You are correct in that it will take a heck of a lot of electrical energy and a lot of time to charge these batteries.
One work-around is to make the batteries easily swappable, like you drive in, the battery drops down, like dropping your gas tank, and a newly charged battery pops up. Could be done in ten seconds, much faster than filling your gas tank.
Ahem, the fine article describes something that has quite a few limitations>:
It's a 2-D device. Hard enough to build it in 2-D. It's not clear it is even theoretically doable in 3D. Even if doable in theory, it may prove impossible to manufacture.
It only works for waves approaching it at a certain azimuth. Usually you need a much wider front.
These devices are hard to design, even for a limited frequency range. Visible light has less than a 2-1 frequency range, and that's likely to tax these devices. For audio, its a 1000-fold frequency range. It's hard to imagine getting these synthetic metamaterials to work over a thousand to one frequency and wavelength range.
>In what sense is discovering errors a pointless pursuit?
Because it focuses on the tip of the iceberg, the symptoms, not the disease. I wonder how many of the browsers have been tweaked to pass certain tests, instead of being engineered to meet the specs.
Swell, better than nothing, but tests miss the point. It was pointed out by Dykstra i think, that tests can reveal the presence of errors, but never their absence. So testing is in some sense a pointless pursuit. Being able to display a smiley face tests something like 1 googletillionth of the phase space.
>The hydrogen fuel cell people would be very interested to know that protons can't move or diffuse, what with it being the entire operating principle of their devices. Anyone who works with ionized hydrogen would also want to hear about this amazing discovery.
Protons do not move. Hydrogen ions can move through liquids or gases, but this guy's device looks like a solid.
And let's not forget the provenance of this story, a magazine which routinely had cover stories on "The new car engine with 15 triangular pistons, coming soon to a car near you".
>> If you instead have like a parabolic dish that tracks the receiver, the losses will be lower, but what happens to kitty or your eyeballs if they get in the way?
>I've passed under 100W light bulbs, and direct sunlight, millions of times in my life, and yet my eyeballs continue to function just fine.
A "100W" light bulb puts out like 2 watts of actual light, and in every direction. Try taking 50 of those light bulbs, with reflectors, and look into those. No, don't.
Just a few watts of microwave power has been shown to cause cataracts.
>>
The strength drops off as the CUBE of the distance, so any significant distance is a no-go.
>
Only true with onmidirectional... A high-gain antenna, or collimated beam like a laser, and you can get very good distances with very little loss (not counting conversion losses, inherent at any distance).
You're correct if this was about electric fields. By then though we were talking about magnetic fields.
Shooting photons across a room to deliver significant power just ain't gonna be practical. If you use an omnidirectional antenna, the losses will be huge. If you instead have like a parabolic dish that tracks the receiver, the losses will be lower, but what happens to kitty or your eyeballs if they get in the way? Cooking your eyeballs to a nice firm egg-white consistency is not going to fly.
Magnetic fields are dipole fields, that means the little wavy lines leaving the North pole want to curl back as quicly as possible to the South pole. Which means they have very little extent in space. The strength drops off as the CUBE of the distance, so any significant distance is a no-go.
Some of us ancients recall what happened when Subaru tried selling their "360" in the USA.
They sold a few. You'd see three or four a day. Then 6 months later, two or three, all badly dented front and back. Then a year later, no 360's.
A person is making outrageous claims. Efficiencies far beyond anything ever achieved.
Not a smidgen of actual technical data. I mean stuff like "prototype X199 put out 3.4 gigawatts for 1200 hours with an input temp of 821C, output temp of 183.5C." You know, measureable facts.
Instead we get animated GIFs of protons moving (diffusing?). In case you never took high-school science, this is impossible.
And we get a lot of personal aggrandization.
Just in case yo haven't figured it out, working at a govt lab is not necessarily a mark of distinction. Having worked at several, many of us have first hand knowledge that the govt often hires and promotes total idiots. Not saying anything about this guy, just sayin.....
This would be a *perfecct* use for the Queen Mary! The old one.
It weighs about 175 million pounds. Take it out into the open seas where there are 3-foot waves, or actually big enough waves to lift and drop the ship by three feet say every ten seconds. By my Excel calcs, if you use that lift to heave up on a big anchor half the weight of the ship, that's about 30 megawatts of electricity. Plenty enough to power tens of thousands of servers.
The front boiler and engine room spaces of the QM were cleared out long ago, leaving a huge open space for lots of server racks. All you have to worry about is shipwrecks and hurricanes and the effects of humid, salty and diesely air.
There's no way this is ever going to work. Al the Crays in the world can't drive a car as well as a 16-year old with a learner's permit. Among the undoables:
Getting a computer to recognize the difference between a toddler crawling on the road, versus a doll on the road.
Seeing well in the rain.
Telling the difference between a dishwasher carton (which might not have to be braked for, versus a fallen cubic meter of rock.
Telling the difference between a solid object and just a splash of water.
About the only way this could work: have 360 degree cameras and send the video to some poor sod in India who does the driving for you.
Only problem with this idea-- at any time there are hundreds of planes coming in to land from the West, as the sun is setting. It's unlikely any system is going to be able to detect the infrared signature of a small missile with the Sun as competition. All the bad guys have to do is have a little patience and wait til near sundown to make all these gadgets ineffective.
Blimps are unlikely to get very high, so they have to fly through the weather, or land and hide in a hangar.
So they're no good for any kind of dependable, scheduled service.
Even if good weather, blimps have a terrible safety record.
220 tons sounds like a lot of lifting, but it's only two rail cars. It's never going to be economical to replace two super-reliable, all-weather $100K rail cars with a million dollar blimp that can only fly in good weather.
Consider how much real-estate it takes to moor just one blimp.
Presuming you want to melt salt, you probably need a whole lot of mirrors.
Compute the cost of a square meter of mirror, one that will last for twenty years.
Now add the cost of a mirror support, one that will keep it aimed at the collector.
The sun moves, so you'll need a aiming device. Estimate the cost of an aiming device that can last for say twenty years and survive typical weather conditions over twenty years. Don't forget wind gusts!
I suspect you'll have trouble getting the cost down to an economical level. By about a factor of thirty.
Even assuming economies of scale. Good luck selling your idea to the bankers.
>Did you know that different frequencies of electromagnetic waves have different effects...
Yes indeed, some frequencies get preferentially absorbed. But the peaks are only like a factor of 100,
and the ratio we're talking about is about a billion. That leaves a factor of about ten million that has to be explained. In TFA there is not a bit of explanation of physical process to explain this factor of ten million shortfall. That's not good science.
Funny how people worry about 1 watt @ 800 MHz, but have no problem going to the beach where they're exposed to 1,000 watts @ 800,000,000 MHz. At the beach you're exposed to one thousand times the power, with one million times the energy per photon. Yet nobody seems to get a headache at the beach.
> If you want to believe that all of the test subjects were autonomously and secretly trying to subvert the results and that all scientific studies are flawed because people make mistakes, then go ahead and...
The history of science could be summed up as a long struggle to get beyond believing what we WANT to believe, beyond unduly influencing the experiment, and to scrupulously design an experiment free of uncontrolled variables.
As a few points of reference, look up "N rays", "Feynman on cargo cult science", "Feynman on Millikan", The Challenger Disaster, Lamarckian theory, and any book by Randi or Marvin Gardner on remote viewing, Uri Geller, and the Duke telepathy experiments.
If these GSM experimenters had the slightest sensitivity to these issues, they would have spent at least a few more sentences on defusing the many very alarming loose ends in this paper. It would not take much, just a couple of sentences on the measures they took to avoid the well-known pitfalls.
>They did say that the subjects were unable to "guess" as to whether the RF was on,
That's swell, but insufficient. Subjects are not immune to social cues. In this case it would not take a genius subject to realize that guessing would not be a good thing. And they'd look dumb if they said they could guess, but could not pinpoint the reason.
And the mention of "two rooms" is puzzling-- why two rooms? That's an extra dimension of variability that sounds completely unececessary.
Let's not forget that a huge amount of the "rat in maze" experiments were invalidated when one scientist controlled for things that seemed irrelevant, like the pitch of footsteps in the maze. Forty years of research mostly invalidated. One has to be extra careful in any kind of experiment.
Uh, no. I don't see the words "double blind". I don't see any detailed description of how they did the placebo business.
I don't see any description of how they tested for cheating.
If there are two rooms, one for placebo and one for RF, or if the RF generator was in the same room,
obviously the whole experiment is bogus.
I forgot a few things: Were the rooms checked for possible olfactory clues, such as warm polyethylene (coax), ozone (generated at the high voltage nodes on the coax cable and antenna). How about auditory clues? A little bit of corrosion on a coax connector can demodulate RF signals and generate audible sounds. Or come to think of it, just general warmth from the RF. Those screened rooms tend to have lousy ventilation, so was the ventilation and temperature controlled?
I think we need a whole lot more info about this experiment before its results can be taken as valid.
They exposed the subjects to 1.4W/kg? What the **** does that mean? Do they have any idea how deep GSM band signals penetrate human flesh and bone? Did they take out and weigh the left hemisphere of the subjects? Did they use the body weight instead? Did they offer some subjects a tiger-team-style $100 if they could tell the difference between RF and no RF on? Was this a double-blind experiment? People are really clever at catching on to subtle clues like experimenter's face, little clicks, dimming lights, etc. The literature is replete with poorly designed experiments.
These are just a few of the questions that pop up in any thorough analysis of this experiment.
Huh? Since when are actors considered the authorities on their costumes and paraphenalia? One might suspect the studio art and prop departments would be better and more reliable judges of what was actually used on a show. As if that matters.
If this is the journal I'm thinking of, it's only of interest to a certain teensy demographic, those that have labored for months to years writing, editing, and re-editing a scientific paper.
Only then do these parodies have any jocular impact.
First of all, the Gray patent was for sending multiple telegraph signals over one wire, nowadays known as analog frequency-division multiplexing.
Bell either had the same idea, or borrowed parts of Gray's ideas, and by accident, made a telephone.
It seems a bit of a stretch to call Gray's idea a "telephone", as it was more like sending beep-boop-bork tones over one wire. Nothing to do with voice.
ANd it's also a stretch to claim Bell "stole" the Telephone idea. Independent inventions happen all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
One work-around is to make the batteries easily swappable, like you drive in, the battery drops down, like dropping your gas tank, and a newly charged battery pops up. Could be done in ten seconds, much faster than filling your gas tank.
Because it focuses on the tip of the iceberg, the symptoms, not the disease. I wonder how many of the browsers have been tweaked to pass certain tests, instead of being engineered to meet the specs.
Swell, better than nothing, but tests miss the point. It was pointed out by Dykstra i think, that tests can reveal the presence of errors, but never their absence. So testing is in some sense a pointless pursuit. Being able to display a smiley face tests something like 1 googletillionth of the phase space.
Protons do not move. Hydrogen ions can move through liquids or gases, but this guy's device looks like a solid.
And let's not forget the provenance of this story, a magazine which routinely had cover stories on "The new car engine with 15 triangular pistons, coming soon to a car near you".
>I've passed under 100W light bulbs, and direct sunlight, millions of times in my life, and yet my eyeballs continue to function just fine.
A "100W" light bulb puts out like 2 watts of actual light, and in every direction. Try taking 50 of those light bulbs, with reflectors, and look into those. No, don't.
Just a few watts of microwave power has been shown to cause cataracts.
>> The strength drops off as the CUBE of the distance, so any significant distance is a no-go.
> Only true with onmidirectional... A high-gain antenna, or collimated beam like a laser, and you can get very good distances with very little loss (not counting conversion losses, inherent at any distance).
You're correct if this was about electric fields. By then though we were talking about magnetic fields.
Shooting photons across a room to deliver significant power just ain't gonna be practical. If you use an omnidirectional antenna, the losses will be huge. If you instead have like a parabolic dish that tracks the receiver, the losses will be lower, but what happens to kitty or your eyeballs if they get in the way? Cooking your eyeballs to a nice firm egg-white consistency is not going to fly.
Magnetic fields are dipole fields, that means the little wavy lines leaving the North pole want to curl back as quicly as possible to the South pole. Which means they have very little extent in space. The strength drops off as the CUBE of the distance, so any significant distance is a no-go.
Draw your own conclusions.
His web site looks like your prototypical scam job. Very little text, no science, and a confusing and contradictory animated GIF.
It weighs about 175 million pounds. Take it out into the open seas where there are 3-foot waves, or actually big enough waves to lift and drop the ship by three feet say every ten seconds. By my Excel calcs, if you use that lift to heave up on a big anchor half the weight of the ship, that's about 30 megawatts of electricity. Plenty enough to power tens of thousands of servers.
The front boiler and engine room spaces of the QM were cleared out long ago, leaving a huge open space for lots of server racks. All you have to worry about is shipwrecks and hurricanes and the effects of humid, salty and diesely air.
About the only way this could work: have 360 degree cameras and send the video to some poor sod in India who does the driving for you.
Only problem with this idea-- at any time there are hundreds of planes coming in to land from the West, as the sun is setting. It's unlikely any system is going to be able to detect the infrared signature of a small missile with the Sun as competition. All the bad guys have to do is have a little patience and wait til near sundown to make all these gadgets ineffective.
Let's do the math, folks.
Presuming you want to melt salt, you probably need a whole lot of mirrors. Compute the cost of a square meter of mirror, one that will last for twenty years. Now add the cost of a mirror support, one that will keep it aimed at the collector. The sun moves, so you'll need a aiming device. Estimate the cost of an aiming device that can last for say twenty years and survive typical weather conditions over twenty years. Don't forget wind gusts!
I suspect you'll have trouble getting the cost down to an economical level. By about a factor of thirty. Even assuming economies of scale. Good luck selling your idea to the bankers.
Yes indeed, some frequencies get preferentially absorbed. But the peaks are only like a factor of 100, and the ratio we're talking about is about a billion. That leaves a factor of about ten million that has to be explained. In TFA there is not a bit of explanation of physical process to explain this factor of ten million shortfall. That's not good science.
Funny how people worry about 1 watt @ 800 MHz, but have no problem going to the beach where they're exposed to 1,000 watts @ 800,000,000 MHz. At the beach you're exposed to one thousand times the power, with one million times the energy per photon. Yet nobody seems to get a headache at the beach.
The history of science could be summed up as a long struggle to get beyond believing what we WANT to believe, beyond unduly influencing the experiment, and to scrupulously design an experiment free of uncontrolled variables.
As a few points of reference, look up "N rays", "Feynman on cargo cult science", "Feynman on Millikan", The Challenger Disaster, Lamarckian theory, and any book by Randi or Marvin Gardner on remote viewing, Uri Geller, and the Duke telepathy experiments.
If these GSM experimenters had the slightest sensitivity to these issues, they would have spent at least a few more sentences on defusing the many very alarming loose ends in this paper. It would not take much, just a couple of sentences on the measures they took to avoid the well-known pitfalls.
That's swell, but insufficient. Subjects are not immune to social cues. In this case it would not take a genius subject to realize that guessing would not be a good thing. And they'd look dumb if they said they could guess, but could not pinpoint the reason.
And the mention of "two rooms" is puzzling-- why two rooms? That's an extra dimension of variability that sounds completely unececessary.
Let's not forget that a huge amount of the "rat in maze" experiments were invalidated when one scientist controlled for things that seemed irrelevant, like the pitch of footsteps in the maze. Forty years of research mostly invalidated. One has to be extra careful in any kind of experiment.
Uh, no. I don't see the words "double blind". I don't see any detailed description of how they did the placebo business. I don't see any description of how they tested for cheating. If there are two rooms, one for placebo and one for RF, or if the RF generator was in the same room, obviously the whole experiment is bogus.
I think we need a whole lot more info about this experiment before its results can be taken as valid.
These are just a few of the questions that pop up in any thorough analysis of this experiment.
Huh? Since when are actors considered the authorities on their costumes and paraphenalia? One might suspect the studio art and prop departments would be better and more reliable judges of what was actually used on a show. As if that matters.
Only then do these parodies have any jocular impact.
First of all, the Gray patent was for sending multiple telegraph signals over one wire, nowadays known as analog frequency-division multiplexing. Bell either had the same idea, or borrowed parts of Gray's ideas, and by accident, made a telephone. It seems a bit of a stretch to call Gray's idea a "telephone", as it was more like sending beep-boop-bork tones over one wire. Nothing to do with voice. ANd it's also a stretch to claim Bell "stole" the Telephone idea. Independent inventions happen all the time.