Even better, the GP's values are wrong. The sun has a power density of around (3.846E26 Watts / 1.4E27 m^3) = 0.27W/m^3. Humans are thus nearly 10,000x more energetic than the sun per cubic metre
"If someone can't afford a car, they should go first" - I love the insinuation that the only people who don't have a car are those that can't afford one. I quite often forget that Musk is an American but every now and then, he makes it super obvious.
Exactly. I know the UK is hardly subject to hurricanes but most of our low voltage cables are buried. It's only the high voltage (tens of kV) that are often above ground and even then, a lot of these are buried.
Whilst your electric might be free, running a 100-200W PC instead of 6W router is a little overkill for most people. The best solution, of course, is to be allowed to put new firmware on your existing router;-)
The reason it's in the current news (at least on the BBC) is that the BBC have recently published the salaries of many of their top earners for the first time. The discussion has arisen because many are earning in the millions and are effectively paid from the public purse (well, licence fee but all the same in the end...).
People subscribe to it because most internet in the UK is via ADSL or variants which is delivered through the POTS system. Most often now, there is fibre to a nearby street cabinet with copper only for the last couple of hundred metres.
Cable is available but is only used by 20% of the population or so as it's often more expensive or comes with unwanted TV services.
Yes there will. So many of the options for a post-Brexit agreement with the EU (the "Norway model" comes to mind) rely on us accepting free movement and EU legislation in order to retain access to the common market. The catch is that we will be subject to the same regulation without a hand in saying how it is made or implemented.
I appreciate some of your points. I had to look up how many days it rains here (not easy to guess) and it turns out to about 30% of days (reference).
I can't give stats for everyone in the country but in my house, with 2 people, we each cycle a lot and take a shower every day with at least one bath a week. We do a couple of loads of laundry and all the normal washing/cooking/toilet flushing you expect. We collect rain for usage in the garden but importantly we have plants adapted to the local climate. We use 60L/person/day i.e. less than one sixth of a Californian. If I had a moderate pool (say 5x3x2m i.e. 30,000L, 8000 US gallons or 24 milliacre feet), that means that I could drain it and re-fill it completely every 2 months and still come in under a Californian usage. Surely most pools don't need much maintenance water provided they are covered when not used?
It's great isn't it? Google says 1 acre foot is around 1.23 megalitres (reference) or 1230 m^3.
The more astounding bit once you do the conversion is that according to TFS the average individual Californian living in a 5 person household uses well over 300 litres per person per day (reference). I'm from the UK, a place with over twice the rainfall of California, and yet our typical usage per person in a five person household is only 100L/person/day (reference). Even our "high usage" households only use 135L/person/day, only just over 1/3 of the *typical* California usage. What are they doing with it all?
I know the Californians like to blame agriculture for using the majority of the water (true) but these stats are just examples of the monumental waste of water that occurs, both industrially and residentially. If these waste problems were solved, I'd imagine there wouldn't be a shortage of water at all.
<title>Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters</title>
However, since many browsers, especially those on Windows, dropped the title bar for more viewable screen area, it's often not shown. It does flash up for a few hundred milliseconds in the tab text in FF on Windows but is rapidly replaced with "Slashdot".
It does sound like a badly done odd-one-out list, doesn't it?
"For 10 points, which of these are people who may actually be able to cure your cancer? Surgeons, homeopaths, oncologists, Chinese doctors, nutritionists and spiritual healers."
Random off-topic trivia: £ on a standard British keyboard layout is reached by shift+3 - all the more confusing when referring to the pound sign with someone using an American keyboard layout as the convention is to call the # symbol a pound sign and it too is shift+3.
The argument Stallman uses against this is that we, as voters, have no way to know whether the code actually running on the machine in front of us is the same as the open code that we have reviewed. Ultimately there will come a time when a very select number of people are responsible for compiling the code and putting it on the machine. If those people have a vested interest in some outcome or other then they could tamper with the machine and no-one would know any better. In fact, we would all be thinking it was a secure system because of the "open" nature of it. These things aren't like our PCs, we can't just install VotingMachine From Scratch and be done with it.
That's why most startups don't do real business anymore: their model is to hype an idea and be bought up early, by a large corporation with its own protective patent portfolio.
Topical case in point: Facebook buys Instagram photo sharing network for $1bn. Instagram was launched in 2010, has 13 employees and has just been bought out at a minimum rate of around $30 million per employee per year. That's an astonishing yield and all without actually taking the business to the full term.
They're brilliant aren't they? They crop up everywhere now. The BBC uses them with gay abandon and whilst I'm sure that they're just using them in their traditional sense (i.e. to delineate a quote) the results can often be hilarious.
As per the post above, you can use longurl.org to see where it goes (in this case, here) without ever clicking on it. I'd not seen the service before but can see how it would be handy in situations like this where you are unsure whether to trust the link.
I did wonder about the exact temperature required and naturally assumed it was a carefully controlled centigrade temperature. Of course, it's just another case of mis-conversion from one unit to another. 1382 F is the exact conversion from 750 C, a value only given to 2 sf. 1400 F would be a more appropriate conversion if you have to convert it at all.
Some quick back of the envelope calculations: FTFA, each tile generates "2.1 W" per step. If we assume a typical step time of 500ms based a pace of 120 steps per minute this could be interpreted as about 1.05J captured per step.
The casing is made from stainless steel which required about 53 MJ/kg for production in 2004. If we assume a tile casing mass of 2kg that is 106 MJ required for the steel production alone.
The shopping centre may be open around 10 hours a day with perhaps 20 seconds between each step averaged over a typical day. This is 1800 steps per day at 1.05J per step giving a total of 1890 J captured per day. Assuming 100% efficiency and a never-closing shopping centre, this gives an energy breakeven for the steel alone of around 56000 days or 153 years.
I know that other factors are in play such as the potential to raise awareness of environmental issues but this is ridiculous. I noticed that the award that the guy is in the running for is sponsored by Shell and part of me suspects that they know that these things are crap but want to be seen to promote something like this which appeals to the public and appears "green".
This is something I really need to look at in more detail. If you try astrophotography with a lot of digital cameras, you'll find that the H-alpha wavelength (around 650nm, red) is greatly diminished by the filter. However, an IR LED (peak wavelength about 960nm) shows up brightly in digital photos taken on the same camera. It seems more sensible to include a short-pass filter as they are cheaper to manufacture but perhaps they are band-pass? Just a thought; may be totally off here.
I think your best one was to say that the average rainfall is around 6.1 cubic inches! The error is confusing millilitres with millimetres. The first is a measurement of volume (about 6.1 cubic inches) and the second is a length, interpreted in this case as a depth. The area of Brisbane according to wikipedia (I know it's been raining in more than one place but this is an approximation) is 5904.8 square kilometers which gives a total typical rainfall for this area for this month of about 590 million tons or about 3.6x10^13 cubic inches.
I'm sure there should be some sort of record broken for most orders of magnitude out here:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, the GP's values are wrong. The sun has a power density of around (3.846E26 Watts / 1.4E27 m^3) = 0.27W/m^3. Humans are thus nearly 10,000x more energetic than the sun per cubic metre
Mod: +1 (Hopeful)
"If someone can't afford a car, they should go first" - I love the insinuation that the only people who don't have a car are those that can't afford one. I quite often forget that Musk is an American but every now and then, he makes it super obvious.
Exactly. I know the UK is hardly subject to hurricanes but most of our low voltage cables are buried. It's only the high voltage (tens of kV) that are often above ground and even then, a lot of these are buried.
Whilst your electric might be free, running a 100-200W PC instead of 6W router is a little overkill for most people. The best solution, of course, is to be allowed to put new firmware on your existing router ;-)
The reason it's in the current news (at least on the BBC) is that the BBC have recently published the salaries of many of their top earners for the first time. The discussion has arisen because many are earning in the millions and are effectively paid from the public purse (well, licence fee but all the same in the end...).
Original article
People subscribe to it because most internet in the UK is via ADSL or variants which is delivered through the POTS system. Most often now, there is fibre to a nearby street cabinet with copper only for the last couple of hundred metres.
Cable is available but is only used by 20% of the population or so as it's often more expensive or comes with unwanted TV services.
Yes there will. So many of the options for a post-Brexit agreement with the EU (the "Norway model" comes to mind) rely on us accepting free movement and EU legislation in order to retain access to the common market. The catch is that we will be subject to the same regulation without a hand in saying how it is made or implemented.
I appreciate some of your points. I had to look up how many days it rains here (not easy to guess) and it turns out to about 30% of days (reference).
I can't give stats for everyone in the country but in my house, with 2 people, we each cycle a lot and take a shower every day with at least one bath a week. We do a couple of loads of laundry and all the normal washing/cooking/toilet flushing you expect. We collect rain for usage in the garden but importantly we have plants adapted to the local climate. We use 60L/person/day i.e. less than one sixth of a Californian. If I had a moderate pool (say 5x3x2m i.e. 30,000L, 8000 US gallons or 24 milliacre feet), that means that I could drain it and re-fill it completely every 2 months and still come in under a Californian usage. Surely most pools don't need much maintenance water provided they are covered when not used?
It's great isn't it? Google says 1 acre foot is around 1.23 megalitres (reference) or 1230 m^3.
The more astounding bit once you do the conversion is that according to TFS the average individual Californian living in a 5 person household uses well over 300 litres per person per day (reference). I'm from the UK, a place with over twice the rainfall of California, and yet our typical usage per person in a five person household is only 100L/person/day (reference). Even our "high usage" households only use 135L/person/day, only just over 1/3 of the *typical* California usage. What are they doing with it all?
I know the Californians like to blame agriculture for using the majority of the water (true) but these stats are just examples of the monumental waste of water that occurs, both industrially and residentially. If these waste problems were solved, I'd imagine there wouldn't be a shortage of water at all.
It's also still there in the title tags:
<title>Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters</title>
However, since many browsers, especially those on Windows, dropped the title bar for more viewable screen area, it's often not shown. It does flash up for a few hundred milliseconds in the tab text in FF on Windows but is rapidly replaced with "Slashdot".
It does sound like a badly done odd-one-out list, doesn't it?
"For 10 points, which of these are people who may actually be able to cure your cancer? Surgeons, homeopaths, oncologists, Chinese doctors, nutritionists and spiritual healers."
I love the juxtaposition of your comment and your sig.
Random off-topic trivia: £ on a standard British keyboard layout is reached by shift+3 - all the more confusing when referring to the pound sign with someone using an American keyboard layout as the convention is to call the # symbol a pound sign and it too is shift+3.
It is off a bit ;-) ((335,258,000 sq km * 0.77mm) * 1000 kg per metre cubed) / 200000 tonnes = about 1.2 million suezmax tankers.
The argument Stallman uses against this is that we, as voters, have no way to know whether the code actually running on the machine in front of us is the same as the open code that we have reviewed. Ultimately there will come a time when a very select number of people are responsible for compiling the code and putting it on the machine. If those people have a vested interest in some outcome or other then they could tamper with the machine and no-one would know any better. In fact, we would all be thinking it was a secure system because of the "open" nature of it. These things aren't like our PCs, we can't just install VotingMachine From Scratch and be done with it.
That's why most startups don't do real business anymore: their model is to hype an idea and be bought up early, by a large corporation with its own protective patent portfolio.
Topical case in point: Facebook buys Instagram photo sharing network for $1bn. Instagram was launched in 2010, has 13 employees and has just been bought out at a minimum rate of around $30 million per employee per year. That's an astonishing yield and all without actually taking the business to the full term.
They're brilliant aren't they? They crop up everywhere now. The BBC uses them with gay abandon and whilst I'm sure that they're just using them in their traditional sense (i.e. to delineate a quote) the results can often be hilarious.
Here's another amusing example from today on the BBC: 'Cloaking' a 3-D object from all angles demonstrated. You can just hear the derisive journalist as he writes the headline...
As per the post above, you can use longurl.org to see where it goes (in this case, here) without ever clicking on it. I'd not seen the service before but can see how it would be handy in situations like this where you are unsure whether to trust the link.
I did wonder about the exact temperature required and naturally assumed it was a carefully controlled centigrade temperature. Of course, it's just another case of mis-conversion from one unit to another. 1382 F is the exact conversion from 750 C, a value only given to 2 sf. 1400 F would be a more appropriate conversion if you have to convert it at all.
But it has happened...
Some quick back of the envelope calculations: FTFA, each tile generates "2.1 W" per step. If we assume a typical step time of 500ms based a pace of 120 steps per minute this could be interpreted as about 1.05J captured per step.
The casing is made from stainless steel which required about 53 MJ/kg for production in 2004. If we assume a tile casing mass of 2kg that is 106 MJ required for the steel production alone.
The shopping centre may be open around 10 hours a day with perhaps 20 seconds between each step averaged over a typical day. This is 1800 steps per day at 1.05J per step giving a total of 1890 J captured per day. Assuming 100% efficiency and a never-closing shopping centre, this gives an energy breakeven for the steel alone of around 56000 days or 153 years.
I know that other factors are in play such as the potential to raise awareness of environmental issues but this is ridiculous. I noticed that the award that the guy is in the running for is sponsored by Shell and part of me suspects that they know that these things are crap but want to be seen to promote something like this which appeals to the public and appears "green".
This is something I really need to look at in more detail. If you try astrophotography with a lot of digital cameras, you'll find that the H-alpha wavelength (around 650nm, red) is greatly diminished by the filter. However, an IR LED (peak wavelength about 960nm) shows up brightly in digital photos taken on the same camera. It seems more sensible to include a short-pass filter as they are cheaper to manufacture but perhaps they are band-pass? Just a thought; may be totally off here.
There's also a very similar SMBC cartoon (although a little later than the XKCD one).
I think your best one was to say that the average rainfall is around 6.1 cubic inches! The error is confusing millilitres with millimetres. The first is a measurement of volume (about 6.1 cubic inches) and the second is a length, interpreted in this case as a depth. The area of Brisbane according to wikipedia (I know it's been raining in more than one place but this is an approximation) is 5904.8 square kilometers which gives a total typical rainfall for this area for this month of about 590 million tons or about 3.6x10^13 cubic inches.
I'm sure there should be some sort of record broken for most orders of magnitude out here :-)