I actually did the math once, and it is feasible. You need, of course, the more expensive, higher power cells to do it. And you don't want it just sitting around unused in the vehicle, because of course any batteries in the vehicle should be going to good use; it should be connected to the vehicle's electric system in normal operation. But if you have a detachable battery section, you can have 20-30 pounds of cells with shoulder straps and a hip belt for walking to the nearest farmhouse, charge on 110V/15A for an hour minutes or 220V/24A for 20 minutes, walk back, and add an another 5-10 miles range in a reduced power mode to your vehicle to get to a charging station. It's quite doable.
When you fuel your gas car the average [chemical] power of the connection is 8 MW.
Misleading. Given that there's about 20% average operational efficiency pump-to-wheel in a non-hybrid and a bit over 30% average efficiency in a hybrid (note: we're talking *average* efficiency, not peak), you're only getting ~1.5-2.5MW usable energy. Of the 100kW that goes to the EV, about 85kW is usable.
Secondly, most of the time spent filling up a vehicle isn't "filling up the vehicle". It's the time to find a gas station, drive out of your way to get to it, take an exit, decelerate, pull up to a pump, stop the vehicle, get out, get your credit card out, put it in the machine, put it away, open up the gas tank, take the cap off, pick up the pump, select your fuel, put the pump in, finish fueling, take the pump out, hang it back up, take your receipt, get back in your car, start it back up again, pull out of the gas station, reaccelerate, get back on the road, find your way back to where you left off, and continue on your way. And possibly add "go to the bathroom" or "get something from the convenience store" to the list while you're at it. The fueling process itself may only take a minute, but the whole process is more like 10 minutes or so on average.
Beyond that, while that is the "normal case" for a gasoline vehicle, that is the "special case" for an electric vehicle. Electric vehicles normally don't have to ever do any of that. You just plug it in in your garage and then never have to think about it unless you're going on a long trip. The charge is just there, every time, no going out of your way, no standing outside in bad weather, none of that.
I think the occasional 15 minute charge on a long trip -- aka, a bathroom break or quick meal -- and then never having to deal with going to a gas station in your normal daily life -- is more than reasonable.
First, why would you ever need such fast charging in your house? No, seriously -- why? Given that you can't "rapid-charge" your gas car at home -- nay, can't "charge" it at all at home -- and that there's really no point, since you only need rapid charge on long trips...
Secondly, it is possible if you add a battery bank.
Fast charging battery tend to have very low lifespan.
Only in batteries not designed for fast charging.
That may sound like a snarky answer, but it's not. There's a huge number of engineering design decisions and tradeoffs that one can make, and you can basically pick and choose your ability to deal with different challenges by how much you care about them versus other challenges -- namely, cost and energy density. Of course, today's LiPos and spinels have advanced so much that it's not hard at all to deal with fast charging, from a cell chemistry perspective; the main challenge now is simply designing a pack that can be cooled properly without being overly heavy or complicated.
FYI, A123 has packs that can repeatedly be charged and discharged in just a couple minutes without any special cooling that are popular in the RC world, but they're quite expensive.
And anyway, beyond all this -- how often do you think the average person goes more than 100 miles on a tank? No, seriously? A couple times a year perhaps? A couple fast charges per year -- let's say 6 -- and, say, a 10 year battery life = 60 fast charges. Not a freaking lot.
Quite true. The optimal speed for a Tesla Roadster under controlled conditions (perfectly flat, no wind, no accel/decel, etc) is 17-18 mph. The Roadster's range under such conditions is about 410 miles, versus the 170 or so that you'll get driving 70 down a highway (the Roadster's nominal range is generally achieved at around 55mph steady-state).
Yes, running the AC or heater takes power. But, say, 3kW to run a heater (the heat output of two blow driers running at full blast) for two hours stuck in traffic in freezing weather is still only 6 kWh, compared with the 3x efficiency gain from driving slowly. Run a heat pump or insulate the vehicle, and your heating requirements become much less.
I'm still trying to figure out, in OO, to make it format numbers in 1,234.56 format when my locale setting is 1.234,56. Just because my locale setting is one way doesn't mean that I only ever deal with numbers in that format, and I don't want to have to change my locale just to enter numbers in different formats (especially when I'm dealing with *both* in the same document).
I assume you have a breakdown of the executives of companies that received the loans and which campaigns they donated to to back up such a harsh allegation, right? I mean, surely you wouldn't be so irresponsible as to throw that out there without a shred of evidence apart from hearsay, would you?
What sort of idiot would claim that you only need a background in STEM to be a climate expert? Climate science is an incredibly complex field, with certain subsets (such as dendrochronology) being about as nuanced as they come. You could understand, for example, the summaries of the papers with only a STEM background, but you're certainly in no position to critique the research itself.
Wow. Because when I want an opinion on climate change, I automatically turn to astronauts, shuttle leading edge system managers, and pogo prevention panel chairs.
Is anyone else really disappointed that they didn't even mention, much less discuss, HiPER? For those not familiar with it, think "ITER, but designed for power generation rather than weapons research". It uses a weaker compression pulse, which is much easier to generate, along with a rapid heating pulse, using both the heat and pressure to achieve fusion at far greater efficiency and in a much smaller/cheaper facilitiy. It's mainstream hot fusion, no exotic schemes required, and has a lot of support in the scientific community. And its approach could readily beat ITER to economical fusion power. So why no mention of it?
I wonder if that's kind of like what I made back in middle school. I had a design, which I've totally forgotten, which would every time you threw it go forward, rise up, stall, turn around, fly back just over your head and hit the person behind you.;)
Not really, because the coulomb constant in the numerator of the fine structure constant is relative to the length of a meter, which would obviously be likewise shifting if the Planck length is shifting. What you'd find is that everything would constantly -- albeit incredilbly slowly -- be moving into a higher energy state due to the "greater distances" between objects, which would then be radiated back down. So there would be a signature, but it'd be an incredibly weak one, and one that should be expected from dark energy as well. It's just a different perspective on the same phenomenon -- that is, objects in the universe are shrinking down into themselves rather than being pushed outward.
I find the concept of a shifting concept much easier to picture than some unexplained force pushing everything apart over cosmological distances (very different from all known forces). The analogy would be that we're all points in a balloon and are slowly "shrinking" down into ourselves. We see each other point as being pushed apart, and our "universe" (the balloon from each other.) being driven outward at an increasing expansion rate, while really it's just us that are shrinking away from each other.
Personally, I like to view the expansion of the universe as simply a reduction in the Planck length/time relative to C. This would create the perception of a force pushing everything apart (light taking increasingly long, in terms of Planck units, to travel from one point to another). Ultimately, it's just a different perspective on the same thing, but I like it because it doesn't require the conception of some sort of mysterious "dark energy" -- just an explanation of why the Planck length would slowly shift.
And I find that, too, rather simple to envision, in a number of ways. For example, one that I've been thinking about recently is that if you view the universe in terms of information processing, the distance-limited interactions like the strong force decline in frequency as the universe ages. So if there's a fixed "processing power" of the whole universe but a decreasing number of "calculations" per "unit" time, then the number of steps per "unit" time increases, which could be expressed in any number of ways toward the universe's physical constants.
Here's the problem. Neonicotinoids went into wide use starting in the 1990s to replace other pesticide families such as organophosphates, which are generally much more indiscriminate in what they hurt and more hazardous to human health. Organophosphates are the same family of chemicals that include VX and sarin. Neonicotinoids are in the same family as nicotine and are analogous to the old technique of spraying plants with tobacco juice to kill insects.
And also, just to make clear, we're not talking about "two pesticides". We're talking about a whole family.
And anyway, the study has all sorts of other problems that I've talked about elsewhere, and is like the 10th study to loudly proclaim, "we've solved it!" with a different solution.
Except that the article neglected to mention that nobody so far has successfully measured imidacloprid levels in HFCS. One study found "trace" levels but couldn't quantify it.
And if HFCS is the problem, how does this explain population declines in wild bees?
It's been linked to about a dozen different things, with each study calling itself "conclusive". It actually starts to get annoying after a while.
Here's the most balanced and detailed article I've seen on this most recent paper so far. In particular, I like Krupke's comments:
“If the relationship was as easy as that, we’d have noticed it long ago. There are areas where neonicotinoids are used, but you don’t have colony loss,” Krupke said. “But what these studies are showing is that because neonicotinoids are absolutely ubiquitous, and we’re seeing sub-lethal effects, is that they’re stressors. They’ve softened up the bees for other parasites.”
Pesticide risk analysis in the United States has focused too much on whether chemicals are immediately, obviously toxic, said Krupke. “Our way of thinking is fundamentally flawed,” he said. “We need to look at sub-lethal effects, and for a longer time period. These pesticides are everywhere, every year. We’ve never used pesticides in the way we’re using them now, where we charge up a plant and it expresses pesticides all year long.”
I think that's a fair view on the subject, and ties in well with all of the other "conclusive" studies.
It's also worth remembering -- not that it helps anything now -- that honeybees are not native to the US. We only need them because of our extreme use of pesticide-heavy monoculture. Pesticides obviously kill off native pollinators, but monoculture is just as bad -- when everything for dozens of miles around, for the most part, all blooms at once and then there's virtually nothing for the rest of the year, you can't support most types of pollinator populations.
It occurs to me that one might be able to create 3d printer mass-adoption *without* a special printer -- just special paper. Create a water-soluble printer paper (except the edges) that reacts to common ink solvents by becoming insoluble, and which has a thin layer of adhesive (potentially water activated, potentially heat activated, or other possibilities) on one side. Open your model as a many-page PDF, with each page being a sequential cross-section. Print. Clamp. Activate adhesive and soak. Viola, 3d part, no special printer (and with a pretty fine layer-resolution, too). The "paper" doesn't have to be cellulosic (and the solvent doesn't have to be water), so long as everything can follow the basic priciples laid out above and that the "paper" can be fed into the printer. The cost to print a part could be reduced if printer manufacturers offered special cheap "solvent-only" cartridges (if this became popular, I'm sure they would -- it'd be a whole new market for them, and any printer-maker to offer such cartridges would have a big marketing advantage for their printers).
Perhaps it's not reasonable to ask things to be performed in the original language, but why always British is the question. Just to pick an example, your average Icelander speaks perfect English, but most have at least somewhat of an accent -- be it rolled "r"s,"w/v" mixing, vowel sounds that tend to go down at the end instead of up (for example, an "e" or "o" briefly starts to sound more like an "a" before it ends, while with most English speakers, it briefly starts to sound more like an "i"), breathy/dulled trailing consonants, things of that nature. The accent is understandable but unfamiliar to your average American. So why not? Why not Danish-accented English? Norwegian-accented English? Swedish-accented English? Again, most of them speak excellent English, but with different accents than your average movie fare. The issue is that the "unusual" accent roles needed for movies are almost always British, and that's kinda strange.
1) Which is why no radiation escaped, right? 2) Can I count on you to reliably oppose any reactor design that doesn't have a pressuretight containment structure beyond the reactor vessel itself?
I've read Rider's work. In one of his papers, he actually *proposes* non-equilibrium fusors that do not run afoul of his thesis. As mentioned, the key is that you cannot simply accelerate the bulk plasma, but have to specifically select for ions within a given energy band.
If you disagree, take it up with Rider, not me. If necessary, I'll dig up the papers and page numbers for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually did the math once, and it is feasible. You need, of course, the more expensive, higher power cells to do it. And you don't want it just sitting around unused in the vehicle, because of course any batteries in the vehicle should be going to good use; it should be connected to the vehicle's electric system in normal operation. But if you have a detachable battery section, you can have 20-30 pounds of cells with shoulder straps and a hip belt for walking to the nearest farmhouse, charge on 110V/15A for an hour minutes or 220V/24A for 20 minutes, walk back, and add an another 5-10 miles range in a reduced power mode to your vehicle to get to a charging station. It's quite doable.
Misleading. Given that there's about 20% average operational efficiency pump-to-wheel in a non-hybrid and a bit over 30% average efficiency in a hybrid (note: we're talking *average* efficiency, not peak), you're only getting ~1.5-2.5MW usable energy. Of the 100kW that goes to the EV, about 85kW is usable.
Secondly, most of the time spent filling up a vehicle isn't "filling up the vehicle". It's the time to find a gas station, drive out of your way to get to it, take an exit, decelerate, pull up to a pump, stop the vehicle, get out, get your credit card out, put it in the machine, put it away, open up the gas tank, take the cap off, pick up the pump, select your fuel, put the pump in, finish fueling, take the pump out, hang it back up, take your receipt, get back in your car, start it back up again, pull out of the gas station, reaccelerate, get back on the road, find your way back to where you left off, and continue on your way. And possibly add "go to the bathroom" or "get something from the convenience store" to the list while you're at it. The fueling process itself may only take a minute, but the whole process is more like 10 minutes or so on average.
Beyond that, while that is the "normal case" for a gasoline vehicle, that is the "special case" for an electric vehicle. Electric vehicles normally don't have to ever do any of that. You just plug it in in your garage and then never have to think about it unless you're going on a long trip. The charge is just there, every time, no going out of your way, no standing outside in bad weather, none of that.
I think the occasional 15 minute charge on a long trip -- aka, a bathroom break or quick meal -- and then never having to deal with going to a gas station in your normal daily life -- is more than reasonable.
First, why would you ever need such fast charging in your house? No, seriously -- why? Given that you can't "rapid-charge" your gas car at home -- nay, can't "charge" it at all at home -- and that there's really no point, since you only need rapid charge on long trips...
Secondly, it is possible if you add a battery bank.
Only in batteries not designed for fast charging.
That may sound like a snarky answer, but it's not. There's a huge number of engineering design decisions and tradeoffs that one can make, and you can basically pick and choose your ability to deal with different challenges by how much you care about them versus other challenges -- namely, cost and energy density. Of course, today's LiPos and spinels have advanced so much that it's not hard at all to deal with fast charging, from a cell chemistry perspective; the main challenge now is simply designing a pack that can be cooled properly without being overly heavy or complicated.
FYI, A123 has packs that can repeatedly be charged and discharged in just a couple minutes without any special cooling that are popular in the RC world, but they're quite expensive.
And anyway, beyond all this -- how often do you think the average person goes more than 100 miles on a tank? No, seriously? A couple times a year perhaps? A couple fast charges per year -- let's say 6 -- and, say, a 10 year battery life = 60 fast charges. Not a freaking lot.
Quite true. The optimal speed for a Tesla Roadster under controlled conditions (perfectly flat, no wind, no accel/decel, etc) is 17-18 mph. The Roadster's range under such conditions is about 410 miles, versus the 170 or so that you'll get driving 70 down a highway (the Roadster's nominal range is generally achieved at around 55mph steady-state).
Yes, running the AC or heater takes power. But, say, 3kW to run a heater (the heat output of two blow driers running at full blast) for two hours stuck in traffic in freezing weather is still only 6 kWh, compared with the 3x efficiency gain from driving slowly. Run a heat pump or insulate the vehicle, and your heating requirements become much less.
A pain, yes, but not a bad idea. :) Thanks.
I'm still trying to figure out, in OO, to make it format numbers in 1,234.56 format when my locale setting is 1.234,56. Just because my locale setting is one way doesn't mean that I only ever deal with numbers in that format, and I don't want to have to change my locale just to enter numbers in different formats (especially when I'm dealing with *both* in the same document).
I assume you have a breakdown of the executives of companies that received the loans and which campaigns they donated to to back up such a harsh allegation, right? I mean, surely you wouldn't be so irresponsible as to throw that out there without a shred of evidence apart from hearsay, would you?
Right, because the field went from 97-98% acceptance to "everyone thinks it's BS" in 3 years, right?
97-98% of active, publishing climatologists accept the consensus position. And that's what matters.
What sort of idiot would claim that you only need a background in STEM to be a climate expert? Climate science is an incredibly complex field, with certain subsets (such as dendrochronology) being about as nuanced as they come. You could understand, for example, the summaries of the papers with only a STEM background, but you're certainly in no position to critique the research itself.
Wow. Because when I want an opinion on climate change, I automatically turn to astronauts, shuttle leading edge system managers, and pogo prevention panel chairs.
Is anyone else really disappointed that they didn't even mention, much less discuss, HiPER? For those not familiar with it, think "ITER, but designed for power generation rather than weapons research". It uses a weaker compression pulse, which is much easier to generate, along with a rapid heating pulse, using both the heat and pressure to achieve fusion at far greater efficiency and in a much smaller/cheaper facilitiy. It's mainstream hot fusion, no exotic schemes required, and has a lot of support in the scientific community. And its approach could readily beat ITER to economical fusion power. So why no mention of it?
I wonder if that's kind of like what I made back in middle school. I had a design, which I've totally forgotten, which would every time you threw it go forward, rise up, stall, turn around, fly back just over your head and hit the person behind you. ;)
Not really, because the coulomb constant in the numerator of the fine structure constant is relative to the length of a meter, which would obviously be likewise shifting if the Planck length is shifting. What you'd find is that everything would constantly -- albeit incredilbly slowly -- be moving into a higher energy state due to the "greater distances" between objects, which would then be radiated back down. So there would be a signature, but it'd be an incredibly weak one, and one that should be expected from dark energy as well. It's just a different perspective on the same phenomenon -- that is, objects in the universe are shrinking down into themselves rather than being pushed outward.
I find the concept of a shifting concept much easier to picture than some unexplained force pushing everything apart over cosmological distances (very different from all known forces). The analogy would be that we're all points in a balloon and are slowly "shrinking" down into ourselves. We see each other point as being pushed apart, and our "universe" (the balloon from each other.) being driven outward at an increasing expansion rate, while really it's just us that are shrinking away from each other.
Personally, I like to view the expansion of the universe as simply a reduction in the Planck length/time relative to C. This would create the perception of a force pushing everything apart (light taking increasingly long, in terms of Planck units, to travel from one point to another). Ultimately, it's just a different perspective on the same thing, but I like it because it doesn't require the conception of some sort of mysterious "dark energy" -- just an explanation of why the Planck length would slowly shift.
And I find that, too, rather simple to envision, in a number of ways. For example, one that I've been thinking about recently is that if you view the universe in terms of information processing, the distance-limited interactions like the strong force decline in frequency as the universe ages. So if there's a fixed "processing power" of the whole universe but a decreasing number of "calculations" per "unit" time, then the number of steps per "unit" time increases, which could be expressed in any number of ways toward the universe's physical constants.
I usually have to let my sugars be eaten by yeast first before they cause me trouble in navigating ;)
Here's the problem. Neonicotinoids went into wide use starting in the 1990s to replace other pesticide families such as organophosphates, which are generally much more indiscriminate in what they hurt and more hazardous to human health. Organophosphates are the same family of chemicals that include VX and sarin. Neonicotinoids are in the same family as nicotine and are analogous to the old technique of spraying plants with tobacco juice to kill insects.
And also, just to make clear, we're not talking about "two pesticides". We're talking about a whole family.
And anyway, the study has all sorts of other problems that I've talked about elsewhere, and is like the 10th study to loudly proclaim, "we've solved it!" with a different solution.
Except that the article neglected to mention that nobody so far has successfully measured imidacloprid levels in HFCS. One study found "trace" levels but couldn't quantify it.
And if HFCS is the problem, how does this explain population declines in wild bees?
It's been linked to about a dozen different things, with each study calling itself "conclusive". It actually starts to get annoying after a while.
Here's the most balanced and detailed article I've seen on this most recent paper so far. In particular, I like Krupke's comments:
I think that's a fair view on the subject, and ties in well with all of the other "conclusive" studies.
It's also worth remembering -- not that it helps anything now -- that honeybees are not native to the US. We only need them because of our extreme use of pesticide-heavy monoculture. Pesticides obviously kill off native pollinators, but monoculture is just as bad -- when everything for dozens of miles around, for the most part, all blooms at once and then there's virtually nothing for the rest of the year, you can't support most types of pollinator populations.
It occurs to me that one might be able to create 3d printer mass-adoption *without* a special printer -- just special paper. Create a water-soluble printer paper (except the edges) that reacts to common ink solvents by becoming insoluble, and which has a thin layer of adhesive (potentially water activated, potentially heat activated, or other possibilities) on one side. Open your model as a many-page PDF, with each page being a sequential cross-section. Print. Clamp. Activate adhesive and soak. Viola, 3d part, no special printer (and with a pretty fine layer-resolution, too). The "paper" doesn't have to be cellulosic (and the solvent doesn't have to be water), so long as everything can follow the basic priciples laid out above and that the "paper" can be fed into the printer. The cost to print a part could be reduced if printer manufacturers offered special cheap "solvent-only" cartridges (if this became popular, I'm sure they would -- it'd be a whole new market for them, and any printer-maker to offer such cartridges would have a big marketing advantage for their printers).
To achieve that, you need a ... wait for it... pressuretight containment building. Yes, of course they have filtered ventilation systems.
Perhaps it's not reasonable to ask things to be performed in the original language, but why always British is the question. Just to pick an example, your average Icelander speaks perfect English, but most have at least somewhat of an accent -- be it rolled "r"s,"w/v" mixing, vowel sounds that tend to go down at the end instead of up (for example, an "e" or "o" briefly starts to sound more like an "a" before it ends, while with most English speakers, it briefly starts to sound more like an "i"), breathy/dulled trailing consonants, things of that nature. The accent is understandable but unfamiliar to your average American. So why not? Why not Danish-accented English? Norwegian-accented English? Swedish-accented English? Again, most of them speak excellent English, but with different accents than your average movie fare. The issue is that the "unusual" accent roles needed for movies are almost always British, and that's kinda strange.
1) Which is why no radiation escaped, right?
2) Can I count on you to reliably oppose any reactor design that doesn't have a pressuretight containment structure beyond the reactor vessel itself?
I've read Rider's work. In one of his papers, he actually *proposes* non-equilibrium fusors that do not run afoul of his thesis. As mentioned, the key is that you cannot simply accelerate the bulk plasma, but have to specifically select for ions within a given energy band.
If you disagree, take it up with Rider, not me. If necessary, I'll dig up the papers and page numbers for you.