Major Electronics Magazine Picks Up On Polywell

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

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KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

Betruger wrote:
DavidWillard wrote:LHC probably would have been up and running if it weren't for the idiot that left a beer bottle in the test chamber. Maybe they have an eco-terrorist on their staff. Some disgruntled janitor. Maybe that's why the recent failure happened.
Seriously? :lol: A stray beer bottle is what broke the LHC? I don't believe it..
This seems to be a case of bad blogging. The original report I find suggests it was the LEPC, not the LHC that had the beer bottle sabotage. Subsequently, other reports and blogs loose the LEPC reference.
BBC News wrote:If there was a fault with any of these, he said, it would have stopped the beams. They were also wary of obstacles in the beam pipe which could prevent the protons from completing their first circuit.

Mr Myers has experience of the latter problem. While working on the LHC's predecessor, a machine called the Large-Electron Positron Collider, engineers found two beer bottles wedged into the beam pipe - a deliberate, one-off act of sabotage.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/7604293.stm

JLawson
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Post by JLawson »

Tom Ligon wrote:I don't know about the beer bottle, but while at EMC2 we needed to have an ion pump overhauled by a local vacuum outfit. The owner described to me an episode in which a large chamber with one whole wall composed of the same ion pump element simply refused to pump down to the required level after several months of trying. They finally gave up and opened the chamber, and found a brown bag containing the dryest bologna sandwich anyone could recall seeing.
I've had a few of those in chow hall flight lunches. It was always puzzling how they could get them so dessicated - now we know! :D
When opinion and reality conflict - guess which one is going to win in the long run.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

I don't know of any cases where hunter gatherers have been the main cause of an extinction.
Go back and look at the fossil records. Every time humans expanded into an area there was a wave of extinctions.

Humans are an extremely deadly species.
What use do you have for thousands of feet of high-quality rope?
Many uses. I can climb, I can winch, I can put up a tent... and it's useful to the Bushmen too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope
The use of ropes for hunting, pulling, fastening, attaching, carrying, lifting, and climbing dates back to prehistoric times and has always been essential to mankind's technological progress. It is likely that the earliest "ropes" were naturally occurring lengths of plant fiber, such as vines, followed soon by the first attempts at twisting and braiding these strands together to form the first proper ropes in the modern sense of the word. Impressions of cordage found on fired clay provide evidence of string and rope-making technology in Europe dating back 28,000 years.[1] Fossilised fragments of "probably two-ply laid rope of about 7 mm diameter" were found in one of the caves at Lascaux, dating to approximately 15,000 BC.[2]

The ancient Egyptians were probably the first civilization to develop special tools to make rope. Egyptian rope dates back to 4000 to 3500 B.C. and was generally made of water reed fibers.
AFAICT, the Bushmen don't even have 26,000 B.C. ropemaking technology.

And rope is just one example. Virtually everything we use, from glass to steel (screws, nails, autos) to plastic to electronics to antibiotics, is either a huge investment of time or cannot be produced at all by Bushmen.

choff
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Post by choff »

Humans didn't kill off the Indian elephant after coming out of Africa, unless we evolved at essentially the same time in India, or Elephants are tough chewing/bad tasting or easier game was abundant in Asia but not North America. I've heard of sled dogs eating dug up frozen mammoth meat.
CHoff

Tom Ligon
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Post by Tom Ligon »

Sheeesh!

A large asteroid or comet hit North America a few hundred years after the Clovis culture arrived. It apparently blew up over the Laurentide Ice Sheet. It basically set North America on fire, and caused a flood of fresh water to enter the North Atlantic, altering the ocean circulation and surface albiedo, producing a 1000 year mini-ice-age called the Younger Dryas. Debris from the object most likely produced the "Carolina Bays" of the southeast.

Below the layer of charcoal and ash from the fires there are North American megafauna and large Clovis points. Above the layer, the big mammals are gone, along with the Clovis culture (survivors switched to much smaller projectile tips.

Hence my sly comment that the Clovis are responsible because they did not pursue space technology, and failed to develop the ability to deflect space objects. They did not kill off the megafauna.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

Tom,

That's one theory.
The most commonly held perspective on the end of the Clovis culture is that a decline in the availability of megafauna, combined with an overall increase in a less mobile population, led to local differentiation of lithic and cultural traditions across the Americas.[2][4] After this time, Clovis-style fluted points were replaced by other fluted-point traditions (such as the Folsom culture) with an essentially uninterrupted sequence across North and central America. An effectively continuous cultural adaptation proceeds from the Clovis period through the ensuing Middle and Late Paleoindian periods.[5] It has also been argued that Clovis ended in a very abrupt fashion.

Whether the Clovis culture drove the mammoth, and other species, to extinction via overhunting – the so-called Pleistocene overkill hypothesis – is still an open, and controversial, question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture

But virtually everywhere the human superpredator expands, extinctions follow. I don't know why anyone expects otherwise. If a super-cheetah or super-shark evolved, the same thing would happen.
The Quaternary epoch saw the extinctions of numerous predominantly larger species, many of which occurred during the transition to the Holocene epoch in what is termed the Holocene extinction[citation needed]. Among the main causes hypothesized by paleontologists are the spread of disease, natural climate change, and overkill by humans, which appeared during this epoch. A variant of this last possibility is the second-order predation hypothesis, which focuses more on the indirect damage caused by overcompetition with nonhuman predators.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_ ... xtinctions

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

DavidWillard wrote:
TallDave wrote:Again, it's a question of cost.

A 20GW plant is a little scary anyway. These giant engineering projects like LHC have so many potential failure points.
What about the cost of not doing it? Compounded with scarcer resources making it more expensive? Compounded with inflation over the past 20-30 years? Rule of 72.. 72/interest rate = cost doubling in years.
Er, the cost of not doing it is zero. We have enough fission fuel to last 1000 years. Maybe in 100 or 200 years it makes sense to start building these things. Not now.

It won't be more expensive due to inflation; inflation is just the value of money. Real (inflation-adjusted) GDP generally grows at around 2-3%, so everything gets cheaper in relative terms. By 2100, GDP per capita (adjusted for inflation, mind you) should be around $100K, even if real GDP per capita only grows at 1%. We'll all be rich, relative to today, just as we're ungodly wealthy compared to 1909 (GDP per capita (adjusted!) was around $4000 then compared to $40,000 now).

And of course there's no reason not to keep doing research. If by 2200 AD, when per capita GDP should be at least $250K (and probably closer to $1M), we decide we need tokamak reactors, we'll be much, much better at building them.

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

I will repeat an earlier statement, we HAVE fusion energy systems now, and they are ALMOST cost competative now, for summer peaking power needs. (PV dude) What we need is something that is competative with base-load power plants, and having 20GW holes in base-load capability seems hard to cover for. I suspect that PV will prove generally competative before any tokamak. I could be wrong.

Tom Ligon
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Post by Tom Ligon »

Kiteman,

I hope to install my latest PV panel this weekend. 80W (for about 4 hours per day) at a sale price of about $440. It measures 4 ft by 20 inches. It will drive the pumps on my solar heating system, with a little left over to charge the battery stuck over in the corner.

I believe in solar, but I dread having to run a power grid on it.

alexjrgreen
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Post by alexjrgreen »

TallDave wrote:
What use do you have for thousands of feet of high-quality rope?
Many uses. I can climb, I can winch, I can put up a tent...
None of which require thousands of feet of rope.
TallDave wrote:AFAICT, the Bushmen don't even have 26,000 B.C. ropemaking technology.
You might need to do a bit more research...
Ars artis est celare artem.

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

Tom Ligon wrote:I believe in solar, but I dread having to run a power grid on it.
Me too, for a while. Eventually, it may be cheap enough to pay for the losses and costs of battery (or other such) storage. And I suspect it will become so before tokamaks produce economic net power. And even now, I think there would be a LOT more PV in sunny climes if the household power rates weren't so frequently subsidized.

In sunny California, where they are having all sorts of problems power wise, the summer peak power rate for commercial buildings is ~55 cents per kwh. The high summer demand signal is mostly due to air conditioning loads. But home power rates (where much of the air conditioning goes) is down around 8 cents per kwh. Now true, my data are several years old, but it would surprise me if it has changed much.

KitemanSA
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Post by KitemanSA »

Tom Ligon wrote:Sheeesh!

A large asteroid or comet hit North America a few hundred years after the Clovis culture arrived. It apparently blew up over the Laurentide Ice Sheet. It basically set North America on fire, and caused a flood of fresh water to enter the North Atlantic, altering the ocean circulation and surface albiedo, producing a 1000 year mini-ice-age called the Younger Dryas.
Then again, maybe not. See http://www.nature.com/news/index.html for a short while.
Nature News wrote:North America comet theory questioned
No evidence of an extraterrestrial impact 13,000 years ago, studies say.
Rex Dalton

An independent study has cast more doubt on a controversial theory that a comet exploded over icy North America nearly 13,000 years ago, wiping out the Clovis people and many of the continent's large animals.


Sediments at the San Jon site, in eastern New Mexico, contained very low abundances of magnetic spherules said to be evidence of an impact.Vance HollidayArchaeologists have examined sediments at seven Clovis-age sites across the United States, and did not find enough magnetic cosmic debris to confirm that an extraterrestrial impact happened at that time, says the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)1. It is the latest of several studies unable to support aspects of the impact hypothesis.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

None of which require thousands of feet of rope.
Depends how big your winch is. A logger could also go through that much pretty quickly. Several large tents could easily consume a thousand feet of rope. So could trebuchets and catapults.

I could also, oh, say, build a sailing vessel, construct a rope bridge... the possibilities go on and on...

And again, rope is just one example.
You might need to do a bit more research...
You mean the Bushmen might need to do a bit more research. They appear to be doing simple thigh-rolling according to most sources. Regardless, even relatively modern 18th-century processes are much more labor-intensive than modern mechanized factories. That's why I can get thousands of feet of high-quality pre-tested rope in a few minutes and Bushmen can't.

The cult of the noble savage is deeply stupid. OTOH, I guess it's nice they get some tourist dollars out of it.

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