Obvious comment: How do you fine someone you can't identify? By reading the article?
If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.
The lamp uses five 10lb weights... are you quite sure that isn't enough, because it all checks out for me (this thing is NOT tiny). Let's see... 50 pounds dropping 4 feet is 200 foot pounds of energy. 200 foot pounds is equal to 0.0753 watt hours. If the weight drops over 4 hours, you'll get about 0.019 watts of output. Getting "600-800 lumens - roughly equal to a 40-watt incandescent bulb" out of that is quite a feat, unless I screwed up my math somewhere...
Methane can be formed by inorganic processes...although how enough of it could be formed to be detectable to us way over here is an intriguing question.
I think it's less a question of how enough of it could form--Titan in our own solar system has 1.6% methane in its atmosphere, and reasonable geochemical processes for the formation have been described by Sushil Atreya (see this article, or here for the actual journal article, if you have access)--but rather why it can survive in a 700C atmosphere long enough to be observed. (or maybe that just means it's forming really f*cking fast?)
FTA:
"When the temperature is this high, the dominant form of carbon should be carbon monoxide, not methane," But then they go on and say "Alternatively, the methane might simply mean that the planet happens to be very rich in carbon..." so maybe it's not so strange after all...
C...all we need now is a next-gen version of the Oregon Trail and we can successfully bring our childhoods into the 21st century. But we already have one!
Microwaves heat molecules, period, and don't penetrate very far through food. But the problem is that they don't heat all molecules equally. Liquid water absorbs considerably more microwave energy than ice crystals. So the portion of your chicken on the outside that melts first is now "blacker" to microwave energy than the still frozen part in the middle and will heat much faster.
Modern microwave ovens do a pretty good job of cycling the power on and off during a defrost cycle to allow equilibration of heat from the melted spots to the frozen spots (and thus melting them). But don't try to defrost at full power (which some people probably do..;).
TBH I'm more worried about running out of copper and silicon. I can understand copper, but why are you worried about running out of silicon? It makes up something like 25% of mass of the earths crust.
Market cap for YHOO is 44.99 billion, so $50b is in line, 10% or so premium. That's the market cap after news of the potential takeover made it out and the share price rose ~18%. The market cap yesterday was ~38 billion.
Amazingly, the most popular RPN calculators are the HP11/12 which are for beancounters! The 12's were indeed financial, but the 11's were scientific. I should know, since as I type this I have an 11c (as well as a 32sII and an old original 35) on the desk in front of me. My 11c was my first scientific calculator, I think I was 12 or 13 when I got it new. I still use it. Unfortunately the 35, which was a gift, is out of commission.
Have those two NOT been previously combined before, or what?
Yes, they have. Especially in diesels (all those Volkswagen TDI's you see around, it stands for Turbo Direct Injection). The standard engine in an Audi A4 (as well as the Volkswagen Passat among others) is now the 2.0T FSI turbo direct injection gasoline engine.
Imagine a highly toxic substance, for instance Sodium Cyanide. NaCN is so toxic that, literally, a sniff can kill you. Yet it's widely used worldwide, one of the most used chemical compounds in metal plating. But very few people die from cyanide poisoning, exactly because it's so toxic that everyone knows it and acts accordingly. It's very easy to characterize NaCN as a toxic substance, mix the slightest amount of it in a rabbit's food and the rabbit will die in seconds.
What I find amusing about sodium (or potassium) cyanide is that it is such a well known toxin (and so heavily used in industry, as you point out) that it's relative toxicity is often overstated. The LD50 of sodium cyanide for oral administration (in rats, anyway) is 6.4 mg/kg. In comparison, that of caffeine is just 30 times greater, at 192 mg/kg. If we take into account that a single molecule of caffeine weighs 4 times that of sodium cyanide, the molar toxicity of caffeine is only 7.5 times less than that of sodium cyanide. When we then compare that to a supertoxin like batrachotoxin (from the skin of some tropical frog), with an LD50 of just 1 or 2 micrograms/kg (and a molecular weight 12 times that of cyanide), sodium cyanide looks downright tame. Then again, maybe the surprise in the above comparison is just how toxic caffeine is... or that oral doses in rats aren't always indicative of the potential of a toxin by other routes. Inhaled hydrogen cyanide is much more nasty and easily produced anywhere large amounts of sodium cyanide are stored...
The colloquial "speed of light" is the speed of light in a vacuum. These experiments are causing light & thus information to travel faster than that benchmark.
So, yes - The speed of the information is being affected.
No. In fact neither the speed of light nor the rate of trasmission of information exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. It is only the position of a relative maximum along the length of a light pulse that is accelerated or slowed. A light pulse (gaussian, say) consists of the sum of waves of many different frequencies extending out in both directions from the pulse maximum. If you create a region of space with a high gradient in the index of refraction, the different frequencies will change their relative phases, shifting the position of the pulse maximum. This can create the illusion of a change in the speed of light, since the pulse maximum appears to travel at a different speed. But for any information to be trasmitted, the whole pulse must be transmitted. It's not like a bullet--it's more like a vibrating string with a kink in it. When the string comes out the other side, the kink is in a different place, but the string moved the same speed. Since you can only send one whole string at a time, you can't send information faster than the speed of light. This is old hat.
This is a common mistake. Mixing methanol and sodium hydroxide does not produce sodium methoxide. This is because water is produced as the NaOH dissolves into the MeOH, and the water breaks down the methoxide.
This is incorrect, and that Wikipedia article you linked is horrible. If there was no methoxide, you would get no biodiesel, only soap. However, since the base is catalytic, methoxide is never present in high concentrations, and doesn't actually need to be. Methoxide and hydroxide are in equilibrium in this situation. They both exist and are interconverted rapidly:
Na+ + OH- + MeOH \===\ Na+ + OMe- + HOH
The concentration of each reflects the relative acid dissociation constants of water and methanol and the relative amounts of methanol and water in solution. In the presence of a lot of water, the equilibrium will be shifted to the left towards hydroxide resulting in a lower concentration methoxide. This will lower your yield of biodiesel and increase your yield of soap.
The NaOH is not in fact a catalyst, it is an intermediate reaction component.
The NaOH base most certainly is a catalyst. This is just a simple base-catalysedtransesterification.
The base is not consumed by the reaction, but regenerated at the end. Perhaps you are thinking about the manufacture of soap, where vegetable oil is reacted with NaOH and the hydroxide is consumed (resulting in the sodium salts of the fatty acids).
How are we to produce the next generation of recreational drug designers
...possibly too heavy to stay in suspension when coated with sugars?
Yup. Micron sized gold particles will settle out.
Additionally, the readout is with visible light--a change in color from red to blue. Micron sized particles, even if shaken to form a relatively uniform suspension, will scatter visible light and interfere with your detection (the solution will look cloudy). 16 nm particles will form a clear solution that will allow you to accurately measure the color by absorbance without interference from scattering.
My mistake (and yours too): Wikipedia doesn't seem to be referencing that paper at all for that quote, but rather the first note and not the first reference. The note states the following of your quote:
References say "isolated", which is a sufficient condition, but more restrictive than necessary. The only way a closed system can lose entropy is by losing heat. So in this regard, there is no difference between an (idealized) isolated system and an (idealized) insulated one. They both have monotonically increasing entropy. In this regard, "closed" means the system does not exchange matter with its surroundings.
These 'references' they speak of in that note don't seem to be identified in the article. That reference you cited is apparently just "further reading," which explains why it is completely unrelated to the quote you used it to reference. My caution about using references from Wikipedia without checking them stands, however. If you're going to post something cut and pasted from Wikipedia, identify your source as such. If you're going to cite an outside source, check it.
- Denis J. Evans & Debra J. Searles (1994). Equilibrium microstates which generate second law violating steady states. Physical Review E 50: 1645-1648.
That is indeed the reference the wikipedia article cites for that quote, but I just read that paper and no where in it is any definition of the second law of thermodynamics. It is a high level paper that rightly assumes anyone reading it already has a rather firm grasp on what the second law of thermodynamics is. Wikipedia is notorious for bad references. Unless you actually take the time to check them, I would recommend citing wikipedia directly instead of the references contained therein, which are often questionable, non-existent or just plain wrong (as is the case here). I realize that a reference to a scholarly journal carries a lot more weight than saying you looked it up on Wikipedia, but it makes you look stupid when you post a reference to a scientific journal article that doesn't contain the information you are referencing, because you obviously didn't read it. That said, I doubt many people here on Slashdot check references and besides, you have to have access to that journal to download it anyway, and it is not even a text-searchable pdf.
Slashdot Mirror
200 foot pounds is equal to 0.0753 watt hours.
If the weight drops over 4 hours, you'll get about 0.019 watts of output.
Getting "600-800 lumens - roughly equal to a 40-watt incandescent bulb" out of that is quite a feat, unless I screwed up my math somewhere...
I think it's less a question of how enough of it could form--Titan in our own solar system has 1.6% methane in its atmosphere, and reasonable geochemical processes for the formation have been described by Sushil Atreya (see this article, or here for the actual journal article, if you have access)--but rather why it can survive in a 700C atmosphere long enough to be observed. (or maybe that just means it's forming really f*cking fast?)
FTA: "When the temperature is this high, the dominant form of carbon should be carbon monoxide, not methane," But then they go on and say "Alternatively, the methane might simply mean that the planet happens to be very rich in carbon..." so maybe it's not so strange after all...
Modern microwave ovens do a pretty good job of cycling the power on and off during a defrost cycle to allow equilibration of heat from the melted spots to the frozen spots (and thus melting them). But don't try to defrost at full power (which some people probably do..;).
I can't understand why UHaul beat BestBuy...
Have those two NOT been previously combined before, or what?
Yes, they have. Especially in diesels (all those Volkswagen TDI's you see around, it stands for Turbo Direct Injection). The standard engine in an Audi A4 (as well as the Volkswagen Passat among others) is now the 2.0T FSI turbo direct injection gasoline engine.
AHA! See? Gay marriage is going to RUIN CHEMISTRY!
Next thing you know every reaction will proceed via the "backside attack".
I don't know for sure, but intuition tells me you'll get a CH3- anion, and a H+ cation. Not sure though, you might get a carbocation...
.H
It's a "homolytic cleavage"--they split as two radicals:
H3C-H ---> H3C. +
Well you probably wanted to say intramolecular C-H bond instead of hydrogen bond, which is a kind of intermolecular bonding...
Hydrogen bonds certainly can be intramolecular. Intramolecular hydrogen bonds are a significant part of what holds a folded protein in its shape.
> > On a side note, real irony is when you make a ferrousiously bad pun.
> I always thought it was when you made a ferriciously bad pun...
He must be hypoventilating. He just needs to get out into fresh air and get some oxygen...
articles that were not fragrantly biased against prevailing Slashdot opinion
;)
What exactly does bias smell like?
So when do they repeal the "temporary" income tax?
When the federal government stops spending more than it collects?
What I find amusing about sodium (or potassium) cyanide is that it is such a well known toxin (and so heavily used in industry, as you point out) that it's relative toxicity is often overstated. The LD50 of sodium cyanide for oral administration (in rats, anyway) is 6.4 mg/kg. In comparison, that of caffeine is just 30 times greater, at 192 mg/kg. If we take into account that a single molecule of caffeine weighs 4 times that of sodium cyanide, the molar toxicity of caffeine is only 7.5 times less than that of sodium cyanide. When we then compare that to a supertoxin like batrachotoxin (from the skin of some tropical frog), with an LD50 of just 1 or 2 micrograms/kg (and a molecular weight 12 times that of cyanide), sodium cyanide looks downright tame. Then again, maybe the surprise in the above comparison is just how toxic caffeine is... or that oral doses in rats aren't always indicative of the potential of a toxin by other routes. Inhaled hydrogen cyanide is much more nasty and easily produced anywhere large amounts of sodium cyanide are stored...
No. In fact neither the speed of light nor the rate of trasmission of information exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. It is only the position of a relative maximum along the length of a light pulse that is accelerated or slowed. A light pulse (gaussian, say) consists of the sum of waves of many different frequencies extending out in both directions from the pulse maximum. If you create a region of space with a high gradient in the index of refraction, the different frequencies will change their relative phases, shifting the position of the pulse maximum. This can create the illusion of a change in the speed of light, since the pulse maximum appears to travel at a different speed. But for any information to be trasmitted, the whole pulse must be transmitted. It's not like a bullet--it's more like a vibrating string with a kink in it. When the string comes out the other side, the kink is in a different place, but the string moved the same speed. Since you can only send one whole string at a time, you can't send information faster than the speed of light. This is old hat.
it's down
Must be the slashdor effect.
This is incorrect, and that Wikipedia article you linked is horrible. If there was no methoxide, you would get no biodiesel, only soap. However, since the base is catalytic, methoxide is never present in high concentrations, and doesn't actually need to be. Methoxide and hydroxide are in equilibrium in this situation. They both exist and are interconverted rapidly:
Na+ + OH- + MeOH \===\ Na+ + OMe- + HOH
The concentration of each reflects the relative acid dissociation constants of water and methanol and the relative amounts of methanol and water in solution. In the presence of a lot of water, the equilibrium will be shifted to the left towards hydroxide resulting in a lower concentration methoxide. This will lower your yield of biodiesel and increase your yield of soap.
The NaOH is not in fact a catalyst, it is an intermediate reaction component.
The NaOH base most certainly is a catalyst. This is just a simple base-catalysed transesterification.
The base is not consumed by the reaction, but regenerated at the end. Perhaps you are thinking about the manufacture of soap, where vegetable oil is reacted with NaOH and the hydroxide is consumed (resulting in the sodium salts of the fatty acids).
How are we to produce the next generation of recreational drug designers
Maybe we'll have to outsource to India...
...possibly too heavy to stay in suspension when coated with sugars?
Yup. Micron sized gold particles will settle out.
Additionally, the readout is with visible light--a change in color from red to blue. Micron sized particles, even if shaken to form a relatively uniform suspension, will scatter visible light and interfere with your detection (the solution will look cloudy). 16 nm particles will form a clear solution that will allow you to accurately measure the color by absorbance without interference from scattering.
These 'references' they speak of in that note don't seem to be identified in the article. That reference you cited is apparently just "further reading," which explains why it is completely unrelated to the quote you used it to reference. My caution about using references from Wikipedia without checking them stands, however. If you're going to post something cut and pasted from Wikipedia, identify your source as such. If you're going to cite an outside source, check it.
From the article: