its guts intact.
... the RIAA represents the companies, not the artists. The companies should represent the artists, but they're too busy making a fast buck.
No, the RIAA SHOULD NOT represent the artists. It is an organization of, by, and for the labels.
There IS an organization that SHOULD be representing the artists.
It's their UNION.
To which they've been paying dues since they first got on stage.
The Musician's union has accused of been nothing but a scam for quite some time.
Now's the artists' chance to do something about it.
The surgeon is being trained to keep cutting until the knife warns him that the tissue he's about to cut is important.
So if the knife DOESN'T warn him - even for a couple miliseconds, he cuts right through arteries or nerves.
The potential for trouble is enormous.
And unlike VR built from MRI imaging, there's no indication that a failure is in progress until the damage is done.
I sure hope the authors of any software involved, and the designers of any hardware, are VERY good at building a VERY robust product.
I remember a certain radiation therapy machine, which operated in two modes - one with an attenuation shield, one without it. If you typed too fast on the touch-panel control, it would go through the whole cycle normally, but with the shield OUT rather than IN. Killed several patients before they figured out what was happening.
I hear they had done a marvelous faiure analysis on the hardware. But they had assumed the software would be perfect.