Pumping so much water out is like pumping the water out of the Titanic with a bucket. It won't help much. If the water is getting there fast enough to cover the pumps in such a short time, the pumps won't do much. Just abandon the city and move some other place.
Speaking of that, I wonder how many people as the result of this will decide to move, even if they didn't suffer any direct material losses? I imagine, I lived there, I would be selling my house and moving North. Even Kansas with the tornados doesn't sound bad after what Ms. Katrina did...
Thanks for clarification, you are right. The plasma wouldn't burn a huge hole in the ground, rather it will destabilize and cool. Anyone that works(ed) on the project TOKAMAK here?
By the way, I found this little 'Tokamak' game, it's kind of fun if you like this kind of stuff. here.
Thank you for clarification. The equations make it more clear.
I tried to say that the hydrogen (as an atom that has a nucleus) is already a system that has a tremendous amount of energy pent up as the strong nuclear force in it. The original post seemed to have assumed that hydrogen atoms are just somehow squashed by the gravity then it is that squashing potential energy that is released during fusion. (Much like a mechanical spring that is compressed then it heats up).
Actually everything is just different forms of energy and when they transition from one form to another sometime an extra boost is needed (the gravity in the sun's case perhaps, or the fission charge in an H bomb) to kickstart the transition reaction.
See my response to your article for answer to were the "free" energy comes from here
Also note, table-top fusion would be possible. It is not the lack of gravity, but more like the ability to sustain and contain the reaction. Tokamak and other fusion reactor attempts strugle with containing the plasma. The magnetic field is not like a solid container were you can just store substance, which is what would be desirable to do with a million degree hot plasma (it cannot touch anything without evaporating it, that is why you need the magnetic field in the first place). So if you can build some rigid force field like they have in sci-fi movies you could make it easier to have fusion power.
Then you need to kick-start the reaction and keep it going until it becomes self-sustainable.
Gravity is not the only thing that produces and sustains the fusion in the Sun.
You also assume that hydrogen is already available and its potential is 0 then you bring in the gravity and eventually the energy from the gravity gets emmited during fusion.
Some energy should have already been spent combining and 'creating' the hydrogen from the Big Bang soup of protons, neutrons and electrons. Of course the energy for the Big Bang should have come from some place, but that is another question [God anoyone? - *warning* lame flamebait attempt]
To release that energy you would need to break the nuclear bonds of hydrogen and then it will become helium. Think of it as wanting to get over a very tall mountain and on the other side there is a much deeper valey than the one you are on. But to get to the longer downward slope, on the other side, you need to overcome the upward slope in front of you.
In case of H and He transition, as someone already pointed out, the difference in the energy is just a little (the valey on the other side is just a little deeper than the one are on now). But when you have billions and billions of small differences -- they add up and you get the Sun (or an H bomb).
The court proceeding are usually public, you can just go to your court house in your county and sit through the whole day and make fun of stupid criminals that steal phones.
Now in most states (not in Ohio, Hamilton county yet), there are companies that will compile and publish the records online for a fee. Some counties just publish it themselves. It is always fun to check out your professors' or co-worker's traffic tickets and other run-ins with the law.
You know what's funny? I am from Cincinnati too. It was a Cinci Bell phone too that was stolen. Maybe it was the same guy that was making rounds through all the libraries;-)
I was asleep in the library at my school and someone stole my backpack with my cell phone in it. I found my backpack later in another part of the library with my cell phone missing.
I went to the campus police and filed a report. They said they'll get their detective to work on it later that day. I fought it was just a waste of time at first but then I slowly realized how stupid it is to steal a cell phone. Any call from that phone can be traced by the phone company. And sure enough that evening the police called me and told me to come pick up my cell phone. They called this idiot and told him that he better return it, to make it easier on him. He claimed that he didn't steal it but bought it from someone for $30. Yeah right! Anyway he returned it and I got my phone back.
Later the police gave me a copy of the sheet he singed when he returned the stolen item and the sheet has this guy's home address, date of birth and social security. I checked his court records and he has like 10 convictions on his record for theft, drug charges and some smaller things. I thought of posting his info out on the web, for people to have some fun with, but that would be a little too evil for me.
I agree with you. I will also add that our society often like to attribute everything to nature, today everything is "genetic". All of the sudden, everying that is not convinient or people refuse to be responsible or is just "genetic" and nothing can be done about. I smoke because my dad smoked, so I must be genetically programmed to do so. If I beat someone up, of course it is because my genes made me do it and so on.
Everyone is different and when it comes to gender there might be a small difference in some innate genetic predispositions that help men, on average, do better than women or vice-versa at some tasks. But what is more important and what needs to be stressed is the human ability to change, addapt, learn, think and grow. A women if she wants can study and excel and outperform men at any mental task.
You are right. Also good scientists will never report something like "men are smarter than women, we'll give you the results in a week, until then let the 'flames' begin!". Their reported finding (which might have been twisted by journalists to create a sensational headline) is so general it invites attention (mostly negative) and just provokes everyone. They should have said probably like "in a random sample of 1000 individual from Northern America, men have been found to solve derivatives %20 faster than women" and that's it. Let everone take for what it's worth. It doens't make claims about someone being 'better', or more 'intelligent' or whatever, it just reports a finding. This why, they don't make an implicit assumption that there is a common measure of intelligence...
Well that is just being ignorant. You'll find them in any camp, on the "left" and on the "right", even among the apparently "tollerant", seemingly "objective", secular liberal thinkers, which many feminists think they belong to. Just because they hate men, or just because they are against conservative "old and evil" Christians, doesn't make them less fanatical and biased.
That is where I was heading towards. Different cultures have different types of knowledge that need s to be applied. Some mathematician will be very un-intelligent to someone living in a tribe in Australia. So when there is talk about intelligence, we are mostly talking about the ability to take the IQ test, or the mathematical ability or the abilty to solve a particular type of a puzzle.
The article claim is too general and that makes it seem, at least, like scientific 'flamebait'. If all they measured is how fast can mean calculate derivatives and found that the sample they used caclulated derivatives 20% percent faster than women in their sample, that is all they should have reported, and let everyone take for what it is worth. Not "men are smarter than women, we'll show you the proof in a week".
I didn't use 'flamebait' in the direct sense. I was more a metaphore. A flame bait article is something that attracts attention and provokes a response (it sure did on Slashdot!), mostly a negative one, but it is still one way to put your name and the name of your research group out there. How much do you really hear about Ulster University, now there you go, their name is out there.
Notice, I _never_ said that "everyone is the same", I don't think that is true. Due to chemistry and hormones and physical differences, I think men and women have different _predispositions_. Testosterone, for example, might enhance brain's ability to process spatial orientation better. That doesn't mean that women cannot read maps if they want to learn the skill.
But I do believe that the study is probably biased or not done correctly because of the nature and cultuaral and social meaning of the topic. But you are right, I didn't see the data, so it is not fair towards the researchers.
Actually I am not familiar with it. After reading your post I searched for the phrase on Google and found the book on Amazon. If the local library doesn't have it, I'll pay $1 or so to get.
The way I see it, the problem is not that women or men might be better at math or logic puzzles of whatever, it is finding scientists that are unbiases and will conduct a fair and objective investigation.
This issue is so loaded with social and cultural connotation, it is almost like abortion or religion.
Intelligence is not easily defined for humans, and thus it cannot be consistently measured. (Saying what an IQ test measures is intelligence is a circular argument).
I am in neither camp, I don't think that men and women are totally equal. This again is probably an oversimplication that arose to combat the earlier basis for discrimanation against women. Women and men are different biologically, especially when it comes to hormones, not just "piping". Hormones like testosterone and estrogen act on everyone's brain, and if they are powerfull enough to make some guy grow breasts, trust me, they are powerfull enough to alter the brain chemistry.
So men and women are different. The are not better than each other consistently over all the possible tasks, they are just _different_
I've heard that testosterone improves spatial orientation ability, so men might be better at reading maps, but women might be are better at verbal skills and they have more empathy. Depending at what you are looking for you'll always find some task that someone is better than someone else.
At the same time, the difference is so small that it only becomes a predisposition. Men's predisposition to do better in Math is like a predisposition to have cancer. Not everyone will be an Einstein and not everyone will get cancer. It is possible through education (this is the nature vs. nurture argument creeping in...) and parenting to produce women mathematicians that are just as good or better than men mathematicians.
As you say, this paper is probably just flamebait, just because it will _sound_ scientific doesn't mean won't or can't be an attempt to draw some attention. I wish they had Slashdot moderation for scientific research publishings. This one might be a "-1 Troll".
This issue, like abortion, religion and others like that (...emacs vs. vi - oops, perhaps that doesn't go here) is so loaded that there is nobody there who is capable of serously and objectivly conducting an investigation of this.
The bigger problem with this, the way I see it, is that before we even get to comparing men vs. women, we need to define what "intelligence" is and how to measure it.
Interestingly there is an accepted and known test for machine intelligence --the Turing test, but for humans it is not as clear. Is a tribesman from Africa less intelligent than me? He knows how to kill a lion, while I might know what a Hilbert space is, so who is more intelligent?
Until there is a concrete and accepted definition of human intelligence there can be no study about who is more intelligent than whom.
One might as well say that "men have been shown to be better at 'blah' then women, while women consistently outperform men at 'foo', and both are equally good at 'x'." Untill those 'blah', 'foo' and 'x' are defined the statement will make no sense.
There is some overelap. Raid is not a reliable backup but one can think of it as a continuous local backup that will mostly prevent against downtime in case of a disk failure. Plus it might provide some increased disk read performance
But if lightning strikes your laptop, raid might not help much. If someone steals the machine, raid won't be there to save your data. That is what remote backup is for. But then, of course, some data between backup and the moment of failure will be lost.
So the best bet is to have a backup server (that will mostly likely have raid) and have raid on the laptop (or workstation for that matter) too.
The thing is, you will have a great number of people who will not get those. On the other hand you might not want those people logging in sometimes...
Re:Old news is no news. :-(
on
Defeating Captcha
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with with captcha stuff is that if it is so good that if the current OCR cannot read it, it is probably bad enough that even humans cannot read it.
I saw a couple of sites a while that used some captchas that you could barely read, which made it annoying and unusable.
What would make it much more difficult is if they combined captchas with pictures, or ask people a simple question with a captcha that would have a common sense answer. Like "what is 2+2=" and then alternate it with forms like "what is two plus two equal to" and such, combine such questions with stuff like "what color is the sky?" or "what is the 1st derivative of x^n with respect to x"... well, ok, maybe not this one...
Or how about blending images together. For example a picture of a dog and a cat on some background, also both transperenlty super-imposed with a small overlap. Then ask the question name the two animals in the picture?
How about asking the user to make a mouse gesture in an applet. (Did someone already implement this?). For example: "draw a circle with a small triangle in the middle" or "draw number '4'", then let the server use OCR to validate.
As someone in the discussion forum already pointed out , most materials that emit beta will emit gamma too. So it might have to be very small scale (nano scale?), so that radiation that passes the shielding would be no more than the background radiation from an occasional Radon gas emission from the ground. Is that the case with the pacemakers, sorry I am not familiar with that specific use?
Good point. The #3: "Last a long time" is usually equivalent to "stores a lot of energy". And mostly it contradicts with #1 and #2. Whenever you have anything that produces and stores large ammounts of energy you are bound to have toxicity, explosive potential and other harmful effects.
For example it has been long known that you can have very long lasting nuclear batteries using betavoltaics (couple of a source of beta radiation and a p-n junction and you have your battery), but would you put it on your lap that is the question.
Either it has so much shielding that it is too heavy, or it is nice and light and will make you grow another set of legs (or something else down there...).
But I remember that there was an article about someone developing such a battery here the link, I think.
Well, strap 2 overclocked 64bit 2x Core CPU's to the motherboard, along with a set of 2 SLI GPUs, throw in there 4 IDE hard drives, maybe another 4 SCSI ones, 8 Gigs of memory, some multimedia USB powered devices, bunch of other PCI cards, 4 large fans, and you could be looking at around 1kW peak to keep the system stable. You'd have to run the AC in the Winter, to stay cool and you could bake potatoes in the case, but you would have a nice stolid system...
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of that, I wonder how many people as the result of this will decide to move, even if they didn't suffer any direct material losses? I imagine, I lived there, I would be selling my house and moving North. Even Kansas with the tornados doesn't sound bad after what Ms. Katrina did...
Not if you are with Verizon or Sprint. CDMA phones don't have a SIM card. Only GMS (Cingular, T-Mobile) do.
sorry, English is 3rd language, I'll get better. Thanks for correction.
Thanks for clarification, you are right. The plasma wouldn't burn a huge hole in the ground, rather it will destabilize and cool. Anyone that works(ed) on the project TOKAMAK here? By the way, I found this little 'Tokamak' game, it's kind of fun if you like this kind of stuff. here.
I tried to say that the hydrogen (as an atom that has a nucleus) is already a system that has a tremendous amount of energy pent up as the strong nuclear force in it. The original post seemed to have assumed that hydrogen atoms are just somehow squashed by the gravity then it is that squashing potential energy that is released during fusion. (Much like a mechanical spring that is compressed then it heats up).
Actually everything is just different forms of energy and when they transition from one form to another sometime an extra boost is needed (the gravity in the sun's case perhaps, or the fission charge in an H bomb) to kickstart the transition reaction.
Mr. Kelvin would be dissapointed too because you post isn't the first. Mr. Celsius is already 273.15 posts ahead.
Then you need to kick-start the reaction and keep it going until it becomes self-sustainable.
You also assume that hydrogen is already available and its potential is 0 then you bring in the gravity and eventually the energy from the gravity gets emmited during fusion.
Some energy should have already been spent combining and 'creating' the hydrogen from the Big Bang soup of protons, neutrons and electrons. Of course the energy for the Big Bang should have come from some place, but that is another question [God anoyone? - *warning* lame flamebait attempt]
To release that energy you would need to break the nuclear bonds of hydrogen and then it will become helium. Think of it as wanting to get over a very tall mountain and on the other side there is a much deeper valey than the one you are on. But to get to the longer downward slope, on the other side, you need to overcome the upward slope in front of you.
In case of H and He transition, as someone already pointed out, the difference in the energy is just a little (the valey on the other side is just a little deeper than the one are on now). But when you have billions and billions of small differences -- they add up and you get the Sun (or an H bomb).
Now in most states (not in Ohio, Hamilton county yet), there are companies that will compile and publish the records online for a fee. Some counties just publish it themselves. It is always fun to check out your professors' or co-worker's traffic tickets and other run-ins with the law.
I went to the campus police and filed a report. They said they'll get their detective to work on it later that day. I fought it was just a waste of time at first but then I slowly realized how stupid it is to steal a cell phone. Any call from that phone can be traced by the phone company. And sure enough that evening the police called me and told me to come pick up my cell phone. They called this idiot and told him that he better return it, to make it easier on him. He claimed that he didn't steal it but bought it from someone for $30. Yeah right! Anyway he returned it and I got my phone back.
Later the police gave me a copy of the sheet he singed when he returned the stolen item and the sheet has this guy's home address, date of birth and social security. I checked his court records and he has like 10 convictions on his record for theft, drug charges and some smaller things. I thought of posting his info out on the web, for people to have some fun with, but that would be a little too evil for me.
Everyone is different and when it comes to gender there might be a small difference in some innate genetic predispositions that help men, on average, do better than women or vice-versa at some tasks. But what is more important and what needs to be stressed is the human ability to change, addapt, learn, think and grow. A women if she wants can study and excel and outperform men at any mental task.
You are right. Also good scientists will never report something like "men are smarter than women, we'll give you the results in a week, until then let the 'flames' begin!". Their reported finding (which might have been twisted by journalists to create a sensational headline) is so general it invites attention (mostly negative) and just provokes everyone. They should have said probably like "in a random sample of 1000 individual from Northern America, men have been found to solve derivatives %20 faster than women" and that's it. Let everone take for what it's worth. It doens't make claims about someone being 'better', or more 'intelligent' or whatever, it just reports a finding. This why, they don't make an implicit assumption that there is a common measure of intelligence...
Well that is just being ignorant. You'll find them in any camp, on the "left" and on the "right", even among the apparently "tollerant", seemingly "objective", secular liberal thinkers, which many feminists think they belong to. Just because they hate men, or just because they are against conservative "old and evil" Christians, doesn't make them less fanatical and biased.
The article claim is too general and that makes it seem, at least, like scientific 'flamebait'. If all they measured is how fast can mean calculate derivatives and found that the sample they used caclulated derivatives 20% percent faster than women in their sample, that is all they should have reported, and let everyone take for what it is worth. Not "men are smarter than women, we'll show you the proof in a week".
Notice, I _never_ said that "everyone is the same", I don't think that is true. Due to chemistry and hormones and physical differences, I think men and women have different _predispositions_. Testosterone, for example, might enhance brain's ability to process spatial orientation better. That doesn't mean that women cannot read maps if they want to learn the skill.
But I do believe that the study is probably biased or not done correctly because of the nature and cultuaral and social meaning of the topic. But you are right, I didn't see the data, so it is not fair towards the researchers.
Actually I am not familiar with it. After reading your post I searched for the phrase on Google and found the book on Amazon. If the local library doesn't have it, I'll pay $1 or so to get.
This issue is so loaded with social and cultural connotation, it is almost like abortion or religion.
Intelligence is not easily defined for humans, and thus it cannot be consistently measured. (Saying what an IQ test measures is intelligence is a circular argument).
I am in neither camp, I don't think that men and women are totally equal. This again is probably an oversimplication that arose to combat the earlier basis for discrimanation against women. Women and men are different biologically, especially when it comes to hormones, not just "piping". Hormones like testosterone and estrogen act on everyone's brain, and if they are powerfull enough to make some guy grow breasts, trust me, they are powerfull enough to alter the brain chemistry.
So men and women are different. The are not better than each other consistently over all the possible tasks, they are just _different_
I've heard that testosterone improves spatial orientation ability, so men might be better at reading maps, but women might be are better at verbal skills and they have more empathy. Depending at what you are looking for you'll always find some task that someone is better than someone else.
At the same time, the difference is so small that it only becomes a predisposition. Men's predisposition to do better in Math is like a predisposition to have cancer. Not everyone will be an Einstein and not everyone will get cancer. It is possible through education (this is the nature vs. nurture argument creeping in...) and parenting to produce women mathematicians that are just as good or better than men mathematicians.
This issue, like abortion, religion and others like that (...emacs vs. vi - oops, perhaps that doesn't go here) is so loaded that there is nobody there who is capable of serously and objectivly conducting an investigation of this.
The bigger problem with this, the way I see it, is that before we even get to comparing men vs. women, we need to define what "intelligence" is and how to measure it.
Interestingly there is an accepted and known test for machine intelligence --the Turing test, but for humans it is not as clear. Is a tribesman from Africa less intelligent than me? He knows how to kill a lion, while I might know what a Hilbert space is, so who is more intelligent?
Until there is a concrete and accepted definition of human intelligence there can be no study about who is more intelligent than whom.
One might as well say that "men have been shown to be better at 'blah' then women, while women consistently outperform men at 'foo', and both are equally good at 'x'." Untill those 'blah', 'foo' and 'x' are defined the statement will make no sense.
But if lightning strikes your laptop, raid might not help much. If someone steals the machine, raid won't be there to save your data. That is what remote backup is for. But then, of course, some data between backup and the moment of failure will be lost.
So the best bet is to have a backup server (that will mostly likely have raid) and have raid on the laptop (or workstation for that matter) too.
The thing is, you will have a great number of people who will not get those. On the other hand you might not want those people logging in sometimes...
I saw a couple of sites a while that used some captchas that you could barely read, which made it annoying and unusable.
What would make it much more difficult is if they combined captchas with pictures, or ask people a simple question with a captcha that would have a common sense answer. Like "what is 2+2=" and then alternate it with forms like "what is two plus two equal to" and such, combine such questions with stuff like "what color is the sky?" or "what is the 1st derivative of x^n with respect to x"... well, ok, maybe not this one...
Or how about blending images together. For example a picture of a dog and a cat on some background, also both transperenlty super-imposed with a small overlap. Then ask the question name the two animals in the picture?
How about asking the user to make a mouse gesture in an applet. (Did someone already implement this?). For example: "draw a circle with a small triangle in the middle" or "draw number '4'", then let the server use OCR to validate.
For example it has been long known that you can have very long lasting nuclear batteries using betavoltaics (couple of a source of beta radiation and a p-n junction and you have your battery), but would you put it on your lap that is the question.
Either it has so much shielding that it is too heavy, or it is nice and light and will make you grow another set of legs (or something else down there...).
But I remember that there was an article about someone developing such a battery here the link, I think.
Well, strap 2 overclocked 64bit 2x Core CPU's to the motherboard, along with a set of 2 SLI GPUs, throw in there 4 IDE hard drives, maybe another 4 SCSI ones, 8 Gigs of memory, some multimedia USB powered devices, bunch of other PCI cards, 4 large fans, and you could be looking at around 1kW peak to keep the system stable. You'd have to run the AC in the Winter, to stay cool and you could bake potatoes in the case, but you would have a nice stolid system...