We already tap into a small fraction of the sun's power. We use most of what hits the earth in the form of plant production.
'Understanding these forces, and learning to harness them effectively certainly reduce the necessity of efficiency.'
I doubt it. If we're harnessing things like differential asteriodal momentum, comet momentum, large chunks of the sun's radiation, etc., I would submit that the eneergy requirements for such endeavors to be successful would have 'high efficiency' in them.
'In modern society, emphasis on efficiency is capitalism's response to rising costs of an energy supply that is not effectively scaling against our population or usage rates.'
For emphasis on efficiency at the consumer's point of view, you may be correct. Or not.
Consider that an efficiency gain in, say, an internal combustion engine can be directed toward one of two things: reducing fuel use per unit power, or increasing power generated per unit fuel use (ie: kick up the MPG or the HP). Sure, the direction is presently towards using less fuel, ie: hybrids, but generally the purpose for all efficiency gains in engineering is to build a better product, whether that means more bang for the buck, or less buck for the bang.
"No reason that solar power cannot [drive energy production beyond our ability to consume] in the intermediate term (100 years)."
Riiight. I think you're completely missing something: Solar is expensive to build, and presently only gets between 6% (for the cheap morphous silicon type) to 40% (for the ridiculously expensive multijunction indium selenide cells) efficiency. That means to meet this planet's energy needs, you'd have to cover from 1/6th to more than *all* of the world's surface in solar panels, depending on the efficiency of the panels used. Once again, efficiency becomes an important issue.
Basically, stop dismissing efficiency as more or less the most important material factor in engineering behind dimensional specification and physical properties, and I'll stop talking.
You're not imagining it. 'course TFAuthor seems to misunderstand the difference between signal compression and data compression.
Signal compression is a simple matter; basically you run this over each data sample: if (abs(signal[i])<threshold) signal[i]=sgn(signal[i])*(threshold+(abs(signal[i] )-threshhold)*factor); (where 0<factor<1)
Then, you run a normalization reoutine over the whole data set. When run over PCM data, it's a good way to get quieter portions of a track up into the audible level. When run over ADPCM data, it's a good way to amplify small sounds during a particularly loud portion of a song.
Then there's data compression - when working with audio, it's usually a psychoacoustically filtered DCT. Basically, you break music into a spectrum, select out the bands by their psychoacoustic weight versus bitrate, and store the analysis as a data file - which is then reconstructed in the reverse direction for playback.
One has the potential for making *more* detail in a track audible, the other selects out the nigh-inaudible portions of the track.
And really, other than the track being louder, only self-declared 'audiophiles' can tell the difference at high-bitrates.
Fusion, by necessity, has to be 'hot', hot in this case meaning in the range of in the range of 0.01 - 0.1 MeVs/AMU. That's a LOT of juice. For each collision of, for example 3He with another, you get 26.2MeV (per 6 AMU).
Now, yes, that means, ideally you get out about 450x as much energy as you put in... but wait!
Keep in mind that the energy you dump into a fusion reactor goes mostly to waste - it's primarily used to keep the gas atoms close enough to one another to react. In a star, we're given a pass, as gravity does the job for us. In reactors, though, the energy to redirect the particles (via magnetic or laser pincers) comes from somewhere, and must be accounted for.
Meanwhile, you then have to worry about heat losses due to containment, radiation, heat transfer efficiency, etc. All in all, you've lost more than you've gained.
Unless we figure out how to generate (and shield from) our own gravity, I don't think fusion will be a viable energy source.
Not to mention that 3He is ridiculously rare. We'd have to mine the moon to get it. And it's not sufficiently renewable; the sun replenishes it at a rate lower than we'd need to consume it.
I'm holding out for Thorium tetra-flouride liquid-cycle reactors. Those are at least theoretically feasible in non-exotic environments, and have had some prototypes built that, you know, produce more energy than they take in. The only major stumbling blocks are corrosion issues, and they're likely to be sussed within the decade.
Benefits? Cleaner mining than uranium, cleaner output than Light Water reactors (no transuranics), non-fissile fuel (needs a small 233U charge to get it going) for safe handling, continuous fuel processing (They burn ALL their fuel; light-water reactors leave about 20% unspent 235U).
Meanwhile, other than solar and its derivatives (wood, ethanol, biodiesel), energy resources are always finite in total; there's a limited amount of thorium in the world, for example). Even 'renewable' resources have their limits (you can only put up so much solar).
In other words, ENERGY EFFICIENCY IS ALWAYS AN ISSUE. Period. If you're not using it, it's floating out of the atmosphere as heat radiation, never to be useful to anyone.
Yeah. I was thinking as I read this - if they tax e-mail, e-mail will go away in favor of a new technology that simply fails to call itself e-mail.
I'm working on a project management suite that can replace e-mail in its entirety, as well as provide needed organization to the e-mail concept. I wonder if this is now an opportune time to finish it up? The opportune time to release it, by the by, would be *after* any law of this nature is passed.
"30 percent indicated they valued careers that afforded them opportunities to perfect skills in technical areas, others said they wanted careers with managerial opportunities"
Which is why they don't work in IT. You don't get to 'perfect your skills' without freelancing, and you *don't* go into IT for managerial opportunities - at least, you don't tell anyone that; the managers get a little insecure...
"Hydrogen is a possiblity to solve the mobility problem, not the net amount of available energy problem. No? Am I missing something?"
That's the problem with a hydrogen-based economy. It solves one problem (the energy mobility issue) only to make the other (energy shortage) worse.
Not to mention that this aluminum solution requires you to take your spent fuel (A slurry of water and Al2O3/gallium dust) to the refueling station so that it can be reformed.
Batteries, by the way, get 66%-99% non-carnot efficiency, and electric motors get about 75%-90%. Individually, a battery can't provide the power needed to get good acceleration out of a motor, but switchable arrays of small batteries can (just look at the Tesla Roadster). Add regenerative breaking, and you can boost even that a bit.
Well, lithium-based batteries generally reach a storage efficiency of 66-99%, and that's real, not carnot. No hydrogen-burning device comes even close to that.
Ultracapacitors tout about 90% efficiency, but have a low power-to-mass ratio.
Add to that, commercially available motors reach about 75%-90% efficiencies (for a worst-to-best case of 49.5%-89.1% efficient), I see no issue with a battery-to-motor system, so far as efficiency goes.
So, with a nicely-sized array of low-energy batteries (say, 256 AA equivalents) in a swithable power arrangement (so that you can go all-parallel, half-parallel, all-serial, and everything in between), you could provide both the power and energy requirements for a car. Add regenerative breaking (at about 45% efficiency on average), and you can boost the efficiency of a car to almost 75%-95%.
The problem is then one of how to provide the electricity to the car. Refueling would ideally take a few minutes, but most people don't have a circuit in their house that could provide the needed 200-400 kW of power. But then, the idea is that a refuleing station could.
You're then passing the energy costs to your local power plants, which is why I mentioned thorium above. The plants can be smaller, produce no transuranic (Bad) waste (instead, they produce industrially useful suburanic heavy elements), don't have a meltdown scenereo (they operate safely at critical mass, and shut down if significantly below it), can be built into smaller complexes (your normal nuclear plant could house roughly four throium reactors of equal capacity), their fuel isn't radioactive, and can be mined using less resources than uranium.
The problem is that there's a corrosion issue with throium tetraflouride fluid-cycle reactors presently, and I don't know why the DoE isn't attempting to research it away.
Did you miss the part where you have to pressurize and heat the water? That's dumping energy into it. Even if it makes 100% carnot, after the resulting Hydrogen, you're still losing energy in the process.
Of course, it's a high-efficiency version of a light-water nuclear reactor in the end. You still need uranium to get it going, and need to find a way to dispose of the transuranic spent fuel. Both of these are as-yet unsolved problems.
Not to mention the cost of replacing existing reactors with ones that have only minor improvements. I maintain that if you're going to do that, the environmental benefits and efficiency of thorium is a better option. You can disagree, but that's how I see it.
Sheeit. I suppose you'd prefer I drive a Fit. There's only enough room in a Fit to hold a Llama. Won't do for when I've got to cart a drumset and amps around.
Incorrect. Extracting Aluminum from Al2O3 takes a LOT of heat - ie: energy. You're, essentially, calling for the use of even more energy than you extract from the resulting hydrogen.
Hint: Water is a component of all hydrocarbon ash. You can't extract energy from it. You can only dump energy into it to make it hydrogen, and re-extract it.
In terser words: A hydrogen economy is a waste of time, far as I've seen. That is, I havent seen any process for the mass production and transport of hydrogen that gets better efficiency than your standard ICE.
Alternatives: raw solar (too inefficient at the time of this posting), ethanol (via DEFC, *not* ICE; still not fully developed), thorium nuclear (some engineering problems to be overcome, but most promising), thermal conversion (more a waste management solution than an energy-infrastructure solution).
I'm looking forward to thorium fission. I'm not looking forward to a hydrogen economy.
You've missed the point: it's practical to state hard drive sizes in powers of two, whereas it's imparactical to state them in powers of ten. This is because every piece of software since its inception (except, maybe the ones that the HD industry uses) specifies 1024 as the step for data prefixes, every user and program *expects* a kilobyte to mean 1024 bytes.
As a result, while 'kilobyte' may mean 1000 bytes to the HD industry, most users feel gyped when they bring it home to find a terabyte is only 0.9T.
Nothing. But the point is that the term 'Megabyte' when dealing with data - to computers and users, whether by the OS's definition or the users' deifnition - means 1024*1024 bytes. Using the SI prefixes is impractical at best and deceptive advertising at worst.
Sure, they're *technically* correct, but they're not oblivious to the fact that what they call a megabyte is less space than what everyone else calls a megabyte. That means someone in marketing must have actively *decided* they can get away with inflating their numbers in this way.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, if it's pissing lawyers off, then I'm using it to select my lawyer, if I ever have need of one.
True that.
But why did I read TFT as 'The Dangers of a Patent War on Christ'?
I mean, I'm not even Christian. Still, PP's comment still applies.
We already tap into a small fraction of the sun's power. We use most of what hits the earth in the form of plant production.
'Understanding these forces, and learning to harness them effectively certainly reduce the necessity of efficiency.'
I doubt it. If we're harnessing things like differential asteriodal momentum, comet momentum, large chunks of the sun's radiation, etc., I would submit that the eneergy requirements for such endeavors to be successful would have 'high efficiency' in them.
'In modern society, emphasis on efficiency is capitalism's response to rising costs of an energy supply that is not effectively scaling against our population or usage rates.'
For emphasis on efficiency at the consumer's point of view, you may be correct. Or not.
Consider that an efficiency gain in, say, an internal combustion engine can be directed toward one of two things: reducing fuel use per unit power, or increasing power generated per unit fuel use (ie: kick up the MPG or the HP). Sure, the direction is presently towards using less fuel, ie: hybrids, but generally the purpose for all efficiency gains in engineering is to build a better product, whether that means more bang for the buck, or less buck for the bang.
"No reason that solar power cannot [drive energy production beyond our ability to consume] in the intermediate term (100 years)."
Riiight. I think you're completely missing something: Solar is expensive to build, and presently only gets between 6% (for the cheap morphous silicon type) to 40% (for the ridiculously expensive multijunction indium selenide cells) efficiency. That means to meet this planet's energy needs, you'd have to cover from 1/6th to more than *all* of the world's surface in solar panels, depending on the efficiency of the panels used. Once again, efficiency becomes an important issue.
Basically, stop dismissing efficiency as more or less the most important material factor in engineering behind dimensional specification and physical properties, and I'll stop talking.
You're not imagining it. 'course TFAuthor seems to misunderstand the difference between signal compression and data compression.
] )-threshhold)*factor); (where 0<factor<1)
Signal compression is a simple matter; basically you run this over each data sample:
if (abs(signal[i])<threshold) signal[i]=sgn(signal[i])*(threshold+(abs(signal[i
Then, you run a normalization reoutine over the whole data set. When run over PCM data, it's a good way to get quieter portions of a track up into the audible level. When run over ADPCM data, it's a good way to amplify small sounds during a particularly loud portion of a song.
Then there's data compression - when working with audio, it's usually a psychoacoustically filtered DCT. Basically, you break music into a spectrum, select out the bands by their psychoacoustic weight versus bitrate, and store the analysis as a data file - which is then reconstructed in the reverse direction for playback.
One has the potential for making *more* detail in a track audible, the other selects out the nigh-inaudible portions of the track.
And really, other than the track being louder, only self-declared 'audiophiles' can tell the difference at high-bitrates.
*pictures the fifth puppeteer planet*
Ahhh, ringworld. How long has it been before I could use you as a reference in a subject-appropriate way?
Helium-3 reactors? You're joking, right?
Ok, let me break down the fusion problem for you:
Fusion, by necessity, has to be 'hot', hot in this case meaning in the range of in the range of 0.01 - 0.1 MeVs/AMU. That's a LOT of juice. For each collision of, for example 3He with another, you get 26.2MeV (per 6 AMU).
Now, yes, that means, ideally you get out about 450x as much energy as you put in... but wait!
Keep in mind that the energy you dump into a fusion reactor goes mostly to waste - it's primarily used to keep the gas atoms close enough to one another to react. In a star, we're given a pass, as gravity does the job for us. In reactors, though, the energy to redirect the particles (via magnetic or laser pincers) comes from somewhere, and must be accounted for.
Meanwhile, you then have to worry about heat losses due to containment, radiation, heat transfer efficiency, etc. All in all, you've lost more than you've gained.
Unless we figure out how to generate (and shield from) our own gravity, I don't think fusion will be a viable energy source.
Not to mention that 3He is ridiculously rare. We'd have to mine the moon to get it. And it's not sufficiently renewable; the sun replenishes it at a rate lower than we'd need to consume it.
I'm holding out for Thorium tetra-flouride liquid-cycle reactors. Those are at least theoretically feasible in non-exotic environments, and have had some prototypes built that, you know, produce more energy than they take in. The only major stumbling blocks are corrosion issues, and they're likely to be sussed within the decade.
Benefits? Cleaner mining than uranium, cleaner output than Light Water reactors (no transuranics), non-fissile fuel (needs a small 233U charge to get it going) for safe handling, continuous fuel processing (They burn ALL their fuel; light-water reactors leave about 20% unspent 235U).
Meanwhile, other than solar and its derivatives (wood, ethanol, biodiesel), energy resources are always finite in total; there's a limited amount of thorium in the world, for example). Even 'renewable' resources have their limits (you can only put up so much solar).
In other words, ENERGY EFFICIENCY IS ALWAYS AN ISSUE. Period. If you're not using it, it's floating out of the atmosphere as heat radiation, never to be useful to anyone.
Seriously.
I mean, Amazon's 1-click patent should have failed on obviousness at the very least.
That's kinda a nightmare use for them.
On the other side of the futurist spectrum, I'm kinda looking forward to finding random fun easter eggs on my packaging.
It's not low frequency (10MHz), as for efficiency:
"Measurements showed that the setup could transfer energy with 40% efficiently across the gap."
Yeahhh... wires do 100%. Fuck that.
-.O
Wow, that almost broke my brain with the crazy.
No, seriously. I'm pretty sure that page was meant as an attempt to offend EVERY argument meme on every forum on the internet.
It's nifty.
Yeah. I was thinking as I read this - if they tax e-mail, e-mail will go away in favor of a new technology that simply fails to call itself e-mail.
I'm working on a project management suite that can replace e-mail in its entirety, as well as provide needed organization to the e-mail concept. I wonder if this is now an opportune time to finish it up? The opportune time to release it, by the by, would be *after* any law of this nature is passed.
"30 percent indicated they valued careers that afforded them opportunities to perfect skills in technical areas, others said they wanted careers with managerial opportunities"
Which is why they don't work in IT. You don't get to 'perfect your skills' without freelancing, and you *don't* go into IT for managerial opportunities - at least, you don't tell anyone that; the managers get a little insecure...
I smell sarcasm here, but it has to be said: Kevin Ham is scum.
"Your body can get, at most, something like 25% of the energy out of the food you eat."
I meant to add 'in the form of physical work'.
Your body can get, at most, something like 25% of the energy out of the food you eat. At body temperature vs. room temperature, carnot is about 5%.
Congratulations. You've got Carnot in spades. Meanwhile, you're still only about as efficient as an internal combustion engine.
"Hydrogen is a possiblity to solve the mobility problem, not the net amount of available energy problem. No? Am I missing something?"
That's the problem with a hydrogen-based economy. It solves one problem (the energy mobility issue) only to make the other (energy shortage) worse.
Not to mention that this aluminum solution requires you to take your spent fuel (A slurry of water and Al2O3/gallium dust) to the refueling station so that it can be reformed.
Batteries, by the way, get 66%-99% non-carnot efficiency, and electric motors get about 75%-90%. Individually, a battery can't provide the power needed to get good acceleration out of a motor, but switchable arrays of small batteries can (just look at the Tesla Roadster). Add regenerative breaking, and you can boost even that a bit.
Well, lithium-based batteries generally reach a storage efficiency of 66-99%, and that's real, not carnot. No hydrogen-burning device comes even close to that.
Ultracapacitors tout about 90% efficiency, but have a low power-to-mass ratio.
Add to that, commercially available motors reach about 75%-90% efficiencies (for a worst-to-best case of 49.5%-89.1% efficient), I see no issue with a battery-to-motor system, so far as efficiency goes.
So, with a nicely-sized array of low-energy batteries (say, 256 AA equivalents) in a swithable power arrangement (so that you can go all-parallel, half-parallel, all-serial, and everything in between), you could provide both the power and energy requirements for a car. Add regenerative breaking (at about 45% efficiency on average), and you can boost the efficiency of a car to almost 75%-95%.
The problem is then one of how to provide the electricity to the car. Refueling would ideally take a few minutes, but most people don't have a circuit in their house that could provide the needed 200-400 kW of power. But then, the idea is that a refuleing station could.
You're then passing the energy costs to your local power plants, which is why I mentioned thorium above. The plants can be smaller, produce no transuranic (Bad) waste (instead, they produce industrially useful suburanic heavy elements), don't have a meltdown scenereo (they operate safely at critical mass, and shut down if significantly below it), can be built into smaller complexes (your normal nuclear plant could house roughly four throium reactors of equal capacity), their fuel isn't radioactive, and can be mined using less resources than uranium.
The problem is that there's a corrosion issue with throium tetraflouride fluid-cycle reactors presently, and I don't know why the DoE isn't attempting to research it away.
*blink*
Did you miss the part where you have to pressurize and heat the water? That's dumping energy into it. Even if it makes 100% carnot, after the resulting Hydrogen, you're still losing energy in the process.
Of course, it's a high-efficiency version of a light-water nuclear reactor in the end. You still need uranium to get it going, and need to find a way to dispose of the transuranic spent fuel. Both of these are as-yet unsolved problems.
Not to mention the cost of replacing existing reactors with ones that have only minor improvements. I maintain that if you're going to do that, the environmental benefits and efficiency of thorium is a better option. You can disagree, but that's how I see it.
A prius is big?
Sheeit. I suppose you'd prefer I drive a Fit. There's only enough room in a Fit to hold a Llama. Won't do for when I've got to cart a drumset and amps around.
Dunno. Do you have some elitism about being environmentally conscious?
My hybrid gets about 60MPG in practical conditions. That's about 7 miles per pound of gasoline.
By the way, even your haughtily most efficient car only gets about 30% of the energy out of its petrol. Carnot is much, much holier than thou.
Incorrect. Extracting Aluminum from Al2O3 takes a LOT of heat - ie: energy. You're, essentially, calling for the use of even more energy than you extract from the resulting hydrogen.
Hint: Water is a component of all hydrocarbon ash. You can't extract energy from it. You can only dump energy into it to make it hydrogen, and re-extract it.
In terser words: A hydrogen economy is a waste of time, far as I've seen. That is, I havent seen any process for the mass production and transport of hydrogen that gets better efficiency than your standard ICE.
Alternatives: raw solar (too inefficient at the time of this posting), ethanol (via DEFC, *not* ICE; still not fully developed), thorium nuclear (some engineering problems to be overcome, but most promising), thermal conversion (more a waste management solution than an energy-infrastructure solution).
I'm looking forward to thorium fission. I'm not looking forward to a hydrogen economy.
Dude lives in Romania.
Just sayin.
Um.
You realize that Google is not selling thumbnails, right?
You've missed the point: it's practical to state hard drive sizes in powers of two, whereas it's imparactical to state them in powers of ten. This is because every piece of software since its inception (except, maybe the ones that the HD industry uses) specifies 1024 as the step for data prefixes, every user and program *expects* a kilobyte to mean 1024 bytes.
As a result, while 'kilobyte' may mean 1000 bytes to the HD industry, most users feel gyped when they bring it home to find a terabyte is only 0.9T.
Nothing. But the point is that the term 'Megabyte' when dealing with data - to computers and users, whether by the OS's definition or the users' deifnition - means 1024*1024 bytes. Using the SI prefixes is impractical at best and deceptive advertising at worst.
Sure, they're *technically* correct, but they're not oblivious to the fact that what they call a megabyte is less space than what everyone else calls a megabyte. That means someone in marketing must have actively *decided* they can get away with inflating their numbers in this way.