Before videogames, the sources of entertainment for young men tended to involve a lot more actual violence.
Honestly I wish there was more porn in videogames, esp. with S&M. So far the highlight has been that GOW3 scene where you pin the hottie under the wheel and she writhes around.
I think Rossi probably does not have an acceptable theoretical basis for patent in any case. He would not be able to patent (even if the machine works) unless he can convince the patent office he really understands how it works and his explanation fits their understanding of things. I am skeptical on both counts (again, this is assuming it actually does work).
In fact, it's actually flattening. Remember, this is supposed to be the hottest 10 years in the last 10,000 or whatever.
This may have to with additional Antarctic accretion, or a reversal of thermal expansion driven by the La Ninas. But it seems likely that the current sea level regime will not change a whole lot as long as we have an isolated polar continent -- we are still firmly in the grip of the Antarctica-driven glaciation cycles that began some tens of millions ago. So long term, I'm much more worried about massive new glaciers forming in, say, Canada and Norway, than whether we lose some in Greenland. Cold has generally been a much harsher foe to humankind than warmth.
Polywells already operate over 2K. The advantage of IEC is that temperature is essentially just the voltage of the well, so it's relatively easy to drive these machines at >10K.
The problem in IEC is confinement and density. In primitive IEC machines, there is a physical, spherical grid which drives collisions inside the grid. Because the ions hit the grid on at least 1% of passes, the losses are too great to achieve breakeven. Additionally, without compression density is low.
The Polywell is a basically an Elmore-Tuck-Watson IEC device with a shielded anode and magnetic compression of the virtual cathode, which may give the concept good enough confinement and density to drive net power. Additionally, the instabilities that plague tokamaks are avoided; the magnetic field has good curvature at all points.
Results for WB-8 (which has.8T magnets that will tell us a lot about scaling) are due in April 2011; at that point they decide whether to approve WB-8.1 which will attempt a p-B11 reaction.
The Navy contract has an option for an honest-to-God 100MW fusion reactor if results are good, so this thing is for real.
The advantage Polywell has over the ITER path is power density. Even if it works as well as advertised, the most advanced ITER follow-on design still has a power density a few orders of magnitude below light water reactors, meaning tokamaks will probably never compete with fission plants. Polywell, OTOH, operates at high beta, so it has a power density that makes it economically competitive.
The Maldives holds the record for being the lowest country in the world, with a maximum natural ground level of only 2.3 m (7½ ft) with the average being only 1.5 m above sea level, though in areas where construction exists this has been increased to several metres. Over the last century, sea levels have risen about 20 centimetres (8 in);[citation needed] further rises of the ocean could threaten the existence of Maldives. However, around 1970 the sea level there dropped 20-30 cm.[10] In November of 2008, President Mohamed Nasheed announced plans to look into purchasing new land in India, Sri Lanka, and Australia, due to his concerns about global warming and the possibility of much of the island being inundated with water from rising sea levels. Current estimates place sea level rise at 59 cm by the year 2100.
The new sea level curve of the Maldives; present level reached ~4000 BP, sea level strongly oscillating for regional dynamic reasons, a drop in sea level ~1970, no rise in the last 30 years.
Depends who you believe. It's not like we had weather stations everywhere back then.
We can't even get today's temperatures right. This week, Hansen announced October 2008 was the hottest October ever... and then the "skeptics" pointed out he had re-used data from September.
The likely global rise in sea levels for the next century is much less than the tidal surge. So they've either been flooding all along, or are going to be fine. In either case, this is silly.
It's perhaps worth noting, when the internal combustion engine was first discussed, it was also believed by some engineers, accustomed to steam engines, to essentially violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics because they assumed the heat of combustion would dissipate before it could do any useful work like moving a piston -- and to boot, the ridiculous contraption required work in the form of cooling to function!
"In spherical Penning fusion devices, a spherical cloud of electrons, confined in a Penning-like trap, creates the ion-confining electrostatic well. Fusion energy gains for these systems have been calculated in optimistic conditions (i.e., spherically uniform electrostatic well, no collisional ion-electron interactions, single ion species) using a bounce-averaged Fokkerâ"Planck (BAFP) model. Results show that steady-state distributions in which the Maxwellian ion population is dominant correspond to lowest ion recirculation powers (and hence highest fusion energy gains). It is also shown that realistic parabolic-like wells result in better energy gains than square wells, particularly at large well depths (>100 kV). Operating regimes with fusion power to ion input power ratios (Q-value) >100 have been identified."
Here was Bussard's take:
"Ions spend less than 1/1000 of their lifetime in the dense, high energy but low cross-section core region, and the ratio of Coulomb energy exchange cross-section to fusion crosssection is much less than this, thus thermalization (Maxwellianization) can not occur during a single pass of ions through the core. While some up- and down- scattering does occur in such a single pass, this is so small that edge region collisionality (where the ions are dense and âoecoldâoe) anneals this out at each pass through the system, thus avoiding buildup of energy spreading in the ion population (Ref. 14). Both populations operate in non-LTE modes throughout their lifetime in the system. This is an inherent feature of these centrally-convergent, ion-focussing, driven, dynamic systems, and one not found (or even possible) in conventional magnetic confinement fusion devices."
You don't necessarily need to add energy to reorder a system, if reordering puts things back to their lowest energies. Consider some balls lined up at the bottom of a V-shaped well. You disorder them, they bounce around in the V but reorder at the bottom of the well again because that's their lowest energy point. It required energy to disorder them, but no additional energy was added to reorder them.
Bussard's Polywell approach is pretty promising, and is being funded by the Navy at the moment under a contract that finishes up in August. There's lots of discussion of the concept here:
There's some talk that an attempt to build a Polywell reactor similar in power to ITER might be funded if current experiments go well. It would cost about 1/100th of what ITER would.
A few rich lawyers will get richer, a few more suspected terrorists will go unmonitored, everyone's phone bills will go up.../victory?
We were all freaked out after 9/11. We all, Dem and Repub, did what we thought we had to in order to avoid another 9/11. If we're going to pass laws now saying "maybe we went too far," OK, great, I agree on privacy grounds. And if we're not going to waterboard any more than the three people we already did, okay, moral high ground, and maybe we can still avoid terrorist attacks without the intel that provided in the past. But let's not play gotcha in the graveyard.
"a)We know the change in radiative forcing is due to greenhouse gases."
No, we don't. The correlation is not strong enough for that. At times, temperatures have decreased even as amounts of CO2 and other gasses went up.
See, here's the problem: you can't just sit down and write an equation for the amount of temperature rise a given increase of x mass in CO2 would create. If it were that easy, there would be no controversy. So instead, we have all these computer models, which plug in the appropriate warming factor to get the results that match actual temperatures. There could be any number of factors not included in the models that are actually causing warming.
So why do most researchers say it's greenhouse gasses? Because we know greenhouse gasses are increasing, and are continuing to increase. That makes it convenient for two reasons: one, it roughly tracks current temperature data, which are also near highs. And two, and perhaps more importantly, it creates the possibility of a future catastrophe, which = $$$$$$ and importance.
Remember, in the 1970s Hansen was making computer models that showed global COOLING -- and his team was using that model to argue the same exact thing as they are today: we need to limit pollution or the world will face disaster. That's far too convenient.
Maybe CO2 is the primary forcing agent. But that's far from certain.
It's hard to take Hansen seriously when he says global warming is a huge crisis, but doesn't even take the issue seriously enough to release the raw data and algorithms used to calculate the GISS data. Credible doubts have been raised; things like air conditioner exhaust, light bulbs, and other sources of bias have been identified, and now we find there are errors in the algorithms too. Maybe the rest of the data is perfect, but sunlight is the best disinfectant.
If Hansen really cares about climate change, then he should release all the relevent GISS information for public scrutiny. Unless he believes a threat to his ego or funding is a bigger crisis than global warming, it's hard to understand why he would not do so.
It's also difficult to escape the fact his response, attacking the motives of critics, is not exactly the model of a dispassionate scientist. When did science become the arena of highly paid polemicists? Surely we can do better, on such an important issue.
It can't produce usable power from the gravity/magnetic fields of the Earth, Sun, or galaxy. They're present, but they're all far too diffuse.
That said, it's not impossible someone figured out how to draw a very tiny amount of power, enough to perhaps make something tiny spin to show "it's working!"
But I'm guessing permanant magnets. Those Sonship guys were selling those forever, along with the magic laundry ball.
Yes, I've learned that you can't tell the difference between reasonable emergency powers and hysterical claims of infringed rights based on zero actual occurrences.
And neither is this Constitutional power. Do you think Lincoln wasn't intercepting Confederate mail while suspending habeas corpus? If we got suspicious mail from Germany in WW II, do you think FDR wasn't opening it while putting Asian-Americans in concentration camps, summarily executing unlawful combatants (today they get a Caribbean vacation), forcing the press to give him positive war coverage, and wiretapping the press and his political opponents?
Sheesh, no one even glances at history anymore. They just scream "FASCISM!" at the drop of a hat.
The real problem with climate change advocates isn't their fuzzy science, it's their Luddite solutions.
They mostly talk about emissions control solutions that involve trimming around 1% off of world GDP, and may not have much effect on climate change anyway. That's about $500 billion every year. For that much money, we'd be much better off trying to build some kind of active climate control systems (space mirrors, massive carbon sinks, etc) that are more likely to have a real effect and not leave us poorer with little or nothing to show for it.
If any exist, we should start finding them in the next 10-20 years.
Step 2: Build interstellar craft
This is the tough part. Whether FTL remains a pipe dream or new physics turn out to allow it, we'll either need space elevators or a massive new source of energy (cheap fusion, maybe) to get the huge amounts of mass into orbit. (Fusion power would be used to create the massive amounts of fuel, not power craft directly).
Step 3: Seed planet with bioengineered life
We would probably send a very smart AI probe to do this, armed with bioengineered terraforming microbes. The trip would be very very long, but I think it could conceivably leave by 2056.
Step 4: Move in!
Hopefully the AI will also build us some nice beachfront condos to enjoy the purple sunsets and double moons. Either the colonists would be frozen for the trip, or spend the duration awake and wandering around the ship, fornicating and filling themselves with flavored fizzy fermented fruit juices. Arrival would be timed for opening of beachfront condos.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wait, no they aren't.
Before videogames, the sources of entertainment for young men tended to involve a lot more actual violence.
Honestly I wish there was more porn in videogames, esp. with S&M. So far the highlight has been that GOW3 scene where you pin the hottie under the wheel and she writhes around.
Right, because it's unethical to give somebody living on $1/day a chance to make $10/day.
Threat of violence =/= religiously controversial statement.
Unfortunately, there's also a thing called China.
Secret > patent.
I think Rossi probably does not have an acceptable theoretical basis for patent in any case. He would not be able to patent (even if the machine works) unless he can convince the patent office he really understands how it works and his explanation fits their understanding of things. I am skeptical on both counts (again, this is assuming it actually does work).
Real median income has been stagnant since around 1999, but it sure as hell hasn't been falling for two generations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States#Over_time_-_by_Race_.26_Sex
Heck, today's poverty line is about where the median income was in the 1950s (yes, adjusted for inflation).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/05/new-sea-level-page-from-university-of-colorado-now-up/
In fact, it's actually flattening. Remember, this is supposed to be the hottest 10 years in the last 10,000 or whatever.
This may have to with additional Antarctic accretion, or a reversal of thermal expansion driven by the La Ninas. But it seems likely that the current sea level regime will not change a whole lot as long as we have an isolated polar continent -- we are still firmly in the grip of the Antarctica-driven glaciation cycles that began some tens of millions ago. So long term, I'm much more worried about massive new glaciers forming in, say, Canada and Norway, than whether we lose some in Greenland. Cold has generally been a much harsher foe to humankind than warmth.
A lot more discussion on PWs here.
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php
Richard Nebel (who is running the project) left a couple hundred comments but has been quiet since the last contract was awarded.
Polywells already operate over 2K. The advantage of IEC is that temperature is essentially just the voltage of the well, so it's relatively easy to drive these machines at >10K.
The problem in IEC is confinement and density. In primitive IEC machines, there is a physical, spherical grid which drives collisions inside the grid. Because the ions hit the grid on at least 1% of passes, the losses are too great to achieve breakeven. Additionally, without compression density is low.
The Polywell is a basically an Elmore-Tuck-Watson IEC device with a shielded anode and magnetic compression of the virtual cathode, which may give the concept good enough confinement and density to drive net power. Additionally, the instabilities that plague tokamaks are avoided; the magnetic field has good curvature at all points.
Results for WB-8 (which has .8T magnets that will tell us a lot about scaling) are due in April 2011; at that point they decide whether to approve WB-8.1 which will attempt a p-B11 reaction.
The Navy contract has an option for an honest-to-God 100MW fusion reactor if results are good, so this thing is for real.
The advantage Polywell has over the ITER path is power density. Even if it works as well as advertised, the most advanced ITER follow-on design still has a power density a few orders of magnitude below light water reactors, meaning tokamaks will probably never compete with fission plants. Polywell, OTOH, operates at high beta, so it has a power density that makes it economically competitive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
The Maldives holds the record for being the lowest country in the world, with a maximum natural ground level of only 2.3 m (7½ ft) with the average being only 1.5 m above sea level, though in areas where construction exists this has been increased to several metres. Over the last century, sea levels have risen about 20 centimetres (8 in);[citation needed] further rises of the ocean could threaten the existence of Maldives. However, around 1970 the sea level there dropped 20-30 cm.[10] In November of 2008, President Mohamed Nasheed announced plans to look into purchasing new land in India, Sri Lanka, and Australia, due to his concerns about global warming and the possibility of much of the island being inundated with water from rising sea levels. Current estimates place sea level rise at 59 cm by the year 2100.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maldives
This seems to say there has been no rise in the last 30 years.
http://www.schmanck.de/KlimaWiss/Morner.INQUA.1.7.pdf
The new sea level curve of the Maldives; present level reached ~4000 BP, sea
level strongly oscillating for regional dynamic reasons, a drop in sea level
~1970, no rise in the last 30 years.
Depends who you believe. It's not like we had weather stations everywhere back then.
We can't even get today's temperatures right. This week, Hansen announced October 2008 was the hottest October ever... and then the "skeptics" pointed out he had re-used data from September.
The likely global rise in sea levels for the next century is much less than the tidal surge. So they've either been flooding all along, or are going to be fine. In either case, this is silly.
They get the game right, and screw the deadline.
It's perhaps worth noting, when the internal combustion engine was first discussed, it was also believed by some engineers, accustomed to steam engines, to essentially violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics because they assumed the heat of combustion would dissipate before it could do any useful work like moving a piston -- and to boot, the ridiculous contraption required work in the form of cooling to function!
"In particular Bussard claimed that the monoenergetic velocity distribution in the plasma was periodically restored without input of energy."
Ion upscattering was addressed pretty conclusively by Chacon here:
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PHPAEN000007000011004547000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes
"In spherical Penning fusion devices, a spherical cloud of electrons, confined in a Penning-like trap, creates the ion-confining electrostatic well. Fusion energy gains for these systems have been calculated in optimistic conditions (i.e., spherically uniform electrostatic well, no collisional ion-electron interactions, single ion species) using a bounce-averaged Fokkerâ"Planck (BAFP) model. Results show that steady-state distributions in which the Maxwellian ion population is dominant correspond to lowest ion recirculation powers (and hence highest fusion energy gains). It is also shown that realistic parabolic-like wells result in better energy gains than square wells, particularly at large well depths (>100 kV). Operating regimes with fusion power to ion input power ratios (Q-value) >100 have been identified."
Here was Bussard's take:
"Ions spend less than 1/1000 of their lifetime in the dense, high energy but low cross-section core region, and the ratio of Coulomb energy exchange cross-section to fusion crosssection is much less than this, thus thermalization (Maxwellianization) can not occur during a single pass of ions through the core. While some up- and down- scattering does occur in such a single pass, this is so small that edge region collisionality (where the ions are dense and âoecoldâoe) anneals this out at each pass through the system, thus avoiding buildup of energy spreading in the ion population (Ref. 14). Both populations operate in non-LTE modes throughout their lifetime in the system. This is an inherent feature of these centrally-convergent, ion-focussing, driven, dynamic systems, and one not found (or even possible) in conventional magnetic confinement fusion devices."
You don't necessarily need to add energy to reorder a system, if reordering puts things back to their lowest energies. Consider some balls lined up at the bottom of a V-shaped well. You disorder them, they bounce around in the V but reorder at the bottom of the well again because that's their lowest energy point. It required energy to disorder them, but no additional energy was added to reorder them.
Bussard's Polywell approach is pretty promising, and is being funded by the Navy at the moment under a contract that finishes up in August. There's lots of discussion of the concept here:
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php
There's some talk that an attempt to build a Polywell reactor similar in power to ITER might be funded if current experiments go well. It would cost about 1/100th of what ITER would.
A few rich lawyers will get richer, a few more suspected terrorists will go unmonitored, everyone's phone bills will go up... /victory?
We were all freaked out after 9/11. We all, Dem and Repub, did what we thought we had to in order to avoid another 9/11. If we're going to pass laws now saying "maybe we went too far," OK, great, I agree on privacy grounds. And if we're not going to waterboard any more than the three people we already did, okay, moral high ground, and maybe we can still avoid terrorist attacks without the intel that provided in the past. But let's not play gotcha in the graveyard.
"a)We know the change in radiative forcing is due to greenhouse gases."
No, we don't. The correlation is not strong enough for that. At times, temperatures have decreased even as amounts of CO2 and other gasses went up.
See, here's the problem: you can't just sit down and write an equation for the amount of temperature rise a given increase of x mass in CO2 would create. If it were that easy, there would be no controversy. So instead, we have all these computer models, which plug in the appropriate warming factor to get the results that match actual temperatures. There could be any number of factors not included in the models that are actually causing warming.
So why do most researchers say it's greenhouse gasses? Because we know greenhouse gasses are increasing, and are continuing to increase. That makes it convenient for two reasons: one, it roughly tracks current temperature data, which are also near highs. And two, and perhaps more importantly, it creates the possibility of a future catastrophe, which = $$$$$$ and importance.
Remember, in the 1970s Hansen was making computer models that showed global COOLING -- and his team was using that model to argue the same exact thing as they are today: we need to limit pollution or the world will face disaster. That's far too convenient.
Maybe CO2 is the primary forcing agent. But that's far from certain.
It's hard to take Hansen seriously when he says global warming is a huge crisis, but doesn't even take the issue seriously enough to release the raw data and algorithms used to calculate the GISS data. Credible doubts have been raised; things like air conditioner exhaust, light bulbs, and other sources of bias have been identified, and now we find there are errors in the algorithms too. Maybe the rest of the data is perfect, but sunlight is the best disinfectant.
If Hansen really cares about climate change, then he should release all the relevent GISS information for public scrutiny. Unless he believes a threat to his ego or funding is a bigger crisis than global warming, it's hard to understand why he would not do so.
It's also difficult to escape the fact his response, attacking the motives of critics, is not exactly the model of a dispassionate scientist. When did science become the arena of highly paid polemicists? Surely we can do better, on such an important issue.
It can't produce usable power from the gravity/magnetic fields of the Earth, Sun, or galaxy. They're present, but they're all far too diffuse.
That said, it's not impossible someone figured out how to draw a very tiny amount of power, enough to perhaps make something tiny spin to show "it's working!"
But I'm guessing permanant magnets. Those Sonship guys were selling those forever, along with the magic laundry ball.
Yes, I've learned that you can't tell the difference between reasonable emergency powers and hysterical claims of infringed rights based on zero actual occurrences.
And neither is this Constitutional power. Do you think Lincoln wasn't intercepting Confederate mail while suspending habeas corpus? If we got suspicious mail from Germany in WW II, do you think FDR wasn't opening it while putting Asian-Americans in concentration camps, summarily executing unlawful combatants (today they get a Caribbean vacation), forcing the press to give him positive war coverage, and wiretapping the press and his political opponents?
Sheesh, no one even glances at history anymore. They just scream "FASCISM!" at the drop of a hat.
The real problem with climate change advocates isn't their fuzzy science, it's their Luddite solutions.
They mostly talk about emissions control solutions that involve trimming around 1% off of world GDP, and may not have much effect on climate change anyway. That's about $500 billion every year. For that much money, we'd be much better off trying to build some kind of active climate control systems (space mirrors, massive carbon sinks, etc) that are more likely to have a real effect and not leave us poorer with little or nothing to show for it.
Not many countries have the United States' commitment to freedom of speech. Most other countries would have censored the internet to some extent.
Yes, he's completely powerless, except for commanding a quarter-million ISF and a budget of tens of billions.
I'm sure he pales next to YOUR power. I bet the United States government even lets you try U.S. soldiers in your own court.
Step 1: Identify habitable planets
If any exist, we should start finding them in the next 10-20 years.
Step 2: Build interstellar craft
This is the tough part. Whether FTL remains a pipe dream or new physics turn out to allow it, we'll either need space elevators or a massive new source of energy (cheap fusion, maybe) to get the huge amounts of mass into orbit. (Fusion power would be used to create the massive amounts of fuel, not power craft directly).
Step 3: Seed planet with bioengineered life
We would probably send a very smart AI probe to do this, armed with bioengineered terraforming microbes. The trip would be very very long, but I think it could conceivably leave by 2056.
Step 4: Move in!
Hopefully the AI will also build us some nice beachfront condos to enjoy the purple sunsets and double moons. Either the colonists would be frozen for the trip, or spend the duration awake and wandering around the ship, fornicating and filling themselves with flavored fizzy fermented fruit juices. Arrival would be timed for opening of beachfront condos.