Before UNH caught on, the school's entire email directory was publicly accessible. Obviously the work of Wallace, there were a bunch of spam emails poorly disguised to look like some girl's conversation about the club that she mistakenly forwarded to the whole school.
Like it or not, percent weight is the common metric to compare hydrogen storage methods. Around 6% by weight, the energy/mass ratio of molecular hydrogen is in the ballpark of gasoline, so 6% is the target you hear all the hydrogen storage scientists talking about. Of course what weight percent sweeps under the carpet are the important issues like stability after many charge/discharges, energy required per cycle, and the operating temperature range. Anybody claiming near or over 6% is cutting major corners on one of those areas. In this case, the buckyball bursting open to release H2 is not an easily reversible step so it will have a lifetime of exactly one discharge before the leftover carbon has to be reclaimed and re-packed with H2.
As someone who does model calculations involving buckyballs myself, this is a very intriguing calculation. But if I showed this to my buddies down the hall who do fullerene chemistry, they would have a few questions about how they are supposed to pack that much H2 in a fullerene and then scale the process industrially.
No. Typically we get hydrogen via electrolysis (though there are other methods). That means electricity. So, any way we can produce electiricity, we can get hydrogen. But Wikipedia says:
Currently, global hydrogen production is 48% from natural gas, 30% from oil, and 18% from coal; water electrolysis accounts for only 4%. So right now we aren't getting much H2 from electrolysis. Certainly not enough to replace automobile fuel anytime soon.
The research of this article claims to increase the efficiency of the fuel cell. Great. Even with a 100% efficiency in the fuel cell itself, if you account for the entire process electrolysis of water and compression hydrogen still make this route inefficient compared to batteries Source . And on top of that, the real bitch is H2 storage that doesn't require unsafe high pressure or a storage medium that is half the size or weight of the car itself in order to go 250 miles. Battery technology is making leaps and bounds compared to H2 storage technology.
The US dept of energy set a target of 6.5% hydrogen by weight for automobile hydrogen storage. So, yes, 9% is great (although the article is short on details and 9% is only their prediction - they haven't done it yet). The main alternatives to storing H2 gas in a high pressure gas cylinder are:
Molecular hydrogen (H2) physically sticking to a porous storage medium, such as a metal organic framework, without chemically reacting.
Chemically storing atomic hydrogen in a compounds, such as metal hydrides, where it can reversibly react to form H2.
The challenge is trying to do the above reversibly in non-extreme temperature and pressure conditions and in a method that won't break down with hundreds and thousands of empty/full cycles.
The reason the weight percent numbers seem small is that H2 has a molecular weight of ~2 AMU and any material with the capacity to adsorb lots of hydrogen or store it chemically is going to be made of much heavier atoms. In this way, mass percentage is deceiving but it is the most common measure of storage capacity. My wild guess is that the 6.5% cutoff is in the ballpark of the energy output to mass ratio of gasoline. Luckily, neither fuel requires the automobile to haul around all the oxygen necessary to for the reactions.
If people aren't happy with single digit weight percentages, they could suggest using a heavier hydrogen isotopes to double or triple the numbers!
The UCS agenda is to state the consensus of qualified scientists loudly and clearly and refute the widespread claims that there is controversy on the basics of global warming among scientists.
No matter how many times journalists, think tank writers, corporate shills, politicians, and other non-scientists say so, there isn't any real debate among scientists - at least not about the basic ideas, sure there is debate over the fine points. But the public doesn't get their science through primary literature. They get it through the aforementioned groups. Some members of these non-scientific groups intentionally distort findings, cherry pick facts, mis-represent what scientists say, over-emphasize discrepancies, under-emphasize agreements, and abuse their direct access to communicate to the public. All in all, they present a picture that scientists are not in agreement - which is false.
Whether or not they are correct, the scientists are in consensus about global warming. But they need a noisy PR machine to make that consensus known when other non-scientists with so much direct public access claim otherwise.
... corporations again and again attempt to subvert the powers of the state and twist both public opinion and the law to their own benefit. In many cases, large corporations behave like small, independant countries or baronies, accountable to no one but themselves...
I don't personally buy into Friedman's reasoning but based on news like this I suspect an awful lot of executive boards and marketing departments do. This mentality won't change for a long time. For now, the real problem is the integrity of the so called "journalists" who present these prepackaged news-vertisements as legitimate news.
Any idea if one of these transflash jobs would work on the SanDisk? Someone mentioned earlier that only music could be stored in removable memory. Even so, 8 extra GB dedicated to music would make this device expensive but all the more worthwhile.
Not true. A provider of a product or service will provide what the consumer wants, including making sure that they abide by whatever environmental restrictions the market demands.
Correction: A provider of a product or service will provide whatever generates the largest quarterly profit margin. Often times this correlates to what consumers want, but often times it doesn't. Are advertising:content ratios in the 1:3 ballpark during primetime television in response to what a consumer wants? Does a consumer want to jump through so many hoops and be harassed by sales reps just to cancel a recurring subscription service (AOL was recently sued for this, and you should have heard my conversation when I called to terminate my T-Mobile subscription)? Were GE's PCB discharges in the Hudson River what people who purchased lightbulbs or flew on a plane with a GE jet engine really wanted? Did vioxx users want to be kept in the dark about studies that hinted at deadly side effects? Did Ford SUV drivers want their defective Bridgestone tires to spontaneously blow up?
The answer to all of these questions is: No, any sane consumer wouldn't want these things, but either they didn't know, or didn't have any clear alternative. At the end of the day all of these things fatten the bottom line and clash with what consumers really want.
The net neutrality issue is a great example of the same thing. The cost of implementation and the fees that content providers have to pay are ultimately going to be passed on to the consumer. In return, the consumer will get a tiered internet service. Other than the internet providers that grease congress and stand to reap the benefits and the people who trumpet unregulated business models, it appears that not many other people are in favor of abolishing net neutrality. If paying more for tiered internet is really what consumers want, I'd like to see the letters and emails pouring into our elected officials' mailboxes saying so.
Re:So it almost seems evolution follows a... desig
on
Is Evolution Predictable?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This title wasn't phrased very well. Anybody involved in climate science knows that smog reflects (some) solar radiation but they wouldn't tout it as a way to curb global warming. As someone else pointed out, a lack of nuclear winter would also add to global warming. The fact is that excessively polluted air isn't the planet's preferred mechanism for temperature regulation. Saying -- or even implying -- that air pollution is beneficial because it reflects some solar radiation is like saying amputation is an effective means of weight loss. Only someone piss-ignorant or with a big financial stake would take such an absurd stance to justify something.
Things like the Chapman Cycle (ozone photodissociation in the stratosphere), (water) clouds, snow cover, acid rain, and photosynthesis driven carbon cycles are a few of the planet's dominant (time tested) mechanisms for managing solar radiation, temperature, and atmospheric composition. One thing people don't realize is that the atmosphere is mostly inert nitrogen gas and the major players in the chemistry (nitrates, sulfates, organic compounds, ozone, etc) are only present in parts per billion or parts per trillion concentrations.
The fact that humans are causing major changes in these concentrations is well established and the results are being documented by the scientific community. Concrete long term predictions aren't exactly easy though since this is the first time there have been such acute human-driven changes in atmospheric composition and scientists studying it. It would be nice to exercise some restraint as a society and err on the side of caution when it comes to anthropogenic emissions though. The fact so many people are eager to exploit is that we really don't know exactly what will happen.
To twist a well established fact into a title like this is Fox News-esque. I can't wait till I see an editorial in a student newspaper trying to discredit an emissions regulation arguement with a statement like that title.
Speaking of the state of online advertising... I have now seen two ads for CACIQUE Bras exclusively at Lane Bryant. Last time I checked I was male and I certainly don't need anything from the 36C-48DDD,F,G,&H cupsize range they advertise. If I had to take a guess, whoever or whatever decided/. users are subject to impulse online bra purchases was dead wrong...
Either that or ad bots are so adept that they can anticipate a sex change/boob job I don't even know about based on some of my online habits.
When adverts of all varieties aren't annoying the snot out of me, I amuse myself by painting mental pictures of the person that fits the demographics targeted in a series of consecutive ads. For example when I read the science section of the NYT and see an ad for a free* online IQ test and another for an investment agency I think of someone with the ability to earn enough money to "invest" and not enough brains to realize what a scam free* online IQ tests are.
Are the newer shuttles very noisy at all? I have an SB61G going on three years old and the fan is pretty darn loud. I assume there aren't many aftermarket cpu fans for shuttles since the fan/radiator/heatsink/heatpipe contraption is one big piece.
The vast majority of the science community is appreciative of the beauty, majesty, and overwhelming complexity of nature - especially in the context of evolution but also in many other fields such as quantum physics. To speculate that there is some sort of "intelligent design" (not capitalized) or divine nature underlying everything is a philosophical/theological issue that doesn't necessarily go against the grain of modern science.
Intelligent Design (capitalized, proper noun), however, is nothing more than (crinkly, noisy, and almost transparent) wrapping paper for literal biblical creationism. This biblical story, literally interpreted, is a full frontal assault on almost the entire field of biology, hence the violent opposition from the science community.
The people trying to shove Intelligent Design down the throats of biology teachers are christian fundamentalists who believe in the literal account of creation detailed in the bible and reject evolution (and apparantly the other parts of science it compliments). By conjuring Intelligent Design - a broader principle which conveniently encompasses their creation beleif and many other beliefs - they have muddied the waters and gained partial support of people outside their religious circle who (like me and many other slashdotters) believe in some sort of "intelligent design" (not capitalized) or divine nature underlying everything.
Intelligent Design is a trojan horse. Read more about it here
(and who will end up being thier bosses later on)
I disagree. At my school the students who bomb weeder courses like physics I, II end up going to the business school where they get management degrees and eventually boss around the hard working engineers/scientists.
The skyrocketing CEO salaries are simply inhumane when you contrast them with the fact that any annual raise less than annual inflation is a paycut when you consider the actual purchasing power.
My idea has always been to offshore CEO positions and redistribute some of their bloated salaries to other deserving folks at the bottom. Why should overprivledged CEOs act like a bunch of crybabies when an enterprising Indian with an MBA is willing to do three times as much work for 1/40th the price of an American CEO? It's the same line they tell the worker slaving away at minimum wage (or IT wage) when they send his/her job oversees.
Oh wait, I think I just answered my own question.
Interesting tidbit about Sanford Wallace....
on
Spam Kings
·
· Score: 4, Funny
This guy started a dance club in rural New Hampshire after he "oficially" got out of the spam business. The funny thing is that every month or so he mass emails all of the University of New Hampshire students advertising his scummy club by pretending to be a girl talking about the place.
At one point I sent him a snide reply "Why don't you just go back to spamming professionally?" I can't find his response but it was something to the effect that he has more fun doing it unprofessionally.
Slashdot Mirror
They finally fixed word wrap! In TB 2, saved message drafts were stuck with carriage returns at the end of each line.
Before UNH caught on, the school's entire email directory was publicly accessible. Obviously the work of Wallace, there were a bunch of spam emails poorly disguised to look like some girl's conversation about the club that she mistakenly forwarded to the whole school.
As someone who does model calculations involving buckyballs myself, this is a very intriguing calculation. But if I showed this to my buddies down the hall who do fullerene chemistry, they would have a few questions about how they are supposed to pack that much H2 in a fullerene and then scale the process industrially.
The research of this article claims to increase the efficiency of the fuel cell. Great. Even with a 100% efficiency in the fuel cell itself, if you account for the entire process electrolysis of water and compression hydrogen still make this route inefficient compared to batteries Source . And on top of that, the real bitch is H2 storage that doesn't require unsafe high pressure or a storage medium that is half the size or weight of the car itself in order to go 250 miles. Battery technology is making leaps and bounds compared to H2 storage technology.
- Molecular hydrogen (H2) physically sticking to a porous storage medium, such as a metal organic framework, without chemically reacting.
- Chemically storing atomic hydrogen in a compounds, such as metal hydrides, where it can reversibly react to form H2.
The challenge is trying to do the above reversibly in non-extreme temperature and pressure conditions and in a method that won't break down with hundreds and thousands of empty/full cycles.The reason the weight percent numbers seem small is that H2 has a molecular weight of ~2 AMU and any material with the capacity to adsorb lots of hydrogen or store it chemically is going to be made of much heavier atoms. In this way, mass percentage is deceiving but it is the most common measure of storage capacity. My wild guess is that the 6.5% cutoff is in the ballpark of the energy output to mass ratio of gasoline. Luckily, neither fuel requires the automobile to haul around all the oxygen necessary to for the reactions.
If people aren't happy with single digit weight percentages, they could suggest using a heavier hydrogen isotopes to double or triple the numbers!
No matter how many times journalists, think tank writers, corporate shills, politicians, and other non-scientists say so, there isn't any real debate among scientists - at least not about the basic ideas, sure there is debate over the fine points. But the public doesn't get their science through primary literature. They get it through the aforementioned groups. Some members of these non-scientific groups intentionally distort findings, cherry pick facts, mis-represent what scientists say, over-emphasize discrepancies, under-emphasize agreements, and abuse their direct access to communicate to the public. All in all, they present a picture that scientists are not in agreement - which is false.
Whether or not they are correct, the scientists are in consensus about global warming. But they need a noisy PR machine to make that consensus known when other non-scientists with so much direct public access claim otherwise.
According to Milton Friedman they are accountable solely to their shareholders. He lays it out pretty clearly in The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.
I don't personally buy into Friedman's reasoning but based on news like this I suspect an awful lot of executive boards and marketing departments do. This mentality won't change for a long time. For now, the real problem is the integrity of the so called "journalists" who present these prepackaged news-vertisements as legitimate news.
Any idea if one of these transflash jobs would work on the SanDisk? Someone mentioned earlier that only music could be stored in removable memory. Even so, 8 extra GB dedicated to music would make this device expensive but all the more worthwhile.
This inkjet printer mod was done over a year ago and accomplished the same thing as far as I can tell.
Not true. A provider of a product or service will provide what the consumer wants, including making sure that they abide by whatever environmental restrictions the market demands.
Correction: A provider of a product or service will provide whatever generates the largest quarterly profit margin. Often times this correlates to what consumers want, but often times it doesn't. Are advertising:content ratios in the 1:3 ballpark during primetime television in response to what a consumer wants? Does a consumer want to jump through so many hoops and be harassed by sales reps just to cancel a recurring subscription service (AOL was recently sued for this, and you should have heard my conversation when I called to terminate my T-Mobile subscription)? Were GE's PCB discharges in the Hudson River what people who purchased lightbulbs or flew on a plane with a GE jet engine really wanted? Did vioxx users want to be kept in the dark about studies that hinted at deadly side effects? Did Ford SUV drivers want their defective Bridgestone tires to spontaneously blow up?
The answer to all of these questions is: No, any sane consumer wouldn't want these things, but either they didn't know, or didn't have any clear alternative. At the end of the day all of these things fatten the bottom line and clash with what consumers really want.
The net neutrality issue is a great example of the same thing. The cost of implementation and the fees that content providers have to pay are ultimately going to be passed on to the consumer. In return, the consumer will get a tiered internet service. Other than the internet providers that grease congress and stand to reap the benefits and the people who trumpet unregulated business models, it appears that not many other people are in favor of abolishing net neutrality. If paying more for tiered internet is really what consumers want, I'd like to see the letters and emails pouring into our elected officials' mailboxes saying so.
Hey bud, copy and paste much?
http://www.worldmag.com/articles/11485
All I had to do was copy and paste one phrase into google with quotes.
This title wasn't phrased very well. Anybody involved in climate science knows that smog reflects (some) solar radiation but they wouldn't tout it as a way to curb global warming. As someone else pointed out, a lack of nuclear winter would also add to global warming. The fact is that excessively polluted air isn't the planet's preferred mechanism for temperature regulation. Saying -- or even implying -- that air pollution is beneficial because it reflects some solar radiation is like saying amputation is an effective means of weight loss. Only someone piss-ignorant or with a big financial stake would take such an absurd stance to justify something.
Things like the Chapman Cycle (ozone photodissociation in the stratosphere), (water) clouds, snow cover, acid rain, and photosynthesis driven carbon cycles are a few of the planet's dominant (time tested) mechanisms for managing solar radiation, temperature, and atmospheric composition. One thing people don't realize is that the atmosphere is mostly inert nitrogen gas and the major players in the chemistry (nitrates, sulfates, organic compounds, ozone, etc) are only present in parts per billion or parts per trillion concentrations.
The fact that humans are causing major changes in these concentrations is well established and the results are being documented by the scientific community. Concrete long term predictions aren't exactly easy though since this is the first time there have been such acute human-driven changes in atmospheric composition and scientists studying it. It would be nice to exercise some restraint as a society and err on the side of caution when it comes to anthropogenic emissions though. The fact so many people are eager to exploit is that we really don't know exactly what will happen.
To twist a well established fact into a title like this is Fox News-esque. I can't wait till I see an editorial in a student newspaper trying to discredit an emissions regulation arguement with a statement like that title.
Speaking of the state of online advertising... I have now seen two ads for CACIQUE Bras exclusively at Lane Bryant. Last time I checked I was male and I certainly don't need anything from the 36C-48DDD,F,G,&H cupsize range they advertise. If I had to take a guess, whoever or whatever decided /. users are subject to impulse online bra purchases was dead wrong...
Either that or ad bots are so adept that they can anticipate a sex change/boob job I don't even know about based on some of my online habits.
When adverts of all varieties aren't annoying the snot out of me, I amuse myself by painting mental pictures of the person that fits the demographics targeted in a series of consecutive ads. For example when I read the science section of the NYT and see an ad for a free* online IQ test and another for an investment agency I think of someone with the ability to earn enough money to "invest" and not enough brains to realize what a scam free* online IQ tests are.
Gmail Space is a firefox extension that provides a decent interface for storing files as gmail attachments.
Are the newer shuttles very noisy at all? I have an SB61G going on three years old and the fan is pretty darn loud. I assume there aren't many aftermarket cpu fans for shuttles since the fan/radiator/heatsink/heatpipe contraption is one big piece.
The vast majority of the science community is appreciative of the beauty, majesty, and overwhelming complexity of nature - especially in the context of evolution but also in many other fields such as quantum physics. To speculate that there is some sort of "intelligent design" (not capitalized) or divine nature underlying everything is a philosophical/theological issue that doesn't necessarily go against the grain of modern science.
Intelligent Design (capitalized, proper noun), however, is nothing more than (crinkly, noisy, and almost transparent) wrapping paper for literal biblical creationism. This biblical story, literally interpreted, is a full frontal assault on almost the entire field of biology, hence the violent opposition from the science community.
The people trying to shove Intelligent Design down the throats of biology teachers are christian fundamentalists who believe in the literal account of creation detailed in the bible and reject evolution (and apparantly the other parts of science it compliments). By conjuring Intelligent Design - a broader principle which conveniently encompasses their creation beleif and many other beliefs - they have muddied the waters and gained partial support of people outside their religious circle who (like me and many other slashdotters) believe in some sort of "intelligent design" (not capitalized) or divine nature underlying everything.
Intelligent Design is a trojan horse. Read more about it here
From one of those pictures it certainly looks like a CRT. Is it still accepted that for the absolute best gaming display you still need a CRT?
(and who will end up being thier bosses later on) I disagree. At my school the students who bomb weeder courses like physics I, II end up going to the business school where they get management degrees and eventually boss around the hard working engineers/scientists.
The skyrocketing CEO salaries are simply inhumane when you contrast them with the fact that any annual raise less than annual inflation is a paycut when you consider the actual purchasing power. My idea has always been to offshore CEO positions and redistribute some of their bloated salaries to other deserving folks at the bottom. Why should overprivledged CEOs act like a bunch of crybabies when an enterprising Indian with an MBA is willing to do three times as much work for 1/40th the price of an American CEO? It's the same line they tell the worker slaving away at minimum wage (or IT wage) when they send his/her job oversees. Oh wait, I think I just answered my own question.
would dare to use raspberry jam. THE USA!
This guy started a dance club in rural New Hampshire after he "oficially" got out of the spam business. The funny thing is that every month or so he mass emails all of the University of New Hampshire students advertising his scummy club by pretending to be a girl talking about the place. At one point I sent him a snide reply "Why don't you just go back to spamming professionally?" I can't find his response but it was something to the effect that he has more fun doing it unprofessionally.