They can only sell or transfer the end result. They cannot grant the right to produce the item to others. That means they must produce it themselves, no contracting out the work on the patented portion. That makes it usually unattractive for big companies.
Most will prefer to either file for a patent or block patents by making a public disclosure. (Some practical details will still be closely held, which still gives a competitive edge.)
The alternative is not that Einstein was wrong, but that neutrinos have imaginary mass rather than real mass. This is consistent with observations. We can't measure neutrino mass in experiments, only mass squared, and the error bars on those measurements persistently include some small negative numbers. (And some of these measurements virtually exclude any positive mass^2 values. Other measurements purporting to exclude negative mass^2 values may be the result of over-correction and wishful thinking.)
Imaginary-mass particles are consistent with relativity and were first theorized in the 1960s and given the name "tachyons". High-energy tachyons move near the speed of light; low-energy tachyons move at unlimited velocities. This accounts for the fact that the neutrinos from the 1987A supernova were only 18 hours ahead of the light from the explosion, despite the distance -- they were extremely high energy tachyons.
If neutrinos are tachyons, this could account for a couple of odd things about them - the exceptionally low cross section (likelihood of interaction) and their oscillating between different flavors (electron, muon, tau). Exactly how is a job for the theoreticians, but it seems to me that a neutral particle moving effectively backward in time and at unlimited velocities coupled with low energies is not often going to interact, and imaginary mass could be likened to a rotation or oscillation, much like many other things involving imaginary numbers in physics.
of the six most recent experimental determinations of neutrino mass, all have given negative values of the mass-squared to within the statics of the measurements. The experimental observation is that in the vicinity of the end point the yield of electrons lies above the zero-mass line, while for neutrinos with non-zero real mass, the electron yield should lie below this line. The measured mass-squared values are negative to an accuracy of several standard deviations in the most recent of these experiments.
These experimenters have been strangely quiet about mass-squared measurements with negative values. If the results had been positive by the same amount, the literature would be filled with claims that a non-zero value for the neutrino mass had been established. But a negative mass-squared is not something that can be easily publicized.
You obtain the measured mass value from a mass-squared measurement by taking the square root of the measured value. However, the square root of a negative number is an imaginary number. Thus the measurements could, in principle, be taken as an indication that the electron neutrino has an imaginary mass.
What are the physical implications of a particle with an imaginary rest mass? Gerald Feinberg of Columbia University has suggested hypothetical imaginary-mass particles which he has christened "tachyons". Tachyons are particles that always travel at velocities greater than the speed of light. Instead of speeding up when they are given more kinetic energy, they slow down so that their speed moves closer to the velocity of light from the high side as they become more energetic. Feinberg argued that since there are no physical laws forbidding the existence of tachyons, they may well exist and should be looked for.
Here's a link to another, slightly more technical look at the idea: Neutrinos Must be Tachyons by Eue Jin Jeong. Googling "neutrino tachyon" also turns up several previous discussions.
VistA isn't the usual US medical software. It was built for the VA (a government healthcare system with around 1100 facilities and nearly 200,000 employees) which isn't much concerned with billing insurance companies. VistA is open source, free software. It's used in other large deployments around the world, usually customized for local needs. It forms the backbone of the Finnish system's hospital software, and has done well there.
"There isn't a healthcare organisation anywhere in the world the size and complexity of the NHS."
Nonsense. VistA was developed by the US Veterans' Administration, which serves about 8 million people and has potential obligations to about 1/4 of the US population. That's not far from the size and complexity of the NHS at all. Two thirds of the hospitals in Finland use MUSTI, a system derived from VistA, and many other large hospitals and networks of hospitals around the world also use customized versions of VistA. Not customizing a successful, open system was hugely risky, if not destined to fail.
The backhauls are uniformly symmetric links, as are all the other links in the network aside from the ADSL/VDSL. The upstream bandwidth in the network is just going to waste. It's just the dog-in-the manger attitude of the phone companies that is throttling the rates. Even if it would cost them literally nothing, they see no reason to give it to you unless you pay more.
Oh, and the big company cannot transfer that right to practice to others, either. It has to make the patented item itself and cannot use outside contractors or suppliers to do so, since that is not internal use. Courts will likely interpret it that way since to do otherwise would effectively allow licensing to others by the non-patent holder, thus invalidating a valid patent.
No, see the "so long as it is continuously performed" and "commercial use" requirements. If they put the idea on the shelf for any length of time then they lose their defense to infringement suits. Just coming up with the idea or even constructing a prototype is not enough, they have to actually use the results commercially. They have to have proof of not only the timing of the invention but also its continuous commercial practice.
It wouldn't take all that much space -- I figure for residential communities 8600 people per km^2 (half private home lots, 1300sq. ft.= 120m^2 each, average 3.5 residents each, still leaving over half the space for roads and common amenities). For a city with workplaces, schools and so forth let's reduce the density to 4000 people/km^2. At that density, China could house 1.2 billion people in 500 cities of 2.4 million each, with each of them being only 600 km^2, equivalent to a circle less than 28km diameter (just over 17 miles). The total area of all the cities together is 300,000km^2, equivalent to a circle 618km in diameter (384 mi), about 1/32 of China's area. Not impossible, and that's using just 22% of the city land for residential lots.
With 3-story buildings and eliminating the private gardens to allow apartment buildings with 3600sq. ft. interiors averaging 18 residents each on the same 120m^2 lots, the city area could be reduced - but unless everything else in the city is scaled to match, the reduction in size is less than 18%. The basic issue persists even if all residents are in 20-story apartment blocks and the office jobs are also in similar buildings. The roads and parks hardly stack at all, and the factories, restaurants and shops only stack a bit, likely only about a factor of 2 on average. Overall, without eliminating parks, factories, and other amenities and necessities it's virtually impossible to get more than a factor of 3 reduction in area compared to having single-story, single-family homes with back gardens. A really radical, unpleasant, economically and logistically unsustainable city that pushes many of its essentials out to other places could maybe get up to a factor of 6 reduction in area, but that would really just be an accounting trick. The diameter of the city would only go down as the square root of the area reduction, so the distances don't fall nearly as quickly, even for extreme stacking. Overall the expense goes up and the quality of life tends to go down with ubiquitous high-rise development.
Yes, the houses are just one element in the system. Utilities, roads, and shared amenities including parks, recreation areas, gathering places, and shops all within walking distance are essential to creating a livable community. To avoid a cookie-cutter monotony, there also need to be several house designs and variation on those designs, a street layout that balances traffic efficiency, local geography and noise, and a planning system that prevents nuisance, fosters convenience and aesthetics while remaining adaptable to change.
How much would that cost, at minimum? I figure ten 800 sq. ft. (74m^2) houses per acre (25 per hectare) is a reasonable density, with the net lot size after the street, sidewalks, and ~1/4 of the total land set aside for other common amenities is 2050 square feet (190m^2), giving room for 6 ft. (2m^2) between houses and a 550sq ft. (51m^2) patio/garden area.
That' 2050sq. ft. (190m^2) is about about half of the 1/10 acre area for the lot, 750sq. ft. (70m^2) for the road, sidewalk, and parking/loading, 1300 sq. ft. (120m^2) for common amenities. The average occupancy would be 3-4 per house, (with a range of 2-6). and a population density of about 20000 per sq. mile. (8600/km^2)
To pay for these things along with the house itself, estimating $50K/acre for the land, would cost about $15,000 per house. On the other hand, one could get a house twice as nice for another $5000, so $20,000 is a better deal in the long run. That would still cost less than $5/day on a 15-year mortgage. Modest government subsidies (20% grant, 15 years interest-free loan) could get that under $3/day, or less than $1/day/person
The effective federal income tax rate for those making over $1M is 25%. (2007 IRS figures: tax paid/gross income). The $10M+ group pays less than 20%.
US taxes are low by developed world standards, particularly when VAT is taken into account. Places with lower total taxes as a percentage of GDP are mostly 3rd world. The wealthy in the US are finding it hard to hide their wealth overseas anymore, enforcement is very serious now, reporting requirements are practically airtight. Anyway, even if the rich do try to evade taxes, that is no argument not to tax them, but rather to tax them even more, to close loopholes and increase enforcement so that the taxes they can't evade still meet revenue needs.
"Then why aren't either short or long term interest rates soaring?"
1. The Fed is loaning money to the banks at even lower rates, which they put into treasury bonds because it's risk-free, makes their balance sheets look good, keeps the regulators off their backs and does not have the risk of loaning money to the private sector when they already have so many bad loans on their books.
2. The Fed is likely selling options on treasury bonds to manipulate the market. A few years back this is what the head of the Fed trading desk told the FOMC would be the plan if other tools were exhausted, and all the other tools he listed have been used. If rates do rise past where those options were sold, the Fed will take huge losses, which amounts to putting more dollars in circulation. It could snowball catastrophically. (And the federal budget would be screwed, too. If average interest rates rose to the levels of the early 90s, we might have to cut spending by a factor of two or three to avoid default - and rates could go much higher than that.)
3. Rates really aren't low for consumers. What is the effective rate if you can't get a loan? Sure, you can get a nice rate if you have lots of equity in your house, few other debts, high and long-term confirmed income... but how may people have that now? No, the real rate for most consumers in the credit market today is the 29.99% credit card penalty rate.
Inflation is a worry - commodities prices reflect that. Shopping at the grocery store or buying gas reflects that. That the official figures do not (as much) shouldn't be surprising, given how easy they are to manipulate and how much not incentive, but absolute necessity there is for the government to fudge the inflation numbers down. But there is no wage inflation, and ability of consumers to borrow is now quite limited, so that is holding inflation back from the brink. If the economy does recover, wages and spending will increase, and borrowing will multiply the effect. The velocity of money will increase sharply (it is the velocity times the money supply that determines inflation, not either by itself), and there will be no opportunity to reduce the huge increases in the money supply that have taken place over the past few years (M3 before the crisis, converted to M0-M2 after). Inflation will go wild, interest rates will follow and real incomes will lag. A recovery would paradoxically potentially mean financial armageddon for the Fed and the federal government, while at the same time the recession is slowly bleeding them to death, and it is clear that the only way to deal with the federal debt is to gradually inflate their way out of it. It's going to be a tricky tightrope for them to walk.
The US government has cracked down hard on overseas accounts, shell corporations and all the other dodges. Basically if you are a US citizen or legal resident or a corporation or trust anywhere in the world with a US citizen who owns any significant fraction or amount of the corporation or who is a beneficiary of the trust, you have to file detailed accounts with the IRS, and they are getting pretty ugly with those who don't comply. So the usual dodges just don't work anymore - nobody overseas wants to do financial business with Americans anymore if they can avoid it. Even those who have been US citizens any time in the last 10 years have to file the same as citizens. The $1M/yr. club is not going to be able to get their money out easily, it's essentially back-door capital controls for everybody but the biggest of big US banks.
Obama's proposal makes sense. For 2007 (more representative than 2008, and statistics after the rebound of the rich aren't yet available), those declaring over $1M adjusted gross income were 0.28% of returns, but made nearly 16% of all income (about 14% of all after-tax income, counting state and payroll taxes). Their average federal tax rate was less than 25%.
Even after adjusting for an estimate of all taxes (12.4% SS and 10% state,sales,excise&fees on all income to $100K, 2.9% medicare on all income, 5% state,sales,excise&fees above $100K), they pay about 43% of their gross income in taxes, compared to a minimum of over 25% tax for those making less than $10K/yr. If we assume that people need to sleep indoors and eat, and budget a bare minimum of $10K for that, and express the total tax rate as taxes paid divided by the income left over after paying for $10K in necessities, we find that the tax rate actually declines continuously with increasing income, from 125% for those making $9-13K to 44% for those making $75-$100K, and after that the effective tax rate stays constant to within 1.5% for the next six brackets, all the way out to $5M-$10M income, before dropping to 40% for the $10M+ bracket.
The rich aren't paying more than their share. There is clearly room to increase their effective federal tax by 5% or more without causing them the least bit of inconvenience or driving them abroad.
Let's see - 1500ft required setback, 500mph = 2 seconds. Make it 4500 ft. and you get 6 seconds, or a bit more to account for the change in velocity needed for the path to divert toward the crowd. The videos show that the plane was out of control for at least 12 seconds. The photos and videos show a wide setback and a broken elevator trim tab, so it appears that something exceptional happened to that aircraft and the rules likely were being followed.
A comment on the Gosling blog has a link to a very clear picture from less than a second before the crash showing the left elevator trim tab missing, also possible smoke from under the rear fuselage in the vicinity of the tail wheel. There do not appear to be any major control inputs to my inexperienced eye other than a slightly depressed right aileron and possible up elevator, though the latter is hard to see. The view shows only the top of the plane and no background to show the plane's orientation. The pilot is hunched forward with his helmet at the front of the cockpit.
Another shot, less than a plane length before impact, shows the tail wheel deployed and the pilot's head is not visible in the cockpit, though the picture would show it if it were above the edge of the cockpit.
That tail wheel is normally retracted in race trim. Odds are control flutter from the unbalanced elevator combined with the high-G pull-up maneuver shook it open.
Eyewitness reports say Jimmy [Leeward] did everything he could to keep that plane out of the crowd. He was probably pulling on that stick with everything he had.
Curiously, the rear portion of the left elevator is not clear, although the shot is fast enough to freeze the propeller and the angle is a perfect left-side profile. The elevator may have been fluttering at an extreme rate, blurring the view, or it may just be a consequence of the low contrast of the elevator against the fuselage with identical paint. At the time of the crash the plane is right-side up, flying above the crowd from the back towards the front of the crowd, as if trying to pull out of a loop and it impacts at about a 45 degree angle.
Another video from the parking lot shows that the plane lost vertical control about 12 seconds before impact and first nosed up several hundred feet in 7 seconds before turning from vertical up to vertical down in less than three seconds, apparently at near full speed the whole way. The crash happened less than three seconds after the plane nosed down.
That makes sense. For those not paying attention, EURCHF moved several percent in just a few minutes (1.12 to 1.20 IIRC) when the Swiss central bank decided to peg to the Euro. That is several times the expected daily range and about a hundred times the expected range over such a short period. Ordinarily since movements are so small, currency trades are highly leveraged, often 10x or more. Even small traders have trades nominally worth several hundred thousand euros. When the market gaps in price, stop-loss orders are not honored at the level the trader set if that stop was set in the price gap, but only when there is a matching order or set of orders on the other side, which might not have happened in the EURCHF case for several hundred pips (each pip worth 10 euros for each contract of 100,000 euros, which he likely needed only 2,000-4000 euros margin initially to obtain.) If he was on the wrong side of 6400 contracts that broke 500 pips past his stops, he could have lost $2B on a trade he thought he was only risking a few $10s of millions. Using options the risk surprise could be even worse.
Pipe friction losses will more than double the energy needed. OTOH it should be able to offset a bit of that with wind. Solar would only offer a percent or two of the energy needed, even if it covered the whole upper surface of the balloon, and the weight and expense would make it impractical.
Harnessing the wind could potentially be better, given the high and relatively constant winds in the stratosphere. Because of the nearly 20x lower density, though, the ~15m/s (34mph) median stratospheric wind speed's average energy content per area is about equivalent to an 14mph (6.25m/s) breeze at sea level. (~88W/m^2 Betz limit).
With the vast quantities of electrostatically charged droplets produced by the sprayers and the huge size of the droplet plume, a direct conversion of wind energy to electricity with an enormous effective wind capture area should be possible. The wind will pull the charged droplets away from the oppositely charged sprayer, doing work and increasing the voltage between them. The droplets will eventually settle out onto the oppositely charged ocean, completing the circuit. A load such as a pump can be hooked between the ocean potential and the sprayer potential. (An insulating layer between the ocean potential and the sprayer potential is needed, which can in principle be achieved by having the pump body be nonconductive, isolating the two sides of the circuit in the same way a revolving door prevents a free flow of air. The actual system would be in multiple stages, as it would have to withstand megavolts to keep the currents in the tether manageable while transmitting many hundreds of megawatts.) With plumes over a km thick and several km wide, (dozens of km^2) the system could potentially power itself, or even produce a surplus.
In another comment on this article, I ran the numbers for a bigger version (much more efficient - you need a big pipe to get the friction losses down to a reasonable percentage, the water/pipe-wall mass ratio up to make efficient use of the lift, and a bigger balloon has a better surface/volume ratio and thus more lift for the mass). It came out to 1.25e8m^3 water per year and about the same for the envelope volume. If I've done my math right, that is only about 1000 tonnes of H2 at 20km altitude, or about 1.4e14J equivalent energy of combustion. That is only about the same energy needed in a single day to pump the water to that elevation, after figuring in pipe losses. Even with smaller balloons or lower flow rates the energy embodied in the hydrogen will be about 10-100 times less than that needed to pump the water for a year.
You're right, helium is too precious to be used for more than the initial tests. Once they get into unmanned platforms far out to sea, there is really no reason not to use hydrogen. It should be possible to arrange it so that if there is an fire nearly everything but the envelope itself can be salvaged.
The amount of lift needed will less than 100,000 tonnes. A 50cm diameter x 20km column of water weighs less than 4000mt. The pipe will have to have some serious walls, though - that's nearly 2000 bar just from hydrostatic pressure, and much more will be needed to push the water -the article states 4000bar. Allowing 50% extra length for the curve and figuring the weight including the hose wall as equivalent to a 64cm diameter column of water, that is about 10000 tonnes. The envelope will have to be huge, though, and it will weigh much more, about 72 tonnes if I've done my math right. (Figuring 1250m length, fineness 2.8 ellipsoid, 50g/m^2 envelope (higher weight envelope figured to allow for airbeam skeleton/keel), net lift of 0.8N/m^3 for H2 at 20km standard atmosphere.) A bit more lift is needed for reserve lift, other equipment and the higher density of salt water, but the total should be in the neighborhood of 100,000 tonnes.
That size pipe at that pressure should deliver about 3 or 4 cubic meters per second if the water is going at 15-20m/s (~35-45mph). At the higher flow rate, that would be about 785MW just to lift the water, and over 1.6GW including pipe friction. That's about 1/8 km^3 per year and about 5e16 Joules/year.
The water will need to be atomized - Prof. Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh designed an elegant, efficient and reliable way of atomizing such large volumes of water in his paper "SPRAY TURBINES TO INCREASE RAIN BY ENHANCED EVAPORATION FROM THE SEA". (The rain-making part didn't work, as the spray suppressed natural ocean eveporation by increasing humidity.) The atomization should not take a relatively significant amount of power, less than 1MW.
It may be possible to offset the energy cost by using wind power. The wind will do work on the charged water spray, which will be carried a long way, turning into microscopic salt-crusted condensation nuclei before being rained out, mostly into the ocean, which could act as a current return path. The work of the wind would be turned into a higher voltage on the droplets by capacitive voltage multiplication (costant charge on the droplets, increasing distance from the spray electrode -> lower capacitance, higher voltage). A direct wind-electric energy conversion should be possible, though how much power it would produce is an open question.
It was done a bit better than most such projects- it had a case, display, mini-control joystick, mini-USB jack, basic software and firmware, they tested it in several experiments beyond the basics - the DNA analysis was particularly slick. More effort should have been given to coming up with a useful set of electrodes and reagents and a proper connection from the instrument to the electrodes - alligator clips are a bit below the standard of the rest of the project.
I'm just an armchair engineer, but I suspect the electronic design could be improved a good deal with modest extra cost. A proper electrometer-grade op-amp, using proper guards/shields on the circuit board for the op-amp inputs, preferably not running the working electrode input through a switch (though I'd have to think harder to see if it's really a problem as they are using it, charge injection could be a worry), better insulation and electrode connections on the cables, using a uC with built-in USB, (perhaps an ARM from STMicro similar price, it also has better ADC and DAC, 32bit, faster clock, more RAM and more flash), and maybe a precision voltage reference and a couple of trim pots. This really isn't suitable as a portable instrument as they were using it, though I suppose some people might do so . As a bench instrument with a computer connection the expensive screen could be dispensed with, and DC-DC converter might be replaced with a simple regulator. The case is big enough to stuff full of batteries, and they give a much longer lasting and less noisy power supply than a single-battery & converter setup for a portable device, and for a bench instrument USB power should be sufficient. The ferrite on the analog ground with the double HF/LF bypass caps is a very good thing, but feeding it through a separate, battery analog supply would be even better.
Well, maybe so. It is marketing stuff. However this independent comparison by IBM shows that this vendor's 10G products are neck and neck with IB, even faster on some tasks. 10G is a couple of percent lower performance on many tasks, and substantially slower on ~10% of tasks. The prices of adapters are somewhat higher for 10G, but the switches and extras such as cabling seem to more than make up for it. Basically as far as performance and HW cost, there isn't much difference at all. But 10G will likely be easier to maintain and monitor, there are more vendors available for equipment and it will be easier to get support and expertise for 10G.
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They can only sell or transfer the end result. They cannot grant the right to produce the item to others. That means they must produce it themselves, no contracting out the work on the patented portion. That makes it usually unattractive for big companies.
Most will prefer to either file for a patent or block patents by making a public disclosure. (Some practical details will still be closely held, which still gives a competitive edge.)
"What's the alternative?"
The alternative is not that Einstein was wrong, but that neutrinos have imaginary mass rather than real mass. This is consistent with observations. We can't measure neutrino mass in experiments, only mass squared, and the error bars on those measurements persistently include some small negative numbers. (And some of these measurements virtually exclude any positive mass^2 values. Other measurements purporting to exclude negative mass^2 values may be the result of over-correction and wishful thinking.)
Imaginary-mass particles are consistent with relativity and were first theorized in the 1960s and given the name "tachyons". High-energy tachyons move near the speed of light; low-energy tachyons move at unlimited velocities. This accounts for the fact that the neutrinos from the 1987A supernova were only 18 hours ahead of the light from the explosion, despite the distance -- they were extremely high energy tachyons.
If neutrinos are tachyons, this could account for a couple of odd things about them - the exceptionally low cross section (likelihood of interaction) and their oscillating between different flavors (electron, muon, tau). Exactly how is a job for the theoreticians, but it seems to me that a neutral particle moving effectively backward in time and at unlimited velocities coupled with low energies is not often going to interact, and imaginary mass could be likened to a rotation or oscillation, much like many other things involving imaginary numbers in physics.
Physicist John Cramer talked about the idea back in 1992 in his Analog column: Neutrino Physics: Curiouser and Curiouser (Alternate View Column AV-54)
Here's a link to another, slightly more technical look at the idea: Neutrinos Must be Tachyons by Eue Jin Jeong. Googling "neutrino tachyon" also turns up several previous discussions.
VistA isn't the usual US medical software. It was built for the VA (a government healthcare system with around 1100 facilities and nearly 200,000 employees) which isn't much concerned with billing insurance companies. VistA is open source, free software. It's used in other large deployments around the world, usually customized for local needs. It forms the backbone of the Finnish system's hospital software, and has done well there.
"There isn't a healthcare organisation anywhere in the world the size and complexity of the NHS."
Nonsense. VistA was developed by the US Veterans' Administration, which serves about 8 million people and has potential obligations to about 1/4 of the US population. That's not far from the size and complexity of the NHS at all. Two thirds of the hospitals in Finland use MUSTI, a system derived from VistA, and many other large hospitals and networks of hospitals around the world also use customized versions of VistA. Not customizing a successful, open system was hugely risky, if not destined to fail.
The backhauls are uniformly symmetric links, as are all the other links in the network aside from the ADSL/VDSL. The upstream bandwidth in the network is just going to waste. It's just the dog-in-the manger attitude of the phone companies that is throttling the rates. Even if it would cost them literally nothing, they see no reason to give it to you unless you pay more.
Oh, and the big company cannot transfer that right to practice to others, either. It has to make the patented item itself and cannot use outside contractors or suppliers to do so, since that is not internal use. Courts will likely interpret it that way since to do otherwise would effectively allow licensing to others by the non-patent holder, thus invalidating a valid patent.
No, see the "so long as it is continuously performed" and "commercial use" requirements. If they put the idea on the shelf for any length of time then they lose their defense to infringement suits. Just coming up with the idea or even constructing a prototype is not enough, they have to actually use the results commercially. They have to have proof of not only the timing of the invention but also its continuous commercial practice.
It wouldn't take all that much space -- I figure for residential communities 8600 people per km^2 (half private home lots, 1300sq. ft.= 120m^2 each, average 3.5 residents each, still leaving over half the space for roads and common amenities). For a city with workplaces, schools and so forth let's reduce the density to 4000 people/km^2. At that density, China could house 1.2 billion people in 500 cities of 2.4 million each, with each of them being only 600 km^2, equivalent to a circle less than 28km diameter (just over 17 miles). The total area of all the cities together is 300,000km^2, equivalent to a circle 618km in diameter (384 mi), about 1/32 of China's area. Not impossible, and that's using just 22% of the city land for residential lots.
With 3-story buildings and eliminating the private gardens to allow apartment buildings with 3600sq. ft. interiors averaging 18 residents each on the same 120m^2 lots, the city area could be reduced - but unless everything else in the city is scaled to match, the reduction in size is less than 18%. The basic issue persists even if all residents are in 20-story apartment blocks and the office jobs are also in similar buildings. The roads and parks hardly stack at all, and the factories, restaurants and shops only stack a bit, likely only about a factor of 2 on average. Overall, without eliminating parks, factories, and other amenities and necessities it's virtually impossible to get more than a factor of 3 reduction in area compared to having single-story, single-family homes with back gardens. A really radical, unpleasant, economically and logistically unsustainable city that pushes many of its essentials out to other places could maybe get up to a factor of 6 reduction in area, but that would really just be an accounting trick. The diameter of the city would only go down as the square root of the area reduction, so the distances don't fall nearly as quickly, even for extreme stacking. Overall the expense goes up and the quality of life tends to go down with ubiquitous high-rise development.
Yes, the houses are just one element in the system. Utilities, roads, and shared amenities including parks, recreation areas, gathering places, and shops all within walking distance are essential to creating a livable community. To avoid a cookie-cutter monotony, there also need to be several house designs and variation on those designs, a street layout that balances traffic efficiency, local geography and noise, and a planning system that prevents nuisance, fosters convenience and aesthetics while remaining adaptable to change.
How much would that cost, at minimum? I figure ten 800 sq. ft. (74m^2) houses per acre (25 per hectare) is a reasonable density, with the net lot size after the street, sidewalks, and ~1/4 of the total land set aside for other common amenities is 2050 square feet (190m^2), giving room for 6 ft. (2m^2) between houses and a 550sq ft. (51m^2) patio/garden area.
That' 2050sq. ft. (190m^2) is about about half of the 1/10 acre area for the lot,
750sq. ft. (70m^2) for the road, sidewalk, and parking/loading,
1300 sq. ft. (120m^2) for common amenities.
The average occupancy would be 3-4 per house, (with a range of 2-6). and a population density of about 20000 per sq. mile. (8600/km^2)
To pay for these things along with the house itself, estimating $50K/acre for the land, would cost about $15,000 per house. On the other hand, one could get a house twice as nice for another $5000, so $20,000 is a better deal in the long run. That would still cost less than $5/day on a 15-year mortgage. Modest government subsidies (20% grant, 15 years interest-free loan) could get that under $3/day, or less than $1/day/person
The effective federal income tax rate for those making over $1M is 25%. (2007 IRS figures: tax paid/gross income). The $10M+ group pays less than 20%.
US taxes are low by developed world standards, particularly when VAT is taken into account. Places with lower total taxes as a percentage of GDP are mostly 3rd world. The wealthy in the US are finding it hard to hide their wealth overseas anymore, enforcement is very serious now, reporting requirements are practically airtight. Anyway, even if the rich do try to evade taxes, that is no argument not to tax them, but rather to tax them even more, to close loopholes and increase enforcement so that the taxes they can't evade still meet revenue needs.
"Then why aren't either short or long term interest rates soaring?"
1. The Fed is loaning money to the banks at even lower rates, which they put into treasury bonds because it's risk-free, makes their balance sheets look good, keeps the regulators off their backs and does not have the risk of loaning money to the private sector when they already have so many bad loans on their books.
2. The Fed is likely selling options on treasury bonds to manipulate the market. A few years back this is what the head of the Fed trading desk told the FOMC would be the plan if other tools were exhausted, and all the other tools he listed have been used. If rates do rise past where those options were sold, the Fed will take huge losses, which amounts to putting more dollars in circulation. It could snowball catastrophically. (And the federal budget would be screwed, too. If average interest rates rose to the levels of the early 90s, we might have to cut spending by a factor of two or three to avoid default - and rates could go much higher than that.)
3. Rates really aren't low for consumers. What is the effective rate if you can't get a loan? Sure, you can get a nice rate if you have lots of equity in your house, few other debts, high and long-term confirmed income... but how may people have that now? No, the real rate for most consumers in the credit market today is the 29.99% credit card penalty rate.
Inflation is a worry - commodities prices reflect that. Shopping at the grocery store or buying gas reflects that. That the official figures do not (as much) shouldn't be surprising, given how easy they are to manipulate and how much not incentive, but absolute necessity there is for the government to fudge the inflation numbers down. But there is no wage inflation, and ability of consumers to borrow is now quite limited, so that is holding inflation back from the brink. If the economy does recover, wages and spending will increase, and borrowing will multiply the effect. The velocity of money will increase sharply (it is the velocity times the money supply that determines inflation, not either by itself), and there will be no opportunity to reduce the huge increases in the money supply that have taken place over the past few years (M3 before the crisis, converted to M0-M2 after). Inflation will go wild, interest rates will follow and real incomes will lag. A recovery would paradoxically potentially mean financial armageddon for the Fed and the federal government, while at the same time the recession is slowly bleeding them to death, and it is clear that the only way to deal with the federal debt is to gradually inflate their way out of it. It's going to be a tricky tightrope for them to walk.
The US government has cracked down hard on overseas accounts, shell corporations and all the other dodges. Basically if you are a US citizen or legal resident or a corporation or trust anywhere in the world with a US citizen who owns any significant fraction or amount of the corporation or who is a beneficiary of the trust, you have to file detailed accounts with the IRS, and they are getting pretty ugly with those who don't comply. So the usual dodges just don't work anymore - nobody overseas wants to do financial business with Americans anymore if they can avoid it. Even those who have been US citizens any time in the last 10 years have to file the same as citizens. The $1M/yr. club is not going to be able to get their money out easily, it's essentially back-door capital controls for everybody but the biggest of big US banks.
Obama's proposal makes sense. For 2007 (more representative than 2008, and statistics after the rebound of the rich aren't yet available), those declaring over $1M adjusted gross income were 0.28% of returns, but made nearly 16% of all income (about 14% of all after-tax income, counting state and payroll taxes). Their average federal tax rate was less than 25%.
Even after adjusting for an estimate of all taxes (12.4% SS and 10% state,sales,excise&fees on all income to $100K, 2.9% medicare on all income, 5% state,sales,excise&fees above $100K), they pay about 43% of their gross income in taxes, compared to a minimum of over 25% tax for those making less than $10K/yr. If we assume that people need to sleep indoors and eat, and budget a bare minimum of $10K for that, and express the total tax rate as taxes paid divided by the income left over after paying for $10K in necessities, we find that the tax rate actually declines continuously with increasing income, from 125% for those making $9-13K to 44% for those making $75-$100K, and after that the effective tax rate stays constant to within 1.5% for the next six brackets, all the way out to $5M-$10M income, before dropping to 40% for the $10M+ bracket.
The rich aren't paying more than their share. There is clearly room to increase their effective federal tax by 5% or more without causing them the least bit of inconvenience or driving them abroad.
Let's see - 1500ft required setback, 500mph = 2 seconds. Make it 4500 ft. and you get 6 seconds, or a bit more to account for the change in velocity needed for the path to divert toward the crowd. The videos show that the plane was out of control for at least 12 seconds. The photos and videos show a wide setback and a broken elevator trim tab, so it appears that something exceptional happened to that aircraft and the rules likely were being followed.
A comment on the Gosling blog has a link to a very clear picture from less than a second before the crash showing the left elevator trim tab missing, also possible smoke from under the rear fuselage in the vicinity of the tail wheel. There do not appear to be any major control inputs to my inexperienced eye other than a slightly depressed right aileron and possible up elevator, though the latter is hard to see. The view shows only the top of the plane and no background to show the plane's orientation. The pilot is hunched forward with his helmet at the front of the cockpit.
Another shot, less than a plane length before impact, shows the tail wheel deployed and the pilot's head is not visible in the cockpit, though the picture would show it if it were above the edge of the cockpit.
Curiously, the rear portion of the left elevator is not clear, although the shot is fast enough to freeze the propeller and the angle is a perfect left-side profile. The elevator may have been fluttering at an extreme rate, blurring the view, or it may just be a consequence of the low contrast of the elevator against the fuselage with identical paint. At the time of the crash the plane is right-side up, flying above the crowd from the back towards the front of the crowd, as if trying to pull out of a loop and it impacts at about a 45 degree angle.
Another video from the parking lot shows that the plane lost vertical control about 12 seconds before impact and first nosed up several hundred feet in 7 seconds before turning from vertical up to vertical down in less than three seconds, apparently at near full speed the whole way. The crash happened less than three seconds after the plane nosed down.
Also see: the gallery for the AP story "3 dead, 56 injured in horrific US air show crash" for high-resolution versions.
That makes sense. For those not paying attention, EURCHF moved several percent in just a few minutes (1.12 to 1.20 IIRC) when the Swiss central bank decided to peg to the Euro. That is several times the expected daily range and about a hundred times the expected range over such a short period. Ordinarily since movements are so small, currency trades are highly leveraged, often 10x or more. Even small traders have trades nominally worth several hundred thousand euros. When the market gaps in price, stop-loss orders are not honored at the level the trader set if that stop was set in the price gap, but only when there is a matching order or set of orders on the other side, which might not have happened in the EURCHF case for several hundred pips (each pip worth 10 euros for each contract of 100,000 euros, which he likely needed only 2,000-4000 euros margin initially to obtain.) If he was on the wrong side of 6400 contracts that broke 500 pips past his stops, he could have lost $2B on a trade he thought he was only risking a few $10s of millions. Using options the risk surprise could be even worse.
His background is in computers, his former job at UBS before becoming a trader was in communications. He may have hacked the oversight systems.
His name is Kweku Adoboli. "Kweku" seems to be a Ghanian name meaning "born on a Wednesday".
(Updated verse: "Wednesday's child is full of WHOA")
Pipe friction losses will more than double the energy needed. OTOH it should be able to offset a bit of that with wind. Solar would only offer a percent or two of the energy needed, even if it covered the whole upper surface of the balloon, and the weight and expense would make it impractical.
Harnessing the wind could potentially be better, given the high and relatively constant winds in the stratosphere. Because of the nearly 20x lower density, though, the ~15m/s (34mph) median stratospheric wind speed's average energy content per area is about equivalent to an 14mph (6.25m/s) breeze at sea level. (~88W/m^2 Betz limit).
With the vast quantities of electrostatically charged droplets produced by the sprayers and the huge size of the droplet plume, a direct conversion of wind energy to electricity with an enormous effective wind capture area should be possible. The wind will pull the charged droplets away from the oppositely charged sprayer, doing work and increasing the voltage between them. The droplets will eventually settle out onto the oppositely charged ocean, completing the circuit. A load such as a pump can be hooked between the ocean potential and the sprayer potential. (An insulating layer between the ocean potential and the sprayer potential is needed, which can in principle be achieved by having the pump body be nonconductive, isolating the two sides of the circuit in the same way a revolving door prevents a free flow of air. The actual system would be in multiple stages, as it would have to withstand megavolts to keep the currents in the tether manageable while transmitting many hundreds of megawatts.)
With plumes over a km thick and several km wide, (dozens of km^2) the system could potentially power itself, or even produce a surplus.
In another comment on this article, I ran the numbers for a bigger version (much more efficient - you need a big pipe to get the friction losses down to a reasonable percentage, the water/pipe-wall mass ratio up to make efficient use of the lift, and a bigger balloon has a better surface/volume ratio and thus more lift for the mass). It came out to 1.25e8m^3 water per year and about the same for the envelope volume. If I've done my math right, that is only about 1000 tonnes of H2 at 20km altitude, or about 1.4e14J equivalent energy of combustion. That is only about the same energy needed in a single day to pump the water to that elevation, after figuring in pipe losses. Even with smaller balloons or lower flow rates the energy embodied in the hydrogen will be about 10-100 times less than that needed to pump the water for a year.
You're right, helium is too precious to be used for more than the initial tests. Once they get into unmanned platforms far out to sea, there is really no reason not to use hydrogen. It should be possible to arrange it so that if there is an fire nearly everything but the envelope itself can be salvaged.
The amount of lift needed will less than 100,000 tonnes. A 50cm diameter x 20km column of water weighs less than 4000mt. The pipe will have to have some serious walls, though - that's nearly 2000 bar just from hydrostatic pressure, and much more will be needed to push the water -the article states 4000bar. Allowing 50% extra length for the curve and figuring the weight including the hose wall as equivalent to a 64cm diameter column of water, that is about 10000 tonnes. The envelope will have to be huge, though, and it will weigh much more, about 72 tonnes if I've done my math right. (Figuring 1250m length, fineness 2.8 ellipsoid, 50g/m^2 envelope (higher weight envelope figured to allow for airbeam skeleton/keel), net lift of 0.8N/m^3 for H2 at 20km standard atmosphere.) A bit more lift is needed for reserve lift, other equipment and the higher density of salt water, but the total should be in the neighborhood of 100,000 tonnes.
That size pipe at that pressure should deliver about 3 or 4 cubic meters per second if the water is going at 15-20m/s (~35-45mph). At the higher flow rate, that would be about 785MW just to lift the water, and over 1.6GW including pipe friction. That's about 1/8 km^3 per year and about 5e16 Joules/year.
The water will need to be atomized - Prof. Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh designed an elegant, efficient and reliable way of atomizing such large volumes of water in his paper "SPRAY TURBINES TO INCREASE RAIN BY ENHANCED EVAPORATION FROM THE SEA". (The rain-making part didn't work, as the spray suppressed natural ocean eveporation by increasing humidity.) The atomization should not take a relatively significant amount of power, less than 1MW.
It may be possible to offset the energy cost by using wind power. The wind will do work on the charged water spray, which will be carried a long way, turning into microscopic salt-crusted condensation nuclei before being rained out, mostly into the ocean, which could act as a current return path. The work of the wind would be turned into a higher voltage on the droplets by capacitive voltage multiplication (costant charge on the droplets, increasing distance from the spray electrode -> lower capacitance, higher voltage). A direct wind-electric energy conversion should be possible, though how much power it would produce is an open question.
One striking statistic they cite is that the number of robots in the word is the same as the population of New Jersey.
Coincidence? I think not.
It was done a bit better than most such projects- it had a case, display, mini-control joystick, mini-USB jack, basic software and firmware, they tested it in several experiments beyond the basics - the DNA analysis was particularly slick. More effort should have been given to coming up with a useful set of electrodes and reagents and a proper connection from the instrument to the electrodes - alligator clips are a bit below the standard of the rest of the project.
I'm just an armchair engineer, but I suspect the electronic design could be improved a good deal with modest extra cost. A proper electrometer-grade op-amp, using proper guards/shields on the circuit board for the op-amp inputs, preferably not running the working electrode input through a switch (though I'd have to think harder to see if it's really a problem as they are using it, charge injection could be a worry), better insulation and electrode connections on the cables, using a uC with built-in USB, (perhaps an ARM from STMicro similar price, it also has better ADC and DAC, 32bit, faster clock, more RAM and more flash), and maybe a precision voltage reference and a couple of trim pots. This really isn't suitable as a portable instrument as they were using it, though I suppose some people might do so . As a bench instrument with a computer connection the expensive screen could be dispensed with, and DC-DC converter might be replaced with a simple regulator. The case is big enough to stuff full of batteries, and they give a much longer lasting and less noisy power supply than a single-battery & converter setup for a portable device, and for a bench instrument USB power should be sufficient. The ferrite on the analog ground with the double HF/LF bypass caps is a very good thing, but feeding it through a separate, battery analog supply would be even better.
That IBM whitepaper link was supposed to be: Performance of HPC Applications over InfiniBand, 10 Gb and 1 Gb Ethernet
Well, maybe so. It is marketing stuff.
However this independent comparison by IBM shows that this vendor's 10G products are neck and neck with IB, even faster on some tasks. 10G is a couple of percent lower performance on many tasks, and substantially slower on ~10% of tasks. The prices of adapters are somewhat higher for 10G, but the switches and extras such as cabling seem to more than make up for it. Basically as far as performance and HW cost, there isn't much difference at all. But 10G will likely be easier to maintain and monitor, there are more vendors available for equipment and it will be easier to get support and expertise for 10G.
The Tesla 2090 is the best thing on the market, but the 2070 is 85% as good for 65% the $.