Bad analogy. The water at the top and bottom have different temperatures and densities. You are lifting COLD (heavy) water but siphoning back WARM (lighter) water.
And even if it only takes 10% of the energy to pump the water, the overall recovery efficiency is still much smaller than that. You can't make up a loss on volume.
Sigh. We're not going to get anywhere if we are so uneducated to fall for all of these pink herrings (this one isnt blatant enough to be fully red).
Any scheme that depends on *slight* variations in temperature is extremely unlikely to ever make more energy than it consumes, or takes to build and pay off over a reasonable lifetime.
The problems are many, and generally difficult, intractable, or impossible to overcome:
The energy needed to lift heavy things (like water) is greater than the energy in the temperature difference.
Things in seawater rust very quickly, somewhat slower if they have a goodly percentage of nickel ($$) or chromium ($$$). You have to take into account the cost of the metal spread out over its lifetime (a few years for steel, a few decades for various grades of stainless steel).
The cost of money is significant, and can't be ignored in any capital-intensive project.
The risks of any new technology are going to make it difficult to raise the $$$$$$$$$$ needed.
It would be wonderful if this super lens stuff was correctly explained in the article, BUT:
I seem to recall light waves are one heck of a lot longer than a nanometer, like hundreds of times. Viewed as a particle, a photon is similarly huge. To put it into Enquirer-speak: You can't peek into the eye of a needle by throwing bowling balls at it.
Regular lenses work by slowing down light. Is it likely that you can speed up light?
One nanometer wavelength "light" is somewhere in the gamma-ray area. It's really hard to bend these. Even if you could, most target materials are semi-transparent at these wavelengths. Worse yet, that energy of photon is likely to disrupt whatever it's hitting. Not good for viewing things unless you get off on watching a lot of microscopic Terminator-style explosions.
I seem to recall that a lens's resolving power is proportional to the lens width in wavelengths. How wide are these superlenses, and is that wide enough for nanometer resolution?
If you did get that level of resolution, which seems mighty doubtful, what is the depth-of-field or width of field? It's not much fun looking through a drinking straw at really out-of-focus blobs.
There are already a whole host of super-microscopes of the electron scanning and tunneling varieties.
All those caveats aside, it does soound really exciting!
800-some isnt so bad. Do you remember when part of the Windows source code got out, and a little GREPping showed about 48,000 uses of untamed strcpy, strcat and sprintf?
If you assume only 5% of those calls could overflow a buffer, Windows is doing 4x better than expected!
Every four score fortnights somebody predicts molecular electronics is going to jsut SHOOT out of the gate in a year or two. This goes back to at least 1960. Someday they may be right.
Also every other year, some new meaningless buzzword like oh, just picking one, "nanotechnology", invades every nitwit's predictions. They don't know what it means, you don't know what it means, but it sure sounds cool, whatever it is, and it gets four breathless pages in "Wired".
Meanwhile the real advances usually come out of left field and take over.
There are several hundred million A/D converters already in use that ignore the VEIL info.That should be plenty enough input devices for anyone who really wants to copy audio or video.
Macrovision can be defeated by two resistors and a diode. With VEIL it may take one more 5 cent capacitor. Really.
One can always go and buy a generic A/D flash converter chip for around $8. It's unlikely they can control all the A/D chip manufacturers worldwide.
The strength of material has *absolutely no relation* to it's ability to withstand impact.
For example, glass is extremely strong in compression, but easily shattered.
The steel used to make files is also extremely strong, but shatters with the slightest impact.
What you need to handle impact is a material that can spread the impact energy as uniformly as possible over TIME and SPACE. So you need something that's extremely uniform and ductile.
This stuff may be good for something, but touting it as good for this application sounds mighty fishy.
Note from the trenches:
My boss's home computer hasnt been the same since SP2. The first time it got installed, the desktop wouldnt come up. You could start tasks with the task manager pop-up, but that's a bit clumsy.
A complete reinstall fixed that, but now file sharing is broken and we've spent days applying bizarre SP2 KB patches to no avail.
So my suggestion to the world: don't. Just don't !
Lesse, we have a heat engine turning hundreds of gallons per second of cryogenic liquids into heat, then into a bazillion horsepower, a fair percentage of which gets turned into vibration. What are the chances of a bolted flange working loose, or a pipe fracturing, or a short temperature imbalance warping a pipe, valve, seal, or flange? What are the chances some piece of paper or other material was left in a hot zone, and the oxygen is just being boiled off the object? 500ppm is miniscule-- you can't get a flame or explosion until the fraction gets 100's of times higher. And a lot of the compartments are filled with inert gases, so it's even harder to start a fire.
the amount of mercury vapor in a four-foot fluorescent tube is about, hmm... lesse a pint's a pound, never eat anything bigger than your head,..... >.
I ma ke the volume of a 4foot 1.25" diameter tube versus a 17 inch 0.15 inch tube as about 150 times.
So if you survived the overhead light breeaking, you're not going to be much worse off breaking a little LCD CCFL tube.
Sheesh!
Required disclaimer: When breaking fluorescent tubes, do so in an area with some ventilation. Do not huff the tube. Do not lick the insides of the tube.
Sounds like somebody other than me is confused. NTSC has ansolutely nothing to do with pixels, or 4:2:2 ratios, or anything having to do with bits. It's an analog standard, devised a couple decades before subsampling was even established as a concept.
Let's look at this in the frequency domain, since that's how NTSC was defined. There's about 4.2MHz of bandwidth for the total signal. With B/W, that whole bandwidth is used for grayscale (minus a very few KHz for audio). NTSC, to be "compatible color", had to fit the color info in there somehow without messing up all the extant B/W TV's. They did this by choosing just the right subcarrier frequency so the color info tends to average out between adjacent lines. Since that subcarrier ends up at 3.7545MHz or thereabouts, the color bandwidth is severely limited, to a bit under 1MHz. With 15,750 scan lines per second, the color can't change more than 2*1Mhz/15,750 times per scan line. Anybody who ever tried to use an Apple ][ in color mode has experienced this.
Now that's theoretical bandwidths. With off the air signals, or worse yet, VHS tape, the resolutions get even worse. Not to mention dynamic range, which you've probably noticed, is really bad for VHS.
Conclusion: A 640x480 display is plenty good resolution for TV watching. Sure, your "golden eyed" folks can complain, and they will. But you can't squeeze much more than that resolution out of the medium.
>They don't "quit", the picture gets badly distorted and unwatchable. The fact that you've never seen it doesn't prove anything... except that you've never tried it.
Well according to the IMDB, I've used one for 4.7 hours. I watched "thunderball" (130 Minutes) and "Forrest Gump" (142 minutes) at one sitting one rainy day. No problems.
Maybe you've used a tablet that was flaking out?
>Gee, how nice. Then you can have a 640x480 image (lower-res than a standard TV) scaled up to 50". I'm sure that'll look great.
Doesnt look bad. USA TV has 525 lines, a bit more than the screen's 480. The horizontal resolution is debatable, as it's analog, and quadrature phase encoded, so depending on how you calculate it, there's about 4 million dots per second per every 55 microsecond scan line, and about half that many color changes, so that's only about 440 pixels across.
So in most cases a 640x480 display is way above what a TV signal can deliver.
>Attach a couple large powerful fans to the LCD screen...
Think. These screens were designed to sit on top of overhead projectors. They typically have a infrared blocking glass plate on the bottom (the glass looks slightly greenish), plus a long squirrel-cage fan along the whole length of the LCD display. I've never seen one overheat and quit.
Pick out an overhead projector. Personally I prefer the 3M brand ones. They come in tasteful earth colors. Most of the other brands are more garish. Make sure the bulb lights and the fan spins.
Go visit your high school A/V department. If they're like most, they have a back room with a stack of overhead projection tablets that nobody uses anymore because they're 480x640. Offer them a box of Mallomars or $5 for the one with the fewest scratches. Remember to get the right VGA cable and power supply.
It's kinda unlikely he will be able to make a cyclotron of any usable size. The main hangup is the magnet-- you need many many many tons of iron for the core, many many tons of copper for the windings. Unless he has a 50-ton crane and $500,000 for the core and wire, he's not going to get very far.
I guess he could go with superconducting magnets, but that requires mad crogenic skillz. And you still need lots of iron.
Even then he's going to need another big jar of cash for the RF generator, excellent high-vacuum skills and lots of electricity. Then if he's lucky, he *might* be able to generate a microamp of million volt electrons-- about what the average cat brushing by nylon curtains can generate.
I wouldnt worry too much about the nuclear-spiltting capabilities here.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad analogy. The water at the top and bottom have different temperatures and densities. You are lifting COLD (heavy) water but siphoning back WARM (lighter) water. And even if it only takes 10% of the energy to pump the water, the overall recovery efficiency is still much smaller than that. You can't make up a loss on volume.
Any scheme that depends on *slight* variations in temperature is extremely unlikely to ever make more energy than it consumes, or takes to build and pay off over a reasonable lifetime.
The problems are many, and generally difficult, intractable, or impossible to overcome:
It would be wonderful if this super lens stuff was correctly explained in the article, BUT:
All those caveats aside, it does soound really exciting!
If you assume only 5% of those calls could overflow a buffer, Windows is doing 4x better than expected!
Also every other year, some new meaningless buzzword like oh, just picking one, "nanotechnology", invades every nitwit's predictions. They don't know what it means, you don't know what it means, but it sure sounds cool, whatever it is, and it gets four breathless pages in "Wired".
Meanwhile the real advances usually come out of left field and take over.
Um, no, the cat isnt both dead or alive. As soon as the random event has made a mark on our world, the decision is final. No need for an observer.
The actual .exe files still have to be digitally signed before the CPU will accept them.
Changing one bit of the .exe will break the digital signature's validity.
So this isnt a way to sneak fresh code onto the 360.
Sorry.
- Superfluidity isnt new, it's been around for 50+ years.
- Superfluidity is only tangentially related to superconductivity.
- Superfluidity is not particularly useful in and of itself.
- Superfluidity among ferminons *is* new and interesting to physics geeks.
As to its applications to daiily life, well, unlikely in the short run.For example, glass is extremely strong in compression, but easily shattered.
The steel used to make files is also extremely strong, but shatters with the slightest impact.
What you need to handle impact is a material that can spread the impact energy as uniformly as possible over TIME and SPACE. So you need something that's extremely uniform and ductile.
This stuff may be good for something, but touting it as good for this application sounds mighty fishy.
A complete reinstall fixed that, but now file sharing is broken and we've spent days applying bizarre SP2 KB patches to no avail.
So my suggestion to the world: don't. Just don't !
- Know what the world needs.
- And funny, it's just what they'd like to play with.
- And they have figured out how to build something for less than the cost of the parts.
- And engineers capable of making a rugger and reliable machine, for peanuts.
- And they've figured out a distribution system, where there isnt any.
- And a support system, where there isnt any.
- And a repair shop structure, where there are not any.
- And a manufacturer willing to build something with no profit margin for them, and a billion headaches.
Prolly happen just about when pigs fly, or Bruno Nagorski kisses Pricess Di. Oops, that rhyme is bit outdated.One of Don Lancasters maxims re startups: If you have money, you'll find something to spend it on.
Lesse, we have a heat engine turning hundreds of gallons per second of cryogenic liquids into heat, then into a bazillion horsepower, a fair percentage of which gets turned into vibration. What are the chances of a bolted flange working loose, or a pipe fracturing, or a short temperature imbalance warping a pipe, valve, seal, or flange? What are the chances some piece of paper or other material was left in a hot zone, and the oxygen is just being boiled off the object? 500ppm is miniscule-- you can't get a flame or explosion until the fraction gets 100's of times higher. And a lot of the compartments are filled with inert gases, so it's even harder to start a fire.
Otherwise, it's a swell idea.
Sheesh!
Required disclaimer: When breaking fluorescent tubes, do so in an area with some ventilation. Do not huff the tube. Do not lick the insides of the tube.
Let's look at this in the frequency domain, since that's how NTSC was defined. There's about 4.2MHz of bandwidth for the total signal. With B/W, that whole bandwidth is used for grayscale (minus a very few KHz for audio). NTSC, to be "compatible color", had to fit the color info in there somehow without messing up all the extant B/W TV's. They did this by choosing just the right subcarrier frequency so the color info tends to average out between adjacent lines. Since that subcarrier ends up at 3.7545MHz or thereabouts, the color bandwidth is severely limited, to a bit under 1MHz. With 15,750 scan lines per second, the color can't change more than 2*1Mhz/15,750 times per scan line. Anybody who ever tried to use an Apple ][ in color mode has experienced this.
Now that's theoretical bandwidths. With off the air signals, or worse yet, VHS tape, the resolutions get even worse. Not to mention dynamic range, which you've probably noticed, is really bad for VHS.
Conclusion: A 640x480 display is plenty good resolution for TV watching. Sure, your "golden eyed" folks can complain, and they will. But you can't squeeze much more than that resolution out of the medium.
>They don't "quit", the picture gets badly distorted and unwatchable. The fact that you've never seen it doesn't prove anything... except that you've never tried it. Well according to the IMDB, I've used one for 4.7 hours. I watched "thunderball" (130 Minutes) and "Forrest Gump" (142 minutes) at one sitting one rainy day. No problems. Maybe you've used a tablet that was flaking out?
Doesnt look bad. USA TV has 525 lines, a bit more than the screen's 480. The horizontal resolution is debatable, as it's analog, and quadrature phase encoded, so depending on how you calculate it, there's about 4 million dots per second per every 55 microsecond scan line, and about half that many color changes, so that's only about 440 pixels across.
So in most cases a 640x480 display is way above what a TV signal can deliver.
>Attach a couple large powerful fans to the LCD screen...
Think. These screens were designed to sit on top of overhead projectors. They typically have a infrared blocking glass plate on the bottom (the glass looks slightly greenish), plus a long squirrel-cage fan along the whole length of the LCD display. I've never seen one overheat and quit.
It's actually a very profound observation, something along the lines of:
So there's things you know (We wanna build an airplane, around $10 mil each).
Things you think you know (It's likely going to cost $13 million)
things you know you don't know ( costs above expected overruns)
and things you don't know you don't know ( unexpected events beyond the expected unexpected events)
Go home.
Place tablet on projector.
Plug in all cords into their correct sockets.
Enjoy!
I guess he could go with superconducting magnets, but that requires mad crogenic skillz. And you still need lots of iron.
Even then he's going to need another big jar of cash for the RF generator, excellent high-vacuum skills and lots of electricity. Then if he's lucky, he *might* be able to generate a microamp of million volt electrons-- about what the average cat brushing by nylon curtains can generate.
I wouldnt worry too much about the nuclear-spiltting capabilities here.
- Density of really light rock: ~ 1.2 tons/cubic meter
- Assume "supporting area" around the building: 1000 meters square
- Assume "supporting depth" of tectonic plate: 10km meters deep
- Volume of: 10^10 cubic meters
- Weight of that area around the building: 1.2 x 10^10 tons
- Building, fraction thereof: 0.00055
As a real rough calculation, the weight of the building is negligible.