You mean extremely low yield results that rely on extremely expensive and very tricky to set up setups of palladium and deuterium?
Nope. Cold fusion has come a long way in twenty years. The initial interpretation has fallen by the wayside, and many experimental configurations showing more pronounced effects and energy output have been developed. For a fun one that you can easily reproduce yourself, see this page: http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/index.htm
You sure do your handle "assert(0)" justice: you make assertions with zero basis.
Nature has spoken loud and clear, low energy nuclear reactions are happening. If you do not accept the data, much of it published in established peer-reviewed journals, then go and do your own experimental reproduction. Some kinds of experiment, such as the Mizuno type experiment, are sufficiently cheap and easy that anyone with a modicum of tinkering ability can have a go: http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/index.htm
You are ignorant. Fleischman and Pons believed in the reality of their findings. So it was obviously not a hoax. And many others have corroborated their findings through a variety of experiments: excess heat, neutron emission, tritium/helium production, non-natural-abundance isotope ratios, elemental transmutation, and on the list goes. A large number of these results were obtained using experimental techniques, such as mass spectrometry, that leave no room for ambiguity. I suggest you read some research articles before commenting further.
What has changed, though, is that people no longer adhere to the interpretation that the excess heat is the result of a classic (D+D->He or otherwise) fusion reaction. That is why the label "cold fusion" is no longer in fashion. Nuclear reactions are being enabled, but the mechanism is enigmatic. Many tentative theories trying to explain it have been forwarded.
Name one that is "implemented and reproduced" that is "beyond currently accepted physical science".
The most well-known and well-corroborated example goes by the name of "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" (formerly known as "Cold Fusion"). In spite of all the efforts to repress and ridicule it, the diligent and mostly unfunded efforts of thousands of scientists in hundreds of labs have, over the past twenty years, established the reality of it beyond a shadow of a doubt. The following site provides and overview: http://www.lenr-canr.org/
Yes, I have read Atlas Shrugged. An elitist wet dream. I'd be cautious when it comes to her works and the objectivist philosophy they are propounding. Current events do hold similarities to the plot of Atlas Shrugged, but they are fundamentally quite different.
Ah, the "defer to authority argument". In a world of lies, that is not going to get you very far when it comes to learning the truth. The fact of the matter is that anthropogenic global warming has been refuted by atmospheric, oceanic, and solar observations. Nature does not care about what people believe or want us to believe.
You are missing the point. Yes, energy currently is cheap only in a few places such as Saudi Arabia. But energy should and could be cheap, almost free even, everywhere. The reason that is not is because of artificially induced scarcity.
A bold claim, I know, so let me substantiate it. Oil is the most glaringly obvious example of how energy is being kept scarce. Here is some fun reading you can do: what oil really is, oodles of oil in Prudhoe Bay, ditto for the Bakken Formation, Cuba, and in several other places. Not very surprising given the true oil genesis mechanism.
Of course, there are some intrinsic costs associated with oil: you need to pump it and transport it. So how can energy be almost free? Well, there are at least a dozen implemented and reproduced means to produce energy that go beyond currently accepted physical science. It is too broad a topic to address here, and it is subject to much disinformation, bullshit, and suppression. If you care to dive into it, Google "Free Energy" and click away. Good luck separating the truth from the lies.
But water? _Clean_ water, suitable for drinking, industry, and growing crops?
Yes, water. If you grant, for the moment, that energy is not really scarce, then it is easy to see that water need not be either. Given energy, you can easily create clean water using reverse osmosis anywhere near the sea or where there is brackish ground water. This is actual practice today: Saudi Arabia, the land where energy is cheap, is doing lots of agriculture out in the desert.
And where there is no sea within pipeline range (this excludes the areas of earth where most of the population lives and agriculture takes place), you can, using somewhat more energy, condense out atmospheric water.
You are right that vested interests are being carefully defended. So much so that very little of what is commonly accepted as truth actually is so. This includes your belief in the truth of global warming. The essence of it is simply this: the sun is a rather more dynamic system in terms of energy output than it is being given credit for. Hence periods of global warming and cooling happen. The greenhouse effect has a relatively minor impact.
Of course, some research on your part is required to verify the truth of my claim: sometimes, you just have to dig. This is a good place to start: http://wattsupwiththat.com/. Supposing that what I say is true, it is reasonable for you to wonder why global warming is being sold so vigorously. What do vested interests have to gain by doing so?
Carbon credits is one way they aim to gain. And induced fear of climate disaster makes people accept policies and taxes they otherwise would not. But there is a more subtle gain: using global warming and the "green" world view it is embedded in as a means of selling people on a belief system of scarcity. You see, if people believe that something is scarce, they accept that the corresponding resources are withheld from them or have a high price.
Here is a list of things that are being made to appear scarce, but are not really so, or are artificially induced to be so: land, water, energy, food, oil, diamonds, and even gold.
Since you are a C coder and aware of the limitations of LabVIEW, it may interest you to learn that there is a freely downloadable toolkit that closely merges LabVIEW with a modern scripting language (Lua). http://www.citengineering.com/luaview/. With that you can use many of the modern coding practices (run-time scripting, recursion, exception-like error handling, etc.) lacking in pure LabVIEW.
Ars Technica report
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 5, Informative
In visible light, sunspots look "cooler" than their surroundings. This is because their emissions are further up the spectrum. Take a look at sunspots in the xray region sometime.
Indeed, there are short-wavelength emissions associated with sunspots. But these are non-thermal: it is not a black-body spectrum with an emphasis on emissions at shorter wavelength because of a higher temperature. Were that so, the emissions in the visible would still be higher than for lower-temperature regions since the black body radiation curve not just shifts its peak but also increases in intensity across the spectrum with increasing temperature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blackbody-lg.png
Sure, there are hand-waving mechanisms consistent with the mainstream astronomy view that are interesting to entertain as hypotheses. But if, as you claimed, solar EM phenomena would indeed be well-understood, there would instead be models encompassing the major observable phenomena with quantitative accuracy.
Solar coronae are extremely hot, but also EXTREMELY DIFFUSE. The energy density in the corona is lower than at the sun's surface. No problem there.
Um, it is not the energy density that is the issue but rather the required energy flux. Over half of the massive UV, EUV, and X-Ray coronal emissions are radiated out into intersteller space. This requires continuous extreme heating of the corona to sustain.
The energy comes from the sun....
Wrong. The energy is produced inside the corona. The energy production mechanism has been verified in the laboratory. Just create a Helium and Hydrogen plasma and see what strange things happen: http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0509/0509127.pdf.
Bullshit. Where is the quantitative explanation for the (obviously magnetodynamic) solar cycle? Whence the twisted plasma filaments edging solar spots? http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/3306886.html?page=1&c=y Not well understood at all.
The corona is radiating like mad in the UV, EUV, and X-ray. Have a look at some of the UV imagery: http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/eit/eit_full_res.html. In those bands the corona is more luminous than the surface. The magnetoacoustic model cannot quantitatively account for that, the required energy flux to keep the corona temperature up there is way too high.
Electric Universe movement is heavily laden with kooky pseudoscience.
The whole of astrophysics and cosmology is laden with kooky psuedoscience. The large number of observations that just won't fit and out-there patches to rescue models that should really be considered as having been falsified should tell you as much.
If you doubt that, consider the following observations: the over 1M Kelvin hot solar corona (where is that energy coming from?), the dark centers of solar spots (should the inside of the sun not be hotter instead of cooler?), the angular clustering of high-redshift quasars with "foreground" galaxies (less than one-in-a-million chance of emerging from the isotropic distribution dictated by Big Bang cosmology).
The many unexpected and anomalous astronomical observations are not really that surprising given that the astrophysical theories used to predict/interpret them are limited and likely mostly wrong. One big omission is the ignored role of the electric field. For a good overview of what should be (but is not) taken into account, see this site: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/indexOLD.htm
Government programs such as the civilian space program, the missile defense farce, and others that involve a lot of money and are very inefficient, or even pointless, allow large amounts of taxpayers money to be moved into the hands of the few. This, to a large extent, is their purpose. To see the greater scheme of things, take a closer look at how government finance really works: http://cafr1.com/
For failing memory, a cheap dietary add-on you could try, and that has been shown to work rather well for some, is coconut oil: http://tampabay.com/news/aging/article879333.ece. Since it is used commonly in certain Caribian cuisines, it should be quite safe.
I sincerely hope MS get their feet held to the fire over this.
Why just MS? They were bribed into lowering their vista ready standards by Intel. Intel should also be punished for trying to keep the market to themselves through such an illegal backroom deal.
Obsolete?! Give me a break. I assure you for things like tractor trailers, and anything construction / work site related, we'll be using combustion engines for a very long time yet.
Yes, obsolete. Modern electric motors are far superior to internal combustion engines in terms of power/weight, torque, conversion efficiency, robustness, lifetime, required support systems, and RPM range. What has kept the internal combustion engine competitive nevertheless was the backward state of electric energy storage technology. Traditionally, batteries have been bulky, with limited energy density and power. Lithium ion batteries are sort of getting there in terms of energy density, but they are rather expensive still and take hours to charge. The EEStor technology solves all that: it provides high energy density, extremely high peak power, and can in principle be produced cost effectively. To make that reality, the main development focus of EEStor has been refinement of automated materials-processing and production lines.
As to required support systems, you can drop the radiator-fan-water cooling system, drive-train/transmission, differential, clutch, oil reservoir, gas tank, and some other crud when you replace an internal combustion engine with electric motor(s). Electric motors are so compact that you can place them where power is required, e.g. in the wheel rims. That's why hybrids are such a farce: all the weight and expense needed to still put in an internal combustion engine could instead have been allocated to batteries so as to give the thing a good all-electric drive range.
Given the revolutionary potential of so many applications, I find it difficult to establish why investments are so small.
It is simply because there is far too much money power behind maintaining the status quo. The energy industry turns over thousands of billions of dollars each year. That is why electric cars have simply not been allowed to reach the market in quantity, so far. To see the lengths industry has gone through to keep us addicted to oil, I can recommend the documentary movie "Who killed the electric car?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F.
But there is good hope that this time around it is different, mostly because the US has not stopped the petrodollar scheme (oil up until recently being priced only in dollars and thus causing dollar liquidity to be mopped up abroad) from being unwound. With the main reason for the US to support oil and high oil prices slowly dissipating, it is reasonable to assume that a transition is planned.
By independent accounts they have been realized. Lockheed Martin for example has taken out a license and confirmed the performance claims that EEStor makes http://gm-volt.com/2008/01/10/lockheed-martin-signs-agreement-with-eestor/. When the technology will make it to the market is still a bit of an open question. In 2009, supposedly. But given the big vested interests in the oil industry, I would not be surprised if it will be delayed.
The noise difference is not nearly as large over 50 km/h because then the road/tire noise starts to dominate over engine noise. Electric cars are silent only at low speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Cold fusion has come a long way in twenty years. The initial interpretation has fallen by the wayside, and many experimental configurations showing more pronounced effects and energy output have been developed. For a fun one that you can easily reproduce yourself, see this page: http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/index.htm
You sure do your handle "assert(0)" justice: you make assertions with zero basis.
Nature has spoken loud and clear, low energy nuclear reactions are happening. If you do not accept the data, much of it published in established peer-reviewed journals, then go and do your own experimental reproduction. Some kinds of experiment, such as the Mizuno type experiment, are sufficiently cheap and easy that anyone with a modicum of tinkering ability can have a go: http://jlnlabs.online.fr/cfr/index.htm
You are ignorant. Fleischman and Pons believed in the reality of their findings. So it was obviously not a hoax. And many others have corroborated their findings through a variety of experiments: excess heat, neutron emission, tritium/helium production, non-natural-abundance isotope ratios, elemental transmutation, and on the list goes. A large number of these results were obtained using experimental techniques, such as mass spectrometry, that leave no room for ambiguity. I suggest you read some research articles before commenting further.
What has changed, though, is that people no longer adhere to the interpretation that the excess heat is the result of a classic (D+D->He or otherwise) fusion reaction. That is why the label "cold fusion" is no longer in fashion. Nuclear reactions are being enabled, but the mechanism is enigmatic. Many tentative theories trying to explain it have been forwarded.
The most well-known and well-corroborated example goes by the name of "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions" (formerly known as "Cold Fusion"). In spite of all the efforts to repress and ridicule it, the diligent and mostly unfunded efforts of thousands of scientists in hundreds of labs have, over the past twenty years, established the reality of it beyond a shadow of a doubt. The following site provides and overview: http://www.lenr-canr.org/
Yes, I have read Atlas Shrugged. An elitist wet dream. I'd be cautious when it comes to her works and the objectivist philosophy they are propounding. Current events do hold similarities to the plot of Atlas Shrugged, but they are fundamentally quite different.
Ah, the "defer to authority argument". In a world of lies, that is not going to get you very far when it comes to learning the truth. The fact of the matter is that anthropogenic global warming has been refuted by atmospheric, oceanic, and solar observations. Nature does not care about what people believe or want us to believe.
You are missing the point. Yes, energy currently is cheap only in a few places such as Saudi Arabia. But energy should and could be cheap, almost free even, everywhere. The reason that is not is because of artificially induced scarcity.
A bold claim, I know, so let me substantiate it. Oil is the most glaringly obvious example of how energy is being kept scarce. Here is some fun reading you can do: what oil really is, oodles of oil in Prudhoe Bay, ditto for the Bakken Formation, Cuba, and in several other places. Not very surprising given the true oil genesis mechanism.
Of course, there are some intrinsic costs associated with oil: you need to pump it and transport it. So how can energy be almost free? Well, there are at least a dozen implemented and reproduced means to produce energy that go beyond currently accepted physical science. It is too broad a topic to address here, and it is subject to much disinformation, bullshit, and suppression. If you care to dive into it, Google "Free Energy" and click away. Good luck separating the truth from the lies.
Yes, water. If you grant, for the moment, that energy is not really scarce, then it is easy to see that water need not be either. Given energy, you can easily create clean water using reverse osmosis anywhere near the sea or where there is brackish ground water. This is actual practice today: Saudi Arabia, the land where energy is cheap, is doing lots of agriculture out in the desert.
And where there is no sea within pipeline range (this excludes the areas of earth where most of the population lives and agriculture takes place), you can, using somewhat more energy, condense out atmospheric water.
You are right that vested interests are being carefully defended. So much so that very little of what is commonly accepted as truth actually is so. This includes your belief in the truth of global warming. The essence of it is simply this: the sun is a rather more dynamic system in terms of energy output than it is being given credit for. Hence periods of global warming and cooling happen. The greenhouse effect has a relatively minor impact.
Of course, some research on your part is required to verify the truth of my claim: sometimes, you just have to dig. This is a good place to start: http://wattsupwiththat.com/. Supposing that what I say is true, it is reasonable for you to wonder why global warming is being sold so vigorously. What do vested interests have to gain by doing so?
Carbon credits is one way they aim to gain. And induced fear of climate disaster makes people accept policies and taxes they otherwise would not. But there is a more subtle gain: using global warming and the "green" world view it is embedded in as a means of selling people on a belief system of scarcity. You see, if people believe that something is scarce, they accept that the corresponding resources are withheld from them or have a high price.
Here is a list of things that are being made to appear scarce, but are not really so, or are artificially induced to be so: land, water, energy, food, oil, diamonds, and even gold.
Since you are a C coder and aware of the limitations of LabVIEW, it may interest you to learn that there is a freely downloadable toolkit that closely merges LabVIEW with a modern scripting language (Lua). http://www.citengineering.com/luaview/. With that you can use many of the modern coding practices (run-time scripting, recursion, exception-like error handling, etc.) lacking in pure LabVIEW.
Ars Technica has a good report on this development: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090114-nokia-qt-lgpl-switch-huge-win-for-cross-platform-development.html
Indeed, there are short-wavelength emissions associated with sunspots. But these are non-thermal: it is not a black-body spectrum with an emphasis on emissions at shorter wavelength because of a higher temperature. Were that so, the emissions in the visible would still be higher than for lower-temperature regions since the black body radiation curve not just shifts its peak but also increases in intensity across the spectrum with increasing temperature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blackbody-lg.png
Moreover, the x-ray emissions seem to originate mostly from the corona and not from the surface: http://www.lmsal.com/YPOP/ProjectionRoom/latest/sxt/full/sxtdag_512.gif. The spatial correlation of coronal activity with sunspots is likely the result coronal plasmas being caught up in the magnetic-field loops pinned down by sunspots. See for example this EUV image: http://www.lmsal.com/YPOP/ProjectionRoom/latest_TRACE_171.html.
Sure, there are hand-waving mechanisms consistent with the mainstream astronomy view that are interesting to entertain as hypotheses. But if, as you claimed, solar EM phenomena would indeed be well-understood, there would instead be models encompassing the major observable phenomena with quantitative accuracy.
As to coronal heating, a picture does more than a thousand words. Have a look at this soft X-ray image of the sun: http://www.lmsal.com/YPOP/ProjectionRoom/latest/sxt/full/sxtdag_512.gif. Does that not look awfully like energy production in the corona? Not surprisingly, several experiments have been done that have verified the existence of an energy production mechanism under coronal conditions, though an appropriate theory is still lacking. The mechanism occurs in a low-pressure plasma containing helium and hydrogen, see for example http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0509/0509127.pdf and http://www.springerlink.com/content/3u3v2eqnv9y1jmwg/.
Pure hydrogen plasmas without helium do not show anomalous energy release. Given that, it can be understood why the solar wind is strongly modulated by how much helium is present: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070530114957.htm
Um, it is not the energy density that is the issue but rather the required energy flux. Over half of the massive UV, EUV, and X-Ray coronal emissions are radiated out into intersteller space. This requires continuous extreme heating of the corona to sustain.
Wrong. The energy is produced inside the corona. The energy production mechanism has been verified in the laboratory. Just create a Helium and Hydrogen plasma and see what strange things happen: http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0509/0509127.pdf.
Bullshit. Where is the quantitative explanation for the (obviously magnetodynamic) solar cycle? Whence the twisted plasma filaments edging solar spots? http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/3306886.html?page=1&c=y Not well understood at all.
The corona is radiating like mad in the UV, EUV, and X-ray. Have a look at some of the UV imagery: http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/eit/eit_full_res.html. In those bands the corona is more luminous than the surface. The magnetoacoustic model cannot quantitatively account for that, the required energy flux to keep the corona temperature up there is way too high.
The whole of astrophysics and cosmology is laden with kooky psuedoscience. The large number of observations that just won't fit and out-there patches to rescue models that should really be considered as having been falsified should tell you as much.
If you doubt that, consider the following observations: the over 1M Kelvin hot solar corona (where is that energy coming from?), the dark centers of solar spots (should the inside of the sun not be hotter instead of cooler?), the angular clustering of high-redshift quasars with "foreground" galaxies (less than one-in-a-million chance of emerging from the isotropic distribution dictated by Big Bang cosmology).
The many unexpected and anomalous astronomical observations are not really that surprising given that the astrophysical theories used to predict/interpret them are limited and likely mostly wrong. One big omission is the ignored role of the electric field. For a good overview of what should be (but is not) taken into account, see this site: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/indexOLD.htm
Government programs such as the civilian space program, the missile defense farce, and others that involve a lot of money and are very inefficient, or even pointless, allow large amounts of taxpayers money to be moved into the hands of the few. This, to a large extent, is their purpose. To see the greater scheme of things, take a closer look at how government finance really works: http://cafr1.com/
For failing memory, a cheap dietary add-on you could try, and that has been shown to work rather well for some, is coconut oil: http://tampabay.com/news/aging/article879333.ece. Since it is used commonly in certain Caribian cuisines, it should be quite safe.
Why just MS? They were bribed into lowering their vista ready standards by Intel. Intel should also be punished for trying to keep the market to themselves through such an illegal backroom deal.
Yes, obsolete. Modern electric motors are far superior to internal combustion engines in terms of power/weight, torque, conversion efficiency, robustness, lifetime, required support systems, and RPM range. What has kept the internal combustion engine competitive nevertheless was the backward state of electric energy storage technology. Traditionally, batteries have been bulky, with limited energy density and power. Lithium ion batteries are sort of getting there in terms of energy density, but they are rather expensive still and take hours to charge. The EEStor technology solves all that: it provides high energy density, extremely high peak power, and can in principle be produced cost effectively. To make that reality, the main development focus of EEStor has been refinement of automated materials-processing and production lines.
As to required support systems, you can drop the radiator-fan-water cooling system, drive-train/transmission, differential, clutch, oil reservoir, gas tank, and some other crud when you replace an internal combustion engine with electric motor(s). Electric motors are so compact that you can place them where power is required, e.g. in the wheel rims. That's why hybrids are such a farce: all the weight and expense needed to still put in an internal combustion engine could instead have been allocated to batteries so as to give the thing a good all-electric drive range.
It is simply because there is far too much money power behind maintaining the status quo. The energy industry turns over thousands of billions of dollars each year. That is why electric cars have simply not been allowed to reach the market in quantity, so far. To see the lengths industry has gone through to keep us addicted to oil, I can recommend the documentary movie "Who killed the electric car?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F.
But there is good hope that this time around it is different, mostly because the US has not stopped the petrodollar scheme (oil up until recently being priced only in dollars and thus causing dollar liquidity to be mopped up abroad) from being unwound. With the main reason for the US to support oil and high oil prices slowly dissipating, it is reasonable to assume that a transition is planned.
By independent accounts they have been realized. Lockheed Martin for example has taken out a license and confirmed the performance claims that EEStor makes http://gm-volt.com/2008/01/10/lockheed-martin-signs-agreement-with-eestor/. When the technology will make it to the market is still a bit of an open question. In 2009, supposedly. But given the big vested interests in the oil industry, I would not be surprised if it will be delayed.
The noise difference is not nearly as large over 50 km/h because then the road/tire noise starts to dominate over engine noise. Electric cars are silent only at low speeds.