"... massive improvements, including some of the GIMP UI team's work."
1. There's a Gimp UI team?!? 2. This phasing indicates that most of the UI team's work was not only not an improvement, but unmentionable in polite society, or even on Slashdot.
It's a maximum 16" (40cm) run, so no big deal. Really, they could use 8AWG wire (0.1285" 3.264mm dia.)for 200 amps at that distance with less than a 3% voltage drop
Not really. cgs or kgs? Bq or Ci? Sv or rem? WTF is a candela when you're measuring any frequency other than 540 x 10^12Hz? What about time and angles and solid angles where the official units are less common than the traditional ones in most uses? Metric still has plenty of weird constants, it isn't natural units. (of which there are various systems, each with some inconveniences) Not to mention economic measurements, a little area the metric system completely ignores.
Converting isn't that hard any more. Use Frink. It will handle practically any unit out there, and if it isn't in http://futureboy.us/frinkdata/units.txt (well worth a read), you can add it.
Further supplementary memorandum submitted by the Government Office for Science and the Cabinet Office (SAGE 00b) RECORD OF THE SEVERE SPACE WEATHER WORKSHOP Meeting held in Room 35 Great Smith Street, London on 21 September 2010 at 1000.
Representation from Government: Cabinet Office, Ministry of Defence, Her Majesty's Treasury, Department for Transport, Department of Energy and Climate Change, Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, Government Office for Science, Department of Health. Representation from the science community: The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, The British Geological Survey, The Electrical Infrastructure Security Council, The Meteorological Office. Representation from the Energy, Communication and Transport Sectors.. [...] THE REASONABLE WORST CASE SCENARIO
(2) The selection of the Carrington Event as the basis for a reasonable worse case solar scenario was discussed. Although much work has been done on the scaling of this event compared to other historical events, the data on which this has been based are limited. A full analysis and use of the Carrington event as a reasonable worst case scenario requires the use of "extreme value statistics" and the currently available data allow only rough and preliminary estimates using this technique. Discussion also centred on different scaling factors used between the UK and the US, because of differences in magnetic latitude. Given these uncertainties, the view of most was that the duration and magnitude of a Carrington event scenario cannot at present be used with high levels of confidence.
(3) It was reported that there was a 1% chance of a Carrington-like event occurring during a solar maxima year. The Carrington Event was 150 years ago but the intervening years contain about 30 strong geomagnetic storms of a similar but slightly lower intensity, notably the 1921 storm which damaged telephone networks in Sweden. It was also reported that large geomagnetic storms can be caused by a rapid succession of flare/Coronal Mass Ejections and this has been the case in several important storms. Discussions were held on the increase or decrease in the probability of a severe event in relation to solar maxima and minima years respectively. It was reported that strong solar events can happen at any time, including minima years (eg the 1986 storm), however there is 20 fold increase in likelihood of an event happening during maxima years. Discussions also centred on the robustness of 1% likelihood of a Carrington-like event and whether this was a sufficiently reliable statistic on which to base investment in more resilient technologies.
(4) Concerns were raised about the amount of credible data available which could be used to make predictions about future solar events. It was reported that, while UK Flood risk assessment exploits decades of data from similar streams in different catchment areas to construct long statistical datasets (hundreds of years of data), accurate solar data has only been available for the past 40yrs, and with only one source; the Sun within the Solar System. Around 500 years of good recorded data would be needed to estimate 1/100 year events with high degrees of confidence. Ice core readings containing trapped nitrates have provided data which may be used as a proxy of solar radiation storms over the past 400 years, but no proxy yet exists for geomagnetic storms. It was noted that there has been a very strong scientific focus on the Carrington Event in recent years and that other storms should also be considered to construct a reasonable worst case scenario.
(5) The direction of solar events was discussed. The impact of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) of Carrington magnitude is dependent upon the direction of the ejection and the orientation of its magnetic field, relative to t
No, for psychometric purposes "smart", is defined as the largest common factor behind the correlation in the same person or group's scores on different tests. That is the factor-analytic definition of intelligence. Those who do well on valid IQ tests generally do well on all valid tests, even those that seem to be of specialized subject information. (Exposure to that information helps, of course, but it helps the smarter ones disproportionately.)
How the hell did this moron get modded up? Pretty much everything in science is correlations. Every experiment is limited to the specific things tested. You think we can't say one type of rock isn't softer than another unless we test all rocks everywhere?
Yeah, I've always wanted a left-handed music keyboard. Why isn't there just a software switch on those things? OTOH (ha!) why are guitars all made for lefties? Fretting requires more dexterity than picking.
How your BS got modded up and his on-topic, correct comment got modded down shows the metamod system really needs more people participating in order to function.
[ITER] is unlikely to discover any fundamentally new physics. It certainly won't generate power. It will generate some radioactive waste. It might even lead us to the conclusion that fusion power is not economic. In a sense, it is designed to fail—a power station that uses power—but to fail in such a way that we learn enough to succeed. Unfortunately, governments see the price tag, the "if" statements that go with every science experiment, the lack of certainty... and go weak at the knees.
And it's been, what, $25B? And the MIT guys say they need another $80B to maybe go commercial by 2040? How many kinds of advanced fission plants could we try for that kind of money - each with a virtual certainty of generating actual power, and long odds of being more reliable than tokamak fusion is ever likely to be?
Good thing you catched that and bringed it to our attention. I have seldom readed such a suppurating solecism. In English our verbs is regular, and if they ain't, well, they gets more fiber in their diet til they be.
(See this comment for the history of the Germanic / Old English use of "drug" as the past tense of "drag". )
Well, maybe he's lying, but then again maybe it wasn't the research that was the problem but rather the results. I can believe that nobody would have had a problem if he had concluded that everything was just fine, the way he was supposed to.
This is really the most dangerous area of "scientific" research - the temptation to get the "right" answers, and to avoid any research or conclusions that your colleagues and the powers that be might find unacceptable.
Inbreeding - in the loosest sense - is inevitable. It's undoubtedly a major part of both the maintenance of species against drift and perhaps of some of the apparent oddities of evolution that sometimes make it seem as if there is some sort of genetic coordination across different members of the population. Less than 1000 years ago, 30 generations, each of us had 2^30th grandparents - over a billion, more than the whole human population back then, and many times more than the restricted territories occupied by any given person's ancestors. Going further back, each of our ancestors is related to us in exponentially more ways. Our common ancestors 70,000 years ago are likely related to each of us in about 10^840 different ways, give or take a few dozen orders of magnitude. Lots of counter-intuitive things can happen in complex adaptive systems that produce such huge numbers of different potential paths.
Yes, and there are some genies that aren't quite out of the bottle yet. Using induced decay of metastable nuclear isomers it may be possible to make tiny nuclear weapons and exawatt gamma-ray lasers with few to no fission products.
It was first reported in 1988 by Collins that (180m)Ta can be forced to release its energy by weaker x-rays. After 11 years of controversy those claims were confirmed in 1999 by Belic and co-workers in the Stuttgart nuclear physics group.
Another reasonably stable nuclear isomer (with a half-life of 31 years) is (178m2)72Hf, which has the highest excitation energy of any comparably long-lived isomer. One gram of pure (178m2)Hf contains approximately 1.33 gigajoules of energy, the equivalent of exploding about 315 kg (690 lb) of TNT. Further, in the natural decay of (178m2)Hf, the energy is released as gamma rays with a total energy of 2.45 MeV. As with (180m)Ta, there are disputed reports that (178m2)Hf can be stimulated into releasing its energy, and as a result the substance is being studied as a possible source for gamma ray lasers. These reports also indicate that the energy is released very quickly, so that (178m2)Hf can produce extremely high powers (on the order of exawatts). Other isomers have also been investigated as possible media for gamma-ray stimulated emission.
"I'd also think the fancy cooling on the engine they show here is mostly for the turbine operating between mach 2.5 and mach 5 where the compressor blades would start to seriously heat up."
The idea is actually to liquify and store the air as they fly to provide oxidizer for the rocket phase of flight. I think they're freaking nuts, but if they can do it then they are truly gods among engineers.
ITER is a money hole with no chance of working. Other fusion programs are much cheaper and more likely to get results, for instance the Lawrenceville Plasma Physics and Navy electrostatic inertial confinement programs. It looks like some of these latter programs may get more money.
"Actually, I was pretty sure because we had computer images that showed the hole, showed it was growing over time, and most importantly we could reproduce the effects of CFCs on ozone in a lab..."
No, we had no images for comparison from before CFCs were widely used. The few readings we do have from before CFCs were widely used (1950s) show the hole was already there. The ozone hole is a natural phenomenon which occurs in the antarctic winter regardless of CFCs. Ozone is produced by UV hitting regular O2. Since the antarctic winter is dark, there is no ozone production, and since, unlike the arctic, it is surrounded by sea, there is a ring of wind that helps prevent mixing with air from brighter, higher latitudes, thus the antarctic ozone concentrations fall every winter. The cause and effect actually go the other way - high UV leads to high stratospheric ozone. Ground-level UV was never shown to be increasing - quite the opposite. World stratospheric ozone levels rise and fall a few percent with the sunspot cycle, but UV rises and falls in synchrony, not out of phase as we would expect if lower ozone actually let more UV through.
The hypothesis that CFCs result in catalytic destruction of ozone was never proven in the lab. Free chlorine destroys ozone, but chlorine is extremely tightly bound in CFCs, and it is not a significant source of free chlorine in the stratosphere, not only because it's so difficult to break up CFCs, but because they have such a higher molar mass than air - they accumulate near the ground. Sea salt and gasses from volcanoes such as Mt. Erebus near the McMurdo sound station in Antarctica are far larger sources of chlorine and other halogens than CFCs. See http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/bulletin.php?id=196 for more.
Lovelock bears much more responsibility for the CFC-ozone debacle than for the global warming thing - he invented the sensors that could detect parts per trillion of all sorts of things, including CFCs, which in turn lead to all sorts of BS over all sorts of substances from people who couldn't understand just how negligible an amount ppt or ppb really is of most things. Lovelock failed to speak against the innumerate BS from enviro-nuts, thus giving them a pseudoscientific club with which to attack industrial society, and dispersing efforts which should have been concentrated on more pressing concerns such as PCBs, lead in gasoline, particulate pollution and many others.
More - each pixel samples each of the six colors, (u-g-r-i-z-y, roughly 300-400-500-600-700-800-900-1000-1100nm) using filters. Each exposure is a bit less than 2.5s, for a total of 15s. The sequence is then repeated before the telescope is moved to the next patch of sky.
Slashdot Mirror
"... massive improvements, including some of the GIMP UI team's work."
1. There's a Gimp UI team?!?
2. This phasing indicates that most of the UI team's work was not only not an improvement, but unmentionable in polite society, or even on Slashdot.
It's a maximum 16" (40cm) run, so no big deal. Really, they could use 8AWG wire (0.1285" 3.264mm dia.)for 200 amps at that distance with less than a 3% voltage drop
The diagrams show the length of the bus bars as being less than 16 inches (40cm). That's quite reasonable, even for hundreds of amps.
Not really. cgs or kgs? Bq or Ci? Sv or rem? WTF is a candela when you're measuring any frequency other than 540 x 10^12Hz? What about time and angles and solid angles where the official units are less common than the traditional ones in most uses? Metric still has plenty of weird constants, it isn't natural units. (of which there are various systems, each with some inconveniences) Not to mention economic measurements, a little area the metric system completely ignores.
Converting isn't that hard any more. Use Frink. It will handle practically any unit out there, and if it isn't in http://futureboy.us/frinkdata/units.txt (well worth a read), you can add it.
Here's some real information:
No, for psychometric purposes "smart", is defined as the largest common factor behind the correlation in the same person or group's scores on different tests. That is the factor-analytic definition of intelligence. Those who do well on valid IQ tests generally do well on all valid tests, even those that seem to be of specialized subject information. (Exposure to that information helps, of course, but it helps the smarter ones disproportionately.)
How the hell did this moron get modded up? Pretty much everything in science is correlations. Every experiment is limited to the specific things tested. You think we can't say one type of rock isn't softer than another unless we test all rocks everywhere?
Yeah, I've always wanted a left-handed music keyboard. Why isn't there just a software switch on those things? OTOH (ha!) why are guitars all made for lefties? Fretting requires more dexterity than picking.
All primitive flint tools have somewhat asymmetric faces, many of the oldest are unifacial. So about 2.6 million years ago.
How your BS got modded up and his on-topic, correct comment got modded down shows the metamod system really needs more people participating in order to function.
If so, I'm not alone:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/01/why-is-iter-so-hard-to-fund.ars
And it's been, what, $25B? And the MIT guys say they need another $80B to maybe go commercial by 2040? How many kinds of advanced fission plants could we try for that kind of money - each with a virtual certainty of generating actual power, and long odds of being more reliable than tokamak fusion is ever likely to be?
Unless, of course, you are sick or ever have been sick.
Good thing you catched that and bringed it to our attention. I have seldom readed such a suppurating solecism. In English our verbs is regular, and if they ain't, well, they gets more fiber in their diet til they be.
(See this comment for the history of the Germanic / Old English use of "drug" as the past tense of "drag". )
Well, maybe he's lying, but then again maybe it wasn't the research that was the problem but rather the results. I can believe that nobody would have had a problem if he had concluded that everything was just fine, the way he was supposed to.
This is really the most dangerous area of "scientific" research - the temptation to get the "right" answers, and to avoid any research or conclusions that your colleagues and the powers that be might find unacceptable.
Inbreeding - in the loosest sense - is inevitable. It's undoubtedly a major part of both the maintenance of species against drift and perhaps of some of the apparent oddities of evolution that sometimes make it seem as if there is some sort of genetic coordination across different members of the population. Less than 1000 years ago, 30 generations, each of us had 2^30th grandparents - over a billion, more than the whole human population back then, and many times more than the restricted territories occupied by any given person's ancestors. Going further back, each of our ancestors is related to us in exponentially more ways. Our common ancestors 70,000 years ago are likely related to each of us in about 10^840 different ways, give or take a few dozen orders of magnitude. Lots of counter-intuitive things can happen in complex adaptive systems that produce such huge numbers of different potential paths.
"Three generations of imbecile posts are enough"
Yes, and there are some genies that aren't quite out of the bottle yet.
Using induced decay of metastable nuclear isomers it may be possible to make tiny nuclear weapons and exawatt gamma-ray lasers with few to no fission products.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_isomer
Nano-particles are going to be a mixed bag. Some are likely good for you: Diet of buckyballs nearly doubles rat lifespan
Oops - I was thinking of an earlier version, the liquid air cycle engine (LACE). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine) for the actual Skylon engine details.
"I'd also think the fancy cooling on the engine they show here is mostly for the turbine operating between mach 2.5 and mach 5 where the compressor blades would start to seriously heat up."
The idea is actually to liquify and store the air as they fly to provide oxidizer for the rocket phase of flight. I think they're freaking nuts, but if they can do it then they are truly gods among engineers.
ITER is a money hole with no chance of working. Other fusion programs are much cheaper and more likely to get results, for instance the Lawrenceville Plasma Physics and Navy electrostatic inertial confinement programs. It looks like some of these latter programs may get more money.
Small wind-powered NH2 plants allow using wind in rural areas without transmission lines or electrical energy storage. They also mean the fertilizer does not need to be trucked in, and excess can be burned in IC engines, displacing some diesel in agriculture.
http://windnh3.blogspot.com/search/label/02)%20The%20Process%20of%20turning%20Wind%20to%20Nh3
"Actually, I was pretty sure because we had computer images that showed the hole, showed it was growing over time, and most importantly we could reproduce the effects of CFCs on ozone in a lab ..."
No, we had no images for comparison from before CFCs were widely used. The few readings we do have from before CFCs were widely used (1950s) show the hole was already there. The ozone hole is a natural phenomenon which occurs in the antarctic winter regardless of CFCs. Ozone is produced by UV hitting regular O2. Since the antarctic winter is dark, there is no ozone production, and since, unlike the arctic, it is surrounded by sea, there is a ring of wind that helps prevent mixing with air from brighter, higher latitudes, thus the antarctic ozone concentrations fall every winter. The cause and effect actually go the other way - high UV leads to high stratospheric ozone. Ground-level UV was never shown to be increasing - quite the opposite. World stratospheric ozone levels rise and fall a few percent with the sunspot cycle, but UV rises and falls in synchrony, not out of phase as we would expect if lower ozone actually let more UV through.
The hypothesis that CFCs result in catalytic destruction of ozone was never proven in the lab. Free chlorine destroys ozone, but chlorine is extremely tightly bound in CFCs, and it is not a significant source of free chlorine in the stratosphere, not only because it's so difficult to break up CFCs, but because they have such a higher molar mass than air - they accumulate near the ground. Sea salt and gasses from volcanoes such as Mt. Erebus near the McMurdo sound station in Antarctica are far larger sources of chlorine and other halogens than CFCs.
See http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/bulletin.php?id=196 for more.
Lovelock bears much more responsibility for the CFC-ozone debacle than for the global warming thing - he invented the sensors that could detect parts per trillion of all sorts of things, including CFCs, which in turn lead to all sorts of BS over all sorts of substances from people who couldn't understand just how negligible an amount ppt or ppb really is of most things. Lovelock failed to speak against the innumerate BS from enviro-nuts, thus giving them a pseudoscientific club with which to attack industrial society, and dispersing efforts which should have been concentrated on more pressing concerns such as PCBs, lead in gasoline, particulate pollution and many others.
Quite right. (undoing accidental mismod)
More - each pixel samples each of the six colors, (u-g-r-i-z-y, roughly 300-400-500-600-700-800-900-1000-1100nm) using filters. Each exposure is a bit less than 2.5s, for a total of 15s. The sequence is then repeated before the telescope is moved to the next patch of sky.