You must not have a large TV with any sort of surround sound system, have a gas heater, dryer, and stove, and not leave your front porch light on!
I have a secondhand 500W kenwood system, but it uses about 25W continuous when it's on (with good speakers 1W RMS is plenty loud enough! I get 92dB sound from 1W). Our TV uses around 150W, but it's only on for 4 hours a day max, we don't have a heater at all, we dry our clothes in our greenhouse, the stove is gas, and our front porch light is only 5W and comes on when people approach. So not a bad guess:) You forgot gas DHW (DHW is the biggest user of energy anyway). Most of our energy is used running the fridge and chest freezer.
But even if you were paying 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, a hundred left-on PCs each wasting a hundred watts would still only cost you five bucks an hour. Big deal. 5 cents per hour. Or around $36 total. a month.
I pay 16c per kWh in Melbourne, and I figure on $1.4 for every watt continuous, so that makes a 200W system left on use $280 of electricity a year. That's a fair amount. As I said, that's about a third of our total electricity usage. My parents daily energy usage was 30kWh, then my brother moved out and it dropped to just over 10. Guess who had all the hardware?:)
Spending a grand on a new computer to save $100 a year is not economically logical, nor environmentally logical... and you can save more by spending 30 seconds in the BIOS: My year old athalon cost me $200 all up, and uses 40W continuous (underclocked from 2.2GHz to 1.6GHz, dropped the voltage and the disks are auto standby). My terrarium uses more energy:)
(Yes, my dad has a watt-hour meter, and I measured everything; I like to live cheap - means I can work the hours I want and still have money)
Yes, I read that a while back. And I agree with what he says. You need to look at the numbers I'm posting - I live in an area with 4000 people / sq km. That's not rural! I would describe our area as dense suburbia. Yet we provide our own food, and use only 5800kWh/year electricity. I get to work by bike, my wife by train. We use 1000l of petrol a year in fuel, including our extensive driving (we travelled 10000km of highway in one trip last year). That article also does not consider the energy invested in moving all the food, consumer goods and water in and out of the city. I suspect that is at least of the same order of magnitude as personal transportation cost. Most people I know pay a lot more for food each year than fuel, and in a way food needs as much fuel as it costs (particularly when you include farm subsidies and the like).
I think we do pretty well compared with a manhattan dweller (at only 2.5 times higher density). But our house required just 3 mature Eucalyptus regnans to build, about 400l of petrol to make and when it goes down the soil will be immediately available for crops. The only concrete is the new stumps and the shower base (less than a tonne total) and the only steel nails, screws and door hinges:) Insulation is old phone books and polystyrene foam boards. Being old, we don't have much glass either.
I believe that the most efficient housing will incorporate food production at the house. Paris was a net exporter of food until the war, and Paris has (had) more than double the people density of NYC! I'm imagining something akin to techno-villages, population say 60000, packed into clusters of houses perhaps as circuses or crescents, joined on the sides, with a village green in the center and individual cropping gardens radiating away. Each circus might have 27 apartments, with two families in each (say 4 ave per family, 8 per house, 216 per circus. The total area of a circus might be 2 hectares, or a circle radius 80m. We can put 40 of these comfortably to the square km, getting a population density of around 8000/km^2 (almost NYC). We have 2160m^2 taken up by the houses, and in cool temperate/mediteranian climates 50m^2 is enough per person to feed themselves over a year. That leaves 40m^2 per person free space (we might take 10 of these up for road, and the rest a shared green). This is without requiring a new technology or putting crops on the roofs. (flaws: won't collect enough water to be self sufficient, nor PV electricity, but energy and water are easier to move than people and food) We could run some kind of public transport through this so that nobody needs to travel more than 500m. I propose computer collated minibuses seating say 8 people that provide door to door service.
Between villages we might have a few kms of farmland, bush land or factories forming a patchwork. People could commute to work on bike in many cases (I ride 10km to work, covering at least 160000 people) (manhattan also has a large population of people commuting considerable distances in to work from surrounding areas) or by intervillage mass transit. 216 people is small enough that people can get involved, 60000 is enough to provide intellectual stimulation. Different towns can focus on different interests, be that sport, industry or fiction. With modern transportation I could visit something 500km away for the day, or cross the USA for the weekend.
High rises require high energy materials such as steel and concrete, small single and two story dwellings don't. The fact that people could build 2 storey houses a thousand years ago, but not 40 storey ones is a big hint. We keep our house warm with just the heat generated by our electrical applicances: this is easy to confirm - we don't have any heaters; yet I'm sitting here in late winter in my shorts (about to ride to work). Large buildings, on the other hand, require large airconditioning plants just to provide fresh air. You can get most of the heat sharing behaviour with apartments, without the expensive materials. Modern insulations make the heat sharing idea fairly moot anyway (build your house with SIPs and the energy loss through the walls is less than that required for fresh air).
A housing model where people live in a tower surrounded by productive farmland is plausibly better, but it will never happen because of the vast cost of highrise living (another hint that highrise living is not energy comparible with short houses).
I'm not north american, something you could have deduced very easily. (perhaps something to do with laziness in fact checking?)
Sorry, where did I say lets spread it all over the country? I mentioned the rather high density of 4000/km^2, and the fact that we could all grow our food locally. I did say that I didn't believe high rises are efficient.
Our car already gets 40mpg (toyota starlet). I disagree about your other points, they are well meaning but based on false premises: Because we live in suburbia we can grow our own veggies and chickens (indeed we produce an excess to sell to others); we live in a fairly dense area (average space per person 4000 people/km), but don't incure the high energy cost of a high rise; bikes are more efficient than walking (about 5 times in fact); and we can collect and use our own water.
Suburbia is no less 'natural' than urban living. Our ancestors lived in small groups surrounded by hunting, then agricultural land. Cities create huge resource demands on the surrounding area and discourage self-reliance, separating people from their needs and making them indifferent to the problems they create. Which makes them unjustifiably smug.
Because of all this crap floating around on both sides, I personally have just said "fuck it" in relation to global warming. I'm not looking in to it anymore, I don't know who to believe. I neither believe nor disbelieve the theory. I'll continue to conserve as much as possible in my personal life (biking to work, for example, which I highly recommend) since I believe in conservation for it's own sake and since it makes economic sense (use less, have more). However I'm not going to get all worked up about it because I just can't figure out if there's anything to get all worked up about.
I pretty much agree with you here. The facts are hard to verify personally, mostly relying on science by consensus and big computer models. But I do believe we are stuffing things up, so I to try to ride my bike to work all the time and drive a tiny car. I'm glad that it is possible/arguable to believe in environmental conservation without having to take all the baggage that some people attach.
Wireless is only practical in large cities with high population density.
Wireless 'broadband' is the most popular net connection in rural australia, with most areas with more than 1000 people in a 10km radius having private providers already. I think if anything, wireless makes the most sense in low density areas, where the ISM bands are underused and line of sight is cheaper than cables.
So you should use Australia as a model for the US, with our national population density of only 2.4 per sq km, and as low as 0.8/km^2 in WA. I just got back from central WA, where the locals know everyone in a radius of 20km, and everyone there had fast internet access.
Sorry, but a good engineer, scientist or programmer instinctively worries. Worry is a way of pondering the relative merits of problems. Whenever I 'worry' that there might be a flaw in a mathematical proof I look closer and usually find I'm right. Tapping into my worry circuit provides very useful information. It is a form of negative insight. Perhaps you have a different definition of worry (one that satisfies your claims), perhaps 'pathological worrying'. The worry demonstrated in the FA seems to me to me to be more 'logical worrying'. (Though unjustified in this case, IMO)
The fact that worry exists gives it some kind of evolutionary value, particularly given
You lose credibility when you start attacking people's motivations and abilities. Personal attacks are often a sign of insecurity.
Actually, worry is a very useful emotion. Worry drives a lot of human behaviour, and worry can be very productive in future planning. It's fair to say that worry is the main reason why humanity is still here.
Remaining mobile will have a dramatic effect on the rate of decline in later years. In the case of arthritis, gentle movement such as riding and swimming has been shown to prevent joint seizure and improve the chance of other treatments succeeding. In the case of altzheimers, regular exercise and (strangely) regular chewing can even stop the progress of the syndrome.
So no, it does not do jack shit for people in the latter half of their life. Indeed it is plausible that your 'halfway life' is exactly when you stop exercising;)
Not true. The best two ways to control arthritic knees are swimming and bike riding, because they are essentially non-impact exercise. People who ride lots during their life also live longer and suffer less from degenerative disease (such as arthritis and alztheimers).
Boeing stores plane documentation in etched glass plates? Do you have evidence? How likely are we to be able to read something stored as compressed binary data in a few hundred years?
It is not hard to make a book last a few centuries if you want it to. There are plenty of books out there describing reliable techniques that have been tested for as long.
Actually, 50-60Hz is far more likely to cause the heart to go into fibrilation. The heart generally restarts after a DC shock (which is why those people-jump-starting things use a big pulse of DC).
I'm not sure what you mean by DC is more likely to start fires.
Wow! you're right that is most odd. A very smart friend of mine (appeal to authority...) convinced me once that blackholes don't really exist, and gave something like 10 reasons ranging from definitional to practical as to why they don't exist. He never mentioned this one. My personally (unqualified) feeling is that black holes don't exist in practice, what we observe instead is the infinitely slowing collapse of neutron stars (never actually creating an event horizon). I think this because nobody has ever given me a compelling model of how an event horizon might be created - the time dilation and photon pressure seem to get in the way.
Slashdot Mirror
You must not have a large TV with any sort of surround sound system, have a gas heater, dryer, and stove, and not leave your front porch light on!
:) You forgot gas DHW (DHW is the biggest user of energy anyway). Most of our energy is used running the fridge and chest freezer.
:)
:)
I have a secondhand 500W kenwood system, but it uses about 25W continuous when it's on (with good speakers 1W RMS is plenty loud enough! I get 92dB sound from 1W). Our TV uses around 150W, but it's only on for 4 hours a day max, we don't have a heater at all, we dry our clothes in our greenhouse, the stove is gas, and our front porch light is only 5W and comes on when people approach. So not a bad guess
But even if you were paying 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, a hundred left-on PCs each wasting a hundred watts would still only cost you five bucks an hour. Big deal.
5 cents per hour. Or around $36 total. a month.
I pay 16c per kWh in Melbourne, and I figure on $1.4 for every watt continuous, so that makes a 200W system left on use $280 of electricity a year. That's a fair amount. As I said, that's about a third of our total electricity usage. My parents daily energy usage was 30kWh, then my brother moved out and it dropped to just over 10. Guess who had all the hardware?
Spending a grand on a new computer to save $100 a year is not economically logical, nor environmentally logical... and you can save more by spending 30 seconds in the BIOS: My year old athalon cost me $200 all up, and uses 40W continuous (underclocked from 2.2GHz to 1.6GHz, dropped the voltage and the disks are auto standby). My terrarium uses more energy
(Yes, my dad has a watt-hour meter, and I measured everything; I like to live cheap - means I can work the hours I want and still have money)
Idle: not that much. 120-200 watts maximum. while idle.
That's a third of my electricity bill! I've found that computers on 24/7 are the biggest load in most houses, particularly people who have 5.
EXACTLY. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm keeping that Feynmann quote :)
Now be nice, give it back when you're finished using it so others can enjoy it too.
Yes, I read that a while back. And I agree with what he says. You need to look at the numbers I'm posting - I live in an area with 4000 people / sq km. That's not rural! I would describe our area as dense suburbia. Yet we provide our own food, and use only 5800kWh/year electricity. I get to work by bike, my wife by train. We use 1000l of petrol a year in fuel, including our extensive driving (we travelled 10000km of highway in one trip last year). That article also does not consider the energy invested in moving all the food, consumer goods and water in and out of the city. I suspect that is at least of the same order of magnitude as personal transportation cost. Most people I know pay a lot more for food each year than fuel, and in a way food needs as much fuel as it costs (particularly when you include farm subsidies and the like).
:) Insulation is old phone books and polystyrene foam boards. Being old, we don't have much glass either.
I think we do pretty well compared with a manhattan dweller (at only 2.5 times higher density). But our house required just 3 mature Eucalyptus regnans to build, about 400l of petrol to make and when it goes down the soil will be immediately available for crops. The only concrete is the new stumps and the shower base (less than a tonne total) and the only steel nails, screws and door hinges
I believe that the most efficient housing will incorporate food production at the house. Paris was a net exporter of food until the war, and Paris has (had) more than double the people density of NYC! I'm imagining something akin to techno-villages, population say 60000, packed into clusters of houses perhaps as circuses or crescents, joined on the sides, with a village green in the center and individual cropping gardens radiating away. Each circus might have 27 apartments, with two families in each (say 4 ave per family, 8 per house, 216 per circus. The total area of a circus might be 2 hectares, or a circle radius 80m. We can put 40 of these comfortably to the square km, getting a population density of around 8000/km^2 (almost NYC). We have 2160m^2 taken up by the houses, and in cool temperate/mediteranian climates 50m^2 is enough per person to feed themselves over a year. That leaves 40m^2 per person free space (we might take 10 of these up for road, and the rest a shared green). This is without requiring a new technology or putting crops on the roofs. (flaws: won't collect enough water to be self sufficient, nor PV electricity, but energy and water are easier to move than people and food) We could run some kind of public transport through this so that nobody needs to travel more than 500m. I propose computer collated minibuses seating say 8 people that provide door to door service.
Between villages we might have a few kms of farmland, bush land or factories forming a patchwork. People could commute to work on bike in many cases (I ride 10km to work, covering at least 160000 people) (manhattan also has a large population of people commuting considerable distances in to work from surrounding areas) or by intervillage mass transit. 216 people is small enough that people can get involved, 60000 is enough to provide intellectual stimulation. Different towns can focus on different interests, be that sport, industry or fiction. With modern transportation I could visit something 500km away for the day, or cross the USA for the weekend.
Ok, I'm dreaming again.
High rises require high energy materials such as steel and concrete, small single and two story dwellings don't. The fact that people could build 2 storey houses a thousand years ago, but not 40 storey ones is a big hint. We keep our house warm with just the heat generated by our electrical applicances: this is easy to confirm - we don't have any heaters; yet I'm sitting here in late winter in my shorts (about to ride to work). Large buildings, on the other hand, require large airconditioning plants just to provide fresh air. You can get most of the heat sharing behaviour with apartments, without the expensive materials. Modern insulations make the heat sharing idea fairly moot anyway (build your house with SIPs and the energy loss through the walls is less than that required for fresh air).
A housing model where people live in a tower surrounded by productive farmland is plausibly better, but it will never happen because of the vast cost of highrise living (another hint that highrise living is not energy comparible with short houses).
I'm not north american, something you could have deduced very easily. (perhaps something to do with laziness in fact checking?)
Sorry, where did I say lets spread it all over the country? I mentioned the rather high density of 4000/km^2, and the fact that we could all grow our food locally. I did say that I didn't believe high rises are efficient.
Our car already gets 40mpg (toyota starlet). I disagree about your other points, they are well meaning but based on false premises: Because we live in suburbia we can grow our own veggies and chickens (indeed we produce an excess to sell to others); we live in a fairly dense area (average space per person 4000 people/km), but don't incure the high energy cost of a high rise; bikes are more efficient than walking (about 5 times in fact); and we can collect and use our own water.
Suburbia is no less 'natural' than urban living. Our ancestors lived in small groups surrounded by hunting, then agricultural land. Cities create huge resource demands on the surrounding area and discourage self-reliance, separating people from their needs and making them indifferent to the problems they create. Which makes them unjustifiably smug.
(Note that deliberate particulate emissions would not be a feasible countermeasure to global warming: they are too unhealthy.)
And they stop it from raining.
Because of all this crap floating around on both sides, I personally have just said "fuck it" in relation to global warming. I'm not looking in to it anymore, I don't know who to believe. I neither believe nor disbelieve the theory. I'll continue to conserve as much as possible in my personal life (biking to work, for example, which I highly recommend) since I believe in conservation for it's own sake and since it makes economic sense (use less, have more). However I'm not going to get all worked up about it because I just can't figure out if there's anything to get all worked up about.
I pretty much agree with you here. The facts are hard to verify personally, mostly relying on science by consensus and big computer models. But I do believe we are stuffing things up, so I to try to ride my bike to work all the time and drive a tiny car. I'm glad that it is possible/arguable to believe in environmental conservation without having to take all the baggage that some people attach.
Wireless is only practical in large cities with high population density.
/km^2 in WA. I just got back from central WA, where the locals know everyone in a radius of 20km, and everyone there had fast internet access.
Wireless 'broadband' is the most popular net connection in rural australia, with most areas with more than 1000 people in a 10km radius having private providers already. I think if anything, wireless makes the most sense in low density areas, where the ISM bands are underused and line of sight is cheaper than cables.
So you should use Australia as a model for the US, with our national population density of only 2.4 per sq km, and as low as 0.8
Have you used the tracing built into inkscape?
As an Aussie I say ROOOOTFL.
As we're talking about science/engineering, that's not efficiency but efficacy:
s )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficacy
However, economists use the term more losely:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiency_(economic
I believe the technical term is 'tidal power'.
Sorry, but a good engineer, scientist or programmer instinctively worries. Worry is a way of pondering the relative merits of problems. Whenever I 'worry' that there might be a flaw in a mathematical proof I look closer and usually find I'm right. Tapping into my worry circuit provides very useful information. It is a form of negative insight. Perhaps you have a different definition of worry (one that satisfies your claims), perhaps 'pathological worrying'. The worry demonstrated in the FA seems to me to me to be more 'logical worrying'. (Though unjustified in this case, IMO)
The fact that worry exists gives it some kind of evolutionary value, particularly given
You lose credibility when you start attacking people's motivations and abilities. Personal attacks are often a sign of insecurity.
Actually, worry is a very useful emotion. Worry drives a lot of human behaviour, and worry can be very productive in future planning. It's fair to say that worry is the main reason why humanity is still here.
More likely a plot by Japan to justify their fishing policy.
Remaining mobile will have a dramatic effect on the rate of decline in later years. In the case of arthritis, gentle movement such as riding and swimming has been shown to prevent joint seizure and improve the chance of other treatments succeeding. In the case of altzheimers, regular exercise and (strangely) regular chewing can even stop the progress of the syndrome.
;)
So no, it does not do jack shit for people in the latter half of their life. Indeed it is plausible that your 'halfway life' is exactly when you stop exercising
which is why you ride more than a doors width away from cars... sheesh, don't they teach anything to cyclists these days?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_cycling
Not true. The best two ways to control arthritic knees are swimming and bike riding, because they are essentially non-impact exercise. People who ride lots during their life also live longer and suffer less from degenerative disease (such as arthritis and alztheimers).
Boeing stores plane documentation in etched glass plates? Do you have evidence? How likely are we to be able to read something stored as compressed binary data in a few hundred years?
It is not hard to make a book last a few centuries if you want it to. There are plenty of books out there describing reliable techniques that have been tested for as long.
I've got textbooks and a family bible that are over 200 years old. The dead sea scrolls are a lot older than that.
As long as you only want 2.5W. At least phantom power, firewire and power over ethernet gave useful amounts of power!
Actually, 50-60Hz is far more likely to cause the heart to go into fibrilation. The heart generally restarts after a DC shock (which is why those people-jump-starting things use a big pulse of DC).
I'm not sure what you mean by DC is more likely to start fires.
Wow! you're right that is most odd. A very smart friend of mine (appeal to authority...) convinced me once that blackholes don't really exist, and gave something like 10 reasons ranging from definitional to practical as to why they don't exist. He never mentioned this one. My personally (unqualified) feeling is that black holes don't exist in practice, what we observe instead is the infinitely slowing collapse of neutron stars (never actually creating an event horizon). I think this because nobody has ever given me a compelling model of how an event horizon might be created - the time dilation and photon pressure seem to get in the way.