If you had links to some of this research, perhaps you'd be willing to share them and spare me the effort?
I'm particularly interested in the sources of funding for this research. Research sponsored by the coal and oil industries can be expected to be suppressed if it supports actions contrary to their interests. (One would also expect research sponsored by left/socialist organizations to be suppressed if it didn't support their agenda, which may be neutral or anti-corporate.)
If the IPCC's research is as you describe, that's fine. If human activities are warming the planet in addition to the effects of solar changes, we probably want to act to reverse the human contributions.
1. prevention: trying not to piss off people, letting terrorists know that you won't yield under the pressure and eliminating situations which create supply of fresh suicide bombers (hint: Palestine)
Not pissing people off? That's going to be mighty difficult, because what offends people like Osama bin Laden is the fact that we exist. Democracy and non-Muslim rule (especially secularism) are anathema to him, and he wants us all killed or put under strict religious rule. Unless you can stop money and moral support from going to people like him, it's not going to stop.
when this is done, we answer with an army of robo-grunts and pound the baddies into the ground.
You assume that your robo-grunts can distinguish between "the baddies" and the rest of the world well enough to make a difference. Experience has shown that even the best intelligence apparatus we have available to us isn't always able to find even those baddies whose names we know (coughbin Ladencough), weapons programs (Libyan nukes?) and other essential data. If we don't know where to point our grunts, we have three choices, all bad:
Do nothing, which makes us look ineffectual and encourages the baddies.
Attack anything that looks like it might be a baddie, which makes us look brutal and encourages people to join and support the baddies.
Genocide, to get rid of anyone who even thinks about being a baddie.
Face it, this is a problem that is not going to be solved at the level of infantry.
Build these things, train our soldiers on them, and nobody's gonna wanna fight us.
... on the conventional battlefield. Truck bombs in financial districts, airliners into skyscrapers and anthrax through the mail will be quite viable weapons no matter how much better our infantry gets.
(I searched all the comments for "crosstalk" and "RFI" and didn't come up with any hits... hope I'm not redundant before this is posted.)
The problem with capacitive connections is that you are, for all intents and purposes, using small radio links. This causes several issues to come to the fore:
Your immunity to cross-talk goes down. Misalignment will exacerbate these problems.
Capacitive receivers will also be able to pick up local RF fields. The computer will be much more vulnerable to external interference than it was before.
The computer will also radiate much more than it did before, creating more RFI and leaking information that might be crucial (like crypto keys).
Making the chips the meat in a sandwich with metal sheets for the bread would help this a lot, because tightly coupled ground planes attenuate both radiation and reception. As long as you're putting a ground plane on top of the assembly it might as well do double duty as a cooling device, though I wonder what effect the heat-transfer compounds would have on transmission and crosstalk.
Note that the Greening Earth Society is founded and financed by companies with an interest in unrestricted CO2 emissions (the Western Fuels Alliance is mostly coal-mining interest). If you are looking for scientific truth-seeking or even fairness and balance, don't look to them.
According to AC Propulsion, the profit potential from the use of batteries to provide regulation services to the grid could pay for the batteries. Even if it doesn't pay for all the battery deterioration, so long as it pays for more than its share it reduces the cost of using the vehicle.
Take a look at the way that the proponents expect to actually use V2G capabilities before you say that. Study here; pointers to that and other documents here.
According to the specs, the average run time is "> 2 hours" with continuous maneuvering. The vertical speed is around half a meter per second (meaning that it cannot descend vertically). This means that the maximum depth it can achieve under its own power is 1800 meters or so before it has to come back up, and it gets no loitering time down there.
Being able to perform descents and ascents without running the maneuvering motors would allow access to the full depth capability of the hull. You would have to add hardware to extract power from the slipstream during buoyant maneuvers; given that this would probably not extend the time-at-depth by a huge amount (and might decrease powered speed and range), it might not be worth it.
Keeping in mind that the little ship is good for "up to" a day (at what speed?) and that it would take 3 hours to get to depth and back at its top speed, how long will it take the makers to give it droppable ballast weights? You'd need two; one to ballast the positively-buoyant ship to neutral, and a second to give it extra weight to sink to depth without using its motors (thus saving the battery). Bonus points for using the weight to power a glide to points of interest instead of descending straight down.
If hungry sea creatures are a problem, use some of that battery power to shock them, or shotgun-shell primers to scare them off.
You're making an incorrect distinction between absorption and fixation. Whether or not the carbon is fixed in organic matter, it can go into the ocean; unfixed CO2 will exist as carbonic acid, dissolved CO2, bicarbonate ion or carbonate ion.
Adding CO2 means reducing alkalinity, which makes carbonate less stable in the oceans. This may have serious effects on marine organisms which use carbonate in their skeletons; see here for a brief news item. Science News has run several articles on the subject, but none appear to be on-line; here are the references from one of them.
I'm not sure you can draw a clean line between them. On the one extreme you have old-growth in places like Alaska, and on the other you have conifer or aspen pulpwood plantations. But how do you classify all the various national forests? Even a roadless area can be turned into clearcut, at least if certain interests have their way. Much of Maine is owned by private companies and managed for wood production, but it seems to have more of the characteristics of a forest.
People like to live among trees. How do you classify "urban forests"?
The failure of farms all over the USA (beginning in places like Vermont, but hardly confined to that region) plus deliberate conservation efforts have led to a re-forestation of the continent. River-bottom land in some areas has been removed from farming and returned to oak forest. Michigan was clear-cut in the 19th century, and it's once again heavily forested in many areas.
We could do more, beginning with discouraging (instead of subsidizing) excess agricultural production and returning that land to forest - but that doesn't mean that a lot has not already been done.
Companies would deliver anything that they could call "broadband", take the money and run. Read about the scandals over the "Gore Tax" money to wire schools? It would be that, times a thousand.
If you used devices to reinforce the instruction and recall, perhaps they wouldn't repeat their mistakes.
Some wires across the outside of the screens, hooked to the flash capacitor of a scrap disposable-camera flash unit, might do the trick. You'll have to find a way to force the unit on, though; if it stays off for too long all the charge will leak away and its usefulness as a memory aid will be nil.
If you can't easily scan the printout and recover the data (including links, attributions and other metadata) it's rather worthless for recovery purposes. Further, with only a handful of copies in the world it would be equally useless as a reference work to rebuild the infrastructure required to make it accessible again.
To be really useful, such a printout should incorporate enough information to allow bootstrapping from a much lower level. If you had a 10-year-old scanner (as if such would still work) and each page had a dot-code representation of its complete data on the back (including some redundancy from other pages, perhaps) and redundant sets of scripts to use to decode the contents and code from the raw scans, it would be worth making such printouts.
If you don't have such things or if you do not consider it important to be able to recover from a disaster which destroys the Internet, you might as well distribute electronic copies worldwide and leave it at that. The cost of keeping mirrors up to date will be far lower than the price of 600 reams of paper plus ink/toner, and recovery would be immensely quicker.
Some things I just can't let go by without comment. Quoth the poster:
Or perhaps the modern day battleground of evolution against the challenging new scientific theory of intelligent design, which suggests that certain biological features such as the flagellum are irreducibly complex and therefore could not possibly have been developed by increments as evolutionists would have it.
So-called "intelligent design" is not challenging, nor is it a scientific theory (it lacks the feature of falsifiability). If you want to go through large volumes of text which examine the claims of ID in detail, including the "irreducible complexity" of the bacterial flagellum (and find them wanting), look here.
Getting back to the topic, ID proponents are somewhat like James Van Allen; both assume that they already know all that is worthwhile or necessary, so there is no need to go further except for those things which particularly interest them (plasma physics or biblical exegesis, take your pick). Both are wrong.
Van Allen's work involves fields and particles, not rocks or life. It's not at all surprising that he doesn't like manned missions; they are no good for his (narrow) field of science. But that doesn't mean that we should take him as anything other than a proponent of his own parochial interests; we should certainly not regard him as an authority on the worth of all expeditions into space.
Mercury rotates 1.5 times for each orbit around the Sun (note, relative to space and not the Mercury-Sun line), so at each perihelion it shows the opposite face to the light. Thus a Mercury "day" is 2 Mercury "years".
I don't know if the ellipticity of Mercury's orbit is such that the apparent motion of the Sun can reverse, and I'm not about to go digging for all the numbers when I have paying work to do. Maybe you can either document it or refute it.
One of the problems on my physics final was to calculate the difference in delta v measured as a scalar possible in a space craft burning a specific amount of fuel continuously from a tank of such and such capacity, with and without gravity assist. The professor congratulated me in private for being the only student to correctly answer that question.
Did you need to use GR calculations? Sounds like a non-sequitur to me.
I'll bet that Newtonian physics was good enough, and GR corrections would have been down by the 5th decimal place or lower. It is barely possible to measure GR effects in the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, let alone in the delta-V from leaving your burned fuel lower in a gravity well.
The Venera landers were able to make it down to the surface, and IIRC one or two of them actually sent back pictures for a while. Their lifespans were very strictly limited by their insulation; as heat soaked in there was no way to pump it out again, and it did not take long before the electronics were too hot to function.
Aerogels have one flaw, and that is that they are rigid (and not particularly strong). The job definitely requires the ability to survive launch vibrations, and may also need to conform to the shape of other parts of the spacecraft. For this, a ceramic quilt might well do a better job than aerogel.
A factor that I can't judge is that many aerogels are made of silica, which has a much lower melting point than ceramics like alumina; it may be that the available aerogels were not sufficiently heat-resistant to do the job.
I've read analyses which say that the poles of Mercury have permanently shadowed areas which are close to sunlit zones (for power) and just might contain water ice. So yes, it may be possible for people to live there. (Getting on and off would be difficult due to the density; the kinetic energy energy of orbit is proportional to the density, so you couldn't use a LEM-equivalent lander despite the rough equivalence of the size.)
I bet that the flight plans include hiding the other side of planets/moons for as long as possible to take advantage of all that lovely shade.
Space is mighty big. Shadows are few and far between. When you have a spacecraft that has to take 11 suns beating on its face for months at a time during cruise, why would a mission designer compromise his science by trying to pass behind bodies just for the shade? (For gravity-assist maneuvers, yes. Shade, no.)
... if fuel wasn't a consideration I bet they'd love to run straight up Mercury's shadow and just park in it.
If you parked in Mercury's shadow you wouldn't be able to do any analysis that requires good light (like spectroscopy to determine mineral composition) nor would you be able to watch any day-side phenomena like observing the rate of warming and thus the thermal conductivity of the surface.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm particularly interested in the sources of funding for this research. Research sponsored by the coal and oil industries can be expected to be suppressed if it supports actions contrary to their interests. (One would also expect research sponsored by left/socialist organizations to be suppressed if it didn't support their agenda, which may be neutral or anti-corporate.)
If the IPCC's research is as you describe, that's fine. If human activities are warming the planet in addition to the effects of solar changes, we probably want to act to reverse the human contributions.
- Do nothing, which makes us look ineffectual and encourages the baddies.
- Attack anything that looks like it might be a baddie, which makes us look brutal and encourages people to join and support the baddies.
- Genocide, to get rid of anyone who even thinks about being a baddie.
Face it, this is a problem that is not going to be solved at the level of infantry.The problem with capacitive connections is that you are, for all intents and purposes, using small radio links. This causes several issues to come to the fore:
- Your immunity to cross-talk goes down. Misalignment will exacerbate these problems.
- Capacitive receivers will also be able to pick up local RF fields. The computer will be much more vulnerable to external interference than it was before.
- The computer will also radiate much more than it did before, creating more RFI and leaking information that might be crucial (like crypto keys).
Making the chips the meat in a sandwich with metal sheets for the bread would help this a lot, because tightly coupled ground planes attenuate both radiation and reception. As long as you're putting a ground plane on top of the assembly it might as well do double duty as a cooling device, though I wonder what effect the heat-transfer compounds would have on transmission and crosstalk.Note that the Greening Earth Society is founded and financed by companies with an interest in unrestricted CO2 emissions (the Western Fuels Alliance is mostly coal-mining interest). If you are looking for scientific truth-seeking or even fairness and balance, don't look to them.
According to AC Propulsion, the profit potential from the use of batteries to provide regulation services to the grid could pay for the batteries. Even if it doesn't pay for all the battery deterioration, so long as it pays for more than its share it reduces the cost of using the vehicle.
Take a look at the way that the proponents expect to actually use V2G capabilities before you say that. Study here; pointers to that and other documents here.
Being able to perform descents and ascents without running the maneuvering motors would allow access to the full depth capability of the hull. You would have to add hardware to extract power from the slipstream during buoyant maneuvers; given that this would probably not extend the time-at-depth by a huge amount (and might decrease powered speed and range), it might not be worth it.
If hungry sea creatures are a problem, use some of that battery power to shock them, or shotgun-shell primers to scare them off.
The carbon-uptake of N. American landmass may be due in large part to the adoption of zero-till farming; here is an article on it.
Adding CO2 means reducing alkalinity, which makes carbonate less stable in the oceans. This may have serious effects on marine organisms which use carbonate in their skeletons; see here for a brief news item. Science News has run several articles on the subject, but none appear to be on-line; here are the references from one of them.
People like to live among trees. How do you classify "urban forests"?
I wish it was easy, but it doesn't appear to be.
We could do more, beginning with discouraging (instead of subsidizing) excess agricultural production and returning that land to forest - but that doesn't mean that a lot has not already been done.
Companies would deliver anything that they could call "broadband", take the money and run. Read about the scandals over the "Gore Tax" money to wire schools? It would be that, times a thousand.
Some wires across the outside of the screens, hooked to the flash capacitor of a scrap disposable-camera flash unit, might do the trick. You'll have to find a way to force the unit on, though; if it stays off for too long all the charge will leak away and its usefulness as a memory aid will be nil.
To be really useful, such a printout should incorporate enough information to allow bootstrapping from a much lower level. If you had a 10-year-old scanner (as if such would still work) and each page had a dot-code representation of its complete data on the back (including some redundancy from other pages, perhaps) and redundant sets of scripts to use to decode the contents and code from the raw scans, it would be worth making such printouts.
If you don't have such things or if you do not consider it important to be able to recover from a disaster which destroys the Internet, you might as well distribute electronic copies worldwide and leave it at that. The cost of keeping mirrors up to date will be far lower than the price of 600 reams of paper plus ink/toner, and recovery would be immensely quicker.
Getting back to the topic, ID proponents are somewhat like James Van Allen; both assume that they already know all that is worthwhile or necessary, so there is no need to go further except for those things which particularly interest them (plasma physics or biblical exegesis, take your pick). Both are wrong.
Van Allen's work involves fields and particles, not rocks or life. It's not at all surprising that he doesn't like manned missions; they are no good for his (narrow) field of science. But that doesn't mean that we should take him as anything other than a proponent of his own parochial interests; we should certainly not regard him as an authority on the worth of all expeditions into space.
I don't know if the ellipticity of Mercury's orbit is such that the apparent motion of the Sun can reverse, and I'm not about to go digging for all the numbers when I have paying work to do. Maybe you can either document it or refute it.
I'll bet that Newtonian physics was good enough, and GR corrections would have been down by the 5th decimal place or lower. It is barely possible to measure GR effects in the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, let alone in the delta-V from leaving your burned fuel lower in a gravity well.
The Venera landers were able to make it down to the surface, and IIRC one or two of them actually sent back pictures for a while. Their lifespans were very strictly limited by their insulation; as heat soaked in there was no way to pump it out again, and it did not take long before the electronics were too hot to function.
A factor that I can't judge is that many aerogels are made of silica, which has a much lower melting point than ceramics like alumina; it may be that the available aerogels were not sufficiently heat-resistant to do the job.
I've read analyses which say that the poles of Mercury have permanently shadowed areas which are close to sunlit zones (for power) and just might contain water ice. So yes, it may be possible for people to live there. (Getting on and off would be difficult due to the density; the kinetic energy energy of orbit is proportional to the density, so you couldn't use a LEM-equivalent lander despite the rough equivalence of the size.)