Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

1984: STILL NOT AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL | "Big Brother Is WWWatching You" (VIDEO)


This is some excellent matter to put in one's pipe, as it were.

 

Do pay especial attention to the cameo appearance by Mr. George (T)Orwell.  Actually, pay attention to all of it.  An you value my opinion, it differs from theirs but little.

Seeing such an important message preseed with such sheer, if wig askew, exuberance did much to cheer my day, weighed down as my mind has been lateley.  What with the news current in these most miserable of fascist learnedly helpless politically myopic dangerously uneducated and far too radiated and otherwise polluted of worlds...





"I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own."


Be seeing you.

Science, Not Fiction: Nasa Working On... Get This... WARP DRIVE. Really.



"warp factor" image manipulation by a female faust

"FTL (Faster Than Light) Human Transportation Soon To Be Reality,"  "Too Bad The Military Will Be In Charge," and "Earth First! We'll Destroy The Other Planets Later" (alternate headlines).


It takes my breath away, brings it back sharper, shallower. We stand at the threshold of the impossible made possible: this is only the beginning, of that I am sure. O Brave new world, that has such science in't!

From "Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say"
by Clara Moskowitz, SPACE.com Assistant Managing Editor:


 A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television's Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.
A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.
Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.

But... Warp drive?  Really. Really?

From "NASA Scientists to Begin Warp Drive Experiments," written by Mark Whittington for Yahoo News:

It is an axiom in modern physics that faster than light travel, at least by conventional means, is impossible. The fasting an object is accelerated, the more massive it becomes, according to a piece on the problem on the Discovery Channel website. At the speed of light, an object would have infinite mass, clearly impossible. In any case, even at near light speed, the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is about a 4 1/2-year voyage away.

[snip]

The implications of the proof of the concept of a warp bubble cannot be overstated. Space.com suggests that a football field-sized starship, surrounded by a ring that would generate the warp bubble, could travel an apparent speed of 10 times light speed. Gizmodo suggests that an Earthlike world about 20 light years away, Gliese 581g, would be a two year voyage away.


And Alpha Centauri? Two weeks, as reported by Jesus Diaz over at Gizmodo

By creating one of these warp bubbles, the spaceship's engine will compress the space ahead and expand the space behind, moving it to another place without actually moving, and carrying none of the adverse effects of other travel methods. According to Dr. White, "by harnessing the physics of cosmic inflation, future spaceships crafted to satisfy the laws of these mathematical equations may actually be able to get somewhere unthinkably fast—and without adverse effects."
He says that, if everything is confirmed in these practical experiments, we would be able to create an engine that will get us to Alpha Centauri "in two weeks as measured by clocks here on Earth."
[snip]
...the energy requirements are much lower than previously thought. If they optimize the warp bubble thickness and "oscillate its intensity to reduce the stiffness of space time," they would be able to reduce the amount of fuel to manageable amount: instead of a Jupiter-sized ball of exotic matter, you will only need 500 kilograms to "send a 10-meter bubble (32.8 feet) at an effective velocity of 10c."
Ten c! That's ten times the speed of light, people (remember, the ship itself would not go faster than the speed of light. But effectively it will seem like it does).
That means that we would be able to visit Gliese 581g—a planet similar to Earth 20 light years away from our planet—in two years. Two years is nothing. It took Magellan three years to circumnavigate around our home planet...

Nasa has been playing around with this idea for some time, previously concluding that a parade-dampeningly impossible amount of fuel would be required. What's new is that it appears there is a way to reduce this to a manageable size. From Space.com again (and thank them also for the video below):


The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.
But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.
Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more, White found.


And Gregory Mone at Popsci, besides an(other) illuminating explanation of how warp drive works, offers a few helpful to-do lists, including: 

The Warp Drive To-Do List

A few not-so-minor challenges you'll need to tackle before takeoff
  • Discover Negative Energy:
    There are no known particles with negative mass. The closest scientists have come is a phenomenon called the Casimir effect, wherein empty space between two conducting plates behaves as if it contains negative energy.
  • Devise a Way To Manipulate It:
    Even if scientists could transform matter into negative energy, they would still have to find a way to focus it and create an infinitesimally thin, yet extraordinarily stable, bubble of the stuff around the spaceship.
  • Harness Dark Energy:
    In recent years, cosmologists have been studying a mysterious force called dark energy that they think is accelerating the expansion of the universe. If scientists could generate it at the back of the bubble, it might move, or expand, space.
  • Build Bubble Brakes:
    Because the spacetime carrying the ship would be completely cut off from the outside of the bubble, there would be no way to send a signal to turn off the warp drive. The signal would never get there, and the ship would never stop.


Be seeing you.

Why not reuse nuclear fuel?


This was a post over at Washington's estimable blog, which I reproduce because I can:



Radiation Danger Covered Up Ever Since Nuclear Weapons Invented

Government Has Been Covering up Radiation Danger for 67 Years
The U.S. and other governments have been covering up nuclear meltdowns for fifty years to protect the nuclear power industry.
It turns out that the U.S. tried to cover up the destructive nature of radiation produced by nuclear weapons 67 years ago. As Democracy Now reports:
The army was well aware in 1943 of the enormous potential for radiation dangers to civilians and military personnel as a result of the use of radioactive weapons ….
[The New York Times] was essentially putting out the official government narrative [regarding the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki], which is that atomic radiation is not harmful, is not a major byproduct of the nuclear weapons program. You know, it’s only the blast that has essentially a very short impact. The reason that this has importance is that for really a half century, this narrative became the government’s response to all protests against nuclear power, the nuclear weapons programs of the 1950s and 1960s and the Cold War. So, [The New York Times] essentially set the table that the government was to occupy for the next half century as they disputed any attempt to rein in, you know, the rapid acceleration of nuclear weapons and power programs.
Nothing has changed. Governments worldwide continue to this day to cover up the amount – and health effects – of radiation released by military and energy facilities.
And the same considerations which drove the cover up in 1945 are still driving it. The archaic uranium reactor designs developed more than 40 years ago are good for making bombs.

And this, the comment that sparked this post:


The Energy Doctor says:
With all of the disinformation out there, it is hard to know the truth. But, I saw an interview with a retired nuclear engineer that helped design the reactors like Fukishima had. He said they were originally designed to reuse the uranium until it had no radiation at all. He says that is why the containment parts weren’t so foolproof since the remaining material would have no radiation danger. He said the Feds made them change so the fuel rods were not reused. HMMMM?
The farther you go down the rabbit hole, the more evil and crazy TPTB are.

Read more

To which "...so the fuel rods were not reused" I proffer the following.

From Wikipedia:




Isotopes of Plutonium
....The higher plutonium isotopes are created when the uranium fuel is used for a long time. It is the case that for high burnup used fuel that the concentrations of the higher plutonium isotopes will be higher than the low burnup fuel which is reprocessed to obtain weapons grade plutonium.

Read more



Plutonium-240 
... is an isotope of the metal plutonium formed when plutonium-239 captures a neutron. About 62% to 73% of the time when Pu-239 captures a neutron it undergoes fission; the rest of the time it forms Pu-240. The longer a nuclear fuel element remains in a nuclear reactor the greater the relative percentage of Pu-240 in the fuel becomes. For weapons use, the fuel needs to be as low in Pu-240 as possible, usually less than 7% of the total plutonium (this is because Pu-240 sometimes undergoes spontaneous fission, causing the weapon to detonate prematurely), but this is achieved by reprocessing the fuel after just 90 days of use. Such rapid fuel cycles are highly impractical for civilian power reactors and are normally only carried out with dedicated weapons plutonium production reactors. Spent civilian power reactor fuel typically has under 70% Pu-239 and around 26% Pu-240, the rest being made up of other plutonium isotopes, making it extremely difficult but not technically impossible to use it for manufacturing nuclear weapons.
Read more

and from 
y Mark A. Prelas, Michael Peck, Chapter 3, "Characteristics of Nuclear Weapons:" 







Here are the surrounding pages -- sorry, Google books does not give them as text, only images:



    
  










































Be seeing you.