Edison and Tesla do a good job pointing to the difference between a "cut and try" design engineer, and a really good engineer who knows his theory. Edison got his stuff to work after many tries, often with sub-optimal solutions, and was quite the marketeer and salesman. Tesla quietly got the right solution, with math to back it up, and got screwed over thanks to his less effective self promotion.
Tesla nailed the guts of the 3 phase AC power grid pretty quickly. Edison's DC solution was lame and nuts at its face. Edison invented the electric chair to poison the well on AC for years, while Tesla had to give away his rights to Westinghouse to get the right answer adopted.
I see shades of this play out in engineering companies all the time, and the lesson I have learned is to always be doubly cautious whenever an engineer is a little too good at selling his idea and too confident in the promised results.
Did you expect that factories and ships all ran on pixie dust?! China is putting their money where their mouth is, but conversions take time.
China is building out there solar very rapidly, more than doubling their capacity each year for the last 5 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China). Oil and coal should be conserved for the things that solar and wind suck at, such as cargo ships. Predictable commutes of 30 miles are a travesty to waste gasoline on.
The missing revenue is small, under $100 per year (12k miles per year for a 30 mpg car is 400 gallons of gas at $0.18/gal of tax for a total of $72). As an EV owner I would be happy to pay my fare share. I do not want a GPS tracker in my car, and would prefer either a flat fee per year or to have my odometer checked every couple years. Hell I want my taxes raised to properly fund schools too, there is an excess of dumbasses in this country.
EV's that charge at work combined with solar is a great combo, but it would be nice to see some of the Smart Grid fantasies come to reality so that I could just set my car to be charged by 7 AM and 5 PM and it would smartly play nice with the grid to charge when the sun is shining, the wind was blowing, or the dams are full. We are still a ways from the point where solar will fill in the afternoon peak daytime hours and EV's more than plug the night time trough in base usage, but those days are likely closer than we think.
The 39" Seiki TV is a good shot across the bow of your argument. 60 Hz refresh in a proper monitor format is coming next year, but for now you can pick up the current TV version for $340 shipped from Amazon. I think the next 12 months will bring a big shift to 4k the way we went from CRT's to LCD's in an amazingly short window.
More than half the trouble is that new laws are being passed with little or no public knowledge that are undercutting our democratic system. The Patriot Act made so much of the stuff "legal" without nearly enough scrutiny. Our laws have become perverse, and their enforcement is equally perverse (bye-bye Eric Placeholder). So the 99% rule is being followed more than we would like to realize, thanks to the like of the FISA court. Somehow we need to get our laws to reflect the will of the People again, and not that of the puppet masters (some obvious, many less so).
"I like and believe very much that we should have to obtain a warrant from an independent judge to be able to take the contents"
A better opener might be to point to the cases where NSA, CIA, and FBI employees have been prosecuted for violating the constitutional REQUIREMENT (not just a "like") before whining about some of the gaping privacy gaps getting patched up. Oh, wait, there aren't violators being punished, just whistle blowers? Funny that.
Now please leave us alone as we attempt to regain some of our privacy from you damn peeping toms.
Payday loans are a scurge on the earth. If you have to resort to one you are already financially toast, and all they do is suck you into a final debt black hole that is nearly impossible to escape.
The need to install an ignition interrupter makes it clear that these loans should not have been made in the first place, and put htese loans into the same category as payday loans. The practice should not be legal, and these customers should simply not qualify for these vehicles in the first place.
There are plenty of ways to rant on the financial misery that is fairly common in our country. We have a weak safety net, basic home accounting/budgeting is either not taught or poorly taught, wages are stagnant, living and working in the USA without a car is a poor option in nearly all parts of the country, etc. These loans and associated practices are just one more symptom of a broad set of problems we have in this country.
"After all, just because you learned something growing up as a child doesn't mean it's true."
Or perhaps the sensationalist non-peer reviewed paper making wild claim about the nature of the universe will wilt under scrutiny?
I generally don't throw out everything I learned as a child the first time I hear a contradictory claim, I perk up my spidey sense and look for extra info pro/con and decide if it is time to adjust my mental model of the world around me. Often it turns out that wild claims are a load of bunk from crackpots (shocker!).
My favorite early formative experience like this from my teenage years was a guy at a cafe who, after overhearing my step-dad and me talking engineering, and posed a riddle about a piece of string wrapped around the earth, and if by adding some length (I forget now) while evenly raising its height above the ground, could a poodle walk under it? Turns out that simple analysis showed his answer was completely wrong and BS (he claimed it took miles, while it takes 2*pi*poodle). My take-away was to be skeptical of crack-pots making wild claims about the world, they are often either idiots or wrong (especially if they clearly have an anti-science agenda).
Yep. A much better argument would be to encourage people to have clear expectations for old age, and to make options to check out much easier. I would welcome the ability to choose my exit day while I still have the faculties to do so. The US's lousy options are deplorable. Old folks have few options in most states to pull their own plug when they determine the time is right.
In my Grandmother's case she knew it was time a few weeks before she died, but ended up in a lot of misery and humiliating circumstances for her final days due to a lack of legal options. Little has made me angrier at the religious set than listening to my grandmother beg God to let he die, and there being no legal avenue for any of her family to grant that wish thanks to those selfish bastards keeping euthanasia illegal.
Have you met a lot of scientists? Many of them are amazing at jargon and obfuscation, but suck at most everything else. Many of them are very narrow and deep, making their work as obscure as it is hard. So yes, the cutting edge of science is hard, but that is only a fraction of what science is all about.
A lot of everyday science is NOT hard, it is just training yourself to approach the world with curiosity and with critical thinking (asking why, and being open to new answers). Kids are perfect candidates, with lots of curiosity and few hardened preconceptions (schools fix both in short order). You can do a lot of science with the under 10 crowd, so how hard can it be? A lot of people simply have never been given a good framework as to how to be scientific about their lives, and the more they are told it is HARD, the more they reflexively avoid it.
A new Leaf battery will set you back $5500, not $15-45k. That price may drop further in the future.
Tesla's have bigger batteries and go through a lot stress per mile than a Leaf (less percentage discharge for the same number of miles driven), so they are likely to last several times longer than the ~100-150k miles you can expect out of a Leaf's battery.
New battery for the Leaf is $5500, and should be good for at least another 100-150k miles, more if you are in moderate climates. So the second 100k miles on a second battery will only cost you electricity of about $0.03 to $0.04 a mile, and about $0.06 a mile worth of battery cost. Still cheap.
You get about 4-5 miles per kWh. Even in California electricity is only ~18 cents a kWh, or about $0.04 of electricity per mile. Gas is about $4 a gallon, so a 30 mpg car is about $0.13 worth of gas per mile. In almost every state the ratio is about 3-4x cheaper for electric vs. gas. It is possible to put your car on a separate meter and get time of use billing on just the car so you can do a lot better than 18 cents per kWh if you use timers to charge in the way off peak hours.
I'd be happy to chip in my fair share of road tax. At 18 cents a gallon and about 10k miles a year driving, that works out to about $60 per year I ought to be paying towards road maintenance if you compare my Leaf to a 30 mpg econobox. Just don't try and stick a GPS tracker on my car like Oregon keeps thinking is a good idea. Make it part of my registration fees or something similarly simple.
Also depends on experience. There are getting to be a critical mass of folks who know someone with a Leaf or a Tesla, and for the most part these early adopters are pretty darn happy and are evangelizing effectively against the drone of skeptics and naysayers. It is not dissimilar to the wave of gay support that happened when a critical mass of folks were out of the closet. Almost everyone now knows at least one friend or family member who is openly gay, and it takes the wind out of the sails of the haters.
Agreed. Right now I have no good way to vote down the oodles of crap channels, or to really vote up my tastes. Worse yet, the price keeps going up faster than my paycheck inflation. So we dropped it and have no regrets. We watch less total TV, and pay vastly less to get the handful of shows we actually want. Sadly Hulu still has ads, and I am getting close to dropping it too.
I am fine with some bundling, but really want to some option to be able to defund ESPN, QVC, Christian Blab, "History" Channel, TLC, and similar. I would be fine if the model was a handful of ad funded "Free" stations if they wanted access to me (broadcast model), then say a few bucks each for each station I actually wanted with a minimum 1 month buy-in and some base service charge. Tons of stations would wither, others would flourish. Ideally I would be able to stream at will and be able to choose a higher ad-free price tier. All wishful thinking I am sure.
Part of my hope of seeing the likes of ESPN wither, is that it would lead to less funding of professional sports via reduced budget for buying broadcast right. Professional sport are a colossal waste of resource, IMO.
Or solar panels on houses plus a switch to mostly EV's.
An integrated system of EV's that charged at work during daylight, and could dump a little back into the grid as needed to load level is not out of reach technologically. It is sadly way out of reach politically.
I am curious as to how the license works. Is it for a specific revision of software, or does Google have free reign to make large changes to the software without re-testing?
It seems to me that as more of these vehicles hit the road, even in test mode, there should be tight control over how big of a change can be Beta tested on live streets without a re-qualification.
If you have to be at full driver attentiveness at all times, what the heck is the point? A self-driving car should let you take a nap, read a book, or otherwise tune out from the road. Having to be a secondary driver ready to jump in could be even more stressful than just driving by yourself. And what if you have gone for a few months without touching the controls, can you be reasonable expected to be a competent driver if you only drive for 10 minutes a handful of times a year, and under conditions that are atypical?
I am all for giving Google and other access to the real road for continued development under very strict supervision, but there is a chasm between that and what the headlines say about the capabilities of our new robot overlords. Google is pushing for cars without steering wheels long before the technology is close to ready. It is that apparent dissonance that really bugs me. Little things like rain or a snow flurry blinding the thing, or being unable to recognize a traffic cop are pretty major obstacles to overcome, but their marketing department does not appear to be too keen on waiting for those to be solved.
Way too many fad conclusions come and go in science, and especially with food. Eggs are bad, eggs are good, fat is bad, fat is good, carbs are good, carbs are bad, resveritol cures all, resveritol no better than placebo, Dr. Oz is a genius, Dr. Oz is a pocklining schill....
In the end it seems that if you wait about 10 years almost every headline on health gets contradicted, then thar contradiction gets at least qualified another 10 years after that.
Nothing so far has done better than simply trying to aim for eating plenty of real food with moderation on the highly processed stuff, and moderation on the calorie dense stuff.
The one thing about salt is that it does make stuff tasty, often the highly processed stuff, making it easy to overdo it. Avoiding salt sort of automatically helps one to cut out the heavily processed foods.
Yep, but so much more needs to be done to reign in EULA's. Having to agree to lousy binding mediation terms just to buy software or sign up for internet service is such a sham. Sadly we often end up having little real choice thanks to either no competition, or competition that employs the same tactics. There should not be 48 pages of EULA just to download and listen to a song.
Part of what drives scientists away is that all of these grant proposals are a huge time sink. It takes a very large percentage of time just to write enough proposals to keep funding coming in that actually doing the science becomes secondary.
Stop and think about what sort of scientists you get if the top priority is writing grant proposals and churning out incremental paper after incremental paper. On of my engineering profs fell into this category, it was year after year of publishing correlation "papers" between weather data and recorded satellite signal strength. He lacked in almost all forms of creativity, and was not an inspiration for students, but climbed up to department head on the back of all that publishing (and on the backs of a few perpetual grad students who actually did the work).
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Edison and Tesla do a good job pointing to the difference between a "cut and try" design engineer, and a really good engineer who knows his theory. Edison got his stuff to work after many tries, often with sub-optimal solutions, and was quite the marketeer and salesman. Tesla quietly got the right solution, with math to back it up, and got screwed over thanks to his less effective self promotion.
Tesla nailed the guts of the 3 phase AC power grid pretty quickly. Edison's DC solution was lame and nuts at its face. Edison invented the electric chair to poison the well on AC for years, while Tesla had to give away his rights to Westinghouse to get the right answer adopted.
I see shades of this play out in engineering companies all the time, and the lesson I have learned is to always be doubly cautious whenever an engineer is a little too good at selling his idea and too confident in the promised results.
Or they could adopt the new place names like Yosemite. Being a Washington state company they should do Windows Mount St. Helens.
Did you expect that factories and ships all ran on pixie dust?! China is putting their money where their mouth is, but conversions take time.
China is building out there solar very rapidly, more than doubling their capacity each year for the last 5 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China). Oil and coal should be conserved for the things that solar and wind suck at, such as cargo ships. Predictable commutes of 30 miles are a travesty to waste gasoline on.
The missing revenue is small, under $100 per year (12k miles per year for a 30 mpg car is 400 gallons of gas at $0.18/gal of tax for a total of $72). As an EV owner I would be happy to pay my fare share. I do not want a GPS tracker in my car, and would prefer either a flat fee per year or to have my odometer checked every couple years. Hell I want my taxes raised to properly fund schools too, there is an excess of dumbasses in this country.
EV's that charge at work combined with solar is a great combo, but it would be nice to see some of the Smart Grid fantasies come to reality so that I could just set my car to be charged by 7 AM and 5 PM and it would smartly play nice with the grid to charge when the sun is shining, the wind was blowing, or the dams are full. We are still a ways from the point where solar will fill in the afternoon peak daytime hours and EV's more than plug the night time trough in base usage, but those days are likely closer than we think.
The 39" Seiki TV is a good shot across the bow of your argument. 60 Hz refresh in a proper monitor format is coming next year, but for now you can pick up the current TV version for $340 shipped from Amazon. I think the next 12 months will bring a big shift to 4k the way we went from CRT's to LCD's in an amazingly short window.
More than half the trouble is that new laws are being passed with little or no public knowledge that are undercutting our democratic system. The Patriot Act made so much of the stuff "legal" without nearly enough scrutiny. Our laws have become perverse, and their enforcement is equally perverse (bye-bye Eric Placeholder). So the 99% rule is being followed more than we would like to realize, thanks to the like of the FISA court. Somehow we need to get our laws to reflect the will of the People again, and not that of the puppet masters (some obvious, many less so).
"I like and believe very much that we should have to obtain a warrant from an independent judge to be able to take the contents"
A better opener might be to point to the cases where NSA, CIA, and FBI employees have been prosecuted for violating the constitutional REQUIREMENT (not just a "like") before whining about some of the gaping privacy gaps getting patched up. Oh, wait, there aren't violators being punished, just whistle blowers? Funny that.
Now please leave us alone as we attempt to regain some of our privacy from you damn peeping toms.
Payday loans are a scurge on the earth. If you have to resort to one you are already financially toast, and all they do is suck you into a final debt black hole that is nearly impossible to escape.
The need to install an ignition interrupter makes it clear that these loans should not have been made in the first place, and put htese loans into the same category as payday loans. The practice should not be legal, and these customers should simply not qualify for these vehicles in the first place.
There are plenty of ways to rant on the financial misery that is fairly common in our country. We have a weak safety net, basic home accounting/budgeting is either not taught or poorly taught, wages are stagnant, living and working in the USA without a car is a poor option in nearly all parts of the country, etc. These loans and associated practices are just one more symptom of a broad set of problems we have in this country.
"After all, just because you learned something growing up as a child doesn't mean it's true."
Or perhaps the sensationalist non-peer reviewed paper making wild claim about the nature of the universe will wilt under scrutiny?
I generally don't throw out everything I learned as a child the first time I hear a contradictory claim, I perk up my spidey sense and look for extra info pro/con and decide if it is time to adjust my mental model of the world around me. Often it turns out that wild claims are a load of bunk from crackpots (shocker!).
My favorite early formative experience like this from my teenage years was a guy at a cafe who, after overhearing my step-dad and me talking engineering, and posed a riddle about a piece of string wrapped around the earth, and if by adding some length (I forget now) while evenly raising its height above the ground, could a poodle walk under it? Turns out that simple analysis showed his answer was completely wrong and BS (he claimed it took miles, while it takes 2*pi*poodle). My take-away was to be skeptical of crack-pots making wild claims about the world, they are often either idiots or wrong (especially if they clearly have an anti-science agenda).
Yep. A much better argument would be to encourage people to have clear expectations for old age, and to make options to check out much easier. I would welcome the ability to choose my exit day while I still have the faculties to do so. The US's lousy options are deplorable. Old folks have few options in most states to pull their own plug when they determine the time is right.
In my Grandmother's case she knew it was time a few weeks before she died, but ended up in a lot of misery and humiliating circumstances for her final days due to a lack of legal options. Little has made me angrier at the religious set than listening to my grandmother beg God to let he die, and there being no legal avenue for any of her family to grant that wish thanks to those selfish bastards keeping euthanasia illegal.
I mean really, this is a new low for story quality.
Have you met a lot of scientists? Many of them are amazing at jargon and obfuscation, but suck at most everything else. Many of them are very narrow and deep, making their work as obscure as it is hard. So yes, the cutting edge of science is hard, but that is only a fraction of what science is all about.
A lot of everyday science is NOT hard, it is just training yourself to approach the world with curiosity and with critical thinking (asking why, and being open to new answers). Kids are perfect candidates, with lots of curiosity and few hardened preconceptions (schools fix both in short order). You can do a lot of science with the under 10 crowd, so how hard can it be? A lot of people simply have never been given a good framework as to how to be scientific about their lives, and the more they are told it is HARD, the more they reflexively avoid it.
A new Leaf battery will set you back $5500, not $15-45k. That price may drop further in the future.
Tesla's have bigger batteries and go through a lot stress per mile than a Leaf (less percentage discharge for the same number of miles driven), so they are likely to last several times longer than the ~100-150k miles you can expect out of a Leaf's battery.
New battery for the Leaf is $5500, and should be good for at least another 100-150k miles, more if you are in moderate climates. So the second 100k miles on a second battery will only cost you electricity of about $0.03 to $0.04 a mile, and about $0.06 a mile worth of battery cost. Still cheap.
For a level 2 charger you need 240V and a 20-50 A capacity depending on the EVSE you choose. A fish tank timer just won't do.
You get about 4-5 miles per kWh. Even in California electricity is only ~18 cents a kWh, or about $0.04 of electricity per mile. Gas is about $4 a gallon, so a 30 mpg car is about $0.13 worth of gas per mile. In almost every state the ratio is about 3-4x cheaper for electric vs. gas. It is possible to put your car on a separate meter and get time of use billing on just the car so you can do a lot better than 18 cents per kWh if you use timers to charge in the way off peak hours.
I'd be happy to chip in my fair share of road tax. At 18 cents a gallon and about 10k miles a year driving, that works out to about $60 per year I ought to be paying towards road maintenance if you compare my Leaf to a 30 mpg econobox. Just don't try and stick a GPS tracker on my car like Oregon keeps thinking is a good idea. Make it part of my registration fees or something similarly simple.
Also depends on experience. There are getting to be a critical mass of folks who know someone with a Leaf or a Tesla, and for the most part these early adopters are pretty darn happy and are evangelizing effectively against the drone of skeptics and naysayers. It is not dissimilar to the wave of gay support that happened when a critical mass of folks were out of the closet. Almost everyone now knows at least one friend or family member who is openly gay, and it takes the wind out of the sails of the haters.
Agreed. Right now I have no good way to vote down the oodles of crap channels, or to really vote up my tastes. Worse yet, the price keeps going up faster than my paycheck inflation. So we dropped it and have no regrets. We watch less total TV, and pay vastly less to get the handful of shows we actually want. Sadly Hulu still has ads, and I am getting close to dropping it too.
I am fine with some bundling, but really want to some option to be able to defund ESPN, QVC, Christian Blab, "History" Channel, TLC, and similar. I would be fine if the model was a handful of ad funded "Free" stations if they wanted access to me (broadcast model), then say a few bucks each for each station I actually wanted with a minimum 1 month buy-in and some base service charge. Tons of stations would wither, others would flourish. Ideally I would be able to stream at will and be able to choose a higher ad-free price tier. All wishful thinking I am sure.
Part of my hope of seeing the likes of ESPN wither, is that it would lead to less funding of professional sports via reduced budget for buying broadcast right. Professional sport are a colossal waste of resource, IMO.
Or solar panels on houses plus a switch to mostly EV's.
An integrated system of EV's that charged at work during daylight, and could dump a little back into the grid as needed to load level is not out of reach technologically. It is sadly way out of reach politically.
I am curious as to how the license works. Is it for a specific revision of software, or does Google have free reign to make large changes to the software without re-testing?
It seems to me that as more of these vehicles hit the road, even in test mode, there should be tight control over how big of a change can be Beta tested on live streets without a re-qualification.
If you have to be at full driver attentiveness at all times, what the heck is the point? A self-driving car should let you take a nap, read a book, or otherwise tune out from the road. Having to be a secondary driver ready to jump in could be even more stressful than just driving by yourself. And what if you have gone for a few months without touching the controls, can you be reasonable expected to be a competent driver if you only drive for 10 minutes a handful of times a year, and under conditions that are atypical?
I am all for giving Google and other access to the real road for continued development under very strict supervision, but there is a chasm between that and what the headlines say about the capabilities of our new robot overlords. Google is pushing for cars without steering wheels long before the technology is close to ready. It is that apparent dissonance that really bugs me. Little things like rain or a snow flurry blinding the thing, or being unable to recognize a traffic cop are pretty major obstacles to overcome, but their marketing department does not appear to be too keen on waiting for those to be solved.
Way too many fad conclusions come and go in science, and especially with food. Eggs are bad, eggs are good, fat is bad, fat is good, carbs are good, carbs are bad, resveritol cures all, resveritol no better than placebo, Dr. Oz is a genius, Dr. Oz is a pocklining schill....
In the end it seems that if you wait about 10 years almost every headline on health gets contradicted, then thar contradiction gets at least qualified another 10 years after that.
Nothing so far has done better than simply trying to aim for eating plenty of real food with moderation on the highly processed stuff, and moderation on the calorie dense stuff.
The one thing about salt is that it does make stuff tasty, often the highly processed stuff, making it easy to overdo it. Avoiding salt sort of automatically helps one to cut out the heavily processed foods.
Yep, but so much more needs to be done to reign in EULA's. Having to agree to lousy binding mediation terms just to buy software or sign up for internet service is such a sham. Sadly we often end up having little real choice thanks to either no competition, or competition that employs the same tactics. There should not be 48 pages of EULA just to download and listen to a song.
Part of what drives scientists away is that all of these grant proposals are a huge time sink. It takes a very large percentage of time just to write enough proposals to keep funding coming in that actually doing the science becomes secondary.
Stop and think about what sort of scientists you get if the top priority is writing grant proposals and churning out incremental paper after incremental paper. On of my engineering profs fell into this category, it was year after year of publishing correlation "papers" between weather data and recorded satellite signal strength. He lacked in almost all forms of creativity, and was not an inspiration for students, but climbed up to department head on the back of all that publishing (and on the backs of a few perpetual grad students who actually did the work).