Feasibility of the Space Elevator.
on
Space Elevator Update
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I recall Arthur Clarke pitching the initial concept for a Space Elevator some time back, and revisited the idea in 3001 : The Final Odyssey - in which he depicted planet Earth having a fully functional ( four actually ) space elevator system; which facilitated a subset of human civilisation living in low earth orbits in reduced gravity - thus invoking presumed benefits of doing so.
Anywho. He spoke a couple years ago, subsequent to 3001's release on how at the time of writing, such a feat was nigh on impossible at this stage - as the materials to construct the 'elevator' were yet to be developed. Until now. The carbon molecule Buckminsterfullerene ( C60 ), also known as 'Fullerene', is supposedly strong enough to actually make such a concept a reality - which is in part the reason the space elevator was hurled back into the limelight of late.
I think its a fascinating idea - which until we develop propulsion systems beyond the primative scope of the 1,000+ year old firecracker concept, certainly seems a more elegant way for the species to venture into Space more regulary. Or, at the very least, be the catalyst for what could perhaps become the initial stepping stones to establishing a permanent presence in space which will hopefully later lead to space initiated launches.
Forgive my ignorance, MEMS and Nanotech has fascinated me for a while, but I don't know enough of the math behind them to tell if this is true. My grandfather, rest his soul, once told me of something called the Sailor's Rope Rule, which effectively says that the weight a rope can support is diminished by its length. Thus, a 500 lb. rope might support 500 lbs when there's less than a foot or so in length between the pully and the weight, but might only support 250 lbs when there is a good 100 ft. or so... The actual support degradation of course depends upon the width of the rope and the material the rope is made of.
So what I'm wondering is, does the same apply to the weight supported by nanotubes and other molecular chains. I figure it has to be less of a degradation due to the ionic bonds involved, but it would seem to me that, unless some Quantum rule is involved dealing with extremely small-scale weight supporting chains, that they might never overcome this problem due to the sheer thinness of the tubes, chains, etc. It might be extremely strong material, but if it's width is only a few atoms wide, wouldn't this material be, at least in single lengths, more or less useless by the time it got to a respectable length? This is, of course, excluding bundles, which make the most sense, I'm really just curious if the same rule applies to nanotubes as applies to rope.
My first thought upon hearing of the space elevator was "what happens if it breaks?" Who cares if science suggests it won't be a catastrophe? Most terrorists do not exactly subscribe to the latest scientific journals. A lightbulb will go off in one of their dim minds and they'll try to ram a plane into the cable, or the tower, or whatever, hoping it will somehow dislodge the asteroid from orbit and send it crashing into Washington D.C. or something. It'd make a great scifi action movie, wouldn't it?
And don't forget it'd be a tremendous icon of Western achievement. You'd better believe everyone in the US, or whatever country eventually builds one, would be proud as hell of it. The media would be going on and on about how it'll usher in a new age for mankind, and so on, and so forth. If terrorists could somehow take it out, wouldn't that have tremendous psychological value? Remember that they chose the World Trade Center and Pentagon to strike at us, two (or three) buildings that symbolized, to them, everything that's wrong with the US. Wouldn't a tower that reaches into the heavens (hello, Tower of Babel?) symbolize that even more?
It's quite reasonable to take terrorism into consideration when designing a structure. While I may be obsessing over the whole "living in fear" deal, its definitely something that needs to be considered.
I've read quite a few posts about "riding the space elevator." I'm under the impression (and yes, I RTFA) that the space elevator would be solely used to send cargo up to space. Astronauts would still get up to the ISS by conventional means, and then the space elevator would just be a cheap[er] way to get supplies up to them without worrying about sending up rockets. Unless I missed something, humans wouldn't be travelling on this space elevator at all.
Everyone who is interested in space elevators may also be interested in the book Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven, which features a sort of organic space elevator; a tree that grows from a planet far into space. Nice story.
How about creating a simulator for a space elevator? It would be great to mess around with values to see how possible this thing really is. The closest thing to a simulator I've seen is this but its sadly lacking.
http://spaceelevator.sourceforge.net, anyone?
Is the space elevator a bit premature?
on
Space Elevator Update
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A "space elevator" is totally unlike anything ever done before. As I read in a Slashdot post some years ago (referring to nanotubes, the favorite among space-elevator aficionados), "When somebody has built a 40,000 millimeter bridge across a creek on campus, then we can start to talk about a 40,000 kilometer bridge straight up".
The fact that we have not yet achieved one millionth of the task (and in fact fall several orders of magnitude for that) suggests to me that, much as I would love to see a space elevator in place, the job today belongs to materials scientists who are looking at shorter-term goals.
An eye to the future is great, but experimenting on climbers is like practicing the high jump: if you're jumping twice as high today as last year, I wouldn't start drawing any exponential curves. The ribbon is the really, really hard part, and we're currently so far away from it that research energy is better spent elsewhere for a while. 2010 is way, way too close.
Maybe with enough motivation we could get that 40,000 mm bridge by 2010, but somehow I doubt you're going to raise $10 million to build a bridge. The X-prize shot somebody into space for that kind of money.
I'm prepared to be wrong. I'm a software developer, and I've learned that as a consultant I can say, "Your project is doomed" with 95% accuracy before I've even heard your name. Being a nay-sayer is easy. But the real trick is being able to spot the 5% that will actually be profitable, and there are a lot of projects more immediately deserving of this kind of money.
The cartoon was cute and all, but what I'm wondering is if its really accurate or not. Are bits really these square pieces on a platter? I always had the impression that they were magnetic grooves in the platter (thus why you dont put a magnet near it). I don't see how you could make grooves perpendicular, so I guess I'm wrong. I did RTFA, but it would be great to see a better explanation of it!
The DMCA was shot down in Canada so this is just another pathetic attempt to fight fair use. I have no doubt that this bill will fail just like the rest.
Canada has a lot more liberals than the US, and many less politicians who are swayed by corporate interests. Very little chance Canada will ever have a "real" anti-freedom law like the DMCA or like this one.
What you say is true, but the court case is not the RIAA against P2P in general. The court case is RIAA against Grokster and Morpheus. Both of those companies definitely have a business model.
You can easily run point to point encryption over a VPN (H.323 and SIP over IPSEC tunnels) to encrypt your VOIP communication. One potential concern, however, is that the computationally intensive nature of IPSec processing could add unacceptable latency to IP voice packets, but if you have decent broadband it most likely would not be a problem.
An alternative would be to use encryption in IAX2, which a man named Mark Spencer is already working on. Running IAX over stunnel would probably be feasible if both sides of a tunnel were machines.
In short: Secure, standards-based Internet telephony is a reality today, ready to be exploited in the next wave of Internet applications.
Re:There should be more online awards given.......
on
2005 Hugo Nominations
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· Score: 1
All members of WorldCon are entitled to make nominations and to vote on who receives the Hugo Awards. That's pretty open.
Open online voting would create huge headaches and would be very hard to secure (people could easily vote more than once). If online polls at CNN, MSNBC and other news sites are to be believed, George W. Bush trounced John Kerry in November's elections. The reason most online polls are 90 percent inaccurate is because they're self-selected and do not accurately represent the whole population.
The word 'octopus' is derived from the Greek oktopous - okto, "eight," and pous, "foot." The Greek plural of pous is podes. Since it is best to use a Greek plural for a Greek root that means the most proper plural for octopus IS octopodes like you said. However, practically no one uses this term, not even the scientists who study the animals.
The word octopi is still the least correct of our options. That usage mistakes the "us" on the end of octopus as a Latin suffix, and applies a Latin plural to it. You shouldn't put a Latin plural on the end of a Greek root.
This leaves us with octopuses, which isn't as technically correct as octopodes, but conforms to the rule for English plurals.
Still, Webster's gives both octopuses and octopi as plurals for octopus.
If your school is just throttling Bittorrent, you can easily change the ports. Just go into the Options of whatever client you're using and change the port range to something high (like 49000-49300). Or, if you want to be extra careful/paranoid, you can change it to port 80 or such so anyone who views your computer would assume its a web server or such.
If you are actually behind a real firewall, there is really no way around it, unless your school leaves you some ports open. You can visit a Port Tester and try a few common ports (52, 80, 81, 110, etc.) to see if any of them go through. If one does, just change Bittorrent's port to that port. If none go through, then.. well, you're outta luck.
Hatch himself, is actually an amateur musician (http://www.hatchmusic.com/). I am guessing we will not be seeing his latest album available through Napster.
At $125 each, 40gb of Memory Stick Duos is actually only $5,000.
But, seriously, the PSP isn't meant for people who are going to be having 40gb of music. It isn't meant for people to backup their harddrive onto. Its meant for people to buy 2gb of memory and put some music on it, and fill the rest with movies. And when you're done with those movies and bored of those songs, you swap them out for new ones.
You can't really compare an iPod, a music-only device, to only the music function of the PSP. It would be like me saying the DS is way better than iPod because the games on the iPod suck.
By the way, you can reencode your DVDs down to 300mb each and play them from your Memory Sticks without having to buy a UMD.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall Arthur Clarke pitching the initial concept for a Space Elevator some time back, and revisited the idea in 3001 : The Final Odyssey - in which he depicted planet Earth having a fully functional ( four actually ) space elevator system; which facilitated a subset of human civilisation living in low earth orbits in reduced gravity - thus invoking presumed benefits of doing so.
Anywho. He spoke a couple years ago, subsequent to 3001's release on how at the time of writing, such a feat was nigh on impossible at this stage - as the materials to construct the 'elevator' were yet to be developed. Until now. The carbon molecule Buckminsterfullerene ( C60 ), also known as 'Fullerene', is supposedly strong enough to actually make such a concept a reality - which is in part the reason the space elevator was hurled back into the limelight of late.
I think its a fascinating idea - which until we develop propulsion systems beyond the primative scope of the 1,000+ year old firecracker concept, certainly seems a more elegant way for the species to venture into Space more regulary. Or, at the very least, be the catalyst for what could perhaps become the initial stepping stones to establishing a permanent presence in space which will hopefully later lead to space initiated launches.
Forgive my ignorance, MEMS and Nanotech has fascinated me for a while, but I don't know enough of the math behind them to tell if this is true. My grandfather, rest his soul, once told me of something called the Sailor's Rope Rule, which effectively says that the weight a rope can support is diminished by its length. Thus, a 500 lb. rope might support 500 lbs when there's less than a foot or so in length between the pully and the weight, but might only support 250 lbs when there is a good 100 ft. or so... The actual support degradation of course depends upon the width of the rope and the material the rope is made of.
So what I'm wondering is, does the same apply to the weight supported by nanotubes and other molecular chains. I figure it has to be less of a degradation due to the ionic bonds involved, but it would seem to me that, unless some Quantum rule is involved dealing with extremely small-scale weight supporting chains, that they might never overcome this problem due to the sheer thinness of the tubes, chains, etc. It might be extremely strong material, but if it's width is only a few atoms wide, wouldn't this material be, at least in single lengths, more or less useless by the time it got to a respectable length? This is, of course, excluding bundles, which make the most sense, I'm really just curious if the same rule applies to nanotubes as applies to rope.
Andrew Price's list of alternative names:
space bridge space way space rail
In the effort to increase public comprehension of this concept, I offer up "space yo-yo".
My first thought upon hearing of the space elevator was "what happens if it breaks?" Who cares if science suggests it won't be a catastrophe? Most terrorists do not exactly subscribe to the latest scientific journals. A lightbulb will go off in one of their dim minds and they'll try to ram a plane into the cable, or the tower, or whatever, hoping it will somehow dislodge the asteroid from orbit and send it crashing into Washington D.C. or something. It'd make a great scifi action movie, wouldn't it?
And don't forget it'd be a tremendous icon of Western achievement. You'd better believe everyone in the US, or whatever country eventually builds one, would be proud as hell of it. The media would be going on and on about how it'll usher in a new age for mankind, and so on, and so forth. If terrorists could somehow take it out, wouldn't that have tremendous psychological value? Remember that they chose the World Trade Center and Pentagon to strike at us, two (or three) buildings that symbolized, to them, everything that's wrong with the US. Wouldn't a tower that reaches into the heavens (hello, Tower of Babel?) symbolize that even more?
It's quite reasonable to take terrorism into consideration when designing a structure. While I may be obsessing over the whole "living in fear" deal, its definitely something that needs to be considered.
I've read quite a few posts about "riding the space elevator." I'm under the impression (and yes, I RTFA) that the space elevator would be solely used to send cargo up to space. Astronauts would still get up to the ISS by conventional means, and then the space elevator would just be a cheap[er] way to get supplies up to them without worrying about sending up rockets. Unless I missed something, humans wouldn't be travelling on this space elevator at all.
Everyone who is interested in space elevators may also be interested in the book Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven, which features a sort of organic space elevator; a tree that grows from a planet far into space. Nice story.
How about creating a simulator for a space elevator? It would be great to mess around with values to see how possible this thing really is. The closest thing to a simulator I've seen is this but its sadly lacking.
http://spaceelevator.sourceforge.net, anyone?
A "space elevator" is totally unlike anything ever done before. As I read in a Slashdot post some years ago (referring to nanotubes, the favorite among space-elevator aficionados), "When somebody has built a 40,000 millimeter bridge across a creek on campus, then we can start to talk about a 40,000 kilometer bridge straight up".
The fact that we have not yet achieved one millionth of the task (and in fact fall several orders of magnitude for that) suggests to me that, much as I would love to see a space elevator in place, the job today belongs to materials scientists who are looking at shorter-term goals.
An eye to the future is great, but experimenting on climbers is like practicing the high jump: if you're jumping twice as high today as last year, I wouldn't start drawing any exponential curves. The ribbon is the really, really hard part, and we're currently so far away from it that research energy is better spent elsewhere for a while. 2010 is way, way too close.
Maybe with enough motivation we could get that 40,000 mm bridge by 2010, but somehow I doubt you're going to raise $10 million to build a bridge. The X-prize shot somebody into space for that kind of money.
I'm prepared to be wrong. I'm a software developer, and I've learned that as a consultant I can say, "Your project is doomed" with 95% accuracy before I've even heard your name. Being a nay-sayer is easy. But the real trick is being able to spot the 5% that will actually be profitable, and there are a lot of projects more immediately deserving of this kind of money.
The music in normal elevators is already driving me crazy...
Imagine going upwards for hundred sof miles while having to listen to Julio Iglesias' songs, performed by some guy on a synthesizer. NOOOOOO!
The cartoon was cute and all, but what I'm wondering is if its really accurate or not. Are bits really these square pieces on a platter? I always had the impression that they were magnetic grooves in the platter (thus why you dont put a magnet near it). I don't see how you could make grooves perpendicular, so I guess I'm wrong. I did RTFA, but it would be great to see a better explanation of it!
So I guess CherryOS stands for "Cherry Open Source" now?
Redhat is NOT a GPL product. Red Hat is licensed under its own open-source license.
The DMCA was shot down in Canada so this is just another pathetic attempt to fight fair use. I have no doubt that this bill will fail just like the rest.
Canada has a lot more liberals than the US, and many less politicians who are swayed by corporate interests. Very little chance Canada will ever have a "real" anti-freedom law like the DMCA or like this one.
Its a wonder why I still live in the US.
No, it isn't... Its April Phools!
I guess Slashdot got dunced on this one. These are a real accessory to protect the iPod, not an April Fools joke.
The submitter of the story must be giggling to himself, "April Fools!"
SELL SHORT! SELL SHORT!
Hey, if Linux Torvalds thinks that a mac is good enough for him, its definitely good enough for me.
What you say is true, but the court case is not the RIAA against P2P in general. The court case is RIAA against Grokster and Morpheus. Both of those companies definitely have a business model.
You can easily run point to point encryption over a VPN (H.323 and SIP over IPSEC tunnels) to encrypt your VOIP communication. One potential concern, however, is that the computationally intensive nature of IPSec processing could add unacceptable latency to IP voice packets, but if you have decent broadband it most likely would not be a problem.
An alternative would be to use encryption in IAX2, which a man named Mark Spencer is already working on. Running IAX over stunnel would probably be feasible if both sides of a tunnel were machines.
In short: Secure, standards-based Internet telephony is a reality today, ready to be exploited in the next wave of Internet applications.
All members of WorldCon are entitled to make nominations and to vote on who receives the Hugo Awards. That's pretty open.
Open online voting would create huge headaches and would be very hard to secure (people could easily vote more than once). If online polls at CNN, MSNBC and other news sites are to be believed, George W. Bush trounced John Kerry in November's elections. The reason most online polls are 90 percent inaccurate is because they're self-selected and do not accurately represent the whole population.
The word 'octopus' is derived from the Greek oktopous - okto, "eight," and pous, "foot." The Greek plural of pous is podes. Since it is best to use a Greek plural for a Greek root that means the most proper plural for octopus IS octopodes like you said. However, practically no one uses this term, not even the scientists who study the animals.
The word octopi is still the least correct of our options. That usage mistakes the "us" on the end of octopus as a Latin suffix, and applies a Latin plural to it. You shouldn't put a Latin plural on the end of a Greek root.
This leaves us with octopuses, which isn't as technically correct as octopodes, but conforms to the rule for English plurals.
Still, Webster's gives both octopuses and octopi as plurals for octopus.
If your school is just throttling Bittorrent, you can easily change the ports. Just go into the Options of whatever client you're using and change the port range to something high (like 49000-49300). Or, if you want to be extra careful/paranoid, you can change it to port 80 or such so anyone who views your computer would assume its a web server or such.
If you are actually behind a real firewall, there is really no way around it, unless your school leaves you some ports open. You can visit a Port Tester and try a few common ports (52, 80, 81, 110, etc.) to see if any of them go through. If one does, just change Bittorrent's port to that port. If none go through, then.. well, you're outta luck.
I found this article on Mr Hatch quite amusing too for anyone interested... Orrin Hatch, Software Pirate?
Hatch himself, is actually an amateur musician (http://www.hatchmusic.com/). I am guessing we will not be seeing his latest album available through Napster.
At $125 each, 40gb of Memory Stick Duos is actually only $5,000.
But, seriously, the PSP isn't meant for people who are going to be having 40gb of music. It isn't meant for people to backup their harddrive onto. Its meant for people to buy 2gb of memory and put some music on it, and fill the rest with movies. And when you're done with those movies and bored of those songs, you swap them out for new ones.
You can't really compare an iPod, a music-only device, to only the music function of the PSP. It would be like me saying the DS is way better than iPod because the games on the iPod suck.
By the way, you can reencode your DVDs down to 300mb each and play them from your Memory Sticks without having to buy a UMD.
You can find mirrors of all the links posted on Slashdot at http://www.mirrordot.org/.