Since the article is a bit short on detauils, we can reverse-engineer to get the info...
Let's see... absorbs things....
Aha ! Charcoal! Activated carbon!!
But darn, you might recall since WWI the technology has been around to char things like peach pits until they're pure carbon, for use in gas masks. Only about 90 years too late to patent this.
There are several levels of physical safeguards. Typically the polonium initiator and/or a chunk of the fissionable core is stored in a separate bunker, plus several arming devices are stored separately and not configured except when we're at Defcon 2 or at biyearly qualification runs.
Not to mention the bombs do not become "live" until a rather involved configuration procedure, involving several levels of secret codes. Even when "live", they can't go off unless a series of very unlikely events happen in the correct order, including specific changes in altitude, airspeed, arming, g-forces, and parachute release.
So there's no way the things could have gone off. Maybe spilled a little fissionable material in case of a crash, requiring a few bucketloads of dirt to be removed from the site.
200,000 galaxies sounds like a lot. But it's not. It's less than one part per thousand.
And there's no way to tell how closely they're aligned, maybe many are 20-30 degrees off.
Would you still call that aligned? Is it still significant if one in a thousand galaxies are within 30 degrees of each other in orientation? Who knows? Who cares?
Okay, I probably would have applied this patch to my software, at 2Am, with a mental note to remove it in the morning and do the right thing, smarten up the task scheduler, perhaps with an app callback saying "I'm falling behind, could you boost me up a bit?".
As goes without saying, arbitrarily throttling one particular task, at some arbitrary level, is the wrong thing.
Perhaps this could go in Wikipedia under "Kludge"?
Oh My God. Yet another set of fudged statistics and prices, attempting to make solar look competetive somehow, somewhen.
How's about a look at the real numbers, of today.
Sitting at our State fair, a BIG solar array, many meters square. The sign says: makes $25 of electricity per month. Cost $25,000.
If we assume we borrow the $25k at 10% interest, that's $2,500 we have to pay back the first year just in interest. The panel made $25*12 = $300. If the panel lasts 20 years, we've lost $25,000 plus roughly $2,200 times 20, or about $65,000. Actually, much more as we lost the ability to invest the $25k in something worthwhile.
Solar power is not going to be anywhere near break-even, not now, not likely anytime. The physics just don't allow it.
IMHO the fact that "The Wealth of Nations" was written long ago, and is still read and acknowledged to have a lot of relevance, is a big plus.
And let's compare how bad a "trade deficit" is. Below you'll see a list of countries, their relative per capita GNP, and their trade deficits. See if you can spot a pattern or correlqtion:
Country GNP per capita Trade deficits
USA High High
Canada High High
Sweden Very High High
China Very Low Very Low
Argentina Low Low and infrequent
Burkina Faso Very Low Low
For every thing we buy from far away, we give back little pieces of paper.
In other words, we "trade".
The essence of trade is that both sides would rather have what the other guy has.
So we fork over $49.95 for a CD player.
Some place in Taiwan has decided they'd rather have $49.95 than have a CD player.
We decided the exact opposite.
After the "trade", both Ching-Chong Charlie and us, we are both happier.
That is the essence of trade.
So where is the "deficit"? We have fewer pieces of green paper, but that's okay, we got something better in exchange.
Poor C-C Charlie is stuck with little pieces of paper, only good for buying things priced in dollars. Which would be another "trade", beneficial to both parties.
Don't have a cow. Refined U235 is only faintly radioactive. Spilling the solution is no big deal at all. You get out the disposable diapers, the kitty litter, the shop vac. It's very different from the stuff that's been cooked in a reactor, which *is* very very nasty stuff.
Same thing with Plutonium-- it's only mildly Alha emitting. As a liquid or solid it's not bad. As a powder it tends to go pyrophoric (burns up in air), so you have to be careful with that.
Not everything radioactive is nasty. You have to know the difference and handle it accordingly.
Last year it was "nanotech", this year, it's "Quantum computing".
Like nanotech, QC still has many high theoretical and practical hurdles before the very first Nanite or quantum gate makes it to market. Lots of wild theorizing, but darn little actual hardware.
In particular, a quantum gate or quantum computer is only capable of probabilistic answers. That is, each gate only has a slight predisposition to give the right answer. How you'd use unreliable gates to do say a 32-bit address decode is a bit of a brain-teaser. Without huge amounts of error-detection and correction, there's only a 1 in 2^32 chance it will access the right memory cell. We need like 1 error in 10^10, a 10^19 shortfall in reliability. I'm loath to slough off nineteen orders of magnitude.
The numbers bandied about don't add up to anything.
Voltage by itself is meaningless, we need POWER, which is voltage times current. No mention of the current in the article.
If they're getting the extra voltage by putting these nanoparticles in series with the regular cell, then the nanoparticle layer current will be the limiting factor. And IIRC there's far fewer ultraviolet photons than visible or infrared ones.
So it's not clear how much of a win, if any, this new development is.
And as solar cells are still several powers of ten less economical than anything else, it may be a net loss if the gain is overshadowed by increased cost or decreased durability.
Think, folks, think. Liquids are going to spill. Pipes will leak, valves will be left open, containers will tip.
But this isnt a big problem.
You only get a chain reaction with *compact* arrangements of fissile material. For liquids, their innate tendency is to flatten out, spread out, and head downhill. For example, if a bottle of uranium nitrate breaks, its going to fall into a less critical configuration.
Even if the stuff drains into some sump, not a huge problem. It might get more reactive, but being a liquid it's going to boil, splash, spatter, and otherwise get less critical.
Sure, a big mess, some radioactivity, but we're talking self-limiting here, nothing like a mushroom cloud.
Oy vey, how likely the article is accurate if they get the basics wrong?
"Microwave photons" are neither "light", nor "energetic".
Photons with a frequency in the microwave region are thousands of times less energetic than the least energetic light photon.
Basic Plank's equation, E = hv, you see.
And Einstein need not worry, his basic theory or Relativity covers the fuzzy concept of "simultaneity" and "instanteinity" quite thoroughly.
Don't get too excited-- most quantum computing ideas are rather far-fetched-- there are really hard roadblocks that are theoretically and practically very hard to solve. The basic one is you have to keep all the electrons from interacting in ANY WAY with the rest of the universes for a considerable length of time (on the quantum scale). The slightest interaction with anything else and the quantum magic goes *poof*.
Is there a problem here at all? Heatsinks cost about 50 cents wholesale. Processor heat production is going down. I do't think there's much of a problem here to be solved at all.
Is this a good solution for the non-problem? There are lots of cheap and tried-and-true alternatives, such as heat pipes, conduction cooling to the case, and just bigger heatsinks.
How well are microscopic pinpoints going to work with your typical dusty air? How much energy does it take to move all that air? A wild-butt-guess suggests not good numbers at all.
Using the heat of crystallization of Pine resin is a really cool idea, but it seems unlikely there is that much heat capacity there. Dang, my CRC handbook doesnt list that number.
What's the error estimate on that trillion-trillion number?
Real scientists give error bounds.
Just as one example why that's important:: There are probably quite a few unknowns that can skew the estimate. For instance the time, temperature, pressure, ambient poisons, and radiation level.
Any one of those, if unfavorable, could change the odds by a large factor, like 1000. Wouldnt take too many of those to lower the odds to Vegas levels.
This is a pointless announcement. Anybody can make a capacitor with two conducting surfaces separated by an insulator. A good, useful, and economical capacitor is something else. Questions like capacitance, capacitance per unit area, capacitance per unit volume, voltage rating, Q, stability, cost per unit, testability, long-term stability and reliability, manufacturability, testability, structural strength, vibration effects, electromigration, overvoltage resistance, pinhole noise, dielectric drift, leakage current, leakage drift, stray inductance, longevity, temperature range, polarization, memory effect, moisture resistance, solvent resistance, altitude effects, and more are significant parameters. A useful new capacitor design would have to have some significant advantages over current designs.
>>"On the top it's constrained by the Unix and socket interfaces. That doesnt leave a whole lot of room for innovative bits in the middle"
>What can't Unix sockets do exactly?
"constrained" doesn't have to have a negative connotation-- I just meant it's a plain vanilla humdrum interface on both ends.
>Can you provide any examples of these 'innovative bits'?
IMHO the networking stack is quite uninteresting. On the bottom, it's constrained by the networking protocols and network interfaces. On the top it's constrained by the Unix and socket interfaces. That doesnt leave a whole lot of room for innovative bits in the middle.
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Since the article is a bit short on detauils, we can reverse-engineer to get the info... Let's see ... absorbs things....
Aha ! Charcoal! Activated carbon!!
But darn, you might recall since WWI the technology has been around to char things like peach pits until they're pure carbon, for use in gas masks. Only about 90 years too late to patent this.
These were not "live nukes".
There are several levels of physical safeguards. Typically the polonium initiator and/or a chunk of the fissionable core is stored in a separate bunker, plus several arming devices are stored separately and not configured except when we're at Defcon 2 or at biyearly qualification runs.
Not to mention the bombs do not become "live" until a rather involved configuration procedure, involving several levels of secret codes. Even when "live", they can't go off unless a series of very unlikely events happen in the correct order, including specific changes in altitude, airspeed, arming, g-forces, and parachute release.
So there's no way the things could have gone off. Maybe spilled a little fissionable material in case of a crash, requiring a few bucketloads of dirt to be removed from the site.
Really, not much to see here.
And there's no way to tell how closely they're aligned, maybe many are 20-30 degrees off.
Would you still call that aligned? Is it still significant if one in a thousand galaxies are within 30 degrees of each other in orientation? Who knows? Who cares?
Thanks for the reminder.
One might suspect that those companies are dabbing their feet in the solar water for PR purposes, not for any direct savings.
As goes without saying, arbitrarily throttling one particular task, at some arbitrary level, is the wrong thing.
Perhaps this could go in Wikipedia under "Kludge"?
How's about a look at the real numbers, of today.
Sitting at our State fair, a BIG solar array, many meters square. The sign says: makes $25 of electricity per month. Cost $25,000.
If we assume we borrow the $25k at 10% interest, that's $2,500 we have to pay back the first year just in interest. The panel made $25*12 = $300. If the panel lasts 20 years, we've lost $25,000 plus roughly $2,200 times 20, or about $65,000. Actually, much more as we lost the ability to invest the $25k in something worthwhile.
Solar power is not going to be anywhere near break-even, not now, not likely anytime. The physics just don't allow it.
And let's compare how bad a "trade deficit" is. Below you'll see a list of countries, their relative per capita GNP, and their trade deficits. See if you can spot a pattern or correlqtion:
Country GNP per capita Trade deficits
USA High High
Canada High High
Sweden Very High High
China Very Low Very Low
Argentina Low Low and infrequent
Burkina Faso Very Low Low
See if you can spot the correlation, if any.
Perhaps you could all benefit by turning off talk radio and actually READING A BOOK.
You might start with PJ O'Rourke's commentary on "Wealth of Nations". Deep, insightful, and amusing too.
There is no such thing.
For every thing we buy from far away, we give back little pieces of paper. In other words, we "trade".
The essence of trade is that both sides would rather have what the other guy has.
So we fork over $49.95 for a CD player.
Some place in Taiwan has decided they'd rather have $49.95 than have a CD player. We decided the exact opposite.
After the "trade", both Ching-Chong Charlie and us, we are both happier.
That is the essence of trade.
So where is the "deficit"? We have fewer pieces of green paper, but that's okay, we got something better in exchange.
Poor C-C Charlie is stuck with little pieces of paper, only good for buying things priced in dollars. Which would be another "trade", beneficial to both parties.
Same thing with Plutonium-- it's only mildly Alha emitting. As a liquid or solid it's not bad. As a powder it tends to go pyrophoric (burns up in air), so you have to be careful with that.
Not everything radioactive is nasty. You have to know the difference and handle it accordingly.
Like nanotech, QC still has many high theoretical and practical hurdles before the very first Nanite or quantum gate makes it to market. Lots of wild theorizing, but darn little actual hardware.
In particular, a quantum gate or quantum computer is only capable of probabilistic answers. That is, each gate only has a slight predisposition to give the right answer. How you'd use unreliable gates to do say a 32-bit address decode is a bit of a brain-teaser. Without huge amounts of error-detection and correction, there's only a 1 in 2^32 chance it will access the right memory cell. We need like 1 error in 10^10, a 10^19 shortfall in reliability. I'm loath to slough off nineteen orders of magnitude.
Voltage by itself is meaningless, we need POWER, which is voltage times current. No mention of the current in the article.
If they're getting the extra voltage by putting these nanoparticles in series with the regular cell, then the nanoparticle layer current will be the limiting factor. And IIRC there's far fewer ultraviolet photons than visible or infrared ones.
So it's not clear how much of a win, if any, this new development is.
And as solar cells are still several powers of ten less economical than anything else, it may be a net loss if the gain is overshadowed by increased cost or decreased durability.
But this isnt a big problem.
You only get a chain reaction with *compact* arrangements of fissile material. For liquids, their innate tendency is to flatten out, spread out, and head downhill. For example, if a bottle of uranium nitrate breaks, its going to fall into a less critical configuration.
Even if the stuff drains into some sump, not a huge problem. It might get more reactive, but being a liquid it's going to boil, splash, spatter, and otherwise get less critical.
Sure, a big mess, some radioactivity, but we're talking self-limiting here, nothing like a mushroom cloud.
Rocket exhaust is high-velocity, low thrust. For a mechanical arm, you need like 1/100th the velocity, and lots of thrust.
In other words, rocket powered arms are like trying to drag race with your transmission in like 30'th gear.
"Microwave photons" are neither "light", nor "energetic".
Photons with a frequency in the microwave region are thousands of times less energetic than the least energetic light photon. Basic Plank's equation, E = hv, you see.
And Einstein need not worry, his basic theory or Relativity covers the fuzzy concept of "simultaneity" and "instanteinity" quite thoroughly.
If they can't get a simple page renderer to work well, what are the odds they can do a whole slew of apps that don't totally suck?
Don't get too excited-- most quantum computing ideas are rather far-fetched-- there are really hard roadblocks that are theoretically and practically very hard to solve. The basic one is you have to keep all the electrons from interacting in ANY WAY with the rest of the universes for a considerable length of time (on the quantum scale). The slightest interaction with anything else and the quantum magic goes *poof*.
Using the heat of crystallization of Pine resin is a really cool idea, but it seems unlikely there is that much heat capacity there. Dang, my CRC handbook doesnt list that number.
Just as one example why that's important:: There are probably quite a few unknowns that can skew the estimate. For instance the time, temperature, pressure, ambient poisons, and radiation level. Any one of those, if unfavorable, could change the odds by a large factor, like 1000. Wouldnt take too many of those to lower the odds to Vegas levels.
This is a pointless announcement. Anybody can make a capacitor with two conducting surfaces separated by an insulator. A good, useful, and economical capacitor is something else. Questions like capacitance, capacitance per unit area, capacitance per unit volume, voltage rating, Q, stability, cost per unit, testability, long-term stability and reliability, manufacturability, testability, structural strength, vibration effects, electromigration, overvoltage resistance, pinhole noise, dielectric drift, leakage current, leakage drift, stray inductance, longevity, temperature range, polarization, memory effect, moisture resistance, solvent resistance, altitude effects, and more are significant parameters. A useful new capacitor design would have to have some significant advantages over current designs.
"constrained" doesn't have to have a negative connotation-- I just meant it's a plain vanilla humdrum interface on both ends.
>Can you provide any examples of these 'innovative bits'?
That's the problem, I can't.
IMHO the networking stack is quite uninteresting. On the bottom, it's constrained by the networking protocols and network interfaces. On the top it's constrained by the Unix and socket interfaces. That doesnt leave a whole lot of room for innovative bits in the middle.