The Remarkable CSS555

No, it was Star Wars that did the trick.

Even if they had worked as a technical matter, the X-Ray Laser Battle stations had a singular flaw: Shoot a big missile (or just a big hunk of iron) directly at a battle station, and you'll either destroy it, or it will fire an X-Ray Laser at the incoming threat, but destroy itself in the process. So no 50:1 kill ratio.

Well, amuse him to death.

Except that Putin doesn't want to destroy Kiev, he wants to own it so he can replace the Ukrainians with Russians.

The scales have already been falling from many eyes due to the Invasion of Ukraine. And nothing would energize and stiffen NATO and Europe like seeing Kiev nuked, with fallout covering all of Europe.

Yes. Actually, it could turn out that while Russia is locked for decades in cold-war containment poverty, forgotten, Ukraine joins the EU and becomes vastly wealthier than Russia ever was, with a world-class military-industrial complex to be reckoned with.

Joe

I've certainly got reservations about the kind of information you seem to want to impart. The Le Sage theory of gravity comes to mind.

As you demonstrate here much too often.

Technically speaking, it isn't coming out of the black hole, but out of the event horizon. And while small black holes do eventually evaporate by that mechanism, galactic scale black holes lose mass very slowly indeed.

Hawking radiation isn't remotely into the bomb blast category.

It would need a 2kV MOSFET. Mouser Australia stocks one for $A9.53 one-off, $A5.85 for ten.

I'm not going to bother going any further - its clearly do-able, but would be more expensive than you'd like.

I knew you wouldn't.

As people are OK in Moscow.

"All rivers flow to Moscow" is the expression.

I don't think that it has ever predicted anything unexpected.

Einstein at least explained the progression of Mercury's orbit, which Newton couldn't.

To your own complete satisfaction.

Because it's you who assesses it after you have built it

AI also goes in for a fair bit of hallucination.

Dream on.

Why bother?

Find somebody more gullible to do your detail design work for nothing.

Jan Panteltje has stepped up. He's probably right that that a neon would give more photons per microamp than a LED, but probably not 500:1. 70V is lot less than 2kV.

That seems like the extreme case, a halfway solution would be to keep the diac and have it discharge into a 10:1 (assuming 32v to 3.2v) transformer to better match the led forward voltage and step up the current. The 10:1 auto transformer is also more likely to be found somewhere as an off the shelf item.

Science Daily is so interesting! I paraphrase from one of its astrophysics articles:

"The simulation shows that Rubin will detect 70 % of hazardous asteroids. This will cut the risk of an undetected catastrophic asteroid impact by at least two times"

Phew, that's a relief!

Jeroen Belleman

Do something sensible and I'll pay you for it.

Incandescents run about 14 l/w. Neon glow lamps are around 40. An LED runs around 160.

But I can couple an LED's light out a panel efficiently; we use little mushroom-type light pipes with good viewing angles. I doubt that I could get 2% of the light from a neon out to where our customers could see it.

I don't see any surface mount neons at Mouser either.

The circuit challenge is to invent an affordable circuit that makes visible blinks from a kilovolts power supply without wasting tons of power, or costing some absurd amounts of space and dollars and labor.

Engineering looks useful here.

How about a reverse Marx generator? It would take a lot of diacs but would be fun.

A diac-pumped buck switcher might be done with just a few parts, including one cheap inductor.

Suppose an RC charges up and fires a diac. It is the switch of a buck converter, namely drives a diode and an inductor and the LED. Might work.

Something involving an LC ringing oscillation could be interesting too. The (bidirectional?) LED would be the major Q killer, damping the ring by emitting light.

I was lecturing the kids about tapered transmission lines on Tuesday. That would be fun to simulate but not very practical.

and some Brazilian who thinks that it is a delusion generated by not applying Lorenz contraction correctly when calculating gravitational forces between moving objects,

The problem is that the "tiny invisible particles" that Le Sage wants aren't dark matter, or anything like it.

It might have been an attractive hypothesis until it was looked into in more detail.

You are trying to re-invent string theory for yourself.

Probably written by somebody as daft as you are. Peer review blocks a lot of nonsense, but by no means all of it.

Some parts of it come pretty close. One hydrogen atom per cubic metre is the average density of the universe.

Presumably it has much the same sorts of unstable isotopes as the the earth does. They emit heat when they decay to a stable isotope. There isn't much of them, but bury them deep enough in a planet's core and the rest of the planet on top of them is a pretty good insulating blanket.

None that you can understand.

The definition of a black hole is that it doesn't emit anything. Hawking radiation comes from the event horizon, not the back hole itself. It's matched by an anti-particle that doesn't leave the black hole, thus shrinking it.

Redshift is photons losing energy, not speed.

They regularly come up with speculations that might totally change the current views - it's one way of getting attention. None of them seem all that promising.

The dead brain here is all yours. String theory has turned out to be more interesting than useful - more an ivory tower than a useful structure - and while local fusion power still seems to be some way off, we've still got a a working fusion reactor only 93 million miles away, and we currently rely on it for most of our power.

Sadly, you'd have to decide whether it was sensible or not and I don't have lot of faith in your judgement.

But a neon dropping 70V extracts a lot more watts per amp than a LED dropping 1.5V

Cheap is the killer here. We had a thread a few months ago about getting power out of a 1kV source, and I worked out a sort Baxandall inverter that would have worked, but it needed two 2KV MOSFETs. Your 2kV source would need two 4kV MOSFETs.

The inverter would also have had to run quite fast. I eventually worked out a way to build a transformer that should have worked, but it was odd enough to probably be patentable (not that it would have been worth patenting).

Your situation doesn't need anything like as much efficiency, and you could probably use the MOSFET to charge up a step-down inductor, and discharge the inductor through a low voltage secondary into an LED.

The LED would be reverse-biased below breakdown in the charging phase.

The inductor wouldn't be big enough to let the discharge phase take long enough to give a visible blink, so you'd have to add a slow timer to get that. The inductor would have to be wound for the job, and the MOSFET wouldn't be cheap.

Any intelligence I have is entirely natural, and while I do have much to learn, you wouldn't be a good choice of teacher.

AI has yet to master critical thinking, but then again, so have you.

The interference was most probably the Russians spoofing the GPS signal in the vicinity of the aircraft. This isn't so much interfering with the aircraft as messing with it's electromagnetic environment. The Russians have been doing it here and there for years.

And pigs might fly.

The war-making Putin monster should go first. Van der Leven hasn't invaded any other country, and Putin's army has been trying to take over the Ukraine for several years now.

I doubt that his news job will make much difference to Russian antics in the Netherlands.

Rutte stayed on as prime minister of the Netherlands for a remarkably long time - more objective observers rate him as remarkably clever.

We can hope, but the Americans are spending quite a lot of money on scanning for earth grazing asteroids. If they find one that could be steered towards the Kremlin, Trump is irresponsible enough to try to exploit it.

In the Netherlands field hockey is a higher status sport.

I watched a bit of her 30-minute piece on Russian Motivation:

.

I'm sure that she's right, or right enough.

The problem is that essentially all empires thought and still think this as well, and over time empires evolved towards fewer but bigger, to the point that only internal rot could destroy the biggest ones.

Which always happened. Lasting one millennium was doing well; most didn't get close. So keep an eye out on present-day empires.

Joe