mopani
4 days ago edited
Hydrogen molecules are the smallest in the universe, making it very difficult to make effective seals. First strike.
Hydrogen has an extremely wide flammability range, 4% to 76% of air. Strike two.
While the molar energy density (per molecule) and energy density by weight of hydrogen are exceptional, its volumetric energy density is extremely low, even in liquid form. Compare the size of hydrogen tank to the size of the oxygen tank in the space shuttle. That's one of the primary reasons the SpaceX Super Heavy and Starship rockets use methane instead of hydrogen, because the volumetric energy density is orders of magnitude greater. Strike three.
The Hydrogen energy economy is just another government boondoggle like Solyndra. Attractive on the surface, and sounds intelligent, but ultimately impractical and wasteful.
It's funny actually, if not ironic, that the volumetric energy density of hydrogen is so poor, but as soon as you combine it with some other element, say carbon, its volumetric energy density and practical usability go off the charts! I'm sure some commercial enterprise will discover this and exploit it real soon, and I'm willing to wager that it won't take any government money to build an absolutely booming economy out of it either!!
Just skip the hydrogen! If you're not going to exploit the most efficient energy store in the universe by using a hydrogen compound (hydrocarbons), why do you want to use only half of it, the hydrogen alone?
One should not too quickly dismiss what several generations of the most brilliant minds have already developed and streamlined into an efficient system with sophomoric thinking that somehow believes is an overlooked insight into the fundamentals of the universe.
What is being overlooked is the fantastic energy available from fissioning atoms. The most powerful chemical reaction generates 9 electron volts of energy per molecule. The energy from the fission of one atom (of which there are at minimum three in any chemical reaction) is almost 2 million electron volts. We know how to safely harness an energy source that is six orders of magnitude more powerful than any other, and yet it is rejected. You have to ask why.
"What about the nuclear waste?" It's not waste, it is used fuel, and it can be reused, except that Jimmy Carter, who calls himself a "nuclear engineer" although he never completed the Navy nuclear school, decreed that reusing spent fuel was too dangerous.
Consider too, that nuclear power plants are the only source of energy that completely contain all of their waste/byproducts. The used fuel from all of the nuclear power plants in 70 years of operation in the United States would not fill one single Walmart store.
Annual fuel use for one reactor is 35 tons of uranium fuel -- one semi truck load, although it would only fill a couple of milk crates. The same size coal power plant requires 100 coal cars per day.
Much Hoon, Very Flerp -> mopani
3 days ago
Mo, if you don’t mind my asking, what is it you do for a living? That’s probably the best short form explanation of the issue I’ve ever heard or read. Thank you.
mopani -> Much Hoon, Very Flerp
a day ago edited
Thank you for the compliment. I'm a missionary radio engineer that manages diesel generators and some solar plants because of poor energy supply in Africa.
I've been reading about and studying "renewables" and energy most of my life; I've come to the conclusion that most of the world's leaders are at the energy sophomore phase I was at in high school. Will they ever grow up? Doubtful, to be honest.
If you want a really well-rounded perspective on the whole energy and environment picture and not just the hot takes, read Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never. Fantastic book, and hard to put down! His website is http://environmentalprogres... and is the only thing I've ever seen come out of Berserkely that I could whole-heartedly support. =)
[Edit: I should also give a shout-out to David MacKay's Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air, available on Amazon and online at http://www.withouthotair.com. There is not a better "whole picture" view of energy use out there. ]
One of the best nuclear reactor designs was the Molten Salt Reactor, built and tested at Oak Ridge National Labs from 1965-1969. Thorcon Power wants to mass produce this proven design on a ship-yard assembly line. If CO2 emissions are an existential threat, then we need to be building one hundred 1GW nuclear power plants per year.
A molten salt reactor doesn't need to exchange fuel when the fission product isotopes start to poison the reaction, because the worst poisons ("neutron eaters") are noble gases, and if your fuel is liquid, they can easily be removed instead of being trapped in a solid fuel pellet. So instead of 35 tons of fuel per year, it would only need 1 ton of nuclear fuel per year, and it would extract at least 30% of the potential energy instead of 1%, like the typical Pressurized Water Reactors (Boiling Water Reactors are similar efficiency).
Besides Thorcon's website, visit http://www.daretothink.org to learn more about Molten Salt Reactors; I recommend starting with the "Numbers" page. //
mopani > C. S. P. Schofield
2 days ago
"Hydrogen has its own problems"
Yes, yes it does. It may have the highest energy per molecule, but it is also the smallest molecule, making it very difficult to seal. It also has the worst volumetric energy because of its low density. It's funny how combining it with a couple of carbon atoms fixes that! I wrote a long comment about this the other day on Ward Clark's article about hydrogen.
What would really be interesting, and I think is being ignored for obvious reasons, is hydrocarbon fuel cells, combining the simplicity of the electric drive train with the efficient energy storage of hydrocarbons. It also makes it very easy to make it a hybrid, and if we're wanting to improve efficiency and lower emissions, every vehicle should be a hybrid to recover braking and downhill energy. But hybrids with internal combustion engines add significant complexity.
Sources told Fox that Thompson said he would be turning over four terabytes of data, then turned over only about two. But Loudermilk's Committee hired a forensics team to scrape the hard drives and found out that 117 files were deleted and encrypted. They were deleted on Jan. 1, 2023 – just days before the GOP was to take over and Thompson had to turn over the data.
But even though they tried to delete the information, it looks like they weren't smart enough to do it right. According to the report, the forensics team recovered all 117 deleted and encrypted files, and now Loudermilk is demanding to know what was going on here and how to get into the files. //
"You wrote that you sent specific transcribed interviews and depositions to the White House and Department of Homeland Security but did not archive them with the Clerk of the House," the letter says. Why are they sending the interviews/depositions to the White House but not recording them for the archives as they are supposed to? Sounds like they're trying to give the Biden White House a heads up, but not Congress and the American people.
Liberia is Africa's oldest republic, but it became known in the 1990s for its long-running, ruinous civil wars and its role in a rebellion in neighbouring Sierra Leone.
Although founded by freed American and Caribbean slaves, Liberia is mostly inhabited by indigenous Africans, with the slaves' descendants comprising 5% of the population.
Around 250,000 people were killed in Liberia's civil wars, and many thousands more fled the fighting as the economy collapsed.
Big programmes are under way to address the shortage of electricity and running water.
anon-lwil Dagwood
28 minutes ago
“The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it”
- H. L. Mencken
They don't want to save us; they want to dominate and control us.
Aaron Slodov @aphysicist
·
Jan 18
Milei's 2024 Davos talk, directly translated to English by AI (by heygen), in his own accent. Better than the dubbed version imo.
Rafael Fontana @RafaelFontana
WELCOME TO DAVOS
The place where:
-
Men who hire prostitutes deliver speeches on gender equality.
-
Tycoons arrive in private jets to persuade you to ride a bicycle.
-
Billionaires assure you that you can be happy without having anything.
#Davos
1:51 PM · Jan 18, 2024
Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that causes Covid-19 in late December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world, congressional investigators said, raising questions anew about what China knew in the pandemic’s crucial early days.
Documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by a House committee and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure to a U.S. government-run database on Dec. 28, 2019.
Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial Covid-19 outbreaks.
China only shared the virus’s sequence with the World Health Organization on Jan. 11, 2020, according to U.S. government timelines of the pandemic.
Whether the sample that leaked was “natural” or had a lab-crafted genetic sequence, it is clear that experiments involving the virus were occurring in China. The Chinese were studying the samples in a facility that lacked the proper biocontainment controls to do so safely.
And while some may bitterly cling to the “natural origin” option, I simply will note that the coronavirus has “rare” genome sequences that are hallmarks of genetic manipulation.
George Soros is pouring money into local Democratic parties in Texas in a ploy to help Democrats turn the state blue, according to the Texas Tribune. //
This is yet another reason why I always preach the importance of focusing on local politics. The government closest to the people tends to have the most impact – positive or negative. But, focusing on local politics will also help conservative and libertarian voters become aware of the game progressives are playing and alert their communities to what will happen once another “woke” district attorney gets into power.
Biden claims that he hasn't believed the border was secure for the last ten years and that he's been saying that for the last decade. Of course, that's completely untrue. He and his people have insisted that the border was secure right up until this comment that he just made this week. So this is a huge falsehood he's attempting here. How can you trust anyone who is this delusional and dishonest? //
He seems to want to blame Republicans here for not giving him money. It isn't about money, it's about enforcing the law. It's because Biden undid everything former President Donald Trump had in place that was working and then things exploded. Plus, he had a Democratic Congress for the first two years. //
Laocoön of Troy Mildred's Oldest Son
6 hours ago
None of the explanations have been particularly satisfying. Last week I heard one that made more sense. Alot of hard-blue states are exporting population as quick as U-Haul can get the trucks. Those voters and the nums that they generate go into the census. The Congressional Districts where the U-Hauls are going are in red states. Blue states down and red ststes up. It's a freakin' lightmare for the left.
Unless more warm bodies can be shoehorned into Chicago, NYC, LA, San Francisco, Boston, and other crazy urban areas...those states are gonna lose ALOT of House seats and electoral votes after the next census. It's not about generating fake votes...which would be a bonus for the lefties...it's about pumping up their nums to slow the bleeding in terms of House seats.
Don't know if that's supported by data...but it makes sense to me.
This nonsense of demanding denunciations and letting whiny little brats who have nothing better to do with their time than try to silence people whom they dislike get away with their bullying has to stop. The best way to stop them is to tell them to STFU and go away. These people aren't operating in anything approaching good faith. The sole purpose is to control language and control the social narrative.
White showed that you don't have to endorse speech to protect it, as did Strickland's colleagues. The people truly offended by Strickland can resort to the marketplace and refuse to watch UFC or consider the sage advice of David Chappelle. ///
Reporters paying "let's you and him fight"...
On Thursday, UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) announced the release of previously unseen images and documents related to Colossus, one of the first digital computers. The release marks the 80th anniversary of the code-breaking machines that significantly aided the Allied forces during World War II. While some in the public knew of the computers earlier, the UK did not formally acknowledge the project's existence until the 2000s.
Colossus was not one computer but a series of computers developed by British scientists between 1943 and 1945. These 2-meter-tall electronic beasts played an instrumental role in breaking the Lorenz cipher, a code used for communications between high-ranking German officials in occupied Europe. The computers were said to have allowed allies to "read Hitler's mind," according to The Sydney Morning Herald. //
The technology behind Colossus was highly innovative for its time. Tommy Flowers, the engineer behind its construction, used over 2,500 vacuum tubes to create logic gates, a precursor to the semiconductor-based electronic circuits found in modern computers. While 1945's ENIAC was long considered the clear front-runner in digital computing, the revelation of Colossus' earlier existence repositioned it in computing history. (However, it's important to note that ENIAC was a general-purpose computer, and Colossus was not.)
Fujitsu software bugs that helped send innocent postal employees to prison in the UK were known "right from the very start of deployment," a Fujitsu executive told a public inquiry today.
"All the bugs and errors have been known at one level or not, for many, many years. Right from the very start of deployment of the system, there were bugs and errors and defects, which were well-known to all parties," said Paul Patterson, co-CEO of Fujitsu's European division.
That goes back to 1999, when the Horizon software system was installed in post offices by Fujitsu subsidiary International Computers Limited. From 1999 to 2015, Fujitsu's faulty accounting software aided in the prosecution and conviction of more than 900 sub-postmasters and postmistresses who were accused of theft or fraud when the software wrongly made it appear that money was missing from their branches.
Some innocent people went to prison, while others were forced to make payments to the UK Post Office to cover the supposed shortfalls. So far, "only 93 convictions have been overturned and thousands of people are still waiting for compensation settlements," a BBC report said. //
A Financial Times article said that the public inquiry "heard in December last year that the Post Office's lawyers had rewritten Fujitsu witness statements."
The FT article also said the Post Office, which used prosecution powers available to private corporations in the UK, obtained 700 of the 900 convictions. The other convictions came in cases brought by Scottish prosecutors. The scandal may lead to reforms of the private prosecution system that lets organizations take people to court.
Douglas Engelbart changed computer history forever on December 9, 1968.
A half century ago, computer history took a giant leap when Douglas Engelbart—then a mid-career 43-year-old engineer at Stanford Research Institute in the heart of Silicon Valley—gave what has come to be known as the "mother of all demos."
On December 9, 1968 at a computer conference in San Francisco, Engelbart showed off the first inklings of numerous technologies that we all now take for granted: video conferencing, a modern desktop-style user interface, word processing, hypertext, the mouse, collaborative editing, among many others.
Even before his famous demonstration, Engelbart outlined his vision of the future more than a half-century ago in his historic 1962 paper, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework."
To open the 90-minute-long presentation, Engelbart posited a question that almost seems trivial to us in the early 21st century: "If in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display, backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day, and was instantly responsible—responsive—to every action you had, how much value would you derive from that?"
Of course at that time, computers were vast behemoths that were light-years away from the pocket-sized devices that have practically become an extension of ourselves.
Engelbart, who passed away in 2013, was inspired by a now-legendary essay published in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, physicist who had been in charge of the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II.
That essay, "As We May Think," speculated on a "future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library." It was this essay that stuck with a young Engelbart—then a Navy technician stationed in the Philippines—for more than two decades.
By 1968, Engelbart had created what he called the "oN-Line System," or NLS, a proto-Intranet. The ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet itself, would not be established until late the following year.
Five years later, in 1973, Xerox debuted the Alto, considered to be the first modern personal computer. That, in turn served as the inspiration for both the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, and the rest, clearly, is history.
Oct 29, 2019
Marlor_AU Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius 20y 6,800
Rector said:
LordEOD said:
Did Al Gore Say ‘I Invented the Internet’?"Despite the multitudinous derisive references to the supposed quote that continue to be proffered even today, former U.S. vice president Al Gore never claimed that he “invented” the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way."
Al Gore never said that he invented the internet. He said he created the internet. See direct quote above.
Gore was the driving force behind legislation that opened up various agency-specific networks and united them to create the precursor to today’s internet. Without this legislation, the siloed networks would have continued developing in parallel. From Kahn and Cerf (linked above):
“As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.
As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an "Interagency Network." Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush's administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This "Gore Act" supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.”
If the guys who created the protocols that drive the internet are happy to credit Gore as the administrative driving force behind it, then who can argue with that?
Nathan2055 Ars Centurion 7y 355 Subscriptor
mknelson said:
tjukken said:
"Without ARPANET, there would have been no Internet"I doubt that is true.
The internet is more than just wires between computers (or Tubes if you're from Alaska). It's the protocols that make it all work.
The origins of those protocols and the hardware they work on in many ways have their origins in the early work on ARPANET
This is exactly right.
ARPANET was, indisputably, the first network to implement TCP/IP, which eventually became the backbone protocols of the modern Internet. Now, ARPANET did not originally launch with TCP/IP; it originally used the far more simplistic Network Control Program, which had severe limitations and was not standardized outside of ARPANET. The need for a single, standardized protocol for sharing network resources that could be utilized by any computer system led to the development of the Transmission Control Program in 1974. Incidentally, the RFC for this system, RFC 675, is notable as it contains the first use of the word Internet, intended as a shorthand for "internetworking."
Transmission Control Program would later be split off into the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol, separating the transport layer and network layer for increased modularity. TCP/IP was declared the new standard for computer networking by the DoD in March 1982, and shortly after University College London did the same; and the entire network was rebooted and switched over on January 1, 1983. This is another candidate for the Internet's birthday, along with March 12, 1989 (Tim Berners-Lee submitting his original proposal for CERN to adopt an information management system based on "hypertext") , December 20, 1990 (the first hypertext web page using HTML and HTTP was published, www.cern.ch, describing the World Wide Web project), and January 1, 1990 (the first fully commercial Internet backbone, not controlled or limited in anyway by government or educational institutions, was switched on by PSInet).
That being said, I'd certainly argue that the first long-distance computer network connection, even if it wasn't using TCP/IP yet, makes the most sense to celebrate as the Internet's birthday.
RoninX Ars Tribunus Militum 12y 2,849 Subscriptor
Dibbit said:
tjukken said:
"Without ARPANET, there would have been no Internet"I doubt that is true.
I kinda concur.
While Arpanet was very early and important, the way it is framed always brings to mind the image that everything grew out of this original network.The truth is more that individual networks grew bigger and bigger and linked up. For instance, The Swiss network was already interconnected before hooking up to the "main node" so to speak.
If Arpanet hadn't been there, there would've been another big network that would've been appointed "the origin"
There would undoubtedly have been some sort of global computer network without the ARPANET, but it might have taken a very different form.
It could have evolved from something like Compuserve into a more cable-TV model, with a sharp distinction between computers that could serve information (which would need to be approved by the network supplier) and those that just accessed that information. So, like Comcast, except you would need Comcast's approval for any information you wanted to post to the network, and undoubtedly have to pay an additional fee.
Or it could have evolved from the heavily-regulated world of amateur radio, where some hobbyists were experimenting with packet radio for teletype communication -- where every user needs to have a license, and things like profanity are strictly prohibited.
Or it could have become a government bureaucracy, like the Post Office or the DMV, where the service is paid for by a combination of taxes and user fees, and all use is both licensed and tracked to individual users.
Or it could have grown out of Fidonet into an even more distributed model, where all of the networking was peer-to-peer, and evolving into a network that would have been like torrents on steroids.
Or it could have been built and owned by Microsoft and have only supported Windows PCs.
Or any one of a dozen other possibilities.
Computer networks were inevitable, but the fact that the Internet works the way it currently does -- for better or worse -- is directly a result of the architecture pioneered by the ARPANET.
The precursor to the Internet carried its first login request on October 29, 1969. //
On October 29, 1969, at 10:30pm Pacific Time, the first two letters were transmitted over ARPANET. And then it crashed. About an hour later, after some debugging, the first actual remote connection between two computers was established over what would someday evolve into the modern Internet.
Funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (the predecessor of DARPA), ARPANET was built to explore technologies related to building a military command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear attack. But as Charles Herzfeld, the ARPA director who would oversee most of the initial work to build ARPANET put it:
The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them. //
The first letters transmitted, sent from UCLA to Stanford by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, were "l" and "o." On the second attempt, the full message text, login, went through from the Sigma 7 to the 940. So, the first three characters ever transmitted over the precursor to the Internet were L, O, and L. //
When it was shut down, Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the modern Internet, wrote a poem in ARPANET's honor:
It was the first, and being first, was best,
but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years
of faithful service, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.
On Thursday, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf announced that Dr. David L. Mills, the inventor of Network Time Protocol (NTP), died peacefully at age 85 on January 17, 2024. The announcement came in a post on the Internet Society mailing list after Cerf was informed of David's death by Mills' daughter, Leigh.
"He was such an iconic element of the early Internet," wrote Cerf.
Dr. Mills created the Network Time Protocol (NTP) in 1985 to address a crucial challenge in the online world: the synchronization of time across different computer systems and networks. In a digital environment where computers and servers are located all over the world, each with its own internal clock, there's a significant need for a standardized and accurate timekeeping system.
NTP provides the solution by allowing clocks of computers over a network to synchronize to a common time source. This synchronization is vital for everything from data integrity to network security. For example, NTP keeps network financial transaction timestamps accurate, and it ensures accurate and synchronized timestamps for logging and monitoring network activities.
In the 1970s, during his tenure at COMSAT and involvement with ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet), Mills first identified the need for synchronized time across computer networks. His solution aligned computers to within tens of milliseconds. NTP now operates on billions of devices worldwide, coordinating time across every continent, and has become a cornerstone of modern digital infrastructure.
Reagan Airport @Reagan_Airport
·
🔺TRAFFIC ALERT: Expect delays around the airport due to a group in vehicles exercising first amendment rights in roadway. Use caution and expect slow moving vehicles. Recommend @Wmata to access airport.
Readers added context
There is no first amendment right to block traffic
aclu-il.org/en/news/when-e… https://t.co/7PWvBDRP5u
Context is written by people who use X, and appears when rated helpful by others. Find out more.
2:53 PM · Jan 20, 2024
(((tedfrank))) @tedfrank
·
You do not have a first amendment right to block the roadway. In fact, drivers inconvenienced by such illegal action have a civil cause of action for public nuisance against the people and organizations conspiring to block the roadway. If you were trapped in your car, you have a false imprisonment tort claim, too. You may wish to consult an attorney.
The "Today" report goes on to say that Biden is encouraging House Speaker Mike Johnson to work with his administration to solve the border crisis. Does anyone actually believe this stuff?
Biden has ushered in the worst border crisis in American history, and it's not because we need "reform." It's because he has steadfastly refused to enforce the law and has dismantled provisions that were in place helping to stem the tide. It was a choice to get rid of "Remain in Mexico." It was a choice to escalate the practice of "catch-and-release" of illegal immigrants into the interior. //
When the deal falls apart, Biden wants to be able to claim he had every intention of securing the border but those dastardly Republicans stopped him.
He has no actual intention of doing that, no matter what the outcome in Congress is.
And while the sci part of the sci-fi equation may be questionable in Scott's 1982 original, the production design felt so right to audiences that it has overshadowed almost every future-set movie since. Even if – with only two years to go – our world looks nothing like Blade Runner's vision of 2019, Scott's vision remains the benchmark for The Future.
William Gibson invented the future. He also coined the term "cyberspace", which earned his place not just in literary and sci-fi but also nerd history. His world of elite hackers, shady super-corporations and unfathomable artificial intelligences inform almost all modern speculative fiction.
Gibson didn't invent Blade Runner. He was just breathing in the same post-industrial silicon fumes as its director Ridley Scott and futurologist production designer Syd Mead, who also shaped the look of Aliens and Tron. A heady mix that stapled Blade Runner to the pantheon of film and ensures we're discussing it today.