Here you mixed details from 2 related stories: Daghlian accident during the war and Slotin accident after the war. The accidents happened with the same plutonium sphere. Slotin was boss of Daghlian and saw him dying. He had very similar accident and died in the same hospital room 9 months later. This Pu sphere was stored for safety reasons as 2 separate hemispheres and these were put together before experiment. The accidents were caused not by combining the Pu hemispheres but by surrounding them with neutron reflector which turned the system critical.
Daghlian was trying to find the practical (=just barely subcritical) arrangement of cube of tamper material (tungsten carbide) which would be completely surrounding a solid 6.2 kg sphere of delta-phase of Pu239. The carbide bricks functioned as neutron reflector also. Daghlian was working very slowly as he was getting close to critical configuration (neutron reflection increased reactivity). One of the heavy bricks felt out of his hand - on top of the Pu sphere and the system went critical. Daghlian trew the brick quickly away and disasembled the system into more strable configuration, etc. He got just above letal dose so he was dying very slowly.
Slotin was demonstrating for his colleagues reactivity of Pu depending on reflection of neutrons from berylium cover (Be holow hemispheric cover surrounding Pu sphere which was sitting half-embeded within another large Be hemispheric stand). The Be cover slipped, enclosed the Pu sphere, the system went critical, there was flash, Slotin took it apart with his bare hands (to save his colleagues) and got huge dose which killed him few days later.
Old Czar-era roubles did have exactly that. On a 50-rouble note from 1908 (very impressive looking, with Catherine the Great) the tiny text line within the bar under the picture of the Emperor reads something like "Counterfighting of the bank notes is punished by forced labor and exile in Siberia" (I recently gave the note away to my russian ex-boss so I do not have the text verbatim)
Vending machines: Printer or copier-produced bill will not work in current vending machines. The black ink on genuine bills is ferroelectric, sensor reads the magnetic pattern on the bill. So you would have to produce your own ink cartrige filled with ink of similar properties. Huge amount of experimentation would be needed. (It is so much easier to cut metal disks of the right size/weight to emulate the $1 coins to fool the vending machine.)
Paper: Bank note paper is made from cotton, not from wood pulp as most of the normal paper. Wood-produced paper allways contains some traces of lignins. It is very easy to devise a chemical reagent that produces color reaction with lignins. I believe that this is the principle behind the "magic marker" they have been using here in our campus caffeteria for some time - they put a mark on every note to spot the fakes. The marker is light-colored (light tan) but turns deep brown on normal paper.
"The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered at Turgid University. Tentatively named administratium, element has no protons or electrons. It has one neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons and 111 assistant vice neutrons. These 312 particles are held together by a force that involves exchange of strong-interacting particles, so-called morons.
Administratium has half-life of approximately three years but it does not decay. Instead it undergoes a reorganization in which assistant neutrons, vice neutrons and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. (Some studies suggest that the total mass actually increases after each reorganization.)
Administratium is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with. A minute amount of administratium causes reactions to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second.
"Oh and the reason the goverment is carefull is that their is no way to tell wich fish is without poison and wich isn't"
There is very easy way. The paralysis is fast: the unfortunate guests tend to freeze right at the table. (The restaurants could display some happy sushi-nibbling rodents at the entrance.)
The Loschmidt echo is what you hear in the state of decoherence. Typicaly it is similar to human voice (quite like yours, but very remote and slow)saying "and make it double, will you"
Morton Thiokol (of the infamous shuttle SRB's) did a lot of vertical rocket test firing in remote areas right by shores of Salt Lake. I guess it is hard to keep a good rocket down.
I wonder if they did a control experiment - with soot. Also I would like to know how they dispersed fullernes in water - the fullies are terribly insoluble, greasy and tend to lump together. Unless you add a bit a detergent to make a stable slurry. Adding a trace of detergent into fish tank is a sure way how to make the fish very unhappy. I wonder if this brain damage could have been caused by insufficient oxygen because of mucked-up gills. Also, the comment about fullerenes being "more toxic than nickel but less toxic than copper" for aquatic life did not scare me too much. Copper is not a plutonium, and tap water in many cities in Arizona is quite rich in copper. (So much that the water stone sediment in sink sometimes has a bluish tint).
Breathing a microparticle dust is not a healthy habit, the manufacturers will have to protect their workers but I do not expect to see this as a big enviro problem.
No, NIF is the academy for training new homeland security agents. If you own books, you may want to make a bonfire voluntarily and nobody will need to know.
"NIF experiments will be the first to create fusion that gives off more energy than it takes in."
I think this output>input fusion problem was solved on some pacific atol a half century ago. They are just trying it now with a reusable equipment.
Re:Can somebody explain something?
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 1
I think, in warm and humid times a long time ago (in a galaxy far away) there was life on Mars but it has all died out. Now all that is left is a cold desert with oilfields and without oxygen it is difficult to burn off the escaping natural gas at the top of the wells.
Of course Hercules could beat Jesus hands down. Hercules used to be a stable stand-alone hero. The current Trinity system has too many internal conflicts (and the love-stuff gimmicks are outright annoying).
The stationary layer on the surface of heatsink is the problem, which they try to fix with their invention.
Instead of playing with a high frequency/high voltage surface of the heat sink, I am thinking about a small but high velocity air fan and a dimple-patterned heat sink surface for maximum turbulence. I believe it is possible to generate air vortex over a small surface even with a modest power supply fan. Alternatively, I would use a piezo crystal vibrating the heat sink surface in an (unaudible) ultrasonic frequency for the same effect.
This competition in distributed computing is becoming even more popular than CETI@HOME
Australia shot from 14th place to 5th over the last six months of 2003
Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge!
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1
There are wide-ranging estimates concerning the ice sheet thickness on Europa. Although the modern (small, multiple) warheads are now about 0.5 MT yield, if a 20-100 megaton bomb was small enough in 1960 to be dropped from a cargo plane, they could fit one like this onto a rocket now. I suggest performing a peacefull termonuclear test to settle the thickness question once for all. Let's peal Europa.
Re:We use to do this with goldfish...
on
Reanimated Lobsters?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
...how about Babel fish?
"Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Squornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to life again."
There is hydrocarbon-based stuff and micro-diamond particles all over in the interstellar space. Their absorbtion bands have been seen in the IR spectra long before. But probably never with such a good resolution.
Carbon is common, so is hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.
Slashdot Mirror
Here you mixed details from 2 related stories: Daghlian accident during the war and Slotin accident after the war. The accidents happened with the same plutonium sphere. Slotin was boss of Daghlian and saw him dying. He had very similar accident and died in the same hospital room 9 months later. This Pu sphere was stored for safety reasons as 2 separate hemispheres and these were put together before experiment. The accidents were caused not by combining the Pu hemispheres but by surrounding them with neutron reflector which turned the system critical.
Daghlian was trying to find the practical (=just barely subcritical) arrangement of cube of tamper material (tungsten carbide) which would be completely surrounding a solid 6.2 kg sphere of delta-phase of Pu239. The carbide bricks functioned as neutron reflector also. Daghlian was working very slowly as he was getting close to critical configuration (neutron reflection increased reactivity). One of the heavy bricks felt out of his hand - on top of the Pu sphere and the system went critical. Daghlian trew the brick quickly away and disasembled the system into more strable configuration, etc. He got just above letal dose so he was dying very slowly.
Slotin was demonstrating for his colleagues reactivity of Pu depending on reflection of neutrons from berylium cover (Be holow hemispheric cover surrounding Pu sphere which was sitting half-embeded within another large Be hemispheric stand). The Be cover slipped, enclosed the Pu sphere, the system went critical, there was flash, Slotin took it apart with his bare hands (to save his colleagues) and got huge dose which killed him few days later.
Old Czar-era roubles did have exactly that. On a 50-rouble note from 1908 (very impressive looking, with Catherine the Great) the tiny text line within the bar under the picture of the Emperor reads something like "Counterfighting of the bank notes is punished by forced labor and exile in Siberia" (I recently gave the note away to my russian ex-boss so I do not have the text verbatim)
Vending machines: Printer or copier-produced bill will not work in current vending machines. The black ink on genuine bills is ferroelectric, sensor reads the magnetic pattern on the bill. So you would have to produce your own ink cartrige filled with ink of similar properties. Huge amount of experimentation would be needed. (It is so much easier to cut metal disks of the right size/weight to emulate the $1 coins to fool the vending machine.)
Paper: Bank note paper is made from cotton, not from wood pulp as most of the normal paper. Wood-produced paper allways contains some traces of lignins. It is very easy to devise a chemical reagent that produces color reaction with lignins. I believe that this is the principle behind the "magic marker" they have been using here in our campus caffeteria for some time - they put a mark on every note to spot the fakes. The marker is light-colored (light tan) but turns deep brown on normal paper.
"The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered at Turgid University. Tentatively named administratium, element has no protons or electrons. It has one neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons and 111 assistant vice neutrons. These 312 particles are held together by a force that involves exchange of strong-interacting particles, so-called morons.
Administratium has half-life of approximately three years but it does not decay. Instead it undergoes a reorganization in which assistant neutrons, vice neutrons and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. (Some studies suggest that the total mass actually increases after each reorganization.)
Administratium is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with. A minute amount of administratium causes reactions to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second.
"Oh and the reason the goverment is carefull is that their is no way to tell wich fish is without poison and wich isn't"
There is very easy way. The paralysis is fast: the unfortunate guests tend to freeze right at the table. (The restaurants could display some happy sushi-nibbling rodents at the entrance.)
small and diluted doses are completely harmless in any quantity and volume
Christ is not involved, boredom did it. Someone should quickly do something about job satisfaction of the ghost in the machine.
The Loschmidt echo is what you hear in the state of decoherence. Typicaly it is similar to human voice (quite like yours, but very remote and slow)saying "and make it double, will you"
Morton Thiokol (of the infamous shuttle SRB's) did a lot of vertical rocket test firing in remote areas right by shores of Salt Lake. I guess it is hard to keep a good rocket down.
This alloy sounds like exciting fuel, not something to store LOX in. And they can power the onboard controls with the lithium-aluminum cell batery...
I wonder if they did a control experiment - with soot. Also I would like to know how they dispersed fullernes in water - the fullies are terribly insoluble, greasy and tend to lump together. Unless you add a bit a detergent to make a stable slurry. Adding a trace of detergent into fish tank is a sure way how to make the fish very unhappy. I wonder if this brain damage could have been caused by insufficient oxygen because of mucked-up gills. Also, the comment about fullerenes being "more toxic than nickel but less toxic than copper" for aquatic life did not scare me too much. Copper is not a plutonium, and tap water in many cities in Arizona is quite rich in copper. (So much that the water stone sediment in sink sometimes has a bluish tint).
Breathing a microparticle dust is not a healthy habit, the manufacturers will have to protect their workers but I do not expect to see this as a big enviro problem.
No, NIF is the academy for training new homeland security agents. If you own books, you may want to make a bonfire voluntarily and nobody will need to know.
"NIF experiments will be the first to create fusion that gives off more energy than it takes in."
I think this output>input fusion problem was solved on some pacific atol a half century ago. They are just trying it now with a reusable equipment.
I think, in warm and humid times a long time ago (in a galaxy far away) there was life on Mars but it has all died out. Now all that is left is a cold desert with oilfields and without oxygen it is difficult to burn off the escaping natural gas at the top of the wells.
Of course Hercules could beat Jesus hands down.
Hercules used to be a stable stand-alone hero. The current Trinity system has too many internal conflicts (and the love-stuff gimmicks are outright annoying).
The stationary layer on the surface of heatsink is the problem, which they try to fix with their invention.
Instead of playing with a high frequency/high voltage surface of the heat sink, I am thinking about a small but high velocity air fan and a dimple-patterned heat sink surface for maximum turbulence. I believe it is possible to generate air vortex over a small surface even with a modest power supply fan. Alternatively, I would use a piezo crystal vibrating the heat sink surface in an (unaudible) ultrasonic frequency for the same effect.
We should fervently pray that the power companies would not replicate Microsoft's level of security and reliability
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to continue
This competition in distributed computing is becoming even more popular than CETI@HOME
Australia shot from 14th place to 5th over the last six months of 2003
There are wide-ranging estimates concerning the ice sheet thickness on Europa. Although the modern (small, multiple) warheads are now about 0.5 MT yield, if a 20-100 megaton bomb was small enough in 1960 to be dropped from a cargo plane, they could fit one like this onto a rocket now. I suggest performing a peacefull termonuclear test to settle the thickness question once for all. Let's peal Europa.
...how about Babel fish?
"Arthur prodded the mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in the swamps of Squornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to life again."
it took many attempts and both hands of many bright young people - but Ms. Higgs bosom was found at the end.
inter-connecting in this testbed...
Mice-financed, this thing was. This is the End. (But let me read you some poetry first).
You will stop laughing when its Energizer logo comes to the focus.
There is hydrocarbon-based stuff and micro-diamond particles all over in the interstellar space. Their absorbtion bands have been seen in the IR spectra long before. But probably never with such a good resolution.
Carbon is common, so is hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.