Here's what Wikipedia says about the efficiency of conventional electrolysis:
The energy efficiency of water electrolysis is a measure of what fraction of electrical energy used is actually contained within the hydrogen. Some of the electrical energy is converted to heat, an almost useless byproduct. Some reports quote efficiencies between 50% and 70%.
How can you possibly get "20 times" more efficient than that?
Yet again, Diebold has shown their security prowess. This time they posted, on their website, a picture of the actual key used to open all of their Diebold voting machines. Ross Kinard of Sploitcast crafted three keys based on this photo. Amazingly enough, two of the three keys successfully opened one of the voting machines.
This was very popular during and after WW-II in Germany as gas supplies were next to non-existent. In these gasification systems, you could burn pretty much anything combustible. Wood was popular a popular choice. It's a very old technology.
(Ok, that wasn't very witty. Superior replies encouraged.)
On a more serious note: given that the Milky Way's diameter is ~100,000 light years, this thing being only "3,500 light-years above the disc of the Milky Way" would make it a straggling member of our galaxy, would it not?
Your post solidifies my resolve that, as LehiNephi eloquently explained, production of goods should never be subsidized: Solyndra failed in spite of the extraordinarily hard work put in by its employees.
The big ideas happen once, maybe twice in a generation
I can think of three specific really big sci/tech ideas in the last 100 years: * the Double-helix model of DNA (Watson and Crick, 1953) * General relativity (Einstein, 1916) * the Transistor (Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, 1947)
(Am I missing any?)
Everything since then has been either a smaller idea, or an evolutionary refinement of one of these big ideas. We're about due for another big idea, don't you think?
The US taxes companies' dividends but not interest paid on debt, stock buybacks, or executive compensation. As a result, most companies don't pay dividends and borrow too much.
I can think of a handful of companies that got into trouble from borrowing too much: AIG, Lehman Brothers. (Chrysler and GM's troubles, I think, stemmed more from not getting their money's worth out of the inflated union wages they were paying.) There are far more companies in the opposite situation: they're sitting on large piles of cash, and would like to hire more workers, but not in the current climate. Read what Steve Wynn has to say about that, for example: http://bit.ly/nL3rIQ
Government's borrowing addiction is a much more serious problem than corporate borrowing. National debt is $14.3 trillion, and on track to rise to $22.2 trillion under the recent "deficit reduction compromise" (see http://paul.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=280 ).
We have no clue how to run a post-oil world with 6 billion people
It's not just nostalgia or some historical distortion that things were different between the two world wars... cafes were abuzz with conversation about this very stuff. Not everyone had an opinion about all of it, but everyone did have an opinion about some of it
And you know this because you were alive and frequenting cafes in 1930?
Yes -- Slashdot has far and away the best system for moderating comments, and all web sites should adopt it! I would mod you up above Score:5 if I could. (Maybe the upper limit of 5 is a flaw in the system.)
I bet many Slashdot users aren't even aware that you can see a sweet summary of all your comments, and how many replies each has received, by going to http://slashdot.org/~insert_your_User_ID_here/comments. That summary really facilitates the exchange of ideas.
The LA Times headline is, "Test of hypersonic aircraft fails." Now let's look at it from the perspective of an engineer, not a drive-by journalist. The first flight sent back nine minutes' worth of telemetry. Today's test transmitted telemetry for 20 minutes. That's a 122% improvement. Any engineer would be happy to get credit for that accomplishment!
Our sensitive microelectronics is very vulnerable to being wrecked by electromagnetic pulses, whether natural or set off by human enemies.
Regarding the huge "Carrington Event" solar flare of September 1, 1859, NASA reports that "Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire." The Engineer goes further and says, "The Carrington Storm caused fires and electrocuted workers at telegraph stations".
The alleged quote from Cheney is a gross oversimplification of reality. It would have been more accurate if he had said "small deficits don't matter much."
The largest deficit during Reagan's term was about $220 billion. Even after accounting for inflation, that doesn't come close to the devestating effects of this year's $1.5 trillion shortfall. (Also, keep in mind that every year Reagan proposed a budget in which the deficit was smaller than the previous year -- and every year, Congress pronounced his proposal "dead on arrival." So it would have been still more accurate if Cheney had said "Congress in the 1980s proved that moderately-sized deficits are not fatal.")
There's actually very little difference between an individual's personal debt and the national debt. Our current $14.3 trillion national debt is a hole. Our options are to (1) dig ourselves out (i.e., start paying down principal), (2) continue to live in the hole at the same depth (i.e., pay interest on the debt forever, without changing the amount of principal owed), or (3) dig ourselves deeper.
Guess what -- the "debt deal" being voted on tonight digs the hole deeper (albeit at a slightly slower rate than during the first half of the Obama administration). As difficult as it would be to dig ourselves out of a $14.3 trillion debt, after a few more years of these huge deficits it's going to be impossible.
I think risom was trying to say that it's possible for a country to weasel out of its debt by inflating its currency (i.e., paying off creditors with dollars that aren't worth as much as the dollars that were originally lent). Be sure to consider all the downsides of that approach: (1) It's fundamentally dishonest. (2) It erodes the life savings of all of the country's citizens. (3) It may take decades to restore trust in your creditors that you aren't going to do that to them again. (4) Inflation cuts both ways: the revenue dollars the government is still able to collect hold less purchasing power than they used to, and interest rates rise during periods of inflation, so as old debt gets rolled over, the government must pay more interest on it. (5) You run the very real risk of losing control of the situation and slipping into hyperinflation.
That whole article is summed up in this amazing sentence: "By calculating the product of all six redenominations, it is seen that a seventh ruble is equal to 5E15 original rubles."
TFA says they are generating "hundreds of microwatts of power." Nobody is going to be powering their lights or robots off of this tiny trickle of electrons.
To do it all at once would be to not raise the debt ceiling, ever again, thereby forcing our annual deficit to suddenly go from $1.5 trillion to zero.
You're right, that would be quite a shock to the system, causing much short-term pain; and I haven't heard anybody, no matter how far on the right, propose that.
I have, however, done a thought experiment about it.
If you're going to stop spending money on things that you shouldn't be spending money on, is it better to phase out the improper spending over a period of 10+ years, or to do it all at once?
Depends whether you want to minimize your short-term pain, or the total amount of pain that accumulates in future years. Because if you phase out the spending too gradually, our national debt keeps increasing -- from the current $14 trillion, to $30 trillion and beyond. We, and our kids and grandkids, will have to pay the interest on that enormous sum, every year -- probably forever, because after paying the interest you're exhausted and you can't pay down any principal.
If you really think about it, we are stealing from our kids and grandkids by not biting the bullet and doing it all at once.
And then there's the likelihood that future Congresses, any time they're not faced with an immediate crisis, will return to their old ways and not honor the restrained spending plans agreed to by previous Congresses. (It's not accurate to call them spending "cuts," because they aren't cuts, they are merely smaller increases in government spending. So I'll generously call them "restrained spending plans," not cuts.)
If that happens, we may be looking at a $45 trillion debt 10 years from now, not $30 trillion.
"The 'price of gold' comparison is 100% crap" -- so says "Crotalus horridus," who just deleted that information from the Wikipedia article.
And Crotalus is right; using the Consumer Price Index to calculate the SX-1980's price in 2011 dollars would give you a much better answer than using the price of gold.
Thanks, but your article is about objects that might have hung out at the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points. It neither supports nor disproves the idea of some plain old moons currently orbiting Earth, which are simply too small to have been discovered yet.
Good point about the external tanks. There's speculation that future space manufacturers will have to obtain their raw materials from asteroids. But if we had collected spent tanks in orbit, we'd have a small asteroid's worth of stuff there already -- and it would be made of pure aluminum and lithium, not just unrefined ore.
Now, how can we get NASA, Russia, and the other ISS partners to start thinking in "reduce, reuse, recycle" terms?
I've always suspected that Earth has some additional tiny moons that haven't been discovered yet -- but my professors always pooh-poohed that idea, without really giving a good reason why.
Now it turns out that an Earth Trojan has gone undetected until now. This strengthens my belief that Earth has some miniature natural satellites awaiting discovery.
Someday we will have manufacturing capabilities in orbit -- the ability to melt down metals and forge them into new structural components for vehicles, habitats, etc. But where will the raw materials come from?
Solution: at the end of its useful life, boost the ISS into a low-maintenence parking orbit. When the manufacturing capability finally arrives -- whether that is 15, 50, or 150 years from now -- we'll have 920,000 pounds of aerospace-grade titanium, aluminum, and steel to work with.
Remember, it costs $10,000 per pound to put "stuff" in orbit. (Hopefully the cost will decrease in the future, but it will never be cheap.) At that rate, think about how unbelievably wasteful it would be to spash all of that highly-refined metal into the drink.
I made the same argument before Mir was deorbited. Alas, nobody listened. Deorbiting ISS, 3.2 times more massive than Mir was, would be 3.2 times more of a cryin' shame!
Slashdot Mirror
Here's what Wikipedia says about the efficiency of conventional electrolysis:
The energy efficiency of water electrolysis is a measure of what fraction of electrical energy used is actually contained within the hydrogen. Some of the electrical energy is converted to heat, an almost useless byproduct. Some reports quote efficiencies between 50% and 70%.
How can you possibly get "20 times" more efficient than that?
...this incident?
Yet again, Diebold has shown their security prowess. This time they posted, on their website, a picture of the actual key used to open all of their Diebold voting machines. Ross Kinard of Sploitcast crafted three keys based on this photo. Amazingly enough, two of the three keys successfully opened one of the voting machines.
http://it.slashdot.org/story/07/01/25/217240/diebold-security-foiled-again
This was very popular during and after WW-II in Germany as gas supplies were next to non-existent. In these gasification systems, you could burn pretty much anything combustible. Wood was popular a popular choice. It's a very old technology.
You are correct... see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator#History. Wood gas was also used to fuel vehicles in WWII Japan.
"The Coffee Car was created with the sole intention of proving that renewable/green energy sources can power cars — and it looks like it succeeded!"
No, it's not possible to succeed at that, because the concept had already been proven and utilized 70 years ago.
Looking up a contiguous block of data vs not looking up a contiguous block of data makes no difference to an SSD.
Then is it safe to say that we should never again worry about running defrag utilities after moving to SSD?
It would be interesting to know how many "standard deviations" it is from the plane of the galaxy.
That's no star -- it's an extragalactic surfboard flare!
(Ok, that wasn't very witty. Superior replies encouraged.)
On a more serious note: given that the Milky Way's diameter is ~100,000 light years, this thing being only "3,500 light-years above the disc of the Milky Way" would make it a straggling member of our galaxy, would it not?
Your post solidifies my resolve that, as LehiNephi eloquently explained, production of goods should never be subsidized: Solyndra failed in spite of the extraordinarily hard work put in by its employees.
The big ideas happen once, maybe twice in a generation
I can think of three specific really big sci/tech ideas in the last 100 years:
* the Double-helix model of DNA (Watson and Crick, 1953)
* General relativity (Einstein, 1916)
* the Transistor (Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, 1947)
(Am I missing any?)
Everything since then has been either a smaller idea, or an evolutionary refinement of one of these big ideas. We're about due for another big idea, don't you think?
The US taxes companies' dividends but not interest paid on debt, stock buybacks, or executive compensation. As a result, most companies don't pay dividends and borrow too much.
I can think of a handful of companies that got into trouble from borrowing too much: AIG, Lehman Brothers. (Chrysler and GM's troubles, I think, stemmed more from not getting their money's worth out of the inflated union wages they were paying.) There are far more companies in the opposite situation: they're sitting on large piles of cash, and would like to hire more workers, but not in the current climate. Read what Steve Wynn has to say about that, for example: http://bit.ly/nL3rIQ
Government's borrowing addiction is a much more serious problem than corporate borrowing. National debt is $14.3 trillion, and on track to rise to $22.2 trillion under the recent "deficit reduction compromise" (see http://paul.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=280 ).
We have no clue how to run a post-oil world with 6 billion people
Somebody has a clue. For a Big Idea about a new source of energy, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Criswell
It's not just nostalgia or some historical distortion that things were different between the two world wars... cafes were abuzz with conversation about this very stuff. Not everyone had an opinion about all of it, but everyone did have an opinion about some of it
And you know this because you were alive and frequenting cafes in 1930?
Yes -- Slashdot has far and away the best system for moderating comments, and all web sites should adopt it! I would mod you up above Score:5 if I could. (Maybe the upper limit of 5 is a flaw in the system.)
I bet many Slashdot users aren't even aware that you can see a sweet summary of all your comments, and how many replies each has received, by going to http://slashdot.org/~insert_your_User_ID_here/comments. That summary really facilitates the exchange of ideas.
The LA Times headline is, "Test of hypersonic aircraft fails." Now let's look at it from the perspective of an engineer, not a drive-by journalist. The first flight sent back nine minutes' worth of telemetry. Today's test transmitted telemetry for 20 minutes. That's a 122% improvement. Any engineer would be happy to get credit for that accomplishment!
a lot of threats we face would go away if we could take out just the top few people: are you listening S&P ratings board?
Wow, you don't grok the phrase "don't shoot the messenger," do you?
Our sensitive microelectronics is very vulnerable to being wrecked by electromagnetic pulses, whether natural or set off by human enemies.
Regarding the huge "Carrington Event" solar flare of September 1, 1859, NASA reports that "Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire." The Engineer goes further and says, "The Carrington Storm caused fires and electrocuted workers at telegraph stations".
There is a glass envelope which is coated with phosphor on the inside, and the UV light excites the phosphor.
That's interesting. The brain-dead DOE press release doesn't contain any interesting technical details like that.
If 15% of the population is purple, and 15% of the characters are purple, it's real.
If 15% of the population is purple, and 30% of the characters are purple, it's politically correct.
The alleged quote from Cheney is a gross oversimplification of reality. It would have been more accurate if he had said "small deficits don't matter much."
The largest deficit during Reagan's term was about $220 billion. Even after accounting for inflation, that doesn't come close to the devestating effects of this year's $1.5 trillion shortfall. (Also, keep in mind that every year Reagan proposed a budget in which the deficit was smaller than the previous year -- and every year, Congress pronounced his proposal "dead on arrival." So it would have been still more accurate if Cheney had said "Congress in the 1980s proved that moderately-sized deficits are not fatal.")
There's actually very little difference between an individual's personal debt and the national debt. Our current $14.3 trillion national debt is a hole. Our options are to
(1) dig ourselves out (i.e., start paying down principal),
(2) continue to live in the hole at the same depth (i.e., pay interest on the debt forever, without changing the amount of principal owed), or
(3) dig ourselves deeper.
Guess what -- the "debt deal" being voted on tonight digs the hole deeper (albeit at a slightly slower rate than during the first half of the Obama administration). As difficult as it would be to dig ourselves out of a $14.3 trillion debt, after a few more years of these huge deficits it's going to be impossible.
I think risom was trying to say that it's possible for a country to weasel out of its debt by inflating its currency (i.e., paying off creditors with dollars that aren't worth as much as the dollars that were originally lent). Be sure to consider all the downsides of that approach:
(1) It's fundamentally dishonest.
(2) It erodes the life savings of all of the country's citizens.
(3) It may take decades to restore trust in your creditors that you aren't going to do that to them again.
(4) Inflation cuts both ways: the revenue dollars the government is still able to collect hold less purchasing power than they used to, and interest rates rise during periods of inflation, so as old debt gets rolled over, the government must pay more interest on it.
(5) You run the very real risk of losing control of the situation and slipping into hyperinflation.
An extreme form of this weaseling is redenomination. For an extreme example of redenomination, see the history of the ruble: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_ruble
That whole article is summed up in this amazing sentence: "By calculating the product of all six redenominations, it is seen that a seventh ruble is equal to 5E15 original rubles."
TFA says they are generating "hundreds of microwatts of power." Nobody is going to be powering their lights or robots off of this tiny trickle of electrons.
the issue is that they want to do it ALL at once
To do it all at once would be to not raise the debt ceiling, ever again, thereby forcing our annual deficit to suddenly go from $1.5 trillion to zero.
You're right, that would be quite a shock to the system, causing much short-term pain; and I haven't heard anybody, no matter how far on the right, propose that.
I have, however, done a thought experiment about it.
If you're going to stop spending money on things that you shouldn't be spending money on, is it better to phase out the improper spending over a period of 10+ years, or to do it all at once?
Depends whether you want to minimize your short-term pain, or the total amount of pain that accumulates in future years. Because if you phase out the spending too gradually, our national debt keeps increasing -- from the current $14 trillion, to $30 trillion and beyond. We, and our kids and grandkids, will have to pay the interest on that enormous sum, every year -- probably forever, because after paying the interest you're exhausted and you can't pay down any principal.
If you really think about it, we are stealing from our kids and grandkids by not biting the bullet and doing it all at once.
And then there's the likelihood that future Congresses, any time they're not faced with an immediate crisis, will return to their old ways and not honor the restrained spending plans agreed to by previous Congresses. (It's not accurate to call them spending "cuts," because they aren't cuts, they are merely smaller increases in government spending. So I'll generously call them "restrained spending plans," not cuts.)
If that happens, we may be looking at a $45 trillion debt 10 years from now, not $30 trillion.
"The 'price of gold' comparison is 100% crap" -- so says "Crotalus horridus," who just deleted that information from the Wikipedia article.
And Crotalus is right; using the Consumer Price Index to calculate the SX-1980's price in 2011 dollars would give you a much better answer than using the price of gold.
Thanks, but your article is about objects that might have hung out at the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points. It neither supports nor disproves the idea of some plain old moons currently orbiting Earth, which are simply too small to have been discovered yet.
Good point about the external tanks. There's speculation that future space manufacturers will have to obtain their raw materials from asteroids. But if we had collected spent tanks in orbit, we'd have a small asteroid's worth of stuff there already -- and it would be made of pure aluminum and lithium, not just unrefined ore.
Now, how can we get NASA, Russia, and the other ISS partners to start thinking in "reduce, reuse, recycle" terms?
I've always suspected that Earth has some additional tiny moons that haven't been discovered yet -- but my professors always pooh-poohed that idea, without really giving a good reason why.
Now it turns out that an Earth Trojan has gone undetected until now. This strengthens my belief that Earth has some miniature natural satellites awaiting discovery.
Someday we will have manufacturing capabilities in orbit -- the ability to melt down metals and forge them into new structural components for vehicles, habitats, etc. But where will the raw materials come from?
Solution: at the end of its useful life, boost the ISS into a low-maintenence parking orbit. When the manufacturing capability finally arrives -- whether that is 15, 50, or 150 years from now -- we'll have 920,000 pounds of aerospace-grade titanium, aluminum, and steel to work with.
Remember, it costs $10,000 per pound to put "stuff" in orbit. (Hopefully the cost will decrease in the future, but it will never be cheap.) At that rate, think about how unbelievably wasteful it would be to spash all of that highly-refined metal into the drink.
I made the same argument before Mir was deorbited. Alas, nobody listened. Deorbiting ISS, 3.2 times more massive than Mir was, would be 3.2 times more of a cryin' shame!
The reason may be as simple as, he's too busy now. You could always go to http://www.dribin.org/dave/contact/ and ask him.