The distinction is between ice caps on land vs. on the ocean. The arctic ice is already in the ocean, so melting it won't raise sea levels. But the majority of antarctic is is on land (same as Greenland), so melting that ice would raise global sea levels.
I reckon this is more about convenience than efficiency. Look at the popularity of "brick" batteries to keep your smartphone going all day. This is the part I found interesting:
the company has developed a treatment that turns [hydrogen] into a sold form that's safe to handle but is still useful as a fuel
So apparently their business model is to sell packets of "hydrogen-goop" in your local 7-11. Hey, as long as it's reasonably safe for the user and the environment, go for it. Who knows? It might actually take off.
Yeah, except gerrymandering is the real reason why the GOP held the house. Dems actually got more votes nationwide for Congress in 2012. Even so, the Dems still held the Senate, and gained eight seats in the House... hardly a "resounding mandate" for the GOP's crusade against Obamacare.
I assume the GP was referring to the fact that the ACA is based very closely on the Massachusetts healthcare plan signed into law by Gov. Romney in 2006. And he/she is correct in noting that a sizable chunk of people who "do not approve" of the ACA are actually disappointed because it didn't go far enough. Remember, nationwide, there was well over 70% support for the so-called "public option", but that got tossed out before the "discussion" even began.
Why bother putting them in space? Even if you could beam the power to earth at 90% efficiency, you'd have trouble making a viable business case to do it. For the price of one unit in space you could have at least half a dozen on the ground. If you're worried about intermittency, install some on-site storage, such as the liquid metal batteries coming out next spring (with backing from Khosla Ventures). And if your're near the ocean, use a water-cooled solar concentrator to combine PV electricity generation with water desalination, like these guys in Switzerland are doing.
I reckon the "real" purpose of the program is to develop a mach-10 air-breathing aircraft, not to put 3-ton payloads in LEO. We already have many options for the latter, and they're getting cheaper all the time. (If that were the goal, they would use off-the-shelf tech to build a slower plane with a bigger rocket.) But hey, I'm not complaining, I'd love to see that kind of aircraft get developed. If they need an "excuse" for funding, that's fine with me.
Yes, obviously... but is that enough, by itself, to trigger a negative response? I don't think anyone knows the answer to that question. Dogs are the only species that can "read" human facial expressions like we do ourselves... no other species even comes close (not even chimps). And we know that a good deal of this perception is purely visual, so it's a fair question how much "weirdness" a dog would tolerate.
Good point. I was also thinking they should do the same experiment with "realistic" looking robots. Some of these can be just lifelike enough to be kinda creepy. I suspect that dogs might be just as creeped-out by them as most humans are, but it would be interesting to see the results. Perhaps someday we can add the "Rover Test" to the Turing Test as a measure of robotic realism.
"You can take the bus in 12 minutes, or I can get you a car. Going by car will be 18 minutes faster."
The first time I read this it put me into a spontaneous time warp. But I got it on the second try, so I should be back in a few minutes ago.;-)
Seriously though, I agree this is the future we're heading toward. I just wonder how long it will take before driverless/autopilot tech becomes mandatory. Then how long after that before "manual" driving becomes illegal? I'm all for safety and convenience, but a lot of us also enjoy driving just for fun. Will that eventually become "quaint" and old fashioned... sorta like home-brewing your own beer?
OTOH, as much as I enjoy driving, most of the time it's more of a hassle than relaxation. I'd just as soon let the car drive me to work, so I can focus on my Egg McMuffin and coffee, etc., and only "manually" drive on the weekends, going to the beach and such.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time.
Adjuncts are also handy for keeping your payroll costs down. Economist Richard Wolff mentions this often in his lectures. It's the same trend toward part-time work that shows up in a lot of industries lately.
My suspicious side notes that this study in TFA is rather convenient for academic administrators who might want to "enhance the institution's bottom line" by reducing the number of tenured faculty. But I'm sure there's no connection, and it would never be used like that.;-)
That's my impression too, "like Facebook only not as good." Perhaps I'd feel differently if I had more friends who use it, but of the few dozen people I "follow" on Twitter, only a handful are people I actually know (and all of them are also friends on FB). As for keeping up with breaking news, FB is pretty good for that too.
Coincidentally, an old friend who lives in the USA just wrote a book called "Twitter In 30 Minutes," so maybe that will shed some light. He just posted (on FB of course) that it should be released in a week or two.
I'm still mystified by Twitter. I have an account, but have yet to find anything useful about it. Every time I check the page, it's just a jumble of random stuff, some of it is good/interesting, but most is not. I guess I must be doing it wrong, but I haven't a clue why it is popular. Can someone here enlighten me?
Of the languages I've studied, Mandarin is by far the easiest one to learn
Well, yes and no. Yes, the grammar is simple when compared with Russian or Greek, but then so is English grammar. In both cases, I'd say that simplicity is deceptive, because so much of the complexity manifests at a higher level. A good example of this is "phrasal verbs" in English. Absorbing all the distinctions between "pick up", "pick on", "pick at", "pick out", "pick over", etc. can be a real struggle for ESL students.
Similarly, in Chinese you have to deal with a lot of vocabulary with classical roots, such as chengyu and random quotes from Tang poetry or Confucian analects, many of which can be pretty opaque in meaning, even if you see them written and know all the characters you're looking at.
And, having spent some time doing Chinese->English translation, I can tell you that written Chinese can be quite challenging, in part because the grammar is so lax. It's not at all uncommon to find whole paragraphs consisting of one "sentence"... meaning they the only "." appears at the end. Even though it "makes sense" in Chinese, it's almost an art form to figure out how to sensibly split this mess into grammatically correct English sentences.
Most Chinese words are either one character or the newer style which are compounds of 2 or 3 of the older characters.
This confirms my suspicion that you're still in the early stages of learning Chinese. Although "theoretically" the single-character words must have predated the multi-character words, that transition happened so long ago that it is lost to history. I've been speaking Chinese since the 80s, and have lived in Asia for more than two decades, and I've never heard a Chinese speaker refer to "the newer style compounds of 2 or 3 characters."
Sorry, I don't mean to rain on your parade. I totally understand your fascination with Chinese, and I hope you'll continue to pursue it. But if you think it's always going to be as "easy" as it is now, you're in for a surprise at some point.;-)
Chinese speakers in Taiwan use the "zhuyin fuhao" (aka: "bopomofo") system for keyboard input. Whereas pinyin is a purely phonetic alphabet, zhuyin is more of a phonemic alphabet (similar to a syllabary, though technically it isn't one). This has the beneficial side effect of being somewhat more efficient in terms of keystrokes.
For example, the word [] "zhuang" takes 7 keystrokes in pinyin (including a tone designation). Using bopomofo, it takes only four: [] (number 5), [] (letter j), [] (";:" key), plus [spacebar] to indicate 1st tone.
Hmph! After all that trouble converting unicode to HTML, it doesn't display in preview.:-( Oh well, I reckon you get the idea anyway...
If you're curious, the codes above are: #12563; #12584; #12580; and #35037;
Well, some of it does, but how much depends on lot of factors such as temperature, humidity, insolation, shade, etc.. And some of it will also get oxidized into CO2.
Yes, it's ironic (and frustrating) that apparently "green" policies can often lead to undesirable results. Thus, it's nice when somebody comes up with an idea that solves the problem without them.
There are lots of hopeful things happening. It would be nice if we would get past the left/right rhetoric and focus on the things we can all agree on. Unfortunately, "agreement" doesn't have enough "drama" to attract eyeballs to TV screens. Thus we end up with a spoon-feeding of "breaking news" every day with only a tenuous relationship to reality.
But why bother thinking about the subject when you can just make stupid declarations like "efficiency is arbitrary.
Nice way to "respond" without actually "answering" the point.
most of the people in the world wouldn't die at such an early age if their local economies were more efficient
Dude! What are you smoking, and where can I get some? Seriously, I'm still trying to work out WTF point you're trying to make here...
Obviously the "efficiency" of any system depends on how you define the boundaries of that system, and those boundaries are necessarily arbitrary. (Where do you draw the line?...your house?...your town?...your country?...the earth?...the solar system?...the galaxy?) It seems to me that the Parent is defining "efficiency" as how much energy it takes (on average) to have a decent life in "my" country. And he claims a significant advantage over us 'Murcans in this regard.
But rather than stepping up to defend the home team, you launch into a totally irrelevant rant about markets?...wait, what??
But the A/C is huge. My bills run $40-$50 7 months a year, $75 1 month a year, and $130 4 months a year. The difference is entirely A/C.
How much insulation do you have? How much time/money have you invested in retrofitting your house for passive-solar energy savings?
Amory Lovins lives in an energy positive house at 9,000ft elev. in the Rockies, and regularly grows bananas in his living room atrium. (And no, his house was not more expensive than a "normal" house to build.)
$130 4 months a year
Let's round everything out and just call that $100 per month "A/C penalty" for living in the USA, or $400 per year. Last I checked, that $400 would buy you a thousand sq/ft of insulation.
And that is just scratching the surface... There are so many things you can do, such as:
1. Install awnings to shade windows in summer. (and/or plant deciduous trees over windows) 2. Install rooftop solar (whether PV cells or water heating, doesn't matter, as long as you shade the roof and harvest the insolation) 3. Install a thermal mass storage/buffer system of some kind. (there are numerous options... water, stone, earth shelter, etc.. pick what works best for your region) 4. If you're in a cold-winter region, look into a rocket mass heater as an alternate/backup system. (one guy in New England claims to have heated his home on nothing but junk mail last winter.)
The "trick" is to understand the energy flows in your own home and take control of them for your own benefit.
Yes, this is something Amory Lovins has been talking about for several years. However, I reckon these other storage solutions will see faster "uptake" than electric cars in general. Even with Tesla running flat-out, triple-shift production, it will take a while before they start to seriously impact the overall electricity grid. Meanwhile, simple, cheap solutions like Ambri and Lightsail will make energy independence available to the broader public before Elon ever gets his "affordable" 3rd-gen EV on the market.
This, in turn, will have a salutary effect on the "fitness" of our energy grid.
Most of Europe (and much of the world) pays more for electricity than the average American. So what? The fact remains that in much of the USA it is already economical to install a solar system. And as time goes by, that trend is going to continue.
But the real game changer will be the advent of affordable, grid-level storage, which is just around the corner. In particular, Khosla Ventures is backing two novel technologies that are expected to hit the market around the end of next year. One is the liquid metal battery that came from a research project at MIT. The other is a new twist on compressed air storage that uses a type of water carburetor to achieve isothermal compression. Both of these offer cheap, simple, reliable electricity storage.
As the grid becomes more distributed and "islandable" it will naturally be more robust. And storage is a key enabler to make that happen.
Slashdot Mirror
The distinction is between ice caps on land vs. on the ocean. The arctic ice is already in the ocean, so melting it won't raise sea levels. But the majority of antarctic is is on land (same as Greenland), so melting that ice would raise global sea levels.
I reckon this is more about convenience than efficiency. Look at the popularity of "brick" batteries to keep your smartphone going all day. This is the part I found interesting:
the company has developed a treatment that turns [hydrogen] into a sold form that's safe to handle but is still useful as a fuel
So apparently their business model is to sell packets of "hydrogen-goop" in your local 7-11. Hey, as long as it's reasonably safe for the user and the environment, go for it. Who knows? It might actually take off.
Yeah, except gerrymandering is the real reason why the GOP held the house. Dems actually got more votes nationwide for Congress in 2012. Even so, the Dems still held the Senate, and gained eight seats in the House... hardly a "resounding mandate" for the GOP's crusade against Obamacare.
I assume the GP was referring to the fact that the ACA is based very closely on the Massachusetts healthcare plan signed into law by Gov. Romney in 2006. And he/she is correct in noting that a sizable chunk of people who "do not approve" of the ACA are actually disappointed because it didn't go far enough. Remember, nationwide, there was well over 70% support for the so-called "public option", but that got tossed out before the "discussion" even began.
Gotta post a link to the classic "helium scene" from Woody Allen's "Broadway Danny Rose"...
Why bother putting them in space? Even if you could beam the power to earth at 90% efficiency, you'd have trouble making a viable business case to do it. For the price of one unit in space you could have at least half a dozen on the ground. If you're worried about intermittency, install some on-site storage, such as the liquid metal batteries coming out next spring (with backing from Khosla Ventures). And if your're near the ocean, use a water-cooled solar concentrator to combine PV electricity generation with water desalination, like these guys in Switzerland are doing.
Expect to see more and more "un-natural" sequestration soon, as knowledge of manage intensive rotational grazing spreads among the peoples who inhabit damaged range lands. Allan Savory describes the process (along with some pretty amazing before & after photos) in this TED Talk: How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change.
Definitely an "idea worth spreading."
I reckon the "real" purpose of the program is to develop a mach-10 air-breathing aircraft, not to put 3-ton payloads in LEO. We already have many options for the latter, and they're getting cheaper all the time. (If that were the goal, they would use off-the-shelf tech to build a slower plane with a bigger rocket.) But hey, I'm not complaining, I'd love to see that kind of aircraft get developed. If they need an "excuse" for funding, that's fine with me.
Just got lucky. But feel free to mod me down, off-topic...
Sorry, I always wanted to do that. ;-)
my first FP?
Yes, obviously... but is that enough, by itself, to trigger a negative response? I don't think anyone knows the answer to that question. Dogs are the only species that can "read" human facial expressions like we do ourselves... no other species even comes close (not even chimps). And we know that a good deal of this perception is purely visual, so it's a fair question how much "weirdness" a dog would tolerate.
Good point. I was also thinking they should do the same experiment with "realistic" looking robots. Some of these can be just lifelike enough to be kinda creepy. I suspect that dogs might be just as creeped-out by them as most humans are, but it would be interesting to see the results. Perhaps someday we can add the "Rover Test" to the Turing Test as a measure of robotic realism.
"You can take the bus in 12 minutes, or I can get you a car. Going by car will be 18 minutes faster."
The first time I read this it put me into a spontaneous time warp. But I got it on the second try, so I should be back in a few minutes ago. ;-)
Seriously though, I agree this is the future we're heading toward. I just wonder how long it will take before driverless/autopilot tech becomes mandatory. Then how long after that before "manual" driving becomes illegal? I'm all for safety and convenience, but a lot of us also enjoy driving just for fun. Will that eventually become "quaint" and old fashioned... sorta like home-brewing your own beer?
OTOH, as much as I enjoy driving, most of the time it's more of a hassle than relaxation. I'd just as soon let the car drive me to work, so I can focus on my Egg McMuffin and coffee, etc., and only "manually" drive on the weekends, going to the beach and such.
It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time.
Adjuncts are also handy for keeping your payroll costs down. Economist Richard Wolff mentions this often in his lectures. It's the same trend toward part-time work that shows up in a lot of industries lately.
My suspicious side notes that this study in TFA is rather convenient for academic administrators who might want to "enhance the institution's bottom line" by reducing the number of tenured faculty. But I'm sure there's no connection, and it would never be used like that. ;-)
That's my impression too, "like Facebook only not as good." Perhaps I'd feel differently if I had more friends who use it, but of the few dozen people I "follow" on Twitter, only a handful are people I actually know (and all of them are also friends on FB). As for keeping up with breaking news, FB is pretty good for that too.
Coincidentally, an old friend who lives in the USA just wrote a book called "Twitter In 30 Minutes," so maybe that will shed some light. He just posted (on FB of course) that it should be released in a week or two.
I'm still mystified by Twitter. I have an account, but have yet to find anything useful about it. Every time I check the page, it's just a jumble of random stuff, some of it is good/interesting, but most is not. I guess I must be doing it wrong, but I haven't a clue why it is popular. Can someone here enlighten me?
Of the languages I've studied, Mandarin is by far the easiest one to learn
Well, yes and no. Yes, the grammar is simple when compared with Russian or Greek, but then so is English grammar. In both cases, I'd say that simplicity is deceptive, because so much of the complexity manifests at a higher level. A good example of this is "phrasal verbs" in English. Absorbing all the distinctions between "pick up", "pick on", "pick at", "pick out", "pick over", etc. can be a real struggle for ESL students.
Similarly, in Chinese you have to deal with a lot of vocabulary with classical roots, such as chengyu and random quotes from Tang poetry or Confucian analects, many of which can be pretty opaque in meaning, even if you see them written and know all the characters you're looking at.
And, having spent some time doing Chinese->English translation, I can tell you that written Chinese can be quite challenging, in part because the grammar is so lax. It's not at all uncommon to find whole paragraphs consisting of one "sentence"... meaning they the only "." appears at the end. Even though it "makes sense" in Chinese, it's almost an art form to figure out how to sensibly split this mess into grammatically correct English sentences.
Most Chinese words are either one character or the newer style which are compounds of 2 or 3 of the older characters.
This confirms my suspicion that you're still in the early stages of learning Chinese. Although "theoretically" the single-character words must have predated the multi-character words, that transition happened so long ago that it is lost to history. I've been speaking Chinese since the 80s, and have lived in Asia for more than two decades, and I've never heard a Chinese speaker refer to "the newer style compounds of 2 or 3 characters."
Sorry, I don't mean to rain on your parade. I totally understand your fascination with Chinese, and I hope you'll continue to pursue it. But if you think it's always going to be as "easy" as it is now, you're in for a surprise at some point. ;-)
Good luck!
Chinese speakers in Taiwan use the "zhuyin fuhao" (aka: "bopomofo") system for keyboard input. Whereas pinyin is a purely phonetic alphabet, zhuyin is more of a phonemic alphabet (similar to a syllabary, though technically it isn't one). This has the beneficial side effect of being somewhat more efficient in terms of keystrokes.
For example, the word [] "zhuang" takes 7 keystrokes in pinyin (including a tone designation). Using bopomofo, it takes only four: [] (number 5), [] (letter j), [] (";:" key), plus [spacebar] to indicate 1st tone.
Hmph! After all that trouble converting unicode to HTML, it doesn't display in preview. :-(
Oh well, I reckon you get the idea anyway...
If you're curious, the codes above are: #12563; #12584; #12580; and #35037;
That's why I included Wikipedia links too. You can get a pretty good precis in text form from there.
A log in contact with dirt becomes more soil;
Well, some of it does, but how much depends on lot of factors such as temperature, humidity, insolation, shade, etc.. And some of it will also get oxidized into CO2.
Yes, it's ironic (and frustrating) that apparently "green" policies can often lead to undesirable results. Thus, it's nice when somebody comes up with an idea that solves the problem without them.
For example, Allan Savory has a proven idea that, if adopted by even 50% of the industry, could sequester all the CO2 emitted since the industrial revolution in less than a decade. And, by the way, it has potential to mitigate the problem of brush fires too.
Another example: Amory Lovins, who has a plan to wean us off oil within the next 40 years, led by business, driven by profit.
There are lots of hopeful things happening. It would be nice if we would get past the left/right rhetoric and focus on the things we can all agree on. Unfortunately, "agreement" doesn't have enough "drama" to attract eyeballs to TV screens. Thus we end up with a spoon-feeding of "breaking news" every day with only a tenuous relationship to reality.
[sigh!] Have another soma...
But why bother thinking about the subject when you can just make stupid declarations like "efficiency is arbitrary.
Nice way to "respond" without actually "answering" the point.
most of the people in the world wouldn't die at such an early age if their local economies were more efficient
Dude! What are you smoking, and where can I get some? Seriously, I'm still trying to work out WTF point you're trying to make here...
Obviously the "efficiency" of any system depends on how you define the boundaries of that system, and those boundaries are necessarily arbitrary. (Where do you draw the line? ...your house? ...your town? ...your country? ...the earth? ...the solar system? ...the galaxy?) It seems to me that the Parent is defining "efficiency" as how much energy it takes (on average) to have a decent life in "my" country. And he claims a significant advantage over us 'Murcans in this regard.
But rather than stepping up to defend the home team, you launch into a totally irrelevant rant about markets? ...wait, what??
But the A/C is huge. My bills run $40-$50 7 months a year, $75 1 month a year, and $130 4 months a year. The difference is entirely A/C.
How much insulation do you have? How much time/money have you invested in retrofitting your house for passive-solar energy savings?
Amory Lovins lives in an energy positive house at 9,000ft elev. in the Rockies, and regularly grows bananas in his living room atrium. (And no, his house was not more expensive than a "normal" house to build.)
$130 4 months a year
Let's round everything out and just call that $100 per month "A/C penalty" for living in the USA, or $400 per year. Last I checked, that $400 would buy you a thousand sq/ft of insulation.
And that is just scratching the surface... There are so many things you can do, such as:
1. Install awnings to shade windows in summer. (and/or plant deciduous trees over windows)
2. Install rooftop solar (whether PV cells or water heating, doesn't matter, as long as you shade the roof and harvest the insolation)
3. Install a thermal mass storage/buffer system of some kind. (there are numerous options... water, stone, earth shelter, etc.. pick what works best for your region)
4. If you're in a cold-winter region, look into a rocket mass heater as an alternate/backup system. (one guy in New England claims to have heated his home on nothing but junk mail last winter.)
The "trick" is to understand the energy flows in your own home and take control of them for your own benefit.
Yes, this is something Amory Lovins has been talking about for several years. However, I reckon these other storage solutions will see faster "uptake" than electric cars in general. Even with Tesla running flat-out, triple-shift production, it will take a while before they start to seriously impact the overall electricity grid. Meanwhile, simple, cheap solutions like Ambri and Lightsail will make energy independence available to the broader public before Elon ever gets his "affordable" 3rd-gen EV on the market.
This, in turn, will have a salutary effect on the "fitness" of our energy grid.
Most of Europe (and much of the world) pays more for electricity than the average American. So what? The fact remains that in much of the USA it is already economical to install a solar system. And as time goes by, that trend is going to continue.
But the real game changer will be the advent of affordable, grid-level storage, which is just around the corner. In particular, Khosla Ventures is backing two novel technologies that are expected to hit the market around the end of next year. One is the liquid metal battery that came from a research project at MIT. The other is a new twist on compressed air storage that uses a type of water carburetor to achieve isothermal compression. Both of these offer cheap, simple, reliable electricity storage.
As the grid becomes more distributed and "islandable" it will naturally be more robust. And storage is a key enabler to make that happen.