I don't know about you, but where I live the sun sets.
That's why I included a 25% efficiency term. 50% of the day is light (average) and the panel operates at 50% of capacity, average, in daylight hours. But I'm not sure how accurate those estimates are.
You're forgetting two very important things. In your math you're forgetting to amortize your capital costs. Basically you're assuming that you can get a 0% loan. In reality, paying for solar up-front, instead of coal as you need it, you need to tripple the cost of the solar, because of the interest you will have to pay over the 25-year life of that "loan".
Ah, assumptions. Will coal prices stay constant? What about inflation, even if coal supply remains constant? And the 25 year figure was only for $4/W. At the $1/W figure cited, it's less than 7 years (assuming the 25% capacity, and I don't know how reasonable that is). What about if I buy more than my capacity, and actually am able to sell electricity back to power company when I produce excess?
Secondly, solar provides great energy during the middle of the day. However, most residential electrical demand happens in the early evening, when people get home from work and turn everything on. Most industrial users of electricity need a constant supply, around the clock. Commercial users need electricity throughout the day, with a spike in the late afternoon as air conditioning demand increases. Solar-electricity provides for some, but not all of these needs. Storing solar energy in batteries, thermal storage systems, or mechanical storage systems doubles or tripples the cost again.
Batteries? Huh? First, solar electricity in California (not where I live, btw, but it is a state with very expensive electricity) can be sold back to the utility company; if you produce more than is required, it causes the meter to run backwards. And since the highest electricity demand is during the middle of the day, especially when people run air conditioning, that is when the rates are highest. If you sell energy back to the utility company when the rates are highest, then use electricity in the evenings when rates are lower, it's a win-win. And storage? Use the grid! Besides the advantage of selling excess energy, being connected to the grid eliminates battery and storage costs (not to mention inverters and other equipment).
Thus, even with $1/W panels, general-purpose solar power is still 8-10X the cost of coal.
Except that your math is incorrect, the panels in question are very inefficient, and a bunch of other people are working on this problem to drive the prices down. Not to mention you used the 25 year figure, which applies to $4/W panels, not $1/W. Also, I checked the price of energy on the DOE website, and California electricity costs $0.125/kWh, not $0.07/kWh. In sunny Hawaii, the electricity cost is $0.207/kWh! http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochures/rep/ In Hawaii, with rates 3X above what I used in my calculations, $1/W panels would pay for themselves in only 2-3 years. That's assuming you don't lose too much money getting them shipped to Hawaii, and that the panels are still only 25% efficient even so close to the equator.
This is a huge milestone. However, the summary gets a couple things wrong: First, $1/watt panels aren't "cheaper than coal". Large coal consumers buy 2,000 pounds of coal for $50. Burn that in a crappy Bush-endorsed power station, and utilities can print money at $0.07/KWh.
You can't compare watts to kWh. They aren't the same units. But I went ahead and did the math for you.
1 kWh = 3.61 x 10^6 J
$0.07/kWh = 14.3 kWh/$ = 51.6 x 10^6 J/$
solar panel = $1/W = $1/(J/s)
3600 s/h, 24 h/d, 365 d/year --> 31.5 x 10^6 s
51.6 x 10^6 (J/$) / 31.5 x 10^6 (J/year/$) --> 1.64 years (producing at full capacity) makes it cheaper than coal. Even if you only run at 25% capacity on average, taking into account varying daily solar intensity, the investment pays for itself in 6.5 years.
Of course, your other points are valid; burning coal is bad, at least using the current technology. And that $1/W number is still theoretical, so if they're selling at $4/W, then it would take 26 years to be as cost-effective as coal (given constant energy costs; but that time would be much shorter if we have an energy crunch and prices spike--or another Enron-style price-gouging scam, for that matter).
Ah, so I was wrong about the number. It only contains frequencies up to ~22kHz, which is sensible in light of the human auditory range I mentioned in my earlier post.
This is why I don't read/. so much any more. Lots of people know the numbers, but too few know what they mean.
Methinks you don't know what the numbers mean in this case, either. Think about it for a second--if you were to encode a 22 kHz sine wave (nothing complicated right now) with a 44.1 kHz signal, how many points would you have per cycle? Exactly two. One for a peak, one for a trough. What does that spell? TRIANGLE WAVE. And those sound nothing like sine waves, which you probably know if you've ever played an old Nintendo game. But it's worse--the triangle wave will only resemble the sine wave in frequency if sampled at exactly the right places (peaks and troughs) but will be silent if sampled at the point that the wave is at zero amplitude. This is the problem with aliasing. This is why CDs will never sound as good as analog, regardless of the nominal frequency range. Analog frequency and bitrate are limited by the recording equipment and the medium (e.g., acetate records). Realistically, you need about eight points per cycle to represent a sine wave, meaning that CDs, with their 44 kHz sampling, only capture realistic sounds up to about 5 kHz, not 22. Above that frequency, it all starts to become electronic-sounding. And for more complicated waveforms, eight samples per cycle is still inadequate, meaning those waveforms sound "muddy."
Caveat: I am not an electronic engineer, and I don't know how aliasing appears in the frequency domain (i.e., mp3s ripped from CDs), just the time domain. But CDs use the time domain, so these limitations do apply.
In this case, bandwidth is a smaller expense than credit card processing fees
Yeah, the processing fee was 45 pence (UK), I believe. I didn't expect that, or I would have lowered my purchase price. So the figure for how much fans paid probably does NOT include credit card processing, which was tacked on at checkout.
To put it simply, You're full of shit. If you REALLY wanted to support them you would have done it anyway and made the suggestion that they encode in a higher bitrate. All your doing is trying to claim you 'would buy it for the common good' but didn't because of some retarded technicality that wouldn't have affected you if you did what you claim you were going to do.
On point 1, I agree. I am annoyed at the relatively low bitrate (160 kbps = low, 128 kbps is not even worth downloading), but I paid 5 pounds to support the band and hear their new album. And I like it. But when I read they were releasing a CD in January, I wished I had not paid good money for shitty mp3s.
Second, I'd put a months pay on the line that I could encode a 320kbs mp3 and a 128kbs mp3 and play them both on your hardware and you wouldn't know the difference. I hate when people are all high and mighty about high bitrate mp3s... and you play them through you $15 over amp'd speakers connected to your onboard soundcard via a frayed headphone cable
You're setting the bar way too low. 128 vs 320? Hah! The difference is pretty damn significant, if you've got decent ears. Now if you had said 192 vs 320, I would have been more hesitant. But I'll take you up on that 128 vs 320 bet any day, any time. However, I demand to use my own hardware, since you've been listening to music on a computer with a shitty soundcard and a frayed headphone cord.
You know the original MP3 encoders were designed so that at 128kbps most people could not tell the difference right? Yet you are one of the many people who claim 'OMG LOW BITRATE SUCKS'
Key word being MOST, here. I can tell the difference, and I'm sorry if that makes you feel inferior with your sub-par ears. But I (I am not the OP) will NOT shut the fuck up about how low bitrates suck. One of my biggest fears from digital music distribution is that high quality tracks will disappear completely, along with the CD. I still buy CDs because, as I said I CAN TELL THE FUCKING DIFFERENCE. Maybe you can't, but I've ripped at various bitrates and tested myself.
Seriously, shut the fuck up and stop acting like you were all out to buy the album but this stupid little bitrate issue is what stopped you from buying it.
Okay, so that was just a mean spewing rant, but I really hate people that talk like this and act like bitrates like this are the end of the world... cause you can tell a difference on your shitty ass PC sound card./me waits to here how he has an ASUS board with tube amp onboard, monster cables feeding a harmon kardon amp with bose speakers...
The original poster didn't even seem to LIKE radiohead, so you have to take the whole post with a grain of salt. I like the band, have bought several of their previous albums. I paid for the download, and I'm giving notice: 256+ kbps in the future if you want me to pay top dollar. Downstairs, I listen to my music on a Power Mac G5 with a Texas Instruments TAS3004 sound card. My audio-out is connected to my amp/pre-amp stereo system, which is made by Audio Source (not a big name, but decent hardware without whistles and bells) and has speakers by Boston Acoustics. Upstairs, in the bedroom, I have a Klipsch ProMedia THX 2.1 computer speaker system to which I plug in my iPod, and it sounds sublime.
I want to build my own tube amp, but I don't currently have the $$. I'm a wannabe audiophile without the means to buy the fanciest equipment. It doesn't require the fanciest equipment to differentiate shit (128 kbps) from quality (256 kbps). I know people who rarely listen to music, and I know people who are perfectly satified with 128 kbps coming from tiny, tinny computer speakers. For some of us, music has a bigger place in our lives. Music to me is kind of a propulsion system that keeps me going, keeps me productive. I constantly have music running through my he
I think if they had not dorked around with a low bitrate download, they would have done even better. Still, I'm glad that it looks like they've proved this business model and I think many more artists will follow suit.
Ditto.
I did pay for the download (although if I hadn't it would NOT be piracy, contrary to what many people here have implied). I paid 5 pounds for the album, but that is definitely inflated compared to the fair market value, in my opinion. A full-length CD (not mp3s) is worth $7-10 to me at most (though I sometimes pay more). I always rip my CDs at 256 kbps (128 kbps per stereo channel) and that's good enough quality for me. I would routinely pay $7 for a 256 kbps mp3 album. But 160 kbps? On any other day, when I wasn't trying to support the band and this new distribution model, I'd pay $3-5, tops.
In 20 years, the RIAA will have been completely replaced by a set of publicists. These publicists won't own the copyright to anything--they'll be paid, on salary, to hook the musicians up with venues, hire web designers for band websites, and in some cases find places to record.
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What do you think the 'recording industry' was to begin with? Their current power did not spring forth fully formed. Started out small, got lucky with a couple of acts that made it big, then had the money/resources to take a chance (with their own rules) on no-name acts. And a few of those made it big.
And so the circle goes.
I think you're referring to artists & repertoire, whereas the "recording industry" also consists of the manufacturing and distribution elements (and of course publicity, as mentioned). Manufacturing is dirt cheap DIY, more than ever before, because CD duplication is available to anyone with access to a compuer. Same goes for distribution, a la Radiohead's new album. A&R doesn't make sense without manufacturing and distribution--the only thing left is publicity. So I think I have to agree with the original post. And it's about damn time the artists got the biggest share of the revenue.
There are aspects of our immune system that deal with macroscopic threats - parasites, foreign bodies, etc. In modern, industrialized society intestinal parasites and unremoved splinters aren't really a problem so a part of our immune system is left with very little to do. Like a bored child or pet, our immune system goes looking for something to do. It overreacts to pollen, proteins in common foods, and animal dander.
Yup. Right on the money--although I might add rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, type I diabetes, and maybe even autism to the list in the subject line. It's called the hygiene hypothesis, and has a lot of evidence backing it up. The first is that children in Ghana who were dewormed subsequently developed asthma and dust mite allergies. If they became reinfected with worms, the asthma and allergies went away. Recent article (abstract): http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a779532758~db=all
Also, people with autoimmune intestinal disorders (inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's) had nearly complete remission of their symptoms when they were voluntarily infected with pig whipworm eggs. The eggs can't fully mature in humans, so the person has to drink more eggs (in a shot of Gatorade) every few weeks. Article: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/537189.
Finally, there's the growing field of Metabolomics, which is basically what it sounds like. They've been discovering that gut microflora are incredibly important to our health because they do most of our digestion for us--and if our intestinal bacteria can't metabolize a drug, or turn it into a toxic metabolite, that can hurt us. In addition, bacteria may also secrete immunomodulatory stuff, so people who've had lots of antibiotics may have immune systems that are out of calibration. Link about effect of chamomile tea on gut bacteria (abstract): http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v3/n5/abs/nrmicro1152.html
And since that link is just an abstract, here's another article by the authors with free full text, where mice were innoculated with human baby gut bacteria: http://www.nature.com/msb/journal/v3/n1/full/msb4100153.html
In the paper, they demonstrate the use of this photo-marker in live mice, and are able to image the location of hydrogen peroxide anywhere in the mouse body.
I see you've posted several times for this discussion, and that you've actually read the paper. As you pointed out earlier, pentacene is a fluorescent dye. However, that fact is misleading since its fluorescent properties are not utilized for this application. But what can you expect from a science blurb? They also spelled ester as esther, so I can't expect them to have their chemistry straight.
Anyway, I just wanted to point out that in-vivo imaging is already done on mice using actual fluorescence rather than chemiluminescence (long-wavelength dyes, which emit between about 650-800 nm, are best). Enhanced Raman spectroscopy using metal nanoparticles (SERS) has also been used for in vivo imaging of mice, and I believe it has better tissue penetration. However, the size of the animal is crucial for all these in vivo techniques--being able to see through a mouse is cake compared to a human being (or horse, cow, elephant, whatever).
The problem there is that you're essentially proposing the equivalent of making a car instantly go from 50 km/h to 200 km/h, without it ever having a speed of 100 km/h in between (or any other between 50 and 200.) Only in this case you're proposing something like going from 0.5c to 2c without ever being at the other speeds in between.
Well... how?
Even if there wasn't the pesky issue of having c in between, that violates even Newtonian mechanics. Savagely. Since you're proposing that speed "jump" to essentially happen in exactly zero time (or you'd go through all the values in between), even by old Newtonian mechanics you're talking about an infinite force.
What we need is an electromagnetic equivalent to the de Laval nozzle. The speed-of-light barrier comes from an equation, and could be an over simplification. When you break the sound barrier, the sonic boom is a result of a shock wave--which corresponds to a singularity in the Prandtl-Glauert equation, i.e., a Mach number of 1.0. So maybe there's an optical boom instead of a sonic boom when you break the light barrier, but I'm not going to say it's impossible.
voip' when it's said as a word (they pronounce it voyp) and not an acronym. Most of the time people saying "voyp" don't even understand what the technology means.
I beg your pardon. I know perfectly well what it means and I refuse to waste my time and effort by spelling it out for you. If you can pronounce it, then pronounce it. Maddox is wrong about pronouncing URL, as are you about pronouncing VOIP.
And you do it too. Unless you plan to live out the rest of your life spelling, not saying, RADAR, SONAR, LASER, FUBAR, SNAFU, AWOL, NORAD, NASA, FEMA, NASCAR, FIAT, OPEC, MADD, RIAA, SCUBA, ANSI, NASDAQ, and even SCSI, then get off my case.
Sorry, but you, sir, are wrong about "URL," "VOIP," and "RIAA." I have rarely if ever heard people pronounce those words as acronyms, and for damn good reason. "Earl" is a noun already; "voyp" sounds really stupid, and doesn't reflect the "IP" origin of the word; "rhea" for RIAA, while certainly appropriate in its evocation of diarrhea, doesn't capture the second "A," unless you pronounce it "ree-AAH." "are-eye-double-A" would be a better choice. I also had to consult the interwebs to figure out who the hell uses "FIAT" as an abbreviation (the answer, for anyone besides Atario, is Python programmers: FInite element Automatic Tabulator).
You may think you're ahead of the curve, or some sort of trend-setter by treating these abbreviations as acronyms, but sometimes it just isn't meant to be. Ever heard someone try to pronounce, rather than spell, PCMCIA? Or NAACP? Maybe someday earl, voyp, and rhea will be common usage--then I'll have to eat my words. But in this argument, today, you sound like a snotty script kiddie who pronounces IRC as "irk."
If you grabbed 1000 people at random - heck, I'll even give you 1000 people between the ages of 20 and 40, you'd be hard pressed to find 20 that have ever heard of DCT or Fourier analysis, and phenominally lucky to find one that could actually describe what it means.
Oh, and the answer to your question is "yes." Saying "Frequency Space" as part of a description to anyone who is not involved in either said data analysis, compression, or vibrations (my former, and sometimes current, field) is guaranteed to be met with a blank stare.
I first came across Fourier transforms in chemistry--specifically IR spectroscopy. I had the unfortunate experience of using a non-Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer (FTIR), a.k.a. a single-wavelength IR. It was a pain, and very time consuming, since the instrument scanned through each individual wavelength measuring absorbance of the sample. When I first used an FTIR, well, wow. It was explained to me that the FTIR measured all wavelengths at the same time, then crunched some numbers to calculate the absorbance at each wavelength. That's not so hard to understand for something that is time-invariant, but audio and video don't fit that description. That's why I'm still trying to figure out codecs, DCT, etc.
All chemical and electrical engineers, at the very least, know what frequency space is. Not just the small subset of occupations you mentioned. Wrapping one's brain around the Laplace transform is trickier than grasping the Fourier transform, in my opinion. The Dirac delta function is counterintuitive, to say the least. And frequency space--that at least has some physical sense. But s-space? WTF? It is only used to solve tricky differential equations, then you transform back into the time domain. If there is a physical interpretation for s-space, someone please correct me.
At this point, there seem to be more followers of the Big Rip than a Big Crunch, since the days when scientists detected indication of dark energy and that the universe is not just expanding, but accelerating.
Why did someone mod you down as troll? Am I missing something?
Your entire last paragraph is a logical fallacy, mostly an argument from personal incredulity. It's amazing how often people make this.
Ever taken a math class? Ever fit data to a mathematical model? Ever interpolated a value between two data points? The first thing they tell you is that extrapolation, unlike interpolation, is a dangerous and unreliable thing. The further you extrapolate from the existing data, the less likely it is that your extrapolation will be accurate. For a trivial example, take the Taylor series for the sine function. Unless you're really close to the origin, the Taylor series (centered at the origin) is a polynomial that goes to plus or minus infinity rather than being bounded by -1 to 1.
So back to my point--my personal incredulity has nothing illogical about it. Three trillion years from now is so far away that it is asinine to make predictions about what will happen then. But nature is full of waves and cycles, from the microscale to the macroscale. So it makes way more sense, from a scientific, rational, empirical viewpoint that the universe would behave in some cyclical fashion than an infinite expansion--an idea, as I cited, which is mirrored in Hindu mythology / philosophy / whatever.
I have a hunch you said I was making a logical fallacy because of your personal beliefs about religion (confirmed by reading some of your other comments). I am a very non-religious person myself, and I consider most religious beliefs to be fallacious. But for every question with a single correct answer there are an infinite number of incorrect answers. If I were to assume no correct answer existed simply because the vast preponderance of answers are incorrect, that would be a logical fallacy. In other words, if you assume an idea is wrong simply because it appears in a religious text, you're just as closed-minded as someone who believes an idea is right simply because it appears in that text. Scriptures are never going to take the place of science for providing definitive answers, but they might provide inspiration and insight for some good research.
I think photons get turned into mass when they collide with an atom. That's constructive right?
Anywho, from what I'm able to understand, dark energy(which is one theory about why the universe appears to be expanding) is quite likely simply a property of space(or a volume...), and thus will never be converted into mass.
Hmm. Interesting (and indeed constructive). I guess I need to learn more about dark energy. I believe dark matter is just non-radiative mass (i.e, cold stuff), but I really have no idea what dark energy is supposed to be.
I think when photons collide with atoms they usually excite electrons, which then drop back to the ground state and release the energy as either lower-energy photons (photoluminescence) or as phonons (lattice vibrations), but I never really understood group theory and symmetry, so maybe sometimes photons do turn into mass upon collisions with atoms, under the right conditions.
Yeah, no shit. That's why I said "Isn't it a bit incorrect to differentiate "matter" from "energy" when E=mc^2?" I could weigh myself in terms of electron volts instead of pounds or kilograms if I were so inclined (and yes, I know the difference between mass and weight, but nobody talks about "massing" themselves, and I'm not going be be weighing myself on the moon). Did you read my whole comment? Got anything constructive to add?
While a dense enough universe could collapse into a "Big Crunch", that is not the hypothesized ending of our universe. The density of our universe is not dominated by matter, but by energy, such that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. You're right that it's difficult to extrapolate to a time several orders of magnitude greater than the current age of the universe, as currently-unknown physics could end up dominating. (Someone observing the universe about 8 billion years ago would have been unable to measure the energy density of the universe, for instance.) But that does mean we shouldn't even try?
Where do supermassive black holes fit into the equation? Isn't it a bit incorrect to differentiate "matter" from "energy" when E=mc^2 and black holes can prevent massless photons from exiting? I guess a better question is: we know that fusion and fission can turn mass into energy, but how do you turn energy into mass? More specifically, how do you turn photons (and maybe neutrinos) into mass? Does that happen in a black hole? If so, maybe the universe is currently dominated by energy, until some of that energy gets converted back into mass, then the crunch begins.
As far as whether people should be trying to extrapolate into the really distant future--it's their time to spend as they see fit. But I think it would be better spent addressing some of the above questions (existence or not of gravitons, how to convert energy into mass).
Interesting.. Except that Hinduism doesnt really exist. It was given a name by discoverers, but is really much more diverse than any other religion, because it isnt really a religion either. You can be a Christian and a "Hindu". Hinduism accepts that because you are actively pursuing the truth, alas other religions cannot accept that so easily.
The creation myth comes from the Vedas, which is more scientific than myth and religion.
I certainly didn't mean to disparage Hinduism--er, the philosophy of the people who read the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita--and I wasn't even sure if I should use the word "mythology" to describe the creation story. I'm aware of the fact that a person can be "Hindu" and still be a Christian, or Muslim, or Jew, or whatever. That's why the Muslims had such a frustrating time converting "Hindus" to Islam back in the Delhi Sultanate days. As long as you're following your dharma, you're being a good Hindu. Even if your dharma is to be a good Muslim.
On the subject of misunderstandings about Hinduism, it bugs me that some people consider it to be a polytheistic philosophy. Not anymore so than most varieties of Christianity, with their Patris-Fílii-Spíritus Sancti trinity.
Isn't the universe supposed to collapse sooner than that? If scientists are currently saying that the universe is 10-20 billion years old, why the hell would anyone assume the "Big Crunch" won't happen by then?
I'd be much more interesting if someone had a theory about what the universe looked like before the Big Bang, assuming that isn't a bunch of bullshit too.
Right now, Hindu creation mythology is looking less silly than theoretical astrophysics. I'll be waiting for Kalki to come destroy the universe and start a new cycle before I'll believe any speculation about what will happen in the way, way future, 150X as long away as the speculated age of our universe. That's like making predictions about the 3000th birthday of a 20 year old person.
Personally, I'm a fan of direct matter-to-energy conversion. That would solve all our energy problems, once and for all. We need that tech and we need it TODAY! Why does someone give me a first-generation product now?
I know you're being sarcastic, but we already have technology that turns matter into energy. It's called nuclear fission. The first generation products have been around for about 50 years.
Also, we don't have a good idea of the durability of these cells. I'm a bit concerned because of the organic nature; how stable are they? What kind of reduction in efficiency will we see over, say, 20 years?
Very good question. These are not just dyes--they're fluorescent dyes. They absorb a photon in a certain energy range, which puts and electron in an excited state. After a certain amount of time in that excited state (i.e., the "fluorescence lifetime") the electron drops back down to the ground state and emits a photon of lower energy (the difference in energy between absorbed and emitted photons is called the Stokes shift). Every time an electron jumps to that excited state, it can potentially react with an oxidant and destroy the fluorescence (this is known as "photobleaching." If you mix antioxidants with the dye solution you can decrease the rate of photobleaching--such an antioxidant solution is called an "antifade." There are other ways to reduce photobleaching, such as sticking certain chemical moieties onto the dye.
In short, the stability of the dye system really depends on the dye structure and the presence (or absence) of oxidizing molecules. There are plenty of fluorescent dyes used in lasers, but I don't know how long they last before bleaching. If the dye is in the right solvent (such as DMSO, perhaps) it might take a damn long time to bleach. But the point is that dye is cheap compared to refined silicon, and replacing bleached dye might be as simple as flushing out the old stuff and pouring in a new solution.
In my opinion there are only two reasonable long-term solutions to solar energy production: 1) Imitate photosynthesis using fluorescent dyes. 2) Let the plants do all the hard work of turning photons + water + carbon dioxide into sugar, then figure out how to imitate cellular respiration and turn sugar into energy (specifically, a separation of charge).
This site has tons of information about various fluorescent dyes, though it's geared towards use in molecular biology, not photovoltaics (unless you count the voltage-sensing dyes).
I repeat DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME DOES NOT GIVE US MORE DAYLIGHT. It does not change the planets tilt, rotation speed, or smell.
Whenever I hear someone talk about how awesome it is to have extra hours of daylight, I ask them why wouldn't it be better to just "recalibrate" the time zones so that "daylight savings time" is the new standard time, then just stop all this switching nonsense.
But time zones are another total pain in the ass, even if there's no switching back and forth. I recently found out the China has a single time zone, whereas the country would encompass about eight zones if they used our style of time zones. And have you seen the time zone map of the US? It makes no sense at all. Alabama is completely on central time, but if you go due north, Michigan is in . . . eastern time? WTF?
I personally advocate the abolition of time zones altogether. Let's all use Greenwich Mean Time, no time changes, and deal with it. Businesses and schools can just change their hours of operation, rather than messing with time itself. Sure, it would be weird to have sunrise at 6 pm and sunset at 6 am, but would it be any more complicated than the current system?
"How likely is it that two snowflakes are alike? Very likely if we define alike to mean that we would have trouble distinguishing them under a microscope and if we include the crystals that hardly develop beyond the prism stage--that is, the smallest snow crystals,"
In other news--it is very likely that two people will have identical fingerprints. If by fingerprints we mean the part of the fingerprint that cannot even be distinguished as a whorl. That is, a couple of cells constituting a tiny fold of skin.
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I don't know about you, but where I live the sun sets.
That's why I included a 25% efficiency term. 50% of the day is light (average) and the panel operates at 50% of capacity, average, in daylight hours. But I'm not sure how accurate those estimates are.
Batteries? Huh? First, solar electricity in California (not where I live, btw, but it is a state with very expensive electricity) can be sold back to the utility company; if you produce more than is required, it causes the meter to run backwards. And since the highest electricity demand is during the middle of the day, especially when people run air conditioning, that is when the rates are highest. If you sell energy back to the utility company when the rates are highest, then use electricity in the evenings when rates are lower, it's a win-win. And storage? Use the grid! Besides the advantage of selling excess energy, being connected to the grid eliminates battery and storage costs (not to mention inverters and other equipment).
Except that your math is incorrect, the panels in question are very inefficient, and a bunch of other people are working on this problem to drive the prices down. Not to mention you used the 25 year figure, which applies to $4/W panels, not $1/W. Also, I checked the price of energy on the DOE website, and California electricity costs $0.125/kWh, not $0.07/kWh. In sunny Hawaii, the electricity cost is $0.207/kWh! http://www.eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochures/rep/ In Hawaii, with rates 3X above what I used in my calculations, $1/W panels would pay for themselves in only 2-3 years. That's assuming you don't lose too much money getting them shipped to Hawaii, and that the panels are still only 25% efficient even so close to the equator.
1 kWh = 3.61 x 10^6 J
$0.07/kWh = 14.3 kWh/$ = 51.6 x 10^6 J/$
solar panel = $1/W = $1/(J/s)
3600 s/h, 24 h/d, 365 d/year --> 31.5 x 10^6 s
51.6 x 10^6 (J/$) / 31.5 x 10^6 (J/year/$) --> 1.64 years (producing at full capacity) makes it cheaper than coal. Even if you only run at 25% capacity on average, taking into account varying daily solar intensity, the investment pays for itself in 6.5 years.
Of course, your other points are valid; burning coal is bad, at least using the current technology. And that $1/W number is still theoretical, so if they're selling at $4/W, then it would take 26 years to be as cost-effective as coal (given constant energy costs; but that time would be much shorter if we have an energy crunch and prices spike--or another Enron-style price-gouging scam, for that matter).
University of Texas came out with an electronic tongue 8 years ago: http://www.engr.utexas.edu/news/articles/19981026319/index.cfm
I think they've developed a nose since then, but can't find a good link.
Ah, so I was wrong about the number. It only contains frequencies up to ~22kHz, which is sensible in light of the human auditory range I mentioned in my earlier post.
/. so much any more. Lots of people know the numbers, but too few know what they mean.
This is why I don't read
Methinks you don't know what the numbers mean in this case, either. Think about it for a second--if you were to encode a 22 kHz sine wave (nothing complicated right now) with a 44.1 kHz signal, how many points would you have per cycle? Exactly two. One for a peak, one for a trough. What does that spell? TRIANGLE WAVE. And those sound nothing like sine waves, which you probably know if you've ever played an old Nintendo game. But it's worse--the triangle wave will only resemble the sine wave in frequency if sampled at exactly the right places (peaks and troughs) but will be silent if sampled at the point that the wave is at zero amplitude. This is the problem with aliasing. This is why CDs will never sound as good as analog, regardless of the nominal frequency range. Analog frequency and bitrate are limited by the recording equipment and the medium (e.g., acetate records). Realistically, you need about eight points per cycle to represent a sine wave, meaning that CDs, with their 44 kHz sampling, only capture realistic sounds up to about 5 kHz, not 22. Above that frequency, it all starts to become electronic-sounding. And for more complicated waveforms, eight samples per cycle is still inadequate, meaning those waveforms sound "muddy."
Caveat: I am not an electronic engineer, and I don't know how aliasing appears in the frequency domain (i.e., mp3s ripped from CDs), just the time domain. But CDs use the time domain, so these limitations do apply.
In this case, bandwidth is a smaller expense than credit card processing fees
Yeah, the processing fee was 45 pence (UK), I believe. I didn't expect that, or I would have lowered my purchase price. So the figure for how much fans paid probably does NOT include credit card processing, which was tacked on at checkout.
To put it simply, You're full of shit. If you REALLY wanted to support them you would have done it anyway and made the suggestion that they encode in a higher bitrate. All your doing is trying to claim you 'would buy it for the common good' but didn't because of some retarded technicality that wouldn't have affected you if you did what you claim you were going to do.
... and you play them through you $15 over amp'd speakers connected to your onboard soundcard via a frayed headphone cable
... cause you can tell a difference on your shitty ass PC sound card. /me waits to here how he has an ASUS board with tube amp onboard, monster cables feeding a harmon kardon amp with bose speakers ...
On point 1, I agree. I am annoyed at the relatively low bitrate (160 kbps = low, 128 kbps is not even worth downloading), but I paid 5 pounds to support the band and hear their new album. And I like it. But when I read they were releasing a CD in January, I wished I had not paid good money for shitty mp3s.
Second, I'd put a months pay on the line that I could encode a 320kbs mp3 and a 128kbs mp3 and play them both on your hardware and you wouldn't know the difference. I hate when people are all high and mighty about high bitrate mp3s
You're setting the bar way too low. 128 vs 320? Hah! The difference is pretty damn significant, if you've got decent ears. Now if you had said 192 vs 320, I would have been more hesitant. But I'll take you up on that 128 vs 320 bet any day, any time. However, I demand to use my own hardware, since you've been listening to music on a computer with a shitty soundcard and a frayed headphone cord.
You know the original MP3 encoders were designed so that at 128kbps most people could not tell the difference right? Yet you are one of the many people who claim 'OMG LOW BITRATE SUCKS'
Key word being MOST, here. I can tell the difference, and I'm sorry if that makes you feel inferior with your sub-par ears. But I (I am not the OP) will NOT shut the fuck up about how low bitrates suck. One of my biggest fears from digital music distribution is that high quality tracks will disappear completely, along with the CD. I still buy CDs because, as I said I CAN TELL THE FUCKING DIFFERENCE. Maybe you can't, but I've ripped at various bitrates and tested myself.
Seriously, shut the fuck up and stop acting like you were all out to buy the album but this stupid little bitrate issue is what stopped you from buying it.
Okay, so that was just a mean spewing rant, but I really hate people that talk like this and act like bitrates like this are the end of the world
The original poster didn't even seem to LIKE radiohead, so you have to take the whole post with a grain of salt. I like the band, have bought several of their previous albums. I paid for the download, and I'm giving notice: 256+ kbps in the future if you want me to pay top dollar. Downstairs, I listen to my music on a Power Mac G5 with a Texas Instruments TAS3004 sound card. My audio-out is connected to my amp/pre-amp stereo system, which is made by Audio Source (not a big name, but decent hardware without whistles and bells) and has speakers by Boston Acoustics. Upstairs, in the bedroom, I have a Klipsch ProMedia THX 2.1 computer speaker system to which I plug in my iPod, and it sounds sublime.
I want to build my own tube amp, but I don't currently have the $$. I'm a wannabe audiophile without the means to buy the fanciest equipment. It doesn't require the fanciest equipment to differentiate shit (128 kbps) from quality (256 kbps). I know people who rarely listen to music, and I know people who are perfectly satified with 128 kbps coming from tiny, tinny computer speakers. For some of us, music has a bigger place in our lives. Music to me is kind of a propulsion system that keeps me going, keeps me productive. I constantly have music running through my he
I did pay for the download (although if I hadn't it would NOT be piracy, contrary to what many people here have implied). I paid 5 pounds for the album, but that is definitely inflated compared to the fair market value, in my opinion. A full-length CD (not mp3s) is worth $7-10 to me at most (though I sometimes pay more). I always rip my CDs at 256 kbps (128 kbps per stereo channel) and that's good enough quality for me. I would routinely pay $7 for a 256 kbps mp3 album. But 160 kbps? On any other day, when I wasn't trying to support the band and this new distribution model, I'd pay $3-5, tops.
Also, people with autoimmune intestinal disorders (inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's) had nearly complete remission of their symptoms when they were voluntarily infected with pig whipworm eggs. The eggs can't fully mature in humans, so the person has to drink more eggs (in a shot of Gatorade) every few weeks. Article: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/537189.
Finally, there's the growing field of Metabolomics, which is basically what it sounds like. They've been discovering that gut microflora are incredibly important to our health because they do most of our digestion for us--and if our intestinal bacteria can't metabolize a drug, or turn it into a toxic metabolite, that can hurt us. In addition, bacteria may also secrete immunomodulatory stuff, so people who've had lots of antibiotics may have immune systems that are out of calibration. Link about effect of chamomile tea on gut bacteria (abstract): http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v3/n5/abs/nrmicro1152.html And since that link is just an abstract, here's another article by the authors with free full text, where mice were innoculated with human baby gut bacteria: http://www.nature.com/msb/journal/v3/n1/full/msb4100153.html
Anyway, I just wanted to point out that in-vivo imaging is already done on mice using actual fluorescence rather than chemiluminescence (long-wavelength dyes, which emit between about 650-800 nm, are best). Enhanced Raman spectroscopy using metal nanoparticles (SERS) has also been used for in vivo imaging of mice, and I believe it has better tissue penetration. However, the size of the animal is crucial for all these in vivo techniques--being able to see through a mouse is cake compared to a human being (or horse, cow, elephant, whatever).
Sorry, but you, sir, are wrong about "URL," "VOIP," and "RIAA." I have rarely if ever heard people pronounce those words as acronyms, and for damn good reason. "Earl" is a noun already; "voyp" sounds really stupid, and doesn't reflect the "IP" origin of the word; "rhea" for RIAA, while certainly appropriate in its evocation of diarrhea, doesn't capture the second "A," unless you pronounce it "ree-AAH." "are-eye-double-A" would be a better choice. I also had to consult the interwebs to figure out who the hell uses "FIAT" as an abbreviation (the answer, for anyone besides Atario, is Python programmers: FInite element Automatic Tabulator).
You may think you're ahead of the curve, or some sort of trend-setter by treating these abbreviations as acronyms, but sometimes it just isn't meant to be. Ever heard someone try to pronounce, rather than spell, PCMCIA? Or NAACP? Maybe someday earl, voyp, and rhea will be common usage--then I'll have to eat my words. But in this argument, today, you sound like a snotty script kiddie who pronounces IRC as "irk."
All chemical and electrical engineers, at the very least, know what frequency space is. Not just the small subset of occupations you mentioned. Wrapping one's brain around the Laplace transform is trickier than grasping the Fourier transform, in my opinion. The Dirac delta function is counterintuitive, to say the least. And frequency space--that at least has some physical sense. But s-space? WTF? It is only used to solve tricky differential equations, then you transform back into the time domain. If there is a physical interpretation for s-space, someone please correct me.
So back to my point--my personal incredulity has nothing illogical about it. Three trillion years from now is so far away that it is asinine to make predictions about what will happen then. But nature is full of waves and cycles, from the microscale to the macroscale. So it makes way more sense, from a scientific, rational, empirical viewpoint that the universe would behave in some cyclical fashion than an infinite expansion--an idea, as I cited, which is mirrored in Hindu mythology / philosophy / whatever.
I have a hunch you said I was making a logical fallacy because of your personal beliefs about religion (confirmed by reading some of your other comments). I am a very non-religious person myself, and I consider most religious beliefs to be fallacious. But for every question with a single correct answer there are an infinite number of incorrect answers. If I were to assume no correct answer existed simply because the vast preponderance of answers are incorrect, that would be a logical fallacy. In other words, if you assume an idea is wrong simply because it appears in a religious text, you're just as closed-minded as someone who believes an idea is right simply because it appears in that text. Scriptures are never going to take the place of science for providing definitive answers, but they might provide inspiration and insight for some good research.
I think when photons collide with atoms they usually excite electrons, which then drop back to the ground state and release the energy as either lower-energy photons (photoluminescence) or as phonons (lattice vibrations), but I never really understood group theory and symmetry, so maybe sometimes photons do turn into mass upon collisions with atoms, under the right conditions.
As far as whether people should be trying to extrapolate into the really distant future--it's their time to spend as they see fit. But I think it would be better spent addressing some of the above questions (existence or not of gravitons, how to convert energy into mass).
Btw, I like the idea of currently unknown physics. Reminds me of Vonnegut's "Slapstick."
On the subject of misunderstandings about Hinduism, it bugs me that some people consider it to be a polytheistic philosophy. Not anymore so than most varieties of Christianity, with their Patris-Fílii-Spíritus Sancti trinity.
I'd be much more interesting if someone had a theory about what the universe looked like before the Big Bang, assuming that isn't a bunch of bullshit too.
Right now, Hindu creation mythology is looking less silly than theoretical astrophysics. I'll be waiting for Kalki to come destroy the universe and start a new cycle before I'll believe any speculation about what will happen in the way, way future, 150X as long away as the speculated age of our universe. That's like making predictions about the 3000th birthday of a 20 year old person.
I know you're being sarcastic, but we already have technology that turns matter into energy. It's called nuclear fission. The first generation products have been around for about 50 years.
Very good question. These are not just dyes--they're fluorescent dyes. They absorb a photon in a certain energy range, which puts and electron in an excited state. After a certain amount of time in that excited state (i.e., the "fluorescence lifetime") the electron drops back down to the ground state and emits a photon of lower energy (the difference in energy between absorbed and emitted photons is called the Stokes shift). Every time an electron jumps to that excited state, it can potentially react with an oxidant and destroy the fluorescence (this is known as "photobleaching." If you mix antioxidants with the dye solution you can decrease the rate of photobleaching--such an antioxidant solution is called an "antifade." There are other ways to reduce photobleaching, such as sticking certain chemical moieties onto the dye.
In short, the stability of the dye system really depends on the dye structure and the presence (or absence) of oxidizing molecules. There are plenty of fluorescent dyes used in lasers, but I don't know how long they last before bleaching. If the dye is in the right solvent (such as DMSO, perhaps) it might take a damn long time to bleach. But the point is that dye is cheap compared to refined silicon, and replacing bleached dye might be as simple as flushing out the old stuff and pouring in a new solution.
In my opinion there are only two reasonable long-term solutions to solar energy production: 1) Imitate photosynthesis using fluorescent dyes. 2) Let the plants do all the hard work of turning photons + water + carbon dioxide into sugar, then figure out how to imitate cellular respiration and turn sugar into energy (specifically, a separation of charge).
This site has tons of information about various fluorescent dyes, though it's geared towards use in molecular biology, not photovoltaics (unless you count the voltage-sensing dyes).
Whenever I hear someone talk about how awesome it is to have extra hours of daylight, I ask them why wouldn't it be better to just "recalibrate" the time zones so that "daylight savings time" is the new standard time, then just stop all this switching nonsense.
But time zones are another total pain in the ass, even if there's no switching back and forth. I recently found out the China has a single time zone, whereas the country would encompass about eight zones if they used our style of time zones. And have you seen the time zone map of the US? It makes no sense at all. Alabama is completely on central time, but if you go due north, Michigan is in . . . eastern time? WTF?
I personally advocate the abolition of time zones altogether. Let's all use Greenwich Mean Time, no time changes, and deal with it. Businesses and schools can just change their hours of operation, rather than messing with time itself. Sure, it would be weird to have sunrise at 6 pm and sunset at 6 am, but would it be any more complicated than the current system?
In other news--it is very likely that two people will have identical fingerprints. If by fingerprints we mean the part of the fingerprint that cannot even be distinguished as a whorl. That is, a couple of cells constituting a tiny fold of skin.