A collection of thoughts I've developed watching the continuing hybrid saga:
1. Within the American car manufacturers, there's some major problems; particularly, the sheer profitability of their SUVs is just daunting. For about the same marketing / sales / distribution / engineering / raw materials cost as they'd have to expend on your $20k Taurus, they can sell you a $30k+ SUV; it's as if they somehow stumbled onto a means of making suburban moms all buy mid-market luxury cars. Plus they can build it on marginally modified versions of their light truck lines...so don't expect American manufacturers to stop or slow down SUV manufacture anytime soon.
2. That said, I think that Bill Ford is a not-kidding environmentalist. Some of their factories are really leading the way in terms of green building (article here), and he was a prime mover behind this (admittedly belated and somewhat slow) project. Ford has also become a lot more reasonable on climate and emissions issues over even just the past three years. I am a pretty active environmentalist, but I've always much preferred the "pat on the back" to the "too little too late" carping, so thank you, Ford, for giving us all the opportunity to insure ourselves a little better against future fuel supply, national security and global warming uncertainties.
3. The political rhetoric surrounding SUVs on both sides is so disingenuous and heated that you'd think they were talking about guns. There's essentially two positions: 1. Every one of these light trucks is being used by a farmer or contractor, and any attempt to regulate fuel emissions back to, say, early 80's standards will annihilate small business in America and kill thousands of people because our cars will be too small. 2. Every one of these light trucks is being driven by a latte-slugging soccer mom, and unless we triple our CAFE standards in two years, we'll annihlate our economy, and kill thousands of people because our cars will be too big.
4. People talk about fuel cell cars constantly, but here's the thing; a fuel cell car will have to be a highly streamlined, possibly drive-by-wire, light-body device with electronic drive components and regenerative brakes; you get there by developing hybrids, not by skipping them.
5. This is one of those "we have to do it now, even though it won't matter for a while" problems; we have to get our transportation fuel economies up, but new cars alone won't do it. The reason? As cars have become less junky, we actually now turn over our automotive stock fairly slowly; in 2020, people will still be driving their 03s...as a result, incremental fuel economy standards have a sort of marginal impact in any given year.
6. and final. You don't make your money back on a hybrid, even with the tax credits, but if Yukos gets slapped / the Venezuelan labor situation doesn't settle, that could change real quick...or, the other option, I've never understood why no one just started an all-hybrid cab company. The more miles you put in on one of these things, the better your ROI compared to a normal car, and you could even end up with a distinct brand that people would prefer, vs. current commoditized cabs.
Hahaha, Ahhh, the scourge of CTDs; there really should be a public service campaign. Though I'm not sure what media would be appropriate.
My point, really, was that in our society, we can generally treat these things as though they are not contagious (though they are infectious), because we don't have so much contact with each other's nervous tissue.
(Sorry, was out of town.) The prion is disqualified as a catalyst because its presence alone in an otherwise unremarkable environment induces the reaction - viz. it isn't facilitating some other reactant's interactions, it's just prion + functional molecule = two prions. The stoichiometry is entirely dependent on the prion and nothing else; that's not catalytic.
I was just completely wrong about it being infectious in cattle; I was thinking of the initial transmission into the population, which I think there's wide agreement was from nervous tissue consumption...but kuru is not a good example...again, we're talking people that were directly eating the brain tissue of infected individuals. "Cannibals" is a key phrase there.
Yeah, I seem to remember taking 6 or 8 bchem courses.
It just isn't that quantum; at the timescale of protein functional interactions, you can treat the envelope of the invovled atoms as a deformable but contiguous charge cloud; otherwise projects like Folding@home would never work.
People overmystify proteins; they can be very profitably thought of as near-mechanical widgets in their functional interaction. It's like if I said "In this discussion, let's treat car as a box that you get in that makes you go places; you don't have to think about a lot of chemistry or physics" and a bunch of people jumped on me to say ""You're such an idiot! Take a mechanical engineering course sometime like I did, once! Cars are built in a process that involves thousands of steps, and the combustion physics of their engines alone could fill a textbook!
I don't think you are sorry to say it; in fact, I think you took a bit of delight in a pedantic reply that was more than slightly off-base.
Read carefully - the *function* of proteins is frequently, largely due to their conformation. A conformation which, yes, arises from their (to anthropomorphize) attempts to "conceal" hydrophobic areas from their aqueous environment. during the folding process.
However, i am particularly "worried" by your dismissing charge effects in favor of polarity, hydrophobicity, and hydrogen bonding. Polarity = having a net structural *charge* detectable across a structural axis of a molecule? Hydrophobicity = repulsion from the *charge envelope* of polar water molecules? Hydrogen bonding = bonding due to the mutual induction of *charge* and subsequent attraction in hydrogen atom components of other molecules?
All of these interactions are in fact similar to the (proximate but not bonded, if I understand correctly) interactions that allow prion infection. Arising from the charge cloud, charge field, what have you. I really don't think it's a catalytic reaction
Hey, at the atom by atom level, it's all electric. So I don't think a pop science description of this kind, especially targeted at a pretty electronics-intensive crowd, earned this patronization.
While we're down here in the pit, BSE hardly counts as an infectious disease within cattle populations, when you consider the means of transmission - namely EATING EACH OTHER'S NERVE TISSUE. For all the grotesquery of considering it, eating the brain or spinal tissue of an Alzheimer's-infected patient might well make it infectious. Also, apparently from reading other comments, this is a theory that is being taken seriously in other circles. Interesting.
No dice, in the near term. Designing something that bonded to the prion but not its (useful and extremely similar) parent brain protein would be a formidable piece of atom-by-atom engineering.
Then, since your immune system isn't set up to hit anything as small as an individual protein, you can't do the vaccine trick of "programming" an immune response; you'd have to actually drop in this antibody in a more or less one-for-one mix to the prion.
As has been hinted at in other entries here, a prion is an alternate, stable, but nonworking and here's the kicker *infectious* conformation of a normal brain protein.
Proteins fold and twist, combine, etc., into little functional specially-shaped nuggets, sheets, strands, etc. What's strangely intuitive about functional proteins is how many of them function based on their shape. No obscure chemsistry or quantum effects here; they make little socket wrenches, funnels, motors, lock-and-key assemblies, etc.
However, that's not to say that because their core function doesn't have to do with their electronic properties, that these aren't important. Since their individual atoms do still have charge effects, they can be deformed, ("denatured",) reshaped, etc. They can also do this to each other. E.g. certain enzymes have two "sockets": the one that would normally work on a target molecule is bent out of shape and inactive until some other "cofactor" atom or molecule snicks into the back of the enzyme, bending it differently and opening up the active area.
So proteins are a little flexible, and can affect each other's shapes if they're close enough. As previously mentioned, the kicker: you can take certain sheet-like molecules in the brain and mutate them so that not only do they no longer work right, but they generate a charge field around themselves that will eff up other, similar molecules that encounter them, *and so on*
So you end up with this Night of Living Dead effect where as soon as you make a legit molecule of this kind, it goes off all peppily into the brain, doing its deal, until it encounters a zombie prion, and hey, you don't look right...but...somehow..seductive...yes! I will join you in your plaque pile! I must tell others! So you get scrapie or CWD or mad cow or some others.
What I have always thought strange is that no one seems to have looked at prions as a possible cause of Alzheimers', another poorly-understood neurological disease marked by pileups of nonfunctional protein plaques in the brain.
The reason this is significant? Folks, I thought this was one of your core beliefs! The only way to really truly understand something complex (a cake, a compiler, a neuropathic protein) is to build one that works.
"The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manifacture." - Elbert Hubbard.
I had always thought this quote was randomly generated....now I am not so sure.
If this were a local computer store, I'd be with you. But HP? Doing this at 850 stores? No way. Because, also, people aren't going to be bringing in useful stuff - some good chunk of this will be truly, definitively, worthless (or require more than an hour of work.)
Plus, even if you're not *pulling down* $20 an hour, giving you tools, light, liability insurance, a workspace, health insurance (maybe), a manager to every 20 or so, and any parts at all...no way it makes sense at a national level to distract themselves from their much more profitable core business areas.
They're going to spend technician time at $30 an hour to fix up (or dismantle) now-worth-$20 laser printers that they have to ship to anyone at $30 plus packaging? Not to mention the enormous amount of broken / hopelessly outmoded / unsellable computers? Or to wipe the hard drives? Even to traige this equipment into saleable v. nonsaleable would wipe out the price delta immediately.
By the way, speaking as someone who's spent a lot of time at various nonprofits, please don't be so casual about kicking used tech equipment to them; 90%+ are white elephants that end up taking up much more time, space, etc., than they're worth; only give something away if you talk to them about it first. (and are willing to support it if it comes down to that.)
It is all too infrequently that we see major corporations doing something like this; not just kicking in 1/10% of revenues to charity, but leveraging their respective competencies for social good. This is the best kind of corporate responsibility.
If you're like me, and vote with your dollars whenever a company angers you with poor customer service / irresponsible behavior, the more fun and more effective upside is to drop those $ when you see someone doing something right; I would hope that all you Slashdotters needing some Post-Its or stylii or what have you pick them up while you're there; a boost in same-store revenue will ensure that we see them doing this again. (Rather than having these pitched into cyanide vats or roadside ditches in SE Asia.)
I am always confused by the omission from these tests of collaborative filters like Cloudmark's SpamNet, which I have used at work for a long time with a very high "catch" rate, no real processing time, and no false positives. Essentially, every email you get it hashes and checks with the server. If you get a spam, you right-click and report it as such. Then it pulls any messages from your inbox which enough credible people have marked before you. (A gross oversimplification, but close enough.)
I feel like at our current stage of technological development, you have to combat human-generated deception with human intervention.
(By the way, that cloudmark tool is Outlook-only, but contains some concepts I'd like to see in other filters...
The actual number is 100 miles squared, which too many people take as 100 square miles. Not the same. (In fact, I have been personally misquoted as saying the latter.
That said, it's pretty clear why the utilities haven't done it...Space has not been the issue with solar panels for 15 years now. Plenty of unused roof space, brownfields, etc., etc.
It's cost...here's your math.
Bulk solar panels go for ca. $2.90 / Watt anymore, making for a residential turnkey full system cost of a little over $6.50 (say $6 commercial.) So, a 30-year lifetime electricity cost of maybe $.22 / kWh , (less for commercial - better tax depreciation treatment.)
Now, happily, we compete on the meter side, so we're competing with $.07 - $.13/kWh instead of the $.02 that the wind people have to generate. And those prices keep going up (by perhaps 5% per year,) while ours come down (by ca. 5% per year,) but you're still not making that money back without a state or utility incentive. Check DSIRE.
With current technology cost trends, that will slowly stop being the case for individuals in the US with high electricity bills over about the next five to eight years...
Solar panels are not, themselves, reflective - it's just that the ones you've seen on houses, highway signs, etc., are covered with tempered glass.
CIGS cells are small, flexible, nonreflective, and easily integrated into fabrics...enough to provide standby "vampire" power for a host of electronics, which should reduce overall battery requirements.
More likely, you've been hearing the same forecasts, and not paying enough attention to the timeframe.
Many simulations show that a period of swimming like "Water World" increases the Earth's albdeo sufficiently that it *induces* a new ice age - several decades later.
We're not that good at simulating something as complex as the climate out more than a few years. However, please realize that we *are* very good at measuring CO2 and its impact on the atmosphere, and that marginal scientists aside, no other variable - sunspots, orbital precession, yadda, yadda, has changed nearly enough - or in as obviously correlated a fashion - as atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Just because there's still a very very small number of scientists out there who question it does not really mean there's a "difference of opinion in the science community."
Well, except that "Manufacturing cost of goods sold" equals, for Evergreen, installing all of their new dual-ribbon furnaces. For Shell, automating their Camarillo factory. For BP, gutting half the Frederick facility and automating that (and then doing the next line next year.)
This is, for instance, why Evergreen would appear to be half as profitable on gross margin for the last year, despite (about) halving their production costs.
I feel like we're doing this backwards. I've shown you multiple peer-reviewed documents from industry experts stating that energy payback is less than 4 years; show me something that demonstrates it's more than 25.
However - we make almost none of our electricity from oil here in the US.
Also, economists tend to talk about those sorts of resource-to-resource transitions as though they were instantaneous chemical reactions. In reality, they're discontinuous, inefficient, "jerky" and rather prolonged. Viz. gas lines and street riots. The rational thing to do is therefore to build these markets and technologies as quickly and cheaply as possible - before we have to. Because having to is very painful and prolonged.
Good points, but...I don't think it's completely fair to include the energy originally put into crystallizing microelectronics silicon, as they put that energy in to sell it to chip fabs anyway. Since it gets recrystallized for PV use, and would be thrown away otherwise, this is a pretty legitimate thing to do. Dedicated solar-grade silicon operations are slated to come on line in 04...
The latter point is, I think, simply saying that while Alsema did only polycrystalline cells, Kato looked into monocrystalline and got about 3 years (vs. 3.75ish for poly), when he didn't charge for the off-grade feedstock (which, as above, I think is a legitimate thing to do.)
This will be settled with the original-silica-to-solar-wafers processes that we expect to see this year, but I'm not too worried. I'd say you'll see variance much less than +/- 10% in these figures (I won't attempt to engage here in estimating the energy payback of fossilizing plant material to make coal.)
Keep in mind the obvious paradox here, as well. Imagine a 100W solar array lasts 30 years and costs about $300 in bulk. (These are approximately correct current unsubsidized values.) Over its lifetime, in, say, Chicago IL, it will generate about 4,400 kWh. If it was *made* with 4400kWh of electricity, which costs about $.05 / kWh say, for an industrial customer, the electricty alone would cost $220, leaving $80 for all the materials, labor, shipping, factory overhead, salaries, profit, and production line expansion (which by the way is above 36% annually for the industry as a whole.) The math doesn't work out. If, however, the payback period is about 3.75 years, the panel would take about $41 of electricity to make (almost all silicon recrystallization,) which seems anecdotally to be about right.
All right! I *knew* someone would trot out the "solar panels take more energy" schtick! This is great; it's practically the only time I get to get modded up to insightful. Ahem.
They just updated this peer-reviewed survey study: (PDF) from the national laboratories. Short version? Worst case payback is 3.75 years from a system that will last 30 years. (A coal or natural gas combined cycle power plant, by the way, has about the same energy payback - they don't spring fully formed from the soil.)
This is not to denigrate the Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technologies you spoke of; they're promising central station power. Check DOE's CSP page for more info there. But read up before you dismiss photovoltaics out of hand.
Last time you heard, or did you actually look it up for yourself? Because that old chestnut hasn't been true since about the mid-70s. (Think about it; they're silicon-based semiconductors...would you take someone's 1975 estimate of microprocessor efficiency? Check this (PDF) national laboratory meta-study for the most recent data (albeit now somewhat dated and therefore overconservative, given, e.g. Evergreen and Shell Solar's new crystal growth methods, and the thin film processes.) About 3 - 4 years into a solar cell's 25 year+ (warranteed) lifetime, it "pays back" its energy.
2.Conversion efficiency does not take into account manufacturing energy costs; only energy in (fuel) to energy out. The conversion efficiency of a gas turbine would come way down if you included smelting all the steel in its casing, I assure you.
3. Also, just do a back of the envelope calculation. A 100 watt panel will last 25 years in, let's say Maryland, getting solid sunlight for about 19% of all hours (clouds, night, etc.) 100 watts * 24 hours * 365 days * 25 years *.19 = 4161 kWh. At industrial $.05/kWh electrical rates, that's about $208 worth of electricity; manufacturing cost for the panel (and all manufacturers are unsubsidized) in 2004 is about $190; bulk sales are ca. $300 per 100 watts. Hard to pay for materials and labor if that's your energy cost.
The organic LED based technologies (polymeric / organic/nanostructured / Titania / Gratzel / Graetzel) cells are not yet ready for prime time, though they have huge promise. Check out Konarka or Nanosolar. GE and HItachi are also fooling around with this. The idea is that you can make solar cells out of TiO2, which is almost infinitely cheap in industrial quantities (see here toothpaste or white paint.)
Uni-Solar's product is in fact based on conventional silicon, just like 90%+ of the market today. The difference is that instead of slicing it out of crystals, they sputter it onto a backing, enabling them to make, e.g. peel-and-stick solar panels for commercial raised seam roofs, a conventional shingle for residential roofing, as well as, here, a flexible backing product for airships. Many are working in this area; it's sort of the next generation for solar cell cost decreases (which have come down by more than half in the last ten years; world production doubled between 2000 and 2003 - however, we're going to run out of tricks with conventional silicon within about 5 years at this pace.)
I find everyone's obsession with conversion efficiencies touching; what sense does it make when your fuel source is infinite and free? Area - related costs are subtle, so focus on this: with solar, efficiency matters not at all - the be all and end all is cost per watt.
Also, the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute at MFRI.org
They train many of the responders for Washington, DC and Southern Maryland - DC being a spectacular interagency nightmare, with just about every Federal agency having their own police force, then Secret Service, DC Metro police / fire / EMS, TSA, Customs Service, Coast Guard, Park Police, and professional and volunteer forces from three states serving as second-line responders, I bet they've got something useful together - check their EMS officer classes for response to terrorism coordination. (MFRI does some other interesting work with UMd College Park engineers and researchers, as well - believe they're trying to get firefighters some augmented reality HUDs, for instance.)
Of course, maybe they don't have any ideas. In which case we're all doomed.
Bulk unsubsidized price of a 100 watt solar panel:
$350
Lifetime energy production:
100W * 8 hours a day * 300 days per year * 25 years
6,000,000 Wh (6000 kWh)
Retail price of that electricity: $.10 / kWh
$600
Not a lot of profit margin for the manufacturer there is there?
I'll confess that I am beginning to lose my patience with debunking this over and over again; it was true back in the 1950s-60s when solar power was an elaborately hand-assembled product, and before you techie people caused the silicon market to blow up so hugely. (Though these are probably CIGS instead of crystalline silicon.)
Slashdot Mirror
A collection of thoughts I've developed watching the continuing hybrid saga:
1. Within the American car manufacturers, there's some major problems; particularly, the sheer profitability of their SUVs is just daunting. For about the same marketing / sales / distribution / engineering / raw materials cost as they'd have to expend on your $20k Taurus, they can sell you a $30k+ SUV; it's as if they somehow stumbled onto a means of making suburban moms all buy mid-market luxury cars. Plus they can build it on marginally modified versions of their light truck lines...so don't expect American manufacturers to stop or slow down SUV manufacture anytime soon.
2. That said, I think that Bill Ford is a not-kidding environmentalist. Some of their factories are really leading the way in terms of green building (article here), and he was a prime mover behind this (admittedly belated and somewhat slow) project. Ford has also become a lot more reasonable on climate and emissions issues over even just the past three years. I am a pretty active environmentalist, but I've always much preferred the "pat on the back" to the "too little too late" carping, so thank you, Ford, for giving us all the opportunity to insure ourselves a little better against future fuel supply, national security and global warming uncertainties.
3. The political rhetoric surrounding SUVs on both sides is so disingenuous and heated that you'd think they were talking about guns. There's essentially two positions: 1. Every one of these light trucks is being used by a farmer or contractor, and any attempt to regulate fuel emissions back to, say, early 80's standards will annihilate small business in America and kill thousands of people because our cars will be too small. 2. Every one of these light trucks is being driven by a latte-slugging soccer mom, and unless we triple our CAFE standards in two years, we'll annihlate our economy, and kill thousands of people because our cars will be too big.
4. People talk about fuel cell cars constantly, but here's the thing; a fuel cell car will have to be a highly streamlined, possibly drive-by-wire, light-body device with electronic drive components and regenerative brakes; you get there by developing hybrids, not by skipping them.
5. This is one of those "we have to do it now, even though it won't matter for a while" problems; we have to get our transportation fuel economies up, but new cars alone won't do it. The reason? As cars have become less junky, we actually now turn over our automotive stock fairly slowly; in 2020, people will still be driving their 03s...as a result, incremental fuel economy standards have a sort of marginal impact in any given year.
6. and final. You don't make your money back on a hybrid, even with the tax credits, but if Yukos gets slapped / the Venezuelan labor situation doesn't settle, that could change real quick...or, the other option, I've never understood why no one just started an all-hybrid cab company. The more miles you put in on one of these things, the better your ROI compared to a normal car, and you could even end up with a distinct brand that people would prefer, vs. current commoditized cabs.
Just hoping to spur some discussion...
Wait. Did you just ask what the purpose of this academic exercise is, beyond an academic exercise?
Hahaha, Ahhh, the scourge of CTDs; there really should be a public service campaign. Though I'm not sure what media would be appropriate.
My point, really, was that in our society, we can generally treat these things as though they are not contagious (though they are infectious), because we don't have so much contact with each other's nervous tissue.
(Sorry, was out of town.) The prion is disqualified as a catalyst because its presence alone in an otherwise unremarkable environment induces the reaction - viz. it isn't facilitating some other reactant's interactions, it's just prion + functional molecule = two prions. The stoichiometry is entirely dependent on the prion and nothing else; that's not catalytic.
I was just completely wrong about it being infectious in cattle; I was thinking of the initial transmission into the population, which I think there's wide agreement was from nervous tissue consumption...but kuru is not a good example...again, we're talking people that were directly eating the brain tissue of infected individuals. "Cannibals" is a key phrase there.
Yeah, I seem to remember taking 6 or 8 bchem courses.
It just isn't that quantum; at the timescale of protein functional interactions, you can treat the envelope of the invovled atoms as a deformable but contiguous charge cloud; otherwise projects like Folding@home would never work.
People overmystify proteins; they can be very profitably thought of as near-mechanical widgets in their functional interaction. It's like if I said "In this discussion, let's treat car as a box that you get in that makes you go places; you don't have to think about a lot of chemistry or physics" and a bunch of people jumped on me to say ""You're such an idiot! Take a mechanical engineering course sometime like I did, once! Cars are built in a process that involves thousands of steps, and the combustion physics of their engines alone could fill a textbook!
I don't think you are sorry to say it; in fact, I think you took a bit of delight in a pedantic reply that was more than slightly off-base.
Read carefully - the *function* of proteins is frequently, largely due to their conformation. A conformation which, yes, arises from their (to anthropomorphize) attempts to "conceal" hydrophobic areas from their aqueous environment. during the folding process.
However, i am particularly "worried" by your dismissing charge effects in favor of polarity, hydrophobicity, and hydrogen bonding. Polarity = having a net structural *charge* detectable across a structural axis of a molecule? Hydrophobicity = repulsion from the *charge envelope* of polar water molecules? Hydrogen bonding = bonding due to the mutual induction of *charge* and subsequent attraction in hydrogen atom components of other molecules?
All of these interactions are in fact similar to the (proximate but not bonded, if I understand correctly) interactions that allow prion infection. Arising from the charge cloud, charge field, what have you. I really don't think it's a catalytic reaction
Hey, at the atom by atom level, it's all electric. So I don't think a pop science description of this kind, especially targeted at a pretty electronics-intensive crowd, earned this patronization.
While we're down here in the pit, BSE hardly counts as an infectious disease within cattle populations, when you consider the means of transmission - namely EATING EACH OTHER'S NERVE TISSUE. For all the grotesquery of considering it, eating the brain or spinal tissue of an Alzheimer's-infected patient might well make it infectious. Also, apparently from reading other comments, this is a theory that is being taken seriously in other circles. Interesting.
No dice, in the near term. Designing something that bonded to the prion but not its (useful and extremely similar) parent brain protein would be a formidable piece of atom-by-atom engineering.
Then, since your immune system isn't set up to hit anything as small as an individual protein, you can't do the vaccine trick of "programming" an immune response; you'd have to actually drop in this antibody in a more or less one-for-one mix to the prion.
I think....
As has been hinted at in other entries here, a prion is an alternate, stable, but nonworking and here's the kicker *infectious* conformation of a normal brain protein.
Proteins fold and twist, combine, etc., into little functional specially-shaped nuggets, sheets, strands, etc. What's strangely intuitive about functional proteins is how many of them function based on their shape. No obscure chemsistry or quantum effects here; they make little socket wrenches, funnels, motors, lock-and-key assemblies, etc.
However, that's not to say that because their core function doesn't have to do with their electronic properties, that these aren't important. Since their individual atoms do still have charge effects, they can be deformed, ("denatured",) reshaped, etc. They can also do this to each other. E.g. certain enzymes have two "sockets": the one that would normally work on a target molecule is bent out of shape and inactive until some other "cofactor" atom or molecule snicks into the back of the enzyme, bending it differently and opening up the active area.
So proteins are a little flexible, and can affect each other's shapes if they're close enough. As previously mentioned, the kicker: you can take certain sheet-like molecules in the brain and mutate them so that not only do they no longer work right, but they generate a charge field around themselves that will eff up other, similar molecules that encounter them, *and so on*
So you end up with this Night of Living Dead effect where as soon as you make a legit molecule of this kind, it goes off all peppily into the brain, doing its deal, until it encounters a zombie prion, and hey, you don't look right...but...somehow..seductive...yes! I will join you in your plaque pile! I must tell others! So you get scrapie or CWD or mad cow or some others.
What I have always thought strange is that no one seems to have looked at prions as a possible cause of Alzheimers', another poorly-understood neurological disease marked by pileups of nonfunctional protein plaques in the brain.
The reason this is significant? Folks, I thought this was one of your core beliefs! The only way to really truly understand something complex (a cake, a compiler, a neuropathic protein) is to build one that works.
"The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manifacture." - Elbert Hubbard. I had always thought this quote was randomly generated....now I am not so sure.
If this were a local computer store, I'd be with you. But HP? Doing this at 850 stores? No way. Because, also, people aren't going to be bringing in useful stuff - some good chunk of this will be truly, definitively, worthless (or require more than an hour of work.)
Plus, even if you're not *pulling down* $20 an hour, giving you tools, light, liability insurance, a workspace, health insurance (maybe), a manager to every 20 or so, and any parts at all...no way it makes sense at a national level to distract themselves from their much more profitable core business areas.
They're going to spend technician time at $30 an hour to fix up (or dismantle) now-worth-$20 laser printers that they have to ship to anyone at $30 plus packaging? Not to mention the enormous amount of broken / hopelessly outmoded / unsellable computers? Or to wipe the hard drives? Even to traige this equipment into saleable v. nonsaleable would wipe out the price delta immediately.
By the way, speaking as someone who's spent a lot of time at various nonprofits, please don't be so casual about kicking used tech equipment to them; 90%+ are white elephants that end up taking up much more time, space, etc., than they're worth; only give something away if you talk to them about it first. (and are willing to support it if it comes down to that.)
It is all too infrequently that we see major corporations doing something like this; not just kicking in 1/10% of revenues to charity, but leveraging their respective competencies for social good. This is the best kind of corporate responsibility.
If you're like me, and vote with your dollars whenever a company angers you with poor customer service / irresponsible behavior, the more fun and more effective upside is to drop those $ when you see someone doing something right; I would hope that all you Slashdotters needing some Post-Its or stylii or what have you pick them up while you're there; a boost in same-store revenue will ensure that we see them doing this again. (Rather than having these pitched into cyanide vats or roadside ditches in SE Asia.)
I am always confused by the omission from these tests of collaborative filters like Cloudmark's SpamNet, which I have used at work for a long time with a very high "catch" rate, no real processing time, and no false positives. Essentially, every email you get it hashes and checks with the server. If you get a spam, you right-click and report it as such. Then it pulls any messages from your inbox which enough credible people have marked before you. (A gross oversimplification, but close enough.)
I feel like at our current stage of technological development, you have to combat human-generated deception with human intervention.
(By the way, that cloudmark tool is Outlook-only, but contains some concepts I'd like to see in other filters...
The actual number is 100 miles squared, which too many people take as 100 square miles. Not the same. (In fact, I have been personally misquoted as saying the latter.
That said, it's pretty clear why the utilities haven't done it...Space has not been the issue with solar panels for 15 years now. Plenty of unused roof space, brownfields, etc., etc.
It's cost...here's your math.
Bulk solar panels go for ca. $2.90 / Watt anymore, making for a residential turnkey full system cost of a little over $6.50 (say $6 commercial.) So, a 30-year lifetime electricity cost of maybe $.22 / kWh , (less for commercial - better tax depreciation treatment.)
Now, happily, we compete on the meter side, so we're competing with $.07 - $.13 /kWh instead of the $.02 that the wind people have to generate. And those prices keep going up (by perhaps 5% per year,) while ours come down (by ca. 5% per year,) but you're still not making that money back without a state or utility incentive. Check DSIRE.
With current technology cost trends, that will slowly stop being the case for individuals in the US with high electricity bills over about the next five to eight years...
Solar panels are not, themselves, reflective - it's just that the ones you've seen on houses, highway signs, etc., are covered with tempered glass. CIGS cells are small, flexible, nonreflective, and easily integrated into fabrics...enough to provide standby "vampire" power for a host of electronics, which should reduce overall battery requirements.
More likely, you've been hearing the same forecasts, and not paying enough attention to the timeframe. Many simulations show that a period of swimming like "Water World" increases the Earth's albdeo sufficiently that it *induces* a new ice age - several decades later. We're not that good at simulating something as complex as the climate out more than a few years. However, please realize that we *are* very good at measuring CO2 and its impact on the atmosphere, and that marginal scientists aside, no other variable - sunspots, orbital precession, yadda, yadda, has changed nearly enough - or in as obviously correlated a fashion - as atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Just because there's still a very very small number of scientists out there who question it does not really mean there's a "difference of opinion in the science community."
Well, except that "Manufacturing cost of goods sold" equals, for Evergreen, installing all of their new dual-ribbon furnaces. For Shell, automating their Camarillo factory. For BP, gutting half the Frederick facility and automating that (and then doing the next line next year.) This is, for instance, why Evergreen would appear to be half as profitable on gross margin for the last year, despite (about) halving their production costs. I feel like we're doing this backwards. I've shown you multiple peer-reviewed documents from industry experts stating that energy payback is less than 4 years; show me something that demonstrates it's more than 25.
However - we make almost none of our electricity from oil here in the US.
Also, economists tend to talk about those sorts of resource-to-resource transitions as though they were instantaneous chemical reactions. In reality, they're discontinuous, inefficient, "jerky" and rather prolonged. Viz. gas lines and street riots. The rational thing to do is therefore to build these markets and technologies as quickly and cheaply as possible - before we have to. Because having to is very painful and prolonged.
Good points, but...I don't think it's completely fair to include the energy originally put into crystallizing microelectronics silicon, as they put that energy in to sell it to chip fabs anyway. Since it gets recrystallized for PV use, and would be thrown away otherwise, this is a pretty legitimate thing to do. Dedicated solar-grade silicon operations are slated to come on line in 04...
The latter point is, I think, simply saying that while Alsema did only polycrystalline cells, Kato looked into monocrystalline and got about 3 years (vs. 3.75ish for poly), when he didn't charge for the off-grade feedstock (which, as above, I think is a legitimate thing to do.)
This will be settled with the original-silica-to-solar-wafers processes that we expect to see this year, but I'm not too worried. I'd say you'll see variance much less than +/- 10% in these figures (I won't attempt to engage here in estimating the energy payback of fossilizing plant material to make coal.)
Keep in mind the obvious paradox here, as well. Imagine a 100W solar array lasts 30 years and costs about $300 in bulk. (These are approximately correct current unsubsidized values.) Over its lifetime, in, say, Chicago IL, it will generate about 4,400 kWh. If it was *made* with 4400kWh of electricity, which costs about $.05 / kWh say, for an industrial customer, the electricty alone would cost $220, leaving $80 for all the materials, labor, shipping, factory overhead, salaries, profit, and production line expansion (which by the way is above 36% annually for the industry as a whole.) The math doesn't work out. If, however, the payback period is about 3.75 years, the panel would take about $41 of electricity to make (almost all silicon recrystallization,) which seems anecdotally to be about right.
Can do, but in large part, it depends where you live - contact info@seia.org for a run-through.
All right! I *knew* someone would trot out the "solar panels take more energy" schtick! This is great; it's practically the only time I get to get modded up to insightful. Ahem.
They just updated this peer-reviewed survey study: (PDF) from the national laboratories. Short version? Worst case payback is 3.75 years from a system that will last 30 years. (A coal or natural gas combined cycle power plant, by the way, has about the same energy payback - they don't spring fully formed from the soil.)
This is not to denigrate the Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technologies you spoke of; they're promising central station power. Check DOE's CSP page for more info there. But read up before you dismiss photovoltaics out of hand.
Last time you heard, or did you actually look it up for yourself? Because that old chestnut hasn't been true since about the mid-70s. (Think about it; they're silicon-based semiconductors...would you take someone's 1975 estimate of microprocessor efficiency? Check this (PDF) national laboratory meta-study for the most recent data (albeit now somewhat dated and therefore overconservative, given, e.g. Evergreen and Shell Solar's new crystal growth methods, and the thin film processes.) About 3 - 4 years into a solar cell's 25 year+ (warranteed) lifetime, it "pays back" its energy.
2.Conversion efficiency does not take into account manufacturing energy costs; only energy in (fuel) to energy out. The conversion efficiency of a gas turbine would come way down if you included smelting all the steel in its casing, I assure you.
3. Also, just do a back of the envelope calculation. A 100 watt panel will last 25 years in, let's say Maryland, getting solid sunlight for about 19% of all hours (clouds, night, etc.) 100 watts * 24 hours * 365 days * 25 years * .19 = 4161 kWh. At industrial $.05 /kWh electrical rates, that's about $208 worth of electricity; manufacturing cost for the panel (and all manufacturers are unsubsidized) in 2004 is about $190; bulk sales are ca. $300 per 100 watts. Hard to pay for materials and labor if that's your energy cost.
The organic LED based technologies (polymeric / organic /nanostructured / Titania / Gratzel / Graetzel) cells are not yet ready for prime time, though they have huge promise. Check out Konarka or Nanosolar. GE and HItachi are also fooling around with this. The idea is that you can make solar cells out of TiO2, which is almost infinitely cheap in industrial quantities (see here toothpaste or white paint.)
Uni-Solar's product is in fact based on conventional silicon, just like 90%+ of the market today. The difference is that instead of slicing it out of crystals, they sputter it onto a backing, enabling them to make, e.g. peel-and-stick solar panels for commercial raised seam roofs, a conventional shingle for residential roofing, as well as, here, a flexible backing product for airships. Many are working in this area; it's sort of the next generation for solar cell cost decreases (which have come down by more than half in the last ten years; world production doubled between 2000 and 2003 - however, we're going to run out of tricks with conventional silicon within about 5 years at this pace.)
I find everyone's obsession with conversion efficiencies touching; what sense does it make when your fuel source is infinite and free? Area - related costs are subtle, so focus on this: with solar, efficiency matters not at all - the be all and end all is cost per watt.
Also, the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute at MFRI.org
They train many of the responders for Washington, DC and Southern Maryland - DC being a spectacular interagency nightmare, with just about every Federal agency having their own police force, then Secret Service, DC Metro police / fire / EMS, TSA, Customs Service, Coast Guard, Park Police, and professional and volunteer forces from three states serving as second-line responders, I bet they've got something useful together - check their EMS officer classes for response to terrorism coordination. (MFRI does some other interesting work with UMd College Park engineers and researchers, as well - believe they're trying to get firefighters some augmented reality HUDs, for instance.)
Of course, maybe they don't have any ideas. In which case we're all doomed.
1. You're exactly right. This national laboratory study is generally considered definitive.
2. Idiot Check:
Bulk unsubsidized price of a 100 watt solar panel:
$350
Lifetime energy production:
100W * 8 hours a day * 300 days per year * 25 years
6,000,000 Wh (6000 kWh)
Retail price of that electricity: $.10 / kWh
$600
Not a lot of profit margin for the manufacturer there is there?
I'll confess that I am beginning to lose my patience with debunking this over and over again; it was true back in the 1950s-60s when solar power was an elaborately hand-assembled product, and before you techie people caused the silicon market to blow up so hugely. (Though these are probably CIGS instead of crystalline silicon.)