Re. Palin hating on JFK, I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised. I'm not sure Republicans ever got any closer to not hating JFK than chafing under his martyrdom. (I'm not trying to criticize the partisanship in this case - there are plenty of reasonable problems to have with JFK. I'm not a huge fan, although I'm quite non-Republican. A reasonable Republican has good reasons not to like JFK.)
I don't think it's politically stupid. It's a pretty smart move. Palin's not trying to change any Democrat's or Libertarian's mind. This is just to out-hate the competition within the Republican party, to collect as many Republican voters as possible. She's fortifying her position as the people's choice within the party.
It's the perfect time, because anything you can call remotely "socialist" can be hated openly. This would also be the time to eliminate Social Security or Medicare or something. (OK, those would be beyond tricky. But some young Republican genius might be able to pull off an association game, and voters are a bit desperate.)
(Note that I don't think you have to be an idiot to be a Republican or anything, or that most Democrats aren't idiots. I just happen to have seen the Rally to Restore Sanity videos recently and think Jon Stewart's optimism is misplaced. The media echo-chamber and political antics are, after all, just reflections of (1) some real, fundamental disagreements about governance and (2) actual human nature to form tribes and hate.
I agree with those on this thread who say that there's a huge Republican constituency that's not being understood. Palin is not unelectable. Before 2000, I would've said the same thing myself. There are a lot of voters who actually like neocon-flavored nonsense.
Again, I'm not trying to say every Republican is dumb. Just that you don't get elected by overestimating the intelligence of the American electorate or trying to reason with anyone.)
I agree with this, and also point out the pure engineering/logistics/production issue: money spent on 3D is not spent on something else that might have less buzzword value to the movie-going public but actually make the movie better.
That said, it's a tool, and I'm kind of excited to see what artists will use it for. Good cinematographers and directors will get a tasteful grip on it pretty soon. Eventually, someone will do something really worthwhile with it. Maybe Jackson? Probably too soon to hope for that, but I'm curious.
A bunch of crappy movies, easily avoided if I don't want to see them, is a small price to pay to, ultimately, advance the art and science. It's not like that crap isn't being made anyway, with ample budgets. Really, would Transformers have been *worse* in 3D? Having Hollywood do the advance development of 3D camera technology is really not costing us anything of value, and it puts cheap 3D cameras in more directors' hands sooner, which turned out pretty well for HD / all-digital production.
And grow sugarcane and other crops from which to make ethanol and food products (some of which are indeed fed to cattle). And, apparently (news to me), most significantly for the poorest among us, in the poorest places, to feed our families (subsistence farming) [Wikipedia, UN report]. And for harvesting wood to go in all the engineered wood products we buy.
In discussions of heating efficiency, don't forget heat pumps for your baseline. The fact that electric heaters (including incandescent bulbs) are 100% efficient in converting electricity to heat is actually not that good, because ("geothermal") heat pumps are more like 400% efficient in that sense.
Heat pumps are too expensive for a cabin or whatever, at least the ground source ("geothermal") heat pumps you need up north, but for big buildings they make sense. They even compare favorably to efficient combustion heaters, which are otherwise much better than the total efficiency of direct electric heat. (Burning oil directly is like 90% efficient to heat. Burning it in a power plant around 40%, so that's really the efficiency of direct electric heat, where the heater itself is 100% efficient. But then you can multiply that by a COP around 4 for a good heat pump.)
The fundamental principle at work here is that not all heat is equivalent. Electricity has a very high effective temperature, so you can trade some of that high temperature heat to pump a larger volume of lower temperature heat.
The thing most public schools have in common is (1) disdain for rational thought / academic achievement / intellectualism, (2) Lord of the Flies style social structure that anti-prepares you for real life, and (3) entitlement. Actually, it's not just public schools, it's current American culture generally, so I imagine most private schools are similar, although I haven't been there.
The "liberal" / "conservative" indoctrination is regional. Where I went to public school, we learned more about how towel-heads are funny, environmentalists are retarded, atheists eat babies, football is the most important subject (and funded by the school board accordingly), and so on, in addition to the shared nationalistic and War on X stuff (every vote counts, drugs 'r' bad, etc.).
(1) is the biggest threat, I think, and the reason I didn't send my kids to public school at a young age. If you can avoid (1), you can think your way past all the rest and make the best of the (substantial) resources available in public schools. But if you can't think your way out of a paper bag, you get sucked in by all the rest.
The tree-hugging indoctrination is by no means universal and I don't think it's the underlying problem. In fact, America is polarized by AGW because like 40% are successfully indoctrinated that way and 40% the other. (It's also kind of hard to see how respect for other cultures is a destructive value, unless you mean completely uncritical acceptance of the bad with the good.) There's a fraction that respond to reason and evidence, but they're not a politically significant bloc.
So, the indoctrination works great, but it's not there to create a homogeneous arborophilic utopia. It's there to support football-game style political circuses, which end up being good for Republican and Democrat politicians within their constituencies and also serve to give them something to argue about to appear busy while they do the usual politician thing in the background. Enough people benefit from the education-industrial complex that it can keep itself going well beyond what otherwise makes rational sense, like the other industrial complexes.
Hence, (1): kids get taught that thinking is naughty.
You do need lots of energy to collect the CO2, apparently around 6-15kJe/mol CO2 [http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/papers/84.Stolaroff.AirCaptureGHGT-8.p.pdf], by my layman's interpretation of the paper. Then you also need a lot of energy to break the CO2 up via, e.g., reverse water-gas shift, maybe 38kJ/mol. (You get all this back, and more, if you then put the resulting CO through Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, but you need to supply extra H2 to drive the reaction. The extra O2 from the CO2 ends up in an H2O byproduct, which represents a lot of energy sucked out, having been supplied as a lot of extra H2 in this case.)
So, hopefully one of the researchers that's commented will address this point, but it appears to this layman that the limestone cycle isn't too bad. (Capital-intensive, since efficient calcination requires a recuperator with particulate mass flows, but at least that's an industrially solved problem.) It's more that the thing you're pulling out of the air, CO2, is extremely stable.
You're lucky to live where you live, if wind is viable. I live near Buffalo, NY, in a moderately windy lake plain location. It sounds like a good place to favor wind, but I got a load factor of like 8 for wind, even if I cut out very early and throw away most of the wind energy. More like 20 if I did the math with a higher cut-out speed, where my plant cost was totally dominated by generator capacity, which is expensive. So the lower cut-out was more economical, but still much worse than solar, which is maybe 3-4 load factor, and it's relatively cheap to store heat, even high temperature heat. (This is all on paper, in early planning, so not very convincing. Still, I did several hours of analysis to estimate capital costs and ROI, and you'd have to live in a place with extremely steady wind to favor wind over solar. On the other hand, a wind plant is much simpler and scales down much better than a solar thermal plant, and if you don't have to store the electricity, because you use it immediately in some process, then that's not an issue. I know I can build a wind turbine, but my solar design-under-evaluation is risky and more of a hobby idea than a sure-fire solution.)
Synthesizing longer chair hydrocarbons rather than methane is not much harder, thermodynamically, if I recall. There are the various synthesis processes, which use different catalysts and conditions, but I don't recall methane synthesis being all that much easier or more efficient. Again, I guess we want to hear from an expert, not a layman such as myself that has merely surveyed some random sample of the literature from a position of ignorance...
If we can demonstrate an 800-bar compressor that's relatively efficient, and carbon fiber composite or other tanks to store hydrogen, and somehow make room for the still-3x-bigger fuel tank [http://planetforlife.com/h2/h2swiss.html] in a subcompact car, and also reclaim the energy that's necessarily used to compress the hydrogen when we release it (because otherwise it will really be too inefficient to store compared to the alternatives), that's awesome.
In fact, if we can just get people to pay for engines using inconel or ceramics and recuperators, that would also be awesome, since we could substantially increase the efficiency of existing engines using existing materials and technology. We could burn the fuel hotter to raise the Carnot limit and reuse more waste heat. At least we're pretty close to getting them to switch to turbine-electric drive trains, which is even better. (We already do mass-produce inconel turbine blades in the form of turbochargers, so we're in good shape to mass-produce Capstone-style microturbines. They are already produced at some scale. If only recuperators didn't weigh and cost so much...)
Until then, it makes some sense to at least talk about compounding hydrogen with carbon, if we have the hydrogen. We have relatively good ways to collect the carbon from the air in a well understood, not yet industrial-scale, process [http://academiccommons.columbia.edu:8080/ac/handle/10022/AC:P:6744], to obtain carbon neutrality. (I say "relatively" because you're really climbing a hill on that one, with the low concentration of CO2 in the air. That's why plants are so inefficient, and why they respond so strongly to more CO2, and why the latest evolutionary arms race is in collecting CO2 - see C4 plants [http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/C/C4plants.html].)
Or, as the GP suggests, let algae do the job for us, although I think we're already near the point where we can beat the land-to-wheel (system energy efficiency per unit land used) and dollar-to-wheel ROI of algae with industrial processes (limestone cycle above for the carbon, Fischer-Tropsch-style synthesis with reverse water-gas shift on the back end, solar thermal collection for energy in). (I am personally swayed by the arable land use drawbacks of biofuels, but, it really comes down to the numbers to know what's really more land-efficient. Anyway, algae have some potential to sidestep these arguments.)
So, we actually have a pretty good idea how to run a car on sunlight via hydrocarbon fuels, it's just not as cheap as pumping oil out of the ground, so we don't. We can even run a car on sunlight via various high temperature fuel cells, if you prefer more of a closed-loop system. None of these is really that efficient, but at least we can make favorable comparisons to, e.g., the corn ethanol boondoggle. (And we can, on that basis, for example, pretty much punt the zinc cycle due to the inefficiency of that particular calcination reaction.) What we can't compare to is gaseous hydrogen, because we don't even know how to build several components in that fuel chain, so we don't know exactly how bad it will be. Sure, it looks bad, but I can't claim it's guaranteed to be worse.
So, let's do research on light, high pressure (800-bar) tanks and thermodynamically efficient 800-bar compression / decompression cycles. (And especially on thermolysis and photolysis to produce the hydrogen.) But let's not pretend it's already done, and let's also work with what we have. When oil really starts to get expensive, we have several mature possibilities already on deck, which fit well into our existing infrastructure. We also have H2 in the future, when and if those problems are solved satisfactorily. And then, I hope, direct mass-energy fuel systems, for even more density and land use / environmental benefits than we can ever get from our pathetic chemical fuels.
(I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are claiming CO2-free combustion is good because it avoids
There's plenty of room for both sides to be wrong. Seems like any issue important enough for public debate with two "sides", i.e., where real money is at stake so significant numbers of people care, subtle details like the actual truth get lost in all the excitement.
In this case, I apparently get to choose between "omg z ices r melting buy my carbon credits or you hate cute little polar bear cubs" and "omg yesterday it was cold out god will never change the climate the liberals just like 2 eet ur babies". I guess I should look on the bright side and keep reminding myself that both "sides" are slightly not wrong sometimes. Yay?
Where did you live in the US? There is such variety, from moderately to quite severely warped. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure where I live now is not one of the least warped places...
I used to think like you. I used mobile phones until I moved somewhere without coverage or Verizon decided I needed an upgrade and started dropping calls randomly. I replaced their batteries when they wore out after three years.
But, it turns out that, once you have kids, every device is a throwaway device! I'm on my third PS2 and had to replace a laptop this year.
So it turns out the electronics manufacturers are just supporting family values, and we are agreeing by buying their products.
Not only that (students tend to be more idealistic), but I think the original "compromise" meant between people. My experience is that engineers are terrible and compromising among themselves to accomplish something, and get emotionally invested in their particular tradeoffs and solutions to a given problem. Those that can compromise with others get promoted into management very quickly; it seems like this "no compromise" trait of engineers is one of the things that makes most of them (us, I should say) terrible managers.
High temperature fuel cells like sulfur would be my suggestion also. Utilities use them, and there are practical examples of scaling down well below building-scale, like the ZEBRA mobile battery. (The ZEBRA is not sodium-sulfur, but is molten salt and shares the hot-insulated-box Nature.)
I don't see an insulated 300C box as much of a problem. Sure, they don't scale down to a single apartment, but at a building scale, no big deal. Counting in my head, I think I have seven appliances that regularly exceed that temperature, all perfectly typical.
As others have pointed out, lead-acid and iron-nickel batteries are also practical for sessile applications and already readily available at the home scale.
I believe wood gas and water gas are distinct, although, as you say, used as a synthetic municipal fuel for a long time. The difference (as I understand it; not a chemist) is that adding steam is necessary with coal, which is mostly carbon, whereas wood can be gasified efficiently without water, as it contains plenty of bound hydrogen, some bound oxygen, and significant moisture.
Water gas, syngas, and wood gas imply different ranges of CO:H2 ratios, corresponding to the content of the feedstock. Also, as you mentioned, you end up with significant pyrolysis products like methane in your typical wood gas, depending on how it's done. (Usually, that's what you want, if you're burning it directly, like in an ICE. Natural gas, which is mainly methane, has much higher energy density than syngas, and pyrolysis is more efficient, thermodynamically, than gasification.)
And also as you mentioned, synthesis of liquid fuel via Fischer-Tropsch becomes economical at a certain price point.
I've been frustrated by this as an ordinary consumer, as I'm sure many of us have. Not that it solves fishbowl's problem, but I've largely given up and gone to outboard dongles ("game adapters"). It's now finally common and cheap for widgets with a radio and an Ethernet port to provide "client mode" wireless bridge functionality. (That wasn't true a few years ago.)
I like it because I don't have to care what radio chip is on the widget. Saves time fighting with broken Windows drivers, too. And with finding something Mac-compatible. Ethernet to the rescue again. And I guess I have the gamers to thank for bringing the prices down into my range.
Of course, adding a separate widget is not ideal and is a dealbreaker for many applications...
I generally drink a toddy brewed with Ethiopian beans roasted (with a hot air roaster) and ground at home. This is a very sweet and complex cup and very easy on the stomach. Honestly, I would prefer a ristretto in milk with the same beans and a better grinder. That extracts more of the flavor. But a good espresso machine is not yet in my cards. Someday.
Good post, more people should be aware of cold brew. It's a great cup, relatively cheap and easy, so quite cost-competitive with the muddy piss generally drunk around here (US) giving everyone heartburn.
I find that PC100/PC133 memory is getting scarce and expensive. An eBay memory grab-bag resurrected several of my old, free PCs, but if I were actually going to buy or build a cheapest possible box ($400), I would do PC2700/PC3200, mostly because the memory is cheaper.
On the other hand, a Cube is really quiet, which costs. It's not fair to compare against a cheap PC desktop. Maybe an old laptop would be a suitable replacement, though.
I have to place myself in the minority of posters that have tried a dual-monitor setup and not liked it. However, I would call that a personal preference, i.e., I don't claim to have measured my productivity one way or the other.
Anybody want to step to the parent and show some kind of quantitative evidence that 2 monitors increase productivity? 3 monitors? N monitors? Surely, someone has at least tried with different monitor setups and measured their ?
Feel free to flame me for not doing my homework on the subject, of course, but there does seem to be a fair amount of advocacy going on here, and I missed any supportive scientific references that may have been posted.
Grocery store? My tenant is too lazy to walk the 300' to her mailbox. If she had a flying machine, she'd be asking me to cut down some trees so she wouldn't have to fly around them to get her mail.
NardofDoom is right, people will fly these things to the grocery store. Eventually, roads will be reclaimed, and we'll *have* to fly them to the grocery store. (Well, us country folk, anyway.)
Can you imagine the amount of money the City of New York has tied up in Manhattan streets? It's amazing to me that they're still there now, without flying machines. If emergency response vehicles and taxis could fly...
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Unfortunately, the average voter's thought process is much less sophisticated than that.
Interesting.
Re. Palin hating on JFK, I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised. I'm not sure Republicans ever got any closer to not hating JFK than chafing under his martyrdom. (I'm not trying to criticize the partisanship in this case - there are plenty of reasonable problems to have with JFK. I'm not a huge fan, although I'm quite non-Republican. A reasonable Republican has good reasons not to like JFK.)
I don't think it's politically stupid. It's a pretty smart move. Palin's not trying to change any Democrat's or Libertarian's mind. This is just to out-hate the competition within the Republican party, to collect as many Republican voters as possible. She's fortifying her position as the people's choice within the party.
It's the perfect time, because anything you can call remotely "socialist" can be hated openly. This would also be the time to eliminate Social Security or Medicare or something. (OK, those would be beyond tricky. But some young Republican genius might be able to pull off an association game, and voters are a bit desperate.)
(Note that I don't think you have to be an idiot to be a Republican or anything, or that most Democrats aren't idiots. I just happen to have seen the Rally to Restore Sanity videos recently and think Jon Stewart's optimism is misplaced. The media echo-chamber and political antics are, after all, just reflections of (1) some real, fundamental disagreements about governance and (2) actual human nature to form tribes and hate.
I agree with those on this thread who say that there's a huge Republican constituency that's not being understood. Palin is not unelectable. Before 2000, I would've said the same thing myself. There are a lot of voters who actually like neocon-flavored nonsense.
Again, I'm not trying to say every Republican is dumb. Just that you don't get elected by overestimating the intelligence of the American electorate or trying to reason with anyone.)
I second the question, and I am being snarky (but still don't know the answer).
I agree with this, and also point out the pure engineering/logistics/production issue: money spent on 3D is not spent on something else that might have less buzzword value to the movie-going public but actually make the movie better.
That said, it's a tool, and I'm kind of excited to see what artists will use it for. Good cinematographers and directors will get a tasteful grip on it pretty soon. Eventually, someone will do something really worthwhile with it. Maybe Jackson? Probably too soon to hope for that, but I'm curious.
A bunch of crappy movies, easily avoided if I don't want to see them, is a small price to pay to, ultimately, advance the art and science. It's not like that crap isn't being made anyway, with ample budgets. Really, would Transformers have been *worse* in 3D? Having Hollywood do the advance development of 3D camera technology is really not costing us anything of value, and it puts cheap 3D cameras in more directors' hands sooner, which turned out pretty well for HD / all-digital production.
It's the property taxes that really get you, although real estate is otherwise cheap. Check out the next county over, Orleans...
And grow sugarcane and other crops from which to make ethanol and food products (some of which are indeed fed to cattle). And, apparently (news to me), most significantly for the poorest among us, in the poorest places, to feed our families (subsistence farming) [Wikipedia, UN report]. And for harvesting wood to go in all the engineered wood products we buy.
In discussions of heating efficiency, don't forget heat pumps for your baseline. The fact that electric heaters (including incandescent bulbs) are 100% efficient in converting electricity to heat is actually not that good, because ("geothermal") heat pumps are more like 400% efficient in that sense.
Heat pumps are too expensive for a cabin or whatever, at least the ground source ("geothermal") heat pumps you need up north, but for big buildings they make sense. They even compare favorably to efficient combustion heaters, which are otherwise much better than the total efficiency of direct electric heat. (Burning oil directly is like 90% efficient to heat. Burning it in a power plant around 40%, so that's really the efficiency of direct electric heat, where the heater itself is 100% efficient. But then you can multiply that by a COP around 4 for a good heat pump.)
The fundamental principle at work here is that not all heat is equivalent. Electricity has a very high effective temperature, so you can trade some of that high temperature heat to pump a larger volume of lower temperature heat.
The thing most public schools have in common is (1) disdain for rational thought / academic achievement / intellectualism, (2) Lord of the Flies style social structure that anti-prepares you for real life, and (3) entitlement. Actually, it's not just public schools, it's current American culture generally, so I imagine most private schools are similar, although I haven't been there.
The "liberal" / "conservative" indoctrination is regional. Where I went to public school, we learned more about how towel-heads are funny, environmentalists are retarded, atheists eat babies, football is the most important subject (and funded by the school board accordingly), and so on, in addition to the shared nationalistic and War on X stuff (every vote counts, drugs 'r' bad, etc.).
(1) is the biggest threat, I think, and the reason I didn't send my kids to public school at a young age. If you can avoid (1), you can think your way past all the rest and make the best of the (substantial) resources available in public schools. But if you can't think your way out of a paper bag, you get sucked in by all the rest.
The tree-hugging indoctrination is by no means universal and I don't think it's the underlying problem. In fact, America is polarized by AGW because like 40% are successfully indoctrinated that way and 40% the other. (It's also kind of hard to see how respect for other cultures is a destructive value, unless you mean completely uncritical acceptance of the bad with the good.) There's a fraction that respond to reason and evidence, but they're not a politically significant bloc.
So, the indoctrination works great, but it's not there to create a homogeneous arborophilic utopia. It's there to support football-game style political circuses, which end up being good for Republican and Democrat politicians within their constituencies and also serve to give them something to argue about to appear busy while they do the usual politician thing in the background. Enough people benefit from the education-industrial complex that it can keep itself going well beyond what otherwise makes rational sense, like the other industrial complexes.
Hence, (1): kids get taught that thinking is naughty.
You do need lots of energy to collect the CO2, apparently around 6-15kJe/mol CO2
[http://www.ucalgary.ca/~keith/papers/84.Stolaroff.AirCaptureGHGT-8.p.pdf], by my layman's interpretation of the paper. Then you also need a lot of energy to break the CO2 up via, e.g., reverse water-gas shift, maybe 38kJ/mol. (You get all this back, and more, if you then put the resulting CO through Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, but you need to supply extra H2 to drive the reaction. The extra O2 from the CO2 ends up in an H2O byproduct, which represents a lot of energy sucked out, having been supplied as a lot of extra H2 in this case.)
So, hopefully one of the researchers that's commented will address this point, but it appears to this layman that the limestone cycle isn't too bad. (Capital-intensive, since efficient calcination requires a recuperator with particulate mass flows, but at least that's an industrially solved problem.) It's more that the thing you're pulling out of the air, CO2, is extremely stable.
You're lucky to live where you live, if wind is viable. I live near Buffalo, NY, in a moderately windy lake plain location. It sounds like a good place to favor wind, but I got a load factor of like 8 for wind, even if I cut out very early and throw away most of the wind energy. More like 20 if I did the math with a higher cut-out speed, where my plant cost was totally dominated by generator capacity, which is expensive. So the lower cut-out was more economical, but still much worse than solar, which is maybe 3-4 load factor, and it's relatively cheap to store heat, even high temperature heat. (This is all on paper, in early planning, so not very convincing. Still, I did several hours of analysis to estimate capital costs and ROI, and you'd have to live in a place with extremely steady wind to favor wind over solar. On the other hand, a wind plant is much simpler and scales down much better than a solar thermal plant, and if you don't have to store the electricity, because you use it immediately in some process, then that's not an issue. I know I can build a wind turbine, but my solar design-under-evaluation is risky and more of a hobby idea than a sure-fire solution.)
Synthesizing longer chair hydrocarbons rather than methane is not much harder, thermodynamically, if I recall. There are the various synthesis processes, which use different catalysts and conditions, but I don't recall methane synthesis being all that much easier or more efficient. Again, I guess we want to hear from an expert, not a layman such as myself that has merely surveyed some random sample of the literature from a position of ignorance...
If we can demonstrate an 800-bar compressor that's relatively efficient, and carbon fiber composite or other tanks to store hydrogen, and somehow make room for the still-3x-bigger fuel tank [http://planetforlife.com/h2/h2swiss.html] in a subcompact car, and also reclaim the energy that's necessarily used to compress the hydrogen when we release it (because otherwise it will really be too inefficient to store compared to the alternatives), that's awesome.
In fact, if we can just get people to pay for engines using inconel or ceramics and recuperators, that would also be awesome, since we could substantially increase the efficiency of existing engines using existing materials and technology. We could burn the fuel hotter to raise the Carnot limit and reuse more waste heat. At least we're pretty close to getting them to switch to turbine-electric drive trains, which is even better. (We already do mass-produce inconel turbine blades in the form of turbochargers, so we're in good shape to mass-produce Capstone-style microturbines. They are already produced at some scale. If only recuperators didn't weigh and cost so much...)
Until then, it makes some sense to at least talk about compounding hydrogen with carbon, if we have the hydrogen. We have relatively good ways to collect the carbon from the air in a well understood, not yet industrial-scale, process [http://academiccommons.columbia.edu:8080/ac/handle/10022/AC:P:6744], to obtain carbon neutrality. (I say "relatively" because you're really climbing a hill on that one, with the low concentration of CO2 in the air. That's why plants are so inefficient, and why they respond so strongly to more CO2, and why the latest evolutionary arms race is in collecting CO2 - see C4 plants [http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/C/C4plants.html].)
Or, as the GP suggests, let algae do the job for us, although I think we're already near the point where we can beat the land-to-wheel (system energy efficiency per unit land used) and dollar-to-wheel ROI of algae with industrial processes (limestone cycle above for the carbon, Fischer-Tropsch-style synthesis with reverse water-gas shift on the back end, solar thermal collection for energy in). (I am personally swayed by the arable land use drawbacks of biofuels, but, it really comes down to the numbers to know what's really more land-efficient. Anyway, algae have some potential to sidestep these arguments.)
So, we actually have a pretty good idea how to run a car on sunlight via hydrocarbon fuels, it's just not as cheap as pumping oil out of the ground, so we don't. We can even run a car on sunlight via various high temperature fuel cells, if you prefer more of a closed-loop system. None of these is really that efficient, but at least we can make favorable comparisons to, e.g., the corn ethanol boondoggle. (And we can, on that basis, for example, pretty much punt the zinc cycle due to the inefficiency of that particular calcination reaction.) What we can't compare to is gaseous hydrogen, because we don't even know how to build several components in that fuel chain, so we don't know exactly how bad it will be. Sure, it looks bad, but I can't claim it's guaranteed to be worse.
So, let's do research on light, high pressure (800-bar) tanks and thermodynamically efficient 800-bar compression / decompression cycles. (And especially on thermolysis and photolysis to produce the hydrogen.) But let's not pretend it's already done, and let's also work with what we have. When oil really starts to get expensive, we have several mature possibilities already on deck, which fit well into our existing infrastructure. We also have H2 in the future, when and if those problems are solved satisfactorily. And then, I hope, direct mass-energy fuel systems, for even more density and land use / environmental benefits than we can ever get from our pathetic chemical fuels.
(I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are claiming CO2-free combustion is good because it avoids
There's plenty of room for both sides to be wrong. Seems like any issue important enough for public debate with two "sides", i.e., where real money is at stake so significant numbers of people care, subtle details like the actual truth get lost in all the excitement.
In this case, I apparently get to choose between "omg z ices r melting buy my carbon credits or you hate cute little polar bear cubs" and "omg yesterday it was cold out god will never change the climate the liberals just like 2 eet ur babies". I guess I should look on the bright side and keep reminding myself that both "sides" are slightly not wrong sometimes. Yay?
Where did you live in the US? There is such variety, from moderately to quite severely warped. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure where I live now is not one of the least warped places...
I used to think like you. I used mobile phones until I moved somewhere without coverage or Verizon decided I needed an upgrade and started dropping calls randomly. I replaced their batteries when they wore out after three years.
But, it turns out that, once you have kids, every device is a throwaway device! I'm on my third PS2 and had to replace a laptop this year.
So it turns out the electronics manufacturers are just supporting family values, and we are agreeing by buying their products.
Not only that (students tend to be more idealistic), but I think the original "compromise" meant between people. My experience is that engineers are terrible and compromising among themselves to accomplish something, and get emotionally invested in their particular tradeoffs and solutions to a given problem. Those that can compromise with others get promoted into management very quickly; it seems like this "no compromise" trait of engineers is one of the things that makes most of them (us, I should say) terrible managers.
Unpossible. Spelling and grammar checkers would be obsoleted. Us would fail English.
High temperature fuel cells like sulfur would be my suggestion also. Utilities use them, and there are practical examples of scaling down well below building-scale, like the ZEBRA mobile battery. (The ZEBRA is not sodium-sulfur, but is molten salt and shares the hot-insulated-box Nature.)
I don't see an insulated 300C box as much of a problem. Sure, they don't scale down to a single apartment, but at a building scale, no big deal. Counting in my head, I think I have seven appliances that regularly exceed that temperature, all perfectly typical.
The real issue seems to be the prices of the scaled-down stacks. ZEBRA batteries are expensive. So are sodium-sulfur batteries, even at utility scale.
As others have pointed out, lead-acid and iron-nickel batteries are also practical for sessile applications and already readily available at the home scale.
The chianti and favas go with the liver. Don't be uncivilized.
I believe wood gas and water gas are distinct, although, as you say, used as a synthetic municipal fuel for a long time. The difference (as I understand it; not a chemist) is that adding steam is necessary with coal, which is mostly carbon, whereas wood can be gasified efficiently without water, as it contains plenty of bound hydrogen, some bound oxygen, and significant moisture.
Water gas, syngas, and wood gas imply different ranges of CO:H2 ratios, corresponding to the content of the feedstock. Also, as you mentioned, you end up with significant pyrolysis products like methane in your typical wood gas, depending on how it's done. (Usually, that's what you want, if you're burning it directly, like in an ICE. Natural gas, which is mainly methane, has much higher energy density than syngas, and pyrolysis is more efficient, thermodynamically, than gasification.)
And also as you mentioned, synthesis of liquid fuel via Fischer-Tropsch becomes economical at a certain price point.
I've been frustrated by this as an ordinary consumer, as I'm sure many of us have. Not that it solves fishbowl's problem, but I've largely given up and gone to outboard dongles ("game adapters"). It's now finally common and cheap for widgets with a radio and an Ethernet port to provide "client mode" wireless bridge functionality. (That wasn't true a few years ago.)
I like it because I don't have to care what radio chip is on the widget. Saves time fighting with broken Windows drivers, too. And with finding something Mac-compatible. Ethernet to the rescue again. And I guess I have the gamers to thank for bringing the prices down into my range.
Of course, adding a separate widget is not ideal and is a dealbreaker for many applications...
I generally drink a toddy brewed with Ethiopian beans roasted (with a hot air roaster) and ground at home. This is a very sweet and complex cup and very easy on the stomach. Honestly, I would prefer a ristretto in milk with the same beans and a better grinder. That extracts more of the flavor. But a good espresso machine is not yet in my cards. Someday.
Good post, more people should be aware of cold brew. It's a great cup, relatively cheap and easy, so quite cost-competitive with the muddy piss generally drunk around here (US) giving everyone heartburn.
I already have one of those amazing abilities. Maybe one of these mice bit me while I was sleeping.
I find that PC100/PC133 memory is getting scarce and expensive. An eBay memory grab-bag resurrected several of my old, free PCs, but if I were actually going to buy or build a cheapest possible box ($400), I would do PC2700/PC3200, mostly because the memory is cheaper.
On the other hand, a Cube is really quiet, which costs. It's not fair to compare against a cheap PC desktop. Maybe an old laptop would be a suitable replacement, though.
I have to place myself in the minority of posters that have tried a dual-monitor setup and not liked it. However, I would call that a personal preference, i.e., I don't claim to have measured my productivity one way or the other.
Anybody want to step to the parent and show some kind of quantitative evidence that 2 monitors increase productivity? 3 monitors? N monitors? Surely, someone has at least tried with different monitor setups and measured their ?
Feel free to flame me for not doing my homework on the subject, of course, but there does seem to be a fair amount of advocacy going on here, and I missed any supportive scientific references that may have been posted.
As it should be, but you should also look at the positive aspects: Milla Jovovich will fall through the roof of your flying taxi into your lap.
Taxi drivers in landlubbing vehicles are pretty scary, anyway.
Grocery store? My tenant is too lazy to walk the 300' to her mailbox. If she had a flying machine, she'd be asking me to cut down some trees so she wouldn't have to fly around them to get her mail.
NardofDoom is right, people will fly these things to the grocery store. Eventually, roads will be reclaimed, and we'll *have* to fly them to the grocery store. (Well, us country folk, anyway.)
Can you imagine the amount of money the City of New York has tied up in Manhattan streets? It's amazing to me that they're still there now, without flying machines. If emergency response vehicles and taxis could fly...