Well said, Swedishchef. I live near Soap Lake. My house was $130,000 for two acres with water rights. There is an apple orchard across the street. Red tailed hawks nested in a tree about 100 yards from the house, seriously depleting the local rodent population.
Not everything is perfect though. The Western Tanagers have made heavy inroads on my grapes. I hope the netting gets here soon.
Why anyone lives in the city has always been a mystery to me. Unless you live right down town you end up spending more time in traffic than you do in the country. A visitor from Seattle asked my how far I drove to work, and I answered is 28 miles. He looked horrifed, and asked how long it took. That answer is 35 minutes. His jaw dropped. (I don't have to park on the highway on the way to work.) Apparently this is unheard of in Seattle.
Back to the house, the average house in Seattle is $330,000 now. If I lived there, I would make maybe 50% more, if I'm optimistic. So 1.5 times salary minus the higher taxes from the higher tax bracket, 2.5 times housing costs, 1.5 times more food costs, (my garden pays for itself big time, plus the other benefits on living in a farm area), and maybe 0.75 the gas cost, if the trip is shorter, and I don't waste it all idling in traffic jams. I see no benefit in city life.
Oh, and live theater is available at the Masquers in downtown Soap Lake, 2.5 miles from my driveway.
"I don't understand how performance per watt is useful as *the* statistic for comparing processors."
Good point. Your 1 Mhz comment made me look up the power usage of the current 65C02 version. It pulls 150 microamps at 1.8 V at 1 Mhz, which is 0.27 milliwatts.
I suspect that an Apple II is not fast enough for your purposes.:-)
"The intersection between hardcore gamers and Mac users is very small"
I suspect you are right. Since my first mac in '89, not counting various solitare versions, I had three games, and one demo of a game. The demo was Glider, the three real games were Spaceship Warlock, Myst, and Diablo II.
I'm still not done playing Diablo II. I got the Amazon all the way to the end, but am still working on the others. Unless I get laid off again, I may not have enough spare time for years to play out every character, in every major variation.
"Oh, and what if you live in a place with real winters? Last I heard, batteries die a quick and silent death in subzero conditions."
Really cold batteries will not have much power output, but they are not harmed. Since you have a hybrid, assuming you can get the gas engine going, that will start putting current through the batteries, heat them up, and off you go. You won't have much of a battery boost for the first 10 miles or so, but they'll warm up eventually.
"(the energy loss from charging is negligible and motors are nearly 100% efficient)."
I wish that was true. Charging is about 90% efficient, the other 10% is why the battery gets warm. Discharging is slightly better, but there is still internal resistance, and therefore energy losses. Big three phase industrial motors can be 95% efficient, but smaller ones are notably less so.
So if you take all three steps as 90% efficient, which seems reasonable, then the total for the chain is about 73% efficiency.
Which is still three times better than a standard ICE:-). So you are mostly right anyhow.
It saves energy if, and only if, you get up late enough so that it is already light when DST is in effect. If you get up so early it's dark either way, then it's irrelevant. If you get up when it's light on standard time, and in the dark on DST, then it costs energy, or at best shifts some of the load to the morning hours.
Now, I suspect that on both coasts they get up late, and go to bed late. There has to be a reason that prime time is from 8 to 11. I get up at 6 AM, so I am in bed by 10 PM, and I haven't seen the last hour of "prime time" since 1990. And here I am in the Peak Buying demographic too.
Actually, the 10 PM bed time is an improvement. From 1990 to 1995 I got up at 5 AM, and the TV was off by 9 PM.
When I grew up in the Central time zone, Bed time was 10 PM (once I was in my teens) but Prime time was 7 to 10, which meant I could watch more then than I can now, which is NOT at all what I was expecting at the time.:-)
First, what excess oxygen? It will take exactly as much to burn it back to water as you got from splitting the water in the first place.
Second, The lawsuit from the first one of these that blows up a McMansion is going to be spectacular. Making hydrogen, the gas with the widest known explosive limit in a Yuppy's fireplace? Odorless, colorless hydrogen? The stuff we sample for all the time at work with LEL meters because we would like to be alive tomorrow? There is a reason the gas company puts oderants in the natural gas, and also in the propane. Forget to open the damper, or have snow plug up the flue a bit, and boom.
Third, a hydrogen-oxygen flame is hot enough to make NOx, so unless the burner is really well designed, and the fuel-air mix is correct (as in colorless), the thing is going to make more smog than a cold Hummer.
A good idea this is not! (others have already mentioned the energy balance silliness of it, so I won't harp on that.)
"Not everything is a direct result of what america wants to believe is the worlds worst tragedy."
You got that right. I am an American, and I think 9/11 was blown, and is being blown way out of proportion. But then I live in the Northwest, so it had no immediate impact. Now when Mt. St. Helens has a burp, that is a different matter entirely. It's very important, but only locally.
The problem was that 9/11 was aimed right at where the elite live and work, the Eastern Corridor. A good hit on LA, right at Media central would also be effective at generating prolonged hysteria. But any small town in the sticks would rate a few days mention in the paper, then silence. We lose 10 times as many as died on 9/11 every year on the highways without a thought.
It's all in the presentation. This is not always a good thing, but still true.
"So long story short, is, if you believe in true republican ideals, right now you need to vote democrat."
I used to vote democrat on occasion. I might again if they would stop trying to put me out of work. I used to have a good job in mining. The Democrats demonized that industry right out of the country, as far as I can tell, to provide high-quality low-cost vacations for the urban elite.
My current job depends on low-cost hydro-electric power, so what do the Democrats want now? To tear out the 4 dams on the lower Snake River and at least one on the Columbia, in order to "save the salmon" which are supposed to create a booming "eco-tourism industry". (Not just minimum wage, but seasonal minimum wage at that. Starve slowly for six months, quickly for the other six. What a deal!) That would raise electric rates enough to close down this job too. (Ironically, we make silicon for solar cells.)
So, once the democrats start saying people are more important than fish, trees,and so on, as well as stop nannying and otherwise trying to micromanage my life, I'll consider voting for them again.
Here's to Bill Proxmire, the last Democrat I voted for for a reason other than "lesser of two evils."
"the United States (along with most spacefaring countries) has not ratified the 1979 Moon Treaty, which would basically prohibit any property rights on the moon (or other celestial bodies). So the door is still open for future ownership of lunar surface."
So that's how they intend to pay for Social Security! Sell off property on the moon. But have to get up there and have Century 21 set up by 2020 at the latest...
"5. Reactors wear out, and when they are no longer usable, the entire reactor is itself toxic waste, and remains that way for longer than the life of any known civilization."
False. After shutdown, since the fission fragments are still in the (removed) fuel elements, the structural elements that have been activated are what's left. Problem #1 is cobalt-60. Half life of that is 5.3 years. 10 half-lives is considered gone, especially since it is a trace element anyway (at least in newer plants.) So that means that the cobalt-60 will be gone in 53 years.
The US has been around for over 200 years. So your statement is falsified on the first examination.
Point 3 isn't looking too good either. Reactors melt UP. Heat rises etc. But everyone else missed this one too. Even now after TMI and Chernoble both proved this, the popular perception is they melt down. It's probably related to the water and ice experience we all have. Few people understand how odd water really is.
"The problem is that the environment in the US is becoming hostile to science."
You can stop there, you are already right without invoking religious extremists. Look at TV, 20 channels of "sports" which involve semi-sentient plains apes tossing various balls around, vs the Discovery Channel, toodling around at about the 6th grade level.
Jocks get millions per year, Ph.D> scientists and engineers get $50 to $80 K per year. And its a surprise that the supply of American grad students in the sciences are dropping?
Supply and demand baby. No more is wanted, no more is needed.
Mike; Ph.D Metallugical Engineering, U of Idaho, 1997
"Well, your car's headlights are, for one thing."
Exactly. So now they will be on for the trip into town (at 7 AM), where before, they would be off. They will be off for the trip home (4 PM) either way, unless it's snowing. (We are talking November and March after all.)
Result, I burn more gas by extending DST, not less.
Natural gas is often used for peak generation, not oil. Around here (Eastern WA) it's mostly hydropower, with one nuclear plant tossed in.
What fuel cells? 44 psi per 100 ft of depth, so at 20,000 ft that's 8800 psi. If it's gas, they won't be able to exhaust anything, if it's liquid fueled they might be able to push out the waste products.
If they seal the fuel cell, feed it H2, and O2, then use a small positive displacement pump to get rid of the water, the pumping power is going to use most of the elceticity they just made.
I am definitely curious now.
"it's more a move to stimulate the economy."
Yup! Especially that part about extending DST until After Thanksgiving weekend. More daylight, more spending. It's a simple theory. Especially if they can keep some of the cheapskates from storming the doors at opening to snap up the loss leaders before the one hours special sales end.
"The main idea behind DST involves aligning the solar day with the average person's active hours to save energy consumed by residential electric lighting."
Work hours in my area are 7:30 to 4, 7:30 to 4:30, 8 to 4:30, or 8 to 5. Having to turn the lights on the first hour of the day will exactly offset the advantage of leaving them off an hour later.
In November it's already dark when the kids get on the bus at 7 AM. Now, it will be even darker. This is going to make it ever so much easier to get them moving. (\sarcasim)
Also, residential lighting is not significantly powered by oil in the US.
It's probably a ploy by business to con people into shopping more.
".. Ethanol is much more valuable than left over corn/soy... "
And history repeats itself, at least as far back as the whiskey rebellion...
Ethanol was the best way to move corn to an urban market back around 1800 too..
"I think that the main problem with the increased pollution is that they haven't spent the research and tuning efforts into reducing it, and most ethanol cars today are adaptions of gasoline cars"
IIRC, back in the late '70s they had a VW rabbit tweaked with a ethanol-optimized engine. it was running about a 14 to 1 compression ratio with no pinging. They "only" used 190 proof alcohol for it, saving the cost of getting the last of the water out. It was an easy way to get the benefits of water injection. An engine intended to run an ethanol would be much better than a gas engine that was adapted, but you have the chicken and egg problem. In the short term, it's easier to put a bigger fuel tank on the gas engine, and let the computer and the fuel injector figure the mix on the fly.
"Apple has really been pushing people to Sleep the machines instead of turning them off."
Then they need to fix the crash-on-wake problems. The absolute most reliable way to crash my dual processor G4 is to wake it up after it's been sleeping for awhile. If it doesn't kernal panic, then the USB ports don't come up and the keyboard and mouse do nothing. Then it's time to push the reset button.
Anyway, it boots faster than the XP box at work, so I'm not worried about booting every day.
"Rowling deserves a medal. She has written a series of books that CHILDREN WANT TO READ. "
I Second the motion! Books over 500 pages long that kids want to read! That's the hard part. They'll read short books OK. But Robinson Crusoe length tomes were right out. But Harry Potter is back in.
And I will be reading #6 as soon as the elder daughter is done with it.
" IF you think it's weird for a woman to wear a dress she sewed, "
Definitely not. And one of the highest tech widgets at our house is a Bernina serger. Five threads, up to three needles, two loopers, and a wiper. And they all manage to miss each other.
They sent a video tape to show how to thread the thing. Good thing too.
"While I'm on this rant, Four Wheel Drive does not mean Four Wheel Traction."
The converse applies too; they always had 4-wheel brakes. So when they shift into 4X4 and then stomp the brake on a sheet of ice, it's always entertaining, assuming you are far enough away they can't get you as they spin out.
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Well said, Swedishchef. I live near Soap Lake. My house was $130,000 for two acres with water rights. There is an apple orchard across the street. Red tailed hawks nested in a tree about 100 yards from the house, seriously depleting the local rodent population.
Not everything is perfect though. The Western Tanagers have made heavy inroads on my grapes. I hope the netting gets here soon.
Why anyone lives in the city has always been a mystery to me. Unless you live right down town you end up spending more time in traffic than you do in the country. A visitor from Seattle asked my how far I drove to work, and I answered is 28 miles. He looked horrifed, and asked how long it took. That answer is 35 minutes. His jaw dropped. (I don't have to park on the highway on the way to work.) Apparently this is unheard of in Seattle.
Back to the house, the average house in Seattle is $330,000 now. If I lived there, I would make maybe 50% more, if I'm optimistic. So 1.5 times salary minus the higher taxes from the higher tax bracket, 2.5 times housing costs, 1.5 times more food costs, (my garden pays for itself big time, plus the other benefits on living in a farm area), and maybe 0.75 the gas cost, if the trip is shorter, and I don't waste it all idling in traffic jams. I see no benefit in city life.
Oh, and live theater is available at the Masquers in downtown Soap Lake, 2.5 miles from my driveway.
"I don't understand how performance per watt is useful as *the* statistic for comparing processors."
:-)
Good point. Your 1 Mhz comment made me look up the power usage of the current 65C02 version. It pulls 150 microamps at 1.8 V at 1 Mhz, which is 0.27 milliwatts.
I suspect that an Apple II is not fast enough for your purposes.
"The intersection between hardcore gamers and Mac users is very small"
I suspect you are right. Since my first mac in '89, not counting various solitare versions, I had three games, and one demo of a game. The demo was Glider, the three real games were Spaceship Warlock, Myst, and Diablo II.
I'm still not done playing Diablo II. I got the Amazon all the way to the end, but am still working on the others. Unless I get laid off again, I may not have enough spare time for years to play out every character, in every major variation.
"Oh, and what if you live in a place with real winters? Last I heard, batteries die a quick and silent death in subzero conditions." Really cold batteries will not have much power output, but they are not harmed. Since you have a hybrid, assuming you can get the gas engine going, that will start putting current through the batteries, heat them up, and off you go. You won't have much of a battery boost for the first 10 miles or so, but they'll warm up eventually.
"(the energy loss from charging is negligible and motors are nearly 100% efficient)."
:-). So you are mostly right anyhow.
I wish that was true. Charging is about 90% efficient, the other 10% is why the battery gets warm. Discharging is slightly better, but there is still internal resistance, and therefore energy losses. Big three phase industrial motors can be 95% efficient, but smaller ones are notably less so.
So if you take all three steps as 90% efficient, which seems reasonable, then the total for the chain is about 73% efficiency.
Which is still three times better than a standard ICE
I would ride mine all year, except for that winter thing. I need something warmer for the October to May period.
"How is this going to save energy?"
:-)
It saves energy if, and only if, you get up late enough so that it is already light when DST is in effect. If you get up so early it's dark either way, then it's irrelevant. If you get up when it's light on standard time, and in the dark on DST, then it costs energy, or at best shifts some of the load to the morning hours.
Now, I suspect that on both coasts they get up late, and go to bed late. There has to be a reason that prime time is from 8 to 11. I get up at 6 AM, so I am in bed by 10 PM, and I haven't seen the last hour of "prime time" since 1990. And here I am in the Peak Buying demographic too.
Actually, the 10 PM bed time is an improvement. From 1990 to 1995 I got up at 5 AM, and the TV was off by 9 PM.
When I grew up in the Central time zone, Bed time was 10 PM (once I was in my teens) but Prime time was 7 to 10, which meant I could watch more then than I can now, which is NOT at all what I was expecting at the time.
First, what excess oxygen? It will take exactly as much to burn it back to water as you got from splitting the water in the first place.
Second, The lawsuit from the first one of these that blows up a McMansion is going to be spectacular. Making hydrogen, the gas with the widest known explosive limit in a Yuppy's fireplace? Odorless, colorless hydrogen? The stuff we sample for all the time at work with LEL meters because we would like to be alive tomorrow? There is a reason the gas company puts oderants in the natural gas, and also in the propane. Forget to open the damper, or have snow plug up the flue a bit, and boom.
Third, a hydrogen-oxygen flame is hot enough to make NOx, so unless the burner is really well designed, and the fuel-air mix is correct (as in colorless), the thing is going to make more smog than a cold Hummer.
A good idea this is not! (others have already mentioned the energy balance silliness of it, so I won't harp on that.)
"Not everything is a direct result of what america wants to believe is the worlds worst tragedy."
You got that right. I am an American, and I think 9/11 was blown, and is being blown way out of proportion. But then I live in the Northwest, so it had no immediate impact. Now when Mt. St. Helens has a burp, that is a different matter entirely. It's very important, but only locally.
The problem was that 9/11 was aimed right at where the elite live and work, the Eastern Corridor. A good hit on LA, right at Media central would also be effective at generating prolonged hysteria. But any small town in the sticks would rate a few days mention in the paper, then silence. We lose 10 times as many as died on 9/11 every year on the highways without a thought.
It's all in the presentation. This is not always a good thing, but still true.
"So long story short, is, if you believe in true republican ideals, right now you need to vote democrat."
I used to vote democrat on occasion. I might again if they would stop trying to put me out of work. I used to have a good job in mining. The Democrats demonized that industry right out of the country, as far as I can tell, to provide high-quality low-cost vacations for the urban elite.
My current job depends on low-cost hydro-electric power, so what do the Democrats want now? To tear out the 4 dams on the lower Snake River and at least one on the Columbia, in order to "save the salmon" which are supposed to create a booming "eco-tourism industry". (Not just minimum wage, but seasonal minimum wage at that. Starve slowly for six months, quickly for the other six. What a deal!) That would raise electric rates enough to close down this job too. (Ironically, we make silicon for solar cells.)
So, once the democrats start saying people are more important than fish, trees,and so on, as well as stop nannying and otherwise trying to micromanage my life, I'll consider voting for them again.
Here's to Bill Proxmire, the last Democrat I voted for for a reason other than "lesser of two evils."
"the United States (along with most spacefaring countries) has not ratified the 1979 Moon Treaty, which would basically prohibit any property rights on the moon (or other celestial bodies). So the door is still open for future ownership of lunar surface."
So that's how they intend to pay for Social Security! Sell off property on the moon. But have to get up there and have Century 21 set up by 2020 at the latest...
"5. Reactors wear out, and when they are no longer usable, the entire reactor is itself toxic waste, and remains that way for longer than the life of any known civilization." False. After shutdown, since the fission fragments are still in the (removed) fuel elements, the structural elements that have been activated are what's left. Problem #1 is cobalt-60. Half life of that is 5.3 years. 10 half-lives is considered gone, especially since it is a trace element anyway (at least in newer plants.) So that means that the cobalt-60 will be gone in 53 years. The US has been around for over 200 years. So your statement is falsified on the first examination. Point 3 isn't looking too good either. Reactors melt UP. Heat rises etc. But everyone else missed this one too. Even now after TMI and Chernoble both proved this, the popular perception is they melt down. It's probably related to the water and ice experience we all have. Few people understand how odd water really is.
"The problem is that the environment in the US is becoming hostile to science."
You can stop there, you are already right without invoking religious extremists. Look at TV, 20 channels of "sports" which involve semi-sentient plains apes tossing various balls around, vs the Discovery Channel, toodling around at about the 6th grade level.
Jocks get millions per year, Ph.D> scientists and engineers get $50 to $80 K per year. And its a surprise that the supply of American grad students in the sciences are dropping?
Supply and demand baby. No more is wanted, no more is needed.
Mike; Ph.D Metallugical Engineering, U of Idaho, 1997
"with only a single pedal for both acceleration and braking."
Actually easy! -1 to -128 for braking, 1 to 127 for acceleration, 0 for coasting.
We might have built cars that way if we had velcro on the feet, and could pull up as well as push down.
"Well, your car's headlights are, for one thing." Exactly. So now they will be on for the trip into town (at 7 AM), where before, they would be off. They will be off for the trip home (4 PM) either way, unless it's snowing. (We are talking November and March after all.) Result, I burn more gas by extending DST, not less. Natural gas is often used for peak generation, not oil. Around here (Eastern WA) it's mostly hydropower, with one nuclear plant tossed in.
What fuel cells? 44 psi per 100 ft of depth, so at 20,000 ft that's 8800 psi. If it's gas, they won't be able to exhaust anything, if it's liquid fueled they might be able to push out the waste products. If they seal the fuel cell, feed it H2, and O2, then use a small positive displacement pump to get rid of the water, the pumping power is going to use most of the elceticity they just made. I am definitely curious now.
"it's more a move to stimulate the economy." Yup! Especially that part about extending DST until After Thanksgiving weekend. More daylight, more spending. It's a simple theory. Especially if they can keep some of the cheapskates from storming the doors at opening to snap up the loss leaders before the one hours special sales end.
"The main idea behind DST involves aligning the solar day with the average person's active hours to save energy consumed by residential electric lighting."
Work hours in my area are 7:30 to 4, 7:30 to 4:30, 8 to 4:30, or 8 to 5. Having to turn the lights on the first hour of the day will exactly offset the advantage of leaving them off an hour later.
In November it's already dark when the kids get on the bus at 7 AM. Now, it will be even darker. This is going to make it ever so much easier to get them moving. (\sarcasim)
Also, residential lighting is not significantly powered by oil in the US.
It's probably a ploy by business to con people into shopping more.
".. Ethanol is much more valuable than left over corn/soy... " And history repeats itself, at least as far back as the whiskey rebellion... Ethanol was the best way to move corn to an urban market back around 1800 too..
"I think that the main problem with the increased pollution is that they haven't spent the research and tuning efforts into reducing it, and most ethanol cars today are adaptions of gasoline cars"
IIRC, back in the late '70s they had a VW rabbit tweaked with a ethanol-optimized engine. it was running about a 14 to 1 compression ratio with no pinging. They "only" used 190 proof alcohol for it, saving the cost of getting the last of the water out. It was an easy way to get the benefits of water injection. An engine intended to run an ethanol would be much better than a gas engine that was adapted, but you have the chicken and egg problem. In the short term, it's easier to put a bigger fuel tank on the gas engine, and let the computer and the fuel injector figure the mix on the fly.
Two cards, SATA and a USB 2.0 card. network is DHCP off of a linux box.
"Apple has really been pushing people to Sleep the machines instead of turning them off."
Then they need to fix the crash-on-wake problems. The absolute most reliable way to crash my dual processor G4 is to wake it up after it's been sleeping for awhile. If it doesn't kernal panic, then the USB ports don't come up and the keyboard and mouse do nothing. Then it's time to push the reset button.
Anyway, it boots faster than the XP box at work, so I'm not worried about booting every day.
"Rowling deserves a medal. She has written a series of books that CHILDREN WANT TO READ. "
I Second the motion! Books over 500 pages long that kids want to read! That's the hard part. They'll read short books OK. But Robinson Crusoe length tomes were right out. But Harry Potter is back in.
And I will be reading #6 as soon as the elder daughter is done with it.
" IF you think it's weird for a woman to wear a dress she sewed, "
Definitely not. And one of the highest tech widgets at our house is a Bernina serger. Five threads, up to three needles, two loopers, and a wiper. And they all manage to miss each other.
They sent a video tape to show how to thread the thing. Good thing too.
Swiss technology is still with us.
"While I'm on this rant, Four Wheel Drive does not mean Four Wheel Traction."
The converse applies too; they always had 4-wheel brakes. So when they shift into 4X4 and then stomp the brake on a sheet of ice, it's always entertaining, assuming you are far enough away they can't get you as they spin out.
Oh well;