They didn't "ban Senators" from editing, but they did call into question edits that apparently came from congressional office IP address ranges that attempted to whitewash biographies on Wikipedia.
People are generally discouraged from editing their own biographies on Wikipedia, although fixing factually inaccurate information is not explicitly prohibited. This certainly isn't a problem restricted to biographies of politicians either.
Anyway, the article doesn't really explain the mechanics of how this analysis works. Do they just run a program to fetch the page every n seconds, use a reg exp to find the area where the number of edits are, get the counter and repeat for some number of hours?
I guess that this is possible but it seems a bit crude. Anyone know a more sophisticated method? err... does anyone know a more sophisticated legal method?
The method of analysis is quite a bit more mundane than you seem to be implying here. Every Wikipedia page has a "history" log that shows every contributor, when the edit happen, and even what words were changed on each edit. All they did is take this page history and perform a modest analysis between each one of the VP candidates... and that was done more as a forensics review than anything when it was happening. The page history is public data, and you simply have to go to the Wikipedia article and click on the "history" tab to see the information.
As far as monitoring changes in real-time, you can do that via RSS-feeds which you can get for each page individually or for Wikipedia as a whole (although the whole Wikipedia RSS-feed is a firehose of data). Basically, you can get notified when each page gets edited or modified. Usually this is used to catch trolls, but it could be used for this sort of analysis a well.
I didn't say that carbon dating has many sources of error. What I'm saying is that measurements of known, independently dated materials abundantly demonstrate that a strict measurement of C-14/C-12 ratios are insufficient for dating of materials, and that something, somewhere, is influencing a change in that ratio.
Indeed, solar radiation (including but not limited to neutrino flux) has been varying over a period of years and decades to even centuries. It can even vary from month to month. I am simply rejecting your premise that the sun is a constant source of radiation of any kind, including neutrinos, and I'm trying to back that up with some hard data.
There is no way that you can know for certain that neutrino flux has remained constant over the period of about the last 40,000 years (the "carbon dating horizon"), and my assertion is that it has not, certainly over that period of time.
It isn't quite true that countries who have a nuclear plant also have the concentrators necessary for nuclear fuel. Several of the "third world" countries who have reactors get that fuel from a "nuclear power" who produces that fuel for them.
The point with breeder reactors... if they are operating at peak efficiency and re-using their own waste as most of them are designed to do... have those facilities in place. It is more than just plutonium that is extracted, although that is a major component of it.
This is the major political issue that confronts those who would build a breeder reactor. Indeed the French nuclear power industry does precisely this process... and uses the extra Plutonium to make bombs for its country's arsenal. Since France already had the capability to make nukes prior to the construction of that plant, it didn't really make major news media headlines when it was built.
My point is that it is precisely this and a few other political issues that keep breeder reactors from being built, not the technical issues involved with actually getting the thing up and running, or even the cost of building those kind of facilities.
The breeder reactor that is operating at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory is a model facility and works beautifully.... much to the dismay of the contractors and engineers who built her and have seen people dismiss that technology as science fiction.
I didn't say that we don't know that neutrinos are produced in nuclear reactions. I'm just saying that we don't have 18th Century data about neutrino measurements that can confirm the long term cycles that can indicate increases or decreases in the rate of fusion. Heck, we don't even have realistic data for more than a decade or so, and even that isn't with a high degree of confidence or methodology to determine accurately what the rate of fusion is within the solar core. Basic theories about what the neutrino measurements describe have been debated even quite recently.
And what is known, from carbon dating of wood and other samples that can be dated through alternative (even historical documentation considered accurate) measurements, is that C-14 ratios do vary by quite a bit and in a significant manner over the course of several centuries and sometimes even from year to year. How much of that is influenced by solar radiation and how much is due to extra-solar influences (aka "cosmic radiation") can be debated, but it does happen. And that happens certainly more than the +/- 0.1% difference described in this paper. In fact, variation in solar radiation may be an overwhelming factor with this variance in radioactive decay being just a minor variable swamped out by the other variance.
The other huge problem with breeder reactors is that the ability to process nuclear waste also gives you the ability to concentrate nuclear by-products to whatever levels of concentration that you desire.
In other words, this gives whatever corporation, country, or agency that has one of these facilities the ability to build a nuclear bomb. That tends to scare off the diplomats and brings out the anti-nuclear crowd in hoards. Perhaps justifiably.
In other words, it is better to bury nuclear waste in some obscure mountain in the middle of Nevada (obviously the last state that anybody would bother living in... according to the Washington DC policy-setting crowd) than it is to dispose of this sort of waste via these bomb producing factories.
It isn't like fertilizer or other chemical factories can't produce bombs either, but that is irrelevant.
BTW, my family is from Nevada and I love the state, and I hate to see it turned into a nuclear waste repository. The scars from nuclear bomb testing are bad enough.
This is indeed one of the presumptions of the "global warming" crowd, that the solar flux (aka the "radiation" including heat, light, and other forms) from the sun is constant over human lifetimes.
By far and away most stars that can be observed have some sort of variation over time, and I don't believe Sol to be the exception here either. Indeed, the thermal mass of the Sun's mid-layers between the core and the "surface" would seem to be a moderating influence to variations in nuclear reactions, and even a modest oscillation in the density of the solar core could have some profound variations in nuclear reaction rates.
As for historical records of solar activity, there are records of sunspots going back hundreds of years, and there have indeed been periods of nearly zero sunspots at all.... with a correlation between this sunspot minimum and global temperatures. For some hard data including information that is fairly current, you can see the raw numbers at:
Since neutrino detection is something rather new to science, there really aren't direct historical records to compare this sort of information to what may or may not be happening in the past. "We don't know" is a better answer than trying to take a shot in the dark about what may or may not be the case in terms of what is happening inside of the Sun.
Einstein documented that there would be some variation due to the position of the test in a gravitational field, as there would be a small variation due to time dilation being closer to a gravity well. Relatively does account for some variation of time being closer or further from a gravitational source... and in fact the orbital path of Mercury was one of the early "proofs" offered for Relativity.
I'm hoping that these scientists were intelligent enough to take this variation into consideration when pronouncing this new theory... and that this variation in elemental decay rates swamps any potential time dilation variation due to gravity.
If not, all they've done is re-discover relativity in another context. I've seen major mistakes like this in the past, but it may be that they've discovered something genuinely new and can be explained even with this factor accounted for.
This is completely untrue. Of course you can design a building that can be evacuated all at once.... it has to be built into the basic design of that building. The problem is that such an evacuation plan may be far more expensive than the organization that is constructing that sort of building to be able to afford in terms of putting in those sort of safety features.
There are features such as "fire floors" that allow breaks between sections of the building that can act as collecting points in an emergency, reinforced stairwells that can punch through floors that are on fire for evacuations, and other features that in general could have saved a great many people in the WTC that simply were never implemented at all in the structure of that building... yet have been installed in other major buildings of that size elsewhere.
As for being able to evacuate a major building like the WTC or the Empire State Building quickly... again, it is a matter of getting a good plan in place and setting up methods for those who are in the building to be able to make the journey out of the building quickly. Any corridor or stairwell has a set capacity in terms of pedestrians per minute, and you simply have to make them big enough or numerous enough to handle the crowd in an acceptable time period.
Certainly major league sports stadiums are designed to hold more fans than would be found in a major office building like the WTC, but it would be unreasonable to expect fans in that sort of building to wait "several hours" in order to be able to "evacuate" from that building after the conclusion of the game. The same principle holds true for a major building.
There are also structures like shoots and slides that can be installed which could rapidly evacuate large numbers of people rapidly from upper floors... including some ingenious devices that can even allow emergency slides to be deployed to neighboring buildings in an emergency basis.
This is all called engineering, and something that has to be organic to the design of the building in the first place. It may be expensive, but it can be done.
Also, my point above was that the WTC had an evacuation plan in place when it was originally designed that wasn't even followed on 9/11... and that very fact contributed to a considerable loss of life that should never have happened.
The WTC was a disaster waiting to happen for a whole bunch of reasons. The evacuation plans that had been put into place when the building was built weren't even followed, nor was there any sort of realistic thought given in terms of practically evacuating that building complex.
There were issues like fire exits sealed by sheetrock (with desks+cubicles put in their place), a design failure of the stairwells themselves, and an evacuation plan that hadn't been reviewed for well over 20 years by the tenants of that building.
I disagree with your presumption here that sky scrapers aren't designed to be evacuated. They can be designed that way, and I've seen a number of buildings that indeed have such an evacuation plan set up and reviewed. Indeed, that very same NOVA episode that you are referencing here went into some examples of a good evacuation plan that could be implemented and safety equipment installed that could ensure a rapid evacuation of a building... including in a situation just as happened on 9/11 where you could evacuate people who were "trapped" above the fire zone and were unable to get out via the normal stairwell exits.
One other sad fact about the WTC and 9/11: It was only at about 10% of its normal occupancy when the planes struck the building. Had the highly intelligent terrorists simply waited for a slightly later flight, the building would have been near capacity and had that 10x the number of people there to evacuate. That as many of them got out as it was is an amazing accomplishment.
While Tokyo might have the money and the motivation to build one of these structures, it is Abu Dubai that has the money to blow by a government knowing that it has a huge surplus of cash that won't last forever.
They are realistically investing in projects that are going to result in long-term infrastructure that can hold them through the upcoming century in style, and to become a center of commerce for the Middle East as well. Well, Dubai and Qatar are each trying in their own way in becoming a heavily armed but neutral political power following the Swiss model, and hoping like mad that the storms of that part of the world will avoid them if possible.
I don't see this happening in Oklahoma, as there is neither the pressing need for this sort of concentration of humanity nor the money to pull it off.
I would beg to differ here. Usually there is at least a "hook" of something that makes it relevant to a recent event or something similar. Yeah, book reviews can and have been sometimes quite dated (aka the review of the Lord of the Rings a little while ago) and there are occasionally items of simply general interest, but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
Then again, stuff sometimes slips through the cracks and appears to be a current news story when in fact it isn't. This seems to be one of those.
Can you point to any other article/major thread that has been published on the/. site over the past day or so that doesn't have one of these "hooks" in it?
At least this isn't a dupe of an old story... well, too much of one at least. I was just hoping that there was some genuine news about the Rosetta disc rather than simply a rehash of the project.
This is certainly an interesting project from the perspective of something interesting to nerds and all, but what is newsworthy here?
This disc project has been going for nearly a decade, and they have been gradually collecting information for its design for some time. This disc has been in production for awhile as well now.
So what has changed to make this something that is "news for nerds"? From a journalistic viewpoint, this web page and related information is about as stale as it gets. The blog entry fills in some interesting details, but even that doesn't give anything newsworthy. I've certainly seen information about this project referenced here on/. for some time as well.
No need. It is being stored using character glyphs that are natural to that language. This is an analog disc, not a digital one, that simply requires some high magnification.
If this were to be a digital disc, I'd have to agree, however.
This disc is being designed to be read through analog processes.... and in fact the first few words can be read with the naked eye, and gradually get smaller to the point that each attempt to magnify the words shows there is much more on the disc.
Each language that is being used is also given "equal" treatment, other than some languages tend to be much more verbose than others such as Latin languages vs. Germanic languages or even the most efficient being Chinese (in terms of characters per word/idea in the language)
It is indeed likely that we have some very similar views toward power generation and energy projects. The abuses that you are referring to can only happen when you permit large organizations that operate on the scale of governments to operate in a position of political power.
One previous energy company of which I used to be a customer that also used to be locally owned and controlled... in North America... is now owned by Scottish Power. Why some guy living in the UK, acting as CEO, cares one little bit about a state government much less an ordinary consumer in another country half-way across the planet is something that I don't think can be effectively answered in an honest manner. In other words, the very state regulatory agency in charge of monitoring and regulating this company is literally dwarfed in sheer manpower by a company that has more employees than the whole of the state government that is regulating it, and arguably more gross revenue than that state as well. Even threats of removing a business license from this company ring very hollow for businesses this large.
I, for one, advocate local ownership and small community-operated power facilities. It doesn't really matter what the "fuel source" is, it ought to be controlled on a level that an individual can make a difference in what happens and how everybody gets affected by the decisions of creating the power in the first place.
There is also some very interesting developments of power generation on a very small scale... even to the point of being done by individuals. How the utility companies are dealing with these issues is something to consider, and unfortunately government responses to this sort of potential is mixed at best.
One of Superman's special abilities is to locally modify the universal gravity constant... hence the reason he is able to "fly", pick up incredibly heavy things, and to catch stuff like our sweet little damsel in distress (read Lois Lane).
Kryptonite, unfortunately, has some properties that counter this gravitational distortion and makes space "normal" for Superman, sort of like another physical property like electrical charge that has a polar opposite in Superman's blood vs. Kryptonite.
Of course this ability is non-cannonical so it obviously hasn't been completely explored by the comic book guys. Still, it explains a whole bunch:o)
I find your understanding of radioactivity to be somewhat lacking.
The huge issue with Chernobyl is that most of the radioactive material was released over a relatively short period of time. Had that happened all at once with the coal plant you mention here, I'm quite certain it would have been a major international incident instead of merely business as normal.
Radioactivity is simply a part of the environment that we live in. All I'm trying to point out is that those getting hyper-paranoid about radioactive material need to get a better clue about what it is that they are talking about, and understand that there are radioactive sources other than nuclear power plants that can and do cause environmental damage.
BTW, the final chapter on living near a major coal power plant has yet to be written. You seem to be implying "since I'm still alive and don't have cancer, this coal plant is harmless and has caused no health damage to me due to radiation". I'm pointing out that the radioactive material has indeed been spewed out of generator plants like this, and the areas surrounding those kind of facilities do have higher levels of some radioactive materials than comparable areas that don't have such generator plants. Indeed the levels of radiation may even be higher than would be the case for a well-designed nuclear fission power plant.
As for how damaging to your health such low levels of increased radiation may be to you, your children, and future generations.... I'm not even sure how to quantify that at all. I do live in an area which was down-wind from the above-ground (and underground) tests of hundreds of nuclear bombs. My father even has told me stories of going out to the desert to watch some of them go off and treating them like an evening of watching fireworks. Certainly the operation of a nuclear power plant, even going explosively damaging like Chernobyl, is nothing compared to thermo-nuclear detonations, yet I live in a city of well over a million people that is continuing to grow.
The Polywell attempts to combine "the best" of both types of fusion reactors, as it tries to set up a "magnetic bottle" that can contain an electric charge that does pretty much the same thing as the Fusor in terms of trying to confine the nuclei of fusible atoms. Since the electrons creating the electrical field are contained in a magnetic structure instead of a physical metallic structure, it solves two things at once:
Removes the pesky wires that the nuclei keep banging into... giving more energy back into the system.
Allows the reactor core to get to much higher temperatures that can be substantially warmer than the melting point of a conductor like gold or copper.
Still, there are a number of other issue and things unique to the Polywell that raise questions if that line of thinking will actually produce energy as well. Some detractors of the Polywell think that some of the energy losses from its design may still not get past the break-even point, but that remains to be seen in practice.
What you've written here, harrkev, is a good introduction to the topic. Thanks for putting this together!
A huge difference between the folks pushing around the "cold fusion"-like apparatuses and those experimenting with internal electrostatic confinement (IEC) devices is that the IEC devices have been proven that they are at least producing a fusion reaction. The real question here isn't if the reaction is happening, but if the technology... if somehow modified... could possibly be used to make a real power source that is self-sustaining.
The "cold fusion" reactors have even the very question of if a fusion reaction is happening at all raised, much less trying to bring this to something of a more practical power generation system. From what I've seen, there may in fact be a real fusion reaction in these sort of devices, but it is so small that it is hardly detectable from the background radiation noise of whatever environment that you happen to be in.
The infamous Pons/Fleishman experiment tried to use a calorimeter instead of a neutron detector, and was unable to explain away a potential chemical reaction instead of a purely nuclear reaction.
Again, none of this applies to these IEC experiments, as calorimeters aren't even being applied here... just a visual examination of the interior of these chambers is evidence that plasmas are being produced and that conditions favorable to have at least some fusion is taking place.
It really isn't the containment field that is causing the problem, but rather that the particles (including atomic fuel source nuclei) keep bumping into the physical structure of the apparatus, sucking energy out of the process before it can initiate a fusion reaction. If you could build the containment field without the need to put in the physical elements, it may just be enough to get past that energy break-even point. But how do you accomplish such a task?
There are a few interesting ideas on how to accomplish something similar to that, but it does take some imagination. The Polywell concept is at least one that uses a similar approach but avoids the physical metal grid in the center that causes so much grief to the IEC researchers.
I would have to agree with you to a perhaps much more limited extent:
The fusion design that has been getting all of the attention is the Tokamak design, where all of the billions of dollars and thousands of professional engineers and physicists have been working toward. After all of the money and decades of research, I think it is fairly safe to say that this line of research is at or very nearly at the end of the road in terms of what else they are going to learn from it.
If you compare this to computer technology, it is like trying to build a full modern computer using vacuum tubes in logic circuits. You ended up with monster computers like the ENIAC or UNIVAC that worked, but pushed the technology right to its edge and demonstrated that something else was needed in order to significantly scale down the complexity of the design.
What is needed for fusion research is to find the equivalent of a semi-conductor solution that can significantly reduce the size of the needed components and allow a major break-through in terms of efficiency and power output.
Just as semi-conductors haven't completely replaced vacuum tubes, any new breakthrough in fusion power generation will have to come from some place completely different.
It should be noted that the IEC reactor (aka the "Farnsworth Fusor") is something that has only recently been explored to any major extent, and even this is only by mostly amateur researchers. It certainly isn't something that a complete knowledge of the technology has been obtained about, nor have there really be "decades of research" on the concept.
The Polywell reactor is a direct descendant of the IEC, and there may be other similar kinds of designs. Bussard even gives credit to Philo Farnsworth and his research, and goes into what the actual limitations of the basic IEC design might be as well as noting how the Polywell design tried to overcome some of those limitations.
This certainly isn't a scientific well of ideas that has been exhausted.
I would agree that the tokamak reactor is something that simply won't work on a small scale... and seems to be the current darling technology for mainstream physicists who are working on fusion technologies.
With the billions of dollars spend in that direction, it should speak volumes that this is a dead-end technology.
As far as a practical fusion device that can generate more energy than it takes to get the fusion process started.... that is indeed a tough challenge. The IEC hints that it may not have to be as complicated as the tokamak reactor design, and the IEC at least allows an amateur scientist to study this concept where actual real fusion is taking place... admittedly on a small scale.
As far as steel fabrication and manufacturing, I happen to know a few amateur blacksmiths that get pretty good at what they are doing, and can make some rather incredible things. It isn't quite on the scale of a major steel fab plant, but there is room for amateur metallurgy and glass fabrication that can work on the scale of an individual or small-team level. That economies of scale are there, no doubt, but it can be done on a much smaller scale than you are implying here. The rest is how you scale that production up to larger quantities and ensuring more consistency in terms of the end product.
I was referring to hard core radioactive waste like Uranium and Thorium. Carbon-14 and other background stuff is also there, but you would find some materials that clearly would be regulated by groups like the Atomic Energy Commission if the concentrations of the materials were higher.
Yeah, this is a complicated issue, and getting back to my original point: a nuclear fusion reactor using Boron-11 as a fuel source would in the long run be even cleaner than a coal plant in terms of just the issue of radioactive contamination alone. Other minor issues like CO2 production and environmental damage from scraping coal out of the ground are then just added bonuses.
BTW, the #1 source of Boron is Borax, which you can get enough for a lifetime supply of the element (in terms of energy production) at your local neighborhood Wal-Mart in the laundry detergent aisle.
The "pro-nuclear fanboys" that you are complaining about here are the engineers who know a hell of a lot more about nuclear power than you do... partly due to the fact that they are in the trenches helping to design these things and have a hell of a lot better knowledge about basic physics than you seem to be demonstrating with this sort of posting.
If this gives me a chance to vent my spleen, so be it.
I will admit that there are issues well above and beyond just the raw design of the reactor, and the concentration of wealth/power that comes from the building of a major nuclear power plant is a huge issue as well.
One of the advantages of the polywell reactor is that it would de-centralize the building of power plants, and put them on the scale of a neighborhood plant that wouldn't be a major terrorist target. This is a reactor that conceivably an ordinary person in a 1st world country could own on their own, or at least it could be owned by a small non-profit group.
Another of the more interesting applications that Bussard and his team came up with was a nuclear-powered semi-truck using this technology. He didn't think he could get it any smaller than something on the back of a semi-trailer rig, but it could be used on that scale and haul freight on that sort of scale. That the radioactive products would be low-grade enough to allow transport on public highways is something to think about as well.
Of course all of this depends on getting the Polywell to work in the first place. While there have been some interesting promises, Bussard had his funding dry up right before he died. There is a group that was able to get some continued funding on the idea, but it is in the backwater of the R&D development.
As an extra note, the reason why there were budget cuts for this line of fusion research: The war in Iraq. Seriously. That was the explicit reason given by the OMB about why this research program was cut. Now mull that one over for a little while. This is about the "greenest" form of power production that I can even think about, yet because it is "nuclear", the green movement doesn't want to touch it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't "ban Senators" from editing, but they did call into question edits that apparently came from congressional office IP address ranges that attempted to whitewash biographies on Wikipedia.
People are generally discouraged from editing their own biographies on Wikipedia, although fixing factually inaccurate information is not explicitly prohibited. This certainly isn't a problem restricted to biographies of politicians either.
The method of analysis is quite a bit more mundane than you seem to be implying here. Every Wikipedia page has a "history" log that shows every contributor, when the edit happen, and even what words were changed on each edit. All they did is take this page history and perform a modest analysis between each one of the VP candidates... and that was done more as a forensics review than anything when it was happening. The page history is public data, and you simply have to go to the Wikipedia article and click on the "history" tab to see the information.
As far as monitoring changes in real-time, you can do that via RSS-feeds which you can get for each page individually or for Wikipedia as a whole (although the whole Wikipedia RSS-feed is a firehose of data). Basically, you can get notified when each page gets edited or modified. Usually this is used to catch trolls, but it could be used for this sort of analysis a well.
I didn't say that carbon dating has many sources of error. What I'm saying is that measurements of known, independently dated materials abundantly demonstrate that a strict measurement of C-14/C-12 ratios are insufficient for dating of materials, and that something, somewhere, is influencing a change in that ratio.
Indeed, solar radiation (including but not limited to neutrino flux) has been varying over a period of years and decades to even centuries. It can even vary from month to month. I am simply rejecting your premise that the sun is a constant source of radiation of any kind, including neutrinos, and I'm trying to back that up with some hard data.
There is no way that you can know for certain that neutrino flux has remained constant over the period of about the last 40,000 years (the "carbon dating horizon"), and my assertion is that it has not, certainly over that period of time.
It isn't quite true that countries who have a nuclear plant also have the concentrators necessary for nuclear fuel. Several of the "third world" countries who have reactors get that fuel from a "nuclear power" who produces that fuel for them.
The point with breeder reactors... if they are operating at peak efficiency and re-using their own waste as most of them are designed to do... have those facilities in place. It is more than just plutonium that is extracted, although that is a major component of it.
This is the major political issue that confronts those who would build a breeder reactor. Indeed the French nuclear power industry does precisely this process... and uses the extra Plutonium to make bombs for its country's arsenal. Since France already had the capability to make nukes prior to the construction of that plant, it didn't really make major news media headlines when it was built.
My point is that it is precisely this and a few other political issues that keep breeder reactors from being built, not the technical issues involved with actually getting the thing up and running, or even the cost of building those kind of facilities.
The breeder reactor that is operating at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory is a model facility and works beautifully.... much to the dismay of the contractors and engineers who built her and have seen people dismiss that technology as science fiction.
I didn't say that we don't know that neutrinos are produced in nuclear reactions. I'm just saying that we don't have 18th Century data about neutrino measurements that can confirm the long term cycles that can indicate increases or decreases in the rate of fusion. Heck, we don't even have realistic data for more than a decade or so, and even that isn't with a high degree of confidence or methodology to determine accurately what the rate of fusion is within the solar core. Basic theories about what the neutrino measurements describe have been debated even quite recently.
And what is known, from carbon dating of wood and other samples that can be dated through alternative (even historical documentation considered accurate) measurements, is that C-14 ratios do vary by quite a bit and in a significant manner over the course of several centuries and sometimes even from year to year. How much of that is influenced by solar radiation and how much is due to extra-solar influences (aka "cosmic radiation") can be debated, but it does happen. And that happens certainly more than the +/- 0.1% difference described in this paper. In fact, variation in solar radiation may be an overwhelming factor with this variance in radioactive decay being just a minor variable swamped out by the other variance.
The other huge problem with breeder reactors is that the ability to process nuclear waste also gives you the ability to concentrate nuclear by-products to whatever levels of concentration that you desire.
In other words, this gives whatever corporation, country, or agency that has one of these facilities the ability to build a nuclear bomb. That tends to scare off the diplomats and brings out the anti-nuclear crowd in hoards. Perhaps justifiably.
In other words, it is better to bury nuclear waste in some obscure mountain in the middle of Nevada (obviously the last state that anybody would bother living in... according to the Washington DC policy-setting crowd) than it is to dispose of this sort of waste via these bomb producing factories.
It isn't like fertilizer or other chemical factories can't produce bombs either, but that is irrelevant.
BTW, my family is from Nevada and I love the state, and I hate to see it turned into a nuclear waste repository. The scars from nuclear bomb testing are bad enough.
This is indeed one of the presumptions of the "global warming" crowd, that the solar flux (aka the "radiation" including heat, light, and other forms) from the sun is constant over human lifetimes.
By far and away most stars that can be observed have some sort of variation over time, and I don't believe Sol to be the exception here either. Indeed, the thermal mass of the Sun's mid-layers between the core and the "surface" would seem to be a moderating influence to variations in nuclear reactions, and even a modest oscillation in the density of the solar core could have some profound variations in nuclear reaction rates.
As for historical records of solar activity, there are records of sunspots going back hundreds of years, and there have indeed been periods of nearly zero sunspots at all.... with a correlation between this sunspot minimum and global temperatures. For some hard data including information that is fairly current, you can see the raw numbers at:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/SSN/ssn.html
Since neutrino detection is something rather new to science, there really aren't direct historical records to compare this sort of information to what may or may not be happening in the past. "We don't know" is a better answer than trying to take a shot in the dark about what may or may not be the case in terms of what is happening inside of the Sun.
Einstein documented that there would be some variation due to the position of the test in a gravitational field, as there would be a small variation due to time dilation being closer to a gravity well. Relatively does account for some variation of time being closer or further from a gravitational source... and in fact the orbital path of Mercury was one of the early "proofs" offered for Relativity.
I'm hoping that these scientists were intelligent enough to take this variation into consideration when pronouncing this new theory... and that this variation in elemental decay rates swamps any potential time dilation variation due to gravity.
If not, all they've done is re-discover relativity in another context. I've seen major mistakes like this in the past, but it may be that they've discovered something genuinely new and can be explained even with this factor accounted for.
This is completely untrue. Of course you can design a building that can be evacuated all at once.... it has to be built into the basic design of that building. The problem is that such an evacuation plan may be far more expensive than the organization that is constructing that sort of building to be able to afford in terms of putting in those sort of safety features.
There are features such as "fire floors" that allow breaks between sections of the building that can act as collecting points in an emergency, reinforced stairwells that can punch through floors that are on fire for evacuations, and other features that in general could have saved a great many people in the WTC that simply were never implemented at all in the structure of that building... yet have been installed in other major buildings of that size elsewhere.
As for being able to evacuate a major building like the WTC or the Empire State Building quickly... again, it is a matter of getting a good plan in place and setting up methods for those who are in the building to be able to make the journey out of the building quickly. Any corridor or stairwell has a set capacity in terms of pedestrians per minute, and you simply have to make them big enough or numerous enough to handle the crowd in an acceptable time period.
Certainly major league sports stadiums are designed to hold more fans than would be found in a major office building like the WTC, but it would be unreasonable to expect fans in that sort of building to wait "several hours" in order to be able to "evacuate" from that building after the conclusion of the game. The same principle holds true for a major building.
There are also structures like shoots and slides that can be installed which could rapidly evacuate large numbers of people rapidly from upper floors... including some ingenious devices that can even allow emergency slides to be deployed to neighboring buildings in an emergency basis.
This is all called engineering, and something that has to be organic to the design of the building in the first place. It may be expensive, but it can be done.
Also, my point above was that the WTC had an evacuation plan in place when it was originally designed that wasn't even followed on 9/11... and that very fact contributed to a considerable loss of life that should never have happened.
The WTC was a disaster waiting to happen for a whole bunch of reasons. The evacuation plans that had been put into place when the building was built weren't even followed, nor was there any sort of realistic thought given in terms of practically evacuating that building complex.
There were issues like fire exits sealed by sheetrock (with desks+cubicles put in their place), a design failure of the stairwells themselves, and an evacuation plan that hadn't been reviewed for well over 20 years by the tenants of that building.
I disagree with your presumption here that sky scrapers aren't designed to be evacuated. They can be designed that way, and I've seen a number of buildings that indeed have such an evacuation plan set up and reviewed. Indeed, that very same NOVA episode that you are referencing here went into some examples of a good evacuation plan that could be implemented and safety equipment installed that could ensure a rapid evacuation of a building... including in a situation just as happened on 9/11 where you could evacuate people who were "trapped" above the fire zone and were unable to get out via the normal stairwell exits.
One other sad fact about the WTC and 9/11: It was only at about 10% of its normal occupancy when the planes struck the building. Had the highly intelligent terrorists simply waited for a slightly later flight, the building would have been near capacity and had that 10x the number of people there to evacuate. That as many of them got out as it was is an amazing accomplishment.
While Tokyo might have the money and the motivation to build one of these structures, it is Abu Dubai that has the money to blow by a government knowing that it has a huge surplus of cash that won't last forever.
They are realistically investing in projects that are going to result in long-term infrastructure that can hold them through the upcoming century in style, and to become a center of commerce for the Middle East as well. Well, Dubai and Qatar are each trying in their own way in becoming a heavily armed but neutral political power following the Swiss model, and hoping like mad that the storms of that part of the world will avoid them if possible.
I don't see this happening in Oklahoma, as there is neither the pressing need for this sort of concentration of humanity nor the money to pull it off.
I would beg to differ here. Usually there is at least a "hook" of something that makes it relevant to a recent event or something similar. Yeah, book reviews can and have been sometimes quite dated (aka the review of the Lord of the Rings a little while ago) and there are occasionally items of simply general interest, but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
Then again, stuff sometimes slips through the cracks and appears to be a current news story when in fact it isn't. This seems to be one of those.
Can you point to any other article/major thread that has been published on the /. site over the past day or so that doesn't have one of these "hooks" in it?
At least this isn't a dupe of an old story... well, too much of one at least. I was just hoping that there was some genuine news about the Rosetta disc rather than simply a rehash of the project.
This is certainly an interesting project from the perspective of something interesting to nerds and all, but what is newsworthy here?
This disc project has been going for nearly a decade, and they have been gradually collecting information for its design for some time. This disc has been in production for awhile as well now.
So what has changed to make this something that is "news for nerds"? From a journalistic viewpoint, this web page and related information is about as stale as it gets. The blog entry fills in some interesting details, but even that doesn't give anything newsworthy. I've certainly seen information about this project referenced here on /. for some time as well.
No need. It is being stored using character glyphs that are natural to that language. This is an analog disc, not a digital one, that simply requires some high magnification.
If this were to be a digital disc, I'd have to agree, however.
This disc is being designed to be read through analog processes.... and in fact the first few words can be read with the naked eye, and gradually get smaller to the point that each attempt to magnify the words shows there is much more on the disc.
Each language that is being used is also given "equal" treatment, other than some languages tend to be much more verbose than others such as Latin languages vs. Germanic languages or even the most efficient being Chinese (in terms of characters per word/idea in the language)
It is indeed likely that we have some very similar views toward power generation and energy projects. The abuses that you are referring to can only happen when you permit large organizations that operate on the scale of governments to operate in a position of political power.
One previous energy company of which I used to be a customer that also used to be locally owned and controlled... in North America... is now owned by Scottish Power. Why some guy living in the UK, acting as CEO, cares one little bit about a state government much less an ordinary consumer in another country half-way across the planet is something that I don't think can be effectively answered in an honest manner. In other words, the very state regulatory agency in charge of monitoring and regulating this company is literally dwarfed in sheer manpower by a company that has more employees than the whole of the state government that is regulating it, and arguably more gross revenue than that state as well. Even threats of removing a business license from this company ring very hollow for businesses this large.
I, for one, advocate local ownership and small community-operated power facilities. It doesn't really matter what the "fuel source" is, it ought to be controlled on a level that an individual can make a difference in what happens and how everybody gets affected by the decisions of creating the power in the first place.
There is also some very interesting developments of power generation on a very small scale... even to the point of being done by individuals. How the utility companies are dealing with these issues is something to consider, and unfortunately government responses to this sort of potential is mixed at best.
One of Superman's special abilities is to locally modify the universal gravity constant... hence the reason he is able to "fly", pick up incredibly heavy things, and to catch stuff like our sweet little damsel in distress (read Lois Lane).
Kryptonite, unfortunately, has some properties that counter this gravitational distortion and makes space "normal" for Superman, sort of like another physical property like electrical charge that has a polar opposite in Superman's blood vs. Kryptonite.
Of course this ability is non-cannonical so it obviously hasn't been completely explored by the comic book guys. Still, it explains a whole bunch :o)
I find your understanding of radioactivity to be somewhat lacking.
The huge issue with Chernobyl is that most of the radioactive material was released over a relatively short period of time. Had that happened all at once with the coal plant you mention here, I'm quite certain it would have been a major international incident instead of merely business as normal.
Radioactivity is simply a part of the environment that we live in. All I'm trying to point out is that those getting hyper-paranoid about radioactive material need to get a better clue about what it is that they are talking about, and understand that there are radioactive sources other than nuclear power plants that can and do cause environmental damage.
BTW, the final chapter on living near a major coal power plant has yet to be written. You seem to be implying "since I'm still alive and don't have cancer, this coal plant is harmless and has caused no health damage to me due to radiation". I'm pointing out that the radioactive material has indeed been spewed out of generator plants like this, and the areas surrounding those kind of facilities do have higher levels of some radioactive materials than comparable areas that don't have such generator plants. Indeed the levels of radiation may even be higher than would be the case for a well-designed nuclear fission power plant.
As for how damaging to your health such low levels of increased radiation may be to you, your children, and future generations.... I'm not even sure how to quantify that at all. I do live in an area which was down-wind from the above-ground (and underground) tests of hundreds of nuclear bombs. My father even has told me stories of going out to the desert to watch some of them go off and treating them like an evening of watching fireworks. Certainly the operation of a nuclear power plant, even going explosively damaging like Chernobyl, is nothing compared to thermo-nuclear detonations, yet I live in a city of well over a million people that is continuing to grow.
The Polywell attempts to combine "the best" of both types of fusion reactors, as it tries to set up a "magnetic bottle" that can contain an electric charge that does pretty much the same thing as the Fusor in terms of trying to confine the nuclei of fusible atoms. Since the electrons creating the electrical field are contained in a magnetic structure instead of a physical metallic structure, it solves two things at once:
Still, there are a number of other issue and things unique to the Polywell that raise questions if that line of thinking will actually produce energy as well. Some detractors of the Polywell think that some of the energy losses from its design may still not get past the break-even point, but that remains to be seen in practice.
What you've written here, harrkev, is a good introduction to the topic. Thanks for putting this together!
A huge difference between the folks pushing around the "cold fusion"-like apparatuses and those experimenting with internal electrostatic confinement (IEC) devices is that the IEC devices have been proven that they are at least producing a fusion reaction. The real question here isn't if the reaction is happening, but if the technology... if somehow modified... could possibly be used to make a real power source that is self-sustaining.
The "cold fusion" reactors have even the very question of if a fusion reaction is happening at all raised, much less trying to bring this to something of a more practical power generation system. From what I've seen, there may in fact be a real fusion reaction in these sort of devices, but it is so small that it is hardly detectable from the background radiation noise of whatever environment that you happen to be in.
The infamous Pons/Fleishman experiment tried to use a calorimeter instead of a neutron detector, and was unable to explain away a potential chemical reaction instead of a purely nuclear reaction.
Again, none of this applies to these IEC experiments, as calorimeters aren't even being applied here... just a visual examination of the interior of these chambers is evidence that plasmas are being produced and that conditions favorable to have at least some fusion is taking place.
It really isn't the containment field that is causing the problem, but rather that the particles (including atomic fuel source nuclei) keep bumping into the physical structure of the apparatus, sucking energy out of the process before it can initiate a fusion reaction. If you could build the containment field without the need to put in the physical elements, it may just be enough to get past that energy break-even point. But how do you accomplish such a task?
There are a few interesting ideas on how to accomplish something similar to that, but it does take some imagination. The Polywell concept is at least one that uses a similar approach but avoids the physical metal grid in the center that causes so much grief to the IEC researchers.
I would have to agree with you to a perhaps much more limited extent:
The fusion design that has been getting all of the attention is the Tokamak design, where all of the billions of dollars and thousands of professional engineers and physicists have been working toward. After all of the money and decades of research, I think it is fairly safe to say that this line of research is at or very nearly at the end of the road in terms of what else they are going to learn from it.
If you compare this to computer technology, it is like trying to build a full modern computer using vacuum tubes in logic circuits. You ended up with monster computers like the ENIAC or UNIVAC that worked, but pushed the technology right to its edge and demonstrated that something else was needed in order to significantly scale down the complexity of the design.
What is needed for fusion research is to find the equivalent of a semi-conductor solution that can significantly reduce the size of the needed components and allow a major break-through in terms of efficiency and power output.
Just as semi-conductors haven't completely replaced vacuum tubes, any new breakthrough in fusion power generation will have to come from some place completely different.
It should be noted that the IEC reactor (aka the "Farnsworth Fusor") is something that has only recently been explored to any major extent, and even this is only by mostly amateur researchers. It certainly isn't something that a complete knowledge of the technology has been obtained about, nor have there really be "decades of research" on the concept.
The Polywell reactor is a direct descendant of the IEC, and there may be other similar kinds of designs. Bussard even gives credit to Philo Farnsworth and his research, and goes into what the actual limitations of the basic IEC design might be as well as noting how the Polywell design tried to overcome some of those limitations.
This certainly isn't a scientific well of ideas that has been exhausted.
I would agree that the tokamak reactor is something that simply won't work on a small scale... and seems to be the current darling technology for mainstream physicists who are working on fusion technologies.
With the billions of dollars spend in that direction, it should speak volumes that this is a dead-end technology.
As far as a practical fusion device that can generate more energy than it takes to get the fusion process started.... that is indeed a tough challenge. The IEC hints that it may not have to be as complicated as the tokamak reactor design, and the IEC at least allows an amateur scientist to study this concept where actual real fusion is taking place... admittedly on a small scale.
As far as steel fabrication and manufacturing, I happen to know a few amateur blacksmiths that get pretty good at what they are doing, and can make some rather incredible things. It isn't quite on the scale of a major steel fab plant, but there is room for amateur metallurgy and glass fabrication that can work on the scale of an individual or small-team level. That economies of scale are there, no doubt, but it can be done on a much smaller scale than you are implying here. The rest is how you scale that production up to larger quantities and ensuring more consistency in terms of the end product.
I was referring to hard core radioactive waste like Uranium and Thorium. Carbon-14 and other background stuff is also there, but you would find some materials that clearly would be regulated by groups like the Atomic Energy Commission if the concentrations of the materials were higher.
Yeah, this is a complicated issue, and getting back to my original point: a nuclear fusion reactor using Boron-11 as a fuel source would in the long run be even cleaner than a coal plant in terms of just the issue of radioactive contamination alone. Other minor issues like CO2 production and environmental damage from scraping coal out of the ground are then just added bonuses.
BTW, the #1 source of Boron is Borax, which you can get enough for a lifetime supply of the element (in terms of energy production) at your local neighborhood Wal-Mart in the laundry detergent aisle.
The "pro-nuclear fanboys" that you are complaining about here are the engineers who know a hell of a lot more about nuclear power than you do... partly due to the fact that they are in the trenches helping to design these things and have a hell of a lot better knowledge about basic physics than you seem to be demonstrating with this sort of posting.
If this gives me a chance to vent my spleen, so be it.
I will admit that there are issues well above and beyond just the raw design of the reactor, and the concentration of wealth/power that comes from the building of a major nuclear power plant is a huge issue as well.
One of the advantages of the polywell reactor is that it would de-centralize the building of power plants, and put them on the scale of a neighborhood plant that wouldn't be a major terrorist target. This is a reactor that conceivably an ordinary person in a 1st world country could own on their own, or at least it could be owned by a small non-profit group.
Another of the more interesting applications that Bussard and his team came up with was a nuclear-powered semi-truck using this technology. He didn't think he could get it any smaller than something on the back of a semi-trailer rig, but it could be used on that scale and haul freight on that sort of scale. That the radioactive products would be low-grade enough to allow transport on public highways is something to think about as well.
Of course all of this depends on getting the Polywell to work in the first place. While there have been some interesting promises, Bussard had his funding dry up right before he died. There is a group that was able to get some continued funding on the idea, but it is in the backwater of the R&D development.
As an extra note, the reason why there were budget cuts for this line of fusion research: The war in Iraq. Seriously. That was the explicit reason given by the OMB about why this research program was cut. Now mull that one over for a little while. This is about the "greenest" form of power production that I can even think about, yet because it is "nuclear", the green movement doesn't want to touch it at all.