While I agree with your point, the fact that you're applying it to this story makes me sad.
Slashdot is full of cynical gits who think they know more than they do. But this story seems to be about something trivial enough that someone with a high school education should be able to calculate the result on the back of a napkin with no problems. It's also not confirming theory... that particular theory has been confirmed a LOT, including regularly in high school science classrooms.
Now, the original article seems to be a tongue in cheek light science story in Physics Today. But the tongue in cheekness got lost somewhere between the original experiment and the Slashdot summary. Your post suggests you missed it entirely and think the result is in some way important.
"there are various issues related to freedom, security, availability, economic development, etc. that come from having all these different communication systems that are essentially proprietary."
I don't know what kind of e-mail you're using, but mine is pretty much the opposite of proprietary. All of your other objections seem to boil down to "but everyone won't use my preferred system, so we need to force them to!" There are standards for all of the things you've mentioned. Except for e-mail, the standards are unpopular. I'm not going to support you in forcing everyone use whatever you think is open enough. If you think it's that big a problem then write a killer SMS/twitter/forum/facebook/IM/kitchen sink app using open standards for everything and see if you can convince anyone to use it.
I think it's a nonissue because, with the possible exception of e-mail, which is already standardized, nobody is really bound to any particular system. ICQ was abandoned when MSN and Yahoo came around with something better. MySpace got the boot when Facebook offered something better. Twitter might fall to something new. SMS is facing death at the hands of reasonably priced alternatives. There's no significant lockin because the vast majority of people don't really care about things like their SMS message archive.
That's great for you. Personally, it seems rather silly to have legal regulation for how much you can charge for specific forms of data called "SMS" and "Voice," and to have those restrictions vary depending on where you are, where your provider is, and where the person on the other end of the connection is. It's even sillier when, moving forward, cell networks will be set up so that all traffic, voice, data, whatever, all travel the same way.
SMS was always a hack. It's going to be a relief to move on to something more sane.
I agree with you, so long as nothing catastrophic happens, we'll just all switch to alternative sources over time. But, I think there's a great opportunity now to fund alternative energy research so that when we start building out large scale infrastructure we're going to be stuck with for a while, it's as good as possible. 20% efficient solar panels instead of 10%, for example. I think we're doing this. One potential complicating factor is that there are likely large indirect costs for using fossil fuels that are not currently being factored into the cost of their use. Other things, like gas from fracking and deep sea hydrocarbons have other indirect costs we might want to consider carefully before developing them too fully. For electricity generation, wind and solar are now competitive with gas, oil or coal and the fossil fuels are only going to get more expensive.
The peak oil observation/theory/hypothesis/whatever seems likely to be more generally applicable to any similar nonrenewable resource. Just like oil, there are easy to obtain gas reserves and harder and harder ones, until although there might be gas still in the ground, it's cheaper to synthesize it or use something else. You could equally well talk about peak gas, or peak fossil fuels, or peak iron.
It's interesting to see people talking about replacing oil with natural gas. In that same oil rich region I grew up in, all houses were heated with gas, most electricity was generated from gas, and even quite a few fleet vehicles ran on gas. We really only used oil for gasoline.
I remember ten years ago when people (I lived in an oil rich region) were worried about oil going above $40 a barrel because that was the price point at which people seriously started looking at alternatives. Now we're talking about oil never going below $40 a barrel again.
Yes, if you're willing to pay for it we'll never run out of oil. But that's not what peak oil is about. The theory says that oil production will peak an then decline because it becomes more and more expensive to extract oil, until it becomes unfeasible. For individual fields and countries, the competition comes from other fields and countries. For the world as a whole, the competition comes form renewables and, eventually, synthesis.
That doesn't really mean anything. Inflation is an estimate of the increase in living expenses, calculated by looking at the cost of various things average people buy. Gasoline figures a great deal in that total, both directly at the pump and in increased transport costs for, well, everything.
The important thing is how the relative price of fossil fuel energy and renewable energy is changing. If you want to hold fossil fuels constant, fine, but the result is that renewables are getting cheaper at an accelerating rate. If they aren't already cheaper, they will be in the near future.
That's not a good reason. At some point, we'll run out. Burning through resources quickly is okay if you're using them to get access to more resources. So if we were using up our oil to get cheap space travel and colonization, or expand once we had it, or develop fantastic renewable technology, great! But we're not, we're using more and more to essentially sit idle.
There's also the problem of conversion efficiency. If you've ever cranked one of those flashlights with an attached hand generator you know that it's not something you want to be doing regularly. Actually, I read about a hand generator iPhone charger recently. The reviewer's conclusion was that it would be useful if you were lost in the woods and needed to send a text message to tell someone where you were, but wouldn't work for more regular use.
The hat you linked to, however, has possibilities.
You might have noticed that the price of oil has more than quadrupled recently. If it does that again we won't be having the discussion - renewables will be cheaper.
Personally, I think we're probably beyond the point where it matters. The price of oil will go up to the point where the renewable technologies we already have will be cheaper, sooner rather than later. It's still worth investing now so that we build up our renewable infrastructure with the best technology available, but it's going to happen.
The only problem is coal, which is still cheap, plentiful, and useful for generating electricity.
If I made t-shirts with big breadboards, a bunch of wires and a nine volt battery hanging off the chest I don't think I'd sell very many. And if you're in an airport wearing such a thing, somebody asks you about it, and you just walk away without answering, you really shouldn't be surprised by a little extra scrutiny.
I'm someone who gets dragged into the back room every single time I cross the US border. Sometimes there are unholstered guns and handcuffs involved, all because I share a name with someone they're scared of (and a few million other people). I don't have much respect for border guards who can't read a physical description, or airport security who make everybody take their shoes off but can't find real weapons. But I also don't have much sympathy for idiots who do unreasonably suspicious things in such an environment.
Who cares. I have half a dozen e-mail addresses, all of which go to unified mailboxes on my computer and my phone. People ask me what address to use. I don't care. When I used IM it was the same. A unified client, both desktop and phone, that combined everything. GTalk, MSN, Yahoo, whatever. It made no difference. Now with SMS replacements (and SMS itself), everything just goes to my phone. Sure, it's several different apps, but regardless of which one, the notification pops up, I tap on it, and write a reply. It's a non-issue, just like it was ten years ago when Microsoft and Yahoo decided they wanted part of the ICQ pie.
That's nice. Your situation isn't really generally applicable. For example, I'm currently travelling out of the country. I'm not that far away though - text messages only cost $0.70, both to send and receive. Let's not talk about how much it costs to actually call someone.
You're not really a huge electro-chemical generator, despite what thermodynamically challenged Hollywood would have you believe. You can sometimes tap a little bit of waste heat from a person. Or use some kind of kinetic generator. Either or both of those provide tiny amounts of electricity, at least an order of magnitude less than it would take to run something like Glass.
Yes. I thought of that when I originally posted. I think that might be worse than one big boom. 10,000 big hydrogen bombs all in one place at one time would be pretty devastating. But a small portion of the antimatter would probably annihilate, creating a decent initial explosion and sending the bulk outwards at high speed. Some of that would slam into the ground, creating a bigger explosion, hurrying the rest on it's way. Depending on what form it was in (probably some kind of solid for compactness and ease of handling), it would spread out on a variety of trajectories as something ranging from chunks to plasma. If it was in fairly small particles, imagine a nuke style fireball that just keeps exploding as it grows. If chunks, the bits that got sent into high trajectories might spend a long time skipping along on the atmosphere, irradiating the planet.
More than that. I don't have an envelope handy, but a couple thousand pounds of antimatter annihilating would probably make the planet a rather poor place to live.
Yup. If you want a number, 3 x 10^8 m/s (i.e. the speed of light in a vacuum) works pretty well. A neutrino with that much energy must be going at 99.many-nines % of the speed of light. The actual number of nines depends on the mass.
Even regular solar neutrinos go at essentially the speed of light, as far as the m/s scale goes, and they have energies that are far lower.
Wow, you've obviously got some issues. "Stewardess" is the female form of "steward," which was a fairly high position in a household staff. Vaguely related to "squire" which has become "esquire" which is today a title granted to pretentious people by themselves.
I think the term you're confusing it with is "whore."
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's hard to heat beer up to 12 degrees and keep it there without scalding it?
While I agree with your point, the fact that you're applying it to this story makes me sad.
Slashdot is full of cynical gits who think they know more than they do. But this story seems to be about something trivial enough that someone with a high school education should be able to calculate the result on the back of a napkin with no problems. It's also not confirming theory... that particular theory has been confirmed a LOT, including regularly in high school science classrooms.
Now, the original article seems to be a tongue in cheek light science story in Physics Today. But the tongue in cheekness got lost somewhere between the original experiment and the Slashdot summary. Your post suggests you missed it entirely and think the result is in some way important.
I think we covered heat of vaporization in grade ten or so. Quantitatively.
"there are various issues related to freedom, security, availability, economic development, etc. that come from having all these different communication systems that are essentially proprietary."
I don't know what kind of e-mail you're using, but mine is pretty much the opposite of proprietary. All of your other objections seem to boil down to "but everyone won't use my preferred system, so we need to force them to!" There are standards for all of the things you've mentioned. Except for e-mail, the standards are unpopular. I'm not going to support you in forcing everyone use whatever you think is open enough. If you think it's that big a problem then write a killer SMS/twitter/forum/facebook/IM/kitchen sink app using open standards for everything and see if you can convince anyone to use it.
I think it's a nonissue because, with the possible exception of e-mail, which is already standardized, nobody is really bound to any particular system. ICQ was abandoned when MSN and Yahoo came around with something better. MySpace got the boot when Facebook offered something better. Twitter might fall to something new. SMS is facing death at the hands of reasonably priced alternatives. There's no significant lockin because the vast majority of people don't really care about things like their SMS message archive.
That's great for you. Personally, it seems rather silly to have legal regulation for how much you can charge for specific forms of data called "SMS" and "Voice," and to have those restrictions vary depending on where you are, where your provider is, and where the person on the other end of the connection is. It's even sillier when, moving forward, cell networks will be set up so that all traffic, voice, data, whatever, all travel the same way.
SMS was always a hack. It's going to be a relief to move on to something more sane.
I agree with you, so long as nothing catastrophic happens, we'll just all switch to alternative sources over time. But, I think there's a great opportunity now to fund alternative energy research so that when we start building out large scale infrastructure we're going to be stuck with for a while, it's as good as possible. 20% efficient solar panels instead of 10%, for example. I think we're doing this. One potential complicating factor is that there are likely large indirect costs for using fossil fuels that are not currently being factored into the cost of their use. Other things, like gas from fracking and deep sea hydrocarbons have other indirect costs we might want to consider carefully before developing them too fully. For electricity generation, wind and solar are now competitive with gas, oil or coal and the fossil fuels are only going to get more expensive.
The peak oil observation/theory/hypothesis/whatever seems likely to be more generally applicable to any similar nonrenewable resource. Just like oil, there are easy to obtain gas reserves and harder and harder ones, until although there might be gas still in the ground, it's cheaper to synthesize it or use something else. You could equally well talk about peak gas, or peak fossil fuels, or peak iron.
It's interesting to see people talking about replacing oil with natural gas. In that same oil rich region I grew up in, all houses were heated with gas, most electricity was generated from gas, and even quite a few fleet vehicles ran on gas. We really only used oil for gasoline.
I remember ten years ago when people (I lived in an oil rich region) were worried about oil going above $40 a barrel because that was the price point at which people seriously started looking at alternatives. Now we're talking about oil never going below $40 a barrel again.
Yes, if you're willing to pay for it we'll never run out of oil. But that's not what peak oil is about. The theory says that oil production will peak an then decline because it becomes more and more expensive to extract oil, until it becomes unfeasible. For individual fields and countries, the competition comes from other fields and countries. For the world as a whole, the competition comes form renewables and, eventually, synthesis.
Considering that the price of oil has a huge effect on the inflation rate, an increase of 50-100% means that the price of oil has indeed skyrocketed.
That doesn't really mean anything. Inflation is an estimate of the increase in living expenses, calculated by looking at the cost of various things average people buy. Gasoline figures a great deal in that total, both directly at the pump and in increased transport costs for, well, everything.
The important thing is how the relative price of fossil fuel energy and renewable energy is changing. If you want to hold fossil fuels constant, fine, but the result is that renewables are getting cheaper at an accelerating rate. If they aren't already cheaper, they will be in the near future.
And even cheaper when you do it on a large scale. You'd pay a lot more than $65/MW for a natural gas generator installed in your home.
That's not a good reason. At some point, we'll run out. Burning through resources quickly is okay if you're using them to get access to more resources. So if we were using up our oil to get cheap space travel and colonization, or expand once we had it, or develop fantastic renewable technology, great! But we're not, we're using more and more to essentially sit idle.
There's also the problem of conversion efficiency. If you've ever cranked one of those flashlights with an attached hand generator you know that it's not something you want to be doing regularly. Actually, I read about a hand generator iPhone charger recently. The reviewer's conclusion was that it would be useful if you were lost in the woods and needed to send a text message to tell someone where you were, but wouldn't work for more regular use.
The hat you linked to, however, has possibilities.
You might have noticed that the price of oil has more than quadrupled recently. If it does that again we won't be having the discussion - renewables will be cheaper.
Personally, I think we're probably beyond the point where it matters. The price of oil will go up to the point where the renewable technologies we already have will be cheaper, sooner rather than later. It's still worth investing now so that we build up our renewable infrastructure with the best technology available, but it's going to happen.
The only problem is coal, which is still cheap, plentiful, and useful for generating electricity.
If I made t-shirts with big breadboards, a bunch of wires and a nine volt battery hanging off the chest I don't think I'd sell very many. And if you're in an airport wearing such a thing, somebody asks you about it, and you just walk away without answering, you really shouldn't be surprised by a little extra scrutiny.
I'm someone who gets dragged into the back room every single time I cross the US border. Sometimes there are unholstered guns and handcuffs involved, all because I share a name with someone they're scared of (and a few million other people). I don't have much respect for border guards who can't read a physical description, or airport security who make everybody take their shoes off but can't find real weapons. But I also don't have much sympathy for idiots who do unreasonably suspicious things in such an environment.
Who cares. I have half a dozen e-mail addresses, all of which go to unified mailboxes on my computer and my phone. People ask me what address to use. I don't care. When I used IM it was the same. A unified client, both desktop and phone, that combined everything. GTalk, MSN, Yahoo, whatever. It made no difference. Now with SMS replacements (and SMS itself), everything just goes to my phone. Sure, it's several different apps, but regardless of which one, the notification pops up, I tap on it, and write a reply. It's a non-issue, just like it was ten years ago when Microsoft and Yahoo decided they wanted part of the ICQ pie.
That's nice. Your situation isn't really generally applicable. For example, I'm currently travelling out of the country. I'm not that far away though - text messages only cost $0.70, both to send and receive. Let's not talk about how much it costs to actually call someone.
You're not really a huge electro-chemical generator, despite what thermodynamically challenged Hollywood would have you believe. You can sometimes tap a little bit of waste heat from a person. Or use some kind of kinetic generator. Either or both of those provide tiny amounts of electricity, at least an order of magnitude less than it would take to run something like Glass.
Google's ultimate goal: being plugged directly into everyone's brain.
Sure it is. Because people haven't been working on that for a decade.
I'm going to start making shirts with IR LEDs sewn into them.
Yes. I thought of that when I originally posted. I think that might be worse than one big boom. 10,000 big hydrogen bombs all in one place at one time would be pretty devastating. But a small portion of the antimatter would probably annihilate, creating a decent initial explosion and sending the bulk outwards at high speed. Some of that would slam into the ground, creating a bigger explosion, hurrying the rest on it's way. Depending on what form it was in (probably some kind of solid for compactness and ease of handling), it would spread out on a variety of trajectories as something ranging from chunks to plasma. If it was in fairly small particles, imagine a nuke style fireball that just keeps exploding as it grows. If chunks, the bits that got sent into high trajectories might spend a long time skipping along on the atmosphere, irradiating the planet.
More than that. I don't have an envelope handy, but a couple thousand pounds of antimatter annihilating would probably make the planet a rather poor place to live.
Scientists like upsets. They wouldn't BE upset, it would be an upset.
Yup. If you want a number, 3 x 10^8 m/s (i.e. the speed of light in a vacuum) works pretty well. A neutrino with that much energy must be going at 99.many-nines % of the speed of light. The actual number of nines depends on the mass.
Even regular solar neutrinos go at essentially the speed of light, as far as the m/s scale goes, and they have energies that are far lower.
Wow, you've obviously got some issues. "Stewardess" is the female form of "steward," which was a fairly high position in a household staff. Vaguely related to "squire" which has become "esquire" which is today a title granted to pretentious people by themselves.
I think the term you're confusing it with is "whore."