While the capabilities available by driving smaller devices ever-faster are interesting, there is another side to the speed/power progression: as the devices get smaller, they need less and less power to do the same thing.
I'm interested in the possibilities of these minuscule gates to run on the tiny bits of power from a glucose/oxygen fuel cell. With some molecular photodetectors, gates like these could be used to make an artificial retina and restore sight lost due to age, injury or disease; with the tiny size of the gates, they could be made smaller than the cells they replaced.
Biomolecules don't seem to like heat very much, so really high-speed (and high-power) operation might not be the best use for these. But making up for it with massive parallelism, and taking hints (or outright copying) natural systems could lead us to a whole new world of technology that we might have trouble recognizing as computing. Still, I'm game for it! --
They won't have to assemble each gate. They are using self-assembly techniques, which work in ways similar to the ways that cells make proteins which fold themselves (sometimes with help) into the proper configurations, or DNA automatically pairs with complementary strands.
When the techniques are refined sufficiently, it will be just about as easy as mixing the ingredients and stirring. This is where the claims of "dirt cheap" come from, and yes, they're quite serious about it. --
PEACE, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
One point consistently missed by the people who keep banging on the ABM treaty is that this isn't a two-superpower world any more. The USSR is gone, the Russians have no stomach for imperialism in Europe (they have their hands full with their own former SSR's), and our threats now include ideological (China, N. Korea), religious (Iran, maybe someday Pakistan) and personality-cult (Libya, Iraq) nation-states. It's never been easier to go nuclear, and we can't go on pretending that the only credible threat is HQed in Moscow. --
Then, if by some miracle the system figures all this out, the enemy missile just explodes and scatters its insides at somewhere besides its target.
Scattered materials do a lot less damage than targeted ones. Hitting a nuclear warhead in flight would tear it to shreds before its own detonation system could operate; it would not explode, it would disintegrate. The scattered nuclear material would be nasty, but a lot less nasty than blast effects, fire and fission products.
This is even more true of chemical and biological agents. If you spilled these above the atmosphere, they'd be cooked by the heat of re-entry. Anything that survived that would be left to drift down from very high in the stratosphere, where solar UV tears molecules apart. While the shell of the vehicle would very likely harbor some dangerous stuff, it would be off-target and far less likely to cause serious damage. In short, being able to damage or destroy a warhead before it re-enters eliminates most of the threat it represents. --
Would you consider the use of faulty figures and outright lies to push a particular POV (even if it is pro-disarmament) to be a good thing, or even neutral?
SciAm has been caught at this before; consider the notorious article by Kosta Tsipis (?) some years ago about space-based antimissile lasers where there was an error of 10^4 (yes, a factor of 10,000) in the calculations regarding the system capacity required. The article was published without correction (or maybe even checking) by the editors, and the letter correcting the errors was given nowhere near the prominence of the article itself.
If disarmament is a good idea on the numbers, let the numbers do the talking. Using fraudulent numbers to push an agenda does not serve us; suppose that some aggressor saw through the fraudulent numbers, built a defense system based on the realities instead of the perceptions, and then hid behind its shield to blast us with impunity? What if we ignored this possibility because "it can't be done"? We'd pay an awful price. And that's why the propagandizing of Scientific American should be roundly condemned. --
China, Russia probably have nucs in the US. Probably brought in via diplomatic pouch.
If they did, our spooks would know it. The decay of U-235 and Pu-239 leaves a very distinctive radioactive signature, and the gamma rays can be detected at quite a distance. A diplomatic pouch will not have the shielding to mask them; even a suitcase isn't enough. From the scuttlebutt I've heard, maybe even a ship isn't enough. Suffice it to say, if there's a bomb "pit" smuggled into the USA, it's probably being closely monitored by the CIA.
Who knows, maybe the bombing of the embassy in Belgrade was a hidden message to China that we can nail any smuggled nukes any time we want, and all the other fuss over it is just posturing. Besides, think of the amazing propaganda value of being able to parade a captured Chinese nuke in front of the UN. If we had that the executive would have an absolutely free hand in dealing with China, beginning with a complete trade blockade through expulsion from the UN up to and including a nuclear strike on Beijing. The price of that would be too high for China to pay, so you can be fairly sure they are keeping their bombs safely on their own soil. And Pyongyang... Kim Jong Il may be crazy, but he's not suicidal.
This threat sounds a lot worse at first blush than it appears to be after careful analysis. --
You claimed that there is no software older than 50 years. When you said "Yes...", you just admitted that your claim was false. You might as well have quit right after that, because you were just refuting your own words.
As for the far greater value of recent versus ancient "software", I cannot disagree. Unless one is reproducing an historical cloth weave, Jaquard loom cards would be of little use. --
You could make a case for the cards used to "program" Jaquard looms being a form of software, although the looms have no state information or jump instructions. Jaquard looms are far older tech than ENIAC. --
I'm looking forward to the day when the first software copyright expires. I, for one, am anxious to get my hands on all that great ENIAC code!
Since the "code" for ENAIC was plugboards used to re-wire it, if any of it still exists (in a museum somewhere) you can *literally* get your hands on it (unlike most software, where you can only get your hands on the physical medium into/onto which it is printed/written). --
Last time I spent real money on hardware, I did that exact thing: I bought a box with an AMD processor. Unfortunately for AMD, I am nowhere near starved for cycles yet so I have no reason to buy an Athlon anytime soon. --
Creationists vs. thermodynamics
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Darwin's Radio
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· Score: 2
I'm afraid you missed the point. It doesn't matter how many different species of organisms there are, the biomass of organisms is much more highly organized (and thus has lower entropy) than the same quantity of chemical elements as water, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and the oxides and salts of the various trace elements. Life is not becoming less organized with time, it is becoming more organized the more of it there is.
You can disprove the creationist version of thermodynamics right in your own home. All you need is some potting soil (preferably sterilized so you have no other living stuff in there), some seedling plants, and a big bottle or balloon you can seal adequately for use as a terrarium. (A 5-gallon springwater bottle will probably do.) Put the seedlings into the bottle, give them adequate light, and keep them from overheating. Add water and carbon dioxide as needed, and some inorganic plant food (nitrates, phosphates, potash) now and then.
After a while your seedlings will have turned this input of purely inorganic, high-entropy stuff (and light) into a lot of low-entropy plant mass and oxygen. The grown plant is a lot more organized than the matter which went into it. So doesn't this violate the 2nd Law? No. The ignored input is sunlight, which has very low entropy. Some part of the sunlight which is absorbed by the plant's leaves gets turned into useful energy, but the rest of it comes out as heat. A given amount of energy in the form of heat at room temperature has much higher entropy than the same amount of energy as sunlight. So the Earth merrily absorbs low-entropy sunlight at the effective temperature of about 5700 Kelvin, and radiates high-entropy heat at the effective temperature of about 250 Kelvin. The Earth is constantly creating and radiating entropy, and some of that entropy has been extracted from disordered matter when it is organized by some process (biological or otherwise). So there's nothing at all in thermodynamics which rules out the increasing organization of life over time, so long as the Sun continues to shine. --
Yes, Marvin and his Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator should be our biggest fear. Forget our claim on the Moon, he'll annihilate us for blocking his view of Venus! --
Secondarily, it's kinda hard to blow a flag down without an atmosphere to sustain a wind, dontcha think?;-)
Well, a rocket exhaust is a "wind", and its gas constitutes at "atmosphere" for whatever's in its influence. That's what blew down the flag left by the Apollo 11 mission. FWIW, each LEM left a number of tons of nitrogen and water vapor on the moon during its descent, landing and ascent. IIRC, this temporarily multiplied the normal lunar atmosphere several-fold, until the solar wind and UV drove the molecules to escape velocity and they flew off never to return. --
A machine doesn't discriminate on anything other than what it 'sees.' People are far less objective.
You forget that people are going to be deciding what to put into the machine. People, falliable, prejudiced people, will be its eyes and ears. If some All-American kid tortures animals and bullies classmates, that may get ignored. A Goth, a geek or a pagan is likely to be in the system as "suspicious" even if they treat everyone and everything with the respect they're due.
This reminds me of the computer selection process used by a British university a while back. Because it was "computerized", it was believed it "couldn't discriminate"... until it was found that one of its rules was to mark down the scores of people with very long names. It was very non-discriminatorily weeding out people with names like Chandrasekhar and retaining people with names like Smith. Face it, Mosaic-2000 is just CyberSitter, only it will weed people.
Far from calming the nerves of worried parents, this thing will just reinforce the prejudices of the authors. Any school that lets it in the door should be subjected to a blizzard of FOIA requests to see exactly what they're doing with it, and then sue the district and the company into oblivion as soon as discrimination can be proven (either in actions or in recommendations). This thing has to be shut down. --
Re:Terminal ballistic qualities if it falls ;-)
on
Sir Arthur Speaks
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· Score: 2
No, it can't come straight down, except the first infinitesimal increment of motion.
I could go into detail, but at this hour the only thing I'm going to tell you is to review your coursework relative to rotating frames of reference, which is a rather important issue you appear to have neglected. Check out Coriolis acceleration if you are having difficulties. --
Re:Terminal ballistic qualities if it falls ;-)
on
Sir Arthur Speaks
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· Score: 3
It might be designed to 'break-up' into sections in such a case, with parachute or balloon assist.
If the break was 4000 miles up (18,300 miles down from geosync), the bit at the top end of the bottom segment would have an eastward velocity of about 1050 MPH relative to the surface and potential energy equivalent to a speed of roughly 18,000 MPH. You are NOT going to stop this thing with a parachute.
Or perhaps the broken Earthward end could be retracted at such a rate that it never completely 'falls over'
You can only guide it while it is moving slower than the speed of sound in its own material; after that, any change of tension or direction gets shoved downward by the motion of the material faster than it can propagate upward. On the other hand, by reeling it in you can increase the speed (thus kinetic energy) of what's about to smack you. If that happens, osculate your posterior farewell!
One thing here: The entire skyhook, which is rotating about the Earth's axis on the same 23 hour 56 minute sidereal schedule, is moving eastward and will keep moving eastward; the downward pull of the lower sections will "crack the whip" and accelerate the upper sections to even higher velocities (eastward and downward) than they would attain as disconnected masses.
Or it could be made to 'disintigrate' on demand
This is about the only thing you could do. Since Buckytubes are made out of carbon, they can burn in an oxygen atmosphere. After the speed gets up to a couple thousand MPH, the heat created by the supersonic passage through the air should be enough to keep a flame going. If the skyhook cable could separate itself into very fine filaments on its way down, it would either burn or turn to dust. The dust may be harmful, but at least it would not make tsunamis.
As for the sonic booms this might create, I have no idea how damaging they might be. --
If their "back door" is "active", that would explain a lot. Wouldn't it?;-) --
Terminal ballistic qualities if it falls ;-)
on
Sir Arthur Speaks
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· Score: 2
What would happen to the attached end I couldn't say...
It goes the only place it can: down. And since it is rotating along with the Earth but at a greater radius, it has a greater eastward velocity than the Earth's surface so it falls to the east, wrapping itself around the equator like string around a ball.
It wouldn't be particularly nice to be around, like a broken steel cable whipping into its attachments and ripping up anything that gets in its way. It would be best to be elsewhere. --
You wouldn't be using Buckyballs, you'd be using Buckytubes. A Buckyball is an interesting molecule, but it's a ball; not very useful for making a cable. A Buckytube is made along the same principles of connected triangles of carbon, but there's a large section between the two ends which is like a plane of graphite wrapped around and spliced to itself, forming a pipe. Now THAT can make a cable.
The problem with a geosynchronous skyhook is that if it breaks, there's a hell of a lot of stuff that's coming down, hard. Fortunately, you don't have to use a skyhook for that. "Space fountains", Lofstrom loops, Jacobs Ladders and other ways of exploiting kinetic momentum could build structures that wouldn't be so tall that they'd span an ocean if they failed; if they were all sited on Eastern shores with nothing but open water to the dawnward, breaking them would only make some waves (ahem). --
I believe you'll find that the predictions that it will not go bust are predicated on the current longest-in-history economic expansion continuing for another ten years; despite that, it's ruined no matter what if the demographics continue to deteriorate. You decide which projection to believe.
I'm not worried about Social Security, I'm taking care of my own retirement thank you (but I wish I could get that money out of the government's clutches and into my own far-better-invested portfolio). --
Also, a number of countries started to have military dictatorships during that period, like the world's number one copper producer, Chile. After Pinochet took over the government, he brutally suppressed the unions, then lower wages in the mines. The same thing happened in many other countries. The result: lower commodity prices.
You forgot one really big player on the scene: AT&T.
I'm serious. Most of the USA's phone communications used to be carried over heavy cables. Many pairs of copper wires inside a jacket of lead. This worked for a goodly part of a century, but along came...
Plastics. Polyethylene insulation is a lot cheaper than cloth, and allows the use of smaller wires. After a period of advancement, it became worthwhile to dig up the old cloth-wrapped, lead-jacketed cables and recycle them. The cables that went into the ground to replace them had less copper and NO lead. The difference went onto the market, with predictable results for commodity producers.
Today we're replacing copper with glass (silicon dioxide). SiO2 is a goodly fraction of the earth's crust; guess what happens when metal is replaced such a common substance? The price falls again! This is why copper plumbing is in no danger of being priced out of reach.
Moral of the story: Technology can throw a monkeywrench into any projection that depends on substances being both rare and valuable. Sperm oil, once the ultimate source of light, is useless. Plus ça changé, plus c'est la meme chose. --
Essentially, our model predicted that the Earth would have an infinate population in real time (in about 40 years). This clearly can't happen!
Obviously! Get a clue: even if every woman on earth started having a baby every year, the population increase would only be linear until those girl-children became fertile themselves (I'm ignoring males because they don't have babies). Basically you have about 13-15 years from conception to conception. In 40 years you have about 3 generations of this, so you'd have about 20 times today's population born to today's population, plus the cohort born to those children (for about 26 years expansion time), plus the cohort born to them (for about 13 years expansion time). It would be an amazing, astounding, completely unsupportable and unsustainable number of people, but it would not be infinite by any stretch of the imagination. If it was a serious assignment and you got such a result from any model you turned in for credit, I hope you got an F.
On the other hand, if the exercise was intended to show you that mathematical models are often good examples of GIGO, I'd say it was a good class. --
If we privatize Social Security... then retirement will still be guaranteed, but not by the government.
True, but having the Social Security program under government control gives the pols an amazing amount of power. I hate the Republicans' social policies, but I have to give them a lot of credit for being willing to give it up.
Privatizing schools would reduce everybody's taxes and since parents would then be paying their own hard-earned money for education, rather than freeloading on the taxpayers, they'd pay lots more attention to the schools they sent their kids to.
Do you really think that poor people could pay enough to get their kids into good schools? Do you think that anyone would give them loans to do it? I don't. Do you think that parents who are unmotivated now would pay more attention and put forth more effort in a privatized world? I've seen too many counter-examples to believe it; I know there are lots of people out there who'd buy the cheapest thing they could get away with, and since they wouldn't have to live with the results, quality wouldn't interest them.
Reducing people's taxes if their kids do well in school gives you the same results, and it would create pressure to improve public schools. I have nothing against private schools (went to one for three years myself), but we used to have pretty good public schools and I see no reason why we can't have some again if we don't destroy them first in a fit of pique. --
Slashdot Mirror
I'm interested in the possibilities of these minuscule gates to run on the tiny bits of power from a glucose/oxygen fuel cell. With some molecular photodetectors, gates like these could be used to make an artificial retina and restore sight lost due to age, injury or disease; with the tiny size of the gates, they could be made smaller than the cells they replaced.
Biomolecules don't seem to like heat very much, so really high-speed (and high-power) operation might not be the best use for these. But making up for it with massive parallelism, and taking hints (or outright copying) natural systems could lead us to a whole new world of technology that we might have trouble recognizing as computing. Still, I'm game for it!
--
When the techniques are refined sufficiently, it will be just about as easy as mixing the ingredients and stirring. This is where the claims of "dirt cheap" come from, and yes, they're quite serious about it.
--
PEACE, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
One point consistently missed by the people who keep banging on the ABM treaty is that this isn't a two-superpower world any more. The USSR is gone, the Russians have no stomach for imperialism in Europe (they have their hands full with their own former SSR's), and our threats now include ideological (China, N. Korea), religious (Iran, maybe someday Pakistan) and personality-cult (Libya, Iraq) nation-states. It's never been easier to go nuclear, and we can't go on pretending that the only credible threat is HQed in Moscow.
--
This is even more true of chemical and biological agents. If you spilled these above the atmosphere, they'd be cooked by the heat of re-entry. Anything that survived that would be left to drift down from very high in the stratosphere, where solar UV tears molecules apart. While the shell of the vehicle would very likely harbor some dangerous stuff, it would be off-target and far less likely to cause serious damage. In short, being able to damage or destroy a warhead before it re-enters eliminates most of the threat it represents.
--
SciAm has been caught at this before; consider the notorious article by Kosta Tsipis (?) some years ago about space-based antimissile lasers where there was an error of 10^4 (yes, a factor of 10,000) in the calculations regarding the system capacity required. The article was published without correction (or maybe even checking) by the editors, and the letter correcting the errors was given nowhere near the prominence of the article itself.
If disarmament is a good idea on the numbers, let the numbers do the talking. Using fraudulent numbers to push an agenda does not serve us; suppose that some aggressor saw through the fraudulent numbers, built a defense system based on the realities instead of the perceptions, and then hid behind its shield to blast us with impunity? What if we ignored this possibility because "it can't be done"? We'd pay an awful price. And that's why the propagandizing of Scientific American should be roundly condemned.
--
Who knows, maybe the bombing of the embassy in Belgrade was a hidden message to China that we can nail any smuggled nukes any time we want, and all the other fuss over it is just posturing. Besides, think of the amazing propaganda value of being able to parade a captured Chinese nuke in front of the UN. If we had that the executive would have an absolutely free hand in dealing with China, beginning with a complete trade blockade through expulsion from the UN up to and including a nuclear strike on Beijing. The price of that would be too high for China to pay, so you can be fairly sure they are keeping their bombs safely on their own soil. And Pyongyang... Kim Jong Il may be crazy, but he's not suicidal.
This threat sounds a lot worse at first blush than it appears to be after careful analysis.
--
As for the far greater value of recent versus ancient "software", I cannot disagree. Unless one is reproducing an historical cloth weave, Jaquard loom cards would be of little use.
--
--
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Last time I spent real money on hardware, I did that exact thing: I bought a box with an AMD processor. Unfortunately for AMD, I am nowhere near starved for cycles yet so I have no reason to buy an Athlon anytime soon.
--
You can disprove the creationist version of thermodynamics right in your own home. All you need is some potting soil (preferably sterilized so you have no other living stuff in there), some seedling plants, and a big bottle or balloon you can seal adequately for use as a terrarium. (A 5-gallon springwater bottle will probably do.) Put the seedlings into the bottle, give them adequate light, and keep them from overheating. Add water and carbon dioxide as needed, and some inorganic plant food (nitrates, phosphates, potash) now and then.
After a while your seedlings will have turned this input of purely inorganic, high-entropy stuff (and light) into a lot of low-entropy plant mass and oxygen. The grown plant is a lot more organized than the matter which went into it. So doesn't this violate the 2nd Law? No. The ignored input is sunlight, which has very low entropy. Some part of the sunlight which is absorbed by the plant's leaves gets turned into useful energy, but the rest of it comes out as heat. A given amount of energy in the form of heat at room temperature has much higher entropy than the same amount of energy as sunlight. So the Earth merrily absorbs low-entropy sunlight at the effective temperature of about 5700 Kelvin, and radiates high-entropy heat at the effective temperature of about 250 Kelvin. The Earth is constantly creating and radiating entropy, and some of that entropy has been extracted from disordered matter when it is organized by some process (biological or otherwise). So there's nothing at all in thermodynamics which rules out the increasing organization of life over time, so long as the Sun continues to shine.
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Well-said, sir. Moderator...
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Yes, Marvin and his Illudium Q-36 Space Modulator should be our biggest fear. Forget our claim on the Moon, he'll annihilate us for blocking his view of Venus!
--
--
This reminds me of the computer selection process used by a British university a while back. Because it was "computerized", it was believed it "couldn't discriminate"... until it was found that one of its rules was to mark down the scores of people with very long names. It was very non-discriminatorily weeding out people with names like Chandrasekhar and retaining people with names like Smith. Face it, Mosaic-2000 is just CyberSitter, only it will weed people.
Far from calming the nerves of worried parents, this thing will just reinforce the prejudices of the authors. Any school that lets it in the door should be subjected to a blizzard of FOIA requests to see exactly what they're doing with it, and then sue the district and the company into oblivion as soon as discrimination can be proven (either in actions or in recommendations). This thing has to be shut down.
--
I could go into detail, but at this hour the only thing I'm going to tell you is to review your coursework relative to rotating frames of reference, which is a rather important issue you appear to have neglected. Check out Coriolis acceleration if you are having difficulties.
--
One thing here: The entire skyhook, which is rotating about the Earth's axis on the same 23 hour 56 minute sidereal schedule, is moving eastward and will keep moving eastward; the downward pull of the lower sections will "crack the whip" and accelerate the upper sections to even higher velocities (eastward and downward) than they would attain as disconnected masses.
This is about the only thing you could do. Since Buckytubes are made out of carbon, they can burn in an oxygen atmosphere. After the speed gets up to a couple thousand MPH, the heat created by the supersonic passage through the air should be enough to keep a flame going. If the skyhook cable could separate itself into very fine filaments on its way down, it would either burn or turn to dust. The dust may be harmful, but at least it would not make tsunamis.As for the sonic booms this might create, I have no idea how damaging they might be.
--
If their "back door" is "active", that would explain a lot. Wouldn't it? ;-)
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It wouldn't be particularly nice to be around, like a broken steel cable whipping into its attachments and ripping up anything that gets in its way. It would be best to be elsewhere.
--
The problem with a geosynchronous skyhook is that if it breaks, there's a hell of a lot of stuff that's coming down, hard. Fortunately, you don't have to use a skyhook for that. "Space fountains", Lofstrom loops, Jacobs Ladders and other ways of exploiting kinetic momentum could build structures that wouldn't be so tall that they'd span an ocean if they failed; if they were all sited on Eastern shores with nothing but open water to the dawnward, breaking them would only make some waves (ahem).
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Do you realize that you just described Todos Santos? (Read Oath of Fealty by Niven & Pournelle.)
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I'm not worried about Social Security, I'm taking care of my own retirement thank you (but I wish I could get that money out of the government's clutches and into my own far-better-invested portfolio).
--
I'm serious. Most of the USA's phone communications used to be carried over heavy cables. Many pairs of copper wires inside a jacket of lead. This worked for a goodly part of a century, but along came...
Plastics. Polyethylene insulation is a lot cheaper than cloth, and allows the use of smaller wires. After a period of advancement, it became worthwhile to dig up the old cloth-wrapped, lead-jacketed cables and recycle them. The cables that went into the ground to replace them had less copper and NO lead. The difference went onto the market, with predictable results for commodity producers.
Today we're replacing copper with glass (silicon dioxide). SiO2 is a goodly fraction of the earth's crust; guess what happens when metal is replaced such a common substance? The price falls again! This is why copper plumbing is in no danger of being priced out of reach.
Moral of the story: Technology can throw a monkeywrench into any projection that depends on substances being both rare and valuable. Sperm oil, once the ultimate source of light, is useless. Plus ça changé, plus c'est la meme chose.
--
On the other hand, if the exercise was intended to show you that mathematical models are often good examples of GIGO, I'd say it was a good class.
--
Reducing people's taxes if their kids do well in school gives you the same results, and it would create pressure to improve public schools. I have nothing against private schools (went to one for three years myself), but we used to have pretty good public schools and I see no reason why we can't have some again if we don't destroy them first in a fit of pique.
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