So they found three tracks? Wow, so they only need to scale it up by a factor of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to get a decent number of neutrons per second.
And oh, they need to improve the efficiency by almost that same factor, so that the energy in is not greater than the energy out.
And what are the winds like at 65,000 feet? A cursory Googling shows they average around 60 knots and can reach 110 knots. Has anyone made a dirigible capable of even a third that speed?
Okay, you got me. I did the calculation in my head. Now let's do it in a spreadsheet. Let's assume we want to seed space with 1/10th the air pressure at 65 miles. That's 1/10th of a millionth of 15PSI, or about 1.2 micrograms per cubic meter. Now between 200 and 1000 miles there are, crunch, crunch, crunch, about 5.8x10^20 cubic meters. Put a microgram in each one and it would take 5.8x10^14 kilos of water. So my estimate was about 40% high. Still, that's a lot of samoleons.
For instance, sending water into space is mighty hard on the wallet. Figure on about $8,000 per pound to send it into a retrograde orbit. And you'd need to send up, oh, let's say a trillion pounds to seed the orbits with a 0.0000001% density of ice. About 10^11 cubic kilometers, 10^26 cc's, 10^18 grams, 10^ 15 kilos, 2.2x10^15 pounds, 1.8x10^19 dollars. That's a 18 billion billion dollars.
And using lasers is no picnic either. You'd want to deliver many kilowatts per square centimeter, which isn't going to be feasible from the ground. Normal atmospheric refraction over the long distance (you have to shoot at the approaching edge of the object, low in the west), that's going to wiggle and disperse the beam by many miles, that's even assuming one could ever develop a radar with the required accuracy (not likely).
What you're doing is applying an oxygenating bleach to the surface. Works quite well to remove the yellow. But anytime you apply oxygen to a surface you speed up the rate of.... oxidation!
So while you're whitening it, you're also speeding up the deterioration of the plastic.
If you've ever used an "ozone generator" to remove smoke odors you know it does that job very well, and it also destroys every rubber band, ballpoint pen, and bicycle tire in the area.
Half a percent a day growth seems mighty underwhelming if you're starting from zero.
It's also a fallacy to expect anything to continue at its current pace. Cockroaches would fill the galaxy in a month if they reproduced like they do behind your fridge.
$1 a watt sounds good. Until you think about it a bit. A one meter-square panel generates about 150 watts, so that would be $150. But the ancillary costs are many times that. First figure on the cost of a support frame and a glass cover. Then to get the 150 watts for more than an hour during the day you need a sun-tracking mount. For this all to last ten years it all has to be mighty sturdy to handle the anticipated peak winds during the interval. You're now up to at least $600 just in parts. Assuming the usual markups and installation the retail price is going to be upwards of $1000. So even if this miracle cell technology could be driven down to ZERO cost, you're only lowering the total system cost by 15 percent.
This is not an article about making Hydrogen cheaply or efficiently, it's an article about an unusual chemical reaction, one of whose byproducts is Hydrogen.
You cant get something for nothing. For each Hydrogen atom let off, you have to spend an atom of Aluminum. Aluminum weighs 27 times as much as Hydrogen, so for every kilogram of Aluminum you burn up you get at most 38 grams of Hydrogen. Aluminum costs almost a dollar a kilo. That makes the Hydrogen cost at least $27 a Kilo. The market price for Hydrogen is around $2 a Kilo, so this process costs about 13 times too much.
This article is a supe example of how having just a smidgen of knowledge can get you into deep doo-doo.
First of all they should not switch the two ground wires. If the switch disconnects those first, you have several amps of DC flowing back through the SATA signal cable ground wires and connector pins, which are not designed for this kind of current. Gray smoke and major disk and motherboard damage is not out of the question.
Next they apparently chose the prettiest and most expensive switch in the most expensive catalog, without care to check it for current or make before break specs. So they paid $28 for the wrong switch. A simple $1.99 DPDT 5-amp switch from the hardware store costs less than a tenth as much and will be able to handle the current.
Lastly, this switch should have some sort of lock on it. Accidentally flipping it in the middle of a disk write would be disastrous.
Re:even more ironic, he praises add/remove
on
A Real Bill Gates Rant
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Problems opening the control panel can often be due to poorly written 3rd party control panel applets (.cpl files). My control panel would frequently lock up or open very slowly....
Well that sounds like a very poor design decision, synchronously calling into 3rd party code to see if it's okay to remove such code. IMHO an uninstaller should have more confidence and authority. What's the point of an uninstaller that is subordinate to its minions?
If you are talking about the time taken to list installed programs, this was sped up considerably with Vista, which begins to show installed programs instantly...
No thanks, I tried Vista for an hour and then returned the laptop. Plus this is a pointless hack. I do not care if the items start showing up as they're found. I need to see all of them.
...and populates the list in a fraction of the time XP uses for the same task.
A fraction of two hours is still too long to wait for something that should be instantaneous.
This seems more like "Classic Troll" to me. Are you sure you aren't ripping the programs out manually in a fit of rage and then surprised to find that Windows can't find the uninstaller?
I sometimes rip the program out by hand as the stupid add/remove gadget is not featureful enough to inform me as to what it's talking about or when or where it installed FooMangler Deluxe, plus it gives me no useful undo/redo ability with these critical system components.
Entires can be removed by deleting the appropriate registry keys located in:
Oh yeah, good strategy, point me to yet another clueless system utility, where any change is likely to break the whole system, and with no undo ability.
Re:even more ironic, he praises add/remove
on
A Real Bill Gates Rant
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It has nothing to do with a fragmented Registry. My Registry is not fragmented and the time goes from two hours to 20 seconds when I unmount the disk with all the files.
And the installed programs list in the registry is only 15 entries, that should not take two hours to load.
It's just poor design. You should never have to scan the universe when you already have the info in at least two places, the Registry and the installer directory. And of course it's a bad idea to have the info in two places.
even more ironic, he praises add/remove
on
A Real Bill Gates Rant
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's funny that he praises the add/remove programs control panel. Try opening it up when you have a file system mounted that contains a whole lot of files. Apparently this control panel, even though it has a cache of installed programs in some subdirectory, plus roughly the same info in a registry subtree, this sterling piece of software goes off and looks at every file on every device. That's the only explanation I can think of why the disks whir for like two hours before this control panel lists anything.
And even then all that work was for naught, because the items listed have not been even slightly vetted for correctness. You click on some of them and get an immediate "no uninstaller found" or even more cryptic messages, and no way to remove these useless entries. This control panel is a classic fail, with it doing slow and useless work several times over and still missing the whole point of what it should be doing.
Bill, you got real problems when you think this really crapalicious control panel is a shining star.
Okay, so we're going to grow trees to make "lignin plastic" and then the stuff is going into landfills where it will biodegrade and will release CO2. How is this better?
I looked at it. It looks like they're using an interferometer to gauge degrees of polarization. It's a little hard to follow, as they're trying to describe signals in optic-speak, which does not jibe too well. Nothing all that special, and they do note a major drawback-- due to the quantum nature of polarization, you don't get a definitive answer, just a probabilistic one. That shows up as random noise out of the detector, and there's where Shannon steps in.
The original article hints at its own counter-measure. If you aim at the head or other extremity, it's easy to move it out of the way with a simple muscle contraction.
But if instead the shooter aims at the target's center of gravity, it's much harder to move that.
Not much point in a device that can be so easily countered.
As far as I can tell, they're phase-modulating the polarization. Very clever but not new on the transmitting end. If their fancy interferometer phase-sensitive receiver can be made to work well they may have something, but I think in the end Shannon's limits still apply.
Signal theory has been extremely extensively studied, so it's unlikely someone not familiar with the field, like these optics guys, have found a loophole.
Polarization has been known since about 1200AD when the Vikings used calcite crystals to navigate by. It also pops right out of Maxwell's equations.
It's been used to make directional radio antennas since about 1925.
It's been used to dynamically steer and polarize signals ever since phased-array radars came in use, circa 1965.
And no, you can't transmit huge amounts of information that way. Circular polarization is just a vector sum of two quadrature vectors. There's nothing you can do with a sum that is more information efficient than a single vector.
>But since and 0.5 HP equals 325 watts, and the typical alternator at cruising speed is putting out less than 500 watts, that's a significant load taken off the alternator in every day driving.
Whoa, padner. That's 325 watts if and only if you're driving over heavily rutted roads. And a typical car only draws about 100 to 200 watts while running. And a car battery can't tolerate much charging at that rate without breaking down. And when not on rutted roads, like 97% of the time for most cars, you still have to pay the ~$500 for the equipment, plus lug those extra hundred pounds, plus maintain them. A net negative for the majority of drivers. Just like ABS.
Dang, you may be correct. It may be as high as 5 HP then over a constantly bumpy road. Of which maybe half will make it though the pistons, valves, pipes, manifolds, and turbine to a generator.
Problem is, most vehicles don't spend a lot of time on very bumpy roads, but you have to pay the initial cost of this device and carry it and accelerate it and maintain it 100% of the time. Only a very determined bean-counter could tell us whether it's worthwhile to build, install nd maintain a $500 100lb device that gives back maybe 2HP a small percent of the time.
At first glance this sounds like a good idea, but let's do the math.
Assume you're driving over an evenly and heavily potholed road, such that all four wheels are rising and falling four inches four times a second. That's a very generous assumption. And assume a rather pudgy 400 pounds of unsprung weight. To move that stuff 1.33 feet per second takes 900 ft-lbs.sec of power, about 1.5 horsepower. But you don't want to absorb all that power or the whole point of a flexible suspension is lost. Let's guess we want a Q-factor of about 3, that is, we absorb 1/3 of the energy per cycle. We're down to 0.5 horsepower, and that is under optimally bumpy conditions. And small random jiggles are hard to capture as electricity. Overall it does not seem to be worth harvesting.
If one is going to be driving on such surfaces a lot, it makes a whole lot more sense to fit the vehicle with larger flotation-type tires. Those tend to flex and span potholes, so the car and passengers don't jiggle at all.
Yes I'm sure after a few drinks some airline president came up with the bright suggestion that Boeing should build a bigger plane.
Now since Boeing by then had a long history of building bigger and better planes, every few years, as new engine and structure technology became available, do you really think Boeing would not have thought of building a bigger plane until J.T. brought it up? Pan Am only bought 25 of them, not enough to make it a go.
When you consider the energy required to grow a fat pig or cow, how could this ever be practical?
It takes thousands of pounds of feed grain to raise a big pig or cow. Only a small percentage of that energy gets captured as oil or fat. Then you need to expend more energy to melt out that oil or fat.
I suspect it would be about ten times more efficient if they just burned the feed grain in their furnaces.
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So they found three tracks? Wow, so they only need to scale it up by a factor of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to get a decent number of neutrons per second.
And oh, they need to improve the efficiency by almost that same factor, so that the energy in is not greater than the energy out.
Otherwise ok.
What is a "camera-operated weather balloon"?
The camera did not operate anything.
And is it a weather balloon if it isn't doing weather observations?
And what are the winds like at 65,000 feet? A cursory Googling shows they average around 60 knots and can reach 110 knots. Has anyone made a dirigible capable of even a third that speed?
Okay, you got me. I did the calculation in my head. Now let's do it in a spreadsheet. Let's assume we want to seed space with 1/10th the air pressure at 65 miles. That's 1/10th of a millionth of 15PSI, or about 1.2 micrograms per cubic meter. Now between 200 and 1000 miles there are, crunch, crunch, crunch, about 5.8x10^20 cubic meters. Put a microgram in each one and it would take 5.8x10^14 kilos of water. So my estimate was about 40% high. Still, that's a lot of samoleons.
The economics of this plan are kinda awful.
For instance, sending water into space is mighty hard on the wallet. Figure on about $8,000 per pound to send it into a retrograde orbit. And you'd need to send up, oh, let's say a trillion pounds to seed the orbits with a 0.0000001% density of ice. About 10^11 cubic kilometers, 10^26 cc's, 10^18 grams, 10^ 15 kilos, 2.2x10^15 pounds, 1.8x10^19 dollars. That's a 18 billion billion dollars.
And using lasers is no picnic either. You'd want to deliver many kilowatts per square centimeter, which isn't going to be feasible from the ground. Normal atmospheric refraction over the long distance (you have to shoot at the approaching edge of the object, low in the west), that's going to wiggle and disperse the beam by many miles, that's even assuming one could ever develop a radar with the required accuracy (not likely).
What you're doing is applying an oxygenating bleach to the surface. Works quite well to remove the yellow. But anytime you apply oxygen to a surface you speed up the rate of .... oxidation!
So while you're whitening it, you're also speeding up the deterioration of the plastic.
If you've ever used an "ozone generator" to remove smoke odors you know it does that job very well, and it also destroys every rubber band, ballpoint pen, and bicycle tire in the area.
Half a percent a day growth seems mighty underwhelming if you're starting from zero.
It's also a fallacy to expect anything to continue at its current pace. Cockroaches would fill the galaxy in a month if they reproduced like they do behind your fridge.
$1 a watt sounds good. Until you think about it a bit. A one meter-square panel generates about 150 watts, so that would be $150. But the ancillary costs are many times that. First figure on the cost of a support frame and a glass cover. Then to get the 150 watts for more than an hour during the day you need a sun-tracking mount. For this all to last ten years it all has to be mighty sturdy to handle the anticipated peak winds during the interval. You're now up to at least $600 just in parts. Assuming the usual markups and installation the retail price is going to be upwards of $1000. So even if this miracle cell technology could be driven down to ZERO cost, you're only lowering the total system cost by 15 percent.
This is not an article about making Hydrogen cheaply or efficiently, it's an article about an unusual chemical reaction, one of whose byproducts is Hydrogen.
You cant get something for nothing. For each Hydrogen atom let off, you have to spend an atom of Aluminum. Aluminum weighs 27 times as much as Hydrogen, so for every kilogram of Aluminum you burn up you get at most 38 grams of Hydrogen. Aluminum costs almost a dollar a kilo. That makes the Hydrogen cost at least $27 a Kilo. The market price for Hydrogen is around $2 a Kilo, so this process costs about 13 times too much.
This article is a supe example of how having just a smidgen of knowledge can get you into deep doo-doo.
First of all they should not switch the two ground wires. If the switch disconnects those first, you have several amps of DC flowing back through the SATA signal cable ground wires and connector pins, which are not designed for this kind of current.
Gray smoke and major disk and motherboard damage is not out of the question.
Next they apparently chose the prettiest and most expensive switch in the most expensive catalog, without care to check it for current or make before break specs. So they paid $28 for the wrong switch. A simple $1.99 DPDT 5-amp switch from the hardware store costs less than a tenth as much and will be able to handle the current.
Lastly, this switch should have some sort of lock on it. Accidentally flipping it in the middle of a disk write would be disastrous.
Problems opening the control panel can often be due to poorly written 3rd party control panel applets (.cpl files). My control panel would frequently lock up or open very slowly....
Well that sounds like a very poor design decision, synchronously calling into 3rd party code to see if it's okay to remove such code. IMHO an uninstaller should have more confidence and authority. What's the point of an uninstaller that is subordinate to its minions?
If you are talking about the time taken to list installed programs, this was sped up considerably with Vista, which begins to show installed programs instantly...
No thanks, I tried Vista for an hour and then returned the laptop. Plus this is a pointless hack. I do not care if the items start showing up as they're found. I need to see all of them.
...and populates the list in a fraction of the time XP uses for the same task.
A fraction of two hours is still too long to wait for something that should be instantaneous.
This seems more like "Classic Troll" to me. Are you sure you aren't ripping the programs out manually in a fit of rage and then surprised to find that Windows can't find the uninstaller?
I sometimes rip the program out by hand as the stupid add/remove gadget is not featureful enough to inform me as to what it's talking about or when or where it installed FooMangler Deluxe, plus it gives me no useful undo/redo ability with these critical system components.
Entires can be removed by deleting the appropriate registry keys located in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
Oh yeah, good strategy, point me to yet another clueless system utility, where any change is likely to break the whole system, and with no undo ability.
It has nothing to do with a fragmented Registry. My Registry is not fragmented and the time goes from two hours to 20 seconds when I unmount the disk with all the files.
And the installed programs list in the registry is only 15 entries, that should not take two hours to load.
It's just poor design. You should never have to scan the universe when you already have the info in at least two places, the Registry and the installer directory. And of course it's a bad idea to have the info in two places.
It's funny that he praises the add/remove programs control panel. Try opening it up when you have a file system mounted that contains a whole lot of files. Apparently this control panel, even though it has a cache of installed programs in some subdirectory, plus roughly the same info in a registry subtree, this sterling piece of software goes off and looks at every file on every device. That's the only explanation I can think of why the disks whir for like two hours before this control panel lists anything.
And even then all that work was for naught, because the items listed have not been even slightly vetted for correctness. You click on some of them and get an immediate "no uninstaller found" or even more cryptic messages, and no way to remove these useless entries. This control panel is a classic fail, with it doing slow and useless work several times over and still missing the whole point of what it should be doing.
Bill, you got real problems when you think this really crapalicious control panel is a shining star.
Let's do the math on this one.
Let's say we want to put up enough PV cells to replace just one largish power plant, say 1GW.
Using conservative estimates, and assuming everything works perfectly the first time, I get a cost per kilowatt-hour of close to $8.
That's mighty steep, like 80 times the going wholesale rate.
The numbers for those interested in such minutea:
watts delivered 1,000,000,000.000
conversion to AC 0.950
DC needed 1,052,631,578.947
uwave to DC 0.850
AC needed 1,238,390,092.879
Receiving ant. Eff 0.750
To recv ant. 1,651,186,790.506
Atm loss 0.900
from sat 1,834,651,989.451
xmt ant eff 0.900
to xmt ant 2,038,502,210.501
uwave gen eff 0.750
DC to uwave gen 2,718,002,947.334
Solar cell eff 0.150
Watts to s cell 18,120,019,648.896
watts per sq meter 1,400.000
avail of light 0.600
watts avg 840.000
sq meters needed 21,571,451.963
weight per sq m 5.000 lbs
cell weight 107,857,259.815
$/lb to geo $5,000.00
cost to lift $539,286,299,074.30
lbs/watt gen 0.010
lbs gen 27,180,029.473
cosrt cells/sq meter $1,000.00
cost cells $21,571,451,962.97
gen cost/watt 1.000
gen cost 2,718,002,947.334
tot cost 563,575,753,984.601
time to build 5.000 yrs
cost of money 5.00%
int factor 0.250
cost fin 704,469,692,480.751
yrs runs 10.000
cost/yr 70,446,969,248.075
kw gen 1,000,000.000
hrs/yr 8,766.000
kwh/yr 8,766,000,000.000
cost/kwh 8.036
current cost/kwh 0.100
overrun factor 80.364
Okay, so we're going to grow trees to make "lignin plastic" and then the stuff is going into landfills where it will biodegrade and will release CO2. How is this better?
I looked at it. It looks like they're using an interferometer to gauge degrees of polarization.
It's a little hard to follow, as they're trying to describe signals in optic-speak, which does not jibe too well. Nothing all that special, and they do note a major drawback-- due to the quantum nature of polarization, you don't get a definitive answer, just a probabilistic one. That shows up as random noise out of the detector, and there's where Shannon steps in.
The original article hints at its own counter-measure. If you aim at the head or other extremity, it's easy to move it out of the way with a simple muscle contraction.
But if instead the shooter aims at the target's center of gravity, it's much harder to move that.
Not much point in a device that can be so easily countered.
As far as I can tell, they're phase-modulating the polarization. Very clever but not new on the transmitting end. If their fancy interferometer phase-sensitive receiver can be made to work well they may have something, but I think in the end Shannon's limits still apply.
Signal theory has been extremely extensively studied, so it's unlikely someone not familiar with the field, like these optics guys, have found a loophole.
>will carry twice the information.
I meant summing two to get one circular signal. You're of course correct that you can sum two more with opposite chirality to get another channel.
Polarization has been known since about 1200AD when the Vikings used calcite crystals to navigate by. It also pops right out of Maxwell's equations.
It's been used to make directional radio antennas since about 1925.
It's been used to dynamically steer and polarize signals ever since phased-array radars came in use, circa 1965.
And no, you can't transmit huge amounts of information that way. Circular polarization is just a vector sum of two quadrature vectors. There's nothing you can do with a sum that is more information efficient than a single vector.
>But since and 0.5 HP equals 325 watts, and the typical alternator at cruising speed is putting out less than 500 watts, that's a significant load taken off the alternator in every day driving.
Whoa, padner. That's 325 watts if and only if you're driving over heavily rutted roads. And a typical car only draws about 100 to 200 watts while running. And a car battery can't tolerate much charging at that rate without breaking down. And when not on rutted roads, like 97% of the time for most cars, you still have to pay the ~$500 for the equipment, plus lug those extra hundred pounds, plus maintain them. A net negative for the majority of drivers. Just like ABS.
Dang, you may be correct. It may be as high as 5 HP then over a constantly bumpy road. Of which maybe half will make it though the pistons, valves, pipes, manifolds, and turbine to a generator.
Problem is, most vehicles don't spend a lot of time on very bumpy roads, but you have to pay the initial cost of this device and carry it and accelerate it and maintain it 100% of the time.
Only a very determined bean-counter could tell us whether it's worthwhile to build, install nd maintain a $500 100lb device that gives back maybe 2HP a small percent of the time.
At first glance this sounds like a good idea, but let's do the math.
Assume you're driving over an evenly and heavily potholed road, such that all four wheels are rising and falling four inches four times a second. That's a very generous assumption. And assume a rather pudgy 400 pounds of unsprung weight. To move that stuff 1.33 feet per second takes 900 ft-lbs.sec of power, about 1.5 horsepower. But you don't want to absorb all that power or the whole point of a flexible suspension is lost. Let's guess we want a Q-factor of about 3, that is, we absorb 1/3 of the energy per cycle. We're down to 0.5 horsepower, and that is under optimally bumpy conditions. And small random jiggles are hard to capture as electricity. Overall it does not seem to be worth harvesting.
If one is going to be driving on such surfaces a lot, it makes a whole lot more sense to fit the vehicle with larger flotation-type tires. Those tend to flex and span potholes, so the car and passengers don't jiggle at all.
Yes I'm sure after a few drinks some airline president came up with the bright suggestion that Boeing should build a bigger plane.
Now since Boeing by then had a long history of building bigger and better planes, every few years, as new engine and structure technology became available, do you really think Boeing would not have thought of building a bigger plane until J.T. brought it up? Pan Am only bought 25 of them, not enough to make it a go.
When you consider the energy required to grow a fat pig or cow, how could this ever be practical?
It takes thousands of pounds of feed grain to raise a big pig or cow. Only a small percentage of that energy gets captured as oil or fat.
Then you need to expend more energy to melt out that oil or fat.
I suspect it would be about ten times more efficient if they just burned the feed grain in their furnaces.