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See http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

A lot, I think.... http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

United States: 3.03 Trillion vehicle miles per year
Germany: 405.13 Billion vehicle mies per year

The only reason the fatalities are higher in the US is because we drive more. The fact that we drive 7x more than germans but only have 2x the number of fatalities is proof that Americans are better drivers than Germans.

United States: 3.03 Trillion vehicle miles per year
Germany: 405.13 Billion vehicle mies per year

The only reason the fatalities are higher in the US is because we drive more. The fact that we drive 7x more than germans but only have 2x the number of fatalities is proof that Americans are better drivers than Germans.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=39+times+the+area+manhattan+divided+by+area+of+a+football+field

OMG it is alive!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=39+times+the+area+manhattan+divided+by+area+of+a+football+field

60^-1 plutos per cubic light year aint much. More than 8 million blocks yes, but our universe is pretty empty too.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

If you've ever been stuck between two superclusters you know what I mean.

60^-1 plutos per cubic light year aint much. More than 8 million blocks yes, but our universe is pretty empty too.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=...
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

If you've ever been stuck between two superclusters you know what I mean.

Ok. "At the end of 2012, there were 76GW (91GW in 2013) of electricity generating capacity installed in China, more than the total nameplate capacity of China's nuclear power stations,[3] and over the year 115,000 gigawatt-hours of wind electricity had been provided to the grid.[4] In 2011, China's plan was “to have 100 gigawatts (GW) of on-grid wind power generating capacity by the end of 2015 and to generate 190 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of wind power annually” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

For comparison: "As of the end of 2013 the capacity was 61,108 MW.[1] This capacity is exceeded only by China.[2] Projects totaling 12,000 MW of capacity were under construction at the end of 2013, including 10,900 MW that began construction in the 4th quarter.[1]" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

Not bad on either account. Here is a comparison of USA to China on solar power. The trend is very exciting and probably scares the pants off of traditional utilities: http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

Here is a comparision of USA to China on wind power. Also an exciting trend: http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

It looks like China really needs to catch up on nuclear. If they start popping out nuclear plants like they do wind turbines we are in real trouble.

Ok. "At the end of 2012, there were 76GW (91GW in 2013) of electricity generating capacity installed in China, more than the total nameplate capacity of China's nuclear power stations,[3] and over the year 115,000 gigawatt-hours of wind electricity had been provided to the grid.[4] In 2011, China's plan was “to have 100 gigawatts (GW) of on-grid wind power generating capacity by the end of 2015 and to generate 190 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of wind power annually” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

For comparison: "As of the end of 2013 the capacity was 61,108 MW.[1] This capacity is exceeded only by China.[2] Projects totaling 12,000 MW of capacity were under construction at the end of 2013, including 10,900 MW that began construction in the 4th quarter.[1]" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

Not bad on either account. Here is a comparison of USA to China on solar power. The trend is very exciting and probably scares the pants off of traditional utilities: http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

Here is a comparision of USA to China on wind power. Also an exciting trend: http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

It looks like China really needs to catch up on nuclear. If they start popping out nuclear plants like they do wind turbines we are in real trouble.

Hmm, I don't know.

Suppose you build a tube (radius = 100 m) out of concrete where the water is 200 m deep. If I'm not mistaken you could then store up to this http://www.wolframalpha.com/in... much energy in watt-hours. That's not a lot in the big scheme of things. To store one terrawatt-hour you would need a tube that's 2.5 km in radius, or lots and lots of smaller tubes.

Unless I messed up my high school level physics calculation there.

Unless your figures are adjusted for population that would make it about a 1:1 ratio with the UK as the US is five times more populous. That and correlation != causation and all that.

I suppose it's going to be a while before we run out of alpha emitters. So the Wikipedia page is wrong then, when it says Helium is a finite resource. Last time I trust Wikipedia (yeah right:).

You said it slowly dissipates into space. That means the rate it leaves the atmosphere is low, so the rate it is replenished is low, and that's the limiting extraction rate.

According to this (that didn't take long), the rate Helium leaves the atmosphere is 50g/s, or 3e5 cm^3/s. The National Helium Reserve is 1e9 m^3. So, extracting all of the Helium from the atmosphere before it escapes, it would take 1e9 m^3 / (3e5 cm^3/s), or over 100 years to replace the reserves.

But extracting all of it is hopelessly unrealistic. I don't know, but it seems even 1% would be ambitious. So now we're looking at tens of thousands of years.

So either the national reserve is ridiculously large, or removing it from the atmosphere is not going to be a solution to the shortage. Right? Or am I missing something (else)?

1 cubic light year of water should weight thousands of times more than it, at least if there is enough oxigen in the universe to make that cube.

It boggles the mind that you can say "dick all would have happened (and that's mostly what did happen" regarding Fukushima. It's clear that the vast majority of the population of japan do not agree with you.

And 78% of the US population believes in angels. Popular vote does not determine reality. Moreover, your reading comprehension needs work again, as had you not cut my sentence off there and torn it out of context, you'd see that I was comparing it to the tsunami that drowned nearly 20000 people.
It is estimated that, assuming linear dose response, ultimately ~200 excess cancer deaths will result from Fukushima over the coming years, most of them in Japan. Are those inconsequential? Of course not. But keep it in context - on that day alone 20000 people drowned, millions have been displaced, their homes gone and vast tracts of shoreline and coastal cities and associated infrastructure have been utterly destroyed. If you look at it honestly, you have to conclude that living in a coastal city in Japan is vastly more dangerous than the occasional nuclear accident. But people aren't rational beings and the media know fear sells news, so guess which story you heard on TV?

Nuclear can do no wrong in your eyes. Are you aware that Fukushima is leaking at least 400 tonnes of highly radioactive water every day and it could be over 1000 tonnes a day, the ice wall the tried failed.

Care to elaborate on what "highly radioactive" is? We have ways to measure that. Also, where did you get that crazy figure. I couldn't find it anywhere on any reputable news source, only on some fear mongering blogs. Besides, while certainly not something to be dismissed as inconsequential, leaks of this nature into the ocean get diluted down beyond background levels pretty quickly.
Anyways, stop frequenting crazy conspiracy blogs and listening to professional nutjobs like Helen Caldicott or Arnie Gundersen, it'll rot your mind. Read some research on radiation effects and you'll see that it's far less problematic in the big picture than the media would like to make you believe.

(3c for wind because current PPAs are averaging 2.5c and the subsidy is 2.2c for the first ten years)

You're comparing current electricity sales prices for wind with LCOE for new nuclear power plants. Good job on comparing apples to oranges.

Hoover dam capacity: 352,000km3

Uh oh, massive reading fail on your part. The Wikipedia page actually says "28,537,000 acreft (35.200 km3)" - that's thirty-five-point-two cubic kilometers, so right out of the door you're wrong by 4 orders of magnitude - quite an achievement, and it only gets worse from here. In order to be able to use, say, 10% of the reservoir's capacity for energy storage (which is a big ask, considering it's been at ~2/3 capacity since the 90s due to droughts and extensive water use by the population), you need another reservoir (or set of reservoirs) of at least 10% the volume at a suitable lower position close to the dam. The nearest possible suitable reservoir is lake Mohave, unfortunately it's 50km downstream, so that ain't gonna happen. But let's imagine you find some way to blast the mountains right beyond the dam apart to create a nice little reservoir at 100m height difference (the dam itself is ~200m tall, but the water reaches all the way to its bottom and it's not always full, so we'll split the baby and use 100m average water height to simplify the calculation). So how much does that give you?
3.5 x 10^9 m^3 x 100m x 9.81m/s^2 x 0.75 (roundtrip efficiency) ~= 2.575 TWh
That'll give you the power to back up the US power supply for around 4 hours, or countries the size of Germany for about 2 days. Your goal is ~14 days, so you're still about an order of magnitude short. And that's using the largest water reservoir in America.

Dinorwig

Try plugging your trip into the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. Assume the most theoretically advanced engine exhaust velocity. What is the required initial mass for your rocket? How many multiples of the mass of the entire universe are required for your rocket?

what is the best search engine http://www.wolframalpha.com/sh...

I've been asking WolframAlpha this on an semiannual basis for years. I'm hoping it will rise to the level of "decent" some time and be able to provide an answer.

Wow! So...it's like Google?

Is it like Wolfram Alpha?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Google has some catching up to do.

Yah...

Google has some catching up to do.

Yah...

Seriously? archive.org? The direct link works fine for me.

Of course I say all of the above, but look at this.

Some questions are too easy for our weak AI underlings.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

Google has some catching up to do.

You forgot to divide by sqrt(2) in your erfc expression. The actual probability of IQ of a random human being over 197 is about 5e-11, which means about 0.35 humans should have it.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

Good point.

I'm risking being modded flamebait, but EU has more, not very much, but still more:

EU: $17.36 trillion

US: $16.97 trillion

Good point.

I'm risking being modded flamebait, but EU has more, not very much, but still more:

EU: $17.36 trillion

US: $16.97 trillion

Don't be mistaken by the name of Michael Crichton books. Those big dinosaurs were Cretaceous.

Your point still stands that there wasn't more oxygen in the atmosphere, but by the end it was about the same

"There was a lot more oxygen in the air back then. It wasn't just hotter. With the lower oxygen levels the huge dinos wouldn't do so well because they didn't have muscles for breathing like we do."

I think you are rather badly mistaken. There was actually much less oxygen in the atmosphere then.

Warning, link is not really a webpage, js required :( but you can search yourself for a better source.

France's overall price of electricity with tax is lower than Denmark's untaxed price, meanwhile emitting >30% less CO2 per capita with a very similar GDP per capita (to within 5%). If we limit our consideration to electricity, France has ~75% lower emissions per MWh generated than Denmark; and over 80% lower than Germany, the renewable powerhouse of the continent. In fact, they have so much zero-CO2 electricity that they can afford to offset the CO2 emissions from many of their neighbors via transmission. Also keep in mind that France has had this CO2 per kWh value for the better part of two decades because its power mix has always been ~70-80% nuclear and ~15% hydro (the rest being filled in with things like gas, hence why this CO2/kWh number isn't a flat zero).

The OECD average is so high mostly because of heavy polluters like the US, being the about 1/4 of the population of the entire OECD (not just the high-income bracket), but twice the per capita CO2 emissions of, say, Germany.

To preemptively dispense with the "we can't build it fast enough" criticism of nuclear, I again present the example of ... France. They initially started construction in 1974 and finished installing >50 reactors, hitting over 70% of generation capacity, within 15 years. So don't believe the renewable industry talking points of "it can't be done on time". It has been done before and it can be done again. If it had the political and popular will, Denmark could hit its CO2-reduction targets for electricity for 2050 some 20 years earlier.

1 trillion Bq is about 0.3g worth of Cs-137.

You wouldn't want to swallow it, but it's not going to be "cooking" anything.

Becquerels are tiny units. In the first 3 months after the accident 14 Quadrillion (1.5x10^16) becquerels were released. For comparison Chernobyl released 14 Quintillion (1.4x10^19) becquerels in total. (source).

Compared to that, 1 trillion (1.1x10^12) becquerels is a big improvement in rate of release and according to Wolfram Alpha represents around 300mg of Cs-137.

If for reasons of cultural sensitivity they wanted to stop the explosion at our smallest common* unit of time they would use 1 second plus expansion time. Now a soccer ball is 11 cm in radius. If we assume the expansion to that size is done at light speed it will arrive there in .00000000003669 seconds. So they'll stop the experiment at t-1..00000000003669 seconds. They must use very precise clocks.

*yes I know bout clock ticks, just go with it.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

$260,000. I'm sure Verizon loses that in the couch cushions every other month.

e^(i*(1/2)*2*piiiii)+(0.19915)=-0.80085

Whoops, I switched a sign there.

Only 56.5 acres on land, but 395 million acres downrange.

...over many decades. Cars are driven on billions of trips-- trillions of miles-- per year. Really, truly, there are differences of many orders of magnitude here.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

They're different numbers. Wolphram Alpha says 44oz of Pepsi is 503 Cal, which is 25% RDA. It also says it's 46% of the RDA for carbohydrates. RDA for sugar is 90g for women, 120g for men, and it contains 139g of sugar, so that's 115%-154%, depending on your gender. Putting that number on the cup ('this contains 150% of your recommended daily amount of sugar') would be even better.

According to WolframAlpha:

1.903 x 10^28

http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

No, we aren't talking about visible photons. The emissions from the supernova were neutrinos and a gamma ray burst, the visible light travels still separately because of the other things in space that it interacts with that are transparent to gamma energy and above. But, yes, over the very large distances between us and the supernova it was not just a few photons that traveled at less than c for some time, but the chance rose high enough that it was nearly all of the photons.

All EM radiation travels at the speed of light. High energy photons can, briefly, become virtual particle pairs that do not travel at the speed of light. The article author noted that the chance, over the time and distance between us and this specific supernova, was high enough that it would account for all of the gamma ray and higher energy photons traveling as particle pairs for some part of their trip and that time would account for the known time delay. This only applies to gamma rays above (i think) 511 keV (one of the gamma rays emitted in an electron-positron annihilation. might need to be 1022keV for a single ray to form both particles from a single photon; ask a particle physicist, not a programmer like me). According to Alpha, a 500nm green photon has only around 2eV. Violet light gets up to 3 eV and a little higher; still not enough to create any particle. E=mc^2, so you need a good deal of energy just to create a very tiny electron.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...
Only 1/64th blood relation.

Responded on the wrong comment and wasn't logged in.

Let's ignore all relativity and use kinematic equations
vf= vi + a*t
vf^2 = vi^2 + 2*a*d
So assuming our inital velocity at earth is 0
vf = a*t
vf^2=2*a*d
(a*t)^2 = 2*a*d
a^2*t^2 = 2*a*d
t^2 = 2*d/a
Discarding negative time
t = sqrt(2*d/a)
So let's call the halfway point our final destination and double it in the end.
2*t = 2*(sqrt(2*(1.216*10^22 m)/(9.81 m/s^2)))
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...
Now lets see how fast we'd have to be going
vf = vi + a*t
vf = 0 + (9.81 m/s^2)(2232 years)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...
So 1151 times the speed of light.
Good luck past the the speed of light, and all the of relativistic effects like Lorentz contraction...

Responded on the wrong comment and wasn't logged in.

Let's ignore all relativity and use kinematic equations
vf= vi + a*t
vf^2 = vi^2 + 2*a*d
So assuming our inital velocity at earth is 0
vf = a*t
vf^2=2*a*d
(a*t)^2 = 2*a*d
a^2*t^2 = 2*a*d
t^2 = 2*d/a
Discarding negative time
t = sqrt(2*d/a)
So let's call the halfway point our final destination and double it in the end.
2*t = 2*(sqrt(2*(1.216*10^22 m)/(9.81 m/s^2)))
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...
Now lets see how fast we'd have to be going
vf = vi + a*t
vf = 0 + (9.81 m/s^2)(2232 years)
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...
So 1151 times the speed of light.
Good luck past the the speed of light, and all the of relativistic effects like Lorentz contraction...

OK, this is going to be full of people saying climate change isn't real. They'll be saying that it's all a hoax by 99% of the world's scientists, or they're in cahoots, or they just want that sweet sweet grant money..... Then there are the folks who will say that those of us that respect scientists and science in general are just drinking the kool-aid.

To them, I give this link. http://whowhatwhy.com/2012/02/...

On top of that, you can see the stupid data yourself with a few seconds work. Here. I'll give you that too. http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

You can quite clearly see a rise in temp that started around the 1900s(almost looks like ... some sort of.... hockey stick....). You can quite clearly see which data is from historical data, which is from readings from instruments, and which is reconstructed from tree rings and the like.

I wonder what happened right around that time that was so different from all of our history before that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... There's even a lag time for a hysteresis effect, which one would expect.

In ending, I will paraphrase Dawkins when speaking of how EASY it would be to disprove evolution. All you have to do is find ONE modern fossil in the wrong era. Just one. One duck fossil next to a T-rex fossil would throw doubt on the whole thing. Just one. And it's never been found. It's EASY to disprove evolution. It's never been done, because it's right. Same thing here. Just show that tree ring growth doesn't correspond to temperature, and the entire thing goes out the window. Just show that C02 isn't a greenhouse gas. Just show that the global mean temperatures are NOT rising. Bring your data. It's so EASY to disprove, and you have nothing but FUD.

That is all.

So... why the !@#$ are you on Slashdot, News for Nerds? Cultural Groups tend to think alike. Film at Eleven...

Sigh. The Fuck'in hockey stick is accurate, and you can see the data he used with a simple search on Wolfram Alpha. It doesn't even take that much effort to look for yourself.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

You can see what is projection and what is actual data. You can see the names of all the different data sets. You can do research on them to figure out if they're accurate or not. It's not even hard. But... You keep believ'in that it's all a hoax by scientists for that big flush grant money.....

http://imgur.com/n4XNJ

If I'm doing my math right here, that comes out to ~1,900km/s at the outter edges of the platter. That's about 0.6% of the speed of light.

Wolfram Math ...Divide by pi and sqrt to get radius, multiply by 2pi to get circumference, multiply by RPM, divide by 60 to get it in seconds... Correct?

So if it's a third the size of Manhattan at rest, how big is the outer edge at full speed?

If I'm doing my math right here, that comes out to ~1,900km/s at the outter edges of the platter. That's about 0.6% of the speed of light.

Wolfram Math ...Divide by pi and sqrt to get radius, multiply by 2pi to get circumference, multiply by RPM, divide by 60 to get it in seconds... Correct?

At 1000 bits per square inch, to get 6TB you need about a third the size of Manhattan.

According to Wolfram Alpha at least:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...