Not quite, there is a 20% reduction in 20 years, about 1%/yr, loss in the value of your PV (I don't know the life span of the inverter, my father's inverter has been going fine for 8 years). But I think you are right qualitatively.
A lot of the decrease is the PVA layer between the cells and the glass (the panels turn brown). You can replace this and increase the output fairly easily. I have a friend who runs a project in Nicaragua to salvage such panels, and broken panels, and resolder them for local use. Apparently it's quite a money spinner there (solar panels themselves are basically money machines, and these ones are very cheap, being rejects).
In principle, I agree with you, but in practice, architects rarely, if ever, understand how to make a thermally efficient house. It is probably better all round to specify both a performance characteristic, and a way to achieve that. Allow exemptions for people who can prove their design will achieve the required performance, specify the design to all others.
There's some reason behind that - sometimes you want to lose heat.
Then open a vent and turn on a fan. Your suggestion is akin to 'people should run around in only their underwear all year because in hot weather they need to keep cool'. More insulation is always the first step in conserving energy.
Winter is a bit of a pain but it is the subtropics.
So you live in northern NSW/southern QLD and think your house scales to any climate? An uninsulated unheated weatherboard house is miserable in winter in Melbourne (been there, done that), and lethal in Colorado.
This development will not change much. People prefer to have the files on their computer and build collections, not stream them.
I don't see how being able to watch a stream is incompatible from being able to save that stream to disk. I wonder what that 'save' button on the bottom right hand side does?
The evidence of the USSR and China and Vietnam show it to be true.
Ignoring the rest of your drivel, Vietnam was clearly hamstrung by some fading power dropping a billion bombs, enough toxic chemicals to kill everyone on the planet and leaving landmines to cripple workers for the next 50 years. To then turn around and blame 'communism' for this seems a little disingenuous.
I don't see how there is a difference between an impulse projectile and a continuously accelerated projectile (heck, that was your proposal that started this discussion). The proposal was going quite fast - 14km/s. That's fast. In fact, it's nearly orbital velocity.
Regarding energy, back of the envelop says that the proposed 35 * 5tonnes per day @ 500MW (43TJ) is about 7 space shuttle launches a day in payload (22TJ). So I agree that the current design is underwhelming. Pity. Perhaps there is an advantage that you could power it directly from electricity (though solar thermoelectrochemical production of hydrogen has an electrical efficiency of over 100%, so perhaps not).
Are you talking about what allows it to support its weight vertically (like a lasso, accelerated by linear motors at the base), or what stops it tipping over sideways (guy cables from the ground)?
A friend tried to build a scale model once and wanted to divide the angles by the scaling factor too. He didn't think his cunning plan all the way through.
Ah, whoops!:)
How is the conversion hard? Convert the foot+inches measurement into inches, then do your cosines and tangents. It's the exact same as using mm, except you have to convert the feet first.
Try doing it outside, on a windy, drizzly day, with a RPN calculator in poor light. As I said, we thought it was sensible to use the local units. It wasn't. Oh, and it's inches and 16ths of an inch. Or maybe we should convert to 16ths of an inch first?
Wouldn't it evaporate quickly, as small black holes are want to do? How do we know that it would even have a chance to absorb a particle before it fizzes away?
The issue was the constant conversion between base 10,12,16 and decimal. sqrt, sin and cos are hard to compute in the former, easy in the latter (especially when given a calculator). I have no idea what you mean by scaling the angles, angles are dimensionless.
I had a friend who made this same claim. I helped him build a greenhouse. As lumber etc comes in US imperial units I suggested we try doing everything in traditional units. Everything went swimmingly until we got to the various angles for the roof, and computing the diagonals to check for square. After 20 minutes with a calculator and a page of scrawlings trying to convert to feet, inches, and 16ths of an inch(the units on the tape measure) we gave up, changed to mms and finished the project.
My friend now uses metric for pretty much everything.
Yay demand pricing. I have used citylink, E470 and the various lexus lanes in DC. They save a little time, but perform poorly to grade separated PT in real terms. Again, until you have lived in a city where PT is done right, I can see that it is hard to believe it could work.
That movie seemed to avoid any real solutions, instead framing things to match the agenda of the show. Helicopter to work... haha.
Now apply pricing to all roads. Then realise that with PT you get the same effect with a lower cost and lower induced demand. But I don't need to convince you, we are testing the idea in practice at the world level. And evidence is that European cities with good PT consistently outperform those without. Europe has been outperforming the US on 'most livable' for decades.
The PPP roads have been a complete disaster in Australia, the Sydney cross city tunnel is haemoraging money, and the only way that citylink has been able to make money is by dropping capacity on alternative routes. Both have enshrined private monopolies into law. Neither have reduced congestion. In fact, both coincide with dramatic increases in PT usage, and in the case of Sydney, increases in PT coverage.
Go read something other than reason. They have some irrational hatred of PT and it skews their analysis into crazy land.
I work random hours. I only commute by light rail or bike. Works fine for me. Your mileage may vary. If anything the VTA is above average for the US (but well below average for the rest of the world).
Vancouver and Toronto have about the same density housing as any (sub)urban area in California. They have perfectly workable public transport, with mode share of 50%.
I certainly find your claim about PT not being workable outside those three cities ludicrous. Picking an 'average' Bay Area city, Los Altos has a density of 1,683.8/km which is roughly the same as Oslo (which has a similar income and higher car ownership per capita). Oslo had 160million trips on PT in 2004 from a population of 560000. That's about 0.8 PT trips per person per day. I'd consider that working.
Picking another random city in CA, Stockton, we have a density of nearly 2000/km^2.
The long and short of it is, transportation is something that the market will always do a better job of providing than the government. Oh, you're one of them. I s'pose you think freeways appear as if by magic too. If you really believe this, privatise the roads.
You've just never lived in a place where it works. Moving to America explained to me exactly why Americans think the way they do about public transport - it's terrible here.
And I disagree about fuel having an effect. I catch the light rail in San Jose. When I first arrived I was the only person who caught the mid morning trains. Now it's getting hard to find a seat. PT is several orders of magnitude more fuel efficient than cars (especially once you look at secondary effects such as road construction and environment). Even inefficient diesel buses become competitive with cars with only an average of 4 passengers.
Certainly trains won't displace all transport needs (intercontinental is going to be air for the foreseeable future, and cars are going to be needed when there isn't a PT option.) But the PT mode share can certainly increase dramatically for PT competitive tasks (such as commuting, diddling around town etc). And it is.
Moving those journeys out of cars will reduce congestion and thus improve car essential journeys. Everyone is better off.
I agree and was going to post much the same thing. MagLev has a number of problems over TGV/ICE/bullet style trains:
* more expensive trackwork (by a factor of 2 or so) * can't run on conventional trackwork, thus unable to continue at lower speed to other destinations, or to negotiate the city ends whilst direct routes are being built (See London and Madrid for examples) * slow and complex switches: rail switches involve moving a few 100kg of steel rail a few cm, monorails (including maglev) require moving huge 100tonne segments of track many metres. * dubious speed merits - as you point out the TGV has been matching the maglev for speed in trials, though not in commercial operation.
On the pro side, maglevs have a number of purported advantages:
* no contact: reducing wear, rolling resistance vibration and noise. * lower drag coefficient * no overhead wires
But these turn out to be less significant in practice because:
* wheel wear is not a major operating cost. The wheel vibration in railed vehicles can be avoided with maglev suspension in the bogies/trucks; and most vibration at high speed comes from the air (the AGV has special door handles to minimise turbulence).
* The wheels do contribute to the drag coefficient, and in fact the limiting factors for TGV speed are drag, power supply and the speed of sound in the overhead wires. But as I noted, they have matched the MagLev's speed repeatedly and there is no known reason why they can't increase the speed (especially when nanotubes become commercially available, allowing an order of magnitude increase in the speed of sound in the catenary). Increasing the operating voltage is practical to at least 50kV, at which point the rail line can start to be considered as an additional supply line.
* Overhead wires are considered by some to be unsightly, but as someone who lives next to a freeway, I can't see that roads are any more sightly. Often these people then propose having an elevated line - let's replace those unsightly wires with giant concrete trackways:)
They use them quite a bit in Europe. Europe also has a plethora of voltages (and a choice between 0Hz, 16.7Hz and 50Hz depending on the line). There are locomotives that can tap into any combination. The general trend in the Europe is for electrification reduce the noise and raising the voltage to increase the available power.
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Not quite, there is a 20% reduction in 20 years, about 1%/yr, loss in the value of your PV (I don't know the life span of the inverter, my father's inverter has been going fine for 8 years). But I think you are right qualitatively.
A lot of the decrease is the PVA layer between the cells and the glass (the panels turn brown). You can replace this and increase the output fairly easily. I have a friend who runs a project in Nicaragua to salvage such panels, and broken panels, and resolder them for local use. Apparently it's quite a money spinner there (solar panels themselves are basically money machines, and these ones are very cheap, being rejects).
In principle, I agree with you, but in practice, architects rarely, if ever, understand how to make a thermally efficient house. It is probably better all round to specify both a performance characteristic, and a way to achieve that. Allow exemptions for people who can prove their design will achieve the required performance, specify the design to all others.
There's some reason behind that - sometimes you want to lose heat.
Then open a vent and turn on a fan. Your suggestion is akin to 'people should run around in only their underwear all year because in hot weather they need to keep cool'. More insulation is always the first step in conserving energy.
Winter is a bit of a pain but it is the subtropics.
So you live in northern NSW/southern QLD and think your house scales to any climate? An uninsulated unheated weatherboard house is miserable in winter in Melbourne (been there, done that), and lethal in Colorado.
This development will not change much. People prefer to have the files on their computer and build collections, not stream them.
I don't see how being able to watch a stream is incompatible from being able to save that stream to disk. I wonder what that 'save' button on the bottom right hand side does?
The evidence of the USSR and China and Vietnam show it to be true.
Ignoring the rest of your drivel, Vietnam was clearly hamstrung by some fading power dropping a billion bombs, enough toxic chemicals to kill everyone on the planet and leaving landmines to cripple workers for the next 50 years. To then turn around and blame 'communism' for this seems a little disingenuous.
Fair enough.
I don't see how there is a difference between an impulse projectile and a continuously accelerated projectile (heck, that was your proposal that started this discussion). The proposal was going quite fast - 14km/s. That's fast. In fact, it's nearly orbital velocity.
Regarding energy, back of the envelop says that the proposed 35 * 5tonnes per day @ 500MW (43TJ) is about 7 space shuttle launches a day in payload (22TJ). So I agree that the current design is underwhelming. Pity. Perhaps there is an advantage that you could power it directly from electricity (though solar thermoelectrochemical production of hydrogen has an electrical efficiency of over 100%, so perhaps not).
What are the economics of the maglev launcher?
I don't think I can help you understand. Why does a projectile travel in an arc when it is fired upwards?
Are you talking about what allows it to support its weight vertically (like a lasso, accelerated by linear motors at the base), or what stops it tipping over sideways (guy cables from the ground)?
By the time we mine it all out if the Earth, space access costs will be very low...
Why is that? Are the laws of physics to be repealed?
Momentum. Think of a lasso.
How about one of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
It seems plausible. Especially if you look at using Al or CU loops in dyneema as diamagnets rather than iron as a ferromagnet.
It broke 3 days after the warranty expired? That sounds like brilliant engineering!
So they are more efficient. Which was his point.
No, ice has a density of 0.917 kg/L. a kg of ice has a volume of 1/0.917 = 1.09L. It's easy when you understand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensional_analysis .
A friend tried to build a scale model once and wanted to divide the angles by the scaling factor too. He didn't think his cunning plan all the way through.
Ah, whoops!How is the conversion hard? Convert the foot+inches measurement into inches, then do your cosines and tangents. It's the exact same as using mm, except you have to convert the feet first.
Try doing it outside, on a windy, drizzly day, with a RPN calculator in poor light. As I said, we thought it was sensible to use the local units. It wasn't. Oh, and it's inches and 16ths of an inch. Or maybe we should convert to 16ths of an inch first?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hawking_radiation
has some discussion of this, and some links.
I don't understand it myself.
Wouldn't it evaporate quickly, as small black holes are want to do? How do we know that it would even have a chance to absorb a particle before it fizzes away?
The issue was the constant conversion between base 10,12,16 and decimal. sqrt, sin and cos are hard to compute in the former, easy in the latter (especially when given a calculator). I have no idea what you mean by scaling the angles, angles are dimensionless.
I had a friend who made this same claim. I helped him build a greenhouse. As lumber etc comes in US imperial units I suggested we try doing everything in traditional units. Everything went swimmingly until we got to the various angles for the roof, and computing the diagonals to check for square. After 20 minutes with a calculator and a page of scrawlings trying to convert to feet, inches, and 16ths of an inch(the units on the tape measure) we gave up, changed to mms and finished the project.
My friend now uses metric for pretty much everything.
Yay demand pricing. I have used citylink, E470 and the various lexus lanes in DC. They save a little time, but perform poorly to grade separated PT in real terms. Again, until you have lived in a city where PT is done right, I can see that it is hard to believe it could work.
That movie seemed to avoid any real solutions, instead framing things to match the agenda of the show. Helicopter to work... haha.
Now apply pricing to all roads. Then realise that with PT you get the same effect with a lower cost and lower induced demand. But I don't need to convince you, we are testing the idea in practice at the world level. And evidence is that European cities with good PT consistently outperform those without. Europe has been outperforming the US on 'most livable' for decades.
The PPP roads have been a complete disaster in Australia, the Sydney cross city tunnel is haemoraging money, and the only way that citylink has been able to make money is by dropping capacity on alternative routes. Both have enshrined private monopolies into law. Neither have reduced congestion. In fact, both coincide with dramatic increases in PT usage, and in the case of Sydney, increases in PT coverage.
Go read something other than reason. They have some irrational hatred of PT and it skews their analysis into crazy land.
Vancouver and Toronto have about the same density housing as any (sub)urban area in California. They have perfectly workable public transport, with mode share of 50%.
I certainly find your claim about PT not being workable outside those three cities ludicrous. Picking an 'average' Bay Area city, Los Altos has a density of 1,683.8/km which is roughly the same as Oslo (which has a similar income and higher car ownership per capita). Oslo had 160million trips on PT in 2004 from a population of 560000. That's about 0.8 PT trips per person per day. I'd consider that working.
Picking another random city in CA, Stockton, we have a density of nearly 2000/km^2. The long and short of it is, transportation is something that the market will always do a better job of providing than the government. Oh, you're one of them. I s'pose you think freeways appear as if by magic too. If you really believe this, privatise the roads.
You've just never lived in a place where it works. Moving to America explained to me exactly why Americans think the way they do about public transport - it's terrible here.
And I disagree about fuel having an effect. I catch the light rail in San Jose. When I first arrived I was the only person who caught the mid morning trains. Now it's getting hard to find a seat. PT is several orders of magnitude more fuel efficient than cars (especially once you look at secondary effects such as road construction and environment). Even inefficient diesel buses become competitive with cars with only an average of 4 passengers.
Certainly trains won't displace all transport needs (intercontinental is going to be air for the foreseeable future, and cars are going to be needed when there isn't a PT option.) But the PT mode share can certainly increase dramatically for PT competitive tasks (such as commuting, diddling around town etc). And it is.
Moving those journeys out of cars will reduce congestion and thus improve car essential journeys. Everyone is better off.
I agree and was going to post much the same thing. MagLev has a number of problems over TGV/ICE/bullet style trains:
:)
* more expensive trackwork (by a factor of 2 or so)
* can't run on conventional trackwork, thus unable to continue at lower speed to other destinations, or to negotiate the city ends whilst direct routes are being built (See London and Madrid for examples)
* slow and complex switches: rail switches involve moving a few 100kg of steel rail a few cm, monorails (including maglev) require moving huge 100tonne segments of track many metres.
* dubious speed merits - as you point out the TGV has been matching the maglev for speed in trials, though not in commercial operation.
On the pro side, maglevs have a number of purported advantages:
* no contact: reducing wear, rolling resistance vibration and noise.
* lower drag coefficient
* no overhead wires
But these turn out to be less significant in practice because:
* wheel wear is not a major operating cost. The wheel vibration in railed vehicles can be avoided with maglev suspension in the bogies/trucks; and most vibration at high speed comes from the air (the AGV has special door handles to minimise turbulence).
* The wheels do contribute to the drag coefficient, and in fact the limiting factors for TGV speed are drag, power supply and the speed of sound in the overhead wires. But as I noted, they have matched the MagLev's speed repeatedly and there is no known reason why they can't increase the speed (especially when nanotubes become commercially available, allowing an order of magnitude increase in the speed of sound in the catenary). Increasing the operating voltage is practical to at least 50kV, at which point the rail line can start to be considered as an additional supply line.
* Overhead wires are considered by some to be unsightly, but as someone who lives next to a freeway, I can't see that roads are any more sightly. Often these people then propose having an elevated line - let's replace those unsightly wires with giant concrete trackways
There are diesel-electric/electric locomotives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-diesel_locomotive
They use them quite a bit in Europe. Europe also has a plethora of voltages (and a choice between 0Hz, 16.7Hz and 50Hz depending on the line). There are locomotives that can tap into any combination. The general trend in the Europe is for electrification reduce the noise and raising the voltage to increase the available power.