I've seen some misunderstandings in several posts that warrant correction at the top level.
Dealing with relativistic speeds is an engineering problem, and not necessarily a difficult (at least when compared with other challenges of interstellar travel) one. https://phys.org/news/2018-09-...
Deceleration with light sails is a solved problem, at least on paper. I'm not aware of any deployed examples. http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/21...
Just about the only chance to make hydrogen as a fuel worthwhile (compared to electricity production) is if we can use availably energy _directly_ for electrolysis or thermal decomposition in a way that's more efficient than making electricity. Since PV panels are wildly inefficient (albeit significantly more efficient than photosynthesis), a solution like this might turn out to be a game changer, making a hydrogen economy feasible instead of a subsidy-fueled wildly inefficient pipe-dream.
Thermal decomposition is how this would work, unless electricity becomes so cheap (or Hydrogen valuable) that the economics of electrolysis work.
The heat might come from very high temperature steam from gas-cooled high temperature nuclear reactors. This high temperature steam could potentially have a lot of industrial applications eventually, replacing natural gas powered process heat and reducing CO2 emission and methane leaks.
As a added bonus, higher temperatures mean higher thermodynamic efficiency, resulting in more electricity per unit of fuel, and less waste heat to dump.
Not exactly. Reprocessing to extract Plutonium and unburnt fissile Uranium is absolutely a civilian thing, and still uses nasty nitric acid, although much of the waste at Hanford is from earlier processing that was a lot less efficient. France and Japan have done a lot of civilian reprocessing in recent times.
Most (in excess of ninety percent!) of the U-235 fuel in modern commercial light water reactors is not burnt, due to the accumulation of "neutron poison" reaction products that kill the reactions. A bit like alcohol killing/inhibiting the yeast in fermented products, requiring distillation to obtain higher alcohol concentrations.
There are approaches to getting better fuel economy, but most of these involve higher enrichment, fast spectrum reactors that have a lot of serious engineering problems, or reactor designs that are completely untested and can't address carbon emission concerns in the near term.
Not even close. Maybe in property losses, but 18,000 people died; it's closer to four orders of magnitude by that metric.
I tried looking up property losses, but what I ended up finding was total economic impact, which is too vaguely defined for this comparison.
Umm, don't count on it. Businesses making those kinds of bets get their management fired or they die. Maybe market forces will produce a substitute, but it will, at least at first, cost a lot more, and possibly perform not as well.
Market forces might just as easily push your wind turbines out and substitute something else more economical (which may or may not be as nice by some other metric), if materials science and availability of the resources don't cooperate!
Precision doesn't gain you anything when accuracy is the actual problem. Why thousandths of seconds are significant where the bulk activity of a human is concerned baffles me. At this level of precision, the outcome is basically arbitrary.
would you use battery technology adapted for transportation (high specific energy/power) for a stationary application? Flow batteries have been around for decades for just this sort of application. They load follow well, too. Not as sexy as Elon Musk, though, I guess. (Yuck!) He probably can deliver faster though, and might subsidize it a bit for the PR.
Is more R&D into advanced GenIV designs like MSR, VHTR, or small modular reactors, and a less punishing regulatory review process. We are abdicating our leadership to China, India, and Europe.
Still a serious bug, but if forward secrecy had been widely deployed, much, much less threat exposure would have occurred.
That's the lesson. Code audits are great, but they still miss stuff and are expensive. Take good practices more seriously, and you get a lot of bang for your investment in time/money/whatever.
But not taking action has consequences, too. Rather scary ones, in this case, I think one could argue. Maybe the responsible thing to do is to is to take a more deliberative role in how our species is altering the environment, rather than just allowing ourselves to continue to alter it according to maladapted systems and nonconscious collective behavior.
between articles submitted with the term "correlation" in the summary, and with comments taking the article to task for being wrong about correlation implying causation.
Nevermind that most of the articles make no such claim at all.
BMW... mainstream..? Anway, tripling a small number is still a small number. Whether the numbers are small is impossible to judge from the summary.. or the article.
Science education at the primary level has long emphasized the products of science, with little regard for the process. Science teachers are a product of this system as much as everyone else. Most of them just aren't equipped to draw a distinction between science and pseudoscience.
Mumbling something about falsifiability isn't going to fly without motivating it and showing evidence, whether or not they have internalized those concepts themselves. Holding them to higher standards won't help, as there aren't enough qualified individuals to go around, unless some sort of mass teaching approach becomes the norm, and it's hard to see that working well with kids.
This is not an educational problem. It's a cultural problem, and it needs a broader approch.
Nobod's suggesting we send colonists! Well, nobody serious.
We've sent a lot of probes to Mars in the last couple of decades, a number of which soft-landed. A mission to take astronaust to Martian orbit could be done in a few years, with proper funding. A more likely scenario is landing and getting back, that would take a couple of decades to plan and develop, but it isn't really that far fetched.
Pneumonic plague being transmitted by air isn't news. It's a form of the disease that gets into your lungs, after all. Also, the primary vector isn't rats at all, but fleas, which often go directly from person to person.
The article's credibility is not helped at all when it mentions the plague virus, when it is actually caused by a bacterium.
Slashdot Mirror
that mythical equality has been used to justify inequality.
I've seen some misunderstandings in several posts that warrant correction at the top level.
Dealing with relativistic speeds is an engineering problem, and not necessarily a difficult (at least when compared with other challenges of interstellar travel) one.
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-...
Deceleration with light sails is a solved problem, at least on paper. I'm not aware of any deployed examples.
http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/21...
Just about the only chance to make hydrogen as a fuel worthwhile (compared to electricity production) is if we can use availably energy _directly_ for electrolysis or thermal decomposition in a way that's more efficient than making electricity. Since PV panels are wildly inefficient (albeit significantly more efficient than photosynthesis), a solution like this might turn out to be a game changer, making a hydrogen economy feasible instead of a subsidy-fueled wildly inefficient pipe-dream.
Thermal decomposition is how this would work, unless electricity becomes so cheap (or Hydrogen valuable) that the economics of electrolysis work.
The heat might come from very high temperature steam from gas-cooled high temperature nuclear reactors. This high temperature steam could potentially have a lot of industrial applications eventually, replacing natural gas powered process heat and reducing CO2 emission and methane leaks.
As a added bonus, higher temperatures mean higher thermodynamic efficiency, resulting in more electricity per unit of fuel, and less waste heat to dump.
You know the next part. China is eating our lunch in innovation, but somehow Donald Trump isn't hot and bothered. Huh.
The Slashdot article
Not exactly. Reprocessing to extract Plutonium and unburnt fissile Uranium is absolutely a civilian thing, and still uses nasty nitric acid, although much of the waste at Hanford is from earlier processing that was a lot less efficient. France and Japan have done a lot of civilian reprocessing in recent times.
Most (in excess of ninety percent!) of the U-235 fuel in modern commercial light water reactors is not burnt, due to the accumulation of "neutron poison" reaction products that kill the reactions. A bit like alcohol killing/inhibiting the yeast in fermented products, requiring distillation to obtain higher alcohol concentrations.
There are approaches to getting better fuel economy, but most of these involve higher enrichment, fast spectrum reactors that have a lot of serious engineering problems, or reactor designs that are completely untested and can't address carbon emission concerns in the near term.
https://www.hanford.gov/page.c...
https://inis.iaea.org/collecti...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.nuclear-power.net/...
Not even close. Maybe in property losses, but 18,000 people died; it's closer to four orders of magnitude by that metric. I tried looking up property losses, but what I ended up finding was total economic impact, which is too vaguely defined for this comparison.
Umm, don't count on it. Businesses making those kinds of bets get their management fired or they die. Maybe market forces will produce a substitute, but it will, at least at first, cost a lot more, and possibly perform not as well.
Market forces might just as easily push your wind turbines out and substitute something else more economical (which may or may not be as nice by some other metric), if materials science and availability of the resources don't cooperate!
Precision doesn't gain you anything when accuracy is the actual problem. Why thousandths of seconds are significant where the bulk activity of a human is concerned baffles me. At this level of precision, the outcome is basically arbitrary.
would you use battery technology adapted for transportation (high specific energy/power) for a stationary application? Flow batteries have been around for decades for just this sort of application. They load follow well, too. Not as sexy as Elon Musk, though, I guess. (Yuck!) He probably can deliver faster though, and might subsidize it a bit for the PR.
Is more R&D into advanced GenIV designs like MSR, VHTR, or small modular reactors, and a less punishing regulatory review process. We are abdicating our leadership to China, India, and Europe.
Still a serious bug, but if forward secrecy had been widely deployed, much, much less threat exposure would have occurred.
That's the lesson. Code audits are great, but they still miss stuff and are expensive. Take good practices more seriously, and you get a lot of bang for your investment in time/money/whatever.
UCMP has an online exhibit that I find to be more browsable and complete than the other sites I've tried.
They don't seem to be related.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/p...
"the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"
But not taking action has consequences, too. Rather scary ones, in this case, I think one could argue. Maybe the responsible thing to do is to is to take a more deliberative role in how our species is altering the environment, rather than just allowing ourselves to continue to alter it according to maladapted systems and nonconscious collective behavior.
between articles submitted with the term "correlation" in the summary, and with comments taking the article to task for being wrong about correlation implying causation.
Nevermind that most of the articles make no such claim at all.
But is it causal? Hmm..
Perhaps they were right. I don't think anyone's ever proved humans are conscious either, except by defining it that way.
BMW... mainstream..?
Anway, tripling a small number is still a small number. Whether the numbers are small is impossible to judge from the summary.. or the article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Good luck with that. While your impractal solution fails to be implemented, the rest of us would prefer to have one in place that saves lives.
We can agree that the problem is people. That doesn't mean that the workable solution involves fixing those people.
Flight simulators. Of course, we've been using VR for these for decades, so it's not exactly news..
Science education at the primary level has long emphasized the products of science, with little regard for the process. Science teachers are a product of this system as much as everyone else. Most of them just aren't equipped to draw a distinction between science and pseudoscience.
Mumbling something about falsifiability isn't going to fly without motivating it and showing evidence, whether or not they have internalized those concepts themselves. Holding them to higher standards won't help, as there aren't enough qualified individuals to go around, unless some sort of mass teaching approach becomes the norm, and it's hard to see that working well with kids.
This is not an educational problem. It's a cultural problem, and it needs a broader approch.
Nobod's suggesting we send colonists! Well, nobody serious.
We've sent a lot of probes to Mars in the last couple of decades, a number of which soft-landed. A mission to take astronaust to Martian orbit could be done in a few years, with proper funding. A more likely scenario is landing and getting back, that would take a couple of decades to plan and develop, but it isn't really that far fetched.
Pneumonic plague being transmitted by air isn't news. It's a form of the disease that gets into your lungs, after all. Also, the primary vector isn't rats at all, but fleas, which often go directly from person to person.
The article's credibility is not helped at all when it mentions the plague virus, when it is actually caused by a bacterium.
Ok, you can't send em back, and the gov't says they aren't legal here. Why not a third destination?
simple, just use the existing, tried 'n true APIs until the new ones are vetted. I hack on my brain all the time. All the sane kids are doing it!