As someone who teaches physics for a living, the Slashdot summary is making my eyes bleed.
Now EDN reports they may use more energy than claimed
Argh! No, they don't use more energy, but they do have higher "Load".
Here's the analogy. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people travel in to Boston. Does that mean we need to build hundreds of thousands of new apartments every day? No, because every day they all leave again: they're commuters.
Boston needs to design its roads to handle the rush hour traffic, but it doesn't have to build a ton of houses for them to stay.
Energy in a low power factor circuit is like a commuter: it flows into the device, then it flows back out again. The utility company needs to design its power lines to handle the rush hour flow, but you're not "using up" the energy in any sense.
TFA talks about real wasted energy caused by this "rush hour" flow, but transmission losses are a small fraction of total energy use. This isn't going to affect the overall efficiency of CFLs.
TFA talks about requiring "power factor regulation" on CF light bulbs. This is a pointless extra expense. While CF bulbs make life harder for the power company, other common appliances act to counterbalance the effect, so averaged over an entire city, the problem is mitigated. But even when it's not, the *power company* can always install devices (giant capacitor banks, typically) which compensate for the power factor. There's no need to build more power plants.
So what it comes down to is, CF light bulbs don't use more energy than they claim, but they do generate higher peak loads. We can force either the consumer or the power company to install equipment to compensate for this.
I say, "Hey power company. I'm paying you guys to deliver me some kilowatt-hours. Nothing in my contract limits how I suck up those kWh: if I do it in a way you're not expecting, it's your job to install equipment to handle it."
Exactly. In fact, I'd say that NK's insane foreign policy is actually just brilliant (but hideous) domestic policy.
Say you're a dictatorial lunatic. You look around and see your fellow dictatorial lunatics dropping like flies, as the lunatics' careful brainwashing of their people is undone by a toxic combination of abundant food, satellite TV, cell phones, internet, movies, and rock 'n' roll. So what do you do?
You act like a belligerent lunatic on the world stage. The rest of the world ostracizes you, and refuses to sell your people satellite TV, cell phones, etc.
Uh. South Korea, while being pretty rich and having lots of economical freedom, has less than ok political freedom, at least judging from information available to me.
If your information is more than 15 years old, it's out of date. South Korea stopped being a military dictatorship around the end of the cold war. Today, it has its accusations of corruption and scandal, but no more than your average democracy.
But more importantly from a geopolitical perspective, it's where all the cell phones and memory chips come from, and it would be bad if they got blowed up.
(Actually, I'm prepared to make the case that countries that make cell phones are countries that make freedom, but that's a topic for another thread.)
So, which is more use to North Korea: a) A nuclear launch capability they can't use, or b) An orbital launch capability for their own satellites and maybe some foreign cash spinoffs?
c) a couple dozen textile mills making cheap clothing for export. d) an automobile manufacturing infrastructure making cheap cars (hell, mopeds) for export. e) a few hundred miles of decent roads and a deep-water port for foreign cargo ships. f) a few thousand tractors and combines, and a fertilizer plant to allow them to feed their people.
All of these are proven by other Pacific rim countries to be a better long-term strategy for success than playing global games of Chicken.
But all of these make it rather difficult to force your citizens to treat you like a demigod. Which is why North Korea isn't using them.
How is this a failure? They launched an ICBM that cleared Japan before hitting the water, thus proving they now have the capability to deliver a nuclear strike against Japan.
They've been able to throw payloads as far as Japan for years.
If you're defining "success" as "no progress since 1993", then yeah, this latest test is a success.
Which is funny, because that's exactly the definition the U.S. anti-ballistic-missile program has been using...
Speaking of lunatic demagogues bent on world domination...
Why is the U.S. so concerned about Kim Jong Il, while they're *giving* Elon Musk free launch facilities to hold the world under his thumb with a reign of ballistic missile terror?
The good news is, when SpaceX holds your nation hostage with its ICBMs, you'll be able to pay the ransom with PayPal.
Why would any nation want to isolate itself the way the DPRK is isolated?
Because the nation's leader is a vain, paranoid demagogue, who knows that if his people ever come in contact with the outside world and realize that the rest of the world is mostly full of nice, reasonable people who get to eat more than 500 calories a day, they'll all rise up and murder him in his sleep.
the tiny country is being stomped on for no good reason other than for siding with the losing superpower from the twentieth century
That, and the fact that the moment the world stops stomping, they'll march a million men across the border and burn Seoul, one of the greatest free cities on Earth, to the ground.
You may be right that their posturing towards the U.S. is a result of their being boxed in by cold war politics. But they've made it clear that their attitude towards South Korea is anything but posturing.
It's a good question, and the people responding to it on both sides have missed a key point:
"Global warming" implies that we should be worried about temperature. But while temperature rise might be the primary response to greenhouse gases, it's the least of our problems. For most people in most places, a few degrees of warming, mainly in the winter, is no big deal.
It's the *secondary* effects of greenhouse warming --- droughts, floods, meltwater and river flow changes, sea level rise, changes in frequency of severe storms --- that have the potential to seriously disrupt human civilization. These are included under the term "Climate Change", but excluded from "Global Warming".
(And frustratingly, these guys are much harder to understand than the temperature rise.)
You're right that the shattered bits of the ice sheet do capsize and tilt sideways as the shelf collapses -- see MacAyeal et al, 2003. (MacAyeal finds a height-to-width ratio of roughly 4:1.) Thus, there would be a period of increased albedo.
But it doesn't take long for these bergs to melt: they're not the gigantic "mega icebergs" that calve off the major ice shelves farther south. Since the fragments are much taller than they are wide: once they capsize, they're really very thin (tens of meters), and should melt very quickly.
So, I'd say (without running the numbers) that they might have a short-term impact on climate (months to a year), but I doubt they'll have any significance over years or decades.
It doesn't matter. In today's rating system, the only difference between PG-13 and R is "Does the show contain boobies?" Violence has no impact on ratings.
Violence is a core part of the superhero genre, but explicit sex is not. You can do all the superhero movie you want inside a PG-13 rating.
And if I accidentally short the battery with a big hunk of metal whose resistance is much less than the internal resistance of the battery? Where's the energy go then?
Not into the "load". Mostly into the battery itself. And the elctrolyte. Which boils in a couple seconds. Boom!
I'm surprised nobody has pointed out how dangerous this is. Lithium batteries are a serious fire hazard already, and this just makes it much worse.
If you work out the energies involved, you'll find that if the terminals on the the "1-liter battery" mentioned in the summary are shorted out accidentally, it will heat itself up to the melting point of lithium in a few seconds.
Best-case scenario, the battery destroys itself and melts into a puddle of molten metal on the tabletop. Worst-case scenario, the aqueous electrolyte vaporizes and the battery explodes like a grenade.
This level of power output makes the battery Not A Consumer Item.
Yes, let's use robots to prepare the moon base site. And then we can use robots to build the habitats. And then we can use robots to collect the field samples -- after all, that's just more digging. And then we can use the robots we already use to analyze the samples. And then use more robots to manufacture and operate a moon mining operation...... wait, why were we sending people again?
(I mean that as a serious question. Why bother with humans?)
I'll be willing to accept a ban on advertising your sexual orientation in online games, so long as it came with a ban on *accusations* of sexual orientation.
Which is to say, you can ban this lesbian if I can ban everyone who ever types "u r so gay" online.
No, we're both considering the same factors of night, latitude, and weather: my factor of two is the same as your factor of three. I'm just taking a bit off from space-based cells to account for energy lost during the microwave conversion proess.
Space-based cells have no intrinsic advantage, and we're double-counting the extrinsic issues.
I spent a lot of time in grad school looking at seafloor topography maps, and let me tell you, the Google Ocean stuff is just *TERRIBLE*.
Much of the data comes from the GEBCO maps -- General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans. These were hand-drawn topo maps from the early- and mid-20th century. Beginning in the '90s, these were scanned in and digitized, but whoever did it did a lousy job.
The topo contours on the drawings weren't smoothed out on the digital map, so in many places the sea floor has a "terraced" or "layered" look which is not at all accurate. The original map data was supplemented with modern digital hydrographic data taken by shipboard sonars, but this data is only available along the path of the ship. No real effort was made to sensibly combine the old data with the new, so the new data forms straight lines cutting across the older data.
Which is what this "Atlantis" is. Some ship did a detailed survey of that area, following a grid search pattern. The data in between is older, less accurate, and mismatched.
If our land surface data was this bad, Google Earth would be mocked constantly. But since it's the ocean, nobody cares or notices.
I'm guessing you're an accountant? Think of this article headline as "North Pole, Inc. to Restate Earnings for First Quarter of 2009". It's the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who teaches physics for a living, the Slashdot summary is making my eyes bleed.
Now EDN reports they may use more energy than claimed
Argh! No, they don't use more energy, but they do have higher "Load".
Here's the analogy. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people travel in to Boston. Does that mean we need to build hundreds of thousands of new apartments every day? No, because every day they all leave again: they're commuters.
Boston needs to design its roads to handle the rush hour traffic, but it doesn't have to build a ton of houses for them to stay.
Energy in a low power factor circuit is like a commuter: it flows into the device, then it flows back out again. The utility company needs to design its power lines to handle the rush hour flow, but you're not "using up" the energy in any sense.
TFA talks about real wasted energy caused by this "rush hour" flow, but transmission losses are a small fraction of total energy use. This isn't going to affect the overall efficiency of CFLs.
TFA talks about requiring "power factor regulation" on CF light bulbs. This is a pointless extra expense. While CF bulbs make life harder for the power company, other common appliances act to counterbalance the effect, so averaged over an entire city, the problem is mitigated. But even when it's not, the *power company* can always install devices (giant capacitor banks, typically) which compensate for the power factor. There's no need to build more power plants.
So what it comes down to is, CF light bulbs don't use more energy than they claim, but they do generate higher peak loads. We can force either the consumer or the power company to install equipment to compensate for this.
I say, "Hey power company. I'm paying you guys to deliver me some kilowatt-hours. Nothing in my contract limits how I suck up those kWh: if I do it in a way you're not expecting, it's your job to install equipment to handle it."
Exactly. In fact, I'd say that NK's insane foreign policy is actually just brilliant (but hideous) domestic policy.
Say you're a dictatorial lunatic. You look around and see your fellow dictatorial lunatics dropping like flies, as the lunatics' careful brainwashing of their people is undone by a toxic combination of abundant food, satellite TV, cell phones, internet, movies, and rock 'n' roll. So what do you do?
You act like a belligerent lunatic on the world stage. The rest of the world ostracizes you, and refuses to sell your people satellite TV, cell phones, etc.
You win!
I'll start worrying about Glen Beck when he can command an army of a million brainwashed fanatics with guns...
Oh wait.
Uh. South Korea, while being pretty rich and having lots of economical freedom, has less than ok political freedom, at least judging from information available to me.
If your information is more than 15 years old, it's out of date. South Korea stopped being a military dictatorship around the end of the cold war. Today, it has its accusations of corruption and scandal, but no more than your average democracy.
But more importantly from a geopolitical perspective, it's where all the cell phones and memory chips come from, and it would be bad if they got blowed up.
(Actually, I'm prepared to make the case that countries that make cell phones are countries that make freedom, but that's a topic for another thread.)
So, which is more use to North Korea:
a) A nuclear launch capability they can't use, or
b) An orbital launch capability for their own satellites and maybe some foreign cash spinoffs?
c) a couple dozen textile mills making cheap clothing for export.
d) an automobile manufacturing infrastructure making cheap cars (hell, mopeds) for export.
e) a few hundred miles of decent roads and a deep-water port for foreign cargo ships.
f) a few thousand tractors and combines, and a fertilizer plant to allow them to feed their people.
All of these are proven by other Pacific rim countries to be a better long-term strategy for success than playing global games of Chicken.
But all of these make it rather difficult to force your citizens to treat you like a demigod. Which is why North Korea isn't using them.
How is this a failure? They launched an ICBM that cleared Japan before hitting the water, thus proving they now have the capability to deliver a nuclear strike against Japan.
They've been able to throw payloads as far as Japan for years.
If you're defining "success" as "no progress since 1993", then yeah, this latest test is a success.
Which is funny, because that's exactly the definition the U.S. anti-ballistic-missile program has been using...
Speaking of lunatic demagogues bent on world domination...
Why is the U.S. so concerned about Kim Jong Il, while they're *giving* Elon Musk free launch facilities to hold the world under his thumb with a reign of ballistic missile terror?
The good news is, when SpaceX holds your nation hostage with its ICBMs, you'll be able to pay the ransom with PayPal.
If it had help failing, the U.S. would have bragged about it.
Why would any nation want to isolate itself the way the DPRK is isolated?
Because the nation's leader is a vain, paranoid demagogue, who knows that if his people ever come in contact with the outside world and realize that the rest of the world is mostly full of nice, reasonable people who get to eat more than 500 calories a day, they'll all rise up and murder him in his sleep.
the tiny country is being stomped on for no good reason other than for siding with the losing superpower from the twentieth century
That, and the fact that the moment the world stops stomping, they'll march a million men across the border and burn Seoul, one of the greatest free cities on Earth, to the ground.
You may be right that their posturing towards the U.S. is a result of their being boxed in by cold war politics. But they've made it clear that their attitude towards South Korea is anything but posturing.
Hit the link to the poster's profile, and check out his prior posts. He's a wit, not a whacko.
It's a good question, and the people responding to it on both sides have missed a key point:
"Global warming" implies that we should be worried about temperature. But while temperature rise might be the primary response to greenhouse gases, it's the least of our problems. For most people in most places, a few degrees of warming, mainly in the winter, is no big deal.
It's the *secondary* effects of greenhouse warming --- droughts, floods, meltwater and river flow changes, sea level rise, changes in frequency of severe storms --- that have the potential to seriously disrupt human civilization. These are included under the term "Climate Change", but excluded from "Global Warming".
(And frustratingly, these guys are much harder to understand than the temperature rise.)
You're right that the shattered bits of the ice sheet do capsize and tilt sideways as the shelf collapses -- see MacAyeal et al, 2003. (MacAyeal finds a height-to-width ratio of roughly 4:1.) Thus, there would be a period of increased albedo.
But it doesn't take long for these bergs to melt: they're not the gigantic "mega icebergs" that calve off the major ice shelves farther south. Since the fragments are much taller than they are wide: once they capsize, they're really very thin (tens of meters), and should melt very quickly.
So, I'd say (without running the numbers) that they might have a short-term impact on climate (months to a year), but I doubt they'll have any significance over years or decades.
It doesn't matter. In today's rating system, the only difference between PG-13 and R is "Does the show contain boobies?" Violence has no impact on ratings.
Violence is a core part of the superhero genre, but explicit sex is not. You can do all the superhero movie you want inside a PG-13 rating.
Dark Knight proved that.
And if I accidentally short the battery with a big hunk of metal whose resistance is much less than the internal resistance of the battery? Where's the energy go then?
Not into the "load". Mostly into the battery itself. And the elctrolyte. Which boils in a couple seconds. Boom!
I'm surprised nobody has pointed out how dangerous this is. Lithium batteries are a serious fire hazard already, and this just makes it much worse.
If you work out the energies involved, you'll find that if the terminals on the the "1-liter battery" mentioned in the summary are shorted out accidentally, it will heat itself up to the melting point of lithium in a few seconds.
Best-case scenario, the battery destroys itself and melts into a puddle of molten metal on the tabletop. Worst-case scenario, the aqueous electrolyte vaporizes and the battery explodes like a grenade.
This level of power output makes the battery Not A Consumer Item.
Yes, let's use robots to prepare the moon base site. And then we can use robots to build the habitats. And then we can use robots to collect the field samples -- after all, that's just more digging. And then we can use the robots we already use to analyze the samples. And then use more robots to manufacture and operate a moon mining operation... ... wait, why were we sending people again?
(I mean that as a serious question. Why bother with humans?)
... and just to save you all some time, a pre-emptive reply:
"goodmanj, That idea is so gay."
I'll be willing to accept a ban on advertising your sexual orientation in online games, so long as it came with a ban on *accusations* of sexual orientation.
Which is to say, you can ban this lesbian if I can ban everyone who ever types "u r so gay" online.
No, we're both considering the same factors of night, latitude, and weather: my factor of two is the same as your factor of three. I'm just taking a bit off from space-based cells to account for energy lost during the microwave conversion proess.
Space-based cells have no intrinsic advantage, and we're double-counting the extrinsic issues.
Keep studying, grasshopper. Nature can be amazingly precise and geometric, but she doesn't make basalt columns 200 km across.
This is a mapmaking artifact, the grid pattern is the track of the ship collecting the data.
As usual we get Tech-speak here and not economics
If "it costs twenty times more and is no better" isn't a sound economic argument against, I don't know what is.
I spent a lot of time in grad school looking at seafloor topography maps, and let me tell you, the Google Ocean stuff is just *TERRIBLE*.
Much of the data comes from the GEBCO maps -- General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans. These were hand-drawn topo maps from the early- and mid-20th century. Beginning in the '90s, these were scanned in and digitized, but whoever did it did a lousy job.
The topo contours on the drawings weren't smoothed out on the digital map, so in many places the sea floor has a "terraced" or "layered" look which is not at all accurate. The original map data was supplemented with modern digital hydrographic data taken by shipboard sonars, but this data is only available along the path of the ship. No real effort was made to sensibly combine the old data with the new, so the new data forms straight lines cutting across the older data.
Which is what this "Atlantis" is. Some ship did a detailed survey of that area, following a grid search pattern. The data in between is older, less accurate, and mismatched.
If our land surface data was this bad, Google Earth would be mocked constantly. But since it's the ocean, nobody cares or notices.
Parent post is good, but it's really much simpler than that.
Cost per kg to send something to GEO orbit: $10,000
Cost of solar cells per kg: $400
Space-based cells produce about twice as much energy as the same panels on the ground.
So until launch costs drop to equal to the cost to build the panels, it'll be cheaper to just build twice as many panels on the ground.
Space-based power is a factor of 20 away.
And 3 times as efficient.
And they can be made as a coarse mesh, so you can hang one over a cornfield or ranch land and still grow crops and cows.
I'm guessing you're an accountant? Think of this article headline as "North Pole, Inc. to Restate Earnings for First Quarter of 2009". It's the same thing.