I remember reading articles about Chevrolet Corvettes with a similar feature back in the 1990s.
I'm a little bit torn in this case about the merits of the idea. In principle, I sympathise with the idea that if you can't trust kids to drive responsibly, you can't trust them to drive. In practice, being out late at night with friends can turn otherwise sensible teenagers into wannabe street racers.
I've now read the paper, but I'm still very suspicious. In essence, their experiment demonstrated their method increased the power of the car at idle. Why did they choose such an unrepresentative operating regime, when they could have chosen anything they liked? Furthermore, their "real-world experiment" was completely useless - something that anybody who's taken an introductory course on quantitative research could have told them.
I've had a brief look at the paper; thanks for pointing it out.
I'm no expert in this area, but to my layperson's eye some things look rather strange.
For example, the static test of the Mercedes 300D is conducted "At a fixed fuel consumption rate close to 500 g/h". In other words, roughly 0.15 gallons of fuel per hour.
A go-cart uses far more fuel than that per hour.
Then I look at the results of the test: "When the device was turned off, the average power output was 0.3677 hp. It increased to 0.4428 hp after the device was turned on."
Leaving aside the totally spurious level of quoted accuracy (the paper later states the measurements have an accuracy of 5%. If so, quoting to 4 decimal places is silly), those power levels are, again, well below those of a typical go-cart. Heck, I can produce a power output on a bike of around 0.25 hp for half an hour without straining too much, and I'm no Lance Armstrong. The only conclusion is that the engine was idling when the measurements were taken.
The paper then goes on to state "in other words, if the engine on the road is under the same condition as our laboratory test with the dynamometer, the fuel mileage will be increased by 20.4%."
But, clearly, the car will not be being driven anywhere while at idle! Furthermore, while any change in the engine power output when the device is connected is interesting and relevant, I do wonder Mercedes-Benz spent a great deal of time optimizing their engine to produce the maximum possible power under idling conditions. It would have been a hell of a lot more convincing if the effect had been observed under more typical operating conditions. The authors haven't provided any justification for doing their experiments with the engine at idle - indeed, it's only clear on a very close reading of the paper. In my field of study (software engineering) when you have to do an experiment in conditions that in some way don't reflect the real world, you have to not only fess up to that fact, you have to provide a convincing rationale why such a deviation was necessary. That these authors have done neither concerns me greatly.
As others have pointed out, the study of the Mercedes-Benz on the road is essentially useless. Given that it would have been very easy for them to do a double-blind study of the car in much more controlled conditions, I wonder how rigorous the peer review of this paper was. I would have asked the authors to either remove that section, or do the experiment properly.
That's more than enough to make me very suspicious of the parts of the study I lack the expertise to critique properly.
The way to demonstrate these things in a rigorous manner isn't to bolt them on a car and drive them around for a few months.
The way to do so is to bolt them into a test rig, where the engine can be placed under load in a precisely controlled manner, under identical conditions, as many times as required.
There are any number of universities (and, presumably, independent labs) which have such test rigs.
Until this device has been tested under such conditions, and given the extensive history of "fuel saving" devices which do no such thing, it's safe to assume this is snake oil.
That said, I gather Temple is a reputable university, and one does not get to be chair of Physics at such a university without a track record of quality research.
Either Prof. Tao is a genius who has done the seemingly impossible, the PR flack who did this press release has horribly misinterpreted the study and Prof. Tao, or Prof. Tao should start clearing out his desk forthwith for embarrassing the university.
Corn is a renewable resource. Trying to use it as an energy source has been an environmental and social calamity and has produced bugger-all energy. It may be renewable, but it's not in any way environmentally sustainable.
There is a metric buttload of coal out there. The problem is that it causes massive environmental damage when you mine it, and potentially civilization-destroying environmental damage when you burn it - the part that this sequestration plant mostly prevents. It's obviously not renewable; if the technology in this plant pans out it becomes relatively sustainable, at least for the next century or so.
Nuclear energy (and I know this is very far from a universally accepted view), by contrast, is clearly not renewable, but it causes comparatively little environmental damage to mine the raw materials, bugger-all damage in operation, and the quantities of waste are such that it can be safely disposed of without causing environmental harm. Additionally, for all practical purposes the quantities of fuel available - particularly if you count thorium - are infinite. So, in my view, nuclear energy may not be renewable, but it's completely sustainable for millennia, or we invent something better.
Those are best-case scenarios. In reality, the Acela takes 8 hours to get from Boston to Washington, DC -- a flight I've made in about an hour and fifteen minutes.
Yes, the Acela is crap compared to European high-speed rail. But that flight time is completely misleading. I do a comparable flight sometimes. I live near downtown Melbourne, Australia, and fly up for work in downtown Sydney, Australia. The flight is one hour, 30 minutes. Even without checked baggage, it takes four hours door-to-door.
Why couldn't a wind farm hook up some kind of huge battery to store wind power in excess of whatever the grid could handle? And then once the wind died down, they could basically bleed off the battery into the grid?
Because the battery fairy doesn't drop off batteries for free.
There is one form of large-scale energy storage in wide use; pumped-storage hydroelectricity. Essentially, this involves pumping water from low to high places when there's surplus power, and running it back through a hydro turbine when there's a shortage. To make this work, you need the right geography, and there's only so many places with the right geography.
Conventional batteries cost a fortune to store energy. Get the price on some deep-cycle lead-acid batteries off the internet and do the sums yourself.
There is a lot of research going on at the moment into better ways to store energy. Aside from better battery chemistries, and the long-standing dream of the "hydrogen economy", the more realistic proposals involve storing energy as heat or mechanical energy. For instance, using wind power to compress air, which can be stored in a network of pipes connecting the wind farm, or, if you're lucky, a salt mine or some other sealed underground spot. The compressed air can then be used to run a gas turbine (much of the energy released in a gas turbine is used to compress the air for combustion anyway). Alternatively, for solar thermal power, you can just run the hot pipes through something convenient (molten salt is a popular one), and then when the sun goes down you connect the pipes to the steam turbine through the heat storage rather than through the solar field.
Your idea is sound in principle. Making it work is hard.
Exercise is good for many reasons, including improving muscle tone, reducing your risk of heart attacks, improving your aerobic capacity and so on. However, my experience is that it's virtually impossible to lose weight by exercise alone unless you go to the lengths of Steve Vaught.
I managed to lose 60 pounds (and have now kept it off for about six months), and the key was combining the exercise I was already doing with eating less. Initially, I ate a lot of those not-very-tasty diet meals; long-term, I've largely cut out things like fries and cola from my diet, and just gotten used to eating smaller portions and not snacking between meals. Now that I've lost the weight, I still eat nice food; I've just learned that I have to eat less of it if I want to maintain a reasonable weight.
As far as exercise goes, I echo the suggestions to try riding a bike. Can be as solo, or as social, as you like.
In any case, most Swedes speak almost perfect English, as do most Norwegians, Finns, and Danes.
Apparently, the main reason is that all the English-language movies are subtitled, not dubbed. Furthermore, they're very small countries, and they use it as a lingua franca (if you'll pardon the irony) amongst themselves.
That said, learning a language is a great intellectual exercise; I've just started learning German, and have enjoyed it a lot.
I visited Washington DC in 2003, and went for a wander around the White House boundary fence. One thing you don't realize when you see it on television is just how big the garden is, and how far away the fence is.
But that's by the by. As I was walking around the boundary fence, I noticed a security guard, armed with what appeared to be a shotgun, hiding behind a bush. What was even stranger, he was attempting to, but failing, to hide from me, armed with what was obviously a digital camera and nothing else.
I continued walking around a bit, looking at him. He continued to edge around the particular shrub; again, trying, and failing, to keep out of my view.
It was so patently absurd that I felt like taking a photo of the scene, but given that the guy was carrying a shotgun and this was the White House, I thought it might be prudent to ask first.
So, I called out to the guy "excuse me, but do you mind if I take a photo"?
The reply comes back "no, don't take one". And he tries even harder, and fails, to hide himself.
This is despite the fact that anybody with a pair of binoculars, or a long lens camera, would have easily spotted the bloke from several hundred yards away. The Secret Service must, of course, know this, and probably had two other armed guards I hadn't spotted watching me.
For the life of me, I still don't understand what this guy was trying to achieve hiding behind the shrubbery. Look, everybody expects there to be guards in the White House gardens, some of whom you'll see, some of whom you won't unless you try something insanely stupid. But this whole hide-and-seek routine made absolutely no sense at all.
I care about the environmental impact of my technology usage too, but Greenpeace are are bunch of publicity-seeking, medievalist extremists who wilfully distort science just as much as the "global warming is bunk" crowd. It's a terrible shame, because they make adopting real, practical solutions that much harder.
The kid should consult a solicitor (Brit-speak for a lawyer) with a background in human rights issues. Liberty should be able to point him in the right direction.
Frankly, this kind of crap is what you'd expect the CIA and NSA to do, not the Air Force. The Air Force's job is to make things explode, not go snooping around in other people's computers.
But if there's one thing that armed services habitually put more effort in to than preparing for war, it's engaging in bureaucratic cold wars between themselves. And if one branch of the US government puts their hand up to do "cyber-war", you can bet your bottom dollar that half a dozen others will want a piece of it too.
Basically, you're falling prey to two classic biases.
1) You remember things that rise in price, and forget things that fall. 2) You remember things you buy all the time, and forget things you buy every so often.
As it turns out, gasoline and food - which you buy all the time - have gone up a lot. Things that you buy relatively infrequently, like big-ticket electronics, have dropped dramatically.
It's a piddle in the ocean. It's, what, about 30 cents per American citizen?
Given the importance of finding less carbon-intensive energy sources, and that so many people are wedded to coal, you'd think that it'd be worth spending $125 Billion on the technology if we're really serious about the issue.
Yes we can plant trees, or even just stop clearing them. We can also do things like preventing peat bogs from drying out. All of these things release a pile of CO2.
That said, the pile released from burning fossil fuels is even bigger again. There's no way we could plant enough extra biomass to do the job of sequestering all the CO2 we produce.
There's one possible exception - algae in the ocean, but I'm reserving judgment on that one until it's clearer that it a) doesn't just replace one environmental disaster with another, and b) that the dead algae stay as solid carbon on the ocean floor, as promised.
Dude, I like nukes too (we'd save tens of thousands of lives every year by shutting down coal and building nukes, let alone the greenhouse benefits) but unless you plan to run a nuclear reactor in your car, it doesn't solve the problem that this technology is trying to solve.
While everybody's focussed on greenhouse gas emissions at the moment, the unburned hydrocarbons, nitrous oxides, soot (mainly from diesels) and whatnot are killers.
I don't have the exact statistics to hand for the USA, but a study in Sydney, Australia (and by global standards Sydney's air is very, very clean) suggested that urban air pollution, mostly from vehicles, caused around 1000 premature deaths every year. That's at least triple the number of deaths from car accidents.
So, even if they do increase fuel consumption a little, anti-pollution gear is a very good thing.
One thing that has really pissed off a lot of people (like myself) who want to use OOO for anything vaguely scientific is the lack of vaguely functional error bar support. The fix is finally coming, but not yet. We'll have to wait till 3.0, apparently,
Frankly, I would have considered this a higher priority than 3D transitions for slide presentations...but I'm glad it's going to be fixed, only seven years after it was identified as an issue...
Ah, found it. It seems to be from the Nuclear Weapon archive. It doesn't appear to be an American document at all, rather something that a British scientist, William Penney, prepared to inform the British government what would be required to build its own bomb.
Thank you for contributing to nuclear weapons proliferation... Looks like you did...
I doubt it very much. There doesn't appear to be anything at all new here, just a pencil sketch of the basic implosion design that's been known for many years.
The hard part of making a nuclear weapon is getting the raw materials and the means to shape them precisely enough.
How much of this is due to the fact the US dollar has dropped a lot in value recently?
Not that this is a bad thing - it will help to correct the imbalances in the US economy far more than bleating about NAFTA or whatever other nonsense is coming out of your politicians at the moment...
There are a number of people proposing to build new types of reactors on the 10-300 MW scale, rather than the 1000+ MW scale that the latest conventional designs are. There's designs like the IRIS and CAREM (scaled-down LWRs), and also pebble-bed modular reactors.
While you might lose some efficiency, there's an argument that if you can build your reactors on a production line, take them to the location required in only a few pieces rather than thousands, and screw them together in a few months rather than years, the overall economics might improve.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember reading articles about Chevrolet Corvettes with a similar feature back in the 1990s.
I'm a little bit torn in this case about the merits of the idea. In principle, I sympathise with the idea that if you can't trust kids to drive responsibly, you can't trust them to drive. In practice, being out late at night with friends can turn otherwise sensible teenagers into wannabe street racers.
See my other comment.
I've now read the paper, but I'm still very suspicious. In essence, their experiment demonstrated their method increased the power of the car at idle. Why did they choose such an unrepresentative operating regime, when they could have chosen anything they liked? Furthermore, their "real-world experiment" was completely useless - something that anybody who's taken an introductory course on quantitative research could have told them.
I've had a brief look at the paper; thanks for pointing it out.
I'm no expert in this area, but to my layperson's eye some things look rather strange.
For example, the static test of the Mercedes 300D is conducted "At a fixed fuel consumption rate close to 500 g/h". In other words, roughly 0.15 gallons of fuel per hour.
A go-cart uses far more fuel than that per hour.
Then I look at the results of the test: "When the device was turned off, the average power output was 0.3677 hp. It increased to 0.4428 hp after the device was turned on."
Leaving aside the totally spurious level of quoted accuracy (the paper later states the measurements have an accuracy of 5%. If so, quoting to 4 decimal places is silly), those power levels are, again, well below those of a typical go-cart. Heck, I can produce a power output on a bike of around 0.25 hp for half an hour without straining too much, and I'm no Lance Armstrong. The only conclusion is that the engine was idling when the measurements were taken.
The paper then goes on to state "in other words, if the engine on the road is under the same condition as our laboratory test with the dynamometer, the fuel mileage will be increased by 20.4%."
But, clearly, the car will not be being driven anywhere while at idle! Furthermore, while any change in the engine power output when the device is connected is interesting and relevant, I do wonder Mercedes-Benz spent a great deal of time optimizing their engine to produce the maximum possible power under idling conditions. It would have been a hell of a lot more convincing if the effect had been observed under more typical operating conditions. The authors haven't provided any justification for doing their experiments with the engine at idle - indeed, it's only clear on a very close reading of the paper. In my field of study (software engineering) when you have to do an experiment in conditions that in some way don't reflect the real world, you have to not only fess up to that fact, you have to provide a convincing rationale why such a deviation was necessary. That these authors have done neither concerns me greatly.
As others have pointed out, the study of the Mercedes-Benz on the road is essentially useless. Given that it would have been very easy for them to do a double-blind study of the car in much more controlled conditions, I wonder how rigorous the peer review of this paper was. I would have asked the authors to either remove that section, or do the experiment properly.
That's more than enough to make me very suspicious of the parts of the study I lack the expertise to critique properly.
The way to demonstrate these things in a rigorous manner isn't to bolt them on a car and drive them around for a few months.
The way to do so is to bolt them into a test rig, where the engine can be placed under load in a precisely controlled manner, under identical conditions, as many times as required.
There are any number of universities (and, presumably, independent labs) which have such test rigs.
Until this device has been tested under such conditions, and given the extensive history of "fuel saving" devices which do no such thing, it's safe to assume this is snake oil.
That said, I gather Temple is a reputable university, and one does not get to be chair of Physics at such a university without a track record of quality research.
Either Prof. Tao is a genius who has done the seemingly impossible, the PR flack who did this press release has horribly misinterpreted the study and Prof. Tao, or Prof. Tao should start clearing out his desk forthwith for embarrassing the university.
Corn is a renewable resource. Trying to use it as an energy source has been an environmental and social calamity and has produced bugger-all energy. It may be renewable, but it's not in any way environmentally sustainable.
There is a metric buttload of coal out there. The problem is that it causes massive environmental damage when you mine it, and potentially civilization-destroying environmental damage when you burn it - the part that this sequestration plant mostly prevents. It's obviously not renewable; if the technology in this plant pans out it becomes relatively sustainable, at least for the next century or so.
Nuclear energy (and I know this is very far from a universally accepted view), by contrast, is clearly not renewable, but it causes comparatively little environmental damage to mine the raw materials, bugger-all damage in operation, and the quantities of waste are such that it can be safely disposed of without causing environmental harm. Additionally, for all practical purposes the quantities of fuel available - particularly if you count thorium - are infinite. So, in my view, nuclear energy may not be renewable, but it's completely sustainable for millennia, or we invent something better.
Yes, the Acela is crap compared to European high-speed rail. But that flight time is completely misleading. I do a comparable flight sometimes. I live near downtown Melbourne, Australia, and fly up for work in downtown Sydney, Australia. The flight is one hour, 30 minutes. Even without checked baggage, it takes four hours door-to-door.
Because the battery fairy doesn't drop off batteries for free.
There is one form of large-scale energy storage in wide use; pumped-storage hydroelectricity. Essentially, this involves pumping water from low to high places when there's surplus power, and running it back through a hydro turbine when there's a shortage. To make this work, you need the right geography, and there's only so many places with the right geography.
Conventional batteries cost a fortune to store energy. Get the price on some deep-cycle lead-acid batteries off the internet and do the sums yourself.
There is a lot of research going on at the moment into better ways to store energy. Aside from better battery chemistries, and the long-standing dream of the "hydrogen economy", the more realistic proposals involve storing energy as heat or mechanical energy. For instance, using wind power to compress air, which can be stored in a network of pipes connecting the wind farm, or, if you're lucky, a salt mine or some other sealed underground spot. The compressed air can then be used to run a gas turbine (much of the energy released in a gas turbine is used to compress the air for combustion anyway). Alternatively, for solar thermal power, you can just run the hot pipes through something convenient (molten salt is a popular one), and then when the sun goes down you connect the pipes to the steam turbine through the heat storage rather than through the solar field.
Your idea is sound in principle. Making it work is hard.
Exercise is good for many reasons, including improving muscle tone, reducing your risk of heart attacks, improving your aerobic capacity and so on. However, my experience is that it's virtually impossible to lose weight by exercise alone unless you go to the lengths of Steve Vaught.
I managed to lose 60 pounds (and have now kept it off for about six months), and the key was combining the exercise I was already doing with eating less. Initially, I ate a lot of those not-very-tasty diet meals; long-term, I've largely cut out things like fries and cola from my diet, and just gotten used to eating smaller portions and not snacking between meals. Now that I've lost the weight, I still eat nice food; I've just learned that I have to eat less of it if I want to maintain a reasonable weight.
As far as exercise goes, I echo the suggestions to try riding a bike. Can be as solo, or as social, as you like.
In any case, most Swedes speak almost perfect English, as do most Norwegians, Finns, and Danes.
Apparently, the main reason is that all the English-language movies are subtitled, not dubbed. Furthermore, they're very small countries, and they use it as a lingua franca (if you'll pardon the irony) amongst themselves.
That said, learning a language is a great intellectual exercise; I've just started learning German, and have enjoyed it a lot.
One thing you don't realize when you see it on television is just how big the garden is, and how far away the fence is.
But that's by the by. As I was walking around the boundary fence, I noticed a security guard, armed with what appeared to be a shotgun, hiding behind a bush. What was even stranger, he was attempting to, but failing, to hide from me, armed with what was obviously a digital camera and nothing else.
I continued walking around a bit, looking at him. He continued to edge around the particular shrub; again, trying, and failing, to keep out of my view.
It was so patently absurd that I felt like taking a photo of the scene, but given that the guy was carrying a shotgun and this was the White House, I thought it might be prudent to ask first.
So, I called out to the guy "excuse me, but do you mind if I take a photo"?
The reply comes back "no, don't take one". And he tries even harder, and fails, to hide himself.
This is despite the fact that anybody with a pair of binoculars, or a long lens camera, would have easily spotted the bloke from several hundred yards away. The Secret Service must, of course, know this, and probably had two other armed guards I hadn't spotted watching me.
For the life of me, I still don't understand what this guy was trying to achieve hiding behind the shrubbery. Look, everybody expects there to be guards in the White House gardens, some of whom you'll see, some of whom you won't unless you try something insanely stupid. But this whole hide-and-seek routine made absolutely no sense at all.
I care about the environmental impact of my technology usage too, but Greenpeace are are bunch of publicity-seeking, medievalist extremists who wilfully distort science just as much as the "global warming is bunk" crowd. It's a terrible shame, because they make adopting real, practical solutions that much harder.
The kid should consult a solicitor (Brit-speak for a lawyer) with a background in human rights issues. Liberty should be able to point him in the right direction.
But if there's one thing that armed services habitually put more effort in to than preparing for war, it's engaging in bureaucratic cold wars between themselves. And if one branch of the US government puts their hand up to do "cyber-war", you can bet your bottom dollar that half a dozen others will want a piece of it too.
Basically, you're falling prey to two classic biases.
1) You remember things that rise in price, and forget things that fall.
2) You remember things you buy all the time, and forget things you buy every so often.
As it turns out, gasoline and food - which you buy all the time - have gone up a lot. Things that you buy relatively infrequently, like big-ticket electronics, have dropped dramatically.
Given the importance of finding less carbon-intensive energy sources, and that so many people are wedded to coal, you'd think that it'd be worth spending $125 Billion on the technology if we're really serious about the issue.
That said, the pile released from burning fossil fuels is even bigger again. There's no way we could plant enough extra biomass to do the job of sequestering all the CO2 we produce.
There's one possible exception - algae in the ocean, but I'm reserving judgment on that one until it's clearer that it a) doesn't just replace one environmental disaster with another, and b) that the dead algae stay as solid carbon on the ocean floor, as promised.
Dude, I like nukes too (we'd save tens of thousands of lives every year by shutting down coal and building nukes, let alone the greenhouse benefits) but unless you plan to run a nuclear reactor in your car, it doesn't solve the problem that this technology is trying to solve.
Essentially, it only works on fats and oils, not carbohydrates or cellulose, and the yields are considerably lower than they claimed.
I don't have the exact statistics to hand for the USA, but a study in Sydney, Australia (and by global standards Sydney's air is very, very clean) suggested that urban air pollution, mostly from vehicles, caused around 1000 premature deaths every year. That's at least triple the number of deaths from car accidents.
So, even if they do increase fuel consumption a little, anti-pollution gear is a very good thing.
Frankly, I would have considered this a higher priority than 3D transitions for slide presentations...but I'm glad it's going to be fixed, only seven years after it was identified as an issue...
Ah, found it. It seems to be from the Nuclear Weapon archive. It doesn't appear to be an American document at all, rather something that a British scientist, William Penney, prepared to inform the British government what would be required to build its own bomb.
The hard part of making a nuclear weapon is getting the raw materials and the means to shape them precisely enough.
Your ideas were tried in 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It didn't cause the Great Depression on its own, but it made it a whole lot worse.
Not that this is a bad thing - it will help to correct the imbalances in the US economy far more than bleating about NAFTA or whatever other nonsense is coming out of your politicians at the moment...
While you might lose some efficiency, there's an argument that if you can build your reactors on a production line, take them to the location required in only a few pieces rather than thousands, and screw them together in a few months rather than years, the overall economics might improve.