I started working on this project in December. Months later and, for certain values of the word “done,” it’s done. All this time, I’ve been building tools to make implementing various and sundry experiments easy, or at least, easier. Now that I have my tools, let’s play with them.
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Once you’ve learned how to tap nuclear energy, what can you do with it? One proposal was to take a couple thousand nuclear bombs, drop them behind a spacecraft, and set them off to push the craft from the Earth’s surface, into orbit, and then around the solar system. Called “project Orion,” it is undoubtedly the most spectacular use of nuclear energy ever seriously considered.
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The medieval alchemists wanted to change lead into gold. It was, by the methods they were attempting to use, impossible, but modern physics might be able to turn gold into lead. it is possible to change one chemical element into another. In nuclear reactors, with all those neutrons flying about, materials that absorb the neutrons are changed.
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It’s been several days since I noticed that my oh so very clever notion wasn’t actually a good one. I’ve been developing my little subleq creatures, called “figures,” layer by layer. There is one more layer to go, and I had what I thought was a brilliant way to implement it. That is, until I tested the new layer against the old version and saw that the same exact run, with the same exact results, was taking up to 59 percent longer!
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A given element can have different numbers of neutrons. While the protons determine an elements chemical properties, the different number of neutrons can have different nuclear properties. Uranium occurs naturally with mostly u238, with only about 0.07 percent of it occurring as u235. It’s the uranium 235 that can support a nuclear chain reaction. For most nuclear power reactors, you need around 4 or 5 percent of the uranium to be u235. If you want a nuclear explosion, it requires more than 90 percent. The process of increasing the percentage of 235 in uranium is called “Enrichment,” and it is a difficult and dangerous process.
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I’d like to thank john peacocke for giving me the idea for the next few episodes. We’ve been chatting via email, and he told me about molten salt nuclear reactors. That reactor and the general subject are interesting, and they make a nice break from the if and maybe of things like biology and evolution that we have been and will be talking about. Today, we cover the basics of nuclear fission.
I must make note of this mess before it leaves my head, and leaves me lost in the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine. I would shiver the whole night through.
In the newly defined handler object, there are methods that get called when a figure is added to the realm.
Handler.realmAdd(Realm realm, Figure figure)
Handler,realmAdd(Realm realm, Figure figure, int address)
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The fossil record contains, at best, only a few percent of any given ecology during any given time. To complicate the picture, some of the fossils are fakes. From money to reputation to jokes, there are many reasons why such fossil hoaxes are perpetrated. Today we look at a few examples of, and motivations for, false fossils.
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In the mid 1800/s some fossils were found in a tributary of the Illinois river, called “Mazon Creek.” They had simply weathered out of the ground, but it wasn’t until coal mining moved in, that the true extent and value of the Mazon Creek fossil deposit was discovered.
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Yesterday, I got email from the relevant companies. The smart glasses I ordered are on the way, actually shipped this time. This marks the end of a long, and quite Ludacris saga. I wondered just how long it really has been, so I took a look in the journal where I keep track of this mission. It’s taken more than five years, almost six.
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