Stop dating people you're attracted to? Really, is that your suggestion?
I think it's easier for a guy to say something like that because guys in general are more physical in their attraction than women, more based on looks. I.e., looks being equal, a shy girl in a bar has dramatically better odds of going home with someone than a shy guy in a bar. How a guy acts is hardly the only aspect of how attractive he comes across, but it is a major part of it. Here's an experiment for you: go to a club some time and only give a meek, timid "hey" to whoever you want to pick up, only respond with short, meek statements to what they say, avoiding direct eye contact, etc, and compare your results to going there and being assertive, self confident, and persistent. "Bad Boys" win because bad boys tend to exude behavioral traits that many if not most women are attracted to.
One could say that this distinction -- far from universal, but definitely extant -- is a cultural phenomena. But there's certainly a reasonable genetic argument to be made for it as well, at least historically.
One has to be cautious about making these sort of declarations without knowing the details. For example, back during the last Iran election thing, I heard a lot of people talking about how some districts in Iran reported more people voting in them than lived there, and stuff like that as indisputable proof of fraud. Apparently not realizing that in Iran, you don't have to vote in your own district; you can vote anywhere in the country, so business districts usually get a disproportionate voter-to-resident ratio.
I wouldn't want to make any declarations about the significance of this data without knowing more about it.
Unfortunately, one can't control what they're attracted to. If you're attracted to guys who exude that sort of energy, aggression, sex drive, that "knowing what they want and going for it" attitude, etc, you can't just decide to not be attracted to it, any more than a guy who's attracted to women with big breasts can just decide not to be attracted to them.
Carbon is the backbone of the molecules in ours, and every living thing on the planets, bodies
In *ours* and every living thing that evolved from primitive carbon-based organism on *Earth*'s bodies. We're not talking about life on Earth. We're talking about xenobiology. You're arguing from a dataset of precisely one element. The question is not what is life on Earth like, but whether all life must be like it is on Earth.
My argument is a lot less like substituting a line of code into a program of a different language, and more like me saying if you hook up your mouse, monitor and hard drive to a tree stump, it's not going to work the same as if you'd hooked them up to your computer.
That's not your argument at all. If you think silicon-based compounds are as "computationally" inert as a tree stump is to a computer, read this for a random example for just one class of silicon compounds. Silicon compounds are just as capable of complex reactions as carbon. The problem is that they're not really compatible with carbon-based life; very different optimum environments. For the most part, it's either one or the other.
but the chemistry just is not there
Name one class of life-essential reactions that you don't think a silicon/silicone/silanol/etc equivalent could exist for.
Which is the whole point: we're not talking about a direct substitution. Your argument is like saying "Java programs can't exist, because if you substitute a line of C code in a C program with a line of Java code, the program breaks."
As noted above, the fact remains that Si - Si bonding is much weaker than C - C bonding
Which is why silicon-based life would primarily use Si-O chains instead of C-C chains, as previously mentioned. Once again, you reinforce my main point: most people are way too uncreative, only looking at a direct C/Si substitution, which isn't at all realistic. You want to talk stability? Bake cookies on a plastic sheet sheet, then bake them on a silicone baking sheet, and tell me which survives the ordeal better.
Things like repeated Si-O chains simply require more factors to be favorable: both elements in the same place, physical conditions that favor sufficiently large quantities of specific silicon oxidation over any other process, etc.
Silicon and carbon are the two most common elements in planetary crusts, and they prefer to bond to each other rather than their own kind. Carbon, on the other hand, is rare in planetary crusts and prefers to bond to oxygen (yielding CO2 when done sufficiently, not chains). Silicon has its own weaknesses, mind you -- the preferred state of Si-O is silica, not silicone, but then again, carbon overcame its similar weaknesses.
The crazy thing is that you *haven't* hit on the real difference in silicone (Si-O... chains) vs. carbon chemistry. There is one notable difference in the two chains' behavior, and it's not stability, formation ability, ability to functionalize and react or any of those other things. Its that single-bonded carbon chains can generally freely rotate, while silicone chains cannot. What implications that has for life, I have no idea, but it is a notable difference. Also, it's harder to get multiple bonds between elements in a silicone chain, but then again, it's hard to say if that's a limiting factor or not, given the near countless range of *possible* chemical bonding structures.
The problem is of people envisioning silicon-based life in a manner that's too similar to carbon-based life. Silicon life, if ever found, is essentially guaranteed to not have any long Si-Si-Si-.... chains; they're not stable. The silicon equivalent in terms of stability is Si-O-Si-O-Si-O... etc (silicone). Silicon also has some fascinating complex chemistry in the form of silanols, which can form membranes, catalysts, and all sorts of other fascinating stuff... so long as they don't get too hot or in too acidic or basic of a chemical environment.
There's more ways to form a complex compound than just Si-Si-Si-Si... chains (which, as you note, tend to oxidize into crystaline silicon dioxide). As a random example as proof, look at silica gel. Si-O-Si-O-Si-O... etc. Chain it pretty much as long as you want, functionalize the side chains, etc.
When it comes to LNAWKI (Life Not As We Know It), I think a lot of people lack creativity to a tremendous degree -- envisioning the situation as altering only one parameter (say, substituting silicon for carbon but otherwise keeping the chemical structures roughly the same).
Which is why they're called "niche markets". Niche market buyers blow vastly more money on vehicles sold in quantities of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars than a merely $25k hyperefficient EV.
Really? People don't spend big bucks on unusual, niche cars? What world are you living in? There's a whole industry out there, ranging from the Big Three to little garage shops, that exists specifically to sell low-volume, unusual, high-cost cars to enthusiasts who love them specifically for their differences.
Is that a joke? The Aptera crush test results were getting over 4x the federal standard for roof crush and nearly 2x the standard for door crush. Full airbags, standard automotive glass, composite skin, sloped front-end with an internal structure designed to collapse at an angle to push the vehicle up and over in a collision, and on and on. On what grounds are you calling it unsafe?
Composite vehicles are generally the safest vehicles on the road.
That's absolutely not true in the least. They were getting about 100Wh/mi at 55mph on flat ground. Do you realize how incredible that is for a full size non-cramped two-passenger EV with full safety, climate control, entertainment, etc systems?
At highway speeds, aerodynamic drag is the dominant energy loss mechanism. Drag is proportional to cross-sectional area (rounded body = corners cut off, and the driver in the Aptera vehicles is a bit more tilted back) and drag coefficient (which *dramatically* varies between vehicles, and was obscenely low on their vehicles). We're talking less total aerodynamic drag at a given speed than a person riding a bike.
The main drag mechanisms on a passenger vehicle are:
* Road turbulence
* Wheel turbulence
* Turbulence from protrusions (mirrors, wipers, etc)
* Wake turbulence (a *big* one)
A smooth underside dramatically reduces turbulence between the vehicle and the road. Shrouded wheels dramatically reduce wheel turbulence. The Aptera (depending on the version) either eliminates or significantly reduces mirror presence, and the windshield wipers are shrouded (and the antenna is concealed, and all sorts of other such issues). And most importantly they do dramatic things to reduce wake turbulence. Rather than a kammback and vortex generators, they simply keep laminar flow adhering to the skin all the way to the rear, which is a superior solution (which is why aircraft, where aerodynamic drag is utterly critical, use it). And what little bit of wake turbulence is left is filled in with internal air, like the wake-filling rockets on some modern artillery shells.
There's a lot of complexities to vehicle drag, mind you, such as the effects of crosswinds on the drag coefficient, but your statement is just flat-out wrong.
And FYI, Wilbur totalled the vehicle with a redesign, turning it into a bloated, heavy, higher drag monstrosity, which they entered into the X-prize with minimal testing.
Aptera had a waiting list of thousands of people who had not only never test-driven one before, but put $500 into a vehicle in a company that had never produced or sold anything before. If that's not "interest", what is?
Right. Because there's only one mode of transportation in the world -- the optimum, the car -- and nothing else, right? There's no such thing as, say, a "motorcycle", because the four-wheeled car is the epitome of transportation, right?
And people never choose inferior solutions because that's what they're used to, right? It's not like automakers constantly deliberately compromise efficiency in order to make vehicles look more like what their buyers are used to. It's not like entire lines of vehicles have been reworked to be less efficient in order to address consumer aesthetics criticisms -- some of which were over things that later became standard on vehicles as consumers got used to them (such as embedded headlights, raked windshields, etc) -- right?
And it's not like the auto industry is ridiculously slow to adapt to change. That's why most cars are built out of composites and use general-purpose computing platforms instead of a bunch of single-purpose boxes that have to be re-engineered for each vehicle, right?
No, clearly cars are as good as they're ever going to be!
The first Typ-1 had a tremendous clearance. When they switched it to FWD from rear-wheel drive, clearance dropped in order to account for the driveshaft to the front wheels instead of the belt drive in the rear; however, it still had about the clearance of a Prius. The wheels were stock. The early Typ-1s used the Potenzas from the 1st-gen Insight, for example.
Now, I can't call your views on aesthetics "false", mind you, but I can point out that the whole point of Aptera was that a particular persons idea of what a car "should" look like should not dictate what this vehicle looked like. They took vehicle design back to square one: "How can we carry two people and cargo using the absolute minimum of energy without compromising safety?" Everything flowed from that. If the most efficient vehicle shape to achieve that goal was a giant pig's nose, then the vehicle would have looked like a giant pig's nose.
The vehicle does not have a "plastic body". It has a "composite body". If you don't know the difference between the two, you really owe it yourself to at least look up what composites are. The strength in a composite comes from a fiber matrix ; the plastic resin that's injected is simply a bonding agent which defines the shape and transfers any forces into longitudinal stress on the individual fibers. Hence, stress on a composite is really tensile strength, which makes them very hard to damage. Ever seen pictures of one of those 100+mph wrecks of a composite supercar where the car is in pieces but the driver walks away unharmed? That's what composites do -- they either don't break at all or they shatter, but in the process they absorb tremendous amounts of energy compared to their mass. A nice side effect is that you can never get pinned into a composite vehicle; they don't irreversibly deform.
Three wheeled vehicles have not "always failed in the marketplace". If you want a present example, the Can-Am Spyder has been doing very well. Most of the difficulties of three-wheelers in the US are regulatory anyway. You can't have a three-wheeler that weighs more than (depending on the state) 1500-1800 lbs, to name one.
You need to realize what happened with this company. Since I somehow inexplicably became the go-to gal for leaks, I would recommend what I've alreadywritten on the subject. The short of it: they *were* about to ship vehicles (I even have the vehicle integration schedule to back it up) when the board of directors forced a new CEO on them, a Detroit guy who ordered a redesign of almost everything in order to make it more mainstream.
Now that the company is dead, expect all of this and a lot more to start coming out of official circles.
The whole "portal only as an afterthought demo" seems to me a huge flaw as well. You think your average person is going to install this on their computer just so they can do web searches? Not-going-to-happen. People who want to run it, will. People who don't or don't know how, won't. They're the 99.99%. They need a portal. Clients should automatically be putting themselves in the portal-switching queue.
As for the capabilities, I just tried it out. The results are *extremely* few and very poor. "Dog" gets five hits, for example. You'd almost think it was a joke. Hopefully this was a load problem or a problem due to a lack of scaling in the system thusfar, and not a design flaw.
At least their frontend doesn't seem designed with injection in mind. Start off a search with ' (such as 'Test) and watch what happens to the peer listed at the bottom of the page. I doubt that particular issue is exploitable, but if this a habit of one of their coders...
It's well know over here that you can just plain make up stuff about the country when talking to people who've never been to Iceland, and they'll probably believe it. One guy I know likes to tell people that he has a pet polar bear, and that such pets are very common up here.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Stop dating people you're attracted to? Really, is that your suggestion?
I think it's easier for a guy to say something like that because guys in general are more physical in their attraction than women, more based on looks. I.e., looks being equal, a shy girl in a bar has dramatically better odds of going home with someone than a shy guy in a bar. How a guy acts is hardly the only aspect of how attractive he comes across, but it is a major part of it. Here's an experiment for you: go to a club some time and only give a meek, timid "hey" to whoever you want to pick up, only respond with short, meek statements to what they say, avoiding direct eye contact, etc, and compare your results to going there and being assertive, self confident, and persistent. "Bad Boys" win because bad boys tend to exude behavioral traits that many if not most women are attracted to.
One could say that this distinction -- far from universal, but definitely extant -- is a cultural phenomena. But there's certainly a reasonable genetic argument to be made for it as well, at least historically.
One has to be cautious about making these sort of declarations without knowing the details. For example, back during the last Iran election thing, I heard a lot of people talking about how some districts in Iran reported more people voting in them than lived there, and stuff like that as indisputable proof of fraud. Apparently not realizing that in Iran, you don't have to vote in your own district; you can vote anywhere in the country, so business districts usually get a disproportionate voter-to-resident ratio.
I wouldn't want to make any declarations about the significance of this data without knowing more about it.
Unfortunately, one can't control what they're attracted to. If you're attracted to guys who exude that sort of energy, aggression, sex drive, that "knowing what they want and going for it" attitude, etc, you can't just decide to not be attracted to it, any more than a guy who's attracted to women with big breasts can just decide not to be attracted to them.
I wonder if they've had any success with the opposite -- trying to get rid of memories. I bet there'd be a big market.
In *ours* and every living thing that evolved from primitive carbon-based organism on *Earth*'s bodies. We're not talking about life on Earth. We're talking about xenobiology. You're arguing from a dataset of precisely one element. The question is not what is life on Earth like, but whether all life must be like it is on Earth.
That's not your argument at all. If you think silicon-based compounds are as "computationally" inert as a tree stump is to a computer, read this for a random example for just one class of silicon compounds. Silicon compounds are just as capable of complex reactions as carbon. The problem is that they're not really compatible with carbon-based life; very different optimum environments. For the most part, it's either one or the other.
but the chemistry just is not there
Name one class of life-essential reactions that you don't think a silicon/silicone/silanol/etc equivalent could exist for.
Which is the whole point: we're not talking about a direct substitution. Your argument is like saying "Java programs can't exist, because if you substitute a line of C code in a C program with a line of Java code, the program breaks."
Which is why silicon-based life would primarily use Si-O chains instead of C-C chains, as previously mentioned. Once again, you reinforce my main point: most people are way too uncreative, only looking at a direct C/Si substitution, which isn't at all realistic. You want to talk stability? Bake cookies on a plastic sheet sheet, then bake them on a silicone baking sheet, and tell me which survives the ordeal better.
Silicon and carbon are the two most common elements in planetary crusts, and they prefer to bond to each other rather than their own kind. Carbon, on the other hand, is rare in planetary crusts and prefers to bond to oxygen (yielding CO2 when done sufficiently, not chains). Silicon has its own weaknesses, mind you -- the preferred state of Si-O is silica, not silicone, but then again, carbon overcame its similar weaknesses.
The crazy thing is that you *haven't* hit on the real difference in silicone (Si-O... chains) vs. carbon chemistry. There is one notable difference in the two chains' behavior, and it's not stability, formation ability, ability to functionalize and react or any of those other things. Its that single-bonded carbon chains can generally freely rotate, while silicone chains cannot. What implications that has for life, I have no idea, but it is a notable difference. Also, it's harder to get multiple bonds between elements in a silicone chain, but then again, it's hard to say if that's a limiting factor or not, given the near countless range of *possible* chemical bonding structures.
The problem is of people envisioning silicon-based life in a manner that's too similar to carbon-based life. Silicon life, if ever found, is essentially guaranteed to not have any long Si-Si-Si-.... chains; they're not stable. The silicon equivalent in terms of stability is Si-O-Si-O-Si-O... etc (silicone). Silicon also has some fascinating complex chemistry in the form of silanols, which can form membranes, catalysts, and all sorts of other fascinating stuff... so long as they don't get too hot or in too acidic or basic of a chemical environment.
There's more ways to form a complex compound than just Si-Si-Si-Si... chains (which, as you note, tend to oxidize into crystaline silicon dioxide). As a random example as proof, look at silica gel. Si-O-Si-O-Si-O... etc. Chain it pretty much as long as you want, functionalize the side chains, etc.
When it comes to LNAWKI (Life Not As We Know It), I think a lot of people lack creativity to a tremendous degree -- envisioning the situation as altering only one parameter (say, substituting silicon for carbon but otherwise keeping the chemical structures roughly the same).
Which is why they're called "niche markets". Niche market buyers blow vastly more money on vehicles sold in quantities of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars than a merely $25k hyperefficient EV.
Clearly you weren't a customer, so how is this "idiots who don't talk to customers"?
Aptera had a huge waiting list. Demand was not the problem.
Really? People don't spend big bucks on unusual, niche cars? What world are you living in? There's a whole industry out there, ranging from the Big Three to little garage shops, that exists specifically to sell low-volume, unusual, high-cost cars to enthusiasts who love them specifically for their differences.
Is that a joke? The Aptera crush test results were getting over 4x the federal standard for roof crush and nearly 2x the standard for door crush. Full airbags, standard automotive glass, composite skin, sloped front-end with an internal structure designed to collapse at an angle to push the vehicle up and over in a collision, and on and on. On what grounds are you calling it unsafe?
Composite vehicles are generally the safest vehicles on the road.
Oh, and I forgot another major drag mechanism:
* Airflow through the engine
Obviously, an EV needs way less air intake. The Aptera models used little "nostrils" next to the headlights, and were otherwise smooth up front.
That's absolutely not true in the least. They were getting about 100Wh/mi at 55mph on flat ground. Do you realize how incredible that is for a full size non-cramped two-passenger EV with full safety, climate control, entertainment, etc systems?
At highway speeds, aerodynamic drag is the dominant energy loss mechanism. Drag is proportional to cross-sectional area (rounded body = corners cut off, and the driver in the Aptera vehicles is a bit more tilted back) and drag coefficient (which *dramatically* varies between vehicles, and was obscenely low on their vehicles). We're talking less total aerodynamic drag at a given speed than a person riding a bike.
The main drag mechanisms on a passenger vehicle are:
* Road turbulence
* Wheel turbulence
* Turbulence from protrusions (mirrors, wipers, etc)
* Wake turbulence (a *big* one)
A smooth underside dramatically reduces turbulence between the vehicle and the road. Shrouded wheels dramatically reduce wheel turbulence. The Aptera (depending on the version) either eliminates or significantly reduces mirror presence, and the windshield wipers are shrouded (and the antenna is concealed, and all sorts of other such issues). And most importantly they do dramatic things to reduce wake turbulence. Rather than a kammback and vortex generators, they simply keep laminar flow adhering to the skin all the way to the rear, which is a superior solution (which is why aircraft, where aerodynamic drag is utterly critical, use it). And what little bit of wake turbulence is left is filled in with internal air, like the wake-filling rockets on some modern artillery shells.
There's a lot of complexities to vehicle drag, mind you, such as the effects of crosswinds on the drag coefficient, but your statement is just flat-out wrong.
And FYI, Wilbur totalled the vehicle with a redesign, turning it into a bloated, heavy, higher drag monstrosity, which they entered into the X-prize with minimal testing.
Aptera had a waiting list of thousands of people who had not only never test-driven one before, but put $500 into a vehicle in a company that had never produced or sold anything before. If that's not "interest", what is?
Right. Because there's only one mode of transportation in the world -- the optimum, the car -- and nothing else, right? There's no such thing as, say, a "motorcycle", because the four-wheeled car is the epitome of transportation, right?
And people never choose inferior solutions because that's what they're used to, right? It's not like automakers constantly deliberately compromise efficiency in order to make vehicles look more like what their buyers are used to. It's not like entire lines of vehicles have been reworked to be less efficient in order to address consumer aesthetics criticisms -- some of which were over things that later became standard on vehicles as consumers got used to them (such as embedded headlights, raked windshields, etc) -- right?
And it's not like the auto industry is ridiculously slow to adapt to change. That's why most cars are built out of composites and use general-purpose computing platforms instead of a bunch of single-purpose boxes that have to be re-engineered for each vehicle, right?
No, clearly cars are as good as they're ever going to be!
The first Typ-1 had a tremendous clearance. When they switched it to FWD from rear-wheel drive, clearance dropped in order to account for the driveshaft to the front wheels instead of the belt drive in the rear; however, it still had about the clearance of a Prius. The wheels were stock. The early Typ-1s used the Potenzas from the 1st-gen Insight, for example.
Amazing density of false claims.
Now, I can't call your views on aesthetics "false", mind you, but I can point out that the whole point of Aptera was that a particular persons idea of what a car "should" look like should not dictate what this vehicle looked like. They took vehicle design back to square one: "How can we carry two people and cargo using the absolute minimum of energy without compromising safety?" Everything flowed from that. If the most efficient vehicle shape to achieve that goal was a giant pig's nose, then the vehicle would have looked like a giant pig's nose.
The vehicle does not have a "plastic body". It has a "composite body". If you don't know the difference between the two, you really owe it yourself to at least look up what composites are. The strength in a composite comes from a fiber matrix ; the plastic resin that's injected is simply a bonding agent which defines the shape and transfers any forces into longitudinal stress on the individual fibers. Hence, stress on a composite is really tensile strength, which makes them very hard to damage. Ever seen pictures of one of those 100+mph wrecks of a composite supercar where the car is in pieces but the driver walks away unharmed? That's what composites do -- they either don't break at all or they shatter, but in the process they absorb tremendous amounts of energy compared to their mass. A nice side effect is that you can never get pinned into a composite vehicle; they don't irreversibly deform.
Three wheeled vehicles have not "always failed in the marketplace". If you want a present example, the Can-Am Spyder has been doing very well. Most of the difficulties of three-wheelers in the US are regulatory anyway. You can't have a three-wheeler that weighs more than (depending on the state) 1500-1800 lbs, to name one.
Stability is not in the least compromised.
Which is why obviously nobody ever sells cars to niche markets, right?
You need to realize what happened with this company. Since I somehow inexplicably became the go-to gal for leaks, I would recommend what I've already written on the subject. The short of it: they *were* about to ship vehicles (I even have the vehicle integration schedule to back it up) when the board of directors forced a new CEO on them, a Detroit guy who ordered a redesign of almost everything in order to make it more mainstream.
Now that the company is dead, expect all of this and a lot more to start coming out of official circles.
Instead of insight, comment contained bobcat. Would not read again.
The whole "portal only as an afterthought demo" seems to me a huge flaw as well. You think your average person is going to install this on their computer just so they can do web searches? Not-going-to-happen. People who want to run it, will. People who don't or don't know how, won't. They're the 99.99%. They need a portal. Clients should automatically be putting themselves in the portal-switching queue.
As for the capabilities, I just tried it out. The results are *extremely* few and very poor. "Dog" gets five hits, for example. You'd almost think it was a joke. Hopefully this was a load problem or a problem due to a lack of scaling in the system thusfar, and not a design flaw.
At least their frontend doesn't seem designed with injection in mind. Start off a search with ' (such as 'Test) and watch what happens to the peer listed at the bottom of the page. I doubt that particular issue is exploitable, but if this a habit of one of their coders...
Slashdot andskotans... ég get ekki skrifað "thorn". :P
It's well know over here that you can just plain make up stuff about the country when talking to people who've never been to Iceland, and they'll probably believe it. One guy I know likes to tell people that he has a pet polar bear, and that such pets are very common up here. ;)