Lithium-air is, IMHO, one of the least promising upcoming battery techs. It's really more like a fuel cell, and to be blunt, fuel cells suck. By that, I mean:
* Expensive per watt
* Short lifespans
* Inefficient
There are many, many promising next-gen battery techs other than li-air. Here's just a couple of my favorites.
Lithium-sulfur: This has long been worked on, but only just recently one of its big problems has been worked around. It offers great energy density, but some of the intermediary reaction products -- various lithium polysulfides -- are rather soluble. They'd migrate across the membrane and precipitate out on the other side, being rendered permanently useless to the reaction and thus aging the cells very quickly. Older solutions to try to prevent this caused dramatically lower energy density. The latest technique involves wicking the sulfur into the pores of mesoporous carbon and then functionalizing the outside of the carbon with polyethylene glycol to keep the hydrophobic polysulfides inside when they form. The longevity improvements were amazing, without sacrificing energy density. We're talking that when they deliberately chose a worst-case solvent, one that's really good at dissolving polysulfides, the traditional Li-S cell lost 96% of its sulfur in 30 cycles while theirs only lost 25%.
Nickel-lithium: It is, quite literally, a hybrid NiMH/li-ion battery -- a traditional NiMH cathode that can hold a tremendous amount of lithium, and a lithium metal anode (almost obscene anode energy density). That's normally impossible, since you want to run a NiMH battery with an aqueous electrolyte and your various lithium-based cells with an organic electrolyte. They do both -- they use a new tech called a LISICON membrane to keep the two different electrolytes apart but allow lithium ions across. An additional problem with li metal anodes is that dendrites tend to form that rupture the membrane -- but LISICON membranes are a rigid ceramic that resists dendrite damage.
Digital quantum battery: This is my favorite, because it comes straight out of left field. It's really a type of capacitor. Now, capacitors normally hold a lot less energy than batteries; if the voltage gets too high, you get dielectric breakdown, it arcs across, and your energy is lost. But at very tiny scales, current must move as quanta. So if instead of a single big capacitor, you lithographically print an array of nanoscale capacitors, all of the sudden you can make it so that you essentially can't get dielectric breakdown. In fact, you can store so much energy that the stresses become so great that it's best to use a carbon nanotube for one of the electrodes in each nano-capacitor.:)
And even ignoring next-gen battery techs, there is still *huge* range for improvement in li-ion. In particular, for the cathodes, my favorites are layered manganese cathodes which alternate long-life forms and high energy density forms of magnanese oxides to get both properties; and fluorinated metal cathodes. For the anodes, there's many kinds of tin and particularly silicon anodes out there that store nearly an order of magnitude more lithium than conventional graphite anodes. Silicon anode li-ion cells are just this month starting to hit the market. The tech has finally matured to the point where their longevity is sufficient.
Every expense bears an opportunity cost, and going to the moon poses a huge one. What if instead that money was spent on basic research to reduce launch costs? That would play a dramatically bigger role in pushing our future out into the stars rather than just building yet another series of Big Dumb Rockets to haul massive amounts of metal and supplies to either a temporary venture or a huge long-term fiscal sink (a base/colony).
Look, I was (and am) staunchly against the war in Iraq. But that's just not true. Apollo cost $20-$25B. Using the NASA New Start Index (NNSI - the inflation index for NASA projects), that's just under $200B in today's dollars. The cost of the war in Iraq thusfar is just over $700B.
The war in Iraq was a *colossal* waste of money. But that doesn't mean that a merely "big" waste of money is a good idea. We need to be putting our space funds into robotic research and reducing launch costs. Only the former is economically justifiable by the scientific returns, and only the latter can ever make human space travel be more than a feel-good stunt.
But such a merger process would require a tremendous amount of light. You'd need to find some sort of "Sun Device" to pull it off. Anyway, we're talking about the moon here. All you'll find there are common minerals.
That, and robots pushing around piles of dirt to the tune of "Winky's Happy Night".;)
Well, diapsid reptiles.... but birds are diapsids, too. They just no longer fit into the class "Reptilia". Naming is somewhat of an arbitrary distinction.
For contrast, we're offshoots of synapsid "reptiles".
Vinther also has a good point about feathers being capable of diffraction. For example, green parrots have no green pigment; the green is the result of the natural diffraction grating formed by the feathers. If you give a parrot a bath or shower, its green feathers turn a dark grayish brown. By only looking at the pigments, you'd think that a green parrot would actually be a dark grayish brown.
Still, it's very interesting work. Additionally, while it seems unlikely that we will ever be possible to 100% recreate a dinosaur, there are a lot of individual lines of data -- morphological characteristics, the DNA of their descendants, the remains of broken-down proteins in the fossils, microscopy of fossilized cells, etc -- that should allow us to come pretty close, as biological science continues to mature.
Advanced hydroponics Advance carbon dioxide filtering techniques Learning how to grow food in mineral-less soil
You mean like the sort of experiments they did on the ISS? Amazing how everyone here on Slashdot thinks that ISS was a wasteful boondoggle but somehow building a base on the moon won't be.
Why not show that every now and then we can rise above petty insignificant squabbles over religion, resources and power and as a species we can reach higher and achieve almost anything.
Because the last time around, it consumed as much as 6% of our entire GDP to do so? And because NASA's inflation rate is much higher than the CPI?
The moon will not be able to provide a backup to us any time soon, if ever. Survival on the moon requires modern technology, and the dependency chains for modern technology are just *way* too long to recreate on the moon along the order of a century or less. Even several centuries from now, if we started now, the moon would probably still remain reliant on Earth for our most advanced technology, such as computer chips, etc.
Heck, for that matter, the moon itself may *never* be able to be self-sufficient, as it's so utterly poor in so many important minerals. Even in the places where we found evidence of water ice, it was a trace component; hydrogen is very rare on the moon. Carbon and nitrogen, too, are very rare on the moon. Phosphorus isn't too common. Given that the five most fundamental elements to life are CHONP.... Well, at least there's lots of oxygen on the moon!;)
The moon is also rather depleted in heavy elements.
Why are you so obsessed with, out of thousands of entire papers containing tens of thousands of graphs, a single decade+ old graph which was primarily used for general public-illustrative purposes and which has been superceded many times over? What do you think you're accomplishing by harping on it? Heck, the graphs that superceded it which are *not* controversial in the scientific community (some using easier to calibrate datasets such as boreholes, for example, as well as others that use revised dendrochronology datasets) and which still have the same general shape (just with a small blip for the medieval warm period that wasn't present in Mann)
Yes, CRU has *a* temperature dataset used in the IPCC reports. It's just one of three major and a dozen or so minor datasets. And what is your complaint with the CRU dataset?
The problem is simple. Take a look at how massive the amount of material from the IPCC is. It would take a bloody miracle to not have at least one error in there. They have the unenviable task of summarizing the results of literally thousands of research papers.
Unfortunately, people are going to leap on this as though an error in one paragraph on one page means that all thousands of pages are totally invalid.
Yeah. I mean, how dangerous can "thoughts" be? It's not like anyone would ever have a thought of, say, hijacking a plane and crashing it into a skyscraper or anything like that.
The paper generally seems to recommend ignoring harmless conspiracy theories (such as the moon landing or roswell), but intervening in ones that are likely to lead to violence. And most of the paper comes across as a thought exercise anyways.
Why not link in HuffingtonPost, FreeRepublic, and MichaelMoore.com while you're at it.;)
For those who care about the actual paper rather than the right-wing spin of it:
--------
Abstract: Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event. A recent example is the belief, widespread in some parts of the world, that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out not by Al Qaeda, but by Israel or the United States. Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories may create serious risks, including risks of violence, and the existence of such theories raises significant challenges for policy and law. The first challenge is to understand the mechanisms by which conspiracy theories prosper; the second challenge is to understand how such theories might be undermined. Such theories typically spread as a result of identifiable cognitive blunders, operating in conjunction with informational and reputational influences. A distinctive feature of conspiracy theories is their self-sealing quality. Conspiracy theorists are not likely to be persuaded by an attempt to dispel their theories; they may even characterize that very attempt as further proof of the conspiracy. Because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a crippled epistemology, in accordance with which it is rational to hold such theories, the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. Various policy dilemmas, such as the question whether it is better for government to rebut conspiracy theories or to ignore them, are explored in this light. ------
Note how the Slashdot header linked to COINTELPRO, to imply that that's what's being talked about? Even in the *scenario* where infiltration is discussed, the paper explicitly states, "By this we do not mean 1960s-style infiltration with a view to surveillance and collecting information, possibly for use in future prosecutions." The paper is about how (or whether to) dispel conspiracy theories to prevent them from spreading, not to prosecute the individuals who promote them. Cognitive infiltration is discussed (again, in purely theoretical terms) in not just a covert manner, but also an overt manner. A lot (although not all) of the paper also is about overseas actions against muslim radical organizations, too, giving examples of tactics we're already employing to dispel conspiracy theories that help fuel terrorist organizations. Anyone who doesn't realize that our government actively employs propaganda even against non-conspiracy-theories isn't paying attention.
Now, all of that said, Sunstein does come across in the end as as supporting debunking conspiracy theories which can "create or fuel violence" by "rebutting more rather than fewer theories, by enlisting independent groups to supply rebuttals, and by cogitive infiltration designed to break up the crippled epistemology of conspiracy-minded groups and informationally isolated social networks." Which form of cognitive infiltration discussed -- covert or overt -- is not mentioned, nor is whether this is a reference to domestic, international, or both kinds of conspiracy theories.
I disagree, but it's not as radical of a paper as it's being made out to be.
To most high school students, their relationship is TEH MOST SERIOUS EVAR! In retrospect, they're not, but that doesn't change the equation.
5% is way, way, way too low. In the right situation, I bet he could fall in love with 80% of women in his age group. And the percent that is single is still quite high. And people don't get "locked up" forever in relationships, either, due to divorce or breakups. And it's not like people get married in the order of most attractive to least.
I think 5% is a reasonable number. Keep in mind when thinking about the number, he's 31, that means the dating pool of women is shrinking, I would think the majority of those are from the end of the pool that the general public is going to find attractive, which means that the available women keep getting "uglier".
That's rather insulting. His age group is 24 to (34?), and you're acting like the singles in that age group are mostly hags.
Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier:
"Compare this to the average high school where every other kid pairs up with someone in the same school. What does his Drake equation have to say about that?"
And that's *with* the social awkwardness of high school. Out of your average of, what, perhaps 1000 kids per school, generally over half of them pair up. And usually with people from the same class.
His standards of attractiveness alone only apply to 2.5% of his age group (5% of females). Those are ridiculously high standards. Then he narrows it further by requiring them to live in the exact same city (yeah, nice goal, but it doesn't always work out that way) and have a similar education.
Compare this to the average high school where every other kid pairs up with someone in the same school. What does his Drake equation have to say about that?
I wouldn't be surprised if the probability of a person finding a girlfriend is inversely correlated to how likely they are to attempt to calculate the probability of finding a girlfriend.;)
Love, too, is surprisingly predictable. Take two people who would not automatically rule each other out romantically, put them in frequent contact with each other, give each a significant need (sexual or not) that isn't being met in their life but is met through the other, and odds are surprisingly high that they'll end up in a relationship. And there are all sorts of actions that dramatically increase the odds. For example, confessing your feelings to another person tends to encourage them to reciprocate even if they hadn't had the feelings before. That's why the #1 and #2 rules for if you're trying to avoid having an affair are that if you develop feelings for someone else, immediately cut off contact with the person insomuch as is possible and *never* confess your feelings to them.
Ignoring for the moment that only a tiny percentage of cars (hybrid or otherwise) on the road actually meet that standard as of the time I write this, what you are looking for IS coming. The technology has already been under development for years. Supposedly Nissan was to introduce a SULEV diesel version of their Maxima this year. (we'll see if they actually do) But there has been no point until very recently because it wasn't commercially viable.
As I pointed out in a different comment, you apparently don't know how to read for comprehension. The engine they're coming out with for the Maxima is *Tier 2 Bin 5*. It's not SULEV. Tier 2 Bin 5 isn't even close to SULEV. They're *also* working on a SULEV engine, but have announced no plans for it for production vehicles.
SULEV is a US only standard and the US market historically has not bought passenger diesels in sufficient quantities to justify the investment. Diesels comprise a tiny percentage of US passenger car sales. What likely will change this is the new CAFE standards. Diesels will pretty much have to get more attention to meet the new fuel efficiency standards. If more diesels sell, the tailpipe emissions will inevitably get more attention too.
Sorry, but Europe has been putting pressure on diesel tech for years, and this is all the further they've gotten.
Show me a Prius that matches the acceleration and emissions of the Tesla Roadster. Show me a Prius that can generate 400ft-lb of torque and tow a 7000lb trailer like a Dodge Ram Diesel pickup. Show me a Prius that gets the fuel economy of a Honda VTR1000F motorcycle (>100MPG). Show me a Prius that can haul a ton of freight 400 miles on a gallon of gas like a diesel locomotive. Are you done missing the point with stupid comparisons?
What the hell are you talking about? I'm asking for an apples to apples comparison. Sure, you could pick some tiny car with no room that takes 16 seconds or more to do 0-60 that perhaps comes close to the Prius in terms of emissions, but you will not find anything close to an *equivalent* car that gets its mileage. And if you want to compare the merits of hybrids to diesels, you need to compare *equivalent cars*. Diesels are nowhere close to *equivalent* hybrids, in terms of CO2 and even moreso in terms of non-CO2 emissions.
First off, just because it goes out of warranty doesn't mean it dies. Odds are, it won't, as warranties have to also cover the people who drive way more than average, not just the average driver. See the Prius for an example; they've had a very low percent of pack replacements on them, even from first-gen Prius *taxis*. But even if it did go out of warranty, you're talking about replacing it *10 to 20 years from now*. Do you honestly think that automotive-grade li-ions are going to cost as much as they do today once they hit mass production and have a decade or two of tech advancements? Not a chance. Esp. since automotive-style li-ions are capital cost limited, not materials limited. This is a pack that costs $8k today. It'll probably cost about $3k in 10-20 years. If that much.
Do you ever drive more than 40 miles in one day?
Rarely. Probably ~20-30% of my miles are outside of that range (and a much smaller percent of my "trips"). And there are plenty of people who go out of that sort of range a lot less than I do.
Slashdot Mirror
Lithium-air is, IMHO, one of the least promising upcoming battery techs. It's really more like a fuel cell, and to be blunt, fuel cells suck. By that, I mean:
* Expensive per watt
* Short lifespans
* Inefficient
There are many, many promising next-gen battery techs other than li-air. Here's just a couple of my favorites.
Lithium-sulfur: This has long been worked on, but only just recently one of its big problems has been worked around. It offers great energy density, but some of the intermediary reaction products -- various lithium polysulfides -- are rather soluble. They'd migrate across the membrane and precipitate out on the other side, being rendered permanently useless to the reaction and thus aging the cells very quickly. Older solutions to try to prevent this caused dramatically lower energy density. The latest technique involves wicking the sulfur into the pores of mesoporous carbon and then functionalizing the outside of the carbon with polyethylene glycol to keep the hydrophobic polysulfides inside when they form. The longevity improvements were amazing, without sacrificing energy density. We're talking that when they deliberately chose a worst-case solvent, one that's really good at dissolving polysulfides, the traditional Li-S cell lost 96% of its sulfur in 30 cycles while theirs only lost 25%.
Nickel-lithium: It is, quite literally, a hybrid NiMH/li-ion battery -- a traditional NiMH cathode that can hold a tremendous amount of lithium, and a lithium metal anode (almost obscene anode energy density). That's normally impossible, since you want to run a NiMH battery with an aqueous electrolyte and your various lithium-based cells with an organic electrolyte. They do both -- they use a new tech called a LISICON membrane to keep the two different electrolytes apart but allow lithium ions across. An additional problem with li metal anodes is that dendrites tend to form that rupture the membrane -- but LISICON membranes are a rigid ceramic that resists dendrite damage.
Digital quantum battery: This is my favorite, because it comes straight out of left field. It's really a type of capacitor. Now, capacitors normally hold a lot less energy than batteries; if the voltage gets too high, you get dielectric breakdown, it arcs across, and your energy is lost. But at very tiny scales, current must move as quanta. So if instead of a single big capacitor, you lithographically print an array of nanoscale capacitors, all of the sudden you can make it so that you essentially can't get dielectric breakdown. In fact, you can store so much energy that the stresses become so great that it's best to use a carbon nanotube for one of the electrodes in each nano-capacitor. :)
And even ignoring next-gen battery techs, there is still *huge* range for improvement in li-ion. In particular, for the cathodes, my favorites are layered manganese cathodes which alternate long-life forms and high energy density forms of magnanese oxides to get both properties; and fluorinated metal cathodes. For the anodes, there's many kinds of tin and particularly silicon anodes out there that store nearly an order of magnitude more lithium than conventional graphite anodes. Silicon anode li-ion cells are just this month starting to hit the market. The tech has finally matured to the point where their longevity is sufficient.
Every expense bears an opportunity cost, and going to the moon poses a huge one. What if instead that money was spent on basic research to reduce launch costs? That would play a dramatically bigger role in pushing our future out into the stars rather than just building yet another series of Big Dumb Rockets to haul massive amounts of metal and supplies to either a temporary venture or a huge long-term fiscal sink (a base/colony).
Look, I was (and am) staunchly against the war in Iraq. But that's just not true. Apollo cost $20-$25B. Using the NASA New Start Index (NNSI - the inflation index for NASA projects), that's just under $200B in today's dollars. The cost of the war in Iraq thusfar is just over $700B.
The war in Iraq was a *colossal* waste of money. But that doesn't mean that a merely "big" waste of money is a good idea. We need to be putting our space funds into robotic research and reducing launch costs. Only the former is economically justifiable by the scientific returns, and only the latter can ever make human space travel be more than a feel-good stunt.
But such a merger process would require a tremendous amount of light. You'd need to find some sort of "Sun Device" to pull it off. Anyway, we're talking about the moon here. All you'll find there are common minerals.
That, and robots pushing around piles of dirt to the tune of "Winky's Happy Night". ;)
Well, diapsid reptiles.... but birds are diapsids, too. They just no longer fit into the class "Reptilia". Naming is somewhat of an arbitrary distinction.
For contrast, we're offshoots of synapsid "reptiles".
Vinther also has a good point about feathers being capable of diffraction. For example, green parrots have no green pigment; the green is the result of the natural diffraction grating formed by the feathers. If you give a parrot a bath or shower, its green feathers turn a dark grayish brown. By only looking at the pigments, you'd think that a green parrot would actually be a dark grayish brown.
Still, it's very interesting work. Additionally, while it seems unlikely that we will ever be possible to 100% recreate a dinosaur, there are a lot of individual lines of data -- morphological characteristics, the DNA of their descendants, the remains of broken-down proteins in the fossils, microscopy of fossilized cells, etc -- that should allow us to come pretty close, as biological science continues to mature.
Advanced hydroponics
Advance carbon dioxide filtering techniques
Learning how to grow food in mineral-less soil
You mean like the sort of experiments they did on the ISS?
Amazing how everyone here on Slashdot thinks that ISS was a wasteful boondoggle but somehow building a base on the moon won't be.
Step 1: Convert ourselves into robots so we can be built out of titanium.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!
The moon is also rich in silicon. Perhaps we should convert ourselves to Chenjesu.
Why not show that every now and then we can rise above petty insignificant squabbles over religion, resources and power and as a
species we can reach higher and achieve almost anything.
Because the last time around, it consumed as much as 6% of our entire GDP to do so? And because NASA's inflation rate is much higher than the CPI?
The moon will not be able to provide a backup to us any time soon, if ever. Survival on the moon requires modern technology, and the dependency chains for modern technology are just *way* too long to recreate on the moon along the order of a century or less. Even several centuries from now, if we started now, the moon would probably still remain reliant on Earth for our most advanced technology, such as computer chips, etc.
Heck, for that matter, the moon itself may *never* be able to be self-sufficient, as it's so utterly poor in so many important minerals. Even in the places where we found evidence of water ice, it was a trace component; hydrogen is very rare on the moon. Carbon and nitrogen, too, are very rare on the moon. Phosphorus isn't too common. Given that the five most fundamental elements to life are CHONP.... Well, at least there's lots of oxygen on the moon! ;)
The moon is also rather depleted in heavy elements.
THE repository
Then it's wrong. Because I've read the IPCC reports, and they cite all sorts of climate reconstructions.
In other words, the IPCC is using what is more than likely fraudulent data.
Yeah, those fraudulent weather stations. Or is it fraudulent weather?
Why are you so obsessed with, out of thousands of entire papers containing tens of thousands of graphs, a single decade+ old graph which was primarily used for general public-illustrative purposes and which has been superceded many times over? What do you think you're accomplishing by harping on it? Heck, the graphs that superceded it which are *not* controversial in the scientific community (some using easier to calibrate datasets such as boreholes, for example, as well as others that use revised dendrochronology datasets) and which still have the same general shape (just with a small blip for the medieval warm period that wasn't present in Mann)
Yes, CRU has *a* temperature dataset used in the IPCC reports. It's just one of three major and a dozen or so minor datasets. And what is your complaint with the CRU dataset?
The problem is simple. Take a look at how massive the amount of material from the IPCC is. It would take a bloody miracle to not have at least one error in there. They have the unenviable task of summarizing the results of literally thousands of research papers.
Unfortunately, people are going to leap on this as though an error in one paragraph on one page means that all thousands of pages are totally invalid.
Yeah. I mean, how dangerous can "thoughts" be? It's not like anyone would ever have a thought of, say, hijacking a plane and crashing it into a skyscraper or anything like that.
The paper generally seems to recommend ignoring harmless conspiracy theories (such as the moon landing or roswell), but intervening in ones that are likely to lead to violence. And most of the paper comes across as a thought exercise anyways.
Why not link in HuffingtonPost, FreeRepublic, and MichaelMoore.com while you're at it. ;)
For those who care about the actual paper rather than the right-wing spin of it:
--------
Abstract:
Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event. A recent example is the belief, widespread in some parts of the world, that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out not by Al Qaeda, but by Israel or the United States. Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories may create serious risks, including risks of violence, and the existence of such theories raises significant challenges for policy and law. The first challenge is to understand the mechanisms by which conspiracy theories prosper; the second challenge is to understand how such theories might be undermined. Such theories typically spread as a result of identifiable cognitive blunders, operating in conjunction with informational and reputational influences. A distinctive feature of conspiracy theories is their self-sealing quality. Conspiracy theorists are not likely to be persuaded by an attempt to dispel their theories; they may even characterize that very attempt as further proof of the conspiracy. Because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a crippled epistemology, in accordance with which it is rational to hold such theories, the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. Various policy dilemmas, such as the question whether it is better for government to rebut conspiracy theories or to ignore them, are explored in this light.
------
Note how the Slashdot header linked to COINTELPRO, to imply that that's what's being talked about? Even in the *scenario* where infiltration is discussed, the paper explicitly states, "By this we do not mean 1960s-style infiltration with a view to surveillance and collecting information, possibly for use in future prosecutions." The paper is about how (or whether to) dispel conspiracy theories to prevent them from spreading, not to prosecute the individuals who promote them. Cognitive infiltration is discussed (again, in purely theoretical terms) in not just a covert manner, but also an overt manner. A lot (although not all) of the paper also is about overseas actions against muslim radical organizations, too, giving examples of tactics we're already employing to dispel conspiracy theories that help fuel terrorist organizations. Anyone who doesn't realize that our government actively employs propaganda even against non-conspiracy-theories isn't paying attention.
Now, all of that said, Sunstein does come across in the end as as supporting debunking conspiracy theories which can "create or fuel violence" by "rebutting more rather than fewer theories, by enlisting independent groups to supply rebuttals, and by cogitive infiltration designed to break up the crippled epistemology of conspiracy-minded groups and informationally isolated social networks." Which form of cognitive infiltration discussed -- covert or overt -- is not mentioned, nor is whether this is a reference to domestic, international, or both kinds of conspiracy theories.
I disagree, but it's not as radical of a paper as it's being made out to be.
To most high school students, their relationship is TEH MOST SERIOUS EVAR! In retrospect, they're not, but that doesn't change the equation.
5% is way, way, way too low. In the right situation, I bet he could fall in love with 80% of women in his age group. And the percent that is single is still quite high. And people don't get "locked up" forever in relationships, either, due to divorce or breakups. And it's not like people get married in the order of most attractive to least.
I think 5% is a reasonable number. Keep in mind when thinking about the number, he's 31, that means the dating pool of women is shrinking, I would think the majority of those are from the end of the pool that the general public is going to find attractive, which means that the available women keep getting "uglier".
That's rather insulting. His age group is 24 to (34?), and you're acting like the singles in that age group are mostly hags.
Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier:
"Compare this to the average high school where every other kid pairs up with someone in the same school. What does his Drake equation have to say about that?"
And that's *with* the social awkwardness of high school. Out of your average of, what, perhaps 1000 kids per school, generally over half of them pair up. And usually with people from the same class.
His standards of attractiveness alone only apply to 2.5% of his age group (5% of females). Those are ridiculously high standards. Then he narrows it further by requiring them to live in the exact same city (yeah, nice goal, but it doesn't always work out that way) and have a similar education.
Compare this to the average high school where every other kid pairs up with someone in the same school. What does his Drake equation have to say about that?
I wouldn't be surprised if the probability of a person finding a girlfriend is inversely correlated to how likely they are to attempt to calculate the probability of finding a girlfriend. ;)
Love, too, is surprisingly predictable. Take two people who would not automatically rule each other out romantically, put them in frequent contact with each other, give each a significant need (sexual or not) that isn't being met in their life but is met through the other, and odds are surprisingly high that they'll end up in a relationship. And there are all sorts of actions that dramatically increase the odds. For example, confessing your feelings to another person tends to encourage them to reciprocate even if they hadn't had the feelings before. That's why the #1 and #2 rules for if you're trying to avoid having an affair are that if you develop feelings for someone else, immediately cut off contact with the person insomuch as is possible and *never* confess your feelings to them.
I mean, for crying out loud, the Kindle has a text-to-speech reader built in. How many books have that?
Any other questions that could be easily answered by playing Starcraft?
Ignoring for the moment that only a tiny percentage of cars (hybrid or otherwise) on the road actually meet that standard as of the time I write this, what you are looking for IS coming. The technology has already been under development for years. Supposedly Nissan was to introduce a SULEV diesel version of their Maxima this year. (we'll see if they actually do) But there has been no point until very recently because it wasn't commercially viable.
As I pointed out in a different comment, you apparently don't know how to read for comprehension. The engine they're coming out with for the Maxima is *Tier 2 Bin 5*. It's not SULEV. Tier 2 Bin 5 isn't even close to SULEV. They're *also* working on a SULEV engine, but have announced no plans for it for production vehicles.
SULEV is a US only standard and the US market historically has not bought passenger diesels in sufficient quantities to justify the investment. Diesels comprise a tiny percentage of US passenger car sales. What likely will change this is the new CAFE standards. Diesels will pretty much have to get more attention to meet the new fuel efficiency standards. If more diesels sell, the tailpipe emissions will inevitably get more attention too.
Sorry, but Europe has been putting pressure on diesel tech for years, and this is all the further they've gotten.
Show me a Prius that matches the acceleration and emissions of the Tesla Roadster. Show me a Prius that can generate 400ft-lb of torque and tow a 7000lb trailer like a Dodge Ram Diesel pickup. Show me a Prius that gets the fuel economy of a Honda VTR1000F motorcycle (>100MPG). Show me a Prius that can haul a ton of freight 400 miles on a gallon of gas like a diesel locomotive. Are you done missing the point with stupid comparisons?
What the hell are you talking about? I'm asking for an apples to apples comparison. Sure, you could pick some tiny car with no room that takes 16 seconds or more to do 0-60 that perhaps comes close to the Prius in terms of emissions, but you will not find anything close to an *equivalent* car that gets its mileage. And if you want to compare the merits of hybrids to diesels, you need to compare *equivalent cars*. Diesels are nowhere close to *equivalent* hybrids, in terms of CO2 and even moreso in terms of non-CO2 emissions.
By long way away you mean possibly 2010?
Tier 2 Bin 5 (the engine they're announcing for 2010) is *not* SULEV. You're misreading the article; they're talking about two different engines.
Refilling the urea tank once every 10-15,000 miles is a pain? Umm... sure. Whatever.
Talk to Consumer Reports.
First off, just because it goes out of warranty doesn't mean it dies. Odds are, it won't, as warranties have to also cover the people who drive way more than average, not just the average driver. See the Prius for an example; they've had a very low percent of pack replacements on them, even from first-gen Prius *taxis*. But even if it did go out of warranty, you're talking about replacing it *10 to 20 years from now*. Do you honestly think that automotive-grade li-ions are going to cost as much as they do today once they hit mass production and have a decade or two of tech advancements? Not a chance. Esp. since automotive-style li-ions are capital cost limited, not materials limited. This is a pack that costs $8k today. It'll probably cost about $3k in 10-20 years. If that much.
Do you ever drive more than 40 miles in one day?
Rarely. Probably ~20-30% of my miles are outside of that range (and a much smaller percent of my "trips"). And there are plenty of people who go out of that sort of range a lot less than I do.