For instance, I just recently built a custom PC for myself using a 64 bit CPU, a PCI Express video card and 1 gig of ram. Motherboard, CPU, RAM, Video Card, and case only cost me $350. Can't do that with a Mac. Not even the Mac Mini which wouldn't be as powerful. It may be lacking a couple hundred dollars worth of software, but at least I don't pay for the stuff I don't want.
Ditto. I was a mac man through and through, but linux is now at the point where macosx just gets in my way. I bought a very nice new desktop machine that does everything I want for $150US from a local guy who builds machines in his garage. It's worked flawlessly and I know I'll get better follow up service from him than from apple (who still haven't fixed my airport base station 3 years after I sent it in for repair).
Yeah, Melbourne is behind the times, although there is talk of using 22kV AC for the proposed highspeed link to Adelaide. Until recently some of the tram substations still used mercury arc rectifiers too:) Victorian rail is mostly moribund (though the new ballarat line looks nice).
Ignoring the fact that you seem to be confused about DC vs AC for transmission, modern trains generally use AC. Carrying energy makes the train subject to the rocket equation and thus more limited in efficiency.
I haven't really used Windows, and I've been programming computers since 1986. I've run wine a few times to try it out, I had to use a custom program on Windows 3.1 for my chemistry classes, and I used Windows XP for web browsing when I worked at MS research. I couldn't even tell you how to run a program not in the start menu.
Re:Analogies are like dandelions.
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They are showy and superficially attractive, but in reality are destructive weeds that need to be mercilessly extirpated.
Sorry, your analogy breaks down here - dandelions are fantastic at extracting minerals from poor soils for compost.
The electricity they generate could be sold back to the grid at a profit, instead they are burning it running computers. Whether they make their own electricity or not, the value of the electricity is still something like 12c/kWh.
To make this clearer, lets say you discovered 100t of gold on your property. Maybe you make your house out of gold, maybe you make it out of bricks. If you sold the gold you could buy a lot of bricks. Which would you do?
If you like Linux, it seems like your political system, if you hate it, it seems like the bad guy's political system. I've heard Linux described as socialist, liberterian, capitalist, communist, consumer-oriented, darwinist, populist, green, lean, fat and mean.
More importantly, sharecropping is a guaranteed loss. If the original poster's system ran entirely on free software or software they owned this would never have happened. I can't say I'm very sympathetic to people who make this mistake.
My objection to your objections is that you either haven't read the article, or your didn't understand it. A better title might have been 'nanowire electrodes made from virus bodies' or something.
As for this: The power available goes down as the third power of the linear dimensions. A virus has about the smallest linear dimension of just about anything. When you take about the smallest number one can imagine, and cube it, you get a breathtakingly small number. That's the watt-hour capacity of a virus, down in the microwatt-microsecond range. Just stunningly small.
WTF are you talking about? Do you think that they would use a single cell to power a laptop?!
yeah, I know. It was just an opportunity too good to miss:)
millidegrees kelvin is standard terminology. Anyway, why can't we have millidegrees arc? My calculator can work out degrees in decimal. I bet you've said something like 'it's warmed up 5 degrees already!' too. I'd rather people got that wrong and got energy and power, temperature and heat, weight and mass, and power and current right.
Kelvin is on its own, except when talking about millidegrees:) millikelvin is also valid. As you said, it's mainly a question of hysterical raisons. (And one does not normally write the UNITS IN ALL CAPS:)
I have no experience with OpenOffice, but I can tell you that LaTeX is more appropriate (better? depends on how you define better) than Star Office or Microsoft Word for my wirting.
Milk bars/general stores were a great idea that should never have died out (well they haven't totally, but they really struggle to compete against stupormarkets). If we had an internet based ordering scheme I would happily trundle a km with a trolley to a shop to pick up my order.
I don't believe that stochastic delivery need trust people, as long as a person can find out who mislaid their parcel I think existing social and legal systems would work. It just requires careful protocol design (something I would leave to cryptanalysts or something). It would certainly be safer than ebay.
In the cities I've lived in it wasn't that hard to find 50m^2. lets say we have a 1km*1km square of land. That would support 20000 people with permaculture. By comparison, bangladesh, which is cramped by any standard, has only 1000 people/km^2. When we look at cites, the highest in the US is NYC, with 10000 people/km^2. Perhaps we could use the roof space.
I don't really know how it would all fit together, to be honest, but it seems work investigation, eh?
Permaculture in a way is ultimately unsurprising, as it is based on very simple and clear thinking. That you've come up with some overlapping set of rules indicates the rules are probably very good. It would, however, be worth your while finding a book in the library and see if there is anything else you might learn.
I'm learning about hydroponics at the moment, as I have a friend who grows amazing tomatos using hydroponics. Perhaps adding seaweed, worm wee or some suitable compost might help with the trace elements. I'm actually interested in hydroponics for a) greenhouse temperature control (a long story) and b) getting rid of partially treated greywater.
If most people were just moving numbers around, perhaps that would be better done with a computer anyway? Do you work from home at all? (I do, but I need to go in to work 3 times a week, not because of authority, but because despite being in one of the best industries for telecommuting (CS), I still get more done with f2f meeting than using gnomemeeting!) I think you're on the right track, but I think it is much harder than you think.
Trucks are only more efficient/kg m, not more efficient per m. So if you have a truck driving around delivering things making the same trips as people do in their cars, the trucks would be much more inefficient! The way to reduce this is by merging deliveries by location, but that would require somewhere to gather/scatter the products, adding an extra warehouse. It would also eat into supermarket's profits, so they wouldn't be interested in that. Perhaps amazon might do something. So far they haven't (despite asking for the cheapest delivery, my last amazon shipment travelled by itself 26000km by air). Would having only one shop per city lead to monopolistic behaviour?
One idea I've pondered over the years is stochastic delivery. Instead of requiring predictability of delivery, most parcels really only require reliability, economy and promptness. Why not instead have a scheme where mail/post is merged at the street level (I'm going north, what other stuff in my street is going north) and delivered as far as possible/convenient for me. At each location the mail would be RFID scanned and computers would prepare for the next person to move some. Much like IP. People would know who last handled their parcels thus giving perhaps more security than existing post. Big hops (intercity etc) might be sponsored by some kind of millipayment scheme.
Perhaps we would get more improvement by not shipping tomatos on average 5000km. Eat local produce and all that. Did you know that using permaculture techniques it is possible for a person to live off 50m^2 using only 4 person/hours per week labour?
They don't take as long. The various front-loaders I've interacted with have all taken forever to do a load of washing, and can do far less (try washing a queen sized doona in a consumer front loader!). We personally have a 40 year top-loader still going strong. As we reuse the waste water, and use only cold water and a suitably biodegradable (low Na, low P) powder the environmental impact is very slight indeed. The machine fully loaded uses 100Whr of energy.
If you were an electrical engineer you would know that photon interaction with magnetic fields is of the order of plank's constant. (indeed photon/photon interaction in general is very weak)
grams of H2O per kilometer of travel. (hydrogen enthusiasts, water vapor is a greenhouse gas too)
Yes, but even if we converted all our energy using some new technology that produced hydrogen for free, the amount of water vapour in the air due to burning hydrogen would be swamped by the amount due to evaporation!
specific heat of steel = 620 J/kg K latent heat of fusion of steel = 267 kJ/kg latent heat of vaporisation of steel = 349.6 kJ/kg melting point of steel 1515 C boiling point of steel 2750C
energy to bring steel to melting point (1515 - 20)*620 J/kg = 926.9 kJ/kg energy to bring liquid steel to vapour point (2750 - 1515)*310J/kg (this is wild guess, as I can't find the specific heat of liquid steel) = 383 kJ/kg
total energy to bring steel from room temp to gas: 926.9 + 267 + 383 + 349.6 = 1926 kJ / kg
compare with energy require to boil 1 kg of water = (100-20)*4.2+2200 = 2535 kJ/kg
You're right that at 540C (800K) water is a supercritical fluid. It was a way of thinking about the energy in steam. Of course 540C steam burns more than 100C it has more energy, my point was that 100C steam burns like 540C water (except that water becomes a supercritical fluid and the concept of latent heat gets messy). I'm not sure whether you are being unecessarily pedantic, or just missing the point completely...
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For instance, I just recently built a custom PC for myself using a 64 bit CPU, a PCI Express video card and 1 gig of ram. Motherboard, CPU, RAM, Video Card, and case only cost me $350. Can't do that with a Mac. Not even the Mac Mini which wouldn't be as powerful. It may be lacking a couple hundred dollars worth of software, but at least I don't pay for the stuff I don't want.
Ditto. I was a mac man through and through, but linux is now at the point where macosx just gets in my way. I bought a very nice new desktop machine that does everything I want for $150US from a local guy who builds machines in his garage. It's worked flawlessly and I know I'll get better follow up service from him than from apple (who still haven't fixed my airport base station 3 years after I sent it in for repair).
Yeah, Melbourne is behind the times, although there is talk of using 22kV AC for the proposed highspeed link to Adelaide. Until recently some of the tram substations still used mercury arc rectifiers too :) Victorian rail is mostly moribund (though the new ballarat line looks nice).
(nice to hear from another ferroequinologist)
Ignoring the fact that you seem to be confused about DC vs AC for transmission, modern trains generally use AC. Carrying energy makes the train subject to the rocket equation and thus more limited in efficiency.
I haven't really used Windows, and I've been programming computers since 1986. I've run wine a few times to try it out, I had to use a custom program on Windows 3.1 for my chemistry classes, and I used Windows XP for web browsing when I worked at MS research. I couldn't even tell you how to run a program not in the start menu.
They are showy and superficially attractive, but in reality are destructive weeds that need to be mercilessly extirpated.
Sorry, your analogy breaks down here - dandelions are fantastic at extracting minerals from poor soils for compost.
BAN = Basel Action Network (If you'd RTFA)
Why don't they just use two bent sticks?
The electricity they generate could be sold back to the grid at a profit, instead they are burning it running computers. Whether they make their own electricity or not, the value of the electricity is still something like 12c/kWh.
To make this clearer, lets say you discovered 100t of gold on your property. Maybe you make your house out of gold, maybe you make it out of bricks. If you sold the gold you could buy a lot of bricks. Which would you do?
If you like Linux, it seems like your political system, if you hate it, it seems like the bad guy's political system. I've heard Linux described as socialist, liberterian, capitalist, communist, consumer-oriented, darwinist, populist, green, lean, fat and mean.
More importantly, sharecropping is a guaranteed loss. If the original poster's system ran entirely on free software or software they owned this would never have happened. I can't say I'm very sympathetic to people who make this mistake.
Except they still are paying for the electricity. Which was the original point.
My objection to your objections is that you either haven't read the article, or your didn't understand it. A better title might have been 'nanowire electrodes made from virus bodies' or something.
As for this:
The power available goes down as the third power of the linear dimensions. A virus has about the smallest linear dimension of just about anything. When you take about the smallest number one can imagine, and cube it, you get a breathtakingly small number. That's the watt-hour capacity of a virus, down in the microwatt-microsecond range. Just stunningly small.
WTF are you talking about? Do you think that they would use a single cell to power a laptop?!
yeah, I know. It was just an opportunity too good to miss :)
:) millikelvin is also valid. As you said, it's mainly a question of hysterical raisons. (And one does not normally write the UNITS IN ALL CAPS :)
millidegrees kelvin is standard terminology. Anyway, why can't we have millidegrees arc? My calculator can work out degrees in decimal. I bet you've said something like 'it's warmed up 5 degrees already!' too. I'd rather people got that wrong and got energy and power, temperature and heat, weight and mass, and power and current right.
Kelvin is on its own, except when talking about millidegrees
for example there's no such thing as a millidegree..
& ie=UTF8
millidegrees are used all the time in cryogenics. http://www.google.com/search?q=millidegree+Kelvin
Pedantic humour is best when you're actually correct.
I have no experience with OpenOffice, but I can tell you that LaTeX is more appropriate (better? depends on how you define better) than Star Office or Microsoft Word for my wirting.
Yeah, and the spell checker is better too.
Milk bars/general stores were a great idea that should never have died out (well they haven't totally, but they really struggle to compete against stupormarkets). If we had an internet based ordering scheme I would happily trundle a km with a trolley to a shop to pick up my order.
/km^2. When we look at cites, the highest in the US is NYC, with 10000 people /km^2. Perhaps we could use the roof space.
I don't believe that stochastic delivery need trust people, as long as a person can find out who mislaid their parcel I think existing social and legal systems would work. It just requires careful protocol design (something I would leave to cryptanalysts or something). It would certainly be safer than ebay.
In the cities I've lived in it wasn't that hard to find 50m^2. lets say we have a 1km*1km square of land. That would support 20000 people with permaculture. By comparison, bangladesh, which is cramped by any standard, has only 1000 people
I don't really know how it would all fit together, to be honest, but it seems work investigation, eh?
Permaculture in a way is ultimately unsurprising, as it is based on very simple and clear thinking. That you've come up with some overlapping set of rules indicates the rules are probably very good. It would, however, be worth your while finding a book in the library and see if there is anything else you might learn.
I'm learning about hydroponics at the moment, as I have a friend who grows amazing tomatos using hydroponics. Perhaps adding seaweed, worm wee or some suitable compost might help with the trace elements. I'm actually interested in hydroponics for a) greenhouse temperature control (a long story) and b) getting rid of partially treated greywater.
Good luck with your business.
If most people were just moving numbers around, perhaps that would be better done with a computer anyway? Do you work from home at all? (I do, but I need to go in to work 3 times a week, not because of authority, but because despite being in one of the best industries for telecommuting (CS), I still get more done with f2f meeting than using gnomemeeting!) I think you're on the right track, but I think it is much harder than you think.
/kg m, not more efficient per m. So if you have a truck driving around delivering things making the same trips as people do in their cars, the trucks would be much more inefficient! The way to reduce this is by merging deliveries by location, but that would require somewhere to gather/scatter the products, adding an extra warehouse. It would also eat into supermarket's profits, so they wouldn't be interested in that. Perhaps amazon might do something. So far they haven't (despite asking for the cheapest delivery, my last amazon shipment travelled by itself 26000km by air). Would having only one shop per city lead to monopolistic behaviour?
Trucks are only more efficient
One idea I've pondered over the years is stochastic delivery. Instead of requiring predictability of delivery, most parcels really only require reliability, economy and promptness. Why not instead have a scheme where mail/post is merged at the street level (I'm going north, what other stuff in my street is going north) and delivered as far as possible/convenient for me. At each location the mail would be RFID scanned and computers would prepare for the next person to move some. Much like IP. People would know who last handled their parcels thus giving perhaps more security than existing post. Big hops (intercity etc) might be sponsored by some kind of millipayment scheme.
Perhaps we would get more improvement by not shipping tomatos on average 5000km. Eat local produce and all that. Did you know that using permaculture techniques it is possible for a person to live off 50m^2 using only 4 person/hours per week labour?
They don't take as long. The various front-loaders I've interacted with have all taken forever to do a load of washing, and can do far less (try washing a queen sized doona in a consumer front loader!). We personally have a 40 year top-loader still going strong. As we reuse the waste water, and use only cold water and a suitably biodegradable (low Na, low P) powder the environmental impact is very slight indeed. The machine fully loaded uses 100Whr of energy.
If you were an electrical engineer you would know that photon interaction with magnetic fields is of the order of plank's constant. (indeed photon/photon interaction in general is very weak)
grams of H2O per kilometer of travel. (hydrogen enthusiasts, water vapor is a greenhouse gas too)
Yes, but even if we converted all our energy using some new technology that produced hydrogen for free, the amount of water vapour in the air due to burning hydrogen would be swamped by the amount due to evaporation!
10 miles is a nice distance to ride your bike.
Sounds good, how would you go about doing this?
Though, I don't see that buying stuff and getting it delivered is going to reduce our transport energy costs. Better to grow your own food, perhaps?
Laser steel cutters seem to work well. I think that hot steel might be a rather poor conductor of heat.
The answer is a little surprising:
specific heat of steel = 620 J/kg K
latent heat of fusion of steel = 267 kJ/kg
latent heat of vaporisation of steel = 349.6 kJ/kg
melting point of steel 1515 C
boiling point of steel 2750C
energy to bring steel to melting point (1515 - 20)*620 J/kg = 926.9 kJ/kg
energy to bring liquid steel to vapour point (2750 - 1515)*310J/kg (this is wild guess, as I can't find the specific heat of liquid steel) = 383 kJ/kg
total energy to bring steel from room temp to gas: 926.9 + 267 + 383 + 349.6 = 1926 kJ / kg
compare with energy require to boil 1 kg of water = (100-20)*4.2+2200 = 2535 kJ/kg
You're right that at 540C (800K) water is a supercritical fluid. It was a way of thinking about the energy in steam. Of course 540C steam burns more than 100C it has more energy, my point was that 100C steam burns like 540C water (except that water becomes a supercritical fluid and the concept of latent heat gets messy). I'm not sure whether you are being unecessarily pedantic, or just missing the point completely...