By the way Landis' idea about CaCl2 is not totally unworkable. It's unworkable in the FFC Cambridge process sense, where you keep adding solid chunks of oxides/rocks that get reduced by the dissolved metallic calcium in the molten calcium chloride salt - there is a continuous buildup of oxygen in the melt, as CaO, which is not very fusible, and you emit the chlorine gas at the anode, so you have an unstable molten bath that needs constant replacing/regeneration. One way to recycle the bath is to bubble HCl through it, but it cannot be done small steps at a time during electrolysis, because the metallic calcium dissolved in the salt will react Ca+HCl-->CaCl2 + H2 gas, in preference to your preferred reaction of CaO+HCl-->CaCl2+H2O vapor. A more elegant way is to not mess with an unstable bath, but electrolyze pure CaCl2 for Ca and Cl2, burn the Cl2+H2-->HCl, react the HCl + CaO--> CaCl2 + H2O, dry the CaCl2, and electrolyze the H2O-->H2+O2, you got your O2 and recycle to H2 to burn more Cl2. The advantage of the CaCl2 method is that it's lower temp than CaF2, so easier material constraints, but that may be a disadvantage if you want to distill out the metallic calcium, as with a molten CaCl2 electrolysis you can never get 100% coulombic efficiency, because some metal will redissolve and wander back to the anode and react with the gases evolved there, even if you apply that stick-drawing trick to only let the tip of the metal hang into the molten salt, to save it from dissolving away, As far as the FFC Cambridge method goes, it works ok to take a fistful of oxide and reduce it to metal (after you electrolyzed enough to build up the dissolved metallic calcium concentration in the liquid salt), but on an industrial scale it's simpler to just get the metallic calcium out of a stable and productive process, granulate the calcium metal, pulverize the oxide, stir the two together and ignite the calcium thermite (Goldschmidt-like, Al-Cr-like) reaction. It's hard to get much new intellectual property innovation in inorganic chemistry that hasn't already been tried, but organometallic catalysis at room temperature is pretty promising. In particular room temperature N2 fixation from the atmosphere would be nice.
On XP I use the last nondotnet Zonealarm, and it's not perfect, but it does a pretty good job, Zonealarm itself is a backdoor, but at least it's a predictable one. It also stops programs from starting or interacting with each other. The only way I could get my hands on the latest nondotnet version was to buy a boxed copy off ebay, as they no longer will sell you a code for it to downgrade to old copies online, as I had to find out through a credit card refund from the company. Hey, I wanted them to make money, but they are fully committed to dotnet, and I'm fully committed not to use dotnet. I'm the customer, and I'm still a customer even if they are willing to dump me as one, because the shit they used to make used to be so good compared to the other firewalls/connection managers out there. And a hardware firewall is not that much better, it only protects from inbound threats, not stuff running on your computer, outbound threats, as Zonealarm the old version does. Sill, the Opera Browser, Zonealarm itself, etc, they are all outbound threats themselves.
I'm stuck on Opera 12/XP, and I got really high speed internet these days to capture and save as much from the web as possible, as I'm bracing for impact with a time when I have to fully abstain from the internet, because my computer is no longer compatible with the new shit on there. And that's not such a big deal. I mean I might get some tv-like appliance with software that has 2 buttons and 2 menus instead of the millions of buttons and millions of menus in my present computing environment, and go on the internet with it to pay my gas bill, or read email, but the fun of the internet will be gone, especially if everything is DRM'd, and I can't save a jpg file depicting some nature scene for my wallpaper without paying 10 cents to the owner for it. They are telling me other people are gonna buy my pictures too. Haha. 10 cents add up very fast, I ain't got that kinda dough. I get emusic, 49 cents a song, and I run out of the monthly fee in like no time! And if you only knew how many people are putting songs on emusic, each thinking they are gonna hit it big, and they are LUCKY if they ever pay off their equipment/software used to generate that music, let alone make a profit. That's what a lot of music business makes money on, like the lottery does too - it gives people a dream of when they hit it big!
When you have kids to feed you can be forced with money, as you can't just commit suicide when you're out of options and whatever will be will be with them, I mean you can but you're not supposed to. You're responsible for your kids more than you're responsible for your siblings or parents and cousins, because you choose to create them and bring them into being. The limit of what you're willing to do, how immoral you're willing to stoop to to feed them then goes very very far.
I'm using a browser without java plugin. Every time I hit a site that needs java plugin, I give it the finger and go somewhere else. I remember back in the Nutscrape 2.0 days what a great invention Java was, and I spent hours playing Go and Chess and Hearts on yahoo games back in 1999-2002, running as a java plugin. Don't need java no more, especially once it went into the bloatware oblivion. The first java plugin was like 1 or 2 MB. By 2000 the j2sdk was like 30 MB, and it just kept growing, what a mess!
I'm proud to say that I also never watched an actual DVD yet, except like 30 seconds of Black Superman(he had a cape and he was flying) when a friend of mine popped it into a laptop running Knoppix 3.6/Xine. And I do this abstaining because it contains DRM - region codes, encryption, etc. Had it not had any of that crap, I'd gladly watch DVD's, after all who likes the quality of VHS tapes?
I accidentally bought an ebook on google books thinking it'd be like pdf files I used to buy on EPE magazine back in 06, but instead the pdf came with DRM. Yucckk! The only thing that could read it was Adobe Digital Editions 2.0. What a joke that program is! Somebody held a gun at the skulls of the programmers at Adobe and told them they were either gonna program it in dotnet or die, because nobody in their right mind would ever program such a thing in dotnet, or java, instead of straight win32 api c. And it shows, the pdf file craaaawwwwls on this wonderful little HP Mini 210 netbook with a 5 Watt chipset/cpu and 7 hrs battery life on a 4 year old battery. And that's after downgrading to the faster XP, because the default Win 7 that it came with had some serious bloat/speed issues. They are trying to tell me this wonderful little thing from 2010 ain't fast enough to run modern software, please buy a new computer. Bullshit. It's miles faster than a P2 450, and those things used to be pretty usable back in 1999 to read text and watch videos. What the hell happened to text, like a pdf file or Slashdot or twitter that I have to run a friggin supercomputer just to read a line of text on twitter with a browser? It's bad programming practices, that's what happened. I can bring any supercomputer to its knees by feeding it a two line infinite loop. That's all what's wrong with the web today, semi-infinite loop javascript everywhere, telling you to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, dump your old software that you got used to. Anyway, a DRM removal tool makes the pdf file pretty readable on this netbook via Foxit Reader 2.3, and it's pretty damn unusable with Adobe Digital Editions 2.0. It's not the file, it's not the computer that's wrong, but the software that reads it is crap. It's crap because it's forced to use the bloatware dotnet. By the way had I known the file was gonna be DRM'd before I bought it, I would have never touched it with a 10 foot stick! I was seriously expecting an unDRM'd pdf. I might be just one customer, but I will fully abstain from any further DRM'd pdf purchases, and if that means going back to paper books only and no computer, I can imagine living a life without any computing. I'm only one customer, way off the chart, halfass vegetarian, etc. By the way I never intentionally bought any music from any DRM'd music sites, but I still buy Emusic, but will stop as soon as they start DRMing their shit. I'm the customer, and I CAN live without a computer, with just paper and pencil. I don't want to, but if push comes to shove, it's not that difficult. I'm a customer, just one, but I vote with my money, and unless the goverment forces me to purchase something, like they force me to purchase insurance and tomatoes regardless of the astronomical or potentially astronomical prices charged for it, I will choose myself how to spend or not to spend my money. Property is nice, everyday life is bogged down with gathering property, food, etc, but as the Buddhist monks teach you, all you need is a begging bowl for rice and a robe to live happily. As long as you got food on the table every day or every couple days, life is good. You don't have to use DRM if you don't want to, unless the government forces you to use it. Then it's like tea tax.
The real issue is jobs. Without more sites to clean up, these guys are out of a job. So of course the stuff drags on and on. For a career, for a lifetime. All they gotta do is set their geiger counters to detect cosmic radiation, and there you go, more beeps means more digging. All they know how to do is make a geiger counter beep and dig some earth with an excavator. They are not gonna take some burger flipping job next to a teenie weenie for minimum wage or a factory production line for minimum wage when they can make at least double minimum wage. All you gotta do is give them a job somewhere in Canada or even in the US near a nuclear fuel mine, and they can do what they do best, hunt for the most beeps and keep digging. Miraculously all the EPA cleanup sites will officially be done, signed off by the people running the show. If you can't find them nuclear mines, use them at other regular mines, where instead of geiger counter beeps, they get ore concentration numbers (either from a lab or from an xray spectroscope (xrf fluorescence) or even a blowpipe/borax bead) to guide them which way to dig. Digging is what they are best at.
I'm against automatic transmissions, or even radios in cars sold in the base models, or any such shebangs, but I love them as optional features that I can say no to, and I might seriously consider a device that lets me adjust the air pressure in tires on the fly depending on road conditions, within a certain range for a given tire, as in if I slip around on ice and snow, drop the air pressure so it sticks better, but if it's hot outside in the summer with dry roads and sticky asphalt, increase air pressure so my tires don't heat up that much and develop a crack and erode from it, and if it starts raining drop it back to the safer but more gas consuming wet traction zone, without having to stop the car.
Also the patent system's past is dynamic, and unless anyone has a record of each and every one of the millions of individual records in the patent system, it's possible to modify the past and insert patents in 2014 as if they were invented in 2013. Which is why the computing cloud is pushed so heavily, to be able to search against who has what copy of what (your mental memory does not count for much, especially if they forcefeed some memory erasing Haldol or Risperdal into you), and then it's possible to control and own intellectual property of the whole world. Which is why, like DNS on the internet with no centralized servers, it is important to have all patents mirrored at many libraries throughout the world, with local disk copies archived, to make sure the past does not get modified and edited away from everybody else as it pleases the powers that be, who like to constantly rewrite history. Old paper books are difficult to edit too, but easily editable electronic records, like medical records and ebooks stored in the Cloud are useless when it comes to defending against absolute dictatorships modifying them as they please.
Also, from a calcium reduction you'd recuperate the slag that contains all the oxygen, but the metalloid residue, containing silicon, aluminum, iron, sodium, potassium, magnesium, and especially titanium(lightweight strong like steel), is valuable too. Down here on Earth we have carbochlorination to get TiCl4 and SiCl4 liquids ready for distillation purification, but up on the Moon there might be a carbon shortage, and then you can use calciochlorination instead, but you have to do the steps separately, because unlike carbon+chlorine nonreacting with each other, calcium loves to react with chlorine. Silicon, titanium, aluminum, iron, magnesium/Na/K chlorides are easy to separate by fractional distillation (magnesium+alkali metal chlorides being the bottoms), though good luck running such a process, trying to not block up the conduits with unmolten magnesium/sodium chloride crust. Water can be an aid to unblock almost blocked passages, Some of the magnesium might react with the water during the slag extraction step, so during the thermite reaction it's best to let the magnesium/sodium/potassium distill off, then collect it in a remote portion of the reaction retort (if not enough excess Ca, at the tip of the retort it may be magnesium/sodium/potassium sulfide of phosphide with free sulfur and phosphorous, but most likely S and P end up as calcium salts, then as H2S and PH3 on water extraction). Some of the aluminum will react too under high pH quicklime conditions, but it shouldn't be too bad, and if it is, there might be other solvents that are between water and alcohol that dissolve the calcium oxide, but don't react with Mg and Al, maybe not even with Na, K. It's best to distill the Na, K, Mg out as metal first before water extraction of the slag.
Some of the unreacted metallic slag could be shaped into small rods and used in a solar powered or nuclear powered nailgun propulsion system to get stuff off the surface of the Moon into outer space, then recollected for later use, so they should be built nonaerodynamic but flat impact shape so they don't bury deep into the lunar surface and can be picked up for reuse. Steering becomes a huge issue with such propulsion, because you have to shoot these things towards a predefined location, not just anywhere, so you still need gaseous steering emissions, such as high temperature/pressure oxygen gas you made out of moonrock.
Oh, btw, if you're going to do the iridium anode/CaF2/CaO electrolysis, the calcium has to be distilled off at the cathode, otherwise it loves to dissolve back into the salt as some monovalent ion and go to the anode and react with the gaseous oxygen there. Present industrial Ca production uses aluminum vacuum distillation of the oxide, similar in concept to the ferrosilicon silicothermic Mg production named Pidgeon process, because of the redissolution issues of Ca salt electrolysis (such issues are not prevalent with alkali metals, as they can't go to half valent from monovalent, or even Mg electrolysis probably doesn't have this issue.) There is a section in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica talking about calcium electrolysis with continuously raised rods, and the Ca metal forms as a stick, as a bar, and being held above the liquid salt, it does not dissolve back too much, as long as the rate of deposition is faster than the local redissolution at the tip of such stick. So the best idea at the high melting point of CaF2 is to distill off the Ca metal instead of having it as a stick, and then if the cathode is under vacuum, the anode has to be too, and you'd get the oxygen out as a very high temperature vacuum gas. But the device may nevertheless be small scale, because of the superhigh electric conductivity of a molten salt and high reaction rates at such huge temperatures, only this vacuum consideration adds some volume, but not that much weight.
That reminds me, why don't space agencies use a maglev-like device to accelerate their rockets, at least through the initial part of the ascent? A whole lot of rocket fuel is wasted on getting the rocket from 0 mph to 1 mph, when you could easily get it to 1000 mph first on a rollercoaster-like maglev track, then ignite the rockets once you left the track at the end. There is a big altitude gradient from the ocean and the Andes, in South America, near the equator, shooting eastward up, there is some less nice but still good near the Himalayas, but a mountainside somewhere in Utah might do just fine, how much track length do you need?
The space shuttle was a marvelous invention were it not for the huge amounts of liquid O2 it had to lug around. Hydrogen is light, but the O2 was 8 times heavier, as H2O has a molecular weight of 18, out of which 2 is H2 and 16 is O, so 8/9th the shuttle weight was liquid O2 and 1/9th was H2. If you could get the O2 out of the Moon's silicate rock, you could save rocket weight by an order of magnitude. NASA had a competition challenge back in like 2002 about this, it expired a while ago, but I been thinkin about it.
Geoffrey A Landis at Nasa came to a natural conclusion that Calcium reduction is a catchall method to treat any rock, as shown at http://lib.znate.ru/pars_docs/...
You could do a thermite-like reaction with excess metallic calcium and get calcium oxide plus silicon, aluminum, magnesium(evaporated), iron, etc. You don't need a huge device for that, as astronauts might play around with it out in the open Moon surface as shown by this thermite reaction http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... (thermite railroad welding) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (thermite out on grass and bricks). Calcium will do a thermite reaction stronger than aluminum with everything (magnesium might be difficult, barium and calcium stay as oxides (which is OK), but aluminum and silicon, the bulk or rocks, and especially iron, should be OK.) So GA Landis' problem is still how to get O2 out of the CaO, and his best process is CaCl2/CaO melt. That has huge issues, the biggest being that it is Cl2 not O2 that comes out of that melt if electrolyzed. A CaF2/CaO mix might work, but now you're talking huge temperatures to melt that. An Iridium crucible and Iridium anode (for cathode there are many options) with a CaF2/CaO electrolyte might be workable, which might be the reason for the iridium signature from the dinosaur extinction layer is geological rocks - it might have been a spaceship full of tiny alien creatures destroying their ship Jabal al Tariq (ibn Ziyad) style (from whom Gibr Al Tar iq is named.), after some 70,000 year trip, millions of years ago, before humans or even monkeys ever stepped foot on this planet. Iridium is almost the heaviest thing in the world around us, with some uncertainty about osmium. To maintain high enough heat some of the electric energy has to be used to melt the CaF2/O mix, similar to the calcium carbide making electric furnace, and the expensive fluoride needs very careful recycling, including distillation of the metal Ca, or amalgam extraction (in which case now you got a Hg recycling problem), or who knows what.
Another option is dissolving CaO in water, as quicklime, and electrolyzing that, as Sir Humphry Davy did 200+ years ago when first making metallic calcium on this planet. The problem of this aqueous electrolysis is conductivity compared to a molten salt, therefore production rate/scale of device, but on the other hand it can be conducted at low temperature, and mercury recycling issues might be smaller than fluoride recycling issues out of calcium metal, especially once you extract the amalgam the following way: Davy distilled off the mercury, and as only like 0.5% or less can be a liquid amalgam, that's a huge amount of distillation energy wa
The Universe will manifest itself, will tell you if you're rotating or not. The principles of Galilean relativity apply against Newton's absolute space, where, if locked inside a black box such as an elevator, you cannot tell whether you're moving in a uniform rectilinear motion of constant velocity, or standing still, as standing still is nonsense, only standing still vs. another object moving with a uniform rectilinear motion is definable. Also, when inside a black box you cannot tell whether you're in a gravitational field or a uniform rectilinear accelerating field, which was the source of Einstein's general relativity principles applied to gravity. (We still don't really know what gravity in as much detail as we'd like to.) Rotation is not rectilinear uniform motion. That's all Venus really needs to jumpstart its natural dynamo and get a solar wind shielding van Allen belt magnetic field, and some Aurora Borealis at its poles. To get Venus spinning, you need to smack something into it at the correct position - to spin it toward the east, you smack something into it toward the east side, to spin it to the west, you smack the same thing on a slightly different path, on the west side. So whatever gets smacked into Venus, probably has to get its trajectory corrected right after it comes back from the Sun, as relativistic calculations apply near the Sun, plus you got solar wind, and solar flares might hit it, there is uncertainty of the path enough to miss off target. The earlier the correction, the greater the effect later, so you probably can't wait til last minute if all you have is a few tiny bombs buried inside the artificial comet, and you can set any of them off as needed to create a trajectory correction. Also its always easy to add more weight to Venus, but very difficult to take any away, because the atmosphere slows down explosions blasting stuff into outer space, and instead you need cannons + rocket like continuously firing things to get stuff off of Venus. So whatever gets smacked into Venus, should be of relatively high speed and small mass to get it spinning, and keep the mass on the low side. We probably don't wanna get a planet where we're heavier than we're on Earth, but lighter is OK - such as long distance jumps get more fun, and you'd have a world record on Venus different than one on Earth, if you're lighter there. The Asian martial art movies where the girls revenge their murder of their fathers by biting their braided pigtail hair while fighting 200 enemy soldiers and jumping up on the roof from standing still, well, those jumps would be more believable on Venus.
Sending Mercury into higher orbit and ultimately into Venus would simply require speeding it up as it goes round and round the Sun, so it stabilizes in a higher and higher orbit. While speeding it up, the material ejected off its surface would still end up in the Sun, unless it has enough negative velocity to stay in orbit going in the opposite direction. So reusable material saved for later use by humans would have this issue of going the wrong way around the Sun (all planets go the same direction, there is this concept of conservation of angular momentum of the initial dust that formed the solar system, still present today, and all planets rotate in the same direction, unless they were later hit by huge asteroids in an unlucky way that made them spin the wrong way.) So the material ejected off the surface of Mercury would have to go with sufficient negative speed, negative angular momentum to compensate for the increase in angular momentum of Mercury. Such an object could be used as an energy harvesting station spinning the wrong way, or it could be consumed by sending it all the way up to Mars, and taking away angular momentum from Mars, so it comes closer to the Sun. That way no stuff would be flying about the Sun the wrong, dangerous direction. Mercury only has a 0.055 Earth's mass, Venus 0.815 Earths, and as long as the average density is the same, there is room to bring Venus to full Earth's mass. For every average density there is a specific mass (and volume to go with it) that creates the correct 9.78 m/s2 on the surface.
Also I found out why Venus has no magnetic field - it's not rotating! It has enough internal temperature
Bumping Ganymede or Io into Mars on the other hand might be safer than bumping them into Venus, as long as they get put into orbit with low eccentricity around the Sun that never crosses Earth's height about the Sun. There is probably still a risk from moving such large objects in our planet system, but the risks might be minute enough to be acceptable. There is probably a long way to go before Mars can be built up into a planet large enough to hold water, but vent all hydrogen. What is the gravity/temperature range for Mars for this to happen in its present orbit. If Mars gets built up to a larger size by interplanetary ping pong, it might be worth to send it closer to the Sun, and in fact you could have a trio, Earth, Mars, Venus almost sharing Earth's orbit equally spaced from each other, not across the Sun from Each other, this way they are always visible to each other and communication is easy. Almost sharing as in at different heights around the Sun, never getting close enough to each other to toss each other into random unpredictable orbits. (Note: the 3-body problem in physics is a great chaos generator, it's very unpredictable sometimes.) They could have a prize for the best analysis of the safest orbits, where the temperature/distance from the Sun is considered. The economic analysis is the most important, as it may be cheaper to put up shades and keep Venus into higher but still low orbit compared to Earth, and Mars very high with possibly a focusing Fresnel lens at it's Lagrange point, on 3 out of each other's plane orbits where the 3 never meet each other. As different height orbits around the Sun go around with different speeds, putting all 3 planets into exactly the same orbit might be the safest way to guarantee they never catastrophically or unpredictably meet each other.
Also, just how expensive would it be to send the useless Mercury up into Venus, in a way that also sends the blasted off momentum conservation ejected stuff from it not deep into the Sun, but into some usable, higher area orbit where people could get to it.
People talk about how the solar wind blows away a planet's atmosphere, and to that I've said all you need is a magnetic field and van Allen belts to deflect the solar wind. I just thought about this a little more. The wind itself does not blow away the atmosphere, as in physically blow it away, because a particle impacting the upper atmosphere at high speed is like a super fast ball inside a lottery urn, or when breaking in pool, the initial ball at high velocity, its velocity gets transferred and distributed over to the other particles of the atmosphere, raising the temperature, but not really knocking anything off the planet's surface. There is probably a dynamic equilibrium of the size of the atmosphere, a balance between particles captured and lost, particles captured by gravity from the solar wind, and lost from gravity if they ever reach the escape velocity from random thermal motions (the Maxwell Boltzmann velocity distribution of gas molecules has a sizable tail in the high velocity region) in the very upper zones of the atmosphere. The temperature in the troposphere matters the most, and the higher the troposphere the colder the temperature, the more it retains the atmosphere, and the troposphere becomes even higher, so the size of the atmosphere may be very sensitive to temperature, and has to be in a very narrow range to retain all nitrogen and oxygen and CO2, but let hydrogen fully escape (else you have an explosion in the atmosphere from a lightning strike, or can never build up much oxygen because it keeps turning to water from the captured hydrogen). Too cold a troposphere may retain too much hydrogen. In fact the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus are probably silicate cored just like Earth, might have water too if they have lightning strikes, but they have so much gravity and sufficiently low troposphere temperature they retain all the hydrogen, increasing gravity which retains even more hydrogen, and this process would go on indefinitely weren't it for the fact that there is so little hydrogen in outer space, it takes forever to grow a millimeter for the size of the planet. These gas giants are probably growing, and the closer they are to the solar wind source, the Sun, the faster they must be growing, Jupiter growing faster than Saturn, etc, if the hydrogen concentration decreases in outer space when going farther from the Sun. In fact the silicate core of Jupiter might have started off about the same size as Earth, but because it was so much lower temperature in its troposphere, it retained the hydrogen and it grew into a massive gravity object which now heavily attracts all kinds of meteorites and comets, so its silicate core is probably much bigger now than Earth's. So anyway, what I was trying to say at first was that Venus may not need a magnetic field if its temperature is low enough, the atmosphere may absorb the impact of the solar wind, as long as the fully dispersed diffuse Aurora Borealis phenomenon across even the equator happens deep enough in the atmosphere that the hot particles impact colder ones above and lose their escape velocity, and never escape. It's very hard to create a natural magnetic field if you don't even understand why such a thing arises. It might have to do with a huge nickel-iron core, and if Venus lacks that, that's very expensive to gather in outer space and dump into Venus. If it's lava is not molten enough, it's also very expensive to find radioactive containing silicates and dump it into Venus.(It may be that simply Venus does not have the perfect size for a lava, not enough insulation to get the core hot enough, even if it has the same average concentration of radioactive trace elements as Earth, or the Moon, or Jupiter.) If push comes to shove, it's possible to put up superconducting magnets by the Lagrange point to deflect off some of the solar wind. But a cold average temperature of the planet is a must before water and oxygen and nitrogen get retained in large quantities, especially water. I just read up on the atmospheric composition of Venus, it
Object recognition is intelligence.- this includes rule recognition, i.e. the rules by which objects behave. Rules are also objects, thought objects, of the mind.
Ever look at clouds and see sheep and other things? Ever look at a distant object while driving and it takes you a while to determine whether it's a trashcan or a bear? That's all intelligence has to do - recognize objects in the world around it, and model the world through objects, predict the likely outcomes and behaviors of those objects. It's not that complicated. When you have a car that can drive itself, you have one that can distinguish between a bear and a trashcan, and that requires a pretty sophisticated world modelling system, on par with the IQ of a horse or dog, as a bear might walk into the road and be a threat to driving, a trashcan will probably not. Any robot that can't predict the likely behavior of objects it sees would be extremely dangerous at driving. So what I'm saying is that before AI gets to the level of humans, it has to pass through the level of a dog. Btw dogs and animals are stupider than you, but they are not that stupid. It's possible to maintain a good interpersonal relationship between a pet and a human, because the pet is pretty smart. A dog can't do calculus or talk English, but it's pretty smart regardless.
I see a lot of doctors and nurses bicycle to work where I live, to the nearby hospitals.
At least I used to a couple years back. White hipster kids are slowly leaving the area, and there are irreversible transformations at the nearby hospitals, which may have longterm effects on the budget and bottom line of the whole city and region, especially when it comes to tourist-health-care, people visiting for a surgery from far away land because they heard the local hospitals are best at it, or at least used to be, that kind of cash cow may go on for a while longer then just stop, unless they can mobilize a whole new gang of different class of customers, but still of affluence, I'd say mostly from Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, etc, and stay away from a financial implosion. Some people are so fed up with "discrimination" that they will shortsightedly drive entire businesses out of business by trying to fix "discrimination" issues. And then how do you gain from the whole thing? At least you used to get tax revenue to your own area from these "discriminatory" punks that used to work there, once the place goes out of business, then there is nothing. Nothing. You get a whole lot of this: http://media.salon.com/2011/10... and this http://media.cmgdigital.com/sh... and this http://i1109.photobucket.com/a... and this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... and this http://blog.preservationnation... and this http://www.museumofthecity.org... How many times have you seen it? Let's fix what's wrong with America today, it's discrimination, once we fix that, everything'll be alright. You know I'm saying?
One neat thing in polymer science lately is what every other idiot spends his free time poking at, it's a smartphone, driven by OLED's, organic LED's, but that's like not even polymer science at its core, but organic chemistry optoelectronics, and may have more in common with pharmaceutical science than polymer science.
Dense atmosphere and low gravity is nonsense, unless you have very high molecular weight materials, which tend to boil at higher temperatures, such as sulfuric acid on Earth sized Venus at 10 bar and very high temperature. But as far as we know almost all life on Earth directly connected to the atmosphere is photosynthetic origin as it's energy core (with the exception of deep ocean volcanic eruption sulfur chemistry cycle based lifeforms), so you'd assume low molecular weight oxygen in the atmosphere, to support carbon combustion of aerobic lifeforms, and therefore not that much density of atmosphere. Earth might be on the lowest possible gravity side of possibilities for life, as Mars has a very thin atmosphere, because of both low gravity but also because of lack of magnetic field/lack of solar wind shield. So you can't really have a life connected to an atmosphere in its function on a planet the size of our Moon, because there is no atmosphere at all on such sized a thing, because of insufficient gravity to hold one. So elephants on Earth might be the largest possible land based life forms in the entire Universe, but there might be a whole lot of places with say double or triple maybe 5x the gravity on Earth, and then most likely the largest lifeforms are bug-sized, with huge leg muscles compared to total body weight. If the gravity is too high, then we run into situations like Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, that are full of captured gaseous hydrogen, as hydrogen is the most abundant element in interstellar and interplanetary space, and the only reason why Earth is not full of gaseous hydrogen is because it does not have sufficient gravity to retain it in the atmosphere at its escape-velocity escape region temperature. So if life is possible on these gas-giants in our solar system, then there are a lot of possibilities out there, but most likely life is only possible within a limited gravity range, Earth being on the lower end as Mars and Luna can't really support life (i.e. can't hold low pressure unboiled unvented to outers space liquid water to dissolve carbon based organic chemicals in essential for life), and on the gas giant high end you have issues with atmospheric hydrogen coexisting with oxygen during a lightning flash, and the whole atmosphere exploding - even if life is possible in/on gas giants, it cannot be carbon dioxide/oxygen photosynthetic/oxygen combusting hydrocarbon based, because of hydrogen explosions, but deep ocean hydrothermal vent type lifeforms might be possible, all you need is a sufficient driving force, high enough head for a local caloric waterfall.
I used to ride a bicycle, about 40 minutes one way commute to work, slightly uphill, and the worst part was lack of fenders, and the whole road wetness spraying into my face during each rain. I could literally taste the road each time. I also had a rainproof set of clothes/boots, but my face was uncovered. Then I upgraded my bicycle to one with fenders. What a difference when it rained! But I can no longer get minimum wage jobs anywhere close, so my bicycle has been down for like 7 years now. But one day, when the price of gas hits $20/gal(not counting inflation), it's gonna be useful.
Can we get a Star Trek like movie but instead of meeting human looking weirdos in outer space, let's meet species that look really weird, yet make friends with us and we commnunicate. Like Octopuses, and Snake-people, bug-looking-people, birds with intellect, Koala bear looking chess players, etc.
Or more like patent collector fanatix. Seriously, polymer reasearch happened in 1890-1990. I have yet to see much new since. How about nanotubes! Yay! Or nano this nano that. It's a miracle! Like my nano-dick! Stronger than bone. Seriously, I was disappointed when reading the word "bone." I was expecting something like stronger than Kevlar.
I've been thinking about modding the car, it comes as a 5-speed, and 3000 rpm in the 5th speed is like 80 mph. It needs to be a 6 speed of 7 speed. It would be nice to get 2000 rpm at 80 mph, or 1400 at 60 - it would really cut down the high rpm engine friction, let you maintain constant speed and not be a jerk, but it would not cut out gear friction, which is not that big of a deal. But tire rolling resistance is the major loss when coasting, and it depends on the air pressure in the tires, and too much of it is a tire bursting safety issue, plus wet traction issue, so I haven't been playing with optimizing tire pressure yet. If I had the dough I'd buy silica tires.
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By the way Landis' idea about CaCl2 is not totally unworkable. It's unworkable in the FFC Cambridge process sense, where you keep adding solid chunks of oxides/rocks that get reduced by the dissolved metallic calcium in the molten calcium chloride salt - there is a continuous buildup of oxygen in the melt, as CaO, which is not very fusible, and you emit the chlorine gas at the anode, so you have an unstable molten bath that needs constant replacing/regeneration. One way to recycle the bath is to bubble HCl through it, but it cannot be done small steps at a time during electrolysis, because the metallic calcium dissolved in the salt will react Ca+HCl-->CaCl2 + H2 gas, in preference to your preferred reaction of CaO+HCl-->CaCl2+H2O vapor. A more elegant way is to not mess with an unstable bath, but electrolyze pure CaCl2 for Ca and Cl2, burn the Cl2+H2-->HCl, react the HCl + CaO--> CaCl2 + H2O, dry the CaCl2, and electrolyze the H2O-->H2+O2, you got your O2 and recycle to H2 to burn more Cl2. The advantage of the CaCl2 method is that it's lower temp than CaF2, so easier material constraints, but that may be a disadvantage if you want to distill out the metallic calcium, as with a molten CaCl2 electrolysis you can never get 100% coulombic efficiency, because some metal will redissolve and wander back to the anode and react with the gases evolved there, even if you apply that stick-drawing trick to only let the tip of the metal hang into the molten salt, to save it from dissolving away, As far as the FFC Cambridge method goes, it works ok to take a fistful of oxide and reduce it to metal (after you electrolyzed enough to build up the dissolved metallic calcium concentration in the liquid salt), but on an industrial scale it's simpler to just get the metallic calcium out of a stable and productive process, granulate the calcium metal, pulverize the oxide, stir the two together and ignite the calcium thermite (Goldschmidt-like, Al-Cr-like) reaction. It's hard to get much new intellectual property innovation in inorganic chemistry that hasn't already been tried, but organometallic catalysis at room temperature is pretty promising. In particular room temperature N2 fixation from the atmosphere would be nice.
On XP I use the last nondotnet Zonealarm, and it's not perfect, but it does a pretty good job, Zonealarm itself is a backdoor, but at least it's a predictable one. It also stops programs from starting or interacting with each other. The only way I could get my hands on the latest nondotnet version was to buy a boxed copy off ebay, as they no longer will sell you a code for it to downgrade to old copies online, as I had to find out through a credit card refund from the company. Hey, I wanted them to make money, but they are fully committed to dotnet, and I'm fully committed not to use dotnet. I'm the customer, and I'm still a customer even if they are willing to dump me as one, because the shit they used to make used to be so good compared to the other firewalls/connection managers out there. And a hardware firewall is not that much better, it only protects from inbound threats, not stuff running on your computer, outbound threats, as Zonealarm the old version does. Sill, the Opera Browser, Zonealarm itself, etc, they are all outbound threats themselves.
I'm stuck on Opera 12/XP, and I got really high speed internet these days to capture and save as much from the web as possible, as I'm bracing for impact with a time when I have to fully abstain from the internet, because my computer is no longer compatible with the new shit on there. And that's not such a big deal. I mean I might get some tv-like appliance with software that has 2 buttons and 2 menus instead of the millions of buttons and millions of menus in my present computing environment, and go on the internet with it to pay my gas bill, or read email, but the fun of the internet will be gone, especially if everything is DRM'd, and I can't save a jpg file depicting some nature scene for my wallpaper without paying 10 cents to the owner for it. They are telling me other people are gonna buy my pictures too. Haha. 10 cents add up very fast, I ain't got that kinda dough. I get emusic, 49 cents a song, and I run out of the monthly fee in like no time! And if you only knew how many people are putting songs on emusic, each thinking they are gonna hit it big, and they are LUCKY if they ever pay off their equipment/software used to generate that music, let alone make a profit. That's what a lot of music business makes money on, like the lottery does too - it gives people a dream of when they hit it big!
When you have kids to feed you can be forced with money, as you can't just commit suicide when you're out of options and whatever will be will be with them, I mean you can but you're not supposed to. You're responsible for your kids more than you're responsible for your siblings or parents and cousins, because you choose to create them and bring them into being. The limit of what you're willing to do, how immoral you're willing to stoop to to feed them then goes very very far.
I'm using a browser without java plugin. Every time I hit a site that needs java plugin, I give it the finger and go somewhere else. I remember back in the Nutscrape 2.0 days what a great invention Java was, and I spent hours playing Go and Chess and Hearts on yahoo games back in 1999-2002, running as a java plugin. Don't need java no more, especially once it went into the bloatware oblivion. The first java plugin was like 1 or 2 MB. By 2000 the j2sdk was like 30 MB, and it just kept growing, what a mess!
I'm proud to say that I also never watched an actual DVD yet, except like 30 seconds of Black Superman(he had a cape and he was flying) when a friend of mine popped it into a laptop running Knoppix 3.6/Xine. And I do this abstaining because it contains DRM - region codes, encryption, etc. Had it not had any of that crap, I'd gladly watch DVD's, after all who likes the quality of VHS tapes?
I accidentally bought an ebook on google books thinking it'd be like pdf files I used to buy on EPE magazine back in 06, but instead the pdf came with DRM. Yucckk! The only thing that could read it was Adobe Digital Editions 2.0. What a joke that program is! Somebody held a gun at the skulls of the programmers at Adobe and told them they were either gonna program it in dotnet or die, because nobody in their right mind would ever program such a thing in dotnet, or java, instead of straight win32 api c. And it shows, the pdf file craaaawwwwls on this wonderful little HP Mini 210 netbook with a 5 Watt chipset/cpu and 7 hrs battery life on a 4 year old battery. And that's after downgrading to the faster XP, because the default Win 7 that it came with had some serious bloat/speed issues. They are trying to tell me this wonderful little thing from 2010 ain't fast enough to run modern software, please buy a new computer. Bullshit. It's miles faster than a P2 450, and those things used to be pretty usable back in 1999 to read text and watch videos. What the hell happened to text, like a pdf file or Slashdot or twitter that I have to run a friggin supercomputer just to read a line of text on twitter with a browser? It's bad programming practices, that's what happened. I can bring any supercomputer to its knees by feeding it a two line infinite loop. That's all what's wrong with the web today, semi-infinite loop javascript everywhere, telling you to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, dump your old software that you got used to. Anyway, a DRM removal tool makes the pdf file pretty readable on this netbook via Foxit Reader 2.3, and it's pretty damn unusable with Adobe Digital Editions 2.0. It's not the file, it's not the computer that's wrong, but the software that reads it is crap. It's crap because it's forced to use the bloatware dotnet. By the way had I known the file was gonna be DRM'd before I bought it, I would have never touched it with a 10 foot stick! I was seriously expecting an unDRM'd pdf. I might be just one customer, but I will fully abstain from any further DRM'd pdf purchases, and if that means going back to paper books only and no computer, I can imagine living a life without any computing. I'm only one customer, way off the chart, halfass vegetarian, etc. By the way I never intentionally bought any music from any DRM'd music sites, but I still buy Emusic, but will stop as soon as they start DRMing their shit. I'm the customer, and I CAN live without a computer, with just paper and pencil. I don't want to, but if push comes to shove, it's not that difficult. I'm a customer, just one, but I vote with my money, and unless the goverment forces me to purchase something, like they force me to purchase insurance and tomatoes regardless of the astronomical or potentially astronomical prices charged for it, I will choose myself how to spend or not to spend my money. Property is nice, everyday life is bogged down with gathering property, food, etc, but as the Buddhist monks teach you, all you need is a begging bowl for rice and a robe to live happily. As long as you got food on the table every day or every couple days, life is good. You don't have to use DRM if you don't want to, unless the government forces you to use it. Then it's like tea tax.
The real issue is jobs. Without more sites to clean up, these guys are out of a job. So of course the stuff drags on and on. For a career, for a lifetime. All they gotta do is set their geiger counters to detect cosmic radiation, and there you go, more beeps means more digging. All they know how to do is make a geiger counter beep and dig some earth with an excavator. They are not gonna take some burger flipping job next to a teenie weenie for minimum wage or a factory production line for minimum wage when they can make at least double minimum wage. All you gotta do is give them a job somewhere in Canada or even in the US near a nuclear fuel mine, and they can do what they do best, hunt for the most beeps and keep digging. Miraculously all the EPA cleanup sites will officially be done, signed off by the people running the show. If you can't find them nuclear mines, use them at other regular mines, where instead of geiger counter beeps, they get ore concentration numbers (either from a lab or from an xray spectroscope (xrf fluorescence) or even a blowpipe/borax bead) to guide them which way to dig. Digging is what they are best at.
I'm against automatic transmissions, or even radios in cars sold in the base models, or any such shebangs, but I love them as optional features that I can say no to, and I might seriously consider a device that lets me adjust the air pressure in tires on the fly depending on road conditions, within a certain range for a given tire, as in if I slip around on ice and snow, drop the air pressure so it sticks better, but if it's hot outside in the summer with dry roads and sticky asphalt, increase air pressure so my tires don't heat up that much and develop a crack and erode from it, and if it starts raining drop it back to the safer but more gas consuming wet traction zone, without having to stop the car.
Also the patent system's past is dynamic, and unless anyone has a record of each and every one of the millions of individual records in the patent system, it's possible to modify the past and insert patents in 2014 as if they were invented in 2013. Which is why the computing cloud is pushed so heavily, to be able to search against who has what copy of what (your mental memory does not count for much, especially if they forcefeed some memory erasing Haldol or Risperdal into you), and then it's possible to control and own intellectual property of the whole world. Which is why, like DNS on the internet with no centralized servers, it is important to have all patents mirrored at many libraries throughout the world, with local disk copies archived, to make sure the past does not get modified and edited away from everybody else as it pleases the powers that be, who like to constantly rewrite history. Old paper books are difficult to edit too, but easily editable electronic records, like medical records and ebooks stored in the Cloud are useless when it comes to defending against absolute dictatorships modifying them as they please.
Also, from a calcium reduction you'd recuperate the slag that contains all the oxygen, but the metalloid residue, containing silicon, aluminum, iron, sodium, potassium, magnesium, and especially titanium(lightweight strong like steel), is valuable too. Down here on Earth we have carbochlorination to get TiCl4 and SiCl4 liquids ready for distillation purification, but up on the Moon there might be a carbon shortage, and then you can use calciochlorination instead, but you have to do the steps separately, because unlike carbon+chlorine nonreacting with each other, calcium loves to react with chlorine. Silicon, titanium, aluminum, iron, magnesium/Na/K chlorides are easy to separate by fractional distillation (magnesium+alkali metal chlorides being the bottoms), though good luck running such a process, trying to not block up the conduits with unmolten magnesium/sodium chloride crust. Water can be an aid to unblock almost blocked passages, Some of the magnesium might react with the water during the slag extraction step, so during the thermite reaction it's best to let the magnesium/sodium/potassium distill off, then collect it in a remote portion of the reaction retort (if not enough excess Ca, at the tip of the retort it may be magnesium/sodium/potassium sulfide of phosphide with free sulfur and phosphorous, but most likely S and P end up as calcium salts, then as H2S and PH3 on water extraction). Some of the aluminum will react too under high pH quicklime conditions, but it shouldn't be too bad, and if it is, there might be other solvents that are between water and alcohol that dissolve the calcium oxide, but don't react with Mg and Al, maybe not even with Na, K. It's best to distill the Na, K, Mg out as metal first before water extraction of the slag.
Some of the unreacted metallic slag could be shaped into small rods and used in a solar powered or nuclear powered nailgun propulsion system to get stuff off the surface of the Moon into outer space, then recollected for later use, so they should be built nonaerodynamic but flat impact shape so they don't bury deep into the lunar surface and can be picked up for reuse. Steering becomes a huge issue with such propulsion, because you have to shoot these things towards a predefined location, not just anywhere, so you still need gaseous steering emissions, such as high temperature/pressure oxygen gas you made out of moonrock.
Oh, btw, if you're going to do the iridium anode/CaF2/CaO electrolysis, the calcium has to be distilled off at the cathode, otherwise it loves to dissolve back into the salt as some monovalent ion and go to the anode and react with the gaseous oxygen there. Present industrial Ca production uses aluminum vacuum distillation of the oxide, similar in concept to the ferrosilicon silicothermic Mg production named Pidgeon process, because of the redissolution issues of Ca salt electrolysis (such issues are not prevalent with alkali metals, as they can't go to half valent from monovalent, or even Mg electrolysis probably doesn't have this issue.) There is a section in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica talking about calcium electrolysis with continuously raised rods, and the Ca metal forms as a stick, as a bar, and being held above the liquid salt, it does not dissolve back too much, as long as the rate of deposition is faster than the local redissolution at the tip of such stick. So the best idea at the high melting point of CaF2 is to distill off the Ca metal instead of having it as a stick, and then if the cathode is under vacuum, the anode has to be too, and you'd get the oxygen out as a very high temperature vacuum gas. But the device may nevertheless be small scale, because of the superhigh electric conductivity of a molten salt and high reaction rates at such huge temperatures, only this vacuum consideration adds some volume, but not that much weight.
That reminds me, why don't space agencies use a maglev-like device to accelerate their rockets, at least through the initial part of the ascent? A whole lot of rocket fuel is wasted on getting the rocket from 0 mph to 1 mph, when you could easily get it to 1000 mph first on a rollercoaster-like maglev track, then ignite the rockets once you left the track at the end. There is a big altitude gradient from the ocean and the Andes, in South America, near the equator, shooting eastward up, there is some less nice but still good near the Himalayas, but a mountainside somewhere in Utah might do just fine, how much track length do you need?
The space shuttle was a marvelous invention were it not for the huge amounts of liquid O2 it had to lug around. Hydrogen is light, but the O2 was 8 times heavier, as H2O has a molecular weight of 18, out of which 2 is H2 and 16 is O, so 8/9th the shuttle weight was liquid O2 and 1/9th was H2. If you could get the O2 out of the Moon's silicate rock, you could save rocket weight by an order of magnitude. NASA had a competition challenge back in like 2002 about this, it expired a while ago, but I been thinkin about it.
Geoffrey A Landis at Nasa came to a natural conclusion that Calcium reduction is a catchall method to treat any rock, as shown at http://lib.znate.ru/pars_docs/... You could do a thermite-like reaction with excess metallic calcium and get calcium oxide plus silicon, aluminum, magnesium(evaporated), iron, etc. You don't need a huge device for that, as astronauts might play around with it out in the open Moon surface as shown by this thermite reaction http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... (thermite railroad welding) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (thermite out on grass and bricks). Calcium will do a thermite reaction stronger than aluminum with everything (magnesium might be difficult, barium and calcium stay as oxides (which is OK), but aluminum and silicon, the bulk or rocks, and especially iron, should be OK.) So GA Landis' problem is still how to get O2 out of the CaO, and his best process is CaCl2/CaO melt. That has huge issues, the biggest being that it is Cl2 not O2 that comes out of that melt if electrolyzed. A CaF2/CaO mix might work, but now you're talking huge temperatures to melt that. An Iridium crucible and Iridium anode (for cathode there are many options) with a CaF2/CaO electrolyte might be workable, which might be the reason for the iridium signature from the dinosaur extinction layer is geological rocks - it might have been a spaceship full of tiny alien creatures destroying their ship Jabal al Tariq (ibn Ziyad) style (from whom Gibr Al Tar iq is named.), after some 70,000 year trip, millions of years ago, before humans or even monkeys ever stepped foot on this planet. Iridium is almost the heaviest thing in the world around us, with some uncertainty about osmium. To maintain high enough heat some of the electric energy has to be used to melt the CaF2/O mix, similar to the calcium carbide making electric furnace, and the expensive fluoride needs very careful recycling, including distillation of the metal Ca, or amalgam extraction (in which case now you got a Hg recycling problem), or who knows what.
Another option is dissolving CaO in water, as quicklime, and electrolyzing that, as Sir Humphry Davy did 200+ years ago when first making metallic calcium on this planet. The problem of this aqueous electrolysis is conductivity compared to a molten salt, therefore production rate/scale of device, but on the other hand it can be conducted at low temperature, and mercury recycling issues might be smaller than fluoride recycling issues out of calcium metal, especially once you extract the amalgam the following way: Davy distilled off the mercury, and as only like 0.5% or less can be a liquid amalgam, that's a huge amount of distillation energy wa
The Universe will manifest itself, will tell you if you're rotating or not. The principles of Galilean relativity apply against Newton's absolute space, where, if locked inside a black box such as an elevator, you cannot tell whether you're moving in a uniform rectilinear motion of constant velocity, or standing still, as standing still is nonsense, only standing still vs. another object moving with a uniform rectilinear motion is definable. Also, when inside a black box you cannot tell whether you're in a gravitational field or a uniform rectilinear accelerating field, which was the source of Einstein's general relativity principles applied to gravity. (We still don't really know what gravity in as much detail as we'd like to.) Rotation is not rectilinear uniform motion. That's all Venus really needs to jumpstart its natural dynamo and get a solar wind shielding van Allen belt magnetic field, and some Aurora Borealis at its poles. To get Venus spinning, you need to smack something into it at the correct position - to spin it toward the east, you smack something into it toward the east side, to spin it to the west, you smack the same thing on a slightly different path, on the west side. So whatever gets smacked into Venus, probably has to get its trajectory corrected right after it comes back from the Sun, as relativistic calculations apply near the Sun, plus you got solar wind, and solar flares might hit it, there is uncertainty of the path enough to miss off target. The earlier the correction, the greater the effect later, so you probably can't wait til last minute if all you have is a few tiny bombs buried inside the artificial comet, and you can set any of them off as needed to create a trajectory correction. Also its always easy to add more weight to Venus, but very difficult to take any away, because the atmosphere slows down explosions blasting stuff into outer space, and instead you need cannons + rocket like continuously firing things to get stuff off of Venus. So whatever gets smacked into Venus, should be of relatively high speed and small mass to get it spinning, and keep the mass on the low side. We probably don't wanna get a planet where we're heavier than we're on Earth, but lighter is OK - such as long distance jumps get more fun, and you'd have a world record on Venus different than one on Earth, if you're lighter there. The Asian martial art movies where the girls revenge their murder of their fathers by biting their braided pigtail hair while fighting 200 enemy soldiers and jumping up on the roof from standing still, well, those jumps would be more believable on Venus.
Sending Mercury into higher orbit and ultimately into Venus would simply require speeding it up as it goes round and round the Sun, so it stabilizes in a higher and higher orbit. While speeding it up, the material ejected off its surface would still end up in the Sun, unless it has enough negative velocity to stay in orbit going in the opposite direction. So reusable material saved for later use by humans would have this issue of going the wrong way around the Sun (all planets go the same direction, there is this concept of conservation of angular momentum of the initial dust that formed the solar system, still present today, and all planets rotate in the same direction, unless they were later hit by huge asteroids in an unlucky way that made them spin the wrong way.) So the material ejected off the surface of Mercury would have to go with sufficient negative speed, negative angular momentum to compensate for the increase in angular momentum of Mercury. Such an object could be used as an energy harvesting station spinning the wrong way, or it could be consumed by sending it all the way up to Mars, and taking away angular momentum from Mars, so it comes closer to the Sun. That way no stuff would be flying about the Sun the wrong, dangerous direction. Mercury only has a 0.055 Earth's mass, Venus 0.815 Earths, and as long as the average density is the same, there is room to bring Venus to full Earth's mass. For every average density there is a specific mass (and volume to go with it) that creates the correct 9.78 m/s2 on the surface.
Also I found out why Venus has no magnetic field - it's not rotating! It has enough internal temperature
Bumping Ganymede or Io into Mars on the other hand might be safer than bumping them into Venus, as long as they get put into orbit with low eccentricity around the Sun that never crosses Earth's height about the Sun. There is probably still a risk from moving such large objects in our planet system, but the risks might be minute enough to be acceptable. There is probably a long way to go before Mars can be built up into a planet large enough to hold water, but vent all hydrogen. What is the gravity/temperature range for Mars for this to happen in its present orbit. If Mars gets built up to a larger size by interplanetary ping pong, it might be worth to send it closer to the Sun, and in fact you could have a trio, Earth, Mars, Venus almost sharing Earth's orbit equally spaced from each other, not across the Sun from Each other, this way they are always visible to each other and communication is easy. Almost sharing as in at different heights around the Sun, never getting close enough to each other to toss each other into random unpredictable orbits. (Note: the 3-body problem in physics is a great chaos generator, it's very unpredictable sometimes.) They could have a prize for the best analysis of the safest orbits, where the temperature/distance from the Sun is considered. The economic analysis is the most important, as it may be cheaper to put up shades and keep Venus into higher but still low orbit compared to Earth, and Mars very high with possibly a focusing Fresnel lens at it's Lagrange point, on 3 out of each other's plane orbits where the 3 never meet each other. As different height orbits around the Sun go around with different speeds, putting all 3 planets into exactly the same orbit might be the safest way to guarantee they never catastrophically or unpredictably meet each other. Also, just how expensive would it be to send the useless Mercury up into Venus, in a way that also sends the blasted off momentum conservation ejected stuff from it not deep into the Sun, but into some usable, higher area orbit where people could get to it.
People talk about how the solar wind blows away a planet's atmosphere, and to that I've said all you need is a magnetic field and van Allen belts to deflect the solar wind. I just thought about this a little more. The wind itself does not blow away the atmosphere, as in physically blow it away, because a particle impacting the upper atmosphere at high speed is like a super fast ball inside a lottery urn, or when breaking in pool, the initial ball at high velocity, its velocity gets transferred and distributed over to the other particles of the atmosphere, raising the temperature, but not really knocking anything off the planet's surface. There is probably a dynamic equilibrium of the size of the atmosphere, a balance between particles captured and lost, particles captured by gravity from the solar wind, and lost from gravity if they ever reach the escape velocity from random thermal motions (the Maxwell Boltzmann velocity distribution of gas molecules has a sizable tail in the high velocity region) in the very upper zones of the atmosphere. The temperature in the troposphere matters the most, and the higher the troposphere the colder the temperature, the more it retains the atmosphere, and the troposphere becomes even higher, so the size of the atmosphere may be very sensitive to temperature, and has to be in a very narrow range to retain all nitrogen and oxygen and CO2, but let hydrogen fully escape (else you have an explosion in the atmosphere from a lightning strike, or can never build up much oxygen because it keeps turning to water from the captured hydrogen). Too cold a troposphere may retain too much hydrogen. In fact the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus are probably silicate cored just like Earth, might have water too if they have lightning strikes, but they have so much gravity and sufficiently low troposphere temperature they retain all the hydrogen, increasing gravity which retains even more hydrogen, and this process would go on indefinitely weren't it for the fact that there is so little hydrogen in outer space, it takes forever to grow a millimeter for the size of the planet. These gas giants are probably growing, and the closer they are to the solar wind source, the Sun, the faster they must be growing, Jupiter growing faster than Saturn, etc, if the hydrogen concentration decreases in outer space when going farther from the Sun. In fact the silicate core of Jupiter might have started off about the same size as Earth, but because it was so much lower temperature in its troposphere, it retained the hydrogen and it grew into a massive gravity object which now heavily attracts all kinds of meteorites and comets, so its silicate core is probably much bigger now than Earth's. So anyway, what I was trying to say at first was that Venus may not need a magnetic field if its temperature is low enough, the atmosphere may absorb the impact of the solar wind, as long as the fully dispersed diffuse Aurora Borealis phenomenon across even the equator happens deep enough in the atmosphere that the hot particles impact colder ones above and lose their escape velocity, and never escape. It's very hard to create a natural magnetic field if you don't even understand why such a thing arises. It might have to do with a huge nickel-iron core, and if Venus lacks that, that's very expensive to gather in outer space and dump into Venus. If it's lava is not molten enough, it's also very expensive to find radioactive containing silicates and dump it into Venus.(It may be that simply Venus does not have the perfect size for a lava, not enough insulation to get the core hot enough, even if it has the same average concentration of radioactive trace elements as Earth, or the Moon, or Jupiter.) If push comes to shove, it's possible to put up superconducting magnets by the Lagrange point to deflect off some of the solar wind. But a cold average temperature of the planet is a must before water and oxygen and nitrogen get retained in large quantities, especially water. I just read up on the atmospheric composition of Venus, it
Object recognition is intelligence .- this includes rule recognition, i.e. the rules by which objects behave. Rules are also objects, thought objects, of the mind.
Ever look at clouds and see sheep and other things? Ever look at a distant object while driving and it takes you a while to determine whether it's a trashcan or a bear? That's all intelligence has to do - recognize objects in the world around it, and model the world through objects, predict the likely outcomes and behaviors of those objects. It's not that complicated. When you have a car that can drive itself, you have one that can distinguish between a bear and a trashcan, and that requires a pretty sophisticated world modelling system, on par with the IQ of a horse or dog, as a bear might walk into the road and be a threat to driving, a trashcan will probably not. Any robot that can't predict the likely behavior of objects it sees would be extremely dangerous at driving. So what I'm saying is that before AI gets to the level of humans, it has to pass through the level of a dog. Btw dogs and animals are stupider than you, but they are not that stupid. It's possible to maintain a good interpersonal relationship between a pet and a human, because the pet is pretty smart. A dog can't do calculus or talk English, but it's pretty smart regardless.
I see a lot of doctors and nurses bicycle to work where I live, to the nearby hospitals. At least I used to a couple years back. White hipster kids are slowly leaving the area, and there are irreversible transformations at the nearby hospitals, which may have longterm effects on the budget and bottom line of the whole city and region, especially when it comes to tourist-health-care, people visiting for a surgery from far away land because they heard the local hospitals are best at it, or at least used to be, that kind of cash cow may go on for a while longer then just stop, unless they can mobilize a whole new gang of different class of customers, but still of affluence, I'd say mostly from Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, etc, and stay away from a financial implosion. Some people are so fed up with "discrimination" that they will shortsightedly drive entire businesses out of business by trying to fix "discrimination" issues. And then how do you gain from the whole thing? At least you used to get tax revenue to your own area from these "discriminatory" punks that used to work there, once the place goes out of business, then there is nothing. Nothing. You get a whole lot of this: http://media.salon.com/2011/10... and this http://media.cmgdigital.com/sh... and this http://i1109.photobucket.com/a... and this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... and this http://blog.preservationnation... and this http://www.museumofthecity.org... How many times have you seen it? Let's fix what's wrong with America today, it's discrimination, once we fix that, everything'll be alright. You know I'm saying?
One neat thing in polymer science lately is what every other idiot spends his free time poking at, it's a smartphone, driven by OLED's, organic LED's, but that's like not even polymer science at its core, but organic chemistry optoelectronics, and may have more in common with pharmaceutical science than polymer science.
Dense atmosphere and low gravity is nonsense, unless you have very high molecular weight materials, which tend to boil at higher temperatures, such as sulfuric acid on Earth sized Venus at 10 bar and very high temperature. But as far as we know almost all life on Earth directly connected to the atmosphere is photosynthetic origin as it's energy core (with the exception of deep ocean volcanic eruption sulfur chemistry cycle based lifeforms), so you'd assume low molecular weight oxygen in the atmosphere, to support carbon combustion of aerobic lifeforms, and therefore not that much density of atmosphere. Earth might be on the lowest possible gravity side of possibilities for life, as Mars has a very thin atmosphere, because of both low gravity but also because of lack of magnetic field/lack of solar wind shield. So you can't really have a life connected to an atmosphere in its function on a planet the size of our Moon, because there is no atmosphere at all on such sized a thing, because of insufficient gravity to hold one. So elephants on Earth might be the largest possible land based life forms in the entire Universe, but there might be a whole lot of places with say double or triple maybe 5x the gravity on Earth, and then most likely the largest lifeforms are bug-sized, with huge leg muscles compared to total body weight. If the gravity is too high, then we run into situations like Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, that are full of captured gaseous hydrogen, as hydrogen is the most abundant element in interstellar and interplanetary space, and the only reason why Earth is not full of gaseous hydrogen is because it does not have sufficient gravity to retain it in the atmosphere at its escape-velocity escape region temperature. So if life is possible on these gas-giants in our solar system, then there are a lot of possibilities out there, but most likely life is only possible within a limited gravity range, Earth being on the lower end as Mars and Luna can't really support life (i.e. can't hold low pressure unboiled unvented to outers space liquid water to dissolve carbon based organic chemicals in essential for life), and on the gas giant high end you have issues with atmospheric hydrogen coexisting with oxygen during a lightning flash, and the whole atmosphere exploding - even if life is possible in/on gas giants, it cannot be carbon dioxide/oxygen photosynthetic/oxygen combusting hydrocarbon based, because of hydrogen explosions, but deep ocean hydrothermal vent type lifeforms might be possible, all you need is a sufficient driving force, high enough head for a local caloric waterfall.
I used to ride a bicycle, about 40 minutes one way commute to work, slightly uphill, and the worst part was lack of fenders, and the whole road wetness spraying into my face during each rain. I could literally taste the road each time. I also had a rainproof set of clothes/boots, but my face was uncovered. Then I upgraded my bicycle to one with fenders. What a difference when it rained! But I can no longer get minimum wage jobs anywhere close, so my bicycle has been down for like 7 years now. But one day, when the price of gas hits $20/gal(not counting inflation), it's gonna be useful.
Can we get a Star Trek like movie but instead of meeting human looking weirdos in outer space, let's meet species that look really weird, yet make friends with us and we commnunicate. Like Octopuses, and Snake-people, bug-looking-people, birds with intellect, Koala bear looking chess players, etc.
Or more like patent collector fanatix. Seriously, polymer reasearch happened in 1890-1990. I have yet to see much new since. How about nanotubes! Yay! Or nano this nano that. It's a miracle! Like my nano-dick! Stronger than bone. Seriously, I was disappointed when reading the word "bone." I was expecting something like stronger than Kevlar.
I've been thinking about modding the car, it comes as a 5-speed, and 3000 rpm in the 5th speed is like 80 mph. It needs to be a 6 speed of 7 speed. It would be nice to get 2000 rpm at 80 mph, or 1400 at 60 - it would really cut down the high rpm engine friction, let you maintain constant speed and not be a jerk, but it would not cut out gear friction, which is not that big of a deal. But tire rolling resistance is the major loss when coasting, and it depends on the air pressure in the tires, and too much of it is a tire bursting safety issue, plus wet traction issue, so I haven't been playing with optimizing tire pressure yet. If I had the dough I'd buy silica tires.
Modems are for long distance. Local networks only need PCI NE2000 compatible NIC's. Or even ISA if you can find ISA mobos.