There are plenty of companies that would quite willingly give him their tech and 24/7 customer support, gratis. Intel has been such a "sponsor" of Hawking for years. However, because this technology must work for him all the time, and because he can't spend his days trying to learn the latest new-fangled thing you want him to try, he himself is slow to adopt new technology. Having a computer freeze up is bad enough for most folks. For him it means he is stranded and speechless until someone checks in on him.
Could you please explain why one of the most brilliant men of all time is sitting in a 70's era wheel chair using a fucking joystick and his cheek to try and type words
There are several reasons. One of the biggest reasons, which is also the reason space probes have seemingly antiquated computing power, is that it has to work. EEG-based headcaps for playing video games is great, but how good is the fidelity? How good does it do when you need to be able to use it 24/7? Face it: most consumer electronics is simply not robust enough nor reliable enough for this kind of application. There's a good reason you and everyone else calls it "shit that's damn near available at WalMart."
A second reason is cost: the kinds of technology you are talking about it really f*&#ing expensive. Who will pay for the R&D to create it? Who will pay for it to purchase onesey-twosey? How many people do you know who are in his position, medically, yet have it means, financially? That "shit that's damn near available at WalMart" is cheap because it is mass produced for paying customers. If you want to help this man and those like him, figure out how to leverage the economies of scale that enable consumer technologies to be cheap and ubiquitous.
I'm not sure I would complain about their yard. But what I would hope is that events like these gradually bring about the change in mindset in China that occurred in the United States over the last half century. I hope they come to realize that they can't treat their own country as a toxic waste dump forever and not face dire consequences. The legacy of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and EPA are just that: clean water, clean air, and environmental protection. There have been costs associated with all of them,sure, but the societal and economic benefits have drastically outweighed the costs. China ought to do the same, not because the U.S. or any outside group tells them to, but because it will be in their own self interest. If the Chinese can bring themselves around to environmental regulation, they will be a lot better off socially, medically, and economically. And ya know what, the United States will be better off, too. Yes, products the U.S. imports will be more expensive, but that will have two important beneficial effects: 1) less cheap crap will be produced and sold and 2) there will be sound economic reasons to bring more manufacturing back to the U.S.
Mod parent up; I already posted in thread, so I can't.
We'd already be mining the moons of Saturn if atomic drives hadn't been scuttled.
Your endorsement falls flat when looked at in context. You are talking about atomic drives: hot gasses or ion propulsion from a fission reactor. The parent was talking about harnessing the power of the sun. Grandparent was talking about the difficulties in creating antimatter. Y'all need to get on the same page!
The use of the word "revealed" seemed odd to me to - the shutdown isn't something new or unexpected. But, given the literacy and intelligence of science journalism these days, I'm just glad that they managed to write the article without once mentioning "God Particle."
I agree. It irks me to no end when journalists, even science or engineering journalists, conflate (units of) energy and power. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, since hardly anyone else gets it right either. Nor, it seems, does anyone care. No wonder we can't have meaningful conversations about energy, where it comes from, and how we use it.
Newly proposed wind farm to produce 100 megawatts of energy per month.
MW are not units of energy. Megawatts per month makes no sense whatsoever.
Or...
Newly proposed wind farm to produce 100 megawatts of power per month.
Power is already a time-rate unit, throwing the "month" in there just confuses things.
Or...
Newly proposed wind farm to produce enough energy for 30,000 homes.
Over what time scale? Did they mean average power? What is the typical "home" journalists and PR folk use for this drivel? Homes consume power in different amounts - a highrise condo in NYC is very different than a McMansion in the 'burbs. The same house, occupied by different people, will use power at vastly different rates.
Or...
The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120 V battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat
Unlike helium, which is so tenuous it escapes the atmosphere, xenon is a relatively heavy gas that sticks around. It's not particularly abundant (less than 100 parts per billion in the atmosphere) but it can be pretty easily separated out. According to wikipedia's references, annual xenon production is 5000-7000 m^3 (at STP), or about 35,000 kg. (This reference estimates 9000 m^3/yr, or 53,000 kg.) So 770 kg used in one multi-year experiment isn't such a big deal. When it is used in various applications, it tends to return to the atmosphere, from whence it can be separated again.
Since when have you had to sign exclusivity agreements to connect a battery to another battery?
Whether you are aware or not, you have to pay a license fee to incorporate USB into any device, too. I'm not defending Apple, nor making any judgment about this project. But, yes, licenses need to be obtained, and it is well known that Apple retains a choke hold on their connectors and licenses them only quite sparingly. Arbitrary? Yes. Capricious? Yes. Ought to be loosened and made less exclusive? Definitely. But it's also well known and should have been anticipated.
If you are looking to build a system (I will assume a desktop), then don't worry about waiting for cost parity. There is really no reason to put most of your files on an SSD, unless you are building a server that requires lots of random I/O requests. Instead, go both ways: purchase a modestly-sized SSD for the OS and Apps (64 GB), and a conventional spinning disc for bulk storage (photos, video, etc., 500 - 4000 GB). Sized appropriately, you can configure a system that gives you the speed where you want it and capacity where you want it for a decent price.
Yes, I've been driving for decades. I never said that the head lamps were 200 W electrical. The electrical rating nfor headlights is in the range of 50-75 W. However, I was careful to put my estimate in terms of mechanical power, because that's what the internal combustion engine produces. The alternator in a typical automobile, driven by the serpentine belt, creates the electrical power for the rest of the car, and it's a terribly inefficient process at that. Add in resistive losses from wiring, fuses, etc., and I would be surprised if the conversion efficiency of mechanical power to electricity at the headlamp terminals is above 50%. So, the mechanical power demand of the headlights is 2* (50 to 75 W), well within the range I originally stated.
I live in an area of the northeast, where I know that my generating potential and load factor is substantially lower than the "nameplate" rating on any PV equipment I would install. That doesn't mean I couldn't do it, but I know that I would get a substantially greater ROI if I took the same array and installed it, say, on a similar home in New Mexico. There are similar situations (renters that can't or won't make capital investments in property they don't own, people in highrise condos that have power requirements far beyond what the footprint could provide using solar) where installing solar on one's own domicile juts doesn't make sense. I don't plan on moving to New Mexico, but I still want to see the widespread adoption of solar, and put my money where my mouth is.
It would be nice if there was some mechanism, other than semi-formal arrangements among friends (e.g., people I know in California and Nevada), for me to front the tab to get solar installed on their house in return for (contractual) repayment over the years. This is kinda what Elon Musk's SolarCity is doing on a grand scale. They just had an IPO yesterday, but chasing IPOs is a loser's bet in my opinion. The renewables sector more generally has been a terrible investment for years because companies have been losing money left and right - so many big players driving down costs. I'd rather not play the odds of a whole sector, but rather invest in a single project that I have some control over.
Damn, I'm gonna start driving without my headlights on to get better gas mileage
Actually, driving without your headlights on would give you better gas mileage, but not because of the radiative pressure. The electrical power that goes into the headlights is generated, quite inefficiently, by the internal combustion engine. So turning off your headlights will reduce your engine's (mechanical) power demand by perhaps 100-200 watts. Then again, cruising down the highway at 100 kph requires many kilowatts of power, so the effect of the headlights is just noise. You could get the same results by reducing your speed by 1 kph, or properly inflating your tires, or leaving excess mass at home, or not accelerating as fast, or, or, or....
This is science kid, leave it for people who can read a full paragraph without needing a red bull.
Err no.... This is a fluff piece....
IEEE Spectrum is not a science journal, per se, it is a (free) general interest publication from a professional organization. It's Popular Science, actually well researched and written, without unfounded hype about The Next Big Thing. Most importantly, it has with significant technical content (not dumbed down or spoon-fed) that's accessible to the curious, without first requiring a PhD in that particular field. IEEE also publishes over 150 journals with hard core articles, if all that matters to you are the details.
but the big finds on these moons are going to have to wait for future generations of equipment that can drill through kilometers of ice
I always figured that a Europa mission wouldn't drill its way down and bring material back to the surface, but rather would have its science instrumentation in a pod that would melt its way down. The lander would be a base station on the surface, mostly for communication, and the probe would use an RTG to gradually melt its way down, paying out a tether cable behind it. The melt-probe is on a one-way mission; the hole would progressively freeze behind it. Since the probe has the RTG, it may be that the surface lander gets powered by way of the tether, rather than having an independent supply. This configuration introduces significant mission risk, if the tether gets severed by shifting ice for instance. But risk is a part of exploration.
That's a really neat infographic. It stands to be updated, however. Phobos-Grunt was a total failure - didn't even leave Earth orbit. Mars Curiosity has successfully landed, but it's technically too soon to see if the mission is a success (two years operating on the surface is a mission success criteria). MAVEN looks likely to launch next year, but ExoMars (2016) may or may not make it off the ground.
a lot of the stuff that was viable for spacecraft 30 years ago is pretty cold now (see the Voyager probes, for example, which are running on extremely low power).
The halflife of Pu-238 is 88 years. The Voyagers' Pu is only about a half-of-a-halflife old. The falloff in power for a Pu RTG is due largely to material degradation in the thermocouples that generate electricity, not due to a drastic falloff in heat.
"Shortest Route" algorithms, such as the traveling salesman problem, are extremely difficult. Sometimes humans can intuit a better solution, but only when the number of spots to hit is small. For a warehouse with millions of items not already organized, it's impossible for a human. The best you can hope for without throwing using every computer on the planet is an approximate solution, which again for large datasets isn't really guaranteed to be all that good.
So long as there are accompanying moratoria on new copyright bills, perhaps the/. crowd can get behind it.
But as any patent examiner can tell you - adding the phrase "on the internet" to everything is all the rage these days. Would the passage of this bill mean that the next congressional session can't do anything, because everything is related to the internet? What about privacy protection, the upcoming FISA renewal, patent reform, etc.? Probably those are pressing areas, related to the internet, that are in need or some action.
you missed the joke I was trying to make: the summary was talking about the spectra being different from natural elements. As best we know, the elements (carbon, chlorine, etc.) on some distant planet world are identical, interchangeable, to those here on earth or anywhere else in the Universe. So, if we are looking for exotic spectra, we should be looking for those coming from exotic, not-naturally-occurring molecules. Talk to a chemist: if you're conflating elements with molecules, or claiming that one oxygen isn't identical to another, ur doin it wrong.
CFCs can be easily recognized in planetary atmospheres because their atmospheric 'fingerprint' (i.e. chemical spectra) is very different from natural elements, and are a tell-tale sign that life on the surface has advanced industrial capabilities.
Are these CFCs made from exotic kinds of matter? Are we looking for advanced civilizations that have been able to synthesize new forms of chlorine, fluorine, carbon, etc., that are different than those that arise from stellar nucleosynthesis? No? In that case, we should be looking for spectra different from naturally occurring molecules, not elements.
Except that oceans actually release CO2 as they get warmer
Well... yes and no. It is true that a warm fluid - be it the ocean or Coca-Cola - cannot hold as much CO2 as the same fluid when cold. So when a cold fluid that is in equilibrium with the atmosphere warms, a portion of the dissolved gas is given off. But that's not the only thing that is going on. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are also increasing, and on the whole that is what is forcing CO2 concentrations in the ocean. The ocean is far from being saturated with CO2 at any temperature, which means that the concentration of CO2 in the ocean is driven almost entirely by the concentration in the atmosphere. On the whole, these must be in equilibrium with each other, and they are able to do so pretty quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of companies that would quite willingly give him their tech and 24/7 customer support, gratis. Intel has been such a "sponsor" of Hawking for years. However, because this technology must work for him all the time, and because he can't spend his days trying to learn the latest new-fangled thing you want him to try, he himself is slow to adopt new technology. Having a computer freeze up is bad enough for most folks. For him it means he is stranded and speechless until someone checks in on him.
There are several reasons. One of the biggest reasons, which is also the reason space probes have seemingly antiquated computing power, is that it has to work. EEG-based headcaps for playing video games is great, but how good is the fidelity? How good does it do when you need to be able to use it 24/7? Face it: most consumer electronics is simply not robust enough nor reliable enough for this kind of application. There's a good reason you and everyone else calls it "shit that's damn near available at WalMart."
A second reason is cost: the kinds of technology you are talking about it really f*&#ing expensive. Who will pay for the R&D to create it? Who will pay for it to purchase onesey-twosey? How many people do you know who are in his position, medically, yet have it means, financially? That "shit that's damn near available at WalMart" is cheap because it is mass produced for paying customers. If you want to help this man and those like him, figure out how to leverage the economies of scale that enable consumer technologies to be cheap and ubiquitous.
I'm not sure I would complain about their yard. But what I would hope is that events like these gradually bring about the change in mindset in China that occurred in the United States over the last half century. I hope they come to realize that they can't treat their own country as a toxic waste dump forever and not face dire consequences. The legacy of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and EPA are just that: clean water, clean air, and environmental protection. There have been costs associated with all of them,sure, but the societal and economic benefits have drastically outweighed the costs. China ought to do the same, not because the U.S. or any outside group tells them to, but because it will be in their own self interest. If the Chinese can bring themselves around to environmental regulation, they will be a lot better off socially, medically, and economically. And ya know what, the United States will be better off, too. Yes, products the U.S. imports will be more expensive, but that will have two important beneficial effects: 1) less cheap crap will be produced and sold and 2) there will be sound economic reasons to bring more manufacturing back to the U.S.
Your endorsement falls flat when looked at in context. You are talking about atomic drives: hot gasses or ion propulsion from a fission reactor. The parent was talking about harnessing the power of the sun. Grandparent was talking about the difficulties in creating antimatter. Y'all need to get on the same page!
The use of the word "revealed" seemed odd to me to - the shutdown isn't something new or unexpected. But, given the literacy and intelligence of science journalism these days, I'm just glad that they managed to write the article without once mentioning "God Particle."
MW are not units of energy. Megawatts per month makes no sense whatsoever.
Or...
Power is already a time-rate unit, throwing the "month" in there just confuses things.
Or...
Over what time scale? Did they mean average power? What is the typical "home" journalists and PR folk use for this drivel? Homes consume power in different amounts - a highrise condo in NYC is very different than a McMansion in the 'burbs. The same house, occupied by different people, will use power at vastly different rates.
Or...
Don't even get me started.
Unlike helium, which is so tenuous it escapes the atmosphere, xenon is a relatively heavy gas that sticks around. It's not particularly abundant (less than 100 parts per billion in the atmosphere) but it can be pretty easily separated out. According to wikipedia's references, annual xenon production is 5000-7000 m^3 (at STP), or about 35,000 kg. (This reference estimates 9000 m^3/yr, or 53,000 kg.) So 770 kg used in one multi-year experiment isn't such a big deal. When it is used in various applications, it tends to return to the atmosphere, from whence it can be separated again.
Also not included in your calcs is the velocity "lost" due to escaping from the sun's gravity well. Still, it's a hell of a lot faster.
Only problem is coming up with a multi-kilowatt electrical source that far out in space. Voyager's RTGs were only a few hundred watts, I believe.
OK, so what have you accomplished lately that utilized your brain to its full, Ramanujan-like potential?
Of which there are several hundred million?
Whether you are aware or not, you have to pay a license fee to incorporate USB into any device, too. I'm not defending Apple, nor making any judgment about this project. But, yes, licenses need to be obtained, and it is well known that Apple retains a choke hold on their connectors and licenses them only quite sparingly. Arbitrary? Yes. Capricious? Yes. Ought to be loosened and made less exclusive? Definitely. But it's also well known and should have been anticipated.
If you are looking to build a system (I will assume a desktop), then don't worry about waiting for cost parity. There is really no reason to put most of your files on an SSD, unless you are building a server that requires lots of random I/O requests. Instead, go both ways: purchase a modestly-sized SSD for the OS and Apps (64 GB), and a conventional spinning disc for bulk storage (photos, video, etc., 500 - 4000 GB). Sized appropriately, you can configure a system that gives you the speed where you want it and capacity where you want it for a decent price.
Yes, I've been driving for decades. I never said that the head lamps were 200 W electrical. The electrical rating nfor headlights is in the range of 50-75 W. However, I was careful to put my estimate in terms of mechanical power, because that's what the internal combustion engine produces. The alternator in a typical automobile, driven by the serpentine belt, creates the electrical power for the rest of the car, and it's a terribly inefficient process at that. Add in resistive losses from wiring, fuses, etc., and I would be surprised if the conversion efficiency of mechanical power to electricity at the headlamp terminals is above 50%. So, the mechanical power demand of the headlights is 2* (50 to 75 W), well within the range I originally stated.
I live in an area of the northeast, where I know that my generating potential and load factor is substantially lower than the "nameplate" rating on any PV equipment I would install. That doesn't mean I couldn't do it, but I know that I would get a substantially greater ROI if I took the same array and installed it, say, on a similar home in New Mexico. There are similar situations (renters that can't or won't make capital investments in property they don't own, people in highrise condos that have power requirements far beyond what the footprint could provide using solar) where installing solar on one's own domicile juts doesn't make sense. I don't plan on moving to New Mexico, but I still want to see the widespread adoption of solar, and put my money where my mouth is.
It would be nice if there was some mechanism, other than semi-formal arrangements among friends (e.g., people I know in California and Nevada), for me to front the tab to get solar installed on their house in return for (contractual) repayment over the years. This is kinda what Elon Musk's SolarCity is doing on a grand scale. They just had an IPO yesterday, but chasing IPOs is a loser's bet in my opinion. The renewables sector more generally has been a terrible investment for years because companies have been losing money left and right - so many big players driving down costs. I'd rather not play the odds of a whole sector, but rather invest in a single project that I have some control over.
Anyone have any suggestions?
Actually, driving without your headlights on would give you better gas mileage, but not because of the radiative pressure. The electrical power that goes into the headlights is generated, quite inefficiently, by the internal combustion engine. So turning off your headlights will reduce your engine's (mechanical) power demand by perhaps 100-200 watts. Then again, cruising down the highway at 100 kph requires many kilowatts of power, so the effect of the headlights is just noise. You could get the same results by reducing your speed by 1 kph, or properly inflating your tires, or leaving excess mass at home, or not accelerating as fast, or, or, or....
IEEE Spectrum is not a science journal, per se, it is a (free) general interest publication from a professional organization. It's Popular Science, actually well researched and written, without unfounded hype about The Next Big Thing. Most importantly, it has with significant technical content (not dumbed down or spoon-fed) that's accessible to the curious, without first requiring a PhD in that particular field. IEEE also publishes over 150 journals with hard core articles, if all that matters to you are the details.
I always figured that a Europa mission wouldn't drill its way down and bring material back to the surface, but rather would have its science instrumentation in a pod that would melt its way down. The lander would be a base station on the surface, mostly for communication, and the probe would use an RTG to gradually melt its way down, paying out a tether cable behind it. The melt-probe is on a one-way mission; the hole would progressively freeze behind it. Since the probe has the RTG, it may be that the surface lander gets powered by way of the tether, rather than having an independent supply. This configuration introduces significant mission risk, if the tether gets severed by shifting ice for instance. But risk is a part of exploration.
That's a really neat infographic. It stands to be updated, however. Phobos-Grunt was a total failure - didn't even leave Earth orbit. Mars Curiosity has successfully landed, but it's technically too soon to see if the mission is a success (two years operating on the surface is a mission success criteria). MAVEN looks likely to launch next year, but ExoMars (2016) may or may not make it off the ground.
The halflife of Pu-238 is 88 years. The Voyagers' Pu is only about a half-of-a-halflife old. The falloff in power for a Pu RTG is due largely to material degradation in the thermocouples that generate electricity, not due to a drastic falloff in heat.
"Shortest Route" algorithms, such as the traveling salesman problem, are extremely difficult. Sometimes humans can intuit a better solution, but only when the number of spots to hit is small. For a warehouse with millions of items not already organized, it's impossible for a human. The best you can hope for without throwing using every computer on the planet is an approximate solution, which again for large datasets isn't really guaranteed to be all that good.
Username Genda is a known alias for Newt Gingrich - it was never going to happen.
So long as there are accompanying moratoria on new copyright bills, perhaps the /. crowd can get behind it.
But as any patent examiner can tell you - adding the phrase "on the internet" to everything is all the rage these days. Would the passage of this bill mean that the next congressional session can't do anything, because everything is related to the internet? What about privacy protection, the upcoming FISA renewal, patent reform, etc.? Probably those are pressing areas, related to the internet, that are in need or some action.
you missed the joke I was trying to make: the summary was talking about the spectra being different from natural elements. As best we know, the elements (carbon, chlorine, etc.) on some distant planet world are identical, interchangeable, to those here on earth or anywhere else in the Universe. So, if we are looking for exotic spectra, we should be looking for those coming from exotic, not-naturally-occurring molecules. Talk to a chemist: if you're conflating elements with molecules, or claiming that one oxygen isn't identical to another, ur doin it wrong.
Are these CFCs made from exotic kinds of matter? Are we looking for advanced civilizations that have been able to synthesize new forms of chlorine, fluorine, carbon, etc., that are different than those that arise from stellar nucleosynthesis? No? In that case, we should be looking for spectra different from naturally occurring molecules, not elements.
Well... yes and no. It is true that a warm fluid - be it the ocean or Coca-Cola - cannot hold as much CO2 as the same fluid when cold. So when a cold fluid that is in equilibrium with the atmosphere warms, a portion of the dissolved gas is given off. But that's not the only thing that is going on. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are also increasing, and on the whole that is what is forcing CO2 concentrations in the ocean. The ocean is far from being saturated with CO2 at any temperature, which means that the concentration of CO2 in the ocean is driven almost entirely by the concentration in the atmosphere. On the whole, these must be in equilibrium with each other, and they are able to do so pretty quickly.