One of the easiest and most effective way to reduce your energy bills is to generate your own electricity from gas or fuel oil.
Not only are the fuels cheaper, kWh-for-kWh, than mains electricity, but you get to use the waste heat from the generator to heat the building at the same time. Doing both at once gives you huge savings.
Typically people tend to use I/C engines for the generators --- gas turbines would be more efficient, but I/C engines are cheap and reliable and will scale down far more effectively for gas turbines. A car engines would do fine. (Remember that one horsepower is.7 kW; even a small car engine has a huge power rating.)
Plus you get to sell power back to the grid if you're not using it.
Got a reference for that? I'd be interested to hear about it. It might well be true, but it's certainly new to me. I'm not expert by any means. But, as an amateur sleep deprivation enthusiast I'm not totally ignorant of the subject.
Well, most of that came from the same rat study you mention (via Wikipedia). But there are occasional diseases in humans that cause an inability to sleep (fatal familial insomnia) and they seem to always lead, via dementia and permanent personality changes, to death, via rather similar effects as on the rats.
While I'm not suggesting you might die by doing this, I do think that you may risk subtly changing your personal and emotional makeup --- there's the well-known story of the radio DJ who stayed awake for about 200 hours and ended up with permanent personality changes (but I can't quite remember his name --- was it Peter Tripp, or another one?).
If you're playing with alternative sleep patterns, take care. It can have all sorts of unpleasant side effects, including playing with your mind, changing your emotional makeup, and so on.
If you forcibly deprive someone of sleep, they end up with physical brain damage and then die. You're unlikely to be able to do that to yourself, but... take care, okay?
The quick answer is no. The earliest that the shuttle can turn back toward land & make it back safely is at about 6 minutes after liftoff...
Mmf. If I ever get the chance to go into orbit, I think I'll fly Soyuz.
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention is the exact reason why Challenger started tumbling in the first place --- I presume this was due to off-axis thrust from the failed SRB and the disintegration of the tank causing aerodynamic instability, but I haven't seen any actual details.
I believe part of the design of conventional (manned) vehicles is that if anything goes wrong, you can dump the stage and leave the problem behind you. By keeping the burning end at the bottom and the manned end at the top, you should be able to buy yourself some recovery time... but I would like to know what kind of recovery modes Soyuz has if something goes wrong a couple of minutes into launch, by which time you've dumped the escape tower.
No, it doesn't work like that --- that sort of thing's additive, not exponential. (Otherwise detonating the hundredth 50 megatonne bomb is going to somehow add on 1x10^30 megatonnes of energy from somewhere, which is obviously impossible.)
The Shuttle at that time was made up of the Orbiter, a Fuel Tank and two Solid Rocket Boosters, there was an explosion, so I think Mister Oberg is wrong for saying it did not "explode in the common definition of that word". It blew up.
Mmmm... technical distinctions.
Normally when people talk about explosions they're thinking of enclosed, concussive events where something bursts. That didn't happen. What happened to Challenger was that most of the fuel got spilt out into the air and then burnt there, unenclosed. This caused a huge, visually impressive fireball, but wasn't actually particularly violent. That's why the reports you quoted talked about 'explosive burns'.
What killed Challenger itself was being tossed sideways into a wall of supersonic air --- it's not designed to cope with that, and it just broke up.
I wonder --- if Challenger could have jettisoned the SRBs and failed external tank quickly enough, could it have escaped the fireball and glided down to safety?
you placed a bunch of hydrogen bombs at the right strategic places in the mantle (think vulnerable fault lines and plate intersections), detonating them all at the same time would cause such a shockwave through the earth's core that it would likely tear itself apart.
No, it wouldn't. This is the Big Number Fallacy. Nukes are big. Planets are big. But the two are not equally big. Planets are many orders of magnitude bigger. Your average volcano releases more energy that one of those nukes, and the amount of energy released on an ongoing basis due to tectonic plates shifting is so much vaster than that that your nukes aren't even worth measuring.
You want numbers? In order to disintegrate the Earth, you have to counter gravity. This is equivalent (if I can trust my figures) to about 1x10^16 megatonnes. The largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated was at Bikini Atoll in 1954, and was 13.6 megatonnes, which is rather smaller than 10'000'000'000'000'000.
You say that the bombs' shock waves merely liberate energy already inherent in the Earth's core? Well, if it could happen, it would have --- Earth has been struck with a lot of very big asteroids in its history, and it's still intact. As are all the other planets in the solar system: the asteroid belt always was debris, there's not enough there to form a real planet. It's worth mentioning that on the scales we're talking about, rock flows like liquid. Any big impact will cause a splash, and the result will very quickly reform into a sphere again.
Sorry if I'm seeming rude, but this is something that I've seen a lot and it always irritates me --- I think it stems from people wanting to believe that humankind is a lot more influential that it actually is. On a planetary scale, we have no power whatsoever. We're barely at the stage of being able to affect ecosystems, and that is, quite literally, only just scratching the surface.
I am pretty sure planting a few hundred hydrogen bombs a couple of miles below the surface of the planet at strategic locations, and detonating them, would make the world uninhabitable.
No, we couldn't. Hydrogen bombs just aren't big enough.
Oh, we could probably screw up the global ecosystem enough that we'd kill ourselves off, and probably most other large mammals, but we couldn't come anywhere close to sterilising the planet. Not like that.
(A better approach would be to use those bombs to change the orbit of a nice, large, 100km asteroid to intersect Earth's. And even then, you'd be pretty hard pressed killing everything.)
Lilo and Stitch is another under-appreciated strange and hilarious movie from Disney, except it sticks a little bit closer to the Disney formula than New Groove does.
Which is why I didn't mention it, and, well, I'd already done three. But yeah, I like that one as well. A bit too earnest, but I can forgive it a lot for that superb opening sequence...
Very Small Technician #1: Sir, he's stolen a police cruiser!
Very Small Technician #2: (with awe) He's taken the red one...
Damn. There's no justice. That film is great, and completely blows away most of their other recent films for sheer style, verve and originality --- I reckon it's better than The Lion King, which suffered rather from the Disney over-earnestness.
Treasure Planet (2002) $38
That one's a real pity. Everything about it was so good --- the animation, the concept, the style, the characterisation, the acting --- except for the actual plot. If only they'd stuck to the original Stephenson novel instead of going off into la-la land with space portals and huge explosions and crap like that, this could have been good. The first half --- up until whatshisname gets pushed overboard by Silver --- is well worth watching.
Home on the Range (2004) $50
I've never even heard of this one. That's how much Disney's impacted me recently...
But does your algorithm on some days just not *want* to learn?
Ask anyone who's dabbled with neural networks or learning algorithms. The answer is, hell yes...
If you can't mimic those sight and smell accurately, how can you mimic a dog's soul?
Ah, I thought we'd be using the S-word after a while. The answer to this question is, first define 'soul'.
I'm not going to bother rehashing all the arguments, because there are other people who do a far better job of it. But fundamentally, it all boils down to whether you want to invoke the supernatural or not.
If you do, you're saying: 'Why?' 'Because.'
If you don't, you're saying: 'Why?' 'I don't know. Let's find out.'
I see you conveniently left humans out of that sentence. Why?
As far as today is concerned, a robot is executing a program, which means that it will never do anything it has not been programmed to do by a human being. This is inherently different from a real dog...
Learning algorithms are as old as computing; you can easily build a system that will learn from its environment. Does learnt behaviour in that respect count as 'programmed by a human being'? Do you also count algorithms constructed using evolutionary systems? How are they different from behaviours induced in dogs via directed breeding or training?
And given that both computers and dogs are both made of symbolic processing elements, can you point at any specific difference between the two, other than the fact that dogs are way, way more complex? Because it sounds very much like your argument is based on 'because they're different, dammit'.
No, a robot pet can never learn love, loyalty, hate or other emotions. It can at best closely mimic the behaviour caused by these emotions in real animals.
Are you sure? Can you prove that? Can you state what it is makes a 'real' animal different from a robot, other than several orders of magnitude of complexity?
Gas seems to be over 80% efficient, probably the same for oil.
I've just bought a category A condensing combination gas boiler. This provides central heating and instant on-demand hot water. It claims to be 91% efficient --- that's conversion of chemical energy in the gas into thermal energy in the water. Of course, you then get losses in the pipes between the boiler and the radiators or taps, but 91% is pretty decent for a consumer device.
Plus, I get limitless, mains-pressure hot water, I don't waste energy by heating up a tankful of hot water which I then don't use, I don't need a hot-water tank at all so I manage to reclaim lots of valuable space in the bathroom, and my central heating system is vastly simplified --- all the complicated bits are in the boiler. It's very cool (in a hot kind of way).
('Condensing' means it manages to suck enough heat out of the exhaust gases that the water vapour condenses into big clouds of steam. It looks really odd seeing lots of white 'smoke' come out of the chimney when it's running.)
I don't have much to add about the formatting of articles; I agree with Taco over pretty much everything, except the grammar issue. I think grammar's important; bad use of language leads to muddy thinking. (No, I'm not a card-carrying member of the Pedant's Society. It's actually made out of plastic.) But then, Slashdot's his site, and his opinions are the only ones that matter.
But I was intrigued by his mention of the huge number of people who mail him complaining about things. I'd be fascinated to know more about what people dislike about the site.
Might it be interesting to create a semi-regular Feedback topic? In the same vein as The Register's letter's column?
This would contain things like: in the past week, 80% of people complained about grammar, 15% complained about dupes, 2% of people were just incoherent, and 3% of people complained about the lack of Natalie Portman jokes these days. Plus, of course, a careful selection of the more amusing of the lunatic postings. It would also contain a summary of what people liked about the site, such as changes in formatting, policy changes, etc.
One of the things that makes a community is community involvement. In the past, Slashdot did have a reputation for not caring what its community thought, which is one of the reasons I really like these new About Slashdot articles. It's interesting to know what the editors think about things, and likewise it's interesting to know what people like and dislike about the place. It would bring out community spirit.
Bleach is the ultimate bug killer. It can even kill the virus which causes AIDS (though the side effects to the patient aren't good).
*nods*
I've heard a number of researchers say that killing bacteria is trivial. The trick is killing bacteria while also not killing the person the bacteria are living inside --- which, since people are largely made out of complicated bacteria, is non-trivial...
Antibiotics are at least better than such approaches as chemotherapy. This works by slowly poisoning the patient in the hope that the cancer will die before the patient does. It's not fun.
If it is a black hole, it's comforting to see that Hawking was right and they do evaporate, rather than sit at the Earth's core devouring us all.
You are aware that if he was wrong and the black hole didn't evaporate, then it would also emit no Hawking radiation and be largely undetectable? So it could very well have fallen out the bottom of the collider and even now be orbiting the Earth's core deep underground...
Sure, India has a long way to go. But the country has some of the world's best scientists and has become a significant center for global technological innovation. Why shouldn't they put their skills to work in space?
India has the potential to become one of the world's next great economic powers, if they play their cards right. They have two huge things going for them: firstly, they've got a massive workforce with a strong work ethic (unlike most western countries), and secondly, they have a leadership who are absolutely focused on building the infrastructure to let them use that workforce effectively. That's a killer combination.
All I can say is, it'll be an interesting couple of decades. Watch this space (pun intended)...
...but what it really shows is that he's drastically misinformed. He doesn't know about games, he doesn't know about game technology, he doesn't know about game culture.
For example, his comment about a game needing to be written 'by a company'. He says that anyone can knock something up in a garage. Well, Darwinia was one of the best games to come out last year and was knocked up in a garage; Counterstrike started life as a purely amateur project. By his logic, neither of these are real games.
I think Thompson's fundamental issue is that when he looks at something, he sees what he expects to see, not what he actually looks at. From what little information I can find about Bully, it's the exact opposite of what he says it is --- it's all about standing up to the bullies and defeating them. But he wants it to be evil, so that's what he sees...
Actually, I suspect he should see a psychiatrist, not because there's anything wrong now, but because this might blow up into something more serious later. He may also have borderline paranoid tendencies. The way he's being harrassed by PA and Slashdot weenies probably isn't helping, either.
Slashdot Mirror
SRB (Solid Rocket Booster) - Solid Fuel - 14.7 MN
J-2 (2nd and 3rd stage Saturn V) - LHOx - 890 kN
F-1 (1st stage Saturn V) - Kerosine - 6.7 MN
How do these compare to the disposable engines used on the latest Soyuz boosters?
Or you could run the standby circuit using the battery, charger, etc that's already built in to your computer to run the CMOS clock...
Not only are the fuels cheaper, kWh-for-kWh, than mains electricity, but you get to use the waste heat from the generator to heat the building at the same time. Doing both at once gives you huge savings.
Typically people tend to use I/C engines for the generators --- gas turbines would be more efficient, but I/C engines are cheap and reliable and will scale down far more effectively for gas turbines. A car engines would do fine. (Remember that one horsepower is .7 kW; even a small car engine has a huge power rating.)
Plus you get to sell power back to the grid if you're not using it.
Well, most of that came from the same rat study you mention (via Wikipedia). But there are occasional diseases in humans that cause an inability to sleep (fatal familial insomnia) and they seem to always lead, via dementia and permanent personality changes, to death, via rather similar effects as on the rats.
While I'm not suggesting you might die by doing this, I do think that you may risk subtly changing your personal and emotional makeup --- there's the well-known story of the radio DJ who stayed awake for about 200 hours and ended up with permanent personality changes (but I can't quite remember his name --- was it Peter Tripp, or another one?).
If you forcibly deprive someone of sleep, they end up with physical brain damage and then die. You're unlikely to be able to do that to yourself, but... take care, okay?
Mmf. If I ever get the chance to go into orbit, I think I'll fly Soyuz.
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention is the exact reason why Challenger started tumbling in the first place --- I presume this was due to off-axis thrust from the failed SRB and the disintegration of the tank causing aerodynamic instability, but I haven't seen any actual details.
I believe part of the design of conventional (manned) vehicles is that if anything goes wrong, you can dump the stage and leave the problem behind you. By keeping the burning end at the bottom and the manned end at the top, you should be able to buy yourself some recovery time... but I would like to know what kind of recovery modes Soyuz has if something goes wrong a couple of minutes into launch, by which time you've dumped the escape tower.
No, it doesn't work like that --- that sort of thing's additive, not exponential. (Otherwise detonating the hundredth 50 megatonne bomb is going to somehow add on 1x10^30 megatonnes of energy from somewhere, which is obviously impossible.)
Mmmm... technical distinctions.
Normally when people talk about explosions they're thinking of enclosed, concussive events where something bursts. That didn't happen. What happened to Challenger was that most of the fuel got spilt out into the air and then burnt there, unenclosed. This caused a huge, visually impressive fireball, but wasn't actually particularly violent. That's why the reports you quoted talked about 'explosive burns'.
What killed Challenger itself was being tossed sideways into a wall of supersonic air --- it's not designed to cope with that, and it just broke up.
I wonder --- if Challenger could have jettisoned the SRBs and failed external tank quickly enough, could it have escaped the fireball and glided down to safety?
You're right --- my information was out of date. Sorry about that.
No, it wouldn't. This is the Big Number Fallacy. Nukes are big. Planets are big. But the two are not equally big. Planets are many orders of magnitude bigger. Your average volcano releases more energy that one of those nukes, and the amount of energy released on an ongoing basis due to tectonic plates shifting is so much vaster than that that your nukes aren't even worth measuring.
You want numbers? In order to disintegrate the Earth, you have to counter gravity. This is equivalent (if I can trust my figures) to about 1x10^16 megatonnes. The largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated was at Bikini Atoll in 1954, and was 13.6 megatonnes, which is rather smaller than 10'000'000'000'000'000.
You say that the bombs' shock waves merely liberate energy already inherent in the Earth's core? Well, if it could happen, it would have --- Earth has been struck with a lot of very big asteroids in its history, and it's still intact. As are all the other planets in the solar system: the asteroid belt always was debris, there's not enough there to form a real planet. It's worth mentioning that on the scales we're talking about, rock flows like liquid. Any big impact will cause a splash, and the result will very quickly reform into a sphere again.
Sorry if I'm seeming rude, but this is something that I've seen a lot and it always irritates me --- I think it stems from people wanting to believe that humankind is a lot more influential that it actually is. On a planetary scale, we have no power whatsoever. We're barely at the stage of being able to affect ecosystems, and that is, quite literally, only just scratching the surface.
No, we couldn't. Hydrogen bombs just aren't big enough.
Oh, we could probably screw up the global ecosystem enough that we'd kill ourselves off, and probably most other large mammals, but we couldn't come anywhere close to sterilising the planet. Not like that.
(A better approach would be to use those bombs to change the orbit of a nice, large, 100km asteroid to intersect Earth's. And even then, you'd be pretty hard pressed killing everything.)
Which is why I didn't mention it, and, well, I'd already done three. But yeah, I like that one as well. A bit too earnest, but I can forgive it a lot for that superb opening sequence...
Very Small Technician #1: Sir, he's stolen a police cruiser!
Very Small Technician #2: (with awe) He's taken the red one...
http://www.ccma.ca/inthumor/
That's... very odd. Very. Odd.
And remember: Pudge controls the weather!
Ech.
We're not going to agree, are we? There's a wall there...
Damn. There's no justice. That film is great, and completely blows away most of their other recent films for sheer style, verve and originality --- I reckon it's better than The Lion King, which suffered rather from the Disney over-earnestness.
Treasure Planet (2002) $38
That one's a real pity. Everything about it was so good --- the animation, the concept, the style, the characterisation, the acting --- except for the actual plot. If only they'd stuck to the original Stephenson novel instead of going off into la-la land with space portals and huge explosions and crap like that, this could have been good. The first half --- up until whatshisname gets pushed overboard by Silver --- is well worth watching.
Home on the Range (2004) $50
I've never even heard of this one. That's how much Disney's impacted me recently...
Ask anyone who's dabbled with neural networks or learning algorithms. The answer is, hell yes...
If you can't mimic those sight and smell accurately, how can you mimic a dog's soul?
Ah, I thought we'd be using the S-word after a while. The answer to this question is, first define 'soul'.
I'm not going to bother rehashing all the arguments, because there are other people who do a far better job of it. But fundamentally, it all boils down to whether you want to invoke the supernatural or not.
If you do, you're saying: 'Why?' 'Because.'
If you don't, you're saying: 'Why?' 'I don't know. Let's find out.'
I see you conveniently left humans out of that sentence. Why?
Because we were talking about dogs, not humans?
Learning algorithms are as old as computing; you can easily build a system that will learn from its environment. Does learnt behaviour in that respect count as 'programmed by a human being'? Do you also count algorithms constructed using evolutionary systems? How are they different from behaviours induced in dogs via directed breeding or training?
And given that both computers and dogs are both made of symbolic processing elements, can you point at any specific difference between the two, other than the fact that dogs are way, way more complex? Because it sounds very much like your argument is based on 'because they're different, dammit'.
Are you sure? Can you prove that? Can you state what it is makes a 'real' animal different from a robot, other than several orders of magnitude of complexity?
I've just bought a category A condensing combination gas boiler. This provides central heating and instant on-demand hot water. It claims to be 91% efficient --- that's conversion of chemical energy in the gas into thermal energy in the water. Of course, you then get losses in the pipes between the boiler and the radiators or taps, but 91% is pretty decent for a consumer device.
Plus, I get limitless, mains-pressure hot water, I don't waste energy by heating up a tankful of hot water which I then don't use, I don't need a hot-water tank at all so I manage to reclaim lots of valuable space in the bathroom, and my central heating system is vastly simplified --- all the complicated bits are in the boiler. It's very cool (in a hot kind of way).
('Condensing' means it manages to suck enough heat out of the exhaust gases that the water vapour condenses into big clouds of steam. It looks really odd seeing lots of white 'smoke' come out of the chimney when it's running.)
Oh, please. Do you know how ridiculous it would be for an adult IT professional to go around sucking his thumb in public?
But I was intrigued by his mention of the huge number of people who mail him complaining about things. I'd be fascinated to know more about what people dislike about the site.
Might it be interesting to create a semi-regular Feedback topic? In the same vein as The Register's letter's column?
This would contain things like: in the past week, 80% of people complained about grammar, 15% complained about dupes, 2% of people were just incoherent, and 3% of people complained about the lack of Natalie Portman jokes these days. Plus, of course, a careful selection of the more amusing of the lunatic postings. It would also contain a summary of what people liked about the site, such as changes in formatting, policy changes, etc.
One of the things that makes a community is community involvement. In the past, Slashdot did have a reputation for not caring what its community thought, which is one of the reasons I really like these new About Slashdot articles. It's interesting to know what the editors think about things, and likewise it's interesting to know what people like and dislike about the place. It would bring out community spirit.
Does this make any sense?
*nods*
I've heard a number of researchers say that killing bacteria is trivial. The trick is killing bacteria while also not killing the person the bacteria are living inside --- which, since people are largely made out of complicated bacteria, is non-trivial...
Antibiotics are at least better than such approaches as chemotherapy. This works by slowly poisoning the patient in the hope that the cancer will die before the patient does. It's not fun.
You are aware that if he was wrong and the black hole didn't evaporate, then it would also emit no Hawking radiation and be largely undetectable? So it could very well have fallen out the bottom of the collider and even now be orbiting the Earth's core deep underground...
India has the potential to become one of the world's next great economic powers, if they play their cards right. They have two huge things going for them: firstly, they've got a massive workforce with a strong work ethic (unlike most western countries), and secondly, they have a leadership who are absolutely focused on building the infrastructure to let them use that workforce effectively. That's a killer combination.
All I can say is, it'll be an interesting couple of decades. Watch this space (pun intended)...
spykids ownz you
I suspect someone at Edge is having a really bad day. Oh dear...
For example, his comment about a game needing to be written 'by a company'. He says that anyone can knock something up in a garage. Well, Darwinia was one of the best games to come out last year and was knocked up in a garage; Counterstrike started life as a purely amateur project. By his logic, neither of these are real games.
I think Thompson's fundamental issue is that when he looks at something, he sees what he expects to see, not what he actually looks at. From what little information I can find about Bully, it's the exact opposite of what he says it is --- it's all about standing up to the bullies and defeating them. But he wants it to be evil, so that's what he sees...
Actually, I suspect he should see a psychiatrist, not because there's anything wrong now, but because this might blow up into something more serious later. He may also have borderline paranoid tendencies. The way he's being harrassed by PA and Slashdot weenies probably isn't helping, either.