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Comment: Re:Kevin Bloody Warwick (Score 3, Interesting) 57

by seanellis (#45002039) Attached to: Captain Cyborg Is Back! Kevin Warwick Predicts the Future

As a more ragged and old alumnus of the Reading University Cybs Deprtment (1984-1987), I have to add my own observation.

Prior to Prof. Warwick being engaged, we were a backwater department of about 25 students per year, stuck in half of a drafty old WWII building at the Earley end of the campus, equipped wth a heating system inherited from early Pleistocene times. (The other half was the psychlogy department.)

Warwick was appointed one year after I left. Within a year after that, the department moved to a nice shiny new building with hot water and transistors so plentiful that they didn't have to be desoldered and reused at the end of a project. I think that he can be credited with at least some of this upswing in fortune, even if he is a regular figure of fun in the news.

Comment: British Department of Health (Score 5, Interesting) 126

...currently headed by a Health Minister who is doing his best to sell off as much as possible, close A&E departments, believes in funding homeopathy as a treatment using taxpayers' money, and who co-wrote a book describing the NHS as a "sixty year old mistake".


Submitted by seanellis

Comment: Re:Chart of the nuclides (Score 1) 368

by seanellis (#42978775) Attached to: NASA's Basement Nuclear Reactor

Master Control P (below) also points out that you need to supply the additional energy (about 0.78MeV) to account for the difference in mass between p+e and n. That sounds like "game over" to me.

Since the ionization energy of hydrogen is around 14eV, there's nowhere near enough energy in a bound electron to do so, by a factor of 50,000 or so.

Also, the photoelectric work function for nickel is of the order of 5eV, so I'm pretty sure that unbound electrons at 100,000x that energy would easily boil off the surface, at least until the nickel got charged up enough to prevent it. But then, this residual positive charge would attract lower-energy electrons from the surroundings, effectively cooling the electron gas.

So, the remaining question is: can the THz radiation boost the energies of sufficient numbers of bound electrons to make the process work?

The more I look at it, the more skeptical I get.

Comment: Re:Chart of the nuclides (Score 5, Interesting) 368

by seanellis (#42977561) Attached to: NASA's Basement Nuclear Reactor

Nickel-64, at a natural abundance of about 1%, would be a better candidate, as neutron capture would result in Nickel-65 which decays to stable Copper-65 with a very short half-life of 2 hours. This is a "clean" beta-emitter with an energy of about 2.1MeV.

The overall reaction seems to be p + Ni-64 -> Cu-65 + ve + anti-ve + 2.1MeV. This is at least physically plausible as a reaction. The electron (removed from both sides above) acts as a sort of catalyst, a way to get the proton through the coloumb barrier by transforming it into a neutron.

Getting the neutrons to collide with Ni-64 nuclei rather than escaping implies a lot of Ni-64, and any escaping neutrons would irradiate everything else nearby, or impurities in the nickel such as the aforementioned Ni-62, or worse Ni-58 which would produce Ni-59, a positron emitter with a half-life of 76000 years.

But to me, the real red flag on this is getting the hydrogen atoms to collapse into neutrons, a process which I've never heard of before. Even if it's possible, can you get a net gain? Does it take more than 2.1MeV? Slashdot - educate me!

Comment: Pre-VRML (Score 1) 320

by seanellis (#42939007) Attached to: Why Hasn't 3D Taken Off For the Web?

I've been involved with the 3D-browser market since before VRML. Does anyone remember the Superscape VRT, Visualizer plugin, and the Virtual World Wide Web? The VWWW was a linked 3D world, spanning multiple websites - you could walk from one site to another in a virtual world, back in 1996 or thereabouts.

There's a problem with the economics of 3D content, but in my view it is beginning to shift.

On the one hand, creating 3D content is hard. There's a lot more effort in creating a model of a toaster for an online catalog, as opposed to taking a photo (even a nicely lit, airbrushed, professionally produced one). Time means money.

On the other hand, there is your market. VWWW required a rather hefty download - about an hour on a 28.8kbps modem - and a separate installation process. This limited the number of people who could see the content.

The tools for creating 3D content are also getting more available, and more automatic, and more pre-built models are available than in the VRML days.

WebGL has the possibility to crack the audience side of the equation. Three of the big four browser manufacturers are behind it. It just needs a very successful browser game to force the hand of the fourth. What if the next Minecraft was a browser game?

3D will never replace 2D. But it will become a useful tool alongside it, just as video and Flash do today. WebGL will be an important part of that process.

Comment: Art as prior art? (Score 1) 89

by seanellis (#42075069) Attached to: Microsoft Granted Patent For Augmented Reality Glasses

The Personal System glasses from "Norbert and the System", a short story by Timons Esaias from 1993, may anticipate some of the features of this system. I haven't read the patent, but the overlay of contextual social information sounds a lot like what the original poster describes.

(Here's a link: http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech-Society/Esaias-Norbert.pdf)

+ - Chilean Company Promises Objects from Thought->

Submitted by seanellis
seanellis writes "A small Chilean startup is promising the ability to create objects by mere thought. It seems impossible at first glance, but ThinkerThing, set up by ex-patriot Yorkshireman Bryan Salt, uses neural interfaces to guide the evolution of 3D designs. Its first full-scale project, the Monster Dreamer, allows children to design fantastical monster toys by the power of thought, which will then be printed out as real 3D models. All of this is, as usual, assuming that they can get the funding.

I interviewed Bryan for the Pod Delusion podcast earlier this month."

Link to Original Source

Comment: Some oldies (Score 1) 1244

by seanellis (#39273511) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Good, Forgotten Fantasy &amp; Science Fiction Novels?

The Professor Jameson series by Neil R Jones. Clunky but fun.
Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. How they translated all the wordplay from Polish I will never know.
Not forgotten, exactly, but all of Larry Niven's "Known Space" series, especially "Protector".
Dragon's Egg and Flight of the Dragonfly by Robert L Forward.

(I just had a look at my bookshelf. Half the space is by authors beginning with "B" - Banks, Baxter, Bear, Benford, Bester, Bova, Brin, Bradbury, Brunner, Bulmer. Weird.)
