OddLinks

Write a Novel Month

November is National Write a Novel Month and I have decided to do it. Sometime soon I will post a pointer to my progress chart, but seven days in it's looking promising. I won't be writing a lot of other things during that time, so my blogs will be somewhat sparse.

Decay rates of nuclear isotopes vs. temperature

I found this blog entry regarding decay rates of radioactive materials as a function of temperature and container type. The blog speculates on using some techniques to improve handling of nuclear waste.

While I find get rid of it sooner a desirable end, if the decay rate could be increased to the point where useful thermal energy was generated, it would open a path to getting more energy out as well.

Today's thought: if I were handling nuclear waste, I would investigate something like zone melting to see if it could be used to separate isotopes for differential treatment. I know about centrifuges, but I can't find evidence of zone melting being tried. If you didn't follow the link it's used to purify semiconductors and produce a large single crystal.

AI assisted emotional music composition

Researchers at the University of Grenada (who knew?) have married AI to music and emotion, to create a real-time system which composes and plays music. The claimed advantages are that it can replace elevator music, will never bore you because as you become bored it will change, and it avoids copyright issues. Wonder if I could prime it with some ragtime and 12 bar blues?

It's what's under the hood that counts

I found this article on speeding up IE8 under Windows 7 and although I use neither, I have many friends and clients who do, through choice or necessity. I worry that too many pages will stop working if you start disabling add-ons, but putting the Chrome engine under the IE8 hood sounds like the best of my old hot rod days.

A support system for cats

Cats are heavy... when I sit at the keyboard with a cat on my lap I need something to keep the cat from sliding down between my knees. I fear I have become a support system in the literal sense.

Ones you don't see coming

My wife lost a lot of weight during her recent illness, and she notes that her hands are smaller, weaker, and ache a lot in the cold. The last one isn't something which I expected.

physics-talk Sept 17 2009

physics-talk is a Thursday night physics discussion group, starting at 8pm ET.

Bohmian Mechanics is a theory about point particles moving along trajectories. It has the property that in a world governed by Bohmian mechanics, observers see the same statistics for experimental results as predicted by quantum mechanics. Bohmian mechanics thus provides an explanation of quantum mechanics. Moreover, the Bohmian trajectories are defined in a non-conspiratorial way by a few simple laws.

If superconducting sheets reflected gravitational waves... and it seems that they do. Now 42 orders of magnitude sounds like a lot (of damn near anything), so maybe this effect is useful for something besides explaining oddities in gravity wave experiments, or even concluding that the oddities mean gravity waves are present.

From the Earth to the Moon kids measured the distance using Neil Armstrong's trip and data off the Internet.

New high temperature superconductor iron arsenide plus water. Okay, 25K isn't really high temperature, but interesting.

What's wrong with this idea? A new world speed record for steam powered cars was recently set, erasing the record help by a Stanley Steamer. It used a flash boiler setup. My thought is that by using hydrogen peroxide the whole boiler mechanism could be replaced by a high pressure pump and a catalyst. Thoughts and comments?

Dell looks at Linux on an ARM processor for netbooks

It seems that Dell is contemplating building netbooks based on the ARM processor and Linux. PC World reports that Dell is going to call these "SmartBooks." It seems like a return to the intent of netbooks, to be cheap and portable. ARM uses less power and will give better battery life.