Not the problem here: They are assembled horizontally but they aren't horizontal in a functional stormy environment. If one has severe enough waves to topple over a standing core (where almost all the mass is that the bottom in the engines), a sideways core isn't going to be happy in that environment.
Perhaps they should come up with a way to lay the booster down on its side, once it's successfully landed on the drone ship?
Doesn't work. The rockets are not designed to handle heavy horizontal stress. They can handle pretty extreme vertical stress but to make them survive being on their sides that reliably would require a lot more reinforcements which means the rockets would have a lot more mass.
Launching rockets from airplanes has been done before but the plan with Stratolaunch is to do so on a larger scale with functionally a bigger rocket. There are some advantages and some disadvantages. One major disadvantage is that there's functionally a size limit: one cannot really put that large a rocket on a plane (and the fact that to get this to work they need to use what is by multiple metrics the largest airplane ever reflects that).
The plane is functioning to some extent like a reusable first stage, but a plane isn't likely to go as high or as fast as as a true first stage, like the Falcon 9's first stage, so it isn't the same as having a true reusable first stage in terms of power.
At the same time, a plane is a well understood, reliable technology. Another connected advantage of air launch is that one is much less beholden to weather events. since the plane can fly above or around bad weather. The Falcon 9 in contrast frequently needs to be delayed due to weather issues (which are made worse in its case because it is a very long and thin rocket); one does have things like the Soyuz which is able to launch in functionally blizzard conditions, but that's pretty rare for a rocket and is in a large part due to the fact that it was originally designed to be an ICBM.
There's no "flaw" in calculus. They've proposed a notation which if one used it would allow a broader range of formal manipulations to be valid. This is interesting but it isn't groundbreaking.
This is another example of how zoning and business regulations in the US have run amok where the default is that something can't happen. This is the same sort of trend that is making it so difficult to build even residential homes in the Bay Area and elsewhere. And this isn't a problem in many other parts of the world; look for example at how zoning in Japan functions based on nuisance level http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html. Not only does this sort of thing cause economic harm, not only does it unnecessarily restrict basic liberties, but it causes environmental damage by encouraging urban sprawl and interfering with businesses and ideas that are even slightly outside the ordinary in how they are trying to be helpful or reduce waste.
The cradle to grave environmental impact of most lithium-ion batteries is small, especially if CO2 is your primary concern. See for example https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231269141_Batteries_from_Cradle_to_Grave. See also Bingbing Li, Jianyang Li, Chris Yuan's "Life Cycle Assessment of Lithium Ion Batteries with Silicon Nanowire Anode for Electric Vehicles" (which can be found easily online but which I can't link to because the Slashdot filter is unhappy with the very long URL).
That's specifically for silicon nanowire anode batteries, which is a pretty common design. The numbers for most others aren't that far off. Note also that as battery recycling and reuse becomes more common, and economies of scale ramp up further, the footprints in terms of CO2 and other pollutants will continue to decline.
This also doesn't make much sense as an issue in the context of Toyota since a hybrid requires a pretty decent size battery also. While previous batteries were nickel-metal hydride for the Prius, the newer ones use a hefty lithium ion battery also. https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1120320_lithium-ion-vs-nickel-metal-hydride-toyota-still-likes-both-for-its-hybrids. If one thinks that batteries are a big problem, then it isn't clear why one would think hybrid cars are a good thing.
This is only partially true. Yes, E-Waste is a substantial problem. But climate change is a much more serious environmental problem by any reasonable stretch. If someone is producing E-Waste but isn't contributing to CO2 output that's a net win. Not all environmental problems are the same priority.
Actually smoking is a really good comparison because failure to vaccinate harms not just the individual who doesn't have a vaccine but people around them. Here immunity is important https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity.
The device in question is a fusor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor which does involve actual nuclear fusion. They aren't easy to build but they do engage in actual fusion. They are used for a bunch of practical purposes, including as neutron generators. Hobbyists have built them before. Still, a 12 year old doing it is pretty impressive.
You are missing the central point. People agree that putting police where crimes are more likely isn't a bad idea. The problem is that if one some crimes are reported or noticed by police, then having police in a given area is a self-reinforcing observation where the more police in an area, the more likely one is to detect crimes there and so the more police one puts there, even if it means other areas aren't going to get enough police. This is reinforced further by the fact that cops often feel a pressure to either directly make minimum quotas (e.g. at least some number of arrests and tickets) or are subject to other pressures which can cause them to engage in enforcement actions of things which are not crimes or are questionably criminal (e.g. disturbing the peace). If this is enough of an observational bias is probably a difficult question, but the researchers discuss it in more detail and it is something that likely can't get resolve by a few non-experts simply having a few paragraph conversation on Slashdot.
Sorry, you are correct. The unicorn example is in the original post about the research, but not in TFA. Unicorn example is in https://blog.openai.com/better... .
I know that it is tough to read TFA but at least you could read the summary: "Where earlier reductions were largely negated by rising imports, the past decade has seen genuine cuts in the amount of CO2 for which the UK is responsible. " That means that even with manufacturing moving elsewhere the UK's total CO2 production has gone down.
This is a really good example of why the "right to be forgotten" idea is a really bad idea. Aside from issues of free speech, in any reasonable context, patients should have a right to know what problems or potential issues a doctor they have has had. One doesn't even need an American style strong free speech norm to see that this should be unacceptable.
There's a legitimate reason to be annoyed with short-sellers. Short-sellers have an incentive to exaggerate bad things in a company and blow up little things into big things. Yes, a company trying to hide issues hves reasons to hate short-sellers but others have legitimate concerns also.
They didn't do a first stage recovery with this rocket. The orbital profile and satellite mass required using all the first stage fuel. If they had a Falcon Heavy they maybe could have done this with first stage recovery. It is worth noting how successful SpaceX has gotten at recovery that actually not recovering the booster makes this one notable.
And before anyone asks, no these large Mersenne are much too large to be used in practical cryptography. There is a random number generator called a Mersenne twister which does use a Mersenne prime, but that uses much smaller ones to be feasible, and in any event is not sufficiently random to be safe for serious cryptographic purposes.
The primary interest in these primes is two-fold: First they have a very efficient primality test, the Lucas-Lehmer test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas-Lehmer_primality_test and so if one is interested in simply finding very big primes, these are the ones to look for. For most of the last 100 years the largest known prime has beena Mersenne prime.
Second, there's a connection with perfect numbers. A number is said to be perfect if the sum of all its positive divisors which are less than the number add up to the number. For example, 6 is perfect because 1,2 and 3 divide 6 and 1+2+3=6. But 8 is not perfect because 1+2+4=7 which is not perfect. The two oldest unsolved problems in all of math are a) are there any odd numbers which are perfect and b) are there infinitely many even numbers which are perfect? About 2000 years ago, Euclid recorded a proof (which may or may not have been due to him) that every Mersenne prime allows you to construct an even perfect number. In the 1700s, Euler proved that any even perfect number must arise from Euler's construction. So if one cares about answering this question about even perfect numbers, then one wants to investigate Mersenne primes.
This will combine really well with increasing reliance on wind and solar power. Also electric buses if they are designed appropriately can when not being used directly as buses can have their batteries used as on-grid storage which can help smooth out fluxuations in the grid. Since buses also mostly have short distances traveled, it is easier for them to do their jobs on an electric system than cars, since the issue of short-range is less of a problem (the buses will always be near their recharge stations).
The only real downsides are twofold: First, that the date is 2029 which is a decade away; I wish the time-range for the mandate was shorter. Second, as California switches to an electric system, other places may actually take the old gasoline buses which isn't necessarily a good thing. The energy involved in making new buses is high, so using a bus for as long as possible seems like a good idea, but there's a point where continuing to use it hits diminishing marginal returns. For example, Bangor, Maine has in the past gotten old buses for essentially free from some cities which were otherwise going to scrap them, but there's some argument that the reliability and efficiency is so poor of these old buses that it may have cost more overall to try to use them.
You wrote "The costs to make it superconduct are so much higher than electricity losses in comparable HVDC line of that length, it's not even funny. " I apparently misread that as being a claim about energy use. My apologies. I would still be interested in seeing some sources for your other claims although I agree that from a pure cost standpoint the current small scale systems that's likely correct; but that shouldn't be surprising in general for a new technologies. Technologies generally start off expensive.
That requires very large scale and highly efficient batteries. We might move there in the long-run but it in the short and medium run, having grid transfers makes sense. Batteries let you displace supply through time, and efficient grids let you displace supply through space. Both are useful.
I'm not disagreeing with your expense claim (although that is to some extent due to the technology still being very young). My primary question is your claim that the energy loss is higher from these than the HDVC. Do you have a citation or numbers to back that up?
Do you have some citations to back that up? It wouldn't be terribly surprising to me if HDVC is better than a modern superconducting cable, but it isn't obvious to me. Once one has something that is well-insulated down to liquid nitrogen temperatures, the energy cost of keeping it there is extremely low.
Slashdot Mirror
Not the problem here: They are assembled horizontally but they aren't horizontal in a functional stormy environment. If one has severe enough waves to topple over a standing core (where almost all the mass is that the bottom in the engines), a sideways core isn't going to be happy in that environment.
Perhaps they should come up with a way to lay the booster down on its side, once it's successfully landed on the drone ship?
Doesn't work. The rockets are not designed to handle heavy horizontal stress. They can handle pretty extreme vertical stress but to make them survive being on their sides that reliably would require a lot more reinforcements which means the rockets would have a lot more mass.
Launching rockets from airplanes has been done before but the plan with Stratolaunch is to do so on a larger scale with functionally a bigger rocket. There are some advantages and some disadvantages. One major disadvantage is that there's functionally a size limit: one cannot really put that large a rocket on a plane (and the fact that to get this to work they need to use what is by multiple metrics the largest airplane ever reflects that).
The plane is functioning to some extent like a reusable first stage, but a plane isn't likely to go as high or as fast as as a true first stage, like the Falcon 9's first stage, so it isn't the same as having a true reusable first stage in terms of power.
At the same time, a plane is a well understood, reliable technology. Another connected advantage of air launch is that one is much less beholden to weather events. since the plane can fly above or around bad weather. The Falcon 9 in contrast frequently needs to be delayed due to weather issues (which are made worse in its case because it is a very long and thin rocket); one does have things like the Soyuz which is able to launch in functionally blizzard conditions, but that's pretty rare for a rocket and is in a large part due to the fact that it was originally designed to be an ICBM.
There's no "flaw" in calculus. They've proposed a notation which if one used it would allow a broader range of formal manipulations to be valid. This is interesting but it isn't groundbreaking.
This is another example of how zoning and business regulations in the US have run amok where the default is that something can't happen. This is the same sort of trend that is making it so difficult to build even residential homes in the Bay Area and elsewhere. And this isn't a problem in many other parts of the world; look for example at how zoning in Japan functions based on nuisance level http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html. Not only does this sort of thing cause economic harm, not only does it unnecessarily restrict basic liberties, but it causes environmental damage by encouraging urban sprawl and interfering with businesses and ideas that are even slightly outside the ordinary in how they are trying to be helpful or reduce waste.
The cradle to grave environmental impact of most lithium-ion batteries is small, especially if CO2 is your primary concern. See for example https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231269141_Batteries_from_Cradle_to_Grave. See also Bingbing Li, Jianyang Li, Chris Yuan's "Life Cycle Assessment of Lithium Ion Batteries with Silicon Nanowire Anode for Electric Vehicles" (which can be found easily online but which I can't link to because the Slashdot filter is unhappy with the very long URL). That's specifically for silicon nanowire anode batteries, which is a pretty common design. The numbers for most others aren't that far off. Note also that as battery recycling and reuse becomes more common, and economies of scale ramp up further, the footprints in terms of CO2 and other pollutants will continue to decline.
This also doesn't make much sense as an issue in the context of Toyota since a hybrid requires a pretty decent size battery also. While previous batteries were nickel-metal hydride for the Prius, the newer ones use a hefty lithium ion battery also. https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1120320_lithium-ion-vs-nickel-metal-hydride-toyota-still-likes-both-for-its-hybrids. If one thinks that batteries are a big problem, then it isn't clear why one would think hybrid cars are a good thing.
This is only partially true. Yes, E-Waste is a substantial problem. But climate change is a much more serious environmental problem by any reasonable stretch. If someone is producing E-Waste but isn't contributing to CO2 output that's a net win. Not all environmental problems are the same priority.
Actually smoking is a really good comparison because failure to vaccinate harms not just the individual who doesn't have a vaccine but people around them. Here immunity is important https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity.
The device in question is a fusor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor which does involve actual nuclear fusion. They aren't easy to build but they do engage in actual fusion. They are used for a bunch of practical purposes, including as neutron generators. Hobbyists have built them before. Still, a 12 year old doing it is pretty impressive.
Thank you. That's a very reasonable back of the envelope estimate to support the claim in question.
Nearly all police actions other than traffic citations come from dispatches - someone calling in/reporting a crime.
Do you have citation or source for that claim?
You are missing the central point. People agree that putting police where crimes are more likely isn't a bad idea. The problem is that if one some crimes are reported or noticed by police, then having police in a given area is a self-reinforcing observation where the more police in an area, the more likely one is to detect crimes there and so the more police one puts there, even if it means other areas aren't going to get enough police. This is reinforced further by the fact that cops often feel a pressure to either directly make minimum quotas (e.g. at least some number of arrests and tickets) or are subject to other pressures which can cause them to engage in enforcement actions of things which are not crimes or are questionably criminal (e.g. disturbing the peace). If this is enough of an observational bias is probably a difficult question, but the researchers discuss it in more detail and it is something that likely can't get resolve by a few non-experts simply having a few paragraph conversation on Slashdot.
Sorry, you are correct. The unicorn example is in the original post about the research, but not in TFA. Unicorn example is in https://blog.openai.com/better... .
True. But the unicorn example given in the article is amazingly coherent for multiple paragraphs.
I know that it is tough to read TFA but at least you could read the summary: "Where earlier reductions were largely negated by rising imports, the past decade has seen genuine cuts in the amount of CO2 for which the UK is responsible. " That means that even with manufacturing moving elsewhere the UK's total CO2 production has gone down.
This is a really good example of why the "right to be forgotten" idea is a really bad idea. Aside from issues of free speech, in any reasonable context, patients should have a right to know what problems or potential issues a doctor they have has had. One doesn't even need an American style strong free speech norm to see that this should be unacceptable.
There's a legitimate reason to be annoyed with short-sellers. Short-sellers have an incentive to exaggerate bad things in a company and blow up little things into big things. Yes, a company trying to hide issues hves reasons to hate short-sellers but others have legitimate concerns also.
They didn't do a first stage recovery with this rocket. The orbital profile and satellite mass required using all the first stage fuel. If they had a Falcon Heavy they maybe could have done this with first stage recovery. It is worth noting how successful SpaceX has gotten at recovery that actually not recovering the booster makes this one notable.
No direct practical applications. But practical and interesting are not synonyms.
And before anyone asks, no these large Mersenne are much too large to be used in practical cryptography. There is a random number generator called a Mersenne twister which does use a Mersenne prime, but that uses much smaller ones to be feasible, and in any event is not sufficiently random to be safe for serious cryptographic purposes.
The primary interest in these primes is two-fold: First they have a very efficient primality test, the Lucas-Lehmer test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucas-Lehmer_primality_test and so if one is interested in simply finding very big primes, these are the ones to look for. For most of the last 100 years the largest known prime has beena Mersenne prime.
Second, there's a connection with perfect numbers. A number is said to be perfect if the sum of all its positive divisors which are less than the number add up to the number. For example, 6 is perfect because 1,2 and 3 divide 6 and 1+2+3=6. But 8 is not perfect because 1+2+4=7 which is not perfect. The two oldest unsolved problems in all of math are a) are there any odd numbers which are perfect and b) are there infinitely many even numbers which are perfect? About 2000 years ago, Euclid recorded a proof (which may or may not have been due to him) that every Mersenne prime allows you to construct an even perfect number. In the 1700s, Euler proved that any even perfect number must arise from Euler's construction. So if one cares about answering this question about even perfect numbers, then one wants to investigate Mersenne primes.
This will combine really well with increasing reliance on wind and solar power. Also electric buses if they are designed appropriately can when not being used directly as buses can have their batteries used as on-grid storage which can help smooth out fluxuations in the grid. Since buses also mostly have short distances traveled, it is easier for them to do their jobs on an electric system than cars, since the issue of short-range is less of a problem (the buses will always be near their recharge stations).
The only real downsides are twofold: First, that the date is 2029 which is a decade away; I wish the time-range for the mandate was shorter. Second, as California switches to an electric system, other places may actually take the old gasoline buses which isn't necessarily a good thing. The energy involved in making new buses is high, so using a bus for as long as possible seems like a good idea, but there's a point where continuing to use it hits diminishing marginal returns. For example, Bangor, Maine has in the past gotten old buses for essentially free from some cities which were otherwise going to scrap them, but there's some argument that the reliability and efficiency is so poor of these old buses that it may have cost more overall to try to use them.
You wrote "The costs to make it superconduct are so much higher than electricity losses in comparable HVDC line of that length, it's not even funny. " I apparently misread that as being a claim about energy use. My apologies. I would still be interested in seeing some sources for your other claims although I agree that from a pure cost standpoint the current small scale systems that's likely correct; but that shouldn't be surprising in general for a new technologies. Technologies generally start off expensive.
That requires very large scale and highly efficient batteries. We might move there in the long-run but it in the short and medium run, having grid transfers makes sense. Batteries let you displace supply through time, and efficient grids let you displace supply through space. Both are useful.
I'm not disagreeing with your expense claim (although that is to some extent due to the technology still being very young). My primary question is your claim that the energy loss is higher from these than the HDVC. Do you have a citation or numbers to back that up?
Do you have some citations to back that up? It wouldn't be terribly surprising to me if HDVC is better than a modern superconducting cable, but it isn't obvious to me. Once one has something that is well-insulated down to liquid nitrogen temperatures, the energy cost of keeping it there is extremely low.