"Spinning reserve" is required whether you have zero renewable energy or 50% renewable energy. Those conventional plants that are in standby mode are required anyway, and adding renewables doesn't mean more are needed in standby mode. Additionally, modern gas stations can come online extremely quickly - basically, a modern gas station is the core of a Rolls Royce Trent jet engine, and it can throttle up in a power station just as rapidly as it can on a plane on its takeoff roll (in seconds. Of course the power turbine might take a bit longer, but it's measured in at most a few minutes).
In fact, from the point of view of the UK national grid, nuclear or coal power is seen as intermittent and wind power is seen as reliable. The reason is that Sizewell B (a very large nuclear power plant) can suddenly go offline without any warning at all, and suddenly the grid is short of 420MW. However, over a period of an hour, wind and solar are considered extremely reliable. We can easily predict what the wind is going to do over the next hour or so, it won't suddenly start or stop unforecast over a gigantic area. Also wind and solar plants are widely distributed and small. If a wind turbine suddenly goes offline you lose maybe 1MW out of 2GW of power production. So you actually need less spinning reserve for renewables than you do for a large nuclear or coal station because you don't risk suddenly losing all 420MW in an instant like you do with a large power station. Similarly, with solar, you can easily see where the storms are so you can easily predict how the generation is going to change over the next hour.
There isn't just spinning reserve either, high power users like electric furnaces have frequency cutoffs in them. On the UK national grid, when generating capacity is falling behind load, the frequency falls (and conversely, when the load is lighter than capacity, the frequency rises. IIRC they try to keep the frequency between something like 49.9Hz and 50.1Hz). Some industrial users who have equipment that takes days to get up to temperature aren't affected by having the power cut off for a half hour to this piece of equipment, so their contract with National Grid includes a piece of equipment that cuts the power to the equipment if the frequency falls below a certain threshold. This can be used for brief periods of load shedding.
So in summary, no, this is not an issue with solar and wind. The spinning reserve is required anyway, and from the point of view of the grid and the timescales for spinning reserve, wind and solar is actually seen as more reliable than a large coal or nuclear power station because of its distributed nature and the predictability of wind and solar over the short term.
Air running over cooling fins DOES work, otherwise we wouldn't use cooling fins. Your muffler does not have cooling fins.
An aircooled engine does, though. We have an air cooled piston engine in our light aircraft. If air moving over the fins didn't cool the engine, it would in short order turn into molten aluminium and fail - which evidently it doesn't because it can last several thousand hours.
Pot smoking? I've never known pot make anyone violent. In fact I've only known it to make people extremely non-violent. Alcohol - yes, I've seen that make plenty of people violent. Never pot. If anything evidence of pot smoking would indicate someone less likely to be violent.
Lane splitting (or filtering as it's known here) is good. It means you're not stationary at the end of a traffic queue just waiting to be rear ended.
I think most places that ban it, the bans are put in place by jealous car drivers who happen to be in the legislature. They see bikes passing stationary traffic and think that bikes should have to wait with the cars and not have an advantage because it's unfair to car drivers. However, this is cutting your nose off to spite your face - where bikes can filter, it reduces traffic jams because the bikes effectively are no longer taking part in the traffic jam that the cars are in. As an example, imagine a traffic signal with 100 cars and 10 bikes. The traffic signal goes green only long enough for 10 vehicles to get through. Imagine you're in the last vehicle of this queue. If bikes are allowed to filter, you have to wait 10 light cycles to get through, because you are in a 100 car queue and the bikes form a parallel queue of bikes. If bikes are not allowed to filter you get an 11 light cycle delay because now you have 10 more vehicles added to the queue in front of you.
Well, no. If they tie your product rigidly to some server of theirs, yes it might, but really that's a design flaw. A device which you can put in and use settings other than just company sanctioned ones will work years after the original company has long since disappeared.
1. FM and/or DAB radio. 2. Bluetooth interface 3. Steering wheel controls with actual buttons for the most used radio and whateverplayer functions - i.e. volume, previous track, next track, previous station, next station. Less used controls on the front panel of the radio but still physical buttons. Not a touch screen. 4. USB power points.
I don't want a CD player, MP3 player, satnav or anything else. They will be hopelessly outdated in no time and touch screens are quite frankly awful for use in a car, and satnav updates for built-in car systems are generally expensive - compared to TomTom on my iPhone which gets updated automatically. Passengers can bring their own tablet if they want to watch videos in the back seat.
I'd really argue that because who you are is really all in the head, this is a body transplant rather than a head transplant.
TFA says that the idea is still rather speculative, but if it were to work I have to wonder how long it would take the brain in the head that was connected to a new body to figure out how to make the new body work. I doubt all the individual axons would connect perfectly in 1:1 fashion in the same way as it were on the old body. In fact I'd be surprised if any axons connected to the same corresponding one in the new body.
As an aside as a teenager I suffered a very serious injury to my wrist when my right hand went through a pane on a glass door. The glass basically sliced my wrist open to the bone. Aside from losing a lot of blood from the severed arteries, the radial nerve was completely severed and was microsurgically reconnected that night. The radial nerve basically gives your hand sensation from the thumb to the middle finger, and when the nerves first grew back, the sensations would come out in the wrong place - if I touched the inside of my middle finger the sensation would come out elsewhere on the hand. However after a few months things got "remapped" and the sensations all now come out in the correct places. I'd imagine this would be a more serious problem if a nerve that conducts some sensation is now connected to one that's supposed to activate a muscle.
Well it'd take more than 16 - a recent simulation showed an exchange of 50 warheads in a regional conflict would likely cause a "nuclear autumn", reducing the growing season in the United States by up to 60 days. Certainly survivable, but with a lot of suckiness for the rest of the world who had nothing to do with the conflict.
The crucial difference between the atmospheric nuclear tests and an actual nuclear war that you and the other posters have missed is that no one tested nuclear weapons on actual live cities. The nuclear winter is not a direct effect of the actual nuclear detonation, it's actually caused by burning cities. Modern cities are extremely flammable - laced with hydrocarbons and other flammable material - and the soot from the ensuing firestorms would be lofted into the stratosphere. Soot is also vastly more effective than volcanic ash at blocking sunlight (and absorbing infrared).
It's not about the energy released. The nuclear winter is not a direct cause of the nuclear explosion or energy released by a nuclear weapon, it is caused by the cities that burn in huge firestorms for some time afterwards. Volcanic ash isn't like the soot you get from our highly flammable cities (all laced with hydrocarbons, plastics, you name it). The nature of the soot from burning cities has a far greater effect than the ash from a single volcano, blocking far more light and absorbing far more infrared radiation, which in turn heats the stratosphere (destroying ozone, so when it finally dissipates you now have to deal with having no ozone layer).
We all know that Russia and China abuse human rights, China has a great firewall, China for sure logs everyone's traffic. And they don't try to cover up the fact. The Russians don't even try to cover up the fact their elections are not fair, for instance when pressed by a BBC journalist over the way candidates not blessed by Putin were not getting any airtime, the Russian official being interviewed sort of shrugged (I imagine, it was on the radio...) and said, "Yes it wasn't fair, but that's just the Russian way". None of this is news. You don't need a leak to know that Russia rigs elections (they are quite happy to admit they do it), or that China snoops everyone's traffic, because China openly tells everyone that this is what they do.
What is news is the western "free world" claims to be different, and claims to not have a massive surveillance operation going on their entire public, and claims that we are better than Russia or China because of this - when in reality they DO have a massive surveillance drag net and are doing just what Russia and China do but in secret. So that *is* news.
1. The Start menu might not be used a lot but that's not the point. The point is that it's discoverable. It's easy to find something new, like a new desktop program that's been installed. The user can then make a shortcut if they want. It leaves the user feeling in control. 2. Metro and desktop are jarringly different. The primary golden rule of Shneiderman's 8 Golden Rules of user interface design is "strive for consistency". In the past Microsoft have done this, but now they've done the diametric opposite and made an inconsistent interface where half of it works one way, and the other half works another way, and you often suddenly get launched into a completely different user interface.
Let's take a look at the Latter Day Saints. Their "prophet" flies around in a Gulfstream V business jet, which costs several thousand dollars an hour before even considering the purchase price ($millions) and fixed cost. If they really cared about poverty, their prophet would book travel on Southwest Airlines like the rest of us do and direct the money they are currently spending on the jet on things like soup kitchens. Same thing goes for the Catholic Church, incidentally. The Vatican is richer than Creosote.
It's lithium ION, not lithium metal. You know how sodium reacts with water, yet you still put sodium ion on your chips (french fries), because you're using an ionic compound of sodium (sodium chloride). Similarly, lithium ion batteries contain no metallic lithium, only stable lithium compounds.
The violent reactions that lithium ion batteries have when exposed to water are all to do with very high electrical currents. Any battery or electricity storage mechanism that has the ability to discharge these high currents will react in just the same way if short circuited with sea water, yet we still regularly travel on passenger ships with generators that make several megawatts. Keeping ships electrics dry is not a new problem.
Lithium ion batteries are stable so long as you don't actively damage them (physically or by over charging, or discharging at an excessive rate). They are only prone to rupture if you physically rupture them (or abuse them by overcharging or discharging at an excessive rate).
Probably an easier example: imagine this. You have a really good laser pointer. You shine it on one side of the moon and then quickly move it so the spot is now on the other side of the moon. The spot tracks across the moon's surface faster than the speed of light. It won't lag behind. However no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light this way since to actually transmit information from one side of the moon to the other via the laser, you need to make the full round trip to Earth and back.
The same thing happens with the shadow. It can't be used as a faster than light signalling device because the putative sender (at the shadow's starting point) cannot influence what the shadow does at its terminating point without making the full round trip to whatever cast the shadow, so even if the shadow moves across a plane faster than the speed of light, it can't carry any information that way.
No, CRT (televisions in particular) really do make a high pitched whistle, and some of them can be quite loud. It's 15kHz more or less for a TV, and comes from the flyback, and is audible to much of the population. Whether it annoys you or not is dependent on the person, I just tune it out.
No, if you're billing enough that it's worth doing 120 and risking jail (and driving far enough that you'll get a good stretch at that speed), a private aircraft is what you get.
Slashdot Mirror
"Spinning reserve" is required whether you have zero renewable energy or 50% renewable energy. Those conventional plants that are in standby mode are required anyway, and adding renewables doesn't mean more are needed in standby mode. Additionally, modern gas stations can come online extremely quickly - basically, a modern gas station is the core of a Rolls Royce Trent jet engine, and it can throttle up in a power station just as rapidly as it can on a plane on its takeoff roll (in seconds. Of course the power turbine might take a bit longer, but it's measured in at most a few minutes).
In fact, from the point of view of the UK national grid, nuclear or coal power is seen as intermittent and wind power is seen as reliable. The reason is that Sizewell B (a very large nuclear power plant) can suddenly go offline without any warning at all, and suddenly the grid is short of 420MW. However, over a period of an hour, wind and solar are considered extremely reliable. We can easily predict what the wind is going to do over the next hour or so, it won't suddenly start or stop unforecast over a gigantic area. Also wind and solar plants are widely distributed and small. If a wind turbine suddenly goes offline you lose maybe 1MW out of 2GW of power production. So you actually need less spinning reserve for renewables than you do for a large nuclear or coal station because you don't risk suddenly losing all 420MW in an instant like you do with a large power station. Similarly, with solar, you can easily see where the storms are so you can easily predict how the generation is going to change over the next hour.
There isn't just spinning reserve either, high power users like electric furnaces have frequency cutoffs in them. On the UK national grid, when generating capacity is falling behind load, the frequency falls (and conversely, when the load is lighter than capacity, the frequency rises. IIRC they try to keep the frequency between something like 49.9Hz and 50.1Hz). Some industrial users who have equipment that takes days to get up to temperature aren't affected by having the power cut off for a half hour to this piece of equipment, so their contract with National Grid includes a piece of equipment that cuts the power to the equipment if the frequency falls below a certain threshold. This can be used for brief periods of load shedding.
So in summary, no, this is not an issue with solar and wind. The spinning reserve is required anyway, and from the point of view of the grid and the timescales for spinning reserve, wind and solar is actually seen as more reliable than a large coal or nuclear power station because of its distributed nature and the predictability of wind and solar over the short term.
On a point of pedantry, 1821 to now is just 1.9 centuries. Note the plural in the word "centuries".
Air running over cooling fins DOES work, otherwise we wouldn't use cooling fins. Your muffler does not have cooling fins.
An aircooled engine does, though. We have an air cooled piston engine in our light aircraft. If air moving over the fins didn't cool the engine, it would in short order turn into molten aluminium and fail - which evidently it doesn't because it can last several thousand hours.
You've obviously never worked with or known any Russians.
Pot smoking? I've never known pot make anyone violent. In fact I've only known it to make people extremely non-violent. Alcohol - yes, I've seen that make plenty of people violent. Never pot. If anything evidence of pot smoking would indicate someone less likely to be violent.
It reduces drag by a great deal.
All cars should have this really. We're throwing away a lot of fuel by not doing so.
Lane splitting (or filtering as it's known here) is good. It means you're not stationary at the end of a traffic queue just waiting to be rear ended.
I think most places that ban it, the bans are put in place by jealous car drivers who happen to be in the legislature. They see bikes passing stationary traffic and think that bikes should have to wait with the cars and not have an advantage because it's unfair to car drivers. However, this is cutting your nose off to spite your face - where bikes can filter, it reduces traffic jams because the bikes effectively are no longer taking part in the traffic jam that the cars are in. As an example, imagine a traffic signal with 100 cars and 10 bikes. The traffic signal goes green only long enough for 10 vehicles to get through. Imagine you're in the last vehicle of this queue. If bikes are allowed to filter, you have to wait 10 light cycles to get through, because you are in a 100 car queue and the bikes form a parallel queue of bikes. If bikes are not allowed to filter you get an 11 light cycle delay because now you have 10 more vehicles added to the queue in front of you.
Well, no. If they tie your product rigidly to some server of theirs, yes it might, but really that's a design flaw. A device which you can put in and use settings other than just company sanctioned ones will work years after the original company has long since disappeared.
Autoland has been available since the Hawker Siddeley Trident III (the first aircraft to have it) in the early 1970s.
All I want from an in car system is:
1. FM and/or DAB radio.
2. Bluetooth interface
3. Steering wheel controls with actual buttons for the most used radio and whateverplayer functions - i.e. volume, previous track, next track, previous station, next station. Less used controls on the front panel of the radio but still physical buttons. Not a touch screen.
4. USB power points.
I don't want a CD player, MP3 player, satnav or anything else. They will be hopelessly outdated in no time and touch screens are quite frankly awful for use in a car, and satnav updates for built-in car systems are generally expensive - compared to TomTom on my iPhone which gets updated automatically. Passengers can bring their own tablet if they want to watch videos in the back seat.
Sorry, I meant median nerve (the radial artery was severed too)
I'd really argue that because who you are is really all in the head, this is a body transplant rather than a head transplant.
TFA says that the idea is still rather speculative, but if it were to work I have to wonder how long it would take the brain in the head that was connected to a new body to figure out how to make the new body work. I doubt all the individual axons would connect perfectly in 1:1 fashion in the same way as it were on the old body. In fact I'd be surprised if any axons connected to the same corresponding one in the new body.
As an aside as a teenager I suffered a very serious injury to my wrist when my right hand went through a pane on a glass door. The glass basically sliced my wrist open to the bone. Aside from losing a lot of blood from the severed arteries, the radial nerve was completely severed and was microsurgically reconnected that night. The radial nerve basically gives your hand sensation from the thumb to the middle finger, and when the nerves first grew back, the sensations would come out in the wrong place - if I touched the inside of my middle finger the sensation would come out elsewhere on the hand. However after a few months things got "remapped" and the sensations all now come out in the correct places. I'd imagine this would be a more serious problem if a nerve that conducts some sensation is now connected to one that's supposed to activate a muscle.
Well it'd take more than 16 - a recent simulation showed an exchange of 50 warheads in a regional conflict would likely cause a "nuclear autumn", reducing the growing season in the United States by up to 60 days. Certainly survivable, but with a lot of suckiness for the rest of the world who had nothing to do with the conflict.
The crucial difference between the atmospheric nuclear tests and an actual nuclear war that you and the other posters have missed is that no one tested nuclear weapons on actual live cities. The nuclear winter is not a direct effect of the actual nuclear detonation, it's actually caused by burning cities. Modern cities are extremely flammable - laced with hydrocarbons and other flammable material - and the soot from the ensuing firestorms would be lofted into the stratosphere. Soot is also vastly more effective than volcanic ash at blocking sunlight (and absorbing infrared).
It's not about the energy released. The nuclear winter is not a direct cause of the nuclear explosion or energy released by a nuclear weapon, it is caused by the cities that burn in huge firestorms for some time afterwards. Volcanic ash isn't like the soot you get from our highly flammable cities (all laced with hydrocarbons, plastics, you name it). The nature of the soot from burning cities has a far greater effect than the ash from a single volcano, blocking far more light and absorbing far more infrared radiation, which in turn heats the stratosphere (destroying ozone, so when it finally dissipates you now have to deal with having no ozone layer).
I don't think you understand the point.
We all know that Russia and China abuse human rights, China has a great firewall, China for sure logs everyone's traffic. And they don't try to cover up the fact. The Russians don't even try to cover up the fact their elections are not fair, for instance when pressed by a BBC journalist over the way candidates not blessed by Putin were not getting any airtime, the Russian official being interviewed sort of shrugged (I imagine, it was on the radio...) and said, "Yes it wasn't fair, but that's just the Russian way". None of this is news. You don't need a leak to know that Russia rigs elections (they are quite happy to admit they do it), or that China snoops everyone's traffic, because China openly tells everyone that this is what they do.
What is news is the western "free world" claims to be different, and claims to not have a massive surveillance operation going on their entire public, and claims that we are better than Russia or China because of this - when in reality they DO have a massive surveillance drag net and are doing just what Russia and China do but in secret. So that *is* news.
But that ship has already sailed. The classified information is now all public knowledge, it's just stupid still calling it classified.
It's not really that.
1. The Start menu might not be used a lot but that's not the point. The point is that it's discoverable. It's easy to find something new, like a new desktop program that's been installed. The user can then make a shortcut if they want. It leaves the user feeling in control.
2. Metro and desktop are jarringly different. The primary golden rule of Shneiderman's 8 Golden Rules of user interface design is "strive for consistency". In the past Microsoft have done this, but now they've done the diametric opposite and made an inconsistent interface where half of it works one way, and the other half works another way, and you often suddenly get launched into a completely different user interface.
Unfortunately all it does is flip you over to the Metro interface. It doesn't give you a menu.
Let's take a look at the Latter Day Saints. Their "prophet" flies around in a Gulfstream V business jet, which costs several thousand dollars an hour before even considering the purchase price ($millions) and fixed cost. If they really cared about poverty, their prophet would book travel on Southwest Airlines like the rest of us do and direct the money they are currently spending on the jet on things like soup kitchens. Same thing goes for the Catholic Church, incidentally. The Vatican is richer than Creosote.
It's lithium ION, not lithium metal. You know how sodium reacts with water, yet you still put sodium ion on your chips (french fries), because you're using an ionic compound of sodium (sodium chloride). Similarly, lithium ion batteries contain no metallic lithium, only stable lithium compounds.
The violent reactions that lithium ion batteries have when exposed to water are all to do with very high electrical currents. Any battery or electricity storage mechanism that has the ability to discharge these high currents will react in just the same way if short circuited with sea water, yet we still regularly travel on passenger ships with generators that make several megawatts. Keeping ships electrics dry is not a new problem.
Lithium ion batteries are stable so long as you don't actively damage them (physically or by over charging, or discharging at an excessive rate). They are only prone to rupture if you physically rupture them (or abuse them by overcharging or discharging at an excessive rate).
No it won't.
Probably an easier example: imagine this. You have a really good laser pointer. You shine it on one side of the moon and then quickly move it so the spot is now on the other side of the moon. The spot tracks across the moon's surface faster than the speed of light. It won't lag behind. However no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light this way since to actually transmit information from one side of the moon to the other via the laser, you need to make the full round trip to Earth and back.
The same thing happens with the shadow. It can't be used as a faster than light signalling device because the putative sender (at the shadow's starting point) cannot influence what the shadow does at its terminating point without making the full round trip to whatever cast the shadow, so even if the shadow moves across a plane faster than the speed of light, it can't carry any information that way.
That's the whole point of public key cryptography - there's no need to exchange any secrets for the cryptography to happen.
No, CRT (televisions in particular) really do make a high pitched whistle, and some of them can be quite loud. It's 15kHz more or less for a TV, and comes from the flyback, and is audible to much of the population. Whether it annoys you or not is dependent on the person, I just tune it out.
No, if you're billing enough that it's worth doing 120 and risking jail (and driving far enough that you'll get a good stretch at that speed), a private aircraft is what you get.