In the recent past, whenever a story would come up here about how poor the broadband service is in America, there would be posters here proclaiming "Fiber? Feh! Luddites stuck in the 20th Century! America is far ahead in wireless broadband which totally superior in every way!". But thus far (with 70 posts) there is not one of these wireless corporate shills around.
Perhaps it is because TFA is not pointing the superior service and pricing in many other countries. That is what often seemed to trigger the trollish claims of US wireless being "more advanced" and superior to fiber.
You should realize that the numbers you are throwing out there don't make sense. Your claim is that increasing the atmosphere of Mars in density 20-fold, will get half of it stripped about in a few thousand years? If that were the loss rate then its atmosphere would be dropping by a factor of a billion every few million years, and would have been a hard vacuum for billions of years now.
Somewhere I read that Mars lost its atmosphere because it didn't have a magnetic field to keep the solar wind from blasting its atmosphere away, and, if we tried to build up an atmosphere again, the same thing would happen.
While this is true, it doesn't mean we would care. How long are planning on using Mars for? The timescale of atmosphere loss was on the order of a billion years. Even a timescale 100 times shorter than that (which it isn't) would still give 10 million years of use.
Optimized sulfur halocarbons for the role of super-greenhouse gases have been identified, like SF4(CF3)2. The amount required for this to warm Mars is about a billion tons. So we need to find sulfur and fluorine deposits on Mars, and create robot mining and chemical plants to manufacture it. If we manage to reach 10 million tons a year production, it will take only a century to warm up Mars.
That will mobilize all of the free CO2 in the atmosphere, according to TFA we don't even reach 15 mbar (Earth's atmosphere is 1000 mbar). But we will also be able to saturate the atmosphere with water vapor (there is more water than CO2 on Mars) which might add another 20 mbar or so. At that point you are stuck unless you import comets, or start processing the crust of Mars like the mantle subduction system on Earth does, to turn carbonate in to oxides and free CO2.
To make Mars more "livable" in any useful sense the pressure has to be at least 120 mbar, which will allow walking around with an oxygen mask, but no pressure suit. The oxygen level would be equivalent to 4000 m, which you can acclimate to - there are quite a number of cities at this altitude. But this requires adding over 100 trillion tons to the atmosphere. Comet Halley (a large comet) weighs about twice this, but it isn't all CO2 and ammonia, the two gases that would be helpful here. it would probably take centuries of in-falling comets, with orbits close enough to divert, to accomplish this (or to go to the outer solar system and cause a large body with an orbital period of centuries to fall inward).
This "very plausible" is supportable if you mean eventually, say over the next 500-1000 years.
+2 Flamebait? That's a new one to me, not sure how the moderation system makes that happen.
Someone with mod points must have had an delicate little ideology protect.
All I did was point out a very exact parallel between believing that the word "socialist" in the official name of the Nazi Party - and beleiving on exactly the same grounds that Kim Jong Un runs a democracy, and give a sober factual link analyzing the false "the Nazis were socialists" belief.
Well, then you must believe that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea to you) is really a democracy, because its in its name.
The Nazi Party had "Socialist" in its name essentially for the same reason that "Democratic" is in the name of North Korea -- it was a popular marketing term, regardless of validity.
You leave out of the equation building high voltage DC transmission lines to move the electricity to distant markets. 800 KV DC lines are used all over the world and the losses are only several percent even for transcontinental transmission. A better power grid for the 21st Century seems a logical and necessary idea. Power lines cost less than power plants over time. The power excess this article is discussing is only a local one due the lack of opportunity to sell it in more distant markets. A large part of the variability of renewable energy can be addressed by long distance transmission much more cheaply than building any type of storage.
They are simply modulating the flow between Lake Mead and Lake Mojave,which is further downstream. Lake Mojave can release water at whatever rate it needs to. Since they are capturing the water above Lake Mojave, this water does not actually reach that lower lake at all, and its elevation remains the same.
The elevation of the lowest Hoover Dam outlet is 272 meters, well above the river level, and the lowest Lake Mead elevation that produces electricity is 320 m. You get your biggest energy return if you pump the water up when Lake Mead is high. In that case you are raising it 174 m, and then getting 100 m of water drop back out. If it is at low water level you are raising it 122 m for a 48 m drop. So a 57% return (neglecting other losses) versus a 39% return.
You could raise the level of Lake Mojave, or build another dam farther upstream to increase the return. But you'd have to look at the additional costs vs benefits. But remember all of this is "free" electricity, it would be 100% wasted without this storage pump system.
Pretty stupid. 20 miles down river means it is at an even lower elevation, meaning you have to pump water even further vertically with that much more efficiency loss. A typical pumped hydro has a reservoir at the base of the hydro outlet for a very good reason.
The only relevant things here is the cost of building the return pipe system, and the amount of extra electricity at high value times they can get out of it, and thus the levelized cost of that electricity. That only part of the electricity (that otherwise would have been 100% wasted) is recovered is irrelevant.
More power could be recovered if a second dam was built, to create a second lake with a level just below the Hoover Dam outlets. But whether this additional power produced would be worth the cost of building this dam, and the hassle of getting approval for a second lake, is questionable.
We have known for some time that Antarctica's subsurface lakes are rich ecosystems. This is the first plausible location to look for life on Mars that we have discovered (as opposed to merely hypothesized).
Ice is also relatively easy to drill through, or even penetrated with an ice subterrene.
It will be a much larger operation of course than any lander mission to date, by far.
But how many electromagnetic coil equipped aeroshells does the Moon have to put the rocks in? EM launchers can't move rocks, and rocks by themselves can't stand high angle entry into the atmosphere.
And how many electromagnetic launchers with power supplies does the Moon have that can withstand nuclear attack?
Such a system could only do substantial damage on Earth with a very long, slow bombardment, lasting weeks or months. People on Earth will do something about that.
There is at best only a 19-fold energy gain in launching a payload from the Moon. Given the extremely high cost of building the launcher, this is a paltry gain. Nuclear weapons rule.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is just an entertaining story.
The FDA defines "noodles" as a product made from wheat flour and eggs, neither of which Asian cuisines use in their noodles, so for many years they had to be called "alimentary paste" in the grocery store. But when you went to an Asian restaurant you got "noodles" (of course the same product).
Eventually the FDA relented and allowed them to be called "Asian noodles".
Perhaps we can call these products "vegan milk" (though this is really no different from the more specific "soy milk", etc.)?
The difference of course is there are no "noodle producers" associations of industrial farmers whose primary product are noodles.
You have (thus far) written nine posts claiming "NOTHING TO SEE FOLKS" but have provided zero actual data or citiations, just your personal assurances. Can you provide a link to any source that supports your assertion here?
They are sold as scrap - specifically as scrap to make ferrotitanium which is added to steel to scavenge sulfur, nitrogen and oxygen. The titanium is being used simply as a chemical reagent to purify the steel.
This video is what you should look at to find out about the actual size of the object and you can see how it was made. The size is 1.16 meters (46.7 inches, not the 46 given in the press release, they should have rounded up to 47 if they wanted two use two digits of precision).
It was made by laying down titanium on a rotating platform and fusing it in place. Although you can see it being done in the video how the titanium is applied and what they are using to fuse it is not explained. I'm guessing titanium ribbon and a helium atmosphere arc.
The lead time they quote for forgings is presumably the time to make the tooling. Additive "printing" processes are good for low production items so that expensive tooling isn't necessary.
Highly concentrated titanium is extremely cheap. It is titanium dioxide that makes "white paint" white. It costs about $100 per ton. World production is in the millions of tons annually. Even high purity oxide is cheap.
The cost of raw titanium is entirely in the processing required to reduce it to metal. The most efficient process currently is the recent FFC Cambridge process that uses electrochemical reduction of the oxide in molten calcium chloride.
Yes, they can track the neutrino through the detector, and that gives them a direction. In this case the single detection had a 90% error box of 1.6 degrees x 0.8 degrees. Gamma ray instruments looking in this direction detected increased activity of the blazar, with a combined significance of 3 sigmas. Adding the previous neutrino detections from this apparent source allows even more accurate source determination.
With most cities you can read off features of their history and topography from the histogram.
Los Angeles you see the small disk of streets that represent hill neighborhoods on top of a simple grid.
"Ancient" cities (developed gradually over centuries), only found in Colonial America in the U.S., are large disks due to the incorporation of many unplanned, or separately planned, nuclei. Or you see rapid modern growth from an ancient core. Delhi is a good example, and but this same pattern with different scales for the central disk is found with many cities.
It looks like Charlotte started with a typical colonial city core - multiple city centers that fused together, then the city expanded in the modern era by building highways radiating out from the center, with developments built in grids along these highways, using them as the orientation axis.
As a nerd, one thing that has really annoyed me is the lack of support for scientific notation on the web. Even 30 years after the invention of the web there is no good way to put scientific notation on a web page. Now we do have the MathJax JavaScript librar, but it is not a standard. It requires a special web server installation procedure, or if you are hosting on a service you have to use the external MathJax service creating an external site dependency, and the browser has to enable JavaScript. This is a PITA, not a standard mark-up.
The really odd thing about this is that the WWW was invented at a physics lab by a physicist. If Tim Berners-Lee had only made an a "latex" (or just "tex") tag a required part of HTML, rendering the standard scientific equation markup already in use, things would have been so much easier.
Slashdot Mirror
In the recent past, whenever a story would come up here about how poor the broadband service is in America, there would be posters here proclaiming "Fiber? Feh! Luddites stuck in the 20th Century! America is far ahead in wireless broadband which totally superior in every way!". But thus far (with 70 posts) there is not one of these wireless corporate shills around.
Perhaps it is because TFA is not pointing the superior service and pricing in many other countries. That is what often seemed to trigger the trollish claims of US wireless being "more advanced" and superior to fiber.
You should realize that the numbers you are throwing out there don't make sense. Your claim is that increasing the atmosphere of Mars in density 20-fold, will get half of it stripped about in a few thousand years? If that were the loss rate then its atmosphere would be dropping by a factor of a billion every few million years, and would have been a hard vacuum for billions of years now.
Somewhere I read that Mars lost its atmosphere because it didn't have a magnetic field to keep the solar wind from blasting its atmosphere away, and, if we tried to build up an atmosphere again, the same thing would happen.
While this is true, it doesn't mean we would care. How long are planning on using Mars for? The timescale of atmosphere loss was on the order of a billion years. Even a timescale 100 times shorter than that (which it isn't) would still give 10 million years of use.
Optimized sulfur halocarbons for the role of super-greenhouse gases have been identified, like SF4(CF3)2. The amount required for this to warm Mars is about a billion tons. So we need to find sulfur and fluorine deposits on Mars, and create robot mining and chemical plants to manufacture it. If we manage to reach 10 million tons a year production, it will take only a century to warm up Mars.
That will mobilize all of the free CO2 in the atmosphere, according to TFA we don't even reach 15 mbar (Earth's atmosphere is 1000 mbar). But we will also be able to saturate the atmosphere with water vapor (there is more water than CO2 on Mars) which might add another 20 mbar or so. At that point you are stuck unless you import comets, or start processing the crust of Mars like the mantle subduction system on Earth does, to turn carbonate in to oxides and free CO2.
To make Mars more "livable" in any useful sense the pressure has to be at least 120 mbar, which will allow walking around with an oxygen mask, but no pressure suit. The oxygen level would be equivalent to 4000 m, which you can acclimate to - there are quite a number of cities at this altitude. But this requires adding over 100 trillion tons to the atmosphere. Comet Halley (a large comet) weighs about twice this, but it isn't all CO2 and ammonia, the two gases that would be helpful here. it would probably take centuries of in-falling comets, with orbits close enough to divert, to accomplish this (or to go to the outer solar system and cause a large body with an orbital period of centuries to fall inward).
This "very plausible" is supportable if you mean eventually, say over the next 500-1000 years.
+2 Flamebait? That's a new one to me, not sure how the moderation system makes that happen.
Someone with mod points must have had an delicate little ideology protect.
All I did was point out a very exact parallel between believing that the word "socialist" in the official name of the Nazi Party - and beleiving on exactly the same grounds that Kim Jong Un runs a democracy, and give a sober factual link analyzing the false "the Nazis were socialists" belief.
Well, then you must believe that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea to you) is really a democracy, because its in its name.
The Nazi Party had "Socialist" in its name essentially for the same reason that "Democratic" is in the name of North Korea -- it was a popular marketing term, regardless of validity.
Here is a good discussion of this issue.
You leave out of the equation building high voltage DC transmission lines to move the electricity to distant markets. 800 KV DC lines are used all over the world and the losses are only several percent even for transcontinental transmission. A better power grid for the 21st Century seems a logical and necessary idea. Power lines cost less than power plants over time. The power excess this article is discussing is only a local one due the lack of opportunity to sell it in more distant markets. A large part of the variability of renewable energy can be addressed by long distance transmission much more cheaply than building any type of storage.
They are simply modulating the flow between Lake Mead and Lake Mojave,which is further downstream. Lake Mojave can release water at whatever rate it needs to. Since they are capturing the water above Lake Mojave, this water does not actually reach that lower lake at all, and its elevation remains the same.
The elevation of the lowest Hoover Dam outlet is 272 meters, well above the river level, and the lowest Lake Mead elevation that produces electricity is 320 m. You get your biggest energy return if you pump the water up when Lake Mead is high. In that case you are raising it 174 m, and then getting 100 m of water drop back out. If it is at low water level you are raising it 122 m for a 48 m drop. So a 57% return (neglecting other losses) versus a 39% return.
You could raise the level of Lake Mojave, or build another dam farther upstream to increase the return. But you'd have to look at the additional costs vs benefits. But remember all of this is "free" electricity, it would be 100% wasted without this storage pump system.
Pretty stupid. 20 miles down river means it is at an even lower elevation, meaning you have to pump water even further vertically with that much more efficiency loss. A typical pumped hydro has a reservoir at the base of the hydro outlet for a very good reason.
The only relevant things here is the cost of building the return pipe system, and the amount of extra electricity at high value times they can get out of it, and thus the levelized cost of that electricity. That only part of the electricity (that otherwise would have been 100% wasted) is recovered is irrelevant.
More power could be recovered if a second dam was built, to create a second lake with a level just below the Hoover Dam outlets. But whether this additional power produced would be worth the cost of building this dam, and the hassle of getting approval for a second lake, is questionable.
So, you are saying these 'couple hours at the edge of space' is so that people can join the 41.4 km club?
We have known for some time that Antarctica's subsurface lakes are rich ecosystems. This is the first plausible location to look for life on Mars that we have discovered (as opposed to merely hypothesized).
Ice is also relatively easy to drill through, or even penetrated with an ice subterrene.
It will be a much larger operation of course than any lander mission to date, by far.
But how many electromagnetic coil equipped aeroshells does the Moon have to put the rocks in? EM launchers can't move rocks, and rocks by themselves can't stand high angle entry into the atmosphere.
And how many electromagnetic launchers with power supplies does the Moon have that can withstand nuclear attack? Such a system could only do substantial damage on Earth with a very long, slow bombardment, lasting weeks or months. People on Earth will do something about that.
There is at best only a 19-fold energy gain in launching a payload from the Moon. Given the extremely high cost of building the launcher, this is a paltry gain. Nuclear weapons rule.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is just an entertaining story.
That's an idea, but I think "milq" is a better implementation of this idea ("milque"?, that is even in play in the form of Caspar Milquetoast).
The FDA defines "noodles" as a product made from wheat flour and eggs, neither of which Asian cuisines use in their noodles, so for many years they had to be called "alimentary paste" in the grocery store. But when you went to an Asian restaurant you got "noodles" (of course the same product).
Eventually the FDA relented and allowed them to be called "Asian noodles".
Perhaps we can call these products "vegan milk" (though this is really no different from the more specific "soy milk", etc.)?
The difference of course is there are no "noodle producers" associations of industrial farmers whose primary product are noodles.
The logical entity to take this on is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), formerly the Bureau of Standards.
You have (thus far) written nine posts claiming "NOTHING TO SEE FOLKS" but have provided zero actual data or citiations, just your personal assurances. Can you provide a link to any source that supports your assertion here?
This alleged "fact" is not found in any of the reporting on this that I have seen such as original New York Magazine story, updates by Motherboard, The Verified Voting watchdog project, etc.
You wouldn't be, y'know, just making stuff up now, would you?
They are sold as scrap - specifically as scrap to make ferrotitanium which is added to steel to scavenge sulfur, nitrogen and oxygen. The titanium is being used simply as a chemical reagent to purify the steel.
Those are just units for the negative space; they're not building the part they counted using donuts. They're just hungry.
The coffee and M&M ("hard-shell candies (you know which ones we mean)") examples support this theory.
But how to explain the ping ping balls (6,225)?
This video is what you should look at to find out about the actual size of the object and you can see how it was made. The size is 1.16 meters (46.7 inches, not the 46 given in the press release, they should have rounded up to 47 if they wanted two use two digits of precision).
It was made by laying down titanium on a rotating platform and fusing it in place. Although you can see it being done in the video how the titanium is applied and what they are using to fuse it is not explained. I'm guessing titanium ribbon and a helium atmosphere arc.
The lead time they quote for forgings is presumably the time to make the tooling. Additive "printing" processes are good for low production items so that expensive tooling isn't necessary.
Highly concentrated titanium is extremely cheap. It is titanium dioxide that makes "white paint" white. It costs about $100 per ton. World production is in the millions of tons annually. Even high purity oxide is cheap.
The cost of raw titanium is entirely in the processing required to reduce it to metal. The most efficient process currently is the recent FFC Cambridge process that uses electrochemical reduction of the oxide in molten calcium chloride.
Yes, they can track the neutrino through the detector, and that gives them a direction. In this case the single detection had a 90% error box of 1.6 degrees x 0.8 degrees. Gamma ray instruments looking in this direction detected increased activity of the blazar, with a combined significance of 3 sigmas. Adding the previous neutrino detections from this apparent source allows even more accurate source determination.
I am pretty sure the club owner gets a cut.
This is a neat presentation of data.
With most cities you can read off features of their history and topography from the histogram.
Los Angeles you see the small disk of streets that represent hill neighborhoods on top of a simple grid.
"Ancient" cities (developed gradually over centuries), only found in Colonial America in the U.S., are large disks due to the incorporation of many unplanned, or separately planned, nuclei. Or you see rapid modern growth from an ancient core. Delhi is a good example, and but this same pattern with different scales for the central disk is found with many cities.
It looks like Charlotte started with a typical colonial city core - multiple city centers that fused together, then the city expanded in the modern era by building highways radiating out from the center, with developments built in grids along these highways, using them as the orientation axis.
As a nerd, one thing that has really annoyed me is the lack of support for scientific notation on the web. Even 30 years after the invention of the web there is no good way to put scientific notation on a web page. Now we do have the MathJax JavaScript librar, but it is not a standard. It requires a special web server installation procedure, or if you are hosting on a service you have to use the external MathJax service creating an external site dependency, and the browser has to enable JavaScript. This is a PITA, not a standard mark-up.
The really odd thing about this is that the WWW was invented at a physics lab by a physicist. If Tim Berners-Lee had only made an a "latex" (or just "tex") tag a required part of HTML, rendering the standard scientific equation markup already in use, things would have been so much easier.