Yep, people play around with explosive hydrogen gas in lots of places....
Like KANSAS ---Farmland Industries Inc.'s fertilizer plant will remain closed while officials seek the cause of the second explosion in a week in a compressor building.
The building's safety systems contained the fire, which was fed by hydrogen gas.Lind didn't know how much hydrogen gas was in the pipeline, but he estimated it was more than the 12,000 pounds of gas that officials had said was in the system July 7.
The building was significantly damaged, although a specific damage estimate hadn't been made, said Carl Findley, the plant's human-resource director.
No injuries were reported in the latest blast, which occurred Friday afternoon as employees were resuming production in the building where a smaller explosion damaged a pipe and control systems July 7.
And LOUISIANA...Two workers were killed and a total of ten were hurt when a CF Industries fertilizer plant exploded in Donaldsonville, LA, fifty-five miles west of New Orleans. The explosion occurred in the facility's Ammonia No. 3 unit. Fueled by hydrogen, the blast did so much damage that investigators had trouble finding the exact origin. It occurred as workers were preparing an empty mixing tank.
And let's not forget FRANCE where this litle playing around with hydrogen gas at a fertilizer plant killed 18, seriously injured 49, sent 500+ to the hospital in a 3.2 Richter scale blast. Hey, the only reason it's called the Haber process is that in 1900, when the French chemist Henri Le Chatalier showed that ammonia could be formed from nitrogen and hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst, an explosion destroyed his apparatus and he lost interest in the experiment.
Realization that hydrogen explosions happen is not paranoia. Pointing out that a leak in a lithium / water heat exchanger could result in a hydrogen gas explosion in a fusion powerplant is not paranoia. I am gung-ho about building whoop-ass technology. But let's not minimize our perception of the risks we're taking by making it sound like hydrogen gas is some harmless toy like a can of Crisco or african violet food. That attitude is even worse than having dumb journalists making basic errors in their science writing.
Well, I agree I oversimplified some things to make for a short and understandable post, but I assure you that I've got the "little more information" at hand as well. Everything I said was a verifiable fact, although I agree that my introduction of the tritium topic in the post by referring to neutron irradiation of hydrogen gas instead of fission of lithium was somewhat misleading, tho true...
I know a little about the nuclear uses of lithium. In Oak Ridge I worked on the team that documented the pollution that occurred in the program there in the 1950s when Lithium 6 was separated from Lithium 7 and purified to use as fusion fuel in hydrogen bombs. There was a step where the Lithium 6 was dissolved in liquid mercury to purify it and later recovered by reacting it with nitric acid. Over 7 million pounds of mercury were dumped into Bear Creek, then the Clinch River, then the Tennessee River, then the Ohio River and ultimately the Mississippi by lithium processing in Oak Ridge. My point remains, and it's not paranoia, that there are unintended consequences that come with the use of major technologies like this. The public would do well to keep this in mind...if only they were smart enought to, as you correctly allude to in your other post here.
I've got a permanent burn mark above my right knee where I dropped a blob of solder on bare skin and I'm still using it routinely at work and at home in building my Beowulf cluster, etc, so I assure you I'm not afraid of technology for technology's sake. The fact remains that a reactive liquid alkali metal at 600 degrees C is inherently much more dangerous than non-reactive tin and lead at 250 degrees C. Fusion powerplants of the future will almost certainly use a lithium-water heat exchanger as I stated (and you did not deny) and it's almost a certainty that THESE THINGS LEAK at times and such a leak will probably cause LOTS of hydrogen gas to form. Hydrogen gas explosions were serious steps in both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents and have the potential to be one in a lithium cooled fusion reactor accident as well. Such a reactor probably wouldn't contaminate miles of countryside but the loss of the investment in the reactor would be devastating, as well as public confidence in the supposed "safety" of fusion reactors over fission ones. Such a public relations disaster doesn't occur at vegetable shortening of fertilizer plants even when they have explosions there (and they do) because those are "low-tech" kinds of plants in the public eye and they are more conditioned to think of them as "risky". Things like reactors and space shuttles are held, perhaps unfairly, to a higher standard.
Again, you post proves my point when you note correctly that sodium doesn't absorb neutrons like lithium does. It's easier in explaining it to the public to say sodium is "more corrosive" which is true. But the very fact a fusion reactor group would pick lithium instead of sodium for the coolant shows that somewhere along the line, neutron absorption and tritium production is important...the "hidden agenda" that is neither paranoia on my part or even hinted at in the ABC article.
Amen, brother, preach on. Last night a fellow slashdotter was wondering when a supernova in a distant galaxy went off and actually stated "...so it stands to reason it actually took place days, weeks, or even months ago". I am VERY concerned that the average slashdotter is an absolute computer whiz that has no feeling at all about basic scientific reality. Maybe this is why we have guys writing code that crashes orbiters on Mars because there's no inherent gut-feeling perception of difference between meters and miles? Or that write code that cut off the Mars lander engines when a switch is closed, and never considers that the switch accidentally gets closed by the jolt of the lander legs opening instead of contact with the Martian surface? Both of these actually happened, of course...
I dunno, it just makes me nervous to go in a bookstore and see miles of shelves on computer topics and one little corner of science books that never get looked at. Or to see a slashdot posting on Tivo get 200+ comments and one on fusion reactors get less than 10 comments less than an hour later....
I used to work in Oak Ridge in the nuclear program years ago and those guys LOVE to consider using liquid metals to cool things. Back in the 1970s it was the the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, which was gonna turn plentiful inert (U-238) uranium into vast quantities of power-packed plutonium in a machine cooled with liquid sodium. Wow - CRBR never got built.
Logically, a layperson would consider a liquid metal to be a very dangerous material to have around, but if you've already got pounds and pounds of plutonium you are juggling around, sodium doesn't seem so nasty anymore. They would still be talking about using sodium if it weren't so darn reactive - read corrosive. That's where our friend lithium comes in - less reactive, less corrosive. Ha.
There aren't any electric generator turbines that run on liquid lithium pressure so there's gonna be a lithium-to-water-to-steam heat exchanger loop in there somewhere in a functional fusion powerplant. Lithium is gonna come in contact with water somehow, by accident (or design) and make hydrogen gas which is not only explosive, but turns into radioactive tritium when bombarded by the neutrons put out by ANY reactor - fission or fusion.
Playing around with explosive hydrogen gas near a reactor is often done deliberately and may be a hidden agenda here. Don't kid yourself - America needs tritium. It is a prime ingredient in nuclear weapons and however much of it you've got, you've only got half that much 12 years later. This means unless you replenish your tritium stockpile you loose half of your nuclear weapons arsenal every 12 years. So far this hasn't been a problem because we are retiring nukes rapidly after winning the Cold War and we are scavinging tritium for our online weapons from the ones we retire. Sooner or later the US will run out of recycled tritium.
We used to make tritium at Savannah River Nuclear Plant but that was closed for environmental reasons years ago. Now the US is going to refurbish that old reactor and start it back up. Sooner or later we're gonna have to switch over to something else besides World War II factories like Savannah River. When that happens, and it's a fusion reactor with a lithium core, remember that there's something else in going on with that liquid metal coolant...
M74 is 30 million light years away so this supernova went off 30 million years ago. This is about 15 times farther away than the Andromeda galaxy, which is the closest "true" galaxy to the Milky Way.
No criticism intended, but if you are wondering if something visible in a distant galaxy occurred days, weeks or months ago, you need to get a fast update on just how BIG the universe is. I recommend a quick trip to the Powers of Ten website....
You don't have to go to Australia to find lack of funding endangering valuable genetic resources; The National Seed Storage Lab in Colorado is in exactly the same boat...er, ark. Read about their funding problems here. An excerpt:
What does this lack of funding mean? It results in another major problem for the banks:
germination backlog, currently of about 30,000 samples at the NSSL. Periodic germination tests
are important to assure the quality of the samples. Also, since seeds will not store indefinitely,
they must periodically be removed, grown out for new seed, and collected. Says Major
Goodman, a crop scientist at NC State who investigated the status of the samples, "Evaluation,
regeneration and utilization are essential parts of a functioning germplasm system. Yet the entire
emphasis...is based upon acquiring larger and larger numbers of samples to be stored in so-called
seed repositories..." A more accurate name, according to Goodman, is "seed morgues." The
samples that are most at risk are older or unusual varieties that are rarely requested, and
germination potential of these samples deteriorates. According to NSSL director Steve Eberhart,
who estimates that it would take 25 years to catch up with the backlog, "We normally test seeds
every ten years to make sure they'll still viable...we've had to eliminate our retesting in order to
process new materials. We don't know which material is deteriorating because we don't have the
staff to the do the germination." For example, there are 30,000 varieties of corn from Latin
America with four scientists assigned to grow and evaluate them. Each person can do 30 varieties
a year, totaling 120. At that rate, it would take 250 years to evaluate them all! Many of the corn
varieties will not survive to be regenerated.
You are absolutely correct, the photos taken by the photographer during the Shackleton voyage were a monumental historical, artistic and technical achievement. They would be remarkable today...but in 1912, they were utterly dumbfounding. There is an IMAX movie about this, too...
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
on
The Coldest March
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· Score: 4, Informative
In October 1915 the ship Endurance was crushed by Anarctic ice, and the crew became castaways in one of the harshest regions of the world. Their adventures make one of the most intense, gripping stories ever written.
Description from The Reader's Catalog
The story of polar explorer Shackleton's survival for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctic seas. "One of the most gripping, suspenseful, intense stories anyone will ever read"--Chicago Tribune
From the Publisher
In August 1914, explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew set sail from England for Antarctica, where Shackleton hoped to be the first man to cross the uncharted continent on foot. Five months later, the Endurance - just a day's sail short of its destination - became locked in an island of ice, and its destiny and men became locked in history. For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted until it was finally crushed, and Shackleton and his crew made an 850-mile journey in a 20-foot craft through the South Atlantic's worst seas to reach an outpost of civilization. Inspired by the ordeal that Time magazine said "defined heroism," author Alfred Lansing conducted interviews with the crew's surviving members and pored over diaries and personal accounts to create his best-selling book on the miraculous voyage. In Audio Partners' abridged recording of Endurance, reader Patrick Malahide renders a masterful portrayal of these courageous men.
MC Hawking - The Ultimate Science MP3s
on
Science Songs as MP3
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The ULTIMATE in science oriented songs is to be found at MC Hawking's Crib. Yes, little did you know that everyone's wheelchair bound astrophysicist, Steven Hawking, is in reality a rap star on the side. His works have to be heard to be believed. To give you a flavor of what we're taling about, here's the lyrics to his smash Entropy:
Trash Talk
Harm me with harmony.
Doomsday, drop a load on 'em.
Verse 1
Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it,
to have you all jumping, shouting saying it.
Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder,
in a system that is closed, like with a border.
It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness,
proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress.
"What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming,
it seems I gotta start the explaining.
You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break?
You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake.
But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true,
if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.
That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y,
the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die.
Order from disorder is a scientific rarity,
allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity.
Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility,
at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy.
That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it,
if you are here's your membership.
Chorus
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me! (x3)
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!
Verse 2
Defining entropy as disorder's not complete,
'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat.
So my first definition I would now like to withdraw,
and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law.
First we need to understand that entropy is energy,
energy that can't be used to state it more specifically.
In a closed system entropy always goes up,
that's the second law, now you know what's up.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about,
you're now down with a discount.
Circuit Cellar was a fixture in the back of Byte magazine back when it was worth reading. Hosted by hardware guru Steve Ciarcia, it was the beginning of many a budding computer hacker's career. Fortunately, it got spun off into its own magazine. Back issues are available on CD-ROM - get them, they're worth it. You'll be an expert hardware hacker in no time by reading the CD-ROM back issues.
The thing that gets me the most about Apollo is how few people got how SIGNIFICANT it was. Folks, once upon a time humans could GO TO THE MOON. They couldn't do that for THOUSANDS of years, and they can't do it now, only thirty years later. As the rate things are going, nobody alive today may ever see a human on another world again. Forging the national or international will or concensus to do it may be impossible to achieve, ever again. And the one chance humans had, that Americans had, to insure a future for humanity across the solar system and perhaps to the stars will be / already is GONE. To let our eyes be diverted from such a prize because of Vietnam and Watergate and Watts is a tragedy of mythic Greek proportions. To forget we ever had such a chance because of HDTVs and six-part miniseries DVDs and the Internet have effectively become our reality is even worse. The Fermi paradox about where is everybody - why havent aliens/human colonized the Galaxy - may be as simple as before a species gets out of the gravity well of their home world, they just stop giving a damn. Pretty pictures on an ever-changing screen becomes their reality as the populations get ever larger and and the resource wars begin...
Israel A. Wagner's home page about Ants, Robots and Computation is here and it's a great and interesting compilation of data on this topic. Absolutely recommended.
Hmmm....Actually Livermore was using Time Domain technology with the microwave impulse radar, as discussed here. Also, I wouldn't envison a high powered spread spectrum transmitter reaching miles of range as tthe solution to this problem...more like a bunch of low powered ones where A can pass on to B which can pass on to C and so forth...
The real key to universal broadband is the so-called last mile - the connection to the home and thru the home into the computer there. Whatever solution you come up with will have to be duplicated tens of millions of times, just like it has been for telephone jacks and electrical outlets. A company in my hometown, Time Domain, is about to get licensed by the FCC for a revolutionary new type of wireless technology that may very well be the key to solving the last mile problem. You can read coverage about them from USA Today, The Economist, US News & World Report, Business Week, and The New York Times.
As someone who has a family history of depression, lost a mother to suicide from it, struggled with major depression myself on an ongoing basis, and have LOTS of reasons I won't go into here to feel just as empty as you do, I can say respectfully that you are wrong, there is indeed depression and it is a totally different mental state than the boredom you feel. I perceive you have embraced the boredom and emptiness you feel as part of your identity and individuality. That's OK, people get to be goth just like they get to be geek. I believe that as time goes on, however, you will change into something else that I or you or nobody can forsee. A human lifetime is the blink of an eye in one sense and an awfully long haul in another. It's hard to be bored - or depressed - forever. These are not equilibrium mental states. Only change is constant and it leads to evolution not only of species but of individuals. Scoff at me now all you want. Next year or ten or twenty years from now you will say something different. And that "you" will be no more or less "valid" than the "you" of today. Death comes eventually and inevitably and too soon to us all. This being the case, why not embrace life?
End of pseudo-Zen rambling. Best wishes to you.
Re:Very misleading, not "proof of quantum gravity"
on
Quantum Gravity Observed
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I see you have accepted questions from the public at large and done a fine job in answering them so here's mine....
This isn't GR, but it's at least associated with Da Man himself. Say you cool a cloud of radioactive atoms into a Bose-Einstein condensate and hold the condensate together for a period longer than the half life (or more accurately, a period long enough to where there is an overwhelmingly high probability that one radioactive decay would sponaneously occur). What happens? If the wave functions of the atoms all merge into a single wave function (admittedly a QM situation, not a GR one) then when the BEC is warmed, how is it "decided" which atom underwent decay? Maybe you could float this around your physics dept and see what the concensus is....
I only have a BS in Physics, marriage, kids, divorce and a job got in the way of my PhD, but I have the requisite curiosity in abundance, since these are such amazing times in which we live....
NASA is getting really good at crashing stuff and turning it off on purpose. Not too long ago it was the Deep Space 1 probe, which was set up to go by an asteroid after a successful comet flyby- oops, no more money for that. Since it was in deep space, they couldn't find anything to crash it into, I'm surprised they didn't slam it into the comet just for the hell of it. Before DS1, NASA crashed the NEAR Shoemaker into Eros because the mission budget was exhausted on that one. Before THAT was the lunar orbiter Clementine, which could have kept mapping neutrons over the moons poles and refining our understanding of extremely valuable ice lurking in shadows there. Before THAT NASA destroyed the Magellan Venus probe by commanding it to do an "aerobraking experiment". As a kid I dreamed about space probes orbiting the Moon and Venus and Jupiter and Eros and comets. Now as an adult, I watch NASA crash functioning probes into these places not because they have outlived their usefulness but because we have become so bored with them we don't care enough to pay for their upkeep. If I were an astronaut on a Mars mission, I'd be scared to death that halfway thru the mission, the'd turn off the deep space tracking and communications net to save money. And this is all because of Space Station sucking every available dollar and then billions more out of other areas of the NASA program.....
Actually, the "common" name for methanol is "wood alcohol". "Rubbing alcohol" generally refers to isopropyl alcohol. Methanol is actually fairly toxic and I don't think you'd want it routinely rubbed into your skin...
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, people play around with explosive hydrogen gas in lots of places....
Like KANSAS ---Farmland Industries Inc.'s fertilizer plant will remain closed while officials seek the cause of the second explosion in a week in a compressor building.
The building's safety systems contained the fire, which was fed by hydrogen gas.Lind didn't know how much hydrogen gas was in the pipeline, but he estimated it was more than the 12,000 pounds of gas that officials had said was in the system July 7.
The building was significantly damaged, although a specific damage estimate hadn't been made, said Carl Findley, the plant's human-resource director.
No injuries were reported in the latest blast, which occurred Friday afternoon as employees were resuming production in the building where a smaller explosion damaged a pipe and control systems July 7.
And LOUISIANA...Two workers were killed and a total of ten were hurt when a CF Industries fertilizer plant exploded in Donaldsonville, LA, fifty-five miles west of New Orleans. The explosion occurred in the facility's Ammonia No. 3 unit. Fueled by hydrogen, the blast did so much damage that investigators had trouble finding the exact origin. It occurred as workers were preparing an empty mixing tank.
And let's not forget FRANCE where this litle playing around with hydrogen gas at a fertilizer plant killed 18, seriously injured 49, sent 500+ to the hospital in a 3.2 Richter scale blast. Hey, the only reason it's called the Haber process is that in 1900, when the French chemist Henri Le Chatalier showed that ammonia could be formed from nitrogen and hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst, an explosion destroyed his apparatus and he lost interest in the experiment.
Realization that hydrogen explosions happen is not paranoia. Pointing out that a leak in a lithium / water heat exchanger could result in a hydrogen gas explosion in a fusion powerplant is not paranoia. I am gung-ho about building whoop-ass technology. But let's not minimize our perception of the risks we're taking by making it sound like hydrogen gas is some harmless toy like a can of Crisco or african violet food. That attitude is even worse than having dumb journalists making basic errors in their science writing.
Well, I agree I oversimplified some things to make for a short and understandable post, but I assure you that I've got the "little more information" at hand as well. Everything I said was a verifiable fact, although I agree that my introduction of the tritium topic in the post by referring to neutron irradiation of hydrogen gas instead of fission of lithium was somewhat misleading, tho true...
I know a little about the nuclear uses of lithium. In Oak Ridge I worked on the team that documented the pollution that occurred in the program there in the 1950s when Lithium 6 was separated from Lithium 7 and purified to use as fusion fuel in hydrogen bombs. There was a step where the Lithium 6 was dissolved in liquid mercury to purify it and later recovered by reacting it with nitric acid. Over 7 million pounds of mercury were dumped into Bear Creek, then the Clinch River, then the Tennessee River, then the Ohio River and ultimately the Mississippi by lithium processing in Oak Ridge. My point remains, and it's not paranoia, that there are unintended consequences that come with the use of major technologies like this. The public would do well to keep this in mind...if only they were smart enought to, as you correctly allude to in your other post here.
I've got a permanent burn mark above my right knee where I dropped a blob of solder on bare skin and I'm still using it routinely at work and at home in building my Beowulf cluster, etc, so I assure you I'm not afraid of technology for technology's sake. The fact remains that a reactive liquid alkali metal at 600 degrees C is inherently much more dangerous than non-reactive tin and lead at 250 degrees C. Fusion powerplants of the future will almost certainly use a lithium-water heat exchanger as I stated (and you did not deny) and it's almost a certainty that THESE THINGS LEAK at times and such a leak will probably cause LOTS of hydrogen gas to form. Hydrogen gas explosions were serious steps in both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents and have the potential to be one in a lithium cooled fusion reactor accident as well. Such a reactor probably wouldn't contaminate miles of countryside but the loss of the investment in the reactor would be devastating, as well as public confidence in the supposed "safety" of fusion reactors over fission ones. Such a public relations disaster doesn't occur at vegetable shortening of fertilizer plants even when they have explosions there (and they do) because those are "low-tech" kinds of plants in the public eye and they are more conditioned to think of them as "risky". Things like reactors and space shuttles are held, perhaps unfairly, to a higher standard.
Again, you post proves my point when you note correctly that sodium doesn't absorb neutrons like lithium does. It's easier in explaining it to the public to say sodium is "more corrosive" which is true. But the very fact a fusion reactor group would pick lithium instead of sodium for the coolant shows that somewhere along the line, neutron absorption and tritium production is important...the "hidden agenda" that is neither paranoia on my part or even hinted at in the ABC article.
Amen, brother, preach on. Last night a fellow slashdotter was wondering when a supernova in a distant galaxy went off and actually stated "...so it stands to reason it actually took place days, weeks, or even months ago". I am VERY concerned that the average slashdotter is an absolute computer whiz that has no feeling at all about basic scientific reality. Maybe this is why we have guys writing code that crashes orbiters on Mars because there's no inherent gut-feeling perception of difference between meters and miles? Or that write code that cut off the Mars lander engines when a switch is closed, and never considers that the switch accidentally gets closed by the jolt of the lander legs opening instead of contact with the Martian surface? Both of these actually happened, of course...
I dunno, it just makes me nervous to go in a bookstore and see miles of shelves on computer topics and one little corner of science books that never get looked at. Or to see a slashdot posting on Tivo get 200+ comments and one on fusion reactors get less than 10 comments less than an hour later....
I used to work in Oak Ridge in the nuclear program years ago and those guys LOVE to consider using liquid metals to cool things. Back in the 1970s it was the the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, which was gonna turn plentiful inert (U-238) uranium into vast quantities of power-packed plutonium in a machine cooled with liquid sodium. Wow - CRBR never got built.
Logically, a layperson would consider a liquid metal to be a very dangerous material to have around, but if you've already got pounds and pounds of plutonium you are juggling around, sodium doesn't seem so nasty anymore. They would still be talking about using sodium if it weren't so darn reactive - read corrosive. That's where our friend lithium comes in - less reactive, less corrosive. Ha.
There aren't any electric generator turbines that run on liquid lithium pressure so there's gonna be a lithium-to-water-to-steam heat exchanger loop in there somewhere in a functional fusion powerplant. Lithium is gonna come in contact with water somehow, by accident (or design) and make hydrogen gas which is not only explosive, but turns into radioactive tritium when bombarded by the neutrons put out by ANY reactor - fission or fusion.
Playing around with explosive hydrogen gas near a reactor is often done deliberately and may be a hidden agenda here. Don't kid yourself - America needs tritium. It is a prime ingredient in nuclear weapons and however much of it you've got, you've only got half that much 12 years later. This means unless you replenish your tritium stockpile you loose half of your nuclear weapons arsenal every 12 years. So far this hasn't been a problem because we are retiring nukes rapidly after winning the Cold War and we are scavinging tritium for our online weapons from the ones we retire. Sooner or later the US will run out of recycled tritium.
We used to make tritium at Savannah River Nuclear Plant but that was closed for environmental reasons years ago. Now the US is going to refurbish that old reactor and start it back up. Sooner or later we're gonna have to switch over to something else besides World War II factories like Savannah River. When that happens, and it's a fusion reactor with a lithium core, remember that there's something else in going on with that liquid metal coolant...
M74 is 30 million light years away so this supernova went off 30 million years ago. This is about 15 times farther away than the Andromeda galaxy, which is the closest "true" galaxy to the Milky Way.
No criticism intended, but if you are wondering if something visible in a distant galaxy occurred days, weeks or months ago, you need to get a fast update on just how BIG the universe is. I recommend a quick trip to the Powers of Ten website....
You don't have to go to Australia to find lack of funding endangering valuable genetic resources; The National Seed Storage Lab in Colorado is in exactly the same boat...er, ark. Read about their funding problems here. An excerpt:
What does this lack of funding mean? It results in another major problem for the banks:
germination backlog, currently of about 30,000 samples at the NSSL. Periodic germination tests
are important to assure the quality of the samples. Also, since seeds will not store indefinitely,
they must periodically be removed, grown out for new seed, and collected. Says Major
Goodman, a crop scientist at NC State who investigated the status of the samples, "Evaluation,
regeneration and utilization are essential parts of a functioning germplasm system. Yet the entire
emphasis...is based upon acquiring larger and larger numbers of samples to be stored in so-called
seed repositories..." A more accurate name, according to Goodman, is "seed morgues." The
samples that are most at risk are older or unusual varieties that are rarely requested, and
germination potential of these samples deteriorates. According to NSSL director Steve Eberhart,
who estimates that it would take 25 years to catch up with the backlog, "We normally test seeds
every ten years to make sure they'll still viable...we've had to eliminate our retesting in order to
process new materials. We don't know which material is deteriorating because we don't have the
staff to the do the germination." For example, there are 30,000 varieties of corn from Latin
America with four scientists assigned to grow and evaluate them. Each person can do 30 varieties
a year, totaling 120. At that rate, it would take 250 years to evaluate them all! Many of the corn
varieties will not survive to be regenerated.
...they'd be dumbfounding in 1912, alright, since they were taken in 1914-1916....I seem to have Titanic on the brain here....
You are absolutely correct, the photos taken by the photographer during the Shackleton voyage were a monumental historical, artistic and technical achievement. They would be remarkable today...but in 1912, they were utterly dumbfounding. There is an IMAX movie about this, too...
If you liked this book, you will LOVE Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. Some sample pages are here. From the jacket blurbs:
In October 1915 the ship Endurance was crushed by Anarctic ice, and the crew became castaways in one of the harshest regions of the world. Their adventures make one of the most intense, gripping stories ever written.
Description from The Reader's Catalog
The story of polar explorer Shackleton's survival for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctic seas. "One of the most gripping, suspenseful, intense stories anyone will ever read"--Chicago Tribune
From the Publisher
In August 1914, explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew set sail from England for Antarctica, where Shackleton hoped to be the first man to cross the uncharted continent on foot. Five months later, the Endurance - just a day's sail short of its destination - became locked in an island of ice, and its destiny and men became locked in history. For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted until it was finally crushed, and Shackleton and his crew made an 850-mile journey in a 20-foot craft through the South Atlantic's worst seas to reach an outpost of civilization. Inspired by the ordeal that Time magazine said "defined heroism," author Alfred Lansing conducted interviews with the crew's surviving members and pored over diaries and personal accounts to create his best-selling book on the miraculous voyage. In Audio Partners' abridged recording of Endurance, reader Patrick Malahide renders a masterful portrayal of these courageous men.
The ULTIMATE in science oriented songs is to be found at MC Hawking's Crib. Yes, little did you know that everyone's wheelchair bound astrophysicist, Steven Hawking, is in reality a rap star on the side. His works have to be heard to be believed. To give you a flavor of what we're taling about, here's the lyrics to his smash Entropy:
Trash Talk
Harm me with harmony.
Doomsday, drop a load on 'em.
Verse 1
Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it,
to have you all jumping, shouting saying it.
Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder,
in a system that is closed, like with a border.
It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness,
proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress.
"What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming,
it seems I gotta start the explaining.
You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break?
You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake.
But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true,
if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.
That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y,
the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die.
Order from disorder is a scientific rarity,
allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity.
Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility,
at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy.
That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it,
if you are here's your membership.
Chorus
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me! (x3)
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!
Verse 2
Defining entropy as disorder's not complete,
'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat.
So my first definition I would now like to withdraw,
and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law.
First we need to understand that entropy is energy,
energy that can't be used to state it more specifically.
In a closed system entropy always goes up,
that's the second law, now you know what's up.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about,
you're now down with a discount.
Chorus
Trash Talk
Hit it!
Doomsday, kick it in!
Hey, let's give karma points to a logged-in poster, not an AC...
WorldForge is the first thing that should be considered on this topic...
WorldForge is the first thing that should be considered in a discussion on this topic...
Circuit Cellar was a fixture in the back of Byte magazine back when it was worth reading. Hosted by hardware guru Steve Ciarcia, it was the beginning of many a budding computer hacker's career. Fortunately, it got spun off into its own magazine. Back issues are available on CD-ROM - get them, they're worth it. You'll be an expert hardware hacker in no time by reading the CD-ROM back issues.
The thing that gets me the most about Apollo is how few people got how SIGNIFICANT it was. Folks, once upon a time humans could GO TO THE MOON. They couldn't do that for THOUSANDS of years, and they can't do it now, only thirty years later. As the rate things are going, nobody alive today may ever see a human on another world again. Forging the national or international will or concensus to do it may be impossible to achieve, ever again. And the one chance humans had, that Americans had, to insure a future for humanity across the solar system and perhaps to the stars will be / already is GONE. To let our eyes be diverted from such a prize because of Vietnam and Watergate and Watts is a tragedy of mythic Greek proportions. To forget we ever had such a chance because of HDTVs and six-part miniseries DVDs and the Internet have effectively become our reality is even worse. The Fermi paradox about where is everybody - why havent aliens /human colonized the Galaxy - may be as simple as before a species gets out of the gravity well of their home world, they just stop giving a damn. Pretty pictures on an ever-changing screen becomes their reality as the populations get ever larger and and the resource wars begin...
Schedule Apollo 18.
Here's a whiff of Mars for a lot less than $3000 per gram...
Aircraft as small as a chocolate bar will one day fly on Mars?
Israel A. Wagner's home page about Ants, Robots and Computation is here and it's a great and interesting compilation of data on this topic. Absolutely recommended.
Hmmm....Actually Livermore was using Time Domain technology with the microwave impulse radar, as discussed here. Also, I wouldn't envison a high powered spread spectrum transmitter reaching miles of range as tthe solution to this problem...more like a bunch of low powered ones where A can pass on to B which can pass on to C and so forth...
The real key to universal broadband is the so-called last mile - the connection to the home and thru the home into the computer there. Whatever solution you come up with will have to be duplicated tens of millions of times, just like it has been for telephone jacks and electrical outlets. A company in my hometown, Time Domain, is about to get licensed by the FCC for a revolutionary new type of wireless technology that may very well be the key to solving the last mile problem. You can read coverage about them from USA Today, The Economist, US News & World Report, Business Week, and The New York Times.
As someone who has a family history of depression, lost a mother to suicide from it, struggled with major depression myself on an ongoing basis, and have LOTS of reasons I won't go into here to feel just as empty as you do, I can say respectfully that you are wrong, there is indeed depression and it is a totally different mental state than the boredom you feel. I perceive you have embraced the boredom and emptiness you feel as part of your identity and individuality. That's OK, people get to be goth just like they get to be geek. I believe that as time goes on, however, you will change into something else that I or you or nobody can forsee. A human lifetime is the blink of an eye in one sense and an awfully long haul in another. It's hard to be bored - or depressed - forever. These are not equilibrium mental states. Only change is constant and it leads to evolution not only of species but of individuals. Scoff at me now all you want. Next year or ten or twenty years from now you will say something different. And that "you" will be no more or less "valid" than the "you" of today. Death comes eventually and inevitably and too soon to us all. This being the case, why not embrace life?
End of pseudo-Zen rambling. Best wishes to you.
I see you have accepted questions from the public at large and done a fine job in answering them so here's mine....
This isn't GR, but it's at least associated with Da Man himself. Say you cool a cloud of radioactive atoms into a Bose-Einstein condensate and hold the condensate together for a period longer than the half life (or more accurately, a period long enough to where there is an overwhelmingly high probability that one radioactive decay would sponaneously occur). What happens? If the wave functions of the atoms all merge into a single wave function (admittedly a QM situation, not a GR one) then when the BEC is warmed, how is it "decided" which atom underwent decay? Maybe you could float this around your physics dept and see what the concensus is....
I only have a BS in Physics, marriage, kids, divorce and a job got in the way of my PhD, but I have the requisite curiosity in abundance, since these are such amazing times in which we live....
NASA is getting really good at crashing stuff and turning it off on purpose. Not too long ago it was the Deep Space 1 probe, which was set up to go by an asteroid after a successful comet flyby- oops, no more money for that. Since it was in deep space, they couldn't find anything to crash it into, I'm surprised they didn't slam it into the comet just for the hell of it. Before DS1, NASA crashed the NEAR Shoemaker into Eros because the mission budget was exhausted on that one. Before THAT was the lunar orbiter Clementine, which could have kept mapping neutrons over the moons poles and refining our understanding of extremely valuable ice lurking in shadows there. Before THAT NASA destroyed the Magellan Venus probe by commanding it to do an "aerobraking experiment". As a kid I dreamed about space probes orbiting the Moon and Venus and Jupiter and Eros and comets. Now as an adult, I watch NASA crash functioning probes into these places not because they have outlived their usefulness but because we have become so bored with them we don't care enough to pay for their upkeep. If I were an astronaut on a Mars mission, I'd be scared to death that halfway thru the mission, the'd turn off the deep space tracking and communications net to save money. And this is all because of Space Station sucking every available dollar and then billions more out of other areas of the NASA program.....
Actually, the "common" name for methanol is "wood alcohol". "Rubbing alcohol" generally refers to isopropyl alcohol. Methanol is actually fairly toxic and I don't think you'd want it routinely rubbed into your skin...