There are occasions where citing Wikipedia is perfectly acceptable:
Where the Wikipedia article has a nifty turn of phrase that you want to quote verbatim
Or, like you said, when you want to provide background information on a topic which you know a lot about but the reader may not. In that case you're taking responsibility for the Wikipedia article being correct.
But lazy students who turn in papers entirely referenced on Wikipedia deserve to be flunked repeatedly until they learn not to.
There are an awful lot of used fuel rods being stored on site at plants, do you think they count them every day?
No, but the fact that the potential terrorist would be dead by the time they got anywhere near a spent fuel rod might be a bit of a giveaway. Read this. Anybody who tries to steal a spent fuel road will be, as the article describes, "burnt toast" well before they actually get to deploy it. Not to mention that it's not particularly dangerous if you distribute it with a bomb.
My point was that even if you theoretically could build an engine close to the theoretical efficiency limit of a Carnot cycle engine, the efficiency when the temperature gradient is small is very poor.
Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down. (p. 16)
"Appeasers" is another Republican favourite.
As to terms specifically relating to modifying the name, I think "dumbocrats" got a bit of a run, back in 2003-04 or so, but it kinda lacks its sting in today's political climate.
How does 15 kilowatts at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour come out to $3?
In any case, the point I'm trying to make is even if it is cheaper to run a battery car than a fuel cell car, that doesn't mean people are actually going to do so.
If you assume an energy efficiency of about 30%, you get roughly 11 kilowatt-hours of energy out of a US gallon of gasoline. To put 11 kilowatt-hours of energy into a battery using the electric motor and battery efficiencies indicated in the article, you need to purchase roughly 14-15 kilowatt-hours of electricity. What's that cost, retail? A hell of a lot less than buying the equivalent amount of gasoline.
But, funnily enough, nobody wants to buy an electric car, despite the fact that they'd probably be cheaper to run. Why? Because the range and performance is unacceptable to most people. And it's the same with a fuel cell vehicle compared with a battery-powered electric car. Sure, the hydrogen might be more expensive than the equivalent power straight from the grid. But the car's range and performance will be much better than the battery car.
Furthermore, he makes the strange assumption that the hydrogen will be coming from room-temperature electrolysis. That's highly unlikely. It's much more likely that hydrogen will be produced using chemical processes on fossil fuels (using geosequestration to dispose of the resulting CO2), by using a nonchemical source of heat (such as a nuclear reactor or solar furnace) in high temperature electrolysis, or through all manner of nifty renewable hydrogen sources that don't involve producing electricity and then doing electrolysis.
I live in Australia, which has "socialised medicine", as you call it. The current conservative government hates it and dreams of being able to kill it off. But they haven't been game to try because they know the public would have their testicles for cocktail olives at the next federal election.
Furthermore, it's a quality issue. Wikipedians want to make sure that the articles on Wikipedia are fair, accurate, and supported by sources. If an article is on a complete nonentity it's likely to be impossible to do so. Even if it can be checked, if it's on a trivial topic, it's simply not worth the effort.
If their 30% efficiency is accurate, if you used a burner in combination with this chip to power a 25W laptop you'd still have 60 watts of heat to get rid of. That's going to be a rather warm lap...
What would be really nice, instead, if you could scale this up to work with the waste heat of a combustion engine or a fuel cell. It'd give you a nice boost in system efficiency without the complexities of a secondary turbine system.
There's a discussion of your basic at laser propulsion on Wikipedia. It's not nearly as much of a no-brainer as you seem to imply.
Both conventional rockets and laser launch schemes work by heating something up to push it out the back of the spacecraft. Laser launch's main advantage is that you can push stuff out faster with the laser than with a chemical rocket, so you need less propellant.
By contrast, with a space elevator you're pushing against the elevator. No reaction mass required at all. Much, much, much more efficient.
In any case, how much do you think a set of lasers capable of aiming multiple megawatts of power into a miniscule area many kilometres away costs?
Energy storage costs a fortune and is very inefficient. If it was cheap and efficient, we'd build more baseload plants and store their energy for peak demand use.
Until that changes, intermittent renewables are going to be a peripheral source of energy, and a distraction in the main game of cutting greenhouse emissions (which will more than likely be energy efficiency, geosequestration, and nuclear power).
What the government does affects you and your family. Your parents elderly? Guess what, the government helps pay for perscription drugs - and pays for a significant fraction of the world's medical research. Like to visit national parks? Governments manage them. Care about how much tax you pay? Yep, government. Care about whether your friends in the army are sent off to war or not? Government. Drive a car? The roads you drive on were largely built by the government with your tax dollars. And then there's social issues. Think the Supreme Court got it wrong on Roe vs. Wade? Wish that it would get overturned - or, conversely, does the thought of women losing their right to choose chill you to the bone? Well, guess what; the President appoints Supreme Court justices, and they're approved by the Senate. Furthermore, candidates are not all the same - not only in terms of policies, but in terms of experience and all-round competence. This gets more the case as you get into the less and less prominent elected positions.
Whether you realise it or not, politics affects you. It's in your interests to do a little bit of research, and then make a decision based on that.
We'll have to do something about burning fossil fuels before too long anyway, because the increased carbon dioxide levels are steadily making the oceans more acidic. Change the pH of the oceans enough, and you kill just about everything living in them.
Not to mention that air pollution (other than CO2) caused by burning fossil kills hundreds of thousands of people every year - in the USA alone the estimates are generally around 25,000.
Uranium was being sold for around $10 per pound in 2001. It's now selling for around $60 per pound. So the world's uranium produces already are, in large part, selling uranium for at least six times its production cost.
Is this sustainable? No. New mines are going to come on stream over the next few years, and production is expanding at existing ones. But uranium producers are rolling in money at the moment.
Look, I'm sure the Wikipedia's archives will indeed be a treasure trove for historians and historiographers in a century. But their numbers are far outweighed by those who will use the evolving encyclopedia as quick, convenient reference to find introductory information about a topic of choice.
Much and all as I dislike the Chinese regime, I'm not sure that Microsoft refusing to do business with them would make a lick of difference. While it's wrong for Western countries to directly assist the regime in oppressing its opponents, pulling out because of a general objection to the regime is probably a rather pointless gesture.
In any case, the best way to help China reach something more closely approximating a liberal democracy is probably to continue cooperating with them to make the place richer. While it's not guaranteed, and there are functioning poor democracies (India and Indonesia are reasonably democratic and poor), sooner or later a comfortable middle class is probably going to start demanding more say in the way China is run.
Yes, the USA and the UK are peculiarly obsessed with the sex lives of their politicians. But other countries, including New Zealand, aren't immune. And my example was deliberately chosen as something a lot of people do find distasteful (the "barely legal" thing), but isn't illegal. There are lots of other possibilities for blackmail that widespread internet surveillance would reveal.
Who wants to bet that a decade from now, the new New Zealand Prime Minister (to give an example) receives a visit from the local American ambassador who politely asks whether New Zealand would reconsider its policy regarding visits of nuclear-powered ships. Oh, and by the way, is he still into "barely legal teens", seeing he used to spend so much of his time searching the net for them.
"Need to know" is a rather amphormous concept. Half the time in research (which is what intelligence analysis is - a specialised form of applied research) you don't know you need to know something until after you know it. Ergo, if you keep all your data locked up in vaults, mistakes will be made that could have been avoided if the intelligence agency had been a little less paranoid about secrecy.
Furthermore, a lot of the data that intelligence agencies use for analysis comes from open sources - reading foriegn news sources and the like. Reputedly, much of what the KGB used to send to the Kremlin about American politics was paraphrasings of the Washington Post - but often rewritten in such a way as to look like the information came from a highly secret source because the Kremlin would actually take it seriously then.
Your plan: a) convert from carbon (or hydrocarbon) to carbon dioxide, release energy. b) convert back from carbon dioxide to carbon.
Let me give you an alternative, equivalent plan - have motor. Connect output shaft to generator. Connect output wires to inputs of motor. Start motor spinning. Funnily enough, system does not run forever because of inconvenient laws of thermodynamics.
To make this work, you need to put a lot more energy in from another source. Unless that energy source is something we can't currently exploit effectively in any other way, it makes a lot more sense to use that energy to do whatever it is we were trying to do in the first place.
Let me give you a very simple proposition: just because a new form of taxation is imposed, it doesn't mean the overall tax take has to rise.
For instance, you could use the money raised by a carbon tax to cut income taxes. Or sales taxes. Or inheritance taxes, if rewarding the American nobility is your primary policy priority as it seems to be for most Republicans.
Or how about simply dividing up the returns from carbon taxation by the number of US citizens, and mailing out the same sized check to every one of them?
That headline reads like something straight out of the religious fundies' playbook in their dogmatic (and I use that word advisedly) opposition to experimenting on clumps of cells.
This is a partial success. The therapy did what it was supposed to do - it cured the Parkinson's Disease. It's just that the side effects are worse than the disease at this point. But that's a whole lot better news than it not working at all.
Everybody with even a modest understanding of how scientific research goes knows that the road from interesting phenomena to practical application is usually a long and complex one, and that the claims of instant cures for everything from heart attack to spinal cord injuries were exaggerated for the purposes of winning political debate. But when a trial has a partial success, in my view that is further encouragement to continue research.
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But lazy students who turn in papers entirely referenced on Wikipedia deserve to be flunked repeatedly until they learn not to.
I fail to see how IEEE doesn't make a profit, given the amount they charge for institutional subscriptions to their journal archive...
No, but the fact that the potential terrorist would be dead by the time they got anywhere near a spent fuel rod might be a bit of a giveaway. Read this. Anybody who tries to steal a spent fuel road will be, as the article describes, "burnt toast" well before they actually get to deploy it. Not to mention that it's not particularly dangerous if you distribute it with a bomb.
My point was that even if you theoretically could build an engine close to the theoretical efficiency limit of a Carnot cycle engine, the efficiency when the temperature gradient is small is very poor.
Nice try. Unfortunately, as I understand it, you can't beat the Carnot cycle no matter what technology you use.
you forgot (j): being piggybacked by CowboyNeal.
"Appeasers" is another Republican favourite.
As to terms specifically relating to modifying the name, I think "dumbocrats" got a bit of a run, back in 2003-04 or so, but it kinda lacks its sting in today's political climate.
In any case, the point I'm trying to make is even if it is cheaper to run a battery car than a fuel cell car, that doesn't mean people are actually going to do so.
But, funnily enough, nobody wants to buy an electric car, despite the fact that they'd probably be cheaper to run. Why? Because the range and performance is unacceptable to most people. And it's the same with a fuel cell vehicle compared with a battery-powered electric car. Sure, the hydrogen might be more expensive than the equivalent power straight from the grid. But the car's range and performance will be much better than the battery car.
Furthermore, he makes the strange assumption that the hydrogen will be coming from room-temperature electrolysis. That's highly unlikely. It's much more likely that hydrogen will be produced using chemical processes on fossil fuels (using geosequestration to dispose of the resulting CO2), by using a nonchemical source of heat (such as a nuclear reactor or solar furnace) in high temperature electrolysis, or through all manner of nifty renewable hydrogen sources that don't involve producing electricity and then doing electrolysis.
I live in Australia, which has "socialised medicine", as you call it. The current conservative government hates it and dreams of being able to kill it off. But they haven't been game to try because they know the public would have their testicles for cocktail olives at the next federal election.
Furthermore, it's a quality issue. Wikipedians want to make sure that the articles on Wikipedia are fair, accurate, and supported by sources. If an article is on a complete nonentity it's likely to be impossible to do so. Even if it can be checked, if it's on a trivial topic, it's simply not worth the effort.
What would be really nice, instead, if you could scale this up to work with the waste heat of a combustion engine or a fuel cell. It'd give you a nice boost in system efficiency without the complexities of a secondary turbine system.
Both conventional rockets and laser launch schemes work by heating something up to push it out the back of the spacecraft. Laser launch's main advantage is that you can push stuff out faster with the laser than with a chemical rocket, so you need less propellant.
By contrast, with a space elevator you're pushing against the elevator. No reaction mass required at all. Much, much, much more efficient.
In any case, how much do you think a set of lasers capable of aiming multiple megawatts of power into a miniscule area many kilometres away costs?
Until that changes, intermittent renewables are going to be a peripheral source of energy, and a distraction in the main game of cutting greenhouse emissions (which will more than likely be energy efficiency, geosequestration, and nuclear power).
Whether you realise it or not, politics affects you. It's in your interests to do a little bit of research, and then make a decision based on that.
Not to mention that air pollution (other than CO2) caused by burning fossil kills hundreds of thousands of people every year - in the USA alone the estimates are generally around 25,000.
Is this sustainable? No. New mines are going to come on stream over the next few years, and production is expanding at existing ones. But uranium producers are rolling in money at the moment.
Look, I'm sure the Wikipedia's archives will indeed be a treasure trove for historians and historiographers in a century. But their numbers are far outweighed by those who will use the evolving encyclopedia as quick, convenient reference to find introductory information about a topic of choice.
Much and all as I dislike the Chinese regime, I'm not sure that Microsoft refusing to do business with them would make a lick of difference. While it's wrong for Western countries to directly assist the regime in oppressing its opponents, pulling out because of a general objection to the regime is probably a rather pointless gesture. In any case, the best way to help China reach something more closely approximating a liberal democracy is probably to continue cooperating with them to make the place richer. While it's not guaranteed, and there are functioning poor democracies (India and Indonesia are reasonably democratic and poor), sooner or later a comfortable middle class is probably going to start demanding more say in the way China is run.
Yes, the USA and the UK are peculiarly obsessed with the sex lives of their politicians. But other countries, including New Zealand, aren't immune. And my example was deliberately chosen as something a lot of people do find distasteful (the "barely legal" thing), but isn't illegal. There are lots of other possibilities for blackmail that widespread internet surveillance would reveal.
Who wants to bet that a decade from now, the new New Zealand Prime Minister (to give an example) receives a visit from the local American ambassador who politely asks whether New Zealand would reconsider its policy regarding visits of nuclear-powered ships. Oh, and by the way, is he still into "barely legal teens", seeing he used to spend so much of his time searching the net for them.
Furthermore, a lot of the data that intelligence agencies use for analysis comes from open sources - reading foriegn news sources and the like. Reputedly, much of what the KGB used to send to the Kremlin about American politics was paraphrasings of the Washington Post - but often rewritten in such a way as to look like the information came from a highly secret source because the Kremlin would actually take it seriously then.
Let me give you an alternative, equivalent plan - have motor. Connect output shaft to generator. Connect output wires to inputs of motor. Start motor spinning. Funnily enough, system does not run forever because of inconvenient laws of thermodynamics.
To make this work, you need to put a lot more energy in from another source. Unless that energy source is something we can't currently exploit effectively in any other way, it makes a lot more sense to use that energy to do whatever it is we were trying to do in the first place.
For instance, you could use the money raised by a carbon tax to cut income taxes. Or sales taxes. Or inheritance taxes, if rewarding the American nobility is your primary policy priority as it seems to be for most Republicans.
Or how about simply dividing up the returns from carbon taxation by the number of US citizens, and mailing out the same sized check to every one of them?
This is a partial success. The therapy did what it was supposed to do - it cured the Parkinson's Disease. It's just that the side effects are worse than the disease at this point. But that's a whole lot better news than it not working at all.
Everybody with even a modest understanding of how scientific research goes knows that the road from interesting phenomena to practical application is usually a long and complex one, and that the claims of instant cures for everything from heart attack to spinal cord injuries were exaggerated for the purposes of winning political debate. But when a trial has a partial success, in my view that is further encouragement to continue research.