Hey Moon, Rosethornn is doing a fine job of putting the steam into "steampunk".

~~~

The super thing about this is that they took something ordinarily reflective to microwaves and by messing with the shape alone, made it an excellent absorber.

Imagine if we could do the same thing to boingboing, absorb memes instead of reflecting them?

~~~

Links to the papers describing the metamaterial:

http://www2.bc.edu/~padillaw/PDF/Opt_Exp_16_7181_2008.pdf

http://www2.bc.edu/~padillaw/PDF/PRL_100_207402_2008.pdf

For some reason these never get linked to even when they're available.

~~~

Actually the pictures looks copperish in color, while what's shown above is almost certainly an electron micrograph.

Not that this isn't cool (oh it's damn cool), but it doesn't work in the visible. The resonance is at 11.5 GHz, so a few orders of magnitude longer wavelength than visible. Although they say in the paper they've achieved the same at 94 GHz and 1 THz.

The design of these devices gives them an inherently narrow resonance (they're even described in the paper as "narrow-band perfect absorbers," so you won't see scaled down versions blacking out all the visible light. They're also dependent on the angle of incidence.

Still, cool stuff. Most likely the first people to find these useful will be astronomers.

~~~

Evidence:

Your definition of "scientific truths" is a bit off. You're trying to argue that because with the power of hindsight we (well, you) can match science to bible passages, that makes the bible predictive of the science. This is high order bullshit - they only work through the lens of hindsight, interpreting the passages to mean scientifically correct things.

Also, I find it amusing that you quote that the universe is expanding as support for your cause. Evidence from the expansion of the universe dates it at 13 billion years old and some change. If you want to talk about appearing old or being young and made to appear old, the universe is it. You can try to discount the fossil record till you're blue in the face, but you're going to have a hard time with the whole cosmology game.

~~

@Agent 86

Actually, I think the point is basically valid - either god spake or spake not but the two are mutually exclusive. The point remains the same, but under literal reading, the two are inconsistent, no?

Misquoting Jesus - here's a book written by a guy who originally took the whole thing completely literally, then started to study the history of the translation. I saw an interview with him and was impressed, though I haven't read the book yet. I find it interesting that his effort was started because of his literalism, but the effort actually let him to a different point of view. I quote from the review on amazon:

From Booklist The popular perception of the Bible as a divinely perfect book receives scant support from Ehrman, who sees in Holy Writ ample evidence of human fallibility and ecclesiastical politics. Though himself schooled in evangelical literalism, Ehrman has come to regard his earlier faith in the inerrant inspiration of the Bible as misguided, given that the original texts have disappeared and that the extant texts available do not agree with one another. Most of the textual discrepancies, Ehrman acknowledges, matter little, but some do profoundly affect religious doctrine. To assess how ignorant or theologically manipulative scribes may have changed the biblical text, modern scholars have developed procedures for comparing diverging texts. And in language accessible to nonspecialists, Ehrman explains these procedures and their results. He further explains why textual criticism has frequently sparked intense controversy, especially among scripture-alone Protestants. In discounting not only the authenticity of existing manuscripts but also the inspiration of the original writers, Ehrman will deeply divide his readers. Although he addresses a popular audience, he undercuts the very religious attitudes that have made the Bible a popular book. Still, this is a useful overview for biblical history collections. Bryce Christensen Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

~~~

@Takuan

You need to make sure you mix the ashes with holy water first, else you might as well just curse your own soil.

@Evidence

Say you're going to try to evangelize someone who basically regards all religions as equally unlikely to be right - I postulate that your best bet for a sales pitch is on the poetry of what you're selling. As far as predictive powers go, your books aren't even as good as someone with a tarot deck. Why should I believe you and your book, when a street magician can do better? And that's not even comparing you to science!

The only really predictable thing from the bible is that one group of believers will screw up another group. That's been a long standing pattern.

Can you say "shibboleth" ?

~~~

@Evidence

Say I pick up Moby Dick and assume it's all true, why shouldn't I?

Does it bug you at all that you're taking literally a work which has been translated numerous times?

The problem with using the bible to prove the bible is that if you have no reason to assume it is true then it's really hard to use it to deduce its truth.

Pretend I'm an evolutionary biologist who was raised Hindu, why should I buy the idea that your book (younger than our books) is literal truth?

~~~

@Era

Masturbation has also been shown to be healthy.

I trust a doctor who can explain to me why something will work.

~~~

@Evidence

You say "Shouldn't science be looking at it a thousand and one ways and then choose the best one?" Which is pretty much what it does, you're the one who only will accept something if you see it as compatible with the bible.

~~~

@Evidence

Scientific theories are proposed and and dismissed by scientists with as much attention paid to the bible as to any other work of fiction. The reason your theories are readily dismissed is that they don't hold up to the evidence and they don't explain anything.

@Evidence

Why is your bible any better than the books of another religion? How do you pick which translation to use? And how do you decide which pages to understand as poetry and which literally?

At some point it was understood that he earth was flat and any other interpretation of the facts was sacrilege. You're content to engage in post hoc rationalizations with some parts of science and the bible.

Scientists should have some humility about their predictions, they're sometimes wrong, but religion has no place trying to tell science what is what.

~~~

@Era

I agree that medicine fucks up. It does it all the damn time. But what is your point of comparing medicine to religious approaches? What are you getting at?

I just reread your posts and while I'm not sure what your main point is, you aren't arguing that fatuous I had initially thought you were, with the exception of "scientists can learn from creationists."

Do scientists make mistakes? Yes.

Do scientific theories get abused for profit? Yes.

Do scientific theories get totally misrepresented in the media? Oh hells yes, just see how science gets discussed here on bb.

But how does this lead to your conclusion?

Having once confused me with an analogy, why not try to explain your point directly?

What about the choice between praying for your health and modern medicine?

~~~

@Era

What's your point? Creationists would never have made the mistake of the oncogene theory? I tend to agree that there are a lot of mistakes they wouldn't make, but here again we might be over looking root causes.

Also, your example of the house and the lightening is false - lightening doesn't hit church steeples because they were built in the wrong place, but because they were there. Do I have to explain to you about how lightening hits tall objects?

Let's take this to a logical extreme - if you're totally illiterate, you're unlikely to misspell words, that doesn't make you a better speller however.

~~~

@Era

Do you know of any decent epidemiology from the early 20th century or so? I ask out of genuine curiosity.

@Era

You don't get to claim hatred of big pharma as your own. You've got a lot of company there, myself included.

@Era

ps Your argument about what the "evos" can learn from the "creos" is utter crap too. Until recently our drive to conquer nature was because of our divine right to, now it's our divine nature not to?

I'm as down on scientists who claim to know more than they do as I am on religious zealots who claim the same.

@Era

Your argument with regard to genetics and disease is a mix of strawman and post hoc reasoning.

I'm sort of busy now, so I'll keep it short but ...

The germ theory of disease didn't become popular until the late 19th century. I don't know off the top of my head when heart disease and cancer were discovered, but while you talk about them as being "virtually unknown" they were unknown for a a long time. The expected mortality rate due to either of those will also have to do with the expected lifespan of given population (you have to live long enough for either to show up).

There is definitely a relationship between lifestyle and expected outcome, but among a population with an identical lifestyle, genetics play a role in determining expected outcomes.

~~~

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

So this is actually a rather interesting article for the questions it raises rather than what it answers.

I'm hoping there are some biologists lurking in the crowd who can correct me if I go astray here, this isn't my field, but my understanding of this goes as follows -

The significance of this result is that it completely unexpected. Prior to observing this result one would expect the results of the experiment (10 lizards introduced to an island) to be one of the following:

- lizards that look like the original population
- lizards that look the introduced population
- lizards that look like a cross

Finding a forth option is just weird. I don't know if the results of the study are strong enough to preclude the interbreeding option, but I think they might, mitochondrial DNA is from only one gender of parent (female, right?).

From a numbers point, this seems unexpected, but not beyond explanation - if the population doubling time is a year, then there were over a billion lizards descended from the original 10. Does anyone know what the clutch size is for these sorts of lizards?

~~~

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

It was in the March 25th, issue, for anyone who cares.

~~~

@185 Vorpalsword

I realized the mistake, I was trying to point out something to the person claiming such intellectual might.

For as Jesus said, "Let he who lives in a glass house throw the first stone."

~~~

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/*
I propose that we have a separate thread discussing
the content of the article marked as above. This isn't the place to engage in the big argument about evolution, there are other places on the internet where people have done so more capably than we will - this applies for both sides - and we all know how to find it. Essentially, we've had 180 comments of noise, there hasn't been anything new here.
*/

So has anyone in the room read the article?

Not to start another meta-discussion, but can anyone tell me why the popular press rarely cites the paper they're talking about properly? They only mention "The findings were published in March in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." It's a friggin weekly journal, don't make me do the work of finding the exact issue!

Okay, that's enough bitching from me, I'm going to go dig up the article and see what it says, it sounds rather interesting.

~~~

@ B Dagger Lee

Sir,

You are right.

~~~

@Evidence:

"Like it or not this is what Darwin was abdicating in his book."

Huh? What newfangled use of "abdicate" are you using?

~~~

This is pretty neat.

But Cory, if you weren't busy blogging about every glued together piece of steampunked nik-gnak from your high altitude balloon, you could have built up your own navy of coal powered submarines by now ...

I'm so much cooler than you, I get the internet via a modified RFC1149 connection (IP via Tursiops truncatus).

http://xkcd.com/331/ seems sort of relevant here.

Generally, scientists are loath to publish things that are faked, as a community, we don't take it well when we discover it, eg the case of Jan Hendrik Schon.

Those images are not particularly difficult to make (for real) with FIB.

What I always find amusing is the misplaced credulity on the internet - this gets doubted, but people want to think that the latest perpetual motion machine might just work.

~~~

@29, 32 Generally it's not the University providing the money for the sciences, but an external organization (NSF, DOD, etc). You just need to figure out how to sell your humanities studies to the military.

Only half joking.

I like how a non-sequiter is met with an implicit threat of cannibalism. You guys crack me up.

@Paul D

That's what you want nanotechnology to be, but people who work in the field talk about making bulk like things while controlling the nanoscale properties as nanotechnology as well. Noen is pretty spot on here.

Not only is this a story about discrimination against college students, but it's also about discrimination against minorities. This is a historically black college we're talking about.

This has everything to do with the gerrymander - until recently (2004) it was okay to disenfranchise college students. The population of the school represents 25% of the population of that county. Presumably that would mean they'd be an even higher percentage of the eligible voting population. This is a republican county they're in - the whole point of the gerrymander is to avoid contests, with that many people who are "likely democrats."

The connection between this and the gerrymander is that this is a "republican county." Letting "those people" vote would endanger that.

Does anyone know if Texas was letting college students register to vote where they go to school before the court decision in 2004?

The commenters so far have missed pointing out that there is an issue of racism at work here too. The college is historically black.

Not that I'm saying an effort to disenfranchise college students is okay, but this is effort to disenfranchise minorities.

The student body (assuming they all live in the county) represents about 25% of the population of the county. That is a significant number of voters who should have access to a polling station.

@dculberson -

Urea was the first organic compound synthesized. Before it was made, it was widely believed that chemicals from living things were different from chemicals made in the lab.

So they're very unlikely to be starting with urine.

If it's a few days old, we notice. If it's a decade old, we don't?

At this point someone could ask Albin if he got his ass kicked in school.

@ Ted

Snake wants to know, what sort of unstable organisms are you talking about? Are unstable like nitroglycerin, explode on contact? Or do they just fall off of shelves ...

But seriously, what do you mean? Do you have a reference? It's outside my expertise, but sweeping claims like that arouse my suspicion.

jere7my said it better than I did.

"wheel speed" is a vague phrasing that transforms this into a semantic problem rather than a physics.

A response to engineerny:

If I'm standing on a treadmill with rollerskates on and let the treadmill accelerate while holding onto the handles to stay in place, will the force required to keep me in place increase with the speed of the treadmill? I say yes, but only because the bearings in the rollerskates aren't ideal.

At some point the treadmill will be going fast enough that I can't hold on, assuming I can get the treadmill going fast enough.

So, there are two questions to deal with: can a treadmill overcome the forward thrust of a plane/rocket/whatever? And, does the velocity of the ground matter if you roll it backwards?

If you assume the plane won't take off, your model assumes that if i had a plane on a treadmill attached to a rope tied to the ground, I could break the rope by running the treadmill fast enough.

This problem mostly is one of semantics, the debate here is more about language than anything.

If my plane were powered by a rocket, would that convince more people that it will take off?

Takuan, why so violent, you're usually so nice. Besides, everyone cracks when subjected to the comfy chair!

@ Bzishi, You're also a bit off with the point about the latent heat of vaporization, if you take that into account, you'll calculate how much energy it takes to turn the water into steam.

And, yes, I know you can heat water in the blender. I'm pretty sure I said as much. But thanks for reminding me that it was Joule who performed the experiment, I think it is still an impressive achievement and it's good to remember why a unit is named after him.

@ Scuba SM
I realize you can heat water in the blender - I was trying to make a point that if agitating water were an efficient way of heating it, we'd be using blenders as tea-kettles.

Or something like that. I was tired.

But we agree on thermodynamics at least.

@ Zan
Good point about the power needed. Your numbers look good, they should put a stop to any debate about if he is in fact boiling water. My money says it won't however.

Also, where in the article does it say that it boils water instantly?

@ NikFromNYC

The microwave isn't actually at the exact rotational frequency of the water, just close.

@ noen

Then what is the harmonic frequency of water? Propose an experiment to measure it or a way to calculate it. Or point to a reference where they do.

I think you're confusing the fact that water does have vibrational resonances, but they are generally in the IR or so, which is a relatively low frequency from the point of view of optics is still orders of magnitude higher frequency than sound.

If water had acoustic harmonics, they'd be easily measured.

@ morehumanthanhuman

What's this about sonication and coffee? Where can one get a taste?

@Imhotep -

Really, do you want to turn this into name calling?

Actually I did do a patent search. Couldn't find one held by this dude, I looked in both the USPTO database and IPONZ.

Ultrasonic welding is based on generating friction between two pieces of polymer, causing them to heat up. The frequencies involved are tens of kilohertz, well below the resonant frequencies of water that other people were speculating about.

I'm skeptical of explanations of this that use frictional heating. If that works, why can't I warm water in my blender?

See, we don't need to resort to name calling.

My money says he's essentially put a resistor inside a cup of water. Sort of like one of these.

That said, you could in fact heat water by moving it around. Lord Kelvin observed that water at the bottom of a waterfall is warmer than it is at the top. This is because in the microscopic sense, temperature is velocity.

That said, I tend to doubt the velocity of the speaker is high enough to heat the water, but I could be wrong.

The sonic refrigerator works on principles of physics which are well understood. It's friggin' sweet, but not a mystery as to how it works. Well, it is to me, but I haven't really read the papers, but I think it's basically pumping on a coolant, just in a fancy way. By sonic they mean ~60 Hz, not something crazy high (I read that far).

A couple more points:
@1 Sound waves are the mechanical jostling of particles against each other, collisions of particles are actually how heat is most efficiently transfered (for example, the space shuttle has a hard time bleeding off heat because it is in vacuum). Also, microwaves work near the resonant frequency of water, 2.45 GHz happened to be unassigned to anything else so they operate there so as not to interfere communications and the like. I'm too lazy to look up the resonant frequency of water.

@2 Microwaves operate in the gigahertz. You are not going to mechanically drive something in the gigahertz without being pretty damn badass.

@6 It only matters how it works in that he is claiming to have discovered a new physical principle. It would be nice if he showed us the guts so we could know what's actually going on.

MarlboroTestMonkey7, I think you're right for the most part. I do think we should be in a hurry to at least point out the idiocy of the stance of these backwards thinking luddites. It's not terribly diplomatic of me call them that, and I promise it's only on the internet that I call them names, I perhaps should stop that, but there is a certain frustration encountering it in what I thought was a tech-savvy environment.

I'm all for security, I'm all for safety. I tend to think everything is a carcinogen until shown otherwise. But a lot of the fears about the technology (gray-goo for example) are founded on little science and pretty much everything that people are doing that they're calling "nano" has nothing to do with it even remotely. People are using nano to do things like build better, cleaner solar cells.

A sales pitch for nano, probably should be more like: do you love mother earth? Are you sick of poisoning her with nasty chemicals? Well, people are using nano-technology to make cleaner power so we can stop poisoning her.

It's true.

Please ignore the jug marked "poison."

Jeff, could you expand on: "We need AI to help make Nano work. I wouldn't trust a human with the oversite and regulation of stuff that could be used, in such obvious ways, as weapons technology."

What are the obvious ways? And are you serious about using an artificial intelligence to regulate them? Could you maybe explain a bit more? I don't understand your position at all.

Most of these doomsday scenarios make sense as science fiction, but not as science. Do you want to regulate Ice-9 as well?

I had to run off and left my sales pitch for nano somewhat incomplete:

Nanoscience is promising a whole slew of exciting things. Better sensors that can do the work of a lab on a chip - imagine diagnosing diseases with only a drop of blood instead of the vials they need now. Smaller computer chips, nanoscience is the one way that promises to save Moore's law as traditional lithography methods break down. A better understanding of what is going on in the human body to allow us to fix it better. Drug delivery that is better directed and painless, stronger lighter materials, better solar cell ... basically better everything.

Sure this also means better weapons, but when hasn't that been the case for new technology? Is caution warranted? Absolutely. But complete dismissal of it, or trying to ban it, is just plain stupid.

I wasn't particularly approaching it from a selling point, more just grinding axes ...

But the sales pitch for nano goes something like this:

Nanoscience refers to science on systems at or near the scale of one nanometer. The newness of it comes from our recent ability to manipulate systems on that scale. It often involves the study of "bottom-up" (giggle) processes, which are contrasted with "top-down" which is the traditional way of building small things. A key example of this would be the idea of growing circuits instead of making circuits by photo-lithography processes. In order to make actual devices, a combination of the methods is usually called for (eg, grown nanowires put into a circuit with lithography). As far as "bottom-up" processes go, life is probably the ultimate one. While people are dreaming of being able to design the smallest parts of something and then grow what they want, this is far far off. Trying to ban that sort of research at this point is far too alarmist.

The dangers of nano-technology are pretty much the dangers of any science or engineering. But it's a lot less scary sounding if you realize that fundamentally it is glorified chemistry that we're talking about. Of course a chemistry lab has terrible things in it. But without chemistry, we'd be in a pretty dark place.

As far as me calling you on an obsession with fullerenes, it wasn't so much to say "you're obsessed," but that fullerenes seem to be the first risk everyone worries about. They represent only a small part of the research.

Looking through google scholar for "fullerene exposure" it looks like several studies have been done on fish to gauge the effects of acute exposure. Adding "chronic" to the search, gives a few different results. From glancing at it briefly, it appears clear the fullerenes are in fact toxic (not surprising).

Fullerenes may be touted as new, but more correctly, the ability to manipulate them is quite new. That said, why the obsession with fullerenes? They are just one aspect of nanotech. Take a look at Nano Letters (http://pubs.acs.org/journals/nalefd/index.html) to get an idea of some of the diversity of what's going on in nanotechnology research.

Doh, my dyslexia took over, I was trying to compliment #31.

@32 That's the problem, it sounds dangerous and pretty cool, so it makes for good propaganda.

@23 I think yours is the best.

I think I'm staking out something of a middle ground. I'm all for caution, but I get pissed off by luddite alarmism.

@23 I haven't talked to them, nor do I see why I would. And I firmly believe the moratorium they call for is idiotic. Perhaps I am making a stretch by calling the people who make idiotic statements idiotic, misguided is maybe more accurate. They certainly were smart enough to propogandize cleverly. But you won't know about the dangers unless people do the research on it, and they are. Part of the reason why you don't know about how super toxic they are is that there have been no definitive results. What we have found is that inhaling small particles is bad for you, but you could have just asked a miner about that.

The problem with trying to argue about the safety of "nano" is that it is a buzzword.

@21 The question of the bio-compatibility of nanoparticulates is a good one. In general any ingredients that go into products for human consumption should be tested.

But "nano" refers to a specific sort of science which is in many ways an extension of chemistry. You might as well think of it as "macro-molecular-engineering." Trying to argue about its safety is like arguing about the safety of chemistry. I wouldn't go ingesting new compounds just like I wouldn't huff nanowires (deliberately at least). It's a good idea to treat new things with caution.

But what this group is calling for is absurd.

Since "nano" became the big buzzword for science, people have been finding ways to work nano into all sorts of names. If you were using some sort of chemical process before, you might as well start calling it "nano" to sell. Now they want to ban it?

Gray-goo and the crap by Crichton are irrational fears.

Arguing that we should take care to limit the amount of particulate people are intaking is fine. Arguing that things with unknown properties shouldn't be used in skin products is reasonable. But arguing for a moratorium on all nanoscale research is idiotic. Beyond idiotic. It's ignorant anti-technology FUD and should be called what it is.

5 points to anyone who can tell me what a nanohazard is. And why is it different than any other chemical hazard?

They might as well ask for a moratorium on chemistry until the risks are better understood.

@5

No.

Are you?

This is sponsored by a group that has an alarmist agenda regarding nanotechnology. They're asking for a moratorium on any research involving "molecular self-assembly and self-replication."

That describes large chunks science. They're buzzword conscious luddites.

Nick D -

I totally agree with your PS. I'm sick of the comments being a forum for people to either bitch about what is being posted or bitch about being "censored."

The alternative to moderated comments is mind bogglingly ugly. Remember usenet? Without moderation, trolls take over. And cries of "hypocrisy" ignore the fact that this a private site that has been kind enough to allow us to leave our comments on. Until BB tries to take down sites they don't like, they're in the clear on that charge.

Okay, I just added nothing to the discussion of the post. I might be a hypocrite. I can live with that.

#21 Futurenerd -

The idea of twisted pair is to reduce interference and radiation from your lines. The next best thing is to minimize the distance between the pair of lines and that is how powerlines are built. Actually, I don't even really understand your suggestion, but you should keep in mind that you wouldn't want to get two high power lines close to each other.

I was recently discussing the issues of DC vs. AC with a high power engineering. According to him, DC is making something of a comeback as they're now using it in places in Japan. The big issue with transmitting power long distances is that you want to do it at a high voltage so the current can be low. The reason this was until recently infeasible with DC was that transformers require AC to work. Modern methods of switching power mean that DC-to-DC conversions can be just as efficient.

The safety issue is an interesting one too, despite being an asshole, Edison may have been right about it. Someone will probably disagree with me, but as far as I understand it high-voltage AC will cause you to lock onto it while DC is more likely to throw you free. That said, high voltage (backed by high current for you pendants out there) can fuck you up if it's either AC or DC.

I would place serious money that QWERTY is the keyboard of choice for most baby eating socio-paths.

@#11

I'm somewhat skeptical of the claim about the story of the sailor killing himself with the multimeter.

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=39;t=000945;p=1

The language may shock you, or else you will be electrocuted with laughter.

But the whole thing about current and voltage killing you, you still have to drive the current through you with something. If you're going to argue by analogy, then I see voltage more like water pressure and current water flow, but this doesn't even work perfectly. Electricity ain't actually plumbing, so maybe it's better understood through its terms.

As an electrocution hazard that switch is about as dangerous as a 12V battery. But I agree with Sinclair about the other hazards from the knife switch.