We already have hashers who have been in space! No country in the world has conquered the HASH. So we are well on our way to making the required improvemnts.
If you can detect the passing Gravitational Wave then does this mean it has done work? If so then the waves should attenuate.
So in what form is the energy of a Gravitational Wave? With EM the energy travels in the form of a photon. Does this mean if we detect a gravitational wave that we have detected a graviton?
If so is it quantized? Also does this mean that somehow the graviton interacts with other mater? Wouldn't this unify gravitation into the EM force?
Well - I don't know enough physics to answer but I suspect that gravitational energy might actually be continuous.
However the mechanizm by which gravitational energy (which should have mass because E=MC^2 - except they are thinking "rest" mass and the rest mass may be zero) gets transfered from the gravitational wave into whatever it gets transfered into may have a consequence. If we have a pair of spinning black holes for instance then this may be a way for them to leak energy and thus they might slowly evaporate.
I've been looking for the Feynman lectures on physics for a while. Where did you get them from?
Re:The hypocrisy of "sustainable"
on
Chinese Eco-Cities
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well you can laugh because I know something about sustainability and I am not left wing. I can grow TONNES of organic delicious gormet food and it normally sells wholesale for over $12 bux per kilo. So - maybe I'll just get rich eh?
To a large degree it is all about knowledge and engineering.
BTW - I could NEVER sell any of this stuff in China for a price like that because they've known these technologies for over 1000 years.
Often people pay dearly for food because they are either lazy or simply have no idea of the real costs of production. A sack of dried beans for instance costs less than 20 cents per pound. Dried peas are even cheaper. So for about $10 bux I can pretty much fill a 45 gallon drum with beans with pork. If you buy this at the supermarket I suspect $10 bux might get you a case.
Of course beans with pork are not gormet. However if you live in a poor 3rd world country then maybe beans with pork will have you dancing in the streets being it is the musical food.
I think there is a lot we in the western world can learn. We have been very wasteful of our natural resources. I suspect this will hit you right between the eyes this winter and the next when you look at your gas heating bills and wonder why the people who built your house designed it to exclude all free energy and instead replaced it with inefficent non-renewable sources (such as your furnace) where you have to buy the fuel month after month after month.
Check out the Solar Decathalon. The work presented there is very exciting.
Then look around you and try to figure out if there is anything in your house that doesn't have to be torn apart to be rebuilt.
In this city if I go to the new construction areas I see the contractors have not learned much in the last 50 years. They still think houses need furnaces for instance. I know for a fact they do not.
Mod parent up. Yes - exactly. Your anaolgy is very appropriate. However I think this kid might be off the scale.
There is one thing about Koreans however. I know from personal experiance that they have a perfection fetish and that this is very emotionally damaging. It probably explains some of the Korean wars.
If the kids has this inside him then fine. If he has parents who are out to drive him then it will be harmful. We do not know how his mind works.
Sometimes these things come in a a special gift and in other areas he will be normal. In other cases the intelligence is very broad and in this case he would feel like a fish out of water if left in the main system.
kids at the upper and lower 10 percentiles should not be in the main stream. Whether university is right for him is an open question. I suspect they have nothing else to challenge him.
He will find physics challenging.
As for the social side - well - he'll have to do the best he can. If anyone wants to ponder what it is like to be the brightest kid in the classroom then consider how it would feel to be sitting in a classroom of monkeys being taught by a monkey.
Once you get past the 99th percentile the measuring stick no longer is working.
So the post is not insightful. I could have moderated it down but I chose to reply instead.
Please note that I am not talking about accelerating someone with a high 80's average. I'm talking about those few kids that nail 100% time after time after time and don't bother to study becuase there is nothing to study.
For them, being in a gr 12 math class is like asking a normal "A" student to take a grade 2 math class.
I had the same experiances. In addition to having to sit for literally years in a class full of people who could not understand the maths - and hense I was not challenged - I was bullied as well. In the adult world this would have been called assult and battery which is a criminal offense.
What social benefit is there for having to endure a prison system.
It was a condition of employment. No office - good by!
Programmers can't function efficiently without an office. I would say the same goes for sysadmins. Salesmen can get along without an office - but not technical people who need to concentrate
Yes - but in Washington apparently there is no personal income tax. So Microsoft programmers are managing to slip through the personal income taxes other states charge.
Oh well - guess I was dreaming that Microsoft might be guilty of tax evasion eh?
Does this mean Microsoft has to pay income taxes in every country adn state of the world where someone might buy some of their products? Since they havn't done so would their programmers be guilty of tax evasion?
Most people didn't realise that the nuclear concentrations performed in Tennisee in the 40's were dangerous. Richard Feyman almost had a heart attack when he saw their storage system and boldy ran to the powers in charge (L. Groves) to explain the whole plant would blow up unless they stacked the Uranium Hexafloride properly.
The simple fact of the matter is that it is not a good idea to poll the general public what should be done because the general public has no clue what we are dealing with.
Here is how. The new energy sources have already been discovered but have not been exploited. I like technology that is decades old because we can count on it working!
1) Thermal decomposition.
Put some hydrocarbons in a bucket - put the lid on - heat it up under pressure and we get oil. There is a plant near a butterball turkey plant that is doing this. We can use thermal decomposition for any organic wastes including sewage. However we might be better off turning sewage into organic fertilizers.
2) Fischer Tropshe.
Put some carbon (or hydrocarbon) in a bucket. put on the lid - heat it up under pressure and inject water. Depending on how you do this you can get liquid fuels or gas such as methane. The Germans did this int he 2nd world war from Coal and South Africa has been doing this as well. Its tried and proven. This will be the basis for the Hydrogen plants Suncor is building at a billion a pop for their tar sands expansion. They decided to not go nuclear. Their pres doesn't want to hear the word used in fact. The next pres may feel different.
3) Passive and active Solar.
I know this will work. Photons arrive with high energy which is typically not captured. If you take a glass tube and evaccuate it and put a collector then without cooling the collector will melt. So this has a lot of potential. The energy per meter is max about 1 KWatt. That is a considerable amount of energy that can be captured. Our houses were designed to discard almost all incomming solar energy and then replace this with energy from a "cheaper" source. This IMHO is a very short sighted plan. A well designed solar house can be cheaper to build because you can leave out the furnace. If you check Fiberglass insulation - then you'll note that the R50 insulation costs about $1 buk per square foot. Wall construction labor and other materials are not changed - its just the wall thickness needs to be about a foot. A 2000 sq ft home might be 30x40 so that is about 1400 square feet of wall surface plus another 2000 for the ceiling. Upping the insulation in the building envelope to R50+ would cost only $3500 or so extra. This will _really_ cut down heating and cooling bills and has a pay back of only a couple years because you can probably subtract out the HVAC.
4) Vaccume panels.
Europe has these in testing now. They can do R40 per inch. The ones they are testing are a passive system. The factory builds the vaccume into the panel and once installed they are expected to last several decades. I figure one can use an active system. A vaccume pump can be purchased for $250 bux (maybe too small - but it only needs to top up the vaccume). Or a serviceman could come by once a year to pump down your walls. R 40 - R70 is in the range we need. Replaceable panels are also an option. IE - they can look like siding.
5) Geothermal coupling with radiant heating.
Currently quotes in Calgary are $20,000 for a contractor to install a soil coupled heat pump. Water Furnace International has systems running as well.
To couple your HVAC to an air source which has low thermal coupling and a delta-Temp that wanders all over the graph is just stupid. Soil or water coupling is far more efficient and the temperature gradients are much much smaller.
For that $20,000 an active solar system with more insulation will probably eliminate about 90% of the energy costs so I really think the Geothermal coupled heat pump is probably not the way to go.
6) Fiber Optics and the virtual office
Most people are now doing Intellectual service work which typically can be done from a home office. A virtual commute will add 2-3 hours per day of free time. Why sit in a traffic jam with 6 lane stop and go listening to the radio with the A/C on max when you can just walk across the hallway to an office which is far more comfortable than any cubical employers want to provide? I have been doing this since 1980. I made more money and had time to spend with my kids. I
Since I live in Calgary Canada and work in the industry then I'll put it this way. If you know where to drill then why don't you make some suggestions. British oil companies certainly don't because the North Sea peaked in 1999-2000.
Mexican oil companies don't because Canatarell production is expected to go into terminal decline in 2006 and Pemex has some prospects but not much. Indoneasia doesn't seem to know where to drill because Indoneasia became an oil importer this year as did Britian. Indoneasia use to supply Australia.
Iran doesn't know where to drill. The Saudis say they can up production but they have been saying this for years and so far no real joy. The USA doesn't know where to drill because their production peaked about 1970. Two years ago the largest geophysical field operations company in the world shut down North American operations. It seems there was not enough exploration work to keep them going. They were a client of mine.
Ok. More research.
1) Saudi Ghawar field 5 MBOPD 2) Mexico Canatarell 2.1 MBOPD less 14% per year starting 2006 3) Kuwait Bergan 1 MBOPD 4) China DaQing 1 MBOPD less 7% per year starting 2004
These are the 4 largest sorted by production. Ghawar is running over 55% water cut with over 7 million barrels of water injected per day. 65% comes from North Ghawar. Original reserves were estimated to be about 65 billion barrels and 55 billion have been produced to date. Most of the flank wells on the anticline have become injector wells. With the remaining reserves clearly dropping (but no acknowledgment from the house of Saud) the arial extent of that feild is significantly smaller today than it was say in the 70's. It is about 1/4 or less in fact. The writing is on the wall and the Saudi's can lose 2 MBOPD production at the drop of a hat.
So I don't know where you get your information from. I get my information from industry sources including the Geological Survey of Canada. I do consider myself informed. Now if you want to beleive the DOE be my guest.
As for the Tar Sands. Yup - it will last a good long while because there is something like 1.8 trillion barrels in them. However with over $1 billion per year being invested in production facilities we are going to be lucky to get production up to 3.3 MBOPD by 2015.
So if you feel you are up to it I guess we can go head to head and compare each and every oil project in the world. When we do this the numbers come out to 2007 as being the most optimistic realistic estimate for the world peak.
But yes - you are correct there is lots of oil adn lots more to be found. We just cannot find it fast enough to replace our consumption.
A MASSIVE building program to tap every renewable and alternative energy source should have been underway 10 years ago. In addition we should re-engineer our homes to capture as much solar energy as possible, probably via more insulation - over R50 and passive solar designs.
There is no reason that all new housing should not be energy self sufficient in fact. It can be done. I know how to do it. I've been in houses in Calgary that demonstrate the principals - houses without a furnance.
Since North American Natural Gas production peaked in 2001 we have lost a large percentage of the North American Fertilizer industry and now we'll be losing the plastics industry. The president of DOW Chemicals has already announced possible plastics shortages. This is due more to hurricane damage - but declining production is in the picture as well.
The way I see it - North America does not have a workable energy program in place. The world does not have a workable energy program in place. The political administrations are dreaming and are proposing solutions like wars.
As I see it - the only reason the UK and USA are in Iraq right now is control over oil and a desire to liberate Iraqii oil. I would prefer to see engineering solutions instead.
If people think nuclear waste is difficult to handle then I will suggest it is a lot better to handle than 1000's of body bags filled with dead kids.
Clearly they have the wrong people making the decisions. The obvious answer is to reprocess the fuel and pull out the Plutonium which can then be combined with uranium to make mox and stuffed back into reactors where it can be burned.
If the waste is from light water pressurized reactors then the next best thing is to ship it to Canada where we have Candu reactors and we'll burn it for them. Waste from light water reactors is still more radioactive than what the Candu system is designed to run on (natural uranium - 0.7% U235, 99.3% U238) So a Candu can make very good use of it. But it should be reprocessed to remove some of the undesirables.
We need about 75 BIG 1GWe Candu's to support Tar Sands operations but it seems only Total SA has caught on. Why waste 25% or more of the carbon mined producing CO+CO2 as a byproduct of generating the Hydrogen we are desperatly short of when you can just electrolize water? The difference is that by 2015 Tar Sands will be ramping up to about 3.3 million Barrels of Synthetic crude per day. With Nuclear assitance that can be closer to 5 million. By 2015 I expect the world will be in a HUGE energy crisis because I expect world oil production to peak by 2007 and then go into decline. If we have 8 years decline of 3% per year that is a loss of about 20 million barrles per day of world production. (World production is about 82 million barrels per day. USA consumption is about 20 million barrels per day. China is about 7 million and India about 2.5 million barrels per day. Yet I see the press blames China and India for high oil demand and hense high oil prices. Thats the press for you - just a source of distortion.)
If anyone things the oil crisis of the 70's was bad I can say right now that is was a picnic compared to what is comming!
Next, we should be building the advanced Integral Fast Reactors (IFR's) which Argonne Labs designed by about 1994. The program was shut down by Clinton.
The wisdom of this will be very clear long before 2014. By then the short sightness will be felt every summer when the electricty is out and also every winter when the heating oil is short.
IFR technology is proven and it burns all actinides leaving only short lived waste which has industrial uses such as gamma sources and atomic batteries.
In short - none of the so called waste is really waste. It is actually very valuable if used intelligently.
Furthermore it can solve our energy needs for at least 100's if not 1000's of years.
Well - the mod request was just ignorant. That happens sometimes.
Your point is well taken. I agree we are nowhere near understanding the results of modification of the gene pool. However there are some defects that we can try to repair and we'll learn a little from that. I'm thinking down's syndrom, bubble boy syndrom and things like that.
However you are correct that something like this while it may work may also have side effects we cannot anticipate.
Gene pool manipulation of a higher organism such as a human is not as dangerous as of other plants and animals. Already Monsanto has unleashed genetically modified rape. It is not under control. Our laws do not make it illegal it would seem for Monsanto to contaminate farmer's seed however it is illegal for farmers to use contaminated seed as has been pointed out in the Canadian case against Percy Schmeiser. http://www.percyschmeiser.com/
If we get genetically modified viruses and bacteria - those that reproduce at a cellular level as do fungus - then we may well be in serious trouble.
Genetics are evolving. This is what these new diseases and strains which jump species is all about - that is evolution. We tend to force evolution along in directions which are quite hazardous to our own well being and this has been proven by the superbugs hospitals have bred through the over use of antibiotics and sterilants. I'll give a simple example:
With the new anti-bateriacide detergants... does anyone really believe that it is a good idea to kill all the bacteria? Does anyone really think it is even possible? I can tell you that I have sterilized in an autoclave for over 2 hours at over 121C and still have samples contaminate. I have done this 3x in fact - once today - then let sit for 24 hours then do it again - and again! and still some will contaminate.
If food is present there is something that is going to come in to eat it. This is a simple biological fact of life.
So the issue is that we want to keep the benign and easy to control stuff around because it mops up the food supply that would otherwise be consumed by quite hardy and potentially very dangerous bugs.
What this means is that if some overzealous housewife were really able to kill 99.9% of the bugs in her kitchen then I would not want to eat in that kitchen because what would move in to take the place of what she killed would probably be able to eat me alive! That is the isssue with the hospitals. They have bred very dangerous bugs through well meaning but misguided efforts.
So, if the medical system has already shown it cannot properly manage say antibiotics for instance - then what of genetic recombination?
You are quite right to point out it has a dangerous side and we really need to proceed with a great deal of caution.
However I still feel there are specific areas where we can learn something and maybe achieve something. Fighting cancer is probably going to fall into this category. Fighting HIC with a magic bullet allso may fall into this category. At the some time I wonder if we'll unleash some new little prions or a new virus that will wipe out 99% of the population as they did in "12 Monkeys".
Probably the military's work in dangerous bugs is more dangerous than the medical community. At least the medical community are trying to do something positive for mankind. The purpose of the military is totally evil. Isn't it interesting how society can justify pure evil in the name of god and defense.
AH yes - Network solutions was bought by Verisign. It was really Network solutions who screwed up. They didn't even follow their own poliies on lame names back then. There was a lot of crap going on.
How is this different than someone stealing your identity and going to the bank and withdrawing your money and the bank says what? You don't have any money anymore because we gave it to someone else? Bullshit. It is the Banks responsibility to ensure they are dealing with who they think they are dealing with and ditto for Network Solutions. As I said before, Network Solutions could have fixed the problem with a simple DNS change and that only takes a few minutes. For Network solutions to hide behind their own error and refuse to correct things until a Judge orders them to is just bullshit.
IMHO Network solutions should be held liable because it was their error.
Yes - I think it was Verisign. This is a DNS entry which could have been fixed in a few minutes. This is not like he absconded with the website and couldn't be reached. The website is an address in a nameserver! People should understand this. The issue is beauracatic bungling and Verisign was doing a lot of this back then.
Yes, I apay my ISP to get access to internet content. My ISP connects via the local Telephone company and they pay for access as well. The local Telephone company pays to get access to the POP's (Point of Presence). We are all paying to get access to internet content. I would like to know how it is legal for the food chain to suddenly switch direction at the connection to the servers that run Wikimedia.
I would propose that if one looks at this legally then it is an unfair trade practice. To bad I am not a lawyer.
The point in countries other than the USA who connect to pop's in the USA is that these telcos pay Americans for access to internet content yet they refuse to pey citizens of their own country. In the USA the principal is the same - one group of people are being paid while another group are being billed.
I have not in detail checked your calcs but I did pick up on another simplification. Yes - max incident solar is about 1 Kwatt per square meter. However that is at high noon with the sun directly overhead which places you between the tropic of cancer and capricorn. Anywhere else you get less.
The solar constant is about 1300 watts per square meter. NOAA has satelite data available but it doesn't matter for our purposes.
We loose about 300 watts due to atmospheric absorbtion. This is about 1/4 and that is directly overhead. If you pass the light through 2x as much atmosphere and assuming it is a clean atmosphere without clouds then you can expect to lose an additional 1/4 right? Ie you get 9/16th which is about/12 for about 650 watts at a angle you can estimate with a little geometry.
Between dawn and that time and from that time is the afternoon to dusk you get far less energy available.
So you made the assumption of 6 hours per day. You are probably about twice what you should be considering.
I used an overall of 10% in my calculations. IE 10% of 24 or 2.4 hours per day. I was conservative.
If your estimates on solar panel costs are in line then you are correct that it is not yet cost effective.
I've made some other posts in this subject. Check my user name and read them. Without doing detailed analysis I think my numers were that with 80 square meters of collector area then we get something that approaches what we need.... IE - energy for the house and car.
Not all this needs to be electrical. I was thinking on the idea of steam electrolysis and space and hot water heating. The energy in the photons is actually quite hot and it is hotter for instance than what you get comming out of a nuclear reactor. Which this much potential Delta-T available we should be able to engineer systems that are actually quite efficient but we will be working with potential thermal temperaturs of over 1000 degrees. This is good but it is dangerous. We are really dealing with a full blown thermonuclear reactor here and we need to treat it with respect.
Good work!!! Keep up the good work. A breakthrough in this area can be worth billions.
It is probably #2. I say probably because with additional effciency you could possibly get away with it for a short time. However!
If you check the BP reveiw as I suggested then you will see that in order for us to use natural gas to supply both electricity and space heat even with a more effcient system will require us to grow our natural gas supply. This is no longer possible. We are on the down side.
Imports of LNG are a possibility however the infrastructure cannot be built fast enough. I made this comment in about 2001 to a head honcho in the Fertilizer industry and was promptly dennounced and the comment was that we can import for x dollars per mmcf so how can I possibly suggest otherwise. Within 2 years the industry was permenantly shutting down operations.
We _can_ however use the coal gasification method to create CH4 from carbon sources and water. This is what Suncor is doing at the tar sands, but they won't be starting with coal. We can even put this into pipe lines. From an energy standpoint it actually might make sense to use the coal to make CH4 which is put into the pipeline instead of using the coal to make electricity and then loosing about 1/2 the energy at the generating station and another 25% in transmission losses.
Thus - if we can figure out a cost effective way to have natural gas arrive at the homeowner's home then I really like the idea of a small co-gen.
Yet this is 2005. Peak natural gas production was in 2001. Gas is sitting between $13 and $14 per mmfc. By 2010 we will have a smaller supply of gas. Care to suggest what the price might be? At $18 USD per GJ for methane it is as expensive on an energy basis as electicity sold at 5 cents per KWh. So at $14 bux I don't think you can pay for the capital cost of the equipment quickley enough. Note an mmcf is _about_ the same size as a GJ. Conversion factor is about 1.05.
I think in North America The system might be doomed to failure for lack of feedstocks. This same idea BTW was hatched by Calpine (NYSE:CPN) about 2000 and their stock prices at the time were about $45 bux. Check them now. CPN had so many co-gens on order that GE, Germany and Japan could not build them fast enough. They were planning on burning the whole North American methane gas supply all by themselves.
It clearly didn't fly as an idea. But that was actually quite obvious at the time and I _was_ asking people in some of the stock chat groups where CPN was planning on getting CH4 to run the co-gens and that was in 2000. Some suggested new turbines were actually multifueled!!! and can run on coal dust. I dunno - seemed strange to me but maybe some can.
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Now why use the grid? The reason is that the grid is a cheap battery. Of course if the power feed from all the little guys is not balenced then the big utilities end up with spinning assets that aren't producing power. This saves on fuel but it costs them money so they don't like it. Windmills BTW will have this effect.
Here is another reason. On a cold day you may be able to produce more electricty than you can use and on a warm day in order to get the electricty you need then your waste heat has no useful purpose. So any little co-gen in the home is not going to be perfectly matched to your fluctuating needs. A system where you produce the heat you need and draw or push the electricty might be more optimal. If you can tie in photovoltaics then you will be even better off!!! Especially in the summer time. If you are re-thinking how to properly engineer such a system then you want to look at heat pumps and earth couplings. Water Furnace International has some systems. Also there are projects in Europe where they store the thermal energy from summer to use in winter.
If you combine this with super insulation in the house then perhaps it all fits together. PV's can be used to manufacture hydrogen as well.
I think you would want about a 25-35 HP diesel in a Prius. This would probably be better than what they used. However they do run the gasoline engine on the atkinson cycle and that helps.
You could try picking up a Volkswagon engine from a wreak and retrofit it.
The problem is that you are going to have to hack the engine control system. That wonderful transmission design has to be computer controlled and matched to the power requiremnts of the car and the performace of the engine. So hacking the control system is going to be about the same as what the Toyota engineers faced when they designed it.
You better redo your calulations. Also electrolysis is quite efficient. Compressing the hydrogen however is going to take energy which will be converted to heat and can be used to heat a swimming pool in the summer and your home in the winter.
But you are going to need more than just the roof I think.
But show us your calcs and if they stand up then you get tthe kudos!!!
Slashdot Mirror
We already have hashers who have been in space! No country in the world has conquered the HASH. So we are well on our way to making the required improvemnts.
Calgary Full Moon Hash House Harriers invites everyone to our 1000's hash to be held on our property in our soon to be built FULL MOON BASE.
/.
Like all full moon hashers - we run every full moon - come moonmud, moondust or moonshine.
So how any other Full Moon Hashes have their moonbases in planning?
There have to be lots of hashers in
Yes - but they don't have a "complete" set. last I looked I felt I was expected to sort through some salesmans' demented mind.
If you can detect the passing Gravitational Wave then does this mean it has done work? If so then the waves should attenuate.
So in what form is the energy of a Gravitational Wave? With EM the energy travels in the form of a photon. Does this mean if we detect a gravitational wave that we have detected a graviton?
If so is it quantized? Also does this mean that somehow the graviton interacts with other mater? Wouldn't this unify gravitation into the EM force?
Well - I don't know enough physics to answer but I suspect that gravitational energy might actually be continuous.
However the mechanizm by which gravitational energy (which should have mass because E=MC^2 - except they are thinking "rest" mass and the rest mass may be zero) gets transfered from the gravitational wave into whatever it gets transfered into may have a consequence. If we have a pair of spinning black holes for instance then this may be a way for them to leak energy and thus they might slowly evaporate.
I've been looking for the Feynman lectures on physics for a while. Where did you get them from?
Well you can laugh because I know something about sustainability and I am not left wing. I can grow TONNES of organic delicious gormet food and it normally sells wholesale for over $12 bux per kilo. So - maybe I'll just get rich eh?
To a large degree it is all about knowledge and engineering.
BTW - I could NEVER sell any of this stuff in China for a price like that because they've known these technologies for over 1000 years.
Often people pay dearly for food because they are either lazy or simply have no idea of the real costs of production. A sack of dried beans for instance costs less than 20 cents per pound. Dried peas are even cheaper. So for about $10 bux I can pretty much fill a 45 gallon drum with beans with pork. If you buy this at the supermarket I suspect $10 bux might get you a case.
Of course beans with pork are not gormet. However if you live in a poor 3rd world country then maybe beans with pork will have you dancing in the streets being it is the musical food.
I think there is a lot we in the western world can learn. We have been very wasteful of our natural resources. I suspect this will hit you right between the eyes this winter and the next when you look at your gas heating bills and wonder why the people who built your house designed it to exclude all free energy and instead replaced it with inefficent non-renewable sources (such as your furnace) where you have to buy the fuel month after month after month.
Check out the Solar Decathalon. The work presented there is very exciting.
Then look around you and try to figure out if there is anything in your house that doesn't have to be torn apart to be rebuilt.
In this city if I go to the new construction areas I see the contractors have not learned much in the last 50 years. They still think houses need furnaces for instance. I know for a fact they do not.
Mod parent up. Yes - exactly. Your anaolgy is very appropriate. However I think this kid might be off the scale.
There is one thing about Koreans however. I know from personal experiance that they have a perfection fetish and that this is very emotionally damaging. It probably explains some of the Korean wars.
If the kids has this inside him then fine. If he has parents who are out to drive him then it will be harmful. We do not know how his mind works.
Sometimes these things come in a a special gift and in other areas he will be normal. In other cases the intelligence is very broad and in this case he would feel like a fish out of water if left in the main system.
kids at the upper and lower 10 percentiles should not be in the main stream. Whether university is right for him is an open question. I suspect they have nothing else to challenge him.
He will find physics challenging.
As for the social side - well - he'll have to do the best he can. If anyone wants to ponder what it is like to be the brightest kid in the classroom then consider how it would feel to be sitting in a classroom of monkeys being taught by a monkey.
Once you get past the 99th percentile the measuring stick no longer is working.
So the post is not insightful. I could have moderated it down but I chose to reply instead.
Please note that I am not talking about accelerating someone with a high 80's average. I'm talking about those few kids that nail 100% time after time after time and don't bother to study becuase there is nothing to study.
For them, being in a gr 12 math class is like asking a normal "A" student to take a grade 2 math class.
I had the same experiances. In addition to having to sit for literally years in a class full of people who could not understand the maths - and hense I was not challenged - I was bullied as well. In the adult world this would have been called assult and battery which is a criminal offense.
What social benefit is there for having to endure a prison system.
It was a condition of employment. No office - good by!
Programmers can't function efficiently without an office. I would say the same goes for sysadmins. Salesmen can get along without an office - but not technical people who need to concentrate
Yes - but in Washington apparently there is no personal income tax. So Microsoft programmers are managing to slip through the personal income taxes other states charge.
Oh well - guess I was dreaming that Microsoft might be guilty of tax evasion eh?
Does this mean Microsoft has to pay income taxes in every country adn state of the world where someone might buy some of their products? Since they havn't done so would their programmers be guilty of tax evasion?
Can we throw them all in jail now?
Yes - you are correct. If you want the cheapest solution then Nukes are a go.
But I sort of compare them to women. I don't want a cheap woman - do you?
Funny but the story is Woman's Institute! RRRiight!
This is very well said.
Most people didn't realise that the nuclear concentrations performed in Tennisee in the 40's were dangerous. Richard Feyman almost had a heart attack when he saw their storage system and boldy ran to the powers in charge (L. Groves) to explain the whole plant would blow up unless they stacked the Uranium Hexafloride properly.
The simple fact of the matter is that it is not a good idea to poll the general public what should be done because the general public has no clue what we are dealing with.
Clearly the pollies don't either.
Here is how. The new energy sources have already been discovered but have not been exploited. I like technology that is decades old because we can count on it working!
1) Thermal decomposition.
Put some hydrocarbons in a bucket - put the lid on - heat it up under pressure and we get oil. There is a plant near a butterball turkey plant that is doing this. We can use thermal decomposition for any organic wastes including sewage. However we might be better off turning sewage into organic fertilizers.
2) Fischer Tropshe.
Put some carbon (or hydrocarbon) in a bucket. put on the lid - heat it up under pressure and inject water. Depending on how you do this you can get liquid fuels or gas such as methane. The Germans did this int he 2nd world war from Coal and South Africa has been doing this as well. Its tried and proven. This will be the basis for the Hydrogen plants Suncor is building at a billion a pop for their tar sands expansion. They decided to not go nuclear. Their pres doesn't want to hear the word used in fact. The next pres may feel different.
3) Passive and active Solar.
I know this will work. Photons arrive with high energy which is typically not captured. If you take a glass tube and evaccuate it and put a collector then without cooling the collector will melt. So this has a lot of potential. The energy per meter is max about 1 KWatt. That is a considerable amount of energy that can be captured. Our houses were designed to discard almost all incomming solar energy and then replace this with energy from a "cheaper" source. This IMHO is a very short sighted plan. A well designed solar house can be cheaper to build because you can leave out the furnace. If you check Fiberglass insulation - then you'll note that the R50 insulation costs about $1 buk per square foot. Wall construction labor and other materials are not changed - its just the wall thickness needs to be about a foot. A 2000 sq ft home might be 30x40 so that is about 1400 square feet of wall surface plus another 2000 for the ceiling. Upping the insulation in the building envelope to R50+ would cost only $3500 or so extra. This will _really_ cut down heating and cooling bills and has a pay back of only a couple years because you can probably subtract out the HVAC.
4) Vaccume panels.
Europe has these in testing now. They can do R40 per inch. The ones they are testing are a passive system. The factory builds the vaccume into the panel and once installed they are expected to last several decades. I figure one can use an active system. A vaccume pump can be purchased for $250 bux (maybe too small - but it only needs to top up the vaccume). Or a serviceman could come by once a year to pump down your walls. R 40 - R70 is in the range we need. Replaceable panels are also an option. IE - they can look like siding.
5) Geothermal coupling with radiant heating.
Currently quotes in Calgary are $20,000 for a contractor to install a soil coupled heat pump. Water Furnace International has systems running as well.
To couple your HVAC to an air source which has low thermal coupling and a delta-Temp that wanders all over the graph is just stupid. Soil or water coupling is far more efficient and the temperature gradients are much much smaller.
For that $20,000 an active solar system with more insulation will probably eliminate about 90% of the energy costs so I really think the Geothermal coupled heat pump is probably not the way to go.
6) Fiber Optics and the virtual office
Most people are now doing Intellectual service work which typically can be done from a home office. A virtual commute will add 2-3 hours per day of free time. Why sit in a traffic jam with 6 lane stop and go listening to the radio with the A/C on max when you can just walk across the hallway to an office which is far more comfortable than any cubical employers want to provide? I have been doing this since 1980. I made more money and had time to spend with my kids. I
Since I live in Calgary Canada and work in the industry then I'll put it this way. If you know where to drill then why don't you make some suggestions. British oil companies certainly don't because the North Sea peaked in 1999-2000.
Mexican oil companies don't because Canatarell production is expected to go into terminal decline in 2006 and Pemex has some prospects but not much. Indoneasia doesn't seem to know where to drill because Indoneasia became an oil importer this year as did Britian. Indoneasia use to supply Australia.
Iran doesn't know where to drill. The Saudis say they can up production but they have been saying this for years and so far no real joy. The USA doesn't know where to drill because their production peaked about 1970. Two years ago the largest geophysical field operations company in the world shut down North American operations. It seems there was not enough exploration work to keep them going. They were a client of mine.
Ok. More research.
1) Saudi Ghawar field 5 MBOPD
2) Mexico Canatarell 2.1 MBOPD less 14% per year starting 2006
3) Kuwait Bergan 1 MBOPD
4) China DaQing 1 MBOPD less 7% per year starting 2004
These are the 4 largest sorted by production. Ghawar is running over 55% water cut with over 7 million barrels of water injected per day. 65% comes from North Ghawar. Original reserves were estimated to be about 65 billion barrels and 55 billion have been produced to date. Most of the flank wells on the anticline have become injector wells. With the remaining reserves clearly dropping (but no acknowledgment from the house of Saud) the arial extent of that feild is significantly smaller today than it was say in the 70's. It is about 1/4 or less in fact. The writing is on the wall and the Saudi's can lose 2 MBOPD production at the drop of a hat.
So I don't know where you get your information from. I get my information from industry sources including the Geological Survey of Canada. I do consider myself informed. Now if you want to beleive the DOE be my guest.
As for the Tar Sands. Yup - it will last a good long while because there is something like 1.8 trillion barrels in them. However with over $1 billion per year being invested in production facilities we are going to be lucky to get production up to 3.3 MBOPD by 2015.
So if you feel you are up to it I guess we can go head to head and compare each and every oil project in the world. When we do this the numbers come out to 2007 as being the most optimistic realistic estimate for the world peak.
But yes - you are correct there is lots of oil adn lots more to be found. We just cannot find it fast enough to replace our consumption.
A MASSIVE building program to tap every renewable and alternative energy source should have been underway 10 years ago. In addition we should re-engineer our homes to capture as much solar energy as possible, probably via more insulation - over R50 and passive solar designs.
There is no reason that all new housing should not be energy self sufficient in fact. It can be done. I know how to do it. I've been in houses in Calgary that demonstrate the principals - houses without a furnance.
Since North American Natural Gas production peaked in 2001 we have lost a large percentage of the North American Fertilizer industry and now we'll be losing the plastics industry. The president of DOW Chemicals has already announced possible plastics shortages. This is due more to hurricane damage - but declining production is in the picture as well.
The way I see it - North America does not have a workable energy program in place. The world does not have a workable energy program in place. The political administrations are dreaming and are proposing solutions like wars.
As I see it - the only reason the UK and USA are in Iraq right now is control over oil and a desire to liberate Iraqii oil. I would prefer to see engineering solutions instead.
If people think nuclear waste is difficult to handle then I will suggest it is a lot better to handle than 1000's of body bags filled with dead kids.
Clearly they have the wrong people making the decisions. The obvious answer is to reprocess the fuel and pull out the Plutonium which can then be combined with uranium to make mox and stuffed back into reactors where it can be burned.
If the waste is from light water pressurized reactors then the next best thing is to ship it to Canada where we have Candu reactors and we'll burn it for them. Waste from light water reactors is still more radioactive than what the Candu system is designed to run on (natural uranium - 0.7% U235, 99.3% U238) So a Candu can make very good use of it. But it should be reprocessed to remove some of the undesirables.
We need about 75 BIG 1GWe Candu's to support Tar Sands operations but it seems only Total SA has caught on. Why waste 25% or more of the carbon mined producing CO+CO2 as a byproduct of generating the Hydrogen we are desperatly short of when you can just electrolize water? The difference is that by 2015 Tar Sands will be ramping up to about 3.3 million Barrels of Synthetic crude per day. With Nuclear assitance that can be closer to 5 million. By 2015 I expect the world will be in a HUGE energy crisis because I expect world oil production to peak by 2007 and then go into decline. If we have 8 years decline of 3% per year that is a loss of about 20 million barrles per day of world production. (World production is about 82 million barrels per day. USA consumption is about 20 million barrels per day. China is about 7 million and India about 2.5 million barrels per day. Yet I see the press blames China and India for high oil demand and hense high oil prices. Thats the press for you - just a source of distortion.)
If anyone things the oil crisis of the 70's was bad I can say right now that is was a picnic compared to what is comming!
Next, we should be building the advanced Integral Fast Reactors (IFR's) which Argonne Labs designed by about 1994. The program was shut down by Clinton.
The wisdom of this will be very clear long before 2014. By then the short sightness will be felt every summer when the electricty is out and also every winter when the heating oil is short.
IFR technology is proven and it burns all actinides leaving only short lived waste which has industrial uses such as gamma sources and atomic batteries.
In short - none of the so called waste is really waste. It is actually very valuable if used intelligently.
Furthermore it can solve our energy needs for at least 100's if not 1000's of years.
Well - the mod request was just ignorant. That happens sometimes.
Your point is well taken. I agree we are nowhere near understanding the results of modification of the gene pool. However there are some defects that we can try to repair and we'll learn a little from that. I'm thinking down's syndrom, bubble boy syndrom and things like that.
However you are correct that something like this while it may work may also have side effects we cannot anticipate.
Gene pool manipulation of a higher organism such as a human is not as dangerous as of other plants and animals. Already Monsanto has unleashed genetically modified rape. It is not under control. Our laws do not make it illegal it would seem for Monsanto to contaminate farmer's seed however it is illegal for farmers to use contaminated seed as has been pointed out in the Canadian case against Percy Schmeiser. http://www.percyschmeiser.com/
If we get genetically modified viruses and bacteria - those that reproduce at a cellular level as do fungus - then we may well be in serious trouble.
Genetics are evolving. This is what these new diseases and strains which jump species is all about - that is evolution. We tend to force evolution along in directions which are quite hazardous to our own well being and this has been proven by the superbugs hospitals have bred through the over use of antibiotics and sterilants. I'll give a simple example:
With the new anti-bateriacide detergants... does anyone really believe that it is a good idea to kill all the bacteria? Does anyone really think it is even possible? I can tell you that I have sterilized in an autoclave for over 2 hours at over 121C and still have samples contaminate. I have done this 3x in fact - once today - then let sit for 24 hours then do it again - and again! and still some will contaminate.
If food is present there is something that is going to come in to eat it. This is a simple biological fact of life.
So the issue is that we want to keep the benign and easy to control stuff around because it mops up the food supply that would otherwise be consumed by quite hardy and potentially very dangerous bugs.
What this means is that if some overzealous housewife were really able to kill 99.9% of the bugs in her kitchen then I would not want to eat in that kitchen because what would move in to take the place of what she killed would probably be able to eat me alive! That is the isssue with the hospitals. They have bred very dangerous bugs through well meaning but misguided efforts.
So, if the medical system has already shown it cannot properly manage say antibiotics for instance - then what of genetic recombination?
You are quite right to point out it has a dangerous side and we really need to proceed with a great deal of caution.
However I still feel there are specific areas where we can learn something and maybe achieve something. Fighting cancer is probably going to fall into this category. Fighting HIC with a magic bullet allso may fall into this category. At the some time I wonder if we'll unleash some new little prions or a new virus that will wipe out 99% of the population as they did in "12 Monkeys".
Probably the military's work in dangerous bugs is more dangerous than the medical community. At least the medical community are trying to do something positive for mankind. The purpose of the military is totally evil. Isn't it interesting how society can justify pure evil in the name of god and defense.
AH yes - Network solutions was bought by Verisign. It was really Network solutions who screwed up. They didn't even follow their own poliies on lame names back then. There was a lot of crap going on.
How is this different than someone stealing your identity and going to the bank and withdrawing your money and the bank says what? You don't have any money anymore because we gave it to someone else? Bullshit. It is the Banks responsibility to ensure they are dealing with who they think they are dealing with and ditto for Network Solutions. As I said before, Network Solutions could have fixed the problem with a simple DNS change and that only takes a few minutes. For Network solutions to hide behind their own error and refuse to correct things until a Judge orders them to is just bullshit.
IMHO Network solutions should be held liable because it was their error.
Yes - I think it was Verisign. This is a DNS entry which could have been fixed in a few minutes. This is not like he absconded with the website and couldn't be reached. The website is an address in a nameserver! People should understand this. The issue is beauracatic bungling and Verisign was doing a lot of this back then.
Yes, I apay my ISP to get access to internet content. My ISP connects via the local Telephone company and they pay for access as well. The local Telephone company pays to get access to the POP's (Point of Presence). We are all paying to get access to internet content. I would like to know how it is legal for the food chain to suddenly switch direction at the connection to the servers that run Wikimedia.
I would propose that if one looks at this legally then it is an unfair trade practice. To bad I am not a lawyer.
The point in countries other than the USA who connect to pop's in the USA is that these telcos pay Americans for access to internet content yet they refuse to pey citizens of their own country. In the USA the principal is the same - one group of people are being paid while another group are being billed.
I have not in detail checked your calcs but I did pick up on another simplification. Yes - max incident solar is about 1 Kwatt per square meter. However that is at high noon with the sun directly overhead which places you between the tropic of cancer and capricorn. Anywhere else you get less.
/12 for about 650 watts at a angle you can estimate with a little geometry.
The solar constant is about 1300 watts per square meter. NOAA has satelite data available but it doesn't matter for our purposes.
We loose about 300 watts due to atmospheric absorbtion. This is about 1/4 and that is directly overhead. If you pass the light through 2x as much atmosphere and assuming it is a clean atmosphere without clouds then you can expect to lose an additional 1/4 right? Ie you get 9/16th which is about
Between dawn and that time and from that time is the afternoon to dusk you get far less energy available.
So you made the assumption of 6 hours per day. You are probably about twice what you should be considering.
I used an overall of 10% in my calculations. IE 10% of 24 or 2.4 hours per day. I was conservative.
If your estimates on solar panel costs are in line then you are correct that it is not yet cost effective.
I've made some other posts in this subject. Check my user name and read them. Without doing detailed analysis I think my numers were that with 80 square meters of collector area then we get something that approaches what we need.... IE - energy for the house and car.
Not all this needs to be electrical. I was thinking on the idea of steam electrolysis and space and hot water heating. The energy in the photons is actually quite hot and it is hotter for instance than what you get comming out of a nuclear reactor. Which this much potential Delta-T available we should be able to engineer systems that are actually quite efficient but we will be working with potential thermal temperaturs of over 1000 degrees. This is good but it is dangerous. We are really dealing with a full blown thermonuclear reactor here and we need to treat it with respect.
Good work!!! Keep up the good work. A breakthrough in this area can be worth billions.
It is probably #2. I say probably because with additional effciency you could possibly get away with it for a short time. However!
If you check the BP reveiw as I suggested then you will see that in order for us to use natural gas to supply both electricity and space heat even with a more effcient system will require us to grow our natural gas supply. This is no longer possible. We are on the down side.
Imports of LNG are a possibility however the infrastructure cannot be built fast enough. I made this comment in about 2001 to a head honcho in the Fertilizer industry and was promptly dennounced and the comment was that we can import for x dollars per mmcf so how can I possibly suggest otherwise. Within 2 years the industry was permenantly shutting down operations.
We _can_ however use the coal gasification method to create CH4 from carbon sources and water. This is what Suncor is doing at the tar sands, but they won't be starting with coal. We can even put this into pipe lines. From an energy standpoint it actually might make sense to use the coal to make CH4 which is put into the pipeline instead of using the coal to make electricity and then loosing about 1/2 the energy at the generating station and another 25% in transmission losses.
Thus - if we can figure out a cost effective way to have natural gas arrive at the homeowner's home then I really like the idea of a small co-gen.
Yet this is 2005. Peak natural gas production was in 2001. Gas is sitting between $13 and $14 per mmfc. By 2010 we will have a smaller supply of gas. Care to suggest what the price might be? At $18 USD per GJ for methane it is as expensive on an energy basis as electicity sold at 5 cents per KWh. So at $14 bux I don't think you can pay for the capital cost of the equipment quickley enough. Note an mmcf is _about_ the same size as a GJ. Conversion factor is about 1.05.
I think in North America The system might be doomed to failure for lack of feedstocks. This same idea BTW was hatched by Calpine (NYSE:CPN) about 2000 and their stock prices at the time were about $45 bux. Check them now. CPN had so many co-gens on order that GE, Germany and Japan could not build them fast enough. They were planning on burning the whole North American methane gas supply all by themselves.
It clearly didn't fly as an idea. But that was actually quite obvious at the time and I _was_ asking people in some of the stock chat groups where CPN was planning on getting CH4 to run the co-gens and that was in 2000. Some suggested new turbines were actually multifueled!!! and can run on coal dust. I dunno - seemed strange to me but maybe some can.
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Now why use the grid? The reason is that the grid is a cheap battery. Of course if the power feed from all the little guys is not balenced then the big utilities end up with spinning assets that aren't producing power. This saves on fuel but it costs them money so they don't like it. Windmills BTW will have this effect.
Here is another reason. On a cold day you may be able to produce more electricty than you can use and on a warm day in order to get the electricty you need then your waste heat has no useful purpose. So any little co-gen in the home is not going to be perfectly matched to your fluctuating needs. A system where you produce the heat you need and draw or push the electricty might be more optimal. If you can tie in photovoltaics then you will be even better off!!! Especially in the summer time. If you are re-thinking how to properly engineer such a system then you want to look at heat pumps and earth couplings. Water Furnace International has some systems. Also there are projects in Europe where they store the thermal energy from summer to use in winter.
If you combine this with super insulation in the house then perhaps it all fits together. PV's can be used to manufacture hydrogen as well.
I mentioned steam electrolysis in another post.
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The bottom line is that w
I think you would want about a 25-35 HP diesel in a Prius. This would probably be better than what they used. However they do run the gasoline engine on the atkinson cycle and that helps.
You could try picking up a Volkswagon engine from a wreak and retrofit it.
The problem is that you are going to have to hack the engine control system. That wonderful transmission design has to be computer controlled and matched to the power requiremnts of the car and the performace of the engine. So hacking the control system is going to be about the same as what the Toyota engineers faced when they designed it.
You better redo your calulations. Also electrolysis is quite efficient. Compressing the hydrogen however is going to take energy which will be converted to heat and can be used to heat a swimming pool in the summer and your home in the winter.
But you are going to need more than just the roof I think.
But show us your calcs and if they stand up then you get tthe kudos!!!