'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#61

Post by coldtea » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 1:17 AM UTC

joering2 wrote: post #47

anigbrowl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes for a great story until you consider the fact that bigelow is rich and $22 million is small change to the billionaire set that Reid has had on speed dial for years. Enormously elaborate schemes to launder relatively small amounts of money are only plausible to people who think $22 million is a vast fortune.

What an absurd argument that a guy worth $200MM would not spend his time and money on a $22MM deal. Besides, why everyone assumes this is ALL they did? A "businessmen" like those two spent probably 30 minutes on the phone once, and delegate bunch of people to do the work for them. Yes, Reid would not spent his last 5 years on $22MM deal, but he would spent few hours on the phone here and there on 100 deals each worth…

>What an absurd argument that a guy worth $200MM would not spend his time and money on a $22MM deal.

The argument is that a 200MM+ guy wouldn't spend his time on such an elaborate and risky 22M deal that's sure to get a lot of attention even if it was fully legit.

Your straw-man version is indeed absurd, though, I'll give you that.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#62

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 1:18 AM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #32

Osmium wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> based on their current understanding rather than testing the claim. The point is that there is no claim. It is very very straight forward to identify an unknown material (figuring out how it was made, what it's for, etc., is the difficult task). If you want to claim there's an 'unknown' material, show us your XRD patterns, your EELS/XPS/NMR/EDX/PL/SIMS spectra, your AFM surfaces, your electron micrographs, atom pro…

Right, so if they have no idea what the material is then what's the point of their comments claiming that they are impossible?

[deleted]

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#63

Post by fjsolwmv » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 1:30 AM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #51

sushisource wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if you are willing to buy that they have something stored they can't identify, this is the most logical explanation. That said, I would still buy that there are probably almost no materials that we couldn't at least get a handle on. If they were truly incomprehensible it would likely be because they were the result of manipulating properties that we don't even know exist yet (higher dimensionality, etc, whateve…

A Pentium chip would probably seem like an incomprehensible material to Alan Turing (and not just because of the awful instruction set), because even though all the materials were known at the time, the design and fabrication techniques and mind-bogglingly fine granularity and complexity of how they are combined hadn't been conceived of yet. I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better…

You think Alan Turing wouldn't be able to use a microscope?

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#64

Post by yk » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 1:31 AM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #42

yk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite simply, x-ray diffraction tells you the distribution of electrons in the unit cell of the alloy. So you just put an sample into your spectrometer and it will print out the chemical elements and how they are assembled. And even if there is another island of stability of super heavy elements or something like that, it will still just tell you the charge of the nucleus. So this side of quite literally magic, as in…

You're assuming "unit cell" is a meaningful concept for these materials. Can x-ray diffraction completely characterize, say, a quasicrystalline structure? Moreover, even if you can tell what it's made of, that doesn't necessarily tell you how it was made or how it works.

Well, there are other techniques for anything that is not a crystal, and they are similarly developed as x-ray diffraction, if nothing else, take an atomic force microscope and identify each individual atom directly.

> that doesn't necessarily tell you how it was made or how it works.

Absolutely, there may be materials were we don't have the slightest idea how they are made or how some property arises. But my point is, that the analysis techniques are at a level were it is pretty much guaranteed that an expression like "unknown alloy" is pretty much just clickbait, we know a great deal of anything that is made out of atoms a few days after a sample showed up in a laboratory.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#65

Post by fjsolwmv » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 1:35 AM UTC

hyperbovine wrote: post #43

anigbrowl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes for a great story until you consider the fact that bigelow is rich and $22 million is small change to the billionaire set that Reid has had on speed dial for years. Enormously elaborate schemes to launder relatively small amounts of money are only plausible to people who think $22 million is a vast fortune.

That's the difference between billionaires and you and me: the billionaire thinks $22m is a lot of money.

You mean isn't a lot of money

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#66

Post by DonHopkins » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 1:40 AM UTC

fjsolwmv wrote: post #63

DonHopkins wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Pentium chip would probably seem like an incomprehensible material to Alan Turing (and not just because of the awful instruction set), because even though all the materials were known at the time, the design and fabrication techniques and mind-bogglingly fine granularity and complexity of how they are combined hadn't been conceived of yet. I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better…

You think Alan Turing wouldn't be able to use a microscope?

Of course he could, but unless you told him you were a time traveler from the future, or the Germans had vastly superior secret technology they hadn't deployed yet, it would be so unlike the computers of his time that it probably wouldn't seem plausible that it was what he knew of as a computer.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#67

Post by DonHopkins » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 1:45 AM UTC

greggarious wrote: post #57

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just think about what you are saying. Even if you don't like Reid, you should know he didn't get to where he is by being an idiot. Does it make sense to make your most SHADY kickback deal based on Aliens??? Something that will get TONS of press coverage even with nothing fraudulent going on. If Reid was looking for a quid-pro-quo, he would be working with the Mega Resorts on the strip (MGM, Caesars, and even Republic…

>If Reid was looking for a quid-pro-quo, he would be working with the Mega Resorts on the strip (MGM, Caesars, and even Republican Steve Wynn). His decisions could massively benefit them, and sitting as an honorary member of their board could be profitable. Are honorary board members paid?

No, but they do tend to win a lot of jackpots in the slot machines.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#68

Post by sandworm101 » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 1:49 AM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #51

sushisource wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if you are willing to buy that they have something stored they can't identify, this is the most logical explanation. That said, I would still buy that there are probably almost no materials that we couldn't at least get a handle on. If they were truly incomprehensible it would likely be because they were the result of manipulating properties that we don't even know exist yet (higher dimensionality, etc, whateve…

A Pentium chip would probably seem like an incomprehensible material to Alan Turing (and not just because of the awful instruction set), because even though all the materials were known at the time, the design and fabrication techniques and mind-bogglingly fine granularity and complexity of how they are combined hadn't been conceived of yet. I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better…

Turing could see the recognizable structure and after probing it a while would quickly work out its function. He would understand all the bits and pieces and almost instantly speculate on how it was manufactured. Something alien would be more akin to showing Plato a laser pointer. Plato could spend a lifetime poking at it without learning much of anything. That's the sort of material they would need to lock up.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#69

Post by gonzo » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 2:02 AM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #67

greggarious wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If Reid was looking for a quid-pro-quo, he would be working with the Mega Resorts on the strip (MGM, Caesars, and even Republican Steve Wynn). His decisions could massively benefit them, and sitting as an honorary member of their board could be profitable. Are honorary board members paid?

No, but they do tend to win a lot of jackpots in the slot machines.

This would get Reid in trouble with his Mormon bishop and constituency.

Re: 'Alien Alloys' in The New York Times' UFO Story

#70

Post by jseip » Sat, Dec 23, 2017, 2:02 AM UTC

Sad to see this (clickbait) story come from SI. No substantive refutation of the evidence, just speculation and the truism that atomic components of any alloy can be identified, which of course they can. But alloys -and nanomaterials- can and do have extremely interesting properties independent of their chemical composition and these are often non-obvious. SI completely glosses over that point.