If I had a speedometer that gave me useful information about my fuel consumption it would be interesting and possibly useful but it wouldn't help me avoid getting speeding tickets.
The difficulty is in the measurement. In your analogy, it would be like speedometers being calibrated from the factory for 205/60R15, but with all cars being delivered without wheels and anyone could put on anything they wanted. The speedometer would be very accurate for differences in speed (when it reads 100 mph, you are going exactly twice as fast as when it reads 50 mph), but to compare the readings between cars would be problematic. Did they put on some big wheels? Little ones? What's their actual speed? Those are some issues with it that can't be handled well.
Whew. Y'know, when I wrote my original post, I thought "well, that oughtta get their attention, but y'know what it's missing? An overstretched car metaphor."
So IQ doesn't measure intelligence. So what? If IQ score is, as claimed, highly correlated with success in life, and if it's measuring motivation and determination rather than intelligence, and if it's motivation that determines success in life, doesn't that make the IQ test pretty damned useful?
Who even knows what "native intelligence" means, anyway? If I've got a test that tells me whether someone understands problems, can find solutions to them, and is motivated enough to carry through, isn't that as useful a definition of "intelligence" as any?
Or to put it bluntly: of what use to anyone is a brilliant mind who doesn't give a shit?
"Hey, Stephen Jay Gould, you there? Yeah, they're talking evolution on Slashdot. They seem to think organisms always adapt perfectly to their environments. Heh, yeah, I know, right? Okay, I'll tell 'em you said that."
We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. Organisms inherit a body form and a style of embryonic development; these impose constraints upon future change and adaptation.
Organisms are always constrained in their evolution by the limits of their embryonic development, their biochemical systems, and by the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. Plants evolving in a binary system with a broader spectrum than sunlight won't necessarily evolve a broad spectrum system of photosynthetic absorbers, and thus look "black". It can only happen if there exist possible transition metal complexes with the right absorption spectrum, if those complexes can be manufactured by the cell's chemical machinery, if those photo-active molecules can be linked into an existing metabolic pathway, if if if.
Hell, existing Earth plants don't even make very efficient use of the Sun's spectrum. Plants are green because they fail to absorb green light. Yellow is also poorly absorbed. But these are right at the peak of the solar spectrum! Why are plants letting all this good energy be wasted? Because despite billions of years of evolution, they haven't "figured out" a way to take advantage of it. Why should we expect different anywhere else?
Exactly. The way you mass-produce rockets is with high-precision CNC machining and minimizing human hand-work. More robots, less people. This is what US manufacturing is good at -- and if you've seen SpaceX's video tours of the inside of their shop, you've seen how CNC-focused they are.
Whoever modded this post "flamebait" should look up the history of Samuel Slater, Francis Cabot Lowell, and others. America lagged far behind Britain at the end of the 18th century, but soon reached parity through a combination of technology purchase and straight up industrial espionage.
Carnot efficiency doesn't enter into it; gasoline easily burns hot enough to do 60% efficiency with a room temperature cold reservoir.
Yes, but what do you hold the burning gasoline in? Common steels lose their strength at a few hundred C, limiting your Carnot efficiency quite a bit. Even the high-temperature alloys used to make aircraft turbines start to get a little soft at the necessary temperatures. Turbine engines solve that problem by limiting the stress on the turbine blades, but this engine must endure a high-frequency series of pulse detonations.
High temperature, high stress, high-frequency vibration, requiring absolute reliability with zero maintenance -- It's a materials science worst-case scenario. Good luck!
Have you ever noticed that *everyone* has a grandfather who invented a miracle engine that was repressed by Big Auto? This is at least the tenth time I've heard a story along these lines.
I'm sure your grandpa was an amazing engineer, but the "200 MPG engine" was the cold fusion / room-temperature superconductor of the mid-20th century. Maybe somebody's grandpa really had the answer, and maybe somebody's grandpa did get hushed up by GM... but maybe a lot of peoples' grandpas like telling stories to their grandkids.
As for the specific engine in this story: I don't see an engine. I see a nicely machined chunk of steel and a piece of lucite on a bearing, some heavy handwaving, and an efficiency claim which can only be achieved if the engine operates at a temperature high enough that steel is as useful a construction material as pudding.
They get about a dozen stories a week uploaded to Slashdot, most of which are just generic nerd news reports, all of which include just a single link to Network World, never a link to original source reports. "FBI Wants You To Solve Encrypted Notes From Murder" links to Network World, not the FBI. "NASA Green-lights $16.5M To Advance Future Jets" links to Network World, not to NASA. And so on.
I don't mind if Network World dominates the Slashdot airwaves, they're submitting some good nerd news. But here at Slashdot we believe that if you take somebody else's idea and use it to make money, you should give everyone access to the original idea. What's true for software should be true for news too.
The Slashdot post is about a cool game website. It has a link in it. Where does it go? Not to the game, but to Network World's article describing it. This happens ALL THE TIME, and it's is no coincidence: article authors are using Slashdot to drive traffic to their own sites. Network World in particular does this *constantly*.
Refuse to play along. Slashdot moderators should reject articles which don't link to original source data. "Scientists publish interesting paper" should link to the Nature journal article, not to Bob's Science Blog. "Company releases new geek toy" should link to the vendor's website, not myawesometoyblog.com. Make Slashdot an information source, not a spam factory.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but I wanted to point out the weasel-wording in the title and references: "apparent" alcohol consumption. I have a feeling that official data on alcohol consumption during Prohibition might be a little inaccurate. If the paper's authors are smart, they did something clever to correct for that, but without having the paper in front of us who knows how accurate it is.
A distinction without a difference. The way to avoid "preventive insurance" is to ensure that everyone's health care is paid for, and nobody can be denied care for any reason. If it's tax-funded and government-regulated, it doesn't really matter to me whether insurance companies act as middlemen or not.
As for space, one of the points I keep harping on to naive environmentalists is that if implemented on a scale big enough to matter, renewable technology is going to be very big and kinda ugly. I'm a practical environmentalist, who knows that a town powered by one little windmill on the hillside is a pipe dream: I see dozens of giant turbines churning over a square mile, and I'm not shy about it.
As for cost, no question we're talking about rebuilding our entire energy infrastructure. But we replace that every 30 years or so regardless, and as the fossil fuels run out, it's not like we'll have a lot of choice.
The proposal would essentially turn these areas into permanent clients to sections of the country with space to spare and no climatic issues to overcome.
Just like the Northeast states are permanent food clients to the agriculture-rich midwest, the landlocked states are permanent international trade clients to the coastal port cities, and the whole nation is a fossil fuel client to the coal and oil states of Texas, Alaska, Wyoming, and West Virginia. It's called a continental scale integrated economy, and leveraging it was what made this nation a success.
Whoops, major miscalculation, I'd need a couple thousand car batteries, not 10. But still, the problem is they'd only last a few minutes. The problem is energy capacity, not power capacity.
It's not the megawatts, it's the megawatt-hours. Give me a couple hundred bucks and I'll go out and buy ten lead-acid car batteries which can provide 2 megawatts of power... for a few minutes.
The NAS battery PR I've seen has been enthusiastic about power capacity, but suspiciously silent on energy capacity.
I understand all these issues. You're missing my point, and you're underestimating the size I'm talking about.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, your average renewable source is active 1/3 of the time. If I have six of them, widely spaced and diverse enough that their power output is uncorrelated, how often will I have at least one available? Answer: about 92% of the time.
A large collection of diverse but unreliable systems will be able to satisfy the demand almost all the time. To put things in Slashdot speak: if your network isn't reliable enough, you just need a bigger network.
Of course, in reality renewable power sources are rather correlated in output, even across an area as large as the U.S. But still, the research I've read suggests that a diverse continental renewables network should be able to maintain 60-80% uptime. As I said, the rest can be filled in with natural gas, hydro, and demand limiting.
Solar panel and wind farm facilities are space prohibitive and have operational windows drastically affected by local climate.
Space is not an issue. The US is a big freaking country, with a lot of open plains and desert. The ground area needed to power the entire country via solar power alone (not my proposal, just for the sake of argument) is a tiny chunk of Arizona.
Hydro-based power in this country is about as far along as it's going to get.
Hydro in the US is limited by the amount of water available. If you're only using that water when wind and solar plants are idle, you can add more turbines to existing dams to increase peak power by a factor of 5, at which point it can power almost the entire country. (Yes, I realize this has environmental consequences. I'm willing to sacrifice the Colorado if I have to.)
With sufficiently massive and widespread deployment of wind/solar, they *become* the base load, and the rest is a matter of filling in gaps. A combination of demand control, natural gas plants, pumped hydro, and ordinary hydro run intermittently can fill those gaps.
That said, I absolutely agree that the grandparent post has no idea how much battery is needed. For a major American city power trying to make use of local wind/solar, I estimate you'd need about 130,000 tons of batteries.
Really good point. But this sort of "insider trading" isn't regulated by the FCC or anyone else with legal authority. ARIN can refuse to transfer the numbers to Microsoft's control, but it's easy to do an end-run around this by keeping a "shell Nortel" around. The judge could stop it, but it's not his job to do so.
I don't see how anyone but the bankruptcy judge stop this.
As someone who's used in-class polling systems quite a bit (I'm a college professor), there are only two solutions that will work. A dedicated "clicker" system (I recommend the ones by Turning Point), or a non-technical solution. Paper ballots are obvious; the guy who suggested labeled poker chips had a good idea too.
If you try to muck around with laptops and cell phones and polling websites and custom software and/or hardware, you're going to spend your whole time doing tech support rather than model UN'ing.
Pick between low-tech or high-cost. If you try to go high-tech and low-cost, you will also get "doesn't work".
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, the humanity!
I'd say "IQ tests don't measure intelligence" has risen beyond conventional wisdom to a point of religious zeal here on Slashdot.
Whew. Y'know, when I wrote my original post, I thought "well, that oughtta get their attention, but y'know what it's missing? An overstretched car metaphor."
PROBLEM SOLVED.
Lemme be an iconoclast here for a moment.
So IQ doesn't measure intelligence. So what? If IQ score is, as claimed, highly correlated with success in life, and if it's measuring motivation and determination rather than intelligence, and if it's motivation that determines success in life, doesn't that make the IQ test pretty damned useful?
Who even knows what "native intelligence" means, anyway? If I've got a test that tells me whether someone understands problems, can find solutions to them, and is motivated enough to carry through, isn't that as useful a definition of "intelligence" as any?
Or to put it bluntly: of what use to anyone is a brilliant mind who doesn't give a shit?
"Hey, Stephen Jay Gould, you there? Yeah, they're talking evolution on Slashdot. They seem to think organisms always adapt perfectly to their environments. Heh, yeah, I know, right? Okay, I'll tell 'em you said that."
-- Hen's Teeth and Horses' Toes.
Organisms are always constrained in their evolution by the limits of their embryonic development, their biochemical systems, and by the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. Plants evolving in a binary system with a broader spectrum than sunlight won't necessarily evolve a broad spectrum system of photosynthetic absorbers, and thus look "black". It can only happen if there exist possible transition metal complexes with the right absorption spectrum, if those complexes can be manufactured by the cell's chemical machinery, if those photo-active molecules can be linked into an existing metabolic pathway, if if if.
Hell, existing Earth plants don't even make very efficient use of the Sun's spectrum. Plants are green because they fail to absorb green light. Yellow is also poorly absorbed. But these are right at the peak of the solar spectrum! Why are plants letting all this good energy be wasted? Because despite billions of years of evolution, they haven't "figured out" a way to take advantage of it. Why should we expect different anywhere else?
Exactly. The way you mass-produce rockets is with high-precision CNC machining and minimizing human hand-work. More robots, less people. This is what US manufacturing is good at -- and if you've seen SpaceX's video tours of the inside of their shop, you've seen how CNC-focused they are.
Whoever modded this post "flamebait" should look up the history of Samuel Slater, Francis Cabot Lowell, and others. America lagged far behind Britain at the end of the 18th century, but soon reached parity through a combination of technology purchase and straight up industrial espionage.
FTP died in 1993, murdered by httpd and the Mosaic browser. I watched it die. I shed no tears.
Worth noting that the V1's engine was just barely durable enough to last for one trip across the English Channel.
Yes, but what do you hold the burning gasoline in? Common steels lose their strength at a few hundred C, limiting your Carnot efficiency quite a bit. Even the high-temperature alloys used to make aircraft turbines start to get a little soft at the necessary temperatures. Turbine engines solve that problem by limiting the stress on the turbine blades, but this engine must endure a high-frequency series of pulse detonations.
High temperature, high stress, high-frequency vibration, requiring absolute reliability with zero maintenance -- It's a materials science worst-case scenario. Good luck!
Have you ever noticed that *everyone* has a grandfather who invented a miracle engine that was repressed by Big Auto? This is at least the tenth time I've heard a story along these lines.
I'm sure your grandpa was an amazing engineer, but the "200 MPG engine" was the cold fusion / room-temperature superconductor of the mid-20th century. Maybe somebody's grandpa really had the answer, and maybe somebody's grandpa did get hushed up by GM ... but maybe a lot of peoples' grandpas like telling stories to their grandkids.
As for the specific engine in this story: I don't see an engine. I see a nicely machined chunk of steel and a piece of lucite on a bearing, some heavy handwaving, and an efficiency claim which can only be achieved if the engine operates at a temperature high enough that steel is as useful a construction material as pudding.
Oh, and to justify my singling out of Network World for this sort of abuse: try search the Slashdot archives for "networkworld".
They get about a dozen stories a week uploaded to Slashdot, most of which are just generic nerd news reports, all of which include just a single link to Network World, never a link to original source reports. "FBI Wants You To Solve Encrypted Notes From Murder" links to Network World, not the FBI. "NASA Green-lights $16.5M To Advance Future Jets" links to Network World, not to NASA. And so on.
I don't mind if Network World dominates the Slashdot airwaves, they're submitting some good nerd news. But here at Slashdot we believe that if you take somebody else's idea and use it to make money, you should give everyone access to the original idea. What's true for software should be true for news too.
The Slashdot post is about a cool game website. It has a link in it. Where does it go? Not to the game, but to Network World's article describing it. This happens ALL THE TIME, and it's is no coincidence: article authors are using Slashdot to drive traffic to their own sites. Network World in particular does this *constantly*.
Refuse to play along. Slashdot moderators should reject articles which don't link to original source data. "Scientists publish interesting paper" should link to the Nature journal article, not to Bob's Science Blog. "Company releases new geek toy" should link to the vendor's website, not myawesometoyblog.com. Make Slashdot an information source, not a spam factory.
I don't think you get to claim a record until your rocket gets off the pad and delivers payload to orbit.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but I wanted to point out the weasel-wording in the title and references: "apparent" alcohol consumption. I have a feeling that official data on alcohol consumption during Prohibition might be a little inaccurate. If the paper's authors are smart, they did something clever to correct for that, but without having the paper in front of us who knows how accurate it is.
A distinction without a difference. The way to avoid "preventive insurance" is to ensure that everyone's health care is paid for, and nobody can be denied care for any reason. If it's tax-funded and government-regulated, it doesn't really matter to me whether insurance companies act as middlemen or not.
The question is, is this preventive medicine or preventive insurance?
With single-payer health care, this distinction doesn't exist.
As for space, one of the points I keep harping on to naive environmentalists is that if implemented on a scale big enough to matter, renewable technology is going to be very big and kinda ugly. I'm a practical environmentalist, who knows that a town powered by one little windmill on the hillside is a pipe dream: I see dozens of giant turbines churning over a square mile, and I'm not shy about it.
As for cost, no question we're talking about rebuilding our entire energy infrastructure. But we replace that every 30 years or so regardless, and as the fossil fuels run out, it's not like we'll have a lot of choice.
Just like the Northeast states are permanent food clients to the agriculture-rich midwest, the landlocked states are permanent international trade clients to the coastal port cities, and the whole nation is a fossil fuel client to the coal and oil states of Texas, Alaska, Wyoming, and West Virginia. It's called a continental scale integrated economy, and leveraging it was what made this nation a success.
Whoops, major miscalculation, I'd need a couple thousand car batteries, not 10. But still, the problem is they'd only last a few minutes. The problem is energy capacity, not power capacity.
It's not the megawatts, it's the megawatt-hours. Give me a couple hundred bucks and I'll go out and buy ten lead-acid car batteries which can provide 2 megawatts of power ... for a few minutes.
The NAS battery PR I've seen has been enthusiastic about power capacity, but suspiciously silent on energy capacity.
I understand all these issues. You're missing my point, and you're underestimating the size I'm talking about.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, your average renewable source is active 1/3 of the time. If I have six of them, widely spaced and diverse enough that their power output is uncorrelated, how often will I have at least one available? Answer: about 92% of the time.
A large collection of diverse but unreliable systems will be able to satisfy the demand almost all the time. To put things in Slashdot speak: if your network isn't reliable enough, you just need a bigger network.
Of course, in reality renewable power sources are rather correlated in output, even across an area as large as the U.S. But still, the research I've read suggests that a diverse continental renewables network should be able to maintain 60-80% uptime. As I said, the rest can be filled in with natural gas, hydro, and demand limiting.
Space is not an issue. The US is a big freaking country, with a lot of open plains and desert. The ground area needed to power the entire country via solar power alone (not my proposal, just for the sake of argument) is a tiny chunk of Arizona.
Hydro in the US is limited by the amount of water available. If you're only using that water when wind and solar plants are idle, you can add more turbines to existing dams to increase peak power by a factor of 5, at which point it can power almost the entire country. (Yes, I realize this has environmental consequences. I'm willing to sacrifice the Colorado if I have to.)
With sufficiently massive and widespread deployment of wind/solar, they *become* the base load, and the rest is a matter of filling in gaps. A combination of demand control, natural gas plants, pumped hydro, and ordinary hydro run intermittently can fill those gaps.
That said, I absolutely agree that the grandparent post has no idea how much battery is needed. For a major American city power trying to make use of local wind/solar, I estimate you'd need about 130,000 tons of batteries.
Really good point. But this sort of "insider trading" isn't regulated by the FCC or anyone else with legal authority. ARIN can refuse to transfer the numbers to Microsoft's control, but it's easy to do an end-run around this by keeping a "shell Nortel" around. The judge could stop it, but it's not his job to do so.
I don't see how anyone but the bankruptcy judge stop this.
In other news, MIT just gained $189 million dollars worth of assets.
As someone who's used in-class polling systems quite a bit (I'm a college professor), there are only two solutions that will work. A dedicated "clicker" system (I recommend the ones by Turning Point), or a non-technical solution. Paper ballots are obvious; the guy who suggested labeled poker chips had a good idea too.
If you try to muck around with laptops and cell phones and polling websites and custom software and/or hardware, you're going to spend your whole time doing tech support rather than model UN'ing.
Pick between low-tech or high-cost. If you try to go high-tech and low-cost, you will also get "doesn't work".