See my comment above. Trackers don't make economic sense, especially with today's natural gas prices, which make even the cheapest solar far too expensive to be economically viable without HUGE subsidies. They're usually a maintenance nightmare, too. (Remember that every "truck roll" costs an average of $1000! That's the fully burdened cost of two crew, equipment, supplies, etc. The exact figure varies a bit, but all the utility scale solar operators I've worked with use a figure that's in that ballpark...)
Seriously, there are lots of both single and dual-axis trackers. Note that single-axis trackers still have this issue, and that skewing them westward can make a difference in late afternoon power production. (BTW, this isn't a huge difference, and of course, it's not free - you're just trading off power in the morning for power in the late afternoon, which is itself offset somewhat by the fact that the panels are considerably more efficient in the cooler ambient air of the morning. (To a first-order approximation, the voltage output of PV panels is almost entirely an inverse function of temperature, and output current is almost entirely a function of irradiance (incoming sunlight) - so the best solar power days are cold and clear. Heat absolutely slays PV power production. This is one of the most important "physics things" to understand about solar PV.)
Unless you're someplace where real estate is really expensive, trackers don't even pay for themselves. Given the increasing efficiencies of the panels themselves over the past few years, you're far better off just throwing in more panels and avoiding the maintenance headaches associated with the trackers. (As they are mechanical devices and need to be built as cheaply as possible since no one makes any money in solar without subsidies, trackers are BY FAR the most and trouble-prone and expensive part of an array from a maintenance perspective.)
As the guy who led the development of the most advanced utility-scale solar array monitoring system on the market, I can tell you that pretty much every site that has trackers wishes they'd either added more panels or just settled for less output. The exceptions are usually sites where economics are not a factor - "green cred" showplaces and the like - and there are a lot more of those than you might think...
In reality, the optimum angle to face the panels is driven by several competing concerns, including relative time-of-day pricing, which of course can vary after you build the array, so it's not entirely safe to use as a design criterion. In MOST cases, the optimum is around 20 degrees West of South. If you need to optimize for peak power, just do that (or something close to it) and call it a day. Anything else is over-analyzing and probably not really beneficial.
Also, keep in mind that you're already losing a fair amount of power by having the panels at the wrong (usually too shallow) elevation - almost all real-world solar installations tilt the panels at only 15-20 degrees off horizontal, which means that in latitudes higher than those numbers, you're losing power since the panels aren't pointing directly at the sun anyway (Here in Austin, for instance, that means you're at least 10 degrees off optimum all day, every day.) This is a very deliberate and conscious design decision made simply because the cost and strength required (and weight, if roof-mounted) to survive likely wind loading at higher angles is generally prohibitive.
BTW, acting as though this is some great discovery is as bogus as hell - Common array design practice is to orient due South, which is clearly suboptimal, but one of only dozens of really stupid conventional design practices in solar - tha most idiotic probably being grounding the negative leg of the DC side, thus turning all your wiring into a sacrificial anode. It's not like the telco guys didn't figure this out well over a century ago - there's a reason your phone line is at -48 Volts! I've seen lots of arrays only a few years old that are headed for having the panels connected by hollow straws. Having to replace any sizeable fraction of that wiring (esp. at the current price of copper) will ensure that the entire solar plant can NEVER break even. Break-even usually takes over 20 years best-case, and the panels only last 25-30 years, if they're not the cheap Chnese junk everyone's using now. Most solar PV plants being put in now could well be both dollar and energy negative over their entire life. (Do a Google search for Wassermann and EROEI for some of the latest and best figures).
With the newly Obama-mandated Electronic Medical Records that will keep your medical history for generations to come (harming not only you, but potentially your progeny, too) seeking mental illness treatment may soon be prima facie proof of poor mental faculties, anyway. It's hard to imagine a move that places a bigger stigma on those who would otherwise consider seeking help. #UnintendedConsequences
Seriously, I believe this is a far greater deterrent to needed treatment than "more aggressive institutionalization". Let's face it - most of the "homeless" are mentally unstable and at least marginally incompetent people who would have been institutionalized in past years. I have a hard time believing it's "kinder and more respectful" to let them fend for themselves and die on the streets than to make sure they're cared for in a State Home. It's certainly not cheaper to turn them out, at least in the long run...
I didn't take then into school, but there were guns in a fair fraction of the cars in the parking lot (including quite a few in gun racks in the back windows of pickups, back when no one ever stole the guns that way...)
We'd head down to the river or the I-35 underpass and blast away after school. Pistols, rifles, shotguns, you name it. There might have even been an "illegal" weapon or two from time to time - one guy filed his sear to get full-auto - the problem with that method was that once you pulled the trigger, you had to empty the entire magazine, since releasing the trigger won't stop it firing.
It was tons of fun and a literal blast, but no one was ever killed or even injured (at least by firearms, with the exception of the occasional newbie whose improper grip would slice the web of his thumb with the slide of an auto pistol.)
One guy shredded his knee slipping into the creek, though. Turns out mud can be more dangerous than guns...
There's probably a good chance you could get a false positive with a firecracker or similar device - even maybe something as small as a cigarette load or those little pops-when-you-throw-them (or pull-on-them) things, if near the sensor.
This could rapidly become a popular new sport at schools equipped with this system. Just sayin'... (Don't try this at school, kiddos!)
No, there is approximately ZERO chance of anyone confusing Gnome (which was a word long before Stallman decided to mispronounce it), a commercial product by a company called Groupon, with GNOME, a free window mangler by the GNOME Foundation, part of an organization that is explicitly designed to *prevent* commerce. Yeah, sure, people will confuse those.
Sorry, but from both the trademark law and a common sense points of view, the GNOME Foundation is simply engaged in self-righteous trademark bullying rather than valid defense of a mark.
Agreed. Bennett needed some editing for length and focus, but the basic article and the experiments behind it are reasonably thoughtful and intriguing.
I'd actually like to see a more detailed article on the validity caveats associated with using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for these kinds of surveys. My guess is that the biggest problem is that this is a very skewed, self-selected pool in the first place, but it *would* be interesting to know if that's really the case...
This is back-of-the-envelope-type research - it's not perfect, but I find the methodology (even if flawed) to be of considerably more interest than any possible conclusion about racism in the perception of breastfeeding mothers.
I'd also argue this is appropriate for/. simply because of the use of AMT in an attempt to quickly and inexpensively conduct rough-order-of-magnitude sociological/perception research. (I know, still needed more samples, etc.) Kinda cool and clever, though, really...
Lots of us have gone *back* to mechanical watches. I'm especially fond of the wonderful Seiko 5 automatic (self-winding) series. Seiko doesn't sell these through their usual US channels, but Amazon and others have them (and Amazon substitutes thier own warranty for Seiko's original - this is a pretty safe bet, as these things are extraordinarily well-built for the money). A good, basic Seiko 5 can be had for as little as ~$50. At that price, they're understandably popular with those who want to hack and modify their watches (faces, bands, upgraded lume, etc. - I'm planning on copper and brass-plating some of the guts of my next one to give it a dieselpunk feel, just because I can...)
I have several much nicer watches, but my 5s are now my daily go-to watches. (I also like the clean, somewhat Bremont-like lines of the less expensive models. If I win the lottery, I'll buy a Bremont, but until then, I'm pretty enamored of the value of the 5s. Don't get me wrong - I actually appreciate the design and workmanship of high-quality watches like Omegas, Reversos, etc., but I also have to admire a fairly decent and rugged mechanism that's cheap enough that I don't get too upset when I inevitably ding it on an I-beam or engine block.
While the 5s don't have the accuracy of a quartz watch, mine aren't far off, and they can be adjusted - don't even try until you've worn it (or at least run it) for several months solid: the springs and winder really do need to settle in. I've thought each new one needed adjusting, but almost all of them settle in to pretty much dead accurate after several months of running.
Unless you need a navigation-grade chronometer, buy yourself one of these - they're cheap, fun, and the see-through back crystal alone is worth the price of the watch just for entertainment value, especially if you carry any mech-hacker genes.
Is it a truly awesome watch? Not really. But it's a very good watch that's definitely awesome for the price, though. I own several great quartz watches, but these inexpensive automatics have earned a special place in my heart - as Jeremy Clarkson might say, "They've got Soul!"...
It comes from all kinds of things, but nowhere int he amounts and strengths found in birth control pills. The pill is *far* worse than even regular hormoe replacemtn therapy, since the dose has to be strong enough to swamp the body's normal hormonal actions and responses. This type of overloading always produces very high levels of excreted chemicals - far more than you'll find from almost any other source.
And keep in mind, these are more dangerous for people than other environmental estrogens, since they're *designed and intended* to work most effectively on humans.
Still, won't someone think of all those poor, chemically gay fish? They didn't choose to be that way...:-)
Try buying food that isn't packaged, cooked, or served in materials that are well-known to leach xenoestrogens... From bottles to juice boxes to plastic/vacuum bags to polymer coatings in almost all modern cans and coffee and drink cups - you're getting bathed in this stuff unless you can afford to buy everything you eat at the farmer's market, and even them it's almost impossible to avoid the various pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, etc., many of which are loose in the environment themselves.
No, the EPA is worried about the natural non-pollutant CO2 rather than the clear and present danger of concentrated chemicals from city water treatment plants. Do you really expect the Feds to attack their urban power base? As another poster mentioned, the urban hipsters would scream bloody murder if they had to pay to have their effluent treated to eliminate these extraordinarily powerful chemicals...
I've yet to see any that correlate estrogen in contraceptive pills with the quantities of estrogen in waste water. Modern contraceptive pills use minute amounts. Additionally, our bodies produce estrogen in the liver,adrenal glands, breasts (in women), and fat cells (are increased obesity rates producing more waste estrogen?). We put far larger amounts into some cosmetics and shampoos. We also use synthetic estrogen compounds in substantial amounts plastics in our food packaging and containers. They've long been known to leech into our food and are harmful endocrine disruptors which can have effects that are passed on to our offspring, including infertiility and cancers
Or maybe, just maybe, the right solution is to start eliminating *all* of those sources - sounds to me like you're trying awfully hard to defend birth control hormones for reasons other than the provable scientific fact that environmental estrogens and xenoestrogens are wreaking havoc on our entire ecosystem, people and animals.
The thing that differentiates hormones from other kinds of chemicals is that a tiny amount produces an enormous biological response. The smart thing to do is to quit acting like bathing our bodies and our environments in this stuff doesn't matter... (The studies you seek are out there and numerous - use Google yourself, dammit.)
BTW, I'm far from a green weenie (I strongly support fracking and nuclear, and believe the science shows that man made global warming is complete and utter BS), but I do believe that there are two very large, very real technological dangers to our biology that will finally become recognized in the coming decades - environmental sex hormones (far more often female than male, but both are troublesome), and modern digital wireless communications with sharp square-wave edges which are more and more proving to affect biology through methods other than heating or ionization.
I know it's silly and old-fashioned to bring up the Constitution when discussing the creation of yet another sclerotic Federal Bureaucratic behemoth, but this proposal is ridiculous on its face. Even the absurdly over-stretched interstate commerce clause and general welfare clause do not even come close to justifying this sort of overreach by the Feds.
IF (and that's a *big* if) this kind of regulation is needed at all (personally, I can't think of one good reason for it), then I see no reason why it can't be handled by the states. Centralizing policy and regulations for what amounts to the convenience and increased power of "bureaucrats armed and clerical" (in the immortal phrase of Dabney) is NOT allowed by the Constitution.
I'd vote in a heartbeat for any Presidential candidate, regardless of party, who would carry out Goldwater's pledge: "I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' "interests," I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can."
Sounds to me like every aspect of a Federal Robotics Commission would be the triumph of special interests over liberty...
And we'll see if it really pays off for him. So far, unless you're on an island and have to ship in your diesel fuel, solar doesn't make economic sense without massive subsidies. (I'm pretty sure even a billionaire like Musk would blanch at backing solar without FITs, RECs, PPAs, etc.)
I work in solar, and it's a technology I'd really like to see succeed, but we're quite some ways away, and in a few important ways, we're slipping backwards - It takes at *least* 20-25 years to make back your investment. But current solar cells (even good ones) will begin to rapidly degrade at that time -(to about 80% output, falling off a cliff to single digits within around another 5 years. So even if everything goes your way, you've got only about five years of positive and rapidly decreasing power production before you have to replace the whole thing and start over.
The race to cheap Chinese panels now has panels lasting fewer than 10 years before delaminating and coming apart (leaching toxic heavy metals in the process...) - if that happens to even a few percent of the panels there's no way you can *ever* break even. Add in big outstanding questions about the lifespan of other expensive components such as inverters and wiring, and it's a good bet that only the most attentive operators of solar plants will ever make thier money back. (On the DC wiring issue, the prevalent PV industry practice of grounding the negative leg effectively *designs* for galvanic corrosion of the wiring, resulting in little more than hollow straws in a few years if things get a little damp - 300-1200 VDC *will* do that!)
Lastly, you don't get much power out of solar on an areal basis - a good figure for perfect siting, etc. puts the max power per panel/year at only a few dozen dollars worth of electricity. (Heck, there's less than 1000 W/m^2 there to start with on a clear day and a LOT less than that if there are *any* clouds, and after conversion and transmission losses, you're down to only a little over 10% of that.)
Solar is starting to make sense in limited cases, but it will be probably at least another decade or two before putting solar panels everywhere makes economic sense - especially in very distributed environments like residential rooftops, where no one is really going to be monitoring or maintaining the system. that's one advantage of Musk's approach - he tends to be focused more on larger sites that he can make sure are performing (or at least not sucking too bad...)
Look, this isn't about a lack of money - well it is, but the reason there's no money there is because there's NO reason for anyone (govt or private) to bet tons of money on somthing that has so little realistic chance of working. If fusion looked doable, we'd have people throwing money around like crazy, and we'd have billionaires tripping all over each other to be the Rockefeller of fusion. It's laughable that the tinfoil hat folks see a conspiracy to protect "big oil" - I work with some oil investors, and I can assure you that if they really thought for a second that they could invest in an alternative that could *really* economically displace oil, gas, and nuclear, they'd do it in a heartbeat.
I am certainly no fan of the F-35 - I think it's one of the worst military boondoggles ever - a plane that is staggeringly bad at everything it does but sucking money and hollowing out American airpower.
That said, it has some limited utility. Spending that money of F-35's gets us F-35s no matter how bad they suck.
On the other hand, there's no real reason to expect that a terabuck thrown at fusion would get us anything at all. Personally, I think lottery odds are better than a big government funded program sure to be rife with corruption actually solving the world's energy problems...
Good of you to call BS, now I'm going to... We quite simply DO NOT KNOW what goes on inside the Sun - we only see the outer layers, and are completely guessing about what's inside - your temperature and density figures are most likely wrong, especially if certain uniformitarian assumptions turn out not to hold...
Now, to be fair, those guesses *could* be right, but I kinda doubt it - the universe has this bizarre tendency to be, as Haldane said, "not only queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we *can* imagine"...
Like a LOT of people, I will NEVER live anywhere that requires an elevator. No claustro- or acrophobia, I just can't imagine anything more soul-crushing than having to get in a smelly sardine tin to ride to my house. And yes, that includes penthouses in highrises. Great place for a party (maybe), but you damn sure couldn't get me to live in one, even if you gave it to me...
Interestingly, as many cities pursue high-density growth policies and their local governments rant against the manifest evils of suburbs, it's going to turn out that suburban rooftops are the largest and most readily usable area for solar PV power generation (which does after all go well with the idea of electric cars, which make no sense now, but will someday...)
Cities are just too dense to make anywhere near enough power from the clean solar sources all the people say they want.
Distributed renewables generation has problems (max benefit at 15%, and negative value by 30% - See Eleanor Denny's great recent PhD dissertation on the Irish grid), but one thing's for sure - you sure can't distribute generation without someplace to distribute it *to*, and high density development doesn't give you anyplace to do that...
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See my comment above. Trackers don't make economic sense, especially with today's natural gas prices, which make even the cheapest solar far too expensive to be economically viable without HUGE subsidies. They're usually a maintenance nightmare, too. (Remember that every "truck roll" costs an average of $1000! That's the fully burdened cost of two crew, equipment, supplies, etc. The exact figure varies a bit, but all the utility scale solar operators I've worked with use a figure that's in that ballpark...)
And obviously, this has been tried.
Seriously, there are lots of both single and dual-axis trackers. Note that single-axis trackers still have this issue, and that skewing them westward can make a difference in late afternoon power production. (BTW, this isn't a huge difference, and of course, it's not free - you're just trading off power in the morning for power in the late afternoon, which is itself offset somewhat by the fact that the panels are considerably more efficient in the cooler ambient air of the morning. (To a first-order approximation, the voltage output of PV panels is almost entirely an inverse function of temperature, and output current is almost entirely a function of irradiance (incoming sunlight) - so the best solar power days are cold and clear. Heat absolutely slays PV power production. This is one of the most important "physics things" to understand about solar PV.)
Unless you're someplace where real estate is really expensive, trackers don't even pay for themselves. Given the increasing efficiencies of the panels themselves over the past few years, you're far better off just throwing in more panels and avoiding the maintenance headaches associated with the trackers. (As they are mechanical devices and need to be built as cheaply as possible since no one makes any money in solar without subsidies, trackers are BY FAR the most and trouble-prone and expensive part of an array from a maintenance perspective.)
As the guy who led the development of the most advanced utility-scale solar array monitoring system on the market, I can tell you that pretty much every site that has trackers wishes they'd either added more panels or just settled for less output. The exceptions are usually sites where economics are not a factor - "green cred" showplaces and the like - and there are a lot more of those than you might think...
In reality, the optimum angle to face the panels is driven by several competing concerns, including relative time-of-day pricing, which of course can vary after you build the array, so it's not entirely safe to use as a design criterion. In MOST cases, the optimum is around 20 degrees West of South. If you need to optimize for peak power, just do that (or something close to it) and call it a day. Anything else is over-analyzing and probably not really beneficial.
Also, keep in mind that you're already losing a fair amount of power by having the panels at the wrong (usually too shallow) elevation - almost all real-world solar installations tilt the panels at only 15-20 degrees off horizontal, which means that in latitudes higher than those numbers, you're losing power since the panels aren't pointing directly at the sun anyway (Here in Austin, for instance, that means you're at least 10 degrees off optimum all day, every day.) This is a very deliberate and conscious design decision made simply because the cost and strength required (and weight, if roof-mounted) to survive likely wind loading at higher angles is generally prohibitive.
BTW, acting as though this is some great discovery is as bogus as hell - Common array design practice is to orient due South, which is clearly suboptimal, but one of only dozens of really stupid conventional design practices in solar - tha most idiotic probably being grounding the negative leg of the DC side, thus turning all your wiring into a sacrificial anode. It's not like the telco guys didn't figure this out well over a century ago - there's a reason your phone line is at -48 Volts! I've seen lots of arrays only a few years old that are headed for having the panels connected by hollow straws. Having to replace any sizeable fraction of that wiring (esp. at the current price of copper) will ensure that the entire solar plant can NEVER break even. Break-even usually takes over 20 years best-case, and the panels only last 25-30 years, if they're not the cheap Chnese junk everyone's using now. Most solar PV plants being put in now could well be both dollar and energy negative over their entire life. (Do a Google search for Wassermann and EROEI for some of the latest and best figures).
With the newly Obama-mandated Electronic Medical Records that will keep your medical history for generations to come (harming not only you, but potentially your progeny, too) seeking mental illness treatment may soon be prima facie proof of poor mental faculties, anyway. It's hard to imagine a move that places a bigger stigma on those who would otherwise consider seeking help. #UnintendedConsequences
Seriously, I believe this is a far greater deterrent to needed treatment than "more aggressive institutionalization". Let's face it - most of the "homeless" are mentally unstable and at least marginally incompetent people who would have been institutionalized in past years. I have a hard time believing it's "kinder and more respectful" to let them fend for themselves and die on the streets than to make sure they're cared for in a State Home. It's certainly not cheaper to turn them out, at least in the long run...
Our children are in schools that have completely inadequate meteor defense systems! Something must be done! They could be mashed flat in an instant!
I didn't take then into school, but there were guns in a fair fraction of the cars in the parking lot (including quite a few in gun racks in the back windows of pickups, back when no one ever stole the guns that way...)
We'd head down to the river or the I-35 underpass and blast away after school. Pistols, rifles, shotguns, you name it. There might have even been an "illegal" weapon or two from time to time - one guy filed his sear to get full-auto - the problem with that method was that once you pulled the trigger, you had to empty the entire magazine, since releasing the trigger won't stop it firing.
It was tons of fun and a literal blast, but no one was ever killed or even injured (at least by firearms, with the exception of the occasional newbie whose improper grip would slice the web of his thumb with the slide of an auto pistol.)
One guy shredded his knee slipping into the creek, though. Turns out mud can be more dangerous than guns...
There's probably a good chance you could get a false positive with a firecracker or similar device - even maybe something as small as a cigarette load or those little pops-when-you-throw-them (or pull-on-them) things, if near the sensor.
This could rapidly become a popular new sport at schools equipped with this system. Just sayin'... (Don't try this at school, kiddos!)
It depends a LOT on both the round and what you're shooting it from. While many rimfire .22s are subsonic, especially from pistols, some can be quite powerful with longer barrels - check out this test of .22 magnum penetration of aluminum diamond plate when shot through the new KelTec CMR-30 carbine: http://olegvolk.net/blog/2014/11/13/should-22mag-be-taken-seriously-as-a-defensive-caliber-new-on-alloutdoor/
No, there is approximately ZERO chance of anyone confusing Gnome (which was a word long before Stallman decided to mispronounce it), a commercial product by a company called Groupon, with GNOME, a free window mangler by the GNOME Foundation, part of an organization that is explicitly designed to *prevent* commerce. Yeah, sure, people will confuse those.
Sorry, but from both the trademark law and a common sense points of view, the GNOME Foundation is simply engaged in self-righteous trademark bullying rather than valid defense of a mark.
Agreed. Bennett needed some editing for length and focus, but the basic article and the experiments behind it are reasonably thoughtful and intriguing.
I'd actually like to see a more detailed article on the validity caveats associated with using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for these kinds of surveys. My guess is that the biggest problem is that this is a very skewed, self-selected pool in the first place, but it *would* be interesting to know if that's really the case...
This is back-of-the-envelope-type research - it's not perfect, but I find the methodology (even if flawed) to be of considerably more interest than any possible conclusion about racism in the perception of breastfeeding mothers.
I'd also argue this is appropriate for /. simply because of the use of AMT in an attempt to quickly and inexpensively conduct rough-order-of-magnitude sociological/perception research. (I know, still needed more samples, etc.) Kinda cool and clever, though, really...
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at you!
Lots of us have gone *back* to mechanical watches. I'm especially fond of the wonderful Seiko 5 automatic (self-winding) series. Seiko doesn't sell these through their usual US channels, but Amazon and others have them (and Amazon substitutes thier own warranty for Seiko's original - this is a pretty safe bet, as these things are extraordinarily well-built for the money). A good, basic Seiko 5 can be had for as little as ~$50. At that price, they're understandably popular with those who want to hack and modify their watches (faces, bands, upgraded lume, etc. - I'm planning on copper and brass-plating some of the guts of my next one to give it a dieselpunk feel, just because I can...)
I have several much nicer watches, but my 5s are now my daily go-to watches. (I also like the clean, somewhat Bremont-like lines of the less expensive models. If I win the lottery, I'll buy a Bremont, but until then, I'm pretty enamored of the value of the 5s. Don't get me wrong - I actually appreciate the design and workmanship of high-quality watches like Omegas, Reversos, etc., but I also have to admire a fairly decent and rugged mechanism that's cheap enough that I don't get too upset when I inevitably ding it on an I-beam or engine block.
While the 5s don't have the accuracy of a quartz watch, mine aren't far off, and they can be adjusted - don't even try until you've worn it (or at least run it) for several months solid: the springs and winder really do need to settle in. I've thought each new one needed adjusting, but almost all of them settle in to pretty much dead accurate after several months of running.
Unless you need a navigation-grade chronometer, buy yourself one of these - they're cheap, fun, and the see-through back crystal alone is worth the price of the watch just for entertainment value, especially if you carry any mech-hacker genes.
Is it a truly awesome watch? Not really. But it's a very good watch that's definitely awesome for the price, though. I own several great quartz watches, but these inexpensive automatics have earned a special place in my heart - as Jeremy Clarkson might say, "They've got Soul!"...
Well, I suppose in a roundabout way...
Gen. Jack Ripper salutes you, sir!
(This message sent from my CRM-114 Discriminator)
It comes from all kinds of things, but nowhere int he amounts and strengths found in birth control pills. The pill is *far* worse than even regular hormoe replacemtn therapy, since the dose has to be strong enough to swamp the body's normal hormonal actions and responses. This type of overloading always produces very high levels of excreted chemicals - far more than you'll find from almost any other source.
And keep in mind, these are more dangerous for people than other environmental estrogens, since they're *designed and intended* to work most effectively on humans.
Still, won't someone think of all those poor, chemically gay fish? They didn't choose to be that way... :-)
Try buying food that isn't packaged, cooked, or served in materials that are well-known to leach xenoestrogens... From bottles to juice boxes to plastic/vacuum bags to polymer coatings in almost all modern cans and coffee and drink cups - you're getting bathed in this stuff unless you can afford to buy everything you eat at the farmer's market, and even them it's almost impossible to avoid the various pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, etc., many of which are loose in the environment themselves.
No, the EPA is worried about the natural non-pollutant CO2 rather than the clear and present danger of concentrated chemicals from city water treatment plants. Do you really expect the Feds to attack their urban power base? As another poster mentioned, the urban hipsters would scream bloody murder if they had to pay to have their effluent treated to eliminate these extraordinarily powerful chemicals...
I've yet to see any that correlate estrogen in contraceptive pills with the quantities of estrogen in waste water. Modern contraceptive pills use minute amounts. Additionally, our bodies produce estrogen in the liver,adrenal glands, breasts (in women), and fat cells (are increased obesity rates producing more waste estrogen?). We put far larger amounts into some cosmetics and shampoos. We also use synthetic estrogen compounds in substantial amounts plastics in our food packaging and containers. They've long been known to leech into our food and are harmful endocrine disruptors which can have effects that are passed on to our offspring, including infertiility and cancers
Or maybe, just maybe, the right solution is to start eliminating *all* of those sources - sounds to me like you're trying awfully hard to defend birth control hormones for reasons other than the provable scientific fact that environmental estrogens and xenoestrogens are wreaking havoc on our entire ecosystem, people and animals.
The thing that differentiates hormones from other kinds of chemicals is that a tiny amount produces an enormous biological response. The smart thing to do is to quit acting like bathing our bodies and our environments in this stuff doesn't matter... (The studies you seek are out there and numerous - use Google yourself, dammit.)
BTW, I'm far from a green weenie (I strongly support fracking and nuclear, and believe the science shows that man made global warming is complete and utter BS), but I do believe that there are two very large, very real technological dangers to our biology that will finally become recognized in the coming decades - environmental sex hormones (far more often female than male, but both are troublesome), and modern digital wireless communications with sharp square-wave edges which are more and more proving to affect biology through methods other than heating or ionization.
I know it's silly and old-fashioned to bring up the Constitution when discussing the creation of yet another sclerotic Federal Bureaucratic behemoth, but this proposal is ridiculous on its face. Even the absurdly over-stretched interstate commerce clause and general welfare clause do not even come close to justifying this sort of overreach by the Feds.
IF (and that's a *big* if) this kind of regulation is needed at all (personally, I can't think of one good reason for it), then I see no reason why it can't be handled by the states. Centralizing policy and regulations for what amounts to the convenience and increased power of "bureaucrats armed and clerical" (in the immortal phrase of Dabney) is NOT allowed by the Constitution.
I'd vote in a heartbeat for any Presidential candidate, regardless of party, who would carry out Goldwater's pledge: "I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' "interests," I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can."
Sounds to me like every aspect of a Federal Robotics Commission would be the triumph of special interests over liberty...
And we'll see if it really pays off for him. So far, unless you're on an island and have to ship in your diesel fuel, solar doesn't make economic sense without massive subsidies. (I'm pretty sure even a billionaire like Musk would blanch at backing solar without FITs, RECs, PPAs, etc.)
I work in solar, and it's a technology I'd really like to see succeed, but we're quite some ways away, and in a few important ways, we're slipping backwards - It takes at *least* 20-25 years to make back your investment. But current solar cells (even good ones) will begin to rapidly degrade at that time -(to about 80% output, falling off a cliff to single digits within around another 5 years. So even if everything goes your way, you've got only about five years of positive and rapidly decreasing power production before you have to replace the whole thing and start over.
The race to cheap Chinese panels now has panels lasting fewer than 10 years before delaminating and coming apart (leaching toxic heavy metals in the process...) - if that happens to even a few percent of the panels there's no way you can *ever* break even. Add in big outstanding questions about the lifespan of other expensive components such as inverters and wiring, and it's a good bet that only the most attentive operators of solar plants will ever make thier money back. (On the DC wiring issue, the prevalent PV industry practice of grounding the negative leg effectively *designs* for galvanic corrosion of the wiring, resulting in little more than hollow straws in a few years if things get a little damp - 300-1200 VDC *will* do that!)
Lastly, you don't get much power out of solar on an areal basis - a good figure for perfect siting, etc. puts the max power per panel/year at only a few dozen dollars worth of electricity. (Heck, there's less than 1000 W/m^2 there to start with on a clear day and a LOT less than that if there are *any* clouds, and after conversion and transmission losses, you're down to only a little over 10% of that.)
Solar is starting to make sense in limited cases, but it will be probably at least another decade or two before putting solar panels everywhere makes economic sense - especially in very distributed environments like residential rooftops, where no one is really going to be monitoring or maintaining the system. that's one advantage of Musk's approach - he tends to be focused more on larger sites that he can make sure are performing (or at least not sucking too bad...)
Look, this isn't about a lack of money - well it is, but the reason there's no money there is because there's NO reason for anyone (govt or private) to bet tons of money on somthing that has so little realistic chance of working. If fusion looked doable, we'd have people throwing money around like crazy, and we'd have billionaires tripping all over each other to be the Rockefeller of fusion. It's laughable that the tinfoil hat folks see a conspiracy to protect "big oil" - I work with some oil investors, and I can assure you that if they really thought for a second that they could invest in an alternative that could *really* economically displace oil, gas, and nuclear, they'd do it in a heartbeat.
I am certainly no fan of the F-35 - I think it's one of the worst military boondoggles ever - a plane that is staggeringly bad at everything it does but sucking money and hollowing out American airpower.
That said, it has some limited utility. Spending that money of F-35's gets us F-35s no matter how bad they suck.
On the other hand, there's no real reason to expect that a terabuck thrown at fusion would get us anything at all. Personally, I think lottery odds are better than a big government funded program sure to be rife with corruption actually solving the world's energy problems...
Good of you to call BS, now I'm going to... We quite simply DO NOT KNOW what goes on inside the Sun - we only see the outer layers, and are completely guessing about what's inside - your temperature and density figures are most likely wrong, especially if certain uniformitarian assumptions turn out not to hold...
Now, to be fair, those guesses *could* be right, but I kinda doubt it - the universe has this bizarre tendency to be, as Haldane said, "not only queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we *can* imagine"...
Well, at least we know how to do fusion that way at significantly over-unity...
Like a LOT of people, I will NEVER live anywhere that requires an elevator. No claustro- or acrophobia, I just can't imagine anything more soul-crushing than having to get in a smelly sardine tin to ride to my house. And yes, that includes penthouses in highrises. Great place for a party (maybe), but you damn sure couldn't get me to live in one, even if you gave it to me...
Interestingly, as many cities pursue high-density growth policies and their local governments rant against the manifest evils of suburbs, it's going to turn out that suburban rooftops are the largest and most readily usable area for solar PV power generation (which does after all go well with the idea of electric cars, which make no sense now, but will someday...)
Cities are just too dense to make anywhere near enough power from the clean solar sources all the people say they want.
Distributed renewables generation has problems (max benefit at 15%, and negative value by 30% - See Eleanor Denny's great recent PhD dissertation on the Irish grid), but one thing's for sure - you sure can't distribute generation without someplace to distribute it *to*, and high density development doesn't give you anyplace to do that...