You know, we tried extending daylight savings time before, back in the energy crises of the 1970s (or there abouts). It was shortened back to its present form to keep kids from being run over going to school in the dark (at one end), and allowing them to celebrate a traditional Halloween without staying up too late (at the other end).
Going back to try this again sounds inordinately stupid to me.
"I think this has some potential for abuse. Do we want this power to get into the wrong hands?"
Somehow I don't see a new way to make warm acetone, even along with a few neutrons, as being much of a threat.
Once the acetone boils (and probably before, I suspect cold acetone is required for sufficiently spherical bubbles) your reaction will stop. You may be able to use some fluid with a higher boiling point than acetone, but I can't think of any with a high enough boiling point to be useful that also contains much hydrogen.
I do most of my playing around programming using DJGPP, so that was my natural choice for compiling your program. I posted about my minor troubles in case someone else was trying to do the same thing with less success.
Posting a reply to my Slashdot messages is probably the BEST way to contact me, I'm really bad about checking my email.
Oh, and I enjoyed your program. I'm a bit of a sucker for silly things like that.
I compiled it using DJGPP on Windows. First I had to add the pdcur24b module, which I had never needed before, from the v2tk download section. Second, the strtof (string to float, I assume) function came up undefined, so I commented out one line. This appears to disable, in some sense, the "t" option, whatever that is.
I knew the six piece set was mostly done. Before posting I checked around for anything saying the six piece tablebases were finished, but I couldn't find anything. I check Hyatt's site and some are obviously missing, but that doesn't prove anything.
If you have link for the completion of them, I would be interested in seeing it.
The best results I am aware of only solve chess for up to five pieces on the board, although most six piece positions are known. These are actually for a slightly limited version of chess, as possible castling is not considered.
It may just be possible to physically store a weak solution for chess, in the far future. To prove a draw for black, only the correct responses for all possible white moves have to be stored. Similarly for the white side, of course. It's hard to make a good estimate of how much storage this would take but, at one atom per bit, perhaps a medium sized asteroid would do. Still looks too hard for anyone to actually bother doing it, even if it does become possible.
Gotta blame it on something... Blame it on the rain that was falling, falling Blame it on the stars that did shine at night Whatever you do don't put the blame on you Blame it on the rain yeah yeah.
The people who measure such things think that volcanoes only emit 1% as much carbon dioxide as human activities do. Since this doesn't seem like a terribly difficult measurement to make, I doubt they are off enough to make a difference.
I do think the severity of the dangers of global warming are exaggerated. Such "dire" predictions as biomes moving 100 miles north in a decade or two don't move me much. Global warming should cause more rainfall, but oddly most of the early models had all the extra rainfall falling at sea. The modelers seem quick to note that the higher temperatures cause more evaporation, leading to more stress on plants in dry areas, but much slower to acknowledge that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air mean some plants don't need as much water. Plus, the severe effects aren't projected for many decades, by which time I think there is a good possibility of effective remediation technologies. Still, even if rising ocean levels were the only consequence of global warming, the problems caused are at least somewhat annoying.
Coal plants have many negatives besides carbon dioxide emissions, such as sulfur particulates (reduced but not eliminated by scrubbing) and large volumes of toxic waste. These problems cost society in ways that don't show up on power bills. The French seem to find nuclear power affordable and, since it is, I think coal should be abandoned for electricity. Other power sources may be feasible now or in the near future, and these could turn out to be preferable to nuclear, but in any case I think we should commit to a non-coal future now!
Given how the article talks about how expensive carbon sequestration is, nuclear plants seem to be a better option for producing electricity. You're not going to be able to separate out 100% of the carbon dioxide from the waste stream anyway.
The example of reducing the emissions from steel plants is very interesting. I'm sure there are ways to refine steel that don't release carbon (e.g. electrolysis), but using coke would probably still be much cheaper even with the costs of removing most of the carbon from the flue gases. Getting steel plants to implement this without being wiped out (by carbon emitting overseas competitors) or supported by massive government subsidies sounds very tricky, though.
I really think the best first step for reducing green house gases is to stop producing more coal fired power plants, and schedule the eventual closing of the current ones. The amount of damage done to the atmosphere by the remaining oil to be extracted is probably manageable, but there is enough coal (and tar sands, oil shale, etc.) to cause much more severe problems.
Apple may use some current Intel processors for their low end x86 notebooks, but their desktops will probably only use chips that don't exist yet. Most likely, something evolved from the Pentium M series with 64 bits and multiple cores.
Jobs didn't choose Intel based on their current product, but on what they are promising one to two years from now.
There is a current theory that the Earth did completely freeze over, several times. This was in the Precambrian, and is posited to have dropped oxygen levels close to zero. See http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Snowball- Earth
If Hoth was in such a state, most oxygen breathing life would die off soon unless things changed. If Hoth became ice covered within the previous few thousand years, there could still be enough oxygen for a relic population of animals.
I don't think Hoth is too hard to rationalize. The earth has gone through some global ice ages that left it pretty much an ice ball. Perhaps Hoth used to be a lot warmer. The bombardment could be temporary too, or at least episodic. As long as there are no asteroids large enough to wreak the ecosystem, life can put up with a lot.
Larry Niven's "The Smoke Ring" has a band of habitable space with an atmosphere that's not on a planet; and it is reasonably justified scientifically. I don't know if it's entirely sound, but if it's good enough for hard science fiction I think it's good enough for Star Wars.
The biggest problem I had with the science of episodes one and two was the submarine ride through the center of Naboo. A habitable planet needs to recycle its crust, and so it seems must have a molten core. Awhile after seeing Episode I the first time, I had sort of convinced myself they left some wiggle room about how deep they were going, but on a second viewing I saw no reasonable way to interpret that scene.
How long do you think a pixel can stay lit when what it's displayed on is constantly moving? Longer phosphors sure aren't going to help this 3D display.
Fermi's Paradox really doesn't apply to galaxies billions of light-years away, since we expect it would take a substantial part of the age of the Universe for intelligence to spread that far.
The map shows that I have only a 1/25000 chance of experiencing an earthquake with a Modified Mercalli Intensity of six or greater tomorrow. Sounds like a good day for a picnic!
I guess this math stuff is just too hard for me. One of these days I'll figure out how to do percentages.
If you read the article, you know that this particular "battery" runs on tritium gas, which is why the guy I was quoting was talking about volume.
If we consider a theoretical battery that can use solid fuel, and a three watt (really?) laptop, the 100 cc of LiT to power it would weight 330 grams (11.6 oz) for the fuel part of the battery. Not too bad, I suppose. A thirty watt laptop would be pretty heavy though.
One good point about the hydride, tritium decays to helium 3, which would escape the battery case, making it grow lighter with time.
"Yeah, except that tritium's beta is only ~6 keV and one mole of hydrogen would occupy 22 liters at STP. Or be pressurized to over 3000 psi to be 0.1 liters."
You seem to have a good point, but by not providing an estimate of energy output it's hard for people to tell.
One mole of tritium atoms (3 grams and 11.2 liters at STP: it's diatomic) will, over it's half life of 12.3 years, generate 6.02e23 * (6500 eV) / 2 = 1.96e27 eV.
Converting to ergs by dividing by 6.2e11 results in 3.16e15 ergs.
Converting to watt-hours by multiplying by 2.8e-11 gives 88000 watt-hours.
Over its half life, this gives an average energy output of (88000 watt-hours)/(108000 hours) = 0.82 watts. Half as much at the end than at the beginning, of course, but I don't care enough to calculate the actual values.
Assuming a conversion efficiency to electricity of around 10% would give us 8 milliwatts to run our laptop. Ouch! Even the weight of enough tritium to power current laptops would be a burden.
The oil can't flash unless it's in contact with the air, where the temperature will be much cooler. I can't imagine there would be enough heat to bring the whole aquarium up to near frying temperatures.
A Google search shows flash points from 135 C to 220 C, so it may vary depending on the type of mineral oil.
I think a bigger danger would be from external heat sources, like static sparks. If the aquarium is sealed against oxygen that may not be much of a hazard either.
The mineral oil could also make a fire caused by something else much worse. Fire departments would probably rather not see this type of cooling become popular.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, we tried extending daylight savings time before, back in the energy crises of the 1970s (or there abouts). It was shortened back to its present form to keep kids from being run over going to school in the dark (at one end), and allowing them to celebrate a traditional Halloween without staying up too late (at the other end).
Going back to try this again sounds inordinately stupid to me.
"I think this has some potential for abuse. Do we want this power to get into the wrong hands?"
Somehow I don't see a new way to make warm acetone, even along with a few neutrons, as being much of a threat.
Once the acetone boils (and probably before, I suspect cold acetone is required for sufficiently spherical bubbles) your reaction will stop. You may be able to use some fluid with a higher boiling point than acetone, but I can't think of any with a high enough boiling point to be useful that also contains much hydrogen.
Yeah, most all of us care about liberty and freedom, but we don't seem to be able to agree on just what will make us free and liberated.
Glad to have helped.
I do most of my playing around programming using DJGPP, so that was my natural choice for compiling your program. I posted about my minor troubles in case someone else was trying to do the same thing with less success.
Posting a reply to my Slashdot messages is probably the BEST way to contact me, I'm really bad about checking my email.
Oh, and I enjoyed your program. I'm a bit of a sucker for silly things like that.
I compiled it using DJGPP on Windows. First I had to add the pdcur24b module, which I had never needed before, from the v2tk download section. Second, the strtof (string to float, I assume) function came up undefined, so I commented out one line. This appears to disable, in some sense, the "t" option, whatever that is.
I knew the six piece set was mostly done. Before posting I checked around for anything saying the six piece tablebases were finished, but I couldn't find anything. I check Hyatt's site and some are obviously missing, but that doesn't prove anything.
If you have link for the completion of them, I would be interested in seeing it.
The best results I am aware of only solve chess for up to five pieces on the board, although most six piece positions are known. These are actually for a slightly limited version of chess, as possible castling is not considered.
It may just be possible to physically store a weak solution for chess, in the far future. To prove a draw for black, only the correct responses for all possible white moves have to be stored. Similarly for the white side, of course. It's hard to make a good estimate of how much storage this would take but, at one atom per bit, perhaps a medium sized asteroid would do. Still looks too hard for anyone to actually bother doing it, even if it does become possible.
Gotta blame it on something...
Blame it on the rain that was falling, falling
Blame it on the stars that did shine at night
Whatever you do don't put the blame on you
Blame it on the rain yeah yeah.
Composed by Diane Warren.
Probably too late to add PARs to the bittorrent design, I expect Microsoft has now patented the technique.
The people who measure such things think that volcanoes only emit 1% as much carbon dioxide as human activities do. Since this doesn't seem like a terribly difficult measurement to make, I doubt they are off enough to make a difference.
I do think the severity of the dangers of global warming are exaggerated. Such "dire" predictions as biomes moving 100 miles north in a decade or two don't move me much. Global warming should cause more rainfall, but oddly most of the early models had all the extra rainfall falling at sea. The modelers seem quick to note that the higher temperatures cause more evaporation, leading to more stress on plants in dry areas, but much slower to acknowledge that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air mean some plants don't need as much water. Plus, the severe effects aren't projected for many decades, by which time I think there is a good possibility of effective remediation technologies. Still, even if rising ocean levels were the only consequence of global warming, the problems caused are at least somewhat annoying.
Coal plants have many negatives besides carbon dioxide emissions, such as sulfur particulates (reduced but not eliminated by scrubbing) and large volumes of toxic waste. These problems cost society in ways that don't show up on power bills. The French seem to find nuclear power affordable and, since it is, I think coal should be abandoned for electricity. Other power sources may be feasible now or in the near future, and these could turn out to be preferable to nuclear, but in any case I think we should commit to a non-coal future now!
Given how the article talks about how expensive carbon sequestration is, nuclear plants seem to be a better option for producing electricity. You're not going to be able to separate out 100% of the carbon dioxide from the waste stream anyway.
The example of reducing the emissions from steel plants is very interesting. I'm sure there are ways to refine steel that don't release carbon (e.g. electrolysis), but using coke would probably still be much cheaper even with the costs of removing most of the carbon from the flue gases. Getting steel plants to implement this without being wiped out (by carbon emitting overseas competitors) or supported by massive government subsidies sounds very tricky, though.
I really think the best first step for reducing green house gases is to stop producing more coal fired power plants, and schedule the eventual closing of the current ones. The amount of damage done to the atmosphere by the remaining oil to be extracted is probably manageable, but there is enough coal (and tar sands, oil shale, etc.) to cause much more severe problems.
All these newfangled editors, I just can't keep up. I started with TECO (http://almy.us/teco.html), and I'm gonna stick with it!
Apple may use some current Intel processors for their low end x86 notebooks, but their desktops will probably only use chips that don't exist yet. Most likely, something evolved from the Pentium M series with 64 bits and multiple cores.
Jobs didn't choose Intel based on their current product, but on what they are promising one to two years from now.
There is a current theory that the Earth did completely freeze over, several times. This was in the Precambrian, and is posited to have dropped oxygen levels close to zero. See http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Snowball- Earth
If Hoth was in such a state, most oxygen breathing life would die off soon unless things changed. If Hoth became ice covered within the previous few thousand years, there could still be enough oxygen for a relic population of animals.
I don't think Hoth is too hard to rationalize. The earth has gone through some global ice ages that left it pretty much an ice ball. Perhaps Hoth used to be a lot warmer. The bombardment could be temporary too, or at least episodic. As long as there are no asteroids large enough to wreak the ecosystem, life can put up with a lot.
Larry Niven's "The Smoke Ring" has a band of habitable space with an atmosphere that's not on a planet; and it is reasonably justified scientifically. I don't know if it's entirely sound, but if it's good enough for hard science fiction I think it's good enough for Star Wars.
The biggest problem I had with the science of episodes one and two was the submarine ride through the center of Naboo. A habitable planet needs to recycle its crust, and so it seems must have a molten core. Awhile after seeing Episode I the first time, I had sort of convinced myself they left some wiggle room about how deep they were going, but on a second viewing I saw no reasonable way to interpret that scene.
How long do you think a pixel can stay lit when what it's displayed on is constantly moving? Longer phosphors sure aren't going to help this 3D display.
Fermi's Paradox really doesn't apply to galaxies billions of light-years away, since we expect it would take a substantial part of the age of the Universe for intelligence to spread that far.
The map shows that I have only a 1/25000 chance of experiencing an earthquake with a Modified Mercalli Intensity of six or greater tomorrow. Sounds like a good day for a picnic!
So they will accuse an innocent person, when has that stopped anyone?
There are lots of people in jail on evidence no better than that. Most of them are in fact guilty, but a fair number aren't.
The proper term in the industry for man made gems is synthetic, if they are the same composition as the natural gem.
If they just look like the natural gem the proper term is simulated, that is they are simulants. These are sometimes call artificial, as well.
High quality rubies are still more expensive than high quality colorless diamonds, though there might have been a period when that wasn't true.
Pink and blue natural diamonds are a different story.
Ah yes, that seem straight forward. Now how did we get four justices who can't understand that?
I guess this math stuff is just too hard for me. One of these days I'll figure out how to do percentages.
If you read the article, you know that this particular "battery" runs on tritium gas, which is why the guy I was quoting was talking about volume.
If we consider a theoretical battery that can use solid fuel, and a three watt (really?) laptop, the 100 cc of LiT to power it would weight 330 grams (11.6 oz) for the fuel part of the battery. Not too bad, I suppose. A thirty watt laptop would be pretty heavy though.
One good point about the hydride, tritium decays to helium 3, which would escape the battery case, making it grow lighter with time.
"Yeah, except that tritium's beta is only ~6 keV and one mole of hydrogen would occupy 22 liters at STP. Or be pressurized to over 3000 psi to be 0.1 liters."
You seem to have a good point, but by not providing an estimate of energy output it's hard for people to tell.
One mole of tritium atoms (3 grams and 11.2 liters at STP: it's diatomic) will, over it's half life of 12.3 years, generate 6.02e23 * (6500 eV) / 2 = 1.96e27 eV.
Converting to ergs by dividing by 6.2e11 results in 3.16e15 ergs.
Converting to watt-hours by multiplying by 2.8e-11 gives 88000 watt-hours.
Over its half life, this gives an average energy output of (88000 watt-hours)/(108000 hours) = 0.82 watts. Half as much at the end than at the beginning, of course, but I don't care enough to calculate the actual values.
Assuming a conversion efficiency to electricity of around 10% would give us 8 milliwatts to run our laptop. Ouch! Even the weight of enough tritium to power current laptops would be a burden.
The oil can't flash unless it's in contact with the air, where the temperature will be much cooler. I can't imagine there would be enough heat to bring the whole aquarium up to near frying temperatures.
A Google search shows flash points from 135 C to 220 C, so it may vary depending on the type of mineral oil.
I think a bigger danger would be from external heat sources, like static sparks. If the aquarium is sealed against oxygen that may not be much of a hazard either.
The mineral oil could also make a fire caused by something else much worse. Fire departments would probably rather not see this type of cooling become popular.