Has anyone considered the heat modernity produces?
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I know this is an odd question, but has anyone considered the amount of heat our modern society produces? Lightbulbs, cell phones, cars, trains, airplanes, power plants--everything modern society relies on produces heat.
Might that heat--maybe combined with greenhouse gases--be contributing to recently noticed warming trends?
OK--next time you are at X-mart try and collect as many RFID tags as you possibly can. Then attach them to your body in creative and interesting ways. Finally--run for the door. When stopped asked for a body search.
This could be a lot of fun with a large group of 20-30 conspirators.
I work at one of the "Big 3" automakers and I have to comment. The electric car is a short term solution. While it does reduce the consumers dependence on oil it does little to reduce polution. Why? Because most of the power produced in this country is done with coal or oil. So in essence you are merely displacing who is poluting. Additionally, the batteries themselves are hazardous waste and most be replaced and disposed of. For these reasons the electric car is a short term solution.
I'm intrigued with the fuel cell ideas but am worried that they will be too complicated and expensive to maintain. Hydrogen looks good until you consider it takes more energy to produce hydrogen then what you get out of hydrogen. I believe steam is the proper way to go but haven't seen any development in this arena. Anyone who thinks a steam car is impracticle or unworkable should look up the Doble steam cars.
I work as in IT in one of the major US automakers. Not gonna tell you which one. Seems to me steam powered vehicles could go a long way in solving some of our polution problems. We could run them off any clean burning fuel--change fuels if necessary--and eliminate some of the complexity of the current engines. Yet I hear nothing of this in the halls and labs of my fine employer. Odd that.
So why go for expensive fuel cells or batteries that become tomorrows expensive landfill or new hydrogen combustion engines when you could run a steam engine with propane or natural gas and eliminate your problems.
"The Soviet Union decided in 1918 that the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the northeast, would be diverted to try to irrigate the desert, in order to grow rice, melons, cereal, and also, cotton..."
In the movie one can clearly see ice breaking off the ice sheets in antartica. That's what ice does--it breaks off. These video segments are meaningless.
Hundreds of years ago, Iceland and Greenland had far less ice then current day. The climate was warmer. Indeed, we are just now exiting a little ice age. According to the fossile record, abrupt climate change has occurred before.
So is global warming happening: probably. Is it natural: probably. Does mankind have anything to do with: If so very very very very very very very little. Should we worry: Yes--about the idiot poloticians and their election crusading
Your "It's likely to hit a populated area sometime in the future," is a typical engineer response. Most people are not engineers and engineering "probabilities" don't mean squat to the average person when they are trying to make a living and feed themselves and/or a family.
So instead I suggest, "A meteor will one day hit the earth and you will find your dog dead, your car destroyed, you house burned, your family suffocated, your job gone, your money useless, your government pointless, and life as you knew it forever and completely changed. You may survive but we doubt it. That's why we need money to find and track these things." Maybe that'll get some funding.
I'm with you 100%. Most conspiracy nuts have no idea that speed+fuel+ground=very little plane left. Look at the remains of the XB-70. Engines gone missing? Yeah--maybe they'll show up on e-bay one day. Strange things happen during a crash because of physics and after because of people.
I once saw the impact of an aircraft in the end of the runway in England. After the impact and fireball, the right seater got out of the cockpit remains and ran for around 100 feet before dropping. The medics said he was dead before he ever left the cockpit. Must have been aliens using a Klingon cloaking device and a sonic screwdriver.
Give it a rest. The planes crashed into the buildings. The government is not nearly coordinated enough to coverup anything much less form a conspiracy. Need proof? Look at ada.
No body reads e-books? I read them all the time. I keep them handy on my Pocket PC phone for those times I'm stuck waiting for a doctor's appointment, subway, business travel, or other such normally dead time. After all, when was the last time you saw a magazine from this decade at a doctor's office?
They aren't a substitute for paper--I still read paper books and subscribe to paper magazines like Asimov's Science Fiction. However, since I always carry my phone an e-book is easily accessable for those moments when there is literally nothing else to do.
At such times some game, most stare blankly at the wall, and others are mezmorized by the babble box. I prefer to read.
I often wondered if there were some type of feedback loop in evolution. I'm not a biologist and would know how such a loop would function, but I am a systems engineer and a feedback loop would seem "necessary" for evolution to function properly.
And yes, in school I was taught natural selection--but that loop seems awefully slow and tedious. I'm thinking one quicker. Maybe a way environmental changes are "written" back into the genome somehow.
Spam is a part of internet life as is commercials on television and telemarketers on the telephone.
Difference--I can pay for premium cable channels and have commercial free viewing. I can put my name on the "no call" list (and yes it works) and not be bothered by telemarketers. But there is no escape from spam. It eats the bandwidth I pay to use. It consumes the space I pay to have. It's a pox on the face of the Internet.
"Haven't you got anything without spam?" "Well, there is spam spam spam spam green eggs and spam--that doesn't have much spam in it."
Maybe it's time for something completely different.
Ever drive an X1/9, Fiero, or MG? These cars have their die hard enthusiests as well, believe it or not.
My point--while you may have been a satisfied customer with your EV1, there are many things that go into producing a car. In the end the EV1 was nothing more then an experiment to evaluate how well electric cars perform against their gasoline breatherine.
From my auto manufacturing experience I would say the reasons for destroying the existing fleet are these: 1) Small fleet--too expensive to keep parts inventory. 2) Electric vehicles may open some liability issues--let someone else break that ground. 3) EV do not have the range of gasoline cars and thus are in a narrow market. 4) Operating expense of EV is far higher then gasoline vehicles.
Regardless of the debates over the suckiness of "Enterprise", the opening of "Enterprise" seems to be a mozaic of aviations finer moments. I think footage of Space Ship One should be included--definately a milestone in mans quest for space and fitting to the opeing mozaic of Enterprise. Maybe get rid of the footage of the flying submarine thing and add Space Ship One.
Fans got the first shuttle named "Enterprise"--a great honor to a great show. The least the Star Trek producers could do is return the favor.
BTW: I'm not intersted in debating the suckiness of "Enterprise". Keep your "Enterprise sucks" comments to yourself please.
TowerHobbies (www.towerhobbies.com) had this listed yesterday for a little over $2k. A little pricey for me. As a long time rc pilot, I love the features. Give it 5 years and every computer radio will have this kind of technology.
I feel your pain. I work in one of your competitor's plants (won't mention the name). Our cost for downtime is a little higher then yours. We recently switch VIN plate emobossers and I had to add some new code to handle the machines. When I turned the things on, all VINS were misprinted. I had a two day fight with the vendor before they finally concluded I was right--it was there fault. Two 8 hours shifts times two and a half days times $24000=a whole PILE of money.
Working for one of the major auto manufacturers I feel impelled to respond.
For us, the 17 digit vin is broken into a number of different fields. The last six numbers are the actual serial number field of the car. There are other fields for year, production facility, model, etc. So in any given year, for any given model, there are 999,999 possible serial numbers that can be produced. The next year, the field containing the year code changes so we have all 999,999 combinations available for use again.
The problem: We don't really use all 999,999 combinations. Instead, we subgroup them out. 200000 is Ford, 600000 is mercury--you get the point. The solution is make all 999,999 combinations of the last six digits available.
I haven't really seen anything good as far as magazines go for computers. Is used to read Dr. Dobbs and in the old days, Nibble. I guess its my maturity and my understanding of systems that makes most magazines on the subject I see useless and boring.
Here's why: Computers are VERY simple machines. Think of a bit--no smaller means of conveying data. Yet computers have reached complexity through sheer numbers. Now think of a trillion bits. Case made. As such, the ways these systems are currently being used is not unique or innovative--just rehashing old algorithms and paradigns.
What I'm interested in are the things that have NOT been done before-EVER. Where's the innovation?
To answer the question: Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine is all I get and I love it.
Theres a couple of complete kits out there. This one has a good programmable controller and remote that might make a good start. Granted, you couldn't use the chassis, but you could use the brains. In has a breadboard for (I think) another 8 digital inputs or outputs. It works well and should be adaptable for what you want to do.
I've never understood how electric cars can be rated zero emissions. They require a charge. A charge requires power. Power requires a power station. Most power stations in the US burn coal to produce the power your electric car needs to recharge. Hmm.
So, in reality you're just shifting the emissions to someone else and making some hippy self feel better--but it's not really accomplishing anything.
And let's not talk about the possible environmental damage caused by the increase of batteries in our land fills.
By far, walking or cycling is a better solution. But who wants to load up the family bike for a 400 mile vacation?
Ahh. Don't get discouraged. Here. Hug this tree awhile. Better? Good.
Last time I went was in 1996 i believe--the last year in Atlanta. It had already become a showcase for Windows and pretty much nothing else. Might as well have called it MS-Comdex.
I hate to see it go, but if it's time to go let it go.
I'm with you. My car, I'll do what I want with it. And it makes me mad that I'm considered a criminal if I mod an XBox, but not a criminal if I mod the PCM in my car. There is no difference...
OK, I work in a major auto manufacturing facility as an IT engineer. Does anyone realize how much time and effort is being expended to meet government regulations regarding auto manufacturing? We've had to spend millions building systems that aquire, store, and track data for tires, airbags, onboard computers, radios, paint, fluids, batteries, etc. Do we obsorb that cost? NOOOOOO--we pass it to the consumer. That's why the average auto costs around $24000 in the US. What about the third brake light or tire pressure monitoring (and you thought that was an "added safety option"--nope--required by government and soon to be on all cars).
Don't cry labor--there's only about $500-$700 in labor in any given vehicle except the exotics of course.
And now--another government regulation. Not withstanding these codes are publically available and the tools to read them are out there. This is just senseless, meaningless, does nothing to improve anything legislation.
On another note, the CODE that runs the car IS copyrighted material. It's code-just like a game ROM. I'm not sure I see how XBOX modders are being punished but the "speed chip" industry isn't. Maybe that's another discussion.
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I know this is an odd question, but has anyone considered the amount of heat our modern society produces? Lightbulbs, cell phones, cars, trains, airplanes, power plants--everything modern society relies on produces heat.
Might that heat--maybe combined with greenhouse gases--be contributing to recently noticed warming trends?
OK--next time you are at X-mart try and collect as many RFID tags as you possibly can. Then attach them to your body in creative and interesting ways. Finally--run for the door. When stopped asked for a body search.
This could be a lot of fun with a large group of 20-30 conspirators.
I work at one of the "Big 3" automakers and I have to comment. The electric car is a short term solution. While it does reduce the consumers dependence on oil it does little to reduce polution. Why? Because most of the power produced in this country is done with coal or oil. So in essence you are merely displacing who is poluting. Additionally, the batteries themselves are hazardous waste and most be replaced and disposed of. For these reasons the electric car is a short term solution.
I'm intrigued with the fuel cell ideas but am worried that they will be too complicated and expensive to maintain. Hydrogen looks good until you consider it takes more energy to produce hydrogen then what you get out of hydrogen. I believe steam is the proper way to go but haven't seen any development in this arena. Anyone who thinks a steam car is impracticle or unworkable should look up the Doble steam cars.
I work as in IT in one of the major US automakers. Not gonna tell you which one. Seems to me steam powered vehicles could go a long way in solving some of our polution problems. We could run them off any clean burning fuel--change fuels if necessary--and eliminate some of the complexity of the current engines. Yet I hear nothing of this in the halls and labs of my fine employer. Odd that.
So why go for expensive fuel cells or batteries that become tomorrows expensive landfill or new hydrogen combustion engines when you could run a steam engine with propane or natural gas and eliminate your problems.
Me? I want a steam powered laptop!!!!
Lake Chad and the Aral Sea are drying up because the water is being diverted and USED elsewhere--not because of global warming.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
"The Soviet Union decided in 1918 that the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the northeast, would be diverted to try to irrigate the desert, in order to grow rice, melons, cereal, and also, cotton..."
In the movie one can clearly see ice breaking off the ice sheets in antartica. That's what ice does--it breaks off. These video segments are meaningless.
Hundreds of years ago, Iceland and Greenland had far less ice then current day. The climate was warmer. Indeed, we are just now exiting a little ice age. According to the fossile record, abrupt climate change has occurred before.
So is global warming happening: probably.
Is it natural: probably.
Does mankind have anything to do with: If so very very very very very very very little.
Should we worry: Yes--about the idiot poloticians and their election crusading
I've said my peace. Now, flame on...
Your "It's likely to hit a populated area sometime in the future," is a typical engineer response. Most people are not engineers and engineering "probabilities" don't mean squat to the average person when they are trying to make a living and feed themselves and/or a family.
So instead I suggest, "A meteor will one day hit the earth and you will find your dog dead, your car destroyed, you house burned, your family suffocated, your job gone, your money useless, your government pointless, and life as you knew it forever and completely changed. You may survive but we doubt it. That's why we need money to find and track these things." Maybe that'll get some funding.
I'm with you 100%. Most conspiracy nuts have no idea that speed+fuel+ground=very little plane left. Look at the remains of the XB-70. Engines gone missing? Yeah--maybe they'll show up on e-bay one day. Strange things happen during a crash because of physics and after because of people.
I once saw the impact of an aircraft in the end of the runway in England. After the impact and fireball, the right seater got out of the cockpit remains and ran for around 100 feet before dropping. The medics said he was dead before he ever left the cockpit. Must have been aliens using a Klingon cloaking device and a sonic screwdriver.
Give it a rest. The planes crashed into the buildings. The government is not nearly coordinated enough to coverup anything much less form a conspiracy. Need proof? Look at ada.
No body reads e-books? I read them all the time. I keep them handy on my Pocket PC phone for those times I'm stuck waiting for a doctor's appointment, subway, business travel, or other such normally dead time. After all, when was the last time you saw a magazine from this decade at a doctor's office?
They aren't a substitute for paper--I still read paper books and subscribe to paper magazines like Asimov's Science Fiction. However, since I always carry my phone an e-book is easily accessable for those moments when there is literally nothing else to do.
At such times some game, most stare blankly at the wall, and others are mezmorized by the babble box. I prefer to read.
With a line like "What great knockers!" how can you go wrong.
That would be a violation of our security policy.
WTF!
We've none how bees fly for years. They essentially "swim" through the air as do other insects.
Flight is a well known science now regardless if you are talking about insects, birds, rc aircraft, or a Boeing 747.
Nothing to see here folks--move along...
I often wondered if there were some type of feedback loop in evolution. I'm not a biologist and would know how such a loop would function, but I am a systems engineer and a feedback loop would seem "necessary" for evolution to function properly.
And yes, in school I was taught natural selection--but that loop seems awefully slow and tedious. I'm thinking one quicker. Maybe a way environmental changes are "written" back into the genome somehow.
Spam is a part of internet life as is commercials on television and telemarketers on the telephone.
Difference--I can pay for premium cable channels and have commercial free viewing. I can put my name on the "no call" list (and yes it works) and not be bothered by telemarketers. But there is no escape from spam. It eats the bandwidth I pay to use. It consumes the space I pay to have. It's a pox on the face of the Internet.
"Haven't you got anything without spam?"
"Well, there is spam spam spam spam green eggs and spam--that doesn't have much spam in it."
Maybe it's time for something completely different.
Ever drive an X1/9, Fiero, or MG? These cars have their die hard enthusiests as well, believe it or not.
My point--while you may have been a satisfied customer with your EV1, there are many things that go into producing a car. In the end the EV1 was nothing more then an experiment to evaluate how well electric cars perform against their gasoline breatherine.
From my auto manufacturing experience I would say the reasons for destroying the existing fleet are these:
1) Small fleet--too expensive to keep parts inventory.
2) Electric vehicles may open some liability issues--let someone else break that ground.
3) EV do not have the range of gasoline cars and thus are in a narrow market.
4) Operating expense of EV is far higher then gasoline vehicles.
Regardless of the debates over the suckiness of "Enterprise", the opening of "Enterprise" seems to be a mozaic of aviations finer moments. I think footage of Space Ship One should be included--definately a milestone in mans quest for space and fitting to the opeing mozaic of Enterprise. Maybe get rid of the footage of the flying submarine thing and add Space Ship One.
Fans got the first shuttle named "Enterprise"--a great honor to a great show. The least the Star Trek producers could do is return the favor.
BTW: I'm not intersted in debating the suckiness of "Enterprise". Keep your "Enterprise sucks" comments to yourself please.
TowerHobbies (www.towerhobbies.com) had this listed yesterday for a little over $2k. A little pricey for me. As a long time rc pilot, I love the features. Give it 5 years and every computer radio will have this kind of technology.
Move along, there's nothing to see here.
That? That was swamp gas.
Move along...
I feel your pain. I work in one of your competitor's plants (won't mention the name). Our cost for downtime is a little higher then yours. We recently switch VIN plate emobossers and I had to add some new code to handle the machines. When I turned the things on, all VINS were misprinted. I had a two day fight with the vendor before they finally concluded I was right--it was there fault. Two 8 hours shifts times two and a half days times $24000=a whole PILE of money.
Working for one of the major auto manufacturers I feel impelled to respond.
For us, the 17 digit vin is broken into a number of different fields. The last six numbers are the actual serial number field of the car. There are other fields for year, production facility, model, etc. So in any given year, for any given model, there are 999,999 possible serial numbers that can be produced. The next year, the field containing the year code changes so we have all 999,999 combinations available for use again.
The problem: We don't really use all 999,999 combinations. Instead, we subgroup them out. 200000 is Ford, 600000 is mercury--you get the point. The solution is make all 999,999 combinations of the last six digits available.
I haven't really seen anything good as far as magazines go for computers. Is used to read Dr. Dobbs and in the old days, Nibble. I guess its my maturity and my understanding of systems that makes most magazines on the subject I see useless and boring.
Here's why: Computers are VERY simple machines. Think of a bit--no smaller means of conveying data. Yet computers have reached complexity through sheer numbers. Now think of a trillion bits. Case made. As such, the ways these systems are currently being used is not unique or innovative--just rehashing old algorithms and paradigns.
What I'm interested in are the things that have NOT been done before-EVER. Where's the innovation?
To answer the question: Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine is all I get and I love it.
Theres a couple of complete kits out there. This one has a good programmable controller and remote that might make a good start. Granted, you couldn't use the chassis, but you could use the brains. In has a breadboard for (I think) another 8 digital inputs or outputs. It works well and should be adaptable for what you want to do.
I've never understood how electric cars can be rated zero emissions. They require a charge. A charge requires power. Power requires a power station. Most power stations in the US burn coal to produce the power your electric car needs to recharge. Hmm.
So, in reality you're just shifting the emissions to someone else and making some hippy self feel better--but it's not really accomplishing anything.
And let's not talk about the possible environmental damage caused by the increase of batteries in our land fills.
By far, walking or cycling is a better solution. But who wants to load up the family bike for a 400 mile vacation?
Ahh. Don't get discouraged. Here. Hug this tree awhile. Better? Good.
Last time I went was in 1996 i believe--the last year in Atlanta. It had already become a showcase for Windows and pretty much nothing else. Might as well have called it MS-Comdex.
I hate to see it go, but if it's time to go let it go.
I'm with you. My car, I'll do what I want with it. And it makes me mad that I'm considered a criminal if I mod an XBox, but not a criminal if I mod the PCM in my car. There is no difference...
OK, I work in a major auto manufacturing facility as an IT engineer. Does anyone realize how much time and effort is being expended to meet government regulations regarding auto manufacturing? We've had to spend millions building systems that aquire, store, and track data for tires, airbags, onboard computers, radios, paint, fluids, batteries, etc. Do we obsorb that cost? NOOOOOO--we pass it to the consumer. That's why the average auto costs around $24000 in the US. What about the third brake light or tire pressure monitoring (and you thought that was an "added safety option"--nope--required by government and soon to be on all cars).
Don't cry labor--there's only about $500-$700 in labor in any given vehicle except the exotics of course.
And now--another government regulation. Not withstanding these codes are publically available and the tools to read them are out there. This is just senseless, meaningless, does nothing to improve anything legislation.
On another note, the CODE that runs the car IS copyrighted material. It's code-just like a game ROM. I'm not sure I see how XBOX modders are being punished but the "speed chip" industry isn't. Maybe that's another discussion.