If your use is impaired (especially if you have costs to recover) you've been damaged. Consuming large amounts of CPU, impairing the operation of peripherals and requiring time and/or expertise to return the computer to its original state is damage.
The proper role of an editor is to properly categorize material which is suitable for the publication, and reject that which is not. Taco's judgement in this case is, shall we say, questionable. The source website is full of logical and scientific garbage, so it doesn't belong in the science category. The talk of "particle accelerators" is bunkum too, unless you are talking about phenomena like sprites and jets which also occur in thunderstorms (and are at least somewhat understood but still under research), or perhaps if you are talking about particles from shingles and 4x8 sheets of plywood up to whole trees accelerated to 150 knots. Thus it doesn't belong in the hardware category either. And it takes itself far too seriously to be funny.
There really is no legitimate Slashdot heading under which this piece fits. Accordingly, I suggest a new one: the duncecap. This is for articles (or editorial decisions to post articles) which are too stupid for words, and to properly categorize such errors in judgement rather than throwing them down the memory hole.
Any editor posting a mis-categorized article which really ought to be filed in "It's stupid. Ask your editor why this is here" should have to wear a real duncecap during the performance of their duties for the next 24 hours. That sort of reminder is necessary to keep editors from shirking their responsibility to be, you know, editors.
During its transit of Florida, satellite photos showed that areas of the high clouds of Wilma covering more than 1/3 of the state were below -135 F. (The lowest temperature for the IR satellite chart). It was actually close in a large area to -175. Some areas exceeded that. This is what happens when you dump the arctic into the tropics. Explosions happen! The forecast of a weak Cat 1 became a strong Cat 3 due to this temperature shock.
Actually, that's what happens when you take huge amounts of air and loft them tens of thousands of feet; they expand and cool (even as they drop moisture and release heat to power the lift process) and get very cold at their tops.
None of this is strange physics. All of it is accounted for by current weather models. Talk of "particle accelerators" and "capacitor banks" is silly; there's a lot of energy converted to lightning in thunderstorms, but it's small and secondary compared to the heat engine which drives it.
Further, the energy lost in the reaction of aluminum or magnesium with water reduces the efficiency a great deal; you'd have to use the metal in a "boiler" and expand the product gas through an engine to have any hope of catching even a bit of it. Which doesn't matter anyway; hydrogen from most sources is a waste, and appears to be a way to block renewable energy. </blogwhore>
Aluminum can be used more or less directly in an aluminum-air battery, but you've got the same problem with regeneration of the sludge (expensive and can't be done with water-based chemistry). The thing you want is something like zinc, which works fine in zinc-air fuel cells and can be regenerated easily and cheaply by a variety of means.
The general formula of hydrocarbons is CH2(n). From this you get:
CH2 + 3/2 O2 -> CO2 + H2O
An interesting thing is that the molecular weight of CH2 is 14, while the MW of H2O is 18; thus, you can recover as much or more weight of water than you supply as fuel. I seem to recall this being used on Zeppelins to replace the weight of the fuel they burned so that they would not have to vent (and later replace) lifting gas, but I am unable to find a reference with Google.
This is just as OT as the parent, but you leave out more than a few pertinent facts:
The Soviet Union was one of the most murderous regimes on the planet. It starved millions before the war gave Stalin an excuse for it (read up on "kulaks" sometime); of the ~20 million who died, most of them starved due to forced collectivization and outright stealing of all food from farmers. Anyone who had ever been "wealthy" was deemed a class enemy and sent to a labor camp from which they were unlikely to emerge alive. Being wealthy meant as little as owning a cow or two, even if they were an inheritance or a gift.
The Soviet Union allied itself with Nazi Germany, and would have remained so if Germany had not attacked it.
After the war, Stalin went back on all his agreements to allow free elections in eastern Europe. Thus, we got more murderous regimes in Poland, the Baltics, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the division of Germany into two states.
Until the fall of the Soviet Union, it financed armed aggression (both by states and terrorists, such as the PFLP) against non-communist states. Iraq was a Soviet client state for quite a few years, back when Iran was a US ally. Saddam's tanks were all Soviet built.
You should get the idea. Or maybe you won't, if you've been brainwashed by the "everything the West does is evil/wrong and anyone who opposes it is right and moral" meme spread for years by the crypto (and not-so-crypto) Marxists running academia and a lot of the "progressive" movement (it's a certainty if you think Zinn writes good historical accounts). It's just Soviet propaganda, shambling on with a life of its own after its makers were dead and buried.
The focal point is inside the receiver for the engine, silly git.
If the dish is aimed off-axis enough for the light to fall outside the receiver, you start losing focus (due to foreshortening of perspective). Essentially, it gets astigmatism.
Last, flash-fried pigeons, starlings and English sparrows would be excellent. They are non-native species and would make great soil amendments. If the system came with a detector for parasitic species like brown spotted cowbirds and fried them too, it would be a great benefit for the songbirds they're driving down.
There is no reason to install these things in farms unless they are maintenance-intensive. This says a 40-unit array is rated at a megawatt, so the individual units are 25 kW each. You could put them on buildings and over parking lots (find some way to make them do double duty as lights at night, maybe using the mirrors as full cut-off shades).
I'm trying to get a feel for the size of a parking lot, but I believe spaces are about 8 feet wide and 15 feet long and lanes are usually around 15 feet wide; a representative area would be 180 square feet per space. If you could tile a lot with collectors similar to these at 1/3 coverage, you'd get 1 unit-equivalent for every 3226 square feet or more than one for every 18 parking spaces. If each one can produce at full power for 8 hours a day, that's 200 kWh/unit/day or more than 11 kWh/space/day.
The median commute is around 22 miles; assuming an electric or plug-in hybrid car that used 350 watt-hours per mile, the median commuter would need 7.7 kWh/day. These solar dishes could recharge the electric cars of the commuters parking beneath them, and have power left over to supply to the office the commuters work in.
Goodbye, grid distribution losses! Hello, green suburban commuter lifestyle!
You don't necessarily need helium; HTGR's have used carbon dioxide (British MAGNOX). If we run out of helium, we could use neon (another noble gas). It may require some small redesign because of lower thermal conductivity and viscosity, but it should not be a big deal.
The atmosphere is about 18 ppm neon. That's one resource that's not going to run out.
One can argue the practicality, but not the existence. (I believe there were a number of hybrid cars built as academic exercises, for "energy crisis" competititions, etc. but I can't list them off the top of my head. Of course, none were production models.)
Is it difficult to set up better public transportation in the US? No... most other countries do it better.
Most other countries have very different cities and architecture. The low density of American suburbia makes it extremely difficult to serve with mass transit (there are no masses to serve), and traffic gridlock makes buses just as slow as cars even before you add in the waits for arrival and transfers. A huge increase in mass transit in the USA is a pipe dream.
In theory there's no difference... in practice, there is.
Theoretically, if you start with methane, and you end up with CO2 + H2O, it doesn't matter what catalysts you use in between, your net energy in the end should be the same (without considering efficiency losses.)
Tell me, why wouldn't you consider efficiency losses? <verybigevilgrin>
The problem with steam reformation of methane to hydrogen is that it must be done at a relatively low temperature to proceed to completion, and you have to supply the steam. This has two implications:
One of the inputs is a substantial amount of heat, to vaporize the water and bring it up to temperature; this energy has to come from your fuel.
What excess heat of reaction you do get is at low temperature and cannot be effectively converted to useful work.
If you're doing this to make hydrogen to burn in the same engines which once burned methane (such as combined-cycle gas turbines) your net efficiency will drop substantially.
I don't understand, why they don't just burn methane, condense all the water into a liquid, and keep the CO2 as gas.
Because either compression of CO2 to liquid, or chemical combination of CO2 with other material for sequestration, is an energy-intensive process. You are much better off reacting methane with oxygen at high pressure and getting liquid CO2 more or less directly after cooling; you can fractionally distill the effluent using the process's own waste heat, and what little CO2 comes with the water is of small consequence.
A solid-oxide fuel cell or molten-carbonate fuel cell operating at 60% efficiency, combined with a waste-heat steam turbine driven by the 1500 F output heat, could certainly beat 70% thermal efficiency. If you go to a double bottoming cycle (fuel cell / gas turbine / steam turbine) you can beat even that, but you sacrifice the ability to get liquid CO2 directly from the cooled FC effluent.
A concept more people need to get is that of the "limiting nutrient". Deserts get enormous amounts of light, but plants can only grow so much given the lack of water; rainforest floors have plenty of water but lack light, and the vast areas of the oceans have plenty of light and water but are starved for nitrogen, phosphorus, iron and the like. Whatever runs out first is the limiting nutrient. (Carbon dioxide is not it.)
Marine scientists have identified iron as one of the key limiting nutrients in the ocean, and seeding areas with iron has produced algal blooms. But there are organisms which need more than extra iron; they have hard skeletons and they need raw material to build them. For corals and some varieties of diatoms, that nutrient is carbonate ion; they use this to make calcium carbonate.
Acidifying the oceans with carbonic acid converts carbonate ion (CO3--) to bicarbonate ion (HCO3-) via the reaction CO3-- + H2CO3 -> 2 HCO3-. The eliminated carbonate not only depletes the raw material required by diatoms and corals, the acidification makes the ocean water corrode their skeletons and requires more energy for upkeep. At the extreme, they can't keep up and they die.
When the "nutrient" kills photosynthesizers, it's an anti-fertilizer.
The reaction of methane and steam to form hydrogen and CO2 is energetically downhill. In practice, this means that the efficiency of the conversion of fuel to energy goes down.
If there was natural gas to spare, this wouldn't matter so much. Unfortunately, North American gas production has already peaked; I'm sure Britain's situation is no better. We cannot afford to sacrifice efficiency to sequester CO2.
What we could use is technologies which allow CO2 to be captured and simultaneously boost efficiency. Solid-oxide fuel cells and molten-carbonate fuel cells, which can operate at substantial pressure, are good candidates for these. SOFC's in particular look good to me; their charge carriers are oxygen ions (O--) so the mixture on the fuel side of the cell shifts from fuel to CO2 and H2O. This means you don't have to exhaust CO2 along with the air feed, and it's easier to capture.
High-efficiency combined-cycle gas turbines can convert natural gas to electricity with an efficiency on the order of 60%, but they require large, central installations. SOFC's could conceivably be made in home-sized units without losing efficiency, and the waste heat from the process could be used for space heat and hot water. Heating with them would result in a substantial excess of electricity over local needs, which could be diverted to heat pumps to reduce the overall fuel required. (If you can get 60% out of the fuel cell and 3.3:1 out of the heat pump, the total CoP of the system can go as high as 2.4.) Run CO2 exhaust lines in parallel with the natural-gas supply lines, and you've really got something.
The heart receives signals from the brain stem (as well as chemical signals like adrenaline), but it's controlled by its own pacemaker node and will tick along just fine even if the nerve from the brain stem is disrupted.
Slashdot Mirror
If your use is impaired (especially if you have costs to recover) you've been damaged. Consuming large amounts of CPU, impairing the operation of peripherals and requiring time and/or expertise to return the computer to its original state is damage.
AYRABTU
Of course, IANAL, IAAEE.
The proper role of an editor is to properly categorize material which is suitable for the publication, and reject that which is not. Taco's judgement in this case is, shall we say, questionable. The source website is full of logical and scientific garbage, so it doesn't belong in the science category. The talk of "particle accelerators" is bunkum too, unless you are talking about phenomena like sprites and jets which also occur in thunderstorms (and are at least somewhat understood but still under research), or perhaps if you are talking about particles from shingles and 4x8 sheets of plywood up to whole trees accelerated to 150 knots. Thus it doesn't belong in the hardware category either. And it takes itself far too seriously to be funny.
There really is no legitimate Slashdot heading under which this piece fits. Accordingly, I suggest a new one: the duncecap. This is for articles (or editorial decisions to post articles) which are too stupid for words, and to properly categorize such errors in judgement rather than throwing them down the memory hole.
Any editor posting a mis-categorized article which really ought to be filed in "It's stupid. Ask your editor why this is here" should have to wear a real duncecap during the performance of their duties for the next 24 hours. That sort of reminder is necessary to keep editors from shirking their responsibility to be, you know, editors.
A hurricane is a heat engine. Heat engines need heat sinks to get rid of their waste heat. Ergo, a hurricane needs to lose heat, QED.
None of this is strange physics. All of it is accounted for by current weather models. Talk of "particle accelerators" and "capacitor banks" is silly; there's a lot of energy converted to lightning in thunderstorms, but it's small and secondary compared to the heat engine which drives it.
The authors of this piece are first-class cranks.
Aluminum can be used more or less directly in an aluminum-air battery, but you've got the same problem with regeneration of the sludge (expensive and can't be done with water-based chemistry). The thing you want is something like zinc, which works fine in zinc-air fuel cells and can be regenerated easily and cheaply by a variety of means.
CH2 + 3/2 O2 -> CO2 + H2O
An interesting thing is that the molecular weight of CH2 is 14, while the MW of H2O is 18; thus, you can recover as much or more weight of water than you supply as fuel. I seem to recall this being used on Zeppelins to replace the weight of the fuel they burned so that they would not have to vent (and later replace) lifting gas, but I am unable to find a reference with Google.
- The Soviet Union was one of the most murderous regimes on the planet. It starved millions before the war gave Stalin an excuse for it (read up on "kulaks" sometime); of the ~20 million who died, most of them starved due to forced collectivization and outright stealing of all food from farmers. Anyone who had ever been "wealthy" was deemed a class enemy and sent to a labor camp from which they were unlikely to emerge alive. Being wealthy meant as little as owning a cow or two, even if they were an inheritance or a gift.
- The Soviet Union allied itself with Nazi Germany, and would have remained so if Germany had not attacked it.
- After the war, Stalin went back on all his agreements to allow free elections in eastern Europe. Thus, we got more murderous regimes in Poland, the Baltics, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the division of Germany into two states.
- Until the fall of the Soviet Union, it financed armed aggression (both by states and terrorists, such as the PFLP) against non-communist states. Iraq was a Soviet client state for quite a few years, back when Iran was a US ally. Saddam's tanks were all Soviet built.
You should get the idea. Or maybe you won't, if you've been brainwashed by the "everything the West does is evil/wrong and anyone who opposes it is right and moral" meme spread for years by the crypto (and not-so-crypto) Marxists running academia and a lot of the "progressive" movement (it's a certainty if you think Zinn writes good historical accounts). It's just Soviet propaganda, shambling on with a life of its own after its makers were dead and buried.I was going to write a comment about ubiquitous energy systems but you beat me to it. On the other hand, I don't think anyone has noted yet that the backpack might generate juice even in the dark.
Get thee to a grammarian, go!
"It's funny. Laugh" should have been at the top of the totem pole.
If the dish is aimed off-axis enough for the light to fall outside the receiver, you start losing focus (due to foreshortening of perspective). Essentially, it gets astigmatism.
Last, flash-fried pigeons, starlings and English sparrows would be excellent. They are non-native species and would make great soil amendments. If the system came with a detector for parasitic species like brown spotted cowbirds and fried them too, it would be a great benefit for the songbirds they're driving down.
I'm trying to get a feel for the size of a parking lot, but I believe spaces are about 8 feet wide and 15 feet long and lanes are usually around 15 feet wide; a representative area would be 180 square feet per space. If you could tile a lot with collectors similar to these at 1/3 coverage, you'd get 1 unit-equivalent for every 3226 square feet or more than one for every 18 parking spaces. If each one can produce at full power for 8 hours a day, that's 200 kWh/unit/day or more than 11 kWh/space/day.
The median commute is around 22 miles; assuming an electric or plug-in hybrid car that used 350 watt-hours per mile, the median commuter would need 7.7 kWh/day. These solar dishes could recharge the electric cars of the commuters parking beneath them, and have power left over to supply to the office the commuters work in.
Goodbye, grid distribution losses! Hello, green suburban commuter lifestyle!
Nantucket is an island. Think about it.
The atmosphere is about 18 ppm neon. That's one resource that's not going to run out.
- Declare the perps apostate (takfir), or
- Issue a penalty even remotely similar to that aimed at e.g. Salman Rushdie.
Hand-wringing performed for consumption of the news media doesn't count.I read about this quite some time ago on Bruce Sterling's Viridian list; I've been using this cite but it's great to have better ones.
One can argue the practicality, but not the existence. (I believe there were a number of hybrid cars built as academic exercises, for "energy crisis" competititions, etc. but I can't list them off the top of my head. Of course, none were production models.)
Most other countries have very different cities and architecture. The low density of American suburbia makes it extremely difficult to serve with mass transit (there are no masses to serve), and traffic gridlock makes buses just as slow as cars even before you add in the waits for arrival and transfers. A huge increase in mass transit in the USA is a pipe dream.If you're going to have to offload used silica-stuff anyway, you might as well use zinc.
The problem with steam reformation of methane to hydrogen is that it must be done at a relatively low temperature to proceed to completion, and you have to supply the steam. This has two implications:
- One of the inputs is a substantial amount of heat, to vaporize the water and bring it up to temperature; this energy has to come from your fuel.
- What excess heat of reaction you do get is at low temperature and cannot be effectively converted to useful work.
If you're doing this to make hydrogen to burn in the same engines which once burned methane (such as combined-cycle gas turbines) your net efficiency will drop substantially. Because either compression of CO2 to liquid, or chemical combination of CO2 with other material for sequestration, is an energy-intensive process. You are much better off reacting methane with oxygen at high pressure and getting liquid CO2 more or less directly after cooling; you can fractionally distill the effluent using the process's own waste heat, and what little CO2 comes with the water is of small consequence.A solid-oxide fuel cell or molten-carbonate fuel cell operating at 60% efficiency, combined with a waste-heat steam turbine driven by the 1500 F output heat, could certainly beat 70% thermal efficiency. If you go to a double bottoming cycle (fuel cell / gas turbine / steam turbine) you can beat even that, but you sacrifice the ability to get liquid CO2 directly from the cooled FC effluent.
Marine scientists have identified iron as one of the key limiting nutrients in the ocean, and seeding areas with iron has produced algal blooms. But there are organisms which need more than extra iron; they have hard skeletons and they need raw material to build them. For corals and some varieties of diatoms, that nutrient is carbonate ion; they use this to make calcium carbonate.
Acidifying the oceans with carbonic acid converts carbonate ion (CO3--) to bicarbonate ion (HCO3-) via the reaction CO3-- + H2CO3 -> 2 HCO3-. The eliminated carbonate not only depletes the raw material required by diatoms and corals, the acidification makes the ocean water corrode their skeletons and requires more energy for upkeep. At the extreme, they can't keep up and they die.
When the "nutrient" kills photosynthesizers, it's an anti-fertilizer.
If there was natural gas to spare, this wouldn't matter so much. Unfortunately, North American gas production has already peaked ; I'm sure Britain's situation is no better. We cannot afford to sacrifice efficiency to sequester CO2.
What we could use is technologies which allow CO2 to be captured and simultaneously boost efficiency. Solid-oxide fuel cells and molten-carbonate fuel cells, which can operate at substantial pressure, are good candidates for these. SOFC's in particular look good to me; their charge carriers are oxygen ions (O--) so the mixture on the fuel side of the cell shifts from fuel to CO2 and H2O. This means you don't have to exhaust CO2 along with the air feed, and it's easier to capture.
High-efficiency combined-cycle gas turbines can convert natural gas to electricity with an efficiency on the order of 60%, but they require large, central installations. SOFC's could conceivably be made in home-sized units without losing efficiency, and the waste heat from the process could be used for space heat and hot water. Heating with them would result in a substantial excess of electricity over local needs, which could be diverted to heat pumps to reduce the overall fuel required. (If you can get 60% out of the fuel cell and 3.3:1 out of the heat pump, the total CoP of the system can go as high as 2.4.) Run CO2 exhaust lines in parallel with the natural-gas supply lines, and you've really got something.
(Your co-workers have been saying that about you for three years now...)
The heart receives signals from the brain stem (as well as chemical signals like adrenaline), but it's controlled by its own pacemaker node and will tick along just fine even if the nerve from the brain stem is disrupted.