For those of you who are blessed to find this reference utterly mysterious, I hold up for you a case in point of John Roger's insightful comment on Kung Fu Monkey:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Not according to "Zuck". Your diatribe is more or less correct over all, but trying to put an "evil Democrat" spin on it is stupid.
Both parties have been way too Plutocrat friendly for decades now, but only one party currently has every one its candidates for the Presidency declaring that the number one problem the country faces is that the rich pay way too much in taxes, and the number one solution to all our problems are slashing those taxes. Its not the Democrats sweetheart.
You have identified the intellectual parlor trick (aka "lie") that underlies all of Libertarianism. Everything is selfish. Thus you can never point out, or act against, selfish behavior, ever. Its all good. In fact since altruism and selfishness are identical, any good that ever came from altruism really came from selfishness, so all selfish acts are inherently good.
The only thing I'd call Matt Ridley and expert in is climate science denial. But he has motivation because his family owns coal mines.
He has also invested heavily in fracking, and is opposed to regulating same.
Oh, and he is extremely hostile to wind and solar power.
He must really be panicking about solar and wind since the deployment costs have plummeted, and expansion rates have been averaging 25% annually, year after year. Currently wind and solar 11% of the entire annual electricity production in the EU, yet Ridley keeps asserting that it is impossible for these to make any significant contribution.
Anything to promote burning fossil fuels, which puts dollars directly into his pocket.
There is no wide agreement on this fundamental question, and without a clear understanding of what "intelligence" is, we cannot make progress toward making a real version of it.
Seriously - if we knew what intelligence was, then consistent unambiguous ways of measuring it would exist. We have many "IQ" tests, and there is real experimental evidence that a common factor called "g" underlies intelligence, but the field attempting to study/measure intelligence is fragmented, and contentious. If intelligence testing really measured a fundamental property of the mind, we would not have the Flynn Effect.
Two things have emerged in the past few decades that have thrown notions of what we mean by intelligence into a cocked hat.
First, many difficult "symbolic" activities thought to be the epitome of human reasoning (chess playing, theorem proving, etc.) have been surprisingly easily automated - it is commonsense activities that small children pick up quickly and naturally that prove intractable.
Second is has become clear that animals are intelligent by any reasonable understanding of the term, those impossible-to-automate mental skills exhibited by young children? Animals can do them also, as easily. In fact animals have been exhibiting complex problem solving behavior to novel problems for decades - consider crows.
We've just shaved off first 1.5km/s out of the required 9 or so needed to reach orbit - and with the tyranny of rocket equation, that's quite a bit of savings!
No you haven't. The Earth's surface is not in a vacuum. The initial launch of a rocket is just spent climbing out of the atmosphere . The Space Shuttle traveled at a constant, subsonic velocity (slower than a commercial airplane) until it reached 10 km, above most of the atmosphere, before it started to accelerate and acquire its actual launch velocity.
Clearly you do not understand the OPs statement about "a straight line tube cutting into the earth's curvature". Such a straight line is called a chord, the max depth of the chord is called the sagitta. A 200 meter sagitta ("600 feet") means that the total length of the journey is only 100 km. To go from LA to SF, a distance of 630 km, the depth of the sagitta increases to 7.8 km. Currently the deepest anyone has ever dug a tunnel is 3.9 km (the TauTona Mine in South Africa).
... And of course in return Sadat was murdered by his own people....
Just goes to show how completely different Arabs and Israelis are. No Jewish Israeli would ever dream of murdering their national leader for trying to make peace. Oh wait.....
...you should check out the NAIC study on the space elevator, it is an equally interesting read.
Are we 50 years after everyone stops laughing yet?
It is an interesting read, and this study shows that material strength is required that does not exist in any prospective nanotube material. Their design requires operating at 50% of the theoretical limit of nanotube strength. This level of performance will never be achieved in any substantial cable.
Right now, after 30 years of work, 1 mm long nanotube cable samples just barely break 1% of the theoretical strength. Increase strength 50 times, length of a factor 40 billion, and cross section by a factor of a million, and you are there.
People are going to be laughing for a long, long time yet.
I hope everyone notes though: energy cost $80/kg, launch cost (at least) $18,000/kg.
Talking about "energy costs" shows rank amateurism when talking about space flight. Virtually the entire cost is the flight hardware and ground support infrastructure. Energy costs aren't even rounding error on those.
Employers just don't invest in employees like they used to.
Well to that I took the advice of one of my former, now retired by choice at an early age coworkers, take every dime you can from the company.
401k put in the maximum amount they will match
employee share matching plan, put in as much as they will match
chance for training or conferences, take it all
business travel, take it
vacation, take it but carry over as much as you can
tuition reimbursement, get that advanced degree
Even if your employer doesn't offer all of those options take what ever they do and make use of it.
Maybe we should enroll in their defined benefit pension plan also.
I don't know if you have looked at the job market lately, and what employers are doing - but "matching" exists at a token level is it exists at all. Instead of tuition reimbursement we have extremely low (or zero) pay, no security internships for those already with degrees. Training? It is so amusing.
It means you have absolutely no security. No benefits, no paid time off, etc. None of this is conducive to a proper work/life balance.
This is fine when you are single and have a safety net to fall back on. But that doesn't work when hard times hit and you have no net and/or you have a family.
And of course the U.S. has the stingiest safety net in the modern world. Which the right wing is convinced is far, far too generous and must be slashed deeply.
We are heading for a 21st Century Dickensian society. The life span of the lower economic ladders (not the poor), who are taking the brunt of this brave new world of gig work, and suffering from the "safety net", is already dropping - an end to 2 centuries of improvement in living conditions.
Believing capitalism should be regulated doesn't make you a socialist
Wanting to alter capitalism into a more "humane" form through regulation is pretty much the definition of socialist, at least as commonly used today.
Which means that "socialist" has completely changed its meaning, and has nothing to at all to do with socialism. Right.
In other news war is now peace.
Newspeak is just a way of lying. The Soviets, Nazis and other fascists mastered this, and it worked pretty well for them. The American political right has adopted this lesson of history, so vividly described by Orwell.
How about you keep your work output and pay your expenses, I keep my work output and pay my expenses? That way we don't have to shuffle people's money around and worry about fairness.
Because then you have a fragmented, private insurance system attempting to dump risks and costs on externalities, which shuffles peoples money around. And when that happens you have to pay double for your health care. I am sure you love being overcharged 100%, because FREEDOM!
Also, clearly the decline in lifespan for lower end of the Middle Class (not the poor), a unique event for any advanced country, due to high medical costs is just hunky-dory with you. Watching your less well off fellow Americans (remember that old idea, civic-mindedness?) die young is terrific because FREEDOM!
You mean like how a bed of nails causes all the nails to penetrate extra deeply? How snowshoes cause the feet to sink extra deep in the snow?
Just...no.
Excellent point. Also: the technique of weaving fibers into a mesh that does not pull apart (essential for soft ballistic protection) is well developed.
They were doing exactly that in Fukushima but a tsunami arrived. It could be an earthquake or a tornado in the USA, instead.
> keep the spent fuel rods in above-ground 10 ton concrete casks permanently
Those could be stolen for making a dirty bomb or a plane or a meteorite or space junk could fall onto them, during the hundreds of years required for 10x half-life storage or the above mentioned hurricane or earthquake could happen.
Smart to post as an AC, since you are pulling objections out of your nether regions.
Fukushima is a good example of where to never to site any nuclear facility whatsoever. The cooling ponds were a trivial problem compared the reactor units that were breached. In a non-insane site they are fine.
But objecting to the cooling ponds is a complete red herring - fuel is only held in ponds for a few years. We are discussing the problem of long term storage.
Clearly you know nothing at all about the characteristics of concrete fuel casks. Or tornados, or earthquakes, or hurricanes, or plane crashes, or space junk, or meteorites, for that matter. None of these are going to breach a storage cask - even a one in a thousand year meteor strike like Tunguska would not breach one, even if it happened to just hit that exact spot.
And even if you did breach one, the fuel is in solid intact rods of metal encased uranium oxide. Radiation is not going to go flying out everywhere.
Successfully stealing rods to make a dirty bomb is a bit of a problem too. Medical radiation sources are much easier to get and actually more dangerous as dirty bombs. I don't see radiation treatment in medicine going away.
I was reading an article about how the closing of reactors in California has lead to coal based power plants, and not wind or solar, stepping in to fill the breach.
Link to the article you read? From all sources I have seen the replacement power for the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station shutdown was from natural gas power plants. The lifecycle carbon emissions for gas is about half that of coal, and other pollutants far less than that.
Currently (2014) wind and solar provide 11.8% of California's (in state) electricity (12.3% if you include energy import across state lines). They were only 3.7% and 5% in 2010, thus increasing 3 times and 2.5 times in just four years (this is all actual production, not "capacity"). The added production in those 4 years is more than the output of San Onofre, so although they were not the source of the drop-in power replacement for San Onofre, over 4 years they did replace its net annual production and more, and are continuing to grow quickly. If they add the same capacity over the next four years they will produce more power for California than nuclear power ever did.
The regular nuclear power industry, using enriched uranium fuel and light water moderator/coolant, but presumably with advanced designs, will recover 20 years before any commercial thorium reactors are built. If you ever want to see an operating LFTR you should be rooting for the construction of existing designs.
ka9dgx claimed that "uranium fueled reactors" cannot use uranium oxide fuel (believing apparently, that all of them are using uranium metal fuel - e.g. his concern about the fuel "oxidizing").
In fact all commercial reactors (which are all "uranium fueled") use nothing but uranium oxide fuel - his assertion that this was a deficiency in uranium fueled reactors was simply false.
We already have a solution for nuclear waste - the one we are currently using by default. After a few years cooling in a pond simply keep the spent fuel rods in above-ground 10 ton concrete casks permanently. Currently the casks are kept on the reactor site, but it would be better to move them to a few remote central sites for long term monitoring (in the U.S. the Chiricahua Apache have suggested their reservation as such a storage site).
The fuel rods are perfectly stable in the casks for thousands of years.
Also, if we should ever desire to reprocess them (currently a fantastically uneconomic idea) they would be easy to retrieve.
That this is not being treated as a final storage solution is due to political, not technological issues.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you who are blessed to find this reference utterly mysterious, I hold up for you a case in point of John Roger's insightful comment on Kung Fu Monkey:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Thanks for dropping in with the clarifications!
>
... Zuck is a Democrat ...
Not according to "Zuck". Your diatribe is more or less correct over all, but trying to put an "evil Democrat" spin on it is stupid.
Both parties have been way too Plutocrat friendly for decades now, but only one party currently has every one its candidates for the Presidency declaring that the number one problem the country faces is that the rich pay way too much in taxes, and the number one solution to all our problems are slashing those taxes. Its not the Democrats sweetheart.
You have identified the intellectual parlor trick (aka "lie") that underlies all of Libertarianism. Everything is selfish. Thus you can never point out, or act against, selfish behavior, ever. Its all good. In fact since altruism and selfishness are identical, any good that ever came from altruism really came from selfishness, so all selfish acts are inherently good.
The only thing I'd call Matt Ridley and expert in is climate science denial. But he has motivation because his family owns coal mines.
He has also invested heavily in fracking, and is opposed to regulating same.
Oh, and he is extremely hostile to wind and solar power.
He must really be panicking about solar and wind since the deployment costs have plummeted, and expansion rates have been averaging 25% annually, year after year. Currently wind and solar 11% of the entire annual electricity production in the EU, yet Ridley keeps asserting that it is impossible for these to make any significant contribution.
Anything to promote burning fossil fuels, which puts dollars directly into his pocket.
Gag me, thats so 19990's.
How about something we can use now, and is much more abundant?
I am of course talking about Thorium.
How about uranium? We actually have plant designs ready to build that can use that stuff.
There is no wide agreement on this fundamental question, and without a clear understanding of what "intelligence" is, we cannot make progress toward making a real version of it.
Seriously - if we knew what intelligence was, then consistent unambiguous ways of measuring it would exist. We have many "IQ" tests, and there is real experimental evidence that a common factor called "g" underlies intelligence, but the field attempting to study/measure intelligence is fragmented, and contentious. If intelligence testing really measured a fundamental property of the mind, we would not have the Flynn Effect.
Two things have emerged in the past few decades that have thrown notions of what we mean by intelligence into a cocked hat.
First, many difficult "symbolic" activities thought to be the epitome of human reasoning (chess playing, theorem proving, etc.) have been surprisingly easily automated - it is commonsense activities that small children pick up quickly and naturally that prove intractable.
Second is has become clear that animals are intelligent by any reasonable understanding of the term, those impossible-to-automate mental skills exhibited by young children? Animals can do them also, as easily. In fact animals have been exhibiting complex problem solving behavior to novel problems for decades - consider crows.
The Gravity Train is a well established idea. The article also explains why no one builds them.
We've just shaved off first 1.5km/s out of the required 9 or so needed to reach orbit - and with the tyranny of rocket equation, that's quite a bit of savings!
No you haven't. The Earth's surface is not in a vacuum. The initial launch of a rocket is just spent climbing out of the atmosphere . The Space Shuttle traveled at a constant, subsonic velocity (slower than a commercial airplane) until it reached 10 km, above most of the atmosphere, before it started to accelerate and acquire its actual launch velocity.
Because you only want to travel 100 km?
Clearly you do not understand the OPs statement about "a straight line tube cutting into the earth's curvature". Such a straight line is called a chord, the max depth of the chord is called the sagitta. A 200 meter sagitta ("600 feet") means that the total length of the journey is only 100 km. To go from LA to SF, a distance of 630 km, the depth of the sagitta increases to 7.8 km. Currently the deepest anyone has ever dug a tunnel is 3.9 km (the TauTona Mine in South Africa).
... And of course in return Sadat was murdered by his own people....
Just goes to show how completely different Arabs and Israelis are. No Jewish Israeli would ever dream of murdering their national leader for trying to make peace. Oh wait.....
Mod this guy up please. Too bad he posted as an AC.
Subject line says it all.
...you should check out the NAIC study on the space elevator, it is an equally interesting read.
Are we 50 years after everyone stops laughing yet?
It is an interesting read, and this study shows that material strength is required that does not exist in any prospective nanotube material. Their design requires operating at 50% of the theoretical limit of nanotube strength. This level of performance will never be achieved in any substantial cable.
Right now, after 30 years of work, 1 mm long nanotube cable samples just barely break 1% of the theoretical strength. Increase strength 50 times, length of a factor 40 billion, and cross section by a factor of a million, and you are there.
People are going to be laughing for a long, long time yet.
I hope everyone notes though: energy cost $80/kg, launch cost (at least) $18,000/kg.
Talking about "energy costs" shows rank amateurism when talking about space flight. Virtually the entire cost is the flight hardware and ground support infrastructure. Energy costs aren't even rounding error on those.
Employers just don't invest in employees like they used to.
Well to that I took the advice of one of my former, now retired by choice at an early age coworkers, take every dime you can from the company. 401k put in the maximum amount they will match employee share matching plan, put in as much as they will match chance for training or conferences, take it all business travel, take it vacation, take it but carry over as much as you can tuition reimbursement, get that advanced degree Even if your employer doesn't offer all of those options take what ever they do and make use of it.
Maybe we should enroll in their defined benefit pension plan also.
I don't know if you have looked at the job market lately, and what employers are doing - but "matching" exists at a token level is it exists at all. Instead of tuition reimbursement we have extremely low (or zero) pay, no security internships for those already with degrees. Training? It is so amusing.
It means you have absolutely no security. No benefits, no paid time off, etc. None of this is conducive to a proper work/life balance. This is fine when you are single and have a safety net to fall back on. But that doesn't work when hard times hit and you have no net and/or you have a family.
And of course the U.S. has the stingiest safety net in the modern world. Which the right wing is convinced is far, far too generous and must be slashed deeply.
We are heading for a 21st Century Dickensian society. The life span of the lower economic ladders (not the poor), who are taking the brunt of this brave new world of gig work, and suffering from the "safety net", is already dropping - an end to 2 centuries of improvement in living conditions.
Wanting to alter capitalism into a more "humane" form through regulation is pretty much the definition of socialist, at least as commonly used today.
Which means that "socialist" has completely changed its meaning, and has nothing to at all to do with socialism. Right.
In other news war is now peace.
Newspeak is just a way of lying. The Soviets, Nazis and other fascists mastered this, and it worked pretty well for them. The American political right has adopted this lesson of history, so vividly described by Orwell.
How about you keep your work output and pay your expenses, I keep my work output and pay my expenses? That way we don't have to shuffle people's money around and worry about fairness.
Because then you have a fragmented, private insurance system attempting to dump risks and costs on externalities, which shuffles peoples money around. And when that happens you have to pay double for your health care. I am sure you love being overcharged 100%, because FREEDOM!
Also, clearly the decline in lifespan for lower end of the Middle Class (not the poor), a unique event for any advanced country, due to high medical costs is just hunky-dory with you. Watching your less well off fellow Americans (remember that old idea, civic-mindedness?) die young is terrific because FREEDOM!
You mean like how a bed of nails causes all the nails to penetrate extra deeply? How snowshoes cause the feet to sink extra deep in the snow?
Just...no.
Excellent point. Also: the technique of weaving fibers into a mesh that does not pull apart (essential for soft ballistic protection) is well developed.
The summary links to a lousy article that says essentially nothing about the actual research. Here is an account that describes the material under study.
> After a few years cooling in a pond
They were doing exactly that in Fukushima but a tsunami arrived. It could be an earthquake or a tornado in the USA, instead.
> keep the spent fuel rods in above-ground 10 ton concrete casks permanently
Those could be stolen for making a dirty bomb or a plane or a meteorite or space junk could fall onto them, during the hundreds of years required for 10x half-life storage or the above mentioned hurricane or earthquake could happen.
Smart to post as an AC, since you are pulling objections out of your nether regions.
Fukushima is a good example of where to never to site any nuclear facility whatsoever. The cooling ponds were a trivial problem compared the reactor units that were breached. In a non-insane site they are fine.
But objecting to the cooling ponds is a complete red herring - fuel is only held in ponds for a few years. We are discussing the problem of long term storage.
Clearly you know nothing at all about the characteristics of concrete fuel casks. Or tornados, or earthquakes, or hurricanes, or plane crashes, or space junk, or meteorites, for that matter. None of these are going to breach a storage cask - even a one in a thousand year meteor strike like Tunguska would not breach one, even if it happened to just hit that exact spot.
And even if you did breach one, the fuel is in solid intact rods of metal encased uranium oxide. Radiation is not going to go flying out everywhere.
Successfully stealing rods to make a dirty bomb is a bit of a problem too. Medical radiation sources are much easier to get and actually more dangerous as dirty bombs. I don't see radiation treatment in medicine going away.
I was reading an article about how the closing of reactors in California has lead to coal based power plants, and not wind or solar, stepping in to fill the breach.
Link to the article you read? From all sources I have seen the replacement power for the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station shutdown was from natural gas power plants. The lifecycle carbon emissions for gas is about half that of coal, and other pollutants far less than that.
Currently (2014) wind and solar provide 11.8% of California's (in state) electricity (12.3% if you include energy import across state lines). They were only 3.7% and 5% in 2010, thus increasing 3 times and 2.5 times in just four years (this is all actual production, not "capacity"). The added production in those 4 years is more than the output of San Onofre, so although they were not the source of the drop-in power replacement for San Onofre, over 4 years they did replace its net annual production and more, and are continuing to grow quickly. If they add the same capacity over the next four years they will produce more power for California than nuclear power ever did.
The regular nuclear power industry, using enriched uranium fuel and light water moderator/coolant, but presumably with advanced designs, will recover 20 years before any commercial thorium reactors are built. If you ever want to see an operating LFTR you should be rooting for the construction of existing designs.
Try reading the exchange again, oh AC.
ka9dgx claimed that "uranium fueled reactors" cannot use uranium oxide fuel (believing apparently, that all of them are using uranium metal fuel - e.g. his concern about the fuel "oxidizing").
In fact all commercial reactors (which are all "uranium fueled") use nothing but uranium oxide fuel - his assertion that this was a deficiency in uranium fueled reactors was simply false.
Your response reads as a non-sequitur.
We already have a solution for nuclear waste - the one we are currently using by default. After a few years cooling in a pond simply keep the spent fuel rods in above-ground 10 ton concrete casks permanently. Currently the casks are kept on the reactor site, but it would be better to move them to a few remote central sites for long term monitoring (in the U.S. the Chiricahua Apache have suggested their reservation as such a storage site).
The fuel rods are perfectly stable in the casks for thousands of years.
Also, if we should ever desire to reprocess them (currently a fantastically uneconomic idea) they would be easy to retrieve.
That this is not being treated as a final storage solution is due to political, not technological issues.