Why deploy an advanced and experimental stealth aircraft in Kandahar against an enemy that doesn't have radar (nor any capability to threaten aircraft)?
Although there are inevitably political implications with any military deployment (what will Pakistan think about it? etc.), a very good reason for deploying a new weapon system in the only current active combat theater where the U.S. is engaged is simply to gain real operational experience with it. It is a big step beyond even the most carefully and thoroughly planned training and test program to operate it in a remote combat zone.
* Radiocarbon dating has not been carried out because it would be necessary to destroy a small portion of the vellum; even then it could only give the date of death of the animal from which the vellum was made, not the date of the application of the ink, which could have been any time after; and also because radiocarbon dating isn't sufficiently exact – it could say whether the animal died in the thirteenth century, or between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries, but could not be any more specific than that (ie, it couldn't distinguish between vellum from 1912 or vellum from 1600).
Dare I question the first result in a Google search? Yes, I dare. This assertion does not match the capabilities of accelerator mass spectrometer carbon dating.
A good proxy for the Voynich Manuscript is the equally mysterious Vinland Map, which has been dated to within +/-27 years using only 28.8 milligrams of parchment. It is true that once having dated the parchment you only have a maximum age for the document since old parchment was commonly reused back in the day due to its cost, and is commonly reused today to make forgeries. Still, it is an important and essential staring point for a serious investigation.
Apparently the ink has also never been subjected to chemical analysis to see if markers are available for dating (but the inconclusive results of this with the Vinland Map suggests that this is no panacea).
... If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work. Someone lost in a period of time where autism was misunderstood and they are forever lost to anonymity except they'll get the last laugh because we'll never understand what message they were trying to get to us. And some of us might go mad spending hours and hours and hours trying to figure this out with no luck.
This is an interesting possibility, but a problem with this hypothesis is that the Voynich Manuscript exhibits a statistical property of natural languages called Zipf's Law ("the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in a word frequency table"). Possibly the postulated artist produced imaginary symbols following this law? It would be interesting to see if studies of work created by autistic individuals commonly possess this property. If this is not a common pattern then this possibility would be much reduced.
So, is the economy or global warming treated as a perfect sphere?
Yes. In a vacuum.
After reading the article, I am also reminded of a quote from Mark Twain:
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
He has a 36 year data set of world economic activity, combined with energy use and carbon emission, from which he finds a universal constant (which he assumed to exist in order to write an elementary differential equation of the relationship) that defines the relationship between energy use and economical output for all time and space. His key conclusion is this supposed invariant: "the relationship between value and rates of energy consumption is a constant parameter" (p. 8 of the paper).
Yet if this were so would a chart of national wealth to energy consumption (a ratio known as economic "energy intensity") look like this (a sample of actual energy intensity ratios are plotted here)? Among the wealthy nations there is roughly a 3:1 ratio in this parameter, with equally wealthy (per capita) Austria consuming 1/3 the per capita energy of Canada. The fact that the U.S. consumes 50% more energy for the same economic output of Germany, Japan and the UK suggests that saving energy saving without destroying wealth is indeed possible.
The paper is not worthless, but the author is incautious in applying his models, and seems unaware of the limitations of his approach. The key problem is that he fits a simple mathematical model to a period when the majority of historic economic and energy use growth occurred, and argues (very implausibly based on basic thermodynamics) that the relationships that dominate this period are physically determined and inescapable. Of the course the model describes this one epoch well, any strictly increasing function of simple shape can be adequately modelled this way, without the model having any specific relevance to the underlying processes.
The one example he includes in the paper of using thermodynamics to model a complex system. the growth of a child, reveals the limitation, not strength, in his approach. If describes the child's growth as a balance between energy consumption and expenditure, and when the two are completely equal growth stops. The problem with this as a tool of analysis is that it offers zero predictions of when the child will stop growing or how large the child will get, or that the child will stop growing at all (we know all this for other reasons, his "thermodynamics of a child" does not predict it).
On the other hand what his modelling does illustrate is the magnitude of the inertia problem in changing the course of the economy. It is real, but other authors deal with this is a far more useful way.
... I would suggest using privilege escalation to grant users more power and control based on how long they've been members and require that when people create accounts, they specify a number of areas that they possess knowledge of.....
I think that this is the right track for an enduring and effective Wikipedia. The ethos of "anyone can edit" (including anonymous IP addresses never before used) and pretending that all are equal seems to be the source of most of WIkipedia's problems.
For example, I read that anonymous IP address edits are the source of most vandalism, and have very low quality over all, and that anonymous edits are usually reverted, and that dealing with all of this is a substantial work load for the active editors and Admins. While allowing anonymous edits surely helped get Wikipedia started, it seems to be a purely negative policy at this point.
Requiring that edits be made by accounts (which are still free, anonymous, and easy to set up) will allow a meritocracy to emerge from among the editors/contributors based on a history of quality contributions (with appropriate supporting policies and tracking techniques), and more importantly this meritocracy would confer a presumption of value to their work, and higher levels of protection from newbie editors, so that effective long-time contributors do not find their work being trashed by the uninformed. Wikipedia tries to do some of this (anonymous edits being apparently presumed likely of no value, Admins with special powers, both of which the illustrate that the notion that everyone is equal is a sham in fact), but not having a system of merit built in makes it much harder and less effective. It makes it possible to recognize that an account represents a true authority on some area of knowledge (perhaps by dropping thie anonymity to the WIki Foundation), and treat their contributions appropriately without forcing them to try to jump through many hoops.
...not after being cooled down to -271 C and exposed to vacuum (if you were very lucky, in that order)...
You don't need to get all frigid to have a meet and greet with the beam. They extract it and fire it down a 600 m tunnel, where it hits a 5 ton graphite cylinder know as the beam dump, to shut down the accelerator. Stand anywhere in the tunnel and all you'll need is some bottled oxygen or a bubble (the tunnel is flooded with pure nitrogen since the beam dump would catch fire in an oxygen containing environment)./P
The beam dump is a 7 m long, 0.7 m wide graphite cylinder (about 5 tonnes) surrounded by a cooling system and several hundred tons of concrete and iron. The beam gets their by shooting down a 600 m tunnel after extraction from the ring. Normally this tunnel is filled with nitrogen at 1.2 atmospheres (since the carbon dump gets heated to 1000 c and would catch fire if oxygen were present), but some arrangement where a test chamber gets inserted in the tunnel seems possible.
What is a dumped beam like? It is very narrow, at the tunnel entrance window it is 1.5 mm , but is swept in a spiral path (length 110 cm at the window) by deflector magnets as it enters the tunne. The spiral expands to a 1.2 m wide spiral pattern 4 m long when it reaches the dump. The initial mass absorption coefficient is 80 g/cm^2 (for carbon) indicating a mass of tissue 6 inches thick with a density of 1 would absorb something less than 20% of the energy (360 megajoules, indeed about 87 kg of TNT), which see. The mass of a 1.5 mm x 4000 mm irradiated zone is only 6 g.
So, perhaps 15 kg TNT of energy would be absorbed by several grams of tissue in a long stripe. It would make a very violent explosion. The MythBusters guys better bring a strong walled chamber.
True enough. But as you say, Northrop is in the business of making money, so it would've made sense for them to do the following:
* Deliver a offer for the system requested.
* Get the deal signed
* Say: We notice you've not specified any backup, do you want that additionally ?
Gives them a chance to upsell, AND potentially makes the customer happier -- a win-win.
According to article:
In a unique public-private venture, Virginia agreed in 2005 to let the giant defense and information contractor Northrop Grumman run nearly all the state's IT systems.
The 10-year, $2.3 billion project aims to modernize 85 state government agencies' computer networks, PCs, phones, servers and e-mail systems, while holding down costs. The deal also provides IT services to about 1,000 local government customers.
This suggests that this was not just a typical IT project on public bid -- Northrop Grumman took on the responsibility of being the manager and provider of IT services, including appropriately balancing costs and risks. It does not sound like "you didn't put it in the contract" is a valid defense in this case
Now we have a similar situation with Nukes. The Test Ban Treaty radically changed the nuclear weapons development environment, and as a result our nukes are now well past their retirement age.
The age of U.S. nukes has absolutely nothing to do with either of the Test Ban Treaties (that is, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, the only two of which that are in force). Every single nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal was designed, developed, tested and manufactured after the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and all of the most advanced (and the large bulk of the U.S. arsenal) were tested and manufactured after the Threshold Test Ban Treaty went into effect.
The age of U.S. warheads is simply due to the fact that we stopped making them. If we want younger warheads we can simply build new ones to match existing designs, and the extended Life Extension Program comes close to doing that (every component in every bomb can be eventually refurbished as needed).
They were meant to be replaced, but haven't been.
But as with classic cars (there it is - the inevitable car analogy) which were meant to be replaced after several years (believe me - Detroit designed them that way), but can be maintained indefinitely, if the warheads can be refurbished then replacement is unnecessary.
Actually, the goal of saving energy/reducing pollution from energy generation would be better served by taxing energy.
In effect this is already the practice in California. There is a basic rate for electricity (slightly higher than the national average) up to the level that is 55% of what the average user consumes in a particular rate area. Every kilowatt hour over that level is charged at two, then three times the basic rate. (This means that the average, not abnormally excessive, user is paying punishing prices for almost half of their electricity.)
I live in California and already pay the punitive three-fold price for my marginal electricity usage. Am I motivated to buy energy efficient appliances? You bet!
Now here's the problem. I am currently shopping for a replacement TV (mid-size). I am eager to find the most energy efficient models. Is it easy to comparison shop for an efficient TV? No, in fact I would describe it as being essentially impossible. Comparable data on energy consumption of TVs is not available. Even looking for manufacturers specs on-line usually does not turn up a single power consumption figure, and in the dealership it is completely impossible.
There are some TV models advertised as being especially low power consumption. A problem is that I don't see them at any dealer. I could buy one sight-unseen and pay extra for shipping to boot, but this is a very undesirable option.
Without government regulation this situation will not improve. I would like to be able to walk into a show room, know what I am buying in terms of power consumption, and be able to actually buy an efficient model. Only passing regulations that have some teeth are going to bring this situation into existence.
Everyone, please read the article. The summary is a deliberate prevarication (three dollar word for "lie"). There is no plan or proposal to " target your big-screen TVs for elimination". Under the proposed California regulations anyone can sell or buy and size TV they like now and in the future. In fact the proposed regulations are unremarkable: they are essentially the same as the voluntary Energy Star program, considered to be well within reach by the industry. The CEC mandate simply makes them mandatory instead of voluntary. The better TV manufacturers (e.g. Visio) are in full compliance, and fully support both the standards, and making them mandatory. The only whiners here are companies that wish to hawk cheap inefficient TVs, and ideologues who feel that any government regulation is inherently evil in principle.
From a quick reading he does hand wave quite a bit.
Anything that's not a full scale commercial enterprise doesn't exist and never will.... research is pointless.
For the uranium from seawater thing he talks about the cost of the experiment rather than any kind of estimated costs of large scale extraction.
It seems to boil down to "we're not getting much uranium out of the ground right now while prices are low and we have massive stockpiles keeping prices low.... hence somehow people won't start mining more as the price of uranium goes up again....."
It is also helpful to note that granite, which makes the largest share of the Earth's crust, has a uranium concentration of around 10 ppm (some granites are over 20 ppm). Sound ridiculously low? Some commercially mined gold ores contain only 5 ppm of gold.
Sea salt (sea water minus the water) is 0.1 ppm uranium, but this low concentration is compensated for by the fact that it is already in solution. Many ore extraction processes require expensive crushing of rock to a powder then extraction with chemicals to put the desired metal in solution. Processes that selectively attract or bind dissolved seawater uranium ions offer reasonable prospects of being practical in the long run.
I think uranium is going to available for a long time, even if the uranium market runs short once and awhile.
Granted that very small black holes cannot eat fast enough to threaten Earth, this raises the question: "How large would a black hole have to be to be a threat to Earth"?
Can any one generate a black hole mass/time-to-eat-the Earth table? Enquiring minds want to know!
The fundamental problem with doing this is that it is extremely expensive. The cost of plutonium extracted from spent fuel is equivalent to natural uranium costing $700/kg or so. The actual market price of natural uranium is about $100/kg and for $300/kg you could extract natural uranium from seawater and have a 1000 year supply.
Is that taking into account the cost you then don't have to pay to "dispose" of the non-recycled fuel?
The waste disposal issue actually makes fuel reprocessing even worse, not better.
The reason? Because existing reprocessing technology creates a huge volume of radioactive waste streams that must also be disposed of. Whereas what we do instead now - leaving the spent fuel in concrete casks on-site - costs very little and really should remain the preferred waste handling method for the next several decades. (It would be better to move the casks to a central facility, but this is a minor detail.)
... if we'd use common sense and recycle the fuel, as many other nuclear nations already do. The whole terrorist argument against this was bogus from the start. Recycle the damn fuel, and you can reuse 93 percent of it.
Not in any existing reactor you can't. The fissile content (U235+Pu) going into a reactor in fresh fuel is about 4%, the rest is unusable U-238. Burning the fuel fissions about 4% of the actinide nuclei present, and leaves a fissile content of something slightly under 1% (due to plutonium breeding) at the end. Recycling this spent fuel would extend existing fuel supplies by only 25%.
The fundamental problem with doing this is that it is extremely expensive. The cost of plutonium extracted from spent fuel is equivalent to natural uranium costing $700/kg or so. The actual market price of natural uranium is about $100/kg and for $300/kg you could extract natural uranium from seawater and have a 1000 year supply. Even if the extracted plutonium were free (instead of being far more expensive than the uranium) the cost of fabricating and handling plutonium-bearing fuel is so high that it would still be more expensive that uranium-only fuel. In fact the DOE has to pay utilities to use the mixed plutonium/uranium MOX fuel it makes from ex-Soviet weapons.
Reprocessed plutonium is that rarest of industrial products: one that it worth less than nothing (even if the extravagant production cost is completely written off).
Now a breeder reactor fuel cycle could use the U-238 to produce power in principle, but the cost would be much more than conventional nuclear power, and it is hampered by the fact that every breeder reactor project thus built has failed. It may be possible to build a workable breeder pwer reactor, but no one has yet succeeded in doing it.
In away your right, from what I understand suicide bombers aren't even remotely afraid or even consider what they are doing to be anything but gods holy work...
And for those that are agitated about exploding, holy virgins or not, there are pharmaceuticals like valium and propanolol that do a very good job of suppressing physical reactions to stress.
And let us not forget that old, old mood elevating intoxicant reportedly favored by the original assassins of the Nizari Ismaili sect - hashish. Any number of euphoria inducing intoxicants could be used to the same, or better effect.
You may want to reconsider that. According to TA the Afar region is "is one of the lowest and hottest places on the planet". That's right low AND hot! Sounds like the perfect club scene!
What's most interesting about IE's market share is that version 6 (this oldest one indeed) is actually the most used version of Internet Explorer. Both version 7 (released 3 years ago) and version 8 (released about half a year ago) have not caught on enough to overtake IE6's position as the number one browser out there in sheer market share.
These figures are unlike all other browsers, where the more recent versions have way more market share than the older ones....
I wonder to what extent this is due to Microsoft's own barriers to IE upgrade - the requirement that the XP user (the large majority of all Windows users) install the so-called "Genuine Advantage" piracy trolling program, and pass its certification of your OS configuration before permitting IE8 download. Those of us who own XP licenses, but find Microsoft's intrusive attempt to control my own installation unacceptable and thus refuse to install the GA spyware, thus cannot get this update. And reportedly something like 22% of all legitimate XP users fail validation once GA is installed, and also can't get the update.
The fact that modern bacteria can survive in those conditions says nothing about whether life could arise or even evolve there. Its a bit like assuming that because cockroaches can survive high doses of radiation there's potential for a 6 legged lifeform to arise inside nuclear reactors.
There are at least two serious problems with the objections offered above. First, no one supposes that life arose under conditions anything like Mars today, anymore than people suppose that new life is arising de novo on Earth today. Life would have arisen long ago under radically different (warmer and more moist) conditions. Second, not every study addresses all aspects of every question of science. In fact, none of them do! Criticizing a study for not examining a radically different question, not amenable to laboratory examination, and only distantly related to the one under study is simply perverse.
The point is: it does say something about whether viable Martian bacteria (if they exist) could be recovered from the near surface soil.
To my knowledge many species of bacteria can survive indefinitely in practically any environment, but not while actively metabolizing. I am curious whether any of the species the article is talking about could actually survive and spread, if they would just stick around for a while and die out, or if they would only survive in a dormant state.
What this study is establishing is whether it is possible to recover viable organisms from the near-surface soil. Such organisms might thrive below the reach of the surface lander's probes, but still have inactive spores brought to near the surface through water welling up from deeper down (and possibly other processes). Evidence of surface water outflows have been found in various spots on Mars.
It's so freaking cool that there's going to be something man-made that will reach temperatures similar to the core of the sun. It's just... too cool....
Umm, this would be much hotter than the center of the Sun, by a factor of about 11 fold. The Sun only operates at about 13 million K.
I'm sure it'll be producing cheap, abundant power.... in about 20 years.
Just ignore the fact that we've been 20 years away from cheap, abundant fusion power for the last 50 years.
Naah. The situation is much worse than that.
When controlled thermonuclear research started in the early 1950s as part of the highly classified Project Sherwood it was expected that viable power plants were only 10 years away (the expectation of comparative ease of development is why it was so secret).
Now, 55 years later, the official ITER schedule envisions that "Experiments with deuterium-tritium plasmas would begin in mid 2026, according to the plan, with high gain (Q=10), long pulse (15 min) operation in 2028". In other words, simply beginning to operate ITER like a power plant won't happen for almost 20 years, a full 43 years after the project's start, and 27 years after the acceptance of the detailed design in 2001. See: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-11125488/New-ITER-schedule.html.
Any real power plant would be a new, even larger facility that would follow ITER and which is not even on the drawing boards. If we assume that a real power plant design will be available the day ITER starts full power operation with a D-T plasma (i.e. we have already learned all the lessons we need to learn), but that it take the same length of time to build and start it at full power, then we are looking at 46 years before the first fusion power plant starts producing power.
The article's notion that fusion power will be around in 10 years, is astonishing ignorance (well, not so astonishing given science reporting standards). Evidently the reporter made this number up without asking anyone who knew anything about the subject. I haven't seen any prognostications by the tokamak community positing a prototype power plant (actually producing net electricity) before 2050 for years.
Wait, meteors that hit the ground are cold to the touch? That doesn't make sense - they enter the atmosphere, and as we know objects entering the atmosphere travel so fast that they get hot...real hot...so hot that our space ships need to have heat shields to keep the folks inside from getting burnt to a crisp...which makes it not cold to the touch. So when the rock hits the ground why would it become cold all of a sudden? Maybe if it sat around in cold climate for a while but after touch-down it should be very hot.
There is a difference between a space vehicle, which is as light as possible and hollow, and a meteor which is solid rock (or, much more rarely, metal). The heat shield is thin and light (comparatively speaking) but keeps everything inside quite cool despite a very lengthy heating period (due to the shallow re-entry angle of manned vehicles, and most unmanned ones, which cannot stand severe deceleration forces).
A meteor (one meter across or less) typically enters at a steep angle, decelerates rapidly (in several seconds) at a few hundred Gs, and becomes a rock falling under the influence of gravity through the lower atmosphere same as any other rock of similar size dropped from a high-altitude airplane.
For those several seconds a very small part of the rock gets very hot indeed - a thin layer vaporizes, and a thin layer melts. But it is physically impossible for the bulk of the rock to get significantly heated in the few seconds of re-entry, conduction is far too slow. During the longer part of its descent (when it is simply falling through the air for a few tens of seconds), there is enough time for the thin molten surface layer to get cooled down to near normal temperatures by the cold airflow. Then when it hits the ground within a minute or two there is enough time for the icy cold interior to cool down the surface to frigid temperatures.
The special effect of burning a pyrotechnic in the crater was perfect to take in the ignorant, but is laughable to anyone knowing something about meteors.
Slashdot Mirror
How about the day a policeman shows up your the door with a search warrant because Google informed the police of probable criminal behavior?
Why deploy an advanced and experimental stealth aircraft in Kandahar against an enemy that doesn't have radar (nor any capability to threaten aircraft)?
Although there are inevitably political implications with any military deployment (what will Pakistan think about it? etc.), a very good reason for deploying a new weapon system in the only current active combat theater where the U.S. is engaged is simply to gain real operational experience with it. It is a big step beyond even the most carefully and thoroughly planned training and test program to operate it in a remote combat zone.
Why has no one tried carbon dating this book yet?
Well gee, let me Google that for you.
First result:
Dare I question the first result in a Google search? Yes, I dare. This assertion does not match the capabilities of accelerator mass spectrometer carbon dating.
A good proxy for the Voynich Manuscript is the equally mysterious Vinland Map, which has been dated to within +/-27 years using only 28.8 milligrams of parchment. It is true that once having dated the parchment you only have a maximum age for the document since old parchment was commonly reused back in the day due to its cost, and is commonly reused today to make forgeries. Still, it is an important and essential staring point for a serious investigation.
Apparently the ink has also never been subjected to chemical analysis to see if markers are available for dating (but the inconclusive results of this with the Vinland Map suggests that this is no panacea).
This is an interesting possibility, but a problem with this hypothesis is that the Voynich Manuscript exhibits a statistical property of natural languages called Zipf's Law ("the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in a word frequency table"). Possibly the postulated artist produced imaginary symbols following this law? It would be interesting to see if studies of work created by autistic individuals commonly possess this property. If this is not a common pattern then this possibility would be much reduced.
So, is the economy or global warming treated as a perfect sphere?
Yes. In a vacuum.
After reading the article, I am also reminded of a quote from Mark Twain:
He has a 36 year data set of world economic activity, combined with energy use and carbon emission, from which he finds a universal constant (which he assumed to exist in order to write an elementary differential equation of the relationship) that defines the relationship between energy use and economical output for all time and space. His key conclusion is this supposed invariant: "the relationship between value and rates of energy consumption is a constant parameter" (p. 8 of the paper).
Yet if this were so would a chart of national wealth to energy consumption (a ratio known as economic "energy intensity") look like this (a sample of actual energy intensity ratios are plotted here)? Among the wealthy nations there is roughly a 3:1 ratio in this parameter, with equally wealthy (per capita) Austria consuming 1/3 the per capita energy of Canada. The fact that the U.S. consumes 50% more energy for the same economic output of Germany, Japan and the UK suggests that saving energy saving without destroying wealth is indeed possible.
The paper is not worthless, but the author is incautious in applying his models, and seems unaware of the limitations of his approach. The key problem is that he fits a simple mathematical model to a period when the majority of historic economic and energy use growth occurred, and argues (very implausibly based on basic thermodynamics) that the relationships that dominate this period are physically determined and inescapable. Of the course the model describes this one epoch well, any strictly increasing function of simple shape can be adequately modelled this way, without the model having any specific relevance to the underlying processes.
The one example he includes in the paper of using thermodynamics to model a complex system. the growth of a child, reveals the limitation, not strength, in his approach. If describes the child's growth as a balance between energy consumption and expenditure, and when the two are completely equal growth stops. The problem with this as a tool of analysis is that it offers zero predictions of when the child will stop growing or how large the child will get, or that the child will stop growing at all (we know all this for other reasons, his "thermodynamics of a child" does not predict it).
On the other hand what his modelling does illustrate is the magnitude of the inertia problem in changing the course of the economy. It is real, but other authors deal with this is a far more useful way.
... I would suggest using privilege escalation to grant users more power and control based on how long they've been members and require that when people create accounts, they specify a number of areas that they possess knowledge of.....
I think that this is the right track for an enduring and effective Wikipedia. The ethos of "anyone can edit" (including anonymous IP addresses never before used) and pretending that all are equal seems to be the source of most of WIkipedia's problems.
For example, I read that anonymous IP address edits are the source of most vandalism, and have very low quality over all, and that anonymous edits are usually reverted, and that dealing with all of this is a substantial work load for the active editors and Admins. While allowing anonymous edits surely helped get Wikipedia started, it seems to be a purely negative policy at this point.
Requiring that edits be made by accounts (which are still free, anonymous, and easy to set up) will allow a meritocracy to emerge from among the editors/contributors based on a history of quality contributions (with appropriate supporting policies and tracking techniques), and more importantly this meritocracy would confer a presumption of value to their work, and higher levels of protection from newbie editors, so that effective long-time contributors do not find their work being trashed by the uninformed. Wikipedia tries to do some of this (anonymous edits being apparently presumed likely of no value, Admins with special powers, both of which the illustrate that the notion that everyone is equal is a sham in fact), but not having a system of merit built in makes it much harder and less effective. It makes it possible to recognize that an account represents a true authority on some area of knowledge (perhaps by dropping thie anonymity to the WIki Foundation), and treat their contributions appropriately without forcing them to try to jump through many hoops.
and you wouldn't know a lot about it.
...not after being cooled down to -271 C and exposed to vacuum (if you were very lucky, in that order)...
You don't need to get all frigid to have a meet and greet with the beam. They extract it and fire it down a 600 m tunnel, where it hits a 5 ton graphite cylinder know as the beam dump, to shut down the accelerator. Stand anywhere in the tunnel and all you'll need is some bottled oxygen or a bubble (the tunnel is flooded with pure nitrogen since the beam dump would catch fire in an oxygen containing environment)./P
"It would be the equivalent of having 87kg of TNT dumped into your body." jamie wants big boom
... Whether or not it's "myth", it would make for a pretty cool Mythbusters episode. ...
Looking at a description of the LHC beam dump system, it sounds like this sort of experiment could be arranged: http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/components/beam-dump.htm.
The beam dump is a 7 m long, 0.7 m wide graphite cylinder (about 5 tonnes) surrounded by a cooling system and several hundred tons of concrete and iron. The beam gets their by shooting down a 600 m tunnel after extraction from the ring. Normally this tunnel is filled with nitrogen at 1.2 atmospheres (since the carbon dump gets heated to 1000 c and would catch fire if oxygen were present), but some arrangement where a test chamber gets inserted in the tunnel seems possible.
What is a dumped beam like? It is very narrow, at the tunnel entrance window it is 1.5 mm , but is swept in a spiral path (length 110 cm at the window) by deflector magnets as it enters the tunne. The spiral expands to a 1.2 m wide spiral pattern 4 m long when it reaches the dump. The initial mass absorption coefficient is 80 g/cm^2 (for carbon) indicating a mass of tissue 6 inches thick with a density of 1 would absorb something less than 20% of the energy (360 megajoules, indeed about 87 kg of TNT), which see. The mass of a 1.5 mm x 4000 mm irradiated zone is only 6 g.
So, perhaps 15 kg TNT of energy would be absorbed by several grams of tissue in a long stripe. It would make a very violent explosion. The MythBusters guys better bring a strong walled chamber.
True enough. But as you say, Northrop is in the business of making money, so it would've made sense for them to do the following:
* Deliver a offer for the system requested. * Get the deal signed * Say: We notice you've not specified any backup, do you want that additionally ?
Gives them a chance to upsell, AND potentially makes the customer happier -- a win-win.
According to article:
This suggests that this was not just a typical IT project on public bid -- Northrop Grumman took on the responsibility of being the manager and provider of IT services, including appropriately balancing costs and risks. It does not sound like "you didn't put it in the contract" is a valid defense in this case
Now we have a similar situation with Nukes. The Test Ban Treaty radically changed the nuclear weapons development environment, and as a result our nukes are now well past their retirement age.
The age of U.S. nukes has absolutely nothing to do with either of the Test Ban Treaties (that is, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, the only two of which that are in force). Every single nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal was designed, developed, tested and manufactured after the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and all of the most advanced (and the large bulk of the U.S. arsenal) were tested and manufactured after the Threshold Test Ban Treaty went into effect.
The age of U.S. warheads is simply due to the fact that we stopped making them. If we want younger warheads we can simply build new ones to match existing designs, and the extended Life Extension Program comes close to doing that (every component in every bomb can be eventually refurbished as needed).
They were meant to be replaced, but haven't been.
But as with classic cars (there it is - the inevitable car analogy) which were meant to be replaced after several years (believe me - Detroit designed them that way), but can be maintained indefinitely, if the warheads can be refurbished then replacement is unnecessary.
Actually, the goal of saving energy/reducing pollution from energy generation would be better served by taxing energy.
In effect this is already the practice in California. There is a basic rate for electricity (slightly higher than the national average) up to the level that is 55% of what the average user consumes in a particular rate area. Every kilowatt hour over that level is charged at two, then three times the basic rate. (This means that the average, not abnormally excessive, user is paying punishing prices for almost half of their electricity.)
I live in California and already pay the punitive three-fold price for my marginal electricity usage. Am I motivated to buy energy efficient appliances? You bet!
Now here's the problem. I am currently shopping for a replacement TV (mid-size). I am eager to find the most energy efficient models. Is it easy to comparison shop for an efficient TV? No, in fact I would describe it as being essentially impossible. Comparable data on energy consumption of TVs is not available. Even looking for manufacturers specs on-line usually does not turn up a single power consumption figure, and in the dealership it is completely impossible.
There are some TV models advertised as being especially low power consumption. A problem is that I don't see them at any dealer. I could buy one sight-unseen and pay extra for shipping to boot, but this is a very undesirable option.
Without government regulation this situation will not improve. I would like to be able to walk into a show room, know what I am buying in terms of power consumption, and be able to actually buy an efficient model. Only passing regulations that have some teeth are going to bring this situation into existence.
Everyone, please read the article. The summary is a deliberate prevarication (three dollar word for "lie"). There is no plan or proposal to " target your big-screen TVs for elimination". Under the proposed California regulations anyone can sell or buy and size TV they like now and in the future. In fact the proposed regulations are unremarkable: they are essentially the same as the voluntary Energy Star program, considered to be well within reach by the industry. The CEC mandate simply makes them mandatory instead of voluntary. The better TV manufacturers (e.g. Visio) are in full compliance, and fully support both the standards, and making them mandatory. The only whiners here are companies that wish to hawk cheap inefficient TVs, and ideologues who feel that any government regulation is inherently evil in principle.
From a quick reading he does hand wave quite a bit. Anything that's not a full scale commercial enterprise doesn't exist and never will.... research is pointless. For the uranium from seawater thing he talks about the cost of the experiment rather than any kind of estimated costs of large scale extraction.
It seems to boil down to "we're not getting much uranium out of the ground right now while prices are low and we have massive stockpiles keeping prices low.... hence somehow people won't start mining more as the price of uranium goes up again....."
It is also helpful to note that granite, which makes the largest share of the Earth's crust, has a uranium concentration of around 10 ppm (some granites are over 20 ppm). Sound ridiculously low? Some commercially mined gold ores contain only 5 ppm of gold. Sea salt (sea water minus the water) is 0.1 ppm uranium, but this low concentration is compensated for by the fact that it is already in solution. Many ore extraction processes require expensive crushing of rock to a powder then extraction with chemicals to put the desired metal in solution. Processes that selectively attract or bind dissolved seawater uranium ions offer reasonable prospects of being practical in the long run. I think uranium is going to available for a long time, even if the uranium market runs short once and awhile.
Granted that very small black holes cannot eat fast enough to threaten Earth, this raises the question: "How large would a black hole have to be to be a threat to Earth"?
Can any one generate a black hole mass/time-to-eat-the Earth table? Enquiring minds want to know!
Actually anti-hydrogen is the rarest of industrial products. Anti-hydrogen costs roughly $62,500,000,000,000 per gram.
Not an industrial product. Can you cite a commercial manufacturer of anti-hydrogen?
The fundamental problem with doing this is that it is extremely expensive. The cost of plutonium extracted from spent fuel is equivalent to natural uranium costing $700/kg or so. The actual market price of natural uranium is about $100/kg and for $300/kg you could extract natural uranium from seawater and have a 1000 year supply.
Is that taking into account the cost you then don't have to pay to "dispose" of the non-recycled fuel?
The waste disposal issue actually makes fuel reprocessing even worse, not better.
The reason? Because existing reprocessing technology creates a huge volume of radioactive waste streams that must also be disposed of. Whereas what we do instead now - leaving the spent fuel in concrete casks on-site - costs very little and really should remain the preferred waste handling method for the next several decades. (It would be better to move the casks to a central facility, but this is a minor detail.)
... if we'd use common sense and recycle the fuel, as many other nuclear nations already do. The whole terrorist argument against this was bogus from the start. Recycle the damn fuel, and you can reuse 93 percent of it.
Not in any existing reactor you can't. The fissile content (U235+Pu) going into a reactor in fresh fuel is about 4%, the rest is unusable U-238. Burning the fuel fissions about 4% of the actinide nuclei present, and leaves a fissile content of something slightly under 1% (due to plutonium breeding) at the end. Recycling this spent fuel would extend existing fuel supplies by only 25%.
The fundamental problem with doing this is that it is extremely expensive. The cost of plutonium extracted from spent fuel is equivalent to natural uranium costing $700/kg or so. The actual market price of natural uranium is about $100/kg and for $300/kg you could extract natural uranium from seawater and have a 1000 year supply. Even if the extracted plutonium were free (instead of being far more expensive than the uranium) the cost of fabricating and handling plutonium-bearing fuel is so high that it would still be more expensive that uranium-only fuel. In fact the DOE has to pay utilities to use the mixed plutonium/uranium MOX fuel it makes from ex-Soviet weapons.
France has conclusively proven that a nuclear fuel cycle with recycling is more expensive than one without it. See: http://www.fas.org/press/_docs/021507PlutoniumRecycle3L.pdf.
Reprocessed plutonium is that rarest of industrial products: one that it worth less than nothing (even if the extravagant production cost is completely written off).
Now a breeder reactor fuel cycle could use the U-238 to produce power in principle, but the cost would be much more than conventional nuclear power, and it is hampered by the fact that every breeder reactor project thus built has failed. It may be possible to build a workable breeder pwer reactor, but no one has yet succeeded in doing it.
In away your right, from what I understand suicide bombers aren't even remotely afraid or even consider what they are doing to be anything but gods holy work...
And for those that are agitated about exploding, holy virgins or not, there are pharmaceuticals like valium and propanolol that do a very good job of suppressing physical reactions to stress.
And let us not forget that old, old mood elevating intoxicant reportedly favored by the original assassins of the Nizari Ismaili sect - hashish. Any number of euphoria inducing intoxicants could be used to the same, or better effect.
You may want to reconsider that. According to TA the Afar region is "is one of the lowest and hottest places on the planet". That's right low AND hot! Sounds like the perfect club scene!
What's most interesting about IE's market share is that version 6 (this oldest one indeed) is actually the most used version of Internet Explorer. Both version 7 (released 3 years ago) and version 8 (released about half a year ago) have not caught on enough to overtake IE6's position as the number one browser out there in sheer market share.
These figures are unlike all other browsers, where the more recent versions have way more market share than the older ones....
I wonder to what extent this is due to Microsoft's own barriers to IE upgrade - the requirement that the XP user (the large majority of all Windows users) install the so-called "Genuine Advantage" piracy trolling program, and pass its certification of your OS configuration before permitting IE8 download. Those of us who own XP licenses, but find Microsoft's intrusive attempt to control my own installation unacceptable and thus refuse to install the GA spyware, thus cannot get this update. And reportedly something like 22% of all legitimate XP users fail validation once GA is installed, and also can't get the update.
The fact that modern bacteria can survive in those conditions says nothing about whether life could arise or even evolve there. Its a bit like assuming that because cockroaches can survive high doses of radiation there's potential for a 6 legged lifeform to arise inside nuclear reactors.
There are at least two serious problems with the objections offered above. First, no one supposes that life arose under conditions anything like Mars today, anymore than people suppose that new life is arising de novo on Earth today. Life would have arisen long ago under radically different (warmer and more moist) conditions. Second, not every study addresses all aspects of every question of science. In fact, none of them do! Criticizing a study for not examining a radically different question, not amenable to laboratory examination, and only distantly related to the one under study is simply perverse.
The point is: it does say something about whether viable Martian bacteria (if they exist) could be recovered from the near surface soil.
To my knowledge many species of bacteria can survive indefinitely in practically any environment, but not while actively metabolizing. I am curious whether any of the species the article is talking about could actually survive and spread, if they would just stick around for a while and die out, or if they would only survive in a dormant state.
Bacteria definitely exist on Earth that can reproduce under conditions that exist somewhere on Mars, an example are the chemosynthetic bacteria found deep underground and are nourished by geothermal energy: http://www.planetary.org/news/2006/1027_Bacteria_Found_Thriving_Deep.html
What this study is establishing is whether it is possible to recover viable organisms from the near-surface soil. Such organisms might thrive below the reach of the surface lander's probes, but still have inactive spores brought to near the surface through water welling up from deeper down (and possibly other processes). Evidence of surface water outflows have been found in various spots on Mars.
It's so freaking cool that there's going to be something man-made that will reach temperatures similar to the core of the sun. It's just... too cool. ...
Umm, this would be much hotter than the center of the Sun, by a factor of about 11 fold. The Sun only operates at about 13 million K.
I'm sure it'll be producing cheap, abundant power.... in about 20 years.
Just ignore the fact that we've been 20 years away from cheap, abundant fusion power for the last 50 years.
Naah. The situation is much worse than that.
When controlled thermonuclear research started in the early 1950s as part of the highly classified Project Sherwood it was expected that viable power plants were only 10 years away (the expectation of comparative ease of development is why it was so secret).
Now, 55 years later, the official ITER schedule envisions that "Experiments with deuterium-tritium plasmas would begin in mid 2026, according to the plan, with high gain (Q=10), long pulse (15 min) operation in 2028". In other words, simply beginning to operate ITER like a power plant won't happen for almost 20 years, a full 43 years after the project's start, and 27 years after the acceptance of the detailed design in 2001. See: http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-11125488/New-ITER-schedule.html.
Any real power plant would be a new, even larger facility that would follow ITER and which is not even on the drawing boards. If we assume that a real power plant design will be available the day ITER starts full power operation with a D-T plasma (i.e. we have already learned all the lessons we need to learn), but that it take the same length of time to build and start it at full power, then we are looking at 46 years before the first fusion power plant starts producing power.
The article's notion that fusion power will be around in 10 years, is astonishing ignorance (well, not so astonishing given science reporting standards). Evidently the reporter made this number up without asking anyone who knew anything about the subject. I haven't seen any prognostications by the tokamak community positing a prototype power plant (actually producing net electricity) before 2050 for years.
Wait, meteors that hit the ground are cold to the touch? That doesn't make sense - they enter the atmosphere, and as we know objects entering the atmosphere travel so fast that they get hot...real hot...so hot that our space ships need to have heat shields to keep the folks inside from getting burnt to a crisp...which makes it not cold to the touch. So when the rock hits the ground why would it become cold all of a sudden? Maybe if it sat around in cold climate for a while but after touch-down it should be very hot.
There is a difference between a space vehicle, which is as light as possible and hollow, and a meteor which is solid rock (or, much more rarely, metal). The heat shield is thin and light (comparatively speaking) but keeps everything inside quite cool despite a very lengthy heating period (due to the shallow re-entry angle of manned vehicles, and most unmanned ones, which cannot stand severe deceleration forces).
A meteor (one meter across or less) typically enters at a steep angle, decelerates rapidly (in several seconds) at a few hundred Gs, and becomes a rock falling under the influence of gravity through the lower atmosphere same as any other rock of similar size dropped from a high-altitude airplane.
For those several seconds a very small part of the rock gets very hot indeed - a thin layer vaporizes, and a thin layer melts. But it is physically impossible for the bulk of the rock to get significantly heated in the few seconds of re-entry, conduction is far too slow. During the longer part of its descent (when it is simply falling through the air for a few tens of seconds), there is enough time for the thin molten surface layer to get cooled down to near normal temperatures by the cold airflow. Then when it hits the ground within a minute or two there is enough time for the icy cold interior to cool down the surface to frigid temperatures.
The special effect of burning a pyrotechnic in the crater was perfect to take in the ignorant, but is laughable to anyone knowing something about meteors.