Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:54 — 3.5MB) | Embed
From television to nuclear fusion In 2005, a small team, headed by Robert Bussard, built a nuclear fusion reactor. The design was a descendent of a fusion reactor invented by the same man who invented the television. The program was chronically underfunded. Though they were able to build two more models after Bussard’s death, they …
The internal i/o is a mess—the methods that allow the digital creatures to read and write to and from themselves and each other. I’ve always planned on changing it. Each figure, (one of the digital creatures I created) gets a turn, one after another, enough time to execute one instruction. But, no matter how much …
I changed my mind and posted this, just because I like the last line. I tested a short-lived population, they made it to 923 in the name field, before dying out. I saved the first two figures of that line to play around with them.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:36 — 3.3MB) | Embed
Nuclear powered aircraft In the 1950/s the United States Airforce and Navy considered nuclear powered aircraft. Instead of burning fuel to heat air and provide thrust, a nuclear-powered jet engine would heat the air from the heat generated by a nuclear reactor. If it had worked, the aircraft could have remained airborne for months at …
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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:00 — 4.2MB) | Embed
Blast me to the moons! 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 …
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:38 — 3.2MB) | Embed
Nuclear alchemy 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 …
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 …
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:17 — 3.6MB) | Embed
Isotopes and enrichment 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 …