While it is impossible to tell the NOx emissions of a vehicle without special instruments, the CO2 emission is very simple to measure as it is a direct function of gas mileage. Fuel is about 12/14 carbon by mass, CO2 is 12/44 carbon. Pretty much all the carbon in fuel ends up as CO2.
We used to have at least half a dozen. Mock electronics, Webb electronics, W&W electronics, Austin Electronics, plus a few upstarts that only hung around for a while. They are all gone, every single one of them along with all the Radioshacks.
However, many things in the electronic hobby world are better then ever. Parts are CHEAP these days. I can buy brand new entire reels of resistors and capacitors for a couple of bucks. There are many dedicated surplus catalogs not to mention eBay. The stuff in the brick and mortar stores was interesting, but it was also over priced.
The AMA was founded by doctors. It's main purpose is to promote the welfare of doctors. That is not good or bad thing, but it is a very useful to keep that mission in mind when you hear the AMA speak.
The first question I would ask is that if the AMA is really concerned about health care costs, why does it not push harder to make more drugs like birth control pills available over the counter without a prescription? Or streamline the prescription process for drugs that low potential for abuse or for causing harm (most ED drugs)?
The second question I would have to ask is why is a better-informed consumer a bad thing? If the ads are incorrect or misleading, that obviously need to be addressed, but other than that, why would a patient hearing about a possible new treatment option be a bad thing? Are we not supposed to ever question our doctors? Is a doctor's time really so valuable that they cannot explain treatment options?
There are some serious 1st Amendment issues here as well. 30 years ago, you could have made the argument that public airwaves are a limited resource and that the government should have some say in their use. With cable, that is no longer true. You really have to show that drug ads are a major concern for public health like the cigarette ads were. The fact that drug ads annoy doctors is not a good enough reason.
Investigation and fraud? Why? Are we never allowed to change our beliefs once they are 'sincerely held'?
Accommodation should never be made exclusively on religious grounds. First, it is not fair and secondly it puts the state in the rather uncomfortable position of evaluating the legitimacy of a religion.
High Pressure Sodium lamp produce somewhere between 50-140 lumens per watt depending on bulb size, bulb age, temperature, and the type of ballast used. LEDs have passed the 300 lumens per watt mark in the lab and real-word LEDs are currently running 70-120 lumens per watt and constantly improving. Unlike HPS lamps, LEDs are directional which can be lead to additional savings.
It is still not clear what the real-world bulb life of LEDs will be so it is difficult to calculate the total cost of operations. Since electrical power is usually abundant at night, power is only a small factor in the cost of operating street light. It is unlikely that further improvements in LED efficiency will have any meaningful impact on operating cost.
In spite of the relatively poor color rendering index of HPS lights, I also find the warm orange from HPS easier on my eyes for night driving. It is also possible (but not cheap!) to filter out most HPS light for sky viewing.
I wish we could re-think the whole idea of street lighting and use if more sparingly. It is very helpful to have intersections marked with lights but there is no need to light every street, every hour of every night. Dark can be quite nice!
Costco does not offer you a lot of choices. Want paper towels? You have two choices, a leading brand or the store brand. Same with toilet paper. Need a vacuum cleaner? There are maybe three to choose from. Jam? One brand, maybe two flavors plus some high-end organic stuff. Pop Tarts? One box, with two mixed flavors.
Radiation shielding in space is harder than you might think. You can't just add a thin lead sheet or other dense material around critical circuits and be done. When photons get above a certain energy level, they pretty much blast through anything dense. What you really need for shielding for those types of high energy photons is a _really_ thick layer of low density shielding, say several miles of a gas under about 1 atmosphere of pressure. But this is simply not practical on today's spacecraft. There are other approaches to shielding such as layering high and low density materials, but in a spacecraft shielding is always limited by volume and mass constraints.
The other option is to deal with radiation by building chips with redundancy. The idea is that if one part of the circuit gets temporarily zapped, two other parts are still functional and the majority is probably the correct answer. You also build the electronics so that if everything goes south they can reboot and recover.
80% predicted value... lets see. Temperature is an absolute quantity. The average temperature of the earths surface is currently about 15C (57F), in absolute terms, that is 295 K.
You will be happy if the models predict average temperature with 80% accuracy, so if the models can predicted average temperature for any given year between 236K (-35F) and 368K (202F) this will pass your test?
I always check my rear-view mirror when coming to a stop. If the car behind me does not appear to be slowing down, I flash my brake lights by pressing and releasing the brake pedal several times. I have also gone through intersections at yellow lights when it was clear that the car behind me had not intention of stopping. A lot of avoiding accidents has to do with figuring out other driver's likely mistakes. Eye contact or lack of eye contact with other drivers is an important part of driving. When changing lanes, what is the other driver doing? Are they looking at me? Are they looking at a screen?
A the time Model 80 was their ONLY model that used the 386, it was top end and crazy expensive. I never actually saw one. IBM was still offering entry level models based on the 8086. The cloners had long since abandoned the 8086 and had a large offering of fairly reasonably-priced 16MHz 386 machines in their arsenal.
They also offered entry level PS2 machines with ISA slots, but for some reason they did not offer any machines with both ISA and MCA slots. This was probably a good technical decision, but it was a marketing disaster. Then there was the non-standard HDD, non-standard floppy drive, non-standard graphics, etc.
In 1987, people were still looking to IBM to set PC standards, but they did such a craptastic job at such an unreasonable price that they became completely irrelevant.
"Because the transformers which convert distributed power (typically lower frequency and higher voltage) to the household power (60 Hz / 240 VAC split-phase) are made to work efficiently, one-way. Going the other way, they are considerably less efficient."
No.
Everything on a power grid operates at exactly the same frequency. DC interconnects and other exotic technology aside, it is one gigantic synchronous machine. If load increases faster than supply the frequency of the entire gird slows down a tiny amount, as supply increase and load drops, the frequency goes up a tiny amount. Supply is continuously adjusted to keep the frequency stable. It is like a train. Locomotives tend to speed it up, wagons tend to slow it down, but it is all going at the same speed.
Power transformers are not "considerably less efficient" "going the other way" .
It can, however, be a matter of who is paying for the inefficiency of the conversion. Assume that a transformer at the distribution level is 90% efficient going either way. So the power company has to generate 1.1 units of power to get 1.0 unit of power through your meter. They take that into account when they figure out how much to change. However, if you sell power back to them at the same rate, that 1.0 units of power you generate is only 0.9 units of power back on the grid. So if you take a unit of power off the grid at one point during the day and give it back at another point during the day, you net bill is zero but the utility company has lost 0.2 units of energy during the conversion.
The biggest advantage that liquid hydrocarbons have over conventional batteries is that you can use air as the oxidizer. The oxidizer is much, much heavier than the fuel. Think about it. For burning hydrogen, the oxidizer is 8 time the mass of the hydrogen. For burning carbon, the oxidizer is over 2.5 times the mass of the carbon.
But you don't have to use conventional batteries to operate an electric vehicle. You could use hydrocarbon-air fuel cells.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is impossible to tell the NOx emissions of a vehicle without special instruments, the CO2 emission is very simple to measure as it is a direct function of gas mileage. Fuel is about 12/14 carbon by mass, CO2 is 12/44 carbon. Pretty much all the carbon in fuel ends up as CO2.
We used to have at least half a dozen. Mock electronics, Webb electronics, W&W electronics, Austin Electronics, plus a few upstarts that only hung around for a while. They are all gone, every single one of them along with all the Radioshacks.
However, many things in the electronic hobby world are better then ever. Parts are CHEAP these days. I can buy brand new entire reels of resistors and capacitors for a couple of bucks. There are many dedicated surplus catalogs not to mention eBay. The stuff in the brick and mortar stores was interesting, but it was also over priced.
I do miss the SMELL of those places.
I can buy a 3T drive on Amazon for $85. That is less than 3 cents per Gig.
The school certainly overreacted...
Initially I though the school over-reacted. My opinion on this changed as more facts came in. It was the nerd community that certainly overreacted.
The AMA was founded by doctors. It's main purpose is to promote the welfare of doctors. That is not good or bad thing, but it is a very useful to keep that mission in mind when you hear the AMA speak.
The first question I would ask is that if the AMA is really concerned about health care costs, why does it not push harder to make more drugs like birth control pills available over the counter without a prescription? Or streamline the prescription process for drugs that low potential for abuse or for causing harm (most ED drugs)?
The second question I would have to ask is why is a better-informed consumer a bad thing? If the ads are incorrect or misleading, that obviously need to be addressed, but other than that, why would a patient hearing about a possible new treatment option be a bad thing? Are we not supposed to ever question our doctors? Is a doctor's time really so valuable that they cannot explain treatment options?
There are some serious 1st Amendment issues here as well. 30 years ago, you could have made the argument that public airwaves are a limited resource and that the government should have some say in their use. With cable, that is no longer true. You really have to show that drug ads are a major concern for public health like the cigarette ads were. The fact that drug ads annoy doctors is not a good enough reason.
Investigation and fraud? Why? Are we never allowed to change our beliefs once they are 'sincerely held'?
Accommodation should never be made exclusively on religious grounds. First, it is not fair and secondly it puts the state in the rather uncomfortable position of evaluating the legitimacy of a religion.
High Pressure Sodium lamp produce somewhere between 50-140 lumens per watt depending on bulb size, bulb age, temperature, and the type of ballast used. LEDs have passed the 300 lumens per watt mark in the lab and real-word LEDs are currently running 70-120 lumens per watt and constantly improving. Unlike HPS lamps, LEDs are directional which can be lead to additional savings.
It is still not clear what the real-world bulb life of LEDs will be so it is difficult to calculate the total cost of operations. Since electrical power is usually abundant at night, power is only a small factor in the cost of operating street light. It is unlikely that further improvements in LED efficiency will have any meaningful impact on operating cost.
In spite of the relatively poor color rendering index of HPS lights, I also find the warm orange from HPS easier on my eyes for night driving. It is also possible (but not cheap!) to filter out most HPS light for sky viewing.
I wish we could re-think the whole idea of street lighting and use if more sparingly. It is very helpful to have intersections marked with lights but there is no need to light every street, every hour of every night. Dark can be quite nice!
The first programming language I learned was BASIC.
I had to unlearn BASIC to learn FORTRAN.
I had to unlearn FORTRAN to learn C.
My brain is at its erase cycle limit.
Now I basically program in FORTRAN using C.
Costco does not offer you a lot of choices. Want paper towels? You have two choices, a leading brand or the store brand. Same with toilet paper. Need a vacuum cleaner? There are maybe three to choose from. Jam? One brand, maybe two flavors plus some high-end organic stuff. Pop Tarts? One box, with two mixed flavors.
This model seems to work well for them.
Nixon's Handshake in Space was also a huge waste of good hardware!
Radiation shielding in space is harder than you might think. You can't just add a thin lead sheet or other dense material around critical circuits and be done. When photons get above a certain energy level, they pretty much blast through anything dense. What you really need for shielding for those types of high energy photons is a _really_ thick layer of low density shielding, say several miles of a gas under about 1 atmosphere of pressure. But this is simply not practical on today's spacecraft. There are other approaches to shielding such as layering high and low density materials, but in a spacecraft shielding is always limited by volume and mass constraints.
The other option is to deal with radiation by building chips with redundancy. The idea is that if one part of the circuit gets temporarily zapped, two other parts are still functional and the majority is probably the correct answer. You also build the electronics so that if everything goes south they can reboot and recover.
NASA knows what they are doing here!
80% predicted value... lets see. Temperature is an absolute quantity. The average temperature of the earths surface is currently about 15C (57F), in absolute terms, that is 295 K.
You will be happy if the models predict average temperature with 80% accuracy, so if the models can predicted average temperature for any given year between 236K (-35F) and 368K (202F) this will pass your test?
Guess what? That can do that!
Yeah, if only they had carried Arduino boards or something.
If you want to convert Styrofoam to CO2, just burn it. But why would you want to do this?
In a landfill, Styrofoam really does not hurt anything.
If gravity waves in space and no one interacts, does it really radiate energy?
"Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all"
The Agent Zero Sonic Blaster. Destroying drones and kid's hearing since 1960.
http://www.retrothing.com/2009...
That headline would be a little more accurate but far less sexy.
Of course they could. But they also want another half million dollars. So they put up a high priority project that should have strong public support.
Even notice that when NASA budget is threatened they say shit like "There goes the Hubble Telescope" or "There goes the Mars Rovers"?
It is the same kind of crap.
I always check my rear-view mirror when coming to a stop. If the car behind me does not appear to be slowing down, I flash my brake lights by pressing and releasing the brake pedal several times. I have also gone through intersections at yellow lights when it was clear that the car behind me had not intention of stopping. A lot of avoiding accidents has to do with figuring out other driver's likely mistakes. Eye contact or lack of eye contact with other drivers is an important part of driving. When changing lanes, what is the other driver doing? Are they looking at me? Are they looking at a screen?
You cut $200 off your utility bill in a few weeks with a new thermostat...
My conclusion is that you could not figure out how to turn in on an went without any sort of heat or AC for several weeks.
The state government is saying that the federal government has no right to interfere with the state's right to interfere with local government.
True but...
A the time Model 80 was their ONLY model that used the 386, it was top end and crazy expensive. I never actually saw one. IBM was still offering entry level models based on the 8086. The cloners had long since abandoned the 8086 and had a large offering of fairly reasonably-priced 16MHz 386 machines in their arsenal.
They also offered entry level PS2 machines with ISA slots, but for some reason they did not offer any machines with both ISA and MCA slots. This was probably a good technical decision, but it was a marketing disaster. Then there was the non-standard HDD, non-standard floppy drive, non-standard graphics, etc.
In 1987, people were still looking to IBM to set PC standards, but they did such a craptastic job at such an unreasonable price that they became completely irrelevant.
"Because the transformers which convert distributed power (typically lower frequency and higher voltage) to the household power (60 Hz / 240 VAC split-phase) are made to work efficiently, one-way. Going the other way, they are considerably less efficient."
No.
Everything on a power grid operates at exactly the same frequency. DC interconnects and other exotic technology aside, it is one gigantic synchronous machine. If load increases faster than supply the frequency of the entire gird slows down a tiny amount, as supply increase and load drops, the frequency goes up a tiny amount. Supply is continuously adjusted to keep the frequency stable. It is like a train. Locomotives tend to speed it up, wagons tend to slow it down, but it is all going at the same speed.
Power transformers are not "considerably less efficient" "going the other way" .
It can, however, be a matter of who is paying for the inefficiency of the conversion. Assume that a transformer at the distribution level is 90% efficient going either way. So the power company has to generate 1.1 units of power to get 1.0 unit of power through your meter. They take that into account when they figure out how much to change. However, if you sell power back to them at the same rate, that 1.0 units of power you generate is only 0.9 units of power back on the grid. So if you take a unit of power off the grid at one point during the day and give it back at another point during the day, you net bill is zero but the utility company has lost 0.2 units of energy during the conversion.
The biggest advantage that liquid hydrocarbons have over conventional batteries is that you can use air as the oxidizer. The oxidizer is much, much heavier than the fuel. Think about it. For burning hydrogen, the oxidizer is 8 time the mass of the hydrogen. For burning carbon, the oxidizer is over 2.5 times the mass of the carbon.
But you don't have to use conventional batteries to operate an electric vehicle. You could use hydrocarbon-air fuel cells.