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> The problem with that is then you need a mechanism that creates non-uniformly distributed mass.

The mechanism is gravity; and we have good observational evidence that the mass distribution of the universe is not uniform, at least at the scales we can observe (we can see galaxy clusters and voids).


Sadly, this is not possible, at least AFAIK. The basic problem is that a gravitational wave won't push against you, like a water wave would; the wave will pass through you.

See https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36113/woul... for a more detailed explanation.


Because they are researching inertial confinement fusion, not trying to build a working power plant. The efficiency of the lasers doesn't matter, since it doesn't affect their research.


Is energy on the order of 300MJ so cheap? You’d think that cutting it down to 150MJ would allow them to do more experiments.


300 megajoules is 83 kilowatt hours

a typical power price at trading hubs is US$40 per megawatt hour, though this varies considerably depending on many factors and is sometimes actually negative

a typical retail price is US$120 per megawatt hour

so this is about US$10 worth of electrical energy


300MJ ~= 83kWh which is like, $2000 in CA


I think you're out by some orders of magnitude. With the current energy issues in the UK it'd be under £100. Other things suggest in California it's more like 20 cents per kWh so were you thinking ~$20?


You're right of course, messing up my units again.


You can download a version without the watermarks from arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03719.


So if HN added advertising to support the site, you would totally stop posting here, right?


Not unless I could find a place that would pay better for my posts.


This is a good observation, but gravitational lensing surveys have all but eliminated massive compact objects as a potential source of dark matter; see for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17359015.


Unrelated, but why is a paper on astrophysics on the NIH website?


The NIH (specifically PubMed) just indexes most scientific journals. This paper is actually in Phys. Rev. Letters (which the NIH site links to, if you click the DOI link below the abstract):

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.98....


Gravitational lensing surveys coverage is pretty darn small so far it's also might not be appearant on the scales we are talking about there will need to be a pretty lucky alignment of a galaxy and a black hole given the space and relative size of both objects and the noticeable lense diameter I'm not sure that intergalactic lensing will be detectable as intragalactic ones which also are pretty rare.


Have you done the math to back up this position? Because I'm pretty sure the people who wrote the paper did the math for theirs.


"The period for which reasonably reliable instrumental records of near-surface temperature exist with quasi-global coverage is generally considered to begin around 1850. Earlier records exist, but with sparser coverage and less standardized instrumentation.

The temperature data for the record come from measurements from land stations and ships. On land, temperature sensors are kept in a Stevenson screen or a maximum minimum temperature system (MMTS). The sea record consists of surface ships taking sea temperature measurements from engine inlets or buckets. The land and marine records can be compared.[13] Land and sea measurement and instrument calibration is the responsibility of national meteorological services. Standardization of methods is organized through the World Meteorological Organization and its predecessor, the International Meteorological Organization.[14]"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_recor...


This article is not about FRBs:

Earlier this year, Swinburne University's Emily Petroff was the lead author of a report on the first observation of a fast radio burst (FRB) in real time. Previously, the enormously powerful but poorly understood events known as FRBs had only been detected in the records of large radio telescopes years after they happened.

However, among those records was something else, which astronomers named perytons. The first peryton detected was in 1998, although it was not recognized as such until 2011. Perytons look sufficiently like FRBs that astronomers even speculated that the first FRB, known as 010724, might actually have been a peryton.


That is, the article writes about this paper but poorly and with the totally wrong title:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.02165

Because:

"Now that the peryton source has been identified, we furthermore demonstrate that the microwaves on site could not have caused FRB 010724. This and other distinct observational differences show that FRBs are excellent candidates for genuine extragalactic transients."

Better changing the HN link to the Arxiv paper and the title too.


The convenience is hard to beat. I recently switched from a drip coffee maker to a Keurig, and I love it. My wife and I don't drink much coffee and so making 12 cups is a huge waste, we end up throwing away 3/4 of the pot. I also leave for work fairly early (and I don't have a lot of time to spend making coffee in the morning) and so being able to put a pod in the Keurig and get decent coffee out of it a minute or two later is really nice.

I can't agree with their attempt to use "DRM" to prevent users from buying pods from independent vendors (and arguments that they need to "control the experience" so that users don't buy low quality pods and get poor coffee ring hollow to me) but the machine itself is great.

Fortunately, their efforts to control the k-cup market seem doomed to failure in any case.


I can understand the multiple cup problem, it sucks to throw out coffee. For anyone else in your situation, check out an Aeropress [0]. It can make a single cup, it's easy, and I have to boil the water to make tea for my wife anyway :) Less waste than a Keurig, and cheaper TCO.

[0] http://aerobie.com/products/aeropress.htm


When I saw Aerobie, I immediately thought of the flying ring.

Interesting that they branched out to a coffee press from all their other products., which are basically all things that you throw.


And every time you make a cup of coffee you throw away a little plastic container. It's inefficient, expensive and wasteful, and it supports DRM. Putting some grounds into a filter and then composting them afterwards should not be a huge inconvenience.


It's a bash bug because the bug is ultimately in how bash parses environment variables. My understanding is quite limited, but IIUC, after the invalid function definition, the bash parser simply stops trying to parse the environment, and the remaining input tokens get used as arguments to the next command executed by the shell.


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