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As is usual whenever electric cars comes up, it's time for some mythbusting.

No, they don't increase pollution and overload the grid; precisely the opposite (more specifically, the only pollutant that goes up is particulate matter, and it's displaced away from population centers. NOx and SOx remain the same, CO2 drops, and CO and VOCs are nearly eliminated; the grid gets to make use of its surplus off-peak capacity and, with smart charging, can eliminate the supply/demand fluctuations that are currently so troublesome).

Yes, they are far more energy efficient than their alternatives.

No, modern batteries don't take forever to charge. The phosphates, titanates, modern spinels, and others can all charge in 5-20 minutes, given sufficient power.

Yes, fast chargers exist. The SAE J1772 standard covers Level 3 charging at hundreds of kilowatts. Yes, chargers as strong as 250kW exist. Yes, there's already a network of 60kW Level 3 chargers in place around Oahu. Install one yourself.

No, the batteries are not toxic. Current li-ions are only mildly toxic, and this only because of their cobalt-based cathode. The phosphates and spinels eliminate this cathode in favor of nontoxic elements.

No, lithium is not running out.

Yes, the batteries last a long time. The phosphates last 7000+ gentle cycles, having only 20% capacity loss after 1000 abusive cycles. The titanates? 20,000 cycles. Accelerated aging tests suggest LG Chem's packs will last 40+ years in typical use.

Yes, both rapid charging stations and EVs make financial sense.

Hmm, did I miss any?

I'd like you to defend your "minimal environmental damage" statement at the very beginning. If you had a magic wand, and we were all driving electric cars tomorrow, what would the additional load be on the electric grid, and how much more pollution would that load cause when fed (mostly) by coal-fired power plants?

How about a DOE study conducted by PNL? We could convert 84% of our existing vehicles over to PHEVs running mostly on electricity without building a single new power plant. Even though the extra power would be mostly coal, the only pollutant to rise would be particulate matter. CO2 would drop by a third, NOx would stay roughly the same, SOx woudl stay roughly the same, and CO and VOC pollution would be virtually eliminated. To top it all off, the pollution would be displaced from "ground-level in densely populated areas" to "out of the cities and emitted at altitude".

Here's another study for you. Check out the graph.

I contend that energy consumption is energy consumption, and moving everyone from hydrocarbon burning to burning coal isn't really fixing anything in the long-run.

I contend that not only is it far easier to clean up the grid than to clean up individual tailpipes, but that the very basic fact that power plants are far more efficient than individual ICEs makes even coal cleaner. And I'm backed up by peer review. And you?

Wrong spinel; there are several (just for manganese alone, there's LiMnO2, LiMn2O4, Li2MnO3, and combinations thereof). This spinel is the primary one being investigated for automotive applications. Read more about the differences and Argonne's work on the subject (they have their own version). For LG Chem's cells, accelerated aging tests suggests a lifespan of 15 to 40 years. When referring to automotive batteries, when someone says "spinel", it's cells like LG chem's that they're talking about.

Look, before you start spouting off, educate yourself. If you had to look up the terms on these most basic issues of battery chemistry, you're way out of the loop and need to get in the loop before you debate the topic. It's not like these are esoteric details; we're talking about the fundamentals.

The phosphates probably are the most widely known. These are what powered, among many other different vehicles, the Killacycle electric motorcycle, with its 0-60 in less than 1 second. Check into them -- A123 reports over 7,000 normal cycles on them, while independent testing by people on the RC Groups forum (they're becoming popular for RC aircraft) put them through over a thousand incredibly abusive cycles (3-4C charge, 6-8C discharge, sometimes all the way down to 0V) and only lost 20% capacity. And, heck, while you're at it, check out the titanates. They're even more impressive, IMHO, than the phosphates and spinels. AltairNano has done over *20,000 cycles* on a single pack. They're so stable that they're being used for grid load balancing, where the cells go from drawing 2MW from the grid to feeding 2MW to the grid, over and over whenever demand or supply fluctuates, to give peaking plants time to come online.

Here's a wikipedia section of the section of the electricity transmission page related to losses. It gives you the math, but does explain things well. The paper that I read about the topic is here, but isn't free.

Note that I'm talking about marginal losses during periods of peak demand.

In other words, when transmission lines are at or near capacity, you lose more each time you increase the amount of energy in the line. In New York, they are dealing with it by reducing peak demand in the summertime through financial incentives. Commercial customers are offered an electricity discount in exchange for agreeing to curtail their electricity usage during power emergencies.

So when the Hindenburg burned, why didn't it explode?

A wavefront of about 100 feet per second on an unmixed fuel-air burn? That's *darned fast*. It only looks slow because the Hindenburg was the size of the Titanic. http://www.oldbeacon.com/beacon/airships/images/zmc-2-5.jpg">Another perspective.

That's *fast* -- way faster than batteries.

Given that 5-10 minutes is pretty standard for automotive fast charging (phosphates, titanates, spinels, etc), when you factor in the time to get off the highway, to get to a station, to connect, to disconnect, to pay, to get back to the highway, and get back up to speed, an extra couple minutes is hardly a relevant difference. I certainly wouldn't pay 5-10 times as much for my fuel and do ~3 times the environmental damage in order to save a couple minutes. Who would? :And about efficiency: Where are those numbers from?

I gave you a peer-reviewed paper; read it yourself. I can give you a dozen more that'll tell you the exact same thing. Li-ion batteries are nearly lossless. Electrolysis and fuel cells are quite lossy.

And in terms of efficiency, what are they even measuring? efficiency from battery to drive train? from power source to battery?

Are you incapable of reading? The paper is linked, right above. Need it linked a second time? Here you go. Do you not know what "well to wheel" means? That means measuring the efficiency all the way back from the source of the energy used in the power plant, all the way to the torque imparted by the vehicle's wheels.

If peer-review isn't good enough for you, I can show you where you can buy these things yourself and test them yourself. Get, say, some A123 batteries from DeWalt power tool packs or any other LiP from the open market, a Manzanita Micro charger, and an Azure Dynamics Force Drive. The batteries are 96-99% efficient (depending on how fast you charge them), the charger is ~93% efficient, and the drivetrain is 85-90% efficient (actually a bit low for an EV). The power going to the charger coming from the US grid has an average transmission efficiency of 92.8%. What part of this are you having trouble with, so I can give you a dozen references on the subject?

The funny thing? The efficiency is atrocious and the fear quite legitimate.

As for the fear: check out what NASA has to say about hydrogen. Some excerpts:

Ignition:

"Hydrogen-air mixtures can ignite with very low energy input, 1/10th that required igniting a gasoline-air mixture. For reference, an invisible spark or a static spark from a person can cause ignition."

"Although the autoignition temperature of hydrogen is higher than those for most hydrocarbons, hydrogen's lower ignition energy makes the ignition of hydrogen-air mixtures more likely. The minimum energy for spark ignition at atmospheric pressure is about 0.02 millijoules."

----

Mixtures:

"The flammability limits based on the volume percent of hydrogen in air (at 14.7 psia) are 4.0 and 75.0. The flammability limits based on the volume percent of hydrogen in oxygen (at 14.7 psia) are 4.0 and 94.0."

"Condensed and solidified atmospheric air, or trace air accumulated in manufacturing, contaminates liquid hydrogen, thereby forming an unstable mixture. This mixture may detonate with effects similar to those produced by trinitrotoluene (TNT) and other highly explosive materials"

"Explosive limits of hydrogen in air are 18.3 to 59 percent by volume"

"Flames in and around a collection of pipes or structures can create turbulence that causes a deflagration to evolve into a detonation, even in the absence of gross confinement."

(For comparison: Deflagration limit of gasoline in air: 1.4-7.6%)

Leaks:

"Leakage, diffusion, and buoyancy: These hazards result from the difficulty in containing hydrogen. Hydrogen diffuses extensively, and when a liquid spill or large gas release occurs, a combustible mixture can form over a considerable distance from the spill location."

"Hydrogen, in both the liquid and gaseous states, is particularly subject to leakage because of its low viscosity and low molecular weight (leakage is inversely proportional to viscosity). Because of its low viscosity alone, the leakage rate of liquid hydrogen is roughly 100 times that of JP-4 fuel, 50 times that of water, and 10 times that of liquid nitrogen."

----

It also covers how hydrogen likes to pool under roofs and overhangs, and that buildings containing hydrogen or hydrogen pipelines should have roofs designed to be blown away, as well as extreme caution on spark suppression. It also talks about how hydrogen can enter pipes and follow them to their destinations, and pool there.

As for efficiency, the efficiency of a hydrogen economy is atrocious. Don't take my word for it; listen to peer review. Check out the convenient chart. Electric cars have three times the efficiency of hydrogen cars from a given power source. Even if your power is renewable, this tremendous efficiency difference can't be ignored. This means, for hydrogen, three times the land covered in solar cells, three times the dammed up rivers, three times the coastline covered in wind farms, and so on.

Hydrogen is a complete waste of time. A fuel cell stack will weigh down and take up space in a typical vehicle as much as a modern li-ion battery stack, only give similar range, cost ten times as much, have less room for price improvement in fuel cell costs versus battery costs (platinum playing a big role in this), have a shorter lifespan (again, compared to modern automotive li-ions like phosphates, spinels, titanates, etc, not laptop batteries), more temperature sensitivity (yes, you read that right; modern li-ions are often good to -30 or less

The funny thing? The efficiency is atrocious and the fear quite legitimate.

As for the fear: check out what NASA has to say about hydrogen. Some excerpts:

Ignition:

"Hydrogen-air mixtures can ignite with very low energy input, 1/10th that required igniting a gasoline-air mixture. For reference, an invisible spark or a static spark from a person can cause ignition."

"Although the autoignition temperature of hydrogen is higher than those for most hydrocarbons, hydrogen's lower ignition energy makes the ignition of hydrogen-air mixtures more likely. The minimum energy for spark ignition at atmospheric pressure is about 0.02 millijoules."

----

Mixtures:

"The flammability limits based on the volume percent of hydrogen in air (at 14.7 psia) are 4.0 and 75.0. The flammability limits based on the volume percent of hydrogen in oxygen (at 14.7 psia) are 4.0 and 94.0."

"Condensed and solidified atmospheric air, or trace air accumulated in manufacturing, contaminates liquid hydrogen, thereby forming an unstable mixture. This mixture may detonate with effects similar to those produced by trinitrotoluene (TNT) and other highly explosive materials"

"Explosive limits of hydrogen in air are 18.3 to 59 percent by volume"

"Flames in and around a collection of pipes or structures can create turbulence that causes a deflagration to evolve into a detonation, even in the absence of gross confinement."

(For comparison: Deflagration limit of gasoline in air: 1.4-7.6%)

Leaks:

"Leakage, diffusion, and buoyancy: These hazards result from the difficulty in containing hydrogen. Hydrogen diffuses extensively, and when a liquid spill or large gas release occurs, a combustible mixture can form over a considerable distance from the spill location."

"Hydrogen, in both the liquid and gaseous states, is particularly subject to leakage because of its low viscosity and low molecular weight (leakage is inversely proportional to viscosity). Because of its low viscosity alone, the leakage rate of liquid hydrogen is roughly 100 times that of JP-4 fuel, 50 times that of water, and 10 times that of liquid nitrogen."

----

It also covers how hydrogen likes to pool under roofs and overhangs, and that buildings containing hydrogen or hydrogen pipelines should have roofs designed to be blown away, as well as extreme caution on spark suppression. It also talks about how hydrogen can enter pipes and follow them to their destinations, and pool there.

As for efficiency, the efficiency of a hydrogen economy is atrocious. Don't take my word for it; listen to peer review. Check out the convenient chart. Electric cars have three times the efficiency of hydrogen cars from a given power source. Even if your power is renewable, this tremendous efficiency difference can't be ignored. This means, for hydrogen, three times the land covered in solar cells, three times the dammed up rivers, three times the coastline covered in wind farms, and so on.

Hydrogen is a complete waste of time. A fuel cell stack will weigh down and take up space in a typical vehicle as much as a modern li-ion battery stack, only give similar range, cost ten times as much, have less room for price improvement in fuel cell costs versus battery costs (platinum playing a big role in this), have a shorter lifespan (again, compared to modern automotive li-ions like phosphates, spinels, titanates, etc, not laptop batteries), more temperature sensitivity (yes, you read that right; modern li-ions are often good to -30 or less

I'm tall too (6'4"), and so my BMI will tend to be higher. And yes I might not live as long as someone who is of average height, statistically speaking.
In my original post, I made some clear distinctions between obesity and BMI. I never said that a high BMI meant someone was fat. Read my post carefully please.

Height has been inversely related to longevity too - e.g. shorter people may live longer.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T99-47W4M47-2&_user=4423&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000059605&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=4423&md5=6af865f928fb1bc2c65ff391841ad674

Again, it looks like it benefits you, ON AVERAGE, to be average. Not too tall, short, heavy or thin. I'm not calling anyone fat just because they have a high BMI. It's body mass index, not Body Fat index, so it's not measuring % fat.

Please see the following:

• advanced integrated wastewater pond systems, Tuba Ertas, Victor Miguel Ponce
• ScienceDirect - Water Science and Technology : Methane fermentation, submerged gas collection, and the fate of carbon in advanced integrated wastewater pond systems (abstract only, sorry. But it's just the full paper about the first link.)

In short, this is not an insurmountable problem, and the solution will produce algae and methane.

Now, this is very true.

In fact, there was very little research on the causes of the hole. Research basically informed that there was a hole (but with no previous history) and this paper (I don't remember the authors).

A brief search on the subject reveals this

we conclude that the Principle of Equivalence between particles and antiparticles holds to a level of 6.5, 4.3 and 1.8 x 10-9,

Just a little bit better than 1%.

In virtually any energy transfer system that gets used a significant amount, initial costs are dwarfed by lifetime consumption. What the other poster is trying to explain to you is that the operation consumption of any hydrogen-based propulsion system is about three times higher than an equivalent battery-electric system due to all of the losses. And these aren't just "Oh, we'll figure away around it" losses; most of them are "laws of physics" losses. You can't get around Gibbs free energy, for example.

To go from electricity to hydrogen, you have to have small inverter losses, significant losses in electrolysis, compression (sometimes multiple time), small hydrogen lost through leaking (it leaks through virtually anything; not to mention, it destroys ozone), major fuel cell losses (or worse, hydrogen ICE losses), and finally small electric motor losses. In an EV, you have small transmission losses, small inverter losses, almost nonexistent storage losses (in both li-ion and its variants and in Zebra-style batteries), and small electric motor losses.

Unless you can change the laws of physics, it's going to remain this way. Here's one analysis of many on the subject for you. Check out the graphs. They don't focus heavily on electric cars, but where they do cover them, you can see the difference.

Triple my bodymass in grams of protein is 726.75 grams of protein.

Sorry. 2.5x the "high protein" diet.

Back to your enumerated points (I'm focusing on your ridiculously-off-the-charts-high-protein/low carb/low fat diet)

Do you have Inuit genetics? Whoops.
Do you eat large amounts of seal blubber and other fats like the Inuit? Whoops.
Do you eat the mere ~100 grams of protein and ~200 grams of carbohydrate that the Inuit eat per day? Whoops.
Do you have Maasai genetics? Whoops.
Do you eat the very high-fat diet of the Maasai -- so high fat that a common treat for kids is fat boiled in water? Whoops.
Do you have Bantu genetics? Whoops.
"Northern" and "Southern" indians are not technical terms. Whoops. Did you mean to refer to a particular study or were you pulling that out of a hat?
Do you have any native american genetics from any group? Whoops.
Are you of the mistaken notion that people of different genetic makeups process foods the same? Big whoops. (ever heard of "lactose intolerance"? "Lactose tolerance" is an evolutionary adaptation developed in cultures whose diet included dairy. Cultures adapt to their native diets)
Have there been a ridiculously large number of studies on the negative effects of saturated fats? Whoops.

My average training week includes 30mins of weight lifting upon waking, 1hour of training for lunch, and 1 hour of weights/football/throwing everyday for 4 weeks.

That's it? You eat 600 grams of protein per day and that's all you do? For God's sake!

Look, you're free to destroy your body against the recommendations of all major medical organizations who've commented on high protein diets (and by "high protein", they're typically talking about 1g/lb, not 2.5g/lb). But don't try and pretend that it's somehow natural or good for you.

Oy, where to start with this one?

If they are at all awake they will either realize that the whole world is designed around the idea of one thing eating another.

1) Simply untrue. By your logic, autotrophs don't exist. Unless you call absorbing light, hydrogen sulfide, methane, or whatnot "one thing eating another".
2) Moral equivalency. You are declaring eating any form of life as equivalent to any other. The ~99%** of people who find the concept of raising humans for meat abhorrent would disagree with you.

** -- I did specify 99% because on occasion, I have found people who find nothing wrong with this. Thankfully, they're rare.

Let's focus a little more on #2. What is so abhorrent about eating other humans to most people? Usually, it's some variant on the destruction of the self. Call it a soul, call it a conscience, self-awareness, whatever you will. Raising a sentient being and deliberately killing them for their meat when you don't need to is generally seen as abhorrent.

So, what's sentience? One ancient standard is the ability to reflect on one's own thoughts. Well, that standard certainly doesn't hold up as an argument against eating meat now that we know that even rats do that. So what's the cutoff point? Problem solving or reasoning ability? Chimps, depending on the task, often have the reasoning ability of a 4-6 year old. Parrots, 2-6 year old, depending on the task. Pigs, same general range. None of them have anywhere near the sort of *communication* skill that humans have, but communication is hardly a reason not to eat something, now isn't it?

From my perspective, the simpler the mind, the less of a moral issue there is. Sure, even plants have at least some forms of stimulus response; every cell in existence does. But none of it approaches the complexity in external stimulus-processing as a neural net. A change in light may cause guard cells to open or close a stoma, but you're just looking at a predictable biochemical cascade. That stoma will never, for example, "learn" not to keep opening and closing if you shine a flashlight on and off at it. It is this spark of intelligence in animals, particularly higher animals, that I find tragic to snuff out needlessly.

In a choice between the life of a pig and a human, which do I side with? The human, undeniably, indisputably, every last time. I don't fault in the least, for example, innuit cultures that traditionally survived on sealing; what choice, exactly, do they have? But in this world, I have all of the choices under the sun. I can choose to eat whatever the heck I want. Having that choice, I eat a vegetarian diet.

Of course, I know very well that not everyone will agree with me on this. But that's hardly the only reason. Most people have no clue how extreme of an impact eating meat has on the environment. A staggering, mind-boggling big impact. 1/3 of the world's non-ice-covered land is dedicated, directly or indirectly, to growing meat. Despite programs to abate it, we're losing 1,250 square miles of rainforest in Brazil per month to cattle land. Meat growing releases more greenhouse gasses than transportation (and no, we're not just talking about methane from ruminants; the energy aspect is the big portion, since it takes many pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat), plus huge amounts of water pollution (3/4 of the water pollution in the US, for example), as well as breeding antibiotic resistance.

Oy, where to start with this one?

If they are at all awake they will either realize that the whole world is designed around the idea of one thing eating another.

1) Simply untrue. By your logic, autotrophs don't exist. Unless you call absorbing light, hydrogen sulfide, methane, or whatnot "one thing eating another".
2) Moral equivalency. You are declaring eating any form of life as equivalent to any other. The ~99%** of people who find the concept of raising humans for meat abhorrent would disagree with you.

** -- I did specify 99% because on occasion, I have found people who find nothing wrong with this. Thankfully, they're rare.

Let's focus a little more on #2. What is so abhorrent about eating other humans to most people? Usually, it's some variant on the destruction of the self. Call it a soul, call it a conscience, self-awareness, whatever you will. Raising a sentient being and deliberately killing them for their meat when you don't need to is generally seen as abhorrent.

So, what's sentience? One ancient standard is the ability to reflect on one's own thoughts. Well, that standard certainly doesn't hold up as an argument against eating meat now that we know that even rats do that. So what's the cutoff point? Problem solving or reasoning ability? Chimps, depending on the task, often have the reasoning ability of a 4-6 year old. Parrots, 2-6 year old, depending on the task. Pigs, same general range. None of them have anywhere near the sort of *communication* skill that humans have, but communication is hardly a reason not to eat something, now isn't it?

From my perspective, the simpler the mind, the less of a moral issue there is. Sure, even plants have at least some forms of stimulus response; every cell in existence does. But none of it approaches the complexity in external stimulus-processing as a neural net. A change in light may cause guard cells to open or close a stoma, but you're just looking at a predictable biochemical cascade. That stoma will never, for example, "learn" not to keep opening and closing if you shine a flashlight on and off at it. It is this spark of intelligence in animals, particularly higher animals, that I find tragic to snuff out needlessly.

In a choice between the life of a pig and a human, which do I side with? The human, undeniably, indisputably, every last time. I don't fault in the least, for example, innuit cultures that traditionally survived on sealing; what choice, exactly, do they have? But in this world, I have all of the choices under the sun. I can choose to eat whatever the heck I want. Having that choice, I eat a vegetarian diet.

Of course, I know very well that not everyone will agree with me on this. But that's hardly the only reason. Most people have no clue how extreme of an impact eating meat has on the environment. A staggering, mind-boggling big impact. 1/3 of the world's non-ice-covered land is dedicated, directly or indirectly, to growing meat. Despite programs to abate it, we're losing 1,250 square miles of rainforest in Brazil per month to cattle land. Meat growing releases more greenhouse gasses than transportation (and no, we're not just talking about methane from ruminants; the energy aspect is the big portion, since it takes many pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat), plus huge amounts of water pollution (3/4 of the water pollution in the US, for example), as well as breeding antibiotic resistance.

The stupid .... it burns..... seriously, whoever modded this as informative is as clueless as the author of this post. The opening line tells all you need to know: "I don't need to RTFA to point out how this conclusion does not bare up to even superficial examination." The person dismissing this scientific study does not even know the difference between bear and bare and yet you value his opinion on the on the effect of pollution on pollinators? The study is published in the journal Atmospheric Environment http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/13522310 RTFA - then draw you conclusions.

It's a pretty big topic to summarise in a Slashdot posting, and you'd be a LOT better off doing your own research, if you're genuinely interested. But...

Basically, stock options are a company's way of convincing employees to take less real wages. Paying in stocks has some advantages, but one in particular is that they don't show up as a business loss. The downside is that the more shares out there, the lower the EPS (Earnings Per Share), and therefore the lower the value of each share. Microsoft has been playing this game for a long time, and had more than 20% of it's shares optioned out this way. About 5 years ago, shareholders started to get antsy about the constant dilution of their holdings, so MS restarted the buybacks.

There's also a Business Week article http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_04/b3968099.htm which might be an easier read.

It doesn't look like that'll be the only problem facing MS either. Yahoo subsidiary Alibaba is bailing now the buyout looks likely.
http://www.secinvestor.com/2008/03/19/Alibaba+Wants+Out+Of+Microsoft+Deal+YHOO+MSFT.aspx

I'd like to have me a few of those failures every decade or so.

I don't think Microsoft would agree with you. If you look at W3Counter's stats, MS Operating systems have been losing about half a percent market share per month for the past 6 months.

Now, I've given you the benefit of doubt and responded politely in this post, but frankly I'd be much happier if you stopped stalking me. I'm finding your attention a bit creepy. Thanks.

While this is the first I've heard of lawsuits, the subject of a possible catastrophe due to a new particle accelerator is not a new idea. This has actually been a cycle that's happened a couple of times, IIRC, usually when someone mentions the possibility of black holes (or even AdS-CFT black hole analogues) being created in a new particle accelerator. Scientists have actually thought about this and published a number of papers on the topic. Here are two that came up easily via Google Scholar:

• Will relativistic heavy-ion colliders destroy our planet?
• How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe?

The latter is freely available on the arXiv. From the conclusion:

We have shown that the relatively late formation time of Earth implies that life on our planet is highly unlikely to be annihilated by an exogenous catastrophes during the next 109 years. In the case of the doomsday scenar- ios studied in the Brookhaven report [2], our bound also applies to hypothetical anthropogenic disasters caused by high-energy particle accelerators (risks 1-3). This holds because the occurrence of exogenous catastrophes, e.g., resulting from cosmic ray collisions, places an upper bound on the frequency of their anthropogenic counter- parts.

In short, similar events occur naturally due to highly energetic cosmic rays, so, even if we assume we know almost nothing about the physics of the hypothetical catastrophic event, we can infer from teh fact we're still here that such a catastrophe is very unlikely. Based on this conclusion, and the fairly wide acceptance of that conclusion amongst experts, I think it's safe to say this lawsuit is without merit.

Current best is a little worse than -300F

Completely inaccurate. The error in your thinking is that power plants are far more efficient than ICEs, and the other steps don't lose much at all.

Your pretty graphic shows 80% efficiency because it's based on a flawed assumption: that the energy cost of loading up your car with its energy source is the same.

The "pretty graph" wasn't created by me; its source is linked. It is from the peer-reviewed "Well to wheel study of passenger vehicles in the Norwegian energy system". It covers electricity generated by non-renewable sources, and just like the DOE study conducted at PNL, determines that it's much better for the environment than an ICE.

Finally: every single point on your precious "fourth IPCC WG1 report" has been thoroughly debunked.

So now it's *my* fourth IPCC WG1 report? Apparently I run the IPCC now. Amazing, that! Hey, where's that "point by point" debunking? Given that the IPCC WG1 merely *summarizes the existing papers*, it really needs to be a point-by-point debunking of each of the several thousand papers. Even if it was a debunking of the summarizing of the papers, it'd still have to be several thousand pages long. How did this amazing piece of debunking manage to sneak through the cracks? :)

Phoenix is widely accepted by the EV community as being significantly overpriced, thanks to their use of AltairNano batteries. If you want a 5 seater, the similar-stat MiEV is a much more economical option, at $24k.

The main range limiter at this point isn't the batteries themselves; it's the relatively high cost of automotive li-ion batteries due to small-scale production. Five years from now, the same price vehicle will buy you double the range without any battery improvements. Yet the battery improvements do keep lining up in the lab, and we're talking about 2-3 times the energy density from at least five different battery chemistries (just the ones I've tallied up so far, and I've hardly read all of the research coming out). The odds that *none* of them will make it to commercialization seems implausible to say the least. Give it ten years for that, and you're looking at EVs that cost around the same ($25k or so) and have gasoline-equivalent range and are fast charge capable, release far less CO2 and other pollutants, cost around a penny per mile in energy costs (more or less depending on the vehicle and your rates), and cost a small fraction as much in maintenance. Automotive li-ions are rated for 10+ years, and it's not like they suddenly "die" then; in practice, they last the lifespan of the car. Apart from the batteries, the only other moving parts are the drive shaft from the electric motor, the wheels, and occasionally a belt or small cooling fan. 90% of the complexity of the engine and all pollution controls on the vehicle itself disappear. There's generally not even a transmission because electric motors perform well over a wide torque range.

Oh, and yes, we already have the power infrastructure (study commissioned by the DOE) -- everywhere except the pacific northwest.

For a lot more info, read this.

"There is no evolutionary pressure to be resistant to it, because there is no survival rate."

That doesn't make any sense. The selection inherent in biological evolution doesn't hinge on mere survival. Evolution actually hinges on reproduction and passing genes on to the next generation. Even if there is only partial resistance or temporary resistance anyone with such genes will, theoretically, have a higher liklihood of survival to yield offspring, and those genes will therefore become more common in the population over time. And there is evidence for such genes, although their origin might not have anything directly to do with HIV.

Humans have been dealing with polymorphic viruses of a variety of types for as long as they have been around. Resistance is simply rare, and HIV is an especially variable pathogen. It's not like there is some magical exception when it comes to HIV that makes immunity impossible to develop or to become more common in a population (over a long period of time).

"Same as there's no build-up in antibiotic-resistant bacteria when medication is taken correctly and appropriately."

That's not exactly true. They often still evolve resistance (which is why it is a VERY bad idea to knock off the antibiotics early -- you'll let the population with those mutations re-expand), but as long as the population gets knocked down sufficiently the body takes care of the rest, including the few anti-biotic resistant ones that evolve, and often times the variations that yield resistance make those bacteria more susceptable to other attacks anyway. As is the often the case, the mutations that confer resistance may not be optimal in other situations.

Another example of this for humans is the gene for sickle-cell anemia which confers partial resistance to malaria, but has the side-effect of yielding the sickle-cell anemia disease when the individual has both genes. In non-malaria areas the gene is a disadvantage and gets selected out.

The reality is that anybody making any confident statement about fluoride - positive or negative - is speaking way beyond the evidence. Fluridisation is a very contentious issue, and tends to be debated in a highly polarised, politicised manner, with possibilities stated as certainties and much wailing and gnashing of mottled, slightly less caried teeth. In 1999 the UK Department of Health had the York University Centre for Reviews and Dissemination do a systematic review of the evidence on the benefits and/or harm of fluridisation. There's not much of significance since.

Their most important result wasn't about fluride, it was about the studies - almost to the last one, they were methodologically flawed. The ones which met the minimum quality threshold suggested that there was maybe, possibly, something like a 14% increase in the number of children without dental caries in areas with fluoridated water, but the variance was enormous (some studies even had negative results). So if someone says there's overwhelming evidence that fluridation works, they're talking out of their ass. There may be a small gain to be had, but this isn't established scientifically.

Then there's the potential negatives. Fluoridation gives about one eigth of people fluorosis (discoloured teeth). There are other factors too, though these are less well established, such as a Taiwanese study which found a high incidence of bladder cancer in women from areas where the natural fluoride content in water was high. It's an early result, and the authors of the study even note that there's potentially a statisitcal problem with the study, but the possibility remains. I've heard this result stated as fact.

Obviously our bodies makes TRIM22 to fight against retroviruses already, and it's not good enough. I know that interferon, which activates TRIM22, was an early drug in the fight against HIV.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WXR-4KCGHS0-3&_user=18704&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000002018&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=18704&md5=f922f45405809276e69864f01d98ef4c

According to this study, TRIM22 is one of most ineffectual TRIM proteins.

If an air car is only 1/5th the efficiency of a gasoline car it is still going to result in fewer emissions

No, it is not, at least with respect to CO2. Typical thermal power plants in existance are 30-40% efficient. Modern plants are 40-50% efficient. A gasoline engine is ~20% efficient. 1/5th of 35% (or even 45%) is way below 20%. If you're talking about emissions other than CO2, however, you have a point (at least on some of them). Power plants are worse for NOx and SO2 than ICEs, but a lot better on HCs and CO. Particulate matter is about the same. Also, power plants can displace emissions away from densely populated areas.

If you want to talk efficiency, compare it to an EV where the source of the electricity is the same and thus the efficiencies are directly comparable in terms of environmental friendliness.

Gladly -- and I do that over on my site. Electric cars are incredibly energy efficient; after any generation losses (which are shared by hydrogen and air cars), they lose almost nothing -- 7-8% in transmission, similar in AC/DC conversion, a fraction of a percent in charge and discharge (if using li-ion batteries; with NiMH, it's much higher), and ~10% in the motor. Here's a study you might find interesting. It doesn't cover air cars, but it covers many other types of vehicles.

Mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) are often used as "feeder cells" in human embryonic stem cell research. However, many researchers are gradually phasing out MEF's in favor of culture media with precisely defined ingredients of exclusively human derivation. Further, the difficulty of exclusively using human derivation for media supplements is most often solved by the use of "defined media" where the supplements are synthetic and achieve the primary goal of eliminating the chance of contamination from derivative sources.

Fibroblasts were isolated from tail-tip biopsies of newborn (3-8 days of age) mice as well as from embryos and expanded in fibroblast medium

Newsflash - crops appear different in the IR spectrum, as well as their reflected visible spectrum. Just because your eyes can't see the difference doesn't mean that a computer can't.

Several problems with your claims. First, the energy of a barrel of oil is around 1.35 barrels of ethanol. That means using corn as feedstock, you are getting a bit less than 2 barrels of ethanol from a barrel of oil. Second, we ignore that a heavy ethanol blend doesn't burn as efficiently for its energy content. Third, the economics of corn ethanol are broken. We're converting an expensive barrel of oil into lower value ethanol.

Fourth, there are far better plants for conversion to ethanol, including sugarcane, marijuana, switch grass, and algae. Fifth, growing the corn would take up a huge amount of land. Assuming generously that you can get 10 barrels of petroleum equivalent per year from an acre of corn, then you would need around 340 million acres (which apparently is roughly a third of the US's land area devoted to agriculture). Then taking into account that it takes at least 80% of that yield to grow the corn and process the ethanol, then you're looking at a prohibitive amount of corn. Sugarcane is the best by far, but you're still looking at an impressive amount of land area devoted to ethanol production.

I'd prefer that there be no farm or oil subsidies at all. Let the market sort it out. And yes, bring on the oil refineries. The US's resistance to new oil refineries is a stupid source of problems for the US economy. Keep in mind also that there's plenty of land available for oil refineries. There's no reason to stick one in a suburb or crowded urban area.

As far as your solutions to the problems (frogs? Are you joking), none of them are nearly close to answering energy needs

Other than that it take energy to make DDT what does energy have to do with mosquito control? Oh yea, mosquitoes can breed in the stagnant water behind dams. Oh, and they can also breed in water pools below dams. Guess that only goes to show how much I know, imagine how humans can increase the mosquito population.

Hmm, fair point.

I got 20% efficiency for 4 stroke gasoline engines, vs 85% for brushless DC electric motors.

Actually there's an article here that quotes the density of the new battery as 3000Wh/kg.. 12200 as an energy density for old Lithium Ion batteries is completely bogus by the way.

So
12,200*0.2 = 2440
vs
3000*0.85 = 2550

Not as good as you said since the battery still has 4x worse energy density but you're right that engine efficiency makes up for it.

Hmm, hydrofoil sounds interesting. One of the problems with that is control. You're multiplying 2 very tricky control problems by each other. Some sailing speed records were set by hydrofoils though. Hydrofoils need a certain minimum speed to get out of the water, and it takes a lot of power to lift the ship up to get into the lower power requirement hydrofoil planing. I doubt that a ship that large has enough power to get it up on plane. Maybe use air injection? (see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V4F-4B4YVX3-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=2c70f5a8d0ade5705385e73f96d9f542)

TFA: "Tovey said his collaboration with Seeley demonstrated that the communication provides a "beautiful" feedback loop to prevent one flower patch from being abandoned while another is depleted."

Not that they seem to have ways to resolve aspects of the tragedy of the commons, no ...

"Honey-bee mating optimization (HBMO) algorithm for optimal reservoir operation" ( link)

They help to improve otherways too.

CC.

since we won't have to do uranium extraction from seawater for at least 4,000 years,

I'll make a wild guess

a very cheap solution will be found by then if we really needed fission power at that time.

so nuclear is subsidized

I'm sure. who is it profitable for, stockholders and anyone who can use electricity to make a profit

Smarter ways and cleaner ways to produce power or not, doesn't matter, the choice has been made for mankind, the 21st century is the century of fission power. u-235 at 3-4% PWR for now and more nifty things later.

Yet you want me to buy into the nuclear dream of all the races of the world holding hands together, walking as one, singing KOM-BY-YAH unified by the prosperity of the nukleia age, power too cheap to meter...

Exactly - every doctor learned this back in medical school; atropine is a temporary fix (anti-cholinergic) and pralidoxime allows regeneration of AChesterase to some degree so your body can naturally remove it. It's a little bit of a juggling act, and needs monitoring for levels. Most (civilian) MDs see something like this with pesticide spray (farmer inadvertently sticks his hand in liquid "nerve gas" organophosphate bug spray, etc.) not chemical attacks, but we all get training in this (standard emergency medicine situation).

The new drug is also an oxime -- you can look at the compound and it "looks" like two pralidoxime molecules joined together with a short linking segment (compare this to this. The goal is potency -- I've never personally injected pralidoxime, but I understand its effects on regeneration are limited.

Interestingly enough, in the otherwise healthy individual atropine would "just" cause your heartrate to skyrocket. If I were Nick Cage in that scene, I would go ahead and inject it into a vein, not the heart. Intra-cardiac injection can be used, but only as a last, last resort (e.g. the person is about to go unconscious, they are the only ones who can deliver the medication, no IV to use / no way to reliably otherwise introduce the drug, etc. etc.) It makes for dramatic movie moments, though!

Actually, I did RTFA [...]

While it is not impossible, I feel justified to be skeptical that you've read a study that only became available online today and hasn't been in print so far, found time to perform a serious evaluation of it, and, most critically of all, get an early post to a Slashdot story about it.

(My apologies if you actually are a public health professor or grad student that received pre-prints to this article months ago and just happens to frequently comment on Slashdot stories about tech topics.)

Do you have anything that actually contradicts those criticisms other than, "hey, everyone always says that"?

You're missing my point: you should be testing your preconceptions by looking for those. It's not my job to think for you.

These guys seem to think it's 100km/sec.

First, we need the spontaneous formation of a membrane that can selectively remove calcium. Calcium at higher concentrations is cytotoxic and will aggregate proteins/nucleic acids. Calcium regulation is therefore tight and ubiquitous in living things. See article.

Given such a membrane and some short DNA polymers, we also need to translate this random "information" into something meaningful. The current mechanism is: DNA -> RNA -> PROTEIN. This requires RNA polymerase or, at least, some ribosome-like enzyme to make a protein product. These enzymes are usually proteinaceous themselves--catch 22. We also need a DNA polymerase for replication if we wish to propagate our newly acquired "information".

I am more interested in how this spontaneous aggregation of DNA crystals could play a role in living cells.

The summary:"Although 'alien' microbes might look like ordinary bacteria, their biochemistry could involve exotic amino acids or different elemental building blocks so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes."

Here's the thing: there's unlikely to be a discrete line in the sand, beyond which life occurring on Earth can be called alien. In humans, we have DNA that transcribes into RNA and then translates into protein. Viruses just use RNA, dispensing with DNA, so they have a different elemental building block. Even in humans there are different building blocks: the RNA->protein translation for our main DNA has a different code than our mitochondrial DNA. Likewise, there are many bacteria that use amino acids not seen in the rest of the animal and plant kingdoms, and extreme thermophilic bacteria use ether-linked phospholipids (as do more common bacteria), that act like rivets holding the cell membrane together, rather than the bilipid membranes other bacteria, plants, and animals use. And once you start looking at metal-ion-based coenzymes, you can't stop finding weird and unusual things, especially if it involves moving ions or specific molecules around. Once you get past things that have either fur or flowers, there are more exotic chemistries than normal ones, it seems like.

No, it's really true. Type 2 diabetics NOT produce enough insulin. This is apparently an effect that occurs later in the disease progression and hence ordinary science articles only mention the insulin resistance aspect.

Here is a link to the real article,

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B7MFH-4PT7RDC-B&_user=10&_coverDate=10%2F03%2F2007&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=842a09e850c1253f0206f93a68320da0

Well, it goes like this.

That you just posted is a piece of pseudo-scientific dreck from all I can tell. I had a course on MHD in grad school, the theory of magnetic reconnection most certainly can account for the speed of energy release in solar events. It's also an important problem in plasma instability in tokamaks. Searching on google scholar didn't find any peer-reviewed papers by plasma physicists refuting magnetic reconnection.

Perhaps they were confused by Biskamp's 1986 paper on the Sweet-Parker model failing to achieve fast reconnection that was cleared up in a 1992 paper by Priest and they missed that Biskamp himself seems to accept fast reconnection as possible in his 1994 paper?

This isn't my area, but my Ph.D. is in applied and computational math, and I've spent a great deal of time solving first-order hyperbolic problems where characteristics cross. (In my context, level set methods where the zero contours can split and/or merge.)

For a hyperbolic problem like this, you'll want to be careful. Since the waves have variable propagation speeds, there's a possibility for shock formation. (characteristics can cross) Think of Burger's equation as a nice, tangible first-order analog. In such a case, it will be important to choose a numerical method that satisfies some kind of entropy condition to handle the shock. Similar things have been encountered in level set methods, where you solve an equation of the form ft + V |grad(f)| = 0, where V is the variable speed of an interface that's represented as the zero contour of f.

Since second-order wave equations are so important in physics, you may want to check out the Journal of Computational Physics. You should probably also try the Journal of Scientific Computing.

As for visualization, you'll probably want to check out the "industry standards" Matlab and Mathematica. You could plot the time evolution of level surfaces of your wave equation, for instance. As for other softare, I'd generally advise pulling together what you can find at netlib, although more cutting-edge stuff may require you to roll your own C/C++ or FORTRAN. But any of that stuff will be faster than running in Matlab or Mathematica, and it will take a whole lot less memory.

Best of luck, and have fun! :-) -- Paul