No, TFA is confusing statistics of individual flywheels with clusters of them. The individual 25 kwh flywheels are grouped into modular clusters of 10: each of these 10-unit modules delivers 250 kwh (1 MW for 15 mins), and is the size of a couple of cargo containers. See this white paper from the manufacturer.
Beacon Power flywheel:
1 meter wide x 2 meters high
25 kilowatt-hours energy storage
NGK Sodium-sulfur (NaS) battery:
1 meter wide x 2 meters high
375 kilowatt-hours energy storage
The sodium-sulfur battery stores 15 times the energy. Nobody will quote a price for either on the Internet, but since they're devices of similar size and complexity, their costs are probably similar.
My worry isn't rolling stones, it's shrapnel. Beacon Power's flywheels store 25 kwh of electrical energy. If the rotor fails, this energy will be released in a fraction of a second, causing an explosion with the same energy as 20 kg of TNT. But TNT releases most of its energy in the form of heat, which is imperfectly converted to kinetic energy, while the flywheels will release pure kinetic energy. And it's kinetic energy that kills people. You'd better hope the engineer who designed the metal casing for the flywheel knew what he was doing!
While I agree that asbestos hazards are overrated, I won't go as far as you. Even if the risk is small, there's no reason to keep using it since good alternatives exist.
But back on topic, Issarik's analogy doesn't work, because the anti-GM folks aren't balancing real risk vs real benefits (what you did with asbestos), they're balancing the *fear* of risk vs real benefits.
(there is very little to distinguish between what progressives call "modern" values and those of the Roman Empire)
..apart from slavery, colonial hegemony, autocracy, military control of the state, massive government corruption, starvation as a political tool, suppression of religious freedom, capital punishment, and torture of political prisoners for the entertainment of the masses.
I've got no problem with people having a say in what foods they eat. But it's worth pointing out that, so far, potato blight has contributed to the deaths of millions of people, while GM crops have killed exactly nobody.
Yes, there were extenuating political circumstances for potato blight deaths, and yes, the GM folks are worried about the future, not the past, but it seems to me that dismissing the known body count as irrelevant is the first sign of political extremism.
I was with you until you said "most". Anti-technology progressives are in the minority, they're just really freaking loud and obnoxious.
Can I take a moment to bash both anti-technology progressives (your "progluddites") and conservatives with big-screen TVs and SUVs? Technological progression and social/political progression are inextricably linked. Demanding 21st century technology with 18th century social values, or vice versa, is as perverse as demanding a horse-drawn carriage with Bluetooth.
Keep in mind, this is not really a book library. UChicago says it will "primarily house materials like serials, periodicals, and other materials that are already online, as well as rare and fragile materials that should not be kept on open shelves"
Which is to say, stuff you wouldn't go browsing for anyway.
Does the Internet have a copy of "Proceedings and plans for the completion of the Chicago, St. Paul & Fond du Lac Rail-Road, from Chicago to Oshkosh", published in 1859? (http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/3577896) No? Didn't think so. How about "Sturiella minor: a fossil plant showing structure from the Carboniferous of Illinois", a UChicago student thesis from 1924? (http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/4512895) No? Didn't think so.
If your response is "who would ever need to know that kinda crap?", you don't understand the first thing about academic research. If your response is "why not just digitize these and put them online?" then you'll be glad to know that they built a digitization lab as part of this new library to do exactly that. But that work takes time. Years.
The Internet is great, but some things aren't on the Internet. Some things are very very hard to put on the Internet, due to copyright issues, age issues, and manpower problems. The Internet, for all its glory, often actually *reduces* the variety of information available: have you noticed that when you Google something, the first hit is Wikipedia, and the rest of the page is people plagiarizing Wikipedia? It's crucial that information networks from the past be integrated into the network of the present, or we stand to lose our history.
Setting up physical stacks so you can browse through them is a hardware solution to a software problem. Your average Slashdot reader could easily modify a library search engine so when you click on a book, it shows you a sidebar containing several books a semi-random distance away in Library of Congress number.
Point taken, this is the one part of my post which I haven't actually done personally. I assumed daughter product gammas would be undetectable due to their long half-life.
Radiology is a very analog science... the digital 1s and 0s types have a rough time in radiology.
I gotta disagree. What could be more "ones and zeroes" than radioactive decay? It's the ultimate yes-or-no question.
"Point it at a smoke detector" won't work: the americium in smoke detectors emits alpha radiation, which can't penetrate the walls of the detector. There's no sense messing around here: if you want to do it, do it right. You will need a little bit of money and the ability to do math.
Buy a calibrated radiation source: you can buy them here, among other places. They're relatively cheap -- tens of dollars. Cs137 is very easy to get, but you also might want to get some Sr90, which is a pure beta emitter. These sealed disks contain such a tiny amount of radioactive material that the risk to health from them is negligible, and they can be mailed and used without a license. However, I do not know mailing them internationally is legal or wise.
(The same company will also sell you a lead container to hold your sources in, but I'll tell you from personal experience that quite a few gamma rays will go right through the container.)
Put the source in front of the detector, a short distance away. If your detector is working, it should start clicking/beeping like crazy. Calculate the count rate. By working out the geometry, looking up the properties of your source, and converting curies to counts per second (hey, nobody said this would be easy), you can work out the "efficiency" of the detector. Move the source farther from the detector: the counts should fall off as an inverse square law.
Now that the detector is calibrated, you can use that efficiency factor to calculate the radioactivity of an *unknown* source.
Important note: while these sources are generally considered safe, the radiation they emit will be *many* orders of magnitude more than any contamination in Japanese food products. You can look at this fact in two ways: either this shows that concerns about food safety are overblown, or suggests that the best way to protect yourself from unnecessary radiation is to not do this experiment.
If you don't have access to or don't want to buy calibrated radiation sources, you can buy yourself some "No Salt" salt substitute, which is food-grade potassium chloride. The naturally radioactive potassium-40 in it is easily detectable with a good Geiger counter: you can look up the natural abundance of 40K and do a little chemistry to figure out the number of curies in a carefully measured gram of KCl, and use it as a calibration standard.
Your friend was an idiot to suggest that democracy consists of self rule. It's majority rule, to which we've added a short list of individual freedoms. The result is not a system which lets you do whatever you want. Instead, it lets most of the people do most of what they think is right, most of the time.
Systems which let you do whatever you want have been tried. They generally let the guy who's willing and able to use force to do what *he* wants, while everyone else gets to cower in fear.
See, that's the thing. Some of it isn't sasquatch science. The challenge we're struggling with in the sciences is how to bail out of the physical-paper-and-copyright fiasco that is traditional publishing, while maintaining the useful peer review, editing, and reputation services the traditional publishers provide. It's an evolutionary process, and ArXiv is a duckbill platypus in that evolution.
That's exactly what I *did* use to create my figure. Though I had to use uninterpolated OLR data to get March 2011 data. Both data sets we've linked to are at 2.5 degree resolution. That doesn't prove that the paper's authors don't have access to higher resolution data, but no high-res data is available at the link they cite, and, I find it extraordinarily suspicious that their little blobs of peak OLR are spaced at exact multiples of 2.5 degrees apart, and lie exactly on the grid boxes for the ESRL data.
You can generate figures for yourself that match the article's figures very neatly.
No I cannot. Or rather, I can, but only by engaging in statistical and graphical flimflammery. You try it.
As for the rest of your points: 1: Yes, contentious, but I'm quoting the geology party line here. The extraordinary claim is that despite seismological evidence to the contrary, earthquakes are preceded by warning signs: that claim is the one which requires extraordinary proof. 2: Very clear. The fault in question is in 7 km of water, close to a gigapascal of pressure. Because of Henry's Law, you don't have gaseous bubbles of anything at that pressure: all gases are in liquid solution. Thus, the gas molecules move with the water. Which is sloooowly. 3: The figures do not match the expected behavior of a plume of material released from a point source on the Japanese coast.
Oh, while we're quoting figures in the article, how about Figure 3, which show OLR "events" in Tohoku which are as large or larger than the ones they're interested in, occuring on Feb 22, 2011, and Jan 28, 2010. These are ignored because they're not larger than the error bars. But these error bars are bullshit: do we really believe that the natural variability of weather on March 9 is one sixth as much as on Feb 24? I sure don't. They're computing standard deviations using 6 data points, which is a recipe for disaster.
No, the atmosphere did not heat up rapidly as a result of the quake. This article is total bullshit.
1) Geology: There is no "buildup of unusual stresses" in the days before an earthquake. The stresses build up over decades: the only thing that changes suddenly is the Earth's motion in response to them.
2) Oceanography: Any radioactive gases released by the fault (the mechanism claimed by the authors) would be released *at the bottom of the ocean*. From there it would have to dissolve in the ocean and be carried to the surface. This takes a *LONG* time.
3) Meteorology: Any gases released will mix rapidly in the atmosphere, forming a plume stretching hundreds of miles from the source in a matter of hours. It will not form a coherent blob hovering over the fault.
4) Statistics : the plot in question is supposedly based on "NOAA OLR data". It's been massaged to within an inch of its life, using a statistical technique which is highly sensitive to what happened not just during 2011, but to the vagaries of weather in 2006-2010. The result is a massive exercise in small-number statistics, which is then amplified by:
5) Data visualization: Notice that the OLR "spikes" form nice concentric circles, and they seem to line up along a latitude line. Why? Because what you're seeing is data smoothed to a radius smaller than the actual size of the atmosphere being measured. The link below is to the *actual* raw NOAA AVHRR OLR data over Japan: there are only 9 real data points in the field of view shown by TFA, and they do not show any sign of a peak in OLR over northern Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
Now imagine an ultracentrifuge with 50 times as much energy as the one you've used. Still feel safe?
No, TFA is confusing statistics of individual flywheels with clusters of them. The individual 25 kwh flywheels are grouped into modular clusters of 10: each of these 10-unit modules delivers 250 kwh (1 MW for 15 mins), and is the size of a couple of cargo containers. See this white paper from the manufacturer.
I'm not sure, but I wanna know what you're thinking. Is there something on your mind?
Beacon Power flywheel:
1 meter wide x 2 meters high
25 kilowatt-hours energy storage
NGK Sodium-sulfur (NaS) battery:
1 meter wide x 2 meters high
375 kilowatt-hours energy storage
The sodium-sulfur battery stores 15 times the energy. Nobody will quote a price for either on the Internet, but since they're devices of similar size and complexity, their costs are probably similar.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.test.bpa.gov%2Fenergy%2Fn%2F%2Ftech%2Fenergyweb%2Fdocs%2FEnergy%2520Storage%2FNGK-Paper.PDF&rct=j&q=ngk%20nas%20kwh%20specifications&ei=CnzmTZCLJ4nVgAe-xv2hCw&usg=AFQjCNHUPF1Q-55yAVfzjDOxGWY_gUuCaQ
My worry isn't rolling stones, it's shrapnel. Beacon Power's flywheels store 25 kwh of electrical energy. If the rotor fails, this energy will be released in a fraction of a second, causing an explosion with the same energy as 20 kg of TNT. But TNT releases most of its energy in the form of heat, which is imperfectly converted to kinetic energy, while the flywheels will release pure kinetic energy. And it's kinetic energy that kills people. You'd better hope the engineer who designed the metal casing for the flywheel knew what he was doing!
While I agree that asbestos hazards are overrated, I won't go as far as you. Even if the risk is small, there's no reason to keep using it since good alternatives exist.
But back on topic, Issarik's analogy doesn't work, because the anti-GM folks aren't balancing real risk vs real benefits (what you did with asbestos), they're balancing the *fear* of risk vs real benefits.
What was your point again?
I've got no problem with people having a say in what foods they eat. But it's worth pointing out that, so far, potato blight has contributed to the deaths of millions of people, while GM crops have killed exactly nobody.
Yes, there were extenuating political circumstances for potato blight deaths, and yes, the GM folks are worried about the future, not the past, but it seems to me that dismissing the known body count as irrelevant is the first sign of political extremism.
I was with you until you said "most". Anti-technology progressives are in the minority, they're just really freaking loud and obnoxious.
Can I take a moment to bash both anti-technology progressives (your "progluddites") and conservatives with big-screen TVs and SUVs? Technological progression and social/political progression are inextricably linked. Demanding 21st century technology with 18th century social values, or vice versa, is as perverse as demanding a horse-drawn carriage with Bluetooth.
8000 credit cards? Wow, that's twice as many cards as were stolen from TJX Companies in A SINGLE HOUR between 2005-2007.
Australia, I love you. You're both terrifyingly tough and adorably tiny. Like a snarling chihuahua.
I've said on numerous occasions that if there's a state that's really in need of a socialist revolultion, it's modern China.
A naive pipe dream.
Math fail. You're off by a factor of 2000. Try again.
I call bullshit. Copyright has expired on these books: prove your claim by posting a link to them.
I have a feeling your ebook site has a page for the book titles, but not the books themselves.
Keep in mind, this is not really a book library. UChicago says it will "primarily house materials like serials, periodicals, and other materials that are already online, as well as rare and fragile materials that should not be kept on open shelves"
Which is to say, stuff you wouldn't go browsing for anyway.
Does the Internet have a copy of "Proceedings and plans for the completion of the Chicago, St. Paul & Fond du Lac Rail-Road, from Chicago to Oshkosh", published in 1859? (http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/3577896) No? Didn't think so. How about "Sturiella minor: a fossil plant showing structure from the Carboniferous of Illinois", a UChicago student thesis from 1924? (http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/4512895) No? Didn't think so.
If your response is "who would ever need to know that kinda crap?", you don't understand the first thing about academic research. If your response is "why not just digitize these and put them online?" then you'll be glad to know that they built a digitization lab as part of this new library to do exactly that. But that work takes time. Years.
The Internet is great, but some things aren't on the Internet. Some things are very very hard to put on the Internet, due to copyright issues, age issues, and manpower problems. The Internet, for all its glory, often actually *reduces* the variety of information available: have you noticed that when you Google something, the first hit is Wikipedia, and the rest of the page is people plagiarizing Wikipedia? It's crucial that information networks from the past be integrated into the network of the present, or we stand to lose our history.
For more on this, read "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinge.
Setting up physical stacks so you can browse through them is a hardware solution to a software problem. Your average Slashdot reader could easily modify a library search engine so when you click on a book, it shows you a sidebar containing several books a semi-random distance away in Library of Congress number.
1) Your library has 1/4 as much storage.
2) Your library doesn't look like this:
http://www.uchicago.edu/features/20110520_mansueto/
Point taken, this is the one part of my post which I haven't actually done personally. I assumed daughter product gammas would be undetectable due to their long half-life.
I gotta disagree. What could be more "ones and zeroes" than radioactive decay? It's the ultimate yes-or-no question.
"Point it at a smoke detector" won't work: the americium in smoke detectors emits alpha radiation, which can't penetrate the walls of the detector. There's no sense messing around here: if you want to do it, do it right. You will need a little bit of money and the ability to do math.
Buy a calibrated radiation source: you can buy them here, among other places. They're relatively cheap -- tens of dollars. Cs137 is very easy to get, but you also might want to get some Sr90, which is a pure beta emitter. These sealed disks contain such a tiny amount of radioactive material that the risk to health from them is negligible, and they can be mailed and used without a license. However, I do not know mailing them internationally is legal or wise.
(The same company will also sell you a lead container to hold your sources in, but I'll tell you from personal experience that quite a few gamma rays will go right through the container.)
Put the source in front of the detector, a short distance away. If your detector is working, it should start clicking/beeping like crazy. Calculate the count rate. By working out the geometry, looking up the properties of your source, and converting curies to counts per second (hey, nobody said this would be easy), you can work out the "efficiency" of the detector. Move the source farther from the detector: the counts should fall off as an inverse square law.
Now that the detector is calibrated, you can use that efficiency factor to calculate the radioactivity of an *unknown* source.
Important note: while these sources are generally considered safe, the radiation they emit will be *many* orders of magnitude more than any contamination in Japanese food products. You can look at this fact in two ways: either this shows that concerns about food safety are overblown, or suggests that the best way to protect yourself from unnecessary radiation is to not do this experiment.
If you don't have access to or don't want to buy calibrated radiation sources, you can buy yourself some "No Salt" salt substitute, which is food-grade potassium chloride. The naturally radioactive potassium-40 in it is easily detectable with a good Geiger counter: you can look up the natural abundance of 40K and do a little chemistry to figure out the number of curies in a carefully measured gram of KCl, and use it as a calibration standard.
Your friend was an idiot to suggest that democracy consists of self rule. It's majority rule, to which we've added a short list of individual freedoms. The result is not a system which lets you do whatever you want. Instead, it lets most of the people do most of what they think is right, most of the time.
Systems which let you do whatever you want have been tried. They generally let the guy who's willing and able to use force to do what *he* wants, while everyone else gets to cower in fear.
See, that's the thing. Some of it isn't sasquatch science. The challenge we're struggling with in the sciences is how to bail out of the physical-paper-and-copyright fiasco that is traditional publishing, while maintaining the useful peer review, editing, and reputation services the traditional publishers provide. It's an evolutionary process, and ArXiv is a duckbill platypus in that evolution.
That's exactly what I *did* use to create my figure. Though I had to use uninterpolated OLR data to get March 2011 data. Both data sets we've linked to are at 2.5 degree resolution. That doesn't prove that the paper's authors don't have access to higher resolution data, but no high-res data is available at the link they cite, and, I find it extraordinarily suspicious that their little blobs of peak OLR are spaced at exact multiples of 2.5 degrees apart, and lie exactly on the grid boxes for the ESRL data.
No I cannot. Or rather, I can, but only by engaging in statistical and graphical flimflammery. You try it.
As for the rest of your points:
1: Yes, contentious, but I'm quoting the geology party line here. The extraordinary claim is that despite seismological evidence to the contrary, earthquakes are preceded by warning signs: that claim is the one which requires extraordinary proof.
2: Very clear. The fault in question is in 7 km of water, close to a gigapascal of pressure. Because of Henry's Law, you don't have gaseous bubbles of anything at that pressure: all gases are in liquid solution. Thus, the gas molecules move with the water. Which is sloooowly.
3: The figures do not match the expected behavior of a plume of material released from a point source on the Japanese coast.
Oh, while we're quoting figures in the article, how about Figure 3, which show OLR "events" in Tohoku which are as large or larger than the ones they're interested in, occuring on Feb 22, 2011, and Jan 28, 2010. These are ignored because they're not larger than the error bars. But these error bars are bullshit: do we really believe that the natural variability of weather on March 9 is one sixth as much as on Feb 24? I sure don't. They're computing standard deviations using 6 data points, which is a recipe for disaster.
No, the atmosphere did not heat up rapidly as a result of the quake. This article is total bullshit.
1) Geology: There is no "buildup of unusual stresses" in the days before an earthquake. The stresses build up over decades: the only thing that changes suddenly is the Earth's motion in response to them.
2) Oceanography: Any radioactive gases released by the fault (the mechanism claimed by the authors) would be released *at the bottom of the ocean*. From there it would have to dissolve in the ocean and be carried to the surface. This takes a *LONG* time.
3) Meteorology: Any gases released will mix rapidly in the atmosphere, forming a plume stretching hundreds of miles from the source in a matter of hours. It will not form a coherent blob hovering over the fault.
4) Statistics : the plot in question is supposedly based on "NOAA OLR data". It's been massaged to within an inch of its life, using a statistical technique which is highly sensitive to what happened not just during 2011, but to the vagaries of weather in 2006-2010. The result is a massive exercise in small-number statistics, which is then amplified by:
5) Data visualization: Notice that the OLR "spikes" form nice concentric circles, and they seem to line up along a latitude line. Why? Because what you're seeing is data smoothed to a radius smaller than the actual size of the atmosphere being measured. The link below is to the *actual* raw NOAA AVHRR OLR data over Japan: there are only 9 real data points in the field of view shown by TFA, and they do not show any sign of a peak in OLR over northern Japan.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/veC_EraWL5NUXaCbH6iROcyKBwp3MOnR9qYUE-fJ7v0?feat=directlink
I always said Canadians were boring.