Greed is a basic human instinct. Any plan that ignores that will be doomed to fail. Except for a tiny minority, everybody will seek as much comfort in their lives as they can get away with.
And even ignoring greed, restructuring current society such that we can all live close to work is not really realistic on a short timescale. It's grown too big for that. You'll need a plan that involves a series of gradual modifications, which is feasible every step of the way.
we have EVs which will go 100 miles on a charge
But no charging stations, and no grid capacity to transport the electricity at the necessary scale. Also, if you're going to charge at night, you'll need to store your solar/wind energy during the day. Also, we'll need trucks and vans, and some people would like to take longer trips.
Or put it into a high orbit around the earth, and make it reflect the sunlight. At least when civilization collapses, it will be out of reach of scavengers.
Solar and wind are pretty useless as an automotive fuel, unless you have much better batteries. Developing better batteries is not an engineering problem that only needs a bunch of money to solve. It needs Nobel-worthy scientific breakthroughs that are usually the result of messing around with something else, and muttering "hmm.. that's funny...".
I got most of my general education after I left school, and most of the stuff I learned at school about history or literature I forgot.
I wouldn't say, though, that the university program was narrowly focused on computer programming. Out of all the classes, only a handful talked about actual programming (in Pascal and Lisp). Most of them involved building a solid theoretical basis. I got classes in advanced stochastics, among other things about Wiener processes and martingales (shudder), digital logic design, physics, signals and systems, linear algebra, numerical analysis, database design, information theory, automata, AI, algorithmic complexity, queuing theory, combinatorics, computer graphics, database design, compiler design, operating system design, etc...
Without a willingness and ability to absorb new information, you didn't get very far. Learning English as a second language was pretty much assured, since pretty much all the text books were in English. Adding stuff like history or arts would have meant getting rid of some of the other subjects.
Except that in this case, the fuel cell is not more efficient than directly burning the coal. According to the article the efficiency is 50%, and that probably doesn't include the losses incurred in producing coal gas out of coal.
The major advantage is that coal gas is much easier to transport and store compared to coal, which could make useful as an automotive fuel, for instance. Also, when you clean the coal gas at the production plant, you don't have to worry about nasty emissions when you use it in a car.
If you can handle a 50/60 Hz switch (possibly with a jumper on the circuit board), the clock will work pretty much everywhere. I don't know what countries guarantee long term accuracy though.
Is that how it works on a US university ? I have a CS degree from a university in the Netherlands, and 95% of the courses were about math, physics, electronics, and computers. I only had 1 short class on philosophy of science, and another class about some social thingy that I forgot about.
My general education I got from my secondary education that I did before attending university.
Gold is almost $50 per gram, and I'm willing to bet that it's more than a factor of 20 cheaper to mine gold on earth, than it is to retrieve rocks from the moon.
Also, the market for moon rocks is fairly small, so the price will drop quickly if you get too much of it.
None of the other solutions are as cheap or reliable. Putting a GPS receiver in a $10 alarm clock is going to be a major challenge, even if you don't use vacuum tubes. Also, indoors the GPS signal strength is usually too weak.
A radio receiver is cheaper, but still more expensive than running an extra wire to the transformer. Also, radio signals are not available everywhere in the world, and use different frequencies and protocols, making it hard to design a clock that will work across several continents. And even if there's a suitable radio transmitter, the signal strength may be so weak that it's easily disrupted by nearby electronics, or not work at all. I have several DCF77 clocks, and they generally only work when I place them near a window.
Nice, you got modded insightful for saying plant food is harmful
And rightly so. The fact that something has useful properties doesn't mean it isn't harmful in other places. Plants also need water, and we still consider floods to be harmful.
The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
Parent probably means countries where the bedrock isn't close to the surface. In some places, it's more than a mile deep, which isn't going to be very practical.
A highly accurate crystal costs in the order for $1 for single quantities
If your clock is already mains-powered, counting the pulses from the grid only takes an extra wire from the transformer to the clock IC. That's cheaper than a crystal.
By the way, a cheap crystal may have a 50 ppm drift, which can add up to 2 minutes per month. Mains frequency is controlled by atomic clocks, and will stay accurate (until now, of course)
Most clocks I have are battery powered, but I still have a radio clock/alarm next to my bed that run on mains power, and so does the clock built into the microwave. I'm pretty sure the radio clock uses the mains frequency as a timebase.
Warm blooded also implies that the temperature stays relatively constant within a narrow range. Dinosaurs could have been warmer than their environment, but still with a wide range in operating temperatures, depending on their activity, sunshine and other factors.
That's how warm-bloodedness would have evolved. Starting with a crude mechanism to keep temperature within a wide band, and slowly refining it to narrower and narrower bands.
Not necessarily, the metabolism inside the dinosaur could have kept it warm enough, even when it was resting. The energy produced goes up by the cube of the size, while the surface area to lose that heat only goes up by the square.
Big numbers on a high-contrast sign sounds pretty easy
Usually yes, but sometimes the signs are dirty, turned at weird angles, obscured by other traffic, badly visible through fog, or right next to the sun or other bright lights. Or maybe the sign doesn't say "65" , but "35 on arteries, 25 on residential street" when you enter a neighborhood.
Or, as quite common in some places where I've driven, the speed limit changes, but there's no sign.
In any case, even if you can read the signs, a GPS based system with traffic information will be a very useful addition.
Slashdot Mirror
Who said it was bad ? It's just a sign that things are changing, but the return of the whales or algae in itself aren't bad.
Greed is a basic human instinct. Any plan that ignores that will be doomed to fail. Except for a tiny minority, everybody will seek as much comfort in their lives as they can get away with.
And even ignoring greed, restructuring current society such that we can all live close to work is not really realistic on a short timescale. It's grown too big for that. You'll need a plan that involves a series of gradual modifications, which is feasible every step of the way.
But no charging stations, and no grid capacity to transport the electricity at the necessary scale. Also, if you're going to charge at night, you'll need to store your solar/wind energy during the day. Also, we'll need trucks and vans, and some people would like to take longer trips.
Or put it into a high orbit around the earth, and make it reflect the sunlight. At least when civilization collapses, it will be out of reach of scavengers.
Solar and wind are pretty useless as an automotive fuel, unless you have much better batteries. Developing better batteries is not an engineering problem that only needs a bunch of money to solve. It needs Nobel-worthy scientific breakthroughs that are usually the result of messing around with something else, and muttering "hmm.. that's funny...".
I got most of my general education after I left school, and most of the stuff I learned at school about history or literature I forgot.
I wouldn't say, though, that the university program was narrowly focused on computer programming. Out of all the classes, only a handful talked about actual programming (in Pascal and Lisp). Most of them involved building a solid theoretical basis. I got classes in advanced stochastics, among other things about Wiener processes and martingales (shudder), digital logic design, physics, signals and systems, linear algebra, numerical analysis, database design, information theory, automata, AI, algorithmic complexity, queuing theory, combinatorics, computer graphics, database design, compiler design, operating system design, etc...
Without a willingness and ability to absorb new information, you didn't get very far. Learning English as a second language was pretty much assured, since pretty much all the text books were in English. Adding stuff like history or arts would have meant getting rid of some of the other subjects.
Except that in this case, the fuel cell is not more efficient than directly burning the coal. According to the article the efficiency is 50%, and that probably doesn't include the losses incurred in producing coal gas out of coal.
The major advantage is that coal gas is much easier to transport and store compared to coal, which could make useful as an automotive fuel, for instance. Also, when you clean the coal gas at the production plant, you don't have to worry about nasty emissions when you use it in a car.
Coal gas is a mixture of CO and H2, combining that with oxygen in the fuel cell yields CO2 and H2O. Pretty basic chemistry, actually.
If you can handle a 50/60 Hz switch (possibly with a jumper on the circuit board), the clock will work pretty much everywhere. I don't know what countries guarantee long term accuracy though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_power_around_the_world
Maybe there was never a demand for those things in OP's life and career so far ?
Is that how it works on a US university ? I have a CS degree from a university in the Netherlands, and 95% of the courses were about math, physics, electronics, and computers. I only had 1 short class on philosophy of science, and another class about some social thingy that I forgot about.
My general education I got from my secondary education that I did before attending university.
Actually, the Russians built several (unmanned) moon landers that have brought small amounts of samples back to earth.
Gold is almost $50 per gram, and I'm willing to bet that it's more than a factor of 20 cheaper to mine gold on earth, than it is to retrieve rocks from the moon.
Also, the market for moon rocks is fairly small, so the price will drop quickly if you get too much of it.
None of the other solutions are as cheap or reliable. Putting a GPS receiver in a $10 alarm clock is going to be a major challenge, even if you don't use vacuum tubes. Also, indoors the GPS signal strength is usually too weak.
A radio receiver is cheaper, but still more expensive than running an extra wire to the transformer. Also, radio signals are not available everywhere in the world, and use different frequencies and protocols, making it hard to design a clock that will work across several continents. And even if there's a suitable radio transmitter, the signal strength may be so weak that it's easily disrupted by nearby electronics, or not work at all. I have several DCF77 clocks, and they generally only work when I place them near a window.
And rightly so. The fact that something has useful properties doesn't mean it isn't harmful in other places. Plants also need water, and we still consider floods to be harmful.
The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
Parent probably means countries where the bedrock isn't close to the surface. In some places, it's more than a mile deep, which isn't going to be very practical.
If your clock is already mains-powered, counting the pulses from the grid only takes an extra wire from the transformer to the clock IC. That's cheaper than a crystal.
By the way, a cheap crystal may have a 50 ppm drift, which can add up to 2 minutes per month. Mains frequency is controlled by atomic clocks, and will stay accurate (until now, of course)
Most clocks I have are battery powered, but I still have a radio clock/alarm next to my bed that run on mains power, and so does the clock built into the microwave. I'm pretty sure the radio clock uses the mains frequency as a timebase.
Warm blooded also implies that the temperature stays relatively constant within a narrow range. Dinosaurs could have been warmer than their environment, but still with a wide range in operating temperatures, depending on their activity, sunshine and other factors.
That's how warm-bloodedness would have evolved. Starting with a crude mechanism to keep temperature within a wide band, and slowly refining it to narrower and narrower bands.
Not necessarily, the metabolism inside the dinosaur could have kept it warm enough, even when it was resting. The energy produced goes up by the cube of the size, while the surface area to lose that heat only goes up by the square.
It could have evolved somewhere half way between dinosaurs and birds.
Usually yes, but sometimes the signs are dirty, turned at weird angles, obscured by other traffic, badly visible through fog, or right next to the sun or other bright lights. Or maybe the sign doesn't say "65" , but "35 on arteries, 25 on residential street" when you enter a neighborhood.
Or, as quite common in some places where I've driven, the speed limit changes, but there's no sign.
In any case, even if you can read the signs, a GPS based system with traffic information will be a very useful addition.
The car could be programmed to brake for any object in its path that it cannot reliably identify as something innocent.
I would bet that the current state of GPS (possibly augmented with inertial navigation) is more reliable than computers that can read traffic signs.
Also, the reliability of the GPS signal is easily verified. When the GPS error becomes too big, it can alert the human driver.
Instead of reading the traffic signs, it would probably be easier to use GPS coordinates, and consult a traffic database.
To keep the inside water clean, I suppose you could just pump the water out of the pool, back into the river.