That's one of the most ridiculous posts I've ever seen.
1) The Eyjafjallajökull volcano and the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant are over 100 km apart
2) Eyjafjallajökull's volcano isn't remotely in the same geological feature as Hellisheiði.
3) Eyjafjallajökull's eruption was triggered by smaller eruptions at the new Móði and Magni vents, which are even further east (they laid a fresh layer of lava down over the Fimmvörðuháls hiking trail between Skógafoss and orsmörk.
4) Eyjafjallajökull's eruptions will continue to occur whether or not humans do *anything* to the volcano or glacier, be it nothing or detonating nuclear weapons right next to the magma chamber. Iceland is the mid-atlantic ridge. Magma will continue rising to the surface and building up pressure. If it doesn't release on Day A, it'll release on Day B.
5) Unlike Katla and a number of other Icelandic volcanoes, Eyjafjallajökull's magma chamber is very deep (something like 25km). Hellisheiði is not only over 100km away, but it's deepest well (the deepest in Iceland) is under 3km.
6) There is no link between Hellisheiði and Eyjafjallajökull's eruption.
7) There is no link between Hellisheiði and *any* eruption.
8) There is no link between *any* geothermal power plant and *any* eruption. Geothermal can trigger very small earthquakes, esp. EGS, and there can be links between earthquakes and volcanism. But this has never been demonstrated with any geothermal power plant, and it's exceedingly unlikely it ever would be, because the quakes are too small and in the wrong place. Instead, there's very good evidence just to the opposite. In a very unusual incident, drilling in the Krafla volcanic field drilled straight *into* the magma chamber, causing magma to engulf the drill bit and several meters of the well. The solution? "It's now a production well." Water gets injected, steam gets created, and the underground gets slowly cooler.
9) Even most traditional geothermal power generation is done in non-volcanic areas (Iceland is an exception). Heat does not automatically equate to active volcanism. Usually, it doesn't. Iceland just happens to be the Mid-Atlantic ridge.
10) Geothermal *removes* heat from the ground. Let me reiterate this again. Geothermal *removes* heat from the ground. So even if you were interacting with a magma chamber, you'd be increasing the magma viscosity and *decreasing* the odds of eruption -- and making it so that if there was an eruption, it'd be less violent.
Oh, and I missed your ridiculous remark about geothermal. Geothermal has a capacity factor of greater than 90% (coal is generally 70-90%). It's incredibly cheap in good locations; what defines a "good location" keeps growing every year, and with EGS, could ultimately include almost anywhere on the planet.
And for your information, here's wind installed capacity in the US. It'll be lower for 2010, but so is *all* new power intsalls, as the recession decreased power demand.
2) Hawaii has 1.3 million people. The US has 300 million people. It's a tiny fraction of the US population. In the US, only Hawaii, the outlying islands, and remote parts of Alaska and the a few remote spots in the desert southwest run on oil-fired power. It makes up 1.6% of our total mix. Why? It has nothing to do with the environment; oil-fired power is very expensive. The only thing oil has going for it is that it's easy to get to remote locations, and hence, its used in places like Hawaii and the remote parts of Alaska.
3) Gee willickers, wind farms from the 1970s and 1980s are being decommissioned? Who would ever have guessed that power plants built with technology that has been surpassed many times over could be cheaper to replace than to maintain? Thank god some of those ancient relics are finally getting decommissioned; not only are they expensive and failure prone, but they're often sited poorly and are often bird killers (Altamont Pass in particular). If you were trying to design a raptor cuisinart, designing turbines the way they did for Altamont and placing them in that location would be the way to do it. Anyway, as for the failure rate itself, if you want, I can dig up my spreadsheet of turbine data from the Netherlands, where they documented every turbine in the country and its status. The overall failure rate is extremely low. (and tends to follow a bathtub curve), and the older turbines were *much* less reliable than the modern ones.
4) The wind PTC is under 2 cents per kWh. The estimated health cost from coal power plant emissions, according to the last study I read, ranged from 2 cents to 14 cents per kWh, depending on the plant. *Not* counting climate change, mining consequences, or anything of that nature -- purely airborne emissions.
5) Photovoltaic solar is too expensive for general purpose power generation, but there are many situations individuals or companies can find them in where it's a big cost saver, even without credits. A reasonable installation cost and $2/wh panels in the desert southwest, for example, can produce a good IRR versus commercial or residential rates. The new generation of solar thermal is much cheaper than oil-fired power (some companies claim they'll be able to reach coal parity like wind has in a few places already, but I think that's yet to be proven).
I sure wouldn't mind living near a geothermal power plant like most Icelanders do. Instead of just electricity, you can also get piped-in waste heat, and who wouldn't want this in their backyard?:) Most power generation methods's waste causes long-lasting environmental or health problems. Geothermal's waste causes health spas.;)
1) Oil makes up a tiny percentage of our electricity generation -- low single digits. Most incremental power in the US these days (new capacity being added) is natural gas and wind.
2) According to a PNL/DOE study, 84% of our vehicles could be switched over today without building any new power plants. The reason is because most EV charging is done at night, when we have huge surplus generation capacity
3) There is little to no need for new bulk distribution, for the same reason as #2. Only local distribution infrastructure may need upgrades when there's high penetration in particular neighborhoods for home charging.
1) Li-ion battery packs are generally 96% to over 99% efficient during charging, not 90%. 2) 36kW is not "pretty close to explosive". That's the heat output of a moderately large home's furnace. You really think you can't simply water quench the output of a home furnace for a couple minutes? 3) You don't have to draw a rapid charge straight from the grid. A much more reasonable approach is to charge a shared battery bank at the station, and the battery bank discharges the proper amount whenever someone hooks up. Said batteries can be heavy and cheap instead of light and expensive, and are effectively a "universal standard" instead of requiring the station to stock a separate pack for each vehicle profile.
Think of the battery pack like the frame of the vehicle -- huge, heavy, expensive, and critical to the structural integrity of the vehicle. Yes, you *could* make a "hot swappable frame" for a vehicle -- but that doesn't make it a good idea. The frames would be tough to swap, expensive to stock, ridiculously bulky to stock, and as much as you tried to standardize between vehicles, you'd need different models of frames. It's the exact same thing with battery packs. Swapping heavy, structurally-integrity-critical devices with high power, high voltage connectors whose needs in terms of shape, weight distribution, capacity, weight, and voltage discharge profile vary dramatically between vehicles, and which cost many thousands of dollars each to stock... it's just, no. Fast charge is the only realistic way to go.
False. Most of the Leafs will be produced in Smyrna, TN, and the factory is under construction. But it wont be online until 2012, so for now, the low-volume Japanese production is all that's available.
EV charge connectors are *far* more intelligent than gas nozzles. Ever see an EV charge connector and wondered why there are so many pins? There's sense pins, data pins, etc; there's a bidirectional communication which makes sure the connector is fully secure and that the type of power being delivered is compatible with the vehicle before it is actually delivered.
The problem is that people think that, if we switch, they're going to have to do math every time they see a metric value to make into a value they can make sense of. But that's just not true. What you need to do is just create new reference points. When I see a Celsius temperature, I don't try to convert it to Fahrenheit. I simply remember that 0 is freezing, I need a jacket at 10, 20 is comfortable if it's calm and sunny, 30 is comfortable if it's shady, dry, and breezy, and so on. That's what we've all instinctively done with Fahrenheit, and it's all you really need to do to be comfortable with using a different unit system in your daily life.
I love it when games try to make you feel bad, subverting the trope instead of playing along with it. Shadow of the Colossus was great in this respect. You're killing them because the game is set up around killing them -- there's a dark voice telling you to in order to achieve the primary plot objective, you have to. But then you have to go out and slaughter these huge, majestic ancient creatures -- some of whom are only vaguely aware of your existence, or even sleeping. But you have to keep killing them because it's the *whole game*. You do it because you've been trained to. I think it did a great job of making the player think about the moral issues that are tucked under the carpet in most video games.
What on Earth are you talking about? It's a simple fact that Chinese salaries for things like industrial production are much lower than in the US. It has nothing to do with who deserves what.
If you want to post anything else, you're going to have to yell; I'm having trouble hearing you because your horse is so high.
I don't see what's so shocking about those numbers. Just under $6k per kilo? The cheapest US and European launch systems have long gotten $10k per kilo. What's so shocking about a 40% reduction in price per kilo from a totally new launch stack that makes use of "lessons learned"? And Russia's regular prices hover around $7k per kilo, with "specials" at $5k per kilo or less. China should be embarrassed that with their cheap labor costs, they can't do any better than $6k per kilo. They won't just be ceding the market to the US, but to India, too.
Kinda like how icelandic government promised to pay back its loans but then the voters, who the government serves, decided to flip their creditors the bird instead?
They had "the bird" coming.
Was said bird puffin, and was it prepared in half a dozen disgusting ways?;)
Really? Orders of magnitude pride reductions in solar, half an order of magnitude in batteries, practical HVDC, ultra-compact high-power AC motors... none of those things will change our energy situation?
The only difference between the Japanese "fu" and the English "fu" is whether your lower teeth make contact with your upper lip. And not all English speakers are heavy on dipthongs, nor are all English vowels dipthonged. Heck, part of the "southern accent" is about the elimination of the dipthong in the "eye" sound ("I'm going to buy some ice" -> "Ah'm gonna bah som' ahhs"). And as for your "sakey" example, that's just people who've never bothered to look up the pronunciation; that has nothing to do with how easy it is to pronounce.
BTW, the one that is like scratching nails on a chalkboard to me is "Toe-Key-Yo";) But I generally find I have little trouble correcting people, and you'll find the same with sake.
You do realize that you're reading a forum where there are people posting comments from the middle of nowhere across the planet using a cell phone a fraction the size of a TI-85 which can get data connection rates out in the middle of the woods that blow away the modem speeds most people connected with in the 1990s, right?
Of course, it all depends on what your definition of a revolution is. Today's batteries store 4-5 times as much energy as those of two decades ago. Today's solar cells are a tenth the cost of those two decades ago. The cheapest ones are CdTe thin-films -- non-silicon. But thin-film silicon cells are now on the market. So are silicon cells with far higher efficiency than used to be available. A couple decades ago, a waterproof backpacking fabric meant polyurethane. Today, silnylon is passe at 1.1oz/m^3, when you've got cuben at 0.35oz/m^3. Two decades ago, digital cameras... wait, what digital cameras? Oh yeah, ones that cost $13,000 and were barely over 1 megapixel. I have a $750 digital camcorder which records 1080p 60fps at 24mbps H264 onto 32GB memory cards barely larger than my thumbnail. You know how many fields of technology had to advance to make that happen? And hey, how is that power getting to your house? In many areas, they're starting to rely on HVDC links, which are only affordable now because of recent huge advancements in thyristors. They're also allowing for ultra-compact high-power AC motors. What about medical tech? We now have prescription drugs on the market which can change your eye color. AIDS is no longer a deadly pandemic for people with health coverage, but a controllable syndrome. Remember how long it took to sequence the first human's DNA? Today's systems are 250,000 times faster. You can have your pets cloned and your children screened as embryos for genetic diseases. In pretty much every field, there have been massive advancements in technology. But some people are just completely blind to it because their *preferred* technologies don't exist, be they flying cars, space elevators (which are probably impossible on Earth anyway), etc.
You can technically construct English style sentences in Japanese and ptentially be understood, but it doesn't mean you won't sound like you're talking like a martian, the same as if you say things like "Speaking of me, there is the act of having seen Paris" in English;)
The Japanese l/r is certainly not found in English, and their "g"s and "fu" can sometimes be softer. And as you note, ts occurs in English, although not as a phoneme or at the beginning of a syllable. Their consonant-y-vowel clusters are also rare in English, although they do exist. But all in all, except for the l/r issue, it's a pretty natural pronunciation for English speakers, compared to many languages that we're much more closely related to.
I'm not sure how you think those sentences are at all structured like we structure them. And borrowing our vocabulary is a modern-era thing; it has nothing to do with the origin of the language.:) Icelandic is just the opposite; they largely (although not completely) resist incorporating foreign words into the language (exceptions like "hallo?" when answering the phone notwithstanding -- but "telephone" itself is sími, which is an Old Norse word for thread or wire). But a lot of their original words match up with ours. Heim = home, kurteis = curteous, bróðir = brother, systir = sister, sonur = son, dóttir = daughter, skóla = school, hundur = dog (hound), sandur = sand, vestur = west, norður = north, suður = south, and on and on. I'd say perhaps 1 in 3 words have obvious correlations, and you can find the less obvious correlations if you trace the language back. Yet their phonemes are *very* different from ours, much more different than Japanese's.
I'd be much more convinced if they had explanations for not just the lack of vocabulary between major language families, but the entirely different conceptions on sentence structure, concepts of what the language can represent readily and what it can't, etc, rather than just a rather flimsy, weak "number of phonemes" correlation. You know, as a native English speaker, I find the pronunciation of Icelandic pretty difficult (ég á erfitt með tannbergsmælt sveifluhljóð!), but you can't learn the language without it being plainly obvious that the language is related to English in everything from vocabulary to general sentence structure. By contrast, I find the pronunciation of Japanese quite easy, but for the life of me, I can't find one obvious similarity between the vocabulary, structure, conceptualization, etc of the language. Can they show how this happened? Certainly languages change; for example, the Indo-Iranian branch is SOV word order instead of SVO, but other details of the languages still make it obvious that they're related.
This paper simply shows that there's a weak correlation between distance from Africa and phoneme diversity when population of speakers is taken into account. Well, to be blunt, all that really means is that English and Spanish together have significant phoneme diversity, since these two languages dominate the New World and skew results. Aka, this is about modern history, not ancient history. Even if there was meaning beyond this, it could be explained by many other factors, including genetic diversity (perhaps certain peoples have a greater ability to pronounce a broader range of phonemes than others), socio-political factors (for example, perhaps long-distance trade, being historically more common in Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa than southern Africa, increases phoneme diversity**), or dozens of other possible reasons. Saying "it's a common language" from this one correlation seems quite the stretch without supporting evidence.
** -- They claim to have controlled for this, but are vague as to how (see "Reference 15"), and I really doubt it can be properly controlled for. Also in Reference 15 are other suspect claims, like "Phonemic diversity appears to be highly stable within major language families". Really? Is that why Japanese phonemes are so familiar to English speakers, but Icelandic phonemes so different (alveolar trills, voiceless alveolar lateral affricates, etc)? Which are different still from German, which is linguistically more intermediary between the two, but has sounds found in neither (such as uvular consonants)? Icelandic is closer to Spanish in terms of phonemes, but isn't nearly as closely related.
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That's one of the most ridiculous posts I've ever seen.
1) The Eyjafjallajökull volcano and the Hellisheiði geothermal power plant are over 100 km apart
2) Eyjafjallajökull's volcano isn't remotely in the same geological feature as Hellisheiði.
3) Eyjafjallajökull's eruption was triggered by smaller eruptions at the new Móði and Magni vents, which are even further east (they laid a fresh layer of lava down over the Fimmvörðuháls hiking trail between Skógafoss and orsmörk.
4) Eyjafjallajökull's eruptions will continue to occur whether or not humans do *anything* to the volcano or glacier, be it nothing or detonating nuclear weapons right next to the magma chamber. Iceland is the mid-atlantic ridge. Magma will continue rising to the surface and building up pressure. If it doesn't release on Day A, it'll release on Day B.
5) Unlike Katla and a number of other Icelandic volcanoes, Eyjafjallajökull's magma chamber is very deep (something like 25km). Hellisheiði is not only over 100km away, but it's deepest well (the deepest in Iceland) is under 3km.
6) There is no link between Hellisheiði and Eyjafjallajökull's eruption.
7) There is no link between Hellisheiði and *any* eruption.
8) There is no link between *any* geothermal power plant and *any* eruption. Geothermal can trigger very small earthquakes, esp. EGS, and there can be links between earthquakes and volcanism. But this has never been demonstrated with any geothermal power plant, and it's exceedingly unlikely it ever would be, because the quakes are too small and in the wrong place. Instead, there's very good evidence just to the opposite. In a very unusual incident, drilling in the Krafla volcanic field drilled straight *into* the magma chamber, causing magma to engulf the drill bit and several meters of the well. The solution? "It's now a production well." Water gets injected, steam gets created, and the underground gets slowly cooler.
9) Even most traditional geothermal power generation is done in non-volcanic areas (Iceland is an exception). Heat does not automatically equate to active volcanism. Usually, it doesn't. Iceland just happens to be the Mid-Atlantic ridge.
10) Geothermal *removes* heat from the ground. Let me reiterate this again. Geothermal *removes* heat from the ground. So even if you were interacting with a magma chamber, you'd be increasing the magma viscosity and *decreasing* the odds of eruption -- and making it so that if there was an eruption, it'd be less violent.
The phrase "two birds with one stone" comes to mind...
Oh, and I missed your ridiculous remark about geothermal. Geothermal has a capacity factor of greater than 90% (coal is generally 70-90%). It's incredibly cheap in good locations; what defines a "good location" keeps growing every year, and with EGS, could ultimately include almost anywhere on the planet.
And for your information, here's wind installed capacity in the US. It'll be lower for 2010, but so is *all* new power intsalls, as the recession decreased power demand.
1) Not "nearly all"; it's about 2/3rds.
2) Hawaii has 1.3 million people. The US has 300 million people. It's a tiny fraction of the US population. In the US, only Hawaii, the outlying islands, and remote parts of Alaska and the a few remote spots in the desert southwest run on oil-fired power. It makes up 1.6% of our total mix. Why? It has nothing to do with the environment; oil-fired power is very expensive. The only thing oil has going for it is that it's easy to get to remote locations, and hence, its used in places like Hawaii and the remote parts of Alaska.
3) Gee willickers, wind farms from the 1970s and 1980s are being decommissioned? Who would ever have guessed that power plants built with technology that has been surpassed many times over could be cheaper to replace than to maintain? Thank god some of those ancient relics are finally getting decommissioned; not only are they expensive and failure prone, but they're often sited poorly and are often bird killers (Altamont Pass in particular). If you were trying to design a raptor cuisinart, designing turbines the way they did for Altamont and placing them in that location would be the way to do it. Anyway, as for the failure rate itself, if you want, I can dig up my spreadsheet of turbine data from the Netherlands, where they documented every turbine in the country and its status. The overall failure rate is extremely low. (and tends to follow a bathtub curve), and the older turbines were *much* less reliable than the modern ones.
4) The wind PTC is under 2 cents per kWh. The estimated health cost from coal power plant emissions, according to the last study I read, ranged from 2 cents to 14 cents per kWh, depending on the plant. *Not* counting climate change, mining consequences, or anything of that nature -- purely airborne emissions.
5) Photovoltaic solar is too expensive for general purpose power generation, but there are many situations individuals or companies can find them in where it's a big cost saver, even without credits. A reasonable installation cost and $2/wh panels in the desert southwest, for example, can produce a good IRR versus commercial or residential rates. The new generation of solar thermal is much cheaper than oil-fired power (some companies claim they'll be able to reach coal parity like wind has in a few places already, but I think that's yet to be proven).
I sure wouldn't mind living near a geothermal power plant like most Icelanders do. Instead of just electricity, you can also get piped-in waste heat, and who wouldn't want this in their backyard? :) Most power generation methods's waste causes long-lasting environmental or health problems. Geothermal's waste causes health spas. ;)
Hawaii already requires solar water heating on new homes.
LOL. Okay, let's start from the very beginning.
1) Oil makes up a tiny percentage of our electricity generation -- low single digits. Most incremental power in the US these days (new capacity being added) is natural gas and wind.
2) According to a PNL/DOE study, 84% of our vehicles could be switched over today without building any new power plants. The reason is because most EV charging is done at night, when we have huge surplus generation capacity
3) There is little to no need for new bulk distribution, for the same reason as #2. Only local distribution infrastructure may need upgrades when there's high penetration in particular neighborhoods for home charging.
Or simply a battery bank with at least a little more stored capacity than a Leaf battery pack.
1) Li-ion battery packs are generally 96% to over 99% efficient during charging, not 90%.
2) 36kW is not "pretty close to explosive". That's the heat output of a moderately large home's furnace. You really think you can't simply water quench the output of a home furnace for a couple minutes?
3) You don't have to draw a rapid charge straight from the grid. A much more reasonable approach is to charge a shared battery bank at the station, and the battery bank discharges the proper amount whenever someone hooks up. Said batteries can be heavy and cheap instead of light and expensive, and are effectively a "universal standard" instead of requiring the station to stock a separate pack for each vehicle profile.
Think of the battery pack like the frame of the vehicle -- huge, heavy, expensive, and critical to the structural integrity of the vehicle. Yes, you *could* make a "hot swappable frame" for a vehicle -- but that doesn't make it a good idea. The frames would be tough to swap, expensive to stock, ridiculously bulky to stock, and as much as you tried to standardize between vehicles, you'd need different models of frames. It's the exact same thing with battery packs. Swapping heavy, structurally-integrity-critical devices with high power, high voltage connectors whose needs in terms of shape, weight distribution, capacity, weight, and voltage discharge profile vary dramatically between vehicles, and which cost many thousands of dollars each to stock... it's just, no. Fast charge is the only realistic way to go.
False. Most of the Leafs will be produced in Smyrna, TN, and the factory is under construction. But it wont be online until 2012, so for now, the low-volume Japanese production is all that's available.
EV charge connectors are *far* more intelligent than gas nozzles. Ever see an EV charge connector and wondered why there are so many pins? There's sense pins, data pins, etc; there's a bidirectional communication which makes sure the connector is fully secure and that the type of power being delivered is compatible with the vehicle before it is actually delivered.
The problem is that people think that, if we switch, they're going to have to do math every time they see a metric value to make into a value they can make sense of. But that's just not true. What you need to do is just create new reference points. When I see a Celsius temperature, I don't try to convert it to Fahrenheit. I simply remember that 0 is freezing, I need a jacket at 10, 20 is comfortable if it's calm and sunny, 30 is comfortable if it's shady, dry, and breezy, and so on. That's what we've all instinctively done with Fahrenheit, and it's all you really need to do to be comfortable with using a different unit system in your daily life.
I love it when games try to make you feel bad, subverting the trope instead of playing along with it. Shadow of the Colossus was great in this respect. You're killing them because the game is set up around killing them -- there's a dark voice telling you to in order to achieve the primary plot objective, you have to. But then you have to go out and slaughter these huge, majestic ancient creatures -- some of whom are only vaguely aware of your existence, or even sleeping. But you have to keep killing them because it's the *whole game*. You do it because you've been trained to. I think it did a great job of making the player think about the moral issues that are tucked under the carpet in most video games.
What on Earth are you talking about? It's a simple fact that Chinese salaries for things like industrial production are much lower than in the US. It has nothing to do with who deserves what.
If you want to post anything else, you're going to have to yell; I'm having trouble hearing you because your horse is so high.
I don't see what's so shocking about those numbers. Just under $6k per kilo? The cheapest US and European launch systems have long gotten $10k per kilo. What's so shocking about a 40% reduction in price per kilo from a totally new launch stack that makes use of "lessons learned"? And Russia's regular prices hover around $7k per kilo, with "specials" at $5k per kilo or less. China should be embarrassed that with their cheap labor costs, they can't do any better than $6k per kilo. They won't just be ceding the market to the US, but to India, too.
Was said bird puffin, and was it prepared in half a dozen disgusting ways? ;)
Really? Orders of magnitude pride reductions in solar, half an order of magnitude in batteries, practical HVDC, ultra-compact high-power AC motors... none of those things will change our energy situation?
The only difference between the Japanese "fu" and the English "fu" is whether your lower teeth make contact with your upper lip. And not all English speakers are heavy on dipthongs, nor are all English vowels dipthonged. Heck, part of the "southern accent" is about the elimination of the dipthong in the "eye" sound ("I'm going to buy some ice" -> "Ah'm gonna bah som' ahhs"). And as for your "sakey" example, that's just people who've never bothered to look up the pronunciation; that has nothing to do with how easy it is to pronounce.
BTW, the one that is like scratching nails on a chalkboard to me is "Toe-Key-Yo" ;) But I generally find I have little trouble correcting people, and you'll find the same with sake.
You do realize that you're reading a forum where there are people posting comments from the middle of nowhere across the planet using a cell phone a fraction the size of a TI-85 which can get data connection rates out in the middle of the woods that blow away the modem speeds most people connected with in the 1990s, right?
Of course, it all depends on what your definition of a revolution is. Today's batteries store 4-5 times as much energy as those of two decades ago. Today's solar cells are a tenth the cost of those two decades ago. The cheapest ones are CdTe thin-films -- non-silicon. But thin-film silicon cells are now on the market. So are silicon cells with far higher efficiency than used to be available. A couple decades ago, a waterproof backpacking fabric meant polyurethane. Today, silnylon is passe at 1.1oz/m^3, when you've got cuben at 0.35oz/m^3. Two decades ago, digital cameras... wait, what digital cameras? Oh yeah, ones that cost $13,000 and were barely over 1 megapixel. I have a $750 digital camcorder which records 1080p 60fps at 24mbps H264 onto 32GB memory cards barely larger than my thumbnail. You know how many fields of technology had to advance to make that happen? And hey, how is that power getting to your house? In many areas, they're starting to rely on HVDC links, which are only affordable now because of recent huge advancements in thyristors. They're also allowing for ultra-compact high-power AC motors. What about medical tech? We now have prescription drugs on the market which can change your eye color. AIDS is no longer a deadly pandemic for people with health coverage, but a controllable syndrome. Remember how long it took to sequence the first human's DNA? Today's systems are 250,000 times faster. You can have your pets cloned and your children screened as embryos for genetic diseases. In pretty much every field, there have been massive advancements in technology. But some people are just completely blind to it because their *preferred* technologies don't exist, be they flying cars, space elevators (which are probably impossible on Earth anyway), etc.
The average energy payback time for silicon is 1-3 years. For thin film, it's a couple months.
Try again.
30 years ago, photovoltaic panels cost almost $40 per watt.
Today, the cheap ones are about $2 per watt.
Mods, how is ignorance insightful?
You can technically construct English style sentences in Japanese and ptentially be understood, but it doesn't mean you won't sound like you're talking like a martian, the same as if you say things like "Speaking of me, there is the act of having seen Paris" in English ;)
The Japanese l/r is certainly not found in English, and their "g"s and "fu" can sometimes be softer. And as you note, ts occurs in English, although not as a phoneme or at the beginning of a syllable. Their consonant-y-vowel clusters are also rare in English, although they do exist. But all in all, except for the l/r issue, it's a pretty natural pronunciation for English speakers, compared to many languages that we're much more closely related to.
I'm not sure how you think those sentences are at all structured like we structure them. And borrowing our vocabulary is a modern-era thing; it has nothing to do with the origin of the language. :) Icelandic is just the opposite; they largely (although not completely) resist incorporating foreign words into the language (exceptions like "hallo?" when answering the phone notwithstanding -- but "telephone" itself is sími, which is an Old Norse word for thread or wire). But a lot of their original words match up with ours. Heim = home, kurteis = curteous, bróðir = brother, systir = sister, sonur = son, dóttir = daughter, skóla = school, hundur = dog (hound), sandur = sand, vestur = west, norður = north, suður = south, and on and on. I'd say perhaps 1 in 3 words have obvious correlations, and you can find the less obvious correlations if you trace the language back. Yet their phonemes are *very* different from ours, much more different than Japanese's.
I'd be much more convinced if they had explanations for not just the lack of vocabulary between major language families, but the entirely different conceptions on sentence structure, concepts of what the language can represent readily and what it can't, etc, rather than just a rather flimsy, weak "number of phonemes" correlation. You know, as a native English speaker, I find the pronunciation of Icelandic pretty difficult (ég á erfitt með tannbergsmælt sveifluhljóð!), but you can't learn the language without it being plainly obvious that the language is related to English in everything from vocabulary to general sentence structure. By contrast, I find the pronunciation of Japanese quite easy, but for the life of me, I can't find one obvious similarity between the vocabulary, structure, conceptualization, etc of the language. Can they show how this happened? Certainly languages change; for example, the Indo-Iranian branch is SOV word order instead of SVO, but other details of the languages still make it obvious that they're related.
This paper simply shows that there's a weak correlation between distance from Africa and phoneme diversity when population of speakers is taken into account. Well, to be blunt, all that really means is that English and Spanish together have significant phoneme diversity, since these two languages dominate the New World and skew results. Aka, this is about modern history, not ancient history. Even if there was meaning beyond this, it could be explained by many other factors, including genetic diversity (perhaps certain peoples have a greater ability to pronounce a broader range of phonemes than others), socio-political factors (for example, perhaps long-distance trade, being historically more common in Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa than southern Africa, increases phoneme diversity**), or dozens of other possible reasons. Saying "it's a common language" from this one correlation seems quite the stretch without supporting evidence.
** -- They claim to have controlled for this, but are vague as to how (see "Reference 15"), and I really doubt it can be properly controlled for. Also in Reference 15 are other suspect claims, like "Phonemic diversity appears to be highly stable within major language families". Really? Is that why Japanese phonemes are so familiar to English speakers, but Icelandic phonemes so different (alveolar trills, voiceless alveolar lateral affricates, etc)? Which are different still from German, which is linguistically more intermediary between the two, but has sounds found in neither (such as uvular consonants)? Icelandic is closer to Spanish in terms of phonemes, but isn't nearly as closely related.