Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

Deathwing_sl said:

Even better than machining from a solid single piece?

Click to expand...

I would doubt it, but some things just can't be machined from a single piece. The article that interested me the most was3D Printed Rocket Engine Fired in NASA Test. I thought it had been linked he before though.

BrutulTM_sl said:

I have come to accept that I don't have enough information to have a relevant opinion about climate change, but when someone says that they have made a computer model to predict the climate of the entire planet, my gut reaction is always "Sounds like bullshit to me".

Click to expand...

It's all about your resolution of prediction and amount of data that you plug in. Obviously if you only plug in temperature/precip. data from a few weather stations around the globe you aren't going to be able to predict the micro-climate in Indonesia for December. But with our increasingly powerful computers and algorithms combined with more and more data, the models will continue to be fined tuned and more accurate. It's an iterative process, kind of like...you know....science itself.

Concerning global warming, it's a consequence of one of the simplest and oldest science experiments one can do. The earth's atmosphere is for all intents and purposes a closed system, when the % composition of it is altered there will be an effect. Take 2 glass bottles, fill one with normal atmosphere and the other one with methane and CO2, stick em outside in the sun and see which one warms up faster and hotter. Greenhouses gases are a real thing. Try another easy experiment if you still aren't convinced, fill those same bottles half way with water and with a normal atmosphere and measure the pH, replace that atmosphere with a higher concentration of CO2 shake em up and then measure the pH. It's probably gone down if you did it right because CO2 has a high solubility in water and converts into carbonic acid, thus lowering your pH. We have historic data going back over a hundred years on the pH of the worlds oceans and they have shown a steady decline....more evidence that CO2 emissions are having a direct effect on our planet. I'm sure it's just an amazing coincidence that many of the worlds coral reefs decided to start dieing off after 100,000 years of uninterrupted growth at the same precise moment that humans started whizzing around the globe in giant diesel trucks. Riiiiiiiggghhhttt......

It boggles my mind that normally intelligent people think that we can pump BILLIONS of tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere for every year since the Industrial Revolution and that it wont eventually have an effect on our planet. But honestly who gives a shit right? It's just the only god damn planet we can live on, why err on the side of caution when there's $$$$$ to be made? We'll be dead before it really kicks in anyway, if its even real....

I always find it stunning to read about how much the earth's climate has changed over time.

Ice age - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

- Outside of the five ice ages, there's no ice at the poles - so technically we're in the fifth one now, albeit a warmer interglacial period which will probably last another 30,000 years.
- In the second ice age, the ice caps may have reached as far as the equator, and lasted over 200 million years

I had a crapper thought.

I assume that if you were making an observation of light, and there was some quantity of light which you were trying to observe which ran truly parallel to your observational apparatus you would never be able to actually detect the light. You might could infer it, but you could not observe it. So what if dark matter is just matter which is "parallel" to our observational ability? You don't have to invoke WIMPS to explain it, or gravitons bleeding through a brane, or a 2d substrate, or string theory -- even if all of those things might be true. You do have to jerk with dimensionality on/at cosmic timescales and distances though... and maybe that means you could never actually prove any theory that used the idea as a core assumption. Like there's a biggie sized Plank barrier as well. But that seems to be at least consistent with our observations in the other direction of scale -- form emerges as a new thing from the interactions of (what we have to call) the formless.

Of course, if gravity can have an effect and we can infer through that effect to begin with, why should light be verboten. I dunno. It's just a dumbass crapper thought. I wish I could blame it on bein high.

People accuse me of thinking I'm smart sometimes. I can assure you, I do not.

Iannis_sl said:

I had a crapper thought.

I assume that if you were making an observation of light, and there was some quantity of light which you were trying to observe which ran truly parallel to your observational apparatus you would never be able to actually detect the light.

Click to expand...

I have no idea if I'm understanding your "crapper thought" correctly, but it sounds like you are picturing "light" as a flashlight. I.E the "beam" is only pointed in one direction. Which only makes sense if you are talking about visible light and the effect of shadows. There are plenty of kinds of EMR that pass through whatever medium is preventing visible wavelengths.

Yeah, that's what I meant. Like if you looked at a laser from the side you don't see nothing because it's like focused and stuff. There's nothing to see. Laser has a job to do, ain't got time for your nonsense.

Deep thoughts.

Wellp.

Netherlands Is The 1st Country To Open A Solar Road For Public Use | Collective-Evolution

Palum_sl said:

Wellp.

Netherlands Is The 1st Country To Open A Solar Road For Public Use | Collective-Evolution

Click to expand...

ince the path cannot be adjusted to the position of the sun, the panels will generateapproximately 30% less energy than those placed on roofs.However, the road is tilted slightly to aid water run-off and achieve a better angle to the sun and its creators expect to generate more energy as the path is extended to 100 metres in 2016.

Click to expand...

So you place them in an area that will get more wear and produces less electricity. Great work, these people should make their own kickstarter.

Holy shit, 3.75 million dollars? To add afullmile of highway in the U.S.; with no grade, no removal (Trees ect) costs around 3.5 million dollars. With all that shit, in the most expensive states, it goes up to around 9 millionper mile. That means, per meter, at it's most expensive (Clearing trees, rocks, ect) it would cost 380,000 (Rounded) dollars to build this road. (It would normally be around 150k)....So even at the most expensive for asphalt, this road costs around TEN fucking times what it would have cost to lay asphalt down.

It really forces you to ask the question Khalid is wondering. Why not spend 380k on asphalt; put 2.3 million in a trust fund to repair the road (And arrays) in perpetuity. Then use the last 1 million dollars to build steel risers that can auto-angle solar arrays to power the stuff on the road. In the end you would have ended up with a longer lasting road, and more energy generation.

Lithose_sl said:

Holy shit, 3.75 million dollars? To add afullmile of highway in the U.S.; with no grade, no removal (Trees ect) costs around 3.5 million dollars. With all that shit, in the most expensive states, it goes up to around 9 millionper mile. That means, per meter, at it's most expensive (Clearing trees, rocks, ect) it would cost 380,000 (Rounded) dollars to build this road. (It would normally be around 150k)....So even at the most expensive for asphalt, this road costs around TEN fucking times what it would have cost to lay asphalt down.

It really forces you to ask the question Khalid is wondering. Why not spend 380k on asphalt; put 2.3 million in a trust fund to repair the road (And arrays) in perpetuity. Then use the last 1 million dollars to build steel risers that can auto-angle solar arrays to power the stuff on the road. In the end you would have ended up with a longer lasting road, and more energy generation.

Click to expand...

Here is the thing though: absolutely no one is doing that.

The Ancient_sl said:

Here is the thing though: absolutely no one is doing that.

Click to expand...

No one is doing what? Doing solar the smart way?

The problem isn't with finding places to put the arrays, its with the cost. Finding a new, even more costly place to put them doesn't help matters.

It's human nature that a Sexy approach to the problem like a solar sidewalk will get more attention than ugly angled solar arrays. Policymakers are usually not scientists and neither is the general population. Sometimes the flashy product has to pave the way for the practical ones.