The largest image available appears to be at the Space Telescope Science Institute's web page, here. If you click around on that site you can find links to greyscale images representing filtering at different wavelengths, as well as a recent history of Mars's close encounters.
Semiconductor production also takes a huge amount of electricity -- which is generated by coal, nuclear, etc.
I've been told that solar cells, given their lifespan of 30 years or so (what the article linked said, I believe), a solar cell cannot generate in its lifetime, in full sunlight, more energy than it took to create it in the first place. Now, this may no longer be true, or it may never have been true. I've also been told it's an urban legend. I could figure out how much a given solar cell could generate over that period of time, but I know nothing about how much power every single process needed to make the solar cells takes.
Anyone know if this is truth or fiction?
I've always been partial to wind power, myself -- even if not electric, you can rig up something simple out of wood and fibre to pump water or provide mechanical power. Things that are easier to do are invariably easier and cheaper to bring to the masses.
Yeah, they don't usually mold carbon composite frames for the space station in outer space either. Unless you were going to capture the water evaporating as it cured, it'd be wasted expense launching it, too.
The real news here is that they're positioning this cement blend for use in space structures. They claim it's lighter than and as strong as carbon fiber composites, but able to bend without breaking, and less subject to harm from high energy particles in space. Cement has also been explored for building cheap submarines for third world countries -- I think they tend to look a lot like the sea floor acoustically, so it's really easy for them to hide on the ocean floor and pop up to launch a torpedo.
When I saw this article yesterday I found it really interesting because I'd just been thinking about the submarine thing, and that cement/concrete might be a really cheap and easy material for amateur/private exploration of space, instead of having to have all the nasty chemicals and expensive machines necessary to work with composites.
Anyone contacted this group and found out what the exact proportions of the ingredients are? It might be interesting to mix up a batch and do some testing.
Actually, that's not the jet's engines. That's the APU. It's a diesel turbine (so it's a jet engine in some sense, but at most the size of a small car, including all the electrical components). It supplies 48V (I think) to the power bus of the plane, and also powers the starter motors for the main engines. That's what allows the cockpit computers and so on to function before they turn the main engines on, and to still function in the case of a flame-out. It's the rough equivalent of a car battery.
I sent them some money when they first started doing it. It's probably about time to send some more, given their situation. It's really no big thing, given the immense amount of enjoyment I get out of Penny Arcade.
Here at UT Austin, in the ECE department, the curriculum recently got changed in this regard. It used to be C++ => assembly => more C/C++, then they stuck a Java intro course onto the front end, which you didn't have to take if you'd programmed before, and a good number of people placed out of the (horrible) intro C++ course via the aforementioned AP Compsci exam. Now they've changed it around, I think much for the better, so that:
Machine Language/Assembly (On the LC2, a theoretical teaching processor) => ANSI C procedural programming => MC68HC12 Assembly/C => C++ Data Structures => More Data structures, more embedded 6812 C, and possibly some Java, depending on which route you take.
Two semesters of new students have so far begun at the machine code level, in a class taught by some of the foremost computer engineering researchers in the field. I have yet to interact with enough of them to get a good feel for how successful the curriculum is, but we'll know soon enough.
There are only a few thousand functional nuclear weapons on the planet (8-10 thousand at the upper limit, less if you don't consider most nukes in Russia 'functional', especially since a lot of fusion weapons have shelf lives of a few years). If you airburst all of them over cities, you might kill half the people in cities on the planet, which, since about half the population of the Earth resides in cities, means that you'll kill perhaps 25% of the people on Earth as a maximum. Less because not all those nukes will work. When was the last time anyone actually fired off an ICBM and had it detonate a nuke on target on the other side of the world? That's right, never. No one's ever tested them in their full operational capability, since it would result in World War III. That's probably one reason we never got that far: everyone was too afraid the systems wouldn't actually work, and their bluff would be called.
In any event, that's just people, to say nothing of blowing the/planet/ to dust. Even if you buried all of them in the core of the planet and set them off, it'd produce at most some slight indigestion. Compared to the thermal, kinetic, and magnetic energy contained in the Earth's core and mantle, nukes are nothing.
You don't need to 'take out' a small rock, anyway. Just deflect it ahead of time, which depending on how much advance warning you have, may entail strapping some ion engines to it, or detonating a bunch of fusion bombs next to it to nudge it away.
I don't think it's really a valid workaround to make 'all life forms become robots'. What happens when robots start to be considered life forms?
The last thing we need is a hundred years of oppression and slavery for yet another race (because they'll slaughter us when they break their bonds, not just take over our professional sports).
I'm not sure you understand the market IBM's Power4 chips are aimed at. These chips are two processors on a die, 1GHz, but they'd smoke anything Intel or AMD have even if they were running at 250MHz. They can have incredibly low yields and still make a profit, because these chips are freaking expensive ($10-20k for the chip, I think, although you wouldn't buy one outside an IBM RS/6000). Intel and AMD don't reach that high end, so they have to have the commodity market to prop up their higher priced offerings (Xeons are where the bulk of the profit is). IBM is able to skim off the top, selling a small number of units integrated with all their own hardware and software, and make plenty of money. These are not chips 99% of users will ever have to use or care about.
All electrical engineers are not 'geeks who design computer chips, with a minor in math'. You're right about the geek part and the minor in math part, but there are many of us who are strictly power, electromag, analog, telecom, etc. Designing computer chips is one of the most boring jobs I can imagine. Every time in high school when someone tried to tell me what electrical engineering was, they took me to tour the fucking Motorola plant for another time (Hey, kid, sit in this cubicle and use a software logic analyzer until you're 45, when we'll fire you based on your age!) (that's Mot specifically, not the industry) and showed us the wonders of producing, testing, and packaging ICs.
Now that I'm actually a major sequence EE student, I find that some of the things I enjoy most are analog. Which is not to say that I don't like digital things, or that at some point I might not want to design computers, but trying to shoehorn an entire world of disciplines into 'We draw transistor masks on the computers and use nasty chemicals to etch them.', a specific manufacturing technique (this is EE, not Manufacturing/Industrial/Process engineering), is bland and simply puts me to sleep. Thank god I knew in advance that EE was what I wanted to do, and had more exposure than that, or I would've run for my life.
I was at a career fair Friday looking at Solectron's booth. They had a board they made for Cisco, about 50% larger area than an ATX motherboard. I asked him how many layers it had, and he said '16'. I was a little aghast, but I picked it up and looked, and he was right. Also had column array packages with *thousands* of pins each. So this making, say, an 8 layer Athlon board isn't unreasonable.
Silicon Labs, for which a few of my classmates intern, here in Austin, has integrated at least all the RF functions onto a single chip, and they're selling those by the truckload to Motorola and Nokia. I wouldn't be surprised if they integrated more of the functions soon, or already have.
The reason we're only discovering planets this size is the current state of our astronomy equipment. It can only detect gravitational distortions in other stars that are of the magnitude produced by such planets, hence they're generally all we find. Large masses, orbiting close to their sun.
When we get the Space Interferometry Mission up, and possibly other more advanced interferometers, it's likely we will discover a much greater number of smaller planets, due to the fact that planet size probably looks somewhat like a gaussian distribution. It's taken us years to find around 40 of these Jupiter sized planets. In 10 years or so, when SIM goes up, expect for us to start finding thousands of smaller planets in more Earth-like orbits.
Corporations are a construct upheld by the government, and are given rights not even accorded humans. If the government hadn't created them in the first place, they wouldn't be a problem. If corporations couldn't commit murder and not have laws enforced against them, then it wouldn't be a problem. The root of the problem is still a government that expands to create dangerous new constructs like Corporations, or the New Deal, without regard for the Constitution, which does not allow and never has allowed any such thing. If the Supreme Court wants to restrict free speech, well, they can damn well pass an amendment, can't they? Judicial Activism, a bunch of Senators with the Elastic Clause written on their undies, and a President commanding a vast bureaucratic alphabet soup of thousands of unrestricted minor tyrants like the IRS, FBI, NSA, etc. are the problem.
A libertarian government would also enforce laws on corporations, because campaign soft money contributions would be nonexistent.
Of course Libertarians are up on corporations. That must be how Harry Browne raised all that money for his campaign last year. Right.
I'm a second year EE, I build robots for my school's robot team (UT Austin), etc. We were even approached by a local FIRST team for help, but they couldn't tell us what we could do to help them (being as they already had commitment from the Mech. Eng. department, who would dwarf any mechanical help we could give). Judging by some of the responses, we could've greatly helped with the control systems and such, as it's not entirely mechanical any more. With that said, I don't think this is entirely a bad thing.
In the robots we've built, mechanical systems have typically been an afterthought (until this year). One of the robots that's been in the works for about a year has a wretched drive system. Motors are plenty good, wheels are plenty good, control system and power systems are plenty good. But the interface between the motor shafts and the wheels sucks. So I'm in the process of turning wheel hubs out of 6061 Aluminum and fixing it.
In short, it's not good for EEs to view all other disciplines as unholy (well, all other engineering disciplines, anyway. liberal arts and business are unholy). Even in doing EE sorts of things, like etching printed circuit boards, we've had to have knowledge of chemistry, and how to do mechanical things (like cutting photosensitive boards without fscking up the copper or etchant layers). I've recently been acquiring tools, such as a drill press, band saw, grinder, bench sander, MIG welder, a tap and tie set, a nice drill bit set, etc. in addition to my already existing electronics tool sets. For our newest project the mechanics are a whole major section of the project, and are being done first, and done right, with everything laid out before any building starts, just like anyone would do with a circuit board or program, and not as an afterthought.
We don't want a bunch of EEs attempting to build robots after they graduate from high school where the control systems are crippled because the mechanical systems won't/can't do what they're told. Being exposed early to mechanics is good for so-called budding EEs, although I will agree that the competition should maybe add something extra (while keeping the magical US FIRST controller box), perhaps for bonus, so teams who want to explore designing and building their own circuits can go down that path, at the risk of neglecting the rest of their design. I was personally disgusted when talking to that ex-FIRST team member (he graduated) last year, and he couldn't tell me what sort of CPU was being used, or anything.
Huh? I thought the current price was around $10k/pound. Which is nowhere near the $160/pound they're saying. NASA's reusable launch vehicle efforts, some of which have failed and some of which are still ongoing are merely aiming to lower the cost to $1000/pound. Something all these launch schemes have in common is that they seem to have some technology none of the rest of us know about, or they love throwing money away giving people rides in space for less than they cost.
I especially love it when companies start taking reservations before they have a working launch system. It should be the other way around. I was personally stoked about Rotary Rocket, they had some good tech and weren't overmarketed. Someone needs to bail them out.
Slashdot Mirror
If you click around on that site you can find links to greyscale images representing filtering at different wavelengths, as well as a recent history of Mars's close encounters.
[goes outside to look at Mars in the telescope]
Semiconductor production also takes a huge amount of electricity -- which is generated by coal, nuclear, etc.
I've been told that solar cells, given their lifespan of 30 years or so (what the article linked said, I believe), a solar cell cannot generate in its lifetime, in full sunlight, more energy than it took to create it in the first place. Now, this may no longer be true, or it may never have been true. I've also been told it's an urban legend. I could figure out how much a given solar cell could generate over that period of time, but I know nothing about how much power every single process needed to make the solar cells takes.
Anyone know if this is truth or fiction?
I've always been partial to wind power, myself -- even if not electric, you can rig up something simple out of wood and fibre to pump water or provide mechanical power. Things that are easier to do are invariably easier and cheaper to bring to the masses.
Yeah, they don't usually mold carbon composite frames for the space station in outer space either. Unless you were going to capture the water evaporating as it cured, it'd be wasted expense launching it, too.
The real news here is that they're positioning this cement blend for use in space structures. They claim it's lighter than and as strong as carbon fiber composites, but able to bend without breaking, and less subject to harm from high energy particles in space. Cement has also been explored for building cheap submarines for third world countries -- I think they tend to look a lot like the sea floor acoustically, so it's really easy for them to hide on the ocean floor and pop up to launch a torpedo.
When I saw this article yesterday I found it really interesting because I'd just been thinking about the submarine thing, and that cement/concrete might be a really cheap and easy material for amateur/private exploration of space, instead of having to have all the nasty chemicals and expensive machines necessary to work with composites.
Anyone contacted this group and found out what the exact proportions of the ingredients are? It might be interesting to mix up a batch and do some testing.
Aluminum comes from bauxite. Might be useful, since it's a light, alloyable, machineable, weldable, corrosion-resistant building material. :)
Actually, that's not the jet's engines. That's the APU. It's a diesel turbine (so it's a jet engine in some sense, but at most the size of a small car, including all the electrical components). It supplies 48V (I think) to the power bus of the plane, and also powers the starter motors for the main engines. That's what allows the cockpit computers and so on to function before they turn the main engines on, and to still function in the case of a flame-out. It's the rough equivalent of a car battery.
I sent them some money when they first started doing it. It's probably about time to send some more, given their situation. It's really no big thing, given the immense amount of enjoyment I get out of Penny Arcade.
Excellent. Start coding.
Here at UT Austin, in the ECE department, the curriculum recently got changed in this regard. It used to be C++ => assembly => more C/C++, then they stuck a Java intro course onto the front end, which you didn't have to take if you'd programmed before, and a good number of people placed out of the (horrible) intro C++ course via the aforementioned AP Compsci exam. Now they've changed it around, I think much for the better, so that:
Machine Language/Assembly (On the LC2, a theoretical teaching processor) => ANSI C procedural programming => MC68HC12 Assembly/C => C++ Data Structures => More Data structures, more embedded 6812 C, and possibly some Java, depending on which route you take.
Two semesters of new students have so far begun at the machine code level, in a class taught by some of the foremost computer engineering researchers in the field. I have yet to interact with enough of them to get a good feel for how successful the curriculum is, but we'll know soon enough.
An atom's diameter is about a third of a nanometer. You should check your numbers.
Hey, I'll agree with most of your points, but the series of Robocop feature films is fine cinema.
Hitler was a big fan of Wagner, actually. All that big organ and brass fanfare stirred up a bit of nationalism, I guess.
There are only a few thousand functional nuclear weapons on the planet (8-10 thousand at the upper limit, less if you don't consider most nukes in Russia 'functional', especially since a lot of fusion weapons have shelf lives of a few years). If you airburst all of them over cities, you might kill half the people in cities on the planet, which, since about half the population of the Earth resides in cities, means that you'll kill perhaps 25% of the people on Earth as a maximum. Less because not all those nukes will work. When was the last time anyone actually fired off an ICBM and had it detonate a nuke on target on the other side of the world? That's right, never. No one's ever tested them in their full operational capability, since it would result in World War III. That's probably one reason we never got that far: everyone was too afraid the systems wouldn't actually work, and their bluff would be called.
/planet/ to dust. Even if you buried all of them in the core of the planet and set them off, it'd produce at most some slight indigestion. Compared to the thermal, kinetic, and magnetic energy contained in the Earth's core and mantle, nukes are nothing.
In any event, that's just people, to say nothing of blowing the
You don't need to 'take out' a small rock, anyway. Just deflect it ahead of time, which depending on how much advance warning you have, may entail strapping some ion engines to it, or detonating a bunch of fusion bombs next to it to nudge it away.
Actually, he is a former NASA engineer.
I don't think it's really a valid workaround to make 'all life forms become robots'. What happens when robots start to be considered life forms?
The last thing we need is a hundred years of oppression and slavery for yet another race (because they'll slaughter us when they break their bonds, not just take over our professional sports).
-RevRigel
I'm not sure you understand the market IBM's Power4 chips are aimed at. These chips are two processors on a die, 1GHz, but they'd smoke anything Intel or AMD have even if they were running at 250MHz. They can have incredibly low yields and still make a profit, because these chips are freaking expensive ($10-20k for the chip, I think, although you wouldn't buy one outside an IBM RS/6000). Intel and AMD don't reach that high end, so they have to have the commodity market to prop up their higher priced offerings (Xeons are where the bulk of the profit is). IBM is able to skim off the top, selling a small number of units integrated with all their own hardware and software, and make plenty of money. These are not chips 99% of users will ever have to use or care about.
All electrical engineers are not 'geeks who design computer chips, with a minor in math'. You're right about the geek part and the minor in math part, but there are many of us who are strictly power, electromag, analog, telecom, etc. Designing computer chips is one of the most boring jobs I can imagine. Every time in high school when someone tried to tell me what electrical engineering was, they took me to tour the fucking Motorola plant for another time (Hey, kid, sit in this cubicle and use a software logic analyzer until you're 45, when we'll fire you based on your age!) (that's Mot specifically, not the industry) and showed us the wonders of producing, testing, and packaging ICs.
Now that I'm actually a major sequence EE student, I find that some of the things I enjoy most are analog. Which is not to say that I don't like digital things, or that at some point I might not want to design computers, but trying to shoehorn an entire world of disciplines into 'We draw transistor masks on the computers and use nasty chemicals to etch them.', a specific manufacturing technique (this is EE, not Manufacturing/Industrial/Process engineering), is bland and simply puts me to sleep. Thank god I knew in advance that EE was what I wanted to do, and had more exposure than that, or I would've run for my life.
I was at a career fair Friday looking at Solectron's booth. They had a board they made for Cisco, about 50% larger area than an ATX motherboard. I asked him how many layers it had, and he said '16'. I was a little aghast, but I picked it up and looked, and he was right. Also had column array packages with *thousands* of pins each. So this making, say, an 8 layer Athlon board isn't unreasonable.
Silicon Labs, for which a few of my classmates intern, here in Austin, has integrated at least all the RF functions onto a single chip, and they're selling those by the truckload to Motorola and Nokia. I wouldn't be surprised if they integrated more of the functions soon, or already have.
And if you're inclined to do a little soldering and microcontroller programming, you can randomize your MAC for every packet, or on demand.
Now we can have Russian hackers decide the election for us, instead of the Supreme Court.
The reason we're only discovering planets this size is the current state of our astronomy equipment. It can only detect gravitational distortions in other stars that are of the magnitude produced by such planets, hence they're generally all we find. Large masses, orbiting close to their sun.
When we get the Space Interferometry Mission up, and possibly other more advanced interferometers, it's likely we will discover a much greater number of smaller planets, due to the fact that planet size probably looks somewhat like a gaussian distribution. It's taken us years to find around 40 of these Jupiter sized planets. In 10 years or so, when SIM goes up, expect for us to start finding thousands of smaller planets in more Earth-like orbits.
RevRigel
Corporations are a construct upheld by the government, and are given rights not even accorded humans. If the government hadn't created them in the first place, they wouldn't be a problem. If corporations couldn't commit murder and not have laws enforced against them, then it wouldn't be a problem. The root of the problem is still a government that expands to create dangerous new constructs like Corporations, or the New Deal, without regard for the Constitution, which does not allow and never has allowed any such thing. If the Supreme Court wants to restrict free speech, well, they can damn well pass an amendment, can't they? Judicial Activism, a bunch of Senators with the Elastic Clause written on their undies, and a President commanding a vast bureaucratic alphabet soup of thousands of unrestricted minor tyrants like the IRS, FBI, NSA, etc. are the problem.
A libertarian government would also enforce laws on corporations, because campaign soft money contributions would be nonexistent.
Of course Libertarians are up on corporations. That must be how Harry Browne raised all that money for his campaign last year. Right.
RevRigel
I'm a second year EE, I build robots for my school's robot team (UT Austin), etc. We were even approached by a local FIRST team for help, but they couldn't tell us what we could do to help them (being as they already had commitment from the Mech. Eng. department, who would dwarf any mechanical help we could give). Judging by some of the responses, we could've greatly helped with the control systems and such, as it's not entirely mechanical any more. With that said, I don't think this is entirely a bad thing.
In the robots we've built, mechanical systems have typically been an afterthought (until this year). One of the robots that's been in the works for about a year has a wretched drive system. Motors are plenty good, wheels are plenty good, control system and power systems are plenty good. But the interface between the motor shafts and the wheels sucks. So I'm in the process of turning wheel hubs out of 6061 Aluminum and fixing it.
In short, it's not good for EEs to view all other disciplines as unholy (well, all other engineering disciplines, anyway. liberal arts and business are unholy). Even in doing EE sorts of things, like etching printed circuit boards, we've had to have knowledge of chemistry, and how to do mechanical things (like cutting photosensitive boards without fscking up the copper or etchant layers). I've recently been acquiring tools, such as a drill press, band saw, grinder, bench sander, MIG welder, a tap and tie set, a nice drill bit set, etc. in addition to my already existing electronics tool sets. For our newest project the mechanics are a whole major section of the project, and are being done first, and done right, with everything laid out before any building starts, just like anyone would do with a circuit board or program, and not as an afterthought.
We don't want a bunch of EEs attempting to build robots after they graduate from high school where the control systems are crippled because the mechanical systems won't/can't do what they're told. Being exposed early to mechanics is good for so-called budding EEs, although I will agree that the competition should maybe add something extra (while keeping the magical US FIRST controller box), perhaps for bonus, so teams who want to explore designing and building their own circuits can go down that path, at the risk of neglecting the rest of their design. I was personally disgusted when talking to that ex-FIRST team member (he graduated) last year, and he couldn't tell me what sort of CPU was being used, or anything.
Huh? I thought the current price was around $10k/pound. Which is nowhere near the $160/pound they're saying. NASA's reusable launch vehicle efforts, some of which have failed and some of which are still ongoing are merely aiming to lower the cost to $1000/pound. Something all these launch schemes have in common is that they seem to have some technology none of the rest of us know about, or they love throwing money away giving people rides in space for less than they cost.
I especially love it when companies start taking reservations before they have a working launch system. It should be the other way around. I was personally stoked about Rotary Rocket, they had some good tech and weren't overmarketed. Someone needs to bail them out.