A rough guestimate for the lower limit on installed cost would be twice the bare cost, which can dramatically reduce the incentives for solar.
Grid plus Baseload generation only helps if solar constitutes a few percent of peak demand. Above that, there will be a need for energy storage as the demand curve lags the "solar output" curve by a couple of hours. This still leaves us with what provides baseload generation, which the best candidates are nuclear and coal (the latter using gasification to provide fuel for a combined cycle plant - which also provides a more economical way of sequestering the CO2).
The sodium sulfur battery has a reasonably high energy density and there is no shortage of either (I saw pictures of the huge sulfur blocks in northern Alberta produced from removing H2S from natural gas).
Is the $1/watt figure the cost for the bare PV cell or for total installed cost? In addition, if you're trying to replace coal with PV, you would need some of way of storing energy when the "sun don't shine" - which furthers raises installed cost.
Carrying power through glass fibers was one of the main themes of the eco-fantasy 'YV88' written in 1977 - they also had data transport over glass fibers and multi-user chat program. ASEA was using glass fibers to send trigerring pulses to stacked thyristors in the early 70's.
Something like that WAS proposed in the late fifties. Instead of launching horizontally, the proposed catapult would have been carved out of the insides of a mountain and launched vertically. The launches from this beast were expected to be spectacular with a thunderstorm almost guaranteed after the launch.
The father of one of my neighbors worked for English Electric - he was tickled that I knew about the Lightning - he was also enjoying a late fall Santa Ana (temp about 30C) when visiting his daughter in So Cal. Some reports said it could pass Mach 1.0 without afterburner (reheat). Kind of funny looking to my eyes - my fave was the F-104.
I've heard a figure of Mach 4.2 as the max speed for the inlets on the SR-71 - suspect thermal heating precludes much opertaing above Mach 3.3. I've also have heard that the fuel consumption per mile (or km) decreased as the pane went faster. Will have to pick up a copy of 'I Know You Got Soul' (another book on my 'should get' list is 'Magnesium Overcast'). While the Blackbird gets lots of attention, the B-70 was equally a technological feat - it was simultaneously almost the largest and fastest plane flying - and had a longer range cruising at Mach 3.0 than the SR-71 - only problem was that it was a giant radar reflector (while the Blackbirds were the first stealth aircraft).
It is really weird to think that only 15 years passed between the flight of the X-1 and the first flight of the A-12.
I did know that the SR-71 was supposed to the R/S-71 - late in the B-70 program, the designation was changed to R/S-70 and I'm assuming that the '71' comes from being the next plane in the series after the R/S-70.
LBJ also misread AMI (short for Advanced Manned Interceptor) as A-11, so the YF-12A was credited as being derived from the A-11 when in reality it was derived from the A-12.
It's possible that the fixed inlets on the F-22 may be shaped to give a better shock wave than the F-16, but it still gives up a lot of top speed compared to what would be possible with variable inlets. On the blackbirds, the inlets produce about half the thrust at Mach 3.0 and the Concorde was getting significant thrust from the inlets at Mach 2.0.
I also rather doubt that the fixed inlets on the F-22 would allow it to top Mach 2.0. It is the only plane in production that can cruise at supersonic speeds - would be interesting to see what kind of supersonic range that the proposed FB-22 would have.
From what I remember of a 1970 tour of Fighter Town at (then) NAS Miramar - the F-4 held 20,000 lb of fuel and consumed 37,000 lb/hr in full afterburner - getting above Mach 1 would seriously impact your range. Give ideal conditions, the F-4's were capable of ataining Mach 2.4, but not for long. The F-104 was reported to have a range of ~600 miles when pushed to Mach 2.
There were not that many airplanes designed for supersonic cruise, the first (and the one produced in greatest number) was the B-58. Others included the Blackbirds (A-12. YF-12A and SR-71), the XB-70, the Concorde, the TU-144, maybe the Russian knock-off of the B-70 and the F-22. As the F-22 has fixed intakes, I rather doubt that it can fly faster than Mach 2.0 - you need variable geometry intakes above that speed.
Having read Barrie's "The Great Influenza" (a good and scary book), this discovery was quite an eye opener. In addition, this discovery is actionable by just about anybody and could end up saving a lot of lives. It also explains why face masks can cut down the rate of transfer - the air becomes warmer and moister.
Brings up a question: just how practical would it be to put humidifiers on aircraft?
I have to wonder about the southern California fires being near the top of the list, while it was pretty bad it wasn't as bad as the mud volcano you cited. FWIW, the Witch Creek fire got within 3 miles of where I live.
The author of some of the literature was Alexander Brooks, someone I knew from high school and UC Bezerkeley. Alec's degrees were in Civil engineering, not electrical engineering, and I found quite a few points where he would have done well to consult more with the power systems crowd - and a specific recommendation would have been to consult with Prof O.J.M. Smith of UCB.
A real simple control method is to pay attention to frequency - go from charging to feeding back when the fequency drops below nominal and increase charging when the frequency goes above nominal. If the response is fast enough, this alone would do wonders to increase damping of power system disturbances.
One of the quotes from TFA was about how many 12 ton RR cars would be needed to haul away the ash from a coal plant for a lifetime's worth of electricity generation. Current US practice includes gondola cars with about 120 tons (short tons) capacity - a typical coal train is carrying between 12,000 and 14,000 tons of coal per trip.
P2P can be a net benefit to the ISP by minimizing traffic outside of the ISP's network, but that's assuming the ISP has a rational network topology.
Re:Asimov did say it first, and not just in fictio
on
Earth's Moon is a Rarity
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· Score: 3, Informative
W-e-l-l, the distance from the earth to the moon is about 60 earth radii and the moon is about 1/80th of the earth's mass, so that puts the center of gravity about 1/4 of the way to the center of the earth. Whether one quarter of the distance to the center is "well beneath" is open to interpertation.
IMBO, the earth-moon system can still be called a binary planet as no other major body in the solar system except Pluto has a satellite with as large a mass fraction as the moon is to earth.
The originators of the Rare Earth hypothesis made an assumption that large moons around rocky planets would be rare. The news item tends to support their assumption.
I'd prefer a slightly different tack on a couple of your suggestions.
For original works, copyright should be automatic and free of charge for the first 14 to 28 years. After that period, a tax of 5 to 10% of the gross recepits will be imposed.
For works derived from the public domain, the works would be considered public domain unless the creator can show the same amount of original work that would qualify for a copyright on a work derived from copyrighted material and copyright tax would apply immediately.
An additional suggestion is that the copyrights for any 'works for hire' would return to the original authors if the company misrepresented any facts in the copyright registration.
About the only way for the attack to work without all of the SSL and HTTPS implementations breaking is if the bug affected less than say 10E-9 of normal HTTPS/SSL sessions, and the attacker knows exactly which operands produce a broken result. The attack also depends on the broken hardware being either very common or the attacker knows that his/her target is using the broken hardware. This is a great agument against a hardware monoculture.
I'd think it more likely that a bug in a popular encryption related software package/library would lead to more exploits than a hardware bug. My guess is this would be true for both open and closed source projects. While open source projects can have 'many eyes' looking for bugs, my guess is that more bugs are found when trying to port to multiple architectures than by people casually glancing at the core (the OpenBSD developers maintain ports to multiple architectures for precisely that reason).
That is true about fixed speed AC motors, but a fixed speed motor is not much use in a rail car application.
I more or less made that point in my first posting. There are applications where a fixed speed motor is acceptable (e.g. refrigerators) and that's where an AC induction motor is almost always a more economical choice than a DC motor.
Getting back to traction motors - BART was using a chopper controller from the beginning (service started September 1972) and running off a 1KVDC third rail. If it was being nuilt now, the cars would probably use VVVF inverters with AC motors. For locomotive use, the latest AC drives are more efficient than DC, but add about $500,000 to the cost of the locomotive.
It was the bankers who indirectly ripped off Tesla by telling Westinghouse to reduce the royalties due Tesla or Westinghouse would not get any funding. The Westinghouse Electric Manufacuring Co. was quite open about Tesla's contributions ot the electric power industry, unlike companies such as McDonalds that doesn't want the world to know about the McDonald brothers or Microsoft that pretty much hides the origins of most of their products (e.g. MS-DOS was bought from Seattle Computer, MS C compiler started as a repackaged Lattice C compiler, etc).
The AC-DC radios used a set of tubes where the heater voltage added up to 117V, and rectified the line voltage for the B+. With no power transformer, these radios could be lighter and cheaper. Variations on the AC-DC tube sets were found in other electronics.
Toasters, irons, incandescant light bulbs and appliances with universal motors ran just fine off of DC - back in the 1930's it was possible to get appliances that ran off of 32VDC (standard voltage for wind-chargers). Appliances such as refrigerators would be more of a problem, bu I wouldn't be surprised if some were made to run off 110VDC. Phonographs required a DC-AC MG-set to provide '60' Hz.
Slashdot Mirror
Grid plus Baseload generation only helps if solar constitutes a few percent of peak demand. Above that, there will be a need for energy storage as the demand curve lags the "solar output" curve by a couple of hours. This still leaves us with what provides baseload generation, which the best candidates are nuclear and coal (the latter using gasification to provide fuel for a combined cycle plant - which also provides a more economical way of sequestering the CO2).
The sodium sulfur battery has a reasonably high energy density and there is no shortage of either (I saw pictures of the huge sulfur blocks in northern Alberta produced from removing H2S from natural gas).
Is the $1/watt figure the cost for the bare PV cell or for total installed cost? In addition, if you're trying to replace coal with PV, you would need some of way of storing energy when the "sun don't shine" - which furthers raises installed cost.
The AECL Slowpoke was a small terrestial reactor intended for almost the same use as Toshiba's design.
Carrying power through glass fibers was one of the main themes of the eco-fantasy 'YV88' written in 1977 - they also had data transport over glass fibers and multi-user chat program. ASEA was using glass fibers to send trigerring pulses to stacked thyristors in the early 70's.
Something like that WAS proposed in the late fifties. Instead of launching horizontally, the proposed catapult would have been carved out of the insides of a mountain and launched vertically. The launches from this beast were expected to be spectacular with a thunderstorm almost guaranteed after the launch.
I've heard a figure of Mach 4.2 as the max speed for the inlets on the SR-71 - suspect thermal heating precludes much opertaing above Mach 3.3. I've also have heard that the fuel consumption per mile (or km) decreased as the pane went faster. Will have to pick up a copy of 'I Know You Got Soul' (another book on my 'should get' list is 'Magnesium Overcast'). While the Blackbird gets lots of attention, the B-70 was equally a technological feat - it was simultaneously almost the largest and fastest plane flying - and had a longer range cruising at Mach 3.0 than the SR-71 - only problem was that it was a giant radar reflector (while the Blackbirds were the first stealth aircraft).
It is really weird to think that only 15 years passed between the flight of the X-1 and the first flight of the A-12.
LBJ also misread AMI (short for Advanced Manned Interceptor) as A-11, so the YF-12A was credited as being derived from the A-11 when in reality it was derived from the A-12.
It's possible that the fixed inlets on the F-22 may be shaped to give a better shock wave than the F-16, but it still gives up a lot of top speed compared to what would be possible with variable inlets. On the blackbirds, the inlets produce about half the thrust at Mach 3.0 and the Concorde was getting significant thrust from the inlets at Mach 2.0.
I also rather doubt that the fixed inlets on the F-22 would allow it to top Mach 2.0. It is the only plane in production that can cruise at supersonic speeds - would be interesting to see what kind of supersonic range that the proposed FB-22 would have.
There were not that many airplanes designed for supersonic cruise, the first (and the one produced in greatest number) was the B-58. Others included the Blackbirds (A-12. YF-12A and SR-71), the XB-70, the Concorde, the TU-144, maybe the Russian knock-off of the B-70 and the F-22. As the F-22 has fixed intakes, I rather doubt that it can fly faster than Mach 2.0 - you need variable geometry intakes above that speed.
No brag, just putting things in context. Looks like you were doing more bragging than I was.
Brings up a question: just how practical would it be to put humidifiers on aircraft?
I have to wonder about the southern California fires being near the top of the list, while it was pretty bad it wasn't as bad as the mud volcano you cited. FWIW, the Witch Creek fire got within 3 miles of where I live.
A real simple control method is to pay attention to frequency - go from charging to feeding back when the fequency drops below nominal and increase charging when the frequency goes above nominal. If the response is fast enough, this alone would do wonders to increase damping of power system disturbances.
One of the quotes from TFA was about how many 12 ton RR cars would be needed to haul away the ash from a coal plant for a lifetime's worth of electricity generation. Current US practice includes gondola cars with about 120 tons (short tons) capacity - a typical coal train is carrying between 12,000 and 14,000 tons of coal per trip.
This detector is looking for the neutrons emitted by the nuclear material and doesn't involve using a neutron beam for interrogation.
P2P can be a net benefit to the ISP by minimizing traffic outside of the ISP's network, but that's assuming the ISP has a rational network topology.
IMBO, the earth-moon system can still be called a binary planet as no other major body in the solar system except Pluto has a satellite with as large a mass fraction as the moon is to earth.
The originators of the Rare Earth hypothesis made an assumption that large moons around rocky planets would be rare. The news item tends to support their assumption.
For original works, copyright should be automatic and free of charge for the first 14 to 28 years. After that period, a tax of 5 to 10% of the gross recepits will be imposed.
For works derived from the public domain, the works would be considered public domain unless the creator can show the same amount of original work that would qualify for a copyright on a work derived from copyrighted material and copyright tax would apply immediately.
An additional suggestion is that the copyrights for any 'works for hire' would return to the original authors if the company misrepresented any facts in the copyright registration.
I'd think it more likely that a bug in a popular encryption related software package/library would lead to more exploits than a hardware bug. My guess is this would be true for both open and closed source projects. While open source projects can have 'many eyes' looking for bugs, my guess is that more bugs are found when trying to port to multiple architectures than by people casually glancing at the core (the OpenBSD developers maintain ports to multiple architectures for precisely that reason).
I more or less made that point in my first posting. There are applications where a fixed speed motor is acceptable (e.g. refrigerators) and that's where an AC induction motor is almost always a more economical choice than a DC motor.Getting back to traction motors - BART was using a chopper controller from the beginning (service started September 1972) and running off a 1KVDC third rail. If it was being nuilt now, the cars would probably use VVVF inverters with AC motors. For locomotive use, the latest AC drives are more efficient than DC, but add about $500,000 to the cost of the locomotive.
It was the bankers who indirectly ripped off Tesla by telling Westinghouse to reduce the royalties due Tesla or Westinghouse would not get any funding. The Westinghouse Electric Manufacuring Co. was quite open about Tesla's contributions ot the electric power industry, unlike companies such as McDonalds that doesn't want the world to know about the McDonald brothers or Microsoft that pretty much hides the origins of most of their products (e.g. MS-DOS was bought from Seattle Computer, MS C compiler started as a repackaged Lattice C compiler, etc).
Interesting link - thanks for posting it.
Toasters, irons, incandescant light bulbs and appliances with universal motors ran just fine off of DC - back in the 1930's it was possible to get appliances that ran off of 32VDC (standard voltage for wind-chargers). Appliances such as refrigerators would be more of a problem, bu I wouldn't be surprised if some were made to run off 110VDC. Phonographs required a DC-AC MG-set to provide '60' Hz.