[wolfram]

jamesr wrote: Further to my comment on Elsevier. The Guardian published this today:
Academic publishers have become the enemies of science

Indeed, one of my chemistry professors would rail against these mooks during lunch, they really cheesed her off. I love how physics articles are widely available on arXiv.

[wolfram]

Patience padawan, the polywell crowd has gone something like 2 years without meaningful updates. If they don’t post anything in January, they’ll probably post something delightful in early February.

[wolfram]

Not enough people making a distinction between making a difference and being important, that’s for sure.

[wolfram]

undoubtedly, a reliable open source way of evaluating merit in scientific articles would be a coup in metrology. We’d be able to do away with all those exorbitantly priced journals we use to approximate prestige. Of course it’s tantamount to a method for determining truth, which would be pretty impressive on philosophical level as well pragmatic.

[wolfram]

Isn’t the dominant mind set in industries “how do we perpetuate growth?” Aren’t engineers constantly bemoaning the fact they can’t aim for some project that might take as long as 3 years, because it would reduce next quarters growth report? It’s transparently obvious that [em]something[/em] will prevent the growth paradigm from manifesting, but at the present, it doesn’t seem like it will be because the MBA’s decided en masse that it was silly.

[wolfram]

on the subject of ungainly radiation, i’ve been reading up on nuclear isomers a lot lately. I wonder if the wavelength of the x-rays could be tuned to stimulate nuclear excitations. You could have a nice little complex with a power generating DPF keeping the x-ray generating DPF’s going and recharging atomic batteries.

[wolfram]

jamesr wrote: Its not about quantity. Quality is what matters.

I acknowledge their rights regarding what data they do or do not release, but I also want to make clear, they’re shooting for an industrial result. Quantity is exactly the quality they are looking for. If they can genuinely get an excess of 1, 5 or 10 megajoules a shot, but each shot takes a week of set up, the method and device won’t be very practical. It will provide a giant flag for where to investigate next though. Which will be nice, since I’ll be in need of a thesis subject by about that time.

[wolfram]

So sometimes when we get data posts, the quantity of data leaves me feeling a bit skittish. I know how long it can sometimes take a rig to get up and running, but when things are working properly, how much time passes between shots?

[wolfram]

In most plasmas that I’m familiar with, electrons are consistently much hotter than ions.

[wolfram]

zapkitty wrote:
… but the human brain/body combination is actually pretty efficient at using that energy to accomplish a very wide range of tasks… but as for our gadgets at this time? Not so much. They tend to be either very efficient at a very limited set of tasks or not so efficient at a wider range of tasks. Thus more gadgets and/or more power per gadget are needed to accomplish a given set of tasks.

So while a megawatt per capita would be a giant leap forward in comparison to current available reserves it seems that at this time it would be nowhere near the equivalent of 10,000 people supporting one person. But that will change over time with advances in technology.

… BTW…. doesn’t “slave” in that usage imply sapience? Probably not a good idea to tick off the AIs…

I will admit that 1 megawatt of computers given our current algorithms and programming hutzpah is not going to be able to compete with 10000 humans in terms of, say, dirty limerick writing. But how does a megawatt of backhoe compare to 10000 humans in terms of ditch digging? Looking at wikipedia has a 1950’s back hoe clocking in at 50e3 watts(68 hp), or 500 people’s worth of energy. It’s listed as having a 14 thousand pound operating weight. I don’t know what that term means, but i’ll treat it as what it can lift.

14e3/5e2=140/5=28 pounds per person. Hrmmm, my back pack gets that heavy from time to time. I guess that the advantage of mechanization is you don’t have to pay health insurance.

[wolfram]

the human body operates at 100 watts, in the pretty heavily industrialized countries there’s about a 1000 watts per person, an order of magnitude more. a megawatt is another 3 orders of magnitude, it’s like the average person has 10000 people’s worth of mechanical slaves. I wonder if anybodies done that analysis, position in a hierarchy or something based on available wattage. Anyway, non sequitur.

You seem pretty confident that deviating/abandoning from every bodies favorite economic models will be a walk in the park.

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