Really? Because I just put 13 gallons in my ~3mpg Civic this morning.
So - where is your previous 13 gallons? Let's go back to where it came from, the oil it was refined from. Considerably more than 13 gallons, by the way - it may be as much as 26 gallons of oil, presuming 87 octane. You've used that up. It is gone now. It isn't, as far as we know, being replaced by any process. There's a finite amount. What you did was use a good portion of it up and make a bunch of pollution. When you got "more", you just made the situation worse - it's still not being replaced.
With electricity, we can make more. Indefinitely. And by indefinitely, I mean forever. We don't have to make any pollution in the process. And cars like your civic can have a lot more power and torque. This is why gasoline - and really, anything that you burn with the exception of hydrogen, which produces water instead of pollutants - is a distant tail-chaser as compared to 100% electrical systems.
So don't snark. Educate yourself and get with the program. Don't follow the corn/farmers lobby into a second rate technology, and certainly don't encourage the hydrogen types. Electric is the one to bet on, not just because it performs better (and it surely does) but because it is better for everyone.
and equivalent series resistance of supercapacitors, especially, is quite high.
No. Ultracaps can discharge and charge at hundreds of times the rate of batteries without heating at all; if they had a high series resistance, they'd heat up or outright explode. They have a relatively high leakage rate, or at least, some of the technologies do - you must have confused that with the series resistance, which is essentially non-existent.
With ethanol production or synthesized methane or methanol, you grow extra plants that would otherwise not be grown.
That isn't what appears to be happening. Existing production is being diverted, and prices are going up. Just check corn futures; it's as plain as day. But your presumption is wrong anyway; because you are assuming that "extra" plants are grown; Where, and what do they replace? Arid spots with no plants? Buildings or roads? Not likely. They'll be grown in fields, most likely replacing other, less profitable crops (that is what we're seeing right now, BTW.) If weeds can't grow, neither can corn. So of course, they replace other plants. Even if they are just replacing weeds, which is the best case because it doesn't screw up other food crop balances, still, they are other plants that would not have been converted into atmospheric carbon dioxide, but which were already involved in scrubbing it from the atmosphere. So in the end, you are taking in carbon and the releasing it; you would have just been taking it in if you had used the plants for food or just left the lot to weeds. Electric systems produce no CO2, and therefore they clearly win on this basis. You're right that technically, this is an actual carbon neutral system; but if you want to go there, then corn can't be, it is carbon positive as soon as you burn it because if you had not burned it, there would be less CO2 in the air.
you don't have to worry about battery lifetime and disposal issues (the catalysts in fuel cells are much less nasty than the materials in most batteries
Hmm. Interesting. I don't know a whole lot about this. What is the lifetime of a fuel cell before it needs service, replacement, etc.? An ultracap typically allows for many millions of full charge / discharge cycles. So if you fully charged and discharged a system each day (call it 300 miles a day of driving) and lowballed to one million cycles, you'd get a million days of lifetime out of the cell, or about two thousand, seven hundred years of lifetime without any kind of service on the ultracaps whatsoever. Basically, they're install and forget until the car is junked, and then they can be moved to your next vehicle. How do fuel cells stack up to that?
If you're claiming much more than 1 MJ/kg, provide citations, or it's vapour.
Vapor? Perhaps. But I think we're about to find out. EEStor, a company backed by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, claims a specific energy of about 280 watt hours per kilogram, compared with around 120 watt hours per kilogram for lithium-ion and 32 watt hours per kilogram for lead-acid gel batteries. They say this is in a UC with dielectric strengths from 1000 to 3500 volts; the underlying technology has something to do with barium-titanate powders, and yes, I am hand-waving, that's all I know about it.
Jim Miller, vice president of advanced transportation technologies at Maxwell Technologies (a competing maker of ultracaps) and an ultracap expert who spent 18 years doing engineering work at Ford Motors, said "I have no doubt you can develop that kind of material, and the mechanism that gives you the energy storage is clear" which I doubt you would catch him saying if the technology were not as described. He also says a number of doubtful things about the physical stability of ceramics in automotive applications, worries about the low temperature range (which is just FUD... my darned BATTERY needs a heater where I live - temperature low problems are solved off the shelf.) Anyway, when a competitor says "yeah, this is real technology", I'm inclined to go, ok, it's real, then.
EEStor has said this tech will be shipping this year - 2007 - as an energy supply system for an electric vehicle. This isn't my claim; this is theirs. So we'll both wait and see.
It's the assumption of a "reasonable dielectric" that knocked you off your horse. That's where ultracaps have left the building. They're using altogether unreasonable dielectrics, and there is stuff on lab benches that is approaching battery levels right now.
The energy storage medium of the future will be fuel cells (either hydrogen-based with relatively low capacity, or reforming cells and fuel synthesizers that use methane or methanol as a storage medium for much greater storage density at the cost of added complexity).
Making hydrogen results in a significant net loss of energy. After you've made it, transporting it is a huge problem because hydrogen likes to leak right through most "solid" materials. It has a very low energy density at one aatmosphere, so it has to be compressed to insane degrees to get any decent portability out of it. Both in tankers and/or pipelines and in the target vehicle. That also means fueling presents some serious issues.
Ethanol has already caused corn prices to tweak all kinds of ways; not a good thing. At least at this point, that's a really bad side effect. Corn is a mega-important food crop. Ethanol is like gasoline, in that it must be delivered via tanker, at a hidden energy and pollution cost. It is carbon neutral, in that the carbon in the plant came from the atmosphere, and goes back to the atmosphere as exhaust. Better than gasoline, which takes carbon from the ground and sends it to the atmosphere. However, electrical vehicles can be 100% carbon negative, as a hydro plant, nuke plant, wind plant, tidal plant, geothermal plant, solar plant... none of them produce carbon at all. Better yet. And then corn prices will come back down, too. And we won't need tankers.
The last thing - but not the least - is that to get the most power to the ground, at the least cost, electric wins hands down. Electric motors today are easily manufactured to be lighter and provide better torque and power curves than any internal combustion engine ever made in even a slightly comparable size class. That's why railroads use electric engines everywhere. When torque and power are the issue, electric is the answer. The really cool thing is you can have torque, power, and braking/recovery and efficiency.
It isn't money. And it isn't discipline or operating skills. Or the designs. It's politics. Getting any kind of nuclear plant built at this point in time is like trying to wrestle the midgard serpent. Immovable, stupid, and mythical.
There are new designs that are much safer than the 1960s era stuff by their very nature. They still can't be built, because "nuclear" (sorry, "newk-you-lar") is a boogyman word to the unwashed hordes. Never mind that we lose more people and property to almost any minor cause you can name; just say "radiation" and people will scatter.
As far as I'm concerned, they can put a nuke plant right in my pasture, where I can see it right out the back window. Just give me free power; that seems fair.:-)
I said - and you even quoted - "that's one factor", my clear implication being there are others. Then you added some others and implied that they made what I said wrong, which they do not.
Yes, certainly there are transmission and conversion losses. But two things are important to keep in mind: First, the turbines at power plants are a lot more efficient than the reciprocating engine in your car; that serves to balance out some of those losses. But more importantly, the second point is that for every fraction of your electrical power that is produced in a non-polluting manner (nuclear, solar, hydro, etc), the losses become irrelevant because these energy sources are, for all intents and purposes, unlimited. As we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, whatever efficiency we end up with will be ok, because power production that is non-polluting and renewable isn't a threat or an emptying well, as it were.
transmitting the AC over great distances
Some AC is transmitted over great distances. Some isn't. For instance, I live right next to Montana's Ft. Peck hydropower plant, and so transmission line losses between the source and my demands are negligible. People elsewhere are less fortunate. On the other hand, for you to use your gas, it is carried in a tanker from the refinery to your service stations, and that means that every gallon you use has an invisible energy and pollution cost. Transmission line losses are less pernicious.
...converting to DC, storing as chemical energy, converting back to DC, to power an electric motor.
No. Ultracaps don't convert electrical energy to chemical. They store electrical energy directly. That's one of the many advantages over batteries (in fact, it's the source of some of the others.) Your last step there doesn't exist.
Now, you show me a Tesla four-door hatchback that can carry more that a set of golf clubs, and still match the performance specs of the Roadster, then you might be able to say that Toyota "needs a little schooling."
What do you think extending the body length by a few feet and a few hundred lbs would do to the performance? Do you think they made it a two-seater because they had to, or because they figured a hundred thousand dollar car might not be all that salable if wasn't sporty? Did you look at the torque and power curve of the Tesla's drive system? Are you somehow under the impression that would change if there were two more doors? It'd still be a heck of a car, the only problem being... a lot fewer people would buy it. And as I've said elsewhere, the Tesla is not a mass produced vehicle; the price isn't an Apple-to-Apple comparison. The issue was, is an 8 mile range and peanut power "good", for Toyota, and I maintain, no, it isn't and the Tesla demonstrates that just fine.
I'd say their engineering is spot on, given their goals.
No, I'm sorry, but an 8-mile range without AC on flat ground isn't "spot on" for any car. It isn't even all that great for a riding lawnmower. The car has to be able to get to the next power supply, or it is useless.
The non mass produced, high end market Tesla's price is irrelevant; the point was 8 miles range and squirrel power are not the standard du jour for electric vehicles and such things reflect poorly on Toyota.
You remind me of the people who said cars would never be practical, explaining that there were no gas stations, and that you didn't have to crank a horse to start it.
The Tesla is a carefully crafted, rare, high-tech, high performance ride, very early into the market, and it is priced accordingly. A corvette is an assembly line commodity produced in comparatively huge volume after literally decades of absorbing engineering costs and marketing costs. When the automakers get around to putting a comparable electric car into mass production, the niche the Tesla occupies will close (and the cachet of having a high performance, non-polluting car will go away because they will no longer be rare.) If you think the Tesla's price represents an accurate measure of the price in a competitive market, you're not paying enough attention to how industry works.
My point was that electric cars don't need to be either slow, or have an 8 mile range. The price is what, maybe 5x that of a Prius? That's not so far off, frankly. This is the beginning of the curve. Some of us see that clearly and are all about waiting a little; but others... are still looking at Corvettes.
The amount of energy stored per unit weight is considerably lower than that of an electrochemical battery (3-5 Wh/kg for an ultracapacitor compared to 30-40 Wh/kg for a battery).
Exactly. So it may take quite a bit less than the ten years I specified; I was just being conservative. Thanks for pointing out that ultracaps are only one order of magnitude back now; a little while ago, it was two. And there are numerous technologies on the bench that show a lot of promise. We just have a tedious wait between lab pokery and commercialization.
The gasoline energy density is irrelevant, of course; gasoline is used up and is non-renewable. Ultracaps aren't used up and are reusable millions of times (consequently, your car will wear out before they do.) Gasoline is energy, in a sense; ultracaps aren't - they're gas tanks. So you have to watch out for those kind of misleading comparisons.
When you say that gasoline carries 10,000 times the volumetric energy of an ultracap, the reader may be misled into thinking that ultracaps can't deliver power. Not so. Designing an 1000 HP drive system that uses ultracaps is a matter of plugging a 250 HP motor onto each wheel, adding a controller and pressing the accelerator. Now you have a 1000 HP, non-polluting, sporty machine. Designing an 1000 HP drive system that uses gasoline means you are going to need your own mechanic, you're going to be producing one heck of a lot of pollution, and the cost will make the electric vehicle look positively thrifty.
The best way to think of ultracaps today is that they are like gas tanks; they hold energy electric motors can use, just like batteries do. They're too small of a "tank" (today) to compete with batteries. A decent metaphor is the walls of the tank are too thick and the volume where the energy is stored is too small. And because they're made in small quantities, they are expensive. But they are improving rapidly and they don't use particularly exotic materials, so there is every reason to think they'll be good enough and inexpensive enough to replace batteries very shortly.
The cops go to a judge and get a warrant based upon whatever evidence they have that a law was broken.
Yeah. Except when the authorities just break down your door, or tap your|everyone's phone, or search your vehicle, or take your property, or freeze your assets, just because that's what they've decided they want to do. Warrant, my ass. Wake up.
that access should require a warrant.
Yes, it should. But it doesn't. So... now what?
But there has to be a warrant.
No. There doesn't. There doesn't have to be a trial, either. Or access to representation. Or even a phone call. You can be tortured. Welcome to the USA. Papers, please.
If this is all such great engineers can manage, it shows that batteries have a long way to go.
Perhaps they're not as good at this as they are at fuel based systems, because some people have done a lot better. Apparently, Toyota needs a little schooling.
Big fossil fuel generating plants are more efficient, and that's one factor, but also, a considerable amount of energy is produced by sources like hydro, nuclear and to a lesser extent, solar, wind and so forth. All of these are non-polluting. Further, we have the ability (if not the collective intelligence) to build more nuclear plants. Solar is becoming more efficient. As the grid moves from fossil fuels to non-polluting sources, these types of vehicles will continue to be close to zero impact (they'll still need lubricants and so on, but they won't expel them into the atmosphere.) In addition, electricity transport doesn't require tankers and is non-polluting itself.
One thing about the summary, though — in the end, it won't be batteries, it'll be ultracaps running these things. Batteries - frankly - haven't got a lot to recommend them. They are extreme polluters, hugely difficult to dispose of, expensive and complicated to recycle, charge slowly, can't deliver much power at once, and perform worse and worse as they get older (and not a lot older, for that matter.) I look forward with great anticipation to the day I can say "no more batteries." I'd say that day is about ten years off at most based on the rate that ultracaps have been advancing the last three years.
then the whole radical shift of tone to deal with the destruction of the Earth really, to me, was the end.
...and to me, it was "that naive clown will finally start acting like a captain now..." Plus I totally get off on the weirdness between Trip and T'pal; that was the best, and the most fun, romantic, on-again/off-again theme I've ever seen in a television series. Though a southern-fried boy with dialect issues isn't exactly my idea of "manly goodness", they still pulled it off. So to speak.
Another thing that was cool is Enterprise is showing on satellite in high definition; I've got a radical HDTV setup, and watching Enterprise on it is just plain fun.
The original trek was a cheese-fest just above the level of Dr. Who (though given the time is was produced, some of that was inherent in the format. I did watch the show.) I liked ST:NG fairly well, about in proportion to how well they kept that annoying kid out of the episodes; can't remember his name anymore, must have blocked it for the pain... Crusher's son, anyway. Enterprise, as far as I am concerned, was by far the best of the bunch. That doesn't seem to be the consensus here, but still, that's my take. I'm not saying it was perfect, not by a long shot, but it was better than any of the other series. IMHO. Better story lines, better humor, a lot more interesting and visible interactions with other species, and of course lots of eye candy, both CGI and female. I found the captain to be pretty wooden, but the other characters made up for a lot of that, at least for me.
[50+ year-old synapses fire belatedly] Wesley Crusher, that was his name. Man, was that child ever annoying. Just another example of the awful things that can happen when people forget their birth control.
However, statistically, we know how they behave in groups. So a great deal of successful and useful modeling can model the behavior of the group, then randomly choose victim atoms to force conformance with the known group behavior.
Back to the individual atom: Remember I said that we can model for systems we understand; you say that in this case, there is no reason for a particular atom to decay. This means that the decay of an actual atom in a system is beyond understanding. There is no contradiction here.
...we want to consider ourselves magically above "the rest", or untouchable.
Tonto and the Lone Ranger were hiding in a stand of trees; Geronimo was circling with a thousand well armed and very angry warriors. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says "Well, I guess we've had it, Tonto." Tonto looks him right in the eye, and says "What we, white man?"
It is more likely to be if it upsets an applecart, though. You can't publish everything; every high school and college reproduces certain basic experiments and we'd be drowned if every confirming result was published. For instance, when Pons and Fleishman made their announcement, all kinds of results were reported, and shared less formally amongst labs and researchers.
I'm considerably more concerned with political manipulation of results than I am with the publication bias driven by level of surprise or interest. Political from both ends; the loudest shouters from office and the rank and file always seem to be the least qualified [grump.]
The only way that's absurd, is if you take it to be absurd that someone else has experienced something of consciousness that you have not yet experienced.
No. It is absurd from beginning to end. Your mind can produce any experience you dream up. It can provide the feeling of time stretching, imaginary sexual encounters, terrifying monsters, cobble up situations that never existed at all, tweak you with false recognition of events, mis-identify people and objects, drown you in beliefs from Islam to Voodoo and Astrology and everything in between, it can convince you that you were molested when you weren't, convince you that you were not loved when you were, that Santa is real and government is benign, and so on for pages. It can do this awake, asleep, with or without the assistance of pharmaceuticals. The fact is, the mind is very rarely able to perform as a reliable measuring instrument without external forces to keep it in check.
The strength of science is that it provides a reliable, repeatable, consensual, standardized means for looking at reality outside the boundaries of our skulls. If you say "Do X, Do Y, with Q and R, using protocol M, then Z happens and so I think this may imply..." we can follow you with Q...Z and then take a dispassionate, consensual look at your idea and see if everyone's experience agrees, and other confirming tests can be found. When you say "Man, I had this experience last night, the Lord came and told me consciousness is immaterial", that's not evidence of anything but random junk rattling around in your head. Likewise if you pull a reference out of a book written by those people driven by belief, instead of knowledge.
Likewise, your idea of intelligence, as far as I can tell, is what you recognize in behaviors that is evocative of your subjective experience of that aspect of consciousness.
No. I told you already; I don't know what intelligence is. Please don't imply that I've defined it, or attempted to do so. I have not. I am perfectly comfortable with questions that are not answerable. I find the questions interesting, that's all. Attitude-wise, I don't make things up to fill a silence; I wait for an actual sound.
On certain intelligence related problems, digital will *never* enjoy the economies of scale that analog neural network design provides. This is a deep intuition after much study. Bet on it.
Oh, I do. What I don't count on is that NN's, or more generally, vague models of animal function, are the only, or even the, answer. I have said all along that the general purpose computer can model anything at little or no extra hardware cost; once - if - we find what works, by all means, hand it to the engineers and let them take the most active elements and create hardware specialized to do those operations. I can just about guarantee that this is how it'll go. The problem with (for instance) hardware neural net development is that creating non-NN elements requires painstaking hardware design; in a computer, you just model the inputs, engine, and outputs, and go on with your day. This is more generally true for any hardware-based approach. Even if it is the right path, it's a slow path. Simulate, identify, then go to hardware as and if required. That's what makes the most sense.
Human beings never saw a square or triangle until the first cities were built
Also, just FYI, this is wrong. Iron pyrite (among other things) crystallizes in cubic form, which contains squares. Other minerals found on the surface demonstrate other geometric forms on various crystal faces - triangles, pentagons (regular and non-regular) and so forth. Nature FTW when it comes to demonstrating geometric figures, I'm afraid. Even in 3D.:-)
The error in your idea is that a serial computer has absolutely zero problem 100% accurately modeling a parallel computer; a real parallel machine is probably much faster (that's the point, of course, so you'd hope so) but it won't get any different answer to a problem than the serial computer modeling the parallel one. That's what is being said here - there is no indication that there are any local, small systems of any kind that cannot be modeled on a serial computer; hence, there is no scientific reason to postulate that intelligence represents such an impossible-to-model system. Such a claim (intelligence being impossible to model) is simply an indulgence in hubris until or unless we know a lot more about the problem(s.)
Slashdot Mirror
So - where is your previous 13 gallons? Let's go back to where it came from, the oil it was refined from. Considerably more than 13 gallons, by the way - it may be as much as 26 gallons of oil, presuming 87 octane. You've used that up. It is gone now. It isn't, as far as we know, being replaced by any process. There's a finite amount. What you did was use a good portion of it up and make a bunch of pollution. When you got "more", you just made the situation worse - it's still not being replaced.
With electricity, we can make more. Indefinitely. And by indefinitely, I mean forever. We don't have to make any pollution in the process. And cars like your civic can have a lot more power and torque. This is why gasoline - and really, anything that you burn with the exception of hydrogen, which produces water instead of pollutants - is a distant tail-chaser as compared to 100% electrical systems.
So don't snark. Educate yourself and get with the program. Don't follow the corn/farmers lobby into a second rate technology, and certainly don't encourage the hydrogen types. Electric is the one to bet on, not just because it performs better (and it surely does) but because it is better for everyone.
No. Ultracaps can discharge and charge at hundreds of times the rate of batteries without heating at all; if they had a high series resistance, they'd heat up or outright explode. They have a relatively high leakage rate, or at least, some of the technologies do - you must have confused that with the series resistance, which is essentially non-existent.
That isn't what appears to be happening. Existing production is being diverted, and prices are going up. Just check corn futures; it's as plain as day. But your presumption is wrong anyway; because you are assuming that "extra" plants are grown; Where, and what do they replace? Arid spots with no plants? Buildings or roads? Not likely. They'll be grown in fields, most likely replacing other, less profitable crops (that is what we're seeing right now, BTW.) If weeds can't grow, neither can corn. So of course, they replace other plants. Even if they are just replacing weeds, which is the best case because it doesn't screw up other food crop balances, still, they are other plants that would not have been converted into atmospheric carbon dioxide, but which were already involved in scrubbing it from the atmosphere. So in the end, you are taking in carbon and the releasing it; you would have just been taking it in if you had used the plants for food or just left the lot to weeds. Electric systems produce no CO2, and therefore they clearly win on this basis. You're right that technically, this is an actual carbon neutral system; but if you want to go there, then corn can't be, it is carbon positive as soon as you burn it because if you had not burned it, there would be less CO2 in the air.
Hmm. Interesting. I don't know a whole lot about this. What is the lifetime of a fuel cell before it needs service, replacement, etc.? An ultracap typically allows for many millions of full charge / discharge cycles. So if you fully charged and discharged a system each day (call it 300 miles a day of driving) and lowballed to one million cycles, you'd get a million days of lifetime out of the cell, or about two thousand, seven hundred years of lifetime without any kind of service on the ultracaps whatsoever. Basically, they're install and forget until the car is junked, and then they can be moved to your next vehicle. How do fuel cells stack up to that?
Vapor? Perhaps. But I think we're about to find out. EEStor, a company backed by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, claims a specific energy of about 280 watt hours per kilogram, compared with around 120 watt hours per kilogram for lithium-ion and 32 watt hours per kilogram for lead-acid gel batteries. They say this is in a UC with dielectric strengths from 1000 to 3500 volts; the underlying technology has something to do with barium-titanate powders, and yes, I am hand-waving, that's all I know about it. Jim Miller, vice president of advanced transportation technologies at Maxwell Technologies (a competing maker of ultracaps) and an ultracap expert who spent 18 years doing engineering work at Ford Motors, said "I have no doubt you can develop that kind of material, and the mechanism that gives you the energy storage is clear" which I doubt you would catch him saying if the technology were not as described. He also says a number of doubtful things about the physical stability of ceramics in automotive applications, worries about the low temperature range (which is just FUD... my darned BATTERY needs a heater where I live - temperature low problems are solved off the shelf.) Anyway, when a competitor says "yeah, this is real technology", I'm inclined to go, ok, it's real, then. EEStor has said this tech will be shipping this year - 2007 - as an energy supply system for an electric vehicle. This isn't my claim; this is theirs. So we'll both wait and see.
Yeah... yeah, it's me. :-/
It's the assumption of a "reasonable dielectric" that knocked you off your horse. That's where ultracaps have left the building. They're using altogether unreasonable dielectrics, and there is stuff on lab benches that is approaching battery levels right now.
Making hydrogen results in a significant net loss of energy. After you've made it, transporting it is a huge problem because hydrogen likes to leak right through most "solid" materials. It has a very low energy density at one aatmosphere, so it has to be compressed to insane degrees to get any decent portability out of it. Both in tankers and/or pipelines and in the target vehicle. That also means fueling presents some serious issues.
Ethanol has already caused corn prices to tweak all kinds of ways; not a good thing. At least at this point, that's a really bad side effect. Corn is a mega-important food crop. Ethanol is like gasoline, in that it must be delivered via tanker, at a hidden energy and pollution cost. It is carbon neutral, in that the carbon in the plant came from the atmosphere, and goes back to the atmosphere as exhaust. Better than gasoline, which takes carbon from the ground and sends it to the atmosphere. However, electrical vehicles can be 100% carbon negative, as a hydro plant, nuke plant, wind plant, tidal plant, geothermal plant, solar plant... none of them produce carbon at all. Better yet. And then corn prices will come back down, too. And we won't need tankers.
The last thing - but not the least - is that to get the most power to the ground, at the least cost, electric wins hands down. Electric motors today are easily manufactured to be lighter and provide better torque and power curves than any internal combustion engine ever made in even a slightly comparable size class. That's why railroads use electric engines everywhere. When torque and power are the issue, electric is the answer. The really cool thing is you can have torque, power, and braking/recovery and efficiency.
It isn't money. And it isn't discipline or operating skills. Or the designs. It's politics. Getting any kind of nuclear plant built at this point in time is like trying to wrestle the midgard serpent. Immovable, stupid, and mythical.
There are new designs that are much safer than the 1960s era stuff by their very nature. They still can't be built, because "nuclear" (sorry, "newk-you-lar") is a boogyman word to the unwashed hordes. Never mind that we lose more people and property to almost any minor cause you can name; just say "radiation" and people will scatter.
As far as I'm concerned, they can put a nuke plant right in my pasture, where I can see it right out the back window. Just give me free power; that seems fair. :-)
I said - and you even quoted - "that's one factor", my clear implication being there are others. Then you added some others and implied that they made what I said wrong, which they do not.
Yes, certainly there are transmission and conversion losses. But two things are important to keep in mind: First, the turbines at power plants are a lot more efficient than the reciprocating engine in your car; that serves to balance out some of those losses. But more importantly, the second point is that for every fraction of your electrical power that is produced in a non-polluting manner (nuclear, solar, hydro, etc), the losses become irrelevant because these energy sources are, for all intents and purposes, unlimited. As we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, whatever efficiency we end up with will be ok, because power production that is non-polluting and renewable isn't a threat or an emptying well, as it were.
Some AC is transmitted over great distances. Some isn't. For instance, I live right next to Montana's Ft. Peck hydropower plant, and so transmission line losses between the source and my demands are negligible. People elsewhere are less fortunate. On the other hand, for you to use your gas, it is carried in a tanker from the refinery to your service stations, and that means that every gallon you use has an invisible energy and pollution cost. Transmission line losses are less pernicious.
No. Ultracaps don't convert electrical energy to chemical. They store electrical energy directly. That's one of the many advantages over batteries (in fact, it's the source of some of the others.) Your last step there doesn't exist.
What do you think extending the body length by a few feet and a few hundred lbs would do to the performance? Do you think they made it a two-seater because they had to, or because they figured a hundred thousand dollar car might not be all that salable if wasn't sporty? Did you look at the torque and power curve of the Tesla's drive system? Are you somehow under the impression that would change if there were two more doors? It'd still be a heck of a car, the only problem being... a lot fewer people would buy it. And as I've said elsewhere, the Tesla is not a mass produced vehicle; the price isn't an Apple-to-Apple comparison. The issue was, is an 8 mile range and peanut power "good", for Toyota, and I maintain, no, it isn't and the Tesla demonstrates that just fine.
No, I'm sorry, but an 8-mile range without AC on flat ground isn't "spot on" for any car. It isn't even all that great for a riding lawnmower. The car has to be able to get to the next power supply, or it is useless.
The non mass produced, high end market Tesla's price is irrelevant; the point was 8 miles range and squirrel power are not the standard du jour for electric vehicles and such things reflect poorly on Toyota.
You remind me of the people who said cars would never be practical, explaining that there were no gas stations, and that you didn't have to crank a horse to start it.
The Tesla is a carefully crafted, rare, high-tech, high performance ride, very early into the market, and it is priced accordingly. A corvette is an assembly line commodity produced in comparatively huge volume after literally decades of absorbing engineering costs and marketing costs. When the automakers get around to putting a comparable electric car into mass production, the niche the Tesla occupies will close (and the cachet of having a high performance, non-polluting car will go away because they will no longer be rare.) If you think the Tesla's price represents an accurate measure of the price in a competitive market, you're not paying enough attention to how industry works.
My point was that electric cars don't need to be either slow, or have an 8 mile range. The price is what, maybe 5x that of a Prius? That's not so far off, frankly. This is the beginning of the curve. Some of us see that clearly and are all about waiting a little; but others... are still looking at Corvettes.
Exactly. So it may take quite a bit less than the ten years I specified; I was just being conservative. Thanks for pointing out that ultracaps are only one order of magnitude back now; a little while ago, it was two. And there are numerous technologies on the bench that show a lot of promise. We just have a tedious wait between lab pokery and commercialization.
The gasoline energy density is irrelevant, of course; gasoline is used up and is non-renewable. Ultracaps aren't used up and are reusable millions of times (consequently, your car will wear out before they do.) Gasoline is energy, in a sense; ultracaps aren't - they're gas tanks. So you have to watch out for those kind of misleading comparisons.
When you say that gasoline carries 10,000 times the volumetric energy of an ultracap, the reader may be misled into thinking that ultracaps can't deliver power. Not so. Designing an 1000 HP drive system that uses ultracaps is a matter of plugging a 250 HP motor onto each wheel, adding a controller and pressing the accelerator. Now you have a 1000 HP, non-polluting, sporty machine. Designing an 1000 HP drive system that uses gasoline means you are going to need your own mechanic, you're going to be producing one heck of a lot of pollution, and the cost will make the electric vehicle look positively thrifty.
The best way to think of ultracaps today is that they are like gas tanks; they hold energy electric motors can use, just like batteries do. They're too small of a "tank" (today) to compete with batteries. A decent metaphor is the walls of the tank are too thick and the volume where the energy is stored is too small. And because they're made in small quantities, they are expensive. But they are improving rapidly and they don't use particularly exotic materials, so there is every reason to think they'll be good enough and inexpensive enough to replace batteries very shortly.
English as a "living" language:
English as a "dead" language:
Anything other than proper grammar results in getting your knuckles smacked, from kindergarden right through your last years of your PHd.
I think I prefer it dead.
Yeah. Except when the authorities just break down your door, or tap your|everyone's phone, or search your vehicle, or take your property, or freeze your assets, just because that's what they've decided they want to do. Warrant, my ass. Wake up.
Yes, it should. But it doesn't. So... now what?
No. There doesn't. There doesn't have to be a trial, either. Or access to representation. Or even a phone call. You can be tortured. Welcome to the USA. Papers, please.
Perhaps they're not as good at this as they are at fuel based systems, because some people have done a lot better. Apparently, Toyota needs a little schooling.
Big fossil fuel generating plants are more efficient, and that's one factor, but also, a considerable amount of energy is produced by sources like hydro, nuclear and to a lesser extent, solar, wind and so forth. All of these are non-polluting. Further, we have the ability (if not the collective intelligence) to build more nuclear plants. Solar is becoming more efficient. As the grid moves from fossil fuels to non-polluting sources, these types of vehicles will continue to be close to zero impact (they'll still need lubricants and so on, but they won't expel them into the atmosphere.) In addition, electricity transport doesn't require tankers and is non-polluting itself.
One thing about the summary, though — in the end, it won't be batteries, it'll be ultracaps running these things. Batteries - frankly - haven't got a lot to recommend them. They are extreme polluters, hugely difficult to dispose of, expensive and complicated to recycle, charge slowly, can't deliver much power at once, and perform worse and worse as they get older (and not a lot older, for that matter.) I look forward with great anticipation to the day I can say "no more batteries." I'd say that day is about ten years off at most based on the rate that ultracaps have been advancing the last three years.
Another thing that was cool is Enterprise is showing on satellite in high definition; I've got a radical HDTV setup, and watching Enterprise on it is just plain fun.
yeah, yeah, get off my lawn already! [trips over walker]
The original trek was a cheese-fest just above the level of Dr. Who (though given the time is was produced, some of that was inherent in the format. I did watch the show.) I liked ST:NG fairly well, about in proportion to how well they kept that annoying kid out of the episodes; can't remember his name anymore, must have blocked it for the pain... Crusher's son, anyway. Enterprise, as far as I am concerned, was by far the best of the bunch. That doesn't seem to be the consensus here, but still, that's my take. I'm not saying it was perfect, not by a long shot, but it was better than any of the other series. IMHO. Better story lines, better humor, a lot more interesting and visible interactions with other species, and of course lots of eye candy, both CGI and female. I found the captain to be pretty wooden, but the other characters made up for a lot of that, at least for me.
[50+ year-old synapses fire belatedly] Wesley Crusher, that was his name. Man, was that child ever annoying. Just another example of the awful things that can happen when people forget their birth control.
However, statistically, we know how they behave in groups. So a great deal of successful and useful modeling can model the behavior of the group, then randomly choose victim atoms to force conformance with the known group behavior.
Back to the individual atom: Remember I said that we can model for systems we understand; you say that in this case, there is no reason for a particular atom to decay. This means that the decay of an actual atom in a system is beyond understanding. There is no contradiction here.
Tonto and the Lone Ranger were hiding in a stand of trees; Geronimo was circling with a thousand well armed and very angry warriors. The Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says "Well, I guess we've had it, Tonto." Tonto looks him right in the eye, and says "What we, white man?"
It is more likely to be if it upsets an applecart, though. You can't publish everything; every high school and college reproduces certain basic experiments and we'd be drowned if every confirming result was published. For instance, when Pons and Fleishman made their announcement, all kinds of results were reported, and shared less formally amongst labs and researchers.
I'm considerably more concerned with political manipulation of results than I am with the publication bias driven by level of surprise or interest. Political from both ends; the loudest shouters from office and the rank and file always seem to be the least qualified [grump.]
No. It is absurd from beginning to end. Your mind can produce any experience you dream up. It can provide the feeling of time stretching, imaginary sexual encounters, terrifying monsters, cobble up situations that never existed at all, tweak you with false recognition of events, mis-identify people and objects, drown you in beliefs from Islam to Voodoo and Astrology and everything in between, it can convince you that you were molested when you weren't, convince you that you were not loved when you were, that Santa is real and government is benign, and so on for pages. It can do this awake, asleep, with or without the assistance of pharmaceuticals. The fact is, the mind is very rarely able to perform as a reliable measuring instrument without external forces to keep it in check.
The strength of science is that it provides a reliable, repeatable, consensual, standardized means for looking at reality outside the boundaries of our skulls. If you say "Do X, Do Y, with Q and R, using protocol M, then Z happens and so I think this may imply..." we can follow you with Q...Z and then take a dispassionate, consensual look at your idea and see if everyone's experience agrees, and other confirming tests can be found. When you say "Man, I had this experience last night, the Lord came and told me consciousness is immaterial", that's not evidence of anything but random junk rattling around in your head. Likewise if you pull a reference out of a book written by those people driven by belief, instead of knowledge.
No. I told you already; I don't know what intelligence is. Please don't imply that I've defined it, or attempted to do so. I have not. I am perfectly comfortable with questions that are not answerable. I find the questions interesting, that's all. Attitude-wise, I don't make things up to fill a silence; I wait for an actual sound.
Oh, I do. What I don't count on is that NN's, or more generally, vague models of animal function, are the only, or even the, answer. I have said all along that the general purpose computer can model anything at little or no extra hardware cost; once - if - we find what works, by all means, hand it to the engineers and let them take the most active elements and create hardware specialized to do those operations. I can just about guarantee that this is how it'll go. The problem with (for instance) hardware neural net development is that creating non-NN elements requires painstaking hardware design; in a computer, you just model the inputs, engine, and outputs, and go on with your day. This is more generally true for any hardware-based approach. Even if it is the right path, it's a slow path. Simulate, identify, then go to hardware as and if required. That's what makes the most sense.
Also, just FYI, this is wrong. Iron pyrite (among other things) crystallizes in cubic form, which contains squares. Other minerals found on the surface demonstrate other geometric forms on various crystal faces - triangles, pentagons (regular and non-regular) and so forth. Nature FTW when it comes to demonstrating geometric figures, I'm afraid. Even in 3D. :-)
The error in your idea is that a serial computer has absolutely zero problem 100% accurately modeling a parallel computer; a real parallel machine is probably much faster (that's the point, of course, so you'd hope so) but it won't get any different answer to a problem than the serial computer modeling the parallel one. That's what is being said here - there is no indication that there are any local, small systems of any kind that cannot be modeled on a serial computer; hence, there is no scientific reason to postulate that intelligence represents such an impossible-to-model system. Such a claim (intelligence being impossible to model) is simply an indulgence in hubris until or unless we know a lot more about the problem(s.)