You're right, I'd like to point out also that the same atom can have different toxicity depending on its oxidation state. If you have seen Erin Brockovich, where the whole case was Cr(VII) being measured with the emission limit of Cr(III), causing poisoning among the population, well that's the same thing.
U and Pu are actinides, and that means they can have many different oxidation states, each with its own chemistry.
This is also why lead in gasoline and paint is carcinogen, while veterans have lived with lead bullets in their body for decades.
The incompetent idiots running this country has done again.
Please remark that elections are next year and it's quite unlikely the current right-wing government (Right party, Left party which is actually more centre, and Christian people's party) stands. Next government should likely be Worker's party, Socialist Left, and Centre Party (former Farmer's party). None of these should be especially inclined in favour of this law, and even inside the government there is criticism.
So, in brief: this is going to be like the time they proposed to move rusbrus (light vodka-based drinks) to the Vinmonopolet (if you don't know what it is you probably don't want to): talked about it, seen that everybody was insanely pissed off (taking alcohol from a Norwegian is like taking guns from a Texan), and forgot the matter as they probably noticed the current situation does not allow them to lose voters.
PS- you might notice there is a large party I did not mention, the Progress Party; they have a political attitude similar to American republicans, and therefore nobody wants to have any business with them. An alliance for the right-wing majority with the Progress party would likely result in massive voter defection. So until they get to 51% they count little.
Re:Ironically, that story isn't true
on
New Standard Keyboard
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
No, it's just a half-truth.
I think that it is simply unclear how they projected it. It was the nineteenth century after all, and some weird ideas were followed: eg, you can type typewriter with just keys on the top row (I read this was intended, for what reasons I'm not sure). Probably it was some trial and error, and they came with an half-baked design.
Oh, the exercise to the reader, yes: here is a Guinness record.
Imagine stretching your fingers over the keyboard to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V [on a Dvorak]
I have been using my own dvorak i18n-ized layout for a few years, and typing feels indeed more natural. For the shortcuts, Ctrl-V is actually quite close, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X a bit trickier, but they are all within the span of my hand.
Well, I'm not a statistician, but for what I have heard the methods of calculation of unemployment in continental EU are different from US and UK.
Among other things, I'm quite certain that detainees are not considered unemployed in the US (which have by far the largest detainee population in the western world), but they are in continental Europe. I heard also that people are considered unemployed as long as they collect welfare in the US, which lasts for some time (3 years maybe?), after which one is not officially counted as "unemployed", but I'm not sure of this one.
The article is bringing up the lack of natural resources of sodium borohydride why?
Well, I may lack respect, but I think the journalist does not know the difference between an atom (cannot produce) and a chemical compound (can produce given the blocks).
I don't really know what NaBH4 is mainly used for today, but I know it is a quite powerful reduction catalyst in organic chemistry (another one being LiAlH4, even more reactive). My organic chemistry professor used to tell the tale of the chemical plant of Cormano (north of Milan) where they didn't handle one of these hydrides properly, and "whose remains you can see when driving on the Tangenziale".
Anyway, the chemical industry is very flexible; during WWII, Japan made fuel out of rubber, which they had plenty of since they controlled the Dutch Indies, and America made rubber out of fuel at the same time. So, if this system should be adopted, production would probably catch up fairly quick since this is no new or exotic chemical.
but the cost of the platinum membrane is still prohibitively high
Indeed true, platinum is expensive. But, as reported in Larminie & Dicks, "Fuel Cell Systems Explained" (a standard textbook in fuel cell technology), the main cost of a fuel cell is surprisingly not the platinum catalyst on the polymer membrane, but the bipolar plates. These must seal hydrogen from coming into contact with air, provide cooling channels, and be tortuous enough to generate enough turbulence in the stream so that diffusion slowdown is minimised.
In short, bipolar plates require an awful load of machining, and good materials too since they work with a gas like hydrogen, which can embrittle welds.
On the other hand, platinum reserves are not enough to substitute the world's car fleet with fuel-cell powered vehicles using current technology. This should not be a big roadblock as new technologies are being experimented with. I mean, when the first T model was released, people still rode horses for some time anyway.
there's just not enough sodium borohydride in the entire world to produce enough fuel for this to work on a large scale.
The question is not that important. Sodium borohydride (NaBH4) is made up of sodium (quite common, as in sodium chloride), hydrogen (common too) and boron is fairly common too, according to this link. The fact you don't find steel, carbon fiber or many modern materials in nature does not mean it is a problem. NaBH4 is supposed to be a carrier of energy, not a source: it is converted to sodium borate during use, and this is later regenerated to sodium borohydride.
From my organic chemistry lectures I remember that acetylene (more properly "ethyne") is unstable. Kick it (or make an accident with a car running on it) strong enough, and it will dissociate into gaseous hydrogen (whose pressure will probably breach any tank), and carbon, liberating a whopping 211 kJ/mol in Gibbs free energy; hydrogen combustion with oxygen, as a comparison, is 237 (and it comes in cascade with the previous).
I thought most models/prototypes we have so far were less energy efficient than gasoline powered cars
Fortunately you thought wrong. The real roadblock is the price of fuel cells, which everybody expects to plummet once mass-production is commenced (today most production is pretty much manual), and of course the missing infrastructure.
electrolysis is simply not the most efficient way
Hard to substantiate. Current efficiencies in electrolysis processes rank up to 90% energy efficiency. This is however the "reported" one, which might be away from the standard operating point of equipment; 80% and 94% are reported here.
Compare with the 20-30% of internal combustion engines, which does normally not account for dead time in queues, where some gas is being consumed, which does not happen in fuel cells as there are no major moving parts to keep spinning.
Of course there are other considerations than just efficiency, as usability of current distribution networks (which favours the use of liquid fuels as methanol, formic acid), presence of existing technologies (reforming of natural gas, oil and hydrocarbons in general).
Remark: efficiency is often given (faultily) as the ratio of Work obtained / Available enthalpy ("W/Delta_H"), which is BS: Gibbs' free energy should be used, "W/Delta_G". This causes electrolysis processes to look a bit better than they atually are, since the reaction enthalpy is ca. 286 kJ/mol, while the Gibbs' free energy is less, about 237 kJ/mol. Therefore, we actually need a minimum of 237 kJ to split a mole of water. Don't be surprised when someone will claim "over 100% efficiency in electrolysis", because that is well possible if you use the enthalpy definition.
I notice that games like Battlefield 1942 never include scenarios like being one of the Soviet troops who murdered the Polish officers in the Katyn forest massacre, or playing one of the SS thugs at Treblinka.
For sake of completeness: they don't simulate the bombing of Dresden, or generic carpet bombing on cities either, even when it was the main activity of the planes in the actual war (B-17, B-24); submarine WWII simulators normally don't allow American submariners to surface and finish off the Japs in their life-savers with machine guns, as it usually happened in real life.
FYI, while France has a lot of nuclear power plants (75% of the nation's electricity), Italy has none (barred by referendum), and neither does Norway (they don't accept anything dirtier than hydro power, gas turbines with CO2 removal are already looked with skepticism).
Honestly I don't know much about the situation in Japan, but in most european countries nobody wants nuclear: the people still remember Chernobyl (it was not just a "thing in the news", I had to stop eating yoghurt for a month or two); the decision-makers are well aware of the costs of nuclear power, and most countries (as Sweden or Germany) are gradually phasing it out. Even France has had a longtime stop to its nuclear program.
I'll remind that nuclear power is a source which is economically insane. The costs of maintenance, security, and especially initial investment dwarf the cheap production price. Pro-nukes will point only to the last ones, conveniently "omitting" that an investment should repay itself.
Scientific evidence has shown that, even in the best possible scenario for nuclear, which is quite unlikely to happen anyway, the economic relevance of nuclear power is "marginal at best", with payback times well in the 30-years range and final internal rate of return of 3%. Given these data it should not surprise that private companies avoid nuclear like the plague (unless someone--the state-- is contributing).
I was checking the electoral-vote site to see what had happened with today's polls, and after a few seconds of surfing the site suddenly stops responding... Ok, server problems, I'll check out Slashdot while they fix them... Holy crap!!! Real-time slashdotting!
In Italian it sounds like the guy who "incula", with a Schwarzenegger touch in the end and a trendy, tough Germanlike "k" in the middle.
Oh yeah, "inculare" means "to fuck in the butt", regardless of the gender (or for that sake species) of the recipient. I guess the same goes for all latin languages. So in short this sounds like a cheap B-pr0n movie, like the famous "Aurora Sborrealis" (quoted in Clerks Italian dubbing, don't know whether it actually exists) and "Il signore degli anali" (made that up myself, surely someone will market it sooner or later).
Other derogative meanings of inculare are to steal ("Al bar ho inculato un cioccolatino!"), to swindle ("L'assicuratore ci ha inculato con questa nuova polizza"), or generally to cause physical or psychological distress ("Il parlamento europeo ha inculato Rocco Buttiglione").
Speaking of which: everybody knows what happened in Sodomah. What the hell were they doing in Gommorrah?
Primary recovery: wait for the oil to squirt out of itself.
Secondary recovery: pump in gas, water or anything (well, not air...) in the reservoir to displace the oil. You get as much oil as primary, if not more (depends heavily on the reservoir, though).
Tertiary recovery: modify the structure of the reservoir. Drop a nuke to crack it so oil flows better, heat it up so oil is more fluid. Almost never done, mostly a theoretical stage to classify non-standard interventions (it costs way too much).
I agree with the idea on investing on solar, but keep in mind that the indicators that some catastrophist use to say that "there will soon be no oil more" are often based on a misunderstanding: when you hear that there are 40 years more of oil reserves, only the reservoirs present and economically advantageous are counted. If the oil price rises, someone will open again the oil field in Oklahoma, which were mostly closed long ago because it grew too costly to extract oil there.
So there is not going to be a catastrophic doomsday when the gas stations are suddenly empty, but a oil price that will rise gradually until you decide it's actually cheaper to buy a hydrogen car, or another technology.
Given the quantity of money people waste on satellite tv showing reality shows or strawberry-flavoured condoms, it's hardly going to be that hard (though we'll definitely notice).
The most common idea is usually to bury CO2 in depleted gas or oil reservoirs. They lasted sealed millions of years, and have only the holes we made, and that we know how to plug. It's as simple as household: you pick some jam, you eat it, and put the jar back in place so you don't have depleted jam jars all over the place. On a short-to-medium term, it's not a bad idea. Of course, after about 200 years, natural gas reservoirs will be depleted too, but if we've not cracked fusion by then, we damn deserve extinction.
There was an idea about storing CO2 on the bottom of the ocean, that has been discarded in front of (well justified) environmental concern. Pretty much as smart as an open-air sewer if you ask me.
I doubt the US can afford breaking any more treaties.
Look, I wish you were right. But, there was the guy who said:
A lie repeated seven times becomes truth
And another who said:
A death is tragedy, a million statistics
They were both assholes, but they were right in those remarks. That's what make them scary. The biggest asshole of them all, to return in-topic, is the one who (wisely?) said:
Treaties are pieces of paper
The USSR isn't there any more to deter the US, so the US can do pretty much what they want. (If English had the same distinction as German, I would say können, and not dürfen.)
I understand that in theory this Condorcet thing is nice. However, we had something like that in Italy - we could vote for up to four preferred candidates.
Can you imagine the results? with 30 candidates for each party, there are 30*29*28*27 = 657720 possible combinations. This means, if you want to get elected with mafia help, you simply need to get 10 idiots nobody knows in your party's bottom list, and give everybody in your local poll station clear instructions about whom to vote: me, and three jerks nobody would vote in a certain sequence: if they are 10, you have 10*9*8 = 720 combinations, more than the size of an average poll station.
Then, you place a picciotto at the poll station, who will have a check-list of combinations. If some combination is missing, somebody's car will be burning soon.
This law was abolished with a referendum in the early nineties, which paved the way to the loss of power of the cleptocratic government parties; however, the success was short-lived as the cleptocratic forces reorganized in a better propaganda-focused group (a phenomenon known as trasformismo in Italy), and hold now office (other than direct control of most of the media). But that's another story...
Slashdot Mirror
Just remember that you know that lobotomy and ECT don't work because some experts told you.
You're right, I'd like to point out also that the same atom can have different toxicity depending on its oxidation state. If you have seen Erin Brockovich, where the whole case was Cr(VII) being measured with the emission limit of Cr(III), causing poisoning among the population, well that's the same thing.
U and Pu are actinides, and that means they can have many different oxidation states, each with its own chemistry.
This is also why lead in gasoline and paint is carcinogen, while veterans have lived with lead bullets in their body for decades.
If you were so "good at school", why exactly is that you misspell:
- everyones (everyone's)
- racistism (racism)
- lifes (lives)
- Its (it's)
- ware (wear)
- i (I)
- jelious (jealous)
- them selfs (themselves)
- Im (I'm)
- hatrid (hatred)
- wont (won't)
(and I did not consider the typos).Did you go to Yale and sit next to Dubya? Or are you simply trolling|karmawhoring?
Please remark that elections are next year and it's quite unlikely the current right-wing government (Right party, Left party which is actually more centre, and Christian people's party) stands. Next government should likely be Worker's party, Socialist Left, and Centre Party (former Farmer's party). None of these should be especially inclined in favour of this law, and even inside the government there is criticism.
So, in brief: this is going to be like the time they proposed to move rusbrus (light vodka-based drinks) to the Vinmonopolet (if you don't know what it is you probably don't want to): talked about it, seen that everybody was insanely pissed off (taking alcohol from a Norwegian is like taking guns from a Texan), and forgot the matter as they probably noticed the current situation does not allow them to lose voters.
PS- you might notice there is a large party I did not mention, the Progress Party; they have a political attitude similar to American republicans, and therefore nobody wants to have any business with them. An alliance for the right-wing majority with the Progress party would likely result in massive voter defection. So until they get to 51% they count little.
I think that it is simply unclear how they projected it. It was the nineteenth century after all, and some weird ideas were followed: eg, you can type typewriter with just keys on the top row (I read this was intended, for what reasons I'm not sure). Probably it was some trial and error, and they came with an half-baked design.
Oh, the exercise to the reader, yes: here is a Guinness record.
I have been using my own dvorak i18n-ized layout for a few years, and typing feels indeed more natural. For the shortcuts, Ctrl-V is actually quite close, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X a bit trickier, but they are all within the span of my hand.
Now, that would be a pain in the ass.
Straits, dammit.
Well, I'm not a statistician, but for what I have heard the methods of calculation of unemployment in continental EU are different from US and UK.
Among other things, I'm quite certain that detainees are not considered unemployed in the US (which have by far the largest detainee population in the western world), but they are in continental Europe. I heard also that people are considered unemployed as long as they collect welfare in the US, which lasts for some time (3 years maybe?), after which one is not officially counted as "unemployed", but I'm not sure of this one.
Well, I may lack respect, but I think the journalist does not know the difference between an atom (cannot produce) and a chemical compound (can produce given the blocks).
I don't really know what NaBH4 is mainly used for today, but I know it is a quite powerful reduction catalyst in organic chemistry (another one being LiAlH4, even more reactive). My organic chemistry professor used to tell the tale of the chemical plant of Cormano (north of Milan) where they didn't handle one of these hydrides properly, and "whose remains you can see when driving on the Tangenziale".
Anyway, the chemical industry is very flexible; during WWII, Japan made fuel out of rubber, which they had plenty of since they controlled the Dutch Indies, and America made rubber out of fuel at the same time. So, if this system should be adopted, production would probably catch up fairly quick since this is no new or exotic chemical.
Indeed true, platinum is expensive. But, as reported in Larminie & Dicks, "Fuel Cell Systems Explained" (a standard textbook in fuel cell technology), the main cost of a fuel cell is surprisingly not the platinum catalyst on the polymer membrane, but the bipolar plates. These must seal hydrogen from coming into contact with air, provide cooling channels, and be tortuous enough to generate enough turbulence in the stream so that diffusion slowdown is minimised.
In short, bipolar plates require an awful load of machining, and good materials too since they work with a gas like hydrogen, which can embrittle welds.
On the other hand, platinum reserves are not enough to substitute the world's car fleet with fuel-cell powered vehicles using current technology. This should not be a big roadblock as new technologies are being experimented with. I mean, when the first T model was released, people still rode horses for some time anyway.
The question is not that important. Sodium borohydride (NaBH4) is made up of sodium (quite common, as in sodium chloride), hydrogen (common too) and boron is fairly common too, according to this link. The fact you don't find steel, carbon fiber or many modern materials in nature does not mean it is a problem. NaBH4 is supposed to be a carrier of energy, not a source: it is converted to sodium borate during use, and this is later regenerated to sodium borohydride.
From my organic chemistry lectures I remember that acetylene (more properly "ethyne") is unstable. Kick it (or make an accident with a car running on it) strong enough, and it will dissociate into gaseous hydrogen (whose pressure will probably breach any tank), and carbon, liberating a whopping 211 kJ/mol in Gibbs free energy; hydrogen combustion with oxygen, as a comparison, is 237 (and it comes in cascade with the previous).
Someone has worked on it; there is a whole PhD thesis to answer your questions! (1.3 MB pdf)
Fortunately you thought wrong. The real roadblock is the price of fuel cells, which everybody expects to plummet once mass-production is commenced (today most production is pretty much manual), and of course the missing infrastructure.
Hard to substantiate. Current efficiencies in electrolysis processes rank up to 90% energy efficiency. This is however the "reported" one, which might be away from the standard operating point of equipment; 80% and 94% are reported here. Compare with the 20-30% of internal combustion engines, which does normally not account for dead time in queues, where some gas is being consumed, which does not happen in fuel cells as there are no major moving parts to keep spinning.
Of course there are other considerations than just efficiency, as usability of current distribution networks (which favours the use of liquid fuels as methanol, formic acid), presence of existing technologies (reforming of natural gas, oil and hydrocarbons in general).
Remark: efficiency is often given (faultily) as the ratio of Work obtained / Available enthalpy ("W/Delta_H"), which is BS: Gibbs' free energy should be used, "W/Delta_G". This causes electrolysis processes to look a bit better than they atually are, since the reaction enthalpy is ca. 286 kJ/mol, while the Gibbs' free energy is less, about 237 kJ/mol. Therefore, we actually need a minimum of 237 kJ to split a mole of water. Don't be surprised when someone will claim "over 100% efficiency in electrolysis", because that is well possible if you use the enthalpy definition.
For sake of completeness: they don't simulate the bombing of Dresden, or generic carpet bombing on cities either, even when it was the main activity of the planes in the actual war (B-17, B-24); submarine WWII simulators normally don't allow American submariners to surface and finish off the Japs in their life-savers with machine guns, as it usually happened in real life.
FYI, while France has a lot of nuclear power plants (75% of the nation's electricity), Italy has none (barred by referendum), and neither does Norway (they don't accept anything dirtier than hydro power, gas turbines with CO2 removal are already looked with skepticism).
Honestly I don't know much about the situation in Japan, but in most european countries nobody wants nuclear: the people still remember Chernobyl (it was not just a "thing in the news", I had to stop eating yoghurt for a month or two); the decision-makers are well aware of the costs of nuclear power, and most countries (as Sweden or Germany) are gradually phasing it out. Even France has had a longtime stop to its nuclear program.
I'll remind that nuclear power is a source which is economically insane. The costs of maintenance, security, and especially initial investment dwarf the cheap production price. Pro-nukes will point only to the last ones, conveniently "omitting" that an investment should repay itself.
Scientific evidence has shown that, even in the best possible scenario for nuclear, which is quite unlikely to happen anyway, the economic relevance of nuclear power is "marginal at best", with payback times well in the 30-years range and final internal rate of return of 3%. Given these data it should not surprise that private companies avoid nuclear like the plague (unless someone--the state-- is contributing).
I was checking the electoral-vote site to see what had happened with today's polls, and after a few seconds of surfing the site suddenly stops responding... Ok, server problems, I'll check out Slashdot while they fix them... Holy crap!!! Real-time slashdotting!
I don't know what hari-kari is, probably you mean seppuku or hara kiri.
Sumimasen.
You don't remember it correctly, it's walking on it.
In Italian it sounds like the guy who "incula", with a Schwarzenegger touch in the end and a trendy, tough Germanlike "k" in the middle.
Oh yeah, "inculare" means "to fuck in the butt", regardless of the gender (or for that sake species) of the recipient. I guess the same goes for all latin languages.
So in short this sounds like a cheap B-pr0n movie, like the famous "Aurora Sborrealis" (quoted in Clerks Italian dubbing, don't know whether it actually exists) and "Il signore degli anali" (made that up myself, surely someone will market it sooner or later).
Other derogative meanings of inculare are to steal ("Al bar ho inculato un cioccolatino!"), to swindle ("L'assicuratore ci ha inculato con questa nuova polizza"), or generally to cause physical or psychological distress ("Il parlamento europeo ha inculato Rocco Buttiglione").
Speaking of which: everybody knows what happened in Sodomah. What the hell were they doing in Gommorrah?
I agree with the idea on investing on solar, but keep in mind that the indicators that some catastrophist use to say that "there will soon be no oil more" are often based on a misunderstanding: when you hear that there are 40 years more of oil reserves, only the reservoirs present and economically advantageous are counted. If the oil price rises, someone will open again the oil field in Oklahoma, which were mostly closed long ago because it grew too costly to extract oil there.
So there is not going to be a catastrophic doomsday when the gas stations are suddenly empty, but a oil price that will rise gradually until you decide it's actually cheaper to buy a hydrogen car, or another technology.
Given the quantity of money people waste on satellite tv showing reality shows or strawberry-flavoured condoms, it's hardly going to be that hard (though we'll definitely notice).
The most common idea is usually to bury CO2 in depleted gas or oil reservoirs. They lasted sealed millions of years, and have only the holes we made, and that we know how to plug.
It's as simple as household: you pick some jam, you eat it, and put the jar back in place so you don't have depleted jam jars all over the place. On a short-to-medium term, it's not a bad idea. Of course, after about 200 years, natural gas reservoirs will be depleted too, but if we've not cracked fusion by then, we damn deserve extinction.
There was an idea about storing CO2 on the bottom of the ocean, that has been discarded in front of (well justified) environmental concern. Pretty much as smart as an open-air sewer if you ask me.
Look, I wish you were right. But, there was the guy who said:
And another who said:
They were both assholes, but they were right in those remarks. That's what make them scary. The biggest asshole of them all, to return in-topic, is the one who (wisely?) said:
The USSR isn't there any more to deter the US, so the US can do pretty much what they want. (If English had the same distinction as German, I would say können, and not dürfen.)
I understand that in theory this Condorcet thing is nice. However, we had something like that in Italy - we could vote for up to four preferred candidates.
Can you imagine the results? with 30 candidates for each party, there are 30*29*28*27 = 657720 possible combinations. This means, if you want to get elected with mafia help, you simply need to get 10 idiots nobody knows in your party's bottom list, and give everybody in your local poll station clear instructions about whom to vote: me, and three jerks nobody would vote in a certain sequence: if they are 10, you have 10*9*8 = 720 combinations, more than the size of an average poll station.
Then, you place a picciotto at the poll station, who will have a check-list of combinations. If some combination is missing, somebody's car will be burning soon.
This law was abolished with a referendum in the early nineties, which paved the way to the loss of power of the cleptocratic government parties; however, the success was short-lived as the cleptocratic forces reorganized in a better propaganda-focused group (a phenomenon known as trasformismo in Italy), and hold now office (other than direct control of most of the media). But that's another story...
Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money!