Aye. I know about sharp edges and coronas, but thank you very much for the warning.;) The insulation degrading I didn't know about, but I figure I'd mount the plates on two metal frames that also worked as conductors for each pole. Plumbing copper tubing would work. Then only air would be my insulator. You're right about an inch being a bit much, but the situation isn't quite that bad. Either way I'm more interested in a high break-down voltage than a high capacitance since I'll be dealing with high voltages. And indeed it would look a lot cooler than a cap bank.;)
Pain is IMO tolerable, but with high voltage only I'm unlikely to suffer much worse than burns. Add amperage, don't even need one unit of it, and things turn lethal. I figure the VDG will make me to avoid death through avoiding pain.:)
Google implies it was Tim Davey's VDG in 2004. I can tell you mine will have a prettier sphere since I'll be using those stainless, rimless steel bowls from Ikea.;) 28 cm in diameter, but there is a larger yet version available. I should be able to build up a significant charge on it still. The tubing I'm using for support is however just plain old grey PVC drain tubing. Quite ugly, but easily replaceable. At any rate this is a first attempt for me at these things, so getting the thing to just produce static electricity is enough for now. I can then work to improve it.
Hm. No, I don't really need to do all that. What I'm thinking of is one of these without the actual variable bit. The further I space the plates from each other the higher the voltage tolerance of the cap would be, but the stored charge lessens. If I was to evacuate a chamber for the cap I'd have the very best possible dielectric, but that's effort I'm no interested in. Instead I figure I'd have a number or large metal plates stacked up with about an inch or so in between them.
If I really wanted to use an oil dielectric, I could just pour castrol oil from high up in a thin, thin stream. That way I'd get the air bubbles out without worrying about vacuum.
I don't have much copper wire laying about, but I might build one of those if I get bored with the VDG. The VDG is safer than a Tesla coil, so for a newbie like me it seems like just the ring thing.
Big sparks is not something I'm really interested in since those are rather difficult to control and not very useful. Another experiment I'd like to try is to spin highly charged bodies around in a circle by mechanical force and see how strong a magnetic field I can generate that way. It'd be like a wire loop in which current circulates, but without the wire. I could easily charge these bodies with a VDG but I'm not sure a Tesla coil wouldn't just fry the bodies. Say I got 100kV into one body, have eight of them on a bicycle wheel and spin that around as fast as I could. The current should be quite significant. - What will happen?
I'm building a Van de Graaff generator from which I'ma try accelereating an electron beam, or bolt. It won't of course be portable, but it would be fun if I could fling plasma a meter or so away from the VDG gen. With some metal sheets I could build a rather large air-gap capacitator that I could first charge with the VDG and then tap to a coil to pull the free electrons from the VDG.
Okay, maybe a bit sci-fi, but I'm having fun building the VDG regardless.:D
Posting just to agree with the sibling. Thanks, both of you. Visual descriptions like that are a fantastic aid to get a starting grasp of what in the world the theory is talking about.
I've run across mentions of the Pauli exclusion principle before, but with this 'model' in hand I'll take another look at it.
You know, that sort of thing could actually be like an add-on service you could subscribe to with your ISP, both hosting and home-users... That way you could cut right past the ethics of who filters what in who's traffic.
Also, the hackers would end up proxying through another set of IPs and getting to where they need to be anyway.
Can't proxy anywhere without a route.
Traceroute your connections for a while as you connect over the world and you'll see some reoccurring names. Those are backbone owners, and they make contracts with each other to route traffic through their nets. Say my country fails so bad at keeping me in check online that my entire country gets its routes cut off, I can't connect to the rest of the world because somewhere down the pipe someone applied the scissors to the fiber. There might be another backbone which will still accept my traffic, and I might find a proxy somewhere along their routes, but it ought not take long before that backbone starts losing contracts if I keep misbehaving.
There's a whole lot of non-govt politics involved in international routing. Tricky business.
If it isn't possibly, consider if you really need that thing enough to kill babies for it.
Oh, ouch. That hurt, and I feel entitled to using bandwidth to explain myself because of it. - The "kill babies" thing was supposed to be a funny take on saving the Earth for the sake of our children, since they are the most likely to die cause of our poor choices. I should probably have appended a smiley to make my intention clear, but apparently I did cross someone's line. I apologize.
Vote with your money. Buy stuff that is environmentally friendly if it is at all possible. If it isn't possibly, consider if you really need that thing enough to kill babies for it.
Correction: Earth-Moon-Earth bounce is about 2.5 seconds. - (Long-Delayed Radio Echos, Observations and Interpretations - Dr. Volker Grassmann, DF5AI, VHF Communications 2/1993, http://www.df5ai.net/ArticlesDL/LEchoes(E).pdf ) Means the echos occur somehwere between about half-way to the moon and far beyond it.
To memory, there's one second of lag when talking to someone on the moon on the radio. One to 40 seconds would mean that unless there are multiple reflections that go unheard, whatever is doing the reflecting is located 1 to 40 times further away than the moon.
Oh, right. I was just thinking of my own retired flat CRT. I've cursed the name of the sometimes ball-formed CRTs ever since I got the flat one, years ago. So much easier on the eyes, so much better accuracy. Funny thing is the old 17" Viewsonic (G73fm) of mine still compares rather well with today's CRTs.
The product page however still says that you can use the gadget with any flat surface, but I don't have the heart to tell more of my fellow Slashdotters to RTFA. There's no need to ruin your LCD.
One thing for artists to consider is however that you can probably opt for a any textured surface to give you any amount of "pen drag" you wish. All the tablets I've tried so far are very slippery, which is by no means always a good thing. I could pick a rough paper, or even a textile according to what I feel is comfortable.
Seems the only thing making this thing LCD-only is the design of the plastic clip for the sensor that determins the position of the stylus. Any geek worth his bandwidth could use this with a CRT.
Very interesting product either way. Seems better and cheaper than a Wacom.
In Mythical Sweden, where every geek has a hawt girlfriend and pixies lick your eyeballs whenever you want, they build houses that require next to no heating at all, even in the middle of winter. A meter of insulation in the attic and half a meter in the walls. Big tripple-pane, xeon gas between two panes to reflect heat radiation, windows towards the south and small such windows towards the north. Thanks to the big windows they get heating and natural light, so often they don't even need to turn the lights on. Add a heat-pump air conditioner and your electricity bills are from appliances mostly.
The thing about glucose is that when a solution of it and water is frosen ice crystals that harm the cells do not form easily. Basically the aim of this cryo-stuff is to render and entire body into a glass-like state, and most things can be put in such a state by freezing them really, really fast. For pure water, the speed-of-freezing required is quite astronomical, but luckily water doesn't have to be pure.
I have a Konika-Minolta 5D and a Nokia N70. The dSLR has a 6MP sensor and the phone has a 2MP sensor. The phone cam is horrible in comparison, even in broad daylight, mostly since it seems to make really strange compression artefacts and there's no way for me to change it. The dSLR has a bunch of functions to let me control exposure and focus quickly, letting me take lots of photos with little effort. I attempt to shoot the CF card full and then just select the best of the pictures.
The only thing the phone cam is good for is that I have it with me wherever I go, unlike the dSLR, and I'm therefore more likely to capture something unique with it. At this phone cameras excell. One should however not expect the pic from the phone cam to exhibit any measure of fidelity.
You've observed light in the 300nm to 800nm range, you've observed matter in the 1 milligram to 10 tonne range moving at velocities in the 0.0 m/s to 600.0 m/s range, and just maybe some matter in the 10 gram to 1 microgram range moving at velocities up to 1000 m/s. But man, that ain't shit. The world contains matter moving at up to 0.999999 C, blocks of matter so cold that void of space is over a trillion times warmer, particles that change from antimatter to matter for no apparent reason, and photons energetic enough to shred the nuclei of atoms like a Kattus-Schroedingerus shreds catnip-infused kleenex. There are particles whose position is so inherently imprecise that they have trouble turning because they would start colliding with themselves (like humble electron, for example). There are gobs of matter so weighty that they curve space forming telescopes that are light-years long.
Eloquent, but Shakespeare still said it better;
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
QM is a theory of information; not of physics. This is because we have come so far in studying nature that we have bit by bit began studying ourselves, and the information system that is our mind. Things don't exist when we're not looking at them because the brain and mind receive no data nor information about them.
This subject is much like Plato's World of Ideas. - When we're not looking at a thing, but we are> thinking about them, do they exist? In Plato's world; yes.
It's also an issue of contrast. For black text on a white background a kerning space of a darker grey would appear smaller than one of a bright white even if the areas are the same. Add color to this and determining what the contrast ratio actually is becomes much more difficult. There is for example no such thing as a 'dark yellow'.
'Volume' seems more appropriate since it is a bit ambigous; much as the subject matter at hand. A whole subsection of graphical design is devoted to it.
...to the point where some hardware will actually make mouse movements and big changes to your display audible in your speakers...
Are you kidding? On some computers I can hear electric noise caused by mouse movements even
without spekers connected to the computer.
Heck, on one systems the soundcard driver isn't even installed and somehow electric noise caused by moving the mouse causes
audiable noise. I have absolutely no idea how that works... but it does.
I've also discovered that when I plug the computer into a non-grounded power socket I sometimes get a 110 volt AC current in the case, even when we've got 230 volt in the grid here.
Aspiring to become a radio amateur I've spent a bit of time looking into electric noise. Long story short; if you're going to include a computer in anything relating to analog signals, get the AD converter as far away from the computer as possible. Especially if you've got a CRT monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
Aye. I know about sharp edges and coronas, but thank you very much for the warning. ;) ;)
:)
;) 28 cm in diameter, but there is a larger yet version available. I should be able to build up a significant charge on it still. The tubing I'm using for support is however just plain old grey PVC drain tubing. Quite ugly, but easily replaceable. At any rate this is a first attempt for me at these things, so getting the thing to just produce static electricity is enough for now. I can then work to improve it.
The insulation degrading I didn't know about, but I figure I'd mount the plates on two metal frames that also worked as conductors for each pole. Plumbing copper tubing would work. Then only air would be my insulator.
You're right about an inch being a bit much, but the situation isn't quite that bad. Either way I'm more interested in a high break-down voltage than a high capacitance since I'll be dealing with high voltages. And indeed it would look a lot cooler than a cap bank.
Pain is IMO tolerable, but with high voltage only I'm unlikely to suffer much worse than burns. Add amperage, don't even need one unit of it, and things turn lethal. I figure the VDG will make me to avoid death through avoiding pain.
Google implies it was Tim Davey's VDG in 2004. I can tell you mine will have a prettier sphere since I'll be using those stainless, rimless steel bowls from Ikea.
Hm. No, I don't really need to do all that. What I'm thinking of is one of these without the actual variable bit. The further I space the plates from each other the higher the voltage tolerance of the cap would be, but the stored charge lessens. If I was to evacuate a chamber for the cap I'd have the very best possible dielectric, but that's effort I'm no interested in. Instead I figure I'd have a number or large metal plates stacked up with about an inch or so in between them.
If I really wanted to use an oil dielectric, I could just pour castrol oil from high up in a thin, thin stream. That way I'd get the air bubbles out without worrying about vacuum.
I don't have much copper wire laying about, but I might build one of those if I get bored with the VDG. The VDG is safer than a Tesla coil, so for a newbie like me it seems like just the ring thing.
Big sparks is not something I'm really interested in since those are rather difficult to control and not very useful. Another experiment I'd like to try is to spin highly charged bodies around in a circle by mechanical force and see how strong a magnetic field I can generate that way. It'd be like a wire loop in which current circulates, but without the wire. I could easily charge these bodies with a VDG but I'm not sure a Tesla coil wouldn't just fry the bodies. Say I got 100kV into one body, have eight of them on a bicycle wheel and spin that around as fast as I could. The current should be quite significant. - What will happen?
I'm building a Van de Graaff generator from which I'ma try accelereating an electron beam, or bolt. It won't of course be portable, but it would be fun if I could fling plasma a meter or so away from the VDG gen. With some metal sheets I could build a rather large air-gap capacitator that I could first charge with the VDG and then tap to a coil to pull the free electrons from the VDG.
:D
Okay, maybe a bit sci-fi, but I'm having fun building the VDG regardless.
You assume the Archive use all that capacity...
Either way, the Archive also keeps old versions of the sites, meaning multiple copies of what is essentially the same site.
The images seem to be 404ing, with Mirrordot only giving the image on the first page. Mirror for the rest if them, anyone?
Posting just to agree with the sibling. Thanks, both of you. Visual descriptions like that are a fantastic aid to get a starting grasp of what in the world the theory is talking about.
I've run across mentions of the Pauli exclusion principle before, but with this 'model' in hand I'll take another look at it.
You know, that sort of thing could actually be like an add-on service you could subscribe to with your ISP, both hosting and home-users... That way you could cut right past the ethics of who filters what in who's traffic.
Can't proxy anywhere without a route.
Traceroute your connections for a while as you connect over the world and you'll see some reoccurring names. Those are backbone owners, and they make contracts with each other to route traffic through their nets. Say my country fails so bad at keeping me in check online that my entire country gets its routes cut off, I can't connect to the rest of the world because somewhere down the pipe someone applied the scissors to the fiber.
There might be another backbone which will still accept my traffic, and I might find a proxy somewhere along their routes, but it ought not take long before that backbone starts losing contracts if I keep misbehaving.
There's a whole lot of non-govt politics involved in international routing. Tricky business.
Oh, ouch. That hurt, and I feel entitled to using bandwidth to explain myself because of it. - The "kill babies" thing was supposed to be a funny take on saving the Earth for the sake of our children, since they are the most likely to die cause of our poor choices. I should probably have appended a smiley to make my intention clear, but apparently I did cross someone's line. I apologize.
Vote with your money. Buy stuff that is environmentally friendly if it is at all possible. If it isn't possibly, consider if you really need that thing enough to kill babies for it.
You mean amongst the approximately 0.16% who actually RTFA? :o)
Correction: Earth-Moon-Earth bounce is about 2.5 seconds. - (Long-Delayed Radio Echos, Observations and Interpretations - Dr. Volker Grassmann, DF5AI, VHF Communications 2/1993, http://www.df5ai.net/ArticlesDL/LEchoes(E).pdf )
Means the echos occur somehwere between about half-way to the moon and far beyond it.
To memory, there's one second of lag when talking to someone on the moon on the radio. One to 40 seconds would mean that unless there are multiple reflections that go unheard, whatever is doing the reflecting is located 1 to 40 times further away than the moon.
Oh, right. I was just thinking of my own retired flat CRT. I've cursed the name of the sometimes ball-formed CRTs ever since I got the flat one, years ago. So much easier on the eyes, so much better accuracy. Funny thing is the old 17" Viewsonic (G73fm) of mine still compares rather well with today's CRTs.
The product page however still says that you can use the gadget with any flat surface, but I don't have the heart to tell more of my fellow Slashdotters to RTFA. There's no need to ruin your LCD.
One thing for artists to consider is however that you can probably opt for a any textured surface to give you any amount of "pen drag" you wish. All the tablets I've tried so far are very slippery, which is by no means always a good thing. I could pick a rough paper, or even a textile according to what I feel is comfortable.
Says 400 DPI on the page linked to and go check the "Example" tab for art. It's good enough for anime.
Really, Read The Fucking Article/Product Page/Whatever next time. Borderline trolling, what you posted.
Seems the only thing making this thing LCD-only is the design of the plastic clip for the sensor that determins the position of the stylus. Any geek worth his bandwidth could use this with a CRT.
Very interesting product either way. Seems better and cheaper than a Wacom.
In Mythical Sweden, where every geek has a hawt girlfriend and pixies lick your eyeballs whenever you want, they build houses that require next to no heating at all, even in the middle of winter. A meter of insulation in the attic and half a meter in the walls. Big tripple-pane, xeon gas between two panes to reflect heat radiation, windows towards the south and small such windows towards the north. Thanks to the big windows they get heating and natural light, so often they don't even need to turn the lights on. Add a heat-pump air conditioner and your electricity bills are from appliances mostly.
The thing about glucose is that when a solution of it and water is frosen ice crystals that harm the cells do not form easily. Basically the aim of this cryo-stuff is to render and entire body into a glass-like state, and most things can be put in such a state by freezing them really, really fast. For pure water, the speed-of-freezing required is quite astronomical, but luckily water doesn't have to be pure.
The technical term for converting a substance into a glass-like material is vitrification. Wikipedia knows more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitrification
I have a Konika-Minolta 5D and a Nokia N70. The dSLR has a 6MP sensor and the phone has a 2MP sensor. The phone cam is horrible in comparison, even in broad daylight, mostly since it seems to make really strange compression artefacts and there's no way for me to change it. The dSLR has a bunch of functions to let me control exposure and focus quickly, letting me take lots of photos with little effort. I attempt to shoot the CF card full and then just select the best of the pictures.
The only thing the phone cam is good for is that I have it with me wherever I go, unlike the dSLR, and I'm therefore more likely to capture something unique with it. At this phone cameras excell. One should however not expect the pic from the phone cam to exhibit any measure of fidelity.
Haha, you might have the Bard beaten on that account, but we cannot be sure, can we? ;)
Eloquent, but Shakespeare still said it better;
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
--From Hamlet (I, v, 166-167)
QM is a theory of information; not of physics. This is because we have come so far in studying nature that we have bit by bit began studying ourselves, and the information system that is our mind. Things don't exist when we're not looking at them because the brain and mind receive no data nor information about them.
This subject is much like Plato's World of Ideas. - When we're not looking at a thing, but we are> thinking about them, do they exist? In Plato's world; yes.
It's also an issue of contrast. For black text on a white background a kerning space of a darker grey would appear smaller than one of a bright white even if the areas are the same. Add color to this and determining what the contrast ratio actually is becomes much more difficult. There is for example no such thing as a 'dark yellow'.
'Volume' seems more appropriate since it is a bit ambigous; much as the subject matter at hand. A whole subsection of graphical design is devoted to it.
Are you kidding? On some computers I can hear electric noise caused by mouse movements even
- without spekers connected to the computer.
Heck, on one systems the soundcard driver isn't even installed and somehow electric noise caused by moving the mouse causesaudiable noise. I have absolutely no idea how that works... but it does.
I've also discovered that when I plug the computer into a non-grounded power socket I sometimes get a 110 volt AC current in the case, even when we've got 230 volt in the grid here.
Aspiring to become a radio amateur I've spent a bit of time looking into electric noise. Long story short; if you're going to include a computer in anything relating to analog signals, get the AD converter as far away from the computer as possible. Especially if you've got a CRT monitor.