I guess Sarah Palin also has a few scientists agreeing with her.
I have, too, but I must pay them like everyone else.
This "repent! the end is nigh!" religions just wreck my nerves, first it was global cooling, now it's warming, in between was the forest, killer virii, Russians, tomorrow it's the Dollar and all that stuff.
And I refuse to believe that any politician can influence the global temperature average. That is, politicians that are unable to successfully close even ONE SINGLE self-chosen "important" issue over the course of 2x4 years.
Burning less hydrocarbons is fine as it is, but I'm deeply concerned when someone invents a religion on top of a noble goal just so the rabble will follow.
Because I know where it will lead a few years down the road and what will happen to sceptics once the rabid control the timid.
Running around the soccer field does not make anyone a good soccer trainer and 20 years of history in pole dancing does not make anyone a good pole dancer.
Example?
Gene Ray. He's got substantial history on the subject of cosmology. Almost a decade now, mind you.
I say everyone is. Ridiculously wrong theories can be disproved in the blink of an eye. But we cannot ever prove that X is correct. No matter how many scientists approve of theory X, all it takes is a lousy layman, a mentally retarded neurotic to present one hard but crucial counterexample, the one black swan, to stay in Popper's metaphor.
If we protect our theories from critics by demanding qualification, we open the gates for circular reasoning: after a theory gained enough foothold, say a generation or two, all active scientists are white swan theory advocates and if only they were qualified to present a black specimen, we could possibly never see the bird in question, because it would endanger white swan advocates themselves.
Because only a qualified expert can qualify another, we should never request formal qualification before presenting provable evidence. At worst, qualified experts can dismantle their theories in several seconds while educating the general public and at best the qualified experts are proven wrong and society has advanced a bit again.
To do otherwise would be formally the same as a criminal trial where accuser, defense counsel, judge, jury, executioner and even the bailiffs would all be district attorneys.
Trusting any expert on the field more than yourself could be a wise thing to do, but can also expose yourself to deception and lies.
First, there is a vice circle of circular reasoning looming, because authority would then strengthen authority itself. The snowball would steadily grow bigger the longer it rolls. Authority must be questioned the more it weighs behind a certain issue.
Second it is foolish to allow others to do the thinking without questioning them. Ever. While we cannot repeat the whole science behind it every time we turn on the CD player or microwave, we must heartily and steadily question all science and authority that demand access to our taxes and checkbooks for saving the world a few decades down the road. Because it is so easy to lie with statistics when you know what you're doing and the audience doesn't.
Mark my words: never underestimate the desire of others to sucker out some money and never blindly accept any claim, any authority and any science that asks for several billions of your tax dollars.
But don't mind: I've got the Brooklyn Bridge to sell and a truckload of money to move out of Nigeria. Interested?
The problem for the average layperson is this: We have a vast island now under a huge glacier that is called Greenland, one that was once green enough to earn this name. We had several movies about the Ice Age, that, while distorted enough, show prehistoric times when half of Europe was under ice.
Anyone more familiar with the subject knows about the Medieval Warm Period, where tropical plants could be cultivated across most of Europe and also of much older periods where there weren't permanent ice sheets even in Antarctica.
Therefore, everyone should know that Earth has been much much warmer and colder than today and a delta of annual average temperatures of even 5 or more degrees has already happened long before even the great apes had evolved. The world sure looked much different and today would mean a danger to many human settlements, but as the climate itself shifted so much greater degrees before humans arrived, we cannot ever hope to prove humans are the reason for the current warming. We have a warming now: yes. We had warmings and coolings before humans were expending any amount of CO2: yes. We had even greater amounts of warming and cooling long before civilizations fomed: yes. We had still greater warmings and coolings before the Great Apes used their first improvised tool: yes, yes and yes.
I don't know of any reliable way to prove that it's our human CO2 expenditure that's causing the current warming when all we have is fairy tales from the Middle Ages, ice cores from times before the first Human and proxy data from trees of questionable origin. All we could conclude is that we now have a period of warming. Fine. Now prove that it's the human's and ONLY the human's fault without circular reasoning.
No matter if its private property or not, there needs to be some limit on what security guards can and cannot do. A limit in the sense of where I cannot swing my fist near someone's face.
A private property can have its own rules and limits set, but assaulting people is still illegal, no matter if done in private, public or wherever. A guard following your every move could very well be assault and stalking depending on how threatening and/or sexual this behavior would be.
I am all for free and self-regulating markets and stuff, but I don't agree to not hold private property owners to some code of conduct. They can ban helmets, masks, gang symbols, tattoos, skimpy clothes or whatever. But they cannot needlessly zoom in to make downblouse or upskirt pictures of a customer, needlessly stalk or threaten innocents, rifle through handbags, do a full search of bodily orifices etc. etc. etc. - because the customer doesn't give a general permission to violate their every rights when they entered the damn store.
Private venues that are accessible by everyone during most of the day need privacy and decency standards pretty much equal to the surrounding public area, not in spite of free enterprise but to protect vital rights of an unsuspecting populace.
No matter how high or low the concentration of lithium in sea water may be, we could mine out several millions of metric tons from it and not be able to reduce the planet-wide concentration by a noticeable percentage even if we wanted to.
Assuming we have only 1 microgram of lithium per liter of seawater, there would be oodles of lithium and if or while we may be able to economically extract it, there's just so much untreated seawater left that it would not matter much.
The annual planet-wide downwash of lithium into the oceans from rain and rivers is probably much more than all lithium we ever mined in the last 100 years, but it's should be so diluted that it's of no economic use to extract it.
We could always throw our used lithium batteries back in the oceans:)
All countries with a developed civil infrastructure OR a stable leadership would have done some prospecting by now. We might have some luck in North Korea and Somalia, but I wouldn't count on it. In all other countries, the mining multinationals should be done with at least a cursory prospecting by now, I guess.
A few decades and asteroid mining will look like a real alternative.
We can always sit back and have some popcorn while the fireworks are on display. Worked pretty well after the US brought their troops home after Vietnam. Except for most intellectuals, teachers, students, writers, artists, engineers, politicians and entrepreneurs in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar. But dead people can't hold a peace march so we have forgotten about them by now.
Paper batteries sound like a nice energy-to-weight ratio, which would be great. Our automotive companies should have still some SUV design blueprints and toolsets lying around so energy-to-volume ratios would be less of a limit. The large cargo compartment will finally be useful for suburbanites:)
If you're not barefoot on wet floor tiles and in the 110V region, you might survive for a second try. Oh and don't hold the knife in your left hand, and keep your feet together:)
These alloys were cheaper if they are so easily obtainable, but I think there's a reason behind the price of stainless steel, which could be simple scarcity or high production costs.
A cursory glance at Wiki Grandma tells me that stainless steel requires a chromium content of 10 percent or more. And of course we have a singular dominant reserve: chromium is mined primarily in South Africa, harboring half the world's mineable reserves.
Not only that, but stainless steel is an even worse conductor than plain vanilla steel, having a resistance that is more than 30 times higher.
I was of course thinking of Bolivia, which currently instigates all sorts of quarrels along their borders. They successfully installed metastases in neighboring countries and are clamoring for more, hence the term "Domino".
Of course we can always wait for the socialist dictatorship to snuff some *millions* in their inevitable joy camps and then just build a memorial. This would be sensible, cheap, safe, environmentally-friendly, politically-correct and deeply respecting the local culture and religion.
You can still do a lot wrong when you're doing nothing. I suggest we print more money and send it to them, that's what my great European Union does all the time - and boy, it works sooo well, just look at Somalia, where an entire new industry with thousands of jobs was created by paying hundreds of millions to free a few ships.
Specific Ampere hours don't tell much about the energy content, which is the crucial value in battery development.
The paper talks about a 1-1.2V battery, so we could assume it gets about 1 Wh/g or 1kWh/kg. 1 kWh = 3.6MJ, so this battery could reach about 3-4MJ/kg.
Gasoline or diesel are in the range of 40-50 MJ/kg, but the engine and ancilliaries are much heavier than a simple electric motor. This electric motor has a much higher torque than four-stroke gasoline engines and can sustain short bursts of much higher peaks, therefore 75kW would be comparable in an electric car. Assuming a common automotive power plant of 100kW weighs about 200kg complete with all liquids including 50l of gasoline, we would have 12.5MJ/kg for this common application total.
This revolutionary battery is still only a third of the power-to-weight ratio of a common automotive power plant (with an estimate probably erring some in favor of the battery). And that is without the electric motor, because I have no idea how much a 75kW specimen weighs.
My car still burns non-rechargeable hydrocarbons and one tank barely lasts 600 hours.
If the energy-to-weight and energy-to-cost ratios of that battery could reach even the general vicinity of gasoline, everything else concerning click-in systems or replacement is peanuts and will be invented less than one second after the battery itself. Of course we will have BluBattery and HD-Battery warring for dominance, but that's only a minor nuisance compared to the fact that we now could power cars, trucks, boats and airliners without needing to pay or liberate more 17th century cleptocracies somewhere in the deserts.
We are already extracting sodium and chloride from sea water and it's a boon to people and Golf courses in the Middle East.
But we could start mining lithium in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and filter out all the plastic nurdles there and sell them as a cheap by-product, would that appease the Greens?
A few weeks after Peak Copper, Peak Oil and Peak IQ.
Peak Oil is scheduled since thirty years to happen any minute. Peak Copper is currently underway in Europe because valuable non-ferrous metals are pilfered where and whenever the police isn't looking for a second. But Peak IQ already happened in 1990 (google for "Flynn Effect", if you doubt it) but I think it was some sort of a pre-requisite for the other Peaks - with the exception of Peak Climate, which curiously follows the inverse of the Flynn Effect trend.
The chemical name for mercury is "hydrargyrum" and I'm glad nobody uses that regularly. "Quicksilver" could follow the latin word best without bending the tongue of scientists and technicians beyond repair.
Oh and the commies are back already. And finished nationalizing the critical mining industries several years ago.
And they openly traded weapons with Iran and North Korea, boasted their strength and are currently dominoeing all neighboring countries to follow a socialist agenda. With Maoist rebels operating in the border territory against the still-capitalistic neighbor and all that.
Slashdot Mirror
If you do that, I hope you invest your own money.
If Obama and the European bunch does that, they invest MY money. And I rather have a say about that.
I guess Sarah Palin also has a few scientists agreeing with her.
I have, too, but I must pay them like everyone else.
This "repent! the end is nigh!" religions just wreck my nerves, first it was global cooling, now it's warming, in between was the forest, killer virii, Russians, tomorrow it's the Dollar and all that stuff.
And I refuse to believe that any politician can influence the global temperature average. That is, politicians that are unable to successfully close even ONE SINGLE self-chosen "important" issue over the course of 2x4 years.
It's almost as legitimate as man-made global warming.
Gene Ray takes it pretty seriously himself AND he has years of experience in cosmology.
But that doesn't mean it's NOT crap he writes :)
And Iceland was named that way to discourage invaders?
And Antarctica wasn't free of ice a million years ago?
And palm trees didn't grow in Berlin and London in the 14th century?
Of course you shouldn't.
Burning less hydrocarbons is fine as it is, but I'm deeply concerned when someone invents a religion on top of a noble goal just so the rabble will follow.
Because I know where it will lead a few years down the road and what will happen to sceptics once the rabid control the timid.
Running around the soccer field does not make anyone a good soccer trainer and 20 years of history in pole dancing does not make anyone a good pole dancer.
Example?
Gene Ray. He's got substantial history on the subject of cosmology. Almost a decade now, mind you.
Care to take a look at his work?
http://www.timecube.com/
Admitting that only rhetoric and appeals to emotion is what moves the rabble is one thing.
But actively engaging in rabble rousing changes not the rabble, it changes you.
Galileo was too?
I say everyone is. Ridiculously wrong theories can be disproved in the blink of an eye. But we cannot ever prove that X is correct. No matter how many scientists approve of theory X, all it takes is a lousy layman, a mentally retarded neurotic to present one hard but crucial counterexample, the one black swan, to stay in Popper's metaphor.
If we protect our theories from critics by demanding qualification, we open the gates for circular reasoning: after a theory gained enough foothold, say a generation or two, all active scientists are white swan theory advocates and if only they were qualified to present a black specimen, we could possibly never see the bird in question, because it would endanger white swan advocates themselves.
Because only a qualified expert can qualify another, we should never request formal qualification before presenting provable evidence. At worst, qualified experts can dismantle their theories in several seconds while educating the general public and at best the qualified experts are proven wrong and society has advanced a bit again.
To do otherwise would be formally the same as a criminal trial where accuser, defense counsel, judge, jury, executioner and even the bailiffs would all be district attorneys.
Trusting any expert on the field more than yourself could be a wise thing to do, but can also expose yourself to deception and lies.
First, there is a vice circle of circular reasoning looming, because authority would then strengthen authority itself. The snowball would steadily grow bigger the longer it rolls. Authority must be questioned the more it weighs behind a certain issue.
Second it is foolish to allow others to do the thinking without questioning them. Ever. While we cannot repeat the whole science behind it every time we turn on the CD player or microwave, we must heartily and steadily question all science and authority that demand access to our taxes and checkbooks for saving the world a few decades down the road. Because it is so easy to lie with statistics when you know what you're doing and the audience doesn't.
Mark my words: never underestimate the desire of others to sucker out some money and never blindly accept any claim, any authority and any science that asks for several billions of your tax dollars.
But don't mind: I've got the Brooklyn Bridge to sell and a truckload of money to move out of Nigeria. Interested?
The problem for the average layperson is this: We have a vast island now under a huge glacier that is called Greenland, one that was once green enough to earn this name. We had several movies about the Ice Age, that, while distorted enough, show prehistoric times when half of Europe was under ice.
Anyone more familiar with the subject knows about the Medieval Warm Period, where tropical plants could be cultivated across most of Europe and also of much older periods where there weren't permanent ice sheets even in Antarctica.
Therefore, everyone should know that Earth has been much much warmer and colder than today and a delta of annual average temperatures of even 5 or more degrees has already happened long before even the great apes had evolved. The world sure looked much different and today would mean a danger to many human settlements, but as the climate itself shifted so much greater degrees before humans arrived, we cannot ever hope to prove humans are the reason for the current warming. We have a warming now: yes. We had warmings and coolings before humans were expending any amount of CO2: yes. We had even greater amounts of warming and cooling long before civilizations fomed: yes. We had still greater warmings and coolings before the Great Apes used their first improvised tool: yes, yes and yes.
I don't know of any reliable way to prove that it's our human CO2 expenditure that's causing the current warming when all we have is fairy tales from the Middle Ages, ice cores from times before the first Human and proxy data from trees of questionable origin. All we could conclude is that we now have a period of warming. Fine. Now prove that it's the human's and ONLY the human's fault without circular reasoning.
No matter if its private property or not, there needs to be some limit on what security guards can and cannot do. A limit in the sense of where I cannot swing my fist near someone's face.
A private property can have its own rules and limits set, but assaulting people is still illegal, no matter if done in private, public or wherever. A guard following your every move could very well be assault and stalking depending on how threatening and/or sexual this behavior would be.
I am all for free and self-regulating markets and stuff, but I don't agree to not hold private property owners to some code of conduct. They can ban helmets, masks, gang symbols, tattoos, skimpy clothes or whatever. But they cannot needlessly zoom in to make downblouse or upskirt pictures of a customer, needlessly stalk or threaten innocents, rifle through handbags, do a full search of bodily orifices etc. etc. etc. - because the customer doesn't give a general permission to violate their every rights when they entered the damn store.
Private venues that are accessible by everyone during most of the day need privacy and decency standards pretty much equal to the surrounding public area, not in spite of free enterprise but to protect vital rights of an unsuspecting populace.
No matter how high or low the concentration of lithium in sea water may be, we could mine out several millions of metric tons from it and not be able to reduce the planet-wide concentration by a noticeable percentage even if we wanted to.
Assuming we have only 1 microgram of lithium per liter of seawater, there would be oodles of lithium and if or while we may be able to economically extract it, there's just so much untreated seawater left that it would not matter much.
The annual planet-wide downwash of lithium into the oceans from rain and rivers is probably much more than all lithium we ever mined in the last 100 years, but it's should be so diluted that it's of no economic use to extract it.
We could always throw our used lithium batteries back in the oceans :)
All countries with a developed civil infrastructure OR a stable leadership would have done some prospecting by now. We might have some luck in North Korea and Somalia, but I wouldn't count on it. In all other countries, the mining multinationals should be done with at least a cursory prospecting by now, I guess.
A few decades and asteroid mining will look like a real alternative.
We can always sit back and have some popcorn while the fireworks are on display. Worked pretty well after the US brought their troops home after Vietnam. Except for most intellectuals, teachers, students, writers, artists, engineers, politicians and entrepreneurs in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar. But dead people can't hold a peace march so we have forgotten about them by now.
Paper batteries sound like a nice energy-to-weight ratio, which would be great. Our automotive companies should have still some SUV design blueprints and toolsets lying around so energy-to-volume ratios would be less of a limit. The large cargo compartment will finally be useful for suburbanites :)
If you're not barefoot on wet floor tiles and in the 110V region, you might survive for a second try. Oh and don't hold the knife in your left hand, and keep your feet together :)
These alloys were cheaper if they are so easily obtainable, but I think there's a reason behind the price of stainless steel, which could be simple scarcity or high production costs.
A cursory glance at Wiki Grandma tells me that stainless steel requires a chromium content of 10 percent or more. And of course we have a singular dominant reserve: chromium is mined primarily in South Africa, harboring half the world's mineable reserves.
Not only that, but stainless steel is an even worse conductor than plain vanilla steel, having a resistance that is more than 30 times higher.
I was of course thinking of Bolivia, which currently instigates all sorts of quarrels along their borders. They successfully installed metastases in neighboring countries and are clamoring for more, hence the term "Domino".
Of course we can always wait for the socialist dictatorship to snuff some *millions* in their inevitable joy camps and then just build a memorial. This would be sensible, cheap, safe, environmentally-friendly, politically-correct and deeply respecting the local culture and religion.
You can still do a lot wrong when you're doing nothing. I suggest we print more money and send it to them, that's what my great European Union does all the time - and boy, it works sooo well, just look at Somalia, where an entire new industry with thousands of jobs was created by paying hundreds of millions to free a few ships.
Specific Ampere hours don't tell much about the energy content, which is the crucial value in battery development.
The paper talks about a 1-1.2V battery, so we could assume it gets about 1 Wh/g or 1kWh/kg. 1 kWh = 3.6MJ, so this battery could reach about 3-4MJ/kg.
Gasoline or diesel are in the range of 40-50 MJ/kg, but the engine and ancilliaries are much heavier than a simple electric motor. This electric motor has a much higher torque than four-stroke gasoline engines and can sustain short bursts of much higher peaks, therefore 75kW would be comparable in an electric car. Assuming a common automotive power plant of 100kW weighs about 200kg complete with all liquids including 50l of gasoline, we would have 12.5MJ/kg for this common application total.
This revolutionary battery is still only a third of the power-to-weight ratio of a common automotive power plant (with an estimate probably erring some in favor of the battery). And that is without the electric motor, because I have no idea how much a 75kW specimen weighs.
My car still burns non-rechargeable hydrocarbons and one tank barely lasts 600 hours.
If the energy-to-weight and energy-to-cost ratios of that battery could reach even the general vicinity of gasoline, everything else concerning click-in systems or replacement is peanuts and will be invented less than one second after the battery itself. Of course we will have BluBattery and HD-Battery warring for dominance, but that's only a minor nuisance compared to the fact that we now could power cars, trucks, boats and airliners without needing to pay or liberate more 17th century cleptocracies somewhere in the deserts.
We are already extracting sodium and chloride from sea water and it's a boon to people and Golf courses in the Middle East.
But we could start mining lithium in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and filter out all the plastic nurdles there and sell them as a cheap by-product, would that appease the Greens?
A few weeks after Peak Copper, Peak Oil and Peak IQ.
Peak Oil is scheduled since thirty years to happen any minute.
Peak Copper is currently underway in Europe because valuable non-ferrous metals are pilfered where and whenever the police isn't looking for a second.
But Peak IQ already happened in 1990 (google for "Flynn Effect", if you doubt it) but I think it was some sort of a pre-requisite for the other Peaks - with the exception of Peak Climate, which curiously follows the inverse of the Flynn Effect trend.
The chemical name for mercury is "hydrargyrum" and I'm glad nobody uses that regularly. "Quicksilver" could follow the latin word best without bending the tongue of scientists and technicians beyond repair.
Oh and the commies are back already. And finished nationalizing the critical mining industries several years ago.
And they openly traded weapons with Iran and North Korea, boasted their strength and are currently dominoeing all neighboring countries to follow a socialist agenda. With Maoist rebels operating in the border territory against the still-capitalistic neighbor and all that.
Just like the good ol' times.