Normally I'm all for Republican-bashing, but in this case I think it goes to something more primal than Republican luddism.
Whether a congressman approves or disapproves of Space-X has nothing to do with his/her party, beliefs, or political position, and everything to do with, "Do I have a NASA manned spaceflight center in my district?"
Space-X has gotten jeers from Florida, Alabama, and Texas; cheers from just about everywhere else. At least Florida and Texas have a role to play in a privatized spaceflight arena. Alabama, on the other hand, is watching the Marshall Space Flight Center evaporate like a puddle of liquid oxygen, and is going to fight like hell to keep ol' Werner von Braun's playground alive.
You answered your own question. If you don't believe the answer the geologists give you, feel free to read up on petroleum geology, and do some basic back-of-the-envelope calculations yourself.
There are four ways to answer a question. From best to worst:
1) Figure it out yourself 2) Trust the experts 3) Proclaim it an unanswerable mystery 4) Make up something
"Cost-neutral on the price of electricity, price of gasoline at the pump will go down, the influential senators from coal states are happy, and no more funding terrorism in the middle east."
I've seen worse plans. It's definitely realistic about politics. #3 and #4 are good points, but [citation needed] on points #1 and #2.
From Elon Musk's press telecon, as transcribed by flatoday.net:
"We achieved a "near bulls-eye" on the orbit. There was a little more roll than was expected. It didn't affect the mission. It is something to be investigated and refined. We're very happy with the second stage performance."
This isn't a spin-stabilized spacecraft, so I'd call what I saw more than just a "little roll"... still, damned impressive that the launcher can make an orbital bullseye while having that much uncontrolled spin.
TFA fails on basic mathematics. Let's take as given that there's 2117 cubic meters of water per capita per annum for each Chinese citizen.
The average person needs about 2 liters of water a day. Let's suppose they get all of that by drinking bottled water and soda from Coke's bottling plants. That amounts to less than 1 of those cubic meters per year.
Let's suppose the average person buys one new computer chip per week. Probably most people go weeks or months between purchases, but each device has many chips, so 1/week is about right. From this press release, it takes 10 gallons of water to make 1 computer chip. Oh gosh! That's two cubic meters per year!
To a rough approximation, all fresh water is used for farming. Water use for all other purposes is quite literally a drop in the bucket. Yes, wars have been fought over water, and they may be fought again in the future. But we're talking about agricultural irrigation here: everything else is negligible.
Now, in certain areas, water availability can be orders of magnitude less than the 2000 m^3/year average in the article, so water conservation there is a serious issue. But you don't grow crops in those areas... and you don't build a chip fab plant there either.
Explosions fracture rock. Rock fractures allow gas to pass. This is why the U.S. used nukes to *increase* gas production.
I strongly suspect that what the USSR succeeded in doing was extinguishing a large point-source gas flare and replacing it with a whole bunch of small diffuse gas leaks over a square-km area.
Some conceptual errors in this, plus a massive units error. What do you mean by "average atomic weight of 9 a.u."? I'm going to assume you mean the slick is 1 molecule and 9 angstroms thick. Which isn't the way oil slicks work, but let's go with it.
If you assume that the well could expel 2x to 3x per day than a controlled well, you get a range of 26k to 60k barrels per day being spewed into the gulf.... and this is where both you and TFA go wrong on the economics argument.
It's wrong to assume this well is releasing *more* oil than a production well: the whole point of oil production is to make money as fast as possible: anything you do to slow the flow slows the profits. As a matter of fact, most production wells do everything they can to *maximize* flow.
In contrast, in a well being drilled, like this one, safety can only be ensured by everything possible to *prevent* oil from flowing.
In this case, the bottom of the well was filled with concrete to seal it off. The concrete liner is leaking, causing the current spill, but when they start up a production well they blast great big holes in the concrete to maximize the flow. The blowout preventer is also reportedly partly activated, restricting the flow even more.
So, this well is almost certainly producing far *less* than a production well would.
Not to defend the article, but you're confusing pressure with stress.
Example: if you lay down in the driveway and I park a car on your chest, it'll exert a stress of 20-30 psi and break your ribs. Yet a good swimmer can free-dive to a depth of 20-30 feet, where the water pressure is 20-30 psi, and be fine. The difference is whether the force is along one axis or omnidirectional.
Granite will shatter to bits if you apply 10k atmospheres of compressive *stress*, but if you put it under 10k atmospheres of pressure, it'll be just fine.
The ocean is bigger than you think it is. A *lot* bigger. If your statement were true, then the Exxon Valdez disaster would have destroyed the fishing in Japan and Hawaii. In reality, the Valdez oil affected only a moderate section of Alaskan coastline.
I get a similar result by estimating the cross-sectional area and velocity of the oil coming out the riser pipe, as seen in BP's video.
Which kinda surprises me, since your estimate assumes unobstructed flow from reservoir to ocean, but BP has been saying they believe the blowout preventer valves are partially closed, restricting the flow of oil to a trickle.
I kinda doubt BP would misrepresent the length of a wrench. That, plus the video, is all I need to do my calculation.
Yes, my suppositions are pretty squishy, but I took the trouble to estimate the errors in my calculation, though I forgot to report them in the previous post.
For the record, my 27,000 barrels/day is uncertain to about a factor of 2-3. It could be 50,000, it could be 10,000.
But to match BP's estimates 5000 bpd, the oil would have to be coming out at a speed of about 20 cm/sec: to match TFA's "million bpd", the speed would need to be it would 40 meters per sec. You can tell by eyeballing the video that that it's somewhere in between.
Oh, one more fail in the article: "This well needs to produce over 60,000 barrels/day in order to be profitable: therefore it must be leaking more than 60,000 barrels a day now."
Which would make sense, except that the well is leaking just a trickle of its design capacity. It's the difference between a dripping faucet which you can't shut off completely, and one open full blast.
General fail: proof by hyperbole. LOOK AT THIS HUGE OIL SLICK HOW CAN YOU SAY IT'S 5000 BARRELS A DAY THAT'S CRAZY! is not a persuasive argument.
Specific fail: Pipe is not 5 feet in diameter. here's a photo of the pipe with a wrench for scale -- BP says the wrench is a foot long. So accounting for perspective, the pipe is a bit more than a foot in diameter. (BP says the outer diameter of the riser pipe was 21" diameter when installed, but it's gotten a bit squished since then.)
Video shows the pipe about half full of oil, so the cross-sectional area of the flow is 1/2 * pi * (7 inches)^2 = 0.05 meters^2.
By following the motion of the blobs and plumes of oil, the flow speed seems to be about 1 meter/second. Flow rate = velocity * area = 0.04 m^3/s, or 0.4 barrels/second.
This is 27,000 barrels per day -- about 5 times BP's estimates, but an order of magnitude less than the article claims.
Between endowment losses, reductions in state funding, and student financial hardship, almost every college in the nation is facing short-term financial trouble.
The school I teach at can't even afford security keycard systems for our new building... how on Earth can any college justify paying for RFID logging for every classroom on campus?
1) This is true for 64-bit INTEGERS. The default data type for MATLAB is a 64-bit float, and has been forever.
2) This is a design decision by MATLAB's designers. You don't have to declare or type variables in MATLAB: you just set a = 5 and a new variable "a" is created. You set a(2) = 3, and now a grows into a 1-d array.
It's a handy feature and a core aspect of MATLAB's ease-of-use design, but to do this, you need to have a default data type.
64-bit float is the best choice: you can represent any number up to around 4,503,599,627,370,496 without error. For practical purposes, this means MATLAB will work fine for any real-world integer counting task: it only fails if you're interested in cryptography, primes, or other discrete math tasks, in which case you're not using MATLAB anyway.
although he is still being treated like a terrorist (cannot enter or pass through the US, DNA samples)
Hi! Are you wondering if the U.S. federal government is treating you like a terrorist? Sure, we all are. Here's a handy questionnaire to find out.
Is there a Predator drone overhead firing missiles at your car? [ ] Yes [ ] No
If you checked "No", congratulations! The U.S. government might not trust you or want you in the country, but they're not treating you like a terrorist.
I used world wind power and energy stats rather than US-only to avoid problems with small-number statistics.
But this is a fair comparison: for the years in question, *all* fatal wind turbine accidents were in Western countries with workplace safety laws at least as strong as U.S. laws. The majority were in the U.S., Germany, and England, with a few in Denmark, New Zealand, etc.
Comparing world turbine deaths to world coal deaths would *not* be fair, because up till very recently, turbine work was only done in developed countries. I picked these data specifically to *avoid* the bias you describe.
Yep. There's no question that if you pull in all the industries in the coal energy chain, it'll be quite a bit more. On the other hand, if I included all the manufacturing, transportation, etc. that goes into the wind power industry, that'd increase the score on that side. You gotta draw a boundary somewhere.
And yes, I'm not including deaths due to environmental consequences of coal pollution either.
But I'm not trying to convince you that wind power is absolutely more deadly than coal power. The point is that, compared against one energy industry which "everybody knows" is hideously dangerous, wind power is riskier than you might expect.
Slashdot Mirror
Normally I'm all for Republican-bashing, but in this case I think it goes to something more primal than Republican luddism.
Whether a congressman approves or disapproves of Space-X has nothing to do with his/her party, beliefs, or political position, and everything to do with, "Do I have a NASA manned spaceflight center in my district?"
Space-X has gotten jeers from Florida, Alabama, and Texas; cheers from just about everywhere else. At least Florida and Texas have a role to play in a privatized spaceflight arena. Alabama, on the other hand, is watching the Marshall Space Flight Center evaporate like a puddle of liquid oxygen, and is going to fight like hell to keep ol' Werner von Braun's playground alive.
from long dead organisms
You answered your own question. If you don't believe the answer the geologists give you, feel free to read up on petroleum geology, and do some basic back-of-the-envelope calculations yourself.
There are four ways to answer a question. From best to worst:
1) Figure it out yourself
2) Trust the experts
3) Proclaim it an unanswerable mystery
4) Make up something
You're one rung off the bottom. Climb on up!
"Cost-neutral on the price of electricity, price of gasoline at the pump will go down, the influential senators from coal states are happy, and no more funding terrorism in the middle east."
I've seen worse plans. It's definitely realistic about politics. #3 and #4 are good points, but [citation needed] on points #1 and #2.
From Elon Musk's press telecon, as transcribed by flatoday.net:
"We achieved a "near bulls-eye" on the orbit. There was a little more roll than was expected. It didn't affect the mission. It is something to be investigated and refined. We're very happy with the second stage performance."
This isn't a spin-stabilized spacecraft, so I'd call what I saw more than just a "little roll"... still, damned impressive that the launcher can make an orbital bullseye while having that much uncontrolled spin.
TFA fails on basic mathematics. Let's take as given that there's 2117 cubic meters of water per capita per annum for each Chinese citizen.
The average person needs about 2 liters of water a day. Let's suppose they get all of that by drinking bottled water and soda from Coke's bottling plants. That amounts to less than 1 of those cubic meters per year.
Let's suppose the average person buys one new computer chip per week. Probably most people go weeks or months between purchases, but each device has many chips, so 1/week is about right. From this press release, it takes 10 gallons of water to make 1 computer chip. Oh gosh! That's two cubic meters per year!
To a rough approximation, all fresh water is used for farming. Water use for all other purposes is quite literally a drop in the bucket. Yes, wars have been fought over water, and they may be fought again in the future. But we're talking about agricultural irrigation here: everything else is negligible.
Now, in certain areas, water availability can be orders of magnitude less than the 2000 m^3/year average in the article, so water conservation there is a serious issue. But you don't grow crops in those areas ... and you don't build a chip fab plant there either.
Explosions fracture rock. Rock fractures allow gas to pass. This is why the U.S. used nukes to *increase* gas production.
I strongly suspect that what the USSR succeeded in doing was extinguishing a large point-source gas flare and replacing it with a whole bunch of small diffuse gas leaks over a square-km area.
That's not an acceptable solution in this case.
The problem is there's a hole in the seafloor. Explosives are not known for making *fewer* holes in things.
As they should. We as a nation own the resources: the people who are extracting them should compensate us for them.
If I came over to your house and cut down all the trees on your property and sold them, you'd expect me to pay you, right? Same thing.
Ugh, slashdot destroyed my link. Try this one.
Some conceptual errors in this, plus a massive units error. What do you mean by "average atomic weight of 9 a.u."? I'm going to assume you mean the slick is 1 molecule and 9 angstroms thick. Which isn't the way oil slicks work, but let's go with it.
Anyway, total units fail:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(10000+miles^2+*+1+angstrom%29+in+m^3
6000 gallons. Which is wrong because of course the slick *isn't* one molecule thick, but your calculation is meaningless.
Ha! Sir, I see a promising career for you in the field of loan sharking.
Good argument up until ...
If you assume that the well could expel 2x to 3x per day than a controlled well, you get a range of 26k to 60k barrels per day being spewed into the gulf. ... and this is where both you and TFA go wrong on the economics argument.
It's wrong to assume this well is releasing *more* oil than a production well: the whole point of oil production is to make money as fast as possible: anything you do to slow the flow slows the profits. As a matter of fact, most production wells do everything they can to *maximize* flow.
In contrast, in a well being drilled, like this one, safety can only be ensured by everything possible to *prevent* oil from flowing.
In this case, the bottom of the well was filled with concrete to seal it off. The concrete liner is leaking, causing the current spill, but when they start up a production well they blast great big holes in the concrete to maximize the flow. The blowout preventer is also reportedly partly activated, restricting the flow even more.
So, this well is almost certainly producing far *less* than a production well would.
Not to defend the article, but you're confusing pressure with stress.
Example: if you lay down in the driveway and I park a car on your chest, it'll exert a stress of 20-30 psi and break your ribs. Yet a good swimmer can free-dive to a depth of 20-30 feet, where the water pressure is 20-30 psi, and be fine. The difference is whether the force is along one axis or omnidirectional.
Granite will shatter to bits if you apply 10k atmospheres of compressive *stress*, but if you put it under 10k atmospheres of pressure, it'll be just fine.
The ocean is bigger than you think it is. A *lot* bigger. If your statement were true, then the Exxon Valdez disaster would have destroyed the fishing in Japan and Hawaii. In reality, the Valdez oil affected only a moderate section of Alaskan coastline.
http://feww.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/exxon-valdez-spill-map.jpg
6 2/3 barrels per cubic meter, or 6,666 2/3 barrels per cubic kilometers
*BZZZZZT*
This is a classic units error. since it's meters cubed, you multiply by 1000 *cubed*. 300,000 barrels is around .000045 cubic kilometers.
Your point still stands, but you're off by a factor of a million.
I get a similar result by estimating the cross-sectional area and velocity of the oil coming out the riser pipe, as seen in BP's video.
Which kinda surprises me, since your estimate assumes unobstructed flow from reservoir to ocean, but BP has been saying they believe the blowout preventer valves are partially closed, restricting the flow of oil to a trickle.
I kinda doubt BP would misrepresent the length of a wrench. That, plus the video, is all I need to do my calculation.
Yes, my suppositions are pretty squishy, but I took the trouble to estimate the errors in my calculation, though I forgot to report them in the previous post.
For the record, my 27,000 barrels/day is uncertain to about a factor of 2-3. It could be 50,000, it could be 10,000.
But to match BP's estimates 5000 bpd, the oil would have to be coming out at a speed of about 20 cm/sec: to match TFA's "million bpd", the speed would need to be it would 40 meters per sec. You can tell by eyeballing the video that that it's somewhere in between.
Oh, one more fail in the article: "This well needs to produce over 60,000 barrels/day in order to be profitable: therefore it must be leaking more than 60,000 barrels a day now."
Which would make sense, except that the well is leaking just a trickle of its design capacity. It's the difference between a dripping faucet which you can't shut off completely, and one open full blast.
General fail: proof by hyperbole. LOOK AT THIS HUGE OIL SLICK HOW CAN YOU SAY IT'S 5000 BARRELS A DAY THAT'S CRAZY! is not a persuasive argument.
Specific fail: Pipe is not 5 feet in diameter.
here's a photo of the pipe with a wrench for scale -- BP says the wrench is a foot long. So accounting for perspective, the pipe is a bit more than a foot in diameter. (BP says the outer diameter of the riser pipe was 21" diameter when installed, but it's gotten a bit squished since then.)
Video shows the pipe about half full of oil, so the cross-sectional area of the flow is 1/2 * pi * (7 inches)^2 = 0.05 meters^2.
By following the motion of the blobs and plumes of oil, the flow speed seems to be about 1 meter/second. Flow rate = velocity * area = 0.04 m^3/s, or 0.4 barrels/second.
This is 27,000 barrels per day -- about 5 times BP's estimates, but an order of magnitude less than the article claims.
Between endowment losses, reductions in state funding, and student financial hardship, almost every college in the nation is facing short-term financial trouble.
The school I teach at can't even afford security keycard systems for our new building... how on Earth can any college justify paying for RFID logging for every classroom on campus?
Two things:
1) This is true for 64-bit INTEGERS. The default data type for MATLAB is a 64-bit float, and has been forever.
2) This is a design decision by MATLAB's designers. You don't have to declare or type variables in MATLAB: you just set a = 5 and a new variable "a" is created. You set a(2) = 3, and now a grows into a 1-d array.
It's a handy feature and a core aspect of MATLAB's ease-of-use design, but to do this, you need to have a default data type.
64-bit float is the best choice: you can represent any number up to around 4,503,599,627,370,496 without error. For practical purposes, this means MATLAB will work fine for any real-world integer counting task: it only fails if you're interested in cryptography, primes, or other discrete math tasks, in which case you're not using MATLAB anyway.
although he is still being treated like a terrorist (cannot enter or pass through the US, DNA samples)
Hi! Are you wondering if the U.S. federal government is treating you like a terrorist? Sure, we all are. Here's a handy questionnaire to find out.
Is there a Predator drone overhead firing missiles at your car?
[ ] Yes
[ ] No
If you checked "No", congratulations! The U.S. government might not trust you or want you in the country, but they're not treating you like a terrorist.
I used world wind power and energy stats rather than US-only to avoid problems with small-number statistics.
But this is a fair comparison: for the years in question, *all* fatal wind turbine accidents were in Western countries with workplace safety laws at least as strong as U.S. laws. The majority were in the U.S., Germany, and England, with a few in Denmark, New Zealand, etc.
Comparing world turbine deaths to world coal deaths would *not* be fair, because up till very recently, turbine work was only done in developed countries. I picked these data specifically to *avoid* the bias you describe.
Yep. There's no question that if you pull in all the industries in the coal energy chain, it'll be quite a bit more. On the other hand, if I included all the manufacturing, transportation, etc. that goes into the wind power industry, that'd increase the score on that side. You gotta draw a boundary somewhere.
And yes, I'm not including deaths due to environmental consequences of coal pollution either.
But I'm not trying to convince you that wind power is absolutely more deadly than coal power. The point is that, compared against one energy industry which "everybody knows" is hideously dangerous, wind power is riskier than you might expect.
I thought so too, so I ran the numbers to compare coal mining fatalities to wind power fatalities on a per-energy basis. My guess was wrong!
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1634926&cid=32025486