Of course hemp comes up! Hemp does everything! With it, you can make rope, clothes, food, furnature, computer chips, gold, planets, the One Ring, you name it, hemp can do it!
Q: I've heard hemp mills are awfully loud. A: They run as quiet as a cloud.
Q: What if, perchance, hemp plastics should bend? A: Not on your life, my stoner friend.
Q: What about us doped-up slobs? A: You'll be given cushy jobs!
Q: The ring came off my pudding can! A: Use a hemp one, my good man.
Q: Were you sent here by the devil? A: No, good sir, I'm on the level.
You see, America, hemp's your only choice. Put down your bongs and raise your voice!
That's because it was powered by lead-acid batteries. Nowadays, they'd be powered by things like A123 nanophosphate batteries, which you can get for a rather pricey but still affordable $2/Wh by breaking up Dewalt power tool battery packs. 3 times the energy density, almost twenty times the power density as lead-acid.
Not to mention the extra cost and effort barriers greatly limiting the number of participants. And, if the AI has to be *on* the bot itself, they're putting their expensive computing hardware at risk of destruction, adding even more cost.
I think these changes are great. My two biggest complaints were that they tried to "WWF" it, and that it all degenerated into "Wedge vs. wedge". Sounds like they're fixing both of those problems. An uneven ground surface should indeed deal well with the wedges, as well as encourage more unusual propulsion methods like walkers, snakes, floppers/hoppers, etc. I may well end up watching ESPN for the first time in my life;)
I remember, looking at the rules a while back, that they highly restrict things like that. No free-flying projectiles, no heat weapons, no electric weapons, no sticky traps, and so on. Combat must be physical.
It was an interesting show, although I hated how they tried to "WWF" it, and it did get a bit repetitive after a while. I think one interesting change they could do would be to ban wheels. That'd add a lot of creativity to the robot designs. A lot more snakes, walkers, perhaps even some "rollers" or "floppers".
tI is no more irrational to belive there is a god than it is to belive there isn't
Oh, you're right. It's not irrational to believe that you have an invisible friend in the sky who loves you very much, who sent his son, who was born to a virgin, and that by being dunked in magical water, and later symbolically drinking his blood and eating his flesh, you can get to enter a magical kingdom when you die. Surely that's just as logical as believing that the universe is exactly what science shows it to be.
By the way, if I believed that there was an invisible pink unicorn following me around, would you consider that rational, too? How crazy of belief systems do you declare rational? This is for my own personal amusement;)
While Pol Pot was an atheist, Stalin had a complex relationship with religion. His initial education was to be a priest. He later lost faith in God as a being but continued to have a religious, almost Deist outlook on life. Early in his regime, he continued Lenin's policy of persecuting churches, and did so as brutally as he persecuted everyone else that he targetted; however, during the depths of World War II, he inexplicably restored the Russian Orthodox Church and let it continue operating for the rest of his life, while still attacking minority religions.
Anyways, nowhere was it said that atheists are perfect. Dictatorial strongmen would exist with or without religion. What doesn't exist without religion is things like crusades, sharia, creationism, forced conversions, concepts of a "promised land" that must be conquered, a notion of god-granted racial superiority, religious-based anti-gay bigotry, the notion of divine reward for suicide bombings or abortion clinic bombings, and a whole host of other things. No, not all of the world's ills are caused by religion. The majority of them aren't. But many ills simply would not exist without fervent religious beliefs driving them. And the fact that we are somehow obligated to treat this particular set of delusions as legitimate while condemning others strikes me as more than a wee bit contrived.
Hey, argue against the dictionary all you want.:) Examples of usage from media outlets, just in the headlines alone, and ignoring other uses of the phrase and puns (such as "Home pool tables cue up lots of family fun"):
i) See above. Unless you have anything new to add to this discussion...
ii) If I was trying to be manipulative, I wouldn't have mentioned the terms "as a whole" and "than women". I figured the average reader could do basic math and would know that by doubling the 5% you could roughly get a women vs. men comparison. Perhaps I assumed too much.
Of course, let's not forget that Newton himself wasn't immune to kooky spiritual beliefs. He was a religious nut, believed himself one of the few chosen by God to interpret scripture, believed in the bible code, was a doomsdayist, believed in scrying, believed in alchemy, believed in the Philosopher's Stone, believed in the Elixir of Life, believed in a whole bunch of other magical alchemical products, and so on.
And who could forget when he raised an army in Zaibach to try and create a machine to redirect fates?
You think the previous poster was asking the jokes to form a line? As for eggcorns, you got it backwards. To cue means to "signal" or "sign". As in, "cue the director", or in this case, "cue the jokes". Not "make the jokes form a line".
tr.v. cued, cuing, cues 1. To give a cue to; signal or prompt. 2. To insert into the sequence of a performance: cued the lights for the monologue scene. 3. To position (an audio or video recording) in readiness for playing: cue up a record on the turntable.
A) The phrase is "cue up", not "queue up". B) While the Wired article wasn't focused on men vs. women, Slashdot naturally had to put that twist on it. I mean, what kind of scientist would be a woman? What a silly concept! (As though huge numbers of men don't believe in all sorts of kooky things. No, it's apparently only weak-minded women who fall for pop-culture nonsense.)
Yes, more women believe in astrology then men -- but not by a huge margin. Women are a mere 5% more likely than the population as a whole to believe in astrology. On the other hand, men are 9% more likely than women to believe in UFOs. And why stop at gender? There's a much stronger correlation between being a Democrat and believing in astrology (14%) than being a woman and believing in astrology. Should we have framed the question in terms of political parties? Was the goal to be insulting?
Lastly, while we're talking about pseudoscientific delusions designed to make people feel better, they give a free pass to people who believe silly things that are "religious beliefs". As a society, we always defer to that. But why? A delusion is a delusion. It's not as though religious beliefs are harmless or anything, judging from history -- quite the opposite, really. Why are we saying it's okay to believe as they do -- to think you have an imaginary friend in the sky who loves you very much, and when you die, you get magically transported to a happy place to live with him -- simply because there are so many of them in the US?
And yet, you see it all the time. For example, the article about the cook/tax dodger/inventor who came up with a perpetual motion machine which was posted on Slashdot a month or so ago. Or Pimentel's annual widely publicized reports on ethanol being energy negative, despite everyone else's studies coming up with numbers of about 30% positive. Or pretty much every article about anyone who challenges anything about global warming. It's always the plucky renegade scientist who discovered some brilliant notion that everyone in the scientific community had missed but the other scientists are too jealous/blinded by hubris in their ivory towers to see and accept what should be so obviously true to everyone else.
I actually find myself going back to "old media." Picking up a newpaper (or at least reading something with an editor online, like the NYT), listening to NPR, getting a subscription to Wired, buying CDs and box sets of old shows, and so on and so forth.
I don't know... I've actually grown fond of user-generated entertainment. Just last weekend, some friends got me to watch things like Kiwi! and Jesus Christ Supercop. User generated, low budget, and well worth it.
Wolfowitz, the lead architect of Bush's Iraq policy, would disagree with you....
So, your premise is that a neoconservative cabinet official's opinions about the impact of foreign policy is supposed to be the "gold standard" in reliability?
One of the *lead architects of the war* said that the reason we went to war had to do with oil wealth, and you *still* don't believe that we did? What on Earth will convince you -- Bush showing up at your house and signing an affadavit in front of a notary?
Okay, bad example. The point is, once you get into the game of complaining about oil's unaccounted negative externalities, you MUST substract off its positive externalities
And the positive externalities of burning oil for fuel are...? Sulfur dioxide? Carbon monoxide? Nitrous oxide? VOCs? Oil spills? Refinery fires? Strip-mined bitumen? What positive externalities are you thinking of here?
1) General gain in economic activity from the fact that we have such an energy-dense means.
Our dependence on oil is a *brake* on the world economy. Oil costs many times more than coal per joule. It's more expensive than even silicon-based solar in most of the world these days.
2) My brother getting to the hospital so quickly.
Compared to...? Ethanol fuelled vehicles? Biodiesel-fuelled vehicles? Electric vehicles? What are you picturing that is a slower alternative? All of the alternatives are just as fast.
The opportunity of millions of people to drive (i.e. feelling of freedom and all that crap). (And be careful, it's the OPTION to do this that is the externality; the utility of driving itself is internalized.)
And this is compared to...? Ethanol doesn't let people drive? Biodiesel doesn't let people drive? Electricity doesn't let people drive?
2) Taxes are not a "loss". It's not like the government collects tax money and then just throws it away. Those taxes pay for your roads. Want to drive without roads?
Okay, sure, the proper comparison basis would be "existing fuel taxes" vs. "road costs plust NET negative externalites". Fair enough.
But fuel taxes are levied at several levels and are more than enough to cover the roads.
Exactly: the money *isn't wasted*. It's *spent on the roads*.
The process for deciding what roads get built and maintained involves disgusting political maneuvering -- remember the bridge to nowhere?
And your alternative to a democratic process would be...? Strongman dictator gets to make all of the decisions as to what road gets built where? You get to decide for everyone?
To put it simply: If I drive a vehicle, am I somehow getting a "free ride" if my fuel taxes don't cover the cost of that near-useless bridge? Or the six trillion others that exist purely to get a politician's name on something?
Moreover, road costs are not the same as fuel costs. A subsidy for roads is a subsidy for *whatever* people use to drive on the roads. Road use should be taxed to pay for roads (see first journal entry); fuel should not be taxed to pay for roads, which muddies your point even further.
And since people are driving gas and diesel cars, gas and diesel are taxed. And the problem is...? And you're addressing externalities how...?
Even given all of the above, that externality pales in comparison to that of, say, woodburning, which no one proposes taxing.
-Military intervention is not a true cost of providing oil. (Even spun agreed with this.) It should not be counted as a subsidy if consumers don't pay a cost that shouldn't exist.
Wolfowitz, the lead architect of Bush's Iraq policy, would disagree with you. While the article originally misreported him as saying that the Iraq war "was about oil", what he actually said still had the same effect: we went to war with Iraq, and not with North Korea, because Iraq's oil wealth meant that we couldn't use economic leverage against him. We wouldn't have gone to war with them if they didn't have oil wealth to support themselves.
Why do you think we've been involved in so many major conflicts in the middle east, while we've ignored dictator after brutal dictator in Africa? Pure coincidence, I'm sure? Of course not. Securing our energy supplies is of *critical* natural interest. That doesn't mean owning them, or profitting off of them, or anything of that nature. It just means that the government is paranoid of a repeat of the 1970s oil embargo and will do whatever it takes to prevent any situation that could potentially lead to countries cutting off oil sales.
While pollution is a valid negative externality that is unpriced, it's magnitude (after substracting positive externalities like my brother not dying because of plastics) is almost certainly less than the taxes that already exist on oil, meaning consumers ALREADY feel that cost.
1) Plastics would still exist whether we burned oil as a fuel or not. In fact, they'd be cheaper, since we wouldn't have to be producing oil from more expensive sources to meet market demand. 2) Taxes are not a "loss". It's not like the government collects tax money and then just throws it away. Those taxes pay for your roads. Want to drive without roads?
Pollution externalities are very real and are *not* accounted for by oil prices.
The economically correct solution to such underpricing is to tag on a tax that captures the damage, *and then is applied to fixing the damage*. We should not be thinking in terms of "miles per gallon". The correct miles per gallon on a car is whatever the market produces once it sees the environmental cost in the price.
Which would be accomplished by taxing based on miles per gallon.
Not true. They have protected a number of fields (most notably in the eastern GOM and in ANWR), which certainly are the majority of known untapped deposits remaining in US territory/waters, but not *all* new discoveries. Plenty of little ones have come online, and there seems to be little attempt to stop the development of, for example, the deepwater supergiant Jack 2 field. Anyways, there's a heck of a lot more involved than oil fields in US territory, which are somewhat limited (ANWR represents about a year of our annual consumption, while the eastern gulf probably represents half a decade of consumption). The rest of the world is much more important in terms of oil development than the US, which is mostly tapped (but more on that later). Brazil, for example, just last year found *three* new deepwater supergiants (Jupiter, Tupi, and Sugar Loaf). Sugar Loaf may be the world's third largest oil field ever discovered. In 2003-2004, Iran found two new supergiants, one of which also may be the world's third largest (they'll have to fight it out;) ). Some places are likely huge oil-rich regions that have barely been explored at all due to potentially higher production costs, such as the west coast of Greenland, which has numerous active oil seeps and large amounts of bitumen from old oil seeps, plus a subsurface geology suggestive of massive traps. The arctic as a whole is little explored. And speaking of more expensive sources, bitumen is profitable at $30-$40/barrel, while coal liquefaction is profitable at a little more, and even the price point for shale extraction in the 1970s was less than $100/barrel (I'd be surprised if they couldn't do it for $50-60/barrel today). Venezuela's ultra heavy crude in the Orinoco belt, too, is a Saudi Arabia-scale source, just like Alberta's bitumen, and is easily profitable with prices less than half of what they are now. Our coal resources are essentially boundless on the century-scale. Just coal mineable at current market prices at current consumption rates is something like 200 years worth, just on known reserves alone. Yet, you don't have to actually mine coal to liquefy it; you just need to burn it with insufficient oxygen to create town gas (CO + H2), which can be done subsurface via gas injection, so whether it can be profitably mined or not is irrelevant. So long as you can burn it, you can produce it. Just in 2005, a single subsea coal deposit was found off the coast of Norway that contains over three times as much coal as the world's entire known reserves. By my calculation, that's 60 cubic miles of coal, enough that you could cover the entire state of Indiana 8 1/2 feet deep. And I didn't even cover CO2 injection for oil recovery, which is expected to add dozens to hundreds of billions of barrels to US reserves alone while at the same time doing carbon sequestration.
Supply isn't the problem. Even the price of producing what supply is out there isn't really the problem. The problems are existing infrastructure, domestic instability, the weak dollar, wars and threats of war, and the stocking of the strategic reserves. All of this is overwhelming our existing production capacity, and it takes 5-10 years to build new capacity.
They'll come in as fast as people can make money on them. In case you forgot, this is a market economy.;)
Oh, and the biggest factor for current high oil prices is the weak dollar. In 2003, the Euro was worth barely more than a dollar. Now it's worth over $1.50. The same sort of thing has happened around the world; the dollar is a weaker currency now than it was. Since oil is traded in dollars and since the US is only 1/5th of world consumption, this raises the price of oil. Oil would probably be something like $60-$70/barrel if the US dollar hadn't plummetted. Perhaps $50-$60/barrel if we weren't filling our strategic reserves right now, $40-50 if there weren't the threats of war in South America and Iran, and $30-40 if there wasn't domestic unrest in Iraq, Colombia, Nigeria, and other countries. Oil prices are affected by a whole lot more than just potentially produceable supply.
What gets me is the graph in the report. They show "renewables" climbing by only one percent. They neglect to mention, however, that most of that "renewables" section is hydroelectricity, which has fallen as a percent of our electricity as it is no longer seen as a very "green" option at all. Generation by non-hydro renewables have expanded by several orders of magnitude since the 1970s.
If I have a way to generate electricity cleanly and it costs $1/kWh, while coal is $0.08/kWh, almost nobody will adopt. If I double the cost effectiveness and it's $0.50/kWh, more will adopt, but still very, very few will. If I double it again and it's $0.25/kWh, still more will adopt, but it'll still be a small percent. If I double it again and it's $0.12/kWh, more will adopt, and you'll have a small dent in the market. If I double it again to $0.06/kWh, the market will be swept. If I double it again to $0.03/kWh, coal use for power generation will be consigned to the history books.
Rather than looking at the total share of our generation, they need to look at the growth rate of these alternative sources and how their cost effectiveness has changed. And it's been dramatic, with no signs of slowing. Wind costs a fraction of what it did in the 70s, while solar is an order of magnitude lower. Economies of scale and more advanced turbines may halve wind costs (wind already being competitive with coal in some places), while CIGS solar cells are on their way to providing yet *another* order of magnitude cost reduction, making solar cheaper than coal even in Alaska, let alone in the desert southwest. Then there's EGS (enhanced geothermal -- no need for a wet, near-surface heat source), solar thermal, wave, tidal, high altitude wind, and so on.
Let's look at the numbers. They report that the US has spent $57.5B on renewables, fossil, and nuclear in the past 30 years. Let's be kind and say that renewables got a whole third of that (I doubt it) -- $19B. We spend that in *two months* of the war in Iraq. The US consumes 1 billion tons of coal, ~7B barrels of oil, and 22 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Coal costs ~$70/ton, oil in the past year averaged something like $80/barrel, and naturl gas was ~$15/1000 cubic feet, so that means we annually spend about ($70B + $560B + $330B) around a trillion dollars on fossil energy. This doesn't count the externalities of fossil fuel usage -- environmental destruction, increased healthcare costs, increased use of the military, etc. Contrast this with half a billion to a billion dollars on renewables research annually. 3-4 orders magnitude less spending, and yet consumption of techs like solar are growing at almost 40% per year and seem almost certain to overtake the price point of coal in the next decade. How, exactly, is this a bad investment? And all of this ignores some of the idiotic things they've been spending money on, like corn ethanol and hydrogen fuel cells.
There are two main issues: dielectric constant and the permittivity. Voids in the capacitor are problematic for both, so, for one, eliminating voids is very important. Secondly, you need sufficient a dielectric constant to prevent voltage breakdown.
Perhaps the most interesting concept for high storage ultrapacitors out there right now is EEStor's barium titanate supercapacitors. Individual grains of barium titanate have an incredibly high permittivity of 18,500, but there are two problems. One is the aforementioned voids, which can lead to dielectric breakdown, charge leakage, and so on. The second is a nonlinear permittivity response to increasing voltage. Normally, capacitance increases relative to the voltage squared, but in high-K materials like barium titanate, the capacitance may only increase proportional to the voltage (not squared). EEStor has two patents for different ways of making their EESUs, and in both of them, the sintering process involves coated grains designed for the coating to fill in the voids and to provide nanoscale layering. I've run into some papers on the subject of layering of barium titanate with glass which suggest that the voltage linearity constant can be reduced to near zero in the process. I'm not familiar enough to know what the rammifications of this is, however.
EEStor has managed to convince Kleiner-Perkins, ZENN, and Lockheed that they're onto something. But a lot of people, with good reason, still want to see something more convincing before they'd be willing to believe that they've gotten over an order of magnitude improvement in capacitor energy density. If they can pull it off, it'll be a revolution.
If you're using automotive li-ions, that's not necessary; they have plenty of power on their own. If you're using cheap lead-acid, that's a great idea. Not only will it help you with "burstable" speed (peak draw), but there's another, less obvious advantage. Lead-acid batteries are notable for losing charge capacity the faster you draw current from them. By using an ultracapacitor to maintain a lower, steadier draw from the batteries, you'll give yourself longer range.
Excepting EEStor pulling off a real breakthrough with their barium titanate supercapacitors, you'll never have enough space in your car for it to be powered entirely by them. The energy density is too low. Also, they leak charge faster than batteries.
1) Li-ions have no memory effect. 2) Modern automotive li-ions are rated for a decade or two of service. 3) Modern automotive li-ions are non-explosive. Compare, for example, this A123 battery with a traditional li-ion. 4) Many modern automotive li-ions have very fast recharge times -- 5-15 minutes, depending on the type.
Don't get me wrong -- ultracapacitors are great. But until they can increase their energy density by an order of magnitude, they're only competing against the batteries in hybrids (and not plug-in hybrids, either).
Slashdot Mirror
Are you, perchance, part of the peak oil doom cult?
Of course hemp comes up! Hemp does everything! With it, you can make rope, clothes, food, furnature, computer chips, gold, planets, the One Ring, you name it, hemp can do it!
Q: I've heard hemp mills are awfully loud.
A: They run as quiet as a cloud.
Q: What if, perchance, hemp plastics should bend?
A: Not on your life, my stoner friend.
Q: What about us doped-up slobs?
A: You'll be given cushy jobs!
Q: The ring came off my pudding can!
A: Use a hemp one, my good man.
Q: Were you sent here by the devil?
A: No, good sir, I'm on the level.
You see, America, hemp's your only choice. Put down your bongs and raise your voice!
That's because it was powered by lead-acid batteries. Nowadays, they'd be powered by things like A123 nanophosphate batteries, which you can get for a rather pricey but still affordable $2/Wh by breaking up Dewalt power tool battery packs. 3 times the energy density, almost twenty times the power density as lead-acid.
Not to mention the extra cost and effort barriers greatly limiting the number of participants. And, if the AI has to be *on* the bot itself, they're putting their expensive computing hardware at risk of destruction, adding even more cost.
;)
I think these changes are great. My two biggest complaints were that they tried to "WWF" it, and that it all degenerated into "Wedge vs. wedge". Sounds like they're fixing both of those problems. An uneven ground surface should indeed deal well with the wedges, as well as encourage more unusual propulsion methods like walkers, snakes, floppers/hoppers, etc. I may well end up watching ESPN for the first time in my life
Because, as we know, the word "roughly" was redefined to mean "exactly" last week.
I remember, looking at the rules a while back, that they highly restrict things like that. No free-flying projectiles, no heat weapons, no electric weapons, no sticky traps, and so on. Combat must be physical.
It was an interesting show, although I hated how they tried to "WWF" it, and it did get a bit repetitive after a while. I think one interesting change they could do would be to ban wheels. That'd add a lot of creativity to the robot designs. A lot more snakes, walkers, perhaps even some "rollers" or "floppers".
tI is no more irrational to belive there is a god than it is to belive there isn't
;)
Oh, you're right. It's not irrational to believe that you have an invisible friend in the sky who loves you very much, who sent his son, who was born to a virgin, and that by being dunked in magical water, and later symbolically drinking his blood and eating his flesh, you can get to enter a magical kingdom when you die. Surely that's just as logical as believing that the universe is exactly what science shows it to be.
By the way, if I believed that there was an invisible pink unicorn following me around, would you consider that rational, too? How crazy of belief systems do you declare rational? This is for my own personal amusement
While Pol Pot was an atheist, Stalin had a complex relationship with religion. His initial education was to be a priest. He later lost faith in God as a being but continued to have a religious, almost Deist outlook on life. Early in his regime, he continued Lenin's policy of persecuting churches, and did so as brutally as he persecuted everyone else that he targetted; however, during the depths of World War II, he inexplicably restored the Russian Orthodox Church and let it continue operating for the rest of his life, while still attacking minority religions.
Anyways, nowhere was it said that atheists are perfect. Dictatorial strongmen would exist with or without religion. What doesn't exist without religion is things like crusades, sharia, creationism, forced conversions, concepts of a "promised land" that must be conquered, a notion of god-granted racial superiority, religious-based anti-gay bigotry, the notion of divine reward for suicide bombings or abortion clinic bombings, and a whole host of other things. No, not all of the world's ills are caused by religion. The majority of them aren't. But many ills simply would not exist without fervent religious beliefs driving them. And the fact that we are somehow obligated to treat this particular set of delusions as legitimate while condemning others strikes me as more than a wee bit contrived.
Hey, argue against the dictionary all you want. :) Examples of usage from media outlets, just in the headlines alone, and ignoring other uses of the phrase and puns (such as "Home pool tables cue up lots of family fun"):
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/19/business/ptpogue20.php ("Cue up the music, choose the rooms")
http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080212/LIFE/802120309/-1/LIFE03 ("Cue up your appetite")
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/13/business/video.php ("Bank internship? Time to cue up the video")
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1492913/20041021/handsome_boy_modeling_school.jhtml ("Handsome Boy Modeling School Cue Up LP #2")
http://blogs.chron.com/franblinebury/2008/02/yo_adrian_cue_up_the_rocky_the.html ("You, Adrian! Cue up the Rocky Theme!")
http://mediawiredaily.com/2007/01/cue-up-sound-of-cbs-cash-register-ka.html ("Cue up sound of CBS cash register!")
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117853509.html ("MTV arms cue up 'Unplugged' on Net")
Need me to keep going? Just because you haven't heard the phrase doesn't make it any less real, or any less in the dictionary.
i) See above. Unless you have anything new to add to this discussion...
ii) If I was trying to be manipulative, I wouldn't have mentioned the terms "as a whole" and "than women". I figured the average reader could do basic math and would know that by doubling the 5% you could roughly get a women vs. men comparison. Perhaps I assumed too much.
Of course, let's not forget that Newton himself wasn't immune to kooky spiritual beliefs. He was a religious nut, believed himself one of the few chosen by God to interpret scripture, believed in the bible code, was a doomsdayist, believed in scrying, believed in alchemy, believed in the Philosopher's Stone, believed in the Elixir of Life, believed in a whole bunch of other magical alchemical products, and so on.
And who could forget when he raised an army in Zaibach to try and create a machine to redirect fates?
You think the previous poster was asking the jokes to form a line? As for eggcorns, you got it backwards. To cue means to "signal" or "sign". As in, "cue the director", or in this case, "cue the jokes". Not "make the jokes form a line".
From dictionary.com, American Heritage Dictionary:
tr.v. cued, cuing, cues
1. To give a cue to; signal or prompt.
2. To insert into the sequence of a performance: cued the lights for the monologue scene.
3. To position (an audio or video recording) in readiness for playing: cue up a record on the turntable.
A) The phrase is "cue up", not "queue up".
B) While the Wired article wasn't focused on men vs. women, Slashdot naturally had to put that twist on it. I mean, what kind of scientist would be a woman? What a silly concept! (As though huge numbers of men don't believe in all sorts of kooky things. No, it's apparently only weak-minded women who fall for pop-culture nonsense.)
Yes, more women believe in astrology then men -- but not by a huge margin. Women are a mere 5% more likely than the population as a whole to believe in astrology. On the other hand, men are 9% more likely than women to believe in UFOs. And why stop at gender? There's a much stronger correlation between being a Democrat and believing in astrology (14%) than being a woman and believing in astrology. Should we have framed the question in terms of political parties? Was the goal to be insulting?
Lastly, while we're talking about pseudoscientific delusions designed to make people feel better, they give a free pass to people who believe silly things that are "religious beliefs". As a society, we always defer to that. But why? A delusion is a delusion. It's not as though religious beliefs are harmless or anything, judging from history -- quite the opposite, really. Why are we saying it's okay to believe as they do -- to think you have an imaginary friend in the sky who loves you very much, and when you die, you get magically transported to a happy place to live with him -- simply because there are so many of them in the US?
Yes, I dared mentioned the elephant in the room.
And yet, you see it all the time. For example, the article about the cook/tax dodger/inventor who came up with a perpetual motion machine which was posted on Slashdot a month or so ago. Or Pimentel's annual widely publicized reports on ethanol being energy negative, despite everyone else's studies coming up with numbers of about 30% positive. Or pretty much every article about anyone who challenges anything about global warming. It's always the plucky renegade scientist who discovered some brilliant notion that everyone in the scientific community had missed but the other scientists are too jealous/blinded by hubris in their ivory towers to see and accept what should be so obviously true to everyone else.
I actually find myself going back to "old media." Picking up a newpaper (or at least reading something with an editor online, like the NYT), listening to NPR, getting a subscription to Wired, buying CDs and box sets of old shows, and so on and so forth.
I don't know... I've actually grown fond of user-generated entertainment. Just last weekend, some friends got me to watch things like Kiwi! and Jesus Christ Supercop. User generated, low budget, and well worth it.
Wolfowitz, the lead architect of Bush's Iraq policy, would disagree with you. ...
So, your premise is that a neoconservative cabinet official's opinions about the impact of foreign policy is supposed to be the "gold standard" in reliability?
One of the *lead architects of the war* said that the reason we went to war had to do with oil wealth, and you *still* don't believe that we did? What on Earth will convince you -- Bush showing up at your house and signing an affadavit in front of a notary?
Okay, bad example. The point is, once you get into the game of complaining about oil's unaccounted negative externalities, you MUST substract off its positive externalities
And the positive externalities of burning oil for fuel are...? Sulfur dioxide? Carbon monoxide? Nitrous oxide? VOCs? Oil spills? Refinery fires? Strip-mined bitumen? What positive externalities are you thinking of here?
1) General gain in economic activity from the fact that we have such an energy-dense means.
Our dependence on oil is a *brake* on the world economy. Oil costs many times more than coal per joule. It's more expensive than even silicon-based solar in most of the world these days.
2) My brother getting to the hospital so quickly.
Compared to...? Ethanol fuelled vehicles? Biodiesel-fuelled vehicles? Electric vehicles? What are you picturing that is a slower alternative? All of the alternatives are just as fast.
The opportunity of millions of people to drive (i.e. feelling of freedom and all that crap). (And be careful, it's the OPTION to do this that is the externality; the utility of driving itself is internalized.)
And this is compared to...? Ethanol doesn't let people drive? Biodiesel doesn't let people drive? Electricity doesn't let people drive?
2) Taxes are not a "loss". It's not like the government collects tax money and then just throws it away. Those taxes pay for your roads. Want to drive without roads?
Okay, sure, the proper comparison basis would be "existing fuel taxes" vs. "road costs plust NET negative externalites". Fair enough.
But fuel taxes are levied at several levels and are more than enough to cover the roads.
Exactly: the money *isn't wasted*. It's *spent on the roads*.
The process for deciding what roads get built and maintained involves disgusting political maneuvering -- remember the bridge to nowhere?
And your alternative to a democratic process would be...? Strongman dictator gets to make all of the decisions as to what road gets built where? You get to decide for everyone?
To put it simply: If I drive a vehicle, am I somehow getting a "free ride" if my fuel taxes don't cover the cost of that near-useless bridge? Or the six trillion others that exist purely to get a politician's name on something?
Moreover, road costs are not the same as fuel costs. A subsidy for roads is a subsidy for *whatever* people use to drive on the roads. Road use should be taxed to pay for roads (see first journal entry); fuel should not be taxed to pay for roads, which muddies your point even further.
And since people are driving gas and diesel cars, gas and diesel are taxed. And the problem is...? And you're addressing externalities how...?
Even given all of the above, that externality pales in comparison to that of, say, woodburning, which no one proposes taxing.
Lol. Wood burning is responsible for about 3 percent of the total suspended particulates, 6 percent of the total carbon monoxide, and 51 percent of the highly carcinogenic polycyclic organic matter produced by all US sources (EPA, 1986)" Apart from polycyclic organic matter, it's a pretty insiginificant amount of total US air pollution, especially when you consider all of the other pollutants. Yes, woodburning is dirty. It's also comparatively rare, and mostly in sparsely popula
-Military intervention is not a true cost of providing oil. (Even spun agreed with this.) It should not be counted as a subsidy if consumers don't pay a cost that shouldn't exist.
Wolfowitz, the lead architect of Bush's Iraq policy, would disagree with you. While the article originally misreported him as saying that the Iraq war "was about oil", what he actually said still had the same effect: we went to war with Iraq, and not with North Korea, because Iraq's oil wealth meant that we couldn't use economic leverage against him. We wouldn't have gone to war with them if they didn't have oil wealth to support themselves.
Why do you think we've been involved in so many major conflicts in the middle east, while we've ignored dictator after brutal dictator in Africa? Pure coincidence, I'm sure? Of course not. Securing our energy supplies is of *critical* natural interest. That doesn't mean owning them, or profitting off of them, or anything of that nature. It just means that the government is paranoid of a repeat of the 1970s oil embargo and will do whatever it takes to prevent any situation that could potentially lead to countries cutting off oil sales.
While pollution is a valid negative externality that is unpriced, it's magnitude (after substracting positive externalities like my brother not dying because of plastics) is almost certainly less than the taxes that already exist on oil, meaning consumers ALREADY feel that cost.
1) Plastics would still exist whether we burned oil as a fuel or not. In fact, they'd be cheaper, since we wouldn't have to be producing oil from more expensive sources to meet market demand.
2) Taxes are not a "loss". It's not like the government collects tax money and then just throws it away. Those taxes pay for your roads. Want to drive without roads?
Pollution externalities are very real and are *not* accounted for by oil prices.
The economically correct solution to such underpricing is to tag on a tax that captures the damage, *and then is applied to fixing the damage*. We should not be thinking in terms of "miles per gallon". The correct miles per gallon on a car is whatever the market produces once it sees the environmental cost in the price.
Which would be accomplished by taxing based on miles per gallon.
Not true. They have protected a number of fields (most notably in the eastern GOM and in ANWR), which certainly are the majority of known untapped deposits remaining in US territory/waters, but not *all* new discoveries. Plenty of little ones have come online, and there seems to be little attempt to stop the development of, for example, the deepwater supergiant Jack 2 field. Anyways, there's a heck of a lot more involved than oil fields in US territory, which are somewhat limited (ANWR represents about a year of our annual consumption, while the eastern gulf probably represents half a decade of consumption). The rest of the world is much more important in terms of oil development than the US, which is mostly tapped (but more on that later). Brazil, for example, just last year found *three* new deepwater supergiants (Jupiter, Tupi, and Sugar Loaf). Sugar Loaf may be the world's third largest oil field ever discovered. In 2003-2004, Iran found two new supergiants, one of which also may be the world's third largest (they'll have to fight it out ;) ). Some places are likely huge oil-rich regions that have barely been explored at all due to potentially higher production costs, such as the west coast of Greenland, which has numerous active oil seeps and large amounts of bitumen from old oil seeps, plus a subsurface geology suggestive of massive traps. The arctic as a whole is little explored. And speaking of more expensive sources, bitumen is profitable at $30-$40/barrel, while coal liquefaction is profitable at a little more, and even the price point for shale extraction in the 1970s was less than $100/barrel (I'd be surprised if they couldn't do it for $50-60/barrel today). Venezuela's ultra heavy crude in the Orinoco belt, too, is a Saudi Arabia-scale source, just like Alberta's bitumen, and is easily profitable with prices less than half of what they are now. Our coal resources are essentially boundless on the century-scale. Just coal mineable at current market prices at current consumption rates is something like 200 years worth, just on known reserves alone. Yet, you don't have to actually mine coal to liquefy it; you just need to burn it with insufficient oxygen to create town gas (CO + H2), which can be done subsurface via gas injection, so whether it can be profitably mined or not is irrelevant. So long as you can burn it, you can produce it. Just in 2005, a single subsea coal deposit was found off the coast of Norway that contains over three times as much coal as the world's entire known reserves. By my calculation, that's 60 cubic miles of coal, enough that you could cover the entire state of Indiana 8 1/2 feet deep. And I didn't even cover CO2 injection for oil recovery, which is expected to add dozens to hundreds of billions of barrels to US reserves alone while at the same time doing carbon sequestration.
Supply isn't the problem. Even the price of producing what supply is out there isn't really the problem. The problems are existing infrastructure, domestic instability, the weak dollar, wars and threats of war, and the stocking of the strategic reserves. All of this is overwhelming our existing production capacity, and it takes 5-10 years to build new capacity.
They'll come in as fast as people can make money on them. In case you forgot, this is a market economy. ;)
Oh, and the biggest factor for current high oil prices is the weak dollar. In 2003, the Euro was worth barely more than a dollar. Now it's worth over $1.50. The same sort of thing has happened around the world; the dollar is a weaker currency now than it was. Since oil is traded in dollars and since the US is only 1/5th of world consumption, this raises the price of oil. Oil would probably be something like $60-$70/barrel if the US dollar hadn't plummetted. Perhaps $50-$60/barrel if we weren't filling our strategic reserves right now, $40-50 if there weren't the threats of war in South America and Iran, and $30-40 if there wasn't domestic unrest in Iraq, Colombia, Nigeria, and other countries. Oil prices are affected by a whole lot more than just potentially produceable supply.
What gets me is the graph in the report. They show "renewables" climbing by only one percent. They neglect to mention, however, that most of that "renewables" section is hydroelectricity, which has fallen as a percent of our electricity as it is no longer seen as a very "green" option at all. Generation by non-hydro renewables have expanded by several orders of magnitude since the 1970s.
If I have a way to generate electricity cleanly and it costs $1/kWh, while coal is $0.08/kWh, almost nobody will adopt.
If I double the cost effectiveness and it's $0.50/kWh, more will adopt, but still very, very few will.
If I double it again and it's $0.25/kWh, still more will adopt, but it'll still be a small percent.
If I double it again and it's $0.12/kWh, more will adopt, and you'll have a small dent in the market.
If I double it again to $0.06/kWh, the market will be swept.
If I double it again to $0.03/kWh, coal use for power generation will be consigned to the history books.
Rather than looking at the total share of our generation, they need to look at the growth rate of these alternative sources and how their cost effectiveness has changed. And it's been dramatic, with no signs of slowing. Wind costs a fraction of what it did in the 70s, while solar is an order of magnitude lower. Economies of scale and more advanced turbines may halve wind costs (wind already being competitive with coal in some places), while CIGS solar cells are on their way to providing yet *another* order of magnitude cost reduction, making solar cheaper than coal even in Alaska, let alone in the desert southwest. Then there's EGS (enhanced geothermal -- no need for a wet, near-surface heat source), solar thermal, wave, tidal, high altitude wind, and so on.
Let's look at the numbers. They report that the US has spent $57.5B on renewables, fossil, and nuclear in the past 30 years. Let's be kind and say that renewables got a whole third of that (I doubt it) -- $19B. We spend that in *two months* of the war in Iraq. The US consumes 1 billion tons of coal, ~7B barrels of oil, and 22 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Coal costs ~$70/ton, oil in the past year averaged something like $80/barrel, and naturl gas was ~$15/1000 cubic feet, so that means we annually spend about ($70B + $560B + $330B) around a trillion dollars on fossil energy. This doesn't count the externalities of fossil fuel usage -- environmental destruction, increased healthcare costs, increased use of the military, etc. Contrast this with half a billion to a billion dollars on renewables research annually. 3-4 orders magnitude less spending, and yet consumption of techs like solar are growing at almost 40% per year and seem almost certain to overtake the price point of coal in the next decade. How, exactly, is this a bad investment? And all of this ignores some of the idiotic things they've been spending money on, like corn ethanol and hydrogen fuel cells.
Depends on how long a strip that can transmit charge is.
Its easy to be an environmentalist, you don't have to think of the requirements to achieve whatever goals you might have. It just has to sound good.
And it's easy to insult environmentalists when you don't know what you're talking about. We already have tons of spare generating capacity for EVs and PHEVs -- everywhere except the pacific northwest. And even if we had to build more, as if electricity infrastructure was somehow more expensive to build and operate than oil infrastructure (it's far cheaper -- that's part of why a joule of electricity costs so much less than a joule of gasoline).
Why electric cars? Here's a primer.
There are two main issues: dielectric constant and the permittivity. Voids in the capacitor are problematic for both, so, for one, eliminating voids is very important. Secondly, you need sufficient a dielectric constant to prevent voltage breakdown.
Perhaps the most interesting concept for high storage ultrapacitors out there right now is EEStor's barium titanate supercapacitors. Individual grains of barium titanate have an incredibly high permittivity of 18,500, but there are two problems. One is the aforementioned voids, which can lead to dielectric breakdown, charge leakage, and so on. The second is a nonlinear permittivity response to increasing voltage. Normally, capacitance increases relative to the voltage squared, but in high-K materials like barium titanate, the capacitance may only increase proportional to the voltage (not squared). EEStor has two patents for different ways of making their EESUs, and in both of them, the sintering process involves coated grains designed for the coating to fill in the voids and to provide nanoscale layering. I've run into some papers on the subject of layering of barium titanate with glass which suggest that the voltage linearity constant can be reduced to near zero in the process. I'm not familiar enough to know what the rammifications of this is, however.
EEStor has managed to convince Kleiner-Perkins, ZENN, and Lockheed that they're onto something. But a lot of people, with good reason, still want to see something more convincing before they'd be willing to believe that they've gotten over an order of magnitude improvement in capacitor energy density. If they can pull it off, it'll be a revolution.
If.
If you're using automotive li-ions, that's not necessary; they have plenty of power on their own. If you're using cheap lead-acid, that's a great idea. Not only will it help you with "burstable" speed (peak draw), but there's another, less obvious advantage. Lead-acid batteries are notable for losing charge capacity the faster you draw current from them. By using an ultracapacitor to maintain a lower, steadier draw from the batteries, you'll give yourself longer range.
Excepting EEStor pulling off a real breakthrough with their barium titanate supercapacitors, you'll never have enough space in your car for it to be powered entirely by them. The energy density is too low. Also, they leak charge faster than batteries.
1) Li-ions have no memory effect.
2) Modern automotive li-ions are rated for a decade or two of service.
3) Modern automotive li-ions are non-explosive. Compare, for example, this A123 battery with a traditional li-ion.
4) Many modern automotive li-ions have very fast recharge times -- 5-15 minutes, depending on the type.
Don't get me wrong -- ultracapacitors are great. But until they can increase their energy density by an order of magnitude, they're only competing against the batteries in hybrids (and not plug-in hybrids, either).