You will do better to use the heat directly in the house. Turbines are best for waste heat reclamation: they burn fuel to generate power, producing 350-400F exhaust used to support heating. Internal combustion engines function quite well in this way, since the cooling system and exhaust remove 100% of the heat from the engine. External combustion engines, on the other hand, require a cold sink for efficiency: you want that sterling engine exchanged with 10C ground heat, not 40C air.
Capstone turbines are great for this. Capstone makes roof-mounted turbines for businesses; they burn anything--sour natural gas, biomass waste, low-grade fuel, the works--and are often fitted with feed from natural gas service or a big diesel tank, like any other on-site generator. Capstone's turbines are efficient generators, but also efficient heating systems: if you heat via natural gas, you can pipe your natural gas into the Capstone and produce electricity, with 370F exhaust exchanging into a heating loop to heat the building. Likewise, the exhaust goes to an absorption chiller when running AC or running off emergency power and using AC.
Combination systems are complex. Internal combustion generates waste heat; external combustion sinks waste heat. Solar hot water run to a boiler and sinking the hot collection loop to a sterling engine is doable; natural gas heating doesn't have a waste heat component, but you can run a natural gas turbine and vent the cooling system (and an intercooler on the exhaust manifold) into your house.
The huge progressive education push of the early 20th century has been the bane of education. The roots of making education "fun" come from John Dewey's attempt to make education "child-centric" by converting it to "experience". This has destroyed education as an institution and as a functional concept.
Education used to be about learning, about remembering, about memorizing. It was based on a broken theory: the mind is a muscle, and exercising it makes it strong. Upon learning this was, in fact, complete crap, progressive educators moved to eschew the hard labor of learning in favor of teaching through relateable experiences. They threw out actual education in the process.
The mind actually learns by association. In John Dewey's new vision, a student doesn't study meaningless biology textbooks; he grows plants from seeds, and then is able to tell us that plants grow from seeds with sunlight and water. It would be much more effective and efficient to carry out these such processes while also drilling the textbook knowledge as before: more knowledge was absorbed in the past, and these experiences give a way to more quickly and effectively grasp such knowledge.
The progressives failed to realize the brain makes such associations, and can more effectively process new information with a great wealth of old to work from: Latin and Greek provide a basis of comparison for English and European languages, rather than the raw strength of the brain's language centers. To make education fun and meaningful should have been an effort in making the raw facts being taught more meaningful, not excising them from the mind of the student and leaving them uneducated but also unperturbed by the labors of study.
I fear the same will happen here: cars will be converted by rote mechanical exercise, and students will learn little of engineering. They will believe they know about electric cars because they have bolted together some parts which they do not understand in ways which they do not comprehend. Rather than convey comprehension and understanding, we will convey a hollow sense of accomplishment and experience.
Isn't that what Howard Stern said? Some advertisers pulled out from the Howard Stern show, and he's like... I have over a hundred million listeners; there are thousands of advertisers waiting to buy your spot. Have a nice day.
Back in the 90s, someone would have an Angelfire or Geocities cite talking about the fire. Someone else would buy MySmallTownHistory.com (not.gov) and largely paraphrase the bits about the fire from the Geoshitties cite. Nobody can edit these except for a small oligarchy, so they can't be contested publicly except on another Web site. Meanwhile, MySmallTownHistory.com would be considered more authoritative, and so you'd be wrong.
You can actually dispute the facts on Wikipedia, but it requires effort. You'll cause an edit war or otherwise draw admin attention, and then you have to duke it out.
Daniel Tammat went from being an incredibly-fucked-up autistic sociopath to a fairly normal, highly-intelligent savant. Kim Peek, on the other hand, has brain damage such that he can't properly be educated: he just regurgitates facts and occasionally interacts with people by what amounts to reflex, although it's cognitive reflex and appears to approximate intelligence ("I don't know! Shut up! I'm reading!!").
Peek is interesting in that he can learn, but can't be educated: he is so divorced from human interaction that he can't follow what people are saying. You don't expect a car to tell you anything; you get inside, try to drive, and figure out how to make the damn thing go where you want. When people talk to Peek, he doesn't take stock in what they're saying if it's not directly to his interest; he's learn to tell people to shut the fuck up when he wants their mouths to turn off, and isn't aware that this is rude. Because of this, he doesn't recognize any external suggestions about learning or improving, or about anything being wrong with him; thus he can't be educated.
Tammat was just fucked up. He could interpret what people were saying, regard them, and then regurgitate some horribly-formed reaction. With some concerted effort (driven by severe discomfort in life), he learned to be a normal person: he is now charismatic and highly intelligent. Tammat was always educable; it was never easy, but he's learned to be more effective at learning, and developed an ethos to do so vigilantly.
There are multiple studies concerning people with damaged hypocampus structures, who universally display an inability to access long-term episodic and semantic memory. They can learn patterns and tasks, but are unaware of those patterns and tasks, or of any events or facts they've learned. These are people who learn to knit, and then never knit because they don't know how; and then you give them knitting needles and they are amazed that knitting comes so naturally to them. Two minutes later, you can give them knitting needles again, and they're convinced it's the first time they've ever seen knitting needles in person, and amazed that knitting comes so naturally. These people are also beyond reach, even worse than Peek.
The brain is a fascinating machine, but it has its limits. We haven't quite reached them; although we've become familiar with its limits in routing around damage.
We brought in new programmers, and they threw it out because it was a mess. Due to constant demands from everyone using the software being written (which was in production, and getting incremental rearchitecture), the new architecture kept changing: several parts have been rewritten more than once, a lot are glued together to get around bad architecture decisions, and some stuff is just plain wrong and has odd work-arounds.
We can blame the programmers for the architecture; but the truth is they were told, by functional managers, to produce everything that was asked for as it was asked for. They didn't have the luxury of collecting requirements, producing a requirements document, breaking down the work, and then designing the architecture as part of the early phase of work. They had to make up architecture on-the-fly, and integrate it with architecture they were replacing, and integrate it with new architecture for new requirements which couldn't reasonably be met under the architecture they had started implementing.
Project management avoids exactly this;
Add time to every single task you think you see for doing architecture related stuff. At the end, allocate a large blob of time to figure out the correct architecture rather than the one you built which now resembles a dirty snowball. And begin rebuilding the thing, reusing any errant parts you did in pass one. And because you are agile, be sure to appropriate time for execs who understand agile as they get to change what's necessary on the taste of their coffee that day, whether their secretary gave them a perky Good Morning, or whether their hair will turn sufficiently silver in time for that next promotion.
You do know what a bell curve is? Sure, most people tend towards a mean but the difference between either end is immense, with very real implications.
You assume performance as such is inherent, and cannot be changed. It's not.
I am definitely on the right side of the bell curve, I was born a lot later than Einstein, and modern physics is still one of the hardest subjects I've taken, if not the hardest.
Bacon claimed that a man cannot know much of mathematics until he has studied for at least 40 years of his life. What Bacon knew about mathematics is well-known to most grade school kids now; we have since developed calculus, statistics, modern physics, and all such things beyond basic Algebra, Trigonometry, and Geometry.
Do you honestly think Einstein's physics was the pinnacle of modern physics? Special relativity is nothing more than complex math; it is a dated theory which has been built upon because it is so firm, along with general relativity. Quantum physics exceeds it, and we are ever searching for a grand unified theory to bring these together. Einstein's arguments about quantum physics were frequently put in their place, and more frequently found wrong later; modern physicists have little problem looking at Einstein's incorrect arguments and postulating counter-arguments.
In short: you must be smarter than Einstein.
I know the technique of mind palaces and find them utterly unwieldy. Why use a mind palace to remember a fact when you can just write it down or google it?
For the same reason you actually study physics, instead of googling it the moment you have a piece of physics research on your desk.
The difference between a CERN physics researcher and a third grader is what the CERN physics researcher remembers. When a CERN physics researcher sees something he doesn't recall, he goes and looks up the concept; that is to say, he remembers something about special applications of the Casimir effect or some such, based on information that indicates attributes he recalls about the Casimir effect, and realizes he can't remember what in the fuck the Casimir effect actually does. He then looks up the Casimir effect, relearns it in full (which takes little time, since he's already learned it and a bunch of supporting information), and continues his work.
In short: your ability to assess the various technical problems relies on your ability to remember how to assess them. You can only google things you already know something about. Your brain is an enormous index of facts, and includes indexing of external facts; but your brain is associative, and must analyze information and find a relationship to what facts you want to look up.
Mnemonics techniques such as progressive elaboration and the mind palace are used to index important facts. Besides just storing this week's grocery list--another good use of the mind palace--you can store information about things you've recently learned. If you're studying new material or working on new research, you can keep important information in your head by indexing it firmly. This shortens your referencing time, and eventually incorporates the facts into long-term memory by repeat referencing; eventually, you can drop them out of the mind palace. The end goal is to put more things into your head and keep them there so that you can recognize and recall them, rather than spending half an hour looking through your notes, re-reading a physics test, or punching random phrases into Google while complaining that you can't remember what the fuck the thing you're searching for is called.
More important to the discussion, however, is the illustrative nature of this whole system: anyone can teach themselves to have a useful semantic memory by training these techniques; likewise, anyone can use these techniques to store and recall more information as they study a subject, allowing them to recognize and understand the
Look up the legal definition of "conspiracy", and come to understand copyright laws. When people say, "Oh, I just linked to torrents and provided the tracker; I don't actually host copyright work," they are saying, "Oh, I just sold guns, ammunition, and the addresses of doctors who performed abortions; I didn't actually murder anyone for pro-life activism." Both are conspiracy to commit a criminal act.
Yes, that happens when you have strong synesthesia. Those of us who don't, or who have a moderate synesthesia, are able to willfully apply such associations as a matter of technique. This makes our minds more functional.
Solomon Shereshevskii had such strong synesthesia that he couldn't read. His brain turned everything into a mess; visual imagery and metaphor were lost on him. Whatever was going on in the story was occluded behind a wall of garbage; but he could vividly recall that wall of garbage by assembling it into a systematic image. Us normal people can do the same, turning numbers and concepts into pictures and actions; but we're not compelled into it, and so we can use other mental techniques as appropriate. Where Shereshevskii could only read a book as a jumble of abstract images, most people can thread a narrative into a representative visual image, unless we make the purposeful decision to assemble it as a representative assembly of abstract images for memorization purposes.
I have, at times, been able to experience something as you describe: when I read some of the Thomas Covenant books, I ceased to exist in this world, and instead lived through the experiences of the books. In my case, I divorced myself from the experience of reading, but continued to pull information into my head through the text; my mind assembled everything into a vivid representation of the world being described, and I came out of it with a sense that months of time had passed and that I had lived my life upon a ship with giants and with a great many perils to face and conquer. The experience of reading was lost; the experience of adventure is a part of me.
I do not remember how to do that. I wish to learn, and to document how to do this intentionally; for us who are unlike you, we would be able to firmly remember stories as such, and to enjoy them to a greater degree. For you, perhaps you can come the other way: accept what happens when you read stories, but perhaps shape it to live in the story, and teach yourself to continue reading even as you become unaware of it. Maybe we can meet in the middle.
I hate kids because they're stupid. They're in a phase where they can learn rapidly, due to not being able to survive if they don't learn rapidly. 10-year-old boys used to drive farm trucks and handle animal husbandry; today, we think these tasks are beyond the physiological capability of a child's brain. While they *are* stupid, that can be fixed pretty readily.
It's easy to teach a first grader that X is not Y, even when X and Y look exactly the same. We mostly use this to teach small children that all adults unfamiliar to them are evil people who want to molest them, while all adults familiar to them are infallible and trustworthy--least that's what we taught kids when I was 6 years old.
Almost a decade to improve two seconds. In 1934, the time was 4:06.8, giving 5.4 seconds of improvement over a decade; in 1964, the improvement was 5.3 seconds for the decade. There was also a period from 1895 to 1911 where the record, just above 4:15, improved by 1/5 of one second.
More importantly, once the 4 minute mile was broken, it quickly became a standard benchmark. This was a world record set for just a few years, after dangling 1.4 seconds out of reach for a decade, and it's suddenly required of everyone who competes. A few short years prior, nobody could run a mile that fast. It'd be like telling everyone on my 100 meter dash team that they're getting cut if they can't run within 0.05 seconds of Usain Bolt's 100 meter dash, because that's just how fast people run.
Simplifications are good for application. All heavy scientific research becomes simplified application.
It's a gross oversimplification to say you can do anything that you put your mind to; it's not an oversimplification to say that everything requires effort, but methodical effort can bring everyone to the same skill set if they are sufficiently motivated. The first implies that all things are apparently easy, or at least equally difficult; the second implies that all things are equally possible for all persons, and they may or may not be of sufficient value for any given individual to put forth the potentially immense effort, or they may require a method of pursuit which a person is not aware of.
The most succinct coverage of this is a passage in Joshua Foer's "Moonwalking with Einstein," an entertainment piece. If you bother to read the writings of K. Anders Ericsson, you can take this out incredibly far; but you'll also notice Foer's distillation into a few paragraphs is precisely the point which matters, and the rest is academic. Likewise, I find Kennith Higbee's book, "Your Memory: How it Works and How to Improve It", provocative and intriguing; but, once you've gotten it in your head that memory techniques can improve memory, much of the scientific study and the explanation of how the mind works is just a sales pitch. In my case, I find this information useful: I want to design a better education system; but, in the greater cases, the simple explanation is the most meaningful.
Yeah, that's the thing. They're large. 250W is what, average over the day? The average insolation over a day is 164W per square meter, while the peak is 1300W per square meter; 250W is a meaningless number.
Solar panels have historically had a 20+ year ROI. Building out solar infrastructure is complex: it takes a lot of land for little return, and it's unstable (clouds). Concentrated collectors using parabolic reflectors or salt towers have higher efficiency, lower cost, and lower maintenance, thus better return; but are more complex in small installations, and still unstable. Parabolic reflectors have particularly high return (35%+, versus 15%-20% of PV panels); while salt towers come close, and have the advantage of thermal mass storage (allows more time to spin up an alternate power source if it suddenly gets cloudy).
Containing hydrogen is easy. You just build a hollow, spherical core of an aluminum superalloy, 12mm thick, surrounded by 654 concentric 1-atom-thick graphene shells. This provides the highest tensile strength of any material manufactured to date, and acts as a perfect rotational bearing.
Around this, you place a gyroscope constructed of a sphere of ultrapolished silicone, 2cm thick, plated on its interior with 7mm of niobium, and assembled from two fused hemispheres. The gyro itself is suspended in superfluid helium-4 at 1.95K, and rotates in a plane parallel to the surface of the Earth. At this temperature and pressure, quantum effects in the graphene lattice produce a composite material in a metastable state with a mean of 10^5 +/- 10^3 defects, which randomly arise and spontaneously self-repair. Reducing the pressure increases the stability exponentially, such that incredibly high continuous pressures and even higher impulse pressures are readily sustained: at 1.93K, the meteor that extincted the dinosaurs wouldn't scratch this thing.
Once mag drives are used to accelerate the gyro to above 150,000RPM, relativistic effects cause a special case of the Casimir effect to occur between two points on the niobium sphere. This effectively establishes a schwarzschild barrier around the inner core, effectively containing whatever is stored within.
Yeah, but to power an EV, you just take electricity. To power hydrogen, you take electricity, run it through an electrolysis system, then compress the output gas, pump it into a storage unit that uses active cooling with compressed coolants and advanced materials, transport it via lossy and active-cooled pipeline or trucks, and then transfer it into a mobile storage unit on your car.
How long do these panels actually last? What size footprint are they? Is it a roof-sized 250W panel, or a small 250W panel that lets me draw more power per area?
It takes me 5 minutes to fill up my Mazda 3S, which gets about 300 miles from the tank (at 30mpg, I can hit 320; often I fill up at 290-295, almost on E but not hitting the idiot light yet). I have noticed modern gas stations run the pumps slower--about 1/4-1/2 speed--compared to the previous generation, which annoys me.
It takes 20 minutes for a Tesla Supecharger to put a 50% (150 mile) charge on the battery, or 40 minutes to put 300 miles on. That's 8 times the time. At home, a 240V outlet draws 40A and can charge in 2 hours; this is less important, as you can top off continuously at home. The practical importance of charging time is long-trip charge time where you won't be home in less than 300 miles of driving. Logistically, 300 miles at 60mph is 5 hours; you'll need to eat every 4 hours, and so a half hour charge (stopping to eat, charger in parking lot) would only replenish 75 miles, while a supercharger would replenish 150.
Because any installation can provide a supercharger, and the home installation is likely going to spend enough time hooked up to your car otherwise, supercharger installations with no home charging (long trips) are the only metric. It takes 8 times as long to charge a Tesla, compared to a gasoline car. Hybrid electric cars with a 25 pound 1 cylinder bio-diesel (food oil waste) engine are better for range, but bring the full logistics of managing a diesel engine (fuel tank, pumps, ECU, electronic ignition, exhaust management, etc.) and a lot of space usage.
Point is we don't need to think about how efficient the engine is, how many megatrons there are, or whatever. All we need to do is plug it in and charge it to 300 miles. Gasoline does this in 5-10 minutes; electric does this in 40.
Hot water heaters vent hot water. When you heat water, it expands. The water pushes backwards through the system into the cold water pipe, and back out to the mains. In systems where the mains is isolated by a backflow restrictor, code requires an expansion tank to accept roughly 5L of expansion.
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You will do better to use the heat directly in the house. Turbines are best for waste heat reclamation: they burn fuel to generate power, producing 350-400F exhaust used to support heating. Internal combustion engines function quite well in this way, since the cooling system and exhaust remove 100% of the heat from the engine. External combustion engines, on the other hand, require a cold sink for efficiency: you want that sterling engine exchanged with 10C ground heat, not 40C air.
Capstone turbines are great for this. Capstone makes roof-mounted turbines for businesses; they burn anything--sour natural gas, biomass waste, low-grade fuel, the works--and are often fitted with feed from natural gas service or a big diesel tank, like any other on-site generator. Capstone's turbines are efficient generators, but also efficient heating systems: if you heat via natural gas, you can pipe your natural gas into the Capstone and produce electricity, with 370F exhaust exchanging into a heating loop to heat the building. Likewise, the exhaust goes to an absorption chiller when running AC or running off emergency power and using AC.
Combination systems are complex. Internal combustion generates waste heat; external combustion sinks waste heat. Solar hot water run to a boiler and sinking the hot collection loop to a sterling engine is doable; natural gas heating doesn't have a waste heat component, but you can run a natural gas turbine and vent the cooling system (and an intercooler on the exhaust manifold) into your house.
The huge progressive education push of the early 20th century has been the bane of education. The roots of making education "fun" come from John Dewey's attempt to make education "child-centric" by converting it to "experience". This has destroyed education as an institution and as a functional concept.
Education used to be about learning, about remembering, about memorizing. It was based on a broken theory: the mind is a muscle, and exercising it makes it strong. Upon learning this was, in fact, complete crap, progressive educators moved to eschew the hard labor of learning in favor of teaching through relateable experiences. They threw out actual education in the process.
The mind actually learns by association. In John Dewey's new vision, a student doesn't study meaningless biology textbooks; he grows plants from seeds, and then is able to tell us that plants grow from seeds with sunlight and water. It would be much more effective and efficient to carry out these such processes while also drilling the textbook knowledge as before: more knowledge was absorbed in the past, and these experiences give a way to more quickly and effectively grasp such knowledge.
The progressives failed to realize the brain makes such associations, and can more effectively process new information with a great wealth of old to work from: Latin and Greek provide a basis of comparison for English and European languages, rather than the raw strength of the brain's language centers. To make education fun and meaningful should have been an effort in making the raw facts being taught more meaningful, not excising them from the mind of the student and leaving them uneducated but also unperturbed by the labors of study.
I fear the same will happen here: cars will be converted by rote mechanical exercise, and students will learn little of engineering. They will believe they know about electric cars because they have bolted together some parts which they do not understand in ways which they do not comprehend. Rather than convey comprehension and understanding, we will convey a hollow sense of accomplishment and experience.
Not so sure...
I'm a high-functioning sociopath. You're just a paranoid nut.
Isn't that what Howard Stern said? Some advertisers pulled out from the Howard Stern show, and he's like... I have over a hundred million listeners; there are thousands of advertisers waiting to buy your spot. Have a nice day.
Back in the 90s, someone would have an Angelfire or Geocities cite talking about the fire. Someone else would buy MySmallTownHistory.com (not .gov) and largely paraphrase the bits about the fire from the Geoshitties cite. Nobody can edit these except for a small oligarchy, so they can't be contested publicly except on another Web site. Meanwhile, MySmallTownHistory.com would be considered more authoritative, and so you'd be wrong.
You can actually dispute the facts on Wikipedia, but it requires effort. You'll cause an edit war or otherwise draw admin attention, and then you have to duke it out.
Principles like showing you big, yellow, scare-tactic ads for donating to Wikipedia, but not showing you unobtrusive text ads?
Hot sterling engine parabolic reflector. They have an up-front capital cost, and then buff them. They don't degrade like PV panels.
The efficiency is the conversion efficiency of sunlight to electricity.
What's that thing called that accelerates the motor initially? Starter engine? I guess you could just use the battery, unless it's dead.
But, no, diesel doesn't have an ignition system. The key goes in something called an ignition for archaic reasons. My bad.
Daniel Tammat went from being an incredibly-fucked-up autistic sociopath to a fairly normal, highly-intelligent savant. Kim Peek, on the other hand, has brain damage such that he can't properly be educated: he just regurgitates facts and occasionally interacts with people by what amounts to reflex, although it's cognitive reflex and appears to approximate intelligence ("I don't know! Shut up! I'm reading!!").
Peek is interesting in that he can learn, but can't be educated: he is so divorced from human interaction that he can't follow what people are saying. You don't expect a car to tell you anything; you get inside, try to drive, and figure out how to make the damn thing go where you want. When people talk to Peek, he doesn't take stock in what they're saying if it's not directly to his interest; he's learn to tell people to shut the fuck up when he wants their mouths to turn off, and isn't aware that this is rude. Because of this, he doesn't recognize any external suggestions about learning or improving, or about anything being wrong with him; thus he can't be educated.
Tammat was just fucked up. He could interpret what people were saying, regard them, and then regurgitate some horribly-formed reaction. With some concerted effort (driven by severe discomfort in life), he learned to be a normal person: he is now charismatic and highly intelligent. Tammat was always educable; it was never easy, but he's learned to be more effective at learning, and developed an ethos to do so vigilantly.
There are multiple studies concerning people with damaged hypocampus structures, who universally display an inability to access long-term episodic and semantic memory. They can learn patterns and tasks, but are unaware of those patterns and tasks, or of any events or facts they've learned. These are people who learn to knit, and then never knit because they don't know how; and then you give them knitting needles and they are amazed that knitting comes so naturally to them. Two minutes later, you can give them knitting needles again, and they're convinced it's the first time they've ever seen knitting needles in person, and amazed that knitting comes so naturally. These people are also beyond reach, even worse than Peek.
The brain is a fascinating machine, but it has its limits. We haven't quite reached them; although we've become familiar with its limits in routing around damage.
Managing a distributed solar infrastructure is a nightmare. The companies that do so charge as much as your main utility.
I have seen non-project-managed architecture.
We brought in new programmers, and they threw it out because it was a mess. Due to constant demands from everyone using the software being written (which was in production, and getting incremental rearchitecture), the new architecture kept changing: several parts have been rewritten more than once, a lot are glued together to get around bad architecture decisions, and some stuff is just plain wrong and has odd work-arounds.
We can blame the programmers for the architecture; but the truth is they were told, by functional managers, to produce everything that was asked for as it was asked for. They didn't have the luxury of collecting requirements, producing a requirements document, breaking down the work, and then designing the architecture as part of the early phase of work. They had to make up architecture on-the-fly, and integrate it with architecture they were replacing, and integrate it with new architecture for new requirements which couldn't reasonably be met under the architecture they had started implementing.
Project management avoids exactly this;
Add time to every single task you think you see for doing architecture related stuff. At the end, allocate a large blob of time to figure out the correct architecture rather than the one you built which now resembles a dirty snowball. And begin rebuilding the thing, reusing any errant parts you did in pass one. And because you are agile, be sure to appropriate time for execs who understand agile as they get to change what's necessary on the taste of their coffee that day, whether their secretary gave them a perky Good Morning, or whether their hair will turn sufficiently silver in time for that next promotion.
Instead, you break out the work, use that to determine what needs to be done, and have a separate piece of work for product design before implementation.
You do know what a bell curve is? Sure, most people tend towards a mean but the difference between either end is immense, with very real implications.
You assume performance as such is inherent, and cannot be changed. It's not.
I am definitely on the right side of the bell curve, I was born a lot later than Einstein, and modern physics is still one of the hardest subjects I've taken, if not the hardest.
Bacon claimed that a man cannot know much of mathematics until he has studied for at least 40 years of his life. What Bacon knew about mathematics is well-known to most grade school kids now; we have since developed calculus, statistics, modern physics, and all such things beyond basic Algebra, Trigonometry, and Geometry.
Do you honestly think Einstein's physics was the pinnacle of modern physics? Special relativity is nothing more than complex math; it is a dated theory which has been built upon because it is so firm, along with general relativity. Quantum physics exceeds it, and we are ever searching for a grand unified theory to bring these together. Einstein's arguments about quantum physics were frequently put in their place, and more frequently found wrong later; modern physicists have little problem looking at Einstein's incorrect arguments and postulating counter-arguments.
In short: you must be smarter than Einstein.
I know the technique of mind palaces and find them utterly unwieldy. Why use a mind palace to remember a fact when you can just write it down or google it?
For the same reason you actually study physics, instead of googling it the moment you have a piece of physics research on your desk.
The difference between a CERN physics researcher and a third grader is what the CERN physics researcher remembers. When a CERN physics researcher sees something he doesn't recall, he goes and looks up the concept; that is to say, he remembers something about special applications of the Casimir effect or some such, based on information that indicates attributes he recalls about the Casimir effect, and realizes he can't remember what in the fuck the Casimir effect actually does. He then looks up the Casimir effect, relearns it in full (which takes little time, since he's already learned it and a bunch of supporting information), and continues his work.
In short: your ability to assess the various technical problems relies on your ability to remember how to assess them. You can only google things you already know something about. Your brain is an enormous index of facts, and includes indexing of external facts; but your brain is associative, and must analyze information and find a relationship to what facts you want to look up.
Mnemonics techniques such as progressive elaboration and the mind palace are used to index important facts. Besides just storing this week's grocery list--another good use of the mind palace--you can store information about things you've recently learned. If you're studying new material or working on new research, you can keep important information in your head by indexing it firmly. This shortens your referencing time, and eventually incorporates the facts into long-term memory by repeat referencing; eventually, you can drop them out of the mind palace. The end goal is to put more things into your head and keep them there so that you can recognize and recall them, rather than spending half an hour looking through your notes, re-reading a physics test, or punching random phrases into Google while complaining that you can't remember what the fuck the thing you're searching for is called.
More important to the discussion, however, is the illustrative nature of this whole system: anyone can teach themselves to have a useful semantic memory by training these techniques; likewise, anyone can use these techniques to store and recall more information as they study a subject, allowing them to recognize and understand the
It happens to be true.
Look up the legal definition of "conspiracy", and come to understand copyright laws. When people say, "Oh, I just linked to torrents and provided the tracker; I don't actually host copyright work," they are saying, "Oh, I just sold guns, ammunition, and the addresses of doctors who performed abortions; I didn't actually murder anyone for pro-life activism." Both are conspiracy to commit a criminal act.
Yes, that happens when you have strong synesthesia. Those of us who don't, or who have a moderate synesthesia, are able to willfully apply such associations as a matter of technique. This makes our minds more functional.
Solomon Shereshevskii had such strong synesthesia that he couldn't read. His brain turned everything into a mess; visual imagery and metaphor were lost on him. Whatever was going on in the story was occluded behind a wall of garbage; but he could vividly recall that wall of garbage by assembling it into a systematic image. Us normal people can do the same, turning numbers and concepts into pictures and actions; but we're not compelled into it, and so we can use other mental techniques as appropriate. Where Shereshevskii could only read a book as a jumble of abstract images, most people can thread a narrative into a representative visual image, unless we make the purposeful decision to assemble it as a representative assembly of abstract images for memorization purposes.
I have, at times, been able to experience something as you describe: when I read some of the Thomas Covenant books, I ceased to exist in this world, and instead lived through the experiences of the books. In my case, I divorced myself from the experience of reading, but continued to pull information into my head through the text; my mind assembled everything into a vivid representation of the world being described, and I came out of it with a sense that months of time had passed and that I had lived my life upon a ship with giants and with a great many perils to face and conquer. The experience of reading was lost; the experience of adventure is a part of me.
I do not remember how to do that. I wish to learn, and to document how to do this intentionally; for us who are unlike you, we would be able to firmly remember stories as such, and to enjoy them to a greater degree. For you, perhaps you can come the other way: accept what happens when you read stories, but perhaps shape it to live in the story, and teach yourself to continue reading even as you become unaware of it. Maybe we can meet in the middle.
You think children can't learn? That's cute.
I hate kids because they're stupid. They're in a phase where they can learn rapidly, due to not being able to survive if they don't learn rapidly. 10-year-old boys used to drive farm trucks and handle animal husbandry; today, we think these tasks are beyond the physiological capability of a child's brain. While they *are* stupid, that can be fixed pretty readily.
It's easy to teach a first grader that X is not Y, even when X and Y look exactly the same. We mostly use this to teach small children that all adults unfamiliar to them are evil people who want to molest them, while all adults familiar to them are infallible and trustworthy--least that's what we taught kids when I was 6 years old.
In my negotiation class, we covered how important it is to not crush people with their own stupidity.
1945: 4:01.4. 1954: 3:59.4.
Almost a decade to improve two seconds. In 1934, the time was 4:06.8, giving 5.4 seconds of improvement over a decade; in 1964, the improvement was 5.3 seconds for the decade. There was also a period from 1895 to 1911 where the record, just above 4:15, improved by 1/5 of one second.
More importantly, once the 4 minute mile was broken, it quickly became a standard benchmark. This was a world record set for just a few years, after dangling 1.4 seconds out of reach for a decade, and it's suddenly required of everyone who competes. A few short years prior, nobody could run a mile that fast. It'd be like telling everyone on my 100 meter dash team that they're getting cut if they can't run within 0.05 seconds of Usain Bolt's 100 meter dash, because that's just how fast people run.
Simplifications are good for application. All heavy scientific research becomes simplified application.
It's a gross oversimplification to say you can do anything that you put your mind to; it's not an oversimplification to say that everything requires effort, but methodical effort can bring everyone to the same skill set if they are sufficiently motivated. The first implies that all things are apparently easy, or at least equally difficult; the second implies that all things are equally possible for all persons, and they may or may not be of sufficient value for any given individual to put forth the potentially immense effort, or they may require a method of pursuit which a person is not aware of.
The most succinct coverage of this is a passage in Joshua Foer's "Moonwalking with Einstein," an entertainment piece. If you bother to read the writings of K. Anders Ericsson, you can take this out incredibly far; but you'll also notice Foer's distillation into a few paragraphs is precisely the point which matters, and the rest is academic. Likewise, I find Kennith Higbee's book, "Your Memory: How it Works and How to Improve It", provocative and intriguing; but, once you've gotten it in your head that memory techniques can improve memory, much of the scientific study and the explanation of how the mind works is just a sales pitch. In my case, I find this information useful: I want to design a better education system; but, in the greater cases, the simple explanation is the most meaningful.
Yeah, that's the thing. They're large. 250W is what, average over the day? The average insolation over a day is 164W per square meter, while the peak is 1300W per square meter; 250W is a meaningless number.
Solar panels have historically had a 20+ year ROI. Building out solar infrastructure is complex: it takes a lot of land for little return, and it's unstable (clouds). Concentrated collectors using parabolic reflectors or salt towers have higher efficiency, lower cost, and lower maintenance, thus better return; but are more complex in small installations, and still unstable. Parabolic reflectors have particularly high return (35%+, versus 15%-20% of PV panels); while salt towers come close, and have the advantage of thermal mass storage (allows more time to spin up an alternate power source if it suddenly gets cloudy).
Containing hydrogen is easy. You just build a hollow, spherical core of an aluminum superalloy, 12mm thick, surrounded by 654 concentric 1-atom-thick graphene shells. This provides the highest tensile strength of any material manufactured to date, and acts as a perfect rotational bearing.
Around this, you place a gyroscope constructed of a sphere of ultrapolished silicone, 2cm thick, plated on its interior with 7mm of niobium, and assembled from two fused hemispheres. The gyro itself is suspended in superfluid helium-4 at 1.95K, and rotates in a plane parallel to the surface of the Earth. At this temperature and pressure, quantum effects in the graphene lattice produce a composite material in a metastable state with a mean of 10^5 +/- 10^3 defects, which randomly arise and spontaneously self-repair. Reducing the pressure increases the stability exponentially, such that incredibly high continuous pressures and even higher impulse pressures are readily sustained: at 1.93K, the meteor that extincted the dinosaurs wouldn't scratch this thing.
Once mag drives are used to accelerate the gyro to above 150,000RPM, relativistic effects cause a special case of the Casimir effect to occur between two points on the niobium sphere. This effectively establishes a schwarzschild barrier around the inner core, effectively containing whatever is stored within.
Yeah, but to power an EV, you just take electricity. To power hydrogen, you take electricity, run it through an electrolysis system, then compress the output gas, pump it into a storage unit that uses active cooling with compressed coolants and advanced materials, transport it via lossy and active-cooled pipeline or trucks, and then transfer it into a mobile storage unit on your car.
How long do these panels actually last? What size footprint are they? Is it a roof-sized 250W panel, or a small 250W panel that lets me draw more power per area?
You're both wrong.
It takes me 5 minutes to fill up my Mazda 3S, which gets about 300 miles from the tank (at 30mpg, I can hit 320; often I fill up at 290-295, almost on E but not hitting the idiot light yet). I have noticed modern gas stations run the pumps slower--about 1/4-1/2 speed--compared to the previous generation, which annoys me.
It takes 20 minutes for a Tesla Supecharger to put a 50% (150 mile) charge on the battery, or 40 minutes to put 300 miles on. That's 8 times the time. At home, a 240V outlet draws 40A and can charge in 2 hours; this is less important, as you can top off continuously at home. The practical importance of charging time is long-trip charge time where you won't be home in less than 300 miles of driving. Logistically, 300 miles at 60mph is 5 hours; you'll need to eat every 4 hours, and so a half hour charge (stopping to eat, charger in parking lot) would only replenish 75 miles, while a supercharger would replenish 150.
Because any installation can provide a supercharger, and the home installation is likely going to spend enough time hooked up to your car otherwise, supercharger installations with no home charging (long trips) are the only metric. It takes 8 times as long to charge a Tesla, compared to a gasoline car. Hybrid electric cars with a 25 pound 1 cylinder bio-diesel (food oil waste) engine are better for range, but bring the full logistics of managing a diesel engine (fuel tank, pumps, ECU, electronic ignition, exhaust management, etc.) and a lot of space usage.
Point is we don't need to think about how efficient the engine is, how many megatrons there are, or whatever. All we need to do is plug it in and charge it to 300 miles. Gasoline does this in 5-10 minutes; electric does this in 40.
Hot water heaters vent hot water. When you heat water, it expands. The water pushes backwards through the system into the cold water pipe, and back out to the mains. In systems where the mains is isolated by a backflow restrictor, code requires an expansion tank to accept roughly 5L of expansion.