Anyone remember back in 1993 when Clinton was trying to appoint a top Mead (owners of Lexis/Nexis) executive to chair the National Information Infrastructure Technical Commission? Pale by comparison, but still, same ol', same ol'.
Remember 1993, just a decade ago politicians had no idea what the internet was and only one in 20 business cards had email. The "information superhighway" was going to bring us five hundred channels on TV.
Do you really think that a turbine could extract more kinetic energy from wind than 2344 times its land area of forest extracts with friction? Remember, modern turbines have three rather thin blades, whereas forests are by definition filled with foiliage. In terms of surface area against the wind, a single tree within the same area that a turbine takes would have thousands if not millions of times the area. Also, trees aren't very rigid against moderate windspeeds, converting wind into waste heat much more than solid objects do.
Plus, the amount of heat that atmospheric carbon dioxide causes to be forced into the atmosphere will more than make up for 16,000 TWh of turbine extraction. (0.3 watts per square meter yeilds more than 150,000 TWh over the earth's illuminated surface area.)
That power costs about 4 cents per killowatt hour, compared to 3 cents for poorly-scrubbed coal (compared to European scrubbing standards, which result in 4 cents/kwh), anywhere from 7 to 15 cents per kilowatt hour for natural gas (depending on market rates with occasional shortages) 11 cents/kwh for nuclear (plus hidden externalities for waste disposal). In other words, it's the best deal around.
How many of them need to be running at capacity at one time to power the entire U.S. electrical grid?
Right, you hit the nail on the head for the 150,000 figure. Again, I should have said 1.5 million for average output values. The occasional drop caused by widespread windlessness could be backed up by hydroelectric power stations, or storage systems.
According to the Danish Windpower Industry Association, a modern wind turbine will generate about 2 to 3 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year. http://www.windpower.org/faqs.htm#anchor727849
If these numbers (and my math) is right, your conclusion is off by about an order of magnitude.
You are right. I calculated using average peak turbine output, which, given that the wind doesn't blow all the time, is about 1/10 of average sustained output. I should have said 1.5 million modern turbines. Thank you for checking that.
Even if the entire planet converted to 100% wind-powered electricity overnight, the drag on wind flow from all the turbines would be tiny compared to the lost drag caused by deforestation over the past decade alone.
Firstly, I read about this in sci.physics.* or some metafilter rss some days ago. It's still very theoretical that any kind of large mass production is even possible, let alone practical.
Even if it turns out to be practical, there is still the problem faced by the ceramic superconductors: even if you can get them to ambient temperatures, they still are brittle, rigid, and unmalleable and therefore totally unlike wires. The best you could hope for is to lay these things end-to-end in a trench by the side of the road, and the first earthquake or vibrational disturbance that comes along is going to snap, crack, and pop the circuit open. Unlike wires and fiber optics, which at least stand a chance of anything short of a backhoe.
Ordinary wind power is of far more practical importance than superconductors, fusion, fuel cells, and solar energy combined. However, Slashdot editors regularly pick those topics for the front page. In the rare event that/. does something on wind power, it's always in the non-front-page "Science" section. Come on, "stuff that matters" should actually matter. Did you know that the entire U.S. electrical grid could be powered by less than 150,000 modern wind turbines?
Would taking that much kinetic energy out of the atmosphere have climate change effects of its own?
Well, it's a tiny frraction of a percent of the energy in the atmosphere. Storms have been getting stronger and average windspeeds have been increasing, so maybe we should put up more wind turbines than we need.
It's so comforting to know that the fossil fuel industry has done such a good job of astroturfing that even low-userid slashdot posters aren't immune from their disinformation.
According to Accu-Weather, the world's leading commercial forecaster, "Global air temperatures as measured by land-based weather stations show an increase of about 0.45 degrees Celsius over the past century. This may be no more than normal climatic variation...
Accu-weather, a commercial concern controlled by commercial interests, knows which side of their bread is buttered. Instead, you might consider the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which directly attributes the observed tmeperature increase to radiative forcing of greenhouse gasses.
Satellite data indicate a slight cooling in the climate in the last 18 years. These satellites use advanced technology and are not subject to the "heat island" effect around major cities that alters ground-based thermometers.
This is the misinformation that pisses me off the most. I have been in direct telephone contact with the pair of so-called scientists from Huntsville, Alabama who published this crap. Their measurements of cooling above the troposphere are completely consistent with global warming in the troposphere, where radiative forcing keeps heat trapped at the surface of the Earth. Guess where the Huntsville team gets their funding? NASA. Guess what agency pumps carbon dioxide equivalent to driving a SUV two million miles into the atmosphere every time a shuttle launches? NASA.
Projections of future climate changes are uncertain.
Take another look at the r^2 value on the curve fit graph of atmospheric CO2. That value means that all but about 1% of the variation of that curve can be explained by those four numeric parameters of that logistic sigmoid curve. One thing that isn't uncertain is that if we don't start wholesale conversion to wind power pretty damn soon, there will be twice as much atmospheric CO2 in 2060 as their was in 1500. Did you know that less than 150,000 modern wind turbines could supply the entire U.S. power grid demand?
98% of total global greenhouse gas emissions are natural (mostly water vapor); only 2% are from man-made sources.
Oh, PLEASE! Water vapor, unlike CO2, becomes reflective (clouds are white) when it condenses from vapor to aerosol, which it does under temperature increase conditions (greater transpiration at greater temperatures raising humidity.) This tends to nullify water's heat trapping over time.
By most accounts, man-made emissions have had no more than a minuscule impact on the climate. Although the climate has warmed slightly in the last 100 years, 70% percent of that warming occurred prior to 1940, before the upsurge in greenhouse gas emissions from industrial processes. (Dr. Robert C. Balling, Arizona State University)
Both halfs of that statement are a baldface lie. The "prior to 1940" statement directly contradicts the observed data, and anyone who thinks greenhouse gas emissions "upsurged" after 1940 needs to take another look at the graph and/or read up on the history of coal mining.
seasonal changes are quite large and result from small changes in the sun-earth distance.
You may be a chemist, but you are no meteorologist.
Seasonal changes result from the angle of solar radiation incidence, not changes in sun-earth distance. When it is winter in the northern hemisphere, it is summer, not winter, in the southern hemisphere.
Bush and Cheney are using gas "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but does not form the basis of a sound energy policy" on their own people!
It is not, primarily, the cow farts, although they alone probably cause more global warming than any 0.00005/year change in solar output. Carbon dioxide, from whatever source, forces heat that would normally be radiated into space to remain in the atmosphere. The extent is very easy to quantify, and it's a hell of a lot more than 0.05% per decade.
This article is just more fossil fuel apologist crap. It makes SUV drivers feel a little bit better about sending all that cash to Saudi Arabia when they fill up their huge gas tanks.
Bush and Cheney have been using gas "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but is not a sound basis for energy policy" on their own people!
we don't know enough about our ecosystem and it's interaction with the universe around us to automatically assume that it's all our fault.
On the contrary, we understand very well how carbon dioxide forces heat that would normally be radiated into space to remain in the atmosphere. The extent is very easy to quantify, and it's a hell of a lot more than 0.05% per decade.
This is just more fossil fuel apologist crap. It makes SUV drivers feel a little bit better about sending all that cash to Saudi Arabia when they fill up their huge gas tanks.
Bush and Cheney have been using gas "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but is not a sound basis for energy policy" on their own people!
bovik ~ 8:03pmWed19 > traceroute www.uruklink.net traceroute to uruk.uruklink.net (62.145.94.235), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets ... 7 so-7-0-0.mp1.SanJose1.Level3.net (64.159.1.73) 1.613 ms 1.635 ms 1.595 ms 8 so-0-2-0.bbr1.Washington1.level3.net (64.159.1.86) 72.171 ms 72.009 ms 72.066 ms 9 so-2-0-0.mp1.London2.Level3.net (212.187.128.137) 171.216 ms 171.377 ms 171.291 ms 10 so-2-0-0.mp1.London1.Level3.net (212.187.128.50) 171.357 ms 173.192 ms 171.512 ms 11 so-7-0-0.gar1.London1.Level3.net (212.113.3.2) 171.640 ms 171.517 ms 171.357 ms 12 unknown.Level3.net (212.113.3.26) 171.622 ms 171.681 ms 171.567 ms 13 195.50.116.14 (195.50.116.14) 163.327 ms 163.963 ms 163.427 ms 14 62.32.32.46 (62.32.32.46) 167.269 ms 166.901 ms 167.371 ms 15 * * * 16 * * *...
If the comment flew straight up to 5, and was never moderated down, that means no moderator contests its value!
True.
Consider the thermodynamical meaning of "hot" -- the particles are in motion, so total upmods makes sense there. So would measures like "number of comment children" and such. However, we agree that "hot" is not "best," if we don't want to be burned, to extend the metaphor.
What you're looking for seems to be a measure of the rate of upmods. "Comments which made it to +5 in the shortest time." That would be heavily biased towards early posters, articles on the front page, and probably other things. However, there is no reason this ranking can't be unbiased with proper denomination.
Perhaps if there was some way to keep track of every time a comment was offered for moderation, and then use that to divide its number of upmods (including karma bonus), then that would unbias the time dimension. So for example, a comment which made it to +5 after only three presentations to moderators would be a winner for sure, whereas a +4 that took a week and hundreds of presentations to moderators before getting there would be less good.
Indeed I will sleep on this one again. Thank you for the opportunity to consider this.
After having slept on this, I am convinced that "total upmods," including the +1 Karma Bonus counted as an upmod, is the ideal ranking. It would capture controversy and quality simultaniously. Please, please, kick whatever algorithm is used for the "10 Hot" slashbox out and replace it with total upmods.
I'd warn against setting any future number-of-moderations cap too low, as that might dilute the quality of the "total upmods" ranking.
You've obviously thought about mod point inflation more than I have. There are clearly plenty of ways to handle it. I do yearn for the days when a week old article might have only ten or twenty +5s. But that is a minor problem compared to the need for a really good comment ranking.
I'd prefer to "End" moderation after, say, 10 moderations.
If the number of moderations is normally distributed and my moderation logs are typical, 10 moderations is more than three deviations above the mean, so I wonder what percentage of comments ever make it to 10 moderations. I would love to read them.
I think an indicator of an article's value would simply be the quantity of upmods given to it
That would be much, much better than whatever the "hot" slashbox algorithm is now. What is that, by the way; the umber of child comments times some other statistic?
However, there is a problem with the +5 cap: Moderators aren't allowed to use points on +5 articles, so they almost never waste time trying. I'm guessing that is too legacy to change. That would mean that the from-2-to-5 articles would score less in your proposed "total upmods" ranking than the from-1-to-5 articles, which penalizes those of us with excellent karma.
I really want to have a way to read all the -1s that had any upmods, especially when I am moderating. I usually have a hard time browsing at 0, let alone -1, but if I could get the -1s with upmods, that would make me feel like I am doing such a better job when I moderate.
This brings me to another problem of which I'm sure you're aware: mod point inflation. A few years ago when the number of +5s per article was lower on average than it is now, +5s seemed to have been higher quality. I'm guessing you've tried to hold the number of modpoints awarded per comment posted roughly constant. You might want to keep the number of modpoints awarded per editor-posted articles constant instead of per peanut-gallery comment.
I would be happier if you cut the number of modpoints awarded in half, and then tried to hold them constant to the number of editor-approved articles instead of the number of internet-posted comments. What do you think of that?
any ranking system we designed would have to be very carefully thought through.... I would like to see "The Top 100 Recent Good Journals" or something.
Recently I noticed that one of my articles had a greater than average number of moderator points expended on it.
I would like to be able to view the top-25 comments from the past week (on any given day) which have had the greatest number of moderator posts expended on them (positive and negative.)
Is there any way to do that presently? If there is no room in the comment record table for a counter, then another table could be used to tally each moderation with comment id number, using a first-in, first-out queue with a duration of one week. A periodic process could total the counts in O(N) time. This report would not be difficult to generate, but I am not able to do it myself, as far as I know. I will post a copy of this comment as a slashdot.org topic comment to help answer the question.
P.S. I suggest that this report replace whatever is presently used in the Slashbox for "10 Hot Comments". At present, I consider only two of the ten "hot" comments to be at all interesting, and the slashbox preview comment author agrees: "Exciting? Not really, but its a great way to waste time." If the measure was moderation controversy, I think the articles would be exciting.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember 1993, just a decade ago politicians had no idea what the internet was and only one in 20 business cards had email. The "information superhighway" was going to bring us five hundred channels on TV.
Do you really think that a turbine could extract more kinetic energy from wind than 2344 times its land area of forest extracts with friction? Remember, modern turbines have three rather thin blades, whereas forests are by definition filled with foiliage. In terms of surface area against the wind, a single tree within the same area that a turbine takes would have thousands if not millions of times the area. Also, trees aren't very rigid against moderate windspeeds, converting wind into waste heat much more than solid objects do.
Plus, the amount of heat that atmospheric carbon dioxide causes to be forced into the atmosphere will more than make up for 16,000 TWh of turbine extraction. (0.3 watts per square meter yeilds more than 150,000 TWh over the earth's illuminated surface area.)
Well, first off, as someone else pointed out, I should have said 1.5 million turbines, not 150,000, so as not to assume constant peak output as I had mistakenly done. However, each one of those turbines takes only 36 square meters, meaning that all 1.5 million would take less than 14,000 acres, or about as much oak forest that is lost each year in California alone, or less than twice the area of the Stanford University campus.
That power costs about 4 cents per killowatt hour, compared to 3 cents for poorly-scrubbed coal (compared to European scrubbing standards, which result in 4 cents/kwh), anywhere from 7 to 15 cents per kilowatt hour for natural gas (depending on market rates with occasional shortages) 11 cents/kwh for nuclear (plus hidden externalities for waste disposal). In other words, it's the best deal around.
Right, you hit the nail on the head for the 150,000 figure. Again, I should have said 1.5 million for average output values. The occasional drop caused by widespread windlessness could be backed up by hydroelectric power stations, or storage systems.
You are right. I calculated using average peak turbine output, which, given that the wind doesn't blow all the time, is about 1/10 of average sustained output. I should have said 1.5 million modern turbines. Thank you for checking that.
Even if the entire planet converted to 100% wind-powered electricity overnight, the drag on wind flow from all the turbines would be tiny compared to the lost drag caused by deforestation over the past decade alone.
Even if it turns out to be practical, there is still the problem faced by the ceramic superconductors: even if you can get them to ambient temperatures, they still are brittle, rigid, and unmalleable and therefore totally unlike wires. The best you could hope for is to lay these things end-to-end in a trench by the side of the road, and the first earthquake or vibrational disturbance that comes along is going to snap, crack, and pop the circuit open. Unlike wires and fiber optics, which at least stand a chance of anything short of a backhoe.
Ordinary wind power is of far more practical importance than superconductors, fusion, fuel cells, and solar energy combined. However, Slashdot editors regularly pick those topics for the front page. In the rare event that /. does something on wind power, it's always in the non-front-page "Science" section. Come on, "stuff that matters" should actually matter. Did you know that the entire U.S. electrical grid could be powered by less than 150,000 modern wind turbines?
I agree, completely. However, for some reason it made me laugh.
I think my sense of humor is bored and experimenting with surrealism.
The US cash money supply is kept at a fairly constant rate of inflation. Same thing.
You missed the percent sign. 0.05%/decade is 0.00005/year.
The extent to which carbon dioxide forces solar radiation to remain as atmospheric heat is generally well understood.
Well, it's a tiny frraction of a percent of the energy in the atmosphere. Storms have been getting stronger and average windspeeds have been increasing, so maybe we should put up more wind turbines than we need.
Accu-weather, a commercial concern controlled by commercial interests, knows which side of their bread is buttered. Instead, you might consider the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which directly attributes the observed tmeperature increase to radiative forcing of greenhouse gasses.
This is the misinformation that pisses me off the most. I have been in direct telephone contact with the pair of so-called scientists from Huntsville, Alabama who published this crap. Their measurements of cooling above the troposphere are completely consistent with global warming in the troposphere, where radiative forcing keeps heat trapped at the surface of the Earth. Guess where the Huntsville team gets their funding? NASA. Guess what agency pumps carbon dioxide equivalent to driving a SUV two million miles into the atmosphere every time a shuttle launches? NASA.
Take another look at the r^2 value on the curve fit graph of atmospheric CO2. That value means that all but about 1% of the variation of that curve can be explained by those four numeric parameters of that logistic sigmoid curve. One thing that isn't uncertain is that if we don't start wholesale conversion to wind power pretty damn soon, there will be twice as much atmospheric CO2 in 2060 as their was in 1500. Did you know that less than 150,000 modern wind turbines could supply the entire U.S. power grid demand?
Oh, PLEASE! Water vapor, unlike CO2, becomes reflective (clouds are white) when it condenses from vapor to aerosol, which it does under temperature increase conditions (greater transpiration at greater temperatures raising humidity.) This tends to nullify water's heat trapping over time.
Both halfs of that statement are a baldface lie. The "prior to 1940" statement directly contradicts the observed data, and anyone who thinks greenhouse gas emissions "upsurged" after 1940 needs to take another look at the graph and/or read up on the history of coal mining.
Pathetic.
You may be a chemist, but you are no meteorologist.
Seasonal changes result from the angle of solar radiation incidence, not changes in sun-earth distance. When it is winter in the northern hemisphere, it is summer, not winter, in the southern hemisphere.
On the contrary, global fossil fuel consumption has always been the primary cause of global warming. It's effects on forcing heat to remain in the atmosphere are easy to quantify, and a hell of a lot more than 0.05% per decade.
Bush and Cheney are using gas "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but does not form the basis of a sound energy policy" on their own people!
It is not, primarily, the cow farts, although they alone probably cause more global warming than any 0.00005/year change in solar output. Carbon dioxide, from whatever source, forces heat that would normally be radiated into space to remain in the atmosphere. The extent is very easy to quantify, and it's a hell of a lot more than 0.05% per decade.
This article is just more fossil fuel apologist crap. It makes SUV drivers feel a little bit better about sending all that cash to Saudi Arabia when they fill up their huge gas tanks.
Bush and Cheney have been using gas "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but is not a sound basis for energy policy" on their own people!
On the contrary, we understand very well how carbon dioxide forces heat that would normally be radiated into space to remain in the atmosphere. The extent is very easy to quantify, and it's a hell of a lot more than 0.05% per decade.
This is just more fossil fuel apologist crap. It makes SUV drivers feel a little bit better about sending all that cash to Saudi Arabia when they fill up their huge gas tanks.
Bush and Cheney have been using gas "conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but is not a sound basis for energy policy" on their own people!
Yes, it is.
Indeed; I have seen no reports contradicting that thus far.
True.
Consider the thermodynamical meaning of "hot" -- the particles are in motion, so total upmods makes sense there. So would measures like "number of comment children" and such. However, we agree that "hot" is not "best," if we don't want to be burned, to extend the metaphor.
What you're looking for seems to be a measure of the rate of upmods. "Comments which made it to +5 in the shortest time." That would be heavily biased towards early posters, articles on the front page, and probably other things. However, there is no reason this ranking can't be unbiased with proper denomination.
Perhaps if there was some way to keep track of every time a comment was offered for moderation, and then use that to divide its number of upmods (including karma bonus), then that would unbias the time dimension. So for example, a comment which made it to +5 after only three presentations to moderators would be a winner for sure, whereas a +4 that took a week and hundreds of presentations to moderators before getting there would be less good.
Indeed I will sleep on this one again. Thank you for the opportunity to consider this.
I'd warn against setting any future number-of-moderations cap too low, as that might dilute the quality of the "total upmods" ranking.
You've obviously thought about mod point inflation more than I have. There are clearly plenty of ways to handle it. I do yearn for the days when a week old article might have only ten or twenty +5s. But that is a minor problem compared to the need for a really good comment ranking.
If the number of moderations is normally distributed and my moderation logs are typical, 10 moderations is more than three deviations above the mean, so I wonder what percentage of comments ever make it to 10 moderations. I would love to read them.
That would be much, much better than whatever the "hot" slashbox algorithm is now. What is that, by the way; the umber of child comments times some other statistic?
However, there is a problem with the +5 cap: Moderators aren't allowed to use points on +5 articles, so they almost never waste time trying. I'm guessing that is too legacy to change. That would mean that the from-2-to-5 articles would score less in your proposed "total upmods" ranking than the from-1-to-5 articles, which penalizes those of us with excellent karma.
I really want to have a way to read all the -1s that had any upmods, especially when I am moderating. I usually have a hard time browsing at 0, let alone -1, but if I could get the -1s with upmods, that would make me feel like I am doing such a better job when I moderate.
This brings me to another problem of which I'm sure you're aware: mod point inflation. A few years ago when the number of +5s per article was lower on average than it is now, +5s seemed to have been higher quality. I'm guessing you've tried to hold the number of modpoints awarded per comment posted roughly constant. You might want to keep the number of modpoints awarded per editor-posted articles constant instead of per peanut-gallery comment.
I would be happier if you cut the number of modpoints awarded in half, and then tried to hold them constant to the number of editor-approved articles instead of the number of internet-posted comments. What do you think of that?
Recently I noticed that one of my articles had a greater than average number of moderator points expended on it.
I would like to be able to view the top-25 comments from the past week (on any given day) which have had the greatest number of moderator posts expended on them (positive and negative.)
Is there any way to do that presently? If there is no room in the comment record table for a counter, then another table could be used to tally each moderation with comment id number, using a first-in, first-out queue with a duration of one week. A periodic process could total the counts in O(N) time. This report would not be difficult to generate, but I am not able to do it myself, as far as I know. I will post a copy of this comment as a slashdot.org topic comment to help answer the question.
P.S. I suggest that this report replace whatever is presently used in the Slashbox for "10 Hot Comments". At present, I consider only two of the ten "hot" comments to be at all interesting, and the slashbox preview comment author agrees: "Exciting? Not really, but its a great way to waste time." If the measure was moderation controversy, I think the articles would be exciting.
I wonder if we can get a report of the articles with the most points used to moderate them (up or down.)
"Most controversial"?
"We should be deluding neither ourselves nor the American people that there is any way the FBI, despite the various improvements you are implementing, will be able to stem the flood of terrorism that will likely head our way in the wake of an attack on Iraq."
Editors?
Perhaps the moderators missed the first line: