This system seems to be just one of those where an artificial electrostatic charge of the same polarity as the the clouds basically 'pushes' the lightning away. Lightning here needs to overcome less resistance to strike somewhere further away than where the electrostatic charge is being generated.
Not really a new concept. AFAIK lots of tall buildings have these.
Abstract: "A non-catalytic process for the production of carbon nanotubes includes supplying an electric current to a carbon anode and a carbon cathode which have been securely positioned in the open atmosphere with a gap between them. The electric current creates an electric arc between the carbon anode and the carbon cathode, which causes carbon to be vaporized from the carbon anode and a carbonaceous residue to be deposited on the carbon cathode. Inert gas [*] is pumped into the gap to flush out oxygen, thereby preventing interference with the vaporization of carbon from the anode and preventing oxidation of the carbonaceous residue being deposited on the cathode. The anode and cathode are cooled while electric current is being supplied thereto. When the supply of electric current is terminated, the carbonaceous residue is removed from the cathode and is purified to yield carbon nanotubes."
I assume this means she's identified the electric properties of the metal catalyst as the significant factor in the success of those techniques, and simply, with genius, replaces those properties with an electric current. You could probably do the same thing using a metamaterial or an EM radiation cavity, if you wanted to bypass the patent.
* "Intert gas" is usually helium, or the much, much cheaper alternative of nitrogen.
Sorry, but that doesn't seem to beat an inexpensive SAN in price. You're forgetting maintenance costs. Solid-state devices have a lot longer MTBF than mechanical devices, and I assume they need less power too. Both of those get rather costly.
1. Use as little space as possible, so as to reduce unnecessary energy use. This is not true. The opposite is true. The higher the surface/volume ratio is, the higher the heat-exchange is. Large buildings are heat-efficient.
This is why godzilla would have been cooked alive first move it made.
Gödel's incompleteness theorem is only true for non-trivial formal systems. A trivial formal system on the other hand can prove just about anything, very much like we humans do with emotions and totally whacko notions related to religion, political conviction, and such. If we decide that emotions are trivial formal systems, we humans escape the restrictions discussed here.
ASCII would seem sensible, since its the content we care about, not the formatting. No, the formatting is important as well. Sometimes 'the medium is the message', and that whole bunch of artsy crap we geeks would prefer to ignore. - Just think of it as an engineering challenge in order to make the pain go away.
You always archive the original (unless you have a batch; then you sample one and call it the original), and that original can be in just about any format, hand-written, coffee-stained, in sanskrit. When scanning a document into an electronic archive the ideal would be to have OCR create a font and layout on the fly while running, so that the electronic version of the original would still look like the dead-tree original, and yet be machine-readable. Dead-tree is still the standard, as it has been for the past few millennia. Directives on national level will often not even recognize that electronic archiving exists since there is no standard to be used. Once we have a format of SGML such as.odt standardized, electronic archiving might come into existence.
In practice your organization will often receive a document per snail-mail from an external source and an electronic version might not even exist. To make it electronic you have to scan it and to make it machine-readable you have to OCR it. Then the final results needs to be retrievable 50 years from now, or until the end of time. Yes, many things are actually archived without an expiration date. The cost, measured in money, of archiving something permanently is literally infinite.
From this perspective we geeks who are used to Moore's law etc. seem pretty darn impatient and narrow-minded. There are factors involved ranging from constructing immortal dinosaur pens to training staff who 'have been doing it their way for the past 30 years' and are hellbent on continuing so until they retire....But that too could be seen as an interesting engineering challenge. And that's why it's taking so long; because the project is just so gosh darn gargantuan.
Avocados, eh? According to this, from a recent/. discussion, avocados have some of the highest oil-per-area ratios amongst plants, plus they taste good with shrimps and mayo.:)~
Solar power to avocado-preferred light frequencies, and the whole system could be somewhat efficient...
Anyway, having researched a bit more, it seems the designer here seems to think plants will grow just as well with a tenth or less of the energy provided by the the sun. Much of sunlight energy is in the infra-red spectrum, and apparently plants don't use much of this. - If we can convert all of the solar spectrum to frequencies that plants can use efficiently, things might just about break even.
Energy would come from a giant solar panel but there would also be incinerators which use the farm's waste products for fuel.
And with the solar panels, the energy should be enough for.... Hmmm. Lets see now... - Ah! One level! We can do away with the other stories and grow things right on the ground. What an incredible breakthrough! Mother Nature would never figure it out.
And the version for the sarcastically impaired; Plants are more efficient than solar cells. The energy output will never exceed the input. Therefore, this is a dumb idea.
Oooh, I like paradoxes. I've deviced a methology for solving them based on thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Lets say that our wave of light is our thesis and our particle of light is our antithesis. We already know that they are aspects of the same thing, and we can further develop this whole train of thought by calling this whole, this unity that the wave and particle are our synthesis.
Labeling this thing is just fine, but it doesn't explain much regarding the things we really want to know. We'll want to analyze it to see if we can obtain a more satisfying definition or understanding. - We'll start by looking for what the wave and particle have in common. In this case we can see that the wave has a cyclic motion that forms what we could call a sine wave. Just some medium and a normal wave passing through it. The particle on the other hand appears to spin around its axis, and that too is a cyclic motion. We might now try to formulate a synthesis of these as we have just a little bit insight into both. We could for example conceptualize a rotation propagating through jelly. Someone gives the side of the jelly a twist and lets go, and the jelly elastically snaps back, overshoots and oscillates the rotation to let it propagate. This concept has the 'spin' of a particle and the 'wave' of a... wave. Two waves, actually, along both the x and y coordinates.
As a philosopher you might be more interested in the methology for solving paradoxes, and what such a thing implies, than the physics of this example. I find that the method works rather nicely for most paradoxes, but it is in no way complete or a guarantee to find a solution. It's a framework, a mental aid.
I think this 'waveform collapse' isn't a physical phenomena at all, but rather a mathematical description of what happens when we become aware of the measurements. Seems like the math is no longer describing the physics only, but also the instruments used to observe the physics, including our brains and minds.
For example, if we have a device which measures the states, but there is no one to read the measurements, does the waveform collapse? (I.e. Trees falling in forests) Seems things always boils down to an awareness doing the observing. It would be easier to just separate the awareness from the physics and just state for example that an entagled pair has the total charge 0, and whatever charge one has the other counters with the opposite. When you separate the two charges they don't exist in some sort of mysterious limbo, but rather have their charge all the time and we're just ignorant of what it is. When we measure the charge of one to be negative; duh, the other is positive. We don't even need to measure it, except to verify that the laws of physics work as they have for the past 12 billion years.
In conclusion, it seems to me that a very simple thing is being made unncessesarily difficult through mixing two things together when they don't need to be; physics and awareness. Physics can be very easy to conceptualize if we just do away with multiple terms for the same thing and non-descriptive names such as "Hilbert space" which just serve to commemorate someone. Then to make this simple understanding scientifically rigorous we just quantify, measure, our magnitudes and apply mathematics. We don't need to mix all of these things together into one unintelligible mess.
Classical music usually has a wide dynamic range whilst most of the rest doesn't. The audio engineer working on a pop track runs everything through an audio volume-level compressor, bringing every sound to more or less the same volume level. In classical music it is quite normal to play certain things at the level of a whisper.
This means that most of popular music never uses the digital bits representing these low-volume whispers but confines itself to loud shouts and blaring synths, so a lot of the 'bandwidth' on a CD is wasted because of it. Classical music on the other hand uses most of the available bandwidth thanks to the sane use of audio level compressors. When this wideband signal is to have its data compressed then it requires a lot more storage space than the popular music would.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Maybe the people should control the means of production? :)
Not only that, but it seems to be able to output to a raytracer, which basically means it has better graphics than ANY of its competitors.
This system seems to be just one of those where an artificial electrostatic charge of the same polarity as the the clouds basically 'pushes' the lightning away. Lightning here needs to overcome less resistance to strike somewhere further away than where the electrostatic charge is being generated.
Not really a new concept. AFAIK lots of tall buildings have these.
Patent found here
Abstract:
"A non-catalytic process for the production of carbon nanotubes includes supplying an electric current to a carbon anode and a carbon cathode which have been securely positioned in the open atmosphere with a gap between them. The electric current creates an electric arc between the carbon anode and the carbon cathode, which causes carbon to be vaporized from the carbon anode and a carbonaceous residue to be deposited on the carbon cathode. Inert gas [*] is pumped into the gap to flush out oxygen, thereby preventing interference with the vaporization of carbon from the anode and preventing oxidation of the carbonaceous residue being deposited on the cathode. The anode and cathode are cooled while electric current is being supplied thereto. When the supply of electric current is terminated, the carbonaceous residue is removed from the cathode and is purified to yield carbon nanotubes."
I assume this means she's identified the electric properties of the metal catalyst as the significant factor in the success of those techniques, and simply, with genius, replaces those properties with an electric current. You could probably do the same thing using a metamaterial or an EM radiation cavity, if you wanted to bypass the patent.
* "Intert gas" is usually helium, or the much, much cheaper alternative of nitrogen.
GOTO is considered harmful.
Pacemaker for the brain, eh. So if I up clock rate of the pace...
;)
Excuse me, I'm going to look for the appropriate nitrogen ice cream recipes to keep my brain cool for what I have in mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF
The admins are just as much part of the 'system' as the hardware and software is.
This is why godzilla would have been cooked alive first move it made.
Self-dimming welder's goggles should be enough to render this weapon useles.
The practice of using general-purpose processors for 'streamed' data is being phased out in favor of FPGAs and DSPs, since they excel at the task.
Gödel's incompleteness theorem is only true for non-trivial formal systems. A trivial formal system on the other hand can prove just about anything, very much like we humans do with emotions and totally whacko notions related to religion, political conviction, and such. If we decide that emotions are trivial formal systems, we humans escape the restrictions discussed here.
Armored body suits! This keeps getting better and better.
Now lets see what we can do about those elven maidens...
Might be for machines... But soon I'll be just one hack away from becoming The Strongest Geek in the Universe!!
*Smacks hand on forehead.
:)
Good thing I live in Nokia-land.
You always archive the original (unless you have a batch; then you sample one and call it the original), and that original can be in just about any format, hand-written, coffee-stained, in sanskrit. When scanning a document into an electronic archive the ideal would be to have OCR create a font and layout on the fly while running, so that the electronic version of the original would still look like the dead-tree original, and yet be machine-readable.
Dead-tree is still the standard, as it has been for the past few millennia. Directives on national level will often not even recognize that electronic archiving exists since there is no standard to be used. Once we have a format of SGML such as
In practice your organization will often receive a document per snail-mail from an external source and an electronic version might not even exist. To make it electronic you have to scan it and to make it machine-readable you have to OCR it. Then the final results needs to be retrievable 50 years from now, or until the end of time. Yes, many things are actually archived without an expiration date. The cost, measured in money, of archiving something permanently is literally infinite.
From this perspective we geeks who are used to Moore's law etc. seem pretty darn impatient and narrow-minded. There are factors involved ranging from constructing immortal dinosaur pens to training staff who 'have been doing it their way for the past 30 years' and are hellbent on continuing so until they retire.
And "server monkey" becomes "grease monkey"? No thanks.
Avocados, eh? According to this, from a recent /. discussion, avocados have some of the highest oil-per-area ratios amongst plants, plus they taste good with shrimps and mayo. :)~
:p
Solar power to avocado-preferred light frequencies, and the whole system could be somewhat efficient...
And I still don't like optic fibers. Nyah.
Could use mirrors instead. Much cheaper...
Anyway, having researched a bit more, it seems the designer here seems to think plants will grow just as well with a tenth or less of the energy provided by the the sun. Much of sunlight energy is in the infra-red spectrum, and apparently plants don't use much of this. - If we can convert all of the solar spectrum to frequencies that plants can use efficiently, things might just about break even.
And with the solar panels, the energy should be enough for.... Hmmm. Lets see now... - Ah! One level! We can do away with the other stories and grow things right on the ground. What an incredible breakthrough! Mother Nature would never figure it out.
And the version for the sarcastically impaired;
Plants are more efficient than solar cells. The energy output will never exceed the input. Therefore, this is a dumb idea.
Oooh, I like paradoxes. I've deviced a methology for solving them based on thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Lets say that our wave of light is our thesis and our particle of light is our antithesis. We already know that they are aspects of the same thing, and we can further develop this whole train of thought by calling this whole, this unity that the wave and particle are our synthesis.
Labeling this thing is just fine, but it doesn't explain much regarding the things we really want to know. We'll want to analyze it to see if we can obtain a more satisfying definition or understanding. - We'll start by looking for what the wave and particle have in common. In this case we can see that the wave has a cyclic motion that forms what we could call a sine wave. Just some medium and a normal wave passing through it. The particle on the other hand appears to spin around its axis, and that too is a cyclic motion. We might now try to formulate a synthesis of these as we have just a little bit insight into both. We could for example conceptualize a rotation propagating through jelly. Someone gives the side of the jelly a twist and lets go, and the jelly elastically snaps back, overshoots and oscillates the rotation to let it propagate. This concept has the 'spin' of a particle and the 'wave' of a... wave. Two waves, actually, along both the x and y coordinates.
As a philosopher you might be more interested in the methology for solving paradoxes, and what such a thing implies, than the physics of this example. I find that the method works rather nicely for most paradoxes, but it is in no way complete or a guarantee to find a solution. It's a framework, a mental aid.
I think this 'waveform collapse' isn't a physical phenomena at all, but rather a mathematical description of what happens when we become aware of the measurements. Seems like the math is no longer describing the physics only, but also the instruments used to observe the physics, including our brains and minds.
For example, if we have a device which measures the states, but there is no one to read the measurements, does the waveform collapse? (I.e. Trees falling in forests) Seems things always boils down to an awareness doing the observing. It would be easier to just separate the awareness from the physics and just state for example that an entagled pair has the total charge 0, and whatever charge one has the other counters with the opposite. When you separate the two charges they don't exist in some sort of mysterious limbo, but rather have their charge all the time and we're just ignorant of what it is. When we measure the charge of one to be negative; duh, the other is positive. We don't even need to measure it, except to verify that the laws of physics work as they have for the past 12 billion years.
In conclusion, it seems to me that a very simple thing is being made unncessesarily difficult through mixing two things together when they don't need to be; physics and awareness. Physics can be very easy to conceptualize if we just do away with multiple terms for the same thing and non-descriptive names such as "Hilbert space" which just serve to commemorate someone. Then to make this simple understanding scientifically rigorous we just quantify, measure, our magnitudes and apply mathematics. We don't need to mix all of these things together into one unintelligible mess.
Classical music usually has a wide dynamic range whilst most of the rest doesn't. The audio engineer working on a pop track runs everything through an audio volume-level compressor, bringing every sound to more or less the same volume level. In classical music it is quite normal to play certain things at the level of a whisper.
This means that most of popular music never uses the digital bits representing these low-volume whispers but confines itself to loud shouts and blaring synths, so a lot of the 'bandwidth' on a CD is wasted because of it. Classical music on the other hand uses most of the available bandwidth thanks to the sane use of audio level compressors. When this wideband signal is to have its data compressed then it requires a lot more storage space than the popular music would.