Posts by GrimJack

I was on another site talking about when I used to work with explosives on a seismograph crew and stole just a little of the 'goop' (I wanna say blasting powder but it was more like clay with seeds in it) from each of the 5 lb logs while I was setting them up to drop into the hole we had just drilled. This was back in the '60s when I was just out of high school - I was such a bonehead. But I remembered that I always wanted to end a post with the word mayonnaise

My bad - it was the current company owner of the Segway who died not the inventor. The current owner was a noted philanthropist.

This is Dean Kamen - the inventor. Sorry for the confusion.

Heselden died testing his improved Segway; he was developing a cross country version. Among his inventions are a text reader, a 'stair-climbing' wheelchair, and of course, Ginger later called Segway.

When I last left Paris, there were Segway tours starting up (not something I was particularly fond of).

Can't beat NoScript and/or AdBlock+

These guys have way too much time on their hands - but I love 'em.

Question/answer

Look here - If you dig around enough, you can get the actual data (raw or cleaned). Also look here

Splenda(tm) is just sucrose with 3 chlorine atoms added - sometimes aka:
1,6-dichloro-1, 6-dideoxy-β-D-fructofuranosyl-4-chloro-4-deoxy-α-D-galactopyranoside

Heh,heh - Yeah, that methane "clathrate gun" hypothesis is kind of cool but there are problems with limiting it to the Gulf (a science fiction writer Steve Barnes based a disaster novel on it happening world-wide). As you all know, ice floats because when water freezes it crystallizes into hexagonal rings taking up more space than the water so equal amounts have different volumes (or, when the volumes are equal, ice weighs less than water) - well, under extreme pressure water (still liquid) and methane (still a gas) are forced into a crystal-like solid (you probably don't want to know about polar vs non-polar molecules so just believe me) when a crystal is introduced (ie an ice crystal)

Sorry, I got caught up in my research - anyway with world's clathrate reservoir considered to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 - 2500 GtC (Gigatons of carbon), this would seem to be something to worry about. What has set off my early warning tin-foil-hat sensors is that most of the hysteria seems to be on sites like "armedpolitesociety" or have "We the People" prominently displayed (it never ceases to amaze me that WeThePeople sites exclude all the people who disagree with them) so I went off to sites like OckhamsRazor or physicsforum

Damn, side-tracked again - okay, what I am looking for now is the gas hydrate stability zone. It looks like deepwater ghsz is within the intersection of 1200 to 1600 meters below the surface and between …

Wow, check this out - if you think it can't get any stupider, check out geocentrism. Major face palm - wow.

I may have to adjust some of my answers:

"After measuring alpha in around 300 distant galaxies, a consistency emerged: this magic number, which tells us the strength of electromagnetism, is not the same everywhere as it is here on Earth, and seems to vary continuously along a preferred axis through the universe," Webb said. "The implications for our current understanding of science are profound. If the laws of physics turn out to be merely 'local by-laws', it might be that whilst our observable part of the universe favours the existence of life and human beings, other far more distant regions may exist where different laws preclude the formation of life, at least as we know it."

(note: alpha as it appears here is the "fine-structure constant" that binds all physical laws)

Cue FireSign Theatre - Everything you know is wrong,

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100909004112.htm

Oops, FireFox4 - the beta

I can now watch the Daily Show straight through w/o all those damnable glitches, hiccups, and pauses. In fact, I am listening now whenever Craig goes to commercial - pretty cool.

Er, should have posted this last night

For each and every particle in the universe (electrons, protons, neutrons, et cetera), there is at least a billion neutrinos/anti-neutrinos - and more are being created every second.

You can tell a neutrino from its anti because when it zips at you, it spins clockwise - ie, it will always spin clockwise as seen head-on

Coal is a hydrocarbon and, obviously, contains Carbon - the rest is mostly impurities like hydrogen, sulfur and other atoms.

So, discounting the impurities, we are left with Carbon. The most popular form of crystallized carbon is diamond. Extremely high energies are used to make a Carbon plasma kept in a magnetic 'bottle', the bottle is shrunk producing high pressures, then a diamond/crystal seed is introduced into the plasma and (much hand-waving here) and carbon 'crystalizes' around the seed, forming a crystal/diamond. Impurities can be inserted to produce color (see note 1)

Similar processes are use to create bucky-balls, bucky-tubes, etc which could be considered a form of crystal.

Looking in the other direction, I discovered Coulomb Crystal formation at extremely low temperatures - eg carbon atoms embedded in the surface of liquid helium at sufficiently high densities at low temperatures.

I am not sure I answered your question but I satisfied my curiosity.

Note 1 - another method of producing diamonds is using nanotechnology - essentially a tiny robot that stacks carbon into crystalline form. It is thought that this method could be used to produce cable of extreme strength and flexibility -- but I digress

Mostly the StackExchange collection (StackOverflow et al).

Thank you - way kool!

It is generally thought that 'cosmic rays' + time = one form of evolutionary change. If the change brought about by the 'cosmic ray induced mutation' does not provide any survival advantages, it will probably die out.

This is a really small part of evolutionary theory but even small changes over a long enough period of time (consider how mountains are reduced to plains and sea bottoms are raised up to mountains) can spread through a population. Anther way can be thought of as the Genghis Khan method - approximately 1 person in 12 in Euro-Asia carry some small piece of GK's genetic material.

So, you hang out here - what other fora do you go to?

I also visit Personal Finance Forums

The easy answer is a neutrino - only one in a trillion passing through the center of the earth would actually be affected by it; about 60 billion solar neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of the Earth's surface every second. A neutrino is not mass-less but has so little mass that it can approach the speed of light.

<digression> a 'normal' unit of energy produced at the center of the sun takes about a million years to reach the surface of the sun whereas a neutrino produced at the center of the sun will reach the earth in about 8 minutes</digression>

Do you want to be really confused? Check this out - a new paper posits a universe where time and space are interchangeable via a constant in the same way E = mC^2 makes mass and energy interchangeable. This implies that Dark Energy makes up makes up 75% of the total mass/energy of the universe. But this flies in the face of the cosmic background radiation that is theoretically the energy left over from the Big Bang.

In other news, the number of angels dancing on the head of pin is up 32% but I digress.

WOW - sometimes I just can't keep up. Some radioactive decay varies over time - on a recurring pattern every 33 days. Hmmm, could this be caused by solar neutrinos? Er, the sun rotates every 28 days?? It could be that the core of the sun where the …

to think is to do

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcceA03RHOU

When I am at work - usually 8 hours per day, when I am at home about all the time I am not sleeping.

In that moment of indelible fear when the world seems to slow down and you are able to notice every little detail, what actually happens is that all the data you normally discard is written to memory and when you review the memory, there is so much information stored that the 3 seconds of terror takes 10 to 20 times that amount of time to review the data. This is why you do not want a perfect memory - remembering each second of your life would take at least 30 seconds and you would turn into a drooling idiot with the autonomic NS the only thing keeping you breathing.

Sometimes i combine threads

Interesting devices - the questions that come to mind are:
will they produce enough energy in their useful life to balance the energy costs of building them,
what is the useful life of the devices and what can be done to recycle them,
at that scale, why is it better than the hand crank/solar rechargers.

On the positive side, it does mean that scaling is coming into play.

Someone should set up a site to accept the devices when people no longer want them because I am pretty sure the battery will fail long before the generator; someone could justify a small scale wind farm if they could get the generators for free.

I just ran across this hack then I remembered a CSI: New York that revolved around a murder facilitated by hacking the gps then disabling the car in a 'bad' neighborhood, and setting off the alarms. Every device in your home that you can add to your network gives someone somewhere access to it.

I am so old that I remember playing Kick the Can until 10:00pm and no one worried (I lived in Montana so twilight lasted until about 10:30pm). All the kids names ended in the long e sound so moms' voices would carry further "Jimmeeeeeee you get home right now"

Each European country is given one side of the Euro coins to 'play with' sort of like our state quarters.

That makes me wonder what is the Circumference and diameter of a perfect circle. Two numbers you can divide to get the infinit length of pi accurately.

There is not a perfect circumference and diameter - all circles and their associated diameters will give you pi (see proof here).

Pythagoras was a crackpot religious fanatic who stumbled onto mathematics as a way to prove the validity of his philosophy/religion. He discovered the mathematics of music by calculating the relationship of the length of stringed instruments and how they related to tones an octave apart. His math was such an integral part of his religion that an acolyte had to practice his teachings for years before they got to learn math. He believed in metempsychosis and so did not eat meat and his disdain for beans lead to his death. After his death, his followers hid pi because it was irrational.

but I digress

My recurring dream is that I am so tired that I can't keep my eyes open; sometimes it is so bright that I can't keep my eyes open.

Once I dreamt that I was standing on a cliff ledge that was so narrow that I could only keep my heels on it and my back was to the cliff face - I actually figured out I was dreaming and woke myself up. When I went back into the dream, it was a gradual hill and I was able to kick off and float to the bottom.

The famed London Fog was actually pollution based; now that they have cleaned up their factories, the fog has disappeared.

Two words... "Lawn Darts" :twisted:

Good times, good times: Removable parts? Suffocation risk? Lead paint? Pussy hazards compared to the granddaddy of them all. Lawn Darts, or "Jarts," as they were marketed, would never fly in our current ultra-paranoid, safety-helmeted, Dr. Phil toy culture. Lawn darts were massive weighted spears. You threw them. They stuck where they landed. If they happened to land in your skull, well, then you should have moved. During their brief (and generally awesome) reign in 1980s suburbia, Jarts racked up 6,700 injuries and four deaths.

Thanks! They were so kool!

And you thought Google was cool:

Google refuses to test unmanned spy plane
by mr.elasmar on August 9, 2010 | 1 Comment
Google denies testing out unmanned spy drones (610 x 320)

Street View prevent anxiety history
Google has the information you need to fly unmanned spy planes its Street View maps and features in the future increase use denied.

Earlier reports said that Google News has worked with a German manufacturer, microdrones with another company that claims to have sold a UAV flying at Google.

Microdrones already made this type of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the British police and special units.

Speculation about why Google wants to acquire and use a device starts in earnest, especially after Juerss microdrones CEO, “said Sven businesses in this area, the weekly German business:

“The aircraft are well suited to provide equipment to the latest images from Google Maps.

I can just picture the traffic jams now.
You could have a centralized charging station/water fountain to exchange office gossip.

Just stay out of Munden's Bar - TOURBOTS - little robots controlled from a distance. The user sees and feels what the tourbot sees and feels, but without pain or risk of injury if the robot is damaged. They are used in Gaunt's time by tourists to sight see around the sometimes dangerous city. They are not allowed in Munden's Bar. By Twilley's time the remote control technology has been combined with "virgin cloning" techniques to create the Zuvembie's.

I do not think that wind power is usable on a scale much smaller than those creaky thing you see/hear running water pumps on farms. The smallest one I could find produced 50 watts which is kind of over-powered for what you want. Most of the hand crank/solar radios have cell phone charging connectors - this seems to be a better way to go.

The Eisenhower (US) interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies.

Nope - this is an urban legend; there were too many problems with the idea. The main problem was the amount of reinforcement required to support a landing aircraft - the psi-load of a landing aircraft is tremendous; the plane would shatter the concrete (not to mention all the cars what would be crushed in the process).

Wind turbines kill bats because the low pressure from the rotating blades cause their lungs to implode.

Hmmm, the studies (okay, the popular translations of the studies) I have read seem to find that the majority of bats found dead near wind turbines are species of bats that are both migratory and roost in trees. It is theorized that since they are migrating rather than insect hunting, they turn off their echo locating. As they approach what looks like trees, the sudden drop in barometric pressure causes 'barotrauma'. Since the migration happens during periods of low wind speed anyway, reducing the rotation of the blades in the evening seems to be the most promising method of reducing bat-loss.

I would like to answer the 3rd question first:
Bad idea! The inefficiencies of converting energy from a high level(visible light) to a lower level (infrared) and back is a pretty serious energy loss. But it can be done and solar energy is free so as long as every step uses a form of solar energy whether stored as heat in water, chemical imbalance in batteries, or spin states in a theoretical collection of ultra-cold atoms it would not matter about wasted energy. An heat pump could be set up to convert the heat to mechanical energy which would turn a generator to produce electricity to light a bulb. Rube Goldbergian to an extreme.

1st question:
About 429.2 BTU per hour per square foot or roughly 100 watts per square foot hour. Focusing the energy on a square inch would, I think (AuburnMathTutor how is your physics?), puts about 61804.8 BTU per hour (24.28 horse power) in a square inch. Not knowing what you want to do with the energy, I am not sure what units you want this in.

2nd question:
Rock, water (or water-antifreeze mixtures) and a phase-change chemical substance called Glauber's salt are considered the best storage mediums available for home use.

Is there any experiment on dark energy? something like Joule's friction Cone apparatus

Well, there lies madness - ie, we begin to enter the realm of Tesla and I just don't have the skilz necessary to wander there.

or Carnot's engine?

This goes into thermodynamics (and possibly, perpetual motion machines).

But

One major implication of the new study is that the existence of dark matter is the most likely explanation for the observation that galaxies and galaxy clusters move as if under the influence of some unseen mass, in addition to the stars astronomers observe.

There are theories that tweak relativity to try and get around dark matter:
the tensor-vector-scalar gravity (TeVeS) theory was tested and it failed.

The universe is approximately 70% dark energy, 25% dark matter, and normal matter makes up the rest - 5%. So far, science is pretty sure that dark matter is not baryonic (Any of a family of subatomic particles, including the nucleon and hyperon multiplets, that participate in strong interactions)but is most likely a WIMP(Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), a MACHO(MAssive Compact Halo Objects) or an axion (which is beyond my ability to define other than to say axions were posited to solve a problem in quantum chromodynamics (this branches off into 'confinement' and asymptopic freedon)).

Einstein had to fudge his equations to get them to match observed data - he called this fudge the 'cosmological constant' and he regretted it all his life but it seems that the cosmological …

I agree (at least when it comes to theoretical physics). One of my favourite quotes is that "if you think you understand quantum theory, you haven't a clue" (or something like that). Part of me thinks when they finally do find the Unified Theory (the theory that will bring gravity and quantum theory together) it will end up being much simpler and completely different than either of them and will actually make sense.

Richard Feynman made that observation at a time when physics was in turmoil, starting with the Michelson–Morley experiment (they were trying to find the direction/current of the aether wind), progressed through Einstein's Relativity (he was trying to find the theory of absolutes) up through the 'explosion' of particles and on past. I am not saying I understand quantum theory or that very many people do but the paradigm has shifted and what was unimaginable to the leading edge of science has pervaded society (think 'quantum', 'Schrodinger's Cat', 'wavicle').

My favorite Feynman story (yes, I am going to repeat it here) is about how he worked with other physicists, they would sit around and discuss results and various particle interactions. When they were stumped, Richard would disappear for a couple minutes to a couple hours then return with the answer. He never came up with the answer during the bull sessions and this began to perturb his co-workers - eventually, after bringing up a particularly complex particle interaction and Feynman left per usual, they burst into his …

Hey, I can't read your mind (and probably would not want to) - if you were quoting something or someone, make an attribution so we can all share in your erudition. I have a head full of quotes by famous people some of whom are mathematicians and many who are not, the neurons to fire when I read that god reference was s/he does not play with dice. If you had made an attribution or at least put it in quotes, I woulda googled it.

Eh. Beats me. cwarn sort of reminds me of myself, if I didn't know anything about math.

Hunh? Bringing god into a discussion of numbers? Circles are not many-sided polygons; circles can be approximated by many-sided polygons but they are not the same thing. You are a math tutor and you try to bring god into math? Quit your tutoring as you are unable to separate knowledge from belief.

Here is the trick - as long as the energy total = zero, anything is possible.

Every particle has it's anti-particle and so any given volume of empty space can suddenly be filled with particles then empty again. Then remember that matter and energy is interchangeable so it might not be possible to fill the space with mass-less energy particles. It was once thought that neutrinos were mass-less.

<digression> consider that every particle has its anti-particle - let's use the proton in this thought experiment - then consider that the anti-proton can be considered a proton moving backwards in time. It has been posited that all the protons in the universe are actually the same one moving back and forth in time. Unfortunately for this thought experiment, quarks don't quite work that way. </digression>

Please don't stop asking questions - I have to learn something in order to answer them (er, did I actually answer your question?).

I am listening to an updated version of "Another Brick"

Hey Ayatollah, Leave Those Kids Alone

The mean free path of a neutrino is about a light year of lead (a light second is 186,000 miles); in actuality, a moderate(!?) energy neutrino could easily pass through a thousand light years of lead.

The reason we can record neutrino activity at all is because 6 trillion neutrinos pass through a given square meter per second so in a given week a certain number of neutrinos will hit a detector just because there are so effing many of them are flying around. The estimates given are only for neutrinos produced in the heart of our sun; generally speaking, all the suns in the universe are producing an equivalent amount. It is really comforting that we are essentially empty space - otherwise we would be ripped to pieces by neutrinos.

Incase anyone doesn't know this is pi to 1000 digits as I believe it:
3. 1415926535 etc.

I can't make it much clearer than that.

hunh?

Also I hear in pi there is a number combination 666666. Do you believe to same occurs for every other number?

When dealing with random numbers, any and all possible number combinations are possible - including a million '6's in a row. Pi is now calculated to 2.3 trillion places and takes up a terabyte of storage to hold. Go ahead and search it for any combination of numbers you want.

Thanks for such a detailed reply. Any idea whether any form of energy exits which does not interact with matter at all ?

The easy answer is a neutrino - only one in a trillion passing through the center of the earth would actually be affected by it; about 60 billion solar neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of the Earth's surface every second. A neutrino is not mass-less but has so little mass that it can approach the speed of light.

<digression> a 'normal' unit of energy produced at the center of the sun takes about a million years to reach the surface of the sun whereas a neutrino produced at the center of the sun will reach the earth in about 8 minutes</digression>

Do you want to be really confused? Check this out - a new paper posits a universe where time and space are interchangeable via a constant in the same way E = mC^2 makes mass and energy interchangeable. This implies that Dark Energy makes up makes up 75% of the total mass/energy of the universe. But this flies in the face of the cosmic background radiation that is theoretically the energy left over from the Big Bang.

In other news, the number of angels dancing on the head of pin is up 32% but I digress.

See, it depends on where this 1 cubic meter of space is kept. Assume 1 cubic meter of lead (Pb) @ specific gravity of 11.36, which translates to a mass of 11,350 kg. Keeping it at height of 1 m from the ground produces a Potential Energy of 111.23 KJoules. Dropping it will produce a power of 246.63 KW in about 0.451 seconds.

No it does not depend on where this cubic meter of empty space is kept - a cubic meter of empty space can not be a cubic meter of lead by definition.

1) Gamma rays - which is kind of of a cop-out as gamma rays are photons with energy greater than 2 * 10^-14 joules (100 keV), SuperNova produce gamma ray bursts of approximately 10^54 ergs. Sorry for skipping around all the different energy units but it is too late and I am getting lazy. Maximum frequency is >3 * 10^19Hz

2) 0 K is the lowest temperature possible and hence the frequency is 0; check out this experiment

The NIST team, which includes physicists Anders Kastberg, Steven Rolston, Robert Spreeuw, Poul Jessen and group leader William Phillips, found that atoms became trapped in the valleys of the optical lattice and reached temperatures close to 1 microkelvin. The trapped atoms oscillate back and forth around the bottoms of the valleys. To reduce the temperature of the atoms even more, the scientists reduced the intensity of the light. As the laser light fades, the terrain of the optical lattice becomes less steep, slowing the frequency of the oscillations. This phenomenon, known as adiabatic expansion, drives the atomic temperature even lower, where the typical atomic velocity is only 7 millimeters per second.

there are calculators that can translate energy to frequency .

3) I am not sure that the question is posed correctly - if it is pure vacuum then no energy can be stored in it unless you made it into a container then you could pump energy into it but remember E = mC^2 --> m = E/C^2 thus …

When you remember Chinese restaurant menus had:
one from column A
two from column b
and this was number one on the charts just 20 years after the war - Sukiyaki

Sadness hides in the shadows of the stars/I look up when I walk so the tears wont fall....