It's all about statistics. The more diverse your intermittent sources, and the broader the geographical range they're spread (and thus the less their power generation rates correlate), the higher the percentage of your grid it can make up with a correspondingly smaller amount of peaking as backup.
That said, I do have concerns about the uniformitarian principle as applied to generation, that things will just continue in the future as they have in the past, or at least change slowly enough for us to respond to them. What happens if some big one-in-200 year volcano erupts, dims light and changes weather patterns for a year or two? That's not going to show up in weather models based on a couple decades of modern measurements.
Aluminum smelters cannot (except at great expense) shut down altogether. But they can modulate their power consumtion a fair amount. They have to keep enough power flowing through the aluminum to keep it molten, but they don't have to run it at peak production rates through each cell.
Doesn't need to be. I strongly support renewables, but one has to be realistic about the limitations of the technology that they're using. Any plan based around "Let's make a large portion of our power generation from intermittent sources over a very limited geographic area (little variation in production levels) with most of our peaking having very limited connections to us which can and will need to be taken down at points in the future" is just asking for problems. In fact, it's practically guaranteeing them.
Renewables and stability can come hand in hand (dramatic demand variability has been part of the market from day 1, so why not supply). But the higher the percentage of your power you want to come from intermittent sources, the more you need to do it right. And that means, 1) different types of intermittent sources (say, solar paired with wind), 2) geographic distribution of generation (so that drops aren't as extreme or as sudden), 3) sufficient storage OR peaking to fill the gaps, and 4) all elements of the above being linked in a manner that can effectively statistically guarantee constant supply uptime.
They might tag someone like me with such a law. I never deliberately go to any Daesh-run sites, but I do follow the news on Syria closely, and some of the videos, reports, etc posted of various attacks, defenses, status reports, etc from various groups in various locations are posted to social media. And when I go to a random video, I have no clue whether a particular account who posted or shared a video or report is linked with some particular "prohibited" entity. And there are so many small entities that sometimes switch alliances, one entity might be "fine" at some point but then no longer "fine" later. And then there's the collaborative groups. For example, Nusra is part of Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest). Most of JaF isn't considered terrorist groups, but Nusra is linked with al-Qaeda and is (even though they're bitter enemies with Daesh, who is enemy #1... crazy, this war....). So, if JaF puts out a drone video of an assault on south Aleppo and I watch it, am I in trouble? What's the dividing line? Whether the person who filmed it is from al-Nusra? Whether the drone pilot is from al-Nusra? Whether the video editor was from al-Nusra? Whether the guy running the twitter account is a member in al-Nusra, even if it's not a "Nusra account"? Am I supposed to somehow be able to know these things?
Then there's outright mistagging - Youtube takes stuff down without really paying close attention to it. For example, they took down a video I saw once which started out looking like one of those horrific Daesh execution videos - prisoners in jumpsuits, marched out by people with knives, lined up in a row, the knives lifted up in the air in unison. Except that the video wasn't from Daesh; it was from a FSA group from North Aleppo (Azaz pocket). The prisoners were Daesh soldiers. And they weren't executed; the knives were used to cut their bindings. Then an imam came in and gave the prisoners a sermon about how murder is wrong and so forth, and then the prisoners were walked to a holding facility. But clearly whoever had the video deleted paid no attention to who posted it, nor watched more than just the beginning.
I look forward to the day when car crashes are looked on the same as jet crashes. And one of the first goals with a passenger jet crash is to get the data off the flight recorders to crash investigators. The FAA takes the concept that crashes are simply not acceptable, just not "something that happens", and whatever caused a given crash doesn't just get marked "WILLNOTFIX" and closed. The latter is basically the situation with car accidents today. I strongly support, at least on an aspirational level, the concept that all data for every accident of significance is gathered, used to figure out what went wrong, and everything reasonably possible done to prevent that scenario from happening again.
The Tesla logging system is not under investigation for being unreliable.
Whether a hardware system is on or not is entirely different from any data that may be generated by it. There's a number of events required to enable autopilot, and all are logged.
Indeed. If they can get a growth environment that properly imitates natural development, they should be able to produce amazing cuts. Young tissue, electrically stimulated and stressed at whatever levels are determined to be ideal during growth, fed whatever nutrients gives it the best development, etc.
Having been vegetarian as long as I am, I probably wouldn't eat it just because the concept of eating any sort of meat just seems disgusting to me now; even vegetarian products designed to mimic meat come across as gross to me. But if lab-grown meat had been available when I was younger, I would have jumped on the chance to buy it.
Restarting Saturn V production wasn't a reasonable choice either, unless you also had the budget to fund the sort of missions that the Saturn V was designed to launch.
The Shuttle was a classic case of the hazards of ignoring TRL. It should have been designed as a small-scale tech deliverable, which may or may not also prove to provide great economic advantages in spaceflight as only a secondary objective - not as a giant vehicle designed from scratch to be the cornerstone of all launch business in the western world. It's just way too risky to try to make huge jumps like that. We would have gotten just as much useful data from a mini test-shuttle as we did from the big expensive one.
I think the Apollo program gave exactly the wrong lesson (that the best things come from giant leaps). Maybe if you can dedicate a percent or two of your GDP to the thing, sure, but otherwise, that's just too dangerous of an approach. You don't learn to crawl by running a marathon.
IMHO one of the biggest problems with NASA is the fact that it ever came into being. The NACA model, where the agency was an entity for funding basic research and cooperative collaboration with external entities toward the advancement of the state of the art, rather than a body for carrying out congressional megaproject-mandates, seems much more desirable.
The short of it is, for any coordinate system you want to define yourself in, you have to gather a few points of reference - the exact sort of points depending on the coordinate system. There's no single fixed system that all spacecraft have to use, but star trackers (usually combined with a gyroscope) are generally a good one for orientation. The "fixed" stars can give you an absolute frame of reference, while the relative position of the sun and the planets relative to them and the passage of time can give you a very good sense of where you are. Transmissions from Earth are often good for precise determination of distance and velocity, which can be done on either end; however, it's always important that the spacecraft be able to find Earth on its own.
If you want to learn about spacecraft design, I strongly recommend "Space Mission and Analysis Design" by Larson and Wertz. It's sort of the "fundamentals" of all aspects of mission design, and they spend all of section 5 ("Space Mission Geometry") on the topic of the different coordinate systems used in celestial navigation, how to gather the data needed to position in them, how to convert from one to another, and what sort of hardware is needed, how to estimate pointing/positioning errors, etc.
Meh, it might.:) That's one of the things that Juno is present to try to accomplish, to study Jupiter's interior. Maybe there is some abrupt transition layer (say, to metallic hydrogen). And we know it's eaten plenty of rocky material over its lifetime.
But yeah, there should be no sudden, distinct transition between gas/liquid/supercritical/liquid crystal states.
You're pretending that the difference in Chinese costs are drastically different from those elsewhere. They're not. California for example was a rare earth producer until China started dumping on the market. There were some efforts underway to restart production the last I checked.
The efficiency difference is in the range of a couple percent. It's not a practical difference. And at least in compact, high power applications (EVs), AC induction motors tend to be favored at higher powers because they don't require expensive permanent magnets, and because permanent magnets at those strengths can be challenging to work with.
The whole world could run out of rare earths for permanent magnets and you'd hardly notice the difference.
This whole story is silly to begin with. Regardless of what Honda tends to put in their hybrids, makers of electric cars tend to use AC induction motors which don't use any rare earth metals. There's no rare earths used anywhere in the Model S, for example.
(and more to the point, you can get rare earths from just about any country too - they're not actually that rare (just dispersed). But China produces them the cheapest)
I have large feet and they're only 9" long. I don't know what you're defining as "the first thumb joint". On my hand, depending on how it's defined, I can get measurements from 1 1/4 inches to nearly 2 inches. My arm is 2/3rds of a yard long.
These are some pretty lousy "standards". Furthermore, one could use this to justify any system of measurements. Example: My pinky nail is 1cm wide. Heel to my hip is 1 meter. Creases on my fingers are 1mm. And these are actually pretty accurate measurements.
How on earth is base 60 advantageous for doing sums? Our numeric system is decimal, why on earth would you want a non-decimal base?
Agreed. I'm working with an engineer from the US on a project and the difference is a constant headache for us. It's not just about calculations, it's also about intuitive understandings (if I say a beam that's 40x80mm, or he says one that's 3"x3", it's important that the other get an immediate sense of what exactly that means). It's about knowledge of the market, whether elements in particular dimensions are actually available. It's about the ability to double check other people's calculations just by looking at them, without having to run everything through a bunch of conversions. It's about the need to constantly insert conversions into everything you write just to make sure that the other person is on the same page. And yes, it's about mistakes. I wasted a lot of time on an approach that depended on M10 screws when the other person had intended #10 screws... my fault on that one, but still, it's frustrating that this difference in measures and standards exists.
It's perihelion is only 34 AU, aphelion 120 AU. Ie, it's between 1.13 and 4 times as far as Neptune.
Which unfortunately makes it a lot less interesting. I was hoping that they'd found a new sednoid. This planet has been almost certainly scattered by Neptune, rather than some undiscovered distant object.
Still, it really drives the point home about how little we know about our own solar system, given that we're still finding things this large, this close. Our ability to detect them is based on how much light they reflect, which is in turn based off how much light they receive, which drops with the square of their distance. So you have to double the radius to increase the cross section proportional to the light loss with every doubling of distance. So this is equivalent to finding an object the size of Mars at ~400 AU. And there could be objects even larger than this at the distance it was found without us having seen them; this is far from the limits of what we know for certain. We know amazingly little about what's in the Kuiper Belt, and even less about what's beyond.
I really can't wait for the LSST to come online so we can actually start to get a better idea of what's in our own bloody solar system;) And even if it doesn't find any "planet X" type objects itself, it should hopefully find a large enough population of distant bodies to pinpoint any "planet X" objects via their orbits (wherein JWST could be used for followup observations).
1) Person gets in an accident 2) Person blames autopilot 3) News widely reports that autopilot caused a crash 4) Evidence of whether autopilot was actually involved is returned.
Autopilot has been involved in crashes. But most of the "autopilot did it!" stories have turned out to be false. It seems to be a pretty easy thing to blame to try to get out of liability if you wreck your car.
That's not saying that any of the cases above specifically did not involve autopilot (we know for example that the fatal one did, that's been confirmed). But until it's confirmed, it's best to take these with a grain of salt. Tesla vehicles log bloody everything. If autopilot was in use at the time of the crash, it'll be there.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I can't find any evidence that there has been a second fatality.
And really, have only three Tesla vehicles period crashed, period, while on autopilot in 130m miles? If so, that's bloody impressive. More impressive than just a statistic of 1 fatality in 130m miles.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all about statistics. The more diverse your intermittent sources, and the broader the geographical range they're spread (and thus the less their power generation rates correlate), the higher the percentage of your grid it can make up with a correspondingly smaller amount of peaking as backup.
That said, I do have concerns about the uniformitarian principle as applied to generation, that things will just continue in the future as they have in the past, or at least change slowly enough for us to respond to them. What happens if some big one-in-200 year volcano erupts, dims light and changes weather patterns for a year or two? That's not going to show up in weather models based on a couple decades of modern measurements.
Aluminum smelters cannot (except at great expense) shut down altogether. But they can modulate their power consumtion a fair amount. They have to keep enough power flowing through the aluminum to keep it molten, but they don't have to run it at peak production rates through each cell.
Doesn't need to be. I strongly support renewables, but one has to be realistic about the limitations of the technology that they're using. Any plan based around "Let's make a large portion of our power generation from intermittent sources over a very limited geographic area (little variation in production levels) with most of our peaking having very limited connections to us which can and will need to be taken down at points in the future" is just asking for problems. In fact, it's practically guaranteeing them.
Renewables and stability can come hand in hand (dramatic demand variability has been part of the market from day 1, so why not supply). But the higher the percentage of your power you want to come from intermittent sources, the more you need to do it right. And that means, 1) different types of intermittent sources (say, solar paired with wind), 2) geographic distribution of generation (so that drops aren't as extreme or as sudden), 3) sufficient storage OR peaking to fill the gaps, and 4) all elements of the above being linked in a manner that can effectively statistically guarantee constant supply uptime.
Which, as demonstrated in this comment section, people refuse to believe.
Sure takes Rick Rolling to a new, dark level.
They might tag someone like me with such a law. I never deliberately go to any Daesh-run sites, but I do follow the news on Syria closely, and some of the videos, reports, etc posted of various attacks, defenses, status reports, etc from various groups in various locations are posted to social media. And when I go to a random video, I have no clue whether a particular account who posted or shared a video or report is linked with some particular "prohibited" entity. And there are so many small entities that sometimes switch alliances, one entity might be "fine" at some point but then no longer "fine" later. And then there's the collaborative groups. For example, Nusra is part of Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest). Most of JaF isn't considered terrorist groups, but Nusra is linked with al-Qaeda and is (even though they're bitter enemies with Daesh, who is enemy #1... crazy, this war....). So, if JaF puts out a drone video of an assault on south Aleppo and I watch it, am I in trouble? What's the dividing line? Whether the person who filmed it is from al-Nusra? Whether the drone pilot is from al-Nusra? Whether the video editor was from al-Nusra? Whether the guy running the twitter account is a member in al-Nusra, even if it's not a "Nusra account"? Am I supposed to somehow be able to know these things?
Then there's outright mistagging - Youtube takes stuff down without really paying close attention to it. For example, they took down a video I saw once which started out looking like one of those horrific Daesh execution videos - prisoners in jumpsuits, marched out by people with knives, lined up in a row, the knives lifted up in the air in unison. Except that the video wasn't from Daesh; it was from a FSA group from North Aleppo (Azaz pocket). The prisoners were Daesh soldiers. And they weren't executed; the knives were used to cut their bindings. Then an imam came in and gave the prisoners a sermon about how murder is wrong and so forth, and then the prisoners were walked to a holding facility. But clearly whoever had the video deleted paid no attention to who posted it, nor watched more than just the beginning.
Not me.
I look forward to the day when car crashes are looked on the same as jet crashes. And one of the first goals with a passenger jet crash is to get the data off the flight recorders to crash investigators. The FAA takes the concept that crashes are simply not acceptable, just not "something that happens", and whatever caused a given crash doesn't just get marked "WILLNOTFIX" and closed. The latter is basically the situation with car accidents today. I strongly support, at least on an aspirational level, the concept that all data for every accident of significance is gathered, used to figure out what went wrong, and everything reasonably possible done to prevent that scenario from happening again.
Exactly. Autopilot has to be the best excuse for wrecking your car ever invented. "No no, I didn't do it, the car did it itself. Really!"
The Tesla logging system is not under investigation for being unreliable.
Whether a hardware system is on or not is entirely different from any data that may be generated by it. There's a number of events required to enable autopilot, and all are logged.
But what about the poor BSE? Won't somebody please think of the BSE? Quasi-living self-replicating chemicals have rights too!
Indeed. If they can get a growth environment that properly imitates natural development, they should be able to produce amazing cuts. Young tissue, electrically stimulated and stressed at whatever levels are determined to be ideal during growth, fed whatever nutrients gives it the best development, etc.
Having been vegetarian as long as I am, I probably wouldn't eat it just because the concept of eating any sort of meat just seems disgusting to me now; even vegetarian products designed to mimic meat come across as gross to me. But if lab-grown meat had been available when I was younger, I would have jumped on the chance to buy it.
One word in response to you:
Diazepam.
Yes, but Reagan didn't win the coveted "giant swimming rabbit" vote.
Restarting Saturn V production wasn't a reasonable choice either, unless you also had the budget to fund the sort of missions that the Saturn V was designed to launch.
The Shuttle was a classic case of the hazards of ignoring TRL. It should have been designed as a small-scale tech deliverable, which may or may not also prove to provide great economic advantages in spaceflight as only a secondary objective - not as a giant vehicle designed from scratch to be the cornerstone of all launch business in the western world. It's just way too risky to try to make huge jumps like that. We would have gotten just as much useful data from a mini test-shuttle as we did from the big expensive one.
I think the Apollo program gave exactly the wrong lesson (that the best things come from giant leaps). Maybe if you can dedicate a percent or two of your GDP to the thing, sure, but otherwise, that's just too dangerous of an approach. You don't learn to crawl by running a marathon.
IMHO one of the biggest problems with NASA is the fact that it ever came into being. The NACA model, where the agency was an entity for funding basic research and cooperative collaboration with external entities toward the advancement of the state of the art, rather than a body for carrying out congressional megaproject-mandates, seems much more desirable.
The short of it is, for any coordinate system you want to define yourself in, you have to gather a few points of reference - the exact sort of points depending on the coordinate system. There's no single fixed system that all spacecraft have to use, but star trackers (usually combined with a gyroscope) are generally a good one for orientation. The "fixed" stars can give you an absolute frame of reference, while the relative position of the sun and the planets relative to them and the passage of time can give you a very good sense of where you are. Transmissions from Earth are often good for precise determination of distance and velocity, which can be done on either end; however, it's always important that the spacecraft be able to find Earth on its own.
If you want to learn about spacecraft design, I strongly recommend "Space Mission and Analysis Design" by Larson and Wertz. It's sort of the "fundamentals" of all aspects of mission design, and they spend all of section 5 ("Space Mission Geometry") on the topic of the different coordinate systems used in celestial navigation, how to gather the data needed to position in them, how to convert from one to another, and what sort of hardware is needed, how to estimate pointing/positioning errors, etc.
Meh, it might. :) That's one of the things that Juno is present to try to accomplish, to study Jupiter's interior. Maybe there is some abrupt transition layer (say, to metallic hydrogen). And we know it's eaten plenty of rocky material over its lifetime.
But yeah, there should be no sudden, distinct transition between gas/liquid/supercritical/liquid crystal states.
You're pretending that the difference in Chinese costs are drastically different from those elsewhere. They're not. California for example was a rare earth producer until China started dumping on the market. There were some efforts underway to restart production the last I checked.
The efficiency difference is in the range of a couple percent. It's not a practical difference. And at least in compact, high power applications (EVs), AC induction motors tend to be favored at higher powers because they don't require expensive permanent magnets, and because permanent magnets at those strengths can be challenging to work with.
The whole world could run out of rare earths for permanent magnets and you'd hardly notice the difference.
This whole story is silly to begin with. Regardless of what Honda tends to put in their hybrids, makers of electric cars tend to use AC induction motors which don't use any rare earth metals. There's no rare earths used anywhere in the Model S, for example.
(and more to the point, you can get rare earths from just about any country too - they're not actually that rare (just dispersed). But China produces them the cheapest)
(pulls out a tape measurer)
I have large feet and they're only 9" long.
I don't know what you're defining as "the first thumb joint". On my hand, depending on how it's defined, I can get measurements from 1 1/4 inches to nearly 2 inches.
My arm is 2/3rds of a yard long.
These are some pretty lousy "standards". Furthermore, one could use this to justify any system of measurements. Example: My pinky nail is 1cm wide. Heel to my hip is 1 meter. Creases on my fingers are 1mm. And these are actually pretty accurate measurements.
How on earth is base 60 advantageous for doing sums? Our numeric system is decimal, why on earth would you want a non-decimal base?
Agreed. I'm working with an engineer from the US on a project and the difference is a constant headache for us. It's not just about calculations, it's also about intuitive understandings (if I say a beam that's 40x80mm, or he says one that's 3"x3", it's important that the other get an immediate sense of what exactly that means). It's about knowledge of the market, whether elements in particular dimensions are actually available. It's about the ability to double check other people's calculations just by looking at them, without having to run everything through a bunch of conversions. It's about the need to constantly insert conversions into everything you write just to make sure that the other person is on the same page. And yes, it's about mistakes. I wasted a lot of time on an approach that depended on M10 screws when the other person had intended #10 screws... my fault on that one, but still, it's frustrating that this difference in measures and standards exists.
Which unfortunately makes it a lot less interesting. I was hoping that they'd found a new sednoid. This planet has been almost certainly scattered by Neptune, rather than some undiscovered distant object.
Still, it really drives the point home about how little we know about our own solar system, given that we're still finding things this large, this close. Our ability to detect them is based on how much light they reflect, which is in turn based off how much light they receive, which drops with the square of their distance. So you have to double the radius to increase the cross section proportional to the light loss with every doubling of distance. So this is equivalent to finding an object the size of Mars at ~400 AU. And there could be objects even larger than this at the distance it was found without us having seen them; this is far from the limits of what we know for certain. We know amazingly little about what's in the Kuiper Belt, and even less about what's beyond.
I really can't wait for the LSST to come online so we can actually start to get a better idea of what's in our own bloody solar system ;) And even if it doesn't find any "planet X" type objects itself, it should hopefully find a large enough population of distant bodies to pinpoint any "planet X" objects via their orbits (wherein JWST could be used for followup observations).
You mean a garden?
He posts almost the exact same thing in every article about Tesla. I'm not sure what's wrong with him, but he's got a bit of an obsession going.
The way the news cycle goes:
1) Person gets in an accident
2) Person blames autopilot
3) News widely reports that autopilot caused a crash
4) Evidence of whether autopilot was actually involved is returned.
Autopilot has been involved in crashes. But most of the "autopilot did it!" stories have turned out to be false. It seems to be a pretty easy thing to blame to try to get out of liability if you wreck your car.
That's not saying that any of the cases above specifically did not involve autopilot (we know for example that the fatal one did, that's been confirmed). But until it's confirmed, it's best to take these with a grain of salt. Tesla vehicles log bloody everything. If autopilot was in use at the time of the crash, it'll be there.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I can't find any evidence that there has been a second fatality.
And really, have only three Tesla vehicles period crashed, period, while on autopilot in 130m miles? If so, that's bloody impressive. More impressive than just a statistic of 1 fatality in 130m miles.