I covered that possibility too by arguing why heating your house by burning stuff is more efficient than by dissipating electricity. So you'll still benefit from an energy-efficient power supply.
While GP is woefully incorrect and you're right to call him out on it, your explanation isn't right either. Heat pumps can in fact pump against a gradient, and are mostly used to pump heat from a cold to a hot place. Air-source heat pumps (ie. coupled to the outside air rather than a geothermal reservoir) are used in parts of the US to heat houses in the winter and cool them in the summer. They're also what makes a refrigerator work. A fridge pulls heat from a cold place (inside the fridge) to a warmer place (outside the fridge). The resulting decrease in entropy needs to be balanced by an equal of greater increase in entropy, which is accomplished by converting electricity to heat. Or, to avoid the thermodynamic jargon, you're pumping against a gradient, so you need to spend energy to do so. The heat produced at the back of your fridge is the sum of the heat that was pulled out of the interior of the fridge + the heat-equivalent of the electricity the fridge consumed. This is also what an A/C does. Now, if we turn the A/C inside-out, so that it pumps heat from outside to inside, then you have the kind of heat pump we use to heat our homes in the winter. The sum of the heat that was pulled from outside and the heat-equivalent of the electricity the device consumes is larger than the heat-equivalent of the electricity alone, thus the pump brings more heat into your home than a resistor using the same amount of electricity. GP suggested to generate electricity from this heat gradient, but the flaw in his thinking is that the heat pump as well as any electricity generation device he can come up with are bound by the Carnot efficiency, so you can never get more electricity out than you put in.
So they work well in heating a house as long as its not cold outside. Probably not so good in a real winter..
Theoretically spoken, they just need to pump against a larger gradient if it's really cold. They will still have a benefit, only less.
Now, practically spoken, there are these nasty little engineering considerations. A practical heat pump has to be built for cold climates, and the heat pump/AC combos that are popular in the warmer parts in the US aren't, and are actually capable of being slightly less efficient than a resistor if it's really really cold outside.
Negative, the burden of proof is on you. Physics says that there should be no periodicity in large meteor strikes on the time scales we're talking about. The available geological data seems to confirm this. Up to you to demonstrate statistically significant periodicity. And to publish it in Science.
If you don't even read the other guy's arguments, you're doomed to remain an ignorant kook (and waste everyone's time showcasing your ignorance). Did you even consider what he meant with "what you're missing is that this also applies to the coins"? I'll make one last try to make you see it. Who knows what side of the coin will end up? PHYSICS DOES! Who knows in what position the die will come to rest? PHYSICS DOES! Who knows which ball will be the next to fall out of the lottery machine? PHYSICS DOES! Who knows where the ball in the roulette will end up? PHYSICS DOES! Who knows where the slot machine will stop? PHYSICS DOES! Any process that isn't ruled by quantum effects is deterministic (and it is sometimes speculated that even quantum randomness is the result of underlying deterministic processes we haven't yet discovered). but you know what? IT DOES NOT MATTER! As long as the distribution of the outcomes can pass for random and WE can't predict them, they can be approached as random for practical purposes. There's no such thing as being overdue for a meteor strike because on the time scales we're talking about, the odds for a strike are not influenced by the time since the last strike. This much can be inferred from the very laws of physics you're invoking, so if you want to argue otherwise, you have to propose a physical mechanism for large meteor strikes to be approximately evenly spaced in time (on the time scale of decades). And excuse me for not holding my breath.
Get your head out of your ass. Most electric heating is done with heat pumps. A heat pump pumps more heat into your house than the electric energy it consumes (that's why it's called that way). Heating by burning something is also more efficient than dissipating electric energy because you're cutting out conversion (see Carnot efficiency) and transportation losses.
And in the summer, if the AC is on, inefficient appliances make you lose double: once by consuming more electricity than they should, and a second time because the AC needs to consume energy to pump the heat out of your house.
Have you looked at the price difference between different efficiencies for the same wattage? They're usually minimal. So might as well vote with your wallet and go for the highest-efficiency one. There's no telling how electricity prices will evolve over time...
Oh c'mon, I'm not exactly SuperKendall's biggest fan, but in all fairness, the meaning of what he wrote was pretty clear (and he does have a point, too). Might it be that you're being deliberately obtuse for the sake of trolling, Mr. AC?
The basics have been pinned down, debated, agreed upon and bought the t-^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H made it into university textbooks in the late 1980s to early 1990s. It's really not difficult: if more thermal energy is entering a system than exiting it, its temperature goes up. Simple conservation of energy. The mechanism for thermal energy to enter and exit the planet is radiation, and the way different gases interact with this radiation is well-understood. The earth is warming up, and it's because of the CO2 we're releasing - that's as close to a fact as an empirical branch of science like this can get.
The only thing that was (and is) not sure is how bad the effect would be. How much longer would a period of relatively low solar activity slow down the rate of warming? How much of the excess CO2 would be taken up by seas and plant material that doesn't rot or gets burned (slowing down the heating-up)? Would the feedback of the initial warming be negative (slowing down the heating-up) or positive (speeding it up)? Which spots on earth will get warmer and colder? Climate science is not about whether or not climate heats up due to our CO2 release. It hasn't been about that for the last 25 years! It's about how fast the warming will go in function of the CO2 levels and how badly different spots on earth will be affected. The stovetop is on; the question is merely "how high". We've come a long way in narrowing this down over the last 25 years and the results don't look pretty. A lot of governments around the world recognize this.
The present "debate" in the US is entirely fabricated, just like the past debates on whether tobacco increases the risk of lung cancer or on whether hydrogenated fatty acids cause coronary heart disease. The strategies used by industry to discredit reputable science are exactly the same. Even though I'm a big proponent of debating everything, the current climate change debate in the US is a disgrace to human intelligence. They're debating something that has been settled 25 years ago; one side just keeps on bringing up long-discredited arguments like a broken record, forcing the other side to keep on refuting them. The media give both sides equal weight for the sake of "political neutrality" (my ass) and the general public is utterly confused about something that is in essence very straightforward.
To be honest, the Linux versions of some of the most interesting games had bugs (from the top of my head, I remember Cortex Command, which was a blast but had a pre-alpha level of stability, and Torchlight's "faceless" bug). The humble bundle people recognized this, issued a statement they were working on a fix and... nothing happened. I felt betrayed a coupe of times and vowed to think long and hard before purchasing another bundle. Sure, a lot of the games were great and worked just fine, but if you sell a game that has obvious flaws, you have to slap a big fat "ALPHA" or "BETA" on it, and if you're not firmly committed to fixing it, you have to tell people honestly. It's simply a matter of truth in advertising.
Someone who very firmly believes in Occam's Razor could rationally be an atheist. Unless you're going to claim that no one-could rationally believe in Occam's Razor...
Disclaimer: written by an agnostic. Although Occam's razor says that the existence of a god is unlikely, I simply don't feel it's worth pondering over/arguing about/starting holy wars over. The existence or non-existence of a God won't change my belief that (among others) one should strive to be ethical in life, try to treat everything and everyone with respect, find a healthy balance between self-interest and the common good, and leave the place behind in a better state than one encountered it.
Only one thing though: Mercury is closer to the Sun than Venus (about half the distance so it receives about 4 times the radiation per m^2), yet the hottest temperatures reached on mercury (ie. on the sun-facing side) are lower than the averages on Venus.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Atmosphere_and_climate
That's actually a persistent myth. Yes, a plane uses much more fuel per minute during take-off than during high-altitude cruise. But take-off doesn't take that many minutes. On any but the shortest flights, the bulk of the fuel carried by a plane is burned during cruise. And it's certainly not more energy-efficient than an electric train. And most countries that have high-speed trains happen to produce a large percentage (much larger than the US, that is) of their electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources.
(never mind the other obvious problems with the 'greens' being that they are in fact socialists, collectivists, central planners pushing for price controls, exchange controls, wage controls, draft, marshal law, nationalisation, all the worst parts of authoritarian, dictatorial, tyrannical, anti-individual, anti-human, anti-free market, anti-capitalist ideology)
Why do I get a mental picture of roman_mir sitting in front of his keyboard frothing at the mouth?
they are hypocrites that have economic interests in "photovoltaic energy"
Understood, SIR! Because there's so much profit to be made in solar cells, environmentalists are Big Solar's astroturfing lobby; all they care about is the companies' economic interests!
Because they cannot compete in a fair market
Wait, there's not so much money to be made in solar cells?
That's also why environmentalism is a branch of communism/socialism
Wait, what? Communists and socialist are the ones who care about is the companies' economic interests?
Your incoherent rambling doesn't make a lot of sense, buddy. Oh, and one more thing:
because there are no objective reason to build solar plants except in space stations
and many are starting on CO2 sequestration. In most cases, they are as clean as gas plants, and some are ahead of gas plants on sequestration projects.
Didn't find any citations about the sequestration? That's because it's not true. Sure, there have been pilot projects, but the industry concluded from them that sequestering coal's CO2 takes away the economic advantage of using coal in the first place.
The best way to sequester carbon from coal is to not dig it up in the first place. As I always say, coal is the ultimate form of sequestered carbon; it's almost pure carbon, readily buried underground.
Now you're just making a fool of yourself. People already linked you to a wikipedia page that explains in detail why you're wrong, yet you stubbornly refuse to read it (or perhaps you're too daft to understand what it says?)
Here's a demonstration. From TFA, the secret message is:
AOAKN HVPKD FNFJU YIDDC
RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX
PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH.
NLXKG MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ
UAOTA . RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH
LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ.
KLDTS GQIRU AOAKN
My sources are telling me that "AOAKN" is most likely the identifier of the OTP or code page that was used, so the actual content of the message is
HVPKD FNFJU YIDDC RQXSR
DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX PABUZ
WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH NLXKG
MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ UAOTA
RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH LKXGH
RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ KLDTS
GQIRU
Being a 1337 cryptography expert, I determined that the code page in the sender's code book started with:
SBXDZ CUYSG ECWKO CMRSZ
JRGOH DIRFA JRWEP LFXRK
OLULB XHHAW UGKLL NUUKT
JQPKX LMUGR IGRCC AHKCW
OKMZZ LQOSK PPGNH YPPVW
NRVDT RNHYD CNCCY RUVJO
VCNNA
Don't believe me? Go to this page, copy-paste the above "actual content" in the field that says "input" and the key in the field that says "key", and click decode.
Oh wait, I was wrong, the real key is:
ZTLJV VJXRU VERZP YMUND
PYLYB WBHJV ZUWCR ESJNL
FMYUI KMCKU HWYID NIJTM
ZBITS VNBFI TGIWG MLKQS
RMQLD PWASI AHNAS LHFBN
PWYUN XRTPM MVDFU HXKMO
IUUAK
Slashdot Mirror
I covered that possibility too by arguing why heating your house by burning stuff is more efficient than by dissipating electricity. So you'll still benefit from an energy-efficient power supply.
While GP is woefully incorrect and you're right to call him out on it, your explanation isn't right either. Heat pumps can in fact pump against a gradient, and are mostly used to pump heat from a cold to a hot place. Air-source heat pumps (ie. coupled to the outside air rather than a geothermal reservoir) are used in parts of the US to heat houses in the winter and cool them in the summer. They're also what makes a refrigerator work. A fridge pulls heat from a cold place (inside the fridge) to a warmer place (outside the fridge). The resulting decrease in entropy needs to be balanced by an equal of greater increase in entropy, which is accomplished by converting electricity to heat. Or, to avoid the thermodynamic jargon, you're pumping against a gradient, so you need to spend energy to do so. The heat produced at the back of your fridge is the sum of the heat that was pulled out of the interior of the fridge + the heat-equivalent of the electricity the fridge consumed. This is also what an A/C does. Now, if we turn the A/C inside-out, so that it pumps heat from outside to inside, then you have the kind of heat pump we use to heat our homes in the winter. The sum of the heat that was pulled from outside and the heat-equivalent of the electricity the device consumes is larger than the heat-equivalent of the electricity alone, thus the pump brings more heat into your home than a resistor using the same amount of electricity. GP suggested to generate electricity from this heat gradient, but the flaw in his thinking is that the heat pump as well as any electricity generation device he can come up with are bound by the Carnot efficiency, so you can never get more electricity out than you put in.
So they work well in heating a house as long as its not cold outside. Probably not so good in a real winter..
Theoretically spoken, they just need to pump against a larger gradient if it's really cold. They will still have a benefit, only less.
Now, practically spoken, there are these nasty little engineering considerations. A practical heat pump has to be built for cold climates, and the heat pump/AC combos that are popular in the warmer parts in the US aren't, and are actually capable of being slightly less efficient than a resistor if it's really really cold outside.
So... Eternal Summer is to /. what Eternal September is to Usenet?
Negative, the burden of proof is on you. Physics says that there should be no periodicity in large meteor strikes on the time scales we're talking about. The available geological data seems to confirm this. Up to you to demonstrate statistically significant periodicity. And to publish it in Science.
If you don't even read the other guy's arguments, you're doomed to remain an ignorant kook (and waste everyone's time showcasing your ignorance). Did you even consider what he meant with "what you're missing is that this also applies to the coins"? I'll make one last try to make you see it. Who knows what side of the coin will end up? PHYSICS DOES! Who knows in what position the die will come to rest? PHYSICS DOES! Who knows which ball will be the next to fall out of the lottery machine? PHYSICS DOES! Who knows where the ball in the roulette will end up? PHYSICS DOES! Who knows where the slot machine will stop? PHYSICS DOES! Any process that isn't ruled by quantum effects is deterministic (and it is sometimes speculated that even quantum randomness is the result of underlying deterministic processes we haven't yet discovered). but you know what? IT DOES NOT MATTER! As long as the distribution of the outcomes can pass for random and WE can't predict them, they can be approached as random for practical purposes. There's no such thing as being overdue for a meteor strike because on the time scales we're talking about, the odds for a strike are not influenced by the time since the last strike. This much can be inferred from the very laws of physics you're invoking, so if you want to argue otherwise, you have to propose a physical mechanism for large meteor strikes to be approximately evenly spaced in time (on the time scale of decades). And excuse me for not holding my breath.
(but don't try this with meat).
Too late.
And the process is very safe - so safe in fact that at least one company in the Country of Germophobia has FDA approval for doing it.
Get your head out of your ass. Most electric heating is done with heat pumps. A heat pump pumps more heat into your house than the electric energy it consumes (that's why it's called that way). Heating by burning something is also more efficient than dissipating electric energy because you're cutting out conversion (see Carnot efficiency) and transportation losses.
And in the summer, if the AC is on, inefficient appliances make you lose double: once by consuming more electricity than they should, and a second time because the AC needs to consume energy to pump the heat out of your house.
Have you looked at the price difference between different efficiencies for the same wattage? They're usually minimal. So might as well vote with your wallet and go for the highest-efficiency one. There's no telling how electricity prices will evolve over time...
*facepalm*
Oh c'mon, I'm not exactly SuperKendall's biggest fan, but in all fairness, the meaning of what he wrote was pretty clear (and he does have a point, too). Might it be that you're being deliberately obtuse for the sake of trolling, Mr. AC?
Well played sir or madam. Very well played.
Please? It's not so difficult. We have:
1. A measured rise in CO2 concentrations
2. A vast body of measurements showing increase in average temperatures (yes, after correcting for solar variations and what not)
3. A very straightforward and hard-to-refute mechanism for CO2 to cause the increase in temperature:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htm
4. Well-studied stabilities of different gases in the atmosphere
The basics have been pinned down, debated, agreed upon and bought the t-^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H made it into university textbooks in the late 1980s to early 1990s. It's really not difficult: if more thermal energy is entering a system than exiting it, its temperature goes up. Simple conservation of energy. The mechanism for thermal energy to enter and exit the planet is radiation, and the way different gases interact with this radiation is well-understood. The earth is warming up, and it's because of the CO2 we're releasing - that's as close to a fact as an empirical branch of science like this can get.
The only thing that was (and is) not sure is how bad the effect would be. How much longer would a period of relatively low solar activity slow down the rate of warming? How much of the excess CO2 would be taken up by seas and plant material that doesn't rot or gets burned (slowing down the heating-up)? Would the feedback of the initial warming be negative (slowing down the heating-up) or positive (speeding it up)? Which spots on earth will get warmer and colder? Climate science is not about whether or not climate heats up due to our CO2 release. It hasn't been about that for the last 25 years! It's about how fast the warming will go in function of the CO2 levels and how badly different spots on earth will be affected. The stovetop is on; the question is merely "how high". We've come a long way in narrowing this down over the last 25 years and the results don't look pretty. A lot of governments around the world recognize this.
The present "debate" in the US is entirely fabricated, just like the past debates on whether tobacco increases the risk of lung cancer or on whether hydrogenated fatty acids cause coronary heart disease. The strategies used by industry to discredit reputable science are exactly the same. Even though I'm a big proponent of debating everything, the current climate change debate in the US is a disgrace to human intelligence. They're debating something that has been settled 25 years ago; one side just keeps on bringing up long-discredited arguments like a broken record, forcing the other side to keep on refuting them. The media give both sides equal weight for the sake of "political neutrality" (my ass) and the general public is utterly confused about something that is in essence very straightforward.
The blog in question is titled: "Who is McAfee?" Wouldn't "Where in the World Is John McAfee?" be a more appropriate title? *rimshot*
...not to mention what business Major Disaster had in NYC 5 weeks ago.
To be honest, the Linux versions of some of the most interesting games had bugs (from the top of my head, I remember Cortex Command, which was a blast but had a pre-alpha level of stability, and Torchlight's "faceless" bug). The humble bundle people recognized this, issued a statement they were working on a fix and... nothing happened. I felt betrayed a coupe of times and vowed to think long and hard before purchasing another bundle. Sure, a lot of the games were great and worked just fine, but if you sell a game that has obvious flaws, you have to slap a big fat "ALPHA" or "BETA" on it, and if you're not firmly committed to fixing it, you have to tell people honestly. It's simply a matter of truth in advertising.
Someone who very firmly believes in Occam's Razor could rationally be an atheist. Unless you're going to claim that no one-could rationally believe in Occam's Razor...
Disclaimer: written by an agnostic. Although Occam's razor says that the existence of a god is unlikely, I simply don't feel it's worth pondering over/arguing about/starting holy wars over. The existence or non-existence of a God won't change my belief that (among others) one should strive to be ethical in life, try to treat everything and everyone with respect, find a healthy balance between self-interest and the common good, and leave the place behind in a better state than one encountered it.
Thank you.
Only one thing though: Mercury is closer to the Sun than Venus (about half the distance so it receives about 4 times the radiation per m^2), yet the hottest temperatures reached on mercury (ie. on the sun-facing side) are lower than the averages on Venus....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Atmosphere_and_climate
That's actually a persistent myth. Yes, a plane uses much more fuel per minute during take-off than during high-altitude cruise. But take-off doesn't take that many minutes. On any but the shortest flights, the bulk of the fuel carried by a plane is burned during cruise. And it's certainly not more energy-efficient than an electric train. And most countries that have high-speed trains happen to produce a large percentage (much larger than the US, that is) of their electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources.
Apparently, GP should be a little bit more careful in accusing others of being "all talk"...
(never mind the other obvious problems with the 'greens' being that they are in fact socialists, collectivists, central planners pushing for price controls, exchange controls, wage controls, draft, marshal law, nationalisation, all the worst parts of authoritarian, dictatorial, tyrannical, anti-individual, anti-human, anti-free market, anti-capitalist ideology)
Why do I get a mental picture of roman_mir sitting in front of his keyboard frothing at the mouth?
they are hypocrites that have economic interests in "photovoltaic energy"
Understood, SIR! Because there's so much profit to be made in solar cells, environmentalists are Big Solar's astroturfing lobby; all they care about is the companies' economic interests!
Because they cannot compete in a fair market
Wait, there's not so much money to be made in solar cells?
That's also why environmentalism is a branch of communism/socialism
Wait, what? Communists and socialist are the ones who care about is the companies' economic interests?
Your incoherent rambling doesn't make a lot of sense, buddy. Oh, and one more thing:
because there are no objective reason to build solar plants except in space stations
Ah, that would be the good old "energy payback" argument. The one that stopped being true about 15 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#Solar_cells_and_energy_payback
and many are starting on CO2 sequestration. In most cases, they are as clean as gas plants, and some are ahead of gas plants on sequestration projects.
Didn't find any citations about the sequestration? That's because it's not true. Sure, there have been pilot projects, but the industry concluded from them that sequestering coal's CO2 takes away the economic advantage of using coal in the first place.
The best way to sequester carbon from coal is to not dig it up in the first place. As I always say, coal is the ultimate form of sequestered carbon; it's almost pure carbon, readily buried underground.
Now you're just making a fool of yourself. People already linked you to a wikipedia page that explains in detail why you're wrong, yet you stubbornly refuse to read it (or perhaps you're too daft to understand what it says?)
. .
Here's a demonstration. From TFA, the secret message is:
AOAKN HVPKD FNFJU YIDDC
RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX
PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH
NLXKG MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ
UAOTA . RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH
LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ
KLDTS GQIRU AOAKN
My sources are telling me that "AOAKN" is most likely the identifier of the OTP or code page that was used, so the actual content of the message is
HVPKD FNFJU YIDDC RQXSR
DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX PABUZ
WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH NLXKG
MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ UAOTA
RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH LKXGH
RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ KLDTS
GQIRU
Being a 1337 cryptography expert, I determined that the code page in the sender's code book started with:
SBXDZ CUYSG ECWKO CMRSZ
JRGOH DIRFA JRWEP LFXRK
OLULB XHHAW UGKLL NUUKT
JQPKX LMUGR IGRCC AHKCW
OKMZZ LQOSK PPGNH YPPVW
NRVDT RNHYD CNCCY RUVJO
VCNNA
Don't believe me? Go to this page, copy-paste the above "actual content" in the field that says "input" and the key in the field that says "key", and click decode.
Oh wait, I was wrong, the real key is:
ZTLJV VJXRU VERZP YMUND
PYLYB WBHJV ZUWCR ESJNL
FMYUI KMCKU HWYID NIJTM
ZBITS VNBFI TGIWG MLKQS
RMQLD PWASI AHNAS LHFBN
PWYUN XRTPM MVDFU HXKMO
IUUAK
Allright, I'm just messing with you, it's
JHVGR QUHCQ YFZAC EILSG
YVTCW PABZG QALLG HVBDG
OLAZV LGLAS QJGWZ WHVRY
YROWQ XBAPU WTIEY UTOHI
YXZRU ALALV OPGXD USLCW
YSBDI GNILZ OWTSM TUMCB
PZANC