How is it premature to ask that question? They've got some human trials, and impressively it has results. It's premature to say, "This is it," but definitely not to early to wonder.
Yeah, are you going to blames Mars's global warming on humans too? Heh.
Scientists in THAT mystery don't have anybody easy to blame. Maybe we shouldn't be pointing so much at humans as the root of everything.
It's the cows and all their farting.
No, it isn't criminal. However, your very topic line and everything else about your post was rather inane.
So much for freedom of speech? He's no governmental agency, and he has no authority to enforce it, therefore your freedoms haven't been abridged in the least by him telling you to zip it. All it possibly could have been was a (good) recommendation that you keep your trap shut.
You talk about the US pissing good-will of the entire rest of the world down the drain. Heh. Besides states that were already antagonistic and the EU, there really hasn't been that much. What really gets me is when the EU thinks it's the rest of the world...
The land of the free never meant "the land where you're free to go do whatever the hell you want without regard for the consequences." Law has always been necessary for the function of a free society. Yes, there have been some indiscretions that probably shouldn't have happened. But in a country where Michael Moore can make a film like his without fear of censorship, your ranting just comes off as paranoia.
I've got a great article for your sorry hiney:
Bush's 'crime'? Just being a patriot
By Janet Daley, London Daily Telegraph
(Filed: 03/11/2004)
By the time you read this, you may know who is to be the next President of the United States. Then again, you may not.
If things really are as tight as they look at the moment of writing, then the American presidency may be paralysed for months, in a time of great national peril, by a litigious frenzy. Please God, let's not go there, if only because the sight of both sides trying to sue their way into the White House would license yet another wave of supercilious European Ameriphobia.
Now - in this hiatus between my copy deadline and the election result - is probably the ideal moment to look at some of the self-regarding delusions that European and British analysis has perpetrated about this election.
The first - and the most outrageous - is that attacks on George W Bush personally and the United States generally, are a direct consequence of the war on Iraq.
In fact, Bush was loathed by the British and European Left-liberals before he had done anything in office. He was detested purely and simply for what he was - a point to which I shall return. But the idea that the most recent wave of rabid anti-Americanism stems from mistakes in Iraq is simply absurd. Anyone whose historical memory goes back more than 10 minutes should recall the extraordinary effusion of hatred that spewed from sections of the opinion-forming class as a consequence of America being attacked.
Like most expatriate Americans living in Britain, it was a phenomenon I am unlikely ever to forget. The response to the deaths of 3,000 civilians, by comment writers in the Left-wing newspapers and the producers of "flagship" BBC current affairs programmes, was to orchestrate abuse of the bereaved country. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read a leader in Saturday's Guardian which pronounced with brazen sanctimoniousness: "The attack of September 11 2001, an event of historic seriousness, created an unprecedented outpouring of solidarity worldwide."
Oh really? Well, then the Guardian must have been wildly out of step with world solidarity at the time because it was gleefully leading a chorus of "America got what it deserved". And the BBC - sorry to return to this again but it remains burnished in my consciousness - staged an edition of Question Time in which anyone who expressed sympathy for the US was howled down.
Anybody who says that this kind of pathological hatred - the kind that relishes the loss of innocent life as a well-deserved "lesson" - would evaporate with the election of John Kerry, or any other contender who was remotely in tune with the American political culture, is trying very hard to deceive himself or the rest of us.
Perhaps there is a clue to the psychological logic of this argument in the Guardian leader's triumphal conclusion: "Three years later, much of that solidarity has been squandered."
Are the people who attacked the US at
The rest of the game.
Seriously, Bungie has never made anything that sucked (okay, maybe that little RPG before Pathways into Darkness). The ending of Halo 2 sucks. It can't be the true ending. Not from Bungie. Oh no. So maybe we'll get to finish the game, eh?
Hopefully Cortana goes rampant. Or Durandal shows up.
Ah, you sound just like a Ross I know. Good man. And just to make sure you aren't that Ross, I just read all your other posts. So, unless you just moved to California from Utah and your wife is a literary genius, I'll have to be content that people named Ross are intelligent peeps.
However, I'd have to somewhat disagree with your assessment. Generally right-wing nut jobs do think that any criticism of the U.S. is bad. But any imagination that the liberal academia of America appreciate this country or are friendly to anybody who does is silly. Those people most entrenched in today's universities generally have an "Americans are fat lazy arrogant slobs and this country sucks" kind of attitude, and they teach it in their classrooms. If their criticism was about government in particular, that would be understandable, but it's general enough to encompass/America/ as a whole. So the parent of your post was in large measure right: we HAVE had it beaten over our heads that thinking America is a good country is a bad way to think. Thank goodness that many of us have only let it go over our heads, and not in them.
You're not a statistical genius either. If 103 people get an average 20 words for each person in 90 seconds on the first round, that is a total of 2060 words for all of them. If you then apply current and test them and they get 2472 words, some individuals may have gotten 16, while others may have had 32, and the average increase over the sample was 20 percent. And with 103 people, that's a large enough sampling to show a real effect.
Of course, that could mean that they all just did better the second time. That's why the author of the paper split them into two groups, a zapped group and a control group. With 50 people, you're still working with a large enough sample to get useful averages as indicators, though not proof. And what did she discover? The zapped group did twenty percent better than the control group. If the control group showed NO improvement, they'd have 1000 words total, and the zapped group would have 1200 words.
Placebo effect is rather far-fetched here. Yes, the zapped people did feel an itchy feeling, but both groups had electrodes and believed they'd be zapped. The real zappees performed much much better than their counterparts.
What bothers me most about your post is that you're ripping her study apart because it's not absolute proof. Of course it isn't. It's a study. All science is looking at indicators, trends, probabilities, hypotheses... and it's totally counter-productive to wait until you've proven it outright. What you should be saying is, "Hmm... that's really interesting that she reported such a large improvement, and her results definitely indicate something curious going on. Perhaps this deserves a closer look."
If you're going to attack studies and reports, people, make sure you have the credentials and expertise to do so. Usually if somebody is publishing in or being reported on by Nature, they've got their ducks in a row, and your 2-minute armchair critique is going to fall hopelessly flat. Ask questions, offer insights, but criticism comes best from peers, which most of us are not.
They do have their own "fields," silly. Take yourself a little trip out to Humboldt County, CA. That's redwood country, there, and you'll find most of the county is owned by the lumber companies.
Indeed, if you had actually read my post you replied to, you'd have realized that your argument was deflated before it was started: they aren't being short-sighted about it. Most of these companies have been around for about a century or so and are cutting down trees they've planted in that time-frame. Public lands aren't being clear-cut, like you're implying. And when they harvest on public lands, there are very clear rules about replanting.
Trust me, the envirowacko propaganda they gave you in school is a little off the mark.
We're tearing down forests and paving over habitat all the time? Pardon me if I'm rather confused by that. There's a big difference between reality and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest.
My maternal extended family has worked in the logging industry for more than fifty years. And strangely enough, the lumber companies are still making money and selling cheap lumber. They certainly aren't cutting everything down in their path and moving on like some strange marauders. There's only a certain amount of land they own, and they've always recognized that they have to replace what they cut down if they want to stay in business. Thus, nearly every tree cut down by Simpson Lumber or other companies was a tree they planted 50 years ago. They plant 5 trees for every one they cut down, in fact.
And then you have places like the Salt Lake Valley. It looks like a veritable forest, yet when we evil slash and burn white folks got here 150 years ago, there wasn't a tree in the valley. We planted all of them. There are a lot of reasonable estimates that there are now more trees and forest in the United States than there were when the pilgrims set foot in Plymouth.
What's really distressing is that, when you get into the higher echelons of these environmentalist groups, they don't give one hoot about the environment. Go do an internship for one of them in Washington. It'll be a real eye opener, from what I've heard.:)
You hit the nail on the head. Thanks for spelling it out so well.
Growing up sucked, and fantasy worlds of legos and other toys (complete with social structure, political intrigue, military action, dramatic dialogue) filled in with my imagination what my reality couldn't supply. Computers were nice to dink around with back in the late 80s and early 90s, but for me they didn't really hold anything really captivating. Then came this really cool game: Myst. I was hooked. Then I started finding RPGs like Realmz, FPS's like Doom and even more engrossing, Marathon (such an excellent storyline). Along came C&C and Warcraft II, Master of Orion, Escape Velocity, Diablo, Myth, Civilization, StarCraft, Baldur's Gate, etc. Hours and hours of exploration, experimentation, hacking (after I finished games, I'd pick them apart), FIGURING OUT. That was the bottom line: figuring out what I could do in the game and what I could make the game do.
School, well, school absolutely sucked. I gained everything I could learn from school quickly, and then I went home and learned on my own. The only worthwhile class in high school was debate. I competed in foreign extemp, and my coach gave me the leeway to do all my own research, to put together my own files, to learn on my own and then bring that knowledge I gained to competitions. I used the class for practicing my debating skills, but I was really in it because it was finally something that stretched and tested my knowledge. And yes, I was pretty good. But I still spent a lot of time reading and playing computer games, hours each day on games. They were the mental stimulus this artificial reality of school moved too slow in providing.
If school had delved into really teaching symbolism and structure (from linguistics to algebra to science) early on, rather than spelling exercises, reading silly books 5 grade levels behind what I read in my spare time, arithmetic tables, and "white man is evil, indians are good" history, and delved into more advanced topics from there, there's a very good chance it could have kept my attention. But it didn't, and I was in seventh grade helping freshmen with their algebra, continually demonstrating to myself that I could do absolutely no homework and still be more skilled in all the subject matter than my peers. Is it any wonder that computer games were so attractive? They offered stuff, even made-up stuff, that I didn't already know.
That's the problem with public or any mass education: they try to use the same formula to teach all of us, and the formula is only tailored to one type of temperament: kids who care about authority, like to have stickers saying "Great Job!" on their assignments, and really think their teachers know what they're talking about without finding out for themselves.
Quite the contrary, there are a lot of rich people willing to pay half a mil to go to space. Yeah, you're probably not their primary target, but the America Space Prize is absolutely about private space access, commercial development, and tourism. You're just going to have to stomach the fact that it will only be available to extremely wealthy people for a while. As for me, I'm hedging my bets that I can get people to pay me half a mil to take 'em to space.
The Apollo craft really only had thin sheets of metal, almost like a rigid aluminum foil, as the only thing between the astronauts and outer space. It was very thin, and an inflatable structure held rigid by the inside air pressure wouldn't be very different, except that it'd be a lot smaller and easier to launch in the first place. Then once it's up, you just blow it up, and voila, you've got yourself an orbital habitat.
I am focussed completely on the question of "How does the energy wind up as heat?"
If that were the case, you wouldn't have said that it couldn't be a nuclear process. And the last time I checked, turning an alkali metal into a rare earth metal required nuclear transmutation. It's the very definition of a nuclear process: the nuclei have changed composition and structure.
d+d->4He will not yield any neutrons. You will definitely get gamma rays (2.2 MeV), but this really does require working close to background levels with the detection stuff. But you've completely shot your credibility in the foot if you're going to claim that d+d->4He is going to give neutrons, as if somehow it gave out the necessary almost 1 GeV to poop out a neutron that wasn't existent in the system previously. d+t->4He + n, and d+d->3He + n, but when d+d->4He is the dominant reaction, and the rate of 4He production is way above possible contamination, neutrons may still be present from other reactions, but not nearly enough to account for the heat production.
So, there's nuclear products and, yes, we have had radiation signatures. Go back and look at the original Jones paper submitted to Nature on March 23, 1989, and published immediately afterward. It's MOST DEFINITELY nuclear. Unless you're going to claim that Sr -> Mo and Cs -> Pr aren't nuclear processes, I think you have to concede that point. Whether or not the energy involved is really useable is debatable, but any claim that the process isn't nuclear is simply a refusal to believe what all the evidence points to simply as a matter of pride and arrogance.
Unfortunately, most of our models for fusion involve bare nuclei and we don't really know what's going on when it's not in a plasma state. The presence of an electron cloud can do funky things with the coulomb barrier, and we know that nuclear cross sectional areas are increased dramatically at low energies, 10 keV or less.
It's certainly been interesting that the rate of neutron creation has been so low, but that doesn't rule out nuclear processes. It just rules out d+d --> He3 + n + gamma as the dominant reaction. d+d --> He4 is, even in conventional nuclear physics, very possible, and indeed that's what we see the most of. The underlying mechanism for why this is the favored reaction isn't fully understood, but the data does fit with a nuclear process.
Our present lack of a cogent theory widely accepted in the community is definitely a point against us, but having a theory like that is not a prerequisite to believing what you're seeing. Elemental transmutation in d+Z reactions is common, and if you're turning Cs into Pr, and the amount of Cs is decreasing proportional to the increase in Pr, you're going to have a VERY hard time arguing that it's not a nuclear process. (See Iwamura, www.lenr-canr.org )
Apparently, the nucleus isn't such a well understood system after all, and we'd all be smart to not assume we know that much about anything. The field really does deserve more credence than you mainstream NPs have been willing to give it.
On the contrary, it had several reproducible results, immediately, at MIT, Texas A&M, and many others. But the/rate/ of reproducibility remained low and the conditions in which it occurred were and still are poorly understood. Since then, reproducibility rates for deuterium-deuterium and deuterium-metal reactions have climbed really high (some Japanese researchers with Mitsubishi have near 100 percent).
What we do know is that nuclear cross sectional areas increase dramatically at lower energies, 10 keV or less. We suspect that, in very general terms, the electronic structure of metal lattices is playing a role in reducing the Coulomb barrier. And we know that palladium, like used in the Pons-Fleischman experiments, doesn't work if it's pure, and it's the addition of impurities like calcium oxide that contribute to the reaction.
As for a conspiracy to shush it up, it's somewhat true. It's more like mob behavior and fear. Hot fusion research has been extremely threatened, as well as parts of the energy sector, and both have a lot of clout with the DoE. That matters if you're a researcher trying to get funding.
The history of cold fusion really needs some clarification. It was really discovered in 1986, not 1989, by Steven Jones of BYU. If you want, you can request a copy of the relevant minutes from the research group meetings back then: they even called it cold fusion, which might be somewhat of a misnomer, now that the processes are understood a bit better. Pons and Fleischman came across it independently, and the DoE asked Jones to review their work. Their avenue of approach focused a lot on calorimetry, while Dr. Jones had been focusing on looking for nuclear products (neutrons, tritium, helium-3, etc).
Since the two groups had been working on it at the same time and Jones had looked over Pons and Fleischman's stuff, they had made an agreement to publish simultaneously. BYU being so close to the UofU, they were going to meet at SLC Int'l Airport and send in their papers to Nature together. That was to be on March 24th, 1989. Instead, Pons and Fleischman had a press conference on March 23rd, completely stabbing Jones in the back. And worse, they were extremely sloppy, and later unethical. They had a data chart which showed an energy spike at 2.5 MeV, and when somebody pointed out to them that it should have been 2.2 MeV for a d+d reaction, they adjusted the chart downward for their next presentation. The ensuing aftermath nearly completely crippled the field and gave everybody working in it a black eye.
Gratefully, there have been quite a few who decided to continue working in the field. Researchers from Los Alamos, MIT, Naval Research, all over Japan and Italy, BYU, for a good while Texas A&M (there was some controversy there), and elsewhere have made significant progress in the 15 years since that fiasco. I've been working in the BYU group for a year now, and we've had elemental transmutation in varied experiments Sr --> Y, Mo, and I can assure you, the effect is real. And it HAS been published in peer-reviewed journals. Unfortunately, most peer-reviewed journals, because of the stigma the field had gained, automatically rejected anything that sounded like it had anything to do with cold fusion.
For more information about research that's been happening in the field itself, see www.lenr-canr.org
Whoever modded the parent off-topic is an idjit. People, you don't make bread OR beer without yeast, which is influenced, apparently, by these prions. The same prions that are suspected to be the cause of Mad Cow Disease. See the connection?
Yeah, the parent is definitely on-topic.
This is the typical trend of NASA and its budget requests, although a 7 percent cut is a little steep. This is also a big part of the reason why NASA is such a lame duck. Yes, they have had some excellent missions, Galileo, Cassinni, Spirit and Opportunity, but they've all cost way too much.
Private space ventures, like Scaled Composites, have been able to reach the space boundary for very little money: $20 million. As the Economist pointed out, "NASA can't even launch a kite for 20 million dollars." The right stuff has been missing from NASA and Congress both for decades, and there's no reason to believe that either is suddenly going to be able to cut the fat and actually be efficient with anything.
What worries me about this is that it may (though I really don't know) kick NASA between the legs hard enough that people become even more disenchanted with it. Why should they be excited for an organization that spends 15 billion dollars a year on projects that should cost 150 million? And produces about as much? Then space exploration as a whole loses its luster, and private corporations, who are actually doing something useful, are hurt. From talking with them, it seems the majority of engineers working for these start-up rocket companies (XCor, Scaled Composites, SpaceX, Armadillo, etc.) can't stand NASA's bullcrap. But they still need public support, which gets flushed down the drain with NASA.
On the other hand, this may be just the ticket to get the attention over to those folks who need investment. Everybody wants to be an astronaut when they grow up.:)
Except, you've taken an argument that would establish the fact that this won't solve global warming, oil depletion, rising energy costs, and so on, while the statement was that it would be a "weapon in the fight against global warming." M-16s solely can't win a war, nor can tanks, Apaches, aircraft, crew served weapons, effective intelligence, secure supply routes, or anything else by itself win a war. But an effective application of several weapons can.
Besides, global warming ISN'T exponential. It's logarithmic too. Sort of. Really, it's more of an oscillatory pattern, one that's going to make life difficult in the short and medium terms. Having a tool in dampening these oscillations, such as the benefits that may come from using propane, would definitely be useful. A useful tool for dampening any man-made amplifications of natural climatic oscillations could very well be considered a "weapon in the fight against global warming" without being incorrect.
It's good you're putting those math skills of yours to use. Broaden your experience base, and you may be able to effectively apply them to real world situations.
Nuclear fusion of deuterium produces about the same, 2.5 MeV. But considering that in about 2 grams of deuterium, there are 6.02*10^23 particles, if those two grams underwent fusion, you'd have (2.5 MeV/reaction)*(3.01*10^23 reactions)...
By comparison, Halfnium particles are much heavier, about 178.49 g/mol, so you'd have to have a much heavier battery to get the same sort of reaction rate going with it, but for the most part, it's easily manageable.
Now, of course, there are differences with that reaction rate based on nuclear surface tension, questions of whether or not the Hf can really be induced to undergo fission, questions about how to get deuterium to fuse, but from a numerical standpoint, you don't have to have that much material to provide you power.
As for the resultant crap, well, it can't be too much worse than we already get from nuclear reactors, can it?:)
Thank you very much. I am grateful that Pat Tillman went out and did what he did. I'm grateful for all the people who are on the ground now. I'm an intelligence analyst in the 19th SF, and our unit has taken several casualties in Afghanistan. That Pat Tillman received more publicity than others somewhat unnerves me. He's a hero, no doubt, but no moreso than Sgt. Romero or Sgt. Vance, both from my group.
Why didn't they receive front page coverage? They weren't former NFL players. And to think on it, I don't think Pat Tillman would have appreciated being made something special either.
A fusion related accident isn't going to be bad. There is no melt down. If your field loses confinement, everything cools down nearly instantaneously, and you just have this hydrogen and helium gas sitting in your reactor. There are no control rods, no heavy isotopes...
That's why it's so great: it's nearly perfect. It has potential to provide cheap energy, clean reactions, minimal hazards...
Now, whether that will have anything to do with transporation is another question. Mr. Fusion isn't likely to see break-even on your hover-car.
Now, all I need is an omniscient AI with root access on every machine connected to the Internet...
Yeah, and then it goes rampant and sends you to capture an alien ship and slaughter the Phfor garrison on Lh'owon. And the western arm of battle-group seven shows up from Tfear High Command and uses the Trih Xeem, and entire star systems are wiped out. You should know what happens when omniscient AIs start getting jealous.
Slashdot Mirror
How is it premature to ask that question? They've got some human trials, and impressively it has results. It's premature to say, "This is it," but definitely not to early to wonder.
Yeah, are you going to blames Mars's global warming on humans too? Heh.
Scientists in THAT mystery don't have anybody easy to blame. Maybe we shouldn't be pointing so much at humans as the root of everything. It's the cows and all their farting.
Ouch. I think I've forgotten how to format slashdot posts. Eesh.
No, it isn't criminal. However, your very topic line and everything else about your post was rather inane. So much for freedom of speech? He's no governmental agency, and he has no authority to enforce it, therefore your freedoms haven't been abridged in the least by him telling you to zip it. All it possibly could have been was a (good) recommendation that you keep your trap shut. You talk about the US pissing good-will of the entire rest of the world down the drain. Heh. Besides states that were already antagonistic and the EU, there really hasn't been that much. What really gets me is when the EU thinks it's the rest of the world... The land of the free never meant "the land where you're free to go do whatever the hell you want without regard for the consequences." Law has always been necessary for the function of a free society. Yes, there have been some indiscretions that probably shouldn't have happened. But in a country where Michael Moore can make a film like his without fear of censorship, your ranting just comes off as paranoia. I've got a great article for your sorry hiney: Bush's 'crime'? Just being a patriot By Janet Daley, London Daily Telegraph (Filed: 03/11/2004) By the time you read this, you may know who is to be the next President of the United States. Then again, you may not. If things really are as tight as they look at the moment of writing, then the American presidency may be paralysed for months, in a time of great national peril, by a litigious frenzy. Please God, let's not go there, if only because the sight of both sides trying to sue their way into the White House would license yet another wave of supercilious European Ameriphobia. Now - in this hiatus between my copy deadline and the election result - is probably the ideal moment to look at some of the self-regarding delusions that European and British analysis has perpetrated about this election. The first - and the most outrageous - is that attacks on George W Bush personally and the United States generally, are a direct consequence of the war on Iraq. In fact, Bush was loathed by the British and European Left-liberals before he had done anything in office. He was detested purely and simply for what he was - a point to which I shall return. But the idea that the most recent wave of rabid anti-Americanism stems from mistakes in Iraq is simply absurd. Anyone whose historical memory goes back more than 10 minutes should recall the extraordinary effusion of hatred that spewed from sections of the opinion-forming class as a consequence of America being attacked. Like most expatriate Americans living in Britain, it was a phenomenon I am unlikely ever to forget. The response to the deaths of 3,000 civilians, by comment writers in the Left-wing newspapers and the producers of "flagship" BBC current affairs programmes, was to orchestrate abuse of the bereaved country. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read a leader in Saturday's Guardian which pronounced with brazen sanctimoniousness: "The attack of September 11 2001, an event of historic seriousness, created an unprecedented outpouring of solidarity worldwide." Oh really? Well, then the Guardian must have been wildly out of step with world solidarity at the time because it was gleefully leading a chorus of "America got what it deserved". And the BBC - sorry to return to this again but it remains burnished in my consciousness - staged an edition of Question Time in which anyone who expressed sympathy for the US was howled down. Anybody who says that this kind of pathological hatred - the kind that relishes the loss of innocent life as a well-deserved "lesson" - would evaporate with the election of John Kerry, or any other contender who was remotely in tune with the American political culture, is trying very hard to deceive himself or the rest of us. Perhaps there is a clue to the psychological logic of this argument in the Guardian leader's triumphal conclusion: "Three years later, much of that solidarity has been squandered." Are the people who attacked the US at
The rest of the game. Seriously, Bungie has never made anything that sucked (okay, maybe that little RPG before Pathways into Darkness). The ending of Halo 2 sucks. It can't be the true ending. Not from Bungie. Oh no. So maybe we'll get to finish the game, eh? Hopefully Cortana goes rampant. Or Durandal shows up.
Ah, you sound just like a Ross I know. Good man. And just to make sure you aren't that Ross, I just read all your other posts. So, unless you just moved to California from Utah and your wife is a literary genius, I'll have to be content that people named Ross are intelligent peeps.
/America/ as a whole. So the parent of your post was in large measure right: we HAVE had it beaten over our heads that thinking America is a good country is a bad way to think. Thank goodness that many of us have only let it go over our heads, and not in them.
However, I'd have to somewhat disagree with your assessment. Generally right-wing nut jobs do think that any criticism of the U.S. is bad. But any imagination that the liberal academia of America appreciate this country or are friendly to anybody who does is silly. Those people most entrenched in today's universities generally have an "Americans are fat lazy arrogant slobs and this country sucks" kind of attitude, and they teach it in their classrooms. If their criticism was about government in particular, that would be understandable, but it's general enough to encompass
You're not a statistical genius either. If 103 people get an average 20 words for each person in 90 seconds on the first round, that is a total of 2060 words for all of them. If you then apply current and test them and they get 2472 words, some individuals may have gotten 16, while others may have had 32, and the average increase over the sample was 20 percent. And with 103 people, that's a large enough sampling to show a real effect.
Of course, that could mean that they all just did better the second time. That's why the author of the paper split them into two groups, a zapped group and a control group. With 50 people, you're still working with a large enough sample to get useful averages as indicators, though not proof. And what did she discover? The zapped group did twenty percent better than the control group. If the control group showed NO improvement, they'd have 1000 words total, and the zapped group would have 1200 words.
Placebo effect is rather far-fetched here. Yes, the zapped people did feel an itchy feeling, but both groups had electrodes and believed they'd be zapped. The real zappees performed much much better than their counterparts.
What bothers me most about your post is that you're ripping her study apart because it's not absolute proof. Of course it isn't. It's a study. All science is looking at indicators, trends, probabilities, hypotheses... and it's totally counter-productive to wait until you've proven it outright. What you should be saying is, "Hmm... that's really interesting that she reported such a large improvement, and her results definitely indicate something curious going on. Perhaps this deserves a closer look."
If you're going to attack studies and reports, people, make sure you have the credentials and expertise to do so. Usually if somebody is publishing in or being reported on by Nature, they've got their ducks in a row, and your 2-minute armchair critique is going to fall hopelessly flat. Ask questions, offer insights, but criticism comes best from peers, which most of us are not.
They do have their own "fields," silly. Take yourself a little trip out to Humboldt County, CA. That's redwood country, there, and you'll find most of the county is owned by the lumber companies.
Indeed, if you had actually read my post you replied to, you'd have realized that your argument was deflated before it was started: they aren't being short-sighted about it. Most of these companies have been around for about a century or so and are cutting down trees they've planted in that time-frame. Public lands aren't being clear-cut, like you're implying. And when they harvest on public lands, there are very clear rules about replanting.
Trust me, the envirowacko propaganda they gave you in school is a little off the mark.
We're tearing down forests and paving over habitat all the time? Pardon me if I'm rather confused by that. There's a big difference between reality and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest.
:)
My maternal extended family has worked in the logging industry for more than fifty years. And strangely enough, the lumber companies are still making money and selling cheap lumber. They certainly aren't cutting everything down in their path and moving on like some strange marauders. There's only a certain amount of land they own, and they've always recognized that they have to replace what they cut down if they want to stay in business. Thus, nearly every tree cut down by Simpson Lumber or other companies was a tree they planted 50 years ago. They plant 5 trees for every one they cut down, in fact.
And then you have places like the Salt Lake Valley. It looks like a veritable forest, yet when we evil slash and burn white folks got here 150 years ago, there wasn't a tree in the valley. We planted all of them. There are a lot of reasonable estimates that there are now more trees and forest in the United States than there were when the pilgrims set foot in Plymouth.
What's really distressing is that, when you get into the higher echelons of these environmentalist groups, they don't give one hoot about the environment. Go do an internship for one of them in Washington. It'll be a real eye opener, from what I've heard.
Yeah, that stuff's even worse than hydrogen hydroxide!
You hit the nail on the head. Thanks for spelling it out so well.
Growing up sucked, and fantasy worlds of legos and other toys (complete with social structure, political intrigue, military action, dramatic dialogue) filled in with my imagination what my reality couldn't supply. Computers were nice to dink around with back in the late 80s and early 90s, but for me they didn't really hold anything really captivating. Then came this really cool game: Myst. I was hooked. Then I started finding RPGs like Realmz, FPS's like Doom and even more engrossing, Marathon (such an excellent storyline). Along came C&C and Warcraft II, Master of Orion, Escape Velocity, Diablo, Myth, Civilization, StarCraft, Baldur's Gate, etc. Hours and hours of exploration, experimentation, hacking (after I finished games, I'd pick them apart), FIGURING OUT. That was the bottom line: figuring out what I could do in the game and what I could make the game do.
School, well, school absolutely sucked. I gained everything I could learn from school quickly, and then I went home and learned on my own. The only worthwhile class in high school was debate. I competed in foreign extemp, and my coach gave me the leeway to do all my own research, to put together my own files, to learn on my own and then bring that knowledge I gained to competitions. I used the class for practicing my debating skills, but I was really in it because it was finally something that stretched and tested my knowledge. And yes, I was pretty good. But I still spent a lot of time reading and playing computer games, hours each day on games. They were the mental stimulus this artificial reality of school moved too slow in providing.
If school had delved into really teaching symbolism and structure (from linguistics to algebra to science) early on, rather than spelling exercises, reading silly books 5 grade levels behind what I read in my spare time, arithmetic tables, and "white man is evil, indians are good" history, and delved into more advanced topics from there, there's a very good chance it could have kept my attention. But it didn't, and I was in seventh grade helping freshmen with their algebra, continually demonstrating to myself that I could do absolutely no homework and still be more skilled in all the subject matter than my peers. Is it any wonder that computer games were so attractive? They offered stuff, even made-up stuff, that I didn't already know.
That's the problem with public or any mass education: they try to use the same formula to teach all of us, and the formula is only tailored to one type of temperament: kids who care about authority, like to have stickers saying "Great Job!" on their assignments, and really think their teachers know what they're talking about without finding out for themselves.
Quite the contrary, there are a lot of rich people willing to pay half a mil to go to space. Yeah, you're probably not their primary target, but the America Space Prize is absolutely about private space access, commercial development, and tourism. You're just going to have to stomach the fact that it will only be available to extremely wealthy people for a while. As for me, I'm hedging my bets that I can get people to pay me half a mil to take 'em to space.
The Apollo craft really only had thin sheets of metal, almost like a rigid aluminum foil, as the only thing between the astronauts and outer space. It was very thin, and an inflatable structure held rigid by the inside air pressure wouldn't be very different, except that it'd be a lot smaller and easier to launch in the first place. Then once it's up, you just blow it up, and voila, you've got yourself an orbital habitat.
d+d->4He will not yield any neutrons. You will definitely get gamma rays (2.2 MeV), but this really does require working close to background levels with the detection stuff. But you've completely shot your credibility in the foot if you're going to claim that d+d->4He is going to give neutrons, as if somehow it gave out the necessary almost 1 GeV to poop out a neutron that wasn't existent in the system previously. d+t->4He + n, and d+d->3He + n, but when d+d->4He is the dominant reaction, and the rate of 4He production is way above possible contamination, neutrons may still be present from other reactions, but not nearly enough to account for the heat production.
So, there's nuclear products and, yes, we have had radiation signatures. Go back and look at the original Jones paper submitted to Nature on March 23, 1989, and published immediately afterward. It's MOST DEFINITELY nuclear. Unless you're going to claim that Sr -> Mo and Cs -> Pr aren't nuclear processes, I think you have to concede that point. Whether or not the energy involved is really useable is debatable, but any claim that the process isn't nuclear is simply a refusal to believe what all the evidence points to simply as a matter of pride and arrogance.
Unfortunately, most of our models for fusion involve bare nuclei and we don't really know what's going on when it's not in a plasma state. The presence of an electron cloud can do funky things with the coulomb barrier, and we know that nuclear cross sectional areas are increased dramatically at low energies, 10 keV or less.
It's certainly been interesting that the rate of neutron creation has been so low, but that doesn't rule out nuclear processes. It just rules out d+d --> He3 + n + gamma as the dominant reaction. d+d --> He4 is, even in conventional nuclear physics, very possible, and indeed that's what we see the most of. The underlying mechanism for why this is the favored reaction isn't fully understood, but the data does fit with a nuclear process.
Our present lack of a cogent theory widely accepted in the community is definitely a point against us, but having a theory like that is not a prerequisite to believing what you're seeing. Elemental transmutation in d+Z reactions is common, and if you're turning Cs into Pr, and the amount of Cs is decreasing proportional to the increase in Pr, you're going to have a VERY hard time arguing that it's not a nuclear process. (See Iwamura, www.lenr-canr.org )
Apparently, the nucleus isn't such a well understood system after all, and we'd all be smart to not assume we know that much about anything. The field really does deserve more credence than you mainstream NPs have been willing to give it.
On the contrary, it had several reproducible results, immediately, at MIT, Texas A&M, and many others. But the /rate/ of reproducibility remained low and the conditions in which it occurred were and still are poorly understood. Since then, reproducibility rates for deuterium-deuterium and deuterium-metal reactions have climbed really high (some Japanese researchers with Mitsubishi have near 100 percent).
What we do know is that nuclear cross sectional areas increase dramatically at lower energies, 10 keV or less. We suspect that, in very general terms, the electronic structure of metal lattices is playing a role in reducing the Coulomb barrier. And we know that palladium, like used in the Pons-Fleischman experiments, doesn't work if it's pure, and it's the addition of impurities like calcium oxide that contribute to the reaction.
As for a conspiracy to shush it up, it's somewhat true. It's more like mob behavior and fear. Hot fusion research has been extremely threatened, as well as parts of the energy sector, and both have a lot of clout with the DoE. That matters if you're a researcher trying to get funding.
The history of cold fusion really needs some clarification. It was really discovered in 1986, not 1989, by Steven Jones of BYU. If you want, you can request a copy of the relevant minutes from the research group meetings back then: they even called it cold fusion, which might be somewhat of a misnomer, now that the processes are understood a bit better. Pons and Fleischman came across it independently, and the DoE asked Jones to review their work. Their avenue of approach focused a lot on calorimetry, while Dr. Jones had been focusing on looking for nuclear products (neutrons, tritium, helium-3, etc).
Since the two groups had been working on it at the same time and Jones had looked over Pons and Fleischman's stuff, they had made an agreement to publish simultaneously. BYU being so close to the UofU, they were going to meet at SLC Int'l Airport and send in their papers to Nature together. That was to be on March 24th, 1989. Instead, Pons and Fleischman had a press conference on March 23rd, completely stabbing Jones in the back. And worse, they were extremely sloppy, and later unethical. They had a data chart which showed an energy spike at 2.5 MeV, and when somebody pointed out to them that it should have been 2.2 MeV for a d+d reaction, they adjusted the chart downward for their next presentation. The ensuing aftermath nearly completely crippled the field and gave everybody working in it a black eye.
Gratefully, there have been quite a few who decided to continue working in the field. Researchers from Los Alamos, MIT, Naval Research, all over Japan and Italy, BYU, for a good while Texas A&M (there was some controversy there), and elsewhere have made significant progress in the 15 years since that fiasco. I've been working in the BYU group for a year now, and we've had elemental transmutation in varied experiments Sr --> Y, Mo, and I can assure you, the effect is real. And it HAS been published in peer-reviewed journals. Unfortunately, most peer-reviewed journals, because of the stigma the field had gained, automatically rejected anything that sounded like it had anything to do with cold fusion.
For more information about research that's been happening in the field itself, see www.lenr-canr.org
Whoever modded the parent off-topic is an idjit. People, you don't make bread OR beer without yeast, which is influenced, apparently, by these prions. The same prions that are suspected to be the cause of Mad Cow Disease. See the connection? Yeah, the parent is definitely on-topic.
This is the typical trend of NASA and its budget requests, although a 7 percent cut is a little steep. This is also a big part of the reason why NASA is such a lame duck. Yes, they have had some excellent missions, Galileo, Cassinni, Spirit and Opportunity, but they've all cost way too much.
:)
Private space ventures, like Scaled Composites, have been able to reach the space boundary for very little money: $20 million. As the Economist pointed out, "NASA can't even launch a kite for 20 million dollars." The right stuff has been missing from NASA and Congress both for decades, and there's no reason to believe that either is suddenly going to be able to cut the fat and actually be efficient with anything.
What worries me about this is that it may (though I really don't know) kick NASA between the legs hard enough that people become even more disenchanted with it. Why should they be excited for an organization that spends 15 billion dollars a year on projects that should cost 150 million? And produces about as much? Then space exploration as a whole loses its luster, and private corporations, who are actually doing something useful, are hurt. From talking with them, it seems the majority of engineers working for these start-up rocket companies (XCor, Scaled Composites, SpaceX, Armadillo, etc.) can't stand NASA's bullcrap. But they still need public support, which gets flushed down the drain with NASA.
On the other hand, this may be just the ticket to get the attention over to those folks who need investment. Everybody wants to be an astronaut when they grow up.
Nice logic, buddy.
Except, you've taken an argument that would establish the fact that this won't solve global warming, oil depletion, rising energy costs, and so on, while the statement was that it would be a "weapon in the fight against global warming." M-16s solely can't win a war, nor can tanks, Apaches, aircraft, crew served weapons, effective intelligence, secure supply routes, or anything else by itself win a war. But an effective application of several weapons can.
Besides, global warming ISN'T exponential. It's logarithmic too. Sort of. Really, it's more of an oscillatory pattern, one that's going to make life difficult in the short and medium terms. Having a tool in dampening these oscillations, such as the benefits that may come from using propane, would definitely be useful. A useful tool for dampening any man-made amplifications of natural climatic oscillations could very well be considered a "weapon in the fight against global warming" without being incorrect.
It's good you're putting those math skills of yours to use. Broaden your experience base, and you may be able to effectively apply them to real world situations.
My girlfriend? Heh. Lord Omlette, you kidder, you.
Nuclear fusion of deuterium produces about the same, 2.5 MeV. But considering that in about 2 grams of deuterium, there are 6.02*10^23 particles, if those two grams underwent fusion, you'd have (2.5 MeV/reaction)*(3.01*10^23 reactions)...
:)
By comparison, Halfnium particles are much heavier, about 178.49 g/mol, so you'd have to have a much heavier battery to get the same sort of reaction rate going with it, but for the most part, it's easily manageable.
Now, of course, there are differences with that reaction rate based on nuclear surface tension, questions of whether or not the Hf can really be induced to undergo fission, questions about how to get deuterium to fuse, but from a numerical standpoint, you don't have to have that much material to provide you power.
As for the resultant crap, well, it can't be too much worse than we already get from nuclear reactors, can it?
Thank you very much. I am grateful that Pat Tillman went out and did what he did. I'm grateful for all the people who are on the ground now. I'm an intelligence analyst in the 19th SF, and our unit has taken several casualties in Afghanistan. That Pat Tillman received more publicity than others somewhat unnerves me. He's a hero, no doubt, but no moreso than Sgt. Romero or Sgt. Vance, both from my group. Why didn't they receive front page coverage? They weren't former NFL players. And to think on it, I don't think Pat Tillman would have appreciated being made something special either.
A fusion related accident isn't going to be bad. There is no melt down. If your field loses confinement, everything cools down nearly instantaneously, and you just have this hydrogen and helium gas sitting in your reactor. There are no control rods, no heavy isotopes... That's why it's so great: it's nearly perfect. It has potential to provide cheap energy, clean reactions, minimal hazards... Now, whether that will have anything to do with transporation is another question. Mr. Fusion isn't likely to see break-even on your hover-car.
Who on earth modded the parent informative?