... we're already pretty close to the limit on available power in the USA.
No we aren't. Total generating capacity in the USA is close to a terawatt, while average electric consumption is around 440 GW.
What we lack is peak generating capacity. I'll bet my pocket protector that there's considerable off-peak generating capacity available even in rolling-blackout territory, and there would be plenty more if there weren't huge difficulties with non-gas fired generation in California (natural gas is getting scarce and the price is going way up). The problem there isn't finding the generators at 2 AM, it's finding the fuel to run them.
... electricity still has to come from somewhere. And if that source happens to be the existing power grid (i.e., you plug you car in while you're at home, or parked somewhere), then that power is still most likely coming from fossil fuels. It doesn't buy you anything.
Sure it does. Here's a list:
It lets you use non-petroleum fuels (or no fuel) to run the car.
It lets you cogenerate with the fuel used to run the car.
It lets you put the powerplant and the car in different places.
Given that electric cars require storage, it lets you generate the power and use the power at different times (how big the difference can be depends on how much the battery can store).
All of these features are levers you can use to extract benefits which are unavailable from the current crop of vehicles.
An induction motor won't be helped at all by a static remnant field, because it's going to be applying a rotating field that
needs a rotating induced field to grab onto, and
is going to degauss any remnant field in a flash.
You might be thinking of DC generators, which need some remnant magnetism in the field to bootstrap themselves (and can be magnetized backwards, causing all kinds of fun behavior).
In the case of a cooling system, the heat flux will be higher than with water or alcohol (heatpipe...). The specific heat's waaay lower, but the thermal conductivity (as in the rate the heat's absorbed or dissipated...) is much, much higher.
Heat pipes work by phase change. The thermal conductivity of your gallium alloy doesn't matter much, because it's competing against a thin layer of water or alcohol absorbed on a metallic wick. As a bonus, when the liquid evaporates it can travel to the cold end with almost no pressure loss, meaning next to zero temperature drop.
Convection just hasn't got anything on phase-change heat transfer.
I believe you have mis-remembered or mis-heard the incident you relate in paragraph 1. It sounds a lot like Alan Sokal's spoof (he did it alone), "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". The full paper is here, and links to much of the aftermath are at his site.
And yes, the people editting such a journal of nonsense should be relieved of their teaching duties, offices and probably their salaries as well.
The "New World" turned out to be the solution to a host of problems in Europe (not that the native Americans did well, far from it). Religious intolerance? Let 'em sail off to Massachusetts. Cut down all our forests? Plenty over there. Huge masses of poor? Ship them too, and our increasing productivity from industrialization will let us all live better while those ex-peons trade us raw materials for our finished goods. Europe made out really well on the deal.
Not only can people do science a lot better (faster, more flexibly) than robots, the solutions to a host of problems in our current world are at least potentially findable in space. Anything that needs extreme biological isolation is best done well outside of Earth orbit. You can modulate Earth's incoming sunlight a lot better from space. You can capture immense amounts of energy for very little effort in space. You canNOT defend against an Earth-threatening asteroid or comet without getting substantial amounts of hardware into space, and most any large effort takes lead time.
We're something like 30 years past Gerry O'Neil's pioneering space colony research. Our technology has moved on, but our practices are largely mired in the 1970's. On the other hand, our imperatives are changing rapidly: global warming is admitted by all serious climate scientists (note the disclaimer) and oil is becoming both financially and politically dangerous to use the way we do now. Some of the easiest engineering solutions to these problems are potentially done in space. To do serious work there, people are going to have to live at the job site. That makes it time to go.
... until the cashier and manager are fired, and Best Buy has paid Mr. Bolesta a large sum of money for his inconvenience.
But ideally, the law would put the manager and cashier in stocks with a sign saying "Morons Of The Week" over them, and people (starting with Mr. Michael Bolesta and family) would be able to throw overripe tomatoes at them for an hour, and the results would be printed up in color in the local Sunday paper.
Do you think that would be sufficiently humiliating to rein in rampant stupidity? I do.
You just need it to be cheap (and cheap after the costs of fighting NIMBY lawsuits are factored in).
Not only has nobody ever fought PV because of NIMBY (though homeowner's associations may have demanded that roofs not have anything on them except the prescribed style of shingles), you also eliminate the cost and losses of the transmission and distribution system.
I'm all for alternatives to PV. If Energy Innovations could have gotten their #$&! together and put the $1/watt concentrating Stirling on the market, I would have been all over that. But until someone does it, PV is where it's at.
Replacement should be closer to 5%/year; 25-year warranties have been the norm for a while.
Current growth rate in PV seems to be closer to 30%/year, and may be higher. If growth has been even 10%/year over 25 years, retiring all the 25-yr-old hardware is only going to remove 9% of the year's new capacity (and will do nothing to change the growth rate); for 20%/year it would be about 1%, and at 25%/year it would be 0.38%.
If someone brings a PV technology on-line which can produce power more cheaply than retail electric, you can expect demand to ramp up into the gigawatts and even tens of gigawatts per year. If any team of a roofing crew and an electrician can get into the act, WATCH OUT.
When the yurt has a photoelectric roof, stores electricity in lithium-polymer batteries in the floor and uses bags of water against the walls for thermal mass, it's going to feel an awful lot like a real home, only cheap and portable as well as low-impact.
Aluminum burns under the right conditions, and everyone should know something about magnesium. The fact that titanium dioxide is so stable means that it is very tightly bound... and that binding energy means a lot of heat of formation.
My take is that you have been indoctrinated in evolutionist boot camp?
Quite wrong. I grew up with regular training, and my then-church tried to indoctrinate me into being a book-burning fundie (literally!). I had no training in reason (and by extension, the scientific method) as the best way of understanding the world; I came to that conclusion by myself in an environment where this was, if not anathema, seriously frowned upon.
I don't go with the crowd, I believe and do what's right.
If any other scientific theory was under as much controversy and disagreement as evolution, it would hardly be considered a scientific "fact".
You are saying that a political/religious controversy casts doubt upon the science? You are quite wrong. Theologians and the public can be completely full of crap; all that counts is the facts in the form of the evidence and the scientific theories (falsifiable models) which are consistent with them.
I've never encountered a person with your views who knows much about either the history of science or the history of the laughable errors of biblical exegesis, so I'll fill you in on one of the latter that I was chuckling over earlier today.
It's long been known that the Earth is a spheroid; the shadow cast on the Moon during lunar eclipses is a circular arc regardless of the position of the Moon in the sky, and the only shape which has the cross-section of a circle from all angles is a sphere, QED. One geometer even calculated the circumference to a good approximation, based on sun angles. Yet there were people using the New Testament to claim that, since Satan could not have shown Jesus all the kingdoms of Earth from one mountaintop had it been convex, that the Earth was flat! Later, other theologians claimed that there was only one inhabited side of the Earth, based again on Scripture:
The Pope [Zachary], as the infallible teacher of Christendom, made a strong response. He cited passages from the book of Job and the Wisdom of Solomon against the doctrine of the antipodes; he declared it
"perverse, iniquitous, and against Virgil's own soul," and indicated a purpose of driving him from his bishopric. Whether this purpose was carried out or not, the old theological view, by virtue of the Pope's divinely ordered and protected "inerrancy," was re-established, and the doctrine that the earth has inhabitants on but one of its sides became more than ever
orthodox, and precious in the mind of the Church.[34]
... ... the eminent Spanish theologian Tostatus, even as late as the age of Columbus, felt called upon to protest against [the doctrine of the antipodes] as "unsafe." He had shaped the old missile of St. Augustine into
the following syllogism: "The apostles were commanded to go into all the world and to preach the gospel to every creature; they did not go to any such part of the world as the antipodes; they did not preach to any creatures there: ergo, no antipodes exist."
but scientists are confident in evolution (mind you, only a certain percentage of scientists believe in evolution, and only a fraction of that are confident) because this is the only explanation for intelligent life outside of religious creation stories.
You've managed to make several gross errors in one sentence:
Failing to state what that "only" percentage is.
What the percentage is for working biologists, vs. solid-state physics. (Hint: it's an overwhelming majority.)
That the explanation for intelligent life is central, aside from the very specific study of hominids.
I sure won't have to look hard to find another faith that condones genocide (verses 10-12) repeatedly (15.2, 15.3), or moving into modern times (as opposed to holy doctrine) bombing clinics and gay bars...
Look at the number of people dancing in the streets at the news of bar bombings. Compare to the number of people condemning those acts. Were any people murdered for their opposition to such mayhem? How long was it before the perpetrators were broadly condemned as apostate? Hours, or minutes? Did the fringe apologists gain or lose public stature?
I think that the Religious Reich has a lot to answer for, but when you compare attitudes among evangelicals in America with regard to what they regard as blasphemy to those among Dutch-born Muslims regarding Theo van Gogh, you cannot honestly say that the latter are even remotely as tolerant and fit for membership in a pluralist society. As van Gogh found out, that mistake can be fatal.
Say what you will; no Christian society has been that bad for at least a century. As an atheist I would much rather live in the increasingly intolerant USA than in any Muslim country.
The Reverend Franklin Graham called Islam a 'very evil and wicked religion' and said the Qur'an, Islam's revealed text, 'preaches violence.'
Unfortunately, they can both be true. You can have a majority of sane and decent Muslims AND the religion can be evil and wicked and preach violence.
Converts are usually the most enthusiastic members of any faith. They often try the hardest to share what they now have with others. But you'll have to look a long, long time before you find another faith which motivates its converts to try to blow up airliners.
... the responses have shown me that you, as a community, are ignoring the rotting buffalo carcass in the living room that is the very real hate-mongering within your ranks.
It would be nearly trivial to quash that if there weren't facts behind it. Further, uncritical defense of the religion regardless of the crimes committed in its name or the actual attitudes of its adherents reinforces - justifiably - the very attitudes you're condemning.
Defending the indefensible is great training for second-class citizenship under Islam (dhimmi status; also see here).
They can call me an idiot if I weigh in on how many angels can dance on a pinhead...
So, what is the latest on the number of angels which can dance on a creationist?;-)
Seriously, the only time you can call these people idiots without going through the preliminary motions is when your audience already has a clue; otherwise, you will suffer loss of credibility yourself. Most of the American public is poorly educated (just look at Slashdot!) and takes anything that looks like bluster from self-appointed authorities very poorly, unless that authority is their religion. To damage the creationists in the eyes of others, you need to trap them in a contradiction or otherwise make them look like the BS artists that they are. Unfortunately, this takes work.
Yes, it sucks. No, I'm not good at it either. Life isn't fair.
A good theory is a theory that is falsifiable. Evolutionary theory is so vague that there is no way to falsify it.
I see the creationists got to you before your BS detector was working.
It would be trivial to falsify evolution, if it was wrong. One rabbit fossil in the same strata as dinosaurs would do it. One bird with the ammonites. One bony fish with wiwaxia.
Scientists are confident in evolution because nothing even remotely like this has ever been found.
Moreover, it is not reproducible.
It's "reproduced" every time new data is dug up, and it confirms the same patterns. It is also reproduced in the laboratory, where short-lived specimens are observed to evolve (and even speciate) within the scale of individual researcher's careers.
Note that astrophysics is not "reproducible" in the second sense, yet I don't see you attacking it as non-science!
There have been no experiments (yet) that were able to reproduce evolution even in its simplest forms.
You're using the term rather vaguely. What does "reproducing evolution" mean in this context? Speciation has been observed, to list one part of evolution. You might also want to look at the evidence for common descent before going further.
Especially considering the lack of intermediary forms, an "evolutionist" might argue that chagnes became very sudden. As a matter of fact, so sudden that it appears that almost some "force" caused the change to happen so suddenly that no intermediary forms have been captures by the fossil record.
Oddly, anti-evolutionists claim that every discovery of an intermediate form makes TWO "unexplained gaps" in the fossil record where there was only one; their objections appear increasingly dishonest and desperate. (Though that doesn't even scrape the surface of anti-evolutionist dishonesty.)
How is this any different from the belief in "God" who is responsible for making changes... ?
Oh, that's easy. It doesn't postulate any unknown and unknowable mechanisms which implicitly state "There Is Nothing More That You Can Know Here". It also lets paleontology be a science, where things are expected to operate by consistent and knowable principles rather than the whims of some omnipotent entity; if the creationists were right, paleontology would instead be a type of art history.
Except calling people idiots, no matter how idiotic they are, will alienate others from you. Many of them buy the "equal treatment" doctrine for creationist nonsense, probably because they have so little education in such matters that they can't tell the difference between one sensible-sounding explanation expounded with confidence and another.
If you are going to call them idiots, you have to wait until they have proven it to everyone who is listening or reading, or who even might be listening or reaing in the future. And even then they will quote you out of context to show how unfairly you treated them!
Portland cement reacts chemically with water as part of its hardening process. It can't be re-softened by wetting it, and the building wouldn't be terribly useful in most climates if it could.
If you drop it in the middle of a monsoon, nothing happens. It's inside a sealed waterproof plastic bag, you silly git. If it wasn't sealed against humidity, the cement would set up all by itself while it was in storage.
Slashdot Mirror
Just drop it in the crusher... with him still at the wheel.
What we lack is peak generating capacity. I'll bet my pocket protector that there's considerable off-peak generating capacity available even in rolling-blackout territory, and there would be plenty more if there weren't huge difficulties with non-gas fired generation in California (natural gas is getting scarce and the price is going way up). The problem there isn't finding the generators at 2 AM, it's finding the fuel to run them.
- It lets you use non-petroleum fuels (or no fuel) to run the car.
- It lets you cogenerate with the fuel used to run the car.
- It lets you put the powerplant and the car in different places.
- Given that electric cars require storage, it lets you generate the power and use the power at different times (how big the difference can be depends on how much the battery can store).
All of these features are levers you can use to extract benefits which are unavailable from the current crop of vehicles.- needs a rotating induced field to grab onto, and
- is going to degauss any remnant field in a flash.
You might be thinking of DC generators, which need some remnant magnetism in the field to bootstrap themselves (and can be magnetized backwards, causing all kinds of fun behavior).Convection just hasn't got anything on phase-change heat transfer.
And yes, the people editting such a journal of nonsense should be relieved of their teaching duties, offices and probably their salaries as well.
The "New World" turned out to be the solution to a host of problems in Europe (not that the native Americans did well, far from it). Religious intolerance? Let 'em sail off to Massachusetts. Cut down all our forests? Plenty over there. Huge masses of poor? Ship them too, and our increasing productivity from industrialization will let us all live better while those ex-peons trade us raw materials for our finished goods. Europe made out really well on the deal.
Not only can people do science a lot better (faster, more flexibly) than robots, the solutions to a host of problems in our current world are at least potentially findable in space. Anything that needs extreme biological isolation is best done well outside of Earth orbit. You can modulate Earth's incoming sunlight a lot better from space. You can capture immense amounts of energy for very little effort in space. You canNOT defend against an Earth-threatening asteroid or comet without getting substantial amounts of hardware into space, and most any large effort takes lead time.
We're something like 30 years past Gerry O'Neil's pioneering space colony research. Our technology has moved on, but our practices are largely mired in the 1970's. On the other hand, our imperatives are changing rapidly: global warming is admitted by all serious climate scientists (note the disclaimer) and oil is becoming both financially and politically dangerous to use the way we do now. Some of the easiest engineering solutions to these problems are potentially done in space. To do serious work there, people are going to have to live at the job site. That makes it time to go.
But ideally, the law would put the manager and cashier in stocks with a sign saying "Morons Of The Week" over them, and people (starting with Mr. Michael Bolesta and family) would be able to throw overripe tomatoes at them for an hour, and the results would be printed up in color in the local Sunday paper.
Do you think that would be sufficiently humiliating to rein in rampant stupidity? I do.
I'm all for alternatives to PV. If Energy Innovations could have gotten their #$&! together and put the $1/watt concentrating Stirling on the market, I would have been all over that. But until someone does it, PV is where it's at.
Current growth rate in PV seems to be closer to 30%/year, and may be higher. If growth has been even 10%/year over 25 years, retiring all the 25-yr-old hardware is only going to remove 9% of the year's new capacity (and will do nothing to change the growth rate); for 20%/year it would be about 1%, and at 25%/year it would be 0.38%.
If someone brings a PV technology on-line which can produce power more cheaply than retail electric, you can expect demand to ramp up into the gigawatts and even tens of gigawatts per year. If any team of a roofing crew and an electrician can get into the act, WATCH OUT.
When the yurt has a photoelectric roof, stores electricity in lithium-polymer batteries in the floor and uses bags of water against the walls for thermal mass, it's going to feel an awful lot like a real home, only cheap and portable as well as low-impact.
I don't think that's the conclusion you wanted.
Aluminum burns under the right conditions, and everyone should know something about magnesium. The fact that titanium dioxide is so stable means that it is very tightly bound... and that binding energy means a lot of heat of formation.
Quite wrong. I grew up with regular training, and my then-church tried to indoctrinate me into being a book-burning fundie (literally!). I had no training in reason (and by extension, the scientific method) as the best way of understanding the world; I came to that conclusion by myself in an environment where this was, if not anathema, seriously frowned upon.
I don't go with the crowd, I believe and do what's right.
You are saying that a political/religious controversy casts doubt upon the science? You are quite wrong. Theologians and the public can be completely full of crap; all that counts is the facts in the form of the evidence and the scientific theories (falsifiable models) which are consistent with them.
I've never encountered a person with your views who knows much about either the history of science or the history of the laughable errors of biblical exegesis, so I'll fill you in on one of the latter that I was chuckling over earlier today.
It's long been known that the Earth is a spheroid; the shadow cast on the Moon during lunar eclipses is a circular arc regardless of the position of the Moon in the sky, and the only shape which has the cross-section of a circle from all angles is a sphere, QED. One geometer even calculated the circumference to a good approximation, based on sun angles. Yet there were people using the New Testament to claim that, since Satan could not have shown Jesus all the kingdoms of Earth from one mountaintop had it been convex, that the Earth was flat! Later, other theologians claimed that there was only one inhabited side of the Earth, based again on Scripture:
Full text here.
There's a surprise.
You've managed to make several gross errors in one sentence:
In truth, the fraction of scientists who are
I think that the Religious Reich has a lot to answer for, but when you compare attitudes among evangelicals in America with regard to what they regard as blasphemy to those among Dutch-born Muslims regarding Theo van Gogh, you cannot honestly say that the latter are even remotely as tolerant and fit for membership in a pluralist society. As van Gogh found out, that mistake can be fatal.
Show me another religion which still imposes capital punishment for apostates, both formally where it is dominant and informally where it is not, to this very day.Say what you will; no Christian society has been that bad for at least a century. As an atheist I would much rather live in the increasingly intolerant USA than in any Muslim country.
Converts are usually the most enthusiastic members of any faith. They often try the hardest to share what they now have with others. But you'll have to look a long, long time before you find another faith which motivates its converts to try to blow up airliners.
You'll find plenty more examples here, including examples of broad support for terrorism among Muslims even in the west. Also see The Middle East Media Research Institute.
It would be nearly trivial to quash that if there weren't facts behind it. Further, uncritical defense of the religion regardless of the crimes committed in its name or the actual attitudes of its adherents reinforces - justifiably - the very attitudes you're condemning.Defending the indefensible is great training for second-class citizenship under Islam (dhimmi status; also see here).
You'll find all the brothers-in-arms you could want at The Panda's Thumb.
Seriously, the only time you can call these people idiots without going through the preliminary motions is when your audience already has a clue; otherwise, you will suffer loss of credibility yourself. Most of the American public is poorly educated (just look at Slashdot!) and takes anything that looks like bluster from self-appointed authorities very poorly, unless that authority is their religion. To damage the creationists in the eyes of others, you need to trap them in a contradiction or otherwise make them look like the BS artists that they are. Unfortunately, this takes work.
Yes, it sucks. No, I'm not good at it either. Life isn't fair.
It would be trivial to falsify evolution, if it was wrong. One rabbit fossil in the same strata as dinosaurs would do it. One bird with the ammonites. One bony fish with wiwaxia.
Scientists are confident in evolution because nothing even remotely like this has ever been found.
It's "reproduced" every time new data is dug up, and it confirms the same patterns. It is also reproduced in the laboratory, where short-lived specimens are observed to evolve (and even speciate) within the scale of individual researcher's careers.Note that astrophysics is not "reproducible" in the second sense, yet I don't see you attacking it as non-science!
You're using the term rather vaguely. What does "reproducing evolution" mean in this context? Speciation has been observed, to list one part of evolution. You might also want to look at the evidence for common descent before going further. Oddly, anti-evolutionists claim that every discovery of an intermediate form makes TWO "unexplained gaps" in the fossil record where there was only one; their objections appear increasingly dishonest and desperate. (Though that doesn't even scrape the surface of anti-evolutionist dishonesty.) Oh, that's easy. It doesn't postulate any unknown and unknowable mechanisms which implicitly state "There Is Nothing More That You Can Know Here". It also lets paleontology be a science, where things are expected to operate by consistent and knowable principles rather than the whims of some omnipotent entity; if the creationists were right, paleontology would instead be a type of art history.- The highly-oxygenated atmosphere reduces the number of places where proto-organic substances can survive without being degraded.
- The presence of competitive lifeforms means that the raw substances from which new life could arise are likely to be eaten before they get the chance.
- If they did, they'd have to compete against organisms with billions of years of evolutionary advances.
So no, I don't think that it's still happening. But the it's like the reason the starter on your engine is only energized until it fires.If you are going to call them idiots, you have to wait until they have proven it to everyone who is listening or reading, or who even might be listening or reaing in the future. And even then they will quote you out of context to show how unfairly you treated them!
The kind of people who steal laptops for industrial espionage can hire top-flight expertise. They don't need to Ask Slashdot.
Portland cement reacts chemically with water as part of its hardening process. It can't be re-softened by wetting it, and the building wouldn't be terribly useful in most climates if it could.
If you drop it in the middle of a monsoon, nothing happens. It's inside a sealed waterproof plastic bag, you silly git. If it wasn't sealed against humidity, the cement would set up all by itself while it was in storage.
If you have 270 women, you can make a baby on average in a day.