On the Nature of Things | Forum

From computers to office furniture used by cute digital startups like Pinterest or Oink or FoSchnizzle, – it’s all made possible by a superior breed of entrepreneurs and inventors. They toil away in relative obscurity, often in Asia, solving big, complex problems. They squeeze 64GB onto something a Ken doll might swallow. Or, they make un-killable batteries that let Kim Kardashian tweet deep into the night. They even make solar cells viable and water out of thin air.

In the US, a stunning surplus of VC cash and leisure time feeds this feeble form of innovation – where getting something to scroll from left instead of right can be considered a breakthrough. It’s not that the entrepreneurs themselves aren’t smart or impressive. The market simply doesn’t demand they try that hard. Why build a plant when someone will give you $300 million to collect email addresses for a daily deals site?

The risk is the same as what happened in the banking industry – easy money drives high salaries and diverts talent from productive industries to unproductive ones. There’s plenty of demand for top engineers and inventors to improve natural gas extraction or harness ocean water. Instead, that talent can be found gambling on fictitious investments or perfecting the trajectory of a dead digital pig. Multiply that by several thousand and you have:

A country completely disconnected from real world problems faced by the rest of the planet – like no drinking water.

Entrepreneurs missing out on a chance to make money solving tangible problems
The US falling farther behind and deeper in debt as its top talent clicks away inside a dimming, narrow, digital consumer bunghole.

I’m not saying there’s no room for entertainment or leisure-oriented innovation, but I am saying if we want to continue getting those Lenovo’s from China, they’re not going to accept our Tweets or Oinks as payment.

exploration of fuel cells’ potential has moved slowly as boffins try to figure out the larger problem of just how to build a supply chain around a substance rather more volatile than petroleum.

Enter the Australian team from the University of New South Wales, which has found that compound named sodium borohydride (that’s NaBH4 for all you chemists out there) can absorb lots of hydrogen and then release it under what the researchers describe as “mild pressure conditions” of four mega pascals (4 MPa). That’s rather less than the rating of most scuba diving cylinders and presents a less tricky challenge than storing the gas as .. well ... a gas.

Dr Kondo-Francois Aguey-Zinsou, lead author of a paper on the subject published in ACS Nano, told ABC News NaBH4 acts like a “sponge” for hydrogen, and can soak up so much of the stuff that a conventionally-sized fuel tank stuffed full of the compound would get close to the energy potential of the same volume of petroleum.

But the news isn’t all good: the NaBH4 needs to be nano-engineered and stored in a nickel shell. Even then it only releases some of the stored hydrogen at 50 degrees Celsius and it’s only once the mercury hits 350 that the hydrogen really starts to flow.

The Center for Functional Nanomaterials at UNSW’s School of Chemical Engineering, where the work was conducted, intends to keep tinkering with NaBH4 as it believes there is the potential for “ … major advancements in the design of effective hydrogen storage materials from pristine borohydrides.”

Typhoon wrote:How Killing the Angry Bird Will Save American Entrepreneurshi

From computers to office furniture used by cute digital startups like Pinterest or Oink or FoSchnizzle, – it’s all made possible by a superior breed of entrepreneurs and inventors. They toil away in relative obscurity, often in Asia, solving big, complex problems. They squeeze 64GB onto something a Ken doll might swallow. Or, they make un-killable batteries that let Kim Kardashian tweet deep into the night. They even make solar cells viable and water out of thin air.

In the US, a stunning surplus of VC cash and leisure time feeds this feeble form of innovation – where getting something to scroll from left instead of right can be considered a breakthrough. It’s not that the entrepreneurs themselves aren’t smart or impressive. The market simply doesn’t demand they try that hard. Why build a plant when someone will give you $300 million to collect email addresses for a daily deals site?

The risk is the same as what happened in the banking industry – easy money drives high salaries and diverts talent from productive industries to unproductive ones. There’s plenty of demand for top engineers and inventors to improve natural gas extraction or harness ocean water. Instead, that talent can be found gambling on fictitious investments or perfecting the trajectory of a dead digital pig. Multiply that by several thousand and you have:

A country completely disconnected from real world problems faced by the rest of the planet – like no drinking water.

Entrepreneurs missing out on a chance to make money solving tangible problems
The US falling farther behind and deeper in debt as its top talent clicks away inside a dimming, narrow, digital consumer bunghole.

I’m not saying there’s no room for entertainment or leisure-oriented innovation, but I am saying if we want to continue getting those Lenovo’s from China, they’re not going to accept our Tweets or Oinks as payment.

Typhoon wrote:WIRED | Google, Amazon, and Microsoft Swarm China for Network Gear

Is there an app for this?

noddy wrote:woot, the oil age might finally be over and it wont require us running out of oil.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/17 ... n_storage/

exploration of fuel cells’ potential has moved slowly as boffins try to figure out the larger problem of just how to build a supply chain around a substance rather more volatile than petroleum.

Enter the Australian team from the University of New South Wales, which has found that compound named sodium borohydride (that’s NaBH4 for all you chemists out there) can absorb lots of hydrogen and then release it under what the researchers describe as “mild pressure conditions” of four mega pascals (4 MPa). That’s rather less than the rating of most scuba diving cylinders and presents a less tricky challenge than storing the gas as .. well ... a gas.

Dr Kondo-Francois Aguey-Zinsou, lead author of a paper on the subject published in ACS Nano, told ABC News NaBH4 acts like a “sponge” for hydrogen, and can soak up so much of the stuff that a conventionally-sized fuel tank stuffed full of the compound would get close to the energy potential of the same volume of petroleum.

But the news isn’t all good: the NaBH4 needs to be nano-engineered and stored in a nickel shell. Even then it only releases some of the stored hydrogen at 50 degrees Celsius and it’s only once the mercury hits 350 that the hydrogen really starts to flow.

The Center for Functional Nanomaterials at UNSW’s School of Chemical Engineering, where the work was conducted, intends to keep tinkering with NaBH4 as it believes there is the potential for “ … major advancements in the design of effective hydrogen storage materials from pristine borohydrides.”

time to invest in new zealand/iceland.. places with lots of free geothermals for splitting water, they will be the next mad arabs

Researchers at the FOM Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam, King’s College London and the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona broke Ernst Abbe’s specification for the resolution limit of a diffraction-limited microscope using a technique called angle-dependent cathodoluminescence imaging spectroscopy.

Natural photonic crystals — nanostructures composed of two materials with a different refractive index arranged in a regular pattern with exotic optical properties — are what create the iridescent colors found in certain species of butterflies, birds, beetles and opal gemstones.

noddy wrote:woot, the oil age might finally be over and it wont require us running out of oil.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/17 ... n_storage/

exploration of fuel cells’ potential has moved slowly as boffins try to figure out the larger problem of just how to build a supply chain around a substance rather more volatile than petroleum.

Enter the Australian team from the University of New South Wales, which has found that compound named sodium borohydride (that’s NaBH4 for all you chemists out there) can absorb lots of hydrogen and then release it under what the researchers describe as “mild pressure conditions” of four mega pascals (4 MPa). That’s rather less than the rating of most scuba diving cylinders and presents a less tricky challenge than storing the gas as .. well ... a gas.

Dr Kondo-Francois Aguey-Zinsou, lead author of a paper on the subject published in ACS Nano, told ABC News NaBH4 acts like a “sponge” for hydrogen, and can soak up so much of the stuff that a conventionally-sized fuel tank stuffed full of the compound would get close to the energy potential of the same volume of petroleum.

But the news isn’t all good: the NaBH4 needs to be nano-engineered and stored in a nickel shell. Even then it only releases some of the stored hydrogen at 50 degrees Celsius and it’s only once the mercury hits 350 that the hydrogen really starts to flow.

The Center for Functional Nanomaterials at UNSW’s School of Chemical Engineering, where the work was conducted, intends to keep tinkering with NaBH4 as it believes there is the potential for “ … major advancements in the design of effective hydrogen storage materials from pristine borohydrides.”

time to invest in new zealand/iceland.. places with lots of free geothermals for splitting water, they will be the next mad arabs

Typhoon wrote: In principle very appealing - the problem is that the process is difficult to reverse.

I hope that the R&D continues, but I won't be holding my breath

Skin Job wrote:The only way transistor counts are doubling these days is by adding more cores; this won't be productive indefinitely, partly due to limitations in the efficiency of parallel computing, and partly due to the laws of physics, which Moore's Law, unfortunately, cannot trump. It may take breakthroughs in quantum computing to provide the godlike powers you envision.

Enki wrote:You can have godlike powers at current hardware levels. All the real innovation is in software. People who claim that innovation is being stifled are usually biased toward engineering and completely discount simple and elegant innovations like twitter. I am setting up a social media presence for my company that wil with one submission broadcast on two dozen networks. Simple innovations allow me to build a robust network presence for a small business. When SEO is properly tuned we will be at the top page of Google for all of our specialties. This will help us get business.

Skin Job wrote:

Enki wrote:You can have godlike powers at current hardware levels. All the real innovation is in software. People who claim that innovation is being stifled are usually biased toward engineering and completely discount simple and elegant innovations like twitter. I am setting up a social media presence for my company that wil with one submission broadcast on two dozen networks. Simple innovations allow me to build a robust network presence for a small business. When SEO is properly tuned we will be at the top page of Google for all of our specialties. This will help us get business.

Twitter could have never existed but for scientists and engineers feeling stifled by their historical hardware capabilities. It's a mistake to discount the importance of either hardware or software innovation. One does not exist without the other.

Skin Job wrote:Is that so? I don't gravitate toward doom and gloom generally, and so was unaware of that sort of bias.

Right now software is still trying to catch up with existing hardware in the use of ever more processor cores in consumer level machines. There is an eight-core machine on my work desktop using five year old technology that is impossible to overtax with an average power user software suite. I'd love to see a game that could utilize all eight cores, no telling what that should make possible.

Typhoon wrote:

Skin Job wrote:The only way transistor counts are doubling these days is by adding more cores; this won't be productive indefinitely, partly due to limitations in the efficiency of parallel computing, and partly due to the laws of physics, which Moore's Law, unfortunately, cannot trump. It may take breakthroughs in quantum computing to provide the godlike powers you envision.

The material of the moment in condensed matter physics is graphene.

In part due to it's high carrier [electron] mobility with potential applications to ultrafast transistors.

Milo wrote:

Typhoon wrote:

Skin Job wrote:The only way transistor counts are doubling these days is by adding more cores; this won't be productive indefinitely, partly due to limitations in the efficiency of parallel computing, and partly due to the laws of physics, which Moore's Law, unfortunately, cannot trump. It may take breakthroughs in quantum computing to provide the godlike powers you envision.

The material of the moment in condensed matter physics is graphene.

In part due to it's high carrier [electron] mobility with potential applications to ultrafast transistors.

I've been hearing 'law of physics' arguments for 3 decades. Remember when more than 33 mhz would be impossible due to RF interference with the other components? Yet most hardware has exceeded ML for that entire period, without slackening, let alone falling behind.

Oh I know: this time it's a barrier that cannot be gotten around and everything will come to a halt because of it. That's what they said all the other times too.

And it's not just CPU's it's storage and transmission too.

Whenever possible, when the law is ambiguous or silent on the issue at bar, the courts should let those who want to market new technologies carry the burden of persuasion that a new exception to the broad rights enacted by Congress should be established. That is especially so if that technology poses grave dangers to the exclusive rights that Congress has given copyright owners. Commercial exploiters of new technologies should be required to convince Congress to sanction a new delivery system and/or exempt it from copyright liability. That is what Congress intended.