http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18581/artic le_detail.asp Daylight Savings! By Kelly Jane Torrance... Michael Downing.... has recently published Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time (Shoemaker & Hoard), a charming light history of time in America.... one can conclude from Spring Forward that we should blame the twice-yearly time change on capitalists. Downing explains that "without Daylight Saving, the commodities, stock, and bond traders on Wall Street could expect no opportunity at all for arbitrage--buying securities on one market for immediate resale in another market at an advantageous price and profiting by the price discrepancy." The time change gave traders one hour in which the London Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange were both open..... Federal legislators often justified their bills by arguing that the change would save fuel costs. But Downing argues that a real case for this was never made.....
http://doctord.dyndns.org:8000/Stories/Nightfall.h tm... Aton, somewhere, was crying, whimpering horribly like a terribly frightened child. 'Stars -- all the Stars -- we didn't know at all. We didn't know anything. We thought six stars in a universe is something the Stars didn't notice is Darkness forever and ever and ever and the walls are breaking in and we didn't know we couldn't know and anything -- '
Someone clawed at the torch, and it fell and snuffed out. In the instant, the awful splendor of the indifferent Stars leaped nearer to them.
On the horizon outside the window, in the direction of Saro City, a crimson glow began growing, strengthening in brightness, that was not the glow of a sun.
The long night had come again.
(1941)
My own speculation is that we'll manage Bose condensates -- say take a pint of deuterium, cooled down til it acts like a single atom (well, a large one), and a pint of lithium, ditto.
Push them together til you get fusion.
Two pint (eight ounce) sized atoms fusing ought to produce significant energy release.
What's harder to create, a huge accelerator ring for storing antimatter, or a couple of small college-dorm-sized supercold refrigerator compartments with a way to nudge them together?
The credit card slot on your DSL modem will upload payment information at the hightest possible rate, and the company will make a micro-profit on the float.
You've got to think small, fast and predatory to understand business ethics these days.
Think of the legal system as like Professional Wrestling.
When the bell rings, the big company lawyer steps in to shake hands, grapple, and decide if he's facing another professional heavyweight.
If so, they go seventeen rounds, make money, and provide entertainment.
When you go to work for a company and they hand you a contract full of boilerplate taking ownership of any idea you have now or ever afterward, it's one of those events.
When a company gets one of these obvious patents, it's another of those events.
IF NOBODY FIGHTS BACK, the big company wins by default.
THAT is our legal system. They claim whatever they can imagine -- and wait to see if there is a comparably entertaining and well paid legal team on the other side.
If you sign their first draft employment agreement, you lose.
If you don't fight their patent, you lose.
What y'all are missing is the fact that the referee does NOT work to protect you in this kind of event.
The referee is there to keep the entertainment going.
The big companies expect to win some of their absurd essays in taking everything, because nobody objects.
The Patent Examiner is part of the show, folks, part of the illusion that keeps people watching the show instead of saying, hey, this is just a big bully stomping people. Oh, no, it's a refereed match.
Let's see -- they've talked about cracks in the electrodes, and stressed crystals.
Can we make a better fusion device using precise fabrication tools? -- produce exactly the right materials and spacing to create tiny little accelerators, artificial crystals, to optimize this procedure?
If so, can we make a "sea urchin" with a few thousand such little accelerators, all pointed precisely at a tiny pellet -- a miniature version of the giant laser devices currently being built? Build the capacitor, the accelerators and the fusion core all on a little chip, wind it up...
If so there'd be a nice pellet for for a fusion pellet gun to use to drive an Orion-type spacecraft. Even if it DID take more energy to manufacture than it'd produce, it'd be one heck of a good way to store energy for, um, rapid decomposition devices (things that go boom).
Or, a wholly different approach --
I've always wondered what would happen if someone manages to cause fusion to occur between a couple of Bose-Einstein Condensates.
Make them out of, on the one hand, tritium atoms, and on the other hand, deuterium atoms. Result, one large 'atom' of each element. Very large. Then clap your hands. Fusion?
Or better yet, use condensates of boron and hydrogen, of course.
The boron-hydrogen method is described as currently being worked on (not using Bose-Einstein condensates -- using something like the Philo Farnsworth accelerator), if I read it correctly, here:
You're seeing the problems with the Force 1.0 universe -- it's a binary, two-bit universe. Everything's black and white, morally speaking.
Universe 2.0 is 8-bit and has grayscale morality.
Re:+"cell phone" +yagi .... line of sight antenna
on
A Private GSM Cell?
·
· Score: 1
hmmm, I'm working (Verizon, in N. Ca.) from a mountainside that's line of sight about 20 miles to the nearest cell tower; used to get only analog, now can get digital. If I go five hundred feet downhill, I'm in the shadow of the surrounding mountains and have no cell connection til I drive out past them. This is with just the handheld antenna.
I had been using an old analog-only dual-mode Nokia phone but recently switched to a Kyocera 6036 (Palm PDA plus tri-mode handset) so I've been looking for a signal booster myself that works for tri-mode. I note there are signal booster amplifiers, as well as external antennas, claimed to work for distant weak signal sites.
You do need to know exactly what kind of antenna works with your phone -- Kris obviously knows much more specifically what you need. Maybe you can get an exact specification and then search.
I'd be surprised if no external antenna is possible for you, if you can stand having to plug your phone in up on your mountain site.
Watch out for lightning storms though.
Maybe this one?
YAGI AND PANEL CELLULAR / PCS ANTENNAS
These low-cost antennas can improve your signal strength drastically. Installed on poles, the antenna points in the direction of the cellular tower. The antenna can be rotated on the pole until the connected cell phone obtains the maximum signal. These antennas can be combined with our signal booster amplifier product for maximum range.
Products include the CAY807 Yagi antenna, which features four-element Yagi with 7dB (9dBi) directional gain and can withstand 125mph winds, and the CAY1912 PCS panel antenna - a high quality, completely enclosed 11dB (13dBi) gain panel antenna for 1,850MHz to 1,990MHz.
+"cell phone" +yagi .... line of sight antenna
on
A Private GSM Cell?
·
· Score: 1
Yagi Antenna [8 Elements] for Cell Phone Frequencies 806-896 Mhz / 870-960 Mhz Availability: Usually ships the same business day.
all Cellular and GSM phones excluding PCS phones
US $49.95
Nice.sig ---------- Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information.
-- the plans to store carbon dioxide in old oilfields go forward.
-- the CO2 being injected into the old oil fields is, of course, contaminated by bacterial computer components.
-- bacteria, being present in almost every geological structure for a mile or so below the surface, provide both a vast number of components and a rapid rate of evolutionary selection. Earth wakes up.
Yes. The seasons will be called Forward, Inward, Backward, and Outward -- and they'll be named for where you see the sun on the horizon, from your location in the mountains on the pole, in relation to the Moon's motion around it. You'll get a complete set of four seasons during each lunar day, and the brightness and temperature variation will be due to whatever's on the horizon.
I remember once upon a time, these were called the Mountains of Eternal Light -- was that a Heinlein story?
That's a wonderful comic -- I had to start at the beginning and read the whole story, and when I got back to this suit design I see not only the dockable suit, but even the "keep clean" cover is described there. http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1000/fv00988.gif/
I hope NASA reads this stuff. The design is attributed to the Russian space program.
Where the backpack mounts, underneath it on the back of the suit, there's a hatch.
Astronaut backs up to the side of the habitat, removes the backpack or hinges it to one side.
There's a flat oval surface big enough to exit from.
A matching surface on the habitat also opens up.
On it there's a sticky surface like a Post-It note.
Astronaut presses the suit up against that surface, and it seals around the edge.
The sticky surface traps all the dust on the outside of the suit hatch and anything that stuck to the surface gets peeled away along with the sticky layer, out from between the EVA suit and the actual habitat surface.
Think of the old magic trick of slipping a tablecloth out from under the table setting, or of putting down one side of double-sticky tape and then pulling the covering paper out from in between the parts you want to stay in contact.
Then you have a pair of freshly cleaned surfaces stuck together -- astronaut on one side in the EVA suit, and true airlock on the other side in the habitat (yes, you do want a backup door.
Pull the little zip strip all the way around, roll up the membrane with any remaining dust stuck in between two thin layers of clean material.
Astronaut backs into the airlock.
Pull down another clean sheet of sealing material over the opening, with whatever connectors are required for flushing out and cleaning the EVA suit.
Close the portal, leaving the cleaned suit hanging there on the outside of the habitat waiting to be entered next time.
Step through the real airlock door, seal it, wash up, lather-rinse-repeat.
Go into the habitat.
Yes, I take this stuff seriously.
Short of setting up a nice big sprinkler system and freezing the whole area to control the dust, it's going to be a constant issue.
Mars is looking friendlier all the time, as are the Lagrange points.
Also, someone with good scheduling tools could maximize use of a monthly transit pass --- just connect people who travel regularly in alternate directions during the day at staggered times, who can meet at the train/bus terminal and hand the pass to tne next person in the queue.
This fellow in one of the foggiest/rainiest corners of California has been improving -- and lowering the cost of -- sunrise simulators for several years, and I've been giving them to friends who didn't know they needed them for quite a while.
I'm using his current -- $25 -- model; simple, not adjustabled like the $160 research-grade model made by PiSquare, but it works fine.
"Trouble in mind, I"m blue, but I won't be blue always, sun's going to shine in my back door some day." -- meaning, sun starts to rise north of east after the equinox (it's just started shining in my back door on the north side of the house) so I won't need the dawn sim til late August.
If you get winter blues READ UP and try one of these. It saved my life, it might help yours.
I hereby claim_1/ First Post on the new theory that we don't need dark energy because there may just be wrinkles_2/ in space that are not detectable, close to large masses.
And I again say -- don't turn the probes off just as they're getting to the edge of the solar wind, where the non-local universe begins. ______________________________ 1/ Even a blind sow finds an acorn every now and then. 2/ "A Fermilab press release reports that the expansion of the universe may be explainable without the need for dark energy or a cosmological constant. Apparently, ripples from inflation in the early universe may account for the observed expansion rate of the universe.""
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/24/224221 9
For example, the last time the oceans warmed up enough that methane hydrates bubbled out:
QUOTE: "... A long lifetime for CO2 adjustment is also consistent with an isotopic event in the deep sea sedimentary record from 55 million years ago, the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum event. The record tells the story of the sudden release of an isotopically light source of carbon, triggering a fast warming in the deep sea of about 5 degrees C. Both the carbon isotope signal and the temperature (inferred from oxygen isotopes) then relaxed back toward their initial values in about 100,000 years. If the released carbon were initially in the form of methane, it would have been oxidized to CO2 within a few decades, but as CO2 it apparently stuck around, warming the deep ocean, for a long time before it went away...." END QUOTE from: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=134#more-13 4
Also see:
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~earles/methane-wipeouts-d ec 02.htm (nice graphics page, makes you wonder what a big subduction earthquake offshore of Vancouver Island will produce -- likely a LOT of methane gas bubbling up).
His references are: Pecher, I., 2002, Gas hydrates on the brink, Nature, Vol. 420, p. 622-623. (December 2002)
Wood, W., Gettrust, J., Chapman, N., Spence, G. and Hyndman, R., 2002, Decreased stability of methane hydrates in marine sediments owing to surface roughness, Nature, Vol. 420, p. 656-660. (December 2002)
For background information on methane hydrates see: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~earles/m-hydrate-nov99.htm and http://www.mala.bc.ca/~earles/mh-instability-apr00.htm
Slashdot Mirror
So -- the Planetary Society is still saying "dusty old tapes -- have you gotten them in touch with each other?
If they change their page to say they got the MO disks, I'm going to send them a hunk of money for sure.
That RWZ21 drive appears to be currently available for sale, used or refurbished, several places-- Google.
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18581/artic le_detail.asp ... Michael Downing .... has recently published Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time (Shoemaker & Hoard), a charming light history of time in America. ... one can conclude from Spring Forward that we should blame the twice-yearly time change on capitalists. Downing explains that "without Daylight Saving, the commodities, stock, and bond traders on Wall Street could expect no opportunity at all for arbitrage--buying securities on one market for immediate resale in another market at an advantageous price and profiting by the price discrepancy." The time change gave traders one hour in which the London Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange were both open. .... Federal legislators often justified their bills by arguing that the change would save fuel costs. But Downing argues that a real case for this was never made.....
Daylight Savings!
By Kelly Jane Torrance
Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall"
h tm ... Aton, somewhere, was crying, whimpering horribly like a terribly frightened child. 'Stars -- all the Stars -- we didn't know at all. We didn't know anything. We thought six stars in a universe is something the Stars didn't notice is Darkness forever and ever and ever and the walls are breaking in and we didn't know we couldn't know and anything -- '
http://doctord.dyndns.org:8000/Stories/Nightfall.
Someone clawed at the torch, and it fell and snuffed out. In the instant, the awful splendor of the indifferent Stars leaped nearer to them.
On the horizon outside the window, in the direction of Saro City, a crimson glow began growing, strengthening in brightness, that was not the glow of a sun.
The long night had come again.
(1941)
My own speculation is that we'll manage Bose condensates -- say take a pint of deuterium, cooled down til it acts like a single atom (well, a large one), and a pint of lithium, ditto.
Push them together til you get fusion.
Two pint (eight ounce) sized atoms fusing ought to produce significant energy release.
What's harder to create, a huge accelerator ring for storing antimatter, or a couple of small college-dorm-sized supercold refrigerator compartments with a way to nudge them together?
The plan is for _selective_ high speed upload.
The credit card slot on your DSL modem will upload payment information at the hightest possible rate, and the company will make a micro-profit on the float.
You've got to think small, fast and predatory to understand business ethics these days.
Weasels.
Think of the legal system as like Professional Wrestling.
When the bell rings, the big company lawyer steps in to shake hands, grapple, and decide if he's facing another professional heavyweight.
If so, they go seventeen rounds, make money, and provide entertainment.
When you go to work for a company and they hand you a contract full of boilerplate taking ownership of any idea you have now or ever afterward, it's one of those events.
When a company gets one of these obvious patents, it's another of those events.
IF NOBODY FIGHTS BACK, the big company wins by default.
THAT is our legal system. They claim whatever they can imagine -- and wait to see if there is a comparably entertaining and well paid legal team on the other side.
If you sign their first draft employment agreement, you lose.
If you don't fight their patent, you lose.
What y'all are missing is the fact that the referee does NOT work to protect you in this kind of event.
The referee is there to keep the entertainment going.
The big companies expect to win some of their absurd essays in taking everything, because nobody objects.
The Patent Examiner is part of the show, folks, part of the illusion that keeps people watching the show instead of saying, hey, this is just a big bully stomping people. Oh, no, it's a refereed match.
Let's see -- they've talked about cracks in the electrodes, and stressed crystals.
...
Can we make a better fusion device using precise fabrication tools? -- produce exactly the right materials and spacing to create tiny little accelerators, artificial crystals, to optimize this procedure?
If so, can we make a "sea urchin" with a few thousand such little accelerators, all pointed precisely at a tiny pellet -- a miniature version of the giant laser devices currently being built?
Build the capacitor, the accelerators and the fusion core all on a little chip, wind it up
If so there'd be a nice pellet for for a fusion pellet gun to use to drive an Orion-type spacecraft. Even if it DID take more energy to manufacture than it'd produce, it'd be one heck of a good way to store energy for, um, rapid decomposition devices (things that go boom).
Or, a wholly different approach --
I've always wondered what would happen if someone manages to cause fusion to occur between a couple of Bose-Einstein Condensates.
Make them out of, on the one hand, tritium atoms, and on the other hand, deuterium atoms. Result, one large 'atom' of each element. Very large. Then clap your hands. Fusion?
Or better yet, use condensates of boron and hydrogen, of course.
The boron-hydrogen method is described as currently being worked on (not using Bose-Einstein condensates -- using something like the Philo Farnsworth accelerator), if I read it correctly, here:
http://www.focusfusion.org/energy2.html
> Culturecom Holdings, a Hong Kong company
> better known for publishing comic books
It's about time comic books started containing chips so portions can be animated and with story line updates that are downloadable, if you ask me.
You're seeing the problems with the Force 1.0 universe -- it's a binary, two-bit universe. Everything's black and white, morally speaking.
Universe 2.0 is 8-bit and has grayscale morality.
hmmm, I'm working (Verizon, in N. Ca.) from a mountainside that's line of sight about 20 miles to the nearest cell tower; used to get only analog, now can get digital. If I go five hundred feet downhill, I'm in the shadow of the surrounding mountains and have no cell connection til I drive out past them. This is with just the handheld antenna.
I had been using an old analog-only dual-mode Nokia phone but recently switched to a Kyocera 6036 (Palm PDA plus tri-mode handset) so I've been looking for a signal booster myself that works for tri-mode. I note there are signal booster amplifiers, as well as external antennas, claimed to work for distant weak signal sites.
You do need to know exactly what kind of antenna works with your phone -- Kris obviously knows much more specifically what you need. Maybe you can get an exact specification and then search.
I'd be surprised if no external antenna is possible for you, if you can stand having to plug your phone in up on your mountain site.
Watch out for lightning storms though.
Maybe this one?
YAGI AND PANEL CELLULAR / PCS ANTENNAS
These low-cost antennas can improve your signal strength drastically. Installed on poles, the antenna points in the direction of the cellular tower. The antenna can be rotated on the pole until the connected cell phone obtains the maximum signal. These antennas can be combined with our signal booster amplifier product for maximum range.
Products include the CAY807 Yagi antenna, which features four-element Yagi with 7dB (9dBi) directional gain and can withstand 125mph winds, and the CAY1912 PCS panel antenna - a high quality, completely enclosed 11dB (13dBi) gain panel antenna for 1,850MHz to 1,990MHz.
Yagi Antenna [8 Elements] for Cell Phone Frequencies 806-896 Mhz / 870-960 Mhz
Availability: Usually ships the same business day.
all Cellular and GSM phones excluding PCS phones
US $49.95
Nice .sig
----------
Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information.
How much will it cost?
Well, how much are you able to borrow?
Scenario --
-- the plans to store carbon dioxide in old oilfields go forward.
-- the CO2 being injected into the old oil fields is, of course, contaminated by bacterial computer components.
-- bacteria, being present in almost every geological structure for a mile or so below the surface, provide both a vast number of components and a rapid rate of evolutionary selection. Earth wakes up.
-- Earth sneezes. We're gone.
Yes. The seasons will be called Forward, Inward, Backward, and Outward -- and they'll be named for where you see the sun on the horizon, from your location in the mountains on the pole, in relation to the Moon's motion around it. You'll get a complete set of four seasons during each lunar day, and the brightness and temperature variation will be due to whatever's on the horizon.
I remember once upon a time, these were called the Mountains of Eternal Light -- was that a Heinlein story?
Here's the California cite:
http://lawzilla.com/content/ca-emp-002.shtml
That's a wonderful comic -- I had to start at the beginning and read the whole story, and when I got back to this suit design I see not only the dockable suit, but even the "keep clean" cover is described there.
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1000/fv00988.gif/
I hope NASA reads this stuff. The design is attributed to the Russian space program.
Where the backpack mounts, underneath it on the back of the suit, there's a hatch.
Astronaut backs up to the side of the habitat,
removes the backpack or hinges it to one side.
There's a flat oval surface big enough to exit from.
A matching surface on the habitat also opens up.
On it there's a sticky surface like a Post-It note.
Astronaut presses the suit up against that surface, and it seals around the edge.
The sticky surface traps all the dust on the outside of the suit hatch and anything that stuck to the surface gets peeled away along with the sticky layer, out from between the EVA suit and the actual habitat surface.
Think of the old magic trick of slipping a tablecloth out from under the table setting, or of putting down one side of double-sticky tape and then pulling the covering paper out from in between the parts you want to stay in contact.
Then you have a pair of freshly cleaned surfaces stuck together -- astronaut on one side in the EVA suit, and true airlock on the other side in the habitat (yes, you do want a backup door.
Pull the little zip strip all the way around, roll up the membrane with any remaining dust stuck in between two thin layers of clean material.
Astronaut backs into the airlock.
Pull down another clean sheet of sealing material over the opening, with whatever connectors are required for flushing out and cleaning the EVA suit.
Close the portal, leaving the cleaned suit hanging there on the outside of the habitat waiting to be entered next time.
Step through the real airlock door, seal it, wash up, lather-rinse-repeat.
Go into the habitat.
Yes, I take this stuff seriously.
Short of setting up a nice big sprinkler system and freezing the whole area to control the dust, it's going to be a constant issue.
Mars is looking friendlier all the time, as are the Lagrange points.
Maybe the Moon really is for the machines.
Heck, why not use the car structure for compressed air storage? It'd be light, flexible, strong, like driving inside the deployed airbag for safety.
And when you wanted to store it, you could just let the air out and put it in the boot of your other car.
Also, someone with good scheduling tools could maximize use of a monthly transit pass --- just connect people who travel regularly in alternate directions during the day at staggered times, who can meet at the train/bus terminal and hand the pass to tne next person in the queue.
http://humboldt1.com/~zerdo/
This fellow in one of the foggiest/rainiest corners of California has been improving -- and lowering the cost of -- sunrise simulators for several years, and I've been giving them to friends who didn't know they needed them for quite a while.
I'm using his current -- $25 -- model; simple, not adjustabled like the $160 research-grade model made by PiSquare, but it works fine.
"Trouble in mind, I"m blue, but I won't be blue always, sun's going to shine in my back door some day." -- meaning, sun starts to rise north of east after the equinox (it's just started shining in my back door on the north side of the house) so I won't need the dawn sim til late August.
If you get winter blues READ UP and try one of these. It saved my life, it might help yours.
I hereby claim_1/ First Post on the new theory that we don't need dark energy because there may just be wrinkles_2/ in space that are not detectable, close to large masses.
1 9
And I again say -- don't turn the probes off just as they're getting to the edge of the solar wind, where the non-local universe begins.
______________________________
1/ Even a blind sow finds an acorn every now and then.
2/ "A Fermilab press release reports that the expansion of the universe may be explainable without the need for dark energy or a cosmological constant. Apparently, ripples from inflation in the early universe may account for the observed expansion rate of the universe.""
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/24/22422
----
For example, the last time the oceans warmed up enough that methane hydrates bubbled out:
3 4
d ec 02.htm
0 .htm
QUOTE:
"... A long lifetime for CO2 adjustment is also consistent with an isotopic event in the deep sea sedimentary record from 55 million years ago, the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum event. The record tells the story of the sudden release of an isotopically light source of carbon, triggering a fast warming in the deep sea of about 5 degrees C. Both the carbon isotope signal and the temperature (inferred from oxygen isotopes) then relaxed back toward their initial values in about 100,000 years. If the released carbon were initially in the form of methane, it would have been oxidized to CO2 within a few decades, but as CO2 it apparently stuck around, warming the deep ocean, for a long time before it went away...."
END QUOTE
from: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=134#more-1
Also see:
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~earles/methane-wipeouts-
(nice graphics page, makes you wonder what a big subduction earthquake offshore of Vancouver Island will produce -- likely a LOT of methane gas bubbling up).
His references are:
Pecher, I., 2002, Gas hydrates on the brink, Nature, Vol. 420, p. 622-623. (December 2002)
Wood, W., Gettrust, J., Chapman, N., Spence, G. and Hyndman, R., 2002, Decreased stability of methane hydrates in marine sediments owing to surface roughness, Nature, Vol. 420, p. 656-660. (December 2002)
For background information on methane hydrates see: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~earles/m-hydrate-nov99.htm and http://www.mala.bc.ca/~earles/mh-instability-apr0
> Spirit duplicators and mimeograph machines...
m l)
I want inkjet cartridges that will print out in Hektograph (recipes for inks here)
(http://www.fell.demon.co.uk/steve/inks.ht
and Mimeograph (http://www.repeatotype.com/mimeo.html)
with the right colors and smells.
I wonder how many people even realize it's still possible to set up a computer and keep it working without an Internet connection.
Good reasons for moderation in connectivity?
"Why use a teaspoon when you can use a tidal wave?"