The Center for Cognitive Architecture at the University of Michigan and Soar Technology, Inc. are pleased to announce the 28th Soar Workshop will be held Monday, May 5 through Wednesday, May 7, 2008, in Ann Arbor, MI beginning with a dinner on May 4. Greg Trafton (NRL) and Paul Benjamin (Pace University) are the invited speakers this year and will be talking on cognitive robotics.
Dr. Bernard Vonnegut (1914-1997), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s brother, was a professor of atmospheric sciences at the State University of New York at Albany, retired in 1985. A colleague of Dr. Vonnegut, Vincent J. Schaefer, discovered in an experiment during the 1940s that dry ice rapidly produced ice crystals when introduced into a cloud of supercooled water droplets.
Many clouds in our atmosphere are giant collections of supercooled water droplets that refuse to precipitate. One form that clouds precipitate is by a process called aggregation where the water droplets freeze and begin to fall through the cloud, gaining mass as they contact and acquire other water droplets on their way down. Unfortunately, water in this form will not freeze without the help of a condensation nuclei or until the temperature reaches levels around or below -40°C (-40°F), hence the designation “supercooled”.
The dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) Schaefer introduced into the cloud acted as a cooling agent, instantly bringing the droplets well past the necessary -40°C (-40°F) they need to freeze causing the cloud to precipitate. This was the birth of cloud seeding, or the artificial coaxing of precipitation by introducing particles into clouds to act as condensation nuclei and/or a cooling agent.
Dr. Vonnegut soon discovered that silver iodide has a crystalline structure similar to an ice crystal and that, because of this, it acts as an effective ice nucleus at temperatures of only -4°C (25°F). Additionally, silver iodide is far easier to handle than dry ice when attempting to fly it over a cloud to seed the cloud, which is precisely a process that Dr. Vonnegut refined and that is still in use by rainmaking corporations today.
It was this process and research of cloud seeding that inspired his brother Kurt Jr. to create and write a wonderful novel about Ice-Nine.
Note: I wrote this for everything2 back when I was in college.
…it will take longer to figure out what’s happening if dissent is stifled and skeptics are demonized. The skeptics in the minority start off with a disadvantage in getting their message heard simply because of the media’s bias for bad news and horror stories. When there’s a well-financed majority dominating the public debate, I find it odd to hear complaints that anyone else should receive money or attention.
An interesting opinion over at Tierney Lab.
In order to keep track of the number of beers that the keg dispensed, I decided to take a photo of each cupful in its owner’s hand. This scheme meant standing by the keg the whole night, but it turned out that the keg was an epicenter of party action, so I was never lonely. (Link)
This guy is great. I could spend hours on that site, it is rather large.