The name of our moon is Luna. Luna orbits (the Barycenter between itself and) Terra.
Luna is the Latin name for the Moon, but the IAU adopted the English name as its official designation in 1919. They also adopted the Earth for the Earth (but no official name for the Sun, though it uses the Sun in its publications).
If you we were still using Latin as our scientific language they would of chosen Terra and Luna, but they didn't.
The International Astronomical Union was formed in 1919 in part because of the need for systematic names and definitions (like constellation boundaries) that had become urgent with the advent of astrophotography that was generating huge amounts of sky maps. At its founding it officially confirmed the designation we use for the known planets, and the Moon. But not the Sun. It does however in its various materials use "Sun" as the name for the Sun, including labeling its official symbol for the Sun, and this is the default name for the Sun in science. But Spanish, Portuguese, or Swedish scientists often use Sol, their native language use for Sun (as would presumably any native Latin speakers, if there were any). I don't know if Chinese scientists use the Chinese name for Sun or not*.
How in the hell would the USA experience energy shortages? The USA already exports coal. If the USA isn't a net exporter of oil by now it will be one soon, same for natural gas.
I am not agreeing with the "energy shortage" notion at all, but the US is definitely not a "net exporter of oil". The U.S. was a net oil importer at the end of September with 3.065 million barrels a day being imported net (that is 1.8E13 BTU). US natural gas imports and exports almost exactly balance, at the beginning of the year net was zero, the average so far for 2018 was 0.87 BCF/day (9.0E11 BTU, about 10% of production), and the amount of coal we export is 295,000 short tons a day (5.9E12 BTU) so the US is still a net importer of energy to the tune of 1.1E13 BTU a day. Oil production will have to grow another 20% before the US is energy neutral, though at the current rate of growth that might be just after the end of 2019.
Nuclear power output has been growing even though few nuclear reactors have been built in the last 40 years. Upgrades and improved techniques have allowed for greater and greater output from the existing fleet of nuclear power plants.
That was true, but U.S. nuclear power output plateaued almost 20 years ago, and the high point in output was 2007, though it has been essentially flat with only minor year-to-year fluctuations.
There's been a rough restart of building new nuclear power reactors but it's fairly certain that this will be resolved shortly and more new power reactors will be coming online soon.
Oh dear. I don't know how to break this to you but, no, its not. Really its not.
The sad state of nuclear power projects in the U.S. is written here. In the World Nuclear Association tables of reactors under construction, planned or proposed reactors there are 29 projects in U.S. listed with something like 40 units. Licenses are secured for many, loan guarantees are available and awarded for some, but not one of these looks likely to ever operate at this point.
We have been building nuclear power plants recently. We just haven't been finishing them. Eleven reactor projects were started in 2008, or soon after. Nine of them were abandoned, and the last two haven't been cancelled (yet) but they are hugely over budget and their condition looks terminal (the Vogtle AP1000 Gen III+ plants).The only reactor that has started up in the last 22 years actually started construction 45 years ago. And Westinghouse, the creator and sponsor of that AP1000 Gen III+ design, the great nuke hope for lower cost reactors, went bankrupt last year and Toshiba, which bought them has decided to get out of the nuclear power business entirely.
There are nuke-nuts who post here proclaiming that NuScale Power is building 12 tiny (60 MW) reactors, but they aren't - at least not yet. A couple of licenses have been issued (like dozens of other non-built plants) but there are no plans for a ground breaking, no one has put up the money for even one of them, and no site for an actual reactor has been selected.
Except it's not reality. The Indians have already announced their plans to build 370 new coal fired power plants over the next three decades, climate change be damned.
You need to keep up with reality. They no doubt did announce plans to build 370 new coal fired power plants, but have already cancelled most of them. As of August 23, 2018 the number of coal plants currently planned or under construction has fallen to 102 with 581 plans cancelled or shelved, or plants closed in the past 8 years. And at the time that article was written "India’s coal-fired pre-construction project pipeline has shrunk by a quarter in the last six months".
So India's previous plans for coal are rapidly being scrapped as I type.
The average speed of travel of Atlantic hurricanes depends on latitude (and there is considerable variance). They are slowest between 15-25 N (17.5 km/h) but accelerates as the move north (or south, but they don't cross the equator). By 35-40 N the average is 39 km/h, the one that got to 55-60 N was going 56 km/h. That last speed is pretty good clip for any boat that is not a speed boat, but a ship could maintain position in the eye all the way to landfall. But then you tie up and unload the ship real fast. Of course getting to the eye in a ship is a problem.
The world 2 km rowing record is 18.5 km/h (the Ark can't use sails in the calm eye), but even if Noah can match a racing shell, 2 km isn't going to help much. Long distance ocean rowing records are more like 5 km/h. He'll definitely need some holy power there.
Dubai is certifying the Volocopter for air taxi service it seems. Its published specs are 27 km range at its optimum cruise speed of 70 km/h. Its max payload is 160 kg, but I can't find any statement that says what payload (if any) is assumed for that range limit.
A strong wind would ground it of course. Its max speed (limit range) is 100 km/h.
So it isn't a scam. It does appear to have sufficient performance to be used in a limit air taxi role, say between an airport and a VIP parking/check in area, or a fancy hotel. Also, tourist "see it from the air" services would be about right.
Not on current evidence. There is an electric drone multi-motor vehicle on the market right now, the Volocopter (max payload 160 kg, max range 27 km) that has been bought to provide air taxi service in Dubai. It costs $338,000. You can get a bottom end helicopter, the Robinson R-22, for $250,000 (max payload 176 kg, max range 460 km).
A passenger jet typically uses less fuel per passenger-mile than a car with a single occupant.
Talk about a cherries and watermelon comparison.
This is true only on a large airliner that is mostly full (with economy class passengers). My 2018 model Prius (very nice, I rode in a friend's new Lexus costing more than twice as much, and it was only a slightly better experience) gets an honest 51 MPG (averaged over 30,000 miles). This Wikipedia list shows only 9% of the airliners listed can match that if only half full, and smallest of these seats 135 people, which is also the highest mileage airplane listed, the Airbus A220-300 (127 MPG). It would have to have at least 55 people on board (i.e. be more than 40% full) to match or beat the Prius. Getting the same mileage for a vehicle with 55 passengers vs 1 is not that impressive. You should try comparing them to buses, the buses will beat the pants off of them.
In many ways self-navigation in air is simpler than self navigating cars, which is a nearly mature technology. In air you don't have to follow roads, stay in lanes, account for and merge with constant traffic, or avoid as many obstacles. Just "Go north by northwest and fly higher than power lines and wind turbines". Take off and landing may be tricky to implement reliably for all scenarios.
Not if this massively increases the number of flying vehicles, especially at low altitudes. Self-navigation in air will remain simpler in many ways, but they will almost certainly be required to operate in "air lanes" to restrict their impact on the ground.
Race is an outmoded concept, and they were by definition the same species if they could interbreed, so one finally has to accept that they were just humans with different groups of genes.
The ability to interbreed does not necessarily make them a single species. The concept of strict sexual reproductive isolation is a limiting case for the definition of species for sexual species (it is useless for asexual ones). When breeding sterility between populations exists it definitely indicates different species.
But H.s.sapiens and H.s. neanderthalensis (and the Denisovans) are considered sub-species currently.
The burden is upon the original claimant to show there is support for his ideas. Let him/her do so, otherwise there is no point in wasting any time on it.
You could equally well argue the other way. There's no way to estimate how many of our genes were Neanderthal in source, because most of them were identical in the two populations.
Untrue. The different proportions of inheritance of the unique alleles from the two species allows us to directly measure how much admixture there was.
Here is a "water analogy". If you have to buckets of water, and add a drop of dye A to one and a drop of dye B to the other, and then you have a sample that is an unknown mixture of the two buckets, it is a simple matter to tell what the mixture proportion is. It is the relative change in concentration of dyes A and B in the sample. It would be absurd to argue that there is no way to estimate this since the vast majority of molecules in the buckets are identical (being water).
You are way over-selling this idea that "species are fictional" based solely on the the fact that there is not a sharp division (based on the possibility of reproduction)in every case of speciation. If A cannot breed with C there is absolutely no doubt that they are different species. Nothing fictional about. The existence of B that can interbreed with either does not change that at all. Suppose B did not exist (maybe it never did, or did once and died out). Are A and C now separate species (without being any different) but weren't if (or while) B existed? That would be a bizarre result.
The definition of "species" you are applying is only one of several (due to differences in biology there cannot be just one definition, what is termed "reproductively isolated sexual species" (and is a useless definition for species with asexual reproduction for example) and is an extreme case and end result of speciation. Well before that point there are different breeding populations, often due the behavioral isolation -- that is, it isn't an accident of geography, it is the populations genetics (reflected in their behavior) that are keeping them separate. This is perfectly reasonable basis for regarding them as separate species.
This is not at all unusual in science. Many (perhaps most) systems of classification of natural entities have intermediate forms that prevent sharp boundaries in every case. Cloud types for example, or mineral types, and so forth have boundary cases that resemble different categories.
Or to use another example it would be silly to claim that the concept of "French" and "Italian" as separate languages is fictional since there is a continuum of mutually intelligible local dialects stretching between France and Italy. There is a continuum of dialects but French and Italian are mutually unintelligible, and have different vocabularies and grammars (though they are related).
If you look at photos of the post-shredded picture, you see that it is only half shredded (the upper part with the balloon is unshredded) which holds the picture together, and that the image of the girl is still intact, just hanging together in strips. So any claim that is is "destroyed" is factually false. At worst it is "damaged". If the buyer wanted to they could reframe it, with the strips carefully glued down and only close inspection would tell the difference.
Bansky has used this image many times. This is not his only "Girl with Balloon" image, but it is now his most famous one. How can that not add to its value, even if you dismiss the high end art world as pretentious gits? Fame has always been associated directly with value in art.
Looking at the post-shred state it does look like a modern conceptual art installation piece (whether you respect that or not is irrelevant). This piece now has a story: the piece of art is what Banksy intended it to be, a dynamic object that changed its state upon be acquired (but without the acquirer knowing about the state change in advance). If the buyer decides they are upset about the final state of the piece, they might be able to get the purchase contract rescinded on the grounds that what they were buying was not fully disclosed, but that depend on the fine print of what they agreed to when they registered to bid. But I bet if they are upset they can resell it for more than they just paid. Famous, you know.
Last I checked there did not seem to be any statement by the new owner.
Dark matter never panned out, and the information out there seems well-reasoned.
Dark matter never panned out?
Sort of like how "evolution never panned out"?
Dark matter has piled up over a dozen different pieces of observational evidence over the years that have been been consistent with each other. Just read the Wikipedia page, it summarizes the different types of evidence that have been uncovered, and has lots of links to the original research.
The McCulloch-written press release (yes, that is what it is) you link to may indeed "seem well-reasoned"*, but only if you aren't familiar with how well confirmed dark matter is. McCulloch apparently believes that the galactic rotation evidence, the first evidence that clearly revealed its existence (there were actually older observations that hinted at it) is really the only evidence there is, so that if he "explains" the rotation differently, dark matter goes away. Actually his theory would have a serious problem since it wouldn't be consistent with all the other observational evidence. He seems utterly unaware of that.
And he is flatly wrong in some of his claims. His assertion that "There is also a philosophical objection: arbitrary models like dark matter are insidious because they can be fudged to be right for the wrong reasons, and dark matter has to be adjusted arbitrarily for each galaxy separately, so it is not predictive." is bizarre. There is nothing "arbitrary: about dark matter, it has gravitational effects and mass distributions that can be measured and mapped.
*Even within the allowance I make above, it is not "well reasoned at all", it is instead a littany of boasts and unsupported claims. Little reasoning is provided.
And then there his promise to explain the "em-drive", an effect that has entirely disappeared when subjected to sufficiently rigorous test procedures.
It is a thankless task perhaps to take on anonymous BS, the logical fail here is notable.
Cheap and efficient energy storage could in fact kill solar power, it just would not be able to compete with far more reliable energy sources to charge them up. I'm not sure even if solar power were free that it could compete because the demands for storage would still price it out of existence.
Wow. Cheap efficient energy storage will kill even free solar energy by pricing it out of existence. Who knew?
Grid scale battery technology is getting a lot of study now, but there isn't yet much market demand, and so the focus is more on basic research at this point, rather pushing for commercializing. Lithium is not going to be used on a large scale, you see it in limited use right now simply because it is available because of other markets (like vehicles). Sodium ion batteries, look very promising. They are cousins of lithium ion batteries, but with much cheaper raw materials.
Pumped hydro definitely works and is cost effective, and with HVDC transmission lines the actual site of storage can be a thousands of kilometers from the power source, but there are a finite number of good sites for pumped storage even if you take all of Europe. It is hard to find numbers for the limits of future pumped storage capacity. Not much work seems to have been done on assessing this.
But they are getting cheaper power at all other times. The reason that wind capacity is increasing is that is a less expensive source of power. I guess those other users are also being "forced" to buy cheaper power then?
Because Europe is not going to take any measures to keep their grid stable?
I sort of suspect that they are going keep that a high priority as wind capacity is installed, just as they do now and have always done. A whole array of measures are available (long distance transmission to even things out, pumped storage, battery storage, having sectors that can shut down or reduce demand when needed, postpone planned maintenance outages, etc.). Even the pessimistic analyses of fossil fuel proponents admit that the stability problems they predict won't start showing up until the penetration reaches about 30%. This forecast has it increasing to only 27%.
Also the emphasis on randomness is odd, since wind patterns are not in fact random at all, and are predictable with very good accuracy several days out.
We aren't talking about the wind blowing on your lawn, but across a huge subcontinent.
Geographically large countries like Australia emit more carbon per capita than comparable but more compact countries like Austria, which has almost the same per capita GDP. Rich countries like Japan emit more carbon than poor ones like Zimbabwe, which has almost the same land area.
What this means is that there are endless arguments you can make about who is the most carbon-virtuous country on the planet, because every country is a special case.
...
So we shouldn't judge countries by how much carbon they emit, but by the steps they could be taking to reduce their carbon footprint.
You basic point is valid but I do want to point that there useful ways to compare countries. What is most significant is energy intensiveness, the amount of energy used for product each unit of GDP. This automatically levels out differences in wealth alone, and reveals countries that can do better by simply mimicking less intensive, but similarly wealthy countries.
Here is useful map, it was prepared in 2015 from the latest data then available (2011) but since depicts countries in broad intensity categories a map of the world today (if we had one) would most likely be identical.
A very clear pattern is that energy exporting countries, regardless of size, tend to be more intensive than ones that aren't. Thus Russia, Iran, Libya, Canada, Syria, are in the top intensity tier. There are some non-energy exporters that are in the same tier: China, South Africa and Ukraine principally. The U.S. is in the next tier down. Despite what some here like to claim the U.S. in not a net exporter of energy - our net petroleum import has four times the energy content of the coal we export.
Slashdot Mirror
The name of our moon is Luna. Luna orbits (the Barycenter between itself and) Terra.
Luna is the Latin name for the Moon, but the IAU adopted the English name as its official designation in 1919. They also adopted the Earth for the Earth (but no official name for the Sun, though it uses the Sun in its publications).
If you we were still using Latin as our scientific language they would of chosen Terra and Luna, but they didn't.
The International Astronomical Union was formed in 1919 in part because of the need for systematic names and definitions (like constellation boundaries) that had become urgent with the advent of astrophotography that was generating huge amounts of sky maps. At its founding it officially confirmed the designation we use for the known planets, and the Moon. But not the Sun. It does however in its various materials use "Sun" as the name for the Sun, including labeling its official symbol for the Sun, and this is the default name for the Sun in science. But Spanish, Portuguese, or Swedish scientists often use Sol, their native language use for Sun (as would presumably any native Latin speakers, if there were any). I don't know if Chinese scientists use the Chinese name for Sun or not*.
*This is a joke (since Chinese uses ideograms).
At least you know exactly what a moonmoon is when you hear it. I will believe this story when I see it with my own two eyes.
You mean your one eyeeye?
How in the hell would the USA experience energy shortages? The USA already exports coal. If the USA isn't a net exporter of oil by now it will be one soon, same for natural gas.
I am not agreeing with the "energy shortage" notion at all, but the US is definitely not a "net exporter of oil". The U.S. was a net oil importer at the end of September with 3.065 million barrels a day being imported net (that is 1.8E13 BTU). US natural gas imports and exports almost exactly balance, at the beginning of the year net was zero, the average so far for 2018 was 0.87 BCF/day (9.0E11 BTU, about 10% of production), and the amount of coal we export is 295,000 short tons a day (5.9E12 BTU) so the US is still a net importer of energy to the tune of 1.1E13 BTU a day. Oil production will have to grow another 20% before the US is energy neutral, though at the current rate of growth that might be just after the end of 2019.
Nuclear power output has been growing even though few nuclear reactors have been built in the last 40 years. Upgrades and improved techniques have allowed for greater and greater output from the existing fleet of nuclear power plants.
That was true, but U.S. nuclear power output plateaued almost 20 years ago, and the high point in output was 2007, though it has been essentially flat with only minor year-to-year fluctuations.
There's been a rough restart of building new nuclear power reactors but it's fairly certain that this will be resolved shortly and more new power reactors will be coming online soon.
Oh dear. I don't know how to break this to you but, no, its not. Really its not.
The sad state of nuclear power projects in the U.S. is written here. In the World Nuclear Association tables of reactors under construction, planned or proposed reactors there are 29 projects in U.S. listed with something like 40 units. Licenses are secured for many, loan guarantees are available and awarded for some, but not one of these looks likely to ever operate at this point.
We have been building nuclear power plants recently. We just haven't been finishing them. Eleven reactor projects were started in 2008, or soon after. Nine of them were abandoned, and the last two haven't been cancelled (yet) but they are hugely over budget and their condition looks terminal (the Vogtle AP1000 Gen III+ plants).The only reactor that has started up in the last 22 years actually started construction 45 years ago. And Westinghouse, the creator and sponsor of that AP1000 Gen III+ design, the great nuke hope for lower cost reactors, went bankrupt last year and Toshiba, which bought them has decided to get out of the nuclear power business entirely.
There are nuke-nuts who post here proclaiming that NuScale Power is building 12 tiny (60 MW) reactors, but they aren't - at least not yet. A couple of licenses have been issued (like dozens of other non-built plants) but there are no plans for a ground breaking, no one has put up the money for even one of them, and no site for an actual reactor has been selected.
The wind industry is doing well.
No disagreement there.
Except it's not reality. The Indians have already announced their plans to build 370 new coal fired power plants over the next three decades, climate change be damned.
You need to keep up with reality. They no doubt did announce plans to build 370 new coal fired power plants, but have already cancelled most of them. As of August 23, 2018 the number of coal plants currently planned or under construction has fallen to 102 with 581 plans cancelled or shelved, or plants closed in the past 8 years. And at the time that article was written "India’s coal-fired pre-construction project pipeline has shrunk by a quarter in the last six months".
So India's previous plans for coal are rapidly being scrapped as I type.
The average speed of travel of Atlantic hurricanes depends on latitude (and there is considerable variance). They are slowest between 15-25 N (17.5 km/h) but accelerates as the move north (or south, but they don't cross the equator). By 35-40 N the average is 39 km/h, the one that got to 55-60 N was going 56 km/h. That last speed is pretty good clip for any boat that is not a speed boat, but a ship could maintain position in the eye all the way to landfall. But then you tie up and unload the ship real fast. Of course getting to the eye in a ship is a problem.
The world 2 km rowing record is 18.5 km/h (the Ark can't use sails in the calm eye), but even if Noah can match a racing shell, 2 km isn't going to help much. Long distance ocean rowing records are more like 5 km/h. He'll definitely need some holy power there.
Dubai is certifying the Volocopter for air taxi service it seems. Its published specs are 27 km range at its optimum cruise speed of 70 km/h. Its max payload is 160 kg, but I can't find any statement that says what payload (if any) is assumed for that range limit.
A strong wind would ground it of course. Its max speed (limit range) is 100 km/h.
So it isn't a scam. It does appear to have sufficient performance to be used in a limit air taxi role, say between an airport and a VIP parking/check in area, or a fancy hotel. Also, tourist "see it from the air" services would be about right.
They will be cheaper than helicopters.
Not on current evidence. There is an electric drone multi-motor vehicle on the market right now, the Volocopter (max payload 160 kg, max range 27 km) that has been bought to provide air taxi service in Dubai. It costs $338,000. You can get a bottom end helicopter, the Robinson R-22, for $250,000 (max payload 176 kg, max range 460 km).
A passenger jet typically uses less fuel per passenger-mile than a car with a single occupant.
Talk about a cherries and watermelon comparison.
This is true only on a large airliner that is mostly full (with economy class passengers). My 2018 model Prius (very nice, I rode in a friend's new Lexus costing more than twice as much, and it was only a slightly better experience) gets an honest 51 MPG (averaged over 30,000 miles). This Wikipedia list shows only 9% of the airliners listed can match that if only half full, and smallest of these seats 135 people, which is also the highest mileage airplane listed, the Airbus A220-300 (127 MPG). It would have to have at least 55 people on board (i.e. be more than 40% full) to match or beat the Prius. Getting the same mileage for a vehicle with 55 passengers vs 1 is not that impressive. You should try comparing them to buses, the buses will beat the pants off of them.
The cost of getting into the air is not that high.
What are you comparing it to? The cost of the cheapest helicopter is $250,000. That would put it at the number 4 slot in this list of "most expensive luxury cars".
In many ways self-navigation in air is simpler than self navigating cars, which is a nearly mature technology. In air you don't have to follow roads, stay in lanes, account for and merge with constant traffic, or avoid as many obstacles. Just "Go north by northwest and fly higher than power lines and wind turbines". Take off and landing may be tricky to implement reliably for all scenarios.
Not if this massively increases the number of flying vehicles, especially at low altitudes. Self-navigation in air will remain simpler in many ways, but they will almost certainly be required to operate in "air lanes" to restrict their impact on the ground.
Book of Armaments. Which translation are you using?
The optimum degree of inter-relatedness, as measured by fertility, is one equivalent to being third cousins, see for example this.
Race is an outmoded concept, and they were by definition the same species if they could interbreed, so one finally has to accept that they were just humans with different groups of genes.
The ability to interbreed does not necessarily make them a single species. The concept of strict sexual reproductive isolation is a limiting case for the definition of species for sexual species (it is useless for asexual ones). When breeding sterility between populations exists it definitely indicates different species.
But H.s.sapiens and H.s. neanderthalensis (and the Denisovans) are considered sub-species currently.
The burden is upon the original claimant to show there is support for his ideas. Let him/her do so, otherwise there is no point in wasting any time on it.
You could equally well argue the other way. There's no way to estimate how many of our genes were Neanderthal in source, because most of them were identical in the two populations.
Untrue. The different proportions of inheritance of the unique alleles from the two species allows us to directly measure how much admixture there was.
Here is a "water analogy". If you have to buckets of water, and add a drop of dye A to one and a drop of dye B to the other, and then you have a sample that is an unknown mixture of the two buckets, it is a simple matter to tell what the mixture proportion is. It is the relative change in concentration of dyes A and B in the sample. It would be absurd to argue that there is no way to estimate this since the vast majority of molecules in the buckets are identical (being water).
You are way over-selling this idea that "species are fictional" based solely on the the fact that there is not a sharp division (based on the possibility of reproduction)in every case of speciation. If A cannot breed with C there is absolutely no doubt that they are different species. Nothing fictional about. The existence of B that can interbreed with either does not change that at all. Suppose B did not exist (maybe it never did, or did once and died out). Are A and C now separate species (without being any different) but weren't if (or while) B existed? That would be a bizarre result.
The definition of "species" you are applying is only one of several (due to differences in biology there cannot be just one definition, what is termed "reproductively isolated sexual species" (and is a useless definition for species with asexual reproduction for example) and is an extreme case and end result of speciation. Well before that point there are different breeding populations, often due the behavioral isolation -- that is, it isn't an accident of geography, it is the populations genetics (reflected in their behavior) that are keeping them separate. This is perfectly reasonable basis for regarding them as separate species.
This is not at all unusual in science. Many (perhaps most) systems of classification of natural entities have intermediate forms that prevent sharp boundaries in every case. Cloud types for example, or mineral types, and so forth have boundary cases that resemble different categories.
Or to use another example it would be silly to claim that the concept of "French" and "Italian" as separate languages is fictional since there is a continuum of mutually intelligible local dialects stretching between France and Italy. There is a continuum of dialects but French and Italian are mutually unintelligible, and have different vocabularies and grammars (though they are related).
Some other factors to consider:
If you look at photos of the post-shredded picture, you see that it is only half shredded (the upper part with the balloon is unshredded) which holds the picture together, and that the image of the girl is still intact, just hanging together in strips. So any claim that is is "destroyed" is factually false. At worst it is "damaged". If the buyer wanted to they could reframe it, with the strips carefully glued down and only close inspection would tell the difference.
Bansky has used this image many times. This is not his only "Girl with Balloon" image, but it is now his most famous one. How can that not add to its value, even if you dismiss the high end art world as pretentious gits? Fame has always been associated directly with value in art.
Looking at the post-shred state it does look like a modern conceptual art installation piece (whether you respect that or not is irrelevant). This piece now has a story: the piece of art is what Banksy intended it to be, a dynamic object that changed its state upon be acquired (but without the acquirer knowing about the state change in advance). If the buyer decides they are upset about the final state of the piece, they might be able to get the purchase contract rescinded on the grounds that what they were buying was not fully disclosed, but that depend on the fine print of what they agreed to when they registered to bid. But I bet if they are upset they can resell it for more than they just paid. Famous, you know.
Last I checked there did not seem to be any statement by the new owner.
Several posters have asserted here that high end art is a hobby for people and organizations with more money than they know what to do with. And this is true pretty much (give or take a few value-laden terms).
So, what you are saying is - "Why can't you explain this to me using a car example?".
Dark matter never panned out, and the information out there seems well-reasoned.
Dark matter never panned out?
Sort of like how "evolution never panned out"?
Dark matter has piled up over a dozen different pieces of observational evidence over the years that have been been consistent with each other. Just read the Wikipedia page, it summarizes the different types of evidence that have been uncovered, and has lots of links to the original research.
The McCulloch-written press release (yes, that is what it is) you link to may indeed "seem well-reasoned"*, but only if you aren't familiar with how well confirmed dark matter is. McCulloch apparently believes that the galactic rotation evidence, the first evidence that clearly revealed its existence (there were actually older observations that hinted at it) is really the only evidence there is, so that if he "explains" the rotation differently, dark matter goes away. Actually his theory would have a serious problem since it wouldn't be consistent with all the other observational evidence. He seems utterly unaware of that.
And he is flatly wrong in some of his claims. His assertion that "There is also a philosophical objection: arbitrary models like dark matter are insidious because they can be fudged to be right for the wrong reasons, and dark matter has to be adjusted arbitrarily for each galaxy separately, so it is not predictive." is bizarre. There is nothing "arbitrary: about dark matter, it has gravitational effects and mass distributions that can be measured and mapped.
*Even within the allowance I make above, it is not "well reasoned at all", it is instead a littany of boasts and unsupported claims. Little reasoning is provided.
And then there his promise to explain the "em-drive", an effect that has entirely disappeared when subjected to sufficiently rigorous test procedures.
Anti-solar FUD from an AC. What else is new?
It is a thankless task perhaps to take on anonymous BS, the logical fail here is notable.
Cheap and efficient energy storage could in fact kill solar power, it just would not be able to compete with far more reliable energy sources to charge them up. I'm not sure even if solar power were free that it could compete because the demands for storage would still price it out of existence.
Wow. Cheap efficient energy storage will kill even free solar energy by pricing it out of existence. Who knew?
Grid scale battery technology is getting a lot of study now, but there isn't yet much market demand, and so the focus is more on basic research at this point, rather pushing for commercializing. Lithium is not going to be used on a large scale, you see it in limited use right now simply because it is available because of other markets (like vehicles). Sodium ion batteries, look very promising. They are cousins of lithium ion batteries, but with much cheaper raw materials.
Pumped hydro definitely works and is cost effective, and with HVDC transmission lines the actual site of storage can be a thousands of kilometers from the power source, but there are a finite number of good sites for pumped storage even if you take all of Europe. It is hard to find numbers for the limits of future pumped storage capacity. Not much work seems to have been done on assessing this.
But they are getting cheaper power at all other times. The reason that wind capacity is increasing is that is a less expensive source of power. I guess those other users are also being "forced" to buy cheaper power then?
Because Europe is not going to take any measures to keep their grid stable?
I sort of suspect that they are going keep that a high priority as wind capacity is installed, just as they do now and have always done. A whole array of measures are available (long distance transmission to even things out, pumped storage, battery storage, having sectors that can shut down or reduce demand when needed, postpone planned maintenance outages, etc.). Even the pessimistic analyses of fossil fuel proponents admit that the stability problems they predict won't start showing up until the penetration reaches about 30%. This forecast has it increasing to only 27%.
Also the emphasis on randomness is odd, since wind patterns are not in fact random at all, and are predictable with very good accuracy several days out. We aren't talking about the wind blowing on your lawn, but across a huge subcontinent.
Geographically large countries like Australia emit more carbon per capita than comparable but more compact countries like Austria, which has almost the same per capita GDP. Rich countries like Japan emit more carbon than poor ones like Zimbabwe, which has almost the same land area.
What this means is that there are endless arguments you can make about who is the most carbon-virtuous country on the planet, because every country is a special case.
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So we shouldn't judge countries by how much carbon they emit, but by the steps they could be taking to reduce their carbon footprint.
You basic point is valid but I do want to point that there useful ways to compare countries. What is most significant is energy intensiveness, the amount of energy used for product each unit of GDP. This automatically levels out differences in wealth alone, and reveals countries that can do better by simply mimicking less intensive, but similarly wealthy countries.
Here is useful map, it was prepared in 2015 from the latest data then available (2011) but since depicts countries in broad intensity categories a map of the world today (if we had one) would most likely be identical.
A very clear pattern is that energy exporting countries, regardless of size, tend to be more intensive than ones that aren't. Thus Russia, Iran, Libya, Canada, Syria, are in the top intensity tier. There are some non-energy exporters that are in the same tier: China, South Africa and Ukraine principally. The U.S. is in the next tier down. Despite what some here like to claim the U.S. in not a net exporter of energy - our net petroleum import has four times the energy content of the coal we export.