You could replace gasoline and diesel easily enough. Carbon-neutral synthetic hydrocarbon production is a fairly well refined process, the product is just not economically competitive with the stuff you pump out of the ground, because it requires energy to produce. The US Navy Research Lab developed a demonstration system that made jet fuel.
Making natural gas is even easier, but you probably wouldn't do that as much because most of the places we use natural gas would be fine using the raw electricity.
IF the process is reasonably energy efficient, it could solve several problems at the same time. Renewable power needs storage (except reservoir hydro, which mostly provides its own).
This process is a battery: you store excess power in the form of elemental sodium. When you need that power back, you react the sodium with CO2. Unfortunately you get hydrogen, which you then have to burn in a power plant, adding complication. As a benefit, you get carbon locked up in a stable, easily storable form.
It is sequestering the carbon. Sodium bicarbonate can be pretty easily stored.
Sequestering carbon (dioxide) isn't about generating power. That's not possible. It's about converting the CO2 to some form that's easy to store, preferably using the least amount of energy possible.
If it were just bringing the ingredients to the carbon scrubber, that would be a massive win. The energy input in this process is making elemental sodium.
We can hope. I've been predicting a massive scaling back on advertising for years, but it hasn't happened yet. I don't think advertising is anywhere near as effective as the money that's spent on it. Not just directly, but through things like the valuation of advertising platforms... I mean social media companies.
She wants single-purpose contractors. You have something you need done, you put out a contract, it's fulfilled, and then you move on. No need to worry about budgeting for your staff to acquire new skills.
Trying to obscure that with business doublespeak makes for a confusing article.
I think there is such a thing as ethical advertising, but it's not usually what's practiced. Ad people's job is to use psychological manipulation to part the most people with the most money, as efficiently as possible. Otherwise advertising would be a little note once in a while "hey, we made this, give it a try if you think it's something you'd like."
To be clear, it's not the ad people's fault. Advertising has been optimized by competition, exactly as market capitalism is supposed to do. Unfortunately it's a sector where the optimal solution is exploiting people.
In the 20th century, that colour was Soviet red and yellow. The USSR did the vast majority of the bleeding, at the direct exhortation of the UK and USA. Per capita you could make an argument for Poland, the Baltic countries and some of the rest of eastern Europe to join the club.
Yes, it's ironic that the USSR is responsible for the preservation of the free world from the only serious threat it faced in living memory.
Copied and pasted exactly the above quote to say just what you did.
Advertising people are special. I've known a couple, very nice people, in terrible jobs. The stories they tell themselves to justify what they do. Most of the ones I've known have eventually gotten out. And their story changes when they do.
I find the key question when someone is talking about probability distributions is figuring out *what* the distribution is of.
To take your lottery example, what they describe in the paper is more like computing the odds of a random person being a lottery winner based on population, how many tickets were sold, how many numbers you have to get right, etc., then bumping into a random person who IS a lottery winner, and computing the chances of that happening by chance.
You can estimate limits on the number of interstellar objects floating around by estimating the number that have likely been ejected from the solar system, studying star occultation, etc. Put together with a bit of knowledge about the distances and motions of our neighbourhood stars you can estimate a probability distribution describing the chances of such an object wandering into our solar system. Then, if you see such an object, you can compute the probability of that event happening by chance.
There are definitely a lot of approximations involved in that process, and I'm not an astronomer so I can't even guess at how reliable those estimates are likely to be (keep in mind they can probably be off by a few orders of magnitude without invalidating the basic conclusion), but the calculation itself is statistically valid.
I seem to remember hearing that some astronomers estimated that an interstellar rock passes through the solar system on average once a year, so it may be that there's considerable disagreement about the actual likelihood of that happening.
Absolutely. I'm a scientist. The reason you put up with the crappy pay and virtually impossible career advancement is for those moments when you look at some results and say "who ordered that?"
Scientists are test to destruction types. You want to push our knowledge until it breaks, because how it breaks is interesting. The contribution to humanity is computers that always give the right answer, satellites that stay up and birth control that's 99.9% effective.
Oh, you're one of the modern pleasant, knowledgeable Slashdotters!
Okay, let's go back to your "words".
"You're not falling unless you're the smaller of multiple mass localizations that are near enough to cause relative motion."
Now, you don't even need basic general relativity to know that's wrong. According to Newton's laws, any two objects will exert equal and opposite forces on each other. Since they're in space, according to F=ma, both will move, regardless of relative mass. Both are falling, towards each other. "The apple falls towards the Earth, and the Earth falls towards the apple".
Unless of course you were using your words in some special Aighearach way? Or perhaps you've been playing Kerbal Space Program too long?
It is a silly question, but I think not (exactly) for that reason.
You *hear* about scientists being "surprised", because that means they've discovered something. They might not actually be surprised, but as others have pointed out, journalists like to say they are.
You don't hear about everything scientists (and everyone else) do every day that works out exactly, unsurprisingly, as it should. Although if you're comparing science to religion, that's the part that really matters. Science is fundamentally the pursuit of models that can be used to make reliable predictions.
The goal of science is boring reliability. The exciting part of science is surprises, because that means you get to contribute something to achieving a future lack of surprises.
"Physics aside, our models of it tend to be simple."
Physics isn't special. Fundamental physics has simple models that describe exceedingly simple systems extremely accurately. As soon as you scale up to anything that's a little more complicated (like a whole nucleus) you need to use effective theories, which are pretty much like the ones you find in most other sciences.
You're an equal opportunity ridiculer: the occasional "but it happened in such and such a novel" gets the same response as someone who's gone ahead and worked out the math.
Taking you seriously for a moment, the problem with your rhetorical style is that it simply appeals to people's preconceived notions without contributing anything. Aliens, nonsense! Space factories, nonsense! Interstellar probes, nonsense! Quantum computers, nonsense!
Also, your appeal to all the "hard work" the "REAL people" at NASA put in is pretty ironic. Those real people at NASA (and elsewhere) have studied all of the above, and in many cases published real, workable concepts, or, well, have done it already.
Nature abhors all or nothing, and motion is relative. I fall towards the Earth, and the Earth falls towards me. Newton would say that the Earth falls very slightly towards me. Einstein would say that any frame is equally valid.
Of course you are. I have never seen a post from you that wasn't hand crafted to incite angry nerds. I kind of suspect you're actually a Slashdot employee, because you're so consistent, drive so much commenting and seem to have an inordinate amount of time to post.
Your claim that you just hate space nutters doesn't hold up. In the comments to this single story you've ridiculed the existence of aliens, AI, and quantum computing. I've held a quantum chip in my hand, by the way.
Regarding your #1: Given one distribution (the one they computed for interactions with interstellar ejecta based on our solar system) you can compute the probability a single sample belongs to that distribution. The simplest example is the one-sample z-test. It's not necessarily strong evidence, but it's not presented as such.
Slashdot Mirror
You could replace gasoline and diesel easily enough. Carbon-neutral synthetic hydrocarbon production is a fairly well refined process, the product is just not economically competitive with the stuff you pump out of the ground, because it requires energy to produce. The US Navy Research Lab developed a demonstration system that made jet fuel.
Making natural gas is even easier, but you probably wouldn't do that as much because most of the places we use natural gas would be fine using the raw electricity.
You could pump some sea water into a desert. There are several of them in close proximity to oceans.
It's not a power generation technique, it's a power storage and carbon sequestration technology.
IF the process is reasonably energy efficient, it could solve several problems at the same time. Renewable power needs storage (except reservoir hydro, which mostly provides its own).
This process is a battery: you store excess power in the form of elemental sodium. When you need that power back, you react the sodium with CO2. Unfortunately you get hydrogen, which you then have to burn in a power plant, adding complication. As a benefit, you get carbon locked up in a stable, easily storable form.
It is sequestering the carbon. Sodium bicarbonate can be pretty easily stored.
Sequestering carbon (dioxide) isn't about generating power. That's not possible. It's about converting the CO2 to some form that's easy to store, preferably using the least amount of energy possible.
If it were just bringing the ingredients to the carbon scrubber, that would be a massive win. The energy input in this process is making elemental sodium.
We can hope. I've been predicting a massive scaling back on advertising for years, but it hasn't happened yet. I don't think advertising is anywhere near as effective as the money that's spent on it. Not just directly, but through things like the valuation of advertising platforms... I mean social media companies.
She wants single-purpose contractors. You have something you need done, you put out a contract, it's fulfilled, and then you move on. No need to worry about budgeting for your staff to acquire new skills.
Trying to obscure that with business doublespeak makes for a confusing article.
I think there is such a thing as ethical advertising, but it's not usually what's practiced. Ad people's job is to use psychological manipulation to part the most people with the most money, as efficiently as possible. Otherwise advertising would be a little note once in a while "hey, we made this, give it a try if you think it's something you'd like."
To be clear, it's not the ad people's fault. Advertising has been optimized by competition, exactly as market capitalism is supposed to do. Unfortunately it's a sector where the optimal solution is exploiting people.
Vancouver is not US jurisdiction.
In the 20th century, that colour was Soviet red and yellow. The USSR did the vast majority of the bleeding, at the direct exhortation of the UK and USA. Per capita you could make an argument for Poland, the Baltic countries and some of the rest of eastern Europe to join the club.
Yes, it's ironic that the USSR is responsible for the preservation of the free world from the only serious threat it faced in living memory.
Copied and pasted exactly the above quote to say just what you did.
Advertising people are special. I've known a couple, very nice people, in terrible jobs. The stories they tell themselves to justify what they do. Most of the ones I've known have eventually gotten out. And their story changes when they do.
Sure you can. The Internet knows:
http://www.howtocleanstuff.net...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
MP3 filters out that glorious cassette hiss!
I find the key question when someone is talking about probability distributions is figuring out *what* the distribution is of.
To take your lottery example, what they describe in the paper is more like computing the odds of a random person being a lottery winner based on population, how many tickets were sold, how many numbers you have to get right, etc., then bumping into a random person who IS a lottery winner, and computing the chances of that happening by chance.
You can estimate limits on the number of interstellar objects floating around by estimating the number that have likely been ejected from the solar system, studying star occultation, etc. Put together with a bit of knowledge about the distances and motions of our neighbourhood stars you can estimate a probability distribution describing the chances of such an object wandering into our solar system. Then, if you see such an object, you can compute the probability of that event happening by chance.
There are definitely a lot of approximations involved in that process, and I'm not an astronomer so I can't even guess at how reliable those estimates are likely to be (keep in mind they can probably be off by a few orders of magnitude without invalidating the basic conclusion), but the calculation itself is statistically valid.
I seem to remember hearing that some astronomers estimated that an interstellar rock passes through the solar system on average once a year, so it may be that there's considerable disagreement about the actual likelihood of that happening.
Absolutely. I'm a scientist. The reason you put up with the crappy pay and virtually impossible career advancement is for those moments when you look at some results and say "who ordered that?"
Scientists are test to destruction types. You want to push our knowledge until it breaks, because how it breaks is interesting. The contribution to humanity is computers that always give the right answer, satellites that stay up and birth control that's 99.9% effective.
Oh, you're one of the modern pleasant, knowledgeable Slashdotters!
Okay, let's go back to your "words".
"You're not falling unless you're the smaller of multiple mass localizations that are near enough to cause relative motion."
Now, you don't even need basic general relativity to know that's wrong. According to Newton's laws, any two objects will exert equal and opposite forces on each other. Since they're in space, according to F=ma, both will move, regardless of relative mass. Both are falling, towards each other. "The apple falls towards the Earth, and the Earth falls towards the apple".
Unless of course you were using your words in some special Aighearach way? Or perhaps you've been playing Kerbal Space Program too long?
It is a silly question, but I think not (exactly) for that reason.
You *hear* about scientists being "surprised", because that means they've discovered something. They might not actually be surprised, but as others have pointed out, journalists like to say they are.
You don't hear about everything scientists (and everyone else) do every day that works out exactly, unsurprisingly, as it should. Although if you're comparing science to religion, that's the part that really matters. Science is fundamentally the pursuit of models that can be used to make reliable predictions.
The goal of science is boring reliability. The exciting part of science is surprises, because that means you get to contribute something to achieving a future lack of surprises.
"Physics aside, our models of it tend to be simple."
Physics isn't special. Fundamental physics has simple models that describe exceedingly simple systems extremely accurately. As soon as you scale up to anything that's a little more complicated (like a whole nucleus) you need to use effective theories, which are pretty much like the ones you find in most other sciences.
It you expected it, it's not much of a discovery, is it?
They're selling support.
MongoDB sells support too. It just seems not enough people want to pay for it. If the speed of their website is any indication, I'm not surprised.
You're an equal opportunity ridiculer: the occasional "but it happened in such and such a novel" gets the same response as someone who's gone ahead and worked out the math.
Taking you seriously for a moment, the problem with your rhetorical style is that it simply appeals to people's preconceived notions without contributing anything. Aliens, nonsense! Space factories, nonsense! Interstellar probes, nonsense! Quantum computers, nonsense!
Also, your appeal to all the "hard work" the "REAL people" at NASA put in is pretty ironic. Those real people at NASA (and elsewhere) have studied all of the above, and in many cases published real, workable concepts, or, well, have done it already.
Some examples:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/...
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_p...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/...
https://www.nas.nasa.gov/proje...
I'm glad we agree!
Nature abhors all or nothing, and motion is relative. I fall towards the Earth, and the Earth falls towards me. Newton would say that the Earth falls very slightly towards me. Einstein would say that any frame is equally valid.
Of course you are. I have never seen a post from you that wasn't hand crafted to incite angry nerds. I kind of suspect you're actually a Slashdot employee, because you're so consistent, drive so much commenting and seem to have an inordinate amount of time to post.
Your claim that you just hate space nutters doesn't hold up. In the comments to this single story you've ridiculed the existence of aliens, AI, and quantum computing. I've held a quantum chip in my hand, by the way.
Regarding your #1: Given one distribution (the one they computed for interactions with interstellar ejecta based on our solar system) you can compute the probability a single sample belongs to that distribution. The simplest example is the one-sample z-test. It's not necessarily strong evidence, but it's not presented as such.
How can you aim a signal from a distant star at a particular spot on Earth?