Alas, the economics of this are unlikely to pan out.
A fit human can produce somewhere between 150 and 300 watts continuously, with perhaps the occassional excursion to higher. (In contrast, one horsepower is approximately 750 W.) So, in a day, a person might be able to pump out 1-2 kWh, which on the wholesale electrical market might fetch a whopping $0.10. If the company is clever, they'd store and release that power during peak demand, in which case they might get twice that. Could you live on $0.10 a day? A homeless person couldn't even buy enough food calories for that electrical output.
Was there some sort of fundamental, theoretical limit that could have made getting to 2 petaflop difficult or impossible? Did a graph of BOINC computer power vs time ramp up from zero, stall around 2 PFLOP, and only now punch through? Did the administrators have to come up with some sort of breakthrough or new insight to reach this mark? Two PFLOP is just a round number - is it really any different from 1.9 or 2.1?
I think not: 2 petaflops is just a matter of recruiting enough computers and having them running BOINC at the same time. If it has achieved this mark, then it couldn't have been that much of a barrier, could it?
It's not like the $2B dollars is going to go to waste. There is high demand for wind turbines worldwide, now he's got a lock on a whole lot of them. It's difficult to know if he'll come out ahead or behind (are turbine prices on the open market higher or lower than what he paid? did he get a volume discount in his order? is demand high enough and supply scarce enough that he can charge a premium?), but it won't be a total loss.
Probably the worst thing, for him, is the opportunity cost of having so much capital tied up in this - it'll take him a long time to free it up by selling or leasing the turbines to other customers.
Perhaps, but the concept of zero didn't migrate into the mainstream of human culture via the Mayans. The height of Mayan civilization was pre-Columbian, and there's no evidence that their ideas made it across the Pacific, so they didn't have a chance to contribute their ideas to the rest of humanity.
I think you've got an error in your figures. The summary says that the laser produces as much power as the US grid. Your calculations use the electrical energy output of an entire year. To get it right, you would also need to divide out, not by one femtosecond, but by the number of femtoseconds in a year, which would yield the US energy usage per fs.
Alternately, use the (average) power output of US grid, which would be 29000 TWh / number of seconds in a year. It comes to about 920 GW (approx 10^12 W). Then multiply by one femtosecond (10^-15 sec) to get the energy embodied in one of these pulses, which is about 1 mJ if I did my calcs correctly. Say the filament requires millions of pulses to get this new level of efficiency, you are only looking at hundreds or thousands of extra joules added to the manufacturing, which is far less than the bulb will use over its lifetime.
Keep in mind that these rules for stem cell lines only concern what the US Government (mainly the NIH) will be permitted to fund with research dollars. The other stem cell lines needn't be abandoned or thrown away, they just can't be publicly funded.
Private and public companies can still conduct research on them, and several states (notably California) have alternate stem cell research funding programs available, with less stringent guidelines.
The government (not merely the Obama administration) is in a tight spot between those that want absolutely no research conducted on embryonic stem cells, and those that want to follow where the science leads them regardless of tricky ethical considerations.
I think the administration's position is a decent compromise. Plus, it is a foot in the door to loosening restrictions further. In this particular area of research, I feel a conservative (in the literal sense: resistant to change, hesitant, deliberate; NOT the political, neocon meaning), incremental approach is best until we have a good sense of what we are dealing with - the incredible benefits and the awesome risks. This grasp and understanding must be pervasive, too, not just within the small cadre of cutting-edge researchers, but also in the minds of policy-makers and the general public who would be funding this research.
Yes, but all the taciturn yankees in New Hampshire probably just shrugged their shoulders, saying, "well, that's a shame" and moved on with their lives. That's about all the eulogizing it needed.
New Hampshire Yankees can be pretty fatalistic when the mood hits them, and give Buddhists a run for their money in pointing out the impermanence of things. It's kind of an odd philosophy, considering how otherwise obstinate they can be, and how enduring many of their works have been.
Worse still - the outcropping only looked like a face from one angle. If you looked at it from another, it just looked like a rock outcropping. I lived in that area for a couple of years, and the viewing location is right on a highway.
This guy's design produces a symmetric sculpture that will look like a human face from all viewing angles. So he's not perfectly recreating the formation, but using it as a template for sticking a human-looking pile-of-glass on the side of a minor peak in the White Mountains. Leaving questions of "should he?" aside: why on earth would anyone want to do this?
Thankfully, it's not like anyone will need to actively "drive" the shuttle while at the same time repairing the Hubble. There's some station-keeping to do, and the craft's overall health to monitor, but a lot of that can be done by autopilot. There's also about a hundred people at mission control that are doing nothing but driving and checking the shuttle, so the astronauts and do their job.
Of course we like to be outraged, because it allows us to be righteously outraged, and we all know how much we like to be righteous. The two examples you provided - being pissed at the FDA for delaying treatments, and being pissed at the FDA for allowing dangerous treatments into use - are perfect.
Just to clarify: it's Ebola, named for the Ebola River where it was first documented. This is a virus out in meatspace, not something transmitted digitally like some sort of e-STD.
How many 2-1/2 year clinical trials have you done? It is hard to keep people in studies that long, it's as simple as that. People move away, change phone numbers, they lose interest, and generally fall out of touch. Some can't be bothered after the first visit.
You can combat this some by increasing incentives the longer people stick around. Several of my female friends in college participated in the HPV vaccine trials. There were some monetary incentives at the start - a pittance, really. But as the trial went on and reached the two, three, four-year mark, the incentives started looking really good: a few hundred dollars for a 20-minute semi-annual check and pap-smear, plus travel expenses if you've moved away.
The fact that 1/3 of the patients did not finish the trial in an of itself isn't that fishy. More important is, as you say, how the researchers address it: how well documented was it? were they ever able to get reasons from patients, or did they just fall off the face of the earth? Were there any trends in the reasons given for not continuing?
I did, in fact, once see the 1970's 3D porn "Disco Girls in Hot Skin." The 3D effect was understated (you only noticed it here and there), as was true of a lot of 3D movies of the era. The novelty couldn't distract that this was a laughably bad 1970s porno. Very entertaining, though, because it is one of those "so bad it's good" kind of films, like the Evil Dead saga. So, if you ever get a chance to see it, give it a go.
Or, is it because meat packers are concerned that people might stop eating pork in fear of the virus?
Meat packers aren't just concerned about it - it isin factactuallyhappening. Plenty of people genuinely (and jokingly) think that eating pork products is a way to get this disease.
Public health officials have to live in the real world, where irrational behavior, fear, hysteria, and misinformation are enemies as big as disease itself. If referring to it as "H1N1 Influenza" rather than "Swine Flu" gets people to smarten up about it, and has the benefit of reducing damage to the meat industry, then so be it.
I could think of three reasons:
* Because those data centers are probably 10 years old already?
* Because government data centers may have different requirements than internet startups?
* Because 2-3 hours is too far away for social security administrators to drop by for a quick visit?
There are a number of companies that run their beta-testing groups that way. Find a bug, you get points. Person with the top number of bug finds/fixes/workarounds wins. What they win is sometimes a bit nebulous. Sometimes it is actual, material stuff - corporate swag, computer equipment. Other times they win free professional-level software worth a few thousand. Other times they get flown out to the company to "consult" on the next release. This is, of course, a tiny minority of all those that contribute to beta testing, but it is a motivation.
Maybe you're trolling, maybe you are just quick to pan something without thinking it through.
If some crook swaps out a battery pack for a fake one, how is the crook going to drive the car? It's not like you can just show up with a case full of cinder blocks and try to pass it off as a battery.
OK, pedantry aside, I think that, yes, the battery swap stations will be able to determine the authenticity and condition of a battery when it comes in. Something like an encrypted ID chip could easily be built into the pack, which has a lot of electronics in it already to monitor health and whatnot. That kind of check can happen instantly. Even if that gets hacked or replicated by sophisticated thieves, the battery still needs to get checked out and recharged before it goes out again, which is plenty of time to sniff out fakes. If a fake is detected, it can easily be matched to the car that dropped it off, and appropriate action taken. It's not all that different from gasoline drive-offs, except here the car and gas station communicate, so it's pretty hard to be anonymous.
Even if a thief is able to craft a battery pack that is so indistinguishable from the real thing, will they actually be making any money from the crime?
And even if a thief is able to do this, that alone probably won't be enough to sink the company. Are the cell phone companies going out of business due to a rash of cheap knock-offs and counterfeit batteries? Does the electronics industry go bankrupt because people try to return empty PS3 boxes? Companies can absorb a surprisingly high amount of fraud into their bottom line, so long as they can plan for it in their business model. This guy Agassi sounds smarter and savvier than both you and I, so I doubt he's overlooked this.
The battery replacement stations do diagnostics on the battery pack before it goes back out. If it looks bad, or has trouble charging, or doesn't hold a charge after recharging, it gets taken out of circulation.
Plus, the battery packs are not the same as ordinary batteries. There are brains built into them to monitor health, balance cells, control charging and discharging, and generally prevent degradation in the first place.
time will tell if your concern is borne out in practice, but I personally am not too concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
Alas, the economics of this are unlikely to pan out.
A fit human can produce somewhere between 150 and 300 watts continuously, with perhaps the occassional excursion to higher. (In contrast, one horsepower is approximately 750 W.) So, in a day, a person might be able to pump out 1-2 kWh, which on the wholesale electrical market might fetch a whopping $0.10. If the company is clever, they'd store and release that power during peak demand, in which case they might get twice that. Could you live on $0.10 a day? A homeless person couldn't even buy enough food calories for that electrical output.
Was there some sort of fundamental, theoretical limit that could have made getting to 2 petaflop difficult or impossible? Did a graph of BOINC computer power vs time ramp up from zero, stall around 2 PFLOP, and only now punch through? Did the administrators have to come up with some sort of breakthrough or new insight to reach this mark? Two PFLOP is just a round number - is it really any different from 1.9 or 2.1?
I think not: 2 petaflops is just a matter of recruiting enough computers and having them running BOINC at the same time. If it has achieved this mark, then it couldn't have been that much of a barrier, could it?
The NYTimes has devoted its Tuesday Science section to the Apollo 11 anniversary. A feature piece tries to convey just what it was like that summer of '69, and the landing's backdrop of the Cold War. Another tries to list some of the impacts on popular culture of the time. Yet another tries to compare the Apollo effort to what it'll take to get back to the Moon and on to Mars.
Yes, there is also a piece on the hoax-spinners.
It's not like the $2B dollars is going to go to waste. There is high demand for wind turbines worldwide, now he's got a lock on a whole lot of them. It's difficult to know if he'll come out ahead or behind (are turbine prices on the open market higher or lower than what he paid? did he get a volume discount in his order? is demand high enough and supply scarce enough that he can charge a premium?), but it won't be a total loss.
Probably the worst thing, for him, is the opportunity cost of having so much capital tied up in this - it'll take him a long time to free it up by selling or leasing the turbines to other customers.
Gmail has 100 million users and has been around over five years. Apps has 1.75 million. So, yes, about damn time.
So that's why Neo always looked a little sickly! And here I thought it was because all that bullet-time fast action made him a little queasy.
Perhaps, but the concept of zero didn't migrate into the mainstream of human culture via the Mayans. The height of Mayan civilization was pre-Columbian, and there's no evidence that their ideas made it across the Pacific, so they didn't have a chance to contribute their ideas to the rest of humanity.
Now, if they'd only filed a patent...
Or were they cingularly disinterested?
I think you've got an error in your figures. The summary says that the laser produces as much power as the US grid. Your calculations use the electrical energy output of an entire year. To get it right, you would also need to divide out, not by one femtosecond, but by the number of femtoseconds in a year, which would yield the US energy usage per fs.
Alternately, use the (average) power output of US grid, which would be 29000 TWh / number of seconds in a year. It comes to about 920 GW (approx 10^12 W). Then multiply by one femtosecond (10^-15 sec) to get the energy embodied in one of these pulses, which is about 1 mJ if I did my calcs correctly. Say the filament requires millions of pulses to get this new level of efficiency, you are only looking at hundreds or thousands of extra joules added to the manufacturing, which is far less than the bulb will use over its lifetime.
Keep in mind that these rules for stem cell lines only concern what the US Government (mainly the NIH) will be permitted to fund with research dollars. The other stem cell lines needn't be abandoned or thrown away, they just can't be publicly funded.
Private and public companies can still conduct research on them, and several states (notably California) have alternate stem cell research funding programs available, with less stringent guidelines.
The government (not merely the Obama administration) is in a tight spot between those that want absolutely no research conducted on embryonic stem cells, and those that want to follow where the science leads them regardless of tricky ethical considerations.
I think the administration's position is a decent compromise. Plus, it is a foot in the door to loosening restrictions further. In this particular area of research, I feel a conservative (in the literal sense: resistant to change, hesitant, deliberate; NOT the political, neocon meaning), incremental approach is best until we have a good sense of what we are dealing with - the incredible benefits and the awesome risks. This grasp and understanding must be pervasive, too, not just within the small cadre of cutting-edge researchers, but also in the minds of policy-makers and the general public who would be funding this research.
Yes, but all the taciturn yankees in New Hampshire probably just shrugged their shoulders, saying, "well, that's a shame" and moved on with their lives. That's about all the eulogizing it needed.
New Hampshire Yankees can be pretty fatalistic when the mood hits them, and give Buddhists a run for their money in pointing out the impermanence of things. It's kind of an odd philosophy, considering how otherwise obstinate they can be, and how enduring many of their works have been.
Worse still - the outcropping only looked like a face from one angle. If you looked at it from another, it just looked like a rock outcropping. I lived in that area for a couple of years, and the viewing location is right on a highway.
This guy's design produces a symmetric sculpture that will look like a human face from all viewing angles. So he's not perfectly recreating the formation, but using it as a template for sticking a human-looking pile-of-glass on the side of a minor peak in the White Mountains. Leaving questions of "should he?" aside: why on earth would anyone want to do this?
Thankfully, it's not like anyone will need to actively "drive" the shuttle while at the same time repairing the Hubble. There's some station-keeping to do, and the craft's overall health to monitor, but a lot of that can be done by autopilot. There's also about a hundred people at mission control that are doing nothing but driving and checking the shuttle, so the astronauts and do their job.
Of course we like to be outraged, because it allows us to be righteously outraged, and we all know how much we like to be righteous. The two examples you provided - being pissed at the FDA for delaying treatments, and being pissed at the FDA for allowing dangerous treatments into use - are perfect.
Just to clarify: it's Ebola, named for the Ebola River where it was first documented. This is a virus out in meatspace, not something transmitted digitally like some sort of e-STD.
How many 2-1/2 year clinical trials have you done? It is hard to keep people in studies that long, it's as simple as that. People move away, change phone numbers, they lose interest, and generally fall out of touch. Some can't be bothered after the first visit.
You can combat this some by increasing incentives the longer people stick around. Several of my female friends in college participated in the HPV vaccine trials. There were some monetary incentives at the start - a pittance, really. But as the trial went on and reached the two, three, four-year mark, the incentives started looking really good: a few hundred dollars for a 20-minute semi-annual check and pap-smear, plus travel expenses if you've moved away.
The fact that 1/3 of the patients did not finish the trial in an of itself isn't that fishy. More important is, as you say, how the researchers address it: how well documented was it? were they ever able to get reasons from patients, or did they just fall off the face of the earth? Were there any trends in the reasons given for not continuing?
I did, in fact, once see the 1970's 3D porn "Disco Girls in Hot Skin." The 3D effect was understated (you only noticed it here and there), as was true of a lot of 3D movies of the era. The novelty couldn't distract that this was a laughably bad 1970s porno. Very entertaining, though, because it is one of those "so bad it's good" kind of films, like the Evil Dead saga. So, if you ever get a chance to see it, give it a go.
Meat packers aren't just concerned about it - it is in fact actually happening. Plenty of people genuinely (and jokingly) think that eating pork products is a way to get this disease.
Public health officials have to live in the real world, where irrational behavior, fear, hysteria, and misinformation are enemies as big as disease itself. If referring to it as "H1N1 Influenza" rather than "Swine Flu" gets people to smarten up about it, and has the benefit of reducing damage to the meat industry, then so be it.
+1 Informative
Wish I had points today. Thanks for the link. You're spot on.
I'm still waiting for my implanted math co-processor.
I could think of three reasons:
* Because those data centers are probably 10 years old already?
* Because government data centers may have different requirements than internet startups?
* Because 2-3 hours is too far away for social security administrators to drop by for a quick visit?
There are a number of companies that run their beta-testing groups that way. Find a bug, you get points. Person with the top number of bug finds/fixes/workarounds wins. What they win is sometimes a bit nebulous. Sometimes it is actual, material stuff - corporate swag, computer equipment. Other times they win free professional-level software worth a few thousand. Other times they get flown out to the company to "consult" on the next release. This is, of course, a tiny minority of all those that contribute to beta testing, but it is a motivation.
Why would someone want to know more about someone else's shit? Are they gastroenterologists?
Maybe you're trolling, maybe you are just quick to pan something without thinking it through.
If some crook swaps out a battery pack for a fake one, how is the crook going to drive the car? It's not like you can just show up with a case full of cinder blocks and try to pass it off as a battery.
OK, pedantry aside, I think that, yes, the battery swap stations will be able to determine the authenticity and condition of a battery when it comes in. Something like an encrypted ID chip could easily be built into the pack, which has a lot of electronics in it already to monitor health and whatnot. That kind of check can happen instantly. Even if that gets hacked or replicated by sophisticated thieves, the battery still needs to get checked out and recharged before it goes out again, which is plenty of time to sniff out fakes. If a fake is detected, it can easily be matched to the car that dropped it off, and appropriate action taken. It's not all that different from gasoline drive-offs, except here the car and gas station communicate, so it's pretty hard to be anonymous.
Even if a thief is able to craft a battery pack that is so indistinguishable from the real thing, will they actually be making any money from the crime?
And even if a thief is able to do this, that alone probably won't be enough to sink the company. Are the cell phone companies going out of business due to a rash of cheap knock-offs and counterfeit batteries? Does the electronics industry go bankrupt because people try to return empty PS3 boxes? Companies can absorb a surprisingly high amount of fraud into their bottom line, so long as they can plan for it in their business model. This guy Agassi sounds smarter and savvier than both you and I, so I doubt he's overlooked this.
The battery replacement stations do diagnostics on the battery pack before it goes back out. If it looks bad, or has trouble charging, or doesn't hold a charge after recharging, it gets taken out of circulation.
Plus, the battery packs are not the same as ordinary batteries. There are brains built into them to monitor health, balance cells, control charging and discharging, and generally prevent degradation in the first place.
time will tell if your concern is borne out in practice, but I personally am not too concerned.