This comment interested me so I did a little morning time research. You are right in stating that this technology has been out there for a long time. One of the major down falls of conventional SOFC's are that they require a high operating temperature. The efficiency of SOFC's limitations lie in the material they use because of the high operating temperatures. The bloom box claims to have solved this problem with a fairly cost effective solution for what materials to use (melted sand = glass?). They were always made from ceramic before, I don't know what improvements glass have over ceramics. I don't know if their claims are all true. Too early to tell since it was just "released".

That all being said, I don't understand what the hoopla is about, either. You'd still need to bring some sort of natural gas to each "bloom box". Let's say tomorrow, we took out all the power plants and replaced every home and business with one of these devices. Let's say they operate at 70% efficiency (10% more than traditional SOFC's), would this be more energy efficient than a power plant. Would it cost us any less natural resources to run our planet? Those questions are a little more difficult to find out. Gotta do some more research on power plants. Somebody with a degree have any insight?>> ^joedirt:
You guys are total suckers and idiots.
This is like ancient technology. It is just a solid oxide fuel cell.
The only thing interesting is that they have existing fuel cell installs at eBay and google.
This won't be cheap or better. All it does is capture the big green energy investors and also it uses tax rebates in places like California to let rich people subsidize their electricity.

Interesting, but not a "Holy Grail" of any sort.

>> ^Throbbin:
These guys are screened before they ever get on the show, so someone at CBC thought it would be a hoot to get him on the air. While I don't mind the dressing down they gave him, I think it's sad that even CBC - the holy grail of quality public broadcasting IMHO - would think to let this guy on the air, presumably for ratings.
All that aside, has anyone investigated the potential medicinal effects of silver? Reason says there's a 99% chance this guy is nuts. But anyone who has noticed the massive attention being paid to Vitamin D recently as the Vitamin that can cure anything in the 'Professional" medical community should also understand that if someone made those claims about Vitamin D 20 years ago, they'd be labelled a snake oil salesman too.
Maybe he's just ahead of his time. Still, you don't claim it cures cancer. Not cool.


Perhaps they expected half the crazy, not the full crazy he ended up delivering? I think it's ok to occasionally point out to the naive that "this is crazy" in case people aren't realizing it. Psuedo-educational.

Totally agree, why on earth give a nut like this a platform? Sure he looks ridiculous but he's ridiculous before he gets there. Will it stop him suckering people? Sadly I don't think so.

>> ^Throbbin:
These guys are screened before they ever get on the show, so someone at CBC thought it would be a hoot to get him on the air. While I don't mind the dressing down they gave him, I think it's sad that even CBC - the holy grail of quality public broadcasting IMHO - would think to let this guy on the air, presumably for ratings.

>> ^Throbbin:
These guys are screened before they ever get on the show, so someone at CBC thought it would be a hoot to get him on the air. While I don't mind the dressing down they gave him, I think it's sad that even CBC - the holy grail of quality public broadcasting IMHO - would think to let this guy on the air, presumably for ratings.
All that aside, has anyone investigated the potential medicinal effects of silver? Reason says there's a 99% chance this guy is nuts. But anyone who has noticed the massive attention being paid to Vitamin D recently as the Vitamin that can cure anything in the 'Professional" medical community should also understand that if someone made those claims about Vitamin D 20 years ago, they'd be labelled a snake oil salesman too.
Maybe he's just ahead of his time. Still, you don't claim it cures cancer. Not cool.


Yah silver Has gr8 potential as anti bacterial and When u combine small particles of silver in kitchen tops and work services / medical serfices it can have a real impact.

Silver is more of a preventative for anti bacterial its not a cure and I believe it only stops bacteria starting in a given place so if its already in a place and u pore silver on something its not going to make much difference.

Also interms of the human body we are dependent on bacteria so if u had a substance that nuked all the bacteria and u took it you would probably get very ill and die.


there is allso this new spray that is ment to come on the market in the next year or so that coats stuff in a thin film of glass but its such that bacteria or organic matter cannot stick to it so u could wipe stuff with water to make it mostly sterile. but again it wont cure people its just preventative making items esear to steralize.

>> ^Throbbin:
These guys are screened before they ever get on the show, so someone at CBC thought it would be a hoot to get him on the air. While I don't mind the dressing down they gave him, I think it's sad that even CBC - the holy grail of quality public broadcasting IMHO - would think to let this guy on the air, presumably for ratings.

Well, being a CBC show, it likely needs all the ratings it can get.

These guys are screened before they ever get on the show, so someone at CBC thought it would be a hoot to get him on the air. While I don't mind the dressing down they gave him, I think it's sad that even CBC - the holy grail of quality public broadcasting IMHO - would think to let this guy on the air, presumably for ratings.

All that aside, has anyone investigated the potential medicinal effects of silver? Reason says there's a 99% chance this guy is nuts. But anyone who has noticed the massive attention being paid to Vitamin D recently as the Vitamin that can cure anything in the 'Professional" medical community should also understand that if someone made those claims about Vitamin D 20 years ago, they'd be labelled a snake oil salesman too.

Maybe he's just ahead of his time. Still, you don't claim it cures cancer. Not cool.

Nice. Doesn't beat Python's bridge though
http://www.videosift.com/video/Monty-Python-Holy-Grail-The-Bridge-of-Death

I understand the uproar over potentially making a mockery of the White House's security, but people need to get a grip.

Crashing a closed ceremony is an exciting sport to some people. To crash a White House party is the holy grail of party crashers.

Not to mention the fact that they were apparently screened for weapons anyway and were obviously mingling well with politicians.

So fix the security gap, make sure everyone realizes the significance of their robotic duties, and stop acting like these people should be sent to prison when they didn't pose a risk at all to anybody.

Milkman dan is exactly right. It's not quite as free a baldur's gate, but baldur's gate was by no means a fully open world either. It's easier to crank out maps and locations in a BG style environment hence easier to create a game and make good profit from the work you put in.

Have we had a PERFECT reincarnation of BG using modern day gaming standards? Not yet, but it was close. Maybe it's a holy grail we're looking for, all us die hard BG fans.

I will however admit that the side quests and storyline in BG were so incredibly involved and engorging. Dragon age did not drag me in as much. I was absolutely infatuated with Leliana's accent and when i realised i could get my sexy redhead elf girl to get it on with the sexy orlaisian bard temptress, i was obsessed with getting that to happen.

I don't think that counts, though. I believe it was Durlag's Tower that i always remember most of all from any game, ever. The story and depth of that place was immense, you were slowly taken through the dwarf's footsteps and his eventual decline into insanity which led him to kill all his loved ones. That storyline really blew my socks off, and it didn't need lesbian sex or a hugely attractive exotic accent to do it.

Alright, Dragon Age isn't QUITE our new baldur's gate, but it's been the best contender by miles and miles. Maybe if this one does so well and we show our appreciation for the display of quality in areas that we most wanted it, they'll be able to improve on it and give us more. And maybe then we'll have our new baldur's gate.

I've played most of the early MMO's, mainly as research. For the last decade plus, I was working for the company that made the first game to hit 2000 simultaneous players (well before UO was released). I've played UO, EQ, DAoC, and probably 12-15 others. The longest any of them ever kept my attention was about 1.5 months, until EQ2, and WoW. Those kept me paying for around 3 months each. Perhaps part of the reason I could never get deeply involved in any of these games is that I don't really care for most online communities (especially gaming-related ones). I play solo, as I tend to find the average level of maturity in these games to be juvenile and irritating.

Lately, I've gone back to City of Heroes for the third time, and I find myself very impressed. It's probably not coincidence that this is the first time I've played an MMO long enough to hit the level cap.

A couple years back, the holy grail was "user-created content", and every pundit out there swore that it was the only thing that was going to save the genre. Fast forward to today, and you hear next to nothing on that topic. The only game I've seen that actually got it working was CoX. Every player now has the option to create missions for the game, and publish them for other players to play. Highly rated story arcs can even get migrated out of the Mission Architect system and into the game, just like the ones the devs wrote.

I think that part of the reason that I love technology as much as I do is because it advances so quickly. I'm stunned that ten years ago flat panel monitors were the holy grail of high tech monitors. Today they are cheap as hell and the latest and greatest is a monitor that actually flexes and is about 1 mm thick. amazing

Just like my Senior class History project. My buddy and I wore cardboard boxes for helmets and used cardboard tubes to reenact the Black Knight scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail. Got a B+.

Refreshness on theoretical physics should be always welcome , however to be technically careful with new proposals is mandatory !
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"Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Published: 6:02PM GMT 14 Nov 2007
Comments 596 | Comment on this article

The E8 pattern (click to enlarge), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right)
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.
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Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

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In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."
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The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.
He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.
The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.
But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."
And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."
Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.
E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."
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What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.
Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.
Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?" he says.
The crucial test of Lisi's work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.
"The theory is very young, and still in development," he told the Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelyhood to this prediction.
"For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online."

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