Are there really more methane-producing animals than there would be if there were no humans? Cows, buffaloes, deer, any other farting animals? I might be wrong, but it seems implausible that we would be responsible for the fact that there are now too many animals on the planet, quite the contrary. I do believe that we are responsible for the disappearance of vast amounts of forest that used to turn all these farts back into oxygen.
In European cities, the beeper may well be 5 meters (sorry, 15 feet) from your bedroom window. So yes, you WILL hear it even while fucking. Of course it's not going to be a problem on American mega-intersections with parking lots on all sides and the nearest home miles away, but some Canadian cities are (fortunately) more like European ones.
1. Increase of cost. Adding a pole for the near side would add cost.
Then add it to the far pole of the other side. Duh!
2. Looking down at the timer when you should probably just be looking at traffic. Alternatively, having the timer on the post with the "walk/don't walk" sign at least has you focusing near your path of travel.
Who says you have to look down? Just install it at more or less eye height so you can see it before you start to cross. Then, while crossing, you look at traffic instead of at the digits on the other side.
And it annoys the hell out of normal hearing people, especially those living close to an intersection. Please, there's enough noise as it is.
How about a very small timer that can be read by people standing next to it, waiting to cross? There's absolutely no need for it to be readable from across the street.
At times when the renewables production spikes, the electricity is "sold" at negative prices - i.e. whoever takes it, gets paid.
Why would suppliers provide electricity at negative prices? Can't they just waste it somehow, just install a bunch of resistors in a big swimming pool and run the excess electricity through there?
Of course storing it for later use, for example by pumping up water that can be routed through turbines later, would be even better but would also require a serious investment. But certainly from the provider's point of view, simply wasting it is better than selling at negative prices?
It will be 800 km in "extended cruise mode", meaning constant low speed, the way car manufacturers used to measure range before better standards were invented. In other words, they're cheating. Actual real world range will be about the same as a Tesla S 85.
Only just: a model S 60 is $69,900. And I imagine refilling with hydrogen at a gas station will cost a fair bit more than plugging in at home, making the Tesla cheaper and much easier to operate.
The S 60 has 2/3 the range of that concept FCV (208 miles vs. 300 according to Wikipedia), certainly way more than a fifth as stated in the article, and for $10,000 more you get an S 85 with a 265 mile range.
Actually, it goes about the same distance. When they say "5 times the range of an electric car", they are probably comparing with their own abysmal electric carts. According to Wikipedia, the Toyota FCV concept will actually have a range of 480 km (300 miles) which is pretty close to that of a Model S 85 (426 km according to the same Wikipedia article, assuming it uses the same method of range measurement).
And you can't fill it up in your own home, and a refill will cost more, etc...
But as long as you keep more than 50% of the shares, you still have full control of the company, right? As long as you don't mislead the shareholders (which might lead to lawsuits) and make it clear from the start that this is a long term company which is just taking shareholders along for the ride without them having anything to say, what are the risks for SpaceX?
What I don't get is: who cares about hedge fund managers? Just do an IPO for the general public, small investors all over the world are more than eager to pour their money into SpaceX, they are literally asking him for it! Sure, it's a risky investment, and Elon's primary objective doesn't seem to be profit, but why say no to all that crazy excited volunteer funding? Unless he really has all the money he needs right now and wouldn't have any efficient use for more?
Wind chill works because of evaporation on the skin, right? I don't think anyone is going to be walking around on Mars outside a biosphere, in a T-shirt. If you're wearing a space suit, wind chill is totally irrelevant or am I missing something?
You might be on to something there, if you plan it carefully. The text doesn't say it has to be a justified arrest. So you might indeed say "I pointed a laser at an aircraft", get arrested, then explain "but it was my own plane parked in a hangar", get released, but still qualify for the bounty because you did actually get arrested.
That's exactly why it would be unlikely that any technological breakthrough would allow us to get to those places. If we can do that, then you can set up a thought experiment sending things back in time by juggling coordinate systems.
No, those places are accelerating away from us much faster than 1G. Well, depening on the coordinate system you use to calculate that acceleration, obviously. But with cosmological coordinates, yes, way more than 1G and faster than the speed of light. In any case, you will never reach their speed no matter how fast you accelerate, since you can't go faster than (local) light and even light will never catch up with them. Even if you shine a strong laser at them, that light will never get there.
(Assuming our current theories about the inflation of the universe are correct)
I'm just using the term "never" to mean that, with that particular coordinate system, the event does not have a real time coordinate. Maybe an imaginary or infinite one, but not a real one. But if you apply the right coordinate transformation, all of a sudden it's as real as ever. The question whether or not the event is something that will actually exist, is a philosophical one. We will certainly never see it happen, that's all we can really say.
From our pov, it will appear as if time is moving very slowly in their part of space. You might as well have said we don't exist because time is moving slowly here from their pov. Just because the light from the Jurassic is just now reaching some other place, doesn't negate history. The Universe still has a history. It's just the vast majority of it is unknown to us. It's not frozen in a bottle because of inflation.
There is no absolute measure of time in the universe. Depending on your choice of coordinates (special relativistic with us at the center, with some other point at the center, cosmological model, or any other model), distant events can happen in the past, future, present or even never at all. The only thing that matters is interactions between objects. But if events are separated far enough so they cannot possibly have had any causal impact on each other, it's completely meaningless to say one happened before the other or vice versa. Hell, I can make the Andromeda nebula move several years into the future or past simply by getting out of my seat (using a coordinate system tied to my body). That's the beauty of relativity: coordinates are just a way for us to stick numbers onto things and do calculations, but the universe itself doesn't care. That's also why we have such a hard time with general relativity and quantum mechanics.
There's no real center (as far as we know). You can pick any spot and consider that to be "the center" with everything moving away from that spot, but you can just as well pick some different spot.
Of course that's just one theory, with a truly infinite universe. It's perfectly possible that the universe is finite after all, or that it wraps around at some point. It certainly is very big.
It's a bit more complicated than that. General relativity allows you to pick any reference frame, even one that is bent, stretched or distorted in some other way, and do your calculations in that reference frame.
You could pick a "normal" reference frame that obeys the special theory of relativity: speed of light constant everywhere, nothing can go faster, etcetera. Nothing wrong with that, but this turns out to be impractical: we have to pick some place to consider as the center of the universe (for example some place in our immediate neighborhood), and then find that the rest of the universe is moving away at very high speeds, approaching (but not exceeding) the speed of light. This means those galaxies are shrunk in the direction of their motion (Lorentz contraction) and time passes more slowly for them (time dilation). The further you "look" (the infinitely quick kind of looking which you can only do inside a theoretical model, not having to wait for light to get here so we can actually see stuff), the more things are shrunk and the slower time is ticking. At a distance of the speed of light ("c") times the age of the universe, things approach the speed of light and time is passing so slowly that the Big Bang is only just happening right now. In this way of describing the universe, with these coordinates the universe actually fits in a finite sphere around us.
That's a perfectly valid set of coordinates, but I think you'll agree it's not very practical. So physicists invented the cosmological model: imagine a bunch of clocks everywhere in the universe, flying at the same speed as the expansion of the universe (i.e. the same speed as average galaxies in that neighborhood) and ticking at whatever rate the local clocks are ticking at (not synchronized to ours). We define time at any place in the universe as being whatever is indicated by those clocks, not ours. So in effect we change the very definition of simultaneity, moving things from the future into today simply by changing the labeling. Also, imagine measuring sticks available everywhere in the universe, but just like the clocks flying at the same speed as the local expanding universe. To measure distances, we use those sticks instead of our own.
If we now measure everything using local (Lorentz-contracted) sticks and local (time-dilated) clocks, the universe looks completely different. It is truly infinite, the same age everywhere, and distant objects are no longer flat Lorentz-contracted pancakes but look the same as objects in our neighbourhood. Note that this is not a different universe, it's the same one but with different labels stuck onto objects.
Now, with this set of coordinates, it turns out that rays of light don't travel at a fixed speed "c" relative to us, but relative to the local clocks and sticks we used to define the coordinate system. It is still true that nothing can go faster than (local) light, i.e. you cannot overtake a ray of light, but a distant object certainly can move away from us faster than the speed of a ray of light in our neighbourhood. And if some alien over there were to try and shoot a laser beam our way, that light would never reach us because it is traveling towards us at the speed of light relative to the local "space" which is moving away from us faster, like a cosmic conveyor belt. Note that this conveyor belt is not real, it's just a product of our mathematical trickery refefining distances and times.
Of course you might wonder what happens to that alien laser beam in the first coordinate system, where rays of light all travel at the same speed relative to us. Well, in that system, the aliens don't exist yet because time in that part of space is moving very slowly (and has been moving slowly ever since the big bang). And since that part of space is still accelerating away from us ever faster and closer to the speed of light, local time comes to an asymptotic halt before the aliens ever get a chance to shoot that laser.
"Space itself" is just whatever we define it to be. By changing coordinates, we can move things from the past into the future or even into "never". It doesn't matter, it's just math(s), the end result is that we will never see that laser and we will never be able to reach that galaxy either.
Slashdot Mirror
Are there really more methane-producing animals than there would be if there were no humans? Cows, buffaloes, deer, any other farting animals? I might be wrong, but it seems implausible that we would be responsible for the fact that there are now too many animals on the planet, quite the contrary. I do believe that we are responsible for the disappearance of vast amounts of forest that used to turn all these farts back into oxygen.
In European cities, the beeper may well be 5 meters (sorry, 15 feet) from your bedroom window. So yes, you WILL hear it even while fucking. Of course it's not going to be a problem on American mega-intersections with parking lots on all sides and the nearest home miles away, but some Canadian cities are (fortunately) more like European ones.
1. Increase of cost. Adding a pole for the near side would add cost.
Then add it to the far pole of the other side. Duh!
2. Looking down at the timer when you should probably just be looking at traffic. Alternatively, having the timer on the post with the "walk/don't walk" sign at least has you focusing near your path of travel.
Who says you have to look down? Just install it at more or less eye height so you can see it before you start to cross. Then, while crossing, you look at traffic instead of at the digits on the other side.
And it annoys the hell out of normal hearing people, especially those living close to an intersection. Please, there's enough noise as it is.
How about a very small timer that can be read by people standing next to it, waiting to cross? There's absolutely no need for it to be readable from across the street.
That's a great solution, I wonder why nobody else has thought of that!
The same power as 17 Teslas in a golf ball, I wonder what range you get out of one of those.
At times when the renewables production spikes, the electricity is "sold" at negative prices - i.e. whoever takes it, gets paid.
Why would suppliers provide electricity at negative prices? Can't they just waste it somehow, just install a bunch of resistors in a big swimming pool and run the excess electricity through there?
Of course storing it for later use, for example by pumping up water that can be routed through turbines later, would be even better but would also require a serious investment. But certainly from the provider's point of view, simply wasting it is better than selling at negative prices?
Yes, that's a different law: if a headline ends in a question mark, the author of the article got everything backwards.
If the sound makes sense as words in some language then it is playing forwards.
Except for certain Prince songs.
It will be 800 km in "extended cruise mode", meaning constant low speed, the way car manufacturers used to measure range before better standards were invented. In other words, they're cheating. Actual real world range will be about the same as a Tesla S 85.
Only just: a model S 60 is $69,900. And I imagine refilling with hydrogen at a gas station will cost a fair bit more than plugging in at home, making the Tesla cheaper and much easier to operate.
The S 60 has 2/3 the range of that concept FCV (208 miles vs. 300 according to Wikipedia), certainly way more than a fifth as stated in the article, and for $10,000 more you get an S 85 with a 265 mile range.
Actually, it goes about the same distance. When they say "5 times the range of an electric car", they are probably comparing with their own abysmal electric carts. According to Wikipedia, the Toyota FCV concept will actually have a range of 480 km (300 miles) which is pretty close to that of a Model S 85 (426 km according to the same Wikipedia article, assuming it uses the same method of range measurement).
And you can't fill it up in your own home, and a refill will cost more, etc...
Nope, I'm not getting one.
But as long as you keep more than 50% of the shares, you still have full control of the company, right? As long as you don't mislead the shareholders (which might lead to lawsuits) and make it clear from the start that this is a long term company which is just taking shareholders along for the ride without them having anything to say, what are the risks for SpaceX?
What I don't get is: who cares about hedge fund managers? Just do an IPO for the general public, small investors all over the world are more than eager to pour their money into SpaceX, they are literally asking him for it! Sure, it's a risky investment, and Elon's primary objective doesn't seem to be profit, but why say no to all that crazy excited volunteer funding? Unless he really has all the money he needs right now and wouldn't have any efficient use for more?
Maybe the blood doesn't actually boil, but you may get the bends (vapour bubbles forming in your blood) which will probably be lethal.
Wind chill works because of evaporation on the skin, right? I don't think anyone is going to be walking around on Mars outside a biosphere, in a T-shirt. If you're wearing a space suit, wind chill is totally irrelevant or am I missing something?
You might be on to something there, if you plan it carefully. The text doesn't say it has to be a justified arrest. So you might indeed say "I pointed a laser at an aircraft", get arrested, then explain "but it was my own plane parked in a hangar", get released, but still qualify for the bounty because you did actually get arrested.
You can travel the distance, but by the time you get there, that galaxy will be much further away. You'll never catch up with it.
Even then, you'll still never see it happen :-)
That's exactly why it would be unlikely that any technological breakthrough would allow us to get to those places. If we can do that, then you can set up a thought experiment sending things back in time by juggling coordinate systems.
No, those places are accelerating away from us much faster than 1G. Well, depening on the coordinate system you use to calculate that acceleration, obviously. But with cosmological coordinates, yes, way more than 1G and faster than the speed of light. In any case, you will never reach their speed no matter how fast you accelerate, since you can't go faster than (local) light and even light will never catch up with them. Even if you shine a strong laser at them, that light will never get there.
(Assuming our current theories about the inflation of the universe are correct)
I'm just using the term "never" to mean that, with that particular coordinate system, the event does not have a real time coordinate. Maybe an imaginary or infinite one, but not a real one. But if you apply the right coordinate transformation, all of a sudden it's as real as ever. The question whether or not the event is something that will actually exist, is a philosophical one. We will certainly never see it happen, that's all we can really say.
From our pov, it will appear as if time is moving very slowly in their part of space. You might as well have said we don't exist because time is moving slowly here from their pov. Just because the light from the Jurassic is just now reaching some other place, doesn't negate history. The Universe still has a history. It's just the vast majority of it is unknown to us. It's not frozen in a bottle because of inflation.
There is no absolute measure of time in the universe. Depending on your choice of coordinates (special relativistic with us at the center, with some other point at the center, cosmological model, or any other model), distant events can happen in the past, future, present or even never at all. The only thing that matters is interactions between objects. But if events are separated far enough so they cannot possibly have had any causal impact on each other, it's completely meaningless to say one happened before the other or vice versa. Hell, I can make the Andromeda nebula move several years into the future or past simply by getting out of my seat (using a coordinate system tied to my body). That's the beauty of relativity: coordinates are just a way for us to stick numbers onto things and do calculations, but the universe itself doesn't care. That's also why we have such a hard time with general relativity and quantum mechanics.
There's no real center (as far as we know). You can pick any spot and consider that to be "the center" with everything moving away from that spot, but you can just as well pick some different spot.
Of course that's just one theory, with a truly infinite universe. It's perfectly possible that the universe is finite after all, or that it wraps around at some point. It certainly is very big.
It's a bit more complicated than that. General relativity allows you to pick any reference frame, even one that is bent, stretched or distorted in some other way, and do your calculations in that reference frame.
You could pick a "normal" reference frame that obeys the special theory of relativity: speed of light constant everywhere, nothing can go faster, etcetera. Nothing wrong with that, but this turns out to be impractical: we have to pick some place to consider as the center of the universe (for example some place in our immediate neighborhood), and then find that the rest of the universe is moving away at very high speeds, approaching (but not exceeding) the speed of light. This means those galaxies are shrunk in the direction of their motion (Lorentz contraction) and time passes more slowly for them (time dilation). The further you "look" (the infinitely quick kind of looking which you can only do inside a theoretical model, not having to wait for light to get here so we can actually see stuff), the more things are shrunk and the slower time is ticking. At a distance of the speed of light ("c") times the age of the universe, things approach the speed of light and time is passing so slowly that the Big Bang is only just happening right now. In this way of describing the universe, with these coordinates the universe actually fits in a finite sphere around us.
That's a perfectly valid set of coordinates, but I think you'll agree it's not very practical. So physicists invented the cosmological model: imagine a bunch of clocks everywhere in the universe, flying at the same speed as the expansion of the universe (i.e. the same speed as average galaxies in that neighborhood) and ticking at whatever rate the local clocks are ticking at (not synchronized to ours). We define time at any place in the universe as being whatever is indicated by those clocks, not ours. So in effect we change the very definition of simultaneity, moving things from the future into today simply by changing the labeling. Also, imagine measuring sticks available everywhere in the universe, but just like the clocks flying at the same speed as the local expanding universe. To measure distances, we use those sticks instead of our own.
If we now measure everything using local (Lorentz-contracted) sticks and local (time-dilated) clocks, the universe looks completely different. It is truly infinite, the same age everywhere, and distant objects are no longer flat Lorentz-contracted pancakes but look the same as objects in our neighbourhood. Note that this is not a different universe, it's the same one but with different labels stuck onto objects.
Now, with this set of coordinates, it turns out that rays of light don't travel at a fixed speed "c" relative to us, but relative to the local clocks and sticks we used to define the coordinate system. It is still true that nothing can go faster than (local) light, i.e. you cannot overtake a ray of light, but a distant object certainly can move away from us faster than the speed of a ray of light in our neighbourhood. And if some alien over there were to try and shoot a laser beam our way, that light would never reach us because it is traveling towards us at the speed of light relative to the local "space" which is moving away from us faster, like a cosmic conveyor belt. Note that this conveyor belt is not real, it's just a product of our mathematical trickery refefining distances and times.
Of course you might wonder what happens to that alien laser beam in the first coordinate system, where rays of light all travel at the same speed relative to us. Well, in that system, the aliens don't exist yet because time in that part of space is moving very slowly (and has been moving slowly ever since the big bang). And since that part of space is still accelerating away from us ever faster and closer to the speed of light, local time comes to an asymptotic halt before the aliens ever get a chance to shoot that laser.
"Space itself" is just whatever we define it to be. By changing coordinates, we can move things from the past into the future or even into "never". It doesn't matter, it's just math(s), the end result is that we will never see that laser and we will never be able to reach that galaxy either.