Oh, and on the seal problems and such, it sounds like you know more than I do. However, I can tell you that there was a firm trying to move the Wankels back into airplanes because they can be amazing performers -- they're essentially a cylinder horizontally, so you can stack and arbitrary number of cylinders along a crankshaft. More cylinders = more power. You can get some insanely powerful engines, and with no real extra engineering: once you get to 2 cylinders, you get to 5 for free.
And the power to weight ratio is fantastic. Nutty compared to a piston engine. Plus theoretically less failure prone, so it's ideal for aircraft. That said, I did have one engine just die on me. No fuss, no sputter, just quiet. Had to get a new engine, but turned out the dealer who said so was completely incompetent. I suspect I could have saved myself a few grand by going to some corner garage.
So, yeah, lots wrong there, including failures, cost and the dealer system. A modern version could have tremendous advantages, though.
No, don't get me wrong, it wasn't that powerful. It was LIGHT. Nimble. Smooth. No piston vibration.
It was low to the ground and very well designed. I Urge you to find one used and indulge yourself. But it was NOT powerful. It went 70 and made you feel like you were going 90. In normal driving, it accelerated fine, but not spectacularly. However you could absolutely FLOOR it and not worry about ripping the engine to bits because there was NO vibration. No opposed cylinders. Just faster rotation.
I loved my RX7. I only got rid of it when I got married and we needed a "sensible" car. I still miss that car.
I only did a 180 in it once, but it was the second day I owned it. The Wankel has a huge amount of power for the weight of the engine. That means the wheels disconnect from the road when you turn under power.
I ran out and bought really expensive tires and 25 pounds of nails to put in the back trunk. Solved that problem.
This is getting good mileage under indeterminate load. Does anyone know enough about the tricks that they're using to answer this: "How well would it run on a static load, as in a generator configuration in, for instance, a HYBRID?"
I think what he means is selling their investments in the US, selling their dollar reserves, and certainly stopping their underwriting of US debt. Our national interest rates would skyrocket, and we'd be paying vastly more interest for our deficits.
Deficits are bad, we should balance our budgets and pay off our debts, etc. but until we do that, a sudden change in what the US is forced to pay for money could put us in a whole so deep we'd need to default on our loans.
But let's take a second and add that "yes, the Guns of August is a fabulous book, and if you haven't read it you should."
The high school teacher is talking about what got things to the situation where things could go so badly wrong, and she's clearly right -- though I'd add, since I am not a school teacher who would be fired for such things, the educational systems designed by the capitalists to train good workers and its effect on the workers who became the bulk of the armies. So blame the war on MAINE, not MAIN.
After you think about all this background, TGOA is a wonderful analysis of what happened, step by step. You really do need to read it. That and "A Distant Mirror" by Tuchman. Both are fantastic books.
'Okay, I might agree to a point, but based on what you said, who is a real "scientist" in society?'
and
'Hell, point to a group of people that are generally better "scientists" than Doctors. '
Look in academia, outside of medical schools. Doctors may be better scientists than John Q. Public is, but they're way worse scientists than scientists. And being better at science in a society which is just terrible at it wouldn't get you much. You need to be actually good at it.
'I guess my point is that while you may be technically correct, its a moot point when viewed in context.'
No. It's absolutely not. This is why bad medical research jerks us from "don't eat fat," and "that's odd. Fat free potato chips still make you fat." or "Take these antidepressants. They're miracle drugs" and "Oh, wait. Seems they don't work more than placebo in most situations." Both initial studies made companies rich. We NEED science in the medical arena. And yet there are financial and social reasons why it's both not well taught and actively discarded.
Drug company researchers have no reason to do good science. They have their corporate masters to please. Doctors have no vested interest in good science when bad science will get published in peer review journals and good science is usually less flashy and book-worthy than bad.
"Reality limits people, and end of the day, doctors have lives in their hands. Its easy to criticize when you aren't actually doing the work."
Doctors do not exist because they justify themselves, they exist because they serve the needs of others. Their blind spot with respect to science is tremendously damaging to the people they are supposed to be serving. It is easy to criticize. Very easy. But that's immaterial. It is easy to criticize when someone makes boat after boat which falls apart in the water. After all, can I make a boat? No, I can only criticize. And yet I'm sure you agree that as a society, we'd stop that guy from making boats. When doctors feel that they are in combat and do shoddy studies which perpetuate bad practices in the interest of time (call it expediency), society suffers until someone does a good study -- and that's a lot more suffering than than if doctors did good studies in the first place.
And of course, most doctors don't do any science, and we shouldn't expect them to. What they do is read "science" and assume it's right, since they cannot tell bad studies from good. (Thank heavens for peer review journals, huh?) They then apply the ideas from junk science on us.
I know you feel personal insulted by what I've said -- it's your chosen path. I honestly don't mean to discourage you or insult you. But look around in the next 6 years. Talk to academics outside of the medical field about the studies you're doing, if you do any studies. See if they don't have some very annoying suggestions on how to tighten up the rigor of your experiments. Change the pattern.
"I just don't get what you are implying here. Do you think that Computer "scientists" are better scientists on average than doctors? because the answer is no."
No, computer scientist are not scientists at all.
Neither are doctors. Science classes generally don't prepare you for doing science. Chemistry, for example, most often does "experiments" in the lab which are actually demonstrations of observed phenomena. Stats classes do a far better job of preparing you to actually do science, but nothing prepares you better than actually doing it. Constructing experiments with human subjects is notoriously difficult. Doctors do (as we see with their publications) a terrible job. And they train their own. That's a bad system perpetuating itself.
"Science" classes don't generally prepare you to do science for exactly the reason you point to with your computer science comment. We call a lot of things science in modern society, but we don't understand what real modern science is -- the concept of the pursuit of truth without ever absolutely being able to prove what is. We just come closer and closer to the truth while disproving hypotheses. Society doesn't like that definition very much. Drug companies don't like it very much. (It's unsatisfying at a human level, certainly.)
"Your points about prestige might be valid, but i would counter with a very hard leek at yourself. We know VERY little about the human body, most of what we know is from observation, not deduction."
After looking very hard at myself, I deduce lots of things. But that's Francis Bacon's idea of science you're describing (circa 1600), not a modern one. It's also the common conception of science, and that's a problem. (It's also probably your hypothetical surgeon's idea of science, even though he's been told different, since A. most of what he reads and sees and uses is science ala bacon, and B. a surgeon is generally the same as a dermatologist, though he may have been a better student, had steadier hands, worked harder and did very different post-school work -- he still has the same foundations.) Deduction is only the first step and sometimes not even really a required one -- it's the further steps of experimentation with well designed experiments which eliminate theories and provide real knowledge.
Finding cures, by the way, isn't science, most of the time, anyhow. Eliminating cures generally is science. Medicine, as you make clear in your post, is about trying stuff, seeing what works, and running with it. It's also about the application of tech and experience. Doctors do all that. They do a fairly good job. The medical profession educates its own to do that. But it does a bad job of science. It's not the same thing.
I suspect you think that I think that doctors are stupid. I don't. I think they're very well educated in their trade. That's called vocational school -- modern universities have been slowly stuffed full of vocational school ideas in the 20th century. And no, I don't think they're our best and brightest -- they start off as our best students, certainly, but we fail them by allowing and even encouraging them, at least financially, to get an education which only prepares them for being a doctor in our current conception of what a doctor is. That's a self-perpetuating cycle that gives us what we have. And part of that is bad science.
It's much harder to get funding to do medical research without an MD than it is to do it with one. So in order to get funding, people who have real science backgrounds and understand science spend 6 years getting an MD before they can get funding to do what they wanted to do 6 years before, and during that time, they are surrounded by bad methodology which they need to resist picking up. Then the papers that they write go to peer review journals -- and if they're in medical journals, they're reviewed by people who love their Bacon. Guess which articles they're more likely to like?
Bad cycle. Bad science. I suspect you could do a lot
Doctors are notoriously bad at doing scientific investigations, and since peer review journals are reviewed by peers, they don't know bad science when they see it.
I've been arguing with my father about this for... what, fifteen years?!? He subscribes to the New England Journal of Medicine and is forever telling me about the latest study telling you to that standing on one leg reduces breast cancer in nuns. These studies are, without fail, trivial to eviscerate as their control groups are either non-existent or very poorly picked.
Doctors just don't know much about science. That shouldn't be surprising. They have terrible educations. After all, they studied premed in college and then went to a vocational school. MD/PhDs really ought to do better, but I suspect they do their doctoral work with faculty who come from the same under-educated group.
The problem is one of prestige. You cannot walk into a group of doctors and tell them why they're dumbasses and what to change. They know, and society confirms for them, that they are the best educated people on the planet and smarter than anyone else. "Heck, just look at our paychecks," they might respond. "That proves it right there, doesn't it? Figure it out from that data point only -- you don't need a control group."
"Were people contemplating this back in 2004? The idea of video cards being used for general purpose computing is not very old. Transcoding user-generated video from one format to another was not very common until YouTube got popular."
Encoding isn't transcoding, though they're similar. People have been encoding for a long time and always looking to offload any of the task onto some other processor. You live in a time when some encoding can be done in real time with a general purpose CPU. In the 90's, when I was doing encoding, any way one could scratch a little more speed by getting something else to do the work made a lot of sense.
I suspect that there is prior art on the concept (though perhaps using different algorithms) which date back to the first GPUs. Things were really slow, and people were desperate. If I remember correctly, I wound up buying a card for a PC with two PowerPC chips in on it. That was not cheap. And yes, I know, not prior art. But I strongly suspect that some people in my position probably tried to do the same things with their Voodoo cards, which would be.
Not sure how, but it must be. OpenJDK is something Oracle doesn't make money on, as far as I can tell. Whenever Oracle touches something it doesn't make money on, it always makes an attempt to crush it between it's teeth.
"I'd be interested to see if this could be used in a football stadium (domed or not)"
You'd design the spacing of the microphone and the logic to match it based on the size and shape of the area. This array is not what you'd use. But you could certainly make an array or set of arrays which would work for a football field.
"...Arginate should take a closer look at Section 512(f) of the DMCA — which provide penalties for misrepresenting that an online video is infringing — before sending any more notices."
Yeah, yeah, right. But has anyone ever heard of ANYONE actually paying any kind of penalty for misrepresenting a video (or anything else) to get a DMCA takedown? Has anyone ever suffered any real consequences for this, even though it amounts to perjury?
Please, I want someone to tell me there have been consequences, and that people have been fined or jailed for it. But I suspect that the has never been a single such case where there any real consequences.
I know we care, but the legal system doesn't and only an idiot could fail to notice. PLEASE, PLEASE tell me I'm wrong.
For the record, I meant Billion 10^9, and may have simply fumbled the math. But I didn't realize there was a language issue between those of us who speak English and those that speak British, much less all those other funny languages we don't learn here in the States.
I just went down a wikipedia rabbit-hole and found the difference between long-scale and short-scale. I am HORRIFIED, but want to thank you for pointing me to something I had no idea about. None. I'm shocked, really.
But I finally understand a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon I saw translated into German about 20 years ago. (I'm sure I'll get some parts wrong...) Calvin, who is taking a test, leans over his school desk in a conspiratorial way and asks Suzy, "Was ist 6 x 8?" Suzy responds "Eine milliarde." Calvin writes it down, then looks puzzled. "Eine milliarde, schon wieder?" I now know Suzy was answering 10^9. Multiple times. Thank you.
Unfortunately, I think you're being naive. How could people outside of the US have any other generalization about us?
A small, vocal percentage of Americans thinks solar is:
1. a threat to their status quo and therefore the work of evil people like liberals and atheists.
2. ugly.
3. a complete waste of time and money which will never amount to anything because, you dumbass, sometimes it's night. (And wind power just the same because sometimes the wind stops blowing. What are you gonna do then, moron?)
4. a threat to their jobs.
5. a first step by the enemy of what's right and good (the status quo) in the ultimate aim to take away the things that Americans have. Things like trucks and homes and Barbie.
Just like in any other country, we have stupid people here. But we also have a media which likes to pander to them because they're a wonderful demographic. They buy things they see advertised on TV without questioning whether they need such a thing, whether it's a good idea, whether it works, etc. This makes advertisers, and therefore the media, happy.
That, coupled with the fact that English has become the lingua franca of the entire world, means that educated people in every country in the world can see American TV and see people who believe the things above. They understand our dumb people, and we put our dumb people on TV.
(Dumb people in the Mongolia say things and we never hear them. We don't speak Mongolian. Well, for that matter, dumb people in France say things and we never hear them. We don't speak French. The smartest Mongolians and French all speak English -- if we're going to see Mongolians or Frenchies on TV, they're gonna be the smart ones who talk normal.)
Compounding all this, American "liberal" media's obsession with balanced coverage means that it is considered good policy (though thankfully it doesn't always happen) that when someone comes on to say "Solar is Good", someone has to be dragged out who will say "no it isn't", no matter how far down you have to scrape the barrel to find such a knuckle-dragger. (I think we see less of this, now as, like with almost anything, at some point controversy on non-controversial things just seems pointless even to the media.)
OK, if we put up a rectangle 8,000 kilometers by 8,000 kilometers, it'll produce 100,000,000,000,000 times the energy we need.
WHY DON'T THEY SUGGEST A 1 KILOMETER BY 1 KILOMETER SAIL?
What's going on here? Did the guys being interviewed say something reasonable, and then also abstract it to a high number for the reporter, and the reporter only decided to write up the insane, absurd, bizarrely huge number? Or were the guys being interviewed just nuts?
It's been a few years and I don't remember too well, but the reconstruction in my mind (which might very well be a composite) had a little picture, explained that the filament heated up, etc. No more than three lines -- it is just a light build after all -- but you could see the enthusiasm in some of the answers. "Oh, goody! I get to explain something!"
Heck yeah. The OLPC guys came out with a neato box for $200, and you had to buy one buy buying two (on for you, one for a kid). They missed their mark by something like a factor of two, but definitely came up with a bunch of good ideas for an educational device, and a cheap one, at that.
Sure they'll miss the mark on this one, too. But it'll still push the industry downward. It won't take much innovation to get prices even lower, but it will take some. OLPC will provide some of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and on the seal problems and such, it sounds like you know more than I do. However, I can tell you that there was a firm trying to move the Wankels back into airplanes because they can be amazing performers -- they're essentially a cylinder horizontally, so you can stack and arbitrary number of cylinders along a crankshaft. More cylinders = more power. You can get some insanely powerful engines, and with no real extra engineering: once you get to 2 cylinders, you get to 5 for free.
And the power to weight ratio is fantastic. Nutty compared to a piston engine. Plus theoretically less failure prone, so it's ideal for aircraft. That said, I did have one engine just die on me. No fuss, no sputter, just quiet. Had to get a new engine, but turned out the dealer who said so was completely incompetent. I suspect I could have saved myself a few grand by going to some corner garage.
So, yeah, lots wrong there, including failures, cost and the dealer system. A modern version could have tremendous advantages, though.
Because it really was incredibly sweet.
No, don't get me wrong, it wasn't that powerful. It was LIGHT. Nimble. Smooth. No piston vibration.
It was low to the ground and very well designed. I Urge you to find one used and indulge yourself. But it was NOT powerful. It went 70 and made you feel like you were going 90. In normal driving, it accelerated fine, but not spectacularly. However you could absolutely FLOOR it and not worry about ripping the engine to bits because there was NO vibration. No opposed cylinders. Just faster rotation.
It was so sweet.
"Wankel"! "Wankel"! "Wankel"!!!!!
I loved my RX7. I only got rid of it when I got married and we needed a "sensible" car. I still miss that car.
I only did a 180 in it once, but it was the second day I owned it. The Wankel has a huge amount of power for the weight of the engine. That means the wheels disconnect from the road when you turn under power.
I ran out and bought really expensive tires and 25 pounds of nails to put in the back trunk. Solved that problem.
I REALLY miss that car.
This is getting good mileage under indeterminate load. Does anyone know enough about the tricks that they're using to answer this: "How well would it run on a static load, as in a generator configuration in, for instance, a HYBRID?"
Deficits are a valid long term problem. But we have far more severe short term problems that need to be solved first.
Agreed. Thanks for the excellent response.
I think what he means is selling their investments in the US, selling their dollar reserves, and certainly stopping their underwriting of US debt. Our national interest rates would skyrocket, and we'd be paying vastly more interest for our deficits.
Deficits are bad, we should balance our budgets and pay off our debts, etc. but until we do that, a sudden change in what the US is forced to pay for money could put us in a whole so deep we'd need to default on our loans.
But let's take a second and add that "yes, the Guns of August is a fabulous book, and if you haven't read it you should."
The high school teacher is talking about what got things to the situation where things could go so badly wrong, and she's clearly right -- though I'd add, since I am not a school teacher who would be fired for such things, the educational systems designed by the capitalists to train good workers and its effect on the workers who became the bulk of the armies. So blame the war on MAINE, not MAIN.
After you think about all this background, TGOA is a wonderful analysis of what happened, step by step. You really do need to read it. That and "A Distant Mirror" by Tuchman. Both are fantastic books.
Wait, I heard #7s have BPA.
'Okay, I might agree to a point, but based on what you said, who is a real "scientist" in society?'
and
'Hell, point to a group of people that are generally better "scientists" than Doctors. '
Look in academia, outside of medical schools. Doctors may be better scientists than John Q. Public is, but they're way worse scientists than scientists. And being better at science in a society which is just terrible at it wouldn't get you much. You need to be actually good at it.
'I guess my point is that while you may be technically correct, its a moot point when viewed in context.'
No. It's absolutely not. This is why bad medical research jerks us from "don't eat fat," and "that's odd. Fat free potato chips still make you fat." or "Take these antidepressants. They're miracle drugs" and "Oh, wait. Seems they don't work more than placebo in most situations." Both initial studies made companies rich. We NEED science in the medical arena. And yet there are financial and social reasons why it's both not well taught and actively discarded.
Drug company researchers have no reason to do good science. They have their corporate masters to please. Doctors have no vested interest in good science when bad science will get published in peer review journals and good science is usually less flashy and book-worthy than bad.
"Reality limits people, and end of the day, doctors have lives in their hands. Its easy to criticize when you aren't actually doing the work."
Doctors do not exist because they justify themselves, they exist because they serve the needs of others. Their blind spot with respect to science is tremendously damaging to the people they are supposed to be serving. It is easy to criticize. Very easy. But that's immaterial. It is easy to criticize when someone makes boat after boat which falls apart in the water. After all, can I make a boat? No, I can only criticize. And yet I'm sure you agree that as a society, we'd stop that guy from making boats. When doctors feel that they are in combat and do shoddy studies which perpetuate bad practices in the interest of time (call it expediency), society suffers until someone does a good study -- and that's a lot more suffering than than if doctors did good studies in the first place.
And of course, most doctors don't do any science, and we shouldn't expect them to. What they do is read "science" and assume it's right, since they cannot tell bad studies from good. (Thank heavens for peer review journals, huh?) They then apply the ideas from junk science on us.
I know you feel personal insulted by what I've said -- it's your chosen path. I honestly don't mean to discourage you or insult you. But look around in the next 6 years. Talk to academics outside of the medical field about the studies you're doing, if you do any studies. See if they don't have some very annoying suggestions on how to tighten up the rigor of your experiments. Change the pattern.
"I just don't get what you are implying here. Do you think that Computer "scientists" are better scientists on average than doctors? because the answer is no."
No, computer scientist are not scientists at all.
Neither are doctors. Science classes generally don't prepare you for doing science. Chemistry, for example, most often does "experiments" in the lab which are actually demonstrations of observed phenomena. Stats classes do a far better job of preparing you to actually do science, but nothing prepares you better than actually doing it. Constructing experiments with human subjects is notoriously difficult. Doctors do (as we see with their publications) a terrible job. And they train their own. That's a bad system perpetuating itself.
"Science" classes don't generally prepare you to do science for exactly the reason you point to with your computer science comment. We call a lot of things science in modern society, but we don't understand what real modern science is -- the concept of the pursuit of truth without ever absolutely being able to prove what is. We just come closer and closer to the truth while disproving hypotheses. Society doesn't like that definition very much. Drug companies don't like it very much. (It's unsatisfying at a human level, certainly.)
"Your points about prestige might be valid, but i would counter with a very hard leek at yourself. We know VERY little about the human body, most of what we know is from observation, not deduction."
After looking very hard at myself, I deduce lots of things. But that's Francis Bacon's idea of science you're describing (circa 1600), not a modern one. It's also the common conception of science, and that's a problem. (It's also probably your hypothetical surgeon's idea of science, even though he's been told different, since A. most of what he reads and sees and uses is science ala bacon, and B. a surgeon is generally the same as a dermatologist, though he may have been a better student, had steadier hands, worked harder and did very different post-school work -- he still has the same foundations.) Deduction is only the first step and sometimes not even really a required one -- it's the further steps of experimentation with well designed experiments which eliminate theories and provide real knowledge.
Finding cures, by the way, isn't science, most of the time, anyhow. Eliminating cures generally is science. Medicine, as you make clear in your post, is about trying stuff, seeing what works, and running with it. It's also about the application of tech and experience. Doctors do all that. They do a fairly good job. The medical profession educates its own to do that. But it does a bad job of science. It's not the same thing.
I suspect you think that I think that doctors are stupid. I don't. I think they're very well educated in their trade. That's called vocational school -- modern universities have been slowly stuffed full of vocational school ideas in the 20th century. And no, I don't think they're our best and brightest -- they start off as our best students, certainly, but we fail them by allowing and even encouraging them, at least financially, to get an education which only prepares them for being a doctor in our current conception of what a doctor is. That's a self-perpetuating cycle that gives us what we have. And part of that is bad science.
It's much harder to get funding to do medical research without an MD than it is to do it with one. So in order to get funding, people who have real science backgrounds and understand science spend 6 years getting an MD before they can get funding to do what they wanted to do 6 years before, and during that time, they are surrounded by bad methodology which they need to resist picking up. Then the papers that they write go to peer review journals -- and if they're in medical journals, they're reviewed by people who love their Bacon. Guess which articles they're more likely to like?
Bad cycle. Bad science. I suspect you could do a lot
Doctors are notoriously bad at doing scientific investigations, and since peer review journals are reviewed by peers, they don't know bad science when they see it.
I've been arguing with my father about this for... what, fifteen years?!? He subscribes to the New England Journal of Medicine and is forever telling me about the latest study telling you to that standing on one leg reduces breast cancer in nuns. These studies are, without fail, trivial to eviscerate as their control groups are either non-existent or very poorly picked.
Doctors just don't know much about science. That shouldn't be surprising. They have terrible educations. After all, they studied premed in college and then went to a vocational school. MD/PhDs really ought to do better, but I suspect they do their doctoral work with faculty who come from the same under-educated group.
The problem is one of prestige. You cannot walk into a group of doctors and tell them why they're dumbasses and what to change. They know, and society confirms for them, that they are the best educated people on the planet and smarter than anyone else. "Heck, just look at our paychecks," they might respond. "That proves it right there, doesn't it? Figure it out from that data point only -- you don't need a control group."
"Were people contemplating this back in 2004? The idea of video cards being used for general purpose computing is not very old. Transcoding user-generated video from one format to another was not very common until YouTube got popular."
Encoding isn't transcoding, though they're similar. People have been encoding for a long time and always looking to offload any of the task onto some other processor. You live in a time when some encoding can be done in real time with a general purpose CPU. In the 90's, when I was doing encoding, any way one could scratch a little more speed by getting something else to do the work made a lot of sense.
I suspect that there is prior art on the concept (though perhaps using different algorithms) which date back to the first GPUs. Things were really slow, and people were desperate. If I remember correctly, I wound up buying a card for a PC with two PowerPC chips in on it. That was not cheap. And yes, I know, not prior art. But I strongly suspect that some people in my position probably tried to do the same things with their Voodoo cards, which would be.
Not sure how, but it must be. OpenJDK is something Oracle doesn't make money on, as far as I can tell. Whenever Oracle touches something it doesn't make money on, it always makes an attempt to crush it between it's teeth.
"I'd be interested to see if this could be used in a football stadium (domed or not)"
You'd design the spacing of the microphone and the logic to match it based on the size and shape of the area. This array is not what you'd use. But you could certainly make an array or set of arrays which would work for a football field.
Why are you asking? You know it's fair use, we know it's fair use, and the lawyers who demanded the takedown know it's fair use.
This isn't about copyright law. This is about the clever use of perjury.
"...Arginate should take a closer look at Section 512(f) of the DMCA — which provide penalties for misrepresenting that an online video is infringing — before sending any more notices."
Yeah, yeah, right. But has anyone ever heard of ANYONE actually paying any kind of penalty for misrepresenting a video (or anything else) to get a DMCA takedown? Has anyone ever suffered any real consequences for this, even though it amounts to perjury?
Please, I want someone to tell me there have been consequences, and that people have been fined or jailed for it. But I suspect that the has never been a single such case where there any real consequences.
I know we care, but the legal system doesn't and only an idiot could fail to notice. PLEASE, PLEASE tell me I'm wrong.
"May"?
"My blackberry is running out of juice. Quick, shoot someone!"
For the record, I meant Billion 10^9, and may have simply fumbled the math. But I didn't realize there was a language issue between those of us who speak English and those that speak British, much less all those other funny languages we don't learn here in the States.
I just went down a wikipedia rabbit-hole and found the difference between long-scale and short-scale. I am HORRIFIED, but want to thank you for pointing me to something I had no idea about. None. I'm shocked, really.
But I finally understand a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon I saw translated into German about 20 years ago. (I'm sure I'll get some parts wrong...) Calvin, who is taking a test, leans over his school desk in a conspiratorial way and asks Suzy, "Was ist 6 x 8?" Suzy responds "Eine milliarde." Calvin writes it down, then looks puzzled. "Eine milliarde, schon wieder?" I now know Suzy was answering 10^9. Multiple times. Thank you.
Unfortunately, I think you're being naive. How could people outside of the US have any other generalization about us?
A small, vocal percentage of Americans thinks solar is:
1. a threat to their status quo and therefore the work of evil people like liberals and atheists.
2. ugly.
3. a complete waste of time and money which will never amount to anything because, you dumbass, sometimes it's night. (And wind power just the same because sometimes the wind stops blowing. What are you gonna do then, moron?)
4. a threat to their jobs.
5. a first step by the enemy of what's right and good (the status quo) in the ultimate aim to take away the things that Americans have. Things like trucks and homes and Barbie.
Just like in any other country, we have stupid people here. But we also have a media which likes to pander to them because they're a wonderful demographic. They buy things they see advertised on TV without questioning whether they need such a thing, whether it's a good idea, whether it works, etc. This makes advertisers, and therefore the media, happy.
That, coupled with the fact that English has become the lingua franca of the entire world, means that educated people in every country in the world can see American TV and see people who believe the things above. They understand our dumb people, and we put our dumb people on TV.
(Dumb people in the Mongolia say things and we never hear them. We don't speak Mongolian. Well, for that matter, dumb people in France say things and we never hear them. We don't speak French. The smartest Mongolians and French all speak English -- if we're going to see Mongolians or Frenchies on TV, they're gonna be the smart ones who talk normal.)
Compounding all this, American "liberal" media's obsession with balanced coverage means that it is considered good policy (though thankfully it doesn't always happen) that when someone comes on to say "Solar is Good", someone has to be dragged out who will say "no it isn't", no matter how far down you have to scrape the barrel to find such a knuckle-dragger. (I think we see less of this, now as, like with almost anything, at some point controversy on non-controversial things just seems pointless even to the media.)
Why is this tagged "funny"?
OK, if we put up a rectangle 8,000 kilometers by 8,000 kilometers, it'll produce 100,000,000,000,000 times the energy we need.
WHY DON'T THEY SUGGEST A 1 KILOMETER BY 1 KILOMETER SAIL?
What's going on here? Did the guys being interviewed say something reasonable, and then also abstract it to a high number for the reporter, and the reporter only decided to write up the insane, absurd, bizarrely huge number? Or were the guys being interviewed just nuts?
Stirling engines are simple, cheap to make, and incredibly weak, unless you have a pretty amazing heat differential.
It's been a few years and I don't remember too well, but the reconstruction in my mind (which might very well be a composite) had a little picture, explained that the filament heated up, etc. No more than three lines -- it is just a light build after all -- but you could see the enthusiasm in some of the answers. "Oh, goody! I get to explain something!"
Heck yeah. The OLPC guys came out with a neato box for $200, and you had to buy one buy buying two (on for you, one for a kid). They missed their mark by something like a factor of two, but definitely came up with a bunch of good ideas for an educational device, and a cheap one, at that.
Sure they'll miss the mark on this one, too. But it'll still push the industry downward. It won't take much innovation to get prices even lower, but it will take some. OLPC will provide some of that.