Moreover: is this is so "common sense", why do the USA need a law to implement it
It involves the ownership transfer of government property, theoretically owned by the taxpayer, to a private entity. It's not that such things need specific authorization in law, but rather that the mechanism for that transfer needs to be codified. You and I might be fine transferring ownership of a car by exchanging $1, signing the back of the title, and shaking hands. But for a $100-million satellite we all payed for that requires some fairly sophisticated care, a more formal process is warranted.
TFA mentions that compared to the current method, they can have a replacement in 4 hours
Having personally executed through the process of using CT scans to produce 1:1 computer models of bones that can then be printed with a rapid prototyper, I can assure you that you cannot have a replacement in just 4 hours. Oh, sure, it can be 4 hours from when you start the machine to when the part is finished printing, but you cannot go from presurgical CT scan to part model to printed part to cleaned, polished, (coated with bone, according to the article) quality checked, packaged, sterilized, and ready for surgery in 4 hours. 4 days minimum, and probably closer to 4 weeks.
We already know that space can be bent and distorted, so who says our method of travel will be brute force velocity
Star Trek aside, we have no way to influence the curvature of spacetime, and hence have no way of taking advantage of it for propulsion. More exotic possibilities like wormholes are theoretical oddballs that aren't (even on paper) suitable for transportation. Perhaps some new theory will point the way, but I wouldn't bank on it. I think that if we ever plan to get off this rock, we're going to need to accept that "brute force" is the most likely way.
And, hey, if there is a faster way, the next ship can just pick up all the people still en route on the brute force ship. Where's the downside?
Since there is little friction in space what is there from stopping us from reaching an appreciable fraction of the speed of light? I was reading that we might attain lightspeed in about 1 year at 1G acceleration rate
What stops us is: 1) we have no way to produce sustained thrust anywhere near that high 2) even if we had a means, it would take something on the order of the entire power output of humanity to propel an interstellar craft at 1 G for that long, 4) to build and supply such a spacecraft would require a significant portion of the GDP of humanity for decades, and 4) special relativity dictates that as you approach the speed of light, your mass increases, which requires more power to accelerate, etc.
A 44 year round trip if you travel at the speed of light from start to finish
For the passengers on board this theoretical spacecraft, practically no time would have passed at all during the journey. It's only for us suckers left behind that 44 years passes.
Element density[g/cm^3]
Os 22.61
Ir 22.56
Pt 21.46
Re 21.02
Np 20.45
Pu 19.84
Au 19.28
W 19.25 U 18.95
[all the others]
It is perhaps more correct to say that uranium is one of the densest metals, and of the dense metals, has relatively high abundance (2.7 mg/kg of Earth's mass. All the others on this list, other than tungsten, are measured in micrograms/kg, or less).
I do claim it: strain energy in material objects will manifest itself as a change in mass. However, it's not something that you are likely to see in an experiment. The mass equivalent of the energy you could realistically put into a laboratory-sized spring would be almost impossible to detect in the noise. c^2 is a really big number.
I think the point the author is making isn't about the energy of burning fossil fuels, it's about the heat trapping that results. Normally the Earth is at ~100% energy balance with respect to solar radiation: a lot comes in (174 petawatts), and just about all of it gets radiated back out, continuously. But by trapping extra energy here on Earth in the form of heat, AGW gradually increases the Earth's total energy. E=mc^2 is not just for nuclear reactions: any system that gains or loses energy effectively gains or loses an equivalent mass. By how much? This guy says it's the energy equivalent of 160 tons of mass 160 tons, when converted to energy, is 1.44*10^22 Joules: a whole bigass boatload of energy. But, it is actually rather small (1/400th) compared to the total energy received by Earth from the sun in one year. So it doesn't take but a tiny percentage change the energy balance, accumulated over many decades, to get 160 tons of mass.
The rover's aren't like the Deacon's Masterpiece, where every component reaches end-of-life at exactly the same time, the mission life was dictated not by component life but environmental factors. As I understand it, the relatively short life-rating was based largely on power availability. From all previous Mars landers, it was expected that the solar panels' output would drop to useless levels within a couple months of landing. And although they surely had some ideas on how to get the rovers to survive the Martian winter, they certainly weren't going to make that a mission requirement. The mission life wasn't a matter of the rated life of the motors, or the computers, or of the fatigue life of the chassis. You couldn't have really made them cheaper and still had a usable rover: a strut with a fatigue life of only a few months' driving probably may have snapped on impact, a 1-year motor would have been more or less the same size and weight, a 1-year computer would have been identical to the computer they've got.
And, really, why would you want to shave everything down to such a short life: it's not like you could have saved much money for the taxpayer - the component cost of the rovers is only maybe 1/100th the total cost of the mission. Most of the cost is in getting the rover to Mars in the first place, followed by having a full-time staff of dozens or hundreds designing, testing, and running the thing.
The latest I heard indicates that EUV is still having a tough time getting going. The light source isn't bright enough, so throughput is too low to be commercially viable. ASML may claim to have a source capable of exposing 69 wafers per hour, but it's not like those machines are rolling off the assembly line right now.
Some other people out there are investigating using free-electron lasers to produce EUV, either directly as the output of the FEL, or by using the FEL to stimulate EUV emission in some other medium. A major benefit of FEL's is that they are highly tunable: you can get a huge range of output frequencies, so theoretically one could use the same equipment to migrate from EUV to X-ray lasers as lithography technology advances. Although tabletop FELs exist, I wonder if it would make sense to consider having one really big one for an entire fab facility, and using it to stimulate the EUV at the level of each lithography machine. This would be not unlike how big particle accelerator or telescope facilities work (one source, multiple instruments).
Unfortunately, I don't think this will be useful for that at all, for two important reasons:
1) X-rays, although pretty potent in the grand scheme of things, are too wimpy to influence, and certainly cannot initiate, nuclear reactions. X-rays tend to interact with the electron cloud around atoms, and so don't penetrate down as far as the nucleus. Bombarding a slug of some fissile material with X-rays will only yield a lot of scattered X-rays; the nuclear decay will be more or less unaffected.
2) The facility that did this research to produce this X-ray laser is big. Really big. The X-ray light they used to stimulate the subsequent X-ray emissions is at the tail end of a mile-long linear accelerator. Although you can make free-electron lasers that are smaller, it's unlikely you'll see one of these in your average home anytime soon.
While the court did rule 9-0 that the tracking was too extensive and had to be thrown out, the court split 5-4 on the reasoning and scope of the ruling. The majority opinion held that the tracking was invalidated by the fact that police used the defendant's private property (his car), in violation of the 4th amendment. This largely sidesteps the much broader questions about stake: police use of GPS tracking in cellphones, camera networks backed by face/vehicle/license plate recogniztion software, etc. The minority opinion sought to invalidate the tracking on more broad grounds such as the duration (one month), continuous nature, expectation of privacy in the modern age, etc. But, being the minority opinion, it doesn't exactly have the same force behind it. Their opinion, however, is likely to form a blueprint for how these things can get argued going forward. It is certain that these issues will come up again and again in the Court.
More information and explanation of the ruling can be found at the NYTimes, wikipedia, and the court's opinion text (PDF).
Do the mechanisms which originally created life still occur? Or is "The Genesis Event" so rare that it was a one-time occurrence billions of years ago
The mechanisms and conditions still exist - to an extent. There are abundant chemical precursors around, energy from the sun or chemosynthesis. But there are a couple of important differences between now and when life first arose from the organic soup of aeons ago. The biggest difference I can think of: life already exists, which puts any new, nascent forms of life at a distinct disadvantage in terms of competing for resources and avoiding being eaten. When life first formed on Earth, they had the place to themselves, and so only had to worry about being obliterated by a lightning strike, volcano, meteor, or exposure to UV. They had time (a few billion years) to work things out. Today, it would be like a band of tribal people with spears competing against a modern mechanized army for the same scrap of land. We all know how well that worked for the upstarts (even if they won a battle or two, they usually lost the war, and badly). New life would need to find a niche where there would be less, or no, competition.
This is not to say that it couldn't, or doesn't, still happen. I rather think that new viruses are forming all the time through the random clumping of various amino acids and RNA strands. Perhaps one in a quadrillion find a way to infect a host and perpetuate. But something totally new, created from pure organic chemistry, that didn't immediately get snuffed out or co-opted by present life: I think the chances are slim on this planet.
The video is impressive, but it is important to recognize the difference between the length of a construction project, and the time actually spent building it. In the case of this Chinese hotel, I suspect that most, if not all, of those prefabbed components were already built and stocked before the 15-day clock started running. Even more significantly, the ground was already prepared, and the foundation put in place, before the 15-day clock started running. So it is more correct to say the building was assembled in 15 days, like a giant Lego kit. The length of the project from engineering plans to factory pre-fab to site preparation to construction to grand opening was probably more prosaic: somewhere between 1 and 5 years. That's for a 30-storey, 17,000 m^2 building in the middle of an open field.
The new One World Trade Center tower, under construction now, didn't break ground until April 2006. It'll be 105-floors, ~250,000 m^2, in the middle of some of the densest real estate in the world. It's already the highest thing on the Manhattan skyline, and construction is expected to finish at the end of this year. Given all that, I would say they've been doing a decent job on a mammoth project.
As for the rest of the World Trade Center buildings, those are expected to be completed by the middle of the decade, not 2020. When you think of it, it makes sense: southern Manhattan is some of the most valuable land on Earth - it can make a lot of money for a lot of people, and leaving it fallow or under construction for a day longer than absolutely necessary is a paper loss of millions.
A plant thousands of kilometers away from your main sales point can be faster to ramp up production than the shop down the street? We're not speaking about a small-scale project, either! I find this utterly unbelieveable
Because it is not a small project, it is difficult to ramp up production at the place down the street. In order to survive, those kinds of "turnkey" board-fab-and-populating houses have to run very close to full capacity all the time. They can squeeze in a prototype run of a few hundred units if you need it fast, but a larger run requires you get to the back of the queue. As they themselves said, there aren't a whole lot of these places in the UK (chicken and egg, who knows?).
Contrast this to China, where it seems every city with access to a shipping port has a factory with the capacity for a million units a day. There's huge capacity available, and so jobs get done sooner, the queues are shallower, and a 10,000-unit run is peanuts.
Which at this point is surprising to me. He did pioneering work on the physics of black holes, and was the first to theorize on what is now called Hawking Radiation. That seems like a pretty good accomplishment. Do you suppose the relative lack of experimental confirmation keeps him from it?
On the other hand, the Nobel committee has been known to overlook some rather obvious candidates. Einstein never received a Nobel for his work on relativity (special or general) or his contributions to quantum mechanics. His prize was given for his explanation of the photoelectric effect which, while an important contribution, most people don't know about.
Despite being on the equator, Kenya and other countries that the equator crosses never have temperatures beyond 30 degrees Celsius for more than 3 months in a year.
So much the better: power plants based on thermal cycles (so, 90%+ of all electricity generated worldwide) require large, relatively cold heat sinks to drive the thermal gradient and dump their waste heat. Solar panels operate more efficiently when they are cold. In short, a temperate climate works in your favor, compared to a roasting hot one.
DOT approved seat belts are designed for comfort, not protect
Compare the results of a crash with someone who has used those comforting seatbelts to the results where no seatbelt was used. I think you'll agree that they provide a lot of protection. Most people would say they aren't especially comfortable; people only use them because they could save your life.
Yes, but you can only see the night sky for about half of each day. When you take away twilight, you are down to perhaps 6-8 hours of observation time per night. With that kind of cycling, you get a lot of diurnal temperature variation, both in your equipment and in the air you are looking through. And while an equatorial site can see more of the sky over the course of a year, it can't see all of it equally well. To see the celestial poles, you would need to point your scope more or less at the horizon, which means looking through a whole lot of atmosphere. There aren't all that many high and dry places near the equator, and while interior Antarctica is a relatively stable air mass, the tropics are raging atmospheric torrents by comparison.
In contrast, telescopes at the south pole can have days or weeks of continuous observation with very stable temperatures. And while it is true that the south pole has whole months where no observation is possible, the long stretch of continuous observation makes up for it. If it wasn't worthwhile, astronomers and the NSF wouldn't have gone through all the headaches and difficulty to do it.
It doesn't need to be an either/or situation. There are lots of good places to put scopes, and lots of good reasons for each site. There's a large untapped potential of semi-equitorial sites in the Southern Sahara, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the Arabian Peninsula. But in some ways Antarctica is logistically and politically easier.
Slashdot Mirror
It involves the ownership transfer of government property, theoretically owned by the taxpayer, to a private entity. It's not that such things need specific authorization in law, but rather that the mechanism for that transfer needs to be codified. You and I might be fine transferring ownership of a car by exchanging $1, signing the back of the title, and shaking hands. But for a $100-million satellite we all payed for that requires some fairly sophisticated care, a more formal process is warranted.
Having personally executed through the process of using CT scans to produce 1:1 computer models of bones that can then be printed with a rapid prototyper, I can assure you that you cannot have a replacement in just 4 hours. Oh, sure, it can be 4 hours from when you start the machine to when the part is finished printing, but you cannot go from presurgical CT scan to part model to printed part to cleaned, polished, (coated with bone, according to the article) quality checked, packaged, sterilized, and ready for surgery in 4 hours. 4 days minimum, and probably closer to 4 weeks.
It's still really cool, though.
Star Trek aside, we have no way to influence the curvature of spacetime, and hence have no way of taking advantage of it for propulsion. More exotic possibilities like wormholes are theoretical oddballs that aren't (even on paper) suitable for transportation. Perhaps some new theory will point the way, but I wouldn't bank on it. I think that if we ever plan to get off this rock, we're going to need to accept that "brute force" is the most likely way.
And, hey, if there is a faster way, the next ship can just pick up all the people still en route on the brute force ship. Where's the downside?
What stops us is: 1) we have no way to produce sustained thrust anywhere near that high 2) even if we had a means, it would take something on the order of the entire power output of humanity to propel an interstellar craft at 1 G for that long, 4) to build and supply such a spacecraft would require a significant portion of the GDP of humanity for decades, and 4) special relativity dictates that as you approach the speed of light, your mass increases, which requires more power to accelerate, etc.
For the passengers on board this theoretical spacecraft, practically no time would have passed at all during the journey. It's only for us suckers left behind that 44 years passes.
Siiiigggghhhh. Let's spend five seconds to find out if that's true.
Element density[g/cm^3]
Os 22.61
Ir 22.56
Pt 21.46
Re 21.02
Np 20.45
Pu 19.84
Au 19.28
W 19.25
U 18.95
[all the others]
It is perhaps more correct to say that uranium is one of the densest metals, and of the dense metals, has relatively high abundance (2.7 mg/kg of Earth's mass. All the others on this list, other than tungsten, are measured in micrograms/kg, or less).
I do claim it: strain energy in material objects will manifest itself as a change in mass. However, it's not something that you are likely to see in an experiment. The mass equivalent of the energy you could realistically put into a laboratory-sized spring would be almost impossible to detect in the noise. c^2 is a really big number.
I think the point the author is making isn't about the energy of burning fossil fuels, it's about the heat trapping that results. Normally the Earth is at ~100% energy balance with respect to solar radiation: a lot comes in (174 petawatts), and just about all of it gets radiated back out, continuously. But by trapping extra energy here on Earth in the form of heat, AGW gradually increases the Earth's total energy. E=mc^2 is not just for nuclear reactions: any system that gains or loses energy effectively gains or loses an equivalent mass. By how much? This guy says it's the energy equivalent of 160 tons of mass 160 tons, when converted to energy, is 1.44*10^22 Joules: a whole bigass boatload of energy. But, it is actually rather small (1/400th) compared to the total energy received by Earth from the sun in one year. So it doesn't take but a tiny percentage change the energy balance, accumulated over many decades, to get 160 tons of mass.
If it is from beyond our solar system, it is, by definition, interstellar.
The rover's aren't like the Deacon's Masterpiece, where every component reaches end-of-life at exactly the same time, the mission life was dictated not by component life but environmental factors. As I understand it, the relatively short life-rating was based largely on power availability. From all previous Mars landers, it was expected that the solar panels' output would drop to useless levels within a couple months of landing. And although they surely had some ideas on how to get the rovers to survive the Martian winter, they certainly weren't going to make that a mission requirement. The mission life wasn't a matter of the rated life of the motors, or the computers, or of the fatigue life of the chassis. You couldn't have really made them cheaper and still had a usable rover: a strut with a fatigue life of only a few months' driving probably may have snapped on impact, a 1-year motor would have been more or less the same size and weight, a 1-year computer would have been identical to the computer they've got.
And, really, why would you want to shave everything down to such a short life: it's not like you could have saved much money for the taxpayer - the component cost of the rovers is only maybe 1/100th the total cost of the mission. Most of the cost is in getting the rover to Mars in the first place, followed by having a full-time staff of dozens or hundreds designing, testing, and running the thing.
The latest I heard indicates that EUV is still having a tough time getting going. The light source isn't bright enough, so throughput is too low to be commercially viable. ASML may claim to have a source capable of exposing 69 wafers per hour, but it's not like those machines are rolling off the assembly line right now.
Some other people out there are investigating using free-electron lasers to produce EUV, either directly as the output of the FEL, or by using the FEL to stimulate EUV emission in some other medium. A major benefit of FEL's is that they are highly tunable: you can get a huge range of output frequencies, so theoretically one could use the same equipment to migrate from EUV to X-ray lasers as lithography technology advances. Although tabletop FELs exist, I wonder if it would make sense to consider having one really big one for an entire fab facility, and using it to stimulate the EUV at the level of each lithography machine. This would be not unlike how big particle accelerator or telescope facilities work (one source, multiple instruments).
Unfortunately, I don't think this will be useful for that at all, for two important reasons:
1) X-rays, although pretty potent in the grand scheme of things, are too wimpy to influence, and certainly cannot initiate, nuclear reactions. X-rays tend to interact with the electron cloud around atoms, and so don't penetrate down as far as the nucleus. Bombarding a slug of some fissile material with X-rays will only yield a lot of scattered X-rays; the nuclear decay will be more or less unaffected.
2) The facility that did this research to produce this X-ray laser is big. Really big. The X-ray light they used to stimulate the subsequent X-ray emissions is at the tail end of a mile-long linear accelerator. Although you can make free-electron lasers that are smaller, it's unlikely you'll see one of these in your average home anytime soon.
Yaaar, sounds like an invasion of piracy, if you be askin' me!
While the court did rule 9-0 that the tracking was too extensive and had to be thrown out, the court split 5-4 on the reasoning and scope of the ruling. The majority opinion held that the tracking was invalidated by the fact that police used the defendant's private property (his car), in violation of the 4th amendment. This largely sidesteps the much broader questions about stake: police use of GPS tracking in cellphones, camera networks backed by face/vehicle/license plate recogniztion software, etc. The minority opinion sought to invalidate the tracking on more broad grounds such as the duration (one month), continuous nature, expectation of privacy in the modern age, etc. But, being the minority opinion, it doesn't exactly have the same force behind it. Their opinion, however, is likely to form a blueprint for how these things can get argued going forward. It is certain that these issues will come up again and again in the Court.
More information and explanation of the ruling can be found at the NYTimes, wikipedia, and the court's opinion text (PDF).
I think they call that vaporization.
The mechanisms and conditions still exist - to an extent. There are abundant chemical precursors around, energy from the sun or chemosynthesis. But there are a couple of important differences between now and when life first arose from the organic soup of aeons ago. The biggest difference I can think of: life already exists, which puts any new, nascent forms of life at a distinct disadvantage in terms of competing for resources and avoiding being eaten. When life first formed on Earth, they had the place to themselves, and so only had to worry about being obliterated by a lightning strike, volcano, meteor, or exposure to UV. They had time (a few billion years) to work things out. Today, it would be like a band of tribal people with spears competing against a modern mechanized army for the same scrap of land. We all know how well that worked for the upstarts (even if they won a battle or two, they usually lost the war, and badly). New life would need to find a niche where there would be less, or no, competition.
This is not to say that it couldn't, or doesn't, still happen. I rather think that new viruses are forming all the time through the random clumping of various amino acids and RNA strands. Perhaps one in a quadrillion find a way to infect a host and perpetuate. But something totally new, created from pure organic chemistry, that didn't immediately get snuffed out or co-opted by present life: I think the chances are slim on this planet.
But evolution is just a theory that's out there. It isn't actually true.
Right?
The video is impressive, but it is important to recognize the difference between the length of a construction project, and the time actually spent building it. In the case of this Chinese hotel, I suspect that most, if not all, of those prefabbed components were already built and stocked before the 15-day clock started running. Even more significantly, the ground was already prepared, and the foundation put in place, before the 15-day clock started running. So it is more correct to say the building was assembled in 15 days, like a giant Lego kit. The length of the project from engineering plans to factory pre-fab to site preparation to construction to grand opening was probably more prosaic: somewhere between 1 and 5 years. That's for a 30-storey, 17,000 m^2 building in the middle of an open field.
The new One World Trade Center tower, under construction now, didn't break ground until April 2006. It'll be 105-floors, ~250,000 m^2, in the middle of some of the densest real estate in the world. It's already the highest thing on the Manhattan skyline, and construction is expected to finish at the end of this year. Given all that, I would say they've been doing a decent job on a mammoth project.
As for the rest of the World Trade Center buildings, those are expected to be completed by the middle of the decade, not 2020. When you think of it, it makes sense: southern Manhattan is some of the most valuable land on Earth - it can make a lot of money for a lot of people, and leaving it fallow or under construction for a day longer than absolutely necessary is a paper loss of millions.
Because it is not a small project, it is difficult to ramp up production at the place down the street. In order to survive, those kinds of "turnkey" board-fab-and-populating houses have to run very close to full capacity all the time. They can squeeze in a prototype run of a few hundred units if you need it fast, but a larger run requires you get to the back of the queue. As they themselves said, there aren't a whole lot of these places in the UK (chicken and egg, who knows?).
Contrast this to China, where it seems every city with access to a shipping port has a factory with the capacity for a million units a day. There's huge capacity available, and so jobs get done sooner, the queues are shallower, and a 10,000-unit run is peanuts.
Which at this point is surprising to me. He did pioneering work on the physics of black holes, and was the first to theorize on what is now called Hawking Radiation. That seems like a pretty good accomplishment. Do you suppose the relative lack of experimental confirmation keeps him from it?
On the other hand, the Nobel committee has been known to overlook some rather obvious candidates. Einstein never received a Nobel for his work on relativity (special or general) or his contributions to quantum mechanics. His prize was given for his explanation of the photoelectric effect which, while an important contribution, most people don't know about.
Being curious, I looked it up: 1661 m, or a shade above one mile. So, yes, it'd have an effect.
So much the better: power plants based on thermal cycles (so, 90%+ of all electricity generated worldwide) require large, relatively cold heat sinks to drive the thermal gradient and dump their waste heat. Solar panels operate more efficiently when they are cold. In short, a temperate climate works in your favor, compared to a roasting hot one.
While your annecdote is interesting, the fact remains that being ejected from the vehicle in a crash is usually a pretty sure way to get killed.
Compare the results of a crash with someone who has used those comforting seatbelts to the results where no seatbelt was used. I think you'll agree that they provide a lot of protection. Most people would say they aren't especially comfortable; people only use them because they could save your life.
Yes, but you can only see the night sky for about half of each day. When you take away twilight, you are down to perhaps 6-8 hours of observation time per night. With that kind of cycling, you get a lot of diurnal temperature variation, both in your equipment and in the air you are looking through. And while an equatorial site can see more of the sky over the course of a year, it can't see all of it equally well. To see the celestial poles, you would need to point your scope more or less at the horizon, which means looking through a whole lot of atmosphere. There aren't all that many high and dry places near the equator, and while interior Antarctica is a relatively stable air mass, the tropics are raging atmospheric torrents by comparison.
In contrast, telescopes at the south pole can have days or weeks of continuous observation with very stable temperatures. And while it is true that the south pole has whole months where no observation is possible, the long stretch of continuous observation makes up for it. If it wasn't worthwhile, astronomers and the NSF wouldn't have gone through all the headaches and difficulty to do it.
It doesn't need to be an either/or situation. There are lots of good places to put scopes, and lots of good reasons for each site. There's a large untapped potential of semi-equitorial sites in the Southern Sahara, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the Arabian Peninsula. But in some ways Antarctica is logistically and politically easier.