A little news from Alan Boyle

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

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MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

To find the number of chicken wings - take the number of chicken feet and divide by 2 to get the number of chickens, then multiply that result by 2 to get the number of chicken wings.

You can't de-feet the wings, but you can de-feet the chickens.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

Stable System = System no longer responds to environment.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

JohnSmith
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Post by JohnSmith »

The 200K superconductor would be... huge.
That's what, -73 degrees C. That's (almost) easy to maintain. Not much colder than winter on the prairies...

Of course, I'm not sure I want to get my physics news from a random website. I'm interested in seeing these reproduced.

scareduck
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Post by scareduck »

JohnSmith wrote:Of course, I'm not sure I want to get my physics news from a random website. I'm interested in seeing these reproduced.
We've been over alleged ultraconductors, which I suspect are either an interesting lab phenomenon, or a fraud. Since there's no peer-reviewed papers attached to this report, I would be skeptical of it, too.

And did I mention that Joe Eck, the fellow who claims to have made this discovery, is also the author of superconductors.org? I'm not saying that he's intrinsically wrong here, but independent verification of this potentially very useful result would be very important.

Nanos
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Post by Nanos »

Yes, very helpful link Icarus (Finally a decent enough book to think about getting with book vouchers that have been burning a hole in my pocket for the last 10 years..), I particularly like the bit:

> it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy

This concerns me a lot, from my experiences I see this happening all over and robbing us of our productiveness, you end up with everyone telling everyone else what to do, but no one left to do any of the actual work..
(And one of the issues I see at the heart of something like Technocracy, a bureaucratic heavy solution I'd like to see trimmed of all the fat and working smoothly, not full of pen pushers with endless rules..)


> education of the population

Your perhaps rather lucky in the US for that, in the UK we have been dumbing down for years our educational system, whilst grades are up, its only because they keep taking the difficult bits out each year..

Brilliance and ability are looked upon as a social disease here, though recently there has been a little shift away from that with various television shows putting smart people as the in thing. (Gordon Ramsey for example.)

Though some shows, like The Apprentise show political skills are often more important than actual ability..


> In previous society collapses, the population did not had time
> to research the solution to the problems because their human
> resources where to limited.

Sadly, we have had many solutions in our hands for decades, but all the idiots in charge have decided not to take them up.. (Amusingly is the reason I cited when I resigned from my last government job, "I don't mind working with idiots, but I refuse to be ordered what to do by them.")


> few inventions that caused a paradigm shifts

We might be in luck there, capitalism does help push inventions into the market, even when governments are slow to think about the benefits.


> but I would not trade those away in return for the at best more
> stable but overall lower increase in wealth such a society might
> generate.

I would, the speed of wealth increase being lower in exchange for a better quality of life for the majority, rather than the minority, I think is far better.

And no I won't change my mind when I shift from being in the majority poor bracket to minority rich bracket :-)

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

If you look closely at the experiment you will see that at this point they do not have a bulk material.

Just a wiggle on a graph indicating that such a material may exist in the sample.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

I would, the speed of wealth increase being lower in exchange for a better quality of life for the majority, rather than the minority, I think is far better.
By the second or third generation it starts to look like a bad deal when the worst off in the fast growing areas are doing better than the average in the slow growing places. And everyone else is doing way better.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

drmike
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Post by drmike »

Nanos wrote: Amusingly is the reason I cited when I resigned from my last government job, "I don't mind working with idiots, but I refuse to be ordered what to do by them."
darn that's good! I think I'll steal it!
:D

dnavas
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Post by dnavas »

JohnSmith wrote:The 200K superconductor would be... huge.
[...]
Of course, I'm not sure I want to get my physics news from a random website. I'm interested in seeing these reproduced.
Well, even if we buy the existence (MSimon -- I think the mixed-compound test was from 2006? Edit: Ah, yes, I see "a method of refinement to increase its volume fraction" -- good point!), it's a long, long way to a product. How much current can it carry, what kind of fields would it survive in, how do you make reels of the stuff, is the material malleable enough to make a bendable wire from it, and in this particular case, how do you keep it away from water.

As a way to balance out my content-less "chicken" post, I merely thought it was interesting, as opposed to game changing :)

-Dave
Last edited by dnavas on Thu Oct 23, 2008 4:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

JohnSmith
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Post by JohnSmith »

Maybe not game changing, but still big. I mean, even if it can't handle high strength fields, it would still be pretty useful. Current would be a bigger issue, I suppose. Still, if it's as cheap as it sounds, and it's easy to keep cold, non-toxic, a lot more people could play with superconductors. Dry ice is a lot easier to get ahold of then liquid nitrogen.

scareduck
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Post by scareduck »

I would, the speed of wealth increase being lower in exchange for a better quality of life for the majority, rather than the minority, I think is far better.
Fabian socialism in the U.K. eventually spawned stasis eventually spawning the Sex Pistols. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on which side of 50 you're on. :-)

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