Often, GLBT-issues get completely ignored by the history books.
Here's one that has major implications for the Slashdot crowd: One person was responsible for two of the major revolutions in computing in our era: Lynn Conway, a transgendered individual. Back in the 1960s, "he" worked at IBM, where "he" invented multiple-issue dynamic instruction scheduling, the way-ahead-of-its-time idea of executing multiple instructions at the same time in a single CPU that was to make the performance boom of the late '90s and the '00s possible. Conway was fired by IBM in 1968 for stating her intent to transition from male to female, and had to rebuild her career up from scratch a second time around with a blank slate (starting out as a contractor and building up to ultimately heading the LSI group at Xerox PARC). And from this work, she and Carver Mead invented VSLI -- the Mead and Conway Revolution that lead to the boom of CPU advancements of the '80s.
For example, lets examine one of the pieces of insanity on his site. He mentions embedding supercapacitors into the road surface to store energy (I assume overnight). If you don't know what those things are, they would be the filthy expensive, highly experimental, rarely used in commercial products devices with lower than battery storage capacity.
First off, right there, you completely discredited yourself. Supercapacitors are a billion dollar market today, and are projected to grow to 8.3 billion dollars by 2015. There are anything but "experimental"; they're a mass-market product. What year are you living in, 1990?
Since the enthalpy of fusion of water 333 J/g, then 200J of energy will melt 0.6g of water. A layer of water (or ice) 0.6g/cm^2 is 6mm deep.
Snow is not ice. Snow has a density of about 0.1g/cm^2 (it varies). That's 6cm of snow, or almost 2 1/2 inches. And that's ignoring the snow that gets melted by the heat of the road; keeping a road clear of snow and ice means it heats up more in the sunlight. Anyone who lives in a snowy area can tell you that the first snow to fall on a completely clear road melts right off; the snow has to cool the road before it can stick.
AND, you're forgetting that this is gridded. Not everywhere gets snow at the same time, not everything has to be melted at the same time (just like everything doesn't get plowed at the same time), and so forth. Really, what's your argument -- that a non-gridded version wouldn't work well in Buffalo, so the whole concept is silly? To top it all off, you picked a small supercapacitor, and its numbers include casing, monitoring electronics, etc -- things that on the large scale will decrease.
assuming that the weak winter sunlight was sufficient to fully charge the capacitors during the previous day.
I already do the math earlier in this thread; the road should produce enough energy to melt about 4 inches of snow per sunny day.
Not to mention that no matter how much capacity you have, there's not enough sunlight to charge it.
Yeah, nice bold assertion, Numbers Guy.
On one of the pages, he mentions a target price of USD48 per square foot.
He shows cost-competitiveness with asphault at about $10,000 per panel, *not* counting tangential benefits such as the cost of transmission infrastructure, reduced road maintenance, plowing, health benefits, etc. That's $70 per square foot.
"Divide this amount by the 4.84 billion Solar Road Panels(TM) required to replace the asphalt, and we get a target cost of $9923.16 per panel."
Building as a roof means you need to withstand winds (as well as blocking the view). And cells can be tilted underneath glass. You can also use a fresnel lens approach.
Except that the ambient temperature is below 0, which is often the case during winter
And it's often above 0. I think a 10C temperature rise is perfectly fair.
Heating something from -10C to 0C takes a bit of energy - heating it while it's in a freezer takes a lot more.
Depends on the rate of heating. Given the limit of heating time approaching zero, energy lost to conduction/convection/radiation approaches zero. Also, don't forget: snow is an excellent insulator.
Secondly, if you discount all the areas not covered in snow (i.e. we look at the snow-covered area in isolation, as you do) then an asphalt covering should obviously be equally effective at melting snow.
Yeah, let me know when snow becomes transparent, rather than reflecting 90% of the light that hits it.
In the first snow after a long bright or warm spell, roads *do* tend to melt a lot of the early snow that hits them until they cool off. The problem is that they then become covered in snow and ice (which the plows often don't completely strip), and they then reflect the lion's share of the light that hits them.
Melting an inch of snow and raising it by 10C on a 10'x1mi stretch of road takes 46,000 kWh, or $4,600 at residential rates, $2,700 at industrial rates.
Yeah, it'd probably only be cost effective for minor snow events and freezing rain, rather than trying to melt five inches off the snow, but better than nothing.
Try this: Go to Google Maps and start looking at roads. Random roads. Select without bias. Tell me how much of the road surface is covered on average. Then go deliberately seek out traffic, and again, tell me how much of the road surface is covered.
Even in "bumper to bumper" stop-and-go traffic, about half the roadway is exposed. On average, a quick glance at the US's road system suggests that perhaps 98% of it is exposed at any point in time during the day, and perhaps 90% in cities.
The first inch or two of snow to fall on an asphalt road *does* melt from the heat of the road. Even lighter colored concrete roads tend to melt a lot of the first snow to hit them. The problem is that once the road gets covered with snow, it's no dark. Snow reflects about 90% of the light that hits it.
To sum up: it's significantly more expensive, but since glass doesn't wear like asphalt does (it either works or breaks -- and it doesn't generally break from compressive stress, only torsional stress and impact), it should last longer and need less maintenance. And since you also get power out of it, displace plow crews, etc, they make the argument that it'll be a better investment if they can make the panels for $10k or less each.
Given that the one-off prototype is to cost $100k, and they have the potential for a *huge* amount of mass production, I don't think it's all that unrealistic. I'd still like to see how they handle in the real world, of course, but hey, that's why you give funding to build prototypes.;)
And why not? Sun = 1000W/m^2, decreased by angles, obstructions, night, etc. Let's say 8kWh/day/m^2 on a clear stretch of road. That's 6.88Mcal/day/m^2. Latent heat for melting ice is 80 cal/g and temperature raising is 1cal/g/C, so 10C temperature rise and melting is 76.4kg snow per day at 100% efficiency. Snow is about 100kg/m^3, so that's.764m^3 per m^2 per day, or 2 1/2 feet per day.
Now, obviously, efficiency isn't 100%. Solar cell efficiency is about 15% in this application. However, the "waste heat" isn't exactly waste; it's heating up the road. Now, it radiates away instead of being stored, but what's there is useful. Anyone who lives in a northern clime can tell you how the first snow after a warm period tends not to stick well. And even the 15% solar efficiency -- call it 12% after grid and storage losses -- times 2 1/2 feet is 4 inches of snow per day, or 27 feet of snow per winter.
What, you think nobody bothered to check the numbers before issuing the grant?
Can we stop acting like the cars are driving directly on top of the solar cells? They're not. They're driving on glass, treated for greater impact resistance and a textured surface. The question should be, how well does treated glass withstand winter damage?
Right. Build a grid the size of Connecticut to get 50 pounds of hydrogen -- not enough to get a model rocket off the lunar surface.
It scales. The Moon is a lot bigger than Connecticut.
It absolutely does not scale. Even if it was just sparsely scattered wires and towers, that would way more than the hydrogen it could harvest in a hundred thousand years.
Perfect correction? I'm just interested in capturing positively charged ions (most of the solar wind is ions as I understand it). As long as the grid is electrically neutral at a distance, it will work on anything positively charged. There's no need to "tune" it to a particular energy.
Wrong. Picture rolling an iron ball past a magnet at a hundred miles an hour. Now picturing rolling an iron ball past the same magnet at 1 mile an hour. Do you really think the balls will get deflected by the same amount? Solar wind isn't a single energy level; it's a broad range. Your idea is to try and concentrate solar wind into smaller collectors via an electrostatic grid. That would only work if the particles were uniform energy, which they're not.
Boy, I'm tempted to toss in a hypocritical "cite?" remark here. But you seem pretty knowledgeable on the solar wind. You can find out for yourself whether you are right or wrong. I bet you're wrong here.
It's very, very simple. Craters and crevices have no significant electrostatic charge, so they're not going to be bending ion paths. The only thing they can do is shield, which means, if anything, *less* hydrogen.
Right. Build a grid the size of Connecticut to get 50 pounds of hydrogen -- not enough to get a model rocket off the lunar surface. FYI, your suggestion wouldn't work because solar wind isn't unform energy. The perfect correction for one energy particle would just scatter a particle of different energy.
No, craters and crevices will not increase solar wind density.
There's 40 sources about the details of the coup. As for your resignation letter, I love how you linked to the image instead of the page that covers it, where it is headlined Purported President Chavez resignation letter, and includes the description, "regardless of its veracity". And read the letter's talk page -- nobody there believes its veracity. For example:
"If I see correctly (resolution is too low) the letter is dated as April 13th, not April 11th. If Chávez renounced (Which I think he did) he did it the 11th, not the 13th, when he was almost certain to return. I oppose to Chávez, but I think this is a hoax. "
And, FYI, I don't type with my mouth. I think you'll find that you get a better words-per-minute rate if you use your fingers, as I do.
New Orleans is not banning any violent videogames so there's no reason to mention any other city in the list, it's irrelevant, and the violence in Caracas has increased dramatically in the last 10 years of government, that's a fact that you can't hide, one of the highest murder rates in the world when it doesn't even have wars, even Colombia with terrorists groups has less murder rates, that sure tells you something....
New Orleans doesn't "even have wars" either, and their murder rate is essentially the same as Caracas's. Is New Orleans' murder rate Chavez's fault as well?
As for your comments about Chavez ordering the (oft violent -- but you'll never admit to that, despite video evidence) opposition marches tear gassed, well, gee, that never happens here, now does it? And give it a rest about the radio and TV stations, which were owned by the very people who organized a coup against him and constantly try to promote his overthrow. The people you're supporting sponsored the overthrow of a democratically elected government. When they took power, their very first act was to dissolve the judiciary. When Chavez regained power, what did he do? Practically nothing -- they got house arrest. Freaking *house arrest* for *overthrowing the government*. Do you know what we'd do here in the US to those who overthrew our government? We'd bomb their hometowns flat. This is your hardened dictator, because he shuts down their mouthpieces? Give me a freaking break.
The ridiculous part about that line is that Venezuela spends significantly less on defense spending than Colombia, it's oft-foe. And the "peaceful marches" involved a freaking coup.
Meh, I saw that in Costa Rica, which is by all standards one of the safer, more stable Central American nations. You see some nice mall that by all standards could equally well blend in in Iowa, except for the guy out front with the military-style assault rifle.
The country that has bought Sukhois, tanks and 100,000 AK-103's, is planning to build a manufacturing plant of Russian rifles, and oppresses peaceful marches
Venezuela's defense spending is just over $2B/year. Their oft-foe, Colombia, spends about $6B/year. And the US spends over $400B/year.
And, FYI, your "peaceful marches" involved a freaking coup.
Just today the AFP released a report showing Caracas as the second most violent city on the planet -- even more violent than Baghdad.
Didn't bother to mention that New Orleans came in right after Caracas, with only one less murder per 100,000 people, did you? Or that Caracas's murder rate fell dramatically since their last survey. Skew much?
Slashdot Mirror
So someone's gender is the equivalent of trivia about what color underpants they wore, to you?
I assume you don't know what gender Albert Einstein was?
Btw, I do think there's something wrong with building brides.
Well, if they ever do build brides, it wouldn't have been possible without Shannon and Turing's work. ;)
Often, GLBT-issues get completely ignored by the history books.
Here's one that has major implications for the Slashdot crowd: One person was responsible for two of the major revolutions in computing in our era: Lynn Conway, a transgendered individual. Back in the 1960s, "he" worked at IBM, where "he" invented multiple-issue dynamic instruction scheduling, the way-ahead-of-its-time idea of executing multiple instructions at the same time in a single CPU that was to make the performance boom of the late '90s and the '00s possible. Conway was fired by IBM in 1968 for stating her intent to transition from male to female, and had to rebuild her career up from scratch a second time around with a blank slate (starting out as a contractor and building up to ultimately heading the LSI group at Xerox PARC). And from this work, she and Carver Mead invented VSLI -- the Mead and Conway Revolution that lead to the boom of CPU advancements of the '80s.
I'll never forget the immortal last words of Socrates:
"I drank what..?!"
For example, lets examine one of the pieces of insanity on his site. He mentions embedding supercapacitors into the road surface to store energy (I assume overnight). If you don't know what those things are, they would be the filthy expensive, highly experimental, rarely used in commercial products devices with lower than battery storage capacity.
First off, right there, you completely discredited yourself. Supercapacitors are a billion dollar market today, and are projected to grow to 8.3 billion dollars by 2015. There are anything but "experimental"; they're a mass-market product. What year are you living in, 1990?
Since the enthalpy of fusion of water 333 J/g, then 200J of energy will melt 0.6g of water. A layer of water (or ice) 0.6g/cm^2 is 6mm deep.
Snow is not ice. Snow has a density of about 0.1g/cm^2 (it varies). That's 6cm of snow, or almost 2 1/2 inches. And that's ignoring the snow that gets melted by the heat of the road; keeping a road clear of snow and ice means it heats up more in the sunlight. Anyone who lives in a snowy area can tell you that the first snow to fall on a completely clear road melts right off; the snow has to cool the road before it can stick.
AND, you're forgetting that this is gridded. Not everywhere gets snow at the same time, not everything has to be melted at the same time (just like everything doesn't get plowed at the same time), and so forth. Really, what's your argument -- that a non-gridded version wouldn't work well in Buffalo, so the whole concept is silly? To top it all off, you picked a small supercapacitor, and its numbers include casing, monitoring electronics, etc -- things that on the large scale will decrease.
assuming that the weak winter sunlight was sufficient to fully charge the capacitors during the previous day.
I already do the math earlier in this thread; the road should produce enough energy to melt about 4 inches of snow per sunny day.
Not to mention that no matter how much capacity you have, there's not enough sunlight to charge it.
Yeah, nice bold assertion, Numbers Guy.
On one of the pages, he mentions a target price of USD48 per square foot.
He shows cost-competitiveness with asphault at about $10,000 per panel, *not* counting tangential benefits such as the cost of transmission infrastructure, reduced road maintenance, plowing, health benefits, etc. That's $70 per square foot.
"Divide this amount by the 4.84 billion Solar Road Panels(TM) required to replace the asphalt, and we get a target cost of $9923.16 per panel."
Building as a roof means you need to withstand winds (as well as blocking the view). And cells can be tilted underneath glass. You can also use a fresnel lens approach.
Except that the ambient temperature is below 0, which is often the case during winter
And it's often above 0. I think a 10C temperature rise is perfectly fair.
Heating something from -10C to 0C takes a bit of energy - heating it while it's in a freezer takes a lot more.
Depends on the rate of heating. Given the limit of heating time approaching zero, energy lost to conduction/convection/radiation approaches zero. Also, don't forget: snow is an excellent insulator.
Secondly, if you discount all the areas not covered in snow (i.e. we look at the snow-covered area in isolation, as you do) then an asphalt covering should obviously be equally effective at melting snow.
Yeah, let me know when snow becomes transparent, rather than reflecting 90% of the light that hits it.
In the first snow after a long bright or warm spell, roads *do* tend to melt a lot of the early snow that hits them until they cool off. The problem is that they then become covered in snow and ice (which the plows often don't completely strip), and they then reflect the lion's share of the light that hits them.
Melting an inch of snow and raising it by 10C on a 10'x1mi stretch of road takes 46,000 kWh, or $4,600 at residential rates, $2,700 at industrial rates.
Yeah, it'd probably only be cost effective for minor snow events and freezing rain, rather than trying to melt five inches off the snow, but better than nothing.
Is reading the FAQ too much to ask?
Try this: Go to Google Maps and start looking at roads. Random roads. Select without bias. Tell me how much of the road surface is covered on average. Then go deliberately seek out traffic, and again, tell me how much of the road surface is covered.
Even in "bumper to bumper" stop-and-go traffic, about half the roadway is exposed. On average, a quick glance at the US's road system suggests that perhaps 98% of it is exposed at any point in time during the day, and perhaps 90% in cities.
The first inch or two of snow to fall on an asphalt road *does* melt from the heat of the road. Even lighter colored concrete roads tend to melt a lot of the first snow to hit them. The problem is that once the road gets covered with snow, it's no dark. Snow reflects about 90% of the light that hits it.
People should really read the FAQ and the numbers.
To sum up: it's significantly more expensive, but since glass doesn't wear like asphalt does (it either works or breaks -- and it doesn't generally break from compressive stress, only torsional stress and impact), it should last longer and need less maintenance. And since you also get power out of it, displace plow crews, etc, they make the argument that it'll be a better investment if they can make the panels for $10k or less each.
Given that the one-off prototype is to cost $100k, and they have the potential for a *huge* amount of mass production, I don't think it's all that unrealistic. I'd still like to see how they handle in the real world, of course, but hey, that's why you give funding to build prototypes. ;)
Yeah, I don't see that happening.
And why not? Sun = 1000W/m^2, decreased by angles, obstructions, night, etc. Let's say 8kWh/day/m^2 on a clear stretch of road. That's 6.88Mcal/day/m^2. Latent heat for melting ice is 80 cal/g and temperature raising is 1cal/g/C, so 10C temperature rise and melting is 76.4kg snow per day at 100% efficiency. Snow is about 100kg/m^3, so that's .764m^3 per m^2 per day, or 2 1/2 feet per day.
Now, obviously, efficiency isn't 100%. Solar cell efficiency is about 15% in this application. However, the "waste heat" isn't exactly waste; it's heating up the road. Now, it radiates away instead of being stored, but what's there is useful. Anyone who lives in a northern clime can tell you how the first snow after a warm period tends not to stick well. And even the 15% solar efficiency -- call it 12% after grid and storage losses -- times 2 1/2 feet is 4 inches of snow per day, or 27 feet of snow per winter.
What, you think nobody bothered to check the numbers before issuing the grant?
Can we stop acting like the cars are driving directly on top of the solar cells? They're not. They're driving on glass, treated for greater impact resistance and a textured surface. The question should be, how well does treated glass withstand winter damage?
Ummm... what? You do realize that the snow falls *on top* of the dark-colored asphalt, right? And that snow isn't transparent. You know that, right?
Snow reflects 90% of the light that hits it. It's an insulator, too.
Right. Build a grid the size of Connecticut to get 50 pounds of hydrogen -- not enough to get a model rocket off the lunar surface.
It scales. The Moon is a lot bigger than Connecticut.
It absolutely does not scale. Even if it was just sparsely scattered wires and towers, that would way more than the hydrogen it could harvest in a hundred thousand years.
Perfect correction? I'm just interested in capturing positively charged ions (most of the solar wind is ions as I understand it). As long as the grid is electrically neutral at a distance, it will work on anything positively charged. There's no need to "tune" it to a particular energy.
Wrong. Picture rolling an iron ball past a magnet at a hundred miles an hour. Now picturing rolling an iron ball past the same magnet at 1 mile an hour. Do you really think the balls will get deflected by the same amount? Solar wind isn't a single energy level; it's a broad range. Your idea is to try and concentrate solar wind into smaller collectors via an electrostatic grid. That would only work if the particles were uniform energy, which they're not.
Boy, I'm tempted to toss in a hypocritical "cite?" remark here. But you seem pretty knowledgeable on the solar wind. You can find out for yourself whether you are right or wrong. I bet you're wrong here.
It's very, very simple. Craters and crevices have no significant electrostatic charge, so they're not going to be bending ion paths. The only thing they can do is shield, which means, if anything, *less* hydrogen.
Right. Build a grid the size of Connecticut to get 50 pounds of hydrogen -- not enough to get a model rocket off the lunar surface. FYI, your suggestion wouldn't work because solar wind isn't unform energy. The perfect correction for one energy particle would just scatter a particle of different energy.
No, craters and crevices will not increase solar wind density.
It's just a stupid idea.
Like this? :)
Mal: "Now we're favored guests, treated to the finest in beverages that make you blind."
2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt
There's 40 sources about the details of the coup. As for your resignation letter, I love how you linked to the image instead of the page that covers it, where it is headlined Purported President Chavez resignation letter, and includes the description, "regardless of its veracity". And read the letter's talk page -- nobody there believes its veracity. For example:
"If I see correctly (resolution is too low) the letter is dated as April 13th, not April 11th. If Chávez renounced (Which I think he did) he did it the 11th, not the 13th, when he was almost certain to return. I oppose to Chávez, but I think this is a hoax. "
And, FYI, I don't type with my mouth. I think you'll find that you get a better words-per-minute rate if you use your fingers, as I do.
Winemaking: Watermelon Wines.
New Orleans is not banning any violent videogames so there's no reason to mention any other city in the list, it's irrelevant, and the violence in Caracas has increased dramatically in the last 10 years of government, that's a fact that you can't hide, one of the highest murder rates in the world when it doesn't even have wars, even Colombia with terrorists groups has less murder rates, that sure tells you something....
New Orleans doesn't "even have wars" either, and their murder rate is essentially the same as Caracas's. Is New Orleans' murder rate Chavez's fault as well?
As for your comments about Chavez ordering the (oft violent -- but you'll never admit to that, despite video evidence) opposition marches tear gassed, well, gee, that never happens here, now does it? And give it a rest about the radio and TV stations, which were owned by the very people who organized a coup against him and constantly try to promote his overthrow. The people you're supporting sponsored the overthrow of a democratically elected government. When they took power, their very first act was to dissolve the judiciary. When Chavez regained power, what did he do? Practically nothing -- they got house arrest. Freaking *house arrest* for *overthrowing the government*. Do you know what we'd do here in the US to those who overthrew our government? We'd bomb their hometowns flat. This is your hardened dictator, because he shuts down their mouthpieces? Give me a freaking break.
Wow, a government accused of (and denying) providing aid insurgents within its enemies' borders!
Thank God we'd never do anything like that...
The ridiculous part about that line is that Venezuela spends significantly less on defense spending than Colombia, it's oft-foe. And the "peaceful marches" involved a freaking coup.
Meh, I saw that in Costa Rica, which is by all standards one of the safer, more stable Central American nations. You see some nice mall that by all standards could equally well blend in in Iowa, except for the guy out front with the military-style assault rifle.
The country that has bought Sukhois, tanks and 100,000 AK-103's, is planning to build a manufacturing plant of Russian rifles, and oppresses peaceful marches
Venezuela's defense spending is just over $2B/year. Their oft-foe, Colombia, spends about $6B/year. And the US spends over $400B/year.
And, FYI, your "peaceful marches" involved a freaking coup.
Just today the AFP released a report showing Caracas as the second most violent city on the planet -- even more violent than Baghdad.
Didn't bother to mention that New Orleans came in right after Caracas, with only one less murder per 100,000 people, did you? Or that Caracas's murder rate fell dramatically since their last survey. Skew much?
Love the sig. But in case you didn't notice when this collapse happened...
Amazing powers Obama has, to retroactively cause banks to issue bad loans and buy toxic assets for years on end.