Lemme see... what if we look at the net energy produced? Adding all those towers and wires, it must take quite a bit of energy to refine all that steel and aluminum. How long do the windmills have to turn to make up for all that energy? Until then you're in an energy hole.
>The type, nature and ratios of chemicals that were produced at Oak Ridge and sent to Los Alamos would, alone, be enough to suggest the chemical cocktail necessary to produce an atomic bomb.
Not not. In the end the Soviets did not use anything from Oak Ridge. They made their bomb out of plutonium, which was strictly a Hanford operation.
It ran on GE Model 645 hardware, a not particularly complex nor fast CPU. Maybe someone will whip up a bunch of macros to convert that language to X86 or even C. Shouldnt take more than a couple of weeks of hacking.
Er, um, we don't really know what this guy found out, do we?
Chances are, given the considerable security, he did not learn a whole lot.
Even the top designers of the Oak Ridge gas separation plant did not know exactly what they were doing. What are the chances this guy got the goods?
And half of what they did at Oak Ridge was electromagnetic separation, which turned out to be way too inefficient. If he gave the Soviets that info, he did us a huge favor.
The Polonium separation that went on at a scientist's mother's house in Dayton was straightforward chemistry, nothing particularly novel or secret.
>The moon is 750000 kilometers away? wait, no it's not. This would be TWICE that distance and more data;which was the point you ********* ******.
Tsk, tsk. Such language.
Sorry the SC couldn't move the Moon to please you. They used whatever reflector was available, not some distance that would be post-ordained some sixty years later.
If you want to be that picky, add six years and change "Moon" to "Venus", which is many times farther away than both the Moon and the recently spanned distance.
My point was that sending electromagnetic waves long distances is not exactly a new thing and should not be a cause of much surprise. The rules governing signal power, bandwidth, noise, data rate, and receiver signal to noise ratio and error rate were worked out by Shannon many many decades ago. On the practical side, Jansky heard the Sun and the Milky Way in IIRC 1931. There's nothing novel in either theory or practice in what these guys did, AFAICS.
Fellas and Gals, it was done first in 1948, at zero net cost.
Some guys in the US Army Signal Corps aimed their very primitive SCR-348 radar sets at the Moon, and wadda you know, an echo came back. All done with what looks like from now as very primitive vacuum tubes, diode detectors, and magnetrons.
A laser is just a Very high frequency radio transmitter. The latecomers just upped the frequency by a large factor.
>So basically he's saying that the 6-stroke "regenerative cooling" (I made that up) engine could equal a turbodiesel,
Yes but turbodiesels have been running well for many decades now.
By comparison there is a question whether this 6-cycle engine would ever run for more than a few thousand revs before seizing up.
>Water injection is used to allow increased power output all the time, from NA aircraft to hopped up turbo racecars.
Yes, but we are after increased efficiency, not increased power at the expense of efficiency. You can inject water into a cylinder to reduce detonation, but with a decrease in efficiency.
>It's a way to harness the energy that's normally removed through the radiator. It works theoretically, and in tests. Problems are most likely due to materials.
No kidding. Cylinders and pistons and piston rings and valves are not designed to be hit with water while at operating temps.
A less catastrophic way to harness this wasted heat would be to fill the cooling system with plain water and let it boil, then use that steam to run a steam engine or turbine. Then the cylinders wouldn't be getting shock-cooled and corroded on every cycle.
If you do just a teensy bit of the math, the idea of recharging by "vibration" or body motion is revealerd to be quite ridiculous.
First let's estimate how much of your body motion you would not mind having drained off.
Let's say you're walking, that takes about 0.05 horsepower. Let's assume you would not mind having some VERY STIFF pants that siphon off 10% of your walking power. That's 0.005 of a horsepower.
Then let's assume that the motion sensors are 20% efficient, which is rather high for your typical piezo squeeze transducer. So we have a whole 0.001 of a horsepower. Convert to watts, and that's 750 milliwatts. Assume you're walking 30% of the day, that's 250 milliwatt-hours per day. A single AA lithium cell can put out 4 watt-hours, so this whole nasty stiff-pants thing can be replaced at a cost of ONE AA cell every SIXTEEN days.
Doesn't sound like the stiff pants are a win-win for anybody, anywhere.
Just in case nobody's mentioned it.., the article is full of crap.
There are no technical reasons why CD's can't sound much better than records.
You have wider frequency response, no noise, and 16-bits of dynamic range (at least 80 db depending on how you define the bottom end), and infinite channel separation. Not to mention random-access and no degradation on copy.
While on a record you have 15KHz top end, lots of rumble, scratch and hiss, maybe 55db dynamic range, and only 15db channel separation on a good day.
Conventional memories rely on moving electrons in and out of insulating wells. This works both reliably and quickly. Reliable because it's a simple electrical process. Quickly because electrons are very light.
Now building copper bridges is a whole different kind of animal. It's more akin to chemistry. Reliability is likely to be poor, as impurities and dust bollix things up.
Speed and power consumption are not going to be great, as you're moving copper atoms, many thousands of times heavier than electrons.
This device may be more in the running as a disk-drive replacement than as a substitute for flash memory.
Sending analog and digital data over twisted pairs has been studied by Bell Labs and others for about 120 years.
It seems a bit unlikely this one guy has made 200x of progress over what scads of EE's and Shannon and Nyquist and innumerable PHD's
have worked out over the years.
Knowing a little bit about the many safety and quality control measures required to build a barely acceptable helicopter, I don't think I'd ever ride any home-made one, not for ten seconds.
Certain absolutely mandatory items, like X-ray and ultrasonic parts inspections, are not practical for the home builder and are likely to lead to a very short trip.
Let's do a little math. 200 picowatts. At 1 volt, that's 200 picoamps. So you can drive a circuit with a resistance of ( R=E/I), wait for it--- 5,000 megohms. That's about 100,000 times a typical circuit resistance. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's going to be mighty tricky to design a useful circuit at those power levels. Even more challenging-- eventually the circuit has to drive some interface, be it a USB port, a LED, or a buzzer, and those require millions of times more power than is available with this gadget.
>Er, yes you can. The SpectroLab cells can handle 500 times concentration.
You can be forgiven for believing a manufacturer's datasheet.
But looking over the datasheets, if you mull over the data, you see the cell has to be kept far under 100C for it to work. You see they're made of Germanium, which becomes much like a piece of wire at about 70C.
Not a huge problem on Earth where you could have a water-cooled heat-sink.
In Space, it IS a huge problem to carry away 500,000 watts per square meter and keep the hot side way below 100C. Especially in the sunlight! Just an eyeball estimate, you'd need 50 to 500 times the hot-side area in a shadowed, cold-side shaded radiator. Just not practical.
It's well known CTS is due to repetetive motions, without variation in position.
Most computer users have the option of shifting their chair and keyboard positions, they tend to be okay.
It's people that are stuck with 8 hrs a day of one keyboard position that are harder hit.
A friend of mine got a bad case of CTS after a month long binge of using the original IBM PC keyboard, you remember the click-clacker model. It's taken over 15 years for it to subside somewhat.
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Lemme see... what if we look at the net energy produced? Adding all those towers and wires, it must take quite a bit of energy to refine all that steel and aluminum. How long do the windmills have to turn to make up for all that energy? Until then you're in an energy hole.
Not not. In the end the Soviets did not use anything from Oak Ridge. They made their bomb out of plutonium, which was strictly a Hanford operation.
It ran on GE Model 645 hardware, a not particularly complex nor fast CPU. Maybe someone will whip up a bunch of macros to convert that language to X86 or even C. Shouldnt take more than a couple of weeks of hacking.
Chances are, given the considerable security, he did not learn a whole lot.
Even the top designers of the Oak Ridge gas separation plant did not know exactly what they were doing. What are the chances this guy got the goods?
And half of what they did at Oak Ridge was electromagnetic separation, which turned out to be way too inefficient. If he gave the Soviets that info, he did us a huge favor.
The Polonium separation that went on at a scientist's mother's house in Dayton was straightforward chemistry, nothing particularly novel or secret.
No James Bond here.
Tsk, tsk. Such language.
Sorry the SC couldn't move the Moon to please you. They used whatever reflector was available, not some distance that would be post-ordained some sixty years later.
If you want to be that picky, add six years and change "Moon" to "Venus", which is many times farther away than both the Moon and the recently spanned distance.
My point was that sending electromagnetic waves long distances is not exactly a new thing and should not be a cause of much surprise. The rules governing signal power, bandwidth, noise, data rate, and receiver signal to noise ratio and error rate were worked out by Shannon many many decades ago. On the practical side, Jansky heard the Sun and the Milky Way in IIRC 1931. There's nothing novel in either theory or practice in what these guys did, AFAICS.
Some guys in the US Army Signal Corps aimed their very primitive SCR-348 radar sets at the Moon, and wadda you know, an echo came back. All done with what looks like from now as very primitive vacuum tubes, diode detectors, and magnetrons.
A laser is just a Very high frequency radio transmitter. The latecomers just upped the frequency by a large factor.
Yes but turbodiesels have been running well for many decades now.
By comparison there is a question whether this 6-cycle engine would ever run for more than a few thousand revs before seizing up.
>Water injection is used to allow increased power output all the time, from NA aircraft to hopped up turbo racecars.
Yes, but we are after increased efficiency, not increased power at the expense of efficiency. You can inject water into a cylinder to reduce detonation, but with a decrease in efficiency.
No kidding. Cylinders and pistons and piston rings and valves are not designed to be hit with water while at operating temps.
A less catastrophic way to harness this wasted heat would be to fill the cooling system with plain water and let it boil, then use that steam to run a steam engine or turbine. Then the cylinders wouldn't be getting shock-cooled and corroded on every cycle.
Similarly anything powered by compressed air can't fail to have low efficiency.
And that's just the obvious Carnot-cycle defying impossible inventions. One wonders about the rest of them.
And if you look up in the night sky, you'll see an archer, a bull, a big and a small dipper.
What's your point?
First let's estimate how much of your body motion you would not mind having drained off. Let's say you're walking, that takes about 0.05 horsepower. Let's assume you would not mind having some VERY STIFF pants that siphon off 10% of your walking power. That's 0.005 of a horsepower.
Then let's assume that the motion sensors are 20% efficient, which is rather high for your typical piezo squeeze transducer. So we have a whole 0.001 of a horsepower. Convert to watts, and that's 750 milliwatts. Assume you're walking 30% of the day, that's 250 milliwatt-hours per day. A single AA lithium cell can put out 4 watt-hours, so this whole nasty stiff-pants thing can be replaced at a cost of ONE AA cell every SIXTEEN days.
Doesn't sound like the stiff pants are a win-win for anybody, anywhere.
There are no technical reasons why CD's can't sound much better than records. You have wider frequency response, no noise, and 16-bits of dynamic range (at least 80 db depending on how you define the bottom end), and infinite channel separation. Not to mention random-access and no degradation on copy.
While on a record you have 15KHz top end, lots of rumble, scratch and hiss, maybe 55db dynamic range, and only 15db channel separation on a good day.
Now building copper bridges is a whole different kind of animal. It's more akin to chemistry. Reliability is likely to be poor, as impurities and dust bollix things up. Speed and power consumption are not going to be great, as you're moving copper atoms, many thousands of times heavier than electrons.
This device may be more in the running as a disk-drive replacement than as a substitute for flash memory.
It seems a bit unlikely this one guy has made 200x of progress over what scads of EE's and Shannon and Nyquist and innumerable PHD's have worked out over the years.
(1) Adobe works on making Acrobat less than a huge PITA.
(2) Apple fix QuickTime's TIFF viewer so it works on the images at the US Patent office site? Only been broken for three years or so.
(3) The other free TIFF viewers fix their manifold flaws and foibles regarding speed, imaging, scaling, printing, etc.
just a Modest Proposal.
Well, not really. The 747 has one of the best safety records. It's more likely this 747 crashed due to weather or pilot error.
> 2. The guy's implement may be using some aviation-grade pieces after all... Well, they were aviation-grade, up to a millisecond before the crash. :)
Certain absolutely mandatory items, like X-ray and ultrasonic parts inspections, are not practical for the home builder and are likely to lead to a very short trip.
Let's do a little math. 200 picowatts. At 1 volt, that's 200 picoamps. So you can drive a circuit with a resistance of ( R=E/I), wait for it--- 5,000 megohms. That's about 100,000 times a typical circuit resistance. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's going to be mighty tricky to design a useful circuit at those power levels. Even more challenging-- eventually the circuit has to drive some interface, be it a USB port, a LED, or a buzzer, and those require millions of times more power than is available with this gadget.
You can be forgiven for believing a manufacturer's datasheet.
But looking over the datasheets, if you mull over the data, you see the cell has to be kept far under 100C for it to work. You see they're made of Germanium, which becomes much like a piece of wire at about 70C.
Not a huge problem on Earth where you could have a water-cooled heat-sink.
In Space, it IS a huge problem to carry away 500,000 watts per square meter and keep the hot side way below 100C. Especially in the sunlight! Just an eyeball estimate, you'd need 50 to 500 times the hot-side area in a shadowed, cold-side shaded radiator. Just not practical.
You'd have to focus the light on say a water boiler driving a steam turbine, which has major weight and gyroscopic problems in space.
Most computer users have the option of shifting their chair and keyboard positions, they tend to be okay. It's people that are stuck with 8 hrs a day of one keyboard position that are harder hit.
A friend of mine got a bad case of CTS after a month long binge of using the original IBM PC keyboard, you remember the click-clacker model. It's taken over 15 years for it to subside somewhat.