In canadian winters everyone plugs in their cars at night (block heater) or else they won't start in the morning, so I don't see what the big deal is.
True that. In places where winters get even colder, many workplace parking lots have power outlets to plug in your block heater so you can start the car in the evening. (Of course in areas where it's cold for long stretches, EVs may be impractical because of the lowered battery efficiency and the need to keep the car warm so the occupants don't freeze.)
I'm not sure what Toyota's strategy is in downplaying the plug-in hybrid model. Are they not able to come up with a good way to do it themselves? Are they trying to steal GM's thunder and delay the buzz until Toyota can catch up? Did the CEO of ExxonMobil threaten to have the CEO of Toyota shot if they started producing plug-in hybrids?
I wondered about this myself. Perhaps it is FUD to help Toyota retain their lead if they've missed seeing the timetable for demand.
My 66 mile round trip depends on the traffic. Some days, it's 30 minutes one way with sleci traffic. Some days, it's 60+ minutes with 18 miles of pure stop-n-go. Sometimes more, never less. I wonder how my plug-in will handle that variation.
Wonderfully. When you're stopped, the motor isn't drawing any power from the batteries. True, acceleration takes some juice, but you get some of that back - if you have regenerative braking - when you stop. (Lights, radio, etc will be constant power draws, but if you have LED-based lights it shouldn't be too bad.)
If you're routinely doing medium-to-long trips, a hybrid makes more sense than a pure electric. If you mostly do short trips, I could see some kind of trailer-mounted generator (or a flatbed full of solar cells;-) for longer hauls.
They should design hybrids so that the transmission switches the energy source. Higher gears switch to battery power, lower gears switch to gasoline.
That's pretty much the opposite of what you want. Electric motors develop peak torque at low RPM, gas engines at high RPM. In fact I wonder about the losses in the additional transmission if you want to drive the wheels from the gas engine; mechanically it makes more sense to use the electric all the time (much simpler transmission) and run the gas engine at a constant speed (more efficient) to keep the batteries charged.
Must be a US rule. Back when I got my license (in Canada), spin training was required for all pilots and we didn't wear 'chutes. For a commercial license, the flight test includes getting into a full spin (at least two full turns) and then recovering on a given heading.
'Chutes are required for aerobatics, but simple spins aren't considered such. (Granted, there are some kinds of aircraft that should not be spun because they don't recover well. They're placarded "DO NOT SPIN". Some you really have to force to get them to spin: a C-172 just kind of wallows and will pretty much recover by itself if you let go.)
Pilots of small planes don't need parachutes -- unless they're flying aerobatics (in which case they're required). The Citabria is a plane designed for aerobatics, although if Fossett wasn't planning on doing any he wouldn't have needed to take a 'chute.
(One of the things that makes a plane designed for aerobatics is that there are ways to make it easy to get out. I don't know about the Cit but for example on the Cessna Aerobat, you just pull the hinge pins (designed to be easy to pull) and the door comes off.)
And in a mountainous or heavily treed area, there's no such thing as "a decent crash landing", the plane is going to break up.
Actually I think the original puzzle is to connect the dots with as few straight lines (and no curved ones!) as possible.
If the dots have size (as in my example above), and are not just zero-dimensional imaginary entities, then it can be done with just three lines.
If "straight" means "as confined to the plane of the page" and you allow the "plane" to be curved in the third dimension, it can be done with one line.
No, the phrase "thinking outside the box" has always meant thinking unconventionally, or outside of assumed (but not actual) limits. It has nothing to do with packaging.
The phrase comes from a puzzle. Take a 3x3 grid of dots (as below) and connect them all with just four straight lines (without lifting pen from paper). The only way to do it is to extend the lines "outside the box" formed by the outermost dots.
Well, I'm glad he's got something to make him feel better, but I'm not sure that even a.45 is going to slow down a bear much. As for the RV door, I don't think that'd necessarily slow down something like a grizzly much; they've been known (I've seen pictures) to tear the entire back off a camper (the pickup truck mounted kind, not a person camping - although I'm sure they've done that too).
So let me get this straight: you kicked him in the face -- after confrontational language -- and then he stabbed you?
Sounds like he was carrying the knife for self-defense, and justifiably so.
What ever happened to just ignoring beggars, rather than trying to start arguments with them? Were you trying to start an argument so as to justify to yourself a little arab-bashing? Are you a racist?
We don't have the right to bare arms for every day self defense
The Second Amendment places no limitations on why we're allowed to bear arms. The Supreme Court just struck down the DC gun ban because it discerned just such a right to self defense.
Where do you think the various stalactites, stalagmites and flowstone formations in those caves (once the water drains) comes from? (I know about the water-filled caves, I've dived Ginny Springs, seen cenotes in the Yucatan, and tromped through miles of Mammoth Cave, still water filled at its lowest levels). You won't find caves in sandstone, though.
You apparently missed the "(With some variation depending on the specific subsurface rock, of course.)" in my original post.
Nothing happens, even in the unlikely event that a seismic event could open a crack 3000 meters (almost two miles) deep.
Aside from the fact that CO2 is denser than air and will tend to stay in the bottom of whatever hole it's put in, the hole that it is being put in is a depleted gas field -- meaning that the rock is porous enough for the CO2 to disperse through it like a rock sponge. It takes a bit of effort to get the gas back out again. Plus, CO2 mixed with ground water forms a mild acid which tends to react with rock to form carbonates, chemically locking the CO2 in place. (With some variation depending on the specific subsurface rock, of course.)
To take your example of Anatomy, most of the naming is just describing in latin/greek from where to where a structure is connected (the muscle attached to the sternum, the mastoid process and the clavicle is simply called sternocleidomastoid muscle).
Close but no cigar. I almost added something specifically about anatomy's naming conventions in the original post. Yes, latin and greek are requisite. Connections are only a small part of it, though. Anatomical names are based on where a structure is, or what it looks like, or who discovered it. There's no absolute rhyme or reason as to which naming convention is used. Even your example of muscle naming isn't constant - take "gluteus maximus", that just means "the biggest butt muscle"; "biceps" just means "two-headed (or ended) muscle", throw in a "brachii" or "femoris" to disambiguate arm or leg; and some are named by function (eg various "levator" muscles.)
Or take this example: "The levator muscle is the major elevator and originates from the orbital apex just above the annulus of zinn to insert over the anterior tarsal border." Annulus of zinn? Okay, that's something round, but who what or where is a zinn?. Anterior tarsal border? Something that connects the eye to somewhere in the foot, say what?
Nerves are no better, which is why med students end up with mnemonics like "Luscious French Tarts Sit Naked In Anticipation (Of Sex)" for the nerves etc through the supraorbital fissure (lachrymal, frontal, trochlear, superior oculomotor, nasociliary, inferior oculomotor, abducent, (opthalmic vein and sympathetic nerves)).
Sure, nature makes sense -- in a kind of hackish, kludgey way. But the naming conventions don't, accumulated as they are from centuries of anatomists and biologists doing their own thing. Hell, we're just lucky that homologous structures from one species to the next tend to have the same names (but not always).
You say you've never "brute force memorized anything". Well, good for you, perhaps you're one of those very rare individuals with a near-eidetic memory. You wouldn't have had to brute force memorize anything in organic chem, either -- and o-chem naming makes a lot more sense than anatomy. I've got a pretty good memory myself, rarely having to make an effort to memorize something, and had no problem with o-chem or microbiology or astrophysics (which I took as an option). But anatomy... I understood it well enough and could visualize the relationships and interactions, but the inconsistency in naming conventions threw me.
I heartily agree with you about the need for some basis in hard science, I just wish anatomy was one;-) (Also agree about statistics.)
I hear ya, but for some people it takes a lot of mindless repetition to sink in. That said, two years sounds a bit much unless you're going into a field where you need it (which sometimes means recognizing just what you need to tell the computer to do).
Anyone who hasn't taken enough calculus to at least grasp the concepts of derivatives and integrals (if not necessarily do the math involving them) is an idiot who knows almost nothing about how the world works. There are a lot of those around, alas. (Many of whom probably took calculus at one point or another and then promptly forgot it all.)
That's okay, a lot of medical school is massive brute force memorization too. (Anatomy comes to mind in particular, but it's hardly the only one.) It's a useful ability for doctors to have.
(Me, I was premed until I discovered how easy computer science was and switched my major.)
So does anyone know what 3d shape he used to achieve a 500x efficiency gain?
It must be tapping the vacuum energy, so it's probably really a 4d shape.
Even a crappy commodity solar cell is about 10% efficient, so this kid is talking about a 5000% efficiency (unless the reporter screwed up, which is highly likely). For it to get 50x more energy out than is going in, something magic (or nuclear) is happening.
Levitating a frog inside a multi-tesla electromagnet is obviously a technological parlor trick, even to someone who has never heard of diamagnetism. (It may look more like magic to someone who has never heard of electricity, but they'll still wonder about all that apparatus you're setting up.)
Levitating a single arbitrary frog out of a collection of them in a pond by pointing a stick at it and muttering "wingardium leviosa", now that's magic distinguishable from advanced technology. If kissing the frog then turns it into a handsome prince (or beautiful princess, your choice) without the associated energy surges or whatever to account for the sudden mass increase of 50 to 100 kg, then that's clearly distinguishable from advanced technology.
(Excluding trickery, of course; no rendering you momentarily unconcious while the frog is mundanely swapped out for the prince/princess.)
No, it was never a well understood law that the Earth was flat, nor that the universe orbited the Earth. You need to learn the difference between anecdotal observation and well understood law. Conservation of momentum is pretty well understood, so anything that really causes, for example, the Sun to "stand still" in the sky for a day without all sorts of other interesting and observable side effects is magic, not advanced technology.
There are still plenty of things we know that we don't know -- which is why we do things like build Large Hadron Colliders. And probably half the physicists out there are hoping it never finds the Higgs boson, but instead opens up new areas for study -- those poorly understood loopholes in currently stated laws.
To put my earlier post another way, real magic is supernatural, advanced technology never is, but it can sometimes fake it to the naive observer.
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In canadian winters everyone plugs in their cars at night (block heater) or else they won't start in the morning, so I don't see what the big deal is.
True that. In places where winters get even colder, many workplace parking lots have power outlets to plug in your block heater so you can start the car in the evening. (Of course in areas where it's cold for long stretches, EVs may be impractical because of the lowered battery efficiency and the need to keep the car warm so the occupants don't freeze.)
I'm not sure what Toyota's strategy is in downplaying the plug-in hybrid model. Are they not able to come up with a good way to do it themselves? Are they trying to steal GM's thunder and delay the buzz until Toyota can catch up? Did the CEO of ExxonMobil threaten to have the CEO of Toyota shot if they started producing plug-in hybrids?
I wondered about this myself. Perhaps it is FUD to help Toyota retain their lead if they've missed seeing the timetable for demand.
Now where'd I put my tinfoil hat?
My 66 mile round trip depends on the traffic. Some days, it's 30 minutes one way with sleci traffic. Some days, it's 60+ minutes with 18 miles of pure stop-n-go. Sometimes more, never less. I wonder how my plug-in will handle that variation.
Wonderfully. When you're stopped, the motor isn't drawing any power from the batteries. True, acceleration takes some juice, but you get some of that back - if you have regenerative braking - when you stop. (Lights, radio, etc will be constant power draws, but if you have LED-based lights it shouldn't be too bad.)
If you're routinely doing medium-to-long trips, a hybrid makes more sense than a pure electric. If you mostly do short trips, I could see some kind of trailer-mounted generator (or a flatbed full of solar cells ;-) for longer hauls.
They should design hybrids so that the transmission switches the energy source. Higher gears switch to battery power, lower gears switch to gasoline.
That's pretty much the opposite of what you want. Electric motors develop peak torque at low RPM, gas engines at high RPM. In fact I wonder about the losses in the additional transmission if you want to drive the wheels from the gas engine; mechanically it makes more sense to use the electric all the time (much simpler transmission) and run the gas engine at a constant speed (more efficient) to keep the batteries charged.
Must be a US rule. Back when I got my license (in Canada), spin training was required for all pilots and we didn't wear 'chutes. For a commercial license, the flight test includes getting into a full spin (at least two full turns) and then recovering on a given heading.
'Chutes are required for aerobatics, but simple spins aren't considered such. (Granted, there are some kinds of aircraft that should not be spun because they don't recover well. They're placarded "DO NOT SPIN". Some you really have to force to get them to spin: a C-172 just kind of wallows and will pretty much recover by itself if you let go.)
Pilots of small planes don't need parachutes -- unless they're flying aerobatics (in which case they're required). The Citabria is a plane designed for aerobatics, although if Fossett wasn't planning on doing any he wouldn't have needed to take a 'chute.
(One of the things that makes a plane designed for aerobatics is that there are ways to make it easy to get out. I don't know about the Cit but for example on the Cessna Aerobat, you just pull the hinge pins (designed to be easy to pull) and the door comes off.)
And in a mountainous or heavily treed area, there's no such thing as "a decent crash landing", the plane is going to break up.
The estate of Sir Arthur Clarke and MGM might have a thing or two to say about attempting to claim 2010.
The thing being... for all their evils and wrongs, there's been a few good things that have come from them.
Really? Name three . . . that they didn't acquire/copy from somebody else.
And no, Clippy is not a good thing.
Actually I think the original puzzle is to connect the dots with as few straight lines (and no curved ones!) as possible.
If the dots have size (as in my example above), and are not just zero-dimensional imaginary entities, then it can be done with just three lines.
If "straight" means "as confined to the plane of the page" and you allow the "plane" to be curved in the third dimension, it can be done with one line.
No, the phrase "thinking outside the box" has always meant thinking unconventionally, or outside of assumed (but not actual) limits. It has nothing to do with packaging.
The phrase comes from a puzzle. Take a 3x3 grid of dots (as below) and connect them all with just four straight lines (without lifting pen from paper). The only way to do it is to extend the lines "outside the box" formed by the outermost dots.
Well, I'm glad he's got something to make him feel better, but I'm not sure that even a .45 is going to slow down a bear much. As for the RV door, I don't think that'd necessarily slow down something like a grizzly much; they've been known (I've seen pictures) to tear the entire back off a camper (the pickup truck mounted kind, not a person camping - although I'm sure they've done that too).
Managed to kick him in the face first though
So let me get this straight: you kicked him in the face -- after confrontational language -- and then he stabbed you?
Sounds like he was carrying the knife for self-defense, and justifiably so.
What ever happened to just ignoring beggars, rather than trying to start arguments with them? Were you trying to start an argument so as to justify to yourself a little arab-bashing? Are you a racist?
We don't have the right to bare arms for every day self defense
The Second Amendment places no limitations on why we're allowed to bear arms. The Supreme Court just struck down the DC gun ban because it discerned just such a right to self defense.
Where do you think the various stalactites, stalagmites and flowstone formations in those caves (once the water drains) comes from? (I know about the water-filled caves, I've dived Ginny Springs, seen cenotes in the Yucatan, and tromped through miles of Mammoth Cave, still water filled at its lowest levels). You won't find caves in sandstone, though.
You apparently missed the "(With some variation depending on the specific subsurface rock, of course.)" in my original post.
Nothing happens, even in the unlikely event that a seismic event could open a crack 3000 meters (almost two miles) deep.
Aside from the fact that CO2 is denser than air and will tend to stay in the bottom of whatever hole it's put in, the hole that it is being put in is a depleted gas field -- meaning that the rock is porous enough for the CO2 to disperse through it like a rock sponge. It takes a bit of effort to get the gas back out again. Plus, CO2 mixed with ground water forms a mild acid which tends to react with rock to form carbonates, chemically locking the CO2 in place. (With some variation depending on the specific subsurface rock, of course.)
To take your example of Anatomy, most of the naming is just describing in latin/greek from where to where a structure is connected (the muscle attached to the sternum, the mastoid process and the clavicle is simply called sternocleidomastoid muscle).
Close but no cigar. I almost added something specifically about anatomy's naming conventions in the original post. Yes, latin and greek are requisite. Connections are only a small part of it, though. Anatomical names are based on where a structure is, or what it looks like, or who discovered it. There's no absolute rhyme or reason as to which naming convention is used. Even your example of muscle naming isn't constant - take "gluteus maximus", that just means "the biggest butt muscle"; "biceps" just means "two-headed (or ended) muscle", throw in a "brachii" or "femoris" to disambiguate arm or leg; and some are named by function (eg various "levator" muscles.)
Or take this example: "The levator muscle is the major elevator and originates from the orbital apex just above the annulus of zinn to insert over the anterior tarsal border." Annulus of zinn? Okay, that's something round, but who what or where is a zinn?. Anterior tarsal border? Something that connects the eye to somewhere in the foot, say what?
Nerves are no better, which is why med students end up with mnemonics like "Luscious French Tarts Sit Naked In Anticipation (Of Sex)" for the nerves etc through the supraorbital fissure (lachrymal, frontal, trochlear, superior oculomotor, nasociliary, inferior oculomotor, abducent, (opthalmic vein and sympathetic nerves)).
Sure, nature makes sense -- in a kind of hackish, kludgey way. But the naming conventions don't, accumulated as they are from centuries of anatomists and biologists doing their own thing. Hell, we're just lucky that homologous structures from one species to the next tend to have the same names (but not always).
You say you've never "brute force memorized anything". Well, good for you, perhaps you're one of those very rare individuals with a near-eidetic memory. You wouldn't have had to brute force memorize anything in organic chem, either -- and o-chem naming makes a lot more sense than anatomy. I've got a pretty good memory myself, rarely having to make an effort to memorize something, and had no problem with o-chem or microbiology or astrophysics (which I took as an option). But anatomy... I understood it well enough and could visualize the relationships and interactions, but the inconsistency in naming conventions threw me.
I heartily agree with you about the need for some basis in hard science, I just wish anatomy was one ;-) (Also agree about statistics.)
I hear ya, but for some people it takes a lot of mindless repetition to sink in. That said, two years sounds a bit much unless you're going into a field where you need it (which sometimes means recognizing just what you need to tell the computer to do).
Anyone who hasn't taken enough calculus to at least grasp the concepts of derivatives and integrals (if not necessarily do the math involving them) is an idiot who knows almost nothing about how the world works. There are a lot of those around, alas. (Many of whom probably took calculus at one point or another and then promptly forgot it all.)
That's okay, a lot of medical school is massive brute force memorization too. (Anatomy comes to mind in particular, but it's hardly the only one.) It's a useful ability for doctors to have.
(Me, I was premed until I discovered how easy computer science was and switched my major.)
So does anyone know what 3d shape he used to achieve a 500x efficiency gain?
It must be tapping the vacuum energy, so it's probably really a 4d shape.
Even a crappy commodity solar cell is about 10% efficient, so this kid is talking about a 5000% efficiency (unless the reporter screwed up, which is highly likely). For it to get 50x more energy out than is going in, something magic (or nuclear) is happening.
China has a population problem. Who says they want them back?
(That's a, I say that's a joke, son. </foghorn_leghorn>)
Well played, sir. No need to apologize.
"Warp core breach"
Levitating a frog inside a multi-tesla electromagnet is obviously a technological parlor trick, even to someone who has never heard of diamagnetism. (It may look more like magic to someone who has never heard of electricity, but they'll still wonder about all that apparatus you're setting up.)
Levitating a single arbitrary frog out of a collection of them in a pond by pointing a stick at it and muttering "wingardium leviosa", now that's magic distinguishable from advanced technology. If kissing the frog then turns it into a handsome prince (or beautiful princess, your choice) without the associated energy surges or whatever to account for the sudden mass increase of 50 to 100 kg, then that's clearly distinguishable from advanced technology.
(Excluding trickery, of course; no rendering you momentarily unconcious while the frog is mundanely swapped out for the prince/princess.)
No, it was never a well understood law that the Earth was flat, nor that the universe orbited the Earth. You need to learn the difference between anecdotal observation and well understood law. Conservation of momentum is pretty well understood, so anything that really causes, for example, the Sun to "stand still" in the sky for a day without all sorts of other interesting and observable side effects is magic, not advanced technology.
There are still plenty of things we know that we don't know -- which is why we do things like build Large Hadron Colliders. And probably half the physicists out there are hoping it never finds the Higgs boson, but instead opens up new areas for study -- those poorly understood loopholes in currently stated laws.
To put my earlier post another way, real magic is supernatural, advanced technology never is, but it can sometimes fake it to the naive observer.