The chief problem of not having a magnetosphere is that solar wind strips the atmosphere slowly away without it. If we can terraform the atmosphere of Mars (obviously not a short-term project), then the challenge of keeping the atmosphere should not be insurmountable. We might be able to artificially create a magnetosphere, or we might find another solution, such as cocooning the atmosphere of the planet.
Since the magnetosphere of Earth doesn't protect the Moon, and the Moon doesn't have one to protect itself (it has a magnetic field, but not one coherent enough to protect from the solar wind), it's hard to see how the lack of magnetosphere on Mars makes the Moon a more likely terraforming target.
Humus can be made. It's a matter of composting and time. You can start with plankton and fungi and so forth and work your way up. Mars isn't capable of retaining an Earthlike atmosphere over hundreds of millions of years without replenishment, but it certainly can hold one. Also, oxygen molecules aren't really all that light, relatively speaking. Agriculture can probably be done mostly in lightly pressurized tents, and some types may even be possible without any additional pressurization at all, just UV protection. As for water only being available in ice form, that's not really a huge problem if you apply heat to the ice. When you apply heat to ice, it melts into liquid water. As for ice being found only at the poles, all the modern evidence seems to point to quite a lot of permafrost all over the place on Mars.
On the subject of Oxygen: There's plenty of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere, although only at about 1/20,000th the concentration that is found in the atmosphere of Earth. It can still be collected from the Martian atmosphere and concentrated. It can also be cracked from Martian CO2 (which Mars has at about 16 times the concentration of Earth) through various chemical methods or through plant photosynthesis. It can also be extracted from minerals, such as perchlorates, which can be mined on Mars. You can also get it from water through electrolysis and through chemical methods.
The resources are all there. No-one said you didn't have to do some work to extract them, but they're there if you put the work in and have the technology and know-how to make use of them.
We didn't give up alchemy. We rationalized the practices involved over time and made use of what was practical and abandoned what wasn't. Modern chemistry, medicine, metallurgy, etc. are just the alchemy that worked. We're even capable, these days, of elemental transmutation. That includes lead into gold (although it's certainly not economically practical). When Soddy and Rutherford discovered nuclear transmutation of thorium to radium in the early 1900's, Soddy has claimed Rutherford told him: "For Christ's sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation. They'll have our heads off as alchemists."
The thing is, scientists like Soddy and Rutherford didn't just stumble on such a breakthrough discovery. They were very actively studying radioactivity and exploring the structure of matter. They found something new because they were _looking_ for it. Saying, as you do, that we should just give up and wait for someone to come along with an easy answer doesn't work because, if we give up, no-one will come along with any answers.
Your scoffing dismissal of the "power" of pressurized steam throws the rest of your post into doubt. You do realize that, ultimately, most of our electrical power is still, at some point, coming from pressurized steam, right? How about steam catapults on carriers, and _Mythbusters_ launching a hot water heater five hundred feet into the air? Those kinds of examples seem to be enough to take the quotation marks away.
Now, that ancient steam engine was really only a demonstration of principles. As you say, it was pretty much a toy. But it was also very definitely an engine.
Not to mention the fact that the GP is incorrect about the average lifespan increasing. In the US it has actually been going down for the last 25 years or so.
But the quote itself doesn't include the information on where it came from (most of the time - I suppose you could quote someone saying something like "I, Joe Schmoe, fifth President of the Republic of hypothetica, declare, on this 32nd day of Smarch, eighteen-elleventy-tweenth in this keynote speech of the 3rd International Conclave of Anorak-Wearing Pedants, that I am not a crook!"), otherwise it wouldn't be a quote. The information on where it came from is generally provided right after the quote, making it a citation. Which is exactly what you did. You might be able to argue that you declared that it wasn't a citation before a subsequent explanation of where the quote came from retroactively turned it into a citation, but written works generally stand as a whole. Additional data on quotes can certainly appear in footnotes, endnotes and even in later passages. It may not conform to some exact MLA handbook version of what a citation must look like, of course.
Loyalty cards are not designed for data mining (sorry paranoid cranks, but this is true) they are designed to keep you going back to the same store as opposed to going to the cheaper or more convenient stores
Depends on the particular gimmick with the loyalty card. Some of them do have rewards systems you can build points towards and so forth. The most basic form, though, just gives you access to sales prices when they have sales. That's all very well and good, but before everyone and their mother started coming out with these loyalty cards, they still had sales, but the sales prices applied to everyone.
Also, the shuttle's SRB's had a little trouble with the O-rings in their tang and clevis joins fitting properly. This may have been partly due to the mild deformation of the SRB's occurring during splashdown. The problem was mostly due to other design causes, but the deformation of the tanks was part of it. As a consequence of this problem and other factors, a jet of flame ended up spurting out of one of the SRB's during a launch and cutting into the liquid booster during Challenger's last launch. Also, for the shuttle SRB's, has anyone ever done the numbers on the costs of recovering and refurbishing the tanks rather than just remaking them each time? The bottom line seems to be that re-using components that have gone through a sudden, violent impact is maybe not always the best policy.
A citation is when you say where you got the information from, not when you just put quote tags around it
See what I mean? That's not really a citation... I just put quote tags around my own words.
Sorry, can't help being pedantic about this. Do you realize that, when you wrote: "I just put quote tags around my own words", you were saying where you got your information from? So, by your definition, your example of something that isn't a citation actually is a citation.
"Reversible sterilization" sounds like a form of birth control to me. No details given on how it's implemented. Maybe some sort of contraceptive implant. Making it mandatory seems a little extreme, but making it available and encouraged seems like a good idea. Then, on top of that, teach kids how to use condoms and so forth and emphasize the disease-control aspects over the birth control aspects.
#1 and #2, best and funniest both belong to Sluggy Freelance in my opinion. #3, best art, is a lot harder to pin down. Pete Abrams on Sluggy Freelance can do some pretty good art, but he's not the best. There are a few possibilities from the stuff I peruse: Charby the Vampirate has some pretty good art or maybe No Need for Bushido. #4, most relevant to me, is definitely very, very subjective. I'm probably just going to have to go with xkcd.
One final point - find me one Jew of Jesus' time that says he didn't do the miracles, etc., that he did.
A little hard to do that with the lack of immortals these days. Would Jesus himself count? If so, he might possibly be a bit of a biased source. There's the immortal "Wandering Jew", cursed to immortal misery until the second coming by Jesus. That's out of christian mythology, not dogma, so I'm not sure if it counts. There's Cain, but that's pre-Abrahamic, so I'm not sure he would count as Jewish, and, even if he did, I think he would be considered excommunicated. Aside from that, I can't think of any other potential immortal Jews from Jesus' time that we could find and ask.
Actually, the engineers knew that that the multiple watertight sections in the Titanic should make it extremely resistant to sinking. The marketing people went around making claims like "unsinkable". Statements like "God himself could not sink this ship" seem to come exclusively from the movie _Titanic_. The engineers also knew that the Titanic didn't have a double hull and that the watertight sections weren't as watertight as they could be since they didn't run all the way to the top like in the original plans before the budget cutbacks. They may or may not have known about the substandard riveting.
My rough estimate is that an average kid in the US spends about a thousand hours a year in school and maybe around 400 hours and 20,000 miles in vehicles. So, it looks like they spend a lot more time in school and still manage to die there a lot less than they do in cars. I'm not sure how to figure out how many miles they spend in school. In any case, it seems to support the GP's point that, even with incidents like this, schools are very safe from a fatality point of view compared to other things kids do that politicians could focus on in order to pretend they're doing something to justify their existence. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the hours children spend in school are statistically safer (once again, only looking at fatalities) than all the other hours of their day, including when they're at home sleeping.
In my case the pump actually is changing the temperature of the water by moving it through heat exchanging coils in the gas furnace.
Hence it's not the pump that heats the water, it's the gas furnace's exchanging coils.
I know it's the gas furnace that's heating the water, just it's the outside air heating the working fluid with a heat pump.
The heat pump is just moving heat around, just like the water recirculation system in my gas furnace based system.
You don't know how heat pumps work. In a heat pump it's the pump itself that heats the fluid by compressing it. There are then two exchangers, one to heat the house and one outside to return the now very cold fluid back to the outside temperature.
Sigh. Clearly you're the one who doesn't know how heat pumps work. In a heat pump, the pump raises the _temperature_ of the fluid by compressing it. That's not the same thing as heating it. The majority of the heat (obviously there's going to be some smaller amount of heat generated by the electric pump itself as well, just as with my gas furnace) is coming from the outside. The whole point of the system is to ensure that the working fluid is hotter than the inside air while inside so that heat flows from the fluid to the air and that the fluid is colder than the outside air while outside so that heat flows from the outside air into the fluid. I am pretty sure what you're failing to grasp is the fundamental difference between heat and temperature.
Also, aren't there transportation and conversion losses from burning something for heat just as there are with electric heating?
Ok. Here I'm really confused. [...] The original poster was the one claiming that electricity generation has transportation and conversion losses and that heating by burning something does not [...] why does it matter how the _electricity_ is generated?
While your argument about the extraction, refining and transportation losses was correct, you missed the point of the original poster which is that the big source of inefficiency for electricity is in its production from fossil fuels (as explained in my post). That's what makes the "fossil fuel -> electricity -> toasters -> heat" chain so bad comparted to '"fossil fuel -> heat". It's interesting to note that replacing the 'toasters' by heat pumps is just enough to get one back to roughly the same efficiency as using fossil fuels for heating directly.
It seems to me that the point of the original poster was that "heating by burning something is also more efficient than dissipating electric energy because you're cutting out conversion (see Carnot efficiency) and transportation losses". I don't think I missed anything from that single sentence. _My_ point was that, in fact, you aren't cutting out conversion and transportation losses. Generally speaking, it is more efficient, when all you want is heat, to burn something on the spot than to burn it in a central location, convert the heat to electricity, then use that electricity to generate heat in a remote location. I certainly never argued that it wasn't. I only argued that conversion and transportation losses still applied. I should also add that neither you nor the original poster have provided any proof that in situ burning will always be more efficient in every case. There are certainly a lot of variables involved.
And the method of production is important because in the case of photoelectric, wind, and hydro there is quite obviously no wasted heat in the electricity production. Also it's not as if you could cut out the electricity step to heat yourself directly from wind or hydro (in the case of solar you actually could to some extent but the efficiency gain is not that big). Of course in that se
Ah, what you fail to understand is that the sixteen(16) space times demonstrates cube proof of 4 full days simultaneously on earth within one (1) rotation. So, obviously you can work an 80 hour day if you pull a double shift.
Can you really qualify heating done with heat pumps as electric heating?
Yes.
My house is heated with hot water from a gas furnace recirculated using an electric pump. By your definition of electric heating, wouldn't that make my house electrically heated?
In your case the pump is not changing the temperature of the water. It's the gas furnace that's heating the water so it's a gas heater. In the heat pump case it's the electricity driven pump that heats whatever fluid is being used. So they are electric heaters.
In my case the pump actually is changing the temperature of the water by moving it through heat exchanging coils in the gas furnace. If your statement "it's the gas furnace that's heating the water so it's a gas heater" holds true, then, since in a heat pump system it's the outside air heating the working fluid, a heat pump system should be called an outside air-based heater, not an electric heater. The heat pump is just moving heat around, just like the water recirculation system in my gas furnace based system. You seem to have missed my point entirely, then essentially restated my point in your own words in your post.
Also, aren't there transportation and conversion losses from burning something for heat just as there are with electric heating?
It depends how the electricity is generated.
Ok. Here I'm really confused. If you're arguing against my point (which was that the original post statement that "Heating by burning something is also more efficient than dissipating electric energy because you're cutting out conversion (see Carnot efficiency) and transportation losses" was ignoring that other methods also have conversion and transportation losses), why does it matter how the _electricity_ is generated? The original poster was the one claiming that electricity generation has transportation and conversion losses and that heating by burning something does not. I was arguing against that by point out that other methods also have those losses. How the electricity is generated is irrelevant to my argument, even if you're positing a method of electricity generation that leads to no conversion or transportation losses.
But for most cases (coal, fuel, gas, even nuclear) you incur the same kind of extraction, refining and transport costs that you would get when you get gas or fuel delivered to your house (just a bit less because in bulk). But on top of that electricity production wastes about 60% [wikipedia.org] of the heat right in the power plant(*). So you then only get to convert the remaining 40% or less to heat your house.
(*) The most recent and advanced plants that use a combined cycle manage to only waste about 45% [wikipedia.org] of the heat but it's not the majority of the installed production capacity by far. Co-generation plants [wikipedia.org] do better but only because they combine heating buildings with producing electricity. And they cannot heat individual houses (cost issue).
But the extraction, refining, and transport costs aren't non-existant as the original poster was implying. Also, furnaces aren't 100% efficient either. Some of the newer ones are pretty impressively efficient, but a good portion of the installed base of furnaces dump quite a lot of heat outside in their exhaust gases. In any case, we can keep drawing the circle wider and wider. Eventually we can get to how incredibly inefficient fossil fuels are because the equivalent amount of energy input from solar radiation to end up with a joule worth of natural gas was probably thousands of joules worth of solar energy. Then we can move on to the energy efficiency of photosynthesis and of the sun itself, etc. etc.
I'm not sure what method you can possibly imagine for pumping heat out of your house that doesn't consume energy.
My point is that a heat pump isn't magic. It requires specific conditions to function. Any magical super-efficiency it displays isn't actually efficiency, it's just taking advantage of latent energy in the system.
I know what a heat pump is, yes. I also know what it isn't. One of the things it isn't is magic. I see a lot of people try to make claims that they're somehow more than 100% efficient. That's just an accounting trick. Using the same trick, my gas heating system, seen as a system that uses an electric pump that pumps hot water around my house, is more than 100% efficient as long as you ignore where the heat is coming from.
While peer pressures certainly may affect attitudes about sex, you're crazy if you think it's all a result of socialization. There's this thing called puberty you may have heard of. Humans are biologically predisposed to think about sex, and puberty is a trigger that gets the process rolling.
Then have a once-per-search warning, or a time out period or something. Crippling search results - there's no mistake that this truly does cripple the results- for everyone is not the proper way to do things.
It depends a lot on whether "about 350 W" is a maximum or an average and even more on what you've been doing with your computer while you measure. Measuring draw like that is a good idea, but it doesn't tell you everything. There very well may be usage patterns for components in your system that some software may cause that are higher than your normal usage. If you start using your computer a different way (say by running a demanding game which uses your CPU, hard drives, optical drives and gpu hard all at the same moment) then it may abruptly shut down or blow up its power supply if you based your power supply choice on typical draw.
The proper way to do it is always to find out the documented maximum draw of each component in the computer and add them all together. Then, the power supply you get should be at least 20% higher than that. Power supply ratings, especially in the certified ones being discussed in this article, have been improving, but the conventional wisdom is that the wattage rating of a power supply represents a momentary peak the power supply may be able to achieve, but that if you run even close to it for any length of time, the power supply will burn out.
Also, as mentioned in the summary, these power supplies are rated for efficiency at varying levels of load, so a 400 Watt regular power supply running at 350 watts should use more power than a high-efficiency 4000 Watt power supply running at 350 watts.
Can you really qualify heating done with heat pumps as electric heating? My house is heated with hot water from a gas furnace recirculated using an electric pump. By your definition of electric heating, wouldn't that make my house electrically heated? Also, aren't there transportation and conversion losses from burning something for heat just as there are with electric heating?
And in the summer, if the AC is on, inefficient appliances make you lose double: once by consuming more electricity than they should, and a second time because the AC needs to consume energy to pump the heat out of your house.
I'm not sure what method you can possibly imagine for pumping heat out of your house that doesn't consume energy.
If it's not just fuel, it's more likely that it's just the result of the square-cube ratio in action. It's obviously not just a scaled down shuttle, but it helps to imagine it that way. If you took a shuttle and scaled it down 1/6th in every dimension, you couldn't actually scale the thickness of the sheet metal. If you did, it would basically be foil and wouldn't be able to withstand the launch stresses. So, a mini version of the shuttle would need to be made of metal with about the same gauge as the full size version, meaning that a bigger shuttle can be less dense than a scaled down version of itself.
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The chief problem of not having a magnetosphere is that solar wind strips the atmosphere slowly away without it. If we can terraform the atmosphere of Mars (obviously not a short-term project), then the challenge of keeping the atmosphere should not be insurmountable. We might be able to artificially create a magnetosphere, or we might find another solution, such as cocooning the atmosphere of the planet.
Since the magnetosphere of Earth doesn't protect the Moon, and the Moon doesn't have one to protect itself (it has a magnetic field, but not one coherent enough to protect from the solar wind), it's hard to see how the lack of magnetosphere on Mars makes the Moon a more likely terraforming target.
Humus can be made. It's a matter of composting and time. You can start with plankton and fungi and so forth and work your way up. Mars isn't capable of retaining an Earthlike atmosphere over hundreds of millions of years without replenishment, but it certainly can hold one. Also, oxygen molecules aren't really all that light, relatively speaking. Agriculture can probably be done mostly in lightly pressurized tents, and some types may even be possible without any additional pressurization at all, just UV protection. As for water only being available in ice form, that's not really a huge problem if you apply heat to the ice. When you apply heat to ice, it melts into liquid water. As for ice being found only at the poles, all the modern evidence seems to point to quite a lot of permafrost all over the place on Mars.
On the subject of Oxygen: There's plenty of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere, although only at about 1/20,000th the concentration that is found in the atmosphere of Earth. It can still be collected from the Martian atmosphere and concentrated. It can also be cracked from Martian CO2 (which Mars has at about 16 times the concentration of Earth) through various chemical methods or through plant photosynthesis. It can also be extracted from minerals, such as perchlorates, which can be mined on Mars. You can also get it from water through electrolysis and through chemical methods.
The resources are all there. No-one said you didn't have to do some work to extract them, but they're there if you put the work in and have the technology and know-how to make use of them.
We didn't give up alchemy. We rationalized the practices involved over time and made use of what was practical and abandoned what wasn't. Modern chemistry, medicine, metallurgy, etc. are just the alchemy that worked. We're even capable, these days, of elemental transmutation. That includes lead into gold (although it's certainly not economically practical). When Soddy and Rutherford discovered nuclear transmutation of thorium to radium in the early 1900's, Soddy has claimed Rutherford told him: "For Christ's sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation. They'll have our heads off as alchemists."
The thing is, scientists like Soddy and Rutherford didn't just stumble on such a breakthrough discovery. They were very actively studying radioactivity and exploring the structure of matter. They found something new because they were _looking_ for it. Saying, as you do, that we should just give up and wait for someone to come along with an easy answer doesn't work because, if we give up, no-one will come along with any answers.
Your scoffing dismissal of the "power" of pressurized steam throws the rest of your post into doubt. You do realize that, ultimately, most of our electrical power is still, at some point, coming from pressurized steam, right? How about steam catapults on carriers, and _Mythbusters_ launching a hot water heater five hundred feet into the air? Those kinds of examples seem to be enough to take the quotation marks away.
Now, that ancient steam engine was really only a demonstration of principles. As you say, it was pretty much a toy. But it was also very definitely an engine.
Not to mention the fact that the GP is incorrect about the average lifespan increasing. In the US it has actually been going down for the last 25 years or so.
But the quote itself doesn't include the information on where it came from (most of the time - I suppose you could quote someone saying something like "I, Joe Schmoe, fifth President of the Republic of hypothetica, declare, on this 32nd day of Smarch, eighteen-elleventy-tweenth in this keynote speech of the 3rd International Conclave of Anorak-Wearing Pedants, that I am not a crook!"), otherwise it wouldn't be a quote. The information on where it came from is generally provided right after the quote, making it a citation. Which is exactly what you did. You might be able to argue that you declared that it wasn't a citation before a subsequent explanation of where the quote came from retroactively turned it into a citation, but written works generally stand as a whole. Additional data on quotes can certainly appear in footnotes, endnotes and even in later passages. It may not conform to some exact MLA handbook version of what a citation must look like, of course.
Yes. Making things difficult and frustrating for customers has always been a winning business strategy.
Loyalty cards are not designed for data mining (sorry paranoid cranks, but this is true) they are designed to keep you going back to the same store as opposed to going to the cheaper or more convenient stores
Depends on the particular gimmick with the loyalty card. Some of them do have rewards systems you can build points towards and so forth. The most basic form, though, just gives you access to sales prices when they have sales. That's all very well and good, but before everyone and their mother started coming out with these loyalty cards, they still had sales, but the sales prices applied to everyone.
Also, the shuttle's SRB's had a little trouble with the O-rings in their tang and clevis joins fitting properly. This may have been partly due to the mild deformation of the SRB's occurring during splashdown. The problem was mostly due to other design causes, but the deformation of the tanks was part of it. As a consequence of this problem and other factors, a jet of flame ended up spurting out of one of the SRB's during a launch and cutting into the liquid booster during Challenger's last launch. Also, for the shuttle SRB's, has anyone ever done the numbers on the costs of recovering and refurbishing the tanks rather than just remaking them each time? The bottom line seems to be that re-using components that have gone through a sudden, violent impact is maybe not always the best policy.
A citation is when you say where you got the information from, not when you just put quote tags around it
See what I mean? That's not really a citation... I just put quote tags around my own words.
Sorry, can't help being pedantic about this. Do you realize that, when you wrote: "I just put quote tags around my own words", you were saying where you got your information from? So, by your definition, your example of something that isn't a citation actually is a citation.
"Reversible sterilization" sounds like a form of birth control to me. No details given on how it's implemented. Maybe some sort of contraceptive implant. Making it mandatory seems a little extreme, but making it available and encouraged seems like a good idea. Then, on top of that, teach kids how to use condoms and so forth and emphasize the disease-control aspects over the birth control aspects.
#1 and #2, best and funniest both belong to Sluggy Freelance in my opinion. #3, best art, is a lot harder to pin down. Pete Abrams on Sluggy Freelance can do some pretty good art, but he's not the best. There are a few possibilities from the stuff I peruse: Charby the Vampirate has some pretty good art or maybe No Need for Bushido. #4, most relevant to me, is definitely very, very subjective. I'm probably just going to have to go with xkcd.
One final point - find me one Jew of Jesus' time that says he didn't do the miracles, etc., that he did.
A little hard to do that with the lack of immortals these days. Would Jesus himself count? If so, he might possibly be a bit of a biased source. There's the immortal "Wandering Jew", cursed to immortal misery until the second coming by Jesus. That's out of christian mythology, not dogma, so I'm not sure if it counts. There's Cain, but that's pre-Abrahamic, so I'm not sure he would count as Jewish, and, even if he did, I think he would be considered excommunicated. Aside from that, I can't think of any other potential immortal Jews from Jesus' time that we could find and ask.
Actually, the engineers knew that that the multiple watertight sections in the Titanic should make it extremely resistant to sinking. The marketing people went around making claims like "unsinkable". Statements like "God himself could not sink this ship" seem to come exclusively from the movie _Titanic_. The engineers also knew that the Titanic didn't have a double hull and that the watertight sections weren't as watertight as they could be since they didn't run all the way to the top like in the original plans before the budget cutbacks. They may or may not have known about the substandard riveting.
My rough estimate is that an average kid in the US spends about a thousand hours a year in school and maybe around 400 hours and 20,000 miles in vehicles. So, it looks like they spend a lot more time in school and still manage to die there a lot less than they do in cars. I'm not sure how to figure out how many miles they spend in school. In any case, it seems to support the GP's point that, even with incidents like this, schools are very safe from a fatality point of view compared to other things kids do that politicians could focus on in order to pretend they're doing something to justify their existence. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the hours children spend in school are statistically safer (once again, only looking at fatalities) than all the other hours of their day, including when they're at home sleeping.
In my case the pump actually is changing the temperature of the water by moving it through heat exchanging coils in the gas furnace.
Hence it's not the pump that heats the water, it's the gas furnace's exchanging coils.
I know it's the gas furnace that's heating the water, just it's the outside air heating the working fluid with a heat pump.
The heat pump is just moving heat around, just like the water recirculation system in my gas furnace based system.
You don't know how heat pumps work. In a heat pump it's the pump itself that heats the fluid by compressing it. There are then two exchangers, one to heat the house and one outside to return the now very cold fluid back to the outside temperature.
Sigh. Clearly you're the one who doesn't know how heat pumps work. In a heat pump, the pump raises the _temperature_ of the fluid by compressing it. That's not the same thing as heating it. The majority of the heat (obviously there's going to be some smaller amount of heat generated by the electric pump itself as well, just as with my gas furnace) is coming from the outside. The whole point of the system is to ensure that the working fluid is hotter than the inside air while inside so that heat flows from the fluid to the air and that the fluid is colder than the outside air while outside so that heat flows from the outside air into the fluid. I am pretty sure what you're failing to grasp is the fundamental difference between heat and temperature.
Also, aren't there transportation and conversion losses from burning something for heat just as there are with electric heating?
Ok. Here I'm really confused. [...] The original poster was the one claiming that electricity generation has transportation and conversion losses and that heating by burning something does not [...] why does it matter how the _electricity_ is generated?
While your argument about the extraction, refining and transportation losses was correct, you missed the point of the original poster which is that the big source of inefficiency for electricity is in its production from fossil fuels (as explained in my post). That's what makes the "fossil fuel -> electricity -> toasters -> heat" chain so bad comparted to '"fossil fuel -> heat". It's interesting to note that replacing the 'toasters' by heat pumps is just enough to get one back to roughly the same efficiency as using fossil fuels for heating directly.
It seems to me that the point of the original poster was that "heating by burning something is also more efficient than dissipating electric energy because you're cutting out conversion (see Carnot efficiency) and transportation losses". I don't think I missed anything from that single sentence. _My_ point was that, in fact, you aren't cutting out conversion and transportation losses. Generally speaking, it is more efficient, when all you want is heat, to burn something on the spot than to burn it in a central location, convert the heat to electricity, then use that electricity to generate heat in a remote location. I certainly never argued that it wasn't. I only argued that conversion and transportation losses still applied. I should also add that neither you nor the original poster have provided any proof that in situ burning will always be more efficient in every case. There are certainly a lot of variables involved.
And the method of production is important because in the case of photoelectric, wind, and hydro there is quite obviously no wasted heat in the electricity production. Also it's not as if you could cut out the electricity step to heat yourself directly from wind or hydro (in the case of solar you actually could to some extent but the efficiency gain is not that big). Of course in that se
Ah, what you fail to understand is that the sixteen(16) space times demonstrates cube proof of 4 full days simultaneously on earth within one (1) rotation. So, obviously you can work an 80 hour day if you pull a double shift.
Can you really qualify heating done with heat pumps as electric heating?
Yes.
My house is heated with hot water from a gas furnace recirculated using an electric pump. By your definition of electric heating, wouldn't that make my house electrically heated?
In your case the pump is not changing the temperature of the water. It's the gas furnace that's heating the water so it's a gas heater. In the heat pump case it's the electricity driven pump that heats whatever fluid is being used. So they are electric heaters.
In my case the pump actually is changing the temperature of the water by moving it through heat exchanging coils in the gas furnace. If your statement "it's the gas furnace that's heating the water so it's a gas heater" holds true, then, since in a heat pump system it's the outside air heating the working fluid, a heat pump system should be called an outside air-based heater, not an electric heater. The heat pump is just moving heat around, just like the water recirculation system in my gas furnace based system. You seem to have missed my point entirely, then essentially restated my point in your own words in your post.
Also, aren't there transportation and conversion losses from burning something for heat just as there are with electric heating?
It depends how the electricity is generated.
Ok. Here I'm really confused. If you're arguing against my point (which was that the original post statement that "Heating by burning something is also more efficient than dissipating electric energy because you're cutting out conversion (see Carnot efficiency) and transportation losses" was ignoring that other methods also have conversion and transportation losses), why does it matter how the _electricity_ is generated? The original poster was the one claiming that electricity generation has transportation and conversion losses and that heating by burning something does not. I was arguing against that by point out that other methods also have those losses. How the electricity is generated is irrelevant to my argument, even if you're positing a method of electricity generation that leads to no conversion or transportation losses.
But for most cases (coal, fuel, gas, even nuclear) you incur the same kind of extraction, refining and transport costs that you would get when you get gas or fuel delivered to your house (just a bit less because in bulk). But on top of that electricity production wastes about 60% [wikipedia.org] of the heat right in the power plant(*). So you then only get to convert the remaining 40% or less to heat your house.
(*) The most recent and advanced plants that use a combined cycle manage to only waste about 45% [wikipedia.org] of the heat but it's not the majority of the installed production capacity by far. Co-generation plants [wikipedia.org] do better but only because they combine heating buildings with producing electricity. And they cannot heat individual houses (cost issue).
But the extraction, refining, and transport costs aren't non-existant as the original poster was implying. Also, furnaces aren't 100% efficient either. Some of the newer ones are pretty impressively efficient, but a good portion of the installed base of furnaces dump quite a lot of heat outside in their exhaust gases. In any case, we can keep drawing the circle wider and wider. Eventually we can get to how incredibly inefficient fossil fuels are because the equivalent amount of energy input from solar radiation to end up with a joule worth of natural gas was probably thousands of joules worth of solar energy. Then we can move on to the energy efficiency of photosynthesis and of the sun itself, etc. etc.
I'm not sure what method you can possibly imagine for pumping heat out of your house that doesn't consume energy.
You missed the point by a
My point is that a heat pump isn't magic. It requires specific conditions to function. Any magical super-efficiency it displays isn't actually efficiency, it's just taking advantage of latent energy in the system.
I know what a heat pump is, yes. I also know what it isn't. One of the things it isn't is magic. I see a lot of people try to make claims that they're somehow more than 100% efficient. That's just an accounting trick. Using the same trick, my gas heating system, seen as a system that uses an electric pump that pumps hot water around my house, is more than 100% efficient as long as you ignore where the heat is coming from.
While peer pressures certainly may affect attitudes about sex, you're crazy if you think it's all a result of socialization. There's this thing called puberty you may have heard of. Humans are biologically predisposed to think about sex, and puberty is a trigger that gets the process rolling.
Then have a once-per-search warning, or a time out period or something. Crippling search results - there's no mistake that this truly does cripple the results- for everyone is not the proper way to do things.
It depends a lot on whether "about 350 W" is a maximum or an average and even more on what you've been doing with your computer while you measure. Measuring draw like that is a good idea, but it doesn't tell you everything. There very well may be usage patterns for components in your system that some software may cause that are higher than your normal usage. If you start using your computer a different way (say by running a demanding game which uses your CPU, hard drives, optical drives and gpu hard all at the same moment) then it may abruptly shut down or blow up its power supply if you based your power supply choice on typical draw.
The proper way to do it is always to find out the documented maximum draw of each component in the computer and add them all together. Then, the power supply you get should be at least 20% higher than that. Power supply ratings, especially in the certified ones being discussed in this article, have been improving, but the conventional wisdom is that the wattage rating of a power supply represents a momentary peak the power supply may be able to achieve, but that if you run even close to it for any length of time, the power supply will burn out.
Also, as mentioned in the summary, these power supplies are rated for efficiency at varying levels of load, so a 400 Watt regular power supply running at 350 watts should use more power than a high-efficiency 4000 Watt power supply running at 350 watts.
Can you really qualify heating done with heat pumps as electric heating? My house is heated with hot water from a gas furnace recirculated using an electric pump. By your definition of electric heating, wouldn't that make my house electrically heated? Also, aren't there transportation and conversion losses from burning something for heat just as there are with electric heating?
And in the summer, if the AC is on, inefficient appliances make you lose double: once by consuming more electricity than they should, and a second time because the AC needs to consume energy to pump the heat out of your house.
I'm not sure what method you can possibly imagine for pumping heat out of your house that doesn't consume energy.
If it's not just fuel, it's more likely that it's just the result of the square-cube ratio in action. It's obviously not just a scaled down shuttle, but it helps to imagine it that way. If you took a shuttle and scaled it down 1/6th in every dimension, you couldn't actually scale the thickness of the sheet metal. If you did, it would basically be foil and wouldn't be able to withstand the launch stresses. So, a mini version of the shuttle would need to be made of metal with about the same gauge as the full size version, meaning that a bigger shuttle can be less dense than a scaled down version of itself.