There will be a test tonight. A guide to fireworks effects.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Killing The Planet
…with wind mills:
…the only feasible backup for the planned 25-gig wind base will be good old gas turbines. These would have to be built even if pumped storage existed, to deal with long-duration calms; and the expense of a triplefold wind, gas and pumped storage solution would be ridiculous. At present, gas turbine installations provide much of the grid’s ability to deal with demand changes through the day.
The trouble is, according to Oswald, that human demand variance is predictable and smooth compared to wind output variance. Coping with the sudden ups and downs of wind is going to mean a lot more gas turbines – ones which will be thrashed especially hard as wind output surges up and down, and which will be fired up for less of the time.
The fiends.
The Economics Of Longevity
Some thoughts, over at Fight Aging.
Better Living
…through hookworms:
“Many of the people who were given a placebo have requested worms, and many of the people with worms have elected to keep them,” Dr. Pritchard said.
I hope they can figure out how it works, and (literally) eliminate the middle man…errrrr…worm.
We’re Not Ready
It’s been a hundred years since Tonguska, but we’re still not taking the threat seriously.
We’re Not Ready
It’s been a hundred years since Tonguska, but we’re still not taking the threat seriously.
Better Diagnostics
…through metabolites:
Douglas Kell, a researcher at the University of Manchester in Britain, has already created a computer model based on metabolite profiles in blood plasma that can single out pregnant women who are developing pre-eclampsia, or dangerously high blood pressure. Research published last year by Rima Kaddurah-Daouk, a psychiatrist at the Duke University Medical Centre in America, may not only provide a test for schizophrenia, but also help with its treatment. She found a pattern of metabolites present only in the blood of people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The patterns change according to the antipsychotic drugs patients take and this may throw light on why some respond well to certain drugs, but others suffer severe side-effects.
This seems very promising, and near term. This part is a little misleading, though:
Studying genes alone does not provide such detail. Genes are similar to the plans for a house; they show what it looks like, but not what people are getting up to inside.
This implies that the genome is a blueprint–that the body is built by following a plan. But that’s a bad analogy. A much better one is a recipe. First do this, then do that. If it were a blueprint, identical twins would be truly identical, and indistinguishable. But because it’s a recipe, there are subtle differences (e.g., fingerprints) because the genome doesn’t specify the body design to that high a level of detail, and much can depend on womb environment (one reason to think that this could be a strong factor in the creation of homosexuals, in addition to genetic predisposition).
Boostback
Jon Goff has another installment in his excellent series of tutorials on future space transport concepts. The interesting thing, as he points out, is that one can see a clear development and technological maturation path to these types of affordable systems via operational suborbital vehicles, both horizontal and vertical.
Hooking Them Early
Behold, Space Camp Barbie. Maybe math isn’t as hard as she thought.
A Solution To The Ares 1 Problem
A tuned mass vibration damper:
Due to both the immense size of Taipei 101 and the fact that it sits just over 600ft from a major fault line, engineers had no choice but to install one of this size at a cost of $4m. Too heavy to be lifted by crane, the damper was assembled on site and hangs through four floors of the skyscraper. It can reduce the building’s movement by up to 40%.
And only 728 tons. Hey, the vehicle’s already overweight. What’s a little more?