$13333 @ $79/hr is 168hrs 46mins 19.7 seconds. What kind of employer pays you in units of fractions of a second? Also, 168 hours a month is more than "a few hours". Hell, it's a 40 hour week.

I suspect your spam is dishonest and wish to speak to your supervisor.

No, the insensitive clots are cataracts.

Modern artificial lenses filter UV. But some brands of lenses are more UV transparent than others. Only if you remove the lenses entirely will you have the full effect.

Monet is a famous example. After his cataract surgery, he painted in blue/green pigments that supposedly reflected more UV to try to copy what he saw.

Anyway, pics or it didn't happen: http://www.komar.org/faq/colorado-cataract-surgery-crystalens/ultra-violet-color-glow/

Are you sure you're not just rotating at relativistic velocities?

Remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

And this is the sort of thing that happens with all these fringe-physics/alt-physics devices. (Also conspiracy theorists.) There's no negative finding that doesn't somehow still confirm their beliefs. See Dean Drive, GIT, or the anti-gravity disc for past examples.

The NASA tests picked up seismic effects of waves on a seashore 25 miles away. It would take a ridiculously small error to create a false positive. That's why you do null tests, to check you've eliminated noise and contamination. Faffing around afterwards saying "Oh, yeah, but but, ummm, the null article is actually not a null article. Yeah! Wait, that means this is confirmation! Woo! Theory confirmed! Suck it, skeptics!" is not science.

Which is more parsimonious? That the rig picked up noise (tiny unexpected thermal effects, say) in both the test and null articles, or that Shawyer accidentally produced a null article that also produced the magic force?

So how does that put the burden on skeptics?

Perhaps frustrated tech writers like yourself should get together to form their own group (with blackjack and hookers) which picks specific un/underdocumented FOSS projects and "bombs" them with documentation. Self-hosted if the project devs don't realise what they're getting. Gathering professionals, enthusiast volunteers, through to helpful coders.

Eventually the group gains enough reputation that you can start to make demands of projects, in order to raise the general standard of technical/project and user documentation across FOSS projects. Likewise, tutorials, courses, e-textbooks, etc.

FTFA: "The term brings to mind dystopian visions of fighters patrolling near space, but will actually revolve around protecting satellites from space debris orbiting the Earth."

Nationalisation pays the previous owner. It's a compulsory purchase, not just seizing control.

What the Russians are doing is just theft, extralegal, unconstitutional, just as they did with all the energy companies which are the only thing propping up their economy, and media companies. The method is a variation on how organised crime takes over a business, but with the backing of the courts.

It's Roman numerals. MM=2000. Legislators like Roman numerals, makes them look clever. But they obviously forgot how to write the 400 (CD) in $2400.

That's a pretty big bill, I guess, but with a hundred sponsors it works out at $24 each. I assume they all got hats.

That's cute. But parody is better when it's not so exaggerated. Even the US right wing aren't stupid enough, insane enough, to go around saying that the EPA is going to tax breathing, nor invoke Nazi death camps to condemn US environmental regulations. The premise of the joke has to at least be believable.

Newton's laws also fall out of GR at non-relativistic velocities. The inventors say their device is consistent with GR.

I'm not assuming it, if the device works as advertised, it meets the standard criteria for "reactionless", and thus it can be used to create a free energy machine.

For it not to be able to be used as a free energy machine, it must break some other tenet of physics (such as mass/inertia equivalence, non-locality, no universal frame of reference, etc.) The explanations by the inventors have mostly involved ad-hoc efforts to let it break some tenet, but somehow in a way that doesn't actually break it. "It's exchanging momentum with the inertial state of the background universe, but not by violating non-locality", "it's interacting with virtual particles, but in a way that doesn't violate CoE", "it can't be used to accelerate, only to hover, but totally doesn't violate equivalence," and so on.

Virtual particles work in a different way to regular particles, because at the beginning of a reaction the virtual particles always have net zero initial velocity (net zero momentum) WRT the device, regardless of the acceleration of the device; that means the device will have a constant force-per-watt equation regardless of velocity. With regular particles, if you accelerate, you change their velocity relative to you, that changes the force-per-watt equation. The two are not analogous.

(Read my explanation using your "swimmer" analogy.)

And this is the same regardless of what explanation you have for the "fabric" of space, virtual particles, quantum foam, M-theory. They all must have this zero-net-velocity component in order to be consistent with, not just theoretical, but observed general relativity.

Re: Virtual particles becoming "real".
However, they steal that energy from something else. For example, when a virtual particle pair is split by the event horizon, the lost partner reduces the mass of the black hole. The net energy must be zero. And it must be uniform, there's no propulsive effect.

[In the case of a "drive", if you push against one partner in a virtual pair, you will be pulled back by the equal-and-opposite virtual partner. The net is zero. Even with Casimir, both sides of the gap are pulled equally. No net force.]

But not net momentum. Not a force in a single direction.

--

Aside: Doesn't it make you curious that the more careful (and skeptical) the experimenters are with their test rigs, the smaller the measured effect gets?

Doesn't it make you curious that the supposed "null" device, designed by the same people not to produce a force, somehow produced a force on the same test rig? Isn't that what a null hypothesis is for? Doesn't Occam's razor suggest that the experimental protocol is missing an unusual but mundane effect and not a revolutionary unidirectional reactionless propulsion system?

Frankly the whole thing screams of a very technical version of those old perpetual motion devices made from magnets and moving weights and levers arranged on a wheel, which the inventor insists allows one side to experience more force than the other. No matter how many people explain why it can't work, they concoct increasingly elaborate explanations for how it must work. Look! It's turning! Oh it stopped. Well that just means it needs stronger magnets and axles with less friction. (Or in the case of EmDrive, superconducting cavities and higher-Q designs.) Or, in mathematics, like someone encountering the Monty Hall three door problem for the first time.

And that's why skeptics are skeptical of the claims made for the EmDrive.

Skeptics are, because all reactionless drives are free energy machines.

However, the power input is constant for the thrust out (Newtons-per-Watt), therefore power input is constant for acceleration (m/s^2-per-Watt), therefore energy input is constant for delta-V (m/s-per-Joule). But the energy out (kinetic energy) is proportional to the square of total velocity (Ek=1/2mv^2). Therefore energy-in increases more slowly than the energy-out. (Energy-in is linear, energy-out is exponential.) At a certain velocity, the energy-out exceeds the energy-in, and the device can be used to power a free energy machine.

It can be hard to get your head around, you may want to actually do the maths to convince yourself. (Fortunately the maths is simple. Basic Newtonian stuff. You get to skip all the GR stuff and just use the proponent's own figures for Newtons-per-Watt.)

Skeptics are. It's the class of device that the EmDrive belongs to. How it actually operates is largely irrelevant. All the proposed mechanisms have the same problem. For example...

Space doesn't work that way.

Say the device interacts with virtual particles, a la Casimir Effect. The physics of virtual particles is not analogous to regular particles. The net velocity of virtual particles is zero, regardless of the velocity of the EmDrive. Hence it is still a "reactionless" drive, for the purposes of physics, even if people are waving their hands and saying it "reacts" with virtual particles. It's not the sort of "reaction" that Conservation of Energy or Momentum need to balance their books.

(The faster a swimmer goes, the more drag they experience, the more power they expend to overcome that drag, the less "efficient" the "device" (this loss of efficiency increases their free-energy transition velocity, so they never reach it.) But virtual particles are always at the same speed as a quantum "swimmer", the swimmer never experiences drag. A water-swimmer can't be used as a free energy machine because they can never reach the transition velocity due to drag. But a quantum-swimmer can. If free energy machines are impossible, then so is quantum swimming.)

The same is true of every proffered mechanism for the EmDrive.

Should I fight against online voting in our municipality?

- Yes
- Confusingly also yes
- No
- Very no
- Cowboy Neal is my "straight ticket"

Actually you don't. Any reactionless thruster can be turned into a free energy machine. If force-produced is directly proportional to energy-input (eg, the device in TFA gets 31uN/W) regardless of position in the universe and direction of thrust (**), then the change of velocity per unit time is also proportional to energy-input. Linear. But the kinetic energy available is proportional to the square of total velocity. There's a cross over velocity where the increase in kinetic energy is greater than the energy input necessary to produce that change in velocity. Stick a set of reactionless thrusters on a flywheel, hook the hub to a generator, spin it up until the tip-velocity passes the cross-over, and from then on it's a free energy machine. So the potato would have one set of EMdrives powering a generator, and another set for propulsion powered by the generator.

At 31 microNewtons/Watt, the required tip velocity is over 30km/s, a wee bit past material limits. But as the "Q" increases in the EMdrive (predicted for the use superconducting cavities) the cross over velocity drops below 100m/s, well within the tip-velocity of a generator flywheel.

(** An anti-gravity drive that could only act in the direction of existing gravity, and lost efficiency moving out of a gravity well or at speed within a gravity well, wouldn't be a free energy machine. And the inventors of the EMdrive have indeed created some ad-hoc explanation for why theirs loses power at speed (to which every critic screams back "relative to what!") and can thus magically only be used to hover.)