In Ontario, our peak electrical demand comes with hot summer days. See, we mostly heat our houses with natural gas, but we mostly cool them with electricity. And when do our houses get hottest? When the sun is shining brightly! So the whole thing makes perfect sense (as does the $0.42/kWh) when viewed correctly as a PEAK energy producer and a peak energy cost. The average cost of electricity here is way lower, I know, but on an August day when we really need it, $0.42 will seem like a bargain. The alternative is firing up gas turbines or coal plants, neither of which makes the cities much cooler or the air more breathable. The nukes are already running at full tilt (on those peak days) and hydro actually drops off in the heat of summer (due to lower water levels.)
So, don't view this a bulk energy solution -- we all recognize that it's too expensive for that. This, and a few hundred more MW of solar installations will give us some diversity and prevent us from buying expensive peak power from New York State, or indeed, falling right over into rolling blackouts.
OK, 2 things. 1) Mr. Slippery is correct, they compared the kudzu extract to both a) no treatment and b) a placebo treatment indistinguishable from the kudzu.
Furthermore, each volunteer hard drinker served as their own control -- one week they took the kudzu, next week they took nothing and drank anyway, week after that they took placebo, week after that they took nothing again and drank. Order of placebo first or kudzu first was randomized.
If you read the article, it's a rather elegant experimental design. I guess you'd rather just blissfully that scientific researchers are all so dumb you can outthink their dayjob in a 3-minute posting?:)
2) In something as psychological as hangover
Ummm, what about hangover? Did someone mention hangover? I didn't mention hangover, myself.
Virginia Smith did a great write-up for the Philadelphia Inquirer, in which the researcher, Scott Lukas, offers a speculation about how it all works. He thinks it's not making you more drunk -- just making you aware of how drunk you are earlier. I suspect mechanistic research on this is forthcoming.
eastpole (disclosing he works for Harvard and covered the story for a local publication)
Let's imagine that a levitating guru moves upwards at 1 mph for about 200 mi, putting him in (according to you) low earth orbit.
Two questions may be helpful: 1) what happens if the guru loses concentration and ceases to levitate?
Answer 1: he falls down to the ground. Oh, maybe that wasn't orbit after all.
2) What are the satellites near the guru doing?
Answer 2: They're doing about 8 km/s past him, falling down just as fast, but also moving along the Earth's curvature, so they never get closer to it. Now THAT is orbit.
Now, if you buy a business package with guaranteed bandwidth, it might be a different story.
It might, if the ISP can afford to maintain dual infrastructure, one oversold for resi customers and one strictly conforming to weird "sell-one-build-one" rules for business customers.
And when I say "afford", I mean afford to do so while competing with companies that just oversell everything.:) So, business-only providers might.
The real goal is not to restrict overselling but to identify when your oversell level begins to impact customer throughput.
don't sell someone 40 Mbit/s guaranteed in an area that's already oversold -- they might actually use all 40 Mbit/s and
have a plan to rapidly increase bandwidth when the crunch comes.
The third item is tough -- depending on who has what fiber in the ground, it could take weeks to get an OC-3, months to get an OC-12 in place. That won't be cool with the customers to whom you've sold "guaranteed bandwidth". So you need to trigger the order when the traffic reaches maybe 80% of the pipe capacity in question.
Oversell is probably a canard, since everyone does it, but it does lead to interesting and difficult issues which are NOT handled the same way (or well) by every provider.
eastpole
Re:Wait... so you're telling me...
on
A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 1
The first reply, re: Greenland is correct.
Also, check out a map of Antarctica. It's a continent at the south pole of Earth. Continents are land. The ice there, if it melts, flows off that land and into the southern ocean.
If the ice softens, large chunks break off the ice shelf (shelf = elevation above sea-level, see) and fall into the ocean. It now doesn't matter if they melt or not, because they are floating in the ocean and raising the global sea level.
Last issue with ice vs. water. Ice reflects light better. Pack ice (yes, you're right, it's already IN the sea!) at the north pole and shelf ice at the south pole reflect the sun's light very well, and the energy bounces back out into space. Polar oceans (darker than ice) don't; they absorb it. Do you see a heating issue here?
Then some genius decided that hey.. if it melts, the water levels won't change
Yeah, well, said genius needed to look at a topological map of the planet's ice distribution.
Yes, the space station has to make course adjustments to miss objects that are tracked by RADAR.
But neither it nor the space shuttle can do anything in advance about ojects too small (less than 10 cm) for U.S. Space Command to track with the ground-based RADARs.
There would not be a lot of time to react if something like a large nut were approaching at several miles per second.
Slashdot Mirror
In Ontario, our peak electrical demand comes with hot summer days. See, we mostly heat our houses with natural gas, but we mostly cool them with electricity. And when do our houses get hottest? When the sun is shining brightly! So the whole thing makes perfect sense (as does the $0.42/kWh) when viewed correctly as a PEAK energy producer and a peak energy cost. The average cost of electricity here is way lower, I know, but on an August day when we really need it, $0.42 will seem like a bargain. The alternative is firing up gas turbines or coal plants, neither of which makes the cities much cooler or the air more breathable. The nukes are already running at full tilt (on those peak days) and hydro actually drops off in the heat of summer (due to lower water levels.)
So, don't view this a bulk energy solution -- we all recognize that it's too expensive for that. This, and a few hundred more MW of solar installations will give us some diversity and prevent us from buying expensive peak power from New York State, or indeed, falling right over into rolling blackouts.
Furthermore, each volunteer hard drinker served as their own control -- one week they took the kudzu, next week they took nothing and drank anyway, week after that they took placebo, week after that they took nothing again and drank. Order of placebo first or kudzu first was randomized.
If you read the article, it's a rather elegant experimental design. I guess you'd rather just blissfully that scientific researchers are all so dumb you can outthink their dayjob in a 3-minute posting? :)
2) In something as psychological as hangover
Ummm, what about hangover? Did someone mention hangover? I didn't mention hangover, myself.
Virginia Smith did a great write-up for the Philadelphia Inquirer, in which the researcher, Scott Lukas, offers a speculation about how it all works. He thinks it's not making you more drunk -- just making you aware of how drunk you are earlier. I suspect mechanistic research on this is forthcoming.
eastpole (disclosing he works for Harvard and covered the story for a local publication)
Vidarh,
Turgid is right in his reply to you.
| You can reach orbit at 1 mph if you want to.
Let's imagine that a levitating guru moves upwards at 1 mph for about 200 mi, putting him in (according to you) low earth orbit.
Two questions may be helpful: 1) what happens if the guru loses concentration and ceases to levitate?
Answer 1: he falls down to the ground. Oh, maybe that wasn't orbit after all.
2) What are the satellites near the guru doing?
Answer 2: They're doing about 8 km/s past him, falling down just as fast, but also moving along the Earth's curvature, so they never get closer to it. Now THAT is orbit.
eastpole
It might, if the ISP can afford to maintain dual infrastructure, one oversold for resi customers and one strictly conforming to weird "sell-one-build-one" rules for business customers.
And when I say "afford", I mean afford to do so while competing with companies that just oversell everything. :) So, business-only providers might.
The real goal is not to restrict overselling but to identify when your oversell level begins to impact customer throughput.
The third item is tough -- depending on who has what fiber in the ground, it could take weeks to get an OC-3, months to get an OC-12 in place. That won't be cool with the customers to whom you've sold "guaranteed bandwidth". So you need to trigger the order when the traffic reaches maybe 80% of the pipe capacity in question.
Oversell is probably a canard, since everyone does it, but it does lead to interesting and difficult issues which are NOT handled the same way (or well) by every provider.
eastpole
The first reply, re: Greenland is correct.
Also, check out a map of Antarctica. It's a continent at the south pole of Earth. Continents are land. The ice there, if it melts, flows off that land and into the southern ocean.
If the ice softens, large chunks break off the ice shelf (shelf = elevation above sea-level, see) and fall into the ocean. It now doesn't matter if they melt or not, because they are floating in the ocean and raising the global sea level.
Last issue with ice vs. water. Ice reflects light better. Pack ice (yes, you're right, it's already IN the sea!) at the north pole and shelf ice at the south pole reflect the sun's light very well, and the energy bounces back out into space. Polar oceans (darker than ice) don't; they absorb it. Do you see a heating issue here?
Then some genius decided that hey.. if it melts, the water levels won't change
Yeah, well, said genius needed to look at a topological map of the planet's ice distribution.
eastpole
Yes, the space station has to make course adjustments to miss objects that are tracked by RADAR.
But neither it nor the space shuttle can do anything in advance about ojects too small (less than 10 cm) for U.S. Space Command to track with the ground-based RADARs.
There would not be a lot of time to react if something like a large nut were approaching at several miles per second.
It's worrisome.
eastpole