Astronauts wear bulky, air-tight radiation/heating suits. I'm sure they won't engage the control rods until they are on "Luna Firma." Besides, it isn't like they are going to be sitting in that launch tower for weeks on end. If they use sodium, lead, or tungsten in its construction, it should be fairly shielded given the small amount of material involved. If it is lead-cooled, you are in great shape, because the coolant mass is also going to shield that gamma radiation pretty well with lead. My guess is that the new space suits will use Demron (invented by a freakin' Dentist, of all people).
As for the reactor life, I'm betting 10-30 years with the included fuel, and it is probably not meant to be serviceable. I get the feeling those who don't know much about nuclear reactors think that there are these big, daily freight trains, like with coal plants, but full of uranium. Fact is, nuclear power isn't all that resource-intensive.
Do the math on 14KW. Also, don't forget it has to fit inside what amounts to an 8x8 cubicle. I say the atomic waste can fits better. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the space required for the array to yield 12 Kw is 45' by 45'. Perhaps less mass than the atomic waste can, but certainly not less volume!!! Besides, those cells are fragile like eggshells and require careful packing and engineering. When people's lives are at stake, they need something that is reliable and simple. Space programs are all about fault-tolerant systems and redundancy.
Used Uranium is lead or something else. If it is still radioactive, you can still use it to run a different power plant, affectionately referred to as the nuclear fuel cycle. A breeder reactor "breeds" radioactive material, so rather than going down from Uranium to Lead, you go up from Uranium to Plutonium. I'm over-simplifying, because the process involves more elements, isotopes, and so forth, but if this interests you, I know you'll go get yourself a decent book on the subject (get the old ones, the new ones don't say as much).
You've obviously not been on the moon before. The radiation is pretty bad up there. I suppose you are going to tell us we need to use wind or hydro power on the moon, then? Oh, wait, solar. yeah, that leaves half of the planet off-limits. Also, launching something the size of an office trashcan, versus an array of solar panels 45'x45', all of which are susceptible to micrometeorite and radiation damage. So what does that leave you? Hamster wheels? I can just see their spacesuits.
That kid was a total 'tard and didn't read the Bible at all. Jonah was swallowed by a leviathan. The book of Job, chapter 40, describes a land creature with the tail of a cedar tree. Satan was described in the Garden of Eden as a serpent (not a snake, and I'm told the word is different. Hebrew scholars, anyone?).
Furthermore, the Japanese are always hauling the most unusual carcasses out of the Pacific, whether they are giant squid befitting captain Nemo, or ancient plesiosaurs. There are accounts in the Lower Kingdom of Egypt of poisonous spitting lizards that walk on two legs, and nearly every culture with written tradition that existed during the Dark Ages had Wurm/Dragon mythos.
C-14 is radio-carbon dating. C-12 and C-13 are not half-life techniques. For a creationist, though, answer me this: how do we know the half-life of anything going back more than 100 years? Mdme. Curie's work really got going around 1910, so people could have started making test samples for measurement at that point.
Is it me, or is there an awful lot of extrapolation going on here? Also, how do people get the half-life of stabilized nickel to be some odd Billion years? I read once in an article that they used the geologic record of the earth to determine it, but I figured that can't be right, because you use that to determine the age of a mineral sample, and that makes it circular reasoning.
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
on
LHC Success!
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Not exactly, you see, academic types are full of goats. The Monty Hall problem was interesting, though. It is interesting in the article to note how many people did not bother to sit down and go through a mere handful of permutations.
Re:Of course we're still alive...
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
If it is happening in December, I can imagine the Dr. Who Christmas Special in the making already!
Speaking of "turned on"
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
Particle Physicist Claire was definitely part of the turning-on process for me. Whoever her husband is must be pretty lucky to have her, when she's not busy at the lab, that is!
Oh if only we had nuclear-powered cars. That'd show the foreign oil companies a thing or two about American ingenuity! I think your mechanic is a luddite, more than anything else.
Step 1 requires more engineering and construction. More energy. The low heat levels mean that the engineering will not likely be net positive. You need much higher temperatures there.
Step 2 still isn't "free" energy. In fact, go price out those renewable energy sources. I seem to recall California residents have the option of paying for the energy sources they choose. Funny how they can't seem to get excited about 10x to 15x the cost of base load power sources.
Step 3 cracks me up. How are they being deployed? Trucks, or ships? What do trucks and ships use as power? What? Diesel? No wait, stick it on an aircraft carrier, which is nuclear. Oh, you can't win. Ha ha ha. Oh, sure, like they're going to dust off the ships at the maritime museum and sail them to Africa, then carry it by oxcart to the center of a remote village.
This is an interesting article because it is do-it-yourself. I respect the engineering here. But please don't be fooled into thinking this is some holy grail. It is a lot like that peanut sheller idea: give folks the tools to take care of themselves and they will live better lives.
Last point: why is it these billions of hungry people, stumbling around in the dark are not taking care of themselves? I mean, we are talking about entire provinces and even nations at some point, right? Some of these countries don't even have banking systems in place. No real estate agents, no loan specialists, no financial planners... Let's just take a page from Sim City and recognize that there are entire nations and provinces full of illiterate, primitive settlers. Back in the "Age of Sail" this was grounds for empire building. Honestly, if China said the following, I wouldn't mind: "hey, this random pathetically poor country in Africa has lots of arable land, and well, they are starving. We're gonna go conquer them, feed them, and build there. Anyone got a problem with that?" The sovereignty of these struggling countries really is begging for conquest. For the good of the people. Look what England did to India. A model colony, really. Even Hong Kong was a colony. These ideas are over the top, and I'm asking the question, not making a suggestion.
I think that early childhood development is overfunded. They are trying to unlock the secrets of stupidity. Does anyone see the point? What stupid person is going to say "you mean I can get gene therapy and be un-stupid?" This will just lead to millions of American stupid kids becoming briefly very bright, only to have the genes regress, the stupidity return, and, like the rat Algernon, all the stupid kids die. Genetic glitch. Why don't they find the genetic thing for incredibly smart people who never make mistakes, get picked on in school, move to Montana, and start mailing triggered explosives, only to be arrested and locked up in Hi-Max with the likes of Richard Reed (may his feet stink forever)? I think rather than finding what makes people incurably stupid, they should develop more aerodynamic paddles, switches, canes, etc. Or, maybe a non-physical punishment that works just as well. Even the Bible says the world is full of simple-minded people. I half-wonder if the folks in early childhood development are simple-minded themselves. I mean, if they were smart, they would have come up with something usable by now. Someone point to a single, commonly accepted axiom or technique that was produced by the early childhood development movement. Go ahead. Name one.
the lead lining wasn't thick enough. Also? There is no accounting for the heat levels. He may have had a reduced radiation dose, but his carcass would have been fried to a crisp.
SETI strikes me as a large use of bandwidth and electricity. Maybe they don't find intelligent life, in 100 years. Have they managed to find anything else, or is the scope of their research purely as the name states? All that data and analysis cycles, you'd think they found at least an interesting sub-space anomaly, while scanning for life forms. I'll go take a look.
So have we proven that these two detractors have insignificant influence on the black community voting trends, or not? I'd like to get some useful conclusion out of a slashdot thread, once in a while.
Wow. So, my kids have over a dozen memory card games. Each from possibly a different manufacturer, perhaps not including Hasbro. I would appreciate details regarding that lawsuit with Kellogg. One thing about cereal company lawsuits: "They're Grrrreat!"
You are right, that's only two votes. I think, however, your question also says "Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have no influence on the Black American community, politically." So who does? Colin Powell? Chris Rock? Bill Cosby? Oprah? Condolezza Rice? Levar Burton? Michael Jordan?
As a non-Black American, Bill Cosby has more influence on me than Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. My friends influence me far more than an actor. I would like to know why Obama has such uniform support from the Black Americans, though. I have trouble believing there are that many voting Americans who make choices so consistently, when no other ethnic group does. I'll tell you what, I'd vote for Cosby, Rice, and probably Powell over John McCain, any day. And McCain over Obama on principles and ideology alone.
Would someone mind doing a cost analysis on all this? Also, is it me, or don't we already have enough hair-brained ideas on the back burner? I say we finish that space elevator before we start dumping silt into the ocean in amazing quantities. That way, we could much more easily harvest a meteor from space and bring it down to the ocean in small chunks, rather than digging up the Western half of the Australian continent. I mean, the alternative without the space elevator would be to aim the lime meteor to crash into the ocean. Although this would potentially pulverize the lime meteor, and stir up "resting" silt on the ocean floor, which would definitely change the earth's atmosphere, I see an inherent risk of another Kevin Kostner post-apocalyptic movie in the making.
I do like "bobdotorg's" post about growing more coral, that's a good thing. Not killing it in the first place would be good, too, but that would mean we couldn't have cheap tuna, and we would stop bottom-drag fish harvesting. We could also plant more trees. Amazing thing, plants. They actually consume CO2. A second-grader told me that. Brilliant kid. He had this idea of planting lots of trees, all over the country, and founding a national holiday where people plant trees (instead of cut them down for fun and profit).
I'd really like to contrast, for a moment, the industry of forestry with... fishing. Forestry is all about treating trees like crops. You concern yourself with soil chemistry, erosion, biodiversity, replanting, and disease/outbreaks. Fishing is all about what, dropping a line or a net and hauling it back? Well, that sounds like a lot of fun. Remember when just swinging an axe at a tree and seeing it fall was fun? Fishing the ocean needs to be treated as carefully as forestry treats the forests, but I'm not sure that licensing alone covers all topics. I suppose the same could be said about mining. I think anything involving natural resources requires a certain stewardship. If the responsibility were a cultural mandate for natural resource industries, nobody would be fretting over the chemical make-up of the atmosphere.
It requires greater genius to assemble an approach that is cost/labor saving and not also destructive, but with the right cost model (not a per-season approach), I think this is provable for all industries.
Not that I particularly want to drive up the cost of monitors, but real glass, not the soda glass we so often use to make windows and pop bottles, is really tough stuff. They make scratchproof watch faces out of it. For a while, I thought the iPhone had real glass. I guess I was wrong, based on anecdotes of it being tough, but not able to withstand metal contact.
I am left to wonder where you work. All those screen-touchers. Perhaps if you got one of those acetate inserts or drop-over acetate sheets in a frame (privacy screens), you could get your point across. Or they could.
My advice to respond to the urge of touching a screen is to say to the person to touch the housing of the display along the vertical axis. The other approach is to have them go at it with their fingernail facing the screen, not the pad side of the finger. Fingernails do not, under healthy conditions, secrete screen-spoiling substances, and apart from a deliberate jab, will not mar an LCD display. I don't recommend you make a habit of spraying people, you'll get a nickname, like "skunk."
Feedback. That's a really good point. I hadn't considered the tactile feedback. I don't think we can solve everything with pure electrical simulation, I believe the mechanics and speed of a button will be hard to replace. That's why people like and dislike specific brands of keyboards. I miss my old Amiga 2000 keyboard. It made a sound without too much racket, and it had a short travel for a keypress. Also, there was this slight twitch at the end of the motion of the keys that I've missed for many years. Apple makes a wireless bluetooth keyboard that has some good tactile characteristics.
This won't work. I don't know who they hired at Gartner to suggest the VP make that kind of claim, but I don't see the computer mouse falling out of the "Magic quadrant" of input devices anytime soon. Touchscreens are a constant source of eyestrain, especially in the morning, after a nice, greasy doughnut. The Wii motion plus approach is going to give everyone very stiff arms in the morning; it just isn't suitable for hours and hours of use as a pointer, extended at arm's length. Our arms will get tired and that precision requires a steady hand.
If someone had bothered to say a pad-free stylus, I might agree, but apart from Flypaper & pen from HP, I'm not seeing it happen. A computer mouse is cheap, it has an effective paradigm (move the shiny bar of soap, the pointer moves accordingly), and it no longer has moving parts or even surface requirements. Well, technically, it will not work in most Starwood Hotels due to their affection for glass-topped black tables, but hey, go Hilton, right?
If we are going to analyze this properly, Gartner, we need to review some old-school terms, like data gloves, virtual reality, and motion capture. Dust off your zooba pants and try to remember. Main issues: weight and balance, response speed, range of motion, precision and control, and aesthetic and ergonomics. The Wii Motion Plus is a superb example of virtual swords, baseball bats, tire irons, 9-irons, and tennis rackets. Only Zorro himself would be at home using a virtual sword to create a painting, Visio diagram, or click through EULAs. The rest of us need a surface. The trouble is, our fingers are not clean, and our monitors transmit light. Any goo, gunk, phlegm, oil, or food residue is going to get in the way of photons. Every stroke of the screen is going to leave a "snail trail" for the effort. Now, if we went back to the old "light pen" technology (whoo hoo! and modem couplers!) and had another go, we might be getting somewhere, at least. The trouble is, the stylus tip is going to grind off any coatings over time.
Gartner, you are outside your safe zone, get back in the right quadrant!
Slashdot Mirror
As for the reactor life, I'm betting 10-30 years with the included fuel, and it is probably not meant to be serviceable. I get the feeling those who don't know much about nuclear reactors think that there are these big, daily freight trains, like with coal plants, but full of uranium. Fact is, nuclear power isn't all that resource-intensive.
Do the math on 14KW. Also, don't forget it has to fit inside what amounts to an 8x8 cubicle. I say the atomic waste can fits better. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the space required for the array to yield 12 Kw is 45' by 45'. Perhaps less mass than the atomic waste can, but certainly not less volume!!! Besides, those cells are fragile like eggshells and require careful packing and engineering. When people's lives are at stake, they need something that is reliable and simple. Space programs are all about fault-tolerant systems and redundancy.
Used Uranium is lead or something else. If it is still radioactive, you can still use it to run a different power plant, affectionately referred to as the nuclear fuel cycle. A breeder reactor "breeds" radioactive material, so rather than going down from Uranium to Lead, you go up from Uranium to Plutonium. I'm over-simplifying, because the process involves more elements, isotopes, and so forth, but if this interests you, I know you'll go get yourself a decent book on the subject (get the old ones, the new ones don't say as much).
You've obviously not been on the moon before. The radiation is pretty bad up there. I suppose you are going to tell us we need to use wind or hydro power on the moon, then? Oh, wait, solar. yeah, that leaves half of the planet off-limits. Also, launching something the size of an office trashcan, versus an array of solar panels 45'x45', all of which are susceptible to micrometeorite and radiation damage. So what does that leave you? Hamster wheels? I can just see their spacesuits.
Furthermore, the Japanese are always hauling the most unusual carcasses out of the Pacific, whether they are giant squid befitting captain Nemo, or ancient plesiosaurs. There are accounts in the Lower Kingdom of Egypt of poisonous spitting lizards that walk on two legs, and nearly every culture with written tradition that existed during the Dark Ages had Wurm/Dragon mythos.
Is it me, or is there an awful lot of extrapolation going on here? Also, how do people get the half-life of stabilized nickel to be some odd Billion years? I read once in an article that they used the geologic record of the earth to determine it, but I figured that can't be right, because you use that to determine the age of a mineral sample, and that makes it circular reasoning.
Not exactly, you see, academic types are full of goats. The Monty Hall problem was interesting, though. It is interesting in the article to note how many people did not bother to sit down and go through a mere handful of permutations.
If it is happening in December, I can imagine the Dr. Who Christmas Special in the making already!
Particle Physicist Claire was definitely part of the turning-on process for me. Whoever her husband is must be pretty lucky to have her, when she's not busy at the lab, that is!
Oh if only we had nuclear-powered cars. That'd show the foreign oil companies a thing or two about American ingenuity! I think your mechanic is a luddite, more than anything else.
Well, They've gone to plaid. Nothing's faster than Plaid.
Step 2 still isn't "free" energy. In fact, go price out those renewable energy sources. I seem to recall California residents have the option of paying for the energy sources they choose. Funny how they can't seem to get excited about 10x to 15x the cost of base load power sources.
Step 3 cracks me up. How are they being deployed? Trucks, or ships? What do trucks and ships use as power? What? Diesel? No wait, stick it on an aircraft carrier, which is nuclear. Oh, you can't win. Ha ha ha. Oh, sure, like they're going to dust off the ships at the maritime museum and sail them to Africa, then carry it by oxcart to the center of a remote village.
This is an interesting article because it is do-it-yourself. I respect the engineering here. But please don't be fooled into thinking this is some holy grail. It is a lot like that peanut sheller idea: give folks the tools to take care of themselves and they will live better lives.
Last point: why is it these billions of hungry people, stumbling around in the dark are not taking care of themselves? I mean, we are talking about entire provinces and even nations at some point, right? Some of these countries don't even have banking systems in place. No real estate agents, no loan specialists, no financial planners... Let's just take a page from Sim City and recognize that there are entire nations and provinces full of illiterate, primitive settlers. Back in the "Age of Sail" this was grounds for empire building. Honestly, if China said the following, I wouldn't mind: "hey, this random pathetically poor country in Africa has lots of arable land, and well, they are starving. We're gonna go conquer them, feed them, and build there. Anyone got a problem with that?" The sovereignty of these struggling countries really is begging for conquest. For the good of the people. Look what England did to India. A model colony, really. Even Hong Kong was a colony. These ideas are over the top, and I'm asking the question, not making a suggestion.
Moller's Volantor flies, but the FAA hates it.
What useful implications to you envision will come from this? I can think of none.
I think that early childhood development is overfunded. They are trying to unlock the secrets of stupidity. Does anyone see the point? What stupid person is going to say "you mean I can get gene therapy and be un-stupid?" This will just lead to millions of American stupid kids becoming briefly very bright, only to have the genes regress, the stupidity return, and, like the rat Algernon, all the stupid kids die. Genetic glitch. Why don't they find the genetic thing for incredibly smart people who never make mistakes, get picked on in school, move to Montana, and start mailing triggered explosives, only to be arrested and locked up in Hi-Max with the likes of Richard Reed (may his feet stink forever)? I think rather than finding what makes people incurably stupid, they should develop more aerodynamic paddles, switches, canes, etc. Or, maybe a non-physical punishment that works just as well. Even the Bible says the world is full of simple-minded people. I half-wonder if the folks in early childhood development are simple-minded themselves. I mean, if they were smart, they would have come up with something usable by now. Someone point to a single, commonly accepted axiom or technique that was produced by the early childhood development movement. Go ahead. Name one.
the lead lining wasn't thick enough. Also? There is no accounting for the heat levels. He may have had a reduced radiation dose, but his carcass would have been fried to a crisp.
SETI strikes me as a large use of bandwidth and electricity. Maybe they don't find intelligent life, in 100 years. Have they managed to find anything else, or is the scope of their research purely as the name states? All that data and analysis cycles, you'd think they found at least an interesting sub-space anomaly, while scanning for life forms. I'll go take a look.
So have we proven that these two detractors have insignificant influence on the black community voting trends, or not? I'd like to get some useful conclusion out of a slashdot thread, once in a while.
Wow. So, my kids have over a dozen memory card games. Each from possibly a different manufacturer, perhaps not including Hasbro. I would appreciate details regarding that lawsuit with Kellogg. One thing about cereal company lawsuits: "They're Grrrreat!"
As a non-Black American, Bill Cosby has more influence on me than Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. My friends influence me far more than an actor. I would like to know why Obama has such uniform support from the Black Americans, though. I have trouble believing there are that many voting Americans who make choices so consistently, when no other ethnic group does. I'll tell you what, I'd vote for Cosby, Rice, and probably Powell over John McCain, any day. And McCain over Obama on principles and ideology alone.
I do like "bobdotorg's" post about growing more coral, that's a good thing. Not killing it in the first place would be good, too, but that would mean we couldn't have cheap tuna, and we would stop bottom-drag fish harvesting. We could also plant more trees. Amazing thing, plants. They actually consume CO2. A second-grader told me that. Brilliant kid. He had this idea of planting lots of trees, all over the country, and founding a national holiday where people plant trees (instead of cut them down for fun and profit).
I'd really like to contrast, for a moment, the industry of forestry with... fishing. Forestry is all about treating trees like crops. You concern yourself with soil chemistry, erosion, biodiversity, replanting, and disease/outbreaks. Fishing is all about what, dropping a line or a net and hauling it back? Well, that sounds like a lot of fun. Remember when just swinging an axe at a tree and seeing it fall was fun? Fishing the ocean needs to be treated as carefully as forestry treats the forests, but I'm not sure that licensing alone covers all topics. I suppose the same could be said about mining. I think anything involving natural resources requires a certain stewardship. If the responsibility were a cultural mandate for natural resource industries, nobody would be fretting over the chemical make-up of the atmosphere.
It requires greater genius to assemble an approach that is cost/labor saving and not also destructive, but with the right cost model (not a per-season approach), I think this is provable for all industries.
I am left to wonder where you work. All those screen-touchers. Perhaps if you got one of those acetate inserts or drop-over acetate sheets in a frame (privacy screens), you could get your point across. Or they could.
My advice to respond to the urge of touching a screen is to say to the person to touch the housing of the display along the vertical axis. The other approach is to have them go at it with their fingernail facing the screen, not the pad side of the finger. Fingernails do not, under healthy conditions, secrete screen-spoiling substances, and apart from a deliberate jab, will not mar an LCD display. I don't recommend you make a habit of spraying people, you'll get a nickname, like "skunk."
Feedback. That's a really good point. I hadn't considered the tactile feedback. I don't think we can solve everything with pure electrical simulation, I believe the mechanics and speed of a button will be hard to replace. That's why people like and dislike specific brands of keyboards. I miss my old Amiga 2000 keyboard. It made a sound without too much racket, and it had a short travel for a keypress. Also, there was this slight twitch at the end of the motion of the keys that I've missed for many years. Apple makes a wireless bluetooth keyboard that has some good tactile characteristics.
If someone had bothered to say a pad-free stylus, I might agree, but apart from Flypaper & pen from HP, I'm not seeing it happen. A computer mouse is cheap, it has an effective paradigm (move the shiny bar of soap, the pointer moves accordingly), and it no longer has moving parts or even surface requirements. Well, technically, it will not work in most Starwood Hotels due to their affection for glass-topped black tables, but hey, go Hilton, right?
If we are going to analyze this properly, Gartner, we need to review some old-school terms, like data gloves, virtual reality, and motion capture. Dust off your zooba pants and try to remember. Main issues: weight and balance, response speed, range of motion, precision and control, and aesthetic and ergonomics. The Wii Motion Plus is a superb example of virtual swords, baseball bats, tire irons, 9-irons, and tennis rackets. Only Zorro himself would be at home using a virtual sword to create a painting, Visio diagram, or click through EULAs. The rest of us need a surface. The trouble is, our fingers are not clean, and our monitors transmit light. Any goo, gunk, phlegm, oil, or food residue is going to get in the way of photons. Every stroke of the screen is going to leave a "snail trail" for the effort. Now, if we went back to the old "light pen" technology (whoo hoo! and modem couplers!) and had another go, we might be getting somewhere, at least. The trouble is, the stylus tip is going to grind off any coatings over time.
Gartner, you are outside your safe zone, get back in the right quadrant!