> But either way, I knew I was getting a shit sandwich. . .
Everyone did. Canada offers its condolences.
FYI we have five parties with members in the house and an independent. Over the last 25 years I've voted for 4 of them. Having a *real* selection results in a whole less nose-holding when you go to the poles.
Which makes the whole Gary Johnson debacle a nice scoop of shit on top of that sandwich. Ugh, my condolences, again.
> The vehicles would be able to travel at about 150 mph for up to 100 miles
Cruising at 150 mph is pretty energy expensive, even the tiny Moony M20 series needed the better part of its 200 hp to maintain a 150 mph cruise and most other aircraft using the same engine, say the Piper Arrow or (Rockwell) Commander 112 are generally closer to 120 mph cruise and maybe 140 full-throttle.
So if you convert that to electrical terms, 200 hp is 150 kW. To run that for 45 minutes (takeoff, cruise, land) you need 112.5 kW of battery, and with reserves and stores, at least 150 kW. The Tesla 85 kWh pack is 544 kg, so we're looking at something on the order of 960 kg, or a bit over a ton just for the battery. For comparison, a fully loaded Piper Arrow with four passengers, baggage and a load of fuel is 2,500 lbs.
Now that's assuming you're flying straight and level using wings, the efficient way to fly. This claims to be VTOL, which adds A HUGE AMOUNT.
"Russian media report that the missile will weigh up to 10 tons with the capacity to carry up to 10 tons of nuclear cargo."
Clearly an incorrect statement, as anyone who's read the rocket equation will realize. The actual weight, which one can look up in seconds, is 100 tonnes.
" could wipe out nearly all of the United Kingdom or France"
For argument's sake, let's assume the Soviets use a warhead roughly equivalent to the US's W88, one of the more efficient warheadsin the world. The W88 weights an estimated 360 kg, which means the 10 tonne capacity could hold about 26 warheads with about 480 kT each, or about 12 MT. That's maybe 2 to 3 cities worth, depending on the coverage you want.
In the 1950s the US Navy calculated you would need 400 MT to wipe out the Soviet Union. This number has been recalculated endless times since then, and remains basically the same. The US is somewhat more decentralized, so you'd need maybe 50 of these to kill the US, assuming that they spread out fairly evenly.
Really no change here - the numbers remain the same since the 1960s, although the bombs have gotten more efficient. Putting all those eggs into 50 baskets is cheaper than 500 baskets with one each, but the US has a lot more than 50 cruise missiles...
> We've pretty much already dammed every river that's capable of generating reasonable amounts of hydro power
This is patently false.
In pretty much any area you look with some hydro development now, there's about 50% untapped. That includes here in Canada, where only about 55% of the conventional resources are used, and if they expended to all the large ones only, it would provide enough electricity to power everything we already have an all our cars. With some left over to sell to the US as well.
Here, for instance, is a recent-ish report for my area. Ontario currently has 8 GW of installed capacity. The study found about 6 GW of untapped easy capacity, 1 GW of which required internal changes only (new turbines and distribution systems). Another 14 GW exists but is not currently economic. If fully developed, it would be more than enough power to run the entire province.
This ignores the emerging fields like hydrodynamics. It's not entirely clear how large this is, but estimates I've seen place it at about the same as existing sources. Unlike conventional systems, these take up no space and have basically no effect on the river.
> I wonder how many wind and solar plants could be built for a mere 6.8 Billion?
No need to guess, google has that answer: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf
Actually these numbers are already out of date, solar in the US is under $1/Watt: https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2016/07/22/and-were-down-under-1/
So you could buy about 6.8 GWp of PV for that, as opposed to the 1.2 GW of nuclear they did get. Nuclear has a CF around 90% and solar about 32%, so that means PV is only half the price of nuclear, as opposed to six times.
Which is precisely why this is the first nuclear plant in so long, while 8.5GW of wind went into the US in the last year alone.
I'm not sure what its like in the US,but here in Canada if you get 200 channels you're getting about 60 channels, 30 of which are repeated multiple of times (~5) for different cities. Obviously if you watch CBC Toronto, you're unlikely to watch CBC Ottawa. This would explain this "finding" immediately.
With all due respect, this statement is just wrong:
"Clay tablets are more resilient than papyrus manuscripts are more resilient than parchment are more resilient than printed photographs are more resilient than digital photographs."
Digital photographs are infinitely resilient, because they can be infinitely copied with perfect accuracy. Analog mediums do not have this feature.
It may indeed be harder to erase a clay tablet, but because it is so difficult to produce, there's only ever one. Analog photography may be easier to erase than a clay tablet, but there's likely to be more of them. So one could argue (as it is in the opening of I, Claudius) that cheaper mediums are more resilient.
And digital is infinitely copy-able, for free and perfectly, so in effect there are an infinity of them. Sure, the physical media they are stored on may one day degrade, but they should have already been copied to millions of others, and continually do so, forever.
The monkeywrench in this equation is not physical, but legal. If copyright prevents you from making those copies, they will disappear. Not could, WILL. Modern "everything is copyrighted" is a far greater risk to posterity than anything to do with the medium.
> 7.5 m^2 of 22% efficient polycrystalline solar cells covering its flattish surfaces
Did you check that figure? Lets:
We just got a Subaru Forester, a relatively large car. It's roof is about 1.25 m wide, and the hood and roof together are maybe 2.5 m long, so that's ~3.25 m^2. Now you might cover the sides too, but A) that means only one side could possibly be in the sun, and B) the cosign error makes it entirely useless.
Now 22% solar cells still have to go through 95% efficient inverters/charge controllers, and then into a 90% efficient battery and back out again. So that's maybe ~18% end-to-end, ignoring dirt. And finally, you get maybe 3 or 4 hours of "bright direct sunlight" per day once you consider cosine error. (look up PVWatts and play with it)
So, that means: 3.25 m x 1000 w/m x 0.18 x 3.5 = ~ 2 kWh
In a Tesla that would get you maybe 10 km, and there's no way a "real" car of any description is *three times* as efficient. And it's likely smaller than a Forester too. So yeah, color me skeptical.
> but trucking was then deregulated, so it became cheaper to ship a lot of stuff by truck.
It has nothing to do with deregulation, and everything to do with time. You need to go watch them switch a railcar onto an industrial spur some time, it takes HOURS. The last one to go into Dominion Color, a single tanker car, took most of a day.
If your product has any time-dimension value, and they all do, then there is a price differential that means trucks are cheaper end-to-end. That line moves with the *relative* price of trains vs. trucks. Trains are cheaper than trucks, about 35% IIRC, but that's not enough to justify it unless you ship a LOT of stuff that can move from one siding to another. Like steel, or coal.
I seem to recall a study that said when diesel hits $4.00 a gallon an ungodly amount of freight suddenly moves to trains. I guess that's why the train companies are spending so much effort on truck-to-train systems, for that day when it might come.
But we can reduce it significantly. Especially in cars, where plug-in-hybrids can easily double (or more) average milage with basically zero effect on the way the car is used. Pure electric doesn't really help much on top of that.
> solar powered cars would be completely viable
Not possible. Literally.
A Tesla, which is actually pretty average, goes about 5 km on a kWh. At highway speeds, that's three minutes of driving. The S has a roof about 2 square meters. There are 1000 W per meter of sunlight under perfect conditions. That means in those 3 minutes you will collect about 2000 * 0.05 = 100 Wh of electricity, or about 0.5 km. So basically you're discharging 10 times as fast as you could possibly charge.
If you consider realistic conversion on the order of 10% (15% power conversion, 30% geometry losses), its more like 100 times. Even if you drive and then park, there simply aren't enough hours in the day to cover even the shortest transports. A garage roof covered in panels *might* do for people who do shopping and such.
I saw my first HDTV, a 42" Pioneer Elite plasma, during the 1998 winter olympics. It cost $24,000.
I bought my first HDTV, a Sharp 50" which I still have, circa 2006. It cost $2300.
4K has been out, what, a year for real? You can get name-brand 60" models at Cosco for $2300.
So basically what took about a decade to happen with HDTV happened in about a year in 4k.
So given that 4k is currently at the price point that made HDTV "break through", no, I don't find it at all surprising everyone is buying one. The delta in price is fairly minimal, and although there's little content today, if it lasts 10 years like my HDTV, then it's certainly not a bad deal.
A particular project, perhaps not. But in general, it's easy to see that "new" fields will produce more output than "old" fields. It's simply a matter of how deeply the field has been mined.
For instance, thermal expansion of metal wad one a very serious field of study, and about a century ago was the topic of a Nobel prize. However, today there is basically nothing left in that field to dio, and if you proposed spending 10 million to study it you'd be laughed at.
The standard model has remained largely unchanged since the 70s, meaning it is approaching its 50th birthday. It had been largely mined out since the 1990s. Since then they had spent a lot of time and money proving things most people assumed wss true. For instance, pretty much everyone believed in neutrino oscillation and the higgs, but we spent tens of billions proving it. And science didn't advance at all as a result. So far it's 10 billion very poorly spent.
Now it is entirely possible that LHC will detect something new. But we have a lot of good ideas what that would look like. And LHC can't detect most of those. Neither will one that's four times as big. Yo really test any of these theories we need a machine that we have no idea how to build. And so, anything in the middle, like SSC out this Chinese machine is really a total waste, and everyone knows it.
What's a bit sad about all this is that HEP is really one very tiny part of physics as a whole. It hasn't been a practical one since the 1960s, nothing any off the machines since then answers anything but HEP questions. But HEP is the darling of the physics community, because that's where the big machines are. It's rather circular.
The good news I'd that there is plenty of real good physics going on. And better yet, it takes place at your local university on a lab the size of a closet on a budget about what you spend on coffee for a year. And those experiments are producing both new science and real practical results. Look at the blue led for instance. Yet there's no documentary on that, while there's dozens on the LHC.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, does anyone know if there's an extension that looks up every post on snopes and puts a badge on it?
That's what I need.
To wit: Do you sit on a chesterfield, or smoke one?
> But either way, I knew I was getting a shit sandwich. . .
Everyone did. Canada offers its condolences.
FYI we have five parties with members in the house and an independent. Over the last 25 years I've voted for 4 of them. Having a *real* selection results in a whole less nose-holding when you go to the poles.
Which makes the whole Gary Johnson debacle a nice scoop of shit on top of that sandwich. Ugh, my condolences, again.
> The vehicles would be able to travel at about 150 mph for up to 100 miles
Cruising at 150 mph is pretty energy expensive, even the tiny Moony M20 series needed the better part of its 200 hp to maintain a 150 mph cruise and most other aircraft using the same engine, say the Piper Arrow or (Rockwell) Commander 112 are generally closer to 120 mph cruise and maybe 140 full-throttle.
So if you convert that to electrical terms, 200 hp is 150 kW. To run that for 45 minutes (takeoff, cruise, land) you need 112.5 kW of battery, and with reserves and stores, at least 150 kW. The Tesla 85 kWh pack is 544 kg, so we're looking at something on the order of 960 kg, or a bit over a ton just for the battery. For comparison, a fully loaded Piper Arrow with four passengers, baggage and a load of fuel is 2,500 lbs.
Now that's assuming you're flying straight and level using wings, the efficient way to fly. This claims to be VTOL, which adds A HUGE AMOUNT.
So, yeah, I'll believe it when I see it.
> A bomb with a burst-damage radius of 100 mi
Complete twaddle.
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Type in Dallas and hit go. Select Tsar Bomba from the list. Click Detonate.
5 psi blast radius is about 20 km, thermal about 60.
Weight of Tsar Bomba was 27 tonnes, so it wouldn't even fit onto this missile anyway.
"Russian media report that the missile will weigh up to 10 tons with the capacity to carry up to 10 tons of nuclear cargo."
Clearly an incorrect statement, as anyone who's read the rocket equation will realize. The actual weight, which one can look up in seconds, is 100 tonnes.
" could wipe out nearly all of the United Kingdom or France"
For argument's sake, let's assume the Soviets use a warhead roughly equivalent to the US's W88, one of the more efficient warheadsin the world. The W88 weights an estimated 360 kg, which means the 10 tonne capacity could hold about 26 warheads with about 480 kT each, or about 12 MT. That's maybe 2 to 3 cities worth, depending on the coverage you want.
In the 1950s the US Navy calculated you would need 400 MT to wipe out the Soviet Union. This number has been recalculated endless times since then, and remains basically the same. The US is somewhat more decentralized, so you'd need maybe 50 of these to kill the US, assuming that they spread out fairly evenly.
Really no change here - the numbers remain the same since the 1960s, although the bombs have gotten more efficient. Putting all those eggs into 50 baskets is cheaper than 500 baskets with one each, but the US has a lot more than 50 cruise missiles...
> Someone on Reddit already ran these numbers
Can you provide a link for this? I'd like to respond, because its so obviously wrong.
> Wind is about half the cost of solar.
Not for about a year. PV in the US is about $1, and wind is between $1.25 and $1.50. See the post below this for links.
Additionally, new installs of both have CF's on the order of 30 to 35%. This is up about 5% over the last five years.
So they are very, very comparable.
> We've pretty much already dammed every river that's capable of generating reasonable amounts of hydro power
This is patently false.
In pretty much any area you look with some hydro development now, there's about 50% untapped. That includes here in Canada, where only about 55% of the conventional resources are used, and if they expended to all the large ones only, it would provide enough electricity to power everything we already have an all our cars. With some left over to sell to the US as well.
Here, for instance, is a recent-ish report for my area. Ontario currently has 8 GW of installed capacity. The study found about 6 GW of untapped easy capacity, 1 GW of which required internal changes only (new turbines and distribution systems). Another 14 GW exists but is not currently economic. If fully developed, it would be more than enough power to run the entire province.
This ignores the emerging fields like hydrodynamics. It's not entirely clear how large this is, but estimates I've seen place it at about the same as existing sources. Unlike conventional systems, these take up no space and have basically no effect on the river.
> I wonder how many wind and solar plants could be built for a mere 6.8 Billion?
No need to guess, google has that answer:
https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf
Actually these numbers are already out of date, solar in the US is under $1/Watt:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2016/07/22/and-were-down-under-1/
So you could buy about 6.8 GWp of PV for that, as opposed to the 1.2 GW of nuclear they did get. Nuclear has a CF around 90% and solar about 32%, so that means PV is only half the price of nuclear, as opposed to six times.
Which is precisely why this is the first nuclear plant in so long, while 8.5GW of wind went into the US in the last year alone.
> I think it should be outlawed to force a merchant not to charge more to the customer when you pay using a reward card.
This sort of hidden fee is precisely why drugs cost so much in the US.
YOU don't pay the real price for the drug, so what do you care?
> justify yet another middle man :rolleyes:
You realize there's *always* a middle man on every card process, right?
Apple simply replaces some other company that almost certainly charges more.
And the reason the Oz banks are whining is that they negotiated a nice cushy fee between them and now here's Apple doing it for less.
So after losing the original argument, you're now resorting to some magical future?
Let me know when your hair starts falling back in.
I'm not sure what its like in the US,but here in Canada if you get 200 channels you're getting about 60 channels, 30 of which are repeated multiple of times (~5) for different cities. Obviously if you watch CBC Toronto, you're unlikely to watch CBC Ottawa. This would explain this "finding" immediately.
Hydro exists. Providing baseboard a hell of a lot longer than nukes.
With all due respect, this statement is just wrong:
"Clay tablets are more resilient than papyrus manuscripts are more resilient than parchment are more resilient than printed photographs are more resilient than digital photographs."
Digital photographs are infinitely resilient, because they can be infinitely copied with perfect accuracy. Analog mediums do not have this feature.
It may indeed be harder to erase a clay tablet, but because it is so difficult to produce, there's only ever one. Analog photography may be easier to erase than a clay tablet, but there's likely to be more of them. So one could argue (as it is in the opening of I, Claudius) that cheaper mediums are more resilient.
And digital is infinitely copy-able, for free and perfectly, so in effect there are an infinity of them. Sure, the physical media they are stored on may one day degrade, but they should have already been copied to millions of others, and continually do so, forever.
The monkeywrench in this equation is not physical, but legal. If copyright prevents you from making those copies, they will disappear. Not could, WILL. Modern "everything is copyrighted" is a far greater risk to posterity than anything to do with the medium.
> 7.5 m^2 of 22% efficient polycrystalline solar cells covering its flattish surfaces
Did you check that figure? Lets:
We just got a Subaru Forester, a relatively large car. It's roof is about 1.25 m wide, and the hood and roof together are maybe 2.5 m long, so that's ~3.25 m^2. Now you might cover the sides too, but A) that means only one side could possibly be in the sun, and B) the cosign error makes it entirely useless.
Now 22% solar cells still have to go through 95% efficient inverters/charge controllers, and then into a 90% efficient battery and back out again. So that's maybe ~18% end-to-end, ignoring dirt. And finally, you get maybe 3 or 4 hours of "bright direct sunlight" per day once you consider cosine error. (look up PVWatts and play with it)
So, that means: 3.25 m x 1000 w/m x 0.18 x 3.5 = ~ 2 kWh
In a Tesla that would get you maybe 10 km, and there's no way a "real" car of any description is *three times* as efficient. And it's likely smaller than a Forester too. So yeah, color me skeptical.
> but trucking was then deregulated, so it became cheaper to ship a lot of stuff by truck.
It has nothing to do with deregulation, and everything to do with time. You need to go watch them switch a railcar onto an industrial spur some time, it takes HOURS. The last one to go into Dominion Color, a single tanker car, took most of a day.
If your product has any time-dimension value, and they all do, then there is a price differential that means trucks are cheaper end-to-end. That line moves with the *relative* price of trains vs. trucks. Trains are cheaper than trucks, about 35% IIRC, but that's not enough to justify it unless you ship a LOT of stuff that can move from one siding to another. Like steel, or coal.
I seem to recall a study that said when diesel hits $4.00 a gallon an ungodly amount of freight suddenly moves to trains. I guess that's why the train companies are spending so much effort on truck-to-train systems, for that day when it might come.
> There, one is forced to use fossil fuels
But we can reduce it significantly. Especially in cars, where plug-in-hybrids can easily double (or more) average milage with basically zero effect on the way the car is used. Pure electric doesn't really help much on top of that.
> solar powered cars would be completely viable
Not possible. Literally.
A Tesla, which is actually pretty average, goes about 5 km on a kWh. At highway speeds, that's three minutes of driving. The S has a roof about 2 square meters. There are 1000 W per meter of sunlight under perfect conditions. That means in those 3 minutes you will collect about 2000 * 0.05 = 100 Wh of electricity, or about 0.5 km. So basically you're discharging 10 times as fast as you could possibly charge.
If you consider realistic conversion on the order of 10% (15% power conversion, 30% geometry losses), its more like 100 times. Even if you drive and then park, there simply aren't enough hours in the day to cover even the shortest transports. A garage roof covered in panels *might* do for people who do shopping and such.
> Air travel and air freight are the worst offenders for carbon output for work done.
So? If the goal is to reduce carbon, you start at the top. And that's car's.
We get equal carbon reduction by increasing car efficiency by 10% or increasing jet efficiency by 100%
Which do you think we should start on first?
I saw my first HDTV, a 42" Pioneer Elite plasma, during the 1998 winter olympics. It cost $24,000.
I bought my first HDTV, a Sharp 50" which I still have, circa 2006. It cost $2300.
4K has been out, what, a year for real? You can get name-brand 60" models at Cosco for $2300.
So basically what took about a decade to happen with HDTV happened in about a year in 4k.
So given that 4k is currently at the price point that made HDTV "break through", no, I don't find it at all surprising everyone is buying one. The delta in price is fairly minimal, and although there's little content today, if it lasts 10 years like my HDTV, then it's certainly not a bad deal.
"This is just one supplier who fucked up, and that supplier will pay a price for it's incompetence"
No, it's ONE MORE supplier who fucked up. And it's not the supplier that pay a price for it's incompetence, it's YOU.
There's a reason that the F-35 now costs more than the F-22, and it's not because of any one problem.
"The F-35 program has a proven track record of solving issues as they arise"
By tripling the price.
A particular project, perhaps not. But in general, it's easy to see that "new" fields will produce more output than "old" fields. It's simply a matter of how deeply the field has been mined.
For instance, thermal expansion of metal wad one a very serious field of study, and about a century ago was the topic of a Nobel prize. However, today there is basically nothing left in that field to dio, and if you proposed spending 10 million to study it you'd be laughed at.
The standard model has remained largely unchanged since the 70s, meaning it is approaching its 50th birthday. It had been largely mined out since the 1990s. Since then they had spent a lot of time and money proving things most people assumed wss true. For instance, pretty much everyone believed in neutrino oscillation and the higgs, but we spent tens of billions proving it. And science didn't advance at all as a result. So far it's 10 billion very poorly spent.
Now it is entirely possible that LHC will detect something new. But we have a lot of good ideas what that would look like. And LHC can't detect most of those. Neither will one that's four times as big. Yo really test any of these theories we need a machine that we have no idea how to build. And so, anything in the middle, like SSC out this Chinese machine is really a total waste, and everyone knows it.
What's a bit sad about all this is that HEP is really one very tiny part of physics as a whole. It hasn't been a practical one since the 1960s, nothing any off the machines since then answers anything but HEP questions. But HEP is the darling of the physics community, because that's where the big machines are. It's rather circular.
The good news I'd that there is plenty of real good physics going on. And better yet, it takes place at your local university on a lab the size of a closet on a budget about what you spend on coffee for a year. And those experiments are producing both new science and real practical results. Look at the blue led for instance. Yet there's no documentary on that, while there's dozens on the LHC.
> Slashdot Zombie Post Apocalypse
I see what you did there.