Deforestation is myth. It's being pushed by so-called scientists who want to destroy capitalism. If you don't publish papers showing that deforestation is occurring, you lose funding. I have a petition signed by over 31,000 American scientists showing that deforestation is a lie. You should read the op-eds from a certain self-taught British viscount on the subject; he explains what the "scientists" pushing Deforestation Theory are getting wrong.
it's such a hassle to convince security that it's alright for you to bring a bottle of liquids on board the plane,
Depends on where you are. I couldn't get over how lax people in Japan were about security. On our last evening there, we went to the Kansai International Airport on an artificial island in Osaka Bay. We planned to just check our heavy hiking backpacks as baggage and then head back up to Kyoto for more of the Gion Matsuri, or possibly spend some time in Osaka itself. However, when we got there, we not only found that we couldn't check our bags, but that the train that got us there was the last one of the evening, so we were stuck.
It then occurred to us: we still had bottles of white gas in our backpacks. And we were now in an airport.
Rick came up with the idea of emptying it into his coke bottle, and then throwing that into the trash in the bathroom. But in the bathroom, I realize how crazy of an idea this was, throwing something that toxic and flammable into the trash full of paper towels. And talk about suspicious! So we carried it back.
The next morning, when people started showing up to re-open the airport, we then had the idea to give it to a security guard to dispose of. So we carried it up to the security guard, and then realized how incredibly suspicious *that* looked. Here we were, trying to explain in our poor Japanese, why we're carring a coke bottle full of highly flammable liquid in an airport. And while we were confident that we got across *what* it was, I think we did a lousy job of explaining *why* we had it.
In the US, we likely would have been dragged off to security on the spot. In Japan? The guy said it's not a problem and offered to check it as luggage for us. I'll repeat: he offered to check our highly suspicious coke bottle of white gas as airplane luggage for us. We politely refused. He offered to mail it to us if we wanted. Again, we politely refused and recommended that they dispose of it, thinking to ourselves, "That's okay. You can keep this practically-a-molotov-cocktail..."
That's why they changed the name.:) It's based on the Dyson Tree concept, but they didn't want confusion with the vacuum cleaners.
Looking over how gameplay works, it kind of makes me think of "Masters of Orion", but, realtime, and with trees. Now they just need to make the enemies demand a tribute of negative money and create fleets of MAXINT or negative numbers of seedlings, then they'll be all set!;)
very high efficnecy cells can have efficiencies over 60%
Yeah, if you feed them pre-compressed oxygen.
High temperature electrolysis can get around 60-70% electrolytic efficiency.
Good luck fitting a high pressure/high temperature steam electrolysis system on a UAV.
For larger craft, the higher energy density of Hydrogen would start tipping the scale in favor of fuel cells owing to the weight reduction from not having to tow the extra weight of the lithium/sulfur battery material
No, it will always be offset by the vast increase in the required amount of solar cell material.
"Fuel cell plus solar powered electrolysis"? Yeah, throwing away 70-80% of your energy is a good way to stay aloft, right? Low loads on a fuel cell means tank-to-drive efficiency of ~45%, and small-scale electrolysis tends to be very inefficient, generally 50% or less (the big steam electrolysis systems are more efficient).
The Zephyr stayed aloft with lithium-sulfur batteries. Being still experimental, they don't have a very long cycle life yet (although there have been some big lab breakthroughs in this regard), but they have more energy storage capacity than li-ion. And more importantly, they don't throw away the overwhelming majority of their collected energy.
A 550-watt, 0.75 horsepower hydrogen fuel cell will power the Ion Tiger with four times the efficiency of a comparable internal combustion engine
That would mean an efficiency of greater than 100%. Which is obviously nonsense. ICEs are generally 35-45% efficient in peak operation. If you want to say that you're not comparing peak operation, then you can't compare fuel cells at peak operation, either. For example, when driving the NEDC (the New European Drive Cycle, one that generally is gentler than our combined city/highway cycles), the tank-to-wheel efficiency of a fuel cell stack is about 36% (gasoline engines in the NEDC are generally 20-25% efficient, and diesels, 25-30%). Even at low, steady loads, fuel cells are about 45%. And that's tank-to-wheel -- i.e., doesn't include the losses in making hydrogen, which are significant. Yes, you can get really high efficiencies, 50-70% or so, with fuel cells in the lab. But to do that, you have to feed them pre-compressed oxygen rather than low-pressure air, and not count any accessory loads.
and seven times the energy of the equivalent weight of batteries
Notice they chose the one metric that favors H2 -- rather than, say, volume, durability, power, price per watt, fuel price per energy or fuel price per watt, or any other such metric that fuel cells bomb at. And they're almost certainly just comparing the fuel, ignoring how heavy the fuel cell stack is.
Another big advantage is the Ion Tiger's reduced noise, heat and emissions.
Fuel cells lose out to battery-electric in all three of those regards.
Now, I will say that UAVs are a better role for fuel cells than cars -- steadier loads, cost is less of an object, and a higher percent of the vehicle's mass needs to be energy storage. But they still aren't very attractive.
It's not just that. Compressing air is not just a little inefficient; it's very inefficient. Small, home-scale air compressors, amazignly inefficient. Most of the energy put into compressing air is exhausted as heat. Some of these "air car" makers (such as MDI) are borderline scammers, with the sort of claims they make.
For anyone who's not familiar with the standard proposed "clean" transportation techs, the efficiency order is: electric is 2-4 times more efficient than hydrogen fuel cell/electrolysis, which is twice as efficient as an air car with a typical home-scale air compressor providing the energy.
Right. 60 hours of cherry-picked sources from a paid-off thinktank is a perfect substitute for four years of college, two to four years of graduate school, and a decade or two in the field.
For the specifics read the whole article. For a general summary, this excerpt will do:
"Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).
More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though."
Even then, a stabilization system would be require to keep the beam on a single spot for long enough to do damage.
Meh, at least from the software side of things, I could output the required beam offsets in realtime using nothing more than a webcam mounted to the scope, a cluster of laptops, and Cinelerra.:)
No, this is a goal. It's not even a test weapon yet. Perhaps after (if?) they hit this goal, they might set a more ambitious goal. But for now, this is not an effective "raygun".tripod.
But it has to be on a single spot for a whole second just to have the energy of a 9mm. What you're talking about is more like a BB gun. If that. You're not going to "slice" anything.
To avoid eye damage, I bet soldiers will be issued goggles for protection.
To wear 24/7? And how do the soldiers see? And do all civilians in the country get them, too?
2. Lasers have a very small area of effect. Even if you fired one of these guns and pierced the enemy soldier's body, the blood loss will be small if any due to 1) the small size and 2) the bleed-stopping effect of the heat. A hit on the heart might cause internal bleeding, but I can't imagine even a hit on lungs having much of a take-down effect. On the other hand, if you see bullets fired through blocks of clay or ballistics jell you see the damage area is far large than the bullet due to the impact and the spinning of the bullet.
That's why it's proper to compare joules delivered. It's not a bullet traveling through you that does all that damage; it's the force of impact on your internal organs. Yes, the manner in which a given number of joules is delivered does matter, but it lets you know how much total energy is being imparted and how quickly it is imparted. So the energy may no longer be in the form of a projectile rapidly losing kinetic energy, but perhaps, for example, it'll be in the form of flash boiling of internal organs.
As for the size of the wound, that depends on how tightly you focus the beam.
Well, it's all irrelevant anyways, because if you want to compare damage, duration is just as important as energy. A one second laser pulse is nothing like a millisecond bullet impact. And furthermore, how the heck are you going to keep the beam on a single spot for a whole second, esp. at any sort of distance? Perhaps if you're talking stationary armor or something and you've got a tripod...
One of these cells may leave a nasty burn or blind you, but it's not going to kill you.
(Speaking of blinding: if serious lethal laser weapons ever do become common, that's going to be a new horror of war. Even the tangential reflections from any laser powerful enough to rapidly kill a person -- or worse, cut through armor -- are going to do catastrophic eye damage to everyone around them.)
If you do the math, there's not much water there. A crater ~80 feet by ~13 feet, and the plume only showed evidence for about 25 gallons of water. That's ~150ppm. Better than the ppb quantities that were previously known, mind you...
Or the dot-com bubble, where everybody was listening to the market bulls who said we had a "new economy" that was just going to keep on growing and growing
Really? Everyone I knew who had money in tech stocks during the dot com bubble knew it was unsustainable and was just trying to ride it to the top.
As for the collapse, where were you when everyone was talking about the housing bubble, years before it took out Fannie and Freddie?
I think you're confusing not knowing the truth with knowing it but still trying to exploit it.
I like acronym passwords -- first letter of each word in a sentence or phrase. They're very easy to remember but come up very random and aren't easy to attack. You can have different sentences for different types of passwords. You can also still do the typical approach of substitution of letters, insertion of numbers, symbols, punctuation, etc that people often do with normal passwords.
Yeah. Because that's what flag@whitehouse.gov was for. Clearly its stated purpose of trying to help the administration gather information about what misinformation was circulating about its policies was just a smokescreen. It was really the first step in targeting the proles to round up and force into re-education camps.
Back on topic: some bad news, for those who haven't heard. The victim of the car wreck, tragically, was not Glenn Beck.
Slashdot Mirror
Deforestation is myth. It's being pushed by so-called scientists who want to destroy capitalism. If you don't publish papers showing that deforestation is occurring, you lose funding. I have a petition signed by over 31,000 American scientists showing that deforestation is a lie. You should read the op-eds from a certain self-taught British viscount on the subject; he explains what the "scientists" pushing Deforestation Theory are getting wrong.
it's such a hassle to convince security that it's alright for you to bring a bottle of liquids on board the plane,
Depends on where you are. I couldn't get over how lax people in Japan were about security. On our last evening there, we went to the Kansai International Airport on an artificial island in Osaka Bay. We planned to just check our heavy hiking backpacks as baggage and then head back up to Kyoto for more of the Gion Matsuri, or possibly spend some time in Osaka itself. However, when we got there, we not only found that we couldn't check our bags, but that the train that got us there was the last one of the evening, so we were stuck.
It then occurred to us: we still had bottles of white gas in our backpacks. And we were now in an airport.
Rick came up with the idea of emptying it into his coke bottle, and then throwing that into the trash in the bathroom. But in the bathroom, I realize how crazy of an idea this was, throwing something that toxic and flammable into the trash full of paper towels. And talk about suspicious! So we carried it back.
The next morning, when people started showing up to re-open the airport, we then had the idea to give it to a security guard to dispose of. So we carried it up to the security guard, and then realized how incredibly suspicious *that* looked. Here we were, trying to explain in our poor Japanese, why we're carring a coke bottle full of highly flammable liquid in an airport. And while we were confident that we got across *what* it was, I think we did a lousy job of explaining *why* we had it.
In the US, we likely would have been dragged off to security on the spot. In Japan? The guy said it's not a problem and offered to check it as luggage for us. I'll repeat: he offered to check our highly suspicious coke bottle of white gas as airplane luggage for us. We politely refused. He offered to mail it to us if we wanted. Again, we politely refused and recommended that they dispose of it, thinking to ourselves, "That's okay. You can keep this practically-a-molotov-cocktail..."
That's why they changed the name. :) It's based on the Dyson Tree concept, but they didn't want confusion with the vacuum cleaners.
Looking over how gameplay works, it kind of makes me think of "Masters of Orion", but, realtime, and with trees. Now they just need to make the enemies demand a tribute of negative money and create fleets of MAXINT or negative numbers of seedlings, then they'll be all set! ;)
very high efficnecy cells can have efficiencies over 60%
Yeah, if you feed them pre-compressed oxygen.
High temperature electrolysis can get around 60-70% electrolytic efficiency.
Good luck fitting a high pressure/high temperature steam electrolysis system on a UAV.
For larger craft, the higher energy density of Hydrogen would start tipping the scale in favor of fuel cells owing to the weight reduction from not having to tow the extra weight of the lithium/sulfur battery material
No, it will always be offset by the vast increase in the required amount of solar cell material.
"Fuel cell plus solar powered electrolysis"? Yeah, throwing away 70-80% of your energy is a good way to stay aloft, right? Low loads on a fuel cell means tank-to-drive efficiency of ~45%, and small-scale electrolysis tends to be very inefficient, generally 50% or less (the big steam electrolysis systems are more efficient).
The Zephyr stayed aloft with lithium-sulfur batteries. Being still experimental, they don't have a very long cycle life yet (although there have been some big lab breakthroughs in this regard), but they have more energy storage capacity than li-ion. And more importantly, they don't throw away the overwhelming majority of their collected energy.
Oh, I'm sorry -- point to me where they had a wingspan restriction in their unconditional statement.
Also on the subject of misleading claims:
A 550-watt, 0.75 horsepower hydrogen fuel cell will power the Ion Tiger with four times the efficiency of a comparable internal combustion engine
That would mean an efficiency of greater than 100%. Which is obviously nonsense. ICEs are generally 35-45% efficient in peak operation. If you want to say that you're not comparing peak operation, then you can't compare fuel cells at peak operation, either. For example, when driving the NEDC (the New European Drive Cycle, one that generally is gentler than our combined city/highway cycles), the tank-to-wheel efficiency of a fuel cell stack is about 36% (gasoline engines in the NEDC are generally 20-25% efficient, and diesels, 25-30%). Even at low, steady loads, fuel cells are about 45%. And that's tank-to-wheel -- i.e., doesn't include the losses in making hydrogen, which are significant. Yes, you can get really high efficiencies, 50-70% or so, with fuel cells in the lab. But to do that, you have to feed them pre-compressed oxygen rather than low-pressure air, and not count any accessory loads.
and seven times the energy of the equivalent weight of batteries
Notice they chose the one metric that favors H2 -- rather than, say, volume, durability, power, price per watt, fuel price per energy or fuel price per watt, or any other such metric that fuel cells bomb at. And they're almost certainly just comparing the fuel, ignoring how heavy the fuel cell stack is.
Another big advantage is the Ion Tiger's reduced noise, heat and emissions.
Fuel cells lose out to battery-electric in all three of those regards.
Now, I will say that UAVs are a better role for fuel cells than cars -- steadier loads, cost is less of an object, and a higher percent of the vehicle's mass needs to be energy storage. But they still aren't very attractive.
When Ion Tiger took flight on October, it exceeded any demonstration of electrically powered flight so far, flying 23 hours and 17 minutes.
No it didn't. Have they never heard of the Qinetiq Zephyr? It flew for 82 hours.
It's not just that. Compressing air is not just a little inefficient; it's very inefficient. Small, home-scale air compressors, amazignly inefficient. Most of the energy put into compressing air is exhausted as heat. Some of these "air car" makers (such as MDI) are borderline scammers, with the sort of claims they make.
For anyone who's not familiar with the standard proposed "clean" transportation techs, the efficiency order is: electric is 2-4 times more efficient than hydrogen fuel cell/electrolysis, which is twice as efficient as an air car with a typical home-scale air compressor providing the energy.
You clearly didn't read the article, where they responded to several of those. But I guess you'd rather talk to yourself.
Right. 60 hours of cherry-picked sources from a paid-off thinktank is a perfect substitute for four years of college, two to four years of graduate school, and a decade or two in the field.
Anyone else reveling in the irony of the hackers cherry-picking data to support their pre-conceived premises? :)
Since some of the emails are sent from them, it's worth reading.
Link
For the specifics read the whole article. For a general summary, this excerpt will do:
"Since emails are normally intended to be private, people writing them are, shall we say, somewhat freer in expressing themselves than they would in a public statement. For instance, we are sure it comes as no shock to know that many scientists do not hold Steve McIntyre in high regard. Nor that a large group of them thought that the Soon and Baliunas (2003), Douglass et al (2008) or McClean et al (2009) papers were not very good (to say the least) and should not have been published. These sentiments have been made abundantly clear in the literature (though possibly less bluntly).
More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though."
Even then, a stabilization system would be require to keep the beam on a single spot for long enough to do damage.
Meh, at least from the software side of things, I could output the required beam offsets in realtime using nothing more than a webcam mounted to the scope, a cluster of laptops, and Cinelerra. :)
No, this is a goal. It's not even a test weapon yet. Perhaps after (if?) they hit this goal, they might set a more ambitious goal. But for now, this is not an effective "raygun".tripod.
Blind, yes. Burned, probably not. But a fair point to raise.
But it has to be on a single spot for a whole second just to have the energy of a 9mm. What you're talking about is more like a BB gun. If that. You're not going to "slice" anything.
To avoid eye damage, I bet soldiers will be issued goggles for protection.
To wear 24/7? And how do the soldiers see? And do all civilians in the country get them, too?
2. Lasers have a very small area of effect. Even if you fired one of these guns and pierced the enemy soldier's body, the blood loss will be small if any due to 1) the small size and 2) the bleed-stopping effect of the heat. A hit on the heart might cause internal bleeding, but I can't imagine even a hit on lungs having much of a take-down effect. On the other hand, if you see bullets fired through blocks of clay or ballistics jell you see the damage area is far large than the bullet due to the impact and the spinning of the bullet.
That's why it's proper to compare joules delivered. It's not a bullet traveling through you that does all that damage; it's the force of impact on your internal organs. Yes, the manner in which a given number of joules is delivered does matter, but it lets you know how much total energy is being imparted and how quickly it is imparted. So the energy may no longer be in the form of a projectile rapidly losing kinetic energy, but perhaps, for example, it'll be in the form of flash boiling of internal organs.
As for the size of the wound, that depends on how tightly you focus the beam.
Well, it's all irrelevant anyways, because if you want to compare damage, duration is just as important as energy. A one second laser pulse is nothing like a millisecond bullet impact. And furthermore, how the heck are you going to keep the beam on a single spot for a whole second, esp. at any sort of distance? Perhaps if you're talking stationary armor or something and you've got a tripod...
One of these cells may leave a nasty burn or blind you, but it's not going to kill you.
(Speaking of blinding: if serious lethal laser weapons ever do become common, that's going to be a new horror of war. Even the tangential reflections from any laser powerful enough to rapidly kill a person -- or worse, cut through armor -- are going to do catastrophic eye damage to everyone around them.)
As if we have any classified advanced US technology China doesn't already have.
All they're going to do is put lead in it...
If you do the math, there's not much water there. A crater ~80 feet by ~13 feet, and the plume only showed evidence for about 25 gallons of water. That's ~150ppm. Better than the ppb quantities that were previously known, mind you...
Or the dot-com bubble, where everybody was listening to the market bulls who said we had a "new economy" that was just going to keep on growing and growing
Really? Everyone I knew who had money in tech stocks during the dot com bubble knew it was unsustainable and was just trying to ride it to the top.
As for the collapse, where were you when everyone was talking about the housing bubble, years before it took out Fannie and Freddie?
I think you're confusing not knowing the truth with knowing it but still trying to exploit it.
I like acronym passwords -- first letter of each word in a sentence or phrase. They're very easy to remember but come up very random and aren't easy to attack. You can have different sentences for different types of passwords. You can also still do the typical approach of substitution of letters, insertion of numbers, symbols, punctuation, etc that people often do with normal passwords.
Yeah. Because that's what flag@whitehouse.gov was for. Clearly its stated purpose of trying to help the administration gather information about what misinformation was circulating about its policies was just a smokescreen. It was really the first step in targeting the proles to round up and force into re-education camps.
Back on topic: some bad news, for those who haven't heard. The victim of the car wreck, tragically, was not Glenn Beck.