Dream Modeling

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  • Thursday, December 29, 2011
  • Archimedes
  • Ever wonder how fast the human brain could really operate if used with a higher proficiency? Consciously, we can only use about 20% of our brains processing power, I's sure we've all heard this before, but all it really takes to go beyond that is to dream a little.

    When we dream, a level of our subconscious mind uses the knowledge we have to build the dream environment. If I dreamed of a city the cityscape would be constructed of my knowledge of architecture and modern city planning, mixed in with the mood I'm feeling at the moment. If I were dreaming of a forest, the dreamscape would be built based on my knowledge of plants and animals, and the natural cycles of life that I've been taught since middle school.

    When the conscious mind makes a decision in a dream, the subconscious moves even faster to predict the outcome. When you step off a ledge, you know that you are going to start falling, when you get chased down by some big animal, you know that its probably not going to end well, and you knowledge of physics and anatomy usually fills in the gory details.

    Dreaming has been working since the dawn of man, but why then, have we not sought some way of using this to our advantage?

    There are already medications available to instantly send a person into the dreaming part of sleep, and some iffy physiological techniques such as hypnosis are readily available to alter memory. So say we wanted to model an event, such as the big bang and the formation of the galaxy, something beyond the capabilities of modern computing. We find a very logical and methodical patent, and somehow block his normal memories of being a person, family, daily life, etc, and limit his mind to ponder existence with nothing but a through knowledge of physics and its proven laws, it would be quite curious to see what conclusions that person may reach.

    A Strange End

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  • Tuesday, November 29, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • In the world of modern high energy physics, there exists one type of particle that can single-handedly reduce the entirety of the Earth to a smoldering rock. That particle is whats known as a "strange" particle, a hadron (mass made of quarks) composed of quarks so massive that it needs to gain mass in order to maintain stability, and it gains mass by energizing the quarks of ordinary matter into massive "strange" quarks and then assimilating it. The process feeds upon itself and will continue until all the matter surrounding it has been converted and assimilated into one super massive particle, which will remain stable for an unknown period of time. It is comparable to some sort of viral/bacterial particle, changing and accumulating the matter around it in order to sustain its own stability.

    While this type of doomsday particle exists only in theory, the fact that theory allows it is a scary thought indeed. The accidental production of one tiny little particle can destroy all of the Earth. In the future, should this particle ever become realized, it will posses the same threat to entire planets as what threat nuclear weapons posses against our cities today.

    Dyson Sphere, Take II

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  • Thursday, November 24, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • A long long time ago some genius physicist by the name of Dyson predicted that as technology evolved and population grew, the only way to meet an advanced civilizations energy demands is to build a massive superstructure that would completely enclose the sun, capturing most of its energy for our use. Simple mathematics will reveal that such a massive undertaking is simply impossible because the amount of matter required to construct such a large structure simply does not exist within our solar system. This mathematical argument convinced me for a short while, but then an alternate solution presented itself.
    The sun emits so much energy across so broad a spectrum that if we only captured a small spectrum of its emission, the energy gained would still be significant. While the Dyson sphere will capture all of the sun's rays, it would be possible to capture only the ionized energy by projecting via magnetic containment several panels of plasma-state gasses with distinct focal points on generators. While most of the visual light from the sun will pass through the plasma, ionized particles will be reflected to energize a generator. The same particles that power our auroras will then be shoved onto conductors where their excess electrons energize the circuits projecting the plasma barrier, and excess energy is shipped off elsewhere for consumption.
    The concept is still a far ways off, but its a lot closer to reality than the massive Dyson sphere. The technology to contain plasma already exists, as with the ability to produce electricity when given a supply of ions.

    Golden Rain

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  • Friday, October 28, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • Mankind's military forces have grown better and better at delivering objects to distant destinations with extreme force. Ever since the first stone age man figured out how to make a sling, we have been trying to find better ways of throwing stuff with greater speed, precision, and range. However while we moved from bows to guns to rockets, there has only been one significant change in the payload which we deliver, and that is we switched from sharp/heavy objects to explosives. One could argue that a warhead could be engineered to perform just about any task, but I would counter by saying that once it is engineered, its purpose does not change. An armor piercing tank shell will do little agianst a squad of infantry, while an incendiary antipersonnel bomb will do little against a tank. Explosive weapons are inherently inflexible, and I would like to propose a possible solution.

    A warhead is created composed mainly of individual rods of thermite, each with an individual fuse and spaced out by a thin layer of explosives. Depending on the target, this warhead will behave in very different manners.

    If one hard target is to be struck, then the missile delivering the payload will follow its normal path. The thermite primer goes off seconds before impact, and the explosive spacers are not detonated. The result is one dense glob of burning metal boring a hole straight through a ship or a bunker.

    If multiple soft targets are chosen, then the missile will follow a slightly altered course taking it over the target, at which point part of the explosive spacer is detonated, and then the thermite is lit, resulting in several smaller meteors of pseudo-plasma material, each of which will heavily damage vehicles and kill infantry.

    Finally for area denial against infantry/light vehicles, the same high course is chosen, and all of the explosive spacers detonate before primer ignition. This will seed the air in the area with thermite fuel, and act much like a fuel-air explosive when the primers ignite the cloud of volatile powder, cooking all caught in the blast radius.

    Barometric energy generator

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  • Thursday, October 6, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • This is just a crazy concept for renewable energy that i came across, I'm not saying that it will work, I'm saying it could work.

    Basically, this is a scheme of sorts to generate energy by abusing the pressure differences on this planet. What we need is a decently deep body of water and a gas medium preferably denser than water. A flexible "bag" of gas is dropped from a factory down a pipeline into the depths, where the gas becomes pressurized. A simple mechanism at the bottom of the lake transfers the gas from the flexible container to a rigid one. The rigid container is large and takes several bags to fill, once it becomes filled to capacity with pressurized air, it is brought up to a surface generation plant where the pressurized gas is either packaged and sold or used to power gas turbines for power.

    High Efficiency Launch Unit

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  • Monday, September 19, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • There has been a lot of recent talk in regards to the development of space beyond earth's mesosphere, several plans have been proposed by the scientific community and the most popular, or rather, the most debated plans are the deployment of a system of space based solar power plants, a plan to send mining missions to the moon for Helium-3 ore, and the time tested space based ballistic missile defense plan.

    As absurd as some of these plans sound, there is merit, or the public believes there to be merit in all of them. We've all seen the James Bond movie where the bad guy puts a giant mirror into space and beams down the suns energy by reflecting and concentrating it. NASA has recently smashed a probe into the moon to create a cloud of lunar dust for analysts, a stunt which revealed that the moon does indeed have deposits of potentially valuable Helium 3 ore, and the United States have been dreaming of a "Star Wars" orbital missile defense system since the cold war.

    The reason that these plans are not already becoming reality is not that they will bring no benefit, but the sheer economical cost alone to implement them far outweighs the results. All 3 plans call for large amounts of material to be launched into space, and the most efficent launch rockets we have right now costs about $5,000 per POUND of payload. This means that a mining probe, a solar panel, or a laser would cost millions to launch apiece, and even if we get a significant amount of these things into orbit, we still need to send stuff up, most likely human astronauts (which are very prone to dying), to repair and resupply them.

    The scientific community has some good stuff going with the whole development of space thing, but what it needs to do is to take a step back and realize that before we can build castles in the sky, we have to get our feet off the ground. The absurd amounts of funding going towards prototype defense satellites and mining probes are much better used to develop new launch vehicles, some of which I hope to propose in later articles.

    The Lost Oil

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  • Tuesday, August 30, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • Oil, the most precious energy resource since the advent of the internal combustion engine, the lifeblood of nearly all of mankind's creations. Prospectors have searched for the last century for this black gold, and after having turned over every last inch of land on this planet in search of it. Now, after every rock has been turned, we fail to find new reserves and this limit has caused a wave of terror in the commodities market since the last decade. Prices of oil are rising, and with it, the price of nearly every other commodity, but is this planet really running out of oil?

    To realize the full implications of that statement, one has to realize that only 30% of the earth's surface is land, the other 70% water, meaning that if the concentration of resources is the same on land as under water, there lies more than twice our current assessable reserves of oil and metals under the ocean.

    We have only recently developed the technology to develop and extract resourcess from the ocean floor, and by recently I mean think back about 2 years, Gulf of Mexico, BP oil spill. Sure, the whole event was an embarrassment, but the fact that one poorly laid out oil well could leak enough oil to cloud up the entire gulf of Mexico literally speaks volumes about how much oil is out there, under the waves. For those who like hard statics over comparative imagery, a very gloomy estimate puts the worlds oceanic oil reserves at at least 30 trillion barrels, 800 billions of which are within the shores of America, compare that to the 1.4 billion barrels tucked away in Siberia.

    The good news dont even end there, there are far more frequent and violent seismic activity occurring under the waves than on land, and while this is a good thing for us humans who live on land, its a great thing for underwater mineral reserves. In the Pacific "Ring of Fire" alone, where several tectonic plates come together to grind under each other, millions of tonnes of iron, nickel, copper, and even gold are being brought near the surface and deposited on the ocean-floor. There are already companies such as Nautilus who are expressing interest in these reserves which could very well hold enough metals to run the world for another century.

    As mush as prices are rising, this planet is not going to run out of the black stuff any time soon. There wont be wars over petroleum or any other resource, just a lot of red tape about who gets to develop what, and speaking of red tape, my next post is going to cover one UN treaty that just so happens to get in the way of the development

    Reasoning, Path to Truth or Verbal Weapon?

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  • Thursday, August 18, 2011
  • Archimedes
  • Labels: ,
  • Reasoning, the ability of the human mind to apply logical thoughts and this thing called "common sense" to experiences and information accumulated, all with the intention of coming to a truth or conclusion. For centuries this ability to reason has been viewed as a path to truth and self-enlightenment, but recently, people credit the development of this skill to be based on the human desire for victory, be it physical contest, or in the case of reason, verbal contest.

    Two people disagree on something, and when the facts alone are not enough to prove one side wrong and another side right, reason is used by both sides to try to see which idea is more right. But instead of both ideas coming together into one new idea, both sides usually hold firm to their own ideals, and will often bend the facts in an attempt to sway the public opinion. This phenomenon occurs daily on CCTV (I know, who watches that right?) and politicians trying to protect their own positions and benefits. They are the people who cant compromise because if they do they lose support, and so they must defend their starting positions to the last thought, usually with reason.

    But at the end of the debate, reasoning is still used for other purposes, mathematics, theoretical science just to name a few, but then remains the most important question, was reasoning created just so we can "win", or is it really meant as a tool for finding the truth?

    Automated Stock Trading

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  • Friday, August 12, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • As I hope that you are aware of, the US stock market recently led the world in another panicked selling frenzy, crashing over 500% from what it was only weeks ago. Despite the fact that it is beginning to recover, I think it is safe to say that us ordinary citizens without the massive amount of capital needed to have a say on the market are getting tired of some multimillionaire who decided to make even more money that hes not gonna be able to spend by crashing an important stock. This bring up the question of why the heck are human beings still allowed to interact directly in the stock market?
    When you get down to it, all stocks is is a numbers game, when the numbers bottom out and starts to grow, you buy, when it tops off and starts to fall, you sell. Its a simple game played by humans only for the thrill or profit and personal gain, and it is because of those human emotions of greed and panic that the market is so unstable. Why cant we have an exchange which is fully automated and managed only by computers, who sells and buys stocks on a programmed bias and will emotionless evaluate numbers?

    Solar Farming

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  • Thursday, July 28, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • Ever since the use of fossil fuels raised enough worries to begin a quest for a renewable energy source, sunlight has been one of the most sought after methods of power generation. From this quest to harness the sun mankind has created inefficient, but workable solar cells that convert light into electricity, along with monterous fusion reactors in an attempt to make our own "sun in a bottle". Despite these inventions, I'd say that without a significant breakthrough in either of these alternatives, we wont be able to power anything other than individual households even if they are implicated into our power grids en mass.

    Fusion reactors are promising, so I wont shoot that idea down, but why did we go through all the hassle of creating chemical substances that react with light to give off electrical energy when a much more complex but very well engineered natural substance does pretty much the same?

    Chlorophyll in plants convert sunlight into ATP and then from that, glucose. Its been around since the dawn of life on the planet, and, creation or evolution, it works at an efficiency much higher than machines. The only reason that we haven't been able to use it for fuel purposes is that the plant does not see the need to excrete fuel, only to grow and reproduce. Of the energy generated by a plant, a massive amount goes into growing its supporting structures, extracting nutrients from the soil and manufacturing chemicals used to reproduce, only a small amount by comparison is turned into stored sugar, which is of interest to us. What should be done is to engineer a simple plant cell that will at first take nutrients from its surrounding and divide for a set amount of cycles, then begin to grow massive amounts of chlorophyll and store large amounts of sugar, at a chemical que, the stored sugar is released into its surroundings, which would later be collected.

    An outdoor pool given sufficient nutrients and a sterile environment could easily house millions of such cells. Given if one cell could produce but one gram of sugar per day, the energy yield of such a pool will be much larger than if it was covered with conventional solar cells, artificially engineered enzymes and chemical cycles could be implanted onto the cells and speed up production, the whole process is very skin to a nuclear one in the sense that the energy created by one reaction is very little, but the number of reactions make the total substantial.

    U238 (depleted uranium) reactor

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  • Friday, July 22, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • Depleted Uranium, its heavy, its hard to dispose of, it makes good armor piercing shells, and we have piles of it sitting around from nuclear reactors and mines waiting to be processed. Despite us having so much of the stuff, the fact that it is unsuitable for use as weapons grade fissile material resultes in research into its potential limited to it being incorperated into anti-tank rounds, and the fact that this stuff has the potential to power a reactor seems to have slipped the scientific community until now.
    A reactor burning depleted uranium cannot produce any weapons grade material, we can just build one and shove it over to Iran and say "look, this stuff burns cheaper fuel, gives more power, has almost no risk of a catastropic meltdown no matter how incompetent your operators are, and is way better in every respect except that you cant make a bomb with it. If your nuclear intentions are peaceful, replace your reactors with this."
    As for the reactor design itself, there is already one being looked into called a traveling wave reactor which will use enriched uranium to start a self sustaining reaction in a field of depleted uranium using neutrons released from the enriched reaction to enrich/destabalize the surrounding depleted uranium in order to keep the reaction going. Once fueled, such a reactor could run for decades before the entire field of depleted uranium is brunt, and its output will only increase unless checked for the "burning front" will increase in legnth as the reaction spreads. Despite the increased output, the fuel starts out unsutable for weapons and never actually gets close to a critical mass except when the reaction is first started, so although the risks of a meltdown are there if some idiot turned off the cooling system, the chances of the reactor turning into a bomb are slight.
    Another design I was going to propose was slightly more complex and involves a series of faceleted and interconnected chamebers lined with depleted uranium, one central chanber will have a small neutron fuse like the ones used in bombs, but neutrons from the fuse will not be focused onto one point like in bombs but released to bounce along the chamber whose geometrical design allows the escape of neutrons into a similar neighboring chamber. The neutrons arnt actually "bouncing", rather, they are exciting and causing fissile reactions whenever they hit the sides of a chamber, causing more neutrons to be released.

    Recoil Inhibitor

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  • Sunday, July 17, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • "If the first shot hits their feet, the second shot probably goes up to their chest, the third flys over their heads, and anything after that you are wielding an anti aircraft gun." Such were the words of a gunnery sergeant describing the effects of firing an automatic weapon from the hip without aiming.

    Over the course of the evolution of the gun, primitive muskets were made more reliable, more powerful, more accurate, and easier to reload. But as weapons got more "automatic", I think one area of development was missing until lately, recoil reduction.

    The power and firerate of small arms are still being upgraded, the US military for example has finally moved past the 5.66mm NATO rounds used by the M16 and its variants into the more powerful 7.56mm NATO rounds used by higher performance weapons such as the M4A1 and the SCAR heavy. All this advancement in reliability, weight, and firepower still resulted in the same primitive recoil reducer in the form of a rifle stock jarring the shoulder of the soldier firing said weapon, someone seems to have forgotten to tell the firearm developers that the amount of kinetic force the target receives is always less than the amount of recoil generated.

    One exception to this trend however is the KRISS Super V, otherwise known as the Vector submachine gun. It has a recoil dampening device built into the receiver which makes the hammer that fires the gun move in a up and down motion countering the up and down of the recoil resulting in a fully automatic weapon of the .45 caliber with the recoil of a pistol.
    What I propose is an add-on which will dampen the recoil of any weapon, recoil is a phenomenon which occurs in two stages, stage one where the hammer hits the pin firing the bullet, and stage two where the bullet leaves the barrel and the gasses behind the bullet escape, pushing the barrel upwards. While the KRISS solved the issue by reducing stage one recoil, I try to take on stage two. After the bullet leaves the gun, an attachment that screws onto the end of the barrel captures some of the gas and releases a spring loaded hammer downwards against the recoil. After the gasses leaves, the hammer resets itself and waits for the next shot.

    Computer Optimization (AKA the reson I coudnt post for the last 5 days)

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  • Tuesday, July 12, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • Personal computers have become so common nowadays that we don't really appreciate how complex they are until they break down and us dumb users are left with the daunting task of fixing them. My computer recently had a fit involving a corrupt windows folder on my backup portable hard-drive and the system trying to use the bad backup as its windows folder. Whats worse than the buggy performance was that one of the first things to go was the less-than-stable driver for my internet adapter, meaning I had no way of going online and just googleing whatever problem I had. Then came the chore of reinstalling windows on a computer that dosent recognize its own hard-drive (bad drivers) and reinstalling all the servicepacks, directx, adobe flash, java, etc., and at this point I wondered, shoudnt there be an easier way to do this?

    Why dont somebody, like the manufactures who are trying to sell their computers, make a boot-able disc with all the registry, drivers, updates, extensions and all that crap pre-optimized and ship it with their products? Whenever dumb users decide to delete their drivers and system 32 folder and realize "oh crap, maybe that stuff was important" they just have to boot off the disk instead of bothering the manufacturer/retail store/tech support making life a little easier for everyone.

    Addon Video Card?

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  • Tuesday, July 5, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • Well I just got back from a trip to China and the electronics there are dirt cheap. Some nice friends of mine decided to endow me with a new laptop to replace the ancient IBM R50 I have been using for the past 7 years, but sadly said friends know very little about computers...

    The computer I received has a decent dual core processor and an upgraded 3GB of RAM, no complaints there. Its small, light as a feather and has a great keyboard, again no complaints. Its got all the safety specs that comes with the thinkpad series, but the only thing which makes it a piece of junk to a gamer like me is the integrated graphics card...

    My older computer is about seven years old, and this one is only 3, one would think that the new one would run some basic 3d fps games a little faster, but that is sadly not the case. Games that ran smoothly on my old computer were choppy and gay on my new one, and when I looked for a solution, I seemed to find only a sad reality, you cant really upgrade integrated graphics...

    I really don't think its the CPU or motherboards inability to handle a full sized graphics card, its just that its become cheaper recently to just slap a really crappy card onto the motherboard. I think if some genius out there would make a PCI splitter, the problem would be solved. I split the PCI cable used for the internet adapter, slap on another video card, the system recognizes the VGA, install a few drivers and we are good to go, right?

    If anyone knows another way to increase graphics performance on a computer with integrated graphics, please feel free to speak up...

    Drone Carrier

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  • Tuesday, June 14, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • This ideas seems to obvious and natural that I am amazed that i have found little mention of anything like it, either its being developed as some top secret project, or its being completely overlooked.

    WWII has proved that aircraft rule the seas, period. The Iraq war has proved that drone aircraft are fully capable of delivering ordnance to a target and excel at reconnaissance and surveillance. These two instruments are virtually made for each other, lets put them to good use, together.

    A naval vessel consisting of nothing but extensive machine shops and control centers for drone aircraft would be bulky, but smaller I'd think, than an actual aircraft carrier. Drones takeoff from vertical launch rails assisted by booster rockets, allowing for an extremely fast takeoff that would kill the pilot of a manned aircraft. Multiple such rails would take little deck space, and an entire wing of drones could be launched at once.

    A drone is much lighter than an actual jet, so the landing strip could be shorter. Computerized landing and refitting allows a drone to quickly re-fuel and re-arm and get back in the sky. Drones once developed to be fast and maneuverable enough will serve as the carriers missile defense, specialized defense drones constantly surround the carrier and places themselves between any incoming projectiles and their host carrier.

    At the current drone technology, the only fesitable combat role for a vessel "armed" with these drones would be similar to that of a missile cruiser, area defense and support. But once the next generation of possibly jet powered drones come operational, a large nuclear carrier refitted to carry hundreds of these drones could very well replace a super-carrier.

    Infantry Mobility Suite

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  • Saturday, June 11, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • Despite modern combat becoming more and more mechanized, infantry is still a vital element in securing and fortifying a position taken by machines. The offensive potential of infantry has nevertheless decreased drastically. Personally I don't think this is due to a lack of infantry weaponry, as man portable weapons can still take down the most advanced war machines, and I also don't think the fragility of infantry has much to do with their demise. I believe the only reason that a man with a rifle is no longer an offensive battlefield threat is due to his lack of mobility, and as such he is usually transported by machines.

    There are already several existing methods that seek to remedy this issue, the Armored Personnel Transport for one proves that infantry still has potential on the front lines, but the death of one loaded transport is the loss of quite an asset, and by itself the transport is of little use compared to other vehicles. I'd say that right now, the average marine needs a way to move himself from place to place fast and without the help of other machines.

    The perfect solution would be a man portable jet pack or some jet powered device that will enable a man to fly, but I'd say that its painfully obvious that a jet used continuously would burn off a man's legs and most of the lower torso. At the time i don't believe there is any material that can dissipate the heat fast enough for such a device to be remotely possible.

    But how much does it actually take to lift a man? Your average marine weighs about 200 pounds with all equipment attached, your average jet weighs a few tonnes with all its weapons and fuel. Why use something used to lift tonnes to lift 200 pounds? Using a jet to lift something as light as a single man seems like overkill.

    My solution, a small but powerful air compressor, a propellent tank, an enhancement tank filled with water or loose dirt, and some very heavy protective pants. The amount of thrust generated is closely related to the amount of propellent expelled, and by adding water or dirt into the compressed air stream we increase the mass of the propellent and ensure that the temperature of said propellent dosent reach harmful levels. Such a device is not meant for sustained flight, but should hold enough charge for two bursts, one takeoff burst to blast the user into the air, and another landing burst to soften the impact of landing. In combat the device can be used to jump from cover to cover, making the user extremely hard to engage, and "parachuting" with this device would require no parachute.

    Nanoscale Mold

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  • Sunday, May 29, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • Killing people and blowing stuff up has been losing appeal recently, and I suppose that that would be a sign of a sort of maturity. But other than weapons and means of war, there is still plenty to be contributed to the world, and the topic today is nanoscale materials.

    Arranging all the atoms in a mass of material yields materials with properties nothing short of magical. A thread of light alkali metals linked together in a series of organized ionic bonds held in a precise triangular lattice strung across a road has the potential to cut a car in half. But the potential of such materials aside, how do we efficiently organize atoms on a large enough scale so that we can actually produce enough material to b of use?

    The aforementioned NME (nano material engineered) thread/car cutter would consists of trillions of individual atoms per centimeters of thread, how can we then, rapidly arrange so many atoms? Well, isn't this a question asked by the earliest of industrialists? So much material has to be shaped to make a chunk of iron into a usable knife or pan, having individual blacksmiths pound away at the ingot is definitely not the way to go, instead, we make a mold that produces one shape over and over again.

    When we feel or push something, like my fingers feeling and pushing the keys on my keyboard, the atoms in my finger are not actually touching the atoms in the plastic keyboards. I feel the keys under my fingers when the electron clouds of the two collide, the actual atomic nuclei never comes into contact. Even now, between your buttocks and your seat, there lies a few angstrom units of space dominated by the electron clouds of whatever you are wearing on your butt (I hope you are wearing something there) and whatever the materials of your seat.

    The distance between atoms I mentioned is a nice little nonstick coating of you will, for the mold I now propose. To make the mold we use conventional means to aline a grid of nanoscale electrodes, each with its own electrical field. To shape the mold, we provide ore power to some electrodes while giving less to others, creating an uneven electron surface in order to acquire a desired shape, such as a nanoscale triangular lattice. Once the desired shape is set, the material that needs to be shaped is ground down to a fine nanoscale powder and heavily ionized negatively to maximize the distance between it and the mold, and to also prevent clumping of the substrate material before it takes the shape of the mold.

    A few seconds later after the mold is filled, the substrate material is de-ionized and normal ionic and covalent bonding takes over, "solidifying" the material into its desired shape, and the mold is reset for another shape, another batch of material, and produces another NMEed batch of material.

    The Great Firewall of China

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  • Saturday, May 28, 2011
  • Archimedes
  • For reasons of my own I am currently in China and find that I simply must make a post about the internet here.

    I'm sure that all of you are aware that in China the government blocks any websites that might speak agianst it and this includes personal websites such as bloggger (yes, I am using a bypass program to get this post posted...), facebook, youtube, and more. Instead of bitching and whining about how stupid this whole affair is, I think I will tell you all a story.

    When George Bush was giving a speech one day he was hit in the head by a rather large shoe, I'm sure everone knows about this story, but there is another one behind it. Shortly after George Bush received his negative feedback from the crowd it was announced that the head programmer of the Chinese firewall was going to visit the US and give a short public press confrence. Little did he know, there was a feed setup on Twitter by Chinese intelectuals who have figured out how to bypass the wall full of people offering certain rewards for hitting the programmer with certain objects, hitting the guy with a shoe for example was worth a medal and a plane ticket to LA, the latter offered by a Chinese travel agent.

    That little feed grew and sure enough, the guy was actually struck by a shoe on the day of his press confrence. After his bodyguards safely escorted him away from the steady stream of miscallaneous projectiles he stormed angrily into his office and immediately begin a video confrence with his subordinates, to whom he said something along the lines of "Why didnt you block the feed?". The response was simple, "Twitter was blocked, we had no idea the feed was there..."

    Proposed Muscular Growth Therapy

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  • Monday, May 16, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • Body builders and athletes have already demonstrated to the world that with enough time and dedication, along with the proper resources, the average human being can develop into a very physically strong organism on whose strength is on par with many other "lower" creatures of the same size.

    Humans are not readily born with such strength and yet human society value this strength for rather obvious reasons, I think it is time that a reliable and safe method of rapidly developing physical strength to be developed and that the field of modern medicine is well enough developed to make this possible.

    Stem cell therapy has already been proven to repair muscles, and there are already several cases where regenerative stem cell therapy has repaired large (40 ish) percents of the heart muscles of heart disease patients.

    The reason that injured muscles and healthy ones grow so slowly, and that is because the human body ceases to create new muscle cells once the infant is born. You most likely have now, the same or less number of muscle cells you had since you were born, you are stronger because those cells have grown individually stronger.

    But what if we can generate more muscle cells and control them? Not only would that result in an immediate increase in strength, the gains from working out would also increase, allowing for faster muscular training and recovery, only problem now is how.

    Well, most of the pieces are in place, we simply need a drug which temporarily severs a small percentage of muscle cells from the nervous system. The cells affected are still there, but as far as the body is concerned, there is nothing there. Because only a small percentage of cells are deactivated, the body can still function.

    At this point, we introduce the same regenerative stem cell therapy which has benefited heart disease patients. The body will regenerate new cells, wired into the same nerves, to replace the cells "lost" due to the drug. Once the new cells are matured, an antidote is given to flush out any remaining drugs and the old inactivated cells are reintegrated into the nervous system, basically cloning themselves as far as muscle mass is concerned.

    Assuming the body fully integrates all the new muscle fibers, rejection is not an issue because stem cells are grown from your own cells, repeated sessions of the described procedure will rapidly strengthen any fit human being past human limits on physical strength.

    Feeds

    1
  • Thursday, May 12, 2011
  • Archimedes
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    Nuclear Powered Flight and its Practicality

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    Ever since the world entered the atomic age predictions were made that one day just about everything would become nuclear powered. Today, the world sees wonders such as nuclear powered aircraft carriers and many other naval engineering marvels.

    Despite all that, there has yet to be any sort of nuclear powered devices on land, and for good reasons. Any military vehicle to be powered by nuclear power will require huge amounts of shielding and armor around the reactor to make a possible tank capable to withstanding damage. The raw power of a nuclear reactor could not be directed for offensive purposes unless such a vehicle carries a large arsenal of conventional or a very bulky directed energy weapon. And at the end of all this, the speed of such a thing is limited due to the huge amount of weight it has to carry, making it out of place in a modern battlefield where speed is key. For civilian uses, conventional power is simply much cheaper and much more reliable, not to mention much more safe. The thought of a literal thermonuclear train wreck alone should discourage the use of nuclear power on land for transport.

    But in the skies, I believe, lies a different future for the fruits of the Manhattan Project.

    Say we built the smallest safe reactor the modern world could build, and around it built a engine which takes magnetized or electrically charged conventional fuel pellets, accelerated them into the combustion chamber of a normal ramjet engine, and pressurized even further the combustion chamber itself with intense magnetic fields powered by a small nuclear reactor. Such a hybrid jet engine, even if it can only provide the thrust of a normal rocket motor, would use up much less fuel compared to a liquid fueled rocket and would be able to lift a relatively large fixed wing aircraft and accelerate it to immense speed.

    At this point, assuming such a device is capable of flight, one could argue that all we have created is a very large and bulky target practice drone which can be seen by even the most primitive of radar, and shot down by even more primitive weapons. Even if we stealth-coated such a beast, which would no doubt be several times larger than most aircraft due to the sheer bulk of a nuclear reactor, this aircraft would not be maneuverable enough even for commercial use as a cargo plane, assuming it is even capable of taking on cargo.

    Well, once such an aircraft gets off the ground, I would like to remind everyone that there is no speed limit in the skies. Using the same electromagnet-boosted engines we continue to accelerate the aircraft past the efficient speeds of conventional aircraft, and eventually reach a speed where the plane is constantly falling towards the horizon, or extreme low earth orbit. At this point, the engines can be shut off, and the plane is essentially invulnerable from surface threats as it would be moving so fast relative to the ground that no weapons system could react to it. From this immense speed, one could observe, command, and even fire ordnance onto virtually the entire globe without fear of retaliation.

    The Finals

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  • Tuesday, May 10, 2011
  • Archimedes
  • Well, if you notice that I have been a little lazy in my posting, it would be due to the fact that finals in coming up and I would actually like to pass all of my classes, which means studying. Speaking of studying, I've noticed something rather interesting in the efficiency of test prep.

    Being in band does not help this issue, but lately I seem to have a song or two stuck in my head 24/7, besides being annoying, I think that this is reducing my studying and thinking capacities by quite a lot. There are studies out there that show listening to music while studying reduces efficiency, and I have quit listening to my mp3 player for about half a month now. The result of me boycotting my mp3 player is that I constantly have songs stuck in my head, and every time those songs hit a small climax my chain of thought gets interrupted.

    If anyone out there have a sure fire way of quieting the mind short of taking a bullet to the head, please speak up.

    Project Skymine

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  • Sunday, May 8, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • I have tons of ideas floating around my head, but this one in particular I wanted to share because it actually does good and makes really big explosions, what more can you possibly ask for?

    So we earthlings are always under the constant threat of doom by ICBMs, which we really haven't done anything about. Its like having a sword over your throat, but you don't move away from it. Well, here is my proposed solution.

    ICBMs, before they hit their targets, have to go into low earth orbit to efficiently cover ground. if a country had the money, you could create a low orbit geostationary satellite, made of nothing but a small computer, battery, and a giant fuel tank surrounded by a shrapnel coat. Place said device into geostationary orbit between you and the country that is most likely to nuke you, and repeat said process a couple hundred more times in different orbits and possible trajectories. When some crazy North Korean kid decides to launch his excuse of a nuke at you, you find one of your mines in orbit closest to the nukes trajectory, maneuver it into the path of said nuke, and detonate it.

    ICBMs are NOT meant to take a beating, a little scratch on the fuel tank, and the entire missile harmlessly explodes in orbit.

    Railway Launcher

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  • Sunday, May 1, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • 11.3 kilometers per second, that is the velocity a ballistic projectile must attain to leave the gravity of the Earth. That's about three times the speed of a rifle bullet, thirty times the speed of sound.

    So far the only method of leaving earth comes from large rocket engines which burn fuel by the tones and could only lift a few tonnes of weight into orbit, hardly efficient if you ask me.

    Then there is the proposed launch method of basically firing a payload into orbit by an explosion/jet-assisted rail/coil gun. This method, if ever a practical example of it was built, would be only able to send a solid projectile into space due to the fact that the immense acceleration that takes the projectile from 0km/s to over 11km/sec will destroy any electronics, not to mention anything alive on board the payload. Perhaps this will be useful for launching explosives into some part of the planet, but I doubt that even something as simple as a nuclear warhead will survive the acceleration.

    Instead, what I suggest is a very long piece of magnetic levitation track about 300 or so kilometers long. Multiple conducting rails below, on top, and to the sides of a "train car" will serve as rails to both levitate the vehicle, reducing friction, and accelerate it in a rail gun like manner. For those who do not know how a rail gun functions, two or more conducting rails complete a circuit with the projectile in between them. The opposite magnetic fields on the rails and in the projectile send the projectile speeding down the track.

    To further accelerate the "train car", a tunnel of coils that are magnetized will pull on the train as it approaches, and push the train away as it passes through the tunnel, much like a coil gun. The final sections of the rail will gradually curve skywards, and rockets on board the train will only have to maintain a velocity that is already close to escape to reach orbit.

    This device will be much more gentile with its payload, as it has 300 km in which to accelerate to the highest attainable speed, meaning the acceleration is gradual, and no unlucky astronauts are flattened to a pulp.

    Comparative analysis of the American M1A1 and the Chinese Type 99

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  • Monday, April 25, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • The M1A1 tank, long since a formidable threat on the battlefield, has continued the tanks reputation as an unstoppable force. One of the most important features that allows it to crush opposition unscathed is its unique Chobham armor, a ceramic material developed as a joint research project with the British. There are only three types of armored vehicles that have been revealed to be equipped with this armor, the British Challenger 1, Challenger 2, and the American M1 and its variants. Operational history has proven such armor to be nearly indestructible, and it seems that the American's plight for the safety of their armed forces has finally paid off, seeing as how one can count on their fingers how many times any of the listed Chobham equipped vehicles have been destroyed due to accidents and combat in over 20 years of operation.

    Quite recently, China has upgraded its own antiquated and mostly Soviet era tank divisions with a new tank, the Type 99 Main Battle Tank. The tank itself was only recently developed and barely in production before the turn of the century, the final variants are now in mass production.

    The T99 may actually be superior to its American counterparts because of its low cost and higher speeds. The armor of this newcomer is still classified, but we think it may be some form of an aluminum alloy/composite. Armor put aside, the T99 tank has the same, of not better performance in speed, with a top speed of 80km/hr in comparison to the M1's 60, but then again the M1 actually has a top combat speed of approximately 80km/ hr after a speed governor is removed, roughly the same as the T99. But the operational range, which is how far the tank can go before it becomes an immobile turret, is definitely in favor of the T99, with its top range of 600 kilometers compared to the M1's 450 kilos. But I do believe that the M1 still holds the edge in firepower, as it does not use an auto loader like the T99, despite the fact that the T99 has a bigger gun. An auto-loader is actually slower than a human loader, is prone to jamming, and its only advantage is that it reduces the necessary crew by one. The M1 is also capable of firing a variety of different shells, making it a much more flexible weapons platform, the auto loader on the Type 99 however has nto shown itself able to quickly switch ammo types. Targeting for the actual gun on the Type 99 is unclear, the Chinese 155 mm gun is stabilized along all axis of rotation, and the computing software has the advantage of the latest software and hardware packages. The system used by the M1 has already been tested to be effective by long ages of field experience.

    Finally, what I think of as the most important factor is the price per unit, the M1 is a fancy toy that costs upwards of 6 million dollars and even more to maintain the beast. While on the other hand, the slightly weaker and untested T99 costs a tiny 2.5 million US Dollars per unit to manufacture. So when you can field two slightly weaker tanks against one slightly superior tank at the same cost, I would believe that the two T99s would win. Very much the same thing happened in WWII, with the American Sherman tanks, whose shells bounced off the from armor of Tigers and Panzer IVs, winning by sheer numbers and ease of manufacture. We also have to take into account the aircraft which are no doubt supporting any armored cav, something I hope to cover in my next post.

    Tag & Bag

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  • Thursday, April 21, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • After coming up with several lethal and mass effect weapons (I have only posted descriptions of some) over the last few years, I have seen a rather futile folly in designing instruments for simple senseless killing. But as long as there is man, there will be a need for weapons, which is why I am lately turning my interests to non-lethal weapons.
    We already have several different brands of less than lethal rifles which can handle large caliber subsonic ammunition used for crowd control (simply put, rubber bullets in a 12-gauge shotgun). The trouble with these weapons is that at close range, a subsonic rubber bullet will seriously injure/kill someone, but at long enough range its barely enough to bruise.
    I simply propose a new type of ammunition, one which simply consists of a tightly packed powder comparable to chalk, except it would be engineered as a skin irritant. Once the bullet impacts, the bullet explodes in a puff if irritating chemicals transferring kinetic energy fit to bruise a little and spreading a little puff of "pacifying" chemicals.
    Sadly, this type of ammunition could easily have the irritant replaced with a fuel-air explosive, a small taser under-slung below the rifle, and this would turn into an anti-infantry weapon much more lethal than conventional rifles.

    Apocalypse Now

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  • Sunday, April 17, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • Human beings gained the ability to extinguish life on this planet a long time ago when we entered the atomic age, and yet why has no one built a shelter which would be safe from the world should the world decide to end itself?
    Nuclear warheads are in a sense rather overrated, they can level any and all man made structures, but they are still nothing compared to nature's hard shell. To build a self sustaining sanctuary would be a simple although burdensome task, one simply has to find a stable and deep mine such as a depleted gold vein some miles underground, reinforce the cavern to keep it from collapsing and to keep moisture from entering, install a small nuclear reactor, which will run for centuries on only a few tonnes of fuel, and bring in a small population.
    Water needed to sustain life can quickly be farmed by digging a cavern below the water table and not insulating it against moisture, water found by this method would already have been filtered by the earth and would at least not be salt water. In the case of a nuclear war contaminating all the water with nuclear radiation, simply use electricity from the aforementioned nuclear reactor to break down the water into component hydrogen and oxygen, redirect the gas to a sterile chamber, and allow water to re-condense free of most radiation.
    Food could easily be farmed with artificially generated light and water from the above method, such a sanctuary would be virtually invulnerable to any disaster on the surface.

    Online Campus

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  • Friday, April 15, 2011
  • Archimedes
  • Online universities have become a very popular subject as of late, and it is claimed that, by attending these online courses, one could receive an education and prestige equivalent to that of going to a college of similar prestige without the full costs. While I find group conferences and instant messaging perfectly appropriate for planning parties and discussing life with friends, learning from such a chat session is something that I don't think could be done. There are simply too many distractions, trolls trolling trolls in the middle of a class for instance, will still have an effect on the overall learning experience before they are moderated. The lack of direct supervision at least in classrooms means that a student could be farming in WoW while pretending to listen to a lecture, and cheating on tests also become infinitely easier.

    So what can we do about all these distractions? We provide school appropriate distractions of our own.

    There are already powerful "virtual world" software out there, the most prominent of which is probably Second Life. If we hire a bunch of ITs to create and maintain an online campus which is an exact mirror of the real one, the virtual world will have many distractions to keep the students mind occupied and on the topic of school. Instead of ads for Russian women they will see banners for student clubs and study groups. Students can see the virtual avatar of the professor while in class and feel a sense of direct supervision. Peer pressure would be reduced seeing as how online interactions means that a user can change appearances at will. Students who have been to the mirror campus in the real world will feel a sense of familiarization, students who have not been to the real campus will feel a sense of exploring a new world just as new students, and would also want to visit the real campus. The benefits are too man for me to list.

    Altitude Training

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  • Tuesday, April 12, 2011
  • Archimedes
  • The human body is extremely adaptive, and it is through adaptation to stress that we physically become stronger. In the early stone age it was probably already realized that if you lift around enough rocks, you become stronger. The concept of exercise has been around for quite a while now.

    While weight and muscular training have evolved much from the primitive stone lifting/hurling, endurance training has really not evolved much. Even with treadmills and exercise bikes, one still preformed the same motion over and over again, and the rate of gain in endurance is still painfully slow.

    I think endurance is simply how well your body uses the oxygen you take in and how much oxygen you take in at once. If one runner can intake and process more oxygen than another, then his metabolism will eventually outlast the other runner, given that they have the same amount of stored energy. So what better way to train our lungs and bodies how to use oxygen other than to deny our lungs oxygen?

    There are already expensive gyms out there which depressurize their interiors a little in order to simulate high elevations, but those buildings are hardly cheap to maintain and the price of admission is not worth it for the average jogger. And besides, once such a facility reaches a certain level of occupancy, the amount of carbon dioxide generated by occupants in an already thin-aired environment could pose serious problems.

    I am thinking of a small compact exercise mask or tube which houses a small catalyst which converts a small portion of the oxygen we breathe in into something unusable by the body, such as carbon dioxide. At teh very most it would resemble a gas mask, relatively easy to carry around, and could be easily adjusted. Run a few laps each day with one of these things reducing the perceived oxygen concentration from 20 to 10 percent while still maintaining the same volume of air you must process should make it almost dangerous to go directly back to normal oxygen concentration, at which point sprinting a mile should not even hasten your breath.

    Clean Bomb

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  • Sunday, April 10, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • The nuclear bomb, although a powerful weapon, is frowned upon both by tacticians and politicians for its unwanted side effects. From a completely strategic point of view, a nuke makes for a poor offensive weapon. While its primary can and will flatten any man-made target, the affected area is unsuitable for occupation. The only good strategic use of a nuke is to use it as a fail-safe. Say that your forces defending a key position such as a bridge or port is hopelessly outnumbered and enemy troops are already moving in to occupy the position, your best choice of options includes a unscheduled sunrise a few kilometers over that port, flattening out the remaniants of your forces and the bulk of the enemy, while making the key position unusable.

    But to make such a dirty device something suitable for offensive operations is rather easy. Most of the radioactive fallout comes from unreacted primary stage fissile material (uranium or plutonium). Most fission bombs (a-bombs) only have one stage where the conventional explosives crush a fissile stage, and much of the fissile fuel is unreacted and created fallout. In fusion bombs (h-bombs), the energy from a fission bomb is harvested to crush and heat hydrogen to the fusion temperature, which in turn reacts more of the fissile material, creating less fallout.

    What I propose is to create a three stage fission bomb using four layers of conventional explosives and three layers of fission fuel. Stage one is located at the center of the bomb and consists of a thin shell of fission material sandwiched by a conventional core and outer shell, its detonation occurs first.The second stage is located at the outside of the device, and the layout is similar to the first stage, consisting of a thin shell of fissile fuel sandwiched between two shells of conventional explosives. The final stage is simply a thick shell of fissile fuel.

    What happens when the timer goes off is the first and second stage detonates, creating two nuclear scale explosions to either side of the final stage, crushing it with more force and duration than any conventional explosive, reducing fallout without reducing yield. The leftover fissile material from the first stage also has no where else to go other than to the hot little reaction occurring at its neighboring third stage, and the crumbs leftover are given a second chance to fizz, reducing fallout yet again while probably increasing the yield.

    Containment

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  • Thursday, April 7, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • A few days ago I found myself looking at the mess which Japan has created for the world to clean up, and I approached the broken containment vessels and runaway fission reactions just like any other problem. But after a few days of thought and moderate research I will now say with reasonable confidence that at this point, all we can do is cut our losses.

    There is no way that any uranium or plutonium (the latter of the two is not even supposed to be in the reactors in the first place) that was released into the environment can be cleaned up, and there is also no way of stopping the leakage of additional radiation.

    Why? What you are trying to do in cleaning up radiation is to find every individual granule of uranium out in the environment, a task which at best is comparable to sorting out a handful of sugar spread out in a beach full of sand. Stopping the leakage is also impossible due to the same issue, there is no way to stop something as small as individual molecules from escaping such a large area.

    So what should we do? Well, nothing is certainly not the answer, and nothing is what the Japanese seems to be doing.

    If we want to be humane, I would say to open a chute into the now broken containment vessels, and dump tons and tons of sand mixed with cadmium and graphite shavings. Not only do you provide a heat sink, you also absorb neutron radiation from decaying fuel, slowing down the rate of decay and preventing the reactor from turning into a nuke.

    But if we want to be practical, find some patriot ready to die for country and ask the poor chap to go in, grab the fuel rods, encase the molten pile of radioactive shit in concrete and dump the mess into the ocean.

    Overclocking =! Overheating

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  • Monday, April 4, 2011
  • Archimedes
  • Labels: , , ,
  • Overclock != Overheat

    Most gamers and programmers know the benefits of overclocking their CPUs for a higher clock speed and performance, but all too often they also know the misery of a catastrophic CPU overheat destroying their $500+ CPU/Motherboard setups. The most irritating thing about this particular issue is that while the CPU ends up being a steaming pile of slag, everything else under the hood is perfectly fine.

    The fact that CPUs can be overclocked means that they are capable of higher performances, the only limiting factor is the heat issue, and I really don't think that that should be a problem

    Most CPUs nowadays are multi-core, and while this means better parallel computing, it also means a higher energy consumption and more heat generated overall. To cut straight to the bone, I think that we should make the system "roulette" out the individual cores. Overheating wasn't such an issue when there was only one core, but with two or more cores, what you essentially have is a heat source heating another heat source. But if we let two cores run and two cores rest in such a way that a resting core is always between the two running cores, the heating should behave more like a single core than a dual core.

    Why buy a quad core processor and only use two cores at a time? Simple, some programs like most games and some calculations are not meant to be ran in parallel. Having four cores for a program written for two just means that two cores do most of the work (in most cases). And I don't know if anyone's realized this but as the number of cores goes up, the clock speed on each individual core tends to go down. A shitty Intel Atom could be clocked at over 3Ghz, but the Intel quad core only has a clock speed of about 2Ghz. If we can double the clock speed on two cores while resting the other two, programs written for a fewer number of cores will run a lot faster, and when the programs call for multicore parallel processing, we just turn the clock down and turn on the other two cores.

    Public Announcement No.1

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  • Archimedes
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  • So I was chatting with some friends the other day and the comment was made that I should make smaller and easier to understand posts, and I realized the truth behind that statement. From now on there will be a new "bite-sized" category/tag started for small less than 250 words posts, cheers!

    Thermite Reactor

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  • Wednesday, March 23, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • So earlier on I designed a weapon that incorporates thermite, and mom's not too happy about my destructive nature. So here is a reactor that generates lots of power with the same concept, the power from which can be used to power cities or weapons to defend/destroy cities, that outta make the world a little happier...
    It is a grim fact that we are running out of fossil fuels, big deal. As long as there is demand for power, we can always switch to something even more powerful and damaging to the environment, as long as its cheap...
    The core of the earth is made almost entirely out of iron and about 35% of earth's mass is entirely iron, so no risk of iron, the metal which burns in thermite reactions, from running out. The other ingredient for a termite reaction is alumnium, which is 8.1% of the earth's crust, and so we also have plenty of that ingredient. Although it is expensive to extract and purify, for something as crude as a burning reaction we dont need it to even resembol a metal.
    Instead of burning fossil fuels or using nuclear fuel to heat a vat of water, sustain a thermite reaction in the center of the coolant vat (water) by accelerating chunks of iron rust and aluminum into an already started thermite reaction, creating a little thermite "sun" in a vat of coolant(water). Thermite burns at like 3,000 C, and its also self-oxidizing, so the water wont snuff it out, it will absorb heat with more effiency than other reactors. By skipping the contaminated to uncontaminated coolant stage in nuclear reactiors, and the metal container keeping the water from the fire in conventional generators, power is transferred with almost 100% efficiency from heat source to water, because the heat source is in the water. Water exposed to 3,000 degrees will obviously vaporize into steam, and that will be directed up a tower through a bunch of gas based turbines, and instead of going directly back down, it will be collected in an condensing tank at the top of the tower. Condensed water will drop down through the tower, powering yet another set of fluid based turbines on their way back down to the reaction chamber, only to be vaporized again there and set off on another ride through both sets of turbines and so on and so on. On the way up, some steam is siphoned off to push powdered fuels into the chamber. Any solid reactor waste is collected in a fine mesh net below the reaction in the water, and removed and replaced remotely without stopping the reactor.
    The only problem I can find while writing this thing is that to mine the fuels needed will actually require more energy than the energy generated, seeing as how purifying iron(not really, seeing as how we want iron trioxide, which is common iron rust) and aluminum(which is really hard) are challenges in and of themselves. But this problem is softened seeing as how we don't need the fuels 100% pure, just like coal. The bad stuff that wont burn will bet caught up in the mesh nets and filters, so there are problems, but they can be solved.

    The Pacifier

    0
  • Tuesday, March 22, 2011
  • Archimedes
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  • We already have devices, hear beat sensors, that can triangulate the approximate location of a human being by monitoring the weak but distinct EM field of the human heart. This is used mainly by rescue workers trying to locate a live human inside a field of debris, and it is not exactly science fiction. But whats different from the real thing and the one on call of duty modern warfare is that the real thing cannot pinpoint the 2D location of a human on a grid, unless you have at least three sensors set up over an area and all three are linked to a computer, because the real thing will only tell you in which direction and a very approximate distance the signal is.
    But if we know so much about the EM field generated by the heart, why cant we remotely affect this field? Offensively, we can remotely create a field that will give everyone within it a massive heart attack, not always lethal, and medically, it can remotely jump start a persons heart. Also, used in surgery rooms, an artificial field stronger than the signals received by the heart will make sure the patient on the table does not go into cardiac arrest as long as the heart is intact.

    Heart to Heart

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  • Archimedes
  • Labels: , ,
  • We already have devices, hear beat sensors, that can triangulate the approximate location of a human being by monitoring the weak but distinct EM field of the human heart. This is used mainly by rescue workers trying to locate a live human inside a field of debris, and it is not exactly science fiction. But whats different from the real thing and the one on call of duty modern warfare is that the real thing cannot pinpoint the 2D location of a human on a grid, unless you have at least three sensors set up over an area and all three are linked to a computer, because the real thing will only tell you in which direction and a very approximate distance the signal is.
    But if we know so much about the EM field generated by the heart, why cant we remotely affect this field? Offensively, we can remotely create a field that will give everyone within it a massive heart attack, not always lethal, and medically, it can remotely jump start a persons heart. Also, used in surgery rooms, an artificial field stronger than the signals received by the heart will make sure the patient on the table does not go into cardiac arrest as long as the heart is intact.

    Invincibe Solution to the Invincible Tank

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  • Archimedes
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  • Theoretically beating up on the M1A1 Abrams, the "pinnacle" of modern tanks, is really just getting too boring, its armor is only "heavy", not invincible. The insurgents or whoever it is trying to take one down just don't have the right weapons or the right amount of weapons. For once, lets try to find a way to effectively destroy a tank whose armor is theoretically invincible and do so in a wide variety of situations.
    Like the Bill-2 missile, an effective antitank rocket designed against heavily armored and often ERA protected vehicles needs two warheads. Unlike the Bill-2, first, not both warheads will be explosive, and we will not attack the top hatch of the tank. (If you want to learn about the Bill-2, the Wikipedia article has great sources at the bottom) We aim a hybrid rocket (something with an oxidizer and a fuel) complete with guidance system (I recommend the TOW) and have the twin warheads delivered under the tank. The primary explosive warhead will knock the tracks off the tank, and the secondary incendiary warhead burning along with leftover fuel oxidizer from the rocket will slowly but surely turn the immobilized tank into an over-sized cooking pan, killing any crewmen zealous enough to stay within.

    Sky Liners

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  • Archimedes
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  • We know we can float a really heavy cabin and engines with nothing but a sack of helium or hydrogen gas, but sadly, we also know that doing so is very impractical when you want to go somewhere. But it seems to me that, floating around on a cruise liner for months just to get across the ocean is still pretty inefficient, and yet people still do it just for the heck of it. What if airship travel could be made simple and efficient again? How much would people pay to be aboard a floating piece of heaven?
    Instead of a cigar shaped blimp, we make a balloon with dynamic shape so that it can both round out into your standard "cigar" shape or flat out into a massive sail, which would "sail" itself. Attached to the contraption would be a medium barge sized passenger cabin that can be made totally out of a fiberglass outer hull and a not so opaque inner hull which can be pulled back to give riders a magnificent view. Such a device will sail in the jet streams, probably going faster that it would on engines, and its own motors will only be used during takeoffs and landings.

    A Proposed Gadget for Gamers

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  • Archimedes
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  • Gamers are quite a group of consumers. I don't pretend to know the average numbers, but I know that they play a big role in the modern economy. So being a gamer myself, I think I'm going to take a moment and consider what product would appeal to gamers other than an actual game or better computer.
    Well, typing is really a slow form of information input, which is why voice control is like the next big thing. But sadly, we have not gotten to the point of saying commands to the computer yet, but cant we at least chat in voice?
    Sure we have IM clients for all that, but the problem is that they take up lots of precious performance in a game where two seconds of lag gets you killed, and its just not possible when you are already using your keyboard to move. So then, I must ask, why cant we create a headset with its own processing unit that uses only the computers internet connection to send voice messages while the computer is shoulder deep in processing the game? Woudnt that appeal to those with slow typing and crappy computers?

    Water Based Excecise Machine

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  • Archimedes
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  • People always seem to complain that the motions of a weight exercise machine made compact is not as "smooth" as a giant tower with actual weights that move up and down. Several ingenius designs such as the Bowflex have already been devised for this problem, and I think I may have another.
    Center the whole machine around a giant tube of a high viscosity liquid like one would center a traditional machine around a tower of weights. The resistance is generated by trying to move a porous plate up and down the fluid filled tube by pulleys at the top and bottom of the tube which attach to the plate through the liquid. The first plate would have very big holes in it, giving little resistance, the second would have smaller holes and so on. Without the 300 pounds of iron bars to lug around and using water as the fluid, this device could be emptied and carried around quite easily and provide very literally "fluid" motions and feel to the user.

    Anti-Aircraft Carrier Device

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  • Archimedes
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  • China's navy in basically nonexistent, and its air force is only superior to other second an third world countries, and although its land forces are arguably a match for the Russians, without proper air support, superior tanks and men mean little in modern warfare. The main factor denying Chinese air superiority is the presence of American and recently Indian carriers. Not only do they make amphibious landings impossible, they deny air cover for ground forces and can directly threaten major cities. If only there was a way to make them go away...
    Given the amount of anti air defenses integrated into the carrier itself and its supporting battle group, I find it very improbable that anything bigger than maybe an over-sized artillery shell can penetrate its outer defenses, and seeing as how the Chinese submarine fleet is also made of fail, torpedoes are out of the question. Anything big enough to carry long range artillery over water will be sunk before they can find the carrier, so a naval force is also kinda useless. But the Chinese actually has one major advantage, coastal military bases. While Chinese jet engines are very questionable, we have managed to copy one time use cruse missile engines with questionable accuracy. We first construct an unmanned delivery vehicle the size of a small jet fighter. Once in range of carrier anti air perimeter, the drone turns on afterburners and hauls itself almost vertically into the sky until fuel runs out, and breaks into several guided sub munitions each weighing no more than a few hundred kilograms. Although now invulnerable to interception via missile, the sub munitions can still be engaged, although not effectively, by carrier Gatling guns, which causes a problem. But this can be resolved by using termite warheads fused with heat capacitors, which even when shot will explode into burning metal, not gas, and fall upon the deck of the carrier doing damage. Meanwhile, a second type of delivery vehicles will dive under the surface of the water and launch its termite payload underwater, not as accurate, but invulnerable to interception.

    River Resupply

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    Apparently nature cannot keep up with the rate of mankind's natural abuses, so on several occasions, mankind has had to help nature with mankind's abuses. The main problem that I will now address is the fact that our rivers are losing their freshwater sources, and should they dry out, which they will, it will be much harder to bring freshwater into cities that used to have the river as its water supply. So I propose, that at the base of a dying river, we place a giant water treatment plant whose sole purpose is to convert the water in the river into hydrogen and oxygen by means of electric current. The hydrogen gas released will have a naturally high potential energy, due to its light weight. The hydrogen will be fed along a pipeline at the bed of the river back up the river floating from a lower elevation to a slightly higher one. Once the gasses reach the top, they will be burned in a large and extremely tough container such as a natural cave, and the resulting water fed back into the river. To cover expenses, pure water can be diverted and sold and the river dammed to produce both revenue for upkeep and electricity for hydrogen generation.
     
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