The thing about special sauce is that, for it to work as advertised, we can't ever know whether it exists or not. If we could prove that it exists, then it would cease being magic and become a set of physical laws which would be either deterministic or random. We do have choices, it's just probably the case that those choices are predetermined. Knowledge of whether or not we really are predetermined, or random or full of special sauce wouldn't make a difference, we'd still have to make choices. Unless we want to sink into nihilism because we think there's no point in anything if there's no special sauce, we'd still lock up serial killers because we don't want ourselves or our loved ones hacked up and it would still be probable that they would kill again.
The argument makes perfect sense to me. The point really is that we have no choice but to act as if we have free will. Think about it, we cannot choose _not_ to have free will. Even if we kill ourselves, doing so is an exercise of free will (unless we're going to play stupid semantic games about what free will actually means. Predetermination is probably the way things work, but unless we're in a universe where the Predictoscope is possible then we don't know what our predetermined choices are, so they're just as good as true free will. If we can have Predictoscopes, we just have to suck it up and accept that we don't have free will, but there's nothing we can actually do without choosing to do so, therefore we have to act like we have free will. I really should rather have simply said that we have no choice but to act like we have free will rather than that it's better.
It sucks, sure. It means that we keep locking up serial killers who didn't truly have a choice in what they did. The Universe made them do it. The thing is, if you don't lock up or at least try to treat serial killers, then they're pretty likely to kill again. You can go all nihilistic about your free will being an illusion, or you can decide that love is real, even if it is just a matter of circumstance, and that you'd rather not have your loved ones or those of anyone else hacked into bits. It is a pretty good reason to try to understand the circumstances that lead to people doing horrible things rather than simply concluding that some people are just evil and others are good and you just have to scour away the evil ones. Sure some people are good and some are just evil, but that is a result of their circumstances (this term encompassing their genetics, their upbringing, how warm it was on their fourth birthday and the precise velocity and position (screw you, Heisenberg:->) of every particle they're made of or have ever interacted with at every moment in time of their existence as well as a slew of other things, some of which we probably don't know about yet or maybe ever). If person A is good and person B is evil and you swap their circumstances then, unless you believe in special sauce, you've just swapped everything about them, so really you haven't swapped anything. If you do believe in special sauce, so that A now has the special source "soul" of B and vice versa then I'm still not going to believe you that B's soul with A's circumstances is still going to be good. Raise a person with a genetic propensity for psychosis in an abusive environment and give them the right opportunities for evil and I don't think special sauce provided free will is going to make a difference to their victims.
The thing that really bothers me about the nature of special sauce is that it doesn't have one. It cannot be random and allow you to have "true" free will, but it also can't be deterministic or you've lost "true" free will that way as well. So, it has to be a third option. I can't understand what that third option would be. Also, from my understanding of what "to understand" actually means, if anyone could understand what the third option is, then free will would vanish again because understanding it would mean it follows some sort of rules and if it does, then free will is governed from outside by those rules and is therefore not free. So, if it, by definition, is not understandable, what's the point of trying to understand it? Just proceed acting as if you have free will and think what you like, whether or not what you like is determined by the state of the all containing universe or by something outside of the all containing universe (which would inductively need to be part of the all containing universe because it's all containing.
So, because I can't understand an explicitly incomprehensible argument, does that make me a simpleton, or is it the person who believes that they can understand something that's actually incomprehensible who is being the simpleton or at least clinging grimly to some existential illusion. W
The link you gave seems to pretty thoroughly debunk Penrose's argument.
As far as free will goes... The way I see it, there are three possibilities:
The first is that the universe is fully deterministic and that free will does not truly exist. A fully deterministic universe can very well be the case, even if there are unknown and unknowable rules. This further breaks down into two versions of the universe. In one of them, despite the fact that everything is predestined, it's impossible to actually predict the future, so we might as well act as if free will exists, even if we don't actually believe in it. In the other version, it's possible to predict the future and, if you check your Predictoscope (TM, patent pending) and see yourself in five minutes singing "I'm a little teapot" then, in five minutes, that's what you'll be doing whether you try to stop it or not. That would be a very strange universe. Of course, even that universe you might as well act like you have free will. After all, even if you do as predicted 100% of the time, it might still be because that's what you, and everyone else, actually wanted to do.
The second is that the universe follows laws, but those laws, at certain scales, are truly random and the statistics of those truly random occurrences give rise to the rules that we can actually know. In such a universe, the future is unknowable, but it's hard to say that we would truly have free will either. We would still be drawn along inexorably by the currents of the universe, but the currents would be fundamentally random. So, in that case, it would be best to act like we have free will.
The third is that the universe follows laws, but those laws, at certain scales, are affected by some currently unknown special sauce. This special sauce is the source of free will and is where the choices we make actually come from. The special sauce has no ingredient list. It's not made of anything and follows no internal rules whatsoever. Despite the complete lack of rules and completely unpredictable nature of the special sauce, it is also explicitly not random. No need to dig any further folks, completely ineffable stuff here. In that case, we truly have free will (although we also lose the ability to define what free will actually is in any way), so we might as well act like we have free will.
It seems that, no matter what universe we're actually in, we might as well act like we have free will. After all, we have no choice but to exercise free will. If we sit and do nothing, that's a choice. If we sing "I'm a little teapot" that's a choice. If we read Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps", that's a choice. If we look at the Predictoscope to see what we'll be doing in a few minutes, that's a choice. Everything we do where we could possibly have done something else (or at least where it appears that we could have possibly done something else) is a choice.
Why does the house need to be destroyed? Does converting a house into a growing operation make it structurally unsound somehow? I suppose someone could rip out a bunch of supporting walls to make a larger space, but, if the house is still standing, couldn't you just jack those areas up and build new walls rather than demolishing the house? Or is the house just destroyed because it has been "tainted" by pot growing? Just more of the standard circular reasoning you get in drug war debates?
"Why is pot bad?" "Because houses with pot growing in them have to be destroyed! Won't someone think of the houses!" "But why do they have to destroy the houses?" "Because they had pot growing in them and pot is bad." "Why is pot bad..."
So, being constantly being forced to choose between two evils doesn't suck? Sure being beaten with a tennis racket beats being beaten with a cricket bat, but that doesn't mean that they don't both suck.
There was a Slashdot article a while back about required radiation testing of wild boar meat sold in Germany, quite a long way from Chernobyl. Fallout from Chernobyl (radioactive Caesium I think) ends up collected and concentrated in fungi. Then it travels up the food chain. So, the problem isn't just mushrooms, but it's still not really that safe to eat the mushrooms. Of course, it won't kill you to eat the mushrooms. You probably wouldn't get a fatal dose of radiation even if you lived on a diet of nothing but wild mushrooms and boar meat. It's impossible to say how many people it's killed and will kill and how many years it's taken off people's lives. Almost certainly some. Just a handful, or hundreds or thousands? Really difficult in most cases to say definitively where someone's cancer came from.
Sure though, it's an acceptable risk. Just like all the mercury in our seafood (I suppose it's fortunate then that we're overfishing and destroying marine environments so effectively that the problem of heavy metal in our fish will go away on its own). Just like all of the nasties we've managed to add to our drinking water. They're all acceptable risks. Add them all up though, and the risk isn't as acceptable. And we've only just gotten started. Most of the poisoning we've managed has been in the last half century or so, but it's going to hang around for a lot longer than that. Therefore, it's pretty clear that, if the rate remains steady, the concentrations of all kinds of stuff we can't handle is going to continue increasing. But, rates aren't remaining steady, they're accelerating.
Now, most of this isn't from nuclear power, it's from regular old industrial processes, and things like burning coal for power. So, why attack nuclear power if it isn't as bad as burning coal? Because the safety record of nuclear power plants that we're talking about in this discussion is only going to get worse. We still don't have any idea how bad Fukushima is really going to be. Sure, you can say that it was a natural disaster, not a an engineering failure but, given what was known about the safety of the site, what this natural disaster was able to do to the plant was an engineering failure, just like the levees during hurricane Katrina and, let's face it, pretty much all flood damage (floods are pretty much man-made disasters not just because we build on flood plains, but also because deforestation, roads, parking lots, and our marvelous sewer and drainage systems deliver rain water to rivers much, much faster than would occur naturally). All kinds of industries, including nuclear power have shown time and time and time again that they just can't be trusted to do it right, even when it is possible to do it right. New nuclear power plants have much safer designs than the old ones, but we have a lot of old ones operating, and they're aging, and it's naive to believe that they'll all be safely and properly decommissioned when they need to be. Instead, operators are going to try everything they can to squeeze every last drop of life out of them before jumping ship on the expense to properly close them down. The end result of that is almost certain to be a lot more nuclear disasters of one kind or another (I should note here what I forgot to mention earlier, that the poster I responded to was acting like there have only been three serious nuclear power accidents but several other nuclear power plants in Japan only just made it by the skin of their teeth from this same earthquake/tsunami, and then there's the Tokai fuel fabrication plant event back in 1999). There very well may be competent engineers at every single plant who take it as their solemn duty to make sure that safety is the number one priority. If they ever actually stand in the way of profits, however, we have to assume that they'll be shoved aside by management and that said management will probably try its hardest to pin any subsequent disaster on those "disgruntled" engineers.
Anyway, after 60 years of nuclear power, it still hasn't managed to become economi
Three incidents like you describe above, over thirty-two years, is a pretty darned good safety record
While there's plenty of other sources of pollution and industrial catastrophes in the world (our oceans are getting more and more toxic with heavy metals and we should never forget Bhopal), I have to ask you, when will it be safe to eat wild mushrooms in Europe again? That good safety record you mention has still managed to produce long lasting effects over a very wide area. We still don't know how bad Fukushima is actually going to be, but there's a real possibility that children being born in Japan right now are going to have to spend their entire lives following some sort of special behavior to avoid health risks from fallout from Fukushima.
The same thing is true of all kinds of industries, nuclear is not alone. Obviously we need nuclear reactors if only to produce isotopes needed for other industries and nuclear medicine. Claiming that nuclear power is safe as is, however, seems disingenuous given how bad any single incident can get.
So, what is the bright side for nuclear power as it stands at the moment? Is it more cost effective than other methods of power generation? As far as I can find, it looks like it's still pretty much the most expensive form of power generation out there, even ignoring the externalities. Sure, it may be great for submarines and other military ships and if we ever get a moonbase, etc. I'm not actually rabidly anti-nuclear, I think we just need to get it right. Perhaps modern reactor designs really are there and it's just the old ones that are a problem and they'll be phased out over time and we'll end up with only newer, safer designs. The trouble is, it seems to me that the nuclear industry hasn't proven that it can be trusted to safely retire old plants. Running them into the ground to the point of disaster seems more likely. For general use, until we're not using antiquated designs anymore, what does nuclear actually have to offer besides the fact that if we don't keep funding the reactors we will have thrown our money away on them?
I just have to comment on that one. Although police officers do essentially get special rights and privileges that other people don't, they're still civilians. Military personnel, acting as such, are the ones who aren't civilians. They have their own justice system and everything. Even they are civilians when they aren't acting as military personnel. If they shoplift off a military base, for example, they can be arrested by regular police, and even tried and punished by the regular courts and correctional system, although the local cops are more likely to just hand them over to the MPs. When police officers and the like refer to non-officers as 'civilians', it's just a form of contemptuous self aggrandizement.
That said, police officers are in a special class in the sense of being "officers of the law". There's certain special status that comes with that with regards to things like detaining people, using force, and my personal favorite, the automatic assumption in court that they never lie (even to the point that hearsay rules don't apply to police officers). There are other special statuses like "officer of the court" for bar association members and process servers, clerks, etc. There's also special licensing for private investigators, bounty hunters, etc. Then there's members of the press, etc., etc. Lots and lots of special statuses out there, and plenty of people in these various occupations do have some sort of "us vs. them" mentality in which they may refer to others who don't have the same license as 'civilians'. Generally speaking, however, if the term is actually going to have any meaning at all, those people are all pretty much using the term wrong by separating the world into civilians and themselves.
As far as how forceful you are allowed to be in detaining someone when you're not some sort of special class, that really depends. For one thing, state and local laws vary wildly and are generally ridiculously unclear on the subject anyway. Security guards also may or may not have a special status in the jurisdiction. Beyond that, what's allowed and what isn't often comes down to the discretion of the police and prosecutor. In places where it's legal to use "reasonable force" to detain someone who's robbing you, there's still nothing to stop the police from deciding that it was actually assault or even kidnapping based on their gut feeling or their own views on the law. Likewise, in an area where it's illegal to do anything other than report a thief to the police, someone who whacks a thief over the head with a two by four and then ties them up and throws them in a closet may end up with sympathetic police officers and a prosecutor who simply chooses not to press any charges (there's always the possibility of a civil suit, of course).
It seems like the way the world really works is that it isn't about what's illegal and legal, it's about what you can get away with and what you can't. And that rule doesn't just apply to the people on the wrong end of the justice system, it also applies to the police officers and the TSA workers and the prosecutors and the judges and the politicians. It's actually kind of terrifying that we supposedly have a system that operates on principles of justice, but the reality is that what really happens is that might makes right or, if you're not mighty enough, right and wrong are what you can convince enough people of.
Well, hopefully we can reduce our need for coal with solar and wind. Even if we have to use coal to generate the electricity, a central plant can be made a lot more efficient and environmentally friendly than a bunch of distributed, poorly monitored and maintained internal combustion engines. But ideally (at least with the technology level we can currently hope to achieve), we generate power as cleanly as we can with solar, wind, tide power, etc. and as little fossil fuel use as we can get away with and maybe some nuclear if it can be made viable (with all the externalities, the inevitable startup cost overruns and tremendous lead in times, and required subsidization it doesn't look to me as if nuclear has ever actually been competitive although I hold out hope for it in the future). Then we either use that power to charge batteries for pure electrics if we can get that to work, or we use the electricity to make synthetic fuels and burn those in efficient hybrids.
Hmm, yeah I guess the Florida keys and Florida itself is a worst case scenario type of situation for that sort of problem. Rather than being able to fan out roughly 180 degrees and get away from a limited evacuation area, you have pretty much one direction to go and, since in some cases the evacuation area could potentially be pretty much the whole state, you have a long way to go so you need to stop to fuel up even if you started with a full charge.
On the other hand, an emergency situation is a government concern, not one necessarily for the free market to resolve. The government already puts a lot of effort and money into making sure that oil keeps flowing and is available (federal oil reserve, current ongoing wars, and a lot of more mundane infrastructure expenditures). In theory, if an electric and battery distribution infrastructure becomes vital due to electric cars taking over, the government will spend less on supporting the oil infrastructure and more on the electric infrastructure. So, either the government subsidizes greater battery storage and charging capacity and a larger number of batteries than is needed 99.9% of the time or makes sure that they can be delivered when needed. You mentioned a pipeline for delivering fuel to storage tanks. The thing is, with a big enough pipeline and batteries packed in cylinders you could deliver fuel along a pipeline. You don't have to actually do that, of course, but the point is that, once you're treating charged batteries the same way you treat units of liquid fuel, you can set up infrastructure to make batteries just as available as liquid fuels.
By the same token, pumping gas from an underground reservoir will be a big fail the first time there is a large hurricane evacuation. Because a gas station can run out of gas in the same way that a battery filling station can run out of charged battery. The difference is that, as long as its (very heavy duty) power lines don't go down, the battery filling station can gradually restore its capacity without taking delivery of more batteries. The gas station, once it's out of gas, is empty until a tanker truck arrives. Both the gas filling station and the battery filling station can be refilled by taking delivery from a truck, however.
It should be noted that, in the case of the battery filling station, the delivery truck has to take away the uncharged batteries as well as delivering fresh, charged ones, and that the batteries will almost certainly be heavier than the equivalent gasoline, so a delivery of batteries will waste a lot more energy than a delivery of gasoline. Except in emergency situations, however, the battery filling station will not need frequent deliveries/pickups, whereas the gas station will. We are talking about an emergency situation here, however, in which case the performance of the battery exchange station doesn't seem to be worse than the gasoline station.
Also, I think you're misunderstanding the logistics of the situation. Most of the people using a battery filling station are going to be people who are in the middle of a long trip, or who are making a number of shorter trips closer together. Everyone sitting at home or at work (employers might provide it as a perquisite, or they might meter it and charge employees, either way, if electric cars catch on, pretty much every long-term parking spot will have a car charger) is going to have their car charging where it's parked. The default state of an electric car most of the time will be charged. Certainly nearly everyone who needs to go to a filling station is going to be well on their way to their destination rather than near their source. People being evacuated will be near their source and will therefore most likely be fully charged unless it's an area where everyone has a long commute to and from work and the evacuation order is given right around the time everyone is getting home from work. There could also be a problem if there's just one super-long stretch of highway to get out of the evacuation zone that everyone will follow rather than just spreading out in all directions. In that case, the filling stations along that route could get swamped. Once again, this applies equally to gas stations and battery stations. In cases like that, it's the responsibility of emergency agencies to work with the companies behind the filling stations and make sure they're prepared for the extra load. It's a logical part of basic emergency planning. Not that I actually believe that those agencies will actually do this. It will actually take several days of a hundred thousand people sleeping in their cars on the side of the highway for a few days before they'll actually do anything, but that will be true whether the cars are gas or electric.
5 minutes? The article summary says that it can charge smaller battery packs to 80% in 15-30 minutes, which we all know actually means at least 30 minutes, probably more, and that's only to 80%, the remaining 20% would probably then take another 30 minutes. As for a regular gas station fillup taking longer than five minutes, that seems a bit of an overestimate (if we assume that we're talking about just the filling time and not also the payment process) considering that typical US gas pumps are up to 10 gallons per minute. Also, considering that gas has about 130 megajoules per gallon, that means that the gas pump pumps up to 1.3 gigajoules of energy in a minute. Divide by 60 and get about 21.7 megajoules per second, which is 21.7 megawatts. As stated in the summary, CHAdeMO is limited to a 62kW, so it's about 1/349th the potential energy transfer rate of a gas pump. There's all sorts of arguments about the actual equivalence of those figures, but the bottom line is that there's still about two orders of magnitude difference between the current and upcoming fast charging standards and what an existing gas pump can deliver. Also, improvements in fast charging are difficult, whereas the design changes to pump gas 10X faster would be relatively trivial.
The big problem is that we're talking about a lot of energy in a short amount of time. A two minute gas fill up transfers enough stored chemical energy to propel a two ton vehicle at high speed for 500 miles. That's over a period of time about 500 times longer than the fill up took. Add to that, car engines are far, far from 100% efficient, so they produce a lot of waste heat. Compress the time that heat is released in by a factor of 500 and the car doesn't just melt, it partially vaporizes (I think it takes around 4 gigajoules to vaporize two tons of steel starting from room temperature, so not quite enough in a full tank to completely vaporize the car). Batteries are a chemical energy storage mechanism, as is gasoline in an automotive system. When transferring gasoline to a car, the gasoline is kept inert, and no chemical reaction takes place. When batteries recharge, a chemical reaction is taking place inside the batteries. Like the cars gasoline-powered engine, it's far from 100% efficient. Without some unheard of level of charging efficiency, or some amazing heat transfer technology, we're back into vaporize the car (or at least the batteries) territory if the energy is transferred in the same kind of time frame you can fill a gas tank. At the very least, any non-superconducting power cable would certainly vaporize or you'd have to pump the voltage so high it would just arc through the air.
So, if you can physically transfer your energy in a chemically inert way, there's a clear advantage that battery charging won't be able to overcome unless we develop some really amazing technologies such as room temperature superconductors and superconducting capacitors. Maybe someone can come up with an efficient fuel-able battery that can be recharged by pumping in charged fluid(s). For example sticking with traditional lead-acid batteries, you could pump out lead sulfate nanoparticles (suspended in a conductive liquid medium) and pump in fresh lead oxide and lead nanoparticle suspensions into cathode and anode chambers soaked in sulfuric acid solution and separated with a membrane that lets sulfuric acid and sulfate ions through but not the nanoparticles or the conductive medium. The lead sulfate nano-particles would then go into a similar set of chambers to be charged (converted back to lead and lead oxide through the application of electrical charge while in similar anode and cathode chambers) and later once they're no longer lead sulfate (probably there's a good way to separate lead and lead sulfate as well as lead oxide and lead sulfate nanoparticles chemically or based on density or magnetic/diamagnetic properties or optical properties otherwise, you can just charge the chambers until they're certain to have some particular small percentage of lead sulfate left
Hmm, considering how long "the cloud" has been a buzzword, doesn't it seem like an awful lot of unscheduled downtime if there have been enough events already for people to be claiming that they aren't given a fair shake by the media when they go down. After all, if the media have reported on it several times, it's happened several times. That's more unscheduled downtime than your typical web server gets in a few years.
Perhaps if they hadn't gone with a word that means fuzzy, insubstantial and ephemeral to describe their services people wouldn't have the same reservations about it. Maybe it's also because IT people don't like their managers to say "I just heard about this neat new thing, let's abandon the system we have now to pursue this" against their advice, then have to deal with being screamed at by their managers later when everything is down and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it because they've effectively ceded all control to a third party service provider who has not managed, thus far, to establish themselves as particularly safe or reliable.
The apologists whose articles are linked in this Slashdot story seem to think it's great that we're putting all of our eggs into the baskets of known basket droppers. Thus far I'm not impressed enough by these providers. Obviously, in order to do anything on the Internet, you have to rely on some sort of service provider, and even they have to rely on their peers. So obviously there's no way you can have total control. Nevertheless, you should still try to retain all the control you can over your own stuff.
Which is only the case because the US uses simple plurality voting, which is the perfect method when there are exactly two choices (such asvoting yea or nay on a bill), but is actually the worst possible method (outside of methods that are actually crazy like throwing darts at photos of candidates). The paradox you mentioned, where you have to choose the lesser evil out of two rather than choosing the candidate you actually want (because that way the candidate you _least_ want will win), is the most serious flaw in the way US democracy "works". It funnels peoples choices towards a two party model. It's so bad that candidates who aren't either Democrats or Republicans are referred to, without apparent irony as "third-party" candidates.
The problem is that the actual mathematical model the US election system works on is biased to a two party system. Everyone gets one vote, which they cast for one candidate, in one round of voting. This simple plurality voting system works perfectly, and is the ideal system for basic yea or nay votes, such as voting for or against a particular proposition. The problem is, if you introduce more than two choices, it jumps from being the best possible system to the worst (well, the worst out of all the practical choices, anyway). The reason for this is usually referred to as the spoiler effect. It's what happens when a candidate comes along and "splits the vote". The two best examples of so called "spoilers" in recent US history are Nader and Perot. Voters who cast their vote for Nader would have been almost universally much more likely to want Gore to win than Bush, but, because they voted for who they wanted to win, rather than attempting to game the system and compromise by voting for whoever they thought had the better chance, Bush won instead in a very close race. Likewise, the voters who voted for Ross Perot would have, by and large, been much more likely to vote for Bush Sr. than for Clinton, so Clinton won.
So, simple plurality voting means that stupid games have to be played by voters, otherwise the candidate they are least likely to actually want wins. This process leads pretty naturally to a strong two party system where voters are afraid to cast their votes for so called "third parties". This is not the only factor that has led to the current two party hegemony, but, as a bias built into the very fabric of the system, it's a pretty big one.
Then of course there's the electoral college. Among its other problems, it leads to the situation where all votes are not equal since votes from some states are worth up to 4 times what votes from other states are. It's antiquated and ridiculous. If it can't be eliminated, then they should just make every voter a member and count their electoral college vote as the same one they cast when they voted.
Rather than simple plurality voting, they should use one of the other methods. All of them are better. All of the single round systems do have paradoxes similar to the spoiler effect, but they're generally much weaker than in standard simple plurality. Also, there's no reason a multi-round system couldn't be established.
If the voting problem could be fixed, and it was no longer certain that either a Democrat or Republican would win almost all elections, then it would go a long way towards fixing the corruption problem in US government. At the moment, various interests will simply bribe both viable candidates with campaign funds for favorable treatment from the winner. As it stands, elections are currently like horse races with two horses paying 3 to 1 odds. It's possible to bet on both and still profit. If there were 3 or 4 or 10 viable candidates, then they would have to choose just one to back and at very poorer odds. The fact that the process suddenly becomes anyone's game would mean that many more people would actually attempt to run would mean that the payoff for actually bribing a politician would drop and maybe they would stop doing it so much.
You got me on sublimation. I should have changed that to evaporation. I'd originally started writing a more detailed bit about how an ice layer would form quickly due to evaporative cooling and how it would continue to sublimate but would protect the water trapped inside it, but it was too long winded and depends on conditions that aren't really present in our scenario of an astronaut blown out of a spacecraft anyway. So I erased most of it, but still ended up with sublimation in there instead of evaporation.
On to where you said: "the temperature at which the molecules evaporate is lowered. (Called the boiling point in any part of the world. The boiling point of 100C is specified to be at standard pressure.)" No! No! No! Or, rather, yes to the part about evaporation being increased by lower temperature, but a definite no to the temperature at which molecules evaporate being called the the boiling point. Evaporation produces water vapor, hence the name. Water vapor is still technically liquid water (arguably when the individual molecules escape they have enough kinetic energy to be considered steam, but I think it's only really considered a phase change when it happens to a mass of particles rather than just one). Steam is the gaseous phase of water and boiling is when a mass of water converts into steam. The temperature at which water evaporates is well below 100C even at standard air pressure.
On the weight and string analogy. I think my analogy with sudden loading of a string already under light tension from its own weight is much closer to the actual event than dropping a weight. I do agree that there will be some additional kinetic energy which will need to be dealt with faster in a sudden event versus a slower one. However, I also argue that it will only be a small fraction of the overall force from the increase from a relative pressure of 0 PSI to 5 PSI. Sheep lungs for science indeed. I should note as an aside here, that it's not really just the strength of the lungs themselves. The lungs are relatively fragile, being porous and spongy, but since they're porous, the pressure just evens out inside the lungs. The whole chest, including the ribs, diaphragm, other muscles and tissues, etc. must be considered. So when I talk about what the lungs can hold, I'm talking about the whole system.
As for the oxygen being absorbed by hemoglobin, I'm not sure how anything you said about it means that there won't be ongoing absorption of dissolved oxygen in the blood by hemoglobin. It seems to me that the 2% dissolved versus 98% bound figure you gave is probably right, but without an explanation of why it would be otherwise, I have to assume that's an average, probably slightly higher right after you take a breath and slightly lower right before you take the next one. Just a point of diminishing return in absorption of oxygen. However, I have to admit that it certainly seems that the hemoglobin is more likely to be able to absorb dissolved oxygen than the small bubbles when your blood goes fizzy from the pressure drop. Still, it seems like there just isn't that much gas in our scenario and the small bubbles from it aren't going to be much of a problem until they can accumulate into much larger ones and absorption is going to be ongoing to some degree. Also I think we're pretty certain by now that the pressure will drop, but not by that much because the body, and the circulatory system especially, will retain some pressure. Not to mention that the expanding gas, coming out of solution, will itself act as a pressure regulating mechanism to a certain degree. I'm still pretty sure that, since similar pressure drops don't frequently kill divers, the risks for astronauts are about the same.
Overall, I think we just have to figure it out by experimentation. Rather than sheep, I suggest we use humans. Since it would be unconscionable to intentionally do that to humans, I propose we simply properly fund manned space flight. If we do that, and wait a few hundred years, there will probably be enough evidence from accidents to get a good idea of how well astronauts hold up to vacuum.
Regarding the piece of string with the weight, that's trying to stretch an analogy just a bit. The analogy you want is a piece of string (let's give it a cross-section of exactly one square inch) with a 5 pound weight hanging from it (from a hook). Hanging there, the string is stretched a bit and has some tension on it, but isn't breaking. The correct comparison is with the same piece of string with no weight on it, then you reach over with the 5 pound weight, supporting it fully, hook it onto the string and let go. The string suddenly stretches and ends up with more tension on it, but the actual amount of force acting on it is never more than 5 pounds rather than your example where the 5 pounds is dropped from a height and, when the string catches, pulls down momentarily with 50 pounds of force. Promoting that situation as a valid example is disingenuous. Yes, it does make a difference how quickly you ramp up the internal pressure, but not a whole lot. And come on, additional kinetic energy? It is true, that there will be some, but trying to pretend it will be anything other than negligible is silly.
What you said about there being more dissolved oxygen because of the missing nitrogen gave me pause for a moment, but on reflection, that just can't be right. It's been a long time since I took any classes in the physical sciences, but I'm pretty certain there's a few things wrong with that. First of all, the amount of a gas that's supposed to end up dissolved in water is supposed to be directly related to the partial pressure of that gas in the atmosphere. So, if the oxygen partial pressure is the same, there should be no additional dissolved oxygen relative to how much there would be on earth. Secondly, hemoglobin is quite reactive, and red blood cells have a lot of surface area and dissolved oxygen isn't immune from chemical reactions, rather it's more susceptible. Put simply, if there were that much extra oxygen dissolved in your blood, it would either be sucked up by hemoglobin.
The figure you give of 2% of the total oxygen in your blood being dissolved and the other 98% being chemically bound sounds about right. Bearing in mind that the 2% figure is going to be an average based on a regular breathing pattern. If you don't breathe in air for a prolonged period of time, that 2% is going to dwindle (in increments of the remaining amount). Hemoglobin does remove dissolved oxygen from the blood, but you keep on infusing the blood with new oxygen by breathing.
Grrr, you're still bothering me with that boiling thing, by the way. You really need to make a distinction between gases dropping out of solution and boiling. When you say: "The bucket at 1/3 will lose all of its dissolved gas when taken to 0, since the water will all boil away" it makes my head hurt. If you drop the pressure to zero, unconstrained water will sublimate away quickly (but maybe not so quickly as you seem to be thinking), but it won't exactly boil, not unless it was already really hot. You need to pump in additional energy to actually induce a phase change even if you've just lowered the boiling point to below the current temperature of the water by lowering the pressure.
Anyway, if you have buckets of water at 0, 1/3, 1, and 1 1/3 atmosphere, and you drop the pressure by 25%, down to 1 atmosphere, you lose 25% of the dissolved gases. If you then drop it by 66.666...% from 1 to 1/3, then you lose 66.666...% of the remaining dissolved gases. If you then drop it 100% from 1/3 to 0 then you lose 100% of the remaining dissolved gases. It looks to me like the amount of gas released is exactly a function of the difference.
Also, as you point out, there will still be internal pressure. Your body will work to a degree as a pressure vessel. Obviously if your body weren't capable of maintaining greater pressure on the inside than exists outside it, it wouldn't function at all, because your blood wouldn't travel around your body.
I see no reason why your lungs would be weaker in explosive decompression versus slow decompression. Either they can withstand the internal pressure or they can't. Given that you'd probably only need to deal with one third atmosphere, as I go into below, it actually seems pretty likely to me that you'd be able to hold it in your lungs. Whether you did or not would probably depend on how prepared you were when the atmosphere suddenly went away.
I understand about the gas bubbles in your blood. However, I'm considering this in context of an astronaut. My original post on this was a reply to someone's notion that human blood is full of dissolved oxygen and that it would drain out of it if pressure dropped suddenly as a result of being blown out of a spaceship. The thing is, the oxygen in your blood really is mostly contained in hemoglobin. The red blood cells have quite a lot of surface area and the vast majority of oxygen in your blood really does end up chemically bound and therefore resistant to pressure changes. Also, as I pointed out in an earlier post, the US space program doesn't operate at one atmosphere. Instead, they operate at about one third of an atmosphere. The oxygen partial pressure matches that found in Earth's atmosphere. So, there isn't a whole lot of nitrogen or argon in spacecraft air. So, when the pressure drops a third of an atmosphere, an astronaut's blood just isn't going to have that much dissolved gas to bubble out of it and most of what bubbles out wouldn't be biologically inert nitrogen that just sits there, going nowhere, but gases involved in biology like carbon dioxide and oxygen, which would be rapidly chemically re-absorbed. Not to mention the fact that the hypothetical astronaut's internal pressure just isn't going to drop to zero. We're squishy, sure, but we're still pressure vessels, every tissue in our body is going to stretch, but hold at a certain point.
So, we're talking about a pressure change of less than 1/3rd of an atmosphere with very little nitrogen dissolved in the blood to begin with. 1/3rd of an atmosphere is about 11 feet of water. I'm not a diver, unfortunately, but I still tried to play around with some online dive calculators. As far as I can tell, after diving for a long period of time (none of them seem to allow inputting dive times in the tens of thousands of minutes or more, but, what with diminishing returns, 5 hours out to be pretty close to a saturation point), at 11 feet, you're not at significant danger of the bends, and that's breathing air that's mostly nitrogen, rather than mostly oxygen. There is the risk of a fatal air embolism with a really sudden drop in pressure, but that's once again greatly reduced by the very low concentration of gases in the astronaut's blood.
As for the boiling point, I'm not sure what you're talking about there. The boiling point of water hits human body temperature somewhere around 1 psi. That doesn't mean that your blood actually starts boiling at that point, however. Plenty of extra energy needs to be pumped into water to actually make it boil, even as the boiling point drops. So, even if internal pressure dropped that low, the astronaut's blood would technically be supercritical, but still wouldn't actually boil. As for where you said:
When the pressure around your body drops, so does the pressure of the blood and hence its boiling point. This causes the dissolved gases to boil out and form bubbles.
That's... that's not what's happening there. The dissolved gases are still gases, not liquids. They come out of solution, but no boiling is involved.
Little late to reply to this, but I'm going to anyway. From what I can find, it looks like you very well may be able to hold the oxygen in your lungs even in a vacuum. Air may be brought into your lungs by suction, which does rely on air pressure, but once it's in there, you hold it in with your trachea mouth, etc. It may or may not be the case that the lungs empty immediately, but what I can find suggests that you can probably manage to hold in the 5+ psi you're likely to have in your lungs. Also, even if your lungs empty, oxygen isn't just going to be pulled out of your blood into space. So, any oxygen already in your blood will stay there. I used to be able to do four underwater laps of our pool when I was a teenager. I experimented a fair amount with holding my breath when I had that pool and I can say with pretty good authority that someone in good health should be able to stay conscious for at least a minute and probably more even after expelling as much air from their lungs as they can and without intentionally hyperventilating first.
Just a note. Oxygen transport in your body isn't based on the oxygen being dissolved in your blood. It combines chemically with the hemoglobin. So, suddenly exposed to a vacuum, you still might have some gases come out of solution in your body, so maybe the bends, and your body would swell a bit quite possibly accompanied with some discomfort. I'm not sure what would happen with sinuses and eardrums and so forth. Also, if your lungs were full, you probably wouldn't be able to contain the pressure. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be able to blow out your chest or anything, but there could be internal rupturing, or maybe the air would just force itself out of your mouth and nose. In any case, if you had enough oxygen in your blood to stay conscious for two minutes, then it looks like you'd stay conscious for two minutes regardless of the pressure (as long as you don't pass out from the pain of your ear drums bursting, etc.)
Hmmm. Before posting, something just occurred to me about how good a pressure vessel your lungs might actually be. I looked up the PSI trumpet players manage, because I've heard about how professionals manage to rupture their lungs sometimes and end up with air directly entering their body cavities. I found this which says that student trumpet players were able to manage 35-50 PSI and professionals between 75-95 PSI. The question there is how much of that pressure is actually found in the lungs and how much is produced by clever use of the lungs as a lower pressure air supply, producing the pressure mostly in the mouth and feeding it with careful work? I'm not sure, but it makes it seem that it's quite possible that a healthy adult may very well be able to hold air at around 14.5 PSI without even being forced to breath out. For that matter, if they're in space in the first place, they probably weren't even breathing air at 1 atmosphere to begin with. The US space program uses a mostly oxygen atmosphere at only about 5 PSI.
So, it looks like you wouldn't want to just take a stroll out into the hard vacuum of space on a regular basis, but it looks like it's actually pretty survivable in most of our solar system.
To be fair to modern observational evidence versus historical record, historical record often isn't really all that good. Even big, fairly educated civilizations like the Romans didn't leave behind particularly reliable history. Take Caligula, for example, we know a few things about him, but many of the things we think we know are probably just made up. Historians throughout the ages have also often been popular fictional writers and little effort seems to have been put into distinguishing between their fictional works and their factual ones at the time (of course, they were writing for a contemporary audience who probably knew through context). Not to mention all of the propaganda.
On the observational evidence end, dating by geologic layers isn't perfect, but it's still pretty good at telling us that A happened before B, which happened before C. Sure, the dates we ascribe to the events aren't perfect, but, unlike recorded history, we usually have a pretty good idea of what actually happened. We can see flood, fire, meteorite impact, earthquake, continental drift, this species vanishing, this one arising, 1000s of different species all over the globe vanishing at once, etc., etc. Even geological evidence isn't perfect and it apparently can even lie sometimes, but nowhere near as much as a human writer who may well be on drugs, just plain insane, repeating common misconceptions and rumors as fact, or just plain lying like crazy to support an agenda.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about special sauce is that, for it to work as advertised, we can't ever know whether it exists or not. If we could prove that it exists, then it would cease being magic and become a set of physical laws which would be either deterministic or random. We do have choices, it's just probably the case that those choices are predetermined. Knowledge of whether or not we really are predetermined, or random or full of special sauce wouldn't make a difference, we'd still have to make choices. Unless we want to sink into nihilism because we think there's no point in anything if there's no special sauce, we'd still lock up serial killers because we don't want ourselves or our loved ones hacked up and it would still be probable that they would kill again.
The argument makes perfect sense to me. The point really is that we have no choice but to act as if we have free will. Think about it, we cannot choose _not_ to have free will. Even if we kill ourselves, doing so is an exercise of free will (unless we're going to play stupid semantic games about what free will actually means. Predetermination is probably the way things work, but unless we're in a universe where the Predictoscope is possible then we don't know what our predetermined choices are, so they're just as good as true free will. If we can have Predictoscopes, we just have to suck it up and accept that we don't have free will, but there's nothing we can actually do without choosing to do so, therefore we have to act like we have free will. I really should rather have simply said that we have no choice but to act like we have free will rather than that it's better.
It sucks, sure. It means that we keep locking up serial killers who didn't truly have a choice in what they did. The Universe made them do it. The thing is, if you don't lock up or at least try to treat serial killers, then they're pretty likely to kill again. You can go all nihilistic about your free will being an illusion, or you can decide that love is real, even if it is just a matter of circumstance, and that you'd rather not have your loved ones or those of anyone else hacked into bits. It is a pretty good reason to try to understand the circumstances that lead to people doing horrible things rather than simply concluding that some people are just evil and others are good and you just have to scour away the evil ones. Sure some people are good and some are just evil, but that is a result of their circumstances (this term encompassing their genetics, their upbringing, how warm it was on their fourth birthday and the precise velocity and position (screw you, Heisenberg :->) of every particle they're made of or have ever interacted with at every moment in time of their existence as well as a slew of other things, some of which we probably don't know about yet or maybe ever). If person A is good and person B is evil and you swap their circumstances then, unless you believe in special sauce, you've just swapped everything about them, so really you haven't swapped anything. If you do believe in special sauce, so that A now has the special source "soul" of B and vice versa then I'm still not going to believe you that B's soul with A's circumstances is still going to be good. Raise a person with a genetic propensity for psychosis in an abusive environment and give them the right opportunities for evil and I don't think special sauce provided free will is going to make a difference to their victims.
The thing that really bothers me about the nature of special sauce is that it doesn't have one. It cannot be random and allow you to have "true" free will, but it also can't be deterministic or you've lost "true" free will that way as well. So, it has to be a third option. I can't understand what that third option would be. Also, from my understanding of what "to understand" actually means, if anyone could understand what the third option is, then free will would vanish again because understanding it would mean it follows some sort of rules and if it does, then free will is governed from outside by those rules and is therefore not free. So, if it, by definition, is not understandable, what's the point of trying to understand it? Just proceed acting as if you have free will and think what you like, whether or not what you like is determined by the state of the all containing universe or by something outside of the all containing universe (which would inductively need to be part of the all containing universe because it's all containing.
So, because I can't understand an explicitly incomprehensible argument, does that make me a simpleton, or is it the person who believes that they can understand something that's actually incomprehensible who is being the simpleton or at least clinging grimly to some existential illusion. W
The link you gave seems to pretty thoroughly debunk Penrose's argument.
As far as free will goes... The way I see it, there are three possibilities:
The first is that the universe is fully deterministic and that free will does not truly exist. A fully deterministic universe can very well be the case, even if there are unknown and unknowable rules. This further breaks down into two versions of the universe. In one of them, despite the fact that everything is predestined, it's impossible to actually predict the future, so we might as well act as if free will exists, even if we don't actually believe in it. In the other version, it's possible to predict the future and, if you check your Predictoscope (TM, patent pending) and see yourself in five minutes singing "I'm a little teapot" then, in five minutes, that's what you'll be doing whether you try to stop it or not. That would be a very strange universe. Of course, even that universe you might as well act like you have free will. After all, even if you do as predicted 100% of the time, it might still be because that's what you, and everyone else, actually wanted to do.
The second is that the universe follows laws, but those laws, at certain scales, are truly random and the statistics of those truly random occurrences give rise to the rules that we can actually know. In such a universe, the future is unknowable, but it's hard to say that we would truly have free will either. We would still be drawn along inexorably by the currents of the universe, but the currents would be fundamentally random. So, in that case, it would be best to act like we have free will.
The third is that the universe follows laws, but those laws, at certain scales, are affected by some currently unknown special sauce. This special sauce is the source of free will and is where the choices we make actually come from. The special sauce has no ingredient list. It's not made of anything and follows no internal rules whatsoever. Despite the complete lack of rules and completely unpredictable nature of the special sauce, it is also explicitly not random. No need to dig any further folks, completely ineffable stuff here. In that case, we truly have free will (although we also lose the ability to define what free will actually is in any way), so we might as well act like we have free will.
It seems that, no matter what universe we're actually in, we might as well act like we have free will. After all, we have no choice but to exercise free will. If we sit and do nothing, that's a choice. If we sing "I'm a little teapot" that's a choice. If we read Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps", that's a choice. If we look at the Predictoscope to see what we'll be doing in a few minutes, that's a choice. Everything we do where we could possibly have done something else (or at least where it appears that we could have possibly done something else) is a choice.
Out of curiosity, what did he prove that a human brain could do that a turing machine could not?
Why does the house need to be destroyed? Does converting a house into a growing operation make it structurally unsound somehow? I suppose someone could rip out a bunch of supporting walls to make a larger space, but, if the house is still standing, couldn't you just jack those areas up and build new walls rather than demolishing the house? Or is the house just destroyed because it has been "tainted" by pot growing? Just more of the standard circular reasoning you get in drug war debates?
"Why is pot bad?"
"Because houses with pot growing in them have to be destroyed! Won't someone think of the houses!"
"But why do they have to destroy the houses?"
"Because they had pot growing in them and pot is bad."
"Why is pot bad..."
So, being constantly being forced to choose between two evils doesn't suck? Sure being beaten with a tennis racket beats being beaten with a cricket bat, but that doesn't mean that they don't both suck.
There was a Slashdot article a while back about required radiation testing of wild boar meat sold in Germany, quite a long way from Chernobyl. Fallout from Chernobyl (radioactive Caesium I think) ends up collected and concentrated in fungi. Then it travels up the food chain. So, the problem isn't just mushrooms, but it's still not really that safe to eat the mushrooms. Of course, it won't kill you to eat the mushrooms. You probably wouldn't get a fatal dose of radiation even if you lived on a diet of nothing but wild mushrooms and boar meat. It's impossible to say how many people it's killed and will kill and how many years it's taken off people's lives. Almost certainly some. Just a handful, or hundreds or thousands? Really difficult in most cases to say definitively where someone's cancer came from.
Sure though, it's an acceptable risk. Just like all the mercury in our seafood (I suppose it's fortunate then that we're overfishing and destroying marine environments so effectively that the problem of heavy metal in our fish will go away on its own). Just like all of the nasties we've managed to add to our drinking water. They're all acceptable risks. Add them all up though, and the risk isn't as acceptable. And we've only just gotten started. Most of the poisoning we've managed has been in the last half century or so, but it's going to hang around for a lot longer than that. Therefore, it's pretty clear that, if the rate remains steady, the concentrations of all kinds of stuff we can't handle is going to continue increasing. But, rates aren't remaining steady, they're accelerating.
Now, most of this isn't from nuclear power, it's from regular old industrial processes, and things like burning coal for power. So, why attack nuclear power if it isn't as bad as burning coal? Because the safety record of nuclear power plants that we're talking about in this discussion is only going to get worse. We still don't have any idea how bad Fukushima is really going to be. Sure, you can say that it was a natural disaster, not a an engineering failure but, given what was known about the safety of the site, what this natural disaster was able to do to the plant was an engineering failure, just like the levees during hurricane Katrina and, let's face it, pretty much all flood damage (floods are pretty much man-made disasters not just because we build on flood plains, but also because deforestation, roads, parking lots, and our marvelous sewer and drainage systems deliver rain water to rivers much, much faster than would occur naturally). All kinds of industries, including nuclear power have shown time and time and time again that they just can't be trusted to do it right, even when it is possible to do it right. New nuclear power plants have much safer designs than the old ones, but we have a lot of old ones operating, and they're aging, and it's naive to believe that they'll all be safely and properly decommissioned when they need to be. Instead, operators are going to try everything they can to squeeze every last drop of life out of them before jumping ship on the expense to properly close them down. The end result of that is almost certain to be a lot more nuclear disasters of one kind or another (I should note here what I forgot to mention earlier, that the poster I responded to was acting like there have only been three serious nuclear power accidents but several other nuclear power plants in Japan only just made it by the skin of their teeth from this same earthquake/tsunami, and then there's the Tokai fuel fabrication plant event back in 1999). There very well may be competent engineers at every single plant who take it as their solemn duty to make sure that safety is the number one priority. If they ever actually stand in the way of profits, however, we have to assume that they'll be shoved aside by management and that said management will probably try its hardest to pin any subsequent disaster on those "disgruntled" engineers.
Anyway, after 60 years of nuclear power, it still hasn't managed to become economi
thermopile wrote:
While there's plenty of other sources of pollution and industrial catastrophes in the world (our oceans are getting more and more toxic with heavy metals and we should never forget Bhopal), I have to ask you, when will it be safe to eat wild mushrooms in Europe again? That good safety record you mention has still managed to produce long lasting effects over a very wide area. We still don't know how bad Fukushima is actually going to be, but there's a real possibility that children being born in Japan right now are going to have to spend their entire lives following some sort of special behavior to avoid health risks from fallout from Fukushima.
The same thing is true of all kinds of industries, nuclear is not alone. Obviously we need nuclear reactors if only to produce isotopes needed for other industries and nuclear medicine. Claiming that nuclear power is safe as is, however, seems disingenuous given how bad any single incident can get.
So, what is the bright side for nuclear power as it stands at the moment? Is it more cost effective than other methods of power generation? As far as I can find, it looks like it's still pretty much the most expensive form of power generation out there, even ignoring the externalities. Sure, it may be great for submarines and other military ships and if we ever get a moonbase, etc. I'm not actually rabidly anti-nuclear, I think we just need to get it right. Perhaps modern reactor designs really are there and it's just the old ones that are a problem and they'll be phased out over time and we'll end up with only newer, safer designs. The trouble is, it seems to me that the nuclear industry hasn't proven that it can be trusted to safely retire old plants. Running them into the ground to the point of disaster seems more likely. For general use, until we're not using antiquated designs anymore, what does nuclear actually have to offer besides the fact that if we don't keep funding the reactors we will have thrown our money away on them?
MozeeToby, I want to buy your rock!
I just have to comment on that one. Although police officers do essentially get special rights and privileges that other people don't, they're still civilians. Military personnel, acting as such, are the ones who aren't civilians. They have their own justice system and everything. Even they are civilians when they aren't acting as military personnel. If they shoplift off a military base, for example, they can be arrested by regular police, and even tried and punished by the regular courts and correctional system, although the local cops are more likely to just hand them over to the MPs. When police officers and the like refer to non-officers as 'civilians', it's just a form of contemptuous self aggrandizement.
That said, police officers are in a special class in the sense of being "officers of the law". There's certain special status that comes with that with regards to things like detaining people, using force, and my personal favorite, the automatic assumption in court that they never lie (even to the point that hearsay rules don't apply to police officers). There are other special statuses like "officer of the court" for bar association members and process servers, clerks, etc. There's also special licensing for private investigators, bounty hunters, etc. Then there's members of the press, etc., etc. Lots and lots of special statuses out there, and plenty of people in these various occupations do have some sort of "us vs. them" mentality in which they may refer to others who don't have the same license as 'civilians'. Generally speaking, however, if the term is actually going to have any meaning at all, those people are all pretty much using the term wrong by separating the world into civilians and themselves.
As far as how forceful you are allowed to be in detaining someone when you're not some sort of special class, that really depends. For one thing, state and local laws vary wildly and are generally ridiculously unclear on the subject anyway. Security guards also may or may not have a special status in the jurisdiction. Beyond that, what's allowed and what isn't often comes down to the discretion of the police and prosecutor. In places where it's legal to use "reasonable force" to detain someone who's robbing you, there's still nothing to stop the police from deciding that it was actually assault or even kidnapping based on their gut feeling or their own views on the law. Likewise, in an area where it's illegal to do anything other than report a thief to the police, someone who whacks a thief over the head with a two by four and then ties them up and throws them in a closet may end up with sympathetic police officers and a prosecutor who simply chooses not to press any charges (there's always the possibility of a civil suit, of course).
It seems like the way the world really works is that it isn't about what's illegal and legal, it's about what you can get away with and what you can't. And that rule doesn't just apply to the people on the wrong end of the justice system, it also applies to the police officers and the TSA workers and the prosecutors and the judges and the politicians. It's actually kind of terrifying that we supposedly have a system that operates on principles of justice, but the reality is that what really happens is that might makes right or, if you're not mighty enough, right and wrong are what you can convince enough people of.
Well, hopefully we can reduce our need for coal with solar and wind. Even if we have to use coal to generate the electricity, a central plant can be made a lot more efficient and environmentally friendly than a bunch of distributed, poorly monitored and maintained internal combustion engines. But ideally (at least with the technology level we can currently hope to achieve), we generate power as cleanly as we can with solar, wind, tide power, etc. and as little fossil fuel use as we can get away with and maybe some nuclear if it can be made viable (with all the externalities, the inevitable startup cost overruns and tremendous lead in times, and required subsidization it doesn't look to me as if nuclear has ever actually been competitive although I hold out hope for it in the future). Then we either use that power to charge batteries for pure electrics if we can get that to work, or we use the electricity to make synthetic fuels and burn those in efficient hybrids.
Hmm, yeah I guess the Florida keys and Florida itself is a worst case scenario type of situation for that sort of problem. Rather than being able to fan out roughly 180 degrees and get away from a limited evacuation area, you have pretty much one direction to go and, since in some cases the evacuation area could potentially be pretty much the whole state, you have a long way to go so you need to stop to fuel up even if you started with a full charge.
On the other hand, an emergency situation is a government concern, not one necessarily for the free market to resolve. The government already puts a lot of effort and money into making sure that oil keeps flowing and is available (federal oil reserve, current ongoing wars, and a lot of more mundane infrastructure expenditures). In theory, if an electric and battery distribution infrastructure becomes vital due to electric cars taking over, the government will spend less on supporting the oil infrastructure and more on the electric infrastructure. So, either the government subsidizes greater battery storage and charging capacity and a larger number of batteries than is needed 99.9% of the time or makes sure that they can be delivered when needed. You mentioned a pipeline for delivering fuel to storage tanks. The thing is, with a big enough pipeline and batteries packed in cylinders you could deliver fuel along a pipeline. You don't have to actually do that, of course, but the point is that, once you're treating charged batteries the same way you treat units of liquid fuel, you can set up infrastructure to make batteries just as available as liquid fuels.
By the same token, pumping gas from an underground reservoir will be a big fail the first time there is a large hurricane evacuation. Because a gas station can run out of gas in the same way that a battery filling station can run out of charged battery. The difference is that, as long as its (very heavy duty) power lines don't go down, the battery filling station can gradually restore its capacity without taking delivery of more batteries. The gas station, once it's out of gas, is empty until a tanker truck arrives. Both the gas filling station and the battery filling station can be refilled by taking delivery from a truck, however.
It should be noted that, in the case of the battery filling station, the delivery truck has to take away the uncharged batteries as well as delivering fresh, charged ones, and that the batteries will almost certainly be heavier than the equivalent gasoline, so a delivery of batteries will waste a lot more energy than a delivery of gasoline. Except in emergency situations, however, the battery filling station will not need frequent deliveries/pickups, whereas the gas station will. We are talking about an emergency situation here, however, in which case the performance of the battery exchange station doesn't seem to be worse than the gasoline station.
Also, I think you're misunderstanding the logistics of the situation. Most of the people using a battery filling station are going to be people who are in the middle of a long trip, or who are making a number of shorter trips closer together. Everyone sitting at home or at work (employers might provide it as a perquisite, or they might meter it and charge employees, either way, if electric cars catch on, pretty much every long-term parking spot will have a car charger) is going to have their car charging where it's parked. The default state of an electric car most of the time will be charged. Certainly nearly everyone who needs to go to a filling station is going to be well on their way to their destination rather than near their source. People being evacuated will be near their source and will therefore most likely be fully charged unless it's an area where everyone has a long commute to and from work and the evacuation order is given right around the time everyone is getting home from work. There could also be a problem if there's just one super-long stretch of highway to get out of the evacuation zone that everyone will follow rather than just spreading out in all directions. In that case, the filling stations along that route could get swamped. Once again, this applies equally to gas stations and battery stations. In cases like that, it's the responsibility of emergency agencies to work with the companies behind the filling stations and make sure they're prepared for the extra load. It's a logical part of basic emergency planning. Not that I actually believe that those agencies will actually do this. It will actually take several days of a hundred thousand people sleeping in their cars on the side of the highway for a few days before they'll actually do anything, but that will be true whether the cars are gas or electric.
5 minutes? The article summary says that it can charge smaller battery packs to 80% in 15-30 minutes, which we all know actually means at least 30 minutes, probably more, and that's only to 80%, the remaining 20% would probably then take another 30 minutes. As for a regular gas station fillup taking longer than five minutes, that seems a bit of an overestimate (if we assume that we're talking about just the filling time and not also the payment process) considering that typical US gas pumps are up to 10 gallons per minute. Also, considering that gas has about 130 megajoules per gallon, that means that the gas pump pumps up to 1.3 gigajoules of energy in a minute. Divide by 60 and get about 21.7 megajoules per second, which is 21.7 megawatts. As stated in the summary, CHAdeMO is limited to a 62kW, so it's about 1/349th the potential energy transfer rate of a gas pump. There's all sorts of arguments about the actual equivalence of those figures, but the bottom line is that there's still about two orders of magnitude difference between the current and upcoming fast charging standards and what an existing gas pump can deliver. Also, improvements in fast charging are difficult, whereas the design changes to pump gas 10X faster would be relatively trivial.
The big problem is that we're talking about a lot of energy in a short amount of time. A two minute gas fill up transfers enough stored chemical energy to propel a two ton vehicle at high speed for 500 miles. That's over a period of time about 500 times longer than the fill up took. Add to that, car engines are far, far from 100% efficient, so they produce a lot of waste heat. Compress the time that heat is released in by a factor of 500 and the car doesn't just melt, it partially vaporizes (I think it takes around 4 gigajoules to vaporize two tons of steel starting from room temperature, so not quite enough in a full tank to completely vaporize the car). Batteries are a chemical energy storage mechanism, as is gasoline in an automotive system. When transferring gasoline to a car, the gasoline is kept inert, and no chemical reaction takes place. When batteries recharge, a chemical reaction is taking place inside the batteries. Like the cars gasoline-powered engine, it's far from 100% efficient. Without some unheard of level of charging efficiency, or some amazing heat transfer technology, we're back into vaporize the car (or at least the batteries) territory if the energy is transferred in the same kind of time frame you can fill a gas tank. At the very least, any non-superconducting power cable would certainly vaporize or you'd have to pump the voltage so high it would just arc through the air.
So, if you can physically transfer your energy in a chemically inert way, there's a clear advantage that battery charging won't be able to overcome unless we develop some really amazing technologies such as room temperature superconductors and superconducting capacitors. Maybe someone can come up with an efficient fuel-able battery that can be recharged by pumping in charged fluid(s). For example sticking with traditional lead-acid batteries, you could pump out lead sulfate nanoparticles (suspended in a conductive liquid medium) and pump in fresh lead oxide and lead nanoparticle suspensions into cathode and anode chambers soaked in sulfuric acid solution and separated with a membrane that lets sulfuric acid and sulfate ions through but not the nanoparticles or the conductive medium. The lead sulfate nano-particles would then go into a similar set of chambers to be charged (converted back to lead and lead oxide through the application of electrical charge while in similar anode and cathode chambers) and later once they're no longer lead sulfate (probably there's a good way to separate lead and lead sulfate as well as lead oxide and lead sulfate nanoparticles chemically or based on density or magnetic/diamagnetic properties or optical properties otherwise, you can just charge the chambers until they're certain to have some particular small percentage of lead sulfate left
Hmm, considering how long "the cloud" has been a buzzword, doesn't it seem like an awful lot of unscheduled downtime if there have been enough events already for people to be claiming that they aren't given a fair shake by the media when they go down. After all, if the media have reported on it several times, it's happened several times. That's more unscheduled downtime than your typical web server gets in a few years.
Perhaps if they hadn't gone with a word that means fuzzy, insubstantial and ephemeral to describe their services people wouldn't have the same reservations about it. Maybe it's also because IT people don't like their managers to say "I just heard about this neat new thing, let's abandon the system we have now to pursue this" against their advice, then have to deal with being screamed at by their managers later when everything is down and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it because they've effectively ceded all control to a third party service provider who has not managed, thus far, to establish themselves as particularly safe or reliable.
The apologists whose articles are linked in this Slashdot story seem to think it's great that we're putting all of our eggs into the baskets of known basket droppers. Thus far I'm not impressed enough by these providers. Obviously, in order to do anything on the Internet, you have to rely on some sort of service provider, and even they have to rely on their peers. So obviously there's no way you can have total control. Nevertheless, you should still try to retain all the control you can over your own stuff.
Of course. By the same token, since no tigers have attacked me in the past year, this anti-tiger rock I have must be working.
Of course, in this case, it has been made free by the author/developer/producer/etc.
Which is only the case because the US uses simple plurality voting, which is the perfect method when there are exactly two choices (such asvoting yea or nay on a bill), but is actually the worst possible method (outside of methods that are actually crazy like throwing darts at photos of candidates). The paradox you mentioned, where you have to choose the lesser evil out of two rather than choosing the candidate you actually want (because that way the candidate you _least_ want will win), is the most serious flaw in the way US democracy "works". It funnels peoples choices towards a two party model. It's so bad that candidates who aren't either Democrats or Republicans are referred to, without apparent irony as "third-party" candidates.
The problem is that the actual mathematical model the US election system works on is biased to a two party system. Everyone gets one vote, which they cast for one candidate, in one round of voting. This simple plurality voting system works perfectly, and is the ideal system for basic yea or nay votes, such as voting for or against a particular proposition. The problem is, if you introduce more than two choices, it jumps from being the best possible system to the worst (well, the worst out of all the practical choices, anyway). The reason for this is usually referred to as the spoiler effect. It's what happens when a candidate comes along and "splits the vote". The two best examples of so called "spoilers" in recent US history are Nader and Perot. Voters who cast their vote for Nader would have been almost universally much more likely to want Gore to win than Bush, but, because they voted for who they wanted to win, rather than attempting to game the system and compromise by voting for whoever they thought had the better chance, Bush won instead in a very close race. Likewise, the voters who voted for Ross Perot would have, by and large, been much more likely to vote for Bush Sr. than for Clinton, so Clinton won.
So, simple plurality voting means that stupid games have to be played by voters, otherwise the candidate they are least likely to actually want wins. This process leads pretty naturally to a strong two party system where voters are afraid to cast their votes for so called "third parties". This is not the only factor that has led to the current two party hegemony, but, as a bias built into the very fabric of the system, it's a pretty big one.
Then of course there's the electoral college. Among its other problems, it leads to the situation where all votes are not equal since votes from some states are worth up to 4 times what votes from other states are. It's antiquated and ridiculous. If it can't be eliminated, then they should just make every voter a member and count their electoral college vote as the same one they cast when they voted.
Rather than simple plurality voting, they should use one of the other methods. All of them are better. All of the single round systems do have paradoxes similar to the spoiler effect, but they're generally much weaker than in standard simple plurality. Also, there's no reason a multi-round system couldn't be established.
If the voting problem could be fixed, and it was no longer certain that either a Democrat or Republican would win almost all elections, then it would go a long way towards fixing the corruption problem in US government. At the moment, various interests will simply bribe both viable candidates with campaign funds for favorable treatment from the winner. As it stands, elections are currently like horse races with two horses paying 3 to 1 odds. It's possible to bet on both and still profit. If there were 3 or 4 or 10 viable candidates, then they would have to choose just one to back and at very poorer odds. The fact that the process suddenly becomes anyone's game would mean that many more people would actually attempt to run would mean that the payoff for actually bribing a politician would drop and maybe they would stop doing it so much.
You got me on sublimation. I should have changed that to evaporation. I'd originally started writing a more detailed bit about how an ice layer would form quickly due to evaporative cooling and how it would continue to sublimate but would protect the water trapped inside it, but it was too long winded and depends on conditions that aren't really present in our scenario of an astronaut blown out of a spacecraft anyway. So I erased most of it, but still ended up with sublimation in there instead of evaporation.
On to where you said: "the temperature at which the molecules evaporate is lowered. (Called the boiling point in any part of the world. The boiling point of 100C is specified to be at standard pressure.)" No! No! No! Or, rather, yes to the part about evaporation being increased by lower temperature, but a definite no to the temperature at which molecules evaporate being called the the boiling point. Evaporation produces water vapor, hence the name. Water vapor is still technically liquid water (arguably when the individual molecules escape they have enough kinetic energy to be considered steam, but I think it's only really considered a phase change when it happens to a mass of particles rather than just one). Steam is the gaseous phase of water and boiling is when a mass of water converts into steam. The temperature at which water evaporates is well below 100C even at standard air pressure.
On the weight and string analogy. I think my analogy with sudden loading of a string already under light tension from its own weight is much closer to the actual event than dropping a weight. I do agree that there will be some additional kinetic energy which will need to be dealt with faster in a sudden event versus a slower one. However, I also argue that it will only be a small fraction of the overall force from the increase from a relative pressure of 0 PSI to 5 PSI. Sheep lungs for science indeed. I should note as an aside here, that it's not really just the strength of the lungs themselves. The lungs are relatively fragile, being porous and spongy, but since they're porous, the pressure just evens out inside the lungs. The whole chest, including the ribs, diaphragm, other muscles and tissues, etc. must be considered. So when I talk about what the lungs can hold, I'm talking about the whole system.
As for the oxygen being absorbed by hemoglobin, I'm not sure how anything you said about it means that there won't be ongoing absorption of dissolved oxygen in the blood by hemoglobin. It seems to me that the 2% dissolved versus 98% bound figure you gave is probably right, but without an explanation of why it would be otherwise, I have to assume that's an average, probably slightly higher right after you take a breath and slightly lower right before you take the next one. Just a point of diminishing return in absorption of oxygen. However, I have to admit that it certainly seems that the hemoglobin is more likely to be able to absorb dissolved oxygen than the small bubbles when your blood goes fizzy from the pressure drop. Still, it seems like there just isn't that much gas in our scenario and the small bubbles from it aren't going to be much of a problem until they can accumulate into much larger ones and absorption is going to be ongoing to some degree. Also I think we're pretty certain by now that the pressure will drop, but not by that much because the body, and the circulatory system especially, will retain some pressure. Not to mention that the expanding gas, coming out of solution, will itself act as a pressure regulating mechanism to a certain degree. I'm still pretty sure that, since similar pressure drops don't frequently kill divers, the risks for astronauts are about the same.
Overall, I think we just have to figure it out by experimentation. Rather than sheep, I suggest we use humans. Since it would be unconscionable to intentionally do that to humans, I propose we simply properly fund manned space flight. If we do that, and wait a few hundred years, there will probably be enough evidence from accidents to get a good idea of how well astronauts hold up to vacuum.
Regarding the piece of string with the weight, that's trying to stretch an analogy just a bit. The analogy you want is a piece of string (let's give it a cross-section of exactly one square inch) with a 5 pound weight hanging from it (from a hook). Hanging there, the string is stretched a bit and has some tension on it, but isn't breaking. The correct comparison is with the same piece of string with no weight on it, then you reach over with the 5 pound weight, supporting it fully, hook it onto the string and let go. The string suddenly stretches and ends up with more tension on it, but the actual amount of force acting on it is never more than 5 pounds rather than your example where the 5 pounds is dropped from a height and, when the string catches, pulls down momentarily with 50 pounds of force. Promoting that situation as a valid example is disingenuous. Yes, it does make a difference how quickly you ramp up the internal pressure, but not a whole lot. And come on, additional kinetic energy? It is true, that there will be some, but trying to pretend it will be anything other than negligible is silly.
What you said about there being more dissolved oxygen because of the missing nitrogen gave me pause for a moment, but on reflection, that just can't be right. It's been a long time since I took any classes in the physical sciences, but I'm pretty certain there's a few things wrong with that. First of all, the amount of a gas that's supposed to end up dissolved in water is supposed to be directly related to the partial pressure of that gas in the atmosphere. So, if the oxygen partial pressure is the same, there should be no additional dissolved oxygen relative to how much there would be on earth. Secondly, hemoglobin is quite reactive, and red blood cells have a lot of surface area and dissolved oxygen isn't immune from chemical reactions, rather it's more susceptible. Put simply, if there were that much extra oxygen dissolved in your blood, it would either be sucked up by hemoglobin.
The figure you give of 2% of the total oxygen in your blood being dissolved and the other 98% being chemically bound sounds about right. Bearing in mind that the 2% figure is going to be an average based on a regular breathing pattern. If you don't breathe in air for a prolonged period of time, that 2% is going to dwindle (in increments of the remaining amount). Hemoglobin does remove dissolved oxygen from the blood, but you keep on infusing the blood with new oxygen by breathing.
Grrr, you're still bothering me with that boiling thing, by the way. You really need to make a distinction between gases dropping out of solution and boiling. When you say: "The bucket at 1/3 will lose all of its dissolved gas when taken to 0, since the water will all boil away" it makes my head hurt. If you drop the pressure to zero, unconstrained water will sublimate away quickly (but maybe not so quickly as you seem to be thinking), but it won't exactly boil, not unless it was already really hot. You need to pump in additional energy to actually induce a phase change even if you've just lowered the boiling point to below the current temperature of the water by lowering the pressure.
Anyway, if you have buckets of water at 0, 1/3, 1, and 1 1/3 atmosphere, and you drop the pressure by 25%, down to 1 atmosphere, you lose 25% of the dissolved gases. If you then drop it by 66.666...% from 1 to 1/3, then you lose 66.666...% of the remaining dissolved gases. If you then drop it 100% from 1/3 to 0 then you lose 100% of the remaining dissolved gases. It looks to me like the amount of gas released is exactly a function of the difference.
Also, as you point out, there will still be internal pressure. Your body will work to a degree as a pressure vessel. Obviously if your body weren't capable of maintaining greater pressure on the inside than exists outside it, it wouldn't function at all, because your blood wouldn't travel around your body.
I see no reason why your lungs would be weaker in explosive decompression versus slow decompression. Either they can withstand the internal pressure or they can't. Given that you'd probably only need to deal with one third atmosphere, as I go into below, it actually seems pretty likely to me that you'd be able to hold it in your lungs. Whether you did or not would probably depend on how prepared you were when the atmosphere suddenly went away.
I understand about the gas bubbles in your blood. However, I'm considering this in context of an astronaut. My original post on this was a reply to someone's notion that human blood is full of dissolved oxygen and that it would drain out of it if pressure dropped suddenly as a result of being blown out of a spaceship. The thing is, the oxygen in your blood really is mostly contained in hemoglobin. The red blood cells have quite a lot of surface area and the vast majority of oxygen in your blood really does end up chemically bound and therefore resistant to pressure changes. Also, as I pointed out in an earlier post, the US space program doesn't operate at one atmosphere. Instead, they operate at about one third of an atmosphere. The oxygen partial pressure matches that found in Earth's atmosphere. So, there isn't a whole lot of nitrogen or argon in spacecraft air. So, when the pressure drops a third of an atmosphere, an astronaut's blood just isn't going to have that much dissolved gas to bubble out of it and most of what bubbles out wouldn't be biologically inert nitrogen that just sits there, going nowhere, but gases involved in biology like carbon dioxide and oxygen, which would be rapidly chemically re-absorbed. Not to mention the fact that the hypothetical astronaut's internal pressure just isn't going to drop to zero. We're squishy, sure, but we're still pressure vessels, every tissue in our body is going to stretch, but hold at a certain point.
So, we're talking about a pressure change of less than 1/3rd of an atmosphere with very little nitrogen dissolved in the blood to begin with. 1/3rd of an atmosphere is about 11 feet of water. I'm not a diver, unfortunately, but I still tried to play around with some online dive calculators. As far as I can tell, after diving for a long period of time (none of them seem to allow inputting dive times in the tens of thousands of minutes or more, but, what with diminishing returns, 5 hours out to be pretty close to a saturation point), at 11 feet, you're not at significant danger of the bends, and that's breathing air that's mostly nitrogen, rather than mostly oxygen. There is the risk of a fatal air embolism with a really sudden drop in pressure, but that's once again greatly reduced by the very low concentration of gases in the astronaut's blood.
As for the boiling point, I'm not sure what you're talking about there. The boiling point of water hits human body temperature somewhere around 1 psi. That doesn't mean that your blood actually starts boiling at that point, however. Plenty of extra energy needs to be pumped into water to actually make it boil, even as the boiling point drops. So, even if internal pressure dropped that low, the astronaut's blood would technically be supercritical, but still wouldn't actually boil. As for where you said:
That's... that's not what's happening there. The dissolved gases are still gases, not liquids. They come out of solution, but no boiling is involved.
Little late to reply to this, but I'm going to anyway. From what I can find, it looks like you very well may be able to hold the oxygen in your lungs even in a vacuum. Air may be brought into your lungs by suction, which does rely on air pressure, but once it's in there, you hold it in with your trachea mouth, etc. It may or may not be the case that the lungs empty immediately, but what I can find suggests that you can probably manage to hold in the 5+ psi you're likely to have in your lungs. Also, even if your lungs empty, oxygen isn't just going to be pulled out of your blood into space. So, any oxygen already in your blood will stay there. I used to be able to do four underwater laps of our pool when I was a teenager. I experimented a fair amount with holding my breath when I had that pool and I can say with pretty good authority that someone in good health should be able to stay conscious for at least a minute and probably more even after expelling as much air from their lungs as they can and without intentionally hyperventilating first.
Just a note. Oxygen transport in your body isn't based on the oxygen being dissolved in your blood. It combines chemically with the hemoglobin. So, suddenly exposed to a vacuum, you still might have some gases come out of solution in your body, so maybe the bends, and your body would swell a bit quite possibly accompanied with some discomfort. I'm not sure what would happen with sinuses and eardrums and so forth. Also, if your lungs were full, you probably wouldn't be able to contain the pressure. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be able to blow out your chest or anything, but there could be internal rupturing, or maybe the air would just force itself out of your mouth and nose. In any case, if you had enough oxygen in your blood to stay conscious for two minutes, then it looks like you'd stay conscious for two minutes regardless of the pressure (as long as you don't pass out from the pain of your ear drums bursting, etc.)
Hmmm. Before posting, something just occurred to me about how good a pressure vessel your lungs might actually be. I looked up the PSI trumpet players manage, because I've heard about how professionals manage to rupture their lungs sometimes and end up with air directly entering their body cavities. I found this which says that student trumpet players were able to manage 35-50 PSI and professionals between 75-95 PSI. The question there is how much of that pressure is actually found in the lungs and how much is produced by clever use of the lungs as a lower pressure air supply, producing the pressure mostly in the mouth and feeding it with careful work? I'm not sure, but it makes it seem that it's quite possible that a healthy adult may very well be able to hold air at around 14.5 PSI without even being forced to breath out. For that matter, if they're in space in the first place, they probably weren't even breathing air at 1 atmosphere to begin with. The US space program uses a mostly oxygen atmosphere at only about 5 PSI.
So, it looks like you wouldn't want to just take a stroll out into the hard vacuum of space on a regular basis, but it looks like it's actually pretty survivable in most of our solar system.
To be fair to modern observational evidence versus historical record, historical record often isn't really all that good. Even big, fairly educated civilizations like the Romans didn't leave behind particularly reliable history. Take Caligula, for example, we know a few things about him, but many of the things we think we know are probably just made up. Historians throughout the ages have also often been popular fictional writers and little effort seems to have been put into distinguishing between their fictional works and their factual ones at the time (of course, they were writing for a contemporary audience who probably knew through context). Not to mention all of the propaganda.
On the observational evidence end, dating by geologic layers isn't perfect, but it's still pretty good at telling us that A happened before B, which happened before C. Sure, the dates we ascribe to the events aren't perfect, but, unlike recorded history, we usually have a pretty good idea of what actually happened. We can see flood, fire, meteorite impact, earthquake, continental drift, this species vanishing, this one arising, 1000s of different species all over the globe vanishing at once, etc., etc. Even geological evidence isn't perfect and it apparently can even lie sometimes, but nowhere near as much as a human writer who may well be on drugs, just plain insane, repeating common misconceptions and rumors as fact, or just plain lying like crazy to support an agenda.