Note: most GPS is used for aircraft, navigation and outdoors use. Hell the military alone has more units than people in cars that cant read maps do.
This would surprise me. I would be shocked to learn that the military has more units than there are in consumer automobiles (let alone mobile phones), but if you've got something to back that up I'm curious to see it.
This is widely available, and known as a "television" or "hdtv". The trick is making sure you find one that has a 1:1 display mode so that there is no scaling of the input signal. You should be able to find a 720p (likely 1366x768 or similar actual resolution) in 32" sizes relatively easily, with HDMI and VGA inputs.
Because you want to display 1024x768 rather than 1366x768, you'll have black bars on the sides-- but you should be able to find something large enough to accomodate you in the TV aisle at Costco or wherever.
I believe a typical grid-tied setup is fully shut down when the grid goes down. It just makes things simpler-- while your PV array is probably sized to approximate your average load, it has no ability to handle your peak load, and it is subject to the whims of the weather from moment to moment. It would be really easy for you to be trying to draw 4kW while your system could only make 3kW, which would probably result in relatively nasty results.
Battery-backed systems, on the other hand, will continue to run while disconnected from the grid, because the battery offers some ability to address the peak loads independent of what the panels are producing at any given moment.
I don't think the 6:1 human size ratio is quite as troublesome to overcome as the 90:1 dog size ratio presented in the article. While the difference between your example people is large, it's still fifteen times smaller than the difference between those dogs.
Old stuff seems to last forever because the old stuff we have left is the stuff that survived. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's plenty of old junk-- but that went out with the trash years ago. Every era manufactures a bunch of unreliable crap, too.
To make matters worse: through sheer chance, some unreliable junk survives for a century now and then, too. While this stuff is all at the statistically unlikely end of the bell curve, and 99.9% of its cohorts have vanished, what remains by dumb luck reinforces the idea that "stuff was made better in the old days."
Finding an obese vegetarian isn't hard. Not eating meat has nothing to do with how many calories you consume, and there are PLENTY of ways to overeat spectacularly without meat.
Sailboats do all sorts of nonintuitive things that are in fact quite compatible with physics... like sailing downwind faster than the wind, and sailing upwind. There's no reason a boat powered by a wind turbine can't go directly upwind.
I hope you're right, but I'm not counting on it. Good science fiction can be expensive to produce, does not frequently reach a mainstream audience, and has as its target demographic those people most likely to illegally download (or at least buy used on ebay or DVR/commercial skip) the shows in question.
Vaccines do not offer 100% protection against a disease. They rely on your immune system. Sometimes, your immune system fails. The example I keep using is that I got Chicken Pox twice.
Sometimes, the vaccine itself will simply be nonfunctional-- we're human, and nothing we make is ever perfect. Once in a while, a defective batch will get out.
And finally, there are kids who simply can't be vaccinated, due to allergy or weakened immune systems.
If *everybody* is vaccinated and has partial resistance, we greatly protect the kids whose vaccines didn't take, were defective, or couldn't get a vaccine-- simply because they are exposed to the disease less due to everyone else's resistance. If we let people skip vaccination, obviously, they put themselves at risk. But they also then put vaccinated people at risk by increasing their exposure to the disease.
Think of it this way: if you've got 90% resistance, you've got a 1-in-10 chance to get the disease if you're exposed. If the guy next to you has 90% resistance, there's only a 1-in-10 chance he'll get the disease to expose you in the first place, lowering your chances to 1 in 100. If the guy next to *him* has a 90% resistance... it's 1 in 1000 that you're going to get it via this line of transmission. And so on, until your odds are tiny. This is how an imperfect vaccine can result in the eradication of a disease. But the second one kid in a roomful of 50 shows up with the disease, everybody's chances go back to one in ten.
Why not? It's not like she could spread a disease to the other kids; they're all vaccinated!
What makes you think this? Vaccines aren't perfect because your immune system isn't perfect. I got chicken pox twice, for example-- sometimes you only develop partial immunity. Herd immunity works to bolster this-- enough people vaccinated and those with weak immunity are also exposed to the disease less.
Some people simply can't receive vaccines, due to allergy or damaged immune system. Because of this, we've already got a small pool of people who won't receive the vaccine, and we need to reach a threshold of vaccination to protect them with herd immunity. Adding extra people to this pool of unvaccinated folk by "opting out" is just silly. Some of the recent measles outbreaks have even occurred in populations of vaccinated kids, for the simple reason that the voluntary decline in vaccinations has raised the exposure levels for vaccinated kids as well-- and vaccines aren't 100% effective.
I think you're on the right track, though-- your post makes it sound like you've got all the ideas in your head. Just think through why "opt-out" vaccines are probably a bad idea.
People want everything lined up into "good" and "bad" columns, and reality just isn't that simple. Your wine example is an excellent one-- it's good and bad. The fact that somebody found some cardioprotective benefits to moderate amounts of red wine in no way diminishes what alcohol does to your liver and so forth.
And excercise? Same deal. Moderate excercise has all sorts of benefits. But if you do it wrong or too much, you'll cause injuries, weaken your immune system, or even reduce athletic performance. And certain kinds of training aren't directly compatible-- you can't powerlift your way to a marthon victory, and mixing the two will likely result in lowered performance in both sports. But a well-tailored weight regimen is still probably beneficial to runners.
Frequently, the news only reports an isolated finding, like "wine is good for you," (when they actually mean "a small amount of wine reduces risk of a heart condition") and completely ignores the fact that the study is very specific and in no way contradicts existing studies indicating detrimental effects on other parts of the body.
Truth is, it's all freaking complicated, just like everything else in life. Nothing is just "good" or "bad," and you're going to have to do a lot of thinking to figure out how to optimize all the inputs for the results you want.
Co-op games are my favorites. I'm not a huge fan of Halo, for example-- but it's one of the few games I can get online and play with (not against!) geographically scattered friends. So I play it all the freaking time.
I've got enough splitscreen multiplayer games-- what I really want now is more co-op, and more online features that make online gaming with friends feel like local multiplayer. Video chat with a window in the corner, easy transitions from speaking with friends to speaking with other players, and more games where we aren't competing with our buddies. Even among friends, skill levels and differing practice make local multiplayer awkward-- nobody likes getting crushed all the time, and nobody likes not having any challenge. Put everybody on the same side, though, and it becomes a lot more fun as you work together to crush the zombie hordes, and chat and catch up on things with friends the same way you did when you were 10.
I hate this sort of thing. Odds are, it cost the builder/installer $14 less to use a shorter bit of pipe or duct or something. They don't give a crap if it raises your yearly electric bill by $100-- their costs are solely related to labor and materials, and they will do amazingly stupid things to push those costs down. Most people will never notice, since they have no idea how anything works, and the "penalty" costs occur gradually.
Hey, if what you've got is working for you, that's fantastic.
But don't dismiss everything new out of hand-- a slightly smaller 61" LED DLP at moderate brightness consumes roughly the same power as your 19" CRT from 1993. A 19" LCD would halve your power cosumption to around 30 watts.
I'm not suggesting you purchase either one-- just that sometimes, there is truly progress in the world, and to dismiss it out of hand because you don't need it today does a disservice to people whose 19" CRT from 1993 may no longer function.
You won't find a more efficient design on the market right now. Samsung's 67" LED DLP set draws about 120 watts.
A quick google finds these:
65" Panasonic Plasma at 800W. 65" Olevia LCD (probably CFL backlit) at 540W. 55" Samsung LED-backlit LCD at 250W (note that this set is smaller than the rest)
$19,000 is the MAX price for the low end model. They refuse to make a car like that so they only end up as curiosity toys for the rich.
Your under-$19k idea is a good one, and it appears that Honda realizes it with the new Insight. Around 50mpg, $18,500. Sure, it kinda looks like a Prius, but if Honda can build a Prius-clone for $3k less than a Prius, they'll still have a winner.
It seems silly to me that every rooftop, parking lot, and building in sunny areas isn't covered in solar panels. There's no reason there shouldn't be windmills in parking lots and cornfields in areas with sufficient windspeeds-- you can't ruin the view in a landscape already covered with asphalt or corn. And why not stick 'em on the towers for power lines that already blight the view, in areas where the wind is sufficient?
And there should be nuclear power where we can't realistically do these things.
There's no reason to cover the surface of the earth-- but we might as well slap 'em on the parts of the earth we've already covered with other buildings, huge expanses of unproductive asphalt, giant grid-squares of crops, or power line towers.
I'm just curious-- not implying that your calculations are wrong. I'm at the extreme other end in Arizona, and payback appears to be in the 10-15 year range for us, not counting resale and using a constant price for power for the next 15 years. That's well within the system warranty time, but may still be a bit too much for people to pay for up front.
Payback speed depends heavily on your local utility, their rates, their incentives, and whether they allow net-metering over the entire year, or just monthly. It also depends on whether or not you are willing to consider resale value as part of your payback time.
I suspect Hawaii is even better than Arizona despite having more cloudy days, just because power is so freaking expensive there.
In the long run, I think leases will win out. A couple of companies are offering deals where you lease the system and panels, and they promise your new smaller electric bill plus the lease cost will be lower than your current electric bill. A deal like this makes things suddenly interesting to people who don't have $20k to drop up front.
The biggest source of solar subsidy for homeowners in Arizona is the power companies themselves. They'll pay for roughly half of your installation. My guess is that this is just smart infrastructure investment for them-- you foot half the cost and handle the maintenance, but they know the panels aren't moving once they're installed.
You're correct. I definitely oversimplified-- the care is only "free" in the sense that you can't squeeze blood from a stone. If you can't pay, you can't pay, but they still have to treat you.
You're absolutely right. EMTALA essentially created universal healthcare in the US by making it illegal for an emergency room to refuse to treat someone based on their ability to pay. This is (in my opinion) a worthwhile goal, but one which is terribly inefficient with health-care money if not backed by a socialized healthcare system at the same time.
If you've got no healthcare, but get sick, you can roll into the ER for free treatment. Of course, ER care is an order of magnitude more costly than care from a family doctor, and does not include checkups, history, or preventative care that could have avoided the issue in the first place. It also requires that you wait until your condition is far enough gone that it constitutes an emergency, likely making things more difficult and expensive to treat.
So we pay for healthcare for everybody, except we do it as inefficiently as possible, tying up ER doctors, nurses and facilities with things that should have been taken care of at a tenth the cost elsewhere, earlier, and without occupying a bed somewhere at a facility designed for broken bones and heart attacks, not festering infections you should have had cleaned up a year ago.
For some people, it's not taking their work home... it's taking their free work-provided laptop home. I know more than a few people in IT who don't own a computer outside of the department-issue one they've been handed. It's a way to save money and still be able to waste time on the internet at home.
Your numbers are so far off that it is ridiculous. "5-8%" panel efficiency? Off-the-shelf consumer panels are triple or quadruple that.
And the amount of land required by your calculation is just silly. As another poster points out... even using your lowball 8% efficiency estimate, we'd need only 5% of the US land area to power the entire world. Obviously, powering the entire US would be quite a bit lower than that, and real-world panels are many times more efficient. We'd need only a fraction of a percent of our total land area to power our usage, and we have a couple of immense stretches of sunny desert conveniently located in the southwest.
As long as our peak daytime demand remains substantially above our nighttime demand (it is currently near double in the US)... we can build out solar power generation until it is nearly half of our total capacity without worrying about whether or not it works at night.
It would also make sense to do the buildout someplace in the desert southwest-- where there are vast stretches of empty land with constant sun at substantially higher intensity.
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Note: most GPS is used for aircraft, navigation and outdoors use. Hell the military alone has more units than people in cars that cant read maps do.
This would surprise me. I would be shocked to learn that the military has more units than there are in consumer automobiles (let alone mobile phones), but if you've got something to back that up I'm curious to see it.
This is widely available, and known as a "television" or "hdtv". The trick is making sure you find one that has a 1:1 display mode so that there is no scaling of the input signal. You should be able to find a 720p (likely 1366x768 or similar actual resolution) in 32" sizes relatively easily, with HDMI and VGA inputs.
Because you want to display 1024x768 rather than 1366x768, you'll have black bars on the sides-- but you should be able to find something large enough to accomodate you in the TV aisle at Costco or wherever.
I believe a typical grid-tied setup is fully shut down when the grid goes down. It just makes things simpler-- while your PV array is probably sized to approximate your average load, it has no ability to handle your peak load, and it is subject to the whims of the weather from moment to moment. It would be really easy for you to be trying to draw 4kW while your system could only make 3kW, which would probably result in relatively nasty results.
Battery-backed systems, on the other hand, will continue to run while disconnected from the grid, because the battery offers some ability to address the peak loads independent of what the panels are producing at any given moment.
I don't think the 6:1 human size ratio is quite as troublesome to overcome as the 90:1 dog size ratio presented in the article. While the difference between your example people is large, it's still fifteen times smaller than the difference between those dogs.
Old stuff seems to last forever because the old stuff we have left is the stuff that survived. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's plenty of old junk-- but that went out with the trash years ago. Every era manufactures a bunch of unreliable crap, too.
To make matters worse: through sheer chance, some unreliable junk survives for a century now and then, too. While this stuff is all at the statistically unlikely end of the bell curve, and 99.9% of its cohorts have vanished, what remains by dumb luck reinforces the idea that "stuff was made better in the old days."
Finding an obese vegetarian isn't hard. Not eating meat has nothing to do with how many calories you consume, and there are PLENTY of ways to overeat spectacularly without meat.
Sailboats do all sorts of nonintuitive things that are in fact quite compatible with physics... like sailing downwind faster than the wind, and sailing upwind. There's no reason a boat powered by a wind turbine can't go directly upwind.
I hope you're right, but I'm not counting on it. Good science fiction can be expensive to produce, does not frequently reach a mainstream audience, and has as its target demographic those people most likely to illegally download (or at least buy used on ebay or DVR/commercial skip) the shows in question.
Vaccines do not offer 100% protection against a disease. They rely on your immune system. Sometimes, your immune system fails. The example I keep using is that I got Chicken Pox twice.
Sometimes, the vaccine itself will simply be nonfunctional-- we're human, and nothing we make is ever perfect. Once in a while, a defective batch will get out.
And finally, there are kids who simply can't be vaccinated, due to allergy or weakened immune systems.
If *everybody* is vaccinated and has partial resistance, we greatly protect the kids whose vaccines didn't take, were defective, or couldn't get a vaccine-- simply because they are exposed to the disease less due to everyone else's resistance. If we let people skip vaccination, obviously, they put themselves at risk. But they also then put vaccinated people at risk by increasing their exposure to the disease.
Think of it this way: if you've got 90% resistance, you've got a 1-in-10 chance to get the disease if you're exposed. If the guy next to you has 90% resistance, there's only a 1-in-10 chance he'll get the disease to expose you in the first place, lowering your chances to 1 in 100. If the guy next to *him* has a 90% resistance... it's 1 in 1000 that you're going to get it via this line of transmission. And so on, until your odds are tiny. This is how an imperfect vaccine can result in the eradication of a disease. But the second one kid in a roomful of 50 shows up with the disease, everybody's chances go back to one in ten.
Why not? It's not like she could spread a disease to the other kids; they're all vaccinated!
What makes you think this? Vaccines aren't perfect because your immune system isn't perfect. I got chicken pox twice, for example-- sometimes you only develop partial immunity. Herd immunity works to bolster this-- enough people vaccinated and those with weak immunity are also exposed to the disease less.
Some people simply can't receive vaccines, due to allergy or damaged immune system. Because of this, we've already got a small pool of people who won't receive the vaccine, and we need to reach a threshold of vaccination to protect them with herd immunity. Adding extra people to this pool of unvaccinated folk by "opting out" is just silly. Some of the recent measles outbreaks have even occurred in populations of vaccinated kids, for the simple reason that the voluntary decline in vaccinations has raised the exposure levels for vaccinated kids as well-- and vaccines aren't 100% effective.
I think you're on the right track, though-- your post makes it sound like you've got all the ideas in your head. Just think through why "opt-out" vaccines are probably a bad idea.
I had chicken pox twice, the second time when I was 12. Sometimes the real disease produces a "crap immune response," as you so eloquently put it.
I really would have preferred that my first round of exposure was the vaccine, rather than the disease.
People want everything lined up into "good" and "bad" columns, and reality just isn't that simple. Your wine example is an excellent one-- it's good and bad. The fact that somebody found some cardioprotective benefits to moderate amounts of red wine in no way diminishes what alcohol does to your liver and so forth.
And excercise? Same deal. Moderate excercise has all sorts of benefits. But if you do it wrong or too much, you'll cause injuries, weaken your immune system, or even reduce athletic performance. And certain kinds of training aren't directly compatible-- you can't powerlift your way to a marthon victory, and mixing the two will likely result in lowered performance in both sports. But a well-tailored weight regimen is still probably beneficial to runners.
Frequently, the news only reports an isolated finding, like "wine is good for you," (when they actually mean "a small amount of wine reduces risk of a heart condition") and completely ignores the fact that the study is very specific and in no way contradicts existing studies indicating detrimental effects on other parts of the body.
Truth is, it's all freaking complicated, just like everything else in life. Nothing is just "good" or "bad," and you're going to have to do a lot of thinking to figure out how to optimize all the inputs for the results you want.
Co-op games are my favorites. I'm not a huge fan of Halo, for example-- but it's one of the few games I can get online and play with (not against!) geographically scattered friends. So I play it all the freaking time.
I've got enough splitscreen multiplayer games-- what I really want now is more co-op, and more online features that make online gaming with friends feel like local multiplayer. Video chat with a window in the corner, easy transitions from speaking with friends to speaking with other players, and more games where we aren't competing with our buddies. Even among friends, skill levels and differing practice make local multiplayer awkward-- nobody likes getting crushed all the time, and nobody likes not having any challenge. Put everybody on the same side, though, and it becomes a lot more fun as you work together to crush the zombie hordes, and chat and catch up on things with friends the same way you did when you were 10.
I hate this sort of thing. Odds are, it cost the builder/installer $14 less to use a shorter bit of pipe or duct or something. They don't give a crap if it raises your yearly electric bill by $100-- their costs are solely related to labor and materials, and they will do amazingly stupid things to push those costs down. Most people will never notice, since they have no idea how anything works, and the "penalty" costs occur gradually.
Fortunately, ours is in the shade.
Hey, if what you've got is working for you, that's fantastic.
But don't dismiss everything new out of hand-- a slightly smaller 61" LED DLP at moderate brightness consumes roughly the same power as your 19" CRT from 1993. A 19" LCD would halve your power cosumption to around 30 watts.
I'm not suggesting you purchase either one-- just that sometimes, there is truly progress in the world, and to dismiss it out of hand because you don't need it today does a disservice to people whose 19" CRT from 1993 may no longer function.
You won't find a more efficient design on the market right now. Samsung's 67" LED DLP set draws about 120 watts.
A quick google finds these:
65" Panasonic Plasma at 800W.
65" Olevia LCD (probably CFL backlit) at 540W.
55" Samsung LED-backlit LCD at 250W (note that this set is smaller than the rest)
$19,000 is the MAX price for the low end model. They refuse to make a car like that so they only end up as curiosity toys for the rich.
Your under-$19k idea is a good one, and it appears that Honda realizes it with the new Insight. Around 50mpg, $18,500. Sure, it kinda looks like a Prius, but if Honda can build a Prius-clone for $3k less than a Prius, they'll still have a winner.
It seems silly to me that every rooftop, parking lot, and building in sunny areas isn't covered in solar panels. There's no reason there shouldn't be windmills in parking lots and cornfields in areas with sufficient windspeeds-- you can't ruin the view in a landscape already covered with asphalt or corn. And why not stick 'em on the towers for power lines that already blight the view, in areas where the wind is sufficient?
And there should be nuclear power where we can't realistically do these things.
There's no reason to cover the surface of the earth-- but we might as well slap 'em on the parts of the earth we've already covered with other buildings, huge expanses of unproductive asphalt, giant grid-squares of crops, or power line towers.
I'm just curious-- not implying that your calculations are wrong. I'm at the extreme other end in Arizona, and payback appears to be in the 10-15 year range for us, not counting resale and using a constant price for power for the next 15 years. That's well within the system warranty time, but may still be a bit too much for people to pay for up front.
Payback speed depends heavily on your local utility, their rates, their incentives, and whether they allow net-metering over the entire year, or just monthly. It also depends on whether or not you are willing to consider resale value as part of your payback time.
I suspect Hawaii is even better than Arizona despite having more cloudy days, just because power is so freaking expensive there.
In the long run, I think leases will win out. A couple of companies are offering deals where you lease the system and panels, and they promise your new smaller electric bill plus the lease cost will be lower than your current electric bill. A deal like this makes things suddenly interesting to people who don't have $20k to drop up front.
The biggest source of solar subsidy for homeowners in Arizona is the power companies themselves. They'll pay for roughly half of your installation. My guess is that this is just smart infrastructure investment for them-- you foot half the cost and handle the maintenance, but they know the panels aren't moving once they're installed.
You're correct. I definitely oversimplified-- the care is only "free" in the sense that you can't squeeze blood from a stone. If you can't pay, you can't pay, but they still have to treat you.
You're absolutely right. EMTALA essentially created universal healthcare in the US by making it illegal for an emergency room to refuse to treat someone based on their ability to pay. This is (in my opinion) a worthwhile goal, but one which is terribly inefficient with health-care money if not backed by a socialized healthcare system at the same time.
If you've got no healthcare, but get sick, you can roll into the ER for free treatment. Of course, ER care is an order of magnitude more costly than care from a family doctor, and does not include checkups, history, or preventative care that could have avoided the issue in the first place. It also requires that you wait until your condition is far enough gone that it constitutes an emergency, likely making things more difficult and expensive to treat.
So we pay for healthcare for everybody, except we do it as inefficiently as possible, tying up ER doctors, nurses and facilities with things that should have been taken care of at a tenth the cost elsewhere, earlier, and without occupying a bed somewhere at a facility designed for broken bones and heart attacks, not festering infections you should have had cleaned up a year ago.
For some people, it's not taking their work home... it's taking their free work-provided laptop home. I know more than a few people in IT who don't own a computer outside of the department-issue one they've been handed. It's a way to save money and still be able to waste time on the internet at home.
Your numbers are so far off that it is ridiculous. "5-8%" panel efficiency? Off-the-shelf consumer panels are triple or quadruple that.
And the amount of land required by your calculation is just silly. As another poster points out... even using your lowball 8% efficiency estimate, we'd need only 5% of the US land area to power the entire world. Obviously, powering the entire US would be quite a bit lower than that, and real-world panels are many times more efficient. We'd need only a fraction of a percent of our total land area to power our usage, and we have a couple of immense stretches of sunny desert conveniently located in the southwest.
As long as our peak daytime demand remains substantially above our nighttime demand (it is currently near double in the US)... we can build out solar power generation until it is nearly half of our total capacity without worrying about whether or not it works at night.
It would also make sense to do the buildout someplace in the desert southwest-- where there are vast stretches of empty land with constant sun at substantially higher intensity.