Triple my bodymass in grams of protein is 726.75 grams of protein.
Sorry. 2.5x the "high protein" diet.
Back to your enumerated points (I'm focusing on your ridiculously-off-the-charts-high-protein/low carb/low fat diet)
Do you have Inuit genetics? Whoops. Do you eat large amounts of seal blubber and other fats like the Inuit? Whoops. Do you eat the mere ~100 grams of protein and ~200 grams of carbohydrate that the Inuit eat per day? Whoops. Do you have Maasai genetics? Whoops. Do you eat the very high-fat diet of the Maasai -- so high fat that a common treat for kids is fat boiled in water? Whoops. Do you have Bantu genetics? Whoops. "Northern" and "Southern" indians are not technical terms. Whoops. Did you mean to refer to a particular study or were you pulling that out of a hat? Do you have any native american genetics from any group? Whoops. Are you of the mistaken notion that people of different genetic makeups process foods the same? Big whoops. (ever heard of "lactose intolerance"? "Lactose tolerance" is an evolutionary adaptation developed in cultures whose diet included dairy. Cultures adapt to their native diets) Have there been aridiculouslylargenumberofstudiesonthenegativeeffectsofsaturated fats? Whoops.
My average training week includes 30mins of weight lifting upon waking, 1hour of training for lunch, and 1 hour of weights/football/throwing everyday for 4 weeks.
That's it? You eat 600 grams of protein per day and that's all you do? For God's sake!
Look, you're free to destroy your body against the recommendations of all major medical organizations who've commented on high protein diets (and by "high protein", they're typically talking about 1g/lb, not 2.5g/lb). But don't try and pretend that it's somehow natural or good for you.
Really, though, what we're looking at is one of the things that drives me crazy about a lot of environmental "trends" and congress's role in pushing them. And don't get me wrong; I say this as a hardcore green with CFLs in every socket who is on the waiting list for an electric car.
Most of these new biomass-to-ethanol plants work based on syngas. That is, partial oxidation of carbon-and-hydrogen-bearing matter into a mixture of CO and H2. They then either, through an wasteful catalytic process or an even more wasteful biological process, convert the syngas into ethanol. Great. Except that we've been converting syngas to gasoline, in a rather simple and fairly efficient process, for the past century. The main syngas source was coal. This Fischer-Tropsch process powered a large portion of Nazi Germany's war machine (until their plants were bombed flat). It powered South Africa during the Apartheid regime.
Let's state this again: they typically are using *more energy* to create *less output* of a product with *less energy density* that *can't be transported in normal pipelines* and can only be used in *small amounts* in cars unless they're *specially modified*, rather than, more efficiently, just creating gasoline. Why? Because gasoline is a dirty word. Because there aren't the same sort of subsidies for "cellulosic gasoline" as there are for cellulosic ethanol. Because cellulosic gasoline won't win you green cred, or get the investors lining up. So the inferior solution gets chosen.
You're eating *three times* more protein than these *high protein* studies. *Three times* more than the standard for bodybuilders. *Ten times* more than the RDA for the average individual. Believe what you want, but this is neither natural nor healthy. You might as well just use steroids and get it over with.
I don't want to have to repeat the calculations yet again, but synthetics are *way* more environmentally friendly than leather. Leather manufacture is a horribly dirty process at every stage. The animals consume a tremendous amount of agricultural output (which wastes all of the energy that went into it), and then the leather is treated in process after process full of nasty chemicals of all kinds. Versus synthetics which retain something like 80% of their initial energy in the final output. It's not even close.
Doh! I'm not quite sure how that happened, as the post where I looked up the metacognition article for came afterwards... but either way, here's the article I meant to link: Rethinking the Meat Guzzler.
Personally, I cube it fairly small and stir fry it. Never tried it in anything else, but we eat a lot of stir fry here. Stir frying also gives me a chance to experiment with different oils -- peanut oil, sesame oil, hemp oil, etc.
LiPo batteries have a far higher power to weight ratio. that's why.
No, they have worse power density. They have better *energy* density.:) But that's not as big of a deal as all of the other factors in automotive apps.
anyways, the test electric bike we built with those batteries went 50 miles at 35mph and weighed only 15 pounds more than a standard bike. It rocked, and when you kicked in the batteries only on hills you could go for a really long distance.
Yeah, but have you seen what bikes like the Killacycle could do?:) Also, LiPo will only last you a couple years before you need a replacement.
And he is right, if they use LiPo batteries, it will cost $190,000 easily espically generating the KW they are doing on that car.
Actually, the more range you want, the easier it is to get higher kW. High power is harder to achieve in short range vehicles. But either way, if power is your limitation, you *definitely* want something like phosphates or titanates.
I personally consume over 600grams of protein per day
Are you trying to destroy your kidneys, or is this just a side effect of some other goal? That's an obscene amount of protein, even for bodybuilding. Whatever happened to "1 gram per pound"? If you're eating that much protein, you're getting your calories from protein. Which means huge levels of amino acids to be broken down. Amine groups contain nitrogen, which must be excreted as urea. This is hard on your kidneys. ~200g is shown to only be damaging to your kidneys if there are preexisting problems, but that's three times that already "high" number. You probably have ketoacidosis, too. With that mostly coming from meat, I can't imagine your cholesterol and saturated fat intake.
So, now, tell me how, without resorting to a highly processed food powder, do I get that much protein without going over 70 grams of carbs per day?
Off the top of my head, gluten would do it. Most pollens would as well. But again, are you trying to destroy your kidneys? Or, for that matter, your bones? Your blood vessels and heart? Trying to get colon cancer, perhaps? That is simply not healthy.
I feel empathy towards them; but I have no basis for feeling the same sort of empathy towards an animal other than my own incapacity to imagine different sorts of beings
Even when studies show them as having the same reasoning ability as children? Pigs, for example, are tough to train because of metacognition. An example that comes to mind off the top of my head is a person who was training their pig to drop a ball in a "hoop" (a ring of plastic on the ground). The pig learned it, and was getting rewarded, but got tired of having to push the ball around, and instead began to pick up the hoop and put it over the ball. I.e., it wasn't just repeating the task; it understood the goal, the "win condition", and decided to replicate it in a way that it found easier rather than the way it was tought to.
Now, that said, not all animal intelligence is equal. I think it's pretty indisputable that pigs, for example, are far smarter than chickens. And I've never seen any evidence that, say, clams have more than a shred of "intelligence" to them. But "ability to communicate with humans" seems a pretty poor measure of intelligence irregardless.
I should try getting some other company to write and maintain a game of my design for me at their expense, with the excuse that they can advertise themselves in it. I bet that'll work so well!
Awh, man, I'm so sorry to have to be the one to break this news to you, but mortality rate is "a measure of the number of deaths (in general, or due to a specific cause) in some population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit time. Mortality rate is typically expressed in units of deaths per 1000 individuals per year; thus, a mortality rate of 9.5 in a population of 100,000 would mean 950 deaths per year in that entire population."
I know a lot of fat vegans. I don't know how they do it
Silly person, picturing that vegans and vegetarians must just eat a lot of greens or whatnot:) If you don't get enough calories, you don't feel sated, so you eat whatever makes you feel full. Which means enough calories. Which means things that have calories -- carbs, proteins** and fats. That's not just hummus and pitas -- it's pasta, lentils, stir fry, rice, beans, couscous, breads, potatoes, cereals, and on and on and on. I had a bowl of trail nut crunch cereal for breakfast this morning. Last night, I had a red bean jambalaya with bread for dinner. For lunch, I think I had some sort of pasta dish. I eat things like potatoes wedges with carrots and onions covered in olive oil, paprika, garlic, salt and pepper, all roasted until they crisp on the outside; spanish rice burritoes, with black beans, olives, chili powder, lemon juice, salt, pepper, garlic, onion, and whatever else I feel like throwing in; and on, and on, and on. I could recite recipies all day. I'm a vegetarian, not a vegan, but just my list of vegan dishes is quite extensive. And never, after eating them, will you still feel hungry or not have gotten enough calories.
** It's a big surprise to a lot of people that the most protein-rich foods are vegetarian, as most people associate "protein" with "meat". Look up the protein stats on, for example, tempeh or gluten. I could give you a big long list of a couple dozen common vegan foods that contain more protein per unit mass than the most protein-rich meats.
Look, even as a vegetarian, I have a lot of big problems with PETA, but that's just ridiculous. You're not destroying a thinking being or causing incredible environmental damage (like eating meat does -- the scale is truly staggering. See my later post for details). Do you think PETA feels that if you surgically remove someone's injured spleen, you're committing some tragedy because you're "killing living animal cells"? Give me a break.
Kudos to PETA for offering this prize. It's one of the first reasonable things I've ever seen to come out of that organization. I might not even have gone vegetarian had this existed at the time; I would have just switched. Not sure I'd eat vat meat now, as I've grown accustomed to a vegetarian diet and see no reason to switch back, mind you.
If they are at all awake they will either realize that the whole world is designed around the idea of one thing eating another.
1) Simply untrue. By your logic, autotrophs don't exist. Unless you call absorbing light, hydrogen sulfide, methane, or whatnot "one thing eating another". 2) Moral equivalency. You are declaring eating any form of life as equivalent to any other. The ~99%** of people who find the concept of raising humans for meat abhorrent would disagree with you.
** -- I did specify 99% because on occasion, I have found people who find nothing wrong with this. Thankfully, they're rare.
Let's focus a little more on #2. What is so abhorrent about eating other humans to most people? Usually, it's some variant on the destruction of the self. Call it a soul, call it a conscience, self-awareness, whatever you will. Raising a sentient being and deliberately killing them for their meat when you don't need to is generally seen as abhorrent.
So, what's sentience? One ancient standard is the ability to reflect on one's own thoughts. Well, that standard certainly doesn't hold up as an argument against eating meat now that we know that even rats do that. So what's the cutoff point? Problem solving or reasoning ability? Chimps, depending on the task, often have the reasoning ability of a 4-6 year old. Parrots, 2-6 year old, depending on the task. Pigs, same general range. None of them have anywhere near the sort of *communication* skill that humans have, but communication is hardly a reason not to eat something, now isn't it?
From my perspective, the simpler the mind, the less of a moral issue there is. Sure, even plants have at least some forms of stimulus response; every cell in existence does. But none of it approaches the complexity in external stimulus-processing as a neural net. A change in light may cause guard cells to open or close a stoma, but you're just looking at a predictable biochemical cascade. That stoma will never, for example, "learn" not to keep opening and closing if you shine a flashlight on and off at it. It is this spark of intelligence in animals, particularly higher animals, that I find tragic to snuff out needlessly.
In a choice between the life of a pig and a human, which do I side with? The human, undeniably, indisputably, every last time. I don't fault in the least, for example, innuit cultures that traditionally survived on sealing; what choice, exactly, do they have? But in this world, I have all of the choices under the sun. I can choose to eat whatever the heck I want. Having that choice, I eat a vegetarian diet.
Of course, I know very well that not everyone will agree with me on this. But that's hardly the only reason. Most people have no clue how extreme of an impact eating meat has on the environment. A staggering, mind-boggling big impact. 1/3 of the world's non-ice-covered land is dedicated, directly or indirectly, to growing meat. Despite programs to abate it, we're losing 1,250 square miles of rainforest in Brazil per month to cattle land. Meat growing releases more greenhouse gasses than transportation (and no, we're not just talking about methane from ruminants; the energy aspect is the big portion, since it takes many pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat), plus huge amounts of water pollution (3/4 of the water pollution in the US, for example), as well as breeding antibiotic resistance.
The problem is, there hasn't really been a "successful" in modern times (historically, you could argue that the Detroit Electric was, back before gasoline cars got a stranglehold.) They've all either been way underperforming (by design, usually), such as lead-acid powered NEVs, or they've been way too expensive (and sometimes subsidized, such as the vehicles created as a result of the CARB mandate in the '90s -- the EV1, the RAV4EV, etc).
Thankfully, the combination of interest in EVs and advancing tech seems ready to remedy this. I'm on the waiting list for an Aptera. 120 miles@55mph, 0-60 in 10 sec, top speed of 85mph, $27k. 10kWh battery pack means quick to charge and low cost of replacement, which -- since they're using lithium phosphate batteries should be very rare, if ever, over the course of the car's lifespan. Only 80Wh/mi, so power for it is almost free. In my situation, I can show that switching to an Aptera will actually save me money overall -- something you can almost never claim about a new car. Let alone a neat-looking eco-friendly car.
Where *can* you drive 350 miles at 100mph without getting pulled over within the first ten minutes?
Anyways if those really are your needs, right now, your best choice is a PHEV like the Volt. I don't know how much a quid is or how much your power costs, but car-sized EVs are usually 200Wh/mi or less. So, for something like the Tesla, a kilowatt hour will take you about five miles.
Lithium polymer? Why? Lithium phosphates, titanates, spinels, etc are far, far superior for automotive applications. Yes, they're also currently expensive (although your estimate on the amount of batteries needed is way overboard), but their raw materials are cheap, so under mass production, they can be expected to be quite cheap.
As for the amount of batteries. Let's go with something like the Aptera at 200Wh/mi. Cars like the Aptera are only 80Wh/mi, but we'll go with 200. That's 70kWh. For the pack to cost 120k, you'd be having to pay $1.50/Wh. While you could possibly pay that much on titanates currently (Altair certainly has their problems), that's not a realistic price, and certainly not realistic for mass production.
90% of it's cost is in it's batteries.
That's an even more ridiculous claim. They use off the shelf laptop cells, which are, what, $0.15/Wh to $0.20/Wh? They have, what, 52kWh packs? That's ~$10k for the cells.
You mean, say, if he started injecting sentiment against increasing efficiency into his comic? On multiple occasions? Or do you mean it'd have to be a regular thing?
I'm confused. Since when is "scrape the sand out of your vagina" informative?
Pardon me. Apparently the fact that a widely read comic artist is using his comics to try and achieve the exact same thing that Exxon-Mobil and the coal industry are -- to cast doubt on the state of the science to discourage action on the subject -- is irrelevant to you.
They only escaped two seconds before the rocket blew up. It was a miracle that they survived. The crew was badly injured and wasn't able to fly so they couldn't complete their mission. Another launch escape occurred on 18a. They got a *21g acceleration*, recovered, hit the ground, and almost rolled off a cliff (which would have almost certainly been fatal, as the craft had already used its retrorockets). The mission commander was so badly injured that he was never able to fly again.
Soyuz is not the miraculously safe rocket that most people like to pretend it is.
When I first read the subject here, all I could think was, "at least they didn't roll off a cliff" (as a Soyuz once nearly did). And "at least they didn't break through a frozen lake and sink to the bottom" (as another Soyuz once did). There are some very serious hazards to using a nearly unguided reentry. If a craft isn't to have wings, at least give it a lifting body or parafoils or something so that it has *some* sort of guidance.
Because that was nanoparticles (~40 atoms each), not a solid material. Even if the electrical resistance within the particle was perfect, the resistance from one particle to the next could not be guaranteed.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, with the StreetDeck system in my Aptera, I can play the sound of a V8 if I want to hear it ;)
Triple my bodymass in grams of protein is 726.75 grams of protein.
Sorry. 2.5x the "high protein" diet.
Back to your enumerated points (I'm focusing on your ridiculously-off-the-charts-high-protein/low carb/low fat diet)
Do you have Inuit genetics? Whoops.
Do you eat large amounts of seal blubber and other fats like the Inuit? Whoops.
Do you eat the mere ~100 grams of protein and ~200 grams of carbohydrate that the Inuit eat per day? Whoops.
Do you have Maasai genetics? Whoops.
Do you eat the very high-fat diet of the Maasai -- so high fat that a common treat for kids is fat boiled in water? Whoops.
Do you have Bantu genetics? Whoops.
"Northern" and "Southern" indians are not technical terms. Whoops. Did you mean to refer to a particular study or were you pulling that out of a hat?
Do you have any native american genetics from any group? Whoops.
Are you of the mistaken notion that people of different genetic makeups process foods the same? Big whoops. (ever heard of "lactose intolerance"? "Lactose tolerance" is an evolutionary adaptation developed in cultures whose diet included dairy. Cultures adapt to their native diets)
Have there been a ridiculously large number of studies on the negative effects of saturated fats? Whoops.
My average training week includes 30mins of weight lifting upon waking, 1hour of training for lunch, and 1 hour of weights/football/throwing everyday for 4 weeks.
That's it? You eat 600 grams of protein per day and that's all you do? For God's sake!
Look, you're free to destroy your body against the recommendations of all major medical organizations who've commented on high protein diets (and by "high protein", they're typically talking about 1g/lb, not 2.5g/lb). But don't try and pretend that it's somehow natural or good for you.
Actually, it reminds me of thermal depolymerization. Anyone remember that?
Really, though, what we're looking at is one of the things that drives me crazy about a lot of environmental "trends" and congress's role in pushing them. And don't get me wrong; I say this as a hardcore green with CFLs in every socket who is on the waiting list for an electric car.
Most of these new biomass-to-ethanol plants work based on syngas. That is, partial oxidation of carbon-and-hydrogen-bearing matter into a mixture of CO and H2. They then either, through an wasteful catalytic process or an even more wasteful biological process, convert the syngas into ethanol. Great. Except that we've been converting syngas to gasoline, in a rather simple and fairly efficient process, for the past century. The main syngas source was coal. This Fischer-Tropsch process powered a large portion of Nazi Germany's war machine (until their plants were bombed flat). It powered South Africa during the Apartheid regime.
Let's state this again: they typically are using *more energy* to create *less output* of a product with *less energy density* that *can't be transported in normal pipelines* and can only be used in *small amounts* in cars unless they're *specially modified*, rather than, more efficiently, just creating gasoline. Why? Because gasoline is a dirty word. Because there aren't the same sort of subsidies for "cellulosic gasoline" as there are for cellulosic ethanol. Because cellulosic gasoline won't win you green cred, or get the investors lining up. So the inferior solution gets chosen.
You're eating *three times* more protein than these *high protein* studies. *Three times* more than the standard for bodybuilders. *Ten times* more than the RDA for the average individual. Believe what you want, but this is neither natural nor healthy. You might as well just use steroids and get it over with.
I don't want to have to repeat the calculations yet again, but synthetics are *way* more environmentally friendly than leather. Leather manufacture is a horribly dirty process at every stage. The animals consume a tremendous amount of agricultural output (which wastes all of the energy that went into it), and then the leather is treated in process after process full of nasty chemicals of all kinds. Versus synthetics which retain something like 80% of their initial energy in the final output. It's not even close.
Doh! I'm not quite sure how that happened, as the post where I looked up the metacognition article for came afterwards... but either way, here's the article I meant to link: Rethinking the Meat Guzzler.
Personally, I cube it fairly small and stir fry it. Never tried it in anything else, but we eat a lot of stir fry here. Stir frying also gives me a chance to experiment with different oils -- peanut oil, sesame oil, hemp oil, etc.
LiPo batteries have a far higher power to weight ratio. that's why.
:) But that's not as big of a deal as all of the other factors in automotive apps.
:) Also, LiPo will only last you a couple years before you need a replacement.
No, they have worse power density. They have better *energy* density.
anyways, the test electric bike we built with those batteries went 50 miles at 35mph and weighed only 15 pounds more than a standard bike. It rocked, and when you kicked in the batteries only on hills you could go for a really long distance.
Yeah, but have you seen what bikes like the Killacycle could do?
And he is right, if they use LiPo batteries, it will cost $190,000 easily espically generating the KW they are doing on that car.
Actually, the more range you want, the easier it is to get higher kW. High power is harder to achieve in short range vehicles. But either way, if power is your limitation, you *definitely* want something like phosphates or titanates.
I personally consume over 600grams of protein per day
Are you trying to destroy your kidneys, or is this just a side effect of some other goal? That's an obscene amount of protein, even for bodybuilding. Whatever happened to "1 gram per pound"? If you're eating that much protein, you're getting your calories from protein. Which means huge levels of amino acids to be broken down. Amine groups contain nitrogen, which must be excreted as urea. This is hard on your kidneys. ~200g is shown to only be damaging to your kidneys if there are preexisting problems, but that's three times that already "high" number. You probably have ketoacidosis, too. With that mostly coming from meat, I can't imagine your cholesterol and saturated fat intake.
So, now, tell me how, without resorting to a highly processed food powder, do I get that much protein without going over 70 grams of carbs per day?
Off the top of my head, gluten would do it. Most pollens would as well. But again, are you trying to destroy your kidneys? Or, for that matter, your bones? Your blood vessels and heart? Trying to get colon cancer, perhaps? That is simply not healthy.
I feel empathy towards them; but I have no basis for feeling the same sort of empathy towards an animal other than my own incapacity to imagine different sorts of beings
Even when studies show them as having the same reasoning ability as children? Pigs, for example, are tough to train because of metacognition. An example that comes to mind off the top of my head is a person who was training their pig to drop a ball in a "hoop" (a ring of plastic on the ground). The pig learned it, and was getting rewarded, but got tired of having to push the ball around, and instead began to pick up the hoop and put it over the ball. I.e., it wasn't just repeating the task; it understood the goal, the "win condition", and decided to replicate it in a way that it found easier rather than the way it was tought to.
Now, that said, not all animal intelligence is equal. I think it's pretty indisputable that pigs, for example, are far smarter than chickens. And I've never seen any evidence that, say, clams have more than a shred of "intelligence" to them. But "ability to communicate with humans" seems a pretty poor measure of intelligence irregardless.
I should try getting some other company to write and maintain a game of my design for me at their expense, with the excuse that they can advertise themselves in it. I bet that'll work so well!
Awh, man, I'm so sorry to have to be the one to break this news to you, but mortality rate is "a measure of the number of deaths (in general, or due to a specific cause) in some population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit time. Mortality rate is typically expressed in units of deaths per 1000 individuals per year; thus, a mortality rate of 9.5 in a population of 100,000 would mean 950 deaths per year in that entire population."
I know a lot of fat vegans. I don't know how they do it
:) If you don't get enough calories, you don't feel sated, so you eat whatever makes you feel full. Which means enough calories. Which means things that have calories -- carbs, proteins** and fats. That's not just hummus and pitas -- it's pasta, lentils, stir fry, rice, beans, couscous, breads, potatoes, cereals, and on and on and on. I had a bowl of trail nut crunch cereal for breakfast this morning. Last night, I had a red bean jambalaya with bread for dinner. For lunch, I think I had some sort of pasta dish. I eat things like potatoes wedges with carrots and onions covered in olive oil, paprika, garlic, salt and pepper, all roasted until they crisp on the outside; spanish rice burritoes, with black beans, olives, chili powder, lemon juice, salt, pepper, garlic, onion, and whatever else I feel like throwing in; and on, and on, and on. I could recite recipies all day. I'm a vegetarian, not a vegan, but just my list of vegan dishes is quite extensive. And never, after eating them, will you still feel hungry or not have gotten enough calories.
Silly person, picturing that vegans and vegetarians must just eat a lot of greens or whatnot
** It's a big surprise to a lot of people that the most protein-rich foods are vegetarian, as most people associate "protein" with "meat". Look up the protein stats on, for example, tempeh or gluten. I could give you a big long list of a couple dozen common vegan foods that contain more protein per unit mass than the most protein-rich meats.
Look, even as a vegetarian, I have a lot of big problems with PETA, but that's just ridiculous. You're not destroying a thinking being or causing incredible environmental damage (like eating meat does -- the scale is truly staggering. See my later post for details). Do you think PETA feels that if you surgically remove someone's injured spleen, you're committing some tragedy because you're "killing living animal cells"? Give me a break.
Kudos to PETA for offering this prize. It's one of the first reasonable things I've ever seen to come out of that organization. I might not even have gone vegetarian had this existed at the time; I would have just switched. Not sure I'd eat vat meat now, as I've grown accustomed to a vegetarian diet and see no reason to switch back, mind you.
Oy, where to start with this one?
If they are at all awake they will either realize that the whole world is designed around the idea of one thing eating another.
1) Simply untrue. By your logic, autotrophs don't exist. Unless you call absorbing light, hydrogen sulfide, methane, or whatnot "one thing eating another".
2) Moral equivalency. You are declaring eating any form of life as equivalent to any other. The ~99%** of people who find the concept of raising humans for meat abhorrent would disagree with you.
** -- I did specify 99% because on occasion, I have found people who find nothing wrong with this. Thankfully, they're rare.
Let's focus a little more on #2. What is so abhorrent about eating other humans to most people? Usually, it's some variant on the destruction of the self. Call it a soul, call it a conscience, self-awareness, whatever you will. Raising a sentient being and deliberately killing them for their meat when you don't need to is generally seen as abhorrent.
So, what's sentience? One ancient standard is the ability to reflect on one's own thoughts. Well, that standard certainly doesn't hold up as an argument against eating meat now that we know that even rats do that. So what's the cutoff point? Problem solving or reasoning ability? Chimps, depending on the task, often have the reasoning ability of a 4-6 year old. Parrots, 2-6 year old, depending on the task. Pigs, same general range. None of them have anywhere near the sort of *communication* skill that humans have, but communication is hardly a reason not to eat something, now isn't it?
From my perspective, the simpler the mind, the less of a moral issue there is. Sure, even plants have at least some forms of stimulus response; every cell in existence does. But none of it approaches the complexity in external stimulus-processing as a neural net. A change in light may cause guard cells to open or close a stoma, but you're just looking at a predictable biochemical cascade. That stoma will never, for example, "learn" not to keep opening and closing if you shine a flashlight on and off at it. It is this spark of intelligence in animals, particularly higher animals, that I find tragic to snuff out needlessly.
In a choice between the life of a pig and a human, which do I side with? The human, undeniably, indisputably, every last time. I don't fault in the least, for example, innuit cultures that traditionally survived on sealing; what choice, exactly, do they have? But in this world, I have all of the choices under the sun. I can choose to eat whatever the heck I want. Having that choice, I eat a vegetarian diet.
Of course, I know very well that not everyone will agree with me on this. But that's hardly the only reason. Most people have no clue how extreme of an impact eating meat has on the environment. A staggering, mind-boggling big impact. 1/3 of the world's non-ice-covered land is dedicated, directly or indirectly, to growing meat. Despite programs to abate it, we're losing 1,250 square miles of rainforest in Brazil per month to cattle land. Meat growing releases more greenhouse gasses than transportation (and no, we're not just talking about methane from ruminants; the energy aspect is the big portion, since it takes many pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat), plus huge amounts of water pollution (3/4 of the water pollution in the US, for example), as well as breeding antibiotic resistance.
The problem is, there hasn't really been a "successful" in modern times (historically, you could argue that the Detroit Electric was, back before gasoline cars got a stranglehold.) They've all either been way underperforming (by design, usually), such as lead-acid powered NEVs, or they've been way too expensive (and sometimes subsidized, such as the vehicles created as a result of the CARB mandate in the '90s -- the EV1, the RAV4EV, etc).
Thankfully, the combination of interest in EVs and advancing tech seems ready to remedy this. I'm on the waiting list for an Aptera. 120 miles@55mph, 0-60 in 10 sec, top speed of 85mph, $27k. 10kWh battery pack means quick to charge and low cost of replacement, which -- since they're using lithium phosphate batteries should be very rare, if ever, over the course of the car's lifespan. Only 80Wh/mi, so power for it is almost free. In my situation, I can show that switching to an Aptera will actually save me money overall -- something you can almost never claim about a new car. Let alone a neat-looking eco-friendly car.
Where *can* you drive 350 miles at 100mph without getting pulled over within the first ten minutes?
Anyways if those really are your needs, right now, your best choice is a PHEV like the Volt. I don't know how much a quid is or how much your power costs, but car-sized EVs are usually 200Wh/mi or less. So, for something like the Tesla, a kilowatt hour will take you about five miles.
Lithium polymer? Why? Lithium phosphates, titanates, spinels, etc are far, far superior for automotive applications. Yes, they're also currently expensive (although your estimate on the amount of batteries needed is way overboard), but their raw materials are cheap, so under mass production, they can be expected to be quite cheap.
As for the amount of batteries. Let's go with something like the Aptera at 200Wh/mi. Cars like the Aptera are only 80Wh/mi, but we'll go with 200. That's 70kWh. For the pack to cost 120k, you'd be having to pay $1.50/Wh. While you could possibly pay that much on titanates currently (Altair certainly has their problems), that's not a realistic price, and certainly not realistic for mass production.
90% of it's cost is in it's batteries.
That's an even more ridiculous claim. They use off the shelf laptop cells, which are, what, $0.15/Wh to $0.20/Wh? They have, what, 52kWh packs? That's ~$10k for the cells.
So... do you debate with *literal* brick walls, too? :)
My sympathy to you for having to respond to so many inane statements.
You mean, say, if he started injecting sentiment against increasing efficiency into his comic? On multiple occasions? Or do you mean it'd have to be a regular thing?
I'm confused. Since when is "scrape the sand out of your vagina" informative?
Pardon me. Apparently the fact that a widely read comic artist is using his comics to try and achieve the exact same thing that Exxon-Mobil and the coal industry are -- to cast doubt on the state of the science to discourage action on the subject -- is irrelevant to you.
They only escaped two seconds before the rocket blew up. It was a miracle that they survived. The crew was badly injured and wasn't able to fly so they couldn't complete their mission. Another launch escape occurred on 18a. They got a *21g acceleration*, recovered, hit the ground, and almost rolled off a cliff (which would have almost certainly been fatal, as the craft had already used its retrorockets). The mission commander was so badly injured that he was never able to fly again.
Soyuz is not the miraculously safe rocket that most people like to pretend it is.
When I first read the subject here, all I could think was, "at least they didn't roll off a cliff" (as a Soyuz once nearly did). And "at least they didn't break through a frozen lake and sink to the bottom" (as another Soyuz once did). There are some very serious hazards to using a nearly unguided reentry. If a craft isn't to have wings, at least give it a lifting body or parafoils or something so that it has *some* sort of guidance.
The global warming flap was the last straw for me.
Because that was nanoparticles (~40 atoms each), not a solid material. Even if the electrical resistance within the particle was perfect, the resistance from one particle to the next could not be guaranteed.
Familiar with the Josephson effect?