I hate replying to trolls, and I hate replying to ACs, and you're both. But anyway, for the benefit of those who might actually think you're serious...
The brains of humans and other primates are very different. Humans have much larger cranial capacity, for one (about 3 times that of chimps, our closest ancestors), whereas the difference in cranial capacity between men and women is only a few percent, and that is explained mostly by body size (men and women of the same weight & height have no statistically significant difference in brain size). Human brains have much larger frontal lobes than other primate brains. There are a bunch of other differences too.
Anyway, similarity is relative. A chimp brain is way more similar to a human brain than, say, a rat brain.
Growing inside a building may mean that for some crops you have to transport them less, but if energy were free, then it transportation would become much far cheaper as well.
Ultimately the problem reduces to: Is it cheaper to build and run a building, or a set of trucks? The answer so far has always been: Trucks, by a wide margin.
I will grant you that it depends on the crop though. No one is going to be growing corn or apples inside buildings. Just doesn't make any sense. Lettuce or tomatoes, maybe. In fact we already do that in many parts of the world.
Yes, toe the line, follow the rules, bow to your masters, and you MIGHT get a job that pays JUST enough to live on a daily basis and forget about buying a house.
Battery factories are huge and expensive. We're talking billions of dollars. I wish I was kidding. An idea could have the potential to be way better and cheaper than Li-ion but still never make it to market because no one wants to be the first to take such a huge risk. That's why in the past several years plenty of incremental improvements to Li-ion have made it to market, but there haven't been any revolutionary new technologies.
That said, if a technology proved clearly superior to Li-ion then people would seriously consider investing in it, but most 'battery breakthroughs' still fall short of Li-ion in some ways. For example, they may not have the same longevity, capacity, or safety factor.
Actually, that's the case here. Sodium batteries have *less* energy capacity than Li-ion, and the expected lifetimes are similar. It's just that they have the potential to be cheaper. But they're never going to be cheaper if no one builds a big factory to make them.
No, the actual story is that by the 70's it was becoming pretty clear that nuclear was not a viable business model and both the government and various energy companies were only too glad to can the entire enterprise. The environmentalist movement provided a convenient excuse for the public and also a good scapegoat for avoiding responsibility for failed construction and decommissioning contracts.
The problem with this 'solution' is that it makes no economic sense whatsoever. You burn a fuel rod for a few years and then have to pay for its storage for centuries or more - resulting in expenses many times larger than the electricity the fuel rod produced - with taxpayers picking up the tab.
Deep geological storage is the only solution that makes financial sense.
Nope, wrong. Low-level waste is still extremely dangerous; Yucca mountain was actually mostly dedicated (in terms of volume) for low-level and mid-level waste.
I wish it were just the waste. You're right though that waste is a huge problem. It's a problem because processing waste (to 'burn' long-lived isotopes) is so horrendously and obscenely expensive that it makes nuclear essentially financially pointless; solar would be far far cheaper. The only option for waste handling that makes financial sense is deep geological storage, and that is very hard to do. Besides, reprocessing waste is only really good for high-level waste; it's useless for low-level waste.
Nuclear has other problems too: High capital cost, high decommissioning cost.
Even if energy were free and infinitely available, it would still be more cost-effective to dam a river than to desalinate water. The only exception to this might be dry coastal areas.
And, similarly, it would still be more cost-effective to grow on a farm than to grow in a building. Simply because a building requires fairly large up-front cost and a farm requires very little.
> so you end up having to do all sorts of engineering to try to keep it from oxidizing, whilst only a small barrier away from water. It was never a good idea.
Every problem in engineering is a trade-off. To say that a particular solution is a 'bad idea' is meaningless; you have to compare it to other solutions.
LFTR is a particularly bad idea, far worse than PWR. For a number of reasons, including cost, materials longevity, and amount of low-level nuclear waste produced. LFTR advocates typically try to push the point that LFTR produces less high-level waste, which may or may not be true, but it's definitely true that LFTR produces vast amounts of low-level nuclear waste, far in excess of the PWR design.
I've had my AMOLED phone for 3 years now, using it aggressively for several hours a day, and no visible sign of wear as of yet. If you place it right next to a spanking-new phone and squint your eyes, you can make out the slightest amount of color tint. But so what? LCD backlights degrade too.
I wouldn't recommend an OLED screen for something like a desktop computer where it's on 24 hours a day every day. But for a phone, it's perfect.
"I don't like it" is not the same as "It's not a good idea." To say that it's not a good idea, you have to explain why it's not a good idea. I see no hint of any reasonable explanation of that sort here. He's citing "free speech grounds" which are irrelevant, as I said. That's the point of his I'm addressing.
That's another thing about Dawkins that I find kind of unsettling and in conflict with his atheist message. He says that he likes the CofE because it's part of tradition and history, and is a tolerant establishment. That's all well and good. I prefer the CofE to, say, Catholicism or Southern Baptism, for precisely the same reason. But I think you should apply that kind of reasoning consistently. He's said that “I don’t buy the feeling that because we have Christian faith schools we therefore have to have Buddhist and Muslim and Hindu faith schools as well.” My question is: Why not? There are Buddhist and Muslim and Hindu schools of thought that are just as tolerant as the CofE is, and if one refuses to acknowledge that, one simply professes their ignorance. There are many temples and mosques and synagogues you can go in without being a person of that faith, and people will welcome you and talk to you and be nice to you and so on. Plus all of those religions are important to history - some directly to European history, others part of our shared human history. So why single out Anglicanism?
More and more people are becoming atheist every day because religions have outdated, nonsense beliefs and have outlived their useful purpose. So there's really no reason to defend one or another.
Exactly. Free speech means you can't face legal consequences for what you say. That was a revolutionary concept in its time, as most governments throughout history made it a major offense - often punishable by death or extreme torture - to criticize the government in any way. The idea that you could live under a government and face no consequences whatsoever for even the harshest words against that government was a mind-blowing concept. Thankfully, nowadays its a routine and expected concept, so we aren't blown away daily for just how amazing it is to have that freedom. But free speech never meant that everyone gets a fair share of everyone else's time and money to spread their ideas. That's not only NOT what free speech is, it's also against capitalism and individualism.
Exactly. I'm pro-free-speech and against censorship of ideas, even if they're crazy and upsetting ideas. But you are allowed to not run ads in a private venue. That is the flip-side of free speech that people who don't really believe in free speech fail to understand. You are free to offend people, and they are free to choose not to listen to you, or to give you a platform for your ideas. You are free to camp out in front of the cinema and preach if you want. That's absolutely your right. But you can't insist that the cinema spend their time and money spreading your idea. That is not your right.
So it's curious why -- out of all the things that Dawkins could have been upset by -- he chooses to be upset by a cinema not displaying an ad for an Anglican Church. Would Dawkins be as upset as he is if it were an ad for a Jewish organization, or a Hindu one... or a Muslim one? I'm going to go out on a limb and say no.
Maybe Dawkins is the one who is being biased here.
To be fair, evangelic christianity has come to dominate the discourse, and this is where the insane ideas of the young Earth, flood geology, creationism etc. find their most militant supporters. Catholics largely don't care, and muslims don't believe in a young Earth (although they do dispute evolution).
> You do realize that lots of religious schools, even in Texas, teach evolution even with respect to humans, teach the big bang theory
How kind of them to teach kids actual facts and provide them with a useful education instead of their religious dogma that is backed by zero evidence. A bunch of selfless humanitarians, that bunch!
> teach that the discoveries of science are not in conflict with religion, that science and religion search for answers in orthogonal fields.
Let's put it this way. In the scale of the Galaxy, someone like Hitler would have just been one local warlord out of millions, barely significant to anyone not living on that particular planet, and soon forgotten. In the Foundation, Hari Seldon and the Mule are able to influence the course of history through what is essentially magic (psychohistory is not a real thing, and the Mule was telepathic). With sufficient magic you can of course have an impact on any scale you want. Star Wars has the Force. You need magic to make a story like that believable.
This always seemed kind of weird to me too. This is a story that supposedly takes place on a Grand Galactic Scale, with millions of planets, trillions of sentient beings, wars thousands of light years across, and then something like five main characters determine the fate of everyone and everything.
And R2D2 always seems to find himself everywhere there is action.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright, closest living ancestors.
What part of my post is wrong?
I hate replying to trolls, and I hate replying to ACs, and you're both. But anyway, for the benefit of those who might actually think you're serious...
The brains of humans and other primates are very different. Humans have much larger cranial capacity, for one (about 3 times that of chimps, our closest ancestors), whereas the difference in cranial capacity between men and women is only a few percent, and that is explained mostly by body size (men and women of the same weight & height have no statistically significant difference in brain size). Human brains have much larger frontal lobes than other primate brains. There are a bunch of other differences too.
Anyway, similarity is relative. A chimp brain is way more similar to a human brain than, say, a rat brain.
Growing inside a building may mean that for some crops you have to transport them less, but if energy were free, then it transportation would become much far cheaper as well.
Ultimately the problem reduces to: Is it cheaper to build and run a building, or a set of trucks? The answer so far has always been: Trucks, by a wide margin.
I will grant you that it depends on the crop though. No one is going to be growing corn or apples inside buildings. Just doesn't make any sense. Lettuce or tomatoes, maybe. In fact we already do that in many parts of the world.
Yes, toe the line, follow the rules, bow to your masters, and you MIGHT get a job that pays JUST enough to live on a daily basis and forget about buying a house.
Battery factories are huge and expensive. We're talking billions of dollars. I wish I was kidding. An idea could have the potential to be way better and cheaper than Li-ion but still never make it to market because no one wants to be the first to take such a huge risk. That's why in the past several years plenty of incremental improvements to Li-ion have made it to market, but there haven't been any revolutionary new technologies.
That said, if a technology proved clearly superior to Li-ion then people would seriously consider investing in it, but most 'battery breakthroughs' still fall short of Li-ion in some ways. For example, they may not have the same longevity, capacity, or safety factor.
Actually, that's the case here. Sodium batteries have *less* energy capacity than Li-ion, and the expected lifetimes are similar. It's just that they have the potential to be cheaper. But they're never going to be cheaper if no one builds a big factory to make them.
No, the actual story is that by the 70's it was becoming pretty clear that nuclear was not a viable business model and both the government and various energy companies were only too glad to can the entire enterprise. The environmentalist movement provided a convenient excuse for the public and also a good scapegoat for avoiding responsibility for failed construction and decommissioning contracts.
The problem with this 'solution' is that it makes no economic sense whatsoever. You burn a fuel rod for a few years and then have to pay for its storage for centuries or more - resulting in expenses many times larger than the electricity the fuel rod produced - with taxpayers picking up the tab.
Deep geological storage is the only solution that makes financial sense.
Nope, wrong. Low-level waste is still extremely dangerous; Yucca mountain was actually mostly dedicated (in terms of volume) for low-level and mid-level waste.
I'm guessing the people who voted your comment 'insightful' aren't nuclear engineers.
Fast breeders are basically a dead idea. Other types of breeders are even worse than that.
France tried (and continues to try) reprocessing of nuclear waste, and it's terrible. It's way too expensive. It just doesn't make sense.
I wish it were just the waste. You're right though that waste is a huge problem. It's a problem because processing waste (to 'burn' long-lived isotopes) is so horrendously and obscenely expensive that it makes nuclear essentially financially pointless; solar would be far far cheaper. The only option for waste handling that makes financial sense is deep geological storage, and that is very hard to do. Besides, reprocessing waste is only really good for high-level waste; it's useless for low-level waste.
Nuclear has other problems too: High capital cost, high decommissioning cost.
Even if energy were free and infinitely available, it would still be more cost-effective to dam a river than to desalinate water. The only exception to this might be dry coastal areas.
And, similarly, it would still be more cost-effective to grow on a farm than to grow in a building. Simply because a building requires fairly large up-front cost and a farm requires very little.
> Uranium fueled reactors are the result of a premature optimization.
Ehm, not really. The early pioneers in nuclear technology weren't dumb. https://daryanenergyblog.wordp...
> so you end up having to do all sorts of engineering to try to keep it from oxidizing, whilst only a small barrier away from water. It was never a good idea.
Every problem in engineering is a trade-off. To say that a particular solution is a 'bad idea' is meaningless; you have to compare it to other solutions.
LFTR is a particularly bad idea, far worse than PWR. For a number of reasons, including cost, materials longevity, and amount of low-level nuclear waste produced. LFTR advocates typically try to push the point that LFTR produces less high-level waste, which may or may not be true, but it's definitely true that LFTR produces vast amounts of low-level nuclear waste, far in excess of the PWR design.
Nice try, but anti-discrimination laws are... somewhat different from the free speech issue.
I've had my AMOLED phone for 3 years now, using it aggressively for several hours a day, and no visible sign of wear as of yet. If you place it right next to a spanking-new phone and squint your eyes, you can make out the slightest amount of color tint. But so what? LCD backlights degrade too.
I wouldn't recommend an OLED screen for something like a desktop computer where it's on 24 hours a day every day. But for a phone, it's perfect.
"I don't like it" is not the same as "It's not a good idea." To say that it's not a good idea, you have to explain why it's not a good idea. I see no hint of any reasonable explanation of that sort here. He's citing "free speech grounds" which are irrelevant, as I said. That's the point of his I'm addressing.
Could you be a bit more vague?
That's another thing about Dawkins that I find kind of unsettling and in conflict with his atheist message. He says that he likes the CofE because it's part of tradition and history, and is a tolerant establishment. That's all well and good. I prefer the CofE to, say, Catholicism or Southern Baptism, for precisely the same reason. But I think you should apply that kind of reasoning consistently. He's said that “I don’t buy the feeling that because we have Christian faith schools we therefore have to have Buddhist and Muslim and Hindu faith schools as well.” My question is: Why not? There are Buddhist and Muslim and Hindu schools of thought that are just as tolerant as the CofE is, and if one refuses to acknowledge that, one simply professes their ignorance. There are many temples and mosques and synagogues you can go in without being a person of that faith, and people will welcome you and talk to you and be nice to you and so on. Plus all of those religions are important to history - some directly to European history, others part of our shared human history. So why single out Anglicanism?
More and more people are becoming atheist every day because religions have outdated, nonsense beliefs and have outlived their useful purpose. So there's really no reason to defend one or another.
Exactly. Free speech means you can't face legal consequences for what you say. That was a revolutionary concept in its time, as most governments throughout history made it a major offense - often punishable by death or extreme torture - to criticize the government in any way. The idea that you could live under a government and face no consequences whatsoever for even the harshest words against that government was a mind-blowing concept. Thankfully, nowadays its a routine and expected concept, so we aren't blown away daily for just how amazing it is to have that freedom. But free speech never meant that everyone gets a fair share of everyone else's time and money to spread their ideas. That's not only NOT what free speech is, it's also against capitalism and individualism.
Exactly. I'm pro-free-speech and against censorship of ideas, even if they're crazy and upsetting ideas. But you are allowed to not run ads in a private venue. That is the flip-side of free speech that people who don't really believe in free speech fail to understand. You are free to offend people, and they are free to choose not to listen to you, or to give you a platform for your ideas. You are free to camp out in front of the cinema and preach if you want. That's absolutely your right. But you can't insist that the cinema spend their time and money spreading your idea. That is not your right.
So it's curious why -- out of all the things that Dawkins could have been upset by -- he chooses to be upset by a cinema not displaying an ad for an Anglican Church. Would Dawkins be as upset as he is if it were an ad for a Jewish organization, or a Hindu one... or a Muslim one? I'm going to go out on a limb and say no.
Maybe Dawkins is the one who is being biased here.
To be fair, evangelic christianity has come to dominate the discourse, and this is where the insane ideas of the young Earth, flood geology, creationism etc. find their most militant supporters. Catholics largely don't care, and muslims don't believe in a young Earth (although they do dispute evolution).
> You do realize that lots of religious schools, even in Texas, teach evolution even with respect to humans, teach the big bang theory
How kind of them to teach kids actual facts and provide them with a useful education instead of their religious dogma that is backed by zero evidence. A bunch of selfless humanitarians, that bunch!
> teach that the discoveries of science are not in conflict with religion, that science and religion search for answers in orthogonal fields.
And just when I was beginning to praise them...
Let's put it this way. In the scale of the Galaxy, someone like Hitler would have just been one local warlord out of millions, barely significant to anyone not living on that particular planet, and soon forgotten. In the Foundation, Hari Seldon and the Mule are able to influence the course of history through what is essentially magic (psychohistory is not a real thing, and the Mule was telepathic). With sufficient magic you can of course have an impact on any scale you want. Star Wars has the Force. You need magic to make a story like that believable.
We're talking about GALACTIC scale here. You'd need a million Hitlers to have an impact that would even register on a scale like that
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This always seemed kind of weird to me too. This is a story that supposedly takes place on a Grand Galactic Scale, with millions of planets, trillions of sentient beings, wars thousands of light years across, and then something like five main characters determine the fate of everyone and everything.
And R2D2 always seems to find himself everywhere there is action.