As a suburban inhabitant who's used to small mobile phones it's natural for you to assume that satellite phone size is a major issue, but for people who would regularly require satellite phones they only need to have a better cost:performance* ratio than remote communication alternatives, such as HF radio.
*performance in this context would be a subjective measure which includes factors such as reliability, size, weight etc.
Just for the record, this is the simplest explanation for the difference between climate and weather I can think of: weather is saying that this next dice roll will be a five. Climate is saying that if you roll the dice many times about 1/6th of the results will be a five.
I wonder, would we be better off building it on the side of the Moon facing us as that we we'd still be able to communicate with it via a direct radio link. What advantages would building one on the far side have? A telescope's view of the sky would be the same: away from the Sun. Hmm, (thinking while typing here) but on the near side it would be looking towards Earth. I wonder if that would be a big deal from a light pollution perspective?
To give a bit more perspective: the aluminium smelter at Tomago, just North of Newcastle, Australia, uses 900MW. Together with the smelter at Kurri Kurri (Just West of Newcastle, ~350MW) they use ~14% of all base load capacity in NSW. So next time you're complaining about the LHC just remember that the aluminium in that can of soda came at the energy cost of ~54MJ/kg.
True, but "Significant obstruction to airflow due to operation in an abusive environment" should be. Why are Apple flying the health hazard flag? Surely it's much easier just to say that the increased dust buildup inside a machine causes failure due to overheating. Would they honour the warranty of a machine which has been operated in a factory full of sawdust? How about one which was operated in a laboratory and has corroded due to exposure to acid vapours?
However, a 42" plasma can uses almost twice a CRT. Eg a Panasonic TH-42PX60U is spec'ed at 390W. I'm guessing that people are annoyed by this legislation because it doesn't discriminate between LCDs and plasmas?
I didn't RTFA, but from the summary it would seem that each client has its own method for throttling. What they want to to is build a throttling algorithm into the BT protocol, hence standardizing the procedure. I guess this would make client coding easier, as the throttling would be achieved with a call to a BT library rather than a client coder having to write/find throttling code themselves.
I think you're under-estimating just how useful an electric car with a ~350km range would be.
The only trip such a car wouldn't be able to do is a ~>300km trip which didn't include an ~8hr break at the end. Now seriously, how often do most people drive like that?
In my home town of Newcastle, AU (world's biggest coal exporter, yay) most people drive ~20-30mins to work. Basically you can easily cross the town in 30mins during peak hour, I ride to Raymond Terrace which is 38km (50mins) from home.
Now, the motorbike I ride has a range of ~350km before it hits the reserve tank and hence needs re-filling about once a week. However every day it spends 6.5hrs sitting in the car park at a school and ~14hrs sitting in the garage at home. With that sort of charge time available conventional sockets (although not the grid, for wide-scale deployment) would be able to easily charge a Tesla Roadster. Add to that a Vectrix electric motor scooter would suit my commute (which is long by local standards) as it has a 100km range, although charging at work would be needed.
Anyway, that was all just a long way of re-iterating "yes, this type of car doesn't suit all trips, but it does suit the bulk of the driving time done by the bulk of people". Only with electric cars you have the convenience of being able to refuel at home instead of the of having to go to travel to a special refueling station. See? Bias against electric or petrol cars can exist, it's just a matter of perspective.
I've never studied social networking, but there's a chance that the viral model is still useful mathematically even though it's causal relationship is flawed. For example in semiconductor physics it is often useful to model electron holes as positive charge carriers even though only electrons are actually moving. Basically the idea I'm trying to put forward is that if a model has limits (and every physical model does) it can still be useful if these limits are well understood.
True, but in this context the word "unlimited" is being used to mean "you can't wear it out in 5 years". It's vaguely similar to "unlimited" Internet: The ISP may not slow you down at a set data limit, but you still can't pull more than ~300GB through a 1Mb connection per month.
But yeah, I don't like how marketing departments use the word unlimited either.
This finding also supports earlier research which showed the area of the brain associated with pain lighting up due to social rejection. There's a PDF from 2007 which describes the earlier research. It was also reported on the Australian Science show Catalyst.
People never seem to bring up the type of source either. Any realistic constant voltage source can only supply a limited amount of current. So an 11kV static discharge is limited to a harmless current while an 11kV switchboard is not.
On that note I quite like the 11kV rescue regulations an EE told me once. If somebody is getting electrocuted in an 11kV room you: 1) You let them die. 2) Turn off the power. 3) Sweep up the pieces.
Refrigeration comes to mind too, although it's just an idea without any evidence to back it up. Transport also allows more efficient agriculture as a crop need only be grown where it grows best. But yeah, machinery would be the big one. How many man-hours would it take to harvest 500 acres of wheat using basic hand tools? I'd guess that it only takes a few days at most with a modern harvester and 1 driver.
Australia has nice financial incentives for solar panels. Up until recently there were enough rebates that some companies would give you a grid connected 1kW PV system for free. Others would charge up to $1000 for labour, but $1/W isn't anything to sneeze at. The federal government has since stopped the rebates (a month earlier than they said they would, much to the dismay of the solar industry).
The NSW government did recently introduce their solar feed-in tariff of 60c/kWh, guaranteed for 20 years. The next highest is Queensland at ~40c I *think*. Essentially the government doesn't spend any money doing this, they just tell the utility companies how to credit people's bills, then expect them to charge the costs back to the rest of the users. It was estimated to increase the average household's bill (~24-30kWh/day) by $6-$9/year, depending on solar uptake.
If anybody is interested the two inventors of this technology where recently on the ABC's show "New Inventors". The episode they were in is here (mp4 format). Or you can probably find the clip which has only their invention here.
Clean air, clean water, clean land. These are things no one is going to argue with.
Unless cleaning up your act will cost you a lot of money, or you make a lot of money selling pollutants like oil.
At least we have the history of CFCs to look back on as an example of how to clean up effectively. It's such a shame that CO2 is a) harder to avoid producing and b) more difficult to blame than CFCs were.
You may want to check out some of the work done by OpenStreetMap, especially the Cycle Map layer. The OSM data can be loaded onto a Garmin GPS.
From there you can add topographic layers from other sources. No doubt there's somebody who's made Garmin img files for the US based on SRTM and it's only a matter of time before this higher resolution data is incorporated. I'm Australian so I only know of the Australian sources off hand.
Also, as is the nature of OSM, if you find a trail which isn't marked you're welcome to draw it in and help out other users of the maps.
Hmm, fair enough. In AU we've had a string of companies who give away CFLs in exchange for carbon credits (or something like that, I don't follow the politics) and thankfully they tend to give away good quality globes. The ones we got were Mirabella (an Australian owned company) and after ~2 years none have blown yet. Oh, with the exception of one which is mounted under cover, but outdoors, which just glows red near the edges. We do live ~100m from the ocean though, so there's no surprises there:p.
Out of interest, is this due to limitations in the tube or the controller electronics? In Australia a 23W Philips Tornado CFL retails for ~AU$7.50. I'd quite happily pay $10 for one that has an over-engineered controller that would allow it to power cycle without a significant reduction in lifespan. If the tube is what wears out faster then it may be more difficult to work around though.
Saying that though, in the ~4 years since we started seriously using CFLs we're yet to see one die. We have replaced a few of the older ones though because their light output was undesirable (both in quality and quantity).
It's probably more accurate to compare burying nuclear waste to burying CO2. Both are a waste pollutant from their respective power plants and both have the potential to kill lots of people if they "escaped uncontrollably". The main difference is that we have the technology to bury nuclear waste right now, while CO2 sequestration is still a few years off.
To expand on this: The movement would propagate along the stick due to electron forces between atoms. The force carrier for electromagnetic interactions is the photon, which only travels at the speed of light.
That's nuts. There's a town like that in Australia called Coober Pedy where the average max temp over Summer is ~37C and the highest recorded this year was ~45C. The town only exists because of opals in the region, as such all houses are built underground. The saying goes that the opals you dig up while building your house tend to more than pay for construction.
One then has to ask, why are population centers built in such environments? I wonder how expensive energy has to become before people will cut their losses and say "ok, building a city there was a mistake" and abandon the area.
Is American power consumption really *that* high? I'll admit that the house I live in is probably a low consumer (gas hot water and stove, A/C is never used, a wood burning fireplace and we almost never use a clothes dryer) and we come in at about 21kWh/day, which is 7560 kWh/year. So 2 of those Montana model turbines would do fine in what seems to be a "low wind" area.
Now, there's no way we'd fit 2 5m turbines on our property (~700m^2, I *think*) and get away with it.
Anyway, do US homes, on average, actually use ~40 kWh/day on climate control? It's only an average load of 1.75kW, but it means that you'd need to be running a 2.4kW air conditioner 16hrs a day. (2.4kW = 240V*10A was chosen because it's the max load that can be drawn from a single AU power outlet).
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As a suburban inhabitant who's used to small mobile phones it's natural for you to assume that satellite phone size is a major issue, but for people who would regularly require satellite phones they only need to have a better cost:performance* ratio than remote communication alternatives, such as HF radio.
*performance in this context would be a subjective measure which includes factors such as reliability, size, weight etc.
Just for the record, this is the simplest explanation for the difference between climate and weather I can think of: weather is saying that this next dice roll will be a five. Climate is saying that if you roll the dice many times about 1/6th of the results will be a five.
I wonder, would we be better off building it on the side of the Moon facing us as that we we'd still be able to communicate with it via a direct radio link. What advantages would building one on the far side have? A telescope's view of the sky would be the same: away from the Sun. Hmm, (thinking while typing here) but on the near side it would be looking towards Earth. I wonder if that would be a big deal from a light pollution perspective?
To give a bit more perspective: the aluminium smelter at Tomago, just North of Newcastle, Australia, uses 900MW. Together with the smelter at Kurri Kurri (Just West of Newcastle, ~350MW) they use ~14% of all base load capacity in NSW. So next time you're complaining about the LHC just remember that the aluminium in that can of soda came at the energy cost of ~54MJ/kg.
True, but "Significant obstruction to airflow due to operation in an abusive environment" should be. Why are Apple flying the health hazard flag? Surely it's much easier just to say that the increased dust buildup inside a machine causes failure due to overheating. Would they honour the warranty of a machine which has been operated in a factory full of sawdust? How about one which was operated in a laboratory and has corroded due to exposure to acid vapours?
However, a 42" plasma can uses almost twice a CRT. Eg a Panasonic TH-42PX60U is spec'ed at 390W. I'm guessing that people are annoyed by this legislation because it doesn't discriminate between LCDs and plasmas?
I didn't RTFA, but from the summary it would seem that each client has its own method for throttling. What they want to to is build a throttling algorithm into the BT protocol, hence standardizing the procedure. I guess this would make client coding easier, as the throttling would be achieved with a call to a BT library rather than a client coder having to write/find throttling code themselves.
I think you're under-estimating just how useful an electric car with a ~350km range would be.
The only trip such a car wouldn't be able to do is a ~>300km trip which didn't include an ~8hr break at the end. Now seriously, how often do most people drive like that?
In my home town of Newcastle, AU (world's biggest coal exporter, yay) most people drive ~20-30mins to work. Basically you can easily cross the town in 30mins during peak hour, I ride to Raymond Terrace which is 38km (50mins) from home.
Now, the motorbike I ride has a range of ~350km before it hits the reserve tank and hence needs re-filling about once a week. However every day it spends 6.5hrs sitting in the car park at a school and ~14hrs sitting in the garage at home. With that sort of charge time available conventional sockets (although not the grid, for wide-scale deployment) would be able to easily charge a Tesla Roadster. Add to that a Vectrix electric motor scooter would suit my commute (which is long by local standards) as it has a 100km range, although charging at work would be needed.
Anyway, that was all just a long way of re-iterating "yes, this type of car doesn't suit all trips, but it does suit the bulk of the driving time done by the bulk of people". Only with electric cars you have the convenience of being able to refuel at home instead of the of having to go to travel to a special refueling station. See? Bias against electric or petrol cars can exist, it's just a matter of perspective.
I've never studied social networking, but there's a chance that the viral model is still useful mathematically even though it's causal relationship is flawed. For example in semiconductor physics it is often useful to model electron holes as positive charge carriers even though only electrons are actually moving. Basically the idea I'm trying to put forward is that if a model has limits (and every physical model does) it can still be useful if these limits are well understood.
True, but in this context the word "unlimited" is being used to mean "you can't wear it out in 5 years". It's vaguely similar to "unlimited" Internet: The ISP may not slow you down at a set data limit, but you still can't pull more than ~300GB through a 1Mb connection per month.
But yeah, I don't like how marketing departments use the word unlimited either.
This finding also supports earlier research which showed the area of the brain associated with pain lighting up due to social rejection. There's a PDF from 2007 which describes the earlier research. It was also reported on the Australian Science show Catalyst.
People never seem to bring up the type of source either. Any realistic constant voltage source can only supply a limited amount of current. So an 11kV static discharge is limited to a harmless current while an 11kV switchboard is not.
On that note I quite like the 11kV rescue regulations an EE told me once. If somebody is getting electrocuted in an 11kV room you: 1) You let them die. 2) Turn off the power. 3) Sweep up the pieces.
Refrigeration comes to mind too, although it's just an idea without any evidence to back it up. Transport also allows more efficient agriculture as a crop need only be grown where it grows best. But yeah, machinery would be the big one. How many man-hours would it take to harvest 500 acres of wheat using basic hand tools? I'd guess that it only takes a few days at most with a modern harvester and 1 driver.
Australia has nice financial incentives for solar panels. Up until recently there were enough rebates that some companies would give you a grid connected 1kW PV system for free. Others would charge up to $1000 for labour, but $1/W isn't anything to sneeze at. The federal government has since stopped the rebates (a month earlier than they said they would, much to the dismay of the solar industry).
The NSW government did recently introduce their solar feed-in tariff of 60c/kWh, guaranteed for 20 years. The next highest is Queensland at ~40c I *think*. Essentially the government doesn't spend any money doing this, they just tell the utility companies how to credit people's bills, then expect them to charge the costs back to the rest of the users. It was estimated to increase the average household's bill (~24-30kWh/day) by $6-$9/year, depending on solar uptake.
If anybody is interested the two inventors of this technology where recently on the ABC's show "New Inventors". The episode they were in is here (mp4 format). Or you can probably find the clip which has only their invention here.
Indeed. In the words of Stalin: "Death solves all problems - No man, no problem."
Clean air, clean water, clean land. These are things no one is going to argue with.
Unless cleaning up your act will cost you a lot of money, or you make a lot of money selling pollutants like oil.
At least we have the history of CFCs to look back on as an example of how to clean up effectively. It's such a shame that CO2 is a) harder to avoid producing and b) more difficult to blame than CFCs were.
You may want to check out some of the work done by OpenStreetMap, especially the Cycle Map layer. The OSM data can be loaded onto a Garmin GPS.
From there you can add topographic layers from other sources. No doubt there's somebody who's made Garmin img files for the US based on SRTM and it's only a matter of time before this higher resolution data is incorporated. I'm Australian so I only know of the Australian sources off hand.
Also, as is the nature of OSM, if you find a trail which isn't marked you're welcome to draw it in and help out other users of the maps.
Ah ok. Thanks for that :).
Hmm, fair enough. In AU we've had a string of companies who give away CFLs in exchange for carbon credits (or something like that, I don't follow the politics) and thankfully they tend to give away good quality globes. The ones we got were Mirabella (an Australian owned company) and after ~2 years none have blown yet. Oh, with the exception of one which is mounted under cover, but outdoors, which just glows red near the edges. We do live ~100m from the ocean though, so there's no surprises there :p.
Out of interest, is this due to limitations in the tube or the controller electronics? In Australia a 23W Philips Tornado CFL retails for ~AU$7.50. I'd quite happily pay $10 for one that has an over-engineered controller that would allow it to power cycle without a significant reduction in lifespan. If the tube is what wears out faster then it may be more difficult to work around though.
Saying that though, in the ~4 years since we started seriously using CFLs we're yet to see one die. We have replaced a few of the older ones though because their light output was undesirable (both in quality and quantity).
It's probably more accurate to compare burying nuclear waste to burying CO2. Both are a waste pollutant from their respective power plants and both have the potential to kill lots of people if they "escaped uncontrollably". The main difference is that we have the technology to bury nuclear waste right now, while CO2 sequestration is still a few years off.
To expand on this: The movement would propagate along the stick due to electron forces between atoms. The force carrier for electromagnetic interactions is the photon, which only travels at the speed of light.
That's nuts. There's a town like that in Australia called Coober Pedy where the average max temp over Summer is ~37C and the highest recorded this year was ~45C. The town only exists because of opals in the region, as such all houses are built underground. The saying goes that the opals you dig up while building your house tend to more than pay for construction.
One then has to ask, why are population centers built in such environments? I wonder how expensive energy has to become before people will cut their losses and say "ok, building a city there was a mistake" and abandon the area.
Is American power consumption really *that* high? I'll admit that the house I live in is probably a low consumer (gas hot water and stove, A/C is never used, a wood burning fireplace and we almost never use a clothes dryer) and we come in at about 21kWh/day, which is 7560 kWh/year. So 2 of those Montana model turbines would do fine in what seems to be a "low wind" area.
Now, there's no way we'd fit 2 5m turbines on our property (~700m^2, I *think*) and get away with it.
Anyway, do US homes, on average, actually use ~40 kWh/day on climate control? It's only an average load of 1.75kW, but it means that you'd need to be running a 2.4kW air conditioner 16hrs a day. (2.4kW = 240V*10A was chosen because it's the max load that can be drawn from a single AU power outlet).