Bay 12 Games Forum

There are also a couple of interesting fusion projects in the US, IIRC. Including one big laser-fusion lab.

The National Ignition Facility.

This is a form of inertial confinement fusion (ICF). I've only had limited exposure to this; a couple of talks and some background. Most of my knowledge here is probably a little out of date, but the principles should be sound. Just imagine this was posted about three or four years ago.

ICF using laser ignition works on the same principle as a fusion bomb. The majority of the facilities that are used for such research actually do double duty as (legal) bomb test simulators.

You take a pellet of fusion fuel (normally very small) and wrap it in ablative material designed to exert pressure when it's ignited. These act as the ignition phase of a nuke, compressing the fuel. Unlike the plutonium stage of a fusion bomb, compression alone isn't enough and you normally need a further pulse of energy delivered directly into the fuel to turn it into a plasma. Then the compression works on the plasma to create very impressive fusion conditions.

Both the ignition of the ablative layers and the heating of the fuel are done by laser pulses. The ablative heating uses multiple beams focused at different points on the surface of the pellet. The forming of the plasma takes a single, high powered beam, focused into the core of the pellet. When I saw the designs they were using a small gold cone to deliver the energy directly into the fuel. This design varies a lot though, and I think that one was from GEKKO XII, the Japanese design. Most American and European designs use more brute force methods for forcing the fuel to ignite.

It's all very cool.

And now the problems.

Firstly, the laser needs to be big and powerful. Oddly this doesn't cause the obvious problem of getting a net energy output - that's surprisingly easy - but does mean that you are very limited to how many pulses you can fire. More power means more strain on your equipment. Firing rapidly with current technology is just going to blow something up. I remember that the woman giving the talk had one of the lasing crystals from their beamline with her because it was dead. After a handful of shots.

This is a problem for power generation. Let's say you are trying to heat your house by heating up some water. You have the choice between a litre of petrol or a kilo of TNT. Even if you can potentially get more energy out of the TNT, odds are you won't be as warm if you try to use it to heat your house.

In this case magnetic confinement is petrol (constantly burning at lower efficiency) while ICF is TNT. A MCF plant will be burning similar levels or probably even less fuel than a ICF plant, but the energy output is constant rather than in bursts. Even reaching the ignition levels required for net power output would only be a marginal first step towards an effective power plant.

I believe the rough firing rate required is on the order of 1-10 shots per second. Right now the goal at NIF is 700 shots in one year, and that's an end of life goal.

Note that they also have to deliver tiny fuel pellets to the exact point of convergence of the lasers for every shot. While you are running at less than one per day you can position them carefully. If you are trying to deliver (more than) one every second you are going to need a very accurate delivery system, especially when you are delivering each into the epicentre of a miniature nuclear explosion.

My guess is they are dependent on ITER to a degree. AFAIK ITER is the only large scale fast-neutron capture experiment on the books. Any D-T fusion device (which all ICF devices are) will require something like ITER's neutron capture blanket and the neutron safe materials integrated into the design. The current generation of ICF devices, and definitely the NIF, are dual (or duel) use devices, built with the military applications (bomb testing/simulation) in mind. They are happy to justify their peaceful existence by demonstrating potential paths to fusion, but that isn't their primary purpose. They aren't so much fusion energy test-beds as they are military facilities that have enough down time to run some fun experiments.

Radio rip of a song from the new Devin Townsend Project album.

And yes, those are the singers from Cynic and Gojira helping him out.

I was going to do no metal, then I realised that doesn't work. So now I'll try to go non-screaming at least. All instrumental all the time. Mostly non-metal. Except when it isn't.

Neil on Impression - The Perfect Tango
Oceansize - I Am The Morning
God Is An Astronaut - Golden Sky
Rosetta - TMA-1
If These Trees Could Talk - Rebuilding the Temple of Artemis
Mamiffer - This Land
Anathema - Violence
Riverside - Reality Dream II
The Mercury Program - Fragile or Possibly Extinct
*shels - Sea of the Dying Dhow
Agalloch - The Hawthorn Passage
Animals as Leaders - CAFO
Amiina - Seoul

Charles Stross has a couple. Glasshouse is easily the best. Hard to describe much without giving a lot away, but he builds a universe almost matching Bank's Culture and uses it to run a pocket experiment looking at our own. He also has the near future Halting State, with a sequel Rule 34 due out relatively soon. He has some free samplers here, including a short story collection and a complete (looooong) novel called Accelerando.

Richard Morgan is utterly brutal, but writes a fantastic noir style high concept future. The Kovacs novels (starting with Altered Carbon) are a great trilogy. The central technology is the cortical stack; a hardened implant that effectively stores your memories and self digitally, to be transferred between bodies, transmitted between stars, backed up and even cloned to a new stack. This puts a relatively low value on human flesh, resulting in some really nasty sex and violence, although the cost of a new body is still out of reach for the majority of people. He gets to play a lot with race, sex and social factors.

Doctorow does some really nice stories, especially his near future and social commentary. All of his are free online so definitely worth a peak. His two young adult books, Little Brother and For The Win are music to the ears of anyone who agrees with him socially (and technologically) while his first two full length novels, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Standard Eastern Tribe cover a lot of concepts that are becoming more and more common today. I would strongly recommend downloading the audio version of With a Little Help; a short story collection read by various geeks. The Spider Robinson reading in particular is fantastic. It also has a reading by Mary Robinette Kowal who also read his After the Siege, a pretty worthwhile listen in itself.

And unrelated to the topic other than through Kowal, she also read Rude Mechanicals by Kage Baker, pretty far from realistic but a lot of fun. A semi-time-travel romp about two cyborgs in 1930's Hollywood, mostly based around the set of Max Reinhardt stunning production of A Midsummers Night's Dream. Damned good fun.

Scalzi's Old Man's War series (a trilogy plus one effectively) is good, in the same military-plus-social commentary way as The Forever War. The fourth books is pretty damned good considering it's Scalzi writing from the POV of a teenage girl. He also headed the Metatropolis project, originally an audiobook (mostly read by
BSG alumni; the first story is a good two hours of Tigh reading to you) and now also published as as short story collection.

I have to repeat Reynolds (definitely Chasm City and Pushing Ice, although the new Terminal World is a nice take on Steampunk) and Banks, definitely. And for Banks, even if you skip his non-SF fiction you might want to look up Raw Spirit. It's him cruising around Scotland in a variety of cool vehicles sampling every Scotch he can get his hands on and getting paid for it. With occasional digressions about the war (it was written in 2003) and Drunken Urban Climbing.

If you need something more intellectually challenging then try Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan. Wiki describes it as involving 'non-trivial' mathematics and theoretical physics. I read it while taking graduate level quantum mechanics courses and didn't feel it was talking down or over-simplifying things. And the story remains engaging.

Neal Stevenson's Anathem tries to do something similar but (IMO) doesn't pull the science off quite right. This (some spoilers) explains how I feel about it. That said, the writing and story for the majority of the book is fantastic. It just loses the plot at some point and things literally unravel. Given that this includes what should be the climax of the novel, it kinda takes the wind out of it.

So I read somewhere that all of the oil spilled thus far could be used by the United States in only four minutes.

Hard to get a particularly accurate measurement of how much has spilled, given the messy nature of measuring amounts of oil in water and the lies told, but lets take a high end figure for how much has leaked. Being lazy and just taking the high end from wiki gives 307 million gallons of crude spilled.

Current US oil consumption is ~21 million barrels per day. 1 barrel is 42 gallons, giving a US consumption of 882 million gallons per day or 36.75 million gallons per hour. At that rate it would take less than eight and a half hours to consume as much oil as has leaked.

So not quite four minutes, but then there are lots of very low numbers floating around for the size of the leak (some old, some lies, some estimates based on lower flow rates). I almost used a figure from the 1st of June instead of July myself. The error bars on this calculation are pretty big.

That is the arguement Ebert made though. Compare good art in one medium to bad art in another. When the second doesn't compare favourably decide the entire medium isn't art.

Well, no. He didn't. His argument was that, as a medium, games don't qualify as art. My other post in this thread made a couple similar arguments which I've never actually seen addressed.

The problem was that people didn't actually address his arguments about that. I'll let him explain the more common response;

If I didn't admire a game, I would be told I played the wrong one. Consider what happened when I responded to the urging of a reader and watched Kellee Santiago's TED talk. It would finally convince me, I was promised, of the art of video games. I watched it. But noooo. Readers told me I had viewed the wrong talk about the wrong games. Besides, arguing with a You Tube video was pointless if I had never played a game.

See now, this is the problem. If I make an argument that, say, science fiction books by definition can't contain elves - and that if they do they are fantasy - no amount of examples are going to convince me otherwise. You have to instead engage with the argument itself and make a case for how an elf can exist in a science fictional environment. You have to explore the definition of science fiction and show that a sensible definition can include elves. Then you go to the examples of books that fit such a definition.

Listing fantastic games without first exploring what art is and how a game may match that definition is pretty futile. I mean, I love Portal, but I don't really see how I could call it art. I don't have a workable definition of art which it fits.

I was considering this as a question of value rather than quality.

See, this is another category error. Hell, Ebert mentions a game he played and enjoyed and I don't see him saying they have no value. The guy reviews summer blockbusters next to art films without making value judgments based on their artistic merit.

If you are really having problems with an OO installation then just grab the [link=http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable]portable version[/link]. It's entirely self contained and the installation is basically just unpacking the files, so you shouldn't get any advertising spam.

If you want to be hardcore about it, use Notepad++ (or a Mac/Linux text editor of your choice) and learn LaTeX. It's a typesetting language rather than a word processor, so you focus on entering the content and then typeset it according to whatever rules you want. It's WYMIWYG (What You Mean Is What You Get) as opposed to WYSIWYG, which most word processors aren't anyway.

I strongly recommend LaTeX for anything involving equations, more than, say, 50 pages and/or multiple chapters, or which you want to remain portable between computers - you can move the content files around as tiny plaintext files, then compile them to perfectly consistant .pdf or .ps files (and yes, people do still use PostScript).

There are systems that offer a more WYSIWYG interface, like LEd or LyX, but I've never bothered. Texnic Center is a pretty complete LaTeX workstation for Windows, and all I've ever needed.