That article gets cited a lot, but I'd like to see a small plant in operation using saltwater to demonstrate that it is actually economically feasible.
As previous posters have pointed out, what you're doing is surveying/cartography, so if you can possibly afford it you want proper surveying/cartograpic gear.
Surveying GPS's are made by companies like Leica and Trimble, cost a lot more than your Garmin bushwalker's jobby, and are accurate to within a few centimetres.
That's what you really want if you're going to try to make real maps.
If you're selling 1,000 CD's a year, you're not making a living out of selling CD's; you're either making a living out of playing live, you're making music as a hobby, or you're trying to hit the big time.
If you're trying to hit the big time, or making a living out of playing live, getting your music heard by as many people as possible, and therefore turning up to gigs, is the goal. Revenue from the demo CD you recorded at home is neither here nor there.
If you're making music as a hobby, who really cares whether people pirate your stuff or not?
Frankfurt has a certain reputation amongst international travellers. It's the place you fly into when you're going to Germany, but it's also the place you fly, train, or drive straight out of once you get there.
The exceptions are, of course, banking and going to conferences:)
The shuttle is not "safe", but it's safer than it's ever been before. Everybody knows it's not as safe as a 747, and it's never going to be. But surely, given that the astronauts flying on it are all highly intelligent volunteers who understand the risks, it's safe enough to get the ISS Contractual Obligation Tour (and a manned Hubble service mission, with any luck) out of the way before they get sent off to the Smithsonian and a new, safer CEV is built.
As I understand it, the AP1000 is just an improved PWR design, so it presents pretty much the same proliferation issues as any other:
There's plutonium-239 created in the spent fuel, but it's heavily contaminated with pu-240. None of the existing nuclear powers makes bombs with such material; whether it is even possible or not is not known with public information. It's certainly not at all easy, given that even with weapons-grade plutonium you need to develop an implosion design rather than the gun design possible with U-235. Predetonation (the tendancy to blow itself apart before enough reactions have occurred to make a really big explosion) would be an even bigger problem with reactor-grade plutonium than it is with bomb-grade.
I believe you *can* use a PWR to make bomb-grade plutonium, but they're not the best design to do so; CANDU reactors are much easier to use for that purpose because you can load and unload fuel while the reactor is running.
The unburned fuel can't be used in a bomb; but if a nation has the technology to enrich uranium to levels suitable for use in a nuclear plant, it's not much tougher to enrich it to the concentrations needed to make a bomb.
The radioactive waste, of course, can be used to make a "dirty bomb".
I think part of the problem is that most cities in the United States have absolutely abysmal public transport (New York being the outstanding exception), and so over the distances that you might consider taking a train (say 300-400 miles) the trouble is that once you get to wherever you're going you need a car to get around anyway.
If oil prices keep rising, of course, these problems will tend to get solved...:/
I thought Peter Ustinov's turn as the crazy old man was perhaps the greatest highlight of that movie. The guy knew what a complete piece of tosh the script was ('twas a shame, the ideas were moderately interesting) and treated it with the seriousness it deserved. Different but similar (if you know what I mean) to Michael Ironside in Starship Troopers...
I thought the recent referenda made fairly clear that the people of Europe are even less keen on the idea of an elected European parliament with real power, than the national governments are.
Whether they're right in their skepticism I really don't know. It's interesting that the people of France are so seemingly skeptical of an instution that shovels them massive subsidies to keep their tiny, inefficient farms afloat...
And, yes, the same ideas - using antimatter to trigger fusion - could be used to make some "cool" weapons. Notably, small nuclear weapons that don't emit fallout. The political consequences of having nuclear weapons that don't emit fallout available I leave to the reader...
But the periods on the moon can be chosen for convenience. On Mars, there isn't terribly much choice in the matter, and the intervals are *much* longer.
Possibly, but the logistics situation on the Moon (which is a coupla days away from Earth) is, again, completely different to that on Mars (where you're six months away by conventional rocket, and you can only launch stuff at certain times).
Moon is a bad place to refuel for Mars...
on
Back to Moon in 2015?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
According to Robert Zubrin's book on the topic, the trouble with using the moon as a place to refuel on the way to Mars is that it requires almost as much fuel to get to (and go into orbit around) as Mars itself. It's easier just to launch extra fuel tanks (or, even more simply, extra propulsion stages) into LEO.
Secondly, Mars and the moon are going to be totally different kettles of fish to colonize. Mars has an atmosphere, thin as it is, roughly 24-hour days, and a bloody cold climate. The Moon has no atmosphere whatsoever, four-week days (making it near-impossible to grow anything there), and temperatures that go from bloody cold to bloody boiling. I'm not sure how much we're going to learn about living on Mars from the Moon.
The favourite possibility of sci-fi authors for life on planets like this is in the polar "twilight zones". It'd be a hard, hard life (the winds would be killer hot or cold) but life has been found on some pretty strange places on Earth...
A "kill -9" equivalent that doesn't take 20 seconds to perform its function...
Seriously, Windows is somewhat better than it was, but why the hell does it take so long to kill a damn process?
Re:My standard space elevator comment...
on
NPR Talks Skyhooks
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, you might also tell those spiders to lift their game, because spider silk is nowhere near strong enough to build a space elevator. It's about three times the tensile strength of steel. A space elevator needs something more than 100 times stronger than steel to be practical.
I'm not losing sleep over suitcase nukes either, but you're wrong on some points:
Suitcase nukes exist, sort of. While it's not quite something you'd carry in a suitcase, the Special Atomic Demolition Munition was a 1-kiloton nuke that weighed about 68 kilograms. You're not going to carry it in your suitcase unless you're He-Man, but you could certainly fit into the trunk of your car, even a French one;) However, the odds of a terrorist group being able to build a nuke this small are fairly minimal without being handed the design by somebody else.
The resources and experience required to build a nuclear weapon are also somewhat less than is commonly believed; this article on the former South African nuclear program gives some idea of the minimum budget required for the job from scratch- tens of millions of dollars, but not hundreds. I should add that I'm highly skeptical that any terrorist group could coordinate this kind of money and people, in secret, for long enough to pull such an accomplishment off.
Finally, uranium, even enriched uranium, or plutonium is pretty hard stuff to detect; they just don't emit very much radiation until you push them into a critical mass! Bruce Schneier's blog links to an extensive report on the topic; he also links to news reports about how the detectors they have bought detect so many false alarms as to be essentially useless. Maybe the three-letter agencies have something better (for instance, looking for chemical traces of radioactive material rather than radiation itself), but if it is it's kept pretty secret.
Still, you're basically right. Terrorists aren't going to be whipping up nukes to send through the mail any time soon.
My standard space elevator comment...
on
NPR Talks Skyhooks
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Seeing it hasn't been brought up yet, no material strong enough to build the elevator yet exists. It is not yet clear whether it is even possible to do so. Carbon nanotubes may be strong enough, but nobody has yet been able to assemble them together into a "ribbon" of the strength required yet.
The actual critical mass they needed is not hard to determine by experiment, once you've got sufficient quantities of U-235 or plutonium. You just make very small blocks of whatever it is, then push them together, very carefully. If you start to get lots of radiation, pull them apart again real quick; you've got more than the critical mass (at least for that configuration). If not, repeat with bigger blocks. From that experiment, you can figure out some parameters that will allow you to calculate critical masses for just about any configuration of material (as I understand it; I'm not a nuclear physicist).
The experiment is more than a little risky - you're not going to accidentally make a bomb, but you're likely to kill yourself and anybody in the room with you from radiation poisoning. The experiment was called tickling the dragon's tail for that reason, and several people died in the process.
It may be too difficult to read given the poor-quality reproduction on the BBC article, but if possible could somebody translate the labels on that diagram?
From what I can tell, it looks to be a straightforward version of the "gun design" used in the Hiroshima bomb, which a) is so obvious that I think even I could have figured out the basic concept, and b) won't work with real plutonium as Pu-240 contamination will cause the weapon to blow itself to bits before enough of the plutonium has fissioned. So, even if it was true, they had a very long way to go before they could have made a bomb.
An implosion design, by contrast, would be a much bigger deal, though as I understand it just having the idea is a very long way from making it work.
Two final things: one of the reasons why the Nazis never got very far on their nuclear weapons project is that they could never get a reactor working; one of the key reasons for that was their supply of heavy water was kept from them by Norwegian partisans working with British SOE. Their story is a pretty amazing one.
And finally, while it's not possible to make a plutonium gun bomb now; it should be possible in the very distant future. Pu-240 (the contaminant) has a much shorter half-life (about 6500 years) than Pu-239 (about 24,100 years). So, over (lots of) time, the proportion of the Pu-240 should gradually reduce. So maybe these Germans were just a little ahead of their time...
Anything shipped from planet to planet will have to be high-value cargo; there's never going to be money in shipping iron from planet to planet. But what about, say, Platinum, at roughly $340/ounce? Or the other precious metals?
The reason why Antarctica hasn't been colonized has little to do with the climate: it has everything to do with economics and politics.
Antarctica is politically disputed; several nations claim a chunk of it (or, in the case of the US and Russia, reserve the right to claim a chunk of it), and these claims overlap a lot. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 deferred those claims, and the Protocol on Environmental Protection banned the only for-profit activity (other than tourism) you might conceivably conduct in Antarctica - mining. There is also the problem that most of Antarctica is covered with several kilometres of a material with low economic value - water (well, sort of; fresh water is valuable in large quantities but it would cost far more to ship it to where it's needed than it would be to simply desalinate seawater).
If something of sufficient economic value is found, people will go to some pretty inhospitable places to get it, from Alaska (for oil, or earlier gold) to the jungles of Papua New Guinea for copper.
If they disclose that they're being paid by $COMPANY$ to blog, fine. If they don't, that's unethical.Just like advertorial in newspapers or on TV, actually.
By far the worst part of the whole thing is the bowel prep; as others have pointed out, the drugs they give you are sufficiently potent that you probably won't remember a thing about the whole procedure.
As the bowel prep part of the job hasn't changed, it's just a matter of not having to be sedated and having the hassle of having to be driven home afterwards.
If you're sufficiently conscious, make sure you ask for the pictures afterwards:)
You must have been given funkier drugs than I was; you go from fully-conscious to zonked and not-remembering pretty much instantly, and when you wake up again you feel slightly dozey in a rather boring way for a few minutes, but that wears off really quickly. No hallucinations, not even the not-quite-there feeling you get from too much booze.
You certainly wouldn't bother taking them for recreation, put it that way...
I am not a climate scientist, so I will defer to the experts; the IPCC report suggests that, historically, volcanic and solar activity are probably responsible for climate variation over the last 1000 years. However, it argues that 20th century warming cannot be explained by solar variance.
In any case, I'm not absolutely convinced that greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming. I'm certainly not convinced of the exact predictive power of the climate modelling. But I am convinced that on the basis of a) the reasonable probability that humanity is contributing significantly to the changing climate , b) the potential downside of those changes,
that it is worth taking serious action to reduce the rate and extent of change.
Slashdot Mirror
That article gets cited a lot, but I'd like to see a small plant in operation using saltwater to demonstrate that it is actually economically feasible.
As previous posters have pointed out, what you're doing is surveying/cartography, so if you can possibly afford it you want proper surveying/cartograpic gear. Surveying GPS's are made by companies like Leica and Trimble, cost a lot more than your Garmin bushwalker's jobby, and are accurate to within a few centimetres. That's what you really want if you're going to try to make real maps.
If you're selling 1,000 CD's a year, you're not making a living out of selling CD's; you're either making a living out of playing live, you're making music as a hobby, or you're trying to hit the big time. If you're trying to hit the big time, or making a living out of playing live, getting your music heard by as many people as possible, and therefore turning up to gigs, is the goal. Revenue from the demo CD you recorded at home is neither here nor there. If you're making music as a hobby, who really cares whether people pirate your stuff or not?
Frankfurt has a certain reputation amongst international travellers. It's the place you fly into when you're going to Germany, but it's also the place you fly, train, or drive straight out of once you get there. The exceptions are, of course, banking and going to conferences :)
The shuttle is not "safe", but it's safer than it's ever been before. Everybody knows it's not as safe as a 747, and it's never going to be. But surely, given that the astronauts flying on it are all highly intelligent volunteers who understand the risks, it's safe enough to get the ISS Contractual Obligation Tour (and a manned Hubble service mission, with any luck) out of the way before they get sent off to the Smithsonian and a new, safer CEV is built.
If oil prices keep rising, of course, these problems will tend to get solved... :/
I thought Peter Ustinov's turn as the crazy old man was perhaps the greatest highlight of that movie. The guy knew what a complete piece of tosh the script was ('twas a shame, the ideas were moderately interesting) and treated it with the seriousness it deserved. Different but similar (if you know what I mean) to Michael Ironside in Starship Troopers...
Whether they're right in their skepticism I really don't know. It's interesting that the people of France are so seemingly skeptical of an instution that shovels them massive subsidies to keep their tiny, inefficient farms afloat...
And, yes, the same ideas - using antimatter to trigger fusion - could be used to make some "cool" weapons. Notably, small nuclear weapons that don't emit fallout. The political consequences of having nuclear weapons that don't emit fallout available I leave to the reader...
But the periods on the moon can be chosen for convenience. On Mars, there isn't terribly much choice in the matter, and the intervals are *much* longer.
Possibly, but the logistics situation on the Moon (which is a coupla days away from Earth) is, again, completely different to that on Mars (where you're six months away by conventional rocket, and you can only launch stuff at certain times).
Secondly, Mars and the moon are going to be totally different kettles of fish to colonize. Mars has an atmosphere, thin as it is, roughly 24-hour days, and a bloody cold climate. The Moon has no atmosphere whatsoever, four-week days (making it near-impossible to grow anything there), and temperatures that go from bloody cold to bloody boiling. I'm not sure how much we're going to learn about living on Mars from the Moon.
The favourite possibility of sci-fi authors for life on planets like this is in the polar "twilight zones". It'd be a hard, hard life (the winds would be killer hot or cold) but life has been found on some pretty strange places on Earth...
A "kill -9" equivalent that doesn't take 20 seconds to perform its function... Seriously, Windows is somewhat better than it was, but why the hell does it take so long to kill a damn process?
Well, you might also tell those spiders to lift their game, because spider silk is nowhere near strong enough to build a space elevator. It's about three times the tensile strength of steel. A space elevator needs something more than 100 times stronger than steel to be practical.
Suitcase nukes exist, sort of. While it's not quite something you'd carry in a suitcase, the Special Atomic Demolition Munition was a 1-kiloton nuke that weighed about 68 kilograms. You're not going to carry it in your suitcase unless you're He-Man, but you could certainly fit into the trunk of your car, even a French one ;) However, the odds of a terrorist group being able to build a nuke this small are fairly minimal without being handed the design by somebody else.
The resources and experience required to build a nuclear weapon are also somewhat less than is commonly believed; this article on the former South African nuclear program gives some idea of the minimum budget required for the job from scratch- tens of millions of dollars, but not hundreds. I should add that I'm highly skeptical that any terrorist group could coordinate this kind of money and people, in secret, for long enough to pull such an accomplishment off.
Finally, uranium, even enriched uranium, or plutonium is pretty hard stuff to detect; they just don't emit very much radiation until you push them into a critical mass! Bruce Schneier's blog links to an extensive report on the topic; he also links to news reports about how the detectors they have bought detect so many false alarms as to be essentially useless. Maybe the three-letter agencies have something better (for instance, looking for chemical traces of radioactive material rather than radiation itself), but if it is it's kept pretty secret.
Still, you're basically right. Terrorists aren't going to be whipping up nukes to send through the mail any time soon.
Seeing it hasn't been brought up yet, no material strong enough to build the elevator yet exists. It is not yet clear whether it is even possible to do so. Carbon nanotubes may be strong enough, but nobody has yet been able to assemble them together into a "ribbon" of the strength required yet.
The experiment is more than a little risky - you're not going to accidentally make a bomb, but you're likely to kill yourself and anybody in the room with you from radiation poisoning. The experiment was called tickling the dragon's tail for that reason, and several people died in the process.
From what I can tell, it looks to be a straightforward version of the "gun design" used in the Hiroshima bomb, which a) is so obvious that I think even I could have figured out the basic concept, and b) won't work with real plutonium as Pu-240 contamination will cause the weapon to blow itself to bits before enough of the plutonium has fissioned. So, even if it was true, they had a very long way to go before they could have made a bomb.
An implosion design, by contrast, would be a much bigger deal, though as I understand it just having the idea is a very long way from making it work.
Two final things: one of the reasons why the Nazis never got very far on their nuclear weapons project is that they could never get a reactor working; one of the key reasons for that was their supply of heavy water was kept from them by Norwegian partisans working with British SOE. Their story is a pretty amazing one.
And finally, while it's not possible to make a plutonium gun bomb now; it should be possible in the very distant future. Pu-240 (the contaminant) has a much shorter half-life (about 6500 years) than Pu-239 (about 24,100 years). So, over (lots of) time, the proportion of the Pu-240 should gradually reduce. So maybe these Germans were just a little ahead of their time...
The reason why Antarctica hasn't been colonized has little to do with the climate: it has everything to do with economics and politics. Antarctica is politically disputed; several nations claim a chunk of it (or, in the case of the US and Russia, reserve the right to claim a chunk of it), and these claims overlap a lot. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 deferred those claims, and the Protocol on Environmental Protection banned the only for-profit activity (other than tourism) you might conceivably conduct in Antarctica - mining. There is also the problem that most of Antarctica is covered with several kilometres of a material with low economic value - water (well, sort of; fresh water is valuable in large quantities but it would cost far more to ship it to where it's needed than it would be to simply desalinate seawater).
If something of sufficient economic value is found, people will go to some pretty inhospitable places to get it, from Alaska (for oil, or earlier gold) to the jungles of Papua New Guinea for copper.
If they disclose that they're being paid by $COMPANY$ to blog, fine. If they don't, that's unethical.Just like advertorial in newspapers or on TV, actually.
As the bowel prep part of the job hasn't changed, it's just a matter of not having to be sedated and having the hassle of having to be driven home afterwards.
If you're sufficiently conscious, make sure you ask for the pictures afterwards :)
You certainly wouldn't bother taking them for recreation, put it that way...
In any case, I'm not absolutely convinced that greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming. I'm certainly not convinced of the exact predictive power of the climate modelling. But I am convinced that on the basis of a) the reasonable probability that humanity is contributing significantly to the changing climate , b) the potential downside of those changes, that it is worth taking serious action to reduce the rate and extent of change.