No, I don't think so. F-18 is usually used as part of FDG (Flourodeoxyglucose), a biologically active molecule, so that the positrons are emitted from where glucose is consumed. Having random positrons flying throughout your body won't make for a very effective PET scan.
Also, wouldn't it be more effective to just use Ga-68 if you are far from a cyclotron? It has a 68 minute half-life and is produced from Ge-68 generators, which have a 271 day half-life. I have a NIST traceable sample of Ge-68/Ga-68 in equilibrium, which we use to calibrate the F-18 dose calibrators,because there is no way to get a NIST calibrated F-18 sample.
Citizenship should be earned, not handed out willy-nilly.
That's funny. I was born in the U.S., and they just gave me a citizenship for being born. Boy did I have to work hard at that! You don't even have to grow up in the U.S., just being born here is good enough. If that's not willy-nilly, what is?
When people born here have to work as hard for their citizenship as your fiance did, then the system might be considered fair. As it is, I don't see the unfairness in giving rights and privileges to foreign-born individuals who didn't earn it, but rather, I see it as unfair that your fiance (and many others) had to work hard for what IS given out willy-nilly, on the basis of birth, like some aristocratic title. So, yes, it is unfair that others are getting for free what your fiance had to work for, but perhaps you should look first to those never had to do anything at all.
The U.S. never quite gave out citizenships to all comers, but it was once much freer in allowing immigration. It should be noted that that period of freer immigration was also when we rose from being a third-rate backwoods nation to the most powerful nation on earth.
I never realized you worked for a Baby-bell. I always thought you were a a quantum computing kind of guy. It's good if BBs are working on stuff like that; I guess the old Bell Labs isn't really dead, perhaps just spored.
I have a little project I have been working on, in the Shannon/Nyquist/Hartley type of area, and unfortunately none of the physicists I work with are interested in it, because there is not a single MeV anywhere in sight. Does anyone in your group care about such things? I think I have something new and interesting, but alas I have no one to shoot holes in my (possibly) bad arguments.
In my experience, that is because no one knows how to teach math.
In many ways, math is like another language. Imagine if everyone in school, for some reason, needed to learn Malagasy. Now, there aren't too many translators around between Malagasy and English, so most of the people who would be teaching it are going to have to learn it on their own, in one way or another. Some will learn it from books, some might listen to tapes, etc. The fact is, that most of these teachers will not learn it very well. The ones who do learn it well will be those rare souls who could have been explorers in an earlier age, who have a talent for picking up a new language even without a translator. It would be an even rarer soul who would be able to then teach the language successfully - most of the ones who learned it well, learned it as if by an innate gift, and they will think that only those with a rare innate gift could learn it as they did.
That is the situation that Math is in. It is not so much that it is hard to learn, as that few who know it well know how to teach it, because they too had to figure it out for themselves instead of being taught. So unlike most fields, you cannot just teach it the way you were taught, because for most of the students, that doesn't work. And then only those who idiosyncratically figure it out for themselves will understand it, perpetuating the cycle.
Do you know what Freeman Dyson did before he became a physicist? He was an analyst for RAF bomber command in World War II! You know, the kind of job where you have to determine the probabilities of X people dying in order to accomplish Y goal. Yeah, I'm sure he doesn't know anything about risk management.
Actually, that's the beginning of an interesting idea.
We could have the same citizenship requirements for everyone. And I mean EVERYONE. Including those born in France and Mexico and Jamaica... and those born in the USA.
Then see how easy or how hard we decide to make it to become a citizen.
You seem to have confused the word "wrong", as in "morally offensive", with the words "bad for me".
You say that if wealth were spread more evenly around the world and people got jobs they deserved, that would be a wrong thing. Is that "wrong" as in morally offensive, or "wrong", as in bad for you, personally? Because you have noticed that where you are born has a lot to do with how much you make, but you seem to think that is a good thing. Aristocrats used to feel the same way about what family you were born into, instead of which country.
Remember that people in other countries are people too. Many of the Founders were Englishmen, who would have to apply for work permits to make a living here these days. What do you think that does to their RPMs?
People need to put this in perspective. Immigrants aren't people who are coming to steal your job and cash a welfare check. Immigrants are people who are MOVING TO ANOTHER FUCKING CITY. How criminal. Off with their heads.
Are there still technology companies without a website out there? In this field?
Well, I can't speak for Dr. Bussard, but I personally ran a VC-funded company in this exact field for 6 years. We never had a website, nor did our funders want us to have one. We were supposed to be in "stealth mode" until we had good enough results to go public. Unfortunately, we never had good enough results to go public, and the only evidence you will find on the web of our six years of work are the patent and an obsure mention on our VC's website.
Dr. Bussard is well known in the field and does not need a website any more than Hirsch or Rostoker do. Although I doubt that his device works as well as he thinks it does, I wish him luck in finding funding. The more ideas that are tried, and the more different mindsets are applied to the research, the faster we will have effective fusion devices.
I guess you must be doing something wrong then, since the ~only~ time I have ever marched in protest (against the Iraq war in 2003) we had the local Sheriff's dept. send infiltrators to take pictures of us, write down our names, and record our license plate numbers. This was at a protest which was basically composed of a small bunch of college professors and elderly hippy-types holding signs and marching with a pre-arranged police escort. It's quite likely that my name is now on some list somewhere, simply for expressing an opinion which is rapidly becoming a majority view in this country.
I'm completely serious about this. I'd link to an article, but Florida Today has a rather obtuse webpage design. Just search the flatoday.com archives from 2003 onwards, with the keywords "protest sheriff" and see what pops up. Here's an example:
June 16, 2005 639 words ID: brv14520201 FLORIDA TODAY Brevard County Sheriff Jack Parker says his undercover agents will no longer "spy" on political protesters without a definitive reason. In a new policy effective Monday, Parker has altered his criminal intelligence division's methods for monitoring public rallies and demonstrations. Agents will respond to protests only "when the potential for threat to the citizens or law enforcement has been identified" in...
I never would have thought that sort of stuff would happen with a peaceful protest of ~100 people, in a town of ~100,000. You could say that it was just an overzealous small-town sheriff, but the only difference between an overzealous sheriff and an overzealous FBI agent is the shape of the badge.
Now, I don't feel that I should "hide" the fact that I protested - protesting is and should be something very public, that's its nature. But you act like protesting never draws negative attention from law enforcement when even a cursory reading of history shows that is false. Perhaps your Side B isn't being all that unrealistic.
Maybe the reason you don't hear inventors calling out for protection is because we already have it and are happy with it. Sure, there are some things we'd like changed, but they are minor. The people that are being hurt by the current problems with patents aren't inventors - they are engineers and other people who work on things that are not brand new. I invent new stuff. Really new stuff. Sometimes I have trouble figuring out what patent class an invention would fall in. So I'm not too worried about prior art or some guy in Des Moines having an overly broad patent on weed eaters. It is the engineers who work on already existing ideas who are suffering under the current system, as they have to navigate their designs through a sea of patents, half of which should be found invalid under a court of law. I agree that there are problems with too many bad patents being issued, but the reason you don't hear inventors bitching is because we are not the ones that are affected.
Now, as far as your idea of getting rid of patents altogether, please go jump in a lake.
Patents aren't about incentivizing the creation of new ideas. They are about incentivizing the publication of new ideas. I'm working on something really cool right now. Want me to tell you about it? Too bad, I don't have a patent on it yet (I'd like to get a working model built first before I put the time and money into another patent). Without a patent, do you think I'm going to tell anybody who could possibly be a competitor about it? Why should I shoot myself in the foot? But in a couple of months, once I have satisfied myself that I know what I am doing with it and I've sent in a provisional patent application, I'd be happy to tell you all about it and how it works. Without a patent, I would be forced to develop this idea in secret, which could slow its development by years or decades. Do you think that adding years to its development time, and using a lot more of my valuable time, is going to reduce scarcity? Perhaps you ought to look back at the 17th century when patents were first granted to see why they were instituted.
Now, I do agree with you that there are some problems with patents. However, most of those problems have as much to do with the practice of law in this country as they do with patents. Do you think we ought to abolish the courts as a solution, too? And please don't conflate copyright law with patent law. Patent law is in nearly the same state it was in when it was first instituted, with a few modern perversions like genetic and software patents. Copyright terms on the other hand have been extended essentially indefinitely. I don't want a patent that lasts 100 years; I want a fair deal with society. But take away patents altogether and I'll be happy playing with my inventions by myself without telling anyone else about them.
I agree that the implementation of the ad concept has sucked. I've always thought it would be interesting to start a cable TV channel that played nothing but ads - but GOOD ads, the ones where people don't change the channel when they come on. We can all think of interesting and cool ads that we have seen and liked. There are plenty of ads that people download because they thought they were neat. Get a few editors to pick the winner ads and your advertisers would give you all the content you would ever need. And they would pay you for it. You could throw in retro ads and stuff as specials to attract veiwers.
In addition, if they were not played over and over again, but rather interspersed with different ads, people would not get sick of them like they do with regular ads. Everyone gets sick of watching the same ad 10 times during the same show. Sure, advertisers like it when there is repetition, but if they are driving watchers away, shouldn't they have to pay for that? Instead, offer them this option, where placing your ad is much cheaper than between episodes of Law and Order or Survivor, but the ads are placed in such a way that viewers don't hate it.
If QVC works, so would this. In addition, if this were highly successful, it might help change the ad industry's view of the best way to do things.
Reification is no more an issue with photons than with electrons, as the predictions made by the photon model are testable. If you think I am confusing the concept of photons with their actual existence, I ask you why this is not a problem with electrons? What physical objects do you think are real?
Coulomb's Law alone does not predict photons. Maxwell's equations are needed to provide a electromagnetic wave solution. Coulomb's law also does not predict magnetic effects. If you are jiggling electrons, there are magnetic effects. Coulomb's law only tells half the story. You can only use Coulomb's law by itself when your electron's aren't moving.
I'm having some trouble parsing your third paragraph. Are you talking about the "pipe" model we were discussing before? If so, then there is no diminuition of field as it gets farther from the emitter. I'm not sure what a particleicle or particuliculum are. A perfect reflector does not require either infinite mass or infinite restoring forces. You seem to be making the assumption that the reflector experiences no external forces to counteract the radiation pressure from the emitter. In such a case, a perfect reflector will be accelerated by the radiation pressure, however, that does not make it an absorber. An absorber will only receive half the momentum change of a reflector, and a reflector can return its kinetic energy to the photons by moving it back to its original position. An absorber cannot do this.
I'm sorry, but there is actually a need for photons. If you think about it for a little while you will see why.
In your model, you assume that the electrons in source A do not lose any energy at the start because B is initially reflective. This is incorrect. Source A will lose energy until the return signal from B comes back to restore its original energy. This can be measured. I think that looking at the steady-state condition is distracting you from seeing the start and stop conditions accurately. Try running your model with source A turning on and off faster than t. You will find that it is not a signal running back from B to A which causes the energy loss in A, but rather the initial emission of the signal at A. If you send a single pulse, then A will lose energy, and the energy will either bounce off B (if it is reflective) or be absorbed by by (if it is absorptive). The energy state of A will remain lower until it receives that energy back from B. In the case I discussed above, there was no returning signal.
Intermediating particles or fields are necessary to explain the universe we see. Yes, an electron can spread through all space, but in general only very small proportions of the wavefunctions of any two particular electrons will overlap. Perhaps you ought to consider why if electrons are infinitely large, every electron is not always pushing every other electron around.
I have never played Mario Kart, but the spiky blue Koopa shell sounds a lot like an intermediating particle.
Fusion: well, in anything we would actually call a fusion reaction, the nucleus changes. As a result of that change, usually something happens, such as the emission of a photon or other particle. For example, taking a look at one of the deuteron fusion reactions: D + D => He3 + neutron, when the two deuterons fuse, the energy level is raised. Now, during the very brief time before it emits the neutron, the deuterons have the possibility of tunneling out. In such a case, nothing has really reacted and we don't count that as a reaction. The correction for that 'unreacting' possibility is rather small if I remember correctly, because the time frame in which it would have to occur is so short. What is more likely is that a neutron will tunnel out, and then we have our reaction. Basically, all that we really care about is when the reaction occurs and the fusion results in the emission of the helium-3 and the neutron. There are other possible reactions which occur with deuteron-deuteron collisions (D + D => H + T being the other main one) and each reaction has a particular reaction cross section which is measured in barns (10^-28 m^2). The reaction cross section for each reaction varies with the energy with which the two deuterons are collided.
Interference:
I think most of your questioning can be answered with the concept of the wave packet. Real waves generally do not extend infinitely in space; most of the time we are dealing with waves of finite extent, or wave packets which are composed of a superposition of infinite waves. With this is mind:
1) Yes, a downconverted wave packet interacts as a wave packet of the lower frequency. So, yes, your synthetic 100 MHz wave packet should pass through the water with less loss than the 60 GHz signal. Keep in mind that if you are sending information, the modulation frequency will cause your signal to occupy a bandwidth, rather than a single frequency.
2) It is important to keep track of all 3 directional vectors of the wave packet at each point in space you are interested in. Yes, two waves can interfere at one point in space and then separate and not interfere at a different point. However, in order to do this they generally have to not be traveling in the same direction, and because of that, they may not 100% interfere at the 'interference point'. Treat each wave as a vector, and calculate your interference one dimension at a time (x,y,z).
3) Your description sounds something like the Aspect experiment. When quantum effects are taken into account, you have to add something to the 'analog' wavepacket description given above - namely that particles are discrete units with conserved quantum numbers. In other words, you cannot interfere the wave packets from two electrons and somehow end up with zero charge or spin. Ain't gonna happen. You can't merge two beams perfectly (like, across the length of the universe) but you can align them close enough for lab work. Whether they show interference or not has little to do with their alignment and more to do with quantum effects and "measurement", which is a subject too big for this post. If you really want to know more about that, I would recommend some of the earlier papers by this guy: http://quic.ulb.ac.be/members/ncerf/
Perhaps it would be easier for you to see the problem with this idea if instead of electromagnets, you look at an analogous situation with small particles, like marbles.
When you turn on magnet A, you are sending out a field which propogates in all directions. The field is composed of photons, which have energy E equal to E=hv, and a momentum p equal to p=E/c=hv/c. In our analogy, treat these as marbles sent out in all directions. The only real difference between photons and marbles in this case is that marbles have a rest mass, which isn't important in this problem. Because the marbles (or photons) are sent in all directions, then no net momentum will be imparted to magnet A. This is also the case in any symmetrical dispersement of particles, such as sending half the marbles directly towards B and half directly away.
When the marbles or photons reach B, if B interacts with them by capturing the marbles or turning on its field to interact with the photons, then it will receive momentum causing it to move. This is not is not a reactionless engine situation because it is not magnet A which it is reacting against, but rather the symmetric field of photons or marbles which was sent out from A. By reacting against the symmetric field, it changes the field so that it is no longer symmetric. Basically the end result is that B is moved in one direction, and the field produced by A has a net average momentum component in the opposite direction. What has happened to A after it emmitted its symmetrical field is irrelevant.
You could have the same effect if A was never involved, and B emmitted the same assymmetrical field that would result from the above process. Basically, it is a photon drive, using magnets instead of a flashlight, and it would waste a lot of energy if the magnetic field propogated in all directions. You'd be better off using the flashlight.
Cheers, krysith
Similar thing happened here.
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 1
I had almost the exact same thing happen to me last week also. Our phone lines worked but wouldn't call out for a while, and the supposed 911 call happened at that time. I didn't freak out; stuff like that happens and the cop was nice.
It also happened at the business I work at last week. Twice. We replaced the phone system after that, but I don't think that whatever problem was occuring was internal.
I think that somebody out there may be screwing with the 911 service. I live in Florida, so this could be a nationwide problem. Or perhaps it has to do with all the bad weather that has been occuring recently.
I realize these are only a few anecdotes, but if this is actually occuring more often than usual, it could be an important tech story - whatever the cause.
If it is the case that 911 starts receiving a lot of "no voice" calls whenever the phone company is out fixing stuff, it would be helpful to both the 911 centers and the phone company to know that.
I am glad to see you respond. I know that it can be hard to be gracious when everyone is throwing stones, and I do appreciate your gracious response.
Now, I am afraid I must proceed to throw a few pebbles of criticism:
1) You have stated that "Annual lighting discharges are well in excess of any heat energy input to the planet." What is your source for this calculation? The earth receives on the order of 10^17 Watts of solar irradiation. According to the NASA Global Hydrology and Climate Center (http://thunder.nsstc.nasa.gov/primer/primer4.html ), about 100 lightning strikes occur per second. I have had trouble finding a definitive value for the average energy of a lightning strike, but wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning) gives an average of 500 MJ for negative strikes (95%) and 300 GJ for positive strikes (5%) for an average energy of about 15 GJ per strike. That is only 1.5x10^12 Watts. I also wonder about this storm that is supposed to have used a quarter of a year of earth's sunshine energy. That must have been one hell of a storm. I'm not sure you have your numbers right.
2) Recorded pressure levels in a tornado are less than 100 millibars below atmospheric (reference: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/ ). That means that the pressure inside a tornado is about 9/10 of an atmosphere. I would hardly call that a vacuum level appropriate for a particle accelerator. Generally in a particle accelerator you at least want to get well below the conductivity peak in the Paschen curve at about 10^-3 atmospheres. The last particle accelerator I built operated at 10^-10 atmospheres (10^-11 on a good day).
3) Putting charge on one side of a capacitor draws charge onto the other side of the dialectric of the capacitor but does not transmit energy to the other side, unless you are using a very high frequency. Try charging one side of a capacitor while the other side is disconnected from the circuit and see how much energy is stored in the cap. I once tried building an electric motor based upon this misconception, so I am very familiar with it. You can test this using a capacitor and battery with some wires, so I encourage you to explore this yourself.
4) Cerenkov radiation is usually blue. Mako1138 had a good post addressing this point. Of course, I suppose that interaction with some sort of atmospheric chemicals could result in green light coming from a Cernkov radiation source. However, if you want anyone to think that the green is from Cerenkov radiation, you will need to have some proof that it is.
I have seen both Cerenkov radiation and the weird yellow-green sky in person (I was in this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Lake_City_Tornad o ). In my own estimation the color is very different, although they both looked 'weird'. I can't explain it, but both kinds of light were what I would describe as 'penetrating to the eye'. I suspect that this may have had to do with the ambient light conditions in which I observed both.
5) Usually when people use the term "vacuum energy" they are speaking of the energy associated with quantum fluctuations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy). You seem to be using the term to talk about the energy in the interplantetary plasma. Could you be more specific about which vacuum energy you mean? There is a large amount of energy total in this plasma because space is so large, but the energy density is fairly small. If you are referring to interactions between the interplantary plasma and the weather, could you be a little more specific about what that interaction is, and what the predictions or observations of your theory are?
Slashdot's got some issues with pervasive audience negativity, but that doesn't mean that it's a public venue to criticize a story that you don't like.
What is this, TV?
I apologize if I hurt Sterling's feelings. I know that sometimes I can be rather blunt. But actually, slashdot is a public forum where we criticize stories, when we like them and when we don't. That's what we do here. All I wanted to say was, "Before you submit to a public forum, be sure you can handle the heat". In this case, he made a bad choice. There were many other stories on his site which would have been much better recieved. I'm guessing he went with this one because of the hurricane tie-in.
I am sending you an email, as it appears that you believe that discussions like this one should be kept hidden. Feel free to respond to it or send it on to Sterling. You can also respond here if you wish, or ignore me, rude fellow that I am. I know that criticism can be painful, and I do apologize to Sterling for any pain my criticism may have caused, but I said what I felt had to be said.
I'm surprised you have the guts to show yourself in the thread after some of the comments which have been made. So, kudos on your bravery.
However, I would like to take this opportunity to explain to you why so many people are mad at you right now.
People were expecting (rightly or wrongly, this being Slashdot) a science story. This is not what they got. I will explain to you why this is not a science story.
A science story would present a phenomenon which was previously unexplained, then present either a number of possible explanations and a way of testing them to see which one was right, or preferably, evidence showing that a particular explanation was correct. Paul Noel has not done this with his article.
Instead of presenting an unexplained phenomenon, he makes suppositions and then skips the physics. I see a number of phenomenons which are being described in the linked article and its accompanying one at http://pesn.com/2005/10/21/9600193_Wilma_Energy_fr om_the_Vacuum/ One is his back pain. He presents no evidence that his back pain was caused by Wilma, and only presents one possible hypothesis (the electromagnetic one). Another is his link between vacuum energy and hurricanes. His only evidence that there might be link to vacuum energy is that according to his calculations, Wilma was losing energy of an "amount here is equal the detonation of a 20 megaton Hydrogen bomb every few minutes. To strip the planet of this much heat this fast requires an ionic short circuit into deep space." Um, there is this thing called the stratosphere where energy is radiated away into space as electromagnetic energy, named infrared. This is not new knowledge. Nor does it have anything to do with ionization or any "ionic short circuit". People on slashdot know this stuff. You should too.
There are certainly things we don't know about hurricanes and other vortices. However, there are a lot of things that we DO know. Mr. Noel doesn't seem to know the existing science behind hurricanes, and he doesn't seem to have any problem with making up possible ideas to explain his gaps in knowledge. This is not a bad way to learn a subject, mind you. But before you go around telling other people that your ideas are correct, you better test them. Mr. Noel doesn't seem to have considered other hypotheses, much less tested to see which ones are correct. I mean, seriously! Vacuum energy? WTF? Where does that come from? His theory might as well be that the energy fairies are stealing it for all that he explains the mechanism. If he wants to expand our knowledge, great. Where is he doing that?
I appreciate what you are trying to do with OSEN. If you guys want to discuss ideas, please do. However, once you decide it's worthy of publicizing, then you need to hold your people to the same burden of proof that other scientists are held to. Does Paul know how much you just publicly humiliated him? Linus wouldn't let any crap code into the linux kernel, and you shouldn't be posting any old crap to slashdot. Don't waste our time - it's enough of a waste as it is!;)
You know, I work on weird stuff also. I know that there is plenty of energy that we could be harvesting if we did it right. I'm building something right now you would probably find quite interesting. Some day someone like me might need something like OSEN to get word out about something that is not accepted by a part of the science community, or squelched by big business. However, if you think that ideas are more important than evidence, you would do me no good. I'd be better off avoiding you. If you want to have a little club, that's fine. But if you want to have more, you'll have to back up your shit with more than "we don't know everything". No shit. We already know that. Tell us something we don't know - not just something we don't think. There is a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think the situation can be well described with two words:
Scrappy Doo
No, I don't think so. F-18 is usually used as part of FDG (Flourodeoxyglucose), a biologically active molecule, so that the positrons are emitted from where glucose is consumed. Having random positrons flying throughout your body won't make for a very effective PET scan.
Also, wouldn't it be more effective to just use Ga-68 if you are far from a cyclotron? It has a 68 minute half-life and is produced from Ge-68 generators, which have a 271 day half-life. I have a NIST traceable sample of Ge-68/Ga-68 in equilibrium, which we use to calibrate the F-18 dose calibrators,because there is no way to get a NIST calibrated F-18 sample.
Citizenship should be earned, not handed out willy-nilly.
That's funny. I was born in the U.S., and they just gave me a citizenship for being born. Boy did I have to work hard at that! You don't even have to grow up in the U.S., just being born here is good enough. If that's not willy-nilly, what is?
When people born here have to work as hard for their citizenship as your fiance did, then the system might be considered fair. As it is, I don't see the unfairness in giving rights and privileges to foreign-born individuals who didn't earn it, but rather, I see it as unfair that your fiance (and many others) had to work hard for what IS given out willy-nilly, on the basis of birth, like some aristocratic title. So, yes, it is unfair that others are getting for free what your fiance had to work for, but perhaps you should look first to those never had to do anything at all.
The U.S. never quite gave out citizenships to all comers, but it was once much freer in allowing immigration. It should be noted that that period of freer immigration was also when we rose from being a third-rate backwoods nation to the most powerful nation on earth.
Karthik,
I never realized you worked for a Baby-bell. I always thought you were a a quantum computing kind of guy. It's good if BBs are working on stuff like that; I guess the old Bell Labs isn't really dead, perhaps just spored.
I have a little project I have been working on, in the Shannon/Nyquist/Hartley type of area, and unfortunately none of the physicists I work with are interested in it, because there is not a single MeV anywhere in sight. Does anyone in your group care about such things? I think I have something new and interesting, but alas I have no one to shoot holes in my (possibly) bad arguments.
But no one seems to care about how to teach math.
In my experience, that is because no one knows how to teach math.
In many ways, math is like another language. Imagine if everyone in school, for some reason, needed to learn Malagasy. Now, there aren't too many translators around between Malagasy and English, so most of the people who would be teaching it are going to have to learn it on their own, in one way or another. Some will learn it from books, some might listen to tapes, etc. The fact is, that most of these teachers will not learn it very well. The ones who do learn it well will be those rare souls who could have been explorers in an earlier age, who have a talent for picking up a new language even without a translator. It would be an even rarer soul who would be able to then teach the language successfully - most of the ones who learned it well, learned it as if by an innate gift, and they will think that only those with a rare innate gift could learn it as they did.
That is the situation that Math is in. It is not so much that it is hard to learn, as that few who know it well know how to teach it, because they too had to figure it out for themselves instead of being taught. So unlike most fields, you cannot just teach it the way you were taught, because for most of the students, that doesn't work. And then only those who idiosyncratically figure it out for themselves will understand it, perpetuating the cycle.
AFAIK Charles Stross is the only SF writer who has ever done much writing in a milieu where FTL is equivalent to time travel
Don't forget Bob Forward (e.g. Timemaster). Can't forget a book where the protoganist goes back in time for a threesome with himself and his wife.
Freeman Dyson - a lousy risk manager?
Do you know what Freeman Dyson did before he became a physicist? He was an analyst for RAF bomber command in World War II! You know, the kind of job where you have to determine the probabilities of X people dying in order to accomplish Y goal. Yeah, I'm sure he doesn't know anything about risk management.
Actually, that's the beginning of an interesting idea.
We could have the same citizenship requirements for everyone. And I mean EVERYONE. Including those born in France and Mexico and Jamaica... and those born in the USA.
Then see how easy or how hard we decide to make it to become a citizen.
but how long does it take to train someone how to be socially adept in the USA?
;)
Well, judging from Cmdr Taco's Slashdot experience, at least 10+ years. And counting.
You seem to have confused the word "wrong", as in "morally offensive", with the words "bad for me".
You say that if wealth were spread more evenly around the world and people got jobs they deserved, that would be a wrong thing. Is that "wrong" as in morally offensive, or "wrong", as in bad for you, personally? Because you have noticed that where you are born has a lot to do with how much you make, but you seem to think that is a good thing. Aristocrats used to feel the same way about what family you were born into, instead of which country.
Remember that people in other countries are people too. Many of the Founders were Englishmen, who would have to apply for work permits to make a living here these days. What do you think that does to their RPMs?
Well said.
People need to put this in perspective. Immigrants aren't people who are coming to steal your job and cash a welfare check. Immigrants are people who are MOVING TO ANOTHER FUCKING CITY. How criminal. Off with their heads.
Are there still technology companies without a website out there? In this field?
Well, I can't speak for Dr. Bussard, but I personally ran a VC-funded company in this exact field for 6 years. We never had a website, nor did our funders want us to have one. We were supposed to be in "stealth mode" until we had good enough results to go public. Unfortunately, we never had good enough results to go public, and the only evidence you will find on the web of our six years of work are the patent and an obsure mention on our VC's website.
Dr. Bussard is well known in the field and does not need a website any more than Hirsch or Rostoker do. Although I doubt that his device works as well as he thinks it does, I wish him luck in finding funding. The more ideas that are tried, and the more different mindsets are applied to the research, the faster we will have effective fusion devices.
I guess you must be doing something wrong then, since the ~only~ time I have ever marched in protest (against the Iraq war in 2003) we had the local Sheriff's dept. send infiltrators to take pictures of us, write down our names, and record our license plate numbers. This was at a protest which was basically composed of a small bunch of college professors and elderly hippy-types holding signs and marching with a pre-arranged police escort. It's quite likely that my name is now on some list somewhere, simply for expressing an opinion which is rapidly becoming a majority view in this country.
I'm completely serious about this. I'd link to an article, but Florida Today has a rather obtuse webpage design. Just search the flatoday.com archives from 2003 onwards, with the keywords "protest sheriff" and see what pops up. Here's an example:
June 16, 2005 639 words ID: brv14520201
FLORIDA TODAY Brevard County Sheriff Jack Parker says his undercover agents will no longer "spy" on political protesters without a definitive reason. In a new policy effective Monday, Parker has altered his criminal intelligence division's methods for monitoring public rallies and demonstrations. Agents will respond to protests only "when the potential for threat to the citizens or law enforcement has been identified" in...
I never would have thought that sort of stuff would happen with a peaceful protest of ~100 people, in a town of ~100,000. You could say that it was just an overzealous small-town sheriff, but the only difference between an overzealous sheriff and an overzealous FBI agent is the shape of the badge.
Now, I don't feel that I should "hide" the fact that I protested - protesting is and should be something very public, that's its nature. But you act like protesting never draws negative attention from law enforcement when even a cursory reading of history shows that is false. Perhaps your Side B isn't being all that unrealistic.
Maybe the reason you don't hear inventors calling out for protection is because we already have it and are happy with it. Sure, there are some things we'd like changed, but they are minor. The people that are being hurt by the current problems with patents aren't inventors - they are engineers and other people who work on things that are not brand new. I invent new stuff. Really new stuff. Sometimes I have trouble figuring out what patent class an invention would fall in. So I'm not too worried about prior art or some guy in Des Moines having an overly broad patent on weed eaters. It is the engineers who work on already existing ideas who are suffering under the current system, as they have to navigate their designs through a sea of patents, half of which should be found invalid under a court of law. I agree that there are problems with too many bad patents being issued, but the reason you don't hear inventors bitching is because we are not the ones that are affected.
Now, as far as your idea of getting rid of patents altogether, please go jump in a lake.
Patents aren't about incentivizing the creation of new ideas. They are about incentivizing the publication of new ideas. I'm working on something really cool right now. Want me to tell you about it? Too bad, I don't have a patent on it yet (I'd like to get a working model built first before I put the time and money into another patent). Without a patent, do you think I'm going to tell anybody who could possibly be a competitor about it? Why should I shoot myself in the foot? But in a couple of months, once I have satisfied myself that I know what I am doing with it and I've sent in a provisional patent application, I'd be happy to tell you all about it and how it works. Without a patent, I would be forced to develop this idea in secret, which could slow its development by years or decades. Do you think that adding years to its development time, and using a lot more of my valuable time, is going to reduce scarcity? Perhaps you ought to look back at the 17th century when patents were first granted to see why they were instituted.
Now, I do agree with you that there are some problems with patents. However, most of those problems have as much to do with the practice of law in this country as they do with patents. Do you think we ought to abolish the courts as a solution, too? And please don't conflate copyright law with patent law. Patent law is in nearly the same state it was in when it was first instituted, with a few modern perversions like genetic and software patents. Copyright terms on the other hand have been extended essentially indefinitely. I don't want a patent that lasts 100 years; I want a fair deal with society. But take away patents altogether and I'll be happy playing with my inventions by myself without telling anyone else about them.
I agree that the implementation of the ad concept has sucked. I've always thought it would be interesting to start a cable TV channel that played nothing but ads - but GOOD ads, the ones where people don't change the channel when they come on. We can all think of interesting and cool ads that we have seen and liked. There are plenty of ads that people download because they thought they were neat. Get a few editors to pick the winner ads and your advertisers would give you all the content you would ever need. And they would pay you for it. You could throw in retro ads and stuff as specials to attract veiwers.
In addition, if they were not played over and over again, but rather interspersed with different ads, people would not get sick of them like they do with regular ads. Everyone gets sick of watching the same ad 10 times during the same show. Sure, advertisers like it when there is repetition, but if they are driving watchers away, shouldn't they have to pay for that? Instead, offer them this option, where placing your ad is much cheaper than between episodes of Law and Order or Survivor, but the ads are placed in such a way that viewers don't hate it.
If QVC works, so would this. In addition, if this were highly successful, it might help change the ad industry's view of the best way to do things.
My favorites:
http://www.unicornjelly.com/
http://cheston.com/pbf/archive.html
http://www.project-apollo.net/mos/mos000.html
Reification is no more an issue with photons than with electrons, as the predictions made by the photon model are testable. If you think I am confusing the concept of photons with their actual existence, I ask you why this is not a problem with electrons? What physical objects do you think are real?
Coulomb's Law alone does not predict photons. Maxwell's equations are needed to provide a electromagnetic wave solution. Coulomb's law also does not predict magnetic effects. If you are jiggling electrons, there are magnetic effects. Coulomb's law only tells half the story. You can only use Coulomb's law by itself when your electron's aren't moving.
I'm having some trouble parsing your third paragraph. Are you talking about the "pipe" model we were discussing before? If so, then there is no diminuition of field as it gets farther from the emitter. I'm not sure what a particleicle or particuliculum are. A perfect reflector does not require either infinite mass or infinite restoring forces. You seem to be making the assumption that the reflector experiences no external forces to counteract the radiation pressure from the emitter. In such a case, a perfect reflector will be accelerated by the radiation pressure, however, that does not make it an absorber. An absorber will only receive half the momentum change of a reflector, and a reflector can return its kinetic energy to the photons by moving it back to its original position. An absorber cannot do this.
I'm sorry, but there is actually a need for photons. If you think about it for a little while you will see why.
In your model, you assume that the electrons in source A do not lose any energy at the start because B is initially reflective. This is incorrect. Source A will lose energy until the return signal from B comes back to restore its original energy. This can be measured. I think that looking at the steady-state condition is distracting you from seeing the start and stop conditions accurately. Try running your model with source A turning on and off faster than t. You will find that it is not a signal running back from B to A which causes the energy loss in A, but rather the initial emission of the signal at A. If you send a single pulse, then A will lose energy, and the energy will either bounce off B (if it is reflective) or be absorbed by by (if it is absorptive). The energy state of A will remain lower until it receives that energy back from B. In the case I discussed above, there was no returning signal.
Intermediating particles or fields are necessary to explain the universe we see. Yes, an electron can spread through all space, but in general only very small proportions of the wavefunctions of any two particular electrons will overlap. Perhaps you ought to consider why if electrons are infinitely large, every electron is not always pushing every other electron around.
I have never played Mario Kart, but the spiky blue Koopa shell sounds a lot like an intermediating particle.
No problem!
Fusion: well, in anything we would actually call a fusion reaction, the nucleus changes. As a result of that change, usually something happens, such as the emission of a photon or other particle. For example, taking a look at one of the deuteron fusion reactions: D + D => He3 + neutron, when the two deuterons fuse, the energy level is raised. Now, during the very brief time before it emits the neutron, the deuterons have the possibility of tunneling out. In such a case, nothing has really reacted and we don't count that as a reaction. The correction for that 'unreacting' possibility is rather small if I remember correctly, because the time frame in which it would have to occur is so short. What is more likely is that a neutron will tunnel out, and then we have our reaction. Basically, all that we really care about is when the reaction occurs and the fusion results in the emission of the helium-3 and the neutron. There are other possible reactions which occur with deuteron-deuteron collisions (D + D => H + T being the other main one) and each reaction has a particular reaction cross section which is measured in barns (10^-28 m^2). The reaction cross section for each reaction varies with the energy with which the two deuterons are collided.
Interference:
I think most of your questioning can be answered with the concept of the wave packet. Real waves generally do not extend infinitely in space; most of the time we are dealing with waves of finite extent, or wave packets which are composed of a superposition of infinite waves. With this is mind:
1) Yes, a downconverted wave packet interacts as a wave packet of the lower frequency. So, yes, your synthetic 100 MHz wave packet should pass through the water with less loss than the 60 GHz signal. Keep in mind that if you are sending information, the modulation frequency will cause your signal to occupy a bandwidth, rather than a single frequency.
2) It is important to keep track of all 3 directional vectors of the wave packet at each point in space you are interested in. Yes, two waves can interfere at one point in space and then separate and not interfere at a different point. However, in order to do this they generally have to not be traveling in the same direction, and because of that, they may not 100% interfere at the 'interference point'. Treat each wave as a vector, and calculate your interference one dimension at a time (x,y,z).
3) Your description sounds something like the Aspect experiment. When quantum effects are taken into account, you have to add something to the 'analog' wavepacket description given above - namely that particles are discrete units with conserved quantum numbers. In other words, you cannot interfere the wave packets from two electrons and somehow end up with zero charge or spin. Ain't gonna happen. You can't merge two beams perfectly (like, across the length of the universe) but you can align them close enough for lab work. Whether they show interference or not has little to do with their alignment and more to do with quantum effects and "measurement", which is a subject too big for this post. If you really want to know more about that, I would recommend some of the earlier papers by this guy: http://quic.ulb.ac.be/members/ncerf/
Perhaps it would be easier for you to see the problem with this idea if instead of electromagnets, you look at an analogous situation with small particles, like marbles.
When you turn on magnet A, you are sending out a field which propogates in all directions. The field is composed of photons, which have energy E equal to E=hv, and a momentum p equal to p=E/c=hv/c. In our analogy, treat these as marbles sent out in all directions. The only real difference between photons and marbles in this case is that marbles have a rest mass, which isn't important in this problem. Because the marbles (or photons) are sent in all directions, then no net momentum will be imparted to magnet A. This is also the case in any symmetrical dispersement of particles, such as sending half the marbles directly towards B and half directly away.
When the marbles or photons reach B, if B interacts with them by capturing the marbles or turning on its field to interact with the photons, then it will receive momentum causing it to move. This is not is not a reactionless engine situation because it is not magnet A which it is reacting against, but rather the symmetric field of photons or marbles which was sent out from A. By reacting against the symmetric field, it changes the field so that it is no longer symmetric. Basically the end result is that B is moved in one direction, and the field produced by A has a net average momentum component in the opposite direction. What has happened to A after it emmitted its symmetrical field is irrelevant.
You could have the same effect if A was never involved, and B emmitted the same assymmetrical field that would result from the above process. Basically, it is a photon drive, using magnets instead of a flashlight, and it would waste a lot of energy if the magnetic field propogated in all directions. You'd be better off using the flashlight.
Cheers,
krysith
I had almost the exact same thing happen to me last week also. Our phone lines worked but wouldn't call out for a while, and the supposed 911 call happened at that time. I didn't freak out; stuff like that happens and the cop was nice.
It also happened at the business I work at last week. Twice. We replaced the phone system after that, but I don't think that whatever problem was occuring was internal.
I think that somebody out there may be screwing with the 911 service. I live in Florida, so this could be a nationwide problem. Or perhaps it has to do with all the bad weather that has been occuring recently.
I realize these are only a few anecdotes, but if this is actually occuring more often than usual, it could be an important tech story - whatever the cause.
If it is the case that 911 starts receiving a lot of "no voice" calls whenever the phone company is out fixing stuff, it would be helpful to both the 911 centers and the phone company to know that.
Hi Paul,
I am glad to see you respond. I know that it can be hard to be gracious when everyone is throwing stones, and I do appreciate your gracious response.
Now, I am afraid I must proceed to throw a few pebbles of criticism:
1) You have stated that "Annual lighting discharges are well in excess of any heat energy input to the planet." What is your source for this calculation? The earth receives on the order of 10^17 Watts of solar irradiation.
According to the NASA Global Hydrology and Climate Center (http://thunder.nsstc.nasa.gov/primer/primer4.html ), about 100 lightning strikes occur per second. I have had trouble finding a definitive value for the average energy of a lightning strike, but wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning) gives an average of 500 MJ for negative strikes (95%) and 300 GJ for positive strikes (5%) for an average energy of about 15 GJ per strike. That is only 1.5x10^12 Watts. I also wonder about this storm that is supposed to have used a quarter of a year of earth's sunshine energy. That must have been one hell of a storm. I'm not sure you have your numbers right.
2) Recorded pressure levels in a tornado are less than 100 millibars below atmospheric (reference: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/ ). That means that the pressure inside a tornado is about 9/10 of an atmosphere. I would hardly call that a vacuum level appropriate for a particle accelerator. Generally in a particle accelerator you at least want to get well below the conductivity peak in the Paschen curve at about 10^-3 atmospheres. The last particle accelerator I built operated at 10^-10 atmospheres (10^-11 on a good day).
3) Putting charge on one side of a capacitor draws charge onto the other side of the dialectric of the capacitor but does not transmit energy to the other side, unless you are using a very high frequency. Try charging one side of a capacitor while the other side is disconnected from the circuit and see how much energy is stored in the cap. I once tried building an electric motor based upon this misconception, so I am very familiar with it. You can test this using a capacitor and battery with some wires, so I encourage you to explore this yourself.
4) Cerenkov radiation is usually blue. Mako1138 had a good post addressing this point. Of course, I suppose that interaction with some sort of atmospheric chemicals could result in green light coming from a Cernkov radiation source. However, if you want anyone to think that the green is from Cerenkov radiation, you will need to have some proof that it is.
I have seen both Cerenkov radiation and the weird yellow-green sky in person (I was in this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Lake_City_Tornad o ). In my own estimation the color is very different, although they both looked 'weird'. I can't explain it, but both kinds of light were what I would describe as 'penetrating to the eye'. I suspect that this may have had to do with the ambient light conditions in which I observed both.
5) Usually when people use the term "vacuum energy" they are speaking of the energy associated with quantum fluctuations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy). You seem to be using the term to talk about the energy in the interplantetary plasma. Could you be more specific about which vacuum energy you mean? There is a large amount of energy total in this plasma because space is so large, but the energy density is fairly small. If you are referring to interactions between the interplantary plasma and the weather, could you be a little more specific about what that interaction is, and what the predictions or observations of your theory are?
6) What sort of observation
Ok, now that was rude!
Slashdot's got some issues with pervasive audience negativity, but that doesn't mean that it's a public venue to criticize a story that you don't like.
What is this, TV?
I apologize if I hurt Sterling's feelings. I know that sometimes I can be rather blunt. But actually, slashdot is a public forum where we criticize stories, when we like them and when we don't. That's what we do here. All I wanted to say was, "Before you submit to a public forum, be sure you can handle the heat". In this case, he made a bad choice. There were many other stories on his site which would have been much better recieved. I'm guessing he went with this one because of the hurricane tie-in.
I am sending you an email, as it appears that you believe that discussions like this one should be kept hidden. Feel free to respond to it or send it on to Sterling. You can also respond here if you wish, or ignore me, rude fellow that I am. I know that criticism can be painful, and I do apologize to Sterling for any pain my criticism may have caused, but I said what I felt had to be said.
Hi Sterling.
r om_the_Vacuum/ One is his back pain. He presents no evidence that his back pain was caused by Wilma, and only presents one possible hypothesis (the electromagnetic one). Another is his link between vacuum energy and hurricanes. His only evidence that there might be link to vacuum energy is that according to his calculations, Wilma was losing energy of an "amount here is equal the detonation of a 20 megaton Hydrogen bomb every few minutes. To strip the planet of this much heat this fast requires an ionic short circuit into deep space." Um, there is this thing called the stratosphere where energy is radiated away into space as electromagnetic energy, named infrared. This is not new knowledge. Nor does it have anything to do with ionization or any "ionic short circuit". People on slashdot know this stuff. You should too.
;)
I'm surprised you have the guts to show yourself in the thread after some of the comments which have been made. So, kudos on your bravery.
However, I would like to take this opportunity to explain to you why so many people are mad at you right now.
People were expecting (rightly or wrongly, this being Slashdot) a science story. This is not what they got. I will explain to you why this is not a science story.
A science story would present a phenomenon which was previously unexplained, then present either a number of possible explanations and a way of testing them to see which one was right, or preferably, evidence showing that a particular explanation was correct. Paul Noel has not done this with his article.
Instead of presenting an unexplained phenomenon, he makes suppositions and then skips the physics. I see a number of phenomenons which are being described in the linked article and its accompanying one at http://pesn.com/2005/10/21/9600193_Wilma_Energy_f
There are certainly things we don't know about hurricanes and other vortices. However, there are a lot of things that we DO know. Mr. Noel doesn't seem to know the existing science behind hurricanes, and he doesn't seem to have any problem with making up possible ideas to explain his gaps in knowledge. This is not a bad way to learn a subject, mind you. But before you go around telling other people that your ideas are correct, you better test them. Mr. Noel doesn't seem to have considered other hypotheses, much less tested to see which ones are correct. I mean, seriously! Vacuum energy? WTF? Where does that come from? His theory might as well be that the energy fairies are stealing it for all that he explains the mechanism. If he wants to expand our knowledge, great. Where is he doing that?
I appreciate what you are trying to do with OSEN. If you guys want to discuss ideas, please do. However, once you decide it's worthy of publicizing, then you need to hold your people to the same burden of proof that other scientists are held to. Does Paul know how much you just publicly humiliated him? Linus wouldn't let any crap code into the linux kernel, and you shouldn't be posting any old crap to slashdot. Don't waste our time - it's enough of a waste as it is!
You know, I work on weird stuff also. I know that there is plenty of energy that we could be harvesting if we did it right. I'm building something right now you would probably find quite interesting. Some day someone like me might need something like OSEN to get word out about something that is not accepted by a part of the science community, or squelched by big business. However, if you think that ideas are more important than evidence, you would do me no good. I'd be better off avoiding you. If you want to have a little club, that's fine. But if you want to have more, you'll have to back up your shit with more than "we don't know everything". No shit. We already know that. Tell us something we don't know - not just something we don't think. There is a difference.